Unlocking Social Media Success: Strategies for Entrepreneurs

Someone asked you about it, you didn't just, you know, I didn't invite you on to talk about some, you know, Facebook trend and then you just pulled this up when I wanted your thoughts on a scandal of Mark Zuckerberg Media. When Gary Vaynerchuk started, he famously just did a 15 minute wine show, for the most part, unedited, live. And then he says the point everyone always forgets is, yeah, he spent 15 minutes talking about wine, but then he would spend from 8pm until 4am answering people's questions in chat rooms about what kind of wine should I have with Fish, it was the long, long, hard work that he put in. A lot has changed since then and which is presumably why you have second editions of your book and multiple books. What is the single biggest thing going on right now in social media that you think is important for a lot of our audience members who are entrepreneurs, authors, experts, online coaches, online trainers.

I think that the big change took place during COVID which is where we, before COVID we knew that there were platforms like this, but we didn't necessarily use them. We knew that there was social media, but we kind of went there. Now what happens is that, you know, 62% of the world's population is on social media. So pretty much the whole of the of, you know, if you're in the States or in the UK, you know, every quarter, but there'll be like 700 million people in India will be joining. It is just so massive. And the average person now spends 2 hours, 20 minutes a day on social media. So the fact of the matter is this isn't just about your buyers. Your, your buyers are now are on social media. There's no argument about it, but your employees are on social media, your future employees are on social media, your investors are on social media and your future investors on social media. So if you're looking to recruit, you're looking for investment, but you're looking to sell stuff, you have to be on social media. It's not a nice to have anymore. It has to be your most important priority and that's the massive change that's taken place now.

Tim, the reception I get from so many friends, clients, customers is that social media is just so hard. If you're not already famous like Kim Kardashian or a 19 year old computer whiz kid, it's not going to work and you're just going to start and you're going to spend 40 hours a week for three months and then write it off. And you would have Been better off just taking that money and putting it in an index fund. I know you've had a lot of success story. Walk us through some of your success stories that you're proudest of. People who've taken your advice, maybe were not successful before, but used your strategies and went on to actually sell a lot through social media.

Yeah, we've got clients that do multi million dollar deals on social media and the reason for that first and foremost is that they position themselves differently. So a lot of people, what they, as I said earlier on, they think this is all about interruption and it's not, it's, it's about, you know, on social, on. If we take any, any social media platform, your, your profile is available to everybody that can see it and in fact everybody in that social media platform will be walking across or walking in front of that every single day. So for, if we take LinkedIn for example, there's a billion people on LinkedIn. So a billion people can walk in front of your shop profile every single day. And what you want is for people to go, that's interesting, what's that? I need to look about, look at that further. And the problem is, is that most people set themselves up to look exactly the same as everybody else. So, so, so everyone just walks past or what they do is that they immediately start selling saying, you know, his, his, you know, and everybody goes to the market and says exactly the same thing, buy my product because we're great. And so we're in this situation where buyers just walk on by because they've got the opportunity of an infinite amount of data or an infinite amount of profiles and if we don't find what we're searching for, we either carry on searching or we'll look somewhere else. So that's the big issue that people have, is that they take old thinking and position themselves on a new platform using that old thinking and it just doesn't work.

Question, Tim, you don't need me butting in. I'll actually exit the stage a bit and let you talk to Tim directly.

Hello, Tim is by the way, what's that? So I'm just saying hello, hello to Elizabeth Walker.

He's being sociable. Is that really the biggest problem most people have is they're just too quick to say, well, buy my product by my product.

Yes. So, so the thing, the thing that you need to understand with, with social media is its ability to have conversations. And, and what we need to be thinking about is how, how, what am I going to do? How, what am I going to do is going to create a conversation. So if you take the classic way that people use content, but what people do is that they use content as a way to broadcast. So it's just, this is the introduction, which is where you say you, you, you go to social media and you put up a piece of content and say, this is my company, these are my products. Great, come and buy from us. And of course nobody buys people buys like that anymore. We haven't done that for, for 10 years. Whereas if you put up an article that says here is some research that we've done and in the research that we've done. So for example, Six Sense is a company that does a lot of research and they done some research and found that 70 that when people are looking at B2B Enterprise, what they're looking at is that they will actually go 70% of the way through the buying process before they contact a salesperson. Now what they've done is that they just went and said, this is the research and this is the finding that we've had that caused the conversation. Because some people will say, well, I don't believe that other people will say, like me will say, I actually think it's 80%. But the fact is that they're having a conversation and then what you're able to do is, is, is, is you need to have the skill to be able to harvest that conversation. So whenever anybody comes to your content.

I'm hearing you say, harvest the conversation. Yes, walk us through all that.

That. Okay, so, so, so, so, so Elizabeth Walker. Use that as an example. Elizabeth has said, hello all. She's on LinkedIn. What, what, what we then there have is that we're having. We. I have a digital resonance with this piece of content. So I have an opportunity now to go back to Elizabeth and say thank you for watching the T.J. walker program. And if I'm not connected to her, can we connect? And we can do this on any.

And I should point out I don't believe she's any relation of mine, even though we have the same last name. I'm not recognizing the name or the face.

But the thing is it doesn't matter what, what social media platform. It's on the fact that they've actually, if someone's liked or commented. What we're able to do is actually go through a process of saying, thanks Elizabeth for, for coming on the TJ Walker show and for mentioning and saying, hello all, may we connect. Now that's a far better proposition for me to, for, for me to go to Elizabeth, she's more likely to connect than for me to go to Elizabeth and say, you came on the TJ Walker show. We've got this list of products and one do you want to buy? She'll just block me. So what we're doing is that we're using social as, as, as this mechanism to have and, and should be seen as a mechanism to have a conversation. And if we approach things in a, a non salesy way. Now, I'm not telling people that we shouldn't be selling, but we all know that when salespeople come to us, we get a flight or fight reaction. Usually we, we, we run in the opposite direction. And so what we're doing is that we're using social as a way of getting that conversation. We're not being salesy. And maybe what I'll do is I'll go through a process of actually getting that person to have a conversation and it may be we have a zoom or a teams call. And so at that point what you've done is you've taken something that's social all the way through to actually maybe having a call with somebody and having a meeting with somebody just done.

She says, if my bill, if my profile is a billboard and I want to grab people to my link, what are the best hook lines to get people to click? And yes, harvest is a great term, bring the conversation to the surface.

So it's a great question, Elizabeth. So the thing that, the thing that we're looking for on social media is humans.