Transcript for How to Engage and Build Your Audience on Social
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Hey guys. Thanks for joining the webinar today. We’ll get started here in a couple of minutes. I appreciate your patience as the last few people kind of trickle on in. Hey guys. Thanks for joining the webinar today. We’ll get started here in a couple of minutes. I appreciate your …
We can do it right here.
All right. I see a few more people trickling on in here and we really appreciate your patience as we wait for a couple more stragglers kind of join on in so everyone can participate in the webinar today. My colleague Jess is actually going to do the chat so if you guys have any questions at all during the webinar, we love hearing from the community so pop on over to the chat on the right side of your screen here on YouTube. Join in, ask us questions. Let us know what’s been working for you. Share your strategies that has been working with the Edgar Community.
We are definitely all interested in what’s going on in social media, as it’s one of the fastest changing networks out there. Things happen so, so quickly so definitely share your own experiences and we’re super excited to get started on this particular webinar. That’s going to be about, how you’re going to really engage and build your audience on social media to really make sure that you’re connecting with your members in an authentic way and really making sure that all the hard work you’re putting into your updates does not go to waste.
Like I said, we’ll get started here in one minute but definitely let us know who’s here, shout out what industry you’re in, let us know what’s going on in the chat box to the right of your screen now. All right guys, it is coming up here on 10 AM. Pacific Time, 1 PM Eastern Time and we are so excited that you made time today to join us in this webinar, going over how you’re going to engage and build your audience on social media. This is such a cool topic that we’re going to cover today, just because again, marketing on social media is something that all of you can do so well.
To really help increase not only the leads that you’re getting and gain new followers but to nurture the community you already have and really show up for your followers in a meaningful way. We’ll go over some of those strategies today but like I said, we like to get to know you too. Use that chat on the right side of your screen, ask us questions. Let us know what you’re working on, what goals you guys have been kind of checking away at here on your social media strategy and my colleague, Jess will answer any questions you have. As we’re going along here too, we are randomly going to pick one of you guys who participate to get some MeetEdgar Swag.
This little guy right here on this T-shirt you see, if you’re not a MeetEdgar user yet is our little mascot Edgar and he is awesome at helping to manage and automate your social media. He is one of our favorite little helpers in this world so we’d love to get you some swag to wear loud and proud out there in the real world.
Definitely participate, get your opportunity to get some Edgar Swag. Do that by asking questions, like I said, share what’s been working for you with your strategies on the right-hand side of the screen. My colleague, Jess will be answering those. She is an awesome resource and does a lot of our marketing and our customer experience here at MeetEdgar.
My name is Megan and I actually do a lot of our onboarding so if you do have an Edgar account or if you ever wanted to meet for a demo on a Screen Share, if you’ve used Edgar before, you know he’s a pretty flexible platform so we’d love to go over different workflows with you guys to make sure that everything within Edgar is working just perfectly for your business. That’s what I do here a little bit at MeetEdgar. The customer experience team here at Edgar doesn’t just like to kind of set you up with your account and forget you. We like to really nurture and make sure you’re getting the most out of your MeetEdgar account so reach out to us at any time, [email protected] is how you reach us here.
We’ll jump right into the webinar. Like I said, participate, email us, let us know what topics you’re interested in, in the future as well as we do go along with this webinar series. Cool, so today, a little bit of what we’re going to cover is why it’s so important to get this engagement on social media, is because what you’re doing out there is really competing for people’s time and attention. There is so much noise online. There is so much going on in the entertainment world whether it’s Netflix, social media related, magazines even. Now, what you’re doing on social is really making sure that people are taking time out of their day to engage with your content.
We’ll go over some strategies, how you can really make sure that the time you’re spending is grabbing people’s attention, grabbing that valuable time that they’re spending on social media, to interact with your brand. While doing this, we also want to make sure your followers aren’t feeling overwhelmed. They’re going to social media to escape from their day, to connect with their friends and family, to find the little knowledge or solace in there. We want to make sure all those truth bombs you’re dropping, all of that great content marketing that you’re doing out there is being seen in a way that isn’t overwhelming, isn’t salesy, isn’t pushy but adding value to everyone’s day.
Everything that they do when they come to social media and interact with your brand is something that’s going to give them that value added content. We’re also going to talk a lot about how you engage loyal community. People who want to be vocal for you and be your actual brand advocates. Creating these raving fans that if your product shifts, if anything happens in the future, they love your business, they love your content and they love you as that owner of the business so much, that they want to stay engaged with you and believe in you and make sure that they’re basically becoming a part of your marketing team and doing that effort for you.
We’ll go over a lot of how things are … like Direct Selling, isn’t what you want to focus on, on social media. It’s going to be inspiring engagement and inspiring that talk amongst your community, that works so, so well. One of the things that we really like to also have you focus on as you’re looking at some of the examples we go over today is how each post is going to tell a different story. Our brains are so hardwired to latch on to storytelling. This can be something that’s coming up with how your business was started. How this is going to actually help the actual followers of yours use your product to become a hero of their own story.
