Social Media Marketing for Swim Coaches | USSSA Conference Talk

I remember the very first time somebody called me up and asked me to teach their baby to swim. The baby was only eight months old and I had never taught a baby in the water before. And so literally on the way to the lesson I was YouTubing how to teach babies in the pool. And now to this day we are one of the largest online swim lesson education YouTube channels in the world. And it's brought me here to this stage where I get to talk at the USSSA Spring Conference about growing your social media, building trust online, and teaching people what we do in the water every single day. I'm really excited to be here and to present on this and for you guys to see what it's all about. Don't forget to subscribe to our channel and if you want to get connected with me directly you have to do it in the swim coach community and you can find the link to that in the description below. If you want to learn more about becoming a United States Swim School Association member you can find the link to that in the description below as well. Hi everybody, how we doing? Okay you guys ready? Who uses social media? I don't see everybody raising their hands. Not everybody uses it. Does anybody not use it? They hate it. Who hates it? For the business. I don't care about your personal feelings. I'm just kidding. For real, who does not use it for their business? Anybody? Everybody uses it for their business. Great, wonderful. Okay, so who here has seen any of my videos online? Who has no idea who I am? Just a couple people. Okay, if you don't know who I am go on Instagram right now, pull your phone up. Actually everybody, everybody pull your phone up. Go on your business Instagram please. Business Instagram. Go to Superhero Swim Academy. If you look at the very first post it's pinned at the top, the upper left hand corner. You'll see a picture of me and it's just all about me. Now you guys all have to go make one of those tonight. So you can like mine if you like. Looking at my page is a really good example of what you guys should and could be doing for your business's Instagram page. Now I am the face of our company. We do have multiple locations. We have multiple staff. Pros and cons to what I did, right? So ultimately since you're all on my page right now we can talk about it really quickly. Everybody wants to come and learn from Coach Jacob. I'm sure a lot of you struggle with this if you're a coach in your pool, right? Everybody wants to do it with you. So on and so forth. I do deal with this a lot because of the way that I've decided to market myself over the past couple of years. But having somebody who is the face of your business is helpful because people want to build relationships with people online and that's what this whole presentation is about. So I'm not going to dive in fully right now but we're going to get through it here. So guys that's a little bit about me. We have one of the largest online platforms in the world for teaching people digitally. So what does that mean, right? We have I believe 4,500 videos posted online. All educational videos. Completely free for parents, coaches, whoever wants to watch the content. YouTube we're at just under 1.7 million subscribers. Instagram we're at 136,000 followers. Facebook is what 560 something thousand. And TikTok is just under a million. But fun fact those numbers don't matter. Now that's a little bit of what we do. Says SSU media here. We own a media business, okay? It used to just be a swim school and I would just take videos and post online because we make revenue from the media stuff. We separated it this year. There's different liabilities and different risks. So if your business ever decides to take social media extremely seriously like we do and you decide you want to sell digital products and things like that like we do it is very important that you separate the businesses as quickly as possible because there are completely different liabilities, risks, and issues, right? So different insurance policies, things like that. So that's a little bit about what we do online. So I'm going to take questions right now, okay? This helps me help you, okay? Because social media is a giant beast. It's an animal. I can sit here and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah for hours, hours. Me and Guillermo over here. Guillermo is my videographer. He helps me with all my YouTube stuff. We're actually making two pieces of content immediately right now. We make videos all day long. When we're listening to the presentations, we're even doing it. And it's not because we don't want to listen and we don't respect the people up here. It's because we have a problem and we're addicted, right? And that's the truth. So this year is the first year that I've allowed Guillermo to take full control over the YouTube channel. So everything that you see moving forward is going to be all him. Everything on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok is still me, but we're working on trust. It's a hard thing for me being that I love this and I'm very passionate about what I do. Who here is passionate? Yes, okay. You guys are great people to be in the videos. Hardest thing you'll ever do? At first. It's not easy being in front of the camera at first. It takes time. Even I still get a little bit awkward, a little nervous. It gets a little weird for me, right? But he follows me around everywhere I go. So it's becoming more and more just part of my day-to-day and I just ignore him. Okay, questions. What do you want to learn from me in this one hour time period? Right. Kate, who's next? Oh, I just do it. I don't know. Anybody else? This is your chance. I'm going to develop this whole presentation around what you want to learn here. I live and breathe social media. This is all we do all day. This is your chance. Oh, I don't care about that. No, I understand. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that is something I want to pinpoint. Percentages of what you should be posting. Understand. Yep. Sorry, I got to write it down. Otherwise, I'll forget. And yes. That's tough. Yep. Okay. And yes. How are you working with AI? Good. Thank you, Melissa. Did you hop on too? Only because I have personal experience with AI. It's good and bad. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's an animal. I have a marketing team and they want to stage things and I want them to be organic. Organic. Tell them to fire them all. That's what you should do. I'm not even going to write that down. It's organic. You can stage some things. It is important to stage here and there if you have something amazing happening at your school, right? If you have an event or something like that. Yeah, I understand. I get it. They're trying to make their lives easier by coming once a week or once a month or something like this to shoot a bunch of stuff. Looking pretty, looking perfect. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, the real stuff is what gets people. If you guys have seen my videos, my hair is a freaking mess. Back there. Okay, that's a good one. Anybody else? You guys sure? That's it? Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's good. I do talk about that. I don't think that, oh, maybe just because the screen went out. Okay, got it. Now I know why. Okay. What? Perfect. Okay, cool. Oh, great. What? Just kidding. No, I got enough. Honestly, the last time I did a speech in front of people, I got a lot of questions. This helps me help you better, right? Because again, I can sit up here and talk about a thousand things and I can tell you all about TikTok and how awful it is and how you should never use it and this and that, many other things like that. That's not going to help a lot of you, right? So I want to make sure that I gear this presentation towards what's going to benefit your business right now. That's what's important is helping you all make money, get more clients, build trust online, making your signup process faster, easier, and building that trust immediately. So I'm going to go through just a couple of these slides and I'm going to start tackling these questions. The biggest issue with swim schools is either getting their team involved, which we did talk about, or getting up the courage of what to post and when we should post. And it's a whole other side of your business, right? But we need to look at social media as an asset for our company, right? It's 100% an asset that can be used. You can make money from it and you're going to get signups from it. It's just how it works. And you can do this organically or you can do this paid through things like Swim Influx, like Chris back there, right? Or you guys can run ads yourself or so on and so forth. Both of these things work if you're putting in the effort. If you don't put in the effort and you put low quality crappy posts out there, what's going to happen? Yeah, you're wasting your time. You're wasting your time, right? Now again, like you may on accident get a post that does well. Like your team posts something weird or whatever and somehow it blew up and that's great. That's fantastic. But did it get you clients? No, probably not, right? So ultimately we have to look at our challenges, okay? And usually those are the ones. Getting our team involved, knowing what to post, spending time and effort and energy. Do we hire a media team or not, right? Do we get our current staff shooting the content themselves? Do we let them go crazy and just let them post wherever they want? Social media is definitely a missed opportunity for a lot of businesses and the power that meta holds right now is literally insane. It's insane. It's truly impressive what it can do and how it can destroy your business too. I'm just going to put it out there. It really can. So if you're not careful, you absolutely need to take some time, sit down with whoever's leadership, whoever wants to be a part of it. If your staff wants to be a part of it, great. If not, then definitely don't make them. You can't. Something we did put in all of our policies when we do hire staff is they do sign release forms, media release forms. So the staff is in the content. They're in some of the videos. Now again, if my staff doesn't want to be in a video, of course not, right? But we do shoot at our school sometimes and I'm in most of the videos. It's just how it is, right? It's hard to build up skill of being behind the camera. It takes time and so it makes it a little tougher for us to go to my staff and ask them or record them teaching a lesson or talking or so on and so forth and you guys are going to face kind of that same challenge. You're going to be a little awkward behind the camera, whatever it is, right? So again, this is why it's really important that they actually want to do it because then they're going to be happy and confident and excited and they're going to make a better video because of that. The people that you want to ask to do it are going to be the ones that are going to be more passionate about their job and you know which one of your staff members are more passionate, which ones are not. And the ones that are really great coaches and they're doing great things with the kids, you want to get them doing what they do best. That's what people want to see. So when you go watch my videos online, you'll see that I am capturing every little moment that I can and then we make content from what we've captured, right? So we'll go back, me and Guillermo will watch hundreds of hours of video a week, something like that and then we just find pieces like, okay, this is good, this is good, this is good, this is good. And while he's making videos on his camera, I'm making videos on my phone. So we're getting two styles of videos, right, that we can use two different types of content and that comes down to the percentages. So what type of percentages should we be posting on our social media? That's really up to you. There are some people out there that say like, oh, you should do 20% of this, 20% of that, blah, blah, blah. Ultimately, you can look that up yourself and find what's going to be best for your business. I really like this quote by Jimmie Johnson because it's extra, extra, jeez, I'm so, this dryness is awful. It really is, like being from Florida to here has been horrible. Did anybody else get a humidifier in their room? We got one, yeah. You