My New Video Workshop: Content Marketing for Social

You know, you need to build a list, you know, you need to do email marketing better. You know that email marketing is proven to have the highest ROI of any digital marketing channel, why aren't you doing more with your email marketing, that is why I wrote the definitive guide to email marketing. And I would love for you to download it so that I can best help you. All you need to do is go to Neal Schaffer comm slash email slash marketing slash guide. And you can get access to it's almost like a book in itself. It's, you know, a few dozen page PDF, but I think that it will really, really help you. And if you do download it, love to hear your feedback as well. What other resources what other free ebooks can I create for you, let me know but for the time being, download the definitive guide to email marketing, how to generate the highest ROI from Digital Marketing at Neal schaffer.com/email-marketing-guide. From your digital marketing coach. Welcome to maximize your social actionable advice on how your business can maximize your social media presence. Now, the host of maximize your social, social media author, speaker, consultant, founder of maximize social business, the Social Media Center of Excellence, and the social tools Summit, Neal Schaffer. Everybody, this is Neal Schaffer. And this is the maximize your social podcast. Welcome to another episode in the life of social media, author, speaker and consultant Schaffer, you know, I often gets very, very broad requests for social media help. And I want to use that as a lead into today's topic, which is how I plan to scale my own social media consultancy, to help more people, you know, this podcast, my blog posts, my books are all part of my mission on educating businesses and professionals on best practices and social media. But often, the work I need to do comes down to requests that I get similar to something like this. And this is literally from the email that I received that I'll share with you. And maybe some of you have wanted similar help in the past or still looking for this sort of help. And I want to tell you how I'd respond and how I can best help you. So here we go. We are interested in reaching, well, a certain demographic in foreign markets, using social media, as well as broadening our reach domestically, we've recently set up our social network, a paid social network B page and social network C page, I'd be interested to know what your plan would be to help us accomplish this. And that's it. Pretty crazy, right? Because at the end of it, and I hate to repeat myself, but social media replaces nothing complements everything. Without social media in the equation. How are you getting leads? How are you promoting your business? Do you even sell to foreign markets? Do you have a product that is saleable in foreign markets? Are there any regulatory issues that might prevent you from selling into foreign markets, you begin to see how time in and time out social media consultant becomes business consulting, and without first responding to these questions and understanding objectives? Well, we want to reach people in foreign markets, we'll reach people. So do you just want to have a promoted tweet that gets displayed to them on Twitter? Or do you want them to do something? What is that specific objective? broadening our reach domestically? Okay, we'll describe what that is. What what exactly? Are you trying to get new signups? Trying to get more website visitors? Well, what exactly is the objective? And what exactly will be the KPI that we can use to measure the success of what you're doing? So for any of you out there looking to do more, but so So you first have to answer the questions that come before social media, right. And I literally, you know, I got this email two weeks ago, and I saved it in my inbox, because I wanted to bring it up on this podcast, as just an example. And I still get, you know, people that are fairly familiar with social media saying, Neal, what do you think about Facebook ads? Or what do you think about Yelp or you know, whatever it might be, and it really comes down to, you know, everything else that I talked about, without trying any of these, you don't know how effective they are. And what I've learned over time, is that you need to have a process in place, you know, maximize your social obviously goes over this process in more detail, but you need to have a process in place in order to test and measure and optimize what you do and I'm really happy to announce with this podcast, that part of how I plan to scale my own consultancy, to help more people is to take the content that I've developed for my corporate clients, my corporate training, corporate speaking that I do, and package it in a way so that it's available for more people. And the Social Media Center of Excellence, which I will be launching soon is really the first step in doing that. And having regular events, I've been doing regular events with experts connection, we do 90 minutes social media webinars on a regular basis. And today, I am announcing a another product to add to that list of other things I'm doing. It is a new nine day online video workshop, called Content Marketing for social that is available on the pop expert.com platform, you can go to pop expert comm or you can go to any of my social properties, and you'll probably find a link and if you're lucky, a 50% discount for the course. But really what it comes down to, and why I chose the topic of content marketing for social, it's funny, because when I started developing the contents, for this workshop, I wanted it to be a way to respond to those requests I get for social media help like that email that I just read to you. So here's the process that you go through. And I wanted to be a little bit different than reading a book like maximize your social actually me speaking in video format, with worksheets, as well as a private forum where I can respond to questions in real time. So really the the methodology that I use that I sort of want to introduce on this podcast, whether or not you end up attending my workshop, I'd love if you checked it out. But even if you don't, not a big deal, but I do want to go through the methodology because I think it can really help you. And it really begins with understanding the role of content in social media, I talk about the convergence of information and communication. If you read my where