Full Transcript (not edited…word for word)
Hi everyone, welcome to Social Media Hangout Time. Thanks for joining us. Today we have Kimmy, our social media puppet. She is back, she was gone for a couple of weeks. And the reason she was gone is because she jumped into that picture with Ellen, that selfie picture and since then her phone has not stopped ringing at her salon. So we thank you so much for being able to take the time Kimmy to come and join us on our show.
You’re welcome.
And we have an extra special guest today, Grandma Mary. And Grandma Mary, I want to get into her background a little bit and then introduce her and she’s going to teach us some social media stuffs that I’m sure you’ve never heard before. So let me read her bio real quick. Andrea is the co-author and Andrea is behind the scene so I need to get to that point, too. I’m going to let her explain why this is but Andrea Vahl is actually Grandma Mary so we’re going…
Blowing my cover.
So she did have that hint but we’ll talk about that. I’m going to let her explain that though. She is the co-author of the Facebook Marketing All in One for Dummy and was the community manager for Social Media Examiner for over 2 years. And she specializes in teaching Facebook marketing and Facebook advertising to businesses all over the world. She also uses her improv comedy skills to blog as a slightly cranky character, uh-oh!. Grandma Mary as social media edutrainer, and that’s on her site, andreavahl.com. So welcome Grandma Mary.
Thanks so much Janet, it’s great to be here. I love it, I’m happy to be here. Andrea’s been doing a little bit more of the the hangouts. I’ve been a little more behind the scene. I like being out in the world out and about and talking to people so I’m happy to get out here and say hello to everyone. I love what you’re doing with Kimmy, I’m saying don’t be different, don’t be afraid to be different, have some fun in your business and do something that you like doing. So this is what I like doing.
I love it.
Hey Grandma Mary I have a question for you.
Yes Kimmy.
Have you ever been interviewed by a puppet?
You know this is the first, I have to say. It’s like, I don’t know if this has been done before, who knows!
Hey we love to lead the trade, you know.
Exactly, be out in front.
Yeah. Soon we’ll be interviewing maybe Jim Hansen, you never know.
Who knows. Jim Hansen and Carol Burnett on, you know.
What a blast! Some would be, I’d love to talk to Miss Piggy.
That’s great! Now can you explain to us what, going back to what I was just talking about, how did you decide to start with Grandma Mary and all that?
You know that’s what happened is I was noticing there was a lot of boring tutorials out there and I said I got to spice it up. And I had a little bit of cranky stuff to talk about with social media because it keeps changing and that gets me really irritated. And so I had to come out and talk about that and have a little fun. I love doing my, I go out and do interviews all over. I’m out on the street interviewing people, I think that’s fun. So I just decided to blend what I like doing which is getting a little naughty, getting a little crazy with the business and bam here I am. I think it’s been really great because I think that people a little bit of humor. I mean I might not be always be funny but hey, I try.
And what made you decide to come out with Andrea, your other side, what made you decide that.
What happened is I was out there blogging, I was doing most of the work. And so that’s what happened and I said you know what you got to do your share here. What happened was when the book started, when we co-authored Facebook Marketing All in One for Dummies with Amy Porterfield and Phyllis Khare that was Andrea’s name. And so we have to co-brand a little bit. I had to do a share my spotlight, so to speak, and she was doing some of the blogging with straight blogging. I was doing more of the video blogging and so we kind of blend a little bit. I think it works because maybe people don’t always want to talk to me. So it’s okay but I like to have a little fun and a little serious and talk marketing tips.
I think we’re just going to get a long just fine.
I think it’s fantastic. I love what you guys are doing, too.
Thank you. But let’s talk about the thoughts on Facebook. Well you were talking about social media in general but I know the big talk has been the Facebook changes lately. So let’s even back it up for people who don’t, that don’t necessarily follow this – what are the Facebook changes that you’ve noticed lately?
