Your Digital Marketing Coach with Neal Schaffer

Maximize Your Content Output: Social Media Scaling Tips from Expert Andrew Jenkins

• Neal Schaffer • Episode 355

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Unlock the secrets to multiplying your digital content's impact as Andrew Jenkins, who teaches at University of Toronto and has written Social Media Marketing for Business: Scaling an Integrated Social Media Strategy Across Your Organization, and I navigate the ins and outs of content repurposing in digital marketing. From revitalizing your existing digital creations to strategizing for new ones, we share insights on breathing new life into your content. If you've been pouring your heart into your work but it seems to vanish in the digital ether, you'll discover how to make your content work overtime across social media landscapes, using AI tools to revolutionize your approach.

In today’s episode, we peel back the layers of social media content strategy, especially in those tricky, tightly regulated industries. We talk about the pitfalls of a 'one and done' mentality and the magic of repurposing to extend the life and reach of your content. Get ready for an eye-opening look at how employee advocacy can amplify your message and how smart cross-promotion can make every piece of content count. I also share a slice of my journey in content development, from my upcoming book to my LinkedIn-focused venture, revealing how audience engagement can play a critical role in shaping your work.

As we round off our discussion, Andrew and I dissect the role of AI in content creation, bringing you our firsthand experiences with transformative tools that cut through the noise and polish your content for the social sharing limelight. We align the dots between AI’s efficiency and keeping the human touch at the heart of your digital strategy. Whether you’re a budding entrepreneur or a marketing maven, this episode packs a punch full of actionable strategies to revamp your content approach and make every word count. Join us as we unveil the power of AI to not only craft personalized experiences but also to dive deep into data analysis, freeing up your time to build those invaluable community connections.

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Speaker 1:

Hey, are you struggling to keep up with the ever-mounting demands of social media content production that famous hamster wheel of content? Do you wonder how the pros maximize every piece of content across different platforms seamlessly without dropping the ball? Fear not. As we dive deep with expert and fellow university educator and author, Andrew Jenkins, into the world of strategic content repurposing and distribution, We'll discover the secret weapons these experts use, such as AI tools, to create clever content rotation strategies that rocket their social media efficiency to new heights. Get ready for action-packed insights that will transform your content strategy and scale up your digital presence. All this and more awaits you, so stay tuned to this next episode of the Digital Marketing Coach podcast.

Speaker 2:

Digital social media content, influencer marketing, blogging, podcasting, vlogging, tick-tocking, linkedin, twitter, facebook, instagram, youtube, seo, sem, ppc, email marketing. 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 Neil Schaefer is your digital 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 Neil Schaefer.

Speaker 1:

Hey everybody, neil Schaefer here, your digital marketing coach, and welcome to episode number 355 of this podcast. Before we get into the interview today, I just want to give you a personal update. I've had a lot of you ask about my upcoming book. It is finally in the copy edit stage, meaning that the information going into the book is now fixed. It's just a matter of actually what am I going to cut out of the book, as it is a little bit longer than I would have hoped. In parallel, I am proceeding forward on an audio book and I'm really excited about creating a workbook for this next book. I really hope it becomes this definitive digital marketing playbook From yours truly, your digital marketing coach. You're going to have to stay tuned for the updates on that. I will have what are called advanced reading copies available for those influencers, authors, ceos who want to help out and provide a quote that I could use on the back cover, maybe even the front cover or in the front of the book, so I can help promote you as well as you help promote me. If that sounds like something you might be interested, feel free to reach out to me, neil, at neilshapercom. Hopefully you know how to spell my name. By now. I am the real Neil, that's N-E-A-L and Shaper is S-C-H-A-F-F-E-R.

Speaker 1:

I have also, in parallel, made this strategic decision to start working on another book, and this is going to be my first return to LinkedIn. That is right. Some of you may know that I published a book way back in 2009 called WhimMill Networking, which was the name of my blog for a while WhimMillNetworkingcom Understanding, leveraging and Maximizing LinkedIn, as well as maximizing LinkedIn for sales and social media marketing, talking about things like social selling and employee advocacy way back in 2011, before we literally had those terms. I'm really excited. I have continued to do social selling, trainings, work on my own. How should we call them? Frameworks, theories about LinkedIn With some historical specter? I think I can provide some new insight compared to all the other books that are out there. I said why not Lean into my strengths and get that out there? I am in the early development stages. I'm working on the outline and fleshing out the content there. If it is something where you have a case study or you think, neil, please make sure you write about this in that book. Feel free to reach out to me once again, neil, at NeilShapercom. I would love to hear from you.

Speaker 1:

We're now going to go to our segment before the interview on my recommended AI tools. The next recommendation I'll be completely honest is a tool that I have yet to use, as I am an affiliate for many tools. When I see a tool that I have yet to use that I've talked about because I've done research and I include them on listicles on various blog posts, and when I see that it actually is generating revenue and it's actually one of my top 10 tools in terms of affiliate revenue, I know that it's validated, whether I use it or not. This is that tool. It is called Ocoya I believe the pronunciation is correct. It might be called Osoya. Go to my affiliate link to try it out for free. Appreciate every click, every purchase. It is not any more money to you, but it helps support me and this podcast and all the other education that I provide. Osoyacom slash, osoya, osoya gets started.

Speaker 1:

This is the first social media dashboard that I've found.

Speaker 1:

That is post chat GPT. In other words, it has rethought or reimagined a social media dashboard using AI at every step of the process. I'm still a big fan of social B and I will use their AI social media post generator, but this allows you to do everything in AI. They brand themselves as an AI meets social media dashboard. They say push a button, post on all socials, social media content, marketing and copywriting using AI. And this is it.

