Creating value & building relationships is crucial for online sellers who are looking to build a successful business/brand. On this episode of Lunch with Norm, we welcome back returning guest, Social Media Expert Maayan Gordon! Maayan is a pro at connecting with her audiences while using high-quality content to attract new fans. From HOMELESS to Homeowner, Business Owner, TikTok Famous Influencer, Podcast Host and world traveler. You can find her on TikTok @worldofglass. She is a TikTok Consultant, Branding Expert, Glass artist, Business owner, Writer, Speaker and Influencer. Her passion is for helping businesses and people grow their BRANDS and businesses, creating a larger and more impactful online and offline presence.
Date: December 18 2020
Episode: 77
Title: Norman Farrar Introduces Maayan Gordon, a TikTok Expert and has had Incredible Success on the Platform with over 2 Million Followers.
Subtitle: The Power of Social Media
Final Show Link: https://lunchwithnorm.com/episodes/episode-77-creating-value-and-building-relationships-w-maayan-gordon/
In this episode of Lunch With Norm…, Norman Farrar introduces Maayan Gordon, a TikTok Expert and has had Incredible Success on the Platform with over 2 million followers.
Maayan Gordon talks about creating value & building relationships that is crucial for online sellers who are looking to build a successful business/brand.
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Norman 0:01
Hey everyone, it’s Norman Farrar, a.k.a The Beard Guy here and welcome to another Lunch with Norm, the rise of the micro brands.
Norman 0:20
All right, so on today’s show, I am excited. We have a returning guest influencer eCommerce expert, Maayan Gordon and Maayan has just a few followers, like 2 million followers. Not so shabby, huh. I’ve got like, one or two, but she’s got 2 million followers. So she is an expert. She’s an influencer. She’s been on the show and just I learned a ton the last time she was on. So before we get to that, just Kelsey, where are you?
Kelsey 00:55
Here I am. Hello.
Norman 00:57
So Maayan has actually told me about this part. Smashing likes, asking people to subscribe.
Kelsey 1:04
That’s right. That’s right. Yeah. Smashing the like button, call to actions.
Norman 1:07
Yeah, call to actions. We owe it all to her.
Kelsey 1:14
Yeah, we’ve come a long way since then.
Norman 1:16
Yeah. But, you know what, a lot of what we’ve done, and a lot of the improvements that we’ve made, have come from Maayan’s recommendations. So, I’ll tell her that. I’ll let her know how much we appreciate her when she comes on.
Kelsey 1:31
Yes. So yeah, if you’re new to the show, and you’re wanting to check out the past shows, or if you come in a little late, you can always go straight to our YouTube page. All of the full episodes go straight there. Full size clips, and any mini clips, highlights, all the good stuff. All the good little nuggets. We are a podcast too. So you can find us on Apple and Spotify and yeah, let us know how you guys are doing. Go ahead and post where you’re posting from, where you’re watching this from in the comment section. We’d love to know I can see that Tom is already joining us. Hello, Tom.
Norman 2:08
Hey, Tom.
Kelsey 2:09
How are you? We do have a little giveaway today. So you guys want to stick around for that. Oh, we got Rad. Hello, Rad. Welcome Rad. Okay, and I know we have a couple things just to touch on before we get started with the two?
Norman 2:24
Yeah. So let’s talk about them. So there’s two things that are happening that are very important this week. The one we touched on last week and I think it’s important that we mention it again. So there’s 12 Days of Nuggets that was put together by Mike Zagare. He was on the podcast last week and he was talking about an event that he’s been doing. He’s brought together like 70-80 Amazon sellers or eCom sellers that are dropping nuggets and you know I don’t like the word nugget. But you’re not waiting 45 minutes to get a piece of information. It’s like five to 10 minute you get it. You get in, you get out, you learn and this is for a really great cause called Operation Underground Railroad and what the purpose of this is to stop child slavery and if you don’t know, there are 2 million cases right now of missing children in the US and anyways, he got into it on the podcast and he talks about what they’re doing, and how they’re trying to stop slavery, child slavery in the US and around the world. So anyways, I’ll leave it at that, check it out. It’s really cool. The other one is on the 18th. There is Festivus with Melissa Simonsson, another friend of the show over at Empowery with co-host Tim Jordan. Now, Tim is my partner at Centurion League. So anyways, it’s going to be great and I think Maayan is going to be on it as well. So anyways, it’s just more fun. It’s networking. It’s the whole day. So check it out. We’ll put the tag in there or the link in there and let’s see, oh boy, we do have a bunch of people on here. So hey, yeah, Tom, Rad, Marcia, Simon, Victor, you’re back. How are you sir? Darwin, Peter. Okay. So, welcome everybody. Oh, Yarrow is here too, great.
Kelsey 4:41
Fantastic.
Norman 4:42
This is everything that Maayan told us, build a community and we have been trying and providing content and thank you everybody for joining us. So let’s get to today’s podcast, shall we Kels?
Kelsey 4:57
All right.
Norman 4:58
All right. So, look if you have any questions, throw them over to the comment section and we will get to them as soon as we can. If we don’t get to them, we’ll get to them. If we don’t get to them during the podcast, we’ll get to them into the group. All right, so sit back, relax, grab a cup of coffee and enjoy the show and where’s Maayan?
Norman 5:18
There she is.
Maayan 5:19
Hey. How’s it going?
Norman 5:20
How are you?
Maayan 5:21
I’m doing really wonderful. Thank you. How are you doing?
Norman 5:24
Great, I’m smashing. I’m hitting.
Maayan 5:27
Smash that like button you guys.
