Social Media In Our Agency

Note: This transcript was auto generated. As our team is small, we have done our best to correct any errors. If you spot any issues, we’d sure appreciate it if you let us know and we can resolve! Thank you for being a part of the community.

Hi and welcome to the WP Innovator Podcast. The WordPress Podcast for design and Web agencies. Let’s make WordPress work for your business. Hi and welcome to the WP Innovator podcast. Today is going to be very different from normal because you’ve got just me, myself, and I. Oh, and of course you as I talk through social media at our business. So sit back, relax, grab a coffee if you’re driving, don’t. And enjoy. Hi, this is Lee at the WP Innovator podcast. And today you’ve just got me. I want to talk to you about social media. Now, I am not an expert in social media, but I do want to talk to you about social media in my agency. So first of all, to give you a bit of background, you may be aware I’m a digital agency and I focus on converting designs by design agencies into fully functional WordPress websites. Now, I also offer a whole wide range of services behind that as well. That includes things like plug ins. So that’s creating something that doesn’t exist and adding that functionality into our website and also provide things like consultancy services, helping design agencies make sales, etcetera. So you can imagine we are quite a busy agency. We’ve got all sorts of things going on, things like project management, we’re coding, we’re bug testing, we’re doing quality assurance and really we’re just super busy all the time. But we are conscious that there is something called a sales pipeline. Now a sales pipeline, if you’re not aware that is your ongoing sales, what’s happening in the future? And as agencies, we can get so wrapped up in doing the now. So we’re working on everything now, all hands on deck, we’re producing, we’re designing, we’re coding, etcetera, and we’re forgetting to think about the future. What is that sale? What is that piece of business that’s going to be coming in in the next few weeks when the current stuff we’re working on is done? Because when you’re done and invoiced and there is nothing else in the pipeline, it’s a pretty scary place to be. And believe you me, I’ve been there many a time and it’s no fun. So about 2 or 3 years ago we realised that we had a problem with our social media. We are you know, we’re sharing cat pictures. That was obviously the done thing and we were sharing funny animated gifs. We were following, people had haphazardly sharing content haphazardly. There was essentially no strategy, no method to the madness. And we weren’t really building up any following or creating any leads or converting any leads. And we realized we really needed to do something. Why is it that there’s people out there really killing it on social media and yet all we can do is share a few funny pictures, maybe tweet a few people that we might want to work with and essentially get nowhere with it. So we decided we were going to have to have an emergency meeting. Now, that sounds pretty scary, doesn’t it? An emergency meeting. But it really was an emergency. We we knew we had to do something. We knew we needed some sort of strategy.

So the first thing that we did was we held a meeting. And I got to admit, there was no specific agenda other than we need to do something better with social media. That was the agenda. And we just really spoke out loud. We spoke our thoughts out for a while until eventually we decided that what we really needed to do was to define what our core problems were, what are our core problems with our social media strategy now? I think the very first problem was the fact that there was no strategy, and that was pretty obvious. That’s why we were all meeting. But what were our core problems with social media in general? And we got it down to just a few items. I think it was about five points.

