AP 0723: How Early Is Too Early to Start Social Media?

AskPat 723 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 723 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions, five days a week.

We have a great question today from Taj, but before we get to that, I do want to thank today's sponsor, which is FreshBooks, the whole new FreshBooks actually. They've just been redesigned from the ground up. FreshBooks is the ridiculously easy to use accounting software that's on the cloud. It's completely transformed how freelancers and small business owners deal with their day to day paperwork, especially come tax season, which I know is going to sneak up on us. FreshBooks has all these forms that you can use, that you can give to your CPA or use yourself to make tax stuff easier, plus the invoicing aspect which you can create an invoice and send it out in 30 seconds. Get this, you can even check to see if people viewed those invoices so you can follow up with them. You get emails, depending on how often you want them, with FreshBooks telling you how much you're owed and who owes you. It's just an amazing piece of software. I highly recommend you check it out. You can check it out for free for 30 days by going to FreshBooks.com/askpat and make sure you add in “AskPat” in the How Did You Hear About Us section.

All right, thank you, and here's today's questions from Taj.

Taj: Hi, Pat. My name is Taj and my company is called Books, Beats, & Beyond. I have a Twitter account, a Facebook account, and an Instagram account, however I have not published my Facebook account and I'm not active on the other two as of yet because right now I'm pursuing my MBA which absorbs all my free time. I wanted to start sharing pictures, news articles, and other content to start my following, but I'm not sure if it's too premature without a link to a website or some type of landing page as I collect email addresses and to update my followers on my progress and future offerings. My question is, is it a good idea to start posting content on my social media pages without a website or a landing page? Thanks, Pat, and I really appreciate you answering this question. Also, thanks for providing so much value. I appreciate it. Thanks.

Pat Flynn: Hey Taj. What's up? Thank you so much for the question today. I appreciate it, and keep going on your MBA. I hope it's all going well for you. Keep up the great work. To answer your question, is it premature to start posting on social media building a following there before you have a website or even a landing page or a way to build an email list, no. You can totally start building your following now. If that's the only way you're able to start making connections and building a following and fan base, by all means go and do it. You can easily once you start to build that following on social media, once you have a website or a landing page, you can simply link and have all your existing fans or followers come and share their email. Now, not everybody's going to do it, but some people will, and so if the only thing that you are able to do right now is to post on social media and start to build your following and actually I would get on there too just to start building relationships more than anything. I mean, man, it's going to make your life much easier once you have that website.

You can even probably gain some insight from your followers and just the conversations that are already existing without you even having to enter those conversations. You can use Twitter as a search engine, as a research tool so you can make your website or landing page or product in the way that it should be based on the conversations that are already happening. Yeah, please go out there and do it, but I will say that you don't just want to post links and stuff that other people have said. You want to come up with your own stuff and start to ask questions and engage with people, enter these conversations that are already happening, add value if you can. It can just be in 140 characters or less.

That's why I feel Twitter is the best place to start. Especially if you're so busy and you don't have much time, Twitter, because it's so short and easy to consume and easy for you to add messages and add value in short snip-its here and there, it's a great place to start building your following. Like I said, once you have your website up or your business where once you even start, even before that you can start surveying your audience on social media to see what they think about certain things that may relate to this business idea that you might have. Whatever it is you're doing in your MBA, I think it will benefit from you starting to get on social media now and being a part of those conversations, and most importantly like I said earlier, starting to build those relationships. Follow those people who you want to connect with who may be in a niche that you're really interested in and you can start listening to those conversations, replying to their comments, and having a conversation with them too so that they'll reply two years down the road. Then, like I said, that will be very useful for you to drive traffic to any kind of page that you have and set up in the future for yourself.

You know, it's going to take a while. I will say it's not going to be over night where you're going to get 100 or 200 or even 50 fans. It's going to take some time, but the more you put yourself out there and interact and start providing value, the more it is likely that people are going to start to notice and actually start to follow you. Have at it. Get started now. It's the only thing I wish I did earlier was get started earlier too.

Good luck, Taj. Thank you so much and keep us posted on how everything is going. I want to thank you so much by offering you an AskPat t-shirt, so you'll hear from my assistant in the next month or two and we'll collect your information so we can send that to you for free. Again, best of luck to you. For all the people out there who are listening who you'd like your question potentially featured here on the show, just head on over to askpat.com and you can ask right there on that page. Thank you so much.

I also want to thank FreshBooks for their just awesome everything because they've helped me and I think over 3 million other small business owners with managing our finances, making invoicing easier. Like I said, it just got re-designed from the ground up and it is awesome. You got to check it out. FreshBooks.com/askpat is where you go and make sure you enter “AskPat” in the How Did You Hear About Us section.

All right, thank you so much. I appreciate you, and here's a quote to finish off the day. This quote is from Dr. Wayne Dyer. He says, “You cannot be lonely if you like the person you're alone with.”

It all starts from within. Love yourself, guys. Take care and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Bye.