One thing that most business owners forget about is marketing. They get so busy to post anything or to even go into their accounts. We all know that consistency is the most important thing in order to keep accounts growing, to keep followers happy and entertained, and to get more customers and more traffic. Kristie Whites from Serving Social shares her time-tested 18-minute marketing plan to manage all of your social channels, whichever ones they may be. She believes it can be done and you are capable of managing social media in a small amount of time and be able to make some impact with it. You just need to have a plan.

Listen to the podcast here:

The 18-Minute Marketing Plan with Kristie Whites from Serving Social

We’ve got Kristie Whites from Serving Social coming in the office. She’s got a great presentation. She’s going to share basically looking at eighteen-minute marketing plan.

I’m excited to be back at Note CAMP. The community is awesome and I love marketing. I love to sit here and share. I could talk about it all day long. My husband gets a little annoyed at it, but it’s still good. I’m going to talk to you a little bit about planning. That’s the one thing that most business owners, when they’re coming in and starting something, they forget about, “I need to post something,” and they post it right then and there. That works for a certain amount of time until you get busy that you forget to do that posting that day or you forget to even go into your accounts at all. We all know that consistency is the most important thing in order to keep our accounts growing, to keep our followers happy and entertained, and to get more customers and more traffic as we’re trying to grow whatever it may be that we’re growing. What I’m going to show you is how to do that eighteen minutes a day. Manage all of your social channels, whichever ones they may be. I’ve broken multiple of them down and put little pro tips, some hints, and also some software to give you a boost. Then I’m going to show you how to do it in eighteen minutes. It can be done. You are capable of managing social media in a small amount of time and be able to make some impact with it. You just need to have a plan.

My husband and I, my partner in crime in everything, we own a company called Serving Social. It is our marketing company. We help businesses, large and small, and new startups. Doesn’t matter who you are, this is our social spoon because we believe in serving first. Our motto, mission, mantra, is marketing made simple. The idea is that marketing is a complex big thing. There’s lots of moving parts, but you can make it simple by sitting down, looking at yourself, giving yourself a little audit, and making a list, game plan. That’s what we’re going to show you with the eighteen minute a day social media plan. Nine out of ten customers wish to have the ability to have meaningful interactions with brands on social media. This came from stats provided by Hubspot. I’m sure a few of you’ve used them before, but the idea here, the concept or the reality here is that brands want to talk to you. They want to know who you are and they want to engage with you. They just don’t want to see your stuff. They want to see you. All of this is driven in a way where we’ve broken it down to where you can do each element to give your customer exactly what they need. The first step is engagement, and you’re going to do it every single morning for six minutes. Your first step in your social media routine, no matter how long it takes you and the first time, full disclosure, it will take you a little while.

It’ll take you a lot longer than eighteen minutes. The goal here is to keep doing it until eighteen minutes is achieved. Your first step, no matter how long it takes, should always be to pay attention to your most important audience, your current and potential customers. These are the people that are already on your networks. They are already talking to you, you’re already talking to them, and they’re already following you. Sometimes we get caught up in trying to continually grow our accounts that we forget about those that are already there in this community that keeps coming back. They need to be engaged with and you can do that in a variety of different ways. You do it differently depending on the social account. I want you to think about social accounts like personalities. Each one of them has a different type of personality and therefore you have to speak to it in a different way or interact on it in a different way. For example, Twitter moves fast. There are lots of postings all the time. It’s I’m here, I’m there; I’m doing my multitasking personality. That’s what I would consider Twitter to be, but it’s also news and heavy-hitting resources and an opportunity to get on in front of a lot of people really quickly, when leveraged properly. Whereas Facebook is one of the oldest social accounts and it’s a little bit more laid back. It has an older crowd and it’s used in different ways. It’s meant to be personal. It’s meant to be engaging with your family. Businesses have managed to find a way to interject themselves in there, whether it be through ads or through meaningful conversations. I’m going to talk a little bit about how to engage within each social account. The first thing you’re going to do every single day for six minutes is to review your Facebook notifications.

For your actual business page, it’s a tab called notifications. You have lots of different kinds: likes, comments, shares, and other. You can see activities and you can see requests. You should be checking these things daily, particularly requests because if you have a business page and somebody makes a request for information, and they suggest information to Facebook that could be correct, if you don’t reply to it in a certain amount of time, Facebook could override your current information and decide that that’s relevant. It’s about paying attention every single day to what’s happening on your accounts, regardless of what they might be. You can review notifications, like posts shared by your customers. If somebody shared something of yours, for example, Eric Hyde mentioned Serving Social in a post. I’m going to go take a look at that post. I’m going to go interact with it. I’m going to tell him thank you and I’m going to then reply to any new posts or new messages that might come from that. If there’s comments on that post, I’m going to start being active because Eric took the time to include me in that conversation, so I’m going to do the same back.

Same thing with Twitter, but in a different way. You check your mentions tab to see interactions and followers. You have notifications and then you have mentions. You also have moments in messages. All of these things quickly can be glanced out. I had eight other followers that I need to go see, so I’m going to go take a look at who those followers are. I’m going to take the time to tell them, “Thanks for following me” in a private message. I’d love to connect with you. I might even go as far as digging deeper and looking at their pages and starting to interact with some of their postings, but the idea is to engage with that person when they take the time to engage with you. Take time to note mentions that needed a deeper response. You’re going to have some people that are going to leave you direct messages and a lot of them are spam. That’s what they are. They’re automated responses. You can, instead of automated response, reply back as you. You don’t have to get an in depth, lengthy conversation, but you should take the time to at least reply back. Depending on what the comment is, it could be as simple as a high-five emoji or just an emoji itself. It doesn’t have to be very in depth. I don’t want you to feel weighed down when you feel you have to engage with every single person. You have to rate it, look at it, and decide, “Does this deserve more of my attention to engage in a conversation,” or does it just need a simple, “Thanks, I appreciate it?”

