80. An Inside Look at Ben's Personal Social Media Strategy, Lessons and Tips In Growing Social Media

Six months ago, we're at 93,000 impressions for the month. For this month, we've ticked over 700,000 impressions. 17,000 people have visited my profile.

We remained ultra consistent and the results are wild. Yeah, people that go 6 months, 12 months, 24 months and don't get near that engagement.

And we're getting business from it. Welcome back to another episode of the Ben and Bergs podcast with your favorite MBA in high school dropout, talking everything, business, crypto and personal growth. And today, ladies and gentlemen, we're talking business, we're talking content, we're talking an update on my content strategy. How on earth am I going? Because I've been on the content game for probably a good hard six months now. Really, I went hard, started going hard. As of December, the three channels I've gone hard on are Twitter, LinkedIn and Meta Reels, specifically Instagram. Really, from a business perspective, to grow my brand, grow collective shift and grow our membership base. And doing content is a very slow burn. It's fucking painful. It's very time consuming, consuming. It's very long term. But the brand bergs is the what the. The key difference and an example of this, mate, was last night I was over in Sydney at OkX event and this is happening a little bit more, you know, in crypto events where people will come over and they'll be like, Ben, man, I'll follow you online. Like, this guy was like, thank you so much for the content you put out. It's, it's, it's, it's really helped me. Like, you're, you're pushing the industry forward. I just want to say thank you so much. Keep, please keep going. Like a really, really love what you're doing, the space and it's really heartwarming. Like, it feels really nice. You kind of don't believe it. It's just like, oh, come on, man. But it's like, no, people, you know, people are, you know, really genuine and it's really helped the Persona and brand of, of collective shift and myself go to events and people just want to come up and say, hey, because I've seen the content and it's really cool.

Even that time you had that last, that came into the elevator with you and she's like, oh, Ben, did you find your bag? And you're like, do I know you?

Like, I rocked up at an event in Brisbane. I was going to an event in the elevator and she. And I just walked in. There was this lady in there, she's like, oh, did you find your Bag. I was like, what? She's like, your bag. You post on Twitter this morning, you lost your bag. I was like, oh, shit. Yeah. No, I found.

So you and I talked about this. This is just tweaked into my mind where I've started to go to the shops now. And I'm not nearly as Internet famous as you, but people just kind of look at me and I understood when I had, like a big beard, I looked menacing, but I'm, like, wearing, like, trackies. I look like crap and they're just kind of staring me down. And I'm like, either they want to stab me or they've recognized me from somewhere. And someone said hi to me. It was actually at Bunnings.

Really? Oh, hey.

How you. Like, I knew them. And I was like, oh, hey, hey. I'm like, do I know this person or me from the. It's this weird thing. So I asked you about that Happens to you all the time, right?

Yeah, yeah. And I'm really bad with. Really bad with faces. But no, it's really. It's really heartwarming. I mean, it's not really the reason I do it. It's very nice. Obviously, sort of bit of a stroke.

On the ego inside of learn as you go through the journey.

Yeah, exactly. But I want to talk you through my content strategy, how much content I create and the results we've been getting. I'm going to start with Twitter. So on Twitter, approximately.

Hold on, before we go on.

Okay.

It started six months ago.

Yep.

You've been mad steady. You're doing crypto coffee with Ben, you've been doing. Yeah, Helping out with a newsletter. And Ben, we're in a meeting the other day, he randomly pulled it up because he loves numbers. I looked at this and I just went, holy crap. Like this is working. All right, mate, proceed with.

Okay, so. So let's go back to November. So November, when I was first basically starting to get on Twitter, I was in the month of November last year, 91,000 impressions. 91,000. Right. October. Y month prior to that, 34,000 impressions.

You tripled my thumb up. Just quietly, just there.

Let's scoot ahead to.

Where should we go? Maybe the last month. Well, let's go this month. We're basically at the end of the month. We've got two more days in the last 28 days. So six months ago, we're at 93,000 impressions for the month. For this month, we've ticked over 700,000 impressions in the month. How many times am I tweeting a day. I'm tweeting 16 times a day for the month. I've tweeted 483 times this month. I've been mentioned 855 times. 17,000 people have visited my profile in the last month, and I've had 350 new followers. So my tweet content schedule consists of a range of different things. I do two scheduled tweets a day. So ahead of time, I will schedule tweets out and little Storyburg's funny story. There's only one place I can write these tweets.

It is not the place that you would.

There's only one place I can get in the mindset to punch out tweets, and that's on the plane, specifically business class, because it's much. It's much easier to write tweets. So on the way to Perth today, I had about three or four hours. I wrote 38 tweets.

So you can imagine Ben is just sitting in business class. It wasn't a fancy business class. It was just a mess.

Just virgin, just Virginia.

And he's just hyper focused, going, what am I going to do? And he just nails down, puts his head down, writes out 38 tweets, puts his head up, and the plane's landing.

