How Personal Is Too Personal? Hacks to Create Authentic Social Media Content WITHOUT Oversharing

I'm under the notion that you should be sharing what you're up to and building a personal brand so people can follow along the journey. I think there's nothing more powerful than following someone's journey, especially business owners and operators and, like, the day to day what's happening deals they're making, team, they're getting on, how much they're growing their business. And you guys can follow along the journey because you get really invested in that.

I think you need to be cautious when you're a personal brand of sharing that meets your tolerance level of what you can receive back.

Foreign. Welcome to the Success School podcast. We're on episode 64. Can you believe it? There's been 64 episodes.

It feels like longer.

How are you feeling today, Steph? Okay. Tell us how you really feel.

No, but it feels like we've been doing this forever. I think it's because we had our own podcast before this. We both had our own podcast for this. I don't know if you guys ever go on and listen to the Helix Experience.

Oh, it's terrible.

How many episodes did you guys do? Hundreds of 60 episodes of the Helix Experience.

It was lots.

And you had the Tim Fray show as well.

But how are you feeling?

I'm feeling so good.

Okay, great.

How are you feeling?

I'm feeling good. Steph, just a question for you. How you feeling about my jocks on the wall? What?

Are you making your jocks on the. Oh, no, I hate this stuff. Honestly, the other day I was. I was on a group called For Success School, and they were all like, oh, the background of your new studio looks so cool. And I turned the camera. I was like, yeah, but look at the artwork that Tim put on the wall. And honestly, you can't see it in the YouTube channel here, but, you know, we have a pair of framed Bayern Munich shorts. They're red and there's like a green border around it with, like, the oldest photo you've ever seen. It's just. It's honestly hideous. And in the corner over to the right, further in the corner, there's a massive surfboard. I'm like, when did we turn into a bloody jock party?

That was. The surfboard was my greatest ever sporting achievement.

It was. He didn't actually. We can't tell the story. What's the greatest ever sporting achievement?

My greatest ever sporting achievement is winning a beer pong tournament in Bali on New Year's Eve. Well, that doesn't sound like there was 60 teams.

Yeah, and they were really serious because.

They Were giving really serious. How many surfboards we run? Three surfboards. There was one huge one and two small ones. We got one home. But they're meant to be really good surfboards. It's called El Merrick.

Yeah.

Okay. Not sure what that is.

But they were like the Balinese surfer dudes, right? They were dead. They were sober. And because they wanted to win these surfboards because they were so high value.

And we were up and they were.

So drunk, like so. And they won. And it was hilarious. So not the surfboard that he won because he was surfing.

Not at all.

Because of beer pong.

Not at all.

All right, you go first.

Personal updates. I'm feeling quite organized. I sometimes like to run business on the seat of my pants sometimes. So we are planned next year. We are so planned. We have every workshop planned for the full 12 months if you want to come. Makemoreprofit.com and we have all our retreats, all of our holidays. Everything's penciled in for next year already. We're like three months out.

This is very organized. We're not an organized people.

Yeah, because I've been building the not you system for success school and that's a part of it. It's essentially planning 12 months out in front of. But I'm feeling great and I'm feeling less O word. And I can't say O word actually means overwhelmed because everything is out in paper and. And I guess the moral of the story, as Steph likes to say with these personal updates, is proper preparation prevents piss poor performance.

Yeah, I don't say that, but I do love that saying.

Steph does say that all the time. She says it to me at night before we get into bed.

Okay. Okay.

Get prepped.

I don't know if we've spoken about what the episode is about today, have we?

No. No.

Oopsies. Guys, the title of today's episode, in case you were wondering how long you should sit through this, is the rise of the personal brand. And how personal is too personal for personal brands in 2024.

So you should definitely sit through this, by the way.

Yeah, obviously. So worth it. Okay. So very, very cool update. My update is that we did a presentation a couple of weeks ago called 5000 leads for our Clients.

Great name.

Just.

Great name.

Laughing inside joke because Tim thought it would be a really cool name.

Worst selling workshop of time.

It sold one ticket.

Thank you to the one person that came for 5,000.

Thank you.

It was super valuable, though.

It was like the best presentation I think we've Ever. Honestly, flat out, like, obviously, because of course it was.

Yeah, yeah, it was the best one. Of course it was. The cult following was way better.

Okay, excuse me. If you were on 5,000 leads and you were on cult following, no pressure. But it was really actionable, right? It was really. It was very actionable. So 5,000 leads. It was basically our five main strategies that we use to generate leads. 5,000. But we've generated way more than that, which is why the name makes sense.

