If you’re a speaker, trainer or other professional, you’ve probably been sold on the idea that to be successful you need to be on social media.
Like a lot of things that sound like good advice on the surface, there are elements of truth. Yes, social media marketing can help you reach more people and get your message out to audiences who may never have heard of you. But you can certainly build a business without constantly feeding an Instagram account with selfies.
Social media marketing is not a one-size fits all panacea for business success. But that’s the way a lot of speakers see it. And treat it.
Here’s what generally happens. You attend a conference or a seminar on social media and the speaker runs through a list of all the top sites after extolling the virtues creating loads of sharable content.
So you leave either inspired or frightened. Inspired about what social media can do to help you grow your brand or frightened by the amount of work it’s going to take to get you a million followers.
I’m here to confirm what your gut is already telling you. That’s a load of crap.
A lot of speakers are wasting their time on social media. Instead of concentrating on where they’re most likely to connect with clients, they are filling up the Hootsuite queue with quotes and inane pictures that have nothing to do with their business and will never resonate with their prospects.
With great content and a sellable message you should be booking conferences, not posting pictures.
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I recently had a client who was signed up for everything by her social media consultant; Pinterest, Instagram, Tumbler, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. So instead of working on growing her speaking business, she was spending all her time trying to grow her social media followers.
If you have great content and a sellable message you should be booking conferences, not posting pictures.
That’s not to say social media in itself is a waste. But you do have to focus on the channels that are most likely to get you in front of the folks who will write you checks for $10,000 or more.
And those folks are probably not on Instagram.
What I tell my clients – who are primarily speakers, attorneys and sales trainers – is that they should play in the same social media sandbox as their clients are playing in. And for the most part that means LinkedIn and Twitter.
And unless they have a strong B2C element, most of the time I tell you not to worry about Facebook. Why? My mom doesn’t care about your speaking business. My friends from school don’t care about your speaking business. So why would I bore them by sharing your content?
Social media is not a waste of time. But it’s very easy to make it very unproductive. Tackle it with a strategy geared toward results and the time you save can be spent following up on real leads for proper jobs.
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