581. Social Media Doesn't Have To Suck! Here's How

If you want this to be a business, if you want to see the success that so many of my students have, then you have to realize that they do put in the reps, they do do the hard work. Social media is here and it's here to stay. But social media does not have to suck. Hi, I'm Jacqueline Snyder and this is the Product Boss podcast. I've helped launch ngrow that thousands of product based businesses, even one of my own. And over the last 20 years, I've seen behind the scenes of businesses just like yours. Whether they are makers, manufacturers, artists or food and beverage businesses. I have spent so many hours studying it all, I've discovered what makes them successful, what are mistakes they could avoid, how did they turn an idea into successful business? And what are strategies they have used to make more sales and be discovered by more customers. This is what this show is all about. Whether you're just starting out or you're looking to become a million dollar product boss, I'm here to give you the permission to chase your dreams no matter how big or small. All you need is the right mindset, a little courage, strategy and support, and you too can be the next million dollar product boss. Let's do this. Hey, product bosses, welcome back. It's Jaclyn Snyder, your host of the Product Boss podcast. And today we're gonna talk about social media. So one of the first things that I hear, you know, I think social media has this love hate relationship. It's one of those things that it's sort of like I feel like I should be posting on social. There might even be a question of like, I feel like I should be posting everywhere on social. And at the same time it also might feel a little bit like I don't want to post on social. I don't know what to post. I don't like it. And you know, I always think about this like I'm not a big gym goer. If I can incorporate, moving my body into my day to day is probably more of the thing that I will do than really set up. Hey, I'm going to go to the gym and work out at 5am before everyone wakes up. I wish that was me. But a lot of times I hear people talk about it, especially people who do, they commit to working out and they'll say something like, I don't want to work out. I just know I have to do it. I'm always thinking, oh, they don't want to do it either. They just maybe have willpower that operates different than mine. But I bring that up just as an example because I think the other side of this is social media. And we think of it sort of like that. Like some people might love it, some people might not love it, but know, hey, this is a means to an end of how I'm going to communicate with my customers. And other people might be like, nope, not doing it. There is a wide range of all the things you can do. And you know that I teach this, you know, inside of our programs where I'll teach, you know, you can grow your business without social media, you absolutely can. And I teach that inside of multi stream machine. But here's the other side of this, okay? Social media is here and it's here to stay. But social media does not have to suck. It does not have to feel like it's draining the life from us or that we just, you know, we don't want to do it. There are so many ways we can do this. And inside of my new program, Standout Society, we're actually going to be building marketing plans that are going to help us execute what we need to do for marketing in an hour a week. And trust me, if you were to measure the amount of time that you doom scroll social media or you're just, you're like, how did you know, 30 minutes just go by and I watched all these different reels and I don't even know what I've just done, but somehow I've spent all this time on social. I mean, you probably spend an hour a day scrolling some sort of social network and then think about that. If we were to take that and transfer that into, okay, how can we use social media? How can we use social media in this age for our product business? And how can we do it simply? And how can we do this in a way that doesn't feel overwhelming? And that's what I want to dig into today. Let's first talk about why social media feels so overwhelming. I think it's daunting, right? I think it's daunting to business owners. The algorithm is constantly changing. We just want someone to tell us, like, what is the thing that's going to work? It takes up a ton of time. There is this pressure to create content that maybe we don't feel like we have the tools to do, maybe we don't feel creative. Maybe we're just like, I'm not a content creator, right? And the need to constantly engage, the need to kind of always feel like we need to be on there. I don't know where I Was I was like at a track meet for my daughter and I had this realization and I was like, what would we do with ourselves if we weren't on social, scrolling social or thinking about what should we post on social? I said this to my husband. Cause I was like, what did life look like? What did we think about before the time before, you know, where did our focus go? And we weren't like, oh, that's a good reel, I should post that. Or let me go check and see what people are doing on social media. So listen, the entire world is dealing with this and raising kids in this time and all the things. But the thing I want you all to realize and what I've tried to share with you over the years is that, you know, you don't need to be on all of the social media channels or all the platforms all the time. And you also don't need everything to be perfect. So let's dig into the first part of that. We don't need to be on it all the time. I am not on social all the time. We batch out what we're going to post. We actually make four posts a day now. None of you have to go and jump into that. But that is what the product boss is doing. We're doing four posts a day right now. We're just creating a ton of content. Now. I have a team, I have a big team. So if that feels overwhelming, do not think about that. The only thing you have to make a decision about is what channel you want to go all in on. So the first part is Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, I don't know if there's