LinkedIn can be used in two different ways both personally for your profile and also for your business profile. I want you to check and moderate new connections. When I say moderate, I mean moderate. Do not accept every new connection that wants to be connected with you. You want to grow a network and a community that wants to see what you’re doing, that you want to interact with your things. Although they may have reached out to be a connection with you, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re a good fit for your community. I keep saying community because that’s exactly what it is. You’re curating the people that get access to your stuff and your LinkedIn profile, whether it be your company or your actual personal profile, is a lot of information on you and that’s privileged information. Moderate these connections. Do the overview inside LinkedIn and look at their page. Dive a little bit deeper and see what mutual connections you have. Take a look at them. My rule of thumb is that if you don’t even have a profile photo, I’m not even going to take a look at it. Plus, there are other opportunities inside LinkedIn to gain interaction versus just monitoring and connecting with new people. There are published articles with LinkedIn Publisher. Everybody has access to this. When you go to post on LinkedIn, it has the option to publish, to write, so go tell a story.

If you’re already writing a blog, if you’re already producing some podcast or any kind of guide piece of information, whatever it may be, a newsletter, take that information and go publish it on LinkedIn, so that your followers there get the benefit of it too in a different way. See if there are any comments that need in-depth replies, not only on your postings, but postings that you’ve replied on, too. It’s about being active and participating in a conversation. It doesn’t have to be something that you’re spending 30 minutes per conversation on unless it necessarily warrants it, but it’s something where you want to spend that time to at least reply back because you’re gaining that exposure to all those other people that are interacting with it. Thank people for taking the time to read your postings. This is the one thing I noticed. We love it when we get engagement and interaction on our side, but sometimes we forget to like that interaction or comment back because they gave me a high five, do I need to comment back to that? Not necessarily, but to your benefit, yes, because now you’re getting more and more comments that are growing and building on that posting. The more comments and the more engagement that go on that posting, the more that it’s going to be visible within the algorithm, so think about it.

If I have a posting and it has two likes, it’s going to get pushed down. If I have a posting and it has 30 likes and I have multiple people having a conversation, engaging and talking on it, the network is going to look at that as a relevant, engaging, and promotable piece of content, so it’s going to reward it because of that. They want engaging conversation therefore you have to engage in conversation. Google Plus, I know a lot of people may or may not be using this. If you’re not, you should be. If you do not know what a circle is, go educate yourself because Google Plus Circles really are valuable. They allow you to curate your own community for yourself. Check your circles and welcome any new followers. If you’re growing your communities there, check and see if your Google Plus content has been shared by anybody else. It’s the same thing on every network. Take a look at what’s happening to you and respond to it, then go reach out to others. I keep reiterating the giving thanks because showing gratitude as a company or showing gratitude as an individual is not only helping your accounts by continuing the conversation, but it’s opening up the door to an that person took the time to thank me. A little bit of kindness goes a long way.

Instagram, check your news tab for any comments or pictures of your product, of your brand, of your service, whatever it may be. You always want to pay attention to, and sometimes I even forget this, not just those that have liked something that I’ve done but has somebody tagged me in something? That’s a whole different tab inside Instagram and sometimes I forget about it, too. Having this little checklist that you have for every social account that you do every single day helps you remember to pay attention to those. Take the time to thank users who tagged you in those postings and note any photos you can feature on your brand’s own Instagram account. Instagram’s all about photos and I don’t always have the best high quality photos that somebody will want to come and engage with. Some of my influencers that I follow and some of the people that I hang out with in my personal friends, they have great postings that I might want to share. The thing I’d like you to take a look at if you have the time is Repost. Repost is an app that you can download on your phone and it allows you to go into Instagram, save a link and then go into Repost and repost it. What it does is it has this little window at the bottom which gives credit to the person that you’re sharing it from. You can make the edits that you want to in terms of light or dark, how you want the presentation to be. It’ll even copy the caption from it and carry it over, or you can add your own, which I always recommend that you do both. Copy the caption over so that you have the original message that was with the photo and then add your own layer of story on top of it. For Instagram, you don’t always have to have your own photos. You can share using this handy little app called Repost.

It’s going to take you a while the first time that you do it. The idea is to work up to six minutes. When you go into your account, you naturally do some of these things already, but sometimes you can miss certain things in between like reposting or saying thank you even on the littlest comment or like. In six minutes, eventually you’ll get to the point where it’s just you don’t even think about it. Ideally, I would suggest you put these on your phone because our phones are always with us, but if you’re doing it on desktop, bookmark all of your social accounts so that you go into them automatically and you can immediately start your checklist. I’m going to check my notifications. I’m going to check my comments. I’m going to check my likes and my shares and my requests. Whichever channel it may be, make your checklist. Your next four minutes, which will round out to ten minutes, is to monitor. I want you to dedicate time to see what’s happening in your network. Notice trends, notice topics if there’s any content that’s relevant to your field, your clients, the people that you want to reach out to, perhaps. This is something that you have to pay attention to. This can be as easy as scrolling through your newsfeed and it also can be as complicated as going and looking at hashtag categories and seeing who’s posting under #notes. By going to that, you’re seeing what’s happening, you’re seeing the type of posting and content that others are creating and you’re being able to get a backstage look if you want to say that you can, but you’re being able to get that look or that that view inside what are other people interacting with.

On Instagram, for example, I can go to #notes and I can see all of these postings that go all the way down. I can go into each one of those and see how many people interacted with it. What type of posting was it? Was it a photo? Was it a video? Was it a GIF? What made that engaging? Or if it had many followers and it had many comments. It’s almost competitor research in a way, but the idea behind this is to monitor and see what’s happening, what’s trending on Twitter. They have a little sidebar with all of what’s trending now. If it’s relevant to you, share it, and if it’s not, don’t. Never force a piece of content if it’s not something that’s relevant to who you are, what you believe in or what you’re trying to achieve.

