No, You’re Not Promoting Your Work Too Much. You’re Just Close to It.
If you’re marketing a service, a product, or something you genuinely care about — you’ve probably had that familiar wave of self-consciousness creep in at some point: the sense that you’re saying the same thing too often, that you’re pushing too hard, that you’re showing up in your audience’s feed like a pop-up ad they didn’t ask for, and that any minute now people are going to get tired of you.
From the inside, it can feel like you’re hammering your message, simply because you’re immersed in it every day, thinking about it in small moments, hearing the same themes surface in conversation, and inevitably circling back to the same core idea when you sit down to write or speak. And if you’re someone who’s naturally self-aware (or self-critical), it’s easy to interpret that as a warning sign: Maybe I need to stop talking about this. Maybe I’m overdoing it. Maybe I’m fatiguing people.
But most of the time, that thought process isn’t actually grounded in reality as much as you think it is. It’s grounded in the fact that you are close to your own message, close to your own body of work, and therefore you assume everyone else is, too. And that assumption is what tends to cap your growth because it convinces you to pull back right when you should be pushing even harder.
So let’s talk about a few myths that we need to squash once and for all — and how to finally grow in the way you’re really wanting.
Myth #1: Everyone Sees Everything You Post
The first myth is the one that creates the most unnecessary pressure: the belief that your audience sees every single video, caption, story, post, and promotion, and that they’re watching you repeat yourself in real time with perfect consistency, like they’re keeping score.
That’s simply not how social media works, and it’s not how people consume content!
On platforms like Instagram and TikTok, your content is filtered through algorithms, timelines, viewing patterns, and a thousand tiny behavioral factors you’ll never fully see, which means only a fraction of your audience is actually shown any given post.
Even if someone follows you and loves you and thinks you’re brilliant, they might go a week without seeing your content at all, then suddenly you pop up again, and from their perspective it feels fresh, not repetitive. You are living inside the full archive; they are encountering scattered moments.
What feels like “I’ve said this ten times” often lands as “Oh wow, I needed to hear that” because it’s the first time they’ve actually seen it from you, or the first time they’ve seen it phrased in a way that connects.
Myth #2: People Watch Your Content All the Way Through
The assumption here is that when you post something, people are consuming it the way you would consume it — carefully and with full attention. We want to believe that if someone is going to form an opinion about our message, they’re going to hear the whole message.
But that’s not how feeds work either!
People skim. People scroll. People half-listen while they’re cooking dinner or rocking a baby or sitting in a parking lot between errands. They catch the first line and then their attention slips. This is not a critique of your audience; it’s just a reality of modern attention, and it’s one of the reasons repetition is absolutely necessary.
Most people need to hear something more than once for it to truly click, so don’t be afraid to share the same idea again and again. Reinforcement is often what transforms a passing thought into a real shift, what moves someone from “that was interesting” to “wait, I think I actually need this.”
Myth #3: If a Small Group Is Fatigued, You Should Stop
Now, let’s be honest: there may be a small percentage of your audience that sees most of what you post, and there may be people who feel a little fatigued by seeing similar themes repeated, especially if they’re on social media often and they engage with you frequently.
And this is where the conversation becomes less about marketing tactics and more about leadership, because you have to decide what you’re really doing this for.
Are you optimizing for the comfort of a small group of people who are deeply immersed in your content, or are you optimizing for clarity, growth, and the long-term health of your brand — meaning that the right people can actually find you, understand what you do, and take action when they’re ready?
Because if you’re building a business, promoting your services, selling a product, trying to get people to read your blog, subscribe to your Substack, buy your offer, book a call, or simply understand what you stand for, you cannot treat the possibility of mild fatigue as a reason to stop posting.
There’s also something worth saying plainly here: the people who are truly meant to be in your corner can handle you being visible. They can handle you reminding the room what you do. They can handle you repeating yourself a little. And if someone is irritated by the fact that you’re marketing your work — your actual work, the thing you’re building — then they may not be your audience, or they may not be in a season where they can be supportive, and that’s okay.
Your job is not to be universally palatable. Your job is to do your job.
What’s Actually Happening When You Feel “Annoying”
If you’re someone who cares about your audience, who wants to create beautiful content, who wants to be thoughtful and not pushy, the feeling of “I’m being annoying” usually has less to do with your actual posting and more to do with the vulnerability of being seen trying.
It is uncomfortable to want something and say you want it.
It is uncomfortable to promote your offer more than once and trust that it’s not desperate, it’s simply consistent.
It is uncomfortable to choose visibility, especially when you don’t get immediate feedback that confirms you’re doing it “right.”
But the truth is, marketing requires repetition because trust requires repetition. People buy when they feel safe. People book when they understand what you do. People subscribe when they’ve seen enough of your ideas to believe you can take them somewhere meaningful.
If you believe in your work, then the answer usually isn’t to talk about it less. The answer is to keep showing up, keep saying the thing in a few different ways, keep letting the message become familiar, and keep letting the right people catch up to what you’ve been building.
A Better Question to Ask Yourself
Instead of asking, “Am I posting too much?” try asking:
Am I being clear enough for someone who’s seeing me for the first time?
Am I making it easy for people to understand what I offer and why it matters?
Am I willing to trade a small amount of perceived repetition for a much larger amount of actual momentum?
Because if your goal is to grow your brand, build your audience, and market your products or services in a way that works, you don’t need to post less. You need to be consistent, and you need to stop assuming your audience has the same level of proximity to your message that you do. You are not hammering the message. You are becoming someone that people recognize. And true recognition is often the thing that makes everything else you want possible.
