Rev & Reach Episode 9 – From Crickets to Clicks Transcript

00:09

LORI: Hello, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of Rev and Reach, where we share our digital marketing secrets and give you a look behind the scenes at how we get results for our clients. I’m Lori Jo Vest with PopSpeed Digital Marketing. I am the co-founder and partner, and Kiley is here. She is a digital marketing specialist and our, I guess, third in command. And today, we are going to talk about some of the basic things that we do that you may not consider that can help you amp up your results on social. So, Kiley, why don’t you get us started?

00:50

KILEY: Yeah, so in kind of, you know, between Lori and I discussing, like, what we wanted to talk about in this episode, there are so many different directions we could take it. And it’s one of those episodes we could probably continue to talk forever about. And I think that, you know, for us, in terms of our, like, general basic tips that really work for us, they’re gonna ultimately come off as really simple. And I think a lot of people will have a lot of, like, aha moments when we kind of start going through these. But ultimately, it’s so common for people to overthink their brand’s social media marketing. It’s one of those things where yes, it is complicated, and it requires a lot of thought and intention and strategy, but ultimately, the type of stuff that works really doesn’t need to be overcomplicated, and it shouldn’t be. As a matter of fact, the overthought, overproduced, overcommercialized stuff really doesn’t work or play well on social anyway. So I think once we start getting into a few of our, like, top tips and, you know, the things that we kind of refer back to pretty often, it’ll be interesting to see how simple it seems, but ultimately, how few people are doing it the way that that it should be done.

02:17

Lori: Yeah, or the way that gets results. I want to start us off really quick with the most amazing piece of advice that we ever got, and it was from a TikTok Workshop. If you’re in the field of social media and digital marketing and you don’t attend workshops like every freaking day, you’re missing out because there are free workshops put on by the scheduling platforms, by HubSpot, by all that, you know, by subject matter experts about social media that give you all kinds of really, really good information on how to use it to get returns. And the one we were on TikTok, I think it was about a year ago, we just grabbed hold of this saying and have kept it with us, you know, I pet it and keep it, you know, pay attention to it, and they talk about it all the time. What it is is that the most important thing you can do on social media is stand out by fitting in. What that means is we do not go to social media to see your ads. We don’t. People do not go to social media to see the ads that we create as good as we are. People don’t do that. They’re not there looking for our ad. We know that. We are a disruption to their desire to connect with people they know. So in order to be a positive disruption, we want to look like what they’re looking for. So that means natural photos, authenticity, selfie videos, talking heads, things that you’d expect to see other people share, not necessarily brands. What that doesn’t mean, or what it means you should not do, is share a bunch of graphics, graphic billboards, and things like that. If you have to share a graphic billboard, make sure it’s interesting, right? Make sure it’s applicable and appealing and interesting, but “stand out by fitting in” is my favorite piece of social media advice to give. How about you, Kiley? What’s your fave?

04:21

KILEY: I think my favorite one is smiling faces. It’s one that we go back to all the time, and we try to convince—convince may not be the right word—but try to really, really, get our clients to understand this one. Smiling faces, specifically smiling faces that have to do with your brand’s community, whether that’s your audience members, happy customers, people you know within the community, staff, volunteers, anybody behind the scenes that’s involved with the brand using their faces and their happy experiences on social is so, so, so effective. I’d be curious to see an updated stat of this. I should have pulled that before we got in here, but I think it was two or three years ago. The statistic was it performs 29% better according to Meta platforms than all other types of content. And so for us, that goes to show that not only do smiling faces really connect with your audience, they display that authenticity and they make your content more trustworthy and engaging. So exactly what Lori said in terms of standing out by fitting in, if you look at nearly anybody’s Instagram or Facebook or any social platform, maybe excluding LinkedIn, a personal page, it’s a highlight reel of the best times of their life, right? It’s going to weddings, it’s going on trips. It’s happy dinners with your best friends, or whatever the case may be. And all it is is smiling faces, whether it’s posed with your friends or a candid shot of you at your favorite restaurant or whatever. And I think that that is like where that connection really lies, is that in the heart of it, it is standing out by fitting in. Also going kind of in relation to what Lori said, it outperforms graphics and it outperforms stock images, and that’s because it’s incredibly more authentic than a stock image. Because a lot of stock images are very obviously just that, it’s very easy to tell what is stock and what is not. You’ll find some good ones, but with trained eyes… 

LORI: Yeah, typically it’s a great big grin!

