Today we’re going to talk about how to use social media tools to grow your brand without spending a whole lot of time, actually on social media. The bane of a lot of people’s existence is social media, and it’s also the blessing of a lot of people’s existence.
It’s this interesting dichotomy because the social media people, the influencers, the people who are using social media to grow our brand, they typically spend a lot of time in social media, but yet when you’re busy growing a brand and you’re busy growing a business and you have teams and clients and all kinds of stuff going on, sometimes it’s difficult to spend time in social media.
Even a lot of these big Instagram influencers, a lot of them, don’t even do their social media. They have people who do social media for them as them.
- How do you get started?
- What are the social media tools?
- How do you leverage technology to grow your business inside social media, without spending a fortune and without just wasting an entire day posting stuff on Facebook, or Instagram, or YouTube?
That’s some of the stuff that we’re going to try to uncover now.
It’s one of those things that I just, in the last probably two or three months, really started using organically social media the way it was supposed to be used. Not supposed to be used, but trying to chip away at it. There are some things that I have done that work out pretty well. Those are the things I’m going to share today.
This isn’t by any means saying that these are the only ways to do it, but it’s supposed to be a jumping-off point to give you some ideas on how to start leveraging some of these social media tools and software so that you can start growing your brand in social and sell them more stuff at the end of the day.
For those of you who are new to this channel, who are new to me, this podcast, my name is Jason Drohn. I’m the creator of doneforyou.com. We specialize in three things, creating offers, building sales funnels, and then also building marketing automation. That’s what we’re known for. That’s what we’re good at. This is just one of the pieces. This is one of the automation pieces, because every business, the lifeblood of every business is traffic.
To get traffic, you need channels. Social media’s the channel of the vertical that you can get traffic from. And if there’s anything you need, any comment, just go ahead and drop it over in the comments if you’re on Facebook, or YouTube, or whatever, and then we’ll go from there.
Social Media Tools
Today we’re going to talk about social media tools. I just wanted to go through and just do a precursor on social media. It’s amazing how many people, how many business owners I’ve talked to, especially right now that they don’t know much about social media and it’s not that they don’t know. They know social media figuratively. Do you know what I mean? They know what social media is. They know that the kids use it, but a lot of them don’t necessarily know if their business applies if they can use social media, which platforms they should be using. We’re going to do just a precursor, social media brain dump. Then we’re going to talk about social media tools from there.
Now social media, the popular platforms:
- YouTube
1. Facebook
Facebook is always where we start clients off, a Facebook page. And also Facebook ads are always where we start because Facebook has such a broad reach among all kinds of different demographics, that we can touch business owners, we can touch coaches, we can touch consumers, consumers of physical products.
There are so many different ways that we can use Facebook. And Facebook has incredible data that you can leverage for startups. You can upload your customer list, upload a prospect list, create custom audiences, use, and create those lookalike audiences. Facebook is a fantastic tool for getting started.
2. Youtube
YouTube is video-based. If you don’t mind videos, YouTube is a great way to do it too.
Even like this live stream, we’re streaming to your Facebook, a couple of groups inside Facebook, my profile, and the Done For You page. And then we’re also streaming to YouTube as well. We’re streaming to two different platforms. But YouTube is great for video content and you can generate quite a few subscribers and stuff on YouTube too.
3. LinkedIn
LinkedIn is great for businesses. The average was that the average revenue is over $100,000. The average income for like 55% of LinkedIn users is over $100,000. LinkedIn, it’s a business community. If it’s a B2B offer that you are making, LinkedIn is a great way to do it.
4. Instagram
Instagram, the younger generation. That’s image-based, image-based short videos, but you can use Instagram there. If you’re looking to tap into a younger demographic, they’re going to be on Instagram.
5. Twitter
Twitter is kind of odd. There are lots of different demographics on Twitter. We’ve never used their ad account or their advertising. To us, it’s more like a news broadcast mechanism, but some people use Twitter to great extent like Elon Musk.
Facebook is our absolute favorite social media platform, there are all new clients into it, even if it’s B2B. At the end of the day, business owners are on Facebook because they are looking at their pictures of their kids or their grandkids or whatever. Business owners are there. And right now, right now amid the pandemic, everybody is reachable on Facebook. You really can get in front of just about anybody you want on Facebook, all your friends, your clients, or prospects, they’re already there, which means sharing your content is going to be easy.
If people know, like, and trust you in the real world, then they’re going to like your stuff on Facebook too.
Pay traffic campaigns, namely video view campaigns, are key to building quick success.
You’re able to put a video up on Facebook, pay one cent per view. It’s usually one cent, one and a half, two cents, somewhere in there and per view. If you spend 500 bucks, you could get 400 or 500 views. And then Facebook tracks how much of that video somebody watches.
