It can be easy to wonder if there is any point posting on social media if hardly anyone likes it or no one comments.

But what if your social media is doing more work than you realise?

In this episode of the Good Enough Counsellors podcast, I share how having a presence on social media can help potential clients find you - even if they never actually read your posts.

I share my own experience of learning just how much Meta AI knew about me from my online presence: and why this is welcome from a marketing viewpoint. We're no longer only writing for humans because AI is increasingly using information from across the internet to understand who we are, what we do and who we're able to help.

You'll learn some simple ways to make it easier for AI to recommend you to clients and as this is my monthly social media episode, I also give you ideas for October.

In this episode:

• Why low engagement doesn't necessarily mean your social media isn't working
• How AI is changing the way people may find and choose therapists
• Why being clear about who you help matters
• How repeating your areas of interest can strengthen your online presence
• Using real questions people ask as inspiration for posts
• October content ideas around lived experience, identity, change and failure
• Why lighter engagement posts still have a place on your social media

Links & Resources mentioned in this episode:

I'm running an Onlinevents workshop, Private Practice: Who Do You Most Want to Help?, on 26 September, exploring niching and becoming clearer about the people you most want to work with. You can book more HERE

I'm also working on a new resource about how therapists can improve their digital presence so they're more likely to be found and recommended through AI search. Click HERE if you'd like to hear more when it's ready.

Nicola Blunden's episode Trusting What Clients Know appeared in September 2025 and explores epistemic justice.

And coming up on the podcast next week, Claire Ratcliffe joins me to talk about couples counselling, followed by a second episode looking at fees and creating a financially sustainable private practice.

October Social Media Ideas

This year's World Mental Health Day theme of listening to lived experience gives us a starting point for thinking about what we've learnt from the people we work with and whose voices we might want to amplify. I also look at some of October's awareness dates around neurodivergence, menopause, Black History Month and LGBTQ+ experiences.

There are ideas around change and transition as autumn arrives, failure and perfectionism, and some lighter opportunities for posts that simply help people get to know you.

October dates listed in this episode:

• October, all month: ADHD Awareness Month
• October, all month: Menopause Awareness Month
• October, all month: Black History Month UK
• 1 October: International Coffee Day
• 8 October: International Lesbian Day & World Dyslexia Awareness Day
• 10 October: World Mental Health Day
• 11 October: Coming Out Day
• 13 October: Day for Failure
• 14 October: Face Your Fears Day
• 16 October: Global Cat Day
• 15 October: International Pronouns Day
• 25 October: Daylight Saving Time ends / clocks go back
• 27 October: Black Cat Day
• 31 October: Halloween

Setting up in private practice? Download my free checklist HERE

Need ideas for how to get clients? Download my free handout 21 Ways for Counsellors to Attract New Clients HERE

You can also find me here:

The Good Enough Counsellors Facebook Group

Josephine Hughes on Facebook

Josephine Hughes on YouTube

My website: josephinehughes.com

Keywords:

social media for therapists, therapist marketing, counselling private practice, getting counselling clients, AI search for therapists, social media marketing, therapist visibility, private practice marketing, social media content ideas, October social media ideas

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.

Someone told me the other day that they have a presence on social media that's not unusual.

What they told me is that no one ever reads their posts.

That probably sounds familiar, doesn't it?

But the interesting thing they then told me was that that same social media is continuing to get them clients, even though no one ever reads it.

How is that?

That's what we're going to be talking about in today's Good Enough Counsellors Podcast.

Welcome to Good Enough Counsellors, the podcast for growing a private practice without the pressure to be perfect.

I'm Josephine Hughes, counsellor and creator of Therapy Growth Group, helping you get the clients you want and create the practice of your dreams.

Welcome to the Good Enough Counsellors Podcast, and especially if you are tuning in for the first time, having maybe met me at the BACP Private Practice Conference, which is about the same time as this podcast is coming out.

In today's episode, we're going to be talking about how a social media presence can help you get clients, even if those clients never, ever go anywhere near social media.

It's a little puzzle for you, which I'm going to explain.

Last week's podcast was all about eating disorders, and that's something that many of us as private practitioners will come across because.

Because they are so common.

And I spoke to Kel o', Neill, who is an eating disorder specialist, about what we can do about that because it will come into our practice.

And Klel talked about how we could have a referral reflex and just think we've just got to move these people on.

But often the problem is, is that there's nowhere to refer them.

So what do we do about that and what are the implications for our competence?

And next week I'm really excited to introduce you to Claire Ratcliffe, who's coming to talk to us about couples counselling, but also she's going to be talking about private practice and fee setting as well.

That's over the next couple of weeks.

So do listen out for that if today's episode doesn't really feel like it's for you.

But I am going to tell you a story now about something that happened to me the other day and I'm going to explain how it is is that we can be on social media with no one reading what we're saying and it's still having an impact and help clients find us.