A month.

And so, yeah, we ran that last week and it was so good. And immediately our clients started implementing the tactics. And one person with a really small. Kate. Kate has a really small audience on social media. She ran one of the tactics. She got 70 new email addresses added to her email list overnight. Even with the small audience, guys, this stuff really works. It was really awesome. I think the lesson here is, like, lead generation actually gets to be really easy. You just need to know what you're doing and to learn what you're doing. Definitely reach out to us, because in successful. We teach this all the time. But it was awesome.

I thought we were not pitching on the podcast anymore. And you're trying to sell your workshops.

I'm not sure.

Sell yourself. You're like, I'm the best.

I mean, if you don't toot your own horn, who's gonna toot it?

So we're talking about Eminem. What's going on?

Okay, so today, guys, Finger on the Pulse episode. We discuss a topic in pop culture, the news and media, and how it relates to your business owner. We will give you our key insights and takeaways and unsolicited opinions on the topic. And so the topic today is how personal is too personal with personal brands. Now, this episode came out because of the Gen Z's cancel crusade of Eminem. Gen Z found old songs from Eminem Offensive and tried really hard to get him canceled, but it only made him more popular. And I think just recently he presented for the. I was going to say MMA's, but I think it's MBA's Music Video Awards. Yeah, MBAs. And he absolutely crashed. Like, he's actually having, like a secondary surge, a second win. And it got me thinking about all the personal brands out there right now who are swearing, who are talking politics, Taylor Swift, and who are making very divisive content. So let's talk about how personal is too personal when it comes to personal brands. Tim, can we kick off? I would love to know what. Tim is so unprepared for this episode by the Way, guys. So this is going to be.

No, this is. I don't need a preparation.

Yeah. What is a personal brand and how is it different to a company brand?

So I was excited you were going to ask me that question because I'm so prepared for it. I guess the difference between a personal brand and a company brand is a person is like a being. They have a soul, they have feelings, they have opinions, they have thoughts, beliefs, all those types of things where a company brand essentially doesn't. I mean, you could make a company brand that was like a personal brand, but it probably look a little bit weird making up like a fictional character that was a company and had like a Persona online. So they're. The main things is like personal brands have thoughts, feelings, actions, beliefs, those types of things. And then company brands don't. Company brands more talk about like the results they get, the clients they work with, their mission, their values, that type of stuff. Whereas personal brands delve more into the personal stuff that only humans do have. Anything I missed there?

No.

I fucking smashed that out of the park. Let's go. Let's go.

I wouldn't have put it.

Who would have thought? I'm a marketer personally.

Yeah, yeah. I wouldn't have put it in that way personally, but you actually nailed it. And I have nothing down. And I think it's. It's absolutely perfect. I think personal brands. Oh, look, it's interesting because I think we have a few really cool clients who traverse the personal company brand really well. Like M. Sparrow. I'd say that she does a really good job of it, but it's rare to find and I think it's a small business still. I think when you get to big company like Apple, it's really hard to impute, you know, personal brand to the company.

When it comes to personal brand, how personal is too personal. And what does that even look like?

I saw a quote the other day and I have like just loved it. I've used it so much since I saw it and I can't remember who it was by. So sorry in advance, but I'm totally taking it on board now. And the quote is, personal brand doesn't equal personal life. And I think that there's a lot of confusion about this online. I think a lot of people who are considering having a personal brand, like, yeah, but I don't want to share anything about my kids. I don't want to share photos of my children. I don't want to talk about my marriage. My husband's really private, you know, I don't want to showcase my car or where I live because of safety. And I just think that there's this really huge misconception that you have to share all of those things to have a personal brand, and it's actually not true. You don't have to cry on camera. You don't have to share the deepest, darkest in most intimate thoughts of your soul. And I've been working with a lot of our clients on this. Like Tim and I very rarely shared particularly personal stuff on our social media. Like, you never talk about your parents. We don't talk about our dogs getting sick. We don't really even talk about our marriage that much on social media. It's not because we are trying to hide it. It's just it's not really relevant to the people who are following us on our social media. They're not following us for marriage advice. And so we don't really talk about it. We talk about our personal opinions and our personal thoughts on the industry, on what we have expertise over. And so I think that you can have a personal brand that is a personal life. I think people who do this are like, you know, Taylor Swift, Steph Pace, who is a friend of ex client of ours, and, you know, she does a really beautiful job of the personal brand, personal life thing, and she shares a lot about her personal life, but you don't have to do that to have a business. What do you think?

