EPISODE 16 - FINAL
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Aidan Muir: [00:00:00] It's hard to tell for an individual I'm speaking to whether social media is a good use of their time because it's one of those things that isn't until it is. Like you could, I could have sunk two and a half years into it and then stopped and it would have been the worst use of my time. But then when it takes off, it's like exponential and it is suddenly the best use of time at some stage as well.
Chris Hughes: Welcome to How to Build a Profitable Nutrition Business. If you love nutrition and you love helping people and you want to be in the game long enough to keep doing that, Then this is the podcast for you. Let's get into it. If
Chris Hughes: you work in the nutrition space and you've got a social media account, there's a fair chance you've heard of Aidan the Dietitian or Aidan Muir or Ideal Nutrition. Aidan, I heard recently at the Dietitian Australia conference and I was glued to every word. He, he's just an authentic person. There's what you see is what you get.
Chris Hughes: He is so honest about his experience with social media and how he has grown his social media following to now, I think [00:01:00] 77, 000 Instagram followers. But as you'll learn today, that's not the be all and end all when it comes to getting engagement and growing your business through social media. If you can retain 10 percent of what Aidan shares with us today, your business is going to improve.
Chris Hughes: Let's get into it. Welcome back to another episode of How to Build a Profitable Nutrition Business. Today I'm super, super excited to have a guest known as Aidan Muir or Aidan, the dietitan if you're on Instagram, uh, or TikTok, who has a business called Ideal Nutrition, which is a flourishing business with 10 dietitans.
Chris Hughes: And Aidan is, for me, the epitome of success when it comes to social media. He's someone that I follow on Instagram. I every time his posts come up in my feed, I find myself swiping and getting to the end. He's got really engaging posts. But does it in a ethical evidence based way, which many, including me, tend to struggle with.
Chris Hughes: And so I'm pumped to have Aidan on. I was fortunate to hear him at the DA conference a few weeks back, and I was glued to every word that he said [00:02:00] and just basically begged him to come on the podcast and share his wisdom. So Aidan, thanks for coming on, mate. I really appreciate it.
Aidan Muir: Perfect. Thank you so much for having me.
Aidan Muir: I'm keen to see what we can go through today.
Chris Hughes: Yes. Mate, tell us a little bit about your background. Obviously, you're a dietitian, but a little bit about your business and your social media strategy to growing your business.
Aidan Muir: Yeah, so general summary is I view myself as part time dietitian, part time content creator in a way like 50 50.
Aidan Muir: Maybe split it like 33 33 once you back in the business owner type situation. But we, as you said, we have 10 dietitians and I've extended that view of how I view myself onto all of the dietitians as well. They all create content. Most of them have at least one non client facing day. So. Most of them are seeing around 25 clients per week.
Aidan Muir: And then the rest of the time is spent on backend stuff, slash social media stuff, which is what really gets the clients in as well.
Chris Hughes: Yeah, that's fascinating to hear that. So that's great to know. So around 25 clients a week, and that's a good caseload to then free up some of the content creation time.
Aidan Muir: Yeah, [00:03:00] exactly. Right. And this is something I was talking about with a bunch of other dietitians, just being like. Theoretically, you can definitely say more than 40 people per week. I know heaps of dietitans who do it, but then what are the downsides of that? Do you have time to do anything else? And then from a retention thing, like a little thing I've noticed is like a lot of people just get over that after a certain period of time and they want to move on to something else, but I find around 25 people can do that long term from what I've seen.
Chris Hughes: Yeah. Look, early on in my business, I was seeing ridiculous numbers and that was just to keep the lights on kind of thing. And the most important outcome of that is I was a shit dietitan. You're just burnt out. You're not really providing that good of service. It was just numbers because it was kind of born out of need.
Chris Hughes: I had a wife and kids and we'd started this business, but, but yeah, I think 25 would be a sweet spot. Yeah, mate, we were at the conference the other week and someone asked you a question about why social media and one of your responses or during your talk, you were talking about early on, you were posting regularly and getting crickets.
Chris Hughes: And so to give listeners a bit of a [00:04:00] background, you've got 77, 000 followers on Instagram, which is huge. You've got 9, 000 on TikTok because it's a little bit more fresh, if you like, a little newer for you. Um, why social media, why when you're getting crickets all those years ago, what made you keep going?
Aidan Muir: Yeah. The crickets thing for, cause to add context, it was three years before I first got a client through Instagram. I had started Facebook initially and I had got a few clients through that. So I had a bit of evidence that I got on Facebook was working, but on Instagram I actually hadn't got anything for the first time.
Aidan Muir: Three years. And I look back and ask myself that question. Like, why did I, the bit that gets me is like, why two and a half years in did I still have the audacity to think I was going somewhere with this? But a few things. One was I read a lot of self help books, like self improvement things. I don't know if I want to point to this person in particular, but Gary Vaynerchuk, like I was following all of his stuff and just being like, I was very clearly seeing people succeeding with social media and getting business out of it.
Aidan Muir: I'd seen that in the [00:05:00] dietitan world as well. There's a few dietitians I'd seen who clearly were. Making good businesses off of it and everything. So there was enough there and although I say, why at two and a half thousand did I like keep going? It was probably around two thousand to three thousand followers.
