{PODCAST} In-Ear Insights: Social Networks 2020 Webinar

In this episode of In-Ear Insights, listen to the full audio from our Social Networks 2020 webinar, covering what social media platforms you need to focus on in 2020 and what your overall content strategy should look like. This webinar was hosted in partnership with Talkwalker, and features Trust Insights cofounder Christopher Penn and Talkwalker’s Albane Flamant.

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Machine-Generated Transcript

What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.

Albane Flamant
Welcome to this, oh, I’m actually seventh Talkwalker webinar this year. And this time, we’re going to talk about the social networks to watch in 2020. And I’m here we will have a very special guest, Chris Penn from Trust Insights. So Chris and I actually know each other. We’ve known each other for a while, I guess. Yeah, we’ve already done a couple of events even we were at Social Media Marketing World earlier this year. And so I’m really happy to collaborate with Chris on this project. So with this research put together using a little bit of the Talkwalker platform and other and other tools. So again, in case you didn’t hear me earlier, the webinar hashtag is social 2020. Please feel free to use it throughout the webinar to tech Trust Insights and Talkwalker and to ask questions, will be will be getting them and will be addressing them at the end of the webinar. So really quickly, so you have a little bit of an agenda here. We’ll be talking will be recapping a little bit of findings. The social networks to watch for 2020. And they’ll also be some exclusive insights presented in this webinar, and will be also discussing what this means concretely for your 2020 strategy. And then finally, we’ll be taking questions. So don’t go anywhere before the end of the webinar. Because that’s actually the most interesting part of this webinar is the questions from the audience. So really looking forward to it. And Chris, thank you for being here.

Christopher Penn
Thanks for having me. And also, this is go to webinar. So if you don’t use Twitter, or you’re not comfortable asking question, publicly, feel free to use the chat the q&a buttons in in the webinar interface to if you want to ask questions there,

Albane Flamant
definitely. Perfect. So let’s get started. Alright,

Christopher Penn
so social media is kind of an industry in place right now. There’s a lot of people who are doing it. There’s a lot of people who are grasping onto every shiny object. And as marketers, I’m sure you feel this way. I know I certainly do on a regular basis. It feels like we’re trying to do too much. And we’re kind of scattered a little bit. Now. There’s this thing. There’s that thing, there’s two Office this What should we be focusing on? When we looked at the results from the 2019 Pricewaterhouse SEO survey? One of the questions that were asked is what are you going to focus on in the next year to drive growth to drive revenue and the number one thing SEO said was operational efficiencies which is SEO speak for budget God’s you know, the with the famous cartoon expression do work harder, work smarter, not harder, but which we just need to work harder. To

Albane Flamant
more with less, do

Christopher Penn
more with less another another favorite Marketing Pro business through any way you slice it, the C suite, but the head office is asking all of us to be more focused, to be to focus on what matters and try to leave behind as many distractions as possible. And we’re not doing such a hot job of that. If you look, social media spending is now like 12% of marketing budget. This is from the August cmo survey, August 2019 345, CMOS were surveyed by Duke University, and were asked how much you spending on social media. It’s 12% of budget, which, when you think about marketing budgets, the marketing budgets themselves are between eight and 11% of company revenue. That is not a small chunk of change. And what are we spending on everything under the sun, right, every shiny object that comes along? So we are clearly showing a lack of focus here. at an event I was at last week, one of the questions that was asked of some of the companies that are doing a lot with data and analytics was how much your budget are you spending on data and analytics, machine learning data science, anything to do with marketing data your you have? And the answer from the companies are doing it? Well, it’s 20 to 25% of the marketing budgets are double what social, double social budget, because CMOS have said and this is in the CMO survey as well, that could use Have analytics drives more revenue and growth than social and mobile combined?

Unknown Speaker
So in one way

Christopher Penn
in, in helping companies be smart about what they spend their money on, which is really, really difficult if you if you don’t measure, in fact, we’re ready to move on from the bowl.

Albane Flamant
Yeah, I think we can. So I’m going to hide the poor right now. And we’ll go back to the next slide. Here we go.