Norman 5:29
You do it so well. You go ahead and do that, you do it so well, during your live. I watched your live on LinkedIn all the time and you’re so great at that. But you’re really one of the people that helped us improve this podcast so much, just by telling us little things that we can do to improve and to build a community. So, first of all, thank you.
Maayan 5:53
Yeah, absolutely. I’m happy to see I mean, the congrats goes to you guys for taking action on the suggestions.
Norman 5:59
Well, I’m gonna pass that to Kelsey. I do nothing. So hey Maayan, why don’t you tell people that don’t know you a little bit about yourself?
Maayan 6:10
Yeah, so just I’d say the the quickest snippet of understanding who I am is I grew up in a very traditional home and family, education, go to college, I went to college, did the education thing, but in college realized it wasn’t for me, dropped out and got into entrepreneurship. I got into it through copywriting and really found this deep love for writing and just communicating online and then that transitioned into marketing as I started up my own businesses and realize that, without any money for an advertising budget, I had to get creative with social media and content creation and that led me all the way up to this past year, when I had a really high amount of success on TikTok growing my account from zero to 2 million followers, and then subsequently on LinkedIn as well building a pretty substantial community of more than 30,000 people.
Norman 6:59
Wow, wow and you built this community, was it around your company? Was that the reason why you went on? I know that, what is the name of your company?
Maayan 7:13
Which one? So I have two businesses that I’m actively running right now. One is my glassblowing business, so the DBA name of it is Monkey Boy Arts. But we’ve kept the same actual business name since I started my first business, which is 2K industries LLC, but that’s really not attached to any particular brand that I’m developing. That’s just like, 10 years ago, the name we came up with and I say, we, me and my husband, that we came up with for our business, and we just stuck with it the whole time and just changed the DBAs as we switched industries.
Norman 7:47
Okay. But you did build this social network around that. Is that correct?
Maayan 7:52
Initially, yes. So up until this past year, like literally, I would say October of 2019, is really when I started making a push towards my personal brand and with that starting to do consulting and services around marketing, before that, yeah, everything was attached to my glassblowing brand, and that business and just building up community around that and it’s been really interesting seeing the differences in building community that centered around product compared to community that centered around like information, and a different type of value, like product certainly has value. But it’s a very different type of value than education or empowerment, or inclusivity let’s say.
Norman 8:35
Okay, well, let’s dig into this. Let’s start off with a simple question. What’s your favorite social media platform right now?
Maayan 8:45
Right now.
Norman 8:47
Right now.
Maayan 8:48
I’d have to say, probably, Cora, which a lot of people do not consider a social media platform. But yeah, right now, to give everyone context, my favorite changes at least every month, based on the results and kind of the activity and what’s new and what’s not new, and what’s old and getting boring. But I’m really liking Cora right now. Because one, it’s a new platform. I’m trying and I just really enjoy trying new things and two, the results I’m seeing are pretty good and interesting for the little amount of effort that I’m putting into it. So if you haven’t checked out Cora as a platform yet, check it out.
Norman 9:32
I used to use Cora, I almost want to say 10 years ago, but yeah, probably 10 years ago, I used to use Cora and the questions would come up, you’d answer them and then you’d become an authority. Right? Yeah. So that’s really similar to press releases. So, people are searching out your name, or a keyword for press releases or for content and guess what, if you’re so shown on Google, you become that authority and to get sales, you need authority to get trust to get sales and that’s the same thing with Cora. So, you answer these questions, you become the authority. If you’re the authority, you get the trust. So oh, that’s great. I have not looked at Cora in a long time. Kelsey, new social platforms for you.
Kelsey 10:29
I’ll write it down.
Norman 10:30
Yeah. Well, we’ll get some tips from Maayan even after the show. Okay, how’s that? Okay, so after Cora, what’s your next best platform?
Maayan 10:44
My next would probably be TikTok right now, just because I’m enjoying the creative aspect a lot, and kind of being forced to come up with new ideas outside of what I’ve already posted. Being able to adapt certain ideas into a 10 or 15 second video style for me is really fun, creative challenge.
Norman 11:05
Okay. We always talk about value. So it’s so important when we go on to social platforms to create value, many new or even advanced sellers still just promote, promote, promote. What can businesses do and why is it important to create value and what can businesses do to add value?
Maayan 11:28
Yes, I think, creating value and adding value has a lot to do with what you just talked about, which is building trust, we really just naturally trust people who have given us value for nothing seemingly that they want in return. Now, there might be hidden agendas and generally with a business, the hidden agenda is that they want to sell you something, and it’s maybe not so hidden. But at the same time, being able to provide value without having a sale immediately attached to that promotion, or that information that you’re sharing can really be helpful in terms of people just liking you. Like no one likes someone who’s just trying to sell them stuff all the time and in general, we don’t do business with people or entities that we don’t like. So if you’re trying to build up a community, if you’re trying to build up a group of people who like you and are more likely to buy your product or buy your service, giving them value is really excellent way to do that and the way I kind of think about it is, make a friend, make a sale. So first you have to make a friend and a great way to make friends is by giving people value
Norman 12:33
Wilfried Ligthart always told me you have to get engaged before you get married. Yep. What about tools? Any tools that you could recommend to help people out?
Maayan 12:44
Yeah, so in turn, there’s a lot of different tools that I use and that I come across. A couple that I’ll just like, spit out real quick would be Splice on your iOS device for quick video editing on your iPhone and that one is easy to use.
Norman 12:57
Is that for TikTok, or is it for any?
