As I sit down to record this I have a cup of pukka relax tea next to me. Did you know I’m a pukka fanatic with over 10 different varieties in my cupboard? Why am I telling you this? It’s because I know that many of my followers are pukka tea fanatics too. And telling you helps to create a connection between us.
Over time, as we get to know each other, you’ll probably build up your trust in me, and that will help you to feel more confident about contacting me if you’d like my help. This is what social media is all about. It’s all about creating relationships so that people trust you enough to make referrals.
So today’s episode is all about how you can begin to make connections with people by engaging them with topical and fun social media posts. When you’re really stuck on your social media page it’s usually a sign of the fact that you don’t really know who you’re speaking to.
Because if you’ve got an idea in your head about the type of person that you’re trying to reach out to it can be a whole lot easier to know what to say, because you’ll be more aware of the sorts of issues that they’re concerned about. You’ll be aware of how certain things can impact them.
And particularly if you’re looking at what could I do on my page this month and you’re looking at, say, awareness days, which is what this particular episode is about, you can choose the awareness days that would actually suit the types of people that you’re trying to reach.
And so an example of this is that May is actually Teen Self Esteem Month. So if you’re somebody who is working with children and young people that would be a really great thing to focus on this month. All the things that you can think of to do with teenagers and self esteem.
And what I’d suggest you do is maybe divide the month up into 4, so for the 4 weeks, think of 4 different topics to do with teen self esteem, and for each week focus on that subtopic.
So just off the top of my head, one of the things that can really affect children and teenagers self esteem is the effect of social media. So you could have 1 week where you talk about social media and how it can chip away at people’s self esteem. And you could do maybe an information post on that week where you lay out the issues. You could write a small blog.
You could use that post that you’re writing for your social media. You could share that on as a blog post as well because remember, blog posts don’t have to be really long. A 300 word blog post is fine. It gets something on your website, and that helps your SEO. So, you know, one of the weeks you could talk about the impact of social media.
And then from that longer post that you write, you could pick out 3 or 4 different quotes and you could share those at different times during that week. So that would be one aspect of teen self esteem. And then you could talk about something different. So you could talk about the other things that might affect a teen’s self esteem. So, for example, say you work with a lot of dyslexic teenagers, you could talk about the impact of being dyslexic and what that’s like for teenagers.
Or you could talk about how teenagers gradually the peer group becomes much more influential on the teen than parents’ opinions, and what happens during that change, the in crowd, all that sort of stuff.
And I am sure you’ve got lots of ideas and you don’t need me to suggest them. Because if you’re working with teenagers, you’ll know what some of those issues are for them.
So think about 4 different aspects of teen self esteem that you can talk about, split it into weeks, and then split each of those topics into, information post, some posts where you do a quote post or 2, and then you could also do a little poll as well, which is what I quite often do on my page, is that I’ll ask people questions. So if you’re reaching out to parents, say during the week where you’re talking about social media, you could ask them, you know, do you worry about social media?’ or you could ask them something around, do they limit their children on social media?
Or do you understand your children’s social media? Or what’s the main social media platform that your teen uses, and just get them to tell you the answers and it will generate a discussion. So that’s one example of how you could use the month to break it down and to create different posts around one subject. But that’s if you know that you are working with teenagers. And that’s an easy one, really, because you’re either working with them because that’s something you love to do, or you’re not because you’re an adult qualified therapist.
And if you’re working with adults, it then becomes a little bit more complicated in a sense, isn’t it? Because there’s so many different types of adult you could be working with. You could be working with men. You could be working with women. You could be working with a mixture, but you’re working with bereavement, or you’re working with trauma, or you could be working with a whole lot of other things.
And then it becomes, oh, you know, what do I actually talk about? But this is where, sometimes, when you look at the awareness days, it can give you some ideas.
So I’ve mentioned that it’s teen self esteem month, but, also, there’s other things going on during the month that you could use. If you work with women, with younger women, you work with, perhaps, perinatal mental health. You’ve got your maternal mental health month coming up.
So that might be something that’s similar to teen self esteem month where you could really focus in on that subject. But equally, there’s no reason why you couldn’t, if you’re a general counsellor, talk about maternal mental health if that’s something that you’re really interested in.
And also, for a general counsellor, we also have mental health awareness week coming up in May, so look out for that one because that is a week where you can really go to town and talk about mental health. But if you’re somebody who’s perhaps more general and you’re thinking to yourself, oh, you know, it’s alright if, you know, I specifically work with teens, what else can I do?’ There are other days that you could use, that you could focus on and you could use, say, a theme of self care? So one of the people that I worked with in Therapy Growth Group, what she did was she thought to herself, I’m going to choose certain topics that I talk about each week.