We’re going to talk about how we monitor within social accounts. Facebook, browse your newsfeed. Search influencer streams you’ve identified in your industry. For example, for notes, an influencer is Scott Carson. I’m going to go look at Scott’s feeds and I’m going to take a look and see what he’s posting in his streams, how is he presenting the information and did he use emojis? What hashtags is he using? Did he make a video? Was it live? All of those different things matter, but they’re also a way for you to automatically figure out if that’s working, how can I make that mine as well? How can I own that piece of content or that structure posting? Find out popular stories in your network. What is popular? I know it may seem silly to say, “It’s Natural Brownie Day,” and you don’t necessarily have to say something like that, but if it’s Easter, talk about Easter, if that’s relevant to you. Memorial Day, happy holidays, national holidays where everybody’s coming together, everybody’s going to be talking about it or celebrating it in their own way. Talk about it.

For Twitter, check search streams to the industry. It’s hashtags. If you have hashtags and you’ve identified them, for example, #notes, #noteclosers, #notecamp. Go take a look at those hashtags and start engaging, interacting and monitoring with those, because it’s your community already curated for you with that hashtag so it would be easy for you to engage and to monitor what’s happening. Mentions, and then if there’s core industry hashtags. For example, for one of our clients that we have with our agency, who owns a restaurant, we did some hashtag research and found out that it wasn’t necessarily, barbecue. We thought #bbq was going to be this big hashtag that we could use and we’d get all this exposure and it wasn’t at all. I was disappointed when I looked at it, but it was #recipes. When we started switching over and interacting with #recipes and changing the way that we presented our postings, talking a little bit more about how it was created, we started getting more exposure just by using that hashtag; core industry on hashtags, super important, particularly in Twitter and Instagram.

For Google Plus, see what’s going on with the people in your circles. Circles are curated communities. I can create a circle for each type of community that I want to be in. For example, if I have a health and fitness crowd that I hang out with over here, then I’m going to put them in a circle, but if I have my note closures group, I’m going to put them in a different community. What that allows me to do inside Google Plus is I can talk to them individually or I can share one posting to all of them if it’s relevant, but interacting is not what a whole lot of people do within Google Plus. Having you start the conversation is definitely going to be beneficial, but having you monitoring what other people are sharing is going to be essential. You need to know what’s happening. Google Plus, check your notifications, check the circles, see what people are talking about and see how you can create that.

For LinkedIn, check LinkedIn Pulse. It’s the notifications and published material through LinkedIn Publisher, from the people you follow. Typically, you’ll get a notification that will say such and such person has published a new whatever. If it’s a blog, if it’s a newsletter or whatever it is, if they published it through LinkedIn Publishing, your fan base, your audience gets a notification. You have a good opportunity here that even if you’re already writing a blog, even if you did a newsletter, takes it right here through LinkedIn Publishing. You see it’s the same thing as your blog. You do a cover photo, do a headline, you pop in your content, you can curate it how you want to in terms of formatting, and then you publish it. Pretty simple, but not a lot of people are using it in a way that they should and it’s great opportunity. Since this is social monitoring, go see who’s publishing now and how they did it. What type of photos did they use? How big were the photos? How did they break down their content inside of their LinkedIn Publish and see how you can create that for yourself. On Instagram, check the news tab, mentions of your brand. If you’re using branded hashtags, like #weclosenotes, search the hashtag and see what’s happening. It’s important to know because you might be using your hashtag and you think your community might be using your hashtag, it doesn’t mean that a spammer is not either or it doesn’t mean that other people might not be using the same acronym or the same thought that you had on your campaign. You might end up getting intermingled to other people’s postings and you didn’t even realize it because you never searched your own hashtag. Monitor your stuff there because other people might be using it, too. You definitely don’t know what they’re doing.

A pro tip on this is take time to check your social networks throughout the day. Often, the difference whether or not your community is growing or not is a timely response. If you take two or three days to respond back to somebody, you could have the potential of losing them. You’re trying to grow a community, not lose them. They want to know that you’re active, that you’re going to participate with them. Go an extra step, set up alerts or at replies for your mobile phones, so every time somebody, you can set these privacy settings to where every time somebody leaves a comment, it pings you on your phone. Now if you’re doing a whole lot of traffic, you probably don’t want that, and that would just become part of your regimented routine. You’re eighteen minutes that you always check. Putting these on your phone, for me, it definitely helps me remember, “That person responded to me.” That notification stays on my phone until I clear it off. It’s how I use my inbox. Keep all your things in there until it’s absolutely closed out, replied to and completed, and then I file it away. You can do the same with your social notifications. That was ten minutes, so ten minutes to go in, reply and interact, and then ten minutes to do some little bit of research, see what’s trending, and then you have three minutes for postings.

Posting is real time. This means not scheduled content as you need to. If you don’t use a scheduler, I recommend that you do because it allows you to have more time for these eighteen minutes and be able to pull back on some of the, “I have to create all this content all at once.” There, you create content as you need to create content. In your social monitoring, if you found a topic, for example this March Madness, since March Madness is happening and I found a great article and I wanted to share it, this would be that three minutes where you would share that piece of content or you would create your own to that trending topic that you found. Above all, you should always have something interesting and informative for your social media audience. It doesn’t matter if it’s your content, it doesn’t matter if it’s your business content. It doesn’t matter if it’s an influencer, if it’s an article you found on Forbes. Share something because engagement is one thing, but your original content that you are sharing that helps support what you’re trying to do or your community in learning, educating, purchasing your product, your service, whatever it may be, is necessary. They need to know that you have interesting topics that they want to see that keeps them coming back.

For three minutes, Facebook posts or resource a relevant article, share a relevant article from a trusted source. I say post a resourceful article, meaning give some education. Maybe it’s a tip or it’s a top ten deal. It’s something that teaches them, and then share an article that’s from a trusted source. For example, We Close Notes or from Scott or there’s multiple others like Aaron Young, if you’re looking at things there. Share some things that’s relevant for you, but this is your checklist for postings. For Facebook, post a resource, share a relevant article. This guarantees that in this checklist that you’re doing, as you’re going through every single day, you’re checking those things off, but you’re always creating and giving content. For Twitter, I want you to find a client or influencers’ tweet to retweet. Look for a tweet that contains images or videos, preferably videos because that’s where everything is going as we learned when we were in Traffic &Conversion. The visual concept of everything is important. Every day find a client or influencers’ tweets to retweet. Pretty simple but you have to learn how to do it. Post a tweet that has a call to action that drives followers to your businesses, website, your newsletter. I could be your YouTube channel.

