“Work smarter, not harder” is comforting advice—until you realize it’s also a complete lie. Your competitors are doing both: using AI to sprint through research, production, and decision-making while everyone else scrolls.
This week, we break down why tools like Grok and Claude can compress hours of work into mere seconds (if you know how to prompt well), why offloading your thinking is the fastest way to lose your edge, and how a single search can reveal what’s completely hidden from Google.
Finally, we tackle the quiet mistake draining most small businesses: treating platforms like separate worlds. In an interest-graph, algorithm-driven world where 75–85% of views come from non-followers, the smartest move is to cross-post everywhere, ignore vanity metrics, keep personal and business accounts separate, and let the audience, not your assumptions, decide what hits.
Chapters
00:00 Smarter And Harder
01:16 AI Output Trap
03:27 Daily AI Workflow
05:41 Research Story Grok
09:37 Skills Still Matter
11:55 Cross Post Everywhere
15:17 Vanity Metrics Myth
16:00 Hyperlocal Growth Example
17:16 Algorithms And Discovery
20:15 Train Your Algorithm
20:55 Personal vs Business Accounts
22:32 Personality With Relevance
24:21 Non Followers Drive Views
25:09 Hashtags For Discovery
27:16 Post Everywhere Strategy
28:32 Monetize Across Platforms
31:30 Teams Behind Big Creators
34:07 Small Business Content Efficiency
37:00 Final Posting Hacks Wrap
Transcript
Jeff Sarris: Work smarter, not harder is only true if your competitors are dumb.
Amara Andrew: Hey, explorers, welcome back to Useful Not Famous. This is a show where we gather and share things that, uh, that what give your business an unfair advantage. I’m Amara
Jeff Sarris: Andrew. And I’m Jeff
Amara Andrew: Andrew.
Jeff Sarris: No,
Amara Andrew: Sarris.
Jeff Sarris: Thank you. And also with you.
Amara Andrew: Please be seated.
Jeff Sarris: So work smarter, not harder. It is a trope. It is a thing that we’ve all heard so many times.
Amara Andrew: Yes.
Jeff Sarris: Now it’s only true that you work smarter, not harder if your competition is dumb because your competition is working smarter and harder.
Amara Andrew: Yes.
Jeff Sarris: Like that’s what. That’s where we are in the world right now is we can do and achieve so much more.
And do you think about like the Michael Jordan of whatever you do, like Michael Jordan wasn’t being more intelligent about how he was. Practicing to then work less and work less hard.
Amara Andrew: Exactly.
Jeff Sarris: He was intelligent at how he practiced to achieve so much more and worked so hard in an intelligent way.
Amara Andrew: This just reminds me of whichever episode it was and we were talking about AI and how people are using it to one 10th, the X.
Why am I like tongue tied?
Jeff Sarris: We’ve talked about that in so many episodes. Yeah. I think it’s important, but go on.
Amara Andrew: But we’ve, uh. Yeah, I guess we have talked about it in a lot of episodes, but basically a lot of people are using AI like Claude Grok, I guess chat, GPT blah, sorry, but blah, um, to one 10th x their output instead of 10 x in your output, meaning that you could do so much more now because, especially with Claude, because of cowork code, like they keep releasing things basically every single day, which is so cool, but you can use that to.
Basically just run your entire business now at this point, but a lot of people are using it for not to its fullest potential and not working even harder. Using that to do all the work, and then just being like, all right, I’m just gonna hang out or go to the coffee shop or watch TV all day or whatever.
Jeff Sarris: Scroll on social media. Okay. But well,
Amara Andrew: you know what I mean? Just
Jeff Sarris: what is this, 1998 go somewhere,
Amara Andrew: but using, yeah, you can go to a coffee shop, but I’m just saying, using it to not do the things you actually should be doing then, because you can use AI to essentially be your. Personal assistant.
Jeff Sarris: And that’s all I wanted to say is offloading thinking.
Yeah, exactly. People are offloading the thing that makes what they do unique,
Amara Andrew: right? And this is the time when you offload all the grunt work that maybe you don’t like to do in your business, or that takes up so much time when you need to be focusing on, okay, where am I going with my business? What are we actually like doing?
Where should I be heading? Which maybe I’m not. Um, so it’s a really great time for that. So. Yeah. When we say 10 x your output, meaning don’t just give up. Just be like, okay, now I don’t have to do anything. Push yourself even a little bit harder because now we all have access to this exact piece of tech.
So exactly like your competition is using that to then 10 x their output while you’re just. Kind of hanging out.
Jeff Sarris: How many times do you use AI every day? If you were considering it?
Amara Andrew: Oh my god.
Jeff Sarris: Not hours or minutes, but new chats say,
Amara Andrew: so I build off of my existing chats a lot.
