Transcripts
1. 15 MB SocialDerby Ch00F: Hi, guys. Welcome to Social Media. For creatives, this'd is one of a series of online video courses were offering that is aimed to help you tackle social media on a daily basis for your brand in whatever capacity you're looking to do it, whether you're a photographer or you have a product today, we're going to really look at how Teoh truly nail it in that space and see some results. Definitely make sure Teoh enjoy this course at your own pace. We've broken it out into tractors, so it's very easy for you to go bit by bit. Or you can just go full throttle if you want. Teoh. There's also a downloadable PdF, which is everything that I'm talking through today, so you don't have to feel pressured to write down a bunch of notes or hit the pause button a ton, but it allow you to kind of have the base of our conversation. And it's a tool that you can refer back to time and time again, and you'll also see a course exercise book that you want to make sure to download, which is going to have a series of exercises that I will cue for you at the end of certain chapters. That should help you really math out a lot of what we talk about and make it totally relevant for you. Also, if you have any questions as we go along, be sure to just write them in the comments. Someone from our team will be sure to get back to you ASAP, or you can also always tweet us at We are matte black and will get back to you ASAP. So don't be afraid if there's something you don't understand. We're totally here for you, all of social media, to answer your questions. So let's get started in today's course. We're gonna cover a lot. We're going to focus primarily on how to build your strategy in your content and make your social media really feel special on and create value, which is something that I talk a lot about. But we're going to start. I'm kind of just a network overview. We focus primarily on the key brand channels. They spoke Twitter, instagram, Pinterest, things like that. Not so much video YouTube snap trap. But we're totally here to answer those questions again. Refer to the comment box or you can tweet us. We'll be happy to answer any particular questions that you have in those spaces. But really, we're gonna talk about strategy, your content strategy, identifying what your brand voices. We'll go a little bit into analytics and social advertising. If that's something relevant for you, will spend some time on community growth, which is a big thing, and also just how to be a good community manager on. And then, lastly, will also touch a little bit on using social media to drive sales. So if you have a product or if you're an e commerce site of some kind, that'll be an area that you might want to tap into. So, yeah, it's a lot to cover today, but we feel like this is gonna be really well rounded for you, and you should be able to get everything you need toe to tackle this beast moving forward. So before we get started, I should tell you a little bit about me. Um, I am the founder of Matt Black. We are a culture marketing firm based in Los Angeles, in London. We work with brands in so many different industries, from fashion to food on developing there. Brand strategy, their social strategy. We run a lot of their social media. We create a lot of content. We work a lot with influencers, which is both its own kind of PR animal, but also really floods into social media and the success of, you know, creating content and building your community. So we'll touch a little bit on that today. We also have Social Derby, which is our traveling workshop. Um, it's basically the offline version of what you're going to get today on. And then we have the shape shift report, which is are trending Insight digital publication, which, lucky for you, you're also going to get a free issue of the most recent one that has just come out as someone who's taken this course. So that's that's us. I'm not the social media game for many years when it was just Facebook and Twitter and have definitely had a lot of fun watching it evolve. And I'm excited. Teoh share my thoughts with you today. So before we get started in this course, I always like Teoh. Just reiterate that social media is a grind. There's no two ways about it. it's going to take a lot of work. There's a reason that it's a full time job for ah, lot of people, if not entire teens. Eso You know, it's probably a lot of the reason why you're here today because it's something that you might be challenged with or, you know, not necessarily sure to tackle with everything else that you have going on, whether it's you running your business or you actually do have someone dedicated to it. But it does really take having a thought through strategy and really understanding why and like what your purpose is for even tackling social media and paying so much attention to it . So just know you know everything that we talked about today. It takes time to figure out what your groove is. There's no to communities that are the same. Every single community is different. But once you really start to learn your formula and learn what works for you, you can really take it to the next level on something that I always like to get people thinking about is if you could take one brands followers, So all the people that follow a certain brand who would that brand or person B and why? I think a lot of times we think about Oh, I wish I could have the community that this brand has, or I wish I had as many followers as this company did or this person did. Um, But what you really want to do is look at the people who are actually following them. I'm just kind of sift through and see what kind of people they are, where they live. Are they a lot of influencers with big followings? Are they just a bunch of people that live in Florida, like whatever it is, you can tell a lot about a company based on its community? Um, so really think about that. If you if someone could just hand you all of those followers, what would that community be and really pay attention to that brand of that company, what they're doing, the way their content is created, the way that they're positioning themselves, their brand voice, all the things that we're going to talk to you today. So with that in mind, let's get started
2. 15 MB SocialDerby Ch01F: so to get started, we're kind of gonna look at some of the key networks out there that you are probably all really familiar with. In one way or another. You probably have your crepe paper, it's and the ones that you don't love so much. And that's totally cool. We're all in the same boat there, Um, but the 1st 1 I want to talk about is Facebook, which has definitely had, you know, an interesting ride over the last few years. It's it went from, you know, years ago. Being kind of one of the primary channels is a brand to utilize for any sort of social meat marketing to now being a little bit of a loss leader. In that sense, because it's so challenging. Teoh really grow a community there, and it's in reality, not where a lot of millennial consumers are going to connect with brands online. Um, that being said, it's still what we kind of call as the um, kind of brands storyboard, so it kind of feels like a secondary website. There are a lot of people who use Facebook for mobile, and there's a lot of people who use it for search as well. So it definitely is something that almost axes a secondary tool, even in the way that it feels in a lot of ways. The reality, too, is that it is one of the stronger external traffic drivers if you're putting the right money behind it from an advertising standpoint, which we'll talk about later. But if you are brand that is looking to drive traffic to their website or if you're a media company looking to drive traffic to your site, um, this is definitely going to be a big player for you. We'll talk about post frequency of it, you know, with with any network in general. I always like to say, If you don't have anything to say, don't say anything at all. But the reality is is that you do need to post at least one time a day. Ah, lot of times that includes weekends. If you really want to effectively connect with and communicate with the community and build a community, Um, just like anything, the more frequently that you pose, the more likely it is that your content is gonna get seen. So if you're posting three times a day on Facebook because you actually have things to say , then kudos to you. And hopefully from today's course, you'll feel like you can at least get your one post today and then you can start to build from their Facebook is a little bit tricky from an engagement standpoint, which makes it, ah, harder social network to grow in that capacity. But there is thedc ape ability. Teoh. Switch to your brand page quite easily and kind of comment or like or engage with other people's content. Um, as your brand, which is really great with Facebook. It's really important to understand the algorithm that their algorithm is changing all the time on. We'll talk about that a little bit later when we go into analytics. But right now the kind of raining form of content on Facebook is video on its not video that you're sharing from YouTube video. It's actually a video that you're uploading directly to Facebook, so you're not all going to be in a position where you have video content, you know, at your access. But think about it as something that's a part of your strategy as we go, because that is top performing content and that is what's going to be fed to people a little bit more than other content. 2nd 2 videos, of course, photo and then the least kind of lowest performing content is when you just do a post with text. But we don't see a lot of that from brands. Statistically, 40 characters or less on Facebook performs best. You want to kind of let your content, you know, sell in a way and drive people to click and learn more somewhere else. If your post is like two paragraphs long, you're gonna lose people a little bit. Um, but you know, the kind of reality with Facebook in general is that you do really need to pay to play. It's just the kind of environment that it is at this point. So I highly recommend that you allocate some budget even if it's, you know, $5 to boost a post every once in a while so that you're gonna get a little bit of a wider reach. Definitely do it. The next network is Twitter, which is definitely in my eyes, kind of a conversation building network. Even more so than, say, instagram, there is section opportunity to have a dialogue with just about anyone through Twitter, whether it's a celebrity or brand, um, or an editor, whoever it is that you're trying to connect with, Twitter is a great portal for it. I kind of say that it was like a red headed step child of the last couple of years in the social media world. But there's definitely a resurgence with Twitter, and we're seeing a lot of the teen audience really gravitating to it. It's definitely always something important to pay attention to. It might not be your main lead social network, but it's still a very important one, and you'll see that a lot of people have conversations about your brand or you in some capacity on Twitter. So it's important to be present and and have your handles and everything secured. Like Facebook. It's also a great external traffic driver, and you really don't have a lot more than your 140 characters and a click. So this is kind of your opportunity for what's called click baiting. You know, write something really catchy, grab people's attention and then drive them out somewhere to read more, to learn more Twitter, your post frequency is really