189 Social Media - Post As Yourself or As Your Firm?

We're running through some practical social media advice for your accounting firm today. One of the most common sources of analysis, paralysis. Do I post as my firm? Do I post as myself? Do I start this other account? If I already have an account with a following here and I don't wanna have to rebuild that thing from scratch, we're gonna run through that today. The reason we care about social media as an accounting firm is not everybody needs more clients, but everybody needs better clients. And the way that you find people these days, new media, social media, YouTube, influencers, newsletters, it's how people make buying decisions and immersing yourself and just kind of some real basic level social media strategy. It's not a high bar for accounting firms, but just getting to grips with a bit of this will actually make it easier, make it less intimidating and make the efforts you're putting into that stuff more impactful. Today I'll tell you about a strategy conversation I had with a software company this week and go through two real life examples of people who have made that hard decision of whether or not to split their social media. But like presence between the personal, between the business, different specializations and all that. I want to start with this because when we get really nuanced on social media stuff, it can be overwhelming. Every single social media post, every single thing you do can be further optimized. Like there is no such thing as a perfect post. And it's one of the reasons why I enjoy this. You're always learning new things, always picking up tricks, advice from other people versus stuff that you're learning in the wild, just with what works and what doesn't work. But for me, the more I was just familiar with like the way folks thought about this, the way that people strategized around it, the less spooky it was for me, the easier it was and the more it felt like when I did invest a little bit of time into it, it was worthwhile. So don't overthink all of this. What we're gonna go through is like the thoughts that I have when I consume things, not that they're necessarily always going to be better, but like things to weigh when you're considering how to put stuff out there because you have everything that you need up in that noodle already. You have the expertise. We're just trying to figure out what's the most efficient way to put that stuff out in a way that makes me more visible to the world and will attract higher paying clients to my firm. So I was talking with the software company recently and they have a big main YouTube channel and they're doing some new initiatives and it is a, it's a software company that works both direct to small businesses, but also has an accountant channel and they're putting together some new programming for accountants. And so they're faced with the question, we have this main channel on YouTube with a whole bunch of subscribers. Do we put the accountant facing content on this YouTube channel because it has a bunch of subs already, or do we really go out as a big reputable brand and build a new channel from scratch? Right. And for a good sized software company that's like struggling through this decision, I think there's an element of, well, we already have this big impressive thing and we're going to pour everything into that because it looks impressive. Would it look funny if this software company had a YouTube channel with like no subs or a thousand subs? Right? Like you're almost too big for that. And people, this is like one of the traps of having a successful channel. People do the same thing where they're like, yeah, but I really know what I'm doing and I already have the successful channel. So I can't, I really can't imagine going and building a new channel from scratch because I don't know. And it's probably an ego thing, maybe because I'm better than that. I don't want people to think I have a channel with only a few subs. If you look out there at like successful YouTube businesses, it's very common these days for YouTubers to have a number of channels. And if you can build a channel to a successful level, like if you have the framework, you know the recipe, you can absolutely do it again. There's lots of examples of this out here, but where this software company landed was we don't want to build a new YouTube channel from scratch. We want to put this accountant facing channel onto our own like main primary channel, which most of the audience there is just going to be small business owners. Is this a good idea or not? One, I'll give you one thought on why maybe it's not the hugest deal, but another thought on how this could potentially backfire. So if this company starts posting to social media or sorry, to YouTube their main channel, where the current subscriber base, like that person's not gonna be interested in accountant facing content. A risk here is you have folks that are subscribed to that channel and have notifications enabled and, and they then post a video that is for accountants to that channel. But the small business owners that have notifications enabled get that notification, hop in and watch the video very quickly, see that that is not a video for them, and they bounce. And the risk of this is if you have a bunch of people coming into a video and immediately bouncing, the platform itself will think that this is not a video ultimately