Jeff Sarris: So different conversations. It could be an existing chat, but like maybe like if I’m working with plug code to build things, that’ll be one chat for like all day.
Yeah. But thinking holistically, ’cause we use GR for. Research, like data fact-based things most of the time.
Amara Andrew: Okay, so I actually have a story for you from today. You have no idea what I’m gonna say.
Jeff Sarris: Uhhuh. I did want to, I I don’t wanna like leave this though ’cause I wanna know how many times, how many different.
Chats do you think you’d go through in a given day?
Amara Andrew: So this actually ties into that. Okay. A shit ton. If I had to measure in units, it would be one metric shit ton.
Jeff Sarris: Think more like earlier we saw something like a butt ton. I
Amara Andrew: know. Yeah. That’s the only problem if you do a call and response in your video is like, how many toys do you think are in this toy box?
Jeff Sarris: A billion
Amara Andrew: more.
Jeff Sarris: A billion plus one
Amara Andrew: more
Jeff Sarris: a thousand,
Amara Andrew: not even close. So this person was doing that in a video and I was like, a shit done. And then he did more. And I was like, what comes after shit? Done but done. And then anyway, I had to fill the blanks. So, um. Yeah, so I have so many chats going and not even just, uh, text, but also then image generation for different things.
’cause now you can just make literally anything you want, which is extremely helpful with what we do with Maven, our video marketing agency.
Jeff Sarris: And in a minute we’ll explain what tools we’re using for these. Yes. I don’t wanna gloss over that, but I wanna hear a story.
Amara Andrew: Um, so yeah, like I love using basically AI all day, but because also I’ve worked.
How to use it. ’cause at first, when you start, you’re like, hi, what do you do?
Jeff Sarris: Well, or you’re Googling something,
Amara Andrew: it’s like being at a cocktail party and you’re just meeting someone and you’re like, what’s your name?
Jeff Sarris: Well, and like I think that, and like Googling, like I Google in a certain way. That’s not how you chat with
Amara Andrew: something.
Jeff Sarris: So
Amara Andrew: that brings me to my story. So I come from a research background. I, I come from a, where I worked at universities and colleges and I was, part of my job was doing research for people. So I’ve gotten really fucking good at it, at finding these little nuggets of what I need and I was searching. So stupid today.
’cause I haven’t had to do that. Kind of like this was academic research. So what I
Jeff Sarris: feel like you’re speaking like AI’s thinking for you. I was searching so stupid today, it just sounded like
Amara Andrew: I’m actually half AI at this point. Oh no. Hello. Great idea. Um, so I was searching the old school way, which is now silly to say, but I was searching on Google because that’s what I’m just used to doing because.
I’m so used, I’m just used to doing that and then seeing what is sort of out there and then I can deduce what’s true and what’s not. Because sometimes, especially looking up historical research, I have had hallucinations with certain ais, um, and
Jeff Sarris: that just means they’re making up an answer.
Amara Andrew: That’s what I was just gonna say.
Oh,
Jeff Sarris: sorry.
Amara Andrew: And that, yeah, is where there, it’s not a real response. It’s something completely fake and not even remotely true. So I have had that happen, but it was only with chat GPT, which is why I just mm-hmm. Do not use it. Please, for the love of God, you’ll get so much better results with the platforms we are about to tell you.
But anyway,
Jeff Sarris: I just wanted to say Googling something gives you 10 results. Not 10 answers. 10 spots where you can do more research.
Amara Andrew: Exactly.
Jeff Sarris: And then you can go to the next page at 10 more. 10 more, 10 more.
Amara Andrew: So I was looking for a very specific, this is for a video for our hyperlocal platform. I was looking for research, I was looking for one.
Uh, it was about an artist, George Melville Smith, and I was looking for one artwork. That he exhibited at the same time as a very famous artist in one brochure, in one museum almost a hundred years ago. And I was like, the odds of this existing first off are very slim. So I was looking through Google and I was like, not finding what I wanted and then I was like, fuck it.
I should just ask Rock. So we use Grok a lot for research and we’ll talk more about it in a second. Found my answer in half a second. I spent, I didn’t spend that long, honestly. I spent maybe 30 minutes trying to find it, but then I wasn’t getting what I wanted and I was like, oh duh, I should totally do this because I do everything the hard way first, and then I figure out the easy way
Jeff Sarris: and I want to contrast it with Google.
So you had 10 results that you can then look into and see is what I want there?
Amara Andrew: Exactly.
Jeff Sarris: What Rock does is you will see it say. Searching 57 results. Yeah. In a fraction of a section. It went through six, the equivalent of six pages of Google, and checked every page. That actually it didn’t just give a list of sit 57 things like maybe it’ll be here.
It also read 57 articles. Yes. To find it for you.
