Success Using Social Media | Tony Guidry Joins Wendy Day

Hey, welcome back! This is Tony at I Am The Connect. Tony runs A Scratchy Throat, which is a digital marketing company. Did I say it right? Yes, yes, yes. He's also my hubby. Thank you for coming. You're welcome. Yay! So today we're going to talk about social media. We spoke before about the best way to start from scratch, like when you don't have any followers and you're getting like zero love at social media. So let's talk like a little bit of an advanced level now.

Okay, well, the last time we talked about being uniform across all the social media channels, being consistent, uniform in name, correct? Uniform in name, yes.

And what about the bio? Bio's important too.

Bio's important too. Being consistent in posting, not letting any particular account lag. If you're going to post every day to Instagram, don't post once a week to Snapchat or once a week to Twitter. And we talked about following the followers of like-minded people and following the followers of our real-life friends.— to begin the basis of building social media, building your audience, building your followers, and sharing your life, I think was the last thing we talked about. These are all just the foundations of what you do from day one, and you're going to consistently do that. Now, once you get started and you're posting your interesting content and you're getting a few new eyes and you're doing a few new things and getting some new people. You're an artist, so of course you want to try to reach some influencers, um, and so you may feel like a tactic is to tag them in your posts or to tag them in the pictures or, or whatnot. Um, that's not an— it's not effective though. That's not what's going to work for you to get these people's attention. The way to get these folks' attention is to first you follow them, follow the influencers that you feel that can help your career, okay? Of course, I know you're learning and reading daily, so you're not gonna go and follow some con artist and beg him to help you and get raped. You're gonna— you're doing your research, you're learning how stuff works, and you're following the people who you feel can help you. Pay attention to them. You can turn your notifications on on Instagram for them. You can put them in a list on Twitter. You can prioritize them on Facebook. Um, make sure that you pay close attention to— don't say anything to them in the beginning. Make sure you pay close attention to what they're posting and how their lives are. And as you get a better glimpse of what they're presenting on social media, then you can start to interject or, um, interact, comment.

So you're getting to know them basically?

Well, yes.

Okay, like in real life.

It's very similar to real life because if you're, if you're on social media and let's say you see a girl you like, she's in a bikini, she's super fine, the picture got 1,000 likes, and you go and you like all of her pictures thinking that's going to get your attention. Well, you just made yourself into a creep. If she, if she notices you, you're a creep. You're some person that sat around and liked all of her pictures. It's not romantic or sexy. So when you're looking for— if you're looking for a Wendy Day to help you and you say, okay, I'm going to go to Wendy's page and you go to Wendy's page and she averages a couple hundred likes per picture and she has this art photo and then this black and white photo of some ruins, food. Yes, food and plenty of food, dog. And you know that you're not interested in photography. You're not a foodie. You're not interested in some of those things. Those aren't pictures that you would like. And you go through and find what you like. Just see, just monitor what she posts, and when you see something she posts that you like, you know, that you're interested in, you will like it, you will comment on it.

And so be real about it.

Exactly, exactly. And believe it, believe it or not, just listening— when you, when you're doing this for a purpose and you're watching and listening several different people that are influencers, you're going to have plenty of times to comment and like on stuff they're doing, and you're going to have a lot of times that you can pass. But there's going to be plenty of times you don't have to make yourself a pest to get noticed, okay? But what you want to do is, before you start the conversation— nobody likes talking to a know-it-all. So you don't want to talk to— you don't want to start a conversation just talking about yourself. That's not going to work. It's not— it gives the person no reason to interact with you because all you're talking about is, hey, I got a great mixtape. Hey, I'm the hottest artist out my city. I just need this and I just need that and that's all I need you to do. That's not the way to approach somebody who's busy being successful at what you're trying to do. The way to approach them is to learn what they're doing, learn what they like, pay attention to what they're posting, and then start interjecting and interacting with them accordingly to your shared interests. Okay, and then after a while you will get a moment where you may see they follow you back. That don't mean start spamming them and, and all of that, but they may follow you back, they may not. But eventually you're going to get numerous chances to interact with this individual. And when you do, just make sure that you present yourself, who you are, not just your music, not as an artist, but who you are before you interject with them, before you interact with them on a music level. So in getting back to the building your following, you gotta seek out the people on social media that you feel would be interested in you. And a great way of doing that is following the followers of people that are similar to you. Um, if you're, if you're the toughest gangster rapper ever, then you might want to find the hottest gangster rapper out and follow his followers. You know, you follow, you understand what I'm saying? So those, that's, that's one simple tactic, but there are also tools that you can use and I'm gonna share some of these tools with you. The dog is going crazy, dude's working on the roof.

