Fitness Business School – Don’t Rely Too Much on One Platform

Full Transcript

Hey Pat Rigsby here. And in this episode, I want to talk with you about Facebook and Instagram going down. So we’re going to discuss the warning that social media just gave us and how that affects our business in this episode. Let’s get started.

Welcome to The Fitness Business School podcast – the show for fitness business owners who want to grow their income, increase their impact and improve their lifestyle. Be sure to listen til the end of this episode, because we have a brand new special offer exclusive for listeners. So stay tuned.

If you’re like most small business owners you, you noticed when Facebook and Instagram went down recently and for a lot of people, it, it makes you realize how fragile things are with business. If you relying on one platform to really drive things, especially a platform that you’re not the owner of. I mean, make no mistake. I love the impact social media can have and how it makes things simpler, easier for a lot of us. And it certainly allows you to stay connected with people that you, you, you don’t get the opportunity to engage with face-to-face as often as you would like. But, you know, the, the reality is a lot of people. And I know a lot of coaching programs really kind of hinge on this Facebook ad to application business model. And without that, they don’t really exist. It’s not really a, a strategically designed business. It’s reliant on a single tactic that, you know, you sink or swim with, and this is not new, not at all. I mean, we saw this back you know, when Groupon and living social were really, really prominent there were businesses that their entire mechanism for generating new leads and new clients was to promote on those deal of the day platforms and when those left their, their entire source of new new business left.

So, I mean, the, the thing that I think we have to understand is if you are reliant entirely, like if you were putting all your eggs in this basket, it doesn’t take Facebook going down for you to really feel the brunt of that. I mean, you could lose your Facebook ad account. We see that with people all the time, you could have somebody just shut down your, your private Facebook group or delete your Instagram account. I mean, none of these are uncommon occurrences. So understand that social media is not your business. It’s a traffic source. It’s a tool that allows you to connect with the people that you want to serve. It allows you to, to reach people in a simple fashion because you know where they are, you know how to find them. But I think the more important thing here that we have to understand is we need to diversify. We need to leverage other strategies, other tactics, to grow our business. If we’re going to be solid and sustainable, because we can’t let everything hinge on one resource that we’re not the owner of whether that’s Facebook or Instagram or YouTube or whatever. You know, you need to, to, to think about creating your own audience, your own platform, because here’s how I think of something like Facebook and maybe this will help you get a better feel for, for where I’m going with this. And then I’ll, I’ll give you some more tactical suggestions as we get towards the end of this episode. But basically Facebook is just the, the owner of an audience. They have gotten people to be part of their audience. They own that audience.

We are in fact, the product that they’re selling to advertisers when, when we’re on here and in exchange for that, they’re giving us easy access to other people and a source of connection and a way to share you know, pictures with friends and family and, and stay connected with loved ones from afar and all that stuff. But we’re, we are the audience that they essentially rent out to advertisers. Now, our job as business owners is to build our own audience to essentially own our own mini media. If you will. Now, for me, I’ve been a big advocate of building an email list for as long as I can remember. I mean, I’ve sent a daily email for 16 years now, and that email database is the audience that I essentially own. That’s an asset. Now I use tools to, to leverage that, right? Like I’m going to use a platform like our automatic members to reach out to clients and connect them. But if that platform wasn’t gonna work for me anymore, I still own the list. I can move that list with different platform and mail that, that audience, and this is not new. I mean, when I first got into business you know, you would have a prospect list. You would build a mailing list.

You would have a list of people that you were going to call and follow up with. So understand that our goal here is to build this asset, this list that we can control and not be entirely dependent on borrowing access to somebody else’s list. Now, the nice thing about this is you can build your list by essentially kind of siphoning off of these social media platforms, but you don’t want to always leave them as the gatekeeper. You don’t always have them be the middleman, use those tools as long it is there available to you and serve you well, but do not be reliant on them. Now, I sent out an email not too long ago and shared over 140 different ways that I have grown my various businesses throughout the years. And I’ve done a little bit of everything from having kind of public access TV, TV shows and, and having regular spots on news news programming to billboards, to yard signs, to, to hiring door-to-door salespeople, you name it, I’ve tried it to grow a business. And that’s some of the stuff that we teach our clients in business growth accelerator and the other coaching solutions that we have is, you know, various ways to generate business and reach the people that did they want to serve, because let’s face it. If you know who your target market is, you can find them in various spots. You can certainly find them on social media, but you’re not only going to find them on social media. If I wanted to reach people in my local neighborhood, I could use yard signs. I could use direct mail pieces. I could use fliers. I could leverage the various newsletters and neighborhood magazines, which here there are three of to reach out. I could leverage the PTA that is running a, you know, as I record this running a, a, a big event this week and is looking for sponsors, I could do distribution through local businesses through strategic alliances. I can certainly do radio spots and billboards and partner with local organizations. I could do public speaking. I could lunch and learns.

There are any number of things that I could do locally to reach the people that I want to serve. And yes, I would certainly take full advantage of social media as long as it’s available to me, but I would not be completely reliant on that and put myself in harm’s way. Should they choose to shut down for longer than six hours? Should they choose to eliminate my ad account? So it is you think about how you’re growing your business and how you’re building your business, make sure that you’re not building on this foundation of sand. So to speak that way, if there’s an outage, it’s not going to slow you down, not even a little, you’re just going to shift your emphasis and probably be the beneficiary of this change because your competition won’t be as adaptable.

That’s one of the things that I’ve kind of known in the back of my mind, that if Facebook and Instagram went down tomorrow, a lot of the people that would be my competitors when it comes to reaching the target market that I want to serve would disappear because they don’t have a plan B. They don’t have another strategy. Now, do I want the platforms to go down? Not at all, because there’s other collateral damage that goes along with that, but I know that I’ve built a strong foundation that would survive it. And I know that that’s my recommendation for you to so sure. This is kind of a shot across the bow from, from social media, just a reminder to let us know that, you know, we don’t want to be dependent. We want to use things to our advantage, but we also want to set ourselves up to succeed with whatever circumstances come our way.

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