613 – Focus on what works: Tom talks Back Off Social Media

Episode 613 – Back Off Social Media
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with Episode 613 of Screw the Commute podcast? Today, I'm going to try to convince you to back off on your social media. This episode is going to save you a ton of time and wasted effort when it comes to social media and alert you to some things you probably didn't know that are hurting you every time you post. So stick around for that. All right. Hope you didn't miss Episode 612. I discovered a free tool that is really, really fantastic. And I tell you about it on that episode. And this is going to help you beat people that have sites that are more substantial that yours than yours, and give you an infinitely higher chance of getting on the first page of Google legitimately and for no cost. All right, so check that out. Episode 612. Of course, any time you want to get to a back episode, you go to screw the Compucom slash and then the episode number that was 612 and this is 613. And also, please share this with your colleagues. There's plenty of room out there for all of us to be successful, so I'd love to have some more listeners. We get more of them all the time, although I'm a little disheartened because Charter said that I went down eight spots in Entrepreneur podcast in Lebanon, so I'm really feeling bad about that. So you Lebanese people, come on. You know, I'm really trying to help you out here.

[00:02:01] Okay. I was having trouble with Kazakstan or Tajikistan. I don't know how to pronounce it. Maybe that's why they don't like me. I can't pronounce it. All right, grab a copy of your automation e-book. I pushed this on you so hard. Every episode I tell you, download the darn thing because I know some of you are not doing it, but you will thank me if you just take the darn time to do this things. In that book, we sell it for 27 bucks. It could be worth. And you know, I'm not a hipster. It could be worth like it has been to me millions and millions and millions of extra dollars to you if you weren't fighting with your computer, spending the extra time that you have because of what's in this book. Developing products and working with prospects and customers. That's where the money is, folks. So download the book, screwthecommute.com/automatefree.

[00:03:07] All right, let's get into the main event. I would kind of bet the farm, you know, I use some of these terms from my small town background. I would kind of bet the farm you're wasting lots of effort on your social media. See, I don't depend much on social media. And if that's the only determinant, like when you're evaluating someone's worth online, right, you would say, I'm pretty much a nobody. And I'll tell you why. I don't really care in a minute. And if you've heard me for very long, you know that I call social media a necessary evil in the business world.

[00:03:49] So you have to have it. But most businesses use it very ineffectively. It drives them crazy. They spend all this time and effort and get very little results. So that's what I want to help you with on this episode. Now, before I give you the bottom line on how to use or how I use social media, let me take you back to August of 2003. That's when MySpace launched. A lot of you have no idea what I'm talking about. All right. If you're fairly young. But it was the first social media to reach a global audience. It was the end all be all of all the online world. And and it was for a few years. And then it pretty much disappeared off the face of the earth. Now, having been around as long as I have been, and I've seen places like Friendster that actually preceded MySpace, and it quickly went to like 2 million users and then MySpace killed it and. I mean, even Google had Google Plus and it failed. Some of you may remember Vine that pretty much died on the vine. And that is an intended pun. Right? Right. After working the Internet through all these failures, I mean, I've been doing this seven days a week for 28 years. Right. I became quite skeptical about jumping on bandwagons. Heck, I didn't actively fool around with Facebook until it had a billion users.

[00:05:26] That's the absolute truth. I had an account there, but I didn't even look at the thing. Not a billion users. Now, the other reason I was skeptical about putting too much effort into these platforms is that I knew any following that I gained did not belong to me. And that's the same with you. When you're bragging about how many followers you have, they do not belong to you. They belong to the platform that you're on. See one turn of the Facebook dial. And guess what? They turn that dial quite a bit over the years and you would reach less and less of your following. In other words, you aren't in control of the people you attract to your various social media platforms. How long before social media as we know it today came around? I was concentrating on email and building my email list. This is something I could control and no one could take away my subscribers. And I maintain this attitude today. And if truth be told, everyone at my level makes the bulk of their money from email, not from social media. Which brings me to the bottom line of how I treat social media. Now virtually everything I do on social media for my own business I'm talking about for me because yes, I have to know all the intricate details of Instagram and Facebook and Facebook ads and all these things that I have to know to help my students and mentees who want to do those kinds of things.

[00:07:09] I still encourage them to get people on an email list. But yeah, some people are really into the social media and it's my obligation to teach them how to do it properly. But anyway, I personally use it. In the way that I make every effort to get people off of the various social media platforms doesn't mean they have to leave following me on social media. It just means that I want to get them off of their onto an email list. You can take that to the bank, folks, but but that's just the background of why I do what I do and not really the topic of this episode. The topic of this episode is to inform you of how things work. So working your social media takes way less time and gets you greater results. Many of you are spending more time doing things incorrectly to get less results. And how crazy is that? All right. So let's switch to a different kind of bottom line for a moment. Almost all the social media platforms, with the exception of Pinterest. Let me take a sidebar here. I want you to listen. If you're interested in Pinterest, it's really great. People spend more money on Pinterest than the other media platforms by a lot. A lot more like six, seven, eight times as much. And there they encourage you to get people to go off Pinterest. I mean, it's crazy. But anyway, I have three episodes of Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced on Pinterest.