KILEY: Yeah.

06:49

LORI: Earlier today, I screen-capped some Meta analytics from one of our clients that we’re doing their social. We’re doing what we can. A lot of what they do is organic, and once in a while, they’ll share a real photograph of somebody at the practice, right? I looked at the back end of Meta and saw that the actual photo of their team members was shown to 538 people, while the other stock image content we use for them, because we have no other choice, was shown to 35 or 50 people. What a difference! Ten times as many people saw or responded to the image of their actual team, and it was just a cute little pose of a couple of their people. And it’s appealing because it’s real, and real is what social media is about. 

07:47

So let me get my next one here. My next one is CTA. Always. That’s another one of my favorites. And not everybody in social media will agree with me. They won’t, because some people say that you need to gift your consumer with content that doesn’t require their response sometimes, and that kind of thing, and that it’s a balancing act. And I disagree because I think you can always go down a few lines and say, learn more about us and just add that, skip a line or two and put that there. What that does is it lets the consumer make the decision of whether they want to go deeper or not. If you don’t include a link, you’re not allowing them to go deeper, even if they want to, without having to click to your profile, go to your profile page, click the link there, go to your website… Ooh, that’s a lot of clicks, and honestly, most people will not do that. If it’s not easy, they’re moving along. So CTA always and Kiley, what do you think about that? I mean, just on your personal feelings about it, what do you think?

08:58

KILEY: I completely agree with you. And I think one of the things, because I know a lot of people have mixed feelings about that, I think one of the things that’s important is that a CTA doesn’t always have to look the same. You’ll see us, if you’re one of those people that doesn’t think every post should have a link, generally speaking, we put links to learn more, and I would say 95% of our posts, maybe more. You can also incorporate CTAs that build engagement, right? Like, let us, you know, if you tried this tip, let us know how it worked in the comments, or give us a like, or drop a heart in the comments, or subscribe, or anything like that, give us a follow. Those are still CTAs, even without including a link. So I think that in terms of including CTAs, I don’t see a reason in not doing it, because the worst that’s going to happen is they don’t want to, so they don’t. It’s no harm, no foul, really.

LORI: Yeah, and I’ve been surprised by how many click-throughs I’ve gotten on some of my organic posts on LinkedIn, where all I say is learn more about us if they want to move forward, not expecting anything, and you still get, you know, 10, 12, 15 clicks. Because in a lot of cases, if the post is good, they’ll want to learn more. So anyway, that’s what’s your next favorite one? That’s mine.

10:22

KILEY: One of mine. And it’s- I think for a lot of people watching, it may seem a little patronizing. You would be very surprised how often we see this: stop including links in your post copy on Instagram. We see so many people still doing it, and there’s a lot of reasons why it’s a bad idea. First and most important is that links on Instagram and organic content are not clickable. So what they do is, particularly ones that are not shortened in the copy, they just take up way too many characters, and it looks silly, honestly, because it’s just a bunch of mumble, jumbled letters and figures and symbols that do nothing, because you can’t. 

LORI: People will not. They will not copy and paste. I don’t care what you think, they will not copy and paste.

