Social Media Doesn't Work (Unless You Do This Instead)

So it's fair to say that social media doesn't work for most small business owners, especially for coaches, consultants, and freelancers, where we are effectively working in this highly competitive global marketplace, and standing out from the crowd is incredibly hard. Most of these small business owners are trying to grow their social media presence, i.e., their audiences, but they're doing it in a way which is one by one by one by one. I call it the Noah's Ark style marketing. And the challenge with that is you think it's going to be a quick win by posting on social media, and that's immediately gonna get people people to reach out and engage with you, and you may even get a lead from it. However, in my experience, it's a very long-term strategy growing audiences, especially if you want to get to somewhere in the order of even 1,000 people in your social media followings that are going to be regularly engaging with your content. It's a real struggle, and this is ultimately what led me to give up social media towards the back end of 2022 and completely change my strategy around marketing over the past 2 years. What that's led to is me doubling the revenue within my coaching practice and getting to a point where my Audiences are actually growing faster than ever. And ultimately, the mindset decision which I made was to stop getting attached to vanity metrics like likes, comments, and shares on my posts, and instead focus on how I can build a really hyper-engaged audience that will ultimately lead to organic growth in its own right without me having to constantly feed the meter each and every single day. And that's ultimately what it comes down to. It's your expectations around what you get out of social media that are holding you back, that are stopping you from growing your audiences, because you're so focused on getting clients from social media that you can't see that it's not working for you. So you blindly continue to carry on posting each and every day across all of the different social media platforms without really applying any kind of strategy to it. And what I've noticed is that when people are creating content for social media, they make that content so broad in order to attract as many different people as they possibly can do that they lose sight of the fact that really what the power in your audience is an engaged audience of just 1,000 people. And you can have a really successful coaching practice, consultancy, or freelance business, just with a really small amount of hyper-engaged audiences. I'm going to take you on a little journey now and demonstrate to you why social media just doesn't really work in 2025. And then a bit later on in this video, I'm going to explain some statistics and numbers which kind of backs up why social media isn't working as we anticipated right now. So I've got an exercise which I want you to do, and these are the 5 steps, 5 very simple steps for my ultimate marketing funnel that works each and every time. And what I want you to do is follow each one of these 5 steps explicitly as I give you the instructions. And from that, I'm going to demonstrate to you why social media doesn't work, because what I'm going to demonstrate to you is our perception of social media and how it should work compared to how it actually works. So here are the 5 steps. First step, I want you to get out your mobile phone. That's it, really simple first step. Get out your mobile phone, and then step number 2, what I want you to do is navigate to your favorite web browser app on your phone, whether it's Safari or Chrome or whatever it is. So there we go, 2 really simple steps, and I can guarantee already some of you haven't even bothered to get your phone out and start to follow these steps. So you can see that even with the best will in the world, my marketing strategy is starting to fail. But please bear with me. If you haven't done this already, get your phone out, jump onto Safari or Chrome, your favorite web browser app. Step number 3, what I want you to do in the web browser is go and jump onto Amazon, your local Amazon, whether that's amazon.com or .co.uk. That's it, that's step number 3 done in my perfect 5-step marketing funnel that works each and every time. Step number 4, I want you to go onto your search and type in take your shot. Yes, I know some of you are probably already seeing where I'm going with this, but please do bear with me. There is a point and a purpose to this which you'll see at the end of this exercise. And I'll explain the rationale behind it. So you've gone onto your favorite web browser, you've opened up Amazon, and you've typed in Take Your Shot. Hopefully you've found my book. And here is the final step in the 5-step perfect marketing funnel for your business. I want you to go and click on and buy the Kindle version of Take Your Shot. Now I've got a little prize for you, so if you have gone and done that, thank you very much. And yes, you can see that there's a little bit of a gimmick behind this. I've done this exercise hundreds of times in front of live audiences at conferences and events and things like that. Now the reason why I'm getting you to do this is because the vast majority of you who try to follow these instructions will have failed to buy the Kindle version of the book. And this is ultimately what's going on with your marketing strategy. So there will be some reasons behind this. There'll be psychological reasons because that you're— some of you will be watching this video going, why is Robin getting me to buy the Kindle? And you literally just won't do it despite the fact you might have watched hopefully a few of my videos and started to build up a bit of trust with me. You still won't trust me enough to go ahead and actually engage with this exercise and buy the Kindle version of the book. The next reason is technology. Despite the fact that Apple have spent billions of dollars on developing this piece of machinery here, the fact that Amazon has spent billions of dollars developing their, their website, their one-click, you know, buying experience on their website, some of you may not have either been able to buy the Kindle version of it, you may not have Kindle working on your Apple device or the Kindle app. So again, technology, despite the billions of dollars of