 Good morning. At least 75 million young people around the world seek access to meaningful livelihoods. The global youth unemployment rate is currently at 12.6%. In order to generate sustainable growth and avoid a further increase in this rate, at least 400 million new jobs will need to be created. We know that private sector companies alone cannot meet that job demand. So this is why entrepreneurship is essential. Technology can empower entrepreneurs to become drivers of economic and social progress in their home countries and communities. Today we're here to discuss how global entrepreneurs can reach consumers, build their brand, and grow their business via social media tools. My name is Zinat Rahman. I'm the Secretary of State John Carey's Special Advisor on Global Youth Issues, and I am honored to have the opportunity to connect with all of you online. I am joined by Emily Wilson, Director of Ad Management for Social Code. Social Code is a marketing company which works with clients to find innovative ways to employ social media to target potential and existing customers. Emily works with a number of Fortune 500 companies to help them build communities on Facebook and Twitter, and so please take advantage of her expertise and submit your questions via the chat box on the CONX entrepreneurship page or via Twitter using the handle at CONX, C-O-N-X. Emily, welcome. Great. Thank you. It's great to be here. Great. I'm going to jump in with a question. Great. So first of all, what does marketing via social media really mean for entrepreneurs and small business owners? Sure. So social media marketing is basically a form of internet marketing that allows advertisers to promote or sell their brand, product, or services through a platform like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or LinkedIn. There are a lot of advantages to using social media marketing, so the primary one is the cost. Social media marketing is significantly cheaper than traditional media channels like television, billboards, or even email. You can reach the same number of users at a fraction of the cost. It's also the only marketing platform that allows you to interface with your customers directly and establish a meaningful two-way relationship, so you can get direct feedback from your customers about your product or your services, and then you can also message them about new offerings that you have. Results are really measurable, so marketers can easily understand what's performing well, what's not performing well, and because they've established this communication with their customers, what sort of things their customers are actually interested in, and these companies will get direct feedback from their users about what products or services are most interesting to them. And so that's a great aspect for customer relations to feel like they're really being heard by the brand. And I think the last thing is that the wealth of targeting that's available on these social media platforms is pretty insane compared to a lot of these more traditional media channels that you can buy advertising on. So if you think about Facebook, anything that you input into your Facebook about who you are, what you're interested in, where you live, advertisers can target you with ads based on that information. So you can really hone in on who it is that you're looking for and only target those users and reach those users who are actually going to be interested in your product or brand. Fascinating. So you mentioned traditional marketing techniques like billboards and sales. When should an entrepreneur or business owner turn to social media to market their product or service as opposed to these traditional marketing techniques? Sure. So I think one thing that can be a little bit scary for advertisers is that having this social media marketing is still pretty new to a lot of people, and it can be a bit intimidating to dive in, not knowing what sort of best practices are or how to measure success. And so traditional media is a little bit easier because it's been named in existence for longer. It's been proven as a valuable strategy. But I think what social has is the ability to move a lot faster and be a lot more interactive with customers. So you can get a social media strategy put together and implement it in a much faster way than you could on a traditional channel. The barriers to entry are a lot lower. And you can interact with your customers in a much more direct and meaningful way, which is great. So do you think across the board social media marketing is as useful for kind of all business models and products or is it more effective for some than others? So we think that social media should be a social media strategy. Every company should have one. Every brand should have a strategy and a presence on social media, although there are certain certain industries that may be certain platforms work better for. So if you're a consumer, a product, a retail store, it's great to have a presence on Facebook where you can share content about what you sell or what you do and interact with consumers that way. And then again, Twitter is huge for that to establish these personal lines of communication between you and your customers. If you are about business to business sales, being on LinkedIn is obviously a great place to be because that is a social media and a social channel that is designed specifically for business users. If you have a business like a graphic design business that naturally lends itself well to graphics, pictures, that sort of thing, then Pinterest would be a great place to establish a presence. And then if you're about videos and that sort of thing, then you want to be on YouTube. But generally we recommend that you should think about your social strategy in conjunction with your other strategies and looking at your marketing strategy in sort of a holistic way instead of focusing on individual channels and having them all work together. That makes sense. The brand identity. Right. So you want to make sure that your message is consistent from Facebook to Twitter to TV to Billboard to whatever you're doing and making sure those are all working together to support your brand and your marketing strategy. It's fascinating. What social media tools or new technologies should all entrepreneurs be using and what emerging tools should they be aware of? Yeah. So again, it very much depends on the brand and on the company. Facebook we think is a pretty good place to start with a global user base of over a billion people. So likely your customers are on Facebook in some capacity. But again, it's important first step to sort of determine where your audience is and where your customers are. So are they on Twitter? Are they on Facebook? Are they on Pinterest? If you can understand that then you can spend your money or your efforts in sort of the right channel where you're going to get the maximum return on your investment. So I think because barrier to entry is low, people often don't think about there and do sort of an audience analysis to figure out where their audience is. But that's a huge and important part of understanding and starting your social strategies to be on the right platform where your customers are. So we have viewers from all over the world tune in and you know, it's morning, noon and evening around the world where we are, where we're tuning into. Do you think social media marketing strategies are the same for global and local businesses? And how do they differ depending on the target country or you mentioned the customer demographic, but just kind of the global landscape of this. Can you tell me? Sure. So I think one great benefit of social marketing is that the internet is global. So make that makes