I deleted Instagram. Here's why I think you can too.

I'm super excited to inform you that I have deleted Instagram. This episode is not just about Instagram, it's really about all social media and the hold it has over all of us, and how I think it's a little bit of a red herring when it comes to lead generation and finding clients. And I'm gonna break down four reasons why in this episode. I've actually been a big fan of social media for many years in my life. I remember when I was working at the agency, Kluge, I convinced my boss at the time and longtime friend Arturo that we absolutely had to have a Twitter account. And as soon as I set that up, maybe like a couple days later, we got a message from a VC who wanted to connect us to a startup, a potential client. And I remember saying to him, look, it's already proven its value. I have gotten leads before on social media. I'm gonna talk a little bit about that in this episode, but I think we give social way too much weight in the marketing space when many of us have lower energy ways that we can spend our time getting clients and more fulfilling ways that we can spend our time getting clients. Let's get into it. I'm Lex Roman, and this is the Low Energy Leads Show.

So I actually deleted not just Instagram, but Twitter and TikTok as well. Twitter, I fully deleted my account on Instagram and TikTok. I just deleted the apps from my phone, and I may actually come back to them at some point, but right now it doesn't feel like the right place to spend my time. At the end of June, I announced on my professional Instagram that I was gonna go dark for all of July and just take a break from Instagram, but the more time I spend away from it, the better I feel and the less I want to go back to it. I'm planning on staying away from Instagram and TikTok for longer than just the month of July, and I wanna talk more of why I feel okay doing that, because I think there's a lot of hesitation to delete social and this sentiment that like social media is somehow the crux of your business.

And that is actually pretty rarely the case unless you're a social media influencer or a creator who relies on either the monetization of the platform itself or a follower account in order to drive your business like you're monetizing your a hundred K followers on one of these platforms. If you're a service provider or a product based business, social is probably not the linch man of your business that you think it is. And this brings me to reason one, why I deleted Instagram. We're not getting as many leads from Instagram as we think we are. In my business, I work with a lot of people who are trying to understand where their leads are coming from, and initially, people really usually do not know where their leads are coming from. They'll say things like word of mouth or Google search or social media. When we dig into it, it's a little bit more complicated than that, and people aren't taking this critical lens to their leads, sources that they should be.

There's usually some recency bias there. So wherever they got their last couple leads from is what's top of mind. Whenever I ask this question, and I really encourage people to develop a lead tracking practice, but that's a story for another episode. What I really wanna encourage you to think about is where your leads are coming from on social media and if they're actually coming from there. And, and the way to do this would be to go back and look at your last month of clients and or maybe your last quarter of clients and figure out of all these people, did any of them come from a social media platform? And if so, which one? The other thing that gets in the way here, the reason why I think Instagram feels like a little bit of a red herring when it comes to marketing is that there's a lot of activity there, right?

You'll see a lot of interest in your business on social media, so maybe you'll get likes or comments or shares or DMs, and this feels like work that's happening, right? Feels like interest, feels like leads. But I would really urge you to consider whether or not these are leads or whether it is simply activity on a social media platform. Some of that activity might be people who you knew from a different source who are communicating with you on that social media platform. Some of that activity might be partners or collaborators who are just cheering you on.

And you might say, Lex, Lex, I do get my leads from Instagram, or I do get my leads from TikTok. And I have heard that before. And I think as long as you're tracking that and that is actually true in your business, that's great. And if you enjoy being on those platforms, you should absolutely continue to use them.

I just think that people are defaulting to social media and they're failing to look elsewhere. They're burning themselves out, trying to keep up with all the ways that you need to be posting, all the ways that you need to be engaging. And I personally found that exhausting. When I looked at my social media portfolio, I was most active on Instagram and TikTok, and a little bit on LinkedIn and Twitter, and Instagram was just taking so much of my time, such an outsized amount of my time for the value it was bringing back into my business. Reason to why I deleted Instagram is that I realized it was mainly a keep in touch tool, which is great, right? We wanna keep in touch with the people that are important to our businesses, but we can also do that in more channels than just Instagram. I realized that I was crutching on Instagram because I had everybody there, but I also had a lot of those same business owners on my LinkedIn.