Aidan Muir: Somewhere in that range was, oh, I am gaining traction. This hasn't taken off yet, but things were trending in the right direction from there.
Chris Hughes: Yeah, okay, because that is persistence. Like it's, I probably would have given up. Beforehand, but it was one of those things for us that we did it because we knew it wasn't going anywhere.
Chris Hughes: Yeah. But we didn't focus on it. Was it the
Aidan Muir: thing? That's actually like a little thing that I've struggled with, but like when I try to communicate this to other dietitians and stuff like that, just being like, it's hard to tell for an individual I'm speaking to whether social media is a good use of their time.
Aidan Muir: Because. Yeah. It's one of those things that isn't until it is like you could, I could have sunk two and a half years into it and then stopped and it would have been the worst use of my time. But then when it takes off, it's like exponential and it is suddenly the best use of time at some stage as well.
Chris Hughes: Yeah. So you're [00:06:00] like, so you've got 10 dietitians for when in ideal nutrition, are they like, what percentage of those is their 25 caseload online? Is it significantly
Aidan Muir: Yeah, like 80%. Even though it sounds a bit mortality in that we are very Australia focused, I would say less than 2 percent of our clients are international.
Aidan Muir: So we're very Australia focused, but I would say probably close to 50 percent Brisbane based, maybe 40 to 50 percent Brisbane based, which is where we are. It's just that a lot of our Brisbane based clients also see us online because the logic I use is we do 45 minute initials, 30 minute reviews. The review sessions is where the magic happens for being online.
Aidan Muir: And that Somebody could see me at 12 PM and it's their lunch break. If they do it online, they could be at work. They could just find a room at work. Something like that. See me online over zoom. If they drove to see me, 20 minutes to come see me, 20 minutes to go back, and then there's a 30 minute consult, that's so much of their day gone.
Aidan Muir: So even a lot of our Brisbane clients see us online for that reason.
Chris Hughes: Yeah, right. Okay. And I wonder, like, with the algorithms and you posting [00:07:00] consistently, unless I've missed something, like, it's certainly not Brisbane specific content that you're creating, but is it just that the algorithm tends to feed the geographic area around you?
Chris Hughes: Mm hmm.
Aidan Muir: Yeah, a combination of stuff. So like how we're talking about TikTok, that was actually one of the things that I've noticed heaps just being like, I did a semi viral video on lactose intolerance, maybe two years ago. And then I went and played like basketball, like a social basketball. And all my teammates were like, I saw you on TikTok.
Aidan Muir: Like, It clearly skewed very heavily towards Brisbane with Instagram. I don't think the algorithm is as heavily skewed that way, but there's a few things that I did early on that kind of side of the flywheel that kind of made it stay a bit more Brisbane centric. A few angles. One is I've never tried to blow up through other strategies.
Aidan Muir: Like many years ago, hashtags were quite effective in terms of like, you go hashtag nutrition and it would get sent out a bit further, but who's clicking on that hashtag. It would have been like America focused or like other things. So I always avoided trying to grow through. Other things that would be a bit more global, but the, and even with, like, we'll talk about this [00:08:00] later, but collaborations, I collaborate way more heavily with Australian dietitians and nutritionists than I do internationally because it's, do I want a bunch of European collaborations or American collaborations where I'd have to suddenly be working odd hours to service clients from those areas.
Aidan Muir: But the little thing that started the flywheel that I was meant to talk about is, I don't know if I'd recommend this to people, but I'm just telling the truth. It's what I did. I, when I realized I was largely followed by dietitians and other nutrition professionals, and I was like, I, they're not my target audience at that time.
Aidan Muir: I was like, I'd love to work with more power lifters. The thing I did was I found every power lifting gym in Brisbane and I followed them and I checked who is like in their most recent posts. And I started following all of those people and engaging a bit with their content. And so I followed a hundred people per day, which is what I did.
Aidan Muir: Not saying I recommend that. I'm just saying what I did. About 20 of those people would follow back. So suddenly, I was getting like 20 new Brisbane based followers per day, roughly. And then if I made a good post that started getting shared by people on their stories It was Brisbane based powerlifters who were sharing it and that's how it started getting shared with their friends and then their friends started [00:09:00] following me and that's partly what skewed it towards being Brisbane based.
Chris Hughes: Yeah, right. Wow. That's, it's, it's fascinating. Is it Russell Brunson? I've read that somewhere that you've got your top hundred and you follow them and then it grows from there. So there's a real strategy behind it. And one of my questions was actually going to be about that. Cause you were talking about hashtags and not having followers overseas because can you really service them or do you want to service them?
Chris Hughes: I think people can get lost in that. Some of the data behind it, looking at the total followers and people that are liking, whereas it's like, are they actually who you want? Are they your potential clients? For you, you've got 77, 000 followers on Instagram. Clearly you've managed to craft that so that they're, they are potential clients because your business is flourishing from that.
