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Three Weeks to Ideal Engagement on Any Social Media Platform – Week Two

After a full week of overhauling the way this social media platform serves content, we have trained the algorithm to provide you the most valuable content from our recently scrubbed community. In Week 2, we need to amplify our preferences beyond likes, while beginning a habit of quality interaction with that growing community.

Continue Training the Algorithm

In Week 1, we set up our “New Feed, New You” content service, and we liked thousands of posts from that content that brought us value. Most, if not all, of the “liked” content added value for us in “The Five.”

As we progress into Week 2 and beyond, continue to seek out that content as outlined in Week 1. By maintaining this practice, you ensure that the platform serves you and your needs. Your continued use of relevant hashtags to serve useful content and looking for connections among your favorite relevant creators should also never cease. It is the backbone of your growth and helping find new content to explore and appreciate, as well as a bevy of new connections to engage. These activities should always be a part of your experience on the various social media platforms going forward.

Slightly Change Your Behavior

Instead of simply “liking” posts from the creators you receive value from, choose to react with context, where applicable, or comment with gratitude. We started with liking posts to help train the algorithm to serve you the content you want to see and rid yourself of the content that isn’t adding value. We took off the chains that were holding you back from reaching your potential as an active and engaged participant in the right conversations for your community conversation.

You aren’t done letting your community know the content that adds value to you. We’re just altering how you share with them your appreciation by adding context.

React with Context

If you’ve read much of our work, you already know that content is a very important part of your digital strategy. What may be more important is to understand and create context around that content.

As you continue the efforts of Week 1, add the practice of reacting with context on the platforms that offer the option. So, when using Facebook and LinkedIn, choose the appropriate reaction to the post you appreciate seeing in your feed. This active contextual examination helps you identify why you appreciated their content. For example, when someone shares a career update on LinkedIn, you should opt to “Celebrate” rather than just give it a thumbs up. Being able to point to why you appreciate their content will help you add value in later engagement. By moving beyond the very passive “like” only training we undertook in Week 1, we are setting the stage for active engagement with this simple change.

Comment With Gratitude

You’re probably asking how you should go beyond “liking” posts to train the algorithm for the platforms that don’t support multiple reactions on the platform.

For the social media outlets that simply have a “like” or “favorite” option (Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube), continue to like or favorite the post. Then, take a moment to offer a brief comment or reply that offers the creator context around WHY you appreciated it. Simply saying something like “Thank you for explaining how that tool works” would be an appropriate comment on Instagram for a video. These comments should be simple and focused solely on the context of your appreciation. This will let the creators know what about their content you appreciated while also getting you in the habit of sharing contextual comments and replies.

Ready for Week 3?

Three Weeks to Ideal Engagement on Any Social Media Platform – Week One

Are you ready to increase the engagement of your brand or business online? Or are you ready to start a new outlet for it? This is a single-platform engagement plan, so don’t worry about other platforms yet.

Why Only One Platform?

We start this reboot or the kickoff for your engagement implementation on a single platform for two reasons:

Changing your mindset and starting new activity on one platform will take a concerted effort to use the platform differently. At first, the learning, but more so the implementation, curve will be steep. We are changing behavior here, and it won’t be easy at first.
It will take a lot more effort to participate in the conversation that is social media than you’ve done before. You will have to find time, efficiency, and dedication to get it done on a single platform. Can you imagine if you started all this extra work on the five platforms where you have a presence at once?

Week One – Fixing Your Feed

First things first.

Stop posting content on this platform. That sounds crazy right now, but it will make sense.

Doing things as you had always done them wasn’t working for you, so ceasing that content creation and posting will improve your listening and context while we are overhauling how you engage on social media. You were not adding value to enough people to keep it up, so, for the re-boot, no new content created or posted. Period.

To begin, we have to fix the feed that the platform presents to you by shocking the algorithm. Much like we outlined when we sought to change the content before you on a platform because it wasn’t what you wanted to see or stressed you out, we need to fix the feed of the platform.