should you focus your social media efforts in 2015 blog post on maximize social business, as well as on this podcast, the number one thing I talked about was content. Content is the game changer is the way that companies can level the playing field by offering unique, resourceful educational with entertainment value content. And that's why whenever we talk about what you're going to do on social media, whether it's that company looking to do outreach, or what have you, it's going to come down to the content, the content that they share the content that they use to engage in conversations. Now, there's a lot of different types of content, right? If your audience is on Instagram, your contents going to be visual. But there's photos. There's also short video, right? There's long form video, there's discussions, like in LinkedIn groups is blog posts, or status updates. Whenever I put the slide up, when I speak on different types of content, there's, I don't know, maybe a dozen different types. So you really got to decide what is going to be the easiest for you what makes the most sense for your product, and go through on that. And then we get to how we actually once we've decided on the different types of content, how to create content that's going to drive our social media program forward. Because web copy is not social media content, right? It needs to be developed in a way that understands that social media was made for people, not for businesses. And businesses need to understand that and create compelling content that will be engaging in social media. Otherwise, your messages just look like spam to the average social media user, right. And when we talk about the content, I like to put specific significance on the importance of visual content, the visual content, not just because of the social networks like Instagram, or Snapchat, or Pinterest, or YouTube or Ustream or Meerkat or Periscope, but even on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus, the visuals will appear prominently. And it could be the deciding factor whether or not someone actually sees your content, as well as whether or not they're going to click through in your content. I also like to talk about the role of content curation, you don't have to create all the content yourself. In fact, it's invaluable to access the content that others are creating, especially if they're your employees, or your fans, and use this as part of your social media strategy. Because if you're just talking about yourself, well, I don't know how many new followers you'll get, I don't know how many are going to engage with you. Now if you're a big brand like Coca Cola, you can get away with it. But for most small businesses, you can't. And therefore you need to have a content creation strategy in place. You also need to have access to a few what I like to call tools to trade, you know that I found that social tools Summit, and you know that I'm passionate about the message that if you want to scale your social, there's only a few things you can do and tools are one of the most effective ways to do it. You need to pick the right tools of the trade that are going to help you not only in creating better content, but also in managing your social media and measuring your social media more effectively. Finally, we get to choosing which social that worked to invest your time in. And going beyond that, I think paid social has become mainstream. Now, I saw stop somewhere that 92% of marketers surveyed have actually already done advertising on Facebook. I don't think it's mysterious why, but paid social is really mainstream now. And I think it needs to become a mainstream part of even the smallest of businesses, social media marketing, maybe especially the small business, social media marketing. And then we need to put all this together and measure the ROI of all this content marketing you're doing in social media. And that, in essence, is a synopsis of this nine day video workshop that I created, including these actionable worksheets that go along with the videos to help you better internalize the message in this first really, really unique offering that I'm doing once again, together with pop expert.com. So I can't help every business out there. I'm hoping through educational content on social media center of excellence in the near future, I'll be able to help more. And I hope that if you have questions you want me to answer on this podcast, that you email me make a comment in iTunes, on SoundCloud on one of my social postings, whatever it might be, let me know what your questions are. I'm gonna do my best to answer them as well here on this podcast, but it comes down to social media is more than just answering a simple question. There's a whole process involved. That involves a lot of different concepts. If you have time, read maximize your social, if you don't have time, I hope that you'll spend a little bit of money to check out this workshop on pop expert comm content marketing for social, I really hate to sound like an advertisement, I'm gonna stop there. But I'm really passionate about what I do. I'm passionate about the education. And I'm really confident that those of you who do enroll in this workshop are going to find immense value in doing so. So that's it for this episode of maximize your social man. We're at the end of June the end of q2, if there's objectives you have for your social media for your business and q2, now is the time to do it. We got summer vacation coming up. My kids are already out of school. This next podcast next week is probably going to be coming to you from Japan of all places where I'll be traveling and I go back every year for both business and for leisure to see family and friends. But hey, I'm going to stop there. Thanks again for listening. I really appreciate all your iTunes ratings, comments, anyone you can introduce this podcast to and as I like to say, wherever you are in the world, make it a great social day. Wishing you all the best. And hope to talk to you again soon. Bye. Bye, everybody. Thanks for listening to maximize your social. We appreciate all of 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 Please also make sure to check out Neil's new community, his Social Media Center of Excellence at social media ce o e.com. As well as Neil's first social media event, this social tool Summit, which will be in Boston on May 12. And in the Bay Area this fall. Thanks again and make it a social day.