Amara Andrew: And you have to be very clear in your prompt with what you want because that’s how you find the best things. And that’s how I got this result. And like half a second, but I was just like, I know that he exhibited with this person around this time period.
It’s this, through this museum and this place. What can you tell me? And then like, yeah, I saw him, him, I saw it thinking, and then, yeah, it was just like, oh, this is exactly the exhibition catalog you’re looking for. And sure enough, I click on the link. It’s exactly what I was looking for. And I was like, my God, this used to, this would’ve taken me before when I worked at a university, like literally the entire day almost to try to find this one thing because it was hidden.
It wasn’t, uh. Scanned in. It was just on the internet archive. So anyway, it was just like such a fascinating experiment that I literally just did like a couple hours ago.
Jeff Sarris: Well, and it’s important to think too, that was someone’s job.
Amara Andrew: That was my job.
Jeff Sarris: Yeah. Just saying, just research
Amara Andrew: uhhuh.
Jeff Sarris: But now the researchers who will be most in demand are able to use these tools to then be more effective at being a researcher.
So like,
Amara Andrew: yeah,
Jeff Sarris: not to ignore the. The skillset matters so much because it’s not just find this thing for me and then hope for results. It’s, I’m doing research as I would, and my assistant is very fast at diving through everything
Amara Andrew: and sort of just saying what you hope the outcome to be is what I’ve found helpful.
Jeff Sarris: Are you okay? I’m gonna sneeze all of a sudden.
Amara Andrew: Doing Coke. Bless you ladies and gentlemen. That was a Jeff, Sarah sneeze. Bless you. Thank you. Um, but that was just, it was, it made me so happy. ’cause then also I’m really hoping that colleges and universities are using this. Like at, I worked in an archive, I worked in many archives and reference questions were.
Both the thing that I loved the most, but also the bane of my existence. Because you hoped that you could find an answer for someone, but you’re limited. He’s blowing his nose off camera, ladies and gentlemen. Um, but you would hope that you could find somebody’s like an answer to their question, at least like a little crumb of something.
And you know, a lot of times you would come up empty handed because there’s only so much time you can devote to it because that’s just one part of your job. But then also. It might not be digitized, it might not even exist anymore. So like that makes me so happy and I really hope institutions are using that to its fullest potential.
Jeff Sarris: And you know, they’re not yet unfortunately. I know I said it and I was like, we say it for people, I hope people will. Yeah. Because institutions are irrelevant. Like, uh, degrees now are completely irrelevant. Unless you’re trying to be a doctor. Unless you’re trying to be something. ’cause no one, everyone wants results.
They don’t want. A degree unless it’s very, very antiquated today. So it’s, uh, it’s a time that we need to, uh, accept too that we’re in like output, we’re in 10 x and who’s going to be best at what they do
Amara Andrew: be best.
Jeff Sarris: Um, but this leads into the main thing we wanted to talk about today was about posting content.
Amara Andrew: Yes.
Jeff Sarris: And how you can be smarter. About posting content and work harder.
Amara Andrew: Yeah.
Jeff Sarris: Like we’re not talking about the work harder as much, but we get caught up in sort of the nuance, not nuance, the, uh, nitty gritty of things where people are like, well, I don’t post on TikTok because my videos are, they’re Instagram videos.
They’re not TikTok videos, or, I don’t post on LinkedIn because it’s not really a business video. It’s about like this recipe I made for my. Scripting platform,
Amara Andrew: which this boggles my mind when I hear this or which there is a strategy to it. But when someone’s like, I wanna make different content for every single platform, good fucking luck.
You’re never gonna do it. Do you know how insane that is? Like I understand the idea and the thought behind it, which is really cool. But no way, like not even us who do this as a living are like, I should make content for every single platform. ’cause also unique content
Jeff Sarris: for every single platform.
Amara Andrew: Yes. So we’re all about cross posting, meaning taking one video, putting it on every single platform because who are you to decide that this is a TikTok video or this is an Instagram video Videos that I’ve made and posted, and I’ve heard this from other people too.
That we’ve told the cross post and then they do. They’re like, oh, I thought it was gonna flop on this platform, but it ended up doing like, even better than I could have expected on that platform. Um, so like you don’t. You don’t know what’s necessarily gonna pop off to an extent. You can do everything within your control, but some videos just don’t do well.
Or some videos do exceptionally well and sometimes it just doesn’t really totally make sense
Jeff Sarris: because it’s an algorithm based world now. Mm-hmm. It’s interest graph, not social graph. So the algorithm hit that video in some way that it served it to certain people and those people liked it or didn’t.
Mm-hmm. And. The bigger, like the more important part of this is nobody uses every platform. Yes. That’s something that we’ve talked about a lot. Your platform of choice is TikTok.
Amara Andrew: Mm-hmm.