Maayan 13:00
You can use it for anything. Like I’ll use Splice to edit videos for LinkedIn. It has a reformatting feature. So even if you take the video in horizontal, but you want it full vertical, you can kind of switch the dimensions of it. You can add text, you can add music, it does a lot of different things and it’s very quick and easy to use. So like Splice, one that I have my virtual assistant use for any video where I have captions is veed.io. It’s V E E. I O and that’s that kind of just caption adding software. I use Buffer to help schedule some of my LinkedIn posts. I probably should use it more also for Instagram, but it’s just right now, I’ve got a lot of new projects along with existing projects and balancing them has been a little bit tricky this past month. Let’s see, other tools would be Calendly is amazing. I use PipeDrive for my CRM. Let’s see I use Kartra as my website platform so I think tools are the best. Find the tools that work great for you because they’re gonna make your life so much easier and much more efficient and can add a little pizzazz that maybe other people don’t have.
Norman 14:11
I’ve heard and I don’t know why. But people are telling, when I talk about social media and trying to schedule Hootsuite, they said oh, if you have a business account, don’t use Hootsuite and I don’t know why, can you explain that?
Maayan 14:30
I’m not as familiar with Hootsuite. Do you mean Hootsuite is the example or specific?
Norman 14:35
It could be Hootsuite. It could be Post planner. Any of those types of products that schedule your products or curate your products that basically you see it gets posted by Hootsuite or whatever.
Maayan 14:49
Oh yeah. So, if it says it’s posted by Hootsuite instead of saying that it’s posted by you, then it looks like it’s less genuine I would say some of the time, that’s probably part of why I like Buffers, it doesn’t do that. There’s no indication that the post was posted by Buffer, unless it’s a video. So video contents are different because they have to store the video in like a cloud, I would assume and then it gets transferred from the cloud. But when you’re posting pictures or text content, people can’t tell the difference between you posting, just like in the moment or using Buffer as a scheduled post. So I like that about Buffer. I think, where in general, a lot of this anti planner, anti planning platform messaging is coming is from Gary V, who routinely people have kind of asked him Hey, so I’m trying to use this Buffer tool, do you have any advice, and he’s like, Don’t do it. Don’t ever, ever do that. Don’t do it and I think a lot of people like to listen to Gary V, he’s certainly an authority. But I haven’t necessarily heard a good reason other than he thinks that you should do it to be more in the moment and learn from it and observe from it more for me and I think a lot of people whose social media is not their full time thing. They’ve got a full other business, like maybe they also have kids, like they have to be smart with their time and if using a post planner can save you hours and hours every single week that you can put into different parts of your business, that you can put into different parts of your life that really matter. I think that’s a great thing. I think there’s ways to be strategic about it, like there’s a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it, so to speak and realizing what content is not timely, or time sensitive is really helpful for that. So an example of what I mean is stories from your past are always great to share. You don’t have to, worry about some cultural event, if that happened or not, like you have to worry about if it lines up with a holiday, you don’t have to worry about what’s happening in the news, any story from your own past is really relevant to any time period right now, because people can learn from it. It’s not tied to an event that’s currently happening, like it already happened. So sharing it whenever you want, really doesn’t matter timewise.
Norman 17:10
When we were using Hootsuite in the past, we haven’t used it for a couple of years. But one of the really cool things that we were able to do two things. Hashtags, follow hashtags. So if things came up, you’d see it in your stream and the other thing, this was awesome. Questions, if people were asking questions, you could see it in your stream, and you could answer them and you just got so much engagement that way, it was really great and one of the things that you could do nowadays, and it’s free, it’s cheap, it’s easy to set up, Google Alerts. So if you see that somebody’s talking about this specific phrase, or whatever you want, you’ll get the alert, and then you can respond or just take a look at it and it will probably go to Cora.
Maayan 17:56
Yeah. Any tools that help you in the area that you want, like, if you’re looking for more engagement, find an engagement tool, if you’re looking to save time, fine, look at time saving tools, but identify your problems and find technology solutions.
Norman 18:11
You touched on something just a second ago about time. All right, so not everybody is full time. Not everybody can spend hours and hours and hours on a monitor. But for the people that want to do that. So Kelsey for example, Kelsey goes out, and we’re creating a brand, we’re creating a personal brand around the look and feel of this podcast, the colors, the oranges, the blacks, the templates, that takes time, it’s customized, but you don’t have to do that to be engaged and get out there with social media. So do you have any recommendations or any thoughts on what new people that don’t have the time that want to do it themselves that don’t want to outsource? What can they do?
Maayan 19:02
Yeah, I mean, I’ll bring it back to kind of what I just said, I think sharing stories about who you are, and your observations and things that you’re learning are the easiest way, because it’s going to naturally be attached to you personally, like it’s not someone else’s, it’s your story. It’s your opinion, it’s your observations. So you don’t necessarily have to create the extra branding tools like the graphics or the images, people will still remember that it came from you and then also, sharing your analysis around current events that are going on, I think is a really great way to do it. Because you can just search on Google, you can like search any topic and go to the news and see what is the latest news for that topic, pick an article, throw it up, have two sentences of your analysis or your opinion on that and all of a sudden, you’re both a curator and a thought leader in the space. So I think if you want to be fast, think about what’s the fastest type of content for you to make. Is it commenting on an article but in your own post? Is it a 30-second video, like, maybe you’re good at throwing up the phone and be like, Hey guys, what’s up? Today’s Monday, I want to share with you guys this thing that’s going on in my life, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, some people that’s really easy. Some people really hate video, or they feel really uncomfortable with it and maybe they’re more graphic designing clients. So making a graphic in Canva, maybe that only takes them five minutes and posting that to social media. But what is your natural talent for creating content, and where does that lie, and then dive into that more than thinking about what everyone else is saying that you should do? Because your skills are largely going to determine what you’re successful at anyways and even if someone says you should do it this way, this way is the way that works for most people, if you suck at making content that way, like you’re never going to be tapping into that potential. So find out what is the potential for you based on your skills and your talents.
