So What? Social Media Marketing

Welcome, welcome, welcome. Happy Thursday, everyone. Welcome to So What Marketing Analytics and Insights Live Show. I'm joined by Chris and John. Today we are talking about social media marketing.

And I know you're probably thinking to yourself, but guys, you you don't do social media. Well, believe it or not, we actually do social media. We focus primarily on the metrics and helping determine where in your customer journey social media should fall in terms of awareness or consideration. But between the three of us, we do have a fair amount of experience with social media. And if you're looking to follow Trust Insights, you can follow us on various social media channels, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and now TikTok, which I am learning how to use.

Don't age me. So anyway, Chris, where do we want to start with social media marketing today? Well, I one of the things that we wanted to talk about was figuring out how do you make social media work because it it's interesting. And when it doesn't work, why? And how do you evaluate the purpose of different social media channels?

So I'll give you an example. I was doing some volunteer work over the weekend with a nonprofit that I do some stuff with. They have a Discord community, and they wanted to put up Instagram, Twitter, and a couple other profiles just to see if they could attract some new members. And they were like, Oh, we don't know if this is gonna work. I was like, I don't know if this is gonna work either, because those channels generally suck.

Um, so we put up some Instagram posts, we put up some Twitter posts and just blew away our expectations. Like hundreds of people just came swarming in. Uh now we went from like you know, 300-ish members to like 500 members in in two days, and it's like what happened? Well, it turns out that if you have something that people have a very strong emotional attachment to, it's not hard to get them to take action. They see something, you know, an image of your your cause or your the cute dog or whatever on on Instagram, whatever, they're they immediately click through and and and they show up.

And so one of the challenges then, and I gave this some thought because when you think about social media from brands and marketers, it's kind of lackluster, and the things that you're being asked to do are really lackluster, like, hey, go read our new blog post about whatever. It doesn't in I don't know about you, it doesn't invoke uh an emotional response to me, like, yeah, I gotta go do that, as opposed to like, hey, you could go find a whole bunch of new friends to you know who support this cause. That's actually of interest. So, Katie, when you're thinking about how we choose to use social media channels, both for ourselves and our clients, how much do you put into does the end call to action actually suck or not? I don't know, I feel like you're trapping me into something, but you know, let me sort of like walk that back a little bit.

So, you know, a lot of times social media is more successful when you're talking about B2C, which is business to consumer, and so social media lends itself really nicely to consumer-facing organizations, consumer-facing products, whereas we're in this space of more of the B2B, the business to business, and it's harder because it tends to be very cold and dry. And I think Chris, that's really kind of what you're describing is that lack of emotional peace. And so, one of the things that I've been trying to do, and we've been trying to do this year is bring more of that human element to our social media accounts, and that's you know, reposting the videos from our podcast, reposting the videos from our live streams, so that people can see here's who we are, there's humans behind all of this, and sort of maybe they can start to connect with us a little bit more because you're absolutely right. You know, if we say, here's a newsletter about data science and marketing, go sign up for it, like it's not gonna do a whole lot. Yes, we put those posts out there because in some ways they're kind of obligatory, and if we don't do it, then we're never gonna get results.

So we're doing it with the hope of getting some results, but really what we need to be putting out there is something that helps people connect with us a little bit more, and that's through the kinds of content that we create, whether it be this live stream or you know, content that we put in the newsletters that shows that more human and vulnerable side of who we are as people. And I think that's how we're gonna make our social media accounts really more effective because people need to see themselves in the post in the situation. And with the way that the social media algorithms work, you really basically have a split second to get somebody's attention. And so short of like dancing around with firecrackers, which you know, stay tuned, John. That's on your to-do list next week.

Um, you're not gonna get somebody's attention without having that connection established already. Blowing stuff up is always hot social share. That's uh that's an easy hit. I don't know. I dancing on firecracker sounds pretty good to me.

I mean, I don't quite know how it fits into our overall business idea. Maybe it's the like, you know, waving around firecrackers saying buy a digital customer journey. So like now that I have your attention, but that is not authentic. That's not really who we are, and that's not who we want to portray ourselves as because we're not gimmicky, you know, we're not gonna be, you know, I mean, maybe I'm speaking for myself. None of us are ever gonna be super trendy, and so we don't want to start to follow like TikTok trends and you know, news jack those things in order to draw attention to our business, because that's really hard to keep up with, it's not sustainable.

