#132 - Best of 2022 - Q: Do I really need to do social media in 2022???

This episode is for the people who are like, you know what? Social media kind of feels like a really bad boyfriend at the moment. It feels like someone that you just give and give to, that you're constantly trying to not annoy or, you know, trying to keep happy and you get nothing freaking back.

This is the Doing It Online podcast with your host, serial entrepreneur 6 and 7 figure funnel strategist and super nerd Kate McKibben, where every week we're here talking nerdy and sharing the things that actually work to help you do what you do online. But better, easier, and with a ton more profit too. Are you ready? Let's do it.

Hello. Hello everybody. It is Kate here from hellofunnels and welcome to episode number 89 of the Doing It Online podcast. Thank you so much for jumping in and joining me today. It really, truly means a lot to have to just be able to jump in and be a part of your daily walk or your daily drive or whatever it is and, and drop a couple of little nerdy truth bombs for you today. Today I'm actually doing a Q and A style podcast episode. Going to be answering a question that I've actually noticed come up a little bit and it was actually come from discussion that I had with our own amazing content producer, Keely. And it's really around social media. And that question is, and it's a question that even that we were asking ourselves and that I've had clients ask as well, is do I actually need to do social media right now? Like in 2022? Is social media something that I should be spending time on? And I understand where this question is coming from. I think if they'd asked it five years ago, I would have been like, yes, of course you do. Even if you don't like it, like, suck it up and get it done. But these days my answer is fairly different. I mean, that there's something happening in social media where it's just starting to feel a bit blur. I think it seems to be what happens in any platform. Like as it evolves and people are trying to figure out what works and what doesn't, it just gets a bit samey. I don't know if anyone else feels this, like, I know right now that reels or obviously TikTok, the cool kids on the block. That's how you get seen. That's how you potentially go viral and get a big boost in numbers and you sort of need to be doing those if you are serious about growing your social presence. Right. But what if you hate Being silly on camera. What if you don't have the opportunity to. What if your life is not well lit and well manicured? What if you kind of feel like a demented wiggle pointing at things and it just feels like everything's kind of being dumbed down? And just like I said, it's just, it feels samey and gross and particularly, I know a lot of people like also you go and find a trend and then you just copy what other people are doing. And that's what we do now. We're just. There's nothing's original or unique anymore. It's just going out there and doing what everyone else is doing. Okay? Plus, not to ma. Not to mention the fact that it's time consuming. I'm going to put a caveat here and say I know some people freaking love social media and it works really well for them and dedicating that time to it is time and energy well spent. But this episode is not for those people. This episode is for the people who are like, you know what? Social media media kind of feels like a really bad boyfriend at the moment. It feels like someone that you just give and give to, that you're constantly trying to not annoy or, you know, trying to keep happy and you get nothing freaking back. And those people. Let's have a chat, let's have a discussion. Let's really look at do we need social media in 2022? Let's look at the cons, right, of social media for these days. Like I said, it's all feeling a bit samey, a bit sort of meh. It takes a lot of time. Every time they bring out a new type of content, particularly now it's video and stuff. Even though those things are 30 seconds, 60 seconds, that's not how long they take to put together, right? I think we all know that these things can take up to an hour. And then there's the editing and the makeup and the lighting. And then even if you are being a good little social media girlfriend and following along and doing what you're told and showing up regularly and taking every new trend and making the most of it, it's all very unstable, right? Everything changes as soon as. And this is just the way that they all work and have forever, but is they'll bring out a new feature, that new feature, because it's a new shiny thing, they want everyone to adopt it and everyone to use it. So they reward you for using it. So you get really great views and really great cut through if you jump in and use this new feature. But then as more and more people jump on the, like the preference in the algorithm or the weight in the algorithm goes away and all of a sudden that thing no longer is that effective anymore. So it's like you give, give, give, give, give, you get a little bit and then it's all gone. And so it just keeps changing and that is exhausting. I've been doing things on Facebook and doing like ads and posting on Facebook. Since you needed a university email address to have an account, like that's a really long time. I'm like the grandma of social media. So I think it's pretty understandable to be going, eh, you know, And I know a lot of other people doing that as well. If you are one of those people. And let's not even like brush the surface of all the social and the political considerations when it comes to social media because that's definitely something to take serious time and consideration on. So if you're having all these thoughts, if you're like, look, I just really, I don't agree with it anymore. I'm not seeing it as a good way for me to spend my time. It takes a lot of time. It's giving me very little return. Like, do I need to even do it? Let's dive into that a little bit deeper. First of all, there's a few things to consider. So my answer for you, first of all is no, you don't. Okay? You do not need, I'm here to give you permission that if you're just Jack of social media and it really isn't working for you and it's really not a good use of your time and you could then no, you don't need to do it. But