HOW TO AUTOMATE YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA AND BUILD RELATIONSHIPS
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Social Media Automation Tips …
- How To Automate Your Social Media And Build Relationships
- Anything you can automate – – automate
- Social is a great way to become visible and initially make a connection through one on one connections
- On Twitter, you can no longer duplicate content
- Leverage reTweets
- Write down multiple status updates when you do a post
- Always drive people to your email list and website
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SHARE THIS EPISODE: – HOW TO AUTOMATE YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA AND BUILD RELATIONSHIPS
HOW TO AUTOMATE YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA AND BUILD RELATIONSHIPS
Use MeetEdgar to broadcast your information to your followers so you have more time to build relationships
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Doug: Welcome back, listeners, another episode of Real Marketing Real Fast. Today, I am super excited to have a special guest in the studio. Laura Roeder, she is the founder of Edgar or as I refer to it as MeetEdgar, it’s a social media automation tool. It’s designed to prevent status updates from going to waste. Laura is an expert in this field. If you look at her background and her bio, you will see that this tool was formed from a need to be able to recycle and reuse evergreen content. Laura has given talks to conferences like Blog Her, South by Southwest, and has spoken about the value of independent entrepreneurship at The White House. She’s also appeared on Forbes Fast Company, Mashable, C-Net and many other publications. We’re looking forward to digging in deep and learning about social media and automation. Welcome to the show today.
Laura Roeder: Thank you, Doug. I’m excited to be here.
Doug: What I found really interesting was I did a little bit of background, I looked at your company, and I was surprised to see you guys are almost an entirely remote organization. Then, I came across your page of your values and just kind of fell in love with your approach choose kindness, take ownership, and value for value.
Laura Roeder: Yeah. Just to be clear, we’re actually 100% remote. We don’t have any offices.
Doug: Wow. There you go. Today, we’re talking about social media and automation. I fell in love with your tool when I first started my podcast. I was looking for a better way to schedule. As I mentioned to you before we got going, I had tried everything in the marketplace. I’m always looking at best of breed. Do you want to share a little bit of the backstory of how you got started and how you brought the company to where it is today?
Laura Roeder: Yeah. I’ve been working in the social media space for a long time, since 2008. That’s 10 years now. It’s 2018. That’s about as long as social media marketing has been around. Yeah, I started off doing consulting and then training and now, Edgar is a tool that manages your social media for you. How Edgar came to be is I had come up with this methodology to save a lot of time on social media doing social media for myself and exploring what was working for my clients. I noticed how few people see a status update, and obviously, now there’s a lot of talk about reach dropping. Reach has never been 100% on social media. It keeps getting lower. It’s lower now than it has been. But, I would look at my stats for Twitter and Facebook, and even back in the day, let’s say at some point you might have got 30% reach, which you can’t get any more, but if you got 30% reach, that means that 70% of the people that choose to follow you did not see that update. Now, it’s usually more like 5% to 95% are not seeing that update. I thought why is everyone writing five new updates for the rest of time when you could just be leveraging the content that you already have?
I have up with this methodology to divide all your content into categories to make it really easy to batch, so if you like to send inspirational quotes, you can just sit down and grab 50 of them. I was storing all of this in a spreadsheet and copying and pasting it into a social media tool and teaching my clients to do the same. It’s like why doesn’t this social media tool store a library of my social media updates? That seems sort of obvious and why don’t the tools help me to repurpose my updates? That’s exactly what Edgar does. You have a big library of all your updates. Edgar cycles through them. As Doug know, because Doug is one of our customers who got some insider information, we also have some really cool features coming out soon that are going to help you take your existing content and automatically turn it into a bunch of high-quality status updates. It’s going beyond just repeating the same update to being able to vary your updates but still send people to the same great content that you’ve created that they need to see.
Doug: One of the things that I’ve noticed is I always experiment. I figure that I’m a survey of one and when I’m working on my own social media or any of my own marketing for my company, it’s my credit card so I can try whatever the heck I want and see what works and what doesn’t work. When I find stuff that works, I take it to my clients and say hey, this is what I’m doing. This is a great tool and it works. One of the things I started testing with Twitter specifically was increasing the frequency of the tweets like you mentioned. I noticed a direct correlation between the number of tweets that were sent out and the growth of the account.
Laura Roeder: Mm-hmm (affirmative). I’m not surprised to hear that at all. That’s really common advice we give people is just to send out more on social media. Most people are nervous that they’re bothering people or that they’re going to be too noisy, but what we forget is that we see all of our own social updates, right?
