EP 509 – Simplify Your Social Media With Hailley Griffis From Buffer.com

Foreign this is the no Closers show where you get the latest developments in distressed note investing and learn the secrets of how you can control millions of dollars worth of property for pennies on the dollar. Get educated and entertained by someone who has closed thousands of deals and lives to support you in achieving the same. Now, here's your host CEO of We Close notes, Scott Carson. Hey, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, everybody. Welcome to special episode. We are so excited to have this guest on. And what's funny is it's a small world kind of in the podcasting industry out there with our friends out there. And I saw an email from our good friend Tracy Hazard, who we've had on one of our podcasters livestream and they handle poditize.com, do a lot of production for our show and just saw that. She's like, oh, I got this special guest I interviewed. I was like, oh, my gosh, yes. I gotta have this person on. I got to reach out. So you gotta thank Tracy Hazzard for making the introductions to our rock star head of PR, badass Jiu Jitsu, kick asser over@ buffer.com the one, the only, lovely Haley Griffith joining us this afternoon here. What's going on, Haley? How's your day going?

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for having me, Scott. It's been great day. It's been a really lovely day. Beautiful, sunny here in Colorado, so can't really complain.

There you go. Good stuff. Well, Buffer, I mean, I'm so excited when we saw this because Buffer has been one of the biggest tools that we've added not only to our real estate business, but also it's helped us drive a lot of traffic across different social media profiles. And whether it's Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter, stuff like that, it's really helped us dominate our niche out there. And I'm so excited to have you talk about this. We preach on this all the time and, you know, people hear all the time, oh, great. Okay. They're probably feeling a lot like I did. Oh, yeah, I'll get around to it. And then when I got around to it, why didn't I start this earlier? So why don't we start off a little bit? Why don't you explain for those that are maybe catching this or listening to this or watching this on the replays, kind of a little bit about what Buffer is. I think you've got a presentation lined up too, don't you?

Yeah, I've got some slides I can get into in a second here. But Buffer essentially helps you manage your social media. So what you do, Scott, is you can put a bunch of your posts that you want to send out on your various channels into Buffer. You can set a schedule so you don't have to go in and say, all right, I want this to go to 1pm on a Thursday, but then 10am on a Friday. You can set your schedule in advance and just add your content and then we'll send it out in that queue. So that's one of the biggest differentiators between Buffer and other tools. But essentially we're helping you do something that you might do manually automatically saves you time. You get better results when you are posting more consistently too. So there are a lot of really good reasons to leverage the fact that there are tools that exist to help you with this and to just dive in. So, yeah, I was going to chat a little bit about Buffer and then I was also going to share some of my favorite social media marketing strategies while we're at it, because this is something that I love talking about. I was the co host on Buffer's podcast, the Science of Social Media for two and a half years. So I definitely want to chat with you all about Buffer and if it works for you, that'd be amazing. But I definitely want to make sure this is valuable for people even if they don't use Buffer. So I'll also share some of those social strategies.

That's perfect. That's absolutely what I had in mind for this episode. Definitely. You've also got another podcast that you run yourself though too, don't we?

Yes. So I also run a podcast called Make Work Work and that one's all about tech, travel and books. That's more of a conversation podcast. Me and one of their co hosts and we spent an hour or so chatting. We did a two hour episode the other day. We were like, whoo, that was a long one.

Cool. You brought up a good point back on that. Hey, the more you can be consistent in your marketing, the better it is. And I think a lot of new entrepreneurs or people that come from the job force are either doing their side hustle or starting something new, whether it's be real estate, tiddlywinks. There's a lot of like, I call it unfinished bridges. A lot of things that we've got to work on. We kind of halfway start them and never finish them. Yes, we'll create a business profile. Yes, we'll create a LinkedIn profile, but we don't necessarily know what we should be posting or when. And kind of go from there. So I'm gonna shut up and let you just kind of run with it. How's that sound?