other ones right now that the kids are using, but you have to think about what channel do you want to go all in on. And when you're coming up with that thought, when you're trying to figure out which one do I do? I want you to think about your ideal customer. Who is your ideal customer and where are they hanging out online? Where are they consuming content? So if you don't know who your ideal customer is, your ideal customer avatar, we have to nail that first. That is really important. And as you get to know them really well, then you get to identify where are they, where are they spending their time. Now if you have a market and you sell to women in their 80s, most likely they're not on social media consuming content at the rate that so many other people are. And that's probably not where they're discovering product and interacting and buying. So if you have an older audience I'm saying 80s, because that's like, my grandma's in her late 80s, so I'm like, grandma's not. Grandma's not the person. Maybe if they're in their 70s, where are they hanging out? Where are they shopping? Right. Maybe that's more of Facebook person. And if you have a younger consumer, someone in their 20s, for example, early 30s, maybe they're on TikTok. And then if you've got someone that's somewhere in between that, like early to mid-30s, into their 40s, maybe even early 50s, maybe they are on Instagram. Okay? So you just have to think about when social popped up in their life, where their group is hanging out and where they are hanging out, because that will help you decide which social media platform are you going to get really good at. Okay. So that's the first part of that myth of you need to be on all the platforms. There are people out there that are like, post everywhere, you know, get on Twitter and threads and Instagram and TikTok, and I don't even know what. Right. Because I've gone all in on Instagram, to be 100% honest with you. But you just want to decide on the one and then you want to get good at it. You want to. You want to consume content on there. You want to understand your customers and you want to just kind of know what you're doing on that platform. That's step one. Second step is getting over that. Everything needs to be perfect. You've seen, if you follow me on social, which I hope you do, so follow us at the productboss. There are typos sometimes. There are things like, we went viral recently with a reel that at the time of this recording, has 7 million downloads. It's the most viral we've gone. It's the one with Phoebe from Friends running around in the wedding dress shop. So if you end up seeing it online, you'll see what I realized. Even though when I created that reel, everything fit within the section, if you actually go and watch it, you'll see some of my words are cut off. And I almost was like, should I take that down? Like, should I do it again where the words aren't cut off? Like, somehow in my creating of the reel, it bled into the margins, but it still went viral. Like, more viral than anything that we've posted in years, Years and years and years. So it didn't matter. I just knew that it had the hook. I knew that it had the kind of content that my audience consumes and. And then I made the caption make sense to what I wanted it to do. Okay, so those are the two things. If social media feels overwhelming, then I want you to first just decide on the one that you're hanging out on the most. I want you to just kind of pay attention to it and think, okay, what if I just thought about this one platform? And then I also want you to think that it does not always have to be perfect. Okay, so now that you've decided, okay, it's not going to be overwhelming. I'm going to learn it, I'm going to consume it. I'm already consuming it. My customer hangs out here and I want to be where my customer is. So you pick your platform. You know that things don't have to be perfect. Let's talk about content creation. Right? What is efficient content creation? What is the thing you're like, oh, 7 million views. That's or plays. That's amazing. Well, let me tell you that it is. Sure it's amazing. And sure we had a lot of reach and all the things. I'm just going to tell you real quick, what if you hear my phone dinging, it's because I'm pulling it up so that I can tell you how many follows we had from 7. 7.1 million views. So almost 100,000 people have liked it. We have 4,000 comments. But if we look at follows from a piece of content now, there have been other people that have had this many views and had a massive amount of follows. In this one, we've only had about 4,000 follows from it, which you would think would be way more. Here's why it's not because the piece of content that I shared was a shareable piece of content that you, a product boss, will probably share with your audience or another business owner will probably share with their audience. Because it talks about like the whole concept of small business owners trying to decide what to do to grow their business. The reason why I'm not getting a ton of product based businesses following me is because it's probably being used on the consumer side. If you're a candle company, you might be posting it on your stories and sharing it for your, your customers to see. Like, oh yeah, you're a small business. Oh yeah, this is what you're dealing with. But they may not be other candle companies or jewelry companies following you. So what does that mean? That means that it was like really great for the ego. Oh cool. We had something go viral. All the shares and likes and comments, all the different things, the strategies we had behind that were excellent. The 4,000 people we have following us and welcome if you're new here, based off of that is also awesome, right? I know a product boss recently that gained 50,000 followers in a couple days from something going viral with less views. But here's the deal. The 4,000 people that decided to follow me are hopefully my ideal customer because I don't need the general consumer following me, for example, I need other product based business owners and business owners in general to follow me because they are my customers. So what you want to think about is the