Doug: Sure.
Laura Roeder: To us, it’s boring. We’ve read it before. We’re like I already said that or said something really similar. No one else, maybe our mom, is reading 100% of our social updates. They’re literally reading more like 5%, so that’s really cool that you tested that out. I’m not surprised to hear those results.
Doug: When you’re looking at, like you said, people say hey, maybe it’s too much information, I’m really looking to attract an avatar that kind of meets my personality and style of my business. My thinking is if people don’t like the frequency or what I’m posting, then they’ll just unfollow me which is perfectly fine, because we’re probably not a good fit.
Laura Roeder: Everyone seems to forget that social media is 100% opt-in, so when people are like I don’t want to bug people about my business, it’s like why would they follow at Twitter account about your business if they didn’t … Your Twitter account does not say free iPads on it, right? It has the name of your business on it. Why would they follow it unless they actively want news and updates and whatever else you’re providing about your business? Yeah, if they don’t like it, they’ll just unfollow you, right? If they don’t like your emails, they’ll just unsubscribe, and then you know they’re not interested in your business. That’s great. From a sales perspective, if you’re doing direct sales, you’re always looking for the yes or no. A no is great, too, because you can move on at that point. It’s the same in your marketing. When people unfollow you when people unsubscribe, they’ve given you a no and you don’t have to waste any more money advertising on them, just for sending them emails.
Doug: Yep, fair enough. That’s so true. In terms of your business, I noticed that it said when I was doing a little bit of background that you don’t have any sales staff. Do you want to share maybe with our audience how do you guys generate sales and leads for your own business?
Laura Roeder: Yeah. Our customers are very small businesses. It’s funny because this term small business is so broad. It can mean only 2,000 employees. You’re a small business. You’re not a Fortune 500 company. A lot of our customers are solopreneurs or businesses with 10 people or less, and because of that, it really makes sense to us to do an entirely self-serve model, so self-serve means you go to our website, you put in your credit card, and you buy Edgar. We find most entrepreneurs, that’s how they like to buy. They don’t want to have to do a demo. They don’t want to have to schedule a call with a salesperson. They want to just be able to go to the website and sign up. That means that we have literally no sales team at our company. That means that we rely 100% on marketing for people to get educated about the product.
Of course, we do have a great customer service team that will answer any questions that you have. But, they’re not trained in sales, which is great, because they’re not going to do anything pushy. They’re just going to actually answer your questions. Yeah, we’re a very marketing heavy company, because all of our customers have visited our website or gotten on our newsletter, read our blog, basically used our materials to educate themselves about the software.
Doug: I was trying to remember how I first came to know about your product, because like I said, I spend most of my days looking at what’s new and going to events and trade shows and trying to talk to industry leaders. I figure if my clients come to me and say hey, I need this, then I’m really not serving them because they figured it out on their own. It’s my job to find this. I think I was listening to a buddy of mine’s podcast, Shane Sims, and I saw that he had used MeetEdgar and I thought oh man, not another tool. I have a plethora of tools that I’m using and I signed up. The free trial went by and I thought I really need to take a deeper look at this. Once I went away and got my head around how I could leverage this in a big way, it was like man, this makes so much sense. That’s how I got to meet you guys.
Laura Roeder: Yeah, podcasts are great exposure for us. That’s a really active part of our strategy is being on podcasts so people can learn about us. We hear that anecdotally, most people seem to hear about us from a friend who was using Edgar who was like this is so cool. This has saved me so much time. Then, told a friend about it or posted online. That word of mouth is a huge component to our marketing.
Doug: Now, one of the things I couldn’t find in all my looking online is I keep saying MeetEdgar, you say Edgar, and I did reference or see some place in the documentation that you refer to Edgar as a he. Is there a backstory on who Edgar is?
Laura Roeder: Yeah, so our official name is MeetEdgar, but we sometimes say Edgar for shorthand. Edgar is the name of the octopus that manages your social media. Before the project launched, you have to call projects something while you’re working on them. We were calling it Edgar for no reason that I can come up with. It was just a name. It sort of sounded like a grandpa name. We thought it was kind of funny, and then when we’re like okay, this is going to be a real thing. We’re going to launch it. Let’s do a whole branding thing. We thought of all these names and they were all sort of like cheesy like social spinner. We’re like we don’t really like any of these names. I kind of thought wouldn’t it be funny if we just called it Edgar, if there was a social media scheduling tool that was just called Edgar?