Jeff Sarris: Mine of choice is YouTube shorts.
Amara Andrew: Yeah.
Jeff Sarris: There’s people who spend all day on Instagram or all day on Facebook. Very rarely is someone like, I’m a Facebook person and a this person.
Mm-hmm. Like we have the thing that gives us what we want. Most, and that’s where we spend most of our time. We’ll draw to other platforms, but really we’re not gonna spend the lion’s share of our time on more than one, maybe two platforms. So then what about the person who spends all their time on LinkedIn?
Amara Andrew: Mm-hmm.
Jeff Sarris: You’re just never gonna reach them, ever. And that’s fine if you don’t want to, but if you’re making content and doing things to try to make money and reach more people and grow the influence that you have. Not as an influencer, not famous, but as a useful influence. Why would you not post somewhere even if it gets 23 views?
What if those 23 views were actually 23 people who were very interested in what you’re doing?
Amara Andrew: Exactly. Because I think a lot of people too, get like hung up on the vanity metrics where it’s like, well, this only got like a hundred views or 200. Well, you don’t know who those 200 people are like,
Jeff Sarris: or a thousand, 10,000.
Like the scale never ends.
Amara Andrew: Exactly.
Jeff Sarris: People, but this only got 10,000 views. I’m gonna take it down.
Amara Andrew: Which is insane. What? ’cause it’s like 10 thou, imagine 10,000 people. That’s like basically a full arena, almost like a smaller arena. But that’s an entire arena of people. Like that is always. Crazy to me, but
Jeff Sarris: yeah, a hundred views is a hundred people.
When have you spoken in front of a hundred people?
Amara Andrew: Exactly
Jeff Sarris: like that is crazy to think about.
Amara Andrew: And if you’ve targeted your video appropriately with certain things like that, should be a hundred people. Uh, so we work with a lot of like small businesses and realtors, so you’re going for a very hyperlocal audience that should theoretically be a hyperlocal audience of a hundred people.
Um, like when I started my hyperlocal platform. Very minimal views. Like it wasn’t, if I was stuck in like looking at that data, it was mostly just something I wanted to start. ’cause I was like, why not? This would be fun if I, and
Jeff Sarris: we’ve done it countless times for other people.
Amara Andrew: Yes. But then it was like, oh, well we should do it here.
Um, but yeah, if I got stuck in that and only posting to one platform because I personally would’ve only posted to TikTok, now it’s grown like tremendously, like far more than I guess I would’ve ever. I dunno, I don’t have expectations for anything, but it just grew so much and I would not have chosen Instagram as my.
Prime platform, but that’s the one where my hyperlocal content, quote unquote, is doing the best, has the biggest following, whatever, all the vanity metrics. So it’s really funny, like when people don’t wanna post everywhere, how do you know that you’re not gonna be the audience for TikTok? Like your videos could completely crush, or YouTube shorts.
That is such an unsung hero. What’s
Jeff Sarris: funny is last night I saw one of your videos on my YouTube shorts feed.
Amara Andrew: Really?
Jeff Sarris: Yeah, because like we don’t follow our,
Amara Andrew: my personal
Jeff Sarris: or no hyperlocal. Oh, that’s funny. We don’t follow the hyperlocal channel and we don’t engage with hyperlocal stuff, so it’s
Amara Andrew: our proximity.
Jeff Sarris: I don’t even think it’s that. I think it’s whatever else I looked at happened to be nearby. So then it knew, oh, you’re in this area. Because like we, we’ve been doing lots of, uh, growth on our platform in terms of the actual website itself is so robust now. We have an entire business director, director, an entire job board, an entire events calendar all filled out.
Yeah. Like this is what we’ve done for the past seven days and
Amara Andrew: we’ve been having people submit things already as well. Mm-hmm. And we just announced it.
Jeff Sarris: I mean, we didn’t, you could say, we didn’t even announce it though. It was an aside at the end of a random video, just, oh, by the way, we have a job board.
Amara Andrew: Yeah.
Jeff Sarris: Without a link, without how to get there.
Amara Andrew: Because to me that’s an,
Jeff Sarris: oh yeah, that’s,
Amara Andrew: I’m just, I’m focused
Jeff Sarris: on the video. Video. We’ll talk about this advertising stuff says what? Um, but we’ve, that in one week has went from being a DR website to a phenomenally. Useful. It’s
Amara Andrew: a
Jeff Sarris: resource
Amara Andrew: now
Jeff Sarris: website. Mm-hmm.
Again, not just
Amara Andrew: website. Yeah.
Jeff Sarris: And that’s the whole thing. And it’s changed so much in one week, but, uh, where was I going with that? Where, how did I get there? Uh, it was,
Amara Andrew: I was saying like, post everywhere. Instagram wasn’t my first choice.
