So What? Marketing Analytics and Insights Live
airs every Thursday at 1 pm EST.
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In this week’s episode of So What? we focus on Social Media Marketing. We walk through how to approach social for your business and making connections. Catch the replay here:
In this episode you’ll learn:
In this episode, you’ll learn
- How to evaluate the purpose of social channels
- Setting up testing on your social media
- Using social media across your customer journey
Upcoming Episodes:
- Business Processes 1/27/2022
- Change Management(TBD)
- Tag Management(TBD)
- Data Science(TBD)
Have a question or topic you’d like to see us cover? Reach out here: https://www.trustinsights.ai/resources/so-what-the-marketing-analytics-and-insights-show/
AI-Generated Transcript:
Katie Robbert 0:19
Welcome, welcome, welcome. Happy Thursday, everyone. Welcome to so what marketing analytics and insights live show? I’m joined by Chris and John. Today we are talking about social media marketing. And I know you’re probably thinking to yourself, but guys, you you don’t do social media. Well, believe it or not, we actually do social media, we focus primarily on the metrics, and helping determine where in your customer journey, social media should fall in terms of awareness or consideration. But between the three of us we do have a fair amount of experience with social media. And if you’re looking to follow Trust Insights, you can follow us on various social media channels such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and now Tiktok, which I am learning how to use. Don’t age me. So anyway, Chris, where do we want to start with social media marketing today?
Christopher Penn 1:17
Well, I, one things that we want to talk about was figuring out how do you make social media work because it’s, it’s interesting. We’ve said for a while, based on data we can see in from Alavi analysis we do for clients, and for our newsletter, and things that are unpaid social media has been kind of on this gentle fall from a cliff for really about last five years. And, and yet, there are there is evidence that it does work sometimes. And so one of the questions that we’ve been trying to answer is, when it does work, why, when it doesn’t work, why? And how do you evaluate the purpose of different social media channels. So I’ll give you an example. I was doing some volunteer work over the weekend with a nonprofit that I do some stuff with. And they want to roll out they have a they have a discord community, and they wanted to put up Instagram, Twitter, and a couple other profiles, just see if they could attract some new members. And they’re like, Oh, we don’t know if this is going to work out. Like I don’t know, it’s gonna work either, because those channels generally suck. So we put up some Instagram posts, we put up some free to post and blew away our expectations that hundreds of people just came swarming in. Now we went for like, you know, 300 ish members, like 500 members in two days. And it’s like, what happened? Well, it turns out that if you have something that people have a very strong emotional attachment to. It’s not hard to get them to take action, they see an image of your your cause or your cute dog or whatever on on Etsy, or whatever it is, they immediately click through, and they show up. And so one of the challenges and I gave this some thought, because when you think about social media, from brands and marketers, it’s kind of lackluster. And the things that you’re being asked to do are really lackluster. Like, hey, go read our new blog post about whatever it doesn’t, I don’t bet you it doesn’t invoke an emotional response to me like, yeah, I gotta go do that, as opposed to like, Hey, you could go find a whole bunch of new friends to you know, who support this cause that’s actually of interest. So, Katie, when you’re thinking about how we choose to use social media channels, both ourselves and our clients, how much do you put into? Does the End Call to Action? actually suck or not?
Katie Robbert 3:56
I don’t know. I feel like you’re trapping me into something. But you know, let me sort of like walk that back a little bit. So, you know, a lot of times social media is more successful when you’re talking about B2C, which is business to consumer. And so social media lends itself really nicely to consumer facing organizations, consumer facing products, whereas we’re in this space of more of the B2B, the business to business, and it’s harder because it tends to be very cold and dry. And I think Chris, that’s really kind of what you’re describing is that lack of emotional peace. And so one of the things that I’ve been trying to do and we’ve been trying to do this year is bring more of that human element to our social media accounts. And that’s, you know, reposting the videos from our podcast, reposting the videos from our live stream so that people can see, here’s who we are. There’s humans behind all of this and sort of maybe they can start to get Connect with us a little bit more, because you’re absolutely right. You know, if we say, here’s a newsletter about data science and marketing, go sign up for it like, it’s not going to do a whole lot, yes, we put those posts out there, because in some ways that kind of obligatory. And if we don’t do it, then we’re never going to get results. So we’re doing it with the hope of getting some results. But really, what we need to be putting out there is something that helps people connect with us a little bit more. And that’s through the kinds of content that we create, whether it be this live stream, or you know, content that we put in the newsletters that shows that more human and vulnerable side of who we are as people. And I think that’s how we’re going to make our social media accounts really more effective because people need to see themselves in the post in the situation. And with the way that the social media algorithms work, you really, basically have a split second to get somebody’s attention. And so short of like, dancing around with firecrackers which, you know, stay tuned, John, that’s on your to do list next week. You’re not going to get somebody’s attention without having that connection established already.
