Why Posting on Social Media isn’t enough to Grow Your Business – Episode 19
You posted on Social Media! You now have a business! WRONG! But so many people think this is the case. In today’s episode of The Boss Life Podcast, Erin and Miguel Carrasco share with you the truth about social media, and how you should be leveraging it to grow your business!
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Why Posting on Social Media isn’t enough to Grow Your Business – Transcript
In today’s episode, we’re going to talk about why posting on social media isn’t enough to grow your business.
Hey Guess What?
So, I just spent the last eight hours scrolling my Facebook feed.
Sweet.
Then I made a cool post.
Did you get a lot of likes?
Tons of likes. Love it. Love it.
Any comments?
I’m an entrepreneur. Crushing it. Crushing it. I’m going to retire soon.
That sounds like the typical day of someone who’s just starting their online business. We really wanted to talk about this, because a lot of the people that we work with, a lot of our clients they start an online business, and they’re like okay, I need a social media presence. Then they start posting.
Well, isn’t that the first thing? I’m starting a business, I’ve got to buy my domain name and then I’m going to set up my Instagram.
Right.
Start doing some stories.
And stories and posts and cool filters and playing with all the apps that Erin and Miguel told me to get.
Do you know how many people have massive Instagram followings? Or Facebook accounts, but they haven’t made a penny?
It’s so surprising. There’s so many people out there.
It’s freaking massive. Today we want to give you some real value. Listen up, I hope you pay attention. We’re going to end a myth to get us started, and Erin’s going to get us started and then we’re also going to tell you what you really should be doing.
Right. So a lot of the people, if we look at when you’re starting your online business, maybe you did this at the beginning, or maybe you’re doing this right now, is that when we are working on social media, we don’t really have purpose. So we log into Facebook or Instagram and we’re scrolling the news feed, and we’re liking on stuff, and we’re commenting on stuff, but we’re not really doing it, maybe you have a certain amount, a goal, I’m going to like five posts today. I’m going to comment on three posts today, and I’m going to engage with people by liking their posts.
While that might have worked five or six years ago to build an online business, that does not work anymore. We want to make sure that you guys are putting your precious time to the best use. So when we say, scrolling and calling it working, sometimes we say that to ourselves because it makes us feel good. We don’t really know what we’re doing on social media.
I get it right. Can I tell you something else? We’re going to get into some cool points here, but can I share some bombs with them?
Yeah do it.
Maybe a big bomb. I get it. You want to do the exciting stuff.
The fun stuff.
Everybody wants to do the fun stuff.
Totally.
I’ll tell you right now, the biggest reason, if you’ve started businesses before, and they haven’t worked out, I’m not saying you specifically, but when I work with clients, we’ve worked with so many, I can tell you that 99% of the time they haven’t succeeded because they focused on doing the fun stuff, and they never did the hard stuff.
What do you mean? You can’t just do the fun stuff?
You cannot just do the fun stuff.
Dammit.
In relationships, you can’t just do the fun stuff. With your kids you can’t just do the fun stuff. In life, you can’t do the fun stuff so, why people would think that they can just do the fun stuff in business and succeed is beyond me. It blows my mind.
I think a lot of it come from people who are building a side hustle. Not necessarily, say you bought a franchise, and you’re going on all, right. That’s also the problem when you’re building a side hustle.
We started a Boss Life Instagram account abut two years after we had thought about the idea and about eight months after we had actually said, okay this is exactly what we’re going to do, and about three months after we started building our website. It was one of the last things that we did, and we’re going to talk to you guys about that, but number one thing, the first thing I want you guys to understand is, you’ve got to stop just scrolling Facebook. If you’re driving home right now, and the first thing you’re going to do is start scrolling Facebook when you get home, you’ve got to listen up here for one second. Facebook makes money by you wasting time on Facebook.
If you want to make them more money, then keep doing that. But if you want to make money on Facebook, if that’s what you want to do, then you need to understand that you really just got to stop scrolling when you get home and instead, you should start thinking about the things we’re about to tell you.
I think that, one last thing I’m going to add just about this post is that, this point, is that.
Are you thinking about posting?
I am thinking about posting, and that’s something we’ll talk about too is the intention. When you guys are checking your phones, and you’re looking at your little red notification button, how many of you guys, it drives you nuts when you have 50 notifications just sitting there, and you’re like, I’ve got to look at them all. The reason we do that is, we’re addicted to the little hits of dopamine.
I’m addicted to you.
