The Art of Social Media Keynote Speech

So, yes, my name is Guy Kawasaki. I am the chief evangelist of a company called Canva, which I hope many of you already use and hopefully all of you will eventually use. I'm here with my daughter. We've had a very nice time. My daughter is sitting there and I wanted to take her to a conference where she would meet lots of women whose ambitions and capabilities and actions were not defined by men. And I think I hit the jackpot here. So she regularly tells me what to do. So I expect that to be even worse now. So I'm going to talk to you today about the art of social media. These are the lessons that I've learned about social media, or more accurately, the lessons that Peg Fitzpatrick has taught me. I use the top 10 format for my speeches and it's because I have seen so many high tech speakers, mostly men, I'll point out. And the two salient qualities of most high tech speakers are that they suck and they go long. That is a deadly combination. If you suck and you're short, it's okay. And if you're great and you're long, it's okay. But if you suck and go long, that's like being stupid and arrogant. So I use the top 10 format so that in case you think I suck, you know approximately how much longer I'll suck. Okay. And I truly do love social media. I love visual marketing and it is a constant learning process for me. So these are the kinds of things that I'm thinking about constantly. I'm always trying to perfect and I wanted to pass my insights on to you. I will give you a disclaimer right up front though, that I don't pretend to know everything. These are my best shots. My best. One of the recommendations in this presentation is that you always be experimenting so not necessarily just defaulting to people who are so called experts. So with that, let me begin. I think that the first thing that I finally figured out about social media is the one about perspective. And a lot of people have these concepts, very highfalutin concepts about what social media is and how it behaves. And, and I have a very tactical philosophical perspective to how you succeed on social media. And the metaphor that I use, the key to this whole thing is online dating. Online dating, metaphor. So in online dating there are two extremes. May my daughter never have to learn all this. But there are two extremes in online dating. At one extreme there is eharmony. And at eharmony you're going to find your soulmate, right? And you're going to walk Hand in hand on windswept beaches, drinking wine, completing each other's sentences. And your kids are all perfect straight A students. And the house is clean and the dishes are done and the laundry is done, and the dogs are happy and everything is perfect in your life with your soulmate. So the theory of eharmony is you have to find this psychographic match on all these very important variables, such as, you know, are you suitably outgoing enough for each other? Are you suitably warm enough for each other, and are you suitably quarrelsome or not quarrelsome for each other? So you fill out all this psychographic information. Takes a long time. At the other end of online dating is something called Tinder. And at Tinder, at Tinder, you look at this guy and he says, hmm, this guy's posing with a horse. Must love animals. What a wonderful man. And so you either decide he's hot or not. You swipe right for hot, swipe left for not. And you literally make a decision on no more data than this. Interesting. Not interesting, right? And then let's say you swipe left, get rid of Scott, and then you come up to David and you look at that and you say, hot or not. And then maybe you're looking for more of the Favio look. And you, you know, there's Patty at 25. So the first thing I figured about social media is that it is a Tinder world, that people are making instant decisions and they're not gonna. They're not gonna, like, do a lot of research on you, read your LinkedIn profile, find your psychographic match to figure out if you're worth following, worth liking, worth commenting, worth interacting. I think you're gonna make a very, very instantaneous decision. Instantaneous side story for this. In order. I don't know if I should tell this story with my daughter here, but in order to get these screenshots, I had to join Tinder. Now, I wish I could tell you that I was on Tinder for six hours and I was inundated with women contacting me, but nothing happened. Not even men contacted me. It was just a total disappointment to me. So anyway, the first lesson that I learned is, it's Tinder. It's Tinder. Social media, visual marketing is Tinder. It is not eharmony. The next thing I learned is, wow, a lot of people in this Tinder like world, they. They make a fast and huge judgment based on something as simple as your avatar. So let's look at some avatars. So avatar number one, it's that circle in the upper left corner, right. And so even if you were close, even if this were on your monitor, you cannot see that guy's face clearly. He likes water and falling into water, as his cover photo also shows. But you really, you can't make him out. He is sitting on something in front of water, in front of a bridge. I think this is a not good avatar because I think the purpose of an avatar is to convince that you are likable, that you're trustworthy and you're competent. And you cannot get that from that avatar. Another one, this guy, this guy's avatar is a dog with a hat. Likable, trustworthy, or competent, Hard to imagine that's true. Another one, this is an avatar for a person. This is a grown adult man. And in his avatar there is his two daughters, three daughters, wife, but he has decapitated himself. So how would you make any judgment about this person? And these are the kinds of avatars that many people use. And I figured out the first thing you have to do is really perfect that now we also have brands who have avatars, right? And simply for a brand, your avatar is your logo. Duh. No brainer. This is a very interesting case. So this is Porsche's Facebook site, and they have their logo with their word Porsche. But they have a requirement that, that their logo from a brand standard standpoint, has to be surrounded by white space, which I can kind of understand, except that when you look at the context in which many people will see this avatar, the lower part where they make a little post, it becomes so tiny you can't tell what that logo is. And you can hardly read that it's Porsche. It's a very interesting question. Maybe that brand standard, that aesthetic, the white space requirement was determined years ago before there was such a thing as an avatar. Interesting question. By contrast, there's Mercedes Benz. So with Mercedes Benz, it is a dark avatar with their logo. It's smack dab in the middle of your face. There's no mistaking. And even in the smaller context, that is clearly a. A Mercedes Benz logo. So I think even for a brand, this avatar has to convince people that you're likable, trustworthy, competent. Now, I'll tell you the history of avatars. I think the way avatars have evolved and how they got to be so bad for many people is the scenario is you take a picture, right? Somebody takes a picture of you, somehow you get this copy of the picture and you think, ah, I look good in that picture. I'll use this for my avatar. So I'll just crop a little square out. And then, lucky girl standing in the back. She gets to be my avatar. And everybody can see her, too. And there's even a piece of the blue shoulder of the guy standing next to me. So many people do avatars this way. I'm sure none of you do, but so many people do it. It's not the way. So your avatar. Likable, trustworthy, and confident. The big three of avatars. My suggestions, only your face. Not your family, not your dog, not your car, not your tennis racket, not your golf clubs. Just your face. People want to know that you're likable, trustworthy, and competent. I think it should be asymmetric. You are not posing for a DUI