every company whether it's a global corporation or a local business accessible. Excuse me. It's just one click away. So small fish can compete against big fish on the internet. It's just about finding your sort of target audience and hitting them. I think one big difference between large and small companies is that global brands obviously have larger amounts of resources, which can be good. But a negative for that is that they have to coordinate a lot of different teams together to get that messaging or those advertisements out there. So they have to be vigilant about coordinating strategy, branding, messaging and offers across many different departments. Small businesses, while they may not have the same amount of resources can be a lot more nimble in terms of making changes much quicker and that sort of thing. I think for at least on Facebook and Twitter, the offerings product offerings for advertising are the same whether you're spending $500 million a year or $500 a year. So it's really about the individual taking advantage of all those offerings. And for local businesses, like we said, the wealth of targeting that's available on Facebook really allows you to penetrate those local markets with really granular targeting. So you're reaching exactly the right people who you're interested in. And as an advertiser, you have access to that data. So you can anybody can create an ad on Facebook, regardless of whether you're an advertiser or you're just an individual on your own Facebook account. And you can, like we said, input any sort of targeting that you want, based on who you think your customer is. So if you're a video game retailer, you want to target people who are interested in video games, you can target people who are interested in specific video games who are in specific age and gender demographics who live in specific areas of the world or specific areas of a particular state or country. That's amazing. Okay, we're going to go to audience questions. So we have a few questions lined up. We have a question from the Lincoln Reading Lounge in Pakistan. Hello, Pakistan. What should what should be the cycle of the social media marketing? What days of the week or what times should you post? I think that's a great question. Yeah, it is a great question. And it's one that we get from our clients all the time. So people want to make sure that the efforts and the spend that they're putting into Facebook are being maximized on the return. So again, unfortunately, there's no clear 100% right answer for this. It really depends on your brand and your audience. But generally, we recommend posting between one and three times per day. And we would recommend that you are posting every almost every day of the week. So you want to keep your users engaged, you want to keep that conversation flowing and you want to make sure that your posts and and what you're promoting on your page is always rising to the top, so that people will see it. So we tend to see generally that middle of the week and middle of toward the end of the day tend to be to be better performing. If you think about people's Facebook or Twitter usage habits, usually, you know, the end of the day end of the workday where people are getting a little bit tired, they tend to spend more time on Facebook. And then when they're home in the evenings, that can also be a great time to reach people weekends, we tend to see lower interaction rates, which I think makes sense. People are sort of out of their home, they're not on their computer, they're maybe out doing activities. Whereas during the work week, Facebook and Twitter and other platforms can be sort of a break in the workday. Can you talk about that? You mentioned it, the the interactivity part. How important is that to when you post something to make sure that you're communicating with the people who are responding to that? Yeah, yeah. So Facebook works as a tool. If we're talking about Facebook in particular has a system called Edrink, which is how they determine how posts get shown in your newsfeed when you log into your Facebook. So pages that have high interaction rates, meaning that when they post, there's a lot of fans who are commenting, liking and sharing their posts, they have higher Edrink. And so their content will be shown higher in the newsfeed, making it more likely that your content would be shown in your friend's newsfeed, their friend, their friend's newsfeed or something like that and increasing your reach. So constantly keeping your fan, fans engage with your page is hugely important for generating new fans, keeping your Edrink high and making sure that your content is actually being shown to people who will be interested in it. It's basically critical to your advertising strategy. Yeah, so you don't want to build and it makes sense. You don't want to build a community of people and then sort of totally leave them aside, forget about them. You want to make sure that you're nurturing them, that you're establishing this two way communication, reaching out to them, understanding, you know, if they have issues with their product or brand doing customer relations through Facebook and Twitter can be great. Or just messaging to them when you have a sale or an event, that kind of thing is huge to do through your social media channels. Fantastic. We're going to take another question. An online viewer asks, once you've created a Facebook page or Twitter handle, how do you get those first initial followers? Yeah, so there I mean, there's sort of two ways you can try to do it organically, which means not paying for it or you can you can pay for it. So when you're trying to build your page organically, it's really important to rely on your own networks. So reaching out to people who you think might be interested in your product or brand, your friends, your existing social network. So if you've created a page on Facebook, share that page with people your friends with who might also be interested in it or Twitter. If you want to pay for followers, you can also do that. Like we said, targeting is so important on Facebook and Twitter and other social platforms. So if you have a new Twitter handle and you're a charity that operates in the Middle East, you can target people who are interested in charities, who live in the Middle East and likely build your followers that way. Like we said, cost is relatively low on Facebook and Twitter and other social platforms in comparison to other media channels. And we've also seen through our work at Social Code that in some in areas like the Middle East and Northern Africa, there tends to be less competition in the marketplace. So prices can often be a lot lower, which is it's a great time to sort of get in there and spend a little bit of money and see a fairly substantial return. So you've talked a lot about kind of paying for ads on Facebook and Twitter. Can you similarly pay for ads on other social media properties? Yep. So LinkedIn is the other biggest one right now. Pinterest does not have advertising on it, but you can create your page on Pinterest and you can always promote that through your Facebook page or your Twitter handle and working all those things together in conjunction. It's like another question. So if you are from Pakistan asks, how would one use social media properly? For example, hashtags on Twitter, anything specific? Would leaving links on Yahoo answers be considered use of social media? So I think at social code we think of social media as specifically social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest where people have an identity that's their own and they're interacting with other people with their own personal identity. So Yahoo answers I think we would not consider social media given that