Unplugging for a week being sick gave me a chance to reimagine my own social media marketing for the new year. The truth is, when it comes to social media, many businesses continue to do the same old same old even as content consumption tastes change. Social media content creation also requires the resources of time and money, so here is how I recommend you get the biggest bang for your social media marketing buck in the new year.
Key Highlights
[03:41] Changes That I Am Going to Take in Social Media
[04:15] The Concept of Content Curation
[06:29] The Analysis That I Did
[09:33] What Kind of Pins Work Best?
[13:58] Reducing the Volume of Content, But Increasing the Quality
[17:04] You Don't Need to Go Overboard
[17:33] Reasons Why You Need to Use YouTube Shorts More
[18:38] The Quality of An Instagram Reel
[19:09] My Strategy on TikTok That I Recommend
Notable Quotes
Learn More:
Unplugging for a week being sick gave me a chance to reimagine my own social media marketing for the new year. The truth is, when it comes to social media, many businesses continue to do the same old same old even as content consumption tastes change. Social media content creation also requires the resources of time and money, so here is how I recommend you get the biggest bang for your social media marketing buck in the new year.
Key Highlights
[03:41] Changes That I Am Going to Take in Social Media
[04:15] The Concept of Content Curation
[06:29] The Analysis That I Did
[09:33] What Kind of Pins Work Best?
[13:58] Reducing the Volume of Content, But Increasing the Quality
[17:04] You Don't Need to Go Overboard
[17:33] Reasons Why You Need to Use YouTube Shorts More
[18:38] The Quality of An Instagram Reel
[19:09] My Strategy on TikTok That I Recommend
Notable Quotes
Learn More:
Hey, Neal Schaffer here, I just want to let you know that I am finally launching my first digital course. And it's going to be all about helping you create an influencer marketing strategy from scratch. In one week. This will be a cohort based course on the Maven platform for those of you who might be familiar with it, and I'm really excited, it is going to be the last week of November, beginning November 28. Going into December 5, if you're interested in joining me so that I can handhold you not only in creating an influencer marketing strategy, but really providing you all the education you need to up your career and improve your marketing even outside of influencer marketing. I hope that you'll join me in this unique course. Go to Neal schaffer.com/maven One that's M A v n the number one and you can find all the information and register for the class there. I really hope you'll check it out. And I really hope I have the opportunity to serve you deeper. So I'll be honest with you. I thought that I could avoid getting Coronavirus for so long. I took my vaccines I even had the latest Omicron vaccine taken just a few weeks ago. Yet for the first time I fell victim to Coronavirus I'm okay now tested negative three days in a row back to my old self. But during that one week in isolation, I thought a lot about social media and what changes need to be made to get caught up with social media today in entering 2023 I want to share that with you in hopes of inspiring you to fundamentally change how you look at social media going forward in this next episode of The your digital marketing coach podcast. Digital social media content influencer marketing, blogging, podcasting, blogging, tick talking LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, SEO, SEM, PPC, email marketing, who there's a lot to cover, whether you're a marketing professional entrepreneur, or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice. Good thing you've got Neil on your side, because Neal Schaffer is your your digital digital marketing marketing coach, helping you grow your business with digital first marketing one episode at a time. This is your digital marketing coach, and this is Neal Schaffer. Hey, everybody. Neal Schaffer here. Welcome to your digital marketing coach podcast. I am Neal Schaffer, your digital marketing coach. It's probably a better way to say that without repeating myself, but welcome. And yes, a lot of you reached out to me after I found out that I had Coronavirus. I didn't share it with anybody. I wasn't like totally public with it. But everything is going hunky dory now. And yeah, I'm fully recovered and feeling really good. So let's talk about social media. As we head into 2023. I think that a lot of companies, a lot of people have been using social media, like they have been for the past 357 1012 years, I know that there are certain social networks that I have been doing that for. And it was this one week when I had COVID. And I really thought a lot about things, I realized that things had to change. And I want to share with you those changes that I am going to take in hopes that they inspire you. I'm gonna go social network by social network. But I want to start with the concept of content curation. So for those businesses and those people that want to be seen as thought leaders or experts, and or if you don't publish enough of your own content, you are probably leveraging other people's content. We call this content curation. In more recent years, we call this leveraging user generated content, which has become very popular on Instagram and other platforms. But the concept of content curation is that it takes time to find that content that represents both your brand and your expertise. And I realized that, especially on Twitter, where I tend to publish the most curated content, it was also taking a heck of a lot of time to keep up with the frequency at which I was publishing. So this made me question the frequency at which I was publishing. Do I need to publish this frequent? And I want to ask you that same thing, because the newer networks, like tick tock or short form video, yeah, there might be people posting every day, but maybe most of their publishing once a day. I know there's probably some that do two or three times a day, but once a day is the norm Um, so why do we feel the need to publish more frequently on other social networks now I will say a social network like Twitter