Neal gives a preview of his upcoming one day workshop in Bucharest, Romania by focusing in on those advanced social media marketing concepts that you need to dive into to help you raise your social media to the next level.
Key Highlights
[02:23] One Day Social Media Event in Bucharest, Romania
[03:27] How I Help Businesses Get to the Next Level
[04:02] Elementary Workshop
[05:38] It All Starts With the Content
[06:00] Your Content Should Always Be Aligned With Your Brand Objective, Identity, and Culture
[06:15] Think About Your Social Voice
[07:21] Social SEO
[07:56] Ways to Use Paid Social
[08:49] Experimental Social
[09:17] Revamp Your Social Media Strategy
[09:57] Analyze Your Social
[10:22] Importance of Having Baseline Metrics
[11:30] Social Selling
[12:33] Expanding Social Media Through Advocacy
[12:46] 3 Big Ways of Looking at Advocacy
[13:27] Talking About Employee Advocacy
Notable Quotes
- That's, you know, social media at the beginning of its evolution is just something that you do because everyone else is doing it. And there's still a lot of companies in United States, probably majority of companies that are still doing this without a strategy, just throwing things up, not really measuring or maybe measuring the wrong things. And really not knowing how well they're doing what they could be doing better, or what is their ROI.
- If you do a deep dive analysis of each one of these for your business, and I think each one requires a deep dive to better understand it and understand the potential, you'll get a better idea as to how you can help bring your own social media to the next level.
- I always talk about social media being the convergence of information communication, what is the content? Is the content represent your brand? Better yet? Does the content represent your objective? And often we find we begin social media programs with content that aligns with our objectives. And somehow over time, that content gets misaligned.
- And when we talk about tone, we don't talk about font or font size, or font style. When we talk about visual, we start to talk about these things and colors and what types of subjects are going to best resonate with your target audience and be best aligned with your content, your objective, obviously, this is no easy thing to do.
- This is something that we should all be working towards. And the only way to find out about this is really through experimenting, to understand what works and what doesn't work. But we should always not just be throwing content out there, but seeing how we can appear more prominently how we can be seen by more people organically.
- Are we including experiments? And I consider campaigns really a type of experiment on a specific or a group of social networks to test out certain types of content or engaging with a certain target audience. And are we doing enough of this? Because if we're not, we're never really going to be able to best optimize our social media presence.
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Welcome to maximize your social actionable 10 minute advice on how your business can maximize your social media presence. Now, the host of maximize your social, social media author, speaker, consultant, founder of maximize social business, and soon to launch Social Media Center of Excellence, Neal Schaffer. Hey, everybody, this is Neal Schaffer, welcome to maximize your social. If you want to take your social media to the next level, you're in the right place, and you're in for the right episode. I am talking to you today or recording this podcast, I should say, from my home office in beautiful Orange County, California, where it has actually been raining for the last two days, believe it or not, yes, it does rain in Southern California, because we have a drought, we really need the water. So my kids are always really excited when it rains. And you know what I sort of like it to sort of a good change of things. And well, although this goes beyond the scope of this podcast, I actually came back from my annual physical today, I actually take two annual physicals one here in the United States, my annual physical and another one in Japan, where they have what they call a ningun. Doc, or a person doc sort of hard to explain. But it's, it's a half day full on procedure that is really, really thorough, almost like an executive physical exam, I think it's the closest thing we have here in the States. And I mentioned this because our health is everything right? And social media goes, you know, it's part of our life part of our business, but we are human beings. And just a reminder out there that if you haven't scheduled yourself for your annual physical exam, it's a great time to do. So just a great reminder, you hear about young people that come down with diseases you, you see them in the Facebook feeds, your friends are friends of friends, and all we can do is, you know, outside of our daily health, is to get those checkups and make sure that everything is operating according to plan. I want to keep recording these podcasts as long as I can. And I want you to keep listening as long as you can as well. So I'm going to stop preaching about health, because that's not what this podcast is about. And let's get back to social media. So some of you may know if you've been following my personal Facebook feed, where I tend to actually publish my most personal things, believe it or not, it is Facebook, right? That I will be speaking at a one day social media event in Bucharest, Romania, on February 25 2015, if any of you are in Europe, or in Romania, by chance, it's going to be a great opportunity to really learn best practices in what I'm gonna call advanced social media marketing, at this point, even in, you know, not so advanced countries in terms of social media, which I suppose Romania is part of, at least that's what my event organizers have told me. That's, you know, social media at the beginning of its evolution is just something that you do because everyone else is doing it. And there's still a lot of companies in United States, probably majority of companies that are still doing this without a strategy, just throwing things up, not really measuring or maybe measuring the wrong things. And really not knowing how well they're doing what they could be doing better, or what is their ROI. And if you're not in, then you obviously are part of that crowd. And if you're smiling, maybe you're a social media consult like myself, and that's what we do is to help businesses get to that next level. So how do I help businesses get to the next level recently, I've