Now, the first one was lack of time, so we simply did not have enough time to spend on sharing content, creating tweets, even creating content to share. It was just it was just too time intensive for us with all of the projects and the commitments that we had. So we felt that for social media there was an immense lack of time available to us within the business. So problem one down on paper. The next problem then was this just poor content. We had poor content and we didn’t really have the time obviously to find good content and we didn’t really have any good content to share. So there was another howler for us, no real content putting out vague tweets, maybe sharing a generally okay article, but nothing that was really, you know, exciting, engaging, valuable. So that was our second problem. And then the third area we felt as well was coupled with this lack of time. There were simply too many social media platforms. So we were trying to spread ourselves across all sorts of different social media networks. We were doing them all terribly and we didn’t know which one we were meant to be on. There was just too much to do. We were simply echoing ourselves across multiple platforms, you know, trying to push tweet tweets into Facebook. Obviously, that didn’t work very well for us. We were trying to put stuff on this new Google+ that had come out as well. We were trying to manage LinkedIn. We didn’t know whether we should be doing our LinkedIn things personally or whether we should be doing company profiles or a mixture of both. We didn’t know if we needed to be on Pinterest. We had accounts all over the place, left, right and center, and we didn’t really know what to do with them. There was just too many channels to focus on. So that was another one of our problems. Obviously I’ve said this one already, but I’ll say it again, we had no strategy. That was another problem. There was no strategy. All of us had access to the social media accounts, but none of us had any particular goal or strategy, and we didn’t have any particular shared vision or any shared rules. So we were just all doing what we thought was best at that particular time. So as you can see, not a very good strategy. No shared vision, no direction. This was not good for us. Okay. And then lastly, we could not find a tool that would fit. Our requirements. Now, it’s funny that we thought this one, we had no strategy, but at the time we couldn’t find anything that we felt we could plug into all of the social media networks. Google Plus was quite new, so we couldn’t push stuff out to Google Plus. At that time, there was no API available and we just found that we were having to do manual things here and there. There was no kind of centralized automated tool. Now that did stem from the fact that we were all so trying to cover all sorts of solutions. But we are going to go back to the existing tools not fit for purpose thing because something else came up which quite surprised us during our investigations. Now. The meeting was phenomenal because it allowed us to put down those five core issues lack of time, poor content, too many platforms, no strategy and no tool that could serve us and serve as well. But now we were super focused. We had time to go away and individually think of what is it, what, what is it or what are the actions that we can take to really turn this around? What sort of strategies can we put in place to really impact on our social media? So we left it a week. We all took time out. I think I probably went for a few runs, had a few beers. I always think, well, when I’ve had a few beers and we came back a week later, we had our agenda, which was those five problems, and we essentially brainstormed those five problems together. We’d all had time to think and come up with ideas and jot things down, and they were able to brainstorm all of those ideas. When we got back to the drawing board, I guess you’d say.

So as a result of that, we put a whole load of things in place. And I just want to break down what we did. And things have since changed and things are evolving because this is a consistently evolving strategy. But I want to share what we did and hopefully in the hope that it will help to start to focus you and your design or your web agency into really taking social media seriously and to developing some form of social media strategy. All right. So let’s hit that first problem, lack of time. So what we did, first of all, is we just looked at our working day. We were really busy. We were really busy doing lots and lots of stuff. But if you then looked at how much stuff we were doing, we raised this question. What are we doing that will help our ongoing sales pipeline? So we’ve won loads of business. This is great. We can work on all of these projects, but what activities are we doing each week to help towards our future sales pipeline? Now, I don’t know who said this. I’d love to know, so please email me if you know. But somebody once said and it stuck with me for years, sell every day. And that is so important. It’s so important not to make that actual sale every day, but to at least do something towards the sales process. Some form of marketing activity that you can do that will help you in that direction, take you on the next step towards yet another, yet another sale, things like growing an audience, etcetera, generating leads, communicating with people, all those sorts of things are all marketing activities that will help you towards your goal. So we realized that we were neglecting our entire marketing strategy. So not only were we neglecting social media thinking, Oh, this isn’t important enough, we don’t have enough time, but we were also neglecting marketing in other ways. For example, we weren’t doing good enough email marketing, we weren’t following up on phone calls, etcetera, because we were just so focused on creating the product. And at the end of that we it’ll all be hands on deck to try and win the next project.

So, you know, feast or famine, I think we’ve all had that as agencies. So that feast or famine vision really led us to realize that we need to be doing something regularly and quite literally on a daily basis, and social media becomes one of those things. So yes, there are many different avenues to marketing, many different channels that you can go down, but we were definitely neglecting social media, something that was really, really important to that ongoing pipeline, something that was really important towards generating sales, generating leads, converting those leads into real sales so that we had a future pipeline to be working on. So what we did there and then in that meeting is we agreed and we went pretty drastic actually. We agreed that we were that one person within the company was going to spend at least one hour per day on social media alone. So that’s one hour per day on social media that could be putting content out there. It could be filling up some sort of scheduler. We hadn’t decided on one at that point, but we knew we were going to need to do something. That person would have to start engaging with people because we recognize we weren’t doing stuff like that either. So it was going to be at least one hour per day and that could have been split between different 15 minute chunks throughout the day, or that could have just been one solid hour. But we knew at that point we needed to take it that seriously, that we were going to dedicate at least one hour per day of our business time to social media. So that’s where we got at that point with the lack of time, essentially recognizing that lack of time is just a perception, because actually social media is something that is crucially important to your ongoing sales pipeline. Therefore, we need to make time. So we created time quite easily just by making that decision. And of course we’ve since then revisited that hourly decision and we’ve created time that we believe is suitable for the goals that we now have. But that was at least for us, a great start. Okay, let’s move on then to poor content. What were we going to do about the fact we had absolutely no content to share? But also we didn’t really have any main trusted sources that we were happy to share the content of.