Out With the Useless, In With the Valuable

On the first day of Week 1, go through your connections, friends, pages, accounts, groups, and hashtags to UNFOLLOW/UNFRIEND/DISCONNECT all the users of the platform that don’t add value for you. You should also consider if the value they add for you is within “The Five,” the five areas of focus for your content creation. By getting rid of the creators that don’t add value for your experience in the areas where you need to focus, you will let them crowd out the content you need to see and fall back into doing things the way you’ve always done them.

Now that you’ve pruned all the useless and valueless from your feed, explore the connections from those that do add value to you. Take time to look at their content, join relevant groups, or add certain hashtags to the content you consume that will add value to you, specifically in the five areas of focus you have. Doing this will give you an immediate win in controlling what content is served to you. Every platform programs their algorithm to give you more of what you just indicated that you wanted to see. They want you to see that newly-added content, because you will act like a child with their newest toy, ignoring all the ones you have to focus on the fresh one that you now have.

This process to tailor the sources of content you’re served will take a while, but get it done on the first day of this endeavor. This drastic change in how you connect with the platform will get rid of the dead weight and add new and valuable creators, telling Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, or LinkedIn that you need to see THIS content that is now relevant to you.

The rest of the first week gets way easier for you, and you should invest the time of the remaining six days to help the platform really understand you by completing a solitary action repeatedly.

“Like” Posts

Indicate an interest in the creators that show up in the “new” content you see by simply tapping or clicking “like” on the posts that give you even the slightest bit of value.

Simply “like” them. Don’t leave any comments, reply to them, or even react. Just a simple “Thumbs up” for Facebook, LinkedIn, or YouTube and a heart for Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter to let the platform know what kind of content you value. Perform this activity with an emphasis on valuable content in “The Five.” Instead of focusing on seeking out new connections, take the time to consume A LOT of content and force the algorithm to understand the “new you.”

Let’s Start Week 2, Shall We?

Hustleburg Episode 27 – Interview with Green Book Tampa Bay’s Joshua Bean and Hillary Van Dyke

“Intentionality of Where You’re Spending Your Money”

With no larger spotlight on issues important to the black community in history, Joshua Bean and Hillary Van Dyke have seen unprecedented growth and attention for their socialpreneurial venture, Green Book Tampa Bay. As a resource of African-American cultural sites, black artists, and black-owned businesses in Pinellas and Hillsborough counties, Green Book Tampa Bay works to assure the economic vitality of the black community. Their hope is that the Green Book of Tampa Bay serves as a mobile travel guide, becoming the first stop for any service that you need.

In our conversation, Joshua and Hillary share with Brett the importance of their “passion project,” their passion for achieving equity for all black people in Tampa Bay, and where they look to take this endeavor.

Green Book Tampa Bay

Be Intentional:

Website
Facebook
Instagram

Subscribe, Rate, Review

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Hear Your Question, Answered, on Hustleburg

If you have any questions you’d like to have answered on an upcoming Q&A episode, please take a moment to visit beyondyoursidehustle.com/podcastquestion and ask there. If you’re a St. Pete businessperson who’d like to sit down for an interview, please reach out to us here.

Where Do I Start Marketing My Business on Facebook?

The coronavirus shutdowns present an opportunity for you to do a lot of the groundwork for you to grow your business, while you are staying home. With so many people working remotely, they likely have more free time these days. Many in the service industry are not working at all.

The thing to be thinking about how to start building your brand online. Previously, we’ve pointed to Facebook being the most important social media platform that there is right now. Currently, many people look to a Facebook page as a sign of legitimacy, almost as much as they do a website. They are looking for information about you, and by having a presence, even if it is just filling out a page’s information, having a few fans, and having a bare minimum of content, you share that your business is legit.

People want to be able to find you online where they already are. They want to be able to find out your hours or your location, and they look to Facebook, because they are already there. In 2020, it remains the most popular social media platform. Your community is there, and you should be too, even if it’s just to share basic information.

So, while you have this spare time, with the time that we’re spending at home, not going out to the beaches, going to concerts, as more and more businesses and activities close, we no longer have a lot of the distractions away from work that prevent us from making this effort. This is an opportunity here to make the best use of your downtime. You can maximize it by starting to build your brand online.