Christopher Penn
So some of the other challenges that come with this, this budget aspect are outside agencies and outperforming a quarter of all social media activities, which is good for marketers who want to be efficient, spend time on what they’re good at look bad if those outside agencies aren’t keeping current on what’s important, what’s working, what’s not working, if they’re, if you got an outside agency that’s stuck in 2016. They’re saying, you know, Facebook all day every day. Well, maybe, but there’s a lots happened since 2016. I have seen a number of social media marketers talking about well, how do we get more organic reach on Facebook? You don’t it’s 2019 there is a creature various parties. Yeah.

Albane Flamant
And I think that’s even in my team. So as a marketing manager, it’s the exact same thing. So whole question about training, how do you actually, you know, stay current into what’s happening in this industry where you should focus your efforts really resonates to hear you talk about operational efficiency, because yet that’s the reality right now. They want us to focus on what drives results. And what helps with business objectives is usually

Christopher Penn
when you ask companies, how well can you quantify the impact of social media? a disappointing 24% of companies say they can quantify the impact of social the other 76% of folks are just kind of either winging it, or have absolutely no idea what is working what’s not. And that is, that’s frightening to me, because on the one hand, the CEO is saying do more with less focus on what works and on the other hand, 75% of us are like, we don’t know how it works. And so somebody’s getting fired, and it’s probably not the SEO.

Albane Flamant
So, but on the bright side, so if you’d like to see that slide, We can see that at least less people are actually unable to show the Yeah, the impact of what they’re doing. So at least it’s, you know, a little bit of a positive trend. But I agree, it’s scary to still think that the thirds really

don’t know what they’re doing.

Christopher Penn
Exactly. So if you don’t, if you can’t measure and you don’t know what’s working, you’re going to make and you’re outside agencies are going to make some interesting and possibly ineffective or harmful decisions. So that’s really what was the impetus for us to create this research, what we did was, we first used the Talkwalker platform to identify. We know, we all know that major social networks, right Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and so on and so forth. But we used the Talkwalker platform was to find out what are the networks that we don’t know about? What are the ones that we should be paying attention to everything from everyone’s darling of the day, tick tock to more regional platforms, like sign of Weibo, or QQ or Redman or all these other platforms that exist? Are we missing things are things that you wouldn’t think of as social networks function as a social network, one of the important distinctions is that a social network derives its value from the users, right? a blog has value that is independent of how few or many people read it, right? a social network. If Facebook had one user, Facebook would be completely unhelpful, right? The network effect is what makes a social network social network. So we started with that to identify what are the things that we’re looking at social networks, and then social media conversations or not use quantifying, because not that many people talk about the thing. But as detailed in the 2017 book, everybody lies. people search for stuff all the time, and they search for things that you wouldn’t necessarily feel comfortable asking another human about. You don’t want to look, you know, embarrass yourself like, how do I set up a Facebook account? Right? You if you’re a new marketing manager, you don’t want to be typing. You might be asking your staff, like how do I set up a Pinterest account? Yes,

Albane Flamant
that’s something you put on Twitter exactly, but you’ll

Christopher Penn
Google the heck out of it. So what we did is we took those results in Talkwalker weeks, a fed them to the RS SEO tool got search volume. So that blended that with Google’s trend data and built a model of 3000 different search terms, how to set up a fit Facebook profile, how to set up a Pinterest profile, and so on, so forth, and then forecasted that forward, based on the last five years worth of data into what 2020 is likely to look like. And we did this for for two major categories, what we call account creation terms, you know, set up new Facebook page set up how do I create a Facebook profile? And then we set up a second category of what we call quick terms. Delete Facebook, right? How do I delete my Instagram page? How do I erase Instagram? And we wanted to look at how often are people going to be searching for these different terms by social network? If everybody says I’m signing up for Tick Tock how to sign up for that big Google that a lot, but you have even more people saying how do I delete my tik tok account? We’re going to do a little bit of simple subtraction say is there a net Change in the interest of people in each of these networks. And so our results so far have been, what networks have a shrink net growth, which is the orange bars on the right hand side here. What networks, do the joins question, the join searches outweigh the quit searches.