there isn't necessarily a social aspect of it where you have a personal identity that you're sharing content, you're maybe just answering questions. In terms of how to use social media, I think Twitter hashtags are the most important thing for using Twitter. So if you are sharing content from your Twitter handle, you want to include hashtags that are relevant to your brand and that if people who are searching for those hashtags, if they see them, they'll see your brand and identify you with that hashtag. Maybe discover your brand or product by searching for that hashtag that they hadn't thought of before. On Facebook, I think one thing that we've mentioned is keeping that conversation between yourself and your customers. So having a conversational tone is great on Facebook talking to or creating posts on your page that are like talking to your customers and really establishing sort of an informal means of communication and a relationship with your customers that way. Like on Facebook, that's the most important technique. Like you said, nurturing that environment. Nurturing your customer relationship and the best way to do that is to talk to your customers like they're real people. So not trying to necessarily feed them a bunch of marketing speak but talk to them, ask them questions, ask them what they think about your product or brand, share things with them that aren't necessarily, you know, purchase this product but here's a cool thing that I saw and here I want to share with all my customers. It's really about creating a relationship, like we said, between the customer and the brand. Since we're talking about Twitter, I'll say that Emily tweets at social code Inc. and I tweet at Z-naught. Just my first name. Another question. A viewer asks, what do you suggest for entrepreneurs who are limited by a lack of funds for social media promotion? Maybe if you only have a budget of $50 a month or something, you know, like where do you go first? Sure. So I think, like we said before, that tools that are available on platforms like Facebook and Twitter are sort of the same, whether you're spending an insane amount of money or whether you're spending only a little bit of money. And I think the most important thing if you have a small budget is just do your research ahead of time. So like we said, understand who your audience is and what they're interested in and how you want a message to them before you spend any money. So design a social media strategy well in advance and then implement that and then you're spending your money where you know it's going to make a difference as opposed to blasting your message out maybe to people who aren't actually going to be interested in your product or offering and then wasting your money. So we would say start by doing sort of that audience analysis and understanding who is my audience, what are they, where are they, what platforms are they on and then if they're on Facebook, what are they interested in and how am I going to reach them. And then making sure that your every dollar you spend is really benefiting you and you're working toward a really outstanding result as opposed to spending your money sort of indiscriminately. I mean I think what what you're saying is just that you know even a little bit of money will show results and impact so you can even be experimental with that. Exactly, exactly. And we have customers at social code that spend you know on the smaller end we have customers that spend a ton and it's great to see that the results that you get with a small amount of money are very similar or the same as the results you get with a larger amount of money just on a smaller scale. It's great in terms of considering the barriers to entry because previously you wouldn't have been able to kind of enter that space. Right and if you're you know if you tried to advertise on TV and you only had fifty dollars you maybe would get a one second TV spot whereas on Facebook fifty dollars can certainly and in Twitter fifty dollars can go a long way. Fantastic, a question from Rome so how about Facebook publicity which I guess Facebook ads does it help more than a good strategy applied on your Facebook fan page? So it depends on sort of what your goals are again if you are don't have money to spend on Facebook advertising running promotions and doing a page content posting strategy would be more than sufficient to generate publicity you're going to have to rely on your social network and building your network of fans on your Facebook page in order for that content to reach more people so I think the benefit of using Facebook ads is that you can reach people that you might not normally have reached through your promotion on your Facebook page so if you post content on your Facebook page we usually see between 20 and 40 percent of your fans will see that content if you want it to be shared with more than that percentage you're likely going to have to spend a little money to get it out there but it's definitely not essential that you spend money you just need to make sure that your content posting strategy is very you know buttoned up and you've thought it out and done the research in advance so that you're posting content and reaching the right people with that content. So you said 20 to 40 percent kind of eyeballs on it if you if you're just posting do you know what percentage that is if you're doing an ad? It depends how much you spend but you can get it up to you know 90% of your base has seen it and you can also send your promotion or your post content out to people who are not fans of your page and get them to become fans or get them to interact with your content that way as well. Fantastic now we have a question from Chennai how does a business owner make their products stand out from the other products or services being promoted on Facebook via ads? Yeah so I think that's you know sort of a holy grail everybody wants their product to be the one that stands out and I think again establishing the relationship with your customer is really going to set you apart so if you're a brand you know and you sell laundry detergent there might be a 500 other pages of brands that also sell laundry detergent but if all those other brands are doing is posting you know once a week and saying here's our laundry detergent via today and you're saying hey moms who are doing laundry here's this really great tip for getting grass stains out of clothes and creating and making it a relationship that's not just about selling something to the customer but making it a relationship where it's mutually beneficial so you're sharing content with your customer that they're interested in that's not sort of jamming down their throat bye bye bye my product. Really good advice. A viewer from Uzbekistan asks could you describe some problems that entrepreneurs are facing today with social media promotion for example what are some of the common mistakes that businesses make with social media? Yeah so I think one huge mistake is not knowing their audience or doing the research ahead of time and wasting their money or wasting their efforts on people who are not necessarily interested in their content so again doing that audience research to understand where your customers are and what they're interested in and then only spending money or your efforts on those individuals. I think the other thing that people can make mistakes on that we've seen some of our clients make mistakes on is not knowing who that audience is or targeting an audience that's not necessarily going to become a consumer of their product so anecdotally we worked with a client who was a united it was in the United States they were affiliated with a grocery store and there it was a home delivery grocery service