Speaker 1:

This is the quote. It's like having chat, gpt, canva and Hootsuite at your fingertips, which really cool as well, similar to another best seller of my affiliate partners, which is called social pilot, which is also very inexpensive. They have a $15 month profile that you can start for free, or $15 per month subscription that gives you access to five social profiles and a hundred AI credits. The way that these tools work is you have to have AI credits to be able to generate that AI content, but if you want to go full speed ahead and leverage AI as much as possible in a social media dashboard, this is the tool for you. Once again, neal Schaffercom. Nealscffrcom. Slash Ocoya, ocoya. And now here's the interview.

Speaker 2:

You're listening to your digital marketing coach. This is Neal Schaffer.

Speaker 1:

Lights, camera Action. Welcome to another live stream edition of the your Digital Marketing Coach podcast. Today, we're going to be talking about the currency of digital media, of social media, and that is content. Now, content is something that we're going to need to always be creating lots of right, whether we're a business, whether we're a personal brand, and there are tactics or strategies we can do to help us really scale up that content production. This is going to be what we're talking about today with my special guest. My special guest who, first of all, is the author of Social Media Marketing for Business, scaling and Integrated Social Media Strategy Across your Organization. He is also a professor of social media marketing at University of Toronto, so it's always a pleasure to have fellow authors, fellow educators, on this podcast, on this live stream, and Andrew Andrew Jenkins is the name. Professor Andrew Jenkins, welcome to the your Digital Marketing Coach podcast. Thank you very much.

Speaker 3:

It is great to be here.

Speaker 1:

Always an honor, and I know that we got talking in social media and it's like, hey, we've never really done a deep dive and gotten to know each other. So this is it, my friend. I'm glad we made this happen and I sort of made that introduction to you. But I'm curious how do you, as another person who wears many hats author, educator, consultant how do you introduce yourself?

Speaker 3:

I've heard that you know father, recovering filmmaker, and you know CEO and founder of a social media marketing agency, and you've already covered the fact that I, you know, teach at the university and I'm an author.

Speaker 1:

So we've covered all the bases. The man of many hats. So, andrew, I want to get into the backstory and I always ask this of all my guests because I think how you got into doing what you're doing really shapes your direction and why you do what you do and how you do what you do and therefore, can you give us a feeling as to before you wrote the book, before you had an agency? You said you were a recovering filmmaker. That's where it all started. Be curious as to how you got to doing what you do today.

Speaker 3:

Well, I have an aquatic background, I have a degree in economics, I have a degree in film production and I have an MBA. And I worked in the film and television industry here in Toronto before going back to school for film production and then after. But it was after film school that a friend of mine from university was building websites and it caught my attention and I was intrigued and so I. Actually I did work in the film industry for a while, but I was. I saw this emerging internet and thought, hmm, there's something about that. So I actually started my own company selling menswear on the internet. I had my friend build my first website. Wow, this was 1995. Wow, and I call 1995 BG before Google and so.

Speaker 3:

But it was very, very challenging to find a service that would help me take credit cards over the internet, get me the right merchant accounts, fulfilling orders, international orders from Canada. But this is all before Shopify. Whole litany of impediments. But anyway, not to make this a long story even longer, I took what I learned from that and started working for e-commerce startups and worked through the dot com boom and bust and then got into wireless technologies after my MBA, but then my business unit at the telecom that I worked at was shut down and I was evaluating what I wanted to do and I wanted to get into management consulting and so I hung up my own shingle and started working with companies on strategy and strategic planning.

Speaker 3:

And at that time I made a connection of all things through social media, in this case LinkedIn. That led to an engagement where I was hired to do research on all of the predominant social networks at the time Wow, and how it would relate to what the client was trying to do. And this was an organization in the UK that did collaboration between academia, the private sector and the public sector. And so, basically, I got paid to become an expert on social media, and that was in 2008. And I moved from strategy and strategic planning in all called general corporate terms to strategy and strategic planning with a focus on social media, and haven't looked back. And it's 15 years later. We now work with mid to larger enterprises on their social media strategy, content development and more.

Speaker 1:

So are you actually and we're going to go into the social media content piece are you actually, then, creating the content for them? When you say content development, Are you helping them with the content development strategy, sort of coaching them on how they can better create the content? Analyze what is that role that your agency currently plays.

Speaker 3:

So we will help them with their planning and, like in broad terms, our philosophy is we're not trying to bend the organization to social media. We're trying to adapt social media to the way that the organization operates. It'll be more easily accepted, more easily adopted if we're layering it on to how they currently operate without forcing too much unnecessary change. So, with that in mind, we talked to them about what are your objectives for the next quarter, for the next six months? What's your marketing communications plan if they're willing and able to disclose it for the next year. And then we talk about where and how social media can complement that. And then we start planning.

Speaker 3:

Oh okay, so we have a new engagement with an HR benefits company, and so they already have quarterly reports planned. We interview subject matter experts to write blogs on a monthly basis based on interviews with those subject matter experts. Then but and that's our authorship, but with their input and guidance their quarterly reports about industry and clients surveys and things like that. They author that. But then we collaborate with them about where and how we can parse those reports into stackable bits of content.

Speaker 2:

So it's very much collaborative.

Speaker 3:

So it's planning, it's flagging. We're trying to train them on how, to what I refer to as where their content hat, so that they're always thinking about oh, we're doing this, but how can this become content for social? We talk about always something. We just flagged an event for another client, so I went to the relationship manager on my team, said can you see who amongst them is going to this event so that they can at least take a single picture about it To fly that they attended? Can they give us a couple of bullet points about what they learned or whatever? It's just trying to make it an innate habit with them. Oh, could this be content.