If it’s on Twitter, you can send them to Facebook or your LinkedIn to cross promote. The idea here is that you’re sharing one person’s piece of content and then you’re also creating your own. Creating your own shouldn’t take you that long. You’re trying to do this in three minutes. Having already something scheduled will help you, but that research, that social monitoring that you did for those few minutes beforehand, we’ll take care of this for you because you’ve probably in your scrolling and research already saw a topic that you could write on or already found an article that you saw was useful. In a sense, this does it for you. LinkedIn, publish a relevant post. If you think it’s important, it’s because it is. Publishing posts gets exposure. It’s not just about publishing a posting on the network. It’s about the LinkedIn Publisher element that I showed you before. If you’re not already creating content, it might not be something that you want to jump in and do, but if you are already creating a newsletter, if you’ve already done a breakdown of a case study, if you have a testimonial, put those in a line and tell a little bit of story with it. The opportunity that comes from you publishing here will be far greater if you did than if you didn’t.

Google Plus, post one piece of original content or share one piece of external content. This is something that you can do automatically when you have it scheduled and this is something that you could do just by looking at your circles and seeing what pieces of content your audiences already curating and sharing it for them. Instagram, post a minimum of one photo or a six-second video a day. This may seem daunting, but remember Repost. You don’t want to always repost. You want to repost when you don’t have something that is your own, but at the same time there’s that option to do a 60 second video that is compelling because it’s movement. It’s a little bit further in depth into creating content, and if you don’t think that you could do it, you can because GIFs are videos too. You can go to gifly, you can go to Gifs.com and you can download a GIF. You can search a topic and you can download a gif, which if you don’t know a gif it’s an animated photo or it’s a little short, itty bitty clip, so you can have it replay over and over again if you want. Try to post a video, six second video at minimum and again GIFs, so gifly, Gifs.com, you can go to them, download them as an MP4 and you can upload them or share them within your social accounts.

Two minutes to analyze. This is not social monitoring. This is not checking notifications. This is very different. This is the element that tells whether or not what you’re trying to achieve is working. This is the part that most people just forget to do altogether because they haven’t dived that deep into their social accounts to figure out what it is and when you do go to them analytics, it’s a little confusing. If you want to develop an efficient content plan, you need to know what content is working and you need to know what social networks are working for you. There are lots of different analytics tools. Most of the social networks come with some form of free analytics for you. If you have an auto scheduler like Sprout Social, HubSpot or Buffer, they generally come with some sort of reporting or analytics feature with it. Utilize it because it’s going to tell you lots of different things. What I’d recommend that you start with first is getting comfortable and knowledgeable on each social account that you’re using actual offering in terms of the availability to look at your data.

Facebook Insights is what their analytics is called and it shows you audience demographics. You can see age, region and gender if you’re a business page of who is engaging with your stuff. You can see the number of likes, the number of monthly active users and the daily likes. It also lets you see what your postings are doing. Which postings got the most impressions? Got the most engagement? It lets which ones are which ones are your viral postings. Did your boosts in terms of money work for you or was it an engagement? Did it go viral? Looking at these insights will tell you right now whether or not that blog posting got the engagement than it needed to or whether or not your audiences in the region that you needed to be in.

Twitter Analytics, this is one that not people don’t know about, you have to sign up for it. What I mean by sign up for it is you have to sign into it. If you don’t sign into Twitter Analytics ever, if you’ve had an account for two years and you never went to Twitter Analytics, Twitter.com/Analytics, then you probably won’t have it because until you engage it, it won’t give it to you. The Twitter Analytics once engaged, once you’ve gone signed into your account, you’ve gone to the analytics page, it activates and then it’ll start pooling your data. It’ll give you the options to look at mentions, to look at retweets, to look at link clicks, to look at number of impressions. It’ll give you what postings we’re doing well. I liked the Twitter Analytics interface because it gives me a 28-day timeframe, so I’m able to see that entire month worth of content that I put out. What was helpful? What was engaging? How many followers did I get from it? Did I gain any followers at all? This analyze portion of things is essential because you can be posting all day long and talking to people all day long, but if you’re not reaching that goal that you’ve set out for yourself, if you’re not getting the engagement that you need to back, you have to change what you’re doing. This is why analytics is important for these particular networks.

LinkedIn does offer analytics. On the right side of the page for your personal you can see who your new connections are, your profile ranking, how are your published posts doing. You can see analytics on these published posts and see whether or not they’re getting the engagement, if people are reading them and how long they’re staying on their reading them. If you’re a company page, it offers a little higher level of analytics, impressions, clicks, interactions, and engagement. Impressions are each network has a different meaning of what an impression is. Basically, it’s when somebody lingers on your posting for a specific amount of time, it is considered an impression. We know what a click is and then get an interaction or engagement is somebody liking my stuff or engagement, commenting my stuff, and then did you acquire any followers at all? Again, you want to acquire followers. If you’re posting stuff and you’re not getting what you need, then you need to start changing it up.

Google Plus itself doesn’t offer analytics. It does it through Google Analytics. If you have a website and you’re not using Google Analytics, you have to get it now. You’re going to have to create a Google account and then you go to Google Analytics and go in. It will have you login and it’ll automatically walk you through how to connect your website to it. This is something that if you’re not familiar with setting up, I would recommend that you find someone to help you get that going. Analytics can be tricky. There are lots of layers to it, but when it’s set up and working properly, it’s a wealth of knowledge. It gives you, for example, I can see who came in on my website, how long, what page they came in on, where they navigated to the next page. Did they fall off of that page? Did they come in from Facebook? What time of day was it? What device was it? I can see all of that data and information about what people are doing with my accounts and that stuff is invaluable.

When it comes to Instagram, this is relatively new. They have native analytics. If you are a business page, you will start to see at the top of your account where it says 24 people have viewed your page this month, 100 people have viewed your page this month, but it’s giving you an overview and a call to action to go take a look at your analytics, so you can see followers growth and engagement. You have to be a business page. If it’s just a personal page, you’re not going to have the luxury of this information. That’s unfortunate, I know. That’s where some of the paid tools like HubSpot, Sprout and Buffer and there are many more, Meet Edgar. That’s where those come in handy because they can give you that data that these native analytics can’t.

