Trust First, Sales Second: Dr. Sam’s Guide to Social Media That Works

The Berne Podcast with Dr. Sam Berne

Keywords

social media, community building, e-commerce, content creation, branding, patience, persistence, time management, online workshops, marketing strategies

Summary

In this conversation, Dr. Sam Berne shares his journey from being a doctor to becoming an entrepreneur and building a successful e-commerce business. He emphasizes the importance of creating value through social media, building a community before launching products, and the significance of patience and persistence in achieving long-term success. Dr. Berne also discusses effective time management strategies for social media and the difference between branding and transactional selling.

Takeaways

Sam Berne emphasizes the importance of creating value for your audience.
Building a community is essential before launching products.
Patience and persistence are key to long-term success.
Social media offers underpriced attention for entrepreneurs.
Storytelling is a powerful tool for content creation.
Time management is crucial for social media success.
Branding provides insulation from competition.
Course corrections are necessary for growth and learning.
Engaging with your audience builds trust and loyalty.
Utilizing various social media platforms can expand your reach.

Titles

Building a Brand in the Digital Age
The Power of Community in Business

Sound bites

“Create value for your audience.”
“Social media is underpriced attention.”
“Patience is crucial in business.”

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Dr. Sam Berne’s Journey
02:37 Building a Brand Through Social Media
05:36 The Power of Giving Value
08:22 Creating Content and Engaging Your Audience
11:19 Integrating Sales with Community Building
14:07 Patience and Persistence in Business
16:55 Time Management for Social Media Success
20:09 Branding vs. Selling: The Long Game
22:51 Expanding Your Social Media Presence
25:35 Utilizing Email and Text Marketing
28:04 Conclusion and Next Steps

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Sam Berne (00:00.558)
So everybody, I’m really excited to be here just a little bit about myself. You know, I grew up in a middle-class family and we emphasized education. So I ended up becoming a doctor. I was always interested in natural healing. So I combined the two and I started two private practices. One I sold the other I still have. So I’ve always had an entrepreneurial spirit in me. And in 2016, I started my

brand on the internet and I’ll talk about that and actually in 2020 is when I launched my e-commerce right around covid. So I’ll go into more details about that and I’ve been a client of score for the past three years. So here we go.

So when I started I began to think of myself as a media channel and the key thing in if you’re going to do social media in my opinion is to create value for your audience. And what I did early on is I gave away my best information like everything for free and it’s kind of like this idea of give give

give and then you can ask. Okay. This is a really important aspect in building a brand and it’s very different than say being transactional and I’ll kind of go into more detail on that in a minute. But if you are going to do social media, my advice would be start with your strengths. Are you better at writing? Are you better at talking for me? I loved videos. So I loved

doing video. also love doing audio and I actually started this this process called morning walks with Dr. Sam and so I would I love to hike so I be hiking in the National Forest and somebody would ask me a question and so I would stop and go. All right. Let me give you the answer here and it became a huge way to build my following. Another thing that I did was I created

Sam Berne (02:17.496)
four to eight content pieces a day and I posted them across all the social media platforms Facebook Instagram LinkedIn YouTube tick-tock and Twitter. If you’re independent interest, you could do that. You could also do snapchat, but I was very disciplined about creating content and Posting them and people ask. Well, what do you do for content? What’s the best thing and I would say storytelling?

I would also say documenting. like for an example in my own case, you know, how did I get to the place of developing my products? How did I get to the place of you know, I might share a story about a client or a patient who had a success story in terms of documentation. Recently. I did I love whitewater rafting. It’s one of my passions and I did a trip in central and South Southern, Utah.

And I documented the whole trip video audio and then I posted that and so this is another piece. Your content doesn’t just have to relate to your business. People might want to get to know you like for example, you know, let’s say people aren’t interested in my health and Wellness brand, but they’re interested in whitewater rafting. So I ended up getting some people who were now following me.

but it had nothing to do with my professional brand. It had to do with my, you know, personal interests. So you could put your children on if you’ve got animals. I mean, you you could just think about not just posting about your business, but doing some personal things as well. So I feel that we are living in a golden age and what I mean by that is that, you know, if you think about

say 20 years ago, the Kingmakers were the celebrities that we saw on TV, you know, the actors, the sports celebrities or the people who wrote best-selling books. But now the internet is the Kingmaker and what this means is that we can use the internet as entrepreneurs to build our business.

