fbpx

25% OFF ALL PLANS FROM NOW UNTIL JANUARY 15 – USE CODE NYEDGAR25 IN CHECKOUT

An Inside Look at MeetEdgar’s Social Media

Transcript for An Inside Look at MeetEdgar’s Social Media

To learn more about MeetEdgar’s webinar schedule and to catch us streaming live, visit MeetEdgar Live Webinars.

All right, so we are like I said I’m going to get started here and if you have minutes. My colleague Jess is actually going to be manning the chat on to the right-hand side of your screen. We’d love to hear from you guys as you know. So definitely let us know what’s going on, what industry you’re in, what kind of social media goals you are working on right now. We love again to make sure that these webinars are providing the most value for the goals our community is working on. So let us now say hi to each other. Jess is there to answer any questions you have, whether it be about Edgar or the webinar at all. So, reach out to her, say hi in the chat over on the right-hand side of the screen now. We’ll get started in the next couple of minutes here. You can always also email support at Edgar.com if you do questions before or after this webinar too.

We’re super excited to kind of popping in here and chat a little bit mostly because I don’t know if you all know, but this is Edgar’s fourth birthday week, which is very exciting. So, we’ll go into to the little bit of the history about Edgar and how we develop their own kind of following here. Again, excited to get popping in here and answering any questions you have. Say hi over on the chat. Make sure you’re subscribing to our YouTube channel here so that all these webinars are always available for replays for you. We always, again, want to make sure that these are providing the most value possible. So pop into that chat and let us know what you’re interested in learning about, what you’re here for, say hi to each other, and support that small business community. We were hoping to get these tips and tricks to really push forward and make sure that you’re developing the best strategy possible on social media. Like I said, we’ll get started here in a minute now.

All right, it is 10:00 AM Pacific time, 1:00 Pm Eastern Time. Thanks so much for joining us here at MeetEdgar. My name’s Megan. I’m an onboarding coach here at MeetEdgar. So again, we love just to make sure we’re reaching out and knowing our community and one of my favorite parts of my job is being able to talk to all of you followers on social media, being able to talk to all of our account holders here at MeetEdgar about what you’re doing on social media, and this webinar was really inspired by the idea that we are all going through the same thing, finding out these tips and tricks. As I kind of learn along with you guys as we go through this on how Edgar has succeeded and what we’ve learned from our experiments on social media, let us know what’s worked for you as well. We love, again, to chat with the community. So use that chat over on the right-hand side of your screen, and we will go ahead and jump right in.

As I mentioned, this webinar is super exciting and special to us because Edgar does turn four this week and we love, love, love to celebrate with the community here. Again, e-mail [email protected] to go ahead and let us know what you love about Edgar, any feedback that you have about him, as we’re going through and making sure that we’re creating a tool and resources that are valuable for you all. So to find out some really fun discounts we’re also doing to celebrate your email [email protected], and we really want to make sure that, again, we’re creating this great community and this great, great existing content that we really want to make sure we’re getting out there and reaching you guys. So email us. We want to provide you with a little bit of a celebratory vibe to. We’ve got some really fun discounts going on for MeetEdgar right now as well, and we will go ahead and jump in.

So if you’re unfamiliar with the history of Edgar he was created in 2014 with the mission of helping to save professionals and small businesses time and really gain consistency to build a loyal following on social media. So we really came to see that others who were out there were struggling with the same idea that you have so much great content, but getting it out to your followers is also producing so much of a time suck, that you’re not able to engage with your community, and you’re not able to really learn about other aspects of your business. You’ve come to a point where your business is growing and growing, you simply can’t juggle running it and managing all of your social media channels effectively and consistently. During this time we also came up with this idea that we needed a way to do this for our own educational business at the time, and this is kind of how Edgar was born. What we really came to know is that we want to be able to empower the members of the Edgar community on social media, and give them a tool to succeed not only in their content marketing strategy, but make sure that they’re creating time to free up for these focus of points on the other parts of their business that might be getting left to the wayside because you’re too busy checking in on social media constantly, making sure you’re posting.

Edgar really does the trick for you there and creating an automation tool did present a lot of hurdles for us as well because you hear this idea of automating or scheduling your social media, and sometimes that might feel a little bit spammy or that you’re actually not engaging and you’re actually not making sure that you’re being authentic, but we found it’s quite the opposite. When you’re able to get this consistent schedule out there, when you’re able to automate your social media, you still have complete control over everything that you. You’re simply scheduling and publishing each post and nothing more, which means that when you do you spend the time on social media going to that Facebook, going to that Twitter, you can really maximize your authentic human interactions because everything else is already handled and you know that you’re posting when your followers are online and you’re creating that really great engagement with your community.

But before we even chat a little bit about scheduling posts here, the first thing we need to do when creating a social media plan is to make sure that we have all of the social media. So social media doesn’t just become something that’s a, “I’ll get around to,” kind of task. So if you don’t have time for right direction and this right marketing strategy in mind, social media does become a serious times suck. In order to get real traction in getting the benefits of social media marketing, we realized this ourselves and we needed to nail down some holes in the plan. One of the main goals that came out of Edgar and still has today is to gain more traffic to our great content marketing site, whether that be our landing page, offering our features of Edgar, or our blog offering a lot of strategy around social media.

