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.
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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.
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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.
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 and Experience is to take the language from the website and couch it a little differently, then talk about themselves in the first–person voice. When I will tell them, I will take this About section from the website and reconfigure it a bit and email it to me, I can help them because I did major in English and it was another century. It was many decades ago but the point is that I helped them to wordsmith it. Every sentence doesn’t start with me. That one way is how you language it. It’s part of it. The second thing to do is to get social proof. My daughter, when she got married, she didn’t have a single vendor at that wedding that she didn’t vet out.
You need to know what you’re after, why you get up every day, and where your focus is.
People expect you to have folks saying good things about you on LinkedIn. You want to get recommendations or you want to get reviews of your Facebook page. It’s hard to ask but you have to really suck it up and do that. Once you have a recommendation, you can take little snippets of it, perhaps not the whole thing, and then put that up, cross-list up into your About section, into your position descriptions. Now, it’s not you being the only person saying that you rock, it’s these other people, the clients, referral partners and other fans of yours. They are saying good things about you. That’s another way to deal with that admittedly uncomfortable feeling about bragging yourself up.
It reminds me of almost every small business website I have ever looked at where you always see at the bottom of the page, the logos of a whole bunch of companies that they are working with. I feel like that is one way that people look into establishing that social proof, as you put it right through. People do want to know. I imagine like anything anyone is going to do. If someone says, “I need to get a haircut and I need a good barber,” you are going to want someone that your friends recommend or you know is going to be able to do the job well. That’s where that getting started. When people are getting started, it takes a little while to establish that social proof, which is how you get traction in any market.
It’s a chicken and the egg thing. You’ve got to keep doing it. Eventually, you get it.
It takes a while to get someone because you are going to start. You are going to be relatively not well known, no matter what you are doing. You are not going to be well-known in that field, except for the few people who start businesses by quitting the job with their company and taking some clients over and stuff like that. That’s another mechanism. You are saying to get started, people do need to be willing to say, “No, look at me. I am awesome. I can do something good for you.
One thing I did when I started partly because I wasn’t sure I was going to cut it in this field, I would do free LinkedIn reviews for my friends, a lot in Toastmasters where we are both involved, speaking and leadership organization, for readers not familiar with it. I would be asked them, I said. “Do you want to do something nice to me?” I insisted, they will not pay me. I called it myself enforced internship. I would say to them, “You can always write me a recommendation.” One way is to do some pro bono work for people. Now, you are getting practice. They are getting your services and ask them real explicitly and say, “It would help me a lot as I’m getting started. If you were happy with your experience, write me the Google review, write me a LinkedIn recommendation, write a review on my Facebook business page.” That’s one thing people can do.
That pertains to another mindset issue that I touch on quite a bit, which is in the general standard employee mindset. Everyone has this idea of you work a certain number of hours or you do a certain number of tasks and you get paid per delivery. Essentially, the reward, at least a monetary reward, always comes right away. Whereas in a lot of entrepreneurial mindsets, you have to be willing to delay that reward. It’s almost an exercise in delayed gratification, which is when I say I use Instagram the most because that’s the quintessential definition of instant gratification. For entrepreneurial mindset, for anything you are going to do like that, you are going to work for a while, probably for free even if it’s the work of setting up the infrastructure that you need to create your business and incorporating the LLC or however you want to incorporate it. Months and years later, you usually get a bigger reward than you would from standard employment.
That’s true, depending on so many things. Where are you working in that field professionally? You start your business and depending on the non-compete clause when you leave, can you take some of those people with you? That’s the best–case situation because you have this built–in group of fans and clients or if you were switching as I did to a completely different field, I was in sales for a private college serving the financial planning professional community. I had so much to learn.
One of the questions you asked me was, “What were your challenges?” For some people then there were like me. They were still learning the content of what they do, which basically I did spend three years for what it’s worth in a ramp–up phase. When I pulled the plug and retired in March 2013, I retired into my business and I had to pay clients right away because I had been building that infrastructure and doing a lot to get ready. I had the LLC and a lot of things going.