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SHARE THIS EPISODE: – HOW TO AUTOMATE YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA AND BUILD RELATIONSHIPS
HOW TO AUTOMATE YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA AND BUILD RELATIONSHIPS
Use MeetEdgar to broadcast your information to your followers so you have more time to build relationships
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Then, it really lends itself to this character and this avatar and managing this person or octopus, handling your social media for you, which really goes along well with what our tool does, because what’s really cool about MeetEdgar is it is so much more hands-off than other tools. Really does a lot more than the social media scheduling tools people are used to. Yeah, the whole just persona was born. We always call Edgar he. We’re like don’t worry, he’ll get it taken care of. It’s just been sort of a fun way to have a lot of fun with the brand and something that our customers have definitely latched onto.
Doug: That’s really cool. I love the octopus and I thought maybe it was a family pet at some point or a dog or somebody but apparently not.
Laura Roeder: I like the idea that maybe someone had a family pet of an octopus named Edgar and we were like oh, we should name yourself after our pet octopus.
Doug: That’s funny. Where do you see things moving in social media? Right now, there’s so much stuff going on. There’s a couple points I want to cover with you. One is I say that social media doesn’t work because people aren’t being social. They use it as a broadcast tool. I love your tool for the ability to broadcast, but I don’t think that my responsibility in terms of using social media for myself, for my clients ends with sending a message. It’s more about connecting with people and getting conversations offline.
Laura Roeder: Yeah. We’re big believers in using a tool to broadcast so that you can spend your time building relationships, because what happens is if you’re not using a tool, social media just takes an incredible amount of time, right?
Doug: Yep.
Laura Roeder: There’s just a huge amount of grunt work involved and coming up with your status updates every week, sending them out, sending them out to all the networks, and software’s great at handling that, right? Edgar, just leave it to Edgar. He can just so that for you. You do not need to go in and do all that, but what Edgar is terrible at doing is chatting with people, sharing, yeah, actually talking to someone on Twitter and then seeing them at a networking event a week later and referencing the conversation you had or the link you saw they shared. Software cannot do any of those things. That’s what we preach. That’s what we see is really effective for social media marketing. Anything you can automate, automate so that you can spend your lifetime building relationships and connecting. The cool part is that stuff doesn’t take much time at all. For most businesses, 10 minutes a day, you can definitely get in there, chat, share, connect with people and be done.
Doug: What tips might you give people in terms of in addition to making sure that you’re scheduling and getting content out regularly, to get the conversations offline and start to build relationships? Because I find lots of times people will hide behind social or websites or fill in the blank and say this is my sales and marketing. It’s like no, you need to talk to people. That’s not sales and marketing. That’s procrastination.
Laura Roeder: Yeah.
Doug: What would say to people who need to connect, to actually make social work so they generate business and build relationships?
Laura Roeder: Yeah, so social is a great way to become visible to people or form that first part of the relationship. In particular, Twitter and LinkedIn, you can really connect with someone one on one. Twitter, 100%. LinkedIn sort of depends on people’s settings and if they check their messages and all that stuff. But, both of those networks allow you to have a one on one conversation with someone that you’ve never met before, where Facebook is a different beast. It doesn’t really work that way. I’m a huge fan of Twitter, in particular, because unless they’re Kim Kardashian, people are reading all of their mentions. It’s not that hard to read all of your mentions. For any much anyone you want to reach, again, unless they’re a mega-celebrity, they will see a message you send them on Twitter. It’s generally a pretty friendly space.
I’m thinking of someone the other day. There’s a founder that I wanted to connect with and I wanted to meet, so I started following her on Twitter. I sent a few replies to her tweets, which can seriously just be as simple as retweeting and sharing the link and being like this was interesting or responding thanks for sharing that. I liked that article. Don’t overthink it. You don’t have to come up with some brilliant, novel thing to say. Then, I just sent her a message on Twitter and was like hey, would love to jump on a call and connect and we did and we had a great conversation. Now, she’s someone who’s a friend. Yeah, I think social networks are a free place to start those relationships. They’re also a great place to stay in touch and sort of stay on someone’s radar, just reminding the person that you exist, especially if you’re in a field like we have a lot of realtors that use MeetEdgar.
