 So for today's lesson we're going to be focusing on a few things. First of all we're going to be talking about why social media in the first place, how social media works, and then we're going to take a look at how media strategy. We're going to talk about budget a little bit and then just towards the end we're going to quickly set up Facebook and Instagram. Great. So, I'm going to talk about why I'm here today. Many of us know that we are we are going through really interesting unique unprecedented times. I think at the start of the quarantine, especially in San Francisco, a lot of small business owners had to close down their storefronts because of shelter in place. They had to they weren't able to be in store and connect with their customers in real time. And besides that we're also seeing a lot of people who were confined to their home because of quarantine. They maybe they weren't actively working. They decided to use this time to kickstart their businesses, their small businesses. So I actually have friends in both buckets who had to close down their shops. And I had friends who actually use that time off, that downtime to really think of building their businesses from the ground up. So both I've talked to both types of people and from my conversations with them, there are some common questions that I hear a lot. First of all, from those who aren't able to meet their customers in real time, they often say or ask like, what can I do to stay connected with these customers during these times when I can't see them face to face? And for those who are building their businesses during this quarantine times, they want to know like, how do I get people to know about my business, my new business? If I can't really go outside and do traditional networking, what can I do? What can I do from my home? And that's as a social media strategist, of course, my answer would be that social media can help. Here's a really cool stat. Social media is valuable for any type of business, whether you're a small business that's just starting up or you're a big like national nationwide or an international business. Social media can be really valuable for you and it can directly impact your sales and your bottom line. You'll see here in this infographic from throughout social that if you use social media, customers that are customers that use social media are more likely to buy 55, sorry 55, 57.5% of people are more likely to buy from brands that they follow on social media. And that's like a really significant number. So Okay, so then we know that social media is great. A lot of people choose to shop from brands that are on social media. But why exactly does it work? Is it just this like magic platform where you upload posts and suddenly you have a lot of people following you and you're like suddenly all suddenly popular. So what is it that makes social media so effective? Why is it so significant as a marketing channel? Well, the truth is there's nothing really magical about it. It's all within the numbers. So here's the biggest thing. Your audience is most likely going to be on social media. And that's because of the huge user base that's available on social media. If you look at the numbers from the US itself, there are 79% of the US population that uses social media. So regardless of what industry your small business is in, whether it's food, fashion, beauty or something more niche, your audience will most likely be on social media. And so knowing that your audience is on social media, that's really a big marketing channel that you really want to tap into. And then, aside from that, a lot of people use social media to research services and products before they buy. A number of 54% of people actually use it. And that's a lot of people. And this is really true because the other day I was trying to research for running shoes and the first place I looked to with social media was for Instagram to see what people were saying about this brand on social media, what it looked like if it was in photos. And I did a fun little search on Facebook to see exactly how many people you can reach in San Francisco alone if you did a paid advertisement on Facebook. So if you set the parameters for a social media ad on Facebook and set it to San Francisco only, you can potentially reach 3.4 million people while your marketing budget right now, or I don't know, well, it may not be able to get you to that, to everyone within that 3.4 million. But the fact that you know that there's a large pool of people out there on social media that you can really tap into really says that social media is the place you want to be at, you want to be on to talk to your target audiences. So the second reason why social media is so valuable and why it works is because you can easily connect and build relationships with your customers. What's really unique about social media that you don't get from other traditional media like TV or radio is that social media allows for two way conversations. So typically back in the day before social media, you had TV commercials, you have TVs or radio commercials. But if you had feedback or questions, you can't really talk to them right away. You would probably have to call in like their help hotline. But with social media that all has changed. And people are now able to connect with you directly and get responses super quickly. And by getting more responses quickly, you have a better higher conversion rate because people get answers faster. Here I included a few examples of how like people are asking questions to stores during this shell during the shelter in place period, asking them if they have a certain stock of a certain item and people and the account manager, the social media account manager was able to respond directly pretty quickly. So that's one way you could maintain customer relationship without having to meet them in person. Some really cool stats here. We're seeing that 90% of social media users have already connected with a brand or business through their chosen platform. 63% of customers actually expect companies to offer customer service through their social media. So if you're a brand, your followers most likely will expect you to provide customer service and answer questions on your social media channels. And this is really interesting. This last one 33% of consumers would rather contact a brand or company via social media than than by telephone. This is really true. I personally have contacted brands before to ask them questions because I feel like it gives me a faster response rate versus me trying to send them an email. We're calling them via telephone. So moving on. And lastly, why social media that is valuable, and you probably will hear this often, but social media is truly the new word of mouth. And a lot of people have probably heard in the past that word of mouth marketing is the most powerful type of marketing. Here you'll see that 71% of consumers who have had a positive experience on brand with a brand on social media are likely to recommend the brand to others on their own channels. So you probably have experienced like an instance where a friend of yours tweeted about this great new restaurant in the neighborhood and you remember that tweet and later on you're thinking, Oh, I really like that that photo my friend posted about that restaurant looked really good. I want to try that restaurant out. And that's exactly how social media works. So by having your brand on social media, it allows other people to talk about you and tag you directly. So if someone is really happy with your service, your product, your brand, they can tag you directly so that other people can see and and directly reach you through that tag. So here's some key takeaways about why social media works and why it's so valuable. First of all, you can reach your ideal audience because that is most likely where your audience is going to be. You can build relationships with your customers because it allows two way conversations. And lastly, at this platform, the way it works, it encourages organic word of mouth. These are all really powerful things you want to think about as you're building your marketing strategy for your small business. So how exactly does social media work? So we talked about the why and now we'll talk about kind of more technically, like how we look at social media, if from a kind of like a bigger marketing strategy overview, you'll often when you're looking at your building your strategy, you'll often hear words like drivers engagement and that might sound confusing to you, but they're pretty straightforward. So essentially, what you need to remember is that social media is just going to be one part of your brand's larger marketing ecosystem. So remember, the heart and soul of your brand needs to be your brand. Social media is just a driver. It's just a channel to help