10 Tips Series: 10 Social Media Tips for 2019 Success

Transcript for 10 Tips Series: 10 Social Media Tips for 2019 Success

To learn more about MeetEdgar's webinar schedule and to catch us streaming live, visit MeetEdgar Live Webinars. Megan: Hey there, MeetEdgar community. It is Megan, excited to get started today with our webinar on 10 Social Media Tips 2019. We’re going to get started in a couple of minutes here. Thanks for your patience as we wait for the last few people to trickle in.As we wait one more minute here, definitely pop into the chat on the right-hand side of your screen and let us know what’s going on in your life these days, where you are tuning in from. We’d love to hear all the MeetEdgar users as well as just you social media marketing savvy people out there joining in. We’re going to get started in a minute here. We’re going to have my colleague, Kristina, over, chatting with you guys on the right. Ask questions throughout, let us know any feedback that you like, anything like that. As I said, we’ll get started in one minute here.All right. It is 10:00 AM mountain time where I am here in Denver, Colorado, which means that it’s noon out the East Coast and 9:00 AM for you, early morning risers, in the Pacific time zone. Like I said, thanks for joining. We’re really excited just to go over a few tips here to get your week started out right and to get you really starting to think and plan for the 2019 social media campaigns that you guys are going to get out there and rock this coming year.Like I said, let us know if you have any questions at all as we go through these tips. I know you’re so busy with your businesses being a small business owner wearing so many hats. Social media can sometimes be pushed to the wayside, but that’s something we definitely don’t want to happen with your brands in 2019, because social media is a free platform where you’re able to get your message out there and connect with your followers and really create a community, so that [00:02:30] your brand can stand out from all the noise happening on social media.Let’s jump right in here with tip number one, which is more social, less media. You may be thinking, “Megan, this is crazy. We are starting out. The first tip of a social media success webinar with a more social, less media tip, this doesn’t make sense. Shouldn’t those two should be together?” Think about how authenticity is key these days. Personal branding is now a part of company branding. That means you being social and putting your personality out there when it comes to marketing your brand. You can do things like using your Instagram stories to start to talk to your followers in a less curated way than some of your other posts might be.You can see here. This example is from our founder, Laura, who does a lot of founder chats with our community. One of the reasons she does this is she likes to put our values and she likes to put her personality in with our brand, so you know you are buying from a human. Humanizing your brand, because remember, people buy from people, [00:03:30] not businesses.One of the things we like to do when we’re really starting to be more social and producing less media on social media is to ask questions before one of these founder chats in our Instagram stories to collect true, authentic questions from our community to think what they are going to want to know so we can talk right to you in these founder chats. The reason this is so important is because relatability is so huge on social media marketing these days. You want to be able to look at a post and say, “Yes, I relate to that,” in order to get that brand affinity going. Your marketing is really going to get so much stronger if you’re attracting people who your story relates to and talks with.To be successful on social media, whether you’re a service or a product, you really want to know what drives the people in your community and know how each and every one of your posts can serve them so that it can elevate their lifestyle. One of the ways to do this, again, is to collect questions. Ask in your Instagram and Facebook stories what people want to know and let people know when you’ll be chatting with them. Bonus, if you do start to brainstorm these things and get to know your followers better through this question asking technique, you can keep a running Google Doc of everything they ask to really start to develop your brand persona of who the people in your audience are so much better.This doc can also serve for a few other things like being able to know that you have something to fall back on when you’re looking to get a little creative in your posts. [00:05:00] It can be a great way to use the language that your followers already use to talk about your product or to talk about their pain points. If you can incorporate this language in with your own posts, it’s again going to make your social media marketing that much stronger. This is what true authenticity is about. A brand connection is one of the most important things that authenticity can lend itself to on social media.Think of these things that Google has now termed something called identity loyalty when it [00:05:30] speaks a lot about social media. What identity loyalty is, is its people are taking actions and people are being loyal towards brands based on that brand's personality and identity. The easiest way for you to develop your brand’s personality and identity is to put your own personality and identity into your posts. Go ahead and brainstorm some ways that you can get really personal with your posts to make your brand shine in social media in 2019.Next, moving on. This is going to go hand in hand. As you can see, we start to get some patterns coming throughout these tips. More listening, less broadcasting. Guys, listen to your customers and find their real ask on social media, find their real pain points. Ask your customers who their role models are, so you can start to learn who their ideal image of their future self is and build a story around how they can achieve this goal with your product or service.One of the greatest things for social media [00:06:30] is to be able to one-on-one connection with your followers. Social media is such a crowded landscape. There’s more content on social media than anyone can consume in a lifetime. How are you going to make sure that your content is something your followers want to keep looking at and keep engaging