Ed Weeks, Jr, the found of HV Social Media, is all in on Facebook Ads and Messenger BOTS

Hey everybody, it's Ed Weeks Jr., the founder of right here, HV Social Media. Excited to get air today. I haven't dropped a personal video like this in a while. I'm gonna get back at this. I've been doing a lot of podcasting, which I'm gonna put the podcast in here today. I call it The Weeks Way. Again, Ed Weeks. The Weeks Way is really how I'm just going about doing things that I think can help a lot of people out here. I'm out here on the real entrepreneurial grind. I left corporate America at 45, had climbed my way up, and I haven't looked back since. Yes, there's been ups and downs. I got involved with network marketing to start, but it's all led me to the path where I am now. Basically, social media was something that intrigued me. I've always been— I played around with digital marketing and selling affiliate programs and doing various things even in the middle 2000s, so I've been around the space for a while, but Social media really intrigued me. I told this, I've told the story before to friends, but I can tell you guys here. You know, it's like one of the first times that I shopped on Amazon, and then shortly thereafter was on Facebook and got hit with the ad that I was just looking at. And I was like, that's powerful stuff, being able to reach me, A, on my phone at the time, and B, just from me shopping and capturing that information. So it really, it led me on this crazy path. And today I help, right now, 20, I think I have 23 or 24 clients inside of my agency. I've had ups and downs in that as well. I had a partner for a while, started a separate business, but kind of realized that our businesses could function separate and we didn't need to be together. So we kind of shook hands and agreed to carry on as separate entities. So, still refer her, but just together didn't make much sense, so we kind of moved and parted ways there. But I just think, I was at this awesome conference, The Future of Social, put on by Hootsuite, sponsored by Adobe, just awesome speakers from the CMO of Hootsuite to the brand strategist at LinkedIn to a product development lead on Messenger for Facebook and an awesome woman from Adobe and a great guy from Thomson Reuters. It was a great event and what it really, like my whole purpose became so clear as I sat there and listened in and I just positioned myself and my agency to really get involved with Messenger bots and bots and AI. I put a huge investment into Hootsuite for my own agency and my clients. The performance of my ads has gone through the roof so it's just, it's all come to this perfect head and I was at this and this was, Today is Thursday. This was Tuesday that I was at this live event, and it was just realizing I'm there with a bunch of corporate people, which the world I left, right? But where the lightbulb moment was for me is the opportunity that I have being on the forefront and talking to business owners that could use these amazing tools that are really just coming about. Like, bots are in the infancy. There's a lot of people using them. Great stat came out of this: 2 million bot messages from businesses to consumers on Facebook like 3 months ago, now 10 billion. So bots are all the rage, they are huge, but they're really in their infancy. I mean, even this whole digital social media marketing, all of this is really in the infancy. Things will change, but the bots are like email killers. It's— somebody said it there and it's so spot on, like email is dead. I just saw on my feed somebody talking about, you You got to use email to get customers. That's old school. That's, that's nonsense. Like what you can do in Messenger, the open rates are through the roof, the click-throughs, and then using that to the next level can help any business. I'm starting to utilize it in my own agency and I'm seeing it. It gets rid of the nonsense that comes in, weeds it right out. So you know that you don't have to waste your time and it really fine tunes it to who I spend my time talking to is people that actually need my services and Most importantly, can afford them, right? I mean, I go anywhere from $1,000 a month to a few thousand dollars a month in working with businesses, and I do that because I have to, you know, pay for my time, and B, I have to just deliver results, and I'm doing a great job at that, and investing in the platforms I invest in, being at these conferences. I don't spend a lot of time out there at conferences because I have to do business, and I have to prospect and I have to do all those things, but very proud to say I have a steadily increasing right now into about the $300,000 range. I've been higher before, but I had a partnership and things have changed, but I'm in about the $300,000 level in my agency, which is light years above and beyond 95% of the people that I've known that have tried to do this agency thing. So again, I had 20-something years of sales experience, so I've been able to leverage that, to help work with small business owners. So I put this together to tell you, you know, whoever you are, if you're looking to go out there and be great at digital marketing, social media, Facebook marketing, Instagram marketing, whatever marketing it