The Social Media Tutor For Baby Boomers With Joyce Feustel

Taking on a new venture is not only for people in a certain age range or of a certain generation. Stephen Jaye’s guest today is Joyce Feustel, a LinkedIn coach and trainer who started Boomers’ Social Media Tutor at the age of 61! Through this business, she is helping many other Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964) start and grow their own businesses through the effective use of social media. Each social media platform is unique, so you have to spend time doing stuff in them to get the hang of it. Listen to their conversation and discover helpful tips on how you can navigate social media, especially LinkedIn and Facebook. --- Listen to the podcast here window.FuseboxPlayerAPIKey = '736|Bt3uGzU4xc0sddXrD2L8BnN1FwLmic13Qk65z0pZRktxo58SWbNAcFgDsC3FYQ3MK0XyoUWYU7WUaQjG'; window.addEventListener('loadFuseboxPlayer', function(e) { fuseboxPlayer(e.detail).setConfig({ "buttons":[ "download", "share", "subscribe" ], "buttonConfig":{ "subscribe":{ "rss":{ "url":"https://feeds.podetize.com/rss/dUTnqOrR6A", "label":"RSS" }, "apple":{ "url":"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/actions-antidotes/id1574744528", "label":"Apple Podcasts" }, "google":{ "url":"https://podcasts.google.com/search/action's%20antidote", "label":"Google Podcast" }, "stitcher":{ "url":"https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/podcast-startpoint/actions-antidotes", "label":"Stitcher" }, "spotify":{ "url":"https://open.spotify.com/show/4CoKbLyO7mJ6qSUvqjDbsQ", "label":"Spotify" }, "tunein":{ "url":"https://tunein.com/radio/Actions-Antidotes-p1469325/", "label":"TuneIn" }, "overcast":{ "url":"https://overcast.fm/itunes1574744528/actions-antidotes", "label":"Overcast" } } }, "color":"#4E8EE6", "controls":[ "rewind" ], "cover":{ "link":false, "imageUrl":"", "url":"#" }, "coverDisplay":false, "sticky":false, "style":"regular", "position":"bottom", "title":"Action's Antidotes", "tracks":[ { "episodeNo": 0, "title":"The Social Media Tutor For Baby Boomers With Joyce Feustel", "file":"https://feeds.podetize.com/ep/HZDO3JL8b/media", "description": "", "duration":0, "featured":false } ] }); }); The Social Media Tutor For Baby Boomers With Joyce Feustel Our guest is Joyce Feustel, who started her own company that teaches Baby Boomers how to use social media. Those who know me best know that I spend most of my life around other Millennials and for us Millennials. Social media comes second nature to us. It comes very naturally. It came to us either in high school or for some of us even earlier in life. For a lot of Baby Boomers who began their lives and days before people even had personal computers, let alone getting them connected to the internet, if you remember that whole You’ve Got Mail phase if you are old enough, people who were born before that, it doesn’t come quite as naturally. Without further ado, I bring you, Joyce Feustel and her Baby Boomer social media business. --- Thank you very much for being on the show. It’s great to be here. It’s always wonderful to even have an opportunity to share what I have learned about teaching people and Baby Boomers in particular about social media, Facebook and LinkedIn primarily, and providing maybe even a few tips throughout our conversation that someone would say, “I came to be inspired and that was good but I also got a couple of practical ideas from Joyce.” How about that? “People are intrigued by the fact that I'm older and a social media consultant-trainer.” That sounds really nice. Is your customer base pretty much all Baby Boomers or do you expand a little bit beyond that particular generation range? I brand myself with the name of Boomers Social Media Tutor as a Baby Boomer myself born in 1948, an older Boomer and to my fellow Boomers. Let’s get the years straight for the readers. Baby Boomers were born between the years of 1946 and 1964. Therefore, most of my customers are Boomers. That’s the age group I enjoy working with. That said, I have helped people as young as their twenties with their LinkedIn profile, college students even. There I can help people of all ages and very few people go into LinkedIn and hang out. I compare to Tinder to use a more up-to-date dating app, where you go swipe, you’ve got your gal and your guy, whoever you are looking for and you go off of Tinder. At least, I would hope you would because you are set. With LinkedIn, my opinion is that don’t quit LinkedIn because you landed your job or your business is doing better because you went and fixed up your profile, and then you leave LinkedIn alone. You get so much more out of a site like LinkedIn when you actually hang out there and do stuff on it. I even noticed that some people pop in when they are looking for a