Hey I’m Janet Johnson with Social Media Hangout Time. Here today with 2 special guests, 2 people. Well Kimmy’s our normal special guest and if you haven’t been on our show before, seen our show, Kimmy is a salon owner. And what Kimmy does is she is here to learn and ask questions based on her busineness – the small business. And we also have Nathan Latka and Nathan is with Heyo.com.
Hey-o, that’s how to say hey-o.
Oh I have to say it right!
Hey-o!
Kimmy said it right, there you go! Hey-o. I’d want to read about Nathan’s background and we’re going to talk about what this program offers. So Nathan is the founder and Chief Executive Officer at Heyo.com. And what that does is help businesses market on Facebook. They work with over 2,000 customers, these numbers he can fix if I am wrong, and they brand on a monthly basis with over 100,000 total users. And Heyo has grown alot in the past few years. I want to introduce Nathan and thank you so so much for coming on our show.
Janet I’m thrilled to be here and Kimmy, it’s great meeting you as well. All we’re focus on is helping salon owners and other business owners convert on Facebook so I’m excited to be here.
That’s exciting Nathan! I have one question before we start though..
I can’t tell you how my hair gets this big.
Have you ever been interviewed by a puppet before?
I have not, this is the first and I’m really looking forward to it.
Oh we’re going to have so much fun.
We’re starting the pace. I don’t think most of the people that you’ve never been interviewed by a puppet. So let’s talk a little bit about backing up, I like to always kind of get into your story. I want to hear a little bit about Nathan how do you think it started with Heyo?
Yeah, you know, it started really from Virginia Tech. I was studying Architecture and Business Finance here at Virginia Tech. Basically I had an insecurity I was in a classroom one day. And a 5th year in Architecture was upset that they couldn’t find a job. Now this was on 09, right, so Architecture, there weren’t people building in 09. And they couldn’t find a job and I just like wow, I don’t want to put myself thru 5 years of these and not have a job. So I went back home that night and said I need to figure out how to generate revenue for myself online. And every book you read about ideas always say if you’re going to sell something, sell an idea that you know a lot about. And Janet and Kimmy, as a college student I always knew a lot about Facebook because I was using it like most college students do. And I learned that fan pages are what business use, like salon owners like Kimmy, you were using Facebook to get more people on to your salon. And so I said if I can help like Kimmy get more people on her salon using Facebook, I thought there was a big idea there and that was the genesis behind Heyo started.
Wow, wow so you started right out, or well did you actually leave college to start Heyo.com?
Yeah, I did not leave college. I started the company while I was still attending school. But what I did it’s kind of managed risk is I pre-sold about 100 fan page tabs at $700 a piece from my dorm room. Now Janet this is not a pretty picture okay. I was wearing my girlfriend’s, my ex-girlfriend’s Christmas boxer she bought me. I was in a 10ft x 10ft white cinder block dorm room closing sales under my bunk bed because it was a dorm room that was tight so that’s how it all started.
That’s amazing!
It is a great story. That’s a really great story. I love just hearing, obviously you’re an entrepreneur so it’s something I love to hear the story of how you started. So let’s get in to your product and talk a little bit more about what does, what does Heyo offer people that has never heard of it before?
Well Heyo actually really doesn’t matter unless you start by thinking about it in terms of Kimmy. So we have salons of the world like Kimmy, we have authors and singers, restaurant owners, online consltants and marketers that are using social and they see the numbers. They see that there’s 1.2 billion with a B unique humans logging on to Facebook every month. And anytime you have a 6th of the world looking at the same digital piece of real estate there’s an opportunity to allow brands to get more customers or leads from that real estate. So the way we help authors and singers, looking for locations like Kimmy’s salon is we help them capture emails, drive engagement and drive sales via Facebook and other social outlet.
And let’s get into a little more details about what exactly the templates are, what your program is. Obviously Kimmy and I have used it, we are very familiary obviously with it. I think I’ve been with your company close to the beginning, close to the beginning so it’s been a few years, yeah and I love it and it’s so nice to have that product here. So let’s get into what exactly the little details about it.
Yes, so here are the main things that we address. Kimmy was going to launch a campaign on her Facebook page. So there’s a little tab on Facebook page. Kimmy would have to take time away from cutting people’s hair and she’d have to go on freelancer.com and try online at developer from overseas that she could hire 50-60 bucks an hour to custom code a fan page campaign that she could get more people coming into her salon through the Facebook page. What Heyo helps Kimmy do is she can drag and drop this campaigns together without going to the hassle and the money and the expense of hiring one of these developers. So that’s the first benefit is you save time and energy because you don’t need developer and part for is drag and drop. The second piece Janet we do really, really well is because we launched so many Facebook campaigns across every possible industry we have a good sense of the campaigns that can work at 10% or higher for every industry. So if people listening to this show right now went to heyo.com and joined we would immediately recommend to them what we believe to be the highest converting campaigns for their industry. That way they have success quicker in the form of more likes, more comments, more shares, email captures that they can use to build their email marketing list and sales of their product whether that’s Kimmy selling more salon, people coming into the salon. Or Amy Lambert who is a Heyo customer that sells homemade purses all the way down to Maggie Hendricks whose the social media manager at a company called Average Joe’e Entertainment. She wanted more likes and more emails to sell out some of the tours that her band and her artists were going on. So those are the 2 main benefits, it’s to save time and energy because you don’t have to hire a developer and if you launch your campaign with Heyo it will be the highest converting social campaign you’ve launched because we’ve optimized for that.