promote your brand. Similar to how a CEO works, email, newsletters, websites and other marketing channels. So you have to remember that the purpose of social media is to lift your brand up. So I mentioned earlier about social media being a traffic driver, and it really is true. Social media is often said to be one of the biggest traffic drivers on digital media. And it works. It's the way it works is really simple. So say so your audience learns about your brand from a friend or an ad, whether it's through word of mouth, or them talking about you on social media and tagging you. So you check them out, you check them out, and you see their chat, their page, and you're thinking, Wow, this page really speaks to me. And I think I'm really like, this is this is really aligned with my lifestyle and what I'm looking for. I see some products that I think are really cool. So you naturally you want to go and check out their products. So you go into the page. And by doing that, the audience has already earned a very qualified lead. So that's how social media works as a traffic driver. And separately from that, you can also see social media as an engagement platform. So in this sense, say someone is familiar with your brand, some maybe they have shopped with you before, or maybe they are, they've already browsed your site a few times and just wanted to see if you have any more updates. You'll see you have social media sites. So they're going to be, they're going to be looking to your social media. And they're going to go there to see if you share updates, if you share information about potential sales and whatnot. So they go to your site or they go to your social media channel to stay engaged with you to see if they can continue to hear updates from you to interact with you and just to stay up to date. So some things to remember, social media, when used properly or when used correctly, it can really help your brand reach success. But of course, in order to do that, you have to have a good strategy. Here, it included a few brands, examples of a few brands that have really outstanding strategy on social media. Right now, these brands are bigger. They have a really big follower. However, these are the brands I've been following since they've started since they only had maybe like 8,000 followers on their Instagram when they only had very limited funding when they were considered small businesses, but they really leveraged social media as an effective marketing channel that helped them grow into where they are today. And I'll talk about why they why like what about their social media strategy made them unique. So first of all, Glossier. Glossier is the top left corner. You'll see that their products, they're mostly beauty products that you can sense by the colors, the shapes, the visuals, they're targeted for females. But what and they're not the first beauty brand on social media. But what makes them really unique and what made them really grew on social media is the fact that they really leverage their social channels as a customer relationship management platform. So where a lot of beauty brands just use social media to promote products and maybe engage with their fans here and there. Glossier really hold all the stops. They they used surveys. They use WhatsApp channels to really connect with their customers, get feedback. They listen to the comments in in the sense of like what are what are the customers saying in terms of their products, like what type of products are they looking for for their next launch. And they really listen to their community on social media. And every new product that they launch is because they list is based off of the feedback that they get from their social media community. So it gives a sense to the social media community that they have input into building this brand, which is what really drove this brand into becoming really big on social media. The next brand I wanted to talk about is Nissan Nissan kitchen. They're a kitchen wear brand. And I actually got targeted with them a few months ago, like during shelter in place. And what was really unique about them is that the fact that they use really relevant messaging at the time. A lot of people I know were like me. They never really cooked. They usually just do take out. But because of shelter in place they really had to shift their habits, their cooking, their eating habits. I had to go from never cooking to actually cooking every day. And that really made me pay attention to my cooking wear, my kitchen wear, including my knives. It's like now I'm like thinking like why is my eight year old IKEA knife so dull these days? Because I use it every single day. And it's really weird because I sometimes I feel like social media listens to me, although it probably is because I researched these things online. But like I got served an ad by Nissan kitchen about how sharp their knives are, even after multiple uses, after a period of time. And it's great for people who are just learning to cook. And I just felt like the messaging was so relevant for that time and place. And I followed this brand on social media and noticed a huge uptick in their follower base starting from when that shelter in place phase happened from to where they are right now. And so that's an example of how using relevant, contextually relevant messaging can really drive your marketing forward. The next brand I wanted to talk about is Outdoor Voices here on the bottom left. So Outdoor Voices is really unique. Before they were around most of athletic brands, they focused, they geared their products towards athletes or they talked to people who wanted to win. They wanted to talk to the marathon racers. They wanted to take to talk to like serious athletes. But the fact is that there's really a white space out there in the athletic wear industry where a lot of people are like me, that we're not serious athletes, we're not competitive athletes, but we do really like to exercise for our health or just for recreational purposes. But we don't really identify as athletes. But Outdoor Voices was able to really hone in in that white space and position their marketing as a recreational athletic wear, a recreational technical wear for working out. So that really made them stand out. And that's really the messaging that they carry across all of their social media posts that they're not that their clothes are something you can wear when you're walking the dog or when you're doing Pilates or when you're running, you're doing your morning run. It's not something that you have to it's not something you can you have to wear when you're like trying to compete in a marathon. Although a lot of serious athletes do wear Outdoor Voices now because they are professionally created. So we had a, sorry, we had a question come into the chat that it might be good to take now. And it was about talking about the Unmies on Kitchen and how they were sort of targeting ads. Do you can you define targeting and how that works? Yeah, I'll actually have a few slides later about paid, although I don't really go into targeting. But what's really great about social media's advertising capabilities is that because they have such a wide audience base, they have information about the audiences on social media. They understand like years of like what the demographics are on social media. So if you're a brand and you say you want to reach the beauty in the beauty audience, people who are interested in beauty, women who are like 20 to 40 years old, you can enter those parameters into social media. You do have to pay a certain number of dollars to be able to reach that people. But if you do have the marketing spend around it, you are able to tell the social media platform who you're trying to reach with your content and the social media platform will create this group of audience for you and serve your content to that audience. Yep. Thank you. Yeah, that's a really good question. I'll talk about marketing, paid marketing in a bit as well. And lastly, just quickly going over happy by health, they're an app. So they provide wellness like meditation. It helps you to calm you down. And during shelter in place, they really leverage social media to support their community, who is going through a lot of stress, a lot of depression because of shelter in place, because of quarantine, the lockdown. And they provided online social media virtual events for the community. They hosted Facebook lives where they did yoga classes. And they really leveraged like all the features of social media so they can support their current social media community. So those are some examples that I thought were really cool. And I guess this gives us a good time for discussion. If anyone here has seen other brands or businesses that have cool social media strategy and go ahead and unmute yourself if you want to jump