So my little story is about how Samantha Lee mentioned me in one of her Facebook posts the other day.

Sam came onto my show a couple of years ago we're gonna have to get her back soon.

And she shared her episode again with people and she tagged me in the post.

She just put Josephine Hughes.

So of I got a notification that Sam had tagged me.

And so I went and looked at the post and at the bottom of the post there was a little prompt and it said, who is Josephine Hughes?

So of course you can't help but be curious about what might be being said about you.

And basically it was Facebook's meta AI prompt.

So I clicked through and I read what meta AI was going to tell people about me.

And honestly, I was really quite astounded.

I think at the depth of information that meta AI could present to people, you might find that a bit creepy.

You might think, oh, big brother's watching me.

But as someone who likes to help therapists with their marketing, I could see that it was a really useful thing because it told people who I was, what I did, what my podcasts were, the told people about my therapy growth group, which is my membership group to help therapists with their marketing.

It talked about my Good Enough counsellors group.

There was so much information there.

And of course, where's Facebook?

Found this out.

Facebook has found this out from the posts that I've been putting onto Facebook and Instagram.

So this is the answer to that little puzzle.

The fact is, is that you might not be getting humans reading your posts, but AI is reading your posts.

And particularly on Facebook, it's meta AI.

And that means that people may well find out about you and may well read about you.

If they put a search into meta AI about therapists, you may come up as one of the people that they're recommending.

But not only that, as I said to you, I said you don't actually need your clients to go anywhere near social media for it still to work.

And it's sort of like you think, oh, you know, I'm.

I'm producing all this stuff and no one's really seeing it, or I'm not getting many likes or follows.

It's not really working well.

I think what my story tells you is that it can be working in the background, just not in the way that you think it's working.

Because what the various AI bots are doing is they are looking at who therapists are across the board.

So if someone is putting into AI the fact that they are feeling down and they need to find a therapist, AI may well recommend someone.

And they do that by looking at what is going on across the board.

So social media is one of those places that AI might look in order to recommend a therapist.

So if you can have a website, if you can have social media, if you can have a Google My business profile, if you can have appearances on podcasts or doing guest blogs elsewhere, that all helps AI to build a picture of you.

And I should add directories in there as well.

It's effectively giving your digital footprint away.

And that helps AI to find you and recommend you.

And in particular with social media, obviously, if you're posting on Facebook, Instagram, that means that Meta AI can find you.

If you post on LinkedIn, that means that Microsoft Copilot can find you, because Microsoft owns LinkedIn.

And this may not be one of your favorite things if you're the same age as me and know nothing about it.

But I do have younger listeners as well who probably use it quite a lot.

And maybe I'm doing my older listeners a disservice.

I don't use Reddit particularly.

I've never been able to get my head around it.

But ChatGPT OpenAI has an agreement that it can call on Reddit threads when it's trying to answer people's questions.

So presence on Reddit can help as well.

And all of these things don't necessarily need other people to be reading what you're saying.

And the example I gave you at the start of the show is actually my coach, and he says that he has business pages across the different social medias and no one ever reads these business pages, but he just makes sure that they're kept up to date.

Whenever he publishes something, he'll make sure that he updates these different pages across across the web.

And that is all helping AI to find him.

So I think it's really helpful to know that it isn't necessarily about humans finding you at this point, it's about the AI finding you, and that the AI can then become the agent that recommends you to people.

So I don't want to move on until we've just had a little think about what that means in practice.

And here's just a few ideas for you to take away.

So number one is quite important, and this is about being clear about who it is that you're actually helping.

Because, like, we know there's lots and lots of therapists out there, and the more generic therapist is harder for the signal to get through to AI about the sorts of clients that you help.

So if they've got somebody who's saying to them, this is the AI when I say they, if someone's talking to AI about a particular problem.

AI might then look for the solution to that particular problem.

So that's the sort of thing that is helpful for you to be talking about.

And I'm going to have to eat my hat here because one of the things I've always talked about is don't use clinical language, but you do want to talk in a human way to people, but also to maybe pepper what you're doing with a little bit of clinical language in there, because that might help the AI robots as well.

So it's really important for you to be very, very clear about what your specialisms are.

Something that you might shy away from is talking about your specialisms a lot.

You might sort of think, oh, well, I've covered that already, I won't cover that again.

You need to keep on talking about it, not only for AI, but for your human readers as well.

Because the stronger you can make signal, which is by really delving into your particular subject that you're interested in and the areas where you most want to help clients, the more you can do that, the stronger the signal will be.

And I've just talked about using clinical language, but also think about the natural way that people might ask questions.

This can be really helpful.

AI really likes the sort of frequently asked questions type format.

So you could even do that as sort of like a carousel post where you have several different slides as part of the same post on Instagram, where you can put the.

