No BS Truth About Social Media – Smoke & Mirrors, Fact or Fiction

Each Monday, Lisa Larter and I host a live show on Blab.im [The Melonie & Lisa Show] where business and social media intersect. We, along with a special guest share tips, strategies and updates about social media, online marketing and other relevant topics relating to business.

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Blab Episode: No BS Truth About Social Media (Smoke & Mirrors, Fact or Fiction)

1. Fact or Fiction: Do I need 100K Twitter followers to be successful?

• 100K Twitter followers does NOT mean you have a successful business.
• First you need to determine how having 100K Twitter followers will meet your business goals.
• There is no inherent value in just having 100k Twitter followers – you can go out and buy that many fake followers, but they will be of no value to you.
• Followers can be BS or the can be an actual reflection of your popularity.
• The importance of engagement can be an illusion, for example on Facebook, the kind of person that engages is not always the kind of person that buys.
• Engagement does not always lead to sales.
• You can’t assume that having fans/followers or getting engagement is going to lead to sales.

2. Fact or Fiction: I can market my business for free?

• Not a lot of sales happen on social media, unless you are using ads to drive traffic into your sales funnel.

• You can’t trade likes, fans or followers for email subscribers.
• You have to spend money to make ads visible to your fans to get them to become email subscribers.
• It costs money to translate your fans to your email list and then it costs more money to stay visible to those fans on Facebook.

3. Fact or Fiction: You can’t go wrong purchasing from “6 or 7 figure” experts, can you?

• Even if you have a 6 or 7 figure business, if you have less than a 10% profit margin, it’s very possible you will not be making any money.
• If you are spending as much on marketing and ads as you are bringing in, that is not a sustainable business model.
• Get all the facts when some someone says they had a 5 figure day or a 6 or 7 figure year – you can’t take these assertions at face value without knowing the mechanics behind the business – that doesn’t always equal success or profitability.
• You need to determine if what the individual is teaching is relevant to you and your business.

• Just because something works for one person on social media does not mean that it will work for you.

• You need to determine not only that the success is real but also that they can teach you to be equally successful.
• You need to look at their student’s success, not just their success.

• Anyone can be successful doing something once once. But that doesn’t mean that the success can be repeated or is teachable.
• Can you talk to their students? Written testimonials can be faked.
• Video testimonials are much more likely to be real.

4. Two BIGGEST reasons people fail according to Brian Carter

1. People have bad strategies. There a tons of bad strategies out there. You need to have a good strategy to be successful.
2. Most people don’t work hard. Don’t look for a magic bullet. There is no shame in working hard.

5. Fact or Fiction: I need to be on every social media platform

• While you might want to claim your name (business and personal) on every platform, you don’t need to be actively using every social media platform.
• Do one or two (possibly three) social media platforms really well rather than doing a poor job and overextending yourself on too many.
• Figure out which platforms your customers and prospects are using and focus on those.

5. Fact or Fiction: There are benefits to buying Facebook Followers & Likes

• There is no reason you should ever buy fake likes.
• The Audience Insights tool on Facebook allows you to target people based on income, net worth, interests, etc. – if you buy fake followers, you mess up your ability to analyze your followers.
• You will have bad data which will waste any money you spend on Facebook ads.

6. What happens when Shiny Object Syndrome or FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) drives you?

• With each new social media platform that pops up, many people feel the need to find a way to use it for their business.
• You need to determine if the platform is a fit for your business and if your audience is using it.
• You need to ask yourself – does this platform have mainstream adoption and if not now, will it soon?
• It is good to choose social platforms that have mainstream adoption and an advertising platform that works. For example, Facebook can reach almost any audience and is widely adopted.
• Also you need to determine if this platform has produced profits, sales or leads for you.

7. What is the “ceiling of trust”?

• This is the top dollar figure for a product or service that you can sell online without the need for a personal conversation or one-on-one interaction.
• You have to figure out what this number is for you as it is different for every person and business.
• Social media is ideal to find, connect and build relationships with your ideal clients as well as to establish your authority on your topic.

8. Fact or Fiction: Testing is important

• You are only able to see a piece of what people are doing, so it is impossible to exactly duplicate what they are doing to be successful.
• Keep in mind that what works for someone else won’t necessarily work for you.
• You have to do a lot of tests – follow the numbers.

• The more tests you run, the faster you’ll learn.
• You need to be smart about what you chose to test, particularly with ads as each test (every variation) costs you money.
• You need a healthy budget to test.
• You need to determine the responsiveness of your target to your most basic offer before going on to do more extensive testing.

Watch the Blab replay for the full conversation!

There’s so many people with differing opinions on social media. What’s yours? And what do you want to learn next on one of our upcoming Blabs? Let us know in the comment below.

Follow me on Blab.im at blab.im/MelonieDodaro and subscribe to my weekly Blab show every Monday at 10am PT (1pm ET) with Lisa Larter.

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