You've Been Lied to About Social Media

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Social media gurus have been lying to you, and if you are a health practitioner trying to grow your authority online, those lies are costing you time, energy, and real business. 

I am breaking down the six biggest social media myths and showing you exactly what to focus on instead.

Most practitioners are stuck on the social media hamster wheel because they have been told that views, followers, virality, and posting volume are the metrics that matter. 

They are not. 

In this episode, I walk through all six lies one by one, including why a post with 633,000 views added almost no real business, why short attention spans are a myth for the right audience, and why a big following and a big income are two completely different things. 

Whether you are exhausted from posting daily or just starting to think about content strategy, this video will change how you approach your entire online presence.

🕰️ CHAPTERS

0:00 Why Social Media Is a Soul-Sucking Black Hole for Practitioners
1:00 Lie 1: Vanity Metrics Like Views and Followers Actually Matter
3:30 What to Optimize for Instead of Virality
5:00 Lie 2: Short Attention Spans Mean You Need Short Form Content
7:30 Lie 3: A Big Following Equals a Big Business
10:30 Why Your Sales Mechanism Matters More Than Your Follower Count
12:00 Lie 4: Going Viral Is Good for Your Business
14:00 Lie 5: Posting More Frequently Grows Your Authority
15:30 Why YouTube Revenue Per View Is Four Times Higher Than Instagram
16:30 Lie 6: Social Media Grows Your Business

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RESOURCES AND LINKS
 Website: https://healthpreneurgroup.com
 Podcast: The Healthpreneur Show with Yuri Elkaim
 Healthpreneur Website: https://healthpreneurgroup.com

COMMONLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Should health practitioners focus on social media or YouTube to grow their business?

For health practitioners trying to build authority and generate real business rather than just followers, YouTube significantly outperforms social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok. YouTube content builds a permanent asset that appreciates over time, the average user session is 40 minutes compared to seconds on Instagram, and the revenue value per view on YouTube is four times higher, making it a far more efficient platform for trust-building and client conversion.

Does going viral on social media help grow a health practice?

Viral posts typically attract a broad, general audience rather than the specific type of patient or client a practitioner wants to work with. A post with over 600,000 views and more than 2,200 new followers, for example, may add very few actual ideal clients to your audience, while diluting your following with people who have no intention of ever booking a consultation or investing in your services.

Why does a big social media following not always lead to more revenue for practitioners?


A large following and a profitable business are two separate systems that do not automatically connect. Without a dialed-in sales mechanism or enrollment process on the back end, no amount of followers will reliably convert into paying patients or clients. What matters is not the size of the following but the quality of the audience and the clarity of the next step you invite them to take.

ABOUT

I am Yuri Elkaim, founder of HealthPreneur. For over 20 years I have helped health coaches, practitioners, and wellness experts build seven and eight figure businesses online. This channel shares the exact strategies, funnels, and frameworks we use with our clients every day. New videos drop weekly.

#SocialMediaMyths #YouTubeForDoctors #HealthPractitionerMarketing #ContentStrategy #AuthorityBuilding