Things like this to make sure that people are really latching on in a way that it’s not just promotional content or random content out there but it has a through-line that people are really latching onto. Above all else, we really want to make sure that you are always remembering that quality trumps quantity when it comes to social media. We’ll talk a little bit about how much you should post stuff like that but every piece of content you’re putting out there, if it’s providing quality, if it’s providing value, your followers are going to stay, tell their friends about you to bring them on over. Making sure that every piece of content you’re putting out there has that quality aspect to it.
Cool, so to start out here, we want you to know that you are not alone. Study after study finds that posting to social media is something that takes the most time away from people on social media.
Small businesses have so much to worry about, whether it’s marketing, whether it’s getting your actual product up and running. That social media can be something that kind of goes to the wayside a lot of the time. It might not be something that you’re directly engaging with on a day to day basis, it might not be something you know how to quantify if it’s working well for your business, what’s that return on investment, stuff like that.
Know that you are not alone out there and that is why we are all here together to kind of explore this social media world and it doesn’t have to take away from all of these other awesome things that you’re doing in your business. Definitely stay tuned, share away with each other in the community what’s been working for you in your small business because this is something that we all struggle with but we can all find success in. How the heck do you make sure that you’re finding the time and success and motivation when there are statistics like this out there, that the organic reach on Facebook is down to about 6% for every post that you’re putting out there.
Fewer than half of all Twitter users are actually logging into Twitter every day. When they do log in, the half-life of the tweet, so when that’s actually showing up in someone’s feed, is about 24 minutes on Twitter and 90 minutes on Facebook. A lot of the time when people look at these stats, they can get a little overwhelming. What we want to do is kind of shift that mindset and let you know how exciting this is for building that engaged audience. Even though these stats might be a little bit of a time suck and still of this thing that you’re thinking, “Oh gosh, all this hard work that I’m putting in there,” tools like Edgar can actually help to automate all that hard work.
Get your posts out there and really make sure that the ones that are going out are being seen by people and being seen by your followers as value-added, that they want to see it every time and share it with their friends every time to help you build that following up. The problem of why this is occurring and why tools like Edgar and automation services really help out is that sometimes life does get in the way. There are so many competing priorities within your business and it’s something that we want to stress, that if you don’t plan and analyze your social media, the same way that you do with other financials and other statistics in your business, it’s probably going to go to the wayside.
It’s not something that people are actually going to log in and task switch in the middle of something you’re doing like creating that content or anything. We want to make sure that Edgar is a tool that you’re using in order to really systemize this, have that automation going out so you don’t miss that opportunity to connect with your followers. Within this, we want you to also know that this might sound a little bit funny as we’re talking about how important engagement is these days, that we’re also talking about an automation tool like Edgar. Edgar is not a set it and forget it tool and that’s what’s one of the things this webinar is really going to focus on.
It’s the more systemized and the more automation that you utilize within your social media every day with a tool like Edgar, the more engagement you can actually receive from your community. This comes in the form of asking questions, inspiring people to actually reach out and answer you, making sure that the community knows they can talk to each other within your Facebook groups, within your Twitter chat, stuff like that. Thinking of systemizing and automating with tools like Edgar in order to spark that engagement and really start to get your followers knowing how much you care about them as people and that you’re not just there on social media to promote, promote, promote. You’re there to actually engage with them and find this meaningful human interaction.
Shift the mindset as well is … along with this time suck, people think, “Hey, I’m automating. I’m getting all this value-added content out there but I don’t have time to go back in and engage with people.” I want to really challenge you to shift that mindset, that when people are writing back to you, it is so good. When people are reaching out to you for customer support on Twitter, on Facebook it might not be your preferred channel for doing this but it is such a good thing for you to keep an eye on, even if there’s something where people aren’t exactly happy with your product.
Even if it’s something that people are reaching out and asking questions in social media rather than to your support inbox or anything like that. Anytime someone is reaching out to your company, it is such a good thing. They are wanting to get to that first success. They are wanting to get to that win with your product, with your software as a service company, with anything that you’re marketing out there. That if they’re reaching out for help, you want to make sure you’re there. If that social media channel is their preferred method for reaching out for help, shift your mindset to know that is where you’re going to answer them.
Automation can also help with that. If you’re not getting a lot of feedback from your product, make sure you’re putting posts out there, automating posts to really spark people, to let you know that feedback, to get that true authentic connection with your community. You want to be asking them questions. How they feel about the product. You want to be asking them questions about … to make them feel like a partner. To make them have a stake within your company, to really get that awesome engagement going. To get into this mindset more, I also want to really challenge you to think that you are not a product business right now, you are a media business.
Every single one of you, whatever your product may be, whether it’s software, whether it’s eCommerce, whether your brick and mortar store, you are a media business when it comes to social media marketing. For example, here at Edgar, we sell an automation tool, a software as a service tool. However, everything that we do in market is something that we actually don’t sell. This over here on the right side of the screen is our eBook blogging formula. This is something that we give away for free. It’s something that we love to produce content for, to actually make sure our members are getting this value and actually making sure that you guys know how to produce content for yourself.
If you haven’t grabbed this yet definitely email [email protected] and we can get it for you. Our copywriters Tom and Jen are some of the most amazing out there when it comes to making sure that we’re empathizing with our audience, really getting to know you guys and making sure that every content article we’re putting out there is going to help you progress with your small business. Think how you can do this within your business as well. We don’t sell eBooks here at MeetEdgar but this eBook is a tangental piece of content that we can get out to our followers. We can promote this on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and it is relevant content that’s going to be adding value time and time again for our members, for our community.