Chris Hughes: But it is a real risk, isn't it? On that with meals, he's like, we'll post things. And we initially we were doing, there was a personal use login, but it's now just targeted at nutrition professionals, nutrition and fitness professionals. But I'm still getting people that the Joe public that are [00:10:00] looking for a meal plan, which that's not who I want.
Chris Hughes: So it's, there's a real art to try and just niche down on who you're looking for. Isn't it?
Aidan Muir: Yeah. 100%. And it's one of the interesting things in relation to, I remember as I was growing on Instagram, I had a bunch of my friends always like being like, how many followers you up to now? How many followers you up to now?
Aidan Muir: And it's almost like a bit of pressure to keep growing. Yeah. But at the end of the day, like it still makes sense to try to only really get people in your quote unquote target audience. I'm not going to say I'm exclusively trying to only do that at the expense of everything else. But I'm quite proud of the fact that if you check my analytics, it's 50 to 70.
Aidan Muir: I'd say 50 to 60 percent now are Australian. And then another, like 20 percent is American. And then the next highest is UK. And that's almost all of my followers in that kind of area. And obviously it takes a bit of work to do it that way. Like I'm not trying to stop other people from following me, but the target audience is mostly people in Australia.
Chris Hughes: Yeah.
Aidan Muir: Oh,
Chris Hughes: it's
Aidan Muir: working
Chris Hughes: with the analytics. What. How much time of your content creation [00:11:00] strategy is spent analyzing your posts or even looking at content ideas? What's trending?
Aidan Muir: Yeah. So I could go heaps of ways of this in terms of like very short term. I spend two seconds after pretty much every post, like at some stage when I'm like responding to comments, I'll just be like, how did the post go?
Aidan Muir: Did it get how many likes, how many comments, how many? And I don't think about that too deeply. Like being honest, I just don't think about that too deeply. It's more just of a quick vibe check. Did this go well? Did this go poorly? And then I learned from that, but the once a month, something I implemented probably like 12 to 18 months ago, I started doing a bit more of a formal audit of my content, where I just looked back over the last 30 days, see what went well, see what went poorly and try to use that to generate some ideas.
Aidan Muir: So I do look at analytics a bit closer there, but the, the content ideas thing that you touched on is probably where I'll go a bit deeper here. That's the hard part for me because I'm not a perfectionist. I actually post like 98 to 99 percent of the ideas that I have, [00:12:00] maybe I have a bit of a higher threshold for what I call an idea, but it's so rare for me to start creating a post and then pull out halfway through, like I pretty much have an idea, make the post, right?
Aidan Muir: But I post five times per week on Instagram. Which therefore tells you, I, I roughly have the equivalent of five ideas per week. I try to create a bit of content in advance, so when I go on holidays and stuff like that, so it's like I'll post like one less or something than the amount of ideas that I have, because I'll save that up for the future.
Aidan Muir: But how I get ideas is through a mix of ways. One is following a bunch of other people in the nutrition space. And because I feel like my way of delivering things in a way is unique, I'll just use my own words. I'll say my own thoughts. I've obviously been reading this stuff for well over a decade now.
Aidan Muir: I'm very okay. If I saw somebody make a post on, I don't know, protein timing, for example, I'm very okay being like, Oh, that's a good idea. I should post that as well. And I will just use my own words and if my own words come out similarly to that person, I'll just give them credit. So I do get ideas from [00:13:00] other people, but the other thing is like where I'm always thinking about nutrition and stuff like that.
Aidan Muir: I think about what my clients have said. I think about all these things. But the, the bit that I'm about to get to is like, the idea is the most important thing for me. Cause that's the biggest handbrake on my content creation process. But if I'm driving home, I literally pull over if I have an idea and I write it down.
Aidan Muir: It is the most important thing to me. I will stop whatever I'm doing and write the idea down. That's how much it matters to me.
Chris Hughes: Yeah. Right. Well, it's crucial, isn't it? Because it's, I, I, I sympathize, I, I, I relate to that in the fact that, you know, For me, it'll come in a burst, and then for ages, I don't have any ideas, and then my inspiration to even be on social media completely evaporates.
Chris Hughes: So, if you're thinking about it all the time, then how much time of that time is then spent creating the content? If you had to, you do five posts a week, what does each post roughly take you to put together?
Aidan Muir: Yeah, I call it about 30 minutes per post. I'd say that's pretty fair, like from start to finish. I obviously [00:14:00] do have a team that helps me with this.
Aidan Muir: So obviously the 10 dietitians, like some of them help me with some content creation stuff. I'll write every word. If it's like a carousel or an infographic or something like that, I'll write every word. I'll send it to a member of my team. They're the one who puts it together. If I do a video, like I'll have a member of my team edit the video.
Aidan Muir: I'll tell them what to do. I'll tell them what studies to pop up and all these things, but they're the one doing the work. But the most interesting thing in relation to that is. I've probably always taken about 30 minutes to make a post. The difference now that I have a team is I just make higher quality posts, but I've always taken about 30 minutes.
Aidan Muir: And that, if I was doing a video that goes like scripting through the filming, through the entire process, getting props or something like that, averages out to about 30 minutes per post.