Norman 21:03
I think I’ve told you before I really suck at trying to find a good social media manager, except Kelsey, of course. But anyways, what I found is people who are creative are creative. People who do copy are not creative, or vice versa and then people that can really get in and build engagement, it takes a really special person to have all three. When you’re looking for an agency, what are some of the things that you can ask for or what can you put into a job description to get that rounded person? It was so hard for me to find. I don’t know, I think I’m pretty good at training people or getting, writing a job description. It was very hard. I’ve probably gone through 50 social media managers. I really suck at that.
Maayan 22:00
Great question and something I also I think have not necessarily struggled with because I’ve been looking for help in a different capacity slightly. But the general question I think can be broken down into what are and this is the question I would push people to ask when looking for really any position, but I think a social media manager is a great example of this concept is, what are the things they intrinsically have to have that you can’t really teach them. But if they have those elements, or those qualities than the things you will teach them, they’re going to pick up really quickly and be really good at it. So with social media, it depends, again, depending on what it is that you want them to do, and probably that’s the first step or what are their roles and responsibilities going to be? Do they have to create the content? Are they managing someone who’s creating content? Are they doing writing? Are they coming up with the idea for the writing, but not executing on it. So come up with that list of they have to be able to do these action items and then for each action item, write down what is the most important component for them to be good at that action item. So for example with copywriting, I would say, good English writing is probably the main component, like how good is their actual writing, in maybe not in a copy sense, but like can they put together really great sounding sentences. If they can do it in any context, they can probably adapt pretty easily to the context that you’re asking them to. If they have issues though, with grammar, or with the sentence, like just sounding good, when they write a sentence, it’s gonna be really hard to teach that year for what sounds good. If it’s, let’s say content creation, if it’s video, have them create a couple videos and give them the guidelines of, we want this video to make people feel blank. We want this video to make people feel empowered and excited and then have them create a short video for that and see how well that matched kind of your instructions. But I think coming up with a series of like short tests, that really give you the info of how skilled they are intrinsically, in these different areas that you need them to execute. But that’s going to allow you to find the best fit and then you’ll still have to train them on the specific things that you want them to do and what you do like and what you don’t like about it. But I think when finding people to work in positions, it’s really a pretty balanced combination of two things. One, their natural skill and talent and two, how you’re training them and what you’re training them in and then maybe like a third X factor, which I found to be really helpful is just making them feel safe and empowered and valuable. For me, that’s been a major differentiator between how successful hires or employees have been this year for me versus previous years. Like an example, when they make a mistake, letting them know hey, first of all, like you’re doing a great job. Second of all, that’s my mistake, not your mistake, because I didn’t give you the proper support or instructions. Or let’s say it is fully their mistake, letting them know, like, Hey, this is something like, let’s make sure that we double check this area or let’s create a system so this mistake doesn’t happen. But also No, it’s not a big deal. Like it’s totally okay. You don’t have to feel bad, human beings make mistakes and as long as we’re making adjustments and taking action to fix them, like, it’s okay that you make mistakes, like don’t don’t feel terrible about it and it’s been really surprising to me how big deal that’s been to their performance, continually and certainly also just coming off of mistakes.
Norman 25:43
That is so important. I talked to a lot of people about training and building SOPs and when you’re building an SOP, whether you’re doing Toma Rabinovich was on the other day, and he says, basically does a video and he lets he his VA create the SOP, I do it a little bit differently. We create the SOP, or we train people to do the SOPs. But we do a million steps. So if somebody has to go and drag their mouse up to the top right corner, we take a screenshot, I mean, it becomes fairly lengthy, but it gives the person the ability to say, oh, on step 19, that’s where the mistake happened and then they come back to you with, how am I going to fix it and you’re absolutely right. If you’re going to go and you’re gonna scream and yell at somebody, when they make a mistake, first time, all you’re doing is just making them afraid to make mistakes, and they’re not going to go and have the initiative go out on their own and try to experiment. So I mean, that’s a really great point and our system is, okay, you go out, we train, you go out and do it and if there’s a mistake, it’s a learning experience. Second part, same thing. You come back to us if there’s another mistake, where was it? Okay, because usually, that’s on us. The SOP was wrong, or we didn’t train properly. If it comes back a second time. Okay, how do we fix it? If it comes back a third time, I think we have a problem. So it’s either something’s drastically wrong with the SOP, or this isn’t meant for you and if it’s a good person, we’ll try to find in those spot for them and that’s not overall, if we’ve got 50 SOPs, or 400 SOPs, it’s not like three strikes, you’re out. It’s on the task. So anyways, that’s a really great point. Kelsey, do we have questions?
Kelsey 27:37
Yeah, we got a couple of questions. I think we actually have like five or six coming in.
Norman 27:42
Okay. Very good.
Kelsey 27:43
So first of all, I think this is just a question for everyone, too. Has anyone on this chat phone sales on TikTok? I’ve been thinking about getting into it, but I don’t know currently, I just use Instagram. So Maayan, how’s that for you?