in. If it gets crazy, we'll go back to the chat. I think there's someone speaking. However, I cannot hear you. We need to unmute you. Okay, it looks like I'm not able to unmute. Okay, we're trying to talk right now and it's not working. Please let us know in the chat. Hi. Oh, hey, I have a cousin in Greece in Athens, and she has a home decor women's accessories shop. But I've noticed in the last few years is the number of likes that have increased. And she's on Facebook. And she has 4500 likes for a small shop. And I know she's really worked at it actively and it has succeeded for her. And I'm just wondering, part of my fear is I'm starting out as an interior designer. I already have the education. And if I haven't developed my brand as such, is that like the first step in the process? And is that done now through social media? Or is it done? In other words, are there tools in social media to develop a brand? Or is that something where you go to a graphic designer and get help in that respect? I'm I'm just I've had a few clients. I'm moving along. Part of me is afraid that even if I get all the things in place that need to be in place, if I get too many customers at one time, will I be able to handle that? That or, you know, I mean, it could go either way obviously. But anyway, where do you start in developing your brand? Is it through having a bunch of customers first? Or do you start out by creating a logo? Anyway, that's a really good question. So when it pertains in terms of social media, if you have a brand, as so as long as you have a clear defined goal for your brand, you can start a social media page. So you don't need to have a customer base to start up a social media page for your brand. You could be, I don't know, five weeks old, and you're just completely starting out and you're building your customer base and you can start your social media page. You can build a present or you can have a lot of you have already have customers that are fans of your brand and you can leverage those people to help you leave reviews on your social media page as well. So there's a lot of, there's no like clear, there's no like definitive entry point you have to wait until you have five customers to start on social media. You can start at any time, but the only thing that you need to have to start is clear goals on clear business goals, what you want to do with your business and how understanding how social media can support those goals. Does that make sense? Yeah, so like having a business plan or a mission statement as part of the business plan. Yeah. OK, yeah. And then we have another question in the chat. Are we including things like YouTube and Twitter in the definition of social media? We are, yes. So that counts as social media. Social media typically pertains to platforms that allow you to have two way conversations. Thank you. OK. So let's move on. Those are really good questions. Thank you. OK, so we looked at a few cool social media strategies and now we start thinking about how exactly can I put together a social media strategy for my brand? And that's where I'm here to help. But first and foremost, as I mentioned before, before you start with your social media strategy, you really need to understand what your business goals are because if you don't understand what your business goals are, you're just going to be posting aimlessly on social media. Maybe you have some idea of what the goal is, but if you don't put that into writing, then it's really hard for you to have a very effective social media plan. So the reason for this is because your social media strategy needs to align to your overall business goals. Your social media strategy will help you reach your overall business goals. Here's an example of business goal that I quickly put together. So say this person who put together a business goal just set up a new big shop in San Francisco and their business goal for the 2020 year is to increase awareness around their new big shop in the San Francisco Bay Area and drive more purchases from new and existing customers. So we understand what their goal is for 2020 and we can from there we can easily pull out what our social media strategy objectives are. So first of all we know that they have a big shop and we know that so from there we want to get people on social media to know about their big shop. And the second thing we know that they're in San Francisco Bay Area so we probably want to reach people who are in the SF Bay Area. So if people are outside of the country they may not be a qualified audience for this business to help drive the business goal. And then after that we know that they want to drive new followers to make a purchase. So they're not only concerned about retaining their current existing customers but they're also trying to build their customer base. And lastly they do care about their current customers. So they do want to have repeat business from people that have purchased from them in the past. So that's that this is an easy example of how you can pull just. So the idea here is that you just need to understand what your business goals are. You can define a timeframe maybe if you want to be super definitive you can say within the first three months I want to make sure that this is my business goal. So this is how social media strategy my social media strategy can help. So now that you understand what your goals are you want to start building your social media strategy pillars. And these are the four pillars that you want to pay attention to as you're building your strategy. The first thing is audience. Second thing is messaging. And then third is channels and fourth is content. So I'll do a deep dive into each of them. First of all the audience. So the audience is who you'll be speaking to on social media while it's really good for us to think about how we want our brand to be relevant for everyone in the world. Ideally we should have like a primary audience like someone who we think would really resonate well with our product or brand or service. And in order to understand who your audience is there is a few things that can help you define that. The first thing is understanding who is where the location of your audience is is your small business a local small business and can only provide services to people in the Bay Area. Or is it something that can you provide services to anywhere to people anywhere in the world. So that's something you should think about. And then next age because social media does have a really big user base. Everyone starting from teenagers over 13 years old all the way to older people in the baby boomer generation they have social media presence. So you have to understand who do you want your product to appeal to in order so that way that can help you understand who you're going to be talking to your messaging and your content. And then does your product cater to a certain gender. If it's a beauty product. Are you trying to market to women or maybe it's a grooming product specifically for men that will help you understand how you can custom tailor your content. And the profession is your product or service for a certain type of profession. Maybe it's for health workers or maybe it's for frontline frontline workers. And then is your product or service for a certain type of hobby or interest. It does it for example like is are you selling bike parts. If you know you're selling bike parts and maybe your audience is is the group of people that are really into bikes. So that's the person that you want to talk to. And then next you want to think about the household income. And that's really based off of the pricing for your product and services. Is it a high end service. Is it more affordable that really understanding that will help you narrow down the group of people that you can talk to. And then there are of course there are other factors too that can help you define your audience. It really depends on your industry where you are. But this is kind of like a starter package. And you'll again you'll have the stack after this presentation is over. So you can take a look and just kind of use this as like your guideline. So now that you've defined your audience these are the two things that you want to think about in terms of speaking to them. The first thing is understanding what their unmet needs are. And the second is understanding what their secret language is. And those are the two secrets to help you really connect to your target audience. It's so unmet needs is essentially basically understanding what can my problem like what can my product my service provide that can really cater to what they're looking for what to the problems that they have that they haven't been able to solve. And the secret language is something that you can show as a brand to say that I am relevant to you to your lifestyle and this that's why