In this month’s Good Enough Counsellors podcast, I’m taking my own advice - yes, really! With a busy week supporting therapists in the Therapy Growth Group, I didn’t have time to prep a brand new episode, so I’ve reused some golden content from a previous episode on social media planning.

This episode is perfect for you if you're a therapist who struggles with planning content or posting consistently. Whether you're a meticulous scheduler or more of a "post as the mood takes you" type, there's something here for you.

Plus, I’ll share:

• Ideas for social media posts for May 2025
• How to use Mental Health Awareness Week (13–19 May, theme: community) in your content
• Ways to tailor posts to your niche - whether that’s trauma, anxiety, bereavement, neurodivergence, addiction, or maternal mental health
• A few lighter post ideas to mix things up (yes, Talk Like Yoda Day makes an appearance...)

Takeaways:

• Why it’s okay to reuse your posts (and your podcast content!)
• Different approaches to social media planning—and how to find one that works for you
• How to use awareness days like Mental Health Awareness Week and Maternal Mental Health Awareness Week to connect with your audience
• How to create post themes that make your content easier to write and more consistent
• A little reminder that social media can be fun too

Links referenced in this episode:

• mentalhealth.org.uk
• josephinehughes.com

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My website: josephinehughes.com

Keywords: social media marketing for therapists, mental health awareness week, social media planning tips, content ideas for therapists, promoting therapy on social media

The information contained in Good Enough Counsellors is provided for information purposes only. The contents of this podcast are not intended to amount to advice and you should not rely on any of the contents of this podcast. Professional advice should be obtained before taking or refraining from taking any action as a result of the contents of this podcast.

Josephine Hughes disclaims all liability and responsibility arising from any reliance placed on any of the contents of this podcast.

Eat your own dog food or dog foodie is an expression used by companies where they test out and use the products themselves. Colloquially. It can also mean to take your own advice.

Now, I'm sure I'm not the only one who's guilty of encouraging clients to set boundaries or take regular breaks when.

I don't do it myself.

But in today's episode, I am actually going to eat my own dog food, as you'll hear welcome to the Good Enough Counsellors Podcast. I'm Josephine Hughes and today is our monthly social media episode, but with a twist.

As usual, I'll be giving you ideas for next month, but the week I'm recording in, I'm really busy supporting members.

Of Therapy Growth Group in writing their profiles.

I'm giving them lots of feedback, which has reduced the time available to prepare this podcast. So the eat your own dog food advice that I often give to you about reusing your posts is something that I'm going to do today.

I'm going to reuse part of an episode from from last year that is all about how you can make posting on social media easier for yourself.

If you've got time constraints, the chances are this episode will probably reach people who haven't heard it before, but those that have have probably forgotten it anyway. It's always good to be reminded, and that's the same with your social media posts. You can reuse your social media posts.

And when you've listened to this little.

Let's start with a few tips to help you with your planning.

Now, right at the outset, I want to share that I don't rate my planning skills very highly, so much so that I do have a coach who helps me to prioritise, and she also says no to me quite a lot of the time. In the nicest possible way, she usually asks, and what Are you going to let go of Josephine so that you can fit in this new idea?

Personally, I suspect the world is divided into two distinct camps in terms of social media planning. Those who find time in their diary to sit down and plan in advance, and others, like me, who post on the day, or should I say post on the fly?

And actually, either approach is okay. Much as I try, I have never been able to fit into that mould of the organized social media planner.

So over time I've developed my own way of doing things.

And I think you'd agree that I'm visible on social media and I do attract a lot of coaching clients this way, if you come across someone who tells you the best way is to batch and schedule, yes, that may work for them, but don't allow it to stop you.

There's many an adhder who's fallen at the hurdle of planning, and I think that's such a shame because they're incredibly creative people with a lot of ideas. If it suits you to post when you think about an idea, then go for it.

But do remember you can actually write the post and then schedule it to come out later using a tool like the Meta Business suite on Instagram and Facebook.

An example of this is I did this the other day when I created a post about how I'd had to be chased about seven times by Amazon to sort out a payment. It tied in so well with the subject of chasing clients for payments that I wrote a post about it.

And just in time I remembered I had a podcast on fees coming out the following week. So I scheduled the post to tie in with that and I actually felt quite smug about it because I don't usually think that far in advance.

But what I would say is I do find it useful to have a schedule of ideas that I can call on. I have a social media planning diary and I do actually produce post ideas in advance for members of my paid membership, the Therapy Growth Group.

It does mean that when you're sitting and thinking what the hell do I post? You do have ideas to call on. I'll often be consulting my planner about 30 minutes before my post is due to be published.

I usually write it on the spot and then publish it straight away. So if you're someone who finds planning in advance difficult, it can be useful to create a posting habit. That's what I do.