Maayan 27:57
Yeah, I make sales directly from TikTok, I still have people message me through Instagram, or they’ll email me because TikTok doesn’t have a good kind of messaging platform, in my opinion. But I make sales pretty consistently without trying to, most of them come from live streaming, though and a lot fewer of them I would say come from posts on my main feed. But when you’re let’s say you have a business selling bathroom accessories, going and doing a live stream in your bathroom and showing off the different accessories is a great way to sell product and with live interaction, people have the ability to ask you questions about the product to say, where do I get that you have lots of opportunities to multiple times, say, hey, and if you want to check out this bath towel, hit the link in my bio or go to bathroomaccessories.com. So live streaming I found on TikTok as a really powerful component for sales. Now I do get people asking, where can I buy this on the main feed, but again, there’s just not as good a system to direct people to where to purchase from in feed post right now. Now, everyone has to remember Tik Tok is like less than three years old, or maybe it’s like three years old right now. So it’s still a baby in its infancy in terms of app lifecycle and it’s very likely that in the future, there will be more eCommerce capabilities and features. So I think it’s better to get into something before it blows up, than afterwards when everyone’s already on it, because they know about these features existing. So if you can get in now, build that audience, build that community in those relationships with your audience, then when the capability to add a link to your videos appears, like you’re gonna immediately be able to catch in on that versus having to then build your audience, be in a much more competitive space and then be able to tap into that feature.
Norman 29:58
It’s so hard to do when you starting to tell somebody to get on social media, a lot of people, a lot of Amazon sellers, online sellers kind of things that are secondary or just down at the bottom, we don’t need to do it, you have to concentrate on Amazon. We’re getting that presence out there and the website is consistent, your brand on your social media is consistent. But a lot of people don’t take the step, because they’re worried about building a community and that was certainly my problem as well, is that, I talked to you about it and I talked to Danny McMillan about it. But I’m talking to myself, I’m out there going live, talking to myself and this could be like, Okay, this is for this podcast, but selling your product is the exact same thing. You’ve got to start with one person, and that could be yourself and then you’ll start to see people grow and it doesn’t take time before those people in your pet niche, or in your gnome niche or whatever it is, start to take notice of you. You’ve got to build that community one step at a time and take advantage of Facebook communities, and going out and interacting and finding people and inviting them. If you don’t do it, you’ll never reap the benefits of it and I can tell you, that was my deepest, darkest fear doing this is that Kelsey and I would be just talking to ourselves and guess what? We were. The first podcast we might have had one person on, might have had one person on and that’s something that you told me. Like I remember going to you, you say yeah, you might have nobody, but you gotta start somewhere.
Maayan 31:40
Yeah, and it’s all good practice. Like, even if you’re talking to nobody but yourself. When you start, you’re not the best that you’re going to be and so getting those early runs, or your worst kind of performances out of the way early on, when no one’s watching is much better than waiting till you have a million people watching and now you’re nervous, and you’ve never been on video, and you’re doing it for the first time. So I like to think a lot about beginning stages of almost anything. It is just practice to get to the stage that we really want to be at anyways.
Norman 32:12
So do you know if you can ask Mr. Google to take down the beginning podcasts that are really bad?
Maayan 32:18
I don’t know how to use technology that way.
Norman 32:23
All right, Kels. Next question.
Kelsey 32:25
Before we get to that, we should talk about a little prize we have. Okay, so Maayan, what do we have today?
Maayan 32:33
Yeah, so I’m going to be giving away a free 30 minute consultation. It can be in any area from social media or a specific social media platform, to time management to building a team around your business as it’s growing. My main business, that’s not my glassblowing business right now, which is Champion Empire, we’ve got a team of seven people right now. We just started up about six months ago and have been scaling internally pretty quickly. Also, our revenues have been growing really nicely, especially in the past two months. So I’ve got a lot of experience in a lot of different places, even outside of social media and I’ve learned more in this last year than I have probably in the previous 10 years of doing business and so I’m just really eager to share and help people out in any way that they need that help or support.
Norman 33:20
I can tell you as a company, we’ve hired the paid consulting through Maayan, she’s excellent. So no freebies, and I can tell you this free pay consultant, you’ve got to take advantage of it. Because I’m gonna join because I know I had to pay.
Maayan 33:42
Yeah, I’m only doing this for you Norm.
Norman 33:44
Ah, but it was worth I gotta tell you, it was worth every penny. Like Maayan knows your stuff. So take advantage of that and so we’ve already got I love Maayan coming in. So is that the hashtag Kels?
Kelsey 34:03
We’ll get it out of I love Maayan.
Norman 34:05
Alright. There we go.
Maayan 34:06
How do people enter this giveaway?
Kelsey 34:08
So to enter the giveaway, if you’re new to this show, you just need to put in the #IloveMaayan in the comment section and we’ll take all of them and put them into a wheel and we do a little Wheel of Kelsey here but yeah, we’ll start with any people that haven’t won before because we have had double winners so if you haven’t won put I love Maayan in the comment sections and yeah, let’s see what we get.
Norman 34:36
Oh Mir, looks like it’s late for you sir.
Kelsey 34:38
Tony and Mir both entering. I believe Rad’s won already. But maybe we’ll throw them in. We’ll see and cut. Very nice. Okay, so question time. Let’s see, from Tom, do you recommend starting putting out social content from the get go or only once sales have been established?