Chris Hughes: Yeah. What, what do you use to edit if you don't mind me asking? For
Aidan Muir: videos,
Chris Hughes: CapCut is what it is. Oh, CapCut, yeah, yeah.
Aidan Muir: CapCut, and I'm really big on CapCut, and the reason I'm so big on it is because I'm in a bit of a social media group. It's a paid group, I'll shout it out, the social circle is the name of the group. But it is full of a bunch of people who have gained big [00:15:00] followings. Over the past, like two years, a lot of them have gone from like less than 3, 000 to some of them are over a million.
Aidan Muir: A lot of them are over 100, 000. And the reason why I'm pointing to that group for the sake of this CapCut thing is they all use CapCut, all of them use CapCut. And it's so interesting to me, just like the same thing with like their subtitles on their videos, they're all using the same text for their subtitles.
Aidan Muir: And I don't think people are really noticing this on Instagram the same text or whatever, but it's, it's the default text on CapCut is what they're all using. And I always look at that being like, Oh, if it's good enough for all these people with like a million followers, it's good enough for me.
Chris Hughes: TikTok own CapCut, don't they?
Chris Hughes: They do. Yes. Yeah. So that's a good business move by them. They're going to reward people that are using that, but Yeah.
Aidan Muir: And it's so linked in that if I edit a video on CapCut, then save it and then post TikTok separately, right? TikTok still knows that I've done it on CapCut. Sometimes it pops up a little, this was made on CapCut kind of thing.
Aidan Muir: Yeah. Yeah.
Chris Hughes: How do you balance, because the big thing for me as a [00:16:00] dietitan is that evidence based, because you, you see in the nutrition space, nutrition information, it's, it's quite often as a dietitan, you're sawing, I can't believe people are posting this. It's not accurate. It's that clickbait kind of thing.
Chris Hughes: Like, how do you balance that evidence based approach with it also being engaging and entertaining? Cause it's something that I think you've mastered the art of.
Aidan Muir: Yeah, it's a tricky thing. And. I'm always looking like, how could I make my content better? And there's so many things that I could do, but it starts delving into that territory of like, no longer being as evidence based and everything like that.
Aidan Muir: I just think you can do the best you can. And using one of the things that I think allows me to be a bit separate from a lot of other dietitians here is I'm willing to say some stuff and also be okay with being wrong. I'll do everything I can to be as evidence based as possible, but I'm not scared of doing my own research, coming to a conclusion.
Aidan Muir: And then being wrong. Cause if I'm wrong, all I'm going to do is apologize and say, Hey guys, I was [00:17:00] wrong, super rare that which would ever need to happen, but. I think a lot of people are just scared to, to say stuff. Like they're scared to risk ever being wrong. And if you're ever, if you're scared to do that, it's very hard to put out information that isn't, that is, that stands out.
Aidan Muir: It's very hard to put out information that stands out if you're very scared of being wrong all the time.
Chris Hughes: Yeah. That's great advice. Cause that's science, isn't it? Science is about trying to, to prove theories and then sometimes it's wrong. And okay. That's, uh, that's good advice for me, actually. Thanks, Ashton.
Aidan Muir: All good. All good.
Chris Hughes: Mate, you, you were on Facebook. Yeah. You pulled back, it wasn't, and you're focused more on Instagram and now TikTok. Can you give us a little bit of an insight into the platforms and why?
Aidan Muir: Yeah, so the platforms and why, this comes back to that whole Gary Vaynerchuk thing. One of the reasons why I was a little bit drawn to his content was he talks, he has his flaws like everyone, but like one of the things that kind of drew me to his content It was kind of stuff about how he talks about and also effort, but a lot of people would be like, Oh, TikTok's a time suck.
Aidan Muir: Like I just scroll the feed [00:18:00] and he'd be like, okay, if you scroll on the feed, set a timer for however long it takes you to learn and become familiar with the platform, set a timer for how long it makes sense to do that. And then stop when you get to the end of the time. But the other thing I was talking about with time is he talks about this concept of 80, 20.
Aidan Muir: And it's, if you have something that is working for you, you should probably put 80 percent of your effort into that. You could obviously debate the numbers and be like, should it be 80 percent or whatever. It's the concept. That's all I care about. And I started to go a few clients from Facebook. It's obviously I should put 80 percent of my effort into the thing that was getting new clients.
Aidan Muir: But then one day I looked up and I was putting 80 and 20 percent of my effort into Instagram. And I was growing quicker on Instagram. So I was like, Oh, I don't like Instagram as much as like Facebook. It doesn't feel as, Natural to me, but if I'm only putting 20 percent of my effort in here and it's going better, I should probably shift more effort towards here.
Aidan Muir: And I don't, I'm sure you've had the story of speaking of Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg talks about this story [00:19:00] about when he realized that mobile was the future. He was trying to push the Facebook team to focus on the app rather than the desktop. And it was really hard to get them to change. So what do you got them to do?
Aidan Muir: Was they had to design everything for the app first, that just became a blanket rule. They had to develop for the app first because it was the only way he could get people to shift there. And for me, like the same thing with Instagram versus Facebook, because it didn't come naturally to me, it was very hard for me to shift that 80 percent effort over to that.
