 Wrigley Ganaway. Wrigley is a recent graduate from Brigham Young University, Idaho, in the field of web design and development, with an emphasis in design and a personal interest in multimedia design and marketing. She is from Huntington Beach, California, but currently residing in Salt Lake City, Utah, interning for need someone to blog. Wrigley Ganaway. Hello everybody. I'm so happy to be here today. I do want to preface my talk just by saying all of this information in my talk can be found on the internet. Yes, I learned some in school, but it's all on the internet. Super easy to learn. I'm just a vessel of information for you all. So let's get started. Let's see. So my talk is called Content Creation and Synergy. Planning ahead is the only way to cultivate your brand. So let me tell you how you do that. So when I was 13, I made a Facebook and I posted pictures like that. They were edited on Pick Monkey, I believe it was called. It was just casual day with friends and then when I was 14 or 15, I got an Instagram and that was my first Instagram caption. Got an Instagram. So I've learned a lot since then and I'm happy to show you what I've learned. Let's see. So there we go. All right. Consistency is key. So I want to tell you all today about how succeeding in the tumultuous world of social media is all started by rooting in a young audience and by being consistent. If you're not consistent, your audience won't know what to expect and they just won't have the energy to follow you. All right. Let's see. So first off, I want to start with a brain teaser. I read a study recently and it talked about how, why meme culture, does everyone familiar with the phrase meme culture? Okay, perfect. So meme culture, why is meme culture so prevalent today? Why is this a weird random sense of humor? Such a big thing that sparks such joy in people on the internet today. Does anyone have any theories or guesses? Anybody? Yeah, that's part of it. When we get to the end of my talk, we're going to find out what the study hypothesized and found. So we'll get to that soon. All right. Oh, there we go. All right. So how many of you have a Facebook? How many of you have an Instagram? Twitter? LinkedIn? Pinterest? Pretty much everybody has all of these five main social media channels. What I found is that people respond better to visual forms of social media because we are a visual society, you know. People use visuals even when they are putting captions on other visuals. They use little emojis. They use little graphics. And we found a way to even make little tiny videos that take one or two seconds, the GIFs or GIF, whichever way you pronounce it. So even the cavemen drew on walls, even the Egyptians drew on walls. People have been using visual aids since forever. It's no secret. Even in Facebook's early days, modern cavemen drew on walls, Facebook walls. And then, yeah, so visual media is the key to reaching your relevant audience. Hold on. Sorry. Trying to figure out my no cards. Perfect. Okay. So visual media is the key to reaching your relevant audience. You need to be, oh, I lost my place. Hold on one second, you guys. Sorry. Perfect. Yeah. You can't just use your social media and your visual media as an accessory to the content that you already have on your website. You need to be able to use each social media channel right and use it effectively or else it will just be something that you have, you know. You need to put it in accordance with your website and your other branding and it will work out best for you. So what do I need? Let me tell you. You need Facebook. So Facebook is a vital tool in social media marketing because it, everyone has it. Everyone has a Facebook. Even if they just use it to connect with high school frenemies, you know, everyone has a Facebook. You can use it to, oh, well, here's the problem with Facebook. So Facebook has some controversy with hacking risks. There's cluttered news feeds. People, like I said, they use it to keep track of their friends mostly. But it's really important to have your business on Facebook. So Facebook is a vital tool in social media marketing. It helps you promote your outside circle and it helps you make local contacts with Facebook ads, with ads manager. And it keeps your business looking professional. So what you want to do when you, with your Facebook is have a good bio. So have a strong mission statement set up on your Facebook. You want to outsource some good reviews from people who have used your services or just clients in general that have good things to say. You want to write post-men for advertising so that you can use them on ads manager, which is a really cool tool. I've used it before myself. And it just works really well for promoting your business and helping you get more contacts. Instagram is also one you need. So Instagram has revolutionized the way we communicate on social media. And let me tell you how. So it's diversified beauty standards with body positivity. I woke up like this, you know, everything like that. It has sparked new social trends. How many of you take a picture of your food every time you go out? That didn't used to be a thing. It would have taken, I think, I don't know how long old cameras used to take, but it would have taken a long, longer time. It's created a new type of brand strategy. So people share, they do spotlights, comments and likes are worth a lot. It's created a new type of, oh, I already said that, okay, mobilized. It's