product and they wanted to get fans on their page and this is an offering that was only available a company that only available in the United States and they ended up paying for a huge number of fans from the Philippines and they thought that was great because they got a lot of fans on their Facebook page it was relatively cheap but that's not great in the long run because they've just bought a bunch of fans who can never become consumers of their product so although they have numbers on their Facebook page these are users that don't will not go on to interact with them in any way so their edge rank will drop there are also users who can never purchase their product or become consumers of their particular brand so we definitely don't want to make do things like that we want to make sure that if we're spending our spending our effort or our money we're targeting exactly who we want to be targeting who can actually go on to be consumers of our brand I think another big mistake that people can make is spamming so posting strategy is important you want to make sure you're posting enough so that people are staying engaged but you don't want to be posting 15 times a day or content that's really not relevant to your brand you want to make sure that if you're running ads people understand what they're becoming a fan of or what they're clicking on and how that's related to your brand or product so if you're that laundry detergent brand you don't want to be posting pictures on your Facebook page of like you know women in bikinis and trying to get fans that way because that's not indicative of what you're actually selling or who you actually are as a brand I mean I feel like two things you keep saying pretty consistently is that you have to you know know your audience that so which means I think means which may be surprising for people that it's not the more it's not quantity it's actually the quality of the people who you're building the community around right and that you have to add value right from your perspective certainly so you definitely quality over quantity if you have a million Facebook fans but none of them are going to be consumers of your product or brand then what's the point versus having five hundred highly qualified and targeted individuals who are engaging with your page on a daily basis who are attending your events and buying your product that's much more valuable to you in the long run great another viewer from Pakistan asks do you do you recommend marketing via Pinterest tumblr reddit or other platforms and how does marketing work on those platforms sure so those platforms don't have the sort of advertising capabilities that a platform like Facebook Twitter or LinkedIn does but that's not to say that you shouldn't have a presence there so Pinterest is one that we talked about earlier having if your business or company lends itself well to having graphics pictures sharing that kind of content it's great to have a presence there although you can't necessarily run ads on that platform you can support that platform through channels like Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and then tumblr again very similar to have a presence there is great if you have if you have customers there if a lot of your customers are using tumblr to share content then you should be there too if a lot of your users are using reddit then you should be there too but generally those they don't have the same sort of wealth of ad offerings that platforms like Facebook Twitter and LinkedIn do and so can you maybe talk a little bit about the value of just tech you know text written word versus video versus pictures do you do your social media strategy kind of have to encompass all of those things yeah we recommend that so again it depends on what platform you're advertising on but we tend to see that response rates are higher when you include images or video which makes sense if you can share an image that's engaging funny interesting eye catching that will do perform a lot better than it then you know just text about what you do obviously users when they see an image or a video that's associated with the text that will be much more engaging in eye catching and then if you're on a space like a tumblr or an Instagram should you feed that traffic back to your Facebook yeah definitely we recommend like we said thinking about your social media presence holistically and making sure that that channel is sort of complete and it's a circle that goes so if you're sharing content on Facebook that it's you're also linking to your Twitter and that you're bringing in Instagram posts and all that stuff should be integrated together so that if someone finds you on one channel they should easily be able to find you on all your other channels so another just following up on that kind of the different properties that exist another viewer is asking a little bit more about LinkedIn so when and how should you use LinkedIn yeah so we see that LinkedIn like we said is beneficial for people who are really trying to reach business owners who are doing business to business sales we yes so we've used it internally we've had clients run ads on it for credit card signups when they're looking for small business owners to purchase a particular credit card that sort of thing so LinkedIn is useful if you're doing things like that like really looking for people who are in specific industries and need to hyper target people that way however I think the barrier to entry on LinkedIn is slightly higher than it is on Facebook or Twitter and on Facebook in particular you you are able to reach people based on their job description or company that they work at so you know if you don't have a huge amount of money it might be wise to to proxy for people in a particular industry or position via Facebook targeting as opposed to LinkedIn and is is LinkedIn more specific to an individual versus a company brand it depends so you can target companies people who work at specific companies but you can also target individuals who have a specific job title so if you're looking to reach you know office managers or if you are a company like Salesforce and you want to reach people who are making decisions about revenue and sales you can reach people who have the title chief sales officer chief marketing officer that kind of thing really interesting a viewer wants to know when you say engage your followers on Facebook and or Twitter what exactly does that mean or entail sure so engagements on Facebook and Twitter just mean people are sharing liking commenting and interacting with your content as opposed to just consuming or viewing it so it's great if people are seeing your content but it's much better if people are commenting liking and sharing your content or or retweeting it or favoring it that kind of thing that's what we call an engagement so you know it's working when you see that stuff happen right and and that can also end or and excuse me and have resulting in earned media for you which we call it social code so that means that if I see a post on a page and I share it with all my friends all my network of friends of 500 people or whatever some of them will see that post the company that promoted the post to me didn't pay for those people but they that's earned impressions that they got because I shared the content and that's one of your goals yeah so if you are a company and and you want more and more people to see your content getting your users to share your content out to their own networks is a great way to get sort of those earned media impressions and generate your more impressions and more interactions with your content without paying for it another question from Pakistan so there are a lot of fake accounts on