that I should be serving up for people, because all the folks I have shown it to, they immediately bounce. And so in some ways this can actually make it less likely to put your video in front of more people compared to if you originally posted this video in a different channel. Now that is something to consider because people bouncing will hurt the likelihood that that video is served up to more people. Now, on the flip side of that, YouTube is increasingly not really paying attention to who a viewer is subscribed to or not. So these days, if you go to your YouTube homepage, so that homepage actually isn't impacted at all by who you are subbed to, there's an entirely different page that is not the homepage that will show you videos from folks you're subscribed to, but all the homepage is doing and all the video recommendations on the side of a video you're watching, all that is doing is serving up videos that it thinks you will like, regardless of whether you are subbed to that person. And that is determined from a whole bunch of factors from what other people liked who have, you know, similar viewing history to you. But ultimately is not driven by subscribers. So on the YouTube platform these days, really, subscribers is a vanity metric and a metric that isn't even representative of engagement. You'll see this on other social media platforms. You'll see people with huge numbers of followers. But the real thing that matters is if you look at their average post, what sort of engagements are they getting post to post, you'll see people with huge follower counts, oftentimes celebrities, but they get very little engagement with their posts. Now social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, who you are subscribed to does still impact what shows up in your feed. But something like TikTok, YouTube, those things like virtually all the videos you're being presented with aren't impacted by who you're following. So two sides to this argument for what's the right answer for this company? On the one hand, who you are subbed to less and less it like isn't mattering as much as it used to. On the other hand, if you do have people subbed who are who have notifications enabled and they immediately hop into any new video that you watch. And those small business owners then bounce because they see this is a video for accountants, it's not relevant to me. That can actually hurt the performance of that video. And even though, you know, those are views, somebody getting a notification and clicking into it, that is a view, those are not ultimately impactful views. Like, the goal of all this stuff and putting content out there is to provide value to people, is to, like, reach a level of depth with them that will impact their buying decisions and their, their perceived trust in you or in your product. And somebody hitting a video and then bouncing and getting one more view, the only thing that serves to do is increase the view count on that video. But even then, if you are, let's say that's all you cared about was the number of views on a video. Even then, I don't think posting to your existing channel will yield a higher view count, because as soon as somebody watches a video and then bounces, that video's put in front of fewer and fewer people. One other thing this, this company was working on was ultimately, when we start posting these videos, where is the right place to post them? Like, how do people find them? And so we talked about, you know, how do people find my videos? What are all the different places that that happens? And one of the things they're thinking of doing, which is very common, is anytime they publish a new video on YouTube, they post on all the social media channels to point people to that video. And these days that just doesn't work. And there isn't really a point to doing that. So if I post a video to YouTube, I'm not going to then also post to LinkedIn and say, hey, go watch this thing on YouTube, or put a trailer on LinkedIn and say, hey, go post this thing on YouTube. Because all the social media channels are smart enough to not send people off of their platform. All these platforms make money by people hanging around for a long time, getting served ads and not going to other places. So if there's something in a Tweet, in a LinkedIn post, something like that, that's taken somebody to an external site, that post is going to be penalized in the algorithm how frequently it's put in front of people. That's how all social media platforms work. Like, they will all have, like, different ways and weights and how extremely they do this. But that is the reality of posting to social media, is those platforms will optimize people's feeds for what keeps them on that platform. And so if I go through the work of making a Video that I'm going to post to YouTube, going to post the same video to LinkedIn, I'm going to post the same video to Twitter or maybe they're, I don't know, you could change it a little bit if you wanted to like optimize it for that platform. But I'm going to literally upload that same video to those social media platforms. All social media platforms are leaning into video right now because it is a, like a longer form way of keeping people on the platform. Even TikTok is leaning into longer form video. And so right now you get a bit of a bump if it is a video. Like the social media platforms want people consuming video. So if you compare posting a