409 – New Strategy for Social Media: Tom talks Social Media Strategy

Episode 409 – Social Media Strategy
[00:00:09] 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 four hundred nine is Screw the Commute podcast. I'm going to talk to you today about a social media strategy that has to do with paying attention to new features on whatever platform you're using and why that can be of great benefit to you. So stick in here for that. Now, I hope you didn't miss. Oh my goodness. Episode 408 Jason Feifer is editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine. He's surrounded by entrepreneurs all day long, all the time. He's such a great storyteller. He sucked me into listening to a podcast on the most obscure topic you could ever think of. And then he tied that topic to really great entrepreneurial lessons for the future. Now, it was a masterful performance. So don't miss that episode 408. And if you ever want to find an older episode, you go to screwthecommute.com and then slash the episode number in his case 408. Now, how would you like to hear your own voice here on Screw the Commute? Well, if the show's helped you out at all in your business or giving you ideas to help you start a business, we want to hear about it. Visit screwthecommute.com and look for a little blue sidebar that says send voicemail. Click on it. Talking to your phone or computer. Tell me how the show has helped you. And hey, also put your website in there so you can get a big shout out on a future episode of Screw the Commute.

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[00:03:33] And we've got people making money a month or two into the school because every business on earth needs these skills and they just love somebody to take them off their plate because they're not smart enough to go to this school themselves. Okay, so now they're smart enough to do it, but to do the school, but they're not smart enough to make the decision to do the school because I have been living this lifestyle for 27 years. I mean, I've been in business forty four years, but that was before the Internet, some of it. So the last 27 years has just been beautiful to have money coming in through the computer, not worrying about the pandemic, all this stuff. It's the best legacy gift you could ever give to a young person in your life or to help your business have a massive Web presence on a shoestring budget because you'll know how to do things and you won't have to farm them out at super high fees. OK, so that's the story on that. All right. Oh, and by the way, we're the only school dedicated school in the world. I mean, in the country for sure, but probably in the world that has a license to operate by the State Council of Higher Education in Virginia, but it's distance learning. So wherever you can hear my voice, you can certainly take the school. But nobody has gone through this kind of scrutiny. I just want to throw that in.

[00:04:56] All right. Let's get to the main event today. I want to tell you about a common sense topic. And it's usually right in front of our faces, but I mean, even I've been guilty of ignoring it because it's so frustrating with the rapid pace of change with regard to all the social media outlets. And I'm not talking about new social media openings. That's one thing that's a pain in the neck like TikTok. Is it new or what? But each social media is always coming out with new features all the time. They're coming out with new features. And it really can drive you crazy wondering how you're ever going to keep up. I get that. And I've been totally guilty of it, just ignoring things and sticking to the things that are working, but this episode is going to try to instill a new attitude about social media to make any time and effort that you do put into it more productive and with a bigger payoff to you.

[00:06:01] And I'm also going to give you a real life example that just I experienced this past Saturday and it made me really rethink my own game and how to accelerate my success with social media into the future.

[00:06:19] Now, speaking of social media, for those that are new to the podcast, for years I've been calling social media a necessary evil for for two reasons. One, for credibility with the search engines and other potential clients who are going to check you out. Before doing business with you. So that's a main thing right there, that you got to have a presence on all these places. And number two is to get people the heck off of social media onto an email list, which you control. So I don't like the fact that any one of the social media can turn a dial and and you disappear off the face of the earth or or if they don't like what you're saying, they can democratize you or kick you off completely. Well, fortunately, I'm not in any kind of topic area that's really controversial, but but I still want control over my income and I don't want to totally depend on some social media platform to determine how much money I can make. All that being said, I want to give you a strategy that may appear to be a pain in the neck because you will have to learn some new stuff. But you know what, if you're going to be spending time on social media anyway, don't you think it would be a good idea to make it pay off bigger for you? See, what I'm going to show you is that, you know, some of the things you're doing on social media that just to get by and keep a presence, let's say, five or 10 posts that you're doing and they're not getting much engagement and so forth.