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Social media is a soul-sucking black hole. And if you're a health practitioner who wants to grow your authority online, I'm gonna show you six ways that you've been lied to by the gurus when it comes to social media. I'm also gonna show you what to do instead, in terms of what I believe, in my experience, to get off the social media hamster wheel so you don't have to play this endless content creation game that drives you crazy. Hey, welcome to the Health Preneur Show. I'm Yuri Al Kim, CEO and founder of Health Preneur. You are listening to this because you are a health professional or coach who is committed and driven to growing a successful virtual practice or coaching business online. In these episodes, I'm gonna give you the best of the best when it comes to marketing, sales, mindset, business growth in general to help you achieve those goals. So without any further ado, let's dive right in. And I'm not saying social media doesn't have its place. I'm just saying for busy practitioners like yourself, it's probably the last thing on the entire totem pool to even worry about. So let's dive into these six lies and I'm gonna show you how to think about them a little bit differently. So the first lie we've been told from the gurus is that vanity metrics matter. There are tons of agencies out there, and their sole primary focus and their promise is about getting you more views. Vanity metrics like views, subscribers, likes are completely garbage. But I get it. For many content creators, there's that world of people that create contents as an influencer. They don't have anything that they sell on the back end a lot of times. You know, maybe they have a course, maybe there's something on the cheap. But the vast majority of these people are getting paid based on views on their content, whether it's you know, brand deals or partnerships, or if they're on YouTube, it might be from AdSense. But both you and I, we're not playing that game. We're not trying to compete with the viral entertainers. We actually have value that can help people improve their lives, right? So when you play the education game, especially on social media, it's very, very, very tough to stand out. And then I'm sure this from a lot of my own personal frustration. Like I despise short form content. I think when you have wisdom and depth and experience, it's very hard to share that and get it across in 30 seconds. So if you're like me and you want to actually help people beyond a 30-second clip on TikTok or Instagram, this might relate. The most important metric, and there are sources to support this, saves matter most. Think about it this way. Why would someone save a piece of content? It's not because it's necessarily funny or cute. I mean, sure, that might be there. The most saved content is the most useful content. My perspective is if you want to help the most amount of people, you have to share content that is helpful. What an idea, right? So it's not about, hey, look at me and how cool I am and like all these flexes. It's about you have this problem, here's an idea to help solve it. When you start creating content that helps people solve problems that they have or gives an insight into a situation they're stuck around, that's when they save it because they want to reference it again at some point in the future. So the question or the reframe I want to give you here is what are we optimizing for? Are we optimizing for virality? So let's say you want to get millions of views. Fair enough, for white. And I'll share an example with you in a moment of one of our posts that had 600,000 views. It generated 2200 new followers. And I'll share with you how it did nothing to improve our business. So stick with me as we get into that. But what are you actually optimizing for? If you want to go viral for white, other than your own ego, or do you want to optimize for authority? Right. When I think of authority, I mean someone who's actually a thought leader, who actually has valuable insights to share to help a specific market. So if you want to build around authority, you're naturally gonna have fewer views on your videos because you're looking to kind of like narrow in on a single target market. So like our content is specifically geared to very successful established health practitioners. The total addressable market between North America and the UK is with two million people. But if you even go down based on like the level of practice that we typically help at, it's even smaller than that. So I know that my content's not gonna be seen by tens of thousands of people and I don't care about that, right? I could create content that is very surface level, high-level appeals to anyone, but I don't want to play that game. So that's the first lie that we've been told is that vanity metrics matter. That if you have lots of subscribers and lots of views, you will do very well. So remember, like subscribers and views don't tell the whole story, right? Vanity metrics are just that vanity. So let's move on to the second lie you've been told about social media. And this is a big one: short attention spans. People don't have time these days, they have a short attention span. Therefore, if you produce longer form content, no one's gonna pay attention. This is true to an extent. People don't care about watching or consuming anything that they're not interested in. But I can promise you this, and I would bet my life and all the money I have on the table around this. When it's a must, people find the time. And I'm like, just live, just think about your own life. You have consumed copious amounts of content, of things