How to Leave Social Media and Still Grow Your Business

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1:33There's no safe like SimpliSafe. From Entrepreneur Media, this is Problem Solvers, a show in which entrepreneurs do what entrepreneurs do best, solve unexpected problems in their business. We were completely wrong. And I'm just like, it's not selling. It was like, we have to start from scratch. I'm Jason Pfeiffer, the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine.

2:21point to all of this? Well, Amelia has an interesting answer. I'm Amelia Fruby. I am the founder of Software Sounds Podcast Studio and the host of Off the Grid Podcast, which is a show about leaving social media without losing all or any of your clients. And that is a very specific thing. How did you come to that? Yeah, so I came to it through personal experience. I put years into growing my platform as a micro-influencer and I got a book deal and I was selling my book through my social media audience or to my social media audience. And in that process, I really burned myself out and realized that social media wasn't actually selling that many books or anything else anyway.

3:08So through my process of having all of those realizations and then leaving social media and starting a business without it, I realized that this advice I'd been given that you need social media to be successful in business was just not true. And now I'm trying to help other entrepreneurs and small business owners have similar realizations. Although you know what else can burn you out in that story? Launching a book. So here it is. Amelia is saying you can leave social media and not harm your business. This seems very counterintuitive. One of the first things that you're going to hear is if you have a brand, you got to get that brand on social media.

3:47You got to find your audience. You got to engage them. And Amelia is not saying don't engage people. She's just saying maybe, just maybe. Social media is not actually the place to do it. Today on Problem Solvers, we are digging into that. Why not? What happens when you leave social media? Can you leave social media? And what else can you do instead? It's all coming up after the break. In the innovation economy, change is constant, but some things remain the same. Like how Silicon Valley Bank is still the SVB you know and trust, now backed by the strength and stability of First Citizens Bank. Or how SVB continues to be uniquely positioned to deliver specialized lending and financial solutions for companies, founders, and investors.

4:35Or that SVB remains fully committed to the innovation economy. Change is constant. But through it all, SVB is still the Silicon Valley bank that can help your runways lead to liftoff. Yes, SVB. Learn more at svb.com slash solvers. All right, we're back talking with Amelia Frube of the Off the Grid podcast about how to leave social media without hurting your business. And to start, I told Amelia that I am not actually a social media hater. And I don't think this conversation should be limited to people who hate social media. The reason I was in particular interested in talking to you about it is that I I personally do not believe in the narrative that there is some inherent bad to social media, that its very nature is somehow transforming people into monsters or grabbing our attention in ways that override our humanity or any of that.

5:32I just don't believe it. But that is not to say that people can't have individual bad experiences with social media and develop individual bad habits. And for those people, it really is important to step back and pick apart what you have been doing. And I really love your approach to it because you're making this very specific point, which is a lot of people feel anchored to social media because they feel like it has some specific tangible outcome for their business. And you are arguing quite counterintuitively that it doesn't. So let's start with this. Why doesn't it? Yeah. So I think that most entrepreneurs and small business owners overestimate how many clients or customers are finding them through social media.

6:15Or they seem to think that social media is a great audience growth tool. But I think that that has really diminished as we've seen the saturation of brands on social media over the past five years, or even really over the past three years. I think the space has evolved to become much more pay to play. And I think that there are people out there who are still succeeding at that game. And so we see those examples and we think, oh, well, if it's working for them, it will work for me. And I think that unless you're someone who has kind of bountiful time and money to invest into your social media growth, then it's probably not really working for you.

6:51Or it might be working, but there are probably other marketing strategies that you could use that would take way less energy and way less time and get you similar, if not better results. And when you say you, can you define who you're mostly talking to here? because obviously if someone's running a company that has the budget to hire a social media team, well, then it's not exactly the individual founder's problem anymore and isn't that wonderful. So you're talking really to people who are in that phase of business where they're doing almost everything themselves. Is that right? Yeah, so I'm really thinking about the bootstrappers out there, the solopreneurs out there, the people running businesses with tiny teams where we're always kind of stretching the amount of time we have to cover all of the things that we need to get done.

7:35I agree. I am not talking to the VC-backed founders who have a lot of money to put into this or whose kind of whole play is that we need to grow this on TikTok or we need this to really hit on Instagram. And when it does, we will get thousands and thousands of subscribers. Like I'm not really talking to those specific people. I'm thinking more of the founders and small business owners like myself and like some of the former influencers I work with where we don't have that type of team or financial backing. So what should somebody, how does somebody start unpacking this? Because let us imagine the first couple of questions that you usually get.

8:13Number one is, but people need to know I exist and you want to go where people are and people are on social media. What's the answer to that? The answer to that is a series of questions. Okay. My first question would be, Who do you want to know you exist? Because I think that often people conflate like their personal community that they're connected to on social media with their ideal customer or client for their business, right? The people who I used to be connected with on social media were generally one or two degrees away from who I knew in real life. And I didn't need my cousins to know about my business.

