My Biggest Social Media Mistakes

I was traveling for my job 46 weeks per year, and expecting our 4th kiddo...

Coincidentally, I had been staffed to the worst project of my consulting career. I think it was the Universe whispering to me "psst... Amanda... You're not supposed to be here anymore, it's time to make your move!"

You know what I'm talking about...

That moment when you realize that you should be living into your purpose, and stop deferring on the dream!

For me, getting great at social media wasn't ever about... wait hold up...

I would say I'm "good" at social media, but to be clear, I'm not good at it in the sense that I'm an Instagram Influencer, or a YouTuber (though I'm sure our 12 year old would have a renewed sense of realizing exactly how cool I am)...

Rather, I'm more of a "make a lot out of a little" kind of marketer.

Like that time I had a group of 47 people in a Facebook™ Group, and it led to 6-figures in private coaching revenue...

Or that time that I did an email promo and made $10K from a list of existing emails that I hadn't topped up in a few months (roughly 700 people on that list).

Or that time that I promoted to a group of 18 people live, and walked away with $54K in sales...

I'm not telling you this to be douchy.

I'm telling you this because even if my social media numbers may not be the hugest in the land, I gotta say, I'm good with those results.

Getting decent at social media was a big piece of the puzzle for me, and in today's episode I'm sharing with some of the dumb stuff I was doing before I figured out the slightly smarter, and definitely more profitable approaches we use with social media.

Enjoy!

Amanda

P.S. I haven't depended on in-person networking for my business in 18 months for sure, and while we do use paid advertising, that represents about 20% of our total revenue; the rest? Organic (which is nerdy marketer code for "I didn't pay a penny for this lead")

P.P.S If you want to check out our new program The Coach's Social Media Solution, click here.

My Biggest Social Media Mistakes

Transcript of Vlog - Sept 13, 2020

Hi there. My name is Amanda Kaufman, and I'm Chris Lavelle... You are listening to The CRUSH Method Show. Join us each week for ideas to help you move your coaching business forward into service of others faster, and with better results, we're committed to professionalism and coaching. We want to help you get it done. Hey, there, I thought I would pop on here and share a little brainstorm that I had been doing in my journal about all the mistakes that I made when I was first starting my coaching business and wanting to use social media.

These are some of the biggest social mistakes, media mistakes that I made kind of early on. And I had so much fun kind of going down memory lane and thinking about it. I just had to share it with you. So there's quite a few here on this list and I may go over some of them really quickly. I might dive into a couple,

a little deeper, but in any case, if you find yourself making some of these mistakes, Hey, it's all a learning process, right? It's all about doing our very best with what we've got and we can always improve. We can always do better. And that's really what your mission ought to be if you're building your coaching business. So I hope this helps.

The first thing was I was not posting nearly frequently enough to be seen, especially now it's a, at the time of this recording, we're in September 2020, and more people are stepping out onto, online than ever both from a consumer standpoint, but also from a business standpoint. So if you think about it, these platforms, Facebook, Instagram,

YouTube, you know, they're, they're dealing with a huge, just mind bogglingly, huge volume of content that is getting uploaded every single day to the internets. And as a result, there's a very limited amount of space on the social feeds. You may have heard of the algorithm and I'm going to have, I'm going to have a lesson on that one in a second,

but in general, for the main platforms, if you are posting less often than daily to Instagram, to Facebook, and if you're using LinkedIn as a serious strategy, I'd really look at that. Uh, we currently post on Facebook at least five times a day and on Instagram around three times a day. And honestly, I don't think it's frequent enough.

You know, I used to really agonize over what does the post say is this totally representative of my brand and who I am. And I realized that I really didn't have a brand because nobody knew me because nobody saw me because it was not posting often enough. So if you're posting one to three times a week, sorry, it's not that it's not often enough.

It's just not often enough to truly be seen. Now you've got to start somewhere. So if that's where you are today, or you haven't really posted that often for your business, I get it. But we've got to figure out a way to get more consistent. If social media is going to truly be a part of your strategy. Okay. So that was number one.

Is, is I just, I wasn't doing it frequently enough. The second was, I just really didn't build a presence online. So I'm a bit of an introvert, a massive introvert. So I really prefer to have downtime. I'm actually really happy in my home office. Like I am right now, uh, talking into a microphone and not actually looking anybody in the face So I can be a little shy,

Die. And, um, because of that, I just really didn't build a presence online. And I waited so long to do that too long to do that. And here's, here's the thing. You can do it, even if you're very shy for painfully shy like me, if you're afraid of being on camera or being heard the way I used to be fear it,

um, I just gotta let you know, if you want to have people follow you, then you kind of have to be there. So it's kind of coupled with the frequency piece, but it really, if you're posting a bunch of quotes and you never show your face, or if you're reposting everybody else's stuff and you never, you never post something that's just authentically from you.

