TJ Walker and Tim discuss how entrepreneurs should approach TikTok and other platforms. They argue that TikTok and YouTube serve different discovery behaviors, that social skills transfer across platforms, and that businesses should focus where their audience actually is and where they can measure returns.
Chapters
Tim, we're not a political show, but how do you give guidance to clients for things like a lot of people have gotten tremendous traction on TikTok in the last three, four years and right now the United States government is considering banning it. And TikTok has said, okay, we're not going to sell, we're just shutting it down. And I'm not going to get into the political rationale of whether that's good policy or not. I just want to know from a business strategy standpoint, how do you advise people to limit their risk, their platform risk? I mean, I won't bore you with the details, But I had YouTube remove one of my channels 10 years ago and it was wildly painful, which is one reason why I'm streaming on 10 platforms today is I don't want to be dependent on one platform. But how do you give people guidance for dealing with sort of geopolitical issues that TikTok is facing?
TikTok is a great platform because people come to it very different. They, they consume content in it very differently than from other platforms. And the, the what they're doing is that they're looking for, you know, if, if I want to, if I want to fix a, a pipe in my house, say there's a pipe is leaking, I'll do, I'll do two things. I'll either go to YouTube and search, or, or I go to Tik Tok and search. My partner's youngest son is a, a bike mechanic. He learned everything that he knows on how to fix a bike from YouTube. He's learned everything that he needs to know about fixing his flat from YouTube and, and that's the way that, you know, he's, he's what now? 29. That's what a 20 year old person will, will, will do. They'll search on social media to find the, the answer. And TikTok, is that, that place in terms of, is there, is there some.
Up and coming place that you're more excited about that maybe our audience, maybe I haven't heard of before. I mean a couple of years ago it seemed like Clubhouse was going to be the big thing. I never hear anyone talking about it anymore.
Yeah, we used Clubhouse for three months and then left it. It wasn't what we want. We found that our audience was, was on LinkedIn. There's lots of Twitter lookalike products like Threads, excuse me and, but you know, there's only so much time that you've got in the day and you need to decide where you're going to focus your time. And you need to be making sure that you're getting return from the platforms that you're on. What I would say is that this isn't about learning lots of different platforms. This is about being social. If you understand what it means to be social, which we talked about so far in the show, you can take that to any platform, regardless of, of, you know, what the algorithm is doing or how the platform is built. As you said, all platforms are very slightly different, but the critical skill is, the skill is to be social.
You just mentioned two critical things. You mentioned time, return on investment. How when you're working with a client, an entreprene or who is, let's say they're, you know, it's a small shop, they have a little less than a million in revenue, they're already doing a million things. How do you actually sit them down and help them structure? You're going to spend the first 20 minutes a day on social media and you're going to expect zero return on investment for five months. And in month six, you're going to expect to put. How do you get them to set realistic expectations for return on investment? How are they actually defining it and how are they working it into their daily workflow?
So there's two things that you should really be measuring on social media. One is the number of, from a sales perspective. One is the number of meetings that you're generating and the revenue that you create. With our social selling methodology, we will know that people can generate meetings within three weeks. So this is not like you've got to spend six months doing stuff. It's about just understanding what it, what you need to be social. And as long as you're doing the right things and you're not coming across, you know, the worst thing that you can do is just go onto social media and say, here's my product, buy it. Here's my product, buy it. Because people will just tune out. You know, you need to, you need to go onto social media and you need to share insight, you know, share the top, you know, write something like, what's the top three issues that your clients have right now? Because if someone reads that and they go, do you know, I have those three issues right now? And you have a good profile, they'll say, tj, can you help me? You've just written the blog about it. Clearly you know about this stuff. Clearly you're an expert. So this isn't about selling, it's about, it's about helping people and giving them advice. And if they see you as an expert, they'll. They'll come back and ask you for more information, okay?