That’s not a song.
But I want it and I need it. I’m addicted to you. That’s old and it was bad.
Wow, that was bad. Anyways, the reason we do it guys, and the reason everybody does it, is that, and there are apps that you can get, and you can turn off those little notifications in the settings on your phones, which I highly encourage you guys to do when you’re learning to build your business and there’s also times not to do it if you’re running an ad, but I won’t get into that right now. The reason we do it is because we get little hits of dopamine. We’re like, oh we feel important.
What is dopamine?
It’s a chemical in your brain that makes you feel good and happy and loved.
Slow your roll. There’s chemicals in my brain.
Chemicals in your brain. So when we get a little notification it means someone interacted with us or commented on something of ours or liked something of ours, and it makes us feel good. That’s the biggest trickiest thing that happens is that we feel like we’re adding value because we’re getting these likes and comments, and it makes us feel good, but it doesn’t actually mean we’re doing any purposeful work.
Right, so you’ve got to flip this thing on its head. You’ve got to stop becoming the consumer, and the person that’s addicted to all these notifications, and you have to be the person feeding other people.
You’ve got to be the drug dealer.
You’ve got to be the dopamine dealer.
There you go.
I said dopamine, I did not say the other word, right. So that’s a very big key thing. Now that you’ve realized that you’re going to stop scrolling, you’re going to stop wasting time, you’re going to stop making Mark Zuckerberg’s money, what should we do? What’s the next thing? Do you want to start or do you want to do this one, it’s up to you?
Well, why don’t you start.
Okay. You stopped your scroll, you’ve got to really think about what is the purpose of your social media presence.
That’s a big statement.
Let me say that again. What you’ve got to do before you start scrolling, and you get home, or before you go and even create an Instagram account, or your Facebook business page, the first thing you must do is think about what is the purpose of your social media presence? What do I mean by that? What do I mean by that? There’s a couple ways that you could leverage social media and there are actually, you could do all of these, you could do a few of these, or you could leverage it for many of these. Some realtors use social media to sell homes. Some realtors use social media just to create brand awareness.
There’s so many things that you can do, if you’re in network marketing same thing. You could create awareness about yourself on social media. You could inspire other people in your team, or you could generate leads through social media. You could create free groups, not just for network marketing, but for real estate. You could, if you are a chiropractor, you could create brand awareness, that would be a great usage of it, but maybe an even better usage would be to generate leads or create a membership group, or a community of people, but when they’re liking on your things, they’re actually going and taking that next step, and we’ll talk about that in a little bit.
You’ve really got, what I want you to do, step two once you’ve stopped scrolling, really step two is think about why am I creating this social media presence?
Right. I think a lot of this has to do with starting with the end in mind. What is the purpose? Why am I here? What is the purpose of my business? Use social media for that purpose. It has to be intentional because a lot of the times when we start side businesses or other businesses, we’re like, I don’t really know what to do on social media, so I just throw things at the wall and see what sticks. That’s okay at the very beginning, but if you want to get better faster, you have to have a real purpose.
Once you’re aware of what the purpose is for your particular business, everything that you post is structured around that. So, your social media presence is very intentional. It’s not like, oh maybe I’ll try a video today or maybe I’ll do a post today. Every post has to be structured in a certain way, and we should do a podcast around that.
We’ll talk about this in more detail, right now we really want you to just realize that just because you’re on a social media, and you’re scrolling around on Facebook or Instagram or Snapchat, that doesn’t make you an entrepreneur, that doesn’t mean you have a business. You don’t have one yet.
No, and I think a lot of people, what they do is that they start their business, they post on social media, they don’t sell anything, or they don’t sign any people up for their products and then they’re like, well I guess I suck at this and then they quit.
They quit.
Yeah.
Right, and you had no chance. It would be like, let’s say you’re going to run a, I don’t know, a half marathon.
You like these running analogies.
Right, you know, but I love running. I love it. It frees my mind. I’m already like, I should go for a run.
Squirrel, okay.
Realistically, if you’re going for a run, you’re going to do a half marathon, great, but if you don’t have the map, or you don’t know where you’re going, you’re never going to complete the half marathon.
You just get lost.
You’re just going to get lost every time. Many of you, that’s what you’re doing. You wake up in the morning, you go out, and you go, okay life, please happen to me, I don’t know what’s going to happen today, but let’s just see what happens, and you show up at work, and you wait for your emails to come in. You wait for your boss to tell you what to do. You get home, you turn on the TV and you tell the TV to tell me what to do and feed my brain, you go on Facebook and you watch other people’s stories and you consume content, and you’re never really creating anything. Then you say I’m just so busy, I don’t have any time. The reality, you’ve got so much time once you get intentional about your day.
