One small unexpected benefit of having some training
Photo by David Travis on Unsplash
Feel free to tell me if this is a bit meta, but this week I went on a training course to learn how to use LinkedIn better.
So, here we are. Witness the new, more effective me, using LinkedIn more productively and generating better business outcomes for myself and my clients.
“one thing that I was struck by during my recent training session was just how much self-confidence matters.”
Training has many obvious benefits. That's, well, obvious. But one thing that I was struck by during my recent training session was just how much self-confidence matters. I'm not talking about the stand-up-in-front-of-a-room-self-confidence, but more the confidence you feel when your ideas, your beliefs are validated by someone else, especially someone who is an expert in their field.
“I’ve heard optimum post frequencies of between two and eight posts A DAY. I’m capitalising that because it sounds ludicrous to me, but if you’re all shrugging and thinking “yeah, sounds about right”, feel free to mentally tipp-ex over it and rethink it in lower case.”
We all know that social media is not rocket science, despite some of the online marketing community making out that it's a labyrinthine black art. But they're snake oil salesmen. Maintaining a social media presence on behalf of a business, however, is a little more challenging. The pressure to generate constant – and constantly high quality – content is daunting. I've been running Arc Creative Solutions' social media accounts (channels? Do you call them that?) alongside my regular studio role for a couple of years now and I've been muddling through OK. I had a couple of days training at the very start which taught me a lot about how to have a voice, how to sound authoritative and how to represent the personality of the business to drive engagement, but the one thing which always made me wince was post frequency.
I've heard optimum post frequencies of between two and eight posts A DAY. I'm capitalising that because it sounds ludicrous to me, but if you're all shrugging and thinking "yeah, sounds about right", feel free to mentally tipp-ex over it and rethink it in lower case. Finding, generating, creating, plagiarising (OK, OK not plagiarising) that much high quality content every day seems a tall order to say the least. And don't even get me started on video content. Shudder.
I know that all this high quality content doesn't have to be original and lengthy like this blog post (I've managed three in two years, so don't hold your breath for the next thrilling instalment), but on a day-to-day basis I have been finding it hard to identify things that I thought anyone else would actually like to see or be interested in. When you sit in the same room at the same desk, in front of the same screen, surrounded by the same people for five days a week, fresh ideas can be hard to come by. Because I consider myself an amateur at this (social media, not my actual job, thank you), things that may actually be interesting or useful to others get dismissed because I lose confidence in the idea and anyway, I've got a whole load of amends to finish before the end of the day and so on.
That's where self-confidence comes in. In the training room this week, techniques and strategies were revealed that I was already doing. Perhaps not as well or as thoroughly as I could have been, but I wasn't making a right pigs ear of things either. When ideas were suggested, I agreed and understood the reasoning behind them. I was thinking many of the right things, just needed to get motivated to put them into action better – and more frequently. I was inspired.
It's this implicit endorsement, this backing-up of my approach, which gave me a little boost of self-confidence. Having someone who actually knows what they're doing say "that's good" really helps. I think I'm now more like to think "yeah, that's great, share it" than "nah, who'd want to read that?" So, although boosting my self-confidence wasn't on the list of things we were going to cover during the training session, it was one of the most positive things I took away from it.
See y'all on the interwebs.
First published on LinkedIn, June 7 2018