been doing a lot of thinking about my own content and of different ways to productize. That content, and Social Media Center of Excellence, when it is launched is going to be one of these types of ways in which I plan on productizing the content but I really want to work in 2015. My big New Year's resolution, although it's a little bit already for one is really to get my content packaged and consumed in a way that makes sense and has value for everybody out there. So I hope you're as excited as I am. So one of the things I thought of as my Romanian clients were planning this, this workshop with me originally, we were going to do a very, very elementary workshop. I consider an elementary workshop more of a overview of general social media concepts and really an emphasis on platforms learning more about what you can do on all the major platforms. Actually something that I teach at Rutgers University as part of the mini social media MBA program is really going deep on all of the platforms and really summarizing it with social media strategy creation, optimization, metrics, ROI, what have you. But as we found out when we started to publish information about the event, there's already a lot of well content a lot of other people or businesses that are doing seminars on the basics of social media. So what content could I create and deliver that will really help get their clients and their customers Romania to the next His level of visibility, social media marketing, to get them thinking about things that they don't even know about, right. And that's where I came up with the agenda that I want to share with you today, because I think it covers what I would consider more advanced social media concepts, that if you do a deep dive analysis of each one of these for your business, and I think each one requires a deep dive to better understand it and understand the potential, you'll get a better idea as to how you can help bring your own social media to the next level. So consider this a pre 2015 audit, like an annual audit of sort of where we are today with our social media marketing. And well, it all starts with the content, right? I always talk about social media being the convergence of information communication, what is the content? Is the content represent your brand? Better yet? Does the content represent your objective? And often we find we begin social media programs with content that aligns with our objectives. And somehow over time, that content gets misaligned. And the content that I talked about as all the way from blog posts, to status updates to photos and videos that should always all be aligned with our objective. And our business identity, our culture are brand new, right? And is it so? So that's, you know, the first and maybe the easiest one, but the next one, which more companies need to think about is the social voice and I break social voice into two things. The voice is sort of your tone, who is speaking, in what tone, what style, not only for your blog content, and more importantly, for those status updates for anytime, you're, you're typing anything else in social media. But more importantly, recently, with the advent of visual social networks, and with the role that visuals can have in displaying your content more prominently, newsfeeds is that visual voice what is going to be the visual, right. And when we talk about tone, we don't talk about font or font size, or font style. When we talk about visual, we start to talk about these things and colors and what types of subjects are going to best resonate with your target audience and be best aligned with your content, your objective, obviously, this is no easy thing to do. But I think as you begin to think about it, you make a more concerted effort to be aligned with a strategy. And it's going to help your company over time be more effective in your social media marketing. What about social SEO? Now, I consider social SEO as what can you do with your social media presence in your content, to help it appear more prominently in news feeds. And I think this obviously gets a lot of attention with Facebook, diminishing EdgeRank. This is something that we should all be working towards. And the only way to find out about this is really through experimenting, to understand what works and what doesn't work. But we should always not just be throwing content out there, but seeing how we can appear more prominently how we can be seen by more people organically. And that brings me up to the next concept, which is paid social, and just the different ways that we can use paid social on the different platforms, it's really exciting to see the Facebook's of the world, the Twitter's of the world that now will allow you to upload, you know, email databases will allow you to upload or you know, put a pixel, a conversion pixel on your website. So you know, whether they're on your email list, whether they visit your website, you now have a way of approaching them in a very, very natural way, because now you can target them in social media itself. And obviously, the micro targeting options, what have you, you know, paid social is a best practice how often you use it is up to debate how much of your social media budget you put towards it is up to debate, but it is mainstream now. And it's something that you need to learn to leverage better for your company. experimental social, one of my favorites, I always talk about social media marketing, in essence being you know, one nonstop experiments, because the landscape is always shifting. So are we including experiments, and I consider campaigns really a type of experiment on a specific or a group of social networks to test out certain types of content or engaging with a certain target audience. And are we doing enough of this? Because if we're not, we're never really going to be able to best optimize our social media presence, social media strategy, do we have one have we been optimizing it over time, as things change, this is a really, really good time to do a revamp on your social strategy. As we enter 2015 Especially you want to look at the different weights that you have on the different social networks, those tactics you've been using visa vie social SEO, and obviously, that content piece I think is going to be critical as well, as well as just your general spend, and your ratio of spend between organic or you know, people cost versus tools cost versus paid social versus outsourcing agency fees, which is probably going to be the four major components of your social media budget, analyze your social and that's one type of analyze