John Wall 6:15
Blowing stuff up is always hot social share. That’s, that’s an easy hit.
Christopher Penn 6:23
I don’t know I got firecracker sounds pretty good to me.
Katie Robbert 6:27
I mean, I don’t quite know how it fits into our overall business. Maybe see, like, you know, waving around firecrackers saying buy a digital customer journey. So you like now that I have your attention. But that is not authentic. That’s not really who we are. And that’s not who we want to portray ourselves as because we’re not gimmicky. You know, we’re not going to be you know, I mean, maybe I’m speaking for myself, none of us are ever going to be super trendy. And so we don’t want to start to follow like Tiktok trends. And you know, news, Jack, those things in order to draw attention to our business, because that’s really hard to keep up with is not sustainable.
Christopher Penn 7:05
Hey, you do speak for yourself, because we put together a really good post on how to optimize your Wordle stuff in this week’s newsletter, so
Katie Robbert 7:13
yeah, but you weren’t doing like a tick tock trend in order to get someone’s attention to the post.
Christopher Penn 7:19
That’s true. That’s true. So one of the things to think about there also, because you you’ve mentioned tick tock now a couple of times is, as part of our social strategy is to figure out what the intended purpose of each of these channels is. Because they all do different things. You know, LinkedIn is certainly one thing. There’s Tiktok, and stuff. Actually, Donna had an interesting question, just now how do you attract people who don’t know you? How do you build that awareness?
Katie Robbert 7:46
So that’s a great question. And so let’s, let’s be honest, have the three of us I’m the least known. Chris and John have been in the industry, they’re the world’s oldest podcasters, as we are well aware. No, but you guys have been in the marketing industry much longer than I have. And so it’s an industry of known people. And I’m not one of those known people. But it I’ve started to connect with people through the opening of the newsletter. And so that’s my opportunity to tell people a little bit about myself and share my perspective. And so we’re fortunate that it goes to a fair number of people who were already fans of Chris and John. And so I was able to start to insert my personality and my point of view into that content. But I would say honestly, it’s that authenticity of, you know, the way that I write and the way that I tell stories is different from how Chris tell stories is different from how John tells stories, you know, and each of us bring that unique perspective. And so it’s not just what I found in terms of connecting with people. It’s not just repeating the facts and the data. And this is how Google Analytics works. It’s the first time I tried to use Google Analytics, I sat in six months of meetings with people who had no idea what any of us were talking about. And so sharing those anecdotes and personal stories that tie back into the point that you’re trying to make is how I found success and started to connect with people.
Christopher Penn 9:22
One of the things I’ve seen, be very effective is looking at what’s working out there. You know, there’s there’s a lot to be said for, if we’re paying attention if you’re paying attention to Zeitgeist is the wrong word for it. But if you’re paying attention to essentially what other content on the topic is doing well, you can start to work out a landscape pretty quickly. So as some of you know, I do a pandemic newsletter on a almost daily basis except Thursdays because Thursday’s are really busy. And one of the things I have set up is I have a Twitter list of people that are credible right that I that actually know what they’re talking about. And then every single day, I pull all of the tweets that they’ve posted or retweeted in the last 24 hours, scored by the total number engagements, you know, likes and retweets and see what people have had to share. And then I go, and I retweet or incorporate or things like that, or tagged them in pieces of content, to build that awareness among people who clearly know what they’re talking about, and have enough audience that their content is getting attention. And this is something you can do this for sure. On Twitter, you can do it. If you have access to Instagrams Data API, you can do it through Instagram, you for sure can do it on Tiktok, you can’t really and you can do it on Facebook, sorta, and you can’t do it on LinkedIn. But at least for a couple of these networks, if you’ve have access to the Roth, metrics and data about what’s taking off and popular, you can do feasibly wealth. And, you know, another thing that I have to put my shoe in my mouth and apologize to Katie for because I was completely wrong about this.
Katie Robbert 11:15
I’m waiting
Christopher Penn 11:18
for the purposes of discovery, on Instagram, for sure. Twitter, not as much, and Tiktok. Absolutely. Hashtags do if you’ve got the right ones, bring in initial new awareness, you get one shot to to make somebody wear that you have content relevant to that hashtag. And if you do it, well, they will hit that follow if you’ve got more stuff.