So what we did at that point is we made a decision to start creating content and we wrote down a list of the sorts of content we thought we could create. Now, you can imagine in any meeting, everybody’s super excited and I’m pretty sure I probably committed to writing a blog post every day for a year or something ridiculous. I get these ideas in my head and I think I’m going to be able to deliver on them. So thankfully we did something a little bit more realistic and we decided that for the next 30 business working days. So that was Monday to Friday. The next 30 Monday to Fridays, I was going to generate some content on a daily basis, and that was going to be through the form of writing blog posts. So what we did, we created a list of questions, common questions that we know customers ask us all the time. And we recognized that we’d be able to deal with all these questions in 30 blog posts, which would get all on our website, and they would then become a great, valuable resource for us to send clients to whenever they have that exact question. But also it gives us content for us to share and reshare. Because remember, even if a blog post is a year old, it still has value. It doesn’t matter that it was written a year ago, it can still be reshared. So we were super pumped to at least get our blog from for kind of token posts to a good chunk of 30 valuable WordPress based posts. So that was the first challenge we set ourselves. And then what’s happened over time? I mean, if we fast forward now since that 30 that absolutely catapulted us, we had a massive increase in site visits and from that stemmed all sorts of other ways of generating content. So for example, we started creating short videos that we would send out in emails to people through tweets. We get people to sign up for those videos, etcetera. But we also then started doing things like Live Blab, Q and A’s. So I would host something called WP Experts Live, and I would take questions from people all around the world helping them out with their WordPress issues, etcetera. And of course whenever certain questions would come up, I’d be able to pull out from the content I’d already created on the blog. So people would often ask, say, a security question, and I was able to send them to 2 or 3 blogs all about WordPress security. So it’s over the last kind of year, maybe two years. We’ve we’ve come to the realization that creating content doesn’t have to be all about blogs. It can be videos, it can be audio. Obviously. Now, kind of November, we launched the WP Innovator podcast, which you’re listening to right now. And this is another way that we can generate content. Now we recognize that it would be really beneficial to people in our industry to create some form of interview based podcast where we can talk to professionals and industry leaders and learn from them, and we could provide that free content as something that’s really valuable to our potential audience. So if you’re listening to this, you are potentially our client base, but at the same time, we’re not here to try and sell to you. We’re actually here to add value, to generate content, to build up an audience, to build up credibility. And, you know, maybe one day we can and we can do business. But hey, the idea, though, is, is that we found loads of different ways of creating content that doesn’t have to be really hard or really complicated. I mean, you’ve heard the interviews that we’ve done. I get to have loads of fun. I get to have a laugh. We don’t have to be super professional. It helps not to go too crazy. But yeah, we get to have a laugh, we get to have a joke and I definitely try not to take myself too seriously. So our next problem was that there are just too many social media platforms. We were trying to spread ourselves really thin across Facebook, across Twitter. We had LinkedIn profiles, we had Pinterest profiles. Man, I imagine we even had a MySpace profile. Although I’m joking, I don’t think we’ve actually ever had a MySpace account for the business, although I did have my own MySpace account back in the day and I believe Tom was my friend as as was everyone’s. Anyway, back to reality. Yeah, we had too many social media accounts and we simply didn’t know what to share on all of those accounts, what sort of information we should be sharing on each different type of account, how to target people on these accounts. It was just it was essentially the same problem, but multiplied across multiple social media platforms. So what were we going to do? How are we were going to fix this problem? And someone suggested that we need to find the platform or platforms where our clients are. So where are our target audience? Where are they talking and where are they engaging? And wherever we can find them with their voice, their engagement, then we’re going to stick with that social media platform and we’re going to do it and we’re going to do it really, really well. So what we did was we spent after this meeting, we spent quite a little while. I got to admit, it was probably about 3 to 4 month process, really, of looking through social media, connecting with people, chatting with people, and just finding out where our real audience were.

