Overcome perfection paralysis and grow on LinkedIn

I’m not going to sit here and pretend that I don’t also suffer from the affliction I’m about to help you try and solve. I’ve managed the social media channels of huge corporations, SMEs, and highly prominent individuals; in those cases, I practice what I am about to preach. But for my own socials? Pffft. Forget about it. Perfection paralysis, fear of looking like a try-hard, fear that you’re not ‘enough’ of an expert, just… plain old fear.

Sound familiar?

Nope. I have no idea what you’re talking about. Well, good for you. You have my respect and my envy. And you have absolutely no need to read on any further.

Ohmygodyes. How did you know? How can I overcome this? I thought so. I know because you’re not alone. I have conversations with people about this all the time. How to overcome it is trickier, but if you read on, I’ll tell you what I tell my clients.

1. This isn’t the New Yorker

The New Yorker is one of the most infamous sticklers for style and grammar in the world. They are known for having an indelible attention to detail, for sticking to their grammatical guns even when the world appears to have moved on, and for using lots, and lots of commas.

The exchanges between writer James Thurber and editor Harold Ross are legendary; Ross would often send work back with querying things like: the specific shade of a color or the precise angle of a shadow.

Whatever you think about this, The New Yorker has remained a widely read and prestigious publication for nearly a century, and its commitment to the highest literary standards and microscopic attention to detail are absolutely a part of that success.

But social media channels are not The New Yorker. And trying to turn them into that will kill your creativity and make it so you have the fear of god in you every time your mouse hovers over the publish button.

This goes for agencies too. I’ve heard about and lived horror stories where agency owners are hyper-fixated on every minute detail, leaving their poor copywriters in a constant state of anxiety and fear, creatively flattened and terrified of work. Who does that help?  

The truth is, this social media stuff doesn’t have to be all that serious; that LinkedIn post, tweet, or Instagram story will soon be swallowed up by the algorithm and forgotten like everything else in a week or so.

Here’s something to remember when you’re posting on social media:

If there’s (God forbid 😱) the odd typo every now and then, or a misplaced comma, or if you don’t make the point in quite the way you intended, that’s okay. This post will pass.

If you spend hours crafting the most beautifully constructed LinkedIn copy anyone has ever seen, worthy of legendary New Yorker editor Harold Ross himself, so perfect a piece of copy that you are praised by your peers and a celebratory party is thrown your honor. This post too, will pass.

Now…

I am not saying: be sloppy and don’t care about what you write. Of course, the details matter, and you should be trying to give everything you do the best possible chance of success.

I am saying: If you fall short sometimes, so be it. Give yourself a break, learn from it, and do better next time.

I am also saying: Nothing you do is going to be perfect, and if you give yourself a hard time every time something isn’t quite right, you’re either going to drive yourself mad, or you’re going to quit before you’ve even had a chance to succeed.

2. Social media algorithms are a mysterious and ever-changing soup. Stop trying to understand them.

I recently attended a panel about how to grow on TikTok. One of the panelists had over a 5 million views on the platform. She was an incredibly successful businesswoman and was making content that was both resonating and consistently generating leads and sales. But as the talk progressed, it became clear that she didn’t quite have the answers the audience was hungry for. Just because she had found away to make her business work, it didn’t mean she had the secrets for how others could do the same.

A roadmap for social media doesn’t exist, despite how many moguls will try to sell you one. And if you decide to wait until you completely understand the algorithm in all it’s complexities before you post, you will a) fail, and b) set yourself up for a bad time when it changes one day without rhyme or reason.

And it will change.

Instagram went from loving photos to loving graphics, to hating graphics and loving photos again.

TikTok now priorities videos longer than a minute, and YouTube currently likes its shorts to be less than a minute.

All of this has probably changed again depending on when you’re reading this.

I am not saying: Forget optimising your content and ignore what the platform is asking you for.

I am saying: You’re never going to fully understand these algorithms. Your successes and failures are half chance; so are everybody else’s.