KILEY: Exactly. It’s just far too much work and far too much to ask of your audience. They’re not going to do it. So our recommendation for kind of fixing that is to include, you know, we’ve used Linktree, link in bio is another one. There are a lot of platforms where you can kind of build your own profile of just your highlighted important links. They get housed there. You put the link to that page in your profile on Instagram, so then in your captions, in your copy, when you have a CTA and you need somebody to click on something, tell them to visit the link in your bio, instead of clouding your copy and making what could be really, you know, well-spoken, pithy, funny copy be clouded by a bunch of random characters that just look silly and annoying and honestly, like you don’t know what you’re doing.

LORI: Like you don’t know what you’re doing. That’s the part. You don’t want to look like you don’t know what you’re doing because real serious people will dismiss you. It’s hilarious that they’ll dismiss you for that, but they’ll think, oh yeah, they don’t know what’s up. And they’ll get going. Yeah, it’s just how it is.

KILEY: Exactly. 

12:35

LORI: Okay. So mine, this next one is hashtags. Hashtags and targeting by the algorithms is in a constant state of evolution, constant. And there are people saying hashtags are going away, and I truly do believe that. They’re not quite gone yet. But what’s replacing it is what they call interest-based targeting. What that is, it’s more like Google, where you’re going to have a keyword, and you want keywords that other people looking for the thing that your company does. If you are a veterinarian, they’re looking for pet health, you’ll want to use those words in your copy. So you won’t want to write two or three sentences and then you go back and look and you didn’t include any of the keywords that people would be searching for. And that’s the thing, you want to consider what people will be searching for and what they follow. So a veterinarian might be, you know, dogs. Dogs of Instagram. It might be, you know, things like that, but you want to mention the keywords in your copy on all the channels, including YouTube, because they’re all veering more toward this interest-based targeting instead of hashtags. People used to search hashtags or follow hashtags, and that was an active way of putting your content in front of them. It’s evolving, and it’ll be more intuitive and more, you know, if you’re a person who regularly or a brand that regularly uses these specific keywords in your post content, then people are going to understand the algorithms are going to understand that people that are interested in that should be fed your content. So it’s a little bit different, but it’s also the same, it’s also very similar. So same thing, only different, right?

KILEY: Right. The same but different, yeah, exactly. 

LORI: As it should be. What else you got? 

14:39

KILEY: My next one is specific to Instagram. We run into a few situations, particularly recently, which has been really interesting, where we are working with clients that are hyper fixated on their grid on Instagram. And you know, while we totally get that aesthetics matter, it shouldn’t be the forefront of an Instagram strategy, and that’s for a few reasons. We’re never going to tell you to post ugly content. We’re never going to tell you to post content that looks bad in your grid. However, when you hyper fixate on building a pretty grid, you lose sight of where people are going to be in taking your content, and that is in their scroll on their homepage. The amount of time that your audience spends there versus just scrolling through old posts on your grid is astronomically more. Honestly, the amount of time people are going to spend looking at your grid is so few and far between. Unless, yeah, unless you’re running a visit our page ad and so you’re getting a bunch of, you know, really timely clicks to one spot. But even then, if you’re prioritizing consistently appealing content, you’re not going to have an ugly grid. We’ve seen this with, you know, those puzzle piece kind of posts that come together on…

LORI: Oh, that used to be such a big deal, didn’t it?

KILEY: It used to be such a thing. And my take on it is that Taylor Swift can do it. You don’t have to. You’re not Taylor Swift. You know what I mean?

Lori: Exactly. Yeah. 

16:21

Kiley: So what something like that does is it clouds your audience’s feed because you have to post it so fast that it’s A, almost annoying, and B, it looks weird. The only way it looks normal is when it comes together and somebody’s looking at your grid. And then, even then, it’s only aligned every three posts to look normal on your grid. So yeah, getting hyper fixated on what your actual page looks like, we just kind of take it as a missed opportunity to really focus on what’s going to get clicks on your audience’s homepage, and that’s ultimately what matters far more than the look and feel of your grid. Should you stick to brand colors? Yes. Should you prioritize good thumbnails? Absolutely. But by trying to make too many things come together that ultimately, you know, once it’s been three weeks since you’ve posted something, nobody’s thinking about it anymore. So it just doesn’t matter how well it fits on your grid anymore. So yeah, it’s interesting because I think that maybe, you know, in past years, I could get behind it a little bit more when those puzzles were, you know, a much more prevalent trend and things like that. But it’s been really interesting how much we’ve run into concerns about the grid this year compared to how little it really matters if you’re doing everything right, generally speaking.

