Would You Hire a Coach From Social Media?
Filed Under (NLP life coaching) on 01-09-2021
Would you hire a life coach from social media if you were looking for one? If you would, why? If you wouldn’t, why? Does marketing on social media work in this context? Would you trust a stranger who wrote you a marketing message on Facebook or LinkedIn enough to hire him or her?
Maybe this article will do me more harm than good. And maybe there will be readers who will agree with its point. Maybe whether a reader will agree or disagree is generational. The millennials live online, hence are more likely to think nothing of hiring a life coach from social media while older readers are more likely to hire a life coach by referral or by knowing the coach from life, for example as a neighbour.
I am in the middle of the timeline of the generations, so understand both the younger and the older. But what I’ll never understand is how anyone imagines that asking me to be his friend on Facebook or writing me a message on LinkedIn will make me trust him or her enough to give him or her all my expertise just like that. I get lots of message requests from strangers. Many want interviews with me under the pretext that they want the info from the interviews for research or studies. Doesn’t that sound like a scam to you, dear reader? Would you be protective of your expertise and selective about whom you’ll give it to? Or would you honour the requests for interviews etc. because they’d flatter your ego?
Would you hire a life coach from a cold message on social media?
Another trend I noticed years ago but never wrote about until this article is cold messaging on social media. The principle behind it is promotion. That’s all fine, but I certainly wouldn’t buy something from a stranger who sent me a cold message on Facebook that he is a life coach or whatever. I guess that the people who so prolifically send cold messages are either scammers or belong to the young generations which live online and therefore think nothing of how ineffective their approach is to a large part of the audience which they’d like to turn into clients. That’s why I never message anyone offering coaching.
I figure that if someone follows my work for some time, s/he will get a sense of whether I’d be the right coach for him or her. I certainly don’t have the time nor inclination to live online, hence don’t post content every day. Marketing experts who advise people to post almost every 15 minutes would say that I’m terribly inconsistent and they’d be right. But alas, I post only when I have something valuable to say so as to make it worth readers’ time. If I have noting valuable to say, I’m busy gathering experience through coaching. It’s that simple. I wanted to be a coach who helps people, not a marketer who posts free for all advice on social media every 15 minutes.
What do you think of cold messaging on social media? Would you hire a life coach on the basis of a cold message? Or would you have to know the coach a little before you hired him or her? Or is there a tendency among people to think that if they send a message to a life coach on social media, they’ll easily get free advice? After all, my experience has been that people are keen only to the point when I warn that coaching isn’t free of charge. As soon as I mention that, people stop messaging. Don’t they read my info? Or do they think that I’ll easily give them free advice?
Following on social media
Even the business of following is a science in itself. What usually happens is that coaches follow coaches. That’s no good to me, because I don’t coach coaches. I coach artists, people with learning difficulties, landlords, tenants, people in retail, and members of the general public who are NOT coaches or personal development professionals. So why would I want coaches to follow me? It doesn’t make sense. That’s why I block every coach and personal development professional who follows me. I don’t want them to potentially incorporate my work into their success. I don’t steal anyone’s work, so they can also generate their own. Therefore I don’t want to make stealing and taking credit easy for them.
If being on social media is about promotion and visibility, then I want the right people to see me. But again, the fact that someone follows me on social media doesn’t necessarily translate into that person hiring me to be their coach. Would you hire a life coach from social media whose work you have followed for some time?
In conclusion and to continue…
I wrote about why life coaching is difficult to sell and didn’t include the topic of social media in it. So now you can probably imagine why so many coaches out there vie for the attention of the same clients. This article feels like work in progress to which I’ll most likely add as I gather more pearls of value to readers. If you’d like to contribute your pearl of value on this topic, you’re very welcome to do so.