Sam Berne (04:41.254)
And the other thing is you don’t need to spend a lot of money in creating content. In fact, when I first started I was the only one in my company. I did the videos. did the editing. I did the posting. I did the same thing when I would write a blog. So I learned how to do all of those things. And if you’re starting out and you don’t have a lot of money, you don’t need

to spend a lot and especially the way the economy is right now. It’s kind of soft. We may be in heading towards a pretty deep recession. You don’t want to go into debt, but you can do all of this on your own and as the internet using the internet and social media you can start to build your community.

Sam Berne (05:31.498)
So as I said social media reduces or eliminates spending money on ads and you know hiring social media agencies. I don’t recommend any of that. But the thing that you want to consider is whatever product and or service you would like to sell using organic reach is easy and possible for all of us.

And this next point social media is underpriced attention. So what do I mean by that? Well, when I started my philosophy was I am going to give give give I’m not going to ask for anything in return. I’m going to create value for people. I’m going to answer their questions. I’m going to I’m just going to give away the information and start cultivating a relationship.

And as I did that people started to follow me. This was the underpriced attention. I wasn’t paying anything except my sweat equity and in doing that over time what ended up happening is I started to grow my social media. I remember when I started my Facebook live shows. I would do those every Wednesday night and for the first three months nobody tuned in. It was very humbling to me.

And so I would write out questions and I would say, hey, Johnny asked this question. Let me answer it. And so that’s how I started. And then after a few months, a few people started trickling in and one of the aspects of give give give is that number one, you’re going to have more retention of your customers as opposed to hitting them up and you know, asking them to buy something right away.

And the other thing that happened is word of mouth on on social media. This is really amazing. In fact, I just did a post. This is very interesting because I was up in the mountains on Saturday and I was hiking in the deep snow and I had this idea. wow. Let me do this video. I pulled out my phone 20 seconds. I shared my idea. I posted it on tik-tok Saturday night.

Sam Berne (07:54.743)
And I just looked on tik-tok and I have 300,000 views of this 22nd video that I had. I didn’t prepare for it. There was no script. It was just something that came to me. That’s the underpriced attention. It can happen. You can go viral in a nanosecond and that’s what’s exciting about this for all of you. Okay, in this webinar, I want to share the following.

Number one, how to build a social media community. Number two, how to integrate selling products and services using social media. You know, in my case, I spent about three years just cultivating my community. I didn’t sell anything and it was actually at a mentor meeting a score meeting that I had in March of 2020 and one of my mentors said, well, what do you think about

Starting your e-commerce business and I went. that’s a great idea. So I actually launched it June of 2020 and it exploded and of course it is so robust now just I’m in like a year and half two years in but I have the community first and then I launched my products and this is also another key point.

People will come to me and say, I wrote the best book. I’ve got the best product and I’ll ask them. Well, how many followers do you have and they go, why don’t really have any followers? I said, you know, it’s kind of in reverse where why don’t you spend the time building the community first and then you can launch your product or service. So it’s just a another way to think about it. All right. Number three is in this webinar. I’m going to share what it takes to obtain results.

And number four, what are the time management things that you may need to do in order to make this work for yourself?

Sam Berne (09:58.539)
Okay, so in building a social media community, I get these questions. What are the tactics? You know, how do I use YouTube or Facebook and you can go on Google or YouTube and you can Google how do I post on Facebook or how do I start a podcast? It’s all there for you. It’s free. You know, you spend 10 to 15 hours doing that.