Schedule. This is your last three minutes of your eighteen minutes a day. We’ve done fifteen minutes far. These last three minutes and I want you to notice schedule is the last block of the eighteen minute plan because I want you to engage first. I want you to research. I want you to review and then I want you to start scheduling because if you’ve gone through all the steps above, you then should already have it laid out for you to be able to schedule everything that your audience is interested in, that you’re interested in, whatever it may be, but scheduling can help you curate content for the next day, for the next month, for the next two weeks, whatever your timeframe is. You can pick off the wall posting times based on your audience’s habits. If you’ve gone to analyze and you looked inside Facebook, it tells you what day is most of your audience online and what time they are mostly online. For one of our clients, we noticed she thought, “All of our people or corporate or their small business owners. They’re going to be online during the day and we need to be posting around 1:00 to3:00 PM around the time that she thinks that they would be in the office.” When we went into our accounts, it told us that the majority of our followers were online at night, 8:00 or 9:00 PM. When we started to look back and think about that were actually, that makes sense because the audience that we’re trying to target, they can’t be online during the day.

They’re working during the day. When they finally have dinner, when they put the kids to bed, whatever their evening routine may be, they get online at night. We started scheduling all of our postings for that time, that’s why analyze before you start to schedule and you’re going to have a better return. How do we schedule? For Facebook, starting to think about the types of things that you can schedule that you could do, so tell a story. Facebook has this fun little feature on their pages now where it says Your Story. Fill it out, put a photo there, write your story. It’s your bio. You’re company page is going to have it and potentially if you have a branding page for your own persona or your brand, not a personal page. You can tell your story, too. We want to know about you. We don’t want to know and it’s certainly about what you do. This is an opportunity for you to tell your why, but also keep that story going, keep that narrative happening. If you’re going through your entrepreneurial journey, talk about it. It can be a little hard at first to get started, but I know it was hard for me to talk about it some, but once get going, it’s just about starting. That’s what Scott gets onto me about too, “It doesn’t have to be perfect. You just have to do. You have to get started,” but it works. Use visually rich photos and video messaging.

Facebook Live. One thing we learned at Traffic & Conversion is that Facebook wants to be the next YouTube. Twitter wants to do the same thing and then eventually, it’s going to be all video. If you aren’t hopping on the bandwagon with trying video now, you need to do it because it’s already taken off and it’s left you. Get started. Rich photos. When I say by rich photos, I mean high quality photography and this doesn’t have to be something that you hire a photographer for. My smartphone right here takes better photo and video than the equipment that I owned for my company for professional video services. It shoots in 4K. I use it wherever we go now, and this has been my thing. I’ve been logging my photos and then I’ll go back when I’m ready to schedule and I’ll go back to my last two weeks and I’ll pull out a few photos and I’ll tell a story about what happened. One thing I want to keep in mind when you are scheduling is you don’t necessarily have to overdo your postings. You don’t have to post five or six times a day. When you’re curating your content to be about you, your story, limit your post one, two times a day, but make them rich pieces of content, meaning you’ve created and you’ve spent some time on it. Don’t overdo it. Hashtags are great, but I don’t want to see 30 of them there longer than the content that you wrote above it. Think about it.

For Twitter, tweets, space them out to avoid being perceived as spamming your audience. There’s this trend that I’ve noticed that in this eighteen minutes people will go, “I found ten pieces of content. I’m going to share them all now.” Don’t, because that’s going to hammer your audience and then you’re only sharing ten tweets in that one small little eighteen minute window and you’ve lost all of that other timeframe that you could be doing things. The thing about Twitter is spread out your tweets. Do one in the morning, one in the evening, and one in the afternoon. That way you’re not spamming and you’re also reaching the audiences that are online at different times; include tweets with different formats like photos, videos and links. It doesn’t always have to be just text. What I have noticed in one of the little faux pas I will give you what people are doing is they think, “I tweet all the time on Twitter.” We go take a look at it and it’s all stuff that’s been fed over from LinkedIn, or it’s been fed over from Instagram, and it’s no original tweet on the network at all and I can’t see a great preview of a video or photo. I just see a link and I see them in repetition all the way down. That doesn’t make a wall that I necessarily want to come back and see. It’s great to do the feed over, but also keep in mind too that you need to post to the network directly use, it as it was intended to and try different formats. That way we can see your pretty faces and we know that there’s a human being behind the business.

Again, hashtags are important. I mentioned a tool in Note CAMP called RiteTag. It allows you to do hashtag research and also if you look inside Twitter. It gives you what’s trending in terms of hashtags, so you have all of the opportunity to discover what would work for your types of postings and keep in mind they might not always be the same. If I go out to dinner, I might in Instagram or Twitter use #dinner or #foodporn because that’s a big hashtag, believe or not, or # foodies, but that might not be relevant for all of my other postings. Keep in mind the type of postings that you’re using, what type of hashtags might be relevant for it. It’s research, it’s that analysis, and it’s that social monitoring that I’m talking about.

LinkedIn share content with a more serious tone. Think business. Now the network has tried to take itself into more of a Facebook type of space and it hasn’t been received well by pretty much a majority of the network. Keep in mind about the type of things that you’re posting in there are entrepreneurial, business owner related, corporate related, so post content that is oriented to a professional audience. I’m not going to put a whole bunch of emojis necessarily inside LinkedIn and I won’t necessarily put fifteen or twenty hashtags like I would in LinkedIn. It’s a different network. You’re talking to a different individual. Look at it like an individual. That’s how you speak to it. Use LinkedIn Publisher; again, this is the fourth time people, if you haven’t realized it’s important or a scheduling tool. I’m promoting scheduling tools because you’re all busy. You need to be out doing what you do best for your business. Use a scheduling tool to help you do that. It’s a little bit of time upfront, but it’s worth it in the long run. You can’t afford not to do it.