you should work with me. Or that's why you should purchase me. So I'll give you some examples here. These are two examples that I thought did really well in terms of tapping into the unmet needs and the secret language for unmet needs. I pulled in outdoor voices just because I mentioned earlier. They're really a shining star in that white space of non competitive non professional athletic wear. And a lot of people prior to like the outdoor voices being a big hit on social media. They looked to Adidas or they looked to Nike. But they really cater towards more professional athletes. And there was kind of like this need of people who are just casual workout people like me. People who just wanted to exercise recreationally. And they felt like they none of the brands were speaking to them or catering to their needs. And that was how outdoor voices really provided services and really established a strong presence of social media because from the very beginning they established themselves as a recreational technical workout wear. So and next secret language. This is this is a pretty fun one if you're into skin care. But if you're not into skin care. So this picture is a picture of a water inside a pool. I think and it has a tag hyaluronic hyaluronic acid. What hyaluronic acid is quick science lesson is a hydration molecule that's mostly found in your skin and it keeps your skin supple. It keeps your skin moist. And with age it starts decreasing. So that's why you start seeing dry skin or wrinkles. So people who care about skin care and really like to pay attention to their skin. They really love products that contain hyaluronic acid and because it's a hydrating molecule they associate it to water because they think drinking water will help you stay hydrated will keep your skin looking beautiful. And this while this picture doesn't say directly like hey our products contain hyaluronic acid. It this and it will keep you hydrated. The video the photo implies that their product does have moist hydrating molecules that can help your skin stay hydrated. So it's kind of like that secret language and this post actually performs really well on their channel. So quick pause here. A quick discussion point. Does anyone want to share who you plan to speak to you on your social media channels for your small business. Feel free to unmute. Although Kate I might need your help here. What do you mean. If anyone needs to unmute. I'm not sure. All right. Yeah. Feel free to unmute and jump in. If that's not working you can go ahead and type it in the chat and I will read it out. No. OK. Well I'll move forward. But if there are questions I'll go ahead and stop. Just let me know. Excuse me. Yes. The did you just put an image on the screen of this moisturizing product because I didn't see an image on the screen. So so I'm just not sure if we're if we're supposed to be seeing this or not. Did you see an image of a woman with a tennis racket and then some swimming pool water. No I didn't. I'm on the slide right now. Are you seeing the slide right now. I'm seeing you and I'm seeing four other folks on the right hand side. But that's that's really all all that I'm seeing. OK. We have. Yeah you should be seeing it. So I think we want to spend some time. You want to spend some time sort of playing with your configurations. We have one volunteer that says they see it in the chat because everybody else just if you see the slides let us know. OK. Chat me. If you don't see the slides chat that too. OK. Great. So thank you. Thank you guys. All right. So the slides are out there. People are seeing them. Marina there's probably something with your view options. You might want to check in the upper right hand corner of your screen. OK. And then we do have a question from Christina. How do you turn audience to buyers. I've been getting enough money from my social media followers. The engagement has been good. The engagement is good. But the conversion hasn't been good. That's a good question because after this we're going to go into messaging. So I'll touch on that a little bit as we go into messaging unless there are other questions around audiences right now. So let's talk about messaging a little bit. So. Being is the second pillar of your social media strategy and it will tell the audience what your brand is about what and this is what you want to focus on. So your messaging. How do you put together your messaging. First of all here's a nice starter list. And of course there are more questions that you can add in yourself. But essentially what is it that you do. What what what does your service provide. What is your product about. What makes your product unique. What does your product. Why does your product work. Why should customers choose your product over competitors. Why do your current customers love you. What value can customers get from your brand or product. So these are some of the things that you think about as you're putting together your messaging for social media. And the next slide will go into that kind of like that conversion. So like you're saying you have a lot of like awareness. There's a lot of engagement on your site. But what you really want to do is drive purchases. And while social media. This is unrelated to the fight social media it really depends on like where you're activating on social media. Some platforms are really good at driving traffic versus others. Facebook for example in Twitter those are. Sorry Facebook and Instagram stories are higher traffic drivers. Versus like other platforms like Twitter. So like you can you can take a look at what platforms you're activating on. And you can take a look at your messaging strategy as well. So once you put together that list of messages based off of your brand. You take a look at the marketing funnel. So here I pull in the infamous marketing funnel. If you're into marketing or you're just getting into marketing you're probably going to see this marketing funnel a lot. And it looks like an upside down triangle because it shows you the different stages you want your customers to be in as they discover your product as they learn about your product. You'll see here there are four stages. The first one is awareness. That's when your your target starts learning about your brand and becomes aware about your brand. And after they become aware about your brand they start you want them to start considering your brand they just they don't you don't want them to just know about your brand. You want you want to sell them on your brand. You'd want to talk about why they should believe your brand why you should use your brand why you should they should consider your brand over competitors. That's all within that consideration funnel. And then after that after you built that strong consideration after people have been reviewing your brand looking at different posts about your brand you want to drive that purchase thinking you want to drive them down that purchase funnel. And then after you make that purchase you can stop there. However what social media can do is really help you retain your current existing customers. So after that purchase you can maintain the relationship with them and get them to become return customers and driving affinity. So I put together some example messaging here to show you the types of messaging that would go within the different funnel stages. My friend recently created started a bagel shop which is super exciting because I love bagels and I thought about her shop as I put together these examples. So but these are just kind of like things I put together. First of all awareness in that how do you get people to know about you. So the awareness messaging here would be we bring authentic East Coast style bagels the Bay Area. So that way people know wow there's a there's a bagel shop that provides authentic East Coast style bagels and they're in my area. That's super exciting. Consideration so I know that your bagel shop is around but why should I consider like why should I buy your bagels versus the Noah's bagels. And a consideration message here you could bring up is why like some like key differentiators like potentially like our bagels are 100% gluten free. Although I honestly don't know if that's even possible with bagels. And then so you get them to consider like East East Coast authentic style but gluten free. That's really interesting. And once you get them interested that's when you bring up more of that purchase driving messaging to get them to drive urgency. So order by Tuesday for 30% off. So that's a really good example about like giving providing urgency so people can really commit to making that purchase because sometimes when people aren't on a timeline they won't really do anything. They won't make that purchase. But if you give them a deadline they will do something they will take action. So that's