arrest. Okay? You don't have to be smack dab in the middle. Throw some art into it. Everybody's been talking. I've been several sessions. Many people have mentioned the rule of thirds asymmetric. Put your face at the intersection of one of those thirds front lit. Oh, my God. How many people have backlit avatars? I can't even understand that. And finally, something that you might debate me on is I think every platform should have the same avatar, and it's because, God forbid there's more than one Guy Kawasaki. So if you see Guy Kawasaki on Facebook, is that the same Guy Kawasaki on Twitter? LinkedIn. And the answer should be very obvious. If the avatar is the same, yes, it is the same. Now, Guy Kawasaki is an uncommon name combination, but, you know, Mary Smith is the Mary Smith on Twitter. Who just posted that. The same Mary Smith on Facebook. Who knows, right? I think they should be consistent. So these are the. I think the four most important qualities of an avatar. Okay, perfect your avatar. The third point is to now perfect your cover photos. So let's talk about some cover photos, and let's look at some. So here's one. This is the doozy of a cover photo. Because the avatar is lousy, because it's backlit. You do not see the face at all. And this person has not changed the default graphic at Google at all. And you know, again, Tinder. Tinder. Not interesting, right? This is a loser swipe right. Another one. This is a guy whose avatar is a chimp. I mean, if this was Jane Goodall's account, okay, I might understand that. And then he has, like, this gladiator screenshot. I don't know what that's about. I would not say that is a good cover photo. I think a good cover photo tells a narrative, tells a story. About who you are. This is another guy, this one. Okay, so you look at his avatar. Not bad. At least it's face only. You know, it's not front lit. But my God, his cover photo. I mean, clearly he wants to tell a story that he's a family man. He has a wife, a son, a daughter and a dog. But like, what's with the. I can't call it red eye because the eyes are not red. It's what's with the white eye? I mean, you know, people are making this judgment about you. So another example of, I think, a poor cover photo. Now let's talk about the qualities of a cover photo, what it's trying to do. Whereas your avatar should be teaching you. Teaching people or showing people that you're competent and you're likable and you're trustworthy. I think your cover photo is supposed to show people that you're interesting. So it has to have a narrative. What's the story? This is my cover photo. So I'm going to tell you the story that I hope that this cover photo communicates the narrative. So this is me on my knees and I'm polishing somebody's shoes. I must be a funny guy because everybody in the audience is cracking up, right? And then if you recognize the back of that guy's head, that is Richard Branson. So I'm trying to tell you this story that I'm a funny guy. I will get down on my knees. Audiences love me. And I know Richard Branson and you don't. All of that is happening in that cover photo. Also, look at that avatar. It's face only asymmetric. That's my cover photo and that's my avatar. Next quality. I think everybody has to understand, and I think many people miss this, that every social media site has slightly different dimensions and aspect ratios for the COVID photo. This is a screenshot from Canva because we make a specific cover photo template for each service. And so look at the difference between the Etsy banner, the Facebook cover, the Google photo, the YouTube channel art, and the Twitter header. They're all a little bit different. And if you took one picture and tried to use it for all of them, they just would not work. You have to size optimize. Third point is that you should never use a photo that looks like a stock photo. Never, never. And I'm going to show you a very funny story here. So this is a stock photo, a parody of a stock photo. Okay, this was taken at south by Southwest and Peg. Did you take this Picture. I think you did. Right. So what I did is I decided that these stock photos. Vince Vaughn did a stock photo parody series for iStockphoto, which was so funny. So I decided that I was going to parody stock photos, and instead of istockphoto, it would be called Guy stock photo. Exactly. So in this stock photo, we check all the boxes, right? We have two millennials, one with facial hair, one without. One Asian woman, one Asian man, and one woman of probably Middle Eastern descent, right? So we're all looking off into the vision. This is perfect stock photo. So we did this parody at south by Southwest. This is not the kind of photo to use. So the joke's on me, though, because as we were posing for this parody photo, there was a Getty photographer, and the Getty photographer took this photo. And now you can buy this photo at Getty. I'm not kidding you. I'm not kidding you. So this is the kind of photo not to use. But listen, not everybody has a great photo to use as a cover photo, right? Not everybody has this ability to have this great narrative. So I think there is one service, at least one, but one, that Peg and I just love, which is Stocksy. How many of you use stocksea? Stocksea has absolute. Doesn't stock. See have fabulous stock photos. So this is a stock photo from Stocksee. Okay? And let's pretend that you are a person who's making your Facebook cover and you want to tell a narrative that you love to teach children art, okay? Could you come up with a better photo than this? This photo costs $10 at Stocksy. If you're going to use a stock photo, at least consider using stocksy. Okay? Stocks is beautiful stuff. Last thing is, I think that your cover photo should be dark. Not necessarily pitch black in background, but dark. And I'll show you a great avatar and cover photo. This is Peg Fitzpatrick. Let us deconstruct Peg here. So first of all, that avatar is one of the world's greatest avatars, right? Face only smudge. I mean, what's the word? What do you call that where you make your. Like that. The little smudged face? You know, she's obviously a funny person, right? Look at the COVID photo. It's pink and black. It's a typewriter. She's an author and a social media spark. There's a whole narrative to this. And I think dark things and dark designs in this context lend seriousness and gravitas. I think your cover photo should be dark, not light. This is a very good example of a profile If I saw this, I would say this is a woman who's worth following. Next thing, I want you to do a little exercise. When you have a chance, I want you to go to profiles.google.com me because when you go there, you will see what Google thinks you look like. It's going to show you the picture that it has of you. Particularly if you use Gmail. Every time somebody receives a Gmail that they're going to see your photo. You want to know what Google thinks you look like. Here's an example. This is a media inquiry for Father's Day and it's sent by a woman. I removed all identification, but she's standing in front of a sign, one of those kinds of like, what do you call that? Step and repeat. Yes. And she's wearing a cocktail dress. Now, I have nothing against people wearing cocktail dress. It's fine, it's okay if that's how she wants to be pictured. I just want you to be sure that you check this website because what if you don't want to be pictured this way? What if you don't want to be positioned this way? You should know that every recipient of your email is seeing that. So I have to tell you, as someone who gets pitched 10 times a day for a story, when I see an email like this and I see that picture, it's hard to take this serious. This is like I'm making a decision. Tinder, not interested. It's that simple. So this is a quick test for you and then my last thought for you, my last quote is, every profile is your professional profile. I don't think you can make this distinction that well. Facebook is for friends and family. Google