I had had my Facebook page for a year, my LinkedIn profile for much longer. I had been blogging for a year. I had my website up. All those things I had that in place. You’ve got to figure out, how do you run a business? I still am mystified about the elements of that. That’s for sure. What do you need to get trusted advisors to get into, I would suggest mastermind groups? There are plenty of things you can do for free, and then there are business coaches who, on a monthly retainer basis, can help you with a lot of the mindset issues as well as sometimes a practical issue.
Let’s back up and tell me a little more about what got you started. What inspired you to start the Boomer Social Media Tutor?
That’s my second favorite story to tell outside of how I met my husband, which is a cute story about going to Chicago on a bus and finding these guys working at this meatpacking company and working there, then there was my husband also working at the meatpacking company in Madison, Wisconsin. That’s like the short version of that story. My second favorite story was March 2010. Two months earlier, this college for financial planning that serves the financial planning community with distance education had rolled out a Twitter account, a LinkedIn group, a Facebook business page. We, in the enrollment department, functionally inside sales were told that we sure better talk up social media with our current students and our potential students.
When we resisted a little, we were told, “We meant to tell you we are going to give you $5 for every Facebook like, $5 for every Twitter following, $5 for every time someone joins a group on LinkedIn. We’ve got a little more interested. For me personally, who had been on, not Twitter but LinkedIn and Facebook for about a year and liked them, I was so excited to talk about something different than when I was supposed to talk about, which is one of my challenges was sales my whole life and seventeen years in sales. I took to talking about social media, like a duck to water. I was 61 years old, Stephen. Now, I’m 72 and my manager was 35. How old are you now?
I just turned 39.
You are on the older end of the Millennials like my daughters are. Anyway, he was 35, just around your age now and I’m 61. I’m like the age of his mom and dad. He said to me one day in March of 2010, “Joyce, since you are clearly so good at getting our students engaged with social media, you are top of that incentive every month, have you ever thought of helping other people in your Baby Boomer generation?” I say God channeled himself that day through Brett Sandberg because to be perfectly honest, Stephen, I don’t know that I would have come up with this gig out of my own head. It was an inspirational question.
One of the mindset issues a lot of people encounter is this idea that you have to have the perfect, most original idea ever in order to make it in any business, and that otherwise you are plagiarizing or you are entering a saturated market or something like that. Whereas oftentimes, the best ideas of businesses that go are ones that are played on some other ideas that were from before or you have a market and you try to bring it to someone else. If only one person could have one idea, for example, there would be no reason for me even to try doing this show because Tony Robbins has it covered for every single person ever.
Different people get messages out to different people in different kinds of ways. Not only will you say, “Here’s an idea that came to me and you ran with it,” but also the social media idea. The Baby Boomers are largely not using it that much at that time. I know who are using Facebook now because they started wanting to see the pictures of their kids take. At the time, they weren’t. As you went along this journey, what challenges and setbacks did you encounter? Did you encounter the standard naysayers?
I believe I was very blessed because I had no one saying that’s a bad idea. In contrast, they would say, “How clever, how interesting, how needed, how curious that you at your age,” and I had not all gray hair back then but a fair amount, would be confident enough you might say to put yourself out there as a social media, maybe not an expert but tutor, helper, go–to gal. How cool is that? People are intrigued by the fact that I’m older and a social media consultant, trainer, helper or whatever. I had none of that.
I’ve got involved fairly soon with a group called The Women’s Foundation of Colorado, and they all could be like my daughters. We all called each other our social media sisters. When I would stumble on things like a new mom is like, “Now, what do I do?” I would go to our private Facebook group and ask them. I always got my answers. It was so sweet and they never were, in any way, demeaning or like, “What do you think you are doing?” They were so welcoming.
When you find your tribe, I will call it overused word perhaps but of your kindred spirits, of your colleagues. That can be your support system, for lack of a better word but the go-to people when you come up with things. I have had two times now when people brought things to me and I thought, “That’s not my wheelhouse. Who else do I know who I could refer this person to?” I know what goes around comes around that those people would, in turn, refer people to me, who are the people who are at the beginning to maybe internet intermediate users. I think that helps a lot. It’s to help people who believe in you, who think you have something good going, and why not do it?
