MBA1725 Q&A Wednesday: Will Quitting Social Media Kill My Business?

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Hey, welcome to the $100 MBA Show. We're helping grow your business as our business every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software business I started with my partner back in 2014 and today's lesson is a Q and A Wednesday. Less on Q and A Wednesdays. We answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. Today's question is from Fabian and Fabian asks, hey War. Love the podcast. Love all the golden nuggets you drop on the daily I gotta be honest with you, I need to get off social media. It has totally given me so much anxiety. But I'm afraid to quit social media and it will have a really negative effect on my business. Whether that's sales or marketing or just connecting with my audience. Will quitting social media kill my business? Would love any advice on this topic. I know that you got off social media for a period of time. I'd love to hear about your own experience. Thanks a lot for everything you do Fabian. Great question Fabian. Love the fact that you've reached out. You are not alone. A lot of people do complain and suffer from the same things that social media does to you. Sometimes I just feel like biologically we are not not built to be able to sustain long periods of social media exposure. So in today's episode I'm going to share with you my own experience of getting off social media. I took a very long sabbatical in 2017, I should say a sabbatical from social media. But I also want to offer some alternatives to just going off cold. Maybe some things you can try at the start so you can mitigate any risk that is out there in terms of it affecting your business if you leave. So we got a lot to cover in today's Q and A Wednesday. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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I want to begin today's lesson. My answer to today's Q and A Wednesday's question Will quitting social media kill my business? With my own personal experience of stepping away from social media now, I should say everything I share on this podcast is basically me sharing what worked for me. Just sharing my own experiences. This is not a guarantee what worked for me is going to work for you. Having said that, I can help you by giving you some things to look out for, giving you some things that you can try some options. Sometimes just knowing you have options is going to allow you to make the right decision for you and your business. Be careful of anybody who gives you blanket advice. There's no guarantee right way to do everything in life. Your job as an entrepreneur is to educate yourself, know what your options are and make the right choice for you. The choices I made were the choices that were right for me. You see what I'm saying? And what I want out of life and my business may not be the same thing as you. So let me share with you what happened in 2017. I decided to step away from social media for 18 months. I actually committed to a year, but I pushed it for another six months. So for 18 months I was totally off social media. This doesn't mean I closed my accounts. It just meant that I had my account active. And when I say my account, I mean my personal Account that's under my name. We'll talk about the business social media accounts in a moment. But my own personal social media, I just posted a message, I pinned it to the top. Hey, I'm stepping away from social. I'm taking a break. Please excuse me. If you message me, if you at me, I will not respond because I'm taking a break and I really needed to do that. In fact, if I back up even a little bit before that, I was having a hard time handling all the social media conversations. I was trying to keep up. Checking social every single day, getting really, really stressed out because of it. It's a very demanding beast, social, because once you are a part of it, you're kind of obliged to participate, to respond to people, especially these people, your customers, right? If they're asking you questions on your own personal page or commenting on your. So once you opt into social, you are inheriting some responsibilities and it was just getting too much for me. And I was having a chat with a buddy of mine, Matthew Kimberly, awesome entrepreneur, awesome guy. Check out his podcast, the how to Get a Grip podcast. Really cool. And Matthew was just like, it sounds like you just need to take a break, dude. And I took his advice. Now I took a long term break. I just decided I'm going to take a break, that's it. And I committed to a year to see how I feel. Now that's what I did. And my business was not affected at all, actually. And if I was completely honest, if anything, it was a positive effect because I had more time to focus on my team and my products. You don't realize how much social media sucks from you in terms of time. It's a time suck. And I really felt so much better once I made that decision. And within days I was feeling just physically better. Being off social, that's my own personal experience and I really didn't miss it much. I had more time to read and to exercise and just to be present in the moment. I know you've heard this probably a million times from other people, but that's my experience. Now the social media business pages were still active, but I made sure I wasn't a part of that. I had team members that were responsible for that, customer service managers, customer service agents that can take care of your business profiles and business profiles in terms of answering people that can be handled by somebody who's far more qualified than you as the CEO, as the leader of your company, as one of the founders, you don't know the ins and outs of the daily workings of your product and service as much as somebody who does it day in and day out. So leave the replying and commenting or applying to comments to somebody on your team. That's what I did and it worked out brilliantly. Now, in terms of posting online, I didn't post of course on my personal pages, but on the business pages. Again, somebody on my team would create the content and they would actually schedule the posts with Buffer. And that leads me to my first piece of advice or maybe your first option when it comes to this topic. Quitting social media. When it comes to quitting social media with your business, I recommend you take it in stages. I don't recommend what I did when it's just cold turkey. I'm off for a year and I just handed over things to my team that worked for me. But what I would recommend for other people to try first is to test it out. Be off for a week and take that week to see if you can train your team to take care of the things while you're away for that week. So, meaning replying to any comments on social media platforms and posting on your behalf and taking a break from your own personal profiles, especially if just a week is super simple. And what I did when I was off for a year, I actually put in my pinned post, hey, I'm off social. If you have any questions or need