and you’ll find that you become an expert like me and you’ll be able to do these things quite easily. Now in creating ideas for content. I talked about storytelling. I talked about documentation. Another thing that I like to do is depending on the social media platform. I make content based on who’s the customer who’s following. So let me give you an example on LinkedIn, which I think that

for some people that are doing B2B business to business type of things. LinkedIn is the place where you want to be posting. If you’re more business to consumer B2C, then you want to be focused on say Facebook or Instagram. And so I’m creating different content based on the social media platform. So in LinkedIn, I like to talk about well here are the new

industry discoveries or you know, I might get in a conversation with another business owner somebody in a health and wellness brand. I might even invite them on my podcast and have them talk about themselves and then we cross-pollinate. So there’s a lot of ways that you can create ideas for content in the end. I’m going to leave my my links for all my social media. Just as an example, you can look at some of the content pieces.

created and by the way, our Q &A will be at the end. So hang in there. You can put your chat in the chat box and I will get to your question. Okay. Now when you create ideas create a schedule or a calendar for creating and posting so you’re organized about what you’re doing every day. There are scheduling programs that you can get which can automatically post your content so you can actually schedule

Sam Berne (12:25.867)
for an entire week and then finally study the different social media platforms and create appropriate content based on their platform. That’s kind of what I was talking about. And then finally just get yourself a phone a good phone with a camera and a microphone start there. You don’t need to go out and spend a lot of money on fancy microphones or you know other things like that.

Get started and save your money. You know in my social media content, it’s so interesting because a lot of my videos are raw. You know, it’s just like I’m in a car. I’m in a public space and I have a great idea and you know, I shoot the video and it goes viral. That’s kind of what happened for me with Tik Tok last weekend.

So don’t over don’t worry about over producing or doing post-production that can come later. But for the beginning people will love it that you’re more authentic. You just come on and either if you don’t want to do video then just do audio or write but you don’t need to spend a lot of money initially getting started. Okay, this is a big one. How does integrate selling products or services?

One of the things that really worked for me and continues to work is in this community where I’m giving and giving and giving I’ve established trust with people. And so now when I launch a new product and I’ve launched a lot of new products in the last three months, what has happened is because people trust me. They actually will buy my products or services because

What they’re actually really buying is my expertise and my experience, but we have developed a relationship with each other. So they trust me and I’m not hucking them. I’m not, you know, selling them on a transactional way. What’s happening is I’m developing the community and then I can start, you know, talking about my my workshops. And by the way, if you want some help on how to do

Sam Berne (14:54.961)
Online workshops. They are so lucrative because in the online workshops, there’s no overhead and with covid I did a ton of online workshops and they were really well attended and I made a lot of money from them. They were really a great way for me to sustain my process. So it’s all about brand and that takes time.

Okay, I want to give you an example. So I’ve written books five books. I just wrote a new book. It was an interesting idea because what I decided to do was take the transcripts of a lot of my Q &A on my podcast and Facebook live and I had them so I had the transcripts written out and then I had a ghostwriter work with me to write the book. And so basically the book is based on what people are asking what they want.

And so I had an idea. Well, maybe I should do a book tour. So I hired a publicist and nothing was happening. First of all, the bookstores are in big trouble for a lot of different reasons. And so for a self-published published author, they’re not really, you know, interested in taking the risk of maybe doing a book tour or hosting a book tour. So I dropped that idea.

And instead I emphasize my brand and I put out some workshops and bang everything went the other way. So I had some amazing sales from it. And so I shifted out of my transit transactional ID of selling the book and I brought in my brand and I attached the book to that and all of a sudden things really took off in another example. I look at a lot of research and

You know the love of the my customers and patients their eyesight is deteriorating. They’re in the 50 to 75 age range and so I’m always looking for things to help them regenerate their eyes and there was a study that came out of the University College of London. The scientists discovered that if you look through red glasses for so many minutes a day for so many weeks, there was a 22 % increase in a person’s ability to see clearly.

Sam Berne (17:22.667)
It was amazing. So I was looking for a way to to, you know, refer people so where they could buy the product and the only place you could buy the product was in the UK and the people that were promoting it. They were a little flaky. And so I went back to the drawing board. I talked to my manufacturers and I developed my own red tinted glasses. And the thing is is I made a couple of posts on Instagram and the whole thing went viral.