We don’t just send people to sell on Edgar, we want to make sure that every update we’re sending out there is driving traffic to valuable areas of our site. For example, one of our goals here at MeetEdgar with social media is to get more visitors to our site and to convince the visitors that the value we’re offering through Edgar is just as much as the value to your subscription to your account, and having these goals in mind lets us know what we are doing is working, or lets us know when we need to jump ship and maybe try a different strategy. Without these goals we really wouldn’t know what’s working, what social media updates are benefiting our audience and benefiting our company goals. We’ve found out you can tell pretty quickly if you have goals established, if something is going well.

It may take some time to build up some big numbers and followers and get that energy going in the right direction, but we’ve found that it’s useful to have these goals in mind to know when things aren’t working, so we stop right away and not waste our time on things that our audience isn’t finding interesting, or engagement, or is not grabbing their attention because let’s be real guys, social media is really all about this idea of attention trading. People have the ability to follow so many accounts, they have the ability to spend their free time and their time on entertainment in so many different ways, that social media is really the ability that gives you to grab their attention and say, “Hey, we’re worth following.” This not only helps us as a business but it helps make sure that all of you as followers are getting this useful and engaging information to not only entertain you, but also inform. So that kind of brings this idea to this infotainment idea.

So if you don’t have any of these goals established now, please don’t freak out it’s and don’t get overwhelmed. We want to start small and you can kind of ditch this idea that you need a huge complex marketing plan with a gazillion pages of information written down. Instead, let’s start simple. Here at Edgar we drafted a simple plan with clearly defined goals based upon some of these questions you see on the screen here. So, remember that the tactics you employ to reach these objectives may evolve, so having these questions in mind as you start to learn more about your community and revisiting them every once in a while is an awesome strategy that we use here at Edgar too.

You need to know what you’re working towards by asking something like, “What’s the 411 [00:09:00] on your market? How do you differ from your competitors? How is your voice unique in that way?” Who is your ideal target audience? That’s going to be huge. Developing these personas, so you’re speaking right to the people who are taking the time to follow you. I mean, what’s important to your customers? What is really something that’s going to have them spark that emotional connection with your brands and what do you want to accomplish in the next three, to six, to twelve months? Having that long roadmap built out makes sure that you’re not losing sight of the overall goals you’re setting, and which market is an initiative that you’re doing on social media will really get you there. Last, social media is an awesome platform that we are all so lucky to be able to have as a free tool to market our site, but you can also put a few dollars spent behind that. So developing a budget, as well, as you’re going into this to know which of those posts that are working well you can boost to reach those lookalike audiences and really connect with the right numbers on social media, so you can provide them value.

Cool. From there, everything we do on social media is related back to these goals that those questions really helped us establish. So this diagram on the screen that you see here is actually a cool visualization kind of, of these goals, and how we accomplish them. So you can kind of see that we don’t accomplish them with just promotional posts after promotional post leading back to our sign up page, we actually go out there and prove our value by promoting updates that will lead people to valuable blog content where they can learn, and they can self-select if they’re a great fit for our brand.

If we’re doing our job correctly on social media from the blog posts that we’re putting out there, from the inspirational posts that we’re putting out there, from the inside look at how Edgar works with our tool, it really has these updates, answer those questions that might be, “Hey, is this company right for me to engage with? Is this company right for me to have that following with?” And getting these questions answered really helps build that trust among our followers, that we show you all these updates are going to add value, and our product is going to add that much value as well.

You’ll really increase the likelihood of people clicking through on your links if you’re creating really valuable content that people want to follow. Remember that this also includes that you want to be able to talk to your audience, and have a conversation in an authentic tone. Each one of these updates that you’re seeing on this diagram here, those little kind of death star looking bubbles out on the right-hand side there, are updates that are going to make sure that our brand is coming off as valuable and authentic. Just remember, again, these aren’t just postings about our business and what’s going on, it’s about really making sure that our followers aren’t bored, but it’s also about making sure that you’re linking to your new blog posts, and you’re linking out to people who really want to follow you. These status updates mean that we really want to make sure that you’re telling your audience about why you matter in your industry.

So kind of use that as a filter as you’re going through this, and remember, every once in a while you can then earn the right to promote your business, to let people know if you’re running a sale. People don’t want to just be bored with promotional posts after promotional posts, but if you go ahead and you create value in all these other posts, you’re able to earn that promotional post. Directing people back to that valuable blog content where they can then self-select if they want to join your newsletter, if they want to join your product, sign up for anything that you’re offering there, and it’s a great way, again, to build trust. That you’re not just there on social media to sell people, but you’re there to really make sure that you’re finding the right audience for your brand.

Cool. Another thing that kind of goes along with this value added is to remember how you set up your social accounts is important too. This is a kind of screen shot of our Twitter page here. You can see here on our Twitter account that we have a pinned tweet at the top. This is for our social media blogging e-book. It’s a really awesome resource if you guys haven’t checked it out, be sure to. What it actually does is helps you create a content, a really great killer content strategy, so you’re not overwhelmed with the amount of blog posts you’re getting out there, and kind of develops the idea of how we created our blog. We know it provides value to our members because so many of you are out there making sure that you’re creating great content.