Get in the mindset that whatever your product is, you’re also a media business, you’re creating content, you’re creating visuals, you’re creating videos for this and that is a part of your business and that’s going to help so, so much if you can get down that mindset, when you are creating your posts in social media.
Cool so social media does not have to work when you’re trying to turn every new fan or follower into a customer. It gets a lot simpler when you shift your focus to building this engaged audience. What this means is I want you to kind of have a lens through every social media update that you’re posting out there, is to think, “Hey, is this actually trying to get someone to pay me or is this trying to really engage with another human?”
“Is this trying to really make sure that I’m getting that bond?” When it comes down to it, we really want to make sure that you guys are thinking, “Hey, this is a human to human connection,” that no matter what happens in the networks, if social media … if Facebook decides to no longer exist, if Twitter decides to no longer exist, that human to human connection, that brand bond is not going anywhere. It’s never a waste of time to have this kind of interaction with your community so make sure that you’re getting in that mindset as you’re kind of filtering through every social media update.
If it isn’t a direct sell, it’s going to be something that adds value to someone’s day and really gets that audience excited about your product. This is all coming off of this idea that Facebook and Twitter and everything that every app is doing right now is something that’s going to be shifting towards engagement. Facebook’s algorithm change recently has let us know that what they’re looking for, our posts that are going to spark comments more than anything. It’s no longer something that they want just these passive likes. It’s no longer something that you can just get away with asking for reactions.
It’s going to be something they want to see your followers communicating with each other. Asking each other questions within the comment section, sharing your post with friends, having those actions that take a little bit more time and effort for someone to think about and engage with your content. That’s kind of why all of these, posts that we’re going to go over today are shifting towards how can we spark that conversation and how can we really make sure that we are playing towards Facebook’s algorithm right now.
A lot of people are getting a little bit upset about the changes that are being made on Facebook and Twitter and all of this kind of landscape shifting all around.
We want to remind you that Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn are free marketing platforms. If you can learn to play by these rules and really make sure that you’re keeping an eye on what your followers are wanting, you can still be so successful when it comes to organic posting on any social network. What’s going to be your biggest algorithm buster is your community. If they are out there championing for you, sharing your post, commenting on them, the algorithm isn’t going to matter at all. We want to really make sure that you’re realizing when these shifts happen on the social networks.
What’s going to always stay true are those relationships that you’re building with your community out there. One of my favorite Facebook experts out there in the world is someone named Mari Smith. If you don’t know her, look her up. She’s got some awesome content strategies out there as well. What she likes to say and what I think really helps spark a lot of inspiration here is that content is king so create that awesome content.
We’ve all heard this before as copywriters. Her little kind of niche in here is that engagement is queen and she rules the house. It is not enough anymore just to have content out on the web.
It’s not enough just to add noise to what’s going on in your industry. What you really want to do is make sure the content you’re putting out there is sparking that engagement here. One of the things we really want to focus on is how well Facebook groups can do this as well. This is something that you’ll see a lot more of as social media starts to go along with brands too, is that groups are way more social than pages on Facebook right now. Communities like to talk to each other within groups. If your brand does not have a Facebook group yet, I would highly encourage you to start this now and to really get to know your community and start to cross-promote your group on social media.
We’d also don’t want you to just have a group for a group’s sake. If you do have the time to do this, make sure that you’re automating posts from Edgar, asking questions, getting all of your great content out there. Taking 15 minutes maybe at the end of every day to pick a thread within that group and go through it and add your meaningful thoughts to what your community is speaking about. Again, even if it’s not the content you’re putting out there, if you’re starting a new group or a new page, don’t just put it out there just to have a presence on social media. This isn’t going to do any favors to anyone.
It’s about you taking the time to go into your group to interact with your members and really make that awesome connection. How you do this no matter what social network you’re on, is we want to also make sure you’re striking the perfect marketing to value ratio. What this really means is that every promotional message you’re putting out there, we want to make sure that you have at least three to four pieces of content that add value before that. What a lot of people will refer to this as is like the NPR model or something that’s going to provide so much value, that when they’re fundraiser time comes, when they’re asking for money when it comes, you allow them that week to ask you for money.
The content they’ve created has added so much value to your life, has given you so much that it is exciting for you to want to give back. You want to create that sort of vibe within your social networks as well. This might seem overwhelming if you’re just getting started on social media but simplify it, it doesn’t have to be anything that takes more than posting something educational, posting something informational, posting something entertaining and then you’ve earned the right to promote. When I say earn the right to promote, I also want you to get in the mindset that it’s not telling people to buy your product.
It’s asking people. If you’re creating value, if you’re giving them that content, you’re giving them those awesome quotes, those memes, those tips, those blog posts, asking them then to come out and actually take a look at your product. This is how it will add value to your day.
If you’ve provided them that much content and that much value within your social media posts, that ask is going to come across so genuine and it’s going to be something that they want to give back to you and your brand. Make sure you’re not afraid to ask and put out your promotions but do it after you’ve actually given that value of educating, informing and entertaining people first.
