How To Grow Your Social Media Following On Facebook And Youtube

Growing an audience on Facebook and YouTube. This question comes in from Valera, you and they say, hey, Jeff. Here's a quick question for you. How do you think is the best healthy way to grow an audience on social media, especially Facebook and YouTube?

OK. So I'm going to get tactical here because. I'm not sure of anything to say about this growing audience. Well, first, I'm going to start with the strategy, growing audience as a strategy, and we want to do it. And so there's many ways to grow an audience. And the best way to do it is to one show up all the time.

So to show up and to produce things, to engage people, to try to get them to connect with you, to encourage them to follow you and to subscribe to you and to become part of your house list, that's ultimately what you're looking to do. You're looking to build a brand and then you're trying to figure out what is the best chance that I'm going to have of being successful in building this brand. Is it on Facebook? Is it on YouTube or is it a combination of these things? And how should I focus my efforts?

So now we're gonna get to the tactics. The reason why I don't like building a brand on Facebook is that it's hard to reach your followers. And so if you have a Facebook fan page and you're sending out your business, what ends up happening is you can't reach anybody or you to pay for it. It's a little bit better on Instagram, which is a Facebook owned property, where you at least if somebody is following you, they can see your updates. It's not buried nearly as much by the algorithm, but they really do focus. They really do favor individuals versus big company, big companies or whatever.

So if you're trying to do an individual brand, Instagram might be a really good way to go. I don't if I'd build an individual brand on Facebook, that's not something I would do or sign up for. The reason why I like YouTube is because 1 YouTube is completely different than Instagram, Instagram's pictures and stories describing that picture versus YouTube as video. And so you're you're creating a video that highlights certain things, whether it's your, you know, you and what you what you're expertises, your lifestyle, whatever. YouTube is there's a certain format that works in YouTube and it's good looking video and engagement with the audience.

So they anticipate your next your next message. And so the reason why I like YouTube as well as because there's a built in subscriber function where somebody can say, I want to prioritize seeing stuff from you. And there's even distribution methods where they can get emails or they can subscribe to your videos and see them first. And so to me, YouTube is great if you want to maintain some independence and format, but then you also want a built in distribution network where somebody can discover your videos subscribed to you, come back to you over and over again.

YouTube makes it easier to discover you versus Facebook or Instagram. They sort of want you to stay on the platform so they're not asking you to go and they're not really making discovery very easy. So I think that building a brand. On these different platforms comes down to I would just start with doing one and deciding this is one you want to go all in on because it's most related to your audience or to your product or whatever you're aspiring to do, and then to do that really well. And then you can start by porting that content to Instagram and say your YouTube video or taking a snapshot of it and putting it onto Instagram or Facebook and sort of using that as a distribution channel. But generally, the ones who are successful, they just choose one channel and they own it and they do that moving forward.

So I would actually instead of saying Facebook or YouTube or Facebook and YouTube, I would to say, which one do you want to choose, which one's to be the best distribution method? And do you have the skills to do video or do you have the skills to do pictures? Do you have things to say? That's text? Do you have things to say that that is better reserved for the video medium and start to determine, you know, an avatar who you want to be and where are they having the most success? Where are they? Where does their content what foreign does it fit best? Because very few people do every channel. Well, actually, most do not.

Most people are known for one channel and they just syndicate over to other channels. And that's something that I you know, I've tried to do a lot of different channels and try to do it well. And it turns out that there's still really just a handful of things that work for me and other things that didn't work nearly as well. And so putting all your efforts into multiple channels can be a problem. And I would just try to emulate the one that you that you respect the most and then build an audience that way by emulating it. And and but also doing your own unique stuff does continue to chip away at it. Going after the market that you think is the biggest and the most potential. And then you do it long enough and then you start to have your own fans, you start to have your own subscribers and it starts to get easier from there.

So the question is, which one should you start with? Frankly, start with the one that you think is gonna give you the best chance of reaching your goals. And if you don't have goals yet, then start with your goals and then work your way to which ones and to give you the best chance of getting there. So I know that's pretty broad and vague, but basically that's that's how I approach this problem right now is saying what my goal is and then going after that in a tactical way. Which one of these networks is in to help me get closest to that goal?