Five CRUCIAL Do’s and Don’ts For Building A Social Media Platform
It's 3:27 AM on Wednesday morning
my kids have been extra delulu at nighttime the last couple of days, but when I get to wake up and work for a little sliver of time in the middle of the night, their sleep regression doesn't bother me a bit.
if you don't want to read any of my explanations WHY YOU SHOULD BE ON AS MANY PLATFORMS AS POSSIBLE WHILE HOLDING STRONG BOUNDARIES AND HOW YOU CAN FEASIBLY DO THIS, just scroll down to the highlight for the Do's and Don'ts.
Of all the writing sections I get in, a window from 3:30-5:30 AM is my dream. Going back to bed as the sun is coming up, binaural beats on my headphones to really K me O, and a sweater over my eyes. Ah. I wake up feeling like a champ. Not to mention any work done in such naughty hours feels like play.
If you've been following me for any amount of time, you know I am ten toes down on the power of social media.
First step of being an author is building a platform, not writing a book. Jo March looking for a publishing deal or a newspaper to run her short stories? That's securing a platform, back in the "good old days" before social media. Now you can do it yourself, which means you control the business flow, so you don't have to sell your hair for money.
Unless you have a local brick and mortar (like a coffee shop) or a local service-based business, like dogwalking or cleaning, having a social media presence is crucial. If you have one of these types of business, there is a LOT of local advertising you can do, but it's going to involve a lot of posters in a lot of places. You're still posting regularly, just not online.
I ran my business without social media for about four months when I was on my "social media is bad" kick, which is a kind of routine self-sabotage that happens at least once for most online business owners. I've had a few coaches and a few friends proudly "ditch" social media, and gradually reduce their income while delivering consistent superiority updates about how great their life is without social media.
They go through the newsletter phase, they start a zero-discoverability podcast, they go on other podcasts and the theme of all of it is "how I run a business with no social media". Eventually, they all come crawling back.
Now, don't get me wrong. Aimless scrolling does not fly with me, like ever. I'm the best boundaried person I know when it comes to social media, but it's not always like this and I test the system plenty. When we were in Paris on vacation mode, we gave ourselves unlimited end of night "grunning" sessions, a term in our marital lexicon since the beginning.
grunning: verb
deeply browsing the grundle of the internet.
"you can watch a movie, I'm grunning"
"you want to watch a movie or grun?"
you can also be a "grun" here, which is basically just saying you're being an asshole. When this supplement line launched, we about died.
Anyways, we did unlimited scroll time when we were in Paris after about a year of not being permitted to keep apps on our phones. Yeah, we gained nothing. We got no smarter. Good thing we packed plenty of books.
It's BECAUSE of the power of social media that I have boundaries around it the way that I do. Building audiences of people who know who you are, and are interested in what you do is building what we call "neutral income", a pillar of a holistic business strategy . It's untapped income with your name on it, where clients are constantly going from cold to warm, and then from warm to hot. You don't have social media and a newsletter list? You're not building neutral income. Basically you think people should "just pay you" because of your energy, without actually taking time to educate them on what problem of theirs YOU solve.
I also like word of mouth, but to me, word of mouth AND social media get along like shots and beer. WOM is fine for high ticket businesses, but if you want passive income, you're going to need to go for the masses. Even Jesus had to feed the crowd that showed up. Loaves and fishies, anyone?
Plenty of people come through our school with their rules about social media; sometimes, it's a clear judgment like "it rots your brain, steals your data, trafficks your kids," and other times, it's vague - "I'm weird about social media." Unfortunately, at the root of all this judgment is a grotesque fantasy about the endless punishment a social media user will face that the person who has "opted to be present" won't have to deal with.
I'm telling you, you can have both. You can have anything in life with boundaries. You can get your bag from social media, while still being present. For my life, I just can't do it with the apps on my phone. The temptation is too great. I can only refresh my email inbox so many times before I realize that if I had social media on my phone, I'd be tit deep in the scroll. I download my apps JUST to post, and I can browse a wee bit or engage with the comments on a previous post while the video is uploading. If you think this is annoying, remember that I do this JUST to post a story to my Instagram. One minute of downloading for 15 seconds of posting and then it's gone. It's annoying, but I own my life. I own my time.
Your life IS time. The book Four Thousand Weeks - read it! (read by the author on audiobook)
Don't abandon social media because you couldn't have boundaries. Just because social media is addictive doesn't mean you have to be an addict. Don't go on an anti-screen time rampage because you couldn't use boundaries with your kids. Boundaries ALWAYS make you grow. Boundaries are your standards for life.
It's only too late to set public facing boundaries when someone has paid you for a service that was built with a lack of boundaries, for example: "15k gets you unlimited access to me for 6 months".
Finish the commitment without blaming anyone but yourself, and do better next time. Use private boundaries to reduce emotional labor and resentment until the job is done.
Other than that, it's never too late to set boundaries.
Now that we've established the importance of social media, let's discuss platforms. Yes, plural.
This letter is brought to you by my workshop Fuckless, which will teach you everything you need to know about creating authentic passive income, and marketing it to PERFECTION.