link to YouTube on LinkedIn and that getting penalized versus posting the video itself to LinkedIn and that getting boosted because LinkedIn wants people hanging around for a long time watching videos, that is the much better way to go. And if you think of what the counter arguments to this could be, it is stuff like well we want everybody to go consume it in one place so that we get the view count there and so that we get the subs up there. They're all vanity metrics. The goal in being visible online is being useful, is providing value. All of the razzle dazzle, vanity things come from providing value like forcing folks to a platform or doing those like those are all, those are all very short term things to do. You want to play the long game of doing what ultimately will provide the most value to the most people. And that's just posting that wherever it makes sense. I even go a step further on LinkedIn or Twitter I will put like a text summary of the useful things from the video there. And some people may say, well don't write out what the video's about cause I want them to watch the whole video. I put so much work into the video gang, it doesn't matter if I catch one more person who wouldn't have watched the video but will watch the text instead. That's good, that's, I just gave that person value, that's all that matters. Don't get hung up on the vanity metrics, get hung up on reach, get hung up on the things that will get an algorithm to serve that up to more people. But don't get hung up on number of subs, number of followers, that sort of thing. So many of these viewer accounts are subscribers from, you know, years ago and zombie accounts and, and accounts that will not actually engage with content. And it, it is like for whatever reason it is hard to not get caught up on those vanity metrics, but it's just something to be mindful of. It's not ultimately a yardstick of how much you're helping people. This episode is sponsored in part by Cloud Cloud Accountant staffing. You'll know I'm a big advocate of hiring offshore. One of the biggest changes I've made in my firm, we transitioned a Legacy firm from 100% onshore local hiring to 100% distributed US and then 100% distributed globally. Hiring, and honestly is the best thing we did. It virtually alleviated all of our hiring pains, completely changed how we thought about staffing projects and the type of work that we wanted to bring on. Because you know what, the folks we hired offshore, really freaking good. A lot of misconceptions around the type of people that you hire offshore because your enterprises will oftentimes use offshore folks for like menial work. Absolutely not the case. There are tens of thousands of people working for big four accounting firms. You know, offshore outside the US you can get folks that can do anything from tax to junior level stuff to super senior level stuff. But try to do that yourself. Figure it all out yourself. That's going to be hard. It's going to be scary. Really good place to start, Cloud accountant staffing. They will hold your hand through that process. Their story is super simple. An accounting firm in the US hired a bunch of people in the Philippines, fell in love with them, but didn't fall in love with the fees they were having to pay to the staffing companies that were managing these employees. So they built their own solution and now they're starting to pull other accountants in. I'd encourage you. A big tipping point for me was when I was like, I'm going to stop being opinionated on this and just try to learn. And so I talked to the other practitioners, I talked to some of the vendors that would like, help you get into offshoring. That really opened things up for me. So if you've been on the fence, I'd encourage you to at least learn about it and you start heading down that path. Consider cloud accountant staffing. Today's episode. It's sponsored in part by liflow. Okay, so thought experiment. Close your eyes with me. Lean back in that chair. Oh yeah. Now imagine. Imagine if you had a single spreadsheet with a whole bunch of your clients, balance sheets and P&Ls all viewable in one place. They kept auto updating from QuickBooks so you could pull up a single spreadsheet and see all the clients that you want in a single place gang. This could be helpful for monitoring what shenanigans your clients getting up to for ensuring that they're keeping within like the profitability boundaries that maybe you had from a recent tax planning sesh. How's it possible? Through the magic of LifeFlow, they got a new consolidations product that makes it super easy to roll up a whole bunch of different sets of books in one place. And this is obviously helpful for like when you've got a client with a bunch of companies and you need to report that all at once. But it can also be helpful just for informational reporting to see all that stuff in a single spot. Otherwise you're doing the hokey pokey, hopping around, jumping into all these different QuickBooks files. And the really nice thing about this to me is because it's in Google sheets, you've got the entire ecosystem of other stuff that's built in Google sheets that you can like put on top of this. So like monitoring specific cells, all that in a single view across a whole bunch of different clients. How cool is that? Pretty nice. The same tech, right? Or I guess the same use case where folks are now using Live Flow to like review month end