that's a tip for trying to build more conversion. And of course if you're trying to build more conversion on your social through your social media platforms then that means you need to focus more on conversion driving messages. So maybe do more talk about some more urgent things that can really drive people to make that commitment to buy your product. And then lastly affinity is how do you get people to love and come back to your brand and just become loyal fans of your brand. An example here is to use rewards get one free bagel for every five points. I had a I have a friend who actually started a cookie business and she's doing a program where if you return her jars you get one dollar off. And that's a really good thing to do because that makes people want to come back order more and also do something good for their environment. So that's an example. And so as you put together your messaging you understand where your messaging goes within the marketing funnel you think about which phase do you want to focus on for your social media channel. Are you super brand new. Are if you're super brand new you don't have any customers just yet. Maybe you should only focus on awareness and consideration messages because you can't really promote affinity messaging to people if you don't really have a customer base. But if you have a really strong customer base then maybe you should drive more of that affinity messaging or maybe you're feeling like your sales are a bit low. Maybe you can in that case you can amp up more of that purchase driving messaging so people pay more attention to that. So it really depends on what your goals are. Remember what are your goals for your business that that period of time. Like do you want to boost more sales. Do you want to increase more customer attention. So that way you can build specific strategies for your social media channels. So here's a blank blank blank template that you can use once Kate shares out the these slides. But essentially you can use this funnel fill out this marketing funnel with your messaging strategy and decide which marketing stage you want social media to focus on. And lastly no not lastly sorry the third thing the third pillar once you have your audience you know who you're talking to you know what you're going to say to your audience. Now we have to think about the channels which channels do you want to activate on. And there's a lot of different channels out there for social media. But today we're going to focus on some of the bigger ones or some of the most commonly used ones like Twitter Facebook YouTube Instagram and TikTok as well. One thing to remember is that not all social media channels should be used the same way. They each of these social channels are great for different purposes they have strengths and weaknesses. So understanding how different social channels work can really help you activate correctly and choose which channels you want to activate on. So let's look at Facebook first. So Facebook is a really nice kind of like like a strong platform for many different industries. It's a high reach platform. You see here there's like more than two billion active monthly users. So a lot of different types of audiences are using Facebook whether it's women older people younger teenagers. Like they're mostly on Facebook. So if you have your starting a business it's a good bet to just have it start a Facebook page. It reaches all types of audiences and demographics. It's a great community building platform because of the capabilities that allows like you can build a page for your brand and you can allow people to contribute to that page. You can have people post to that page. You can have people to leave reviews around your business on that page. So it really builds a sense of community. And again it it's just a really kind of like a solid platform to start your social media strategy with it's like I don't think I can't really think of an industry that wouldn't work well on Facebook just because of the really vast broad audiences that are on Facebook. There's a lot of users on Facebook as well. But usually Facebook skews a bit older while there are teenagers on Facebook. They do kind of shy away from Facebook a little bit in terms of usage just because their parents are on Facebook. Their aunts or uncles are in Facebook. So the demographic does tend to be a bit older. The fastest growing demographic on Facebook as of 2019 was people in the baby boomer generation. So older people are more older people are signing up for Facebook. So if your service and product is catering for an older generation then Facebook is something you really want to consider. More and more people are using Facebook stories. So that's a channel that could potentially leverage. And one thing to remember is that eighty five percent of videos played on Facebook are played without sound and that'll go into content a little bit and I'll touch on that as well. And Instagram. So Instagram is my personal favorite but it's good for inspirational lifestyle content. It's definitely a visual first platform. So you need to have strong visuals in order to perform well on Instagram. If you don't have photography or graphic design skills you can always tap into someone in your network to help you come up with content for yourself. But definitely you want to have strong visual content for Instagram. Typically short form content works best. So photos or short videos they perform really well on Instagram and Instagram is really good for brands like fashion and beauty food brands just because they're more visual driven. So a lot of people use Instagram there is more than one billion active monthly users and IG store users. There's more than 500 million people using IG stories daily. And that's a lot of people. Per day some an average user spends 28 minutes on Instagram. So people are really using Instagram. You know that they're there and you know they're spending time on it. So that's really that's really a kind of like a strong platform you want to consider for your strategy. It's also the second most downloaded free app on the App Store. And next YouTube. YouTube is a really cool platform because it provides education and entertainment at the same time. And it's one of the few platforms social platforms that allow for long form content. So on Facebook or on Instagram on Twitter you might be kind of tied to that short form content format. But on Facebook if you can create content that's educational around your brand then that works really well for YouTube. So for example like say you have a food business and you want to show people where you shop for your ingredients. That's and how you shop for your ingredients. Maybe it's like at the farmer's market that could be potentially a really good content for Facebook. It's educational and informational as well. A lot of people are on Facebook. Two billion monthly users are logged in. On average people who visit YouTube spend 11 minutes at least per average 11 minutes. And then it's the second most preferred platform to watch on screens by 18 to 34 year olds. And Libby a quick question from the chat about Instagram. Is there any information on the age demographics for Instagram? Instagram is a really interesting while mostly it is millennial. So think kind of like 25 to the 40. That's kind of like the biggest demographic. It does have a pretty broad reach among other demographics as well. Not as strong in the older generation as Facebook. But there are Facebook older Facebook users not as much sorry older Instagram users but not as much as Facebook. And it does it does you more younger as well. So it'll be millennials, Gen Z's. Those are the people mostly using Instagram's Instagram. Great. Sorry there's another question. How how are men likely how likely are men to use Instagram for fashion? Oh, that very likely. So as someone who has done a lot of fashion fashion campaigns, surprisingly there are a lot of fashion focused men's wear brands out there on Instagram and fashion or male fashion influencers on Instagram as well. And these people actually have really good engagement and follower count on their channels. So they're not like they're not just there, they're there and they have a really huge community. So people men are actually going there going to Instagram to look for like content for their for their demographic. Thank you. Hey. And the last platform I want to focus on is Twitter. So Twitter is more of a platform for disseminating news and information. So if you have updates, if you have promos that are super short and can be quickly distributed, Twitter is a platform that you can consider. It is great for driving to your website content. So because they allow for click links, you can quickly get people to click on your links and it's really good for networking as well. So say you're a brand. Say