Why Social Media Matters | Jason Will

All right, perfect. Thank you for coming here. And we've got some little stuff that I'll be tossing out along the way, so just make sure you ask some questions and we'll keep this very interactive. So how many people actually have a Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook account? All 3? All 3 of them? Everybody in this room has all 3 of those accounts? Yes. Okay, some of you don't. Well, today hopefully that— it'll be something that inspires you to become a little bit more social in nature. And not only that, but understand why we actually do need to be on this tool that consumes so much of our life. So here at the beginning, who am I? Jason Will. A little bit about myself. And this is really the start of where you start to brand yourself online, is that every time that you have a chance to put yourself out there on the internet, what you're really doing is, is that you're representing yourself to the world. So the question is, is that we all have a resume, correct? This is actually your digital resume. Whether you want to believe that or not, the PDF that you have that you send around for jobs is actually now more important than that. Because this is what the world gets to see you for. All your thoughts, all the things that you share with the world are all captured here and can be found here. And guess what? They don't ever go away. So your resume, you can change it as much as you want and it stays on your computer. This is your digital footprint. Everybody can always find out who you are. So you have to be very careful and you have to know what you're doing. Okay, here we go. So here's a quote from actually our brand ambassador. And if it doesn't make sense in the real world, then it won't make sense in the digital world. Anybody have any idea what that means? Go ahead. Trying to make a difference or something, that's digital. If it doesn't make sense in an analog format, then it won't make sense in the digital format. Absolutely. And on top of that, even more so, even more so, we get into the situation where if you pass somebody on the street and they say, hi, how are you doing? Do you just look at them, don't say anything, and walk away? No. How often does this really happen though? How many, how many times you pass somebody, they, they recognize who you are, they try to initiate a conversation, maybe you're too busy, you just walk past them without saying anything in return? It happens, right? Do you feel good about yourself, or does it feel like, wow, I feel pretty stupid right now? Does anybody feel that way? Imagine the same thing when somebody reaches out to you online and they want to learn about your business. They want to ask you a question. And if you don't respond, it's the same thing as me passing you on the street saying something, you don't reply to what I'm saying. You have to treat social media like that. It's a conversation between 2 people. And both people need to give people equal respect and understand that it's a conversation. It just happens to be that that conversation's online. That make sense to everybody? Yes. Okay, cool. One more thing about that is that most businesses, especially if you're running a company account online, it is now the new form of customer service. So think about it that way. Whether you're receiving an email to a support email, somebody's calling you on the phone, or somebody's tweeting or sending you an Instagram message, It's the exact same thing, and people expect the exact same level of respect and communication across all those channels. It's not different. So this concept of give, give, give— anybody have any idea what I'm trying to get at with this? Go ahead. Give as much value as you can? This is absolutely it. So typically, once every couple months, I'll put something up here where I'll try to interact with all brand new people I've never interacted with before. And just start giving to random people and hopefully inspire other people to do the same. When you are new on social media, it's very difficult to get traction, and you don't really understand fully what it takes to get to several hundred thousand followers online because you don't get to see the hard work that somebody put in over years and years. But by helping the new person, inspiring the new person to give back to the people that eventually will be the new people that start after them, you continue this cycle and you really get to set a tone for how people, you know, interact with each other. On top of that, every single day I basically on my accounts and our company accounts, we push out our influencer content because that's what we do. We build the network around us. You're only as strong as the network that you create around yourself, correct? Does everybody agree with that? Yes. Okay, so with that being said, If you strengthen the network around you and you're building a community of these like-minded individuals who continuously share each other's content, now what you start to do is build this monster of a community. The more powerful these people are around you, the more powerful that you actually become. So if you think about this concept here around automating across platforms, I see this all the time. This is the quickest way to find out if somebody has no clue what they're doing online. And as a result, a lot of people will not interact with you as a result. Every platform is very different, and the way that you handle those platforms, what you say, the way you use hashtags, the way that you tag people is all extremely different, and you have to know how it works. There are some tools that definitely help with this, but it will never replace that interaction that we talked about earlier, which is that respect. When somebody reaches out to you, you can't send an automated response that says, Thank you so much, Crowdfire. Okay, this does not feel personal. It doesn't feel like they can connect with you. You've gotta make sure that that voice is authentic, whether or not that it comes from the help of one of these tools that helps automate some things, but you always have to reply to people with yourself, right? So that part always has to be manual.