068 – What’s the Point of Social Media? [Spark Infinity]

Creativity Excitement Emotion

Why bother with social media? Is it even worth doing? And if you are going to do it anyway, wouldn’t you rather get results than not? In this installation of Spark Infinity Office Hours, David illuminates how social media can bring real business value to an individual, creator, entrepreneur, or business. Later, Jody and Karlo join the discussion to share what they’re getting from David’s presentation. Download the PDF Transcript Sponsors: Productivity, Performance & Profits Blackbook: Get a free copy of the “Definitive Guide to Productivity for Artists and Entrepreneurs.” Highlights: 00:17 – Why you shouldn’t get caught up in vanity metrics 01:06 – The importance of building connections 01:50 – The cruciality of growing your subscriber list 02:53 – Sales are highly valuable and desirable 03:39 – If you do this right, opportunities will come to you 04:34 – Mindset landmines you must circumvent and avoid 08:05 – Group discussion Transcript: David: Alright, welcome to Spark Infinity Office Hours. It is September 26th, 2024. Today's topic is what's the point of social media? Why do we do it? Why Vanity Metrics Don’t Matter If you are a creative or business oriented individual, you're not doing social media for the vanity metrics. That's things like likes and shares and comments and even follows. They might make you feel good. They might stroke your ego. They might offer validation. No judgment here. It feels good to feel good, but those don't have any inherent business value. There are two examples of people I know who are killing it without a major following. You can look them up yourself, James Schramko being one, Gary Spivey being another. They may not have massive followings, but in the background, they've got multimillion dollar businesses. Okay, so what has business value on social media? Connections – Your Net Worth is in Your Network Number one is connections. If you really stop to think about it, most opportunities you've gotten to this point, including jobs, gigs, partnerships, any other opportunity you can think of, it's not because of your talent, skills, or experience, which can be helpful, but it's because of who you know. Your talents, skills, experience are valuable, but they're secondary to relationship. I can think back on gigs that I got paid $800 for as a guest guitarist. It's not because of my skills. There were other people that could have filled those shoes, it's because of who I knew. And social media is a great way to build new connections. We're not covering how to do that here. That could be a whole can of worms unto itself, but it is valuable. And out of everything we'll be talking about today, connections is probably the easiest thing to build. That's of value. Subscribers – an Asset You Own Number two is subscribers. And in this case, we're not talking about YouTube subscribers, although that can be valuable because if you reach certain metrics, you can monetize your channel. I'm pretty sure TikTok works the same way. But we're talking about building your list, your email subscribers, preferably, but it could also be a text or SMS text message list that you're building. Unfortunately, you can lose followers for a variety of reasons. It could be because people don't like you, which has happened. It could be because you're shadow banned or demonetized or your account's been deleted. You don't get to keep the followers you have on social media unless you turn them into subscribers. Your number one goal on social media, hopefully, is to turn people into subscribers. And then you can grow the relationship with those subscribers to the point where customers are sharing their mailing addresses with you. This is kind of advanced, but if you can send them stuff, direct mail, thank you notes, birthday cards, maybe even the occasional book, you're going to build a better relationship with that customer.