Aidan Muir: I just one day decided I've got to do that. I posted it on LinkedIn and everything. I was like, I'm going to, this is what I'm doing. I'm shifting everything to Instagram. And with the TikTok thing, I'm a little bit undecided on that now as well. But the same kind of thing, like. I saw a lot of people succeeding on Tik Tok.
Aidan Muir: I decided I should have a play around with it. And then one day, same thing, putting 80 percent of my effort into Instagram, 20 and I was growing quicker on Tik Tok. That seems to have slowed down a little bit and same kind of problems about being like, it's not as natural to me as Instagram is and all of those kinds of things.
Aidan Muir: The other thing I'm a little bit unsold on is like whether it generates clients as effectively as Instagram. Like we know factually that if somebody had, [00:20:00] let's say 77, 000 on Instagram, 77, 000 on Tik Tok. They would be getting more business from Instagram, most likely, unless there's a few specific demographic reasons, but the point is more interesting when you'd be like, well, what if you were growing five pounds quicker on Tik Tok, could you then get more business through that?
Aidan Muir: So it's trial and error very much. But the, the one piece of advice that I was going to summarize on a piece of advice to people is don't just get caught on doing one thing. This is even something I talk about a little bit with my team, where it's like, where as a team, we have massively prioritized Instagram.
Aidan Muir: It worked very well for us. I put money into this in many ways, shapes, and forms. What if Instagram declined? Like we need to have at least some, we have to be playing around with other stuff. Just to have a bit of diversity as well.
Chris Hughes: Yeah, exactly. It hasn't happened. But if you're in America, for example, and the threat of TikTok being kicked out.
Chris Hughes: Yeah. So putting all your eggs in one basket is a risk. How do you track where they've come from? Do you ask that question?
Aidan Muir: Their clients? Yeah. Yeah. So for many years, my simple system was every time I'd meet somebody, I'd be like, Oh, how'd you find me? [00:21:00] And part of the reason, or every time I met a client, part of the reason I personally adjusted it that way.
Aidan Muir: It's because it also give me a bit of a gauge of what type of client it was. Like part of the reason I was asking was because if somebody would, I actually, let's use examples. I saw two people this morning, two new clients. One of them found me through Instagram. I know instantly they're on the same page with me with a lot of their nutrition thoughts.
Aidan Muir: The other one I saw this morning was referred from a friend and he's come in with a bunch of different thoughts on nutrition to me. I won't go into details in case he listens to this, but like very different thoughts. And he probably would not have followed me on Instagram for a month or so. Okay.
Aidan Muir: Looked at my stuff and then decided to book in with me very different people. So often I would just ask people to toss out. Cause often I view Instagram as like an easier client in a way. And I don't have to convince them that my stuff is going to work because they've already decided. But we recently added a tracking system just because I was doing that, but now I've got 10 dietitians.
Aidan Muir: So all we do is in our impact form, we're just like, how did you find us? And it just says Instagram like they write the stuff. So it's not like a multiple choice or whatever, but it's very clear. Like we see Instagram heaps or social media heaps. We see word of mouth a [00:22:00] bit. We see referrals from certain PTs and coaches and stuff like that a bit.
Aidan Muir: We see Google a little bit, but like very clearly social media is the main thing.
Chris Hughes: Yeah.
Aidan Muir: Are you putting money into Google as well? We do Google ads. Yeah. So we I've experimented between 400 and a thousand dollars a week on Google ads. I'm still not sold on whether it's profitable for us. If I'm just being honest, like it, we haven't tracked it super well.
Aidan Muir: We're slowly improving the track and stuff like that. And I've had multiple phases of doing it versus not doing it. But the one bit I'm not really sold on is like, The cost to acquire a client just being like how much I think it comes out and going deep into the numbers. I think we can only spend about 100 in acquiring a client through Google ads because the other little thing is our client retention of a Google ads client is lower than an Instagram client.
Aidan Muir: So the average Instagram client is worth about double to us what a Google ads client is for the reasons I just outlined before. So we do it and yeah, I'm even more playing around with Google ads because I think there's more opportunities here without going too deep into it. Like One thing [00:23:00] we haven't done, and I don't think any dietitan has done, is set up specific landing pages for everything.
Aidan Muir: Like, we could do a Google Ads thing targeted at IBS, and then set up a landing page that's specific to IBS. We can do it targeted at like, endurance nutrition, or like, running nutrition. And so, so we have that in the process, which is part of why I'm playing around with it, but Even though I'm like, will that make it profitable?
Aidan Muir: Hard to say.
Chris Hughes: Yeah. Right. Yeah. It's interesting you say that. So with Instagram clients, they're warmed up. They're coming to, yeah. Whereas Google is the modern version of the newspaper, almost like they're not quite cold, but they're not as warmed up as what you could familiar with you as what they will be with social media.
Aidan Muir: Yeah. And even going deep on that, you could talk about a flaw in the way that we do it. And I don't think anyone else is doing this. So I'm pretty easy to expose it, but like, You can run Google ads and then have a lead magnet that warms people up. And then there's so many ways it could be done better, but that that's just where we're at right now.