Katie Robbert 11:47
I feel like it was a missed opportunity to have some kind of like a banner and confetti fall down study falling, or something. So this is this is a really good point is So Chris, I had been sort of challenging your analysis, specifically on Twitter, Instagram, that hashtags are used as discovering new accounts. And so you know, it’s used. So it’s used the way that the search function was meant to be used when Twitter introduced hashtags. And so Instagram does, I think, a pretty good job of well, you follow, you know, Vermont hiking, so you might also want to follow Montana hiking, or I can follow just Vermont hiking, and see accounts of people who have posted with that hashtag. I don’t necessarily need to follow those people. But I can see the content and then find out new things without having to say, Hmm, what are the things that I’m interested in today. And so it’s a really nice way to discover those new accounts. Go ahead.
Christopher Penn 12:54
The reason why I’m wrong is because impression data is not included in the metrics, and neither is follower data, those are the two outcomes that you would get from from hashtag discovery, we’re only able to see engagements. And so if you’re just checking out an account for the first time, you may or may not know like or comment on their content, but you may follow them to see if there’s more of what they have, you may investigate their account more thoroughly. At the very least you seen their stuff and we don’t have access to that data.
John Wall 13:22
You know, when you say you get one shot to do that, is that because you get one chance to have the tag up there and get in the feed? And you get ignored after that? Or is it just more?
Christopher Penn 13:31
In a way? Yeah. So if you if you put in a tag or you know, a Google Analytics, right, and you put up a post, that is irrelevant, people will not take any actions that indicate engagement. And then you as an entity get dinged, you basically get thrown off the cliff for that hashtag and possibly others when you look at what Adam mosseri said, who’s a co founder of Instagram, in his posts last year about what they use to decide what gets shown on the feed. Those initial engages, even view time are part and parcel of what the feed shows you. So if you show up as irrelevant, you’re cooked, you’re done. So you need to make sure that you’ve got content on your account already that’s relevant to what you’re trying to be discovered for so that, you know, somebody can go check you out and say, oh, yeah, this kind of has other stuff. You know, if you’re all about Google Analytics, you’d better have other Google Analytics, it should not be Google Analytics, your cat a pie, and you know, you know, some other random thing. It should be that stuff that someone’s gonna find interesting. And then, again, it’s the it’s what the algorithm does when you first search for a hashtag, especially on Instagram. And you hit and you swipe through that, that, that dynamic field, it’s gonna start pulling together all sorts of stuff. One of the things that’s very interesting is that and I don’t know how they do this. Instagram can infer the images within that wall of images that seem to slow you down, and will preferentially show you what those things even if you don’t tap on them again, I’m not sure how they do that. But it does work because I’ve seen my I’ve done tests on my own I’ve tapped on one image A certain type, and suddenly the rest of the search suddenly just turns into that image is like, Okay, well, that was I’m always only seeing apple pies, I don’t know why. So yeah, that discovery has to be, it’s kind of like, you know, it’s like the first email you send to somebody, right? If that first email sucks, they’re gonna unsubscribe, they’re gonna, you don’t get another chance.
Katie Robbert 15:20
Well, and it makes sense, because, you know, Tiktok is a newer technology to me personally. So I’ve still been trying to wrap my head around how it works. And it’s interesting, because I’ll see, you know, videos with hashtags that have nothing to do with the video itself. And it’s people who are trying to show up in the feed, because that’s the most popular hashtag at the time, you know, for example, um, you know, and so you could see a picture of a dog running in the snow, and the hashtag is like, you know, Doritos nacho cheese challenge. I’m like, this one has nothing to do with the other. But this is how people are trying to get that discovery. I also find it interesting, Chris, that, you know, to Donna’s question about how do you attract people who don’t know you, you and I, interestingly, yet, unsurprisingly, took two very different approaches. Yours is that more data driven approach in mind is that more people connection approach. And so as a follow up question, she’s asking, if we aren’t Chris, which, you know, a billion of us are not? How do you get that kind of data?
Christopher Penn 16:31
So that I think that goes back to the, the the concept topic of hashtags, right? You don’t need advanced data science, just to see if you type in a term with without a hashtag in any of the search engines for these social services. You can see in a few minutes, like, okay, they all seem to have these things in common, you know, just use your eyeballs. If 15 pages of results about Google Analytics all seem to use, you know, hashtag analytics. Okay, let’s give that one a try. And that, you know, that really goes to our second point, which is this stuff is not rocket surgery to set up basic testing, right, you could set up a say, I’m going to put this hashtag on every other post. And then after a week, compare the post with that hashtag versus the post that didn’t have that hashtag and see if there’s any difference, you can get into statistical significance and stuff. But any difference, frankly, would be useful. And, you know, it’s interesting to, to your point, from earlier to this stuff works, even when you’re starting from from zero, from from nothing, because like, the last year and a half, during the pandemic, I’ve taken writing specula fiction, stuff like that, not under my own name, like absolutely nothing tying it to my normal identity, and want to see if I could build an audience with nothing at all. And again, using the same techniques, following hashtags following people who are relevant in the space, creating content that you know, the audience is gonna like, and thinks it works. You get to a point where you can you see, that’s the same proven techniques of have good content, talk to the right people, and post, you know, stuff that, you know, the answer is gonna like, it just works.
