#012 What Are Some Easy Social Media Strategies That Convert?
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How effective is your strategy on social media? Reaching the right people with the right message is half the battle. In this episode, Beth Trejo, CEO of Chatterkick presents to a group of marketers in Council Bluffs, Iowa. She provides details for effective strategies to help reach your business goals on your social media platforms.
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Biggest Takeaways From This Episode
Social Media is the number one channel to give brands the best opportunity to connect with customers.
Liking or responding to consumers is the number one behavior that helps brand connect.
What should we be talking about on social? Products and services, consumers and fans, social initiatives, business performance, important issues facing society, employee features.
SUPER IMPORTANT: Don’t just sell… tell. You need to tell the story of your brand/business. Don’t just push your products down people’s throats. Social media is a passive platform, you aren’t going to catch attention with a sales-y post.
Reviews are key! Have a plan for how you’re going to respond to both positive and negative. Businesses with two negative reviews on the first page of results risk losing 44% of its customers.
Features you should check out on your Facebook Page: Automated responses, messenger settings, response badge.
Think about the persona of your customer when targeting. If I was going to target bridal: people who are recently engaged, bridal magazines, recent life milestones, engagement rings.
You can NOT have a share as a Facebook giveaway entry. Click here for Facebook’s Pages, Groups and Events Policies.
Post more. There is literally no such thing as too much content. If your content is relevant and interesting, post away! You need to be posting at least 3-5 times a week.
Need ideas on what to post: Behind the scenes, employee engagement, industry stories and hashtags.
Tune in for AWESOME Q&A Session with Beth after the presentation.
Want your question to be answered on the generation social media podcast? Tell us what it is here!
Transcript
This text below is a straight up audio transcript of the episode. In our humble opinion, we think the audio podcast sounds much better in its original form. We have not edited the transcription below so there are indeed some grammar errors (some quite funny, in-fact).
So a little bit about me. I was able to speak to a group downstairs, so there's a couple of repeats in the group. But I started Chatterkick seven years ago and had really no desire to start a business, but I was working at the chamber of commerce and I was working with businesses and I would go to the businesses and ask them like, how can the chamber help you? Right. And for a few of you, I think in the chamber world that people kept asking me, well, like, what does the chamber do for me? And I, and I, the only thing I knew how at the time was to say, well, I can help you. Like, let me show you the value that I can provide to you just on behalf of the chamber. And so they're like, okay, well I have questions on social media.
I don't know how to use it. My business, I'm trying to recruit employees and don't want to spend money. I need to get the word out about my business and I'm just stuck. And so I just would kind of plug and play the solutions I had learned at previously, worked at a nonprofit American red cross and, and said, well, you could do this and try this and just really kind of made it a part of what I was doing at the chamber. And then a friend came up to me one day and said, Hey, do you want to be a commercial real estate agent? And I was like, not really, but I have this idea like I think it's a thing, it's obviously a thing on the coast. And seven years ago, social media was very still much not used in businesses.
It was kind of that thing that people like is Facebook a thing? Right? They really didn't believe that it was going to be sustainable. And so I decided to start a business started small with just myself. But really went all in. I thought it'd be cold calling day one. And we ended up landing a large franchise. We, it was really myself and the guy that asked me to be a commercial real estate agent became my partner. And so we landed a franchise like day six, and just kind of scaled up from there. We have 22 employees four different offices, two main branches, one in Sioux city and one in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. We work with clients all over the country and we really focus on the relationships that social media. It can form. And it's funny because coming from a chamber world and not from an agency track, a lot of people that start agencies, you know, have been in an agency.
But I really saw the connections that were made person to person around coffee, around cocktails and the business deals that were done on these handshakes. And so that's really the lens that we look at social media through. How can we use human connection to help grow businesses to help retain employees to help drive customer relationships deeper. All of these things we use social media for, but just to kind of set everybody like in the same area, these are just tools. I would never sit, stand up here in front of it, tell you that this is the magical pill. Right? And I think anybody that, that is not looking at all the different elements that are out there. Social media is amazing and it can really transform and grow businesses, but it's just the tool to do it. It's what you put behind it, the strategies, the plans, the work, the stories, all of that is what really is the fuel behind social media.
So I have Molly here with me. Molly works as an insight strategist at Chatterkick. Another quick note is I have a passion for women led businesses and women owned businesses. I didn't realize starting a business going in, I didn't realize starting a business in the agency category, how dominated it was by men. And so it really kind of opened my eyes to just being able to help other people out. And so I do have another podcast that we have a generation social media is our chatter kick podcast. But I also have a podcast called technically Iowa where we interview Iowa,uwomen throughout the state and just kind of hear their stories and learn a little bit more about technology in the space,uwith women leaders. So it's kind of cool. Today we're going to talk a little bit about strategies on social media.
What should you be doing and why? It's really what strategy lends itself to. And then what really is awesome is if you can get the point where data and research drives what you are doing on these channels. That's where you've really won because we can all have preconceived notions about the platforms. Who's on them, how are they using them? I want to reach the young people. I want to reach the old people. But the reality is is these barriers are broken every single day. So one thing that we do on the podcast, and this is so fun, if you're just like sitting around with your friends, have everybody pull out their phones, the Android has the same functionality and look at your screen time report and do it with your kids. What, like young kids, like, you know, the tweens, teens do it with people in all generations and sit around and look at your screen time report and your battery report.
It is fascinating to see that it's not usually what you think because the people that say that they're not on Facebook, their screen time report will show that they're on Facebook or maybe they think that they check Instagram every once in awhile, but it's taking up, you know, a huge percent of what they're spending their time on. But they just don't realize it because a lot of us, especially younger people, it's so much part of what they do that they don't even realize how many times they're opening apps. So really, really interesting thing to look at. I also love when you go to concerts is another barrier that is broken on social media. People think that old people don't use Snapchat. And I see old people and I'm just putting an air quotes and young people don't use Facebook. Like I hear this all day, every day and there is some truth to these generations using the platforms differently.
