How to choose which social media platform to use in your business.

Welcome to The Empowered Edupreneur Podcast. My name is Michelle Smit, and I am an ex-teacher turned online business coach for Edupreneurs, the owner of Digiteach and a six-figure entrepreneur. I am in love with empowering educators, just like you to create freedom filled online businesses and lives they love.

If you are looking to uplevel your skills, your finances, your mindset, and change the trajectory of your life as an educator in business, then you are in the right place. Think of this podcast as your weekly dose of business and mindset development to help unlock the infinite potential within you to play bigger with your life and go after your dreams.

We are going to have so much fun together. So thank you so much for pushing play today. Now let's dive in. 

Hello, hello. I hope you are having a wonderful day today. I have some exciting news. So I haven't done something like this for a long time, and when I say a long time, I mean like at least two years, two and a half years maybe. I'm hosting a free masterclass, completely free. And it's called the Quadruple Your Teaching Income Through Launching Courses Masterclass.

It's quite a mouthful. And I'm going to be sharing my four-step launch success system that will help you launch any course or group program online or membership as well, and fill it with dreamy students who are excitedly waiting to jump in. Whipping out their credit cards and buying from you.

This is honestly a system that has made me hundreds of thousands of dollars and it has made collectively my students over 100,000 in just course sales, ultimately. Which is unreal. It's so effective. It's so good and it's life changing and I'm excited to share it with you in this masterclass.

So I'm going to be hosting it on the 22nd of February at 6 PM Central European time, and I'm only doing it once. And there are limited spots in the virtual room. So I think there's about 500 spots in that virtual room. And I think we're going to have way over that registering. And so if you want to learn about launching, you really want to learn how you can sell a course and increase your income and impact online, then I definitely would recommend you joining this masterclass. 

You can click the link below this episode, or you can write to me on Instagram if you can't find it and I can share the link with you. But yeah, it's free and it's going to be absolutely epic. So, go get yourself signed up for that.

And even though it's free, I want you to take it seriously and actually show up. If you don't plan on showing up, then don't register. I'm quite strict about these things and I put a lot of work into these things. So if you're going to take someone's spot, then make sure that you show up or you at least watch the replay. All right. So that's that. 

And today, what am I going to talk to you about? Someone suggested that I make a podcast episode on this. And it was all about how to choose the right social media platform for your business. And I get this question a lot.

So I know that this is something that would help a lot of people. So, there's basically, I think four to five things you want to ask when you are starting out your business and you're trying to figure out, okay, which platform and which content am I going to be creating for my business and all of that stuff.

We all need to make those decisions, right? So the first question you want to ask is, which platform does my ideal student hang out on? If you are targeting older women, it wouldn't make sense to go and create content on TikTok, because the majority of TikTok users demographic are young. When it comes to the inverted commas, "older people" older is basically 30 and up or 40, 50, 60. Then you would think more along the lines of Facebook, potentially. Instagram has a young and slightly older user base.

So think around like 20 to about 45 or so, if you are looking to help people in corporate or professionals, then LinkedIn may be a good platform for you. Because that's where they're hanging out. So really think about who is your avatar. Who's the dreamy student that you really want to serve and help and impact and get in front of.

And then think about where they are hanging out, which platform are they hanging out on? That's a very important one. You don't want to go and create content on a platform where you haven't got your people hanging out on. So that's number one. Number two is which platform do you enjoy using and hang out on yourself? 

Which one are you familiar with? If you're not familiar with any of them, then cancel that. Which one would you enjoy using the most? Okay, if you're going to choose something, you've got to enjoy whatever you choose. That's really important. Okay. So which platform do you use currently or which one are you hanging out on or familiar with?

Okay. So the next thing you want to ask is which one feels most aligned that I can keep consistent with. So this is a long term commitment. This isn't something that is going to be like a one month thing, right? When you're choosing a platform to build your business on and do all your marketing and create content on, it's a long term thing.

It's not something that would end soon. So because of that long term commitment, you want to choose the platform that feels good to you. Now, I'm not saying that you are like married to this platform for life and you can never get off it. Of course you can. 

But you want to go into it knowing that it's a long term thing and that's what it is. If you're going to have a business, you're going to have a platform and that's going to be your marketing method. And that's just what you do, right? So you just need to make sure that it is aligned to you. And even if you have to get over the fears and the resistance of being on social media, which everyone has to get through to have an online business. It still needs to feel aligned in the sense that it's a platform that you are happy to be on for a long time. 

And yes, you can change to another platform later down the line. For example, when I started my business, I was aligned with Facebook for two years, and then after that, I decided I was going to move to Instagram and then I went to Instagram and I post my Instagram stuff on Facebook.

But I'm not really active on Facebook anymore. And so obviously you can change platforms as it changes or as your alignment changes, because we're human beings, we evolve, things are going to change. Like for the first couple of years, you might prefer this. And then later you'll might prefer that.

And that's okay, but you want to go into it thinking this isn't going to be for like a month. I'm committed to this for at least a year. And so it needs to be aligned with where you are right now in your life. And what feels like the path of least resistance for you in terms of a platform. 

And then number four is what type of content does your ideal avatar like to consume? Each platform has different types of content, so are your people, your niche, are they big readers? So if they're big readers, then maybe Substack could be your platform, as that's where you would write blog posts and write stories and things like that. And people can subscribe to that.

Are your people into long form videos, like watching video content, and they hang out on YouTube, then perhaps a YouTube channel is a good option to consider. Does your audience prefer short form content, then you would be looking at more TikTok and Instagram, because that is more short videos and short form content.

