Choosing Your Channel

How much thought did you put into choosing your channel when you dove into the social media scene?

I’ve been thinking about all the social media noise, and all the different places that you can go to use social media like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, WhatsApp, YouTube, Periscope, Meerkat, and Facebook Live. Or you can blog, or write for the Huffington Post, Medium, Entrepreneur.com, BusinessInsider.com, Tumblr…you name it!

There are so many different ways to market your content, it raises the question…

How do you go about choosing your channel?

Watch Facebook Live Replay – Choosing Your Channel

When you go to the gym, you don’t walk over to the leg machine and do one rep of legs, and then walk over and do one bicep curl, followed by one abs crunch, and then get on the treadmill for 1-minute. You don’t change like that.

You do one thing, you do it well, and then you repeat it a few times before moving on to the next thing…if you expect to get any results.

I started to think about my own social media, and what channel do I want to commit to:

Do I want to go back to Periscope?

Do I want to keep doing Shop Talk videos?

Do I want to do Facebook Live?

What channel matters the most to me?

I’ve always been a believer that when you focus on one thing, and you do that one thing really well, you can make a significant difference. I’m refining my own focus and choosing the right channel for me.

The channel that I’m choosing is Facebook Live.

The way I get to interact with people on Facebook has helped make my choice. In addition to my personal profile, I have a Facebook business page, a closed group for the paid members of the Pilot To Profit Success System, and a Facebook group called Profit Primer where people talk about business and support each other in our entrepreneurial goals.

I’ve decided to put my stake in the ground on Facebook and to use Facebook Live as a way to connect directly with people. I’ve also decided that I’m going to keep track of this journey over the course of the next year. The plan is to learn everything and anything that there is to know about Facebook Live. I want this to be my channel, my space, and my spot where I get to connect with people. I also want to encourage you to pick a channel.

When choosing your channel on social media you need to consider where your audience has chosen to be AND how much you enjoy that social network yourself.

Maybe it’s not live stream video for you. Maybe you like pre-recorded video that you can upload to YouTube or Facebook. Maybe you prefer to write and blogging is your thing, or you like to talk making podcasting perfect for you. Consciously choosing your channel means picking the one that resonates the most with you, and then sticking with it.

Let’s take a closer look at picking a channel where your audience is – if you’re trying to target older people on Snapchat, you might have a problem because you won’t find many of them there. But, if you’re trying to reach kids who are going to eventually be responsible for taking care of their aging parents, then Snapchat might be the perfect place for you. You may need to think creatively about who it is you need to target, and where you’d like to be, in order to be most effective.

I find it a heck of a lot easier to talk than I do to write. Even though I can write, my preference is to speak, and so that’s why I’m choosing Facebook Live as my channel. I want you to think about, “What channel do you want?”

With this choice, I’m also setting an intention that I want to speak on this topic at Social Media World 2017; I’m coming for you Michael Stelzner!

I want to speak about choosing the channel, sticking with the channel, and this experiment that I am going to do over the next year to move Facebook Live into a core part of my marketing strategy.

When you are everywhere, when you use spray and pray marketing, when you are trying to be all things to all people in all places, you dilute your impact.

I want you to think about where you can make the strongest impact and connect with the most people. You cannot convey your message without connecting with your community, so where are those people hanging out and what are you doing to connect with them? What channel is the best channel for you? Maybe you don’t know. Maybe you need to think about it, but I’m choosing. I’m choosing this channel and I’m sticking with it.

I am committing to doing Facebook Live regularly. I won’t be doing them on the weekend, but Monday to Friday you can expect to hear from me on something. It may be related to business, or Facebook, or some other social network, but I’ve chosen my channel so it will be happening on Facebook Live.

What are your thoughts about choosing your channel? Do you feeling overwhelmed by what you’re currently doing or by the options that exist?

There are so many places that you can market your stuff that it can make your head spin! Even I was starting to feel a little overwhelmed when I thought, “I need to do some Shop Talk videos. I need to create some blog content. I need to spend more time on Twitter and on LinkedIn,” and all of a sudden it felt like too much, like social media burnout.

Maybe my experience can inspire you to think about where you’d like to play. Leave me a comment below and tell me, where do you enjoy being? Where do the people you most engage with spend their time? You do not have to be in all places, and you do not have to be all things to all people. You can pick a channel, you can do really great things on that channel, and you can use other channels to attract people back to the place where you must fully engage.

I’ll be tracking exactly what happens as we go from this beginning to the next 365 days, and we’ll see how picking one place – one channel – makes a difference.