Katie Robbert 18:13
Well, and that, you know, goes back to the old adage of social media is you can’t just show up and start making demands of people, you have to be there, join the community, interact with people, give as much as you’re trying to take and so you can’t just say, Okay, guys, I’m here. You know, I’m now Christopher, Ash men writing a novel, it’s really not me. So I’m assuming that’s your pen name.
Christopher Penn 18:41
Terrible, you know, I’ve actually got to go.
Katie Robbert 18:45
But you need to be interacting with people. And so that’s, again, that’s, it’s using the data, but then it’s also that human element of connecting with people. And so it’s, I’ll be honest, as someone who’s a super introvert, I find a lot of anxiety in, you know, trying to talk with people on social media that don’t necessarily know, but are in the same space as me and even just commenting on their Twitter post, to me, gives me a lot of anxiety because like, what if they’re like, Well, I didn’t want to hear from you. Or, you know, why are you commenting on this, I don’t even know you. And so these are things that you just have to test out to see like, okay, that it didn’t work that time. Maybe that’s not the right person for me to connect with. And you will definitely find those people who post a lot and don’t necessarily give you much back if you do try to interact with them. But there are lots and lots of people on these social media accounts. We’re looking to make those connections. You know, John, you I’ve seen you be a little bit more active on social media in the past few months, you know, posting here’s what we’re doing on weekends and you have your Friday learnings you know, how do you find social media in general and how do you make those things What’s your opinion on that?
John Wall 20:02
Yeah, you know, half of it is funny. It’s, as Chris mentioned, my accounts you don’t want to follow because it’s, here’s work, here’s the dog, here’s some donuts, like completely unrelated crap, which is the worst thing you can do. And another approach with that, too, is I picked up years ago from, I’m trying to even remember who it was, it was somebody at Apple. But the idea was that don’t consider any of these properties, your diary, you know, you want to be telling stories all the time, you want to be leaving places, and of course, I I’m dying everything so that you know, I’m my stuff is again, completely useless. But one thing that’s obvious is getting the retreat, retweets and shares the organic forwarding, like, that’s the real value to get to the new markets, you know, if you’re doing something interesting, and it gets passed, and so and I’d be interested if you guys have seen anything with this, but it is bizarre with like Instagram, where you can’t retweet, you know, you can’t share stuff, you have to just get your own organic likes, which seems I, I can see that for locking it down for ads, but it seems to really throttle the organic share, which is where all the action is. But the other strategy with that, too, is, you know, like we talked about with pure organic is that, you know, it’s not about what you think is cool, it’s what the market likes. And we see so many companies make this mistake, they’re like, oh, man, everybody here is excited about version 3.7. And, you know, nobody in the outside world cares about version 3.7. So you can do all the posts you want about that. But until you find a hook that the audience is interested in, then you know, a great example, this one is iOS update, right? If I talk about the newest version of Find My iPhone, you know, well, it’s just an update, nobody cares. But if you tell the story that hey, did you know that if you lost your phone, you can grab the phone of the person next to you and log into their phone to find yours. Like, that’s a story that, you know, nobody wants to lose their phone for God’s sake, they’d rather lose a limb than the phone. And so this is a way to talk about the feature, talk about the benefit and try and get that spread. But yeah, and you know, it doesn’t hurt to call out influencers, you know, if there’s somebody in your space that has a huge following, and you think the content will be interesting to them, tag them in hopes that they forward to their audience. Because you’re just drafting off the fame of other accounts. And if you share the same interests, it’s not considered weird. Now if you start sharing stuff about, you know, boating to people who live in the Mojave Desert, then you’re going to get spam blocked on everything. But if you hit the right audience, that’s an easy way to ramp up quick.
