Strategic Content: Finding the Right Balance as a Coach on Social Media

Sheri: So let's dive into the topic that we're talking about today, around how much do I give of the good stuff, the secrets, the solutions the really powerful questions. How much of that as a coach should you give in social media?
In strategy sessions or in coaching sessions, how much of that do you give in doses because there have been times certainly where I've given a lot of information and really helped people, but it's been on the front end of. Having a commitment from them, and can be a recipe for frustration, resentment, even over time and burnout.
So where do you wanna take this, Faisal I'll give you the freedom
Faisal: We can start with, because where does your, like if you're a coach who is building a part-time or full-time business, depending on how you're doing it. So it all depends on your context, but. Let's say you're trying to promote yourself on LinkedIn or social media or wherever and maybe you don't want a lot of followers and you're not necessarily focused more on the influencer thing, but you're focused on, okay, how do I get clients, let's say from LinkedIn or let's say within Facebook or wherever.
And that's part of your strategy. And the normal thing is, well, what, how much do I put out there? How much work do I need to do? And this was my frustration as I was beginning, I was putting out actually a lot of content I was doing. Initially, when I started on Facebook, I was doing four posts a day.
I actually do less now. But here was my mindset and it didn't click in for a long, long time. My mindset was, okay, I'm gonna put out these four posts a day, and then people are gonna And that's the idea of people who are gonna engage with the post. And then at some point, they're gonna reach out to me, and then we're gonna book the conversation discovery call, and then we're gonna move forward.
The challenge was that there were a lot of subtleties in there that I didn't understand, from a marketing standpoint. First of all, initially when you were starting out, like. It'll be crickets. There won't be a lot of people who will engage with your post. Even to this day, not a lot of people engage with my posts, but for some reason, I'm able to move forward and we'll talk about the details around that.
Over time I've learned that most people won't engage with your posts, especially if you're talking about values, beliefs, and stuff. A lot of people won't comment or like, because now they're associating with something you're saying. Now they have to put themselves on the line.
So I found out later on that there are a lot of people that are following me, but they're not actually liking and commenting on my posts few people actually do it. On top of that, then you're thinking about Facebook, for example. Algorithms are weird. They're showing it less and less to people.
So then what is the thinking behind your marketing strategy? I would say think about that very clearly because unless you are a seven-figure coach or you're like not close to a million or something, you don't need to do a lot. To gather clients and I wanna talk about from two different perspectives. One of the important things, if you're promoting yourself on social media, you need to be visible to some degree just for credit. People are gonna do, as soon as they hear about you, they're gonna Google you or they're gonna try to find you on LinkedIn. And if they go to your profile and there are only CAT videos, then I mean, nothing wrong with CAT videos, but if That's the only thing they find all over the internet. Often they're like, okay, is this like a side thing that they're not sincere or serious about what they're doing? And this is after you've actually built a relationship with a person. So I would say that's important and it is becoming more and more important like about 10 years ago.
For example, my brother has a few businesses in Virginia. When he was thinking about social media 10 years ago was like, no, I want to get into it. And he was asking me, he was like, can you do part of it for me? I'm like, I'm barely doing my own stuff. I dunno how to figure out your own stuff.
And then he ended up hiring a marketing agency. It's a good thing to have because he was anticipating what's getting bigger, but now it's non-negotiable. Like he has to have a marketing agent even though he is a brick-and-mortar. Because social media drives everything now. Yeah. Online drives everything.
So even for brick-and-mortar businesses, this is a big deal. Not to mention somebody who's building most of their business, most coaches are building it online. And there are ones who will do it in person, but let's say the ones who are building it online, you need to have some kind of presence just for credibility's sake at the minimum.
So that means that if somebody's, go Google if you do anything, go Google your name. You'll find out very interesting things about yourself. First of all, if you don't find yourself at all, that's a problem. But if you fulfill your name, like I found myself on different websites. People are taking my videos and putting 'em on all these things, and it's like, I don't even know that website, but it's fine.
They're probably making some money out of it, but they're promoting my stuff. That's okay. Yeah. So that would be the, the first is like, just put yourself out there. Just for the sake of visibility. And then the next step would be content for the sake of getting clients. Like the proactive approach of what do you need to give away to get clients.
And I'll talk about that. But I want to hear Sheri's thoughts on this cuz she's been online too for a while.
Sheri: Yeah, so it was interesting cuz the first business I built about 13 years ago was a psychological practice and I live in Wyoming, the smallest or least populated state in the United States.
And One of the benefits of living here is we're kind of behind the times on a lot of things. And so I can do what's typical in the US and in Wyoming it's like, oh, wow, that's new. And it's not really new, but so I launched a website and I did a whole bunch of social media stuff and you know, again it was more than what my you know, other folks in town were doing around being a mental health provider and having a, having a business around that.