brought it? Yeah, they gave you one at the hotel here. Yeah, it's bad. It's a good thing I actually took it apart last night and it was dirty. I was like, so I cleaned it up. The last part of this statement, that little extra. I love that. It's so important and it's literally how I live my life. If anybody knows me, like truly knows me, which I don't think too many people here do, I go literally above and beyond for everybody that wants help, right? We have hundreds of messages a week, hundreds. I answer every single one on Instagram, not on Facebook. Don't message me on Facebook. It's an AI bot. I get those quite a lot and those were about 100 a day. So we had to stop because my wife was going to kill me. When I was building my TikTok page, if you guys heard me speak at the last conference that I was at, it was seven videos a day for two years, every single day. That's what we did. It really hurt me emotionally. It's something that everybody needs to understand. Now again, you guys are going to build an asset. You're not going to get emotionally attached like I did, but do be mindful. If you a staff member to do this for you guys and you don't hire like a team, but you pick somebody who loves it and they're passionate and they want to make the videos and they want to do this and they want to do that and they're super excited, be cautious. It's very emotionally, it's a roller coaster and I've talked about this before. Virality can be poison for the mind and they do this on purpose. They will let the first couple of videos on TikTok do well because they want you to be hooked and this is what happened to me and I literally went through some severe depression, all kinds of issues, up all night long because the videos weren't doing well and what am I doing wrong and what mistakes am I making? But now in the last two years working with Guillermo, working with a team of people, it's helped me make it what it needs to be and that is an asset for my business that's going to help us get more clients and help us sell more digital products. That's all it is. So if a video doesn't do well, I learn from it, we move on, who cares, whatever. But being a creative emotional person that I am, it still hurts a little bit. But above and beyond, when you go online, just same thing. When a client walks in your door for your swim school and wants a swim lesson, what do you do? You welcome them. Hey, how are you? Let's do an assessment, get in the pool for free, whatever. You're going to go above and beyond because you want them as a client, right? You got to do the same thing online. You got to do the same thing with people commenting on your Instagram, on your posts. They're messaging you and they have questions and it really is helpful to have a real person answering. Now you can set up an AI bot to do it and you can train them really well, really, really well. You really can. But sometimes the questions are a little bit out there or weird or whatever, you know. So the AI bot's not going to answer everything and what you could do is you could train it to just get their phone number and then you get them on the phone, so on and so forth. But when you're building it, be there. Whoever's in charge of it needs to be there. If you post a video, you need to hang out for 20 minutes, 30 minutes even. You don't have to be on it the whole time and watch it. You got to go back to it. Okay, am I getting any new comments? Because what does social media like? Well, they love controversy, that's definitely true. But they love even more, hold on, they love even more is interactions, right? So what does social media care about? Man, these freaking, these slides are worthless. None of these are, hold on, we're moving on. This one, I'll go into this one in a second. Social media companies want people to be on their platform. That's all they, literally all they give a crap about. That's it, that's all they care about. And of course, stealing all your data and selling it. So they're doing that too. But ultimately, you will be rewarded by the platforms if you can get people to stay on the platform. So how do you get people to stay on the platform? By creating interactions, by responding to their comments, getting them to go back to the video. So that's what happens. Somebody asks a question in my comments section, I'll answer it. They're off their phone, they're going to come back to their Instagram because they got to read my response, right? They're going to give me another response. And then at that point, that's when I have to decide, is it worth my time? I've already got them to come back to the platform. I've already showed Instagram that I can do that, right? So that's, they're going to, they're already rewarding me a little bit for that. Well, how much reward do I really want? Should I keep going? Will this person turn into a client? Could I sell them a product? What happens next? So this is where, this is where the ask, the business part comes in, okay? Is this, because every comment is a lead, not all of them are great, or most of them aren't. Understanding your analytics of your video, optimizing your Facebook. This is our actual analytics from our Facebook page currently, right now. Understanding how you can really use Facebook to grow, right? Now, Facebook is literally the place to be right now. It's the place to be right now. Facebook, Instagram is good too. Instagram is high quality, but anybody who runs ads in here knows that most of you are probably running ads on Facebook, right? Running it through meta anyways. Facebook is so powerful and they want people on their platform more than ever right now, especially because of the sale of TikTok, right? Because TikTok just sold, a lot of people are leaving. It's gone. They're literally stealing everyone's content. Every time you post on TikTok now, it's no longer your video. They own it, they can use it for whatever they want. You can still use it, right? But they are full control. If you draft your video on there, it's theirs. A lot of people don't realize that, okay? So anyways, Facebook is really pushing to get more people over there. They actually pay if you get your page up and you build it up and you get more