investment, will stop you from being able to engage and buy that Kindle version of the book. Some of you may see it as a price blockage. You might see the price of the Kindle at £3.99 and decide that, well, I don't really want to spend that money today. So we all have free will and choice, but again, that's preventing you from following my perfect 5-step marketing funnel and buying my book. And this is ultimately what's happening on social media, is you're going out onto social media and saying, buy my stuff, buy my stuff, buy my stuff, but you're coming up against all of these hurdles which technology has actually introduced between you and I, barriers that are going to stop you from engaging with my content and potentially buying into my coaching products. For example, it might be down to trust, it might be down to technology, it might be down to buying inertia through pricing, and it might just be because you can't be bothered. Which again, like, you think about all of the noise on social media, you might get distracted, disappear off, and you might not have been able to buy the Kindle. So there we go. So this is ultimately what's happening with your social media, putting all these posts out and all of these different reasons it's not connecting with people. And part of that is just because over the last 20 years we've seen this enormous growth in the number of businesses that have come online thanks to social media thanks to fast internet and things like that, and also the explosive growth in the number of businesses that there are globally. You're competing against all this noise, and you might want— if you didn't watch it, go and check out my last video which I did where people are literally shouting into the abyss daily saying, buy my stuff, buy my stuff, buy my stuff, and wondering why nobody's buying their products. I mentioned there was a little prize, or 2 prizes actually. So if you did go ahead and buy the Kindle, I have got— thank you for a start, but I have got something for you as well. If you would like a free signed copy, physical copy of the book, just reach out to me. Drop a note in the comments or reach out to me on my website, email me, and I'll make sure that you get a free signed physical copy of that just as a little thank you for buying the Kindle. I appreciate you doing that. And also, if you do— if you have bought the Kindle but don't want the paperback, if you do leave a review on Amazon, I'll also make sure that you get a free coaching session with me as well, just as a little thank you for following through in that exercise. If you did happen to be able to buy the book, just in the comments below, just put yes, I managed to buy the book, because again, it'd be nice for me to just give you a little thank you in the comments as well. And if you didn't manage to buy the book, again, drop a note in the comments. Share with us why you failed to buy the book. Was it one of those reasons which I outlined? So I mentioned as well, like, what can you do about this inertia with social media? You know, yet we've established that social media marketing is very difficult to do, and there are right ways to do it and wrong ways. You know, Gary Vee is talking about at the moment about this notion of campaigns. I really like this idea because Gary Vee's been all about just blasting out as much content as you possibly can do, repurposing content across all the social media platforms for years. And finally he has changed his mind or mindset around that. And he's now saying that because he set up 2 different accounts to compare, and he said that he has like 20,000 followers on one of his accounts and 20 million or something ridiculous on his other. And he said that the one that got 20,000 followers on it all of a sudden got like 2 million views on a post, whereas he posted something on his far more greatly followed social media account got like 20,000 views on it. So he's saying now that social media is effectively like buying a lottery ticket. You could have like zero followers, post one thing on TikTok, and it blows up and gets 2 million views, and all of a sudden you get an influx of followers from that. So you've got to really think about the content you're putting out in the context of each one of the platforms that, you know, you're putting content out to, and designing your content for the audiences and how they're going to be consumed on each of those individual platforms. Using this methodology, I've actually done a LinkedIn post which got 250,000 impressions. I've had several TikToks Since I've been a lot more intentional around how I've been posting content, I've had several TikToks get 30, 40, 50,000 views and obviously bring an influx of followers into them because I'm creating for that specific platform. That said, I want to give you something which is a bit more valuable in terms of how to think of your marketing when it comes to social media and how it fits into the context of your marketing overall throughout your business. Now, as you know, with entrepreneurs, experts always recommend that in order to be a successful entrepreneur, you have to have multiple streams of income. And they say on average, the most successful entrepreneurs have, I think it's 7 streams of income. So, with your marketing, I want you to think of your marketing and your lead generation as a similar sort of concept. You want to introduce multiple streams of leads into your business. And how I break them down is into 3 very simple categories: short-term, medium-term, and long-term. So, the short-term is your social media strategy. It's making sure that you are putting out content But the concept behind it is not getting attached to generating leads and inquiries for your business. It's purely around raising short-term awareness so that people become familiar with your brand and you start to appear in people's feeds. Maybe they'll follow you, and from there you've then got to go on and engage with your audiences in order to then encourage them to take the next steps. But social media fits very much into that short-term thinking, and the rationale behind that is that you can post on your social media feeds and then within like minutes or hours those posts have disappeared off the feeds and people are no longer seeing them. So you have to constantly keep on feeding the wheel. That's what makes