with. One of the best ways to do this is to listen and reply and engage with your followers, not just broadcast out your promotions all the time.I love this example from Starbucks here. Think about the hours and tons of money that big brands like Starbucks spend on doing things like having focus groups around what their next drink should be or something to the liking, when really all of this exists on social media a lot of the time. Encourage your customers to reach out with feedback and make sure you’re replying to them. Who would think you would get such a lovely message from a huge brand like Starbucks, if you give them an idea on social media? How great would that make you feel and how connected to that brand would that make you feel? Replying to your customers is a great way to get that engagement [00:07:30] and to really uplevel your social media marketing.One of the ways you can start to really listen on social media without just paying attention to app mentions, because I know you guys are already doing that, is to set up things like Google Alerts as well. This is a great thing to do, because it will catch anything that’s going out about your brand and send your emails about it. I suggest setting Google Alerts up not only for your brand, but also keyword terms within industry and niche.This lets you keep on top of what’s going on and add your own voice to that conversation. Adding your own voice in will differentiate your brand so much and it also allows you to do things like share breaking news in your industry and really join the stories that are going around in a timely manner. This is especially important on networks like Twitter since timeliness is baked into their algorithm so strongly.The other thing that goes along with listening, not only paying attention to your app mentions and not only paying attention to your Google Alerts, is paying attention to what’s going on within the world. For example, a lot of brands do things like have contests or have specific hashtags for holidays. One of my favorite examples of this is an e-commerce brand called Red Lighter. They have a hashtag called #momsdayoff. This is where users can share stories about why their mom is amazing and why she deserves a day off today.It’s a great way for then you to go in, search your specific and unique hashtag and look at all the posts that your [00:09:00] followers have generated off of this. It’s a way you can, again, get to personally connect with your followers, get to know what their true values are, because when it comes to family, a lot of people will share more personal stories in that way. You can go a level further even with this personal hashtag and turn it into a giveaway or contest.In 2019, we predict we’re going to see giveaways and contests on social media, drive so much traffic and engagement. Think of the ways that you can really start to get your followers to use your hashtags, tag your brands, become a part of your marketing team and how you can give back to them with either a shoutout on your own social media page or a shoutout on something like a free month for your service or product, stuff like that, to really generate and encourage your followers to become a part of your team. More listening, less broadcasting and get that great ratio of your value-added posts that are going to connect personally with people on social media.Next, more video, less text. Guys, I know that we can sound like a broken record when we talk about video on webinar after webinar but truly everything we read, every trend we're seeing, every analytics that we're looking at goes to this idea that video is where it's at on social media. It helps people experience something in real time that you get to feel like you're a part of something going on with the world. If you're afraid to start out with live video, of course, you can do scheduled videos, but live video truly is getting the most engagement so get brave and hop [00:10:30] on screen to increase your authenticity and really connect with your followers.I love this example here from ABC News. It is so simple. They're just sharing a video of a blizzard going on in Times Square so everywhere around the world can tune in and feel like they're a part of this. It was a great way that they added more followers so people could keep up in real time with what's going on. Think about the ways you can incorporate this kind of activity into your own feed. Go out and look at people like- musicians do this really well. For example, [00:11:00] John Mayer uses live videos a lot to give sneak peeks of his new albums. Now this exclusive content that he does on social media on his Facebook page, that's just a video produced to release something that's people haven't seen before and only his followers get that first look.How encouraging is that, and how enticing is that to continue to follow him. You stay up to date and get something that someone who doesn't follow him doesn't get to see. Think of the ways you can produce that exclusive video content [00:11:30] for your followers to really get them to want to watch and tune in every time they see you're going to broadcast a video. Now when you're making live stream specifically, remember, I'm saying live streams are getting the most views but of course you can do native scheduled videos as well, but when you're making live streams, we recommend actually making an event for them ahead of time so you're letting your followers know when, what and why they should attend.In this live stream events go ahead and prompt your followers to actually [00:12:00] comment on what they what they want to learn. This goes along when we were chatting about how we use our Instagram stories to collect questions for our founder chats. We use these events for our live streams to collect questions to know and how we're going to inform the content in that live to speak to our customer pain points, to speak to our followers interests, so it entices them to keep coming back and tuning in for more.When you're making your videos and your events one last thing I want to touch on here is that you actually want to take the time [00:12:30] to brainstorm 10 different headlines or 10 different unique ways you can introduce this video in the same way we recommend we do this for your blog posts. Now, the reason we always recommend doing this is of course because if you sit there and do just one, you're not going to get that