Maximizing Your Social Media

Hey, what's going on? So it's Tommy again and kind of on a roll today, cranking out some content. And I want to introduce you guys to some of the people who make leadfast possible, but also are experts in their field and all the things that we talk about here. And so Danae Huff is the founder of 26 Social, which is a marketing agency in Chicago. She's also a good friend of ours here at Lead Fast and Wazootix and all the other businesses that we have, handles all these things that keep you attractive and then take that attraction and make interest out of it on social. And so we're gonna talk to her today online and see what that looks like. All right, so I think that we're recording.

Okay, good. Fingers crossed.

Yeah, so it looks that way. So, I mean.

Okay, good. So we did it.

There's a thing that says stop recording. So this is our first time that we've done this. So I have another camera. They're watching. They're watching us. The world is watching us. So this is the first time we've done this. So you'll see both pieces. So thanks for hanging out with us today. I've only already talked to Danae like 47 times today.

Yeah, I know. This is just another check mark.

Yeah. And so she doesn't actually even know what we're going to talk about either. So we've. She. She sent me a text. She was like, what are we going to talk about? We'll figure it out. Which is kind of how we always do things. But Danae is amazing at what she does. And so anybody out there 26social, the word 20, the number 6social.com is her website. She's incredible. And she's currently taking clients. I take up a lot of her time because I'm high maintenance, but she's excellent. And she never sleeps, by the way. What's that?

I said we don't like to frame it that way. But you said it, not me.

This is also true. But she never sleeps, and she's incredible. So we'll get to get to business. Yeah. So you know that I am always talking about attraction, interest, conversion, purchase, repeat. That's for me. That's my whole world. And you handle the attraction and the interest part of things for me. It's difficult for me to be attractive all the time. I know you're looking at me right now thinking, what? But seriously. But Danae and I have been friends for a long time, and I really just hand everything to her. I trust her. Implicitly. So talk to me or talk to them really about what the strategy is for Lead Fast and how all the things I've done wrong so far and.

The fear we've been on here for a while.

Oh, hurt my heart.

Just kidding. Just some good old fashioned client love. That's right. Yeah. So with Leave Fast Company, we have kind of a lot of strategies happening at one time because I think the beauty of starting out with a new business is the fact that the possibilities are endless, but it's also a lot of trial and error. So I think that the biggest struggle that a lot of people have is that they start their social media platforms, they get their handles all locked and loaded and they put together a strategy and they think that they can put it on autopilot and just kind of let it go. But that's something that we are encountering with leadfast, that that's not necessarily the most productive route. So it's been a lot of, okay, well, this post worked and this post didn't and okay, so how can we switch that up a little bit? The next one? Nothing is consistent and that's fun, but it's also time consuming. It also requires a lot of thought and a lot of just fixing, fixing things. And I think that you experience that all the time because you're very quick to want to. Well, I did this before and I got 45 likes, so I'm just gonna do it again and I'm gonna keep doing it until Danae tells me not to.

That's the strategy.

Constant battle. Yeah, that's a strategy in and of itself. But with Lead Fast, it has been a lot of, okay, let's implement this and let's throw this into the content and then, okay, that works. But we can't just stick with that one element of content. We can't just post a quote every single day and hope that it's gonna work. We need to throw Tommy into it and humanize your brand a little bit. So we're starting to implement a little bit more because I think we have a solid ground to work with right now. But yeah, I mean, that's definitely a struggle. And that's kind of been the approach so far. But I think what we're like two months into it now.

Yeah, not very much at all. I keep going back to in my head, the way I have to force myself to think about it is as if you were dating someone new and every time you saw them, they look different.

Yeah.

You know, it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, she's really cute. She's really cute.

Whoa.

She looks busted. Oh. Oh, no, she looks okay. Oh, now she's all glam. Now she looks like a hipster. Like, what the heck? Like, it's sort of like beauty schizophrenia a little bit. And so that for me has been a challenge because whatever ideas in my head I want to instantaneously do, I want to just keep going. But there's some. The problem is that I see because I'm an ingester of content, so I see things that I like and then I want to replicate it and try to do that, and I do that without talking to the experts. Not a good plan. Yeah. So exactly. So, like in Jeff too, like. So Jeff Danae and Jeff work together. Jeff does a lot of almost all of my graphic design. He's responsible for the website and works for our other companies. And he's incredible. E35 Media. What is it with you, like, cool kids and your numbers in the name? So e35Media is Jeff and he's incredible. Brotherton is the last name. He fusses at me all the time too, because my graphic design's not consistent. I get on Canva and I have this thought that I think the world should know right now, and it's not like they could not know tomorrow. And I could send it to Jeff and it could all be consistent, but I have this ego need to express right now, get what I want. So I'm working on that as a leader, but also as a manager of my own brand. That's a challenge for me, but that helps me stay consistently attractive. But talk a little bit about the strategy we've got right now with how we maintain frequency. Because I see guys like gary vaynerchuk post 12 times a day, and I wanna say something 12 times a day, even if it's just ridiculous. But it's me and it's out there. But that doesn't work. Like Facebook algorithms, all the weird stuff in the background for a small startup gu somebody that has all of 140ish people on my Instagram right now, two months into this, that's like the kiss of death is to have that much content.