content that you're creating and what you're putting out there and why. So the three types of content that you want to think about having on social are viral content, things that people see and they're like, oh yeah, like it can reach more people. It's something that maybe has already gone viral. It's something that is shareable. That's what virality is. It's shareable. People start to share it, they start to watch it and they share it. How many of us, my husband and I, like, how many reels do you share with your spouse or when you see or your friends and when you see a static post that you reshare, you're like, oh my gosh, you get me? That's what virality is. And that is a certain part of the creation of content that you want to have going out to your. The second piece of content that you want to have is really the kind of content that's like the hey, stay here a little while longer kind of content, right? It's this content that really establishes what your business and your brand is all about. It's that thing that starts to develop that no like trust factor with your audience and they're like, yes, you get me. I'm going to stay here. Because the viral is like the big net and you catch like a whole bunch of people and you're like, come on in. Now. They see you, they look at your, your piece of content and they maybe look at your feed and then they decide, am I going to stay, am I going to follow or am I not going to follow? Because so many of us now just consume content and we don't necessarily follow, but if it really hooks us, we're like, hmm, let me go see what else they have. Oh, cool. I just discovered a new brand, a new product, a new coach, a new podcast, a new influencer, a new creator. Because you like what you see past just that one post, for example, I just did this with one of our students that's using the standout society framework, and she makes goat's milk soap. The kind of content that she was posting was about her horses and her farm animals, and she was going viral with that. But the problem is, is that the virality around the animals is great, but she's attracting other people that wanted to come in for the farm life, but weren't necessarily consumers of her goat's milk product. So as soon as she kind of went through this, the framework that we teach inside of SOS Standout Society, and she started thinking about this, she was like, oh, okay. I'm realizing that the content that I'm putting out there is not necessarily calling in the right audience. So I recently got an Instagram message from her. Let me just find it really fast. Yeah. So she said that she had officially hit $1,000 in sales in one month, and it wasn't even the end of the month because she started realizing that the kind of content that she was posting needed to be more aligned with her end customer. So now if you go and you follow her, you're going to still see the farm animals, but the content that she's putting out there is more aligned with making goat's milk soap with a snarky twist. And this is a shout out to Falcone Farms with Rachel. That's the thing for you when you're thinking about content, we've got the reality, but then what's the brand building? What's the kind of content that they stay for? That they're like, oh, yeah, I want to keep consuming this kind of content, and it makes sense for the product that you're selling or the brand building that you're doing. And then the third piece of content that you are going to share is going to be the sales content. That's going to be the one where you're actually making the offer. You're putting the product out there and you're saying, hey, buy this. But that's such a small part of what you're going to post on social media. So when you're thinking about this and you know the three types of content, the three pillars of content that you need to post, then what you can do is you start to plan that content. You start to plan it in batches, you start to save time because you're like, this is my content creation time of my week or month. I'm going to create these three types of content. I'm going to know how often I'm going to post. So when I say that I Don't care how often you post. And I say that in the way of, I mean, I do care, but I don't want you to feel pressure of posting because I said I post four times a day. I want you to just come up with an amount that you can do consistently. The word is consistent. What can you do consistently that you can keep up with? And that's what I want you to start with. It's the same idea of going to the gym, right? It's like, I'm going to go to the gym seven days a week. Guess what? Most people don't. So it's like, what if it was like I'm going to go to the gym once a week or I'm going to move my body for 30 minutes a day just even if it's just walking around my pool, right? You want to come up with something that you know that you can stick to, create a habit around and do consistently. So whatever that is for you, I want you to do that. Now if you're thinking about posting and batches and planning content and stuff and people might be thinking like, what app should I use? You know, what should I do? There are so many apps. But honestly, sometimes what we do is we natively, let's say in Instagram, we natively schedule within the Instagram platform to post. So each platform, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, all the things, they're all going to have different strategies behind them and that's why you will pick one to get really good at and then you will think, how can I be consistent and how can I come up with content for these three pillars? Oh my goodness. Friends, have you heard that we just launched a brand new program called Standout Society. Your eight week product business breakthrough to getting more customers and standing out in a crowded market. Listen, I know that product business owners, they need to learn how to get paying customers and stand out in a crowded market without all the things, right? Without lowering your prices, without paying for ads, without thinking you need to do all these other things. Tim Ferriss had this quote and he said, even if you have the best possible version of what it is you're selling, if no one knows