 What do you think is the number one reason people unfollow a brand on a social network? Welcome to the We Are Slam Show where we share marketing agency insights, best practices, and ideas to help your business grow. My name is Tyler Kelly. I'm the co-founder and chief strategist at Slam Agency. We are a small but mighty full service marketing agency that really works as an outsourced marketing department for marketing directors like you, marketing directors that have an idea and a vision for where you want to go, but you don't have the team, the time, or the bandwidth to make it happen. That's where we come in. Now today, we're going to give you some insight into how we do social media. In fact, these are my best practices for social media networking. Now typically, this is the type of information that an agency would want to keep to itself, but we're not that way. As a matter of fact, we know that the more we give, the more we receive, and so we just want to give you as much knowledge, as much value, as many insights as we possibly can, and this show today is going to do just that. Okay, so let me ask you a question. What do you think is the number one reason people unfollow a brand on a social network? Any ideas? Well, let me tell you, it's because their posts are too promotional. I'm going to share with you our rule here at SLAM. We call it the 80% rule. This is a big one. I want you to write this down. No more than two out of every 10 posts should be promotional, and this is true on every network. No more than two out of every 10 posts should be promotional. This is the 80% rule. As a matter of fact, here at SLAM, we try to make that the 90% rule, and with many of our clients, we try to make that the 90% rule. Now I know you're thinking as a marketing director, well, my job is to promote the business that I work for. My job is to promote my brand, so you're telling me that I shouldn't really be doing that in social media. What should I do? Good question. The key is to really create content that people on an engagement network can get behind, can share, can engage with, can have conversations around. This is the type of content that you'd like to share. As a matter of fact, we do social media for an HVAC company. Can you believe it? An HVAC company. Now, typically, this would be, you would think, pretty dry content. It's like, okay, let's fix the boiler. Let's fix the furnace. Those are all promotional types of things. When we got around as a group and we began to brainstorm what types of content would work well, we had to come up with content that wasn't necessarily focused on what they did. What we did was, we looked at associations. We looked at where were they giving money? Where were they donating their time? One of the things that we realized was that they were really dedicated and devoted to the humane society, to making sure that pups had a home. What we wanted to do was, number one, was highlight that association, highlight that relationship. We did it by creating a pet of the month contest where, essentially, people would submit photos of their pets and we would select a winner each month where professional artists would then create a portrait of their pet. We would give them the portrait. The client would give them the portrait and then that portrait would be hung in a pet hall of fame at our client's office. This has been going for over, for almost two years now and it has been one of the most viral campaigns we've ever put out because people are engaged. What this does is it puts our client on their radar so that when it's time to pick an HVAC company, they know who they are, what they do, and they have a connection to their brand. They're going to call this company. That's one way that you can promote without promoting in social media. One of my five best practices, number one, is what I call P2P. We hear all the time about B2B and B2C, which if you're wondering, business to business, business to consumer, these are these acronyms that we hear all the time. In social media, I really want you to be focused on this idea of P2P. This stands for person to person. Social media is a personal experience. When you log in and you're scrolling through your Facebook feed or you're flipping through Instagram photos or stories, it's personal. It's personal to you. As a brand, what you have to do is you have to make sure that everything you do is personal. It's person to person. Don't think of it as like you're on this big hill and you're talking down. It's never about me as a brand talking to this massive people. It's about me as a brand as a person connecting with another human being, person to person. If you keep that in mind, then when you sit down to write your social media post, when you sit down to communicate, then you're no longer communicating to the masses, but you're communicating to individuals, to human beings. And you'll notice that your copy will dramatically improve if every time you sit down to write something, you think P2P. The second best practice is the 80-20 rule. I mentioned it again because it's key. No more than two out of every 10 posts should be promotional. The number one reason that people unfollow brands on social media is because they post too many promotional posts. My number three best practice is perception is reality. Now, I really want you to think about this because this is really key. Perception is reality. What does this mean? Well, what it means is that however I perceive you to be as a brand, that is my reality. Now, remember, social media is P2P. It's person to person. So it's not about what you think of your brand. It's what I think of your brand. And for me, my perception is my reality. Now, you might be thinking, how can I influence someone's perception of our brand? And that's a really good question. As a matter of fact, we talked about that a few weeks ago in our show about confirmation biases. As a marketing director, you can utilize confirmation biases to your advantage by number one, being aware of them, and