Some New Social Media Trends and Features You May Have Missed

Greetings everybody, welcome to the Wednesday, August 16th episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. This is Eric Cook and I'm with WSI Digital Marketing where we work with businesses and organizations on helping them better understand and leverage the power of the internet as a strategic business tool. You can learn more about me and all the fun stuff we get to do here at WSI online at poweredbywsi.com. With me this week is my good friend and Free Webinar Wednesday co-founder, co-host, and all-around great guy, Mr. Jeff Simpkins. Jeff, say hello to everybody out there in Free Webinar Wednesday world.

Hello everybody, this is Jeff Simpkins and I am with Community Bank Consulting Inc., and you can learn more about me and the fun stuff we do at www.communitybankconsulting.com.

Would you like that little all-around great guy plug there? I'm not even like looking for a favor or anything. I just figured I would toss that out there for the internet to know that I think you're an all-around great guy. How about them apples?

Thank you.

Yeah, you're quite welcome. So today's show and all shows are being recorded as usual, and if you've got a question or a thought, feedback, idea, Or just something that you want us to know, feel free to use the chat function and toss it over, and we'll keep an eye on it. But what I thought we would do today, and it's certainly not going to be the entire presentation because those that attended yesterday paid money for it, so I need to be somewhat restrictive in the information that gets out through this free Webinar Wednesdays world. But yesterday I had the pleasure of going down to Indianapolis and I did a full-day social media deep dive session with the Indiana Bankers Association, and I had a good number of marketing directors and other folks from banks around Indiana join the meeting, and we went through and, and spent some time looking at kind of different strategies to get the most out of social media, some of the new things that have hit recently, some of the new tools. We're going to talk about this one in particular, that are out there that provide some additional ways to kind of analyze what's going on in your digital world and just kind of make sure that you're aware that things continue to change. I think those of us that are involved or touch anything related to social media or digital technology, the one thing that is a constant is the pace of change. And so Sometimes that can be a blessing and a curse because as soon as you think you got something figured out, boom, all of a sudden it changes and shifts direction and now it's a completely different way. But it keeps things interesting and I don't have a problem trying to learn new stuff. So it's one of those things that just makes it kind of fun. So I got a series of slides that I've kind of brought over from my time in Indianapolis that I just wanted to walk through and The first one is checking the load times of your website on mobile devices. And to give you a little bit of background, if you're not familiar with this, a couple of years ago, Google came out and introduced its mobile testing tool and told webmasters that in no uncertain terms, it was expecting websites to be mobile responsive. And it gave us a tool to use in order to check the mobile responsive nature of a website to determine whether or not it was going to be something that consumers would want to use. Because Google was seeing very clearly the fact that more and more people were spending time on mobile devices. 2015 marked the first year in the history of the internet that mobile search surpassed the desktop search. And so there's a lot of activity that we are doing and continue to do on our mobile devices. And in order for Google to maintain kind of an enjoyable search experience and those people that are searching on mobile get to a mobile site, It's starting to provide these tools. And so it first provided the GMT, which I've just created a shortened link that you can use for quick and easy access. It'll redirect you to a very long URL. But the first shortened link that I created was just the GMT. And then it changed that URL and made a different tool available. So I had to redo that and it— I created GMT2. And now they've actually come out with this load testing tool. which simulates your website loading on a network using a 3G, which from a global perspective, they claim 75% of the internet connections globally are using 3G speeds or lower. I'm not convinced that the United States is of 3G capacity as much as maybe what Google says, but it does test the site load time on a 3G connection. And it'll come back and it'll provide you with a rating. It'll give you recommendations. And so we're in the process of testing our site. and going through and seeing what it actually is showing us and working on plans to get any deficiencies implemented. But here's a screenshot from the Indiana Bankers Association, and 9 seconds— there were people that were in the room that had 16 and 17 seconds of load time. And so it's one that people really haven't started looking at, but as you kind of think about what the next stage in your web development strategy needs to be, I think optimizing the content for mobile devices is one that is probably next on the list. And one of the other things that we talked about in addition to the load times and just the technology, and Jeff, you may have actually seen some of this or heard about it, but Google has come out with what's referred to as AMP pages or Amplified Mobile Pages or Amplified Mobile Platform. And these AMP pages are specifically designed to take content from a website and deliver it in slightly different formats so that it loads faster on a mobile device. So a lot of news channels are now providing AMP versions of their news because when somebody is going on their mobile device and they want to read CNN or Fox News or CBS or whatever they're wanting to read, they have the ability to hit those articles and they load very, very quickly. Have you noticed any of that or seen AMP pages out? I know you do a ton of reading. Probably more than I do. Not probably, but I know more than I do. But have you noticed any AMP? I'm much more of a, let me listen to a podcast while I'm riding my bike, or let me watch a video. So, but as far as AMP pages go, have you seen that? Have you noticed it at all, Jeff?

