Hello there. Health coaches, I don't have to tell you, social media is terrible for our mental health. We all know this and as health coaches, we really want to be walking our talk, right? You don't want to be getting sucked into the scroll all day. I know the feeling. I know you do too. Today I am sharing ways to simplify your approach and spend less time on social media. When you know that you probably quote should be there for your business, there's this push and pull between, I got to do it for my business, but oh my gosh, it's too much. It's taking over my whole life. Social media is a beast. So if you're here live, tell me in the chat how much time per day do you think you are spending on social media right now? And if you're not sure, your phone keeps track for you so you can go look, that number scared the pants off me.

Recently I was like, you've got to be kidding me with that many hours per day. Now granted some of it's for business but not all. But I could be learning a new language. I could be getting a master's degree and especially lately, more and more health coaches I've been hearing from want to get off social media, certainly off the meta platform or definitely start using it less. So tell me in the chat, how many hours do you spend on social media, do you think? And are you trying to cut down or cut social media out of your marketing or out of your life? Now seems like a good time to mention that in all of our Healthy Profit University programs, including Fast Track, which is coming up, we are social media agnostic. That means we don't really care if you use it or you use it a lot or a little or not at all.

It's totally up to you. Nothing I ever teach is rooted in Facebook ads or sending direct messages to total strangers on Instagram. That's just not what I've seen work in this space. So if you like that idea, you don't want to be relying on social media. The wait list is now open. We just opened it today for this Spring's live Fast track cohort. We only do this one time a year, so listen up. If you're interested in moving your business forward, you want to do it with my help live in real time. We have a 12 week marketing plan for you. It's already mapped out. It's complete with every email, every touchpoint done for you, and you can add your name to the no obligation waitlist for this spring's live Fast Track at healthcoachpower.com/waitlist. That's healthcoachpower.com/waitlist. There's some pretty awesome perks for waitlist members, so don't miss that.

The point is, I think we're all stuck somewhere between seeing the value of social media and just wasting too much time there and potentially being on platforms that we're not aligned with. Ps, those platforms are always changing. The rules shift daily. It is infuriating. Let's be honest, the apps are designed to be addictive. I'm sure you totally know this. You probably talk to your clients about how detrimental social media can be. So how do we use it effectively if we're going to use it at all without letting it take over our lives? And the answer, drum roll please. The answer is moderation. Yeah, I know it's not sexy, but let's talk about how to keep social media for our businesses. Simple, manageable and useful. If it's not useful, it's not doing anything to generate interest in your business, then why bother? First, I want to talk about the hours again.

I don't see any comments yet you guys. Nobody wants to fess up to how many hours. I will tell you, I'm going to look on my phone right now and tell you how many hours I spent. Oh my goodness. Well so far today it's only been 20 minutes on Instagram. It's only two o'clock. Can I look at yesterday? It's usually, it's usually like three hours. Yikes. I know how much of that is really for business and how much is not. Nobody knows. We are spending time scrolling, posting, engaging, thinking, it's going to magically bring us all the clients that we need. And if you want to zone out at the end of the day, I think that's where a lot of my time comes from lately. Instead of watching Netflix, I'm doing the scroll. I'm not saying I'm proud of it, I'm just saying that's what ends up happening.

Melissa here is saying too many, too many hours. It's just a tool. Social media we think like, oh, this is how I'm going to find all my clients. It's just a tool and there's lots of tools out there for your marketing. Inside FastTrack, we use multiple marketing tools. So take notes, email marketing. How are you making use of that? Partnerships you doing any kind of partner marketing events, one-to-one outreach. Even old school methods like hanging paper flyers. Don't laugh, it works. So truly, social media is just one of many, many ways to connect with potential clients. My suggestion is that we approach it with realistic expectations instead of treating it like the one and only solution. I hear a lot of coaches straight out of school just graduated looking for clients. Hey, I've been posting on Instagram every day, I still don't have any clients.

What am I doing wrong? Since when was that? The end all be all to marketing yourself. So again, tell me in the chat, how have you been promoting yourself outside of social media? And Lori's asking, how do you allot your time for social media? I try to just use it for business during the day, but then once you're on, I notice once I'm on, I'm on and then time just magically disappears. So the trick is, and what I want to share with you today, how to just get on it less in the first place. If you're like, oh, I got to post that thing. Oh, I got to do a story right now for my business. The more you're doing that every day, multiple times a day, it just gives you, you're walking right into it. So if we can do that less under the guise of business, I think we'll all be in much better shape.