books for their clients, tying out balances, pulling in ledger detail directly from Live Flow. That stuff keeps syncing and keeps updating without you having to like pull in the numbers, print a PDF to like put in a work paper, that sort of thing. Be pretty nice, right? All those books in one place, you're thinking about it. Learn more about that one. Check out the link below to Live Flow in the show notes. Okay, two folks on the subject of like splitting accounts, like do I post to this new account or do I post on the existing one? Look at two folks who have kind of navigated this in the last six months. So one being Logan Graph. I suspect most of you know Logan already, but he's Got a, a YouTube channel about running his accounting firm, has done some awesome stuff where like every year he posts a video about how much money his YouTube channel has made. And he's done that now for years 1, 2 and 3. I think, honestly I think those videos from Logan are causing more people to start their own firm than pretty much anything else out there. So he's doing great work, but he's doubled down on content in the last few months and is now creating content not just for accounting firm owners, but for small businesses. So like Normie facing content, not industry facing content. And so he had existing channels that were industry facing like public accounting facing, he made the decision to start a new YouTube channel. It's called, I think it's called tax time. And that is his, like Normie facing content. So for all the reasons we just went through for this software company, probably not the best idea to start posting small business content to your accountant facing YouTube channel. Folks that subscribe, they subscribe for a specific format, for a specific expectation and they want, they want more, more of that same thing. And even though it feels like, oh, but I've invested this time and all that into this other like social media account, ultimately those vanity metrics, like if, If Logan has 3,000 or however many subscribers on his existing YouTube channel, none of those people are like small business owners who he's now trying to reach out to, or at least a very small number of them. So like, those numbers do not translate to what you're trying to actually do going forward. So it's much like your fitness goals. It's very easy to like, look at where you were and compare yourself to stuff in the past. But when it comes to social media, like, the only thing that matters is what you do next is what person could see that next post. And one of the nice things about social media, there are not many things in the world that feel like a meritocracy. You know how conference speakers get decided on, like people that get promotions within, within businesses. Social media is far from perfect in this regard, but it's a, it is still better than most things in life. And that's kind of the beauty of it is it doesn't matter what you look like, who you are, what your background is. If you can make stuff that's useful and can get people to stop scrolling, to engage with it, people will find you. And even though we're going to get into like nitty gritty of packaging and all these different things, like the overarching thing here, like is if your content is good, people will engage with it. Bigger, bigger issue than do I post on this YouTube channel or that YouTube channel, make a killer video, like, make it really good and make it really useful. That will always be the like, most important thing of all. And for you, the person behind it, putting it together, building that skill and just doing, doing it, whether it's video, whether it's social media posts, like, that is the, that's the bigger thing is this makes you more capable the next time you go to do it. And I think oftentimes we don't take that into account, how that's an investment in yourself to do that. These days everybody is in a battle for attention. Everybody is fighting for eyeballs, whether it's for your accounting firm, whether it's for your laundry detergent. And so the skill of attracting attention and like getting people to stop and see something, it's a very valuable skill that will aid you not just in whatever you're doing now, but but forever. So let's look at one one video from Logan's new Tax Time YouTube channel. So on his Tax Time channel he's been doing like a series of videos kind of about how taxes work. I'll just pull up a random one here. The video title is Things you should know about your taxes, Part three. I'll play the audio here so you can hear it. It's not that long.

Things you should know about Your Taxes Part 4 if your business hasn't had a profit in the last three of the last five tax years, including the current year, the IRS may call your business a hobby. Hobby expenses can only be deducted up to the gross income from the business activity and only cost of goods sold can be deducted. Think of cost of goods sold as the direct costs required to make or purchase something that a company sells. So if you buy Lularoe yoga pants to resell, the cost of the yoga pants are cost of goods sold. The IRS considers nine factors when determining if your business is actually a business and not a tax avoidance scheme or hobby. Hobby net income is not subject to self employment income tax, which is good news for once. How to avoid all this Just make more money than you spend. Please like and subscribe for more tax information.