When you have a presence, you also have a great way to interact and engage with your customers. If you’ve already done the work to build page, it may be that this is the time that you start a Facebook group, centered around what you do. It may be that this is a time where you spend a lot of time working in local groups, in small business groups, and in industry-specific groups to interact with others. By engaging with the people in these groups you help establish yourself as an authority in what it is that you bring to market.

So, if you don’t have a Facebook page for your business yet, that’s the place to start. If you do, make sure you are posting consistently with the five areas of focus for your business and interacting with the community you’ve already built. You might also want to create a Facebook group to deepen the connections you’ve already made, but most likely you’ll see the best results from heavily investing in engaging with groups that are local, industry-specific, or small business-centered that already exist to help you brand yourself as an expert in what you do.

Five Focus Areas for Content

The most popular question we receive, no matter which social media platform, centers around producing content. We are constantly asked, “What should I post about?” To help, we’ve created the five areas of focus for all of your social media content:

The main thing that you do. This is content centered around how you add value to the world at large, and specifically to your community. This helps you establish yourself as an expert in doing YOUR thing. This should be the focus of about 40% of your content. This doesn’t mean that you should post 40% of your content focused on YOU. It means that you should focus 40% of your content on the topic that is the pillar of your business.
Something related to your “main thing.” This related topic bolsters your expertise in your main focus topic and highlights that you aren’t singularly focused on just one aspect of the business. This content should make up about 20% of what you post. Again, this is a topic that you are posting about, not something about your business’s offering in that area.
Something else related to that “main thing.” Another related topic will further bolster your expertise to those who find you. With this third business topic, you have a base for 80% of your content. Remember, this isn’t 80% of the content you create about YOU, it’s 80% of the content you create about this topic.
Something that is interesting to YOU, but is NOT directly related to your business. Yes, you should post content that isn’t directly related to any of the other topics you’re already creating content about that was outlined above. You’ll do this to offer some personality to your business online. Otherwise, you appear robotic and uninteresting. To offer an example of this type of content, you can share and create about where you went to college, where you are from originally/if you’re a native of your community, a sports team you support, or hobby you enjoy. This should not monopolize your content, making up only about 10% of what you share.
Something else that is interesting to YOU. This should be another interesting topic to YOU, yet something that is not directly related to your business topics. You’re furthering yourself from robotic and flat. This should be about 10% of the content that you share. Often, this can be your family, faith, or your volunteer work to offer a few more examples.

That should be a good place to start for your upcoming posts to social media, keeping in mind that you may want to change it up a bit depending on the platform you’re using.

Create a Facebook Group When You Have a Facebook Page?

Adapted from Hustleburg Episode 12.

What Are the Benefits of Creating a Facebook Group in Addition to Your Business Page?

When it comes to Facebook, you have a lot of options when it comes to creating a community around your business and communicating about your brand. Obviously, with the noted distinction between a personal profile and a business page, you should have a Facebook page for your business in 2020. We know that the page is a communication tool to share with those outside the community you’ve already built. It’s essentially a digital storefront on the largest social media platform. It has the basic information about your businesses, about your hours, your location, any special deals you might have. It rivals your website in terms of importance, and it ranks higher in the search results than many business websites.

Your Facebook Page is a great tool for people that are looking for you already. It’s the social media version of your website that allows you to have a touch of your personality on display. We’ve previously shared the strategy about utilizing your page to share the five focus items:

The main thrust of your business or brand
One thing related to the main thrust
Another thing related to the main thrust
Something personal that shows your brand has a personality (not necessarily business-related)
Another something personal that shows your brand isn’t an emotionless robot (again, not necessarily business-related)

Sounds Great! Why a Facebook Group Then?

Facebook groups present you with a unique way to build deeper relationships with your community. These are the true fans you’ve created around your business, not just passersby. Your group is where you’re going to engage in in-depth discussions, generate and foster engagement with the people that are already associated with you, and build the relationships necessary to have evangelists of your brand or your business. While publicly visible, your page is only an opportunity to build many shallow connections, like the depth of a bathtub, but a group gives you the ability to build ocean-deep connections with people who are committed to you and your business. The people that you engage with in these groups are your raving fans, or they’re going to become your raving fans.