It's really like the only, like. So whenever I get on a plane, I do tweets. It's the only place I can do it. Just the focus and clarity I get for some reason. So I get my. I get our team to help. They give me a lot of ideas and they, they, they help me, they help me, you know, piece together a lot of the content, the scheduled tweets. So they help me do 14 tweets. So, yeah, 30. What's that? 30. Approximately 38 to 45 tweets a month of scheduled. And then the other. The other tweets. Yeah, the other 400. I mean, now a lot of those are replies. I put a lot of time into replies and building the community I love, you know, building that community up.

But yeah, that's. That's basically.

Twitter.

It's like a lot of your tweets. And I can see the difference in the engagement. Like, some of the ones that you scheduled, they hit, but the ones where it's just off the cuff. Yeah, Like, I've just seen this thing. This is what's happened. It reminds me of that. People just like, bang.

And I like to document. I'm really trying to document my journey as well. So I'll be out of meetings you know, personal updates. I do my crypto coffee with Ben as well, which has been a little bit popular. So I do little videos, give you my insight. That's been kind of cool. But, yeah, like, I'm absolutely nobody on Twitter. I'm not saying I'm an expert, not saying I've only got, you know, just a few thousand followers, but like, it's been the journey of six months now, growing. And I just want to say, like, that compounding results. 30, 30 cape impressions. 1003-004006-00700, 800. That's like. That's. Yeah, sort of just compounding.

It's working. And in the social media game, that's not in any game.

Yeah.

Six months is not that much time at all.

Yeah.

You remain ultra consistent and the results are wild. Yeah, people that go 6 months, 12 months, 24 months and don't get near that engagement.

And we're getting. We're getting business from it. Like, people, people, you know, Had a call with a guy this morning from Austin, Texas, had a sales call. He follows me on Twitter and now he's becoming a member.

So you had a lad that called you up as well? Listen to the pod.

This is the big podcast fan. Shout out to. Yeah, but I met you today. But, yeah, shout out, shout out. You know who you are. Yeah. There's been a few podcast listeners that have become members as well, which is really cool.

Fantastic, man. What else you got for us?

Well, the podcast just quickly. We've been up to 75 episodes. We've been going for a year now. Bergs, congrats. That's awesome. That's kind of hard work to do a podcast every week.

It is, mate. To show up, deal with you every single week. Oh, tell you what, that's therapy stuff.

Therapy stuff.

Oh, that's why back was hurting me so much. Just carrying the team.

Exactly. Then LinkedIn. I've been going hard at LinkedIn, so LinkedIn, my. Yeah, LinkedIn's been good. LinkedIn's very hard to grow. I mean, continually optimize that.

And this isn't just.

By the way, I. For those that know me, I'm super competitive and just super human optimization. Like, I just want to, like, get the best I've. You know, the first day after my operation, I was lying in bed watching a LinkedIn webinar on how to create better content.

Every time Ben's like, oh, I've hacked this funnel. I know what to do now. You know what people doing? They're putting their videos on the Side. Oh, they're doing it this way. I have to do this every single optimization. So it's a, it's a constant, it's.

A pro and it's a pro and a con because it drives me mad because I'm just never happy with the results. But on LinkedIn, yeah, I do five, five minimum, five to six pieces of content a week, unique and then plus we do a newsletter and on LinkedIn over the last 90 days we've on my page received 150,000 impressions on LinkedIn which has been really cool and engagement wise about 4,000 engagements, sorry, three and a half thousand engagements in the last 90 days as well. Which is, you know, growing, it's steady, it's hard to grow LinkedIn. But a lot of those are founders, co founders, CEOs, managing directors, BDM managers, like these guys are our target audience. It's a high quality audience on LinkedIn.

They love it.

Or DMs just destroyed.

Oh mate, it is disgraceful.

Like, oh, I have this company, I see you have software development is my LinkedIn calendly or I'd love to pick your brain on this. And it's just all the same business development nonsense. Time after time again my inbox is destroyed.

Yeah, it's crazy.

It's a wild game out there.

One of the things on LinkedIn that I've noticed that works well is just writing really organic content and I even use ChatGPT to help me. It doesn't always work, but really creating long form text content works. The short form stuff I haven't found to kick off too well. And the first sentence in your LinkedIn content has to be really attention grabbing. So what you see in your feed, you only tend to see two sentences and then there's a see more button. You have to engage people at the top, otherwise they don't go in. And LinkedIn's also really interesting where it's a bit of an ego stroke. Like people love to stroke each other's egos on there. So sharing photos, sharing stories of your business, you know, feel good stories, people.

Love that and they want to feel smart to their peers.

Yes, exactly.

I'm in this game, I know about crypto, I know about this thing. And this is what all might told us as well where when you start in the middle of the goods, you don't like warm up to anything. It's like with the movies, right? They start in the middle of the action and you're hooked straight away.

Yeah, straight into it, no fuck around. And that's the same with tweets. No bullshitting. And we're also optimizing to push people to our newsletter. So we've now up to about nine and a half thousand subscribers on our weekly shift, which is just amazing.

That's huge. That is a quality newsletter, so anyone can sign up for free. And it is, even though I'm at Collective Shift is the one piece of content I always read from our company.

Yeah, really? That's cool.

