Somewhere out there, someone’s putting off recording one more reel. In this bonus episode of the Dream Business Blueprint series, Lori explains why you may not need to post it at all.
This isn’t a tutorial on how to use Instagram or beat the algorithm. It’s about where social media actually belongs in the business you’re designing: not as a popularity contest, but as one tool doing a specific job.
3 Main Takeaways:
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You’re a business owner, not an influencer. Every post exists for one reason: so people who could become your clients find out who you are and how to work with you. Stop asking “what should I post?” and start asking “what job does social media need to do in my business?”
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Pick one primary platform based on the job, not the trend. LinkedIn builds professional relationships and opportunity. Facebook is where your personality comes through. Instagram builds your brand and personal connection. TikTok and YouTube are built for discovery, and YouTube in particular works as a searchable library of expertise. Choose the one that fits the job you need done, give it your consistency, and let everything else play a supporting role.
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Engagement beats followers, and five mistakes are costing most business owners. A smaller, engaged audience beats a bigger, silent one. The five most common mistakes: trying to be an influencer instead of a business owner, no call to action, no link, inconsistency, and not sounding like yourself.
This Week’s Action: Pick one platform, the one you’re already on or the one that fits the job you need done. Look back at your last five to ten posts and ask honestly: what job was each one doing? Building relationships? Building your brand? Getting found? Or just noise because you felt like you had to post something?
Resources Mentioned:
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Dream Business Blueprint Assessment Workbook (social media bonus section added), Grab Yours Here
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Referenced episodes: 342 (kicking off the Dream Business Blueprint), 346 (visibility without becoming an influencer)
Ready to figure out where your business is costing you freedom? Book a Dream Business Design Session at TalkWithLori.com
Resources:
Download your Dream Business Blueprint workbook HERE
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Connect with Lori Follow me on social media – grab other free resources of book a call – it’s all right here!
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Chapters (estimated)
0:00 – Why This Episode Exists 0:25 – Welcome to the Midlife Business Academy 0:45 – You’re a Business Owner, Not an Influencer 1:55 – Stop Asking What to Post 3:15 – Social Media Is the Sound Bite, Your Website Is the Full Story 4:45 – Choosing Your Primary Platform 7:00 – LinkedIn: Professional Relationships and Opportunity 8:30 – Facebook: Where Your Personality Comes Through 10:15 – Instagram: Where People Get to Know Your Brand 12:00 – TikTok: Built for Discovery 13:00 – Followers vs. Engagement 14:15 – “I Hate Social Media” — What’s Really Going On 15:45 – YouTube: A Searchable Library of Expertise 17:45 – Bringing It All Together 18:45 – Five Biggest Mistakes Business Owners Make 20:00 – This Week’s Action 20:50 – Closing Thoughts and Next Steps
Why This Episode Exists
Somewhere out there, one of you is putting off recording one more reel. And honestly, I don’t blame you. Today, I’m going to tell you why you may not need to post it at all. Let’s get started.
Welcome to the Midlife Business Academy
I’m Lori Lyons, and welcome to the Midlife Business Academy. If you’ve ever felt like your business is running your life instead of supporting it, you’re in the right place. Around here, I believe a dream business isn’t measured by its size. It’s measured by the freedom and the life it makes possible.
And that starts with something you need to hear before anything else.
You’ve been through this entire series, lifestyle, business model, messaging, authority, AI, and through all of it, I kept thinking, I don’t want to go down the social media rabbit hole. But many of you have replied back and said, what about social media? So I added this section in. If you’ve downloaded the workbook, refresh the Google Doc, because it’s been added in there. If you haven’t gotten the workbook, go right now, so you can go back and listen to all the episodes and follow along.
For a lot of you, social media is the thing that makes marketing feel exhausting. And some of you would rather have a root canal than make another reel. So here’s my promise: I’m not going to teach you how to use Instagram today. Whatever I told you would be obsolete next week. I want to talk about where social media belongs in the business you’re designing. That’s very different.