Additionally, groups offer a place for you to really let your personality shine online. In addition to the five focus topics outlined above, you can share more of your personality here, as you’re building relationships, not seeking transactions. You will be able to get to know your customers and you can truly connect with them in the environment of a group. In a group, the interaction of real conversation goes deeper just a post on your page and maybe a comment here and there. These relationships turn into a tribe of people who will evangelize for you online as well as in the real world. They are your best marketers, and their efforts are going to be way better than yours, because they are a real-world example of how your business solved their problem and can solve others’ problems. They will enthusiastically recommend you to others and devote themselves to you and your brand, because you have made these ocean-deep connections. It doesn’t take very many of these connections to earn these fantastic marketers and their valuable word of mouth buzz for your business.

How Important is it to be “Very Responsive” on your Facebook Page?

This is from an answer to a listener question in Episode 14 of Hustleburg.

On your Facebook page, there is a rating of the time it takes you to respond to direct messages as a page on Facebook. Some of you have one that says “Typically responds within an hour.” This rating of the response time is most certainly a good thing, though many of you are unaware of how Facebook calculates your Messenger rating.

It’s Different For Different Businesses

The importance of this public-facing response time metric is going to be different for different businesses. If you’re in a fast-paced environment, where customers expect that you will respond quickly and you haven’t set the expectation that you don’t respond quickly. If, for example, you operate an auto repair business, and potential customers want to know if it’s possible to bring in their car for a repair that same day, you’re going to want to make sure you can reply to that person nearly immediately. Think of it like having someone available to answer the phone. For many introverts or others with social anxiety, messaging you on Facebook is going to be preferable to using the telephone.

If you’re not in a particularly fast-paced environment like the one above, your customers may appreciate, but not need, an immediate reply, you should operate the Facebook page messaging similar to your personal policy when it comes to texting with acquaintances. It’s not your significant other, your mom, or somebody that you would need to immediately reply to, so consider how swiftly you reply to text messages to friends and acquaintances that aren’t in your inner circle. If you reply swiftly to them, and can handle task-switching to answer a message and the ensuing back and forth, make it a priority to answer these type of messages that are coming in on your Facebook page via Messenger. The thing to think about with asynchronous communication is that every reasonable person realizes that you can’t possibly be doing what you do and responding to every inquiry that comes your way. While bigger businesses and brands will have more interaction, the labor that they allocate to accommodate this is going to be a little bit easier to manage than your typical small business.

Set Expectations

The most important thing to do here is to set expectations about how quickly you will respond, regardless of whether you are someone who is going to be able to respond quickly, if it’s going to take you some time to drag yourself away, or if you’re going to “batch” the answers to some of these inquiries. This is something that Facebook helps you to do by offering instant reply and away messages for your Facebook page. Instant replies are auto-responders, set by you to be an automatic reply to every received first message. Usually, these are used to outline a response timeframe, to thank community member for reaching out to your business, or to direct those messaging you to some resource you offer.

To help you maintain a positive public-facing response rate, you can also create an away message that is automatically sent to people who message your page when your page’s messaging status is set to away. You have two options here. The first of which is to set it to away outside of your hours of operation. Any messages that you receive outside of those certain hours will get the away message sent back to them. The other option is to manually set it on the page yourself, choosing to use the away messages when you are not actively engaged with some other task or away from the business and are going to be able to respond to those messages yourself. Regardless, both the automatic or instant reply and the away message need to set the expectation of what it’s going to be like for the person sending you a message in terms of how quickly you are going to respond to them going forward.

How Facebook Calculates Response Rate and Time

For those curious about how Facebook calculates this, they do so by measuring your response rate to private messages, all of the private messages to your page, measuring two things:

The percentage of messages that you respond to
The speed with which you do so

For the first, they require that you reply to 90% or greater to have a “Very Responsive” label on your page, no matter what the timeframe of your response is. Facebook calculates that your page’s response rate as the percentage of messages that you and other people who manage your page respond to messages received. They consider a message responded to only when it’s the first message a person sends your page after neither party has sent messages for at least 24 hours. Also, your page’s overall response rate is only based on messages received in a rolling 30-day period prior to the last message.