So succinct.

Yeah.

Casey up to date and I can share it with other people at a level where they can understand.

Yep, yeah, it's brilliant. So we're just pushing people there, then we are the data and then we can market and push things like our new live masterclass that we've got coming up. So really owning that data and taking the data away from the social platforms and onto onto our own platforms is really important. And the last channel I've been pushing hard on is reels, so we put out five to seven reels a week. So this is short form content that I record. Again, we do a lot of scheduling of this, you know, pre recorded. I. I like to batch a lot of the content. And over the last 90 days on Instagram, we've reached 100,000 accounts. 34% of those were actually from ads, but 98,000 of those people were non followers. 415,000 impressions. And then, yeah, a couple of videos got up to sort of the 18,000 view mark, 15,000 view mark, six and a half thousand profile visits.

Which is a lot. And, and yeah, starting to grow. The old, the old Instagram, which is again, Gary Vee talks about this idea of pack, which is. Is a pack. Yeah, Platforms and culture. So it's understanding the platform, understand the audience, understanding the culture on there, how they like to consume content and it's all different. You can't post one thing on one platform and expect it to work everywhere else. It doesn't work that way.

And the classic one is posting on Twitter. That's like a conversation right now, people are on their phones, it's upbeat, people responding instantly. LinkedIn, you post something, you get a reply in two weeks. Yeah, literally, yeah, like people like bash their LinkedIn time. Yeah, it's crazy. You also had like a viral video on TikTok, mate.

Yeah, we had a.

Still doing that.

We're still. Yeah, it's still going. So we had a little clip from Ben and bergs that on TikTok is currently up to 143,000 views. Ah, yeah, there we go. So that was, that was pretty cool. Doing a little bit on TikTok. TikTok's a bit more of a grind. It's a bit more natural. Just. Yeah, again, I'm trying to focus on, you know, I, I probably spend, geez, I don't know, 20 hours a week on content at the moment, then CEO finance, fundraising, product marketing, all that, you'd sort of run out of time at some point. So really focusing on the channels that mean the most and I think what.

You'Re actually optimizing for, you're not optimizing for views. Like, we could easily do that. Create a shitty video, do a little dance, do whatever. We're optimizing for a high quality, engaged audience that we provide value to.

We'd much rather a thousand hardcore followers than a hundred thousand snoozes and I'll kind of show up to an event 100%. And that's exactly what we're optimizing for. So thanks everyone for listening, because you are the hardcore fans.

Love you all. What an update, mate.

Yeah, so that's, that's basically how I'm going with social. It continues to be day after day. It's a grind, but just consistency, folks like, you know, I'm the. Not the master of consistency, I'm the master of new shiny object syndrome. So if I can do it, you can too. And just get in there and grind and continue to improve and iterate and get, get feedback and study the platform, study the algorithm, study what works. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's a pro and a con. I think my brain, it's like, it's. You can't stop thinking. I wake up sweating, thinking about the LinkedIn.

He gives me this phone call and he. Or it might have even been like a voice message. God knows when he was Async, he's like, mate, I've worked out the Twitter algorithm. I can feel it, mate, it likes this. And when I engage in this way and I use these words and I post it this time, man, I can just feel it. I feel coursing through my veins. It's so fun.

It's so passionate. Oh, yeah.

It's like I just imagine you're just looking, you just see the matrix there and it's just like, it just all.

Makes sense, you know, to a point. I know an awful lot about this, but like, I, I get quite.

I'm.

I'm so, so fascinated by human psychology and like how and where people spend attention to the point. Like, I usually walk down the street. And I just stare at people. I just think about where. Where do they spend their time? What platforms are they on? Who do they listen to? Are they on Instagram? When do they go on Instagram? What do they like, what do they stop listening to? What do they pay for?

I started doing this when I was on the train. I'm just looking at people. Like, what are they listening to? What stop did they get off at? Who are they going home to?

Yeah.

Like, do they have a family and they have it by themselves? Yeah. Do they like that?

How much money do they earn?

Yes.

What do they spend their money on?

Oh, and then literally, like, I'm visualizing, like, I'm in augmented reality and there's like a bubble above their head.

I would be my superpower if I had a superpower. I love that. Yeah, yeah.

And it could be like, single mother, one child earns this amount.

Yeah.

Like, listens to these things.

Like, just fascinating.

Wears these shoes because of this reason. Like, humans are amazing.

Yeah. Oh, fascinating, man. That's marketing for you. Well, thank you, everyone, for listening. That's been a bit of an update on social media. Hopefully that's been helpful. If you've got any questions around growing your own socials, happy to help. Please DM me on Twitter bensimpsonau and we've gotabybackburg if you want bergs. And we've got our own podcast Twitter as well at Benndbergs on Twitter. And if you've got a friend, someone trying to grow their socials or maybe a company, maybe you work at a company, maybe it's a marketing department that you're looking to grow your crypto Twitter or just social media in general. We'd love for you to share this around if it's been helpful. And thank you very much for listening. We'll see you on the next episode.

Catch you then, champions.

Thanks, guys.