I think, the key here, let me give you some examples. Just real quick and then we’ll go on to the third point. Just a couple quick examples. If you’re a chiropractor, for example, and you’re trying to build an online presence and this is you listening right now, the first thing I would do is brand awareness. What can I do over the next three weeks to create brand awareness around myself? I’d focus on three different types of posts. One post would be talking about the offerings and things that we provide. Two, stories, I would tell stories about you to get people to know, like and trust you. Number three, I’d give something, a free offer or value or maybe join us tonight for XYZ.
Free meditation or something.
Free meditation session. Free, awareness of XYZ. And the other key thing I would do, on all these things, I would give people an offer to join a group. I would also create a Facebook group or a WhatsApp group, however you decide to do it, Facebook group seems to work the best. Where I would funnel everyone that’s seeing our posts on our Facebook business page, and our Instagram account. I would put them in that group, and of course there’s a lot of tricks around how to do that, which we’ll share in later episodes, but my point here is that, hopefully you can see that in a matter of a minute I gave you a plan. That could apply to any business. But you can’t have a plan if you don’t know where you’re going and that’s what Erin was saying. Some of what Erin was saying actually bleeds into the next point.
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Which, I’ll let you go ahead.
A lot of the times when we are posting, say you do have an intention or maybe it’s not very clear, maybe it’s not very defined, but you’re like okay I’m going to post on social media today. I know I should post this many times a week and I know I should put some inspiring content, and I know I should tell a story, but a lot of the times what we’re doing is we’re posting to get likes.
Wait a minute, people post just to get likes?
Yeah.
So the first they do is they post and then they start checking to see how many likes they have?
Who liked it? Did you like it? Did you comment on my post?
Nobody does that.
I think a lot of times too, is that when we are using social media platforms that our friends, and our family is on, when we post on those platforms, I think that we’re not necessarily as clear as we sometimes need to be. We are very hesitant about what we share. Maybe if you’re trying to be authentic and vulnerable on social media and you don’t really want your mom to see it, you don’t really want your best friend to see it, you don’t really want someone, your neighbor down the street to see it. That can cloud your intention and how you come across authentically, right.
A lot of the times when we start posting on social media, we’re not doing it in the way to build our business. We’re not doing it with call to actions. We’re not telling people how to get more of us, like join our groups because we don’t want to be that person on social media. The difference is, you have to be so fired up about what your business is and how it can change somebody’s life that you are doing someone a disservice if you don’t tell them how to buy from you.
I love it. That’s so key and again, another point I want to make on this one is, let’s say you have a really cute cat and you post a cute cat picture. That’s awesome that you have a cute cat, but really what’s 400 likes going to do on a cute cat picture for your business?
Unless you’re in the pet business.
Unless you’re in the pet business, then that’s great.
You can do stories of your cat.
You could, and again, what I was going to say after that is like, you could still do a post if you’re a chiropractor about your cat. You absolutely could if you’ve got a cute picture, but again, we’re talking business here. So if you want to do that picture of your cute cat, you could do a picture of your cute cat at the chiropractor office. Or you could do, as an example, we were just at a beautiful resort in Arizona and there was a cat there.
So cute.
Super cute. They call him chicken nugget or something?
Nugget.
Nugget, and then someone said, “Do you feed him chicken nuggets?” And then if you go to their Instagram, they got all these pictures that have pictures of this cat, and it’s this cat that they feed and all this stuff, there’s a whole story around the cat.
It’s part of their brand.
It’s part of their brand. It’s intentional. Sometimes these things don’t hit us in the forehead right away, but you can make anything a part of your brand if you choose to do it and if you leverage it the right way. Just throwing in another picture of your cat isn’t going to do anything.
I want to also say this too, is you can still post a picture of your cat, but don’t post the picture of your cat and say it’s building your business.
It’s not.
It’s not. It’s just a cute picture and that’s cool.
Unless you adjust him. Why am I on the chiropractor kick today?
You’re on the chiropractor and running kick. Okay, let’s move on to the next point.
Okay, so here’s a big one. We’re on point four and then we’re going to do one more after this.
This is going to take some time to unpack a little bit.
Right, so I think what I’m going to do is, I’m going to just touch on this at a high level and then maybe we’ll talk about this in a future episode fully.