If you put that video on your Facebook page, you don’t even need to spend anything. Facebook tracks how much of that video somebody watches. Even right now, if you were on Facebook, Facebook is tracking how much of this, this very video that you were watching. I can use that to retarget you, which is creepy, I know. But it works out pretty nicely from an advertiser standpoint.
Create Organic Content and Videos
You must create organic content and videos to do well with social though. You need to post articles, post questions, post videos, post pictures, you have to. The social mechanism of social media is social. You have to give, you take, you take by liking other people’s stuff, consuming other people’s content. It’s a very give-and-take relationship. People want to see you.
Youtube
YouTube, in another breath, is the world’s largest video provider. Tens of thousands of people are making more money through sponsorships than they would if they had a real job. And the DFY Accelerate group has lately been posting some YouTube income numbers, and the numbers are crazy.
One video will net somebody $17,000 in a year, just from YouTube’s partner program, or certain sponsorships will make somebody $100,000 in a year if the product is used in the video. There are all kinds of different ways to make money with YouTube as long as you’re providing the content.
Creating Channel and Adding Videos on Youtube
Now creating a channel and adding videos to that channel is paramount to your success. And the earlier you start the better. The best time to start was four years ago, five years ago. The second best time to start is right now. I hate that saying whenever I hear it, but it’s perfectly applicable right here because if you put off the idea of making videos, the best thing you can do is just get started today, literally.
When this pandemic hit, I was doing some podcast stuff, but I wasn’t doing the live streaming. I thought it was a great opportunity to show up and to force myself to create content every day. Now we’re in episode 55 of this and each one is about 20, 25 minutes, sometimes 30 minutes or more. Because of the videos we’ve been so busy, I haven’t been able to go back through, but there are little social media clips I’ve been getting transcripts of. There are so many ways that I can leverage the video.
The video is over on YouTube. People are watching it every day. It’s on Facebook, people are watching it every day. The best thing you can do is to start today, turn on a camera, and just start creating a video. It doesn’t matter what you say. It can be this long or it can be two minutes, but just get started, do something. No video has a long tail effect. Your video might only get a few hundred views in the first week, but two years down the road, it might have racked up hundreds of thousands of views.
I had a friend who, last week, was like, “Does it bother you that only like… you don’t get hundreds of people watching your live streams?” I’m like, “No, not at all.” If I have nobody watching my live stream, it’s fine. The on demands of the live stream if zero people watch an entire live stream, it doesn’t matter to me because hundreds of thousands of people will watch that live stream in the life cycle of that video.
Just by creating the content, I’m able to leverage it in other ways. It’s a benefit if somebody watches the video, but if not, that’s fine too. Somebody down the road is going to watch it. And if I just impact one person’s life, just by giving a strategy, then it’s made all the difference. Do you know what I mean? And YouTube videos give you great search rankings.
Keyword loading, the title, and the description of a YouTube video almost guarantee that you’re going to get ranked in the search engines for that video. Now, the video needs to be well put together. It needs to sell. You need to have links in the description. There are all kinds of things we can talk about from the YouTube organic ranking standpoint, but just know that YouTube is great for a search organic standpoint.
Maybe we’ll talk about organic next week, come to think of it. We don’t have anything for organic yet. I think we’re going to do that. I think we’re going to talk about getting organic traffic, SEO organic traffic next week. This week was social media tools week. Next week is going to be an organic week. This always happens too. I ended up having an idea on Friday based on Friday’s conversation to being what we’re going to talk about the next week. I think it’s going to be organic. I’ll have to check. I don’t know. I don’t think I have anything planned for it.
Beware, a little side note. You need to prepare to create hundreds of videos before you make it. It looks like Tomorrow he likes the organic. Awesome. Prepare to create hundreds of videos before you make them. It at best, if you can speak to an agent and sell some of your products and services is a great return on investment.
But I was listening to one interview and somebody asked if they could interview Gary Vee on their podcast. And Gary Vee said, “Yes. Once you post your hundredth episode, I will be number 101.” And the reason he said that was because, in his experience, it takes a hundred episodes to break free, to have that long-tail effect. Because think about it, if somebody is a one-hit-wonder, they have a video, they post a video, you like the video, you go to their channel, you see what else they have, what other videos they have, if they have nothing there that you can dig into, then all of a sudden you’re like, “Well.” You forget about them because it was just that one video.
Now, if you go to their channel and they have 99 other videos that are all worthwhile to you, then you better believe you’re going to subscribe. That’s the thinking behind the hundred videos. In Russell Brunson’s book, he talks about a hundred days worth of content to establish yourself as an expert in a space, which I believe.
