6 Social Media Rules Every Business Owner Needs to Know

Good morning, guys. I've made a few videos now about social media for business owners, so basically how you can use social media to better the long-run goals of your business, whether revenue, exposure, more customers, you name it. Social media probably is a pretty effective way of getting it for you if you do it right, but that execution component is much, much easier said than done. And you all liked the last video, so we're back for another six tips today. Make that six. So this will be six social media growth lessons for business owners, part three. And the way this series works, very little editing. I'm just going to talk through without any fluff and get you those six growth lessons. That brings us up to 18 total across these three videos. So just plug this in as audio, go walk your dog, do some dishes. And that in mind, let's get straight into point number one. But before we go there, let's hear a quick word from the sponsor of today's video. I want to tell you about something I've been using recently that is a perfect example of this. And what that is, is something I picked up for the price of a pair of AirPods. And that is a 4K mini drone, the Skyrover S1. And I've been flying it for a bit now, having some fun, and it is genuinely impressive for what you're paying. And so first off, this is the camera. It's got a half-inch Sony sensor with a three-axis mechanical gimbal. So it shoots super smooth 4K video at 60 frames per second and also takes crisp 48 megapixel photos. And the live feed is 1080p at 60 frames per second and goes up to 12 kilometers. So you can fly it pretty far and still get crystal clear video with no lag and no stress. Now, on top of that, it even has forward obstacle avoidance, which is a feature you usually don't see on entry-level drones. So your footage stays safe and smooth without worrying about bumps or crashes. Otherwise, on the controller, it also has the auto-track mode. So if you're hiking or biking or whatever, you don't need a second person to film you. It'll just automatically track you. And then there's also these one-tap Smart Go modes. So that's for things like orbit shots, dronies, or rocket shots. So you can look like a professional pilot on day one. And also vertical shot mode lets you post straight to socials for short form with no editing and hassle-free. Now, flight time on this is 40 minutes with a single battery, which is pretty crazy for a drone. And it weighs under 249 grams. That means no FAA registration is required. You can just unfold it, take off. And so for this setup, I think you're matching the performance of drones that are double to triple this price. And they have a 30-day replacement only guarantee, which means you just swap it if something goes wrong in the first month. And that makes it risk-free to try it out, which is important for me. So if you want a reliable drone buddy for adventures, for sports, for social media, I'm going to drop the link in the description. You can use this code on the screen for 5% off. And again, you get that swap guarantee for the first 30 days. That in mind, thanks to Skyrover for sponsoring this video. And let's get back to it. So growth lesson number one is when you start out on social media and you don't have an audience, it's kind of like a chicken and the egg problem. By that, I mean, why should you invest in something new and something risky that might not work before you have the audience who's going to watch it, but you're never going get the audience to watch it if you don't invest in actually making something, whether time or money or so on. And I think a frame to think about this or to approach this problem through is what assets you may already have as an existing business that are non-monetary, which you can use to avoid that whole chicken and the egg problem and basically just start out already having won the game with an audience. And I'll give you a material example of that. Then we'll backtrack to the overarching concept. Let's say hypothetically you have a really cool kind of exhibit, some kind of entertainment school concept store in New York City. And in that hypothetical, I think there are two pretty easy ways to again, just quickstart that whole social media brand thing. Number one is just put a sign on the door that says, Hey, once a month on Instagram, at some point, we're going to put up a story that has a little discount code. And so if you want to be part of that, just follow us on Instagram. You don't do anything else. And if you had a good experience, you are already a customer, then go follow us on social media. So that's basically just converting your existing customer audience stream into a digital one. There are a lot of ways you can do that, whether it's a digital business or not. And then number two, you already have a incredible asset. You have this unique experience. And what the third party content creators want at the end of the day, their North Star is great content. If you have something in that case, non-monetary, like an experience, which other people can use to create great content for themselves and their own brand, but all that's missing is for you to connect yourself with them. And if you can tie into the type of people, let's say people in New York City who review different new spots, just invite them in for free. Your costs for that are basically zero. And then they post things to their audience. And then you just get some portion of their audience, 5, 10, 20%, 3%, whatever it is, and you bring them into your network. And if you're that kind of business and you do both of those things, you might for an effective cost of $0 and very little time, get 50,000 followers, a hundred thousand followers, even just a thousand followers. But just like that, without having to go through the whole, get my first view, get my first hundred views, or let me invest $5,000 into content without knowing whether anyone will watch it. And so to go back to that framing, again, I suggest that you think about all these different assets you already have in your business. That could be your talent. It could be the IP or the knowledge within the business. It could be a system, a physical product and experience, and then also your existing customer streams and people who already have this preexisting knowledge of your business or an incentive or an interest in potentially following or engaging with you digitally. And then just start there. If you have no followers, if you don't create any content on socials, that's step one. And even if you have been creating content for a while, are you using those other business assets as effectively as you can to supplement your digital process and costs? If not, then there's potentially room there as well. That's number one. Number two relates to the notion that an ideal marketing campaign makes customers feel like you're everywhere. They heard about you on the podcast. They read about you in the newspaper. They saw your billboard. And one very low effort way to create this just a little bit is to have your employees also post about your business. And I promise you this applies in any niche. I don't care what kind of business you're in. But go back to that example of a entertainment kind of unique space in New York City, every time you put a tweet out or Instagram story out, just have those 10 employees share it or repost it or kind of quote response it, whatever it may be. And the reason that works pretty effectively and does depend on the platform is that if someone engages with, let's say, one tweet, then they're likely to get in the little niche, the algorithmic niche of that tweet. And so they may just because they engage with that one tweet, see five or six people who said something who like quote responded to that tweet. And even if those were your employees and they may only have 50 views or 100 views, those 50 or 100 people