When we pin this to the top of our page here, we’re letting people know, “Hey, we care about you. We want to make sure that you’re getting all this valuable content.” Another added benefit here is that when people click on this link that’s pinned to the top of our page, you’re directed right to our blog where you’re able to go ahead and put in your email address to receive this email, making sure that we’re increasing our email list, so we can provide more value in the future, and make sure that you stay in touch with us when we do have some really great things going on that you should know about to really help your business.

Think about some of the strongest, kind of, free content that you guys have out there. Whether it’s an info graphic, whether it’s an e-book, and pin that to the top of your page, so that when people go to your Twitter account when they’re researching products and checking it out, they know right away the type of content you’ll be posting and the type of value you will be offering them.

You can kind of see that having these goals in mind is so, so important for everything that you do on social media and I really don’t want you to leave today thinking, “That’s nice, it worked for Edgar.” Because remember four years ago Edgar was born and we went through this process ourselves. We really ramped up Edgar’s user base on social media. We estimated that we got over $600,000 in revenue, just in off of social media advertising, and organic updates. Definitely as we’re going through this pull out your pen and paper, and make a plan yourself because we don’t want you guys to miss out on any of this. We want you to succeed so, so bad. Please don’t wait another day, and know this stuff is really powerful and really works.

As we were kind of talking about here, we mentioned trust a lot in these webinars, and I wanted to touch base on this here as we’re going through this sneak peak of MeetEdgar as well because trust is really how we built up this great following, and got to that awesome revenue number just off of social media updates.

To gain these customers and create this community, the main thing that we focused on is making sure we were grabbing the attention long enough to build trust and show up as an expert in our industry. So you know that everything we do, not only make sure that we’re caring about you, but offers that expert kind of niche advice that’s so important for our community. Whether it’s breaking down some complex idea like an algorithm change that we all get so frustrated about on Facebook and Twitter and keeping up with the face-paced changing on social networks, breaking that down into an understandable concept, or even sharing something like our founder Laura here going on to a podcast. It builds trust that, “Hey, we are always being in this thought leadership side, making sure that we’re getting out there and researching what’s going on on social media, and making sure that we’re talking with people in the industry to really provide value to you guys when these changes do come up.” It’s really about letting your audience know that you’re there, and you’re real, and you’re live for them.

Make sure that you’re not just kind of a fake computer screen and social media account, but there’s a human behind that screen to connect with. We’ve said it before and we’ll keep on saying it, people do not buy from companies and brands, they buy from people. We want to make sure that that all important no like and trust factor is really established through every social media update that you’re putting out there, and that definitely comes into play when you’re loading up your Edgar library, and that’s something we really take into account when we’re creating our status updates and schedules, to build that level of trust. To make sure that you’re purchasing decision is really made easy for you because you trust us as a company, you trust us an expert in our industry, and you make sure that you know we care about you as followers.

The more you’re able to kind of keep your followers around with this content, the more likely it is that you’ll be able to build that trust. A strategy for doing this is also to make sure that you’re kind of speaking right to your followers. People want to be able to see their story in your status updates. This is an example of one that we’ve kind of taken through this lens of; How can we make sure people are seeing this story, and their pain points in our social media update here?

You can see here it says, “If you’re trying to pitch a guest post, this is for you.” It’s speaking right to our followers. If you are someone who’s trying to get your content out there to other influencers, you’re going to see yourself in this story and you’re going to want to click through, and you’re going to have that curiosity sparked to make sure that we’re not actually just providing this Facebook preview, but making sure we’re telling you, “This is directly for you.” It’s okay if this doesn’t speak to everyone in your audience. What we want to get across here is that we’re speaking to a specific portion of our audience who are going to gain so much value from this, and maybe the next social media update will speak to someone else in that way.

Don’t be afraid about accomplishing and making everyone happy with every single social media update. That might be a kind of common disaster of this idea of, when you’re trying to make everyone happy, no one’s happy. Make sure every social media update you’re putting in here is speaking directly to someone who you know is a part of your persona, and who you know is going to read that and say, “Yes that’s me. Yes, this will provide me value,” and really make sure that it’s compelling so they want to click through and see that post.

One way that you can really make sure you’re actually speaking and being relatable in those status updates like that one we just spoke about, is to use things like you’re Facebook insights and your Twitter analytics. If you haven’t checked this out yet in your own account, it’s so super simple. Just go to your Facebook page, and there’s a little insights tab on the top navigation bar there, and you’ll notice on the left-hand side bar that that drop down menus has a people tab. If you click on this people tab, you’re able to really gain a ton of information about your followers, whether it be the gender that they’re in, the gender that they’re in, or even things as much as making sure you know what other interests they have.

Twitter is awesome for this as well. If you go to Analytics. Twitter.com, you’ll also notice they have an audience tab at the top of their account. Now these things are built into the social networks. Both Facebook and Twitter provide you with this information, and you can kind of think of this as a way that it’s the social networks telling you they want you to speak to your followers. It benefits you to get this information. So don’t pass this opportunity up to learn about the types of content that your followers like to engage with, and the other interests they have, so you can really speak every single social media update into that story that they have in their head.