And we found that most people, for us as a business were on Twitter. People were talking, they were sharing content, they were retweeting each other’s content, and they were also talking to each other via Twitter. So we figured over a period of time that that was going to be where we shared our voice the most, that we followed other people and that we engaged with other people the most. We certainly had a look at LinkedIn, but I’ve got to be honest, LinkedIn is like a minefield. It’s never been a platform that we can easily understand and easily connect with people. It’s it seems to be more of like a job posting system. And I know there are guys out there who have got amazing LinkedIn strategy and I’d love to learn about that because I’m sure LinkedIn for us is an untapped resource. But because there was such a steep learning curve, we definitely avoided that anyway. And then for Facebook we found that Facebook was more of A, A, B to C, so we knew that Facebook for us was still an untapped market because we could use that for networking. But we certainly weren’t able to just directly connect with our target audience broadcast as well as engage with them quite so easily as we were with Twitter. So what we decided to do was essentially to ignore all of the other social media accounts that we’d created and focus solely on Twitter, create some sort of content schedule regularly, put other people’s content out our content out, and also ensure that we engage with people. So that was our basic strategy that we implement essentially about a year ago was when we finally got, you know, really into the into Twitter full time and doing that to the best of our ability and focusing solely there. Then what we did was in our own personal accounts, we just ensured that we continued to network via Facebook. We joined groups, we added value, answered people’s questions. We even asked our own questions. And we’ve created over a period of time some really good close friendships with other people in our industry, but also other people who are potential clients. So without focusing on Facebook as a business, we actually focused Facebook, our Facebook efforts as more of a networking opportunity where we’re talking with people. And then for Twitter, this was more of a content marketing strategy and obviously then engagement as well with people who are sharing valuable content, etcetera. So that was where we ended up with about a year ago. We finally decided it’s going to be Twitter and that’s what we’re going to put all of our focus, all of our attention as a business. And then Facebook was going to be the the networking area and also the self-improvement area, because there’s an awful lot of people on there that are absolute experts in their field and they’re giving away tons of free information. It’s amazing the sorts of things you can find in the Facebook groups as well as we discovered exciting new things like new plugins, etcetera.

So it was really great for us. And it kind of took the pressure as well off Facebook because it’s just it’s my personal account, it’s my team’s personal accounts, and we’re getting to know people and we’re sharing friendships, etcetera, and that’s awesome. And then, like I said, Twitter is where our business focus is at for for the content marketing, etcetera. All right, then. So we have obviously started to develop a bit of a strategy about a year ago. Based on all of these conversations. And I’ve got to admit, we identified this problem. Like I said, it was about two and a half years ago, two years ago. It actually took us until about a year ago to really get started to actually get all those blog posts written, to get our our focus solely on Twitter and to just start relaxing on places like Facebook. But it was still another six months to three quarters of a year later. And although we were now actually starting to convert, we were actually getting leads through Twitter. We were actually actually generating business and the same through our networking on Facebook. We still realize that we had a ways to go. We wanted to start doing things like growing our list. We wanted to try and get a broader reach for the content because we really believed we’ve got some really brilliant content that we can share with people, but also we’ve got some great content that we found from other people that we want others to know. So we wanted to understand how could we broaden our reach and also how could we get more targeted followers, you know, people who will benefit from the content that we’re putting out. But also these people, you know, will be potentially people who might engage us in a future product, be it maybe a service where we do development, etcetera, or maybe be it through one of the future products that we’ve got planned, the sale plugin software products, or maybe any of the future consulting or training that we’re going to be offering in the future. So we we recognize that we really need to get even more serious than we already had with our Twitter, our Twitter strategy. So, hey, we decided to go and get somebody involved in our strategy. So we hired somebody. Her name is Sarah. She’s actually been on the podcast before. So go back and check that episode. She’s awesome. And she came into the business and essentially. I don’t know how to say this, but she blew. I guess the simple way is she totally blew our minds with her input. She checked out our existing strategy. She looked at the sort of content we were putting out, and she asked us tons of questions. For example, you know, where do we want to be? Where do we want to be in three months? Where do we want to be in six months? What sort of things are we trying to achieve? She has some really tough questions, and then she came back to us with a fantastic strategy, with actionable things that we as a team could do. And this is a work in progress. She’s still with us. She’s still giving us monthly input, monthly advice, and we’re still trying our very best. And she’s keeping us accountable to doing the things that she’s saying. And as we’re actioning those things, we’re actually seeing results. We’re seeing more and more targeted followers, followers. So this has been amazingly exciting. And we’ve seen since getting somebody involved in developing a strategy for us, somebody who’s got that expertise, who’s got that background. We have seen such an increase in followers, such an increase in engagement, and she’s also looking after things like scheduling all of that content. So we’ve given her all of our content. We’ve also told her about all the future stuff that we want to bring out, like courses, our books, PDFs, etcetera, all of those things.