17:51

LORI: Yeah, it is interesting. And the thing that we noticed is that I think they may be through the transition now that Instagram photos are no longer square, they’re now the vertical format, and so it’s virtually impossible to get a beautiful kind of puzzle piece to fit together in the grid. However, that doesn’t mean there’s nothing that you can do to make your page stand out. And I’ll give you an example. I was working with a cancer center. It was a radiology center about three or four years ago, and we did a bunch of competitive research, and we found that Dana Farber, at that time, Cancer Center, it’s a really well-known cancer center in the US, had actually taken made their Instagram page, smiling patients, and it was just like casual headshots of smiling patients. And when you pulled up their grid, it was almost overwhelming. And how cool it was, because you just look at all these beautiful faces, and I’ve never forgotten that, because that was how you create a beautiful grid that just never is anything but that, right? Yeah. 

KILEY: Well, the thing about that too, is that it also appeals to the scroll, right? Just the random scroll, because it stands out by fitting it. I mean, every tip we’ve covered so far, really, you’re standing out by fitting in because you’re, you know, you’re using those smiling faces and all of that together. There’s a way, exactly what Lori said, there’s ways to make a cohesive, beautiful grid that stands out and gets attention that also works in the algorithms of your audience, in their mid-scroll on their homepage.

19:39

LORI: Yep, absolutely, absolutely, what we tell clients, and this sounds really self-serving, but it’s not, I promise you, is that if you combine social media with a monthly email and regular recurring content on a well-built and well-designed SEOed website, you can’t lose. Those three things work together in a really nice way, and you can repurpose content. So if a newsletter, a monthly newsletter, just sounds like too much, well, consider that social posts make great newsletter stories because they’re short, they’re quick, and they link to somewhere on your website, hopefully, right? And so you want to put regular updates on your website, and we do, for example, we do digital marketing for SandCastles, Henry Ford SandCastles Grief Support. And we do the website, the emails, the social media. And we’ll put a blog article up which turns into, you know, social content, which turns into newsletter content, and it just all flows really well and helps us reach our audience repetitively. Because today, things are not that much different than they were back in the day when they said that a consumer had to see your television commercial five times before they’d even remember your name. So you need to hit them in a lot of different ways to really create that connection and community through your digital marketing. So, yeah, that’s one of my all-time favorites. So go ahead, Kiley, what you got?

21:17

KILEY: My next one is about tailoring your content to different platforms. We’ll see, you know, whenever we go through strategies, we look at all, you know, this long list of competitors for whatever industry we’re creating the strategy for, and we’re constantly looking at what our current clients’ competitors are doing, what works for them, what can we make work for us. And something that I’ve noticed a lot, like, way more than I think that I should with people that are obviously working with digital agencies or have a social media manager, is the amount of brands that keep their content entirely consistent across all channels. And that’s not to say that you can’t repurpose content throughout, right? A lot of what works on Facebook might work on Instagram and etcetera. But when you start getting into YouTube and LinkedIn and formerly Twitter now X, a lot of that content requires a little bit of customization to be really effective on each channel. 