Maayan 34:58
From the get go, Yes, it’s actually much more interesting to put out content, I think, before you’ve accomplished anything. Which again, is not necessarily the common rhetoric around it. But sharing your journey or your adventure or your story, I think is much more powerful than sharing your accomplishments, despite how social media algorithms behave and what I mean by that is, classically, you’ll see that any posts centered around an accomplishment you’ve done will get great engagement, like people love to put a thumbs up or a heart or comment congratulations, when you’re like, Hey, I did this, Hey, I just hit 20,000 LinkedIn followers, like those posts will do very well, you’ll get above average engagement and views on them. That doesn’t mean that they’re better than posts that get less and this is, I think, a really important topic for people to understand that the success of your social media is not dependent on the metrics that you’re looking at. Those metrics are a tool to help you understand what’s going on. But they do not simply measure success in saying that you had a post that got 50,000 views doesn’t mean you’re successfully doing social media marketing or social media content. Because you know what, no one’s gonna remember that post. Like, they’re gonna forget about it. It didn’t bring them any value and therefore, even if a lot of people saw it and hit the thumbs up, like the only thing that that post does is elevate your authority level. Possibly. It also maybe makes you look a little bit self indulgent or egotistical. I think, not to say that if you’re posting an accomplishment, that means you’re an egomaniac, or that I’m judging you in a negative sense. I just think you posting about yourself has less value when it’s in an accomplishment sense, than when you’re posting about a story or an experience that you went through, where you’re still technically posting about an accomplishment, most of the time, Hey, I overcame this hard thing, or, hey, this thing happened to me and here’s how I dealt with it or here’s what I learned from it, like learning something is it as a big accomplishment. Overcoming a challenge is a big accomplishment, I would say even bigger accomplishments than achieving certain numbers or milestones on your social media and you as a human being watching this right now have many stories have many things that you’ve learned have many accomplishments that you’ve made, in terms of overcoming obstacles and so focusing more on those than on, Hey, we just made a million dollars. Like, while that’s great and interesting, it doesn’t necessarily provide the same level of value, as you saying, even Hey guys, I’m just starting my business. I don’t have any sales yet. But here’s my strategy for how I’m going, here’s why I think my product’s gonna crush it. Here’s why I’m even in this business and talking to you guys about this, when I have zero sales and that is almost like a setup as well for that when you do have accomplishments. Now it’s not you just bragging and saying, Hey guys, what’s up, I got my first sale today, it’s you sharing the journey of Hey guys, remember last week when I posted and I didn’t have any sales, and I was talking about this dream, it’s turning into a reality, right now I just got my first sale today, like this is so crazy. Stay tuned, and follow with me on this journey that I’m on and really inviting people in to what it is that you’re trying to build. What it is you’re trying to learn. What it is you’re trying to experience is something that brings a lot of value to other people, but also is just super engaging. One of the things that every human being is fighting, maybe not constant to different degrees, some of us constantly some of us, just in moments is boredom. We’re all fighting the boredom of the normalcy that our brain builds anything into that is repeated. So no matter how exciting something is at first, when we’re exposed to it again, and again, and again, over time, it becomes boring. This is just how all human beings experience things. So the same thing is certainly true of social media and most of us have been on social media for years and even within, let’s say, a month, if you’re on social media every day, it’s going to become very boring in a sense too in certain senses, like there’s going to be parts that you really gravitate to and get excited by. But a lot of it’s going to become dull, mundane and boring. Even if at first it seemed interesting. What never fails to be interesting are great stories and you as a human being have great stories inside of you and sharing those is a great way to start building your brand in a way that then can be transferred, leveraged, translated into momentum and success for your business.
Norman 39:41
Very good. I’m hearing you talk a lot more today about stories. Have you been putting more focused on stories?
Maayan 39:51
Great question. So, an interesting thing I would say is actually over the past three or four months, I’ve personally been putting less emphasis on stories in an effort to balance out the almost all story content that I did previous to that. So there’s always going to be a balance, right and this also just might be like my thoughts that are wrong, but I thought you know what, I’m sharing a lot of stories over and over again in a row, I think it’s gonna be hard for people to remember all these stories versus if I break them up a little bit more with some like purely educational content on like, here’s how to do influencer marketing well, or here are three tips on how to improve your copywriting. So I started mixing that in a little bit more, and then also trying to talk more about Champion Empire, which is this newer business I started up this year, and really starting to build brand around that and in just sharing also some of the things that I’m more actively learning, which I wouldn’t consider to be stories. That’s been a little bit more of my shifted focus for the past probably two or three months.
Norman 40:53
Okay. All right Kels, next question please.
Kelsey 40:57
Okay, from Dr. Koz, in building a new brand, what is your opinion on the frequency of social posts?
Maayan 41:04
Yeah, so I think different platforms have different frequencies that they lend to. But I really think if you feel like every piece of content, your writing is good, like, post as many as you want and as you can. Now, is there a line at which that becomes inefficient with the algorithm? Yes. But is there a point where content becomes inefficient with someone consuming it? No, because if someone likes your content, they’ll read as much of it as you want to put out. If they don’t like it, they’re probably not reading it at all and then of course, there’s people in between. So thinking about is this individual posts going to bring value to the people who like to read my posts is one way to think about it. That’s like one type of content. The other type is, is this a post where new people, if they’ve never engaged with me before, they’re gonna read it, and all of a sudden, follow me. So as long as your content fits into one of those two categories, I think post as much of it as you have the energy, as you have the happiness, don’t do things that make you severely unhappy. So if you hate creating social media content, like do it the minimum that you have to do it to get buyer to see the results that you’re looking for. If you love it, though, do it as much as you want.
Norman 42:21
All right, I always thought there were limits on it.