may be, Twitter, nobody talks about it. I'm going to start looking into some Twitter marketing. It seems to be coming back. Snapchat to me seems to be dead. But if you're interested in that space as an entrepreneur, like dive in, go for it. It's crazy. But let me tell you, Master the skill set. I think far too many people try to outsource everything. Outsource to me, I do outsource very limited tasks, but the reality is I have a very good skill set which allows me to sit in front of business owners and truly explain what I can do through Facebook, through Instagram, through bots, through, uh, you know, Facebook pixels and retargeting. Like, I do it so I can explain it really well and I can make really a complicated subject easy. So if you're coming into this, master the craft, get a few clients, do it for nothing. Like, everybody's so obsessed with trying to get $5,000, $3,500, $2,500— nonsense. It's all nonsense. Get a few clients under your belt, you know, basically learn on their spend, execute, understand how it works, start to understand, get better, get better, get better. Then you can go out there and actually charge. Uh, then for me It's about knowing how to sell. After you really understand how to do this and you have a few clients under your belt, a couple thousand to $5,000, $8,000, $10,000 coming in, it's not that hard to get there. It truly isn't. That part, to get from the $8,000 to $10,000 to $12,000 to the $20,000 to the $25,000 to the $30,000 is the challenge. It's very, very difficult. I have the ability now to leverage and go all in with Hootsuite and what I do there, and it's not the Hootsuite that most people use. It's the ad side, which is The product is awesome and it works well for what I do and it gives me the control to do it. Just point blank, just it's mind-blowing. So if you're looking to do this as an entrepreneur, go out there, get a couple clients, go for it. Then really focus in on getting your salesmanship, saleswomanship, your sales skills up because that's to me is what it's all about. It's knowing how to communicate, it's knowing how to network, it's knowing who to say no to, Very important piece. It's knowing who's not an ideal fit, being able to refer that maybe to somebody else. There's a lot of things about sales that you really need to know. At the end of the day, just be authentic and you can have success. Far too many people give up too soon. I know, look, I started with Tai Lopez and Tai Lopez's course, the SMMA course, and I know there's few and far between that have actually stuck around. I think it's 2 years later now. I don't think many have stayed around. So, stayed the course to be able to go out here and actually say they've had success. You know, real people actually doing it, not being put underneath somebody's wing to go for it. So, you know, I am, I'm doing this, this is what I do for a living. I'm in my house, this is one of the last videos I'm gonna ever shoot in my house, so I wanted to do it because I'm moving into an office. I was in an office with my partner, again, I just told you we kind of axed that, shook hands, walked away. I have a new office, I'm excited to get into that office, it's small, But it's gonna allow me to just have that presence that I want. It's in here, it's in my city, city of Poughkeepsie that I've lived in for, I think, 20, it'll be 25 years now. And I'm just excited, it's growing, it's very much driven by the young transplants coming up from New York City that can't afford it anymore. There's a town just south of here, a little bit, Beacon, that has really taken off, it's become more unaffordable for most, so now, They're coming into the Poughkeepsie area and the real estate boom is not housing, it's apartments. It's crazy what's going on, but I'm psyched to establish my roots to where they should be. My house is in Poughkeepsie. Again, I don't live in a ginormous house. I live in a 1,600-square-foot ranch. I'm not a showboater. The one thing I have is my nice watch. Laugh out loud if the person who's watching this that I won it from is out there, but the The reality is, look, success is out there, it's out there to be had. You just have to really get good at a craft and then know how to sell. And I think both of those are learned. No great salespeople are born. You can be introverted, extroverted, if you understand how to actually like— I think some of the best salespeople are teachers. They know what they're doing, they know how to be able to communicate it. Unfortunately, they're not communicating it to kids. Just focus in on that. If you're a business owner, I see far too many business owners that are still continuing to chase old stuff, chase— and you know, I think one other great thing that came out of the conference, right, like 70 to 80% right now of the spends on digital are for lead gen, right? And I'm a big lead gen guy, I love lead gen, but the reality is there's a whole bunch of wasted opportunity and attention, right? Too much attention on lead gen, less attention The arbitrage, Gary Vee arbitrage right now is on brand. So I'm doing a lot more of that branding with my clients. Video, yes, not as much as I was, but you know, 'cause everybody's doing video, so you kind of back away. For me, it's that