Jeff Sarris: Yeah. Um,
and
Amara Andrew: then it’s
Jeff Sarris: called, oh. So I found you, I, it served me your video because.
In building out our business directory, I have searched for local things here.
Amara Andrew: That’s so funny.
Jeff Sarris: Do you know
Amara Andrew: know which one?
Jeff Sarris: I, I don’t remember, but if I think about it, I would. Okay. But I’ve never searched for local things because I’m not looking for local things regularly. But I did enough searches this week, a small handful that now YouTube is like, oh, you’re in this area.
You might like this video.
Amara Andrew: That’s interesting.
Jeff Sarris: Because like we’ve had proximity forever.
Amara Andrew: Yeah.
Jeff Sarris: You know, and I’ve never had your video. I’ve never had these hyper-local videos show up.
Amara Andrew: I was just wondering if it was like when we went downtown or something. I don’t know. Anyway, I’m just very curious. Which video, was it a green screen or was it out and about?
Jeff Sarris: No, it was out and about, but this is for later. I know it’s irrelevant to me. Um, but that, it served it to me because now the Google algorithm, the, the idea of who I am is slightly different. It’s not like just Chicago. Mm-hmm. Now it is like, oh no, you’re actually closer to here. You’ll, you’ll wanna see this.
Amara Andrew: That’s terrifying and interesting at the very same time,
Jeff Sarris: but it’s all it is. That’s the algorithms and like, if you use your channel, if you use your platform, whatever it is. It’s uh, I say it’s TikTok and all you do is you look at sports content and all you post is cooking content. The algorithm is like, this is a sports profile.
Amara Andrew: Yes,
Jeff Sarris: you’re not gonna get anywhere. Like if you want your cooking content to be served to people interested in cooking content, you better be using your. Profile solely for cooking content.
Amara Andrew: Yeah,
Jeff Sarris: searching for it, looking at it, engaging with it, because it’s an al We’re training the algorithm and then it says, oh, you live here.
I’m gonna give you this. Like, it’s very, it’s so stupidly obvious. But also we don’t think about it because we’re not thinking about it as a sentient thing. Yeah. But the algorithm is trying to give you what it thinks you want. So whatever you’re telling it is what it’s going. However you’re engaging with it, it’s gonna try to give you more.
Amara Andrew: So this is something that we’ve started talking about with people is have a separate personal account and a business account, or treat your if you wanna have one. ’cause normally we were just like, well, no, just have one account. That comes from us who doesn’t really use social media as much? Um,
Jeff Sarris: like not as, like we use it for fun personally, but we don’t use it for business personally.
Amara Andrew: Yeah, we use it very differently. But if you have a business like that, you wanna have social media for, have a separate personal account. Do not mix the two. Because what happens is exactly what you just said, where it’s skewing your profile and. What I’ve also seen people doing is posting personal things that had nothing to do with anything.
It was, uh, just very random. Like it wasn’t even like an insight into their life. It was just like. It had no value. Well,
Jeff Sarris: let’s say you have a, let’s say, a sports platform and you talk all about sports and your favorite sports and this and that, and then one video is just like, um, oh, it’s had so much fun at, at Jane’s birthday party today.
Amara Andrew: Exactly.
Jeff Sarris: It’s like, huh? Who the hell’s Jane? Yeah. What, like, where is, uh, football?
Amara Andrew: Or
Jeff Sarris: like, like what are you talking about?
Amara Andrew: Exactly. Or like, I went to this cooking conference and it’s like, I don’t care, like. I’m here to learn about sports or sports memorabilia, or whatever the hell your platform is. I don’t need to know all this other stuff.
Like I could genuinely give a shit less. So it’s mixing the two, which I think really hurts a platform. Um, because
Jeff Sarris: now we like having personality.
Amara Andrew: A hundred
Jeff Sarris: percent. There’s a, there is a line here
Amara Andrew: though. No. You need personality.
Jeff Sarris: Yeah. We want people to, to sort of get to know you more through things.
Amara Andrew: Yeah.
So like if you were at a cooking conference and then you saw that they had a pair of cleats in the hallway or something like, I don’t know, just like if it’s even tangentially related. That’s fine, but if it’s something so weird out of the blue doesn’t make sense. If
Jeff Sarris: it was just like, okay guys,
Amara Andrew: what’s the value to your audience?
Jeff Sarris: I’m at a cooking conference, I do cooking stuff, blah, blah, blah, blah, but you’ll never just, who’s speaking?
Amara Andrew: And
Jeff Sarris: then you’re like, wait, who’s speaking at the cooking conference? Fucking Tim
Amara Andrew: Grover.
Jeff Sarris: Yeah. Like, it’s just like Joe Montana. Joe Montana has a cookware line now. Who knew?
Amara Andrew: Yeah. Like that would make sense.