followers, subscribers, so on and so forth. They pay you for everything. They pay you for making posts, just text. They pay you for your stories. They pay you for your reels. They pay you for your long form videos that you post on there. They pay you for everything. It's a great asset, but you need to build the Facebook channel up in order to get access to that because you have to apply to be monetized on your channel, right? It can be a great asset for your business. Now, all things aside, we don't make a ton of money from this. It is what it is, right? That's not the idea of this. The idea is to sell our digital products and to get people into the swim school, right? So for you guys, if the goal is just your swim business, it's really important that you spend quite a lot of time building trust and relationships with people on here. Well, how do we do that? We post videos and the most important thing is posting stories. Stories is the most important thing. If you're not posting stories regularly, and I mean regular, like daily, if your swim school is open, you should have a story on your page. Two, three, four, five stories a day. That is the only way to build true relationships with people digitally on social media, okay? Everybody, could you, everybody pull out your phone. Pull out your phone. Go on your answer. You have a question? Can I write it down? Oh, yeah, yeah, okay, okay. Maybe not yet, but I'm telling you, I'm telling you, we get most of our customers digitally from Facebook. Now, again, you should only be running two channels, Instagram and Facebook. That's easy, and you can connect the two. So there's no reason you shouldn't be building your Facebook alongside your Instagram. Places you probably should be avoiding, now again, this is your personal preference, but I would avoid TikTok. There's still value there if you were going to use it, okay, but a lot of people are leaving. There's still younger people using it, you know, kids, teenagers, things like that. It could come back in the future. I don't know, but right now it's risky. Why would you give them everything? It's, you know, so we're going to post probably once a week on it, just stuff that we don't really care about, but Facebook and Instagram is definitely where we want to be leading, but everybody pull up your Instagram. I want you to check out your page. This is a time to be interactive. I want you to look at your page on your Instagram page. I want you to go to your Instagram page, your business, your business Instagram page, not your personal. Take a look at it. Absorb it in. Look at your bio. Look at the link in your bio. Look at the photo, the profile photo. Do you have pinned posts at the top? If somebody was to go to your page right now, would they sign up for lessons? It's a question you need to ask yourself. If they're looking at the videos and they're looking at those posts, if they only wanted to watch two posts, would they trust you? Would they sign up? Would they call you? Do they know what to do? Is there a clear understanding of what you guys offer? Is your bio good or does it suck? If I were to go on your page right now and I was to read your bio, would I know exactly what you guys offer or how to get on to where your school is or whatever? These are questions you need to ask yourself. Watching some videos. Death scrolls happen whenever. I want you guys to use, please use my page as a model. I'm changing it sometimes. I change it sometimes. My page is not perfect. I make mistakes too. There's things that I can improve on, but if you're not where we're at now, this is a great model for you. You guys can use my page. Use my bio. Look at it. Don't copy it. Make your own, but you get the idea. If you go to my page, you know exactly what I do. You can see I have a video. It says parents. It says start here. There's a whole map. I did my best to make it as simple as possible for anybody that goes to my page. You want to be doing the exact same thing. Your Facebook and your Instagram. Facebook is a little trickier to do these kinds of things, but you can still pin things and so on and so forth. Does anybody have any questions about your profile on Instagram? How to make it better? Something that you can do to make it better? Any questions about it? Cool. Didn't want to answer them. Yes. Storytelling. Part one, part two, part three. Is that what you're asking? Yeah. Here and there. I used to do that a little bit more, and there's still value there. There definitely is, but it's a lot more effort, and there's no more payoff for people watching only the one video, so there's pros and cons to it. Sometimes people hate that. They don't want to go watch part two, part three, or part 17. Tag them only if their parents have a large social media following. I will not tag them other than that. We do have a large following, and they're from all over the world, so it's better for safety if we do not do that. If the parents want it, then we'll edit the videos for the parents though, and we will send it to them so they can post it themselves. That's something a little extra that we do for them. Now again, that goes back to my thing earlier, going above and beyond. We go above and beyond for our clients really fast. Tell us. Be honest. Does it suck? It sucks. Yeah, because it sucks, and I'm probably trying to help them out or something. You tell them Jacob said it sucks. That's what you tell them. It's okay. Listen, this is why I believe UUSSA brings me in to speak about this. Exactly. It is, and it's true. Chris, you got something really fast? I definitely wouldn't recommend going right to registration because you still want to make sure the trust is built, and you want a good funnel, and Chris knows all about funnels. It's important to put people where they want to be, not where you've ... Well, I don't know. Maybe you should ... A good funnel is what you need. You need a nice landing page, a landing page that either has one button or two buttons. Mine has three or four, but again, we cater to a lot more people. If you're looking to get people to sign up for lessons, there needs to be one button, and that one button needs to lead them down some sort of path to get them