From Entrepreneur Media, this is Problem Solvers, a show in which entrepreneurs do what entrepreneurs do best, solve unexpected problems in their business. We were completely wrong. And I'm just like the Issa Selling. It was like we have to start from scratch. I'm Jason Feiffer, the Editor-in-Chief of Entrepreneur Magazine. If you have a business, then you are probably on social media. And maybe you're the one posting on social media. We're certainly the one obsessing over social
media and you're thinking constantly, how do I use this better? How do I get more on this? How do I connect to more people? The word more just shows up a lot. More, more, more, more. And maybe at some point you wonder, is there a point to all of this? Well, Amelia has an interesting answer. I'm Amelia Fruby. I am the founder of Software Sounds Podcast Studio and the host of Off the Grid Podcast, which is a show about leaving social media without losing all or any
of your clients. And that is a very specific thing. How did you come to that? Yeah, so I came to it through personal experience. I put years into growing my platform as a micro-impile-ensor and I got a book deal and I was selling my book through my social media audience or to my social media audience. And in that process, I really burned myself out and realized that social media wasn't actually selling that many books or anything else anyway.
So through my process of having all of those realizations and then leaving social media and starting a business without it, I realized that this advice I'd been given that you need social media to be successful in business was just not true. And now I'm trying to help other entrepreneurs and small business owners have similar realizations. Although you know what else can burn you out in that story. I guess. Launching a book.
So here it is. Amelia is saying you can leave social media and not harm your business. This seems very counterintuitive. One of the first things that you're going to hear is if you have a brand, you got to get that brand on social media. You got to find your audience. You got to engage them. And Amelia is not saying don't engage people. She's just saying maybe just maybe social media is not actually the place to do it. Today on problem
solvers, we are digging into that. Why not? What happens when you leave social media? Can you leave social media and what else can you do instead? It's all coming up after the break. And the innovation economy change is constant. But some things remain the same. Like how Silicon Valley Bank is still the SVB you know and trust now backed by the strength and stability of first citizens bank. Or how SVB continues to be uniquely positioned to deliver specialized
lending and financial solutions for companies, founders and investors. Or that SVB remains fully committed to the innovation economy. Change is constant. But through it all, SVB is still the Silicon Valley Bank that can help your runways lead to lift off. Yes, SVB. Learn more at SVB.com slash solvers. All right, we're back talking with Amelia Fruby of the Off the Grid podcast about how to leave social media without hurting your business. And to start, I told Amelia that
I am not actually a social media hater. And I don't think this conversation should be limited to people who hate social media. The reason I was in particular interested in talking to you about it is that I personally do not believe in the narrative that there is some inherent bad to social media that it's very nature is somehow transforming people into monsters or grabbing our attention and ways that override our humanity or any of that.
I just don't believe it. But that is not to say that people can't have individual bad experiences with social media and develop individual bad habits. And for those people, it really is important to step back and pick apart what you have been doing. And I really love your approach to it because you're making this very specific point, which is a lot of people feel anchored to social media because they feel like it has some specific tangible
outcome for their business. And you are arguing quite counterintuitively that it doesn't. So let's start with this. Why doesn't it? Yeah. So I think that most entrepreneurs and small business owners overestimate how many clients or customers are finding them through social media or they seem to think that social media is a great audience growth tool. But I think that that has really diminished as we've seen the saturation of brands on social media over the past five years or even really
over the past three years. I think this space has evolved to become much more pay to play. And I think that there are people out there who are still succeeding at that game. And so we see those examples and we think, oh, well, if it's working for them, it will work for me. And I think that unless you're someone who has kind of bound to full time and money to invest into your social media growth, then it's probably not really working for you.
Or it might be working, but there are probably other marketing strategies that you could use that would take way less energy and way less time and get you similar, if not better results. And when you say you, can you define who you're mostly talking to here? Because obviously, if someone's running a company that has the budget to hire a social media team, well, then it's not exactly the individual founders problem anymore and isn't that wonderful.