Facebook and Twitter how can you differentiate between real fans and fake fans yeah and I think that's a question we get a lot at social code I think that sort of gets a little bit overplayed in the media how many fake accounts there are we see that about 90% of Facebook accounts and Twitter accounts are people's actual identity so I think generally we recommend to our clients that that's not something they really have to worry about if they are targeting their ads in the right way in the first place and they understand who their audience is likely 90% of the fans that you acquire or generate on your page are going to be real human people which is great which is great exactly what you want and then if you do feel like you're getting a lot of spam the way to differentiate is just to sort of refine your targeting of your message even further so making sure that your messaging is really specific to what you're talking about to your brand to your page making sure you're not getting kind of a bunch of spam people in there because they think that your content is something that it's not right right can you start building a following on social media before your business is launched as like well it's still just in the idea phase can you start building that definitely you can create a page whenever you feel like it so you can create a page for something that it does not yet exist that's certainly within the capabilities of Facebook and Twitter and that can be a good way to sort of generate buzz about a product that is maybe launching later we have done that for clients where they have a product that might not be launching until the fall but they want to create buzz about it in the spring and summer so sharing that content getting people excited about something that's coming can be really influential it is a strategy different for kind of before it launches to when you actually yeah so I mean I think it depends but again having that strategy laid out in advance is great so knowing what kind of content you're going to be posting before during and after launch and then heavying up during those the launch time and then post launch to make sure that what you've shared is really getting out there and again using language that will generate buzz in advance so asking users questions sharing images maybe like a snapshot of what the product might look like or you know teasers about what the product might be that can be a really great way to engage your fans and people on Facebook and Twitter so we have an important question from Pakistan how do you define the word entrepreneurship who can be considered an entrepreneur I think anybody can be considered an entrepreneur if you have an idea of something for a business for something you want to sell or share your an entrepreneur and it's just taking what you've sort of your idea and putting in into reality that sort of moves from the idea stage to actually executing it is when you really develop that entrepreneurship and I mean I would agree with that I think you know anybody who has an idea and takes it from creation to realization is an entrepreneur and I think you know we're talking about tech technology tools or social media tools oftentimes people think entrepreneurs are only technology focused and you know frankly in many places in the world when I travel I mean entrepreneurs who are offering services in their community or selling a product that's really specific to where they live and they're not online and they're not it's not only technology entrepreneurs right as long as I mean if you're feeling a need or service that doesn't exist you're an entrepreneur yeah one of the things that one example that I remember all the time is an entrepreneur I met who's based in the US and he's but he's doing a lot of work all around the world now sign-spinning so he has people stand on corners like at doing ad sales by spinning signs and now I every time I notice a sign spinner I think of him because he is an entrepreneur he's not a Twitter but he's a right exactly a question from Bangladesh do you think a social network just for the purpose of business marketing will ever be created and would that be a good business idea that is an interesting questions one that I haven't heard before I think that it's possible but I think having the content like the ads on Facebook and Twitter integrated into the content that you're consuming on a daily basis is sort of the optimal way to do it so it's making people feel like the advertisements that they're seeing are very relevant to them personally based on this information that they've shared and I can't imagine that a business marketing social network would ever have that level of users so who wants to be a member of a social network where they just get ad search for them all the time so user base would be an issue and I also imagine that targeting and having insights into who those users are would probably be an issue so one thing that we said about Facebook is that it's to your advantage to share what's actually true about you on your Facebook so it's not good to have a fake name and a fake profile on Facebook because then you can't connect to anybody you want to have a profile that's indicative of who you are where you live what you do and so that is makes it extremely valuable for marketers because all that information that people have shared on their Facebook is true about them so you can target people in a way that is much more refined than other social platforms I think having the holistic platform where you can interact with your friends and share your photos and watch videos and then also get ads serve to you is sort of a better way to do it because everything is sort of encompassed under that one platform and then anything as a business owner then you can show how you're adding value to somebody's life right not just about exactly and not just trying to sell them something but establishing that relationship and and having a customer when they go to buy laundry detergent think of your product because they interact with you on Facebook as opposed to some other product another question from Bangladesh how can I make sure that my posts are reaching my target market and what do you recommend in regards to data analysis sure so there's you can target your posts on Facebook when you go to create a post you can set up parameters to say I only want this post to be shown to people who live in this specific area or part of this specific demographic which is a good way to gate your post so if you are promoting a contest that's only available in certain regions you want to make sure that those other regions are not seeing that content that aren't eligible for that particular promotion through advertising again targeting you can refine even further so making sure that your content if you're promoting it through ads is only being served to people who are interested in it so you can add again gender age geolocation and then keyword targeting so targeting people who are only interested if you're that laundry detergent brand targeting people who are interested in home house care cleaning products or maybe moms who have children that sort of thing and so but then so how do you know that it's working so you know that it's working when you get good engagement rates basically so you know that you're hitting the right people when people are engaging with their com with your content if you are promoting your posts and you're getting you know a lot of negative feedback of people saying you know I don't like this or commenting negatively or not getting a lot of likes or shares then you that's a good indicator to you that you need to refine your targeting and reach a more highly targeted audience that maybe is going to be more