important. I'll say again, if you don't have anything to say them, don't worry about it. But, um, you know, the more you post, the more likely it's gonna get seen. Unlike Facebook, which actually holds back certain content, Um, for your community, Twitter does not. So once it's gone, it's gone. Unless somebody goes to your feed, it's really important. The more you say, the more likely your community is going to see and potentially connect with that content with Hashtags on Twitter. Sometimes you'll see a lot of random hashtags statistically, and we'll talk a little bit about Hashtags in our community growth section of this video. Um, but what you want to make sure to do is use at least two using to performance better than just using one, using anything more than to seize an actual significant drop in the reach of your tweets. So keep that in mind, and if you can integrate those hashtags actually into the Post caption and that's the best , that's the best option. Twitter has the highest performance on weekends, so if you are down Teoh, you know, talk to your community on the weekend and give it some attention. Weekends are definitely best with Twitter. Definitely make sure to track your clicks. You can sometimes do this through whatever dashboard you use or by using bit Lee, which for those who aren't familiar, Bentley is a totally free link short inner that also tracks how many people click on certain links and where they go to, which is always really good to see. Um, sometimes you might not get a single retweet on a tweet, but you might see that over 40 people clicked on that link and were driven to your website or to wherever you were trying to send them. And that's really, really valuable. Another thing with Twitter is to explore a little bit with Twitter advertising. It works very similar to Facebook. We will talk about it a little bit more later, but there's something called Twitter cards that have launched within the last year, so that have been really effective for brands that are trying to drive traffic to their website, so we'll talk a little about that later. Then we have instagram, which is most certainly the darling of all the social networks. Right now, it's a visual photo and video feed, and it's highly curated. It's definitely a very inspiring platform to be on. It's still one of the fastest growing social networks. Eso it's definitely, you know, continuously thriving and thriving with Instagram. I recommend, you know, at least opposed today, if not more. 123 is always a really good number. Engagement on instagram should be a really big focus for you if you are looking to build a community here because the more you do, the more you're going to see a return. And instagram, unless you have, you know a $1,000,000 to spend is not a platform that you can advertise on as a smaller company. When it comes to engaging on Instagram, it really is more the merrier, because it's not necessarily a platform you can advertise on like you could on Facebook or Twitter. Unless you have a 1,000,000 bucks in the bank. The more that you like and comment other people's content, the more likely they're going. Teoh, discover your feet potentially like your feet and engage with your content. So I believe that Instagram has around a cap of like 100 likes an hour, something like that before they begin to flag you is maybe a robot of some kind. I know a lot of people who will use that to their advantage and actually go through and like and comment on a lot of content within a certain hour and then kind of cap it It maybe 90 before they go on to the next. So I'm a big advocate of Onley engaging with content that you actually do like or feel like you want to engage with. But if you are looking to aggressively grow that community, there are tactics in that capacity that you can focus on. We'll talk more about that and growth like every other channel. Make sure that you're using hashtags and you're tagging appropriate handles so that you get discovered and show kind of that cross pollination of sharing content. And then, of course, use the one link your by a link in your feed to your advantage. So there's not a lot of opportunities to drive people outside of Instagram with e exception of that one link, so use it when you can. If you need to swap it out to tie to a new product or if it's something tied to a post you're doing on use it, then we have Pinterest. So Pinterest is essentially a visual photo platform. There is a lot kind of evolving with Pinterest as a network right now, it's going to become a really, really powerful, sales driven platform, even more so than it is now for those that use it for that purpose. But the beauty of Pinterest is it's really easy to post and engage, you know, liking people's content, repainting content. Re pens are one of the most advantageous ways that you can really grow that community. Um, and for your own post frequency, aimed to do at least 3 to 5 pins a day and spread it out. You know throughout the day, if you can, if you can pin directly from your site. That's ideal, because you know that that pain is going to drive back to your website or wherever you're looking to drive them. Um, but if not, you know, and you're uploading a piece of content from somewhere else, just make sure that you allocate the appropriate link to it because interest is a really big search, and now when people are using it, Teoh discover much like they do on Google images, and then collect and go out to where they can actually source that item on Pinterest. Eggs are optional, which we'll talk a little bit about later. But most importantly, just make sure to always link, because that's gonna be your biggest advantage on that platform. Google Plus is definitely not a network that a lot of brands pay too much attention to unless there may be a larger global brand that uses it for, you know, cool Google hangouts with influencers or celebrities. But the truth of matter is, is that it is a really great S e o driver. It's Google products. So if S CEO is important to US CEO being search engine optimization a k a. Driving people to your website, then Google Plus is an important one for you. And it could be a simple is just sharing the same copy that you shared on Facebook and slapping it on Google, plus once a day or maybe once every, you know, a couple of days it's whatever really works for you. It's not really a highly engaged platform that mean that you can use it in the same way that you would use Facebook. It's just really down Teoh, where you want to spend your energy. But if at the very least you can just put up your posting, your content, your links, then you're going to see something from it. Then we have Snapchat, which, like I said before, we're not gonna talk too much about today. We're still actually discovering a lot about that channel from a brand perspective, but we definitely know it's being used quite heavily by, you know, millennial audiences and and younger, quite a religious basis. Eso it's It's definitely something to pay attention to. At the courts of photo and video conversational network, you can share stories as a brand. So if you are in a position to kind of show a lot of cool behind the scenes content or really kind of, you know, create these storyboards and it's something that you could definitely take advantage. But the biggest challenge with Snapchat is there not a lot of metrics and engagement pieces that you can monitor and kind of keep track of in the same way that you could. Other social channels, eso that's where it's a little bit you know, kind of a gray area in terms of marketing. So a couple of quick stats, um, 81% of consumers say that they're influenced by a friend for a purchase decision that really plays into social media and such a big way. Because if I'm talking about a product or I'm sharing a product or advocating something simply by even liking their page on Facebook, which my friends can see, I'm in some way saying, You know, I I use this or I'm behind it or whatever it might be. So there is a lot of power in what a single person who likes or engages with your feet can do for you. Visual data is consumed 60,000 times faster than text were totally visual creatures. At this point, if you look at just the growth of Instagram Pinterest now, Snapchat were all visual consumers. It's what we take in in such a big way. So it's super important. Um, and as he kind of talked about before, Pinterest is projected to account for 40% of all social media driven purchases, which is a huge amount s. So make sure to pin with prices if you are a brand that is selling a product in some capacity. Pinning with the price is a simple is adding the price in the caption of your pin or your photo? Um, it definitely helps. See a higher conversion on sales from your
3. 15 MB SocialDerby Ch02: when it comes. Teoh Putting together your social media strategy together your strategy for your grand in the hole or your business or anything like that. So it's really kind of the main kind of high arching structure for which you're going. Teoh. Look back to you every couple of months and just make sure that you're staying in line. Um, so there's three kind of areas that we focus on when it comes to figuring out what your strategy is. It's about defining the consumer experience. So what is it specifically that you want people to get out of your social feed or your content in whatever capacity deciding what contents are? Channels or platforms are going to be the most effective at kind of creating that experience. So, you know, even though there's all these different social channels, there might be one that you really decide to focus in on and spend the most time with to nurture and build, and and and that's okay because once you kind of nailed that one down, then you can go to the next one. But it is important to at least have your handles across every social network and kind of be tapped in enough. Um, but really, figuring out which ones are going to deliver the most results for you is is definitely a great place to start. And that was the third point which is delivering value. The biggest thing that I like to preach on about is, you know, what is it? What kind of value are you actually really creating? And do you understand if that value is what people are even looking for on that social network? People follow brands on Facebook because they want to be cut, privy of deals and promotions. It's just the reality of how it is. We're not really going to Facebook Teoh be engaged by the lifestyle behind a brand. We would go to Instagram for that or even Pinterest for that or Snapchat. So think about the kind of content that you're putting on that channel versus what you're putting on Instagram. If you're putting like a 30% off, you know, graphic design image on Instagram. It's not really what people are connecting with their looking to be more visually inspired . Eso really delivering value for the right channels. That kind of trickles back. Teoh what the top level consumer experiences that you're looking to achieve. Outlining your goals is really, really important in any part of business. But even in social media and especially if you aren't the one managing your social media, you have someone doing it for you. It's really good to keep kind of benchmarks and keep track of where you're getting. What does it actually do thing for you? Your goals were going to be dependent on your individual business. So if you're a B two b company and you're trying to generate leads, you're gonna have specific tactics to trying Teoh achieve that. You might really focus on Facebook and LinkedIn as key channels for you to generate leads. If you're looking Teoh Garner a lot of customer feedback. You're gonna rely on certain channels for that, like Twitter, even Instagram. So it really just depends on what your goals are. And then you can start to figure out what channel is going to do that for you and how you're going. Teoh kind of Relais that on a consistent basis, the kind of strategy roadmap that you want to follow is starting with your objectives. So this is what I want to achieve whether it's, you know, 10,000 and sales a day on, then what tactics you're going Teoh use to achieve that objective. Um, what the goals are from that. So obviously, if you're saying I wanna achieve 10,000 sales from an objective standpoint, your goal might be Teoh increase traffic by 25% and grow our community size two x amount because we know that we typically see a conversion of x percent on each user. Whatever it might be, you're gonna know what these answers are based on your community on. And then you need to identify what kind of results you want to see from that on how to keep it consistent. So now you're gonna bust into your first exercise in that handiwork book that you will have downloaded. There's a series of questions for you to kind of fill out and think through, and that is essentially going to create the framework for everything we just talked about and the base of your strategy