creative way of enticing people with emotional words or enticing people with the best headline possible and a lot of people think this is a waste of time but really, guys, I encourage you to think of these 10 extra headlines you don't use as ways you can repurpose those into [00:13:00] social media updates later on.Investing the time and coming up with the strongest headline possible for your video is truly going to get you more views and more clickthroughs on it. If you're having struggles coming up with headlines, some effective approaches you can take is start to think of ways you can promise a specific benefit to someone if they attend your video or use numbers to clearly outline what and how much they're going to learn on that video. Ask questions even in the title so it gets people [00:13:30] really curious about why they should attend and what they're going to learn and do something to create a little bit of urgency, especially with live, if they tune in if you're live, you get this exclusive benefit of XYZ to really again, create that urgency and get people excited about attention.Last but not least, we touched on this but I cannot stress it enough, take the time to go out and search for curiosity words, go out and search for emotional words to really drive more engagement. Of course, we all want to pretend like we're the most logical people when it comes to allocating how we spend our time, but when it goes back to it in the long run, our time is allocated towards emotions mostly in life. Get those headlines really emotionally triggered, and you'll see the increase in your viewership.Next, more new experience, less old status quo. I cannot stress enough what a changing landscape social media is. This will continue into 2019, and as marketers, if we're not experimenting, we are not going to see the benefits [00:14:30] of the full social media experience. You want to invest in new technologies that are popping up. What's coming up next in social media? What's the hottest network that's out there right now? You want to invest your time to get to learn it. One thing we're doing here at MeetEdgar is adding in Instagram and Pinterest services in the next couple of months in order to really make sure that these new platforms that are seeing so much more engagement can be beneficial to you.Again, it's keeping up with the trends, it's seeing which platforms are winning and going out and experimenting on [00:15:00] those. If the platform falls through, or if your social media posts that you're working on don't work, it's really not a waste of time. Think about all of the valuable information that you're going to learn by experimenting on these other platforms to bring it back to your tried and true networks that you know drive the most traffic. I'm not saying I want you guys to spread yourself too thin in 2019. Again, you want to really focus on getting those networks that help you connect with your audience and drive the most traffic but we need you [00:15:30] to make sure you're continuing to experiment with your posts on those networks as well.You can see in this example here, this is the same post that Falcon.io posted with two different headlines. Why are they doing this you may ask? Because A/B testing your post is so important to stay experimental. You don't want to do too much at once when you do this, when you're trying to ascertain what language your followers are really responding to, as well as what images they are responding to, so what I'm going to ask you to do as you're A/B [00:16:00] testing this is to really make sure that the colors or the photo stays the same while you're changing the text or that the text stays the same as you're changing the graphic.Don't go and change everything at once because that way you can't tell which one is driving more and which one enticed your customers and followers more. Change one thing at a time. Experiment slowly but never stop experimenting on social media. The great thing about utilizing a tool like MeetEdgar to do your A/B testing and experimenting is you can actually go [00:16:30] into your history tab in Edgar and if you click to view the performance history of a post we will show you the clickthrough rate of it.You can even do something like change the variation of the text that you're adding in there, and if it shares two separate times with a different text variation, you can see the click through differences in the first variation versus the second right in your MeetEdgar app and triangulating this and utilizing his with your Facebook Insights and with your Twitter analytics it is a foolproof way that you're able to know if you're experiments are [00:17:00] working so you can keep on iterating and keep your feeds fresh.Next, kind of going right along with keeping those feeds fresh and iterating is we want you to focus on more content creation and less analytics and 2019. Now, I know this is a little bit contradictory to what we were just talking about but let me explain here real quick. Long term success and commitment to your marketing goals is going to depend upon you setting aside time and allocating your time properly.Again, as a small business, I want you to really make sure that you are prioritizing what matters to keep your business thriving in 2019. It can get really addictive to log into your analytics, to your Google Analytics, to your Facebook Insights constantly every day and check these statistics but I want you to take a step back in 2019 and set aside maybe one week to go in and do this.Compare posts from week to week. Compare traffic from week to week, not day to day so you can start seeing trends and patterns and really connect the dots on where things are going in your marketing strategy. If you're logging in every day, and just looking at your analytics and not doing anything with it, it's a waste of time that you could be spending on creating more valuable content for your followers.Every time you do log into your analytics, I want you to go in with a goal to come out with at least one action item that you are going to do with the information that you're gaining. Whether that's, hey, this post needs a little boost behind it because it gets great engagement [00:18:30] but not a lot of people have seen it. Go out, find the money to boost that post and do it right then and there. Take action on what you're learning.Another thing guys, a watched pot never boils is an overused