that you're very interested in. Right now, as I'm shooting this, the World Cup is going on. I love soccer. I played pro back in the day. So there's like three to four games a day. That's six to eight hours of soccer per day, plus post-match footage, et cetera. Right now, the amount of content I'm consuming just for soccer is crazy. So to say that people don't have attention spans is so ridiculous because we have attention spans for things that matter to us. So to think that short attention spans are the reason we should create short form content is like saying people don't like working out, therefore exercise is bad. Short form content and short attention spans are very valid for tire kickers, for people that are browsers, not buyers, for people that are curious, not committed. And if you want more of those types of people in your ecosystem, which I'm sure you do, right? Then please, by all means, keep catering to those types of flakes. But if you want committed, actual people who are gonna work with you and want to solve a problem, it's not gonna come from 30-second clips because we're worried about the fact that people don't have time to consume more content. So do you want views? Do you want more views or do you want more business? I think the answer is obvious. You want more business. Now you could make the argument to say, hey, Yuri, well, if I had more views, then if everything flowed from that, I would have more business. 100% true. That is very, very true. But you have to think about how people come into the ecosystem as a starting point. Okay, let's talk with the third lie that you've been told from the gurus about social media. So this one is um kind of obvious. Big following equals big money. And I just shared an example with you about an individual who's doing what 40k a month on a 1.5 million follower uh base on Instagram. That is very, very insignificant. Now, I'm not saying there are not people on Instagram with a million plus followers who don't make way more money, but it's honestly like usually if that's the case, they have really solid businesses behind the following. So they're not an Instagram influencer, they have a business and they use Instagram to multiply their impact. There's a very big difference, okay? In my experience, most of the accounts, when I'm talking to people on Instagram as an example, I'm not really on TikTok. So it's, you know, I'm having DMs of people on Instagram. I look at their following base and I'm like, I want to get a sense of what their business looks like. And usually most people have a big following on Instagram. Uh, their business model looks very similar. It's DMing people forever to try to get people to book a call and those people then booking a call and work with them. And that's fine, right? Because warm, warm people are gonna move into business a lot faster than cold traffic. But the problem though is like that's a very, very hard business. I mean, there's no easy business, but I'm saying like it's just so labor intensive and you're living on your phone. I'm sure like a big following doesn't lead to more money. Big following can lead to way more money, but the key thing is remember this. Wherever people come into, like, you have to look at what does the business ecosystem look like? What does the sales mechanism look like? When I'm talking to people about YouTube, they're like, well, okay, so like this client over here makes a million dollars a month leveraging YouTube. This person over here is doing seven figures of year, charging $30,000 for a service from YouTube 100%. How do I know that I can even get close to that? I'm like, well, I don't know because I can help you put the right content out there. But if when people leave YouTube, if your sales mechanism is shit, you're not enrolling anyone, right? If people book into your clinic and they speak to an office manager who sounds like a friggin' donkey, then no one's converting. But if you have a dialed-in sales conversion process on the back end and you're leveraging proper content and growing the right following for your business, oh my God, the conversions go crazy. So it really, really depends. Like a lot of times, most people don't have their businesses dialed in to begin with. So when I share that our YouTube channel has contributed $21.4 million to our business on a relatively small subscriber account, and most of our videos get maybe a couple thousand views, it's not because of the following, it's because of the Ray content and moving people to the next step that we have largely dialed in. A big following can improve your business and it can lead to a lot of business, but a big following doesn't mean you're gonna have a lot of business on the back end, right? They're two separate systems going on. And if you don't have the business side or the sales mechanism dialed in, it doesn't really matter what you're pouring in on the front end from a following perspective. So again, the key question is like, do you want a big following or do you want the right following? And whatever the answer to that question is, the second question is regardless, you have to make sure the next step that people take from wherever they're coming from, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, outer space, that next step needs to be dialed in because then it'll be much more effective and efficient for any source of traffic to come on in and convert into business for you. Quick little break in the show for you. Are you in our Healthpreneur Hub Facebook group? If not, I want to hook you up. I share some amazing resources in there, including free reports, videos, trainings, obviously more connection to me. And we