Holistic Social Media 101: Asking the Right Social Media Questions

Neal Schaffer: 0:04

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, and founder of maximize social business. Neal Schaffer. Everybody this is Neal Schaffer with coffee in hand for this podcast. And the name of the podcast is maximize your social Welcome, everybody. Hope you're having a great week. You know, it's the summer we all take vacations. I did mine in July. So I've been firing up the podcast, the blog post ever since. And I hope that you're all getting revved back up as well. The world is different Facebook just well, by the time you listen to the podcast last week announced the end of life gaming, pushing people from Facebook messages to the messenger app on mobile, Pinterest introduced Pinterest direct. And the world as we know it is always changing. And hopefully this podcast will keep you up to date. So today, I want to talk about a conversation and well, I had on a certain social network. I don't want to name names, and have you go digging through my social media archives for the conversation, because the exact people really don't matter. But it came down to, you know, I get asked a lot of questions. And as you know, well, if you listen to my podcast from last week, and read my recent blog post on six social media productivity tips and 23 tools to help you, you'll know that I like to reserve time for content creation and engagement. And I urge my listeners this podcast and brands to do the same. So as part of that, I tend to reach out if you follow me on certain social networks, you'll see that you know, I reach out to people, I think people and when they ask me questions, I answer them. So you know, I got an interesting one. And it's funny, because it happened. And shortly thereafter, our Facebook contributor on maximize social business, Jim Valasek, I hope I'm pronouncing his last name, right. But he wrote this blog post that pretty much went viral this week, if I may say so. And that is how to tell if your Facebook efforts are paying off. Jim is the CEO of Shortstack. And they are a provider of Facebook apps and tools. So he knows the land and landscape as well as anyone does. And it was a great reminder. And it sort of echoes well, he gives you a specific, you know, tactics that you can do to see what works. And if you read maximize your social, you know that I talked about PDCA and experimentation, and you need to shake things up and try different things. I call them experiments. I call them campaigns, social media campaigns, not in the traditional marketing sense, but in the experimental sense to get a data set, so that we know what other things we might want to do to help it ourselves. And we'll never know until we experiment, because it's an always changing landscape. So the question that I got that I want to talk about today is sort of related, right? So you're on Facebook, and you've been told you need to build a Facebook page. So you build it up, and you have lots of likes. And I've had, you know, social media strategy consulting clients who came to me and said, Well, we did a giveaway, we have a few 1000 likes, what next? And you know, hopefully, by 2014, we're all a little bit more intelligent, of how we use social and how we use it for our clients. But there are so many companies who chase the like, and then they get a little bit smarter. They go into Facebook Insights, like, Okay, we need likes, we need reach. So the question was, well, how do we expand our reach for our page, the reach has been going down over the course of the year. And it's funny, I've yet to publish my posts based on data that shows that not everybody's reach has gone down as a result of Facebook tweaking EdgeRank. So my response was basically, well, there's, you know, there's a few things you can obviously do, you can promote posts with paid social, which is obviously going to expand your reach, if that's what you want to do, you can post more frequently, which will tend to improve your reach, you can optimize your content, you can obviously try to post different types of content, and you can do an experiment or campaign. And that's really, I'm sure, there's other things that you know, I'm like I said, I don't read these scripts. And that's my simple answer to the question. And with more time, I'm sure there's other things that could brainstorm, and it really comes down to those things, right. And the response was, Well, I've tried all those things. And what I really wanted to ask this person and I just sort of put my hands in the air because I want to engage but I also want to make good use of my time and not everybody's at the same level and not everybody's willing to pay for for consulting and some people just want a lot of free information and you know, I have a business to run myself and and kids look after and a son to play soccer with and a wife to to love with all my heart. So, you know, I just don't have unlimited time to do that. But really, is Facebook reach tied somehow to your business. When you created your business was there this, you know, objective your corporate mission was We want to get more reach on Facebook. And it really comes down if you've read the chapter maximize your social on social media ROI and social media metrics. Now I do understand for some companies, okay, their primary objective for social media, especially ones that are primarily run by Pr departments or maybe corporate communication departments, they basically want to try to reach as many people as possible and try to have as many conversations with as many people as possible, perhaps a lot of nonprofits that are in this as well, as well as a lot of consumer brands. And that's fine. If that is your primary objective. Welcome to the era of paid social. But if that's not your primary objective, right, in maximize your social, I talk about the different types of metrics we have, we have the primary metrics and the secondary metrics, and the primary metrics, drive right into what is going to determine the ROI of your social media program, you know, amount of reach for 90% of companies, I'm gonna assume, is a secondary metric. Right, it equates to how effective your social media is, and how you might be wanting to do better at it. But it doesn't equate to this primary objective, it doesn't feed directly into the reason why you have a social media program. So, you know, this is why I have always thought holistically about business. Right. And I think what differentiates me from a lot of people out there is I launched my career in Asia. And in Asia, I was representing foreign businesses and high tech markets where nobody had ever heard of them. And I had to create a brand or create brand recognition out of scratch. And I had to do it in