4. 15 MB SocialDerby Ch03: when it comes to think about your strategy, your brand, it's really kind of identifying. What do we want to talk about? What is the purpose of what we want to talk about? You know, you don't want to talk about yourself all the time. So you want to kind of really hone in on what the lifestyle of your brand is? Um, you know what? The feeling is that people are gonna connect with all those kind of cool elements. So when you're thinking about your content strategy, there's kind of the eight things that we like to think about. The first part is gonna be finding your why that kind of comes back to the value conversation. Why are we doing this? Why are we in this market? Why are we creating this product and really honing in on what kind of content can help create that? Um, it's not all about you. So as I mentioned before, you're not always going to talk about you. You want to talk about the lifestyle, your customers, all the people who are connecting with your brand in some capacity. Keep that always in mind. Insights inspire ideas, so paying attention to what kind of results you're seeing from the content that you're pushing out is really important in kind of spawning new thoughts and ideas about how you can create for your community. I like toys, say Go all the way. You know, I think that social media is a really experimental platform consistently, so you should always be kind of testing and, you know, just kind of exploring how an idea could unfold. Sometimes something that you might feel nervous about posting or sharing ends up being something that is your top performing content and opens up a whole new channel for you. It's really important to be social at the core. If you yourself are not a social person on the outside, or if your community manager isn't exactly a social person on the outside, they might not be the right person to run your social media. Social media is all about two way conversations and dialogues. So you know, creating the content is one thing, but actually being able to engage and kind of speak from the brand and connect with people and feel that kind of sense of like, adventurous and networking in the digital world is a really important piece of of your overall kind of brand online. Don't post and pray. That kind of comes back to just understanding the insights and knowing what's working and what's not working so that your content strategy, he is really fluid. And you know that what you're spending time creating is actually going to do something for you in the long run. Um, be a storyteller. So we are not black. We like to say that we're social storytellers or whatever, but it really is your opportunity with channels like Instagram to tell a story and have a narrative and be a little bit more than just talking about deals, promotions and things like that. Um, and the last is to expect results. So with any kind of content you're creating for your channel, you want to know again, You know, what is this doing for me and why am I doing it? So expect results from things and analyzes results so you can understand how to better at moving forward. So when it comes to kind of figuring out your content strategy, it really starts with you know what are gonna be my core content categories and kind of the framework that you're going to slot things into. What will do on, like a monthly basis for a client, which is the same you could do for your own brand is map out a monthly content calendar on dso With that, you know, you're really just planning for specific content on specific days. You're making sure you're slotting in. You know what you need to if you have a certain event happening or whatever, but even more importantly, you're making sure that you're hitting your different content categories. So if you are a beauty brand, for example, a category, for one part would be your product, right? So you're those things you're gonna talk about your product. That might be 10 to 20% of what you talk about on social. Another category could be how twos you might want to do hair tutorials or makeup tutorials or something that creates some value. From a education standpoint, you might want to do, Ah, whole content category around, Um, you know women. If you're a female brand, you might want to profile interesting women who are in your key demographic or are inspiring to the brand in some way, you might also have a whole content category that's about the ingredients of your product. So if you have a lot to talk about their so you kind of have these different buckets that you want to check, and when you're putting together your content calendar, you can kind of make sure. Okay, this week, we're talking about one thing to do with product. One thing that's ingredient. We're doing our profile on X Y Z woman. Whatever it might be, it just helps you make sure that you're diversifying your content throughout the week. Original content is best. People can't find it anywhere else. So you're creating something truly valuable in that alone. We'll talk about content creation, all of it later. I know it feels challenging sometimes to create your own original content if you don't have the resource is. But, um, it's actually quite easy to dio. Thanks, Teoh iPhones always think about whether or not a post is terrible. Not everything that you put out is meant to be shareable content, but it is important to at least focus on one post a week or two posts a week, being something that could be shared on. And that's a simple is a quote or maybe something funny. It could also be a really beautiful image that someone gets inspired by doesn't necessarily mean people are going to share it, but by thinking about is this something that I would share? Is this something that I would see somebody else? Share is an important part of kind of checking those boxes in your content strategy. And as we talked about creating monthly content calendars, it will really help. You kind of stay on track for the month, but it will also help on a more granular weekly basis when you're creating content on the framework. So we like to talk a lot about the 80 20 rule. Um, 80% of your content should be the lifestyle. The story about the community and then 20% should be about your brand, your product or you. It's really easy to for flip those around because it is more work to figure out the story and the narrative and the community and talk about those things. But hopefully, in your strategy, you're really figuring out what those areas are and also in your content framework, so that it makes it a lot easier to make sure that you're sticking to that 80%. So the other part of the 80 20 rule is that 80% of your time should be spent creating 20% of your content. Um, the the other time is all about aggregating, so aggregating content is finding quotes online that you turn into, you know, graphics and means for your channels. It could be sharing images and re graham ing stuff from other people anything. It's kind of easy to grasp and is really just kind of, um at your access in a lot of ways. But the 80% of your time should be really thought about some really kind of bigger content , things that take planning things that, you know, take some preparation and maybe bringing the right people in. And maybe it's a photographer. Maybe it's that you want to interview someone or whatever it might be, but those things are really Those are the things that people are really gonna connect with and you really want to spend time focusing on. So I'll give an example of this with our friends over at map, which is a really cool photo curated kind of places community on the interwebs That was started by our friend Kuno. Ah, but something that they started to dio with their 20% you know, they're aggregated content. Bucket is that they started to share photos of places from around the world that people were sharing on Instagram. Or maybe we're sharing actually to their own their map community. What they would do is take that image kind of repurpose the content, and then they would slap a longitude latitude like kind of icon over the image, and it would make it feel on brand while still crediting the source of that content. But it also became very easy for them. Teoh continue to tie into their story and their message without necessarily spending a lot of time going to all these places themselves. But what they did dio with the 80% of their time that they needed to actually really think and create as they started city guides. So the city guides is something that would only happen maybe once a month. So it's a very small portion of your content, but it would take a lot of planning that they would need to find somebody in that city to kind of do the takeover for that day. They would need to find out what places they're going to go to talk. It's a lot of like back and forth to make something like that happen, plus the promotion that you want to do and lead up to it to let people know, Like on Saturday, we're releasing our Amsterdam City guide. Those things really take thought implanting, and that's where 80% of your time should be spent. So with all that in mind, he really just want Teoh. You know, make sure that you're not over sharing certain kinds of content and posting certain things all the time. You always want to go back to the check box of Is is creating value in some way on, and you also to make sure it's easy to understand. Think sometimes we can get a little swept up in what we're saying in our message that it becomes a little bit confusing or diluted, so just keep it, you know, really easy and bite size. That's what social media is kind of all about on and remember that you're really here to inspire a lifestyle. It doesn't matter if you're, you know, just looking to sell a product or whatever it might be. But at the core, social media is about community, and that's a really, really powerful thing, s. So it's really about figuring out what you can deliver to your audience that is exciting and relevant and inspirational in some sort and kind of making it a journey that your community and your consumers can kind of ride along on. You can also keep in mind that Hashtags or something that can actually help kind of build that narrative. A lot of brands or individuals start to