Jeff Sarris: Like, so that’s interesting. And it’s a hook, it’s a cliffhanger. Yeah.
Amara Andrew: That’s actually a really great story.
Jeff Sarris: But like it’s a, it’s a thing and it gets you somewhere and it’s like, oh wow. And then you’re like, oh, I didn’t know that they did like that. They were a professional chef. And then you get to know something, but you still had the payoff that matters.
No one cares that you went to your friend’s birthday party. Like I feel like that’s the best example. ’cause like we’ve all sort done this where you, you have a group photo with a bunch of people that no one knows and you’re like following.
Amara Andrew: Or if you’re like a, oh shit, I had a good one. I totally forgot what it was.
Anyway, just making sure that it’s actually related to what you do. Yeah,
Jeff Sarris: useful, relevant, like anyone would, who would care. Like when it’s a photo, like I know old school, like Facebook, we post a photo with our eight friends that we went out to dinner with and it’s like, Hey, look, and it’s just for us for eight people.
Amara Andrew: Yeah. If you have a small business or you’re a realtor or whatever. Why would anybody care?
Jeff Sarris: And we’re not in the interest, we’re not in the social graph anymore. Exactly. The world. So the algorithms are pure interest. So your friends aren’t the friends who would know These eight people aren’t seeing it anyway.
It’s strangers. Yeah. Like we’ve looked at the analytics lately and consistently across every platform that we worked with approximately on the, on the rare low end, it’s 65%, but 75 to 85% of all views. Our non followers,
Amara Andrew: which is fascinating.
Jeff Sarris: And that’s only on
Amara Andrew: Instagram.
Jeff Sarris: Just lean to lean on it again though.
75 to 85%. Like I’ve looked on multiple, not just Instagram.
Amara Andrew: Oh, okay.
Jeff Sarris: Yeah,
Amara Andrew: I’ve only looked on Instagram.
Jeff Sarris: Okay, so like 75 to 85% of the views and engagement in everything. All non followers, which also shows like your who follow you, it does not matter exactly. You could have eight people follow you. Then you reach so many more because what matters is what you’re saying and who you’re saying it to
Amara Andrew: see.
And then it matters so much what you actually say in your video for like keywords and things to pop up and search for whatever it is. And then same with your description and hashtags. I will die by hashtags. I know nobody uses them anymore, but I really think they do help with discoverability if you’re using ’em properly.
Jeff Sarris: Well, because also, think about it, cooking platform, gluten-free cooking. It’s hard to find the gluten-free cooking community you can search for like gluten-free Sally. Like, you know what I mean? Like what is it gonna be? How did you know my stage name? But if you search gluten-free and it’s like explore this hashtag, the only gluten-free things you’re going to look at are the things that are hashtagged in there.
That is, it’s a mechanism for discovery. Even if it’s not used a lot, it’s sort of the only way to find anything when you don’t know who you’re looking for.
Amara Andrew: Exactly. Yeah. So keep using hashtags. I feel like I need to make a shirt, like I don’t know how people are outraged about the Oxford comma. I’m outraged about hashtags.
Who
Jeff Sarris: is outraged about the comma? That should be there.
Amara Andrew: Vampire weekend. Actually, no, they’re not outraged. They’re anti. Kiss the fuck bad in Oxford, comma. I’ve seen those dramas. Do there go? That’s a good song. Not when I sing it, but it’s a good song.
Jeff Sarris: Ladies and gentlemen, that was singing, are you sure? You were just like,
Amara Andrew: you know what I was wondering.
Jeff Sarris: No. Sound came out.
Amara Andrew: I didn’t wanna give away my many talents. Oh,
Jeff Sarris: okay. Good.
Amara Andrew: I didn’t want to, you know, dazzle the listener with how great I can actually sing.
Jeff Sarris: Mm-hmm.
Amara Andrew: So just if you wanna hear me sing, comment below. Sing, sing, sing, sing, girl sing. Anyway, I forgot what I was just gonna say.
Jeff Sarris: Oh, I didn’t even interrupt you.
Interrupted yourself. But yeah, so basically posting everywhere is so important. We find it very important and you’re, if you just think about. Like I wanna reach,
Amara Andrew: you’re already doing the work of making a
Jeff Sarris: video. Exactly. I wanna reach as many people of the right people. Again, that’s very important. But I wanna reach as many of the right people as I can.
And say you’re sending out flyers, like think just paper, old school. I’m sending out a postcard all over town, but I’m just gonna send it to two blocks. Hopefully everyone figures out that I’m doing this. No, like two blocks out of what? 20,000? So 18 or 18,000. Good God.
Amara Andrew: Carry
Jeff Sarris: the one 19,998 blocks.
Amara Andrew: Yeah.
