In my last book “elBenbo Press” I proudly declared two things:
1. Social media is stupid
2. I’d never write a book on the subject
Yet, barely a month after it launched, I wrote a 400+ page book (called “Social Lair”) about social media (launching on Monday) and am soon going to be launching a social media platform by the same name (“SocialLair”) with “Email Players” subscriber Troy Broussard.
Strange days indeed…
Anyway, there are many reasons for my “about face” on the subject.
One of the main reasons:
Email is great for daily communication.
But there is a limit to how many you can send in a single day without getting into the territory of eroding relationships with even your what I call “Berserker” customers who hang on every word you say and write.
That limit is different for every business.
But a limit there is.
And if you doubt this then go ahead and send 50 emails per day for a month straight and let me know how it goes in the long run with your sales, attrition, engagement, and delivery rates.
Thus, social media.
It’s the one thing I liked using it for:
Dozens of daily impromptu communications.
Sometimes short, sometimes long.
Sometimes selling something, sometimes not.
Sometimes leading to other things I am up to, sometimes mere brain farts.
But the customer has full control to see it or not, there is a social element that can create “feeding frenzy”-like engagement & sales if used correctly with email (what my new Social Lair book launching next week teaches, amongst other things), and it lets you do what I call “list laundering” – which I will also talk more about next week, and that is what has led to my list being probably the single most responsive list in my niche for reasons I won’t go into here.
The problem with social media is everything else:
The privacy butchering.
The creepy line crossings & outright whoring out of your data.
The manipulation of hormones, news, and information.
The anti-small business rules.
The incessant de-platforming & thought policing.
The not being able to export an audience into a list.
And so on, and so forth.
All things our upcoming social media platform does NOT engage in, incidentally.
If anything, it’s capitalist bliss and a way businesses can potentially make fortunes in their own protected “walled garden” platform where your thoughts aren’t policed, where your data is yours and yours alone, and where it’s created — by design — to get maximum engagement and sales if you know what you’re doing.
Anyway, more about that platform in the coming weeks.
For now, I want to talk about my Social Lair book launching in a couple days.
The best way to use social media is in conjunction with email.
And, specifically, in the way I teach in the book.
Until then, to learn the email side of things, go here:
Ben Settle