anything from my two brands, my two businesses, Webinar Ninja and the $100 MBA, here are the emails you can email. Here are the people that you can speak to to solve any issues you have. So that way I'm not like kind of leaving people high and dry. This is who you speak to. If you want help, this is the person that's going to help you. Some people may know me personally and would come to me personally for help and I kind of just, you know what, said I was happy to help you in the past, but now I'm off social, here's somebody else that I'm going to pass you on to. So experiment for a week and in that week you can train people to do things on your team. If you don't have somebody on your team, you can definitely hire a freelancer, upwork freelancer part time. You don't even need that much time. They can just spend one hour a day replying to people once a day in another hour basically posting for you if you want them to post manually, if not, they can schedule it using tools like Buffer or Meet Edgar. These are very easy tools to use to just schedule posts to go on your social media platforms on the regular. You're talking about 10 hours a week for a freelancer that's very, very easy to find and really low cost. In that week, you're going to find out did your business collapse? Did you see a dip in sales dramatically because of this or were things fine? So you really get a ch to see in a short term amount of time, hey, are my fears justified or are they just in my head? Your next step is to turn that week into a month. And you know where I'm going with this? A month into three months and three months into a year. And that's really my recommendation when it comes to easing off social. I already know some really successful entrepreneurs, people like Corbett Barr, who are totally getting off social, like closing their accounts. Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, LinkedIn. I think he's staying Twitter. But the point here is that he knows his business. He knows he doesn't get much business by being on these platforms. Or at least the benefit don't outweigh the negatives. You need to know your business. Do you get most of your clients from social by you just interacting with them? If you don't know that for sure, if you don't have the data to prove that, then that's just an assumption that you're worried about, hey, I'm going to lose my business if I'm not on social. Find the data to prove that assumption. This is your business. Find out. No one else is going to know that answer but you or somebody that you find that can look into that for you. But you have to make that happen. You have to get that information. Having said all this, here's a piece of information we always forget about. The Internet is relatively new and social media is even newer. It's within like a decade or so. That means everything before 10 years ago. That means every business before 10 years ago was functioning without social media, okay? They were making money, they were making sales, even online businesses, okay? It's possible for you to run a business without social media. One of the most popular copywriters and marketers of all time, Dan Kennedy, is not on social media. He's barely on the Internet, right? And yet he's one of the highest paid marketers, online marketers that we know.

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Podcast to wrap up today's Q and A Wednesday's Question Will quitting social media kill my business? I have one amazing resource you should check out if you want to go down this path. You want to experiment with this. If you want to be educated on this topic, I want you to go deep on somebody named Cal Newport. The first thing you can do is easily check out his TEDX talk. Just search Cal Newport TEDX Talk. The title of the video is why you should quit social media and it's just gonna inform your decision. This is a very easy step to take. It's about 15 minutes long, this video. Really good. Next step is I would recommend his book Deep Work. It's one of my favorite books of all time and it explores how well you can function as an entrepreneur, as a creative, as a business if you allow yourself to go into deep work without being distracted. Long periods of deep work. And lastly, he has another book called Digital Minimalism that I would recommend as well. It's a definite read. If you're struggling with social media and technology in general. Listen, technology should be a tool to help us to improve our lives. And for the most part it does do that. But it's our job as the people that use the technology to not use it if it's not helping us, if the negatives outweigh the positive. And only you are going to know that if you actually experiment with this, if you go for that one week trial, then a month, if you read these materials, if you check out this video, if you automate as much as you can with things like Buffer and Meet Edgar or automate by having somebody on our team do what you need to do, you have options. Okay. I remember when I was back in 2017, that story I shared with you. At the top of the episode, I felt trapped. I felt like I had to be on. And then I realized I. I don't. I don't have to be on. And the best way for you to convince yourself of that is to just try to go off. Just try. It's just that simple. Thanks so much for listening. If you have a question you want to ask here on Q and A Wednesday, just go ahead and email me over at omar100-mpa.net and we'll make sure to answer it right here on Q and A Wednesday. If you love this podcast, make sure you hit subscribe so you never missed the next episode. Before I go, I want to leave you with this when you start this experiment. When you try to get off social media, the first thing I recommend is deleting the apps off your phone. The mobile phone was really what made social media so popular because it's just right there in your pocket all the time. You know, it's just a reach away. Your phone is always, you know, within your proximity. So if you delete the apps from your phone, you'll find yourself like, I don't want to go to my laptop to check it. Yes, I know you can go into the App Store and download it and then sign up again or sign in again. But that's a lot of steps and enough time for you to think about it that maybe I don't want to do this. Deleting the apps off your phone really helps. The other thing is that on the computer, on your laptop desktop, there's a great tool called Newsfeed Eradicator. It's a Chrome extension. It's definitely worth it because at least what it does is that eradicates your newsfeed on Facebook, on Twitter, on Instagram. So you open up those sites, those apps on your browser, and you really don't see anything other than your notifications. You can see your notifications, that's pretty much it, your profile. But you don't see anything in the newsfeed, which is usually where you waste most of the time. So that's another tool you can use as you're moving closer to getting off. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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