Hi everyone, welcome to Social Media Hangout Time. I’m Janet Johnson and I’m here today with Kimmy, our social media puppet. Hey Kimmy!
Hi everybody!
And we have our special guest, Rick Cooper. Hey Rick, glad to have you on.
Thanks for having me on Janet and Kimmy.
Yeah absolutely!
You’re welcome. Hey Rick I got a question for you.
Sure.
Have you ever been interviewed by a puppet before?
I don’t think I have, no.
There’s a first for everything. It’s your lucky day!
That’s right.
Thank you for being on the show Rick. Let me do an introduction.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Well we’re glad to have Rick Cooper here. He’s an online marketing and social media trainer. He works with small businesses, business owners who want to generate more leads and increase sales using the internet. Rick is the founder of Social Media Outcomes and specializes in helping entrepreneurs leverage their expertise to attract clients online. Rick is an author of “Seize Your Opportunities”, “Marketing Magic”, “Extreme Excellence”, “The Art of Science of Loving Yourself First,” and “25 Brilliant Business Mentors: Their Top Tips to Catapult You to Success!” That’s a multiple, holy cow, thank you so much Rick for joining us today.
Absolutely.
Talking about how to leverage social media to attract customers and business builders, how do we stand out from each other?
Good question. Well I think part of it is just showing up. There are so many different social media sites out there, whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Instagram. And so part of what you need to do is you need to have a plan about being visible on a daily basis. Out of sight is out of mind. And on social media you want to create top of mind awareness. You want to be out there engaging with people and in particular this is very important on Facebook because it takes a while to build momentum and have your posts show up in the news feed. And if you just disappear for a while and come back, it’s very hard to get interaction immediately. So you want to have strategy to get information out there on a regular basis and get people engaging with you. And when you do that that will create more of an opportunity for you to get your message out there on the long term.
Absolutely.
You know that makes a lot of sense. What happens, what do you feel is the best strategy if somebody does take a break or does take that time where all of a sudden then kind of walk away from it but they want to come back, what’s your suggestion there?
Well, I think part of what I recommend on Facebook, you have to be careful on your Facebook because on your personal page, Facebook doesn’t really want you promoting your business. A lot of people do promote their businesses there but Facebook is converting personal accounts into business accounts and you don’t want that to happen because they will actually, you’ll lose all your Facebook friends. They will become likes on a page but you won’t have the ability to send them private messages and you won’t have the ability to invite them to an event so if you do that marketing. So when you start off again, start off where you plan to be consistent for a while, think of things that you can post which will get easy interaction. Quotes and tips are great. Images are great, anything that is inspirational will oftentimes get people interacting. And then on that basis then you can begin to share more information or details or get people connect with you or share your blog post or other content. And the other thing you could do is you can look for ways to engage people directly like put a post out there on Facebook and then on the comment section go in and mention someone’s specific name; tag them in the post. You don’t want to overdo that and you could probably do it maybe ask 3 to 5 people, tag them within the comment and oftentimes that will cause some interaction. The other thing is it’s a good idea to develop social media partner relationships. Look for people that you can reach out to who are going to help you and just let them know, “hey I’m right back up on social media, want to see if you can keep an eye out for post out on Facebook, make sure you just like or comment on it” and that way it will help create some interaction. And then as time goes on other people will begin to see that as well. Facebook, in particular, works in a way where as people engage with you then their friends start seeing what you’re posting and that will cause them to jump in as well.
Those are fantastic.
And I think people are willing to help out, too, specially if you ask them. So you know Rick I’m a salon owner and we like to post before and after pictures and I’ll have my customers go out and they share those pictures, they talk about what they like. Do you have any suggestions on, sometimes we’ll have an event in our salon, what kinds of things can I do as an event? How do I invite people to an event using social media?
