TL:DR – Save 50% on our Dark Arts Guide by using the promo code “heroikhour11” at checkout. 

Welcome to the Heroik Hour, the podcast where we discuss and bring together Technology Leadership and Culture giving you a little Heroik TLC to get your growth engine rev’d up and mission ready for life. I’m your host, Nicholas McGill , Chief Experience Officer for Heroik Media. Thank you so much for joining us on episode 11.  It’s a privilege to be your guide on this journey, as we talk about business and life.

And since it tis the season, we’re going to talk about the DARK ARTS OF SOCIAL MEDIA. We just launched the Heroik Guide to The Dark Arts of Social Media on our store at getheroik.com and I’m going to give you a sample, a taste test, a free burrito of gritty social media realities, hacks and methods, to encourage you to go big and of course buy the guide  at getheroik.com

On today’s episode we’re going to talk about

• The business metrics you really need to pay attention to in order of priority.
• Why the vanity metrics matter, and how to strike a balance between social validation and engaging your target audience.
• The No Bull way to quickly build a following without getting distracted from your business goals.

• DISCLAIMER: You can’t make an effective potion without blood sweat and tears. These tips will not get you out of doing hard work, they will save you from doing stupid work, and will help you do more of what is most effective and be leaner, and more effective than the competition.

Let’s start the show

• Let’s talk about How Social Media Has Changed – Pay to Play is Here to Stay

• Once upon a time you could start a Facebook page, earn  a fan following, and reach out and connect to 100% of them every single day without spending a dime. Then Facebook made it a pay to play platform. In order  to reach all of those hard earned fans these days, you have to essentially lick a stamp and pay a postage fee for each one. What I mean by this, is that your facebook posts on your fan page are not organically/ automagically being posted in the feeds of your fans. Often, less than 1% of your hard earned fans may see a post. There are several factors that affect this. Don’t worry, we’ll be diving into this later. For now, just know that this is the way things are.
• I’m not really here to explain it or judge it, you decide what that means for your company. The fact is, pay to play exists and you need ways of dealing with it.

The Metrics you need to pay attention to

-Money, what’s driving dollars

-Traffic

-Email

-Retweets

-Twitter Followers

-Instagram Followers

-Facebook Fans

-Twitter followers can see your links and increase your reach.

-Instagram isn’t pay to play yet, but it doesn’t allow you to share clickable hyperlinks.

WHY? They claim it’s to create better engagement but the reality is Facebook sees this as an opportunity to force you to pay to play to get those links out there. Don’t think for a second that businesses create these platforms for the good of humanity.  Don’t buy into this BS. They are there to bring the crowds and charge the marketers. By removing clickable links, they force people to buy ads in order to share a clickable link. So – BE AWARE OF THIS, DON’T LET THEM PULL THE WOOL OVER YOUR EYES.

-You’ll notice on this list of important metrics, all the Social “engagement” is at the bottom of the list.

If you haven’t built out the product, website, and worked out the kinks there, social media efforts are a moot point. So fix your site first.

That is the gateway to the sale and the place where you have the most influence, control and focused attention on your brand and products.

If you have a crappy web presence and an amazing social presence, you’re doing it wrong. Product first, website first. It’s that simple.

Why do these metrics matter – It’s important to remind you that at the end of the day, if you’re marketing a business, you are there to drive it’s financial growth, not spend thousands of dollars to make hundreds.

YOU ARE SOCIALLY ACTIVE TO MAKE MONEY REMEMBER?

Businesses large and small get lost in the chase and forget about why they are playing the game in the first place!

Now to buy you some time and help you detach from your anxiety…

GRITTY – REAL – FACT # 2 –

Real or Not Everyone Values a Great Rack: What Fake Boobs and Social Media Have in Common

Now that I have your attention, let’s address this headline.

Men, women, babies, you name it, value a great rack. Our culture is influenced by T&A. Deal with it. Don’t send me letters. Confront and take ownership of your own issues. Men are dogs (whatever), women judge other women, and only the haters care if the rack is real or fake. And, your social following works the same way.

The social media following is like a pair of honkers. It’s the first thing that people look at (consciously and unconsciously) and use to judge your brand. AND, it doesn’t matter if it’s real or fake as long as it looks good.

No one takes the time to audit your following, they’re too busy ogling it. They don’t care whether it’s made of flesh, silicon or sand! This is a fact of life. Most often, only your haters, your competitors and people who would never in a million years do business with you, will dig deeply enough to find the dirt that validates their original position anyway. Their vote is irrelevant to you because they weren’t your target in the first place! Let the haters hate.

They use your following for third party, or social validation – but no one deep dives or digs in or cares how fake it is. This is a reality.

So – I recommend, in the spirit of the dark arts – that you go to market stacked, with a validating following that will allow you to confidently grow a captivated audience of engaged fans. They judge you based on your following but not the realness. SO YES, I’M RECOMMENDING THAT YOU GET A FAKE RACK, LOOK AMAZING, DEAL WITH THE WORLD AS IT IS, NOT AS AN IDEALISTIC FANTASY PLACE OF THE WAY YOU WISH IT REALLY WAS. THE TRUTH IS, BOOBS FIRST, PERSONALITY SECOND. TOO MANY MARKETERS HAVE BEEN SELLING YOU OTHERWISE AND GETTING YOU TO SPEND MORE AND MORE MONEY, without telling you the real, nitty gritty truth. Boobs first, personality second. This isn’t just men either, this mentality works across genders, women use social validating queues too, including guys with hot bods, stable jobs, well dressed, big bank accounts and nice cars.  These are all hacks we use to rapidly judge and asssess people – We all have biases – are brains are designed to have these patterns. Let’s stop denying it and agree to be honest.

