Levelling up the social media gap: Maybe webinar for the High Streets Task Force

Okay, welcome everybody. Today is this month's edition of the High Street Task Force webinar around levelling up for local businesses. Maybe our partners with the High Street Task Force, we provide them with the data that helps you understand the impact of all sorts of different metrics of activity has on social media, on what people are saying, place sentiments, digital participation, who's engaging in the conversation, what businesses are active and really how social media aligns with some of those metrics in particular footfalls. So you can see within the dashboard, you can add in your footfall data if you have access to that, and then we can overlay the social media activity data. And again, understanding what people are saying in your place is really, really important. So all of this can be accessed from your High Street Taskforce dashboard. If you don't have one, do by all means get in touch with them and I'm sure they'll give you access. One of the things it does do, it gives you direct access into the MAYBE platform. And we're going to be showing you a little bit more around what maybe do and the type of data that you can access. And there's a little, there's a little icon in the High Street Task Force Dashboard with a MAYBE logo. If you click into that takes straight into a maybe account. As partners of the High Street Task Force, all local authorities have access to a free MAYBE account. And that will allow you to understand what the metrics are and the data are around your social media activity and that of your businesses. And it gives you some really interesting insights. We're going to go through some of that. So what do we do? Who are we? Who's maybe? Well, maybe we're a tech company and we have very, very clever tech actually. And every day we go across the Internet and collect all the social media data from just over 3.9 million UK businesses every night. That's across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram right now, soon to be LinkedIn. And I think we're working on TikTok and various other platforms too, which won't be belong behind. So we really have got very clear insights into what's working well for your businesses. Who's doing what, if anything, where are they doing it, which platforms are working for them and who's engaging with that content, what is the conversation and are enough businesses engaging in the conversation? So we're going to really dive, delve now into a bit of data to understand what the consumer is doing and how the businesses are responding. We've got some great case studies of businesses who are embracing social media. One of whom is delightful lady who literally went from a standing start, didn't even own her mobile phone. And we've worked with her and she's now. She's now an Instagram celebrity influencer almost. We've got. We're going to go through some regionalised data showing you really what the data is around social media uptake in your area and then how you can go about levelling up digital support for local businesses. We're all working really hard through our UK Shared Prosperity applications, and there's some really useful evidence that you can take from this data to help you shape those applications and shape your strategy. So here we go. So we have, through our UKCRF projects that we've been running across the local authority for the last five, six months now, really gleaned some very interesting insights into how consumers are using social media and how businesses must really respond. And we've done. We obviously would collect the data from 3.9 million businesses every day. But we also have the insights from surveys from over two and a half thousand businesses and consumers that we've taken over the last month or so. So it's really up to date data and we've compiled formal white paper, actually, that you're all very welcome to have access to. You can get that research paper@mabletech.com Gap or at the end of this webinar, you'll have my contact detail. Sarah Bassett, by the way, I'm head of growth at Maybe, and I will be able to help you have access to that and some of the localized data that we're going to be showing you. So, Paul, let's take it away. Paul joins me. He's our head of marketing and insights and he's going to take you through some of the data that we've gathered over the last few weeks.

Thanks, Sarah. Yeah, we've got some really interesting stats to share with you and this really is the tip of the iceberg. You can find much data and insight in that paper that Sarah just mentioned there. I'll post that in the chat. That link in the chat again just now. So we start off with consumers. So what are the consumers doing? 79.1% consumers are spending over seven hours a week on social media. That's a big number. Hey, Sarah. It's massive. And that's just the small amount of hours being spent. You've got 13% of people spending more than five hours a day on social media. So these are big numbers. That's more per individual than the Average business is spending in total per week on managing their social media. So there's a big, big chunk of, big chunk of people out there using it every day. And here's what they're using it for. Well, in part what we found is that 75% of consumers are using it to find out about products and services before buying. And that's really important for us all to note. That's not just looking at the brands, it's not just looking at influencers. It's also sharing their experiences with their friends, their family, asking people's opinion, shall I buy this, shall I buy that? Should I, you know, where should I go to get my carpets cleaned? All of those sorts of things. So it's a huge influence on people's buying and spending, you know, spending habits on a daily basis. What's really important though, is not just online purchases. 74% of people are still shopping in store once a week. So people quite often associate social media with digital purchases. What we found is that actually more people are still shopping in store than they're shopping online. So don't just dismiss the social media piece as online only source. Lots of people are still going into stores. So lots of businesses need to, you know, they need to sort of come to the table here and say, right, okay, here's my business. It may be online, it may be offline, but here's my, you know, it's effectively a shop window for those businesses.

