I was recently alerted to a blog article articled by a spirituality-based entrepreneur about how social media is terrible for small business owners, which ironies would have it, an article I wouldn’t even have known existed without social media…

The title of the article is this sweeping misleading statement implying that businesses are quitting social media in droves and why small business owners and spiritual entrepreneurs should follow suit. The article has kinda sorta gone viral in our little niche community, so by now I’m sure you already know which article I’m talking about.

I think it’s great that Leonie Dawson does what she needs to do for her own mental and spiritual health, but I’m a little wary of the blanket prescription.

Here’s the original article:

https://leoniedawson.com/businesses-quit-social-media/

Without hesitation, I co-sign on the toxicity of social media and how yes, we all need breaks from it for our mental and spiritual health, but I felt the way that she presented her arguments were imbalanced– to put it the kindest– and self-centered self-congratulatory naval-gazing– to put it the bluntest.

The thesis she presents commingles personal health and business health. Just like your personal and business bank accounts, gotta keep the two separate. Social media got on her personal nerves and then she made the business decision to leave social media because she can.

Some numbers, shall we? She has 20K followers on Instagram and 132K likes on her Facebook business page. Average opt-in rate for a mailing list is 20% of your subscribers. We’ll work with the higher number of 132K just to be generous. If 20% of people who’ve liked her Facebook page opted into her mailing list, then in theory she has 26,400 names on her mailing list right now.

Let’s be conservative and work with the smaller number of 20K on Instagram. That’s 4,000 names on her mailing list. She definitely has way more than that. Even small potatoes me has more than 4,000 names on my mailing list.

If we work with the admittedly useless figure of the average, let’s say she has 6,500 names on her mailing list. Conversion to buy rate in the category of Religion & Spirituality is 3% and for Hobbies it’s 5%. If she’s got a fiercely loyal base of followers, which most social media influencers like Leonie Dawson have, then let’s say it’s 4%.

That means a projection of 260 people are buying every product or service she puts out. Let’s take what she claims is her most popular selling course: it costs $99. From one course alone, annually, the estimate is she’s making $25,740 for just that one course alone. She’s got dozens of products for sale. If she can maintain that sales projection for another 2 courses, then that’s $77,220 before we even get to accounting for the profits from her day planners, workbooks, and essential oils. If she says she can net in well over six figures a year, I believe it.

So when she makes the business decision to forego expansion and to just be happy with where she is right now, then yeah, she can abso-fucking-lutely quit social media and stick to her current mailing list.

For the vast majority of entrepreneurs online, that’s just not their reality, and for her to even unintentionally imply otherwise is irresponsible.

We all aspire to get to that place with our business platform where we can do whatever the hell we want. But to advise all small business owners, especially new, aspiring spiritual entrepreneurs to do the same is feckless, just bad business advice, and comes from a position of naval-gazing rather than being considerate of other people’s reality. “This works for my belly button so I bet it’ll work for everybody else’s belly button too!”

Also, let’s translate into plain English some of the things she said, shall we?

Her saying “post interaction was WAY down” translates to “I’m salty that I work so hard at creating content for social media and I don’t get the positive feedback for it that I’m craving.”

Look, that whole “I’m salty that I…” statement is totally something I could say for myself, I would say for myself. I am with her 300%. I feel that way, too.

Her saying “people were needing to create MUCH more, at a much faster pace… forcing us to become unpaid content creators for THEIR gain. How it was becoming a pay-for-play access” translates to “I can’t keep up with market competition so I’m tapping out.”

That’s totally fine and valid to say so, to acknowledge that she can no longer keep up with how market competition has evolved since her sabbatical. Just say so. Don’t hide behind all this “well it’s other people’s fault… it’s society’s fault…” mentality.

Don’t even get me started on the passive-aggressive manipulative way the next few paragraphs all but compares small business entrepreneurs still playing the social media game as dumb frogs getting boiled alive slowly, then pretty much congratulates herself for not being a dumb frog. If that’s not what you think she was really trying to say, then read it again until the subtext reveals itself to you.

The mailing list advice she gives is true. It’s good advice.

Telling people to quit social media and just focus on their mailing list, without more constructive information and context, is bad, bad, bad advice.

Then all that who owns what when it comes to social media platforms is just fear-mongering from a granola-chewing love-and-light hippy who is so out of touch with how Silicon Valley actually works that I don’t know where to begin. It requires another essay all to explain her logical fallacies. She might own a trademark to her domain name, but who is her webhost? Does she own the webhost platform her website is built on or is she renting it for a monthly or annual fee? How about her e-mail? She own’s that? Really? Why doesn’t she believe her mailing list service provider isn’t a pay-to-play platform?