So you're talking really to people who are in that phase of business where they're doing almost everything themselves, is that right? Yeah. So I'm really thinking about the boot strappers out there, the solar perniers out there, the people running businesses with tiny teams where we're always kind of stretching the amount of time we have to cover all of the things that
we need to get done. I agree. I am not talking to the VC backed founders who have a lot of money to put into this or whose kind of whole play is that we need to grow this on TikTok or we need this to really hit on Instagram. And when it does, we will get thousands and thousands of subscribers. Like I'm not really talking to those specific people. I'm thinking more of the founders and small business owners like myself and like some of the former influencers I work with where we don't have
that type of team or financial backing. So what should somebody, how does somebody start unpacking this? Because let us, let us imagine the first couple of questions that you usually get. Number one is, but people need to know I exist and you want to go where people are and people are on social media. What's the answer to that? The answer to that is a series of questions. Okay. My first question would be
who do you want to know you exist? Because I think that often people can flate like their personal community that they're connected to on social media with their ideal customer or client for their business, right? The people who I used to be connected with on social media were generally one or two degrees away from who I knew in real life. And I didn't need my cousins to know about my business. I needed other small business owners or other people who love whatever you might be
making to know about your business. That'd be my first question. It's like who do you need to know that you exist? And then I think my next question would be what type of relationship do you need with them? Because more and more, we are seeing that people go to social media, social media users go there for entertainment. They go there for fun. They go there maybe to learn about something, but I think they're going there less and less to learn particularly about services or businesses that
they're going to engage with. And so I would think about the type of relationship you're trying to form. Is it that sort of casual entertainment based relationship? Maybe if you run a product based business and you want them to see how cool and fun your product looks in the world, perhaps it's a great fit for you. But I think especially for service providers and for B2B businesses, that's not the type of relationship you're trying to build. So it's not a good place to
go to build relationships. That naturally is going to lead to well, then where do you go? But before we get there, ask you another thing that I bet comes up a lot, which is, but maybe there's just a different way to do social media because there is, I'm on it all the time and it stresses me out. There's also, I'm going to think of it as a box to check in a reasonable time frame. I will post every other day and I will otherwise not look at it. It is just a thing that happens. And if you
get into the habit of that, it can be pretty manageable. So I suppose maybe this is really a question that goes back to again, like who are we talking to? Are we talking to people who are specifically burned out on this or haven't figured out what strategy works for them and maybe no strategy works for them? Like somebody who's already feeling quite negative about this and it's draining energy from other places or do you think if someone is having a neutral to minorly agitating time
on social media, but it's not that difficult that you should just leave it be. Like are you arguing that people should get off of it or you are going that, hey, if you want to get off it, you can get off it. I'm arguing that you can get off of it. So I could certainly sit here and make claims on the basis of mental health or global politics that more of us should be getting off of social media. I've talked about on my podcast while leaving social media was a really values-based
decision for me and how getting off of it aligned with my values. So like certainly that claim is out there and we could make it, but I'm more invested in reminding business owners that they have agency over how they spend their time and over how they grow their business. And so if social media is working for you, I'm not telling you that you should get off of it. But if you're listening to this episode or you go listen to my podcast, it's probably because something with social media is
like not working for you. Maybe it is, like maybe it is creating a lot of angst. Maybe it is stressing you out. Maybe it's not getting the results that you want. And then I think we can often get caught in the sense of, well, I feel bad, but I have to be here. And so I'm trying to take us to the next step. Like, I feel bad and I can leave. That's where I want people to go. Okay, great,
cut it. Okay, so where are we leaving to? So we're leaving to all sorts of places. I think that social media has become this monolith such that marketing and social media marketing feels synonymous at this point in time. And one of the first things that I did when I left social media was I was in the process of leaving social media is I created a list of what 100 ways to share your work in life without social media. So literally we can go to any of those 100 places and be creative and
different with our marketing. So I'm not going to give you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's time for 100, but I'll take a few. Yeah, so I think there are some popular ones. One is definitely going to be an email newsletter. I still, I love email. I highly recommend it for most people leaving social media. I think podcasts or another popular marketing channel. I also think that an under looked and very valuable one is relationships and network marketing really being in better touch with the
people who are ideal clients or who are connectors to ideal clients in your community. I find that lots of people are using social media to avoid ever sending a sales email or a connection email. When in fact they get way more business just doing that. I think other things that you could be doing would be working in different types of online communities could be establishing your business through ads in your local community. There are lots of businesses who would be better served
thinking about proximity than trying to grow online. Who are the people who are around the coffee shop that you run? Who are the people that are around the store that you're opening? Who are the people that you can make a custom t-shirt for based in where you live and they would become new customers
rather than trying to reach people all over the world online? Those are just some ideas. In proposing all that, it's interesting because what you are not telling people to do is to stop producing content. In a way, social media is really just a place to produce content and the answer that you've offered is in part at least just produce content somewhere else. Why would a newsletter or a podcast, for example, be a better thing for someone who is turned out or just feeling they've hit a wall on
social? Yeah, so I think there are different reasons for each one. A newsletter would be a better option than social media because it's what we know as an owned channel. You actually have direct relationship with your audience rather than them being a series of feeds and profiles that you can't export and take anywhere else. So I think that's a clear advantage of a newsletter over social media. Podcasts are a little different because podcasts audiences are not people we know and can
just like export elsewhere. We often have no idea who's listening. Precisely. So I think that with a podcast, what I find is that it really helps people nurture existing relationships. And so when they do get leads, if you're in the business of cultivating leads, they're much warmer and they're much more likely to buy from you. So it's really good at that nurturing stage of marketing.