But you might be listening to this thinking like, yeah, I only have cat videos on my, and like, oh my gosh, that really feels daunting. Like, how am I ever gonna change that? Just wanna give you some practical advice. Something that you can probably do in, let's say maybe just take two hours out of your day.
And do two things. One is to look at your profile, like Facebook or wherever you really want. I would say Facebook is probably one of the important aspects. One of the important platforms, cuz everybody's on Facebook. That may not be one that you focus on, but maybe Facebook, Instagram, maybe LinkedIn, maybe just those three.
Look at your profile if you have one. And if you don't just create one. But what does it say about you? Do you know? And if you've switched businesses, here's the thing that we forget. If you're a newer coach and you had a previous identity make sure that that previous identity is not the only thing in your profile.
Because if somebody went to Faisal's profile and, and he's saying, Hey, I'm a coach. And you go to his profile. And it, all it does is talk about like, Hey, I'm an engineer and you know, I'm this, but it says nothing about coaching. I'm gonna be a little bit skeptical. Like Faisal said, what is a society hustle that you're not really all in on?
So just make sure you've updated the details of your profile so that you are a coach and who are, you know, as much as you can. So do that and then just put. I don't know, 10, 20 different posts in so that there are the most recent things people see. Whether they're pictures that have some sort of comment about life change or whatever it is, however, it is that you're a coach, if you're a relationship coach or whatever, just do like 20 posts.
Even if you post them all today because those are gonna be the ones that people see. If they quick look at your profile, they're gonna see a whole bunch of things related to what you're doing. And that's the easiest thing you can do just to kind of baseline yourself as you kind of switch over into coaching.
So just kind of wanted to give something super practical. I'm gonna guess if you can just whip it out in two hours, I think you'll be good to go.
Faisal: Yeah. And as a model, you can actually just go to either one of our profiles, like you can go to Dr. Sheri's profile on Facebook or search for Faisal Ensaun, because like I had to do a lot of work to optimize the profile and I didn't even realize my profile was actually private.
I thought it was not until my business coach was like, you can't see any of the posts, and I couldn't even if I showed the past ones. Cause I was sharing a lot of stuff on my profile from my page. I was using my business page as a primary thing, but it wasn't getting a lot of views and they got me to use a profile, so I had to optimize everything.
And you can share a bunch of stuff in there. So just go take a look at my profile while you see the link to all my social media, and the link to my website. You can put a bunch of links in there on Facebook, so as soon as people go in there, they'll see the posts and they'll see the links and if you don't have that, people don't know what to do.
And most, like for example, I do the outreach for coaches cuz we have a coaching Mastery community and I go to the coach's website. I can't tell if they're a coach or not. I really can't. It takes me like I have to really go down. There will be one post on personal development. I'm like, maybe this is a coach to some degree, but there's nothing there that says they're a coach.
And it's private, some of them have private profiles. Many of them have public, but all the posts are unrelated. Yeah, let's say and that's Facebook. But LinkedIn is more on the professional end, but even LinkedIn profiles for most people are not optimized. As Sheri said, it has other things like coaches are not the only ones though who do this.
I work with real estate investors. It's actually a very weird thing. It takes courage to change things. I'm like, and when I ask him like, what do you need to do to move your business forward in the real estate investment? He's like, they will hesitantly say he is like, you know, I don't have it on my LinkedIn profile that I'm an investor.
And they're scared of it. I like it, why don't you have it? Like, well, first of all, they need to clarify some things about their job, if they have a job, if they can even do that. So that's one step they need to take. And the next step is like, well now I'm doing this new thing and I don't know how to, like they're scared of their reputation and all sorts of other things, but as soon as they put their thing, then they can own it.
They're like, okay, I'm an investor as well.
Sheri: Yeah. That's the thing is once you've, made sure that your profile and, and your Facebook and wherever else, it's like you're, you're posting things, you're optimizing it, you're posting things about coaching. You're all in baby like you're committing to it.
You are saying, I am a coach. You know, no matter if I have clients or not, no matter how much time, if I'm also earning an income from something else, you're still a coach. Own it. Be excited about it and share it with people. We jokingly say in the Coaching Mastery community, Don't be a covert coach.
Don't be a coach in secret. Let everybody know. That's kind of the first step. And so Faisal as people are then posting things on social media and trying to build that presence, trying to build expertise and a reputation as a coach, how do you think through, or how would you recommend our listeners to think through what to put, how much.
You know, should they do like whole sessions, like master classes teaching stuff for free? Should it be paid? Like how do we think through what to give and how to give it?