Albane Flamant
Okay. So basically here on if I understand correctly, on the left, we’re looking at the number of well search intent for account creation, basically, yes, in the middle, we’re looking at search intent for people to quit or delete the app, etc. And then we have the combination of these two graphs in a way to look at net potential net growth for the social media. Very interesting.

Christopher Penn
Exactly. So what we want to identify is, what are people searching for? And is there is there interested swaying people one way or the other. So the net results then the network that has the largest net growth is actually YouTube half a million more searches of net growth because not that makes Look for how to delete a YouTube account doesn’t happen, then there’s discord which a lot of people are probably right now scratching heads going what is discord, right? If you don’t have any interest in the gaming community or in the under 24 community, you may not have even heard of this. If you’re familiar with slack or Microsoft Teams, discord is a consumer facing version of that where people can get together to just, you know, discuss their favorite games and things. But it’s not a monolithic network. It’s not like Twitter, there’s only one Twitter, like Slack, you can be in many different discourse, you can get many different slacks, and so on and so forth. And speaking of slack, slack is number three in terms of a network where people would want to spend a lot of time Now if we go down to the bottom, we see that yes, there’s still a tremendous amount of interest in like Facebook and Instagram, but there’s way more people who are looking to leave than to join and even the the darling of social media this year Tick Tock. It’s interesting on the back end, if you look at some of the data that’s out there. The reason the major reason for tech talks growth in the last year has been an enormous amount of ad spend by its parent company. And we see that reflected in the number of people who are now looking to delete. Like, okay, I did my six seconds of dancing with, you know, imitating a fish. And now I’m done. So the initial flash

Albane Flamant
that was maybe refining that surprised me, I guess you’re important. It was that whole relationship to take topic? Probably because, you know, social media can be that kind of echo chamber and I heard so much about it that like, oh, should I be it should actually be doing something with tik tok next year, or? Yo, it’s always a question, kind of these thoughts that come by at some point. That’s very interesting.

Christopher Penn
So, so that’s the initial findings from the research. So now let’s talk about what these findings mean in aggregate and what you should be doing with them. There are three main trends from these findings in 2020 private communities, YouTube, and blended listening, we’re going to dig into each one of these things. One thing I do want to emphasize is in that finding, you know, Facebook and Instagram are showing, you know, net losses in the millions, right? When you have 2 billion users, that is literally one 10th of 1%. So if you’re a social media marketer, like, Oh my god, I have to put Facebook, no, no, please, you don’t have to, like Facebook’s not going away. Tomorrow, 2 billion people do not stop using an addictive service overnight. What we do want to encourage you though, is to broaden your horizons to look at some of these other things and see if your audience is there. And if it makes sense for you to create some of these things. So let’s dig into this first trend is velvet rope community. Private communities, Velcro communities like Slack, discord, Microsoft Teams, all these different platforms allow you to have conversations in semi private Facebook groups to some degree as well. What we’ve seen behaviorally is people want to have conversations with people who have a like minded interest around a topic without either seeing all the other stuff that happens like on Facebook, or it just outright and Public where you have, you know, trolls and stuff at Twitter and it’s abuse problems people are gravitating towards. Let’s just talk to the people we like about the things that we want to talk about when you look at slack. So this is from the RFC SEO tool. One of the things that is common to every slack instance is there’s always a name dot slack calm, right? You can see people putting up links that search engines can find. And it’s astonishing an average of 138 new slack instance so for example, there’s the Trust Insights analytics for marketers slack comm that’s out there if you go to Trust Insights, AI slash analytics for marketers, you can join our public

Albane Flamant
there’s tons of them this one for spin sucks a

really great one this one for Sarah marketer of with David Berkowitz, here in New York, this one for content marketing world actually Content Marketing Institute. That’s really good too. And I think we actually have some member in the room from this group. So yeah, I mean, it’s like it is a Amazing. And actually that number is impressive, like 138 new ones every day. Yeah.