But I think that the other thing I really try to point people to in terms of making content specifically off social media is really focusing on the longevity of your content because often what really burns people out about social media is that the content is so fleeting and you have to make more and more and more of it. And I think that most other content we're making online can last
longer and be multi-purpose and multi-use for us. Because for example, you could write a newsletter, like somebody might hear that and say, but wait a second, a newsletter is just going into people's inboxes and most of them are going to delete it because of course the horrifying statistics are like if you have a 20 to 30% open rate, you're like doing pretty good. And yeah, of course you could take that content and put it somewhere else too. You could make a website. And then that content
lives as content on your website. And now you're following a good content marketing strategy. And you're going to SEO the hell out of that thing and maybe people will find you as they search. Is that what you're thinking? Like it's the more you're not just creating these like short forum, made for specific social platform content, the more you're able to think about the kind of stuff that you can repurpose in different ways and just maximize the amount of time that you've invested in
it. Yes, exactly. To use your example, if we're writing a newsletter, that's precisely what I would do with it. Or I think about it in terms of iterating on the content we've created. So I write a newsletter. It's where I kind of try out an idea. If I hear back from people and they're like, oh, this really resonated, then I can convert it into a blog post. And when I do that, I could think about search engine optimization. I can think about, okay, what would people be searching where I want
them to find this? And I tweak it so it actually suits that. And then on my website, I could build a sort of pillar page that includes all of the most helpful things I've created so that I get more associated with those things. And I could go on to, you know, if you wanted to take it onto YouTube, you could do that. If you wanted to move it to a podcast episode, you could do that. If you wanted to pitch it to people as something you can talk about on podcasts, you could do that.
You know, there's so many different places you can take it from there. But yeah, I'm always thinking about what are the ways that we can keep? It's not just saying the exact same thing over and over and over again. But how do we keep like deepening our ideas and helping them reach more people in the process? Yeah, I love that. And I do a version of that. I mean, I am active on social media. But my version of the thing that you're describing is that I pull back on the social media platforms
that I don't feel like are working for me. So I used to try to do everything. And I'm like, oh, I got to be on TikTok. I don't know how to be on TikTok. I'm not going to TikTok. So I am now, I post daily on LinkedIn and I post kind of whenever I feel like it on Instagram. And that's basically it. And then I glance at Twitter, but it's inseparable. And so I don't stay very long. And I don't look at TikTok at all. And that works for me because I'm making the decision that
I don't need to be everywhere. But I'm going to be where my audience is and where I feel like I most naturally produce content. And I have this channel, this flow that isn't always the same, but a version of it could go like this. I could write something on LinkedIn. And it does well. And then maybe I post it on Instagram and it does well too. And then I make it a newsletter. And then I take that same idea and I write a column in the magazine about it. And then I take that
same idea and it becomes a segment of my keynote talk. And then maybe it becomes a chapter of a book. And it can flow and flow and flow. And in doing that, I am maximizing my efforts. And also really in doing that, I'm also refining the idea. I feel like by the time it gets to the bigger stages, it's a better idea. I've some more time with it. I've tested it against the real world. It's more
impactful. Yeah, exactly. And I think that in this era where we're all creating so much content, we have to spend more time working on that impact piece because people are overwhelmed by content. It's why they're only, it's why our emails only have 25% open rate, but that's good, right? It's why on Instagram, well, it's part of the reason on social media, our reach is so low comparative to our follower size. And I just think that while that can often feel overwhelming,
a lot of people hear that and they're like, I guess I can't make any content. No one will ever see it. But I think actually if you're really making impactful, if you're really saying impactful things, it will resonate with people and it will find an audience. But that takes time and it takes that
refinement process that you're talking about. Yeah, that's right. And you could just think of the starting point of however you're producing that content, whether you are still on social in some narrower way or you skip it entirely and you just go straight to newsletter or podcast or whatever. If you just think of the first part of it as the testing ground, then what you're putting
out in the world feels a little different. It reminds me of I once I got a drink with Gary Vee and I asked him how he like what's his process for coming up with ideas that he puts out into the world. And for him, back then at least, I don't know if he's changed it, but this was a couple years ago, he told me that he uses Twitter as a sounding board. Like whenever he has a quick idea, he tweets it.