That sounds great. So this is just what we were chatting about, all about Buffer and social media marketing strategies. So I'll start with Buffer. Then some of the things I'm going to talk about are going to be how to choose your social networks. This is actually a really big one that I think people don't realize. Some social media goals, what those should look like, creating content for social media. And then I'll talk more about other tools that you can use too, because Buffer works really well in tandem with a lot of other tools. There are a lot of free tools out there. Let's start by chatting about what is Buffer and maybe why you should be using a social media management tool at all. And we kind of got into this, Scott and I, in terms of the ways that it helps. But let's talk about a social media solution. So there are a couple of things that you do on social media, and one of them is scheduling posts for the future. That's what we do with our main tool, we call it Buffer Publish. And it's really just about using your time wisely. You can add all of the content you've planned to your queues with your social media management tool, and then they go out at the days and the times that you scheduled them for. You can also engage with your customers and followers. So we have a tool for that called reply, and that means when people take time to respond to your brand instead of going through your notifications. And I don't know about you, but I think Facebook notifications are kind of a mess. I don't know what they're doing. There is a nightmare to try and find anything but still pull all of those comments on Facebook, messages on Instagram, messages on Facebook, all into one inbox, and you can kind of treat it like Inbox zero. So we do that with our tool Reply, so it keeps those conversations organized. And then we also do analytics, of course, because you want to know how you're doing. You don't just want to send stuff out and then assume it's doing well because you might not know. So you want to look into the insights of your analytics on each social account. And we let people do that in one place instead of opening up 10 tabs and being like, oh, I think this is better than before. So it helps with strategy. At the end of the day, those all came through on their own there. I want to talk about what people might be doing right now and, and how that's very different from what we can offer with a tool. So there are a lot of manual processes that I've done. I've done all of these processes and I know a lot of people have done all these processes and they don't work well, but they work enough that people keep doing them. But there are a couple and we'd love to solve these. So publishing each post by hand, sometimes setting alarms to alert yourself to when the post has to go out and posting whenever someone else remembers and then maybe using like Facebook scheduler one time and Twitter schedule one time and then just like, you know, not getting consistent there. This is kind of a funny story because back in the day, way back early days of Twitter, you used to be able to text a number to send a tweet out. So I used to do, I had a flip phone. I was doing this for my flip phone, but I kept a notes document with all my ideas for tweets. I set alarms for when I would want to send them and then I would text this number, like copy paste from the note and text this number. So obviously that's a huge workaround. We have way easier ways to do this today. But that's just one example of like the manual process is not perfect there. Another thing is relying on the notifications within each platform to alert you that one of your followers has sent a comment or a dm. Like I said, those notification systems can be kind of a mess, unfortunately. And this causes people to miss comments or DMs. And that's the last thing you want to do with someone that's, you know, someone's finally engaging with you. Social media, someone has a question or they're interested in your page, you definitely want to be there for them. And just is the worst when you rely on their notifications and then you might miss it. And it's, you know, leaving someone without a response is never a good experience. So that's another thing we want to solve. And then again, like I mentioned, for those analytics, trying to access all your analytics in multiple places can be super difficult. So instead of being confused and going through different social platforms because all of their charts and metrics are different, it's better to find it in one place. So let's talk about some of the benefits of a social media solution as well. Saving time, which we mentioned. So we all wish we had more time. I think a lot of business owners, you're not social media marketers or marketers necessarily by trade and marketing is something that gets pushed to the side a lot. And ideally, it can be something that can take a little bit of time. You figure out how to do it really well. It takes a little bit of time and then you sort of like repeat that. So you're like, okay, I'm going to spend an hour every week scheduling my posts and then all I have to do is focus on the engagement and the replies. So there are, I think there are a lot of ways that social tools can save you time, but one of them is just getting back to doing other things and doing businesses and not having that constant thing that you're thinking of where, oh, is it time for me to post on social media? Have I posted today? Have I posted last week? Because that's not a concern that business owners should be thinking of. Another one is it keeps you organized. Using a tool specifically created to help you save time, you'll find that it's also meant to keep you in the know about all the most important pieces of information. Have you posted something before? Are you sending something out on two channels instead of one? What's performed really well? Again, these can all be things that can help inform your strategy and then it keeps you informed so you don't miss a mention. So I'm going to chat quickly about Buffer's solution since that was something that Scott mentioned, might be interesting to some of you. And, you know, if it works for you, that's great, and if it doesn't, that's totally great too. So I sort of mentioned we have those three products. We have Publish, which is our scheduling platform. We have Reply, which is our engagement tool. And then we have Analyze, which is our reporting and analytics tool. I'm going to go through Publish, Buffer, Publish, which is kind of, most people just know as Buffer in a little bit here, but I do want to mention that. So it's Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Google. Those are all the places that you can schedule your posts. And you know, some people are like, oh, Pinterest, I don't know about that. Actually a huge traffic driver and I guess Google, they shut down. So maybe we don't have that integration anymore. But so that's where Publish can do. You can collaborate. If you have a team, you can collaborate on posts in the drafts area. You can incorporate team members to either have full posting access, or they can send the posts to you and you can approve them. And you can schedule posts from any URL on the web. So if you're scrolling and you see a piece of news that you think that would look good in my feedback, I have the extension on Buffer on the buffer extension for Google Chrome. I'll go through and I'll just hit that extension button and then I'll be able to add a post to my buffer right from there.

Nice.

Yeah. So that was it. Publish, reply and analyze. I thought that now would be a good time to do a quick tour of Buffer. This is our homepage. This is where you'll go when you're looking into Buffer. So I've already got an account, so I'm just going to hit login here. And it's funny, Scott, that you mentioned my other podcast, because that's where I have the most posts lined up right now. So you can see at the top it has us in Publish, and then on the side here, all the accounts. I have a lot of accounts because that's just what I do. But I think it's normal for people to have a Twitter and Instagram, a LinkedIn, a Facebook maybe connected, so maybe a few fewer. And it'll tell you the number of posts scheduled in each one there. So this is what a Twitter account looks like. And this is the Twitter account for that podcast that I run. And one of the first things I want to show you is how to set this schedule so you can kind of see in through here. I have different schedule times for 5:44am, 5:00am, 2:00am, 5:30am and where these times are coming from is in settings and then posting schedule right here. And then you can set this up. And this is what we were talking about in terms of, like, I can on a Sunday, add all my posts and know they're going to go out in the 5 or the 2AMs throughout the week. I am not usually up at that time, but a lot of our listeners are in Europe, so here we are. This is like early. Well, that's the other benefit, too. You don't have to be online when this is happening. You can turn days off very easily. So I just turned off our Monday and I just turned it back on. And you can also pause your queue. This is probably one of my favorite features. If there's something going on in the world that maybe social media is really focused on. You know, there's a hurricane going on right now in the US or if there's some sort of piece of news that is really dominating. And in the midst of that news, you don't want to be like, I hope you're having a really awesome Friday. You know, something that you'd schedule. You just come in here easily. Pause your queue just like this. It says your queue's been paused. If I go back out to my queue, it just tells me that it's paused and then I can resume it at any time. So super, super easy so that you don't run into that, oh, I don't want to be posting at the wrong time. We also have a really great mobile app. I can't display that here, but our mobile app has won Webby awards. And in particular, if you use Instagram, I would highly recommend our mobile app because you can add all your photos. You can preview the Instagram grid and then let's say you have six photos scheduled and you preview the grid. You can drag and drop the photos to where you want them to go, which is probably my favorite feature ever.

That's badass. It's brand new. Relatively new too, isn't it?