For a realtor, just staying on people, maybe you meet someone and you just want them to remember a few times a year that you exist so that when they do need you or they do need to refer you, they can remember your name, right? You’re not just a person that they met three years ago. It’s like oh, I met them three years ago and I follow them on Twitter and they follow me and we chat back and forth every so often. I have a way to reach them. But yeah, it’s really important to turn those relationships, if you’re trying to do something like make a sale, just take that next step of meeting up in person, getting on a call.
Doug: Great advice. I wrote some goals for myself. Every year, between Christmas and New Years, I kind of do my goal setting. I thought how can I get more engaged on social? I thought what if I comment, retweet, and like five people’s posts a day? Some will say that’s not very much. It isn’t for the day, but over the course of a year, it’s a lot. It didn’t take long where like you said, you have a conversation and it’s not a sales conversation. Hey, Laura, you don’t know me but I just followed you and I want you to check out my Facebook page and like this and click on my sales file.
Laura Roeder: Right.
Doug: It’s no like you said, I like your content or this is great advice or what do you think of this? The conversation begins. Then, after the conversation begins, there may be an opportunity. But, I never lead with a hey, buy my stuff, you don’t know me.
Laura Roeder: Yeah. That’s such a great example of what I mentioned before about how doing this is really not that time-consuming. Yeah, five interactions a day is definitely going to be below that 10-minute threshold, if not a lot lower, and you also pointed out something that I think is overlooked a lot. A good way to look at it is you need to leave evidence. This is what I always tell people. If you haven’t left any evidence, you haven’t done social media marketing, because what we do is we’re like oh, I’m going to do some social media marketing and we open up Twitter and we read blog posts, you know? We start clicking on links. We start reading the blog posts. That’s what Twitter was designed to get us to do. It’s no surprise.
Doug: Yeah.
Laura Roeder: But, if you spend 10 minutes reading people’s blog posts, there’s no evidence of that on the internet, right?
Doug: That’s right. Yeah.
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SHARE THIS EPISODE: – HOW TO AUTOMATE YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA AND BUILD RELATIONSHIPS
HOW TO AUTOMATE YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA AND BUILD RELATIONSHIPS
Use MeetEdgar to broadcast your information to your followers so you have more time to build relationships
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Laura Roeder: You haven’t left any [inaudible 00:17:53] lines, so you need to do things that leave evidence, which is like you said, doing a share, doing a like, doing a comment, that’s a good way to know if you’re spending your time wisely, because just reading blog posts is not helping your market your business.
Doug: What I found is by getting conversations offline, even though most of them haven’t transferred into business cause they’re not all necessarily my customer avatar, but there’s been a conversation starter and what I found is you build advocates that way. You build evangelists for your brand. You take a call from somebody, a small business is starting, and they have some questions. You just give them some advice. The next thing you look and everywhere you’re on social, they’re just out there being an amplifier of your content.
Laura Roeder: Yeah, I think that’s such a great lesson. I remember when I first started my business, I didn’t really get that because I was, of course, using Twitter to market myself. I remember I would see some people that would always share my stuff, and they’d never purchase. They’d never bought anything from me. I didn’t get it at first. It would annoy me. I was like if these people love me so much …
Doug: Buy my stuff.
Laura Roeder: Right. Why aren’t they spending any money with me? Then, I realized oh, I’d much rather have someone spreading the word to 100 people than making one sale. Obviously, you need both. You need the sales, too, but they’re actually even providing way more value to me than someone just making a one time sale and not telling anyone about it. Yeah, it’s so important to recognize and appreciate and really actively encourage people who, maybe they never buy anything from you, but yeah, you give them some advice. Now, they have you top of mind. They’re sharing, again like I said how people find out about MeetEdgar, whether it’s linking to you and someone says I need an expert for this or telling a friend about you, those people are so valuable for you for your business.
Doug: Absolutely. Let’s change gears. I talked to you briefly before we got on the podcast and said hey, can we discuss the changes in social? Right now, top of mind for me with my clients are all the bans on crypto and blockchain and CBD and on that, so that’s a content question in terms of what they feel is good for consumers. What’s happening in terms of the space on Twitter for duplicate content? Can’t I post on multiple accounts? Are they suggesting I don’t do that, or I can’t post the same content over and over again? Where are we at and where are we going?
