Save Time with Social Batching and MeetEdgar Categories

Transcript for Save Time with Social Batching and MeetEdgar Categories

To learn more about MeetEdgar’s webinar schedule and to catch us streaming live, visit MeetEdgar Live Webinars.[00:00] Really appreciate you coming on and in hanging out with Edgar today. We are going to be talking about some fun techniques that were going to really help to streamline your social media success here. I will give a couple of minutes for people to start trickling in, but let us know, comment below this video, comment over on the right hand side there where you're from, what you're doing here, what kind of social media goals you are working on, so we can really start to connect with the community and see what you're interested in learning to make sure these webinars are presenting you with the information that's really going to set you up for success.[00:32] Let us know, like I said, why you're here, what you're doing, chat with us and we are more than happy to answer any of your questions here on the webinar or go ahead and email support@meetedgar.com and we can get those answered for you. Like I said, we are going to be talking about something really fun today and we are going to get into social batching, which can be something that is so so important when it comes time to saving you time with your social media as well as making sure it is the most relevant and up to date information you are giving your followers. Like I said, my colleague, Jess will be going ahead and looking in on the chats over on the right hand side, so jump on in the conversation and let us know if you have any questions. You can always email after at support@meetedgar.com.[01:18] We'll jump on in here. I am Megan, an onboarding coach at MeetEdgar and we are so excited like I said, to chat about some techniques to help you engage your audience on social media and save a little time in the process. As we all know, social media is really nothing more than connecting with each other and sharing things that we're really passionate about and this can be really taken out of your personal space on social media and given to your brand as well. Now, we talked a lot about your content and marketing value to your community to see much more success with your campaigns, but today, we're going to focus a little bit more on not a content you're creating, rather the strategy that you're going to put into effect when batching this content into a scheduler like Edgar or into your social media planning routine.[02:05] We'll cover a little bit about things like how you're going to grab the time and attention of your followers and really make sure that you're getting creative and taking the time to share a variety of content can really help this time and attention be directed towards your brand when there's so much noise out there on social media. Social batching your updates and different kind of updates can really help with this because the answer is not simply to use social media like it's a broadcasting network, like it's something that you're just shooting out links and links and hopes that someone's going to click on one once in a while. It should be more of a strategy and batching your updates can help you accomplish this.[02:44] We want to make sure that we're asking a lot of questions, we're getting people to think about things and content that they are worth sharing with their own community and to really give you and your followers a reason to interact with each other to get that awesome brand awareness out there. This concept of social batching has talked a lot about with the metaphor of baking, so you can think about it like cookies or muffins here. You don't just want to whip up one cookie or one muffin at a time, you want to make a whole batch at once getting more out of the time you're putting in. Think about it as how silly you would feel if you were making one cookie, doing all the prep work, cleaning up the kitchen, getting all of that baking stuff in order, and it's the same with social media. It's still to do one update at a time. Really, living your life of the one status update at a time doesn't make any more sense than baking that one lonely cookie over and over again.[03:42] It means you have to start from scratch every single time and we know you are also busy as business owners, as marketers out there that we want to make sure the time you're putting into these status updates is time well spent. Going along with this, there's two things that can really be incorporated when it comes to social media batching. The first is going to be your original updates, things you share with your community, whether it's an update you wrote, a photo or video you're sharing, a link to someone else's website in your industry, and then there are the live interactions as well and that's going to be engaging with people who are mentioning you on Twitter, who are engaging and asking questions back at a link that you shared and both of these things can be done in batches, so you don't have to do them constantly and you can provide a little bit more consistency to your followers and really the name of the game is showing up for your followers and having that consistency as you're going on with social media.[04:38] Let's start here with your original posting. Like any recipe, your ingredients can't all be the same. Your ingredients are going to be your original post that you're throwing up there on social media. You can't make cookies with just a carton of eggs or just a bag of flour, you need a variety of different things to make this work. Same on social media, you need a variety of different updates and these are going to be ingredients. These can be things like links to your own content, all those awesome blog posts, infographics, videos, any kind of PDF downloads that you've created as pre-content. Awesome, awesome stuff to share out there as an ingredient. Other people's content. Again, you want to make sure you're providing the best most relevant information in your industry and linking to other people's content cannot only be a great way to establish some brand awareness with this other company, but also make sure your followers are getting the most relevant information.