You’re a Business Owner, Not an Influencer
So before we go anywhere else, I want to plant one idea today, because it’s going to run through everything we talk about. You’re not trying to build a following. You’re not trying to go viral. You are not auditioning to be an influencer. If you didn’t hear that, go back and listen to it again. It doesn’t matter how many followers you have. You aren’t an influencer. You’re a business owner, and everything you create on social media exists for one reason and one reason only: so people who could become your clients get to find out who you are and how to work with you. That’s it. That’s the whole point of view for this entire episode, and it applies to every single platform we’re talking about.
Because somewhere along the way, you got told you had to post constantly, be on every platform, build thousands of followers, create video, chase trends, understand algorithms, and basically become a content creator on top of running your actual business. That’s not true at all. That’s not your job. Unless your business model is literally being an influencer, social media exists to support something else, your coaching business, your consulting business, your speaking business, your firm, your local business, whatever you’ve built across this series.
Stop Asking What to Post
So stop asking, “what should I post?” Start asking, “what job does social media need to do in my business?” That job might be building relationships, establishing credibility, staying top of mind, gathering referrals, creating opportunities, or simply letting people get to know you before they ever connect with you.
That last one is something you want to think about. When someone hears your name at a networking event, someone recommends you, or they hear you speak, or hear you on a podcast, or maybe someone forwards your emails to them, what do you think they do next? They look you up. They’ll look on whatever platform they use, and they’ll ask: who are you? What do you talk about? Do you seem credible? Do I like you? Does this business look active? And if they like what they find, then they’ll go to your website. And yes, websites are still relevant and valid in today’s world.
Social Media Is the Sound Bite, Your Website Is the Full Story
Because social media is the sound bite. Your website is the full story.
So you’ve probably been asking yourself this whole time, where do I need to go? Don’t choose a platform because someone told you that’s where you’re supposed to be. You choose your primary platform based on what you’re trying to accomplish. Everything else is secondary, and secondary doesn’t mean feeding four platforms every day. One platform gets your consistency and your attention. Everything else plays a supporting role.
Choosing Your Primary Platform
I’m doing this myself right now. My primary platform, the one I’m actually building at the moment, is Instagram. I started a brand new little fun channel about how I use AI in my personal life, in my gardening, and how I’m using it to run my house. I picked Instagram because what I’m doing there is visual, and it’s a much better fit for me than anything else right now. I’ll probably expand it at some point, but right now, that’s what I’m doing.
I’ll be honest, it’s really hard. Vanessa, my wonderful right-arm person, handles all the social media for my business, but this one’s different. I’m teaching myself, with an occasional assist from her, and occasional laughing at me. She’s shown me how to build the reels, given me advice on the carousels. But all of it, I use AI to guide myself along the way. It’s not done by AI, it’s teaching me step by step how to do it. I talked about that in the last episode. So it’s not doing the thing for me, it’s showing me how to do it. That’s one platform, chosen on purpose for a very specific job.
LinkedIn: Professional Relationships and Opportunity
Okay, so let’s get into the platforms. We’re going to start with that powerhouse, LinkedIn.
If you’re business-to-business, LinkedIn deserves serious consideration as your primary platform, not because you need to be a LinkedIn creator, but because that’s where business conversations happen. It’s especially useful if you’re a consultant or a coach serving business owners and executives. If you’re in professional services, a speaker, an author, a corporate trainer, or any kind of business-to-business company at all.
LinkedIn isn’t only about finding clients. It’s about opportunity: speaking invitations, podcast invitations, strategic partnerships, referral relationships, media introductions, people researching you after meeting you somewhere. One of my good friends plans events for a living. She’s told me she spends hours on LinkedIn researching speakers for her clients’ events. That’s LinkedIn doing exactly the job it was built to do.
So if you want to speak, LinkedIn is where you need to be focusing your attention. Go back to episode 346, I talked all about visibility in that episode, how to get known without becoming an influencer, and LinkedIn was one of the vehicles for that.
The strategic purpose is professional relationships, credibility, and opportunities. But if your business runs on personal connection more than professional credibility, there’s a different platform doing that job.
Facebook: Where Your Personality Comes Through
Facebook is where your personality gets to come through.