8:48I needed other small business owners or other people who love whatever you might be making to know about your business. That'd be my first question. It's like, who do you need to know that you exist? And then I think my next question would be, what type of relationship do you need with them? Because more and more, we are seeing that people go to social media. Social media users go there for entertainment. They go there for fun. They go there maybe to learn about something. But I think they're going there less and less to learn particularly about like services or businesses that they're going to engage with.

9:20And so I would think about the type of relationship you're trying to form. Is it that sort of casual entertainment-based relationship? Maybe if you run a product-based business and you want them to see how cool and fun your product looks in the world, perhaps it's a great fit for you. But I think especially for service providers and for B2B businesses, that's not the type of relationship you're trying to build. So it's not a good place to go to build relationships. That naturally is going to lead to, well, then where do you go? But before we get there, I'll ask you another thing that I bet comes up a lot, which is, but maybe there's just a different way to do social media because there is, I'm on it all the time and it stresses me out.

9:58There's also, I'm going to think of it as a box to check in a reasonable timeframe. I will post every other day and I will otherwise not look at it. It is just a thing that happens. And if you get into the habit of that, it can be pretty manageable. So I suppose maybe this is really a question that goes back to, again, like, who are we talking to? Are we talking to people who are specifically burned out on this or haven't figured out what strategy works for them and maybe no strategy works for them? Like somebody who's already feeling quite negative about this and it's draining energy from other places?

10:33Or do you think if someone is having a neutral to minorly agitating time on social media but it's not that difficult that you should just leave it be? Like, are you arguing that people should get off of it? Are you arguing that, hey, if you want to get off it, you can get off it? I'm arguing that you can get off of it. So I could certainly sit here and make claims on the basis of mental health or global politics that more of us should be getting off of social media. I've talked about on my podcast why leaving social media was a really values-based decision for me and how getting off of it aligned with my values.

11:11So like certainly that claim is out there and we could make it, but I'm more invested in reminding business owners that they have agency over how they spend their time and over how they grow their business. And so if social media is working for you, I'm not telling you that you should get off of it. But if you're listening to this episode or you go listen to my podcast, it's probably because something with social media is like not working for you. Maybe it is like maybe it is creating a lot of angst. Maybe it is stressing you out. Maybe it's not getting the results that you want. And then I think we can often get caught in the sense of, well, I feel bad, but I have to be here.

11:48And so I'm trying to take us to the next step. Like, I feel bad and I can leave. That's where I want people to go. OK, great. Got it. OK, so where are we leaving to? So we're leaving to all sorts of places. I think that social media has become this monolith such that marketing and social media marketing feel synonymous at this point in time. And one of the first things that I did when I left social media or was I was in the process of leaving social media is I created a list of 100 ways to share your work and life without social media. So literally, we can go to any of those 100 places and be creative and different with our marketing.

12:25So I'm not going to list. Yeah, we don't have time for 100, but I'll take a few. Yeah. So I think there are some popular ones. One is definitely going to be an email newsletter. I still, I love email. I highly recommend it for most people leaving social media. I think podcasts are another popular marketing channel. I also think that an underlooked and very valuable one is relationships and network marketing, really being in better touch with the people who are ideal clients or who are connectors to ideal clients in your community. I find that lots of people are using social media to avoid ever sending a sales email or a connection email when in fact they'd get way more business just doing that.

13:06I think other things that you could be doing would be working in different types of online communities, could be establishing your business through ads in your local community. There are lots of businesses who would be better served thinking about proximity than trying to grow online? Who are the people who are around the coffee shop that you run? Who are the people that are around the store that you're opening? Who are the people that you could make a custom t-shirt for based in where you live and they would become new customers rather than trying to reach people all over the world online? So those are just some ideas.

13:37And in proposing all that, it's interesting because what you are not telling people to do is to stop producing content. Like in a way, social media is really just a place to produce content. And the answer that you've offered is in part, at least just produce content somewhere else. So why would a newsletter or a podcast, for example, be a better thing for someone who is burnt out or just feeling like they've hit a wall on social? Yeah, so I think there are different reasons for each one. A newsletter would be a better option than social media because it's what we know as an owned channel. You actually have direct relationship with your audience rather than them being a series of feeds and profiles that you can't export and take anywhere else.

14:21So I think that's a clear advantage of a newsletter over social media. Podcasts are a little different because podcast audiences are not people we know and can just like export elsewhere. We often... Quite the opposite. Yeah. We have no idea who's listening. Precisely. So I think that with a podcast, what I find is that it really helps people nurture existing relationships. And so when they do get leads, if you're in the business of cultivating leads, they're much warmer and they're much more likely to buy from you. So it's really good at that nurturing stage of marketing. But I think that the other thing I really try to point people to in terms of making content specifically off social media is really focusing on the longevity of your content.