Laura Roeder: Yeah. In March 2018, Twitter passed some big rules that I’ve been tweeting furiously about because Twitter has really not spread the word about it at all. It’s a pretty big deal. You’re now not allowed to post the same update to multiple accounts that you own. You’re also not allowed to post the same update more than once on the same account. Twitter didn’t put any parameters on that, so as they’ve written it, it literally means that you can’t post the same update five years later is how they’ve written it. Now, it remains to be seen if this will get enforced, how this will get enforced. But, from our perspective, we want to make sure that our clients are not in violation of Twitter’s rules because I’ve seen a lot of people get banned from a lot of social accounts for not following the rules. It’s definitely something that happens. No one thinks it’s going to happen to them, and then it really sucks when it does. When you’ve been building an audience for a few years and your account is shut down or worse. Now, there’s this thing called Shadow Ban, where just no one sees your updates and you don’t know that you’ve been shut down, which is the worst thing that can happen.
We are definitely complying with Twitter’s rules. The rules are interesting because I understand the intent. The intent is that they don’t want Twitter to turn into a place that’s just on marketing messages, right, and no connecting. But, it’s a real balance, because Twitter is a marketing channel. Twitter wants Twitter to be a marketing channel to some degree, but not too much degree, you know? They want to keep both. These rules are their way of trying to make things more conversational.
I think that I personally believe they went a little too hardcore with it. It’s such a common practice, especially with something like your new blog post. You’re going to put the title of the post. You’re going to do that a few times the first week that it’s live. I really don’t think that’s ruining Twitter for anyone. I think that’s actually making Twitter better by giving people more opportunity to find it. My opinion is they took it a little far, but I get the intent behind it. As marketers, it’s just forcing us to step up our game. The good part is you can still send the same link. Twitter’s not saying that once you link to something, you can never link to it again. Basically, what entrepreneurs need to do is change up the messages that they send on Twitter, instead of sending the exact same message more than once.
Doug: Yep. That makes sense. I saw the change as well and I thought oh man, this is a real nuisance, because, for example, I have several Twitter accounts. I have a personal account, which is kind of a mix between my business and the things I like to do with my family and friends and hiking and fitness. But, my wife and I also have a fitness business, so it wouldn’t be uncommon for me to share the same content, whether it’s about a bullet coffee or the latest Cross Fit workout or something across multiple accounts. I’m going darn, now I can’t do that. I have to repurpose.
Laura Roeder: Yeah, that’s so common. So many entrepreneurs have a Twitter account for their business and then one under their personal time. Yeah, I don’t know if Twitter didn’t totally think through how common that is, or if they just were like yep, we know what’s coming and we don’t want people to do it anymore.
Doug: I think the good news like you said, is it will raise the bar. I think that every platform out there, I’m trying to think of who said it. I think it was Gary Vaynerchuk, said that every time there’s a new marketing platform, marketers ruin it. He started with email and he kind of went through the list. I certainly see that in places like Twitter where people think that hey, just because we connected you can send me an immediate sales pitch, which I just ignore with up building relationships. Yeah, okay, I get that. How do we step up our game? How do we take advantage of this? We’re early adopters. We’ve got an audience that are marketers that want to learn how to grow their business. What do we do to stand out from the crowd now that this has changed?
Laura Roeder: Yeah. On Twitter, in particular, one thing that you can do is leverage retweets. If you have, for example, a personal Twitter account and a business Twitter account, you probably want to post your content on the business account and then retweet it from your personal account, which is kind of a nice win/win anyway, because you’re getting that exposure for your business account on your personal account. The downside is at this time, there’s not a way for tools like Edgar. It’s harder, because before you could just have Edgar send your update to both accounts. There’s not a way for tools at this time to do the workflow I just described, although maybe there will be in the future. But, that’s a great thing to do. Then, just I think batching a bunch of updates about the same blog post. This is the functionality that Edgar’s going to have or maybe has, depending on when you’re listening to this, making it really easy to batch a bunch of status updates on the same post. We also have actually some really advanced cool tech coming that’s going to create those status updates for you in a really … Status updates that you actually want to send, not like we’ve had a robot pull random words from the post that don’t make any sense. Not like that.
Doug: Okay.
Laura Roeder: You actually want to send these updates. That’s something that we’re working on right now, and I’ve played with it a little bit. It’s pretty amazing. Whether you’re doing that automatically or you’re just generating them from yourself, I think a practice that everyone needs to put in place is that whenever you have that new blog post, go ahead and write down 10 status updates. That’s just you can do a little poll quote. If you’ve considered multiplied headlines, you can use the other headlines as your status updates. There are different ways to get that done, but I think just putting that in your workflow to say okay, whenever I write a new post, I’m going to have 10 unique status updates to promote that post will … 10 is a lot. If you’re sending that post out once every two months, let’s say, now you have more than a year’s life of status updates pointing to that post. The trick with all this stuff is to batch it and just to do it then. It’s really hard to overtime to remember to keep sending it and take the time to write something new, but if you just do it as part of the process as you’re writing the post, it’s pretty easy to get done.