have thousands of other health professionals and coaches who are in that group actively seeking to grow their business online. If you'd like to join us, let me hook you up with a link. It's healthpreneurgroup.com forward slash hub. That's forward slash H U B. Once again, that's healthpreneur group.com forward slash hub. Go there now, join the group. And when you're in there, just drop me a little note to welcome yourself, let us know what you're up to, and I look forward to seeing you inside, connecting with you a little bit more personally. And once again, that's healthpreneurgroup.com forward slash hub. Now let's get back to the show. All right, let's look at the fourth lie you've been told about social media. And I touched on this a little bit earlier, but I'm gonna hammer this home here. Virality is good. Virality, I'm telling you, is not what you want. And I've seen this happen with many of our clients. They get into a situation like, man, my my posts are not going viral. And then they have one that goes viral, and they're like, oh my God, now I have all these followers and I can't keep up with them. They're not even the right people. I'm like, I get it, right? So let me share an example with you. So a couple months ago, I posted a reaction video to the whole Peter Atia scandal, and I was just sharing my perspective on it. And it got 633,000 views, which is way, way, way more than most of our Instagram posts. And it generated 2,267 new followers. Okay, so when I look at the follow, not that I'm not that I looked at every single one of the new followers, but when I looked at the followers, you know, here and there, I noticed that most of them were not health practitioners. I was like, huh, that's interesting. Some of them were, but the vast majority weren't. So on 2200 new followers, maybe I added 100 to 200 new like actual practitioners. And now I've got 2,000 just randoms who felt just as like I did about the whole Peter Tia thing. So is that a bad thing? Is it a good thing? Is it neutral? That's up for you to decide. But for me, I look at that and you can say, okay, well, we could model what's working, right? But how do I define if that works? Like again, what is the end result? Was the end result there? For me, the end result was sh I had a perspective. I was like, listen, the guy's a piece of shit, we get that. But I'm not saying my my perspective was with that said, and like with all the nonsense with the whole Epstein stuff, there's a lot of crooked people. My belief is that there's also a lot of really, really good people on this planet and they could be making a lot of money and they can still be good people, right? And so that was the message that I wanted to share in that video. Now, that was important for me. I wasn't trying to uh ride the trend, but I saw the power of when you when you ride a trend, obviously when it's you know top of this iPhase, what happens? So I could look at that and say, well, that worked, let's do more of that. But for what? What is the whole outcome of that video? Like, what is the purpose of generating 2,000 new subscribers or followers if they're not the exact right type of people that I want to bring in? So I think that's a big lie. And I and I see so many clients that I've worked with fall into this trap. Like they think that getting a video going viral is helpful. Like we had a client as an example, I'll finish with this one, who works with tennis album, right? Amazing work. And she had a she was posting one day, she said uh one of my Instagram posts went viral. And I was like, that's amazing. Can you share the post? And it was a video that was five seconds of a little girl, I think playing tennis with a cat or something on tennis court or something like that. And I'm like, congratulations, who cares? You're not on the video, so no one even associates you to this video now. You've just amassed tens of thousands of new followers who have no connection to Tennis Elbow. So what's the point? Okay, let's talk about the fifth lie we've been told about social media. All right, so more posting is better. Here's the thing about Instagram and TikTok it's like giving a kid sugar. You give a kid sugar, and all of a sudden that kid wants nothing but sugar and a lot of it. The every social media platform wants one thing to keep you on the platform for as long as possible. We know that Instagram videos, I'm just gonna use Instagram just for the sake of uh not losing my voice, but I'm referring to TikTok as well. Instagram, the large percentage of the content is very short, right? 15 and to 60 seconds. So you need a lot of that content to keep people on the platform. If you compare that to YouTube where the average video might be 15 minutes, you don't need as much of the content because one video is 15 minutes. So if you think about this, like on YouTube, a great cadence is one long form video per week. That's it. Instagram, two, three, four, five times per day because you have to feed the beast. You gotta feed the machine because everything is so short and it's just scroll, scroll, scroll, stop a couple seconds, scroll, scroll, scroll, stop. The time on brand, the time on content on Instagram is so small relative to YouTube or even a podcast. Therefore, you have to increase the amount of volume just to even be relevant. And when I say relevant, I mean for the algorithm to reward you or like to show your stuff and have people stay on the platform. To a certain degree, true. Like you have to post a lot on Instagram to keep up with that game. But do you want to do that? Like, do you want to be included to your phone? Do you want to have a full-time job around this? Like, no, it's