Christopher Penn 22:34
Yeah, and the good influencer things really important because a lot of people, a lot of people do a sort of a single hook for an influencer. And that’s, that’s pretty much guaranteed to get you ignored, especially if it’s if it’s something that’s that’s for work. So if I were to put up a post about data science, or you know, women in leadership will use Katie’s influence example. Katie already gets like a gazillion in one of these pictures, right? So if I use social media, as from a an intelligence gathering perspective, first if you Okay, well, what other things is Katie interested in? Can I then create content that’s more tuned for that specific influencer? Like if Katie had a million followers on Instagram, and I knew I needed to get in front of her face, she had a 500,000 followers on LinkedIn, I could dig in and see what was that if I did a pitch that was about data science, but also included, you know, fluffy Newfoundlands, I have a much better chance of getting that across the desk, because there’s multiple topics of influence there. And again, to Donna’s question, you don’t need to know these people. You just need to do your homework on them and and craft content that you know is going to be a slam dunk with that person. Because that person if they’ve got the audience, then their audience probably has some affinity to more than one a hook as well just because Katie does the sort of the women and leadership thing. Statistically something like 30 ish percent of our audience is going to also be really into dogs too.
Katie Robbert 24:09
And speaking I’m literally wearing the t shirt.
Christopher Penn 24:11
Exactly now and if you could work a like a leadership example into hiking with your dog or not go home,
Katie Robbert 24:20
someone someone send that to me and I will sign up.
Christopher Penn 24:25
But these are all the tactics from a an awareness building perspective that are in your arsenal. The thing that blows my mind is that none of this is new. Like we’ve been talking about this for literally 20 years. Back in the early days of podcasting, when we would do promos for each other’s shows we would figure out like what’s the hook where I can talk about what that show is about and also promote my own show in the 32nd spot that we make we made for each other back then this is no different. It’s just instead of audio, it’s it’s some other hook.
Katie Robbert 24:57
You know what I keep hearing hearing from both you and John is it’s really social media is for that storytelling piece of it that human connection. So you can be sharing, you know, a pitch or a data point. But if there’s no story around it, it’s probably going to fall flat, because people need to have some kind of emotional connection to the thing that you’re sharing in order for them to stop scrolling and pay attention to your thing above anyone else. And so, you know, maybe it’s, you know, a video of Chris showing how he sets up his, you know, computers to compute all of the data, Someone’s probably interested in what that looks like, rather than Chris, just saying, I computed 50,000 lines of code, you’re saying the same thing. But you’re demonstrating it in different ways. And one is more likely to capture someone’s attention versus the other. And so it’s thinking about how you’re presenting that information. And so that’s a lot of what, again, sort of back to the how you connect with people. That’s how I’m trying to think about the newsletter and sort of its content, its writing a blog post, essentially, and how can I bring somebody into the story immediately, and how can I have people say, Oh, I can see myself in that story, or I’ve had that problem, or I’ve made that mistake, as well. And these are not things that I’m making up, these are all things that I’ve really experienced myself. And so if someone were to press me for information, I could probably go on for hours about the story of, you know, how I didn’t do the thing correctly, and what I learned from it. And now here’s what I’m sharing with you in terms of how to do the thing correctly. And this is why you can, you know, rely on me as an authority, it’s building that trust as well.
Christopher Penn 26:46
The other thing you could do, too, is just figure out a way to talk about the other person. I mean, one of the most successful outreach campaigns I’ve ever done multiple years in a row until I got really tired of doing it. Because it’s a lot of work is I would take my DSLR my my big camera with my telephoto lens, and I would sit on the at mile six of the Boston Marathon, I take a picture of every person with gray hair that was running the marathon and go into the official race site, look up their name by their bib number, and then just reach out to them on social media say, Hey, I got this picture of you at mile six, do you want it 80 to 90% people like oh my god, this is amazing thanks, and a bit of a bias here. But people running a marathon tend to be sort of type A personalities, right? They tend to be very mode, highly motivated people. People with gray hair tend to be more senior in their organizations. And the number of CEOs, CMOs CTOs and stuff like that, who were in this bucket of people running the math on who I just sent a nice picture to was enough to substantially build my LinkedIn network and build it with the right people that you would want for hire, you know, bigger leadership discussions. That’s a lot of work and scales, poorly it but it is social media, like you were saying, Katie, in the truest sense, you’re being social with other people. And you’re giving value upfront there’s there was no pitch, there was no oh, by and oh, by the way, I’m you know, so and so at this organization is just, hey, here’s the thing, let’s stay connected. And you build that connection, you initiate the relationship by giving first with something that is of interest to them, literally a picture of them. And it works really well. So what are the other ways you can do that? You know, you know, Donna and I have been to Social Media Marketing World kazillion and a half times, right? And what’s the one thing that’s easy to do from the front row, pick up your phone in assuming the camera is halfway decent, you take a bunch of photos of people, particularly speakers and prominent folks, and then you share it with them afterwards and say, Hey, we got this great photo of you speaking on stage or whatever, I thought you might like it. And you know, again, you’re not asking for anything but it sure is a way to get attract attention from the right people.
