 Social media is composed of four equally important parts. 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 right here at Slam Agency. We're a small but mighty, full-service marketing agency that helps marketing directors like you execute on your vision, execute on your strategy. Just think of us as the outsourced marketing department with a specialty really in digital marketing. And today I want to talk to you about social media. Now a lot of times when we think about social media we just think about the big five. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn. But here's the thing, social media is so much bigger than that. And as a marketing director you really have to understand how big it is so that you can take full advantage of every aspect of social media. So social media is composed of four equally important parts. These are social listening, social influencing, social networking, and social selling. And in this video I'm going to go through each one. Social media allows us to social listen. Social listening is tuning in to the needs and to the wants of our customers. And social media gives us the platforms, the tools that we need in order to do this more effectively. In the olden days we used to do focus groups. We used to do polling and all these types of things. But as we know these things aren't really as effective as they used to be. Polls used to be the gold standard for determining elections. Well now polls aren't worth the paper that they're written on, right? And focus groups used to be the thing. It used to be like let's go in, let's talk with some people, let's ask them questions. But the dirty little secret is this. People don't tell you what is truly on their mind in a focus group situation. They tell you what they think you want to hear. We've known this as marketers for many years. There's been a lot of studies, a lot of research that say focus groups just don't give you the real information. So how can you get the real information? Well social listening is the way to do that. So how do you do it? Well, you figure out where your customers, where your prospects, where your potential customers are online, whether it be Facebook groups, LinkedIn, figure out where these conversations are happening, whether it be a forum or on a blog, comments, these types of things, wherever it is, figure it out and then begin to listen. Hashtag following on Instagram, on Twitter. This might give you some insight into what types of things your customers are talking about. And this is where if you're doing your listening right, you can really begin to tap into what their pain points are, what their psych, what the psychographics are, like what their attitudes, interests and opinions are. And this will give you insight as a marketing director into how to approach them through advertising and marketing. Real quick, a few of my favorite tools for listening in social media. An oldie bit goodie, Hootsuite. Really great way to set up what you want to pay attention to and then go back to that daily and kind of see what's new, what's happening. Hootsuite is an oldie bit goodie. A few others that I like, I like Mention, I like Agora Pulse and I like BrandWatch. Now the second part of social media that you need to be aware of and know how to tap into is social influencing. Now when you think of social influencing, I want you to think really about influencer marketing. Influencer marketing is something that has come on the scene in a big way the last couple of years and there's some really good uses of influencer marketing. There's some really horrible examples of influencer marketing as well. Now here's the thing, if you go Google influencer marketing or social influencing, what you're going to find is you're going to find lots of blogs, lots of articles that are all about how wonderful influencer marketing is. But for the majority of people watching this video, it's probably not going to work for you. Here's the thing, there's been a lot of research recently that has shown that influencer marketing does not provide the ROI that it has promised that it would provide. There's a really great episode on Noah Kagan Presents, which by the way is one of my favorite podcasts. If I tune into a podcast, I'm tuning in to Noah Kagan's podcast and this podcast was all about influencer marketing, the ends, the outs, what works, what doesn't. It was with a guy named Josh Snow who has really approached influencer marketing in some unique ways and he shares his experiences and his data in influencer marketing to tell you what works and what doesn't. For the majority of you watching right now, I guarantee that it's probably not going to give you the results that you expect that it should. The number three part of social media, it's the big one, social networking. When you think about social networking, there's some really big ideas that I want you to grasp. The first is this, likes don't matter. Likes do not matter. There's an article, it's called A Thousand True Fans, and it's all about how just in life and business in the creative world that you can accomplish so much more with a small group of devoted followers, raving fans, than you can with a large group. Perfect example, price line, if you go to their Facebook page, you'll see that they have millions of followers and their interaction rate, their engagement rate is so low, less than one percent, and it just blows my mind that they can invest so much in this likes game, in this likes number, and so little in engaging content. The secret here is social media networking is all about that devoted group of fans, the followers who will buy everything that you put out that will engage with every post that you put out. This is what social networking is truly about, and if you lose sight of that objective, then you're going to just be in this rat race that continues and continues and there's no winning. The better way is to mobilize the audience that you do have and not to focus on all the numbers, not to focus on all those people that aren't going to become customers. Now there's a couple of other things I want you to be aware of when it comes to social networking and the first is seeker versus engagement. Remember this, seeker versus engagement. When it comes to social