Christopher Penn
Can you imagine trying to keep track of 138 new groups a day on any platform, right? People want to spend time with other people that they like Brown the common interests. That’s no surprise, and socials been trending this way. While this is an example, this is the analytics for markers slack mentioned briefly, if you’re not familiar with Slack, this is what it looks like. By the way, for those who have a lot of gray hair like I do, and I’ve been on the internet for a while. This is going to seem really familiar. This is essentially someone took a really nice interface and slapped it over IRC. So back in the old back in the 90s. When you know you’re dialing up to the internet was still a thing. You would use the same commands the hashtags and things a lot of people say this is brand new. Now this is 20 years old now. But this slack allows you that those private communities where you can just have those conversations outside of what search engines to see and outside of what other social networks can see. There’s no algorithm here either Which is really important. If you have a business and you’re running us, you’re not running a slack community, but you want to have access to your audience in an unfiltered way, this is one of the best ways to do it. When you have like a Facebook group, you are still competing with the Facebook newsfeed to be seen when you have something like a slack or discord or Microsoft Teams or whatever, you are able to see everything everybody posts, which means you also have to do some more moderation and stuff and, you know, call bad actors, but you you see and your members see what you want to see.

Albane Flamant
Yeah, I guess it’s an ability responsibility to be present in the community and things like that, and animated, but I figured if people are still stuck on slack as maybe a you know, internal tool of communication, not people still sit like that. But there’s so much more. I mean, yeah, slack is really great. Like, there are great communities I’m just like yet to try actually

Christopher Penn
yeah. This also means you need to change how you Think about influences right now and social media marketing today. Most people especially in B2C, especially B2C think an influencer is somebody who has a really big audience and a big mouth right so you got a Kardashian, for example is sort of the prototype of the put the architectural influencer, we use as a discussion point. As people gravitate away from the public feeds having that big mouth than that big audience, that one 10th of 1% even see that person’s posts, matters less than less. What you have to do now is think about your influencers, to the extent that we want to keep you and keep using that term. as ambassadors. A lot of these slack communities, they are private for a reason. They don’t want marketers, right. Marketers ruin everything.

Albane Flamant
At least in terms of like your promotion,

Christopher Penn
exactly. Like there’s always that that guy and it’s almost always a guy who’s like, hey, check out my new thing, you know, go away. You have to think about How do you work with people who can be an ambassador and usher you into communities that you might not even know about? And then once you’re there vouch for you’re like, yes, this person is not going to behave like a jerk. Right?

Albane Flamant
Right. And so it’s really more word of mouth.

Christopher Penn
Yeah. real relationship building and leveraging your relationship with influencers. If you know, folks who are like, you know, let’s say you’re in b2b manufacturing and you know, 10 people who have their own communities or maybe they’re part of a large community, but they can speak on your behalf as opposed to you having to be the marketer, the annoying marketer and going in and broadcasting everyone beats you up.

Albane Flamant
Yeah, maybe Yeah, at least and they might be actually be promoting the brand saying, you know, for Talkwalker, brags, OO, go, you know, on Talkwalker, and SR demo by Talkwalker Blacklight. Smart wallet. This is how I use Talkwalker. For example,

Christopher Penn
exactly. And one of the biggest sources of ambassadors that most companies don’t think a lot about, is there. Boys, right? Especially if you have subject matter experts on staff, you should hundred percent be working with them to figure out where do you spend your time, like when you need to do professional development? Where do you spend your time. So for example, one of the, quote, social networks I belong to as a cup is a company called Stack Overflow. It’s all programmers, and like hardcore techies, but the value of it comes from users interaction. So it meets the definition of the social network, right? So if you have if you are targeting that market, you would absolutely want to find who are the most active people who are contributing to solutions about your technology on Stack Overflow and talk to those folks. Right. So there’s so much more as one of the reasons why I love the Talkwalker platform, because it’s not social media monitoring. There’s forums, there’s blogs, there’s news, because that’s word of mouth spreads in so many different ways. You’ve got to stay focused on Where are your subject matter experts spending their time, use that information to help guide your own strategy, the trend to as you saw It’s YouTube world. And it feels weird to sit to be talking like YouTube. Like it’s some new thing. It’s not. Google bought it in 2005. Right? So it’s 15 years old.

