Creating Special Moments with Your Social Media Followers / Leveraging the Ever-Changing Visual in Social

Neal Schaffer: 0:01

Welcome to maximize your social, practical and actionable advice on how your business can truly maximize your social media presence. Now, the host of maximize your social author of the recently published book of the same name and founder of maximize social business, Neal Schaffer. Hey, Neal Schaffer here, welcome to a nother episode, or is this a new episode or the first episode, if you've been following this podcast, it used to be called Social Business unplugged. And starting October 1, officially, or by the time you heard this podcast, this podcast is now called maximize your social, the last? Well, nine to 12 months has been an incredible time. And it's been an incredible time because I've basically rebranded my entire online presence from a windmill networking presence, for those of you who remember that to basically splitting off that brand, one into a content brand, featuring all the great thought leaders that blog for what is now called maximize social business. And that has more than, you know, 20 plus contributors, hopefully, you're all familiar with that that social business unplugged was really focused on that blog. However, just one week ago, I launched my new website for my personal brand called maximize your social, maximize your social being the name of my new book, which, by the way, just officially published Monday of this week, that's September 30. The first book that I know of that really teaches you everything you need to know about creating, managing, optimizing, implementing a social media strategy. So I hope you'll check that out. It's been interesting, I get a lot of people asking me, well, what are you going to do for a big promotional push? What did you do on the day of publication? Well, you know, nothing special. In all honesty, books are sort of an interesting beast. And that's probably a subject for another podcast. But in my world, where I am basically b2b, I think campaigns work a little bit differently, then, when you're trying to target consumers directly, my campaigns and you'll start to see some of them. But just having the presence or rebranding my presence to the name of my book in itself and creating a Twitter handle for those of you that are following Max, your social, in a way is just keeping mindshare with with the name of the book, right? That in itself is just sort of an ongoing thing that I'm doing. And I'm creating an infographic, which is probably going to be the subject of my next podcast. But first of all, I want to cover two things in this podcast. And up until now I have limited my podcast or one subject matter. Sometimes I just feel passionate about a lot of different things. And today, I want to talk about two things. The first one is giving back to your network, giving back to your partners giving back to your customers and in social media, we often get into the habit of you know, creating strategies and editorial calendars. And, you know, we want to promote our own content. We want to be seen as thought leaders. Yes, we're sharing contents of others, as well. And as far as content curation, and engaging with influencers, but have we ever taken a step back and said, You know what, let's go out there and just thank those that have supported us that maybe we think before, but especially when you have a new product like I have, which is a book I've gone out and just you know, those people that I know have supported me over the years over the months, however long it's been, but I know that they've been supportive of me out there and social. I've gone out and sent them private messages saying, hey, I want to send you a copy of my new book. And every time I've done that they've you know, they've been ecstatic. It's what Guy Kawasaki would call it enchantment. It's what the folks that All Nippon Airways who have, you know, been proud to be a brand ambassador for they call Anna magic internally, it's creating just a very, very special moment that can deepen your relationship with someone by 10x. And now I know the first thing, the first time I put this on a podcast, I'm gonna have someone be emailing me, hey, Neil, why don't I get a copy of the book? Well, you know, if you've been engaging with me on social, and you'll probably hear from you sooner than later. But it's really just going out of your way and thanking people. It's like when I did maximize your social.com. And I owe a lot of people a lot of LinkedIn recommendations. But you know, my WordPress developer Ryan Talley did such a great job on the site, I believe, you can go to maximize your social.com and check it out as well, that I went out of my way, the minute after I paid him the final payment for the site. I went on LinkedIn and gave him a recommendation which you can read, you know, on his site as well. But it's really doing these little things that make a big difference in the lives of people and it makes a big difference in the lives of your partners, your customers and, and social media. We forget it's about the people, right? We get caught up in these online conversations. What about just reached, you know, taking up the phone or sending that private message and doing something special for that person? So I'm a big fan of that. I realized that I hadn't done that in a long time. I've just been busy with my own book and rebranding and launching two new websites and it's been a busy few months but I'm really glad I did that and I really want to make it part of my normal routine and I hope you will as well but the other thing is And, you know, I want to give you concrete takeaways whenever I give these podcasts. The other thing I want to talk about is the visual is leveraging the visual now in maximize your social for those that you read it, you know that there is a special contribution by the content marketing contributor to maximize social business, Bob Geller, who talks about leveraging the visual In fact, I have an entire chapter on leveraging visual social networks in the book as well, which talks about Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, these are all very, very different websites, obviously. But the thing to note about the visual is it's changing very, very quickly. We've already seen a stat recently where there are more active monthly users on a mobile device, okay. On Instagram, there's actually more mobile Instagram users and Twitter users right now in terms of active monthly users on a mobile device. In the United States, it's come out of nowhere, we know the stats from Pinterest, that they are second to Facebook in terms of the amount of referral traffic. And when it comes to e commerce traffic, you know, the