One of those things actually, interestingly, obviously I work with local authorities all day, every day. And one of their key drivers really is about local economic growth and sustainability. And it's about encouraging the consumer to come back to their high streets. Because actually our high streets are a key part of our community. They're what make our communities come alive. And it's not just about shopping, it's about hospitality, it's about leisure, it's about entertainment, it's about all of those personal care sectors. Professional services might need a solicitor, don't know. But, you know, it's about helping consumers understand what the cumulative offer is of an individual place too, because so businesses, you know, it's important that they're, they're engaging with the consumer, but actually they need to be engaging as a collaborative force to really kind of get consumers to understand the value of coming to a place so we can increase dwell time and spend per head and, you know, and get people back using our high streets. So, I mean, we've had, you know, for the last two years people have been shopping very much with intent and now we're sort of, now we're really back much more freely to be able to go and experience our high streets and be more part of our community. So that's really interesting, isn't it, that you know, consumers are spending seven hours a week on my case, probably way more than that and Certainly my, my 25 year old daughter I think probably spends about eight hours a day. It's insane. I don't have anything else but still, but it's, you know, that's where we're going for information and inspiration is where we're communicating and, and you know, sort of getting ideas from each other, isn't it? Anyway, I've interrupted and I can rattle on about it or something I'm passionate about.

Thanks, Sarah. I mean, I think you make some really good points there about the whole picture and not just about shopping and, but what we found through the surveys we've done and in very specifically here, about the 3.9 million businesses that we can see every day, only 31% of those have social media accounts. So that's, that's, and that's not all businesses in the UK, remember, those are 3.9 million businesses of the businesses we can see on Google, my business, so, but that doesn't mean that they're active either. Having an account doesn't mean that they're active and it doesn't mean they're doing anything. So we had a look at that. We found that only 19% of UK businesses have active social media accounts. And by active we mean posted in the last 30 days. So we think about this, it's still pretty shocking really. So that's 81% of businesses are posting less than once a month on social media whilst their customers are spending seven hours a week on it. And the last stat of this small batch here is that of those 3.9 million businesses, only 9% post at the weekend. So businesses aren't present when people are most likely to be thinking about shopping, being shopping in their leisure time at the weekend, shopping or going to the high street or going anywhere for that matter. They just simply aren't engaging with them. And you've got to remember that as consumers we're digesting this stuff all day, every day, every waking hour. So yeah, absolutely, this is shocking really, that we take it from the top. Only 31% of businesses have accounts, only 16% are active and only 9% post the weekend. So together, that's quite a big divide there, isn't it Sarah?

It's extraordinary. And this always astounds me, this posting at the weekend. Obviously I spend a lot of time helping local authorities access the Mabie platform and the data that they can look into into. And we've got some amazing graphs within the platform and I don't even have to look at what day of the week the Dicks are in. It's always a Sunday. And it's just amazing because actually it's the time when those people that are working, those with the highest level of disposable income, are likely to be browsing and getting inspiration and ideas for what they're going to do the following week. And it's interesting because also, I mean, not in every case, but generally nine times out of ten we're able to show people within the platform on that data that actually those people that do post at the weekend get significantly more engagement in their content than they do when they post in the week. So it's just, it's one of those things, it's about educating businesses, isn't it? It seems logical, but actually until somebody sticks it under your nose, you just.