Google Plus, sharing your news from your visits, what’s happening, what’s going on. It’s like, “It’s Note CAMP and I’m participating, I’m talking to all you people,” you did that. Share external relevant content to your business related to your business circles. Again, if you’re curating those communities, each one of them is going to have a different type of content that you’re going to be sharing with them. Not every single piece of content that you post inside Google Plus is going to go out to all of your audience unless you have one big main audience that you work with. Typically we have multiple ones. I served on the board for Texas Women in Business as their Marketing Director for two years. It’s a great non-profit helping women, but I created a separate board for Women in Business and I started curating my local Women in Business on that board. I expanded out and I did one for a different city because I’m starting to gather other women in that community, but also I’m a marketing professional and I do other things. I have a marketing board were I’m geared towards my marketing professional and then I have a different type of conversation and I schedule different pieces of content specifically for them. Might seem daunting. It’s not. This is why you have this eighteen minute plan to take you through how to get it done quickly.

Instagram, plan a photo, a video content to compliment what your messaging is. Good visual elements are important. Don’t give me a blurry photo, don’t give me content that’s been cut off, I won’t see it, I won’t look at it, we won’t like it. Majority of your audience won’t either. I’m being honest. Brutally honest to a fault but it’s the truth though. Your audience is doing the same thing. They are looking at your content deciding whether or not it’s worthy for them to interact with it. You have to look at it in the same way when you were posting your own content. It can’t be half ass. It has to be good. Doesn’t have to be perfect, but you have to get something out there that’s quality. Post photos and videos to promote your events, your campaign coming up, schedule a photo to spread awareness about a bigger audience. For example, I have influencers, they hold bigger audiences. They might be sharing some things. I’m going to use Repost. I’m going to go in here and I’m going share her posting, his posting, whoever it may be from their bigger audience to mine. They already have all the hashtags curated for me. They already have all of the tags put in it. I’m just borrowing it and giving them credit. Instagram also presents a great opportunity to give your customers a behind the scenes look at your business. It’s, “What are you doing after hours?” or “How does it work in the office?” The We Close Notes office, they have lots of trinkets and fun things here. It’s one of those stuff where you can share those things, and Scott’s great about it.

Yes, this man crate is pretty cool. I don’t think it should be a man crate. It should just be a crate of awesome because I wouldn’t judge you. I would need a woman crate, but he posted about that, so not only did he tag Quest IRA, not only did he probably look up man crates, too and put in relevant hashtags, but it was that behind the scenes look at what’s happening at We Close Notes that you’re engaging with. Try to do the same.

We have a question, “How to embed our page on YouTube video.”

Are you talking about adding your YouTube video on your website, on your page or are you talking about posting it on Facebook or on social network? If it’s not a social network, you should be able to grab the video link from YouTube, which is the URL at top and take that and drop it into a box and it should populate a preview of the video. If you’re talking about doing it on your website, it’s a little bit more than I can talk about now, but you can definitely email me and Info@ServingSocial.com and I’d be happy to help you.

How does one research the traffic on hashtags?”

I mentioned RiteTag a little bit earlier. It’s a hashtag research tool. You can go in there and you can put it in a hashtag. There’s a free option, which gives you features, but it gives you limited features and then there’s a paid option. You don’t have to do the paid option. Do the free option. See what you pull from it. It lets you see how many people are actually using that hashtag and whether or not that hashtag’s going to get you exposure now or later. That’s one way to do research. Another way to do research is search the hashtag in the social networks that you’re are using. If it’s inside of Facebook, in your search bar, search #notes and see what comes up. How many postings are underneath it? Are people commenting on those? It’s a great way to do some rudimentary hashtag research and you can do that in pretty much every network.

“How do you do these eighteen-minute run through several times a day?”

Eighteen minutes is the estimated time that it takes you to go through all of these things. I’m not suggesting that you do eighteen-minute run through in a day. I’m suggesting in the morning, afternoon, evening, whatever time is best for you. Do one eighteen-minute run through on your accounts. That’s do the whole gambit of it. At least for that eighteen to twenty minutes or again it’s going to take you a little bit longer the first few times you try this, but that first time you run through it, at least you’re getting a lot of your bases covered. What I’m suggesting is you just go in and check on your accounts periodically so you’ll notice if you start doing this in repetition consistently, you’ll always have notifications that you need to be checking. You’ll have more people commenting on your stuff because you’re commenting on theirs. If you want love, you got to give love. How it works. It’s one of those deals where run through the eighteen minutes in full once a day, and then periodically check on your account so that you’re not exhausting yourself trying to manage these all the time. That’s a great way. Your phone right here. Look at all these notifications. I’m going to go back through it. I’m going to check each one of those after this and I’m going to see if it’s something I need to comment on, but that’s quick. That’s easy. It’s not my full eighteen minute run through where I’m doing analysis and paying attention to my competitors and monitoring and curating my postings.

“Does my post on Facebook or Instagram get better views or engagement if I like and comment other pages just prior to posting?”

No, not necessarily. Just because you’re commenting on other people’s stuff doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re going to see yours unless they’re following you. It definitely helps that you’re doing active engagement because if you’ve just posted something or if you’re about to post something and you went and followed these people beforehand and you engage with them, they’re going to go check out your page. I’m going to go see who Eric is. I’m going to see what they’ve posted and having that posting there has the possibility for you to get more engagement on it because you’ve done the engagement for somebody else. Doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to get engagement, but gives you the opportunity to get engagement because you’re posting and because you’re being active.

“Didn’t know if it was an algorithm kind of thing.”

No, not necessarily. The algorithm is based off multiple different things and it’s different per social network. Every single one of them is curating their own pieces of content and they have their own importance based on the type of content that they’re reading. Facebook for example, came out and said, “We’re going to focus on videos, Facebook watch,” so those types of pieces of content are going to get more exposure automatically because it’s the preferred piece of content that the network wants to see. If they said new stories too that are going to get more exposures because they’re cracking down from news outlets.