Jeff Sarris: Then you’re not even in the where they are. You’re not doing anything where they are. They are on LinkedIn. Essentially to you, they’re on blip blurp. The, the platform you don’t even know exists
Amara Andrew: are you on blip B blurp.
Jeff Sarris: Blip B Blurp is is everything.
Amara Andrew: Oh, wish should connect on blip
Jeff Sarris: blurp.
Amara Andrew: Well, and another thing that I was just thinking about when you said it, which is a silly reason, but you never know what could happen.
Jeff Sarris: I like silly raisins.
Amara Andrew: Ooh, raisin. Uh. You can monetize multiple platforms. If you get to that stage like that shouldn’t only, that shouldn’t be your objective, but if you happen to build enough of a following everywhere, you can have multiple platforms going at the same time.
Jeff Sarris: That reminds me, we talked about the foodie drill last week, who had like 14 million followers on TikTok.
Oh, yeah. Had reached 350 million people in the last six months, whatever it was. Mm-hmm. The numbers were astronomical. And I hadn’t read the article yet. You told me about it. I read it and sort of the footnote in it is she had 14 or 40 million followers on TikTok. Could never make any money, so I had to quit and she had 900 on YouTube because she never tried.
See, she put a little bit there and didn’t have an A meteoric rise and then gave up. Where if you’re trying to build something and build something worth value. I, if you’re doing something of value, do it everywhere. Like, just think if she would’ve had, I dunno, 2000 people on YouTube who loved what she did and supported it in the way that they can through YouTube or AdSense.
She had 4,000, uh, subscribers, AdSense kicks. Suddenly she’s getting all these views and didn’t paid by YouTube. TikTok effectively doesn’t pay you anything.
Amara Andrew: Yeah,
Jeff Sarris: like compared to YouTube. Suddenly she could have had enough to pay her rent. Like she was doing this full-time for however many months, built a huge following and couldn’t afford rent.
Amara Andrew: Mm-hmm.
Jeff Sarris: That’s gutting.
Amara Andrew: It’s cuckoo.
Jeff Sarris: Yeah, but it’s also because then vanity, it’s like, well, it doesn’t really work there, so I’m not gonna do it. It’s like, no, it works everywhere. Just stop putting your, your bar your expectations at a certain part. At a certain point.
Amara Andrew: Yeah. And like there is a route where. If you wanted to do different content on every platform.
There’s a TikTok that I follow that I really love. She posts her like intimate, not intimate, but like her videos on TikTok. Then she uses
Jeff Sarris: and intimate on OnlyFans.
Amara Andrew: Yes. And then I follow her on OnlyFans now. Uh, but she posts her videos on TikTok and then on Instagram she has her photos and then YouTube, she does her vlogs.
That is so much work, but that’s what she does because she’s an influencer, so that works for her. That works for what she’s trying to do, and now she’s building a couple different companies at the same time, which is really fun to see, but it’s very different types of content that she’s making to distribute people and push them to all the different platforms Now.
I will say, I wish she would post her videos to Instagram because I think she’s missing a huge, like people on Instagram probably haven’t even heard of this person, but on TikTok, she’s like everywhere. But she’s really, I think, missing a huge demographic by not posting everywhere, I think.
Jeff Sarris: But what I wanna throw in here is this podcast that you’re listening to right now is the two of us.
We have two cameras. We have one light.
Amara Andrew: And one ghost
Jeff Sarris: and that’s it. We shoot it, we post it, that’s it. This person has an entire team running all of the video and all of the social media and all the production and all the scheduling and all the planning and everything. And now when we think, what does a team look like?
So for Maven,
Amara Andrew: I know exactly how many people are on your
Jeff Sarris: team. We do hyper-local video content all over the country for small businesses. There’s two of us, but we have built the system so we can, you could be a solo business owner and we can be effectively your marketing department, because we’ve built the systems that do that.
So that still is, this person has us behind them, behind the scenes. You never see. But when we’re talking at certain scales, and I want to hear this number, but I just wanted to say podcast. This is the two of us. We just put this out, whatever diary of a CEO. Oh God. Steven Bartlett. It is a phenomenal podcast.
One episode a week, maybe two, maybe sometimes three, but I don’t think he does three a week. It is so good. So well done. Not that dissimilar from what we’re doing here. Just. Like, arguably just like podcasts, it’s structured, it’s, it’s its thing, but it’s an interview. He, it has grown so much that he just crossed a hundred employees working on the podcast.
Amara Andrew: Yeah,
Jeff Sarris: the podcast.
Amara Andrew: Just the podcast,
Jeff Sarris: like the social media that goes out for it. The clips, the editing, the scheduling. A hundred people. And this is for one man who runs a successful podcast where he talked talk one person. Two, maybe three times a week.
Amara Andrew: This is insane.
Jeff Sarris: We all think this is a conversation.