Now, LinkedIn is becoming one of the social media tools and has for the last year or so, really, really picked up in popularity. Even though it’s been around forever, it’s a publicly-traded company and is now owned by Microsoft, LinkedIn has done well for itself lately. If you are a business that is selling to other businesses, you must produce content like articles and videos on LinkedIn. There’s no better way to get massive business exposure than being on LinkedIn.
And connecting with industry leaders and people that can help bring your business is quick and easy there. You can set up a group, you can post videos. It has a lot of the same video sharing functionality. You can establish a foothold for yourself by creating a company page, by posting videos. They’re just in the infancy of their live streaming capabilities. It would be great once they roll it out site-wide. The one thing about LinkedIn is it’s really… advertising is expensive, but it’s very worthwhile if you have a campaign that’s proven. A lot of times what we do is launch on Facebook and then we’ll go to LinkedIn and we will scale to a B2B audience on LinkedIn. That seems to work out pretty well.
Now, Instagram. A lot of influencers hang out on Instagram. It’s owned by Facebook, as you know, as is most things anymore. It is a huge network for younger folks. It’s just not great for B2B, but the right video campaign will attract them. I just had somebody sign up for a call with us from Instagram. He likes photos. He was like, “Yeah, I was on Instagram, I saw an ad.” And I’m like, “Oh, cool. You’re hanging out on Instagram, that’s awesome.” Most of our Instagram ads go unnoticed. It’s not a platform that we attract well because, for the most part, we work with people who are above it ages 35. Younger than that, it was like, “Oh, okay, cool.” And that worked.
Publish a lot of Images
With Instagram, you need to publish a lot, as infrequently. But you can’t link directly to an article. The post tends to be faster or more image caption-based. And in terms of viability, working on YouTube, Facebook, and LinkedIn is going to get you a much bigger bang for your time, especially for some of those older demographics, and the B2B kind of demographics. If you’re selling younger products that serve a younger demographic or physical products, something that is easily photographed, then Instagram is going to work well.
Twitter always falls in and out of favor. I saw President Trump just signed some executive order with social media or whatever. And it was based on this thing with Twitter, I guess. I don’t know. It’s our least favorite network, but it can be used to establish a good following and then point that following toward a link, toward a website, toward an opt-in, whatever your products and your services, and it’s worthwhile to syndicate your content to Twitter and post things on occasion using Zapier, which is an API integration service, or If This Then That, which is another mobile-based integration service.
Focusing on Twitter exclusively is probably a waste unless it’s tied in with some other platforms, or unless you’re Elon Musk and have like 30,000,000 followers. It’s kind of social media to wrap up. I wanted to kick through some social media tools though and show you how it all comes together. All right. I’m going to share this.
This is a blog post that I wrote quite a while ago, probably three or four years that might give you a little bit more insight into the social media piece. I’m going to drop this in the link. This was some of the inspiration behind the content already, the content we already went through, and then we’re going to make this bigger. This is a tool that I like. I’m really big with workflows. If you haven’t been able to tell… it’s hard for me to get in the swing of things because so many of my hours are spoken for throughout the day. I always try to compress my social media stuff into the most condensed period possible.
What I do in my workflow in the morning is, well now I’ve been waking up at four o’clock every morning, I used to wake up before, well, I used to wake up a lot. I wish we’d do an episode just on my growth stuff, but… I used to wake up before 3:00, I’ve been waking up at 4:00 in the morning. And one of the first things I do is read the news. Well, I read the news to keep up on the goings-on of the world. And I tend… I would find myself reading the business articles and I was like, “Wow, there’s some cool stuff in here that I could share.”
In looking for places, or a way that I could share it once and share it to all kinds of platforms, I found Hootsuite. Now there’s a lot of social media syndication services. Hootsuite is the one that I think is the biggest, or the most well renowned, I guess. There are some things it does well and some things it doesn’t do well. It’ll share to Facebook groups, Facebook pages, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram if it’s photos when you can’t share news to Instagram.
It doesn’t share personal profiles, but none of the services shared a personal profile, but it will share it with your page and your group and YouTube, and some of the other platforms. What I do is I open up news, the news app on my iPad every morning, and I go through and I find some things that I’m interested in. And then I just hit the little Hootsuite app, share to Hootsuite. And then I select all the different platforms and social media tools that I want to share this article to.
Usually, it is Twitter, the Done For You Facebook page, the Done For You traffic page or funnels page, or whatever. Whichever groups I think it works well in. Then I’ll share it with LinkedIn, the LinkedIn company, which is my company leveling policy. I’ll just hit send. It will send it to all those places, but not when I send it, it doesn’t auto-schedule. And it has this intelligent auto-scheduling functionality. I do all of this at 4:30 in the morning. I go through, I read the news for half an hour and I just basically schedule a bunch of posts throughout the day. And then it syndicates them through all my stuff and schedules them for me. And I don’t have to worry about when things are going out.
