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How to Build a Million-Dollar Social Media Business – Entrepreneur

Published

3 weeks ago

March 1, 2023

Harry Miller

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Every time I speak to entrepreneurs and brands, they always seem to complain about a lack of reliable and skilled social media managers. A quick glance at your social media feed will show you how even 8- and 9-figure companies are lost when it comes to posting online.

This is why, if you have a Wi-Fi connection, a phone, and you know how to write and schedule a few Instagram posts, you could easily replace your current 9-5 job with something that allows you to work from anywhere, whenever you want.

But where should you start?

The first thing you should do is create a portfolio that shows potential clients your skills when it comes to managing social media accounts.

If you don’t have any experience yet, you could reach out to friends or family members who have a social media account and ask them if you can manage it for them for free. You only need to do this for three months to have a substantial portfolio that will put you ahead of anyone who has a degree in communication, social media management or marketing but no practical experience.

Another way to build a portfolio is to apply for beginner paid gigs. The best platforms to do this are Upwork or Fiverr. Sure, the pay might not be the best in terms of compensation, but you’d be building a portfolio in no time and get testimonials that you can use once you start approaching bigger clients.

Once you have gained some experience managing social media accounts, it’s time to attract clients that can pay you $500-2000 a month to manage their accounts.

Here, most aspiring social media managers will usually resort to cold emailing or cold calling to find potential prospects and initiate a conversation. And while this approach might work for some, it puts you in a weaker position and makes negotiating a higher rate more difficult.

That’s because, when it comes to negotiating, you always want to come from a place of authority. Contacting a client that has never heard of you can work if you’re already an established figure. But if you’re just a beginner, it will just show that you’re desperate to work.

So, what’s a better approach to finding those clients that pay you premium fees?

How to attract high-paying clients

One way is to keep using platforms like Upwork and Fiverr. If you started there, it’ll be easier to keep searching for clients there, as you’d have collected good reviews and will have built a reputation as a trustworthy professional.

But a better way is to post on social media platforms to build your authority. This has two advantages. First, it will show potential clients that you aren’t just claiming you can manage a social media account. You are practicing it, which is the strongest form of social proof you can have. Second, it will help you attract potential clients that will see you as an expert in your field and will happily pay you your fee without any hassle.

Once you have attracted four to five clients this way, it’s time to turn them into repeat customers. The simplest way to do it is to overdeliver so much that they’d be crazy to not continue working with you. If you do so, you simply need to create an offer to manage their social media accounts that can last between three to nine months that gives you some predictable revenue.

The goal when working with a client on a retainer basis is to keep communications tight and constantly remind them of the wins you are providing them (like increasing their followers or monetizing their platforms). Doing so will also help you routinely raise your rates without losing too many clients and can even make those clients refer you for more work.

On top of maintaining good relationships with your existing clients, you should still actively search for new clients by posting on your pages (or using other lead-generation methods). This will put you in a stronger position when it comes to raising your rates or negotiating different packages.

Still, there is always a cap on how much money you can make working 1-1 with a client. This is why every smart social media agency will eventually package the solutions, frameworks, templates and any other assets they use with their clients in a format that can be sold to many people at the same time.

If your clients all share the same struggles, and you have a solution for it, you can easily turn that into an ebook, a video course or anything else that can be sold digitally. This will allow you to break through the freelance income barrier and scale to a million dollars a year.

It might take some time to get there, but these are the steps that 99% of successful social media agencies have followed. The earlier you begin building your social media agency, the sooner you will reap the benefits.

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Why one county is suing social media companies – CNN

Published

6 hours ago

March 22, 2023

Harry Miller

CNN
—

One mother in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, said her 18-year-old daughter is so obsessed with TikTok, she’ll spend hours making elaborate videos for the Likes, and will post retouched photos of herself online to look skinnier.