Right. Well Facebook in particular is great for this – for events. Many years ago LinkedIn used to have the capability to do events and they eliminated it so, of course you can do events on Google+ and I love Facebook for doing it. Facebook actually has made some improvements lately to make the process even better. What Facebook has done is when you go to invite your friends to an event, there’s a select all button. You can actually invite all of your friends, depending on how many you have. I have over 4,000 friends on Facebook. And you can invite up to about 500 people to an event. But you can also have other people invite people to your own event, as well. So the key with Facebook event is just create a title. Create an interesting title that’s going to grab people’s attention, add in a description. Make sure you include some type of a call-to-action. So if it’s a tele-seminar or a webinar, in your case you’re having a live event at the salon, give people a way to register to let you know that they are going to attend. And you might not want just to limit it to having them click on the button on Facebook to attend, you might want to set up an actual separate registration page like have a specific date and time for the event at your salon and then have people click to go register for that, let them know that you’ve provided visual information to them or special gift or something like that. And then obviously you want to have the date and time of the event. And then you can go and invite your friends to the event. So again, what I recommend for events and inviting friends it’s a good idea to set up a list. Facebook allows you to create list and so what you can do is you can create events or list people in your local area that you want to invite. In that way you can just select that list and then click on select all and all those people will be selected and then you can invite them. It used to be a tedious process just to having to go through one by one clicking on each name, now Facebook has made that process easier. Facebook has actually made an improvement.
That’s a great idea to put all that people in a list. We’ve got customers and we’ve got potential customers. And sometimes it’s nice to have an open house and then invite people that haven’t been to our place already.
Right. Exactly.
Yep, thank you.
It is. Now to back it up I just want to reiterate though this is we’re talking friends and we’re talking page, correct? So this that you’re talking about when you’re inviting to an event, that would be your friends, your personal friends on your profile, correct?
Yes, that’s a good point. When you set up an event, there’s actually Facebook allows you to create events through three locations. One would be related to your personal page that would be on the homepage of Facebook. Another one is that you can create an event through your business page and the third is you can actually create an event through a Facebook group. So what I would recommend is create the event through your business page but then when you go to inviting people, you’re not inviting people who like your page, you’re only able to invite personal friends. Some people think that, some business owners think that they just need to focus on the business page. But that’s not true. If you do event marketing you really need to work on building your personal friends on Facebook as an opportunity to develop those business relationships and then that gives you the opportunity to go in and invite those friends to your event.
Great, great points. I just want to reiterate that because I know what you’re talking about but it’s very important for people to understand that there is a difference between the friends and the likes on a page.
Right.
Now how would you best get to the likes on the page than the people that are actually are your fans? Yeah you posted there but as we know the reach is fairly low so what else would you suggest doing in that circumstance?
Well getting likes is a challenging process, at times. Number 1 I would not recommend just going out and buying likes. There’s been some controversy about that that around buying likes you’re going to get spam accounts and everything else. And it will actually works against you because from what I’ve read around Facebook what happens is that if you have spammy accounts then number one you’re not going to get interaction through those and that’s actually going to cause your post to be more invisible to the people who are interested in what your message is. And you could consider doing some Facebook advertising. Facebook does allow you to do advertising to get likes. That can be helpful, in some cases. Again you might still get some spammy likes but I think the best opportunity is #1, it’s going to help if you already have a network of people that you’re connected to. So if you have an email list, if you have Facebook friends you can invite them to like your page. Again it’s tricky there because Facebook gives you an opportunity to click and then invite people to like your page but you only get to do that once. And so when you go to invite someone to like your page, make sure that you’re doing it at a time of day that people are likely to see that notification because notifications appear only for a little while and then they disappear. So make sure that you’re doing it like mid-day, noon or something like that when a large portion of your audience, the people that you want to invite will see that. If you send out an email message then make sure that you include the link to go out to your Facebook page where the call-to-action to like your page. Now the other thing you have to worry about, you go to your personal page to invite people to like your business page, Facebook doesn’t like that either. They don’t like, the thing you have to think about with Facebook is their goal is to generate ad revenue. So they want businesses to pay for advertising. So they’re going to automatically penalize you if they see that you’re trying to post and just get likes on your page. So it’s kind of tricky. So you kind to have to be a little bit clever. One of the things you could do is you could post something interesting on your business page and then share it over to your personal page. And when you do that then that creates, typically it creates a link back to the business page and people will be able to see that. So the other thing is, again, ask other people to help out. Ask other people to invite people to like you Facebook page. And you could also ask people to email out. Somebody has an email newsletter to send out, encourage them to go out and like your page. But typically the larger your network, the easier it’s going to be like to have likes. The smaller your network or the more invisible you are, the harder it is to get likes.
