Note: This transcript was auto generated then some poor soul sat and listened to it, and followed through correcting any mistakes they spotted. Please however expect human error and shout if you spot an issue. Email: lee [fancy curly symbol] trailblazer.fm.
Verbatim text
Lee Matthew Jackson
Welcome to episode number 136 of the Agency Trailblazer Podcast. This is your host, Lee. And on today’s show, we’re going to be talking about social media. And please do not zone out because we have been stagnating like crazy on places like Twitter, like LinkedIn, there has been a huge problem As an agency, we have not been getting the traffic, we have not been getting the engagement. We’ve not been generating the leads that we used to on social media. And I want to share with you our story. What has happened over the last couple of years and what we are doing about it, and what we’ve been learning recently that has really helped to turn us around. So please do not go anywhere. Stay tuned for social media awesomeness! This podcast is brought to you by the agency Trailblazer Community. Is agency life stressing you out? Then? It is our mission to help you build an agency that you love. We’ve created a community which includes the Agency Reset Roadmap, that will allow you to get your agency back on the right track.
Lee Matthew Jackson
We also have lots of noble, straight to the point, Easy to consume workshops. We have a thriving community of other agency owners, and we all wrap up every month with a mastermind call with myself and sometimes a special guest, where we unpack your questions. For more details, check out agency trailblazer.com. So today I want to share with you some lessons that we’ve learned over the last few months with regards to our social media strategy. And just to put you in the picture, I have really screwed things up. It’s it’s pretty abysmal. We’ve been looking at the data for quite a while and we’ve seen some very scary things happening. I mean, it’s not all doom and gloom. Thankfully, things are fine and everything is fixable and we have been fixing it. But I just want to want to quickly paint a picture of where we were and what we have been doing about it. So essentially, our social media is stagnating or has been stagnating. We have been stuck around the kind of two k follower mark on Twitter.
Lee Matthew Jackson
The growth of the Facebook group has again slowed down. We were originally growing by, say, 80, 100 or even 200 members a month sometimes, and that’s gone down to maybe 36 members a month. I think it was one month that I was looking at and then places like Instagram. It was just crickets. Essentially, there was nothing going on. Now when we’ve looked at our statistics, something shocked me a couple of months ago. I couldn’t believe it. I was seeing that 98% of all of our traffic was actually coming, either through direct access or via the search engines, and only 1 to 2% was being driven by social media. Now, if we go back two years, that was a completely different picture, where 6,070% of all of our traffic was being driven by social media. We I mean, our SEO has obviously improved over the years, which is brilliant, but most of our traffic was coming in through social media posts that we were sharing through everything that we were doing online, whereas now social media is just a very, very small part of a much bigger picture with regards to the traffic that we get.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Now, it’s not all doom and gloom, like I said, because our Facebook strategy of networking online has been really successful. So where Twitter used to be a great source of leads for us, that’s been taken over by the personal network that I’m doing on Facebook on a day to day basis. That’s within the Facebook group, but that’s also within other people’s Facebook groups. The friends that I’ve then added on social media, the relationships that I’ve built up with them. So that’s been a form of business networking, but digitally so I can sit anywhere in the world with my laptop and continue to develop those relationships, which then lead on to business well leads and on to business as well. And just to illustrate that, just at the end of last week, I got off a call with a new lead, and we sent over a proposal for a really cool web build for that business. And that was because of a lead that came through our Facebook networking that we’re doing. So that is phenomenal. It’s a great source of business.
Lee Matthew Jackson
So definitely not all is doom and gloom. But with regards to all of the other efforts that we’re putting into social media, we’re certainly not been seeing the results that we would have expected. We’ve not been seeing the traffic that we would have expected to get from social media with the amount of effort that we’ve put in to creating attractive imagery, sharing information, making sure we’re being present on those platforms. So it was pretty shocking. Pretty scary. And I realised that we needed to do something about that. So we’ve been doing quite a few different experiments over the last few weeks and months. You may have seen a few. You may have been part of a few of them. And thank you very much for your help. But really, we’ve just been poking around trying to work out what works and where. What we’ve been doing wrong and how can we fix it. So instead of giving you a list of all of the things we’ve done wrong, which is a bit of a negative, nearly and a downer, what I want to do is share with you a range of lessons that we have learnt, how we’ve been applying those lessons.