Yeah, it's been around for maybe a year or so, I think, but I think it's just one of those little known features. It's really great, especially if you want to make sure you have a really nice grid that you can go in there. We have a couple of other Instagram first features that I'll mention quickly. When you're posting to Instagram, we have a feature that lets you do a first comment. So a lot of people will use their first comment for a bunch of hashtags. So it's not in their comment or so it's not right in their caption. So you can schedule that through buffer. So you can say like, Here are the 30 hashtags I want to use. I'm going to add them to my first comment and I'm going to schedule this to go out right after, like right when my post goes out so that it's not in my caption, but I'm still getting my hashtags in. So we've got some good Instagram features that I'm a really big fan of.

I have to make them notice because Shannon, our office, who handles a lot, she's online. Listen, I was like, Shannon, that's a big note right there. I think what's the magic keywords in your post is 11. And then there are some bad ones that you don't want to use in your page.

Exactly.

They block and reduce it. But you don't want to have 30, but maybe 11. And then you add some other ones in your first comment there. That's a really good little hack there.

Yeah. I think one of the other tips for Hashtags, too, that I'm very interested in recently is. And I've heard a lot of Instagrammers talk About this and YouTubers talk about this, and it's not using the largest hashtags. So Hashtag Beautiful has millions, millions of hashtags. Your post isn't going to be seen. If you think of it, the purpose of the hashtag is that people can find your content. But if that hashtag is super cluttered, if there are millions and millions of posts constantly, no one's going to find your post. So what I tell people is look for the less popular, but still kind of popular, you know, 100,000, 200,000, sort of. Even the local, the local hashtags are the best. Especially, you know, I know, Scott, you got a lot of people in the real estate or, you know, sort of specific areas that they might be using hashtags. So I'm in Colorado Springs and I always use the Colorado hashtags when I'm taking nice photos. I'll do Colorado photography, which is a lot fewer people than hashtag photography and it's much more likely to get discovered. So while we're on hashtags, that's one of my favorite ones.

Good nugget.

Awesome. Well, so yeah, this is again, we're back to the queue. We've seen where you add your schedule. Very easy to add and share things. So if I select that Twitter account and I can type in whatever it is that I want to type in here, and I can add any photos that I want to add in here as well. And then once you hit, you can hit add that to your queue. It'll just add it next, like what is the next available spot? But you can also share it right now. Share it next. So push it to the front of the queue or schedule it for a really specific time or day. So you still have that option. It's just not the first option. You don't have to do that. Right. I also, I'll jump into analytics really quickly. So in our analytics, one of my favorite things to do is this share again button. Now, this isn't something that you want to overuse, but it is really useful if you've shared something that's super popular and you're like, you know what, I think this is one that could go again maybe in a few months. We'll share this one more time. We have analytics in here as well. So you're always able to see what was performing really well. You can also, in the overview, sort of look at, in the past 90 days, what has everything been looking like? So some of these analytics, if that's something that you're interested in, if you're interested in seeing any of these likes, clicks, replies, new followers, what do our new follower rates look like? This is a great area where you can poke around, but we're mainly talking about in terms of that scheduling content. This is right where it happens. And this is that extension that I was talking about on Chrome. So I can share any page with Buffer through clicking that extension and then it would get added to this queue right here.

Yeah, that Buffer app, really, really handy when you see something or a post or a quote or anything out there, an image that you want to add it to there. It's a great extension to have and makes it easy to not have to download it, then re upload it and do it. Touch of the button, basically.

Yeah. And you can do it with your own blog posts too. If you're looking, you publish a blog post. As you're on the blog post, you're like, oh yeah, I need to send this to you. Social media, you just click that button right there. And I do that all the time with our postset Buffer.

We do have a question. Lyle, want to know if you would be able to show how it kind of looks when you're posting on LinkedIn?

Yeah, it looks very much, very much the same. So I don't have anything scheduled in here on LinkedIn, but you can add what do you want to share. So let me grab a quick link, I'll show you how it pulls. So this is one of our blogs at Buffer. So if I add this link in here, it shortens it, it auto previews the link and then you can sort of add in whatever caption it is that you want to add in here and then again you can add to queue or share next. So I'll quickly add this to the queue that actually goes out. A lot of people are going to be really confused. If you follow Buffer employees on Twitter, you get this sometimes with our engineers where you'll see like Victoria sent out, test, test, test, test, test. We've been testing things out in Buffer and then it gets done and then that's what that looks like. So it's telling me this post is going to get sent at 4:57 and it did that because I clicked on it. So I could also be like, you know what, actually I want to send that out tomorrow because I already sent something out today. And then again, always that option to hit share. Now just send that out right now. I'm going to delete this one, though, so we don't confuse people too much. But I hope that answers the question. So it's very similar. Let me show you quickly another calendar view. So this is the queue by day. You can also look at it. Let's see if it's going to load here. Yeah, you can also look at it by week. So we're posting it mostly the same times, so this isn't anything too crazy. And by month as well. So that gets. If you have a lot of posts that might be a little bit more useful for you. It's not something I personally use, but I know some people prefer this view. Some people want to see the calendar view. And then you just head right back to your dashboard. And then up here, these are the things I was talking about. If you have teammates that are going to send you posts that you want to approve, they would be in here. And if they're writing drafts, they would be in here. And then if you do the other tools, like I was chatting about, our engagement tool, reply links to up here and analyze is linked to up here as well. Yeah. So I think I can move on to social media strategies. Unless we had any other immediate Buffer questions I can answer.

We just got some fans saying they listen to you on the podcast. Loving you.

Oh, that's awesome. Well, thank you. That's very nice. We have such an awesome community. I think podcast listeners are my favorite people. If you listen to podcasts, like, we probably get along.

Yeah, I think that based on the analytics and stuff like that. Like, I just got back from podcast movement in Orlando a couple weeks ago, and they were talking about the demographics of podcast listeners and people that listen on a regular show and how that demographic is growing. They're highly educated, they're making money, and they're really turning everything into kind of a classroom with the learning aspect of how podcasts are, whether it's just people talk interviews or topics or back and forth, it's just a. It's such a growing, especially here in the United States, more so than any anywhere else. But the demographics are people you probably want to hang out with for the most part anyway.

