MBA2538 Why I’ve Changed My Mind on Social Media Marketing

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Hey everyone, welcome back to the Hundred Dollar MBA show. And in today's lesson, you will learn why I've changed my mind on social media marketing. If you've been listening for a while, if you've been following me for a while, you know that I was a total hater when it came to social media marketing. I thought it was a waste of time, a distraction, just a place where people showed off. But my perspective has shifted and I want to share why. But first, did you know that 73% of marketers believe that social media marketing has been somewhat effective or very effective for their business? This is a study done by HubSpot and it shows that social media isn't just about selfies or status updates or, you know, flaunting your latest vacation. It's a powerful tool for growing your brand and your business. And I'm a bit late to the game because of my biases of the past, but I'm going to show you why I changed my mind and what I'm doing about it now. So I'm going to share with you how I came to realize this and the benefits it brought to my business over the last six months of me going really hard on really building my social media presence. Let's get into it. First, let's define what social Media marketing really is. And the definition I like is using social media platforms to connect with your audience to increase website traffic and then eventually increase sales. Now, this involves a lot of things, but I just want to just clarify that social media, in my opinion, is a great place to do content marketing to create awareness for your brand. It's not where you actually do. Eventually you will build enough trust with your audience for them to go to your website, join your email list, and they'll eventually buy down the road. But a lot of people try to sell on social media and that's not really effective. You really want to use it as a marketing tool, not a sales tool. This means you need to create high quality content, listen to your audience, engage with your followers, and analyze the results that come from this. Right, from running social media efforts in terms of posting, but also if you do any kind of advertisements, any page ads, what the results of those ads are as well, it's not just posting and just kind of leave it and hopefully people watch it. You want to make sure it's engaging. You want to make sure you engage with people with that post. So let's talk about why I was so skeptical, right? I was really skeptical about using social media as a major part of my marketing efforts because I just saw it as a distraction from the real work of building a business. Now, I'm not saying that's no longer true. There is a lot of distraction out there in social media and it can distract you from what's important. But I'll talk a little bit later about how to not do that and how to control the time you spend on social media. But generally I felt like it was a place where people were more interested in just showing off and showing their latest cars and their latest vacations. And I kind of was really turned off by. It was like really cringe for me. But then I was like, okay, there's gotta be something here. There's gotta be something other than just showing off. There's gotta be a better way to use it in a way that's comfortable for me. I also thought there was like this constant noise of superficial interactions with people that I hardly knew. And I just thought it was a poor investment of time and resources. But here's the thing. I was wrong. And the thing about business is that often you will find that you are wrong about something. This is called growth, right? When you grow, you change and you realize, oh, I was actually wrong about that. There's some things I can do differently. So I'm going to show you firsthand how social media can be leveraged to do it right, to get real results, to get tangible results for your business and your brand. So just for context, I've been taking my social media presence and the brand I'm presenting on social media really seriously for the last four months or so. And there's a lot of work involved in doing this. But I've seen some momentum, some benefits that I want to share with you from. Okay, so let me share some of the benefits I find that really help build a great business and brand that I was kind of overlooking. The first one is brand affinity. Right? Brand affinity is basically building connections with your audience, allowing people to know, like and trust you. The more and more you hear from brand, the more and more you like the brand. You start to understand the brand. You start to kind of see it as a household name. And this doesn't happen by accident, it happens by repetition. And social media gives you a lot of reps, especially because you got so many platforms now. You have Instagram, you got Facebook, you got, you know, X, you have threads, you have LinkedIn, you have all these platforms where you can really start building a brand and reaching different audiences in different ways, whether through video, through images, or through short texts with, you know, X or long essays or whatever it might be. The point here is, is that if you want to build a long lasting brand and well known brand, you're going to need to be out there and you need to constant publishing your brand and what you're all about and what your values are as a brand as well, what you stand for. If you do this long enough and consistently enough, you become a household name, you become a well known name in your industry, in your niche, in your area of