I use a lot of social media. These are my top techie things:
No. 1 will be the communication apps that we use. Is your Zoom Pro version ready, or will it cut off within 40 minutes? I spend top dollar for all of these good things because they are for work. I am a big fan of WhatsApp Web, which helps me facilitate many good things for productivity. And, of course, Telegram Channels. Have you built a community that you would like to share news? It is a noninvasive way of sharing information. There is Telegram Premium as well.
I’m no expert, but when social media started, I got very excited. I was like, “Hey, this is one free way that we can reach out to so many people.” The most important part is it brings people to us. We started our TikTok journey last year, and it grew and it grew and it grew. Today, we are at about 27,000 organic followers. We thought that it would be only young people, but I’m having all the MDs of SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) in Singapore coming up to me to get me to do workshops for their companies. They are actually out there and looking out for business. We have very good relationships with the bosses, and because of this, I have clinched businesses. I even have young people coming up to me because I said something about a fire drill on my social media.
The next thing is design. Everybody wants their things to look fancy. Canva, if you don’t know about it already, has a free version that is good, but the Pro version has a lot of templates, and there are other operators that sell templates as well for making designs and things like that. Also, PowerPoint. Are you using all these fully to make sure that all your presentation decks are singing the same tune? Is there a brand to it?
The next thing is work-related. I didn’t use ChatGPT for my books, I wrote my books on Grammarly, and it improved my English quite a bit. I use Grammarly Pro quite a bit and ChatGPT. Of course, today we know that you can do your social media captions alongside useful financial calculators. You will be able to do some nice work to share with your clients. And, of course, Voice Memos to remove the coldness of text messages. Are you recording happy birthday songs to your clients? If you have kids, have you considered making music videos and sending them to your clients?
The next thing is newsletters to read and to write for your clients. I’m a Kindle fan, so every time they drop the name of a good book, I download the sample on Kindle and read it. If it’s not any good, then I won’t buy it. This is one of the hacks. I also use an app called One Sec. One Sec has helped a lot of my mentees get rid of their social media addiction. If you download One Sec to your phone, whenever you open Instagram, the moment you touch it, you’ll be asked to take a deep breath — one second, two, three, four — and you’ll get so frustrated that you won’t touch Instagram anymore. It’s fabulous.
And then alarms. I love alarms. Every time I want to snap out of things, I set an alarm for 30 minutes. A lot of my things are on recurring 30 minutes. When 30 minutes are up, I snap out of it and can get work done more efficiently.