He's getting his exercise today.

Yeah, so I'm gonna give you, I'm gonna give you some tools, okay? Um, that can help you.

Oh, give them secrets. I love that. Give them secrets.

Come on, I'm gonna give you some tools. These are tools that I use. This is no fluff. These are things that I use every day. The first one I'm going to share with you is a website called Audiense. It's Audiense with an S. A-U-D-I-E-N-S-E.com. Audiense used to be called SocialBro. It'll help you with your Twitter and your Instagram. It's real good.

What does it do?

Well, what it does, it allows you to search people's bios, um, for certain keywords. Like if you're looking for DJs, you can search people's bios for DJ. You can search people's bios for radio personality, on air. Um, you can search by cities, you can search by, um, not by age, but you can search by cities and location. You can search by interest in the bios and you could target followers of a particular person in a certain city.

Nice.

Okay. And so Audience lets you do all this. Numerous, numerous tools and it tracks your growth. It lets you see which of your photos or videos on Instagram are getting the most likes and the most interaction. It helps you monitor and track what you need to do to get more people looking at you. Um, it's a great tool. That's, that's Audience. Another, um, great Instagram tool is Instagress. It is instagress.com. What Instagress does, you have to go there and see because it's also a real, uh, interactive tool. It lets you focus on locations the followers of certain people or hashtags. And then you can choose to like people that use a certain hashtag or follow them who use a certain hashtag. Or you can choose to like pictures posted from a certain location or follow people that post from a certain location. So let's say you're an artist in, in a small city somewhere in South Dakota, but you're a gangster rapper. You're from the streets of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, from the gutter of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and it's not a big audience for gangster rap in your city. So you can go and you can see where, uh, an artist like Lil Boosie is on tour, and you can go and you can look in and see, okay, he's going to be at the Coliseum in Tallahassee on this particular date. You can set Instagress to go in and follow everybody that posts that has their location on from the Coliseum on that night during the hours that Boosie is going to be live in concert.

So you— awesome.

So you can go and follow all of those. It'll automatically do it. And you got to read and understand how it works because it works while you don't work. You turn it, you select the hours you want it to work, and when it's working, you, you can post, but you can't be liking and commenting on other people's stuff from your phone while it's working. I said because it'll lock you out. It's like two different people. It's like, um, it's like automating the Instagram. None of the social media sites like you to really automate what you got going. So, um, you gotta, you gotta work within the parameters to make sure you don't get locked out. So, but Instagress is a great tool. Another great tool for Instagram is Iconosquare.

I use Iconosquare.

Iconosquare is cool. I use it. It's I-C-O-N-O-S-Q-U-A-R-E.com. Iconosquare.com lets you track your following, track your growth. It tracks so much as to show you which filters that you use that get the most likes. Wow.

Yeah, I didn't know it did that.

Yeah, definitely. So, and then the last thing I'm, I'mma give you is, uh, this is a Facebook tool and it's called Followerwonk.

What?

Followerwonk. Wow. Straight from Morton Atkins. F-O-L-L-O-W-E-R-W-O-N-K.com. Followerwonk, um, lets you, lets you do a lot of those same things with your Facebook.

And guys, I'll put, um, down below in the, in the, um, in the comments, I will put all of these links so that you can just click on them.

You're a nice person. I make them rewatch it. You would, wouldn't you? Yeah, I love you. So I could boost my numbers up, you know what I'm saying? Watch time. 10-minute video, I have a 20-minute watch time because you gotta keep rewinding. But so those are, those are tools that I use, and they change all the time because some tools become ineffective. A lot of times the social sites shut down the effectiveness of a tool when too many people start using them. So you just got to constantly be aware of what's going on.

You got to stay in the know.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

You mentioned hashtags.

Okay, what's up?

I suck at hashtags. So could you, um, could you help me be more effective? Because like, I'll hashtag everything. Hashtag I don't know what I'm doing. Hashtag help me.

The truth about hashtags, there are certain rules with hashtags. You know, you break the rules whenever you're ready, but there are certain rules about hashtags.

Hashtag break the rules.

Exactly. Hashtag F what Tony talking about. In general, on any any social site, you don't want to use more than 2 hashtags per post. You want to use 2 hashtags per post, um, and you want to consistently use these hashtags. And when you're using them, especially on Facebook and Twitter, you want to ask people to share the post, okay? It's, it's, it's, um, a well-known fact amongst marketers and maybe a little-known fact amongst regular everyday people, that if you ask people to retweet your tweet or to share your post on Facebook, it's like a 60% improvement if you ask versus if you don't ask. So—

Wow, that's big.