Love it and you’ve been adding a lot of templates to it lately where there’s more with contest. It’s simpler to collect emails. You’ve integrated it with now Aweber, yey, and MailChimp I know so that it’s automated. And I love that. What are the new contest templates that you have?
Yes, we’ve got a contest template that allows people to ask their fans to put in their email and then click like, share and tweet for a chance to win a prize. We’ve got a referral campaign which allows people to fan page administrator to launch a campaign on their fan page and it asks their fans to put in their email and the Heyo software will give each fan that joined the contest a custom link. And whichever fan drives the most traffic back to the fan page will win some prize, so that’s the referral template which is really cool.
That is.
Yeah and a lot of people are using that to drive traffic without spending money on ads which is exciting. A third one we have that’s doing really well is called our group deal template. So Kimmy might say hey guys this is the Facebook fan exclusive. I want to give you all 20% off coupons for a perm and a hair-dried with the blower thing.
The blower thing?
Sounds good.
Kimmy what’s it called?
The straight blow, you know you could blow your hair straight.
Blow out, okay I got it.
Blow out.
It’s like the Jerseyshore blow out, you know.
I could tell you use that real often, don’t you?
So Nathan, can you tell me…
This is all natural. I just want to point that out.
Thick hair then, yeah.
I do, it’s pretty thick.
That’s awesome.
We share that, we share that Kimmy.
Nathan, how does it integrate with being mobile because sometimes when you’re on your mobile apps or your mobile phones you don’t see the apps all the time?
Yeah and Kimmy you’re not going to believe the statistics. I want you to guess, if you had to guess the number of minutes that the average Facebook user spent using Facebook on their mobile device each month, how many minutes would you guess?
Minutes per month? Holy cr, that’s cash. I’d say 190 minutes.
914 minutes is the amount of time the average Facebook users spends using Facebook on their mobile device every month.
No wonder why my hands hurt. Oh my gosh that’s amazing, can you imagine.
914 and here’s something else interesting. Can you guys guess, Janet, if you have a guess throw it in. What percentage of Facebook users only use Facebook via their mobile device?
6? 40%?
Kimmy, what’s your guess?
Mine would be 80%.
So the answer is 63%
Oh, I had the 6 first.
You did. What that means is 63% of people using Facebook, they’re only using it on mobile which brings validation back to Kimmy’s question. One thing’s Heyo does is when you build a campaign with us, no matter it’s a group deal, contest promotion, about us page, we optimize those for mobile. So Kimmy when you click the publish button on Heyo we’ll give you a smart url. And it’s crazy, the smart URL Kimmy, it’s like it has a brain, right!. When somebody clicks it, it actually thinks okay is this person clicking for mobile, send them to the mobile version. If they’re clicking from a desktop, send them to the desktop version but you still market with the same link.
Wow!
So Janet, when you’re sending out an email blast to your Aweber list, you don’t have to say click here if you’re on mobile and click here if you’re on desktop. It’s just one link, one call-to-action and the link would do all the thinking. It’s really impressive.
That is impressive.
It is. It is and I think I remember when the apps where not mobile and so many people were losing out on that piece of their marketing. So I do see the benefit to that because people are, well 63%, right there. Their just showing how many more people are using them.
Yeah so if you don’t have Facebook mobile optimization setup you’re essentially losing out at least 63% of your conversions.
And are your competitors out there, we don’t need to name any names, but are they mobile?
Yeah, I think there are some interesting companies out there that kind of do half of ish the things we do and they are good at something like, there’s something like page motto or short sac or tab site where they’re kind of template-based. But frankly if you want to completely customize the campaign and ensure that it continues to convert, Heyo is the option people are choosing. So the difference between Heyo and competitors is, again, you’ve got full customization abilities and you’re not jammed into a template. And Janet and Kimmy, you have that mobile integration, mobile optimization which increases conversion. And then lastly you know a lot of our competitors Kimmy, they focus on things like full creative control or things like that. Well we want to be good at as helping you fill your salon, right?
Yeah, definitely!
Right. Because I mean you can hire more people? What?
I need butts on the seats.
You need butts in the seats, right? Exactly. That means you can hire more people for your local economy which is fantastic. You’re creating jobs. The only way Heyo or any social marketing software can do that is by helping you generate leads. That’s why we’re hyper focused on helping you launch your campaign that convert. And so we put a real emphasis on high converting campaigns for anyone that uses us.