3. No one cares

For years, I avoided going to the gym because I was worried the people in there would judge me for not knowing what I was doing.

How many of you reading this would not go to a restaurant or the cinema on your own for the same reason?

On the flip side, how many of you have ever seen someone eating alone in a restaurant and judged them for it?

The hard truth is that nobody cares about you. Everyone is far too wrapped up in their own stuff to give even a second thought as to what you are or aren’t doing. And if they are thinking about you, it’s much more likely to be about how they wished they could be more like you.

The same goes for social media. How many conversations have you had with people who’ve said they need to start posting on LinkedIn more? How many times have you seen someone killing it on social media and told yourself you’re going to do the same.

Just like if you join a gym for the first time, or going out to eat on your own, you’re a lot more likely to have someone’s respect than their judgement.

4. Learn how to S.P.A.R

Okay, so I’ve talked a lot about what not to do, and what doesn’t matter, so how about the opposite… What should you be doing and what does matter?

Everyone loves a framework, right? So here’s one for you.

You need to stop thinking each piece of content needs to be a knockout blow. Instead, learn how to S.P.A.R. When fighters spar, they aren’t going for the killer punch, they are throwing things out there, testing their opponent to see how they react and adjusting their approach accordingly.

Here’s what that looks like for content.  

Strategise

This is an important one that people often overlook. I talk a lot about not sweating the small stuff, and the importance of trying things out, and how so much of success is a mixture of consistency and luck, but that doesn’t mean we’re not thinking about what we’re posting.

You need a plan, and your plan should be based on the best knowledge you have available to you at the time.

If you’re just starting out that might be things like: getting inspired by other content that resonates with you, making content you’d like to see, aligning content with your business goals. Each of these could and will be their own topic in the future, but as you’ll see shortly, the specifics don’t really matter at this point.

Publish

Once you’ve got your strategy, you need to get your content out into the world. Don’t overthink it, just make it and schedule it.

I always prefer scheduling over just writing and publishing daily because it frees you up to think. You never want to be thinking about what your going to post, day to day. You want to be thinking about engagement (a topic for another time).

Analyse

This is the most important step, and it’s the reason I preach not thinking about things too much ahead of time.

At the end of each month, you need to look at your analytics. You can use the analytics tools that the platforms themselves provide but these tend not to be great. Some kind of social media scheduling / analytics tool is usually the best way to go. I’ll be going over some these in the coming weeks.

Look at the top 10% of your content and try to understand why it outperformed everything else. Then look at the bottom 10% of your content and try to understand why it failed.

Was it the time / day you posted? Was it an unusual topic? Did it use a certain type of media? Post enough varieties of content, and I promise you that you’ll start to see patterns.

Revise

This is the fun bit. Now you have an idea of why the top 10% is succeeding and bottom 10% is failing, you just need to get rid of what’s at the bottom and do more of what’s at the top.

When a month passes, you’ll have a new top 10% and a new bottom 10%, and over time your content and engagement will improve dramatically, because you will be letting the platforms themselves organically tell you what’s working.

5. Get over it

I have a musician friend who is always bemoaning the fact that he has to market his work. And I get it. There’s almost nothing worse for a creative person than trying to sell stuff. I even heard Paul Simon argue one time that thinking about marketing your music actually makes the music worse.

Fine. But here’s the thing…

As a musician, you have a choice. Either market your work or don’t. But barring some miracle, nobody is going to find your music if you don’t find a way to show it to them, so by not marketing you’re intentionally limiting your audience. You’re either going to have to accept having a smaller audience or you’re going to have to get over your holdups and do the marketing.

The same is true for social media. You don’t have to do this, you really don’t. If you have no need for a big audience, then just continue doing whatever it is your doing. Maybe post occasionally about some milestone or work-related success so that potential employers see what you want them to see and call it a day.

However, if you both want a big audience and are worried about posting more on social media, you are going to have to get over one or forget about the other.

Hopefully this helps. Stay tuned in the coming weeks for more tips from both myself, and other industry professionals.