I agree with all the points. I guess, like, I want to go into specifics and we'll kind of talk about this. And we have no idea where this is going to go, guys. So we are talking about canceling here. So don't cancel us for any of our opinions. But, Steph, when it comes to personal brands, how do you feel about talking about politics, marriage breakdowns look like, let's talk about Taylor Swift.

So Taylor Swift just come out and she's adorsed Kamala Harris, which is fine, whatever. I don't know how to say her name.

Kamala.

Kamala.

Kamalala.

Kamala sounds like koala.

I don't know.

Look, obviously we're not American, so, you know, we don't really weigh in on this debate, but at the end of the day, what it really comes down to is, like, it's her choice, which is definitely part of the.

But is it her choice? That's the conspiracy.

Oh, don't even get into it. So the thing is that at the end of the day, like, that is her choice. What has been interesting about her taking that stance has been that she then went and turned off comments on all of her posts, which we found super interesting, because it was like she decided that she was going to take this stance publicly, but she didn't want to receive any backlash about it. And. And I find that quite interesting. If you think about, like, obviously it's an incredibly hot debate, and pretty much what we see online right now, especially in the Trump Harris debate at the moment, is like, we're seeing a lot of. In either direction. If you go Trump, you're going to get hate from, you know, Harris fans. If you go Harris, you're going to get hate from Trump fans. It very much seems like that's the only way that it happens right now. And so I do understand her for turning off the comments. However, I do find it interesting. It's like, if you're not willing to receive the hate, why would you take the stance? And if it's freedom of speech, and if that's what we're encouraging is like, she's encouraging freedom of choice and all those things that come with Harris vote, then I think that it's really interesting that she decided to not give other people a voice in that conversation, too. That aside, I want to be really clear, we're not talking about politics necessarily on this podcast today, But I just think if you're not willing to take the heat, you probably shouldn't fucking say it. Like, that's what I think it really comes down to. It's like, you have to be willing to take a stance and then actually cop the heat. And I think that it's very brave of her to come out and do it. I just think that it's. She's going to cop a lot of flack for it. And if you really are going to grow a personal brand, not to even necessarily Taylor Swift size, but Tim and I get trolled most days.

Yeah.

And so you really turn the comments off. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you really have to be okay with what comes if you are gonna talk politics. If you are gonna. Like. I think there's a tiktoker recently who's gone massively viral because they broke. I don't know who because we don't watch this nonsense on TikTok. But they went massively viral because they broke up and it was like a really big deal. And it's like, okay, well, if you're gonna PDA all of your social media, all your social media is going to be about your marriage. You gotta expect that when you break up, it's gonna be really Big news and you're gonna cop a lot of heat. And so I think you need to be cautious when you're a personal brand of sharing that meets your tolerance level of what you can receive back. Tim and I don't share a lot about politics or our, you know, I would love to. Tim would love to. Or our thoughts on socialist conversations or, you know, people's mental health states or the economy or things like that. Because yet we do have strong opinions like most people probably do, and we don't really want to receive any flack for that. And also it's not relevant to what we teach at all.

Yeah, Just to wrap that in a bun, I feel like if you're going to have an opinion online, you need to be ready to take the heat that comes back with it. Turning off comments is weak.

Oh, daggers over there for Taylor Swift.

Yeah.

What do you think Tim stops business owners from building personal brands? Do you think it's this?

No, I don't think it's this. Everyone thinks they're super boring. That's the main one I get. They're like, I have nothing to share and I have no opinions and my life sucks. But you think that your life sucks because you're comparing yourself to someone else whose life you look up to and think doesn't suck. But other people look up to you and think your life doesn't suck. So there's interest in many ways. There's interest from all directions. I'm under the notion that you should be sharing what you're up to and building a personal brand so people can follow along the journey. I think there's nothing more powerful than following someone's journey, especially business owners and operators and like the day to day what's happening, deals they're making, team, they're getting on how much they're growing their business. And you guys can follow along the journey because you get really invested in that. And it's not that every single person that follows you is going to be a perfect or ideal target client of yours, but it just humanizes you as the operator so much more. I feel like people should be sharing it. Their shit isn't boring. And I think it's, it's really cool to see the journey of a lot of people. I think the other thing is like mindset. There's a lot of judgment that comes with it, like, hey, I'm up to this or I'm not doing much or I'm maybe not working as hard as I should be. Like, there's a bunch of Mindset, stuff that comes in anything. I miss that.