For example, here at MeetEdgar, we’ve don’t this a ton of times where we’re constantly making sure we’re providing value for who our audience is, and with our social media updates on Facebook and on Twitter, we’ve learned these statistics that you see over on the right-hand side of your screen, so that we’re making sure our interests are really speaking to the entrepreneurial spirit. Really speaking to what’s changing in technology and business and start ups. This makes sense to us, but having this validated, again, really helps make sure that you’re content strategy is solid and speaking to your audience specifically.

Cool. Once you have that audience established and you’re feeling really confident about loading up your social media updates in your library, the next step is to make sure that you’re really speaking in a reliable way and that you’ve established this tone and responsibility of showing up for your followers when they are online. This is kind of what the scheduling portion of MeetEdgar has helped us with. Thinking about this idea that people are taking time out of their day to click that follow button and make sure that they are following your brand to get your status updates, so make sure that you’re showing up for them when they’re there. Using Edgar as the tool really helps us do that. You can kind of see the schedule here that we have, just as a sample schedule on how making sure on a category base system you are reliable for your followers.

Maybe every Monday morning you know your followers might be dreading their week, so hit them with that inspirational quote. Maybe after work they’ll have time to click through to that blog post. Test having some of that longer content at times you think that people will be able to actually gain value and read it. Maybe at night before they go to bed they’re going to be checking their phone and kind of wanting to zone out, so ask a question that might not have anything to do with your business, but let’s you chat with your followers at these off times during the day. Kind of get creative of when you’re testing putting these different time slots on your schedule, and make sure that you’re knowing the most important thing that people are looking for when they’re on social media are brands that are going to provide that reliable and valuable content. No one wants to kind of follow a brand that’s just going to be there to follow, and it’s not showing up with this valuable content in their newsfeed when they’re online.

Kind of think about that as you’re going through and setting up your schedule as well when the different types of updates are there to be reliable and really create that consistent engagement that you’re followers can count on week after week. Using Edgar as a tool really lets you help to provide that information, and that value to your followers. An important thing here is to make sure when you’re posting something funny and irrelevant at these times, you’re next post should really be something that will lead back to your blog and lead back to your site. You can kind of see that pattern play out here over this weeks schedule. What this really ensures and has helped us do here at Edgar, is that we’re getting back on message after we’ve created our followers that might have a bigger audience involvement. They might like that inspiration or funny content, and that might inspire them to share that on their own page. That next update is bringing it back to our message, bringing it back to that value added business content.

It will also help you weed out followers who aren’t going to benefit from your business. We chatted a little bit about this idea of self-selecting in, so make sure that you’re not afraid out there who you’re business is actually for and you can then make sure that you’re driving relevant traffic to your site. If you lose followers, if you do anything that’s really letting people know who your business is for, they probably weren’t going to want to engage with your brand anyway. So don’t be afraid to let people know who your business is really going to benefit after you’re trying to get back on message after posting some of these more diverse kind of status updates on the funny side or inspirational side that way.

If you guys are kind of coming up with this idea of, “Hey, I don’t know what categories I should post? That slide went by so quickly.” When you log into Edgar, you will notice that we have some pre-established categories as well. These are kind of out of this beginning when Edgar first was born, the things that worked well for us.

We’ve diversified our content categories and really made them quite specific over the years, but take these categories as a great starting point if you are feeling overwhelmed at all, and make sure when you’re kind of posting on the schedule you’re getting that great mix in there. When you are kind of scheduling with these categories, it is important to remember that batching your updates is going to be one of the biggest time savers that we have found at social media. Again, we’ve named some of our categories but what it essentially allows us to do is to pop into our Edgar library, and add status updates to each of these, and then make sure that we know, “Hey, these categories are going to be going out on a weekly basis. It looks like we might need more content for the blog post categories, or the tips category.” It allows you to then get in that frame of mind and load up for maybe an hour a day, a bunch of updates into those categories that need refreshing, rather than having the kind of task, switch, and sign out, and sign in to your social media tasks. It’s a great way to not online streamline your creative efficiency, but also make sure that you’re not breaking during the day.

Cool, cool, cool. Starting out here, again, getting back to this don’t get overwhelmed idea. Here at Edgar at the beginning, this is something we experimented and found really helpful as we were getting to know our audience too. Having these planned categories helped us simplify the process, and know what to post so we don’t get overwhelmed as well. Taking a look here. If you’re struggling to come up with content, you can use this simple process. Looking at the map here, say you’re going to do six updates a day for five days a week. For the record, that is a lot of updates. You probably don’t need to do that many, but it’s a great place to start to know when you’re followers are online and what type of content they like to engage with at specific times.

If you did this strategy to start with here, that only means getting 30 updates a week written. You can definitely pound out getting 30 updates of valuable content written in your Edgar library every week. Breaking this out even more with this little math here, with four weeks in a month, that’s going to add up to 120 total updates per month. Even though you might not be driving traffic directly to your site with each update you’re adding here, it’s going to help you build awareness, and it’s going to help you get your name out there for 120 times every month. Making sure that you’re not getting overwhelmed with that 120 number, remember that only consists of you having to log into your Edgar account and get 30 updates a week added in there.