And one of the topics that she decided that she would talk about each week was self care. And there’s a couple of specific days coming up in May, but if you were talking around self care you could include those in those weeks. So on the 5th May it’s World Laughter Day. So that’s quite a fun one where you can make the point about laughter being good for us, but also you could have fun with it as well, like find a joke or do something silly, something that makes your page seem fun. So you might want to share a fun post, for example.
And then towards the end of May, on 21st, it’s world meditation day. So if you’re somebody who works with meditation, perhaps in your life, you do breath work, that sort of thing, that might be something that you could focus in on that particular day. So a couple of self care days that are coming up in the month. And then if you’re more of a sort of general counsellor, other things that are coming up are, we’ve got world ego awareness day on 11th, we’ve also got on 26th National Sorry Day, and also on the 27th Nothing to Fear Day. So, you can imagine that you could make something of those particular days and you could pick a day and just think, okay, so World Ego Awareness Day, that’s on the 11th May 2024.
That’s actually a Saturday. So you might want to build up to world ego awareness day the week before. So the week beginning the 6th of May, you could be picking things out around ego and talk about if you’re a psychodynamic counsellor, obviously, you might like to try and explain a little bit about it. Or you could talk, if you’re more a general counsellor, about egotistical people, to how that can rub you up the wrong way. You could talk about how we massage our egos and the ways we do that and the ways we try and make something of ourselves, we identify with particular roles in life, for example.
So you could start expanding on that theme of ego and look at it from a counselling perspective because this is stuff that you actually know quite a lot about. Often when I’m talking to counsellors, when we work together we talk about how identity is such an important thing and, of course, the ego is really attached to a sense of identity. And because a lot of what counselling is about is often that transition when we’re dealing with loss, say, the loss of a job, that’s a big knock to our identity as a working person isn’t it? So these sorts of things are ways in which we can talk about our work and help people to see what’s happening to them, to take them to a deeper level of awareness, of self awareness and we can do that through expressing these concepts on our social media page, but done in a way that is quite light and not like a thesis, because because no one’s gonna sit down and read a thesis. And you want to make it quite engaging.
This is social media. It needs to be quite quick a lot of the time. So it is difficult to do sometimes, and what I say to people is that, you know, nobody taught you how to do this unless you’re a marketing graduate. You’ve got to learn how to do this and you’ve got to learn what works with your audience. But, believe me, often it’s the really simple things that very quick for people to answer that actually works well, but also you do want to, in a sense, showcase some of your expertise and it’s quite helpful if you could put something, so say you were doing something around a story, around identity, thinking along this sort of ego theme, what you’d want to do is tell some sort of story alongside it.
So I quite often would tell my own story, but if you don’t want to tell your own story you could have a look at an example of something. So you might like to have a look at an example of someone who’s quite well known, who you might want to talk about in relation to identity and ego. And there is an obvious example that’s coming to my head from across the pond, as they say, but I won’t say the name. So, you know, there’s different things that you can do even if you’re more of a general counsellor and you don’t want to necessarily zone in on a particular type of person. But obviously, if you can zone in on someone, if you could think, oh, this would speak to this type of client that I’ve had coming through my door, that does actually help you shape your post in a much easier it’s easier for you.
It’s you can imagine that you’re talking to them and you can write that post to them and that really can quite often speak to people. I also wanted to showcase some lgbtq days too just so that you know what’s coming up because because May is actually quite a good month for LGBTQ. So on 17th we’ve got the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia. We’ve got Agender Pride Day on the 19th May, and we’ve also got Pansexual Visibility Day on the 24th May. So there’s days there that you can use if you’ve got an LGBTQ following.
And last but not least, I wanted to mention that it’s Dying Matters Week and that is the 6th to 12th May. So, if you are involved in working with people who are facing relatives, perhaps, who are dying or recently bereaved, this could be a week for you to really focus on those particular subjects. So there’s so much that you can do by just having a look and seeing what days are coming up in the calendar. I do a weekly post in Therapy Growth Group, where I let people know what is coming up the following week so that they can write their social media posts. And believe me, I often find it difficult to choose because there’s so many different days that we could use.
If you start using the days as metaphor metaphor that can really help you as well. And also always remember to have some fun posts in the mix, because that will help people to follow your page. Social media, don’t forget, is social. So people don’t necessarily want to be told about things like suicide every week, they like something fun, and so sharing fun stuff can be really, really helpful because that will get people engaging in your page. It will get them sticking around you because they get to know you, they get to like you, they get to trust you and you never know where that might lead.
They might just mention you to a friend who’s upset. So I hope those days help. I look forward to seeing some of your posts from people that I follow, who also follow me. I’ll look out for them. Thanks for listening.
Do come and join my Facebook community, Good Enough Counsellors. And for more information about how I can help you develop your private practice, please visit my website, josephinehughes.com. If you found this episode helpful, I’d love it if you could share it with a fellow therapist or leave a review on your podcast app. And in closing, I’d love to remind you that every single step you make gets you closer to your dream. I really believe you can do it.