Summary

Most advisors treat social media as a broadcast channel, and that is exactly why it is not working for them. In this episode Jim reframes Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn as one enormous cocktail party. Your Top 100 is in that room. Your referral partners are in that room. Your competition is in that room, shaking hands and remembering names. If you have decided the room is too loud, too vain, or too far outside your comfort, you have not opted out of the comparison. You have only opted out of the relationships. This is Pillar 3 work, CRM and relationship Management, with a thread of Pillar 5 - Marketing, Lead Generation and Personal Branding, running through it, and it starts with a decision about which kind of person you are going to be when you walk in.

There are two kinds of people at that party. The first walks in and says look at me. Look at my listing, look at my numbers, look at my video. They post and they leave. The second walks in and asks how they can be useful. Jim gives the practical build for becoming the second kind on Instagram. Use the favorites and close friends settings so your top 100 has its own feed instead of the algorithm's. Comment on five posts a day and five stories a day, with twenty or thirty seconds of real thought behind each one, because a comment on a story puts you in the direct messages where an actual conversation can start.

Facebook gets the same treatment with a different tool. Friends lists, built from the desktop, let you sort three or four thousand connections into the groups that matter and read only those. LinkedIn earns fifteen or twenty minutes a week if your clients work in industries that live there. Google Alerts do the quiet work in the background, telling you when a client is promoted, honored, or written about. All four of these do the same job. They convert scrolling into intelligence, and intelligence is what lets you act before someone has to tell you anything.

The heart of the episode is a story about a loss in Jim's own family and the note and book that arrived from someone in his network who simply noticed a post and did something about it. That book still sits out in the house years later. It is the cleanest illustration of the definition Jim gives here: thoughtfulness is taking the time, putting real thought into something, and then acting on it. Awareness without action is not thoughtfulness. Tools can surface the moment. They cannot supply the care. Next Sunday takes this into a live room, where the same principle has an entirely different set of do's and don'ts.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and overview of social media as a networking tool
01:58 The importance of being present at the social media 'cocktail party'
03:53 Two types of social media users: broadcasters vs. value-adders
05:51 Using Instagram for relationship intelligence and engagement
09:13 Managing your Instagram feed with favorites and close friends
12:08 Commenting on posts and stories to build relationships
14:11 Managing Facebook with friends lists for targeted feed viewing
16:02 Using LinkedIn and Google Alerts for professional networking
17:55 The power of thoughtful actions and recognizing major life events
20:03 The mindset shift: adding value vs. broadcasting
21:03 Engaging actively and responding to comments for better visibility
21:57 Final tips and next steps for social media networking

Resources

Instagram: @askjimmiller

Website: askjimmiller.com