is professional, LinkedIn is professional, Twitter is professional. Because the outside world is not thinking like that. They're going to find you wherever they find you and they're going to conclude whatever they want about you based on the profile they find. They're not going to say, hmm, this is Facebook. This is probably not her professional profile. It is your professional profile. Case in point, I have a 21 year old son and he's of course applying for internships. So I went to his LinkedIn site and I found a picture, his avatar, his picture was a cropped out picture of him at his winter formal. And I told my son, you have to change this picture because it's you at a winter formal. It is not professional. My son, in his infinite wisdom tells me, why does it matter? I never use LinkedIn. My retort to that is, you're missing the point, it's not what you use. It's what recruiters use. So if the recruiter goes to your LinkedIn profile and thinks that it is an unprofessional profile, that's all that matters. So I think that you should figure that every profile is your professional profile. There is no social profile. Next thought is to perfect your card. Your business card specifically. This may seem very tactical, but I just see a lot of people making this mistake. So, you know, I'm 61 years old, man, if I have to get my glasses out to read your business card, something is wrong. Minimum 10 points. You should make sure that it's scannable and include your cell number. I realize I'm talking to 99% women here, so maybe you might not want to put your cell number. But I'll tell you, my business card has my cell phone number. My email signature has my cell phone number. It goes to literally tens of thousands of people every year. And maybe five people a year call me because of that. Maybe five, maybe five. And it just doesn't happen. And Peg, I convinced you to put your cell phone number right? And are like all these wackos calling you now. So two in a year. So two in a year. So I think you should put your cell phone number on your business card. I think the upside far exceeds the downside. Now let's go into a little more detail about scannability. So this is an Evernote scan, Evernote picture of my business card from Apple. And when Evernote takes a picture of your business card, if it can find the information, it sticks in company email, fax, fax and address. So this card passes the scannability test. So another very good exercise for you is to use Evernote. Take a picture of your business card and look at what Evernote thinks it saw. Because if it doesn't work for Evernote, and more and more people are using things like Evernote and throwing business cards into scanners, you may have a problem. This is how Evernote shows one particular business card. This is how Evernote shows the entire collection of business cards. So in my Evernote database, I have 816 cards. I wiped out the person's name from this card in the upper left and anything you could identify. And you see the small part in the bottom left corner, all that stuff in gray, the little things that's out of focus. That's not me. That's what Evernote found. So in other words, this card absolutely would not work for Evernote. Evernote could not scan six point gray Text every other card in this six cards works Ryan's works my Apple card Wayne from the Sydney Bears hockey team Inaki. He's the CEO of Vodafone Australia and my Canva business card. So very good understanding of the context in which your business card and the scan of your business card will be viewed. Very important for you. 4a. Another piece of tactical advice that has worked so well for me is I add a signature to my email. So every email client you can put in a signature. And I'm going to give you several reasons why you should do this. First reason is there may be a few times when the recipient of your email is so interested, so fascinated, and has so much free time because he or she is stuck in a traffic jam that he or she says to himself or herself, why don't I just pick up the phone and call them? And it would be a real bummer if that person can fumble with his phone. Find your email and look in the signature and there is no signature or there is no phone number. So that's reason number one. Reason number two is very logistical. So there are many times when I'm about to go to a meeting that I may be late and I want to call the event planner and tell the event planner I'm stuck in traffic. So I'm in a car by myself with a phone, I can find her or his email and I scroll down to the bottom and there's no way for me to contact her, right? I wish I could just click on that thing and my iPhone dial that number. But it can't happen if there isn't a signature with a phone number. Really? Seriously, Put your phone number in in the signature. And I also put in my email address. It's because many clients, email clients, when you forward an email, strips that out from the header of the email. So there are many times where I forward an email message to someone to do something and they have to write back and say, well, what was that guy's email? Because I got the message, but I didn't get his email address. Well, if your email address is also in the signature, you get away from that problem. So sort of three very tactical situations where it pays to have a signature with all that information. And I'll give you one more reason. A few weeks ago I discovered this company called EverContact. This is a very clever service. So what EverContact does is it looks at your Google contacts, it looks at your incoming email, it matches Google contacts against incoming email for the contacts that match it looks at the signatures, if there is one in those emails, takes the information from the signature and puts it into Google contact. You don't have to type in the company, the address, the phone number, all that because it found the match in your Google contact and the incoming email. And you can see when I did it, I had it scan 119,000 emails. It spotted 16,000 signatures of which 2,547 different people were in my address book. And it then updated 2,351 contacts. So 2,351 contacts in my Google contacts now has complete information because those people had a signature that ever contacts found. So this is a very useful service if you're Google contacts and Gmail. Very clean and easy way to to get all that information into your contacts. So that's tip four, a tip number five. Tip number five is about slides, about PowerPoint and keynote and pitching. So recommendation number one is I think you should always use 16 by nine. I used to always use four by three and I noticed that like 25% of the time those guys back there would tell me I need 16 by 9. And when they tell you they need 16 by 9 and you have 4 by 3, it means that all your pictures are going to be stretched and look ugly. So if you use 16 by 9, it'll work with 16 by 9. It will also work with 4 by 3. But if you use 4 by 3, it won't work with 16 by 9. So from now on, every presentation you make, use 16 by 9. It's just a better way to go. The higher quality the conference, the more likely they'll use 16 by nine. Okay, that's number one. Number two, just like with the COVID photo, I think you should use a dark background. Dark background adds gravitas. I said in several presentations, everybody I saw here used a white background. I think that if you simply used a black background with the same text, everything else the same, your presentation would look a lot better. I'll show you why fonts. The minimum font should be 30 points, should be sans serif and bold. This is not the time to show that you have the world's greatest collection of lacy looking fonts. This is the time to be bold, sans serif and big. And finally, graphics are better than words in a slide. But I tell you, a demo is even better than graphics. My theory is that a picture is worth a thousand words, but a demo is worth a thousand slides. So if you can get a demo in your pitch, this is that slide. Black text on white background. And I truly do believe that the same information, absolutely identical, looks much more serious. White type on black background, then black type on white background. Just try this for me. I think it adds just another level of seriousness and makes it look a lot better. Your audiences won't squint when that big white thing comes up. Okay. I think when you use white, it kind of shows. Well, they opened up PowerPoint. They didn't use a master slide. They just opened up a new document and they started typing and they typed in black. Okay, go white on black, not black on white. Some examples for you. This is Steve Jobs slide. Let's deconstruct old Steve here. Big graphic. Not even Apple's graphic. It's The Windows graphic. ITunes. 