I 100% agree and that's what the data sets. However, like don't write these off because they still are working for different generations. So the best thing ever is to go to a concert like maybe it skews a little bit older, a demographic, and you stand back and you watch the screens of people that are filming the concert. You can easily tell which ones are Snapchat, who's live streaming. It was a football game. This guy next to me literally was live the entire time on Facebook and it was just a ballgame. He was talking to the camera. It was really, really interesting. But people are using these devices and platforms and so many different ways that the only truth is that there is, there's so many different options that when you look at what platforms and how should I use the platforms, I think it's really important to take a step back and say, let's just clear the table.
Let's just not assume anything. Let's not only focus on Instagram cause we're trying to reach this demographic. Let's just think about, first of all, what do we want to accomplish? Right? So if you go to the next site here's what people want from social media. This was a really good report. I'm like standing in the way of these screens or can you, if I see it in the middle, can you tell? So this is report published this year by sprout social. They're a social media software, but they had a really good sample size and the report was run well. So it really lets customers rank which channels give brands the best opportunity to connect with customers, not to sell to customers, different channel strategy. But if you're trying to connect which connection comes before sales on even in product based businesses, people still want to know where their potato chips are made, who's making them, what kind of ingredients are going into them, where are you sourcing the ingredients?
They want the stories behind all sorts of brands. And so social media provides that storytelling, whether it's a validation and after the fact or if it's in that research phase where they want to know, like if I'm running a boutique, tell me why this shirt is two times more than what I pay on Amazon. There's probably a legit reason for that. Like it's higher quality. We, you know, we, the seams are like this. All of the things you just have to tell people about. Otherwise it just, you don't get a chance to even get the opportunity to sell. So connection first, interesting though. Social media, TV, radio ads, email, direct mail and social ads. So again, this is kind of a interesting mix. One of the things that I would note is some of these things like people, a lot of people say direct mail is dead.
We don't do a lot of direct mail campaigns, we don't do any other we partner with people. But there is a space for a lot of these in your marketing mix. It's what you say and how you offer it that really makes a difference. And, and people want that personalized experience right? If you sent me a card with a in it, I got this and this is was such a great example of really customizable marketing. So they sent me like a cup that said the future is female. They did their research, they stocked my social accounts, they knew what I was about. It was, it's a cheap little coffee mug, nothing that costs them much a note in there and they send it to the office. It was a completely cold lead from some software company and they could have sent it to every female on their list. Right. It wasn't that individualized, but just the fact that they made a memory, they made someone feel special, even if it wasn't, I didn't buy the software, but somehow like there's that connection there and that's how I would start thinking about your direct mail strategies. That's how I would think about you know, your gifting, like do, do the things that create memories and that are memorable. Otherwise you're just spraying and praying a lot of cash on some of these campaigns regardless of what the medium do you put it on.
Okay, so I hope you can see this. So social media behaviors that help brands connect with consumers. And this could be B to B or B to C. Again, we're people to people right now. That's what we're talking about. So first like or respond to a customer. Biggest ROI possible in social media is respond, respond to reviews, positive, positive and negative, respond to direct messages comments, tweets, LinkedIn connections. All of those things are the best opportunity for you. And it doesn't take a lot of math to do the ROI, right? The phone's ringing, you pick it up. That's basically an equivalent on social.
The second is really showcasing the brand's personality. This is the opportunity for you, a perfect way to show who you are as a brand. And if you're an owner of a business or your owner is like quippy sarcastic, funny and you have a lot of that in your culture and then you look very press-release like on social, that misalignment is just a missed opportunity. You want to carry out who you are to be a direct representation on social media. And again, this is going to help you recruit and retain your employees as well. I think we have probably a mix here of owners and some individuals that work within a company. So, but recruitment is a whole nother can of worms and opportunity. But really important when it comes to social,
The third is supporting a cause that the consumer personally supports. Really interesting. And I've seen campaigns run really well where you kind of do a you know, we're gonna if we get to this or if this happens or we can get so many people friends tagged on this post you know, we will donate to a cause of your choice or you know, can you guess the name of this puppy, right? Let's name him. People want that impact and input. And the funny thing about this is we've been literally doing these a status only posts, no pictures, nothing. One simple question. Like would you rather like get a dog or get a cat or you could just say team dog, team, cat question, no pictures. They break the noise through the noise and social media. And they will work no money behind them.
Just try it. And people are like, well, I thought you should have all these pictures. Yeah, that's, it is best practice and it works. But just that disruption of like, wait, there's no, it feels so much more real. We don't have any pictures on things. So just try it every once in awhile. Well, so if you're doing any remodels or doing anything where people feel like they can have it like a decision, even if you've already kind of made the decision, but letting them have like a say in it, you know, like what, what do you like better, this or that. Love to give their opinions on that stuff and it really creates high engagement. A couple other things. Highlight industry or category trends. Think new. What's new within your business? Like new to everybody else. It doesn't have to be groundbreaking, but people want to know the newness.
That's why if you look at like grocery store products, right? I'm, I'm the biggest sucker for new, you just put the sign, the new sign on it. And it could be the oldest thing in the world. Not cool. It's brand new. Like I got to try this out. And people want to be that person. They want to discover things on social media. And social media is a passive platform, right? Regardless of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, we're not usually actively like I'm in the mode of meeting my oil change, I'm gonna go search an oil change. We're just sitting back looking through our beads. So you have to match that mentality and then don't forget about communities. This is something that social media started out as a community, right? It's, we're connected around a group of topics. So if you are in real estate, then talk about what that means.
