Strategies to Overcome Social Media Posting Struggles

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In this episode, hosts Chris Inman and John Carpenter discuss how to effectively use social media—especially LinkedIn—as a powerful branding and marketing tool. They break down the importance of consistent posting, even when the content isn’t overly elaborate. John emphasizes the value of sharing content that has personally made an impact, as it’s likely to connect with your audience. They also explore how mixing post types—from personal stories and leadership insights to behind-the-scenes glimpses of company culture—can keep engagement strong. The episode highlights how easy it is to schedule posts in advance and underscores the need to provide real value, rather than treating social media purely as a sales tool. If you’re struggling to build a personal or business brand with meaningful and consistent content, this episode offers actionable tips to get you on track.

Episode Time Stamps:
Consistency in Social Media Posting [1:00]
      Chris Inman: "We both talk to a lot of people that struggle with using social media to use it as a branding tool and a marketing tool to build their business. And it's interesting because I don't know what people struggle with other than lack of effort."

Content Creation Mindset [5:34]
     Chris Inman: "And you probably, as the listeners, aren't always thinking about content. You're not thinking about how you're creating a media company. But Gary Vee always talks about you need to be a media company to brand your business."

Importance of Consistency [6:06]
    John Carpenter: "... it is a problem because I think everything is content. We were having a conversation today. We talked about a million different things. But within that conversation, I pulled out five or six nuggets that have turned into posts."

Tune in to hear more about overcoming these common business struggles and many others so you can navigate your entrepreneurial journey with confidence.

Keywords: Entrepreneurship, Business Struggles, Leadership Tips, Scaling Challenges, Financial Management

Chapters

• 5:54 Ideas constantly generated from conversations and readings.
• 8:10 Gaining and validating attention is crucial online.
• 9:58 Balance sales posts with personal and leadership content.

Transcript

0:00

All right, John, what's one thing that you see that people that don't post off on LinkedIn, what are they doing wrong and what do you wish they would do better? I wouldn't necessarily say anything is wrong. Okay. I just think they need to post, need to post, need to post. And you need to post things that affect you because they've affected other people. So when I talk to people about creating content, it is, have you read a book, have you read an article? Have you watched a podcast or listened to a podcast that made made you feel a little bit different? If the answer is yes, then share that. Because then if it touched you, it's gonna touch someone else. So that would be the easiest way to get somebody to start, is share something that touched you or made you feel a little bit different about something. It'll do the same for someone else. Awesome. Welcome to another episode of struggles presented by NCBI, the podcast where we navigate challenges together. Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of struggles presented by NCBI. This is Chris in with idea Cleveland. And John Carpenter with selling hospitality. So we both talk to a lot of people that struggle with using social media to use it as a branding tool and a marketing tool to build their business. And it's interesting because I don't know what people struggle with other than lack of effort. Yes. So, not to say that if you're having this problem, I'm saying that you're struggling for other reasons. But if you just put a little effort, and that's what we're going to talk about, what effort do you need to put into it? And it's not as much as you think. No. You know, the funny thing is, you and Brian had talked about this on one of your videos. Whether people believe it or not and they want to have it or not, every person has a personal brand. And just because you don't create content doesn't mean you don't have a personal brand. See you in one way, shape or form when they meet you. Right. And so if you are going to create content, though, that side has to be consistent. Like, I think the struggle I see is for most people is not being consistent. And when I say consistent, I mean I don't expect people to be as consistent as I am. Like to post every