does require more frequency to be seen. But it doesn't have to be as frequent as I've been posting, and definitely on a LinkedIn on a Facebook once a day can have major impact. If your content is impactful, that's going to be the major message here is that less is more aim for impact with every piece of content, if your content is not impactful, don't worry about it. You don't have to share it even right. And part of the realization that I came to, and I'm gonna get to my social network by social network advice, but I want you to know how I got there was I was taking a look at okay, well, how do I want to do Pinterest going forward? How do I want to do Twitter going forward? These are the two social networks where I actually get the most traffic. And then what am I going to do with Tiktok, Instagram and YouTube going forward? Three of the other biggest social networks in which I am not getting much traffic, but I also have very little activity, I'm not really publishing much content. So obviously, one of the things I'm doing is recording a video for this podcast. Yes, this is going to be published on the your digital marketing coach podcast. And if you're listening to the podcast, you'll be able to talk see me talk into my camera on my YouTube channel. But that's the first thing I can do is to get more authentic content is simply to record myself more often when I'm doing things like recording podcasts. So that's a really, really easy thing to do. But it was this analysis that I did was okay, well, how much? Like if I was to completely remove Twitter, part of the timing of this is what Twitter has been going through Twitter, like I said, my number one network for traffic generation, what's going to happen with Twitter with Elon Musk? I don't know. I'm still there. I'm not on Mastodon, or Hive or any of these other social networks, I'm still still doing my thing. But I realized, obviously, it's a lot riskier, right. But when I did my analysis, went into my Google Analytics. And if you are new to this podcast, or to my channel, I've invested a lot into SEO ever since I published the age of influence my last book, which came out during lockdown, march 17 2020, which forced me to go more digital, and to force me to go above and beyond mere social media. So going through my Google Analytics, in 2021, the percentage of traffic to my website that I got from social media, you're talking to someone with hundreds of 1000s of followers on social media, frequently publishing content, but that percentage was a mere 2%. That's right. 2% of my traffic came from social media. 98% came from other sources, direct referral email, but overwhelmingly search engines. And that's why I'm still so bullish on search engine optimization. And I look forward to creating more content around that going forward. But when I look to 2022, that 2% went to 1%. So now we get into the question of, Why am I spending all this time, and in some cases, money, because I hire people to help me with my social media, to create content for social media, when it only generates 1% of the traffic. On the other hand, social media is not just about traffic, it's still where we need to be to be found to be seen to build community. So it's not like I can just pull the plug on social or that any business can pull the plug on social, but it's looking at social media differently. It's going back to what social media originally was, which is really about brand awareness, and building fans, right? The traffic generation was great while it lasted. But that is going away as time progresses. A great case in point is Pinterest. So one of the networks that I'm looking to do. Well, less is more with its Pinterest. So just do a search. Now you may be thinking well, why Pinterest? Like I said, it's the second generator, a second largest generator, website, website traffic to me. And I believe that if you're an E commerce if you're targeting a female demographic, but you know, Pinterest was still as a search engine was a bigger search engine, but it still does have its few 100 million users. And it's still someplace that most businesses especially b2c should be on. So in doing my analysis on Pinterest, and doing some searches for some keywords, if someone was going to look for information related to the content that I produce, I took a look at what percentage of the top results were either video pins or idea pins now idea pins sort of show at the top of your profile. You can't see it on the desktop version of Pinterest, but on the mobile version, which is overwhelmingly popular, they will be featured prominently. Video pin is just a pin that is one long video. And when I saw Pinterest speak at Adobe MAX, they said they were really focusing on idea pins and stuff pins, as a video pins were just all idea pins. Needless to say, most of not only, I would say a good portion of the results were ideas slash video pins. But in terms of pins that were getting engagement, it was also idea video pins, the static pins just were not getting any engagement, most were big fat zeros. Now, that doesn't mean that people were not clicking on them for traffic. But the idea is, and I know that a lot of old pinners have a hard time getting used to this is if you get some idea pins up there, you will get more visibility for your other pins. But those idea pins themselves will lead to followers will lead to people clicking on your profile website URL, and it gives you the analytics in it, you know, I've only made two idea pins. But I have seen that they last for a long time they still get traffic. Whereas I used to be able to say that about the static pins, and that's no longer the case. So Pinterest, scaled down the static pin creation, just there's not that big of a need for it, scale up the idea pin. Now there are some people who will take a short form video and repurpose it across all the networks. I'd love to do that I think it really works well if you already have an established following. If you're just starting out, I like to be native to that platform. Idea pins is a little bit different than your other types of pins. If you were to consume them, you would see sometimes they are long videos where a tick tock wherever