So we have found this as a really valuable process to make sure that we’re, again, getting out there to our members, but in a way that keeps us sane and keeps us focused on other parts of our business, like researching social media, creating that great blog content, and interacting with our members. If you are just getting started, again, or you’re creating a killer blog and you want to make sure that you have time to make other updates, you can still kind of think about this other idea that if you have one blog post, you can break it down into different types of content as well. Think about this idea, if you’re struggling or getting overwhelmed with, you can sit down and kind of think of maybe 12 blog topics that you have, and plot them out on a calender. You can see these 12 blog topics, whether you write them as a headline or just idea based system. You can then set yourself up for the next three months with these next 12 updates.

All you need to do is come up with 12 ideas and things that your customers might want to read about, and once you have these 12 updates it gets a little bit easier then to break it down into, “Okay, what is this one idea going to be able to do to instruct my members on how to use my product better?” Or, “Hey, what is this one idea going to be out in the industry right now? What are they saying about this?” Research that on Google to add in your own kind of commentary to this. Again, make sure that you’re breaking things down into little chunks where you’re really able to get your social media strategy set up, like we have here at Edgar, and it’s really helped us, again, streamline things so, so much.

Along with this idea of getting different types of content out of these 12 ideas that you’ve come up with, we’ve put a lot of work into making sure that those blog posts, and those ideas and concepts that we’re creating are also recycled in different formats on our social media. This can be anything like creating different images and photos for the social networks. If you’re sending people to Facebook, maybe they want to see an image or maybe they want to see a link. Maybe you can add a YouTube video into your LinkedIn profile or into your Twitter account that’s talking a lot about a blog post you just wrote. There’s a ton of ways you can get more content out of stuff you’re already writing with those 12 blog concepts that you came up with. We also want to make sure you’re keeping things evergreen when you’re writing these.

Keeping this concept of repurposing your content in mind, as you’re starting to develop your post has really helped us here at Edgar. Everything we do on our blog, we want to make sure is going to provide value no matter what time of year it is sent out at, and that’s that idea of evergreen content right there. This way we can always pull tips from it, we can always go back to it, and re share it with our followers to make sure those who didn’t see it the first time are able to see it, and maybe those who didn’t have time to click on it the first time, or it didn’t show up in their feed the first time are able to still gain value from that.

Make sure, again, that any content that you’re getting and producing is leveraged in the right way on social media, in your newsletters, pulled out quotes from it, added them to fancy backgrounds in Canva or something, to again make sure you’re getting the most out of all the hard work you’re putting into the content that you’re creating.
This is another idea of that category or, excuse me, that network specific content you can get out of each of the value added posts you’re doing. So Edgar, again, it’s our birthday. We want to make sure that you guys are staying exited about that, and we could just do something like go ahead and produce these updates to let people know that we’re running a really great deal on the Edgar right now to celebrate his birthday, and we could just do this with a link leading back to where you’re going to go ahead and claim this giveaway discount. But we could also do this to make sure that we’re stopping people in their track as they’re scrolling through Twitter by adding in these static images as well. As you’re scrolling through Twitter a lot of the time it’s just going to be update after update in your feed, and maybe something like having a photo here will rise about that Twitter noise and be able to stop people to be able to look at it, and be like, “Oh, this is a celebratory moment, let’s connect with this brand I like.”

Again, think about different ways you can make it exciting and kind of stand out from the other things that are going on in the feeds of social media. This, again, goes back to that idea of getting the most out of your content. So headline generation is something we do a ton here at MeetEdgar, and this idea is just that you can sit down with a blog post you wrote, and think of 12 different headlines you could name this blog post. Sit down and kind of either have them in a spreadsheet or Google Doc, and write them all out after you finish that blog post. Brainstorming how the headline would be able to peak curiosity, but still give people that idea of what they’re going to receive when they click through and receive that blog post, is related to that idea you’re producing in your headline.

When you’re thinking, “What else could I have put in here as my headline?” You can also use this as a social media status update now. This is a screenshot here over on the right-hand side of our MeetEdgar library, and you can see when we’re sharing our blog posts we’ve titled it, “Why it might be time to rethink you’re email newsletter strategy.” But our actual content we’re putting in the post says, “When it comes to your newsletter, how much content is too much?” This came from not only being able to brainstorm the best title for our blog post, but that work you did with this exercise of generating multiple headlines for a blog post, can now be used as that status update. This might be able to grab people who are going to be attracted to a different verb that you used or a different adjective, or see themself in the story a little bit better in one headline or the other, increasing your likelihood of having that status update and headline in the same post, of people connecting with it and really, again, seeing their story in every update you’re putting out there.

Make sure you’re sitting down, getting those content categories loaded up, and making sure that you’re not only brainstorming to come up with the best headline for your blog post, but also using that experiment with these brainstorms to provide more and more content and more different content in your social media updates. With these headlines that you did generate here, we also want to make sure that you’re getting out there and testing what’s working well and what people are being attracted to with the words you’re using. One thing that we like to say a lot in the start up world, but you can take into any world, whether it’s product, whether it’s e-commerce, anything at all, is to AB test things. When you’re using this headline generation, make sure that you’re doing things like adding in a blog post link with a different image or adding in that blog post link with a different call to action, and seeing with Edgar that we’re able to put out a blog post like that on the same day every week, and see which one gets more clicks informing us, “Okay, this is the kind of language that our audience really likes to see.”