Katie Robbert 28:58
Well, and that goes back to you can’t just show up on a social network and start expecting things of people you have to build that community now John, you as the primary interviewer for marketing over coffee, which again, podcast is another form of content, you know, you are constantly being asked of you like there’s very little and this is what’s in it for you John Wall so you know you are a lot on the receiving end of people making demands of you. Like what are the kinds of things that you wish were different about that?
John Wall 29:34
Yeah, it’s Chris’s dying because I’m, we have a Slack channel. No, no, but I’m always posting like once a week, there’s at least one wall or pitch that comes in, you know, I’m trying to think of the worst one in the past couple of days. It’s been a while since I’ve had a completely terrible but the best one is when I get a form letter and they’ve misaligned the field so they’re cut they’re like, dear Jeff, we love the marketing billboard. podcast that you do, you know, we’d love to have our guy on your show. And I, you know, I don’t even bother to respond to those. But yeah, that there’s two types that come in that work, right one is the lottery winner, you know, it’s a form letter, but it just happens to be something about some cutting edge email technology or something, and we cover email, you know, at least once a month, if not more. So, I’m going to read that regardless of how crappy of a pitch that is. But then the other ones that actually win are the ones that come in and say, you know, hey, I have this author. And we know you’ve covered this on the show three or four times, and I think this would be great for the show. And, you know, if they actually do know the show, then they’re on the mark. So that’s the the Chris’s angle of taking the time to get a personal pitch together. Like as a PR person, you’d be way better off, making 10 pitches that are right on the mark than spamming 1000 people hoping that you’ve got to hit on one of them. Because and it’s tough, though, because that takes, you know, time and experience, you know, either you’re gonna listen to them, or you’re going to come up with some way to have a group of 10 people listen to stuff and build the directory of your own. So you know, who, you know, is really interested in what kinds of stuff. But yeah, we keep coming back to there’s no getting around the, you know, actually doing the work and figuring out who the people are and what they’re interested in. Because spray and pray just get, you know, place.
Katie Robbert 31:27
Well, and I feel like that’s where you start to introduce things like social listening tools, you know, and so it’s hard to, you know, find out all of the different conversations, but if you have a social listening tool that can help, you know, you can plug in, like, here are the topics I want to listen for what are people saying so that I can understand how they’re talking about it, if there’s an appropriate place for like, for me to insert myself in the conversation, you know, what does that look like, and that kind of goes back to the authenticity of, you know, I actually have something to say that something of value versus I’m just adding noise to this conversation, which is what a lot of brands get wrong, especially on major holidays, that don’t necessarily line with their culture or their values. I’m just, I’m gonna leave that one there. As an example, I’m not going to dig into it, but you know, it, you don’t have to be part of every single conversation, you just have to be part of the right ones, the ones that someone can say, oh, you know, Chris, and Katie and John, were commenting on this thing. But I went to their website, and it says nothing about them actually having those values. So you know, what’s going on there? Um, you know, so I think social listening tools can help with what you and Chris are both saying in terms of that research of, you know, do I know enough about this topic, to insert myself into the conversation and then say, Hey, I did my research, John Wall, I know that you are super into, you know, the following five things. And I can speak about three of those, because you’ve covered them on your last six podcasts. But here’s a different angle that I can take with that. And that to you is probably like, oh, well, someone’s been paying attention. I probably definitely need to have them on because they have, you know, they do their homework. And they have, you know, a really interesting opinion on this thing.
John Wall 33:18
Yeah, it’s too bad with COVID. One, you know, in the time of keynotes and trade shows, there is no keynote speaker that will not answer the I saw you speaking last week yet x? And then, you know, ask your question after that, that’s, you know, totally irresistible.
Christopher Penn 33:38
So, the other thing that I know, we want to tackle today was trying to identify social media, you know, and it’s placed within your customer journey to one of the, there’s a bunch of different ways you can do that. Our favorite way, obviously, for, for having access to the tools to be able to do it is to use machine learning to try and identify like, what things exactly are working. So we were looking, I think, what about a week ago, actually, Katie, on trying to identify what are what were the social media channels for all the 2021? How did it look for us? So we go and take a quick peek here. You know, from a social perspective, the number one channel for us that was purely social is slack, the analyst Marcus cyfrol, 2021. And then, if we go back, and, you know, go back in time, to all the 2020 you can see, there was a lot more social media stuff, because this was, you know, of course, this was prior to the pandemic. So very different results. But this is the way you determine what’s working and stuff and you don’t have to do it. This is the preferable way to do it. But if you don’t have access to machine learning technologies, you can use other people’s so this is Google Analytics four and I have it set up here to look at sort of cross channel. Let’s let’s do cross channel time decay. Looking by source, so what specific sources of mediums or channel groupings can I use to identify what’s working so for this is from my personal website, organic social is relatively small at the top of the phone apps in the middle, and then relatively small at the bottom really is organic searches is a critical part. So for my personal website, I’m not doing as good a job with social media as I probably could be, if I dig in way from Channel groupings down to things like sources and mediums that I can start to see individually, what are those things, one of the oddities here is actually being is doing surprisingly well. But we see Twitter, sort of as a in the in the last touches, or the end of the fall still being relevant. So I know from a customer journey perspective that Twitter isn’t a discovery mechanism. For me, it is, in fact, a nudge mechanism to get somebody to do something.