Like if you went to a round table, how would you have those conversations? Don't make it all about you. Make it about them. Be obsessed with your customers, be obsessed with your communities. Listen and then create content from that. It makes a huge difference. And then don't forget, invite user generated content. Again, when you're talking about ROI, if you're the person in your head that always thinks this stuff is just child's play, this is how you save money. Other people creating your content saves you costs because it's extremely expensive internally to create content because it means you have to employ employees and it saves you money from an external agency or someone else creating your content. If you can get users, your community to create content about you as a brand, you are legit ahead on the money side of things. So two big things that can correspond to direct ROI top and bottom here. Answering the phone, the digital phone and having other people create your content. Really strong things that small and large businesses can both take advantage of.
Okay, a couple other things just to notice here. So what should you be talking about? I think that's where a lot of people get stuck. Like I want to tell the story about what we do, like our products and services, but sometimes it feels like that's all we talk about. Or the other way around. Like all we're talking about is like the office pet. We're not talking about the serious stuff that we do all day. How do you balance it out? So what's really interesting is a majority of people, 68% of people like actually want the brands to talk about the products and services. But it's the way you talk about them. That's important. Don't just sell, tell you want to tell the story. It's the same thing. If you're going to give me a tour of your building and you're going to show off the cool things that you are so excited about every single day.
And it could be any industry tell like, what would you say? What are the most frequently asked questions? What's it like to be your customer? All of those little bullet points to start writing out. And that's where you can really leverage your content strategy. And then the customers are fans. People love attention. You don't have to give away gifts and all the things you can just give them attention. That's the best and least expensive thing that your fans and people would look for if you haven't leveraged that top fans badge, which some of it's not available in all pages. Basically on Facebook you can turn on this functionality that'll give the people that interact with you the most, these little top fan. And what a great way to give the people that are your supporters of a lot of attention for free. You're not paying anything for this. It's awesome and they feel so special. Okay, this super important. We have people that are business owners or CEOs here, couple of them. Okay, so
70% of people feel more connected if their CEO's are active on social media. Tell your CEOs this. If they are thinking that this is not worth it and all of this and they don't want to be on camera and they hate video and all that stuff, that's fine. But the data and statistics shows that people want to connect with the leaders of the organization. It could be a big business, it could be a small business. It's just really they want to know who's leading the team. Also, 72% of people have social engagement. It's happening on local pages. I talked about this a little bit in the last session, but really big opportunity for all of the local businesses because people care more about their than what they really care about in the bigger scheme of, you know, you, you want to be connected to the burger King that is in your town and not just the brand because that's the one you go to.
That's the one you expect to be clean. You expect that service, like that's what you really care about. And we have to remember all this stuff. We're so selfish as people, like all we care about, it's really what's in it for me. And so if you, again, kind of think about that as you're putting out content, what, what are they going to get out of this? Would I click on this if I just showed myself my own ads, what I care like sometimes we have to kind of step out of our box to really understand that. All right. All right, so social media strategy. First of all, first step, let data and research drive the Saturday strategy. We do full strategy sessions for businesses. The first thing that I want to do is I want to look at all their accounts. I want to look at their analytics.
I want to look at their posts. I want to look at their, how much they're posting, who is posting, how much time is it taking their team? Lay that foundation. If you don't have to do with that complicated, just start with my, your Google analytics, social media sending website traffic, yes or no. That's one thing to look at. Another thing and your social media counts. Are you growing? Are you dying? Like are you losing fans and losing reach or are you growing? Yes, the algorithm changes. Yes, there's that stuff that happens, but guess what? It doesn't make that much difference. There's still organic accounts, local businesses that they're posting amazing content and they're getting reach and they're selling their stuff. So if yours isn't, it's time to kind of reevaluate what you're trying to do and what you're doing. Here's three main buckets that we like to start out with.
Don't. If you're a small to medium size business, don't try to do all the things at once. It's just going to be too overwhelming. You're not going to have enough time and it's probably not going to be as impactful as you would like. So three main ways that you can use social media versus customer service. Here's the places where this all comes in at. So Facebook messages, Facebook reviews, Instagram, DMs, I mean there's a lot of them. But if that's your first strategy is we are going to be super responsive across all of our communication channels, email, telephone, all the social channels. Like we say that we are the best in customer service. You better not forget this. Another statistic says that 80% of businesses say that that's the number one thing that distinguishes them from their competitor. We have the best customer service.
Guess what? Of their customers, only 8% of those actually agree with that because this customer's beautiful. What customer service means. We expect customer service, right? Like it's the same thing as when you go to a restaurant, the good food should be the standard. Like if you're going to a restaurant, you don't want to eat crappy food, right? So no one is going to give you reviews about the food unless it was extraordinary or really, and so that bar of customer service, good customer service is already there. So in order to level that up a little bit and really excite people and delight them, you got to go above and beyond and give them an idea of what that means to us is when we, when you call us, we call you back. If you messages us on Facebook, we'll get back to you in three hours. Whatever it is. I just think that we need to start telling your, your clients and your customers, what does that mean to storytelling? Another really good strategy. Just pick one of these and start diving into it if that's what you're really trying to nail this down. Storytelling locally is it's probably the most straightforward, right behind the scenes day in the life. Best reasons to work at your company, top frequently asked questions. All of those things allow you to really showcase who you are and why, what's your purpose?
The next providing value and offers. So if you're ready and you're ready to sell, like I got this stuff all down, I got customer service, we are rocking and rolling local storytelling. I post content from my accounts regularly. Now I just want to sell. And that's okay. And it works on social in all industries. But you gotta kind of go in the right order. Otherwise you'd start a Facebook page and start pushing ads. It's doesn't work. I've, I've literally just reviewed an account yesterday and they had no fan. They started a Facebook account. They wanted to sell, start a Facebook account, started pushing ads, spent $11,000 in two months and they got ton of traffic. Great. Like conversions. Right? But guess what? No, we actually stayed on as a customer because it didn't do the first two steps. So really, really important that brand matters.