200 point font. The best Windows app ever. 90 point font. This slide has seven words on it. Seven words. This is Steve Jobs. This is Bill Gates. You tell me what's the more effective slide? This one or this one? Less is more. Less is more. Dark background. Less is more. Next thing is perfecting your pictures. There are lots of discussions about pictures here, and I love photography, so I have some thoughts for you, some of which may contradict what you heard. So, number one, I think every shot should be horizontal. Really? I mean, I've never been to a movie where the movie was shot vertical, so I think they should be shot horizontal. This is an example. So this is a picture at the Maker Faire. And you would think, wow, this is a perfect use case of a vertical photo, right? People standing in front of this big old plastic robot thing at the Maker Faire. I would make the case that this is just as effective. And I would further make the case that this is even more effective. You don't need to see the waste to the ground to understand that this is a happy family standing in front of this big robot at the Maker Faire. This is a good day for mom because dad has manned up and taken the three kids to Maker Faire. She's off in a spa getting a pedicure. There's like a whole story here, right? But that whole story comes out, and I'm telling you that this picture is not nearly as good as this picture. To tell the story, I think you should always shoot horizontal. The next thing, you should always light from the front. This came up time and time again, but I see so many pictures that do not do this. So this is an example. So I take a picture of my daughter at the cocktail party. Well, she wasn't at the cocktail party. She was passing through the cocktail party. So, you know, white background, her face can't be seen. So there's several things we could do. First, you could just say, hey, honey, you come here. I'll go there. This is the same situation. Now, arguably, you could say, well, you wanted to show the beautiful background of the Grand America Hotel and the nice courtyard and the green stuff, which is better than this stuff. But I don't know. As a dad, I would rather see this picture than this picture. So that's number one. You could simply reverse pictures, reverse positions. You could force a flash. It's interesting. Both sessions that I attended, the instructor said, don't use a flash. I didn't quite understand that. I think there are cases where you have to force a flash when the person is against a light background and you can't reverse. Another thing you could do is shoot raw. So shooting raw, when you shoot RAW format, it just contains a lot more information than if you shoot jpeg. Much bigger files, but storage is cheap now. And then you see on the right side, a little screen from Adobe Lightroom. And so what I did, this is the same photo. You could not see her face. And I jacked up the exposure. The highlights is taken to negative 100. So I'm trying to darken the background and the shadows, which is her face, I jacked up to 100. I'm trying to highlight her face and remove the background. So all of this is really possible because I shot raw. If I shot jpeg, I could not nearly get what I did here. That's another thing you could do. You could also convert it to black and white because it just, you know, seems a little better in black and white. It's not as obvious, right? And then you could crop. And then you crop it and crop it really tight. And then you call it art. And you say, you know, I'm Henri Cartier Bresson. That's mine. This is me. Look at that similarity here between me and him. Same thing. Marilyn Monroe, Noemi Kawasaki. What's the difference? Next. Oh, I'm getting all. Okay, so you could just call it art. Why not? What the hell? Who's going to criticize you for that? Right? Okay, next thing. I think you should crop all the time. Always be cropping. Abc. So another picture from the Maker Faire. I couldn't get any closer to this guy. And all the stuff around him is not essential. So this is Lightroom. I'm cropping in Lightroom. I'm putting him the wheel at the rule of thirds. And this is the final photo that I used. This is a much better photo than this photo. So crop, crop. Next thing is to optimize dimensions. Just like cover photos have optimal dimensions, so do photos photos. This is a screenshot from Canva showing the various aspect ratios and the various dimensions of photos for each social media service. So imagine if you had something that worked for a Twitter post. How could that photo possibly work for a Pinterest graphic? The aspect ratio is so different. You need to optimize for each social media platform. Number seven is about perfecting your posts. Perfecting your posts. I want you to embrace the NPR model. The NPR model is what Peggy and I do. Our thinking is that NPR provides great content 365 days a year. Right? They have Technation. They have. Don't, don't. Wait, wait, don't tell me. Fresh air, this American life. Love npr. NPR has such great content that it can run the pledge drive. It is earning the right to run the pledge drive. Who in this room likes the pledge drive? Who in this room wants to hear the pledge drive? Not even NPR likes the pledge drive, right? Who in this room wants to hear that the people at Microsoft are matching dollar for dollar. So if you come up and donate $10 in the next 30 minutes, Microsoft will match you up to $1,000 and you can get the free Eton 6535 hand crank radio so that in the event of a nuclear disaster, you will know how you will die. Right? Nobody cares about that. Eton crank radio. Nobody wants it. NPR can get away with this because it has earned the right. So I think the key to perfecting your post is to always add value. You add value by providing information, by providing analysis or you provide assistance. If you are an airline, you don't merely talk about how you're now having reduced fares to Las Vegas. You post stories about the top 25 food trucks in Austin, the new exhibit at the Dallas Museum, the story from Real simple magazine, how to pack for a four day holiday in a duffel bag. The story from Money magazine, how to get through TSA faster if you're a foodie, it's not just about your blog. It's not just about your restaurant. It's about Martha Stewart. Just put up a video about how to remove the hus from cloves of garlic. It's about the study that came out from the New England Journal of Medicine that now it's okay to eat bacon. It's not okay to eat carbs. It's this kind of stuff. It's about the Story of why the coffee beans that go through the intestines of that cat are so much better than regular coffee. It's that kind of stories. You're providing information and analysis and assistance so that you can run your promotion for Peg and I. Our promotion is we've been giving you all this great content. We just came out with the book the Art of Social Media, for crying out loud. Buy the book, right? Use Canva. That's our pledge drive. Number one is the NPR model. Number two is to embrace the Reshare test. The Reshare test works like this. To use a food analogy, if you go to a restaurant and you have a decent meal, you tip, right? That doesn't mean you go to Yelp