Hey, you do speak for yourself because we put together a really good post on how to optimize your wordle uh stuff in this week's newsletter. So yeah, but you weren't doing like a TikTok trend in order to get someone's attention to the post. That's true. So one of the things to think about there also, because you you you've mentioned TikTok now a couple of times, is uh as part of our social strategies to figure out what the intended purpose of each of these channels is because they all do different things. You know, LinkedIn is certainly one thing.

Um there's TikTok and stuff. Uh actually, uh Donna had an interesting question uh just now. How do you attract people who don't know you? How do you build that awareness? So that's a great question.

And so let's let's be honest. Of the three of us, I am the least known. Uh Chris and John have been in the industry, they're the world's oldest podcasters, as we are well aware. Um, but you guys have been in the marketing industry much longer than I have, and so it's an industry of known people, and I'm not one of those known people. But in I've started to connect with people through the opening of the newsletter, and so that's my opportunity to tell people a little bit about myself and share my perspective.

And so we're fortunate that it goes to a fair number of people who were already fans of Chris and John. And so I was able to start to insert my personality and my point of view into that content. But I would say honestly, it's that authenticity of you know, the way that I write and the way that I tell stories is different from how Chris tells stories, it's different from how John tells stories, you know, and each of us bring that unique perspective, and so it's not just what I've found in terms of connecting with people, it's not just repeating the facts and the data, and this is how Google Analytics works. It's the first time I tried to use Google Analytics, I sat in six months of meetings with people who had no idea what any of us were talking about. And so sharing those anecdotes and personal stories that tie back into the point that you're trying to make is how I've found success and started to connect with people.

One of the things I've seen be very effective is looking at what's working out there. Um, you know, there's there's a lot to be said for you know if we're paying attention, if you're paying attention to I zeitgeist, I guess is the wrong word for it, but if you're paying attention to essentially what other content on the topic is doing well, you can start to work out a landscape pretty quickly. So as some of you know, I do a uh pandemic newsletter on a on an almost daily basis, except Thursdays, because Thursdays are really busy. Um, and one of the things I have set up is I have a Twitter list of people that are credible, right? Um, that I that actually know what they're talking about, and then every single day I pull all of the the tweets that they've posted or retweeted in the last 24 hours, scored by the total of number engagements, you know, uh likes and retweets, and see what people have had to share.

And then I go and I retweet or I incorporate and things like that, or tag them in pieces of content to build that awareness among people who clearly know what they're talking about and have enough audience that their content is getting attention. And this is something you can do this for sure on Twitter. You can do it if you have access to Instagram's data API, you can do it through Instagram. You for sure can do it on TikTok. You can't really I mean you can do it on Facebook Sorta, and you can't do it on LinkedIn.

But at least for a couple of these networks, if you have access to the raw metrics and data about what's taking off and popular, you can do frequency wealth. And you know, um, another thing that uh I have to uh put my shoe in my mouth and and apologize to Katie for because I was completely wrong about this. Um I'm waiting for the purposes of of discovery on Instagram for sure, Twitter not as much, and TikTok absolutely hashtags do if you've got the right ones, bring in initial new awareness. You get one shot to to make somebody aware that you have content relevant to that hashtag, and if you do it well, they will hit that follow it if you've if you've got more stuff. I feel like it was a missed opportunity to have some kind of like a banner in confetti fall down.

Yeah, confetti falling, right? Or something. So this is this is a really good point. Is so Chris, I had been sort of challenging your analysis, specifically on Twitter um Instagram, that hashtags are used as discovering new accounts. And so, you know, it's use some it's used the way that the search function was meant to be used when Twitter introduced hashtags.

And so Instagram does, I think, a pretty good job of well, you follow um, you know, Vermont hiking, so you might also want to follow Montana hiking, or I can follow just Vermont hiking and see accounts of people who have posted with that hashtag. I don't necessarily need to follow those people, but I can see the content and then find out new things without having to say, huh, what are the things that I am interested in today? And so it's a really nice way to discover those new accounts. Go ahead. The reason why I'm wrong is because impression data is not included in the metrics, and neither is follower data.

Those are the two outcomes that you would get from uh from hashtag discovery. We're only able to see engagements. And so if you're just checking out an account for the first time, you may or may not like or comment on their content, but you may follow them to see if there's more of what they have. You may investigate their account more thoroughly. At the very least, you've seen their stuff and we don't have access to that data.