You can do this as a small business who’s just getting started out with your organic posts pretty easily, but one of the ways this becomes really valuable is if you are running ads on Facebook, to set yourself this goal of getting the ad in front of maybe a 1,000 people, and that ad can be paired with maybe one headline and an image. Then setting up a second ad to get it in front of a different group of a 1,000 people with that same headline but a separate image, and see which of those perform better. Using your organic posting, and your ad strategy posting in this way to inform each other which images your audiences are really compelled to click on, what language is really working to connect with and make your story shine on social media. So again, all of this kind of content generation, all of this is going to lead back to really increasing the likelihood that you’re speaking to your audience so that they’re actually able to gain this awesome valuable information from you.

Another way you can test this with your organic posts, if you’re running this AB test within Edgar, if we do have a link shortener options. If you go to your settings in your Edgar account, we do have the every ed.gr link shortener set up on ours, which works the exact same way that Bentley, and Rebrandlydoes. In that it’s going to track the amount of clicks people are clicking through on those links that you’re sharing. The benefit of this is we can then see a graph charted out of when and how many people clicked on a certain post. This will be accumulated over time, so if this post has been shared multiple times, we’re able to see if it was shared in the morning one day, how many clicks it received versus the evening one day, how many clicks it received? Again, informing us more and more about when we should be posting for when our audience is really able and ready to engage with our social posts.

If you’re unsure of what link shortener might be right for you or how to use this, definitely let us know at, email support at MeetEdgar.com and we can get you set up with the right one to really benefit your business.
Up cycling with images. We touched on this again. This, again, is content right from the MeetEdgar library here, and you can see these kind of full quotes that we have pulled out are attached with images that are actually providing value right in the post itself. So you can see the images is going to go ahead and provide you with a valuable content tip, and it may, again, stop people in their tracks when they’re able to see this as just an image. We are able to have a really talented designer here at MeetEdgar to help us create these, but it’s not something you have to hire another person to do. There are so many free tools out there like Canva. There’s so many free tools that you’re able to overlay quotes and tips on fun backgrounds. So make sure you’re going out there, researching which platforms might be right for you to spend maybe an hour a week getting these tips out in your blog posts, overlaid on some fun images, and providing value right within the social network.
That’s something that we’re experimenting with all the time as well. Make sure that you’re getting that value out within the tips here, so that people might, who don’t have time to actually click through to your blog post, are still able to get those nuggets of knowledge that you’re producing there.

Curation. Within MeetEdgar, this here is our RSF feed reader within our account. The RSF feed reader is really powerful, in that it’s able to bring in blog posts automatically when they’re not only released from you blog, but when they’re released from other people’s blogs that might be relevant for your followers to know about as well. So here you can see we share things from blogging websites that offer blogging tips, as well as technology news. Remember from that Facebook analytics, and Twitter analytics we were able to gain a lot of information about the types of content that our followers like, whether it be marketing, blogging, technology, all of those things, lead us to create this RSF feed.

How we set this up in our account here, you can see, any blog post that’s released to the feeds we’ve added is sent to what we call our pending que. In our pending que, we’re then able to scroll through any new blog posts that came out that week, and we can approve them as posts that we’d like to share. Now our strategy here at Edgar is to approve anything that we know is going to provide value, but also to add in our own commentary to it. To make sure that we’re giving props to the blog posts, tweeting right at them, adding their handle into that post, and letting our followers know the value we gain from it while reading it.

We can, again, go through and make sure we’re selecting relevant content for our followers, adding in our own commentary, and sharing that out to social media in a really systemized way. Curated content, again, is really something that’s so important to show your followers that you’re interested in giving them the best information at the right time, and it’s also this idea of if you’re producing this curated content on your social media, it saves your followers so much time from having to Google it and go out there and seek it out themselves. So make sure that you’re adding all these RSF feeds, that you’re looking around and seeing are going to be really relevant to your followers into your Edgar account, so that you can really diversify your content and show your followers the value that we’ll make them successful. Here is also another thing that we really love to do with our own MeetEdgar account, and that is to get our team involved.

So Laura Roeder, the creator of MeetEdgar, we have her personal LinkedIn and Twitter accounts actually connected into MeetEdgar as well. What this helps accomplish is to make sure we’re consistently posting to her profiles to keep Edgar human. Again, this isn’t to trick the system in any way, this isn’t anything that we’re trying to automate, we’re trying to automate to save her time to free up to really engage with the community, and learn what they want from Edgar, to really help plot out and really help produce a product that’s going to be valuable to you no matter what’s going on in social media.

Within Edgar we do have time sets set up that are dedicated to her posts, specifically, but these are going to be more kind of about thought leadership. Posting and driving traffic to something that’s going to be really, really great for the community to see her as an expert in the industry, and seeing her as an expert will really help build trust for MeetEdgar as well. Knowing that it’s created by someone who cares about keeping up with social media, and who cares about being our thought leader in this industry.

We can set up different schedules in Edgar, again, making sure we’re posting really relevant content to Laura’s own LinkedIn accounts, and then within our LinkedIn accounts here at MeetEdgar, it might be a little bit more precise. It might look something like our other social media accounts that we use for promoting all the great blog content we have. So the more kind of variety that we can provide in Laura’s account, and the more kind of specific industry knowledge and philosophies that we’re able to send out onto our own LinkedIn account, really making sure that using a schedule and automating with MeetEdgar in this way is able to keep those things separate so that we’re providing relevant content to each of those accounts, and the followers know what they’re going to get on each of those accounts.