And my fulfillment team, my web store manager. mean, they were really upset. They called me and said, what are you doing? You know, give us some advanced notice if you’re going to do this. And I said, I have no idea. I had no idea that this was going to go viral like this. Fortunately, my manufacturer got right on it and we were able to fulfill our orders within a week. And so another example, it was because of my brand.

that people trust me. They looked at the research. They went, I want to buy these. It’s going to really help. And I want to make another point that’s not on this slide. And this is really important for small businesses. And I learned this the hard way, you know, in small businesses. One of the things that we’re always battling is cash flow. And if you have products that you are going to be selling, one of the best techniques to use is something called a pre-sale

campaign. So I’ll give you my example. Recently, what we started to do is bundle our products together and each each eye condition was based on the bundle. Okay, and it was going to be a ton of inventory that I was going to have to buy and I didn’t want to tie up all that cash. So what I did was I said to my customers and my community. I’m going to do pre-sale here. You’re going to get 15 % off all my products.

If you take advantage of the pre-sale price. So I did that for about two weeks and I got the number of orders and we got the money up front and then I called my manufacturer and I said, okay, this is the amount of inventory I need. So it saved my cash flow. I actually made money by doing the pre-sale and I would recommend this for any small business who has to pay payroll who’s got personal expenses.

Sam Berne (19:46.409)
by doing pre-sale, you’re not tying up your money on inventory, especially if you don’t know what the sales are going to be. Okay, let’s talk about results because results were very important for me very important for you know, my colleagues and people that who are interested. So the number one thing I’m going to say here. This is probably the most important thing. I’m going to say today is patience. If you can be patient.

financially and emotionally you are going to make better decisions not only in your business, but also it’s going to help you have a better work-life balance, you know without having that pressure of you know, whatever, you know, I need to have it now if you can have patience. Look, this is a marathon. It is not a sprint and so

As I shared my story in 2016, I just started posting. I didn’t have products to sell. I was like, well, let me see what happens here before I, you know, start investing hundreds and thousands of dollars into products and I actually built my community for almost four years before I launched my products and that’s why I’m doing so well. Now, the other thing is persistence, you know,

This can sound kind of glamorous, you know, I’m saying well, I went from this zero to 120,000 followers, but it was a lot of hard work. It was a lot of daily just following through and you know, continually doing the consistent posting answering questions from customers that they would write me questions based on the post I would do so patience and process.

persistence, stay the course. Another thing I want to say and you know, I’m guilty of this too, is that the focus should not be on how many views you have, how many followers you get, whether you go viral or not. Create daily content that gives people value that you’re helping them. This is not about

Sam Berne (22:11.325)
you or me. This isn’t about my well, I make this amount of money and I drive this kind of a car and I buy this kind of a watch, you know, that’s a real turn off and I see that a lot on Instagram, especially my whole thing is how can I serve my community and this is also with my employees as well. You know, one of the things I think about with the people that work for me is I’m actually working for them.

And I listen to them listen to their what are their needs? What do they want? We have regular communication because they’re part of the fabric of whether this is going to go or not for me. And so the whole idea is creating value and once you create the value and you give give give then you have the leverage to begin to ask people

Hey, I’ve got this seminar. I’ve got this book. I’ve got this product. You have leveraged yourself where you’re going to have a greater success. Last but not least, I am going to say this very humbly be willing to make course Corrections. If something doesn’t work, try new things. You learn from it and you keep going and even if there’s money involved and you’ve lost money and believe me I’ve made

many mistakes financially. I’ve made many errors in judgment, but I just do a course correction and I learned so much from it and that’s going to be part of the the process for you. Okay, another thing that the people ask me is about time management because a lot of people maybe are working full jobs full-time jobs already and this may be a side hustle to start off with.

But the thing is is that if you organize your time you can do this and so you have to take a look at maybe the morning time is when you post or maybe it’s on a Saturday. You create your content. So you have to figure out when you’re going to do this and there are also some interesting things to note about optimal times to post where you can get the most attention.

Sam Berne (24:32.781)
And I’ve created this this chart here, which talks about the different social media platforms. So one of the things that I did early on when I started to do workshops is I created a private Facebook group and this is a group with your fans that you might give them premium information or content and I post on my private groups all the time.

