What We've Learned From 1,000,000+ Social Followers

Hey everybody. I know what a lot of us are trying to do these days is build up our digital strategy. We're sheltering, we're working from home and we're trying to do the best we can with digital assets. And a big part of that is content marketing. How can I reach out to customers and prospects through the web, through a new podcast, through a new blog, through digital events and all of that. We've been doing this for a while at Saster and the way we've done it is quirky, it is different than most. But I thought I would share our inside learnings from getting to a million total social followers. Not a million anywhere, certainly don't have a million on YouTube or a million in any particular medium, but we have a million all together and we built a very large community out of that. And I thought it might be helpful to share what are our top learnings building that. First of all, I think the most important thing I've learned on social media is, I guess as with anything, is start with your goals. So what is our goal? Our first goal, which is, is qualitative admittedly, but it's to add value. So what I do is I kind of build a two by two in all types of social media and I think where can I add the most value for relatively speaking, the least amount of work? And what that means is I'm looking for a distribution poll. How can Twitter, how can LinkedIn, how can Quora, how can YouTube even a digital event or a blog, where can I add value so it's appreciated, but yet I can hack an algorithm or get the most benefit? And we've tried a lot of things over the years. For example, on medium we have like 20,000 followers. Not a lot, but meaningful. In B2B nothing, nobody reads a single thing I've ever put on medium. It works for other people. I don't know why other than that. I know we haven't cracked the code on YouTube historically with Saster until very recently. We have years and years of Saster annual videos on YouTube but they have performed poorly. People do not want to read, just upload, I mean watch, just uploaded videos to YouTube from an event that have no editing or curation obviously or else we would have more than 14,000 subscribers on our Saster YouTube channel, though that's grown dramatically since Shelter, which we're trying to learn about. So a lot of the things in our Instagram is a disaster and we have no TikTok or Pinterest strategy. So a lot of things that work for other people have not worked for us. And yet some things have worked for us that maybe others haven't. So number one is add value with a modest amount of effort. And out of that we want to do two things. We want to grow our community. So if one channel is identical to another and it's smaller, it's not worth it. So grow our community. And then at kind of at a business level, we have one metric that really matters, which is growing our list. This is how we measure success. And ultimately almost everything we do at Saster boils down in part to how many attendees come to our digital events, our real world events, whatever else we do, how many people show up. That drives sponsors, that drives everything else. So we need to grow our list. And many of these channels, as we'll talk about, have varying different impacts. Some might really help our community, like a Quora, but not build our list. LinkedIn helps our community a bit, not as much as Quora and builds our list a little bit, but not a lot. Other things are great, great for list building and engagement. And let's talk through that. And let's actually start with Quora, because Quora is probably the nichiest one that many of you have the least experience of. And it's been interesting. We have, I just checked. Right now we have over 56 million views on Quora, which for B2B content is a lot, but like many things for us, it's spread out over a long time. I started writing on Quora in 2012 and 2013 and much more in 2014, and it took out a year and a half to build. And then boom, we hit an algorithm and we went from like 1 to 10 million views in about a year and a half. And it was huge. And it kept building on itself. And we got distribution in their weekly emails, which is huge because if you don't get distribution in Quora in the Quora Digest, not that many people read your stuff. And it kept growing and then it plateaued. I think it plateaued in maybe 2018 or so. I suspect, one, because there was some management change, and two, I think their algorithm started to favor Quora Space, which is a product they have for recirculating content where we also have 330,000 followers, but it doesn't perform the same. So there was a first algorithm change in 2018 and then all of a sudden our traffic plateaued. And then I'll show you on the screen, In June of 2019 there was some other change and then boom, our views on quora plummeted like 70% and really have not come back. And I don't know why. And some may say that's a lesson to not depend on other channels for distribution, but I think that if these other channels give you distribution, it's just the risk. It's just the risk. If we, if we put eight years into Quora and after, you know, six or seven years or whatever, our views are down. We got a lot of great, a lot of great experience, a lot of