In this episode, Michelle breaks down why most business owners use social media completely out of sequence and how to fix it.
Tired of shouting into the void on social media? In this episode, Michelle breaks down why most business owners use social media completely out of sequence and how to fix it. She shares a refreshing take on using these platforms not as traffic machines, but as tools for genuine connection. By shifting from “strategy first” to “sequence first,” you’ll discover how social media can actually support your relationships and make marketing feel a whole lot easier.
Resources
Check out the full episode at TheMichelleWarner.com
Hi, my name is Michelle Warner and I'm a business designer and strategist. And in the 15 plus years I've done this work, I've noticed the same trend everywhere. Business owners are falling into a trap of centering strategies first, when they need to be centering 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.
Rethinking Social Media Through a Sequence Lens
Today, my friends, we are going to be talking about social media. You might be surprised to hear that because it's something I don't talk about all that much unless it's to talk about how I don't use social media. Because it's really the opposite of relationship marking in a lot of things that I talk about.
Often as social is what we think of when we think of traffic marketing. And I know that I often use it as an example. And people who work with me are often trying to get away from social media.
And I understand that. But I'm also often asked about the role social media could and should play in relationship marketing. And that's what we're going to talk about today.
Well, first, it's an interesting question. And the answer is definitely found within a Sequence Over Strategy frame. Because there are ways you can use social media.
There are ways I use social media. But they're very, very different than if you were to just say, should I use social media? Your perception of what you're saying when you say should I use social media is completely different than how I think about social media within a relationship marketing frame.
So, let's get into it. When you are talking about something like social media, and by you, I mean you, me, pretty much the entire world, you are typically talking about a traffic-based social media plan, right? You are likely talking about posting content on your channel in the hope that someone is going to notice it organically and grow to know, like, and trust you and maybe even work with you.
And in the way I talk about marketing within my frameworks that we talk about on this show, this means that you are thinking of social media as an awareness strategy, meaning it's how you want people to actually meet you. You're hoping that they will come across your profile, either via an algorithm that decides it's going to show it to them, or maybe somebody who's already following you shares it on their profile, and people come across it that way. This is normal that you would be thinking about social media in this way, and again, when we think about, oh, should I do social media marketing, this is likely where your brain is going to go to, because it's how 99% of the world thinks about social media, right?
The Real Role of Social Media in Relationship Marketing
Social media is a content machine, and your job as a marketer is to put content out there in order to get your point of view out there so that people can somehow magically find you. But you're not going to be shocked to hear me say this, right? Thinking about social media in this way is thinking about it as a strategy first, and forgetting to think about the sequence of it.
And when you think about the sequence of it, you will realize that you shouldn't leap straight to that strategy because doing so means you're going to miss important questions. And this is always the case in sequence over strategy questions, right? When we get into sequence over strategy, 9 times out of 10, it's that you're missing some foundational questions first, and you're just leaping to what on the surface looks like a very logical conclusion because it's how everybody else thinks about this.
I'm not criticizing you. If you think, hey, social media marketing, that immediately means, you know, getting out my pen, making up a content plan, and then off I go posting a bunch of stuff. That's a very normal response.
And that's why I have an entire show called Sequence Over Strategy, because we forget to ask the questions before that. So what are some of the questions that we're forgetting to ask when your brain just immediately goes to social media as a content strategy, and in my speak, as an awareness strategy, as a way for people to get to meet you? Questions that we're missing are questions like, what job do I want social media to do?
Or even better, how do I want to be meeting people? And how do I want to be building a relationship with them once I have met them? What jobs do I need to be doing during those things in order to accomplish my goals, right?
This gets to a very classic business jobs-to-be-done framework. And when we ask those questions, that's when we start finding some really interesting roles for social media within a relationship marketing system and framework. Rules and jobs that don't look anything like what we typically think of for social media.
And answers and options that'll pop up because, again, we're asking the right questions in the right order. And even if you are then a person who is saying to me, I don't want anything to do with social media, I'm burned out on it. I mean, yeah, I'm raising my hand with you.