Now the duration of how long it is. we’ve talked about duration and posting times probably the best times the post would be either in the morning or in the evening where you’re going to get the most traction. But the thing about social media is it’s a 24-7 cycle and I have a very big international following. So people in Australia and New Zealand people in India. So that even doesn’t matter as much but you can notice

that these are the times when it’s best to post and then these are the duration times. So let me go through this a little bit. Facebook private group, you know, that could be just your premium content. Something that’s come out of Facebook right now is something called Facebook Reels, which are small, short, kind of like TikTok, where you can post something

for 18 to 30 seconds, maybe an idea and it can go viral. This is happening on Facebook reels. It’s also happening on YouTube reels. So, you know, the attention is still there on Facebook and YouTube, but it’s a little harder to get that kind of virality that you can still get on TikTok and LinkedIn. So the reels are the short videos and on YouTube you can post any time on Facebook again.

morning and evening are great. TikTok. This is ever-changing. TikTok is is kind of amazing in what’s going on with it because even though I write here durations 18 to 30 seconds, my best videos are about 22 seconds because I’ve done enough of them. If I do a little longer, sometimes I start losing people. I have to really hook them to keep them engaged and TikTok. The attention span is not not so good.

Sam Berne (26:55.695)
However, what’s happening with TikTok is now some of the longer videos are getting traction. Again, these are the times when you can post LinkedIn. Again, this is more of the B2B. If you’re talking to professionals or you’re marketing to other, you know, businesses. Again, I do a lot of LinkedIn posting even though my brand is mostly B2C.

Every now and again, it surprises me when I get a business owner or somebody that contacts me who found me on LinkedIn and so under seven minutes is is what you do with LinkedIn. Again, I do maybe a one to two minute video or audio or even post one of my written blogs. So these are some of the things that you can start to do in when you start, you know, posting. Okay, brand.

versus selling. Selling is transactional with no long-term growth. There’s also a very low or no retention time and there’s probably not going to be a lot of word of mouth referrals. Whereas in building a brand it insulates you from competition and the ups and downs in the economics. Again, it is like playing the long game. Be patient.

So my talk about building brand through social media is the key. Now, when you create your brand, you want to be able to define your brand in about two sentences. So I put my mission statement up here and my brand so you can take a moment and read that.

Sam Berne (28:54.191)
So I’m to go back to this one creating a website that expresses your mission statement and your brand. if you go to my website, drsamburn.com, you will see that my brand and message are lined up with the website and you don’t need to spend a lot of money on a website. You can get somebody to help you. You can even do it on your own. Just get maybe a landing page or two up again. I’m very concerned.

about you spending money that you don’t have or going into debt in starting this. You don’t need to do that. So start small and get yourself a nice website. You can see what I’ve done. There’s other people as well. And that’s a way that you can really support your brand and message.

So as I said building brand takes patience and persistence when you’re starting avoid debt keep your expenses low go slow and steady your mentors of score can really help you looking at the finances. They’re amazing. These are such successful business people that they can help you in these areas so that you have the time to start building your brand on social media. So

One of the things that you could think about is which social media plan platforms do you frequent? And the second question is what is the best way you like to receive content audio video or written? I know for me, I love podcast. So when I’m driving, I’ll download a podcast. I love that.

In the evening. Sometimes if I’m on YouTube, I’ll look at some videos or tick-tock. I get some great information from that and I also love to read. So sometimes if there’s a written blog that I really like that’s also really helpful to me and I could go back and refer to it. So for you, what is the best way you like to receive content? And then when you’re posting

Sam Berne (31:08.343)
Learn about the different platforms. Again, you can go to Dr. Coot Google and that will kind of guide you on the duration when to post how you know what kind of content works the best. And then the other thing you could do is you can get a podcast going and I’ll talk a little bit about that in a minute, but I think each and every one of you at least in phase two should start a podcast and then you can put it up.

on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, and once you start rolling, you will begin to see engagement. So working with score, I have found every business is different when discussing social media and this depends on the following key elements. Your current use of social media, which social media platforms you are comfortable posting

content how much time do you have available to create content and update and upload your social media platforms?