there's a few things to consider before you go and delete all your accounts. Okay? So first of all, if you're not going to be building a presence on social, showing up on social, then you still need to find other ways to be creating, creating, sharing value and content so you don't completely get out of this scot free, okay? That aren't just your email list because we never want to have all our eggs in one basket. Just as it's really, I think it's really dangerous to, to have a giant following on social media and no other sources of traffic or other ways to communicate with your people. It's equally as unwise to just have a huge email list and no other ways of communicating with your people. It's good to spread it around. If you're not going to do social media, what else are you going to do? And I'm not saying I have the answers here, but it's a question that you need to think about. You also need to make sure that you are putting in some thought around, okay, well, where am I going to get this extra traffic from now? So there's obviously there's other things you can do Google search ads, you can do a podcast, you could promote that podcast. You could do joint ventures and be going out and promoting with other people. There are other ways that are not reliant on social media, that they are options. The other option that you could go for is, all right, I'm not going to be spending time doing this organic and trying to build up an organic following, only to have it, you know, be able to reach 0.01% of that following. Are you then happy to dedicate more of your revenue to ads instead? And are you okay? Okay, for those to still be on social media, there's lots of questions, there's lots of things. You kind of need to sort of dig into this. And like I said, I'm not here with the, with the answers. I'm here with the important questions. I'm here with some suggestions and I'm also here to kind of tell you what we are doing right now. So that's the first thing. It's like, okay, you need to take to consider that. You need to go, all right, if I'm going to remove this as a traffic source, remove this as a content sharing source, how am I going to fill that hole? Because it is a hole that needs to be filled. And like your, your options are, as I said, paid ads. If you're still happy to be on the platforms at all or looking at some additional platforms, just going all in on SEO, like there's, you know, there's other things out there that the Internet existed, funnily enough, before social media existed for a long time. You could get old school, you could send people something physical in the mail. Obviously there's a cost involved, but, you know, doesn't have to be all about social media. The second thing to think about, and this is why I probably wouldn't recommend that you delete yourself entirely from social media, like removing profiles and things. But the having the presence on social media does provide that bit of social proof, that bit of, okay, this is a real person. They're not a scammer. They're here to help us. They've been around before. People follow them. I can trust them. So again, that doesn't mean that you need to be creating content and sharing content regularly. You could even have a post that says, hey, for whatever reasons, I'm no longer going to be regularly updating this platform. You can find me here, here and here. But at least I'd be able to see that you did for a time. That you've got people who are following you, that you have people who have responded and that you've responded on posts. So it still kind of acts as that little touch point for someone who is considering working with you, who may be recommended to you. It means they're going to be able to find you, find your contact details and again, get that social proof alongside it. So definitely something to think about, something I think is should not be overlooked. Third thing you need to think about is. Okay, well, when it comes to. Oh, sorry, before I jump to third thing, the second reason why you may not want to delete your profile completely is if you are thinking that you might still want to do ads here and there, you have to have a profile to have those connected to. So just remember, keep that one in mind. All right, on to number three. Let's talk about delivery. How you deliver your programs or how you deliver. If you're going to do a launch and you want to do something free and you want people to be able to engage in that free thing, how are you then going to do it? And again, traditionally, it used to be Facebook groups, right? Facebook groups. Again, algorithms. They used to be. The post in Facebook groups used to get seen a lot. They used to be really highly weighted. They used to be one of the best options out there. They're actually not the best option anymore. And I think, and as more and more people are themselves getting off social media or moving on to different platforms and different channels, it doesn't still have that strength of offering that it used to have. Where you'd be like, well, everyone's on Facebook, so of course we've got to do on Facebook because that's where they're going to see their reminders. That's where they're going to see the things that they won't show up. We won't get the engagement if we're not on there. It's not the case anymore. And I think it's going to get more and more like of that. Whereas people are slowly finding Facebook and things less compelling, less useful, logging in less. I said they're seeing you less. Marketplace is the cool kid on Facebook now. That seems to be all that is in my feed. That as a reason to be on Facebook isn't so much there anymore, but it is a consideration like, okay, well what do I do instead? How do I still offer this same experience? How do I deliver videos and a place where people can ask questions and can be in community and can chat with each other and it's like an enclosed space. Well, yes, there's lots of other options out there and depending on your target market will depend on whether or not you can abandon this entirely. Like if you have quite a tech savvy target market, they might be happy to go and join a Slack channel or download another app like a Mighty Networks or a Circle or something like that. Like there are other ones out there that can be used for running