MBA2433 Why I Changed My Social Media Strategy

0:08Heyo! Welcome to the$100 MBA show, business insights delivered on a silver platter. With our practical business lessons, I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zinhome. And in today's lesson, you will learn why I changed my social media strategy. If you've been a listener of this show and known me for some time, you know that I have a love-hate relationship with social media. And for the last 10 years, really, I really haven't invested much into growing my social media reach. This is mostly because I don't actually enjoy being on social media. It doesn't make me feel great. And some platforms are worse than others, but the bottom line is that I really haven't spent much time trying to grow my following, my audience, out on the social media world.

0:55I got my profiles and everything, you know, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, you name it. But have I been active on those profiles? Another story. So with the sale of Webinar Ninja, I really wanted to get laser focused on growing this podcast, the$100 MBA brand, and expanding our reach and our audience beyond where it is today. And that meant getting real and getting face to face with social media. What do I want to do with this thing? Am I in? Am I out? I got to commit to something. Even if that something is, I'm off social media. So in today's episode, I'm going to share with you my new social media strategy and why it's working for me and why I absolutely love it.

1:36And that's why I want to share it with you. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business. I find it incredibly helpful when I can focus, when I can just focus on one thing. I hate being pulled from different directions. It makes me feel I'm not making progress anywhere. And that's how I felt with social media. I felt like I had to create content and post on Twitter, on Facebook, dabbled into TikTok, Instagram, and oh, LinkedIn, what a weird, weird place. And the point is, there's so much to do. I'm stretched on different directions and don't believe anybody that tells you, oh, you could just create content once and then modify it and change it for the platform.

2:17No, that's not how it works. You're going to be far more successful when you're creating content for the platform. Just like I'm creating this podcast in audio format, knowing that people are going to consume it in this way. I'm not going to shoot me teaching lessons on video and then just rip the audio and make it a podcast. Trust me, I did that over 10 years ago in an earlier podcast I launched, and it failed miserably. Building for the platform, creating for the platform actually matters. So I was really left with a dilemma because I needed to decide, am I going to just say no more social media?

2:52I will not post for social media ever again and be off it completely? Or am I going to make a different decision? Because when you spread yourself thin, you don't really make much progress anyway. You make very little to no progress on all the platforms. You got to remember, when you're putting out content, when you're trying to grow on different platforms, you're not only trying to get more followers and more engagement, you got to account for the fact that you're going to lose engagement, you're going to lose followers. So if you're not making a concentrated effort, it's very hard for you to grow in a tremendous way.

3:24And I verified this by looking at some of the best people at social media. Some people have the hugest followings in business, and most of them only have ginormous followings on one, maximum two platforms. It's very rare to see somebody to have a huge following on four, five, six different platforms. So I decided that instead of throwing out the baby out of the bathwater, that my new strategy will be focusing on one platform, at least one platform for now. Now, I'm not going to go ahead and deactivate all my accounts. It just means that I'm not going to be posting and trying to produce content across all the platforms.

4:04This, number one, relieves the burden of having to post everywhere all the time on one platform. Now, which one platform should you choose? Well, it depends on the type of medium or media that you want to actually produce or you feel you can be most valuable in. So I love to share great lessons and learnings I've learned along the way in entrepreneurship. So that means either video or audio. I already have the audio thing covered with this podcast, but the video part really got me curious. I knew in 2024 I wanted to go deep into video and start producing more video content and lessons. We already have plans for a major, major project, aka a YouTube channel.

4:46But YouTube is a platform, similar to podcasting. It's not really a social media platform where you market and bring in people. Meaning you use social media to grow your YouTube or your podcast or your newsletter or something like that. So knowing that I'm moving in this direction, this is the kind of content that I like to produce. I found that Instagram is going to be the best platform for me. If you like the written word, that might be Twitter for you. But for me, I chose Instagram. There's only one problem. I have no Instagram following. I basically didn't post on Instagram since I signed up, you know, I don't know, seven, eight years ago.

5:22I think my oldest post is just like three or four years ago, and it's just an image or two. And I'm literally starting with just maybe 100 to 150 followers. And it's kind of humbling, and it's kind of nice to just start from scratch, to be a beginner and to learn how this all works now that I'm not distracted with trying to post everywhere. I started this strategy just about six or seven weeks ago. I'm just sharing it with you right now. So this is kind of up-to-date information. And boy, am I happy that I chose this new strategy. Let me tell you why and let me tell you what I've done. Number one, now that I'm just focused on Instagram, I know there are basically three ways I can share on Instagram.

6:02I can produce content. One is a post, two is a story, three is a reel. Now, I know there's some other ways to do this and there's now broadcast channels and all kinds of stuff, but those are the three major ways that you can produce content on Instagram. This means I need to produce one of those every day, five days a week. That's pretty much it. I've committed to producing two to three reels a week and I just literally shoot these reels when I'm walking back from the gym and you can follow me, Omar Zinhome, on Instagram so that you can check it out and check out my reels. I post something interesting that I'm doing during the week with a post and I'll share some stories that are maybe some timely things that's going on maybe some travel maybe some decisions I'm making maybe I want to talk about something that's just published on the podcast this is super manageable for me now I can just spend 10-15 minutes each day by the way when I started it wasn't 10-15 minutes my first week it would take me maybe 30 to 40 minutes to post something because I still was learning how to edit these videos on my phone with CapCut.