on the phone or to get them to register, whatever that is for you guys. For us at our swim school, we want them on the phone. I need to talk to them. I don't want people signing up for my swim school if they're not good people or appreciative. We're very picky. For us, we have a page. If they're a parent and they want to sign up for in-person lessons, they click that. It does take them to the website, and then they call us, and so on and so forth. For you guys, it might be better to set up some sort of a landing page, and you can do that through a CRM, or you can have it on your own website. Some of your own websites host, or you can build a landing page right there. Then you could ... I don't know. If they want more information, you could just have them put in their phone number to get more information. Then as soon as that phone number comes into our workflow, we're on the phone with them within two minutes, three minutes. If they don't answer, we'll leave a message, and then we text them, hey, it's SuperHeroSwim, blah, blah, blah. Give us a call back. You want to put that in the bio. You want to make sure people know what to click. We have a link in our bio, and people still ask me, oh, do you guys do any online courses? Did you click the link in the bio? Literally, that's my question. Have you checked out the link in my bio yet? Oh, no, I didn't. Okay. I even have arrows that point to it, and all these things that say online courses right here, but nobody reads, and nobody cares, right? We all know that people are just looking to get that interaction and response with a human being, and they don't want to read anything. Anyways, moving on, the power of storytelling, okay? This kind of leads into the part one, part two, part three that she was asking in the back. Stories are what sell, and this is what builds trust with people, and this is where you're going to be able to really differentiate yourself from other companies in your area, right? We charge up to $200 for a swim lesson, for one lesson. I'm not saying that's morally correct, okay? But because of our social media page, and if people want to work with me based on their status in life, whatever it is, we have more say. People are willing to travel farther to come to me than they would maybe another program. They may have another swim school right next to them, but they would rather come to me, and that's what we're trying to do for all of you. That's what you all want, right? You want the people to want to drive 45 minutes to come to the best swim school in the area. Who doesn't want that, right? Of course. So being able to tell stories to help them see why you are better than the other option is done through making proper storytelling content, right? So when we make videos and stories, there's three different parts. I'm going to talk about that here in a second, but you really want to make sure that people see what you guys value within the stories, right? So if you have a student that comes into your school and they are petrified. We just had a kid. He wasn't petrified. He was a little scared. You can watch it on my Instagram. I just posted it yesterday, and you can see that he was asking me for help, and then just the other day, he was able to swim, flip, float, roll, swim across the whole pool. I paired the video up. The editing took me maybe 12 minutes, not that long. The video didn't do amazing, but it's a great quick and simple story without me having to do any voiceovers or anything like that, which I'm sure all of us are wanting, right? We want to simplify the video making and editing process so we can get it out there quicker, and we can make more of it, and it's easier this way. One of my guys on my team had a really interesting idea, and I don't know. We've thought about it, and maybe somebody else will do it first, but strap all the coaches up with GoPros the entire day while they're pumping out lessons all day long, and then have a series of editors from overseas that charge only $2 for a video. Have them go through it all and just make viral clips or try their best to get clips from everything that they're seeing and interacting with, right? Again, that's harder. There's liability. Not all the parents want their kids on video. There's things like that, but if you highlight which kids don't want to do it and so on and so forth, it still could be done, and it's not a bad idea. I really think it's a great idea. It's just logistically, it's a process, and we got to buy everybody a GoPro, which I don't want to do, so I think that's really more of the problem, but this kind of goes through a little bit of what you should be posting on Instagram and Facebook. Carousels are doing really well recently. Actually, you know what? Everybody pull up your Instagram again. Pull it up really quick, quick, quick, quick, quick, quick. If you are not following the creator or the CEO of Instagram, you need to follow him right now. He all the time is posting all new updates, all the things you should be doing. On his stories, he does a questionnaire. You can ask him any question, and sometimes he answers it. He'll answer, I think, 10 or 12 at a time, and he does it every week, and anybody can ask him a question. Moseri, right? M-O-S-E-R-I. M-O-S-E-R-I. Moseri. You absolutely need to be following him. I check his page every single week, and there's another page on Instagram called, I believe, Instagram Creators or Just Creators. It's another one. Also, it's an Instagram page. They're running it. They're telling you what to do. It doesn't get easier. They're literally trying to make it as easy as possible for us, and we all have AI access to ChatGPT and whatever other AIs you're using. You could tell it the story, and you could tell it to help you design a carousel that makes sense, and then you just use photos from the lesson of the kid, and they will tell a story, and people will go along, and they'll watch it. Carousels are great. They're really easy. They're quick to make. It's definitely one you can do fast. Then, again, stories is truly the most valuable thing for building trust, which is what we all want. We all want to build trust, right? Okay. I'm going to go through some of