mobilized activism. If you have, it's caused a chain effect. How many of you had kids doing the ALS challenge where you poured the water on your head? All kinds of things. Let's see. So and it's also created the influencer. How many of you follow influencers on Instagram? I follow a lot for sure. And it has, let's see. Perfect. Yeah. It's created the influencer and the influencer has kind of turned into a job. It has turned into a job. Social media, Instagram has turned into a type of currency where you can, companies will send you on traveling on trips on, they will pay you to promote their brand on your social media channels. Sharing likes, comments, they're all a form of quantitative currency nowadays. Social media is a new type of currency. There you go. All right. So on Instagram, how you want to be successful, you want to share your content on Instagram stories so that people can get real time access into the behind the scenes of your brand. You want to post at least one to two times a day so that people will see that you're consistent and that you have goals and are moving your business forward or your brand forward. You don't want to post too much because it's really easy to follow someone, but it's, well, it's, how do I explain this? It's really easy to follow someone, but it's just as easy to unfollow someone. If you annoy someone on the internet, they will just go unfollow you right away, you know? Because we don't have the patience to be scrolling for days, you know? All right. And you want to have a theme because we are, as we establish a visual society. So we want, when people go to your profile or your page, they want to see consistency in your theme. They want to see colors that match. They want to see good photography, good layouts, and they want to see good infographics. All right. Twitter. So Twitter has 310 million users and 100 million of those are daily active views, which is crazy to me. Not that crazy because I often use Twitter daily as well. So, yep. Twitter is a semi-professional social network. You will find corporate professionals from various industries as well as people who are just there for entertainment. So social marketing professionals from my industry could market their products on Twitter. Also with their word limit, Twitter allows its users to be exposed to clean and crisp ads from advertisers without populating the feed. This is just a testimonial I found on the internet that somebody was sharing their thoughts about why they use Twitter and I thought it was really relevant to what I'm talking about today. So just reiterate, the word restrictions highlight the important part of the message. So that works to your favor. It might not seem like it sometimes when you need to get information out there. But Twitter is kind of like an RSS feed where you just like scroll and you get the daily news. You see what your friends are up to. You see what Jen Miller and need someone to blog is doing. It's just a quick social media, but it's very important to have so that because everyone is on Twitter, everyone. Hashtags are also very important because you can search using your hashtags. You can do that with most social medias. But Twitter, their hashtag algorithm is actually, I find it superior to other social marketing industries because it helps organize everything. So if you have, let's see, if you're doing a marketing campaign, you want to put a hashtag so that people, when they search that hashtag, they'll just get all of the information on the search results. So and it's also easy to reach out to people and brands that has a immediate sort of interaction capability that Instagram and Facebook don't even have. You know, you have likes, retweets. You can quote the retweet, you know, you know how Twitter works. Let's see. And the outliers that I have are Instagram and Pinterest. The only reason why I call these the outliers is because I don't use them as often for social media marketing, but they are very, very valuable. And I need to start practicing what I preach, basically. Um, so LinkedIn, LinkedIn is really valuable because it's very, it's, it's a professional environment. People don't use it for scrolling. They don't use it much for, you know, Facebook, funny videos, America's Funniest Home Videos, you know, they don't use it for that much. What you want to do with LinkedIn is have two profiles, one for you and one for your company or your brand, because it just separates it and it makes you more marketable and more, what's the word I'm looking for more? It gives people a personal connection to you, I think, and your brand. So you can do that by just making a personal page and company page. You want to have a specific advertising or marketing goal so that people know what you're about when they go to your page. They don't want to scroll down and see, oh, she likes photography, she likes dancing, she likes writing poems, you know, they don't want to see your hobbies. They want to see why you're on LinkedIn and what you have to share with them. LinkedIn is special because you can optimize your company page. So you can optimize within LinkedIn so that your pages come up for other peoples. And it's all in the back end, it's very easy to do. Visual content, it supports visual content, of course, all social media channels support visual content that I'm talking about today. But you want to put the visual content first and forward so that you can grab your