Okay. So we talked a little bit about reviews. Two things to really note on this. So this stuff is expensive. Bad reviews are expensive and it doesn't necessarily mean that you have to have a million and all positive reviews. But when you look at reviews, make sure that it's a reflection of who you are. Like if you just have two bad reviews cause to angry customers then you need to put effort into getting more. Like the volume of reviews and positive reviews are going to their currency these days. And you have a big opportunity on search. They make a huge impact with Google search and people really pay attention to it. 89% of people actually care more about the owner's response than they do with the actual review. So make it human. Use real language, have empathy, right? Like tell people, you know, that stinks.
You had to wait that long. That's not what we want for our customers. Give them a little bit of love and then try to make it right offline to help give them your phone number. Let you get a human on the phone that half the time quiet people down. This is something we see all the time. 58% of executives believe online that reputation management should be addressed, but nobody really does anything about it. I mean, I give the review, I have a review presentation and give it to a lot of businesses and everybody agrees that reviews are super important but they become paralyzed. What does that mean? How should I make an impact on that? And it really is baking it into your process. It's making sure that you talk about reviews to your team. What does this mean? Hey, we got this review. Yes, this was a crazy angry person, but is there any element of truth that we can like take from this review to make a better customer experience? Because it's sometimes it doesn't matter what the facts are, it's just how someone feels and that's what reviews are kind of, you've got to balance that.
Okay, so let's look at Facebook and Instagram strategy as well as posting. So I'm going to talk about these two platforms. Primarily. It's the ones that we get a lot of questions on. I I we were talking a little about bit about the others. I'm going to touch on LinkedIn. Linkedin is an amazing platform as well, so we'll talk about that. Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat, take talk. They're all very unique platforms. Facebook and Instagram are kind of the workhorses right now, which is why I'm touching on those. The others, you have to have an individualized strategy and they don't work for all different types of businesses. So that's why I focused on these two. Those are the three or four awesome platforms, but not everybody is always a candidate. So I'm starting with the kind of foundation.
Yes.
Okay. So I hope you guys can read some of this stuff. This isn't as important. It just basically says content. So things we're going to talk about information. Facebook. Okay. Everybody have a Facebook page share for their business. Okay. That's pretty standard right now. Across the board, people are, have Facebook pages, their consistency maybe be a little bit off, but they're trying, they're posting. And it really is where a majority of the people are. Now this election cycle is going to completely change Facebook. We know that we're seeing already on the rules on our advertising. If you are using Facebook ads, be ready, things are moving very, very quickly, especially if you are doing anything with community support. So all of that's transparent now and it tells everybody how much you spend. It has your personal name on it. There's a lot of things happening in the Facebook ad world as it relates to local community, which they clump into politics. So just to preface that so the things that Facebook is kind of the hub for information place where people go, should you have a issue in your business? This is probably one of the first places they're going to go. Maybe Twitter if you haven't a Twitter account, people like that cause it's usually quick. But
Biggest problem on Facebook is admin access that we see. Most people don't know who has access to their page. Rogue employees or old employees have access to all of these accounts. So check your access points on all of your social platforms. Who has the logins? It's the biggest PR crisis opportunity that you probably have exposure to is just that someone accidentally didn't log out of their business account into their personal account and got a little crazy on Saturday night and now your business just did it. It literally happens way more than you'd imagine. The customer service, community sport support, definitely big options opportunities there. And then we typically recommend three to five times a week from a posting schedule. That's a generalization. You can post more, you can post less. Half of it has to do with if you're using advertising or what your content matter is. But in general, that's what I try to encourage most businesses to stick to.
Foundational things. If you haven't looked at the backend of your Facebook page recently, I highly recommend it. This verification is something that you really want to get for your page. It's a verify page. There's a little gray check Mark there. You can also use your name and the URL, very important for search engines. They love that. And then one thing I don't actually have an error on, but you know that you could schedule posts in Facebook. If you don't have escaped Facebook, you don't have a social media scheduling tool. Facebook has its own built in. And one thing that we've had people do is if they kind of want to load up a content calendar, they just save them all as drafts and then they can go in and schedule when it works for them to post saves a lot of time.
A couple other things just to keep this in mind. So automated responses this just says hi, thanks for recommending us. We're glad you had a great experience. Those are in the messenger setting on Facebook. It's kind of a weird spot to find. And your pages may look different than mine. We see that a lot. And then if you do that, you get this response badge, a hundred percent response rate, two hours response time. So great goal to set for your team. Your employees just, you want that quick response cause that's gonna help when your customers.
A couple of other things. So this isn't the targeting who's doing Facebook ads, but I could do like four sessions on this. We have a couple of people running Facebook ads. Okay. So the beauty of Facebook ads, why they are such gold. First of all, they're not just ran on Facebook. They are ran in what we call the Facebook of apps. So that's Facebook, Instagram, the audience network, which is an entirely giant ecosystem of other apps and sites that allow Facebook to place ads on their sites. And so when you're using Facebook ads, you're using the data that we as users submit to the platform. We tell Facebook everything about us. What we like, what wins our birthday, how we're interacting with things. And so Facebook wants to get me as a user connected to things I care about the most with ads, so they can be really effective.