So for my Facebook groups, I'll always post in the mornings and I'll fit it in sometime between 7 and 9am Then in the evening I'll be writing a post for my business page at around 6 or 6:30pm to publish for 7pm What I find is this daily habit supports me in consistency of posting. It doesn't have to take long, but it means I have that dedicated time each day and that helps me to show up for people.

I also find it useful to have weekly themes, so for example, I'll create content around that week's podcast episode so you can see I have a little theme during the week that enables me not to have to think too carefully about what I'm going to be doing. This is something that you could do if you're writing a weekly blog on your website.

Or it could be that you choose a weekly theme using the ideas that I'm going to share shortly and and you could create one longer piece of content that forms the backbone of your social media and then use that to create shorter posts for the rest of the week. Another way of doing it is to have a theme for a particular day each week. You'll notice I do this in good enough counsellors.

My therapy Tuesdays will be a post about an aspect of therapy wellbeing Wednesdays will be an aspect of self care and thankful Thursdays will be celebrating the good stuff that is coming into our lives. So even if you're not a planner, you can make it a little easier on yourself by creating a structure.

In therapy growth group, I help people to decide on their content pillars, the subjects you'd like to focus on that are relevant to the client group that you'd like to reach. Let's use the example of reaching out to parents.

You may like to have a day where you share a piece of news in regard to parenting, another day where you share a therapy tip for parents and a collapse on the sofa at the end of the week post and you could ask people to share what their week's been like on that one. With a structure like this, you just need to keep your eye out for that piece of news or make a list of therapy tips you can post.

And if you're like me, you might think of them about 10 minutes in advance of posting. However, the other thing to say at this point is don't be afraid of republishing your posts.

You you can publish them every few months or so, and that means that you don't have to come up with so many ideas. People won't particularly remember them. So don't be afraid to put your posts on a revolving post schedule.

Now, if you're someone who is more of a planner than I am, you can make your social media posting structured by scheduling in a planning session or two at the end of the month to prepare for the upcoming month.

You could also schedule in a batch processing day or half day where you create your posts and pop them into a tool that will publish them for you at the appropriate time.

You can use the free tools within your social media app like Meta Business Suite, or you can use commercially available software like Buffer or hootsuite.

I hope those thoughts have encouraged you that you're able to create a social media page where you can show up consistently and show clients that you're reliable.

If you'd like any more help in knowing what to Post in episode 48 of the Good Enough Counsellors podcast, Confident Social Media Marketing for Counsellors. I've given you a framework of four different types of post and they are ones that you could use each week.

They're to help you think about content ideas. The other thing that you can use to help you with content ideas are the different awareness days that come up every day of the month.

And there's a really big one coming up in May which I'm going to tell you about and it's Mental Health Awareness Week. It starts on the 12th of May and goes through to the 18th.

I thought it might be really helpful if I give you some ideas about how you could apply it to different types of clients.

The actual theme of Mental Health Awareness Week this year is community, and you can find out all about it if you go to the following website address mentalhealth.org.uk that's the mental Health Foundation. So the week is all about community and recognizing the vital role the community plays in mental health.

It's really helpful to know who it is that you're trying to reach because that can make your posts really relevant and personal to people.

It makes it so much easier if you know who it is that you're talking to, especially around something like mental health awareness and the idea of community.

And this is where I help people in my therapy growth group because we'll actually look at defining who it is you're trying to reach as part of the 12 Action Steps program. And the middle part of that is all about defining your personal brand. That's looking at the types of client that you want to work with.

So what I'm going to do now is share with you some different ideas for different types of clients. Let's start with trauma. Clients think in relation to community. How does trauma actually affect relationships?

We know that trauma has a huge impact on relationships. If you've been traumatised, you. If you've been abused, you're probably going to struggle with trusting people.

This is something that you could talk about as part of the Mental Health Awareness Week and how therapy actually helps you to restore and rebuild trust. You could talk about polyvagal theory and how being in community can have a real impact on your sense of wellbeing.

Whenever I think about polyvagal theory and community, I always remember people leaning out of their balconies in Italy during the pandemic and all singing together and you just think what a fantastic example that is of how being in community can really help people.

If you work with anxiety, you could talk about social anxiety and community, the thought of connection and how small practical steps can ease social interactions. You could think about how isolation actually increases anxiety.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who finds that if I can get to be with people, all that overthinking actually gets stopped in its tracks. You could also consider writing a blog around anxiety and loneliness and the interaction between the two and how it impacts individuals.

If your niche is bereavement and loss, you could maybe talk about the role of community in grieving and how support networks can help with loss, how grief can make you feel really alone and what therapy can do to help. How you can rebuild connections after you've had loss. Let's move on to think about people who are neurodivergent.

You could think about healthy communities for neurodivergent people, and that would probably be mixing with other neurodivergent people who get it.