and you rate the restaurant. It doesn't mean you tell your friends and colleagues the next day, you have to go eat at this restaurant. So that's the difference between liking something and plus wanting something versus resharing something. Resharing means that you're risking your personal reputation by telling people, you, too should read this. Guy posted it. I'm resharing it. You should read it. I'm risking my reputation on what guy posted this is I'm risking my reputation by telling you to go eat at this restaurant. That's the ultimate test. Every time you share something, you should ask yourself, will my followers share it to their followers? This is some statistics for me. On average, I have 491 retweets per day for my Twitter account. So we're constantly trying to post something that people will retweet, and we succeed roughly 500 times a day. It's a very interesting thing. I'm going to come to this, but I want you to remember this graph. So you see, like, in the second half on the right side, it drops down by like a half. So I just pulled this stat last night, and I was like, what the hell just happened on June 1? Why did it go from, you know, roughly 500 a day to, like, 250 a day? What happens there? And I found out that something on our server is broken, so we're not tweeting as much as we used to. And so this helped me discover it. But the point here is I'm getting 500 retweets a day because every time we squeeze the trigger, we're saying to ourselves, this is reshareable. Or at least we hope it's reshareable. Next thing is to add graphics. I think that every post, except for a response as a comment, should have a graphic Literally everyone. Here's an example. So this is a Fast Company story about the trailer for the Road Warrior. And I think that Fast Company thinks that people see its tweets in this context. Single tweet, full screen, right? But in reality, the way your tweet is seen is like this. It's in a string of tweets. And so that's the Fast Company tweet in the real world context. Why would you notice that it looks like every other tweet in that line? A better example is this. This is a Mercedes tweet in the middle of the context. Which do you think is going to get the most attention in this string of tweets? It's the one with the picture. For me, when we went from adding a picture to every tweet, we basically doubled engagement. Just that, just adding the picture, nothing else, doubled the engagement. So add a picture to every tweet. Also, not everybody realizes, but with Twitter, you can post up to four pictures. And with four pictures, man, you can tell a story. So this is the story, the wisdom of Heather Armstrong, right? That's a picture of her with that quote about defensiveness. And that's her three recommendations. So with these four pictures, I can really tell a story. Four pictures is a lot. And when you identify people in the pictures, it doesn't count against your 140 character limit. So with Twitter in particular, man, add a graphic to every one, and if you really want to go for it, go up to four. You can have four pictures per tweet. Number five is to be sure you always upload natively to Facebook. Peggy and I have done many experiments, and what we have found is that if you embed a YouTube video into your Facebook post versus uploading the same graphic, the same video to a Facebook post natively, it's roughly four to five times better reaching more people if you upload natively. This is an example. So the one on the left is the native upload to to Facebook. It's seen by 30,000 people. The one on the right is an embedded YouTube of the same video saw by 13,000 people. These two posts were made about five minutes apart. I'm not saying this is totally scientific because it might depend on which one went first and stuff like that. But generally speaking, we have seen this happen over and over again where a native Facebook video gets 3, 4, 5 times more reach than an embedded YouTube video on Facebook. If you think about it, it makes perfect sense because Mark Zuckerberg wants Facebook video to be successful. Mark Zuckerberg does not want YouTube embedded video on Facebook to be successful. YouTube and Google is the enemy, right? He's trying to make Facebook videos successful. So of course you would think you would hope that Facebook would display native Facebook video much more than they would embedded YouTube video. So I guess I'm telling you that you need to upload twice. You need to upload once to YouTube and once to Facebook. And I see so many large brands making this mistake that they upload to YouTube, then they embed in Facebook and they could get four or five times more reach if they just went through the trouble. And they're probably paying an agency a quarter million dollars a month just to like upload their videos and, you know, review their tweets for 90 days and have the legal department check their tweets. Why not have somebody upload natively to Facebook, do something constructive. Eight, number eight is a source of great controversy for me for the past ten years or so. I believe that you should post a lot. Post a lot. So this is about perfecting your frequency. This is an example of a tweet. This tweet went out three times, eight hours apart. And you can see the traffic, the interaction, the click throughs on the link in the tweet. So big jump first, bigger jump second, bigger jump third, small jump fourth. This was actually four times the same tweet. Literally the same tweet was sent out four times, eight hours apart. Many people would tell you you should not repeat your tweets because if you repeat your tweets, it looks like you're automated, which you are. It looks like you're not being social. It looks like you're not being open and transparent. You're a spammer, you're a bad person, you're a troll. They're going to tell you all this kind of stuff. To which my response is tough. If you gave me a choice of having just that first spike or all four, guess which one I would take all day long. I will tell you that I have one and a half million followers on Twitter. And whenever I do this, which is roughly 25 times a day, we get about three or four people upset a day. A day, right? So with 1.5 million people, I figure it'll take 500,000 days to piss everybody off. I am willing to risk that. And you know, Peg can tell you also that we repeat a lot and we get very little pushback at this point. I mean, let's face it, Twitter has like billions of messages. And my take on this is, man, if you can Notice that I have tweeted the same thing three times in 24 hours. This is more about you than me. Something is wrong with you. I mean, how could you possibly notice in the billions of tweets that I did this three times? You need a life. You need to get off your computer. You need to follow more people. You need to do something. But it's not my fault. You know, espn, cnn, npr, npr. I mean, Fresh Choice runs multiple. Fresh Choice, Fresh Air. Fresh Choice is a restaurant. Fresh Air runs multiple times per day. You know, do you think Terry Gross gets hate mail? Do it again. I'm telling you, if you add a graphic and you Repeat your tweet three times, eight hours apart, you'll get a 6x increase in engagement right there. This is Facebook. This is an unusual case. So Facebook, we posted at 10am, then we posted at 6.30pm and then we posted eight hours again later. And imagine if we listened to the so called experts and they said you can only post once a day on Facebook. And we did it at optimal Pacific Prime Time, 10:30am and we would have gotten 18,000 clicks, 18,000 reach. But we did it two more times and then we got 40,000 more, and then we got 160,000 more. So you tell me, which would you rather have? 18,000 or the sum of those three columns? I can't tell you that. You can get away with this on Facebook as much as you can on Twitter. Okay? But I'm telling you, for the important stuff, for the really good stuff, for the stuff that you are sure passes the reshare test, is