Social media can feel like an exhausting, never-ending battle, can’t it?

You create valuable content, keep up with trends, post consistently, and yet… 

Growth feels slow, engagement is low, and nothing seems to be working. Urgh.

If that sounds familiar, we’re in this together!

Because this is exactly how I felt too. 

Earlier this year, I decided to run a cheeky little experiment to test whether the struggle was down to:

? The algorithm

? My content

? Or something else entirely

And the results? They completely changed how I approach social media in my business!

If you’ve ever felt like you’re wasting time on social media with little to show for it, this blog post is for you.

By the end, you’ll be IN THE KNOW on:

Why engagement and reach have DROPPED for most business owners

The REAL SECRET to getting more eyes on your content

The strategy that TRIPLED my reach – without me spending hours on social media

How you can apply these insights to GROW your business

Let’s get into it! Can’t wait…

Why Social Media Growth Feels Harder Than Ever

I work with business owners across different health niches, and one of the biggest complaints I hear is about how terrible social media is at attracting clients.

Many of us have followed the usual advice:

• Post valuable content regularly. (Yep)

• Use trending audio and formats. (OK)

• Engage with followers. (Doing it!)

But even when you’re doing ALL THE THINGS, growth on the platforms still feels slooooow.

I’ve experienced this too. 

Just a few years ago:

• My Instagram Stories had a 50% viewer rate – then the algorithm changed, and views dropped
• My Reels regularly got 10,000+ views – now, some barely hit 500
• My reach was strong – until Instagram announced a “pay-to-play” model, where you have to pay to regain your visibility

The frustration is real. 

And I knew I wasn’t alone, my colleagues were all saying similar things so I decided to test exactly what was happening.

Shall we take a look?

The Social Media Experiment

In 2024 I was working with a mentor who encouraged me to track my social media performance every single week.

The goal was to just observe and see what was working, what wasn’t, and give us some ideas for whether engagement could be improved.

Here’s exactly what I tracked:

Instagram reach (how many people saw my content)

Engagement rate (likes, comments, shares, and saves)

Website visitors (how many people were clicking through to my site?)

Email list growth (were people signing up for my freebies after I mentioned them on social media?)

For the first few weeks, I followed the same social media strategy I’d always used. 

My results? Flat as a pancake!

Engagement was predictable but unimpressive. 

My content mainly reached my existing followers…but it wasn’t attracting many new people into my world!

Website visitors and email list subscriber numbers, the same numbers as usual.

Then I added one new strategy – and everything changed.

The Strategy That Tripled My Reach

I decided to run a low-cost social media ad campaign.

Now, this wasn’t about boosting posts randomly. 

Instead, I set up engagement ads to a cold audience, where Instagram and Facebook show your content to new people who are most likely to interact with it.

The budget? Just £5 per day.

Want to know what happened?

• My Instagram reach tripled – from 5,600 people per week to 15,398
• 65% of those reached were non-followers, meaning brand-new people were discovering my business. (Yay!)
• Engagement skyrocketed by 952% - from 155 interactions per week to 1,476 and 92% of that engagement was from non followers - this gave me a good indication that my content resonates. People like it!
• On Facebook, I saw an 881% increase in engagement.
• My website visitors are on average 1000 more each week - people are nosey and so it’s likely that some of these new people have stopped to have a poke around.
• I’m getting an additional 102 new subscribers on average on my email list each week too!

“On average per week I am reaching 17, 388 people on social media without actually being on social media. I've had just under 1500 people like, comment, save or share my content. While I was off doing other things…”

AND YES – all of this for just £5 a day – a total of £140 per month.

I compared this to what I was paying my social media management team, which was £2,500 per month. 

The engagement ads were delivering better results for a fraction of the cost and zero of my time!

What This Means for Business Owners

This experiment proved something I had suspected for a long time:

Organic social media growth is slow – not because of bad content, but because platforms are pay-to-play. They make money through advertising afterall, the modern day newspaper!

You don’t need a big budget to see results. A small daily spend can significantly increase your reach and engagement with a knock on impact to your website and email list.