Yeah, so like if you normally post something to Twitter and it gets retweeted 5 times and seen by 100 people, you can get it tweeted by but you can get it retweeted by 10 or 12 people.

Nice.

So nice. That's, that's one thing.

Should you check to see how much a hashtag is used? Like if you're gonna name an album, I know we named a Trouble album Zay Did It, hashtag Zay Did It, right? So did you go in and check to see how much that hashtag was utilized?

Um, how did you choose it? Well, I did check. I always check.

Secrets.

Yeah, I always Yeah, and I don't remember the name of the resource that I used to track the hashtags. I will have to go in my phone and dig that up for you guys, which I could do, but I'm not going to. But, but, um, Tony, what happens is, you know, we're already kind of farther along than your normal videos.

It is. This is, this is kind of long, but there are two of us, so it's okay that it's double time.

Okay, cool. So, um, you know, like I'll type a hashtag in Instagram, um, and see how many people have used it. And, um, you can use— there's a tool called TweetReach, uh, tweetreach.com, that shows— that can show you what a string of words, a word, or a hashtag, how many times it's been used in the last 24 hours. They'll show you that for free, and if you pay, it'll show you the full history. But a lot of times we can just use the simple search tools in Facebook or Instagram and even Twitter and search and see how many times a particular hashtag has been used. And you gotta have some common sense, you know. If you use a common phrase, then your hashtag won't be effective.

Like #ILOveyou, right?

Like #ILOveyou. Just thinking about like with Trouble, we did the hashtags, they did it, but the biggest record on there was Ready, right? Well, using hashtag Ready didn't really— it wouldn't help, right? It didn't—

too common, it's too broad.

Exactly. So we used a whole different tactic of using the quotes from the verses. But anyway, but you want to be creative in making your hashtag, and you want to be consistent. You want to use your hashtag at least, at least 30 to 60 days at a minimum. Um, if you use two of them, if you use one of them, what have you. If you have a unique name, then you want to use the hashtag and your name, um, or the hashtag and your, your mixtape name if it's unique. In each of your posts consistently. Not sometimes, not 2 out of 4 or 2 out of 5 times, sometimes I forget, stuff like that. You want to use that every time. I know people who have their hashtags and a catchphrase without the hashtag saved in the notes of their phone, and every time they post something on social media, they copy and paste.

That's smart. That's a, that's a good way to do it into their status. Very helpful.

That's, that's, that's, that's another tactic.

I'm gonna start doing that. That's a great idea.

But hashtags are, are, allow you to track how many people are checking out what you're doing. Um, and so like with Trouble We Had, the hashtag #ZayDidIt, then we had the Scoob Fresh Project, and we had the Scoobzilla Project. All of these are unique names that allowed us to easily track and see early on how many people were checking out the tape, um, when we posted this, if that brought extra people in, if we posted that, if it took away from what we normally do. It allowed us to do some tracking and monitoring of what's going on. And a big part of what I do with those people who have the budget is we allow the artist to use their social media as an interactive tool with their fans without being a pushy promoter of their stuff. And then we do the pushy promotion behind the scenes where it doesn't look like the artist even has a marketing or promotional plan. It makes it look organic and seamless, right? And so a lot of, a lot of newer artists think that, oh man, I'm just going to do this like Blac Youngsta did. I'm just going to do this like Yo Gotti did, I'm just gonna do this like Beyoncé did and just drop an album out of the blue, when the fact of the matter is there are multiple people working behind the scenes. Yeah, to make sure that this stuff gets seen and optimally placed once it's posted, or along the way that it's getting posted. From, from every artist that you've seen grow a basic following to a great following, from Kevin Gates Kevin Gates, a great example. Beyoncé, a great example. Um, Plies, a great example. These aren't things that just happen. These were well thought out, well planned strategies that got used to get these artists bigger followings. And so you want to— you're going to need your own strategy and your own techniques to get that done. And so the tools I shared with you earlier are going to help you get that Awesome.

Thank you, Tony.

You're welcome.

Tony is @iamtheconnect on all of his social media. He is absolutely brilliant when it comes to social media. Brilliant at social media. Um, thank you for doing this with me. I appreciate you. Yay. Okay, thanks guys. Don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss any of these. Bye-bye.