 through the various social media platforms, what I think of them, and which ones you might want to consider using. So this was asked by one of my viewers. He asked, George, there's Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and YouTube, et cetera, which ones should we use? And so I've gone ahead and written a blog post about it. I'm gonna post this later. After I finish this video, I'll post a link to this here. But let me just kind of talk you through the various ones that I use that I recommend. The first and most important one in my opinion, you might not, hopefully doesn't surprise you, but it's Facebook. Couple reasons, one, Facebook is still the largest social media platform by far. It's way larger. I mean, the next one, so Facebook is at about 2.2 billion users. So I think it's the majority of the people who are on the internet on planet Earth are active on Facebook, not just to have an account, have an account, that's even more people, but active at least once a month. And most of the people who are active once a month are active daily on Facebook. So it doesn't matter who you're trying to reach. It doesn't matter if you're trying to reach executives, corporate executives, or you're trying to reach moms of toddlers, any demographic you're trying to reach, the easiest place to reach them is through Facebook. And particularly, I wanna say Facebook ads, okay? So because you're gonna start posting on Facebook and no one's gonna see what you post. I mean, if you post on your timeline, on your personal timeline, your friends and family will see it. But to really reach the people who are going to hire you, who are going to buy your services and your programs, you've got to use Facebook ads. The other thing, the other way to do it is just to network using Facebook groups, but that's a lot of work. And to be honest, I myself am too lazy to network in Facebook groups. So the easiest way is to learn how to use Facebook ads so that you can reach exactly the corporate executives, the moms with children, the people with mindfulness interest, the people who are interested in, who are divorced or are particular relationship status. I mean, you can detail things exactly. And this Facebook is the world's, where the world gathers on the internet basically. And so you can reach them through ads and it's the easiest way to do it. More than any other social media platform, Facebook is the easiest to reach the people you need to reach to grow your business basically. So I'm a big fan of Facebook because it's been amazing for my business and for my clients who are using my methodologies. So anyway, biggest platform by far and easiest. And also the other thing I like about Facebook is that it allows multiple types of media. I mean, you could do video and Facebook makes video so easy with Facebook Live, which is how I'm making this video. Facebook Live is great because it's one take, you know, it will cure you of perfectionism because if you record video just by yourself and try to upload it later, how many takes are you gonna do? You're gonna be per, oh no, I started that wrong. Let me start over. I mean, I do that, you know, I do multiple takes, but when I'm on Facebook Live, I know that I've got one take. Just gonna go ahead and make it right now. That's it and you'll learn over time that it's always okay. No matter how poor your delivery is, no matter how stumbling like I am right now, it's gonna be fine. It's gonna be fine. What's more important for you to show up consistently because that's how you build an audience who trust you and who like who you are. You don't want somebody who likes only, you don't want someone, you don't want people to like you only when you're perfect. Think about this. Are you trying to be perfect? Are you trying to be good? Then you're only gonna build an audience where people require you to be good or to be perfect. I show up as I am. We're in the same thing every day, you know, not being perfect, not even being good. I don't even try to be good. I don't even try to be good. I just try to show up. That's all I try to do. I just show up. Okay. That's a whole other talk, but anyway, I'm gonna keep going with the social media platform. So Facebook allows video. It allows text only, you know, I do text only all the time. So writing articles, it allows obviously images. If you wanted to do audio only, you can use a tool called tunes to tube. That's not part of Facebook, just Google tunes like iTunes or music. Tunes to T-O, Tube, T-U-B-E like YouTube. Tunes to Tube will transform any audio into a video with some image or something you want, you want. And then you can upload that to Facebook as well. Anyway, so Facebook is the most flexible and the biggest and the easiest to reach anybody you wanna reach. So why are you using anything other than Facebook? Honestly, I'm baffled. Now, the thing is people go, well, I don't like Facebook because of their privacy issues. Facebook has privacy issues because they make it easy to reach people. That's why they have privacy issues, right? You know what I mean? Like Facebook knows so much about each of us that they then sell the information they know about us to advertisers like me, so I can reach you. So I'm like, I wanna reach people who, Facebook, please give me people who you have seen are into, they click on links that are related to mindfulness or they click on