And what he's really doing is just looking to see if people respond to it. And he knows that not everyone's going to like everything that he posts, but he has a good record now of the things that people like and that they don't. And the ones that seem to get more of a response graduate into other forms and become kind of bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And so if you had the expectation that everything that you post on Twitter blows up, then you're going to be sorely
disappointed. But if you see it as basically an experimentation zone where you just throw things out there, then the stakes are lower and maybe you feel freer or again, you just skip that and just go to the newsletter where again, not every newsletter is going to hit. And that's okay because the ones that do just told you a lot about how to communicate with your audience. Yeah, exactly. And I also think that for business owners, often for me at this point, like my paid membership
is where I get the best feedback on my ideas, right? And so I've kind of learned I can actually flip this model. Whereas instead of just giving all my ideas on the internet for free, they go to my inner circle first. And then they go out in a different form if they kind of pass that test. So I feel like I said, what inverted this to really try to create a different type of testing ground
for myself and for my business. And I think that gets into something else that I just see so many business owners fall into, which is trying to be an influencer instead of a business owner. And there's nothing wrong with being an influencer. I want to clear like there's nothing wrong with being an influencer. But I think that what influencer for influencers, your metrics are all about your reach. And for business owners, we have these important revenue and profitability
metrics that we need to keep in mind. And we can get really distracted by focusing on reach instead. And I think that leads a lot of business owners down this path of doing lots of like free knowledge work on the internet, when in fact, that could be really focused on offerings or product development in their business. That's a great point because when you post on social, the metrics by which you are measured are metrics that really feel most relevant to influencers.
Exactly. And that makes you feel like you have to play a game that you were not exactly suited to play. Yeah, precisely. I mean, in that shows in the way that unless you are selling your products through the platform's specific shopping channels, you actually get no information about if anyone bought something from you like through your social media platforms, right? So precisely, the metrics that we're given are about doing the best on that particular app, which is very
different than doing the best in your business. I want to get to a few more of your suggestions. But before I do that, loop back to just one other thing that you had said earlier, which was when you were making the case for why a newsletter can be more valuable than social. And that's because you own that channel and you own the relationship. You can contact those people directly. And you also know if they engaged in your stuff. And that reminded me of a conversation that I've been having
with a friend who is not here with us on this conversation. But I'm going to call her out. And she's going to just be okay with it, which is my friend Lauren, who runs small bagel company called Cloud9 Bagels in Central Massachusetts. Shout out anybody who wants bagels and central Massachusetts. Cloud9 Bagel, you can go to Instagram.com slash cloud nine underscore bagels. And that is where Lauren communicates with her bagel lovers. And I keep telling her that's fine. But the problem is
that you have no idea if you're really reaching everybody. The algorithm is going to stand in the way if you're reaching your full audience. You're sort of at the mercy of whether or not the people who want your bagels happen to be looking at Instagram that day. And you really need to get all their email addresses because even if you don't want to leave Instagram, and I don't think that she has any desire to leave Instagram. But like it can't be your sole channel because it's actually a very
scattered way to reach people. So Lauren, you're listening. Get the email addresses. Would you agree, Amelia? Yeah, I think so. Something I've seen really work for people in that instance or for people with shops like a bagel shop or there's a bakery in my area that does this really well. Shout out to Butterfly bakery Lincoln Nebraska. Would be I think the biggest barrier between a cafe or restaurant owner and sending emails is it's like way easier to snap a photo and put it on Instagram.