You could do some myth busting around the idea of online communities not being as good as in person communities, because we all know that online communities can be a real powerful force for good, especially if you're neurodivergent. You could think about communities that drain your energies and how neurodivergent people need to be able to keep themselves safe.

You could also talk about how helpful it is for neurodivergent people to meet others who are similar, so that you're breaking down that myth of being broken. And when you recognise similarities in other people, it starts to normalise the situation for you.

I think supportive communities could also be a theme for those of you that work in the field of addiction.

And it could be a chance to talk about finding healthy relationships for those who are in recovery, together with looking at the communities that aren't so healthy for people who are in recovery. Something else that's come up for me in thinking about community is to look at our culture and the way culture affects people.

And in this, I'm particularly thinking about diet culture and how that really impacts people with eating disorders, how it can cause shame and isolation for people, and what makes it really difficult for people to be able to talk about eating disorders. We all know that eating disorders are a really common thing.

Talking about how our diet culture affects people could be a really interesting way to explore this idea of mental health awareness and community. And I also think part of this could be about safe communities for LGBTQ people.

They might be fearing rejection from the community if they come out as their true selves.

There's such a culture of homophobia and transphobia that thinking about community and mental health gives you a really interesting intersection that you may well want to blog about too. While we're on the subject of the LGBTQ community, there's some really important days coming up for them.

In May, there's Trans Plus History Week which is happening from the 5th of May and and the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia that takes place on the 17th. There's Agender Pride and Pansexual Awareness and they're happening on the 19th and 24th respectively. Quite a few days there for the LGBT community.

I mentioned earlier my framework for helping you to write posts and I think many of the ideas that I've just talked about would come under the educate part of that framework. But you could also write engagement posts and these would be some myth busting posts.

You could do some polls, you could ask people for their opinions, such as describing the activities that they enjoy that give them connections. An encourage post would be something around sharing a story or encouraging people to make friends.

And I think a really great example that you could use in terms of a story is Andy's Man's Club and the work that it does to prevent suicide amongst men. You could talk about how that all came about and how community really does make a difference to the people who attend.

The last E in the framework is empowerment and by this I mean empowering people to take steps towards therapy. It's an opportunity for you to talk about how great therapy is and encourage people to take that step to get together with you.

We all know that being able to talk about your problems and being able to look at those deep rooted causes of difficulties in relationships can be transformational and that if people have therapy, they have improved connections. It's a great opportunity for you to talk about mental health and community and how you can help that happen.

There's one group that I didn't actually mention when I was talking about Mental Health Awareness Week and that's people who are having babies.

The reason I didn't mention them is there is also a Maternal Mental Health Awareness Week coming up on the 5th of May and the awareness day itself is on the 7th.

If you want to talk about this, you could also use Midwife Day which is on the 5th, and the International Day of Families on the 15th and Children's Day on the 18th. So there's quite a few days this month that you could use to talk about maternal mental health awareness and all around the subject of families.

The actual theme this year for maternal mental health is called you'd voice and you'd strength. And what it's about is the fact that women often feel that they're not listened to with regard to their mental health.

It's about empowering women to use their voice and letting them know that it's okay for them to express their mental health problems and what they need and their feelings and experiences around pregnancy, parenthood and birth.

This means, if you're a therapist talking about how therapy really helps people to feel more courageous and gives them the confidence to speak out, this could be a really important time for you to join in with the maternal mental health awareness campaign. Finally, I want to give you a couple of more general fun days that you can use.

It's always good to lighten up your feed a little bit so it's not all terribly serious the whole time. So there's some lovely chances to be playful during the month and I'm going to give you a couple of them. The 4th of May is Star Wars Day.

Wait for the pun. May the fourth be with you comes up every year and it's actually quite a big thing on people's social calendars, so look out for that.

If you've got any Star wars related stories or you've ever dressed up in a Star wars costume, this would be a great time to share and have some fun with people on your page. And there's also Talk Like Yoda Day. Or should I say talk like Yoda. You must. So obviously it bears no relation to counselling at all.

Unless you can maybe tell them something about counselling while you're talking like Yoda.

Or alternatively, you could talk about things like the Force and how that could be listening to our intuition, to our gut feeling, so you could make it count in that sort of way. Or you could talk about how counsellors are a bit like Yoda, helping people to discover the answers for themselves. But you could just have some fun.

And that's what I'm going to finish this episode with. I'm going to give you some Yoda like advice. Overthink your posts. You do, but post you must. The algorithm pleased it will be doubtless.

Post more.

Laugh at yourself you should now go forth. And social media you must. Hmm.

Thanks for listening. Do come and join my Facebook community. Good enough counsellors.

And for more information about how I can help you develop your private practice, please Visit my website JosephineHughes.com if you found this episode helpful, I'D love it if you could share it with a fellow therapist or leave a review on your podcast app. And in closing, I'd love to remind you that every single single step you.

Make gets you closer to your dream. I really believe you can do it.