Sometimes those are not your family members or your closest friends. I’m reading a book. Tara Mohr wrote a book several years ago called Playing Big: Practical Wisdom for Women Who Want to Speak Up, Create, and Lead. She talks about your inner critic and how too often women, in particular, can be going out and trying to get all those validations from people. It can be very challenging. Here’s one of my big challenges. I am a real giver at heart. I have been involved my whole life in different kinds of volunteer organizations. Toastmasters, in particular, the speaking and leadership group. I have to balance out my commitments to my volunteer side with my commitments to my business. That has been challenging.
I’ve got a low–maintenance husband. I’ve got that going for me. Otherwise, that could be complicated because he’s a 72–year–old regular retired guy but he doesn’t need to spend much time with me, very emotionally and practically self-sufficient. I’m lucky for that but that’s a tricky thing. When you have gotten yourself known within a certain circle for doing A, B, and C, and all of a sudden, you think, “Maybe I can do A but I can’t do B and C anymore.”
That is a challenge that I have experienced and witnessed other people experience and part of it reminds me of the whole challenge of setting boundaries. How do I clearly establish within myself and articulate to others what my priorities are? What matters more than what? What I found is that if you don’t set your own priorities, there’s always going to be someone else that’s willing to set that for you.
I can’t say that any better than that. You need to know what you are after, why you get up every day, and where your focus is. That way some other things can still happen. We have our family obligations and other obligations. We can’t let other people run our lives unless we choose to run our lives. That’s true.
You are a person who started a business at an older age and you are also working with a lot of people who start a business at older ages as well. Do you think that moment when you are inspired in March 2010 and a lot of your customers probably have a similar moment in mind where they can rattle off like, “September 17, 2016, this happened,” or something like that? Once you are inspired, it becomes easier to then go ahead and articulate your priority, stand up for your priorities to others, and not let other people run your life and dictate for you. All of a sudden, you have an inspiration. It’s like, “I have a reason for wanting to have these priorities. It’s clear. I have no second–guessing inside me. I know that this is what I’m meant to do right now in this world.”
You can always find ways to have multiple income streams and keep that day job.
That’s true. If you don’t have that fire in your belly, you shouldn’t have your own business. I mean, bottom line, and then the more you are clear on it, the more you can remove what’s extraneous. I believe there’s a concept called an entrepreneurial spirit. Some people have it from little bitties and others because their parents had their own business or had that kind of a spirit. I grew up on a dairy farm. That’s a business my dad, my uncle and my mom had to make things go and be able to feed the family. My dad had a side job selling seed corn to farmers. They planted the seed corn and someone has got to sell that corn to them. He was very sales–oriented as well and met people easily.
It helped it that I grew up with someone like that. I have started Toastmasters Clubs. I have started professional organizations. I like to start things. Sometimes, the operational side isn’t always my strong suit. I will say that in multilevel marketing if you ever talked to people, that’s a business. If they had something happened, whether it was a health issue or something else, they again are on fire with that product and sometimes, in annoying ways but mostly in a genuine, let me tell you my story and how this might help you too kind of way. When you have that calling, that’s the word I use that you feel like I have something to share. I need to keep my focus here and not over there.
My follow-up question would be for people who are in the middle category like limbo phase where they are aware there’s something more to life than the 9:00 to 5:00, working for a paycheck and working for someone else but don’t quite have the full entrepreneurial mindset for one reason or another. Maybe it’s how they were raised or what their views of risk or their thoughts about money, all these types of things get in people’s way, do you have any specific recommendations to anyone that wants to better cultivate an entrepreneurial mindset?
First off, I want to establish my opinion, which is there’s nothing wrong with 9:00 to 5:00. We need people to pick up our garbage, police our streets and take care of us in the hospital when we are sick or injured. I have heard people talk about how we, the self-employed are the best, we are the cream of the crop and those scum of the Earth. I’m exaggerating of course. I have such respect for people like my husband who worked two careers, 9:00 to 5:00 has a pension, pays the bills, all of that.
The point is he was a very dedicated worker in his career. Somebody has that yearning. A lot of people do, “I have always wanted my own business.” I think the first thing I do is some serious informational interviewing. That’s where LinkedIn can really come in and help them because they are looking to do a certain thing. They type in the search terms, and then they go into their network or people that know folks that could come up in there.