Then it feels to actually write a consistent email newsletter. But what I love to see is that you're seeing payment processors like square actually make it really easy to set up rewards system with your customers and do a lot of SMS marketing that I think is really effective. And I can tell you that I have gone to Butterfly bakery so many days because I got a text from them in the morning that reminded me like, Oh, I actually do want to stop by and pick up a cookie this afternoon.
And so I think there are ways. If the block is that email is a whole other thing to learn and it takes more time, there are ways that it doesn't have to be that hard like their other creative marketing ways, creative marketing strategies where you own the relationship with your audience and it can integrate with other things that you're doing like handling payments. Unpack the SMS thing for a second. I don't think people know that that exists. Do you know
of some good tools or do you have any idea what that bakery uses? Yeah, yeah. So for anyone who's totally new to this, SMS marketing is just marketing through text messages. And so you can get your customers or clients phone numbers and automate sending them messages. I know that I believe the bakery has implemented this through square, which is what they're using to process payments. So when I go check out, I put in my they ask for my phone number. I put in my credit card and I get rewards
based on how much I spend there. And then I get text messages from the bakery about redeeming my rewards, about events they have coming up, about discounts. They're offering that particular day. It is coming straight to my phone through my texts. I don't see an email. I'm not like they're not writing an email. I'm not seeing an email. It's all happening over text message. And for them, it's integrated right into when I pay, I give my phone number and then it all comes from there.
So I think that that could be a really great way for people with like brick and mortars to grow. I think people might be worried about SMS because it would feel too invasive. The email you expect to get marketing by email, social media is all the brands talking to each other anyway. SMS is primarily either your friends or very annoying spam. This is neither. This is not a spam because it's a valued brand that you are buying from. What's not a friend?
How would you suggest that maybe somebody like Lauren who is not doing this would think about it, would think about how to reach her customers in a way that's going to be welcome? First of all, I would say that we're seeing major brands, big brands go to SMS all the time. So we're definitely starting to get that. Instead of get 10% off by giving your email, it's get 10% off by giving us your phone number. So I really see that shift happening at a much higher
level. And I think that each person relates to their text message inbox differently. I would say that I have noticed that kind of myself as like an elder millennial are like my friends are more like the Gen X fear. We feel like our text messages with these like intimate places we are with our friends. Whereas when I talk to my clients who are like Gen Z, they're like their text messages. That's not it for them. It's just like we're everything lands. So I think there's a real shift in the
perception of what a text what the role of a text message is. But what I would say for somebody like Lauren that I love to see is do you like just experiment? How fun would it be if you started sending a bagel a day to people like our people into that? Is that too much? Are they not interested? You could set it up as a one-time experiment. Like give me your phone number and I'll send you a bagel a day for 30 days. I don't know. Not like a literal bagel, a picture of a bagel.
Yeah, that's good to say. Don't give away bagels. That's not what I mean. But so that would be like a fun creative different sort of thing. Or if you're really worried about I don't want to overwhelm people maybe you start something like Bagel Friday. It's an every Friday you send out this text that's like come get the bagels. We've got this this and this this day. Or maybe it's like bagel Sundays. You could use it to bring people in on a day when you have the
most options or to bring people in on a day when you do the least business. So maybe nobody's buying bagels on Tuesdays. So you use your SMS platform to launch a creative bagel Tuesday strategy. Or you just use it to send out discounts every once in a while and you see how it works with a sort of like ad hoc approach here or there. I think you can decide if you want to bring a real like content strategy focus or if you're just interested in seeing how it can like augment sales
every once in a while. So we've talked about some other content ideas and some other direct engagement ideas. Give us one or two more things that people can do once they cut the cord to social. Yeah. So the biggest one that I've already said but I will say it again because I say it all the time is relationship marketing. What I mean by this is really tending to your network. And this is where I really refer to Michelle Warner's work on growing your network. She's built a
system for network marketing by sending an email every day of the week. A different type of email every day of the week and consistently not only growing your network but staying in touch with your network over time. And I think that most business owners underestimate the power of the network. Unless you have a great network and then you're like, oh my network has given me everything it's so great. But most of us who feel that way maybe can't reverse engineer how we built it. And
that's where the Michelle's work is really great. So definitely network marketing. I would say if you're a service provider, particularly a B2B service provider, your network's going to be your clients. But even if you want a different type of business, your network might be a referral network, it might be a network of peers that you need to like know how to grow or how to do certain things or different types of networks depending on what you need. I'm trying to think of another example.