Make sure, again, you’re doing this specifically not only for the profiles, but for the actual network. You’re a small business, so you might choose to really promote on Facebook as a place to share news, and blog posts, and how-to videos, and help educate your audience. You might see LinkedIn as more of a way to establish your expertise and to show your company culture in that way. Get your team involved, add in personal profiles of really great thought leaders, or influencers within your company who are really going to be able to connect and spread your message to their own networks as well. Cool.

Stories. This is something that, of course, is a really great place to experiment with because stories are time boxed. So here at MeetEdgar, we don’t do stories through MeetEdgar at this time, however this is a great place to come up with different kinds of content, and create that kind of scarcity and authenticity within your Facebook and Instagram for stories. Make sure that while you’re kind of scheduling out these updates within MeetEdgar, taking care of those value added posts, that you’re available to start to go in and experiment with different types of inspirational behind the scenes content, anything that will really help to get to know your followers. That kind of authentic not super polished side of yourself, leading back to this idea of building more trust with your community.

Doing Instagram and Facebook stories, again, is another way to not only get types of content that you see people liking there, but it’s also a way that you’re able to learn different tactics. So don’t think of it as a waste of time at all to try out these new features that are being released, it’ll really help you inform the types of posts that are then be able to be a little bit more polished, and show up on your actual Facebook and actual Twitter feed. So use these new technologies. It’s a great way to experiment. It’s a great way to show that behind the scenes content with your community.

Cool. We’ve gone over this idea of evergreen posts a lot now, and we want to talk a little bit more about how we do actual seasonal promotions and special events at MeetEdgar. So seasonal promotions and special events are really important to make sure that you’re, again, speaking right into what’s going on in the world, everything that’s kind of going back to this idea that people can see their story in their social media updates. Here at MeetEdgar, we can sit down and actually load in every single holiday for the whole year into our use once category in MeetEdgar. That way we can make sure that we’re not skipping a holiday, even if it’s something as goofy as, “Hey, this Saturday actually, true story, is social media day.” So we can go ahead and make sure that we have that in our MeetEdgar library, so we’re not missing even these quirky holidays.

It’s a great way to not only get those one off posts into MeetEdgar, but a great way to make sure, “Hey, if we’re going on vacation over the Christmas Holiday, we’re still posting this relevant and timely Christmas themed posts,” because MeetEdgar is able to take care of that, [00:43:30] and we’ve done that months ago as we were loading in all of the holidays for the year. It’s a great way, again, to make sure that every status update that you’re sending with automation stays really timely to connect with your followers as well.

Not only should this kind of be used as holiday specific posts, it can also be used as posts that are really kind of seasonal promotions. Here you can see is one of our cyber Monday deals, and how you’re going to go ahead and set this up in MeetEdgar is you can add this post to your content library under seasonal category that might be named Cyber Monday posts. That way you’re able to, again, sit down and develop something that the post will add value and make sure it’s timely, and we have this awesome feature in MeetEdgar that we use, that’s to set it at a specific date and time.

We can set this post to go out at a specific date and time, again, staying relevant and really making sure that we’re getting the value of this discount out to our community at the time that it matters. So sit down, think of creative ways that you can get special promotions in that are going to speak to the timeliness of what’s going on, and really make sure that you’re not just kind of struggling and haphazardly putting these out there at the busy holiday Cyber Monday time, rather they’re all neatly scheduled within your MeetEdgar library.
The other thing that you can do with more event and seasonal content on MeetEdgar is actually create seasonal categories. So the last couple of examples we chatted about were for a use once category. So that update will go out once, you’ve set a specific date and time for it to go out, but we also have these categories that we might want to be able to repeat this content over a specific period. One example here is how we generate really great excitement for webinars, specifically.

We want to make sure this awareness is getting out there, so you guys are able to know where you should be at what time. This category can now be popped onto our schedule at the time before the webinar’s run all the way up to the webinar, to make sure that it’s getting out to our followers at different times of day, collecting people who will be interested in it. Once that webinar is over, we’re able to pop into our schedule and remove that time slot from the schedule so those posts aren’t going out anymore, but they’re still living in our library, which means we’re able to reuse them if we ever need to promote this webinar again in the future.

Again, it’s all about making sure that you’re getting the valuable information out to your followers, but also making sure that the hard work that you’re putting into your status updates here are not just kind of a one time thing, they’re being stored somewhere so you can be systemized in the future as well.

Other things that we really like to do here at Edgar is make sure that we are providing you with answers to your pain points, and to your questions. This can be something challenging as you’re started out to come up with. So strategy [inaudible 00:46:28] going out there and Googling different frequently [inaudible 00:46:30] industry. Doing something like saying, “Frequently asked questions,” might [inaudible 00:46:37] to see what’s going on and to see what kind of answers people are seeking. So we can, again, make sure that that status updates that we’re putting out there are speaking to your pain points and your stories.