And she is making sure that right now and also in the very near future, all of that content is scheduled. So that takes an awful lot of our plate. She’s looking after our strategy and then we can just really sit back, relax and focus on engagement. But we’re engaging in the ways that she’s recommending. For example, one of the things I think I’ve mentioned before on a podcast is how she recommended we break up people’s information feeds. So you know that bit where you see your notifications. She’s suggested we break those up. So when somebody follows us who is a target or a very particular target audience of ours, then we’re going to make a short video message to that person and we’ll just put hey at that username and leave it at that. So they’re wondering what it’s all about, but they’ll see the automatic playing video in their feed. It’s going to catch their eye. They’re going to see me or one of my colleagues talking to them, but they can’t hear them. So they’re going to then click on that play button and listen to that message. And we have seen absolutely 100% everybody responds in some sort of way, be it a retweet, be it a favorite, be it most of the time, a message back saying, hey, that was really nice. This is great. What a great idea. So it’s getting us seen by other people. And then since then, we’ve found, you know, certain agencies have then regularly come back to our profile and retweeted our stuff. And we’ve continued to respond to reciprocate that favor. So it’s just small things like that where a social media expert can come in and just give you ideas that you just frankly would not have thought of. You know, we’re in the business, we’re working hard and boom, someone from the outside can come in, they can see what you’re doing, they can find out what you want to achieve, and then they can give you small, actionable steps over a period of time and help you monitor it to really dramatically increase what you’re doing.

So we were super excited to have Sarah in on Twitter. She’s continued to help us just solely focus on Twitter and then of course, in the future we definitely want to start upping our game in the realms of Facebook because through the networking we’ve actually found groups and communities in the design sector and in the web development sector. Now that we feel we’d actually like to reach out more in a content route as well. So we’re really excited about that. But the point of having no strategy, we had no strategy. We then took the step to make some form of internal strategy, which which did work quite well, and we were all united by it. And then the final kind of step for us to date has been then to get a real expert involved, which has absolutely changed the way we do social media, change the way we see Twitter, etcetera. And it’s been phenomenally great. So that’s definitely some advice I’d share out to you guys. You know, connect with a social media expert. And I don’t I’m not recommending you go to someone who’s just going to schedule a whole load of tweets out there for you. I mean, get somebody who’s going to really consult, who’s going to understand your business, who’s actually really going to care someone that you get on with as well. We all get on really well with Sarah. She’s a great laugh. And I believe if you’re listening, let us know. Sarah. I believe she likes us and she enjoys working with us, too.