different countries that spoke different languages. And obviously, it wasn't easy, but it taught me a lot of valuable lessons that have given me a lot of unique insight, I believe in the social media, and that's what my clients and people have read my books and heard me speak to me as well. And you know, holistic, and I know, when people think holistic, they think sort of like hippies, or new age or, you know, holistic is just thinking of everything as a whole, you know, business as a whole, and where things plug in, right. So if we were to look at social media as a whole, it's not just Facebook, right. And it's not just reach and Facebook, either. It's a lot of different things. But you know what, maybe Facebook isn't the right platform for you. And I'll be honest, you know, I have 10,000 followers on Facebook, the other day, I posted two photos that I took in the evening, to Facebook, directly from my phone, not even using a third party tool, got a few likes, I've had stuff getting more likes than others. But you know, not a big deal. I'm not like, you know, putting in an Excel spreadsheet and losing sleep at night over it. But you know, the same photos I posted separately on Instagram, where I have, um, near 4000 fans now. And I got like 200 likes for each of those photos. Now, it's, you know, 40% of the number of Facebook fans, but it just goes to show you, you need to think holistically. Different news feeds work differently, different types of fans, on different networks engage differently with different content. So this one trick pony that so many companies did in the good days of Facebook, they're realizing that you know what, we're not getting as much reach and it's time to really, instead of experimenting within Facebook experiment outside of Facebook, there's a whole other world out there. I mentioned the last podcast that you know, maximize social business gets. Now Pinterest is the second driver of traffic to our blog outside of Twitter. And you know, it took a few months of concerted effort and strategic effort to do it. But there's loads of communities where your brand can get new engagement, new brand awareness, what have you. So really my question for you. Okay, is are you asking the right social media questions? How do I get more reach on Facebook? If that is a secondary metric? Is not the question you should be losing sleep over. You should be losing sleep over what is the ROI? What what are the objectives of my program? What are the metrics? And how can I drive those metrics higher? And if you're only on Facebook? Well, it's gonna be a Facebook centric question. But assuming you're on multiple platforms, right? Think of a dashboard. I played music when I lived in Japan played drums. And if you ever go into a recording studio, there's loads of levers, right? And you push the levers up and down in terms of frequency in terms of engagement, different categories of content, your social media dashboard should have 10s of levers for all the different things you can be doing across social across all the different channels with all the different types of content and all the people out there. Okay. So it's not just one lever, which would be I guess, Facebook reach. It's a series of levers, and sometimes they work together, right? You do more on Instagram, and sometimes that spills over to Facebook and Twitter. And the same thing with Pinterest because a lot of people will will share those things on those two social networks that are sort of built in to the platform. But if you're just asking the wrong question, you're digging yourself a hole. And I don't think you're ever going to be effective with your program because you're chasing after the wrong thing. So hopefully, listeners of this podcast have been able to help you improve Your social media literacy where you're not asking those sorts of questions, but really take a step back, right? What are the burning questions that you would like to ask me? What are the things that you're really curious about how to do? And you know, one of my favorites as well, I want to get started on Instagram, what do I do? You get started on Instagram, right? If you don't want to do for your brand, yet, you you start your own you, you start to follow friends on Facebook that are on Instagram, right? You see what they post? You see what sort of posts get likes, you think about what are the things that you could post to represent yourself? And you go from there you do it you learn by doing? And then you optimize? So it's not a question. Well, how do I get more followers on Instagram? Have you followed more people on Instagram? Have you engaged with more people on Instagram? Do you think social media is on autopilot that you just set up shop and everyone's going to come and like you. And you wonder why you don't get more followers. So there's obviously tactical things you can do. But social media is also about reciprocity, right? In fact, it was interesting, I was doing some research, and I was looking at a buffer of blog posts, and everybody loves buffer. And it was a Buffer blog post on Instagram. And gentleman said, you know buffer, I noticed that you barely follow anyone on your Instagram account. Social media is all about reciprocity. And I thought that was an interesting comment. And although I agree about social media being about reciprocity, you know, buffer is one of the most generous companies in terms of support for their users, in terms of the amount and quality of content that they put out there. I have no criticism whatsoever about buffer. And I was sort of shocked by that little comment there. But that's the way it is. So let's stop asking, let's start doing and think about the questions that you have. Are they the right questions, a lot of people are just spending too much time asking and looking for answers for the wrong ones, holistic, 36,000 foot view. Think of the entirety, think of business objectives, lots of different networks out there lots of different things you can do. And if you're looking for ideas, by all means, read, maximize your social again, from front to back. And that will help sync your brain with what I'm trying to teach through these podcasts. Hey, that's it for this week. I hope you enjoyed Well, I'm not going to call it a rant because it really all is about educating and empowering you. But as always, I welcome your feedback. I really enjoy the number of people that I see downloading, commenting, sharing my podcasts, every single one you thank you so much. And signing off from beautiful Orange County, California. It's the end of another episode. We'll talk again next week, wherever you're on the world. Make it a great social Day. Bye Bye, everybody.

Unknown: 12:40

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