Before we get started, let me talk about business pages for a second. Does anyone know why they’re still around? They have their function, ads run through them, they’re an official presence, but that’s not where you want to spend all your energy, even if you’re an established expert. So kind of ignore those for now, unless the algorithm has changed in the last ten minutes.
Personal profiles are where Facebook can be powerful for you. Relationships. People get to know you. They see your expertise mixed with enough of your actual life to remember there’s a human being behind the business. It’s networking that keeps going after you’ve left the room.
Facebook used to be all about what you ate for breakfast. Not anymore. It’s the OG of social media, and I mean that as a compliment. Eighteen years is a long time for any platform to stay relevant, and it stayed relevant because of relationships. I’ve built plenty of my own connections there over the years.
Groups can work too, but they take a lot of nurturing, moderation, and time, which brings you right back to blueprint number one: does running a Facebook group fit the life and business you’ve designed? Just because it’s a viable marketing strategy doesn’t mean it belongs in your strategy. And that’s a very important Dream Business Blueprint distinction.
The strategic purpose of Facebook is to build relationships, community, and to stay connected.
Instagram: Where People Get to Know Your Brand
Now, if Facebook is where people are getting to know you, Instagram is where they get to know your brand.
Instagram has a totally different job. Where Facebook is relationship-driven, Instagram is brand-driven: what your business feels like, what you stand for, your personality, your point of view, your visual identity, what world you’re inviting people into. That connects straight back to your point of view and message blueprints. Go back and listen to those episodes if you haven’t already.
Instagram lets someone absorb the feel of your brand, and it’s especially useful if you’re business-to-consumer, or anywhere the person, the product, the transformation, or the lifestyle matters.
I follow a lot of accounts, and I spend a lot of time on Instagram myself, especially building my new channel, and I’ve been studying how to do this well. Businesses that spend quality time on Instagram get to build a library of video that says who they are, from a brand standpoint, over time, post by post. So someone can spend time on your Instagram channel, get to know who you are at a surface level, and then go to your website.
And here’s how I think about the “know, like, trust” thing everybody talks about. I actually reverse it. If I like you, I want to get to know you, and then I trust you. Instagram is where that first “like” happens for a lot of people. And again, you don’t have to become an Instagrammer to use Instagram strategically.
Its strategic purpose is to build your brand, show your personality, and build connection.
TikTok: Built for Discovery
There’s one more platform worth a mention, but it’s probably not where most of you are. TikTok.
TikTok’s strength is discovery. People don’t need to know you already to find you. It can be powerful if you’re business-to-business or business-to-consumer, if you’re personality-driven, if you’re in education, or if you’re working in a very niche area of expertise. But again, ask yourself, do you want to make the kind of content that works there? Does it fit your audience, your business, your life? If not, you’re allowed to say no.
The strategic purpose of TikTok is discovery, or reach.
Followers vs. Engagement
Now, wherever you land, there’s one number I want you to stop chasing. Picture two accounts. One has a thousand followers and 75 people who actually interact with and engage with the channel. The other has 20,000 followers and almost no engagement. Which one would you rather have?
The first one. You don’t need everybody. You need the right people paying attention. So look at your conversations, your comments, your DMs, your shares, your referrals, and most important, ask yourself: are relationships actually being created?
Followers are a number. Engagement tells you whether anyone cares. I’m going to repeat that: followers are a number, engagement tells you whether anyone cares. I’d rather have 500 people paying attention than 50,000 scrolling right past me.
“I Hate Social Media” — What’s Really Going On
So if you’re still resisting this, let’s talk about it. You hate social media? Okay, that’s fair. You don’t have to love it. You don’t have to dance. You don’t have to tell people what you ate for breakfast. You don’t have to make your private life public. You don’t have to post five times a day or chase every platform.
But you do need to understand how people buy now. They hear about you somewhere, then they investigate, and social media is part of that investigation. Think of it as social proof and familiarity, not just lead generation. You don’t necessarily need social media to find every client. Sometimes its whole job is to simply reassure the person who already found you. It’s to show you as the expert.
I had a client who flat-out refused to use social media. And here’s the thing: it wasn’t that she hated it, it wasn’t that she even minded the work. It turns out she just didn’t like her own business. Once she redesigned it into her dream business, the ideas started pouring out of her, and she was excited to share what she was doing. Now she’s being invited to speak, her workshops are filling up, and she’s quickly known as the expert in her field.
