AdviceTech Podcast #8 – Facebook – Transcript

Peita Diamantidis
Hello, and welcome to the X Y advice tech Podcast. I’m Peita Diamantidis. And this week we’re going to deep dive into Facebook. And joining me here today to help me out is a northern territorian a technologist how cool a title is that? A daily sunrise watcher, a fellow story brand fan and the lead trainer for Facebook. Thank you so much for joining me on the show Dante St James.

Dante St James
Welcome. Thank you so much. That was quite an introduction. I love the word technologist because it can mean anything.

Peita Diamantidis
Absolutely. It just sounds really smart.

Dante St James
It’s my way of saying my geek really but without saying the word geek.

Peita Diamantidis
Yep. We’ve we’ve moved past that, haven’t we?

Dante St James
Geek and nerd have really bad connotations. If you really know where those two terms come from. We’ve kind of as as geeks and nerds, we’ve we’ve kind of owned those names over over a period of time. I like the word technologists and it kind of describes that, that that length and breadth of background where you those of us who have been through many iterations of what technology is, tend to think of ourselves as actually we’re technologists, not just geeks and nerds, we actually have a, we have a finger in the pie. We have skin in the game.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, we sort of got a bent towards those things and learn how to adjust, right, because that’s a lot of what dealing with technology is now the change pivot. Oh, no change, pivot again. You know, I mean, it’s, and I’m sure for the listener, they’re the same. I mean, it’s, it’s a little relentless, to be honest. So it is something you’ve got to sort of step into and own that you’re going to have to get on top of for sure. Now, I’m keen to dive into all things Facebook and pick your brain for me personally, if for no other other listeners can come along for the ride. But before we do that, I wanted to get to know you a little better through your use of technology. What is your most used emoji? Do you even use emojis?

Dante St James
Or do in a limited way? Okay, I’m not a fan of overuse of emojis I find they they confuse the reading rather than clarify it. But a good emoji can help to explain things like sarcasm, it can explain things like when you’re when you’re being funny when you’re actually making a joke, whereas the joke may land flat if it’s just in text, but with an emoji the laughter your cry emoji, which is my favorite one is the one that really helps someone else. Oh, that was a joke. Okay, I get that and they can read it in the spirit that it was that was written rather than having to fill in the gaps themselves. And for those who may not take social cues as well as others, particularly in the written format, which is very hard to explain, I think you’d remember a while ago, there was a push for an emoji for sarcasm or sarcasm, punctuation mark, and it was it never really got anywhere. But it was such a great idea because sarcasm can be read as really nasty sometimes. When really, it’s just someone poking fun often at themselves.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, 100% and I love that. I even encouraged the team with emails to clients, like a single emoji can set a tone. Like it’s just giving them the is it a light tone? Is it a serious? Like, it just lets it really established because you’re right. We all read words with our own perspective and our own baggage and our own soundtrack to that so yeah, and with the the single use of emojis very Very powerful. And like, I use that one a lot too. I’ve got to say, how about if you had to delete everything of all the apps off your phone? And just keep three? Which one was would you keep

Dante St James
a keep LinkedIn? Because that’s where I do so much of my business definitely would keep keep that one. The other ones that really are probably Facebook Messenger, okay, because that’s where our chats my mom, most of all. And so that’s it’s somewhere, I’ve actually trained other people to use that app. And they finally want to probably use is I’d have to be one of the streaming services because I use it all my streaming is done via my phone to my television. So I’d say the one that I’ve watched the most it has to be YouTube.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah. Fantastic. All right, well, I like it. And Facebook Messenger. I’m going to put a little pin in that because I’m going to ask you about that later. Because I’m sure you’ve got some perspective on that, even from a business or a professional perspective. But let’s let’s sort of dive in now. I have been, since we sort of connected for you coming on the show. I’ve been sort of watching a whole lot of your content and subscribers, and I’m getting some real value out of it. And I noticed a post you recently made. That said we sort of seem to have forgotten what Facebook actually is, and what its purpose is. What did you mean by that?

Dante St James
Hmm, so it’s the assumption as a small business owner, myself and yourself being one. And so many of the people we deal with being small business owners, we often forget the Facebook is not a business platform. It wasn’t made for businesses. It wasn’t made for us. It was made for people to connect as individuals. So I told her like a quite a passionate story about the reuniting of my father and his brother, after more than 20 years of being estranged from each other after those typical family breakdowns over in a state of grandparents. horrible story really nasty how it ended out but they they finally did reconnect after 20 years. And it was just a beautiful story that came out of relationships born on Facebook, me connecting with cousins that I hadn’t seen in 23 years, all that kind of stuff. And so that that’s when you put a story like that up there and the millions of other stories of that connection, reconnection with school reunions, communities coming together and disasters, mums connecting with each other in order to be able to be able to get kids to school or babysat. Putting then your local 50% off offer at the local takeaway shop kind of pales into insignificance with that. And that really shows us that Facebook is not a place for businesses, really, it’s just kind of been Frankensteined on to your platform that’s connected for people to then be able to get something that appeals to businesses as well. But we tend to as built small businesses rant and rave and stomp and jump up and down when, you know, we don’t have 50,000 people seeing our latest offer, or our latest special coming up for them to see and take advantage of we forget that businesses are largely boring to the average person. That way it was such an infinitesimally small part of their lives. Yeah. But because it’s a big part of our lives, we expect that everybody should see the business and the importance of that business the way that we do.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, absolutely. And it is, to that point, it is a danger that I’ve I’ve realized in myself when years ago, if you did a presentation know you had some thought leadership or anything like that, you’d put effort into it, you present it, and then you might get some actual feedback, like people actually talking to you, or even send me my feedback. And you’d sort of Oh, good, and then you did it. Right. And you do it again. Whereas now, you know, you stare at that post waiting for a like or according to like the which were a bit messed up. I think I think we sort of missed the point. And to, you know, what you’re saying there is if if the lens you’re using with social media, or particularly Facebook isn’t connection, it’s probably not going to work, you know, because it’s just not what people want to be there for.