Speaker 1:

So it sounds like it's definitely, I think from my own experience, I think you'd agree that when you get into a content mindset, you naturally find more opportunities to create that content. But if you're not in that mindset, it's something that you need to train, especially when you're dealing with an organization at scale. It sounds like that's a lot of the, I suppose, the initial work and that really leads into sort of that first question of the day, which is creating that social media content production workflow. Now it sounds like you tend to work with larger organizations. Obviously the title of your book scaling organization. Would you say that these are primarily B2B, b2c. Do they fit in one industry or?

Speaker 3:

I would say more corporate, and what I mean by that is so we've worked with associations that are for like an industry association and all of their members might be companies but have representatives from those companies. We do a lot of work in financial services through my company. I was the head of social media at the Royal Bank of Canada and so as a result, we get a lot of regulated industries financial services, healthcare where you know they're planning content well in advance because there has to go through some approval processes. So this is where you know content planning is critical and you know we're writing copy, but again it has to go in and get approved.

Speaker 3:

In Canada there's certain industries are compelled to offer their content in both English and French, so we're having to pre-plan because of translation, things like that, and so you know the more planning the better. But you know we have B2B, we have B2C, we have B2B2C like financial services it can be and so it can run the gamut. You know we've worked. We have some startups that are less than 10 employees, but they're trying to scale. We don't tend to work with like a solo printer or a real estate agent no disrespect to any of them but we're tending to apply a team to the effort, and sometimes it can be overwhelming to them.

Speaker 1:

Got it, got it.

Speaker 1:

So I suppose then, when we start and interesting, because you're working with organizations, I'm assuming that there is some concept of employee advocacy or working with internal influencers, and I think maybe we'll get to that at the end, but sticking with the plan of sort of this social media content production workflow.

Speaker 1:

So, assuming that you, you know you have a strategy, you have a corporate strategy, a marketing strategy and that's going to define, you know, what you do in social media For all the businesses that are listening, how do they go about creating for you know, I think that a lot of businesses struggle. Obviously, if they have a large enough team and resources, maybe, or they work with an agency like yourself, maybe they don't struggle as much, but there's still this struggle of what are we going to talk about today? What are we going to talk about next week, how do we handle various platforms, how do we handle new features in various platforms, as you begin to see different types of content in your news Vina, linkedin, for instance. So I'm curious what does this? You know, what would an example social media content production workflow look like, or how would you get started in that process?

Speaker 3:

Well, one of the biggest things that many organizations are dealing with is the fact that they have more. They already have existing content or more content available to them than they think they do. So we tend to do a content audit. So what do they have and in what format that can be reused, repurposed with that, before we start planning, Okay, what are we going to make? That's net new Because a lot of organizations historically have fallen into the habit of what I call the $1,000 tweet.

Speaker 3:

They wrote a blog or they produced a report and they shared it in social once, and then they moved on to the next piece of content and you kind of go well, that was really expensive Because if, when you think about the number of hours and the number of people that might have gone into a quarterly report, you kind of go and you shared it once, or you put it up on your website and you just crossed your fingers that we hope people find it, and so the goal is to optimize and maximize distribution, discoverability. So you know, X, formerly Twitter for example, I can post something on Monday morning at 10 and repost it at four o'clock on Thursday and the likelihood of the same audience seeing it, quite, you know is quite low, but that gives me the freedom to repeat. You know, something as basic as pinning it to the top of the company page on LinkedIn to ensure more discoverability, sharing it more than once and you, I know we'll expand on it. But employee advocacy, getting employees engaged and sharing on behalf of the company, I'm sorry to break the news to companies that sometimes the cumulative reach of their employees is far greater than their page it has currently or ever will. Amen, brother.

Speaker 3:

So the more you can get people working in concert to share and amplify or you know, maybe you did a joint report with a corporate partner A green advance we're going to do some cross promotion, some reciprocal amplification. Just be more strategic. We have to help organizations move away from what I refer to as the one and done with their content. We made it, we posted it once and we moved on and it kind of go well. It's just such a waste of time and energy and it also lessens the burden on them, Like, oh, if I actually do like, I'll call it a rotation approach. It lessens the amount of content we have to produce and the frequency by which we have to produce it If we actually extend its shelf life.

Speaker 1:

Yep, and it's so funny just getting back from Vid Summit, and it's the same concept. Are you familiar with Amy Woods content 10 X.

Speaker 3:

I'm familiar with their name, but not okay, it's that framework of hers, I'm not.

Speaker 1:

She has actually has a book out about content repurposing and has a podcast about it and she refers to it. As you spend so much time and this is your baby and then you just like forget about the baby, like publish once, then you turn away and but it's your baby. You spend so much time and you know I know you're an author and I'm writing my next book and you know they say it's 10% writing, 90% promotion. Coming back from Vid Summit, most YouTubers just spend so much time on the video itself. They forget about the thumbnail, the title, the description, the promotion of that video, etc. Etc. So it is this common theme.

Speaker 1:

I think that when we create content, it we're solely focused is getting that content out there and not really strategically thinking about the different ways it could be distributed, repurpose, what have you. So thank you for bringing that up. So I love the fact that you begin with the content Audicus companies are usually sitting on just a boatload of IP and content. I'm sure you'd agree. Once you get through the content audit, then it sounds like you're going back in the content they already have, creating that sort of distribution schedule across various social media channels when you get to the point where you need to create new content, then how does that look from a social media content production workflow?