Albane Flamant
Right? It’s done. You think that I’m actually very curious about that one. So new for Guys, get back on your screens? I’d like to know, how often does your brand new organization whoever, or you know, any agencies, I’d like to know. How often does your brand post on YouTube? Do you actually post on YouTube? Do you have a strategy on YouTube because you might actually have that choice. And right now that this is a choice that’s winning at 48%. We don’t have a YouTube strategy. So hey, people that are using YouTube, please show up now because that’s looking good. 47% still sitting pretty solid, and we’re at half the room that has voted so far.

Christopher Penn
I’m not ready for this because people don’t think people think YouTube is a video site. They don’t realize it’s this world’s second largest search engine. And this is social network. Now granted, most of the time, the comments A pretty idiotic,

Albane Flamant
kept going all directions for sure. Yeah, that’s Yeah, definitely. So Okay guys, we’re at 60% of the room that has voted. So I’m going to close the poll and share the results.

Christopher Penn
That’s astonishing 51% 33% of people do not have a YouTube strategy 20% of posting monthly, only 9% posting weekly, as a as a and I realized this is no one I post daily on YouTube every weekday because

Albane Flamant
yeah, but as a marketer, I’ve impressed I mean, I guess I’m just I just don’t have the right processes in place, you know, to actually make that happen. Yeah. It’s that’s something we actually do. So yeah, I’m very impressed. And you can see that zero percent of the room is actually posting daily. So your your, well, let’s do your model.

Christopher Penn
Yeah. Let’s Let’s dig into what it what the YouTube strategy, what YouTube means for us. All right. We know yes, it is a huge world out there. Right. When people think of YouTube they think of cutie pie right? They think of the Minecraft channels they think of the big entertainment houses and yes YouTube can seem like it’s an unmanaged Lee large environment with so many millions and millions of people, you know, participating the service. But as with everything when it comes to social media and, and, and digital marketing, you’re not trying to win all of you to write stuff. It’s like you’re not trying to win all over Twitter, you’re trying to reach the right people. And so one of the things you can do with a good social media monitoring platform like Talkwalker, is find your niche. So this is an example from YouTube where use Talkwalker to extract a couple hundred thousand videos. First about YouTube in general, and then a sample of people who are creating YouTube videos of any kind about analytics, most sports analytics folks who want to refine some of the queries, but you can you can find suddenly, when I go back here for a second, the median for the most popular People on YouTube the median number of views 162,000 views right? But when you go down to the bottom 10% of companies that still get, you know more than 100 views on YouTube, it’s these are manageable numbers, right? When you look in the analytic space, suddenly you’re talking, you know, a couple thousand views these are not you know, cutie pie releases or Casey nice that raises the new Beyonce 10 million views and everyone’s benchmarking themselves against that

Albane Flamant
know like the top the top, you know, in your industry you know, that was producing like millions. Exactly,

Christopher Penn
exactly. When you look at like Microsoft Visual Studio and PCG digital and and and these folks are publishing stuff that’s getting a respectable amount of you. But your YouTube strategy is more than Don’t try to be the top of YouTube be the top of your niche of what people are searching for on YouTube. That’s a really important thing. The second thing on YouTube is that people forget YouTube as part of Google and is integrated into Google’s ads system. This is where my caution of outside agencies really comes back. If your agency that You’re using for video or for advertising is not current with the times you can be missing huge opportunities. One of the the best strategies out there for the last couple of years has been this thing called our LSA remarketing lists for search ads. When somebody types in social media monitoring tool, you can run ads to that person, right? You can run a search ad that shows up and you target those people. And you know, they’re interested with YouTube being integrated into Google. You can show ads to people on YouTube, pre roll, lower third post roll interstitial, whatever, to people who search that thing. So for example, with Talkwalker if you wanted to advertise social media marketing software, and you had a 10 second spot, anyone who searched for social media marketing software, and then went to YouTube to watch you know, Gordon Ramsay’s cooking show would see a 10 second ad for Talkwalker. I’m fun, and they like oh, yeah, just searching for that the other day. Uh huh. Right. Well, those It’s funny how that works. You know, Google knows everything exactly. But because it has powerful Google’s machine learning tools and stuff behind it. It is a very, very low cost, highly effective way of winning back that audience. And getting them in multiple places where someone’s behavior on YouTube is different than on Google. Like when you Google for something and search, you’re searching for something. When you’re watching stuff on YouTube, you are sitting down to watch it’s functionally behaviorally like a TV in a lot of ways. So think about as you’re in this goes to your again, that outside agency thing, make sure that you’re thinking about the content that you put on YouTube both organically and paid to serve someone who is behaviorally sitting down to watch something. So there are a lot of brands like MailChimp, what is one of them? that’s doing an amazing amount of original content like shows, because they understand you go to YouTube to sit down and watch something not to immediately go back to work, right? So you could have for example, like a Talkwalker interviews series of stuff that people would sit down and watch behaviorally.