Dante St James
That’s what we’re seeing right now on Facebook is we hadn’t really had these initial Halcyon Days where the business platform was sort of bolted onto it. And there was this immediate massive of posts coming in from businesses. What we don’t realize that while we as businesses thought that was amazing that we’re getting so much out of so much exposure out there. It was hell for the people on the platform who weren’t businesses because they were seeing nothing but ads, what they saw is ads coming through and flooding their feed. So it wasn’t long before Facebook about a year after that happened that Facebook had the really throttle that back because the users were in an uproar about basically all I’m seeing is these businesses I want to see interesting things fun things not you know, buy one get one free offers from the local shoe dispensary. It wasn’t really what people were on there for so that the halcyon days that businesses tend to refer back to were very short lived period of time where we basically had free rein of a platform that we weren’t paying for that we had no real right being there and we really had no idea what we were doing with it anyway.

Peita Diamantidis
No for sure. And so how do you have You see that and of course your lens is, you know, got an expert basis there. How do you see that differing say to Instagram or Tik Tok in terms of, I mean, I see a lot on Instagram say I haven’t yet really dove into Tik Tok, I see, like a lot of it secondhand, you know, it’ll be shared on another platform. I haven’t actually braved myself to go in, and I’m sure I should. But on Instagram, I can see people trying to do the connection thing, but it feels like actually, that’s not what the platform really is for anyway. And so maybe we’re forcing something on one platform, we should be you know, shifting our, the technique to back to Facebook for connection and Instagram. Something else is that

Dante St James
valid, very valid. In fact, there’s, there’s there’s a very big noticeable change happening in social media. Now, once upon a time, it was social networks, and there was media. And then at some point, those things were collapsed together to become this thing called social media. What we’re starting to see now in particular, and Tik Tok, and really be sort of given the credit for taking the lead here, they’ve taken the media side, taking it back out of social media again, and it’s become what we call creative media. Now, Instagram probably started that that trend where there was a tendency to create influencers and content that attracted a lot of people in to interact with it. But it wasn’t social networking. And Instagram is not really a social network. It’s more of a creative platform we’re creating go and create content that attracts people. But when you look at them, I have 50,000 followers, but they’ve only got two or three comments. So the actual social part of it is not really seeing that far. The same with with tick tock, you might say, Oh, yes, at 1.5 million people saw this, but only 36 People actually commented on it. So you see, there’s lots of media consumption happening, but no social networking, flick back to Facebook, what we’ll see is lots of people, when I post in my own profile to people who are not following me, but are a part of my life in some way, shape, or form, I’ll post something funny, and I’ll get 28 comments and, you know, 112 likes and all that, I go to my business page, and I’m lucky to get 36 people seeing it. Because what I’m doing personally to the people who I actually know who know me, they understand my sense of humor, they will respond to that, because that’s so Dante. But then I go and try and do something on a business page. And whilst I might have 1500 2000 people following on that business page, they’re not really on Facebook, to be following a business, they’re there to be falling friends, family, seeing the babies, seeing the grandkids, seeing the joining with other people in their local network to be able to find a good deal on a second hand dresser, that sort of thing. That’s not they’re not there to interact with my business.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah. Yeah. So okay, well, I think it’s really helpful. So listening, today, we’ll have a combination of maybe salaried staff, you know, so advisors or support staff that are salaried, then we’ll have, you know, practice owners, business owners, and even people as bit like me, I put myself sort of almost in the want to be content creators, speakers, you know, which is another sort of category almost on its own. So I guess I wanted to then talk about each of that user and for you, you know, how do they approach it differently? So it’s, it’s interesting, I’d love to start with the salaried staff member, because I think, mentally a lot of people in these roles, think they can’t be themselves professionally on social media, like they didn’t mean like, well, it’s just a tool that I catch up with my mates. And that’s valid based on what you’re saying that’s completely valid. But I’m curious to hear what you would say to somebody like that about, about the why they could utilize Facebook in terms of maybe clarifying, you know, who they are professionally and people getting to know them better in that context.

Dante St James
This is such a timely question. So I’m just before I came into this into this session, I’m actually in the middle of writing a blog post about the four things you should never post on social media. And it’s around that aisle, whole idea of salaried employees who are afraid to post anything on social media for fear that it’ll be read a certain way. And we see this really commonly on LinkedIn where, while someone may be more than willing to post the photos of the zucchini, they’re growing in their garden, or the sunset that they saw on the way home last night, or their holiday to Bali. And they feel completely comfortable doing that in a very public realm like Facebook, when it comes over to something like LinkedIn, they look at that and go, if I’ve got to post something, which is absolutely perfect, because if it’s not perfect, it’s not completely fact checked and not completely spot on in every single way. Everybody who I know is going to judge me, my entire workplace will judge me. In fact, if I post something on Instagram, I saw it on LinkedIn. Today, my entire all the people I work with here in this organization are gonna look at me and go, Who the hell do you think you are used to be posting this kind of thing? So this is the whole conversation that goes on inside everyone’s head every time they go, I want to step out and do something on particularly on LinkedIn is a real stigma to that. In fact, it’s 70. I think it’s something like 57% of all people on Facebook post regularly on Facebook. That’s less than 1% on LinkedIn. In so 100 million, but also people on LinkedIn, we’ve only got perhaps so few people actually posting anything because of that stigma that comes with posting to your peers to your network to your workmates.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah. And it’s, it’s so true. And what’s interesting is if you can on something like LinkedIn, LinkedIn, if you can post with, and I’d say, authenticity is such an overused word, let’s use sincerity. So it’s sincere, and, and a bit exposed. It actually gets far more traction, because it’s real, like and be like, yes, that’s exactly how I failed, you know, like, it’s, that’s the thing that people are commenting on and tagging other people. And because it’s once again, creating that, and and to be honest, it’s making us all feel a bit more normal. You know, and I think that’s the thing that LinkedIn, we’ve, we all, we all treat it like, that’s the most awkward networking event we’ve ever been to. Like. That’s, that’s sort of what it can feel like sometimes, right? Because we all suit up and we get zero sounds professional on us, you know, and it’s all brand new. So I think I take your point in that sense, that there’s more to do for lots of people on LinkedIn. Flipping that, if somebody’s in a role, what do you think could be some subtle ways they could be posting on Facebook that bring a tone of and it doesn’t even need to be their job? I guess it’s just about what they love about their work, or what they they enjoy about their industry, or even what frustrates them, is there a way you think people can approach that better,