You can still find really interesting and effective ways to use social media that don't look like anything that you're burned out on. So let's run through this, right? What does it look like if you're starting with the question of what jobs should my social media be doing?
Using Social Media as a Relationship Tool, Not a Traffic Machine
Instead of just saying, gosh, I guess I'll start writing a bunch of content because I should really be doing social media. And we're going to start by remembering that in relationship marketing, we think in terms of the three stages, awareness, engagement, sales, right? First, people need to get to know who you are.
That's awareness. Then in engagement, that's where some of the knowing and liking and trusting happens. And then sales is when they buy something from you.
And we know in relationship marketing what we want awareness to look like. And as a refresher for anyone who may not know this, in relationship marketing for a gazillion different reasons that are covered on other episodes of this show, we do not want people meeting you on your own platform. That may sound surprising if this is the first time you're hearing of this concept, but in relationship marketing, we want you getting off of your platforms.
So get off your newsletter, get off your social media, get off of your platforms and go insert yourself into a place where your likely audience, your preferred audience has already gathered because you want to build a relationship with them. And so you do not want to wait for them to come find you. You want to go insert yourself into a place they already are so that you can introduce yourself.
And so right there we see a huge difference, right? In relationship marketing, we, meaning I, don't want social media to play the awareness game. I do not want you posting all day long on social media hoping that somebody is going to see you and decide they like you and reach out and ask to hire you.
That's just not realistic in terms of how social media works and that is what leads to social media burnout because you are posting all day long thinking that this is going to lead to something and it tends to lead nowhere, right? And that again, this is the default job of social media. When we say we're going to social media, we're going to do social media, we mean we're going to start posting content.
So right here at this awareness stage, we see a really stark difference in the jobs we're asking social media to do. And I want to be really clear about that because it's a big deal. Normal social media, by normal I mean how 99% of the world thinks about it, is for awareness.
How Michelle Uses Social Media in Practice
They are thinking about using social media in their business as an awareness strategy. In relationship marketing, you are not. You are saying, hey, I already have that covered.
If I'm thinking about my awareness strategies, those are covered by me going to places where people already are and inserting myself in the conversation that's already happening, right? So we don't need social media to do an awareness job. We've got it covered.
So then we can move on to engagement, the second stage of marketing within a relationship marketing framework. And we can say, what is the goal for engagement? And the goal for engagement is helping people to trust the information that they learn from you during awareness.
It's to help them process it. It's to help them, I always say, like help their nervous systems catch up with this information, right? Kind of trust in moving forward.
And usually here the main strategies that I talk about a lot are having an auditor, a diagnostic, or having some sort of community event, places where you gather people to come have conversation, right? Those are the main strategies that generally we want to be having. But there are other jobs that need to happen during engagement.
You need to stay connected with people. You need to invite people to things. If you're hosting community events or you want them to do a diagnostic with you, you need to invite them and ask them to do that in some way.
And you also want to do something as simple as reminding people that you exist. I call this, you know, putting out signs of life. And if we think about those jobs, those jobs, well, they can be done really well by social media, right?
If you need to stay connected with people, a lot of times people are on their social media all day long. So instead of emailing them, it can be way more effective to DM them within a social media platform, right? If you are on LinkedIn, you can send them a message.
And that's a way to stay connected that they may see or may be easier for them to respond to than over email. If you need to invite people to things, well, then you can have invited them to connect with you on social media. When you met them during awareness, at the end of awareness, you can invite them to connect with you on social media.
And so now that you're connected, you can, again, you can invite them to things. And if that's a larger thing, if that's a big community event that you're putting on, you might post that in your feed. If it is something that is smaller, again, you might be direct messaging them to invite them.
Either way, though, it is playing a different role. Even if you're posting on your wall or on your feed, whatever we want to call it, you're not doing it hoping that people will find that and meet you in that way. You're doing it knowing that people you have already met are following you and therefore you are just trying to get the word out in as many ways as you can so that they will see it.