you go could work. But for my type of educational content, that's often in terms of 10 steps or 10 tips. It's like a listicle format. And idea pins give me the ability to create these different pages or slides. So you create one slide per tip, you have a cover slide, you have an ending slide with a call to action, and there you go. So it's a different type of content creation process. But now I'm really dedicated. At least I'm not going to be able to do it every day, but at least once a week to start on that path. And I've started on that path, I've got my resource together, I've got my strategy together. And I've also got my strategy together of how I want to reduce the volume of scattered pins going forward. So that I can invest more resources into the idea being creation. So instead of publishing maybe 4045 50, or even 35 pins a day, let's take that down to 2520. We don't have to go that crazy. So that's number one, that's still a lot of pins. But I also have like almost 600 blog posts. And if every blog post has a pin, you can imagine that's still a lot of content to share across multiple boards, including group boards. So let's move on to Twitter. So once again, I am tackling these by the networks where I generate the most traffic, Twitter, I am a victim of publishing way too much the more of my own content I want to publish, the more I want to balance it out with curated content. And the problem there is now it takes me a long time to prepare that curated content. And if I'm sick for a few days, like I was with COVID, the queue goes dry on the curated content, because I like to only publish relevant and new content from a creative perspective. But I'm also sharing a heck of a lot of my own content. And to be honest with you, it is a semi automated approach. Now with curated content, I have started to provide my own perspective, my own commentary on every piece of content that I curate and share. Why aren't I doing that with my own content. And that is what I'm challenging myself to do going forward. In fact, I want to get out of the habit of having repeatable cues of publishing the exact same thing, month in and month out. This is something that Twitter has already said, violates their terms and conditions. I don't think other networks like it, and your passionate fans will also see wait haven't already published up before. So I've already been doing this, for the most part on LinkedIn and Facebook. I wasn't doing it on Twitter. But that is my policy going forward. And I'm still in transition mode of only publishing once. And I don't need to publish 24 hours on Twitter only publish when my audience most of my audience is online. Most of my audience is United States and Europe. So now I can reduce the frequency, which reduces the amount of curated content that I need to prepare, which is great. Which also means that it's easier for me to put my own spin on every piece of my own content as well, and prepare that on a monthly basis. So that is another step I'm taking to reduce the volume of content but increase the quality by it my own perspective now, with LinkedIn and Facebook, I've primarily been publishing only once a day there as well. I think the trick with LinkedIn and Facebook is really offering more of your own perspective. I've been doing this, I want to offer more of it. And not just links, but selfie photos. And videos also work very, very well. Yes, it's going to reduce the amount of traffic that every Be post generates, because it's not a link post. But I think you're going to be seen more often in the feed so that when you do publish a link posts, maybe one in every three posts is linked, and one is a selfie, and one is a video, that might be a great a really great way to really shake up that content, whether it is on a LinkedIn or on a Facebook, and I think you're going to be a lot more effective. But make it impactful, make it your own voice, your own perspective, there are so many brands and personal brands that are going through the motions on the networks, sticking to an editorial calendar, publishing x posts a day, and they're not putting their heart and soul and authenticity in each post. That is my challenge to myself for 2023. And that is also my challenge for you now, and I do post the same things on LinkedIn and Facebook, I think that is totally okay to do. I have a very professional network on both platforms. And my content is very professional. So it works for me, you might have to tweak your content a little bit. But you might be surprised that exact same content might work Twitter different because obviously, I'm tweeting at a greater frequency. And Twitter requires a shorter dialogue. Whereas a longer dialogue may serve you better on LinkedIn or Facebook, you just have more space to be able to share your thoughts to do a little bit of storytelling to bring people in to your post. So finally, I've simplified it right, we got the Pinterest, the Twitter to LinkedIn, the Facebook, okay, now we got the YouTube, the Instagram the TIC tock. And if I can go 100% short form video, I will now Instagram I will still post static images, when I'm inspired, which happens a lot when I'm traveling. Normally, I will post so if you're inspired. If you're doing an event, if you have a new product, it sort of makes sense to do it. But really, if we can go 100% reels, that's all the better because we know it's going to get the engagement. Well, if we can go 100% reels, we can also create tiktoks. And we can also create YouTube shorts, a lot of people will repurpose the same over all three, I want to talk more about the quality of the content and the frequency of the content, these two main things, I don't think you need to go overboard. I think even if you start once a week, which is my target, once a week Pinterest idea pin, once a week, tick tock slash YouTube short slash Instagram real is a great way to start if you can do it once a day. That's awesome, right? I wouldn't forget about long form YouTube horizontal video as well. Because I think that's going to be really impactful to help you build your channel. But I see more and more YouTube shorts in YouTube search results. And in Google search results when it shows