interested that makes sense yeah engagement right yeah it's all about engagement so you keep saying and I think people should remember that question from tonight when we market a business through social media what should the strategy be should we market the product itself or post about something else which the targeted customer base might be interested in even if it's not necessarily related to the product I think having a blend of the two is a key so we want to make sure that people know what it is that we're advertising for what the product is and you know ultimately we want people to buy that particular product right so we want to make sure that that we're including information about our product or brand at the same time like we said having a relationship with your customer is much more should be much more deeper and complex than just saying buy my product so like we said with the laundry detergent example sharing information with those customers about how to get grass stains out of clothes or you know if it's Mother's Day having a post about Mother's Day for all the mothers who use that product is great so you want to do a blend of both making sure that you're making you're making what you're selling very clear to the user but then continuing to engage them with maybe content that isn't directly relevant to buying your brand but is relevant to your overall sort of what how you want to be a part of your customers life so just a follow-up question to that so let's say if you have like a coffee shop in Chennai right and you want to open that and draw customers physically to come there do you then go on social media and look for you know the other coffee shops that are your competitors and try to kind of draw from there or do you post about coffee beans or both so you can post about coffee beans and what what kind of coffee beans you use in your particular store you can post you know here's an anecdote about somebody who you know came to our coffee shop and met their wife there human interest stories or here's a video about how the company that we work with produces their coffee and then also sharing content like hey today is Tuesday and you get 10% off this particular coffee so come in today and then competitive conquesting is what we call it at social code and that's great it's basically going after after your competitors and their fans so if somebody is a fan of coffee shop a in Chennai they're probably going to be interested in coffee shop B and you can on your page explain to your customers how are you different from coffee shop a do you have you know better beans or a better roasting technique or you know you have Wi-Fi in your in your store that kind of thing and using that your Facebook page to differentiate yourself from your competitors another question from Chennai with the current growth of live streaming video in the case of India particularly live streaming of sports games the potential customer base is around one million and growing every day can live stream video be considered the next it thing in social media and how can entrepreneurs tap into that and integrate that with other social media platforms so I think it sort of depends where that live video is coming from and if there is a social aspect to it so if you're just live streaming a video and there's no chat room there's no personal identity that's not necessarily social media and if you're if you're a company that's doing that sort of thing you want to make sure that you're integrating your social channels in it so if you're live streaming streaming something you should have you know a chat on Facebook at the same time about that content and integrating those all together I think that kind of user base if there's a million people watching a live stream you should certainly be capitalizing on that that's a huge user base that's all in one space at the same time so maybe you join the Twitter conversation about that and you draw users to your page by using the hashtags or interacting with them about what's happening in the live stream a question from Nigeria do you have any tips about selling products on Amazon and driving traffic to your product on Amazon so again Amazon not technically a social network but you should certainly be if you're that's your goals to sell products and Amazon creating a Facebook page and Twitter handle to help you do that is obviously hugely important so if you're a retail retailer and you have a Facebook page where you can say you can post a picture of something that you're selling and say here I'm selling this product for this amount of money and if you order today I'll give you 10% off and here's a code and then you can direct your users from Facebook to Amazon itself or from Twitter to Amazon and drive traffic that way and then again you're sort of keeping that holistic strategy of the channels of communication are all leading back to Facebook or Twitter one central location but on the topic of like the engagement that you keep talking about if you have customers writing reviews and stuff on Amazon you should be interacting with that yeah yeah definitely so I think it's a little bit tricky so you don't want to if people are writing negative things you don't necessarily want to engage people in a negative way but if somebody writes you know I this is the best product I've ever used sharing that content you can share that content on Facebook out to your fans you can communicate with that person on Facebook to say thank you so much here's a coupon for the next thing you buy and then that customer has a really great feeling about your brand not only did they buy a really great product from you but you told them you were really happy that they liked your product and you gave them another chance to come back and buy something else another question is it possible to evaluate your business idea to through social media to see if it's worth your investment yeah definitely so we've done that for clients before not just a business idea but messaging and determining you know what for like we said the the cost of advertising on social media is so much lower than advertising on on TV or billboards is that and that makes it easy for you to test different messaging or ideas on a smaller scale before you spend a huge amount of money on it so great business ideas you can share you can create a Facebook page like we said if your business doesn't exist yet create a Facebook page for it and see if people respond well to it if it would actually be viable you can do polls on Facebook so you can instead of posting a picture you can post a poll and say to your users if we sold this product or if we had this idea would you be interested in it that sort of thing so you can really gauge whether your idea is viable and that's a great place Facebook and Twitter are a great place to do that because users are so interactive and engaged from India in India people still have more faith in vendor or retail stores over online stores how can social media bridge this gap yeah so I think what's great about Facebook is that you don't have to be and you definitely don't have to be a technology company like we said or an online store to have a Facebook presence if you're a brick-and-mortar store you should have a Facebook presence to so that people can locate you on Facebook and then make the move into your store so we have done a lot of work for retail stores at social code where we're driving people to their Facebook page where they can share content about offers and all that kind of stuff and then the ultimate goal is to get those Facebook users into their stores and and that is part of sort of the complex strategy of messaging sharing offers to get people in person in the store in order to bridge the gap