I have not because I tend to use apps on my phone. For reading news. So no, I haven't. Okay.

Well, if you're using the native browser or kind of picking around the internet, you will start seeing AMP pages coming up and you'll see those kind of appearing in the wild. So what I've done is I've just clicked on that bit.ly/googlemobiletest3 and you can see— I'll just do a quick check to make sure because I've got PowerPoint running in the background. Did my screen change okay, Jeff?

Test your mobile speed.

Yeah. So let's— and I'll be honest, this is gonna be kind of a— if we do my Powered by WSI site. So we'll go ahead and we'll run that as a test. Admittedly, I have not run this yet, so this is like first time I'm going without a net here. So this could come back and totally suck, or it could come back and look pretty good. So if you can plug your website address in, I'm hoping it doesn't come back like 20 seconds because that would be really embarrassing. But this will come back and it'll give you kind of a grade or rating, and it'll tell you What it thinks, whether it's good or bad, and it'll give you some instructions or some ideas or suggestions on things that you can do to change stuff. And we've got implemented AMP. We've not really done a lot other than when we built the site, we made sure that the second generation that we created was mobile responsive. So it comes back at 6 seconds, which is fair, which is good. It'd be nice to be able to see it down into 4 or less, but I'll be honest, I'm pretty satisfied with this. When you run this against your own website, you can kind of scroll down and it gives you some of the metrics that you can take a peek at. So you can take a look, you can put in your email address and get access to your free report, which will give you some additional detail about it. You can scroll down and it gives you an idea. I'm at the outside of fair. Certainly if you get it under the 3-second area, you can see where the top performers are falling at a 3.9, almost 4-second rating. Okay. So that'll give you an access. You can also browse by business and industry. So if you wanted to hop in here and say, well, you know, I'm in the finance industry, what does that typically show? You can go in, you can kind of run, see what your site compares to the finance industry versus real estate. You can go through and it gives you all sorts of different options. We'll say other and see what that does. But this number will actually change based off of the industry if they're detecting that there's variances. And then you can continue to scroll down and it sees, you know, here's some top fixes. A few fixes could reduce this by 3 seconds. If I'm at 6 seconds now and I do a couple of tweaks, this would allow me to get down closer to the 3-second area. And the 3-second area, if you go up and scroll, you can see, you know, that gets me in the excellent range. So it's probably not a super difficult thing to do, but as technology changes and other stuff is going on, oftentimes, you know, a couple years ago when we were talking with clients and rebuilding websites and saying you need to be mobile responsive, um, you know, they would say, well, we just got done redoing our website a couple years ago, we implemented a mobile redirect, now we've got to redo it again to do mobile responsive, what's next on our plate? And at that time, we really didn't think of anything beyond, you know, maybe some retina-quality display images so that the crisper, more high-resolution graphics on iPads and devices would pop really well. But I'll be honest, I didn't really see load times and AMP pages really coming to bear. So now this is kind of the next evolution. The good news is probably won't require a complete makeover or redo of your website as you're looking at ways to optimize things. But it will require maybe a little bit of time and effort and some cost in order to go back and take a look at your pages say, okay, now we've got them being mobile responsive, how do we make sure that they load super fast for us? So I suggest that you pop in— again, one of the relatively newer tools. One of my colleagues within WSI, we actually participate in the Facebook at Work program, which is our private intranet. And in addition to that being just an all-around awesome platform for communication, a lot of our colleagues within WSI network are posting really cool links and other sorts of help little nuggets into that system. And so one of my colleagues out of Brazil, I believe, posted this to say, hey, make sure everybody knows that this is there. Take a look at it, test your client sites, make your clients aware of it. So I wanted to make sure to share that with you and give you all a heads up that Google is paying attention to the speed now at which your site loads, and as should you. Thoughts on that one, Jeffrey? Any sites you wanna go out and test on this tool to see, see how they stack up?

Let's start Free Webinar Wednesdays and see how it does.

Let's go in. Boy. 2 without a net. That's pretty awesome.

I would think this one will do pretty good.

Yeah, I would think so as well. Cue the Jeopardy music. Sing a little, sing a little hum for me.

I've started playing Jeopardy on the Amazon device. We'll call Sally.

Yeah, A-L-L-E-X-A. Mm-hmm.

It's fun.

I've not done that yet. Although I just synchronized the SiriusXM satellite radio station with my Alexa, and we've got a trial until the end of December on our new vehicle that we just purchased in December that expires after a year. And so I was able to figure out how to get an ID number and download the app and be able to kind of make sure that it distributes out. And so, yeah, 3 Webinar Wednesdays has been out for so long, we've not taken the initiative with our friends at Typepad to even convert it to mobile responsive. So we've got some other issues. The good news is the site loads really quickly. The bad news is, you know, fortunately there's not a ton of information that would be difficult to read. The site actually loads relatively well from a mobile perspective. Um, so we've got a little bit of house of cards to clean up on our own here. Um, but the Google Mobile Test too would have caught the fact that, hey, your site's not mobile responsive, you really need to fix that. But the good news is, even though Free Webinar Wednesday isn't necessarily mobile responsive, it's still readable and it still loads pretty quickly. So, you know, I guess we kind of got that going for us, which is kind of funny.

