Guest Speakers
- Neal Schaffer, Author, Speaker and Consultant @NealSchaffer
- Jacob Warwick, Founder and CEO of Think Warwick, @JacobWarwick
Overview
Social media is always in a state of flux. Algorithms change, features are updated and functionality continues to improve. What’s true today won’t be tomorrow. What works tomorrow won’t work next week. Knowing this, how can a marketer possibly keep up and stay relevant?
Don’t just have a social media account, have a presence.
As our guest, Neal Schaffer points out, social media wasn’t built for business; it was built for people to interact with people. As a business on social media, it’s not entirely about the content you produce so much as it’s about listening and responding to your community. In this #ProContent Podcast, Neal Schaffer and Jacob Warwick discuss social content that resonates with people, and how to interact with your target audience.
Highlights from our guests
Jacob Warwick: My philosophy is that whatever social channel you’re going to use, it should have a purpose.
Neal Schaffer: You might want to blast the same piece of content to three different social networks at once but at the end of the day, your fan base is going to be slightly different … which is why you should never just use social media as a way to promote your content because you end up just broadcasting the same thing to everybody and you end up being ineffective. When you begin to listen and analyze, you do begin to see those things.
Jacob Warwick: The copy-and-paste mentality, where you can share the same message on every channel, is really incorrect and lazy. It also appears robotic, especially form a brand side.
Neal Schaffer: Instead of pre-creating content and trying to spray-and-pray at social, dip into what’s working in social, become a member of the communities.
Jacob Warwick: I guess the mindset is still from about five or six years ago, where you just post something on Facebook and people are going to see it. That’s just not the case anymore.
Neal Schaffer: The numbers will take you so far. Let’s break it down. I work with a lot of clients and do a lot of data analysis on social media. What engagement can you expect? Facebook, close to zero percent. Instagram, maybe the norm is 1% to 3%. Twitter, maybe it’s 0.5% to 1.5%.
Jacob Warwick: It’s really not about the amount of engagement that you get, it’s about the type of engagement you get from the people that you’re trying to work with.
Neal Schaffer: The best engagement rate that you can expect from any network is going to be in your data. It’s going to be doing an analysis of your competitors in the same industry.
Jacob Warwick: Brand activation versus brand-building versus customer activation. We really need to start thinking about it in terms of long-term strategies and how we’re growing to build part of a bigger picture.
Neal Schaffer: Will optimizing your hashtags give you a 5% uptick in clicks or in followers? Will actively posting three times a day instead of two times a day give you more? What’s going to be the better result? These are the types of questions that I think marketers need to ask themselves when they’re looking, remembering that goal, those objectives, and trying to figure out what lever should they push to help them reach that goal quicker more effectively. Often, these over-technical things are not going to be the answer.
