Social Media Marketing - Bonus questions from webinar with @MyDigitalVidya

Hey, it's Evan. I recently did a webinar on social media with the guys from Digital Vidya, and we had so many questions at the end of it that I couldn't get to them all. And I promised everybody that had asked a question that I would do a video response for those who I couldn't answer on the webinar itself. And so I finally got the Excel spreadsheet of all the questions, and hopefully I'm not shooting myself in the foot here with all the questions here, but I'm going to answer the questions And let's see how it goes. So the topic is social media. So let's see what we got, what we got, what we got. Can we choose one single word for business? Any tips? Yes. So the main theme of the webinar was picking one word to define your business. When you do that, you stand for something important. You attract people who want to work with you. You're sharing stuff in your social media campaigns that means something. That get people excited, that people want to then spread, right? Most of your stuff is boring, and the idea is having one word that means something to you, and when you're creating content for it, it's your guiding beacon. It's not just social media, it's everything. Every decision you have to make in your business, you can match it up to your one word. So another example, again, me and believe. I got the plane, I believe it was on the back. You have to believe in entrepreneurs to be a part of my team, right? If you look at the content that I share on social media, all of them— Facebook, Twitter, YouTube— it's always about believing in entrepreneurs. It's giving helpful advice, tips, suggestions. And if something comes across my desk that I like, that even if I haven't created, I just like it, I'll share it because it relates to believe. And everybody who follows me on all the social media networks are used to that kind of content, so they love it. How do you pick your one word? Assuming you're the owner of the business, the one word isn't about your business. It's about you. It's finding your own personal one word, and the way to find it— so I'm writing an entire book on this, but let me try to condense it into like a couple minutes. Think about all the things that make you happy in your life and have always made you happy. Think about your favorite book, your best friend, your favorite movie, the music you like to listen to, the companies you've started, your your favorite boss, what you love about your parents. There's a common theme across everything that makes you happy. There's one word that connects all of them, and that's what you want to build your one-word campaign around. And it's a personal one word that you bring to your business. So 'Believe' is mine. I, you know, my favorite movie is 'Seabiscuit.' It's about this horse that everybody counted out and came back and won all these races. It was one that nobody believed in, but they believed in themselves. And so I brought that to my business. Another example, a buddy of mine runs a training company called Last Minute Training, and he is really— he loves customer service. So what he wants to do is delight people, and he believes in that himself. This is a value, right? It's a core value to you. It's not just your business, and whatever you bring comes to your business. So he sells training, but his core value is delighted. So his word is about being delighted. And that's what he focuses his business on. If you come, you know, he's hiring salespeople for his company. If you don't believe in hiring— if you don't believe in delighting the customer, you're not going to have a great job. You're not going to fit in with that business. He's not going to hire you even if you look great on paper. Social media stuff that he's planning should be around being delighting, delighting your customers. And so it's a guiding beacon. So it's finding your own personal one word, your own personal value, the most important value to you, and then bringing that to your business and everything that you do. So that was from Surabh. Thank you for the question. The next one comes from— and I'm sorry if I mispronounce your guys' names— Indrajit, who wrote in, "How can one word be patented? Is it essential?" So you can't patent the word. You can't patent the word. It's not going to happen. And ideally, you're picking a word that is If you're picking a word with power that has meaning, somebody else has used it before. If you look at "believe," you know, for me, that means something to me, but tons of people have used "believe" before, right? You know, Justin Bieber has an album called "Believe." There's lots of songs that have been used called "believe," and that's okay. That's great. Like, these are all— they're aligned with me too. These are all potential partners for me to work with. So don't worry about patenting your one word. You can't. It's your value. You should want to spread it and share it and let people know what it means to you, why it's important, because you're going to attract people who believe in the same thing, who have that same one word. That's the ideal way. Okay, next. If I'm new to social media marketing, what would you recommend to test the waters while managing online reputation? This is from Sriram. So if you're new to social media, Start slowly because too many people, they start social media, they, they go crazy, they post, you know, 5 times a day, and then they give up after 2 weeks because they're not seeing any results. You have to make sure that you're getting results from it. And so in the webinar, and you can go back and watch it again, and maybe this question was asked early, I talked about how to take baby steps and get started on a small scale, prove it. So first step is just make sure you have the accounts. Nobody else can take it from you. Then research to see if your customers are actually there, right? If your customers are on Twitter, you should be on Twitter. It's marketing 101. You want to be where your customers are. If your customers aren't on Twitter, don't go on Twitter. It's not worth your time because your customers aren't there. So be where your customers are. Number 3 is just, just pay attention. Pay attention and see if people are talking about you, right? Even if you just have your Twitter name on your website, if