[00:08:45] So episode 511 is beginner five, 14 is intermediate and 517 and is advanced. And it also leads you to a webinar all about Pinterest. So I encourage you to do that. And of course, screwthecommute.com slash 511, slash 514, slash 517 is how you get there. All right. So let's get back to the bottom line for all the other social media. They want you and people you attract to stay on longer. That's the whole deal, folks. They want them to stay on longer so they can be exposed to more ads. That's it. Their money comes from ad revenue. The longer you keep someone on your account, the more the social media platform likes you. Now the way this is done and this is the real bottom line. Is called engagement. You've probably heard this term before. For you to be successful with social media, you must get people to engage with your posts. And there are levels of engagement with each post that you make. And it makes you look more valuable to the social media platform when these forms of engagement happen on a particular post. Alike is the lowest level. Next is a comment. And when you're encouraging people to comment, hopefully it will be a substantial comment, not just nice post or something like that, which which is what happens. And it looks spammy if you have tons of those kinds of comments. Real comments actually say something about the post OC.

[00:10:41] Now the next level is a share. If someone shares something, it must be pretty good. And that sends the message to the social media platform that you put out good content, and that means people will stay on longer and get other people to stay on longer. Looking at your good content and then the social media platform sells more ads, right? That's the way it works. And the next level was the save, which means your content was so good that someone wants to look at it again, which will keep them on the platform longer. Now I see this all the time that most people that are sincerely trying to do a good job and this is why you have to get training from somebody like me or other top people that are doing this. You're trying to do a good job, but you post too much. And you've been taught maybe old stuff which worked years ago that posting more is better. Well, that's not true anymore. I mean, maybe it's true if you're a celebrity and people go crazy every time you post. But that's not the case for most of us business people. Now, one of the most well respected consultants all about Facebook is Mari Smith. Now. I heard her talking about how people post too much and don't get any engagement. And I see this all the time when I'm evaluating the social media accounts of my new mentees. They are diligently posting every day and sometimes multiple times per day, and there is little or mostly zero engagement.

[00:12:28] Now, let me tell you why doing that is a total. And that's total with the capital. Oh, okay. Total waste of time. Literally. You're doing a bunch of work for absolutely nothing. No returns. Now to understand this, let me tell you about a little known secret of social media platforms. Virtually all of them do what is called a micro test. Micro test. This means within about an hour or so, it's secretive. No, nobody's going to tell you the exact thing here. But about an hour with when you post something, the social media platform is looking for how much engagement the post got. If it gets little or no attention from your followers, guess what? That's the end of it. They don't show it to anyone else. They're thinking from their point of view, the social media point of view, if hardly any or none of your followers engage with that post, why should they waste their bandwidth showing it to anybody else? You did all this work to make the post and no one but you seize it. That is crazy. Now, if people do start to engage in reasonable numbers in that first hour or so, then the social media platform shows your post to more of your followers. And if they engage with it, they show it to more of your followers and so forth and so on. So according to Marie Smith and any other credible social media coach, and we say you can you can swing a dead cat and run into a social media expert.

[00:14:26] Right. That doesn't know any of this crap. So anyway. Mari says. And I say, you should cut down on your posting considerably. Spend time making a really great and informative or entertaining post and do everything you can to beg or encourage engagement from people. I'm not above begging to get people to engage. I'll tell you that I do it frequently with my mentees and mastermind students. Now, you also want to make sure everyone knows how important it is to reach. Out and do that engagement within the first hour or so when you post. Now, certainly most other people aren't going to plan their day around when you post. All right. But but you can train them of the importance of trying to engage as soon as they see something from you and not wait till later. Now you can even. This is a really cross-platform type thing. If you've built your email list, you can even use your email list to email people that you have a new post up. Do whatever you can, especially with your close friends, employees, family members and whoever else you know you can get to get action going right away when you make your post. And of course, don't post in the middle of the night or set automated posts for weird hours. That's going to hurt you. So you see.

[00:16:02] This is why you should listen to this podcast. I just saved you tons of work worrying about slapping up anything just to get a post up that's actually hurting you because you're engagement is low. I mean, one great post per week with lots of engagement would do you much better than killing yourself to post daily, which for most of you would be a total waste of time. Nobody sees it and do yourself a favor and get as many of your followers onto an email list that you control because that's where the money is. And you know, this podcast is all about the money. Doing things quality, doing things fairly with customers. But you've got to make money if you want to be an entrepreneur or you won't be an entrepreneur. You'll be back working a dreaded job somewhere. So if you want help with this and the other thousand things you need to know of these details that make you successful. Here in my mentor program, the great Internet Marketing Training. It's the longest running, most successful ever in the field of Internet and digital marketing. We have all kinds of cool perks that you've heard me talk about on other episodes, but these are kind of things that I'll teach you is how to save time and get more results. I mean, that's productivity, I guess, if you had to boil it down. All right. So that's my story now. I'm sticking to it. I will catch you on the next episode. See you later.