links that are related to entrepreneurship or they, based on their posts, they seem like they're probably mothers of children of this age. Based on their posts, they seem like they're corporate executives. Facebook logs all that data and go, what we're gonna do with this data? We're not gonna expose any individuals. We're not gonna do that, but we're gonna take this aggregate data and we're gonna sell it to advertisers like George Cowell and of course, bigger corporations too so that people like George Cowell can reach exactly the kind of people they're trying to reach. And advertisers like me can't know literally the names of the people I'm reaching, Facebook keeps that private, but I can know that I'm basically reaching these types of people. So that's why Facebook has privacy issues because they make the advertisers happy like me and like you by being able to reach the people we need to reach for our businesses to grow. So let's stop giving Facebook flak for the privacy stuff because they're not selling any of our individual data, anybody, they don't care. They just want to make advertisers like me happy and to be able to grow our businesses. Come on, let's give it a break here. Like nobody has ever suffered privacy issues on Facebook. I mean, of course there's always exceptions with 2.2 billion people. There's always a few exceptions, but vast majority of people, it's only helping people to match people who have certain interests with advertisers who wanna reach them with a certain product or service or message. And Facebook is trying to say, how can we make that match better? Because nobody likes advertising only when advertising is irrelevant. Like, oh, I don't like being interrupted by car commercials because I'm not trying to buy a car. Why are you trying to reach me with a car advertisement? I'm not in the market for a car. Well, it's because the advertiser doesn't know enough about me. If I revealed more of myself to the advertiser, oh, yeah, that guy's not in the market for a car. He's much more interested in a pillow. Okay, let's reach him with a pillow ad. Oh, oh, I didn't know that there was this kind of pillow. I'm so glad I saw this ad. Otherwise I wouldn't have known, right? Do you see what I mean? So what Facebook is trying to do is like, we don't care about trying to expose individuals, like individual people. We're trying to aggregate data from individuals. Sure, but aggregate data is to sell it to advertisers so that we can make the advertising a better match so that everybody's happier. The advertiser's happier and you, the consumer, are happier because you're not seeing random ads. You're seeing ads that are like, well, I didn't know that. That's really cool. I'm so glad I know this product because that's exactly what I need right now. That's all. And of course, Facebook is also getting criticized for political advertising. That's Russian meddling in U.S. election, that kind of stuff. Well, again, that's because of the power of the advertising platform. Oh, George, I know that you have particular liberal value, so we're gonna advertise particular liberal candidates to you or make you angry about conservatives or whatever. And that's, of course, on the consumer themselves to be more mindful that, okay, I'm being stoked into anger here. Is that a good thing or not? It's called liberty. It's called freedom. That's why it's like, we can't just blame the corporations for everything. We have to look at ourselves and go, be mindful and go, hmm, am I being manipulated here towards anger? Well, I could, you know, let me check myself and go, hmm, yeah, I'm not gonna, I can, and you could block any advertiser you want on Facebook. That's the other thing. Anyway, I'm a big fan of Facebook, as you can see, but if you have any objections, please comment below and we can talk about it. But I think all, every objection I've seen to Facebook has been questionable. It's like, have you thought it through? Have you really thought it through what they're trying to do here? Well, let's talk about it. I'm very happy to talk about it because I've thought it through for years. So anyway, and I've seen it grow many, many small businesses like mine. So I'm like, Facebook has only done so much good and the other, but the other thing is, some people say, well, I don't wanna use Facebook because I don't wanna be online all the time. I don't wanna be nervous about checking. Look at me, I'm so calm. Well, except here, I'm very passionate about a topic, but I work in such a calm way. I'm never nervous. I don't check my phone all the time. I'm not like, whoa, I better respond to here. I don't respond to any of you, as you could probably tell. I just try to like or love your comments to me and occasionally I might respond to you, but boundaries people stop blaming Facebook for everything. You're getting an opportunity to practice better boundaries for yourself. It's like everybody's blaming big corporations and yes, we need to blame them for certain things like being so profit driven, but we also need to look at our own behavior and go, am I allowing this tool to destroy my brown boundaries with technology? You have to look at your own mindfulness. It's an opportunity for you. A very addictive tool is an opportunity for you to practice mindfulness. That's all it is. So you gotta check yourself, right? So anyway, anyway, so let me keep