between online sales and and retail sales Facebook can be great at that like we said in developing a page for your retail store it doesn't have to have an online presence you don't have to be able to purchase things online but it's still great for your users to see you know here's a picture of this new product that they have in the store it's a new or they have are featuring a new designer and they see that on Facebook and they say oh my gosh I have to get into the store and then they go there that weekend basically so again it's just about promoting what you have available and sharing that in a more meaningful way that makes sense yeah I mean I think of like cutting coupons right and you back in the day would cut a coupon to go into a store but you would probably buy more things right than just a thing you had the coupon for it's kind of the same thing right and if you're a retail store being able to share in pictures and in video what you're actually selling in your store is a great way to get people in the door so if you again if you have a new product or a new you're selling you know a new brand or designer and being able to tell people that on Facebook is a great impetus for them to visit your store and they might not have known that otherwise and it you know I think what Emily keeps saying too is that it doesn't whatever your product is kind of whatever your whether you're online or offline or doing retail sales or doing a technology thing you need to have a social media plan yeah and you need to have a presence regardless so in these days if I hear about a store that I interested and I'm going to look that store up on Facebook before I ever visited in person and you know if you're get trying to get people in the door of your retail business it's great to have share your content about what they can expect to see on your Facebook page so that'll drive them into the store quicker because they've seen hey this is what they actually sell and I really like this so I'm going to get into the store today or tomorrow yeah a viewer asks is it possible to evaluate this virtual relationship between a customer and a trader you talked about this a little yeah so I think you can evaluate the relationship based on are you getting sales so a good way to evaluate that is to have when you when you check people out at your store you can ask them you know how did you find us did you find us via Facebook did you find us via Twitter or you can have you know Facebook or Twitter or social specific offerings so that if someone comes into your store with a coupon that they've printed from Facebook you know that coupon is only available on your Facebook page and so you know that that user has come directly from Facebook and that's a good way to measure it and then again you know measuring by the number of people and the amount of engagements and feedback that you're getting as well so that's a good way to understand you know as my customer are really interested in my product so you ask yeah you ask basically back and you can you know you can do those types of pull ads you can ask your customers questions yeah exactly so just interacting with them and asking them how they feel about your product or brand is a great way to get that feedback right another viewer from Pakistan says do most of the people do most people skip the ads or become desensitized to them because they see them so often and that's a question that we often get from our customers as well I think it depends again but the on Facebook and Twitter the goal of their platform is to make the ads integrated into your day-to-day exploration of the platform as seamless as possible so it doesn't an ad on Facebook doesn't look like an ad or like a banner ad on a website that's flashing in your face and things are changing and it's it's you know intrusive it's interrupting how you consume content on Facebook the goal is to have that content look so natural in your Facebook feed that you don't even notice that's it's an ad and that's what we tend to see I mean if you are running ads for a really long period of time users can become desensitized to what they're they're seeing and that's why it's really important to change your strategy to have content that you can sort of refresh to change out the images and the copy to make sure that what users are seeing is fresh in their mind you definitely social media is definitely not a place where you can sort of set it and forget it it's definitely you need to continue to interact with your customers change your strategy based on how it's performing and because you get such immediate results it should be fairly easy for you to do that but yeah again you don't want to you know put some content out there and then not look at it for another two months you want to make sure that you're evaluating regularly whether what you're doing is working and then tweaking it to make it work even better and so and then can you kind of speak to that regarding Twitter because don't the Twitter kind of promotional ads go to the top of a hashtag feed yeah exactly but again like Twitter is even more important because the immediacy of Twitter is such that if you promote something it could do well for a day and then the next day it might do terrible right or the next day there might be somebody who's also trying to get that space they're outbidding you and your ads are not serving so again making sure that you're constantly tweaking your strategy based on how the marketplace is operating and how what you've put out there is performing on Twitter having you know a presence and immediacy and a recency to your tweets is really important so if you tweeted three weeks ago that tweet got seen you know a huge amount of the beginning but nobody's seeing that tweet now so if that's content that you really want to be sharing you need to make sure you circulate recirculate it so it's rising to the top again and you talked a lot about the importance of hashtags and establishing your identity on Twitter and obviously oftentimes you could see what the hashtags are trending whether in your country your city you're in the world yeah can you take advantage of those hashtags to like draw people to you or is that definitely definitely so I mean you want to make sure that if you're doing that the hashtags are relevant to what you're sharing so you don't want to take a hashtag and just throw it at the end of your tweet even if it doesn't make any sense but if you see something is trending and you can see a way to apply that to your brand or your service then that's a great way to get your message out to a hopefully a larger number of people so like we said with the live streaming video you know if it's a sporting event and you're the laundry detergent company you might throw that hashtag on and say you know if you know your uniforms are really dirty this is this is a great product for you and that doesn't turn like consumers off I can't I mean it depends how relevant it is it can there might be some people that might not like that but likely the number of people who are offended by it is going to be far outweighed for them by the number of people who are interested in it or who don't pay any attention to it at all okay great as privacy is being stressed these days could it be possible for an entrepreneur to monitor their browsing habits and target specific ads or do you have to go to go through Facebook or third-party to do that so Facebook does have an offering where you can target people based on their browsing habits on other sites and this is called this is recently released it's available to people through power editor which is the tool that you can use to create Facebook ads it's called partner categories so partner categories is basically