That's what I'm talking about with presence. And I waited really long to do that. Um, the other one was not having a real sales process in place. So if you're doing this to build presence and to build influence so that you can impact hundreds, thousands, or millions of lives, the thing is, is that having a bunch of followers, it turns out is not that challenging to accomplish pretty much anybody could do it if they had a consistent strategy and they were focused on what they were doing,

but a lot of people will build followings. And I did the same thing. I was really focused on like making more friends online, having more followers online, building my, a Facebook group, for example, and just kind of organically, um, growing, growing, growing, but then not really having the conversation where I am positioned as an expert,

helping them to accomplish something that is all really important. You've got to have some kind of a sales process that you step people through. And if there's one thing that I teach my clients, I'm pretty much right away when we're working together. The first order of business is always what your offer, what is the transformation that you're going to offer? Um,

but then the next thing is what is the sales process that you're going to take people through who want to accept your offer? And then, and only then do we start talking about your marketing and your marketing efforts? Because truly marketing without a sales process is absolutely worthless. And I know this from experience, if, uh, if there's one other thing I really wish that I did,

um, early on is I wish I had created the platform that we have now, right away just in its infancy. I really deferred to other people's platforms. You know, I was in other people's groups, I was going to other people's events. I was doing stuff with other people all the time. And part of it was just, I felt small.

Um, but I realized looking back that I was also acting small because I wasn't creating my own stage. I wasn't creating my own platform. I wasn't trying to build my own email list and I wasn't trying to form my own community. I, because I was at the time a private coach, I was really only focused on making private one on one type relationships so that we could continue to work together over time.

And, you know, bada Bing, bada boom. There you go. And the thing is, is that I was successful in that I did have a few private clients, but if I could just go back, I would be like, Hey girl, Hey, focus on building a community and trust that there are people in that community who want to work with you privately because in the long game,

you're going to want that community. If you're going to grow beyond a six figure coach, you're going to want to have a community that you're serving because you're going to have a group programs and lower ticket offerings that, you know, you'd have built an audience if you started that community even sooner. So I would have the mindset of, I'm not trying to find that one magical person I would instead say to myself,

what's the community that I want to grow and build because social media is really about community. It's about identifying with people who have common interests and have common conversations and values liking each other's content commenting and engaging on each other's content. Like that is what social media is. So if you're approaching social media and you're forgetting about the community aspect like I did for the first while,

um, of building my business, then I encourage you to just pause for a second and really think about what is that community that you want to build in the longer term and start laying the foundation now start doing it right now. Um, I think the other thing that I really got hung up on is I wasn't thinking in terms of years in my business,

uh, or in terms of the patterns in my business. So everything kind of felt like it was a big lift because everything felt like a huge item on a, to do list, instead of thinking about it and being in cycles or in patterns, you know, you can repost content from last year this year, you know, you can, if you had a holiday promotion last year,

you can run the same holiday promotion this year, maybe improve upon it, you know, with things that you have learned since last year. But the point is is that by getting started, you're making your life easier next year, because you can leverage so much of what you already have. And I delayed and deferred on starting on my social media content because I had this belief that everything had to be completely fresh,

completely, um, unique, completely amazing. Um, and I wasn't thinking in, in terms of a long game, same thing with posting patterns, you know, you can create a pattern or a cadence for how you're going to post to your various platforms into your groups, into all of those things. Um, we actually have six months of content in the can,

right? Meaning we, we ha we spent a few days, literally three days and we built six months of premade content, particularly for our group engagement. And, um, It just, it was Such a time saver. I don't even have to think about it. Right. And, uh, you know, that leads me to another big mistake,

which was, I wasn't batching anything. I was just trying to keep up with this cadence. And I felt completely victimized by my social media strategy. And that was just no way to live. So, you know, those are, those are some of the kind of, uh, big things. And I'm going to leave you with this final, big mistake.

And the final big mistake was that we were being way too serious for our personalities. So Chris and I are nerds. We love humor. Chris is a complete addict to memes and jokes and humor. I am silly and nerdy and expressive. And, you know, I, I like what I like and I do what I do. And I think I spent way too much time early on kind of feeling fear or shame for who I was and,

and what I had to say and whether it actually mattered. And I'm here to tell you on the other side of breaking through of a lot of the mindset crap on that, that if you're too serious and it doesn't match your personality, It's, it's just Going to be a snooze Fest. You know, social media is a fun place. People go there for escapism.

They go there because they're bored or they're avoiding things in their life. And so there's a certain amount of entertainment that I realized was very much actually part of my very serious mission. You know, I, I'm on a very serious mission to help people really live into their most amazing version of their lives. And I've chosen to help coaches because I know coaches have the mindset to be able to pass on the breakthrough kind of mindset that the average person really needs.

And so if I can teach you what I know about process teaching, what I know about business and marketing and sales process, and you get those clients to step up and step into their lives, that's what I'm all about, right? So that's kind of serious stuff, isn't it sort of heavy and because it's such a serious thing. When I first started out with my social media,

everything was super somber and really serious. And I will tell you that if you're using social media as a device, as a tool in your business, and even beyond social media, if you think about, if you were to set up a table at a vendor fair or at a conference or something, if you have the super serious dissed, most boring grace lab of,

uh, of office table as a booth, because what you're talking about is so serious and stoic, you will be so ignored. So ignored the best social media content is going to be entertaining and maybe even a little polarizing. And your goal with the social media content is to get people to engage with it, because if they engage with it, there'll be shown more of it.

And the more that they are shown of your stuff, the opportunities you offer to them to move along into your process, maybe into a conversion event, like a masterclass or a webinar, or to download something and join you on your email list where you're inviting them to have consults or join you in your Facebook group, or join you for a challenge, whatever the case may be.

If they're already engaging with you, they will continue to engage with you. And I found that if you can be more entertaining, you will go so much, further, so much faster. So if you have a sense of humor, use it. If you have a funny story or an anecdote, use it be, be your best version of you and just let the rest kind of sort itself out on that note.

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