As humans, obviously analyzing the cost, but we now need to analyze the benefits. And I'm not talking about, you know, likes growth or followers growth or retreats growth, or while the simple ones are following us today. But really are we meeting all those objectives that we had. And when we began a social media strategy for those who read maximize your social, you began it with your social media audit, and you compared yourself to your competitors. So you should have these baseline metrics that you can go back to as part of your analysis, which you should be doing on a regular basis. But it's really in and getting deeper into what I wrote about and maximize your social, those primary ROI metrics from your social media program, which are often not going to be included in any social media dashboards, something that you're actually going to have to calculate, which I hope you will, and are doing at a regular basis. But it's always a good time, as we near the end of the year to take a step back and really take a fresh analysis of what we're doing. So I think these are the major, you know, I covered content, voice SEO, paid experimental strategy analysis, I think those are the seven, you know, major concepts, and there are more. But these are the seven major things that I think form the basis of how to take your social media to an advanced level. Going beyond that these are very general concepts. I mean, like I said, we can go really deep on each one of them. And I usually do, whenever I speak, I'd like to share with you two more, which is the evolution of social business. And I think, you know, because I know a lot of you are interested in social media for business as in increasing sales and marketing, what have you. So I'm not going to talk about social recruiting, which is another major way or social media for customer service, but social selling, right, which is, you know, how can we enlarge our or expand our social media program, train our salespeople, so that they can start generating, in essence, marketing leads from their own network sharing marketing content, contributing to marketing content, and really helping to expand social media to help generate new leads from their unique networks of customers and clients, or I should say, customers and prospective clients, but also help them as part of their sales process by getting unique information from social media that's going to help them close deals, right, or accelerate the sales process, keep things moving quicker, and more volumous in their sales pipeline. And this is something that a lot of companies that obviously because of my my first two books been published on LinkedIn, social selling has been a hot topic for the last two years or so it's something that is still one of the most popular things that I get hired for, to do speaking and training on. And finally, when we think about expanding social media, from a sales and marketing perspective, outside of marketing and sales, we then start to think about advocacy. And I think there's a lot of different ways of looking at advocacy. But if there's, you know, three big ways I would look at it, one is really your customers, your brand advocates, your fans that you already have out there brand advocacy, right? Another way, if you think of advocacy of people advocating for you is influencer marketing is you know, tapping into quote unquote, influencers in your industry or in your genre, or whatever it might be, that are going to, and it may be from a paid arrangement, or by providing them something that are going to speak out on your behalf in social media, right, I consider that part of this general notion of advocacy, although it might be a little bit less genuine. Therefore it comes with higher risk, but it also has the potential of higher return. And finally, we talk about employee advocacy, which is another new buzzword, I wrote a free ebook which you can download on maximize social business with the folks at people links, which are employee advocacy software provider. And really, when we start thinking about social media marketing, spending, and the sales and sales meeting content to share to their networks, we begin to see how salespeople are through social selling program, we see the beginning of the creation of employee advocacy or leveraging your employees, but it goes well beyond that. And it really looks into the evolution of a company into becoming a social business and how I believe employee advocacy can accelerate that, if it's done, right. And it's obviously not being done right by most companies. In fact, the FTC recently in the Wall Street Journal, you'll have to go back a few days to find the article. But it actually has reached out to a company and saying, you know, when your employees are promoting your campaign and social media, they need to note that they are employees or representatives of your company and sort of raises a very, very interesting legal issue about employee advocacy that if you're listening to this podcast, and you represent a larger organization that has a legal department, something you may want to look into for future reference. But these are really the main things that I would look at or I want you to look at when you do an audit you to concentrate on and I look forward to exposing or you know talking more about these concepts on a one on one basis in future podcasts. But hopefully it's given you a few good ideas from a relatively short 15 minute investment of your time. In a listen to this podcast. I Really appreciate your listening. I appreciate all your subscriptions, your comments, ratings on iTunes, those that are reposted on SoundCloud. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I look forward to coming back to you next week, where I'm actually going to be well, I have two speaking engagements next week one is going to be in New York, New Jersey and other one back here in California. I'm going to try to fit in a podcast while I'm back there in New York. Gonna be meeting some pretty interesting people that have a lot of interesting things to say about social. But until then, wherever you are in the world, make it a great, healthy, and social Day. Bye Bye, everybody. Thanks for listening to maximize your social. We appreciate your iTunes subscriptions, ratings and comments. If you would like to appear on this show or recommend content, please contact Neal Schaffer at Neal at maximize your social.com Please also make sure to check out Neil's new community, the Social Media Center of Excellence at social media ce o e.com. Thanks again and make it a social day.