Well, the big talk of the town and I think probably if you are a page owner, you’d notice this is the drop in organic reach. Now I have some thoughts about this because I didn’t experiment. Back when this happened, they made this announcement back in late last year, 2013 and said organic reach is going to be dropping for pages and people were freaking out and loosing their minds then the sky was falling. And here’s the thing, you’re still getting some organic reach here from Facebook. What the big problem is that I see is that Facebook tells you what your organic reach is, they give you a number. Does Twitter give you a number? No. Does Google+ give you a number? Does Pinterest tell you how many people saw your pin? No, you don’t know those numbers. So you got to do some experiments to kind of put those side by side comparison and say what is actually happening for me? I know it wasn’t like it used to be in the good old days when it was all free and kind of free-wheeling and we were getting all the reach we wanted. But the algorithm changed and Facebook is saying okay people are connected to a lot of people. We want to show posts that people want to see. So if people are interacting with certain friends or certain pages they’re going to drop out of sight. And so you have to make sure you have to do a lot of posting, you have to post really interesting things to try and get people to engage with you – like your post, comment, connect. And then you’ll going to be more likely to be seen. But I did this experiment way back when the announcement was and said so I’m going to post the same post across all my networks and I’m going to truly track the results. I kind of gamed it a little because I said, “if you see this comment, like or whatever plus or retweet, or whatever it was.” And I had amazing results on Facebook. Of course, Facebook is still my thing. I knew it’s still getting visible eyeballs, it’s still getting good connection after 4 hours, even after 24 hours it was still getting visibility. Now Twitter dropped down to like nothing. That is a short-lived post, it was okay for the first little bit but then it was gone. Facebook still has it’s organic reach, it still gets bumped up, it’s still gets lots of connection but you have to just realize where you are where you’re business is working. So sometimes maybe LinkedIn is better for you. Maybe you’re more active there and maybe you need to focus there more. But you have to not freak out about the organic reach and just keep what works and measuring what works, that’s the thing.
Yep, that’s true. The measurement thing is a great point you have there because you’re right, they don’t give us number other than Facebook.
Yeah, yeah and I think that people freak out about oh my organic reach is down. And really I know that actually for me it is true that my engagement is lower than it used to be. It is true. But Facebook is no longer a freebie site anymore, you’re got to have to pay to play a little bit so you have to use some strategic spend there.
Speaking of that. what would you suggest on, backing up first before we get in to talking about paying for it, what type of posts would you suggest if you could put 2 at the top for an average business? What would you suggest?
I mean it seems to me that lately from across, I have access to a lot of different pages and I actually know that there’s been some recent studies on from Social Bakers and places that have access to thousands of pages. And it is photos that are still getting the best engagement, the best connection. So I would say focus on photos and for me second is link posts. Now that may not be for everybody, I know some people have said text only post are working better for me. So look at your post area in the insights and see what’s working for you. You can’t just blanket statement all the time but it is true that photos are working best for a lot of businesses and it depends a little bit on what kind of posts you’re posting so what people are used to.
And since I’ve seen something you had talked about with humor posts, just being funny.
You got to be funny, alright? You’ve got to add a little humor. Sometimes businesses are so scared too like oh man I don’t know, I don’t want to I’m a serious business I don’t want to add joke in here. But you know when you’re out talking to people you’re always serious? No you’re not always serious. Let’s have a little fun. People are on Facebook to have fun. So if you want to re-engage your audience, post up a funny post, share something from George Dekay or look at some of those post that people posting are funny seeing what’s working. Some of the meme, the internet memes are fun. You can make them relate to your business. There are lots of things out there that are still related to your business that are fun and funny, so look for some good jokes. Now it’s kind of complicated because of the copyright laws and you have to worry about that.
Yeah that is something to really think about and it’s a little bit where it’s a fine line there because you know like even George Dekay, like you just mentioned.
You know sites will tell you. There’s a comic site I’ve seen that said you can share any of my stuff on social media just give me a credit by linking back to my site so that’s all you need to do. You can share the comic and link back to the site but every site is different. You have to go in and make sure you understand what those rules are.
That’s great advise. And if you look at the Kimmy-type business, we always like to bring Kimmy Salon in here what would you suggest for that type of business specifically?
Yeah, you could some hair pictures. You’ve got lots of good photo opportunities there. The before and after with the hair. Those are always great. You could do a lot of bad 80s hairdos, you could talk about that. I’ve seen some crazy hairdos out there and somebody’s site that compiled all the photos of crazy stuff, so that will be fun.
You know some of my customers that take selfie in the mirror when they have a head full of tin foils and they post it on their personal page and they talk about the salon and they always get lots of engagement.
Yeah, you know you have to make sure they’re okay with that.
Why not!
I passed but okay. So talking about getting into ads a little bit because I know you have your product called FBadvertisingsecrets.com, that’s where they can out more information on specifically on your product that teaches how to do Facebook ads. And I love how simple you make it. How it’s not, talking about the power editor specifically it’s very tedious and complicated and a lot of people just throw in the towel when it comes to Facebook editor. So let’s talk what the difference is there.
