I recorded this video for a private partner meeting in Austin last month, and they insisted I share it with business owners here. You can either watch the video above or read below.

I’m here to talk to you about social media. I’m hopefully going to tell you things you already know, but just in case you don’t, I’m gonna say it anyway. Because if I had a kitten for every time a business owner lamented to me that they should be doing better on social media, let’s just say I wouldn’t have a husband.

Here’s the thing about social media. People are on it to be entertained. It is the opiate of the masses. If you are selling something directly to consumers, you have a product, it can be great, you can sell a lot of product on it. And if you are a global company with a service or a product or an info webinar or a coaching program, great. You can potentially sell on social media.

But if you’re a service provider, then your use of social media really needs to be part of a larger strategy. The goal of a local service provider is to be locally famous. 50 mile famous. There is no point in striving to go viral on TikTok because I’m not going to hire a plumber out of Austin because my pipes are in Loveland, Colorado.

Even if I watch a video, like, thank you, but that’s not gonna result in business for you. You know, just you don’t have to work so hard on social media or guilt yourself about it. Like, it’s fine. It’s okay to just enjoy the reach you have on radio, and the success you have on radio, to enjoy the community engagement you’re doing.

Focus on being 50 mile famous. Famous in your service area, famous in your hometown. If they know you when they need you, people are not gonna look on TikTok for a plumber because my pipes just burst because it’s zero degrees in Colorado right now.

Social media is rented land. You don’t know what’s gonna happen. There are no promises. TikTok is banned. TikTok is not banned. TikTok is banned again. TikTok is not banned again. Instagram, Meta, they change their algorithms. They do whatever they do that’s funky. At the end of the day, it’s rented land.

The audience that you think is yours is not yours. It’s Zuckerberg’s audience. It’s ByteDance’s audience. It’s not yours. It’s borrowed. You’re enjoying it. You’re paying for it. One way or another, you’re paying for it, and just like any other media, you’re paying for your reach.

Also, keep in mind, large luxury brands, Cartier, BMW, and Patek Philippe are all sucking wind on social media. Like, they don’t know how to do it. And the truth is that no one’s interested in following brands on social media. I don’t wanna follow a company on social media. It’s social.

I want to follow people. I can tell you about the lady in Italy that I follow that I’ve ordered her cookbook because she posts her recipes and a few pictures of her dog. And then there’s, you know, the lady in the UK that posts, like, squishy gluten-free bread, but we follow people on social media. We don’t follow businesses.

So if you are a business and you want to be on social media because it fits in your strategy and you’ve tapped radio and television, social media is next, then it has to be a person. It has to be people. It has to be your text. It has to be your clients It has to be storytelling. It has to be heartwarming, and it has to be educational.

Fun and educational content is what will get you followers and reach. And then you have to convert that into something that is yours. You have to convert those people and that reach onto your own email list, your own texts, your own whatever because that platform might be gone tomorrow. So convert it into something you do own.

Let’s talk about the command to watch. In 1937 William Mortensen wrote a book called The Command to Look. It is the holy grail for photographers because he talks about compositional elements, and structure that people cannot walk past. If you see something that is angular, there is a heart rate, a physiological response that it might be dangerous, so you have to look. If you see something that is big, like it might be a big rock, then there’s a physiological response. Even if you’re not looking, you catch it out of your peripheral vision, and you have to turn to see what it is before you can move on.

So when I think about social media and stopping the scroll, I like to think about the command to watch. What is the command to watch? What is it that physiologically strikes me that stops my thumb? And the truth is that it’s either a real curiosity inducer or a real shock or a combination.

The best, of course, is a combination. So I would say a cute kitten is shock, and a sad looking kitten is curiosity, because I wanna know what happened to this sad looking kitten. The command to watch is that it has to be in those first three seconds, and it has to have a moment of woah.

And then because we’re Wizard of Ads marketers, we have to give them satisfaction at the end. This is not clickbait. We’re not gonna say “How to solve your houseplant spider mite problem” and then not tell you how to solve your houseplant spider mite problem. You have to end with a clear takeaway, the one that you promised in the beginning. So that there’s the dopamine release and people wanna watch your content again.

So what’s your strategy? If you don’t know, if you need help, I’m totally here to help you. I love to talk about this crap because I see so much of it done badly. And when I see it done well, it is so much fun. I’m here to help. Just ask me. I’m really good at making stuff.

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