A couple of you can really target people on these as well. But one thing I encourage you to do, don't just target people who like social media. Like, if I was Chatterkick, I don't want to just target people who like social media cause it's so many. Right. But one thing I could target, I could target iPhone users cause typically our clients tend to be iPhone users. I could target people who are admins of a Facebook page cause they already get it. I could target people who like entrepreneur inc magazine cause they're typically a little digital savvy. Right. So do you see how I'm thinking about the persona of a customer, not just what they like. That's obvious, right? So a couple of businesses here, I'll kind of, I can spitball audiences. Anybody want to give me their business? Yeah. Bridal. Perfect. So they have, there's a targeting mechanism here recently engaged, right?
That's one thing. But why not target people who are looking for life changing events so they just graduated college or you could target people who are looking at bridal magazines. That's probably you know, in that same line and literally you can start typing in the names of the bridal magazine. The not that calm. You can they, maybe you're in a certain age demographic or maybe they their behavior is telling you that, okay, if they're looking at engagement rings, they're probably, there's a dress correlation going on there. So you just kinda want to think a little bit outside your normal like people interested in wedding dresses. So some opportunities there. You can also take a list of your customers, upload those into social media and target those called custom audiences. There's no additional charge for that and it is extremely effective.
I'm a couple of other tips with Facebook specifically when you're looking at strategy and this really amplifies your message. So local, we had somebody use our social media sign for a photo shoot and so you can tag other businesses within your content so they get notifications. You can spread your message a little bit farther. Again, some of these are basic steps, but they do make a difference that you don't have to invest additional ad dollars to you can also tag employees if you're connected with them. That makes a really big difference. Just to again, get that message out a little bit farther than just who liked your page or if you're doing it organically, you're just crossing your fingers and hoping the right people are, are seeing your content.
Okay, so a couple other things when it comes to ads, what I want you to take away from this is ads are awesome. They do take a little bit of time, but the potential with this stuff is mind blowing. Again, it doesn't really matter if you don't think 22 year olds are on Facebook. You put in the parameters and Facebook just goes and finds those people. We just ran a campaign for teens, 17 to 19 for college visit day and we put it, we use the Facebook family of apps and we were like 100% sure it's going to be Instagram, right? We're like Instagram because again, we're in that same mind space and we let Facebook just optimize per platform based on signup. So these are kids registering for visit day and Facebook newsfeed was the highest. Completely surprise me. Didn't even think that that was where 15 to 17 year olds, if you would have asked people, they would have said that was not the case, but that's what worked. So again, keep that in mind. Here's all the different like checkmarks that you can have of where there is a place. Facebook messenger is a really great place to be playing and advertising. And events if you guys are doing events, event responses is a really great medium because you could use as little as you know, a couple of hundred dollars and get effective reach and people to sign up and come to your events.
Okay. Couple other things. So when you look at how much we should be posting here's just two graphs of what the difference between two times a week and five times a week. It's a content game right now. Your job as marketers, how can we create content at scale? How can I take this one video shoot that we're doing and break it into 25 different pieces of micro content? I need a tweet. I need a boomerang. I need four pieces of Instagram stories. I need two pieces of Facebook content. If you get that all planned out, it's an organization game really to win this. But if you can plan that out, that will save you so much money and really increase your effectiveness dramatically. All right, so content ideas. This is really, again, when you come to content or when you look at strategy, you have your content strategy and your kind of your platform strategy. It's typically how we break it out. Before I dive into this, do we have any questions? I know this is a lot of information. I've done this as like a four workshop so I'm trying to make sure that you guys are getting the information that will give you some takeaways. But I know we have different levels of
Yeah. When you use the automated response, if you, if you enact that and you have to, I'm assuming make that enabled service, can you still respond back with a personalized message?
You can kind of set the threshold, but a lot of times the way that we will phrase the automated response is I'm like, thanks for reaching out. We're Getting all the information we need and we'll be back to you within two hours or whatever expectations you want to set and you can set different ones for weekends as well, but highly recommend, especially evenings and weekends because some people want immediate responses, but if they get that, they're like, okay, I get it now. Like they don't work overnight. Okay, everybody else good? You following me? Okay. Content ideas. So videos, videos, videos, they're effective, they work and you can really just use your phone. Don't feel like you have to create these fancy highly produced videos. I've used a Snapchat to record a video, saved it to my camera roll and you sit on Facebook. It's easy, it's simple.
It feels authentic. People love the way that Snapchat videos feel and you can use it across platforms and if you have somebody that really doesn't want to be on camera, just using those filters and then they can be a puppy on camera for some reason, they are much more likely to do it. Best practices for post length. In general, if you can keep your posts shorter rather than longer, that's a good play. You can break that rule on some of the platforms, Facebook and Instagram specifically, but you better have a compelling story in that paragraph. I've seen it work many of times, but it, and you usually see it on like a sad story or I need to tell you about something. It has to kind of capture you in that first couple of seconds to really make it stick.
I have no hashtags on Facebook. Just you can use hashtags on Facebook, like they radically work if you're going to an event. But most people on Facebook don't use hashtags. And so when you do, it makes you feel like you don't get the platform. A lot of people used to do this to Twitter all the time. They would connect their Facebook and their Twitter. So everything that goes on Facebook goes on Twitter. Well it didn't, it doesn't work like that. Like you see this three letter dot, dot, dot, and then it takes you back to Facebook and like, it's not the experience you want to have when you're on Twitter. You want to tweet. That's how you consume that media. So just think of the way the platforms work.
Emojis work really well on Facebook. Just a couple of them here and there. Make a big difference and really lighten up even very technical post or a business. And then don't forget about giveaways. I mean, they still work for sure on social. The thing with give it up, giveaways that you need to think about is one, you cannot have a share as an entry point. If that's against Facebook's terms of use and you can't actually source that information. You can't have a like, and you can't have a comment. And there's like auto pickers for that. Like a Facebook auto picker. It'll pick whoever random person liked that post. Like the post. So one way you can get around this is you can say like this post to enter and then share with your friends. So the enter is still the liking and just tell them to share with the friends.
