The Real Reason Your Business Isn't Growing on Social Media

0:00All right, let's start with an uncomfortable question. How many business owners do you know who spend hours every week on social media and make almost no money from it? Yeah, they post daily, they chase followers, they celebrate likes and probably they watch the number of views that they're getting. And then they wonder why their bank account hasn't changed. Well, here's my truth. Okay, social media isn't broken. The social media strategies that most people use are. The problem isn't the platform. The problem is, I guess, they're objective, what it is that they're trying to achieve. And today, I want to show you how social media actually works when the goal isn't attention.

0:40When the goal's revenue, it's got to be done in a different way. You know, too often, I think people are trying to do what happened years ago. You know, years ago, you wanted the number of followers. Years ago, you wanted the number of people on your thing because you thought of it as a database. It's changed, okay? So the biggest social media myth that I see today, most businesses think social media is about followers. It's not. Followers are a byproduct. The real purpose of social media is attention, trust, leads, and customers. Okay, so yes, you want to get the attention from social media, from what you put out there, but you want to get the attention of the right people.

1:23Then the attention leads to trust, as we discussed last week's episode. Attention, trust. Trust goes to leads. Like if you build trust with someone, there's a good chance that you'll turn them into a lead and therefore into a customer. And that's it. If your social media is eventually moving people through that sequence, you're creating good content. If you're not doing that, you're just entertaining, I rest. You're not really building a business. The idea of media, of marketing and social media marketing or interest-based marketing, as we probably want to talk about it as is the idea of all marketing is to generate conversations that generate conversions okay so whether you look at it as social proof media social mentions media social entertainment social education whatever you look at as we've got to understand why does most social media fail and in my world there's five real reasons why social media fails number one is just simple random posting.

2:26No strategy, no theme, no structure, just posting whatever comes to mind. And random posting basically creates random results. When I look at putting this podcast together, I'm really here to educate people that are building multi-million dollar companies aiming for$100 million. Why? Because the programs that I deliver, the coaching that I do is helping people at that level. If you're doing half a million and above, then you start with one of my programs. If you're doing three million, you move to that level program. Does that make sense? So second mistake, if I stay on the track, no consistency.

3:03One week, they're posting daily. The next week, they're invisible type thing. And that can't work. Trust requires consistency of update. I know that I've been posting on YouTube and on Instagram and Facebook now for over 180 weeks straight. So the algorithm rewards consistency. Customers notice consistency. Number three, it's just too promotional. Every post is buy now, call now, special offer, discount, whatever it might be sort of thing. And that doesn't work for anybody out there in the marketplace. When you're too promotional, everybody knows you're too promotional, I guess. Nobody wants to follow a commercial.

3:43and people want value. They want to be entertained, educated, have some sort of an emotional reaction. They don't want constant selling. Number four is that there's no personality. And I think you've heard me deal with this in the last couple of pods, is the content sounds like a corporate brochure and nobody connects with it. People connect with people, not press releases. I know you and I, I hope it feels like you and I are having a conversation here today that you can sit with me and have a 20-minute lunch with Brad each week sort of thing, you know, if that's the way it works. Number five, no strategy.

4:17And this is probably the biggest one that I want to deal with today. Most businesses have no idea what role social media plays in their growth strategy. If you don't have a purpose, okay, if you don't know the purpose of it, how do you build the system? So to build a great social media system or a media and marketing system, you have to have a purpose for it. What do you want people to do? Do you want them to book a call? Do you want them to buy straight away? Do you want them to just follow? You know, unfortunately, YouTubers, okay, and TikTokers and Insta, they want to be paid for the people watching their content.

4:56Most of us in business don't want to be paid for people watching our content. Social media isn't social media anymore. This is one of the biggest mindset shifts I think I had to make, and I think that you might want to have to make it too. Social media is now interest-based media. Think about TikTok, think about Instagram, think about YouTube shorts, okay? The platform isn't showing you your friends anymore. It's showing you not the people you follow. What it is showing you is what you are interested in. It's interest media, and that's a huge distinction. So the question moves from what are your ideal customers interested in?

5:32You know, it's not what do you wanna talk about today with your friends, with your followers, it's about those who want to be interested. And so the interest rule kicks in. That's probably the simplest way to put it. Most business owners talk about themselves. Elite marketers talk about customer interests. So you'll notice here on the pod, it's about how you can grow, how you can do things. Your customers care about their problems, their frustrations, their opportunities, their goals. Your customers, they don't wake up thinking about your company type thing. They don't wake up going, oh, I wonder if I can buy coaching from Brad Sugars today.