Facebook calculates your page’s response time to offer visitors an expectation of the amount of time it typically takes your page to respond to messages. Like the above, they calculate if it’s a response to the first message sent to your page after neither party has sent messages for at least 24 hours. Your page’s response time is the average of the fastest 90% of response times to messages received in the rolling 30-day period prior to the last message that counted toward your response rate. Your page “typically responds within minutes” to messages when your calculated response time is fewer than fifteen minutes.

If you need more information about the response rate and response time, Facebook has a lot of information in the Help Center.

The Value in Facebook Stories, Live, and Watch Party

This is based on an answer offered on Episode 14 of Hustleburg.

Question: Is there any benefit to using Facebook stories? Or should I just stick to Instagram for that? What about Facebook Live or Watch Party? These are kind of confusing and seem like they could overlap and I’m just not sure how to use them.

Facebook Stories

There is absolutely a benefit to Facebook Stories. The first benefit of using Facebook stories is that it’s a great way to connect with the younger users on the platform. As we’ve discussed on Hustleburg, the fastest-growing demographic on Facebook are over 60 years old. Utilizing Facebook stories is going to be a good way to get your content in front of the eyes of Facebook’s younger demographics. Regardless of the age demographic of what you do, reaching younger users plants seeds with them for the future, when they’ll be looking for what you do. You can build your brand identity with them now. Also, you’d be surprised how many buying decisions are driven by interactions between the teenaged sons and daughters and their mothers and fathers.

Stories are also a better way to promote your “Me” content, the links to your website, promotional content, and short videos documenting your business. Because of the quality recording possible with your handheld device, you get two wins here. You are able to produce less polished and more frequent content for both Facebook and its sister platform Instagram. Rather than posting these types of content in your feed as frequently, you can share things in a “Me” way and more “sales-y” in nature, and leave your feed to build your brand. That’s not a hard and fast rule, but generally, that’s kind of how I can segregate the content that I put out that goes there.

An interview I’ve referenced recently with Adam Mossari, Instagram CEO, lends itself to this as well. In it, he discussed the addition of stories as a way of giving people a “behind the scenes” glimpse, a peek into your life, business, or brand. It gives you a way to offer “insider access” to what it is that you do. These looks are a great way to engage with the community you’re building online. As such, these stories shouldn’t feel as polished or produced as some of the things as some of the other videos or images that you see in the feed.

You’ve likely noticed that some of your more “off the cuff” and less polished content offers some great engagement. That’s because we’re seeing communities respond to what they view as more authentic rather than highly produced content anyway. This is akin to how, about a decade ago, we saw a huge rise in reality and competition TV over traditionally scripted TV. Survivor kicked off the trend, followed up by shows like America’s Got Talent, The Voice, American Idol, all those kind of overtook the scripted television for the most part on network TV. Even The Office and Parks and Recreation took that documentary feel into the world of scripted television. Now that our phones offer HD-quality video and a billion megapixels, we’re seeing that kind of authentic content that doesn’t have that same polish or production value as your general feed content be more engaging with our audience.

Don’t Auto-Post

You’ve probably noticed if you are using the Instagram Story features, you have the ability to auto post to Facebook stories as well, if you’ve connected your business page on Facebook. The temptation to put out two pieces of content on different platforms is great, but it should be resisted. First, you can’t swipe up on the Instagram Story, unless you are paying for it via advertising or you are a mega account. Facebook Stories allow you to have all of the same features as Instagram, but they also allow you to have the “Swipe up.” I definitely discourage the auto-posting from Instagram to Facebook Stories, because you don’t have as many features available to you. It isn’t as feature-rich.

Second, if you cross-post from one platform to another, this flies in the face of putting out content that has context to each platform’s audience. You have different audiences on each platform, because your content there resonates differently on each. Generally, what you’re going to see is that something you say to your Instagram audience isn’t necessarily going to be received the same way that you say it to your Facebook audience. When you cross-post, you’re not providing adequate context for the communities that you’ve built in both of the places it’s tempting to cross-post to and from.

Facebook Live

So, if you have a good reason to offer video content, especially live, streaming video content, Facebook Live is a great avenue to do so. Newer features, allow you to create an event (both on the platform and in real life) around your business or your brand. Events like this give your community an opportunity to instantly connect and interact with you.