And I think on the whole what I want to encourage people to do is surprise and delight more. People are so accustomed to brands posting on social media. I think it's pretty hard to be consistently surprising or delightful there. So try different things. I love and believe in the power of the postcard. I send postcards to all my clients multiple times a year. When I launch a new offering, the founding members or first 10 clients or customers or whatever are always going to get
mail from me. So I love sending mail. You can also send. There's so many great services out there to send gifts that your clients can choose. There are ways that you can add, you know, you can add a playlist to something. There's just so many fun ways to be a little different and to differentiate yourself through what you love and what brings you joy. And I think that business owners often approach marketing is like a drag. And we need to flip that and approach it through the lens of play
and creativity and pleasure. And that's actually what's going to attract people to our business, no matter what kind of business we run. Amelia, final thing, which is we mostly talked about social media, replacing social media in the context of reaching your audience. And your network marketing goes a little to answer this, but I just wanted to have us spend a moment on it more specifically, which is discovery. The dream of social media is that you post something, it just has
this exponential reach. It just reaches people who you never could have. It has a life of its own. And that mostly of course doesn't happen. It happens to some people or in some moments and it's uncontrollable. And sometimes it happens and you're not even happy it happened. But the ability when it works of social media to make you discoverable, to put you in front of just the concentric circles outward of people from feels to many people, I think a little unparalleled. How can we find
that? Where hell is going to replicate that? How else we find something in this world where we take some action and it just reaches a lot of people? Yeah, so I could say from personal experience as someone who's not on social media and has now had pieces episodes of my podcast or other things I've created, reached thousands and thousands of people that, finally enough, it kind of happens
in the same way it does on social media. You're just not on social, which is that somebody who has a lot of influence or a big following, finds your work, finds it really compelling and shares it with their community. And for me, that's been happening through newsletters. So I've seen a huge spikes in podcast growth when creators that I admire and often have followed for years, find something that I'm doing and it really resonates and they share it with their community.
And that's how I'm now getting in front of tens of thousands of people is through discovery on these other media, or in these other media platforms or these mediums. And it still is content creation like you pointed to before like I'm still making content and that's what's getting discovered. And I think that for me, this is where I would point business owners back toward
how much reach do you really want or need to be successful? And if you are needing or wanting to grow a platform of thousands and thousands of people, then I still think that content marketing in different areas is really helpful for that. But I also think that many business owners overestimate how many people they actually need to pay attention to them to have a very successful business. And so that may not be the right question for you in the long run. It just depends on
your goals. Amelia, this has been so helpful. The answer is not going to be social media. So what is the answer to if people want to learn more from you? How do they get in touch? Yeah. So if you want to hang out with me more, you can go to my website. You'll find me at off the grid dot fun, which is where my podcast lives and my membership community lives. You could also find my podcast studio at softersounds.studio and my personal work at Amelia Ruby.com. Awesome. Thanks, Miele. Thanks, Jason.
And that's our episode. I would love to hear what you think and maybe even about a problem that you solved. You can find me at my website, Jason Fyfer dot com J a S o n f e i f e r dot com. Also, I have some more useful stuff for you. I write a newsletter about how to future proof yourself and become more adaptable and optimistic. I would love for you to sign up. It is at jasonfifer.bulletin.com.
Also, check out my other podcast. It's called Build for Tomorrow. In each episode, I take on some belief that we have that holds us back from progress and show you why it is not as bad as you think. Problem solvers is a production of entrepreneur media and comes out every Monday morning. So make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss an episode. Thanks to Deepa Shaw for production. My name is Jason Fyfer. See you next week.