You know, when you say you get one shot to do that, is that because you get one chance to have the tag up there and get in the feed and you get ignored after that? Or is it just more in a way, yeah. So if you if you put in a tag like Google Analytics, right, and you put up a post um that is irrelevant, people will not take any actions that indicate engagement. And then you as an entity get dinged. You basically get you know thrown off the cliff for the for that hashtag and possibly others.

When you look at what Adam O'Cerry said, who's a co-founder of Instagram in his post last year about what they use to decide what gets shown on the feed, those initial engagements, even view time, are part and parcel of what the feed shows you. So if you show up as irrelevant, you're you're cooked, you're you're done. So you need to make sure that you've got content on your account already that's relevant to what you're trying to be discovered for, so that you know somebody can go check you out and say, oh yeah, this account has other stuff. You know, if you're all about Google Analytics, you better have other Google analytics. It should not be Google Analytics, your cat a pie, and you know, you know, some other random thing.

Uh, it should be that stuff that somebody's gonna find interesting. And then again, it's the it's what the algorithm does. When you first search for a hashtag, especially on Instagram, and you hit and you you swipe through that that that dynamic field, it's gonna start pulling together all sorts of stuff. One of the things that's very interesting is that, and I don't know how they do this. Um, Instagram can infer the images within that wall of images that seem to slow you down and will preferentially show you more of those things, even if you don't tap on them.

Again, I'm not sure how they do that, but it it does work because I've seen my I've I've done tests of my own. I've tapped on one image of a certain type, and suddenly the rest of the search suddenly just turns into that image. It's like, okay, well, now I'm always only seeing apple pies. I don't know why. Um so yeah, that discovery has to be, it's kind of like you know, it's like the first email you send to somebody, right?

If that first email sucks, they're they're gonna unsubscribe and they're gone, and you don't get another chance. Well, and it it makes sense because you know, TikTok is a newer technology to me personally, so I've still been trying to wrap my head around how it works. And it's interesting because I'll see, you know, videos with hashtags that have nothing to do with the video itself, and it's people who are trying to show up in the feed because that's the most popular hashtag at the time, you know, for example. Um, you know, and so you could see a picture of a dog running in the snow, and the hashtag is like, you know, Dorito's Nacho Cheese challenge. I'm like, this one has nothing to do with the other, but this is how people are trying to get that discussion.

Um, I also find it interesting, Chris, that you know, to Donna's question about how do you attract people who don't know you, you and I, interestingly yet unsurprisingly, took two very different approaches. Yours is that more data-driven approach, and mine is that more people connection approach. And so, as a follow-up question, she's asking, uh, if we aren't Chris, which you know, a billion of us are not, uh, how do you get that kind of data? Um, so that I think that goes back to the the concept topic of hashtags, right? You don't need advanced data science just to see if you type in a term with or without a hashtag in any of the search engines for these social services, you can see in a few minutes, like, okay, they all seem to have these things in common.

You know, just use your eyeballs. Um, if you know 15 pages of of results about Google Analytics all seem to use you know, hashtag analytics, like, okay, let's give that one a try. And that, you know, that really goes extra to our second point, which is um this stuff is not rocket surgery to set up basic testing, right? You could you you set up a say I'm gonna put this hashtag on every other post, and then after a week, compare the post with that hashtag versus the post that didn't have that hashtag and see if there's any difference. Uh, you know, you can get into statistical significance of stuff, but any difference, frankly, would be would be useful.

Um, and you know, it's interesting, Katie, to your point from earlier too. This stuff works even when you're starting from from zero from from nothing. Because like uh for the last year and a half during the pandemic, I've taken up writing um speculative fiction and stuff like that, not under my own name, like absolutely nothing tying it to my my normal identity. I want to see if I could build an audience with nothing at all. And again, using these same techniques, following hashtags, following people who are relevant in the space, um, creating content that you know the audience is gonna like and things it it works.

You you get to a point where you can you you see that's the the same proven techniques of have good content, talk to the right people, um, and post you know the stuff that you know the audience is gonna like. It just works. Well, and that you know goes back to the old adage of social media is you can't just show up and start making demands of people, you have to be there, join the community, interact with people, give as much as you're trying to take. And so you can't just say, Okay, guys, I'm here, you know, I'm now Christopher Ashman writing a novel. It's really not me, so come read.

I'm assuming that's your pen name. Um terrible, you know. I'm actually gonna go use that. Uh, but you need to be interacting with people, and so that's again, that's it's using the data, but then it's also that human element of connecting with people, and so it's I'll be honest, as someone who's a super introvert, I find a lot of anxiety in you know, trying to talk with people on social media that don't necessarily know, but are in the same space as me. And even just commenting on their Twitter post to me gives me a lot of anxiety because like, what if they're like, Well, I didn't want to hear from you, or you know, why are you commenting on this?

I don't even know you, and so these are things that you just have to test out to see, like, okay, that it didn't work that time. Maybe that's not the right person for me to connect with, and you will definitely find those people who post a lot and don't necessarily give you much back if you do try to interact with them. But there are lots and lots of people on the social media accounts who are looking to make those connections. Um, you know, John, you I've seen you be a little bit more uh active on social media in the past few months, you know, posting here's what we're doing on weekends, and you have your uh Friday learnings. You know, how do you find social media in general?

And how do you make those connections? What's your opinion on that? Yeah, you know, half of it is funny. It's as Chris mentioned, my accounts you don't want to follow because it's here's work, here's the dog, here's some donuts, like completely unrelated crap, which is the worst thing you can do. And another approach with that too is I had picked up years ago from God, I'm trying to even remember who it was.

It was somebody at Apple, but the idea was that don't consider any of these properties your diary. You know, you want to be telling stories all the time, you want to be leading places, and of course, I I'm diarying everything, so that you know, I'm my stuff is again completely useless. But one thing that's obvious is getting the retreat retweets and shares, the organic forwarding, like that's the real value to get to the new markets. You know, if you're doing something interesting and it gets passed. And so, and I'd be interested if you guys have seen anything with this, but it is bizarre with like Instagram where you can't retweet, you know, you can't share stuff, you have to just get your own organic likes, which seems I I can see that for locking it down for ads, but it seems to really throttle the organic share, which is where all the action is.

Um, but the other strategy with that too is you know, like we talked about with pure organic, is that you know, it's not about what you think is cool, it's what the market likes. And we see so many companies make this mistake, they're like, oh man, everybody here is excited about version 3.7. And you know, nobody in the outside world cares about version 3.7. So you can do all the posts you want about that, but until you find a hook that the audience is interested in, then um, you know, a great example of this one is iOS update, right? If I talk about the newest version of find my iPhone, you know, well, it's just an update, nobody cares.

But if you tell the story that, hey, did you know that if you lost your phone, you can grab the phone of the person next to you and log into their phone to find yours? Like that's a story that you know, and nobody wants to lose their phone. For God's sake, they'd rather lose a limb than the phone. And so, you know, this is a way to um talk about the feature, talk about the benefit, and try and get that spread. But um, yeah, and you know, it doesn't hurt to call out uh influencers, you know, if there's somebody in your space that has a huge following and you think the content will be interesting to them, tag them in hopes that they forward to their audience.

Um, because you you're just drafting off the fame of other accounts, and if you share the same interests, it's not considered weird. Now, if you start sharing stuff about you know, boating to people who live in the Mojave Desert, then you're gonna get spam blocked on everything. But if you hit the right audience, that's an easy way to ramp up quick. Yeah. And the go ahead, the influencer thing is really important because a lot of people a lot of people do sort of a single hook for an influencer, and that's that's pretty much guaranteed to get you ignored, especially if it's if it's something that's that's for work.

So if I were to to put up a post about data science, uh, or you know, uh women in leadership, uh, we'll use Katie as the influence example. Katie already gets like a gazillion uh in one of these pitches, right? So if I use social media from a an intelligence gathering perspective first to figure, okay, well, what other things is Katie interested in? Can I then create content that's more tuned for that specific influence? Like if if Katie had a million followers um on Instagram and I knew I needed to get in front of her, or if I she had a uh 500,000 followers on LinkedIn, and I could dig in and see what was there.

If I did a pitch that was about data science, but also include you know fluffy Newfoundlands, I have a much better chance of getting that across the desk because it there's multiple topics of influence there. And again, to Donna's question, you don't need to know these people, you just need to do your your homework on them and and craft content that you know is gonna be a slam dunk with that person. Because that person, if they've got the audience, then their audience probably has some affinity more to more than women hook as well. Just because Katie does the sort of the women in leadership thing, statistically, something like 30-ish percent of her audience is gonna also be really into dogs, too. Um literally wearing the t-shirt.