Chris Hughes: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, this is probably for another time, but we've just built these recipe eBooks that you can, that are a great lead magnet because you [00:24:00] can. Put call to action buttons and services within like there's web pages built into it. So we're exploring at the moment, but yeah, there's so many opportunities in there that are still to be tested essentially.
Chris Hughes: Mate, what about when it comes to your strategy for posting headlines, captions, time of day, do you find any time of day is better or do you mix it up?
Aidan Muir: Yeah. So I'm not too picky on time of day. I, because I have the Australian focus anywhere between 8am and. For me, 6 p. m. is I'll do it anywhere in that timeframe.
Aidan Muir: Partly the 6 p. m. cutoff is it gives people a chance before they go to sleep or whatever. And then the other thing is just I don't have to be checking my phone late at night, like responding to comments or whatever. But time of day, I'm not actually trying to optimize for like when my audience is most active.
Aidan Muir: I've just looked at my content and being like, the posts that go well seem to be the good posts. The posts that don't seem to be the worst posts. And it doesn't have anything to do with the time of day. It's just part of my logic with that. What other parts did you want to explore with
Chris Hughes: that? What, what would differentiate a good post?
Chris Hughes: Cause I was looking on your TikTok, you've got, which is really interesting as well. Like you've got 9, [00:25:00] 000 followers cause you haven't been on TikTok as long, but there's a post there that's got a reach of 358, 000 and there could be more. I mean, that was me brushing over it. So it's like,
Aidan Muir: so TikTok's a different one in that the algorithm is so much more wild on TikTok with ups and downs.
Aidan Muir: Like I could do a post quite literally like this week. I did a post that got 250 something thousand and then The next day one that got 1000 and this is a great example of better versus worse. Like we've that TikTok that got so much more. Why did it get so much more? It was just a, it was content that generated discussion in that example.
Aidan Muir: Like so many people commenting on that. So many people liking that one specifically was a lactose intolerance one. And the funny thing on TikTok was it was a lot of people just like disagreeing. Basically. I don't want to get into the content. They were wrong. I was right. It's okay. It just generated a lot of discussion.
Aidan Muir: Whereas the follow up one that only got a thousand. The lighting wasn't that good. The sound quality wasn't that good. I didn't put heaps of effort into it. But the other thing is the one that was a follow up was really the one that like adds a bunch of [00:26:00] context and goes into nuance and closes all the loops that people were commenting on, which doesn't really leave them more room to comment and build engagement.
Aidan Muir: Yeah. And the same thing with the one that got 358, 000, it was. One where both myself and a colleague, Sophie, we're talking about strategies for if you struggle with overeating chocolate. And there were different strategies. Sophie's which would have generated the most discussion was she called it the five block of chocolate rule, which is having five blocks of chocolate in your house at all times.
Aidan Muir: And that's an easy one to generate comments because people would be like, that would never work for me. I just ate all five blocks or whatever. And we're talking about like authenticity and stuff like that to a degree, just being like, that's a very important thing. Okay. I don't actually use the five blocks of chocolate rule myself, but in that video, I was able to say my piece.
Aidan Muir: I was able to say, that's not a strategy I'd use. Here's what I'd use. And that also generated discussion because people could then pick sides and be like, I prefer Aidan's or I prefer Sophie's and you can see why that did so well, because everyone will have an opinion on [00:27:00] that piece of information, but that's obviously not like.
Aidan Muir: The grand strategy. That's just why those did well. The grand strategy, I think in a way is I don't want to create all my content like that. Like that was a piece of information. I think some people can try and implement in their own lives and maybe it helps some people. Maybe it doesn't, but the part that makes social media hard is like trying to put out good information that helps people improve their lives over time.
Aidan Muir: If I shifted to Instagram and being like, what makes a good person, what makes a bad post simple, easy to read or consume in video format or anything like that. Ideally somebody that gives people a key takeaway is really important. If people learn something new, that's typically a good thing, but like low key for engagement.
Aidan Muir: You probably get more engagement on a post that people already agree with to a certain degree. As an example, if I spoke about a supplement that no one had ever heard of, even if it's a really helpful supplement, it's probably going to get lower engagement because people don't know about it. They don't know.
Aidan Muir: They don't know if they agree. Yeah. They don't know if they agree with it or not. So they're not going to chuck a lock or anything [00:28:00] like that in case they don't agree. Like they're not going to engage. They might say, Hey, I've never heard of this before, but not many people want to. expose themselves like that in a way they don't want to like, yeah, it's very easy.
Aidan Muir: It's better to say this did work for me or this didn't work for me or whatever. It's easier to say that than to say, I've never heard of this before.
Chris Hughes: Yeah. Fascinating. So you're really trying to tap into people's familiarities and things that they can relate to
Aidan Muir: a degree. Yeah. That's a hack for engagement.
Aidan Muir: And that's also another little thing where we've, I know I say good versus bad, but some of my lower performing posts are posts that I still think are very important for me to put out there. And they're not necessarily bad posts, but they'll get less engagement. Say I did find a supplement. I did truly think everyone would benefit from it.
