Is Monetizing on Social Media Necessary for Small Businesses?

Chelsea:
Vivian, this is going to be a good conversation that I feel like some people need to hear. We're going to talk about whether monetizing is necessary on your social media as a small business owner? Absolutely small business owners have become content creators. We are right there with you. We have to create content all day long. But does that mean you have to try to monetize on social media? We're specifically talking about monetizing as a content creator and if it is necessary.

Vivian:
So let's go ahead and talk about the different reasons that a small business owner might feel like they have to monetize.

Chelsea:
I think as a small business owner, you want multiple streams of income, right? So you're like, ooh, monetizing on social media. I already have to create content to promote my business, might as well also get monetized on here so I can also bring in some extra money, which isn't a bad idea. I completely understand the thought process. I think people do not understand the time and effort that goes into monetizing.

Vivian:
Well, and we are not advocates for throwing free money away. I mean, if someone is sending money your way, keep it. Keep it. Go buy yourself an ice cream cone. Go do whatever. We're not telling you not to do that, but it's very different. That's just one of the reasons why a small business owner may think, let me go ahead and just get multiple streams of income coming in. Monetizing on social media is one of the easiest ways to do that, according to every other YouTuber on the face of the planet. Which leads me to another reason that as a small business owner, you may feel like you need to monetize. Everybody out there is promoting it and telling you to do that. Now here's what's interesting. Usually the people that are telling you that it's so easy to monetize on YouTube, it's so easy to monetize on Instagram, are the same people that are selling you courses to monetize on these platforms. So can we maybe just acknowledge that these are paid ads to get you into their service, which is a program to learn how to do this.

Chelsea:
Vivian, I'm going to say something controversial. I feel like we have created a new type of pyramid scheme. They have created a new type of pyramid scheme because they're selling you the idea that you can make free money. You can make free money if you watch my course on how to talk to people about making free money.

Vivian:
You're absolutely right because I think there's a key component here of a pyramid scheme, which is always getting you to recruit other people into this course, which is where that affiliate part of it comes in. Because I can't tell you how common it is for a course creator to be like, buy my course, and then when you're done with it, if you sell my course, I'll give you $10. I'll give you $200 for every course that you sell. So now the person's like, I can sell $200 by just recommending this course. Hence a pyramid scheme. This is not different than a pyramid scheme.

I do agree that this idea of monetizing on social media platforms has turned a little bit into a pyramid scheme for some people. That's not to say that it's not a legitimate way to actually bring revenue into your small business. I think what we want to talk about today is if you are going to go that route, it changes your focus. I think that's the big thing, that as a small business owner you need to ask yourself, where does my focus need to be at this time? Because I do have such a limited amount of time. You guys are out here running businesses, y'all. Okay. I know you're out here putting fires out on the daily. Do you need to be spending time focused on making sure you have enough YouTube subscribers so that YouTube can send you a paycheck every month?

Chelsea:
Okay, before we go further into this conversation, I do want to talk about a third reason why a small business owner might be telling themselves, I definitely need to monetize on social media. It is because they think this is easy money. This is easy, free money. I'm already creating content. It'll be easy to do this.

I know I've already brought this up once, but I'm bringing it up again, y'all. Let's think about how difficult it can be sometimes for you to create content. I know you're on the same page with me. Sometimes there are days where you just can't get that creativity going and you're like, I need to create content, but I can't do it. Now you have to create content so that you can monetize. It's not as easy as you think it is.

Vivian:
Well, and it's like a machine that you have to keep feeding. Right? So it's not like, you did really well in June and they're going to keep sending you money. I mean, the videos, views, and stuff do stack up. Great, but they're not going to continue to send you checks just because you did really well one month and then you decide never to show up again.

Chelsea:
I don't know if this is going to sound controversial or not, but I have a respect for content creators, and I know content creators get a lot of hate. It's a lot of work. You are constantly creating content. Do you know how much content there is out there - and you have to constantly be top of mind so that you can monetize. That's crazy.

Vivian:
No, absolutely. So Chelsea, when we're getting in the meat and potatoes of this conversation, what is it that we are wanting to remind our small business owners out there who feel this weird pool to want to prioritize or set a goal to actually monetize on Instagram, to monetize on TikTok.