are just like, I saw this brand everywhere. I saw this experience everywhere. And it's building that critical mass, which exponentially grows just with the assets you already have. Again, employees who are incentivized to share the experience or the business. That's another one of those low effort ways to just kind of speed run initially progress. And this applies all the way up. You see Silicon Valley startups which have 15 of their blue collar employees just post sexy things about the business. And that can result in them raising 20 million bucks just because the 10 VCs or investors or angels that really mattered were like, holy moly, these guys are everywhere. Is it actually that simple? No, but you get the idea. And that really is a strong workflow to consider in practice. Number three, shifting gears here is my recommendation. At least this one is a little more controversial is to be agnostic to paid versus organic traffic. I'll say that again. You want to be net agnostic to the cost versus the benefits of paid versus free EG organic traffic. And I'll give you an example. Let's say you have a YouTube channel that brings you 12 clients a month and you make eight videos per month. Well, you have to spend a certain amount of time and money to produce those eight videos, which go ahead and gets you the 12 clients per month. And let's say you could also run ads on those videos or with those videos as lead hooks. What I'm saying here is just because you are getting clients organically does not mean you shouldn't run paid ads or that paid is intrinsically worse for any reason than organic from the cost benefit right bottom line perspective. And just because you have ads that may be profitable doesn't mean you shouldn't go ahead, maybe, and still keep creating that organic content. At the end of the day, it's all an algorithm. It's an equation that says, if I put in X inputs, time, money, process, I'm going to get something out for my business. And so just I suggest because in practice, this kind of dissolves for a lot of businesses, just holistically, write out those equations for paid and for organic and look at it through that lens, not the holy grail of organic traffic. And my thousand true fans is the only thing that matters. And that still applies if you do have those thousand true fans, even if something is working, do not close yourself off to those other channels, whether paid or not. Number four, which kind of builds on this is that if you have distribution, let's say you have a social media platform or content that's getting exposure, that's converting people into your business ecosystem. Don't just use it for you. There's probably this set of ulterior benefits or ways you can work with partners, with customers to get a lot more value there for yourself. And to add on there, the way a lot of creators make money is with sponsorships by working with brands on their videos. And that can be a massive source of revenue for a lot of people, myself included. Now, if you are running a business, you probably don't want to sponsor your videos, quote unquote, even if that would subsidize nearly all of the costs, if not all of the costs and then some of running your digital presence. But what if there was the best of both worlds? And that I think fundamentally is this idea. What if you went to a supplier of yours who gives you a hundred parts per month and you said, I want next month to be free. I'm not going to pay you anything for those hundred parts. But in return, we're going to make some videos. I'm going to lead it all. I'm going to post it on my socials. It's going to be engaging for my audience because it shows how the product is made, for example. And then what did you just do? You still created something engaging that brings people into your ecosystem. You also provided a lot of value to your partner because they got a lot of exposure that maybe they were not so prepared in-house to get or to do. And then the value you got from that video is all the ad revenue on top of the customers, it gets to you on top of saving all that money from not having to pay for the part. So if you have distribution, that is a superpower. Just maximize it at the end of the day. Just two more here. The fifth one is a quick one, and that is focus on retargeting lists. A lot of people don't use these. If you don't know what they are, go listen and go watch another video. You won't do a deep dive today, but there are an incredible amount of really large businesses that are in large part built off of ads that do really well in turn because of retargeting lists. And the amazing thing about social media is that you can very easily retarget or reconnect or get a message, a narrative, an ad, another piece of content in front of people who already know your face, your brand, your business. For example, if you are watching this right now, you are being put on a list in a Google ads account, which says, hey, he or she knows my face. Because if I go and I create an ad and you know my face and I send that out to you, you're probably going to trust it more because you know me versus a stranger who's never heard of me. And if you were watching this from the United States, you're on another list, which says, hey, these are all the people in the last 30 days who've seen one of my videos who live in the United States. So probably have some kind of pricing power. Again, this is a ubiquitous thing among a lot of businesses who do incredibly well just with this kind of approach where they create content and then they retarget those people with all these other offers. So at the very least, you should have a kind of data collection just turned on. It's completely legal. It's all the big systems. It's nothing sketchy. And then you can decide whether to use it or not later. Just see how it fits in potentially to your paid or your organic systems. And number six, we are approaching the end. This is something I've said before, but I think it's maybe the most important thing here because nearly every time I work with someone who hasn't been in that kind of social media for enterprise space before, they're really concerned with things like hashtags, the time at which they post, the number of posts they make, things like that. And so just to wrap this up, basically at the margin, nothing else matters apart from how engaging and valuable your content is. If you produce anything which people engage with, which they had a great experience, they were entertained, or they learned something valuable or interesting, then that content is going to do extremely well. Hashtags were deprecated like eight years ago. Maybe the time of day matters at a really insanely large scale, but really that's not going to impact anything. The tags on the video, not going to matter. If you can tell a great story, you can keep people's attention, you are going to do extremely, extremely well. Now that said, if you manage to insanely screw up things like a thumbnail or a title on YouTube, and even that is really the only platform where that matters, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, not at all like that, then that could take away from amazing content. But even then, I would put money long run on that content still doing well, even if you absolutely mess up everything else than just telling a great story. So that should be the North Star. If you're not doing well, that's probably why at the end of the day. And again, advice you here, which is like, here's how you game the system and use the hashtags. Just ignore that. Just tell a great story, make great content. And that is over the long run how you do extremely well for yourself and your business. That'll mind y'all, that is part three of social media growth lessons for business owners. If you found it useful, let me know and we'll make part four happen. And I appreciate your time and being with me here today. And I'll see you in the next one. Cheers.