expression but so true here. If you are waiting to see changes happen in a day that's not going to happen with social media marketing. Brands have been working for months and years in order to gain followers and in order to speak to their story and you have to be patient in order to gain your followers trust on social [00:19:00] media but if you are, you'll see such great benefits in the free marketing that social media can provide to you.It can be so much more helpful for you again, to prioritize what is most important for your business, time block yourself some time throughout the day so that you're able to create your content in a really dedicated brainstorming creative space. You're able to go into your analytics at a time that your brain is focused on those numbers and ready to make an action plan, and go into it with a lens no matter what you're doing that your business there is to help your followers.I suggest going along with analytics is to also have a dedicated dashboard. What a dashboard will help you do is focus on the numbers that matter. Again, it's so easy to get bogged down in numbers when it comes to analytics on social media but I want you to really go in with few core numbers that you're looking to change the needle, whether it's brand awareness, traffic to your site, sales and conversions, have those numbers ready and go into your analytics with a goal [00:20:00] and to come out with an action plan in mind.Next, we have more education and emotion and less selling, and this goes along with making sure you have the right ratio post going out to make sure your followers want to keep following with you. This is really helpful if you do have a marketing team or other people to really walk through what the buyer's journey is for your ideal customer type, so you can know when and how to teach them the skills they need to use your product to the fullest or when and how they [00:20:30] might need that little emotional boost, whether it's getting them to their first win with your product, with a great how-to video or whether it's just emotionally giving them a little high five on social media to get them through a busy Monday morning.You can see here, this post on the left is an amazing nostalgic photo. Nostalgia is one of the strongest emotions I want you to try to take into your 2019 strategy, because if you're sitting there scrolling through your social media feed and something reminds you of a nostalgic great memory that you used to have or a conversation that you had way back in the day, this is going to make you stop and think and notice the brand. I know it sounds simple, but try it out. You'll see great engagement on anything you can do to join that Throwback Thursday or any nostalgia. It can be related to your company, telling a story when your company first started out or it can be unrelated to your company just to get a great conversation going.This post over on the right here is from BuzzFeed Tasty. It is such a simple how-to post that doesn't even make use of videos. It's just saying you can make banana splits on a stick for a healthier summer treat. How simple. Think of the way you can simplify your product down to just putting a banana on a stick is how I like to describe it here with this post. It's so simple, but with this photo, you can get a great marriage where your followers can actually learn something and take it into their own life. More education and more emotion to get your social media branding out there and the selling will come if you're adding this value and teaching people how to use your product.Now this one more values, less guessing goes along with this fact that you have to know your company and your brand values before you can convey that to your social media followers. Have a goal to be committed and consistent with your product in every social media you post out there and have that social media post match up with your [00:22:30] values 100%. People can smell inauthentic posts on social media so strongly, and if you're not consistent with everything you're putting out there, matching your values and matching your brand voice, your followers are not going to get that consistent story. Do things like think about what does my brand stand for? Or what opinions do I have? Don't be afraid to share those on social media.These values can change over time too, for example, here at MeetEdgar we're going through a lot of [00:23:00] different value conversations internally. That's because we want to make sure our internal values are really serving our customers. For example, one of our values here at MeetEdgar is always choose kindness, and that is important not only for our business, making sure we are always coming at request from our customers in a kind way, speaking to each other in a kind way, but it also doesn't mean that kindness is something that we're just going to always be nice sunshine and rainbows. We are a business that wants to get stuff done [00:23:30] and have productive conversations.We're going throughout these this values remaking and thinking how kindness can actually help to spark conversations that might be a little bit harder when giving feedback to each other. This can be something that is a little tricky to bring into your social media marketing but think of the ways that this can actually help your followers as well. If we are a team who is pushing to make the best product possible for our followers, we want to share that with you. It might not seem something that [00:24:00] is simply just a social media post, but it really can be. Think of the ways you can share your internal values here.Thinking of other ways that you can share values on social media is think about things like how Lululemon joins in the International Women's Day conversation. They are a brand who knows their values is centered around making women stronger and making women's worth equal and making women feel really empowered. They sought out for International Women's Day, a hashtag that was #worth100 and it was supporting the idea that every woman deserves to feel 100% of their worth.This is a part of their internal values and they're sharing it externally on their social media. You can do this in a simple one-off post or you can do what you see Lululemon here doing is actually utilizing their cover photo on Twitter to get that word out there and encourage more and more people to use this hashtag, join this conversation and get