Maayan 42:24
No, so again, algorithmically, yes, like LinkedIn is not going to give you a huge number of views probably on any of your posts, if you post 20 in a day. But in terms of effectiveness on you building brand, and building a brand with more people, that could be the best strategy. Because if someone sees three of those posts in a day, three of your posts on a platform in one day are sitting is a lot of exposure for that person to then want to be thinking about you. Also, if let’s say none of the people who see those posts, see multiple posts, then you probably actually reached a much wider audience and that’s really good, too. So I don’t think there’s huge amounts of downside to creating so much content that the algorithm goes like, Whoa, you should not create so much content. Unless what you’re looking for are the metrics and the pure virality that you can then leverage to talk about. So if what you’re going for with your strategy is I want to create viral posts, so that then in my next posts, I can talk about the viral posts I created, then you probably don’t want to do that strategy of volume. Which I’m not saying that that’s a legitimate strategy to have one viral post on a platform, and then have other posts that talk about how it went viral. Why, why it went viral, and what that means about the quality of your brand. But I think with most people, it’s hard to intentionally create viral content. So it’s better to do a volume model where you know that the posts have quality and value that are being delivered to your audience and it doesn’t matter how many people that values delivered to you. It’s three more people, even if it’s three people, but it brought those three people a high enough level of value where now they’re fans of your brand. They’ll use your services. Again, if that was every post, why wouldn’t you want to do 20 posts in a day that each brought new customers, like, come on? If any of us could do 20 posts that got to 60 customers a day, like we’d be doing that for sure. I think a lot of us just don’t realize that that’s a reality and a potential when you create content that has value.
Norman 44:37
Okay, I’ve got a question for you. I had a friend of mine, talk to me the other day, it’s got a brand. He launched social media. He actually has a podcast that he’s been doing and he said he sent me over a site and he said you got to join this site. It will get you natural views, natural followers natural and he said it’s between $50 to $300 a month, he says, I’ve been able to get, I don’t know what it was, like 1500 or 4000 followers, different channels had different amounts. What do you think about those types of services that get you these fake followers?
Maayan 45:18
Yeah, I always like to ask how they work. Like, how are they achieving the views and getting the followers, I’ve yet to come across one. Where, in a direct business sense, it made sense. Where they do make sense, is what I just talked about, like, if you’re looking to leverage the number of followers that you have, or the growth, which you can do, again, because of how most people think about social media, if you tell someone, hey, we just grew our Instagram by 5000 followers, they’re going to be impressed, they’re not automatically going to think how did you do that, are those real? Like they’re not going to analyze or scrutinize it, and the way that I, it kind of immediately would, and so if that’s what you’re going for, like, then that’s super valuable to you. If what you’re going for are creating community and creating followers who are paying attention to you and care about what you’re posting, it’s probably not the best way to go and the reason I say that is, I know that a lot of these platforms, the way that they work is you have to sign on and then basically, you’re liking or sharing or commenting on other people’s posts, and however many people’s posts you comment on, you’re getting a return number of engagement from random people that their AI is kind of like scrambling and telling, people to post on your comments based on how many comments you’ve posted on someone else’s account. So that to me is not valuable. While it may look good on the surface, beneath the surface, none of those people want to buy my product, none of them want to support it. Now, is there a chance based on your content that people who start out randomly liking or commenting on your post, actually do them like the content? Yes. So I think there’s value in that sense. Like, it might be interesting as an experiment for you to find out how many of those people actually care about your content naturally. So what I mean by that as an example is if I was going to sign up for one of these services, with my glassblowing account, a lot of them are probably commenting or liking the the photo or the video, the post, because of this software, this program, but also maybe, let’s say 20% of them. Once they’re on the page, and they’ve hit the heart, they go, Oh, actually, this is pretty cool. Let me check out some more of her posts and photos and then all of a sudden, they are legitimate real follower and the software, the tool was just almost like a discovery boost, more than it is a follower boost, or a like boost. In that case, I really like that. But I think you have to test out and experiment and be able to understand whether or not that’s happening.
Norman 47:59
What about with lists? So let’s say that you’re selling shampoo and conditioner, and you have a list of 20,000 people. Would you ever go to Facebook ads, and try to draw them in, try to bring back your customers through Facebook ads?
Maayan 48:17
Do you mean those who are already on your list like retargeting them?
Norman 48:20
Yeah, they’re already on the list and they may not be part of your Facebook group yet. But you want to get in front of their feed. So you go into Facebook ads, you have to load their list, and then you start targeting those 20,000 people.
Maayan 48:36
Yeah, I mean, I think depending on the price point of the item you’re selling, and how much the Facebook ads are gonna end up costing for you to get to that point of sale. Also, depending on is your goal to increase sales, or is your goal primarily to increase your community, knowing that if someone’s in your community, their lifetime customer value is much higher than if you just sell them a bar of soap through a Facebook app. Like it’s really important for you to understand all these different factors, which I think, classically people will talk about is, customer acquisition costs, customer lifetime value cost, but also you understanding the value of your own brand and how that’s calculated. I think it’s something really interesting that people don’t talk about, but we see happen all the time when brands are sold, that a brand will be sold for, x billion dollars, when its sales are 100 million, or its sales are not anything close to make the valuation that big based solely off of sales, but it’s because they’ve built this brand in the brand has this value in this equity in it based on the community, based on the quality of the followers that it engages with, based on the quality of those customers, and certainly also like the lifetime value of those customers and if in the sense of buying and purchasing a brand, which I think is a great context to think about valuations. How they’re going to figure that out is by thinking is this someone who’s a customer, solely because they need the product or the service? Or are they a customer of this brand for life? Because if they’re a customer of your brand for life, there’s a lot of value that you’re going to get from them, a lot of sales, a lot of money that you can’t even predict yet, because you don’t know what your next product is going to be. You don’t know what future services or ways that you’re going to monetize are going to come out and so there’s all this mysterious potential value that exists, because in the lifetime of a person, I mean, so many new products, services, values can be created that you can then monetize through. So I think, are you thinking short term like, I need this number of sales by this year, I would even say short term, do I need this number of sales by five years from now? I’d say five years, and under is short term thinking in terms of building a brand, if you’re thinking a decade or more down the line in terms of the value, and that’s where I would evaluate it differently than if you’re more focused on the five years and closer type of results.