15:01Because often what really burns people out about social media is that the content is so fleeting and you have to make more and more and more of it. And I think that most other content we're making online can last longer and be multi-purpose and multi-use for us. Because for example, you could write a newsletter, like somebody might hear that and say, but wait a second, a newsletter is just going into people's inboxes and most of them are going to delete it. Because, you know, of course, the horrifying statistics are like, if you have a 20 to 30 % open rate, you're like doing pretty good. And yet, of course, you could take that content and put it somewhere else too.

15:37You could make a website and then that content lives as content on your website. And now you're following a good content marketing strategy and you're going to SEO the hell out of that thing. And maybe people will find you as they search. Is that what you're thinking? The more you're not just creating these short form made for specific social platform content, the more you're able to think about the kind of stuff that you can repurpose in different ways and just maximize the amount of time that you've invested in it? Yes, exactly. To use your example, if we were writing a newsletter, that's precisely what I would do with it.

16:13Or I think about it in terms of iterating on the content we've created. So I write a newsletter, it's where I kind of try out an idea. If I hear back from people and they're like, oh, this really resonated, then I can convert it into a blog post. And when I do that, I can think about search engine optimization. I can think about, okay, what would people be searching where I want them to find this? And I tweak it so it actually suits that. and then on my website, I could build a sort of, you know, pillar page that includes all of the most helpful things I've created so that I get more associated with those things and I could go on to, you know, if you wanted to take it onto YouTube, you could do that.

16:47If you wanted to move it to a podcast episode, you could do that. If you wanted to pitch it to people as something you can talk about on podcasts, you could do that. You know, there's so many different places you can take it from there. But yeah, I'm always thinking about what are the ways that we can keep, it's not just saying the exact same thing over and over and over again, but how do we keep like deepening our ideas and helping them reach more people in the process? Yeah, I love that. And I do a version of that. I mean, I am active on social media, but my version of the thing that you're describing is that I pull back on the social media platforms that I don't feel like are working for me.

17:22So I used to try to do everything. And I'd be like, oh, I got to be on TikTok. I don't know how to be on TikTok. I'm not good at TikTok. So I am now, I post daily on LinkedIn and I post kind of whenever I feel like it on Instagram. And that's basically it. And then I glance at Twitter, but it's insufferable. And so I don't stay very long and I don't look at TikTok at all. And that works for me because I'm making the decision that I don't need to be everywhere, but I'm going to be where my audience is and where I feel like I most naturally produce content. and I have this channel, this flow that isn't always the same, but a version of it could go like this.

18:02I could write something on LinkedIn and it does well. And then maybe I post it on Instagram and it does well too. And then I make it a newsletter. And then I take that same idea and I write a column in the magazine about it. And then I take that same idea and it becomes a segment of my keynote talk. And then maybe it becomes a chapter of a book and it can flow and flow and flow. And in doing that, I am maximizing my efforts. And also really in doing that, I'm also refining the idea. I feel like by the time it gets to the bigger stages, it's a better idea. I've spent more time with it. I've tested it against the real world.

18:39It's more impactful. Yeah, exactly. And I think that in this era where we're all creating so much content, we have to spend more time working on that impact piece because people are overwhelmed by content. It's why our emails only have 25 % open rates, and that's good, right? It's why on Instagram, well, it's part of the reason on social media, our reach is so low comparative to our follower size. And I just think that while that can often feel overwhelming, a lot of people hear that and they're like, oh, I guess I can't make any content. No one will ever see it. But I think actually, if you're really making impactful, if you're really saying impactful things, it will resonate with people and it will find an audience.

19:21but that takes time and it takes that refinement process that you're talking about. Yeah, that's right. And you could just think of the starting point of however you're producing that content, whether you are still on social in some narrower way or you skip it entirely and you just go straight to newsletter or podcast or whatever. If you just think of the first part of it as the testing ground, then what you're putting out in the world feels a little different. It reminds me of I once I got a drink with Gary Vee and I asked him how he like, what's his process for coming up with ideas that he puts out into the world?

19:56And for him back then, at least, I don't know if he's changed it, but this was a couple of years ago. He told me that he uses Twitter as a sounding board. Like whenever he has a quick idea, he tweets it. And what he's really doing is just looking to see if people respond to it. and he knows that like not everyone's going to like everything that he posts, but he has a good record now of the things that people like and that they don't. And the ones that seem to get more of a response graduate into other forms and become kind of bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And so if you had the expectation that everything that you post on Twitter blows up, then you're going to be sorely disappointed.