We might, uh, Might at some point decide to choose one of the mobile-friendly templates because they have a ton.

Yep. So I think the last 6 or so years since we've been doing this, I don't think we really tweaked the template much. So it's hard to believe it's been that long, but there's certainly a ton of information out there. So yeah, we probably should, even though this is probably more of a pet project for the both of us. It's something that we should take a look at. So We'll add that to our to-do list, shall we?

Sure.

Yeah, so cool. All right, I guess the next couple of things that I wanted to chat about is the growing prevalence and the importance of video. And so a lot of people are talking about video as a way to better engage and build relationships. We'll see here very shortly, talked a little bit about Facebook and they came out with their second quarter earnings, and when Mr. Zuckerberg was talking about the strategic plan, future direction of Facebook, their ultimate goal and mission statement is to bring communities closer together, bring people of the world closer together. And so by, by helping to figure out ways to bring people together and kind of know each other better, that's kind of Facebook, and they've got a lot of effort that they're putting towards things like video and groups and other stuff. But video, when you're using it as part of your business strategy, can actually have some really nice financial benefits to it because it converts. When somebody goes to your website and they're interested in buying or subscribing or registering or applying for a product or service that you offer, if you can incorporate video as part of that process, there's You know, I've got 4 of many statistics that I found that just talk about why video is so powerful and how it can increase conversion rates, make a landing page more successful, talks about the amount of money that businesses are spending on video ads to try to get video out there from an advertisement perspective, and just the fact that consumers are spending more time watching video and using that as part of the purchase behavior. You know, there's a tipping point where video usage— I think one of the quotes or one of the statistics that's in Eric Qualman's Socialnomics video says, I think by 2018, 2/3 of all mobile traffic is going to be video-based, whether that's watching videos, creating videos, coming across videos, whether, you know, going into watching Netflix or watching videos on Facebook or producing videos yourself through Periscope or You know, Facebook Live. So video is certainly a pretty significant part of the business strategy moving forward. The other thing, just as a reminder, and I think I've mentioned this before on Free Webinar Wednesdays, but video certainly is part of search. YouTube itself is the 2nd largest search engine on the internet, right behind Google, and Google happens to own both of those properties. And so if you can think about ways to create content that answers questions for people. For example, if we think about the banking industry, if somebody goes in and a lot of millennials are going to YouTube first because they don't necessarily want to see words on a page, they want to go in and see a video that shows them how to do something. So they'll type in things like how to apply for a mortgage loan. They'll go in and say, what is remote deposit capture? What, you know, how do I get a business loan? So those sorts of searches that are going into YouTube If your business has got a local presence or maybe can do some advertising around those areas, your business is going to have a higher likelihood of being seen, especially to that younger generation that is relying on video to teach them and educate them as part of the process. So, you get your foot in the door that way. So, don't discount— and when you create videos, particularly YouTube and others, make sure that you don't just upload the video, but take some time thinking about what the name of the video is going to be. Give it a label that's got some nice keywords associated with it. Provide a nice description of what the video entails. Maybe give it add a hyperlink that comes back to that particular product page. So if you're a bank, for example, and you got a video that talks about remote deposit capture and how it can save businesses time from having to drive to the bank, you can make the deposits and all the other kind of you know pain in the butt stuff that you have to do every time you want to make a deposit. You can go in and also include a hyperlink that comes back to your website to the page that actually talks about remote deposit capture. And maybe there's a form on that page that allows somebody to schedule an appointment for one of your business bankers to come out and set remote deposit capture up, or they can download a guide that talks to them about a little bit more about what's going on. But you can incorporate links within your YouTube descriptions as well to bring people back to your website. Live streaming video. This is a Google Glass, and while not a lot of people are being seen in the wild with this now, And really didn't even when it was kind of introduced a few years ago. The concept of Google Glass, in my opinion, actually shifted consumer capability into social media, being able to bring somebody in immediately as part of the moment that something is happening, as opposed to after the fact. And if we think about social media just in general, you know, when I was driving to the IBA offices yesterday morning, before I actually left the parking lot across the street from my hotel, the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile was parked. And so I, of course, took a detour and rolled up next to it and dropped my window, and I had to take a picture. But I then headed over to the IBA offices. I did my presentation, and it wasn't until after I was done did I actually go out to Instagram and post something that said, you know, I knew it was going to be a good day when I saw this on the way into the office. And so everything that has been done up until the advent of Google Glass and now other products and services that other networks provide has always been an after-the-fact type thing. So I saw the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile and it was after the fact, whereas if I had Decided I wanted to hop out on a livestream, I could have actually done that. And maybe somebody that I know works for Oscar Mayer and maybe knew the driver, or they've got a question, or, you know, so there's that interactivity. And so as we think about using platforms like Periscope and Facebook Live and even Instagram now, being able to use that as a way to build that interaction and that dialogue in a real-time perspective is something that just a few years ago with bandwidth restrictions and technology, we wouldn't even have thought about. Nobody really wanted to use Google Glass because you looked like a dork when you wore it, and it didn't have long battery life, and it was kind of cumbersome. But now we've got that has evolved into the services that are on our phones, they're on our devices. It's very similar to that movie Wall Street with Michael Douglas, where when you first saw him using a cell phone, it was big and bulky and expensive and, you know, not something that anybody could see see themselves really using, but now the technology and the form factor has evolved to something that's very comfortable for everybody to use. And, you know, we've got more of these electronic devices now than people in the United States, so they've certainly taken a hold. YouTube, while they don't have live streaming quite yet from mobile devices, you can actually live stream from your desktop. So as a business, if you wanted to create your own little YouTube channel and And to be able to do live streaming from your office and, you know, host your own talk show, your own TV show, answering questions, interacting with your audience. You've got the capability to do that. I suspect it's only a matter of time before they're going to be bringing that in. Facebook announced that they're actually coming out with a competing video service for, for video. They're going to go after YouTube and even to a certain extent Netflix with original content. And so, you know, the big boys are certainly spending a lot of time. One of the other things that I picked up on, and it was about 50/50 in the room, and Jeff, I don't know if you've got your LinkedIn app there on your phone, but I would be curious to see if you have this. But LinkedIn is now providing the ability— it's not live, but you can now capture video as well as photos and use them as part of a post when you're using your mobile device. And the reason that that I think has an advantage is if you're using LinkedIn as a professional network, granted, you're probably not going to be posting pictures of yourself at the beach on vacation to LinkedIn, but like Jeff and I have been on a number of occasions, if we're together at conferences or we're presenting and we want that event or activity to be part of our professional footprint on digital, we can go ahead and capture some of those photos of presenting, of networking, of conferences, talking with vendors, We can now capture that information either in photo or video and share that directly to our LinkedIn audience. So you can see, I'm lucky I've got actually both the photo and the video as an option, but it was about 50/50 because the service is not totally rolled out yet to everybody. So, are you, are you able to check your mobile device, Jeff, and see whether or not, or do you just check LinkedIn natively?