Doug: Yep, that’s a fair comment. The tool makes it so easy to post content and run it. But, I think one of the things that we’ve talked obviously lots about is Twitter, but I also use it for LinkedIn and my personal Facebook page as well as my business page. My thinking was exactly what you mentioned at the beginning. Only 5% of the people are seeing my tweet or my social media post on Twitter. Obviously, maybe there’s more reach or it sticks around a little bit longer on LinkedIn or Facebook, but my goal was when I launched the podcast was I wanted to be able to publish it each time throughout the day on all the different platforms, so obviously Twitter was heavily used and less on my personal Facebook page, one on my personal but multiple on the company page and LinkedIn. Do you see any changes or do you anticipate changes with other platforms kind of following suit, looking at what Twitter’s doing?
Laura Roeder: Yeah, to be clear, we do still advise repeating the exact same status update on LinkedIn and Facebook. There’s no reason not to. It makes your life a lot easier. It’ll help you get a lot more exposure. I can’t predict what these platforms are going to do. There’s nothing that makes me think they would adopt the exact same rules. It’s possible, but you talked earlier about Gary V saying that marketers ruin every platform, and I think the trend that we see from every social network is that they give a lot of leeway to marketers, because they do want the marketers to use it. Then, they pull it back. Obviously, this is something that we’ve seen on Facebook pages, right?
Doug: Sure.
Laura Roeder: You used to be able to get a lot of reach from your Facebook pages, and then you dialed that way back. Right now, Facebook Messenger, they’re letting marketers go wild on Facebook Messenger. They’re letting you use chatbots to send tons of automated messages. I can tell you there is no way that that will last because Messenger will become overrun with marketing messages. Then, they’re not going to let people automate them anymore. Similarly, Facebook Groups. Right now, Facebook Groups are a great way to get more exposure because they show up in the algorithm much higher than pages. Again, I would be very, very surprised if things remained that way because they give marketers a lot of exposure and a lot of leeway to get them to use these tools. Then, they’re like oh, we don’t want that much marketing on Groups or on Messenger and they dial it back. I think that’s the overarching, general trend that I see on all the social platforms.
What’s cool about LinkedIn right now, LinkedIn is in a phase of giving marketers a lot of access. A lot of people don’t realize how much traffic you can drive from LinkedIn, both LinkedIn, is it Pulse? Is that what’s the blogging platform is called?
Doug: Yep. Yep.
Laura Roeder: Yeah, LinkedIn Pulse is great for driving traffic, publishing your articles there. LinkedIn Status Updates, for my personal LinkedIn, I just have Edgar turned on so Edgar just sends updates for me. LinkedIn, sometimes for business sends us more traffic than Twitter, even though we’re super active on Twitter. We’re not active on LinkedIn, but we have messages going there. Right now, LinkedIn is trying to get people on LinkedIn and using it, so it’s actually a great place to market right now. I think that’s something a small business can take advantage of. It’s like when tools like LinkedIn or Facebook Messenger or whatever when they’re in this golden age of giving you a lot of access, don’t count on it lasting forever but take advantage.
Doug: Yeah, that’s great advice. You’re right. They pulled back on Facebook for sure and Facebook Groups. I guess the advice that we’re rolling with our clients is back up your data. You never know when your account may be suspended, but it’s a lot less painful if you have access to your followers to reach out again than going hmm, I had 10,000 followers on Twitter, but I have no idea how to reach them again. Post and being able to reach them because you’re on multiple platforms or you’ve downloaded the contact information.
Laura Roeder: I think that’s great advice. It also points to the reminder to always get people on your email list. Always drive people to your website. Those are still spaces that you own. Yeah, we do have to remember that it’s like people like they have this right to be able to market their business for free on Twitter and Facebook. They’re just companies that are letting you market there for free. They don’t have to. They’re not being unfair when they don’t let you do that anymore. Just be glad they ever did is how I look at it. Yeah, I think it’s really smart not to put all your eggs in one basket or to be assuming yeah, that you’ll always have access to your list of followers somewhere. They’ll always be able to see your messages.
