05/06/2026
Can I be real with you guys for a minute? Please stick with me.
It is exhausting out here as a small business right now. It has been for years, actually. I promise I'm not complaining, I'm just trying to help you see what it's like on our end for a moment.
We make posts that we think will do well. We are upbeat and cheerful and positive. We highlight our favorite items, but we have to be very careful of the words we use because one wrong word will get that post hidden from the vast majority of you... so we do the best we can. And still, because the post is cheerful and positive, the post is hidden anyway.
The page tells us, on our end, "For just $20, you can BOOST this post and get x amount more views!" No thanks. I am a struggling small business who hasn't made a sale in weeks and can't afford that. Could you just show my post, please? Oh, no? You're just gonna hide me? Cool, cool cool.
Meta tells us to go live! To post reels! To post in groups! To create constant content! To interact more! To create interesting and fun content! To stand out! To spend money to be seen! To... but nothing we do is ever enough. And as soon as we FINALLY figure the algorithm out, it all changes again and we have to start all over.
I post in groups. Those posts get no traffic anymore. I used to take the time to record every step along the way and put it all together to create reels... and it did nothing but kill my creative joy. I used to post multiple times a day, but it meant I was ALWAYS on my phone or computer. I would go live, but no one ever joined. I would create fun content, but only the negative posts were given visibility... because that's what feeds social media.
Small businesses are run by people in the community who desperately NEED your support. We aren't huge corporations who receive bailouts. When we fail, we fail. We close our doors and our dreams die. When we fail, what we have worked so hard to achieve dies. We don't get second chances.
We are often up until 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, working, because that's the only time we have. Some of us have families to care for. While I am a stay at home mom (which, by the way, does NOT mean I have constant free time), some of us have full time jobs to work around. But we make time for this dream of ours because it's what's keeping our sanity together right now.
We are exhausted. We are dying. We are doing everything we can to promote what we do... but we are constantly hidden no matter what. And we are tired... scared. We don't want to close our doors. We want to keep creating.
Art is important. It matters. It is freeing.
But we can't do any of this without YOU.
- Bek
🩵
