Value and oversharing online

In the age of social media it’s easy to overshare. You can go from sharing behind the scenes of your business, hobby or creative work to showing people what you ate for breakfast, how you ruined your manicure and asking for suggestions for your new hair colour.

For some people, it works, they like sharing themselves with people in that way. But for others it would be considered too much.

It’s can be challenging to judge whether you need to push yourself to share more online or if sharing more is the wrong thing for you.

If you find yourself caught up in uncertainty over what to share online, consider why you want to share those details.

Does it add to the work you create, does it add value, is it something you’re comfortable doing or is it just more ‘stuff’ to scroll through?

Putting more thought into branding

As much as you might want to focus on other stuff, it will always be worth putting some time into branding. It’s important to think about how things look to an outside eye and understand if you’re able to deliver your intended message.

I’ve always wanted The Daily Gemm (TDG) to be a space with writing and simplicity at the forefront and that’s what I focused on when I started posting to the Instagram account a few months ago. However, I’ve realised that although the simplicity element works well on the blog, it doesn’t translate the same way on Instagram. I realised that I might need to do start doing things differently.

After giving it things more thought and thinking about the grand scheme and my future plans and aspirations, I came to the conclusion that I wanted the TDG Instagram account to represent my long-term plans as a brand, rather than just to represent this blog.

And so over the past week or so I’ve been coming up with ideas for how I could do things differently in a way that works for me.

One the first things that came to mind was more visual content and more colour. Currently the TDG feed is full of quotes from my blog posts in black and white. But it turns out the ‘just words, no pictures’ philosophy that I have for this site doesn’t fit for Instagram.

On one hand my grand plans for Instagram have come crashing down but on the other hand it taught me a lot. I’ve now gone back to the drawing board and spent time planning and creating things that I’m looking forward to sharing.

The challenge of representation

How do you include everyone?

It’s not as simple as black and white although in some cases that might seem like enough. I suppose I’ve learnt and am learning that it’s about having minorities be seen.

Sometimes people make the mistake of being bare minimum. They use a sea of sameness with one person that’s ‘other’ in order to look like they’re being inclusive. In reality they might just be trying to tick a box.

But it’s not always straight forward because when you’re used to only focusing on one type of person, how do you grow away from that authentically?

And then we have to ask the question of what’s authentic anyway and who decides?

I’m online enough to know that everyone is a critic these days and people only need to see a glimpse of something to get the pitchforks ready and call you out.

If a brand went from showing one type of person to a wider variety people will day they’re jumping on the bandwagon or that it’s not enough because what about xyz.

It’s easy to be critical but it’s worth asking yourself if it’s actually helping or if you’re just adding to the noise.

Making a mountain out of a molehill

It might not be such a bad idea.

When it comes to creating content, you have so many options: blog posts, Instagram feed, Insta-stories, IGTV, YouTube, podcasts, tweets etc.

I’ve been thinking about how instead of just creating one thing, you can share one piece of content across different platforms.

That’s a great way to reach more people because blog readers might not watch YouTube and people that listen to podcasts might not be on twitter.

I think it can also be useful when building a brand and trying to grow your audience to not just be in one place.

With this blog I’ve been reluctant to do anything apart from write a blog posts each day because I don’t want to create more work than I can handle alongside a full-time job, part-time study and my lifestyle blog.

But I’m at a point where I’m close to 1 year of daily blogging and I’m opening myself up the idea of sharing things on Instagram and possibly having audio versions of the post or perhaps a podcast.

And so the blogposts are the molehills but the potential to create a variety of content from these posts is the mountain.

I’m realising that this writing practice based around personal growth and random musings can become so much more than I initially intended.