Is Social Media The Best Friend or The Enemy of The Network Marketer?
I’ve been reading a lot of comments on Facebook recently with respect to party plan, how to successfully run your business on social media, why social media has killed Network Marketing and more. And with probably the longest Facebook outage in its history occurring recently and how so many people reacted, I felt it pertinent to write this blog post. Everyone obviously has an opinion on this subject and of course everyone is entitled to have one. What an opinion is, is someone’s own paradigm of reality and it is naturally right to them. And what I am about to share is precisely that. There’s never any right or wrong in anything, anyway. So just treat this blog post as a smorgasbord, take what works for you and leave the rest.
Here in Australia, on average women spend nearly an hour on social media as opposed to 40 minutes’ for men. In America, the average person ‘ingests’ nearly 11 hours’ worth of media in a day – up from 9 hours’ only a few short years’ ago. So why is it we are all so thirsty for information – more so than ever before? Well information gives us choices. We have more choices available to us now than ever before. We can shop in more places, travel to more places – the cost of goods and services has decreased substantially and will probably continue to do so for a while yet. We all like to do our research on something. Many, like myself, like to buy based on feedback. For instance, I don’t tend to buy anything on E-Bay if the seller has less than a 98% feedback score. It’s different for everyone. But what is social media specifically doing to us?
Well on the positive – it’s keeping us more connected than ever before. And we as humans are both curious and nosey creatures. We like to know what other people are doing. Why do you think reality TV shows such as “Married At First Sight” are so popular? People like to compare their own lives (or lack thereof) with others and measure. Judgement is just a natural part of the human condition. And social media is feeding that part of us hour by hour, minute by minute. It’s also a fantastic way for those of us – as myself – who don’t live where they grew up, allowing them to stay up to date with what is happening ‘back home’ easily and effortlessly without the necessity of making half a dozen time consuming phonecalls to friends and family to be updated. We can use it to meet a prospective partner such as Tinder. And lastly, we use to for business connections as well.
But is it really serving your network marketing business or not? I would go so far as to say that most of the time, it isn’t. And this is for the simple fact that most people just don’t know how to use social media effectively to generate high quality leads. Most people think that by joining a few groups, setting up a business page and putting the odd comment and post that by some miracle, someone is going to click on our link and buy something. The interesting dynamic with social media is that now it takes approximately 20 touch points between us and our potential customers before they will know, like and trust us enough to actually financially transact with us. And this is as opposed to less than 10 only 5 – 10 years’ ago. People are way more wary these days’.
The fact is if you want to be paid as a professional marketer, you have to be willing to spend as a professional marketer. The ONLY way to grow your network marketing business to an income that comes close to replacing a full time salary is to pay for ads. And that can be Facebook or Twitter or Linked In. Simply commenting 50 times a day in 10 different Facebook groups is not going to get you clients. Sorry to tell you. Yes definitely do it, but for the large part you are wasting your time if your expectation is to monetize those interactions. The culture of Facebook is very much free stuff and typically that is what you will attract – people that want ‘stuff’ for free. Linked In is purely a business platform and therefore the types of people are more business-minded and focussed. The culture is much different.
The key thing here is to really separate personal social media time from business social media time. Set a timer or alarm if you need to in order to allocate the appropriate time. We have all been guilty of scrolling for an hour or so mindlessly on Facebook not really knowing what exactly it is we are looking for. Get disciplined! If you are finding that a lot of your feed is taken up with negative comments or people discussing the latest TV shows, either unfollow them or their posts. Don’t waste your time or energy on them. I give people a bit of a 3 strikes you are out policy. If 3 consecutive posts are negative, I unfollow them. Sometimes I even unfriend them too if I go to their profile and pretty much all of their posts are negative. I don’t want or need that. Remember junk in junk out. You get what you focus on. If your main circle of influence are negative – it’s time to change things up a bit. Don’t feel bad for having a bit of a cull every once in a while. Just remember that scrolling is not going to increase your numbers for the day. And network marketing is all about numbers. Messaging 10 people a day directly is not going to get you the results you want either. If your mentality is free, you’ll attract more of the same. Think about that.
So be mindful about your time on social media. Are you learning something? Are you staying updated on people you care about? Are you being uplifted? Are you generating enquiry for your business? Are you marketing your product and/or service? Ask these hard questions. If not, time to next whatever you are doing. Time is incredibly precious. It’s the one thing we can’t get more of. We can always get more money – but we can’t get more time. And if you are working a 90 day plan you will absolutely understand that. Guard your time. Social media can easily swallow up so much of it so be sure it is serving you.