Yeah. I had a conversation with one of our clients, Laura, the other day, and she was like, I don't have opinions. And I was like, okay, let's talk about it. Just be really clear. Laura. She helps beauty business owners become more profitable, which is a really cool niche. She's doing very well in that niche. And she goes, I just don't have any opinions. And I was like, I bet you do. And I said, okay, so let's say that a beauty business comes to you. And she goes, hey, I'm making no profit, but my business coach has told me that I should open up a second salon so that I can make more profit. What would you say to her?

And she's so fucking dumb.

And she was like, I would be so mad. And I was like, so you do have an opinion. The thing is that most of you listening to this podcast will have an opinion on something to do with your industry. You're just not digging hard enough to try and find it. Like, we have opinions on business stuff all the time. Like, the other week when I heard that Mike Malkowitz was like, you know, you shouldn't hire a VA to making more than $200,000 a year, I was like, bullshit. That's so crap. That's. You should hire a VA way before then. And so that's my personal opinion. I saw someone that said, you should spend 20 hours on Instagram. Instagram this week. 20 hours to make content on Instagram. I was like, that's bullshit. How would you run a business if you spent 20 hours making content on Instagram? And so I think that you've got to find the things that grind your gears so that you can have an opinion. So my advice is to go looking for triggering content in your niche so that you can make opinions on it so that you can stand for something. That's what I would do there. All right, Tim, do you think that personal brands are the way forward for business owners? I know that you're really big on this.

Yes, 100%, yes. And I'll give you an example. We've had this a few times. Like, we've had some clients in success school for, like, 16, 18 months now, and they've changed direction a few times, and they've had to, like, rebrand their entire thing multiple times, which, when you do that, you lose a little bit of trust in your audience because they're like, what does this person do? And they flip flopping a little bit. And we've told this person this or the one I'm thinking about in particular. But I think, like, just to avoid that, you could just have a personal brand and it would be less obvious if you change your direction. You didn't change your whole business name and all the other stuff associated with it. So for that angle, like if you're pivoting your business quite consistently, I think, like, starting with a personal brand is a thing to do and have a very light, casual business name that isn't like heavily tied to you if you're not like fully solid on it. Also, like, when you're down the track and you are going for pivots, Tim Fray endorses X versus business name. Endorses X is a lot easier to pivot and you can condone or promote or switch lanes a lot easier. And that's like the whole influencer thing. Personal brand is you are becoming a, a micro niche influencer in your thing. Therefore you can promote stuff a lot better, which is great. And I think, like, it's a really good currency and a asset to have long term is a personal brand because you essentially can do whatever the heck you want with it. I've said this on a podcast before, but I'm sure if, like Steph and I really wanted to, we could start selling lipstick or, you know, like, I would love to see songs or like, whatever, like anything. Because we have a personal brand and people trust us. You know, like, you get the point.

I get the point. Lipsticks and thongs. Yeah, yeah, I get the point.

That's what's on my mind. Lipsticks. I want to wear both at the same time. A thong.

Let me see. Tim, I've actually got a follow up question for you. People ask me this all the time. Why did we decide to go two personal brands and will we ever make a success school like Instagram, Social media?

People ask you that all the time.

I've been asked at least probably 12 times.

Yeah.

Tell me your thoughts behind it.

I've thought about this.

I'm like, we haven't really spoken about it.

No, I. I kind of think mine's a little redundant. It. My brand.

No, it's not.

Yeah, that's how I feel.

No.

Yeah, I feel like mine's a little redundant because, like, Steph's the face of successful crap. So I'm like, maybe I just should stop making content and just focus on the back end.

No, Tim, that's so ridiculous. First of all, first of all, no. Second of all, you've been grilling me all week because all the leads that have come through that have signed sales, baby. All the sales that have come through successful the last two weeks have been like connections of Tim.

Can we tell the feel story?

Yeah, well no.

Yeah, yeah. So we had a guy.

This is great.

Phil. Yeah, we had a guy. Phil. Ifbb pro. If you don't know what that is, it means he's jacked and massive and really strong and fit and handsome and sexy. Hey Phil, I've never actually seen you before but I'm assuming that's what you look like.

I hope you listen to the podcast.

I hope you listen to the podcast. And he was on the fence about joining. He went on checked out my Instagram and he said I'm joining because he has a great squat and he is very strong and handsome. He didn't say handsome but I assume he felt handsome and he said that my commitment to my squat shows commitment to business. That's why he joined.

My God, honestly the team chat and I was just like blowing up. It was blowing up. I was like I'm never ever, ever going to get Tim out the door ever again cuz his head's going to be so bloody big. But so I think that it's. Cuz I think that you do get a lot of people through your world so that's crap. But why not have a successful Instagram? Like why don't we have one?