audience's attention and give them what they're looking for. And ads, you can also monetize slash optimize ads on Facebook because, sorry, on LinkedIn. And that helps a lot because that also helps with your SEO with your company page and your personal page. All right, now Pinterest. Pinterest, I love Pinterest. Does anybody else love Pinterest so much? I scroll Pinterest for days, mostly personal use, but you know, it's still important to marketing and social media. So I found this really cool quote on the internet, photos are center stage and sharing is second nature on Pinterest. When you go through, it's all right there, you literally just have to tap and you have five options. It takes three clicks really. So Pinterest highlights the trends, which is really important. It gives like a one stop shop look into what people are looking for, what is popular in audiences today. And we see this in Target and Nordstrom, if you've ever been to Target or Nordstrom, they have little tags that they put on items that have been doing well on Pinterest. So they're used in a real world way to promote the company's social media, which is something you could do as well. Lowe's uses it to show products in action. So they use the storytelling principle. They use, let's see, they take a bench and they do a project with it and then they post the project on Pinterest and they get people to follow along with that. And that is just another way to get people to see what you can do and follow your branding. Let's see, if you were a paper company, let's see, how would you personalize your product? You would put on Pinterest, let's see, this is how you make an origami rabbit. This is how you make a little cutout to put on your wall. This is, you can make homemade cards. You know, it's using it in a real world example humanizes your brand and makes it more easy to relate to. And there is a unique opportunity on Pinterest to humanize your branding, like I said. How do I keep track of all of these social media channels? It's very difficult. There's a lot and it requires a lot of time. You don't want to use too many. You'll get burnt out. You'll spend revenue and time on social media channels that don't apply to you. So what you want to do is either hire a social media manager or be a social CEO. So as we approach business more casually and more transparently, it's becoming more and more prevalent in business to be a social CEO or be in control of your own social media. It humanizes your branding, which is something I obviously love to talk about. I keep saying it. And it makes you more relatable on your social media channels. So take Elon Musk, for example, he is the CEO of Tesla, I believe. And these are some of his tweets just highlighting, you know, Tesla, they got 100% crash rating. They have it available for renting, you know, he's just promoting his branding right now. But oh, there we go. And this is him stoning his kitchen on a Friday night, you know, like he does both ways, he does, he does the branding part of it and he does his own personal touch to his branding. And he's gone from in 2011, they made zero cars and fire in 2019, they made 500,000. So that is some pretty intense growth. Yep. So Tesla and Elon Musk, he's a good social CEO to look up to. He's not the most perfect example, just because he does have a separate Tesla Twitter and his own personal Twitter. But he is a great example of a social CEO. People know him, they know his brand, they know him together. Let's see. So cohesive, how do I make all of my branding cohesive? Tesla, for Elon Musk and Tesla, they use a mix of meme culture of science and just randomness. But you want to find your theme, your voice and your posting schedule. So your theme will be your visuals and your style, just your overall branding style, your voice will be your tone and persona. That's why it's important to have one social media person because it makes it easier to make a voice to it sounds like it's all coming from the same person. And the posting schedule, it's important to stay consistent in that because your audience expects something and if you don't have anything to deliver, then it won't work out as well. Let's see. So let's talk about posting schedules and content calendars. Social media and website content need to work together to keep you accountable to your social, to your branding and your marketing. It's easier to engage, it's easier to reach your clients and your co workers, your just peers in general. You want to keep web content and socials working together so that they benefit you the most. So your social media is going to engage larger audiences. It's going to give you an online persona, which is very important today, and it's going to give you active marketing results. If you have a business Instagram, you can literally look at your insights right away right after you post something you can see what percentage of them is male or female, you can see what age groups they are. It's really cool. And website content is going to provide the meat of your brand, it's going to direct people to your site and tell you and tell them what you do. It's going to get you serious clients who will probably give you your money if you're nice enough to them. And it helps with SEO, which is search engine optimization, I'm sure you know that. But so social media actually helps with SEO as well, but website content by nesting and Google and everything or nesting and Google. It