6:10You didn't wake up thinking that. So you wake up thinking about, okay, how do you grow your business? How do you go from a million to 10 million or 10 to 100? That's your goal. So when you wake up thinking about yourself, I've got to build content around your interests, not around my products, if that makes sense. So that brings us back to then the E's, the three E's of social media. And I hate that I call it social media, but I still have to say that even though it is really interest media. Okay, so this may be one of the most important frameworks that I teach you here today. So take notes on it, use it, build your content around it.

6:48Every great piece of social content contains one of three things, okay? Emotion, education, or entertainment. Obviously, the best content contains all three. And when we sit down and look at it today, the level of filming that goes into a lot of people, the level of editing, the level of, and yeah, AI can do wonderful edits today. It really can. But the reality of the best movies, the reality of the best content is that it's not just AI, it's humans behind it creating emotion or education or entertainment. So let's think about emotion, right? Why emotion? Well, it creates engagement with people, people comment, people share, people react, people connect.

7:30You know, if I tell you a story, it's generally different to if I say, okay, here's the seven strategies you need to do to do X, Y, Z. When I had to learn emotion, and by the way, I know, for those of you who've been following me a long time, you know that I was really awful at putting stories in stuff like this. It was like, oh no, can't I just teach? And it's funny how when I get on stage, I'm better at teaching with stories. And when I get in front of a camera, I just go straight to teaching. But But the examples of emotional are personal stories. Client success stories, in fact, is a great way to bring emotion into what you're doing.

8:06Challenges that you've overcome, wins, failures. These things are emotional when you give yourself a shout out by winning an award type thing. Staff moments, family moments, customer moments. Emotion creates humanity is probably the simplest way that we can look at this. As you build better emotion into what you're doing, and that can be done also by the editing, clipping, moving, changing, different venues, different things. I know my team's like, boss, can we film you doing that? And it's like, no, no. Eventually, I'm going to have to give up and do the crazy filming stuff. But I think that giving you the value of the emotion in the stories, in my voice is important.

8:45Education is the second E. Education creates trust. There's no two ways about it. When someone learns, they grow. And when they grow, they improve. Education positions you as an expert and we do how-to content or frameworks or lessons, tutorials. If I look at my website, there's more framework stuff on my website, more how-to stuff on my website, tutorials as well, lessons, tutorials, mistakes to avoid. All of these things create authority because education creates an authority factor for you with the prospective customer or with your existing customers, convincing them to stay with you and keep coming back.

9:24The third is obviously entertainment. Now, this is where it creates the biggest attention. You and I both know this, and it doesn't mean that, you know, I got to get up and do the dance sort of thing. It means interesting, engaging, unexpected, funny, memorable. You know, people share entertainment, people consume entertainment, entertainment creates reach, and it's far more top of funnel than any other area. But that being said, there's a way to take your education and tell a story and make it entertaining. There's a way to do all three of the E's that doesn't. Maybe we'll call that the golden combination.

9:59And even if you just think about combining two of the different areas, that's probably a great combination, education and emotion or education and entertainment. Ideally, you want emotion, education, entertainment. And that's why I do like filming a lot of the stuff I do on stage. I find that on stage when I have an audience, I'm doing more emotional stuff because I'm connecting with other humans. It's hard when you're here doing a straight pod to get as much emotion and get as many stories type thing. When I'm being asked questions, I'll often do more stories than when I'm not. And that's why I even use Pressmaster AI and yeah, shout out to those guys because it interviews me with an AI interviewer and I find I get better results from it.

10:45The magic does happen when I can combine all three or when you combine all three. So ultimately, I think stories always win, okay? So if you start with the idea of here's a simple lesson, facts tell, stories sell, okay? Let's compare. So version one, here's three ways to improve sales. Fine, it's educational. Now, I'm not gonna say I'm boring at that point, but maybe it's a little boring if I'm just straight, here's the three ways you can improve your sales type thing. Version two, if I said, let me tell you a story about Mary. Six months ago, she was struggling. Today, she doubled her sales. Here's the three things that changed.

11:29So it's the same lesson, three things about sales, but a completely different impact. Stories create an emotional connection type thing. and maybe even they're the stronger hook to get people in that first three seconds. I was reading an article just two days ago where they're saying it's no longer three seconds it's two seconds. I'm like you know it's seconds. Whatever the number is it's the first two three seconds that you've got to grab someone in their doom scrolling as they're going through if you're at top of funnel. Now if you want people who are searching because remember YouTube part of YouTube shorts and things is doom scrolling.