I have a lot of the growth trackers on my LinkedIn. I have them inside our community. I'm in Slack groups and circle groups and platforms like, Like Minded Collective and Product Hunt. And I can find people anywhere If I want to stay connected, I can. I do have people reach out to me on Instagram to talk about work, right? To talk about growth trackers, to talk about power hours or buying courses or things like that. That is valuable to me. However, I know that I can stay in touch with people on other platforms. I have most of the contact information for many of these people. In fact, I met most of them off of Instagram, so a lot of my Instagram following is actually from summits or networking or referrals. It is not really usually from organic reach of my actual Instagram posts, even though I know this and I track my leads obsessively, and I'm well aware that I don't get cold leads from Instagram and that most of the people there are coming from another place.

I still kept getting caught up in the hype about posting in the like, and comment and share ritual. And so I found myself spending way too much time on graphics. I, I had sort of stopped posting on reels, but a lot of time on stories, if y'all followed me on Instagram, you know this, and I just felt like this was a big waste of my time <laugh>, and I just didn't wanna be spending that time there. And then I would spend a lot more hours consuming people's content there rather than having an actual conversation with them. And I, I just didn't want to be told who I should be spending my time with by an algorithm. I, I wanted to decide that for myself. So I think it's great to stay in touch with social media. I think it's actually the most powerful way to frame social media as a tool in your networking, as a way to stay in touch with the people that matter to your business, your clients, your partners, your supporters.

But I also think it's okay to do that work elsewhere and to know that you have other ways to do that. Email, text messages, phone calls, copy chats, other communities. There's plenty of ways to stay in touch. You don't have to rely on one of these big platforms to do it.

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Reason number three is too many inboxes. I heard LaShonda Brown say something about this on her interview with Natalie Franke over at HoneyBook. It was something like, when the notifications slow down, you can hear yourself think, and that is exactly how I feel. I had inboxes everywhere, multiple emails, text messages, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, community inboxes, DMs, everywhere. It was starting to be way too much to check, and I found myself in between sessions, checking my 40 inboxes, and it wasn't a great use of my time. And I'll tell you what, leads don't come in all of those channels. And not only that, often a lead that comes in on one channel will also come in on another channel. Usually people are coming through on my website or they're coming through on email. So even when they start on social, they end up on the same place.

People will find me if they need me. A lot of times what was happening on social media was that my referral partners were reposting things that I was sharing, and that was leading to new awareness of what I was doing. Now, I'm not gonna say that that's not valuable because it is. It is a lot of how I book out things like my webinars or get people on my email list. It's also a lot of how I share this podcast, but it doesn't need to happen on every social channel. And I found that I was spreading myself too thin by having so many different platforms where I was sharing that information anyway. And so now I'm just using LinkedIn, and so I can make sure that the posts there are good. And again, a lot of my business partners are also on LinkedIn, so I'm making sure that I stay connected with them there.

And removing some of these inboxes is also bringing me some space to work on things like my affiliate program and partnerships and newsletter swaps and the things that are actually driving real growth in my business. I really want more of my business to be growth focused, not marketing focused. So as I teach my members inside Growth trackers, we wanna move off the marketing treadmill and into a growth engine. And that comes from within my business. I've been spending way too much time checking all those inboxes and responding to everybody who pops in there rather than with the people that really matter, my clients, my partners, my referrers. And so empowering them with the information that they need to share my business, spending more time with them, finding ways to add value to their lives, like these are things that I wanna be doing with my time.

They bring me joy. They offer a little bit of a slower pace than social, than the social feeds do. Removing some of these inboxes has made space for that. The other thing that I've been thinking a lot about is how social makes it really easy for whoever wants to pop into your life. To do that, a lot of people will make demands on my time in those inboxes. So people will ask questions, they'll ask for your time, they'll ask for a quick 10 minute phone call. And what that really is, is just a lot of free labor. And I would rather choose a little bit more intentionally who I'm spending time with and where that time is going and how I'm spending that time. So shutting down some of those inboxes, you know, closing the doors, if you will a little bit, and being like, here's the pathway here.

You know, there's still pathways to find me that you're still able to talk to me. It just wasn't helpful to have a million different ways to get in touch, and it led to a lot of overwhelm. It didn't necessarily bring quality clients into the business, the highest quality clients and members, they come in regardless of what our and I show up on social media. In fact, many of the growth trackers are not big fans of social media. And so we're constantly exploring new ways that we can keep in touch with each other, ways that we can grow our business community without social ways that we can pair down our social channels and ways that we can make our lives a little bit more social media optional. The last reason that I'm gonna talk about in this episode, though, there are many more, is that I believe in finding what works for you.

And Instagram was not feeling right to me. I've had many business friends say, Lex Instagram can be great. We can make it work for you, and I really appreciate them. But it wasn't feeling right for me. It was feeling like a big drain of my time. And until it feels different than that, I'm gonna keep it off of my phone and I'm gonna find other ways to channel my energy. I'm really loving my LinkedIn, YouTube email ecosystem, and I'm trying to make that my content engine. My business isn't currently run off of content, so I call myself a content led business in any sense, but I am moving more and more to this podcast, to my email list, and it feels right to spend time on longer form content, longer LinkedIn posts, long episodes like this one, my email newsletter, and moving away from like quick hits of content.

It feels right to do that doesn't, it feels more rewarding. It feels more interesting. I feel like I can be more authentic to what I'm trying to say, and I don't have to force myself into a content format that doesn't quite suit my message. In Growth Trackers, we talk a lot about how it's not just about finding where your target audience is, but also the channels that you wanna be on. You can find your buyers on any channel. It might be harder on some than others, but this is why we experiment. This is the beauty of marketing experimentation. You don't have to do something that you hate doing. If you hate public speaking, people aren't gonna force you to do that. I'm not sure why we don't take that same approach to social media and we act like it's a mainstay of everyone's business, but it's, it's not.

I know many business owners who built their business before social media or without social media and it, it really isn't a requirement for a while. I need to live that out by deleting Instagram off my phone. Deleting TikTok Twitter I think might be gone forever, and I'm gonna focus in on the things that feel right in my business. I'm gonna create the space for the things that matter to me. And in a lot of ways, that's connecting with you one-on-one in smaller groups and spending more time with less people. I may return to Instagram one day, but right now it feels like the right decision to not be focused there. It's been really fun to experiment with what it looks like to shift some of that energy elsewhere. How I can get the value that I was getting off of Instagram on other platforms like email, like LinkedIn, like smaller communities that I'm a part of, bring more intention to my relationships, really focusing on who I wanna connect with, going deeper with clients, with members, with partners, so that I'm building longer term relationships and not just focused on meeting as many people as possible.

I've never been focused there, but I think social really gears us towards strangers more than we should be focused there. I really love the opportunity to look at my network and say, who do I wanna be connecting with here?

I'm also really excited to tell you that next week's episode is with system strategist Devin Lee, and we talk a lot about this. Devin has a whole system in place for intentional networking, so you're gonna wanna come back and listen to that next week. I'd love to hear what you thought of this episode. Leave me a voicemail at lowenergyleads.com. If you're experimenting with getting rid of social, I'd love to see you at the Growth Gym. The Growth Gym is your practice space for finding your best marketing place. Join me Fridays at noon Eastern on YouTube and LinkedIn to learn how to make smarter marketing bets. Get on the Low Energy Leads newsletter to get notified.

Until next time, keep that energy low until you know the value will be high.