helps a lot. Bring your information up on the search engines. So here are some content calendar tips as well, because we want the social media, we want the website content, but we have to keep it consistent. And that takes planning. You want to have a rough outline of posts, photos and articles or written pieces thought out and ready to go one to three months in advance. I find I mean, I find it's different for everybody. Some people prefer one month, some people prefer a year, you know, it depends on how often you change up your style or how often what kind of branding you have. So you want to use an online calendar or planning service like Google Suite or some WordPress content planning tools if you use a WordPress site. So here are some that I found. I have used Trello. I haven't used co-schedule or published press, but they look amazing and people really like them. So Trello is free and it has different boards to outline the tasks. The plugin displays everything and it organizes everything into whatever categories that you put them into. It is just a great plugin, which is something you want if you have a WordPress site. Everything is on the front end with Trello. So it's a little bit of a learning curve, but it's pretty easy to use once you get there. So with co-schedule, it's great for social content specifically. It's better for established earning sites simply because it is costly and there is quite a lot you can do with it. So you want to be able to fill out all of the areas of co-schedule if you're going to use them. It has automated social media, so it's perfect for the social content. And published press is free. It gives you full control and a great UI experience, user interface. There we go. And it's just back in control, very easy to use, great user experience. And you can add people onto projects, which is something really valuable if you're using it for a web building business or a business that's larger and has a lot of employees. The free plugin offers enough for any social marketing person. But you can pay to integrate other plugins like WooCommerce and things like that. All right. Another tip is to use an app like Preview. That's just the one I personally use, but you can watch your brand theme. Preview is used specifically for Instagram. It just lays out your Instagram and you can write your captions and schedule when you're going to post it. I find it really useful to use because you want original content and you just want it to be cohesive and nice. You want to have blog posts ready to publish and link in corresponding social media posts. So you don't want to just put a post out about your lunch and then say, oh, look at this website article I did on how social media marketing is great in the world today. You want to be able to have them be relevant to what you're posting or people will just be like, she's fishing for whatever. It helps with search engine optimization and website engagement as well because people can click on these links and go directly to your website. I was having a conversation with someone yesterday about this, though. And one thing you don't want to do, one thing that I don't like personally is the link in bio business because that changes so often. You want to find a way to include your link in your post so that people don't have to go to your profile to click on your link. You want to use relevant and proven hashtags. I say proven. It's just if you search it, it has a lot of hits and it is used a lot. So people are searching it. People are using this hashtag and trying to see what people post with it. And you want to plan with original content. So when you're planning, if you're doing one to three months in advance, you want to be able to have all of those visuals ready before you put them on your plan. You want to make sure that you don't want to get to the day of and be like, oh, no, we have this post that we're going to do and we don't have the visuals for it. That's never a good idea. It's how can you set yourself apart with your visual content? You want to know when to post as well, but you can't take it too seriously. It doesn't matter too much, but it is good to know if you are looking to get the most accurate marketing feedback from Instagram, from Twitter, from Facebook. So the best posting times are Facebook 9am. Let's see. Let's see. Yeah, let's see. So Facebook is 9am. So Facebook is super popular in the industry, business, you know, so lunch, morning commute, three to 4pm. They're great to post then because people are scrolling through their Facebook when they should be working. And it's the best time to post on Facebook is Thursday through Sunday. Instagram one to 5pm because that's right in lunch hours and it's right when work is over. Instagram is a little, it's a little more browsable than Facebook, but Facebook is sometimes more interesting to people to browse during the day. Twitter is like an RSS feed, like I said, and so it's easy to scroll. So a lot of people are scrolling while they're driving 8 to 10am and 6 to 9pm during morning traffic, during night traffic, just the commuting hours. Days to post on Twitter depend on your business and what you're selling. If you're selling something like photography services that you would probably want to post on the weekend so that people could see it, but really posting on posting days on Twitter don't matter as much. LinkedIn 25% of adults use LinkedIn during work hours, which makes