If you’re starting to get a little bit in that kind of juices flowing situation of what type of content you’re going to create, I also wanted to throw out some questions to help you really get that content going with you within your blog posts. Some starter questions you can start asking yourself whether it’s developing a social media post or developing your blog post, is what’s something that your brand or your company does differently? Is there a lot of industry talk going around right now in your industry. Something that you have is different than any of your competitors are doing, write about that. Make sure you’re putting your individual quality out there.
What’s a big change that’s happened recently? This can be industry news, it can be anything like the Twitter Terms of Service, for us here at Edgar was huge. That’s something that a big change happened within our industry recently and developing content around that can be so, so beneficial to make sure that we’re getting it out to our followers. What’s a recent experience you learned from? This one is huge as well so experiences are something that your followers want to know about so they can gain all of that great life knowledge that you already have. Being vulnerable sharing anything that has gone wrong in your business and how you actually bounce back from it and fixed it and what you learned from it.
Sharing things like your business financials might not be something your business is used to. Providing that vulnerability out there and talking about the goals you’re working on and really bringing people into the conversation can be a great way to get that human-to-human interaction that we focus on so, so much here. Then, last but not least what advice do you have to the reader? Is there anything practical? Is there anything philosophical, that kind of so what vibe of saying, “Here’s the advice you have. Here’s how our product can help and here’s why you should care about it.”
Start thinking about these things as you’re kind of going throughout your day. If you’re listening, reading other blog posts, anything like that. Anything you can do to get that niche content out there, whether it’s in a form of a blog post, a social media post, doing anything to get it out there to kind of get your niche going is going to provide so much value for your community. Here is our first IRL, in real life example. This is a post here at MeetEdgar that we did published. As you can see it doesn’t have a ton to do with social media right, within this post. This is what we really want to make sure that you’re thinking about too, is that we’ve done a lot of analysis with our … in our community about who you guys are.
Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics. They tell us a lot about what the interests of our community is and we know that our community is a small businesses, who are really motivated to succeed.
We know you guys, if you’re taking the time to come to these webinars, if you’re taking the time to read our content, set up your Edgar account that you have that drive to succeed in your business. This post here asking ourself these three questions on a weekly basis, change the way we think about our business and it can change the way you think about yours too. Something within this post that’s really strong I think is just this fact that we are relating to you.
This is what we here at MeetEdgar as a small business, have learned. These are the three questions that really help drive our business decisions. This is how it can help your community too. That back and forth of saying, “Hey, we are right there with you,” can compel people to click on this mark because they want to have that sort of connection. Think of anything you can do, to make this nice and conversational. This is something, again that we want to make sure it comes up in every one of your posts, is the topic that you’re talking about comes off conversational. People are going to social media again, to connect with friends and family and to have conversations with real people.
Make sure your brand voice and make sure everything you’re posting here doesn’t come across as sort of a business-related post but something that’s adding value and something that’s really reaching out to the members in a way that they can connect to. In that post as well, again, going back to this idea that customers like to feel both heard and seen when they are on social media. They want to express themselves using your products. You want to create opportunities to make them feel seen and heard. Whether that’s being felt like they see themselves within the copy of your status update, whether that’s creating a piece of content they want to share out to their friends because they find it so helpful, that they then want to help their community.
Anything you can do to make sure that the customer or the follower that you’ve gained to that community feels seen and heard the better. This goes along with that last slide there, is being seen and heard and making sure your customers see themselves in your status update, is one of the strongest ways you can help people engage with your content.
This is another example here. Whether you’re thinking of hiring your very first VA or you’ve been working on a remote team for years, there are things you have to keep in mind that wouldn’t really be a factor in traditional business.
Here are some challenges remote teams have to deal with and how we’ve approached them. This status update is not only setting up this use case of this is who you are, this is who this is going to help. Anyone who’s worked with a VA, anyone who’s worked with a remote team in the past, these are the things that you can keep in mind, these are the things that you can really make sure are going to provide value to your community. Making sure again that you’re putting the user, the follower into the post so they can see themselves in there and you’ll see your click-through rates really increase.
Make sure that people when they get to your blog post are presented with that information that they can digest and really gain a lot of value from. With all of this as we’ve been talking about the best way to engage your community is making sure each post is relatable. You want to make sure each posts the leads your audience to saying things like, “I can relate to that or I can relate to you as a business.” This is getting that human-to-human connection going along with your followers, which is going to make them want to talk to you more. No one wants to just talk to an empty screen on social media. Getting people to relate to you, making sure you’re replying to them and really engaging your community is a strongest way to make sure that this keeps going with your brand social media content.
Along with relatability goes emotion. Everyone knows that emotions are such a strong indicator when it comes to selling. It’s said that it takes about five to 10 touch points with any brand in order to actually have someone convert to a customer buy your product. This can be hard especially when it comes to us talking a lot about value marketing.
Making sure that your promotions and your content is getting out there at the right time to touch someone when they’re in the exact spot, that they’re ready to buy might seem a little bit tricky to you. Doing things to start building people’s emotions up around your business can be a really cool way to see this work. Slipping in an emoji or two to give a message, a little pop of personality can also help keep your brand voice casual. You can see this tweet here from Starbucks, so simple. It doesn’t have a ton to do with coffee adding in a little evergreen tree emoji there but it really livens up the update and it really makes them seem a lot more conversational and a lot more casual within their tweet here.