Most people will do it that way and it gets your shares up like most people want. But if you say share this post to enter, that's actually not fair because you can't see all of those because of the privacy barriers. And again it's against their terms of use. So the other thing to think about for contest is make sure you're giving away something your audience likes. Like if you're giving away a snowblower and you're dealing with 23 to 25 year old females who are in college, like misalignment of gifts, and I see that all the time, then your Facebook page gets flooded with fans who have no connection to you as a business and you can't sell to them. And so it's just this. And then all the likes drop off. And if you're going to give something away, give like something that your people care about and your target audience cares about.
All right. Instagram and LinkedIn. I kind of put these together cause there's similarities here and I know that we're, I want to make sure we keep on time. So a couple of things with Instagram and LinkedIn. When it comes to strategy, consistency is very important as of any of the platforms. But if you really want to dominate Instagram stories right now, consistency is where it's at. You don't have to pay for those, they are free, but you have to be consistent and then you will probably get some attention and leverage as long as the content is on point. Linkedin is, it's, we were just talking, it's having a moment right now. It was this platform that was there. It was kind of resume ish and then they've made some tweaks in the last two years and it's the organic content reach right now on LinkedIn is really impressive.
So make sure that you're revisiting that platform. And again, don't let the rules cloud your strategy. So don't think it's only business. I can't post anything personal on there. You can just make sure that it's, you know, not your bikini photos of your vacation. That's not the way that LinkedIn works. But if you post a picture with you and your daughter, you and your kids, I don't think that that's misaligned. I think people still care about that. We still care about our personal lives when we are in the work mindset, which is what LinkedIn is. And then research hashtags. So different hashtags trend on different, different platforms that hashtags, that trend on Instagram are very different than the hashtags that trend on LinkedIn. So if you're trying to sell bridal dresses, for example, you're going to use different hashtags because people are shopping on Instagram and maybe on LinkedIn they're looking at quality and they want someone who knows what they're selling and talking about so they know they're not getting
A damaged product. So LinkedIn, if it like populates a hashtag where you, is that specific to like LinkedIn or is that across all platforms? Yeah, I know how much it's searched or whatever.
Yeah, I would use those as much as you can, as long as they make sense to the content because they're trying to get you into that mix. I'm in. Linkedin also will index in search engine so it can be really heavy for just general search terms. Okay. So here's a couple of tactics that you use these for these strategies. So if you don't have Instagram, one of the really great things to use Instagram for is just snooping a research. I was working with the electrical industrial electrical company, right? Most people would be like, there's probably not a lot of that on Instagram, right? Actually, no. There's a huge communities of these electricians hanging out on LinkedIn. They're all using the same hashtag. They're like sharing humor and like, what's it like to be an electrical industrial electrician. And so, but you wouldn't know that unless you start really starting to do hashtag research.
You don't have to have a business account to do that. You can just use your own personal account, see what's happening in your industry. What are people saying, what words are they using, what hashtags are they using? And what's working because then you just take that and duplicate it for your business. These also work really well for employee engagement recruitment. Both of these platforms. You're just telling your story very similar to Facebook, but again, those hashtags allow you to really get into the mix and into the attention span of others. And then events work really well. You know, whether it's a trade show that you're showcasing and you're telling people to come and find you. Okay. Most of those are hashtag driven because the events have their own hashtags. So an opportunity there related to get people's attention, a 15 to 20 hashtag or five to 20 hashtags on each post. Just stuff on it as much as you can. You can do the three dots and go down if you don't want it to cloud up your Instagram account. But the more the better on that kind of a, a platform, both of these.
All right. I know that there's a lot of information, so I want to open it up to questions or if you have a type of business that you just want to brainstorm some ideas on, I am more than happy to give you examples of what's worked well in the past for others or how to kind of overcome some of those barriers.
Wonderful question ideas. We had an event responses on Facebook, but it's, so
The Facebook events are like having a moment. So the fourth three things that Facebook put out from the latest conference that they had. One was groups. So if you're not using Facebook groups, these are, it's a whole new world for Facebook groups right now. Another is the marketplace. Again, we didn't even touch on that, but Facebook marketplace is where they're seeing a lot of strength from a platform perspective. So if you can think about it from your business perspective, how can I leverage this? I'm selling good. Should I be putting something out on Facebook marketplace? Should I be doing ads on Facebook marketplace? How can I use this and kind of leverage that? And then the events side of things is really important too and that those events responses are part of the ads manager and the ads module. But basically you're optimizing those ads for people who are likely to respond to an event. That's how those ad objectives kind of work. They're going to go run in the race where they feel like they can get the best results.
Yeah. How long after an event should you still post inside of that page to keep it updated?
Can you give me an example of what type of event you may have?
I don't know. Let's say that you like posted like a networking event or something and you wanted to like give people content. What happened? Like how long after they've been is over. Can you still reach those people that wanted to come or did attend?
So what I would, I mean I would do maybe again depending how monumental the event was, if it was just something small, I would maybe post a couple of followups within the week or so. But then maybe ask those people to join a group that then, because then it will self select as well. Like people who really care about it will go to the group and then your next event you can let them know about within the group. That way it doesn't get too muddy specifically on that
Other types of businesses. It's what ideas on the typical of what I, I haven't had anybody introduce themselves. What kind of businesses we have in the mix. I can't read your nametag.
The Gathering, which is an event center. Okay. Awesome. Awesome. And so I don't do the actual postings, but the guy that does like, we'll make a post from like whatever book your Christmas morning and then they'll just run that same exact post over. Yeah. Kind of. Yeah. And I work with Children's. We're nonprofit. Okay. Awesome.