Lee Matthew Jackson
And I can also, therefore now and again share with you where we were going wrong. To illustrate how we learned that lesson. I think sometimes it’s one of the best ways us humans learn. I’ve said this on the podcast before is by making mistakes. So we learn how not to do something, which forces us to try something different. I think it was Albert Einstein said that only a fool does the same thing multiple times and expects different results. So when I saw that things weren’t working, I knew I should not be doing just more of the same. I needed to work out what I was doing wrong and then how I could remedy that. So let’s do a deep dive. Oh, I love that word. Or as Paul Lacey would ask me to say, let’s unpack this a little bit further. And the first lesson we have learned is be where the audience is. Now, this may seem really obvious, but there are a crap tonne of social media platforms out there. And if you’re old like me, their social media platforms out there that you probably don’t even use, like Musical.ly and, uh, and Snapchat and, and all sorts of other stuff that the youth of today use.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Thankfully, they’re not my target audience, so I don’t have to go and do awkward dancing or whatever it is they do on, on, uh, Musical.ly. However, there are a whole tonne of social media platforms, and as a business or as a human being, as a person, it is practically impossible to be everywhere. The only way you can do that is perhaps automate it, or clone yourself, or have an army of people on social media representing your business so that you can literally be everywhere. And for the people that are everywhere, like Garyvee, they have a freaking team behind them. Whereas, you know, most of us listening to this podcast or running this podcast, we are just small to medium businesses and we don’t have that sort of resource. So it made me realise a lesson that I have been teaching a long time ago and then unlearned, I guess you could say, is I need to be where the audience is, which means I need to be killing it on the social media platforms where my audience are.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Now, originally two years ago, that was actually Twitter. We were doing really well on Twitter, but as I said, that stagnated. We hit the two K mark. Our followers. We’ve seen engagement on Twitter drop right down to points where we can tweet something out, maybe a poll, and we’ll get absolutely no response and feedback. It’s kind of awkward. It’s like saying something and no one replies to you in the room and you kind of feel a bit daft. That’s that’s what’s been happening for us on Twitter. But then we found that our audience isn’t on Twitter. We had to think about who our target audience is, and it’s very important as a business. I go on about this a lot, to have that avatar, to have that ideal client in your mind, that niche business. And for us, it’s design agencies. We make WordPress themes for designers. So where a designer is going to be, are they actually on Twitter or are they somewhere else. So I had a think Facebook’s working for us.
Lee Matthew Jackson
That’s great. We’re finding lots of design agency owners on Facebook. That’s through the groups, through online collaboration, all of that stuff through Facebook. So that’s definitely a place that they are. But we’re certainly not finding that. We’re connecting with people on Twitter. Now, if I go to maybe 10 or 20 different social media profiles for design agencies, these are all target audiences. I was finding that most of them haven’t tweeted for several weeks or even several months, and then whoever is doing the tweeting, they’re not really the decision makers. They may be the office junior who has just been told that they need to tweet some stuff now and again, and usually the sorts of tweets as well is like we have moved or we were at this such and such exhibition, etc. so I realised that there’s my target audience. The people that I want to reach out are not there. Had a look at LinkedIn as well. And LinkedIn people are talking about it’s being very powerful. It’s an amazing way to network in an amazing way to generate business.
Lee Matthew Jackson
And I do believe that. But I wasn’t able to find at the time, again, my target audience who were consistently there either having conversations or checking profiles or communicating. So if you are a LinkedIn genius, I really want to get you on the podcast. It would be amazing to see how we can help other people with regards to LinkedIn marketing, LinkedIn, networking, social media, etc. so what else about my target audience is there? Well, these are designers and they are very visual. What is a visual platform? And it became obvious that places like Instagram and Pinterest, where designers were able to get inspiration from, are probably going to be the places that I’m going to be able to build up a following, to start to share the content that I have, and to perhaps start to drive traffic from that platform where people are. I’ve said, do 1 or 2 platforms really, really well. And with the results that we’ve been getting recently via Instagram and I’ll share some of that later on, it’s becoming clear to me that Twitter is certainly not the space that we want to be investing all of our time in for our business.