use hashtag that they use really consistently and ends up building a narrative the other people start to gravitate to and actually becomes a portal for conversation. You can think about that with, you know, Darling magazine started the hash tag that Starling something that's so simple and sweet. But now there's thousands of people that use it when they're not talking about Darling magazine, it's become a little bit of its own culture and community and in of itself, map. The company that I was talking about before did something very similar creating the hashtag find it live it, which now has over 95,000 photos in the feed. It's not necessarily all tied back to map, but it created this community in this conversation that took on a life of its own. And it's something that people want to use because they want to become a part of that conversation or they want their content to get discovered there. We can't all set out to achieve that, but it does just kind of force you to think about your narrative again and how you're kind of really Creek creating and contributing to these social media communities in a way that goes beyond just a follow to your feed. Um, in the same sense, you can use things like those hashtags or certain content to engage your fans. I give an example of ah, you know, women's fashion brand called Rebecca Minkoff, who started hashtag my RM, which basically just encouraged their customers to share Ah photo of the product or their bag or something on social media. There was no giveaway component or no carrot tied to it. It was just about sharing their product and they were consistent about that messaging where they would constantly say, Share your Rebecca Minkoff item using hashtag share my RM or whatever, and then they would maybe Repin or we share that content in some capacity on its massive. They have thousands and thousands and thousands of people. You are sharing photos of their product, and that kind of exposure is invaluable. On the other thing, too, is is to think about, you know, letting other people create content for you when I, you know, talk a lot about influencers and using them is kind of amplifiers. There also is a huge bank of influencers who are photographers themselves or filmmakers, or just have an eye for something. If you have a product of some sort or some sort of value that you can offer that maybe it's monetarily, you can ask them to take some content for you. They don't necessarily have to post it, but you can, you know, use that on your behalf, and it may be even share that they took the photo or something, and it starts to create this kind of brand alignment. That's really cool. It's so easy sometimes to get people to create content for you if they're not organically doing it on your behalf as it is, maybe set out with a little of intention. Teoh have these people help you create, especially if you don't have the resources to do it yourself. And definitely, you know, just get creative in general, like, think about again. Is is this something that could be share a bowl? Is this image really inspiring in some capacity, Um, thinking about you know, what kind of content and graphics they're gonna get. People kind of excited and feel like they found something that they're not gonna find anywhere else is super important. So now you're gonna break into your next exercise for content strategy, which is in that handiwork book. So take your time. Think through this. This should help you map out a lot of what we talked about. Your content categories of framework, that frequency, all that good stuff
5. 15 MB SocialDerby Ch04: look and feel ties in a big way to quantum strategy because, like we talked about before, visual data and visual content is consumed a lot quicker than text. So the amount that you think about the quality and the visual components of your content is super important. You know, with us as a company we have chosen to invest in content on behalf of our clients by doing weekly photo shoots were work creating that kind of bite size images or INSTAGRAM videos, or whatever it might be that we know we need that's gonna be supplementing. You know, your figures, campaign images or your look book images or whatever it might be because those things on Lee last year for so long and those shoots only happened so frequently. But there's so much you can do by buying like a couple of pieces of marble or pieces of wood and keeping it in your kitchen, at home or in your office and taking some of those you know, easy to do top down shots that we see all over Instagram. Of course, I'd encourage you to be more creative than that, but it's so easy to create that kind of content yourself using your phone and some really awesome photo editing APS like Snap seed After Light, Visco or even Instagram filters have definitely improved since your last update. But really let graphics tell the story. You know, I don't think that you need to overdo it with words and captions and stuff. I appreciate that piece of the narrative as well, but your image can say so much. They're really invest in it when we think about Facebook profiles. So the look and feel of your Facebook page is still very important, even though we kind of talked about like, you know, the way that people are consuming Facebook content is maybe different than, say, instagram. But with your Facebook profile, make sure that your cover photo is really crisp and on Brand. Make sure that your profile photo is totally relevant changes things out as often as you want. Teoh. Make it, you know, tie into a campaign or a new product launch or whatever it might be, Um, and use your tabs to your advantage so the tabs air the like individual, almost like secondary pages within Facebook that you get in your, um, I guess it's your left hand column. You can use a company called Blue Box. It's totally free. They allow you to kind of customize what those tabs are into your own Facebook page and even upload your own images for what the icon photo actually is. So it looks really streamlined. Eso super simple thing. But that kind of makes a good impression on Facebook, so pay attention to it. Another thing to think about on instagram is your grid. So your 1st 6 to 9 images are basically your first impression with anyone who's discovering your feed. Ah, we've seen a lot of people start to play with, you know, actually creating one image that feeds up all of those six tonight images. You can get really creative with that. We like to play more with that. When were, you know, maybe leading up to a launch with a new brand or something that's gonna be kind of static or stationary for a little bit. But there's a lot of brands that play around with that consistently and kind of use the grid. Teoh create really cool kind of solid messaging. So think about that, too, on when it comes actually designing your own graphics for your feed. Um, graphic designers cringe everywhere when I say this, but you can really create a lot using just PowerPoint or keynote or even word. Um, obviously, you want to make sure the resolution is high enough. But fortunately for Social with social media doesn't need to be that huge. So you don't need things like photo shopping and in designed to create really great images you'll actually see in the presentation that you've downloaded. There are some tips on how to actually create these graphics yourself, since I can't sit there and walk you through it together. But it makes it so much easier to have really strong visual assets without necessarily needing a graphic designer if you don't have one. So that being said, you're now gonna bust out your next exercise in the workbook under look and feel, and you're actually gonna create your own to assets, one that's gonna be quote unquote, graphically designed on the other, which is going to be kind of just more of ah, visual image, using some of the fancy absolutely
6. 15 MB SocialDerby Ch05: The next thing we're gonna dive into is your brand boy, which is really one of the first things that people connect with when they're connected with your brand online and any capacity, you know, thinking about your word usage in your tonality and all those things are super super important. When you're tackling social media. Eso what you want to do when you're figuring out your brand voices. You want to understand and determine what your brand identity is. This is something you might have a really clear vision for. It might be something you really need to think about, but that's really important. It's also important to know your audience Really understand who it is you're talking to if you're speaking Teoh a teen audience, but you're speaking with more of a you know, 30 40 something voice. Then you're not gonna connect with that community at all. And the third is it's really take risks, you know, with your with your brand. Do you wanna have fun and you want to make it feel conversational and you want Teoh really kind of spike creativity. I think in kind of conversation that you're having and this could be done a lot for your brand voice. So the four areas of determining your brand voice, our character persona, tone, language and then your purpose. So the character persona is kind of like Who is this character? Um, it could literally be you. It could be your mom. It could be a celebrity. It's anything that you kind of identify. So this is a fun exercise that you'll actually do shortly. But thinking about you know, if my brand was one person living or dead, who would it be? And then you can kind of start to check back when you're writing posts and when you're kind of, you know, conveying your brand voice online. Is it staying true to who you think that it ISS? And it's That's a lot of fun. Your tone is like, you know, Are you going to be the expert? Are you empathetic? Are you playful when you think about brands like nasty gal, for example, they use a lot of like it's toe now, and they're very like the valley girl. Kind of a voice. That's their tone. Then you think about language. So what kind of word choices do you use if we use. Nasty gal is an example again. They'll use OMG or BRB. They have fun with kind of like slings and emojis and things like that. So, you know, figure out with your brand what the kind of language choices you use would be on the last is your purpose. So this is kind of coming back to your strategy on everything that you've been working up to to get to this point, but always making sure does my brand voice really convey the purpose that were out to achieve? So I'll give you guys a little bit example, and you'll kind of dive into this in the exercise, too. But let's say you want your voice to be empathetic. That's one of your atonality choices. Um, example of an empathetic use of words would be so sorry for the hassle will be updating again ASAP. What it wouldn't be like is we apologize for the delay, why it shows a difference in compassion. You're showing that you are. There's a little bit of a personal touch behind a your empathetic that maybe your sights down for a couple of hours, as opposed to just being kind of an abrupt will be down for the next hour. So that's a really small example. But will kind of play around soon with what years are. And that's it for brand voice. It's that simple. It's really just about figuring out who this voice is, whether you're playful, whether you're serious, whether you're the expert, maybe you're looking constantly for information from your community, even things like switching eye out for we you really have a lot of decisions to make with your brand boys. So bust out that exercise in your workbook. Andi, have something.
