authentic social media -- post and *don't* check your likes...
Channel: George Kao
Date: 17/08/2019

You post things on social media.

Most of the time, you don’t get as much engagement as you see others get.

Maybe you get discouraged.... why don’t people like you?

I’ve been there.

You need to understand how the algorithm works… 
Not so that you can game the system to be more visible. (Not authentic!)

You need to understand that when you are browsing the news feeds, you are only seeing the tiniest percentage of posts that already got more engagement than the average post. 

In other words, social media only shows you the tip of the iceberg, the few popular posts, and you don’t see the vast majority of posts that have near-zero engagement… few to no likes, comments, shares. 

You have to realize: little engagement is normal.

Statistically, most of our posts are going to get less engagement than we hoped, and if we use the news feed (what we see) as our measuring stick, we’ll constantly be discouraged (or desperate!) 

This brings up several important issues.

Are you allowing social media engagement to influence your sense of self-worth?

If you don’t pay attention to this, you’ll easily make the false connection: 

“If I get more likes/comments/shares, it means I’m a more worthwhile person.”

Now that you’re consciously evaluating this thought, you can see how untrue it is. 

Truthfully, your worth as a human being is unlimited. (Or if you believe there’s no self, then there’s no self-worth either, so stop measuring yourself against others!)

Most of the time we forget this, because society keeps us measuring our self-worth based on external approval.

So let me be one voice to remind you: detach your social media engagement from anything having to do with how valuable you are.

Authentic Expression

When we forget the above, we lose our groundedness, our authentic power: being able to express ourselves free of attention-seeking. The world loses a moment of unique creativity from you.

It is a practice, done again and again, even multiple times within a day, to express yourself in connection to your deep, resonant truth.

Often, you may find yourself ahead of your time... people won’t understand you. That’s ok. You’ve still added a piece of uniqueness in the world that will be appreciated in the future. 

Sometimes, though, it just happens that an authentic expression of your deep truth also resonates with others. At those rare times, you get lots of likes, comments, or shares. Let this kind of engagement be a pleasant surprise… rather than a consciously-manipulated result.

So… we shouldn’t care about audience engagement?!

I wouldn’t say that. It’s about a difference of intention:

The conventional way -- “I’m not aware that I’m attaching my self-worth to the social media respect I get, and so I will study how others are getting engagement, and emulate the popularity tactics in hopes that I also get more engagement... and when I don’t, I will feel discouraged or resentful, and either quit, or use even more cynical persuasion methods.”

The authentic way -- “I will be continually mindful that it’s easy to attach self-worth to social media respect, so I will practice connecting to my source of infinite worth, and then creating content from that authentic energy. If it happens to resonate with others, then what a delightful surprise! But either way, I will keep practicing authentic connection and creation.”   

Continuing with the authentic way: 

On an occasional basis (e.g. once a month), take notice of the few content pieces we created that got more engagement than usual. What topic was it? Or how did we approach that topic? And do we feel inspired, and in service, to create more similar content? If so, create more content like that… but not until we first reconnect with our Source of worth, so that we can create from authentic expression, not because we expect to get another homerun.

A Few Steps for Social Media Sanity:

https://www.georgekao.com/blog/authenticsocialmedia2