Make sure you’re utilizing those things especially since Twitter allows 280 characters now. If you have that extra space, you have no idea what those emojis can do to make someone smile or really compel someone to stop and take a closer look if that catches their eye. Try using emojis quite a little bit more in order to really help engage and spark that conversation in your community. Cool, so going on from that, after you’ve actually posted something, we want to make sure that you know each time your audience engages with you on social media, it is an opportunity for you to increase your social visibility.
This tweet over here on the right is something that one of our followers here at Edgar retweeted at us. We share this piece of content at one of our blog posts. It compelled her to re-share it with her community. It’s an opportunity for her to increase her own social visibility because it’s something that she believes her community needs to know. It’s something she believes is going to work really well to increase her industry knowledge within her space. It’s also something that gets our word out there because she’s tagging us in it and she’s having that conversation.
After someone does something like tags you in a tweet, shares your content in this way, we also want to make sure that you are replying to them. You can see under here that Edgar replied a simple thank you, a simple share of gratitude and this goes a long way and making sure you’re keeping that connection going and you’re keeping that conversation going.
Again at the end of your day, set aside 15 minutes. Go in and reply to your tweets and get that conversation going. You’ll see huge, huge benefits with more and more people starting to share your content and getting in that conversation.
Social platform not a sales platform. As you’ve been noticing, as we’ve been going along here, it is all about making sure your conversations, your connections are really branded to your brand voice and making sure that everything you’re putting out there is not going to come across as salesy rather it’s going to come across as something that is going to add value to someone’s day. People don’t necessarily want to be marketed to but you can still market to them with your content. Over here is one of our updates, that one of my favorite little taglines, so simple and sweet.
We won’t tell your old English teacher. Just introducing a blog post with a headline, the writing rules you should break when you’re blogging. What this I think does well more than anything is it produces this idea of nostalgia, which is one of the strongest marketing emotions I think you can really take advantage of. Everyone likes to think back on their memories. Everyone has something in common that they can relate to from their childhood. Think about things that you can really do to get people to kind of smile at that old memory that they’re having. To laugh and chuckle at this little one liner that’s introducing our blog post.
To really compel them to click on this, lead over to your blog and get that awesome traffic increased. Cool, so how else can you get your followers to read your post?
What I like to also always point out is I don’t know if you guys have read Seth Godin’s book Purple Cow content right here, is going to be something I want you to focus on when you write your updates as well. What this really is, is the idea that if you’re driving past a field of brown cow, after brown cow, after brown cow, you’re probably not going to stop and actually notice it. What happens is if you’re driving across that field and all of a sudden you see a purple cow, you’re going to stop in your tracks and you’re going to look at it.
That’s what you also want to think about when you’re trying to engage your audience, is how you get people to stop scrolling through their newsfeed and actually look at the content that you’re producing. Doing things like taking risks and making sure that you’re really producing different types of content to learn what your community actually goes out and actually latches onto. Finding a way to present information in a unique way that no one else in your industry is doing. Anything again to make people stop scrolling through their newsfeed. If you see your competitors really sharing visuals all the time that are really color oriented maybe try turning one of your visuals into a black and white one.
This can go a long way in stopping people in their tracks. Emotions, we’ve talked about before. People are in a different emotional state whether they’re out and about looking at social media, in between meetings or if they’re sitting at home. You never know when people are going to be in that state and ready to click and ready to buy your product or your service. This is why we’re really making sure you’re getting your promotional tweets out at different times of day, can also be helpful and Edgar is awesome at helping with that. What Edgar can also do to help really spark engagement is you’re going to avoid the decay factor utilizing automation like Edgar.
What this means is when you share a blog post once, the typical traffic pattern is going to be that you get a huge bump in traffic after that initial share but it’s obviously going to dwindle quite a bit after that. What Edgar can do is help to recycle this content, help to repurpose it and get it out to your members quite a bit more. This is going to actually make sure that all of those scary numbers and statistics we chatted about at the beginning are no longer going to be scary because that recycling is going to get that organic reach up. It’s going to show it to more and more people.
It’s going to really make sure that all the hard work you’re putting into your evergreen blog posts are seen by the majority of your followers. We also want to make sure that you know within Edgar you can maximize your social post for engagement by setting up certain categories for certain days of the week.
What this is, is just following different themes like your motivational Monday, your Tip Tuesday, your Throwback Thursdays and to really help to kind of think when and how to do this, I want you to also just try to empathize with your community. When they’re waking up on Monday morning and really getting ready for the workweek, what is it that you think your brand can provide them?
Maybe it’s that pop of inspiration so you can get a really great inspirational quote up there. Maybe on Friday, it’s something that you can always have a funny Friday meme go out, to really make sure people are getting in that fun mindset for the weekend. Maybe you want to add value to everyone’s day on Tuesday, at lunchtime when you think your audience is going to be just kind of scrolling through their Twitter feed in between meetings or right before after a lunch. Give them that tip to make them feel productive in that downtime. Again, think about what you would want when you’re on social media.