Albane Flamant
So basically, yes. So really use that potential to target people going on YouTube

Christopher Penn
is very interesting and most important, get your skills up to date on organic and paid. The third thing is on that content model. YouTube has an entire Academy it’s called YouTube Academy for creators. If you haven’t gone through it, you should go through it, it’s free. That will teach you what you need to know to succeed at YouTube. And one of the things that has been valuable This was published in 2014 by the way it’s still valid. still works is having this hero hub health model. YouTube’s recommendation is once a quarter you build a big expensive hero piece of content now big Y thought leader these well shot frame looks pro and you run ads to support right to to establish yourself as a thought leader on a monthly basis you have hub content, which is sort of said why like why is socialism important you have what what is socialistic and you dig into stuff. It could be like a recording of a webinar. But you’re you spend some budget on it you put summit campaign effort on it. And but that is sort of the middle part of your strategy. And then the third part of your your strategy is to help strategy. This is high frequency low production cost videos. This is what I do every day, I run a series on my channel called you ask an answer. And all I do is sit in front of a camera for seven to nine minutes a day and answer questions like how do you know what’s the ROI over? How do you measure the ROI or Reddit posts? like

Albane Flamant
yeah, you take questions from the audience. Exactly.

Christopher Penn
And the wonderful thing about that strategy, which is based on Marcus Sheridan’s book they ask you answer is you never run out of content, right? Because every industry has questions like how do I do this? What’s this mean? You know, when should I do this? If you focus on that day, you are aligned with the questions that people will type into YouTube naturally, how to questions and some of the most popular searches and be you create an enormous body of content, which if you are using all today’s modern marketing tools, you can turn into other forms of content. When you put up a YouTube video, you rip the audio out of that, congratulations. You have an mp3 file for a podcast. Take that send out for transcription to a service like Otter.ai AI, congratulations. Now you have a blog post. If I speak for 10 minutes before coffee. That’s about most people speaking about 150 words a minute. That’s 1500 words. Imagine you now putting up a 1500 word blog post every day and a blog, and the podcast and the video. One piece of content,

Albane Flamant
right, that’s intense.

Christopher Penn
And then those blog URLs get wrapped up into your newsletter, your email newsletter, and now you’re taking this content process and really elevating it using this model to help brides you all the tactical content that fill your social calendar. The Hub is like your major campaigns. And then heroes like the big thought leadership pieces that you elevate from the stuff in the hub and the help model that gets the highest resonance. One of the reasons we’re doing this webinars because we saw a lot of people asking, this is the time you’re planning.

Albane Flamant
So in terms of content straight on YouTube, to recap, we have one big 14 TPS where you will definitely craft and invest a bit more time. Hi, I’m Monnie behind you have the hub which is more about you know what is social listening ostrich etc for example if you took take Talkwalker as an example and then we have the shorter faster quicker helping you that can be if we if we go like all the way like you daily

Christopher Penn
yes why what how this is example my channel there’s the the daily video is just popping up and everything and by the way there is an entire discipline of video SEO that you should be looking at and learning as well. Alright, well so now we’re going to we’re going to kick things up a notch and introduce the concept of blended listening. So if you’re not using social listening, you’re definitely not using blended listening.

Albane Flamant
And this is exclusive content, right? Yeah, this is this is.

