In this episode of Sequence Over Strategy, Michelle Warner shares how to transform social media into a powerful tool for building relationships that generate high-quality leads.
Are you tired of social media feeling like a numbers game? In this episode of Sequence Over Strategy, Michelle Warner shares how to transform social media into a powerful tool for building relationships that generate high-quality leads. She discusses why service-based businesses should shift from traditional traffic marketing to a more intentional, connection-driven approach. Michelle offers practical tips on creating authentic content that not only attracts the right clients but also establishes trust and builds lasting business relationships.
Check out the full episode at TheMichelleWarner.com
Hi, I'm Michelle Warner and I'm a business designer and strategist. In the 15 years I've done this work, I've noticed the same trend everywhere. Business owners are falling into the trap of centering strategies first, and what they need to be centering is sequence, because the reality is the steps you take in your business and the order in which you take them is more important than how well you implement any single strategy. So on this show, my goal is to fix that by helping you find and trust your own sequence of actions rather than blindly following someone else's strategy. Welcome to Sequence Over Strategy.
And in every episode of this show, I answer a real question from a real entrepreneur who's struggling with a real challenge in their business. Today's question is a favorite because it highlights how, when you think sequence first, you can find different ways to use different strategies and, even better, find reasons why some strategies work for some and not for others, and maybe even open your mind to how you can think about some much-loved and much-maligned tools differently.
What am I talking about? Friends, I'm talking about social media, that big elephant in the room that we are all struggling with. We are going there today with the seemingly simple but oh-so-complex question. And that question is, You say you don't use social media like most people do, but that you do use it. What are some ways that you're using social media?
And that question was directed at me, so they're asking me how do I use social media. Thank you so much for submitting this question, because it's a topic I love, and if you, like me, are not interested in playing the traditional social media game, listen in. Because if you've ever looked at my social profiles, you might be surprised to learn I actually use social media quite a bit. But you will rarely, if ever, see me actually posting publicly on it. And that's unless you're following me on Instagram, and you want cute pictures of my dog in Lake Michigan in your stories. In that case, I have your back all day long.
But you're not going to see really anything else from me on social media. Why is that, and how can I claim that I use social media a lot for business, and yet you never see anything publicly? Well, as always, we're going to start with the foundation, with the right sequence, before I share the ways that I use social media, and before I make any recommendations for you. Because if I were to just start with recommendations, well, then we would be starting with strategy. And you know that here, we start with sequence. And listen, part of the reason we do that is because 95% of the world hears the words, you should market on social media, and immediately starts thinking about what they should post on social media. Again, this is starting at the end. The last thing you should be taking action on, whatever strategy you're implementing, there's a whole list of things you should be doing first. So the last thing you should be doing is taking the action.
First thing you should be doing is going through a sequence of questions and decisions that we're going to be talking about in this episode. So stay tuned. If you are like the rest of us, and you just like to jump right into strategy, this episode is going to be for you. Because not only are we going to think about social media in a completely different way, but I'm going to show you how to think about any strategy in a completely different way and back up before you start implementing. And yes, maybe that's boring to not get right into strategy. But stick with me on this. Because if you think this through in the correct order, it can literally take you less than 30 minutes to do that. And you will save yourself sometimes years of posting on social media with no return. So we're going to go through this thing in order.
Okay, you've been confronted with a 2024 truth, and that is that you should be using social media to market. I don't even disagree with that. I may say that I don't use it publicly all that much, but I do use social media. So I don't disagree that you should be using social media to market yourself. In fact, I laugh about my own lack of using it. But again, truth is, I'm going to be there a little bit more. And I stress a little bit more. Publicly, you're going to see me on at least one more channel in the coming year. So stay tuned for that. But not only am I using it in ways you can't see right now, but I'm going to start using it a little bit more publicly because it is a good tool. But it's only a good tool if you're thinking through it in the right order first. So despite the fact that it's been years since my last public post on most platforms, I actually went back and looked this up just for this episode.
My last grid post on Instagram was on August 26th of 2021. Like I keep saying, I do actually use those platforms. LinkedIn, I probably posted on publicly a little bit more recently because I'll repost some things on there when folks tag me. But it's probably only two or three posts the entire year. However, I am active most days on those platforms. And it's not an endless doom scrolling kind of way. But it is an intentional business building kind of way. I mean, don't get me wrong, right before bed, sometimes there's going to be some doom scrolling. But most of the time, I'm using it in productive ways during the business day.
