why social media is a bad choice
...sometimes
Over the years, I’ve constantly debated with myself on whether I should spend more time on LinkedIn and X.
All the gurus seem to talk about “attention” being the currency of the age.
I don’t debate that.
But it still poses a problem
And that is the fact that only a tiny percentage of society are wired to do social media well.
And yes, you could argue it’s something we just need to learn.
But I personally don’t think it’s always the right path.
The issue?
Social media is a hamster wheel. You need to create content all the time
It’s time consuming. You need to spend time every day commenting on posts
Many people don’t want to be the face of their brand
As well as this, I’ve seen many people who grew large audiences but were then unable to monetize that attention...
...meanwhile others who spent no time on social media, and instead dedicated themselves to other areas of their business were able to grow to 6-figures and beyond with relative ease.
So this post is for anyone who feels guilty about not spending enough time on social.
If you don’t like the whole social thing, here are a few other approaches to marketing that have worked for me.
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1. Search Engine Optimization
I must admit that I know very little about SEO, yet 95% of traffic for my sites comes from Google.
With the advent of AI, it’s now relatively easy to find ways to generate high-quality content at scale and rank for these in Google.
This could be blog posts, guides, case studies or curated data.
Unlike social media, the content is created once but continues to perform over time.
Whereas social posts often have a shelf-life of only a few minutes.
Also, content that is ranked by Google has an aggregating effect in that as you continue to add more content, the previous content is also ranking, meaning your traffic tends to keep growing with no increase on monthly workload on your part.
2. Direct selling
A little scarier than SEO but still wildly effective is direct selling.
In many industries, particularly B2B ones, it’s incredibly easy to find and connect with potential customers on mass.
Tools like Clay and Apollo allow you to use advanced filtering to identify customers at an incredible level of granular detail.
From there, you can setup automated outbound campaigns to reach out to customers on auto-pilot.
All you need to do is to get your initial email content right and then respond to any replies that land in your inbox.
If you take this approach, I recommend using some semi-templated emails in your responses and having a clear system to handle your replies effectively.
For example;
Respond to incoming emails with email draft 1
Set follow up reminder for 4 days
Send email draft 2
Set follow up reminder for 6 days
Send email draft 3 (final email)
Set follow up reminder for 1 year
3. Press and Networking
We mustn’t scoff at the old tried and true methods.
It used to be that getting published in the press was one of the hardest things to achieve.
Nowadays, there are way more press opportunities because there are 1000s of blogs, websites and newsletters, and they don’t get sent many press releases any more because most businesses are distracted by social media.
So I think this creates a bit of an opportunity.
If your business is small, focus on publications that are also small and would be interested in an angle you can provide.
An easy one would be your local newspapers.
It might not be particularly targeted to your business niche, but part of the reason for going to press is not just to reach customers, but also to raise awareness of your business with other press.
The more press mentions you get, they start to snowball as other sites reference the existing articles to write their articles.
Another great way to achieve this is to target listicles. These are articles that are lists of things like “10 best {things}”. You want to be on that list of things.
Once you get added to a few of these, all the other writers who create posts on similar topics, reference the articles that already exist and end up including you again.
One of my sites got picked up for a few of these lists without me doing any outreach and is now included in well over 500 articles of a similar nature. Absolutely crazy!
In Conclusion
This is not a hate post on social media, but just some alternative routes you could take if you feel the same dilemma I did.
If social media is not for you, there are plenty other ways to build your business.
Even if attention is the currency we’re trading, there are other ways to earn that attention.
Social media isn’t your only option.
If you’re building your own Tiny Empire, you can join us in our Skool community for weekly networking sessions, courses and more here
Thank you for this!! I have been struggling with the wish to build an online business (empire?) but remain as anonymous as possible. It's nice to hear that it just might be possible despite what all the guru's are telling me :)
That's a great point about how Press gets less pitches because everyone is focused on social. Hadn't considered that. Press mentions also have an SEO benefit in the form of backlinks.