day before 08: 2:16

00 a.m. seven days a week on LinkedIn or you. You know, those kind of things. But post every day or decide you're gonna post three days a week or four days a week, like, and stick to it. You don't need to set a time or anything. But the consistency piece is where I think most people struggle. They get burnt out, like you said earlier. And there are ways to get around that, though. Yeah. And I think that people think that they need to have these like you do. Amazing post and you put a lot of time and effort into each individual post, right. Which brings great value. But every once in a while you can call it in a little and take your Google review and make it a post. Exactly. Yeah. You can every once in a while call it in and just send a picture of your team and talk about how exciting it was to take your team to Topgolf and have that kind of atmosphere at your company. It doesn't have to be these very well written storytelling every single time. Consistency is consistency. All you're looking at is trying to get the post out no matter what the platform is. Right? It could be an article you loved, a book you loved, share it. Share why it was important to you and share copied of the book. Like, you know, we saw that book on Brian's desk, the Daily Stoic. Like you could take that, take a picture of it, read a chapter out of it and say, drop the quote that he read and then that's it. Like that's all you gotta do. So when you are consistent on posting, I think the timing is important. It needs to be four to five days a week. But yes, it doesn't all have to be a selfie. It doesn't all have to be, you know, ten paragraphs. It doesn't all have to be any of that. It can be whatever you want it to be, as long as it's daily or a couple times a week. Oh, absolutely. And it's so amazing. Now, is that LinkedIn? It's our social media choice. You can schedule it right on LinkedIn. Exactly. Back in the day, you would have to pay for another service and go through it all, but now you literally can open up your phone. I have an idea. I'm just going to create it. Hey, I'm going to have this go out tomorrow morning. Like, it's so much easier now. Yeah. And I remember you're talking about like ideas and all that. I remember going to jungle gyms one time down at Cincinnati with my family and I spent more pictures and time creating social media posts while my wife was shopping for random stuff. Isn't that the point of jungle gyms? But it's very funny. We walk in the door, they have their own podcast studio at a grocery store, right? I'm like holy cow. I'm taking pictures instantly. Like, oh, man, I'm gonna make a post about this. We walked down the bottled water aisle and there was a Chuck Norris bottled water. And I go, oh, my God, this is ridiculous. It's a Chuck Norris water. I actually have one in my office. And I pulled it off the shelf and I looked at it, then I flipped it over. It's run by a woman only business, even. Yeah. So they pay Chuck Norris to be the face of their bottled water. Of a woman owned business. Of a woman owned business. Because they understand personal branding of Chuck Norris is magically getting to get me to buy his bottle of water or. At least stop and pick it up. Right? Yeah. It's so ridiculous. So I'm like, oh, man, talk about branding and everything. And there's just so many things that I just went through that store coming up with ideas. So I think that you have this problem as well. I call it a problem. We always are thinking about content in our head. Yes. And you probably, as the listeners, aren't always thinking about content. You're not thinking about how you're creating a media company. But Gary Vee always talks about you need to be a media company to brand your business. Yep. And I think you're right. So right, it is a problem because I think everything is content. Right. We were having a conversation today. We talked about a million different things. But within that conversation, I pulled out five or six nuggets that have turned into posts. And I can read an article that could be, you know, two pages long, and I'll find five or six items in there that are going to be a post. Like, I constantly have a running notebook on my phone of topics and ideas that I want to write content about. With NCBI and our luncheons and our free thought Fridays and all this kind of stuff, there's always ideas. And you want to talk about struggles. And I think that's the struggle, is the fact that people struggle with ideas. They don't know what to post. Right. Anywhere you're at, personal posts do better most of the time. So if you don't know what to post and you want to post, like you had mentioned, take a picture of you holding Chuck Norris's water bottle and say, why? Was important to you. Right. And that will resonate with somebody. And that's all you need to do, is resonate with somebody in any post. Yes. And also, you notice what we're talking about here has 0% have to do with what we're trying to sell people exactly. And that's the part of the problem people have as well. They think that they're going to use their social media as a sales advertising platform. And if you take yourself out of your position at that company and put yourself into the customer seat, why would you follow your social media? Right. What is in it for me? The old wifm, what's in it for me? And if there's nothing of value for your followers, prospects and your customers, what are you doing here? Well, I mean, if you go back, right, I worked at John Eagle for 13 years and bed bath at yawn for seven. And the only time, I mean, not the only time, but you would see an influx of customers was when they got the ad at giant Eagle and Pepsi was four for $10. Right. People would flock in to buy it. The only reason they're in the store to buy Pepsi, right, because they read it in an ad or a solid commercial, right. Yeah. And at bed Bath and beyond, guess what 20% coupon hit. People flooded it right after the 20% coupon hit. Right. They knew what they were doing. It was before social media got big. Right. But it was still about attention. And I think that what you're saying is you really just have to have attention. You have to find people's attention in that. If it captures you, is it going to capture someone else? But you have to step into their shoes and see how is it gonna capture them? Is it gonna provide value? And if you're not sure, ask somebody. Like, I'm a big, big proponent of, here's my post. Can you read it and give me your thoughts before I post? Sometimes I will do that with certain people if I know that it kind of resonates with them, because then if it resonates with one person, it's gonna resonate with five other people, and then five more people are gonna share it and things like that. So, yeah, you have to get into their shoes, which is very hard because we can't be in other people's shoes. Nobody's fitting in my size 14, not. Too many anyway, fit in it. They're just kind of baggy. Right. But it kind of like the show, it struggles here. And you think about it, what are your customers struggling with exactly? Because I've heard this and I love stealing it. We're not selling products and services. We're selling solutions to people's problems. We're solving feelings at the end. Yeah. So if you think about what are your ideal clients problems, their struggles, how do you solve them? And you teach them educate them, entertain them, keep them informed. Build that trust factor. That's when social media starts getting you your leads. We just had our b and I meeting on Thursday, and I had to announce everybody like, hey, I got a great prospect coming through for LinkedIn. I probably post a third of the amount of time that you do, and I still get leads through LinkedIn. It's not. You don't need to post seven days a week. You can post three days a week and just make sure they're quality content and you can get some value out of that. Right? Yeah, you don't want to sell. I mean, look, I think the average person who posts seven days a week, like myself, uses two sales posts a week. The rest are usually, for me, there'd be two sales posts, two leadership posts, and three personal posts, usually because you want to give them a wide breast of everything that they're looking for, but it is, you're really selling. The end result and how it made them feel doesn't matter. The service, product, whatever their struggles, if you've satisfied that at the end with what you're selling, and you can sell that through relationships, that's all that matters. You don't want to be on there the entire time. And when I see we're talking struggles and consistencies, some of the things I see is, like you mentioned, you share your Google review. Well, there are some people who share only Google reviews. Right. That doesn't do anything. That's not solving someone's problem. That's not giving you an end result. It gave one person an end result, but that end result might not be the one you're looking for. So they have to find out what their buyers are struggling with on a daily basis. And it changes. And you're like, for you creating videos, it changes. You're dealing with algorithms, you're dealing with different platforms, you're dealing with all that stuff. And maybe somebody only wants to post on LinkedIn. Makes it easy for you because you know what you have to do, right? Yes. You're not editing ten different ways. Well, thank you, John, for joining me, and thank you so much for listening. And hopefully we've kind of helped you. If you've been struggling with social media and what to create and how to actually get going with it, hopefully, you know, this conversation helped you out in some way. Feel free to reach out to John or myself or Brian. Yeah. And if you have any other struggles, just reach out to love, to have you on to talk about them. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Thank you. Cool. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of struggles presented by NCBI, where we navigate challenges together. Don't forget to subscribe, listen, and share this podcast with others who might benefit. We'd love to hear about the struggles you're facing or have overcome, and we'd be thrilled to have you as a guest on a future episode. Let's continue this journey together.