a customer is looking for you, they may talk about you, right? I'd like to look for the Twitter handle of the companies that I deal with and I'll talk about them. So just say— just see if people are talking about you, then recognize your champions. So the people who are talking about you, you just say thank you, right? You're not actively doing anything. None of this actually takes much time at all. All of that is pretty simple, easy. You're not going to get bombarded with questions. And then slowly you work into creating content. Okay, you post your thoughts, your expertise, things that mean something to you. Again, things around your one word. Start with just something once a week. Don't go crazy. Show results. Prove to yourself that it's worth your time, right? You're a busy entrepreneur. I'm a busy entrepreneur. You're busy in your job, whatever you're doing. You don't have time to spend 5 hours a day on social media, right? You have to prove that it's worth the time investment. So prove it to yourself. Prove that people are interacting with you. Share only things that mean something to you. Once a week, start it off and show that people are interacting, are responding to you, love your stuff, and then slowly start expanding. But every step along the way, you're proving to yourself that this thing works. Okay? Next, for SMBs, the social media marketing budget is not much. How do you reach more audiences organically? Thanks a lot for the amazing session. It's perfect. That's from Amit. So I'm glad you enjoyed it. I mean, I don't believe you need to do advertising in a social media campaign. The key is that, again, you're making somebody feel something because if you pour advertising dollars on top of a mediocre campaign, a crappy campaign, if you're out there just promoting your coupon codes and, "Hey, here, check out my latest blog post," advertising that is not going to help you with anything. You don't need a budget, right? You have an unlimited budget. It's not going to help you because It's not something that people want to read, right? It doesn't have any feeling to it. On the other side, you'll see tons of campaigns that have get started that have no advertising budget but have feeling to it, say something strong, stand for something, and people just want to share it, right? If you look at my stuff, I don't advertise any of my stuff. There's no advertising dollars spent. You look at the Believe video that I talked about in the webinar. No advertising dollars were spent on that, 350,000 views on it because it's— the message is something that connects with people. So what I would say is if you have a limited budget dollar-wise, you have a limited amount of time, whatever you're spending should go into creating something amazing. Don't worry about the marketing and promoting of it because if it's good, people will share it. That's the power of social media. So spend your dollars, your time, your energy, your resources on creating something that when you look at it, you say, "Yeah, that's awesome. I made that." You should feel proud of whatever you're creating. And don't worry about posting something 3 times a week. Post something once a week, make it great, make it amazing, feel proud. You know, you want to make something that you're happy to show your family, something you're happy to show your parents or your kids or your coworkers or or your friends, right? Like, look what I just made. It's got to be that strong. If it's that strong and people feel the same connection, then they're going to want to share with their friends. You don't need advertising dollars for it. Okay, next. So this is from Surab, maybe another Surab. I'm a student. I'm launching a new website next week. I want to create buzz. Any suggestions from you for social media buzz? So For a new website launch, I'd say again, think about what you want to accomplish with the site, right? Why are you creating this site? What big problem are you trying to solve? Because for a website, there's tons of websites, millions of websites, people launching websites all the time, and I get hit up constantly with people wanting me to promote their website. What big problem does your website solve, and why should I care, right? If I had to underline one main theme for all of my talks and everything, it's that you want people to care. If people care, they'll share it. If they don't care, they won't. And no matter how much you spam people and bombard people and plaster people with messages, if they don't care about it, they're not going to share it. So what big message does your website have? What big problem are you solving? And how can you get people to care? If you can do that, then people will spread it. And I would think about— so maybe a more tactical thing, if I could think about who to reach out to, find people who are aligned with your mission. So if you had a new website for entrepreneurs that solved a really big problem for entrepreneurs, you'd want to share it with me, right? You could reach out to me on Twitter, and people do all the time, and let me know about this new website you're launching, right? Find people who have a community that is a strong community of your target audience and reach out to them and let them know what you're doing. But again, it's got to be something good, right? If you send me a link to your new website and it sucks or it's just self-promotional and I don't see the value to entrepreneurs, then I'm not going to go be happy with it, right? I'm not going to pay attention to the next thing you send me. So make sure that your website is really strong and that people care about it. Next, from Prashant: If your company has 3 products, each represented one word, how do you market them separately or in common? So this is really, really, really, really, really important. You don't have a word per product. You have a word for your company. You have a word for yourself. It's a value that you then bring to everything that you sell. Okay, so at my company, I have almost 40 different products that I sell. I call them my ZugaGuides. On top of that, I have the webinars, and I sell partnerships and sponsorships, and I do workshops with people and I do speaking engagements, I don't have one word for each one of them. They're all part of believe. And so that's what you need to do for your