Lee Matthew Jackson
That might be different for yours, but for us, Facebook is definitely working. So we’re going to continue to invest in that. But for us, we found over the last few months, especially over the last eight days when I did some tests just to just for this podcast alone, it was phenomenal, the sort of engagement and the increase in followers that we got. Again, I’ll share a bit of that later, but it’s clear to me, therefore, that our strategy as a business needs to be focussed on those two core platforms. That’s not to say that we can’t put content out there on Twitter as well, because we can automate some of that, etc. we can continue to experiment with Twitter, but instead of trying to spread ourselves too thinly across multiple platforms, it seems to make sense to focus on the platforms where we are finding our target audience and where our target audience are having conversations with us, where they are engaging with our content. So be where the audience is. Think about your target audience.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Who are they? What do they like to do? So do they like to have conversations? Do they like to argue with each other? Because if they do, they’re probably on Reddit and you should probably be in there instead. Or are they more visual? What are the sorts of clients and therefore where are they going to be? What is their key area of interest? And remember not to rule out Facebook as well, because Facebook pretty much has everyone in the world in its database. And the myth that it’s not a business platform needs to be busted. Most people are on Facebook in the day as well. They are building up networks in Facebook. They are using things like Facebook groups, pages, etc. so it’s definitely a place to consider. Don’t just rule it out thinking that you need to go to the B2B area. And let’s face it, we’re all in business and most of us are working B2B. But let’s be real here. The phrase B2B business to business isn’t very exciting, and most of us like to make friends.
Lee Matthew Jackson
We like to connect. We like to have conversations. We like to see what other people are doing, and we like to share as well what we are doing and and share of ourselves. So Facebook is a great place for doing that. On that, then the next lesson we’ve learned is that we’re not to hide behind the camera. This is something that Phil Palin has been drilling into my head for years now and I still forget to do it. I still hide behind the camera. I’m showing pictures of other things and other people, maybe not even related to my business, and I’m hiding behind the camera. You’ll have noticed, especially for the last few months, that I’ve not been doing that. And you’ve seen my mug everywhere with the amazing duck face pout that I think I’ve now is now pretty much part of the brand. You’ll have seen images of Larissa as well. If you’ve been following us on Instagram, you’ll have seen us goofing around, you’ll have seen us in Instagram Stories, etc. and the reason for that is that people are attracted obviously to our beautiful faces, but they’re attracted to work with other people, often based on the personality and the likeability of those people.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Through the images, the videos and the comments that are being made on social media. I want to highlight a couple of examples I’m not blustering here. For example, Clay Mosley is a previous podcast guest runs Rock City Digital, and over the last two years, their entire team have been so present on places like Instagram and on Facebook. I mean, their Facebook page gets so much engagement and they’re so often sharing images of themselves, having fun, doing live streams, sharing short videos on their Instagram stories. They’re sharing stories of their day, you know, just little snippets throughout the day. And it’s brilliant. It makes you want to work with that team because they seem like a great bunch of people. It’s the same with Dubsado as well. I’ll put links to both of these people in the show notes, but Dubsado is a CRM system for creatives and again, they’ve shared videos of them going out for dinner, having a chill out. They do regular live streams on Instagram. They have a vibrant Facebook group with, I think, something like 8000 members in there, and they are showing up.
Lee Matthew Jackson
They’re sharing images of themselves. They are showing their personality, they are sharing their opinion, they are being real people. And therefore you want to work with those people, you want to be associated with those people you are attracted to the lifestyle, to the to their personalities, to the fun that they’re having. And I mean, I know dubsado itself, it feels very much a beta product still. It still feels like it’s shifting into more of a mature application, but you forgive a lot of that because of the personality of those people, the personality of that team. They’re not hiding behind the camera. They are showing their personality either visually or through opinion, etc. and it is such good fun. You want to hang around those sorts of people, so don’t hide behind the camera was our second lesson, certainly something we were doing just sharing lots of fancy images, off stock photography, etc. so that has to change. The next lesson is engage with people. This is insane and this is actually one of the most Powerful tools in social media that you can use, and we’ve all heard of it, that engagement is key, but we don’t think about it that much, and we actually don’t invest enough time in that.
Lee Matthew Jackson
I’m going to give you an example. First of all, I’ve seen our Twitter stagnate because all I’m doing is sharing the latest podcast episode, which is boring. Frankly, it’s boring if you go and look at the history of Twitter. Lee Jackson, dev, just me sharing tonnes of stuff that we’ve done. Not great. However, what we found, for example, on an Instagram Story is if we ask one of those questions with a poll, our engagement goes through the roof. We have seen engagement of 600 to 1000% based on any other sort of posts. So we’re getting more likes where we’re asking questions and we’re getting tonnes of comments in those questions because people want to share their opinion, they want to get involved in a in a conversation with you. So I got to admit, I did think that if I just simply put a question underneath an Instagram image that no one would reply. I kid you not, within 20 minutes we’d already had two comments, and then by the end of the week we’d had, um, you know, 810 comments, people having a conversation, giving you their opinion, you being able to reply back.