you're a they are a cookie brand. You have a you have a cookie business and you want to build a relationship with this influencer on Twitter. You can potentially just like you can tweet at them. You can like say hello via Twitter. It's like a very common practice to actually start relationships on Twitter. It's really interesting. There's still a lot of people using Twitter, although it's not as popular as a platform compared to the other platforms. But in America alone, twenty forty nine million people use Twitter as a platform. Twenty two percent of adults in the U.S. use Twitter and that's a really large number and twelve percent of Americans get their news on Twitter. So if your content has a lot of news is related to news or your website, your part of your strategy is to provide a lot of content marketing. Then you definitely want to link out on Twitter as well. So people can access and potentially even share on Twitter their own Twitter. And Tick Tock Tick Tock is a really interesting platform. It's something, a platform I've been super fascinated with, especially these past few months, starting from early this year, because people are so engaged with it. It's an up and coming platform. It's a platform you want to look for, look out for. If you're trying to reach a younger audience, say like older teens to like millennials, Tick Tock is some a platform you want to consider to drive brand awareness. However, it is very video focused. So you need to know how to create videos and it is short form video around entertainment. So like most of the videos that I've observed on Tick Tock they're mostly to provide entertainment value. So not there are more informational, educational content, but a majority is like most of the videos that perform well on Tick Tock are videos that are more entertaining versus like informational. Currently, it's the fourth most popular free app from the app store, which says a lot because it's so young as an app, but it's already the fourth most popular considering like Instagram is like the second. So that's kind of like wild, the fact that they grew so much this year. Nine out of 10 Tick Tock users use the app multiple times daily. So they will check in multiple times. There are 800 million active users monthly, which is a huge number considering how young they are as an app and an average their platform like content from the platform sees a 52.1% engagement rate. If you I included a link here if you're interested in learning more about the stats you can click in the link to see how these stats were calculated. But overall, you now know under you have a better understanding of the different social platforms how they work, what they're good for. So remember to understand. Remember, as you're putting together your strategy, your channel strategy, remember to align your channel strategy to what your goals are. So if your goal is to reach like an audience that is older, make sure to activate on a platform that really meets the older audience. Great. And the fourth pillar of your strategy is content without content. Oh, I see Donald raised his hand. This is a new feature. Yeah, I'm trying. OK, I guess you could hear me. One of the things that you haven't mentioned is the length of time any content is going to stay online. Just one minute. That's a good question. And I don't think I actually cover that in this deck, but depending on the platform, content actually generally lives indefinitely until you remove it. If you think about an Instagram post or a Facebook post, it can live forever on this channel until you decide to remove it or hide it. However, there are newer platforms or newer channels like Instastories or Snapchat or Facebook stories where content actually disappears within 24 hours of you posting them. Yeah. Go ahead. Actually, my point is, well, I'm curious, I've been in book publishing since 1977, and I'd have to say, prior to the Internet, my best marketing platform has been public libraries because it's a chance for people to preview the book. And then if they decide they want to keep it, they buy it. And so I was really interested to see how Facebook, Instagram, YouTube would work. I've put some videos on YouTube and they have proven to be very effective for several decades. What I see happening on Instagram and Facebook is that your content is really only flashed on the screen for a very short period of time. And then it disappears within a lot of noise. I've had a Facebook page for my books and basically it doesn't have anything. It has no marketing value for me. I've tried placing ads and a lot of my books go through Amazon so I can track sales and sales were not at all affected by my advertising on Facebook. So I just thought how you would read what you might comment on about that. Yeah. And thank you, Donald. I appreciate that. And we do have a couple of questions about sort of individual situations. So, Libby, if you could speak to this briefly and then in the interest of time, you probably need to go forward and we'll see what we can do at the end. OK, that's good. So for your case, so you're promoting public, you're a promoting bookstore writer and you're saying that you're getting very small exposure or like a very small window of exposure. So one of the best practices for social media is to have a consistent posting cadence. And the reason for that is exactly the problem is because of the problem that you're saying. You only get a few seconds of fame. You only get like, you know, someone that scrolls through their feed will probably see your content only twice, only once. So they won't be presented the content again if they scroll through the feed again. Because of that, if you want to drive awareness to your brand, it's really important that you drive. You have a consistent posting cadence, whether if you post every week, every every twice every week or every day, that way people can be reminded that you're around on social media and that they can come to your social media channel to learn more about your your business. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. I think it applies to some kinds of business, but not mine. I mean, I've been selling the same book since 1973. So the the idea of just having to say something every day or twice a week or something like that just doesn't make any sense for my kind of business. I mean, YouTube is very effective. I the social media. And I haven't mentioned chat groups. I mean, well, if we have time at the end, maybe we can go into this a little bit, but I do want to make sure he was asking living can get there. But actually, can you add to social media the concept of the forums where people can discuss things on an ongoing basis? Yes, should we discuss that now or later, Kate? I think later. Were there other questions? There is a question about if we're going to talk about the difference between a personal Facebook page and a business page. We won't really go into that. We're going to talk about business pages just because this is more for a small businesses and usually business pages perform better for a business versus a personal page. And Miska would like to know which channel would be best for promoting an event decorating business for like weddings and birthdays? I would say Instagram and Facebook. Instagram to show off your portfolio. Facebook to build up your customer base and like get reviews, get people to leave reviews because with decorating businesses, you want people you some like with decorating businesses, you really want to know how credible this vendor is. Like if they really deliver, if they're on time and whatnot, and those are the things that you want to consider and Facebook really allows you to show off your reviews on their business pages. Thank you. Great, so content. So fourth pillar in your strategy, content. As you are designing content for social media, it may be tempting to just be, to only talk about yourself and your brand. But if you really want to have a long lasting relationship with your audience, you want people to continue to be engaged, you have to really think about what the best practices are and what your audience is looking for. Here I put together kind of like a diagram of what the social audience wants from a social channel if they're following a social channel. 