I check it in the web browser. I do have the app, but I still haven't replaced my communication devices on my desktop from the lightning storm, so I'm using my cell phone.

Gotcha. So, so check that out and see. Just keep an eye on it and then recognize, or maybe remember the next time you're at a professional event, don't discredit the capability of being able to actually share video and photos. that professional activity. So kind of cool. But as we think about producing live video and doing those sorts of streams, whether it's on Facebook, whether it's on Periscope, whether it's on Instagram, Facebook provided a couple of nice little tips and ideas and suggestions. You can see that Facebook media/bestpractices/live link down there at the bottom of this page. That'll give you some ideas on how to do a livestream you know, and get the most out of it. But building anticipation, so, you know, and then I've kicked around, Jeff, the idea of maybe taking, in addition to recording and then go to webinar, maybe every once in a while we try to do a live stream on our Free Webinar Wednesdays page on Facebook so that people can actually see. I know we've done a couple of Google live streams and used the Google Hangouts, but that might be something kind of fun to play with. But if you're going to do that for your business, build some anticipation and say, hey, You know, join us, you know, Wednesday at 1 o'clock. We're going to be going live. So people that are connected with you on Facebook, share that personally so you can help distribute and get kind of the word out and build some anticipation. When people interact with you or when they join, encourage them to ask questions. Very similar to when we start Free Webinar Wednesdays, everybody that joins live has got the chat functionality within their GoToMeeting control panel. We certainly like interaction and dialogue with the live audience that joins us here on the show. And so you can do that very same thing when you're doing, when you're, when you're doing a live streaming video as well. If you're going to be doing a lot of that and you're remote, for example, if Jeff and I were at a conference and Jeff was going to go live and kind of talk a little bit about what's going on and promoting Community Bank Consulting, it might not be a bad idea for somebody like myself to hold the phone and be the actual cameraman. And then as comments come in, Jeff can, you know, focus on delivering information and talking to the audience. But then I can kind of relay the comments and the questions that people are coming in at. So it might be a little bit easier to see and pay attention. Remind your followers and folks that are joining you, because this will be available as a replay on your feed. So if they happen to miss your livestream, remind them if you're going to go live again. You know, don't forget to join us every Wednesday at 1 o'clock if we decide to implement that as part of a strategy with Free Webinar Wednesdays. But if you go live on the first Monday of every month, and you've got a particular topic that you talk about, remind them, remind them to like your page. And if you've got any other calls to action, like sign up for our newsletter, or we'll see you at this conference coming up next, next month. And then don't forget to think about the quality of the transmission. So, it's good to have a nice solid Wi-Fi signal, maybe even bring your own hotspot if you're at a conference. Sometimes those Wi-Fi connections can be a little bit bogged down and overloaded. Microphone if you're going to be standing far away from the camera, a tripod or something to put the camera on so you don't have kind of the shaky hand syndrome. But a few pretty cool little updates that you might be able to incorporate into your live video stream. So a few other recent updates. Here's the info from the folks over at Facebook. And so it looks like there was an inadvertent link from one of the LinkedIn pages that we'll talk about in a little bit that got carried over on this, but so oops on that. But you can see Facebook's new focus and their mission is bringing the world closer together, and they claim they've now got over 2 billion people with a little over a billion people now using it every single day. They really want to focus on groups, and they've made it possible now, and I'll show you how you can turn that on, for you to be able to create groups within your own business's Facebook presence to try to bring your customers together and help them engage with one another better. I know there's a credit union that I had the pleasure of meeting their marketing director last year, and he said one of their most effective means of building community was they have a travel club that's part of their credit union, and that travel club has people that are going on these trips that are part of this program that they pay money to be a part of, and then they come back into this private group and they share photos and stories and, oh my gosh, going to Italy or wherever they went on their trip, the Alaskan cruise, those are awesome. And so it just really helps build that community and ties people together. So you can see the growing popularity of Instagram stories and WhatsApp status messages. Again, further just sharing personality and building kind of camaraderie between folks. So it's It's, it's, it's mind-boggling. And, and, you know, we've had a lot of questions during our session yesterday, especially when we got into the demographics of advertisements. You know, how does Facebook know so much about us? And it's because we're actually telling it about us. We're sharing that information. We're putting it in our profile. We're talking about it in status updates. So it knows all that info. A few other things that I also wanted to point out as it relates to Facebook The platform itself, got some screenshots here. If you haven't noticed this yet, one is you can see the highlighted areas on the page. It used to be that your cover photo or your hero shot really had to be an image. They've now made it possible where if you're so inclined, you can actually turn that into a video. Again, going back to the importance and the growing popularity of video. They used to have all of the buttons off of the picture, so the picture was nice and clean. You can see