exhausting, right? When I think of a platform like YouTube, like why I love it so much is because I just have this belief in my mind. I'm like, if I'm gonna spend any amount of time shooting a video or creating anything, I want it to live forever. So every event that I've ever done, maybe borrowing a few, uh, have all been recorded and we have videos for all of it. If I'm at the events for three days and nothing gets recorded, that whole event in my mind almost didn't happen, right? Versus I can leverage content from those events for the rest of my life, even if it was a two to three day experience. Here's an FYI. The value monetarily per view on YouTube is four times higher than Instagram and TikTok. Why do you think that is? Because people spend more time on YouTube, right? The average user session on YouTube is 40 minutes. So when people spend 40 minutes on a platform, regardless of what they do, whether they're consuming ads or eventually buying a product or whatever, the value of those views is significantly higher because remember what I said the longer time people spend with you, the more money they're willing to spend with you. And even if it's from an advertising perspective that a channel is getting from AdSense of people being on the platform, the value of every eyeball on YouTube is significantly greater than Instagram or TikTok. So if I'm gonna put in my effort to building content, number one, that I really enjoy doing, and two, that actually brings more value into my world monetarily, I'm gonna be on YouTube every single day of the week, metaphorically speaking. Now, if you're in agreement with that and you want my team and I to handle the whole YouTube thing for you, uh check out the link below and learn more about our YouTube authority engine. It's 100% done for you service if you're an established practitioner doing about a million a year or more, and you want to become the leading authority in your space instead of being the best kept secret, my team and I will do the whole thing for you. And uh you can click the link in the description to learn more about that. Okay, but let's get on to the final lie that you've been told. And it's this is that social media grows your business. So we've touched on this a little bit, but here's the way I look at this is that social media rents attention. Okay, you're renting attention at best on social media. If we're comparing that to YouTube, a long-form platform that builds assets that live forever. Social media is like renting a house or renting an apartment. YouTube is like owning a house. Okay. If you had the choice, everything being equal, would you rather rent or own? Probably own. Why would you want to own? Well, it's pretty obvious because if you own an asset, it appreciates over time. That's one major value of YouTube compared to just social media. Social media at best, you're renting attention for a couple seconds. Social media, like you might get some visibility, you might get some some attention, right? A couple seconds of attention, but do you want to do you want a couple seconds of attention, or do you want to build true authority that leads your space? So patients search on YouTube in a very similar fashion that they use Google and or AI. And nowadays people are using AI and Google synonymously, probably even more so on AI. I mean, I don't I don't even search on Google anymore. And when it comes to health, Google and AI pull information primarily from YouTube. So if you're not publishing content on YouTube, you're gonna be largely invisible. And you know, you might just have to rely on social media to keep grinding away on that hamster wheel. And I'll finish this point with this. In 21 years of growing my businesses online, I've never once had a client tell me, hey Yuri, I've watched all of your Instagram content. I'm in, I love it. Never once. But what I've heard, maybe in the past two years more specifically, I'd say 50% of our clients have said stuff like, Man, I watched all of your videos on YouTube, or I watched 200 hours of your content on YouTube, and I knew that was I was just gonna work with you. That I hear a lot. So those are the six or six of the biggest lies we've all been told about social media. And again, if you want to get off the social media hamster wheel and you want to build more authoritative content and build a true asset on YouTube, but you don't want to have to figure the whole thing out. Again, the link for our YouTube Authority Engine is in the description below. But if this has been helpful for you, awesome. Thanks for hanging out. And with YouTube in mind, if you want to see the specific mistakes and lessons and the things I would do differently if I were starting my channel all over from scratch again, uh you'll want to check out this video right now. Hey, thanks for hanging out with me in today's episode. Hope you enjoyed it. If you have, here's what I'd love for you to do next is if you're not already subscribed to the Health Prunner Show, go ahead and hit that button wherever you're listening to this to make sure you do not miss a single episode coming your way. And while you're at it, why not leave a rating review? It would mean a lot to me. And here's why. Because I lay in bed awake at night wondering, are you enjoying this show? Do you get a lot of value out of this? And I never really know until I hear from you. All kidding aside, I would really appreciate a rating review because, as you know, the more people know about this show, the more people we can help. And your ratings and reviews make a huge difference. So thanks for hanging out with me once again. And I look forward to seeing you in the next episode.