Exactly. Now, and if you could work the a like a uh leadership example into hiking with your dog, we're done. Go home. Someone someone send that to me and I will sign up. But these are all the tactics from a an awareness-building perspective that are in your arsenal.

The thing that blows my mind is that none of this is new. Like we've been talking about this for literally 20 years. Um back in the early days of podcasting, uh, when we would do promos for each other's shows, we would figure out like what's the hook where I can talk about what that show is about and also promote my own show in the 30 second spot that we make we made for each other back then. This is no different. It's just instead of audio it's it's some other hook.

You know, I what I keep hearing from both you and John is it's really social media is for that storytelling piece of it, that human connection. So you can be sharing you know a pitch or a data point. But if there's no story around it, it's probably gonna fall flat because people need to have some kind of emotional connection to the thing that you're sharing in order for them to stop scrolling and pay attention to your thing above anyone else. And so you know maybe it's you know a video of Chris showing how he sets up his you know computers to compute all of the data. Someone's probably interested in what that looks like rather than Chris just saying I computed 5000 lines of code.

You're saying the same thing but you're demonstrating it in different ways and one is more likely to capture someone's attention versus the other. And so it's thinking about how you're presenting that information. And so that's a lot of what again sort of back to the how you connect with people that's how I'm trying to think about the newsletter and sort of it's content. It's writing a blog post essentially and how can I bring somebody into the story immediately and how can I have people say oh I can see myself in that story, or I've had that problem, or I've made that mistake as well. And these are not things that I'm making up.

These are all things that I've really experienced myself. And so if someone were to press me for information, I could probably go on for hours about the story of you know how I didn't do the thing correctly and what I learned from it. And now here's what I'm sharing with you in terms of how to do the thing correctly. And this is why you can, you know, rely on me as an authority. It's building that trust as well.

The other thing you could do too is just figure out a way to talk about the other person. I mean, one of the most successful outreach campaigns I've ever done multiple years in a row until I got really tired of doing it, uh, because it's a lot of work, is I would take my DSLR, my big camera with my uh telephoto lens, and I would sit on the uh at mile six of the Boston Marathon and take a picture of every person with gray hair that that was running the marathon. I go it to the official race site, look up their name by their bib number, and then just reach out to them on social media and say, hey, I got this picture of you at mile six. Do you want it? 80 to 90 percent of people like, oh my god, this is amazing.

Thanks. And a bit of a bias here, but people running a marathon tend to be sort of type A personalities, right? They tend to be very mod highly motivated people. Um people with gray hair tend to be more senior in their organizations, and the number of CEOs, CMOs, CTOs, and stuff like that who were in this bucket of people running the marathon who I just sent a nice picture to was enough to substantially build my LinkedIn network and build it with the right people that you would want for higher, you know, bigger leadership discussions. That's a lot of work.

It scales poorly. It but it is social media, like you were saying, Katie, in the truest sense. You're being social with other people, and you're giving value up front. There's there was no pitch. There was no oh by and oh, by the way, I'm you know, so and so at the at this organization was just up, hey, here's the thing.

Uh let's stay connected. And you build that connection, you initiate the relationship by giving first with something that is of interest to them, literally a picture of them, and it works really well. So, what are the other ways you can do that? You know, um, you know, Donna and I have been to social media marketing world a gazillion and a half times, right? And what's the one thing that's easy to do from the front row?

You pick up your phone, right? And uh assume the camera on it's halfway decent, you take a bunch of photos of people, particularly speakers and and prominent folks, and then you share it with them afterwards and say, hey, we got this great photo of you speaking on stage or whatever. I thought you you might like it. And you know, again, you're not asking for anything, but it sure is a way to get a attract attention from the right people. Well, and that goes back to you can't just show up on a social network and start expecting things of people, you have to build that community.

Now, John, you as uh the primary interviewer for marketing over coffee, which again, podcast is another form of content. You know, you are constantly being asked of you, like there's very little, and this is what's in it for you, John Wall. So, you know, you are a lot on the receiving end of people making demands of you. Like, what are the kinds of things that you wish were different about that? Yeah, it's a Chris is dying because I'm we have a off the record Slack channel.

No, no, but I'm always posting like once a week, there's at least one horrible pitch that comes in of you know, uh, I'm trying to think of the worst one in the past couple of days. It's been uh a while since I've had a completely terrible one. But the best one is when I get a form letter and they've misaligned the field, so they're cut, they're like, Dear Jeff, we love the marketing billboard podcast that you do, you know. We'd love to have our guy on your sh on the your show. And uh I you know, I don't even bother to respond to those.

Um, but yeah, that there's two types that come in that work, right? One is the lottery winner, you know, it's a form letter, but it just happens to be something about uh some cutting edge email technology or something. And we cover email, you know, at least once a month, if not more. So I'm gonna read that regardless of how crappy of a uh a pitch that is. But but then the other ones that actually win are the ones that come in and say, you know, hey, I have this author, and we know you've covered this on the show three or four times, and I think this would be great for the show.

And you know, if they actually do know the show, then they're on the mark. So that's the the Chris's angle of taking the time to get a personal pitch together. Like as a PR person, you'd be way better off making 10 pitches that are right on the mark than spamming a thousand people, hoping that you've got a hit on one of them, because um it and it's tough though, because that takes you know, time and experience, you know, either you're gonna listen to them or you're gonna come up with some way to have a group of 10 people listen to stuff and build a directory of your own so you know who you know is really interested in what kinds of stuff. But yeah, we keep coming back to there's no getting around the you know, actually doing the work and figuring out who the people are and what they're interested in, um, because spray and prey just get you no place. Well, and I feel like that's where you start to introduce things like social listening tools, you know, and so it's hard to, you know, find out all of the different conversations, but if you have a social listening tool, they can help, you know, uh, you can plug in like here are the topics I want to listen for.

What are people saying so that I can understand how they're talking about it? If there's an appropriate place for my for me to insert myself in the conversation, you know, what does that look like? And that kind of goes back to the authenticity of, you know, I actually have something to say that's something of value versus I'm just adding noise to this conversation, which is what a lot of brands get wrong, especially on major holidays that don't necessarily align with their culture or their values. I'm just I'm gonna leave that one there as an example. I'm not gonna dig into it, but you know, it you don't have to be part of every single conversation.

You just have to be part of the right ones, the ones that someone can say, oh, you know, Chris and Katie and John were commenting on this thing, but I went to their website and it says nothing about them actually having those values. So, you know, what's going on there? Um, you know, so I think a so social listening tools can help with what you and Chris are both saying in terms of that research of, you know, do I know enough about this topic to insert myself into the conversation and then say, hey, I did my research, John Wall. I know that you are super into, you know, the following five things. And I can speak about three of those because you've covered them on your last six podcasts, but here's a different angle that I can take with that.

And that to you is probably like, oh, well, someone's been paying attention. I probably definitely need to have them on because they have, you know, they do their homework and they have, you know, a really interesting opinion on this thing. Yeah, it's too bad with COVID. One uh, you know, in the time of keynotes and trade shows, there is no keynote speaker that will not answer the I saw you speaking last week at X, and then you know, ask your question after that. That's you know, totally irresistible.

Um so the other thing that I know we wanted to tackle today was trying to identify social media, you know, and its place within your customer journey too. Uh one of the there's a bunch of different ways you can do that. Uh our favorite way, obviously, you know, for having access to the tools to be able to do it is to use uh machine learning to try and identify like what things exactly are working. So we were looking uh I think what about uh a week ago actually, Katie, on trying to identify what are what were the social media channels for all of 2021? How did it look for us?

So uh we go and take a quick peek here. You know, from a social perspective, uh the number one channel for us that was purely social is Slack, uh the analytics market slack for all of 2021. And then if we go back and uh you know go back in time to all of 2020, um you can see uh there's a was a lot more social media stuff because this was you know a portion of this was prior to uh the pandemic. So it's very different results. But this is the way you determine uh what's working and stuff.

And and you don't have to do it. This is the the preferable way to do it, but if you don't have access to machine learning technologies, um you can use other people. So this is Google Analytics 4. Um and I have it set up here to look at sort of cross-channel um uh let's let's do cross-channel time decay. Uh looking by source.