What those little nuggets and truth bombs you can drop to people throughout the day, even if they’re not really related to the product, even if you’re not selling them the product? These go a huge, huge way of keeping your brand on the top of people’s minds and really making sure that you’re setting up these custom categories within Edgar, to make sure that you’re getting that consistency, you’re getting these tips out to your followers every Monday, every Tuesday and really giving them something to count on when they go into social media. How you also do this in Edgar is if you have your Edgar account and categories set up now, you can always schedule them.
This is our schedule view here, if you don’t have an Edgar account yet and you can schedule these categories on specific days. Say you wanted to do that motivational Monday post. You can go to your Monday right here, create a time slot and go ahead and slot that motivational Monday category into your time slot. That way every Monday at 9 AM, that motivational quote is going to go out to your members. Again, creating that consistency and showing them that you are a brand that they can count on. The schedule within Edgar is an awesome way that you can again get this automation going out.
Setting aside a few 15 minute chunks throughout the week to then go in and engage with your community, to make sure they know that you are listening back when they reply to you. Again, it’s human to human not business to business when you’re sending all these updates out there. One of the things I kind of want to leave you guys with is if you want people to take an interest in you, you really have to take an interest in them first. Doing things like commenting on other people’s posts, following people who follow you. If you have a lot of your members in your community, following you on Twitter, following you on Instagram.
Go back and share an interest in their life by following them. It can also help you really gain a lot more followers, if you’re searching out trending hashtags on Instagram or Twitter, going through and liking their posts, setting aside some time to go through and add a couple comments on to why you like a photo they shared or what you found was really interested within their blog content. It’s all about playing the long game here. You want to make sure that you’re creating these really valuable connections now so that in the future, if they wanted to collaborate, if they needed your product in the future, they’re going to remember how kind it was and how wonderful it was to have you engage with them at a time you didn’t ask for anything.
Set up that kind of baseline foundation now and you’ll reap the benefits of it in the future by tenfold. Some things we also want to talk about here is defining your audience, is going to be one of the most important things you can do when you’re creating these posts and loading them into your Edgar library. Defining your audience is going to be something that a lot of people get afraid of because it does have to be the statistics and analytics, scary words coming up. The coolest thing is I myself am not a numbers person but it is so, so easy to follow along.
If you go to your Facebook account and you go to your page, on that upper navigation bar there is a little tool that says insights and if you click the insights button and then go to the navigation bar along the left hand side and go to the posts view, this is actually going to be something that’s so easy to see not only when your audience is online but which posts they’re really reacting to. Is your audience liking post that have photos in them more than links? Are they really relating to blog posts more than photos? If you’re posting every day, are you seeing your engagement drop, are you seeing your engagement go up?
What language in your post is making them take action and providing more engagement and providing those click-through rates? All of this stuff can be really simply found out through this insights tab within Facebook or through your Twitter Analytics.
This can again not only help you define what your posts are but what your audience likes is also going to help you create new features within your product, create that feedback to the rest of your marketing team, to the rest of your product team. Really make sure you’re focusing on the things that people are providing you with, within your insights here.
Cool, so beyond that, once you do start to find out a little bit more about your community, our goal as you’re going forward is to really make sure you’re driving home this point of how your community knows, likes and trusts you. You want to really make sure your followers have this unique access to the brand that they care about and this is going to go a long way in making sure people know, like and trust you. What we do here at Edgar to kind of produce a lot of this is over here on the right, is actually part of our Instagram feed. What we do is we give a so much behind the scenes content on Instagram.
This really helps to humanize our brand and let you know here are the people who are working so hard on this tool for you guys but we also sprinkle in of course, like our secret blogging formula you see there. A lot of quotes that you see there. It doesn’t always have to be just business and what’s going to really help grow that know, like and trust factor is seeing people’s faces, is really making sure that you’re getting your personality in every social media update you’re putting out there. If you guys don’t have a lot of content, ask your team to get involved.
Everyone in your company can be a social media expert. You can do things like setting people up with little signs, letting them know who they are within the company and why they care about your followers. Again, it’s just getting that human connection that’s so, so strong. Another thing that works so well for increasing that know, like and trust factor is using things like Facebook Live and Instagram Stories to introduce a new blog post or to introduce a new feature you’re releasing. It gets you in front of the camera, it gets your audience engaged with who you are as a person so don’t be afraid to kind of think about how much behind the scenes content can actually go ahead and move your brand forward.
If you’re not sure where to start, another thing I wanted to throw out there today is go out and research what your competitors are doing. How they’re engaging with their community, who are they following. We definitely don’t want you to copy any competitors directly but this is a great way to get started and learning new influencers within your community. If they’re following a bunch of bloggers, if they’re following a bunch of thought leaders in your industry, go out and follow those same people. See what people in your community are talking about and see how you can fill in those gaps and you can add your own unique voice into the conversation there.
Seeing what your competitors are doing to engage with their community is also a great way to help you think about what questions you’re seeing their followers actually answer. If they ask a few questions and you don’t see any responses to that post they have out there, maybe you … that can inform you that the community and the followers who are in your industry aren’t that interested in that type of question, aren’t that interested in that type of quote. Learn from what’s already going on, on social media but also go ahead and test out new things on your own.
Take those risks, make sure you’re getting out there and really adding your unique voice to the space. One thing that I also have here for engagement is Twitter Chats. Twitter Chats are an awesome way to make sure that you’re carving out a corner for conversations that you want to have on social media. It’s not anything that is going to be automated through MeetEdgar for the actual chat but what an automation tool like Edgar can do to help you get these Twitter chats started is to help get the buzz out about that. Setting up a specific hashtag for your Twitter chat.