Dante St James
there’s neutral topics they can get in there that don’t necessarily put forward an opinion? I think that’s the opinion part that people can often get a little bit scared off. Because what if I post an opinion, then then I get a pile on of people who just go, that’s not true. That’s not right. I disagree. And it’s either freeze and go, we want to do is look for those neutral topics that inform or entertain, or somehow educate people on something that they otherwise wouldn’t know. So if you’re in a practice, and you’re a salaried employee, and you want to post insights that have come from an industry report, where you’re saying interesting insights that have come up this week from a study by KPMG, into this, and they’re not necessarily adding their opinion to it, but they are presenting it as a trusted source of information. So not just that KPMG report being trusted source of information, but the employee themselves becomes a trusted source of information. Now, the sharing of stuff is not going to set the world on fire. It’s not going to attract hundreds and hundreds of comments. But it does, it does position you as somebody who traffics in good information, traffics in, well researched pieces, that things that are worth sharing, that may not be the most attention grabbing stuff, but it still has credibility, it’s authentic in that you are presenting it and you are adding maybe your words on it, where you may point to and say I’m particularly looking at point, point three A where I think it really impacts on the on the market within southeast Queensland. And then you can go forward and present something which customizes it somehow for your audience, neutral approach, no, no opinions in there. But you’re localizing it or somehow personalizing it down to the people that you would do what a reach? I think that’s probably the first place to go and find some sort of content. Yeah, so

Peita Diamantidis
that’s interesting. So that’s a sort of, almost curating or translating. I mean, I was just thinking that one angle you could take is, is, you know, you might be a junior advisor out there and and, Hey, there’s this thing that came out of the industry, you could you could do a post that sort of along the lines of, you know, if I, how would I walk my grand through the racing industry report on like, making it because you’re in a human platform, it’s about connection. So you need to create connection for your radio your audience to this awkward, potentially dull and confusing thing that you’re telling them about? So sort of humanizing probably important

Dante St James
that we’re you called curating. That’s the perfect is exactly what I’m saying. It’s taking some confusing, often, it may seem a relevant information to some people and making it relevant and less confusing. You’re almost like a pundit. You’re taking a piece of complex information, and bring it down to a level where somebody in the industry who doesn’t understand the intricacies of the terminology, or the jargon can work with that nice and easily.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, lovely. That’s really helpful. So then, if we flip that to business owner, let’s call them slash thought leader, if you started, you know, if your business owner you’re stuck in your posting on on social media anyway, really, then you’ve got to sort of consider yourself as putting forward views I guess that that’s when there is some opinion, I would, I would expect would start to filter through is that fair and a different sort of, that’s the different angle that most business owners would take.

Dante St James
A thought leader can’t be a thought leader without having thoughts. So it’s kind of comes with the territory and I had someone throw to me recently, it’s helped calling me a thought leader and I thought, well, actually, it might be kind of true because I am leading a following of people down a certain path. off. When it comes to that kind of thought leadership stuff as a business owner, or someone who is looking to develop a personal brand of sorts, where they wanted to be someone, you know, what we like to call a, a key person of influence, then you’re working with two kinds of very different content. There’s what we call the obvious content, which is stuff like, we, these days, we work too many hours, and it’s taking us away from our families. And I think that’s a bad thing, then that’s obvious who’s gonna disagree with that, like, no one’s gonna disagree with that, or something like, kids these days eat too much junk food, and it’s time to return to good wholesome food like we have when we were growing up. Mind you, there was no wholesome food on pause sausage rolls, and Sonny Boy ice blocks. But yeah, we’ve got to romanticize the soldier about the way we grew up. And if you’re doing that, no one’s gonna disagree that kids should be healthy eating healthy food. That’s what I call obvious content. It’s easy to agree with no one’s gonna disagree. The very agreeable platform that LinkedIn is, or the Facebook is we’ll come back as a year. Yeah, that’s great, we should go back to these old values, then there’s what I call the not so obvious content. And that’s the the content which says, Okay, I’m going to make a point of view here. That may also be unpopular. So it might be the thing is like the concept of work life balance is a scam. And here’s why. I explained that basically, work life balance is based around people who can afford work life balance, who work the government jobs, which work from 9am to 4:21pm. And they get 15,000 days of annual leave, and another 32,000 days of Flexi days, and they’ve got this structure in their lives, which supports the concept of work life balance, they have 30, people who can back them up when they go on leave. For me, as a solopreneur, as a, as a small business owner might have my own business now down to a company one, I don’t have those luxuries. So I have to go well, work life balance is a complete scam to me, because it has utterly irrelevant, what I would have instead is maybe what we call a blend. So there’s times when my work and my life do overlap with each other, I get the advantages of that, which means flexible working arrangements, flexible working hours, but I get the disadvantages of that. Which means that sometimes on a Sunday, I’m gonna have to pull out the computer and write a blog post. Well, I can you know, that’s an hour of my life, I’m sure I’m gonna be okay with that. So, so when you take that not so obvious, the more thoughtful approach to content where it’s, it’s speaking often from your lived experience, that’s the not so obvious content, the the it’s got insight to it, it’s got thought to it, it’s saying this to say, well, yes, while it might be right, for some people, it’s not right for others. So that’s where you have thought to lead with, rather than just repeating and regurgitate the same platitudes and the same, you know, work hard, and one day your dreams will come true. That’s obvious content. Everyone wants to agree with that, because we all want to believe that working hard leads to millions. But what people don’t necessarily want to agree with and may find confronting is actually sometimes you can work hard not get there. So here’s a few things I’ve got, which helped me to get there. That may actually help you to get there too.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah. Okay. And so that’s the sort of interesting element you when you originally mentioned about Facebook, you know, fun or interesting. And it’s doing that. And I guess the extreme of that, which I think probably doesn’t work is when somebody is just purely contrarian to get a reaction, which of course, doesn’t have that sincerity does it so it’s got to have some sincerity to it. You can rattle people’s cage a little, but it’s got to come from a real place whereas and you we’ve all seen them, you know, where some people just will just say what the opposite of what was going on and what really what’s the point you’re just trying to upset people now. It’s not

Dante St James
by watching parliament and watching the opposition. Basically, they not sort of come up with a with a policy of their own, but they’re just be contrarian because well, what they said we don’t agree with, and it’s a default position. And that kind of person, if they don’t balance it out with other useful content, say, for instance, something that I can teach something I can deliver as a list, something that I can something an observation I’ve made in life, or here’s a story of how I succeeded and here’s how I got there, that kind of thing, offsets so it’s contrarian posi can’t live on contrarian alone, because it actually works against you in terms of the sentiment analysis algorithms within both Facebook and LinkedIn. contrarian tends to be negative and attracts negative so if you’re always posting that sort of stuff you’re following or decrease your reach will decrease Facebook is like brutal with it. But um, LinkedIn these days is actually quite good with it too. I knew that after having too many contrary posts of mine in I think was July I had a massive dip in my in my reach back and when all I did three contrarian posts that week, I was I was a little negative that week, maybe I’m gonna I’m gonna I’m gonna rest the negative for a couple of weeks, come back with some more uplifting and more inspirational stuff. And sure enough, the reach caught back up again. And now what I can do is have one contrarian post a week, which generally is my most followed and most reacted to thing But not because it’s contrary but because it’s it stands out amongst all the other stuff that I’m doing.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah. And I guess that’s a, that sort of leads into the next thing which is, is obvious, but I feel like most of us, and I’ll put myself in this category to just don’t listen to ourselves. We know that when we’re on something like Facebook, it irritates the living daylights out of us when it feels like it’s ads. Right? And I don’t mean actual ads. I mean, there’s actual ads, and that’s one thing. But then when somebody we know, post something that feels like an ad, and we get irritated, or we always skip it, right, because we’re also chain, trying to just ignore it. I mean, we literally, I think our eyeballs sort of turn off, you know, no, not for me. So I’m imagining that something else that you’d you’d sort of suggest is we is almost, you know, too much polish is not necessarily a good thing.

Dante St James
We all know that, that that friend of ours is suddenly joined a network marketing scheme. And next thing, though, like, out of nowhere, all of a sudden, they’re like, I’m working from home and being a boss, mom, and it’s the change my life. And here’s why. And you can do it too. And you’re like, Jennifer, last week, you posted a photo you’re drinking out of a goodie bag. Like honestly, this is not, this is not who we expected you to be like, Who is this person? When it looks like it’s it’s contrived, when it’s doesn’t feel natural. When it doesn’t come from the heart. It doesn’t come from a level of authenticity or sincerity, which is a great term that it doesn’t seem sincere, it’s not really you. It’s gonna look like an ad. And you’re right, we are trained ourselves. But from 25 years of banner ads on websites, we ignore them, we don’t even see them anymore. When asked if Yeah, if you saw that Jetstar ad on the news.com. Today, you website and you don’t remember it, because you literally just filtered, we’ve got a filter. Now, attention filters exist so heavily in that as my ads have to become much more in your face. They’re now disguised as content. In the case of tick tock, for instance, you cannot tell the difference between a tick tock and an ad which will become against them that actually, they’re going to have issues with that with when it comes to consumer law coming up. But they’re not going to get away with it forever. When you can’t tell the difference between the two when you’re listening to the radio, and you don’t know when you’ve gone from an ad into a song or a song into a into a presentation or a talkback segment and into an ad. There’s problems there that’s got real issues. So we as consumers now have taught ourselves how to filter out ads. So if our ads and our content are too close to each other, we then filter out all the content, and we see the things which is clearly not ad related.

Peita Diamantidis
And in you’ve got to like really think about this listeners because I mean, I’m thinking of those ads, I think they’re generally about products in like pharmacies and things, you know, when they’re talking about too, and they pretend, I’m assuming it’s pretend, but maybe it’s even a real consumer and you’re asking them questions, and they love the product. It’s clearly an ad, like we this is not live where they’ve, you know, seconded, some poor person just trying to do their shopping, you can tell because they all look too light, nice. Nobody looks at nice when they’re doing this. We’re all got tracky decks on and you know, it looks. So you know, it’s clearly an ad and they trying to trick us into that. And we sort of need to have, what I’m hearing is apply that filter to what we put forward is really is this an ad? Like, are you trying to be tricky, but actually, all right, I was gonna go up and the person scrolling is going to scroll up astray pastic because that filter rule will kick in,

Dante St James
we find that boomers grew up in an era of very heavily scripted television ads. We Generation X myself, we grew up in a in an era of radio advertising, which was very formulaic and the way it approached what we’ve done, the way we think we need to promote a product or a service is taken from an era that that really doesn’t exist anymore. The best at this game now is generation Zed, who date they just know what they can they can promote something, but it’s so much like content and so interesting that that because of digital natives they didn’t have the benefit I guess of us growing up with terrible cinema or advertising, awful local television ads, even worse slice of life radio things such as, Hey, Karen, I’m going off to the beach this weekend. Gee, I wish I had an umbrella. Well Susan, I know where you can buy an umbrella from it’s from umbrellas are us like they didn’t have that kind of stuff to brag on that we tend to fall back on so they’ve come up with new creative ways to communicate which are commercial in their very nature but are so well done that you wouldn’t even know there was a product being pushed until you find yourself in the supermarket buying the product and go Why am I just bought that?

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, yeah. And I guess that’s part of that you know that learning that over time is why I’ve started to I find myself over reacting negatively to any of the any of the perfume or you know any of those ads because it’s just so manufactured like it just like they it’s clearly art, like credit to all the clever creatives involved in the thing like it’s clearly hard, but it in no way appeals to me. And it doesn’t connect at all. I’m waiting for somebody to do a real ad about you know, like, I want to see you really understand your consumer. Now I guess it’s because that product is aspirational. And you don’t really have to listen to something like the GRU. And sure one of them would say, but what they’re trying to do is make it something you aspire to do. And it’s like, Yeah, but that probably means I don’t aspire to be any of them. So the, you know, really thinking like, an anti advertiser, you know, like trying not to be that sounds like a great lesson, then for any of the listeners, if you’ve never watched the grown on ABC, yes, then it’s worth, it’s really worth watching and couple of those episodes, because they talk about this stuff in detail from the advertisers perspective. And when you hear how clever those people are, I think it’ll start to fine tune your own view of how you might post, you know, on something like Facebook, because it certainly made me more aware, that’s for sure.

Dante St James
There’s a quote I came across yesterday during a webinar I was watching, which was from a very, very successful advertising executive. And in the US, it stated that, that social media is more about sociology and psychology than it is about technology. And the think about that, that’s that’s what social media advertising any sort of promotions and marketing is, is sociology and psychology, Neuro Linguistic Programming, various ways of trying to hypnotize people into into wanting to be interested in a product they otherwise wouldn’t be interested in.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, yeah, for sure. Which he explains, but we all react so violently when it sort of doesn’t, doesn’t meet that and that authenticity thing isn’t met. Now, in terms of somebody who’s like they’re on the platform. I mean, I’m assuming most I mean, my husband isn’t. He’s very proud of the fact he’s not on social media. But he’s one of those. He’s one of those people, you know, got an Xbox. But you know, they’re on there. I’m betting that, you know, if you were going to go to give them a tech tip, one of the first things you tell people is to protect themselves on platforms like Facebook. Yeah, I

Dante St James
would say go in there with intent, don’t just go into photos into social media, just because it’s what everyone’s doing. You go in there with intent, what do I wish to achieve by being in here, if it’s to be connected to my friends who live in far off places, then realize then that there’s there’s, there’s a way of setting up your Facebook particular, which keeps you within that circle, but doesn’t expose you to other people that you don’t want to be exposed to, there’s privacy settings in Facebook, that allow you to post things that are only visible to your friends, or to one friend, or to just a small group of friends. It’s when we post very publicly out to everybody that we find that every time that you can, Harry that we didn’t want to speak to suddenly becomes part of this conversation. And we feel like our privacy has been violated and we shut down and we want to hashtag delete Facebook, and you get really shocked by it, mainly because we’ve gone in there with no intention. We’ve just gone in there blindly. Just okay, I’m going to share this with my friends, when we don’t realize that there’s so much more to that than just posting suddenly there’s privacy settings, all those sorts of things to do.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, and you’re right. I think, particularly if you’ve been on the platform for a long time, you’ve probably forgotten about some of that stuff. I mean, the other one that I’ve become really aware of, is the sort of second factor authentication, you know, the these accounts are constantly hacked, constantly. And so if nothing else, after this podcast episode, please would you set up second factor authentication, because I’m sure Dante you must have, you know, horrible towels of people that haven’t done that. And I’ve lost all of that hard work of connecting with the audience. Really, single

Dante St James
week, I’m sent at least 30 people are referred to me to try and help them I can’t help them. I don’t work for Facebook directly. I’m not an employee. I’m a contracted trainer for them. So I don’t have I have contacts within Facebook, but not within not where people can unlock a locked account. Right. We’ve got to realize that cybersecurity in all cases on all platforms, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Gmail, is our responsibility. It’s not Google’s responsibility to protect your password. You have to do that. And then the the fact is that 97% of all cybersecurity incidents that happen on something like Facebook, start with email. So if you’ve got a Gmail account, that’s got the name of your daughter plus the year of her birth is the password, which is so common or the name your dog and the year of the got them or something like that. Family members, anything that could someone can look at your desk at work and go, that’s broke, and broke. Looks like she’s about 16. So let’s just say it’s this year, and then they come up with that they can just reverse engineer it. Yeah, most passwords are really poorly done. I’ve actually come across a client whose password was password 1230. And then they wondered why they got hacked, but I’ve got a password with numbers in it and I but it’s also the single most common ly hacked password on the planet. We’ve been harping on about cybersecurity for 25 years now. Surely that message has got through to you somehow, but no, because it’s convenient, the same password on everything. They get into one thing, they go into everything. And it’s not Facebook’s responsibility to save you Your business page because you have poor cyber hygiene habits, your responsibility, and then whinging and complaining about Google not helping you out, or they just hate people, their enemy of small business. That’s your stupidity. That is not the his, but it’s not their responsibility. Because the other

Peita Diamantidis
thing is, I think, you know, well, in our industry, particularly as you can imagine, in finance, I mean, cyber has all sorts of, of impacts and horrible out potential outcomes. And so it is something that’s, that’s really at the full, but this is one of those things that super easy to fix folks, like this is a very quick mobile number, you’ll get a text message to confirm the whatever like that second factor authentication stuff is super easy to do. It can and I’m assuming that’s a massive barrier, you know, that’s the thing that just sort of, is the big snarling dog in your front yard, that can defend you against, you know, at least a significant portion of of what somebody might try and do to get to your account.

Dante St James
second factor of authentication will cut your cyber footprint for for hackers be able to get you like 87%, just that one thing. It’s an 87% less chance of you ever being troubled by anyone trying to break in just that one thing. It’s amazing.

Peita Diamantidis
So let’s do that one thing. So listeners, a please, you now have homework from this pot. Oh, sorry about that. I’ve not done that to any of you before. But you’ve got that homework, please, please, please do that. I am curious. You know, and this is, you know, advice tech as a podcast. I’m curious on the tech element. Are there any of the tech features of Facebook that you feel don’t get used much that should like people just aren’t turning on or off for applying these fields? Like, is there any or that that you feel that people could dig a bit more into,

Dante St James
I think one of the most underutilized features of Facebook ad happen to be the business suite still. So as part of the the management of say, a business page business suite is this tool that not only allows you to sort of see the way your business and run ads and things like that, but it’s also a place for you to go in to see how your posts have performed this wonderful place it goes every single post you’ve done. Now, why would you want to go and do that? Well, number one, see what’s worked. If there’s things that have worked, then you can double down and do those again, and do it again, okay, that’s working and clearly, consistently do more of that, then you could also do the opposite, see the things that aren’t working and go, Well, let’s not waste our energy on doing that. So that’s one thing that takes away, you need to go into business page insights, and it puts it in one place. The second thing is, it allows you to post to both Facebook page and Instagram at the same time. Okay, you can then put it in, you can adjust them, it gives you what we call optimal times with which you can post in my case is just about always 630 or 7pm. On Facebook, and the minute that I started taking that advice, my Facebook reach went up by about 30%. So I immediately started reaching more people. Unfortunately, using that time on LinkedIn was completely opposite, though. I tried to do that at 737 o’clock at night, and everybody’s on LinkedIn, they’re on Facebook, in front of the TV, not LinkedIn, in front of the TV. So you gotta be careful. You don’t take that advice for every platform just for Facebook and Instagram. But that’s those two features alone are an efficiency relief. Yes,

Peita Diamantidis
and I because one of the questions I did want to cover, which was sort of in the integration category, but really, it’s about automation of posts, or making things a bit easier, but it sounds like, you know, within the platform itself, we’ve already got a tool that can help with that. So, you know, for some of you who haven’t yet got something that pushes out posts that you can sort of load up all of the stuff you may have at your fingertips and never realized that you could just use something like the business suite. Is that valid?

Dante St James
Yeah, absolutely. Now, that then in case it only does Facebook and Instagram or won’t do Pinterest, or Twitter or LinkedIn, there are other systems that I use to do that, they will post out to all those different places. What it does do though, it’s just gives you a much more in depth look at it, recommending a time and a day to post, you can change in the one place you can go this is what I wanted to say on Facebook, this is what I wanted to say on Instagram. So you may have Instagram has hashtags. Facebook doesn’t. You may go I want to be this version. You can run a B tests. So for instance, you can pay sir, have a photo with a pink background and one with a purple background. And we’ll test them and I’ll tell you, what was the most successful one, what’s the one that people appealed to? So these kinds of tools are just all in there. There’s not really been used?

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, okay. And that’s really interesting, because I think there’s a lot about it, let’s broadly call it marketing, you know, on the web, and that covers all sorts of things where we get told things, and we all nod. But I think sometimes you’ve got to learn the hard way. So for me, I mean, I can see myself now doing thinking about doing an A B test where one post has a video of me talking through it with subtitles and the other one is just the words and just literally seeing for myself what difference does that make? You know cuz I think we all we will get told, you know, videos away. Yeah, but maybe we just need to find out for ourselves, maybe we just need to do that test.

Dante St James
The other thing is that video is not always the best, right I post a video post on LinkedIn and it gets nowhere near the reach of what I do if I do just a written post on LinkedIn, on Facebook. On the other hand, video definitely surpasses written text as as as a as a means of getting things out there. There’s only one formula in social media, everyone keeps thinking, oh, I need the tip, I need the trick. I need that the framework and so now there’s one, there’s one rule on social media, try it. Just try it, see if it works. If it doesn’t, don’t do that, again, if it does work, do it again. Yeah, fantastic only rule in social media.

Peita Diamantidis
And I think that is probably what holds in our industry. I think what holds us back is a whole lot of investigation and analysis. I mean, I’m definitely, definitely do this analysis and compare anywhere and then but actually, that whole time we’re doing all of that we’re not posting. So you’re not connecting, you know, and it’s like, oh, doofus gotta, like better to post, like you said, even without it being perfect, and be taking a look at what respond to doing the IB test. I mean, that to me is a great mission. For those you know, the listeners is to start taking a look at those tools, they right there. And the fact that it’s embedded in the platform means I’m assuming it’s super easy to use, you know, generally when they’re like that it’s not overly complicated. It doesn’t require you to do a whole lot of tricky things. So that’s really valuable.

Dante St James
I think we’re financial services particularly get very caught up as they go. If I take say something, it’s not true, I’m going to be crucified. And whilst that is true, you’ll be crucified. The differences stick to that neutral content, don’t do anything that’s construed as financial advice, don’t do anything, that’s all the things you would not do anywhere else in your work. Don’t do them on social media, what you do is take the best of what you can do, they’re the insights Industry Insights, the the the case studies where you can speak of a client without identifying of a specific circumstance, you went through the doesn’t identify them, make sure the privacy is intact, all the same rules, you follow every other part of your work, bring that to social media, but your personal lived experience that goes alongside that story. And that story is such a part of social media that really matters. That’s the stuff that’s going to set you apart from one person taking a piece of information from Deloitte and another person taking information from Deloitte. It’s the story you tell with it, that will make all the difference.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, absolutely. And that’s true of anything, any messaging. You know, it’s the story is key. Now, I am curious about whether you have got any insight into what’s down the track, you know, what’s coming? What can you see evolving on a platform like Facebook? You know, I’m, I’m curious to ask you about meta, and the metaverse, I’m a little afraid of what could dive into, because I truly haven’t had time to invest in thinking that through but I am curious about what you think about all of those developments and where Facebook’s heading.

Dante St James
So I think that that’s splitting between we were talking before the social media being split more towards social networking, and then create a media that will continue to go down that path. Now Facebook knows that creative media, the TIC tock of occasion of video is great for an audience and then they’re pushing a lot of that through Facebook and Instagram at the moment, but I think they’ll find is that we’ll find our thing on Facebook. Now no matter what Facebook tries to push. As far as as a priority, we the people will find what we want to do with it. We’re already so invested in the platform, it’s such a part of our lives, particularly mums, mums are just so so invested in it because that’s where the information was school comes from. That’s where the playgroup information comes from. That’s where the community groups are. That’s where all her friends who are doing work from home businesses are all from as well. They’re all in Facebook groups, so that the group’s part of Facebook is becoming more and more important all the time, we’ve now got the paid group, so you can join, you’ve got paid live video that can be put on there. So if you want to connect with people who are in a business sense, you can do that. That return to we’re already seeing two or two major returns come to Facebook, which take us back to back in back in time, is that the the business page is back, suddenly, business pages are getting a little bit more reach than what they were Now not every page, not every post, what we’re finding is that really well put together relevant storytelling posts that hit an emotional need, or they answer a question. They’re generally helpful things that are helpful to other people, those things are starting to just add a little bit more reach again, then coming back again. So there’s a swing back to that quality content again. And what we’re seeing too is the splitting of the feeds that’s coming to Facebook very shortly, where there’s gonna be a feed which is it’s called like a discovery feed. So here’s the things we know you know, and love, but we’re gonna throw in their thing. things that we think you’re going to be loving next. So you’re going to see a bit like on Instagram, right? Not just seeing the stuff you’re following, you’re seeing even more interesting stuff who’s going to be interested in? Okay, yeah, and of course, most of that content is gonna be reels and video. So get ready for that, because that’s coming. But then also be another feed which can switch to which is the chronological feed. And the chronological feed is, everything is the firehose that’s coming down. So you can switch between them, it’ll always default back to the discovery fee, because that’s where all the good stuff is. I’m already on that particular version of Facebook now. And they can tell you what, I switched back to the chronological feed once. And I got back off at the end, because it was so boring. But I wanted to go back to the discovery phase, because it had all the interesting stuff on there. It’s like it took out all that boring stuff for the people who I know and love, God bless them, that they’re boring, don’t want to see this stuff. And it brought me all the stuff I really do want to see. So that’s that’s sort of what you’re gonna see a lot more of Instagram and Facebook particularly.

Peita Diamantidis
And I think your point there is why groups work so well, because I so I’m actually in a in a couple of groups that are author groups. So it’s for people who love a particular authors books, then they were clearly all started by the people who love the books, not the author, most of them, right. And these people are insane. It’s fantastic. And because there’s so many of them in the group, the feed can be quite like there’s a lot of variety, there’s themes, and there’s a tone. But to be honest, it’s it’s really interesting, how supportive these strangers are with each other, because they’ve got that connected thing they love, you know, and so, that’s another example of that, well, I don’t know them directly, but because I’m in that group, you know, I’m going to be a part of all of that information, all those posts. And so, yeah, there’s a there’s probably a shift the way we need to consider connection to you know, it’s not necessarily one to one as much as much as shared interest, you know, affinities. Yeah, affinity is absolutely and

Dante St James
as I am my fellow card carrying members of the Catherine Kim appreciation society can attest, we’ve got friends and relationships were developed in there over a number of years now of people who we just share this common love of Katherine Kim. And that is made is over a united and we spoke Catherine Kim isms in everyday life, we bring that into the group. And it makes us smile, it makes us laugh. And because of all that, and the way we interact, it comes up a lot on our feeds. So we’re constantly then doing that. And I think that that group factor, it’s been the great success story of Facebook has been groups and Messenger. There have been two things that have really been the big successes at Facebook.

Peita Diamantidis
Fantastic. And your How do you feel about metaverse? Are you?

Dante St James
Oh, no, not yet. I’m not yet but I’ve seen the whispers of the next star Oculus or not, they call it not Oculus quest. It’s gonna be called meta quest, meta quest Pro. So I recently was in Sydney for training with Facebook. And we got to play with the meta quest headset, where the quest to and I particularly the app that I chose to go to was the National Geographic ABA took you to Machu Picchu. And so you’re in Machu Picchu and you’re immersed in this environment looking around, there’s butterflies going by and you’re actually following things and there’s a bird swoops down, you follow it and and then you look over the edge, you get the vertigo you’ll get if you’re looking over a cliff edge. Whoa, okay, so the difference was that everything I wanted to do was screaming in me to walk forward. You got limitations in physical space that you can walk forward, but you literally feel like you can walk forward. The platform teaches you more about using upper body because using controllers, right so that interact, pick things up and throw them in the metaverse. So you’re able to interact with your environment so much more than if you’re just watching it on a screen. That to me was a killer feature. And I will be buying the next iteration of the medic quest goggles. When they come out in I think, October, late October. They’re coming out. Okay. So I’ll put aside money I’m going to buy I know how much they’re going to be. But they’re going to be in my room. Because I’ve now looked at it experiencing gone. It’s now ready to be something of interest to me. The Metaverse itself in terms of if anyone’s seen the movie Ready Player One that’s kind of like the nth degree of what the the metaverse can be. It’s an alternative world where you can interact you can be educated in there. It doesn’t matter where you are, you can access whatever you want. And in an interactive environment, which is all sensory there in suits, body suits, which have got haptic feedback, you feel things, you feel pain, you feel pleasure, that kind of thing. That’s a decade or more away. That sort of stuff doesn’t exist yet. And it’s, it’s people are thinking that Facebook is building the metaverse and that’s not the case at all. It’s you and I will build the metaverse, so it won’t be something which is appropriate for us to be putting our businesses on and and doing our webinars on until it’s as easy as setting up a Facebook page once the tools are built that help us to enable our presences in that metaverse. That’s when it becomes a significant part. Don’t expect any of that for the next few years like this of three to five years away before we really start to look at that and go now I see some value in this St. For now, it’s early adopters and people who like to play virtual games.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, I guess though, you know, for people, particularly probably with your own business, then the thing they could be doing is just experiencing it, you know, getting the like, actually just going in as a user. So you understand from a user perspective perspective for the next few years, because, and really think about what that experience is like, I mean, the National, your geographic example is perfect. They have enhanced your experience from you being in your living room into you being Machu Picchu. Like that’s an enhanced experience. I think the struggle we have in finance is often what we try and do with things. And let’s call it virtual reality for one of a better expression is we create exactly the same doll experience in virtual reality. No, no, this is meant to be outside your world. This is meant to be beyond something you could imagine, you know. So just making it 3d is not what these tools are for. So maybe just using them and really sort of thinking that through it, like really analyzing your own experience of something like that, I think is the way for us to be ready. down the track. You know, when maybe it’ll be something we can participate in.

Dante St James
I’ll pull it back to something even more simple. Today, create your Facebook pages, interact on your Facebook groups, create content for for Instagram, all those things will have a pathway that goes across to the metaverse so they won’t be the equivalent of a Facebook page in the metaverse, there’ll be a Facebook group equivalent in the metaverse, those things will lead to each other. So if you’re doing it with today’s tools, double down on today’s tools, because there will be pathways and migration paths that take it from the flat screen experience to the immersive experience. So get today’s tools right, participate in today’s economy, then then you’ll be ready to participate in tomorrow’s.

Peita Diamantidis
I love it. Is there anything we’ve missed? Is this some gems that we should have covered?

Dante St James
I think we’ve covered the metaverse, which is pretty happy to cover that’s the one which I get a lot of questions about. But people still walk away and go, I’d still don’t know what you’re talking about. I’d say then the other thing would be to messaging is the great other area. And I think customer service when it comes to dealing with clients and secure protocols, things like WhatsApp, which is an encrypted end to end chat service, those things, be ready for the fact that not all your clients are gonna want to come and see you, not all your clients are necessarily going to want to hop on a zoom call, they may want to deal with you where they’re at. And that happens to be in a Facebook page, they want to be able to contact you and call you through your Facebook page, allow them to do that. I don’t think we I don’t think we do anyone any favors. When we force people into our funnels, we force people into the way that we want to be contacted, particularly if you’re a customer centric organization, let people contact you the way they want to contact you not looking down this hole, like oh, I can’t stand email because I’m on the job site and other than through the email to bad mate, you get a better way of dealing with it. Because people will not contact you, if they can’t contact you the way that they want to contact you.

Peita Diamantidis
That’s natural to them. And all that means folks is is putting up the procedures in place for your business that handles those as they come in. That’s all it is. It’s just It’s just like having somebody that makes you make sure what answers the phone, it’s just another phone. You know, instead of viewing it that way, and having a procedure, having somebody looks after it, you know, it’s just another another channel. Well, that’s been fantastic. Thank you so much Dante, if you’d like to find out more about this wonderful gentleman and how we can assist, insist you in particularly you know your small business, then we’re going to include his website, link in the show notes, don’t he’s got a great weekly email that he sends out that’s got all sorts of useful nuggets in it. So I’d encourage you to subscribe for that. We’ll also include his LinkedIn profile in the show notes. And thank you so much. I think we’ve covered all sorts of things. And don’t forget, folks, second factor authentication, please go and do that. And I spoke again, you will thank us later.

Dante St James
Thanks, Peter, I really appreciate the chance to bring this to a new audience I normally wouldn’t reach. So thank you so much for those who do tune in and get that advice. But yes, second factor authentication, just do that one thing and you’ll be Yeah. And now angel will be given their wings.

Peita Diamantidis
So do you use Facebook from a professional perspective? You know, you’re one of those people that sort of keeps it only for personal interactions? You know, is there some of what we talked about today that sort of prompted some thoughts or maybe you disagree entirely, no matter what you think, please share your insights on the x y platform. As you know, I’d love to hear your take. We all have different perspectives on these things. And of course, anything that you’ve experienced in the way you’ve posted on Facebook or the way you’ve utilized the tool He is always going to be helpful to your fellow advisors and bionic advisors. Now in terms of my thoughts that you’ve heard us say a couple of times, but you know what, I’m gonna say it again, please, please, please, please pretty, please set up that second factor authentication on your socials, do it, the minute you turn, you finish this episode, please get just get that set up. It’s a way to both protect you from being hacked, but also protect your audience or your community, from hearing from somebody that isn’t you. And there’s nothing more distressing than that. So please do that. The other thing I’d say is that we sort of need to sometimes we need to shift the lens, we have over something, I think, you know, Facebook can be viewed as something that’s old school, you know, it’s, it’s, you know, it’s not the up and coming thing. And, and that’s probably correct. But, you know, as Dante was saying, it’s still used a lot. And for certain people, it’s deeply used, I mean, their whole life can be an interaction through Facebook. So, you know, sometimes we need to change the lens over something and understand where our clients or the clients were looking for, where they might be living. And for many of them, that will be Facebook, and don’t underrate the older demographic, lots of them are on Facebook, because that’s how they connect with their grandkids. So, so please, you know, Chang take that lens off, don’t make an assumption that, you know, as data says, experiment a little, and really think about, you know, the way you can connect on a tool like this, you know, make it fun, make it interesting. share a bit of yourself, you know, you’re sure curate something that’s from our industry, but give it your take, give it your sense of humor, or give it you know, a lens through, maybe you know why your kids would think about this or the way your partner or your best mate who’s, you know, maybe like me, you know, my husband’s a cabinet, what would he think of that report, you know, so let’s give, you know, some humanity back to the way that we talk about what we do, and the help that we give the public. Now, you know, I often get asked what it takes to become a bionic advisor, or at least to be sort of as immersed in tech and what’s out there, as you know, I am and I give the same answer every time. It’s just curiosity. We’ve just got to be curious. And don’t I reinforce this, give it a try, just see what you can do. So to really develop those curiosity, muscle muscles or a little bit further, as you know, if you’ve been listening to the pod for a little while, each week, I’m going to bring up just a little groovy app that I think or website I think you could could take a look at, give it a bit of a looky loo, and see if it prompts any thoughts for you now for this week’s curiosity corner. I’d love you to check out answer the public, you can find it at answer the public.com. Now their tagline is discover what people are asking about online. Now, this is really interesting. This website listens into autocomplete data from search engines like Google meaning, when you type in as you start typing into Google, you’ll notice it’s sort of try and preempt what you’re going to fill out. And that’s based on what other people have searched. So it listens to that, and then quickly cranks out, you know, every useful phrase and question people are asking around a particular key word you give it right? This is a goldmine of consumer insight, right? You can get, you can start to create fresh, really ultra useful content. Remember, that’s what we’ve got to try and do more of, on whether it’s a product or a service or anything you’re doing. And it’ll be on a topic that the customers really want right? Now, you know, there’s something like I don’t know 3 billion Google searches every day. But interestingly, 20% of those have never been seen before. So this sort of tool is like a sort of direct line to what your customers are thinking. So I went on the tool and to the public.com, and just typed in as a key word or words, life insurance. Now, what’s interesting is it gives you over 200 phrases that appear. Now, you know, one of the phrases was our life insurance policies worth it. Another popular one was life insurance for moms, or life insurance versus savings accounts. So this is what people are literally googling to find out more about life insurance. So instead of wondering what people want, we could just start with what they’re already asking for, you know, pick your topic of interest, or your niche. And you could come up with a massive list of content ideas just from a free tool, like answer the public, so check it out, and I’d love to know what you think. Well, that’s all we’ve got for this week. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast so you’ll get your advice tech fix automatically sent to you each Friday. And if you’d like a speaker at your next event to brief your audience on the seven habits of bionic advisors and the secrets to tech powered, human centric advice, then please reach out to me on LinkedIn forward slash Peter M D, that P e i, t a n d. And if you think you’d love to have me speak at an event you attend, then please feel free to let me know and I’ll happily reach out to them and see if they’d love to have we come and present on the habits of bionic advisors. Otherwise, I’ll look forward to turning up in your earbuds next week. And remember advice explorers Stay curious.