Christopher Penn
Linda listen means using different listening tools at different points in the customer journey, right? So if you do a digital customer journey mapping, this is an example for my company’s website. There’s all these different channels like Facebook and YouTube and the podcast and organic search and public speaking and email newsletters. No one tool As much as I love Talkwalker, there’s no one tool that covers everything, right. So you need to have a tool kit of the best tools available to do all the major channels in your customer journey. And you have to pay attention to the order in which they occur in the journey so that you know what you should be listening for. Right. So in this case, in our example, your Facebook and YouTube are really up front, which means that I want to not only use a socialist and full of Talkwalker. But I also want to make sure that listening for is my social strategy doing what needs to to build awareness, right? If I was doing social listening on my social channels, and I was seeing all my posts or competitors posts were all saying by now by now, at the awareness stage in the customer journey that’s going to fall flat, right. So you want a blended toolkit that helps you understand what you’re doing at each stage in the customer journey. You need a tool for social, for news for blogs, for forms for videos, you need to have that to cover a lot of those major digital channels. You need great search data. So you don’t Have a great search, search SEO tool to listen to what people are typing into Google and Bing and Yahoo. Yahoo. Just say, Marc, if you don’t have that,

Albane Flamant
there’s so many you know, there’s also questions, for example, find friends.

Christopher Penn
Find in China, definitely. But you need a search platform, because search again, going back to what we’re saying that the about the research itself, people will type things into a search. And then they will not say out loud. And if you’re running one of these private communities, if you if you own it, you have administrative rights, you can also be extracting and listening using data extraction tools to listen to what you talk about in the community. Especially if you have a community where it’s really thriving and you’re not the one starting all the discussions anymore. You now should be using that data to calibrate is my private community to people we know are interested in this thing is what they’re talking about. What we’re seeing in search is and what we’re seeing in search reflected in social media. What are the overlaps? What are the differences among These different channels, right?

Albane Flamant
And then my maybe focusing on the right issues.

Christopher Penn
Exactly. So let’s look at a example of putting all these pieces together. How would this look to blend some of these tools together to build a campaign that will help you take advantage of social networks in 2020? You would start with social listening, right to get the qualitative. I put in Google Analytics, what are all the phrases? This is Talkwalker quick search tool, looking at 13 months of conversations about Google Analytics, in what’s called by grams to word phrases. I wanted to get a sense of what are the discussion topics? I’m not going to quantify them because again, people will ask you questions, they want to say out loud, but at least want to get the lexicon of my environment. Imagine the industry, your industry or whatever, I’ll take that data. I’ll feed it into an SEO tool. This is the RS SEO tool. And this gives me search volumes for each of those terms at Talkwalker. Elevated, okay, now I have a sense of how to rank them, not on what people say but on what people search for. And that’s really this important difference.

Albane Flamant
So first you did to my Okay, people like looking at these terms when talking about Google Analytics, and then you correlate with search volume to see if the actual people searching for it

Christopher Penn
exactly qualitative first, then quantitative quantify that. Then you take the search terms and use Google’s trending software blend with a search volume to figure out when are people going to be talking about these things, because you now want to be able to time it. So this is using predictive analytics time series forecasting. The next week, so this week is, Jay is the 24th. So next week, the number one search term out of the whole list is section in the machine learning. So if I was wanting to create social content, or video or anything, I want to have some content ready for next week, machine learning. Now, look out a little ways. Look out into like, November, December, you start to see like the facebook pixel, actually one of the top terms that we it’s sort of down on the right hand side, I would want to have content now. Start building content so that I have something to publish about the Facebook In a couple of months,

Albane Flamant
so basically just take me through really quickly through this graph. So when we see so the number we seeing is like how high on the priority list, it should be basically, the blue as it is too high as it should be on your priority list. That’s right for that specific week for exam