Absolutely. Yeah, I totally agree. I've been to podcast movement once. I went last year and great, great people. So now let's move on to the social media marketing, which is one of my favorite things and also something that Buffer can help with. But I think that some of these strategies are just things that I would love people to take away from this and be able to implement really quickly. So one of the first ones is choosing the social media networks that you should invest in. And there are a lot of social networks out there. I mean, the little icons that I grabbed, this isn't even all of them. There are so many that I haven't tried all of them. And I don't necessarily think you should try all of them unless you're a social media person yourself. So I'd love to start by chatting about which social networks might make the most sense for your business or what it is that you're trying to accomplish. A lot of people, when I look at their social media strategies, when I start talking to them, they're like, oh yeah, I have the usual, I have Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. So that's four social networks. But one of the things that I want to talk to you about today is that really only need to be on one or two networks to be successful. Because if you spread yourself too thin and especially if you're a smaller team, you're a smaller business, you're a one person business, it's really unsustainable to be on all of those platforms. And in the end you're not giving enough time to each platform. So then none of them will grow. So how do you choose those one or two networks is the question. Right. So it all boils down to who you're trying to reach and which social networks will help you reach those people. So let's go over a couple of stats. I've had people take a lot of photos of this slide. I can send it to you. Scotter, this is something that you can look up online as well. There are a lot of different people on the different social networks. I think there's some really interesting stats on here. So Instagram has a lot of younger users on there. 59% of Internet users between the ages of 18 and 29 use Instagram. There's a fun LinkedIn stats. 41% of millionaires use LinkedIn, which is interesting. You know, there are 62% of online seniors are on Facebook, 88% of online users, 18 to 29 as well. So you can kind of see what it is that you're trying to find. Who are those people you're trying to reach? And are they specifically on one network? Is there one network that is like, oh yeah, my target customer is millionaires. I should probably be on LinkedIn. You know, like that makes sense. So that's one of the best ways to determine who your target audience is in terms of Demographic and then line that up with which social networks are they spending their time on. You know, these are high level numbers. Definitely dig in or like I said, take a picture. If you want to ask yourself, where's my audience hanging out on social media. And then that's where you want to be. Whichever network has to do with your business as well is the other thing that I'll say. If you are really visual business, if you have a lot of things that you can take photos of and share, of course Instagram and Pinterest might be a bit better because people will be very interested. Especially I see a lot of retail companies, clothing companies do very, very well on both Instagram and Pinterest. So those are some things to think about as well. I tend to see more marketing focused businesses, news focused organizations on Twitter, but it really depends. So the big takeaway that I wanted to share from those slides is just choose two or three social networks that you'll be able to focus on and that will reach your target audience and then let yourself forget about the rest. And I hope that's very freeing for you that you don't have to feel like you're concerned about those networks anymore.

That's the thing we've definitely taken too. I mean, with us dealing in real estate and what we're doing with distressed debt, we find the big bulk of our traffic does come from Facebook and primarily LinkedIn. You know, we still use stuff on Instagram with the photos of the properties and things that we're selling, but it's our least effective platform. I mean, we do share some Instagram TVs and some stuff like that with the stories and stuff. But we do. We see a better job of the podcast getting traffic on Instagram versus our traditional investing and education business.

Yeah, that's very interesting. And you know, that has to do with the audiences that are interacting on Facebook and on LinkedIn. And those tend to be audiences that have. Especially LinkedIn. That's usually an educated audience, an audience that has a certain level of income, an audience that has a certain level of interest in business or you know, investing of course too. So I can see that you're not on Twitter and Snapchat and Pinterest. Those wouldn't work for you?

Not Snapchat. I have got about 9,000 plus on Twitter over the years and that number has peaked and valid as the platform has grown and kind of shrunk a little bit. But. And then Facebook, we're in a bunch of different groups and stuff like that that we built over the last years. But yeah, I think that you're right on trying to be across everything else. It's a different type of conversation that you have on each platform and different demographics for the main part, for sure, that you've got to look at. Like you said, if you're a 55 real estate investor, you're probably advertising Instagram. You're going to get some hits off it. But like, what we've been seeing when we do some, like, geotargeting posts, biggest audience is 18 to 24, 24 to 35. I'm like, okay, they're really our true buyers or what we're targeting, you know.

Exactly. And I think there's research too into, like, what people are willing to spend, amounts of money that people are willing to spend on Instagram, you know, a house, probably not a pair of shoes maybe. So also keeping in mind, like, you know, what are people prepared to spend when they're, you know, scrolling around Instagram? So I also wanted to chat about. Let me make sure. Yeah. About setting realistic social media goals. Goals are huge for me. I personally love goal setting. I think it adds a lot of clarity. I think it adds a lot of direction as well to your strategy. So here are a couple of things that social media can do for your business. Brand building, huge. You can create a strong brand online through social networks. Brand awareness, people learning about your brand online. You can create or connect with your community and distribute content announcements and customer support, of course, because on Twitter. And then social media can lead to sales. I'm always really hesitant with this one. It can lead to sales if you're selling something online or if you're directing people to a form and then you put them into the funnel. Somehow a lot of social networks are making it easier. Like we've been talking about, about buying products and that can lead directly to sales. But if you aren't selling something online, then it can be a little bit more difficult to tie social sales. So I'm always a little bit hesitant with that. But you'll notice that some of the things that I don't have on here, like going viral, I don't think that's a realistic social media goal. It might happen, you never know. But it's not something that you can be like, you know, Q4, let's just do it, let's go viral. That's a little bit hard to plan for. And I wouldn't want anyone trying to keep me accountable to that. So these are some of the ones that I recommend. Maybe it's Some of your goals can be to make sure that your content, your blog posts are getting more impressions by sending them out on social channels as well. Or that you'll have more people learning about your brand because they're engaging with your stuff on Pinterest or on Instagram, wherever it ends up being. So the takeaway here is to set realistic goals. So I would encourage you to figure out what your goals are for your business and then how social media can support them. Again, I mentioned being viral, but just remember that simply being present on social media, it doesn't mean that you're going to get these results or necessarily go viral. You really do have to do the work and then you'll receive the results from the work that you put in. And it does take time. So yeah, I also wanted to chat creating content a little bit next.