with this instance, one of the banks that we know, they've actually moved their buttons up to the photo itself. Some pages that we've looked at still have the buttons down in the yellow where it's blank. The reason I mentioned that is if your page has important information where that Contact Us shows, you'll want to make sure. So, proudly serving Ohio since 1911 was up above that orange line, and now the button covers that. They're going to need to know that so they can go in and recreate that cover photo so that they can have that message being displayed and not being overwritten by the button. It's what I say about Facebook and the other social networking platforms sometimes making changes without us even realizing what's going on. And then your menu on the left-hand side for all of your tabs, now that groups is starting to become an option, maybe thinking about adding that. And, you know, you can see that groups really wasn't something that this bank was really paying much attention to, so it wasn't part of their side tabs. Now they may want to go ahead and do that. The other thing that is available to page owners is if you have people that are interacting with your posts, you have the ability to actually go out when you click on the, the names of the people that are on that post as the administrator, you can go in and you can actually invite them to be fans of your page directly from, from that engagement process, which is kind of cool. So that helps you build additional followers. And then from a messaging perspective, they're trying with Facebook Messenger to facilitate that conversation between the visitors to your page and the ability for them to communicate with you and have some conversations. So you can go into your settings and take a look at your messaging options, and you can even have automatic responders. So for example, in the banking industry, which tends to be very regulated and privacy-focused, you can have an autoresponder go back to somebody that might be interested in having some dialogue with you and say, you know, this is not an official support channel, please don't post account numbers or sensitive information. We look forward to having discussion with you, but if you, you know, and provide them with how they can get customer support if they need it. But really, this is more of a discussion around community and activity as opposed to an official support channel. And so you can do that response assistant, that automated kind of feedback. And then the last thing that's on these screenshots is you have the ability, if you have multiple locations in different geographic areas, for example, if you're a business and you've got offices in Michigan, you've got offices in Indiana, and you've got offices down in North Carolina, you can have different Facebook locations for each of those, still manage them centrally, But be able to share information that your Michigan customers would be interested versus your North Carolina versus your Indiana customers and make sure that that information that's flowing to those folks is going to be more regionalized and relevant to them. So you can go in as part of the process and you can request access to locations. Facebook will activate that for you. And then you'll have an administrative dashboard that you'll have access to where you can go in and actually do some of those location-based things. So if you're interested in taking advantage of some of the new group functionality as it rolls out, if you go into the settings for your actual Facebook page, you can scroll and get to the edit page option. And then if you scroll down, it'll show you the list of the tabs that you've got activated. And in this instance, we don't have the actual groups activated, so we can open that add tab and we can click on add tab and it'll toss in the actual group tab for us. And now we can all of a sudden see groups are there, and then we can go in and we can create a group around a particular topic or conversation or product or service. If you already have a group that you're managing and you'd like to merge that into your organization, you can do that. Keep in mind, if and when you decide to do that, that'll make that group now publicly available so they can see that the group exists. It won't necessarily guarantee that anybody can get access to it because you'll still be able to control the privacy, but you will then publish the fact that your group exists, and sometimes you may not necessarily want that to be the case. Um, the other thing we talked a little bit about was audience insights and being able to understand kind of who is on Facebook, who's in your market area. And we just want to do a quick little demonstration on this. So I'm going to kind of pick on Battle Creek, and I'm going to go in and see if I can find a list of, you know, people in Battle Creek for a particular demographic. So when you start into your ad, and you've got to have an ads account, but you can either pick specific people that are connected to your page, or you can go into everybody on Facebook. And I'm just going to say everyone. I'm going to go in here, and I'm— you can see we've got I'm going to pick Battle Creek, Michigan, if I can spell correctly. There we go. My fingers aren't working today. So I can go into Battle Creek, Michigan, and I can see what the makeup of people that are in the Battle Creek area look like. And continuing on kind of the theme of maybe the banking industry, since that's kind of what I do, we could go in and we could look for a particular market segment. Maybe we've got a desire to go into a particular area. We could take a look at homeownership. So maybe if I'm a bank and I'm interested in getting in touch with people that are renting that might be interested in buying a house, I could go in and I could say, well, show me everybody that's a renter that resides in the Battle Creek area. And then I could go through, I could take a look at some other statistics where I could go in and I could say, well, What's the relationship status? So I could say, well, maybe, you know, people that are newlyweds within the first, you know, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year. So maybe those are people that have, you know, gotten married, they're still renting, but there may be a high likelihood that they