Lee Matthew Jackson
And through that, we’ve actually created a couple of good friendships already. And that’s just in the last days of doing some experiment, experimentation. So on Instagram itself. The other lesson on engaging, therefore, is not just asking other people questions to get them to engage with you, but it’s also to actively go and seek other people to engage with them because they are asking questions. They want to know your opinion, and it’s great fun to share your opinion. And through that, if you can find other businesses, other people that you can network with, maybe there are people that you can collaborate with, but also maybe they are people that would be potential customers at some point or their audience are your potential customers. So going and looking actively on the social platforms of choice to find those people to comment on their posts. I don’t mean spam comments, I mean actual proper conversations and interact with those people. And that way, that’s another very good way of building up your following, building up your network and being able to therefore collaborate.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Expand. Another lesson is hashtags still have power and I was quite amazed by this. I’m going to share with you how we’ve changed what we’re doing with our hashtags. But first of all, we were just simply plopping a whole load of hashtags on Twitter, for example, and on Facebook. Facebook hashtags don’t seem to make any difference. I don’t see many people finding us through hashtags. Twitter a couple of years ago. Awesome. We could drive tonnes of traffic to a very specific types of people and our our Twitter following grew. However, we got lazy. We used the same old hashtags and we’ve slowly been slowly but surely that drop out. People don’t seem to be engaging with us or following us or finding us through hashtags on Twitter. However, again Instagram with all the algorithm changes, etc.. Hashtags seem to be working phenomenally well for them. Now you do have to do some research. You’ve got to work out what hashtags your target audience are looking for, what are they interested in, etc.
Lee Matthew Jackson
so for example, I’m looking to connect with designers. I know they’re looking for design inspiration. Therefore hashtag design inspiration is actually a very popular tag or hashtag that I can use to get my content in front of those eyeballs. So take a think about what sort of hashtags your target audience might be looking at. What we did was we selected a few profiles on Instagram of people that would be an ideal client. And then we took a look at the sort of content that they were liking in Instagram. You can see the posts that they’ve liked. You can then look at those posts, and you can look at the hashtags that were associated with those posts. Now, if you imagine as well with hashtags on Instagram, for example, there’s two tiers that you can see with the hashtag. There are the top posts, which are for profiles that get the most engagement. So they go to the top on that tab, and then you’ve got the most recent. So for the most recent, you’re only going to appear for a short period of time, especially for the bigger, more popular hashtags.
Lee Matthew Jackson
And then if you’re getting lots of engagement, you may be lucky and you may therefore be placed on the top posts for that hashtag. So, for example, for the WordCamp hashtag, I actually got popped onto the top tier there of hashtag. I think it was WordCamp London and within 24 hours we got something like 100, 150 likes on one of my images. It just skyrocketed. Now, one of the tricks with hashtags for places like Instagram. I’m not sure how this might work in other areas, is trying to find the sorts of hashtags which are still relevant, but don’t have as many posts on them because that will give you the opportunity for a bit more visibility. You’re more likely to get onto that top tier, the top rated posts, etc., and you’re more likely to stay in the more recent area for a little bit longer. Obviously, it’s swings and roundabouts because the more popular hashtags means there are obviously more eyeballs there, etc. but especially in the early days, something for us that we’ve been doing with our Instagram strategy is being very picky with regards to the sorts of hashtags that we’re using so that we can try and pick up a few extra people initially, so that we can then continue to build up that engagement.
Lee Matthew Jackson
And then hopefully for the more popular hashtags, at some point, we’ll start to feature on those top posts more prominently. So hashtags still have power. It absolutely does depend on the platform that you’re using and how your target audience uses hashtags. Another great place for hashtags is Twitter. For certain industries, like the events industry, they’re still very, very popular and we’ve seen in our other business the ability to drive traffic and to drive eyeballs based on certain hashtags that that community uses to be able to communicate with each other. So, for example, hashtag event of the event organisation is a very big community and everybody likes to have conversations on Twitter. So that’s a great space for that industry, for people in that arena, for us, for designers, we are finding that hashtags are way more powerful in a visual medium like Instagram. Another lesson is posting mixed media. This is pretty much the same everywhere, but especially on Facebook and on Instagram. Now that Instagram have changed their algorithm and they’re rewarding people who post via multiple different methods, it could be an image, could then be a video.