Another mother in the same county told CNN her 16-year-old daughter’s ex-boyfriend shared partially nude images of the teen with another Instagram user abroad via direct messages. After a failed attempt at blackmailing the family, the user posted the pictures on Instagram, according to the mother, with some partial blurring of her daughter’s body to bypass Instagram’s algorithms that ban nudity.

“I worked so hard to get the photos taken down and had people I knew from all over the world reporting it to Instagram,” the mother said.

The two mothers, who spoke with CNN on condition of anonymity, highlight the struggles parents face with the unique risks posed by social media, including the potential for online platforms to lead teens down harmful rabbit holes, compound mental health issues and enable new forms of digital harassment and bullying. But on Friday, their hometown of Bucks County became what’s believed to be the first county in the United States to file a lawsuit against social media companies, alleging TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat and Facebook have worsened anxiety and depression in young people, and that the platforms are designed to “exploit for profit” their vulnerabilities.

“Like virtually everywhere in the United States now … Bucks County’s youth suffer from a high degree of distraction, depression, suicidality, and other mental disorders, caused or worsened by the overconsumption of social media on a daily basis, which substantially interferes with the rights of health and safety common to the general public,” the lawsuit alleged.

The lawsuit, which was filed in California federal court, said “the need is great” to continue to fund mental health outpatient programs, mobile crisis units, family-based mental health services, and in-school mental health programming and training to address the mental health of young people. Bucks County is seeking unspecified monetary damages to help fund these initiatives.

Bucks County is joining a small but growing number of of school districts and families who have filed lawsuits against social media companies for their alleged impact on teen mental health. The unusual legal strategy comes amid broader concerns about a mental health crisis among teens and hints at the urgency parents and educators feel to force changes in how online platforms operate at a time when legislative remedies have been slow in coming.

Seattle’s public school system, which is the largest in the state of Washington with nearly 50,000 students, and San Mateo County in California have each filed lawsuits against several Big Tech companies, claiming the platforms are harming their students’ mental health. Some families have also filed wrongful death lawsuits against tech platforms, alleging their children’s social media addiction contributed to their suicides.

“I want to hold these companies accountable,” Bucks County district attorney Matthew Weintraub told CNN. “It is no different than opioid manufacturers and distributors causing havoc among young people in our communities.”

He believes he has an actionable cause to file a lawsuit “because the companies have misrepresented the value of their products.”

“They said their platforms are not addictive, and they are; they said they are helpful and not harmful, but they are harmful,” he said. “My hope is that there will be strength in numbers and other people from around the country will join me so there will be a tipping point. I just can’t sit around and let it happen.”

In response to the lawsuit, Antigone Davis, the global head of safety for Instagram and Facebook-parent Meta, said the company continues to pour resources into ensuring its young users are safe online. She added that the platforms have more than 30 tools to support teens and families, including supervision tools that let parents limit the amount of time their teens spend on Instagram, and age-verification technology that helps teens have age-appropriate experiences.

“We’ll continue to work closely with experts, policymakers and parents on these important issues,” she said.

Google spokesperson José Castañeda said it has also “invested heavily in creating safe experiences for children across our platforms and have introduced strong protections and dedicated features to prioritize their well being.” He pointed to products such as Family Link, which provides parents with the ability to set reminders, limit screen time and block specific types of content on supervised devices.

A Snap spokesperson said it is “constantly evaluating how we continue to make our platform safer, including through new education, features and protections.”

TikTok did not respond to a request for comment.

The latest lawsuit comes nearly a year and a half after executives from several social media platforms faced tough questions from lawmakers during a series of congressional hearings over how their platforms may direct younger users — particularly teenage girls — to harmful content, damaging their mental health and body image. Since then, some lawmakers have called for legislation to protect kids online, but nothing has passed at the federal level.

Carl Tobias, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law, believes it will be “difficult” for counties and school districts to win lawsuits against social media companies.

“There will be the issues of showing that the social media content was the cause of the harm that befell the children,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t file these lawsuits.”

Tobias added that increased support for government regulation that would impose more restrictions on companies could impact the outcome of these lawsuits in their favor.