Yeah. So I think that. And that's part of the struggle with starting a small business is you're excited, you're motivated, you have a billion things that you've written down and you want to share with people. And it's very easy to be like you and want to just push it all out there because it's new and it's fun. And it's exciting. But to that 140 people, or however large your following is, it's not exciting. They don't want to live and breathe LeadFastCo. They want LeadFastCo to be seamlessly integrated into their newsfeed. And when it hits them, they want to know that it's hitting them for a reason. And that's a really big struggle, I think, that a lot of people have is forgetting to look at their brand in the eyes of the consumer and instead going towards it with their just eye on the prize and clients. Having access to things like Canva is my worst nightmare for that reason. Because you get excited and you have all these thoughts and you're like, okay, let me toss it in here, and I'm just gonna push it up. And with the way that the algorithms are progressing, and granted, don't get me wrong, three weeks from now, I might change everything. But that's what we have to do. We have to adapt with the way that the algorithm tells us to, because it's Facebook's world, and we're all just living in it and trying to play the game. So the way that the algorithms are working right now, don't quote me on this, but right now is that the whole point is to really encourage meaningful conversation. And that's not necessarily conversation between a brand and a follower. That's conversations between followers on your brand. So when someone's scrolling through their newsfeed or scrolling through their timeline on Instagram and they see something, it needs to first be visually appealing, for sure. But then it needs to invoke a thought, an emotion, something that makes them want to say, hey, I'm gonna go tag my friend Susie underneath this post, because I think it's cool, and I think she'll think it's cool, too. And something that people like Gary have are hundreds of thousands of followers that already know him and his brand, and they want to engage with every single thing, all that does is keep pushing him up on the algorithm. For someone like you with LeanFastCo, if you're tossing out that content every five minutes and people don't know who the heck you are, all it's gonna do is make them swipe right past it and move on to the next thing. So with Instagram specifically, I think that's a struggle that we've encountered with you, is because you do want to push stuff out more than once a day. More than once every couple of days. But as you'll see as you're scrolling through an Instagram feed, You'll get posts that come up in your timeline that say from two days ago. And that's because at that moment, Instagram's saying, we know that they posted it a couple of days ago, but people are engaging with it, People are engaging on it. And so we're going to shift that out to a couple more people, and then if they engage with it, we'll shift it out to more. So as you continue to post, you run the risk of your posts showing up out of order, overlapping each other, and it just becoming too overwhelming for a consumer, and it doesn't resonate with them and they move on. And it's so easy to lose followers because of that, because you're overwhelming them with stuff. So understanding the way that the algorithms work in that sense is what's going to help you maximize your content.

So for everybody watching, she's really smart. She said a lot. And I hope you got something out of that. I quit listening like four minutes ago, but here's why. So I'm putting out a video tomorrow. I recorded it today. I'll have the same hat on. You can't miss the hat. It's really cool. About passion and about how excellence is just passion plus proficiency or proficiency plus passion. And I run like a thousand percent passion at any given moment. I just want to get what we want to get, and I want to go hard after it. And you can be 75% of the way there on passion alone. And you can be 75% of the way there on proficiency alone. If you are algorithm nerd and you're one of those people out there that understands the data and how that flows, and you can, you can take almost any content and get it in front of people. Like, for example, I was posting and I was like, you know what? These are great quotes. I think I'm smart. And so I was putting out stuff that I thought was good. And then. And like, 12 people, my mom and my mom's friends were like, liking it or whatever, and Denae sent me this, like, list of hashtags and said, make this the first comment, blah, blah, blah, here's how you do it. Boom, 45 people, 60 people. Like, it was. It was 4x when I was getting sort of just with my little circle of people that I had told about things and they weren't sharing it or whatever. So if so that's. That added a level of proficiency to things I was passionate about and gave me excellence. And that's really what an expert does. It's the reason why. And I'm pretty, pretty hands on, I think. I mean, you know me well enough to know that, like, I like things the way I want things and I want to have, I want them to happen when I want to happen. But seeing a desire for excellence has allowed me to let go to a large degree to Jeff and to Danae and say, you guys tell me what I should be doing. And Danae has been crucial in narrowing that focus for me based on what the numbers and what analytics and what data and what everybody else is looking at tells her you guys are interested in and so that I can maximize my efforts to these people. Where do you find all that? Where should we be looking outside of hiring you? Where should we be looking for all that crap?

So researching. And it's hard because it's really hard to take the time and say, okay, I'm going to dedicate an hour a day or even an hour a week and go through and look at different things like that. But doing the research is going to be the most important step. And it's no different than investing money into your business, investing time, Investing time into figuring out, okay, what marketing strategies are going to work, whether that's social media, which, duh. But on top of that, what else can I look at? The same way that you, for your website would go into Google Analytics, you need to be going into your Instagram insights, you need to be going into your Facebook page insights, Twitter insights, I mean, any of it. And making sure that you're dedicating a certain amount of your time to making sure that the same way all your other strategies are on track. So is your social media, Because I think that people forget that the way marketing is evolving, not just digital marketing, I mean, marketing as a whole, it's going towards the path of social media. And whether you're a brand, whether you're a product, whether you're a service, no matter what it is, there's no denying that that's how people are going to find you. And that's where elements like your hashtag strategy come into play. Because you can't just appeal to your followers. You can't just appeal to the people who are going to scroll through and find you. You need to also appeal to the people that are outside your following base. The same way you would put new products into your stores to try and bring people in. It's the same concept. It's just virtual. And I think that's a really easy thing for people to forget. And so taking the time to say, I'm gonna sit here and I'm gonna look through this. I'm gonna figure out what's working and what's not and evolve my strategy accordingly. Is the most important thing you can.

Yeah. The same way Web went mobile first. You have to have a mobile first strategy. Marketing is really going social first. So we've been doing this for about 15 minutes now, and you've told me that's the maximum amount of time we can make content for, so I'm gonna let you off the hook. And I was watching the clock, but thanks so much for hanging out with us. And you'll hear more from. From her, because it's an easy way for me to get content done. I'm just saying, this is what you said to do, but thanks so much, and thank you guys for tuning in.