So again, how did I get there? Let's walk through my sequence of figuring out how I would use social media. First, who has heard of the concept of jobs to be done? It's a fantastic business book. I recommend it if you haven't read it before. And it's very sequence over strategy in its vibe. And what it is doing is it is reminding us that everything in your business should have a specific job that it is doing. And friends, if I have taught you anything on this podcast and in following me, it should be that marketing is not a job in itself. Because repeat after me, I know you have heard this before. And you've definitely heard it from me. You want to break your marketing into specific steps. You don't just want to say this is a marketing thing that I do.
You want to be really intentional about what marketing job, what is the marketing stage, what is the marketing step that you are focused on. In my world, I break marketing into three steps. Step one, awareness. People have to be aware that you exist. Step two, engagement. This is kind of when they know, like, and trust you. And there's a lot of different things that we do in engagement to make that happen. And then three, sales. They need to buy something for you.
So doing this, breaking it into these three simple steps, helps me identify how I'm going to move people through that process of first discovering me, then getting to know me, all the way through purchasing something from me. And different strategies fit in those different stages. There are different jobs to be done in each of those stages. So before I just say I'm going to market on social media, I need to look at my overall flow of what jobs I need done in each of these stages and determine what job I want social media to do. I'm going to repeat that. We have to understand before we just start marketing on social media, we have to understand what job is it going to do because the answer should be different for many of you.
So let me walk you through how I've thought about this and what it means for how I use these channels. As you know, I primarily use something I call relationship marketing. And what do we know about relationship marketing? And by the way, if you're not familiar with relationship marketing, head back into past episodes. I've talked about it quite a bit, and it's a really important concept to understand. Well, one thing we know about relationship marketing is that that first stage, that awareness stage, should not happen on any of my own platforms.
When I am thinking about how I am going to market and I am thinking about that awareness stage, I am not thinking about anybody finding me on a platform that I am publishing from. Instead, I want people to become aware of me, again, not by running into my material on their social feed or anywhere else, but by meeting me when I come to visit them in some place that they are already hanging out. I'm going to repeat that.
When I'm relationship marketing, the way I want folks to meet me is not by them coming to where I am, but instead, I want to go to where they already are. So I want to come teach them something as a guest teacher in a space where they're already learning things. I want to come speak in an event they're already attending.
I want to appear on a podcast they've been listening to for years. That's how I want people to meet me, and that is specifically because I'm relationship marketing. Traffic marketing is different, but for those of you who are doing relationship marketing, the jobs you want done in that awareness stage are likely jobs that will get you off of your platform and out into the world, meeting your folks where they're already hanging out. Therefore, it makes no sense for me to invest loads of time and effort into having some sort of algorithm-friendly social channel that is designed for people to discover me. Because what do those social channels do? What is their job? Their job is to help people discover you, right? To make people aware of you. And I don't actually want my social channels to do that job.
There are other strategies that are doing that job for me that I just described to you. But what do I want my social channels to do? I want them to do a couple of things. Number one, I want them to work for me in a pre-awareness stage by helping me build relationships with people who might invite me to appear in front of their audiences. So I just told you that in awareness, what I want to do is go out and talk to people where they are already gathered. What's a way to do that?
Well, the best way to do that is to have relationships with people who, quote-unquote, own those audiences, who are gatekeepers to those audiences, who can invite me there. This is everything that networking that pays is about, right? And so I want my social media to do a job there. I want it to do a pre-awareness job of helping me build and maintain my network so that I can find opportunities to get in front of the right audiences. That is job number one of my social media. Job number two of my social media comes right after awareness in that engagement stage because I want it to be able to invite people who have already met me elsewhere to do other things with me.
That's a little awkward, but that engagement stage where now I want people to know, like, and trust me, I can use social media to help me accomplish that by making sure people know of opportunities there are in order to come interact with me so that we can work through that engagement stage together. So when I'm talking about the jobs I want social media to do, I am thinking right before awareness and right after awareness. And when those are the jobs I need done, there are actually way better ways to use social media than to maintain an active feed because the active feed is designed to do that awareness job, and I don't want it to do that job. So when I need it to do the step right before and the step right after, I'm going to use it differently. So what does that look like?