[00:07:57] What I'm going to strategize with you today is if you embrace some new technology that they're providing, they give you a big bonus for that. I'm going to get into more of that later. But the same amount of time learning the new stuff could get you as much results as five or ten posts that you just kind of you know, you're just showing up and putting anything in there. So that's what we're going to get into. And I hate talking about this because I've been guilty of it myself for such, you know, but I've got such a big email list that I'm a little bit lazy in the social media stuff. And I even had a social media person that kind of just kept us afloat, basically because I didn't care so much because I would get him off of there and sell people on my email list.

[00:08:46] So and I'm still going to do that like crazy. But I learned some things that we're going to cover today that will accelerate things and make things better on the social media with just the same amount of effort. See, because you have to understand, like, you know, I have like maxed out years and years ago my 5000 followers on Facebook. But since I haven't concentrated on engaging them other than getting them on an email list, Facebook shows my postings to only a tiny fraction of those 5000. And I'll bet for most of you it's just as bad. See, that's the whole deal. If people aren't engaging with your content, Facebook and all the other platforms are just going to show it to less people. They don't they don't send you a letter and say, you know what, out of your 5000, we sold it. We showed it to one point six people. Sometimes it can it can be that bad. So I'm going to give you a new and proven strategy to get more and more people to see your stuff. And eventually, if you play your cards right, the tournament, the customers. The basic strategy is that when a social media platform rolls out a new feature.

[00:10:01] You need to jump on that feature and use it.

[00:10:05] I told you, it's a pain in the neck, you're going to have to learn how to use it and I actually do have past experience with this. I mean, pretty much just by luck with this, when Facebook came out with live video, it seems like a long time ago. All right. But but I got involved in that near the beginning just because I thought it was a good thing for me, because I'm pretty good at live stuff and being funny and ad libbing and all that stuff, all the while giving good info. So it was a combo thing and it worked perfect for me.

[00:10:38] So it happened. All my other stuff on Facebook started getting more attention. Well, why? Because when the social media comes out with a new feature, when any social media, they reward you if you use it. And they reward you by showing your content to more people. Eventually, as the feature becomes mature, they don't push it as much anymore and they just go back to the status quo, which is how much engagement you can get. Now, if you have taken advantage of the new feature, though, during a time period when they're pushing in developing the feature, you can raise your entire boat to a new level.

[00:11:20] Another thing you have to realize about all the platforms is they reward you for keeping people on their platform as long as possible.

[00:11:29] The new features they introduced are usually to keep people on their platform and keep them from going to another platform.

[00:11:38] And it all boils down to ad sales, the longer someone is on a certain platform, the more ads they can see and the more money the platform makes.

[00:11:47] And on an unrelated to today's topic, I mean, if you have an ad that sends people back to the same platform, it usually is way cheaper than if you were sending them off the platform to your Web site or to a competitive platform.

[00:12:03] So just keep that in mind if you're doing advertising.

[00:12:06] Anyway, back to today's example. See, Instagram rolled out a new feature called Real's, which are really short videos, most of which are funny, although you can do business items with them. The main reason they came out with this was to try to keep people from going to TikTok, which has a similar type of video experience. Now, I've been watching these for fun, and they are addicting, I mean, sometimes an hour goes by because they're so much fun. I never thought they could do me much good. So I just watched for fun. But however, my marketing mind started kicking in and and thinking, you know what? I certainly could create this kind of video, but it wouldn't do me much good business wise, except for the fact I just mentioned. I knew that I would get rewarded by more people seeing my stuff and and my account just because I'm using this new feature. This would mean more followers and more potential people to sell to. So I decided to bite the bullet and see what day Saturday afternoon I settled on Michael Jackson's bad song trend. You can actually look at compilations of these on YouTube. But many of the people that were doing it were cute young girls, tons of young boys and only a couple older people.