Now, I will say this, social media can be useful. I'm not here to say it has no purpose and we should get rid of it entirely, although I don't know, maybe we should. But anyway, I do think it can be useful for keeping you top of mind. It's not going to be the end all be all to finding clients, but it does help keep you top of mind. Think about how you may have found me or how you may have found this podcast. Maybe you searched Apple Podcasts, maybe you saw me speak in some event online. Maybe you're on my mailing list. Then you follow me on Instagram, you see my posts, I follow you back. We start to feel more familiar to each other. And if not me, you've done this with various people and brands and whatever, and this is how it works for your clients too.

So maybe they get your emails or they attend your workshop and then they also see you on social media. It's kind of running into the same person again and again at the gym, and then you see 'em at the grocery store and then you bump into that same person at the post office and eventually that familiarity kind of builds and with it comes connection and some level of trust, which is better than if they had only, you only saw that person one time, you would've forgotten about them. So when we keep seeing someone, when we stay top of mind, there is value with that. I think it's a real plus. I think that is the biggest benefit I personally see from being on Instagram, for example, with my business, Kristen says, Pinterest has been great for me. I love that it's evergreen too and it doesn't require a lot of time spent on the app.

Oh, don't even get me going on Pinterest. Pinterest is, and we've talked about this on the podcast before, it really is less social media. I mean there's really very little social component to it because there's no bunch of commenting or dms that are going on. It's much more of a search engine. So we could kind of consider it social media but also kind of not. I love Pinterest, especially for health coaches for sure. If you're here with us live, tell us here in the chat, which social platforms do you use most or are you not sure if it's a social platform like Pinterest for example, or YouTube. YouTube is a content long form content, short form content. Is it social media? I mean there are comments. It kind of is in that gray area as well. Now there's TikTok, which I personally never got into.

I've been on Instagram for a long time. I think if I think back, I think it was right when my second son was born, so he's about to turn 11. So I've been on Instagram for almost 11 years and then of course our health coach, power community Facebook group, which has been such a wonderful place to connect with you all for well over a decade. Now, you might be wondering when it comes to social media, where should you be on Pinterest? Like Kristen, should you be on Instagram? I've been for so long. My very best advice is just pick one. Just pick one. Maybe it's your favorite of wherever you are. Now, if you're not anywhere, don't think about doing everything. It's just too much. Choose one where you already have the most followers or where you already feel the most comfortable. And like I said, if you're not on any platform yet, if you've never even used social media before, but you're like, I should because I'm a health coach, I should pick one, use it as a consumer in the beginning or as a normal user, not like I'm here for my business health coach because you just have to kind of see how the platform works.

I would just start there. You can follow a couple people and just get a feel for it. Then think about using it for your business. But again, just one because the more apps you've got going on on that phone, the more notifications you have popping up on your phone, turn those off. By the way, nothing, nothing's popping up here except my calendar, right? That's a good way to distract yourself. I do recommend though, wherever you have yourself set up a business account. If the platform allows that, I know Pinterest does, I know Instagram does. It's going to give you access to analytics that you wouldn't get otherwise, and that's really helpful. All right, so we've got our one and I'd love to hear what that is for you. What is your one primary platform? And then consider repurposing content that you've created elsewhere. So you're not sitting down with opening up like, oh, I'm going to make a new Instagram reel.

What should it be? Let me scroll for 20 minutes looking for inspiration. No, no, no. Let's not even go down that road. Find content that you've created elsewhere, such as blog posts that you may have written, clips of videos that you've made, bits and pieces of your client materials like this can all be turned into social media content. So you're not starting from scratch and you're not relying on a 45 minute doom scroll to find something to inspire you in that moment. You've been inspired, you've created things. Look through your client notes. I mean, I'm not saying you should type your client notes word for word on social media, but use that for your inspiration. So for example, all my podcast episodes like this one turn into little video clips. I'll tell you more about that in a bit. And we post those on Instagram, which automatically shares to my Facebook page.

We've even been experimenting with repurposing those same video clips to YouTube shorts or Pinterest. So even though I might show up on four or five different platforms, it's just one piece of content. I just sat here for one 30 minute period to record one idea, one clip, spread it around. So if you're using one platform, really, really well, just think how can I repurpose to any others that I feel I should be on or any others that I'm already generating content for? You don't want this to become a full-time job. So it's like cooking once and eating multiple times. It's just like that except for how you do your social media. I'm sure you're already a pro at making leftovers in the kitchen or at least sometimes I'm good at that. I think one reason that, again, the pros of being on social media, there's lots of cons, but a pro is to have some level of credibility.