[05:34] Good rule of thumb for this if you're just starting out sharing other people's content is to make sure 80% of the content you're sharing is your own, your own links, your promotions, your inspiration and then 20% of it can be that value added content from other people. Another great ingredient to add in here is shareable wisdom, so this can be things like quotes and tips that you're pulling out, any kind of humor or wit that your brand is associated with. These things do awesome on social media. A great, great ingredient to include here is your shareable wisdom and last, your promotional updates. Of course, we're on social media to nurture those relationships and to really get our brand awareness out there, but don't forget to promote your brand too and this can be doing things that are really fun on social media like adding in some contests or adding in some great sales, making sure people know where to signup for your newsletters so they can get all of your information in a timely manner. It can sometimes feel a little bit funny to promote yourself.[06:29] We all know it takes a lot to get up there, stand in front of someone and say, "Hey, my product is worth your time," but if you're doing social media right and sharing all these other ingredients along with your promotions, it makes that recipe work so well. We want to make sure again that you're striking this perfect balance on social media and if you're just getting started again, it's your chance to introduce yourself and to make your community laugh, to teach them something and to give them value for free, not only asking for money. When you're looking for the perfect mix of ingredients in your recipe here, a good rule of thumb that I love for you to start with is make sure that for every three pieces of valuable content you're promoting, you've then earn the right to promote yourself a little whether it's with that contest, whether it's with the call to action to sign up for your newsletter or with an awesome promotional discount you're running.[07:23] This is a great place to start as kind of a good framework of every four updates, three can be really great and one can be really great as a promotional one. Value, value, value and a little bit of promotion is a great place to start for that recipe. If you're thinking, "Megan, this is a lot of updates," I want you to also realize that social media batching is going to save you time. Yes, I might be asking you to do three updates for every one promotional one, but let's take a peek about some easy ways that you can do this with upcycling your content and this tactic is really about repurposing a content you already have. Maybe someone isn't going to sit there and read an entire blog post that you've promoted, but you can actually do a pull quote from that blog post and send it out as a text only tip or overlay it on a really awesome graphic that you designed or one from a site like Canva or something to get that visual aspect popping, and you can get that valuable information out to your followers without having to reinvent the wheel each time. These awesome value added posts are really great for that burst of inspiration and fulfillment that comes with learning something new that your followers will get. Think about it this way. You can have an entire week's worth of social media updates out of one blog post that you might have by just using this simple concept of upcycling your content and then batching it into these ingredient categories we'll look out in a minute.[08:49] Just as an example here. Think about how you can do something on a Monday like share a link to your newest blog post. Tuesday, maybe consider asking a question that has to do with the blog post that you shared on Monday to really keep that topic going. Wednesday, maybe do that text only tip as either just a quick tweet or again overlaying it on the image that visual aspect is huge on social media. Thursday, then maybe this is going to be a more promotional one is directing people to that blog post by asking them to sign up for your newsletter or asking them to consider how this will help them in their own hearer's journey on making sure your product fits in and solves their pain point. Last here on Friday, maybe again you can create another graphic with a different tip from it.[09:33] All from that one blog post, you now have five updates that you can share and add in to your ingredients to create that awesome recipe and give you a lot more content. If you're thinking again that, "Oh gosh, this is a great strategy, but I don't have a lot of content to add in these ingredients," we can also do things that you might be sitting on a ton of wealth and a ton of knowledge that you think might not be worth sharing on social media, but I want you to get over that hurdle and start asking yourself some of these questions in order to get that best content mix out there. As you're probably finding out all of these ingredients here, remember you know what's going on in your industry in a way that your readers don't. You're really interacting with this information on a daily basis, so it might feel like it's common and not something that might necessarily be worth sharing but your followers want to hear that's not something that they are constantly interacting with on a daily basis. Think of it this way. If you're an HR person or a career counselor, you know what people are looking for on their resumes. However, your community might not necessarily know that. Make sure you're offering that information up in the form of your text updates, in the form of your blog post and share what you know and learn with your readers, so you can bring something to their table that they might not necessarily interact with on a daily basis. If you're offering your expert opinion here and you're having a unique point of view, you're able to really make sure that your followers are seeing you as an authority in your field. Start to ask yourself these questions and really make sure that you're getting your content out there and realize that it's worth promoting all of your great thought leadership.