So if you’re resisting, ask yourself the real question: what’s really holding you back from sharing what you’re doing?
YouTube: A Searchable Library of Expertise
There’s one more thing I want to talk about, because it works a little differently from everybody else: YouTube.
Here’s the thing: there’s a difference between building a business as a YouTuber and growing your existing business with YouTube. A YouTuber cares about subscribers, views, watch time, ad revenue, sponsorships. Making money on YouTube itself is their goal, that’s their business model. But it doesn’t have to be yours.
So this is especially important to remember: you’re not trying to be Mr. Beast. You’re creating content so your prospects can find out who you are and how to work with you. It’s the same point of view we started this whole episode with, it just matters most on YouTube, because this is the platform where creator culture is the loudest for your kind of business.
YouTube is a searchable library of expertise. A good video keeps getting discovered months or even years after you publish it. Someone searches a question, finds you, watches you teach, starts trusting your expertise, watches another video, and then goes to your website.
And I’ll point out, if you’re watching this on YouTube right now, remember, you’re using this library of expertise. You didn’t find me because I danced, heaven forbid. You found me because I had an answer to your question. This is a completely different strategy than trying to become YouTube famous. It comes straight back to authority. YouTube lets you demonstrate what you know before anyone ever talks to you.
You don’t have to build a business on YouTube. You can use YouTube to build your business. That’s the strategy.
Bringing It All Together
Now let’s bring this all together. I want you to stop asking yourself what you should be posting. Start asking what you need social media to accomplish. Then ask where the people you want to reach actually are. Then ask which platform is best suited for that job, and for what you want. Then ask what you can realistically do consistently without making yourself miserable. That’s how you choose your primary platform. Everything else becomes secondary.
And consistency doesn’t mean frequency. Consistency means people don’t wonder whether you’ve gone out of business or not. It means an intentional presence.
Five Biggest Mistakes Business Owners Make
Before we wrap up, let me save you some time. These are the five biggest mistakes I see business owners make over and over.
Number one: trying to be an influencer instead of showing up as a business owner. We’ve already covered why that’s not your job.
Number two: not having a call to action. People find you, they like what they see, and then they have no idea what you want them to do next. So tell them.
Number three: not including a link where you can. Some platforms don’t let you, but if you can, put it in there. If someone’s interested, make it easy for them to get from the post to you.
Number four: not being consistent, whatever that looks like for you. Remember, consistent doesn’t mean constant.
Number five: not being you. Trying to sound like every other account in your industry, instead of sounding like your own business. Be you.
Fix those five things, and you’re already ahead of most of what’s out there.
This Week’s Action
So here’s what I want you to do this week. Pick one platform, the one you’re already on, or the one that makes the most sense for the job you need done. Then go look at your last five to ten posts, and ask yourself honestly: what was the job each one was doing? Was it building relationships? Was it building your brand? Was it getting found? Or was it just noise, because you felt like you had to post something? That one exercise will tell you more about your social media strategy than any algorithm ever will.
Check out the new bonus I’ve added about social media in the blueprint workbook. It gives you strategy questions, not platform questions.
Closing Thoughts and Next Steps
Going all the way back to episode 342, you started this whole blueprint by asking, what kind of business allows the life I want to exist? So don’t spend ten episodes designing the business and then build a social media strategy that takes over your life. That’s exactly backwards.
Your business strategy determines your marketing strategy. Your marketing strategy determines your social media strategy. It’s not the other way around. You don’t need a social media strategy. You need a business strategy that tells you how you’re going to use social media.
We have one more episode coming, the one that brings all this together, and we’re going to be talking about profit and making money for your dream business.
So grab the Dream Business Blueprint Assessment Workbook in the show notes. And if you want to figure out where your business is actually costing you freedom, go to talkwithlori.com and book a Dream Business Design Session. We’ll look at what you’ve built and figure it out together, whether it’s designed to give you the life you actually want.
I’m Lori Lyons, and remember, it’s never too late to build the business of your dreams. We’ll see you next week.