Doug: LinkedIn for me has followed the same rule as Twitter. The more I post, the more contacts I get. I probably get a dozen or 15 requests a day. I have my VA to go through and vet them. Is it a real person? Do they have a picture? Do they have a bio? Do we have any common connections? Then, we connect and we send a follow-up message saying hey, great to connect. Here’s my podcast. Here’s a link if you want to set up a phone meeting for 30 minutes just to have a conversation about what you do. I get about one phone call a week. A few of those people will spam me. We just immediately delete them. We carry on. But, so I do exactly what you’ve said. I go into Edgar and I set up my schedule. I’ve got a schedule set in my calendar for every social media platform, and just pick the category, push go, and kind of set it and forget it and off it runs.
Laura Roeder: Yeah, yeah. The strategy that you’ve outlined is something that really any listener can replicate and is going to get some results for their business. If you’re listening, do what Doug just said.
Doug: We’re getting close to the time to wrap up. What advice would you give listeners that are wanting to get started? They’ve got a business. They’re probably running some social media platforms. Are there a couple points that you’d share with them, how they take that next step and set up an automation or set up a tool or a platform to help them grow their business?
Laura Roeder: Yeah. You have to remember that it takes a while to build up the numbers. This is a question that we get a lot about MeetEdgar. People will be like I’m new. I don’t know if I’m ready for it. I would really advise setting up MeetEdgar right from day one, because it’s a catch 22. You can’t build a following unless you’re sending out content and unless you’re active. But, in the beginning, it feels very sad and lonely, because you’re like I’m sending out this content and no one is responding. Yes, that is what’s happening in the beginning.
Doug: That’s right.
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HOW TO AUTOMATE YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA AND BUILD RELATIONSHIPS
Use MeetEdgar to broadcast your information to your followers so you have more time to build relationships
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Laura Roeder: People make the mistake of pulling back. They’re like I sent out a bunch of updates and no one responded. I guess I should stop sending out updates, but really, you just have to sort of trudge through that beginning period. You don’t have to get it perfect. People also get so worried about phrasing the message perfectly or sending out the perfect content. Just start talking to people, right? Just start sending things out. You’ll start to figure out what gets a response. You can look at what gets clicks to your website. You can grow from there. But, just put something into action.
Doug: My content strategy for my personal stuff isn’t really that difficult. I really like learning and staying on top of what’s happening in marketing and technology. If you go look at my Twitter account, what you’ll see is basically my reading list. They’re either articles that I’ve read, I’ve skimmed, or they’re articles that I want to read. I began just posting them so I had a single place instead of using something like Evernote that was easier for me to go find all the stuff that was on my reading list later in the day.
Laura Roeder: Yeah, yeah. It’s such an easy strategy for getting content out there. Right. Post the stuff you’re reading. You want to add your own content to the mix at some point, but just post things and share things that are interesting to you. That’s a great way to get started.
Doug: What are you most excited about today as it relates to marketing and Edgar and the stuff that you’re working on in the next, say six to 12 months?
Laura Roeder: It’s a really exciting time for Edgar, because we recently did a big reimagining of the whole tool, actually. We had meetings where we sat down and we said okay, we built this tool in 2014. If we were building it from scratch again in 2018, what would we build? What features would it have? How would it look different? That was a really fun activity to do. I can’t share everything, but we have shared that we’re going to be doing like I mentioned, a really easy way for you to add a bunch of different statuses for the same link. We are going to be launching both our Instagram integrations and our Pinterest integration this year, so that’s going to be really cool. Social media changes all the time, and being in the social media space, we have to change all the time, too.
It can be frustrating. It can be frustrating at times, but I love it. It’s exciting that we’re always forced to innovate, and we’re always looking for ways to make our customers lives easier.
Doug: I love your approach of saying how would we build it today if we started from scratch? What a great approach to the marketplace.
Laura Roeder: Yeah, yeah. It can be a scary exercise because you’re like oh, there is some things that we would do really different. But, I think it’s so important for keeping your business relevant.
Doug: Yeah, it’s so funny. I can imagine. I’m thinking oh no, what if we’re in the wrong space? We wouldn’t do this again.
Laura Roeder: Yeah. Luckily, we’re like okay, we still want to serve entrepreneurs. We still want to help them save time on social, so yeah, we found that our core values are the same. But, we have some new ways to help them save time even better.
Doug: I’ve got a question that I pulled out of Tim Ferris’ book that it’s a little bit of an unusual question that I want to ask you. That is what is some of the bad advice that you hear in this space? For entrepreneurs that are listening, here’s some stuff you should ignore.