So, you know, uh what specific sources of mediums or uh channel groupings can I use to identify what's working. So for this from my personal website, uh organic social is relatively small at the top of the column, absent in the middle, and then relatively small on the bottom, really is organic searches is is a critical part. So for my personal website, um I'm not doing as good a job with social media as I probably could be. If I dig in away from channel groupings down to uh things like sources and mediums, and I can start to see individually what are those things. One of the uh oddities here is actually Bing is is doing surprising well, but we see Twitter uh sort of as a in the in the last touches or the the end of the file still being relevant.

So I know from a uh customer journey perspective that Twitter isn't a discovery mechanism for me, it is in fact a nudge mechanism to get somebody to do something. And I think you know, I think having that context too, you know, as we look at the trust insights customer journey from 2020 to 2021, the thing that we know that is different is that the beginning of 2020, we had just come off of a lot of speaking engagements, and that's where people tend to for those events tend to connect more and sort of you know reshare, you know. Oh, I saw Chris speak, and you know, here's a quote thing, and here's a sound bite, and here's the network graph. And so for us, that's where a lot of our social media gets engagement is the speaking engagements, and just as those speaking engagements have all gone virtual, it's just not the same. Um, and so the goal, the hope is that moving into this year, we'll have more of those uh in-person engagements and we'll have more of that content that really lends itself to people connecting with one another on social media.

Now, social media, you know, Chris, as you've pointed out, is a broad term. And so, a question uh that we got uh from our uh someone watching on YouTube from Troy is it's been harder for me to get in different circles or notice as I get older. I'm not sure if it's psychological or just less time to engage. And so the first question I would then ask back to Troy is what social media platforms are you currently trying to engage on? Because that might make the whole difference.

Um, if you're on Facebook, for example, we have low opinions of Facebook for various reasons, but there are still communities on Facebook that make sense for certain brands, you know. But you know, I would say, and this is something that we've all been learning is that age should be pretty irrelevant on a social media channel, you just have to find those right communities within the social media channel, and so you know, I like to joke like, oh, I'm too old for TikTok. Well, guess what? We're now starting our TikTok channel, and I just had to find the right types of content on TikTok for me to feel comfortable in that space, and so I guess that would be my first question back is what are the platforms that you're trying to engage with? And so, Chris, John, do you guys have any thoughts on this?

Being the world's oldest podcasters. It's not platform, it's actually people. Um, it's another one of the the trust insights five P's. Uh one of the things that markers do the most wrong, and I'm guilty of this as much as anybody, is trying to appeal to a very, very broad audience. And so if you're trying to appeal to everybody, you'll literally appeal to nobody.

Um, be very specific. You know, Kevin Kelly wrote what it's uh 14-15 years ago now. Um, you know, what you really need are a thousand true fans. You need a thousand diehard fans who will just hand you their wallets and say, uh you know, just keep giving me stuff. And so the question always comes back to well, who are those people and what's unique to them that you can make them deliriously happy, even if the rest of the world does not care, because you will attract a very specific audience then, and that audience will be very, very, very devoted.

Um, and you don't necessarily have to have a large audience, you just need to have uh you know a solid audience. You know, think if you think about it from a tr from a business perspective, trust insights really only needs about 50 diehard fans who are you know uh running uh marketing departments at you know at mid-sized businesses, right? We would do extremely well as a company if we had 50 clients who were just absolutely rabid fans and you know saying, like, here's a hundred thousand dollars a month, you know, just tell us what to do. That would be a great business to have. Um, we don't need five million people on our mailing list to do uh if we had those 50 people.

It's it's the process of getting to that, of kind of reaching out to those communities and finding just those folks who are are in that profile. That is the hard part. And the same thing is true for you know getting noticed or getting into different circles. It's what circles are they, and are they small enough that you are visible? Are they small enough that you resonate?

If you're the circle you're aiming for is a million people, you are one in a million. If the circle you're aiming for is one in a hundred, you have a much greater chance of being seen, of being noticed because you're gonna stand out, especially if you're different from the rest of that crowd. So again, going back to the example we started with, um, in in the the genre of fiction that I write, the audience is predominantly female and queer. I am neither of those things. And so I automatically stand out as slightly odd, but that makes it easy to be noticed because as long as the the the product of the fiction is good, it's an additional differential that helps you get noticed.

So for Troy, and I know Troy, we've been friends for a number of years. Um, you know, think about, for example, the you know, he has a background in Hollywood. He has a lot of fantastic stories from like the 90s about post-production and stuff on a number of really cool shows that you've probably seen on TV. That sort of experience and insight and stuff can appeal to a very specific group of people, and that specific group of people can potentially you know lead into a lot of different avenues. Someone like me, for example, who actually has a film degree, I would love to hear those stories because that was an industry I couldn't afford to get into because you know, back in my day, uh internships were unpaid, so I couldn't afford to move from Boston to California to take a free internship.