Lee Matthew Jackson
And also with Instagram, it could also be a story and a live stream. Now with Facebook it would be an image, a video and polls and also live streams, etc. but using all of the different features available shows that you are an active account that’s building up credibility, that’s building up social proof, etc. and that’s going to help you with regards to the algorithms that they have. Now remember, that might change at some point. We can’t control what the social media platforms are going to do at any one time, but just having that consistent mix of content for us, we found, seems to have really boosted the eyeballs that get to see our content. I’ve said eyeballs an awful lot, but it’s the only thing I can think of right now. So let’s just go with eyeballs for the rest of the show. Now, I want to share with you some fascinating statistics. I actually shared this on Facebook just last week, where we were looking at the sort of engagement that we were getting and the sort of views that we were getting on our Facebook post or sorry, on our Facebook page, which is very hard to get anyone to look at it for at all.
Lee Matthew Jackson
It seems to be crickets half the time on a Facebook page, whereas the personal profile seems to be where most of the power seems to be. And yet we had 2,250% more engagement on video than we had on an image. So there’s kind of two lessons in here, isn’t there? There is. Use video seems to have much more power than a plain old image would have. But also bearing in mind as well is that because we are using a mixture of media on social, on the social platforms, we are also getting rewarded over time. So we’re actually seeing as we’re mixing the media that we post, we’re also seeing more reach, more engagement on the other forms. So whereas video is is killing it, we’re also seeing an increase in the visibility of our other types of content, which is cool. I guess that’s a mixture of more people finding you and more people following you. But I think as well it could be totally wrong here. But I think as well that this is the social media platforms rewarding you for using all of the different aspects of their service.
Lee Matthew Jackson
For being an active user, it’s important for social media platforms to keep people returning. And if they can see that an account is active, that’s got relevant content that people are appreciating that people are liking, they are going to give you more weight. They are going to reward you for being an active user, for being someone that’s going to help them retain those eyeballs. What was that film? Was it Jeepers creepers, I can’t remember. Someone messaged me. You’ll know what I mean. Okay, next is native is best. And what I mean by that is that actually posting up their content like a video into the platform of choice is the best way, rather than linking to a third party hosted video. So if you have a video or if you have some audio, get that uploaded into the social media platform itself. You are going to see much more engagement, many more plays than you would if you were to just simply share the link to a YouTube video that video that you’ve got. We’ve tested this quite a few times.
Lee Matthew Jackson
We’ve got our YouTube channel, which is something else we’ve got to work on. But, you know, if we were to just paste in a URL of our video, we don’t see much traffic. If we were to upload an actual copy of that video into Facebook, for example, boom! You see loads more people having a look. Loads more people engaging and going off and having a look at whatever link that there might be. Furthermore, with regards to native, not only getting those videos on there, but actually physically posting those items again seems to get us more engagement. If we were to automate absolutely everything and just put things onto social media, I could be wrong. But I feel like those posts don’t get as much attention as a post that we physically upload ourselves. I could be wrong. I’m trying to get second guess the algorithm here. I’m definitely not a social media expert, but it’s a hunch that I’ve got. I think it’s a hunch. Many other people have. And if you are a social media expert, you need to get on this podcast because I am still in a learning process and I know everyone listening wants to know more about how they can start to kill it on social media.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Now automation is okay. However, our next lesson, based on the fact that we found that we are getting more engagement on stuff that we have actually physically posted ourselves versus stuff that we’ve just automated. Automation is okay because you can’t stay up in the middle of the night necessarily to post something, but if you’re going to automate something, it’s really important that you circle back around and engage with the people that do find it, that do comment back. So if you’re just posting a link or just telling someone that you’ve moved office, then you’re not going to get any engagement with that anyway. But if you are asking people questions, if you are getting people to engage with you in some sort of way, then make sure that you are there that you can reply to the comments that you get. So whatever time that’s going to go out the next morning, go to that post. Engage with the people that have engaged with you so far. And again, as a post gets engagement on it, depending on the algorithm of the social media platform, it’s going to start to push your content back up so that other people can see it.