The things that people might ask in the way that they might ask it.

You know, why do I feel like this?

What is happening?

Is it normal to grieve for years?

You know, just.

Just different things that people might genuinely ask in a natural way.

And if you can include that in your post, that's going to AI to find you as well.

And last but not least, if you're not getting a lot of likes and follows on your posts, you know, sometimes those sort of information you post don't.

But they will still be speaking to AI, so, you know, don't give up on them, keep going.

That's what I'd really like to say.

And I just want to at this point say, just so that you know, on the weekend of the 26th of September, which is coming up really quickly, I know you might not catch it in time, but I'm doing a workshop with online events called Private Practice.

Who do you most want to help?

I'll pop the link into the show notes for that.

If you can come along to that.

It's all about helping you find out who it is that you want to help and any sort of queries and concerns you might have about that dreaded niching word.

And so that's what I'm going to be doing with online events.

If you miss that, don't worry because I've got coming up in my membership in my therapy growth group.

We'll be doing a whole month on it from early October.

So that's one thing I wanted to say to you.

And the other thing is if you're really interested in finding out more about how you can help yourself, get Recommended by AI.

I'm in the process of doing a really big piece of work on it.

If you'd like to be the first to know when this stuff is coming out, I'm going to pop a link into the show.

Notes on I think I've called it how to Get Recommended by AI.

If you join my email list and put your name down there, you'll get to hear about it when I've done it because what I can really see happening, many of you have been saying I'm not getting as many clients as I used to and there's a lot of fear around and about about, oh, that means that there's not as many clients looking for counsellors.

I don't think that's true.

I think they're getting recommended in different ways.

But what I'd like to say is don't give up.

Don't give up things like directories, they are important.

And this is what I'm going to be telling you all about in my information that I'm producing on AI, because I think this is the next big wave of change that we've got coming as therapists.

You know, we talk with.

There's a lot of stuff out there on how we use AI with our clients and ethical ways to use AI.

But I think it's really important for you as someone who's in private practice, to know how to optimize your digital presence so that AI can find you and can recommend you to clients.

Because increasingly clients are using AI.

Search.

You may not agree with AI, but there's lots of people out there who are actually just using AI for recommendations.

I've started doing it myself.

It's just a much easier way of doing things than having to trawl through a load of blogs, for example.

So I think this is the way the world is changing.

It's really important that we as therapists are actually adapted and ready for that.

Well, it is happening.

I don't necessarily know that we need to get ready.

I think we need to adapt now.

And that's why I'm so keen to help as many of you as possible find out how AI is changing the way that you get clients.

Okay, so that's my little spiel.

And you can probably hear how important I think it is.

But what I wanted to move on to now, which is what I do every month in my social media episode, is to think about awareness states, because awareness dates can help us create posts that are relevant to our clients, are relevant when AI is looking at our social media.

And awareness dates can just help us us think about what we can put into our posts.

So I've got a list here that you may like to know about.

And the first thing I am going to start with is it's World Mental Health Day, and that's coming up on the 10th of October, and I thought I'd start there because the theme is a really interesting one this year and it is about listening to lived experience.

I think often with that something like a mental health day, we could just publish a generic post like it's okay not to be okay, that type of thing.

But I think with this year's theme about listening to lived experience, I really think there's something that you could do with that.

So you could talk about what you've learned through listening to clients.

You could talk about if you've got a particular area that you've worked a lot with, you could talk about what you've learned as a result of listening to clients in that particular area.

Now, one of the areas that I used to work with was the area of baby loss and also involuntary childlessness.

So I'm sorry if that is a trigger for anybody.

Feel free to fast forward through this bit if you want.

But something that, that I learned through that was often, I think for baby loss, how people weren't really their grief wasn't acknowledged, and for involuntary childlessness, how it can be very difficult to talk about because of the stigma.

And so again, there's a whole area of loss that people just never have acknowledged.

So I would want to do a post about that.

If I was talking about what I've learned through lived experience, through listening to the lived experience of my clients, I would probably do something like that.

So see if you can think of something that's really relevant to the people who you most want to help and think about what you've learned through listening to them and make that into a post.

And I wanted to start with that because other parts of October that you might find really helpful to know about.

So let me just get my little list up, and I can tell you a little bit more about is ADHD Awareness Month, and also it's dyslexia awareness as well.

So often people with ADHD and dyslexia, their experience isn't listened to.

We know the grief that goes with, you know, suddenly finding out if you're late diagnosed that, you know, there was a problem all along, but no one really understood it.

No one really listened.

You took it on yourself.

You internalized that you were a bad person because you couldn't do certain things.

And now suddenly people are finding out, actually it's because of this.

And yet there's still quite a lot of people who don't listen to lived experience.

I see this so much with working with transgender people, for example, that their lived experience is just ignored.