The reason I'm telling you about this now is because at Fuckless, we know authentic social media content outperforms ads 10 to 1, and it's FREE. In this course we use an objective method for authenticity on the inside (read: getting over all the reasons you slave for the approval of others), and then take these lessons and combine it with human design to find out EXACTLY what authentic does, and more importantly, does NOT sound like from you when it comes to your content.
On the business side, we cover market research, core offers (high ticket/low ticket) , product development, seed launching, branding, content strategy, sales funnels (evergreen and timely), marketing emails, and how to accurately use your customer data.
Fuckless begins with a SICK free eBook all about authenticity, human design, and marketing. You can get the paperback for $12, or the eBook + audiobook for free.
I only subscribe to a tiny bit of newsletters. My friend's Substack, Sophia Amoruso had a GREAT newsletter but moved it to Substack to catc a subscription fee probably two months before she would have nailed ad space in her current email list(nooooo!). Ugh. It was so good. It was like femme Tech Crunch. That good. Now it's paywalled but it wasn't personal content. It was a best-of type of thing. The type of thing that does really well when advertisers pay you. but it's not something you want to pay to go look at.
Too often, my students enroll me in their newsletters without my consent. I love hustle, but don't do this to my email. Pls. Anyways, TechCrunch is one email I mostly open, and if you're involved in the social media conversation in any capacity, you've heard everyone talking about BlueSky.
BlueSky is Jack Dorsey's (who started Twitter) new social media project. It's actually not new, he's had it for a while. It was invite only for about a year, and then when Twitter > X was banned in Brazil, it had the opportunity to seize the moment and pop off. This happens a lot in social media. Reels popped off with Instagram when TikTok was banned in India.
It's not that we're seeing innovative content requirements, it's that more apps offer variations on the same content. So for example, Vine invented the short form video content, TikTok refined it (but had a super strong reputation of being a "kids dance app"), so Instagram stole it because that's their move, and it works, and now YouTube is pushing shorts and X says it wants to be mainly video going forward. The nice thing about all these dupes is that you can feed multiple platforms on the same content, and this is really good for you. Algorithmically, you won't get the same people on all platforms unless they really like you and want to follow you to multiple locations. Same content, new audience, new earning potential, wider reach, increased neutral income.
The downside of this is unless you're dealing with a REALLY high-end algorithm, like TikTok's (an astonishing, top secret, human/AI hybrid approval process), all these platforms just feel like dupes of each other, and it can feel pretty tired.
Anyways, we'll see a new social media surge when a hole has been created by the one before it. Elon Musk tanked Twitter really fast, which I don't have any feelings about. He bought it for 44 Billion, turned it into his playpen, and now it's valued at 4 Billion. It was such an interesting case study. It was going pretty good, people could separate the person from the platform, until one fatal post where he blocked all the flight tracking accounts because one was used on him and he didn't like it. With that one post, Twitter went from publicly traded company to personal brand. When it became clear that if you piss Elon Musk off, the entire platform will change based on his moods, his moods became pretty freaking important. When he became VERY political, there was no way to make it an "open discourse" because he had inadvertently made it a personal brand. The difference between Facebook, and a Facebook group.
All these companies rushed in to fill the short form written content void. Mastodon, Threads, Substack, and now BlueSky. So far, Threads has done the best, but I don't use it yet and I'll tell you why in a minute.
After the recent election, left wing users and Swifties just couldn't take the gloating on X. Apolitical users like me want to hear about something other than politics for fucking once, and there was no conversation going there. BlueSky filled the void, considering they designed Twitter in the first place, and popped off, clearing 20M users in a relatively short period of time. That's not a lot compared to 270M monthly users with Threads, but that's folded into Instagram so it's not exactly native.
So now "everyone" is headed to Blue Sky, and it's that utopian moment on any new social media where everyone's like "isn't it great that we're not around THOSE assholes anymore" before it becomes evident that you are, in fact, the asshole.
Well look, everything seems to suck when it's new. You don't realize how stubborn you can get about the social media app you've been on the longest. The social media app that you define fame with. The social media app that you've most likely worked for the hardest, and has probably pleased you the least, You need to receive it for a minute, and be open to something new. This is me and Substack. I deleted it like five times because I came across a series of articles over the week that felt like someone's mom having a Pinot Grigio meltdown on Facebook. (I have always said I would rather have red wine teeth than white wine eyes. Even sober, I stand by this.)
If your business will ever need an online presence in any capacity, you're going to need a platform. We live in a social media era. Expect that at least 30 apps "YOU HAVE TO BE ON" will come and go in your lifetime. You love learning new things, why would this not apply to a new app?
When we lived in New Mexico, it was basically all retired people. Some 70 year olds were fun, lively , and stoked on life. Others were basically waiting to die under the AC, eating Swann's for every meal and as crotchety and sick as they come, without any serious health issues. What was the difference?
The "young" ones were busy, adaptable, and loved hearing and trying new things. They were DOWN to try new things. The old ones were stuck in a rut, bored, and afraid to leave their comfort zone.
If you're whining about having to learn a new platform, STOP BEING OLD.
So what do we do when there's all these new apps and they all kind of seem to suck?
