Hey welcome to Social Media Hangout Time. I’m Janet Johnson here today with Kimmy, the social media puppet.
Hello!
And we also have a special guest, the founder of Josh Parkinson. Welcome Josh.
Thanks for having me Janet.
Hey, it’s great to see you Josh! Thanks for coming on the show.
Well Kimmy can you introduce and show, tell a little bit about his background and what is on with Post Planner and then we’re going to get into the meat of what Post Planner is.
You got it. But before I do that, hey Joshua have you ever been interviewed by a puppet?
I have man, several times, actually.
That’s awesome. That’s great, thanks.
So I’m very comfortable, very comfortable with puppets.
Good, thank you. That’s always fun to do. So let me introduce you as Joshua Parkinson, the founder of Post Planner. Your specialties are trouble-making, product development, mongering, fate hacking, catching extremely quick desert lizards, Facebook marketing, obviously, copy writing and crushing the boxes that people think outside of, uncomfortable situations, I love it. And googling things. You scared me, darn it. And your super human feats are to gap from zero to fifty, from zero to 50,000 users and thirty thousand monthly revenue in one year, that’s huge! And you grew blog, your blog from 9,000 to 180,000 unique views in 1 month and 1 year. Congratulations and welcome to the show.
Thank you, thank you for that nice reading of my bio.
And I want to add to that, congratulations to hitting the top ten with your blog this last year with Social Media Examiner.
Oh yeah, thanks.
That’s fantastic and Scott Ayres has done a fantastic job and I appreciate I’ve been a guest blogger a couple of times and I have definitely love Post Planner blog, it’s one to definitely read.
I got to get you back on. When are you going to guest post for us again?
Anytime, anytime. Tomorrow, there you go. Perfect, well, that sounds great. We’ll definitely have to discuss that more. So let’s discuss also Josh what is Post Planner? If we can back it up for people that have never heard of this program before. What is Post Planner and why did you create it in the first place? What brain storm this idea?
Well Post Planner’s an app that makes it really easy for you to post awesome contents on social media, Facebook in particular. The kind of content that gets tons of engagement, tons of reach. And we help our users find great photos, great images, great articles and great status ideas and we really make it easy for them to schedule them up and send them out in the future.
What made you decide to stat this in the beginning, in the first place Mr. Entrepreneur minded here?
Well I kind of gotten into tech back in 2010 and I was doing some stuff on Facebook custom pages and that kind of stuff but I decided that I really didn’t want to have a business that have clients. I wanted to have a business that have customers because it can scale better. So I tried to get in the app business with another app and didn’t quite work out but in the process of doing that I met a technical co-founder who helped with the beginning of Post Planner. And so when the idea of Post Planner came along I had him to turn to and we pushed it out in March of 2011. So we’ve been going strong for about 3 and a half years now.
And you’ve seen a lot of changes. You probably had to adapt quite a bit during that time. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Sure, you know when we launched we were just really a scheduling tool which these days have become a commodity, it’s almost built-in to so many other apps. So we started it that way but I kind of quickly realized that content was really the big pain point for a lot of businesses. They knew they had to be on Facebook but they didn’t know what to write, they didn’t know what to post so I came up with this idea of a status ideas of database where I went out and looked at what all these brands and pages are posting. I grabbed those status ideas and I started writing a ton myself. I started researching and finding a lot of great quotes and putting them into our database. And then we would show those status ideas to our users. That was really the beginning of this feature that suggests content to our users. And we’ve developed it from there to suggest articles, blog posts, and most recently, last spring, we released our viral photos feature which allows you to add any Facebook page on Facebook and we go out and grab all the photos and show you the ones that are going to perform the best for you. And they get really easy for you to share them.
That’s a great feature.
It is.
How many people do you have working for you?
Our company is 7 people right now. So we got 3 people on the content team, 2 full time bloggers, a full time editor and 3 people on the product/development team. And then I’m on the top that kind of wearing all the hats.
You are busy, to say the least, huh?
Actually I just delegate everything.
That’s the way to do it. Well and bringing Scott Ayres really made a difference with, well with the blog side of things, correct?
Oh yeah. Scott was huge. You know he was the beginning of our whole content marketing push. I hired Scott back on January 1st of 2013. So 2013 was kind of a test year for us, you know. It was kind of a case study for us in content marketing and blogging. He kind of proved that it works. In December of 2012 we had 9,000 unique visitors to our Post Planner website and by January of 2014, a year later we had a 186,000, I believe. So we increased our traffic by 20x in one year and really it was all about the blogging. We got Scott pushing out 3 to 4 posts a week. In the beginning I was the editor so I spent a lot of time editing posts and, you know, making them, giving them good headlines, giving them good images, making them nice looking for social media. And that took a lot of my time so I realized I need to hire a full time editor to kind of take over that so I can concentrate on other things. So at the end of the year I hired my brother, Pat Parkinson. He’s the editor now and we also hired Aaron Lee who is our second full time blogger, who’s awesome, as well. So we got 2 amazing bloggers who just love social media, they love Facebook, they live on it. They live and breathe it and they love writing about it. So that’s what I recommend to anybody who’s thinking about content marketing or blogging – hire somebody or maybe yourself but make sure that you’re really obsessed about the topic because that obsession will come through in the content. Scott and Aaron for example are always looking for newest things that’s going on, testing new techniques, they’re seeing what other businesses are doing and they can write about those things and do so provides a lot of value to other people which we get traffic. And that traffic hopefully converts to new users of Post Planner. And those guys, some set of those people upgrade and start to give us money. That’s how we do this business.
