I Used to Be Scared of Social Media Marketing

My foray into marketing started with long-form writing — and I mean long. SEO strategy, blog content, think pieces across industries, even copy in different languages at one point. Putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) on topics I could really sink my teeth into felt natural to me in a way that was hard to explain. There was space to think, space to breathe, space to be wrong in a draft before anything reached an audience.

Social media, on the other hand, felt loud. Immediate. Unforgiving.

I remember asking my then-manager to let me skip the social media copywriting side of things. I just wasn't invested in it. She said no. She was right, and I'm grateful — but we'll get to that.

Here's the thing that's funny in retrospect: I was an extremely private person who somehow had no problem writing for tech blogs and fashion blogs with significant readership. Thousands of eyes on my words and I was fine. But a caption on Instagram? Terrifying. Go figure. Something about the social in social media made it feel more exposed than a published article ever did. Maybe it was the comments section. Maybe it was the real-time nature of it. Maybe I just hadn't found my footing in it yet.

One early exception that I still think about fondly: a client called Bedekar Misal, for whom I wrote copy in Marathi — jokes, slang, sarcastic ukhanas (a form of poetry, if you will). It was playful, culturally specific, and genuinely fun. If anything, it was probably a sign that social media and I could get along just fine, if the context was right. But I wasn't ready to see it that way yet.

Fast forward to my current role at Suportx, where I work as a solo marketer across the full marketing function.

When my colleague Soph — talented, brilliant Soph — left for her next role, social media landed squarely in my lap. No committee. No collaboration. Just me, the platforms, and an industry that is about as niche and sensitive as it gets: ostomy and hernia garments. Healthcare. Real people. Real stakes.

And honestly? I was excited.

Not in a naive way — I knew it would be a challenge. But I'd grown since those early days of asking to be excused from captions. I wanted to prove something, mostly to myself.

What I didn't fully anticipate was how much the challenge would teach me.

The first thing I had to contend with was the judgement — the assumption, from people outside the field, that social media is just posting.

You know the type. "I post on my own Instagram, I could do your job."

David, did you set objectives? Monitor KPIs? Present results to stakeholders and justify the marketing budget? No? Then sit down, David.

The invisible architecture behind every post — the strategy, the audience insight, the tone decisions, the timing, the intent — none of that shows up in the final caption. And that's precisely what makes it look easy from the outside.

The first real lesson I had to put into practice was audience psychology. Something I'd studied, but never fully felt until I was holding full accountability for it.

At Suportx, we have two distinct primary demographics: patients and healthcare professionals. Same product, same brand, completely different emotional starting points. A nurse approaching our content is thinking clinically. A patient approaching our content is thinking personally, often vulnerably. Getting that wrong — even in tone, even in a single sentence — matters in a way it simply doesn't in more generic industries.

So I did what I think every marketer should do and rarely gets credit for: I went and talked to people.

I reached out to members of our audience directly. I asked them what they wanted to see, what their struggles were, where they felt underserved by information out there. I attended the ASCN event representing Suportx and used every conversation I had with nurses as a masterclass in how clinical professionals think about and receive communication. I kept reaching out and listening.

Representing Suportx at ASCN — one of the best opportunities to speak directly with clinicians, hear from professionals, and bring real industry insight back into the work.

What I found was a genuine gap — there wasn't much informational content out there in this space on social media. So that became the focus. Informing, with warmth, rather than selling.

The tone shift that followed wasn't a boardroom decision. It happened gradually, through iteration, through instinct, through feedback.

Same brand, different voice. The shift from clinical to human made all the difference.

Clinical and corporate gave way to warm, empathetic, and human. Captions stopped being announcements and started being conversations. Posts became relational rather than transactional. And the more human the content became, the more it actually worked — which, if you've ever had to convince a stakeholder that "being a bit more like a person" is a valid marketing strategy, you'll know is deeply satisfying to prove with data.

Influencer collaboration became a meaningful part of this, too. I started by reaching out to people already using our garments — real ostomates, people whose credibility with our audience came from lived experience, not a media kit. Their voices carried weight that brand-led messaging simply can't manufacture. Over time, this expanded to introducing our products to new collaborators, offering them the chance to try the garments and share honest feedback only if they were happy to. Authentic acquisition. New audiences. Fresh perspectives.

Influencer outreach doesn't have to be stiff — a bit of creative freedom goes a long way.

Trust, I learned, is built through voices people recognise as their own — not through polished brand copy, however well-written.

On a more personal note: I used to overthink captions for hours. I'm not exaggerating. Hours. Staring at 150 characters wondering if this was the right word, the right emoji, the right energy. There's a version of perfectionism that's actually just fear wearing a productivity costume, and I was very familiar with it.

What helped, genuinely, was design. Creating post templates, building out visual identities, playing with colour and layout and making things pop — that part of the job lit me up in a way I didn't expect. There's something deeply satisfying about watching an idea move from a messy brain-note to a scheduled post with a beautiful preview thumbnail. It grounded the whole process for me.

And performance tracking, which I once assumed would feel like reading a report card, turned out to be one of my favourite parts — largely because I made it mine. Colour-coded spreadsheets, all the analytics in one place, easy to read at a glance. (Don't judge me. Aesthetics matter in all areas of life.) Suddenly, refreshing analytics every ten minutes didn't feel like anxiety — it felt like genuine curiosity. What landed? What didn't? What does that tell me about next time?

Tracking growth — slow, steady, and always telling you something useful.

That's the thing nobody tells you about social media marketing: the feedback loop is fast, and if you're the kind of person who likes learning, that's actually a gift.

Still, even now, there's that small pause before I hit publish. I stare at the post. I stare at it again after. It's a canon event. I think it always will be — not because I'm not confident, but because I care. There's a difference.

And the moments that have made all of it worth it? The comments and DMs.

Running a campaign and getting messages from people saying they felt seen. That the content resonated. That they were excited to try the garment, or that they already loved the product and now they loved the company too. Those responses don't show up in reach metrics. But they're the ones that stay with me.

Moments like these are what make the work feel worth it.

Because at its best, social media isn't just about visibility. It's about connection. And that — the making-people-feel-understood part — turns out to be my favourite part of the job.

I've come a long way from asking to be let out of social media copywriting.

And I think my biggest takeaway is this: it's always going to be a work in progress. The landscape shifts, new platforms emerge, algorithms change their minds, and what worked last quarter might not work next quarter. That used to feel daunting. Now it just feels like the job — and a genuinely interesting one at that.

My biggest tip for any fresh social media marketer: be authentic, not as a buzzword, but as a genuine commitment. Authenticity resonates because it's rare. And what resonates is remembered.

Now, before I overthink this any further and quietly move it to drafts where it will live forever, untouched — I'm hitting post.

See you in the next one. ^-^