absolutely astoundingly good, funny or important. Repeat it, Repeat it. Next thing is to perfect your PIN ability. So Peg and I love Pinterest. And Peg dragged me kicking and screaming into Pinterest because I thought I was too male for Pinterest. Lo and behold, I wasn't. So you need to perfect your PIN ability because I have noticed that many people are using Pinterest the way they used to use Google. So if you want to know how to cook a turkey, many people now go to Pinterest. They don't go to Google, which is very interesting. Could be that Pinterest is the new Google. And if Pinterest is the new Google, man, you need to optimize for pinnability. So I'll show you a real world example. I love cameras. This is the online photographer blog. This is a story about the 125th anniversary of Zeiss. I love this story. So I wanted to pin this story to My board about digital photography, right? Makes perfect sense. So I use Chrome. I have the Chrome extension to pin it. So I see a story, I click pin it. Supposed to put up a window that says, okay, this is what I'm about to pin. Pick the board. Go for it, guy. Right? That's how it's supposed to work. Okay, I click on pin it the first time. I get the graphic from the side. Okay, I understand. Everybody's got to make a living. I click again, I get another ad. Okay, I understand. Still I click again. I get a third ad. Now I'm not so understanding. I click one more time, I get the RSS icon. What the hell is going on? I'm trying to help this blog get pinned to my board, right? Where 500,000 women may see this story, and they make me click five times to get to this. How many people would click five times on pin it to get to this graphic? So another very good test you could do for your blog or your website is to click on pin it and see what happens. Because if the first four times you put up an ad in this window, this is not optimal. It should go straight to this in WordPress. I believe the way it works is you pick one graphic to be your primary graphic, and that's the one that gets pinned. You need to check this. Check what happens when you pin something. When you pin your own blog post. Number 10 is about perfecting your practices. Basically, all other nine things. And this is an example. Peg and I do this kind of thing all the time. So these are two basically identical posts. Same story, same graphic. The difference on the right and the left is the level of editing that I put in on the one on the right. So in the one on the right, there's a comment. What a funny project. There's also a link. I display the link that shows that this is an Ad Week story. And there's also a question, which one is your favorite? Because I'm trying to build interaction, just like I was taught, right? Identical graphic, identical story. They were posted. It doesn't say the exact time they were posted back to back, like literally within seconds of each other. And you can see that the one on the left and the one on the right. The one on the right has about 6 or 7% more reach. Now, I can't tell you that I know exactly why that happened. It may be that because I asked the question, because I displayed a link that said ad Week, so it legitimized the link. It could be that I had this comment about What a funny project. Which was more engaging than the one on the left, which had. Excuse me. Yeah, the one on the left, which had nothing like that. The one on the right got more engagement. That could be one intellectual explanation. I don't know. I don't know for sure. But what I'm trying to communicate here is this practice that you should always be experimenting. You know, try Facebook posts with a graphic and without grab a Bitly Link. Post something to Twitter three times, then go look at the Bitly link, see when the spikes occur. If it only occurred once the first time and nothing happened the next two times, I am wrong. Don't repeat your tweets. But this is something that Peggy taught me. We have to always be experimenting because we really, I swear, sometimes Peggy and I think that, you know, Mark Zuckerberg got up on the wrong side of bed today and he decided to screw this kind of post. And we just can't figure it out. But we're always looking, we're always experimenting. I don't think social media is a science at all. And so we are experimenting all the time. Always be experimenting. Always be trying to perfect your practices. And I have one more thing. So one more thing is I have to tell you about Canva. So how many already use Canva? All right, so Canva is an online graphics design service. You see our homepage here. We basically make templates for all the kinds of graphics that you need. And the blue card that you see on your table, there are instances where you'll be asked to pay a dollar for a stock photo. And you never have to do this because you can upload your own photo. But if you want to use one of our stock photos, it costs you a dollar. So that green card is $10. This is a $10 promotional card. So you come to Canva, you pick a design type. We have the right dimensions. We give you a whole bunch of possible designs. Like this is for Instagram, all the possible designs there. You pick one of those designs, you use our stock photo, or you drag your own stock photo, you change the font and the style and all that, click on the download button, and you're done. And I promise you, you can make a graphic in Canva faster than you can boot Photoshop. Okay? That's my promise to you. And so now you have a coupon. And if you're really a Canva power user, I have this website for you. So at this website, if you're a Canva power user, you realize that Canva is very good for individual Designers. But there are groups of designers, social media teams, corporate designers, who need, shall I say, for us to address other issues, such as workflow, such as sharing digital assets, such as standardizing on fonts and templates and filters and designs. Let's just say that we are addressing all those issues. And if you want to sign up for early access to that version of Canva, just go here, bitly.com for work, and we'll sign you up. Okay? So that is the art of social media as I know it today. Or as I said, as Peg has told me, it is up till today. By the way, Peg should stand up. This is Peg Fitzpatrick here. Just stand up, Peggy. Just stand up. So I have a theory that behind every successful man is an amazing woman. And I have three amazing women behind me. That's why I'm so successful. So I have Peg Fitzpatrick, I have my wife, and I have my daughter. So that's why I'm so successful. I hope you can take some of the experiences and knowledge that I've gained for social media and all this kind of stuff and apply it to your business cards and your websites and your blogs. Don't forget, check what Google looks, thinks you look like. Okay? Pin your blog, see what happens. What does Pinterest think you're doing? Try these experiments. And I hope that you just rock social media. Thank you very much. I just have a quick question about reposting. Are you deleting and then reposting, like on Facebook? It's a very astute question. So on Facebook, we do not. On Twitter. On Twitter, we have custom software that deletes a post before it tweets the same post. Because theoretically, with Twitter, you should not have the Same post within 24 hours. I don't know how the hell they check that, but our software erases the first one, puts up the second one. However, I will tell you that I'm not convinced that's necessary. Now, I happen to do it very intensely three times in 24 hours. One way to get around that rule is, guess what? You repeat your post every 24 hours instead of every eight hours. Right. So if you did one Monday at 8am and then Tuesday at 8:01am and Wednesday at 8:02am, you're free and clear. And I tell you, trust me, it works. I mean, just why experiment? I mean, so, yes, I don't think deletion is necessary, but because we post within 24 hours, we do delete. Yeah. Yes. What are your thoughts on short links.