Time spent chasing algorithms could be better spent elsewhere. Instead of worrying about the latest trend, a simple engagement ad can do the work for you. (And you can get your life back! Hooray.)

Now, I’m not saying organic content doesn’t matter – because it does. 

But if you want consistent, predictable growth, social media ads are the easiest and fastest way to make it happen.

What I Changed in My Business

After seeing these results, I made a big decision:

I stopped working with a social media management team in The Children’s Nutritionist.

For £5 a day, I was getting more reach, more engagement, more website visitors, and more email subscribers…

Without spending hours creating content or worrying about the algorithm! 

I still post on Instagram and Facebook organically, but I no longer stress about showing up daily, chasing trends, or spending hours engaging just to boost reach. (Doesn’t that sound like a much better balance?)

Should You Run Ads for Your Business?

Of course, everyone is different. 

But if you’re fed up of:

• Spending hours on content (that STILL gets little engagement)
• Feeling like you’re talking to a brick wall.
• Wondering how to get in front of more potential clients

So should you run ads? Then yes - ads might just be the game-changer you need. Here’s a post that answers exactly this question.

The amazing news is that you don’t need:

• A huge budget (you can start with just £5 per day, like I did)
• A complicated funnel (just start by promoting your best performing post)
• A marketing team (you can set up engagement ads yourself - easy!)

If you’re already creating high-quality content, ads simply ensure more of the right people see it – which is what makes them so powerful.

Final Thoughts: The Future of Social Media is Paid Growth

Social media isn’t the same as it was a few years ago. Organic growth is harder, and algorithms are built to encourage paid promotion.

But the secret? It doesn’t have to be expensive or complicated!

• A small budget can go a long way
  
  
• The right strategy attracts new leads while you focus on the stuff you enjoy
  
  
• Instead of chasing trends, you can let the algorithm work for you

So, my best advice?

Stop struggling with the algorithm! Life is too short. 

If you want to grow your reach, start small, test engagement ads, and see what happens.

It might just change your entire approach to social media – like it did for me.

Grab The Master Plan!

Ready to build the business you’ve always dreamed of?

This step-by-step workbook will walk you through exactly what you need to focus on and when. You'll get my expert knowledge as a health business strategist.

This guide really is your master plan to business success! Grab your free copy, right here…https://www.sarahalmondbushell.com/master-plan

Connect with me here:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dietitiansinbusiness/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dietitiansinbusiness

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@BeyondTheClinicPodcast

Episode transcription:

[00:00:00] Sarah Almond Bushell: Welcome along to this behind the scenes style episode, where I want to tell you about a social media experiment that I have been running in my business, The Children's Nutritionist. And it's been really revealing and it's actually given me Quite a bit of evidence as to why most of us struggle to grow on Instagram and Facebook.

[00:00:24] Sarah Almond Bushell: So my colleagues, my clients, and actually me as well, often report that despite consistently posting on social media, despite creating really awesome, high quality content, despite Desperately trying to keep up with trending audios or the latest recommendation to go viral, it sometimes feels like there's still a missing piece and you don't quite make it.

[00:00:52] Sarah Almond Bushell: Or there must be some secret that other people know that you don't. And you know what? It's really frustrating and it gets you down after a while and it actually can make you wonder whether the whole social media thing is even worthwhile. So back at the end of last year and probably the beginning of this year, actually, I think I was probably bordering on burnout in my business.

[00:01:19] Sarah Almond Bushell: I just started working with a new business coach and we had developed a strategy to increase the revenue in the children's nutritionist by tenfold during 2024. So quite an ambitious target. And actually I was very excited to get going. So usually. I work when my children are at school and college so that I can be there for a mum and as a wife when everyone's at home.

[00:01:45] Sarah Almond Bushell: And one of the things that we really like to do as a family is we share our evening meal together. We sit around the table, we catch up with each other and generally it's lovely. So my kids broke up from school in the middle of December, like most people's children do. But because I had these really ambitious plans for my business, and I was quite excited about them, I decided that I was going to carry on working for the 10 days that led up to Christmas Eve.