So find someone that you can really enjoy working with who absolutely gets what you’re trying to achieve, and then they’re going to give you no BS. They’re going to hold you accountable and they’re going to help you get to where you want to be. That’s definitely what we’ve learned and we are so excited to see how this goes over the next few months and years. All righty. So we then defined our last problem, and that was that there were no tools that were fit for purpose. At least there were no tools at the time because we had no real purpose, we had no strategy. We didn’t really know what we were doing. And since then, since we defined our target audience, since we defined our target social media platform, we were then pretty much able to find the solution for us. At first that was in the guise of Meet Edgar, which is a fantastic tool. I definitely recommend you go check that one out. And what Meet Edgar allows you to do is to automatically schedule content but with a twist. It’ll allow you to build up a library and then you can keep resharing that content over time. So it’s, I guess like Buffer with the exception of the kind of automatic recycling. Now, I believe Buffer may have changed a little bit in recent times or at least they’ve got the ability to re-import things, but they’re still quite a manual process available in there. So that was quite useful for us to have that Meet Edgar.

So we used that for a little while, but over time we felt we wanted to have something that was inside of our WordPress. We’re in our website all the time. We’re looking at our statistics inside of the WP admin. We’re constantly writing drafts of content, we’re publishing our podcasts in there, etcetera. We’re responding to comments, so we’re pretty much in our WordPress for leejacksondev.com a lot. And so we decided, Hey, what the hell, Why don’t we create our own tool? Because there’s bits of buffer that we like, there’s bits of Hootsuite that we like, there’s bits of me, Edgar, that we like, but we’d like to wrap all of that into one system that we can run from within our WordPress. Now, about two years ago we developed an application called Karuvi and we marketed it only a tiny bit, but then got so busy with other projects it just kind of languished off to the side and that was built on WordPress and it was a full Twitter management solution. Funnily enough, just for Twitter, even before we knew we were going to focus just on Twitter and in that what we’d included was the ability to build up a library of content that you could keep reusing. We’d built in RSS feeds so you could pull in content from your influencers and we’d built in all sorts of other tools like bulk following for people, bulk unfollow all these tools that we thought that people would want. And when we tried to market it, we realized the way we’d built it was super complex. We spent way too much time and made it, you know, it was essentially a beast, an amazing beast. It still exists. And if anyone would like to help us market that, it’s an absolute amazing product. But what we realized we needed to do was create a version of that, take some of that code and create a simplified version of that that could run in the WordPress administration area that would allow us to automatically suck in our blog posts, automatically suck in our podcast posts as well, and but also allow us to create a library of reusable tweets, both image tweets and standard tweets, and also have us be able to pull in RSS feeds, etcetera. And then we’d have one simple schedule panel that we could tweet everything out.

So since then we created sochipress and you can go and check that one out at leejacksondev/podcast, we very quickly realized that social press was is going to be a valuable product for other people who want to focus their own business strategy at Twitter. So we we built it. We used it for some considerable time. It was great to use for us. And that was the answer to our problem at that time. What we’ve since then done is we now use a combination of that. And also we have Sarah, who works with her own scheduling software where she puts in a whole load of content as per the content strategy that she’s helped define. But for us, initially it was define that, that target place. And then we built for ourselves the perfect platform that would meet our needs at that time. Now, the great thing about it is it meets a lot of people’s needs right now.