Speaker 3:

Well, one of my favorite examples. So we did a lot of work with publicly traded mining companies Nice and one of their, their problems, one of their main problems was the fact that they were just tweeting out a press release or posting a press release on their social channels, like once a quarter, once every six weeks, and they were calling that being social. And we said, I'm sorry, but that's not that. And as well, like, given the nature of algorithms and the volume of content out there, your visibility is probably near zero If that's how infrequently you're publishing. So our, we made a case with them to say we recognize and in fairness to mining companies, they're very, very thin on content and the things they have to say about themselves are very I'll call it insider or inside baseball is the way they speak about mining reports and so on. Like, unless you're a mining engineer or you've been a mining investor and know all the lingo, it can be pretty like I don't have no idea what you're talking about, right? So what we tried to do was okay, in between those press releases or when it comes to a press release, can we produce an animation or write a blog that extends the story? Or we did a Facebook campaign for one client where we had a video that was of the CEO talking about the noteworthiness of a particular press release and kind of expanding on the story.

Speaker 3:

Because they were publicly traded, the press releases have to adhere to a certain format due to regulatory requirements, but we would use that as a jumping off point. We would also add to the mix. We would do research around third party industry content and so if they were in the like, if they were in, you know, lithium, for example? Well, lithium is used in batteries, electric vehicles, so we would find all this complimentary third party content that was relevant to their investors and of interest. And so the goal was, yes, you're promoting your investment in your company, but you could also establish yourself as a trusted and valuable source of industry related information. And this is where, just in general terms, most organizations only talk about themselves, right, and instead of providing valuable and informative content and establishing themselves as a thought leader and or resource. And so a friend of mine it works in the automotive industry and his joke is like you go to a party, you don't walk up to someone and say, hey, we've got some good deals on a Cadillac.

Speaker 1:

Although it was, like you're, about those good deals, but it's more about like hi, how are you?

Speaker 3:

Like you know it's. We learn, we build rapport, we build trust. We don't, you know, just extend their hand with a business card and expect some sort of well, you've never met me, but you're now going to respond to my call to action. I don't think so.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, you know it's funny because the whole idea of all this is, at the end of the day, generate more demand for our product, you know, increase sales. And whether it's our content it does that, or industry reports that say the Lithium market is going to expand 100 X in the next 10 years, that can equally, in fact even be more powerful than your own content and generating that demand and making the investors happy, so you know to us, it's a no brainer, but.

Speaker 3:

Well, we have a coin and financial services and it's sort of adjacent to the topic of the electric vehicles and EVs and so on, Because one of the themes that's become big in investing is responsible investing in ESG. And there was an article from the BBC about the US rejoining the Paris Accord that had relevance towards sustainability and ESG investing. And you know, our client, you know, is well known in their space but not well known internationally or globally and it's like you can't compete with the reach and the brand recognition of the BBC, Right. And so here's what would. One, it's a credible source. Two, it's a well-known brand. I bet, if you share this on your channel, that people would respond to it, and sure enough they did. But sometimes there's apprehension, Sometimes it's just like we only talk about our stuff.

Speaker 1:

How intuitive to many. I get it, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3:

And when you think about people that know you and if I send you an article and say, given what you're trying to accomplish or given what challenges you face, whatever, I thought this would be a valuable resource to you. And it's not self-promotional necessarily. You're going to have stronger trust with that person. So it's easy to describe.

Speaker 1:

but yeah, yeah, yeah. You begin with the content audit. Then you look at what content are they already regularly producing, finding ways to expand the audience for that and this is obviously including this concept of especially if they don't have enough of their own content but even if they do, this value of content creation, of including third party content in that production workflow.

Speaker 3:

Well, if we integrate the 80, 10, 10 or the 80, 20 rule, where it's 80% of the content is not from you or about you, so you earn the right to promote. And the other thing is, if you're sending out your own content, if it's helpful content first and less promotional, still very helpful. So you earn the right to ask for the sale, literally or figuratively. But third party content one can likely come from more well-known brands. So we do the content audit. We also ask clients who are your favorite sources of content that you read yourself that are industry related? What partners or peers could we share content from? And then they would reciprocate and amplify yours.

Speaker 3:

You know what competitors do you want to avoid? What keywords or topics or themes do you want us to use for surfacing other potential sources of content? That's all part of that process of so that as we scale up, we have a system of here's maybe weekly or bi-weekly, here's the latest batch of industry content and they just go through and we have drop downs beside the title of the article in the link approved, rejected. They can put notes into more from this, more of this topic or whatever. And then, once whatever's been approved, we have a drop down saying it's been queued and scheduled for them.

Speaker 1:

So are you doing this within? Obviously, this is for your agency clients are you doing this within a specific social media tool? Is this done like on a, like a Trello or Mondaycom or Something very simple, just Google Sheets. Google Sheets got. It makes a lot of sense.

Speaker 3:

Some clients, like we have on Mondaycom, because they have some preference. It can differ with every client. Some are like just give me a Google Sheet and they do like a five minute scan when it comes to their content, that we've, that it's going out under their brand, that we've authored. There might be some more back and forth. Every client's preferences are different. We don't want to get hindered by oh, we have to train them on a tool to approve our content.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, it makes a lot of sense.

Speaker 3:

Well, that can slow down the flow.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and I think you've already given like loads of great advice. But I'm really curious because, as you know from the early days of doing research, that I think at a certain time, just text link-based content could do fairly well on social media, and those days obviously are long over. So now we have, I call it, authentically social content, content written specifically for the platform with the aim of keeping people on the platform longer. Others of Amanda Natavidad give her a shout, as she calls it, zero click content and she sort of invented that term. We also have, obviously, video, carousel photos, static images. We have these carousel PDFs on LinkedIn. So how do you? You know, over time, I'm assuming in short form video I didn't even mention, but over time, I'm assuming you have to at some point in it obviously depends on the industry, depends on the platform and the content that their target audience actually wants to consume. But how do you expand that to handle all these different content formats?

Speaker 3:

Well, I mean. Thankfully, there's tools increasingly presenting themselves that makes that job even easier. You know, blogs are still all quite foundational in terms of the type of content. But can I take that blog and do a poll quote to turn it into a graphic, can I? You know, now with AI I can turn that blog into a short audio podcast. You know a five minute audio clip and there's.