There’s opportunities leveraging the types of actual content that network wants to see, but above all they’ll tell you right now if the cohesive content is getting comments, if it has people talking on it, it’s going to get more exposure because more people are being active. Think about when you comment on something and then you get a notification that somebody else commented on it, everybody else is getting that notification about your posting too. The more exposure you keep getting for it, the more that the newsfeed, the algorithm is going to push it up the timeline for more and more people to see. It’s an algorithm thing but it’s also a due diligence thing in making sure that you’re actively talking to people if you want them to talk to you.

“Can I establish business accounts on each of the platforms under a pseudo name in order to stop my own name from splattering all over the internet?”

I wouldn’t recommend that at all. No, it does nothing for you if you do a pseudo name at all.

You build it against you because people don’t trust you.

I’m not going to engage with somebody if you’re not real. I want to talk to you. Now I know there’s spammers out there and it can be complicated, but there’s privacy settings, there’s changing your password, there’s locking down your websites, there’s locking down your email accounts to make sure that these types of things don’t get hacked and that’s what’s happening. People are scraping pages and creating other pages and pretending to be them. It would be almost creating that same type of accounts of what’s happening to you if you’re doing a pseudo name. I wouldn’t recommend it.

Should we mention and talk a little about how the media has overblown the whole Cambridge analytics thing? It’s important because I could do a search right now on Facebook. I can go into create custom audience, hundred thousand people based on people’s where they live, what they make, their income levels, what they liked, what are their interests, their age group, their education, all that stuff and I can market directly to them on anything I want to from a video to a pitcher.

It’s one of those deals where the more information that you feed to Facebook like the more you fill out your profile and the more you put more details onto your page, the more likely you are to not have somebody scrape your page, no that’s not necessarily to mean that they won’t but the more that you’re piling onto it, the harder it’s going to be for somebody to copy you. In regards to the information with the whole Cambridge thing, it’s an open API which means it’s an open back end to where if I had an app or something that I wanted to plug into it, which is what happened here, I could and I could pull your information. If you’ve given me that information and given Facebook or any other account that information at any point in time, they have it, they use it. I can tell whether or not you’re about to sell a house, whether or not you’re in a single relationship and I want to sell you this product. It’s all of the data that they’ve been collecting and that’s why it’s important to them to keep collecting it. Not much as great for us that they are, but think about it as from a business owner’s perspective. Without that information, how were you ever set up an ad? It shouldn’t be abused but the information used correctly and in the appropriate ways that it’s supposed to is valuable. It needs to be safeguarded.

Facebook changed their algorithm. I discovered this because I had this business page with 34,000 people that I started marketing to and then went up and then they change their algorithm and immediately fell flat on its face.

They want businesses to run ads or they want businesses to create content that creates conversation. It’s community, it’s conversation. If your postings aren’t creating engagement like people commenting on them, I’m not talking likes. Likes are almost fluff at this point in time. I want a comment. I want somebody to say something. The more people are engaging with that, the more that it’s going to get seen, particularly as a business page, but they want you to run ads. It’s how they make money. It’s how they keep things going and unfortunately it’s the way it is. What they tell you, “This is the type of content you can be creating. Here are the types of content we prefer. Don’t go against it. Play with it. Use Facebook Live the way that it wants to. Upload videos to LinkedIn and to Twitter. Leverage Google circles in the way that you’re supposed to. Use all the hashtags that you need to and Instagram to gain the exposure, but have a high quality photo like using the networks as they’re telling you to use them. You’re playing along with it, but you’re getting the exposure that comes with that.”

“Can you address business Facebook versus personal Facebook, which is better for networking? What I do for my biz. I know you mentioned posting on a business page and sharing on a personal page, still the case even with Facebook new algorithm changes?”

That’s part of what we were talking about. What I’ve suggested in the past is to gain some more exposure for your business page is that if the posting that you’re doing on your business page is relevant. For example, Serving Social did a selfie of me and Scott T minus fifteen minutes until we blow your minds with amazing social media stuff. I posted that out there. When I’m done with this, I’m going to go and I personally am going to share that onto my account because it’s going to gain some exposure because I’m sharing it on my personal account. Personal accounts interact completely different than business accounts. They’re supposed to. A lot of people don’t even do business pages anymore and they use their personal account, however, that’s growing exposure for you as a solopreneur. It’s great exposure for you. If you ever want to grow into a brand, it doesn’t help you that much. You then stay the face of it forever. You want people to engage with you as the brand owner, but to also engage with the brand. It’s dual sided here.

Start with one, start with your personal page. Start leveraging that, using that, doing your eighteen minutes a day with that as much as you can with or without analytics and then bring on the business page and replicate. Share where you can across channels but toss-up. It’s your choice. If you want to be that solopreneur and all you are is basically the company and that’s why you want to represent it, then just have a personal page but make sure you’re intermingling your business branding in there or nobody’s going to know that it exists. At the same time, if you’re only posting about your business branding on your personal page, I’m probably not going to pay attention to you anymore because I want to have a conversation with you. I go look at everybody who sends me friend requests. I don’t accept all of them. I look at your pages. I look at what you’re posting. Do we have the same likes? Do we have the same things in common? Are we relevant to be friends, to be connected? It’s one of those deals where if you’re going to hammer your personal page with business stuff, then you’re going to notice you’re probably going to get about as much interaction on it as what your business page does.

“I’m new to social media. My Facebook account is my name but I’m only using it for my note business. How do I manage a business page?”

If you have a personal page, it needs to be a personal page. You can share business to fund it like what we were just talking about, but you need to be having a conversation and talking to people. If you want to start a business page, if you have enough of a following on your personal page and enough of it to your discretion, but if you had people talking to you, your brand is big enough to where you got your own website, get your logo and ready to go. You can start a business page and I would recommend you do so. You have to be ready to do your eighteen minutes a day to create your content and schedule it to make it work and it can be hard to manage both the business page and a personal page. I have the struggle. The struggle is real every day. It’s one of those deals where I posted my personal page and then I posted really curated posts to Serving Social, but Serving Social might not get another posting for a few more days because I’ll post another high quality curated piece where I’m spending my time in between talking and engaging to people to create that community in that conversation. It’s a different focus. That’s all at your discretion without seeing your pages, I couldn’t advise you more, but good luck with that.