70% of the content on that channel should be providing value to the audience and build the brand image. So if they want content that provides value to them, and I'll show you a little bit, I'll show you some examples. And then 20% of the content should be taken from other people, UGC, which is user generated content. So maybe you can have like a review that you show off as a post. You can retweet or reshare industry news or relevant content. And only 10% of your content should be direct brand promotion. So basically, if you're like trying to say, my brand is the greatest, my brand is like the best, I have sales going on right now, try to limit that number so that your page isn't just about like sale, sale, sale and sales. Like you make sure that you provide value to your social audience. And of course these numbers you can tweak around and play with as you start learning more about your audience, see what they resonate more to. If it happens to show that your audience actually prefers more brand promotion, then bump up that number and reduce other numbers. Here's an example that I pulled from Molecule Air. They're an air filter. They're like a really cool air filter. And they have really strong engagement on their social channels. But what I thought was really unique is the content that they push out, they have a variety of content. So here under providing value, they not only talk about like their sales and whatnot, but they talk about like educational stuff, like facts about viruses. They educate people about how to keep their houses clean. And then UGC, UGC is user generated content. So they actually leverage the reviews from their site or from after people purchasing their product and use that and promote that on their Instagram channel. So if a new customer, a new potential customer is looking on their site and trying to learn more about this air filter system, they can see reviews from other people. And then promotion. So this falls into direct promotions. And this type of messaging drives urgency. So if you're looking to push conversion, think about this type of messaging. They're saying, last chance, save $50 on Air Mini. So it's saying that this promotion is ending soon, so you better act quickly. And then brand building, here it's talking about how the air filter was awarded by experts, how it's really credit, it's a good air system. So it shows that this is a strong brand. So those are the types of content that you can consider for when you're planning out your social calendar. Another thing that you want to consider is the fact that 99% of social media users access content through their mobile devices. So while a lot of us maybe using Zoom on our desktops, but when we're scrolling through Facebook or Instagram or Twitter, it's usually through a mobile device. So with that in mind, here's a really cool stat that I was presented once upon a time, but the idea is that an average person scrolls through 300 feet of mobile content every day. That's equivalent to the size of the Statue of Liberty. So on a daily basis, your thumb actually scrolls through 300 feet of mobile content. Knowing that the mobile space, the digital social media space, there's so much content out there, you really need to make sure what you're putting out on social media is designed for mobile viewing. You need to be optimized for mobile viewing, otherwise you can't be, you're not going to be able to compete in that space. So here are a few things you want to remember when you're designing your content. First of all, frame for mobile viewing. Usually when you're using your phone, you're using it like portrait-wise, not landscape. So when you're designing your content, try to design that way. So portrait or square even, so that way people will be able to see more of your content. Design for audio off. So this is a trailer from Netflix. I grabbed a few screenshots, but Netflix does their trailers really, really well on social media. They include subtitles with their social media videos. So that way if you happen to be scrolling through Instagram and you run into a Netflix video, you don't have to turn your audio on to understand what the video is about or what the show is about. You can keep your audio off and you already know what they're talking about. And that's really a smart thing to do when you're designing for video for social media. Make sure that you design for sound off. Yes, you can support with some audio, but you just need to keep in mind that you need to optimize it for sound off. And then lastly, make sure to capture attention and establish relevancy in the first three seconds. Remember, people are scrolling through 300 feet of content every single day on their mobile devices. That's a lot of content. If your content doesn't stand out, they're probably gonna scroll past through it and not even remember that your content was there. So what can you do to make sure they pay attention to your content? Do things to capture attention, to establish your relevancy. So if you're, say, you're in the industry of baking bagels and you want to talk to people who have a gluten allergy, make sure you bring that front and center. At the very beginning of your content, whether if it's a static video, bring it up to your main headline. Bring it up to your caption. Say, hey, gluten-free lovers. So you know exactly that this brand is trying to talk to you. Here, I included an example from Com App. They actually acknowledge the fact that people are just mindlessly scrolling all the time and they immediately say on their creative, stop scrolling and do nothing. So it's basically telling you to like stop, download the Com App and then take some time off to meditate. So those are essentially the four pillars of your social media strategy. Audience messaging, channels and content. So all of those should work together to help drive your goals. Before we go into budgeting, does anyone have any questions? Yes. Let me see. My name is Indriyam from Indonesia and I have my social media account about Revolve. And sometimes I see the, like my timeline and what if some brands like Indonesia, we have financial, one of account of financial planning and do skylights, they're really necessary. Sometimes they're creating issue at social media. So maybe I think that's for increase the attention. Is it like, I don't know, maybe if we sell something, is it good, maybe bad news is good news, like if it's not active or something like that. Is it necessary to create the issues to get attention from the customer of some partnership? Okay. Is it necessary to create an issue? I don't think it's necessary. A lot of award-winning brands have created award-winning social media strategies to get attention. What I think you were saying, these are financial brands? Josca.id. Okay. So I think what they said perhaps, so without actually seeing the actual, like what the content they're putting out, what I'm thinking is that they're really able to leverage into the mindsets of their audiences. So like they're creating issues around things their audience really cares about. So that way the audience is really already like paying, it makes their audience really pay attention to this brand. Does that make sense? So it's like one of their news, whether it's like a need for gossip, a need for, I don't know, but the idea is that they really understand the mindsets of their audience customer bases and they really play into that. But it's not necessarily. It really depends on, you know, your personality as a brand. If you are more of a provocative brand, then go for it. Thank you so because, so I think some of the channel is, yeah, maybe sometimes they're provocative, so to get attention and a lot of people doing like read to it on a diagram or a story. So a lot of people look at the channel and subscribe and something like this. Yeah. Yep. That's definitely a tactic you can consider. It's not for everyone though, but it is if you personally consider your brand to be more provocative, you can go down that route. We have another question in the chat. How does all this apply to service businesses like realtors? Sorry, what was, how was the question? How would these strategies apply to service businesses like real estate agent? Real estate agencies. Well, you can understand, if you're a real estate agency, you can understand where does your audience, where's your audience located? Are you based in a certain city? Who are you trying to target, right? And then like what kind of property are you trying to sell? Is it more, is it targeted for like super high income people? Like those are the, you can consider that as you're putting your, together your audience strategy, right? And as you're looking at channels, you think about like what channel is really well, work really well to support my, to support me selling my property. If you're in real estate, maybe you wanna show off your portfolio of property through Instagram or Facebook. And again, Facebook is a really strong one because you get to show off customer reviews. You can have any happy customers come and leave a review for you. So that's just an example how it would work for real estate. Does that make sense? Thank you. Okay. Wow. It looks like we have 10 minutes left. So we'll go over the budget for social media marketing. The question is, should I allocate a budget for social media marketing? Ideally, yes. If you have a budget for production, if