Last week, I talked with a small business owner on Threads who was bemoaning the thousands of dollars other small businesses spend on these spammy social media courses. I wanted to high five her after I got yet another ad for one of these courses.

I get that people need to make money, and a lot of people are particularly desperate right now. But that doesn’t excuse taking advantage of small business owners with these spammy courses. We’re all just trying to get by, but if your way of getting by is taking money without giving back value, there is a real limit to how long that will last. And after you have burnt a lot of bridges, you won’t have the ability to make money anymore.

I could go on and on about this, so let’s dive in.

There is no formula for social media

“Get my formula that makes me successful.” On all of these ads, I see some form of this statement. According to these people, social media is just a formula, and once you figure that out, it’s easy.

Here’s the thing: Social media is never that easy.

There are so many different industries and audiences. If you tried something and it succeeded with one audience, it might absolutely flop with another. Social media just differs so much from one audience to another because their needs and wants are very different.

And who you are as a company in this industry matters. Any solution that doesn’t take who the company is into account when creating a social media plan is really missing out on some great content.

In the end, the formula is just what they did to sell you this course in the first place. It’s spammy and it likely won’t get you very many sales. And honestly, your business will be short-term on social media if all you do is engage in spammy tactics.

Where is the personality?

What is one of the top reasons why an audience will engage with a brand? Because the brand has a personality they connect with. They feel almost like a friend to fans, and for that reason, the audience keeps coming back.

These course don’t teach that. In fact, they can’t teach that. This is a very strict framework that can’t take a brand’s personality into account. And if there is any kind of personality, it’s not anything connected to the brand.

That means the amount of success you can get is very limited. The audience will feel that the personality isn’t genuine and then move on. Because people on social media nowadays have a million pieces of content coming at them. They will not wait for the ones that do not invite them into a genuine relationship.

Not unique

Despite what I sometimes see on social media, being unique really does matter. Think of how you feel the first time you see a trend versus how you feel the hundredth time. That says everything about how being unique really does matter and being spammy does not do anything for you.

There are things only your brand does. There are interests only your audience has. Not paying attention to those little unique bits and pieces means you won’t get noticed. And not getting noticed on social media means your plan is not working.

It’s really hard to leave spaces for uniqueness when it comes to a course. You can show them how to do the research, but most people looking for help are not up to that level of research. They want answers and uniqueness is way too vague to be an answer that would satisfy them.

It doesn’t take into account goals

These courses have one goal and one goal: Get the maximum reach and engagement on social media. Because most of the people who create them can’t understand that there could be another goal on social media. So if that’s your goal, then maybe this is an option for you. Probably not but maybe.

A company’s goals are very important. They affect how they approach social media to such a degree that you can’t move forward with a plan without them. What does success look like to them? What are their overarching business goals? How can social media support them? Asking all of these questions can give you a clear guide into what social media looks like for that brand.

On the other hand, trying to move forward with generic goals or no goals whatsoever means that the social media program is more of a hope and pray situation rather than one that relies on well thought out research.

What you can sell instead

First and foremost, I’m not here to tell you that any of these ideas will be as successful as a spammy course. What I am saying is that for long-term success, you might want to consider ideas that are less successful so you are not left with all of the bridges you burned with no way to make money.

When courses were becoming a thing for social media consultants, I turned to selling coaching instead. This gives me the ability to dig into what’s going on with clients and let them take the wheel as they learned. I offer two options. The first is a light version where we do all the work over email. The other has the addition of a weekly video call. To be honest, I love when a client goes for this option because I get to see them have a lot of light bulb moments. For most clients, this relationship lasts somewhere between one to two months.

The other option I offer is trainings. This is simply me going into a company and training them on agreed upon topics. Sometimes this includes looking at analytics, but sometimes that’s not necessary. There is some give and take before the training so that I make sure I have materials ready that are applicable to what they want to learn about. And then I leave and it’s up to them to do the rest. It’s rare that I am brought in for just one training simply because there is just far too much to learn and digest in one sitting.

These both work well for my clients because they provide feedback on what they’re doing in a way that a course does not.