Want to Excel at Social Media Marketing? You Need to be an Active Consumer of Social Media First

Neal Schaffer: 0:02

This is the maximize your social influence podcast with Neal Schaffer, where I help sales and marketing professionals, entrepreneurs, and small business owners, build, leverage and monetize their influence in digital and social media. Hey, everybody, this is Neal Schaffer before I launch into this episode, which is Wow, episode number 140. Believe it or not, I just wanted to give you a little bit of preview. So I'll be explaining a little bit more about my rebranding. But obviously, when you listen to the intro, it is very, very different. And if you were to look at the logo on my podcast, you'll see that it also has changed over the last few months in between Episode 139 and 140. I've done a lot of soul searching visa V, my podcast, and with my new book, The Age of influence coming out next March, which is all about not just influencer marketing, but really the concept of influence in social media, and why it's so important to businesses and professionals, I really want to you know, retune. And I also notice that, you know, my intro and outro before, we're very I don't know, after listening to a lot of other podcasts, it just to me didn't sound authentic, it wasn't me. So I did something a lot simpler using my own voice. The music, if you are curious, was inspired by time that I spent in business in Indonesia, where I became a big fan of dang good music for any of you maybe from Indonesia or Malaysia know that that was actually the exact song that it was inspired by was sung called Copy dunk, which one of my favorite songs from that part of the world. But anyway, hope you enjoy that that new feeling the new rhythm there, and I hope you enjoy this podcast. Now, I am in the process. And I talk about this a lot. And hopefully, I'm finally going to do this in q4, of releasing some new digital products. So I hope that if you haven't already gone over to Neal schaffer.com, and you will sign up for my list, which is on the sidebar widgets, or on the bottom of the website so that I can inform you when I release these things, which I think are going to be very, very valuable to all of my listeners. So without further ado, let's launch into the new episode. This is Neal Schaffer. And welcome to another exciting episode of maximize your social. Yes, it's been a while and now you're listening to a podcast from the guy who wrote a blog post saying that I hadn't written a blog for like a year. So apologies. But I don't feel like I want to publish content just for the sake of publishing content, or trying to maintain an editorial calendar. I do know it is a best practice to be consistent on social media, I tell it to all my clients. So like many of us consultants, we need to drink our own medicine, right. So this is really my promise to you. You know, when I get a tweet on Twitter, obviously, that says Neil haven't had a podcast in a while what's going on? You know, it's time for a new podcast. So I am trying to do my best. And you know, I know that a lot of you are bloggers wanting to post more frequently on Instagram, or wanting to get into podcasting or YouTubing, whether for yourself or for your business, and maintaining that consistency is hard. I feel it, I feel for you. But I'm hoping the advice I give you today, well, I'm gonna give you two pieces of advice. But really the the main piece of advice I want to talk about is, if you want to benefit from it, you gotta use it. I'm gonna get to that second. The first one is you got to become proficient at batching content. Now, I am not the best of batching content. But I do know that when I want to post something on Instagram, I can go back into 20 years of photographs that I've taken. I've had a digital camera since like, 1999, I think, if I'm not mistaken. And, man, there's a lot of content to call from right. There's podcasts I've published that I've never shared. On Instagram, there's blog posts, I've never shared on Instagram, you know, so there's batching there's repurposing of what a lot of influencers do is they go out on a shot. They go out on a shoot, obviously, and don't you know, they use the same Photoshop, you know, color settings, and boom, they have like two months worth of content that you post every day. When I travel to Japan or to Europe, wherever I go in the world, I tend to take a lot of photos. And that can last me sometimes a few weeks. I mean, yesterday, I just posted about eating this wonderful quarter banana in Sweden, because I have to go all the way overseas to get good carbon art that I can't find in Italian restaurants, the United States I digress. But you know, the whole idea is that, you know, it's batching content, right? It's taking a lot of when you're out events. You can be taking lots of photos if you have product services, just set up one day to create images or videos. Rent a video studio for a day rent a videographer for a day, spend a day writing blog content, spend a day recording podcasts, right? It's the same concept pencil in your calendar done. So I am trying to get into a better habit, it is a never ending battle. And as you get older in life, you'll find that there's a lot of never ending battles that you're going to face. And it's not saying I've lost it saying, I'm just gonna, I just gotta try harder, right. And I just got to work smarter and more efficient. So this podcast, though, you know, it's taken me a long time to record this next one. Now, I used to go solo on all my podcasts. And I was very passionate about it, because I found that there were a lot of podcasters, that didn't have anything to say, they were just interviewing other people. And while it's great to interview people, and there's definitely value in that and getting a variety of perspectives, I have a lot to say, I'm a speaker, I've been blogging for like a decade, right? I have a lot of advice that I want to give you, my listener, my, I don't want to call you an avatar, but my image of who you are, right. And I want to be more faithful to those of you who do want to tune in on a regular basis. And here's the thing, I'm going to be very honest with