about it in the first place, then you don't have a market. So this brand new program is for literally anyone who sells products, whether you're just starting out or you've been in business for years, if you're a business that needs customers and you're struggling to reach your ideal audience and get them to convert to sales, then this is for you. Now I am so excited because I'm teaching this totally live. It's the very, very, very first time that we're launching it. I'm teaching it live over eight weeks, and it will actually be the only time I teach this live. So if you decide to join in the future, which you totally can, I can't promise that the price will ever be this low. And I know that I will not be teaching it live again. So if you're like, I want this. Let's do this over the next eight weeks. Let's do it together, my friends. All you have to do is head to the productboss.comsos the productboss.comsos because here's the deal. We're going to dig into the four foundational bits of your business that I think so many people have missed. They've gone from coming up with the idea, making the product and jump straight to selling it. But here's the deal. No amount of trainings or courses or tactics are anything that I teach you in any of my other programs are going to work if you don't have clear foundations in your business. And I know that that's not like, the sexiest thing to hear. But guess what is getting more customers. So if you're feeling fuzzy and unfocused and frustrated and you're like, I'm trying to do this, but I don't know what to do, this is the time that we have to go back in and think, this is what we have to do. So the standout society, the whole goal to this is to have you have a breakthrough in your business over the next eight weeks because I want to help you get more customers and stand out in a crowded market. So head to the productboss.comsos theproductboss.comsos and I cannot wait to see you inside. The next part of this to think about is engagement. Now, let's not make any excuses that you're introverted. Extroverted. I'm an introvert. I don't want to do XYZ introvert. And extrovert is just the source of energy in which you get. So if you're going to create a whole day of content creation, you might need to lay down more if you're introverted versus if you are an extrovert. You might be like, I'm planning a whole day of content and then let's go to dinner after. So you just need to know where you're sourcing your energy from and thinking about that. Part as you're thinking about it. But the thing is, is that I don't want you to get in your own way of being a marketer, which you are. You are a marketer. You have to market your products in order to sell them. You just do. If you want this to be a business, this is like a hard truth. If you want this to be a business, if you want to see the success that so many of my students have or success of other businesses around you, then you have to realize that they do put in the reps, they do do the hard work. They do get up at 5am and go to the gym. Right. So the thing is, is that we do have to just get into the discomfort zone. Right? Get into the things that feel uncomfortable, but it's a muscle that we have to work out. So when I talk about engaging, I'm saying that because I think a lot of you are like, post and ghost. Okay, I'm gonna post it and I'm out. But the better thing to do is while you're creating quality content that feels like something you can do consistently but does not have to be perfect, I want you to get it out there more than perfection. You also need to think about how does this content resonate with my audience? Because instead of posting just frequently and all the time being like, okay, Jacqueline said she does four times a day. I'm going to do four times a day. But you're just posting stuff. It's just excessive. And it doesn't have the end goal, which is creating quality content that resonates with your ideal audience, with your ideal customer. The kind of stuff that makes them want to stick around. Because again, you know, Rachel at Falcone Farms could keep posting. She could post all day, I'm sure. Cause she's like delivering horses and has baby chickens and all this stuff. She could post all of that. But if it does not have the effectiveness that she's looking for, I'd rather her post less frequently. But actually post content that's quality, that resonates and that creates relationships with the people that follow you. Right. And they engage with you. It is way better for people, for the algorithm to share your content with people and have people comment and engage with it than it is to just keep posting content that nobody engages with. If they're not engaging, then we might have to switch and change what we're doing here. Okay. And one of the other best ways to do this is if you're going to make a post stay on for the first 10 to 15 minutes and everybody who says something, say something back. Just write back to them. I don't care if it's a full sentence or a word or a heart or an emoji. There used to be rules around it. I'm going to just let all the rules go because again, it's just practicing. You'll see that when we post on Instagram that if you comment a lot of them within the first few minutes of us posting, we are commenting back. And that really helps our growth. One of the last parts that I want you to do here is just, I want you to measure the success of this, right? I want you to measure the success of using social media without being obsessed with it. Now, I'm not gonna lie, I definitely, when we were going viral on that one reel, I checked it. I checked it quite often. Cause I was like, I love data and I love seeing how things happen. And so I definitely was checking it, but it wasn't. I think I wanted to see and I wanted to model this for all of you. I wanted to see like, okay, so we're getting, we got to a million. A million views. What are we getting from that? We got to 2 million views. What are we getting? We got to 5 million. What's happening? And I think it's great that we didn't grow 50,000 followers. I mean, I'd love to have grown 50,000 followers. If you're listening, come follow us at the product boss. If you're not