and

Sam Berne (32:22.553)
You know, you can base that on first of all, are you on social media now? And if you are which social media sites do you frequent and if you don’t why now there’s all kinds of political reasons and people have, you know, personal things against Facebook or tik-tok or whatever. And so I appreciate that. But basically what I’m doing is I’m using the internet to promote

my business and I’m using them. I’m in control of what I’m posting what I’m doing and it’s a way that creates a kind of a balanced playing field because it used to be I could never do something like this. So that’s why if you’ve got some feelings about social media like I’m not sure see if you can figure it out so that you use the social media platforms.

to further your passion your dreams and your business. Now, one of the things that I emphasize when I talk to people is podcasts and I love podcasts because you can multitask you can listen while you’re walking your dog or while you’re driving and I would encourage each of you to see if you could start a podcast and again, I’ll talk about that in a

in a minute or two, but for now take a look at how you digest content and then you can start creating content based on what you’re digesting.

Now the following table will help you determine your skill and comfort zone level and time to invest when you’re building your social media community. So for example on the website and by the way, I learned how to use WordPress so I could actually upload my podcast my blogs my videos and that saved me a lot of money at the beginning. So I used to do that.

Sam Berne (34:36.023)
one hour a week and then with Facebook. Well, I would spend about three hours a week now sometimes with podcasts, you know, again, you can grade yourself and then how many how much time you think you need to be able to get on these different platforms.

Now based on your responses, you’re going to get a questionnaire that Lou Sprecher and I came up with and you can work with your mentors to help you focus on how to get started because it can be kind of overwhelming. You know, I’ve given you a lot of information today and you go, well, where do I start? Well, maybe I would start with your website and maybe start with Facebook.

Okay, you kind of have to look at your customers and your community the age of your customers. I know for me on Facebook, my age range is between 50 and 75 and there’s a lot of those folks on Facebook. So that’s why I chose Facebook live because I was going to get the most engagement. Now another thing that I also did when I was doing Q &A on Facebook and also posting sometimes I would do some

paid advertising so you can do both the organic and then later on you can learn about how to do advertising on Facebook or Instagram and now with my products when I’m doing a sale like a Christmas sale or Thanksgiving Day sale. I am running both organic content. I’m doing advertising and then I have my newsletter.

So the next thing that you can consider is can you collect emails by collecting emails? You have somebody you have somebody who’s really interested in what you’re doing and then either through MailChimp or Clavio or any one of those you can then send out a weekly newsletter. I do that all the time and that’s one of my best selling my return on investment on my newsletter when I’m doing a sale for products.

Sam Berne (36:49.389)
is through the roof. It’s amazing. Another thing that I’ve started is texting that you can actually have people send you texting with questions. And that’s another way that I am now getting a collection of email addresses phone numbers. And so you could look into that later on. So not only am I you know getting questions from my web my email, but I’m now getting questions from texting.

And texting is one of the things that you can receive and it’s a great way to start to build your community.

Okay. Now in stage two, you might expand your platform. You might bring in LinkedIn. You might start talking about Instagram and your personal interests. And again, I want to emphasize, you know, the things that you’re passionate about the things that you’re interested in that may be beyond the regular business. That’s going to help you draw a wider audience who then may discover your products or your services, but they never would if all of your

Posts were just based on your business and Instagram is a great platform to do that. You’ve got Instagram stories Instagram reels

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Dr. Sam Berne has been in private practice in New Mexico for over 35 years and where he works with patients to improve their vision and overall wellness through holistic methods. He holds a Bachelor of Science from Pennsylvania State University, Doctor of Optometry from Pennsylvania College, and did his postdoctoral work at the Gesell Institute in collaboration with Yale University. He has been awarded The Special Awards for Service from the Behavioral Optometrists in Mexico for his innovative and holistic work with children.

His protocols take a proactive, rather than reactive, approach to health and wellness. He understands and treats the body as one integrated system rather than a collection of independent organs in order to identify and address the root causes of disease. His whole health protocols improve vision and wellness by healing the mind-body-spirit through nutritional protocols, vision therapy, and self-care techniques. This views each person as genetically and biochemically unique and enables the individual to make lifelong improvements to their well-being.