the Facebook has partnered with these three third-party data sites and they measure people's buying and purchasing behavior on other sites on Facebook so if you're that laundry detergent company you can go into these partner categories and there might be a partner category that is called you know frequent buyers of home cleaning products and you can target people who on other sites besides Facebook often buy or are interested in you know detergent or cleaning supplies like that so that's a really great way to make sure that you know what who you're targeting on Facebook is actually doing what you want them to do on other channels off of Facebook and hopefully your targeting is also so refined in people's identities are so real on Facebook that that shouldn't matter but this is just another way to connect people's off Facebook behavior with their own Facebook behavior what they're doing in the real world right right so hopefully they're what they're doing in the real world is very much like what they're doing on Facebook but this is just a great way to connect those two things together and you know partner categories run the gamut from people who are likely to purchase you know BMW motorcycles to people who love to exercise and eat healthy so they can be they're really specific and they can be really great for people who are trying to connect on an offline behavior social media marketers usually say that posts with pictures get more engagement but according to my experience normal posts get more engagement and more reach in Facebook what do you think Emily so I'll add one extra thing that which is that I think in a lot of the markets where this is being viewed you know smartphones may not be it's the way that they're consuming social media may be different that if you're in a phone is that different or if you have a slower internet download rate maybe pictures don't work yeah I think that's definitely could be possible if you are in an area where you know content doesn't load as quickly or pictures are you can't see them as well in your phone it might be to your benefit to just share content in text or something like that and that again is just you should be testing all these different things and figuring out for yourself what works so there is definitely not one size fits all social media strategy it really depends on what you who you are where you are and what you're advertising so it's great to be able to say this is what's working for me it might not work for somebody else but if you've determined that it works for you that's definitely what you should be doing and it goes back to your for your mantra of like know who your customer is and then develop a strategy right that right and so Facebook you can target people by a specific device that they're on so you can say I only want to be target people who are using iOS or Android and so that can be useful to you as well so if you are you know advertising for your app and your app is only available on Android you can limit your targeting to only that people those people and if you know again that your users tend to not have smartphones and to consume content on their desktop computer then you can tweak your strategy based on where you where your users and your audience are there's such a high level of specificity that you can get to it's amazing right and that doesn't exist anywhere else which is really really makes Facebook such a and Twitter such great platforms to work on because you can get to the your users in such a more detailed way and and you know as opposed to search marketing or TV you're not waiting for your users to find you you're going out and finding your users before they even know and like particularly to new entrepreneurs you know who who do you need to kind of try out a lot of things who may not have a huge budget who are trying to improvise in every category as they're building an idea exactly so okay we have time for one last question and this is a question from Italy what is the best way to manage negative comments and feedback on your Facebook and Twitter it's a good question yeah it's a great question for instance if you're being spammed by it and it will make you negatively influence your brand image is it acceptable to delete posts and when might you do this yes I think it definitely is acceptable to delete posts so if you get if you're getting posts on your comments or you're you're promoting something and you're getting posts about you know work from home and make $12 an hour or spam things like that it's definitely acceptable to delete those likely people who spam your page or not are spamming so many different pages that they're not going to notice that you deleted their content and you're making the experience better for your fans who are actually interested in what you're posting in terms of negative comments it can be a tricky situation if you delete someone's negative comment that might spur them on to comment more negatively they might feel like their voice is not being heard and that could be you know having even more negative impact what we see a lot of our customers do is is try to move those conversations from the public Facebook wall back into sort of the private messaging so or send those customers that have had negative experiences to their customer service department or provide a phone number that they can call and share those things with so generally if a user has a negative comment but you respond to it and say I'm so sorry you had that negative experience here's our customer service line or here's a coupon that's going to make the user feel like their voice was heard that this is a brand that they might come back and use again because their their concern was really valued and appreciated and that their concern was really given sort of credence and people understood that this is a problem and they wanted to fix it so you should engage those negative comments maybe take them to a private space so yeah directly kind of having that two-way engagement right and you want to make sure that you're you you're not necessarily responding to every negative comment but only those where you can offer some sort of constructive solution so if someone is constantly saying you know your page sucks you suck something like that it's probably not worth engaging that user because they're not really ever going to be interested in your content you can block them if they're really bothering you but if it's a user who says I was in your store the other day and nobody helped me or I bought this product and it broke that's a great opportunity for you to develop a customer relationship with them to say we're so sorry that happened here's our customer service line call us and we'll make it right that sort of thing can be great okay great unfortunately right of time so I want to thank you for sharing your insights today with us Emily and thank you to everyone who participated in this chat online a very active chat fantastic questions I know I learned a lot but just because today's chat is coming to a close does not mean that our conversation about entrepreneurship and social media tools is over on the contrary today's chat should serve as a launching pad for the longer term conversation so I encourage you to stay in touch with the contacts you made today through today's conversation online and I invite you to join the State Department's Facebook page which is dedicated to promoting entrepreneurship it's called innovation generation and again to follow me on Twitter my Twitter handle is at Z not ZEE NAT and Emily's is social code Inc. and so depending on where you joined us from today have a great day good afternoon or good night thanks everyone thank you this program has been brought to you by Kinects