So those are different jobs to be done. And the same thing about kind of reminding people that you exist, right? You can put a post up maybe once a week, even maybe once a month.
It can look like a content marketing post, but the job it can be doing is keeping your existing audience aware of you. As opposed to, again, hoping you go viral and hoping people find you somewhere else, find that post and start engaging with you in that way. It's doing a different job.
It's doing an engagement job, not an awareness job. And that is a really interesting thing to ask of social media. It's also, by the way, much easier to do, right?
The requirements of doing this effectively are much, much lower than the requirements a lot of people put on themselves to pull off an entire content marketing job. And so the output for some of these things may look similar, right? You may be posting on your wall, but you're going to be doing so in such a way that's different than if the goal was awareness.
And it's different, again, because it's nowhere near the volume required of awareness, right? We're getting back to some of my clients who have been told by social media people to post 14 times a week and all these really, really high requirements just in order to game the algorithms. And that's not what you're trying to do here.
And so it's nowhere near the volume. It tends to be a different style of writing because you're writing to people who already know you, so it's a little bit more straightforward, easier. You're not trying to, again, game the algorithm.
And it's a very different end goal. So when we're talking about social media within a relationship marketing context, again, we come and we find some interesting jobs for it to do once we've already met people. Once we move past awareness and we get to engagement, and we realize, hey, I need to invite people here.
I need to stay connected with people. So how can I use social media not as this big strategic thing that is going to build me an audience, but instead as a logistical tool that helps me accomplish some of these intermediary goals I have for people of kind of getting them from place to place? And then it can become a really interesting thing that can help you make your life easier.
So let's kind of talk through an example of how I might use social media, and specifically LinkedIn. And I shouldn't even say how I might. I should say how I am and how I aspire to be because I will share with you one place where I'm not doing a very good job on this right now.
But LinkedIn is a really good example of how I use social media. If you look at my LinkedIn profile, you will see that I very, very rarely post. We'll get to that in a second.
That is something I can improve on. But if you were to just look at my LinkedIn profile, you wouldn't think I was all that active on the platform. However, I tend to be on it every single day.
And specifically, I'm in my direct messages every day, and for a couple of reasons. Number one, when I do give an awareness talk, right, if I go insert myself into an audience and I'm meeting folks somewhere, I will generally invite them to come connect with me on LinkedIn afterwards. I do that for a few reasons.
I do it because it gives them a chance to practice some of the things I'm usually talking about in my talk, if I'm teaching, like, thank you notes or whatnot. It gives them a chance to come to connect with me on LinkedIn and add a little message that allows them to practice that. But then it allows me to start a real relationship with each person, right?
If I'm inviting them to, I say, come on LinkedIn, you know, add me and send me a message. So now I've opened up a messaging channel with folks. And that is valuable to me.
You don't see any of that activity publicly, but that's valuable to me. So I use it for those direct messages, because then I can stay connected with people in that way. And now I've invited them to do something other than, you know, jump on my email list.
Like, I want to build a deeper relationship, so I invite them to do that. And so now I have an open DM channel to them. You will also see me posting or reposting places where I'm going to appear, or if I've been on someone else's podcast, I will post and repost that just to help the people who are trying to spread that message, or I will even post about upcoming public events that I have.
And so I'll use it as that kind of logistical tool I was talking about, where if I need to invite people to something, people that I already know, if I need to invite people I already know to something, I will put that on LinkedIn. Now, here's where I need to get better. What I should also be doing is that third category of things that what I call, like, the signs of life.
And this is posting maybe once a week, once every other week, whatever. I should, you know, do it in line with the podcast and in line with my newsletter, where I'm popping onto my LinkedIn profile and just logistically helping out people who are following. Because I probably have a lot of people following me on LinkedIn who would like to see the podcast.