So one of the things when you get to that point, and I see this a lot, we we help a lot of businesses try to figure out their social media departments and their interns. And when you get stuck, right, you're like, oof, I just feel like it, it's not a direct reflection of us. I think that's really where business owners or leaders or managers get frustrated as like that's not who we are. Like we're not just that ad, right? We are. We want to tell people all of the things why they should come to this event center and why their Christmas party needs to be here. Like give me a sample, the menu, like let me know what it could look like. Decorating. Even you could take a picture of the space and I've seen people do this, just mock it up on Instagram stories like color.
Like here is where we put this, here is where we do this. You could have a tree here and just make this, it's almost like a children's type picture cause it's scribbling with your hands or with stickers, with an Instagram stories, download it from Instagram stories and then you could use that for content. And those kinds of things are fun because you can just show people what it could be and with the space, you know, potential to do. Also one of those really great opportunities to ask like how early is too early for Christmas? Like can we start decorating now? Let them say before Thanksgiving, after Thanksgiving. It was like passion points of all I'm so passionate about when I'm going to get my Christmas tree up. Another one you could ask people about for children's and nonprofit. I've worked with nonprofits in the past that maybe they don't have photo releases for all the kids or there's picture issues.
If you have any of your businesses have just picture issues, right? So it's really difficult to storytell when you can't show the pictures of the people in the stories. There's ways you can fake it. There's also ways where you're probably getting newsletters, style content or you've had years of news letter style content. Those stories are still relevant, especially maybe the picture's old, but you could use a different picture and still tell the story. Some examples of things you could do. So we've, we did some stuff with like an abuse kind of situation with kids and it was like a shelter. You could do pictures of shoes lined up next to the door, do a shut door, pictures of drawings the kids have made with their names in them. You could do like quiet areas or zones that help like environmentally help their space and their mental state. It's kind of just creating stock photos in your business that you can use and you have a bank of. So when you're stuck and you don't know what to say or you can't use that picture anymore or that employee left, you can kind of insert those in. And if you do that on a quarterly basis, you should have a pretty good bank of where to find the images and it's not so disruptive.
Other types of businesses.These are quiet today. What kind of businesses you guys have? Your, you guys were in the last session, right? With nonprofits.
Schools. Foundation, schools. Foundations. Okay. Pottawatomie County community foundation. Okay. Awesome.
I think that a big opportunity of you guys have is to create, maybe you already do this, but takeovers and ambassadors are so awesome because you let someone else do 70% of the work for you when it comes to like creating the content. And a lot of people can leverage this with their customers, with their volunteers, their employees. But you just basically say, here's the login for the day. This is what I need you to do. I'm going to map out like the plan and like I just need you to be real, make sure there's nothing customer facing in the background. But you know, just tell our story and why you like to work here and why you love your job.
It seems simple, but sometimes things in that. So I have a question. So I work with the education agency. We do a lot of like professional development professional with those opportunities to be good to put as a Facebook event. Mmm. I just know that sometimes it's public. People are like, well we had to cancel the training cause not enough people signed up. Right. So those kinds of things out through Facebook. Should we specifically create an event and you do share like you have flyers but like create actual events?
Yeah, I think that you know, when you're trying to engage that group of people, first of all teachers on Facebook are like so bonded together. It is a really great place to reach them. I would do a group and I would put a group together of like all of your area, like educators that you can get into it. You could do watch parties and do your training via a watch party. That's kind of cool. It's a new feature that's newer feature that's come out. You could do push your events through there if you do an event. I love Facebook events cause they give people reminders. Just depends on how many you have. If you have like hundreds of them, it might be too much and if they're not relevant to the same crew but if you, you know, have four a year or you know, smaller scale, then maybe
Giving something along those lines would be really maximal. Yeah.
All right. Cool. You're right on time. Get you guys out. I know. I want to make sure that I respect everybody's time, so I appreciate it. If you have any questions afterwards, feel free to come up. I'm happy to brainstorm and yeah, have a good rest.
But he didn't show up at the event center. We were having
A painting class or so on like page the gathering room. How would I find people? Would it just be people that have liked that? Yeah. So you're having a painting, I'm just trying to make showers. So you're having a painting class that's open to anybody, right. So I think I would use some of the advertising, honestly, because I mean let's start with $100 and you really target people lie. And then I would put like DIY arts and crafts that live within a certain mile radius. Probably females, right within the certain age demographic. Maybe they like Pinterest. So you kind of put that person together and then you show them that event that you created and you say like, are you interested? Please sign up. Okay, very good. So I think you have a big opportunity for that with that event space because it can be huge. Right. And it doesn't take a lot of money to do it. Really. That's exactly. Good luck.
What kind of business you have it at the local hospital. Okay, awesome. So there are somebody that all of our content, social media pages, but I'm responsible for what happens. Interesting. They create content that I basically get mass-produced data driven. Like, you know, you know, that is such an such a relevant topic right now, like moons and like wound care and like, I mean, it's not the pimple copper road, but that's made it more like socially acceptable to look at open space. Right. I'm the director of the wound care center. Awesome. I, yeah, I definitely think that with the targeting, I love like diabetics and people who like diabetic magazines, low carb cookbooks, like there's so many great targetings to reach that audience. You have a huge opportunity.
And so I don't know if she's doing, I don't think she used to be three to five times a week. She's trying to do it for the entire Oh yeah. Oh yeah. She's not an expert and I'm happy to give it to them. Yeah, I would try to do like, no, I would try to see if you could get a couple and I'm sure that like in some publications they feature certain patients that talk about their, if you have any specifically wound care related patients, try to just do a couple of piece of content that you've know are so much better. Like you know the stories are better. Put them out there and then just show the contrast of like see how well this looks five times more than this and I'm going to have to tell her CEO it's a, it's, you're on the stats. He doesn't even drink.