Exactly.
And really just a strategy of posting on your business page on a regular basis, posting things that are interesting, that’s going to create more visibility because and again, you don’t want to overdo it. I would say for most business owners maybe 3 posts a day would be good on their business page and maybe occasionally you can get by with a little bit more than that. You don’t want to overwhelm people because the more that they see content from you the more likely they are to think of it as a spam, if the content is spammy. So once your adding value though people will generally will be interested in what you have to share.
Rick when you talk about adding value, you spoke a little bit before the 80-20 rule.
Right.
Can you share a little bit about that?
Sure. The 80-20 rule can be applied to social media. 80% of your post should be informational and only 20% should be promotional. And I think that’s absolutely true on a business but again on a personal page, you want to be careful about that. Because if you try doing 20% promotions then Facebook could end up seeing/percieving that as too much of a business-related. One thing that’s interesting on what I post on my personal page, I hardly ever post about my business on my personal page anymore because I use Facebook not only just for prospecting for business but also for reaching out and connecting with existing clients. I have over 15 different Facebook groups where I connect with clients in different training programs that I have. So I have a lot of vested interest in making sure that I maintain my Facebook account and keep everything set up properly. So again it depends on how you are using it, what you’re using it for and what you’re likely to do but you just have to be careful about that in terms of what you post on your personal page. And again I think the 80-20 rule is fine on your business page, it’s fine for Twitter, it’s fine for LinkedIn, Google+ and other sites like that but in particular Facebook, just be careful about what you post there on your personal page. And again one of the things that you could do is get other clients to post about you. I was doing a webinar yesterday on Facebook marketing strategies and I invited my clients who are on the webinar to post a message on their page and then tag me in it, just acknowledging that they are on the webinar and getting value from that. And I had 5 people who posted under their page and tagged me in that and it started creating interaction with their audience. They had people commenting on their post and I approved those posts as they appear on my page. So if you can implement strategies which will create 3rd party endorsement and getting people to acknowledge you, that tends to create a lot more visibility and get people interested. And it’s more trusted than with you getting your own horn.
Yeah, yeah.
That’s a great idea.
Yeah, it is. And I’d love the idea of using your personal profile and I like how you brought up that personal profile a lot because there are a lot of people out there that, and I know them, I’m friends of many that really sometimes use their personal profile more than they even use, they may have a business page, they may not have a business page. So it’s interesting that you say that. And one thing that kind of caught me, I don’t know when it happened, probably a month ago, couple months ago, is when they removed being able to advertise through your personal profile.They used to have it.
Yeah, I used that before. I promoted some on my personal page, yeah.
Exactly, exactly. I know like wait, it’s kind of a bummer, it’s gone in a way but did you ever hear about the reasons for that? I mean do we think it’s just because they really want us to get a page if you’re a business?