expertise. For example, I've been sharing valuable content and engaging with my followers on platforms like X, like Instagram. And I've seen noticeable increase in my brand affinity. People are seeing my brand more often and they'll come up to me in person and say, yeah, I've seen you on Twitter, I've seen you or on X or I've seen you on Instagram, I've seen you on Facebook. Just because I am publishing consistently, when I say consistently, I'm talking about every single day I'm publishing pieces of content. That way the algorithm of these platforms understand that hey, I am a regular publisher, push out my information. They love consistency. And the more consistent you are and the higher quality your content is, the more you will get exposed to new audiences. And this is great. And I'll talk a little bit more about paid ads as well. Are boosting your posts so you can get even more exposure. It's actually a pretty low cost way to build your brand, but more about that later. But generally when you have a better, well known brand, people feel more comfortable to connect with you, to buy from you, to transact with you, to get on your email list. Right? Because you're not a mystery. It doesn't sound like a scam because I've seen you everywhere. Now I mentioned paid ads and paid ads and brand affinity go hand in hand. Let me show you what I mean. When you publish regularly on social media and you publish great content on a regular basis, every single day, people get to know your brand, get to know who you are, your logo, you understand what your business is all about. Now when you publish a paid ad, that ad will convert much better. People will click on that ad because they have seen your brand before, they know who you are. They're not like who's this person they're not seeing for the first time. So the conversion rate of that ad is much higher and therefore you pay less for the ads and therefore you get more leads or more sales per ad. I know this because you spend tens of thousands of dollars every single on paid advertising and we find it converting better when we publish regularly on social media. Now the second reason why I've changed my mind on social media and I'm taking it seriously now, is this concept of taking control of the narrative, shaping your own story. Listen, if you don't take control of your own story, whatever is out there, what other people are going to say about you is what the story is going to be. Okay? Social media gives you the power to control the narrative of your brand. You can share your story, your successes, the challenges you have, your vision for the future future and how you want to help your audience. You can shape the narrative of what your brand is all about. So whenever there's a new development in the business, I use social media to share first. So if I'm trying something new out, for example, when I launched a YouTube channel, I put it on X and said, hey, I'm starting a new YouTube channel. It's the first week of me being a YouTuber and I've crossed a hundred subscribers, you know, wish me luck. I asked people for advice and I just share along the journey so people know what I'm doing. There's no point in doing things if you're not going to share it. You got to use that as a marketing and this is what social media is really good at, is kind of building in public and sharing your journey so people can understand what you're doing and they're kind of excited and rooting you on gas, snacks, tolls. This trip is draining my wallet.

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Reason why I changed my mind on social media is content marketing and lead generation. The thing is that I never saw social media really helping me out when it came to driving traffic to my website and getting me email signups or growing my newsletter. I never really saw it because I never was really consistent with social media. That's the first thing. The second thing is that I really didn't make an effort to create high quality content. I would tweet something out one day. I'll share a picture here, maybe share a video once in a while. But I wasn't ever consistent and I was never creating high quality consistency. And this is really important. And eventually what I did is I just hired a team to help me do this because I needed somebody to help me be consistent. And I'm great at creating content, but I want somebody to kind of edit it, put it out there and then actually my team does all the publishing for me, so I don't need to actually remember to publish. So. So if you have a hard time with this, get some help, okay? Because once you start publishing content consistently, this is when the traffic starts. I've noticed that our traffic has increased in the last four months up to 15%. And the traffic sources are from social media. People are going to my link in bio, people are clicking on the link, they're going there, signing up for our waiting list, they're signing up for our newsletter, they're signing up for whatever we have to offer. They're, you know, subscribing to the podcast. There's a lot of interesting things that are happening now because, because I am publishing regularly on social media and I'm really emphasizing quality of content now. We could have published 4, 5, 6 pieces of content every day, but instead we're trying to get really good content, but publish every day. Keep it consistent, keep a high quality, and that's my advice to you. But it's a really good engine when it comes to content marketing that I didn't really see. I kind of underestimated it. A very easy example of us driving traffic to our site and creating this content marketing