company. Your company has to stand for something. Your company has to have a soul. All the people who come into your business have to believe in the same thing. So it's not on a product level because a product doesn't have a soul. You can name your product something. You can brand it something. The name of your product can be one word if you want to. That's powerful. It's easy and short to remember, but the overall feeling that you want to get comes from your business and comes from the people inside the business believing in that one word. So that's really important. This is not on a product level. This is company-wide. Purab, is it better to use one's personal social media to connect if the company is a new startup? How do you eventually transfer the engagement It's a startup social media platform. So I believe it's a lot easier to connect with a person than it is to connect with a company. And if you're going to have a company-based social media platform, and this works if you're not building a personal brand, right? You start off in the beginning, am I building a personal brand or am I building a company brand or am I trying to do both? So if you're starting up a new company, you know, if you're the leader, you have your own Twitter account, do you want to be seen as a thought leader? Do you want to be seen as the expert? Do you want people asking you questions. Do you want to create this Twitter account for yourself or not? You know, if you don't and you just want to be the company, then start it through the company. I like having a face for the company though. So for example, on your Twitter account, if it's a company-wide Twitter account, then, you know, on the page you show the people who are tweeting from it and you show at the end of it, you know, who it was. It could just be their initials. If you're doing YouTube videos, right, show the people in your company. If you're doing Facebook posts, show the people in your company, because people want to connect with people. They want to see who's behind the brand, who's pushing this message out. That's really important. So if you know you're going to go to a, a brand, then just start with that. Start with your brand. If you don't want to build a personal brand, then don't worry about it. Just start on the business side. Build that up, but again, make it personal because people don't want to interact with a logo, they want to interact with a real person. So that was Purab, thank you. Next one is Kapil. My Facebook page was doing well, we were getting 2,500 organic likes a day and now suddenly the likes have fallen by 90% over the past 5 years. Can't figure out the reason why. So the 2 things to think about Facebook, the reason why your engagement has probably dropped off. One, there's a lot more competition than there was 5 years ago. A lot. Everybody's jumping on the Facebook. It's super hard now to stand out because if you look at somebody's Facebook feed, right, it's all the stories that come up from all the pages that they've liked and all of their friends. Now there's so many more brands coming online, so many more brands having Facebook pages that it's getting super competitive. So you're not showing up as much. Facebook in the past year has also updated their algorithm where fan pages are not showing up as much as your friends. So in your own— you probably notice on your own feed, the pages that you like, that you're a fan of, their stuff doesn't show up in your newsfeed as much as your friends' stuff unless you're regularly engaging in it. So that's why it's way more competitive than it was 5 years ago, and Facebook's algorithm is penalizing branded pages instead of your friends. The way around it is you need to get people engaging with your stuff. If people are liking, sharing, commenting on your stuff, then it's more likely to show up in their feeds. That's how it works. So if somebody comments on, on one of your posts, then tomorrow when you post again, it's probably going to show up in their feed. If they ignore you for 5 days, then you're going to be out of their feed unless they go back to your page and type it in, which they usually don't. So the challenge now is on You providing quality information that people want to engage with, not just here's something to learn, but that people want to like, share, and comment, because when they're doing that, when that quality level's there, then they're going to see it in their newsfeed constantly. They're going to refer their friends to it. Their friends are going to see that they're engaging with it. They're going to sign up. So it's really a big challenge now. Quality is more important than ever to stand out on Facebook. So thanks for the question. Next is from Millie. What if we also have an oil distribution and a masala brand distribution as well, run individual campaigns for each? Your thoughts on how a taxi business can benefit from social media. Okay, so lots of different businesses here. I would think about the audience. If your audience is the same, then run it under one campaign. If your audience is different, then run it under two. So I don't know how connected the— what did you have? Oil distribution and masala brand distribution. If they're the same customers, then I would run under the same campaign. If they're not, then you can have two different ones, but there's costs and time and pain associated with each one, right? I think any business can benefit from social media campaigns. So a taxi company, you think about a taxi company, man, taxi companies. Talk about like the most competitive business to be in, it's got to be taxi companies. There's no loyalty to a taxi, right? It's whoever comes as closest to you, you flag down, that's who you get to come on. There's no feeling attached to any taxi company. Now there's one company here in Toronto, I don't know how international they are, called Halo, which which has an app where you can book a taxi, you can see how far away they are from you, you can see them on the GPS. So that's a cool branded loyalty play to Halo, but again, the individual taxi, you gotta make people care, and you can, right? If you were the taxi company— so give me your one word, right? What's the one word for a taxi company? If you were a taxi company that loved entrepreneurs— I love entrepreneurs— I would wait an extra 10 minutes