Good plan.
One of the things you’ve got to realize is, ask yourself, if you’re writing notes, what is your back end system?
What’s a back end system?
Well, what is a back end system? You tell me. Do you even have one?
Right.
Right. Do you have a back end system? A back end system really is the foundation of your business, before social media no one ever thought that you could build a business on social media because there were so many other components to a business. Social media is a small fraction of it. So, what’s your email system? What products are you offering? What are your affiliate links that you have? What are you trying to sell? Where do the links go? What surveys are you running? How are you running payroll? What’s your income versus receivables? All these things. What’s your ad spend? What’s your ad budget for the month? How do you qualify leads? When someone posts and you do a post and you engage with a heart, how do you then funnel them into a system where you can capture their email address? How do you keep track of them? How do you know who opened your email? How do you know who bought your product versus who didn’t buy your product? How do you even sell your product?
This is, yeah.
There’s a lot.
There’s a lot with this one and we, I think, we want you to just have the awareness that if you want to be a serious entrepreneur, if you want to build an empire.
You’ve got to listen to our podcast.
You do. But if you want to build an empire, you have to have a system to track all that. It’s not just, I remember when we first built our business, I didn’t have one. I was winging it. I was like, I remember I have to talk to this one and then I have to followup with this one and then I had all these notes, and then I had an Excel spreadsheet. I learned on the go what not to do.
You can add these things in layers. You might not be running payroll right away, but let’s say that you are now getting some success, and I don’t know, maybe you’re just transferring yourself money. Well that’s going to be a huge nightmare in a year for accounting.
Taxes.
So maybe you go get a payroll system. That’s one of the things that we did and we have a.
We don’t like taxes and payroll stuff. It’s not our strength.
We’ll give a free shout out to the local company, PayWorks. They didn’t even pay for it, but PayWorks rocks. They’re awesome. They actually are super sweet.
We will do an episode too about when to start outsourcing some of the things. At the very beginning, you are going to be the sole person. You’re going to be the one that does everything, until you can start to divide and conquer so to speak and realize what your strengths are, and what you should be focusing your time on.
Again, the key of this episode is we want you to understand that, because you’re scrolling Facebook doesn’t mean you’ve got a business. So keep that in mind. We’re trying to open your eyes to all the things that we’re going to teach you in this podcast, that we teach in the Science of Building Your Online Empire and in a lot of the upcoming courses that we have coming out.
If you’re not in our Facebook group, make sure you go to thebosslife.com/start and make sure you answer all those questions to get in our group because we’re going to share.
Maybe we’ll do a live on that, on backend systems.
I think that’s a great idea. I think we’re going to share what our backend system looks like and maybe how to start yours. I think that ours is probably a lot more complex than when you’re just starting off a business, but.
We can break it down for you because year one, we had very little things in there, but we had stuff.
Yes we did.
I really want you to think this way. Before you post, you’ve got to have some kind of system. Maybe the system is just notes on your phone. Understand that it doesn’t have to be complicated or to cost you anything.
Totally.
Before you do the post of inviting to your free thing on the chiropractor thing, to your free event, when people respond, what is your game plan? Okay, well I’m going to take those people and message them and then I’m going to take note, I’m going to ask them for their email address. I’m going to write their email address down on a piece of paper. It could literally be pen and paper, that’s still a back end system. Then you’re going to add on to that. Let’s move on to the last thing, Erin why don’t you talk about this last thing for us.
I think a lot of people, when you’re starting your side hustle, you’re using your personal social media accounts. While Zuckerberg doesn’t really like that and doesn’t want you to do that, there’s options like a Facebook business page. How many of you actually have a Facebook business page, not just have one, but how many of you use it? How do you scale your content? If you are using Instagram, is your Instagram set up as a business account? Can you promote your posts? Can you boost your posts? Can you reach a different audience that hasn’t connected with you before? If you are just using your own personal account and you’re not actively going in and trying to grow your account, which takes time, if you’re not going to spend money it’s going to take you time. That’s why you need to have your account set up as a business account so you can boost it and run ads.
I think ultimately understand that Instagram right now, even if you set up as a business, you’re not getting penalized for being a business. Right now is the gold rush in terms of Instagram, just to tell you up front. People don’t realize that. You could build an Instagram account much quicker than you could build a Facebook business account. That said, a Facebook business account is critical because you need to have that to tie into so that you can run ads through Instagram. It’s quite easy to do it. We’ll maybe do a live in our Science of Building and Online Empire, how we set it up.