“How do I utilize a Facebook business page?”

There are lots of different ways. We went through the eighteen minutes of how you can utilize the Facebook business page.

Being able to add more custom audience and also the list is a huge feature.

There are also my stories, there are ads, there are notes, and notes in there are a different way or a different feature that you can leverage a Facebook page. There are also apps and plugins that you can install onto Facebook that lets you do different things. We use one a lot called Woobox and it allows us to run promotions or allows us to do questionnaires or fill in your name to win this man crate. It’s what we should do. It lets you run promotions. It is page. It’s pretty minimal cost. The lowest one’s$30 a month but it is another way to leverage your business page if you wanted to do that.

“How much better is Facebook Live versus a video?”

I know you say Facebook Live is shiznit, but is it that much better for exposure than a video? Yes, it’s exactly what the network wants. They tell you, Facebook Live. It’s live in the moment. They put millions of dollars behind advertising Facebook Live. They created Facebook watch. They’re putting money into curated shows like what Netflix and Amazon is doing. Facebook Live is essential and important. They want it now and as it’s happening. Prime example, look at how Scott’s leveraging Facebook Live and postings right now. Look at how we push out the content so that other people can take part in it. A video uploaded. If you have it, definitely do it because a video is better than nothing at all, but a Facebook Live is definitely the hierarchy of what in terms of Facebook they’re wanting you to do.

We did nine months on Facebook Live before we launched the podcast. That built us an audience of almost 37,000 people viewing. Just the views on replays, on Facebook we had almost a quarter million views on 150 episodes.

For Social Media Day last year we did nothing but live streaming. We did live streaming for a total of four hours. No ads to get it. 10,000 views because we opened it up, we pre-promoted it really well as an event. We invited people to come and watch the live feed and then we were engaging in communicating with people as it was happening. It’s something where you don’t necessarily have to do all that, but if you’re going to have a type of show concept or education tips, it’s important. I would say Facebook Live is definitely going to trump your video than anything else.

“Is a business page attached to your personal page different from a business account?”

There’s different ways that you can set up business pages. There’s Business Manager which Facebook has that allows you to basically add everything into a business dashboard and manage your ads, if you’re going to run ads and everything else in one place. If you’re not going to run ads, you don’t necessarily need it. It’s all to you. You don’t necessarily need Facebook Business Manager. You can have it attached to your social account. You can’t have a business page without a personal page attached to it. It’s automatic. It’ll come right underneath the drop down when you’re ready with your companies. It’s pretty easy.

There’s also the platform called BLive. They’ll use it as part of the time on our podcast where it allows you to create custom frames, put your logo and it allows for when people ask you questions while you’re live you can make it pop up in the screen. Pretty expensive thing and I use about a half of the time around with a guest for the podcast.

Most of the things that we use in terms of these apps that cost your probably $3 to $9 like that. When you talk about putting in some of these things, they’re pretty inexpensive for what they do for you.

Another thing that we used called Repurpose.io, that one I get Facebook Live. It will automatically pull that video and then all I do is hit one button and automatically uploaded to YouTube for me with the exact hashtag along with it. It just saves a lot of time.

Why don’t you tell people what you do, how you help people, how do you do your offer up? Is there a coaching program, what do you do?

I forget about that stuff too. Self-promotion. What I’ve done with a few of the other note closers is we’ve done one-on-one sessions that we’ve curated towards a goal. There’s a series of meetings that we set up that takes you through how to manage certain specific things. We’re looking at your brand, we’re dissecting it. We’re essentially roasting it in a way but nicely and then I’m giving you the directions or the guys afterwards to help you get started to where you need to be. What we have going on at Serving Social now has been in the making. We’re about to launch our online marketplace and the marketplace is meant to be for the solopreneur, the new startup, the small business owner, to be able to come in and look at services from our curator, contractors and get the marketing help they need.

If you’re doing it yourself, come to Serving Social, get the education. We have tons of guides that we’re going to be uploading in the next few weeks to promote small business at the end of April. We’re pretty excited about that but it’s downloadable guides that help you get your brand together or it’s the first step that you need to know about Facebook Live. It’s one of these presentations right here about the eighteen-minute social media plan, which by the way, if you want these slides for the eighteen-minute social media plan, go to ServingSocial.com. Scroll down to the bottom where it says Sign Up to our newsletter. Enter in your details and I will send it to you.

It’s always curating. It’s always refining, things are always changing, but we’re super excited. In the making for being able to put a lot of this stuff together and being able to help people the way that we want to because marketing when it’s your business is 80% marketing and it’s 20% everything else. If you’re not doing marketing all the time, you’re not doing anything. You need to be moving. You need to be out there talking about it and promoting it and speaking to people. I know there are a lot of platforms that you can do that on, but it’s all about figuring out what works for you and taking baby steps to do it. Get your roadmaps together. Take the eighteen minute plan, create your own from it and start doing your consistent daily routine because that’s the one thing that’s going to get started. If you want to work with us, Info@ServingSocial.com. You can email me if you have some more questions. We can schedule some consultation time and then reach out to us, go to ServingSocial.com. Subscribe to the newsletter and I’ll send you the eighteen minute play.

Thank you so much, Kristie. I appreciate that.

Important Links

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• Hubspot
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• Repost
• LinkedIn Pulse
• We Close Notes
• Aaron Young
• Traffic & Conversion
• gifly
• Gifs.com
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• Facebook Insights
• Twitter Analytics
• Twitter.com/Analytics
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• Meet Edgar
• RiteTag
• Texas Women in Business
• Info@ServingSocial.com
• Woobox
• Business Manager
• BLive
• Repurpose.io
• ServingSocial.com

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About Kristie Whites

 

Kristie Whites is a brand and marketing strategist, philanthropist, and national speaker. Looking to create social impact in the world, Kristie started Serving Social, LLC whose mission is to show businesses that marketing can be simple when you’re provided the right tools and resources. Having worked with brands like Harley Davidson, Women’s Business Council – Southwest and various nonprofits, Kristie has helped businesses in establishing their marketing strategy, navigate the uncertainty of social media and measure results.