Setting up a specific time, getting people excited to actually join in can all be scheduled through Edgar. This again is a great way to make sure your community knows, you want to talk to them live on social media and that you have the time to engage with them there.
What a Twitter chat is, if you’ve never joined one before, is that it’s a conversation led by you guys around a unique hashtag or topic. That’s going to be your first thing you want to try to do when you’re getting your topics out there, is create that unique short hashtag, something easy for people to remember and create that topic that’s going to be really exciting for people.
If it’s really niche specific, we want to make sure that you’re also leaving a little bit room for some open-ended questions, for some open-ended stuff to bring in maybe a more diverse community, maybe people who don’t know about you directly but can still join in that conversation and can still get a lot of connection not only from you but also that networking from the rest of your community there. Make sure that the questions you’re putting out there are really open-ended and really can help get people really excited about joining in. Getting that hashtag something that people recognize, that’s really associated with your brand.
That people want to use to make sure that they’re seen as someone who’s really on top of their own industry because they participate in these Twitter Chats and that they’re really getting out there and connecting. One thing that we really want to have you define before you start a Twitter Chat for engagement is also to know the goals you’re getting out of your Twitter Chat. Is it to get brand awareness? Is it to get more followers, more traffic to your website or more likes on your latest selfie. These things are things you can start to think about as well.
Leaving aside any jokes here, Twitter Chats are an awesome way to get more followers and to get brand awareness out there if you do them properly so make sure as you’re setting up all of your reminders for these Twitter chats, that you’re getting people really excited about actually joining in and the value that they’ll receive when they do join the chat. Same rules apply, if you do a Twitter chat like this, you want to make sure you’re showing off your human side, introduce yourself, who you are in your company, why you care about being there.
Share the love with your fans and really make sure that they’re gaining value from each other and that you’re leaving them space to ask questions and to add in their own commentary during the Twitter Chat. Use once content within Edgar. If you have an Edgar account, you’ll recognize this as our composer screen here. If you don’t have an Edgar account yet, this is our composer screen. Every Edgar account does come with the use once category. This is what I want you guys to use, if you are going to go ahead and utilize Edgar to get the word out about a Twitter chat, is you can go ahead and construct a post in here, with this use once category and set a specific date and time of when you want this post to go out.
That way as you’re planning weeks in advance for your Twitter chat, you can go ahead and load up your library with all of the posts that are going to let your Twitter community know and you can actually cross promote this on Facebook, on Instagram. You can cross promote this on LinkedIn. Everything that you’re doing to get people excited about this Twitter chat, to get people excited about actually joining in a conversation, doesn’t have to be just on Twitter. That’s the cool thing about Edgar too, is once you load this post in to this use once category, you can tell it’s got the Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
Get people on each network excited about joining in the conversation, saving you time and effort of having to go to each of those networks to promote it. Cool, so switching over real quickly here to LinkedIn. We want to make sure that you are really looking at LinkedIn as something that can be a huge lead generation for your business. They want to get to know you in LinkedIn. They want to get to know who your employees are and a lot of people think LinkedIn is just something that’s kind of a dry business, just there to get a job, sort of network these days but it is truly not.
It is a huge thing that people should be taking advantage of, to stay social on. Again, with this whole idea of human-to-human business, LinkedIn is awesome because you can go ahead and link in all of your employee profiles to your company page, which is one of the most humanizing things you can do. People getting to know everyone within your company and really getting to know your brand that much stronger. Disney is one of my favorite companies who utilizes LinkedIn in a really social way so your longer, kind of long-form blog post, long-form tips do really well on LinkedIn.
Don’t be afraid to do things like add in photos and really get that human side in your LinkedIn posts as well. You can see over here with a LinkedIn post on the left, that this is a Disney employee who has her photo out there, you’re getting to know her in a really awesome way and they’re also offering value because they’re letting you know how she’s going to deliver world-class service to Disney that’s known around the world. You get that value of getting to know the Disney Service but you also get the value of getting to know this employee and feeling like you do have that connection.
Same with the post over here, passion for learning, new technologies and willingness to lead a talented team is a must. Join us as a manager so this is a job post. Job post on any network is really share-worthy content as well because people want to come across as helpful. If someone sees your job posting on a social network, on LinkedIn, on Facebook, on Twitter, they’ll want to share it with their community and with their friends because this is something that they can see themselves as adding value to their friends and family. Job postings are another great way of getting that value-added marketing out there on each social network.
Creating content that evokes an emotional trigger like happiness and people naturally want to brighten other people’s day so similar to how people want to share those job postings to provide helpfulness to their friends and family people also want to provide happiness to their friends and family. Anything that can create that sort of emotional trigger is going to work really well. You can see here at one of our Instagram posts here at MeetEdgar, we are a remote company so we have some team meetings quite a bit and this is one of them where we were celebrating one of our employee’s birthdays.