Norman 51:03
All right, very good, Kelsey.
Kelsey 51:05
So it is about 10 minutes to a bit after that, and Maayan has to get going. She’s meeting at one. So we probably don’t have time for questions. Any more questions? If we want to run it out? So I’m thinking we can do the wheel now and Maayan we’ll be back though, I believe in the next two months. Should it be coming back on the show? So I’ll log all the questions, and we’ll put them in the script for the next time, as well. We also have other social media guests coming on, as well. So we can always ask those questions, too and if you want to post them into the Facebook group, we can answer them too there as well. So there’s tons of different ways. Yeah. So let’s do the Wheel and get started.
Norman 51:58
Wheel of Kelsey.
Kelsey 52:00
Yeah, so I think we got four people in today. Maybe in the new year, we can start giving out the double prices again. But for now, we got Tony, Near and Kitt and Oleg. Here we go. 3,2,1.
Kelsey 52:24
Okay, Tony.
Norman 52:26
All right.
Kelsey 52:27
Congratulations.
Norman 52:28
Tony Sagar?
Kelsey 52:29
That’s right. He’s a former guest on the show. Okay, and yeah.
Norman 52:35
So the best way to claim the prize is to reach out to Kelsey.
Kelsey 52:38
Yes, that’s right. You can reach me at k@lunchwithnorm.com and yeah, we’ll get you hooked up with Maayan.
Norman 52:48
All right, very good. Well, Maayan, you’re off the hook. That’s it. Done
Maayan 52:53
Well, this was great. If anyone has any other questions for me, they can reach out to me on LinkedIn, on Instagram, or straight to my email, which is my first name, maayan@championempire.net.
Norman 53:07
Alright, and if you’re looking for any consulting or any other services with Maayan, please reach out to her. Like I said, our company has reached out. We’ve got some great information and yeah, she knows what she’s doing. So it’ll be straightforward, straight from the hip and she doesn’t hold back. But anyways, great service. Do you want to plug anything else? Because you’re such a great guest. If you have any other types of promotions. Yeah. Where else could people get you?
Maayan 53:41
Yeah, I have a free weekly coaching group that meets, we mostly talk about how to increase your influence whether you see yourself as an influencer or not. If you’re in business, influence deeply matters and that meets every Thursday at 4pm PST and you can sign up for that group for free on my website. It’s maayangordonmedia.com/officehours, and I’ll get the link for that over to Norm so he can post it in the comments or in the group.
Norman 54:13
All right, very good. I know you gotta get going. So thank you so much for being on the podcast today and we’ll talk to you soon.
Maayan 54:21
Yeah, thank you so much. Have a great day.
Norman 54:23
All right. See you later. Bye. All right, everybody. I hope you enjoy the podcast today. Isn’t she great? I just love her knowledge and her enthusiasm or passion for what she does. But all right. If you get a chance, if you haven’t joined the group and gone in and listened to the secret podcast, which was Dave McKean. Anyways, you got to listen to that. But even more so. His partner, Pemba Sherpa is on I Know This Guy. It was released this week. It is already one of the most popular views that we have on YouTube. So check it out. Pemba goes back like this is incredible. We talk about this, we try to talk to people about brand, Pemba lives his brand and Dave, the CEO lives the brand. Pemba went back to his community and built a bridge in Nepal so he could cut the time school kids have to walk three hours to school to 45 and also the same bridge that washed away one of his friends. He also went back and set up hydroelectricity for the village that had none and adopted a few children, brought over a bunch of other people from Nepal Sherpas, employed them in his restaurant at the beginning. They started to adopt people. They just believe it’s from the top down and he is an incredible individual. Dave’s an incredible individual. If you want a really incredible story, listen to I Know This Guy this week, and hear how they built this brand. But anyways, Kelsey, where are you?
Kelsey 56:14
Hello, hello. Yes. Thank you for watching everyone. It was great. Yeah, we got a big turnout. Lots of questions. Lots of people. People love Maayan here. So that’s awesome. She will be back. So don’t worry. Yeah and so our Facebook group, it’s thriving, we’re doing great. We’re building that community organically. It’s taking its time, but I think it’s well worth it with what we’ve achieved so far.
Norman 56:47
So it’s everybody in the community, it’s all about engagement. So we do our best to answer the questions. Sometimes we can take them and bring them into the podcast. But yeah, it’s all about you.
Kelsey 57:00
That’s right. So you can go right to this link, you can join. It’s great and we look forward to meeting you guys and yeah, we’re on a podcast. So Apple, Spotify. Anywhere you listen to your podcasts, you can find us and if you’re just catching the end of this, you can always go to the YouTube channel, Norman Farrar, and you’ll be able to get all the full videos, highlights, everything you need.
Norman 57:25
All right, so come this Friday, we’re gonna be joined with serial entrepreneur, Steven Selikoff and I think you’re going to be learning a lot about just the current state of retail, and different hybrid eCommerce channels. So stay tuned for that. It’s going to be a great podcast. I hope I’m the host. I have to say that. No, but you know what, it’s gonna be great. We’re gonna be tight touching on subjects a lot of people aren’t talking about. So I think that’s about it. Kelsey?
Kelsey 58:00
Yeah, I’m just going to post Maayan’s Instagram and LinkedIn handle here. Yeah, so just check back in a couple of minutes after we ended the broadcast and you should be able to find it.
Norman 58:13
All right, and because of Maayan, smash those likes, subscribe, ring the bell. All that. Yep.
Kelsey 58:22
That’s right.
Norman 58:24
Okay and that’s it for today. So thank you, everybody, for joining us today. Please join us every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, Eastern Standard Time at noon and enjoy the rest of your day.