So let’s say, you know, we’ll go, we’ll go back to SandCastles, for example. We just brought them up. If they are recruiting volunteers for an upcoming event, the way they are going to do that throughout and across each channel that they’re on is not the same, right? So, what’s going to get the attention of potentially interested volunteers on Facebook is not going to be the same as if they’re trying to do it on LinkedIn. The audiences across all of these platforms and consumer behaviors are just so vastly different that it’s not to say that you can’t use the majority of your content throughout every channel that you’re on, but by making a few copy tweaks or maybe slightly editing a graphic, or adding a little something to a photo, or using a video on Instagram as a reel, instead, making those little edits and specifications to make it work on individual platforms is so worth the little bit of extra effort that it takes to get the ROI and to really serve the purpose of a specific post or a series of content or a campaign, or whatever the case may be, because otherwise it’s just falling flat. You know, what’s going to work on Facebook, Instagram is not going to work on LinkedIn, is not going to work on YouTube, is not going to work on TikTok. So going that extra mile is super important.

Lori: It looks lazy, too, to me.

Kiley: Yes.

LORI: But on the other hand, the channels will let you do it, right? The one I see the most of is Instagram being posted on Facebook, and it’s got 30 hashtags. And it says link in bio, and it just is… lazy. 

KILEY: Or vice versa, with Facebook and Instagram, and then Instagram having the link exactly. You don’t need a bunch of hashtags on Facebook. You don’t need links on Instagram. Just even something as simple as that, make those little tweaks just to showcase that you’re taking the time to customize for who it is you’re trying to reach on different channels.

24:38

LORI: And here’s my last one, is that if you’re not taking advantage of stories on Instagram, you are making a mistake. And I know how it happens because a lot of us, we schedule our Instagram content through a scheduler. We may respond to comments and questions from Instagram with a scheduling platform that has the community management function, but there’s nothing better than going to Instagram on mobile and sharing those stories with stickers and things like that. You’ll reach so many people that are not your followers, which I love, and it’s an easy way to expand your reach way beyond what you will get simply by posting content on Instagram. And then you can add them to the highlights, and if someone is really interested, they can dig deeper when they get to your page. But I’m really surprised by how many brands miss out on stories, and I think it’s because going to mobile, you know, who wants to use it, but it’s really important, as a community manager, to make sure that you utilize that particular feature of Instagram just to increase your reach.

25:50

KILEY: My last one, don’t overlook your community management on every single platform. The amount of people when we’re doing our audits and looking at competitors that we see that are not responding to comments, not actively going into their messaging platforms and things like that, is alarming because social media is a regular part of so many people’s lives that it should be an accessible point for consumers to reach brands that they engage with, right? When you don’t build that bridge, but then you also expect your consumers to engage with you back on social media, it’s, you know, you’re asking more than you’re willing to give. And that’s not necessarily fair to people who ultimately you’re asking for dollars from in whatever industry. So, even just having somebody regularly go into each platform, once in the morning, once in the evening, just to make sure there’s no questions that need to be answered, or if you get a happy customer review in the comments on a Facebook post, respond to them, make them feel good that you saw it and you’re grateful that they shared their experience and engage with them. It’s a win-win scenario, right? Because by not doing it, you’re making a lot of customers feel ignored, and by doing it, you’re making a lot of customers feel very heard.

LORI: Yeah, and I’ll add, the algorithm loves it. If you talk to, we’ll talk about Brenda Miller, because we love Brenda Miller. So Brenda Miller is our go-to expert on LinkedIn, and she’ll tell you that when anyone comments on your content there, you respond with five or more words to that comment. Don’t just like it. Respond to it with words. The algorithm on LinkedIn loves that. They love the community aspect of that and that content will get shown to more people. So if you log on in the morning and there are 16 comments, spend the time to respond to every single one, it does pay off, huge.

So thank you again for joining us for this episode of Rev and Reach. We really hope to share things that you can do right now to increase the effectiveness of your social media marketing effort. So I’m Lori Jo Vest with Kiley Metcalfe. You can reach us both on LinkedIn. We’re Open Networkers there, and you can also check out our website at popspeeddigital.com to find out more about us, what we do, and get in touch there if we can help you with your digital marketing. Take care, and we’ll be back soon.