[00:13:41] So I happen to have some some hideous mannequins left over from my entertainment company from years and years ago, so I thought it would be funny to have one of the mannequins do the challenge. All right. So so I watched the YouTube video and how to do the challenge. I spent an hour or so creating it. And guess what, folks? It's only 10 seconds long. All right. But the last half second and I'm not going to give you a spoiler list here, had me laughing hysterically, probably 40 or 50 times Saturday and Sunday, just thinking about it and watching it over and over again. But you have to go watch it on my Antion and Associates Instagram account, Antion and the associates and then on Instagram. So. So what were the results? Well, in the first hour, four thousand people watched, OK. Instagram is e-mailing me, congratulating me on 4000 views in one hour. And I think I had about 65 likes and comments come in or 70.

[00:14:57] I can't remember and I don't know the long term status and what will happen with this. When you visit, you'll see how many thousands. It might have just been a quick flash and gone. I don't know yet because this is you know, this is Monday. I only did it on Saturday.

[00:15:15] But I can tell you, there is no doubt Instagram will be happy with me from taking a relatively boring I mean, to them and low volume account to a player.

[00:15:29] Ok, with those comments and likes. So the lesson and strategy here is as soon as you see a new feature being offered on any of your social media, take a breath. I mean, if you don't want to spend any more time, take the time you would have spent on your next five posts, let's say, and go learn how to use it. Somebody on YouTube will show you how to do it for sure. That's just the way it works.

[00:15:56] Go do it, even if you don't think it helps your company, maybe it shows the fun side of you, maybe it shows a there's people on there that are showing sad things, actually, and there's all and there's people showing business tips. There's all kinds of things on there. So go and watch a bunch of them and see try to think of an idea how you would fit in and then stretch yourself to use that feature so you get rewarded for all the other things you do on the same platform because they're going to show your stuff to more people. So it doesn't make sense to spend five at the time to spend to to do five post things. That gets very little engagement anyway. And kind of it's kind of counterproductive because if you put a post up and nobody reacts to it the next post, they show it to less people unless people tell you you're almost rock bottom. So it's not going to hurt you to do this. And the time wise will just be a little learning curve. But it'll be the same amount of time as you wasted by putting up postings that aren't going anywhere for you say. So that's the balancing act here. All right. So no more posting to yourself where nobody sees it. All right. That doesn't mean you shouldn't work on improving your engagement strategy, because that plays a major part in how many people see your content overall.

[00:17:21] And that's we're talking about likes and followers and comments and shares and that kind of stuff. They all play a part in your success. But I still contend, OK, with all this new strategy, get them on an email list to turn your efforts into the most money. Now, if you want personal help with this, like I've been doing for 23 years for people, check out my mentor program at greatInternetmarketingtraining.com. It all gets you a scholarship to the school. Was part of the deal that you can use yourself or gift to somebody. And it's the most unique, most successful, longest running scam. No flash in the pan, folks. I get on something and I stick with it. It's not I jump all over the place and cross my fingers. It's going to work. I work things until they work. And that's the way this thing's been doing for 23 years. It's helped. Oh, jeez. We've had over seventeen hundred students and their assistants a lot of times benefited from it. And I don't have tens of thousands of people in my audiences around the world. But it's one on one. You're not lumped in with everybody else. It's all specific to you. Nobody on earth does that for you at the kind of fees we charge because we charge an entry fee.

[00:18:39] But other people were charging 50 or 100 thousand bucks upfront to help you. Well, I didn't think that was fair. And a lot of those people are rip offs. So I charge an entry fee and then I tie my success to your success. So if you don't make big money, I don't get any more money. All right. So and it's capped so you're not stuck with me forever. So really, really unique. So just check out the details at greatInternetmarketingtraining.com, and give me a call. I'm very accessible. You can get me through Instagram on a direct message at Tom@screwthecommute.com, orders@Antion.com. I'm all over the place, so. And you'll find my cell phone number if you do text me that. Don't call me because I get so many darn robo calls. I never pick up any more. But you can text me, but make sure you say who you are. So, so you know, because they're spamming the text nowadays. So anyway, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. That's your new strategy for social media. Jump on the new features and go check out my Instagram reels and you'll see me with this old looking dummy doing the Michael Jackson trend.

[00:19:51] Ok, catch y'all on the next episode. See ya later.
 
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