12:06But a major part of YouTube is that long form material where people are searching for it. So you want them to do search. And of course, they're going to search on YouTube's big brother, Google, and also chat GPT and also Gemini and also all these things. So what are we doing? We're building trust at scale. I mean, the real purpose of social media is trust. It's not followers. It's not views. Unless that's your business, of course. If your business is getting paid by YouTube or LinkedIn, sorry, not LinkedIn, paid by Instagram, then okay, that's great. I think if you think about it, every post is helping people decide.

12:45Can I trust you? Do you understand my problem? Do you know what we're talking about? Do you know what you're even talking about? Would I buy from you? Social media becomes a trust-building infrastructure. And so when you start thinking about how you do it, you've got to start looking at the platform you're building. What type of social media? I'm going to go with seven. Seven content categories that I find work and work well out there. So number one is educational. So teach me something. And you could have an educational style podcast, an educational style how-tos. But teach me something. Number two, authority.

13:27Demonstrate your expertise, okay? You can demonstrate it by, I don't know, if you're a carpenter, you might do woodwork. If you're a painter, you might show a painting. You've got to demonstrate that you're good at what you do. Third is proof. Testimonials, results, case studies. Your customers and my customers will do a better job at selling me than anyone else possibly could. So it's that it really is that give me proof type thing. Fourth is then the personal human connection. So, you know, stories, I know for me, again, I do struggle with a gang. And I know that there's a lot of people that are in the same situation as me, where telling all my personal stories, values, sometimes I feel like that's bragging.

14:12And my team tells me, you've got to tell better stories about the things because you've done amazing stuff and okay yeah we've done billions in sales and we do hundreds of millions each year and all that yeah great but I hate bragging about that but the team does tell me I need to do more of that and I think through the stories you gain more understanding of someone's values the fifth would be entertainment uh attention engagement fun and that's why I find a lot of my live seminars like you take a cutting from my live seminar, it seems to work better because there is more engagement with the audience and it seems more fun.

14:47Number six is community. I love celebrating my team, celebrating my customers, celebrating wins, whether it's an award or whether it's, you know, one of my team who's been a coach for say 15 years, that's 15 years of changing lives. Celebrate the community is important. And the seventh type is the offer. You always do want to have some form of offers in amongst what you're doing. It shouldn't all be offers, but if you go back to Gary Vee's book where he talks about it four to one sort of thing is add value, add value, add value, add value. He calls it jab, jab, jab, jab, right hook sort of thing.

15:21So that brings us to the hook, I guess. The hook is everything. The first few seconds determine everything in socials, okay? Nobody watches boring openings. You need hooks, questions, challenges, contrarian statements. I guess that's probably my favorite one is the contrarian statement type thing. Make a comment that people go, what do you mean? Or I like opening loops. You know, there's seven ways you can do this. Or here's the three steps to doing something. Or here's the four ways Mary found about doing such and such. Some of those things would be like most business owners get this one wrong.

15:57Okay, here's why your marketing isn't working. Here's the biggest mistake I made in business when I was young and just getting started. You know, your hook's job is to create curiosity and curiosity then grabs attention. And as long as you're adding value and the cuts and the edits are strong, you'll keep that attention. As I mentioned, my favorite is the curiosity loop. I think it's one of the most powerful techniques. You create an open loop in the mind of the customer. And I saw one just this morning and unfortunately the guy just went too long though. It's like he opened a loop in my mind and he's got me and he's talking about this and talking about this and talking about this and eventually I'm like 40 seconds into this I'm going give me the answer no scroll past you you can't keep them that long on an open loop but if you do things like the three reasons this works or the second one surprised me the third one challenged everything now people want to stay they want closure they want their brain to be filled in curiosity does keep people listening if that makes sense or keeps them watching if that makes sense on it.

17:03So short form versus long form. And I did have a session with you guys a couple of weeks back talking about why video is the form of today. And so when I say short form versus long form, it doesn't just mean video. It can also be audio like a pod. It can also be articles or social media posts, that sort of thing. So you need both. You need short form because short form is about that top of funnel, the awareness, the reach, the discovery, all of that happens through short form, okay? Then if you think of shorts, reels, TikToks, that's what we're aiming to do with that. Stories in some way do that as well, but that's where we're aiming to get.

