Raise your hand if you’ve ever wasted hours looking at social media. ♂️ ♀️
We’re in a war for the attention of billions.
Posts, clips, pictures, thousands of ads, gossip, and content. It’s a lot to handle.
Most people handle it poorly and end up with a scrambled brain.
A few smart people recognize the power of social media and use it to their advantage. Here’s how to be one of them.
If you want to profit from social media, be a creator. If you want social media to rob you blind, be a consumer.
A small percentage of social media accounts create most of the content. They’re the ones who reap all the rewards. If you learn how to harness the power of social media, you can get a ton of benefits:
In this video, $100 million entrepreneur Alex Hormozi said he had a moment in his life that changed his view of business forever. He was making tens of millions of dollars each month without a social media presence.
He thought creating content was a waste of time. Then, he saw Kylie Jenner turn her audience into a billion-dollar company overnight. He thought he was smarter and better at business than her but then realized he had something to learn from her success.
Properly monetized audiences are money printers. The Rock’s tequila company is valued at a billion dollars. Conor Mcgregor sold his whiskey brand, Proper No. Twelve, for $600 million.
Attention is the new currency of the modern economy.
If you’re on the consumer end of social media, you do nothing more than spend your time and money.
You get served ads for products that remove money from your pockets.
To make sure you spend your money on products, social media companies hire the smartest people in the world to figure out how to addict you to their platforms.
A former executive at Facebook, Chamath Palihapitiya, had this to say about social media:
There’s a rumor that executives at social media companies don’t allow their children to have smartphones.
If you want to know how powerful social media is at draining you of valuable time, just look at your screen time on your phone. Social media harnesses the addictive power of dopamine.
In the modern age, managing your dopamine is the key to making or breaking your success in life.
Social media companies get you hooked via the slot machine effect. People love playing slots because, with every pull, a new surprise awaits. Slot machines are designed to get you close to winning with each pull.
The machines let you win a handful of times. Combined with the near-win effect, you keep pulling because you always think you’re close to the next win. But nine times out of ten, you leave the casino poorer.
Think of how social media platforms work:
The platforms play on your dopamine addiction and response to boredom:
One day we’ll look back on social media use like tobacco addiction, maybe worse.
Spend more time creating content and less time consuming it.
Creating content is as simple as talking about the things you’re interested in:
Choose a method of content creation:
Focus on one platform first and build a regular posting schedule.
You can write one Tweet per day to grow on Twitter.
Whatever your cadence is, commit to it. Then, once you hit a groove, post more on the same platform. Don’t move to other platforms until you’ve mastered one channel. Eventually, you can reach a point where you’re posting on all channels all the time, but this may take years to achieve.
Slow and steady wins the race.
When your audience reaches critical mass, you can use insights to create something to sell. Talk to your audience, send DMs, make surveys, develop a product idea, and ask people to pay for it. If it sells, sell more of it.
This is a simplified version for the sake of brevity, but this is the process you can use to build wealth through social media.
Related:
Next, you want to create a system that allows you to take advantage of dopamine instead of letting it work against you.
You have to curb your social media addiction.
This is no easy task, but it can be done in baby steps.
In short, you want to replace the time you used to spend consuming social media and use it to create content instead.
If you say you don’t have time to create content, look at your screen time and see all the time you spend consuming social media content. There’s your time.
My best pieces of advice:
You’re not going to curb your social media addiction all at once. But you can gradually practice spending less time on it.
Other tips:
Related:
You shouldn’t consume social media all day, nonstop, every day, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a useful tool.
If you consume social media the right way, you can use it to get smarter, make more money, and create valuable connections. I’ve done all three.
Social media is a cheat code for learning. Some of the smartest people in the world use it to share their thoughts, give advice, and share the mistakes they made so you don’t have to make them.
Use social media to watch educational content instead of mindless distractions.
I’ve learned tax tips that have saved me tens of thousands of dollars, gotten ideas for products to make, learned marketing techniques, and adopted useful life lessons from people I follow on social media.
I prefer Twitter because that’s where all the smart people hang out. Plus, written content is geared more toward education, whereas places like Instagram and TikTok are more about flash than substance. Although you can find great educational content on those platforms too.
Social media also helps you create valuable connections. It’s like no other time in history. We’ve never had this much access to other human beings. You can ask questions to people you look up to, and they might respond. You can reach out to someone across the world and strike a business deal.
Or you can collaborate on projects with others. I’ve reached out to creators with similar audiences who have let me share my content and products with their tribes. You can reach out to other creators and ask them to reshare your posts. You can trade secrets and techniques with each other. The possibilities are endless.
And that’s the power of social media.
However, social media can be powerful for the wrong reasons. It can make you depressed, anxious, and hateful toward others.
The same platforms you can use to find helpful content can also drag you into a cesspool of negativity.
Media outlets play on your fears and paint the world out to be a scary and dangerous place. Unfortunately, outrage attracts the most eyeballs, so they have every incentive to find the most salacious stories because it’s the best way to grab your attention.
As much as social media connects us, it creates division. People who use social media the wrong way bicker about politics and argue with each other about their beliefs. Social media gives you a way to be much more disrespectful than you would be in person.
Mike Tyson said it well:
!["Social media made y'all way to[o] comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it." -Mike Tyson](https://thevectorimpact.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/power-of-social-media-quote-03.png "power of social media quote 03")
Social media can cause you to focus on things that don’t matter, like celebrity gossip, goofy TikTok dances, and outrageous clickbait news. Last, social media can make you hate your life because you constantly compare yourself to other people.
In the past, you only knew what you could see in your immediate surroundings. You could watch celebrities from afar, but they were distant enough that you didn’t envy them as much.
Now, you can see what celebrities are doing 24/7, which can make your life feel mundane. You can find people who are much more attractive than you to compare yourself to, even though their pictures are photoshopped. People use social media to “flex” their wealth—mansions, Lamborghinis, yachts. Everyone puts the highlight reel of their lives on social media, which makes you think their lives are better than yours.
They say, “comparison is the thief of joy.” If you’re not careful, you can fall into the trap of turning social media into a never-ending status game you won’t be able to win.
Let’s talk about how to avoid the cesspool and focus on the good social media has to provide.
As best you can, try to curate what you see on social media.
In general, do your best to resist the urge of taking on the worst qualities of social media users:
Be a force for good:
Even though it’s wise to spend some time using social media to learn, be careful not to go overboard:
It’s all about how you use them.
We live in a digital world, so it’s hard to avoid it altogether. But at least use it to your advantage. Don’t let the power of social media take advantage of you.
Use social media to make money instead of spending it. Use it to teach and learn instead of moan, gossip, and bicker. Create more than you consume.
If you do all the above, you can build more influence than you can fathom.
Then use that influence for good.