7. 15 MB SocialDerby Ch06: so frozen engagement is a biggie for everyone wants their community bigger. Everyone wants to have a highly engaged audience. It is certainly not easy, but it's something that by setting out the right goals and really putting the right time and attention into it can be really successful for your community and for your brand. So I like to always start out with any company by saying set a goal of 10% growth week after week. That is typically something that's pretty attainable. It depends on the size of your community. If you're a new company that's just starting out, you might see 20 or 30% growth week after week because you have a really small community number to build off of, um, and as you get bigger and bigger, that number is going to get smaller and smaller. You might start to get to a point where you only have 2% growth week after week, so you're kind of, um, weekly. Growth goals should grow with you as your community grows, but started 10% and just start tracking there and then see where you land to better assess . You know what you're gonna do moving forward. You'll see in your presentation in the pdf that there's actually a link in here to a growth spreadsheet that was created by again our friend Pino at mop on that all of you guys get to use. So this is a great way to track your growth week after week. See, you know how you're performing. You can make note of any key events or benchmarks in that week. That might be a reason why you saw certain spikes or maybe didn't see certain spikes. But this is something that you can kind of tweak and Taylor for yourself, and it's really great again. If you have somebody who's managing your social media for you, this is a great way to keep tabs and just see how things were going on a pretty consistent basis. So I highly recommend you use this, and I highly recommend you track it every single week. So some of the tactics to grow in your community, you want to engage with other people. So you wanna like their content, mention them, have a conversation, common all those things that feels pretty obvious. I think all of you, but it really does take the right time and attention. That's not gonna happen just by slapping up your post and then logging out and hoping that something's gonna happen. You really do have to connect with other people through individual social channels on and create a dialogue in order to really see some growth. You're also gonna want to do what I call the DJ dig, but it's basically just going into the hashtag vortex. So finding hashtags that are relevant to you or your brand in some way, whatever they might be we talked about earlier. You know, that's Darling is something that the Darling magazine community created. If you're looking to connect with, um, that kind of woman, then there is a great feed to immediately kind of start to dig through and discover people and like and comment and engage. It's really easy to find these little micro communities through Hashtags to discover who you want Teoh engage with and connect with. Um, this might sound like a silly one, but make sure that your social wings air in your email signature and 100% on your website. You be shocked at how many people don't even have that and also make sure that those links on your website are correct because, ah, lot of times you'll click on it and it will be actually a share button or it'll just be a broken link of some sort. So make sure that those things are working for you, especially your email signature. You're sending probably hundreds of emails every single day. It's amazing what that can drive for you if you are a brand that has a product of some sort , doing things like micro what we call micro campaigns or giveaways or so, so easy to dio. And they are not actually going to be a great organic community builder for you. It could be something that you stick consistently to doing every Friday. It could be something that you do on a larger scale once a month, but there's all sorts of ways that you can do micro campaigns, even just simple re grams. You might create a quote graphic or a mim of some sort and just encourage people to re graham or share it for the chance at winning this. Or maybe it's just you're just simply asking them to do it and you'd be surprised what happens when you ask people to do things. But those things are important, just like little bite size campaigns that you could do on a regular basis to get some engagement spikes. Um, growth. And then the last thing that you really want to do is make sure that you're creating target outreach lists, which, um, are kind of influence or list, but more so specific to your industry or what you dio eso every month it will do is flushed through, say, 10 influencers that we want to connect with unengaged within that month on behalf of that brand. What you'll do then is make sure that your liking their content a lot commenting a lot, maybe sending them some products, creating a conversation through email that then can be translated into social. Um, if you're trying to connect with editors, put together your target editor list and make sure that you're constantly tweeting at those people commenting doing it authentically and you don't want to just annoy it, but make them notice you. It's it's your opportunity to really start to build a community that you want something to remember with Instagram is that for every 33 likes, you'll get one comment so comments are really valuable on the people who do spend time commenting or kind of putting in their two cents are definitely valuable people in your community to engage with a bit more there in some ways already kind of brand advocates. It's very easy for us to swipe through our feet and double tap, double tap, double tap. But when you stop to actually write something, it's it's much more thoughtful. So these are people you definitely want to nurture. Interestingly, when you think about user engagement, um, it's a really interesting number to pay attention to. Even when you're working with influencers, you might want to see like Oh, they have a 1,000,000 followers, but they're only getting 2000 likes on a photo. That's a huge discrepancy in engagement to follow account. So it's something to keep in mind when you're working with anyone but just some things to kind of keep in mind. Typically, on Instagram, you're going to see 4.2% interaction with your content. If you're getting more than that, good on you. You're putting out great content. People are paying attention. They're highly engaged. That's awesome. If you're getting 1% engagement, think about that. Start testing things and figure out how we can get more people liking and commenting with my with my with my feet. Pinterest has, well, Pinterest, Facebook, Google plus linked in YouTube and Twitter all have less than 1% engagement by industry standard. Um, it's super low, but that's just the nature of the beast. Instagram is one of the most highly engaged platforms out there right now. Eso anyway, just just make sure that you're paying attention to your engagement percentage and set that as one of your goals as well. Obviously, growth is one thing, but you might want to start to see more engagement on your posts and see more value and engagement over Just likes. So make note. And now we're gonna talk about the hash tag because the hashtag is definitely your friend when it comes to community growth engagement conversation, um, hashtags on Twitter. We talked about this a little bit before, but two is the lucky number less than to your engagement drops more than two year engagement drops. Eso make sure that your incorporating two hashtags and every tweet and ideally, they actually sit within the post. Caption a supposed to eating up more characters at the end Hashtags on Instagram is a different story. Statistically, it shows that 11 or more hashtags in a Post is gonna garner you the highest engagement and growth. If you're anything like me, that makes you cringe. But it's just the reality of the situation. There's so many Hashtags out there like like for like or instead daily or whatever it might be that go into huge feeds of content and are technically a discovery tool. But they're also kind of a bunch of garbage in a lot of ways. You know, if you're a local business and you're trying to drive people into your restaurant, engaging in those hashtags and those conversations aren't necessarily going to do anything for you in terms of driving people into your restaurant. So you really have to figure out what Hashtags make the most sense for you. But it is. The more the merrier, the more likely you are to get kind of exposed and discovered. My suggestion would be two things. One. Just make sure that you're using really strategic hashtags for your brands and two. If you are going to use a ton of hashtags, go in and actually comment on your post as the brand with all the hashtags, as opposed to putting it in your main coffee caption. Save that for more of what you're actually looking to say and save the Hashtags for a secondary comment on the reason thing. For that is as your community grows and you start to get more comments and engagement on your posts. Those hashtags are going to disappear because, as you know, after six comments, it starts to just keep it to the most recent five that are shown. Um, so that way you're kind of de cluttering your feet and not diluting it with hashtags. Another tip with Instagram to with Hashtags. Some people know this some don't, but if you go in and comment on someone else's photo with a hashtag, let's say you're trying Teoh. Maybe add your campaign hash tag or your brand hash tag on someone else's photo. It's not gonna work. It's not gonna put that photo into your hash tag feed, so why I no point in doing that. But what you can do is with your own content. If you want to take a post that maybe did two weeks ago and revive it, you can go into your post and from two weeks ago and add a hashtag to it to bring it back up to the forefront. So it's a great way to kind of bring back what might be old content on Bring it like refresh it in the hashtag seat. So something to keep in mind Hashtags on Facebook is a very debatable topic. Um, up until maybe two weeks ago, I would have said No hashtags on Facebook. Statistically, it's shown that use sing Hashtags on Facebook actually hurts your content. And we tested that ourselves and found that that was the case for a lot of the content and clients that we were working with. But recently I've been exposed a little bit more to some insights around Hashtags on Facebook, and it appears that potentially the algorithm is starting Teoh play a little bit more with hashtags and benefit your content a bit more. So my suggestion here is play around with it and see what works. If you feel like you get lower engagement, lower reach on posts where you do put a hash tag in your Facebook coffee, then mix it and just keep it to the point without hashtags. But if it does work for you, then great just figure out what what's gonna benefit you. Hashtags on Pinterest and Google Plus are unnecessary because both of those are highly searchable engines. Pinterest is almost as powerful as Google images. As I said before, so any single word that you put in the caption of your post on Google plus or on Pinterest is going to become a searchable keywords, which is really, really awesome when you think about Pinterest. If you're posting a new image of a product that you might have, make sure that you're using as much detail in describing that product in the caption as you he would say on your Web site. I'm treated as a form of S CEO. It's it's going Teoh. Make sure that your photo is shown whenever anyone is searching any of those keywords on, and it's also going to really help you grow your community when we talk about growth, there's always a question that comes up in our offline workshops, which is what's your stance on buying followers. Um, when it comes to buying, followers will admit that we've done it will never do it without, You know, the clients knowledge, because it is simply buying a lot of robots they're there, likes or follows that aren't gonna do anything for you. For those who aren't familiar, it is very, very cheap to buy followers on things like Instagram. You're talking maybe $2 for 100. And sometimes it's a strategy that some brands used to kind of Taylor there, the kind of brand visibility or the perception that a consumer has when they land on a feed and see that it has 200 followers versus 5000. Sometimes the idea is that a user consumer might perceive that the one that has 5000 followers has more kind of natural brand equity or more interest, and so therefore, you're more likely to opt in. So I would say it's totally up to you if that's important to you than great. If you're trying to use social media to drive sales of your product, buying followers is going to do absolutely nothing for you. In reaching that goal, you be more beneficial nurturing