already, let's just help that number. But I have gone viral back, back, back in the day. In 2020, we went viral with content of my husband and I being just funny. And we had 15.1 million views on this one reel when reels were just starting. And I think we gained 17,000 followers back then. Guess what? They weren't product based business owners. They were people who thought this couple was funny and they should follow. So I will get a lot of unfollows when I post content about business because there's a whole bunch of people who followed me back in the day that really probably should have never. So the idea here is that I want you to approach it with this idea of what is an achievable goal that can align with your business goals. So it might be I'm going to just test this muscle of posting once a day. I'm going to learn this one platform and I'm going to post once a day and I'm just going to see what it does. Am I growing my followers? And if I am growing with my followers, am I engaging with them? Are they engaging with me? Who are they? Pieces of content that I'm posting, are people engaging with it? When I then post, you know, post to sell product, are people engaging? Are they buying from it? If they're not, we probably need to come back to the drawing board and say, okay, here's the goals. We're trying this stuff out. We tried something new. It feels like it's working or it's not working. What do we change? And I want you to use each platform has analytics. I want you to track your performance and I want you to track the strategies. But don't get bogged down by the numbers. It's just data, right? It's not drama, math, not drama. It's just data. Because the thing is, and I saw this recently with another one of our students, so she is a really big business on Amazon. She's a masterminder of mine and she started to switch to trying to reel in more direct to consumer to her e commerce site. So this is a muscle she's not used to because she's made millions of dollars through Amazon, but not through her website. So she's been, we've been working together and I've been giving her these strategies and obviously she gets a little bit more because she's a masterminder, but she actually saw her follower count double in three weeks. And she's getting way more views and way more consumption of her content than she was before. But now what we need to do is now we have to. She's like, okay, I get this strategy. Now we have to do is we have to nail the type of content that she needs to create that's going to actually help them stay, that's going to have them engage and the next goal is going to be to get them to purchase. There could be two different things here. One, can we get them on an email list and hook them in the email? And two, can we get them to buy whether it's from, you know, the platform shops like TikTok shops or Instagram, or is it moving them over to buy from your actual website? So these are all just parts of the strategy of what to do. But the idea here is that I just want you to measure the success that you're having. What are the small wins that you can find? Oh, I used to only get 24 plays on my reels and I'm getting 124 and I'm getting 200 and I'm getting 600. You know, is it that like Wow. I wasn't moving at all in my following, but now I am. Is it okay? I'm starting to really understand this platform. I'm not just wasting time and consuming, but rather I'm using this as a learning moment to think, okay, okay, I'm getting it, I'm getting it. I'm going to post more. And these are all just those small steps in the right direction, but just start to take action. I think that's the biggest point. What I'd love for you to do is to make social media not suck. I just love for you to approach it with a new perspective. Perhaps approach it with curiosity. You know, are my customers here? What kind of content are my customers consuming? What do they want to see from me? What gets them to like or share? What gets them to comment or engage? Just start to play with these platforms with curiosity rather than dread. Because when you start to come into it from a curious perspective, I know you're all curious because you've all been curious enough to figure out, what am I going to make? How am I going to make it? How am I going to sell it? How am I going to grow this business? You're curious. These are thoughts other people, other people that watch Shark Tank and they're like, I had that idea, but they never did anything with it. You, my friend, are curious and an action taker because that's why you're here. So start to play with that, with social, get curious and make it fun. Don't make it a source of stress. And if you want to see what we're doing, if you want to follow along, if you want to see the way that we engage, please make sure that you follow us over on Instagram at the product boss, because that is where we hang out and where we're really actively working to grow our audience, our engagement, our email list, consumption, all of it. Right. I think you'll get a lot of clarity there. And if you're continuing to say, like, great, but this is great, but I need more help. I'd love for you to consider the Standout Society, which is our brand new program that we've just launched. And it's really going to get you to the place that you're hoping to get, because I'm going to break all of this down and then help you come up with a marketing strategy that, that you can do in an hour, a week. And I think that is one of the biggest things holding us back because I know you're all very busy. All right, my friends, let me know Send me a DM on Instagram. If there's anything that you know you've gone viral on or had some sort of success, I love to see it and I'll talk to you in the next episode. Thank you for being here and listening all the way through the Product Boss Podcast. If you love our show and it has helped you in any way in your business, would you mind doing two things for us? Subscribe to the show so you never miss an episode and leave us a review. Reviews help other product entrepreneurs know that this is the place to be to grow their businesses and realize that they're not alone. 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