Put whoever else is a figurehead, you know, I think that also makes a difference. I will tell you social media is so much more than a one person gig. I see these hospitals all the time with one person in their department for literally like it would be like running an agency with 70 clients cause there's so many departments and I can't even imagine how do that. There's a foundation page and then there's the family page. I don't have a page. They don't want more pages, more things to me. And then they have the foundation. So I wonder if you could go to a different channel. Could you, I wonder if like, because a lot of times like literally dealing with the same system, like they like all the Facebook stuff but they don't really like really know what's going on and like Instagram or some of these other, so like starting one of those pages we did one for we do one for a women's health and that community is just so connected.
Like the moms, the moms supporting moms and the babies. And it's just like such a really great Instagram account. And we do stories and we really just do two photo shoots and we just get all the content you need twice a year and you just start, keep just, you put a little sticker on this one, you change this one, you put, you know, a little Instagram allows you to do a lot of creativity to make those pictures look very different and they're the same picture. But that would be an, in healthcare it's all about the physicians and providers too. You put those out on social media. People eat that stuff up because they've helped save someone's life or help change their world and they're their celebrities and it's just posting pictures of them. It's amazing. Okay, so good. Yeah, always you can reach out to us if you need anything.
We have a lot of healthcare situation. You want me to email you the debt? Sure. So our alumni and friends, so we both sit on the committee for it and the events at the end of the month, both on the June show me like football frenzy Friday or something every Friday leading up through that today. And our executive director is going to be there, but we need to know like what would she be doing. So we have stuff to give away. We have raffles video event, we have free food. There's going to be so awesome because we are going to be giving feed status, which is like a few mungus it's area.
It's going to be [inaudible] game to come back because they haven't had them since school. Yes. People like going live. Is this a college tailgate? No, no high school. Couple of schools. High school. Okay. And so we're doing like an alumni friends telling you people. So we're going to hide that. We're going to keep that one in your back pocket. That's going to be like under serving them at the school in two weeks. So we thought we'd go to one of the schools and then we'll start trying to guess whatever you're going to release. Like they want people want to be the first to discover. That's one thing. The other thing that I think is really fun, you gotta have some people like prime to do this, but like comment with your Jif of like either you're your best mean face or your best like a competitive base or like people love to comment with those and they just, they're fun because they just get a giant thread going. Like show us how excited you are.
Right. Or that that feeling when your team like wins the game. Like put a jet below that describes, you know, what you look like and then maybe like on those you did the randomly selected like that would be randomly selected and went to yes. Is right for the food, could win tickets if they get right. I don't know if I really feel like people might tell them that it's like a food that weight people liked in school cause I think you'll be like, well I think you got to give him some hints though of like like we're bringing back some nostalgia. Think this age through this age or think you know your elementary days. Like what's your best guess? Those are really great. Just literally text only. You mean any pictures? Let them just thread the comment and early at this Monday date one my daughter in first grade cause they served that I was so excited but when I hit that you didn't like that.
What are they [inaudible] up the picture? Like a stop sign at the octagon with pizza. That's like a Mexican pizza. I feel like this is like, it's like it has like, like a refried bean. Like I do remember that but it's like a thing. Okay. Like this is, yeah that's a thing. That's awesome. You guys on Facebook and other thing that would be fun is like when you're getting people ready to actually guess it, take a picture of a empty tray. I'd be like, no, not here. Not here, not here in this space. And it's in the main, yeah, the main tray because people want to know and they'll keep coming back to your posts then to figure it out pretty good. The other thing is, I mean you do that on probably within the event probably. Or would you do that? I think I would do it on the page.
I would do it on the page and then you can cross-post it like, Hey, we're doing this over here. If you need the link to the actual post Facebook post, the trick is click the timestamp. That will give you the unique link to the post. Otherwise it gets like it's filter to where it gets tricky. So yeah, well good luck. It's fun. Fiesta is all day, all day, but it hasn't been well attended in the past. So this is our first year on the committee. Maybe this is my only six months at the foundation. So we're trying to get people excited. Again, you do what you could do. This is kind of random, but you could like in this pretty, probably pretty quickly. You could make tee teachers that said teen Fiesta and giveaway people loved it and we should make their method to make them like have a select few that you would have team Fiesta on and you'd give away their, they have to show up or they have to, you know, just to make sure that you have the excitement turn into actual attendance.
That could be something we could say like the first whatever, get a to be a a shirt like Oh there. Yeah, I mean it's a tee shirt. It's not expensive and I could probably like take that picture of it and silhouette like one, two color. Graphically in the background. Well they, most of the teacher shirt ordering places have full mock ups available. You just put your like hashtag hashtag on that hashtag team tostada and then use that for the event or you know, the chatter and watch that on Instagram. And then you have all this content once the event is a Friday. Oh yeah, you got time. Cool. Three guys from the city that I worked for. Mobile. Hi. Oh yeah, I'm from Sioux city, my husband's city. Oh really? Yeah, he went to East. His family's pretty big. What's his Morehead? Is there? Oh, I know the my cousins are like actually could get outside.
Yeah. Okay. So Ashley is, I went to high school with Ashley. Okay. She's like, was one of my really different than high school. So that's so funny. So that's on your husband's wall. And Brandon and I met at Morningside, so. Okay. So I have some city. Yeah, I'm still up there. They're in Dakota. Yeah. Yeah, that's, we live too. Okay. So I know that like the whole flooding scares the past few months. I know walking our drains and water's coming up. Gosh, we don't know we're in. So that was the course when I was up. There was two years there. But then when spring Creek, yeah. Yeah. So far so good. So we're just hope were, have you always lived in Papillion originally from LeMars? So I will let you know. And I've been in LA last 20 years, so that's really crazy to say 20 I know. I feel. All right. Good luck with everything. You're welcome. I'm going to be searching that hashtag so it sounds fun.