Hello, and welcome to episode number 61 of the Shine Show. On today's episode, I'm going to share with you why your social media is dead, but don't worry. I'm also going to tell you how to fix it, of course, with Facebook and Instagram ads, but it doesn't have to be expensive ads. In today's show, you are going to discover one of my favorite secrets that makes ads affordable and that helps you reach more people faster.

But before we jump into the episode, I want to remind you that we are coming up to the end of the month when we are going to be launching the Launch Lounge membership, which is a membership I have specifically created for anyone who wants to build an audience of raving fans using Facebook and Instagram ads, build an audience of people who are ready to buy your online course the moment you say the doors are open. So, if you want to get on the wait list for that, there will be a special treat for you. I would like you to go to shineandsucceed.com/waitlist. Get your name on the wait list if you want to be notified when we are going to launch and how you can become part of this amazing experience inside the membership, but now, let's jump to the episode.

Giving up your time and freedom to make money is so 2009. Hi, I'm your host, Salome Schillack and I help online course creators launch, grow and scale their businesses with Facebook and Instagram ads so that they can make more money and have an even bigger impact in the world. If you're ready to be inspired, to dream bigger, launch sooner and grow your online business faster, then tune in because you are ready to shine and this is the Shine Show.

Okay. So, tell me if any of this sounds familiar. You have big dreams. You dream of doing meaningful work that creates a positive impact in the world and you know there's a calling on your life and you're meant for more, you have a dream about having flexibility so that you can spend more time with the people you love and with the people you choose to spend your time with when you choose to spend time with them. You know that you can create a lot of value in the world instead of settling for the value that someone else is telling you your worth like a boss who puts a cap on your salary and doesn't give you a pay raise or an increase. So, you know deep down in your heart this talent that you have, this knowledge that you have, this ability that you have to impact the world and make a difference needs to be heard.

It needs to be out there and it needs to get into the hands of other people who need to hear from you. So, you embark on this journey to create an Instagram profile, and you know that it's a brand new profile. You take the advice of some of the Instagram gurus and you make sure there's at least 9 or 12 tiles on there already before you start interacting and trying to get people to come to your Instagram account. Then, you tell your friends about it and you have about 20, 30, maybe 50 people who follow you, who are mostly friends and family. Then you start posting and nobody talks to you and nobody responds. You're pretty much feeling like you're out there in the cold dancing and nobody's even seeing you. It can feel a little bit embarrassing sometimes.

It can even make you feel ... like it brings up feelings of like, "Well, who am I to share this?" or "Who am I to have a social media account?" If you're anything like me and you have brothers like I do, when I started my social media profiles, my brothers teased the heck out of me because I was like, they said, "Are you becoming one of those selfie girls?" I was offended by it because I'm the furthest thing from a selfie girl, but it's normal to feel that way when you're just starting out on social media. Whether it is your Instagram account where you're literally hanging yourself out to dry every time you post, because nobody responds to your posts or they don't engage with your posts, or it could be a Facebook live. Maybe you have a Facebook account and you go live on Facebook. You take part in some live challenge where you have to go live every day for five days of the week. Then when you do, it's all crickets.

I want to tell you that it is completely and utterly normal. People don't talk about this enough because the people who we learn from, the people who sell the giant massive mega online courses that we all learn from, they've been doing it for a while. They've been doing it for five years. If you've been doing social media for more than five years and you've been in your business for more than five years, you will not understand this problem, because you do not have this problem. I'm going to explain to you why you and me have this problem with the social media and people with 50,000 followers do not have this problem.

I'm not saying you need 50,000 followers, but I am going to explain to you today how the algorithm works and why you get crickets when you post on social media and why the people you've been learning from don't understand that. So, they might just be telling you to do things that used to work for them when they were growing their business or when they were growing their social media and their audience, but it doesn't work anymore. It is because of the algorithm. So, let me explain to you why the algorithm really matters.

The algorithm is the artificial intelligence that Facebook users to know which content is valuable content and which content is less valuable. Some of you might remember back in January 2018 when Mark Zuckerberg announced to the world that the algorithm is changing, and collectively as a marketing community, we all held a funeral for all social media marketing, because basically what Mark said was that from now on the newsfeed will favor the content of friends and families over that of businesses and brands. I'll read a little quote from what he said.

He said, "As we roll this out, you'll see less public content like posts from businesses and brands and the public content you see more will be held to the same standard. It should enhance meaningful interactions between people." So, what Mark was saying is basically a social media platform is only as good as the interactions it creates. If you come onto a social media platform and it does not cause you to feel something like when you see your favorite niece's tea party, you feel something. You say, "Oh, how cute, happy birthday. I wish I was there."

Versus when you come to the newsfeed and it's all pushy marketing, pushy marketing, pushy marketing, pushy marketing. You're going to go, "Wait, you're not going to engage?" You're going to go away. You're not going to like it. It's not going to leave you with a positive emotion. In fact, it might even leave you with a negative emotion. So, you're going to go away. So, Mark learned that and he decided that meaningful interactions is what we want on social media. The only way that Facebook can measure meaningful interactions is through engagement.