Think, goodness me, yeah, absolutely. And I think so. Speaking to the education piece here, 64% of businesses aren't measuring the impacts of social media on their sales. So there's evidently a lack of understanding of both. Well, the lack of measurement itself displays they have no understanding of what impacts their activities having. But also there's a more deeper rooted lack of understanding around what social media can do for the business and how positive it can be to the prosperity of the business itself. We also see that businesses generally aren't spending money on advertising and Facebook is very clever. I mean, your post isn't going to be seen if you're not paying for it. If you're a business, that's the way that meta works. It's promoting businesses that spending money through their platform, that's their business model. So not spending money but posting, you're just wasting your burning time, basically. So what we're finding though is that businesses say they don't know where to start, they don't think it's relevant to them or their business. So that level of knowledge of how to use those platforms and how to make the most and get a return on investment, even if it's a, even if it's a relatively small return on investment, it's still a return on investment and the effort should be made where possible.

Absolutely. I think it's important that again, I've spent many an hour schlepping up and down high streets and talking to business owners about their social media and so on over the years. And I just, we're hit with the same barrier all the time in that a, you know, they think it's just about posting on Facebook. They don't really know what to post, so they take a picture of something in the shop, you know, and they post it and they, they just think it's the thing they should be doing or that somebody's told them they ought to do, but they don't really understand the benefit of it or the marketing impact that it can have and how really to leverage that you to drive sales in store in the till. And I think one of the big barriers, I think, to social media advertising spend from businesses that have a physical store presence is that there's this mindset that it's actually related to online shopping. And when we're not an online shop, actually you can spend money on advertising not just to sell things, but to share your story and drive more people in stores. And I think it's getting that sort of education piece across that it's not just for selling online, it is about getting people more aware of what you do, what's unique about you, what's why they should come and visit your store as opposed to going to someone else. It's about getting across your personality and so on and so forth. But as you say, Meta is driven by finance. I mean, they're a business themselves. So being clever and having that sort of knowledge of how to use social media advertising effectively for your business and having the training and access to that is really, really important and a vital part of the UK CRF projects that we've been running. They've included incentives, grant incentives to encourage businesses to engage with social media advertising. We've seen businesses returning, great return on their investments. Everything from, you know, for every pound of their grant they're spending, they're getting a pound back or £1 50 back to £4 on average. And some of them were even getting £10 back on their, on their ad spend investment. So it does work and it's really, really important for local economic growth. It would be a big, big driver. Anyway, I'm rattling again, you see.

Thanks, sir. Well, I think that, you know, just following on from the last slide there, our research showed that the businesses are wanting this, wanting some training, wanting to find out more how to do those things, that's how to make the measurement, how to post better posts, how to engage better with their customers, how to use all the tools that they've got available to them. Whether that's through natively, through the social media platforms themselves or through tools such as maybe. So, you know, 58% of those business want support with social media and that's, you know, I think we can see there that they know that there's a bit of a challenge but they don't necessarily know where to go and get that support and where to get help to help them get better.

It's a great question actually. Hi all. Are businesses posting on correct social media for their business? Younger people, for example, use Facebook particularly anymore. It's mainly Insta or TikTok. And do people realize how long each post lasts once posted? Do you know what, I think there's. Oh, I've got a dog barking. Excuse me. I think there's some great insights obviously within the platform to help businesses understand what their competitors are doing, what social media channels are working for them, where is the conversation happening around what their offer is. And I think it's really important, a really good point well made, that you don't have to be posting across every single channel to have success. You need to be posting where your ideal customer is hanging out. So I think that's really key as well. It's one of the things we talk to businesses about every single day. Where should I be posting, how often should I be doing reels or stories and should I be using video and so on and so forth. It's a minefield but with the right training, step by step, bite sized rather than, you know, sitting in a classroom for hours on end. It's much simpler than you think. It's just about dipping. Trying to get businesses to dip the toe in the water is, is a good start.