and building 500 people who are actively engaged, like actively shopping and engaged in your in your website than having 20,000 that are doing nothing. That being said, there are tools out there that do help support the kind of growth and engagement side on platforms like Instagram and some of the other channels one which is called insta grass, which we've used on occasion. It's a relatively inexpensive monthly fee. Teoh basically set your keywords and your hashtags and that you're, you know, kind of commenting words that you would choose for that on behalf of that brand eso. It basically does all this searching for you. So if you use a hashtag like that starling, if we're gonna use that as an example again, what Instagram is going to do is scrub posts from people who are using that hashtag and like as it's you doing it and potentially comment as if it's you doing it. This is definitely a great way if you're a small team and you can't do it yourself and you need a little bit of added support on the downside is that you're not controlling what content it's liking and engaging with. So sometimes you might see a photo that it likes that you're like, Well, I wouldn't have like, that photo or something. But it's doing its job by just using certain keywords and search terms. But it is an option for those who need the added support, and that's it for community growth and engagement. There are so many different tips and tactics as to how you can do this, but this is a really great place to start. I almost recommend taking a lot of what we talked about and just kind of creating a checklist every single day again, whether it's you or someone on your team who's managing the community, make sure you're being diligent, and sometimes you just want to focus community by community. So you might say, OK, I'm going to focus on building Instagram this month, and the next month I'm gonna focus on Twitter or it might be over six months. I don't feel like you have to do everything on every channel all at once. It's too much work. It's a lot for someone to take on. You're better off building a community that's really focused in one place, then trying to dilute it across 10 different channels. So there you have it. Good luck
8. 15 MB SocialDerby Ch07: a community manager is someone who is literally managing communities every single day. In a lot of cases are dedicated cleaning managers for individual brands. Or sometimes if you're in an agency setting their managing a number of brands on sometimes that committee manager is you, the business owner who's doing 27 million other things. But what we want to talk about in this tractor is really how to be a successful community manager again, whether this is you, yourself doing it, or just really understanding what someone on your team should be doing, who is taken on this role and how Teoh effectively kind of manage that time and those expectations. So the 12 tasks of a community manager are curating, crafting, posting, scheduling, measuring, analyzing, responding, listening, engaging, helping, planning and experimenting. That is a lot of stuff, but that is what encompasses the role of a community manager. Some daily tactics that we would consider to be successful would be every day, putting aside 30 minutes where you're just searching for unique content. This comes back to the aggregated content piece. Um, where your maybe finding a cool quote. Or maybe you're finding something news related that happened in the industries, I mean that you could give some perspective to you definitely want to spend some time just getting inspired and seeing what's going out there. Look at your competitors feeds. What are they doing? All that kind of stuff. So it's kind of the time to really start to plan out for the day for any real time content that's gonna be relevant. Another thing to do is to write out your post in advance. So, um, you've done your monthly content calendar. Now. You know each week what kind of content you're looking to create or you need to create, so you can very easily map out your content for the week in advance. I typically recommend that you have all of your posts for the following week, done by Thursday, so it gives you time to just kind of edit and finesse and create anything that you need Teoh. But that way it's done. You have it written out. You've added your links, you've got your hashtags. You've got the correct content and images to support it. Everything's in one place with that, too. It allows you to make sure that you're staying in line with the frequency of content that you want to be pushing out. So if you know that you want to be pumping out to post today on every channel, or maybe it's just one channel or whatever it might be, you have this framework every week where your slotting things in. It's also a great way to bring on an intern on your team who might be interested in creative writing or in social media. Let them take a first stab at writing a lot of that copy in those posts. Send it to you and you confine ass and revise. The same thing goes for if you have a graphic designer or maybe a photographer that you're working with, you'll really know. Okay, next week, I need to capture these things so hopefully you've planned far enough in advance to make sure that you have that content in line for the week to follow. You can then take all of that content and schedule it. So that's part of you know, one piece of the puzzle that we talked about, which is actually posting the content up. They're planning for all the content creating, and then it's posting, and a lot of times people go. OK, cool. It posted it. I'm done when in reality, the engagement pieces. Super, super important. But you can schedule on Facebook Twitter, and you can even schedule on Instagram using an app called later Graham. Um, that way it's all done and in place. It also makes makes it easy to time your content for your peak posting times, which we'll talk a little bit about. But that's something that you can find in your analytics also really easily on. Then you would just post real time to any other channel that you're posting to, like Pinterest or YouTube or Snapchat on those things. You still need to make sure you're doing throughout the day. The next thing you're gonna do is monitor your feed every 30 minutes to an hour if you can , um, again really depends on what kind of time you have, but you need to be paying attention to conversations, comments, any kind of leading engagements that you need to be jumping on right away, especially as your community grows. You're going Teoh have a lot more kind of customer service increase and a lot more dialogue and conversation that you're gonna wanna be privy to. Typically, they say, for every community manager, you want to spend four hours a week on conversations two hours a week on listening. So listening is kind of that listening to what consumers air saying maybe in your own feeds , maybe on your competitors feeds just general kind of industry jargon content, whatever on when you want spend two hours on community building. So that kind of broken out through the week amongst everything else that a key manager is doing is pretty significant. But that's typically what you should put aside in the last thing that should be done daily is just kind of looking at metrics and tracking the successes that you can see. Sometimes you will be able to see what's happening that same day, but you can look at what happened from yesterday's content. Obviously, on platforms like Instagram, it's very easy to in real time check where you're like stare at your comments here at all. That is your engagement percentage, doing well, plugging in your growth for that day into your weekly growth spreadsheets, all that kind of stuff. But it's really important to keep track of what's performing the best. So you know how to tailor it for future. And for the next day, a common question of law is. What time should I post? Um, as I mentioned before, it's really gonna be down to your community, and you can use Facebook insights. You can use Icona Square for Instagram. There's a lot of different kind of analytics tools that tell you what time of day your content performs best that as like a general rule of thumb in the industry. Facebook content performance best at the end of the week, typically of 18% higher engagement Thursdays and Fridays into the weekend. For whatever reason, Twitter sees the highest engagement during the middle of the day, and it's also encouraged that you post at the end of an hour. This also is the same with Instagram. So the idea behind that is that, you know, let's just say it's during the work day. People have a meeting at the start of an hour, say, at 2 p.m. And then the meeting last for almost an hour, and people are starting to trickle out around 2 55 as they're walking back to their desks. What are they doing? They're thumbing their feet and their phone and there just kind of engaging, liking whatever. So again, you'll figure out what makes sense for your community. But that's something, statistically, to pay attention to. Instagram honestly is great to post all day. There is higher engagement in the mornings, and it is important to also think about, um, time zones and also timeliness of content. So, you know if most of your users are in New York, but you're in L. A based brand, you might not want to post a breakfast photo at, say, 10 a.m. Because it's already after lunch for them there. So that kind of that kind of timeliness is important. And then Pinterest has the highest engagement on weekends. So if you could dedicate time on the weekends for your Pinterest page, that is when most people are scouring and repainting and all that good stuff. Some of your what I would call your best friends or your tools with social media are some of the things I casually mentioned, um, icon elsewhere, which used to be called static. Graham is a great tool for Instagram analytics I would get on it soon. I think they're going to start charging pretty soon, but it is. It is good insights into your best content. What time? Depose things like that definitely have a social media dashboard of some kind, whether you're using hoot suite or sprout social or buffer, Um, having a place where all of your feeds kind of come into one place and you can kind of jump on conversations pretty quickly, but also manage monitor your successes is great. Bentley, which we talked about before, which is a link shorter but also lets you track your clicks, is a really, really important tool. Facebook has its own version of that integrated into its insights, so you can actually see how many people clicked on links that you've added into a post on Facebook s. So bear that in mind that Bentley will primarily be used for Twitter, Andi anywhere else that you might use it otherwise excel spreadsheets or definitely your best friends with social media. It's a great way to keep track of your growth. Um, and just kind of your general
9. 15 MB SocialDerby Ch08: in this chapter, we're gonna talk about using social media to drive sales. So if you're not necessarily trying to sell a product, then we might not see chapter. But it's interesting for everyone, so enjoy. Firstly, we're going to talk about his Facebook. So we talked about how Facebook is a really powerful external traffic driver. With that in mind, you want to make sure that you're linking strategically out to your site, especially when you're trying to push a certain product as much as possible. As I mentioned before, you know, you can use things like that lead to track those clicks. But we've found, with some testing that it's more effective to just simply add the link directly as it is into Facebook and allow it to be fed. That way, your likelihood of getting the content scene is a little bit higher. Something also they really like with Facebook as kind of a sales tool, is using photo albums to your advantage to kind of create themes. Um, so in Facebook, when you upload any Siris of photos like form or into an album, what happens is you have your main photo to the last the first photo that you update and then you have three smaller ones. And that's kind of the way that it auto populates into your feet and, um, is kind of visual to the consumer before they click through to see all the rest of the photos in the album. This is an opportunity to kind of create something themed. So if you think about let's say you are a fashion brand and you are pushing something around festival season, I would recommend using the first photo that you update the one that's gonna sit right here to be something inspirational. Maybe it's like Kate Moss, that glass denbury or something that is going to evoke that festival vibe. And then the next three images use that to you have as corresponding product that might look like that look that she's wearing or the style that she has. It kind of feels a little bit more editorial that way, while still using those product images to really drive