[00:02:14] Sarah Almond Bushell: So my children, they're teenagers, they're fairly self sufficient. My eldest, Charlie, he gets the bus into town, or he gets the train across to Brighton, and he goes and meets his friends. They can generally take care of themselves. Plus, Ryan, my husband, he was on annual leave, so it was .

[00:02:30] Sarah Almond Bushell: Totally doable for me to crack on and do this work. I took Christmas Eve off, I took Christmas Day off and Boxing Day, and then I got straight back into it. And of course, Christmas is full of visitors, isn't it? We had my dad staying with us from Spain, my sister in law and her children came to stay, my sister and husband and their boys visited as well, and it was a lot of fun, but I didn't actually get to rest.

[00:02:57] Sarah Almond Bushell: And so by the beginning of January, I actually felt exhausted. So you might also know I run two businesses, both of them are in that scaling stage. And so they take a lot of my attention and I quickly realized that I needed to outsource something. in my nutrition business in order to be able to focus on the strategy.

[00:03:19] Sarah Almond Bushell: And so what I decided to do was bring in a social media team and it was this that kind of got me thinking about my data and my numbers because I was outsourcing this. I had somebody else managing it for me. So if truth be told, I am not a huge lover of social media. In fact, I don't even have personal accounts.

[00:03:42] Sarah Almond Bushell: So it was quite an easy decision for me to make because it was the thing in my businesses that I least enjoyed doing. And so actually I was more than happy to outsource it. So why don't I love social media when it's probably one of the cornerstones of an online business? What frustrates me most about social is that forever changing algorithm.

[00:04:08] Sarah Almond Bushell: So just when you think you've found what's working, the people at Meta, they go and change it again, and it stops working. So we saw this in when Instagram stories were new. At that time, what I'd find was around about 50 percent of my followers were viewing my stories, which was great, it was a huge number.

[00:04:28] Sarah Almond Bushell: And then it stopped. And then, a couple of years ago, when Reels came out, it wasn't unusual for 10, 000 being the typical number of views on a Reel. Some even went as high as 50, 000 for me. But now, it's as low as 450 views on some Reels. And then reach, that's the latest one, isn't it? Reach is, for those of you who don't know, it's essentially the number of accounts that your content has been placed in front of, and it was just a few weeks ago in April 24 that Instagram announced a pay to play subscription model, which meant that our reach tanked.

[00:05:07] Sarah Almond Bushell: But we could bring it back up by paying for it. Now, if I had an influencer business model that relied on my social media posts reaching a lot of people, that could really be quite worrying. Anyhow, I only use Instagram and Facebook for my business, and so handing this onerous task off to somebody else was like a huge weight had been lifted from my shoulders.

[00:05:32] Sarah Almond Bushell: It actually felt amazing. And you know what? The team are brilliant. There's a marketing manager, a graphic designer, there's a copywriter, a photographer, a videographer, and an engagement officer. And they create fantastic content. It does really well. All I need to do is check it once a week on a Friday, which takes me less than an hour, and then they go ahead and schedule it.

[00:06:00] Sarah Almond Bushell: They will respond to the comments that come in. They will direct people to my lead magnets. They'll send people blogs. They will engage with my followers. And then they would let me know when people needed more specific, more professional advice, Or when people were on the verge of conversion and actually I could step in and close the sale.

[00:06:24] Sarah Almond Bushell: But social media management teams are not cheap. I was paying around about 2, 500 a month for this absolutely awesome service. And so I really needed to make sure that I was going to be getting a return on my investment. And so back in April, I decided the time was right to start my experiment. What did I do?

[00:06:46] Sarah Almond Bushell: It wasn't my experiment. I'm going to put my hands up here. I've mentioned before that I work with a fantastic mentor, and this experiment was created and guided by her, not just for me, but for the other clients that she mentors as well. So the original idea was to suss out the algorithm. It was an observational study, if you like.