You should know Just make more money. It's a very well done video. It looks great. The information is really good. So let's go through the three stepper when we review social media posts. How's it look? How's it hook and what's the nook? Okay, how's it look? How's the packaging? The video itself looks great. But whether we like it or not, 99.9% of people when something is served up in your feed will not stop scrolling to consume it. So packaging matters. And I know I don't like being clickbait any more than the next person. And there are slimy versions of clickbait and there are non slimy versions of clickbait, but packaging of a social media post of a video, all that stuff, it matters. It doesn't matter if you have the most novel, incredible, impactful thing in the universe that anybody has ever said. If nobody stops to read it and it doesn't matter. So the title of this video, things you should know about Your Taxes, Part 4 for Taxes deductions is a YouTube video. One thing to be mindful of is parts. And parts can actually create friction for viewers. So for example, let's say you put together some sort of three part blog post or something like that. You post the first one, Part one, great, that's fine. You post the second one. One thing to think about is if somebody just sees the second one and we all think that everybody's gonna see everything that we ever do and that will never be the case. Uh, most of the folks who follow you and all of that, like even if they're on that social media platform when you post it will still not be served up that thing that you posted. So if I post an eight part thing, like the reality is like nobody in my following is going to see all eight of those things. But let's say somebody sees the second one and they didn't see the first one. By having part two in the name, it actually creates more friction for that person to then go consume that thing, right? Because there's this sort of implicit assumption or this completionist inside of all of us that's like, oh, I'm, I'm missing something from before. And so parts generally will actually make folks less likely to consume a thing. Now there's still a place for content in chunks, but it's more like mid funnel. Like it's something like once somebody has gotten some, a degree of comfort with you. And so for example, let's say ultimately the goal is, is we're trying to get people onto an email list. We want them to be on our newsletter. And maybe that's the main call to action in our videos, is to subscribe to our newsletter for weekly tax tips or something like that. Well, when somebody subscribes to the newsletter, you now know that that person has like much higher intent, right? Like they are engaged. They're not just the random person that's scrolling by on the feed. So maybe at that point when they subscribe to the newsletter, you actually put them on a drip campaign, something that your email marketing tool will let you set up. Where as soon as somebody subscribes every week they get like a, a se. A sequence of emails. So there's email one, there's email two, there's email three. And maybe inside that email you're doing like an eight part series or something like that for, for folks with higher intent. That's not just anyone and everyone on social Media. I do think that stuff's helpful. Makes feel maybe a little more meaty in the context of something that you're just throwing out into the ether for anyone to consume. I would probably package it in a way that it's going to feel more standalone where people know that, okay, I can just sit down and watch this thing for 40 seconds and I'm going to get value. And this video actually lends itself really naturally to that. So one of the easiest ways to do this is just a list because when somebody clicks into a thing, you want to give them a reason to watch the entire thing. And that's what is great about lists. That's why Most of my YouTube videos now are like lists. If somebody's three minutes into a 10 minute video and they have no idea what's going to be useful for them in the last five minutes of the video, they're going to be less likely to actually stick around as opposed to if they have an idea or if you've teased something in the future that they haven't gotten yet that keeps them watching to the end. The game show on television. Like you watch to the end to see who wins and it's not revealed who wins until you get to the end. And if you have no idea what will be at the end, you may not stick around. So that's something that Logan brought up at some point in this video was, I think he said there were nine tests. And so the packaging, one way I would think of packaging this would be, you know, financially driven. Packaging is always going to be super high engagement. Do something like nine tests to prevent the IRS from taking away your business deductions or something like that. IRS is super clickbait too. People like engaging with, with IRS stuff. So that is the, how's it look? What is the packaging, the video itself. And like Logan's setup now is killer. And he's really good on video. Like he is very engaging I think sometimes. And I, I, this is something I always try to be super mindful of. In general, for me, nobody cares about the thing that I'm making as much as I do. And, and so sometimes we can overestimate how much people care about that thing that we're making or what we have to say, you know, and so if you give a, you know, a vague title like why should, why should they care about that thing just because you think it's important, you know, and that's a little different for your client base. You know, if somebody signed on to be a client, then