Christopher Penn
exactly that week. So using predictive analytics, you can have get a week by week analysis of the terms that you know, you validated from Talkwalker, from the conversations and the news, the blogs, and the forums and everything. All these things should be also when you create that content, it should be in regards to Google Analytics, because that was the original trend we started with with Talkwalker. So not machine learning content in general on the week of October 27, but machine learning as it relates to Google Analytics. So how can you write a blog post or video or social posting? Here’s what we know about machine learning to use in Google Analytics. For example, there’s the insights button in the upper right hand corner of Google Analytics, that is their machine learning facility, understanding how to create content for all these different things. So qualitatively Talkwalker Or the social monitoring tool, your choice, quantitative SEO tool forecasting with a predictive analytics tool. And then this is where the YouTube part is really important. This is what we call the transmedia content framework. And we talked about this earlier, when you create a video, look at what you can turn a one video into the audio becomes a podcast that gets rendered as a transcript. The video clips can be turned into animations and GIFs give me by the way, folks, if you know if you’re unfamiliar, it’s an animated GIF repository. Not that I want markers to go ruin that too, but it’s a great place for you to put your animated gifts if they’re relevant.

Albane Flamant
I know that Hootsuite for example as a bunch of gifts on their with their mascots and everything and they use it quite a bit.

Christopher Penn
Exactly. Those short clips can become Instagram or Facebook or WhatsApp stories. The webinar YouTube videos can become webinars which you can then pitch to conferences to get more video, right so this is that that whole strategy This is you just you figured out the what you don’t win. Now. This is the how How do you make content that fits is starting with that video as a starting point. And then you feed that to your private communities to get their feedback, and ultimately reach out to influencers, outside your private community to distribute.

Albane Flamant
So I’m curious, Chris, so you actually have all of that in your content calendar, how early do you actually plan it?

Christopher Penn
So for what we do will run a year’s worth in advance and then update every quarter. So just to see if they something unexpected, but for the most part, like, again, I was saying, the reason we’re doing this webinar right now is because we figured based on our calendar this week is the week people starting to search for some of these search terms.

Albane Flamant
I remember we had this discussion

and actually told my team like Wow, he even had like is this request as to which specific week he wanted to he wanted the webinar to happen to make sure that we had as many as you guys in the room as possible. So pretty interesting. So this is

Christopher Penn
Talkwalker is influencer one software, which allows you to then take that same query that you started with Google Apps. Linux and look at who are the people who are in potentially influential in that topic and go out and reach out to them with the content that you know is probably timely, probably relevant, and probably, you know, going to benefit them as much as it benefits you.

Albane Flamant
Right. And going back to what you were saying earlier was saying these niche experts, can you really carry the word of mouth and to communities in a non intrusive way? No way.

Christopher Penn
Exactly. So that’s the main takeaways from this. YouTube in the private communities are the two networks, things to watch slack discord, Microsoft Teams, Facebook groups, you have to your skills need to not be ancient, right? You need to be current what these platforms are capable of today, and this is true of your team. This is true of your agencies, usually asking your agencies when they come up for annual review. What have you done that’s new and different lately on YouTube? On slack? Do you have experience administering a slack? Those are questions that would be good to ask an agency and then you need a blended listening strategy social search. predictive to understand what, when, why and how to really inform your marketing and social media strategy.

Albane Flamant
Yeah. And then make sure that that data is actually getting to, you know, that decision making part because I’ve seen it. So we see it a lot. Talkwalker we see Tim collecting tons of data, but not actually doing anything with it. Yes, really interesting. So make sure you say that. It’s human, like, I mean, I have the same problem. As you get so carried away in the operational reality of the job that you just keep going, going going. So make sure that you doing the most of all the tools you have in house, make sure you you cross the data that you integrate, if you can have as many as the data sets on it on one platform as possible. I think that’s great. And it’s kind of like I guess we were to try to do a Talkwalker by allowing people to import their own data also into the platform. So what are you talking about customer success, satisfaction rate, you know, web traffic data, things like that. To help you can’t kind of like haven’t brought a picture but she writes There’s no tool that has everything so you have to find ways around it. Try to have a 360 picture of that. Yeah.

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Trust Insights (trustinsights.ai) is one of the world's leading management consulting firms in artificial intelligence/AI, especially in the use of generative AI and AI in marketing. Trust Insights provides custom AI consultation, training, education, implementation, and deployment of classical regression AI, classification AI, and generative AI, especially large language models such as ChatGPT's GPT-4-omni, Google Gemini, and Anthropic Claude. Trust Insights provides analytics consulting, data science consulting, and AI consulting.