And if you have Kimmy in your campaigns, now we’re talking a little more, we’ve been discussing a little more probably the focus of like a contest type campaign that the specific campaign. But you can even do where there’s multiple, because there’s 3 apps. Like 3 main apps that show unless you open up Twitter, I think the majority of the population doesn’t realize that you can even open up all those apps to show 12 different ones, does that makes sense? And so what would you say the 3 main ones because I suggest to always get rid of those likes. I mean you don’t need to have the likes there, get rid of those and have 3 main ones. For a salon owner, what 3 different types of apps would you suggest?
Yeah so you wanted to have 1 tab that is focused on it’s like about us. So you have your operating hours and directions to your place. And then the second tab would be all the products you offer so you know whatever you call the, Kimmy what did you call the hair blow out thing?
Blow outs?
Yeah. So name some other things you do, blow outs?
Well we do color treatments, we do extensions, hair treatments – conditioning.
Great! So you could list all of those things including how you can make my hair look like your hair because I’m digging your hairstyle. You put all those. You can put all those on your products tab on your Facebook page. And then Janet to answer your question, the 3rd would be a campaign that’s focused on capturing emails. So something like it’s a fan exclusive, insert your email, click like, share and tweet for a chance to win 20% off your next blow out.
Love it, love it. And your product, we haven’t discussed either a little bit more about how to drag and drop works. You were saying, I mean, there are people using your product Heyo that aren’t techie people. Like it’s so simple and it’s so drag and drop that what can you tell us little bit more in explaining and I know showing it visually is a lot easier and we could screen share but we do have this on a podcast also so we try to make it so that people don’t have to see it. But explain that a little bit more the drag and drop and all the different add-ons that you offer too.
Well what we should do is think about the easiest piece of software they’ve ever used. Okay, are you thinking about it?
Yeah.
Heyo is easier, right? The reason is it’s because it’s actually built for people that have no idea how to code. We were hearing stories of business owners like Kimmy, Kimmy, do you have a family?
Absolutely. Two boys.
And how old are they?
12 and 17.
12 and 17. What time do you usually eat dinners?
Anywhere between 3 and 8, depends on who’s home. But yeah about 6 o’clock.
Exactly. So we’re hearing all these stories from business owners like Kimmy who’d be trying to do put an email form on their website by say 3pm in the afternoon in the backroom of your salon Kimmy. And before you know it you’re pasting all these codes in Google trying to figure out how to move a div tag up into the left 3 pixels and change the color of the button and change the text on the button. And before you know it you’ve Googled for 6 hours and you’re late and you missed dinner with your boys.
Yup and I don’t get it done and so it doesn’t get done.
And if you get it done, it’s not exactly how you want it, right?
Right, right.
So Heyo eliminates all that stress. It saves you time, you get dinner with your boys and you get exactly what you want because it’s all drag and drop and you don’t have to know how to code.
I love it.
Yep.
Now I’m a big believer in grabbing emails for Facebook. I think Facebook has become obviously even speaking with Grandma Mary on our last interview we’re talking about how the reach has been lowered so we need to be collecting those emails and that’s what these apps can do, we’ve been talking a lot about that. But you also have another side of Heyo that you launched that had the timeline contest? Can you talk a little bit about that side of things, too?
Yes, on August 27th Facebook made an update their promotions guidelines which made it, that was 2013, in which they communicated that people can now run in a status update contests and use the like button or the comment – social action as an entry mechanism. So you know, Kimmy could post on her fan page wall, ‘hey guys click like below if you like this hair color I just applied to xyz, whoever is in the salon and there’s a big picture of this woman with red hair or something. And everyone’s commenting yes, I love this, yes I love this. And Kimmy in the update would say again, ‘comment if you love this for a chance to win the same kind of coloring.’ And so Kimmy then gets 5 or 6, 7, maybe 30-50 people commenting. What our tool helps you do is come up with the initial idea so the one that I just started to give for Kimmy’s fan page and what say you do get 50 or 60 comments and a 100 or 200 likes, how the heck are you supposed to pick the one winner, right? What Heyo’s timeline contest creator does for Kimmy is she just can copy the URL of the status update, drop them in the tool and Kimmy, it’ll tell you exactly who the winner should be based on a random generator on our backend on anyone who liked it or commented.
Nice, that’s set at simplifies it. And what is that link to get to, we’ll put all these on our show notes, but what is the link to get to that piece of things?
If it’s heyo.com/t as in tom, c as in cat, c as in cat, heyo.com/tcc.
Perfect, perfect and we’ll put all that in the show notes, too.
Great!
So let’s talk a little bit, one of our focuses here is a little bit of a unique show, we’d like to talk about making your business stand out and making your business unique. If you could just say 1 thing that Heyo does that can really make your business unique and stand out, what would that be?
That’s a really good question. Give me an example Kimmy when you say something that’s unique or something that stands out, what do you think about?
I think about people that are actually engaging on social media when they’re sitting in my chair. They love taking selfie when they have tin foil in their head. It’s about being fun, being a puppet, what the heck!
Yeah, I love it.