[11:13] Cool. Now that we have a few questions, you can start asking and a few ways you can start to upcycle the content you already have, let's jump back into this idea of social batching. After all these ingredients have been developed in your head, you're going to go into your Edgar account and if you have one, you'll recognize this as our categories page in Edgar. You know it comes with a six pre-determined categories and this is just, I felt we know works so well in social media to create great engagement like your blog posts, your tips, your questions, your promotional posts, all that fun stuff. If you're not sure what your category should be, you can use these as a jumping off point but know in Edgar, you can also click that little pencil icon on the categories to go ahead and rename them to something that will match your brand because remember, everyone's audience is a little bit different and you know your followers better than anyone on the types of updates they like to see.[12:04] Start thinking about the types of updates you think will really help to connect with your followers, to drive more traffics and to really produce some awesome comments. If you're trying to struggle on coming up with category names too, spend some time on Google and go ahead and google some relevant company content out there that you can really start to see what's going on in your industry and what people like to talk about. Remember, you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time. You can use these six pre-determined categories here, listen to the statistics that are being thrown out there on your Facebook insights and your Twitter analytics to see what type of content your followers really liked and think about this as a way to inform these categories.[12:44] If we're using this example here, say you end up with six categories, whether they're pre-determined by Edgar or they're added in by your own, these are going to be the types of content you routinely share. This is going to allow you to get a nice robust posting schedule up here. You can see on this image here how we're going to do this is put these categories to work, so we're never sharing the same type of update back to back. It's going to show up in their feed as a really nice robust posting schedule that gives you the opportunity to produce content that people are going to share the most. You'll get your funny content out there and this is ... Your blog post out there and your promotional content out there, stuff that you're really excited that you learn to share with your followers and this is really going to be the guiding principle of the content that should go out from these categories.[13:33] You can see here that you have 15 updates here and there's no direct selling on any of these time slots, but this doesn't mean you're wasting any of your time. Batching these updates out with your really value added content gets to this idea that it takes about six touchpoints with the company for most people to trust and purchase from them. This type of nurturing marketing, these 15 posts that are going out this week is a really great place to start to get these touchpoints and start to build your brand awareness. Let's do a bit of math on this example here and stay with us. Say you're using this 15 updates a week. That's going to end up to those three updates a day. Three times five equals 15. This is going to be the first starting place here. Sticking with these numbers, 15 updates a week equals 60 updates a month that you're out creating and sharing if you're starting out with three a day.[14:28] 60 updates a month comes down to 10 updates per category per month. What this means is that each category in Edgar now just needs 10 updates a month in order to have fresh content and that's it. It's a really simple way for you to break it down and get in this idea of, "Wow. Just 10 updates per category, that's something I can do." Social media no longer seems like this overwhelming task, rather something that's really broken out and able to be accomplished with those strategy behind it. All this means is that you are going to now be baking your cookies once a month with this 10 status updates instead of every single day. Once a month time block out your batching time to sit down and write this 10 updates per category and add them into your Edgar library. How much more manageable does that sound to find 10 links to blog post that you think are interesting? 10 tips or quotes that inspire you or educate your community, 10 links to your own blog post that you can add on in. A pro tip here is also, you don't have to go out and find 10 new blog posts. You can actually add these in with different questions or different headlines just coming up with something new to introduce them with, to share that authentic experience with your community and make sure that you're getting the most out of the content you have. Edgar's categories really will help you guide your strategy a little bit further. Once you start to add your updates in, if you pop over to your category's tab again, you can see there's a little number that will provide you with how many updates or image category. Once you start to get to know your community a little bit better and you have months that you're seeing a lot more engagement on a specific category, you can start to up the level of numbers of post you're sharing from that category and also delegate out to your team a little bit more on the types of updates they should be creating.