Like you're not going to read a lot on Instagram and everything's quite fast paced on Instagram and TikTok. Does your audience love listening to long form content? Then maybe considering a podcast could be a good idea. Think about your ideal avatar and what kind of content they'd like to consume as well. 

So that's important. And then number five is what form of content suits your strengths? I think this is a good question to ask. So are you a natural writer? Do you enjoy writing? If that's the case, then I would say blogging or Substack is a good option. Are you a natural speaker? Then podcasting would be a good option for you potentially are you great on camera?

You like to do yourself up and you like recording and you love the gadgets and you like editing and all of that stuff, which I know many people love. Then maybe YouTube is the right kind of content form for you. Because you're going to enjoy creating YouTube videos and it's going to feel satisfying when you create YouTube videos every week and stuff like that. So that's something to consider. Yeah, those are like the main questions I would ask yourself. 

So number one, where does your ideal avatar or your ideal student hang out? Which platform? Number two, which platform style of content do you enjoy or are you familiar with? Number three, what type of content does your ideal student like to consume? Number four, what type of content or platform is in line with your strengths? And number five, ultimately, which platform feels the most aligned so that you can keep consistent with? 

And consistency means something different for everyone. Consistency is just the amount of times you are going to post or create content per week on that platform. So it might look like, three times per week, you're going to post on Instagram.

And that's just what you do every week. You post three times a week. If you're on YouTube, it might be at least one YouTube episode released per week. That's just what you do. So every week you release a YouTube video. If you're on a podcast, then it's maybe okay, every week I release a podcast. If you're on Tik-Tok, maybe it's like I post once a day, every day during the week, and then I don't post on the weekends.

So you get to decide the rules of what your consistency looks like. And obviously it does help to post more in some ways to help grow. It depends on the platform, but really what you want to find is a consistency or a frequency that really is something you can keep consistent with. So don't say I'm going to post five times on Instagram if that's just out of reach.

Don't say I'm going to create a YouTube video once a week. If you know that's just not possible. Maybe it would be biweekly YouTube videos. So once every two weeks you create a video, so really make sure that you give yourself a frequency that is something you can be consistent with. And that's important.

And the other thing that I would say is don't be on lots of platforms. So choose one and double down on it and do it well. It's much better to be on what one platform and do it well and learn about that style of content and get better at creating content on that platform than it is to be on multiple platforms and do all of them averagely.

It's already a lot learning one platform in one style of content. So just stick to one in the beginning. And then as you evolve and get more capacity and your skills grow, and you can hire team members and things you can always go on other content platforms or social media platforms.

So for me, I started with Facebook and then after two years, I decided to move to Instagram. I now have Facebook and Instagram, but I predominantly am on Instagram. And I've got a podcast, but I didn't start out with all of this. I could literally only start with one and now I'm like five years down the line and I've built and laid in all these different things.

So start with one, focus on it. Give it the energy and time, keep consistent with it. Choose a frequency that feels achievable for you and enjoy the process of content creation and being on social media. It's a challenge and it's not always going to be easy. A lot of the time. It's going to feel really hard and out of your comfort zone. But just start taking baby steps. Start exercising the muscle of creating content. Getting in front of people, sharing your perspective.

Start building that confidence and it does get easier and it does get more fun as you get more confident. So that's what I would say on that. And yeah, go wild, go dive in and don't wait. Content creation is something that if you want an online business, you do need to get in front of people and people are always like, can I have an online business without being on social media and.

You can, but it's hard. You need to have a way for people to find you and the way people find you is online. So you just need some way to get in front of people online. And the way you do that is through social media, typically. You could potentially run ads and not have to post every day, but then you have to pay for advertising, which is maybe not something you want to do.

So there are ways you have a business without it, but it's more challenging, I would say. And especially if you're new and you haven't got an audience at all, then I would say you need to make peace with it. If you want an online business, you need to be online for people to find you. The only way for you to be online is for you to create some form of content online. 

So find that method and double down on it and try get traffic to see it, try get people to see it. That's really important. You need an audience and you need traffic. Otherwise it's not going to help. So yeah, go forward and conquer the social media. Don't hold back, just start. And it's just one of those things we need to do.

And our mental health is important, so don't do anything that's going to make you feel absolutely terrible. Make sure it's in alignment with you and how you want to run your business and what you want to do in your business and your strengths and all of that. All right, so that's it for today. A reminder that my free masterclass is coming up soon.

The Quadruple Your Teaching Income Through Launching Masterclass, where I'm going to share my four-step method for launching courses and group programs online and filling it with dreamy students. It's going to be amazing. And there's just one session that I'm going to be doing live. And there are limited spots, as I mentioned, so you can click the link below and get signed up, and if you can't find the link, feel free to message me on Instagram or email and I'll get that link to you. All right. I hope you enjoyed this episode and I will chat to you next week. 

 Bye.

 Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. I have some exciting news for those of you who are wanting to learn more about how you can launch a course or group program online and fill it with dreamy students. I'm hosting my free Quadruple Your Teaching Income Through Launching Courses masterclass soon.

I'm going to share my four-step launch success system that will help you launch any offer online and fill it immediately. It is a life changing system that has helped me make hundreds of thousands of dollars online, as well as change the lives of many of my students. 

This masterclass is free. It's going to be live. There's just one session and there are limited spots in the virtual room. Click the link below to join us. 

I appreciate you so much. And I can't wait to connect with you in the next episode. In the meantime, go create a business and life you love.