I think we haven't had time to be honest. Like I would like one.

Would you?

Yeah.

Why?

Just to like at in my bio.

Interesting.

To drive more people there and I could. Yeah.

What would you post?

We would market from it. So we would run ads from it.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Interesting. So we haven't had that discussion obviously guys. So you think that maybe some people should have personal brands and business?

For sure.

Yeah. Okay.

They could just do call out posts. That's what I would do. Totally with it. I'll do a collab post with it. I would call it success. Cool. And then I would have business coaching program for coaches.

Yeah. Please don't go and steal our handle.

We gotta go buy it off.

Ya. Buy it off? Yeah.

Money talks, baby.

Now someone's definitely stealing the handle. Okay, okay, okay. No worries.

What are your thoughts like?

Yeah, look, I don't know. I. I think it depends on the amount of effort you want to put into it because it's obviously a lot more content that you have to create and I think you need to be ready to create that much content. I think you have to enjoy being on social media. That's what I think. I think in order to be a personal brand, you have to enjoy being on social media. I think if you don't enjoy at least one of the platforms, it's going to be really hard for you to create a social media account or presence. The best social media presence, the best personal brand that are out there, they're on their organization the time like putting stories up and sharing quotes and scrolling and blah, blah. So I do think that you need to enjoy at some level being on social media and consuming content that doesn't have to say it's your favorite thing, doesn't mean that you have to find easy to make content. I think that if you really want to grow a big personal brand, it does require you to have some interest in being on the app, on that, on the platform.

So Steph, how do you bring a personal brand into a company brand and blend the two?

Yes, I think we were just speaking about that. I think there's a couple of different ways you could do it. So for example, we could have the success school Instagram and we could have the Steph Gordon and the Tim Frey Instagram and we could do collaboration posts across the three platforms, which is obviously going to drive traffic, increase awareness across all of them. So that's one way that you can do it. If we were to have a successful Instagram, we probably wouldn't post as much like personal thoughts and opinions content. It'd be a lot more around client wins. What we're working on like problem and pain point solutions for the service. And it would be pretty, I would say, I would say like generic, but it wouldn't be like photos of mine and Tim's faces every single day. Like I think it would like make it a lot more, you know, just carousel posts and things like that, maybe quote posts, but you can blend them really nicely. So we have a couple of clients that have done this really well where they bring their team into it too. So I think, you know, the founder is always going to have some DNA in the brand. At the end of the day, a brand was built off of the DNA and the passion and the values and the mission of the founder. And so the founder story is always going to be relevant if the founder is to going and speaking on stages or getting on podcasts, which we highly recommend doing by the way. However, we don't necessarily want to bring that founder story because most founder stories are created in some level of pain and so we don't really want to lead our founder story all the time. It depends on what your business is. But with, you know, that pain, we don't really necessarily want to tie that to the brand. But I think it's really important to have those stories that you can speak on them on stages and then drive people to the brand for the service that you offer. However, I think that the company brand or the professional brand that you have over here does really need to showcase your client work, the results that you get, your team members, if you have them, the kind of culture you have, the kind of values you have, the missions and the things that you stand behind. So that's a little bit what. What have I missed?

You've got everything. Let's kind of wrap this in a bun. So if we were to convince someone that they need a personal brand or a business brand, you know, and we were gun to your head, we did this on the last episode. But my top two reasons, and then I'll go to Steph's top two reasons, is people want to do business with people, not brands. And the second one is your reach and engagement are going to be a lot higher on a personal brand because they feel like they're interacting with someone, not no one.

I would definitely do the first one.

Concur.

I concur. The second one, I would say, is that it allows you to pivot. You know, Tim and I, we love being business coaches. We love success school. But three years ago, I also loved my last program, and three years before that, I loved my first business. And five years ago, Tim loved his gym. And so I think it really does allow you that fluidity to be able to move through businesses or try new things or test avenues out. Like, if you want to move in any direction, it gives you that ability to do so really easily. And I don't think that professional brands, obviously, you know, when we sold the gym, we sold the asset of the Instagram, which also is an asset that's a benefit to that as well. But at the same time, it's no longer ours. And so all that work, all those hard years that have been put into it is now gone for us from our perspective. So I do think the personal brands are great for that reason.

Awesome, guys. If you got something from the show, don't forget to send us a DM on Instagram. I'm at Real Tim. Ferray. Steph's at Steph Gordon for now. Two underscores on the end. If you're new around here, obviously leave us a review, follow the show. All that good. We really appreciate you. We'll see you guys next week. That was a fun one.

That was fun. See you next week.