And right now, I am not logistically supplying that information to help them easily get there every other week when the podcast comes out. And so that's a miss for me. That's what I would call, like, a signs of life job miss for me that I'm not doing.
And I'm working on improving that. We're working on getting that into our workflows, right? But again, that is just me looking for ways to deepen my relationship with people that I already know.
You did not hear me say one word about writing provocative posts that are gonna go viral and, you know, have everybody figure out who Michelle Warner is. Not my goal on social media. My goal on social media, within a relationship marketing sense, is how can I give it jobs that make it easier for me to do all the other more important stuff.
So my most important thing I wanna do within a relationship marketing funnel is build a relationship with you. So social media can make that easier for me by inviting you to connect with me on LinkedIn and then opening up a DM channel. You best believe I'm gonna do that.
Or if my main goal is to invite you to an event that I'm having, and LinkedIn is one way that I can make sure transactionally you see that in case you missed the email or you're not on my email list, well, I can post it there. And I know that not absolutely everybody is gonna see that, but some people will see it who don't see it in other places. So it's a really good logistical way for me to get you to where I want you to go and what I wanna invite you to.
And finally, the thing I can do a better job at is thinking through things that aren't live and that I don't have as much of a rush to make sure everybody knows about, like new podcast episodes coming out. I know that those are relationship builders. I know that those are so helpful to everybody.
I need to start as signs of life kind of posting those on LinkedIn and again, in kind of a logistical way saying, hey, this exists, you know, go check it out over here. Using LinkedIn as a little bit of a traffic cop in that way, right? Or a map in that way.
Go here, go here, go here. Helping people to navigate my world. And that to me is extraordinarily different than again, trying to think through how am I gonna use LinkedIn to meet clients?
Because if you're in a relationship side of the world using LinkedIn posts to meet clients, sure, it can work. I'm not saying it doesn't work, but I very, very rarely see it work on a consistent basis. And the more B2B you are, the larger the contracts you're signing, the less likely that is to happen.
And so we just wanna be smart about it, folks. We just wanna think through, hey, I have this great tool at my use. I don't wanna burn myself on on it.
I don't wanna put all my strategic energy into it because I need to be doing other smarter things. But how can it make my life easier in other ways? And by the way, I keep saying LinkedIn, but this can also apply to Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or like wherever your audience is, right?
You can be using those things in the same way. You can be using an Instagram DM box the same way I'm using a LinkedIn DM box. So to summarize, social media itself isn't good or bad.
And most of the time when people are turned off by it and saying, I don't wanna use it anymore, and again, hands raised, myself included, it's because we're trying to use it in a traffic sense. And when we try to use it in that traffic sense, it feels inauthentic to what we're doing and who we are. It feels like we're screaming into the void.
It feels like we are wasting a whole lot of time. And all of that is totally true. If you are in a business that's aligned with relationship marketing, that is going to be true of your experience.
On most social media platforms. But if you can think through it in the way we just did here and think through, hey, what are the jobs to be done? If I don't take that default position of just saying social media should be the way that I meet people, and I think through it a little bit differently and I realize there are other jobs that can be done that it can make easier within the entire marketing strategy framework, then we can get really interesting ideas on how to use it in a supportive way.
And that is what I would want for you for your social media is asking, how can I use it in a way that supports the main strategic pieces of my relationship funnel, which are not going to be social media. So with that, I'm going to leave you with a challenge to kind of rethink your definition of social media, rethink how you might be able to use it in a way that makes your life easier within your relationship marketing world. As always, thank you for being here today.
If this episode or any other helped you, I would be so grateful if you shared it with someone else who you think it might also help, or if you left a review. Both of those ways are ways for this podcast to get out there and to help others and to start spreading the word and to help people stop wasting their time. And also an invitation to you to head over to themichellewarner.com, jump on the newsletter list, or come over and see me on LinkedIn, or drop me a DM. I would love to connect with you over there. And in the meantime, I will see you back here in a couple of weeks.