When there's no how, return to the why.
Your content is your portfolio. You need a platform, the bigger the better. If you don't diversify your portfolio, you're putting ALL your eggs in one basket. I had my first Instagram and my first TikTok both promptly deleted with no warning and no chance of restoration. Breastfeeding, man. You don't realize a robot sees tits and not food. Just like that, my entire neutral income was pulverized.
Instagram is a platform you have to REALLY watch out for, because they eat all kinds of content. Remember when we talked about how they just rip things off, and it works? You could easily feed all your content to Instagram, but be dealing with Meta-wide suppression, and never even know. Instagram eats photos (main feed), Snapchats (stories), TikToks (reels), short form tweets (threads), Livestreams, and even long-ish form (captions). If you were only posting content to Meta, you'd be ruined. I'm looking at you, students who proudly diversified from Instagram to Threads! That is not leaving your comfort zone!
Additionally, if you don't diversify your platforms, you're going to feel like your creativity can only come out in one way, which is where I'm kind of stuck now. I've had really good success with 90 second short form videos, posted to TT and IG, but I haven't gone on any short form written content apps because.... I don't really know what to post.
Now, I have a window. If I nail short form, I can feed FOUR platforms all at once, and easily to. Copy paste x 4. I can add FOUR wings onto my neutral income, and innovate my own creativity. Technically, it could be five if I used YouTube community feature. I got zings! It's time.
So (finally) here's my top five do's and don'ts for breaking into a new platform. They're fun, I promise.
I'm pretty sick of teachers who are on a bunch of platforms telling you to just focus on the ones you like. Listen their behavior, not their words.
1.) DON'T go in swinging and feel like you need to start posting and making it profitable right away. This increasing your chances of getting stuck trying to please something that you should make work for you. Most of the "social media pays you" strategies like Substack and TikTok shop are not actually serving you. Your brand pays you most, fastest. Keep your brand reputation pristine with GOOD content.
DO download the apps, and give yourself space and time to explore them. Take the old apps off your phone so you're forced to go learn a new one. Go be a fly on the wall. As you observe neutrally, without seeing any one platform as your savior, the content ideas will come. Your first five posts usually place you in the algo, so you want to do them consciously. It's okay to watch and wait.
2.) DON'T try to do trends to please the algorithm. That's not authentic content. If you get inspired to do one, great. I did a whole TikTok of dance videos and nothing happened. I'm not (just) a dancer. I'm a teacher. When I came in teaching, it worked.
DO research what that platform loves. Don't try to feed Facebook content to TikTok. Find the part of it you like, that's your niche.
3) DON'T learn a new content strategy for each platform. DON'T concern yourself with how often to post.
DO Know YOUR strategy. What are you here to do? What message are you here to share? How do you want to use this platform to do it. Pro-tip: know what your authentic voice sounds like. Know your strengths and weaknesses. Know if you're meant to have a faceless brand or not. We teach this in Fuckless, and like I said, there's a free book here. You can take that strategy with you anywhere. In that free book we also tell you exactly how much you should post, and how you should post, based on your design. *spoiler alert* when you're inspired and energized by the topic (generators/manifesting generators), clear and ready to FULLY inform them (so as a post, not in the comment section - projectors), telling them what they need to hear and not afraid of pissing anyone off (manifestors), and batching content for posting later when you have a wild hair up your ass (reflectors).
Notice the content you WISH existed on each platform. Provide that, fill those holes, and it will be a hit.
4.) DON'T rush to be the first person there. Yeah, there's advantages to being the first person to invest in crypto, but there's plenty of disadvantages as well. What we're going for here is sustainability. Waiting until you see five platforms that eat the same content and hitting them all at once? That's way more sustainable than getting embedded deeper into Meta and hating anything new. If Meta goes belly up, so do you.
DO find a way to do more. Put a post it up where you can see it. "Show me how to optimize the content I'm already making onto more platforms. Show me how branching out can be easy"
5.) DON'T rack your brain thinking of content ideas, and DON'T be afraid to be cringey.
If you're looking at new content styles, your creativity will come forward at the most unexpected times. Keep a note going in your phone of content ideas ALL the time. Draft that tweet, with hashtags right in your notes, and then post it all at once to all the places. Shoot video on your camera, not in any app. You can edit it later. As long as the lighting is decent (all natural lighting is decent), off-the-cuff, in the moment videos will outperform overproduced videos as long as they're not too long.
6.)BONUS: Don't try to get everyone to follow you everywhere. If IG is getting the same content as Tik, they shouldn't be following you in both! If they're a super fan, they'll find you.
Do let people know, just once, that you're on a new platform, and cross post DIFFERENT kinds of content, every now and then, as teasers. For example, posting a tweet to your IG or TikTok story.
and with that, I downloaded X, Substack, Threads, and BlueSky for my research phase. Let the games begin. Want to see how my research concluded and the strategy that came forward as a result? Peep this Instagram Story Highlight
https://www.instagram.com/s/aGlnaGxpZ2h0OjE4MjU1ODExNDYyMjU2NTAz?story_media_id=3506637194405638481&igsh=MTFycmN4b3dpOXhkcA%3D%3D