these questions real quick. You asked me what my biggest mistake was. It's really hard to answer that because I've made so many, but I think one was I really leaned into shock value. Early on, it was popping off, anything crazy, and I posted some things that really hurt me emotionally. I got attacked by a lot of people, even swim instructor friends. People, they thought it was so bad what I was posting and stuff like that. It's funny because I'm friends with them all now, and a lot of people used to just ridicule me. If you go to my old stories on TikTok, you can see my growth as an instructor over the six, seven years I've been posting from a medium level coach to now. I like to consider myself an expert, but I'm not a master. My biggest mistake is taking it to that emotional place and doing whatever I could to go viral. I thought that was the only thing that was important. I had an addiction, to be super straight up and honest. It was a really bad addiction, and it created a lot of problems with my relationship with my wife, well, girlfriend at the time, and other issues, so not thinking of it as an asset. Kids online, it's part of what I do. I'm posting kids. Again, if parents don't want them up there, moving on. I have lost some clients because of it. They didn't want their kids online, and I never asked. I just did it because that's what I do, and I just assumed everybody knew that. I've even had parents ask me to take it down. Again, this is my younger prideful self, and I just didn't. They signed the waiver, whatever. Because of those issues I had, I lost a client. After I'd lose the client, I could just make a thousand more videos. Why the heck would I have done that? I always felt bad about it. I was like, okay. Then I would go back, and I would delete them later. I would let them know that I deleted it. I'd still lose the client, but this is what it is. Managing responses, good and bad. A lot of people say to ignore the bad ones, but I find it's good to educate people. It's funny. Who knows who this is? Does anybody know Helen Hughes? Okay, good. Helen Hughes used to, I'm pretty sure, used to really dislike me. Now, we are really good friends. This is what social media can do because she used to hate the videos that I used to post. She's from the UK. She's a very gentle instructor. She doesn't ever make the kids do anything they don't want to do, but I tell you what, she's one of the best coaches I've ever met and seen. It took a while for her and us to reconnect, and so on and so forth. When she messaged me, I was like, what's the change of heart? Because I knew she bashed me online in her group. She has a massive group, and so on and so forth. We talked about it. We worked through it, and it was what it is. She's been to my pool now. We hang out. We learn from each other, and I promote her products inside of my group. I totally forgot what I was talking about. I don't know why. I just veered off. We have an opportunity here to inspire each other. Your content and the stuff that you post and you make, it's not just for your business. It's for the next generation of coaches that are coming up. There's one thing that we highlight in what I post. If you watch my videos and you really take your time to hear what I'm saying and talking about, I'm glorifying one thing. Not just teaching kids to swim, but can anybody guess what I try to glorify? Anybody? One thing. I'm a swim instructor, and I do it full-time, baby. Full-time. Who here struggles with staff? Who struggles with staff? Struggles with staff. Nobody wants to be a career swim instructor, except all of us crazy people in this room. It's not common. There's not a lot of money in it. This and that. I hear this all the time. Seasonal, where I live. Then move. I don't know. You want to do this, move. What the heck? Shut up. I'm a big believer in doing things. If you want to do something, do it. Go do it. You have to do it quickly. You can't wait for this stuff. I make it a point to show people and teach people how to start their own business. Go do it. Go start it. Here's what you can make. You can make $80,000 your first year. I guarantee it. I guarantee it. You just got to put in the work, you know? That's your part. But anyways, the idea is every content and every piece of video that you make, you're not just catering to, you're not just building trust of future clients. You're building trust of future instructors. Teenagers that are watching your videos, they think, oh, this is cute. This looks like a fun atmosphere. Aquatots does a really good job at showing their atmosphere in their school. They really do. You know, some of the videos are questionable and they're not going to build clients. But I tell you what, it looks like a pretty fun place to work. I've even considered myself like not working there, but like going and visiting and making videos with them just because it looks fun. And they look like they have so much energy and stuff. And I travel a lot anyway, so it's like, man, maybe I should just stop in. And I've built relationships with some of the social media people at the Aquatots all around the United States. So, but that kind of goes into my next thing here is like building relationships with people online, like Helen or other instructors and so on and so forth. From our social media, we've been able to hire, I want to say about 20 instructors just from watching our content from different states. Moving to our state with nothing, well, money to move, of course. We do not move them. We do not pay for it to be. But they're willing to come to Florida and give it a try and see what it's like and come join our team for a little bit. And that's great. And we have a new lady right now. She owned her own swim school and she decided to leave her own swim school because she was lonely and she wanted a team and she wanted people to support her and she wanted us to help her grow and whatever else, you know. So, she moved from North Carolina to Florida and she just started working with us. That was pretty great. So, anyways, building connections with people and coaches. One thing that we do, and again, Helen has come to my pool. Guillermo and me, what we do is we open up our