Sure. I think you're right on there. People expect to post social media and they're like, oh, why did not everybody opt into my thousand dollar funnel? And I think the social media is all about kind of creating the conversations or getting the top of the funnel, getting people to make aware that you're there. You're much more likely to have a lot of clicks or opt ins if it's something that's a dollar versus a thousand bucks. And then you doing a good job of taking those leads and then building customer value along the way and have them become loyal followers or advocates of your product or your education or you're doing so that they do find value in what you're doing. It's not a, hey, just I'm going to follow my credit card up in the air. Free district to run with, right?

Exactly, exactly. And then people are like, Well, I have 600 followers, why don't I get 600 likes? It's like, well, that's not, that's not how that works at all. It's a very different number that you're, you know, your engagement number is very different from the number of people that are actually following you. You have to, you know, you have to be present, you have to keep posting. And that's, that's one of the reasons that we recommend posting consistently. That tells the algorithm, hey, I'm here constantly. You know, Facebook and Instagram and Twitter, those places, they're always changing their algorithms. And you know, Twitter, you can switch it off so that you're just seeing a timeline as well. But at the end of the day it does matter that you're consistently showing up because it also tells your audience like, hey, I'm here, you can engage with me again. And every time you put stuff out, if you always have people that are interested in engaging, that's going to do wonders for your social media presence. And since I mentioned the algorithm, I think something that a lot of people don't realize is when you post something, let's say Facebook, for example, one of the ways that it works is Facebook is not going to show that post to, let's say your 600 followers immediately. They're going to show it to a really small fraction of that who is currently online, let's say like 10, 20 people. And depending on how those 10, 20 people react to your post, do they like it? Do they engage with it? So Facebook also keeps track of how much time they spent looking at it, which sounds kind of creepy, but they do have that information. That's not something you can track, but they know that. So if someone does spend a lot of time looking at the post, so they click the video, whatever it might be, that will then open it up and they'll be like, okay, we'll show this to the next 50 people who are online, in the next hundred people who are online. One of the struggles is that Facebook does prioritize content from family and friends. But Scott, you mentioned being in Facebook groups and that's great because Facebook groups are a really great place for people to engage and people get much better results with their posts being seen in groups than they do just sending it out onto Facebook in general.

Yeah, we see that on a regular basis. The groups, many posting groups do a better job. You know, like I've got 5,000 followers, my personal Facebook page and 33,000 my business page. But posting to the private groups, whether it's for our networking groups or our private students, always does a better job. Always does a better job.

It's prioritized in the algorithm. Yeah. So, you know, since we're talking about that, let's talk about creating content a little bit for your posts as well, for your pages as well. So there are a lot of different kinds of content. I just wanted to quickly, you know, you never know how experienced people are with some of this. So some of you might be like, oh, I already know all this, but I just want to quickly, you know, you've got your text only posts, you've got videos, images and links. You know, you've got stories also on Instagram, Instagram, Facebook. I think LinkedIn was starting to experiment with stories. YouTube does stories. Quite a. And those are the quick 15 second videos or images that you can share that would show up when someone clicks on your profile photo in the little circle around there.

You've seen video, though. I would say climb that ladder quite a bit over the last couple years though, too. Right?

Yeah. So that's something I wanted to chat about here. So we did a study last year of the top 500 Facebook posts of 2018. And I mean, video is way better if you're looking at the top posts all year. Last year it was video by a huge, huge, huge margin. And then images. So one of the big things that I tell people is even if you are not on Instagram or you're not on Pinterest and you're like, well, I don't have to post a photo. If you're able to. If you can find a way to do something visual, if you can, whether it's a video of you or you're doing this live stream. Scott, like, this isn't a photo of a house or anything like that. This is something that some people can engage with and it's, you know, their faces. And I think that's much more engaging. If you can find a way to do that, figure out what it is that you can share that will be a little bit more visual. I can guarantee that that will be more engaging. You know, visual content way outperforms other types of content.

Wow, that's huge.

Yeah, this is definitely huge. So I had a couple quick guidelines that I wanted to share. This one, I think is some people, if they follow Gary Vee, he talks about jab, jab, jab, cross. The idea being, you know, you entertain or educate three times and then on the fourth time you can sell and you can talk about your business, but the other three times, you know, you're talking about something that's more entertaining to them. So that's always something that I recommend. It can feel like, well, of course, it's my, you know, it's marketing. I want to promote my business every time. But that's not how people. People won't respond to that as well as they could get a second opinion. This is something that I recommend a lot of people, especially if you're early in your social media journey or you haven't seen a lot of engagement. Find a friend or find someone and be like, hey, I was about to post this. Would you like it or would you comment on it, or would you keep scrolling? Do you think that this is engaging enough? I think there are a lot of things that you can do with emojis and questions and photos to get things engaging. So keep trying and keep showing it to other people if you have those people that you can lean on to see if something might work. I also always remind people that attention spans are very short. And, you know, if you watch your own social media habits, you will know that this is true. You just see people scrolling, whether it's on their computer or on their phone, they're just, you know, they're going through. So it's, you have to find a way to capture their attention. Whether it's you have a bright color, you have, you know, an emoji that you're using, or someone's face where you don't usually have someone's face. There are different things that you can try. We use very colorful photos on our buffer Instagram and those tend to pop out sometimes when people are scrolling, they tend to see a lot of the same colors and like, boom, there's a rainbow or something that's a little bit more catchy. So remember, attention spans are short as well. And create content for mobile. This is one of the biggest ones. But a lot of people are using their phones when they're consuming your content, when they're on Facebook, when they're on Instagram and on Twitter, they're usually on their phones. So what that means is that vertical video is best if possible. We've done studies on this. We've put money into ads and seeing which performs better, whether it's those little horizontal videos or the vertical video. And it's vertical every time. You can't do vertical. Even square video is better than horizontal video. So whatever it is that will look good on mobile. And then the other thing is remembering types and sort of like if you're going to do a video with text in it, make sure the text is big enough for someone to read on their phone.