Now what’s the difference, can you explain what the difference is between the free version vs the paid version because I know you moved to free at one point to help bring more people in, I don’t know the reason behind that but go ahead and explain.
Yeah, it’s kind of the basic-premium model for a software as a service businesses, what people call Saas. The idea is you give away a product that has valuable functionality that people can use without having to pay. And then you add value on top of that with other features that are not available to free users. So they start using the app, they realize they like it, in the case of Post Planner they can come in to Post Planner, they can schedule posts for their certain number of pages, I believe it’s 5, 5 or 10 for free. And they can, they have a certain number of posts they can have in their plan. There’s certain number of posts they can send out per day. Then they just kind of start to hit barriers, for example they want to jump into our content, they want to get status ideas, they want to get viral photos, they want to get trending content. Now they can get a certain number of those in the free app but it’s a bit constrained. So hopefully that gives them the urge. At least they see the value in paying for it. But the premium model is really based on the idea that people need to test things out a little bit before they pay for them. So that’s kind of what we allowed them to do.
Cool. And so like Kimmy as a salon owner can we give a real world example of like how would she specifically use Post Planner for her business?
Well there’s a lot of ways she could use it. First thing she wanted to do is decide how often she wants to post per day so I would probably recommend at least 3 posts a day.
Yep that’s what we do.
So that’s perfect. Then I would recommend a variety of posts. So you don’t just want to post articles, you don’t want to just post images, you don’t want to only post text updates so what you can do in Post Planner is you can go in and say I want 3 posts to go out per day, one in the morning, one in the afternoon, one in the evening. In the morning I want only a photo to go out because that’s when’s most of my fans are online. In the afternoon I’m going to send out just a text update, a quote or a question. Then in the evening I’m going to share a great article from somewhere, either from my blog or from somewhere else. So you can set that up in Post Planner. You can say I want three posts to go out per day – a photo in the morning, a text in the afternoon and an article in the evening. And then once you set that up, that’s what we call your queue schedule, set that up and customize it. Then you can go in to the content features and kind of batch your tasks. So in the case of a salon owner like Kimmy I would recommend that she put in, first thing that she could do is go to trending content for example and put in some keywords about salon, maybe hairstyles or new salon techniques or any keywords about…
Hair coloring is a big, hot one…
There you go.
But is also hair highlights.
Those kind of things. You can add as many keywords as you want and then Post Planner would go out and find articles that are trending about those topics and then you could easily share those articles. Queue them up in your queue and they’ll basically drop in to the slots that you allowed articles. So if you queue up, if you find 7 articles then you’ll have an article for every evening for the next week. Once you have those then I’d recommend you go next to images and try to find some really cool images that will get a lot of engagement. You can either take our suggestions which we created some folders that will allow you to find really great quotes, for example, quotes on images which tend to perform well. If you decide those don’t work for you business though you can add any other fan page. So for example you might want to add a folder that contains 20 Facebook pages that are all salons. Kimmy you probably follow other salons on Facebook?
Yep. We have certain brands of hair stuff that we use.
There you go. So you could take their fan pages, put them into that folder and Post Planner will quickly show you which of their photos are performing best and you could either share those photos directly or if you find a photo that maybe one of your competitors is using and has performed well, you could go in and use our Canva integration to replicate that, put your own branding on it. So for example say a salon in your same town shared a funny quote about hair styles and put it on image and it just did really well. Got lot of shares, lots of likes, lots of comments and then they put their brand at the bottom of the image. You don’t want to share that image because you will be sharing that brand so what you could do is you could just take the text, the same quote, click the Canva button inside of Post Planner and you could just paste that quote in and put your brand on it and send it out. It’s probably the case that that image of theirs performed well because of the content of that quote, right, because of the text. So you can lean from that that if I put the same text on my own image then I have an audience that’s also interested in salons it’s probably going to perform well. So really what you’re doing is you’re basing your decisions on data, right? You’re basing your decisions on, know what I like to think of as scientific experiments. At Post Planner we look at every social media post as an experiment. So whenever you post something, you have a data set that comes with that post, right, which is for us is the number of shares, number of clicks, number of likes, the number of comments. So every single Facebook post is an experiment and what our app does is we show you the successful experiments. And you can kind of predict, be in a better position to predict how well your social media posts are going to work by basing them off the successes of other posts. So, that’s what I’d do next is I’d find go in there, put those salons in there, find photos that are working for them. And either share them or replicate them and fill up your the next 7 days. Queue up 7 posts. Then you have all 7 posts for the evenings, you have all 7 posts for the mornings now all you’re missing are the 7 posts for the afternoon. So then you’d go to Post Planner and you can click on status ideas and you’d find say if you want quotes, you could go to quotes. And you could shuffle around and find 7 quotes or let’s say 3 quotes and you can go to fill in the blanks, another category. Find 2 fill in the blanks and then you could go to questions and find 1 question and queue those up. And at the end of that whole process that I just described you would have 7 days worth of posts and only probably took you 5 minutes to queue them up and find them. So that’s really what I would recommend. In tandem with that as a Facebook, as a business owner with Facebook page, I’d also recommend that you’re running targeted Facebook ads to build your fan base because posting by itself is not enough. You’re not going to grow your fan base by posting. You’re going to reach your fan base by posting but it’s harder to grow your fan base by posting. And it’s also more, it’s also less precise. So what you can do with Facebook ads is you can be very precise in the kind of fans that you target and ultimately create a fan base that has the chance of really converting into customers which is really what it’s all about as a business owner on Facebook. So that’s my basic recommendation.