you. Okay, there are some social networks that I'm very active on. Instagram is the one I'm probably most active on, I am really deep and Instagram, to the point where if you have not posted in a few months, right, I'm probably not following you anymore, because you're not invested in it. And probably like a lot of people unfollowed me on Google Plus, when I tuned out of it a long time ago, right. And that's human nature. I want to be invested in the platform and invested in people that are equally invested in the platform. So here's the thing about podcasting, right. I'm a marketer, okay, primarily social media marketer, but I'm a digital marketer, I have to do it all, for my own brand for my own business, as well as for my clients. And I'll be very honest, I was not a podcast listener. I was creating podcasts. Without being a podcast listener. That probably sounds really bizarre to a lot of you. I was one of many. It's like, hey, the next thing is podcast, you got to do podcasts like, Okay, I'm a speaker, I'll do it on my iPhone, I'll call it social business unplug, which is how this maximize your social podcast actually started. But the funny thing is one of my clients I work with, well, I guess you could say I work with a team of millennials, and I'm a Gen X or for those that know me, I, you know, I do not hold biases against generations. But obviously, with every generation, media consumption is different. Right? And you talk to your kids, well, my kids, you know, there are in seventh grade and ninth grade. And the influences to them are not, you know, TV or movie stars. They're YouTubers and Instagramers are grammars. So, you know, with that in mind, it was really interesting because I listen to a lot of music. And those you know, I play drums, I was in a band in Japan, we actually recorded two CDs. And sometimes I've shared some music on social media. So I tend to listen to Spotify, in my car, my way to client meetings, business trips, even when I take my kids to school, or to soccer practice or whatever it might be. And I listen to a lot of Japanese music. One of the joys of Spotify is I can keep in touch with latest trends of Japanese music. So I listen to a lot of that, listen, American music as well. And getting back to my client with the millennial marketers. We were talking, you know, I came in and there for my weekly meeting, and hey, how's it going? You know, hey, what sort of music do you listen to, you know, and she's like, I don't listen to music. I'm like, really? She goes, Yeah, I'm like, Well, what are you do in your car? I mean, you have like a 30 minute commute, or, you know, when you're at the gym, or what have you, she goes, Well, you know, at the gym, I might listen to sort of like background music or jazz, but, you know, in my car, I like to listen to podcasts. And it's sort of blew me away. I mean, she's not in my target audience, obviously. But it blew me away. I you know, you don't meet many people where they are podcast first people, unless they're a marketer with a podcast. And then there's a lot of those types. So, you know, it got me thinking, I really haven't been listening to podcasts. The other interesting thing, and I was a guest on someone else's podcast, someone's been doing it for like five years. My podcast is probably five years old, I should look at when I did my first one. And I'm already at like, 137 episodes. But I have definitely noticed since the beginning of the year, a serious uptick in downloads. Now it could happen because I got better, you know, visibility in the algorithms that control iTunes and Spotify and Google Play, whatever it is, or it could just be there's a lot more people listening or could be on better promoting it. But I am a believer that slowly, more and more people are listening to the stops and suggesting this, the fact that Spotify, you know, buys anchor.fm, they're saying we're going to go heavy and the podcast is another symbol, right? And you have a lot of entertainment figures that have their own podcast as well. Now, it's just a way for you to get your message out directly to your audience. And, you know, when you look at all the marketing stats, how long do people engage with your tweet a second, right? What about your Facebook post? Well, not very long Instagram story, maybe up to 15 seconds, Instagram video, maybe up to a minute YouTube, it's gonna be longer podcasts. I mean, it might be 20 minutes might be an hour depending on how long your podcast is. It's a lot of time people are stopping and listening and you got them for a long time. So the net net of all This is and I'm going to share this, I'm probably going to post something on Instagram. I may put it in the show notes. I'm not sure I don't really do show notes. And that's another interesting thing is, before I assumed, well, if I do a podcast, I should write a blog post about it. But you know what? Blogs, from my perspective, be part of its brandy. But part of its SEO, right. It's like posting a bad photo on Instagram, and it's going to kill your engagement. Bad blog content is going to kill your relationship with Google as well. So I would be posting podcast episodes that were fun to record, they might have had some value from audience. But from a Google perspective, it was out of brand, right, or there were just no keywords that people were searching for. That would have relevance. It wasn't value based, it was more entertainment based. And I've noticed this on Pinterest as well. Where I've gotten deeply into Pinterest over the past few months. In complete disclosure, in terms of generating traffic to my website. Google is always number one, by far. That's why I talk a lot about SEO. Number two has been Twitter. Number three has been Pinterest. And that's why over the last two to three months, and I'm gonna have some podcast episodes about Pinterest. Because I'm not a consumer brand. I'm not posting recipes and travel photos. I'm posting marketing information, right. And Pinterest has maintained its ability to generate traffic over the long term, it generates more traffic than probably Facebook and LinkedIn combined on some days, in fact, some days I get more traffic from Instagram than from