Aidan Muir: That doesn't exist, but say I did, I'd still make a post about it. Cause the goal is to help people. And I just copped the hit on lower engagement for that. And I think that's a little bit of a secret in that. I think a lot of other people aren't willing to do that, but the logic I kind of use is. And this is actually a pro tip for getting clients in a way is if I give people three things that they're suddenly [00:29:00] implementing in their own life, they're probably so much more likely to book in with me than if I gave them nothing.
Aidan Muir: So if I did use that supplement as an example, and then I start taking it, that's one of those three things. Yeah.
Chris Hughes: Yeah. Yeah. No, I love that. It's the purposes to help people. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Mate, what challenges do you come across with social media? Yeah.
Aidan Muir: Yeah. So the first one that comes to mind is that thing I was talking about, about the whole, a little bit of pressure from other people, like I don't think about too much, but the story that I come back to a little bit is I went from 3, 000 followers to 50, 000 very quickly, like in a two year timeframe, and if I could go back in time, I'd probably keep the foot on the gas a little bit longer, but I intentionally slowed down a little bit intentionally in multiple ways, partly cause I've heard of a few people with bigger audiences talking about how like the negativity.
Aidan Muir: Doesn't get easier. This one, you have a, I viewed in my head, like I was imagining like LeBron James, he's copping. Hate all the time, probably just brushes up because that's his life. But then I had a few [00:30:00] people around like a million followers talking about how nah, like, and I was like, okay, how big do I want this to be?
Aidan Muir: So I decided to slow down intentionally around that time, keep posting content, but stop like pursuing growth to a certain degree. And it got interesting just being like, I had friends like for that entire journey, always just checking in and being like, how many followers you got now? How many you got now?
Aidan Muir: And then one day it was like, I was at 50, 000 and the next time they asked to be at 51, 000 instead of 70 or whatever they expected. It was a bit weird. I don't know. So that's one thing. So sorry, just on
Chris Hughes: that, do
Aidan Muir: you get
Chris Hughes: much negativity?
Aidan Muir: No, I'm actually so lucky. So on TikTok, I get a little bit and I'm totally fine with that.
Aidan Muir: Like the two examples I've used, the lactose one and the chocolate one, but the, on Instagram, almost nothing. And I think a reason why is because I'm genuinely just a pretty nice person. Like you'll see in the nutrition space, there's a lot of other people who call people out. And one, I don't want to get too deep on that as well, but like, A lot of people who call people out, like sometimes they're doing it from a place of good intentions [00:31:00] and they're trying to call out the information and stuff like that.
Aidan Muir: But the bit it gets me is sometimes they like do a bit of name calling in there. I'm like, come on, you could have just stopped, like, just by focusing on the information. But I don't call people out. I don't do anything controversial. This is another thing with the engagement stuff. Just being like, if I see somebody posting something I disagree with, I know I could get five to ten times engagement.
Aidan Muir: By using their thing and then adding my 2 cents after in response to that. Whereas what I actually do is I see their thing and I just give my 2 cents without actually
Chris Hughes: connecting,
Aidan Muir: naming and shaming or whatever. And I get lower engagement because of that. But you know what, I don't get, I don't get hate.
Aidan Muir: Like, I don't get people trying to like, bring me down. Yeah.
Chris Hughes: I think that's a reflection of your personality, mate. I, I respect that. I think that's 'cause you're right, like, I mean it's a, it can be a pretty toxic place online with Mm-Hmm. . People, you know, getting behind a keyboard and they'd say things that they probably wouldn't say to your face.
Chris Hughes: Yeah. Uh, you, you collaborate and do partnerships. Can you give me some insight into that and your strategy around that and how [00:32:00] beneficial it's been?
Aidan Muir: Yeah. So Instagram probably added the collab feature maybe two years ago. I couldn't exactly say when, but it's been pretty integral to my growth over the last two years.
Aidan Muir: It's a major player for me. Uh, What I do is I collaborate internally and externally internally is obviously with other members of the ideal nutrition team and also with our ideal nutrition page. One of our things for growing our ideal nutrition page is once a week, somebody from our team will collaborate with the ideal nutrition page.
Aidan Muir: They'll probably just do a post that they were planning on doing anyway, but then collab with the page where it grows that page. And it also means if somebody was only following that page, they'd also start seeing all of our dietitians. So it's a bit of synergy basically internally. If we get a new dietitian and I want to build up their caseload, I started doing collabs with them and then suddenly they gained a bunch of exposure to my audience.
Aidan Muir: They grow, but then also people are more likely to book in with them. The external stuff is for growth for me. And I do see why a lot of other people don't do this from like a [00:33:00] branding perspective and stuff like that. But I don't have a set frequency. I just try to do a couple of collabs a set frequency and I'll collab with multiple types of people.
Aidan Muir: If somebody just has good content and I think we work well together, I'll collab with them regardless of their following. Every now and then I'll collab with somebody with a massive following and That's the most followers I'll get in a day. Like I'll get like 400 plus followers in a day if I do a collab like that.
Aidan Muir: And I don't know how interesting any of that stuff is with people. So I'll say what probably is a bit more interesting is my process of doing it. And why I think it's been a lot more successful for me than other people is I see what other people do is they find somebody they want to collab with. They hit that person up and they say, Hey, we should collab.