For social, like using Bitly Yeah.

So, thoughts on short links? Maybe Peg should answer this question. I don't really give it much thought. The only time I really consciously use Bitly is when I want to test the assumption that the Bitly link will get clicked on 8 hours apart when I tweet. 8 hours apart. Because Bitly has very good graphic display of what happens to the tweet. But other than that, I use sprout and buffer and I just let it go. I don't even check. Do you have any strong thoughts on link shortening? Yeah, so I'm not. I'm not, you know, I'm not a quantitative oriented guy. So I don't. I like, you know, my whole approach to SEO is post good shit. So I am. I'm the wrong person to ask that question. I just. I just. I just, like, I'm. I'm npr, man. I just post good stuff. And I figure that you reciprocate.

Yeah, I have a burning question because I've asked attorneys and they weren't quite sure. Can we, you know, obviously we buy the photo from Canva and then we put our, you know, we use the picture, we put quotes on it, and then we put our watermark and then share it to our social media, you know, Pinterest and all that. Is that legal? Is that okay? You know, our own artwork, we have purchased it, but.

So you bought artwork from us or somebody else.

Right.

And you put your watermark on the artwork.

Right. You know, like, we put a quote on it, we add a quote to it, and then we put our watermark. Is that okay, or are we not supposed to do that?

I'm not a lawyer. I went to law school for two weeks and quit. It seems to me that the watermark is supposed to protect the creator of the photograph. But you're saying in effect, you took a photograph, you put your inspiring quote, and so you've added value, so now you should watermark that thing.

Right? Is that okay, or is that we're not supposed to be doing that?

I have no idea. I realize.

So many of us bloggers do that, you know, especially when it goes to Pinterest and all that. So I just needed to.

Do you believe that it really has an effect if you don't have the watermark?

You know, I've heard from different sources that it's more effective if you have a watermark. So when it's shared, and maybe if it's shared incorrectly, that it doesn't, you know, go back to your site that they can see that it came from you. Right. Came from that particular.

Well, I tell you, on the spectrum of repeating your post with a graphic versus having your watermark, I tell you what I told you is more powerful than what you just heard. But I really. I don't know. We don't ever watermark anything, right? I mean, yeah, we think our posts are so outstanding, right?

I mean, like on the bottom, you put. You put the website, dot com, you know, that's what I mean.

Just, you know, I don't know the answer to that question.

Okay.

There's a couple bloggers who are lawyers.

Why don't you just come up here so everybody can hear you.

Hi. Sorry. Okay, so Sarah F. Hawkins and Kerry K E R R Y G O R G O N E. They are both attorneys and they do social media specifically so they can answer all those questions.

Okay, what else? Hi.

I'm just curious how you're planning on using Snapchat. It seems like that's a really big deal right now.

Oh, my God. Yeah. I gotta. I gotta tell you, you should Never ask someone 60 years, 61 years old about Snapchat. You and me both, man. You figure it out, let me know. I just, I don't. I don't have a clue how that works. I just can't. I don't know how to get people to follow me. I don't know what this. I don't know. Noemi. You want to explain Snapchat? Because I can't. What can I say? You know, valuable lesson. When you don't know what you're talking about, you should admit it. Because then when I tell you something, then you think I really know it, right? Because when I don't know. I don't know. I really don't know. Yes.

How much information is too much information on a business card?

How much information is too much information.

On a business card? Like.

Oh, business card.

Yeah, like how much. What's too much information to put on a business card?

Well, I mean, a business card purpose is just to, you know, help you find, get in contact, right? So obviously it's name, address, company email. Nobody uses a fax anymore. Would I put my picture on a business card? No. Website, social media accounts, I mean, that would be the limit. I don't know what else you could put. I never put a slogan or anything like that. I don't, you know, I don't want to look like a real estate broker. I mean, not that I have anything against real estate broker, but you know how some real estate brokers have this card with Their picture and they're on the shopping basket in Safeway and you know, all that kind of stuff. I don't think you should go that far. I know I'm going to hear about that from all my real estate broker friends who I love and I work with all the time. Take that back. Please don't tweet that.