Facebook or LinkedIn. So this is a whole other story, right? A whole other story. But here's the thing on Pinterest, I noticed as well, I was there's a lot of pins that got bad engagement, when you get bad engagement, right? You have this lifetime batting average, like I like to talk about. So it's it's hurting my lifetime batting average. And you know what, I don't need to create a pin for all my blog posts. Because some posts are more relevant to the Pinterest audience and others, you got to be in the platform to know what works, that we repeat that you have to be an active user, you have to want to use the social network and use it on a daily basis and engage in a daily basis and become part of the community if you want it to work for your business. So I'm going to talk about podcasts. I just obviously I'm recording a podcast, I just listen to a podcast. And I'm not gonna say who not important, but they were talking about a certain social network. And once you gain a follower or a connection, or you know, a friend, whatever it is, they're now at the top of your marketing funnel. I do not like that lingo. Because it's treating people in social networks as dollar signs. Now, obviously, we're all listening this podcast. And I don't know if it's gonna come in time, it's gonna have a new jingle, jingle, sorry, jingle bells, it's that time of year. I'm renaming I'm rebranding my podcast with the emerging publication of Age of influence, and really honing in on my target avatar. And I'm going to talk about that, as I talk about podcasting. And what I've learned over the past few months, it's really going to be not maximize your social maximize your social influence, everyone every business wants to and should become more influential. They should grow influence, they should leverage influence, meaning leverage other influencers. And they should monetize that in different ways. So don't get me wrong, right? It's about business. But you know what people do business with people they like, know and trust. And when you come on to me, and immediately we connect, and you're selling to me, even though it might look a little savvy, like, Hey, this is how I help people, let me know, if I can help you, it's still very clear that you targeted me for business, and you have added me to your funnel, you might have added me to your CRM that says you're going to send me a follow up message a week from now, to me, that is not social media, now might be effective. But guess what, it's going to be extremely ineffective. I believe that a large majority of people, and a lot of those people might block you, I block all the time. And when you get blocked, that is sending a signal, right to the social networks, that this person is spamming a lot of people. And I know people that have lost accounts on social media because of that. So you might get some low hanging fruit. I'm not going to say you know, and it gets back to sort of my days in sales. There are people who swear by cold calling, right? But I think what worked 20 years ago, or 10 years ago, five years ago, doesn't necessarily work the same today. So we're all on social media, to hang with friends. Now. There are some networks, we're more more professional, there's some a we're more open, we're more visually engaging. So every network is obviously different. And you got to be part of that community. But here's the thing. I don't think of you as dollar signs. You don't want me to think of you as dollar signs. I want to become your friend, right? And if we become friends, you need my help. I can help you. And yes, if you want targeted help, it's going to use up my time. You know how busy I am. It requires money, and we all get that right? I'm not going to try to pitch you on something. So that's the problem I have with a lot of advice out there. A lot of social media marketing for business advices they take that approach and guess what? Those people end up either sending sort of automated messages or semi automated messages where they piss off a lot of people, they get blocked air or they just publish content without engaging with other people. And then they wonder why no one's engaged with their content. And then social media truly becomes pay to play, when 100% of your social media is just using Facebook ads, that's not social media anymore. That's just pure paid media, right? So you got to be part of the network. And once you're part of the network, and you're actually engaging with people, like you care, you don't see them as $1 sign, because you truly want to help them. Because you know, you can help them better than anyone else, you know that by investing in you, and you're investing in them, they're gonna get tremendous ROI, they'll get that right. Once you start engaging with them, commenting on their posts, sharing content that's targeted to them, that's value based and hopeful, they're going to get that they're going to get that repeatedly, the more engagement you get, the better your engagement gets. So why hit the people over the head, automatically add them to a funnel, I don't think that's the right way to use social media. And I think over time, those people are going to be less and less effective. Not to say that for every 100 People you contacted might be that one person that might be in the market for your services that was in the middle of doing a search, and you had the exact timing. Sure. But you know what, they might have seen your content and posts that might have resonated with them, and ask them to contact you again. With that in mind, I want to get back to the original topic. And I'm sort of, you know, I like to cover a lot of topics here, I'm not working off of a blog post, there's some podcasters, who write a blog post and literally talk that blog post on the podcast and, and what I've learned, because I've actually, I never subscribed to a podcast, I'm gonna be really honest with you. So over the past few months, I've subscribed to several podcasts, I'm going to share some great podcasters out there some people that I really respect, some that have influenced even what I'm talking about today, on the positive or negative side. But and I want to share those, right, and I'm