[16:20] Say you realize that your blog posts are getting way more engagement when you ask questions for them, consider them maybe going in and adding 20 updates to this category and you realize maybe that your job listing posts aren't producing as many click through rates and aren't getting you the candidates you want, so you'll pull those back to maybe one in a category share from their week and you can start to see how the number of updates in each category can be really a tailor towards your specific audience. Pop on in here and let Edgar's categories really help to guide your strategy when you're doing social batching.[16:56] Social batching is really awesome as you can see for that evergreen content, for that stuff that's going to provide your followers value no matter what time a year you're sending it out, but it can also be really great for your content that's going to be a little bit more time box and not as organic and natural for any time of the year, but your seasonal content or your holiday specific content and Edgar, although he's really awesome for sharing your evergreen content, gives you some awesome, more close to do this as well. Setting this up in Edgar goes back to the categories tab. When you go to your categories tab in Edgar, you can click the add new category button to actually produce some holiday specific post that you can start batching as well. When you click to add any category here, the trick is going to be to make sure that you're naming your category that has to do with the holiday whether it's the season, like your summer posts or your more Thanksgiving-y posts or anything that's going to really help to trigger your memory what types of posts go into this category?[17:53] Make sure you're unchecking that little box that says, "Include when you're selecting random content to post." This is going to help with the batching part and we'll look at this in a minute here. Once you say that as a new category in Edgar, it's now available to you in your composer screen. When you click to add new content, you'll see that category is available in the drop down menu. You can now compose your update that has to do with this season and really tailoring it to the advise you can give your community in the winter versus the summer or again in a specific holiday that you might be running a promotion, giving your social media strategy to fit in with your overall marketing strategy and get the best messaging out there as possible, so it's not a last minute thought that you're just running out there.[18:37] As you're doing this, start to load up all of the posts that you'd like to share in that holiday season in a time where you are able to sit down and get a consistent message out there. Then, when that season comes along, you can pop in to your Edgar schedule and click on the add new content times or add new time slot on your Edgar schedule. Again, you can see this category in the drop down menu here where you're able to select your holiday category or select your seasonal category, check out the accounts you'd like it to go out to you and save that as a time slot on your schedule. Because you've uncheck the box to include this in random status updates, you can rest assure that everyone will never share anything from this category unless it's added to your schedule as a category. A really nice way that you can go on in and get your work done ahead of time crafting your social media updates for that season and rest assured, they won't share out unless that category is on your schedule blog.[19:35] From there, you can see my holiday time slot, which is placed on my schedule here on Monday at 4:00 p.m. I want to share a holiday post from this category every Monday at 4:00 p.m. To not get extra post going out, you can either add this in as an additional category or a cool thing about Edgar schedule is you can actually click into that specific category here and you can then reselect a different category, so you can swap out the type of update you're sharing if you don't want to have that holiday schedule post go out in addition to maybe a blog post or something else you're sharing. It's a great way to control the amount of updates that are going out and keep it really, really up to date on the season and stuff that you're sharing there.[20:19] Once that season goes on in and runs out, you can then see that you can go into Edgar and either switch it back to one of your pre-determined categories or you can go on in and you can click the delete button here, which will allow you to remove that holiday specific time slot from your schedule, again allowing your updates to live in your library, but not go out as long as that category isn't on your schedule. That's really great for a content that you'd like to share over and over again during a specific season, but what if you have content that's even more time boxed than this like your holiday specific posts? You can actually go in and use what we have in Edgar as your used ones category.[21:02] This is an awesome category for going on in and thinking about how you can batch all of your holiday posts in one sitting and this is an added bonus of being able to say, "Hey, you know what? When I'm on vacation during Thanksgiving or 4th of July, I know that Edgar is going to post for me and I don't have to worry about missing a beat because I've batched this and I added this to my Edgar library." For example, you can come on in here and go ahead and select the used ones category from the drop down menu you see on your add new content screen. You can then craft all of your updates. One pro tip I'd like to go ahead and get out there is go ahead and download a holiday calendar or go ahead and download a national day of the year calendar and look at this while you're sitting and composing your updates.