pool to any instructor that wants to come. They shadow us. They hang out with us. We certify them in what we teach and how we teach. Whatever it is that they want, we mentor them, whatever. Or they just want to hang out. Some coaches just want to come and hang out with me in the pool. That's fine. Every time they come, we videotape everything. Getting more content for our channel, for our page, showing that we are experts because coaches from all over the place want to come and hang out with us. Makes us feel good and it makes us look better, right? It's all perception. Online is all perception. That's all it is. You know, but it's all true. So, these are things that you guys can be doing as well. You can open up your doors to instructors, but you need to make sure that you're capturing that content. You're helping them grow. You're helping them whatever, okay? And again, it could lead to hiring new staff that are really passionate and love it and want to be mentored and so on and so forth. And then every time you do connect with people, it's important that you tag them. You get them involved in what you're doing so that way your posts get shared on their channels and so on and so forth. Cross-posting is super valuable, okay? This is where things get a little tricky. I have no idea what time it is. Oh, here we go. Okay, I got to go quick. All right, making the content, the art of actually creating the videos, right? This is where a lot of people struggle. The hook, the body, and the payoff. It's not as complicated as you're making it, right? All you have to do is keep trying. Oh, guess what? Instagram has trial reels. Does anybody know what trial reels are? Who's done trial reels? Who knows what I'm talking about? You can just post a video on trial reels and it doesn't even go to your followers. It goes to everybody that doesn't follow you. They have to not follow you. And you can test videos over there. He works for another channel as well. How many trial reels do you guys do a week? Every day or a couple of days a week? You do three a day, okay. If you got somebody who's editing the videos and they're posting them for you, you can be doing three, four, 10, 12 a day. You really can just be testing stuff all the time. And it's not going to your followers. Your followers don't see that. But you can test things over here like, oh, hey, this one's doing really well. You're going to take that video and then you can put it on your main page. You do have to change the description and the captions. You do have to do that. And you can actually make videos from trials be public to your page. You can just switch them back and forth, but I've been told that's not the way to go because you want two pieces of content. Two pieces is doing better than one, right? So more is better. So anyways, creating a hook. You guys can use AI to create a hook. It's not that hard, right? All kinds of hooks. Today I learned that so and so. Holy crap, this kid just jumped in the pool. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Oh my gosh, I can't believe Billy did that. Then you go into the story, okay? The body of the video. If you can get people to the hook and you got them, now you got their attention, you caught them, and you can get them through most of the body, you got a viral video. The video's going to do well, okay? Or not viral, but it'll do well. The payoff is the ending. Now this is why we don't do part one, part two, part three. We try to avoid them the best we can. People want to be fulfilled from the video they are watching. If they feel fulfilled from the video they are watching, guess what? They're going to want to watch another one, and then another one, and then another one. If you can get them to watch one whole video, Instagram and Facebook will definitely recommend another one to them, right? So it is important to manage, or what's the best word? Oversee what's being put out for your business, right? Because let's say you have one video that's doing really, really well, and then the next video gets recommended to them, and it sucks. So you don't want videos that suck. You want to make sure that you feel comfortable with everything being posted out there. It's valuable. It's going to add the information for you. Does everybody have any questions about structuring your content? There's multiple ways to make videos, right? You could do just you speaking, and then some clips of the kids, whatever. You can do POV. Everybody sees my videos. You see I do a lot of POV stuff. I'm talking to the kids. That's true interaction, right? That's addicting. People love that stuff. Why do you think people love POV? Point of view, if you don't know what that means. Makes you feel like you're there. People want to feel like they're there. They're looking to feel something. That's why they're on social media in the first place. They're looking to build relationships. They're looking for stress reliever. They're looking to be educated, wowed, or feel something because this world is filled with a lot of emptiness right now. Any questions? Yeah? How long should the video be? That's such a good question. It's tough to say because it really depends on your ability to make videos because Instagram limits it to three minutes. Me and Guillermo will post three-minute videos all the time. Some of them do well and some of them do okay, but it's very hard to keep people's attention for that long. If you're not really good at creating content or you're getting there and you're learning, play with it. Try a minute. Try a minute and 10. Try a minute 30. Play around. Even five-second videos can do well. They really can. We've all seen them where it's just like a funny sound clip, but if you're trying to build trust with people, you can't do it in five seconds ultimately. Put a little effort into your content creation and your videos and you're going to build trust with people. That happens over a period of time. People have to see you, I think, what Chris? How many times do people have to see before they trust you? Would you say 7, 10, 12 times? 