Social media can be one of those items on your to-do list that never gets checked off because how do you know when you’re done? You don’t – it’s never ending. In this episode, Andrea Jones from Onlinedrea is helping you define an endpoint so you can get out of overwhelm and into higher ROI with your social media.
Andréa Jones is fiercely committed to helping businesses and podcasters build profitable communities online through simple social media solutions. Named one of Social Report’s top marketers to follow in 2019, Andréa’s passion for keeping social media simplified shines through for her full service clients and students as well as on her podcast – the Savvy Social Podcast.
Key Takeaways from this Episode
What has your business journey looked like from when you first hung out that digital “come in, we’re open sign” to where you are today?
- I started my business a little bit accidentally. We were talking before this show that I used to live in the US, in Atlanta, and I moved to Canada. I met my husband, we were both YouTubers at the time, just making videos about our lives.
- Back in the day when it was still a little weird to point a camera at yourself and just talk about nothing. So we met, we fell in love, we got married, and I got to move to Canada. So with that big move I could either get a job, like a traditional job, and I worked in the spa industry at the time. I actually worked in a hotel, so hospitality. Or, I could try this freelancing thing. And I really love social media, being that I was on YouTube, I created my own personal brand and so I decided to give it a shot at freelancing.
- And the early days were very bleak, I was doing a lot of things. One of them was doing fake product reviews for people, so they'd send me their shampoo, and I'd make a video like, “This shampoo's awesome.” It was, yeah. I was doing
- A lot of things like that, writing product descriptions, writing blog posts for other people. I have a degree in English literature so I kind of tended to go towards those writing gigs. And one of the clients that I wrote product descriptions for asked if I could help her with social media. And that's how I really started on the path to building my social media business, and the great thing about social media is that people need it all the time, it never sleeps. So while my product description clients, I would write the product descriptions once and that would be it, whereas my social media clients, they needed help every single day.
- And so it was really a chance for my to create a business model that was a repeating source of income. So that's how the business started, my husband did leave his job and join me in the business as well. He ended up exiting the business in 2016 and that's when I really started building out my team, and started teaching and training more, and that brings me to today.
In terms of legacy – what is the big mission you’re here to accomplish with your business?
- So one of the things I learned along the way in being in social media is that it can feel very overwhelming and negative. We live in this world where we are kind of connected all the time, and so one of things that I want to do is help my clients, my private clients, not have to be tuned into social medial all of the time. So that's my job and my teams job to take that off their plate. But then also in my teaching, a lot of things that I like to teach is that social media is great and wonderful, but too much of a good thing can be bad.
- And so, how can we leverage social media in a way that's still as impactful and shares our message, but doesn't encroach on our personal time or doesn't take up valuable time that we could be using building our businesses in other ways. And so that's kind of like my mission, my message is, “Okay, how can we make this make sense and make it profitable, but also have it not take up all of our time?”
What's the #1 burning question you get from your community and what do you tell them?
- But I would have to say the time question is one that I get a lot because people, they log onto Instagram and they go, “I could literally spend all day scrolling on this thing. So how much time do I put into this platform and how do I make it make sense for my life?” And so, my answer to that is if you're looking at using Instagram as an example to grow your business, I want you to think about it as networking. Think of this as like how can you make connections with individual people? And if you think about it like that, you can give yourself a time limit.
- So the time limit like, let's say 15 minutes, “I want to spend 15 minutes and see how many new connections I can make today.” And I feel like that's a much more productive way to look at the platform rather than, “I'm going to log on and keep scrolling until I see something interesting.” Because that is where the danger comes in, that is where we start scrolling and scrolling, and an hour goes by and we go, “Where did that time go?”
- So, spend 15 minutes, be intentional, log in, find as many new people you can connect with as possible, that could be simply liking a post, but it can also be leaving a meaningful comment, responding to an Instagram story, all of those things are part of networking. And then log off, and move on and do the rest of your business building activities.
So shifting gears to marketing – How do you stay motivated and inspired when it comes to content creation (especially after all this time)?
- That's a good question because I'm always testing with my own content before bringing it to my clients or teaching it to my students. So for me, I just love social media, and so I love trying out different things. One of the things I'm trying out right now is Instagram stories. I used to post a lot of Instagram stories that were image-based, and I'm challenging myself to go face to the camera every single day. And that's something that, for me, is exciting because I want to look at the stats after 30 days and see how my engagement increased. And I want to see if my list grew by a certain number, did I get more students into my membership program, or all of these kind of data-based things. I want to see if this kind of activity makes a difference to the bottom line. And so for me, I kind of geek out a little bit about some of those things, and so it's fun for me to test out and see what works and what doesn't.
How does content work in your business. What do you handle and do you have a team that helps? Fill us in!
- For the most part, my team handles a lot of the day-to-day maintenance for our clients. So, that includes the content creation. I'm kind of like the brains behind it all, I like to think of myself that way at least, so I'm creating the strategies behind it. So this is what we'll post on this specific day. And usually I set that up ahead of time, and again, I'm not going to change it for at least 30 days. With our clients, we're usually doing a 90 day strategy before we tweak and test anything.
- I may just assign every single Monday, every single Monday we're going to have something inspirational. Every single Tuesday we're going to share some sort of tip or piece of advice. Every single Wednesday we're going to share an article from an industry leader. So I'm setting it up so that my team can implement that, all they have to do is go, “Okay, on Monday we have an inspirational thing to day. Andrea already gave us this design to use so we're just going to find the content or create the content based on our clients, and then schedule it and post it.” And again, I use Social Report, it's got a scheduling feature inside of it, but any scheduling tool could work for that kind of strategy.
- And so, it cuts down a little bit on deciding what to post because we already have a plan laid out, I try to do the same thing for myself but I like to experiment too much, so personally doesn't work as well. But, for a lot of our clients, especially people who aren't big fans of social media, this strategy works really well for getting you that consistency.
How would you define a content empire as it relates to your business and what you’ve built?
- I think that having the history of content is a really good content empire. So what I mean by that is, don't give up hope for your content, if it's not working within that 30 day period or 60 day period, keep going. Because the biggest names in the industry, if you look at them, like a Marie Forleo for instance, she's got 10 years of content that we can look at, that to me is an empire. And so some of it is just, you've got to continue to share your message.
- It may come out in different formats like a YouTube show, or a podcast, or Facebook live, or whatever the case may be, or just social media posts. But you kind of have to have that history there for people to be able to see the extent of what you're doing. That, to me, is an empire.
So I know that you have a free course available for people if they are feeling like they're either, don't have any time to do social media consistently, or they feel like their social media doesn't really have an impact on their business goals, and that is a savvy social framework. So, do you want to tell us a little bit more about it and where people can go to download it.
- Absolutely. You can find the course by going to onlinedrea.com/free. And it's really the framework that I teach inside of my membership program for how to create a strategy that works for you. So I kind of touch on some of the pieces in this interview. But the framework will kind of… And it comes with a workbook as well so you can walk through and build out a social media strategy that doesn't take up so much time, but also still has an impact and still is able to share your message with the people who need to hear it.
Lightning Round
Latest content or marketing tool discovery? Storrito.
Most profound business program you've taken? Kyla Roma's program called Indie Business Intensive.
What is one marketing trend that you're passing on for now? Tik Tok.
2019 planner of choice? Emily Ley planner.
Where would you invest $5,000 in your business today? Facebook ads.