I do that and I have done that, whether it’s going into a career or in this case, I knew in my heart, this idea from my manager was a good one. I did have to do informational interviewing but that can help. Also, interview people about the day-to-day life of being an entrepreneur, of having their own business, what are the ups and downs of that? Where’s the satisfaction? Where are the challenges? A lot of questions we are talking about right here because that’s a reality check.
You can always find ways to have multiple income streams and keep that day job as I did for those three years, and then granted, I essentially retired and again, 64 by then. You want to be prudent with how you approach this new possibility and not like say, “I’m going to put my life savings into it.” That’s my approach because I’m a little risk–averse, not completely. It depends. Watch some TED Talks and talk to people. There are a lot of resources out there and books to read. There are so many possibilities.
First of all, Joyce, I want to thank you for clarifying that a little bit better because I want my readers to understand that I’m not sitting here throwing shade on anyone that does the 9:00 to 5:00. The purpose of this show is never to be like, “This group of people is better than that group of people for any way, shape or form.” It’s to help people who want something, want to be more true to themselves or want to build something in this world to create a better life for themselves and their community to has that courage or have that inspiration to go out and do it. Before we wrap up, I want to ask one question. How, in the end, does it feel for you to have helped and continue to be helping a lot of people start, market their businesses and create what would they want for their lives? You work with a lot of these people directly and you are helping them.
For me, satisfaction is when I see a client of mine out there posting on LinkedIn, starting a Facebook group or whatever it is. They take my advice and they run with it. They start to blast them and people start talking about them, and they are glowing. They are so happy. It’s very incremental. Sometimes, it’s very early on. They go, “I didn’t know you could do that. That’s really cool.” It’s like the teacher in me. That’s what I thought I was going to be way back when. For many things, when I see people catching on and applying the ideas, that’s more important to me than any amount of money ever will be. That is what I find so satisfying but I also have to let go of the fact, the outcome and that some people will never take my advice. They will never change their LinkedIn profile and never get active. That’s their challenge and their decision. It’s not mine to say what’s right or wrong but when I see them go for it, it’s pretty exciting.
For people who would like to research more about your services, whether they be Baby Boomers or you said you work with other age groups as well, how would someone go about finding your business?
The simplest way is for them to go on Google and find my website. It’s BoomersSocialMediaTutor.com. On my website, they can see videos of me. There’s a link to another podcast I was on in 2020 and they can find out more about my services. Also, they can download my eBook. That’s another thing to read my nine–chapter, 9 Ways to Stand Out on LinkedIn eBook. It’s free and it’s a very good way for them to get acquainted with the type of information I would share in a LinkedIn session.
Some of my Millennial readers would want to recommend this to their parents if you are frustrated and always trying to show them how to do their social media stuff and they come up to you and ask like, “How do I make this post?”
I’m happy to help them.
Joyce, thank you so much for joining me on the show. It’s a very good and inspiring story. A lot of great ideas to think about, about not having to necessarily have your own Isaac Newton type of moment where the apple hits you on the head and y ou suddenly realize like, “Poof.” Also, the importance of having a good community. It has been said ad nauseam that you are the average of the five people you spend the most time around. Very important to surround yourself with the people who are going to encourage you and say, “I want you to succeed,” even if they give you constructive criticism and even if they say, “This might not be your idea.” It’s not out of sour grapes. It’s out of a genuine desire for you to succeed.
I hope you have those people around you. If you don’t, always tune into more episodes of this show. In the future, I will be bringing on other people who started businesses, people who started things like fitness challenges and community groups. Anyone that went for it and decided they had something they wanted to see in the world, went out and tried to create it. That being said, Joyce, thank you very much. It has been an honor to have you on the show. Best of luck continuing to make more people’s dreams come true, to be honest.
Thank you so much. Again, Joyce Feustel, Boomers Social Media Tutor. It has been a lot of fun, Stephen. Thank you.
Important links:
- Boomers Social Media Tutor
- The Women’s Foundation of Colorado
- Playing Big: Practical Wisdom for Women Who Want to Speak Up, Create, and Lead
- 9 Ways to Stand Out on LinkedIn
About Joyce Feustel
After a lengthy career in sales, Joyce started the Boomers Social Media Tutor company at the age of 61! Now, she helps other Baby Boomers, primarily entrepreneurs, use social media to grow their careers and businesses.
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