going here. 10 minutes just on Facebook. This can't be too long of a video. So Facebook is my first and go to social media platform for text, video, audio if you wish, and images and easiest way to reach the kinds of people you need to reach. Number one, number two is YouTube. YouTube is the second largest social media, yes, it is a social media platform. They've been emphasizing those friend features now for a few years and people go there, it's content platform at the very least, okay? So people go there to look for information, to learn, to be entertained, to be uplifted, to be curious about things. So similar to Facebook, you know? So YouTube has 1.9 billion active users. Facebook has 2.2 billion, YouTube has 1.9, and YouTube is also the second largest search engine on the internet after Google. So meaning people go to Google first and the secondly, they go to YouTube to search for a topic they're interested in. So I'm on YouTube obviously, many of some of you are seeing this on YouTube. But the thing about YouTube is it's really hard to get traction. Meaning it's hard to get any views on your videos. Honestly, if you've ever tried uploading videos to YouTube you think, oh, I've uploaded my video to YouTube, now I'm gonna become famous and become viral. Now, no one's gonna watch your videos, nobody. Unless you promote that video yourself through your own email newsletter, through other social media platforms, you have to start the whole engine going. You have to promote your own YouTube video before YouTube will start giving you some benefit. The other thing is you have to learn YouTube SEO, YouTube search engine optimization, which I'll be honest with you, I haven't really learned it. I have learned a little bit of it, but I need to learn a lot more of it myself and that's on my to-do list later in the year to learn about YouTube SEO because if you learn YouTube SEO and how do you learn YouTube SEO? You go to YouTube and you search YouTube SEO and the people whose videos turn up at the top are obviously really good at YouTube SEO and you can learn from them. So if you get good at YouTube SEO then you could potentially get a lot more views. But the reason why I've uploaded my videos to YouTube even though I get a lot less views than on Facebook. Facebook is way, Facebook Live particularly is way easy to get a lot more views. I get 10, I get 10 times as many views on Facebook than I do on YouTube. Let that sink in. However, in the long term, YouTube is a search engine. So people keep searching the topics that you're talking about and let it be years that your video made five years ago can suddenly go viral or can suddenly get at least a couple hundred views that it didn't get before. So let YouTube be a long-term thing, okay? Look at YouTube as a long-term thing where your videos are kept then where you try to learn SEO to try to get the keywords right, all that stuff. And look at Facebook as a short-term thing. People don't really search Facebook, not really. I mean, there's a search bar but relatively, people just kind of look at what's new on Facebook. So Facebook is good for short-term engagement. YouTube is much better and YouTube is better for long-term engagement. Okay, so that's how I would separate that. The third platform I'll talk about is looking at my notes here, Instagram. Okay, so Instagram has been an up-and-coming social media platform for years now and it's still the third darling of the social media marketer world. And Instagram is at one billion users that would it be. So Facebook is at 2.2 billion. YouTube is at 1.9. And these are numbers from January of 2019. So a few months ago but still the latest numbers that we can credibly have. Facebook 2.2 billion, YouTube 1.9 billion, Instagram 1 billion. So you can see it's already, you know, it's like Facebook and YouTube way up there and then Instagram is down here but it's still bigger than Twitter and LinkedIn and all that stuff. So Instagram is at 1 billion users now and it is a different demographic. I'd say Instagram users tend to be more like yuppies, young urban professionals. Yeah, of course there's some rural people. There's always exceptions but if you wanna reach people who are a little bit younger, not that they're in their 20s only but I would say 20s to early 50s and they tend to be more professional people and kind of entrepreneurial people and more style-driven people. More image, obviously Instagram is about images. So if you have to be comfortable posting images and I am not a photographer, I don't like to post even photos of my dog or whatever, I don't like to post photos. So I just create, I create like image quotes or image ideas and post that to Instagram with the caption being a short article that people can read if they want, you know, to kind of get my message more. So I use Canva, C-A-N-V-A to create my Instagram images. When I give you the blog post associated with this video, you'll get more details and you'll get another video where I talk about how to use, how I use Canva. So okay, so Instagram I think is, and also Instagram makes advertising really easy and Instagram ads are actually even cheaper than Facebook ads. So you definitely should consider using Instagram ads as well to reach the kinds of people you wanna reach. Okay, definitely, definitely, definitely consider that. If you don't mind posting images, even if it's images