It’s easy. I’ll just do it. You know, I’ll just post, I’ll, I’ll have five clips a day from the podcast. That’s the only way people can find it. Da da. I’ll actually do this. I’ll do, I, no, like you won’t
Amara Andrew: trust us. It’s exhausting.
Jeff Sarris: And like everyone you look at who seems to be so prolific and so successful as like a solo person.
When you actually look into them, they probably have, they at least have a small team like what we do for people. But many times they have what I would say, a bloated team. Mm-hmm. Of way too many people. But it’s what it takes to build the thing that they’ve built.
Amara Andrew: Exactly. But that’s such a different business that they’re building.
So like most of the people we’re primarily speaking, I’ve said it multiple times now, but two small business owners and realtors specifically. ’cause that’s sort of our unintentional niche. That, well, intentional, but unintentional. But that is, you’re not an influencer. You’re not hopefully not trying to be an influencer.
Otherwise this isn’t really making sense. So like you need to sort of figure out what is the most, which is what we do for our top bananas and for my hyperlocal content.
Jeff Sarris: What is name.com top bananas.
Amara Andrew: Yeah. We highly, highly optimize the content so that it’s the most effective it can be. Because otherwise A, what’s the point?
And then two,
Jeff Sarris: one,
Amara Andrew: it’s stupid. I laugh at my own jokes. Do you joke? No, I do. But I was busy laughing at my own joke and I was like, God, people that laugh at their own jokes are stupid. And I was like, I laugh at a lot of my own jokes. And that’s all that went on right there in that little gap. Um, I totally forgot what I was gonna say now.
Here we are and I’m a horse. But anyway, just post everywhere. Post your one video, post it everywhere, because you’re like, literally you’re doing the same exact amount of work. I remember hearing people say before too, that this was for home tours, specifically
Jeff Sarris: real estate home tours.
Amara Andrew: Yes. They were gonna go in and record multiple different tours for each different platform.
Then they never posted to social media ever again. Or they tried it once and then they realized, wow, that’s probably not the best use of my time when I should be working on literally anything else in the business. Like this is one tiny part of, it should be one tiny part of your business.
Jeff Sarris: So marketing is a very, very vital, important part.
Amara Andrew: Yes,
Jeff Sarris: but it,
Amara Andrew: but when you’re the only
Jeff Sarris: person
Amara Andrew: doing it
Jeff Sarris: real quick, say like, if. You’re, if that’s you and you have a solo or two person business, someone needs to run the business.
Amara Andrew: Exactly.
Jeff Sarris: You’re not in the business of marketing. Yeah. ’cause if you’re marketing, you’re not working, you’re not working the business.
Like it needs to be worked.
Amara Andrew: Exactly.
Jeff Sarris: So you need to do both or have someone do the marketing. And marketing is vital. Like it is the be all, end all. Like you can have the best product, best business if no one knows you exist. Good luck. Exactly. Like not even good luck. Unfortunately, you are already on the downswing.
Amara Andrew: Yes. So 100% do marketing. And this isn’t to scare you from not doing anything like this is purely just to say, if you’re already dedicating the resources for this one fricking video, whether it’s your time, your money, whatever, put it every single place. Like you literally have no idea where your next customer or client is gonna come from.
So just. Please do that. That’s the, that’s all I have.
Jeff Sarris: Well, and if you are set on having different things on every platform, here’s the one little, the little, uh, hack post, all of the things on all of the platforms. Like you would’ve five things going out every day if you made something for every single platform uniquely every day.
Amara Andrew: Yeah.
Jeff Sarris: And then every platform has five things. Like why not, like
Amara Andrew: even every platform now, except for YouTube, like they support. YouTube video and image,
Jeff Sarris: YouTube. YouTube has posts too. We just never use ’em. Oh, that’s right. Yeah. Everyone has everything. Yeah, it’s all the same.
Amara Andrew: So then you silly ghosts, what do
Jeff Sarris: you do?
But you know, like if it’s just like, oh, you know, but I really, I want to use Instagram for this. It’s like, fine. And post the other stuff.
Amara Andrew: Yeah.
Jeff Sarris: It’s easy. It’s silly. It is easier to just post it there also than to worry about should this be there at all.
Amara Andrew: Sorry, I yawned
Jeff Sarris: with that. I think we’re going bed. No, I’m sorry.
Amara Andrew: No, I didn’t eat too much today. I need to eat more. It’s almost dens time. Mm-hmm.
Jeff Sarris: I’m excited. I think for that we should wrap and we will see you next week.
Amara Andrew: One of these times. I’m actually gonna have a wrap ready for you and I’m gonna forget probably the entire time.
Jeff Sarris: I mean, I have raps, recorded of you, so I’ll just have to play those on here.
Okay. Bye.