maybe they should care about the things that you care about a little bit more. But we're reaching outside that now. We're reaching towards like anybody and everybody. Why should they care about the things that you care about? And like removing that, that ego and trying to be like ruthlessly helpful, I think has been a helpful framing for me to think how do I package this thing up in a way that's going to be helpful to anybody and give them a reason to watch. This episode is brought to you in part by Team up, helping you recruit top Filipino accountants without any ongoing monthly fees. The difference between Team up and all the other offshoring options. The Team up helps you hire staff directly. No middleman. You work directly with your new hire in the Philippines. Hire the person, not the company. Guys, gals, gang. Here's just a few reasons to hire directly. You have access to higher level talent. Makes sense. You have complete control over team culture and training. They keep 100% of what you pay them and it's a lot more affordable for you. So you can retain your team for the long term. Team up could source accountants with experience working at US or Australian firms familiar with tools like Xero, QBO and Dex. Also recruit specialist roles, team leaders, tax specialists, administrative assistants. Thought experiment. What if you had an executive assistant for the first time this tax season? Just just throwing it out there. What would they do? Start at that email video I did on the main channel recently. Get help with that stanky old inbox. I digress. Team up recruits these talented folks for a flat one time fee of 4,000 US American dollars. That's it. 4K one time. Somebody at Robert Half just did a spit take. Robert Half reference. We ever going to get Robert Half to sponsor this pod? Not anymore. And they can connect you with an affordable employer of record if you need help with payroll and compliance once you hire that person. Big fan of hiring in the Philippines. You know I did a bunch of that. Check out the link in the description to learn more about Tima. So that was the how's it look? The packaging Next Will it hook when it comes to short form video? I guess I didn't say that. This is short form video. People basically make it a decision about whether they're going to watch in two seconds or less. So here's the first two seconds of that video.

Things you should know about your taxes Part four.

It isn't necessarily giving you anything, right? So one thing with video that you want to be mindful of or actually with with any type of social media where it Takes an action to engage. And so that could be on LinkedIn or, or Twitter, like clicking the. The button to unfurl the whole post or something like that. Or in YouTube, clicking the video to watch it. Or on TikTok, like, staying to watch a video, you have to immediately give them a payoff for what they thought they were going to consume. So if I have a tweet and within the character limit of what gets shown in the feed, I say one thing and then I tease, here's what you're going to get next. And then they unfurl and it's something totally different. They're going to bounce. So the more that I can give them value immediately, like, the better. In this case, if we're going to build this around, like a list of nine things, I'm going to start with maybe like the most shocking of those nine. Like one the IRS says you have to this or that. Something that's going to be like, wow, really? Like, I didn't know that. Maybe the most surprising or something like that. IRS may have their list of nine reasons you don't have to do it in the same order. Right. So I'd probably build a hook around that. Like maybe the most surprising thing or, or maybe even a thing that I can tie into current events. Maybe I can tie it back to, you know, Taylor Swift's, you know, Kelsey jacket or something like that. But when it comes to video, you want to immediately show them that they're showing what, that they're going to get what they signed up for. And you got to be. Try to be useful as quickly as possible. And third, what's the nook? Who's it for? It's for people who want tax deductions. Anytime you're putting stuff out into the ether, just know the, the wider the thing you're trying to do and the less specific it is, the higher the bar is. So if you're trying to find small business owners of any kind, it's a pretty high bar. And Logan might be able to do that because Logan's really good at this stuff. The more general you get, the oftentimes the harder it is to build a business around it. Because if it's general, oftentimes you're trading depth for reach. And so a more specific version about this, of this, you know, say we're. Say we're trying to attract beekeepers. You can literally do the exact same content, but for beekeepers, nine tests the IRS says you have to pass to deduct your beekeeping expenses. It can literally be that. And the subject matter is pretty much the same. You're using like some of the vernacular that they do, giving examples that are specific to beekeeping. And that's all it takes. We know behind the scenes, like most of this stuff is not really that much different industry to industry, but just by making your messaging that much more specific, you're not going to find as wide of a group. But. But that's the beauty of algorithms these days, is they can find very specific pockets of people. And so if one person that runs a beekeeping business engages with this thing, when the algorithm is deciding whether to put it in front of more people, it will say, okay, this person has a beekeeping interest. So I'm going to put it in front of a