with words like I do. Instagram also has live video. So after I make Facebook videos, I go and make an Instagram live video and so my Instagram feed is basically my live Instagram videos, which I recommend up to 10 minutes only, 10 minute cap, whereas Facebook, I can go as long as I want. Instagram, please cap it at 10 minutes if you want it to show up in your Instagram feed. Okay, so Instagram live, Instagram feed, video and also images. So that's what I recommend for Instagram if you wanna use that platform. And then fourth, let me talk about Medium.com. Medium.com is where bloggers go to put their blogs in addition to their own website. So of course you should have a blog on your own website, ideally, but if you wanna do writing, you should probably also start a Medium.com account and just copy and paste your blog post there. Put it on your website first, okay? And let Google index it, just give it a week or so and then put that on Medium.com. Now, Medium.com is not where you're gonna get a lot of traction either. You're gonna post articles to Medium.com. You're like, George, no one is viewing my Medium.com articles. Just like YouTube, you have to start promoting your Medium.com articles first. So if you notice my email newsletters, I give you snippets and then I send you to my Medium.com articles. So that's my email newsletters I send you to my Medium.com, not even to my own website. I send you to my Medium.com articles because Medium.com I think is a good place to potentially get viral traffic if people clap up your articles there and they might share it then more people from Medium.com might see it. So I think there's something like, there's only like about a hundred million active users on Medium. So look at this, Facebook 2.2 billion, you know, YouTube almost 2 billion, Instagram 1 billion, Medium.com is something like a hundred million users. I could be wrong, it could be like getting close to 150 million. So it's relatively small, but Medium.com users are much more, yeah, much more professional because they are writers, they are thinkers, they're more thoughtful people, okay, leaders, executives, so culture creators, culture leaders, Medium.com, so you have to learn how to promote your articles on Medium.com also. Otherwise no one's gonna look at it. Next one I'll talk about is LinkedIn. So LinkedIn, here, let me just give you a shortcut on LinkedIn because I don't want to keep this video too long. LinkedIn is basically a professional resume directory. So do not stop being concerned about posting content to LinkedIn. Unless you are a career coach or a career consultant or unless you are a recruiter or in your HR or you're an IT, LinkedIn is not a great use of time to post content there. I do it because I'm in marketing and I should know LinkedIn, so that's why I still post content there. But the content I post there is basically a duplicate of what I post to Twitter. And it's basically an image quote in my YouTube videos. It literally takes me another two minute, one minute to also post to LinkedIn, but I don't think it's worth most people's time. I think LinkedIn should just be, you go there once a year to update your profile there with anything, and any big news professionally, you can post it as a post on LinkedIn. I think that's all you should be doing. The most productive use of LinkedIn really is one-on-one contact with other LinkedIn users. Thoughtfully, don't mass message people, but study people's profiles who could be a potential client or potential referral source and message them in a way that is a win for them, not just for you. So message them in a way where you're like, you have to be clever at this. I don't have time to go into this on this video, but you have to be thoughtful and clever and message one person at a time after having studied their profile. That is productive use of LinkedIn, not by posting content, hoping, hoping, hoping, people will like and find your content. That's ridiculous on LinkedIn, okay? And then Twitter. Twitter is also kind of a waste of time for most people. It's great for politics, right? But if you go to Twitter and start trying to hope you get famous and get seen, use hashtags, it's a waste of time because Twitter is, it's hard to compose a good tweet. A tweet is only up to 280 characters now. It's hard to make something that people go, ooh, that's so interesting. And plus, you have to promote your own Twitter profile. You could use hashtags, but a lot of bots, bots will follow you, not real people, but bots. So Twitter, I think, is a waste of time. Don't even do Twitter unless you're really fascinated by it. You love using it for your own as a consumer and you said, well, I might as well try to use it professionally. You gotta learn that. You gotta engage with other people on Twitter, comment on their tweets. That's really how you start getting traction, but I don't know, I'm not a huge fan of trying to use Twitter professionally as a business. Eventually, I'll learn Twitter advertising too, but that's me. And then finally, there's a bunch of other small ones like Pinterest and Tumblr and WhatsApp, WeChat, Snapchat. I tried all of them. I just don't find a reason to use it besides what I've already described. Oh, Reddit also, I use Reddit as a consumer, but it's really hard to get traction there because people on Reddit are very critical. So Quora is another one