Avoiding the Urge to Overshare

How much is too much when sharing from your personal life? 

Sometimes, oversharing can be a good thing. You might be sharing from a personal experience and it can be inspiring or just plain relatable to your audience and followers. But sometimes you have to tap into your intuition like, do I think that my followers would benefit from hearing this? If it's yes, share it. If you think nothing good comes from sharing this, sleep on it, give yourself some time to digest and work through it before you share it. 

I'm going to give an example of this. So this woman that I follow is an influencer. This is on my personal page. I really follow a lot of influencer accounts for things that I'm interested in. I'm into that stuff for my home improvement and I follow a lot of fun fashion influencers that I'm into on my personal page. 

This influencer has a furniture flipping business on the side which is why I follow her. 

A Reaction to an Unfortunate Airbnb Experience

She shared her unfortunate experience going to an Airbnb and staying there. She shared how the Airbnb was not properly cleaned and all of these other terrible things that happened to her while she was there. She then ended up offending some people on her page with the rhetoric and words that she used. And to me, I clearly saw the turn of events. If she wouldn't have shared this negative experience that really didn't have anything to do with her business, it wouldn’t have received that much backlash. Maybe taking time off would have been beneficial to share, but not this negative side to the experience. It would’ve taken a different turn. 

So the reason why I think it rubbed me the wrong way is that I follow her account for fine furniture flips. Like a working mom that's driving her own business from home, I come to her page to feel inspired, excited, ready to tackle my day, and it kind of takes a different type of tone. Then she shared this negative experience at this Airbnb, it just felt really heavy. All of a sudden, the stories just felt super dark. And she didn’t close with something like, “Maybe we can plan a new trip next time and it’ll be different.” There’s no positive side to what she shared. It simply came down to what she felt at that moment and sometimes how we tend to overshare things. When we feel some type of emotion, we tend to be one-sided on things no matter the circumstances. 

Takeaway

This is one downside to oversharing your personal life. It’s good to open up or express how you feel about this particular experience you’ve had. It provides an outlet for you. However, you must keep in mind that above all else, you’re a business figure. People come to you for your business, for whatever you’re advocating for, and if they catch wind of how you are in your personal life, it shatters their perspective of you.

Always be mindful of what you share on social media, in your business, or anywhere else. 

Get more insights on this topic by listening to me talk about this in my latest podcast episode.