So, when a post gets a lot of comments, if it gets a lot of shares, if it gets a lot of likes and loves and hearts and tears and emojis and people go crazy in the comments section, the algorithm sees, "Oh, hang on, something's here and people consider this a valuable piece of content. Let's put that in more peoples news feeds." So in the past, if someone liked your page, your stuff came up on their newsfeed, but now Facebook is saying, if it shows a meaningful interaction, then we will show it to people. So, Facebook started using engagement as the currency of relationships on social media. It is literally become the way Facebook judges the quality of our content and of our ads.

So, if you started your business before January 2018, you would have had lots of organic reach and engagement. So, if somebody liked your page, they saw your posts and they engaged with it. That was back when we were still chasing likes, we were still running ads for likes and we were telling people to like our page and get their friends to like our page. It was really important to us how many likes we have, because it did make a difference. Before January 2018, the pixel was the only way the algorithm was able to learn how to optimize your conversions. So, if you were running ads, you were solely relying on the pixel to get a conversion, learn from that conversion, find someone else who looks the same.

The algorithm worked more like I want to say kind of like a two dimensional computer program, input, output, input output. It was very two dimensional. After Facebook changed the algorithm and upgraded, I want to say they upgraded. It kind of waned from ... I don't know if you remember back in the days when they invented the first computer and it was this giant thing that filled an entire room to where we are now, where we all carry a tiny little computer with a giant screen in our pockets, and we can stop staring at it all day. That's kind of the difference we're talking about here in terms of technology.

So after January 2018, you would have had no organic reach and very little organic engagement. So, this is where the problem comes in. If you're starting your business or you're getting up and running after January 2018 and Facebook uses engagement as the fuel to show your content to people but you don't have people to see it, to engage with it, and plus, maybe add to that, you're still kind of figuring out your voice. You're figuring out your niche, you're figuring out your audience, you're figuring out exactly how to speak to your audience. So, you're left with a social media platform where you need to build your organic reach and your organic engagement. Nobody's engaging and so therefore Facebook is putting it in even fewer people's newsfeed.

Now, what matters is engaged likes. So, Facebook have moved away from attributing value to how many likes you have on your page, what they attribute value to is how engaged are those likes. Now, what matters is how well the pixel and the engagement on your social profiles works together to teach the algorithm where to find your best audience and to start to train your pixel and to start to season that pixel and to improve the quality of your account, because the quality of your account highly affects how many people are going to see your content. Now, the algorithm is super, super, super smart computer.

I want you to think about those. You know those robots in those movies where the robots come and it's the future, and we've built the robots so smart that the robots can take over the planet. Because we've trained them to anticipate our own thoughts, they're able to take over the planet and they're always one step ahead of us because we have trained them to understand how we think, that's where the algorithm is at. Fingers crossed, it won't take over the earth, but it's 2020. I wouldn't be surprised if that happens in 2020. That's just a joke. I seriously don't want the Facebook algorithm to take over the world.

Anyway, okay. So before January 2018, you started a page and you hustled and you got followers. Your followers would see your posts and they would engage with it. That way you would start building your email list and you would build your email list organically, and you would only need to run ads during a launch. So, a lot of my clients back in 2018 and even 2019, they were so used to only running ads during a launch that I actually offered a launch service where I would say, "Well, okay, I am only working for you when you are launching." Then after that, we part ways, and you rely on your social media again for your list building. Next year, when you're ready to launch, you come back and we launch your course.

Unfortunately, as a result of this, these people who launched and only ran ads during launches would every year see conversion costs rise year after year after year. They're the ones who kept saying Facebook ads is getting more and more expensive. I'm putting the same amount of money in, and I'm getting less out in my launch. Then we'd say, "Yeah. You need to put more in because there's more competition." They don't like that.

So, the catch 22 of this is when you have a low number of followers, you have low engagement. If you have low engagement, the algorithm is not learning where to find your best audiences, where to find your best people, which leads to ridiculously high conversion costs. In other words, if you start running list building ads and you've never run any ads and you have don't have any engagement, you're going to pay for it. As a result of your conversions being higher, that just pushes the barrier to entry up even more for someone who's brand new to business and having to fork out money for things like Kajabi, lead pages and online courses and now your ads are expensive too. It's kind of like adding insult to injury.

You're already new. It's already hard, but now it's even harder unless uh-hmm ... unless you know how to use the algorithm to build engagement so that you can build your audience faster, train the algorithm to find your people online and bring down your conversion costs. This way, you can build your email list faster with social media and you get to launch your course without wasting money on expensive ads between the moment when you start building your audience and the moment when you're ready to say, "Get your credit card out, this is where you're going to go to buy."

