The Importance of Consistency (and How It Relates to Paid Social) in Social Media

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. Welcome to another episode of maximize your social. You know, the summer should be coming to an end soon. But here in Southern California, I don't know if you've heard, we've had this incredible heatwave yesterday, it actually got up to 108 degrees here in Irvine, California in Orange County. Pretty incredible heat. In fact, last week, I spoke at a Comerica Bank event in San Diego, California, which is normally hotter than where I'm from. And as I drove north, and right when I got into Orange County, I saw the temperature just go up five or 10 degrees, pretty amazing. So I'm trying to stay cool, not move around a lot, drink a lot of liquids. And hopefully my voice is going to stay true to the end of this podcast. So today, I want to cover the topic of consistency and its importance in social media. Because although it sounds like an esoterical subject, I just still get asked, you know, Neil, how do you get to a significant following a significant reach and social media? How do you build engagement and social media? How do you get more ROI, get more conversions, get more conversations going with people that are following you have like your fan page or what have you. And what I want to offer to you is something very, very simple and eloquent, yet very, very deep, which is consistency. Now, recently, I was asked this on Twitter, you know, Neil may ask how you go about getting 94,000 followers. And my response was? Well, you know, I've been on Twitter since 2008. Right. But on LinkedIn since 2004, I've been on Facebook since early 2009. And on and on and on. And with any social network, okay, you do not win fans right out of the gate. If you're a major brand, you can do some searches for some case studies like Sony. And when they launched a Pinterest account, how they, they did a lot of promotion around that, which acquired them to get a lot of followers at the launch of their their Pinterest account. But for normal businesses and brands that are not part of you know, the fortune 50 or consumer vocabulary, it takes time. And it not only takes time, but it's consistency. When you create your social media strategy for readers that maximize your social, you know that part of it is determining what your daily workflow is going to be what are going to be the tasks. And if for instance, you start tweeting and then stop tweeting, you will disappear from newsfeeds. If you're on Facebook, and you're posting regularly building up engagement, and then you stop posting for a month, you lose whatever, you know, algorithm benefits that you had from building up that engagement by being silent for a while, and on and on and on. See public communities have hundreds of millions of users out there. And once you engage in a relationship with them. However, you know, I'm not saying a Facebook like is equivalent to an opt in. But it does mean that there's a chance that your news will get into their newsfeed. If you're not consistent on it, it works against you in so many different ways. And I'm just talking about posting, but there's a lot of other things that you should be consistent about consistent about engaging with new followers, consistent about retweeting or rewarding those big fans that are already talking about your brand out there in social a following new people, right, you're in this, you know, like Twitter, you're in this huge room of a few 100 million people. And if you just sit there and talk to yourself, other people may hear you. But when you actually tap on people's shoulders by following them and sending them a social signal, or maybe favoriting, a tweet that really resonated with your content, strategy, whatever it might be, it's the consistent sending of those things, and engaging, that builds up, others engaging with you over time, and it is what I would consider a tumbleweed effect. Because the bigger that you become others that are looking for sources for content creation, whether it be on Twitter, on Pinterest, or Google Plus, people tend to be attracted or businesses tend to be attracted to those that I refer to as maximize your social are the role models that you want to emulate. You then become a role model to some, some professionals in your industry, maybe some of your competitors, but you begin to be noticed more and the larger your presence becomes in social. The more that you get recognized, the more credibility you have. And it just sort of feeds upon itself, doesn't it? If you average and you know Have a growth rate of 1% per month in terms of your reach your followers, whatever it may be, obviously, the numbers grow just by the theories of math as you grow. So an increase of 1%, on a month of 100 followers is one of 1000 followers is 10. And when you get to 10,000, followers, that's 100, and what have you, but it all comes from consistency, and all comes to sticking to a plan, and being true to your brand, and being true to all the things that you set out to do in your social media strategy. Now, we do have with the advent of paid social, we now have a way of, in essence, accelerating our efforts in social right. And in maximize your social, I talk about how and I'm doing this myself, for instance, I mentioned in my last podcast that I have a very, very small paid campaign for the maximize social business fanpage, by a certain date, I want to hit a certain number of fans. And if I do that organically great. I want to get to a certain point because I know on average, I reach x percent and I get x percent of clicks, there's just a certain volume that I want to reach that think if I can reach that volume, Facebook is going to have a greater and greater ROI for maximize social business. It's always been one of the weak points in terms of referral sources of traffic. And I just think that there's a lot of upside there, especially as more and more people use Facebook for more and more professional news slowly but surely. So with that being said, if I hit my targets, I will turn off the ad campaign. And if I can hit it organically, I wouldn't even launch an ad campaign. But what I'm trying to say is that consistency, supplementing in the right way with paid social can really help you now what is the wrong way of using paid social, and all of this? Well, the wrong way is, you haven't even let your organic growth efforts starts. You haven't even followed anybody, you haven't even tweeted, or you just said very little. And all of a sudden, you're trying to amass a large amount of followers, or you're trying to amass a large amount of fans, without having to have gone through the process of starting relationships