Just because someone of course is on social media does not mean that they're a credible source of information or someone that you would want to hire. However, don't you go look for people there. You meet them in one place so you see them in one place and then you kind of go, I wonder if they're on Instagram. I wonder if they have a Facebook page. It's kind of like an online business card these days. You know what it's like? It's like they yellow page back in the day, people will kind of go check you out. Is she legit? And they'll kind of search you up just like we would look in the yellow pages to see when we had a practitioner, somebody that we wanted to go see, we'd look them up, but in this case, they could see how many followers you have. They can see how active you are.

You want to be there and your profile is probably what matters most because that's your listing so to speak. You guys remember the yellow Pages, right? It's not just me, it's anybody listening to this that's so young. You don't remember the yellow pages. They're like this thick. My mother has 20 of 'em and the cabinet and her kitchen. Still your profile's like you're listing. So even if you're not posting very often, and I was arguing before, I think we should probably be posting less. It gives us less opportunities for getting sucked in for your profile, which lives there all the time. We're going to start with what is your profile picture? How many of you are using a logo for your profile or a picture of your dog or I see a group photo or a family photo that has multiple people and they're all very, very small and I can't see any of them.

You might be one of them, but I can't see you because every head is teeny tiny. Don't do that. Don't do that for something that is meant for your business. What you do for your personal stuff doesn't matter, but for your business, people are looking to connect with you and we just got that one little tiny profile. We want to see your face, people connect with faces. It should be something that I can see your eyeballs, I can see your smile. I can get a sense of what you look like from your profile. So a couple of you right now are like, oh crap, and you know that you've been using some logo instead, get rid of that. Get your face up there. That's going to make a big difference. And again, you don't have to go on social media every day that can just be sitting there and working for you when people look you up.

You also want to include your actual name, your name, you guys clients need to know who you are, who they'd be working with. Coaching's very personal. You would be surprised how often health coaches don't list their name anywhere on social or even your own website. It's a big oversight. If you want to have a business, you have to be public facing if you want people to find you, and I think you do. If you want people to be able to get familiar with you, they kind of need to know your name. Vodka says People are looking to connect with me. Yes, you're right. The connection is the key. It is. And I don't think they need to see you posting pictures of yourself dancing every single day, but they just want to see that you're there, that you look professional, that if they click a link, it's going to take them somewhere. That makes sense. Not like some nonsense spam thing. And they probably want to see, we'll talk about in a second that you have posted somewhat recently.

They're just looking for that credibility. And then ideally, to make the most out of the fact that people are going to look you up and they're going to view your profile and you want to ideally have a call to action where you are collecting an email address. You want to, ideally if you just have an Instagram, you just have that one link. Ideally that would be leading people to your email list because in my experience, which is long and varied, getting people onto your email list is kind of like the best way to use social media. If you're going to be there and people are going to find you, you want to grab 'em, you want to get 'em onto your list, that will fuel your business better. And at anything else, your mailing list is where your clients are going to come from. I don't even know how many times I could say this.

I could probably just repeat that for 30 minutes and publish it as next week's podcast episode. Your mailing list is where your clients are going to come from, trust me. So try to capture your visitors, give them a way to join your mailing list. And now the question we've all been probably asking ourselves and I've mentioned a few times, is how often should you be posting? Alright, you've probably done this with various people, even if it's just a person in your life, but certainly with businesses or brands, if you look them up, you kind of want to know that the profile is active. Did they post for the last time in the year 2020 and they haven't posted anything since? Right? You kind of want to see that there's something there. Certainly within the last six months or three months, if someone hasn't posted longer than a couple of months, I start thinking, oh, they're probably not in business anymore.

You're posting frequency does not have to be daily. That's my point. It does have to be daily if you're trying to beat the algorithm or something, but that's so much work. I don't think it behooves us to go that route. You have to become a social media superstar for that to work. But for the rest of us mere mortals, let's post often enough that it gives the impression that we're active, we are in fact still working and we're available. And in this way, I feel like we can use social media, yes, but not be a slave to it. We can let it be our online business card. It can work in that way. We're not putting all our eggs in that one basket going, this is how I'm going to find clients. This is the one and only way to do it. So how does that feel?

How would it feel for you to roll back your expectations of social, optimize your profile a little bit like we talked today, and I'm just wondering how that resonates. I think it's like a minimalist approach and then you can use all that energy and all those hours elsewhere. When our fast track members go through the live cohort this spring, they're going to be spending like seconds with social media seconds, not hours. If anything, I feel like it's just splitting the difference between going whole hog, like I said, becoming a social media superstar and quitting it entirely. You can be there, Brad Kas saying, may I ask, where's the best place to put the call to action to get people on my email list? I'm literally just starting with the email list. Oh, I'm so glad that you're starting though. That is fantastic. So it depends what platform you're on.