So, I want to help you. I want to make sure you understand that there is an easier way to start building your audience with Facebook ads that is going to bring down your conversion costs in the long run, that is going to help you get your social media content in front of more people and help you build your audience faster so that you can start building your email list faster, so that you can launch your course faster, so that you can get to the money, the sweet, sweet internet money faster so that you can make a bigger impact.

Quit your nine to five job, finally say goodbye to one on one clients, or just be the stay at home mom you so want to be and not have to choose between making money and being with your kids. What a wicked, wicked choice. You don't have to choose between making money and being with your kids. You can have both.

So, how do we do this? We do this by taking our best social media content, the content that shows who we are, what we stand for, what our values are, what our flag is that we plant, what we really stand for and who we are. The social media post that leads with value and does not ask for anything in return. It's the post that shares who we are, what we stand for and it gives people something that is useful to them either in terms of a practical thing they can go and implement or in terms of something they can think about and know that they have found their person. They have found someone who stands for them, who fights for them, who will teach them, who will create a safe space for them and a safe community for them.

Does this have to be a video? It could be. It could also be a post. It could be a Facebook live. It could be an Instagram story ad. The format doesn't matter. What matters is that it creates a deep connection with your ideal customer. It introduces you to that person in a way where they're immediately going to have an emotional response to your post. That emotional response is going to drive them to comment, to share or to hit like on the post. That engagement in return is going to trigger back to your ad account that you're creating value. It's going to indicate to the algorithm to put your stuff in front of more people.

Now, if you take that post and you turn it into an engagement ad, ideally what you want to do is you want to run it to your warm audiences first. By warm audiences, I mean people who have engaged with you on Facebook and Instagram, people who have visited your website, people who are on your email list. Once you put that in front of people who are already familiar with you, because they know you, they like you, they already trust you, they're more likely to comment and share. Then once you've got a few comments and shares on there, you're going to take that post and run it to a cold audience, to an audience that you define either by demographics or interests or that you create based on a look alike audience. Now, that piece of content is literally doing blind dating for you.

It is literally going out into the newsfeed, finding the people that are a good match to you, to your brand, to your page, to your message. It is saying, "Hello, how are you?" I refer to it kind of as like Joey Tribbiani walking into the ... what was that coffee shop they used to go to? And saying, "How you doing?" If you were a teenager in the '90s, you would know exactly what I'm talking about. So, you take that piece of content and you turn it into an engagement ad. The purpose of it is twofold. It is to stimulate the organic engagement on your page or your Instagram business profile, so that those people that are following you also see your content and can like it and can comment on it and can participate in it, which indicates to the algorithm that you're creating quality content, which then puts it in some of their friends' news feeds.

So, through running an ad in an indirect way, Facebook is rewarding you on your social media platform, but then also you have this ad running consistently to a cold audience introducing you to them and saying to them, "Hey, hello, here I am." Everyone who engages with that post can then go into another warm audience of people who have engaged with you. Now, you're starting to build an audience, and now you're starting to ramp up your efforts, and now you're starting to get some results. Now you no longer go out into the cold every time you hit go live on Facebook. You're not out in the cold speaking to the little rolling bushes. You're actually having two way conversations with your ideal customer and all because you ran a few very cheap ads.

You can run these for as little as $5 a day. If you want to get more information about running engagement ads, I did episode called the cheapest ad you can create today. It is episode number 16 on the podcast. I'm going to link to that in the show notes if you want to go check that one out. There's a little bit more detail for you there on how to set this up, but that my friends is how you create the uncatch 22 of this situation we're in where we have where we're just getting started to building our audience and the algorithm was actually working against us. So, that's how you get out of it.

It's also a beautiful way for you to introduce yourself to Facebook ads in a gentle way, in a slow way, in a way that you do not waste any money, because you're doing it with a cheaper objective. So, you get to test all the audiences you're going to use. Down the track, your conversion rates will come down. So, you start building audience with engagement ads, which feeds the algorithm what it wants. It feeds it engagement and teaches it where to find your people. When your audience grows on social, your website traffic feeds information back to the pixel, which in return helps you create a quality ad account.

Now your warm audiences grow and you have better source audiences for your look alike, and your CPM, your cost per 1,000 impressions come down, and your conversion costs come down and you get to test audiences with a cheaper objective. So, when you launch your course, you already know where to find those golden pockets of audiences that will perform really well for you. So now, you know the secret to unlocking your social media.

I have so much more that I want to share with you about unlocking audiences, building your email list, and really just creating a tribe of hungry people who are ready to buy from you the moment you say the doors are open and you guys already know that if you want to find out more about that, just head to shineandsucceed.com/waitlist and get on the wait list for the Launch Lounge membership launching at the end of July. All right, my friends, I love you to bits. I hope you are safe. Please stay at home if you're in an area where there is lots and lots of coronavirus. Please be safe, take good care of yourself and I'll see you next week. Bye.

Thank you so much for listening. If you had fun, please come back next week and remember to hit that subscribe button, so you never miss a thing.