You know one thing to realize about Facebook is Facebook realizes that they only have an advertising revenue model if they have a user base. So Facebook is very concerned about making sure that what people see in the news feed is what they want to see. And sometimes it doesn’t really feel like that, it doesn’t feel like things are being addressed but they have made a lot of efforts this year in particular to try to cut down on spam. And they’re even doing surveys where they will show people a list of post in their news feed and say, “do you think this is spam?” And it will ask them. And I think in some cases they’re using that information to identify spam accounts. But they’re also using it to, see, the thing about social media sites and Facebook in particular is about algorithms or formulas that they can use where they can re-text and interpret whether it seems spammy. So just be careful about what you’re posting. Now by the way let me just give you a quick tip here that will help you to be able to overcome some of these challenges and leverage your Facebook, your personal page, even better and that’s to use video. So one thing about video is they can’t necessarily read content in the video. Now maybe they can, maybe they can’t, maybe the will in the future. But the point is if you create a short video, maybe 30 seconds to a minute and publish that, you can publish that on YouTube and then share it on Facebook, then, you know people love videos. People love to watch videos. Videos will automatically play in news feeds in some cases and so when you post a video, you could share some information, talk a little bit about your business through the video but just make sure you add value. But videos can be a great thing that you can share in the news feeds – videos and pictures. So think about how you can leverage those as a medium to communicate, develop trust and rapport and then potentially lead people to the next step in connecting with you.
Yes, I love videos. Videos is, now the one thing to mention is if you upload directly to Facebook those videos, is ten times more powerful. I’ve been doing a lot of testing on videos lately myself.
Oh good, excellent!
It’s amazing, I mean even over pictures. It’s just absolutely amazing. So anything people can do to do a quick video. I’ve done some just turn on my hangouts. I turn on hangout, record that video but then I upload it directly to Facebook and it’s probably 200 times the amount of reach.
Wow!
It’s crazy!
That’s crazy Janet. That’s great!
Yeah, video, so I love that you brought up video because I’m a big, I’ve just been testing it a lot lately and it has documented that it is just way more than pictures but it is a little more work, as we know – to take and upload it, that kind of thing. But anything they can put in their strategy that brings in video is very powerful.
Excellent.
So let’s get in to little more, what would you say, we’d like to talk about standing out. So we talked about videos standing out, what are other types of posts that really is going to make somebody on Facebook, what are some suggestions? Throw a couple out.
Sure. One of my favorite strategies and one that creates the most engagement on social media is to ask questions. Everyday I ask, for most of the year I was asking about 3 questions everyday and I actually cut back a little bit on how much I post now on Facebook. Because part of it is one thing about social media is that it takes work. And if you start getting a lot engagement then you’re going to find that it takes more time to go in and respond to everybody. And so there’s a point of diminishing returns and you’ll have to look at your return and investment in terms of time, but in some cases I’ve got networds of 50, 60, 70, a hundred plus comments on just simply asking a one sentence question. So one of the techniques that I would recommend that your viewers do is to instead of just going out to Facebook and looking at the box that says what’s on your mind and think of something, develop content as a strategy. Sit down and say what are 10 questions that I could ask over the next few weeks. And then just spend time thinking about questions and then compile that content into a Word document or into a spreadsheet and then you’ll have a list of questions that you can go and post. And then think about what is the best time of day to create interaction. Like for me I found out that noon is kind of the magic number. If I post a question at noon what is happening is I get a lot of interaction then but that interaction will carry throughout the rest of the night. When you post things on Facebook it makes a difference because the faster that you get interaction from other people the more likely that post will be able to hang and stay out in the news feed. If you post something, say 11 o’clock at night, and nobody interacts with it, nobody will probably see that post at all in the news feed. And that’s the way most people view is through the news feed. Occasionally they will click and view your page and scroll down and take a look but in most cases they’re just scrolling through their news feed and they’re just kind of spinning through it like on their mobile device looking for things they can quickly respond to. The other thing is you’ve got to, you have to train your audience to engage with you. Don’t just assume that people will naturally know to engage. And so if you’re just starting off asking questions, you may have to again, reach out, ask others to respond, tag a few people in comments and get them to jump in. But do that strategy consistently over time. Another technique that I use which gets a lot of interaction is that I post a word of the day. Now don’t do word of the day just because I’m saying to do it. It’s appropriate for me because I do a lot of writing in addition to training people on social media and online marketing techniques I also do a lot of copywriting for my clients. I build websites, create lead capture pages and sell pages. So I do a lot of writing. So word of the day makes sense for me and what’s interesting is I have a particular script that I use when I post that word of the day which encourages people to respond back and to use the word in a sentence. And so everyday I get 10 comments on my word of the day, which is actually pretty good because it’s actually pretty hard for some of the words that I come up with for people to come up with things. And what I find is there are people who love to insert humor. They’ll take the word and use it in a humorous way. So it’s an outlet for people. So give people a way to engage with you and communicate with you and make it fun in the process.