Sharing how we do this here at MeetEdgar not only lets you see all of our faces, get that behind the scenes look but it also creates that happy moment that everyone can relate to, everyone loves celebrating birthdays. Doing stuff like this is an awesome, awesome way to get that behind the scenes content, to get that emotional trigger and to get that value-added post to inform and educate so you can earn the right then to promote and ask people to actually become a part of your business. Cool, so the last couple examples here it are actually from our Facebook page that I just wanted to leave you.
These are some of our most engaged with posts recently. This one here you can read, there are five types of engagement bait that’ll hurt your reach on Facebook if you post them. We broke down each one, how many do you recognize? What this is doing, is the status update is giving you an idea of what you’re going to see if you click through on this post obviously. It’s something that you’re going to know what you’re getting into but it’s also sparking that curiosity. How many do you recognize that question not only prompts you to reply, which you can see a lot of our community did over here.
It also creates that curiosity of like, “I do want to know how much do I recognize,” and compels people to click on this blog post and be directed to our site. When you’re crafting your status updates to introduce your blog post and links, think not only how this can spark a conversation within the link but can also spark and compel people to click and really get that sort of curiosity satisfied, when they land on your blog page and when they actually get the content there. Another one that has led to a lot of engagement for us recently is anything that’s happening in the news in real time.
You can see here, Facebook is making a lot of changes to the News Feed in 2018. What are your thoughts on what’s new? Think it’ll impact what you post? A double question here. This is really showing you guys we want to hear from you. We want to hear your answers to these questions. Again with this industry news, it’s something that we know all of our community is going to be taking an interest in. It’s your livelihood, it’s your business. Social media is changing that’s how you get the word out. We want to make sure we’re providing you with the information and how to do that but we also want to make sure we’re learning about your thoughts on it so we can produce more content.
This post is serving us to get to know you, to listen to you, to empathize with our community’s needs but it’s also something that’s going to hopefully provide value and education. Again educating, informing, inspiring to earn the right to promote. Job posting, we’ve been over this. Another one of my favorite tweets that we have recently, is this one here. Okay, fellow remote fans, who at MeetEdgar has the most iconic home office? How fun is this post here? You get to take a little inside peek into what all of our offices here at MeetEdgar look like, which is so fun.
You not only get that behind-the-scenes feel, that you get brought into our work day lives. You’re a part of our community here at MeetEdgar but it’s also sparking that conversation that we want to hear from you. What are your thoughts on these things. Thinking about again, this idea that you are vying for people’s attention on social media more than anything. This is kind of an attention-grabbing thing. Think about what’s been working well on things like HGTV, this entertainment. People love to see home office spaces.
This doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with social media but it is a post that has worked so well for us because it lets you know who we are, how we work, why we work the way we do in order to serve our community and really make sure we’re producing the best product for you guys. Newsworthy articles, here’s another awesome example. This was retweeted from one of our followers here. ”
Writing unique tweets to promote the same piece of content doesn’t have to take a lot of time. @MeetEdgar shares easy ways to give up your tweet copy of refresh.” This came after Twitter’s Terms of Service was changed.
We responded quite quickly with a blog post to make sure our community knew what was going on. This was newsworthy, timely content and we know timely content works so well on Twitter to be served up in the feed quite quickly. This, you can see, if you get it out there in a way that people are really making sure they’re wanting to grasp onto it, they will retweet you, they will want to make sure that all of this newsworthy content is shared out to their community. Again, they can feel helpful and they can really make sure that they are getting the same information to their followers, that they found so valuable from your brand.
Diversify your content. Again, this goes along with this idea that we are social media business but we know all of our community is interested in more than just social media marketing. We know you guys work so hard on delivering a really great business experience to your internal community, as well as your external customers. We share a lot of our business tools we use here at MeetEdgar. This again, is a post that’s value-added in the way of what we’ve learned worked well for us as a business, giving you guys that value to hopefully help you accelerate and help you gain a lot of really awesome knowledge in any part of your business.
Your success is definitely our success here at Edgar. Lastly here, curiosity. Let’s go back to this every time these post work well. “How to find and get rid of hot dog toaster hiding in your business, we promise that makes sense,” in parentheses. Who wouldn’t want to click on that. What a great headline right there. Making sure again that you think of ways not only to come off as funny but this is definitely going to stop someone in their tracks as they’re scrolling through. Who the heck has heard of a hot dog toaster. It might not have that much to do with social media in your opinion.
Clicking through there we know you’re curious how it does actually makes sense within this blog post. Again anything to make someone smile, to have that curiosity is really going to increase your likelihood of people engaging, people laughing, people telling you how they feel about that hotdog toaster there. Cool so that ends our webinar today here at MeetEdgar. Thank you so, so much for joining. We love hearing from the community. Please keep asking questions in the chat. Please email [email protected]. If you are not an Edgar user yet, we would love to talk to you.
We would love to show you a demo so let us know you can email [email protected]. You can also get a free month with us here. If you do sign up for Edgar, make sure you snag this octopuswebinar18 coupon code and you put that in when you’re registering for Edgar, it will give you a free month. If you have any troubles at all doing that let us know. Email [email protected] and we can get that set up for you. Like I said, super appreciate you joining the webinar today. Let us know what else you guys are interested in learning and we are more than happy to go over any topics in the future.
Reach out to us and let’s connect on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn wherever you guys are. Like I said, thanks so much for joining the webinar and see you in a couple weeks.