videos. So that was an aha moment that I had when I looked at what was happening at the terrible Halloween scene in Seoul, Korea. When I was looking for the news. That is what popped up. And it's like, wow, if more and more people use YouTube shorts, YouTube and Google doesn't need to buy Twitter, Youtube shorts becomes the place for real time news. And that was the aha moment that I had. And we all know that YouTube is really aggressively pushing shorts. Similar to how I think Tik Tok was really spiraling two years ago at the beginning, I think obviously, it's still very popular. Maybe it's harder to get as many views as in the early days. But YouTube shorts is still in the early days. We also have to remember I have a lot of friends in India that remind me that tick tock you cannot see in India it is banned from India right. And you can only see YouTube shorts or Instagram real. So another reason why YouTube shorts might be very popular, especially in those parts of the world. But these are things that I want you to think about the quality, the frequency now the quality of an Instagram reel. I know that there's a lot of people, a lot of professionals, a lot of blog posts that say just show up just do a talking head video of us speaking 1530 45 seconds. I know at the beginning the talking head videos are very refreshing. I don't know how long that's gonna last without it being a little bit more entertaining, or with a little bit more storytelling. I am personally see my Instagram real is flooded with this type of talking head video. I see very little of that on Tik Tok. Now, my strategy for tick tock that I would recommend to you. I believe that trending audios this could be music, these could be voices or sounds. This is the SEO of tick tock that when there's trending audio, if you create something with that trending audio, you have, on average a better chance of being seen by more people than just recording your own voice. So that's my challenge. And I'm already starting to create my own strategy for that I'm not there yet. But I do hope to be doing that and see how that goes. That strategy might change. And then I do hope to take with a tic tock first approach of download that video before I add the TIC tock features and then add my own spin for Instagram and YouTube shorts. Takes a little bit longer time. But if you focus on the quality and not the frequency and it's only once a week, you can spend that extra five or 10 minutes per platform and really have impact At. So I covered all the major platforms. Blogging does not change. I blog four times a week, a one of those four blog posts is repurpose. That is not going to change. But I do have my own content strategy for my blog. And that content strategy is all about building this library of content, which I've talked about before. And it's something I've been working on since when I published the age of influencer right before when I wanted to create more content around influencer marketing. So that's been going on now for two years. Well, it's gonna be three years soon. So that library content, right is now at nearly 600 blog posts, it's not going to go on forever. So at some point, instead of four posts a week, it will be three posts a week, and instead of one repurpose posts a week or republish, it's going to be too, as I go more in the maintenance mode, as if you're confident that I have the content that my audience needs. But guess what, just when you think you have all the content, a new network, tick tock comes around YouTube shorts comes around, and who knows what is around the corner. So there's always new content to publish content about podcast once a week, I think is enough, I know that there's some people do twice a week, if I had a sponsor, if I was doing a lot of advertising. And with every episode, I can make more money. Awesome. That's not the intent of this podcast, right? It's really to build my community, to also for me to learn from the subject matter experts that I bring on the podcast. So that's not going to change at all. So at the end of it, I think I have a reach week strategy going into 2023. And I'm hoping through this advice, that it has given you a few ideas to focus more on the quality, your unique perspective, and less on that frequency that I do believe less is more Remember, you're not going to get gobs of traffic from social media going forward, it's only going to get harder and harder and harder. So using these new forms of media, I know this is a no brainer, I do believe in directly that's going to lead to more people clicking on your profile link. And I think that profile links like the link tree links are going to become even more more important. I'm actually working with a company right now that's coming out with some pretty exciting technology around that that I can't wait to introduce shortly. But I want to leave you with that message. And I hope if you enjoyed this content, if you haven't subscribed, whether it's on my podcast or on my YouTube channel, I do hope that you'll press that subscribe button and stick around for the next video or podcast episode, depending on what platform you're listening to this on. Well, that is it for another episode of The your digital marketing coach podcast. It's really relevant now that we are in World Cup season to keep your eye on the goal, but also be an option for your team, for your community, for your customers for your fans, be out there, be present, follow this advice, and I'm confident you will have a more successful social media marketing program in 2023 and beyond as we retweet we realign for the future of social media ahead. Alright everybody, this is your digital marketing coach Neal Schaffer signing off. You've been listening to your digital marketing coach, questions, comments, requests, links, go to podcast dot Neal schaffer.com. Get the show notes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes and Neal schaffer.com to tap into the 400 Plus blog posts that Neil has published to support your business. While you're there, check out Neil's Digital First group coaching membership community if you or your business needs a little helping hand. See you next time on your digital marketing coach.