networking, there are two types of social networks. The first is seeker networks. A seeker network is, it's kind of based on this idea of search. That's where you as a user will go to that network and you will type in a search and you're looking for something. You're seeking out information. A perfect example of this is YouTube. People go there to seek out, the majority of people go there to seek out information. It's the second largest search engine in the world just behind Google. If your goal with YouTube is to build this massive network with these fans that are engaging, then there's a super high bar to make that happen and more than likely you're going to have to invest a lot of money into making that happen. And the reason why is because you're going against the flow. You're going against the current. The current when it comes to YouTube is as a seeker network. So what you should do on a seeker network is you should build content, optimize it for search, optimize it for SEO so that when people go and they type in the search, your content is going to pop up on that first page of results. So on a seeker network, it's all about how can I optimize SEO, optimize my content to be found to be discovered later on down the line. It's not about building this massive channel where you have a ton of followers and there's just massive amount of engagement that does happen on YouTube, but that is those are the outliers. Those are the success stories. Those are the unicorns. The majority of YouTube and the majority of the people using YouTube use it as a search engine. Now the flip side is engagement. Engagement is where you do have networks where people are engaging where there's conversations where there is community being built. Perfect example, Facebook, Instagram. These are perfect examples of engagement networks. What I want you to realize with an engagement network like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram is that these are the networks where you can do social listening because these are the networks where conversations are actually happening, where there's groups where people are breaking off into groups of similar interests. This is engagement networks and this is where social listening happens. This is also where you can social influence behavior by way of becoming part of the conversation by becoming a thought leader on the network and by generating and creating content that's captivating, motivating, inspiring, that drives action. The second big idea that I want you to get today is this idea of opened versus closed networks. YouTube is a perfect example of an open network. What does YouTube do when you search? It takes you to other people's content and that most likely links out to the web. Very similar to Google, which is not necessarily a social network although many SEOs would argue that it is. When you type a search into Google, what happens is you get a list of results on your search engine results page and when you click the link, it takes you to another site off of Google. Same way with YouTube. It takes you off of YouTube and there's no penalty there. This is actually encouraged. It's the way that the open network is built. It's built to lead you to content that doesn't exist on their site. However, when it comes to closed networks, this is not always the case. A closed network really penalizes you when you post content that is not part of its network, that is not hosted on its network. Facebook is a great example. It's a closed network. How can you identify a closed network? The first thing is in order to access most of the content, you need to be logged in. It's a closed network. YouTube, you don't need to be logged in to access to content. Facebook, LinkedIn. You need to be logged in to access the content. These are closed networks. Any time you have to log in to access the content, then what I want you to think of as a marketing director is I don't want to post third-party links. The first question I always get when talking with a marketing director is, well, my site is not really a third-party link because it's my site. It's my page and it's my site, but you've got to think about it like this. It's your brand on Facebook's page. It's on Facebook.com. Because it's on Facebook.com, if you put a link to your site in the post, to your site, that's a third-party site, meaning Facebook doesn't own your site. Because of that and because Facebook is a closed network, then what's going to happen is Facebook is going to penalize you. I know they say that they don't, but they do. Experience shows that they just don't show content when it's a YouTube link. They're not going to show it to very many people. There are contests on your own pages. When you post a link to your website, they're not going to show it to very many people. Because Facebook is really built on the snowball algorithm, which is like the more people that like and engage with your content, the more they're going to see your content and the more they're going to introduce your content to new people, and then on the flip side, if you post a link, no one sees it, no one engages with it, then what you're doing is you're digging a ditch for yourself any time you post a third-party link on your site. The very wary of any time that might be the case when you want to do that, when your boss is like, I want to post a link to our products page here on the site. The reason why Facebook introduced shops is because they don't want you to go to your website to shop. They don't want your customers to go to your website to shop. They want them to shop on Facebook because Facebook is a closed network and they want everything that happens with their traffic to happen on Facebook.com. If it's not happening on Facebook.com, then guess what? Very few people are going to see it. They're going to push it to the side and they're not going to show it to anyone. So as a marketing director, any time you have a third-party link on a closed network, realize that it's not going to get very far. The fourth part of social media is social selling, and I'll let you know in a little secret, it's not selling at all. Rather, social selling is all about building a brand. It's all about becoming a thought leader, building familiarity. We've talked several times over