it very short-term. You can also put paid advertising into this same bucket of short-term marketing or short-term lead generation, because ultimately, if you're— if you have a bad month and you have to restrict your budget, obviously the number of leads and inquiries you get will start to die off. The amount of awareness you're getting around your brand will start to die off. And so it's this very much short-term thinking of having to constantly pay a pound into the meter in order to feed the machine. The next stream of leads for your business is then the midterm stream, and this falls into what I class as marketing assets. Marketing assets are things like, uh, YouTube videos, podcast interviews, your own podcast, maybe, uh, if you want to write a book or some kind of lead magnet. Ideally what we want is some kind of digital or physical asset which, uh, costs a little bit of money or time in order to build it once, but then you can distribute that multiple times for very little extra investment. So, you know, I gift 3,000 books a year, but I don't have to write 3,000 books, you know, to give away. I only write the book once, and then I can print out 3,000 copies and distribute them multiple times for not a huge amount of money. So you need to be thinking about these medium-term strategies where it might take you slightly longer to build that marketing asset, or maybe invest a bit of money into building that marketing asset. But actually, what then typically tends to happen is those marketing assets live out there on the ether and they attract leads and inquiries and engagement into your brand whilst you're sleeping, effectively. And a good example of this, I went and delivered a talk a few years back and gave away 100 books. And this is whilst I was still in that being attached to outcomes mindset. And I was sort of thinking, well, why is nobody getting back in touch after this event? And 1 week passed, 2 weeks passed, 3 weeks passed, and then all of a sudden on a Sunday morning, my social media started to blow up. People were sending self— like sharing selfies with them with the book. Reviews started to appear on Amazon. I also I started to get inquiries dropping into my inbox saying, hey, we read the book. I'd love to have a conversation with you about my business. And it was interesting, those 3 weeks where I was worrying about this impact of giving away 100 books. But ultimately what happened is, and this is what happens with marketing assets, they were just sat on somebody's bedside table or on their desk or something like that. A few days, couple of weeks passed, and then they thought, oh, that free book from Robin. I've got time now. I'll read it. And as it happened, there was a whole group of people who'd started reading it sort of 2 or 3 weeks in after that event. And then all of a sudden they started to engage. Now, I couldn't have been in bed with those 30-odd people people that engaged with me that Sunday morning, you know, whilst they were reading their books. One, that would be a bit weird. However, it shows the power of, you know, a marketing asset working for me whilst I'm busy going about my day on a Sunday. So marketing assets are really important. And even if you do nothing else, if you have these short and medium-term social media feeding into your marketing assets— and I always say to people, like, spend a majority of the time designing and building these marketing assets, and then about 20% of your time on social media promoting your marketing assets. You'll get far greater results from a lead gen and marketing perspective than just blatting out and spending all of your time doing social media. So those are your short and medium term, but there's also long term as well. So long-term marketing strategies are based around things like partnerships. Now, I've done an entire video where I break down the 5-step process in order to generate these long-term partnerships. And in one particular case, there was a partnership which I did, a podcast which generated 3,000 leads for my business. And that all that was, was that I spent several years nurturing this relationship with somebody. They invited me onto their podcast. I had a train journey down to London, took 2 and a half hours to record. But then in the subsequent year after that, I've generated 3,000 leads for my business and over £250,000 worth of new revenue. That video, we'll make sure we link to it in the description, so do please go and watch that. But partnerships are your long-term marketing strategy. If you just had 5 to 10 partners who had 100,000 people in their audiences, followers on their Instagram or subscribers on their YouTube channel, that would then be willing to market you to their audiences. You have this immediate trust. Or maybe, maybe they have more than that. Maybe you've got 1 or 2 that have got maybe 1 million or 2 million subscribers, and periodically they will allow you to be in front of their audiences, whether that's through a podcast interview or maybe sending out an email to their email list or putting you in front of their audience if they go and do a a talk at a conference or something like that, then all of a sudden you get these explosive influxes of inbound leads. And the reality is that when somebody puts you in front of their audience, immediately what they're saying is, here's Robin, I really trust Robin, listen to what Robin's got to say. And you gain that immediate trust. Social media, you have to spend days, months, weeks, years sometimes building up trust with people before they finally decide under their own steam that they're going to reach out and engage with you. So partnerships is a great way to kind of cut through the noise and get that immediate trust leveraging somebody else's audience. But do go and check out that video where I walk through the 5 steps to generate these amazing partnerships. So that's it. Short-term, social media. Mid-term, make sure you're producing marketing assets for your business. And then long-term, start to forge meaningful partnerships with people with large numbers of your audiences. If you do what I've suggested I can guarantee that you will have enormous amounts of success with your marketing, but it means stopping what you're doing right now and then starting to break down your marketing into these short, mid, and long-term strategies.