Chelsea:
If you want to monetize on a specific social media platform, I love that for you. Go ahead and do it. Just understand that that is going to change your goals for your small business. So what I want you guys to do before making this decision, I want you to sit down and look at your marketing goals. Look at what your goals are for your small business and ask yourself, will this align? Let's also consider the type of content you create is going to be different if you're trying to become a content creator.

Vivian:
Yeah, well, and I'm just gonna share my own personal experience because I've been on YouTube now for going on seven years and y'all, there's this very weird thing that I have to do. I took a little bit of a break. This is probably the longest. For seven years, I have posted weekly videos, okay? Missed maybe a couple weeks here or there. Then this last couple of months, I think I actually didn't post videos for a full month, which was kind of weird because that's just not what I do. But I feel like I needed that break to recalibrate because it is exactly what we're talking about here. It starts to skew your priorities and your focus. And the thing is, if you are a small business owner, I just want to remind you of this.

The information when you are scrolling through, whether that be YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, know, listening to podcasts, whatever it is, you guys never get the full picture behind the scenes. What I realized was when I would follow some of these YouTube channels that were created to help YouTubers grow their audience or whatnot, they're not doing this maliciously, but what I soon realized was they didn't have a business. So a lot of these YouTubers that are giving you advice on how to grow on YouTube, that's the only thing they've done. It's not attached to a business.

Are you trying to be a business owner or a YouTuber? Not that the two can't coincide, but the two are very different on their focus. If I am a YouTuber and I plan to get my daily income from YouTube alone, I'm not selling a product, I'm not selling a service, I don't have a business to promote, I become a monkey to YouTube. Okay? Because then it literally is like you're in the circus and they're prodding you every couple of minutes to dance and to come up with the best ideas, and to be sure that your viewers are watching your videos for more than two seconds, right?

Same thing on Instagram. If I hear one more person that says, you have to have a good hook in the first three seconds, y'all, I'm so tired of hearing about this. Can I please take up space? The reason I say that is because I realized that I was looking at people that didn't have a business, that hadn't built a business on top of their YouTube presence. That's not something I can emulate because I'm never going to be a YouTuber. I don't want to do that. I'm using YouTube as mechanism to get me in front of people that then could join our SOB, Small Owned Business community, our monthly membership. It's a mechanism to drive them there. I think if you're feeling that weird struggle and you're just, you can't find your place right now, ask yourself, am I looking around and am I comparing myself or am I taking advice from someone that's actually built something similar to what I want to build?

If you guys are just following advice of Mr. Beast, I hate to tell y'all, Mr. Beast dropped out of college. He didn't tell his mom, spent two months in his bedroom and literally he was like, my mom's going to find out I'm not in school anymore. This video has to go viral or I'm going to have to go get a real job. We're not on that train. Okay. We all want to pay our bills. We're not living in our mom's house. Just remind yourself of where you're getting your advice.

Chelsea:
I am really glad that you just went on your rant. That was the perfect way to explain that. Can we also talk about something really important that I think people do not realize? You don't get that much money from monetizing. For one, it varies for every platform. So if you guys are looking to be content creators or you're a small business owner looking to make money off of your content and you're like, hey, monetizing on social media is an easy way for me to do that because people are already watching.

Vivian:
You're going to have to learn the rules to play by, okay? The rules are different for every platform. Trust me because we're on YouTube, right, Chelsea? We upload these podcast episodes to YouTube on top of our other YouTube channel. We're on YouTube, we're on Instagram, we're on Facebook. Instagram and Facebook, now that they're both under Meta umbrella, I do think they have very similar monetization rules, but everybody else, TikTok, completely different. LinkedIn, I don't even know if you can monetize on LinkedIn. I think you can. I haven't really looked into it.

Chelsea:
Probably, I haven't looked into it. So that's one thing, the rules to be able to get monetized across the board are different. Then the actual payout per view, let's talk about them, because I did the research.

So on Instagram, per a thousand views, you can get anywhere from one to five cents. Cool. On TikTok, for a thousand views, it's about two to four cents. Now, according to my research, and I don't know how true this is, but I saw this across the board. People were saying per a thousand views, Facebook pays out around $8.75 to $10. For YouTube, I figured we'd ask Vivian. Vivian, do you know?