would be interested in buying a house at some point down the road. And so I can kind of segment that. And you can see as we walk down through the list, now Battle Creek's a little bit smaller market area than maybe, you know, in Indianapolis or Columbus, Ohio, or Charleston, South Carolina, whatever. But we can go through and we can see how many people are here, and this gives us an idea of kind of how the demographic makeup is. And then we can save that list. We can use some ideas where we can say, well, what does that segment look like? What sorts of things are they interested in? This gives us an idea of what pages they like. So if we wanted to network and put together any sort of a strategy around talking about things that they would also be interested in, You can see there's a lot of references to tattooing, which is kind of a surprise because I wouldn't have expected that. But given the fact that it's a younger demographic, you know, maybe I would want to make sure if I'm doing an advertisement and I have people that I am putting in the advertisement, I want to make sure that maybe one of those people that is in the advertisement actually might have a tattoo because that's the demographic that I'm going after. And While a tattooed person in a banking ad might seem somewhat taboo by some, if that's the demographic we're going after, maybe somebody with at least a tasteful tattoo or something along those lines might be appropriate for this demographic because those are the people that are probably going to see it. So a lot of information. I know when we got into the demographic area during our conference yesterday, I saw a lot of eyes starting to glass over because there's a ton of stuff that you can dig into. But it's a fun thing to go in and take a look at, just to give you a little bit of an idea as to kind of what opportunities might exist out there, what those people that you're interacting or interested in interacting with might be interested in. It's also a good idea to go back and double-check policies. So we just kind of provided a reminder there, particularly in the area of promotions and contests. So if you've not gone back through and looked at those things, it's probably something that you're going to want to pay attention to just to make sure that you're not doing a contest or promotion that's going to put you at risk of violating Facebook's terms and conditions and getting yourself in trouble. So those change on a regular basis, and so it's just a good idea to know that those are there. There's also a cool little service that they've got called Live Map where, again, playing off of the increasing popularity of live video, you can now fire up Facebook Live Map, and this will give you an overview and show you where live videos are being streamed from. You have, like, when you're doing this from the office, you want to be maybe a little careful just because you have no idea what live video is actually going to be live and if sound's going to come on. So just kind of, you know, be sure that you're careful and you know what you're doing there because there are some somewhat questionable videos that people have streamed live. But this will give you an idea of what sort of live activity going on. And if you happen to be in an area where there's live video and you can see maybe somebody that's within your community, or maybe it's a client that's using live video, it just kind of helps bring that to bear so that you're aware of what's going on in the live video space. So that live map link is kind of cool. And then shifting over into the world of LinkedIn, this is that web demo that I was telling you about. They have now provided the ability where you can go in and you can put tracking script on your website that will tell you what the audience is. So if I visit your website and I'm logged into LinkedIn, over time you'll be able to see the profile as well as the job and the age and so the different demographic data on What somebody looks like when they visit your website and what their profile looks like on LinkedIn. And so you have to have at least, I think, 300 visitors that are logged into LinkedIn before your demographics is going to be capturing information. But you can see in this little animated image here where you've got some access that shows you what's happening, who's there, and if your business is interested in selling to other businesses, LinkedIn's giving you access to this as a free tool. So you can see, you know, is it a particular industry that's hitting your website? Is it a particular job title? Is it a particular company that's coming by and accessing your information and reading your site info? So this is one that you may want to take a peek at just to kind of get some ideas as to how LinkedIn users are actually browsing and looking at your website information. Last couple of things, and then we'll wrap up and see if there's questions. LinkedIn is now also providing, in addition to giving you the ability to post a photo and a video, you can now post multiple photos. I don't know as if this is available on Android yet. This is one of those, I think, kind of poor me because I'm on an Android device, but I believe on the iPhone I have This has got the ability to add multiple photos. So while you're at conferences or events or any sort of business or professional activity, if you wanted to take a couple of photos and you could add those, you'll be able to build out a collage and be able to post that. And so there's a little link to the press release here that's LinkedIn multiple photos. You can go in and you can visit that, and this will give you a little bit of detailed information About how multiple photos work. You can see it's on iOS. So haven't seen it on my lovely little Android device, but it is coming. It's just a little bit late to the game. And then I think the last item that I wanted to toss out there, because there always seems to be a little bit of question, and I'll give it a moment to see if this joke kind of kicks in. Maybe Jeff's on mute and he's chuckling, but I don't hear him. But I kind of like this hashtag joke just because kind of It's kind of funny. There's my chuckle. Good. So making sure you find it funny, because I thought it was hilarious. Makes me think of McDonald's breakfast, if nothing else.