community building out of the platform. But I will say, with the algorithm changes, I think it's even harder to find a great B2B niche in Quora. And a lot of folks will give you advice on the Internet, hey, just like, go be a subject matter on Quora. And I see endless posts talking about how great their product was. And I think that might have worked a few years ago, but now it's been done so many thousands of times. I'm not convinced Quora is a magic place to promote your product, but I do think it's an incredible community and we have 56 million views. And my net net learning for Quora is even if you're not going to get the same boost you got a few years ago, write what you know. This is true of all content marketing. It's the number one mistake folks make. But write what you know, write what you're an expert on, don't promote yourself, and you'll see it work overtime. But the change in the algorithm is interesting. Twitter will again highlight the same lesson. But it's fascinating. We basically have two Twitter accounts. We have Asunlk, which is me, and yes, I have written 95% of those 60 something thousand tweets. And then there's Aster, which is a little bit smaller, but I think it's 55, 60,000 followers. And so they're roughly the same size. And all of them are either automated or written by an agency, or a handful are written by the team. And so what's very interesting is that both have about the same number of followers. But Twitter has a metric called engagement rate. And I have a 3% engagement rate on my Twitter feed, which is high. It's very high. And the Sasser one is below 1%. So that means curated content, carefully written, performs maybe six times better. And even more importantly, to distill it beyond that metric, when I write something on Twitter and I link to something, people click over it. We can see it in Google Analytics when Aster, which is a content farm, does it, very few clicks. So the reminder is, be authentic, add value. And then for me, for years I had nothing on Twitter. Nothing was happening. It finally took me a while until about two years ago where I realized, you know what? Just like people used to talk about Twitter as a microblogging platform, it is a microblogging platform. So I started writing blog posts in 280 characters. That's what I tried to do. And you know what? It worked. And that drove up massive, massive engagement. And now as a benefit of that one, it's grown our community. There are many folks I hear of who say, I follow you on Twitter. So that's goal number one, grow our community. Two, unlike Quora, which is a walled garden, I do not believe Quora has ever grown our list, ever. I don't know how to use it. We've run a few experiments, but Quora has never grown our list. What happens with Twitter is because I have that high engagement on my account, not on that Saster, but on ascent of it, because they have a high engagement. When I link to a saster.com post, the click rates very high. And so people come to our blog and that's where most of them sign up for our list. So we get about a thousand signups a month for our mailing list, our distribution list from Twitter, because people are clicking over to our blog and I know that's attenuated, but it's just a reminder that make great, authentic content that's tailored to a medium and that's what we'll perform. And again, the Astro one, it's valuable. We recirculate old great Saster content. I read it, I like it. But it's not special. It's not special. It's just social recirculation. And it performs the 6th as well as authentic content at best, maybe even not as well. Okay, next, our blog. And you know, if you're OG Saster, for years you probably either found us on Quora, Quora helped build our community. Maybe no one to our list, but it did help build our community. Or our blog, which traditionally had very different content. The blog was our. I would write long form and Quora was answers. I would just choose to answer. And over time, they have somewhat converged and we take some of the best Quora answers and bring them over to our blog. And now that Quora has changed its functionality, we also link our blog inside of Quora, but they used to be very distinct. But the number one learning for the blog, which if you've been doing content marketing, you know, is that the direct to URL traffic, it's a tenth of what it used to be through maybe 2015. People in cloud, in SAS, they would come into the office, grab their coffee and type sastr.com into their browser and see what there was to read. People used to do that till about 2015. And then you can see it in our Google boom. Like, no one types in saster.com anymore. Overall, our readership since then is up, although not dramatically, maybe 30 or 40%. But what's even more interesting than that is the source, like 80 to 90% of the source for our traffic now is either social media, which is probably half. That's Twitter, LinkedIn and some others. So you need that other social media to fuel people reading your blog. A significant portion has always been SEO. Searching for terms and then our list helps. I mean, our newsletter helps, but the direct to URL is very, very low. So the way I think about it is a data term. Saster.com, our blog in the old day was almost like a