Yeah, we do cover a bit of that in the paper as well. We did do some research around that where we found that actually Facebook isn't dead. Is Facebook is still a, still a primary channel for, for a lot of consumers. But, but I think the point you're making there is the key one which is find where your audience is as a business and go to them there. Don't dismiss Facebook because we all think Facebook is no longer being used by younger audiences. I think it's just a matter of working out what your audience is and that's exactly what we're trying to help businesses with the training so that they understand how to use their time most effectively. I think when we talk about, we've got some case studies here about some businesses who have embraced social media and we've got three case studies and I'll take the first one, which is this chat with this wonderful moustache Sean from Ludlow Gin. He's gone from strength to strength. I think lockdown had a huge impact on their business. Obviously, both on trade and off trades were impacted significantly in different ways during the COVID pandemic. And they were primarily based out of a retail outlet in Herefordshire and they set up an online store and he took a lot of time working out how to working out a best engage with his customers on social media. So what he started to do was build a following, build audiences. And when he released his online shop in I think it was a couple of months, six months into the first lockdown, he sold out of his whiskey in five minutes. In fact, he says 3 minutes and 8 seconds, they had 1,500 people waiting to put something into their basket on their online store. So what that shows us is that businesses who may not necessarily have big resources, but have actually have the time and spend the time and take the opportunity to get out there and grow their audiences, they can reap massive rewards. And I think it's done a huge, it's done, done huge things for his business for sure. He now engages with a, with an agency to help him do that because he can't manage it all together. But what he makes sure he does is he makes sure that that agency and everybody who. And everybody who sort of comes into touch with Ludlow Gin and their social media channels, they all get an answer. They always get an answer. And that's really important to him and it helps build his brand. And I see Tess Cattell said they love Ludlo Marketing is very creative and he's very much about telling stories. And we've got a nice little video on our video hub, which is video.maybetech.com which talks about. Gives him some insight into Sean and his thinking and the stuff that he's done over the last few years to help grow his business. Do you want to talk about Isabella?

Oh, you'll love talking about Isabella. She's just the most fabulous Italian lady from Putney. And when we first came across her, she didn't even have a mobile phone. And she was really struggling to get people to know that she was there and that she had fabulous pasta. She's now's biggest influencer. She posts her pasta on social media and it sells out. She's absolutely brilliant. She has really embraced social media and it's made such a massive difference to her business. She's very, very clever at, I suppose she's got such a Big, fabulous, yummy personality that she just really exudes that in her social media. It's all about her and all about her personality and it's just. And how they do things and how freshly made everything is. And you just got to check out her social just makes you want to go there. That's proper food porn. It's fab. But she's an amazing lady and it's really, you know, she's, she's recognized now. Everywhere she goes around Putney and, you know, local areas, she's sort of a bit of celebrity, but it's just made such a difference. She's not selling anything online. She's getting people to come into her cafe and eat or do takeaway.

And authenticity is really key there, isn't it? So that's the word.

That's the word.

You know, one of the things in our research we found was that, that influencers in the marketing sense actually have less influence than brands who are posting their own authentic message. So for Isabella here to be going out and engaging with an influencer saying, oh, look, I've been into this store, wouldn't work for her. Just her true voice. The picture on the right hand side there of Pepe, her husband, and she's just fun. She says it how it is. If she makes a mistake, she admits it and she has a laugh about it. She jokes about herself, how backwards she is with digital, but she's doing it. And like I say, Sarah, she's out there and she's just made a massive difference to her business. And now she has Q out the shop and past the Waitrose store next door in Putney. Like I say, selling out every day at lunchtime just because she posts pictures of her spaghetti.