Awesome! Those are really simple tips. I’m going to take those tips and we’re going to ask the question we typically ask what can you do in the next 24 hours right there. That is absolutely what they could do in the next 24 hours. And we’re not necessarily talking about the word of the day but the thing is I love that concept but they need to think about their business and get creative.
Right. Yes, exactly.
And figure out what would fit for their business. Would it be the, you know, the word of the day is such a great thing but I think people really need to think and expand on that, too.
Right. And I think part of the benefit of that is having things that you do that are consistent over time. Because if you just do something once and then expect to get a result out of it may not be very likely. If you do things consistently overtime you start building an expectation. People start looking for it. I have people say, “hey where’s the word of the day,” if I don’t get it out by 9 or 10 in the morning. All the people at 1 o’clock saying hey where’s the word of the day? You know, I was ready to post.
That’s awesome.
Yeah. It’s just like the techniques that news, tv shows use and magazines use. They have ongoing features where they repeat the same things and people come to expect it. So think about how you can do that on social media.
Consistency.
Wow, you are so full of ideas. I think this is awesome, you’ve given us a lot of great content.
Excellent, glad to share.
Well Kimmy why don’t we, you know we could go. I love it, love it. Kimmy,why don’t you go ahead and finish up and talk about where we can find Rick.
Yeah, well Rick we’d like to ask you how can we help you and how can our customers get in touch with you? Is there something, a place for you where you’d like them to go? A link or Twitter, how would you like them to interact with you?
Absolutely, yeah. Let me give you a couple different ways that you can contact me.
Facebook page, we got on your Facebook page now.
Yeah, exactly. Because we’ve been talking a lot about it, you could go to facebook.com/socialmediaoutcomes, that’s my business page. You can also add me as a friend, just go to facebook.com/rickscooper, R-I-C-K-S as in Sam, C-O-O-P-E-R, You can connect with me on Twitter, my Twitter handle is @rickcooper or just go to twitter.com/rickcooper. And those are couple quick ways through social media. Visit my website at socialmediaoutcomes.com and you can also send me an email there. Just send it to rick@socialmediaoutcomes.com.
All pretty easy. And we’ll also have, this will be show 39 and we will have all those links in our notes, too. So that will be in the blog, too.
Great.
Well great. And then you have some sort of product that you have right now, tell us something a little bit about what you can offer our audience, also.
Sure. I have a free report for anybody who wants to grab it. It is on 10 ways to monetize social media. So a lot of strategies we’ve talked about around including engagement today in the report I get into more details about monetizing social media. I’ll talk about strategy to start moving your friends from social media on to your email list which gives you an opportunity to be able to connect and interact with people overtime. So if you’d like to get a copy of that report, just go to my website, go to socialmediaoutcomes.com/10ways and that’s with the number 1-0-W-A-Y-S. socialmediaoutcomes.com/10ways, download that free report and that will give you a lot of great tips and information to get into action to leverage social media.
Great idea.
Sales, that sounds like a great guide. I mean, engagement’s one thing but we want to lead in to obviously the funnel of sales. That’s why we’re here. Well, excellent. I appreciate your time today Rick, it was so much information and I think people just need to really apply it, not just listen but actually try it and apply it. And then also, test it. It’s all about testing. It might work with you but it might not work for somebody else.
Exactly.
It’s all about testing and trying and see what works for each individual business. So definitely appreciate your time Rick and thanks for coming on.
Excellent, thanks Janet, thanks Kimmy.
Bye.
Ba-bye.
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