for a taxi, that specific taxi company, right? If you adopted my friend Louis' word of being delighted, if that was you and I knew I'd get an amazing experience every time I booked your taxi, then I would wait or I would call that number, right? Or I would ask for this specific person, but there's no— it's a commodity, right? That's the problem. You got to break out of the commodity by again making people feel something, because if you don't, if there's no connection to your brand, if the stuff you're sharing on social sucks and I'm not sharing it, I don't feel anything looking at it, then I'm just going to go with whoever is the closest taxi company, whoever is going to be cheapest, right? If somebody undercuts you by 2%, I'm going to go somebody else. But when you have a brand, when you have equity built up with that by making people feel strong feelings towards your company, then they're less likely to leave. They have loyalty. And you can start that campaign again on social, again same strategies. You pick your one word, you share things that are important to you, you share things that are meaningful to you, you share people that get people thinking and saying, "Wow, I like this company." Who are they going to call the next time they need a taxi? You got it. What is the future of social media? This comes from Anil. Ah, make me make predictions. I think it's going to be harder and harder and harder for people to stand out and have success with social because it's getting more competitive. It's getting more and more competitive. Every single day there's more people coming online. Every single day. There's more companies promoting, there's more people promoting, and you only have one— you look at Facebook, you only have one feed, right? How do you keep track of all of that? It's really going to be a case where quality is going to rise to the top, and too many people— this is the problem— too many people treat social like advertising, right? You're used to advertising campaigns, you're used to pay-per-click campaigns, you're used to You know, if I spend $1,000, I'm going to get X number of clicks, that's going to be Y number of conversions, and it's going to lead to this number of dollars, right? That's an advertising model. And I can see, does that work? Yes or no? If yeah, then I can increase my budget. You can think that everything is going to increase down the line, right? My conversions, sales, everything. With social, it's not just a matter of pumping dollars into it to get a return, right? I've gotten great returns off my social. I've gotten Even this webinar came from social. I got speaking engagements, client deals, product sales, new people wanting to join my team. Lots of stuff comes from my social channels, but I can't say, "If I spend 5 more hours a week or if I launch 2 more YouTube videos this month, that it's going to generate Y." And I don't know which ones lead to that result, but I know that it generates results, right? When I went to Malaysia and they paid for my trip and hotel and airfare and speaking fee and all that, and I asked them, "Hey, how did you find me?" Like, "Oh, we saw your YouTube videos and we wanted you to come on. We said we have to have you here." So there's definitely an ROI, but it's not directly measurable. You can't pull a lever like you do with advertising, and I think too many people are coming from the advertising world and are treating social like advertising, and they're going to fail. The people who have that mindset, they've already failed. They're not going to have success. And so more and more people, as it gets more competitive, are going to feel the crunch, not get ROI, see that this is— feel like it's not working for them, and there's going to be a greater and greater push towards quality, towards picking your one word, towards creating content that has feeling. That's the future. And last one comes from— Lalitha, Lalitha. There's a few— oh, one part, one part. So can social media activity be outsourced? I am not— this is a great question, and I am not a big fan of outsourcing your social media. The reason is, the reason why people share your stuff is because it has soul, right? This whole talk about having one word, creating something that means something, standing for something important, there's a soul to it. You can't outsource soul. You need to have somebody— a lot of times it should be the person in charge, the person leading this campaign. Doesn't have to do all the day in, day out, but if you're the entrepreneur, you got to at least spend some time on it because you are the soul of the company. You need people on your team who passionately, but passionately believe in what you're doing. Those guys are going to be the ones who can share your story best. Think about— so you look at a big company, right? You look at Nike. You look at Nike, what do they stand for? Be athletic, right? They love— everything is about athletics. You look at their branding, you look at their campaigns, look at their social, look at their everything. It's never about, hey, here's why our shoes are great. We have the best, you know, technology in our air soles and whatever. They never talk about that. What do you see? You see great athletes doing great things. They support athletics. So imagine them outsourcing to a company that didn't understand athletics, right? It wouldn't work. The campaigns wouldn't take off. You have to have people who live and breathe and sweat this stuff, love this stuff, and that's super difficult to find outsourcing. I believe your social campaigns should be the soul of your company and should be run by somebody within your company. So I think that's it. Thank you for all the extra questions. You guys got a bonus 25 minutes that we couldn't get in on the webinar itself. I really enjoyed the talk, seeing you guys. I don't know if we're going to do it again. Well, stay tuned. I really enjoyed all the talks and the interaction. A lot of you followed up on Twitter. If you guys, you know, the full webinar, I'll include it in the link below so you guys can check that out. So for those of you watching, you have no idea what I'm talking about, you can watch the webinar below. Thank you so much. If you have other questions, leave it in the comments. I'm going to give you the response and I'll see you soon. Believe.