Speaker 1:

we actually just had that question do you use AI? I know I want to get that at the very end, but thank you for bringing that up.

Speaker 3:

You know I'll happily address that later. You know the short answer is yes, but you know the goal. No matter what, whether it's the client working independently or working with us, the goal is to work smarter rather than harder. So you know, we have a client. Two women started a community for women in STEM careers. They have a book. They've got another book coming out Every other week.

Speaker 3:

They get on Zoom and just have a conversation about what's happening in their space or a topic they want to flesh out, and they should have a conversation as thought leaders and community leaders and they give it to us and we use an AI tool that will cut that into a dozen clips. We only use four to six, but we can also take the master video of it and it'll caption it. We can make some corrections. The AI creates a nice title splash across the, and I'm a big advocate for and that's the name of my podcast the Low Production, high Value.

Speaker 3:

I'd rather for the speed, doing something at a lower production value that gets it out sooner, instead of spending weeks editing it to within an inch of its life and then it just doesn't perform. And I come from a film and television background. I can shoot a better quality film on my phone than the equipment I had available to me 30 years ago, and the same with editing et cetera. So the barriers to entry to do decent content with decent quality and again airing on the side of speed over high production value, I mean it's just, it's fantastic.

Speaker 1:

I think this is a great lead into this concept of repurposing content. So we have this content workflow and if we're doing a video and even, like right now, we're live streaming this video and this will be repurposed. I'm a huge fan of repurposing and it gets back to that same concept that you talked about, which is you spent all this time creating the content and you publish it once. Right? I checked the box Exactly. So I'm assuming that when you're creating this social media content workflow, you're also looking at each different type of piece of content, based on its medium and what have you in figuring out ways of repurposing that. So, for those that aren't familiar with that concept or just want to have a peek into your mind as to what your approach is to that, can you please describe how you would handle repurposing content? For an example, client fears? Sure.

Speaker 3:

Well. So if it's a call, if it's written form we talked earlier about poll quotes and making graphics but even if it's text base the length of what you, so let's say it's a blog. Well, I can say a lot more on LinkedIn and Facebook. As an intro to the blog, to sort of set it up, twitter 280 characters. You know that's still double what it used to be, but it gives me some restrictions. If I have so we'll use this podcast we're recording.

Speaker 3:

Now I'm restricted in terms of the length of the videos for certain platforms. If it's too long for Instagram, it may treat it as a story or a reel automatically, so that changes the way people are going to find it, et cetera. So you've got to be conscious of I won't say the limits, but the nuances by platform and what that means to the content you have. So carousels perform very, very well on LinkedIn. Well, that's a PDF document. So can I take the ideas? If the blog is a listicle and it's like five things you need to consider about, blah, blah, blah? Well, if I make five slides or five pages carousel, you know, explaining those five things.

Speaker 3:

Well, I've just turned a blog into a carousel document that performs extremely well on LinkedIn, but I didn't have to write us. I mean, yes, it's two different pieces of content, but it's from the same. I'll call it origin, and it's less work than having to create something from scratch. And then, you know, for my own podcast, record it, that's the master episode, both in video and audio form. But then my post-production gives me three video clips, three audio grams and three graphics. But you know, I can upload it to a Riverside which I use for my platform. They have this, you know, clipper, so it'll give me even more clips for social, should I choose? Right, and so like. Basically comes out to how much time do you have? Because you can keep creating content.

Speaker 1:

I think and this is I mentioned Amy and we've had this conversation and I have a podcast episode about this. I've done various YouTube videos but when you start with video, that is just the easiest way to be able to repurpose, because you get the video, you get the audio, you have a transcription of text. What would the process be and I think you hinted at it if you only have text? So obviously creating the video is as easy as doing those interviews, interviewing an internal subject matter expert, you know, as you know, but let's say you only have text. You mentioned if it's elistical of being able to, you know, recreate a PDF, of pulling out like an image, you know, of something that's tweetable from that post, any other sort of thoughts of how you would repurpose just textual based content.

Speaker 3:

You can use something like Lumen 5 or Pictory and the text of video and suddenly, you know, pulls in. So we took a blog for this, the women in STEM community. We took one of their blogs and we use Lumen 5 and it pulled together stock video footage that aligned with the story being told by the blog and we ended up with like a two minute video clip, or like not a video clip, but I mean a two minute video for social that we didn't have to shoot any footage for and that was text to video and so you know we had this option.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, just having come back from VidSummit, what do you think of? Because the text of video is it's stock video, right, and it can be done with transitions and obviously you want to choose better than worst stock video and there's great stock video out there.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, you can give it some pizzazz and call it post production if you want, but it's not stock video.

Speaker 1:

So how do you think that really performs? Like you know, I get, if it's on your website and you use a video like that and it keeps people on your page longer and some people are video learners and some are textual learners and some are audio. But in social media have you found those? And it really gets back to a question that we already received of how are you testing as you repurpose content, but how have you find the performance of that text to video type of content in social media? Just in general.

Speaker 3:

I mean, don't have to look any farther than TikTok. Lower production value content in many ways will outperform highly produced content. And so look at some of these influences on TikTok. With millions of followers and some of them are just like laying in their bed, you know, talking on their phone, and it's not about what's visually being presented, it's the story they're telling or the joke or like whatever. That's what's hooking you. But you know, when you take a podcast and I recognize that that could be in both video and audio form, but if we're just talking on that idea of text base, I can take the transcript and have AI generate a show summary. I can have it. You know, give me the highlights so that I can maybe I'll call it give me the skeleton and then I can put meat on the bone to turn it into a blog. I can get poll quotes, I can get copy for social posts based on the quotes or something provocative from the guest and it goes. Still goes back to what I was saying work smarter rather than harder, right so I guess.