you have a marketing budget, I would highly, highly recommend you considering, including some budgeting for social media. And these are some of the things that you would wanna budget for social media. Content creation. If you are a photographer, if you're a videographer and you're a graphic designer, great, then you probably don't need to hire anyone. But if you don't, you're not able to do that. You probably do want to hire someone more professional. Again, this is not a personal page. You're looking to start up a business. So you probably wanna invest a little bit into creating more professional-looking content. Paid social ads. I'll talk about paid social ads in a bit, but paid social ads are proven to be effective in driving awareness to your page. So if you're a newer brand and you wanna build up your follower base, paid social ads is a great way to start influencers. So do you want to seed product into the influencer community? Do you want people to start talking about your brand before your brand even launches? I know there's a lot of debate about influencers and whether they're an effective strategy of whether they're authentic, but there are really smart ways of leveraging influencers as long as you understand the strategy behind it and you're connecting with influencers that truly, truly understand your brand and care about your brand. And lastly, social media management. So ideally your business will pick up and maybe social media will just be a small piece of your marketing, but you may not have time to always manage it. So that's when you probably want to invest in another person to manage your social media accounts. So that way you can focus on other parts of your business. And aside from someone managing your account, maybe you want to invest in a tool that can help you track your social media platforms, like engagement if people are commenting on different things, that there are tools like Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, that helps you kind of like merge all your social media accounts into one stream. So that way you don't have to log into every single one and that really saves time for you. So if you do have budget for marketing, I highly recommend that you allocate some for social media. So we think about social media in two ways. There's organic social media and paid social media marketing. So paid social, organic social media is the content that you're going to put out on your own channels. You're not going to put any spend behind it. So this content is just gonna live on your channels. Some of your followers might see it up to maybe 6% depending on the platform. It's because social media is a saturated space, not everyone's gonna see your content, unfortunately, but there are ways around it as well. The more engagement you get on your posts, the more people see your posts. And again, if it gets good engagement, the platform is going to want to promote your content more. And where does people see your content, your organic content? So your content's going to go on your profile, on your business profile. If it's a Facebook, it's going to be on your Facebook business page and it's going to live indefinitely until you decide to remove it or hide it. If you don't, then it's gonna live there. And then for paid social media, so what it is, it's content that has spent behind it so it reaches a larger audience. So it's essentially putting an ad but using social media as the channel, as the advertising channel. You can tell the social media platform to assign it to a certain audience. So say, I'm an ice cream store and I want to reach people who are younger because they tend to like ice cream more than I can tell them that this ad needs to be presented to younger people and within the certain location. And who sees your ad? Well, more of your current followers. So not only other followers, but like people who are already following you, they get to see more of your content as well. And then it also reaches new audiences that have never heard about you before. So that's a really good way. If you're starting out, you don't have a follower base. This is a good way to start your follower base and where people see it. They see ads in their feed and unfortunately it won't live permanently anywhere. It just disappears. The question is, should I invest in paid social media? And the short answer is yes. Here's why you should invest in social ads. If you're a brand new business, you'll have virtually zero followers at launch. And while it's great to like text all your friends to like follow your business and tell their friends about it, you ideally want to reach a customer base that's outside of your friend group. So this is a great way for you to reach a new group of audiences. And paid social has very sophisticated targeting capabilities so you can reach your ideal audience efficiently because you can set the parameters, tell them what the age is, what the group, what their interest is, that way it reaches the really ideal audience. And it's not expensive to get started. So I personally, when Sheldron play started, my husband had to shut down his store at the mall and he had to move his services to like kind of like mobile services. I helped him set up a Facebook page and manage his like ad spend budget. And honestly, it wasn't that expensive. We started out with doing like $10 a week on Facebook but their return on investment was really high. With $10 a week, he was able to get four new customers. Four new customers brought him an average of like, each of the customers brought him an average of like $100. So it gave like for $10 media spend, he got him $400 of business. So that's kind of like, you have to test and learn. It really depends on where your industry is, what you're promoting, what your business is. But the more you test, the more you learn about like how much you should spend. But it really, it's not super expensive to get started. So any questions? So it looks like we only have three minutes left. I was technically going to show you how to set up an Instagram and Facebook but I don't think we actually have time for that. Let's use this time to do questions instead. Kate. I think we might have a question from Marina. Marina, are you unmuted? Yeah, I unmuted myself. So again, you were just saying that when we start out, if we don't have a large customer base, it's better to rely on setting parameters on social media, targeting our audience and all of that. And then I'm a little bit unclear, but at that point, you certainly have to have something to draw them in as far as having perhaps a logo or a mission statement or maybe one or two reviews or something. We do, yes. I mean, you can't just hope that suddenly all these people will be interested without feeding them in some way. Exactly. And that's where your content strategy comes in. So before you do any paid advertising, just make sure that you have your content in place. So when they get presented to your brand, they come to your Facebook page, they can learn more about what you're about, they can see content that you already put out. So make sure that you're not driving them to a blank page. So it is important to have some content established. And Libby, two more from the chat. We're gonna do lightning round. How consistent do you have to be to promote your brand successfully? I would say pretty consistent. I won't give you an exact number of cadence. It's always, it really depends on your audience, your industry. It's really a test and learn type of thing. In general, we've seen more success with the more frequent times you're posting. So if you're able to post every single day, that's great, but you know, in success with brand is where we don't really need to post every single day. We still get a high engagement rate if we post really depends on your strategy, but the idea is to have a consistent posting cadence. So that way you don't fall off the face of the earth and your audience forgets about you. Thank you. And do you have to pay to start the business pages for each of the social media channels? No, it's free to set up a Facebook business page and it's free to set up an Instagram page. Also a Twitter, it's completely free. All the social media sites are completely free to set up. If you want to get into paid advertising, that's when you start having to spend money. Do they require anything like a tax number or anything like that? No, no. Well, honestly, I don't, I'm not that I recall. Great. Okay, that is time. We have several requests for another Zoom. So if I can talk Libby into it, you guys, check your email, check the calendars. Yes, just like know what kind of class you guys want. Thank you, Libby. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Libby. Thank you so much for doing this for us today. We appreciate you guys coming. Thanks so much. It's...