organically. And how this hurts you is, first of all, you lose credibility to a lot of people say wow, this page only has this few fans or this page only has this few posts or only this few tweets, you will lose credibility there still there will be some that will end up following or liking you. But because you lose the credibility, and you get clicks when you pay for clicks that don't resonate in the likes or follows. That can obviously be a more expensive acquisition cost for you. And it turns out to be less effective. So really, the best way to use paid social is in a very, very natural and organic way. It's complementing it, like I said, when you want to reach goals after you have a certain base and not overdoing it, it's also promoting those posts, you know, in Facebook has become a best practice to promote posts on a monthly basis, some say on a weekly basis. But it's promoting those posts that already have gotten great feedback from your fans. So you're not in essence spamming people. It's not sort of a promotional campaign, we want you to know about this. And it's more about saying, Our fans are already really engaging with his content, let's build up the engagement for future engagement and give people the content that that they really want that we already see that they're liking. So consistency, like I said, as deep I sort of dived into paid social here, but I hopefully you see the connection. This does not happen overnight. Right? I get the Field of Dreams and everything. You know, baseball stadiums and fan it just does not happen overnight. Yes, there are some success stories. But for 99% of us, it takes time. And I tell you, if you see companies or you know people on Twitter, and I see it on Pinterest all the time, right? They have like 20 pins, and yet they have 10,000 followers. I don't buy it, right. It they're either using well Pinterest does not have paid social yet for all of us. So they're definitely using a Blackhat technique, some sort of, you know, automated bot, to follow unfollow, and or they are buying followers from companies that amass lots of fake followers. And that goes the same for Twitter, and everywhere else. And it even goes the same for a lot of famous celebrities, musicians and even people in the social media world on Facebook, because it's it's just ad on Twitter. It's just something that is very, very easy to do and relatively inexpensive. And people think more followers equals more social proof. But as we all know, when you buy the fake followers, it brings down everything, it just means you're, you know, the EdgeRank part of your newsfeed is going to go out to those fake people. So the real people see even less of your content. And you know, when you go to a page that has 100,000 fans, yet they only get two or three likes on a post. You start to scratch your head thinking hmm, Are these real fans or not? So I think people can see through it like I mentioned. So really You know, the shortcut is paid social, not the Blackhat techniques, not buying followers is using paid social in an authentic and complimentary supplementary way. But it really comes down to the organic, and really that Tumbleweed effect that comes from consistency, having the right presence in the right network with the right branding, and the right content that is going to engage with the right people. And you're going to engage with the right people. And you're going to be social in that network, using best practices in the social etiquette of that network on a day in day out basis. You don't have to live your life in social, but a few minutes a day as part of your social media strategy and creating that daily workflow that that ties into those tasks that we determine what would help you reach your business objectives. That's what it's about. It takes some discipline, fact, consistency takes discipline. And for those of you who have a blog, or understand SEO, a lot of people say it's the same as blogging. You You start with a website, you don't get Google PageRank questionable as to whether it matters or not, you only get it after a certain amount of time. In fact, Google will give your domain more authority seemingly, the longer you have your domain, if you renew for five years instead of one year. It's the longevity that Google looks at that says, Okay, this website is here for the long run, right. And this website has been around for the long run. That's why you still see some blog posts that were created written in like 2007, and 2008, that still come up number one in Google search results, right? Longevity, there's credibility in the longevity. So I really want you to think, you know, social media marketing, and I wrote a blog post on this a few years ago is much like, you know, running a marathon, it's not a sprint, it's a marathon. And hopefully, those of you that have subscribed to this podcast, get that and you're nodding. But for those of you that have been in it for the long haul, and you still don't see the ROI, there is a tipping point, I really do believe there is and it could come in six months, it could come in a year, it may take two years, if you've been consistent, and your strategy is on target, and you've been implementing according to the strategy. And you know, you're where your audience is, and you're providing them useful content and engaging in an authentic and useful way. I do believe that that's going to be closer to the six months or even three months for some companies. So think long term consistency, paid social, I liked it sort of do a mash up of seemingly unrelated concepts. But hopefully, through the apparent madness of what I'm talking about, it will provide you some insight, I mentioned several podcasts ago that I always talk about new content before a blog right here on the podcast, you always get access to it. This also means that my podcast is sort of my experimental testbed for my content and my concepts and ideas and seeing if this flows with my audience or not. So if this resonated with you, send me a tweet, send me an email. If it didn't, or you don't get it, you didn't understand what I was saying, let me know as well. Right? Obviously, as you can tell, I'm not reading off any script here. But what I'm presenting to you really is based on my experience, and sort of what I see in the market, and those concepts I really think will truly help you and your business, maximize your social. That's a wrap for this podcast, everybody. I really hope the next time I'm talking to you, it's gonna be a lot cooler here in Southern California. Until then, wherever you are in the world, make it a great social Day. Bye Bye, everybody.

Unknown: 13:34

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