Speaker 1:

So, getting back to the question about the text of video, is that so? Do you think it is better than not having video at all?

Speaker 3:

Yes. So this video content performs, and I mean the question was, how do you measure repurpose content? It goes back to analytics for simplification. The way we look at social media ROI is what I refer to as the three C's. First C is community, so our is our community or our clients community growing over time. Second C is content so is engagement overall, with content growing over time. And the third C is conversion.

Speaker 3:

It's very nice to have a like and it's very nice to have a new follower, but unless those are generating higher referral traffic to your website, new signups to your newsletter, new attendees to live stream video, like today, then you have a bit of a problem. And I mean not every video is going to perform well and you may have a great video that you release a particular time and then another time you re-release it and performs better. We've seen with clients that there's an August dip because of vacations, doing paid campaigns between September and December when you're competing. So if I'm B2B and I'm trying to reach people, I'm paying a higher price for my paid campaigns because I'm competing with retailers and B2C brands that are trying to reach people for the holiday season. So there's a lot of nuances that go in.

Speaker 3:

But to sum it all up, look at your analytics, and I was just reviewing some paid campaigns with a client. Facebook had told us directly reels perform really well. Well, not on this recent campaign, but that's not Facebook's fault. It's the kind of content that was used for real. It wasn't visually engaging, it was a pretty sort of bland graphic. It served the objective well, but it was better presented as a static graphic than as a real.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and that's the interesting thing about repurposing content and testing. Getting back to that question is that it's not just the content, it's also the medium right. Do you publish as a real or do you publish it as a video in the feed Just for Facebook? And I find video in the feed in general, but it's another thing to consider when doing analysis. That can drive you crazy, but keep it creative.

Speaker 3:

But if you can experiment cost effectively, you're going to learn.

Speaker 1:

And it's the only way to test is to experiment. So, hey, we've already sort of hinted. I want to get into the question of AI and I think that, getting back from VidSummit and being around a lot of businesses and YouTubers and more, that we're all using AI today. So the question isn't like do you use AI? It is what tools do you use, how much are you using it? And, andrew, I want to ask you so I've been sharing a lot of the AI tools I use and just coming back from VidSummit, I have a really cool one for you. So are you familiar with NVIDIA?

Speaker 3:

Yes.

Speaker 1:

So NVIDIA is one of these popular, it's a text to video platform. Well, they're NVIDIAIO. 45 days ago they came out with NVIDIAAI and when NVIDIAAI lets you do and I actually saw, I created a video myself you just put in what do you want the video to be about. So I put in, like you know, kyoto, japan and the winner. So it's using AI then to automatically create the and I'm not affiliated in any way with with you know, nvidia, but just to tell you how far it's gone in text to video. It automatically creates the script, it automatically obviously grabs the stock video, and what NVIDIA has done is they use I stock, but they've actually put an additional meta tag layer on top of it. So the AI actually helps you find better content. And then what it does is it not only creates the video with the script and captions, but now it has a voiceover. They have about six or seven languages supported. They're going to add more and the voiceover is one of these AI voiceovers that actually sounds really authentic and all from you know one prompt. So that's how far this has come.

Speaker 1:

When you mentioned like podcasts, so I've talked about a tool called pod squeeze which allows you to do all of what you talked about. Now I use Buzzsprout. They have something called cohost AI which also allows you to do that. So I actually think for AI podcast, because of all the various assets you can get just from an audio file, is probably the most advanced in terms of AI. But I'm curious, outside of that, what are some of the? Obviously I assume you're using AI, but what would your you know, outside of specific tools, or what is just your general approach to how you use AI right now for for your current clients, and are they okay of you using AI? I guess it's like, since you're an agency, right, because there are some clients that are like no, this has to be human written. Let's just start the conversation.

Speaker 3:

Well, I was talking to a client recently and they're like so are you? You know you're using AI and I said yes, but you know, my caveat, or my qualifier, is I have. I'm not at the stage yet where I trust it to write something from scratch. Now I've taken a chapter from my book and I've asked AI to summarize it into a blog form Right, and then I've also given it some prompts to say, because it has a. I've been, I've given it a chapter from my book. Now you know my writing style to write something in my voice. But the reason I describe it that way is is because, in order for me to trust its output, I need to trust the input. So I really put emphasis on what foundational pieces did I give it so I can better trust the output, which is why you know we author, with humans, blogs.

Speaker 3:

Now we might use AI, like you and I talked about phrase, which helps identify headers. It basically breaks down the structure of a blog. That's ranking well, but I'll use that as a roadmap to guide my structure. But I'm still authoring the elements within it and that's where I would place the sort of the distinction, and we tend to use AI more on the repurposing or, like I said, I'll give it a blog from that. We've written for a client and say, suggest some social posts, but I'll give the criteria about, but we still wrote, we authored the foundational piece, or I'll give it, you know, my podcast transcript. Give me a show summary. Can you suggest some social posts? You know, leveraging quotes from my guest, and I haven't changed with either myself or AI has changed what my guest said. It's just AI has saved me the time of having to pour through a transcript to highlight oh, I like that quote, yeah, and that's a and I'm in 100% agreement.

Speaker 1:

I write all of my blog posts and you know, obviously this video podcast is our raw voices. This is not AI generated and there's no AI generated script here either.

Speaker 2:

I know yeah.

