Every single day I see tonnes of bad tech (and marketing/business) advice given all over Facebook. Today I want to explain why crowd-sourcing tech advice (or business/marketing advice) from total strangers on the internet is a really bad idea for you and your business.

And I want to offer you an alternative.

Why do business owners crowd-source tech advice from strangers

I get it. You’re new to running your business. You hate tech and have never understood how it all works. You’ve never done marketing in your life. You’ve never had to take decisions that heavily influence the future of your business. So you need to ask someone else.

You don’t have the budget to work with someone one on one that you can ask, you don’t have a team member that can figure it out for you – so you feel like the only place left on earth to go is the free (or low price) Facebook Groups that you’re in.

They have thousands of members, there’s gotta be someone in there that knows what to do, right?

Yes, there are, but those people aren’t the ones giving you advice in 99% of cases.

What do you mean by “crowd-sourcing tech advice”…?!

What I mean by crowd-sourcing tech (or marketing and business advice) are the posts where you feel stuck, so you open a Facebook group, you type your question without any context and then take replies from people who have no clue about you and your business, who simply tell you a choice they made based on whatever limited knowledge they have.

Let me show you the kind of crowd-sourcing tech and marketing questions I’m talking about…

This question is a complex question. The answer to this isn’t linear. This is called doing marketing – and you need a whole host of data and input to even scratch the surface on a question like this. You’re better of paying for 90 mins of someone’s time that does paid media and marketing and can tell you where exactly you need to be optimising.

No one in a Facebook Group is going to give you any kind of reply that’s going to save your business. That is your job as the head of marketing of your own business – or else, you need to hire someone.

These kind of issues take weeks to assess, split test, improve marginally and fix over the long term.

If you have challenges like these, I can help you to dig into it in a one on one business breakthrough session.

These posts are my favourite.

“Hey I run a business but you have no idea what I do, what my tech stack is, what my business goals are, what stage of business I’m in and I need you to tell me what tool to use or why I can’t integrate this”

No one is going to be able to give you an answer off of these questions. Even people who KNOW what they’re doing.

The people who DO answer and tell you what to do or what they did have absolutely no clue what they’re talking about and do not understand the importance of picking the right tech stack and setting up functional systems – otherwise they would never dare reply with advice.

I created a monthly tech support membership that costs just $13 (at the moment anyways) and for that you can ask me (someone that’s been managing the systems, marketing and tech in six and seven-figure businesses for the last 7 years) as MANY questions as you like.

I’m super passionate about this, because I am the person that then gets hired a few years down the line to clean up a business backend that is a complete and utter mess, and I’ve seen how much money has been left on the table because the business is running on tools that aren’t fit for purpose, that don’t integrate and provide the necessary data to make good business decisions and team members that are quitting because of all of the chaos and being unable to do their job.

For $13 a month, you’re setting yourself up for success for years to come (and probably saving money by not buying the next shiny tool no one needs and staying focussed on your task – building your business).

“Hey you have no idea who I am, what I do and who my ideal client is, please tell me what my marketing plan should look like”

Again, this doesn’t make any sense. Does your topic lend itself better to video or audio. Does your audience like video or audio better. Are you looking to nurture your audience with much longer form content and build intimate relationships with them. orare you looking to get found in search? Do you love being on camera to keep up with a YouTube schedule? Do you have a professional setup for YouTube or the money to spend on it?

There are SO MANY questions I’d wanna ask you – and again this isn’t the place for a crowd-sourcing advice from strangers on the internet.

Again, I offer one on one sessions to work on exactly this stuff for a reason.

Who are the people that reply to crowd-sourcing tech advice in Facebook Groups

I’m not saying that there aren’t experts in the groups – I hang out there after all. However most of the time the questions are unanswerable.

So who DOES still answer?

1. The “oh-so-helpful” business owner

It’s the business owner who really just wants to be a good person. They want to help you because they can feel how frustrated you are, so they share something they saw someone else to do some time ago. Just so they feel like they did something good. And then they continue scrolling. They are also the ones that feel bad charging their clients, reply all hours whenever someone shouts their name for lack of boundaries and are generally the people people (far from understand tech or a system or the need for order).

2. The business owner that has too much time

I’m not sure about you, but I don’t have much time to hang around. That’s why my replies are always short and to the point. So, why do these people have all this time? Because they’re not working on their business and they don’t have any clients to be servicing.

There is no denying that most people that are in Facebook Groups have too much time on their hands and feel lost with what do in their business – so they pass on their business advice that isn’t working for them to you, so they fell like they did soo much that day.

The people who are really good at what they’re doing don’t hang around and reply to questions that are basic, without context and don’t make any sense – because they know it’s useless.

Conclusion

So, all in all, bad questions lead to bad answers from people who are not qualified to be giving them in the first place.

This will in the best case distract you and throw you off track for a few days and in the worst case it will cost you a lot of time and money faffing around with stuff that is not fit for purpose OR the wrong marketing method or business decision for you.

So, consider who you ask for help next time and screen answers carefully.