Lee Matthew Jackson
It’s got that sort of social proof. This post that’s gone out has had people having a conversation on it. So even though it was automated, people are interested in that. So let’s show this to more people and get more people staying on our social media platform for longer. So yes, you can automate. We do automate quite a bit of our stuff. We can’t stay up all night, but we are making sure right now that we are returning to those posts, that we are engaging with people that we’re tagging people in who might be interested to expand on a conversation, etc.. So really, really important. Yes, you can automate, but make sure that you are still engaging, that you’re asking those engaging questions that questions that you’re getting people to talk to you, but also that you are therefore present, that people aren’t just talking to a bot that doesn’t reply. Now, another lesson is that time does and doesn’t matter, because the algorithms are absolutely screwing with my head. And this is something that we’re still learning.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Now, there seems to be a range of people on different platforms that see our content instantly, and I think the algorithms have been changing again. They’re putting weight on certain types of content. They’re showing some content to people when it’s had a bit more social proof with another group of people, etc., so that again, they can get eyeballs on there for longer. And therefore if I post something out on Facebook, from what I can understand is perhaps only a small set of people that follow me will actually see that post and therefore engage with it. It could be another 2 to 3 days later that suddenly I Suddenly I get a whole flurry. More people seeing that that post and actually then beginning to engage with it certainly happening on, um, it’s certainly happening on Instagram as well, where we’re finding we’ll put something out, we’ll get an initial flurry of maybe 1 or 2 people talking on it, and we’ll reply to those people, but then it won’t be until 24 hours later, where suddenly lots more people are liking that image and having a conversation in the thread.
Lee Matthew Jackson
So time certainly is important to be able to post something at a specific time, especially on Twitter, which is still very much I believe that’s still still current. They they do now have a change in the algorithm, which is going to show you stuff that you may have missed, etc., but there are certain things that are going to be time sensitive. You’re going to post it in a group. People are going to see it instantly. If you’re posting it on your Facebook page or your profile, it doesn’t mean that people are going to see it as quickly. So time is strategic. But do also remember that probably most posts need to be a bit more timeless, as in Then you have to understand that some of these posts aren’t going to be seen straight away. They’re going to be seen later on. So time is important. And it’s also not. It’s screwing with my head. But just be aware that those algorithms are there for the benefit of the social media platforms to keep people there, obviously to the benefit of those people as well.
Lee Matthew Jackson
So essentially what I’m saying is it’s kind of a paradox. I can’t help you any more than that. Be strategic with the time that you post. Be aware that whatever you do post may not be seen by those people straight away at that time, and that the social media platform of choice may choose to serve that content later on to a different subset of your followers or different types of followers. So you probably want to make sure that any time sensitive announcements for something that’s happening or upcoming, you get those out several days earlier to make sure that you can get as many people seeing that announcement, and you can start to build up that countdown, etc.. We’re coming in to land. We’ve got two more lessons that we’ve learned to share with you that we feel are of value. And this one is keep educating yourselves about social media platforms. And I think I’ve just highlighted how kind of confusing it can be, especially with this time algorithm thing that’s going on on quite a few social media platforms. It’s really important to educate yourself as to what’s going on.
Lee Matthew Jackson
The easiest way I can recommend you to do that is just go on YouTube. There are regular videos on YouTube three minutes long, from people all around the world who are killing it on social media, who are therefore sharing the latest and greatest tips that they have learned. And they’re also sharing the changes that are happening on the social media platform that they’re killing it on. So it’s a great way of just making sure you keep up to date. That’s one thing that we didn’t do for a very long time. I just did the same thing on Twitter for two years and didn’t really notice that no one was listening. After a while, because I did what used to work. I then got a bit lazy and stopped doing some of that, but also then found that what used to work no longer works on Twitter, and I either need to change my game or to work out where my audience is. And obviously we’ve we’ve been actually finding our audience on Instagram of all places. It kind of seems dead obvious now.
Lee Matthew Jackson
I kind of wish I’d thought of that two years ago, but hey, what the heck? But yeah, keep educating yourself about the platform. Instagram. I’ve talked about it a lot, but they made a massive change in Instagram recently with the algorithm. It used to be that you would see everything by time, but again, they’ve changed everything so that it’s all based on engagement and based on serving the sorts of content that they think your followers want to see. So you you have to change the way you do your social strategies. I mean, people used to do the follow one follow option on multiple platforms, but I believe that doesn’t really work anymore. So you have to keep current. You have to listen to what’s going on. It doesn’t necessarily have to take a lot of time, just maybe watch a video once a month, a couple of videos about your key social media platforms of choice so that you are staying aware of what changes are happening so that you can make sure that you evolve your practises.