We actually friends and had Hani Mora from Repurposed IO on last night and he's made some amazing software changes that take somebody's video or even their audio podcast and be able to create a stagnant image and then customize it with just a few buttons inside of a service. So they can be either horizontal or square or vertical videos there with just a few settings and workflow creations and just make it a whole lot easier to upload that stuff to buffer and make things happen.

Oh, that's so awesome. Yeah, there are a couple. I really love going through stories when I see people sharing podcasts and I'll share sort of like the sound wave going. But yeah. So the takeaway there find A balance between promoting yourself and entertaining or educating your audience. And then remember to think like your audience when you're creating your content. Would you interact with it? Is it going to capture their attention? Is it good for mobile? All right, last but not least, some tools. So we've already chatted about Buffer, so I'll leave that one. I'll leave that one alone. Since we chatted about that in the beginning, but I just wanted to add it here. This is one of my personal tool stacks as well. Canva is something I always recommend to people. If you've never used Canva before, you jump in there, you feel like you're a graphic designer. It's the best feeling in the world. Feel like you can do anything. You can make graphics for promoting an event that you're doing, or even flyers or pamphlets or social posts, anything like that. You can do it in Canva for free and they charge you if you use some of their images. But I've managed to get away with sending one or two dollars there in the last several years that I've used it.

So there's so much. It's such a great. We're in that every day.

Yeah. So I can highly recommend Canva as like a really good accompaniment to your social media strategy. Unsplash also. So free. Beautiful photos online. If you are not a visual business, but you need really good photos, sometimes use Unsplash. You get them for free. You don't have to credit the person. It's nice if you do, but it's not required. And you can use it in tandem with Canva and sort of like, use Canva. Upload an image from Unsplash, put whatever words or text you want to put over there. Photo editing. This is really big. Even if you're running around on your phone and you're just running around on your phone, you took a photo and you're like, I think that'll be really good for my Instagram post, you know, half a second to try Adobe Lightroom. The mobile app is free, so you can use it. I think there are a couple of features that aren't. You can use it for free on your phone. So it's not like the one on your computer where you need to pay a subscription. And then VSCO is free as well. Or if you want to try playing around with the Instagram, editing and editing, like brightness levels or structure, whatever it is. I always say that just try it and see what happens. Because I think just adding a little bit of work into making your photos look that Much better. It goes a really long way in making your page and your profile look a lot more professional.

So I've taken pictures. Especially when you have light in the background and it puts a shadow on everybody faces. Changing the filters on or even on Instagram will lighten it up and make people actually. Oh, I actually can see the people there versus just being a figure.

Exactly, exactly. And same thing for video. You can create and edit videos very easily online. I recommend Animoto and Wistia. We've worked with both of them before. Very, very easy to use. So if you're super intimidated and you're like, well, I don't know how to edit video, there's a tool out there that can help you. I promise they spend all of their time on this. And then one last one I wanted to mention I'm personally a huge fan of todoist. I use them for my to do list personally. And if you go into Todoist and you look at their project templates, we actually collaborated with them. We created a social media manager template that you can get that project and it will show you how to plan all of your tweets and stuff within Buffer using Todoist for reminders. So if you are the kind of person that likes the to do list, I can recommend them and I can recommend that project template.

Nice. Yeah, I haven't heard it todoist yet. Yeah, that's cool.

They're my favorite. I'm a little addicted. It's a problem. That was it for me. I can stop sharing my screen now. I wanted to quickly shout out that we do a lot of free education on our website. So if you have a lot more questions about social media marketing, definitely check out buffer.com buffer.com resources and I am also, as you would imagine on social media in most places just a little bit.

One of the things I found very interesting is I think when we were first talking about a week or two ago, you mentioned that all of Buffer, all the staff works remotely. You don't have a office, right?

That's right. So we're just over 80 something people and we all work from home around the world. So it's pretty fun. I've been at a company for three and a half years. I've lived in several different cities. So we use a lot of tools online to collaborate with each other and communicate.

Yeah, that's a good thing because it's one of the things we see with people we have, especially with our note business people are buying and doing things across the country. And they're like, oh, I got to have an assistant that works in my backyard. No, not necessarily. There's companies that are doing this all across the world. You can do it as well too, if you run into issues.

Absolutely. And we see a lot of benefits from being remote. We're a software company, so it might be a little bit specific to us, but we have customer support reps all around the world. So any time of the day, if a customer needs to get in touch with someone at Buffer, someone is online. And not only that, we have engineers all around the world. So if something breaks, hopefully it doesn't. But if something does break, there's an engineer probably online. Because we have engineers in Asia and Europe and North America, you know, all.

Over 24 hour day access to help get stuff figured out there for you, right?

Exactly, exactly.

I like using VAS because then I go to sleep and they work while I'm asleep. I wake up and they get the project done and I'm off rocking and rolling there. For those that are watching, what questions do you have for Haley out there? Shannon, I'm sure you've got a question or two. Then putting Shannon on the spot there. While you guys are, you can use the chat roll feature, the Q and A feature here in Zoom that we're using too, to ask your questions. Going back here, we had John Bailey said, hi, Ellie. Listening to your podcast for a long time. Sorry you're gone, but get it. I now need to go. I'm already using Buffer on several accounts and it's www.all.com.

That'S awesome. Yeah, we switched up the hosts on the other podcast. Always good to have new voices and we have a lot of great people at Buffer and great voices at Buffer.

And it's a great thing. They bring different personalities and different experiences and definitely different stories.

Exactly.