Remember you only get one first impression, how do you want people to meet you on social? With 40 followers or 40,000? Which looks better.

So lets recap

• Money is most important. You are in business to build a great life an abundant life and that means getting really good at making money and saving 10x time and cost compared to the rest of the world.
• Focused engagement on environments you control is important, the things that build and grow your email database, and web traffic are important.
• Social media’s chief guaranteed, easy to grasp benefit is third party validation – and like a great rack most people don’t care if it’s real or not, they just care and judge based on how it looks. This is the only guarantee that social media can make you – that you’ll be judged by your following. Is this a fair representation of your business offering or character? NOPE. Is it a fair game or a rigged game? It’s a rigged game full of superficial judgements. SO…. Why not do yourself a favor, honor your integrity by hacking the game to your benefit and getting your target market to see the value that you see in yourself.

This is where I am at – you’ll hear me say this a lot. My job for myself is to get people to see the value that I see in myself and transact and  build and give based on that. The value I bring to you is to help you in all of these different forms of experience design, help you help your target market see the value you are bringing to the table. AND by default, the market

So hack the game to your benefit-

1) get a validating following from the get go by any means necessary. Trust me no one other than your haters, competitors and my haters are going to judge you for this. Why would you listen to the people who want to see you suffer and fail in the first place? Let the haters hate as you dive into a mountain of money and good livin like Scrooge McDuck. Let the haters and competitors spend 50 hrs a week to build their first 100 followers. You deserve an unfair advantage.

1. Set a goal –
   1. how many followers on the major  platforms would make you feel more confident to address the bigger players in your game? How many followers behind you do you need to have so you can confidently talk to the media, the big podcaster, and ask for an interview or a puff piece? Be real- be gritty. Set the number. 10,000 is a good place to start.
2. The only rule is to hit that number as quickly as you can by almost any means necessary. Here are a few tips and guidelines
   1. Don’t follow , share or like ISIS  types on the web or encourage criminal activity of any kind (underage anything, you know what to look for).
   2. Beyond that – any means necessary at first.
   3. Don’t worry about the follower to following ratio at first. Go full boar follow for follow, crank it up. Doesn’t matter – you can weed it out and thin the noise later.
   4. Social media is first and foremost a broadcast art – it’s not as much of an engaging conversation as it is sold to be. It’s broadcast first and let’s have an engaging conversation about the things I’m interested in kind of art.  
3. The first part of this strategy is to hit the number. In stage two you can grow an organic following and prune back the people that don’t fit.

How do you maximize your organic reach of your posts?

1. Have a brand strategy that defines your sense of humor and aspiration that align with your target market. Does your crowd find  George Carlin funny, or does it need to be more Tim Allen family friendly funny? Does your crowd aspire to peace on earth, good will towards men, or great living, abundant and unapologetic relationship to money, like a yacht and McMansion, etc. Figure it out and be ready to share this part of your brand character with the world.
2. Have great content with an epic image, that isn’t an untouched vanilla stock photo. There are countless apps that have so much you can do to create animated GIFs, videos, edit photos and beyond. I cover over 42 apps in the Dark Arts guide and you can read about them in the guide.
3. Know where to source inspiration material- Here’s the epic hack and truth bomb- check out the alt web. The alt web is a collection of social media sites that doesn’t operate with the duplicity of mainstream sites
4. By sharing what is personalized, edited by you, what is funny, what is aspirational, and what is pulled and refined from the alt web, you can increase your engagement and reach. How? People click on what’s funny and like it. They like what is aspirational and resonates with them as well. When they hit that like button, the algorithm is given the signal to show that fan more of your stuff.  So the more inspiration you can pull, the more content you create that’s inspired by it, the more engagement you’ll have.
5. Have a process – here’s mine that I use for content and social media.
   1. I create a crafty headline and some good content.
   2. I use any number of apps and the alt web to guide my efforts for some gritty visuals.
   3. I select a visual and edit it as the feature image for the article.
   4. Then I create a square version of that featured image – for instagram.
   5. I use these two images along with the link to natively post to the appropriate social media outlet. BY NATIVELY UPLOADING AN IMAGE WITH EVERY POST AND UPDATE YOU INCREASE THE ORGANIC REACH. DO NOT USE THE FACEBOOK AUTO THUMBNAIL, THE FB ALGORITHM WILL BURY YOUR CONTENT AND SHOW IT ONLY TO LIKE 10 OF YOUR FANS.
   6. I don’t bother with boosts unless I am going to spend heavy on a smart campaign. I’m here to build an audience without throwing away more dollars than the value of the customer. In business speak – don’t let the cost of acquiring customer be equal or greater than the lifetime transactional value of the customer. That means not spending more money advertising or boosting getting customers than you’d ever make on them.

You want more specifics – like dirty tricks and hacks- Well you’ll have to buy the Heroik Guide to The Dark Arts of Social Media. You can find it at getheroik.com And for my podcast listeners out there, I’m going to hook you up. I’m going to give you a 50% off coupon code -so you can get the guide that includes 13, strategies, 42 apps as well as the formula for selecting, gaming and hacking them to your advantage to boost your following and grow where you want to go, as well as 3 different tools to put your follower growing on autopilot- AND NO I’m not talking about crowdfire which has deteriorated into absolute garbage.  If you’re ready to start playing to win, to grow your following and you want to save 50% on my guide to the Dark Arts- visit getheroik.com click on the store and add the guide to your cart- and use the code heroikhour11 – that’s HEROIKHOUR11 – As in the 11th episode of the Heroik Hour – and it will save you 50%  on the purchase – taking it down to $15 bucks.  Again that’s heroikhour11