Aidan Muir: And then they try to come up with an idea, and then they try to make a post, and they probably go back and forth on that post, it takes ages. And they've probably posted a lower quality post, because they're trying to force the collab without the idea. I do the opposite angle. I, at minimum, I come up with the idea first.[00:34:00]
Aidan Muir: I come up with something that would tick the box of being a good post for myself first, and then I think, Who could jump in on this? Who else could I collab with on this? And then oftentimes I'll do all the work. I'll make it from start to finish and then I'll hit up that person and be like, Hey, do you want to jump in on this?
Aidan Muir: You can edit anything. You can change the brand colors. I don't, I am pretty easy. You can do whatever. Sometimes people feel bad because they're like, Oh, this is not an equal transaction, but it doesn't need to be like, that's the bit, like we both benefit from it. We both get exposure to each other's audience.
Aidan Muir: And oftentimes they'll say that they will, they'll do one for me in return. And that's great if they do, but I have zero expectation of that. And another little thing that's part of my process. Is obviously if I can vouch for that person, like if I've seen their content, which in all of these cases, I've seen these people for usually at least 12 months, I followed them for at least 12 months before clubbing.
Aidan Muir: I will give them a shout out on my story. Once again, giving without expecting to receive. I just give them a shout out. Nine times out of 10, they'll give me a shout out back. And that's where I get the followers from. It's not even so much from the cloud posts. It's from the shout [00:35:00] out, but I generally don't think anything of it.
Aidan Muir: If they don't do it, like I don't even monitor it. I don't track to see if they do. Okay. But that's how it often ends up happening.
Chris Hughes: That's a good lesson in life though, isn't it? The more you give out, the more you get back and you don't give out to get back, but it's just how life works. Yeah,
Aidan Muir: exactly. Right.
Aidan Muir: Yeah. And that's also where I come back to that transaction thing. Some people are trying to get an equal transaction, but if everyone benefits, like why does it matter? That also is the thing coming back to the follow thing. If I collabed with somebody who has 2000 and I've got 77, 000, we could look at that logically and be like, that's not an equal transaction.
Aidan Muir: But I'm still getting exposure to that audience. And if it's still good content that I was going to post anyway, and they found a way to make it better in some way, shape or form by even just like editing the text to be easy to read, it's a win for all involved.
Chris Hughes: I love your strategy. Then you create the idea first and then you find someone who can, can add value to that, that, um, yeah, I love them.
Chris Hughes: Whether it's an equal share, it doesn't matter, does it? Yeah, exactly right. Mate, this has been amazing. I'm going to sit back and watch this and [00:36:00] learn and take some notes. You've shared so much. I'm sure we could talk forever, but I appreciate the time you've given me. So mate, one piece of advice, if you had to give to any budding nutrition entrepreneur, or even a seasoned professional who's in the space, what would it be to help grow their following of useful followers?
Aidan Muir: Yeah. So a lot of what I've talked about has been really social media specific. I'm going to go another angle here, which. Might appeal to certain people, but I've talked about like how Gary Vaynerchuk was one of my original like inspirations. There's another one I follow heaps, Alex Amosie, and both of them have said this thing about do first and then share.
Aidan Muir: And like with Gary Vaynerchuk, he was working in the wine store and he built a business or whatever. And when he gives business advice, people are like, oh, he built a business first. Same thing for Alex Amosie, he's built businesses and then gives business advice. The, I don't take it to an extreme in terms of, I did start my social media straight out of.
Aidan Muir: graduating. And I don't think you need to like delay [00:37:00] posting on social media until you learn how to be a good dietitian first. I don't think that's true. I think you can do both at the same time. But if you build up your skills as a dietitian, you find a way to communicate effective information to people.
Aidan Muir: You help a bunch of people. It is a lot easier to do stuff on social media. It's a little reason why I always want to keep seeing clients myself personally. So I put heaps of reference to social media stuff, but taking another angle, like that social circle course, I've seen a bunch of people in there.
Aidan Muir: We've almost blown up too early. There are a lot of PTs who've like just got their qualifications and they haven't figured it out yet, but they figured out how to make a video. Like it's pretty dangerous to watch because they don't know what they're doing. They can't really, they can't really capitalize on the success anyway.
Aidan Muir: And even if they did, I'd be a bit scared for it. So. I know it's not like super helpful me saying this, but it's also like, you've got to be good at what you do for this to work out as well.
Chris Hughes: Yeah. Yeah. No, I love that. That's great advice. Cause it's, it is a risky strategy otherwise, isn't it? Like it's a horse before the cart.
Chris Hughes: Yeah. All right. Yeah. Thanks again, Aidan. I really appreciate your [00:38:00] time. No doubt. Anyone listening to this, there's so many bits of information here that can help them grow. And so appreciate the time you've given up to share. Perfect. Thank you so much for having me. No problem. Thanks, mate. Do you find this podcast valuable?
Chris Hughes: There may be other nutrition professionals out there will also. If you like, share and subscribe, it's going to help other nutrition professionals make an impact on the world, just like you. Thanks.