[00:07:07] Sarah Almond Bushell: We were going to be tracking our data from social media. Weekly, whilst being consistent with the content creation and posting schedule, and just observe to see what happened. So seeing those algorithm changes in action and trying to spot patterns so that we could identify early what was working nowadays and what wasn't.

[00:07:31] Sarah Almond Bushell: So the metrics that I was collecting on a weekly basis were first of all, on Instagram, the reach and the percentage of those people who were non followers. So this is how many people I was able to get my content in front of, and how many of those people were brand new and just finding out about me. Now, the reason why this is important is every day we need to be doing something consistently in our business to increase our visibility, because the more visible we are, the more our business will grow.

[00:08:09] Sarah Almond Bushell: The more clients we get, the more money that we'll make. So you'll understand that visibility is a fundamental business basic. So as well as that, I was also looking at my engagement. So engagement is defined as your likes, your comments, your shares, and your saves. And so I was tracking the number of accounts that were engaging with me on Instagram and the percentage of engagement that came from those non followers, those new people.

[00:08:41] Sarah Almond Bushell: So engagement from non followers, that's a sign that the content that you're creating is good and it's resonating because it's much easier to get engagement from your current followers because they're your warm audience. They already know you, they already like and trust you, but with non followers, however, it's much harder to get engagement from them.

[00:09:05] Sarah Almond Bushell: And of course, I was also collecting the same data from Facebook because I post the same content on both accounts. So on top of those metrics on social media, I was also keeping an eye on the number of visitors to my website and also the number of new people opting in to my email list. So these are sort of fairly standard business performance metrics that all of us should be looking at on a fairly regular basis in order to help us make evidence based decisions and.

[00:09:38] Sarah Almond Bushell: Essentially to continue to grow. Okay. Let's talk about the results. So this is where things actually got really quite interesting. Now, because I've had a social media team working for me, I had a very consistent social media presence. And as a result, the data that I was collecting week on week was also very consistent and predictable as you would expect.

[00:10:04] Sarah Almond Bushell: But that was a bit boring for me. And so I decided I was going to up the ante a little bit, and I wanted to layer in a second strategy. And so I started running some low cost Facebook and Instagram engagement ads. So ads are something I'm very familiar with. I'm certified in ads and I used to coach people on their ads when I worked for somebody else.

[00:10:28] Sarah Almond Bushell: And of course, I've been running my own ads. in my business for a few years now. So engagement ads, these are essentially where you go and tell Meta to find your ideal customer on Facebook and Instagram and put your post in front of them You And get them to engage. Get them to like, or comment, or share, or save your post.

[00:10:53] Sarah Almond Bushell: These ads are super cheap. I spend about 5 a day on them, so 35 a week, or it's about 140 a month. And, you know what, I could manage that for the purpose of an experiment, and I'm so glad I did, because the results were profoundly different from when I've run these types of ads before. And this is why I wanted to share this episode with you.

[00:11:18] Sarah Almond Bushell: I'm going to break this down for you. On Instagram, my reach tripled. But what was fascinating was that 65 percent of the new people that I was reaching We're non followers. So brand new people coming into my world and finding out about my business for the first time. So in terms of specific numbers, without ads, my weekly reach was about 5, 600 on average.

[00:11:49] Sarah Almond Bushell: And just for five pounds a day, I managed to get it up to 15, 398 people. Now, the engagement increased, as you would expect, because these were engagement ads after all. Without the ads, I was getting around about 155 people engaging on my content each and every week. But with ads, this increased to 1, 476 people engaging with my content in a week.

[00:12:19] Sarah Almond Bushell: How amazing is that? That's a percentage increase of 952%. I mean, Wow. Cool. And when I looked at how many of those people that were engaging were non followers, it was actually 92%. So this told me that my content was absolutely resonating with people, not only those who already know, like, and trust me, but also to brand new people coming into my world and finding out about my business for the very first time.