Well, for the first job, I want it to do of meeting people. Like I said, that's a pre-awareness step. I want to meet people who should be in my intentionally designed network so that they can introduce me to folks who might be able to invite me in front of their audiences. I need that network full of people willing to collaborate with me. So for this, I tend to lean on mutual connections and introductions, and one great place for that to happen is actually social media. I receive a lot of tags and direct messages from other friends and colleagues who are introducing me to people I should know. And even if that intro happens on a tag on a public post that's relatively common, I will get a tag that says, hey, Michelle, hey, you know, Sally, whoever they're introducing us, check out this, you know, you should know each other. And so I'll get that tag on a public post, but then I take that conversation and write to direct message. Because this is a simple case of this being the most convenient way to meet someone, the most convenient way of somebody else introducing us, but that doesn't mean that that translates into public activity on a feed. That just means that's an introduction that we can take to direct message and see if we can build that into some sort of awareness event that looks different than on social media.
I also talk a lot in Networking That Pays about using this as a thank you note to reach out to folks, and I do that as well. This is a great way to reach out to somebody that I don't have a mutual connection with, but I want to meet. I can send a thank you note through social media and start a relationship that way.
So that is one way that I use social media is to accept connections that are coming in and to proactively go make connections, again, 90% of the time, using the direct message functions. So of course you never see that activity, but it doesn't mean that a connection I make on social media is any less important. In fact, I've made some very, very critical connections on social media for my business, but you would never see those publicly because the job I'm giving to the platform is to help facilitate one-to-one introductions, not to be a big public feed that is attracting a bunch of people to come find me.
And then the second way I use social media is to invite people who have met me elsewhere to do other things with me. This is an engagement job. After you have become aware of me, I want you to come hang out and interact with me because I don't expect social media to convert anybody for me into a sale. I don't expect it to be a place where people learn to know and trust me, but I do love the idea of it directing traffic for me and reminding people who have met me that there are great ways to continue to interact with me. So I use social media to tell them about those things. And honestly, this is where I've been dropping the ball.
And when I tease that you're going to see a little bit more social media activity from me in the coming years, it's going to be to facilitate this engagement job that I want to do a better job of on social media. Because once people know me and are following me, I can use that feed, you know, again, not to try and meet new people, but to make sure that the people who do know me know about opportunities for us to spend time together. Like reminding them about my monthly roundtables that happen and that are totally free.
I can use social media to remind folks of that. Come to this event, come interact with me, right? In that case, I'm not asking social media to convince the person of anything of my worth. I'm just inviting them to come to an event where I know I can interact with them and we can spend some time together. Or I can do a better job of using it to let people know there are new podcast episodes out. I can make sure people know where to go.
That's a great job for social media for me, is to let people know what else is happening and where they can meet me and where they can come to real engagement events that I know will do the actual conversion and the actual convincing jobs that I need done during engagement. I don't expect social media to do that, but I would love social media's help in directing folks to those events. And then finally, in the same vein, I use it to stay in touch with people. So another engagement job that social media does for me is very similar to those connections I was talking about, is it allows me to stay in touch with people. And to me, that's also an engagement event, an engagement job. So I spend a lot of time in the direct messages of LinkedIn and Instagram right now that changes over time depending on where people are hanging out. But I spend a lot of time in there just catching up with folks and making sure that connections and relationships are staying stable, checking in on them, seeing how things are going. And again, none of that is public, but it would be something that would be really difficult for me to do just via email or just via text because I'm probably not connected to everybody in that way. So social media is then a great way to do it.
It's a great facilitator of something that would be difficult for me to figure out how to do otherwise, but it's not on a public feed. So all in all, my social media activity or lack thereof is a result of it doing engagement and awareness jobs for me. It does not do traditional awareness jobs for me. It does not do sales jobs. And therefore, my use of it is going to look silent because everything's happening in the DMs or the vast majority of it right now is happening in DMs. And so the activity that you see is very light compared to someone who is using it to do a traffic-based awareness job. Because again, I am using it for an awareness job in a pre-awareness way where I'm meeting people who can facilitate awareness things for me. And then I'm using it for engagement stuff. And none of that looks anything like somebody who is using social media for this big traffic-based awareness job of having to expose yourself to tons and tons of people and try to build an audience that is appropriate for a traffic-based business. So bottom line here is we sum things up.