To drive some stuff there for you. You mentioned Buffer as a personal. And then they also have the business aspect you want to talk about a little bit different between the two different features.

Just the different, like account types, I suppose. Yeah. So we have a free. We have a very robust free version of Buffer that I got away with using for a long time before I started the company. And then we have various levels of business plans, so let me pull up the pricing so that I don't quote anything incorrectly because I know that we've just made a couple of changes and I would hate to be that person.

To give out false subject to change depending on when you're listening or watching.

This little asterisk over Here. But yeah, so we. The next level up from free. So for free, it's just a limited amount of accounts. So you can have three social accounts. You can schedule 10 posts at a time. You can have one user. If you are a one person running a business. That worked for me for a very long time because I didn't need another user. I didn't need more than 10 accounts or 10 posts scheduled at one time. I was not that organized and I only had so many social accounts. The next level up from that is $15 a month gets you eight social accounts, 100 scheduled posts, and one user. And then it goes up from there. If you're a business and if you need 2000 scheduled posts, I don't know what you're up to, but I know some people that use that and adding more users. We also have different levels for our other tools, Reply and analyze as well. And then we have bundles. If you're like, actually, I think my business needs all three of these. There's a discount if you're using all three as well. Our pricing is super flexible. We aim to make it that way so you can upgrade and downgrade as needed. There are no contracts. And we have really, really great customer support reps. Like I mentioned, they're around the world, but we also do these customer advocacy days. At Buffer, we had one last Wednesday where the whole team jumps into the inbox. So I was answering support tickets, our engineers are answering support tickets. So we have a really good culture of getting back to people quickly. Oh, yeah, Very, very good questions get answered.

Yeah, that's a good answer. But, yeah, you guys are really, really quick on any type of support and stuff like that. Fast and. Fast and furious when it comes to it.

We'll take it. We'll be fast and furious. What are we at now? 8, 7, 6, something like that?

It'll be like 16 before 2.

Yeah.

I think the big one of the things I loved about there is that you shared a. Hey, picking where your audience is at, what's the demographics, and really kind of knowing, I guess, as we like to say, the avatar of your client or your investor or whatever your audience member is and figuring out where they're hanging out at.

Right, right. Yeah, I think that's one of the biggest things, because if you think of it, if you were spending all your time on a social network where no one was, first of all, it's a waste of your time. But second of all, it's easier for you to go where everyone else is than for you to Go somewhere new and be like, hey, guys, no, this is great. And try to pull everyone else over. That's a lot of extra work you would be signing yourself up for. So I definitely recommend just figure out where they are. It can take a little bit of research. But once you've done that research and you've actually found like, okay, this is where my audience is. I know this for sure. I need to use the right hashtags or I need to get into the right groups or whatever it is. It might still take a little bit of work. But having that one step, having that one, I'm in the right place as my audience is huge in making sure that the rest of your strategy is set up for success. Because if you're not in the right place, it might not matter what else you do, it might not matter what the rest of your strategy is because you're going to be shouting out into the abyss because people just aren't there.

Good question here. Shannon asked a question. Great tips. Question. What is Buffer's best feature that most people don't know about?

I think those Instagram features are my favorite. Definitely Instagram Mobile for that Grid Rearranged is probably my favorite. We have that, what I talked about. First comment to go out. We also have Hashtag saver, I think. So if you have Those, you said 11 hashtags that you want to save and you're probably going to use them every time or you have like a variant that you're going to use, you can save them and now you don't have to type out 11 hashtags or do what I do, which is I kept them all in notes and I copy pasted them. Yeah. So I think that's probably my favorite is just our new Instagram features for Buffer. Yeah. And then just the app. Like, I think people don't realize how powerful the app is. We have an entire dedicated team of mobile engineers and they are absolutely incredible. I can't believe the stuff that they do. So the mobile app does look different from web. It has a lot of the same features, but it's a little different. It's just so easy to use. I schedule Instagram posts. One of the accounts that I manage, I schedule Instagram posts while I'm watching tv. Like it's so easy to do on my phone. I just do it on my phone. I line up all the Instagram posts for a week and that's it.

That's nice. That's extremely good stuff there. Now I have a question for you. I saw that on one of the accounts, I think your Twitter account, they're posting at 5 o' clock or different various times of 5 o' clock in the morning. Was there a 2am one in there too?

Yeah, I actually have to talk to my co host about that one. I hadn't seen that one.

But you said you have a lot of listeners that are what, in Germany or something like that in Europe?

Yeah, so, yeah, so my co host is in Europe and we do have a lot of European listeners as well. So one of the things that we do is we try to get our posts out early in the day on the US side of things so that the European people are already online and then they engage with it. And once they've engaged with it, then the US people come online and it's already got engagement, so then they engage with it. So I think this is one of the biggest things that people always want to talk to me about. They're like, well, what time should I post? And it's like, I wish I could tell you two o' clock every other Thursday when there's a full moon. I don't know. That's not going to work, unfortunately. I wish I could tell you a time, but I can tell you that looking into your analytics will tell you when to post. So even if you run a group, I don't know if you knew this, Scott, but you have specific group analytics. I don't know if you've been in there. It's really good in your group analytics. It'll tell you what posts perform better on which day and when people are online. We can tell you that in buffer analyze as well. But you can also grab that information from your accounts. Twitter has this, Facebook has this for pages and posts, and Instagram has this as well. It'll tell you what day most people are online or it will tell your demographic and it'll be like most of your people are in North America. And then you know, okay, most people are in North America. Probably east coast. More people are on the east coast than the other coasts or depending on your business then. Now try to think of when do you access social media? For me, probably a little bit in the morning, a little bit on my lunch break, and then a bunch after work. What does that tell you? It tells you there are three times during the day when you will have more people online. Because ideally the time that you're posting is when the most possible people are online. Because we talked about that algorithm, you want the most people possible to like your stuff immediately or comment on your stuff immediately and then it'll show it to more people. So the game is figuring out when is most of your audience online and then posting. Then it takes a little bit of finagling, I think. And it's not perfect. People go on vacations, long weekends, change things up. But I think ideally those times of like, okay, morning lunch breaks after work, when is it that they might want to see this content might change depending on your business too. But definitely look into your analytics because I promise they will have a way better answer than on every other full moon, which is all I can tell you.