As you look at any of our pages, you’ll see three or four posts, three or four articles a day. And then we have the live streams, of course. And then sometimes I’ll throw up a picture of Sebastian or whatever. The only thing I post is these, these are life, and the personal stuff. But all the articles and that’s all syndicated from Hootsuite. I think you can even tell. It even says Hootsuite on the thing. But it’s just my workflow. You wake up, you read the news, you share the interesting stuff to the groups and pages and stuff that I think people are going to be interested in. I add my own two cents here and there, and that has worked out pretty well. That’s one of the tools, the social media tools that I use.
Now, if we look at StreamYard, which is actually where I’m streaming this podcast or this live stream from, this is my live stream right there. I’m not sure if I can go to the public side of this. Tomorrow says, “Is this similar to a content calendar for your social media tools?” Yeah. You can think of it like that. I don’t have a calendar. Some days I will share a bunch of stuff and some days I won’t share anything. Well, rarely, I don’t share anything. I usually try to go find something to share.
If I’m through reading the news, then I will end up trying to find something to share. Just so a day doesn’t go that I don’t share something, but I use the Apple news app, a news aggregator that you could then share social media tools stuff from.
Now StreamYard works a lot like a stream yard, one place you record… This video is being recorded through StreamYard and then sent out to YouTube and Facebook. Super, super nice tool. You don’t even need the live stream, you can just record it if you want. But it’s the nicest live stream software that I have found. And I’ve also played with this one. Back when I very first… it’s not .com. I think it’s .io.
Back when I first got into live streaming, months ago, I tried Restream. And Restream works out pretty nicely. They have a live stream platform, it’s not as nice, or it wasn’t at a time as nice as StreamYard. They’re automated so you can live stream directly from the platform. They also have a functionality where you can schedule videos to live stream, which is cool. They do this multi-streaming. This scheduler is what I was talking about. And then the multi-streaming studio is their live stream platform. You can… There’s the interface right there. Basically like this, you can go in, you can stream right to the platform. You can do banners, you can do questions and call-outs and all that other stuff right here. And then you can schedule a video. You don’t even need to do a live stream.
You can schedule a video. And then it streams as if it was life. But then I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t throw up Tumarrow’s comment here. Tomorrow’s, what are your thoughts on StreamYard compared to Ecamm and Zoom? Never used Ecamm. Zoom I have used, but I’ve never streamed from Zoom. But a lot of the guys that I know who are using Zoom for live streaming, they are going to StreamYard. I had a couple of calls last week and they were like, “Oh, you use StreamYard! We liked it. We started using it,” which is cool. If you want to have a video that plays as live, then this Restream scheduler will work. And then this multi-streaming which… I’m going to start playing with the multi-streaming because, in terms of video solutions, I picked up a SlingStudio.
SlingStudio gives you some multi-camera functionality inside of your office. Not just talking here, but I can also go to my desk and I can just switch the feed and then I can go sit down at the desk and do something on the screen, or I can switch the feed and go do something in a whiteboard. And then all of that is streamed to you. I’m pretty excited about playing around with that. That is one of the things that I have in mind for the coming weeks. Eventually, I’ll figure out how to do it.
Let’s see, we talked about Hootsuite, we talked about streaming and we talked about Restream. One of the social media tools that I think interesting as Canva. We talked about Canva in a previous episode earlier in the week, but like here, you can see some of the Canva images, this is our thumbnail for graphics. If you want to post a Facebook image… Facebook. Like here, let’s say we want just a Facebook post. Here’s your Facebook post. You can grab any of this stuff and you can just drop it in, change the graphics, change the images, all that stuff.
And now you are working with…. you’re posting that looks good on any of your social media tools, which has given you some likes, shares, retweets, all that other stuff. Tomorrow asks, what is SlingStudio? SlingStudio is this thing. The SlingStudio is easy multi-camera broadcasting. It’s a hardware unit. This hardware unit syncs up… You can have four… I think you can have up to 10 cameras on this unit and you can manipulate four of them from an iPad or from… basically you just drag them onto your screen and then it saves a full [res 00:27:26] version of it locally. And then it also streams over the internet to wherever you want to stream it.
The reason I was interested in it was for that full version locally, because we’re creating a lot of content on demand. What happens is, when it goes up to YouTube or Facebook, the quality diminishes just so much because there’s the upload, and then there’s the streaming, and then there’s the compression and all that stuff. I would like to have a local version that is of high quality. That’s why I got it. That’s the idea. And the multi-camera stuff is pretty cool too, but it would be nice to have something that was 1080 HD that I could save on a server and I could edit it later as opposed to editing the Facebook recording, or the YouTube recording.