bunch of people with beekeeping interests. In the grand scheme of things, it's not going to be millions of people. But that's not how accounting firms work. Like, it takes a very small number of killer clients to build a profitable accounting firm. So we don't need to be trying to go mainstream. I'll give that as general accounting firm advice. I don't know what Logan's ultimately trying to do with his small business YouTube channel. Other types of cool, more mainstream businesses to be built around that content that are not accounting firms. Last person we're gonna talk about, Brandon Hall. If somehow you're not following Brandon hall yet, he's got a great newsletter for accounting firm owners. He's very good at the engagement side of things, creating content that folks will engage with. If you're on Twitter, definitely give Brandon a follow a bit of his background. So he, he has a, a real estate podcast that they've done hundreds of episodes for, has a really good listenership and they've used that to attract folks to their accounting firm, which mainly works with different types of real estate folks. And Brandon is one of the OG guys who is really leaning into new media to build a client base. And so they've got this podcast. He's been super engaged in all sorts of private communities where these real estate folks hang out, just providing value. The firm makes a good amount of money selling like digital ass, selling actual products. And so historically he was posting to LinkedIn about real estate stuff. And when I first talked to him when he was coming to Twitter, his main focus coming to Twitter was posting stuff that is industry facing, like for accountants, for people running accounting firms. And that's historically been the case. And he's really good at it and has a lot of really helpful stuff to share I think his. I think he's running something like a $6 million firm now. So most of his content's more around, like, folks that are really looking to, to scale and get more to the mid size range. But lately he's been posting more general tax stuff to Twitter, so not quite as much accounting stuff. But I wanted to bring it up because he's settled into, like a format that is getting really good engagement. So we'll take a look at a recent post of Brandon's on Twitter that got about a quarter million views. And talk about the good and the bad of this. Like, is that a win? Like, just the fact that you got a quarter million views, like, is that a good thing? So here's the post. This business owner bought an Aston Martin and wrote it off $21,747 against his income, got audited, taken to tax court, and lost. Here's the story. And so in Twitter, you have a certain number of characters that will be displayed before you have to click the button to unfurl it and show more. And so the very last thing that you see before that cutoff is here's the story. This is like, in terms of how it looks, is like a perfectly crafted hook to get people to engage with it. And a big driver in what makes the algorithm put posts in front of people more is did somebody engage with it? And engage can mean a number of different things. Engage can mean did they pause on it for a couple seconds when they're scrolling through. But the best type of engagement is like, they clicked on it. And so if that's an image, did they touch the image to expand it? If it's a tweet that can be unfurled, that means did they like unfurl that tweet? If it's on Instagram, that could be. Did they swipe through all the pictures that were posted? That is engagement. And. And that is the strongest signal to the algorithm that it should be put in front of more people because you just actually engaged with it. And so optimizing to get people to engage on a thing or click on a thing. Whole bunch of ways to hack this from, like having a photo that has to be like expanded and zoomed in to see a thing. Like putting, don't pinch zoom in a tweet. I saw that the other day and I'm like, that's genius. Because it's gonna make people open the photo and then pinch zoom in on the photo to see what they're talking about. And that is an Engagement that is a strong signal to the algorithm. But here Brandon's like, crafted this, like, into those character limits where like the end is this cliffhanger and you're like, well, crap, now I got to, Now I got to read more to see what this has to offer. So it runs through kind of the backstory of, of this person that got their deduction taken away. Not a super novel thing like if you're an accounting pro, but it's very well written. Got about 350 likes, over two. Holy geez. Over 200 bookmarks. And so this post is a very well done post. Got great engagement and interestingly, he's actually done a bunch of posts using this exact same format over and over and over again. Tells the story on a single line, has a dollar amount, and then like the last kind of hook before you have to unfurl is here's the story. He's actually done this a bunch of times. A lot of them have gotten good engagement. And if you find something that works, do not be afraid to keep using it. Right. Tomorrow we're going to talk about newsletters and how newsletters are built around recurring formats. If you can find formats that work for you, like, having a specific format is a useful constraint to make it easier to create things that work within that format. And so what brand is doing here, like, this is a recurring format. You can do this every week, you can do this every Tuesday, Thursday. Maybe it's just going and finding a tax court case or a story from a client of yours where they got hoes, something like that. You plug it into the same framework