Or when Mercury is in retrograde, right?

Exactly, yeah. Because I don't know, I haven't looked at your account so.

Well, I just found that interesting because 5 o' clock is making 7 o' clock on the east coast time when people are getting up and rocking and rolling and kind of building that on. This is something that I didn't think about that we might need to bump. If I'm thinking 8 o' clock at night or 9 o' clock at night here, it should be 8 o' clock my time. So that the 9 o' clockers on the east coast time, when they're in bed, like a lot of people checking their social media when they're sitting in bed before they go to the big thing there. Is there a what you think is a no go, a no fly zone of the times that you probably shouldn't be posting? I saw that you don't have a lot of stuff on the weekend. Is that more so because a lot of your podcast listen Monday through Friday or how does that kind of work?

We don't prioritize LinkedIn because we're following my own advice and we're very focused on Twitter and Instagram, which is where our community is primarily. So we still post episode updates to LinkedIn, but our place that we really engage is Twitter and Instagram. So I think you were asking specifically about LinkedIn times or no.

Is there some things that you've come to know that hey, don't be posting Saturday at noon and Sunday at noon or stuff like that one.

That's kind of interesting. Studies have shown that people prefer business content during the week and like fun content on the weekend. So if you were a primarily business company and your weekend posts aren't performing well, it's probably because on the weekend people don't want to be thinking about that. And if you are talking about really fun vacations and stuff like that during the week, some people might like that. But Some people might be like, no, I'm in work mode. I can't really focus on this right now. That's something they might spend more time on the weekend. Just since you mentioned that, I think this is really funny. We found out this is one of our episodes that we did on the science of social media. When I was hosting with Brian. We did a Best times to post. There are a lot of people on Instagram at East coast time, 2am I don't know what it is. I think it's because there are a lot of young users. They're not supposed to be on Instagram, but they are. But again, this is what you're talking about with before bed. We all check social media. We're not all. We wouldn't tell anyone that. We all check. So it's not something that we would advertise. Like, yeah, I spent a bunch of time lying in my bed scrolling through social media. But if you think of your own habits and the habits of the people that you know, we probably are. So I think that's the only one that I can think of is maybe not in the middle of the night. Unless you're trying to reach teenagers that are online at 2am or you're doing.

The whole like Tinder swipe left, I got home from the park.

Mind your. Your audience is going to be very different. But and then that other thing that I mentioned of like, you know, B2B content during the week and B2C on the weekends.

That makes good sense. Good advice out there. That's really good advice because we've seen that happen. Fun stuff on the weekends and try to keep it business Monday through Friday for the most part. Especially if you got a podcast and you schedule on a regular basis, the more you can promote that it's coming out that nearer that time works really well for you aspect of things.

Exactly. Yeah. And again, figure out if your audience are they morning people, are they evening people? Some people will engage in the mornings and others are just, you know, they're just scrolling through. They might not engage. And it's the same with email marketing. You send emails at different times to get different open rates. Yeah.

One final question. When we'll get you on your day because I know you've got a showing here before too long. What's the life of a post? Somebody mentioned earlier that I seen that really a Facebook post is about a five hour life before it kind of gets buried. Twitter, a lot of things can get buried. Post the same thing multiple times, different times throughout the day. On Twitter, where do you see kind of a life? You know, the lifeblood or lifetime of a specific post can have on average.

I think, depending on the engagement, it's probably pretty short. If it is something that you're seeing, like, well, 100 people liked it today and 200 people liked it tomorrow, it's gonna last a little longer because people are excited about it and you're getting a little bit more engagement. For the most part, they are sort of. They'll go away very quickly, especially if you didn't get very much engagement. So we've done something before where if we've posted, I know that Brian, who used to be our social media manager, used to do this. He would post on our Facebook, and if we didn't immediately get a certain number of likes, he might delete it and then try posting again a half hour later when more people are online. That obviously takes a lot of time. And you can figure that out in your analytics as well. I would say. It's a very, very short span. I would definitely caution against posting the same thing multiple times a day because if someone saw it first thing in the day, then Twitter might show it to them again. Or depending on how the algorithm works, depending on where you're posting, that same social network might show the same post to the same person because it's like, oh, well, they saw it earlier and they engaged with it. So let's show them your posts again because they're engaging with it. So I think definitely be cautious with that one. But, yeah, there is no.

If you're sharing the same link, Share a different image or different.

Exactly.

Tweak it up some. Basically, definitely change it up.

Make it a little bit fresh, you know, add some emojis, whatever it might be. Change. Add some different content in between there. Yeah, it's a hard one. It's really difficult and it's tough because it is so specific to each person. But I always recommend just dig into your analytics. You'd be surprised how little effort it takes. A lot of people are intimidated when you say the word analytics, but they try to make them very intuitive. And that's what we try to do when we use analyze. And I know Facebook and Instagram, they're not out there to try and confuse you. They're just trying to show you the information. And there's a lot that you can glean from that. Maybe Google Analytics is a little different. I get lost in there sometimes. But trust me that Facebook and Instagram and Twitter analytics are a little easier to understand.

Yeah, great stuff, Haley. Well, hey, I want to say thank you so much for carving an hour out of your busy day to join us here. There are so many great nuggets and knowledge and dropping some buffer bombs, as we like to say. It's a big figure. So we look forward to seeing you again and having you on something down the road. And something else for you. All right, Hailey.

Sounds great. Yeah, we'll keep in touch. And hopefully now my house will sell.

Great stuff there. Thanks, Haley. Have a great day, Sam.