average spend per user, the average spend per Pinterest user is is above Facebook. And there's been multiple studies which talk about this. So with leveraging the visual and you know, going further just yesterday, and this sort of dates when I recorded the podcast, but being announced that they were going to be adding Pinterest boards into the Bing search results. So if search engine optimization and getting discovered as important for your company and your visual company, well gives you even more reason to be on Pinterest, even if you're not a visual company, there are ways of utilizing Pinterest. And I urge you to you know, check out some ideas that I have a pinterest.com/neal Schaffer for, for what I'm doing. And I'm not selling, you know, makeup and hair products and travel destinations. But you know, there are things that companies and professionals can do to help others discover you on those social media channels. The really interesting one, though, of in terms of the changes that are going that are taking place in terms of images, and it actually comes from a blog post, that buffer did buffer is one of these social media tools, which I highly recommend. It's called seven big Facebook changes you should know about for a better Facebook strategy. This just came out two days ago on October 1. And yes, it's October 3 as I record this, but it's interesting in it talks about something that many of you if you've been even if you've been active in social media, but you've been busy you may have missed out on which is that images are now bigger and wider. In the Facebook newsfeed they're bigger and wider in the desktop newsfeed and they're bigger and wider in the mobile newsfeed. And if you do not have an image that is big enough, your image in the newsfeed is pushed down to a 100 by 100. Well, I guess the official sizes are either 154 by 154 or 90 by 90, really, really small square image that's really not going to help your company when you want to add an image to be seen in the news feed. And it comes in that small and there's all this real estate around it. So what do you need to do in order to be optimizing? You know, if you run on WordPress, we're pressing the media settings, you have this large, medium small. And the default the large is huge. It's like I don't know, 960 pixels wide, the medium is usually 300 wide. The small was like 150, I think, and maybe you're like me, I've just been using the medium set at 300. So I've made sure that images are 300 wide, maybe the 300 by 300 200 by 300, or what have you. But with these new changes, every single one of my images is now being shown at a fraction of what I'd like it to be shown out. So the numbers here, the important ones to remember are for the desktop newsfeed, it's 400 by 209. That is the dimension that Facebook is recommending that will make the best use of the newsfeed screen if you want to have your image be be shown and be engaged with and hopefully lead to greater engagement for what you're posting on Facebook. For mobile. It's even bigger 560 by 292. So there's a comment here that you know when we talk about mobile, it's not just galaxy as far as like the one I have or iPhone fives like you probably have, but it's also the tablet devices, the iPads and what have you. And there's an aspect ratio that is in the post which was recommended by Jon Loomer, who writes some pretty great things about Facebook and has this great infographic which shows all this, which is 1.91 to one seems to be the magical aspect ratio. So it was interesting, I did a little audit yesterday I went to Jon Loomer site, I went to a few other sites like The Next Web, I forgot TechCrunch I don't know these big sites that are always on the latest and greatest of social. And when I looked at the images that they are using as sort of their featured image for their blog post. It's no longer that little image that used to be surrounded by text literally underneath the title. You now have a big white image they have already optimized for Facebook. So what did I do? I immediately went back to Ryan, my web developer and said hey, maximize social business we need a wider we need to be able to put in a My sitemap, I should say maximize social business is pretty unique in that it has two sidebars on each side of the content. So the content width was only about 525, I could not put in an image that was 560 pixels or larger. So we got that fixed, we made it wider so that there's more room for the content. And now I'm going to work on optimizing past images as well as future images. By tweaking that WordPress setting and just making sure that any image I put in there is going to be of a higher resolution. So when I went through and you know, looked at all the images from all these sites, they were set at a width of like 500, or 600, or 700. Obviously, for the mobile newsfeed, you want to be at least 560. So if you wanted to be 560, by 292, great if you wanted to be 600 by that 1.91 ratio, or divided by 1.91, or 650 700, whatever it may be. But with these changes, and I think Google Plus has always you've always been able to display images wider as well. And with the emergence of Pinterest and Instagram in the visual networks, and with Bing now adding Pinterest support, and I do not believe Google has that it may happen in the near future. It just all the more reason why the visual is more and more important not only as content itself, but as that eye candy to draw others into discovering your content in social networks. So thank you for bearing with me. While we discuss different topics today. I thought it was really important. Finally, if you notice at the very beginning, and you'll notice that the outro for those of you who listen to my first podcast, you already know this, but that music was actually from a band that I played in Japan called jackal and I am the drummer. I also did what that oboe sounding instrument that you hear was actually me on the keyboard. But that's another story. But as a way of showing support for my network. My podcast engineer who actually records those intros and outros and does the voiceover, he actually came out with a new CD. So if you're into folksy guitar vocal type of music, check out Jonah luke.com JLN Ah luke.com and pay it forward. Thank you very much everyone for listening to this podcast. I look forward to your comments and any requests that you may have and make it a great rest of your day wherever you are in the world. Bye. Bye, everybody. Thanks for listening to maximize your social. We appreciate your iTunes subscriptions, ratings and comments. If you would like to appear on this show or recommend content, please contact Neal Schaffer at Neal at maximize your social.com Thanks for listening and have a great day.