and it makes the writing and the publishing of that much easier. Now, ultimately, the more interesting conversation here, I think, is when you make a post like this, how does this benefit you? Because there's a lot of, like, big social media accounts out there that are neither providing value to people nor like becoming a viable business. Now, this post, like this is providing value to people, but for Brandon and what Brandon's goals are are right now, and I don't know, so we're guessing here, but if you're running a Twitter account and your goal is just to get in front of more accounting firm owners, maybe it's like a mission thing, like, I just want to help these people. Or maybe you're building a consulting business and you're like, I want to, I want to get these in consulting engagements with this type of person. Or I want to attract more people to my newsletter, if that's all you're doing. Did this tweet help you probably not, right? Because it's not useful to the group of people that you're actually trying to attract. And it's really impressive and it got a bunch of engagement. But I think a really important aspect of like, meaningfully doing social media is being able to, like, get away from how good that stuff can feel. Those vanity metrics. Now, one version of this that Brandon has done a number of times now is something similar, but for real estate folks, and that is a killer format. Now, originally came to Twitter, I think, looking to engage with accountants. So speaking both to the real estate folks who can be clients and accountants through the same, like, social media identity. That's tricky. It's kind of like suboptimized for both of those audiences. But if you were just going all in on trying to attract, like, real estate folks, I love that format for getting people into, you know, stories about where cost segs went sideways or maybe they did cost seg study and then sold that property the next year and that was like, ended up being the wrong move story of somebody putting a building into an S Corp. A lot of cool ways you could do that. But ultimately, like a post being a. A post that a bunch of people engaged with does not necessarily mean that it is something that is helping you in where you're trying to go. This isn't about Brandon, Like, I don't know where he's trying to go right now. It is about it being a really good social media post. Like, it's very well done. But for you, it's ultimately about, like, is this going to get in front of the group of people that I want? The smaller that group can be, the lower the bar is for how good that content has to be. So if you're just getting started, the solution is not to go big, go general small business. That's what almost everyone gets wrong going into social media. So why they say it, it takes so darn long. And like, I just, I'm not getting the roi. And it's like, well, it's because you can't write better tweets than James. You're not going to win that game. But want to be the James clear of beekeeping. Now we're talking. But we still have that, that fear of that specificity, right? Maybe we should. I. I mean, I've. I shouldn't say this out loud. I often think, like, let's just make an accounting firm just for the content and like, share the whole journey. And that would probably be really helpful for people, but that's also a really big job that I'm not ready to commit to. But a social media account, that's less of a job, right? What if we just learned about beekeeping and started running this social media channel just to share that kind of week over week? I'm not sure if that's a good idea or not. I implore you, if you're thinking about doing social media stuff, even if your whole firm isn't super specific, do your social media stuff in a specific way. If you haven't totally niched down your firm yet, fine. But think about like what's the next best type of client you want to have? Maybe it is a luxury yacht builder, maybe it's a professional golf caddy. Like who's that next client you want to attract? Have a landing page for that profile of person that that avatar. And when you're coming to social media, think specific. I'm a broken record here, but when somebody is, you know, there's actually somebody walking through a bookstore actually is very similar to someone scrolling a social media algorithm because there's so many books on the shelves as you're walking by. Well, there's an endless feed on social media and most people are just flying through that thing and our goal is to be so specific to them that when they see that book on the shelf, they stop dead in their tracks and they're like, this is so specific to me that I have to stop and get it. And I appreciate this person making something so specific to me. If you ever write a book, that's the goals. Get that person in the bookstore to stop dead in their tracks or post it on social media. The same thing like, oh my gosh, somebody's like actually finally making stuff for me. I still get people that say that about my content. Thank you so much for making content about small firm running. And this is like a decent sized space. You can go even smaller than that. That's all I got for today. Hopefully you got a couple helpful tidbits out of there if you want me to roast your posts. If you've got content that you've put out into the wild, please share it. Shoot me a dm. Drop a comment. Love to give away some free advice here. That's really valuable for folks to hear that feedback I think because we're all kind of figuring this stuff out together. So if there's any way I can help you drop it in the comments. I'll see you in the next one. Tomorrow's going to be a good one.