“For now, there will be different judges or juries with diverse views of this around the country,” he said. “They aren’t going to win all of the cases but they might win some of them, and that might help.”

Whatever the outcome, the mother of the 16-year-old whose intimate photos were shared on Instagram is applauding the district attorney’s office for sending a strong message to social media companies.

“Before the incident with my daughter, I would not have given a lawsuit filed by the county much thought,” she said. “But now that I know how hard it was to take content down and there’s only so much people can do; corporations need to do so much more to protect its users.”

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Social media is devastating teens’ mental health. Here’s what parents can do.

Published

17 hours ago

March 21, 2023

Harry Miller

If we are serious about addressing the alarming worsening of teens’ mental health, we must reduce their social media use.

The connection is well-established. Abundant research has linked depression and self-harm to frequency of social media use. And a new study from the American Psychological Association shows that cutting back helps teens feel better. Companies are aware of this; Facebook executive-turned-whistleblower Frances Haugen revealed that the company’s own research found that use of their platforms was linked to anxiety, depression and body image issues in teens.

Federal health data highlight why this is so crucial. In 2021, 42 percent of high school students reported feeling so sad or hopeless almost every day for at least two weeks that they stopped doing their usual activities. The crisis is particularly pronounced in girls; nearly 3 in 5 teen girls reported persistent feelings of sadness, an increase of over 60 percent since 2011.

Indeed, social media is creating a “perfect storm” for girls, Jelena Kecmanovic, a psychotherapist and adjunct psychology professor at Georgetown University, told me. “Their tendency to be perfectionist and hard on themselves during their tween and teen years gets magnified thousands of times in the online culture of comparison,” she said.

The trouble with online interactions is also what they are replacing. A 2022 survey found that average daily screen use increased further during the pandemic and is now more than 5½ hours among children ages 8 to 12 and a whopping 8 hours and 39 minutes for teens ages 13 to 18. That’s time that previously was spent engaging in-person relationships and on healthier activities such as playing outside, sports and sleep.

Pediatrician Michael Rich, who co-founded and directs the Clinic for Interactive Media and Internet Disorders at Boston Children’s Hospital, explained to me that he treats teens who “struggle with physical, mental and social health issues” from excessive social media use. He has seen straight-A students’ grades plummet and young adults struggle to forge relationships after entering college.

Given the magnitude of the problem, solving it might seem daunting for parents. Nevertheless, here are four steps they can take:

Create spaces free from screens.

Kecmanovic suggests establishing guardrails, such as taking away screens during meals and before bedtime. Parents can also limit their kids’ social media use to the shared family space, “not behind locked doors, and definitely not until 2 a.m. in their bedroom” when they should be sleeping.

Given the ubiquity of technology and its use in school curriculums, it might be hard to enforce a screen time limit. Instead, Rich advises setting a minimum time without screens. “That becomes a more practical way to offer our kids a rich and diverse menu of experiences, which can include screens but shouldn’t be dominated by them or become the default behavior,” he said.

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Mauritius media guide

Published

18 hours ago

March 21, 2023

Harry Miller

The media scene in Mauritius is divided in two, with a highly politicised media, including the national broadcaster, and elsewhere media outlets which can be outspoken but sometimes veer towards sensationalism, says Reporters Without Borders (RSF).

US-based NGO Freedom House says that the media regulatory agency lacks independence and disproportionately targets opposition media.

Under 2018 changes to the law, journalists can face prison sentences for content that causes “inconvenience, distress, or anxiety”.

Television is the most popular medium. State-owned Mauritius Broadcasting Corporation (MBC) radio and TV generally reflect government thinking. MBC is funded by advertising and a TV licence fee.

Two media groups – Le Mauricien Ltd and La Sentinelle Ltd – dominate the press scene.

BBC World Service is available via a mediumwave (AM) relay (1575 kHz). Radio France Internationale is relayed on FM.

There were 919,000 internet users by December 2021, comprising 72% of the population (Internetworldstats.com).

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