Let’s talk about Facebook advertising has gone a little more complex lately because in the recent times. Because you can do different things. You’ve got the boost post, you’ve got the promoted post. You can set up an ad in the ads manager area which is kind of the basic area for doing ads. You can also access the power editor which is a more advanced area for ads which you have to use Chrome, the Chrome browser to get to that. And so how do you choose all these? And how do you know what type of ad to run? Should I be running likes, should be posting post, should I be advertising my website? What should I be doing? So I have a couple of good posts and we’ll link to them, I’ll tell you about them but there’s one that talks about your whole Facebook budget. Where do you put your money because it’s not like we’ve got hundreds of dollars to burn everyday. We want to make sure that we’re getting the right ads for our goals. So what I suggest is because Facebook has become more of a paid player option, I suggest really focusing on moving everyone to your email list. And using Facebook ads to get people to subscribe to your email list and now you’ve got them and you can always suggest your page to them and put on email saying hey if you liked us yet. Always direct people/spend most of your budget, I suggest 70% of your budget on getting people to opt in somehow and you could offer couple different things. It could be a coupon, maybe they have to give you their email to get a coupon. Or it could be some free report or could be a webinar that you’re running. Or a free 1 hour video tutorial that is a little more in depth than you have on your blog. So think about those kinds of things that you could offer someone that are good freebies and then get them over to your email list. And also the way you run the ads in the newsfeed you will get some natural likes as well to boost your page up and kind of connect with the people that way. But I like running most of your ads through the Facebook ads manager. I think you can do most everything you need through there. There’s a couple of cool tools that power editor has that you can take advantage of. Things like website custom audiences or just custom audiences and similar audiences. And maybe a dark post if you want to have a post that doesn’t show up on your timeline. So I outlined that on what types of things you need to do in the power editor and most everything I think you could do especially for people just getting started that you can use the ads manager for.
Love that, love that. And we’ll put in the notes, it’s show number 13, and we’ll make sure that we have the links that you’re discussing and also that graphic that you have put together. It kinda shows where you need to use the power editor versus the ad manager. Love that. And I’d like to ask the question because, and this is even for me personally, I sometime battle and even small businesses, I battle whether to use the clicks or the engagement. What do you suggest?
You got a couple of different buckets you can run these ads. You can do a boosted post or promoted post. And those types of posts are designed to get engagement on that post. So that is for re-engaging your audience and that’s the main purpose of that. They could be a little bit, it could also be directing them to a website but you’re going to actually end up getting a little bit more on just pure engagement on that post. If you’re looking to direct them to a website I’d recommend using the website conversions and using conversion pixels so you’re actually tracking how well people are opting in to your offer. So you got this little piece of code that goes on your website, you put it on there and you direct the ad to your website. And when they get to that end point, like where they already signed up to your newsletter, the code is on that thank-you page. And they get to that thank-you page and pings back to Facebook saying boom! success, they opted in and it says that’s how much. You got a conversion there now you can track how much it cost you to get that conversion. So now you can say it cost me $2 to get that person to my email list. Maybe there were a bunch of clicks on your ad and you we’re maybe getting 50c a click, something like that, but every fourth person, whatever it was then if I’m doing my math right then opts in and now it says boom $2 per conversion and you can say I know that when I get someone on my email list, 1 out of a hundred people buy from me or whatever it is. Maybe it’s more than that but we’re just saying for an example. And so now if your product you can now do all the math and say okay if it’s costing me $2 to get someone on my email list and I get a hundred people that’s $200 I have to make sure that selling on something that’s worth that amount of money so you’re actually getting a good return on your investment. And it could be a long term. You could be looking to the long term and saying over the course of the year, that’s going to be worth it. Because think about your other marketing. You’re putting ad in the newspaper, how much does that cost? What, the Yellow Pages?
We don’t have those anymore!
They show up on my doorstep and use them for kindling.
That’s the best booster seats for grandkids, too.
There you go, booster seats right there!
Now I like how you broke that down and it really is showing how you can put that ad on Facebook and convert that into true sales and profit.
Exactly.
Okay, I like that idea.
We’re in it for the money baby.
And there’s so much power to how much you can target people in the ads with those Facebook ads.
Kimmy I think you need your hair done.
I just need to sneeze and then I got my hair.
It’s going crazy! There you go!