Oh, it's Giuliano's Deli Socials. I'll have a look in a minute. So if I post them in chat. But yeah, Julie, Arlo's Deli Cafe and Putney. I think Jason's hungry. He's like, where's her social channels? Going off to look at his bit of food porn. There you go. Fabulous. Oh, now this lady is extraordinary. She spent the whole of lockdown dressing up in her stock because a shop was closed. She's got a lovely fashion boutique and she was just, just in her bedroom trying on all the different clothes, talking about doing little twirls, suggesting who. Who it might fit or the type of thing that you might want to wear it for and all this kind of thing. And she just, you know, she, she just in great. Embraced Instagram. And she was full of Instagram stories and so on. And yeah, it's like she says, and it's so sweet when she says it when, you know, first time someone comes in and shows us a picture on Instagram and said, can we buy those? You know, it's a great feeling. But she is, we've just shown her one small thing. We've shown her how to make her social media advertising really return an investment for her. And as a result, she is now taking an extra thousand pounds a week. That's a lot of money for a very small store in the Cotswolds store on the world. It's lovely. Check out her. So she's Lauren Co stores and yeah, she's, she's great at social. Helps that she's very attractive and looks fabulous and anything that she puts on, I think. Not quite sure I'd have the same reaction dressing up all day, but yeah, it's turned her business around. Okay, so let's get back to a serious note. So we've talked about the digital or the social media gap, if you like, between how consumers are using social media and how our businesses are using social media. Why is this a problem for local authorities? Well, we need to get people back onto our high streaks. We need to provide business support for our local businesses. It's really important. And there, you know, there is an appetite out there for businesses. We're seeing from the insight, 65% of those businesses that we've surveyed, if you like, sounds dreadful. We said 8 out of 10 cats prefer whichever whiskers. 65% of these people are saying, do you know what, I'd really like some help but I don't really know where to start and actually I can't take time outside of my business, really. I don't want to be going sitting in the classroom. And they've got all these barriers, all these things that they're quite fearful of. But they do need to understand there is an appetite. They know they've got to do it, they just don't know how to. So let's go and have a look at some local data and this is what we have that you have all can have free access to. As I say, anybody, any local authority and BID in the UK can have access to a free maybe account. You go to maybetech.com sign up for your account and you can have access to all of your local data. So I thought we'd start down south and I started off across Greater London. I thought, let's go and have a look at the whole patch. Really interesting. So we hold the data for over 350,000 local. That's independent businesses across Greater London. And we pull that data from Google. So they've all businesses that have a Google My business listing. But look at that. On average, across Greater London, only 19% of those businesses have a social media presence. That's a staggering statistic. I mean, we've been talking about data of all businesses, nationals and locals, but this is just independence. And there is a big gap that's 81% of independent businesses across Greater London don't have social. And I've zoomed in on a few local authority areas. So I've got Brent Bromley, Croydon and Hammersmith and Fulham, Kensington and Chelsea. And I sort of thought I'd go across sort of a bit for different. It was interesting to see that those areas, Hammersmith and Fulham, Kensington and Chelsea, they're affluent and they're sort of less diverse maybe in their community structure and their cultural. Cultural structure than perhaps Brent, Bromley, Croydon might be. So there'll be cultural and language gaps, I guess, but it's still only 24% in Hammersmith and 23% of the independents in Kensington and Chelsea. And the consumer, don't forget, is spending over seven hours a week and in many cases over five hours a day. So the independent businesses are really missing a trip because those that are engaging, cleaning up, it's really working for them. Then let's go further north. I mean, this is all about the uk. SBF is all talking about, you know, levelling up. Actually, the picture's very similar. I've picked out Liverpool City region. Not for any particular reason. I just thought it was. Would make an interesting kind of comparison from the London City piece. Average of 15%. So really not much less than Greater London. And there's some stronger and less strong areas then Northern Ireland. Actually, that's quite interesting. They're doing better than Greater London. They're at 22%. I mean, let's celebrate it. But actually it's still an enormous gap. And then Wales, much more rural, a lot of these areas. So you'll see higher percentages in the. In Cardiff, for example. But 13% of businesses have social media. That's out of 100, you know, that's 18,000 out of 137,000 businesses. So there's a big need to address that gap. And then let's go to Scotland, 15%. It just goes to show that actually this social media gap isn't just about levelling up. This is a nationwide issue. This is something that local authorities really have to get behind and we need to support local businesses to get better, to get more active, to engage with the changing behaviour of the consumer. So Paul, how can you level up digital support for local businesses to drive economic growth?

