Social Media and Mental Health in Business

We have to admit that Social Media has served us well here at Prickly Thistle. It has helped us grow our business from literally nothing and reach people that we would never have reached without it. It’s the same for the vast majority of businesses. Connecting with the millions of people all around the world and engaging them with our content. 

Social Media has been the main part of marketing plan especially during Covid when we couldn’t connect face to face and everyone was stuck at home.  We have spreadsheets and planners detailing each platform and which clients will be most likely to be on each platform and we have planned our content around this. Speaking and connecting in different ways with our ideal clients. It has worked for us and worked well, however we have to admit that more and more often lately we are staring at a blank screen trying to work out new ways of saying the same thing because more and more of those that followed us on these platforms were no longer seeing our content. We also know that when this is happening, that blank screen stare – you will also feel that. It doesn’t serve any business to feel like this, it in short dampens you passion and your creativity.

Add to this constant need of sharing similar content but in a 'different way', the planning that has been done when a platform changes the algorithm, we are no longer getting to think about our community in a personal way, rather we are feeling pressure to work out with the algorithm wants....

Algorithms control the way that platforms use to sort posts in a users feed based on relevancy (still not clear how that is worked out to be honest) instead of publish time and this can be manipulated by platforms to push whatever posts they think are relevant to THEIR current plan of action AND not what our business cares about the most, which is sharing our journey, our learnings and creations with the people who have opted to follow us. Algorithms now can change at any time, we have no control over this, it becomes a beat the machine 'task'. Recently Instagram changed to prioritise reels and concertina posts – this is a whole new way of promoting business and we had to very quickly get used to recording reels and coming up with concertina posts but really we loved sharing beautiful pictures about our brand, the people, the products and always our purpose.

So, what does this do to the mental health of business and the people who work there?

It makes you unsure of your future?

It takes choices away from you and puts it in the hands of an outside force that has no interest in your business, your morals, your values.

Would we allow any other outside factor to have so much control over the way you work? We think not.

Then there is the constant checking your engagement, your reach, how many click throughs you receive to your website from each post. It becomes obsessive and the truth of it all is that you will be lucky if 5% of those who like your business page see your posts, so what are we obsessing with and why! Is our message reaching the people we need it too? Are our sales viable or being nurtured in a sustainable way because of the time that we are spending on social media? We would say a big fat NO is the answer to this.

So we rebelled....

We want to connect in other ways, we want to enable you to choose to engage with us – not have posts pushed at you. We want to see you in person – at our Mill or at Pop-Up events which we plan to do a lot more off, real connections. We want to engage with you in ways that are kind to both your and our mental health. You always have the opportunity of opting into our messaging platform and/or emails and we won’t be posting to you every day – 4 times a week broad casts via WhatsApp at the most and it will be meaningful, kind messages that you have chosen to see.

Even typing this out is a like a breath of fresh air. Creatives become creative when they say NO to manipulation, exploitation and degradation and YES to building true, kind and free foundations for the future. Are you with us?

What would SHE say in 200 years?.....

Read all about our Sh#t Free Social Rebellion HERE