more brand reach. Commit to consistency in every post you're putting out there, filter it through your internal values to make sure it matches, and remember the details of really making sure that people are joining the conversation and you're attracting the right people who are going to be really great at using your product or service.Moving on here, more customers hero or less product hero. This is a little bit tricky to understand, and I'm sure if you keep up with social media marketing, you hear a lot of the time that you want to speak to a storytelling vibe. You want to have a hero's journey that's tried and true process, where people are going throughout something, they come to a struggle, they overcome it and they are better off for it at the end. This is a structure that has been around for ages and works on social media marketing even.This here is an example post, that's one of our own Instagram stories, excuse me, Instagram posts and it says no more winging it. The best way to get ahead of social media is to plan for it. Planning, strategizing and measuring saves you hours of wasted time and pays off in the end.In our latest blog, we have four free templates that will help you strategize, plan and create your social media content. You can see here how we're not making MeetEdgar. We're not making our software tool. The winner of the story here, we are adding value and making your hard work as the content creator, what is actually going to make you successful in your social media strategy, and that's truly what we believe, but taking a step back we could have written this in this way of, "Hey, add content to your MeetEdgar software. Woohoo. We're the hero of your social media now." That's not true at all, speaking directly to the fact that your hard work with the assistance of our product is really what makes you the winner.You can see how social storytelling can really be a way that you can describe your product and you can take that information and make it feel a lot more exciting and important and then impassioned and relevant to your followers. Campaigns really want to make sure you're perfectly fitting in to what users are already using your platform for, and spark conversations, and encourage sharing of those hero's journey stories back on your social media. Get that user-generated content and those success stories and share them out again, to give people that reassurance and that social proof that your product can get them to where they want to be in their business, or get them to a better lifestyle that they are imagining it might.Now you know you're not just helping your followers navigate this crowded space of social media, but you're actually guiding people to buy your product at the right time, at the right site and decide whether it is right for them at that time. Remember, everyone's in a different, excuse me, everyone's in a different place in the buyers' journey. The more you can build story around each and every one of your segments of followers, the more likely it is, it's going to hit someone at the right time. This really helps build brand trust again, which takes a while on social media so be patient with it, and let's your followers see how the product can help them achieve their ideal life.This next one here, more answers, less questions. There are many questions being thrown around in social media, in your company's inbox, in your messenger apps, and in public forums these days about your company or service. Everyone goes to the internet to get that idea of if that product is right for them. Have some fun with how you use this in 2019. Use [00:28:30] that social listening tip we talked about before to actually see what questions are being asked. Ask your support people what are some of the most frequently asked questions and find a way to answer them in a really unique way on social media.I love this example from Harvard Book Store over here, where they have a template written out in a casual way by one of their employees to really make sure they are answering the questions that are burning on their followers' mind. Again, you can do things like use your Instagram stories [00:29:00] to ask your followers to submit questions or use what's already out there to know what's being asked about your brand so you can answer these frequently questions. As a bonus here, as a bonus tip, I want you to make sure you're thinking of ways you can make this a consistent fun thing to do every week on your social media to get more and more of those questions answered to your followers, and to show them you are there to help serve them and to help them have your best experience with their product or service.This really goes along with one of the trends that we're [00:29:30] seeing in social media a lot too, which is that messenger apps are on the rise. Actually, in 2015, the number of people using private messenger apps exceeded the number of people on social media’s public forums. You can see people want to ask more and more questions directly to brands. Do this and really start to connect with your followers on these messenger apps, too, so that it'll make it more likely in the public forums when you're posting these that they'll want to join in the conversation there. Don't neglect that at all. [00:30:00]Guys, we have made it to number 10. Thanks for sticking with us here. Our last tip is going to be more traffic, less work. Now, this is one of the tried and true things that we like to talk about here at MeetEdgar is that you don't always have to do more work to get more traffic to your site and to get more traffic from social media.It's about working smarter and it's about systemizing your social media strategy, so that you know when you should be sending your posts out. You're setting a schedule that it's going to get a variety of different [00:30:30] types of posts out to your followers to keep your feed nice and robust and to really focus on the traffic and the numbers that matter.Having a systemized plan is really going to make sure that your social media strategy is set in stone in 2019. If you need any help with this at all, we have a lot of templates in our Help Center. If you email support@meetedgar.com, I'm more than happy to send you some of the best ones depending on your goal. Please don't be afraid to reach out. We love giving these extra resources.Speaking of, [00:31:00] I want to end this with a challenge to you guys. We've