Speaker 1:

So that's a great way of looking at it in terms of, you know, the foundational content is human and 100% agreement. But additional things, like the transcript, I don't need to spend an hour, you know, knowing that it's not as important. It might be important to some, you know segments of your audience, but it's not as important as that raw foundational content. But whether I, you know, do I spend the time to create a transcript or do use AI to automatically generate it without using more of my time, and I can invest that time in, you know, community and relationships, then it all makes sense, right. So I think that's a great way of looking at it. Any particular I sort of and we talked about phrase, which is really for this. You know SEO optimization using AI, but it's still using our words. It's not. I don't use the AI content generator of phrase. I will still input my own. You know language yeah, curious. Any other, you know tools that you tend to use more often for your clients.

Speaker 3:

So we, you know we use Opus Pro to. We'll upload a video and they'll make some suggested video clips. We've used Chopcast, which does something similar. I have access to the victory, which I've been using as well. I use Google, bard, claude and chat GPT, where I will test like I'll. I'll test a prompt across all three to see which one gets me sort of what I was hoping for.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, a lot of at VidSum and Opus Pro definitely a lot of talk about them. A lot of talk about cloud or Claude. I've never used it, but it sounds like it has a lot of pretty unique features. That seemed to be actually the preferred tool for those that were really heavy using AI. So those are.

Speaker 3:

those are great what you're trying to explain to me is that the token volume, which is basically the pieces of information, chat, gpt does like 32,000 tokens and I guess a single pass. Or again, I don't want to get in the weeds, but Claude or Claude, because I'm in Canada, I've spent on it. Hey, it does, yeah, it does a hundred thousand tokens, got it. But I'll give you an example Like there's still some limitations, so I had. One of the other areas we're starting to play around with AI is analysis.

Speaker 3:

So, I exported a CSV file from ad manager on Facebook and LinkedIn and said can you run analysis on this? But it will not accept an attachment.

Speaker 1:

Okay.

Speaker 3:

So not to get in the weeds, but you have to open the CSV in Excel, then save it as a text file. Then open the text file and just select all the texts and then paste it in. You give the prompt to prepare to say I'm going to give you data from a text file that's from Facebook Ad Manager, right, and I've got the prompt written and you paste it in and it breaks it down in organized headings. Here's what we found here and then here's the recommendations to improve upon it, all organized.

Speaker 3:

So instead of pouring through a CSV of 10 different campaigns and trying to playing around in Excel okay, which one had the highest click through rate, which one had the most read? And the bubbles to the top. Now we still have a hand in the construction of the original campaign. And now even Meta is using AI to help you create more optimized creative for your campaigns. And I'm sure and I think we touched on this before this is not about AI taking someone's job. This is about becoming more versed with AI so that you remain relevant and competitive, because someone who knows how to use AI might take your job.

Speaker 1:

Yep, and there's generative AI and there's AI just for analysis, right, and that's huge. There were talks at VidSummit of basically data scraping Facebook groups, competitor websites and then feeding that in AI and what is the target persona based on all this content of the average viewer this website or YouTube channel or things of that sort. So I think, for analysis, for marketing, I think, like the use case and you mentioned, I think we're sort of at the tip of the iceberg. A lot of people aren't talking about it, but there's a tremendous amount of things we can be doing, so I'm experimenting.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, and I got into. I'm in the social space and online for last because I was curious and my curiosity. I'm utterly fascinated by what's happening in AI. I was playing around last night. I have some networking meetings to arrange with people that I'm being introduced to and the people that are making the introduction said what should I say in the email? And I thought what the heck?

Speaker 2:

Thanks for your try.

Speaker 3:

And I went on to AI, I said someone's going to be introducing me to prospective clients. If I give you the points I want you to make, what would you say? And I tried you know three different versions in Claude and three different versions in Chat2pt and I was like, okay, I'll play around with those and I'll do some tweaking, but instead of me staring at a blank screen this is especially important it's like I'm staring at a blank screen and I have to talk about myself, which no one likes to do.

Speaker 1:

Right.

Speaker 3:

So why not give the burden to somebody?

Speaker 1:

Well, there was a gentleman on stage yesterday who said same thing. Right, we all need to spend more time with it and get used to using it. He's like, okay, do you have a kid, do you have a young kid? Ask them what you know, what creatures they want in their bedtime story. And then basically have AI create a bedtime story and I think it was Pictory or hey Gem, but he uses basically the text to audio feature and then he'll start and then you know, make it for five minutes long, and then you know the kid will go but daddy, I want to hear it from your brain, not from the AI.

Speaker 1:

So it's a strange world that we live in, but definitely I love that thought of you know, not everyone is a great writer, not everyone has the imagination, not everyone has the creative juices at that moment, at that time.

Speaker 1:

So at least AI will give you something to work with, right, that then you can sculpt into whatever you want to use it for. So I think we can go on and on, and that was the one takeaway and I'm gonna be recording my podcast episode today about my takeaways from VidSummit but that one takeaway is I think there was a time, as social media marketers that we spent a lot of time in social media and I remember when Google Plus first came out, like everyone is circling here and we're all trying to figure out the algorithm, and I think that time right now is better invested, definitely, in AI. Not to say, you want to pull out of social media, don't spend time there, but it really is a great time to invest into AI. I'm sure you'd agree. I try not to spend too much time with it, but it is very addicting. It's possible.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, it can be a black hole, but I mean to just finish off with your question about where it can be used or where we've been using. It is again from a content planning. You can ask AI for suggestions. So, again, instead of a blank slate or left like, oh, I don't know where to start, you can and I've presented on this say okay, I need a content plan for the next 30 days. This is the organization, this is what they're about, and you just feed all the elements.