Katie Robbert 36:07
And I think, you know, I think having that context to you know, as we look at the Trust Insights, customer journey from 2020, to 2021, the thing that we know, that is different is that the beginning of 2020, we had just come off of a lot of speaking engagements. And that’s where people tend to for those events tend to connect more. And sort of, you know, reshare, you know, I saw Chris speak and you know, here’s a quote thing. And here’s a soundbite. And here’s the network graph. And so, for us, that’s where a lot of our social media gets engagement is the speaking engagements. And just as those speaking engagements have all gone virtual, it’s just not the same. And so the goal, the hope is that moving into this year, we’ll have more of those in person engagements. And we’ll have more of that content that really lends itself to people connecting with one another on social media. Now, social media, you know, Chris, as you’ve pointed out, is a broad term. And so a question that we got, from our someone watching on YouTube from Troy is it’s been harder for me to get in different circles, or notice as I get older, I’m not sure if it’s psychological, or just less time to engage. And so the first question I would then ask back to Troy is, what social media platforms are you currently trying to engage on? Because that might make the whole difference? If you’re on Facebook, for example, we have low opinions of Facebook for various reasons. But there are still communities on Facebook, that makes sense for certain brands, you know, but, you know, I would say, and this is something that we’ve all been learning is that age should be pretty irrelevant on a social media channel, you just have to find those right? communities within the social media channel. And so, you know, I like to joke like, Oh, I’m too old for tick tock, well, guess what, we’re now starting our Tiktok channel. And I just had to find the right types of content on tick tock for me to feel comfortable in that space. And so I guess that would be my first question back is, what are the platforms that you’re trying to engage with? And so Chris, John, do you guys have any thoughts on this being the world’s oldest podcasters
Christopher Penn 38:29
it’s not platform, it’s actually people. It’s another one of the Trust Insights, five Ps. One of the things that marketers do the most wrong, and I’m guilty of this as much as anybody is trying to appeal to a very, very broad audience. And so if you’re trying to appeal to everybody, you literally appeal to nobody. Be very specific. You know, Kevin Kelley wrote, what, 1415 years ago now, you know, what you really need are 1000 true fans, you need 1000 diehard fans who will just hand you their wallets, and say, they’ll just keep giving me stuff. And so the question always comes back to well, who are those people? And what’s unique to them, that you can make them deliriously happy, even if the rest of the world does not care, because you will attract a very specific audience then, and that audience will be very, very, very devoted. And you don’t necessarily have to have a large audience just need to have a solid, you know, thing if you think about from a business perspective, Trust Insights really only needs about 50 diehard fans who are you know, running marketing departments that, you know, midsize businesses, right, we would do extremely well as company if we had 50 clients who were just absolutely rabid fans and you know, saying like, here’s $100,000 a month, you know, just just tell us what to do. That would be a great business to have. We don’t need 5 million people on our mailing list to it. had those 50 people, it’s it’s the process of getting to that kind of reach out into those communities and finding just those folks who aren’t, are in that profile. That is the hard part. And the same thing is true for getting noticed or getting into circles. It’s, what circles are they in? Are they small enough that you are visible, the smallest that you resonate, if you’re in the circle you’re aiming for as a million people, you are one in a million, if the circle you aim for is one and 100, you have a much greater chance of being seen of being noticed. Because you’re going to stand out, especially if you’re different from the rest of that crowd. So again, going back to the example we started with, in, in the the genre fiction that I write, the audience is predominantly female and queer, I am neither of those things. And so I automatically stand out a slightly odd, but that makes it easy to be noticed. Because as long as the the product fiction is good, it’s an additional differentiate, that helps you get noticed. So for Troy, and I know, Troy, we’ve been friends for a number of years. You know, think about for example, you know, he has a background in Hollywood, he has a lot of fantastic stories from like the 90s, about post production and stuff on a number of really cool shows, you’ve probably seen on TV, that sort of experience and insight and stuff can appeal to a very specific group of people. And that specific group of people can potentially, you know, lead into a lot of different avenues.