I just, you know, I wasn't a trust fund kid, and so I had to abandon that. But you know, I would love to hear some of those stories, and maybe Troy and I would find out that we have some interests in common, and then we would start to, oh, maybe you know this person, maybe you know this person, and that's how those connections get made. And that kind of goes back to Donna's original question of how do you attract people you don't know? Well, authentically and slowly. You don't have to appeal to everybody.

The other thing I just want to sort of note, um, and I'm guilty of this as well. Part of Troy's question was, you know, you had mentioned as you get older, you're not sure if it's psychological. I would almost guarantee that there is some psychology thinking I'm too old for social media because it tends to skew younger. But I would say if that's where your network is, then as hard as it is, it's easier said than done, you need to take age out of it. You know, your age should be irrelevant, it should be your stories and your experience and the value that you bring to the table.

Yeah, well, you know, one thing with that is if you're trying to break into circles, you you have kind of a chicken and egg problem that there's 30 people that have been sharing and have reputation, you know, the algorithm's gonna favor them when they post stuff. Um, and but that is one way to buy your way out of, you know, you start promoting your own content to the same group. You can kind of jumpstart some of that stuff, and you can do that for small money. That's not like you know, throw a hundred dollars at 20 posts over a month, and that can make a huge difference if you're trying to crack through. So that's a lot of evaluating social.

Talked about testing and and the customer journey. Katie, what else do we want to cover? I mean, like you said, Chris, we've covered a lot. I think the big takeaways are social media really is still for everyone, but use some discretion in terms of you don't need to appeal to everyone. Make sure that when you go there, you have an idea of what you want to get out of that specific channel.

You know, so we had talked briefly about the customer journey. Our dig our social channels operate in different ways. So we know for us, our YouTube channel is more of a retention channel than a discovery channel. Whereas our Instagram and our TikTok channels are a little bit more of discovery channels. And I feel like our LinkedIn or our Twitter kind of sit somewhere in between.

Now that's just sort of off the cuff, but from the data that we've collected over the past couple of years, that's how they tend to fall. And so we need to treat each channel as its own separate entity versus having one global social media strategy that's gonna work for everything, because that's just not how the channels themselves perform for us. So I think that's sort of one of the big takeaways is have a purpose for every specific channel and know what you want to get out of it, and then share your stories, share your experience, and make sure that you're giving as much as you're asking in return. Yeah, I would agree with that. Um I would also say make sure that you're using strategies and tactics that are appropriate to where you are in your overall social media journey.

There are things that do really well when you're starting out that are not scalable later on. But to immediately go and look like at a Twitter account, you know, that has a million followers and stuff and say, okay, we need to replicate this practice. Well, you're not there yet. It's like all the people who you know uh follow uh and try to imitate somebody like a Gary Vaynerchuk, for example, you're not Gary and his team of 22 people that follow him around all day long, you know, filming and editing is not something you can do. It's not within reach for you right now.

So if you wanted to see what you should be looking at right now and you wanted him as an example, go back to 2007 when he was just getting started. Look at his videos from then, look at his account from then, go, okay, these are the things that we're working on. It was just him in his wine shop, you know, hacking stuff together in YouTube. And so same is true for all of us. Where are we right now?

Where are you right now? And what are the tactics that map to the skills and the resources you have available? Sean, final thoughts. No, I think we've hit a bunch of the stuff. I do want to go out and throw to the community though, if anybody has any great tips on MacBook video uh utilities.

I've got this new camera here, and for some reason it's putting me in full IMAX. I don't know why this is like 120 millimeter and you can see my whole house. But uh yeah, here. Twitter me over at John J Wall if you've got anything that works. And uh I would love to take something for a test spin.

Okay. Thanks for tuning in, folks. We'll see you next week. Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you're watching it.

For more resources and to learn more, check out the Trust Insights Podcast at TrustInsights.ai slash TI podcast and a weekly email newsletter at TrustInsights.ai slash newsletter. Got questions about what you saw in today's episode? Join our free analytics for marketers Slack group at trustinsights.ai slash analytics for marketers. See you next time.