7:04I use CapCut. It's a great tool. I was learning how to post and how to tag and how to, you know, put descriptions. I know I sound like a dinosaur here, but I really haven't been active on Instagram. It's a little bit different from other mediums or other platforms like Twitter or Facebook. The other thing is that I found myself being more creative knowing that these are the ways I can produce and more creative because I'm not bogged down by the other platforms. To be honest with you, there's a lot of negativity out there on some of the other platforms, whether it's Twitter or Facebook, as soon as I open it, I just want to close it right away.

7:34And I don't know if it's because I'm fresh on Instagram and my feed hasn't optimized or whatever, but I just feel like it's a happier place. People are sharing interesting things, great knowledge, great images, fun tips, some comedy, kind of love it. But in the last six weeks, let me tell you my results of posting regularly, three reels a week, one post a week, and a few stories a week. My followers grew by 400%, still very modest number of followers, but you gotta start somewhere. And I'm happy to be a beginner and start growing my audience on Instagram. My accounts reached has grown over 634%.

8:10You see, every time you post, Instagram is gonna feed that post to a small group of strangers. And depending on how those strangers react, and I say strangers, those are people that are not following you yet, depending on how they react, they will continue to push that post in people's feeds. This then gets them, and then when they push those, and then when Instagram sees there are reactions, that people are engaging with your post, they'll continue to push it and push it. My account's engagement is up 771%. And this is just me sharing about 59 pieces of content in the last 30 days. Now, I'm still nowhere near some sort of Instagram wizard.

8:49Again, I'm starting from scratch. And I understand that things take a while for you to start getting traction, but this is positive. This is the power of staying focused on one thing, one medium and building for it. Now, of course, Instagram is not perfect, but no platform is. It has drawbacks. It's hard to link to anything. You got to go link and buy on all that stuff. But the point of today's episode is not to tell you to go all in on Instagram. So go all in on one platform so you can get some momentum, so you can grow. So once you feel you've established yourself and have the audience you're looking for on that platform, you can then move on to the next platform and create content for that.

9:29But it's incredibly overwhelming and hard to get traction, like I said, by trying to do every platform at once. I've tried to do that for a decade. Not so wise, right? Doesn't really work. I also recommend to choose a platform that you enjoy being on because you're going to have to consume some content and not just produce content because you got to know what's trending, what people are enjoying. You're going to get some ideas from other creators. You're going to see what music is trending as well. And if you don't enjoy your time on that platform, then not really worth you choosing this platform because you're going to hate the process.

10:03And then the thing I learned from a coach of mine, Dan Martell, was that we don't move towards pain, meaning that if you don't like something, you don't like being on a platform, you're not going to invest in it. You're not going to be a part of it. You're not going to be a creator on that platform. You're just kind of avoiding it. And that's what I was doing with some of the other platforms. I don't really like LinkedIn. And I kind of forced myself to post once in a while. I wasn't consistent. It was just a disaster, really, because I just didn't like LinkedIn and didn't like being there. Now, as you are on the platform for longer, you'll notice that what you are consuming, what you're seeing might change, might be altered.

10:39If you start to feel like, oh, I'm not really enjoying this anymore, start culling who you follow, right? Because mostly you're gonna see the people that you follow and people like the people that you follow. So go through the people that you follow and start moving or start unfollowing them if they don't bring you joy, if they don't bring you excitement and creativity. To wrap up, I highly recommend you go all in on one platform, focus on that, create great content that suits that platform, get a cadence, get a schedule that you can stick to. That's what I did because Instagram rewards consistency over quantity.

11:16So it's better for me to publish six to seven to eight posts a week, every week, rather than doing 20 posts in three days and then not posting again for weeks. And that's pretty much the rule of thumb for all the social media platforms out there. I hope that helps. I wanna share with you what's working for me on my journey so that you can learn from it, do the same, apply it in your business. It's great to be a beginner again on a platform, learn it, apply what works, leave what doesn't. I might pop in and give you an update on how things are going a few months down the line. If you want to follow along my journey, go ahead and follow me on Instagram.

11:54It's at OmarZenholm, O-M-A-R-Z-E-N-H-O-M. Give me a follow if you love this podcast because I give more content outside this podcast over there in forms of short videos, posts, messages, and updates. Thanks so much for listening to the$100 MBA show. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Everybody starts from zero, okay? We get millions of downloads on this podcast every single month. It's so humbling. It's incredible. But I started with zero back in 2014. We recently had Noah Kagan from AppSumo with an extended interview that he gave talking about Million Dollar Weekend. His company, AppSumo, has over a million email subscribers.

12:32Started with zero. and this process of me starting again on Instagram is teaching me, hey, we all started zero. It's okay. Just get started. Zero will become one and then two, then three, then four, then 10, then 100, then 1 ,000, then a million. You get it, but you won't get there if you don't get started. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

13:02Thank you.