20:32But if you see it as basically an experimentation zone where you just throw things out there, then the stakes are lower and maybe you feel freer. Or Or again, you just skip that and just go to the newsletter where again, not every newsletter is going to hit. And that's OK, because the ones that do just told you a lot about how to communicate with your audience. Yeah, exactly. And I also think that for business owners, often for me at this point, like my paid membership is where I get the best feedback on my ideas. Right. And so I've kind of learned I can actually flip this model, whereas instead of just giving all my ideas on the Internet for free, they go to my inner circle first and then they go out in a different form if they kind of pass that test.

21:08So I feel like I've somewhat inverted this to really try to create a different type of testing ground for me, for myself and for my business. And I think that gets into something else that I just see so many business owners fall into, which is trying to be an influencer instead of a business owner. And there's nothing wrong with being an influencer. I want to clear, like, there's nothing wrong with being an influencer. But I think that what influencer for influencers, your metrics are all about your reach. And for business owners, we have these important revenue and profitability metrics that we need to keep in mind.

21:44And we can get really distracted by focusing on reach instead. And I think that leads a lot of business owners down this path of doing lots of like free knowledge work on the Internet, when in fact that could be really focused on offerings or product development in their business. Mm, that's a great point, because when you post on social, the metrics by which you are measured are metrics that really feel most relevant to influencers. Exactly. And that makes you feel like you have to play a game that you were not exactly suited to play. Yeah, precisely. I mean, and that shows in the way that unless you are selling your products through the platform specific shopping channels, you actually get no information about if anyone bought something from you, like through your social media platforms.

22:33Right. So precisely the metrics that we're given are about doing the best on that particular app, which is very different than doing the best in your business. I want to get to a few more of your suggestions. But before I do that, loop back to just one other thing that you had said earlier, which was when you were making the case for why a newsletter can be more valuable than social. And that's because you own that channel and you own the relationship. You can contact those people directly. And you also know if they engaged in your stuff. And that reminded me of a conversation that I've been having with a friend who is not here with us on this conversation, but I'm going to call her out and she's going to just be okay with it, which is my friend Lauren, who runs a small bagel company called Cloud9 Bagels in Central Massachusetts.

23:22Shout out anybody who wants bagels in Central Massachusetts, Cloud9 Bagel. You can go to Instagram.com slash Cloud9 underscore bagels. And that is where Lauren communicates with her bagel lovers. And I keep telling her that's fine. But the problem is that you have no idea if you're really reaching everybody. The algorithm is going to stand in the way of you reaching your full audience. You're sort of at the mercy of whether or not the people who want your bagels happen to be looking at Instagram that day. And you really need to get all their email addresses because even if you don't want to leave Instagram, and I don't think that she has any desire to leave Instagram, but like it can't be your sole channel because it's actually a very scattered way to reach people.

24:03So Lauren, you're listening, get the email addresses. Would you agree, Amelia? Yeah, I think so. Something I've seen really work for people in that instance or for people with shops like a bagel shop or there's a bakery in my area that does this really well. Shout out to Butterfly Bakery in Lincoln, Nebraska. Would be, I think, the biggest barrier between a cafe or restaurant owner and sending emails as it's like way easier to snap a photo and put it on Instagram than it feels to actually write a consistent email newsletter. But what I love to see is that you're seeing payment processors like Square actually make it really easy to set up reward system with your customers and do a lot of SMS marketing that I think is really effective.

24:48And I can tell you that I have gone to Butterfly Bakery so many days because I got a text from them in the morning that reminded me like, oh, I actually do want to stop by and pick up a cookie this afternoon. And so I think there are ways if the block is that email is a whole other thing to learn and it takes more time, there are ways that it doesn't have to be that hard. Like there are other creative marketing ways, creative marketing strategies where you own the relationship with your audience and it can integrate with other things that you're doing like handling payments. Unpack the SMS thing for a second.

25:20I don't think people know that that exists. Do you know of some good tools or do you have any idea what that bakery uses? Yeah, yeah. So for anyone who's totally new to this, SMS marketing is just marketing through text messages. And so you can get your customers or clients phone numbers and automate sending them messages. I know that I believe the bakery has implemented this through Square, which is what they're using to process payments. So when I go check out, I put in my, they ask for my phone number, I put in my credit card, and I get rewards based on how much I spend there. And then I get text messages from the bakery about redeeming my rewards, about events they have coming up, about discounts they're offering that particular day.

26:02And it's coming straight to my phone through my texts. I don't see an email. I'm not like, they're not writing an email. I'm not seeing an email. It's all happening over text message. And for them, it's integrated right into when I pay, I give my phone number, and then it all comes from there. So I think that that could be a really great way for people with like brick and mortars to grow. I think people might be worried about SMS because it would feel too invasive. Email, you expect to get marketing by email. Social media is all the brands talking to each other anyway. SMS is primarily either your friends or very annoying spam.