12? Something like that, right? If they're watching a long video of you and they're willing to stay and look around, they're just building more and more trust throughout that video. Then it comes down to the ending of your video, which is going to be the payoff. The ending of your video could be a CTA at the end. A lot of people don't recommend that. Honestly, I think Alex Ramosi, if you don't know who that is, he's a wizard online. Alex Ramosi talks about you don't even need CTAs in your videos. You really don't because if you're always making new content, you're always posting new things, then they're going to just take the natural next step because they trust you. They're going to look at your links. They're going to message you and see what's up, see what you're doing, and they're going to ask their questions. The best thing for me is when people ask their questions. Advertising and stuff like that. I don't do a lot of advertising. Chris can attest to this. I'm a big believer in organic content. I am running ads currently for one of our online businesses. This is new territory for me. They're doing well, some of them, anyways. It's definitely going to help you. If you're running ads, you definitely want to make sure that you talk to, or if you're not running ads, you want to make sure that you talk to an expert first. Don't just start making ads and wasting money. You need to test ads. You will literally waste thousands of dollars so fast with a pointless ad not leading them down the right path. It's important you talk to some sort of expert who can show you what you should be making, what you should be doing, and how to test them properly. It's really, really important. And that's literally all I'm going to say about ads. Oh, having a media day for ads is a good idea. It really is. Yeah, we make about, when we have a media day, we do about 10 ads in like an hour. We'll just pump them out. And I just go, go, go, go, go. And then we even make pieces of ads. So we'll only do the hook. And I'll make like 10 hooks. And then I'll make 10 bodies. And then I'll make 10 endings. And then our ad guy will just puzzle them up. We have a group online. We have over 250 swim schools in the program. We help them with tons of stuff. If you're interested, okay, you don't have to do this. I don't care if you do it or you don't do it. All right? I want the right people that need help. I will help you. And I will go literally above and beyond for you. I will tear apart your social media for you. And I will be very mean about it. Or I'll be nice if you want that. Okay? We do a lot of things for swim schools. I help with whatever that I can. I am only as good as what I constantly am researching and studying and learning about, right? And I'm happy to share all those things with you inside of our group. It is a school community. It's a whole online community with lots of swim schools. A lot of the swim schools that are in there are smaller businesses. You guys are all a little bit bigger than they are. They are looking to get to where you are, most of them, probably 80, 90% of them. And so if you guys decide to join, you have an opportunity to mentor and educate and help them while I'm helping you with your social media and whatever else I can help you with. We do retreats every year. We have one coming up next month. There's over 70 swim schools that are going to be there. It's really exciting. So we're doing a lot of things here and I help you keep up with the new things that are coming in social media. I do consultations and so on and so forth. And if anybody does decide to join from here, I will do your social media consultation for free. I usually charge $400 for that service. So just so you know. And that is all that I have here. I want to make sure really quick, I answered all of these questions. Staff involvement, it's really difficult to get your staff involved. They have to want to do it. It's really important that you take time and hear them out, hear their ideas. It's really good to get them all to a content table day. Get their ideas. What kind of videos do they want to make? Make a whole list with them. Make it really fun with them. Get them excited about it. That's going to help a lot. I already said how I use AI. I use ManyChat and I use a CRM called GoHighLevel. Those are really valuable tools for us. We use ChatGBT and some other ones to make better descriptions to help us come up with ideas for our long form stuff. The short form stuff is pretty natural for us because we've been doing it for so long. So we don't really need help there. But it is good for somebody who doesn't have that maybe creative side or care as much or they really just want it to be a solid asset. So you need to sit there for maybe an hour or two and tell AI that, hey, I want 200 more swim students in my pool by the end of this month. Tell me exactly what kind of content I need to be posting, what style I need to be making, what percentages it needs to be, so that way I can provide the highest quality and build the most trust immediately. Be very specific if you're going to use AI. Otherwise, it'll tell you to do all kinds of crazy stuff. Posting in the moment is kind of what we do, but scheduling is definitely going to be easier for your life. But posting in the moment does create that organic feel to everything and sometimes that does help. It is important to go to each platform and post the video on the platform. Like I said, repurpose.io is terrible. It will destroy your content. The social media channels will suppress your videos. They do not want that. They want everything to be individualized and they want to see you using their features. Meta has its own editing app. They did make it clear that they're not suppressing anybody, but Meta literally put specific analytics on how your video is doing in only their editing app. I mean, it just goes to show they want you to use it, right? So not saying you have to because we don't, but it could help if you haven't started. Once you're all in on an app, it's hard to switch. You know, and what to post. It's a hard thing to answer, but ultimately you post everything. Post everything. Any more questions? Wow, did I really do that good or that bad? Yeah, was it helpful? Did I help everybody? Thank you, everybody. It was really great speaking to you.