I'll just answer for Instagram because that's what I use the most. You have one link in your profile. So mine usually says, grab my free such and such guide. Or right now it says join the fast track wait list, and then there's a little arrow and people click on the link and then they're taken to the place that I was just talking about. And all of those are places where I'm going to be asking for an email address. So there would be some type of email opt-in form. And then you can do it various other ways too within individual posts. But I'm talking about capturing people who arrive and they just look at your profile. They give it two seconds of time if there's going to be a call to action, make it one where they're going somewhere that they're giving an email address. So I've been playing with all of this myself for some time.

Sometimes I do post daily, I don't know why I get on a roll. And then sometimes I don't post for a week or two, especially during busy periods, but I will see new names pop up on Instagram and then I'll see, I see you guys and then you'll come join the Facebook group or vice versa. Or I'll see somebody who's emailing us with questions about Fast track and then I'll see them pop up on social media. So I do know that being there and having a presence is helpful. It's a way, again, for people to find us to connect with us. We just don't want to be thinking that this is where we put hours of energy every day. It's not going to work out. That's not going to build your business. I can just promise you, there are a few tools that I rely on when it comes to social media.

So I want to tell you about those before we wrap up again, just to make the most of social without spending a lot of time there. So here's some things that have been working for me. So as I mentioned earlier, I auto post from Instagram to Facebook. I do like that. That way I literally never even look at my Facebook page. It's just a setting that you can turn on inside Instagram, easy done, and there's no cost involved. So now when you post once, it automatically goes two places. I also mentioned earlier that when I do a video like this, it's nice to take little short clips and use those for social media, but oh my God, do you know how much time that takes to do that sort of video editing? So we use a tool called Opus, OPUS. It's not very expensive and it uses ai fi, old AI to isolate good clips and then you can just export them and it puts it in the right dimensions for you.

So that is a huge, huge time saver right there. So if you're doing video checkout Opus, I use Canva templates to create posts. Now of course, Canva is free to use. Love that. And we have just a handful of templates that get used over and over and over. So this way you're not starting with a blank page. You're not like, huh, should I use green or should I use pink and should I use this design or that design? And you just get lost in all of that. Just have a few templates that you've replaced the text or you've replaced the image and you can just keep using it over and over again. That really helps. Also, if you're going to ever hire someone to help you in your business, you could say, here are the templates. Here's how we use them. It'll also help you keep a consistent look and feel throughout all of your posts.

And then I do use a tool called ManyChat, and if you've ever been on Instagram with me or whatever, you could see in my posts that I'll say something like, comment episode to get a link to this whole episode. You comment and then it automatically sends a link to your dms. I used to do this manually. I would offer something in my posts and then respond to each and every comment, but it's a lot. It can be a lot, and it's so much better for somebody to get the resource they're asking for in real time instead of having to wait. Maybe it would be 24 hours or 48 hours before I got back to someone when I was doing it manually. So I think it's a really cool thing. And ManyChat I think is like $15 a month. So it allows you to Red's question here, to offer things within each post and say, comment, meal plan if you want my free blah, blah, blah, whatever, meal plan.
And then you are always sending links where people can, again, give an email address to access your free resources. Any of those sound useful for you? I know some of you may feel like, oh, you're not ready for something like ManyChat, but I would definitely look into, like I said, at least templatizing your posts on Canva to make that process smoother, faster, and easier. Again, there are 100 ways to grow your health coaching business. So repeat after me. Social media is just one of them. Social media is just one of them, and in my experience, it is not even the most powerful tool we have. So you have permission if you need it, you have permission to do less like that very much. And if you're tired of the social media grind, you will love FastTrack. We focus on marketing strategies that bring clients in without relying on hashtags or algorithms or dms, any of that nonsense.

The waitlist for our Live Spring Fast Track session is now open, and you can add your name at healthcoachpower.com/waitlist. Also, I do want to mention if you identify as a black, indigenous, person of color, LGBTQ, or living with a disability, we have an equity scholarship available for this spring's Fast Track, and you can apply now at healthcoachpower.com/equity. Remember, you guys, social media can be useful. It is not the whole game if you're like, wait, how else would I find clients? I have no idea. That's when you know should join us inside FastTrack. Thanks for listening everybody. I'll catch you next time.