This is a made-up number, but I'm just going to be dramatic and make it up. 98% or even more of the social media strategies and tips that you see out there are designed to do a traffic marketing awareness job. A.K.A. they are meant to help the masses become aware of you. And that is a massive, difficult job to do. That is no easy feat to run one of these really algorithm-driven social channels that is attracting tons and tons and tons of people. That is a really, really tough job. It's also, by the way, completely correct if you are running a high-volume traffic business. That is the appropriate way to think about your awareness. However, most of you are not running a high-volume traffic business.
Most of you listening to this are running a low-volume service-based business of some kind. So there is absolutely no reason for you to be putting in the time and investment that it takes to do a traffic marketing awareness job when your social media should be doing a different job for you. And especially in a world where it takes so much effort to do that kind of traffic marketing awareness job. That's just content upon content upon content. So that, my friends, to bring it all the way back to the original question, is number one, another way to use social media. I've just described to you how I use social media.
And two, the correct way to think through how you're going to use this social media. Because when you think it through in the correct sequence by asking what job you want it to do, you don't actually have to come up with these clever, unique ways of using social media because you will realize, or most of you will realize, that there's no point in trying to use it as an awareness channel. And in fact, doing so is going to exhaust all of your resources really, really quickly. Instead, you'll just see clear as day how you should be using it, and the rest is going to take care of itself because when you define what job it's doing, now you don't have to come up with clear gimmicks. You just see, like, oh, I need it to do this job. So there's this very straightforward way to do it.
The reason we feel like we have to come up with different ways to use social media and gimmicks and something that's clever is because you're playing the wrong game. You're playing this traffic-based awareness game where you feel like you have to get all this attention and that spirals you into endless content creation and you're not getting any return on it, so you assume you're not clever enough, you're not good enough, so you start coming up with better ideas or you're trying to be creative about it. When in reality, the answer is, stop trying to be creative, stop trying to get the attention there, and instead get clear on what jobs your social media is doing for you, and when you're clear on what jobs your social media is doing for you, when you take that first correct step in the sequence and figure that out first, then there are going to be some really straightforward strategies.
And listen, this takes a little bit of guts to be confident in doing because all the marketing material out there that talks about social media is going to assume that you are using it for traffic-based awareness strategies because most of us aren't thinking about the nuance in marketing enough to break it out in the way that I do. Most people are just teaching marketing strategies. They're not first saying, hey, are you relationship marketing or are you traffic marketing? And hey, cool, if you're relationship marketing, what are you doing for awareness? What are you doing for engagement? What are you doing for sales? Instead, they're just saying, let me teach you how to use LinkedIn, and everybody assumes you need a lot of views, and so everybody assumes they just teach you these traffic-based awareness strategies. And those strategies are only appropriate for one segment of business models out there. And again, the vast majority of you who are running service-based businesses, it's just not necessary.
So when I get these questions about what are clever ways to use social media and can you tell us other ways to use it, my answer is what jobs do you want it to do? That's the first question. What jobs is it doing?
And then let's slot in some very standard, very straightforward strategies instead of trying to get more and more clever, more and more gimmicky, to try to win some game we don't need to win. Ask the right question first, and the simple strategies will slide right in there. With that, good luck. I would love to hear who's redefining their social media strategy, who is rethinking what jobs you're gonna give it, in what order. I would absolutely love to hear that. So if you ever wanna drop me a note, please come tell me.
Message me on LinkedIn. Tell me what you are doing to kind of redefine the jobs that you are asking your stuff to do on social media and what ahas you had for this episode. And as always, thank you for being here.
If you haven't already done it, please subscribe or even rate the show wherever you're listening because it makes a huge difference in others being able to find it. And speaking of finding people, you can always find me at themichellewarner.com where you will see the opportunity to come join us for one of my monthly roundtables. And I would absolutely love to see you there. They happen the first Wednesday of every month. And in the meantime, I will see you back here in two weeks.