Consider making sure that you’re going out there, seeing what kind of information your followers want from the web, from social media, and adding those into your account. Another thing that we do here at MeetEdgar is make sure that we’re adding in testimonials to our site a lot. This is not only going to be a way that we’re able to show, “Hey, our tool is really valuable for people,” it also goes to that way of saying, “Hey, out tool is valuable for people like you.” This is that idea that if your friends, if people you respect in the industry are also liking the tool, are also seeing value in it, then we have that kind of idea that we want to share this to make sure that we’re giving you that peace of mind that you are the right person, that you are here in this community and bonding, and really kind of gaining all this insight that people have found valuable.

Think about some of the best people in your industry who use your tool or who buy your product, and make sure you’re asking them for their opinions on it so you can create these awesome posts to let other people know this is the value they’ve gained from it, and again, this allows people to self-select if they are right for your product or not.

Another really cool thing we do at MeetEdgar is we post a lot about our job posting. This is not only to make sure that we’re attracting really talented people to work at MeetEdgar, it’s also one of the biggest share worthy content pieces that we have. Why is this so share worthy? It’s because people want to be helpful for people in their networks. If they have someone who they know is looking for a job in social media, or is looking to work for a remote tech company, they’re more likely to share that post to their friend, share it out to their network, really making sure the awareness of what MeetEdgar does, not only internally, but also externally is provided to a broader source.

Make sure you’re not only just focusing on status updates that are related back to your blog and back to your landing pages, but about your company culture, and about job postings. This is going to be something awesome that people will start to tag other people in and share out to the community providing them value.

Awesome. More updates that you can kind of think about as you’re starting to load up your library and get you own categories set up is here at Edgar we like to ask a lot of questions. Questions not only let you know that we want to engage with you so much, we want to talk to you on social media, but it also let’s us gain a little bit of knowledge into what you guys are thinking and into what our followers are really into. Get that engagement out there. So much of the time we sit here being like, “Oh, no one’s commenting on any of my posts,” but we’re not asking any questions and inviting people to comment on those posts. So make sure that you’ve sat down and seen all your status updates in your library and said, “Am I inviting people to actually comment on this?” That can be a great way to not only get questions that are industry specific into your account and out onto your social media accounts, it can also be a really great way to get a little bit of your personality in there.

Again, personality is going to be so, so strong in getting people to connect and trust your brand, and getting that human-to-human interaction that’s so great for selling on social media, and so great for creating that authenticity here. Go ahead and think of questions that might not be industry specific, but might show a little bit about your personality and offer that awesome insight. We’ve talked so much about adding great types of valuable content into these categories, and making sure you’re really sitting down and creating a solid plan. When you guys are going throughout this, think about the types of categories that are going out and making sure you’re scheduling them on a consistent basis to really free up time and to engage with your followers. Realize that ultimately automating your social media this way was not only a way that you’re able to respect the time you and your employees have in your business, it’s also going to respect the time of your followers, making sure that your status updates are planned in a really great way that’s providing them value and getting the engagement that they want to be able to talk about themselves and they want to be able to see themselves in every update that you’re putting out there.

It’s important to also remember, again, that it’s all about live interaction. So make sure you’re taking the time then to maybe time box out 20 minutes at the end of [inaudible 00:51:18] throughout the day to go on and check to see what people are replying to, how they’re answering your questions. What they’re asking for, and the time that you’re saving on having Edgar post to these will free up your time then to get a little more specific and individualized. It’s not all about just [inaudible 00:51:37] out there. It’s about talking one-on-one to your followers as well. Having this schedule set up allows you to free up the time to do that. We found so much fun in doing this as well.

It’s not something that we here at Edgar see as anything but a really fun activity. You can see here how playful we get on social media. Developing our brand personality, getting that humor out there, and speaking directly to our followers. Taking a time to reply individually like we did here on this tweet, is really a great way to show people that we want their engagement and will really increase the likelihood that they will respond to us in the future.

Another example here is making sure that we’re staying really, really on brand with our humor. We have a great style guide, if you haven’t checked out the other webinar on brand style guide, our content manager Tom did a great job kind of guest hosting that webinar and there’s a lot of valuable information he answered for us. So go ahead and check that out, but it allows us to go ahead and made sure that everything we’re replying to here is really on our brand message. When we reply to people and when we’re engaging with people, it’s also going to be a great signal to the algorithm of, “Hey, this person wants to see more from this brand.”

As we’re kind of on this point of algorithms, everything you’re posting on social media, we of course want to make sure you’re showing up for the amount of people who are going to see it, but I also want to make sure you’re understanding that we don’t [inaudible 00:53:04] for the algorithm’s sake. The best way to kind of future proof your social media, and make sure that you’re not only posting to the machines algorithm is to connect optically, like this one-on-one post does. If you’re doing this, the followers and the brand loyalty will definitely come.

Guys, this has been so much fun getting to share Edgar’s social media strategy with you. Again, we are turning four and we are so excited about the journey that we have been on, and what we’ve learned on our own social media strategy and how we can help small businesses be successful in theirs. Like I said, we’re doing a lot of really fun things for our social-

Social Share
Categories

Get Actionable Social Media Advice (And Not Too Much of It!)
Get EdgarNews, your monthly social media to-do list, delivered straight to your inbox.

Never Run Out
of Stuff to
Post on Social

MeetEdgar scheduling software automatically pulls posts from your content library to keep your social fresh everyday, on repeat.

Leave a Reply