Mm-hmm.

But the concept around a hashtag— LinkedIn now is supporting hashtags, various other networks support hashtags— and so the hashtag really is intended to be a label or an interactive kind of categorizer, if that's even a word, for a conversation or a topic. And so the difference between kind of giving somebody a mention— so if I post a tweet and I want to @JeffSimkins, I can mention him and it shows up and it makes sure that he knows that I'm talking about him. But I can also put in hashtags like #FreeWebinars or #LinkedIn, and that will give us— and there's 2 strategies around a hashtag. One is you provide a hashtag that you use so that other people can find you. So we're spending a lot of time talking about LinkedIn. I might want to use the hashtag LinkedIn as part of any promotional efforts around the webinar so that other people that are looking for hashtag information will be able to maybe stumble upon the content that Jeff and I are talking about. If I wanted to control more of the conversation and it was more about Free Webinar Wednesdays, or if I'm a community bank or a business that's sponsoring a local event, I would be more inclined in creating a unique hashtag that nobody else is really using, and then that hashtag would then be distributed to anybody that's participating in that event so that as they engage in their preferred social network, whether it's Facebook, whether it's Instagram, whether it's Periscope or Twitter, they can use the hashtag as part of that, and then it gives you the ability to go in and see where people are talking about you in a variety of different platforms. And so in that instance, you're not interested in other people necessarily that are interested in a similar topic. You only want them to look at your topic, and you want to own that category. And so hashtags haven't really shown to make a particular post more engaging or get more clicks, but they have been shown to help kind of further build the community and kind of bring people together and categorize what's really going on kind of in the world of social media and tie it in across multiple different platforms. Because I think one of the challenges or opportunities that businesses have is people will engage with your brand if you are there and you allow them to, or you show them how. In a variety of different platforms because a lot of people don't just use Facebook by itself. They use multiple platforms, and depending on where they're at or the time of day or just their mood, they may choose to interact with LinkedIn, they may choose to interact with Instagram, they may choose to interact with Twitter. And so that hashtag allows them to talk about you and make it trackable regardless of what platform they decide to actually go in and start Kind of having the discussion. So that, that kind of wraps up the, I guess, the main level things that I wanted to chat about. I also wanted to do a little plug, even though there's really no monetary value in it to us because it's a free download. But if you haven't downloaded a copy of Digital Minds, this is the 2nd edition of the book that WSI created that I had the privilege of being a contributing author to. This is one of the books that I certainly talk about when I do presentations, but as a free download, it's a nice little resource that talks about some of the different other elements of a digital marketing strategy and goes into some other stuff that might be interesting to you or anybody else within your organization.

So, Jeffrey.

Back to you. I'm doing the Phil Donahue over-the-head microphone grab. Do you remember that one?

No, I'm too young to remember Phil Donahue.

Yeah. So I do a— speaking of too young, as a joke, I didn't do it in this, but as a joke, I've Developed a little video with a squawking modem noise and an AOL login screen, and I'm wondering when it gets to the point where the audience that I'm presenting to doesn't recognize the sound of a modem.

Well, considering the— your target audience, it may not be in your lifetime.