then number two, by utilizing them ethically. Social media is a great place to apply some of the principles in that episode, which we'll link to in the show notes. Here's three things I want you to think about when you think about perception as reality. Number one is familiarity bias. This is key. If you are building a personal brand, if you're building a brand where there is somebody front and center, then you want to make sure as a marketing director, you put that person front and center over and over and over again, because people buy from those that they like and trust. And in order to accelerate this liking and this trusting, you can build familiarity. This is called the familiarity bias, which simply says that the more people see you, the more they like and trust you. If you're a brand that doesn't have a person that you can put forward as the face or a group of people that you can put forward as the faces, then that's where you really need to take a step back and think about how can we as a brand that essentially is recognized by a logo, how can we become more personal? How can we be more P2P? So before you even get to this point, you have to think about P2P and how can you do that as a logo, as a corporation? If you're just posting from this entity that is unapproachable, then a lot of times you're not going to be as engaging in social media. All right? This is why in fast food, you see the trends with comedy. It's where Wendy's and Jack-in-the-box, they're really able to build this P2P, to build this perception as reality through familiarity by being out there, by injecting their brands and making them more personal. Okay? This is where comedy really comes into play. The number four best practice that I want you to be aware of is to follow channel norms. This is so huge because a lot of times, this just doesn't happen. Okay? We think that we can just create a video for YouTube and then just like distribute it in Facebook and all these places. But the thing is, number one, each channel has its own norms in regards to formats, in regards to times and links of videos, in regards to the way that people communicate. This is a big one, right? So like on Instagram stories, I'm going to communicate differently than I would on a Facebook post. I can't put hashtags in a Facebook post and expect those hashtags to go too far. The hashtags that I use on LinkedIn are going to be completely different than the hashtags that I use on Instagram. And so if you're taking social media as if you're taking the approach of, I'm just going to create one piece of content and then put it everywhere, you're taking the wrong approach. You need to follow channel norms. And what that means is like you have to be in each channel authentically. And a matter of fact, that's number five. Number five is be authentic. No one likes it when you're fake and in social media, we can tell. Okay? We can tell when you're not being your true self, when you're not being your true brand. Okay? It's obvious. People, they have a BS meter and we can see it. A lot of times brands get into trouble because they're trying to be something that they're not. Remember, P to P, remember perception is reality and kind of just be yourself. Be authentic. Authenticity is all about being true to your brand values, being true to your brand voice. If you can do that, then you can be authentic. These are my best practices for social media networking. I hope that you've been able to take something from this video. I hope that you've been able to pull something that you can use today. I want to leave you with this one final tip, editorial calendars. Use them. Okay? It's super important that you get organized as a marketing director. The best way to do that in social media is to utilize an editorial calendar. An editorial calendar just at a high level, it allows you to organize your promotions, any special events, any dates that are important for your business, your brand. You list those on a calendar and then you kind of high level, insert ideas for the types of content that you want to happen week in and week out on each of the networks. I promise if you aren't using an editorial calendar and you start using one, you're going to instantly feel more organized. You're going to be able to report on what works, what doesn't work. You're going to know what's coming up. You're going to stop doing things last minute or in the moment. It's really going to allow you to implement the best practices that we talked about. It's going to allow you to really level up when it comes to your social media game. Okay? A few quick tips for editorial calendars. Number one, editorial calendars, use them. Now, if you've enjoyed this episode of The We Are Slam Show, if you haven't already, please subscribe. You can do that. You can follow us on Spotify. You can subscribe on iTunes. If you're watching on YouTube, be sure to number one, subscribe, and then number two, hit that bell. If you're watching a clip on Facebook or anything like that, do me a favor, Instagram, TV. Do me a favor and let me know. Shoot me a comment, DM me, or you can email me at Tyler at slamagency.com. If you're a marketing director looking to up your social media game, we can help you with that. This is something that we're really passionate about and something that we're really good at. It's taking just your ordinary SEO and taking it to that next level. I'll be happy to share with you some of the things that we've done for brands big and small, and hopefully we'll partner with you to do something amazing. Now, if you want to reach me in that capacity, just go to slamagency.com and click the button for free consultation. It's the big pink button at the top of the page. You can't miss it. Thank you for tuning in. I will see you next week. Thanks for watching. If you like what you saw, subscribe and hit that bell. You'll be the first to be notified when new content goes live. After that, you can watch more videos from slamagency. We've picked something we think you'll love.