MBA2384 Q&A Wednesday: Do I need to be on social media? I hate it.

0:09Heyo! Welcome to the$100 MBA show. No fluff, just the good stuff with our practical business lessons. I'm your host or coach, your teacher, Omar Zinhome. I'm also the co-founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started back in 2014. And today's episode is Q &A Wednesday. On Q &A Wednesdays, we answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you've got a question you want to ask, go ahead and email me over at omar at 100mba.net. Today's question is from Carl. And Carl asks, do I need to be on social media? I absolutely hate it. is it essential to my business success and my personal brand?

0:47Such a solid question, a question I can relate to. I'm not totally in love with social media myself. I am on social media. I kind of do it reluctantly. Sometimes I embrace it. Sometimes I can't stand it. So in today's episode, I'll share with you my thoughts on this topic. Do you actually need to be on social media in today's business world? Are there any examples of anybody being successful that's not on social media? And if so, who are they? Also, is there a way around this? Can we be on social media without hating ourselves? There is no doubt that social media has some negative effects on our mood, on our self-esteem, on our overall happiness in life.

1:24We're not engineered. We're not genetically prepared for this amount of information at one time every single day. So let's tackle this together. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business. I want to first address the question, do I need to be on social media? The flat, simple answer is no. You don't have to do anything. Now, is it going to be harder for you to build a brand, build a business without any social media? Most likely. There's a few people that come to mind that have no social media presence, but yet are quite successful at what they do. The first person that comes to mind in my head is Cal Newport.

2:01Cal Newport is a very successful author. and he talks about the topic. So he walks the talk. He has a book called Digital Minimalism. One of my favorite books of all time is called Deep Work by Cal Newport. He is actually a computer scientist, but is not on social media at all. He guests on podcasts and YouTube channels, but he's just not on social media, but is still a successful author, still has a successful brand and has a thriving career. But I will say that Cal Newport is exceptional. He'll probably never be mainstream because most people learn about people through social media. So those of us who are entrepreneurs who love reading books, that love the topics he explores, we're going to know about him.

2:43And that's fine because that's all he really needs to be successful. The next thing I want to get into is let's explore why we hate social media. Why would you hate it? And it's probably because you hate consuming the content, scrolling aimlessly, seeing things that you just don't love, that don't inspire you, that don't give you happiness, that get you angry, that get you frustrated. Social media is one of those things that you've got to be really vigilant about when it comes to your feed, what you see. When you see something that you don't like, you definitely unfollow that person or choose the option of don't show me posts like this anymore.

3:16I know the options in Facebook. And there's an easy way to be vigilant about this. And one of the things that you should change about your mindset when it comes to social media is production, not consumption. You want to produce on social media as a creator, as a business owner, as a brand, whether that's you producing content, posting and sharing valuable information and being a producer of social media content and not a consumer. So you should definitely be producing more than you're consuming. Now, if you don't like posting, if you don't like sharing things about your business or advice or value, if that's something that you really have a hard time with, or maybe you're not big on video or photos or even quotes, then my tip to you is something I learned from Shannon Morris, a friend of mine here in Australia.

4:03And he says, hey, if you don't like posting, just engage, which means just go ahead and add value through the comments, answer questions, be helpful. This is incredibly easy on Twitter. Twitter is built for this, built for conversations, built for you posting and sharing and retweeting and helping people in these threads. And you could do the same on Instagram, on Facebook, on LinkedIn. And that's how you produce content is you produce value through the comments and you become sort of a helper. And it could be something as simple as 10 minutes a day after lunch, 10 minutes, you spend two or three minutes on each platform and you comment and help out and answer some questions.

4:46This keeps you social on social media. This keeps you active and the algorithms are going to absolutely love you. In fact, many people say, experts at social media say that when you open up, let's say your social media app, whether there's Instagram or Twitter or whatever it might be, or X now, and you first interact, you first comment on people's posts you like, you answer questions, when you spend some time interacting first, then you post, your post gets more reach. It's almost like the algorithm is rewarding you for being social. Most of what we hate about social media is what we see in our feed.