[21:48] You can then go in and click this scheduled settings drop down menu that you see beneath the text field in your add new content screen. This will produce an area where you can go ahead and check off to send at a specific date and time box. What this is allowing you to do is go ahead and get all of your holiday posts to go out on a specific day and time and save them to your Edgar library ahead of time. With that calendar in front of you, go ahead and do this for the whole year. Get all of your great holiday posts into your Edgar library, so you don't have the time switching, you don't have to worry about being on a holiday or a vacation during the time that you can be connecting with your community on social media.[22:27] Go ahead, select the used ones category, put in the holiday date and get all of those in there. Some examples here that you can do is adding all of this holiday posts at once is again, get creative with it. For example, October 8 is International Octopus Day. How fun? Of course, that's a pretty easy date to remember, 08/08, but we also want to make sure that we are getting this in there so we don't forget about it. Think about creative ways that you can use the used ones category to go ahead and batch all of your fun holiday specific posts at once into your Edgar library.[23:01] Other things to think about or how we've used this at Edgar is to produce some fun and valuable contest or fun and valuable promotions around specific holidays and have this fit in with your larger marketing strategy if someone's sending out a newsletter related to this promotion or if you're promoting this on your website, make sure that consistency is following through on social media and you can go into Edgar again and add updates like this to throw a really fun, specific holiday related promotion for Mother's Day or Valentine's Day ahead of time again, so you're not rushing and you can always adjust your strategy at a later date.[23:37] Make sure you're using that used one category to batch those holiday updates in there. Now, as we've gotten a little bit creative with how we're doing our social media that's not going to be as evergreen but still socially batched, we can now move on a little bit more to engaging with your audience. Each time that you are engaging with your audience, it produces this really great and highly visible relationship that's showing the world you care about your customers and your brand is worth following. You take the time to batch out these updates and load them in to your schedule of choice, kick back and relax, knowing that for the next month, your social media profiles are going to be posted to you in a steady stream up updates at the right time no matter where or what you're doing and this now gives you the freedom to schedule these live interactions and batches.[24:27] Now that you can do this, I want you to block out maybe 15 minutes a day to log in and check your notifications. Go ahead and reply to people, like people who have gone ahead and reached out to you on Twitter or Facebook and make sure you're getting that one on one brand connection because remember, it's all about this human to human connection and it's far more beneficial for your brand to have a thousand really strong, really excited followers than to have 10,000 unengaged followers and your engagement is going to come in the form of batching it here. Reply to anyone, reach with anyone who has got something really cool to say in your industry and each time your audiences gage at you on social media, it's really an opportunity for you to increase your social visibility, so don't forget to batch out your replies too and this really goes back again guys to this concept that social media does not work when you're trying to turn every new fan or follower into a paying customer.[25:23] It gets a lot simpler when you've focused on building this engagement into your audience, so batch out those replies now that you've got a social media scheduler to get your updates out there, taking the time to reply is going to be a really great way to up level your social media strategy. This again is just this concept that customers really want to be seen and heard on social media. If you're using it as just a broadcasting way of getting your links out there, your followers don't have a lot of consistency in knowing that you want them to reply and you want them to engage with you. Ask questions and make sure that you are going in and showing your followers that they are seen and heard, their concerns are taken care off as well as their communication on social media is valued by your brand.[26:11] If you're doing this right, you can also make sure that you have all of this profound wisdom out there and if you were always so busy updating your posts and never interacting live, you're going to miss this really fun opportunities like this one you see in our screen here. We have this opportunity to connect and show our brand's personality a little bit with Marlene here who tweeted a simple thank you for how awesome the Edgar is and coming back with this brand on brand reply here is again a great way that we are able to take some time out of our day, 15 minutes and reply to all of the customers who have shown us the respect and show how grateful we are that you are interacting with us on social media.[26:52] Knock out as much as time as you can to do this in your 15 minutes a day, so you're not falling into those nasty task switching habits that keep you going in and out of social media checking on those notifications. Keeping it simple and blocking out just a few times during the day to do this. Guys, batching your social media updates is going to make your life so much easier, not only for sharing your content, but also engaging with your community. You can make sure that it's not just something that's filling the gaps in your daily routine, but it's really becoming a part of your daily routine. Like I said, we love to hear from you. Go ahead and tweet out MeetEdgar if you have any feedback about our webinars or anything you'd like to learn in the future or email support@meetedgar.com and we are more than happy to chat with you.