Vivian:
So in regards to YouTube, I don't have the actual factual numbers, but I can tell you that just like every one of these other platforms that Chelsea mentioned, you have this bar that you have to meet. When I got monetized back in, I think 2020 or 2021, it was you had to have at least a thousand subscribers and you had to have 4,000 watch hours. That means people have watched your videos for over 4,000 hours. So they're not even going to send you money unless you hit that. Now that has changed. They actually lowered it. So more people are able to make money on YouTube, which is great. We love that. YouTube, your payout is going to fluctuate depending on how many subscribers you have once you meet that threshold. Really it's not based on the subscribers, it's based on the watch hours, just like it is for Instagram and everybody else. So that's where making bingeable content, information, making videos that are geared towards the information that people are looking for is really big. This is why we tell y'all that it changes the focus.

I would sit there to plan the next like YouTube video or two. I would get on YouTube, I'd look through Google searches, I'd use keyword searches, what are people looking for online when it comes to marketing? Then I would go to YouTube and actually see what videos were popular. Well, here's the thing, that driver is going to be very different, I'm looking at creating content that is geared towards people that sit there and binge this information online instead of looking for common questions that small business owners have that I can answer with regards to marketing? That's a very different approach to how you create content. You just have to find the middle ground in that. So that way you are able to get those views on these platforms, but you are also sticking to the reason that you have your small business and the reason you started it off, right? So you don't wanna get caught up in this trap of like being on this hamster wheel, okay?

Chelsea:
I just want to reiterate, we are not telling you to not monetize. If you have the ability to, that's great. Go ahead and do it. I mean, never turn down money, right? We just want to make sure that you are focusing your goals on what you want your goals to be. If you want to grow your small business, then make sure that the content you're creating is about growing your small business, not just creating content. You know what? Maybe you've changed your mind and you are going to become a content creator. That's great. Go ahead and make that change. Just make sure that you are evaluating what your goals are and that you are focusing on reaching them with whatever content you create.

I also want to throwback to our very first episode. Do not give away the keys to your kingdom. If everything you do is about the platform you're on, what happens if that platform is gone? Look at what happened to MySpace. I mean, MySpace was huge until it suddenly was not. I've been told, I don't actually know.

Vivian:
I was going to say, girl, what you know about MySpace? Get out of here. I love that you did bring up MySpace and y'all please, you'll probably have to go back quite a few episodes because I mean, we're about to reach a hundred episodes here soon of this podcast, but our very first episode was specifically talking about not giving away the keys to your kingdom, and I will die on this hill, you guys.

Social media is great. I kind of hate what it's done to small business owners. I hate that now we feel such pressure. I can't remember a time where we've told people, hey, on top of owning a business, which is already stressful, we now want you to also cater to our rules in order for you to reach more people and do this and that. I would almost rather do paid advertising, okay? The thing is, at least then you're exchanging money. You're not exchanging time. Everyone says social media is free. Y'all, you're exchanging your precious time. What limited time you have on this earth to do social media? I know I sound like Chicken Little over here. I do love social media. I love the opportunity it gives to small business owners to attract new customers and clients. However, I do think that it does require focus. If you are going to add a lofty goal on there, like I want to be monetized on Instagram, just understand, we talked about in that very first episode of the SOB Marketing Podcast, that you are then giving them the keys to your kingdom. So please, please, please do not let that be the only set of keys you have. Okay?

You may be thinking, Vivian, what the heck are you talking about? How do I get another set of keys for my business? The other set of keys is going to be you having an email list. The other set of keys is going to be then you utilizing and leveraging these platforms that you're trying to monetize on and getting them into your little ecosystem of your business. So whether that be with a free download, now you can email them once a month, now you can email them once a week. That way when Instagram decides to change the rules and you don't want to play by the rules anymore, you're not stressed out and worried about it. If you have over 10,000 followers on Instagram, if you have over 10,000 followers on any one of these other social media channels, when you get tired of Instagram changing stuff every other day, What's your exit plan? Have a place where you can convert people to that you will be able to tap into and continue to have these conversations with them.