Katie Robbert 41:27
Someone like me, for example, who actually has a film degree, I would love to hear those stories, because that was an industry, I couldn’t afford to get into. Because, you know, back in my day, internships were unpaid. So I couldn’t afford to move from Boston to California to take a free internship, I just, you know, I wasn’t a trust fund kid. And so I had to abandon that. But, you know, I would love to hear some of those stories. And maybe Troy and I would find out that we have some interests in common. And then we will start to, oh, maybe you know, this person, maybe you know, this person. And that’s how those connections get made. And that kind of goes back to Donna’s original question of how do you attract people you don’t know? Well, authentically and slowly, you don’t have to appeal to everybody. The other thing? I just want to sort of note, and I’m guilty of this as well, part of choice question was, you know, you had mentioned, as you get older, you’re not sure if it’s psychological, I would almost guarantee that there is some psychology thinking I’m too old for social media, because it tends to skew younger, but I would say, if that’s where your network is, then as hard as it is, it’s easier said than done, you need to take age out of it, you know, your age should be irrelevant. It should be your stories and your experience and the value that you bring to the table.
John Wall 42:51
Yeah, well, you know, one thing with that is, if you’re trying to break into circles, you have kind of a chicken and egg problem, that that there’s 30 People that have been sharing and have reputation, you know, the algorithm is going to favor them when they post stuff. And but that is one way to buy your way out of, you know, you start promoting your own content to the same group, you can kind of jumpstart some of that stuff. And you can do that for small money that’s not like, you know, throw $100 at 20 posts over a month. And that can make a huge difference if you’re trying to crack through.
Christopher Penn 43:26
So that’s a lot of evaluating social. Talk about testing, and, and the customer journey. Katie, what else do we want to cover?
Katie Robbert 43:35
I mean, like you said, Chris, we’ve covered a lot, I think the big takeaways are social media, really is still for everyone. But use some discretion in terms of, you don’t need to appeal to everyone make sure that when you go there, you have an idea of what you want to get out of that specific channel. You know, so we talked briefly about the customer journey, our vision, our social channels operate in different ways. So we know for us, our YouTube channel is more of a retention channel than a Discovery Channel. Whereas our Instagram and our Tiktok channels are a little bit more of Discovery Channels. And I feel like our LinkedIn or Twitter kind of sit somewhere in between. Now, that’s just sort of off the cuff, but from the data that we’ve collected over the past couple of years, that’s how they tend to fall. And so we need to treat each channel as its own separate entity versus having one global social media strategy that’s going to work for everything, because that’s just not how the channels themselves perform for us. So I think that’s sort of one of the big takeaways is, have a purpose for every specific channel and know what you want to get out of it. And then share your stories, share your experience, and make sure that you’re giving as much as you’re asking in return.
Christopher Penn 44:54
Yeah, I would agree with that. I would also say make sure that you’re using strategies and tactics that are appropriate to where you are In your overall social media journey, there are things that do really well when you’re starting out that are not scalable later on. But to immediately go and look like at a Twitter account male that has a million followers and stuff and say, Okay, we need to replicate those practices, you’re not there yet. It’s like all the people who, you know, follow, and try to imitate somebody like Gary Vaynerchuk. For example, if you’re not Gary and his team of 22 people that follow him around all day long, you know, filming and editing is not something you can do. It’s not within reach for you right now. So if you wanted to see what you should be looking at right now, and you wanted him as an example, go back to 2007 when he was just getting started, look at his videos from bed look at his account from Ben go, okay, these are the things that we’re working on. It was just him and his wine shop, you’re hacking stuff together and YouTube. And so same is true for all of us. Where are we right now? Where are you right now? And what are the tactics that map to the skills and the resources you have available?
Katie Robbert 46:02
John, final thoughts.
John Wall 46:05
No, I think we’ve hit a bunch of the stuff I do want to go out and throw to the community though. If anybody has any great tips on MacBook video, utilities. I’ve got this new camera here and for some reason, it’s putting me in full IMAX. I don’t know why this is like 120 millimeter and you can see my whole house. But yeah, here, Twitter me over at John Jay wall if you’ve got anything that works, and I would love to take something for a test spin.
Christopher Penn 46:34
Thanks for tuning in, folks. We’ll see you next week. Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you’re watching it. For more resources. And to learn more. Check out the Trust Insights podcast at trust insights.ai/t AI podcast and a weekly email newsletter at trust insights.ai/newsletter Got questions about what you saw in today’s episode. Join our free analytics for markers slack group at trust insights.ai/analytics for marketers, see you next time.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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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.
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