17:46Now, long form, this pod, other long form videos, that's what creates trust. When I do webinars, live seminars, I go live on YouTube sort of thing. That creates authority, that creates conversion in that whole thing. So whether it's a pod, a webinar, a long YouTube, an article, the short form is designed to get attention and the long form is designed to create a relationship, I guess, to get to know us better type thing. And that's an important aspect of it. And that brings us back to that advantage of personal brand. If you take a look at the personal brand side of things, people follow people more than they follow companies.

18:28They do a little bit follow companies, but mostly people follow people. And this is why founder content often outperforms company content. People want stories, opinions, lessons, experiences. You know, I know when I offer an opinion on something, the greatest thing, and I do love this one, and my team knows how much I love this, is that when I offer an opinion on something, and I say, that's great, that's not great. And people debate me on that sort of thing. And the debate then ends up as half the battle of doing this. And I think people want to get to know the human behind the business, not just the examples, but the actual stories of me.

19:11And today, obviously, AI helps with a lot of this sort of stuff. There's a big advantage with AI in that it can do the research for you. It can help you with the scripting. Don't use the whole thing for scripting because obviously it comes across as scripted. I've seen that on certain social media. When I did social media where we used a company that, and it was kind of, they were doing scripted and I'm like, yeah, it feels scripted. How can I get away from this type thing? But it can also help you with your planning, your editing, content ideas. Content calendars can even be a part of AI. It can think through.

19:45It can do the YouTube or the Google research or the chat GPT. What are people searching for? And therefore, what content do I need to create? You know, AI dramatically lowers the effort required. The bottleneck obviously is no longer content creation. The bottleneck is consistency and quality. So that's where we get to. Now, I mentioned it earlier, but I think it's important to reiterate the social proof loop. Every piece of content should help create comments, shares, conversations, mentions. Social proof creates more visibility. I want shares. I want people to comment. I want people to like and do that sort of stuff.

20:26But mostly I want a conversation to start from this thing. So even saying to people, like I'll say it to you right now, if you want help with your business, comment below free coaching and I'll get one of the team to help you with that. So by doing that, it increases the ability to get social proof on this thing. More visibility creates more trust and more trust obviously creates more customers. So if you think of it, though, as a just a media empire, it's different. If you think of social media as a revenue infrastructure, it's a real big mindset shift. Stop. You got to stop treating it like it's marketing and start treating like it's infrastructure.

21:06structure every post is building trust helping with conversion every trust creating more authority creating greater visibility for you your brand your products your services uh it's attracting opportunities over time that compounds right if we get to this whole thing and say okay well brad what should i be doing right now well ask yourself some of these questions with your content like look back over the last 28 days of content that you've put out there assuming you are and ask am I creating trust? Am I creating authority with what I'm doing? Am I building emotion and creating emotion? Am I telling stories in what I'm doing?

21:43Am I consistent in my posting out there on all the channels that I'm on? Am I helping the customers to make better decisions, buying decisions, just better decisions overall? Or am I simply just posting content for the sake of content? And, you know, there are some common mistakes that we see. And number one is chasing followers. Yeah, it's great to have subscribers it's great to have connections followers all the different words you want to use for it but chasing followers and chasing likes rather than chasing conversations with prospective customers is the thing if you've got no strategy no consistency no real personality all you do is sell you're not telling stories and there's no call to action there's no reason for someone who's interested in what you're teaching to actually buy, then that's hard.

22:35You'll notice at the top, like on my YouTube, every YouTube, the description, the first thing is download my playbook. Yeah, jump in, connect with us, do that sort of thing. Social media shouldn't be a popularity contest. It's a trust building system. If you look at it as a system to build trust, build authority, prove that you know what you're doing. So when someone looks you up, there is that proof of that thing. So this week's challenge, review your last 10 social posts, okay? And score each one on the three main things, emotion, education, entertainment. Out of 10, what was the score on emotion?

23:11Out of 10, what's the score on education? What's the score on entertainment? And hopefully that'll immediately give you what's missing, okay? And then start to think about and create one piece of content this week that is intentional. It combines all three. Okay, so you sit down and go, okay, how do I tell a story that has emotion and education in it? And it's engaging with people. People are actually emotionally bought in. It's going to get shares, it's going to get likes, it's going to get comments type thing. Most businesses use social media as a megaphone. The businesses that win use it as infrastructure.

23:48Attention creates trust, trust creates leads, and leads create customers. It's the conversations that you create that lead to the conversions that happen. So stop posting randomly and start building a system.