a sale and drive out. And don't forget that when you're uploading and album, you want to make sure that you are writing post captions for each individual photo with individual links that go to that specific product on your site, so that's really effective on Facebook. The other thing, too, like we talked about earlier, is allocates. Um, spend. So if you have, let's just say 20% of your content on Facebook is talking about product sales or pushing product sales. Hold back your budget for those posts. If you only have $100 to spend a month, then save it for that to make sure that those posts that are talking about your product or driving to your website are maximized to the fullest of your budget as possible. With Twitter, it's kind of a different story. We talked about Twitter cards earlier, which is definitely effective at getting people out to your site. You do need to pay for that kind of exposure, but it is really effective, and it's really inexpensive, so that would be one tactic. But for the most part, I always recommend that Twitter is more of a conversational listening tool, more so than necessarily a sales tool. But you could prove me wrong on, and if it is powerful sales tool for you, tell me in the comments how you're using it, Instagram is an interesting one because, you know, you only have your one link your bio link eso first and foremost make use of that link. If you have a new product in store swap that link out for the link that's gonna drive specific to that product or just kind of make it be in line with certain content. When you're talking about different things, swap it out pretty consistently. Um, otherwise, you just want to make sure that you're using clean filters and you're really showing your product in the best way possible. You know, people are discovering a lot through instagram. They're discovering new products. They're discovering people, whatever it might be. I know that I have purchased items that I've seen on Instagram not because there was an easy click to go and buy it through the platform itself, but because I was inspired by it, somehow saved that photo or something and then found it online. So there isn't disconnect there, but it is really powerful at driving, not emotional response to a potential sale. You also want to use hashtag hashtags we talked about before, So this is definitely to your advantage when it comes to selling products. Make sure that those HASHTAGS are specific to the kind of product, if your ego friendly, than make sure you're using hashtags that speak to that community. Andi, using hashtags that are specific to the product to because be amazed at how much people are searching for those kind of things. Specifically, there are some advancements from the software side or some kind of tools and plug ins that you can use now so that Instagram is a little bit more malleable to selling online. One example would be like to know it, which is basically run by reward style. What it does is it allows influencers or publisher. So essentially media Teoh encourage their community Teoh to share a photo that they're wearing and actually map it with what the product is so that they actually make a commission on every sale. So, for example, there might be an influencer that you see who's posted a photo of their outfit, which we all see a ton of you might notice that in their feet, they say, if you want to know what I'm wearing, like to know it, and they'll use the hashtag and all that kind of stuff. What that means is me is the user. I double top and I like that photo. I'm gonna get an email in my inbox that breaks down everything that she's wearing or similar items that she's wearing with links on, where to buy it and that influencers then making money for anything that I have actually gone out and bought from that email. Really great. If you're fashion home beauty brand in any capacity, something else to consider is scheduled sales. People do actually like consistency on certain channels. So it could be that every Friday at noon you released a new product. Um, are every Friday at noon, there's a special deal that happens. Think about those kind of consistent messages and be kind of patient consistent with them and seeing how they grow. But that could be really effective for you. And lastly, you know, keep it clean. You know what your whole feed to be about selling product. We've talked about this before. It's got to be about the story in the lifestyle and all of that, so that when you do post something about a product, it's really strategic and smart and hopefully gets a lot of results for you. Then we have Pinterest, which we talked about before. In general, Pinterest is a really great sales driven platform. Used the caption to your advantage. Make sure that you are clearly describing the product in the post captions so that if someone searching they confined it very easily. The discoveries there make sure you're always linking your content as we talked about before. Pin with prices. A simple is just adding the price into your caption on. And also don't be afraid to reuse old content. So one of the biggest advantages with Pinterest is the ability to pin straight from other websites and external sites. The same should go for product on your own website. But if you're just gonna, like, spend 1/2 hour pinning all the images from your product page and then consider your job done, you're missing out because with the exception of someone potentially searching for those products to Pinterest, you've lost that moment in the feet of Discovery. Eso make sure that you're kind of like maybe every once in a while, and maybe every three weeks or so going in and deleting old pins of that same product that you might have in the store and repeating it again. So it's refreshed, comes to the top of the feet, or it catches someone as it's in real time that something that you should be pretty consistent about. And that's it for using Social media for sales. So those were just some simple tactics. Again, it's really gonna be about figuring out what connects with your community and at the core. Social media is about building kind of a brand, um, connection and kind of your positioning in as a whole, as opposed to just being about selling product. But hopefully that those are some good tips for you moving forward.
10. 15 MB SocialDerby Ch09: The cool thing about social advertising is that it doesn't require you to have some huge budget in the way the traditional advertising typically guys. But it's an important thing to understand and figure out if it's something that makes sense for your brand. When we're looking at social advertising, we're primarily talking about Facebook and Twitter because those are the most kind of user friendly. They work a lot like Google AdWords. If you're familiar where you kind of pay to play, in a sense, eso whatever budget you set towards it, you pay based on actual people engaging, liking, clicking whatever it is that you're looking to achieve from those odds, as opposed to just being a blanket on. And it's also something that you can constantly adjust and change and stop and start. So if you are, you know, doing any form of social advertising, make sure that you're monitoring it every single day and just figuring out what keywords air working for you and what's not performing and what you coulda just because it's really flexible that way. And then, of course, you have Pinterest advertising and instagram advertising. Pinterest is interesting. It's definitely something I would recommend looking into, If you are, ah, brand selling a product or any commerce of some sort, they tend to be slightly different kind of pricing packages. And then Instagram is a whole another animal. So you really have to have, I think, at least half a 1,000,000 to even get a sponsor post on Instagram. So it might not be what you're focused on now. But if it ISS get in touch with them when we talk about social advertising and a lot of just kind of digital advertising in general at this point you'll hear a term called Native Advertising. It really is kind of the way forward for the way that consumers connect with and kind of engage with odds online. A native advertising essentially, is any ad that you see that kind of has the perception that it was organic. So, you know, if you think about Facebook where it's like I might like, um, tridents page, what it's going to do is it's gonna come into your feed showing Chelsea Matthews likes tried in it encourage you Teoh like the Page two or any time that I'm liking or engaging with content, it comes into my feet. So essentially it's it is an advertisement. But those brands air paying for that kind of advertising they're paying to have users interactions with their page be shared with their friends because we all know that people are that much more likely to engage with it when they see kind of a brand or a friend kind of advocated in some way. Eso that's really kind of the way forward with advertising and a lot of sense is we can say the same thing for influencer marketing, which will touch on the most important thing. Teoh, you know, with any sort of social advertising, is to make sure you're doing a B testing. So what that means is that you are testing two or more ads at one time to see what performs best. To give you an example, you could choose to advertise on Facebook. Andi add a could be X Y Z coffee, and the photo is of a girl smiling, laughing, running through the fields, and he could be the same exact copies at a. But the photo is a guy on his phone, laughing and walking with his dog. Whatever what you can do with those to add to see which photo is performing best, so you might find that your community connects more. Teoh, the happy looking female, is opposed to the happy looking male on and take those insights and help them drive your future. Advertising efforts on the same could be is if you know at a is X Y Z copy with image of the smiling girl, and add B is that same image of the smiling girl. But the copy has changed a little bit to be a little bit more concise or funny. It might just be a different kind of more playful tonality, and you'll see which one responds better. So always engaged in a B testing you can allocate. Just split your budget between the two and just see what performance past. Those learnings are super, super important and being effective with your advertising moving forward. So in terms of actual goals of social advertising, there's fan advertising, which is all about driving your likes and your followers. There's performance advertising, which is all about driving people outside to your website. So Twitter cards like we talked about, or any sort of ads on Facebook that are all focused on driving people out. And then you have engagement advertising. So that's like Facebook's boosted posts where you're paying for people. Teoh. See that content? Who wouldn't normally see the content like it, comment it on Twitter? It would be paying for people to retweet it, things like that. So those are the three forms, and you can figure out what is most important to you. Or you could do all three. It's like completely up to you. The other thing is influencer advertising. So this, essentially is when you see sponsored posts or any sort of kind of brand advocated content from an influencer, something that we do a lot of so it could be a simple is sending your product to an influencer in hopes that they share something, or it could actually be something where you're paying them to do a certain amount of delivery bols for you. Um, this kind of really falls back into the native advertising peace, even though they legally have to disclose the fact that it is a paid post. In some sense, it still is, you know, down to the user to actually pick up on those things or read that copy, whereas they might just be mawr engaged with the fact that they think that this person is advocating this brand. When you think about expectations on influencer marketing in terms of what is actually going to do for you, what kind of sales it's gonna drive is gonna be completely down. Teoh getting to know what kind of user your influence or you want to work with what their community size needs to be things like that. But on average, you can expect around half a percent Teoh 2% conversion of their followers to your followers. So if you're using influencers to grow your own community because you want them to talk about you and tag your handle or whatever, that's what you can typically expect. And then you can expect about 3 to 8% conversion on engagement. So really effective way to kind of strategically integrate your brand is by using influencers. If it makes sense for you. So there you have it that is social advertising again. If you have any questions, let us know in the comments or give us a tweet about something more specific to your advertising methods. because, of course it's really, really specific to what you're doing in your word choices, and we're happy the way.