Facebook Live gives you the ability to build up your livestream as you schedule that Live, alerting your community about the upcoming interaction. With these new features, Facebook Live can now be used as a souped-up version of Reddit’s AMAs and other platform’s Ask Me Anythings, even if you don’t have an immediate offering for live video content. You get real-time interaction with the brand as a member of their community, and your business gets to create a deeper connection with your true fans in that community. The video component makes it feel more like an in-person interaction that you’ve created, so it truly is a win-win for you and your community. There’s an extra bonus for you if you have video content that will add value to your audience that can be live-streamed, as they engage with your brand in a deeper way.

Facebook Watch Party

If you don’t have the ability or desire to go live with a video to engage the community, Facebook Watch Party offers part of the same value that is possible with Facebook Live. Watching the same content simultaneously gives you the instant connection and interaction capability with the community, surrounding content offered by your brand. It also gives you the opportunity to share more polished, edited video content to your audience, while also giving you the direct interaction with them over it. If you’re 35 or older or have ever had a long-distance relationship, you probably remember calling your friends or significant other on the phone to watch a TV show or a movie together when we were in separate homes. This ability to watch something together but separately, especially in the era of COVID-19 isolation, is a way to connect instantly when you can’t be in the same room to watch the same thing physically together. Watch Party brings us that same ability and feeling to connect and engage with our brand and the community instantly and deeper in the digital space, specifically on the Facebook platform.

As we’ve mentioned before, Facebook is the most important social media platform right now in 2020, and these newer features give you a way to connect in a more personal way going forward.

What Can You Do to “Unplug” or Change What You See on Facebook?

This is based on an answer offered on Episode 12 of Hustleburg.

Question: With everything that’s going on recently, sometimes I need a little break from seeing the constant news cycle, especially about COVID-19, aka the coronavirus. What do you recommend for when you just want to unplug and think of happy or educational or fun things? I love using Facebook to promote my business, I just need a break. I feel bad, and like I’m not putting my business first by taking that break.

Take a Break

If you find that you need a break from social media’s onslaught of news and posts about COVID-19, the 2020 election, or whatever has you feeling this way, push back your laptop, close the platforms or the apps on your phone that you’re using. Take a literal break, by going for a walk around the block, calling to check in on your mom (she says you don’t do that enough anyway), playing or snuggling with your dog, cat, or whatever pet is in your home (they are also saying that you don’t do that enough).

Then, just turn off notifications on your phone and shut your laptop for a while. Only enable the ones that you absolutely must have on for the phone. If you’re an iPhone user, you can enable Bedtime, which is a feature in your settings to take a break in the clock app. Many Android phones have something called Zen mode, where you can’t do anything on the phone except to receive calls for a specified time so that you can disconnect. Use this “unplugged” opportunity to pick up that book or your Kindle to read for fun for an hour.

Focus on Something Else

Personally, I’ve taken to trying to meditate more, using an app on my phone to do so. By doing so, I get to relax while I ignore the world around me for 5, 10, or 20 minutes, by focusing inward, on happiness, or my relationships with other people.

You likely have some “extra” time right now due to a lack of commute, and you can use it for some self-care or to develop yourself. Think of that time as an opportunity, because no one is expecting that you’re going to be “on” all the time, that you’re going to be online all the time, and that it isn’t going to be something that does kind of drive you away.

Now that you’ve taken that break for yourself, I have some great news for you. When it comes to your online experience, you actually find what you seek online. The platform’s algorithms are designed to give you what they calculate that you want to see. If you interact with political posts, they’ll show you more politics. That also means that if you engage with stories about kindness, you’re going to see more kindness. Who couldn’t use seeing more about kindness and the good in the world?

The Good News – You’re in Control

I recently listened to an interview with the CEO of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, who designed the newsfeed for Facebook before moving over to Instagram. During that interview, he confirmed that they really try to tailor what you see online with the type of things that you engage with. So, the good news is that you truly hold the keys to design your own online experience.

Ready for the even better news?