Speaker 3:

It's when it's making a plan. It's not creating the content, but you can ask it to include, make note of any noteworthy days, like national awareness, whatever day, or maybe there's a particular holiday or an event and it starts to build the skeletal structure of your plan, even if you only use 60% of it. That 60% you didn't have to build yourself, and then you can divide it up amongst your team if you have resources, virtual or otherwise, and say, okay, I need you to work on content related to this. So some of it's gonna be written, some of it's gonna be audio, some of it's gonna be video, like whatever. But again, working smarter rather than harder.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and I think that's a really great way of using it, and it's funny because I'm sort of waiting for all these different tools, the pictories and the invidio to come up with all this functionality, and I have seen very recently there are a few tools that have now included that sort of hey create a content calendar, create a content strategy using AI and it's interesting that we as people can be way more innovative than businesses right now when it comes to AI, especially for our own use case scenarios. So the net net is invest more in it. It's not just about do I use it to create a blog post, which our answer is no, but there's so many different use case scenarios and really find your own right, be creative, and it's always a pleasant surprise.

Speaker 3:

It makes everyone more productive, and so if you're a lean startup and you wanna remain so, your team can be very productive. If, in my case, we're an agency, I don't have to be a 50% agency to deliver a high level of service, and that can also be reflected in the pricing that we charge clients. It's like, oh, I can get all of this for X. Yes, you can Not to sound self-promotional, but like it's just. The productivity gains are amazing.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and I think the one thing that even the ones that used AI the most would say is always having a human checking the output before publishing. Absolutely Right, and it's something that you might get so excited about it that you use as is and you probably don't wanna do that. And I'm sure you'd agree that there have been cases where the AI, just once I was looking for like influencer marketing case studies and I've done a lot of. I wrote a book, the Age of Influence and everything, and it came up with case studies of companies that I had never heard about their case studies, and when I did a Google search I couldn't find anything about their case studies. So it's like okay, there's like factually incorrect things because the AI is just trying to help you, right, trying to do its best to come up with the content. So just a word of caution for everyone out there.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, we don't send anything to a client that hasn't been had a review. And even the example I gave about the Facebook analytics and CSV and TXT form, one of the passes of the AI got the budget number wrong. So I don't know if it just, as they call them, hallucinations. So I focus less on the numbers and more about I'll call it the conclusions that the analysis made. Like, oh, this campaign had the highest reach, okay, we're gonna leave it at that. I'm not gonna get into what was the number of reach and not. I'm not trying to cloud the issues like it doesn't matter what the number was, it would. Just the key is getting to the substantive point oh, this campaign was the best performing, this was the least performing. You know ad frequency was, you know there was ad fatigue. Whatever the conclusions, but this again to you mentioned earlier, this is still early days, so there's still a lot of learning, but the pace by which the things are moving is pretty surprising, yep.

Speaker 1:

so all of these you know finding your own way to work with AI. As you know what many called it like a co-collaborator. You just gotta start using it. You gotta start seeing the output, you gotta see what makes sense, what doesn't. I mean, really, we're a fit you workflow and I think it's a great way to you know. Come back to what we started was the social media content workflow. If you don't have a workflow, ai ain't gonna help you. So get the workflow, find out where AI works and go from there. Andrew, this has been just a wealth of information advice. Is there anything that you know coming into this podcast that we should have talked about, that we didn't, or any other final advice you'd like to offer?

Speaker 3:

I mean just sort of to end off with you know it's yes, ai is, I think, here to stay. It's helping us be more productive. It's helping us be more creative, where some people you may not have thought they could be creative. It's like putting a paintbrush in your hand and you weren't a painter before, but I would just, you know, sort of a caveat is Don't hand the keys over Completely like, make sure that you have a hand in it for oversight, quality control. They're still hallucinations happening. It's not perfect, but if it can get you from a to b faster, you know, all the better.

Speaker 1:

Even if you have to correct it, it's still gonna be faster. So oh yeah, thank you, my friend. So, andrew, where can people go to find out more about you? By your book, check out your agency. Where should we send them?

Speaker 3:

Volterra digital comm has my podcast, a link to my book, all the media related to me. When this Recording is live, it'll go there too, and again you'll find the link to the book, and you can find me on LinkedIn as well.

Speaker 1:

So that is Tara digital? How will you spell that?

Speaker 3:

vol er a digital comm perfect.

Speaker 1:

So Volterra digital comm obviously the gentleman Andrew Jenkins. Do a search on LinkedIn. I think you'll find him. Andrew, this has been great. Thank you so much for your time today and I look forward to continue to keep in touch.

Speaker 3:

Thanks for having me, it was great to be here.

Speaker 1:

I hope you enjoyed that interview as much as I did. It was great to get to know someone where we have been following each other in social media for a long time and it's like you know what. Let's record our interview over the podcast. Let's let's give some value away where not only can I learn, but my audience can learn as well. So I'm really grateful and thankful for Andrew to agree to do that and I hope that you got a lot of value and really insight as to what the pros do when it comes to social media content production. Well, that's it for another episode. I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart, all of you that have subscribed to this podcast, that have reviewed the podcast, shared it in social media. Everyone of you means a lot to me and I know you know I can't see you, but I know that my voice is in your ears and that, to me, is enough satisfaction to keep on with this podcast, to keep rolling.

Speaker 1:

We're still only at episode number 355. Man, we got a lot more coming. Next week We'll be a solo episode and the tentative plan is to give you an introduction to the 10 AI tools that I am using today and how I am using them. I really want to educate you so that it's not just we're letting AI do everything, and it's not that we're completely ignoring AI and wish it didn't exist. We're taking a realistic view as to how we can leverage this in our modern Marketing workflow and make the best of it. The smaller the team, the more value and impact it's gonna have. So that's my message be on the lookout, for that should hopefully publish on Wednesday, february 21st, and until then, this is your digital marketing coach, neil Schaefer, signing off.

Speaker 2:

You've been listening to your digital marketing coach. Questions, comments, requests, links. Go to podcast dot. Neil Schaefer Com. Get the show notes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes and Neil Schaefer Com to tap in to the 400 plus blog post 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.