I disagree on the picture thing on the business card.

What?

That was my question.

Anyway, guy, I love you. I've been following you for eight years. My question for you. Oh, and I love that you use the analogy of dating for social media. I always use that analogy for online dating. My question for you. A lot of the women here, we are balancing blogs and our own brands, our own names. So on our social media platforms, do you recommend using, like, our blog logo, the title of our blogs, or should we be branding ourselves?

Personally, I think continue with the theory that every profile is a professional profile. I think following from that theory, it should just tie in completely with your blog. Right. And I'll give you a little inside secret for me. So we did an analysis of the referral traffic to my blog. So how to to my website. Excuse me. And we found that Facebook is roughly 56% of the referral traffic. And just by Contrast, Twitter is 5%. So Facebook is 10 times more powerful than Twitter. And what makes it even more interesting is I have 300,000 followers on Facebook. I have one and a half million on Twitter. So Twitter has five times more followers, but one tenth the referral power. And so that's why Peg had a session about using Facebook as a traffic driver to your blog and website. Facebook for us is the single most powerful platform. And on Google, I have 8 million followers, and it accounts for about 2 1/2% of my referral traffic. So some really interesting stuff going on there. Yeah. But Peggy also convinced me to go back to blogging. I had given up blogging for social media, but I now realize that a blog has. I used the word gravitas twice already. I can use it third time. Blog has a certain gravitas that it cannot just be social media. You need to have a blog, too. And the total package is social media. If I were saying, you know, what's the bare minimum to do? I would say for most people, it's Facebook, then blog. Then if I were in fashion or food, clothing, you know, anything like that, then probably Pinterest or Instagram. What else? Yes.

You mentioned about posting organically on Facebook first rather than embedding videos.

Yes.

What about if you post on Instagram and share to Twitter, does that change interaction? Or, like, if you're sharing to different.

Sites.

Can you answer that question?

You just make sure that your picture shows when you tweet it from Instagram. Instagram, there's a secret ifttt recipe. It's ifttt. I'll tweet it out. But there's a. It's a little recipe. So every time, you have to check it to make sure it works. Because sometimes Twitter changes things, but otherwise it doesn't tweet the picture. So, yeah, it just tweets the link. Right. So there's a way. There's a way. There's a little recipe to do it. Share it. I'll share it into the hashtag later.

I forgot to tell you a really good story I had in the middle of my speech. Can I tell you a really good story? So, you know when I was talking about, your slide should have a dark or black background. This is a true story. So this week I met with an entrepreneur who was black. And he's sitting there and he's saying, yeah, I pitched this morning. Gonna pitch this afternoon. Can you give me any tips about pitching? And I said, well, is your background black? And he says, yeah, I come from a multicultural family in Atlanta. I said, no, no, no. Is your PowerPoint background black? That's a funny story. Anyway, yes.

What, if any, has your experience been with Facebook ads or sponsor posts on Instagram or Twitter?

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So how many of you know the story of the chauffeur and the physicist? None of you. None of you. Seriously? Okay, so. Our flight's at 9:30. The physicist has written a book, and he's giving a book tour. So he gets through his publicist, a chauffeur for this city. And the chauffeur is taking him to various speeches and signings. And at each speech and signing, there's about five in a day. The chauffeur sits in the back and listens to the physicist talk about his book. So at the fifth one, the physicist is just exhausted and says to the chauffeur, you know, you've sat through four of these already. You can see what I did. I say the same thing. You've seen it four times. You think you could just go up there and be me, Be the physicist? And the chauffeur says, no problem. I watched it four times. I can do this. So the chauffeur gets up and gives the physicist speech. But he ends early. So the host of the last one says, we have time for questions. And so the first question comes up from the audience, and of course, the chauffeur cannot answer this question because all he knows about physics is what he's been repeating because he heard her four times. So the chauffeur says, you know, that is such a simplistic, easy question that anybody could answer it. For example, I'll even let my chauffeur answer. So that is such an easy question. I'm going to let Peg answer that. So, Peg, tell them about Facebook purchases, dark posts, and all the stuff you do.

What was your exact question on Promoted Posts? If you had any experience with Facebook sponsored posts or Facebook ads, Instagram sponsored posts, Twitter, et cetera. Nothing on Instagram, but we have promoted Facebook posts page promotion posts, tweets, sponsored tweets, Promoted pins, Facebook, you can do really great things with, like, $5. I have, like, very small budget. You can ask Guy, how often do I ask for marketing money?

Never.

Never. Not once in, like, years, ever. I just do it all. So, yeah, like, really small amounts. You can do really good things with targeted ads. So just experiment and check. Check them all out. Tweets, actually, you can really target things as well. I don't know if they got as good interaction. I have to say, Facebook has been the best.

Yeah, Facebook has been the best.

I love, but they don't. It's, you know, just like a slow cooker. Right. It's not going to be, like an immediate gain. Pinterest as well, over time.

And, Ken, you can do a lot of geographic and age targeting for free, right? So you can do a lot of targeting with Facebook for free. And then you can also do, you know, dark posts are. So instead of posting it to the public on your general timeline, you make it a dark post specifically for some people. So, like, when Peg and I have a book and we want to offer it just to Americans and Canadians because we cannot control what Amazon in Croatia does. So we make a dark post that is targeted towards only people who live in the US And Canada, and so nobody else can see that. And it's not on our public timeline. It's very effective. Very effective. Yes. One last question. Okay. Talk to my chauffeur. Talk to my chauffeur.

Give me your card, and I'll send you one of our books. Oh, my God, that would be great. Thank you and thank you, all of you. But no. Can you get. No, no. Can you tell us how to find you? Oh, really? How to find me at pegfitzpatrick everywhere.

Thank you.

My blog is pegfitzpatrick.com I'm Peg Fitzpatrick everywhere.

So. Peg Fitzpatrick. I would put her up against entire digital agencies. Seriously, the best social media person I've ever met. And don't you even think about hiring her. Thank you very much. Thank you.