Basically what we can do is, for example, when we post on The Boss Life that you see, if a post is getting good traction, it’s got 80, 90 likes, we can go in and boost it and we have a special technique that we use so that it costs us next to nothing and we can take a post that maybe got 90 people that are already following us to see it, we can take that to 1300 people liking it and commenting and just make it look like it exploded, which it does, because we go in and add in a couple bucks with a system that we use and it basically allows it to explode.
Again, we want to make sure you guys are understanding that we’re not posting on Instagram to get likes. We are posting to connect with other people who need our content.
That’s exactly, exactly right. So, let’s move on.
Do the challenge.
Before we go there maybe I’ll just summarize and Erin can give you guys the challenge. The whole key, what we want you to get out of this episode is that just because you’re scrolling Facebook when you finish this podcast and you get to work or you get home, depending on when you’re listening, you’re not building a business. In fact, you are taking away time, and in fact it’s addicting, it’s going to create dopamine in your head and you’re going to not be able to stop. You’re going to waste so much time. Probably two hours at night.
But I will say this, if that is something that you guys are addicted to, put in some work and use it as a reward. Give yourself a time limit. Okay, I did all of these things in my business today to grow my business today, I’m going to go, I don’t know scroll the discovery thing on Instagram. Some people like to do that. But, make it.
I’ve never done that before. It’s funny because we were on a cruise and someone was telling me about how they do that, I’m like, really? That’s a thing.
Then we looked at it and all of ours were very different because it’s targeted to what you like and post on social media. But, if that is your thing.
Yours was all cats.
Mine was cats.
Mine was all people working out and some work stuff thrown in.
Someone else’s was just all food too.
This is so weird.
It’s funny. Anyway, if that’s your jam and you want to use it as a reward for your work, then do that.
But, if it’s not your thing, then don’t do that. So stop scrolling. Think about what’s the purpose of why you’re online at the end of the day. Why are you online? Why is your business online? What are you trying to do? What do you want to leverage from it? We talked about free groups, we talked about lead generation, brand awareness, and we’ll go into more detail on other episodes on that. Also, stop posting just to see how many likes. As Erin said, it doesn’t really matter if you get 10000 likes or even if you go viral. There’s people that have gone viral that have gotten five million likes on their posts, and they haven’t made a penny from it. It doesn’t mean that you’re going to make money just because you got a ton of likes.
Also, just think about the backend systems, whether it’s a piece of paper, whether it’s an Excel spreadsheet or whether it’s something more complicated. What is your back end system? How are you funneling customers into your system, into your circle so that you can ascend them to become some of your best clients ever and in turn make an income. The last one was, is your account set up as a business. Are you just playing around as a hobby or do you actually have a Facebook business account? Do you have an Instagram business account? What are you doing? What’s the challenge for today?
The challenge today is going to be mapping out your back end system that you want to create. Again, I don’t want you to get stuck in overwhelm with this, saying I’ve got to do all these things. I want you guys, first of all, just write out what your system is right now. Maybe you don’t have one, maybe just having the awareness that you need to get one is going to fuel you to make those changes. Whatever your backend system might like look. It might look like I need somewhere to track the people, my customers. I need somewhere to track my potential customers. I need somewhere to, I don’t know, do my payroll. Stuff like that. You have to look at whatever your business is and all of you have different businesses, so it’s really hard to say do this, do this, I want you to start looking at a way that you can implement a system that’s going to allow you to grow.
That means followup with people. That means, having themes for you posting on social media. Having call to actions in your social media. Having things scheduled out. Od you have a schedule that you follow every week so that your posts are consistent? One of the the biggest things I see people do when they’re building a business is that your audience, your fan base doesn’t know when you’re showing up. Because you’re not consistent.
So true. So what we’re going to do is, if you join our group, which is go to thebosslife.com/start, we will actually do a live in there next week. So if you have some questions, you’re listening to episode right now, I think we’re going to publish it on Monday, so if you’re listening to this podcast, or whenever you’re listening to it, if you go to thebosslife.com/start, we’re going to do a live and maybe I’ll do some whiteboarding as well and I’ll tell you guys what the three most common back end processes/systems that you have to have in place in order to succeed in your business. We’re going to share that with you guys in there. Hopefully we see you in there. With that, we give you guys a ton of value and we love to end all our episodes with, remember to ditch the employee mindset.
And start living The Boss Life.