Faisal: Yeah. And this is where getting focused on strategic matters a lot because, I mean, when I started out, like the mistake that I made, I was constantly thinking about, okay, I need to post this.
I need to post this. I, I need to put this out there. And the hope, as I said, was that somebody will reach out to me and book this client. And then we literally had a couple of clients in CMC that was exactly their strategy. And I asked, purposely asked him, like, so tell me a little bit about your strategy.
What are you hoping will happen as you post these things on Instagram? And he's like, I haven't really quite thought about it, but I know what the thought process is. He is like, but if I really think about it, my hope is that if I do a bunch of this stuff, somebody will click on my strategy session link and book that.
And that might happen maybe once or twice. So as a reference in the past six years, I think that's happened four times. Okay. Okay. For me, where somebody has gone to my link, and most of it has been more of an outreach, and this is the difference I wanna make, is that the purpose of your post initially, as Doug Sharon talked about, is for your credibility, for your trust that you're actually doing something.
That's one purpose, but the other purpose is that it actually has a marketing purpose in the sense that you're putting out posts and pieces of training intentionally to direct people to, let's say if you're only doing one-on-one coaching to a sales conversation, to a discovery conversation. So, I used to wait for people to like and comment on my post for me to reach out to people, but now my thinking has completely reversed.
I actually reach out to people so people can engage with my posts. Hmm,
Sheri: interesting. I haven't heard you say that before.
Faisal: Yeah, so it's the complete opposite. It sounds simple, but it took me about five years to think about this.
Sheri: Yay. You're in short, cutting the journey for all of us. Thank you.
Faisal: So thinking of Facebook so what happens when you message somebody? Think of somebody messaging you on Facebook or anywhere. What are you gonna do? You're gonna go into their profile. What are you gonna do? You're gonna see their posts. So when I'm messaging people, regardless of what the context of the message is, The first instinct would be, to go to my profile.
They're gonna see what I'm doing. They might not watch all the videos or posts, but at least now they're going, they're engaging with my profile, which is actually in a sense, hacking the algorithms because Facebook won't just show it. So on average, Facebook will show a very tiny percentage of your posts even to the people who followed.
So that's one thing. And so what I'm sharing here is that you don't have to post a lot. Let's say if you post two posts, if we're taking Facebook as a reference, two posts a day on Facebook and you do that five or six days a week. These posts are there to establish credibility and trust and content.
It shows that you have authority. It shows that you are doing stuff in that space, but most of the work is in the background you're actually reaching out to people regardless of whether they've engaged with you or not. And I'm assuming that you know, Who these people are that you wanna reach out to.
So you know you have an idea of your niche and avatar. So for example, for me, real estate investors. So when I'm doing outreach, I'm not randomly reaching out to people, I'm actually going into people's profiles, seeing what they're doing, what they're up to, and then I'll reach out to them and I'll build a relationship.
So I'll reach out to them, maybe I'll share one of my posts, like, Hey, I did this training and I saw that you were interested in this thing. So it's very custom and context matters a lot here. Even the GAR review will talk about it. It's like context is everything. Yeah. If you're just randomly sending people a bunch of like, copy-paste messages, I've done that too.
It doesn't give you the thing. But if you go into somebody's profile and you see that they, let's say they care about cats, wanna reference that to some degree if that's what it's, or they care about what's happening in the economy right now. And they have concerns about that. And I'll share a message and ideally, I have a post or a video that says something like, Hey I saw that you're thinking about this thing.
I did a video on this. Let me know what you think. Just that could be a message. I'm not asking them to join me in a strategy session cuz they don't even know me. Why would they want to join me? And I'm just building a relationship at that point. And then as that conversation leads, that slowly leads towards strategy session.
There's a framework around that. But the key thing is that you are actually doing an outreach. And this is sales. This is if, if that's not there.
Sheri: You said the, you said the dirty word.
Faisal: Beautiful word. I used to think of it as a dirty word too. I know, I know.
Sheri: It's hard. And if you're listening to this, you still might feel that little.
Like an icky feeling in the pit of your stomach when you think of sales. Or maybe you've turned from that caterpillar to the butterfly and now you're like, I don't have sales. But it's a frame of mine and it is an absolute necessity to being an entrepreneur, to having your own business.
And but it's really, yeah, it's really not a dirty word. I'm just teasing.
Faisal: So let me give a good analogy. It's like, if. Not having a negative relationship or not liking sales and money and business is equivalent to not liking water. And you want to be a swimmer, right? You can have a very, very hard time with that.
Cause money and sales are the center point of business with them, that's the lifeblood. It doesn't work without it. And you can structure it in a way, it can be very service oriented. It can be based on your values. You can do a lot in there. But if you have a negative relationship with money and sales, you're already putting a bunch of blocks in there that you don't need to.