portal that people would engage with, but a lot. We have lot of cool functionality on it. We have a newsfeed, we have an academy with archived content. We have video content on it. Doesn't perform that well because people don't go to saster.com as much to learn. They go to other social media and then click into an article and then maybe explore and find two or three more pieces. So that's just the way the world's changed. The next one for us is LinkedIn. And if you're not in B2B and you haven't spent much time on LinkedIn, you may laugh at LinkedIn, you may think LinkedIn is a resume service, but it's not. Sometime in the last 24 months, LinkedIn became one of the more dynamic feeds in the world, sort of rivaling Facebook and Quora in terms of the quality of the feed. I have about 190,000 LinkedIn followers now, and then about 12,000 to our LinkedIn newsletter. And what you'll see, what a lot of folks see, they get very excited because especially if you're like me and you have a lot of followers in B2B, you'll see insane engagement. So write something very short on LinkedIn and you'll get 10, 20, 50, 100,000 views. And not only will you get the views and sometimes views on LinkedIn and Quora Vanity metrics, unlike your blog, but not only do you get tons of views, but you get lots of comments. And like, when I look back on our early blog posts, we would have 10, 15, 20 comments. We never get a comment on the blog anymore. People don't comment on blogs. And it's not just us. Look at TechCrunch. No one except folks selling weird scammy services comment on TechCrunch articles and they don't comment on us. But on LinkedIn, everybody's talking about it and it's very exciting and it's very fun. But what I. And So I like LinkedIn and it has certainly expanded the footprint of our community. That's goal number one. And so it's worked. How much it's worked, not sure, but I know it's worked. I know the LinkedIn, the time I put into LinkedIn is worth it. But what's interesting is the list building is mediocre. There's no real way to scrape LinkedIn or get your followers out of LinkedIn. Not your followers. You may think your connections, you have a way, but followers is a much larger group. I have almost 200,000 followers and there's no way to, to email them to come to Saster Annual or to do something. And when you embed links to go to our blog or to go to other assets where we can, you know, we can add you to our list, it performs, but it's okay, it's not great. So, you know, on this, two by two, LinkedIn's a decent amount of work. It adds a decent amount of value, and it adds somewhat to our business goals altogether. It's worth it, but it's not a game changer. But it definitely adds. It's additive, so it's worth it. And then just two others I want to hit on. This is at least our podcast and digital events, because our podcast is interesting. So we get about 110,000 downloads for our podcast. And that's a lot. In B2B, people throw out a lot of numbers. They inflate their numbers. They brag. The truth is there are insane podcasts out there, but in B2B there aren't. I'm not sure there's anything in SaaS that gets 110,000. And we've learned a bunch of things. Hard to get good podcast analytics. You can get a lot of stuff on how many downloads you have, but who's listening? How are they listening? I mean, we try and we certainly see a lot of things on social media. And indirectly we get data because every podcast we collect and we put it in our blog and we get analytics based on who reads the blog post and then who clicks through. So we have, we have sort of summit representational metrics for our podcast. And from what we know from that is they're very high quality listeners and relatively speaking, they buy the most tickets and sponsorships to our events. So think about that for a minute. You probably know this intuitively. If you're a B2B buyer and you're trying to buy ads in front of podcasts, it's one of the best things out there. But these are our probably highest quality community members are listening to podcasts, even though we have a little bit of trouble accessing them. We don't really have all their email addresses, we don't know who all of them are. But when we match the contribution to what we do have to revenue, we see the highest correlation of podcast revenue. So that's why I think if you're a digital marketer, buy ads on the best podcast. Ours is sold out through the end of the year. People figured this out for a while. We didn't even. We barely sell ads at Saster. But ours are sold out through the end of the year. And find podcasts that fit your market because you're often going to find the highest quality leads and engagement right there. And that's what we've seen. But podcasts are tough and, you know, it's hard to get a flywheel going. You know, there really are no social discovery platforms. I've talked to many folks that have worked very hard on a podcast and only have a couple hundred downloads per episode. And you have to be consistent. It's exhausting. Podcasts need a lot of post production to be good, and you, you need to do at least one a week. And that means you need to schedule guests 52 times a year. And it's tough. We have Harry Stebbings doing one of ours, and then we now we do two