5:19We might see some cool stuff, some fun stuff. We might hate it because it wastes our time. So there's an easy fix to this actually. There's a great tool called News Feed Eradicator and I use it on my desktop computer and it basically blocks my news feed on all the social media apps, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, whatever it might be. When I go to my feed, there's nothing there. There's actually just a quote there or something, an inspiring quote. So basically it just allows me to check my messages, check my notifications and to post. So if you just want to be in the content production game of social media.

5:52This is a great tool to stop you from seeing something on your feed. I'm a big believer that you should be really vigilant about what you expose yourself to. Jim Rohn said it best, stand guard at the gates of your mind. You've got to be vigilant about what goes in your brain because that's going to influence what you think about, how you feel, what you do. If you want to install something like this on your phone, there's something called Be Timeful with one L and it's available for iOS. I think it's the only app available for iOS that does this. So if you tend to use social media on your phone, then that is a great tool to make sure that you control what you see and you don't waste time.

6:29You open up and you don't get distracted. One of the things I highly recommend is shutting off all notifications from social media on your phone as well as on your desktop. How many times have you opened up your phone to do something and then you get distracted so you see a notification that somebody liked to post and you go and check it out? That's a huge time suck and this is one of the reasons why a lot of people hate social media. It's just always drawing you back into the platform. That's their job. Their job is to get you on the platform so they can get your eyeballs and sell more ads. Your job is to fight that and to use it to your best advantage.

7:01Listen, social media could be a huge tool for you to share your message, share your brand, talk about your products and services, talk about your story, talk about what you do and how you serve your customers. It's really permissionless media, which is huge. No gatekeepers. But you have to be vigilant to make sure that social media serves you and you're not serving social media. And some of these tools I shared with you today and some of the strategies are really helpful because, listen, they have teams of very smart people making sure you stay on this app and you keep coming back to it and back to it and back to it.

7:34We're really no match with the technology without a game plan. We have to have a game plan. We have to have an intention every time we open up the app. I know there's tools also that delay the opening of the app to get you to think, do I really need to open up this app right now? One of them was called App Block. And it actually blocks you from opening up certain apps at certain times. They use technology on us. We got to use technology on them. Now, having said all this, social media can really serve you by building community, by getting feedback, by learning about your customers, not only by creating your own community on your profile, but by joining other communities, other groups, by talking to your customers on their profile, DMs, commenting on other conversations and learning from each other.

8:19It's not all bad, but I'm going to go back to what I said in the beginning. It's your choice. You don't have to do anything. Don't want to be on social media or you don't want to take a hiatus for a little bit. That's okay. I've done that before. I took 18 months off in 2017. Sometimes you just need a break from all the madness and that's okay. See how it affects your business and your brand. And then when you jump back in, you can be a little bit more mindful about how you approach it. That wraps up today's episode. Remember, if you got a question you want to ask right here on Q &A Wednesday, email me at omar at 100mba.net.

8:51I'll make sure to answer right here. If you want to be anonymous, just let me know. If you want me to just use your first name, that's okay too. But by asking a question, I get to help you and others that have a similar question. So it's a total win all around. Make sure you hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app. It's a huge, huge deal. By doing it, you help us get more exposure. So thank Thank you in advance for doing that. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Social media can be overwhelming. It can really, really take a toll on your mental health if you're on it all day long.

9:22So at the very least, have a cutoff time when it's time to shut things down. You don't actually engage in social media anymore, whether it's 5 p.m. or 6 p.m. And you just basically go in do not disturb mode and you can't use these apps. You can use AppBlock, for example. and this gives your mind a chance to take a break from all this frenzy that's happening on social media. This will help you tremendously have a little bit more peace of mind and feel like you're in control of how you use the platforms. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in Friday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.