[00:12:52] Sarah Almond Bushell: And again, this was just costing me five quid a day. And I saw similar results on Facebook. So the reach wasn't quite as impressive as it was on Instagram, but the engagement rate absolutely was, with an 881 percent increase in engagements. So let me summarize this for you. Just, I just really want to make this point here.

[00:13:16] Sarah Almond Bushell: A week, I have reached 17, 388 people on social media without actually being on social media. I've had just under 1500 people like, comment, save or share my content. While I was off doing other stuff, my website visitors increased too, because of course, some of these new people will have poked around a little bit, been a bit nosy, had a little look to see what I do and landed on my website.

[00:13:50] Sarah Almond Bushell: So I'm getting an additional 1, 000 people across to my website every single week as a result of this. And actually most importantly for me, the number of people subscribing to my email list has increased as well. So some of these brand new people Decided to opt in for my freebies and I'm gaining an average of 102 new subscribers every single week.

[00:14:15] Sarah Almond Bushell: And these are not conversion ads that you would usually use to get subscribers. This is just cheap old engagement ads. So I've made a bit of a decision. I've decided to stop working with my social media team in the children's nutritionist because for five pounds a day, which as I said is about 140 pounds per month, I can get more reach.

[00:14:42] Sarah Almond Bushell: I can get more engagement on my posts. I can get more website visitors and I can get more people subscribing to my email list, which means I can stop that 2, 500. Monthly payment. And save myself 2, 360 per month. So yes, I will still be posting organically on social media, but it'll be me doing it, and I won't be killing myself to make sure that I have content ready every single day on the dot.

[00:15:11] Sarah Almond Bushell: And nor will I be dependent upon the whims of what the algorithm is deciding to do today. Or spending ages searching for trending audios just to get more eyeballs on my post. And I certainly won't be following the social media gurus that are online with their ideas. Because honestly, nobody really knows unless you actually work for Meta.

[00:15:36] Sarah Almond Bushell: So my mentor, when she was sharing the results of her own experiment, she said, The time to start running ads is not when you've made your money in your business. It's now, because the ads will get you there so much faster. And I think that my experiment has proven that as well. So I hope you've enjoyed this little sneak peek behind the scenes of the kind of things that I get up to in my business.

[00:16:03] Sarah Almond Bushell: Let me know if you want more of these kinds of episodes because I'm always really happy to share if it'll, it's something that'll help you with your business. And if you like the sound of running ads, come and chat to me about them. My DMs are always open on Instagram, so come and find me there at the end.

[00:16:22] Sarah Almond Bushell: So my action step for you at the end of this episode is I want you to have a look at your data. Are you tracking your social media reach and engagements? Do you know whether you're getting in front of new people or is it just your followers? And is your content resonating with them? If not, I urge you to make this one of your regular weekly or monthly tasks, because knowing your numbers is key.

[00:16:49] Sarah Almond Bushell: is what helps you make the right business decisions, which ultimately is what leads to growth. So join me next week where I've got another guest coming into the studio with me. I'm going to be interviewing Rosie Martin. She's also known as Plant Dietitian Rosie on Instagram. She is a vegan specialist dietitian.

[00:17:10] Sarah Almond Bushell: She's one of my clients and she's going to be sharing her course creation journey with us. I just want to give you a little sneak peek here. She sold out her course before she'd even created it. You do not want to miss this one. So that's it for another week. I hope you've loved this mini behind the scenes episode of the Beyond the Clinic podcast.

[00:17:33] Sarah Almond Bushell: And if you have, I would love for you to leave me a review on whichever podcast player that you use, because it's this that helps us get pushed out to more listeners. And then I can help more people with their businesses as well. I'll see you next week. And also, if you like what I've been sharing so far, and you would like a bit more help from me in building your business, then my diary is open for discovery calls.

[00:17:55] Sarah Almond Bushell: My mission is to help as many healthcare professionals as I can to build their own businesses, to be their own boss, and that of course means helping more people improve their health at the same time. So if you want to chat through different options of how I can support you, head over to saraharmondbushell.

[00:18:14] Sarah Almond Bushell: com where you can book a free Zoom discovery call with me. Bye for now.