Lee Matthew Jackson
You change what you’re doing on social media if you need to change them at that time, rather than making the mistake that I made of just doing the same thing for two years and then realising that we were maybe growing one follower or actually losing more followers than we were gaining, especially on Twitter. And then the last lesson, because I feel like I can’t go on for an hour here is review the data. Yeah, I know it’s nuts, isn’t it? Data. It sounds really boring, and it’s something that I’ve never done until I actually started to look at our data. I didn’t even know we had a had a social media problem. But I then realised that what we were doing was we were putting a whole lot of resource into social media. The way we were doing it, taking a lot of time spending money on it, and we were actually reaching hardly anyone. So it’s really important to actually look at your Google Analytics and see where is my traffic coming from. It’s really important to understand which social media platform is actually where you are starting to build up a following, starting to build up your brand, starting to build up credibility, starting to generate leads.
Lee Matthew Jackson
If you don’t look at the data, you’re not going to know. An amazing tool that we’ve been using, which was out on Appsumo. So if you if it’s still there, go grab it. It’s something called crystal.io. I hate big complicated graphs and tonnes and tonnes of data because I just don’t know how to understand it. Whereas crystal.io is this AI that you can ask a question and I might say, well, how many Instagram followers have I grown by this month? And that’s just as a sentence. And then it will then give me a graph based on that and I can go, oh wow, that’s amazing. So for example, in the last eight days alone, we grew by 46%. So that was from 431 followers to 632 followers in eight days. And that was just a quick question I asked of Crystal. I know it connects basically to all of our social profiles as well as our Google Analytics, and it can also tell us how many, um, how many visits did I drive to our website from each social media platform, etc.
Lee Matthew Jackson
? So it’s a very clever platform, something I definitely recommend you check out. Certainly you don’t need to use that. You can still use Google Analytics. If you are a Google Analytics ninja, then that is also fine. There are tonnes of different reporting tools out there, but if you don’t review the data, you don’t know what you don’t know. You don’t know what you’re doing wrong, you don’t know what you might be wasting time on, and you don’t know what works and what doesn’t work. So another example of reviewing the data is going back to those hashtags that I mentioned earlier. We’re actually getting 800 people seeing some of our content via, um, via Instagram, which is phenomenal. We’re using hashtags. We’re seeing 800 people see that piece of content. But what we’re also doing is we’re testing other hashtags, etc. we’re looking at those numbers and then we’re going over to what works. And it’s not always about numbers as well. It’s if I’ve used that hashtag and I’ve had 800 eyeballs, well that’s great, but what was the result of that?
Lee Matthew Jackson
Did I also get some engagement from those? So did people reply to that post? Did people like that post? Did people send me a message? What what happened with that? So having a look at the data and trying to work out what works and stop doing what doesn’t work because we’re all busy and we don’t want to be spending time and money and energy doing stuff that doesn’t work on platforms that our audience isn’t even listening to us on. So let’s let’s do a recap from the top down. Be where your audience is. So research where your audience is and be there. Show up. Next lesson don’t hide behind the camera. Be personal. Be personable. Share your opinions. Share images of you guys. Have fun. People will be attracted to your team, to you, and want to either work with you, or at least just engage with you and share their opinions to build up your network. Engage with people. Put posts out there where you’re asking people questions. People love to talk about themselves.
Lee Matthew Jackson
I love talking about myself. That’s why I started bleeding podcast. And you know, people will will reply to your questions. Even something ridiculous like, do you like coffee or tea in a morning? We had tonnes of replies on that one. So ask questions. People will converse with you. And remember, engagement with people isn’t just asking other people questions, but it’s also answering the questions of the people that you are following as well and going in and in and finding posts that are relevant with people that are relevant and engaging with them on their posts as well. To build up your following and to build up your network, your credibility, etc.. Remember as well hashtags. Next lesson still have power. Depends on the platform, depends on the industry, how they use it, etc. but research your hashtags and make sure that you are still using them. It’s not old school, it still does work. You just have to be a lot more strategic about it. Next lesson mixed media. Most social media companies seem to like a mix of media.
Lee Matthew Jackson
They like it when you use all of their different services live streaming videos, images, all of the different tools, they’re giving you stories, for example, on places like Snapchat and Instagram, etc. use the full breadth of services that are available to you, because I believe it wins you some brownie points. And even if it doesn’t win you some brownie points, remember that people consume content in different ways. Even on Instagram, I actually look at Instagram stories more than I look at pages and pages of images. So if you are trying to attract me, I would more likely going to find you via a hashtag on an Instagram story than I’m going to find you on a post that you shared. Or maybe I’m going to watch one of your live streams because I watch a lot of live streams on Instagram. So not only will you get rewarded by social media, but you’re also potentially going to reach more people because you are putting content out there in a different range of types of content, because people can consume content in many different ways.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Next lesson native is best. Always good to get that up physically up. It seems to be social media companies can tell if you’ve automated it, if you’re just a bot, or whether you’ve actually gone on and logged on yourself. I guess that’s probably to do with the fact that if you’ve personally put something on, you’re probably going to interact on that. I just made that up. Could be a whole load of rubbish, but I’ve definitely found in our results. If we’re putting it up ourselves natively, we’re not automating it, then that gets us more engagement. Time can be strategic. That’s our next lesson. But also remember that there is an algorithm too, that people are going to see it later on potentially as well. So you’re going to need to make sure that you change. If you’ve got something that’s time sensitive, maybe start announcing it a lot earlier, etc.. Another lesson is keep educating yourself about what’s going on on the social media platforms. I think it’s very clear from this episode that I’m still learning, that we are still experimenting, and that it’s always a learning game because we are at the mercy of these algorithms.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn. Everybody is regularly changing how their algorithms work to see how they can get the most out of their audience so that they can sell more ad space. All of that. So you’ve got to keep your finger on the pulse. You’ve got to understand what’s going on, what’s changing? So you can do that through simple YouTube videos or however you learn. Just make sure you keep your finger on the pulse and finally review the data. Make sure you’re not wasting time on things that are completely fruitless, but also look at the data and look at what works, how it’s working. Are you getting more engagement? If that’s right, then do that thing more. Do that thing that works more. So do look at the data. Do look at your Google Analytics. Do use third parties like IO to be able to understand the information that you have in front of you, to be able to understand what’s working well with you. Do use your group insights. Use your page insights.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Have a look at Instagram Insights and Twitter as well. All of these different platforms have this information available to you. So you can see oh wow. This type of video post seems to be the most popular type of post. This type of question seems to be the most popular type of question. I’m going to ask more questions like this. I’m going to do more Instagram Stories. I’m going to post more videos of my podcast with the little waveform or whatever it is, all these different things. You look at your data, see what works. You keep doing more of what works. Circling back, always still educating yourself about what’s changing. Circling back around. Always looking at the data and having a look to make sure that that thing is still working. So I think it’s always going to be an ongoing learning curve, but it’s absolutely essential if you are going to keep your finger on the pulse of your social media strategy. So from a non-expert to you guys, I hope this has been helpful.
Lee Matthew Jackson
This is what we’ve unpacked so far. We are seeing a marked increase in the traffic that we are driving to our website, which is good. But more importantly, we’re seeing a massive increase in the followers that we’re getting. So 200 followers in eight days on 201 sorry followers in eight days on Instagram alone, just by being present, engaging. And we’ve already created in those two days. Sorry, in those eight days, two very important conversations which could lead either to collaborations or they could be leads in the future. These are our lessons. I will continue to share with you what we’ve been experiencing, what is working. I would say go ahead and follow us on our two primary areas. First one would be Instagram. That’s at love your agency. And the next one is go ahead and add me as a friend on Facebook. I would love to be your friend on Facebook and I’d love to get to know you. I will put a link to my Facebook profile in the description. So that’s Instagram at Love your Agency.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Go to the description of this podcast and find my personal Facebook page and add me as a friend and let’s continue this conversation. If you are not part of the Facebook group, remember Agency Trailblazer trailblazer.com/group. I will be sharing information screenshots in there over the next few months as I continue to learn. And finally, if social media is your game, I want to learn. I know the audience wants to learn, and we would love to unpack strategies with you on this podcast. So do get in touch. Just go to agency. trailblazer.com/contact. Folks have a wonderful week and we will see you in the next episode.
