Carly Buxton, PhD

Social media is hard for me. I find it utterly poisonous. The FOMO, envy, and insufficiency I felt while surfing Instagram during my first maternity leave (almost always while either nap-trapped or nurse-trapped) were what inspired the creation of my company in the first place. I thought there needed to be an oasis online where parents could get judgment-free, evidence-based support, free from the noise, the ads, the self-promotion, and the dopamine slot machine.

And yet.

I dreamed of building a thriving company with no social media accounts. Just radio silence. But social media is where my customers are. Although the torn semi-Luddites like myself—woke to the toxicity of social media and outdone with the companies wielding those marionette strings—have long since given up on posting personally, few have totally given up on scrolling. My customer segments all spend a great deal of time on Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Pinterest. Am I a fool for not doing the same via my company’s account?

Probably.

Amid our rebrand from Nessle to Parentswarm, I’ve been scanning the horizon for inspiration fodder for my company’s own social media reset, and I think I’ve found it.

I just listened to the latest episode (#226) of my favorite podcast (Marketing against the Grain) and their guest was Gary Vaynerchuk, one of the most influential and outspoken figures in marketing, entrepreneurship and personal branding in the digital age. As I listened to him riff on the importance of going hard on social media, I found myself pausing and scribbling down notes at three of his key points in particular, which will be helpful touchpoints for our brand moving forward.

1 – “The reason I’ve been able to outflank… has been simply this: I have never sold anything or made anything that didn’t start with the following framework: why on earth would anybody watch this?”

My touchpoint takeaway: Gary Vee doesn’t post pictures of himself drinking $5,000 bottles of wine or taking private jets “because it doesn’t bring any value to the audience.” With each post: think deeply about why someone would enjoy or benefit from this. If the answer is “well, it’s aspirational,” then that’s a post for you, not for your customer.  So what is YOUR AUDIENCE getting out of your post? It could be “information, education, pondering, insights, wisdom, escapism, beauty, humor, banter,” but it should be something for them, not for you/your brand. “Value” for my audience on Parentswarm will be information, access, and uplift. Education seems like a natural fit but in my experience as a parenting brand too often becomes preachy… it just makes me feel pretty lacking as a parent (case in point: Dr. Becky).

2 – “Look. If your fashion brand 30 years ago could run print ads every day, would you do it, if you could have afforded it? …That’s social media.”

My touchpoint takeaway: Social media offers low-barrier access to millions of eyeballs. That’s an opportunity worth appreciating (rather than just resenting).

3 – “Take organic social media creative seriously.  …The consumer insights that come out of [posting regularly on social media] are worth the price of admission.”

My touchpoint takeaway: Posting online and gaging engagement (or lack thereof), reading comments, seeing what takes off, and observing what others are exploring—this is like free consumer research.

The core problem, I think, is that we business owners are given social media calendars and templates and told to post daily. I remember stretching out a calendar page in front of me and feeling relief when I saw something like “pancake day,” which meant that I now had some sort of PROMPT for what to post that day. But is my picture of pancakes actually doing anything other than contributing to the noise?

Calendar-led guidance for social media posting, I’ve come to believe, is misguided. It becomes a cop-out. A phone-in. It’s also the reason we get so much rainbow washing during June for Pride Month, Blackwashing in February, or why every company who has ever championed me cares deeply about me—a female CEO—in… March and March alone (thanks, Women’s Month).

Inspired by Gary Vee, I’m shifting from calendar-led posting to purpose-led posting. From here on out, I won’t be posting from the Parentswarm account just because I feel like I have to. I’ll only post when I feel that I have something genuinely valuable for my audience. Just because it’s free and easy to post on social media doesn’t mean that we should inundate these channels with noise or lip service, just because the calendar says to post, and the calendar says it’s Such-and-Such day. Treat each unit like a $4,000 print ad that you’ve been given a 100% rebate for; it’s an opportunity to entertain and give value, a chance to gain valuable insights from your target audience.