job and whenever their current job is not going so well. Some people stay engaged regardless. You can tell by looking at how they are posting. They are not posting to get a new job. You can actually tell that they are posting because they are genuinely interested in it and certainly seems to leave a better impression on recruiters or anyone else who might be. That’s such a good point because LinkedIn is a place where you are creating your whole persona, your work persona mainly but also your opportunities where you have been involved, perhaps in a volunteer organization and leadership in some way. You can get more of a 360-degree feel for somebody. You are on LinkedIn not for you but other people. When people see that you are active on it, they will think, “There’s Stephen. He changed jobs. He’s working at that job. That’s great. Look at what he’s sharing.” I think of it very collaboratively rather than what’s in it for me. How do you go about when you work with your clients and your customers? When you work with them, do you have to adjust their mindset and how they are thinking about LinkedIn as opposed to this is the get-a-job site versus how you are describing it? It’s more of a collaborative site to those who most use it more intentionally, who will look at articles about trends in industries, share them and comment on them. Those are good points to bring up and have me think through. First off, I would say my own experience is about 20% of my clientele are job seekers. About 80% are business owners like myself. That’s a little bit different approach to LinkedIn but there are some overlaps between the two, especially regarding the posting and what I call the schmoozing factor. If you peel it back to the core, particularly with the Baby Boomers, I’m often starting with a real attitude, with a mindset issue, which is, “I don’t do technology and social media. I don’t like social media.” This, to me, is very small-minded because social media is incredibly diverse. If you go from something like TikTok to LinkedIn, these are completely different worlds. We are talking almost like different languages and cultures so much. Boomers Social Media Tutor: Social media is incredibly diverse. If you go from something like TikTok to LinkedIn, they are completely different worlds. I say to them with LinkedIn, “A little bit on LinkedIn can go a long way.” They see their children constantly on their devices. They spend so much time, many times a day they are on their various social media. Whereas a Baby Boomer isn’t going to want to do that. They still may be accessing it from their computer. It’s not uncommon. I say to them, “You can go on a couple of times a week.” The real serious business-to-business people may be on there every day but you don’t have to be. I would say maybe 10 to 15 minutes twice a week, a post once a week can probably do it. You really can. I have them start to get the point that LinkedIn is accessible. It’s a matter of learning how to use it, which is what I help them with. After that, they can think of interesting things going on in their life, influencers in their field, now you show how they can then share from their post or comment on them. Sometimes, people overthink it. They think there’s more involved to being involved in something like LinkedIn than there is. With Facebook, what’s tricky there is Boomers tend to have their work-life, and then their personal life, and a little bit together. A little bit of research I was doing, one of you was like, “You can be more fluid.” What’s challenging for me sometimes with Facebook is people are on there and they have only used Facebook personally then they say, “Now, I’ve got to use it for business? Are people going to see my stuff?” I would go, “No, not necessarily.” For me, I’m more like a Millennial that way. I blend them and I have sometimes on my personal side of Facebook, I will share a business-related but I don’t want to piss many people off to be blunt and only talk about business. There’s also, it depends on your business. It depends on you. There are a lot. I find so much of it is as getting through this barrier of not wanting to do a social media and the other thing is, not wanting to toot their own horn. That’s a big issue for a lot of people that I encounter, even people I know that are around my age range where they will say, “I’m up for a job or something like that but I feel like I’m flexing or I’m trying to show out as opposed to demonstrating what it is that I do and what it is that I do well.” How do you usually get through to people who may have an aversion to flexing or to showing off? Often, they will already have their website. That’s a start. What I can suggest to them for their About section or their position descriptions an