You can live with the 2 funniest people on here. That’s great. So now for a little salon like Kimmy’s business do you have any certain type of, well just give us some tips there for little business …
Now here’s the thing, for a small business you don’t have a big advertising budget probably. You’re focused on, you just don’t have a lot of extra thousands of dollars spend every month or something. What I would do is I would take sometime businesses are a little bit against using coupons, I understand that whole coupon mentality. People think and they’re always watching for coupons and you don’t get the right client sometimes. So what I would do is maybe look at something else you can offer to get people on your subscription list. Coupons could be a good thing for salons, maybe special coupons that would entice them to get a different type of service that they might already get. That could work. Or a special once a quarter maybe. So that could be a good enticement to get people on. Or it could be just like a list of new hairstyle. Here’s a list of some examples of some new hairstyles, I mean everyone’s flipping through those magazines looking for a new hairdo. So it could be you’re going to offer some exclusives to them for new hairdos and they get them on the list and could also be a referral friend bonus type of thing maybe you’re looking at. And I would look at spending, start out just looking at spending maybe a hundred dollars on Facebook over the course of a month. And maybe you’re going to run 70% of your ads would be towards getting them on the list to getting people focused on the list and your ads are going to be a little bit easier because you’re focusing on a geographic area. And maybe you’re only focusing on women, you want to appeal to the ones who are more likely to convert. You might serve men clients, too, men need hair cut too I’m sure. But the women might be more likely to connect with you. Then you run 70% of your ads towards trying to get them on to your email list, connect with you somehow. And you can also look at advertising to the friends of your fans in a certain area because they’ll see that their friends go there and they might be looking for a new salon, like oh my friend Sheryl goes there so I’m might try it out. So you know there’s lots of opportunities but look at spending a hundred bucks for a month and then kind of make sure you got those measurements in place to see how well it does. And test it out. You got to test and track.
Yep, those are great tips. You know I can’t write fast enough but this is recorded. But one of the things that works well in a salon, too, is posting image that says short or long and I get a lot of people voting on whether they like short or long hair.
Yeah, nice. And you could even get the celebrities – short or long.
Yeah, Grandma Mary and Kimmy.
Kimmy you’ve got some good hair but I have to say I mean….
I have to say you two have the best hair out there. We’ll have to do a side-by-side.
Yeah, Kimmy or Grandma, what do you think?
Oh that’s great. Well let’s wrap up and I want to end with a couple of things. One thing is we’d like to give our audience action steps to take within the next 24 hours. Can you give us 1 or 2 actions steps for them to just go do.
Alright, so here’s my favorite action step is to post a little bit more. So let’s track where you’re posting is at right now. Say you’re posting once a day, maybe if you’re not posting once a day, well think of getting towards once a day. Let’s use that for an example, you post once a day so now post for 1 week, post 2-3 times a day. I know it sounds like a lot and people might be going wooah, I don’t know that’s too much but you know what you track how well it does for you. And this is engagement for free. You know we’re talking about you want to use some of the free ways you can get more engagement. Posting more works. Now if you’re already posting like 3,5 times a day then move it up to like 7-10 times is a lot. That would be lot but there’s pages that do it. So if you’re posting just once a day look at boosting it up 2-3 times a day and measure the different kinds of people talking about this number and see what that is after a week, kind of give it a couple of days to it lags a little bit so give it a few days after that to see where you’re at. See if you’re getting more engagement with that. See if you’re getting more reach on your post overall and test that out. The other thing I want to make sure you test out is making sure you add a little humor. So go out and find some post that you could put it in there that are humorous, funny. You can also look at creating images. I use stock images, there’s lots of free stock image examples and just put in a funny quote in there. I found an old picture from the 1920s that had people taking little picture of themselves and I said 1920s selfie, I got tons of shares. So ton’s of fun. You can look at doing some of that, creating that yourself. So adding humor and post a little bit more. Those are my 2 actionable steps right there.
Perfect, thank you.
Simple. Great. Well go ahead Kimmy and finish up.
Okay Grandma Mary, can you tell us you know once again where people can find you, give us a domain name or what product you would like them to look for?
Yeah, connect with me on Facebook at facebook.com/grandmamaryshow. I’m there everyday. I take the weekends off, actually. I take the weekends off, you know. I got to rest, too. I got to have some downtime. I’m a big fan of unplugging a little bit. But I will be there occasionally on weekends. Then go look over at andreavahl.com, andrea V-A-H-L.com, connect with me over there. I’ve got whole little corner of some of my fun videos and tutorials right there. And also we’ve mentioned the FB Advertising Secrets, if you want some help with the advertising. And that goes really in-depth into want kinds of post to create, to advertise. How to create them, how to use, it does have a module on the power editor, everything you need to now on the power editor and all that good stuff.
Well thank you so much we appreciate you’re coming on today.
Thanks Kimmy this was fun, thanks Janet.
Thank you very much Grandma Mary. Thank you, great to meet you.
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