one guy who spoke, I know his name was John, but he was from LinkedIn and he talked about contrarian. I've always been a contrarian, and I'm a big fan of knowing when to kind of reverse course. And for me now, I do a lot of that branding, then I use retargeting, then I sell. Whether it's for leads or it's for ecommerce, I have a bunch of different clients right now across all sorts of realms. My biggest client right now is cellular sales. You know, it's a billion-dollar company, and it's, it's somebody that I started out very small. I'm starting to grow it nicely. It's really added to the revenue of the agency quickly. I think there's some other amazing opportunities in front of me. I have a great franchise that I work with that's growing. Again, I started out with one. Like most people, I go back to that, oh, you know, I gotta charge all this money. I started out with these clients on like $500 deals because I had to prove to them that it was something that would work. And then you prove it, then you have them, right? Then you have them. That's the reality of it. If you can't prove it and you gotta outsource it, that doesn't mean— that means you can't do it anyways, right? So You're gonna get these big clients and you're gonna go around, and I see it all the time. I got a $4,000 a month client, and then 2 months later they're gone because you didn't do shit for 'em. You outsourced to the same crap. The reality is like iHeartMedia, Gannett now has LocalIQ, iHeart used Vendasta. A lot of these old, dying traditional media plays are coming into this space and they're outsourcing to The same sources that most people are. You're no different than the crap that is out there, and their program like the stuff they're doing is it's it's yesterday's news. Like get get good at it. If you're going to learn one thing right now, learn how to create bots. Learn how to create bots. You can go to business owners and do very very well just learning how to create bots. It's where it's all going to be. The Facebook gentleman that was with us. On Tuesday, talked a lot about you know the infancy of the Facebook Messenger ads. But all the WhatsApp is going to be woven in here because Facebook bought WhatsApp. So Messenger is going to be huge, huge, both for global, just national and then regional and then local. All going to be it's going to be a huge play for. Everybody, and I think the local market can do really, really well. It's a great way to be able to connect, it's a great way to be able to engage, it's a great way to be able to reengage, right? Messenger now is email 10 years ago. That's it, it's that simple. So get in on that. If you're gonna learn one thing, learn how to do bots. And then if you can't do Facebook, it's okay, you can really, you can. You got to go through. You're not going to find the $300 guy on Upwork. You got to find somebody who can drive the traffic for you and do a great job and make sure they're optimizing. Make sure they're automating. AI is huge. I'm utilizing it with my Hootsuite ad agency products. So guys, like it's not that hard as a business owner. It is hard because you have 20,000 different salespeople trying to get you and you're falling for a lot of crap. I see some, you know, some of these. get-togethers that people go to and there's people talking to them about, you know, how to grow Instagram, how to do this, how to do this, and you go in and you see and they have like 200 followers or they have like 5 people like their posts. Like, you don't even know how to do it yourself, how can you go out there and talk about doing it for a business owner? It's just complete and utter bullshit. It's out here, I just want you to try to avoid it. That's it, that's what I have for you today. A long-winded, video. I just, I, I love YouTube and I keep getting away from it, but I really am really honed in right now and getting better at YouTube. I'm gonna put my podcast there. I haven't done my podcast. I'm gonna drop one of those as soon as I'm done. And that's it, man. That's what I have for you. So if you're an entrepreneur, you're a business owner, you're all social media, social media, look, it's either one. Learn bots. Learn bots and invest in Facebook Facebook, Instagram, it's still, it's crazy. You're still like cost per clicks are so ridiculously cheap compared to Google and you're getting probably better. I think Google has had its heyday. I'm calling it today is October 11th, I think it is. I'm calling the end of the heyday of Google, the paid search side. I think there's still benefit to some of what other products are out there with YouTube and some things, but the paid search is too fucking expensive, and I think it's just time that it comes back down. Like, too many people are— everybody's a Google expert. It's crazy. So guys, that's what I have. Peace. I hope you have a wonderful, wonderful day, week, month, year, whatever it may be whenever you're catching this content. Thank you. You're the best. I love all you out there. Hope something in here connected. Any questions, you can always email me, ed@hvsocialmedia.com. Easiest way to get me. Just drop me an email and I will always, always answer. Check out my podcast too. I'm gonna put in the link below. So peace, guys. Peace.