11. 15 MB SocialDerby Ch10: So in our last chapter in our social media for creative course, we're gonna talk about analytics on analytics, convey, get very, very deep. Um, and we're not going to go beyond much more than the service of what I think you need to know on a very kind of basic level. But look out for future courses all tied to analytics, because they will come out soon. The big question when it comes to social media is what's the r a y? What's the return on investment? We get this a lot as an agency, you know, asked by companies like, Well, if we're paying X amount or we're investing into this community manager, whatever. What can we actually expect in return? We've touched on a lot of different things, you know today, whether it's trying to drive sales or just building brand visibility or driving traffic to your website, there's a lot of things that are more typical are why that you can track and measure, but some things that are not measured by analytics that are so valuable that I want to touch on before we dive into analytics is on three things. So it's your ability to listen. Social listening is super powerful, and the fact that your consumer or your potential consumer, is taking to these platforms to either talk about your brand share your brand show Hate to your brand. Whatever it might be is so, so, so invaluable. You know, if you think back 10 years ago the only way to get some of this inside or even five years ago, the only way to get this insight is through focus groups and through those one on one interactions with your supposed consumer base and taking those insights and making something of them. Now people are actively sharing and talking about brands, products, people, places all day long. Eso never underestimate the value of that for your brand. The other thing is serendipity. So there are moments in social media or in culture in life that happened, um, without anyone knowing it's gonna happen. Let's take the Super Bowl blackout from several years ago is an example. Um, Oreo took that moment to send out a tweet, saying you can always Dunkin or you can still dunk in the dark. Um, and that tweet went massively viral. People thought it was hilarious. There was. I mean, I think they got millions and millions of impressions from that. And that was because one person who managed Oreos Twitter feed thought of something funny and witty at the moment when something happened. That was out of, like, out of everyone's control on and made that something that went massive. There were articles written about it. There was so much, and this is going back many years ago. But that's something that you can't put a price tag on with. Social media is the serendipitous moments were you is a brand or a person are able to take advantage of something that's happening in culture and pop culture, whatever on and turn it into something that could become a really interesting conversation for you on the last thing is building a community instead of just customers, you know, again, if we backtrack five years ago, your main way of communicating with your consumers was through email blasts and email, marketing and direct mail and things like that that required, you know, you compiling email addresses, mailing addresses, whatever it might be. Um, now you really have the opportunity to build community with people that you may not even have access that information from, um the other thing is thinking about the fact that these people are actually consistently often in on a daily basis. To hear from you is so powerful you could pay $25,000 for an ad in a magazine where you might be guaranteed X amount of impressions. But in order to garner those impressions again, in future, you're gonna have to pay $25,000 again to get that ad in the paper. What happens with every single follow that you get on social media is that they have opted in potentially for a lifetime unless at some point they choose to opt out. That is incredibly powerful. You get to impress upon them as many times a day is. You want Teoh, um, that that's there's no price tag on that, Really, If you do things right, there's no price tag on that. So when you're like preliminary kind of getting to know your analytics and looking out and the two big things, you really want to pay attention to our reach and engagement reaches, if you're trying to build your following, that's a number you really want to pay attention to because that's how many people are kind of getting seeing your content in some capacity engagement, which is what we've talked a lot about today. Your total count of likes comments, retweets, whatever it might be. This is important if you're looking to build a lasting relationship with your community, which we all are, so people who are actually taking it the next step beyond just liking the page but are actually engaging with your content, advocating your content in some way. Therefore, advocating your brand on those are the two really big ones reach and engagement. You then want to look at conversion, amplification and applause. So conversion is the number of conversations that you get on a post that could be through comments that could be through likes or replies on Twitter, whatever it might be. Some amplification is the amount that someone actually shares your content. So that is what we all want. We want someone to re graham our photo. We want someone to retweet our tweet, share our post from Facebook. That's really a big one that you want toe pit a lot of attention to, and then we have applause which are the simple things, like the double tap on instagram or the favorite on Twitter. Um, so those air those are important ones to weigh in on. We talked a little bit earlier about Facebook's algorithm, which a lot of people have questions about, and it basically is broken into four main sectors. This is changing a lot now from the point of us shooting this video just because they're starting to adjust their algorithm to speak Teoh some of the demands on the video side and otherwise. So I recommend that you go to a site called all facebook dot com to always kind of keep up to date on how to best beat the algorithm. But consistently, the four things that weigh in on your opportunity for growth or getting your content scene is affinity, wait time decay and negative feedback. So affinity is going to be how much people engage with certain kind of content of yours on Facebook. So Facebook will see Okay, every time they post a photo album, they get a lot of likes in a lot of comments. So in that, in that case, anytime they post more photo albums were gonna make sure that their user base sees them. So it's showing that there is an affinity for that kind of content. Therefore, they know that your community wants to see it, and they're gonna make sure that they see it. Then there's wait. So wait is based on just kind of a general knowledge of your user base and what kind of likeness they put on certain content. So they'll say, OK, Chelsea Matthews is a fan of X y Z brand she really likes. She typically really likes images of home products, home to core interior design. So if this brand that I'm following post something that hasta do with home decor designed or styling or something like that, they know that I like that kind of content. So they're going away that content heavily on me and make sure that I see it. Then you have time to K, which is essentially actually really advantageous for us all, which is that, um, the Facebook will hold back content up to I think it's potentially 24 hours to make sure that you see it. If you're not online when it was posted, eso if they know that there's a strong affinity to that kind of content, and they know that I like content like that. They're going to make sure that I see it. So that's why sometime when you're on your Facebook page and you're looking at your feet and you see something popping up that looks current. But it actually says it was from 12 hours ago. That's Facebook's way of holding back content to make sure you see X. They know you want to see it, Um, and the negative feedback hurts your content. So if you ever had anyone reported a spam or, you know, inappropriate content or anything like that, naturally that's gonna hurt your content in general. And it's just gonna mean that it's gonna get seen by less people. They're not going to feed it out as much. So I hope that's never an issue for any of you. But make sure that your content is always PC, and that's it for analytics. Um, again, any specific questions you have in that space definitely let us know we can give our opinion and our thoughts on some of the areas that you're really looking to focus on. But if this is your first stab at kind of making sense. Of all those numbers and figures, this is a really good place to start in terms of understanding your community and knowing how to make it work for you.
12. 15 MB SocialDerby Ch11: and that wraps up our social media for creative poor. So I really hope you guys feel inspired to take your social media to the next level and feel a little bit of clarity on all those questions that you naturally have when it comes to tackling social media and what channels to be on and what content to create, how to make it work for you. So just remember, you know, this is it. It's all about a two way conversation. It's about building a dialogue and building a community. Um, and most importantly, make sure that you surround yourself with lots of great source material. You are going to be really inspired naturally by the people that you follow and the feeds that you engage with. So be sure to keep it fresh and let that kind of drive you and push you forward all the time. Um, but yes, I hope that you really enjoyed the class and we want to hear all of your thoughts and feedback. So be sure to shoot us an email or respond in the comments on and let us know if there's any future courses you'd like to see from us. because we are here to create a lot more great educational content. Guys forward. So thank you so much. Have fun tackling social and keep in touch.
Chelsea Matthews, Founder & Creative Director, Matte Black