a week, which I'll talk about in a second. And that's a massive amount of production time. Most of you are not up for that. So the good news for podcast is if you get it going, it's probably the best asset out there, pound for pound. But it's an enormous amount of work. I think it's the most work for any asset. It's hard to be novel. It's easier to write a blog post about something special your product does or even write a LinkedIn post. But to come up with 20 to 30 minutes of verbal content that people want to hear every week, it's a high bar and very few people do it well. And then the last thing I'll add because it's not intuitive, is. I'm not exactly sure how we got the flywheel going, although we did a lot of promotion in the early days. Two things that are not obvious. When we went from one podcast a week to two, that helped in the very beginning to get engagement. And then when we did it, we got a boost, but the boost seemed a little ephemeral. And our podcast, I don't really understand how podcast metrics work. Our podcast grows, but it should be growing faster because it's good. I don't know why anyone would unsubscribe, but our subscription growth is modest. In fact, everything slows down. Maybe this is the number one metric and I'll throw a few things in. Our LinkedIn grew like crazy. It slowed down. Our Quora slowed down. As we talked about, our podcast has slowed down, our blog has slowed down. And the key for us has been adding layers. Because if we just had nothing like the old days, but a blog in Quora, Saster would be stagnant. But by adding the podcast, by adding LinkedIn, by adding Twitter, by adding events and other things like, we grow 40 to 50% a year in engagement, sometimes more. But if we didn't add channels, we couldn't grow because we maxed them out. And maybe if we were better at them, they could grow more. But our most mature channels, the 190,000 on LinkedIn, that almost 200,000 on Twitter, the 400,000 on Quora, they're growing 10, 20% a year. Not much. So we've maxed out the kind of distribution we can get through those platforms. And the last one, I'll share learning with you on digital events. And there's, in case you haven't noticed, these days, there's way too many digital events out there. I mean, there are so many everyday. Every market is trying to make up for lack of pipeline and lack of real world events with an infinite number of digital events because they seem easy. They're not easy, folks. Digital events are hard. But I will tell you what we learned in Secret Metric. It's not really secret. So we did our first digital event, Saster Summit, bridging the gap. We did it at the end of April. We threw it together. We grabbed a product that ran on top of Zoom, that worked well, called hey Samaro. Didn't do much and we got 17,000 people to register. And that is great. That, that's pretty good. But bear one thing in mind. A lot of people brag about the digital event numbers, but if People don't come. So what we had about 40% of them show up and which is pretty good considering it was free. It's consistent with some of our free world events. But two interesting learnings from that. The first is that content that is sort of vendor specific performed better. And what I mean by that is when you go to a Saaster Annual or a Saster Europa, one of our rural events, we do everything possible so that no one's doing a vendor pitch. It just destroys the event. If you come to Sasser Annual and you flew out from, from Madagascar or South Africa or Japan or wherever, the last thing you want to hear is a commercial for a vendor. I mean, oh my God, that's the worst. And we don't allow those anywhere. We don't allow them unless they're commercials. Unless they're the pre roll for the podcast or digital assets, we don't allow commercials. But the content that was very good, but was vendor specific. ProfitWell had 5,000 people sign up to their pricing session. For example, G2 and Goddard talked about a lot of metrics they learned from G2. People love that stuff in a way that maybe in a real world comes off as too comm. But if you talk about the data that you get from your app, the value you add, what you've learned that the rest of the community can absorb, that performs much better in the digital world than the real world, as we learned. And the second thing we learned, this is interesting. So of the 17,000 folks that signed up for our first digital event, this is really surprising. Half were new to our list, half were new to our database. So we talked about the first. The strategic goal is to add value, add more and more value. The two tactical goals are one, to grow our community because if we don't, all these channels plateau. And two, is to grow our marketable names. And we added almost 10,000 marketable names, people that opted in to get communications from us from our digital event. That's crazy. I would have assumed they were all the same people that come to everything in Saster, but they weren't. So do a boring digital event. I'm not sure anyone's going to come, but do it right and you may be able to provide like vendor specific content and grow your list, grow your prospects, grow your pipeline in a way maybe you weren't able to do it before. So I hope that works out for you.