Well, I think that from, from what we've learned from the UK CRF projects we've done, we've taken a lot of learnings from it because some, some of it's harder, surprisingly harder than we thought it would be to deliver. The challenging piece is getting businesses to be a aware of the training and getting them to, to get on with it. So we realize. So firstly, you know, you've got to get to these businesses in a lot of different ways. You've got to commit to multi channel outreach. So for us that meant emails, it meant social media advertising, it meant telemarketing and getting out and getting businesses on the hook. So we've got to make contact with them because generally speaking they aren't aware of, of the training that's available or the opportunities that's available to them. And also sometimes they're quite sort of cautious of it as well. They think it might be a scam or, you know, free money from my business? No, I don't believe that. So people don't think there's anything for free. So you have to do a lot of work to convince people a, to come to the party and then once they're in the party, the big thing for us is being mindful of businesses time. So as you said just now, Sarah, these businesses are small businesses, they're run by individuals or very small teams or a lot of them, these independents are so delivering training in bite sized chunks. We do everything we can to keep our training to less than 30 minutes at maximum, but generally speaking in 5 minute, 10 minute chunks max, so that people can do it whilst they're on the tube, on the way to work, whilst they are making a cup of tea or at the end of their day and make it available on demand. So everything that we've done is on demand. There are live webinars, etc. But if they can't get to the live, they can always watch it afterwards. So just make sure that any of that training is totally accessible, supporting it with live expert help. What that means is just human beings basically at the end of a chat function or whether that's on the end of a phone or even in person, face to face sessions that are presented, you've got to be able to back it up because more often than not businesses aren't quite sure about what you're necessarily trying to speak to them. You might not necessarily cover something that's relevant to them or in a specific way. So making sure you've got those experts on hand and making sure that those experts are human and they speak in real language and not jargon is really important. Giving them the tools that enable businesses to put what they learn into practice. For us, that's about measurement really, and making sure that they understand a why measurement is important and relevant to their business and the activity that they're doing, but also just making sure those tools are accessible and easy to use and that they can just dip into it whenever. Something we really, really keen on is making sure that that return on investment and that investment doesn't have to be for pounds, it could be investment of their own time has an impact on their business. Enabling businesses to learn from local best practice. I mean, this is linked to how we deliver the training and some of the training that we do is in case study format and we're really keen to show businesses somebody like them. Now, you might not have a wonderful moustache like Sean from Ludlow Gin, but what we want to do is show businesses that there are the businesses that we're training, that there are other businesses of a similar size out in the regions, whether that's rural or whether it's in a city and saying, look, somebody else like you started from zero and now they're doing really well, or they had these challenges and look how they overcame them. So using that best practice case study piece is really important. And then lastly, incentivizing the training, making sure that people feel like there's an added value really helps. So for ukcrf there was a grant behind it. For other areas we've offered additional support, additional free access to maybe, for example, but really the hooks are multi, you know, there's a multitude of hooks. So it's good training, it's stuff that they can immediately put into, immediately put into practice, but also there are other incentives outside of that as well. So if you're thinking about how you might look at shared prosperity, for example, or how you might support your businesses, think and consider about how you incentivize that training so they get something else back on top of the great, you know, the great skills and knowledge and learning that they're going to get from the programmes anyway, anyway.

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, one of the things that has really been it being able to show them, evidence them, especially with the incentivizing the Social media advertising training that has been, has made the most massive impact, hasn't it? Because it's like, here you go, we'll give you pot of money to play with. We'll show you how to, you know, for every to turn £100 grant into £500 in your till, what's not to love about that? And they get it, that's, that's when the penny drops like, oh, oh, I see. So, you know, if you have a think about it, whatever training you want to provide. But yeah, incentivisation is definitely valuable and also puts money, if we're putting money back in the till and maximising the grant and the return on that investment into the local economy, it's a bit of a no brainer too. So I think that the kind of important place really that we wanted to bring you to is to understand where the gap is, understand perhaps a few things that you can do to help bridge that gap. And we want you to know that you can have your local data for your UK SPF applications. Doesn't have to include anything about maybe, but you know, we're all looking for that evidence data around the delivery of the support that is desperately needed by businesses. So pop me an email sarahavytech.com and that I'll make sure that you get your localised data and you can have access to a platform and you can come and you know, we can have a demo and can show you around. As I say, there's no charge for any of that. We really are here to help. So if you'd also like to access the more in depth data around the social media gap, don't forget you can Access that@maybetech.com Gap it.