Your most recent activity holds greater weight for the algorithms than your older activity. That means that the best time to change your online behavior, in an effort to change what you see, is NOW. Start engaging with the people, groups, and pages that bring you joy by making you the happiest. Disengage with those that are dragging you down by blocking them, unfollowing them, and just scrolling by. If you make your focus to comment on, click on, and like the posts that give you something of value, while disengaging with the people, pages, and groups that don’t, you’re going to see a huge change in what’s in your feed. By taking control over what you see online and who you interact with, you’re actually going to see a complete shift in what’s presented to you in your feed, no matter which social media platform that’s got you down.

Here’s How It Will Change

I remember a period of time when I worked in the non-profit political world, where everything in my feed was political stuff. Today, that’s really not the case, because I unfollowed many pages, I left a lot of groups, and I’m no longer connected with many of the people I was. I no longer interact with many of the same people that I did in that world, and it has completely changed the way social media is presented to me. It’s very rare that I see a political post that isn’t just the news of the day. There’s hardly ever political opinion within them, so I know from experience that you really can switch this on and off, almost like a light switch or a really fast dimmer.

If you are discouraged about what you’re seeing, whether it’s the upcoming 2020 elections, coronavirus, or whatever it is that just has you down, know that you can change what’s in your feed just by fine-tuning who you even allow to put things in your feed, and who you engage with among those that do have that permission.

I’m Stuck About Where to Start Creating Content for My Business

This was a response to a question in Episode 4 of Hustleburg, an episode devoted to answering your questions.

You should start creating content in two ways. The first place to find guidance will be from listening to your customers. Listen for what it is that they need. By listening for their needs first, you begin to understand how your business can meet those needs. This offers you a starting point for much of your content creation. You need to help them solve a problem.

When you examine the underlying issues of your customers, you’ll understand how to better craft your content to help them

As you listen, keep in mind that what they will likely not explicitly give you directions about what they need you to solve. Too often, we, both the customer and the business, focus on the obvious, external problem. That external problem is only a symptom of the underlying internal issue that drives their desire for change.

For example, when you have a plumbing issue, it’s not so much that you need to have your toilet unclogged or sewer line snaked, while that is certainly the obvious and important issue to address. What you are really feeling is the internal problem of how you would feel about being unable to use your toilet, having to rid your waste in some other way. In 2020 America, we live in a society where anything other than indoor plumbing is pretty weird. You would probably feel very odd if you evacuated your wastes in an outhouse, had a Porta-Potty on the side of your house, or used your yard. All of these show that you are unable to operate by the norms of this society. THAT is the internal problem you’re actually solving with a plumber.

Add Value to Their Lives

While you listen, you also need to add value with anything you share online and your other marketing materials. You should share about the things you’ve observed how you can help them to help solve their issues in your areas of expertise. It’s not just a non-stop advertisement about what you do. You should be adding value to their life.

Connections Win

Sometimes, you’ll have areas of interest overlap with your customers, and it won’t be in your field. That’s not just okay. It’s preferred. You should always be presenting yourself as an expert in what it is that you do, but sometimes it’s those related areas or personal interests in another aspect of your life that you share that will forge a connection.

To give you an example, I’m more likely to do business with someone who is a Braves fan or is a fellow alum of the University of Georgia than someone who isn’t. When all other things are equal, that is something that will help me make the decision, because I have that connection or shared experience with someone. That’s only something I learn through interacting around that interest. That’s not to say that I exclude someone due to those factors, but I’ve found time and again that I am definitely more apt to do.

When they are able to connect with you over shared experience or interests, that’s going to be a win for your business. Use this knowledge to expand beyond a single focus for your content.

Five Topics for Your Content

The main thrust of your business
A related aspect to #1
Another related aspect to #1
Something that makes you a real person that interests you.
A second topic of interest that shows you’re real.

When you deploy these varied topics in your content, it shows your community that not only are you an expert in your field, you’re a real person. If you go back to my earlier plumbing example, people aren’t always looking for a plumber. They will, however, remember that person they connected with over a shared fandom or who grew up near them is one when the time comes. They aren’t looking to hire a plumber. They are looking to hire someone they connect with who understands their internal struggle when the toilet won’t flush.