So. I’m going to plug SochiPress just just for the heck of it. If you are focusing on Twitter and you just want to automate some of the process of sharing content, automatically pulling in tweets from other sites and then tweeting them out, then go ahead, check it out. leejacksondev.com/plugin and you can install that. There’s a 30 day money back guarantee and see if that’s a tool that you guys can use for your business. Otherwise, do go and check out Meet Edgar. That’s a fantastic tool. Does the same, but it reaches out other platforms, not just Twitter. You’ve then also got buffer. That’s buffer.com. And you’ve also got Hootsuite. They’re kind of the the three leading platforms for content scheduling, although there’s a whole load more. I remember Kim Doyal was recommending only the other day Coschedule, which allows you to connect multiple social media accounts and your WordPress to plan content, etcetera. So depending upon your needs, go ahead and find a tool that’s fit for purpose. Go and try those free trials. They’re great. 14 Day free trial on Coschedule. There’s I think a 15 or 14 day trial of Buffer, etcetera. So go ahead, try those trials and find that tool that’s perfect for you. You never know, though, if you’ve already got someone involved in your strategy, some a consultant to advise you, then go ahead and use the tool that they have recommended for your platforms. But yet us not having a tool at the time that a couple of years ago and using multiple tools was just a big issue for us. And you know, we were finding that we had 2 or 3 tools on the go. We were overlapping, repeating ourselves and just plainly looking stupid. So it was really good just to to kind of hone in on that one tool that would work for our business. All right. So we’ve talked about a lot here. I want to just kind of break it down real quick then for you. You know, our five problems and what we did. So the breakdown, the first is lack of time. So remember, lack of time is just perception. You got to evaluate what is important and then make time. So your ongoing sales pipeline is important. Therefore, social media is a marketing activity. It is important. It is therefore something you should invest money in. It is something that you should invest your time in. Okay, so lack of time, boom at the water job done. No, No content. Poor content. Fine. If you’ve got nothing to share, there’s definitely other people’s content that you can share. That’s a good start. But secondly, you can quickly and easily create content. You can create a few 500 to 800 letters, sorry worded blogs, but also you can create content using the myriad of tools out there right now, like Periscope, Blab, Meerkat, Snapchat, etcetera. So you can create content in loads of different ways that adds value a short five, 3 minute or 5 minute video that’s valuable content. You can share that out. Another.

The other problem was too many social media platforms. So invest in the platforms where your customers are at, where are they and where are they engaging the most. So like I said, for us it was Twitter. And then if you’ve got no strategy in our experience, although we came up with an internal strategy which started to work, it really started to work when we paid someone. So in our view, it pays to pay somebody to help out. So that’s a real social media consultant, not somebody who will just put content into a scheduler, but somebody who’s going to consult on strategy and he’s going to get under the hood of your business. And then the final problem was finding a tool that was fit for purpose. Once you’ve nailed your strategy, once you’ve committed time to your social media, you’re going to want to find that tool that fits you perfectly. So find a tool that’s going to support the platform or the platforms that you’ve chosen to do and to do well, and then just have a go at all those free trials and find the perfect tool for your business that’s going to minimize the amount of administration that you have to do. Because the important thing is, is finding that tool that enables you to engage more. So you want a heavier a heavier aspect of engagement versus actual administration. And updating your plugin now, obviously, sorry, you’re updating the service. Obviously for us, we created a plugin, social press, but for you guys it might be investing your time in Coschedule or something along those lines, but finding that platform that reduces administration and maximizes your engagement time. All right. Well, this has been a different episode. This has been me talking at you. Thank you so much for bearing with me my ums and ahs as I just work through our short little history of social media. Now, I’m definitely not an expert. That is why I brought in the experts to pay.

But I just wanted to share the story of a real life web agency who had a problem realizing that, you know, they weren’t doing social media well, they weren’t generating leads out of social media and just wanted to share our story over the last couple of years and how we’ve got to where we are today. And we’re still very, very early on in our road. Now, if you’re a social media specialist, hey, get in touch. I’d love to talk to social media gurus and we’d love to get you on the show as well. Funnily enough, the most popular episode was with Sarah Moore only the other day where she shared some real valuable advice on social media, and we’re going to get her back in just a few weeks time, talking specifically about content marketing. So I’m really honored and I’m really, really excited to have her on board. But guys, just remember next steps. What can you do? I’d recommend get that meeting. If you’re on your own, get that meeting with yourself. Excuse me. If you’re in a team, get together, define those problems and then start to put in some solutions. So a recap. Our problems were lack of time, poor content, too many platforms, no strategy and not the correct tools. And we were able to answer all of those problems and then share a united vision, united goal. You know, a shared vision equals results. So I encourage you go out there and start to define your strategy and guys, you’re going to have a blast. So all that is left for me to say is you’re welcome and keep innovating.

And there you have it. Thanks for listening to the WP Innovator podcast. If you made it this far, listening to my voice for 40 minutes, then well done. I hope you got loads and loads of value out of it. Don’t forget I’m still giving away my free plugin list. That’s a list of ten amazing plugins that have added real value to my agency and have helped increase productivity and helped blow clients minds. And you can go and grab that on leejacksondev.com/secret list. That’s leeJacksondev.com/secret list. Have an awesome day.