Her cherry-picked statistics don’t actually support her thesis, by the way. A  business investing too much of its resources into social media marketing but not yielding actual sales from that investment is just bad strategy with its social media marketing. It doesn’t by itself prove that social media marketing is ineffective.

Social media marketing yields phenomenal sales results if you do your social media marketing right.

She’s only correct to the extent that poorly-planned social media marketing yields null results. That, sure. I mean, of course.

All the other articles she posted to prove her point are self-published, not-peer-reviewed-in-any-way, and authored by people who don’t have any established credentials and qualifications to be giving business advice. Yeah I clicked through to the links, saw which website was hosting that article, and the professional credentials of the authors…

As for the companies she cited as having quit social media, each one, on a case by case consideration, makes sense. But are you Lush? Are you Basecamp?

In fact, Lush– let’s talk about Lush, shall we? How did that beauty company get to be as big as it did? Social media, bitches. Lush was widely celebrated and promoted by social media influencers and it was Lush’s presence on social media in the earlier stages of its business that gave it the freedom and power to make conscious decisions in the later stages of its business life. Today. if Lush wants to quit social media as one of their marketing strategy arms, it can. But five years ago? Social media was doing most of the company’s heavy-lifting.

Not to mention the conflicting arguments she gives, points that cancel each other out.

First she says Facebook sucks because Zuckerberg wants to change it so you only see posts from friends and family and commercial, business-sponsored posts will be reduced, and that’s why you should leave Facebook.

Then she quotes Basecamp, who says Facebook used to be this great place to connect with friends and family but now it’s all just shitty commercial, business-sponsored posts and for that reason we’re leaving, because we don’t like how Facebook is just paid advertising now. Therefore, leave Facebook because it’s too commercial and all business-sponsored.

She ends her article saying you are the best person to make business decisions for your business and she’s not trying to tell you what to do, but again, the subtext here. Is she not self-aware enough to realize that the entire point of the article, start to finish, was to try and convince small business owners to follow her decision?

Ultimately, I agree with her recommendation to have a strategy in place that moves your social media subscribers on to your mailing list. Yes, sound business advice. It’s all the other fluff that filled up the space of that article I dispute.

For business purposes, you should absolutely be strategic with social media and use your social media as opportunities to attract prospective customers or clientele.

And yes, one method is to create free quality content that’s going to attract those initial eyeballs.

For personal health and wellbeing, I’ve found that social media can be toxic when you don’t filter it, when you’re not careful about what exactly you’re letting yourself be exposed to. But that is a very different consideration from what’s good for business.

If you’re an entrepreneur looking to expand business, one cost of doing that business is having to fend off some of that social media toxicity. You can’t put yourself out there as some sort of public figure and not at some point become a target for the evil eye.

In fact, sales numbers don’t lie. By being on social media, you might get 100 people who love your brand, and 3 people who think you’re a piece of shit. Sales wise, you are still getting 100 sales and losing 3 sales to the people who think you’re a piece of a shit. In terms of business, no loss.

The problem is in terms of personal wellbeing and mental health, we as human beings ignore the 100 people who support us and focus all of our energy on those 3 people who said we were a piece of shit. Mental health wise, the 3 haters outweigh the 100 supporters.

Dawson gets subjected to serious vitriol on the Internet and from my own experiences, I can empathize. Giving and giving so much of yourself in terms of free content through social media and then not feeling like you get anything fulfilling in return, least of all sales is a reality I can feel her on. No one blames her, or should blame her, for feeling salty about that.

In contrast, those who you interact with who are on your closed newsletter tend to be over and beyond supportive, kind, thoughtful, positive, and they build you up, rather than constantly trying to tear you down, or subscribing to every account you have on the Internet and following you around virtually just to see if you’ll fail, waiting to catch your slip-up so they can be the first to announce that you’re a fraud.

It makes perfect personal, spiritual, emotional sense to quit social media and focus on a closed mailing list group of people for your community.

But that’s terrible business advice, unless you already have a 100K following to draw from and can close the gates on the riff raff. Otherwise, dealing with riff raff is kind of part and parcel to online business reality.

The better advice to give is to present the pros and cons of both so that entrepreneurs and sole proprietors go in with both eyes open. They know what they’re getting into and can do the cost-benefit analysis for themselves.