Laura Roeder: Oh, I think there’s so much bad marketing advice.
Doug: How about limiting it to social, then?
Laura Roeder: Yeah. Oh, there’s tons of that, too. The social advice that frustrates me the most is there are still some people preaching this. It used to be more common. Sometimes you come across these people that are like oh, it’s inauthentic to use any kind of scheduling or any kind of automation on social media. Social media was meant only for live conversations and you shouldn’t use any tools. The reason that frustrates me is they’re really not talking about marketing. They’re talking about using social media for chatting. I think this often gets confused because we use it for both reasons. If you look at Facebook, I’m on Facebook spending money advertising my business and I’m commenting on friends’ baby pictures.
Doug: Sure.
Laura Roeder: I’m doing both these things on Facebook. I cannot use the same strategy for both of them. I hate anything that makes an entrepreneur feel more stressed, more bogged down, feel like they have more to do because we have enough to do in our business. Anyone who’s guilting entrepreneurs, being like you shouldn’t use tools or you shouldn’t have a VA help read through your messages, cause that’s not authentic. That’s not you. It doesn’t make sense from a marketing perspective. We’re using these platforms as a marketing channel for our business, so to me, that’s the worst advice is to not think of social media as marketing. As we talked about earlier, yes, the conversations are a part of it, but that’s not all we’re doing as businesses on social media.
Doug: Yep, fair enough. I totally agree with you. If we want to be social, then we can be social. But, the thing that I think people often forget when they say no automation is that we’re on Pacific time. Guess what? It’s great for me to be active right now, but I’m not active when people in Asia are active or in Europe necessarily. The world isn’t operating …
Laura Roeder: Yeah, you’re not serving your customers. Right. Right. Yeah, so why should I do a disservice to my customers in Asia just because I’m in a different timezone and please do not ask me to wake up at 3 AM and send live tweets to my customers in Asia? That is not a good use of anyone’s time.
Doug: That’s funny. Yeah, the same thing. Don’t do that early in the morning and take your phone away if you’ve been out drinking as well. Who is one guest that you think I absolutely have to have on the podcast?
Laura Roeder: Oh, man.
Doug: This always stumps everybody. I always think it’s the easiest question, but everyone goes man, that’s the toughest question.
Laura Roeder: Because I’m thinking I don’t know who’s been on your podcast. I recently recorded a podcast with Greg Mercer. His business is called Jungle Scout, and they do a really fun podcast. Actually, well, I don’t think it’s out yet, but maybe it’ll be out when you’re listening to this where they did a Shark Tank-style business competition. Jungle Scout is tools for Amazon sellers and being not in Amazon, not in eCommerce, I have learned so much from him about that industry and I think some really interesting market specific things to that industry. That might be an interesting guest for you, yeah, Greg Mercer.
Doug: Super cool. Yeah, I’m interested in Amazon. Obviously, they’re leading the way in a lot of different areas. If you look at the big retailers that are being affected like Sears and Toys R Us and the bay here and the list goes on and on and on. Times are changing, so it’d be good to hook up with people who are going in the right direction.
Laura Roeder: Yes.
Doug: What’s the best place for people to find you? They want to connect with you. How do they find you?
Laura Roeder: Yeah, so you can find Edgar at MeetEdgar.com or MeetEdgar on Twitter, Facebook, and you can find me on Twitter @LKR.
Doug: Awesome. Listeners, as usual, we will have the show notes transcribed. I’ll make sure that we’ve got all of Laura’s contact information and the MeetEdgar information. I encourage you to connect with her in social. Check out their website. We use and love the tool, can’t recommend it any higher than that, other than we use it every single day and it’s made a tremendous increase for our business to connect with our listeners online.
Laura Roeder: Awesome.
Doug: Thanks so much for taking the time. Really appreciate it. I know we’ve been trying to get this interview in for a while with your schedule and my travel schedule as well, so thanks for connecting. Look forward to releasing this episode and hopefully watching you continue to grow your business.
Laura Roeder: Thank you.
Get in touch with Laura
Resources
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SHARE THIS EPISODE: – HOW TO AUTOMATE YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA AND BUILD RELATIONSHIPS
HOW TO AUTOMATE YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA AND BUILD RELATIONSHIPS
Use MeetEdgar to broadcast your information to your followers so you have more time to build relationships
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Links to other podcast and or blog posts:
Real Marketing Real Fast Podcast – host Doug Morneau – Episode #50
HOW TO AUTOMATE YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA