Live social media sessions are the best possible use of your marketing time for so many reasons. You can repurpose them You connect in real time with those interested in you and your topic You learn from the questions and from the topic Your platform algorithm will reward you for doing it You gain confidence every time you do it But, if you don’t plan what you’re going to talk about based on your followers, fans, and prospects asking, What’s in it for me? You could be wasting your time. Social media lives that feel like a blind date may not hold enough attraction to get me there.  Live Social Media Strategy Are you asking people to show up for live social media sessions without giving them a reason to show up for lives? If you’re Jillian Michaels, the president of Lifetime Fitness, or CEO of Club Industry… maybe you’ll get lots of people showing up because you announce you’re going live at a date and time. But if you haven’t got a lot of followers, established a reason why you, or a topic that is JUICY, or given a call-to-action beyond “this is free, you should come” then you’re making a cardinal mistake. Sharing that you’re going live with your email list will help, if they’re also on that platform. It will get more of your buyers there and that will help tell the platform to show your content to more people like them. But if your buyers aren’t on that platform – aka – big mistake to try to use Instagram as your number one platform if your current customers aren’t using it as their ideal platform yet. Be Careful Sending Customers Backward Without a Plan Why spend time and energy promoting a social media platform? When they’re already your customers? I’d say that’s a silly waste of time when you’d want to be thinking about how you upsell those people and keep them busy doing your program instead of taking them back to a relationship on social. Now if they’re there…. Great. But you want to be giving your paying customers more exclusive material, more step-by-step systems to reach success. Tell them what’s in it for them. It's all they care about. What will you teach? What will they learn? What will you share? In fact, when I do monthly webinars for my customers that’s exactly how I lay out the content on the page. My team requests that content, I add it to the form we’ve created and they’ve got the layout and system down. I’ve been doing webinars monthly for 6 years and before that for 2 years I did them weekly… yes, weekly. And I do a separate one for my membership. That’s a crazy amount of practice. And that’s only one arm of my business. When you add the fitness pros master classes I do onto that? I’ve done close to 300 live master classes. Easy Entry with Live Social Media You don’t have any barrier with social media like you do with webinars. You don’t need to use zoom or gotowebinar or be comfortable with them. But you do absolutely want to be as organized as if you were doing a masterclass/webinar. This is your first date. A blind date. The question you have to answer is, will there be a second date? Use a Proven Model Take a look at any syllabus from a course – university or CEC – it doesn’t matter. Or the “blurb” used to advertise a course at a conference or a program you signed up for. That detail is important… if it got you to sign up, it’s likely got some good strategy. It offered and teased some good content. Now, who knows whether the content was GOOD. The point is the marketing was good. Good enough to get you to invest time and money and energy in doing it. Most of the things you and I are going to choose to spend time on we’ll make decisions based on level of importance. And maybe convenience. So, if I see you’re live and happen to be following you, I might check it out for a few seconds – yes, a few seconds. (that’s another podcast… about getting on and getting started ASAP – no chit chat) But if you go to the effort – and you should – of promoting a “live” at a certain day and time, then you want to make