sense because it's more of a professional sort of social media channel. But it said here in my research that 10 to 12pm is when LinkedIn gets the most like scrolling. So it is beneficial to know that just so if you're doing interactions on LinkedIn, you know when you're going to get the most out of it. And Wednesday is the best day to post on LinkedIn and Pinterest is heavily female. It's 29% active users, which is great for a social media channel. And it's a little less browsable so people don't really view it until 8 to 11pm when you know moms who are doing DIY projects are going to bed or putting the kids to bed. So let's see. So that's when you should post. How do you make it work for you? How do you make your social media work for you? Where does your brand succeed? Look at where you succeed. Look at your target audience and make a persona, make a schedule. You know, that's what planning is. It's making your life work for you. So you want to look at your social media as a priority and make sure that it works for you and it's not just something you're checking off a to do list. Social media should be fun. You guys should be fun. All right. And you want to develop an agreement with your audience. So it's important to know the trends and what audiences are responding to. It will help shape your branding. It will help determine marketing moves and influence your visual representation. So you need to be aware of hot colors. You need to be aware of photography style, editing style. Are you a more jokey company or are you all business? You know, you need to make it personalized to you and help you move forward with your branding. And staying on trend is social media branding gold. You know, it will keep your business booming. It will keep clients coming in. All right. And here's my brain teaser. Okay. So the let's see. Okay. Well, here's the answer to the brain teaser, you guys. So so the reason why meme culture, the random sense of humor, you know, is so prevalent and so popular today is because we have the world at our fingertips, right? In our phones, we have all the visuals, all the words we're just scrolling for days, you know, we've seen every word in the English language, probably since social media came out. So so because we've seen so many words and content in such like compounded amount of time, the only way that our brains are stimulated, and it's not the only way obviously, but pop way that our brains are stimulated stimulated is by content and words that are strung together that don't usually get strung together. So things like the Skittles commercials, you know, that's pretty weird. The old spice commercials, and the Super Bowl commercial with the puppy monkey baby. Did anybody see that a couple of years ago? Super weird. I did not get it, but whatever. So yeah, you just need to be aware of the trends and be able to see what kind of socials people are responding to. And that seems to be the weird randomness right now. So have fun with that. And you want to be consistently on trend, like I said, and that will just help you gain a loyal audience. If you root in a younger audience, and you try really hard to stay on trend, engage them, then they will grow with you, and you'll be able to be successful in your branding and marketing strategy. And you want to be ahead of the curve with that. So I would start now. Consistent planning and using relevant social media will help you stay ahead of the curve. So you need to be planning, you need to be aware of what your next steps are at all times. And that is it. So these are my, I'm, that's my Twitter, and that's my email. If you want to discuss this more, but thank you so much for coming to my talk, you guys. And that's it. Thank you. Any questions? I will take a selfie, and I'll put out my Instagram stories. Let's see. Okay. Perfect. Yes. If you want to follow the trends. So on Facebook, sharing articles is really important on Facebook. Right now, I'm just pulling this out the top of my head like I said, I found this all from the internet. I'm just a vessel of information. So if anybody has any other feedback, I would be open to hearing it as well. But Facebook, you want to share, you want to have visual media, of course, you want to share pictures, you want to put a very heavy importance on your visuals. So on your pictures, you want to have flat lays are huge right now, flat lays are big. Let's see. You just want to include one of the trends that I've been saying recently is, like I said, the social CEO, you want to include the behind the scenes and you want to you want people to feel connected to your brand in a personal way, essentially. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, definitely. You want to comment and engaged. Anything else? Yeah. Yeah, you're right. Right, right. Right. Let's see. Well, I don't know. Does anyone have a solution to that? Anybody have any ideas, Jen? Because regardless of when your audience is going, they're still going to see that you can consistent. So they know what you expect from you. Yeah, very true. Yeah, exactly what what your target audience is, maybe pick that time zone if that has a time zone. And if not, then just, you know, you don't take it too seriously. The times people will see your posts because a lot Instagram, Facebook, I don't know Pinterest, I think, they're not chronological. So it doesn't matter as much. It's just like when people are on and interacting with the with the site. For sure. Instagram. Yeah, so Instagram, you want to post one to two times a day, but you want to keep your stories active. So but you don't want to be too active, you know, you want maybe your main posts, which is the most important part, you want one to two times a day, any more than that. And people will be like, Whoa, she's spamming my newsfeed, you know. Oh, of course. Yes, sorry about that. So the stories is what you would. It's like the behind the scenes area. It's in the moment. It's like a live, it's not live, but it's right away. You take the video and you post it right away and people can click on your little profile bubble and see what you're up to at the moment. Your posts are should be more announcements, they should be just like if you have a good picture and you want to share, just make it relevant to your brand and don't don't make it random and just Oh, I'm going to post this picture and put a little emoji just so that I can post the picture. You want to make sure that your content is relevant and important to what you're trying to say. Yeah. So going back to consistent posting. What would you define as consistent like posting, making sure to post several times a week or going the extra step of I post every Monday, every Tuesday, skip Wednesday, every third like making a schedule like that. Is there a is there a key to that? Or is it just is or can it be just as loose as I make sure to post three to four times a week sort of thing? Personally, for me, I find when I have like a rigid schedule. If I have it scheduled that day, I'm going to post this Instagram picture, then I will be more likely to do it. So if you want if you want to grow your social media and you're absolutely serious about it, I would I would make it a little more rigid of a schedule than so you would you would pick out actual days that you will make sure you post that week every week. Yeah, and you want to know exactly what you're posting as well. So as you're planning ahead, you want to be able to have your images and your captions ready and know what's going on in your brand. And I actually saw you at work on this where I need a beach day. Yeah, it's true. It's true. So I when I was using preview, I was showing Jen Miller is my mom if any of you know she works for me. She is the face behind need someone to blog and she has a lot of input into this as well. So I'm happy she's here. But when I was showing her my preview, so I was just using this for my personal Instagram, because I want to be an influencer. I want to be paid to travel to you know, Cabo or whatever. So so I was planning the beach day that I'm going to have tomorrow probably. And I was going on Pinterest finding inspiration for my photos. And I was writing my my comments and my captions in my little bubbles. I don't know what was the question you had like this whole Yeah, well you want. Yeah, that goes along with making a theme for your brand on. So on Instagram, when you go to somebody's profile, you know, you see all their pictures in the little square form and then you see their bio and everything. But the theme of your Instagram speaks a lot to people who visit, you know, if they go to your Instagram, they see a theme, they're going to be like, Oh, she's serious about Instagram, you know. So it's just, I don't know, you want to match your editing style, you want to match your layouts and everything like that. Well, if you're selling a product, you can include that. I don't know if it's available to everyone yet, but I think it will be as soon if you have a business account. You can link to that product and people can click on your picture and there'll be a little bag item and they can go there. Or you could just manually put the link in. But no, if in your bio, you could put your website link just a blanket website link. But if you have a specific post that you want to link, I would recommend linking that specifically in your post. Yeah. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Well, there's this girl I follow on Instagram. She's a little more of a she's a in fashion and stuff. And it's just someone I follow out of personal interest. But I think she does a very good job at her Instagram per say, but social media all over the place. Let's see what am I? Hmm. So her Oh, right. Her name is let me look at her name really quick. It is Alyssa in the city. Alyssa Costco rally is her name but it's Alyssa a l y s s a i n t h e c i t y. And I just her she does a really good job at keeping a theme at keeping consistency and keeping up to date on her stories on her bio on everything. Let's see. Anything else? Yeah. No, I haven't. I have or I know people that do they find it easier for them. But I, I don't want too many hash. You don't want too many hashtags on your posts unless they're separated are on Instagram on on Twitter. Instagram are on Twitter. Hashtags are a great thing to use so you can use a hashtag generator. But I find that just thinking of them myself and finding out the ones that work for me is better. Yeah. Hmm. Yeah. Okay. YouTube I was going to go into YouTube. I didn't I didn't go very go into it at all really. But I was going to mention it. I don't know much about how to use YouTube. But I know Twitch is really big right now. Twitch is huge. So if you and it's a little bigger than YouTube, YouTube is kind of faltering on the social media channels right now. But yeah, anything else? Thank you so much, everybody for coming.