gonna send you all that information later. But I've learned a tremendous amount and what it's helped me do, just like I'm saying, if you want to get business from the Grammy got to be part of the Graham, if you want to get Pinterest, you got to be part of it. And listening to a lot of podcasts have made me realize both the power of podcasting, and what I have been doing completely wrong up until now, because I wasn't a consumer of them. If you want people to consume your content, you need to consume their content, if you want to be extremely effective. Now, I think my podcast has done okay. And I've seen ROI from it. But I've missed out on some really, really, I would say both fundamental and critical mistakes. Now I don't, that's the subject of another podcast, you know, the mistakes that I've learned. But I am renewed with a passion for podcasting as an extremely powerful medium. And I'm going to be keeping my promise to you to try to maintain that consistency. I also, if you've noticed over the last several episodes, I have switched to a half solo half interview, I just have so many incredible people reach out to me wanting to be interviewed on my podcast, and some of them I want to get to know better. So for me, the podcast gives me the opportunity to learn from them to get to know them better to be influenced by those I want to be influenced by. And now I'm getting back to thinking you know, all those people who just interview other people, that's why they're doing it, there's nothing wrong with that they're learning from them. They're using it as a vehicle to develop relationships. That's awesome. So instead of me thinking differently, I am now coming full circle, right? If you want to do that, and that's your objective. That's great, so long as a communist relevant to your target audience, right. And I listen to a podcast where the podcaster did an interview, and it was completely off topic. It's almost like accepting a guest blog post on your blog, that does not fit in one of your blog categories, right? You just stay on topic, you need to always remember that avatar, that target user, that person that you're trying to reach, because you think you can help. So I have done a lot of soul searching. And, you know, in all honesty, I never had I mean, yes, I had an avatar, I had a target user, which is pretty much a corporate marketer. But what I've noticed recently, as a lot of influencers, a lot of bloggers, a lot of small business owners, in addition to marketers, a lot of solopreneurs, as well have reached out to me asking for help, and I want to serve that market. And I think that market may be better served through these podcasts, I have tons of blog content. And some of these, some of these podcasts will be relevant to them as well. So when I was searching for my avatar, I realized, you know what, this is a podcast that not only helps my my peer marketers that have so much respect for, but it also helps solopreneurs and small business owners. So whenever I am recording a podcast, or writing content, or developing digital products, which I have to do, it has to be targeted to them, I have to be in their shoes, and listen to this and see if it has any value. So that's the value I want to provide you today. You got to be part of the network you want to monetize. And by becoming part of it, you begin to build and yield influence there. And this is going to be a topic I'm going to be covering a lot with the obvious publication of my book edge of influence. It's not coming out to March of 2020. It's a long story, but it's going to be worth away but I plan to be doing a lot of stuff before that. So keep tuned in. And if you don't know how to go deep into a platform, you know, I always say social media was made for people, not for businesses. It's not rocket science, spend five minutes a day, spend 10 minutes a day, you know what it is? It's actually at the beginning, checking out the feed, seeing if any of your friends are on the network, following them. Just trying to get a sense as to what are people posting? What are people engaging on doing some searches for some topics that you're interested in either personally or professionally, or maybe looking for customers, people that you can follow that might convert not by sending them an automatic, direct message, but by getting to know them through your content and engagement? And start there? And I think really soon, you're gonna see, I don't even like to cross post my Instagram stuff on my Facebook page. Right? I really don't. It's really unique to Instagram. And I think that is the ideal. Yeah, I know it's gonna take some time. That's where the content batching the content repurposing comes in. But trust me, the more you hone your content for that network, the more effective you're going to be. But it all starts with being part of the network you want to monetize. I hope you enjoyed this. Well, what's the word for it? This reinvented podcast episode My return to podcasting. Now, as an avid podcast listener, hey, you know, make sure that you are subscribed my list because I am going to be releasing some digital products. And I brought this up before, but I'm getting closer and closer to launch them brought in some help. It's gonna help me develop these a lot quicker. So make sure you go to Neal schaffer.com. Subscribe. And hey, if you think my podcast and help other people have more than 130 episodes, there's something in there for everybody. But if you think you can help other people, I would really appreciate you know, take a screenshot of you listening, wherever you are in the world to my podcast, put it up on Instagram, tag me on Instagram stories or wherever you post it. And please, you know, whatever podcasting app, you use iTunes or Stitcher or Spotify, I'd really appreciate a review because it shows that it's legit. It gives us podcast credibility, and it helps other people find it because just like social networks, podcast, app platforms or podcast player platforms, also have algorithms and the reviews genuinely do help. So I want to thank you all for listening to me to the end here. And wherever you are in the world, make it a great social Day. Bye Bye, everybody.