machine is every time we publish a new podcast episode, we take some clips from that episode and we publish that on social media to promote the new podcast episode, right? This increases traffic to our website, increases listenership to our podcast, gets us new subscribers to YouTube, it gets people to join our email list. It does a lot of things. And just because I am publishing regularly content from the actual episode, I've already published the episode, so I might as well just republish it. A quick tip here. When it comes to content marketing, video is where it's at. Okay? A big reason, I would say one of the main reasons we move from just audio to audio and video for the podcast after 2,500 episodes in 10 years is because when you have video content, it's easy to promote the content, right? Because people have a visual of what is there, right? So even though if you're listening to this podcast, we have the podcast on audio format, but we're able to promote the audio podcast through video with the video clips. Because you also have an episode on video, right? So you can check out our video podcast as well on YouTube. Another reason why I changed my mind is that I'm starting to use social media to test ideas and topics, right? Social media is a great way to get real time feedback. As you start to grow following, you'll start to get an engaged following of people that are happy to help you out in creating great content. One of the biggest benefits I've discovered is using social media to test ideas with polls, to get instant feedback from people. Even just a question, open ended question for people to answer. It gives me an understanding of is there interest in, in this idea before I start digging in and building out that content, whether it's a blog post or an episode, or even a product. So, for example, before you launch a new course, I would recommend you share some snippets or ideas on social media to gauge the interest of this topic, of the course that you're thinking about creating. And then you can adjust the content or not do the course at all if there is no interest. Okay? And this allows you to save time, save headaches, save money, and if there is interest, you know exactly how to narrow down that course topic to actually hit a nerve and resonate with people. The fifth reason why I changed my mind on social media and why I am leaning into it is something I can't deny. Something that has helped me, social media has helped me with in the last decade is growing my network. Social media is a great way to build relationships. I've met so many people, especially on platforms like X and Instagram. There's a lot of sharing of ideas, especially X. But social media has been instrumental in growing my network. It's not just about the followers we have. It's about building relationships and chatting with people, DMing people, getting to know people, supporting their work. I mean, think about it. You have access to some of the best entrepreneurs, influencers, thought leaders in the world and you could just, you know, reply to their tweets. So simple. There's so many people I've connected with that have become collaborators, that have partners in launches. I've had even friends, people that have gone on vacation with that I met originally on social media. Now, we all have heard your network is your net worth. So use social media to grow your network, right? And now it's not the end all and be all and okay, you're going to have friends online. No, you start the relationship online, you build that relationship, build that trust. And then when you meet in person, you kind of know each other already and you solidify that relationship when you meet in person. Now, I want to leave you with a bonus tip. Okay. One of the things that really helped me a mindset shift, right? And a practice that I really tried to uphold, and that's be a creator, not just a consumer. You want to maximize your social media efforts. Focus on being more of a creator of content and posting that content rather than just a consumer of content, right? Make sure you're spending more time sharing and writing and communicating and replying to people and jumping into conversations than just scrolling and consuming content. It's easy to get sucked into the scrolling, you know, the endless scrolling in your feed. But it's not where the value is for you as a business. Business owner. The real power of social media comes when you consistently create and share content that add value to your audience and then engage with your audience through that content. So instead of spending an hour consuming content, spend that hour creating content, writing a long form on X, sharing a video or creating a video and sharing it on Instagram, going live. Spend that hour being a creator. So if you've been on the fence about social media marketing like I was, I hope this episode has given you a new perspective. You know, social media isn't just a place for distractions and showing off. Okay. It's a powerful tool that I have found that can help build your brand, generate leads, test ideas, grow your network, and so much more. But the key is to be strategic, right? And remember to focus on being a creator and not just a consumer. Thanks for tuning into the Hundred Dollar MBA show. I hope you found this episode valuable. And if you want to embrace more valuable lessons, if you want to dig into more topics on building that business that you then go ahead to 100 MBA net we have over 2,500 business lessons for you to check out. I'm Omar Zinhom and I'll see you in the next episode.

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