communities and facilitating community that aren't Facebook. You can even go down the right route of just the messenger apps. Although again, that can get functionality wise can get a bit messy. There's a bunch of those now. Telegram is one I know a lot of people are moving to who are wanting to get off Facebook. There are always ways around these things. It's just something you need to consider to wrap it up guys. And I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. I'd love it like if you're thinking like, yes, I feel like this is, this is an issue that we have. Like, I just want someone to give me the permission. I want to bite the bullet. I just want to be jack of it because I've got other things I want to be doing that are definitely going to give us some more return. I want to just share what we're kind of doing. Because one thing, like we had this discussion internally where and I think a lot of us were kind of hoping that we could go, let's just get rid of it. We don't even want to do it anymore. We're happy to run ads we've got. When you have funnels that are dialed in and offers are dialed in, then you know that you get a certain return. Then you know spending money on ads is not seen as a big scary thing. It's. It's more than likely that it's going to be a profitable thing to do as long as you do it right. That's obviously one thing that we're happy to do. We're happy to run paid ads. But one thing I did keep coming back to was that we quite often when we have new clients come to us, they'll say things like, oh, I really loved your content on social. I saw this post, I really loved it. I connected it. I felt like you were talking to me. Even though when we're sitting back, we're looking at our social channels, we're like, you know what? We don't. Our engagement's not as good as we'd like it to be. We spent a lot of time playing with different types of content, creating different types of content to try and move that needle. It hasn't really made a big difference for us. But then you hear these messages that people might not be engaging or commenting, but they're seeing it and they're liking it. And that's all kind of compounding with all the other touch points they have with us, which, whether it's email, whether it's paid ads, whether it's the live stuff that we do, whether it's the free stuff that we do, our podcast here, and all of that comes together to. To build that trust, to build that. That social proof and to have them go finally one day, because we're top of mind. I do want to do something about this problem, and these guys seem great. I want to work with them. For us. We've definitely decided that. Not yet, anyway. We're not ready to completely abandon social media. However, we are definitely looking to pare it back to go, like, what is it? Let's forget what everyone else is doing and what all the trends are telling us we have to do. What do we like on social media, what works for us and how we like to create content. Let's just have a play again, but let's do it in a way that is efficient. With time we go, we realize what the purpose of social media is for us and the importance of social media is for us and how. And therefore we're going to allocate the correct amount of time to that. We're not going to be spending weeks and weeks when for us, it's just. It's another one of many touch points. And yes, we still want it to be there. We're not ready to abandon entirely. It's not saying that we won't next year, but we will keep showing up. We have already moved our delivery off Facebook. We don't use Facebook groups anymore other than live launches. And we're pretty sure that our next time we do that, it won't be on Facebook group either. We're looking at some other options for that instead. So for us, we're not abandoning it completely. That might be the right decision for you, but instead we're going to make some tweaks, do what works for us. I mean that this is one of the Things that I feel strongly about with any part of business is gotta make it work for you, but you also have to think about go. Okay, well if I don't want to do that, if I hate that. Like another example would be sales calls. I don't like sales calls. I think they take up a lot of time. I'm an introvert, so energy wise they're not a good use of time. Okay, well then what if I don't do sales calls? What other things need to be added in or what things need to be changed or how we set up? What other levers need to go up or down to fill in that gap so that we can still be successful, so we can still grow. Social media is just another one of those decisions. If it doesn't make sense for you, if you have moral objections to it, if it's not giving back in like equal measures to what you are giving to it, then maybe it is time to have a reconsider and go, okay, well could I just pare this back? Could I remove it completely? What does that look like? What does that mean for me? And I hope this episode has helped to bring up some of those questions you need to ask so that you can find your own mix that right mix of for you of what's going to work for you energy wise and still mean that you're still going to be able to grow, you're still going to be able to be successful, but you just get to do it on your terms. So anyway guys, I hope this has answered your question well, or at least brought up the questions that you need to ask yourself to be able to answer the questions for yourself. I'd love to hear what you thought about it. I'd love to hear if you feel this way as well. Ironically, the way I'm going to ask you to tell us about it is to tag us over on Instagram because that is still how we are chatting with people. Although again, that may not be forever. And thank you so much for listening in. If you love this episode, please share it and otherwise we will see you same time, same back channel next week for episode 90. Can you freaking believe it? I can't see you then. Guys.

Thanks so much for listening to the Doing it online podcast. If you love this episode, don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review. And if you're ready to take your online course sales to the next level with your own six or seven figure funnel, let Kate show you exactly how today@stealmyfunnel.com.

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