And if you'd like to know more about listening to people's lived experience, there's a lovely, lovely episode by Nicola Blunden, and she talks there about how important it is to really enter into that frame of reference of your client.

And I'll pop which episode number it is into the show notes, because I can't remember off the top of my head, but alongside the sort of ADHD and dyslexia awareness, there's also.

It's Menopause Awareness Month.

So that might be about listening to people, because again, we know that women are often ignored, their health concerns often ignored.

And I don't want to pass over it, because this is a really big one as well.

It's Black History Month in the UK as well.

And again, there's a whole.

I mean, there is a lot of, say, verbal history of black people's experience, but often, again, it's not recognized.

So there's a lot here, I think, this month about really listening to people's experience and maybe sharing voices.

People from those various communities, you know, just mentioned in passing, transgender people there.

But also, yeah, from an LGBTQ point, there are quite a few days this month as well.

And I'll just tell you what they are.

There's Coming Out Day.

Let me just see what date that is.

That's on the 11th.

And there's also a Pronouns day as well, and it's International lesbian day on the 8th of October.

So there's this days coming out around these sorts of subjects as well.

So I think this month in particular, this whole theme about listening to people's lived experience, you could just make your whole month about that if you wanted.

If you wanted to do.

You could choose one of those things that I've talked about per week and maybe to two or three posts around it.

That would easily be enough.

Or even just one post a week because that is enough too, if that's all you've got time for.

Also coming up is October can be quite a month of change and we've got the daylight savings ends on the 25th, so that sort of change and transition.

I'm actually recording this on a beautiful September, September evening where it's been sunny all day, but by the time it comes out, it might still be sunny, but certainly by October I think the weather will have changed.

So, you know, we're moving into autumn as well.

So the idea of autumn, you, if you go out for a walk, say, and you've got some lovely leaves, something like that, you could take a photo of you with amongst autumn leaves and talk.

Use that as a talking point about change and transition as we move forward.

You might also want to talk to parents who perhaps are experiencing that empty nesting as their kids go off to university.

It's also just changing the subject a little bit.

There's some topics around failure.

I didn't know how to introduce that very easily, but on the 13th of October, we've got the day for failure and we've Also on the 14th, got face your fears day.

And I think that would be quite a good one to riff on.

You could talk all about perfectionism.

You could share maybe if you've struggled with perfectionism, how you've overcome it.

You know, the.

The whole sort of point of this podcast is, you know, grow your private practice without the pressure to be perfect.

Because I'm a real perfectionist as well.

And a lot of what I do is about encouraging people to let go of perfectionism and.

And basically is it good enough to for now, and if it is, get on with it and improve it later.

And the same can be true of your social media as well.

You just get something out there, it doesn't have to be perfect.

And I did something this last week and it was a complete and utter failure.

But I know now that didn't work and that's okay.

I've just learned from it.

So you learn from it and you move on.

So that's coming up and you could share something maybe if you've got a bit of a philosophy around that.

And I always like in my social media podcast to pull out the days where you've got a bit of a lighter theme, because social media, it is social, so AI might not appreciate this, but if you have got real people who are following your social media feed and hopefully you have, there's some days that are coming up where it's really easy to get engagement.

So on the, I think on the first it's coffee day.

And then we've got, we've actually got two cat days this month.

My heart is overflowing because I always love anything to do with pets because they're so good at getting engagement on your page.

So we've got the Global cat day on the 16th and on the 27th we've got black cat day because of course we're getting close to Halloween.

So Halloween is another opportunity.

You could use it in a fun way.

So I might do it this year again.

I might reuse the post.

I did, I did a post last year of ghosts and the top 10 scary things that therapists encounter.

So it was things like clients canceling at the last minute.

So lots of sort of scary things that we find scary.

Putting up our fees, that's something else that we can find quite scary.

So I sort of did a fun thing on that.

And you could do something that fun.

You could talk about fear, for example, pick up on that face your fears day and do something else about it towards the end of the month as we reach Halloween.

Or you could simply get people to share photos of their pumpkins.

If you've got maybe one on your dill step, you could share it too.

So these sorts of posts are just light engagement posts that help people to interact with you, get to know that you're not sort of a stuffed up therapist, you know, blank slate, but that you are actually a real person who they can relate to and who they might want to turn to.

So that's my social media episode for this month and I really hope you tune in next week to hear Claire, who's so passionate about relationship counseling.

And she did such a fantastic interview that actually I made it into two.

And the following week she really got into the flow, talking about the importance of charging the right sort of fee that will sustain your private practice.

She's got a lot of wisdom there.

So I've made that into a separate episode as well.

So I hope you enjoy those and I look forward to seeing you again on the podcast the next time you tune in.

Bye for now.

Thanks for listening.

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.

Every single step you make gets you closer to your dream.

I really believe you can do it.