where you can post answers to people's questions and that could be a good thing, but I just rather use my own blog and I have a newsletter, I have an audience already, but if you don't have an audience, maybe consider answering some questions on Quora because that does get a lot of traffic. Bottom line, if you're gonna choose one, just go from the top of this video. Just go from the top of this video or the blog post associated and just go from there. So start with Facebook ads. That's number one. Everyone should be you, should. I just think it's a smartest business decision. If you're not using Facebook ads, I don't understand what you're doing on social media marketing, honestly. I don't get it. $30 a month is all you need to spend. Even $10 a month is better than most businesses. Do you have $10 a month? If so, please try to spend $30 a month on Facebook ads. You'll get more traction than on any other social media platform. I just don't get it if you're not doing it. I really don't understand why. You probably don't understand it. That's why you're not doing it. Learn it. I have a course, of course. I sell an online course about Facebook ads so you can learn it from me or learn it from anybody else if you wanna try that. But I think my course is unique because it does talk about more authentic marketing on Facebook and more quality-driven Facebook ads rather than quantity, just the numbers. So anyway, let me thank those of you who are here. Shelley, hopefully I answered your question about Medium.com. I think it takes a lot of work to make Medium.com worthwhile. I think it's better to use Facebook if you're gonna choose between Facebook and Medium. Just use Facebook for your articles, for your written content, and use Facebook ads. Medium is a tough road to home, honestly. It's not easy. It's really not easy. All right, so thank you, Gudrun, for your comment and Alejandra. Great to see you here. Let's see here. Gudrun says, I found you on YouTube looking for info about Zoom. Yeah, so YouTube, sometimes some of my videos go wild, like my Zoom tutorial went wild, but usually most of my videos only get 30 views on YouTube, whereas on Facebook, it gets about 300 views. So let's see here. So yeah, no, don't worry about posting articles on both your blog and on Medium. It is a myth. There is no such thing. Okay, now, there is such a thing as duplicate content penalty, but it's not how most of us think of it. It's not duplicate content. This is called syndication. You put it on your blog first, you wait a week, and then you put it on mean.com. Google looks at places like Medium and LinkedIn and any other credible places as syndication, not duplicate content. That's not the same idea that people are so scared of getting punished by Google. That's webpages, that's spammers who create hundreds of websites that all duplicate the same content. That's not the same idea. So please stop talking about duplicate content. That's people are getting it wrong. This is called syndication. Google loves that, so don't worry about it, basically. Yeah, Douglas, it's not, duplicate content is not the same. Medium.com, Google understands Medium.com as a place where people syndicate content from their own blogs. That's not the same thing. LinkedIn article, same thing. Google sees that as, okay, you're syndicating content or other places like entrepreneur.com, Inc.com. Yeah, you're syndicating content there. Google understands that. That's not duplicate content, people. It's not that you're not being penalized by Google. Look it up, okay? Just Google is putting your stuff on Medium and LinkedIn duplicate content penalty? Google it. I've read the articles. I haven't seen an evidence for that. It's only a benefit, okay? So let's see here, any other interest? Douglas says Pinterest is great way to get viral. 50% of my web traffic comes from there. You know, I've also seen that to be the case, but Douglas, that's hit and run traffic. They're just looking for your images and they're not really staying to look at, oh, this person, I'm gonna hire this person, buy this person's products. I think Pinterest is good for fashion. It's good for food. It's good for art, but I don't think most of us are in those industries and I just don't, I don't see a case for using Pinterest. Because again, any traffic you get from there is just organic image-based traffic. They're just trying to take your images. That's all they care about. They're not really there to, oh my gosh, I'm so interested in your content now. I'm gonna hire you. I'm gonna read more. Now, not really, in my view also. So let's see here. Thank you, Shweta, for your endorsement on the Facebook ad course. And okay, so anyway, I think that's all for now. I hope this is helpful. Any other questions or comments, please add below. And yes, you might know something, obviously. Some of you will have read something that I haven't read. So please go ahead and put that information in there and feel free to disagree with me because I don't have all the answers. Of course, I'm giving you what I have seen from my own experience and what I've seen from clients, but you may have additional experience or other experience. And please feel free to put that in there. And thank you, people like Douglas and for giving their experience as well. So all right, everybody, that's all for now. Hope this helps and I'll see you later.