I’d love those suggestions because it will just be such a timesaver for us if we implement what you just told us so thank you.
So I’m here for it Kimmy.
It’s the creativity part of it, the one thing I think a lot of business owners struggle with is just coming up with those pictures, the ideas, you know. What am I going to post today? I mean, I don’t know how many times people had that question – what am I going to post? Oh I got to get a post out there, you know. They’re so worried about that but they don’t take the time to actually engage and speak to other people. They’re so worried about that but they don’t take the time to actually engage and speak to other people. They’re so worried about what they’re going to post and Post Planner kind of take the worry out of that, correct?
That’s true. Yep, that’s exactly what we’re trying to do. And now the pain point I saw way in the beginning was that having an app that lets you schedule things isn’t really, doesn’t really help business owners that much. I mean it helps business owners that already have a lot of content to post but the ones that are new to Facebook, there’s so busy running their businesses that they don’t have time to find stuff. And they also just don’t really don’t know exactly what works, they don’t know what they’re suppose to be posting so that’s what we’re trying to help those people.
Got it, got it. Now let me ask you, have to ask this question. Are you guys going to be expanding off of Facebook at all or you’re just going to be sticking with Facebook because I’m a Google+ fan, too, so just curious I have to ask that on the side?
Yeah, we’re definitely going to be expanding off of Facebook. In fact we’re going to be launching a web app in November, probably, to be conservative about it. We’ll start with Twitter posting. We made an acquisition actually last spring of a Twitter technology and we’re kind of in for that. But we’re really preparing a big launch for the web app so Post Planner right now exist inside of Facebook. It’s a Facebook Canvas app, you have to be in Facebook to access it. This is worthwhile for us for the last 3 and a half years but we’ve decided it’s time for us to move out of Facebook and allow users to access the app on the web and on their phones more easily. So we’ll be launching that and with that the ability to Twitter. And then quickly thereafter we’d be following with Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, hopefully, and many others.
Awesome. Awesome. I had the feeling you have that in your future but I just hadn’t heard yet. Scott kind of said, “oh, just wait, just wait.” So I had to ask. We’ll let’s finish up, we’re at about the half-hour mark. Can you just give 1 quick tip, you just gave a whole range of tips but just a quick thing that somebody could do in the next 24 hours to get started, test out Post Planner, if they’ve never done it.
Yeah, I would recommend that they go in to the app and they create a folder of really good pages. That would be the most valuable things. We all have our favorite pages, we all have businesses we probably following competitors and we know other pages who seem to be posting really cool stuff. The cool thing about Post Planner is you can go in there and you can organize all those pages into a single folder and then you can quickly click on that folder in one click anytime. You can go back to it anytime and click on it and it will show you the the best performing posts. So that will be my best recommendation is to go in there, create a folder with all your competitors or with similar products, with pages that are within your domain and you can have that leverage in the future.
Great, great tip. Alright Kimmy, well let’s have you finish up.
Alright. Well Josh let’s tell people where can they find you? If they want to connect with you, where would you like them to go.
Go to postplanner.com and right there on the front page you’ll have a big button that says “Install this App”. I want you to click on that button and accept all the permissions and you’ll be well on your way. Well if you want to read some of our awesome blog posts go to postplanner.com/blog. You can also go to our fan page on Facebook, just type in Post Planner at the search box so you’ll find it. We share all of our new blog post there. Actually we kind of show how to use the app there because we use the app for our own page. So you’ll see a lot of viral photos there, a lot of status ideas, lot of articles. So those are the places I recommend.
Perfect.
Thank you so much for your time and we learned a lot here and can’t wait to dabble into Post Planner even more. Thanks Josh.
No problem. Thanks for having me.