many episodes that people buy from those that they know, like, and trust, and the quickest way to drive and increase likeability is by building familiarity. It's by being present, by being out there, by having your face out there. The more people see you, the more they like and the more that they trust you. I know this is crazy, but it's a fact. The more they see you, the more they like and trust you. As a matter of fact, it's called the familiarity bias. So build it. Put your face out there. Put your brand out there. Be out there. Be out there as often as you possibly can and do so. The step up here, the level up here is if you're out there with valuable content, if you're out there as a thought leader, then people will begin to see you that way. Why do we do the We Are Slam Show so that we can share our experience? We can share our insights, our knowledge with marketing directors like you so that when the time comes for you to hire an agency, when the time comes to when you just can't execute and you just don't have the bandwidth to do everything that you need to do in-house, then it's like, okay, we're going to think about Slam to be that digital partner, to be that outsourced marketing department that we can hire that I can use as a marketing director to do everything that I need to do in terms of like graphic design, video, copywriting, social media, digital advertising, I need a team like that and rather than hiring that team one by one and figuring out who's good in this position, in this position and managing all those people, rather than doing all of that, I'm going to hire Slam because by hiring Slam, I get all those specialties, I get all those people, but I get a team that works well together and that I can provide vision to and strategy for and that they'll execute on that and it'd be amazing for my bottom line, okay, that's the value there and that's why we share content like this to make you aware of our abilities, to make you aware of our knowledge and our capabilities so that when the time comes, you already know who to call. That's what social selling is. Social selling is not me hitting you up on LinkedIn and being a nuisance, okay, that is social spam. It's not social selling. Why am I never on LinkedIn? Why do I just despise LinkedIn? Why do I think that like everyone in the business world putting their time into LinkedIn is a waste of time because it's a spam network. You can quote me on that. It's a spam network and everyone that's on LinkedIn for the most part is using LinkedIn in the wrong way and just rabbit trail. If I want to engage and connect with the real people, then I'm not going to do it on a network like LinkedIn. I'm going to do it on a network like Facebook or Instagram and the reason why I do that is because that's when people put their barriers down and that they're, they are their real selves at that point. On LinkedIn, everyone just has like a mask on. It's the business, you know, it's business, business, business and everyone's in that business mindset and it's hard to break through that and really like what most people do to break through that is just spam the heck out of you and I don't like that. I don't like LinkedIn. You can quote me on that. Social selling is not social spam. So rather than hitting somebody's email inbox or DMing them and like just bugging the heck out of them. How do you prospect? Well, inbound prospecting is the key and that is by putting out articles, putting out posts that provide information and value to the reader and putting that out there knowing that when the right person comes along and sees that content that they're going to reach out. The final thing that I want you to think about when you think about social selling is what I call trigger events. This could be on, you know, one of the ways that you could use LinkedIn is like, okay, I just got a new job. It's posted like so-and-so just got hired here. That is a trigger event. That's an event that you should be aware of because it marks a change in that person's status in that person's career. And so, you know, rather than just saying, hey, congrats, take a note, knowing that, you know, if you're a marketing director, you just got hired on as a marketing director, you're onboarding, you're learning about your new company. There's a lot of stuff going on. And if I were going to contact you, it's not going to be on day one, right? If I were going to reach out to you, if my goal was to do an outbound prospecting, then I would look at that trigger event and I would know that within a month and a half, two months, that's probably the time when you've got your bearings and you're ready to begin seeking out help. And at that point, I want to make sure that you know about who we are and what we do. And so, if I paid attention, if you're, you know, one of my targets, if you will, if you're somebody that I want to work with and I've paid attention to the fact that, that, you know, you started about a month and a half ago, then now I know that it's probably a good time to get on your radar. Okay, this is trigger event awareness. The other thing is just buying cycle awareness. And this is where social listening comes in. In regards to social selling, you have to be in tune with those accounts that you want to work with. So be aware of that buying cycle, be aware of where they are in that consumer journey. And you can do this with social selling. Okay, so the four parts of social media, social listening, social influencing, social networking, and social selling, be sure to listen to this a couple of times because there's a lot of good info in this podcast. Next week, we're going to talk specifically about social media networking and how you can get the best bang for your buck with the big five. All right, if you've enjoyed this podcast, if you've enjoyed this show, do me a favor and let me know anywhere where you listen or watch. Leave me a comment, send me an email tyler at slamhc.com. I'd be happy to connect with you. Now, if you're looking for an outsourced marketing department, if you need help right now, give us a call, shoot us an email or go to our site slam agency.com, click on the free consultation button and we'll be happy to chat with you. Thank you for tuning in. I'll see you next week.