Yeah, that's probably true. Although some of the presentations, you know, the The marketing directors and other folks tend to be a little bit younger, but, you know, I had some early 30-somethings and maybe even some late 20-somethings that were in the room yesterday, and, you know, they made a comment that they remember their mom getting logged into AOL, and they thought that was really cool. And so, of course, that made me feel really old as well. So it is what it is.

Oh goodness, it, uh, yeah, this may be a story too old for you. When I first started working in banking, we received our ACH transactions, you know, the electronic ones. They came on a big old floppy disk about the size of an LP record.

Oh yeah, yep.

They came once a day.

Load it up. So, and the, the little micro SD card that you stick in your little handheld remote flying helicopter, uh, that you bought off of Amazon for $20 probably has, you know, 1,000 times the storage capacity as that giant pizza box floppy disk that you were using for all your bank transactions. So it's, uh, it's certainly a great thing.

I'm not so sure, but, uh, The phone that I have in my hand right this moment may have more memory than the IBM AS/400 that we had at that point.

Yeah, probably, probably. So anyway, I, and I don't know if you even caught any of those kind of newer ones, but I'm excited about the possibility of exploring communities and groups, not just with our community banks but with other clients as well, because I think the whole concept around building a tribe and bringing people in and giving them a sense of involvement within an organization through their Facebook. And that might increase the likelihood of dialogue if you're managing that correctly. So I think that's kind of cool. And certainly I've been playing around with video and just different ways to use that. So I think those are a couple of things that I'm pretty excited to watch evolve. So I don't know if there was anything in that list that kind of struck your fancy, but— Yeah.

Lots of cool stuff in there.

Yeah.

I can only imagine that the full presentation must have been really exciting in all ways. Yeah. Well, yeah.

Well—

And you're right about things evolving. Things change so quickly now. I mean, looking back even 5 years ago, but say 10 to 20 years ago, you know, you invested in something and you expected it to be around for a few years. When it comes to technology things now, you, you really have to think kind of short-term.

Yep.

One of your stories early in the presentation where you talked about, well, We told our clients that they need to get their websites mobile ready and they'll probably be done. I think the reality of it is you're not done anymore.

Yeah.

And you don't know what the next project around the corner is going to be. So they're in budgeting and planning and staffing and thinking. There always needs to be an anticipation that you're always going to have new projects showing up that you're going to need to, to have time and money reserved for.

Yep, exactly. There's no such thing as done when it comes to technology unless you're one of the lucky ones. Well, either going out of business or you tend to, you know, you win the Mega Millions or the lotto or whatever it is and you don't have to worry about it anymore. But for the rest of us that, you know, are still interested in working for a living and not going out of business and realize that the life The likelihood of winning the lottery and not having to care is not going to happen. Yeah, it's a constant struggle sometimes, but it's one that I enjoy. I think it's one that you enjoy, and it's just the reality in the world we live.

So it looks like we have managed to fill up another hour.

We did. I was thinking that this wouldn't take an hour, but Surprise, surprise. So I think the hour is just— they say, you know, what is it? If you've got a table and you drop water on it, the water is going to cover however much space that you have to cover. So we are that proverbial drop of water on the table of the internet. So we've covered it. So, well, we'll go ahead and we will wrap the show for this week. We, we will— I think I'm gonna end up having to cancel for next week. Those of you that are in the St. Louis, Missouri area, I will be in St. Charles next week. Midwest Independent Bank is doing their community banking conference, and I will be presenting a half-day social media session for them. My good friend Donna Harden over at the MIB has asked me to come back and be part of their event again, so I'm really excited to see her again. and be part of that event. So we will be taking a hiatus for next week. I did notice that last week's video has not yet made it out to Free Webinar Wednesdays. We talked about Jeff Lightning Strike and Active God electronic management strategy. So we need to get that up there so those of you that weren't able to sit in on that are able to enjoy it. And I got some nice feedback, and we'll get this one online as well. And And keep an eye out for our next episode coming up probably in a couple weeks. So, Jeff, always a pleasure.

Next week is an exciting week for me. I am in pretty much in the direct path of the eclipse. So we have 2.5 minutes of darkness at my house on Monday.

Yes, very cool. Well, we actually booked a webinar discussion with one of our clients that's in the path of totality. Not realizing we booked it a couple of weeks or months ago, and then came to the realization that nobody really wants to be inside listening to a webinar when that is happening. So we had to push it back, and we've rescheduled. So even though I'm going to only be at about 80% totality here in Michigan, they are in the path as you are and going to enjoy a total eclipse. So I just said, take some cool pictures and Enjoy it. Maybe you'll be able to live vicariously through their social posts. So we'll see. But anyway, thanks for joining us live. Those of you that are listening to the recording, we appreciate you coming back and being part of our Free Webinar Wednesdays family. We'll take next week off and double-check on future weeks, but hope you enjoyed the show, and we'll see you down the road here at freewebinarwednesdays.com. Until then, have a great week, everybody. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.