Not long ago, Neal was on an “Ask Me Anything” on Product Hunt, a website that showcases new products, apps, and startups. Today he’s sharing some of the questions he answered during that session because he thought maybe if one person is asking this, other people are having these same questions. Listen in to hear Neal talk about everything from the best platforms to be on, tools to be using, advice for startups, and tips for fundraising for your new social business.
Key Highlights
[03:09] The Most Underrated Social Platform That Businesses Often Overlook
[07:20] How I Discover My Love for Social
[08:58] How Socials Are Used in Different Countries
[11:33] Advice for Startups
[12:38] Best Rate for Traction
[13:45] Which Paid Ads Should You Use?
[15:13] The Social Media Strategy I Admire
[16:36] The Other People in Social You Should Follow
[18:04] Twitter's Biggest Challenges and Opportunities
[19:42] My Favorite Social Media Tools
[21:27] My Opinion On Social Selling Tools
Notable Quotes
Learn More:
Not long ago, Neal was on an “Ask Me Anything” on Product Hunt, a website that showcases new products, apps, and startups. Today he’s sharing some of the questions he answered during that session because he thought maybe if one person is asking this, other people are having these same questions. Listen in to hear Neal talk about everything from the best platforms to be on, tools to be using, advice for startups, and tips for fundraising for your new social business.
Key Highlights
[03:09] The Most Underrated Social Platform That Businesses Often Overlook
[07:20] How I Discover My Love for Social
[08:58] How Socials Are Used in Different Countries
[11:33] Advice for Startups
[12:38] Best Rate for Traction
[13:45] Which Paid Ads Should You Use?
[15:13] The Social Media Strategy I Admire
[16:36] The Other People in Social You Should Follow
[18:04] Twitter's Biggest Challenges and Opportunities
[19:42] My Favorite Social Media Tools
[21:27] My Opinion On Social Selling Tools
Notable Quotes
Learn More:
Welcome to maximize your social actionable advice on how your business can maximize your social media presence. Now, the host of maximize your social, social media author, speaker, and saltan, founder of maximize social business, his Social Media Center of Excellence and the social tool Summit, Neal Schaffer. Everybody this is Neal Schaffer, welcome to another episode of maximize your social. I know that throughout the United States in many parts of the world, it's been really cold recently, but the weather here in Orange County, California is warming up so sorry about the cold weather. I'm still in long sleeve shirts and long sleeve pants if that makes you feel any better, but pay spring is just around the corner. Boy, I was asked the other day Neil, what are your social media conference plans for the for the upcoming months and it's gonna get pretty crazy starting in April, with the social tool Summit, Social Media Marketing World social media strategy summit and then in April, the content, we're in May, I should say the Content Marketing Conference. I do expect in March I'll be doing some of my Comerica Bank events primarily in California for those of you that are Comerica Bank customers and or get the special VIP invites from Comerica Bank. Hint hint. Alright. So I am not a Gary Vaynerchuk who is sort of the Ask Gary Vee asked me anything I, I was on one of his Facebook Mentions live broadcasts the other day. And he was talking about like racial issues and almost sounded like a politician. So Gary is a great guy, crazy guy has a lot of hutzpah, but you gotta love them. But I'm not about like the Ask Neil. I don't have like an ask me Oh, hashtag. But I do know that when I speak on social media, wherever I am in the world, I want to educate and inspire you and provide you insight. And therefore, I always say any unanswered questions about social media, ask them now. And at the end of the presentation, when no one has any more questions, I'll say, great. So I've answered every question you ever had about social media, and I'll get some laughs and, and hopefully a lot of applause. So I always offer to my podcast listeners, reach out to me, if you have any questions, let me know. And I'll be more than happy to record my answers. Right here in this podcast. I'm going to do this for the first time with this podcast, because I was literally on a Ask Me Anything from Product Hunt, product hunters is great website. It has a lot of startup tech companies. And it's really about tools. And if you're looking for tools for productivity, or what have you, become a member, check it out. It's a great site, I have a list of my favorite social media tools on there, in addition to my SlideShare, which hopefully you all have, as well. But hey, if you could ask me any question, what would it be? And I want to share with you the questions that I get asked recently this chat happened on January 25. It was Product Hunt comm slash live slash Neal dash Schaefer. So I'm going to get to these because they represent a lot of interesting questions that perhaps you have as well. This is from Emily. Neil, what do you think is the most underrated social platform that businesses often overlook? So dubs really a trick question because depending on your industry, and who your target audiences is, obviously going to define what social network you're on. But it's funny because everybody in social media marketing loves the new kids. Snapchat is hilarious, because why? If Snapchat is so popular, and you're so active on it, are you posting your Snapchat invite photo? On Instagram On Facebook And Twitter? I don't get it. I thought being on Snapchat was about tapping into the community there. And therein lies one of the problems with Snapchat, oh, don't get me wrong. It's a wonderful platform that has that has a huge audience. But in order to get a larger following, you literally have to self promote yourself. It's very, very hard. Well, almost impossible to find others. It's it was originally created to be a personal sort of social network. So if you're a Taco Bell, or a Madonna, if you're a well known person that gets a lot of traffic is that Oh, I see Taco Bell's and Snapchat I've been following. That's one thing. But if you're not a celebrity, I think Snapchat tends to be a little bit more challenging. So it's, I just think it's really funny that all these people, you know, they're on Twitter and Instagram and Facebook, and they're talking about Snapchats like, Well, why don't you talk about them Snapchat and, and obviously, the communication functionality of Snapchat while being pretty cool, and unique is limited. But hey, this podcast is not about Snapchat. I'm going to save that for another one. So I think the most underrated platforms are the ones that lose attention, especially when stock prices go down. Do you remember when Facebook stock dropped below?$20 like two years ago when everyone was saying, Ah, you know, Facebook can't leverage mobile and Facebook has no future. And now they just announced they have 1.5 6 billion users your stock is above 100 Good. So when things go down, that to me is usually a time to buy. I don't invest in stocks. By the way, I'm sort of a Vanguard Index Fund type of guy. But you know, low risk, decent return. But for those of you that remember that right now, I believe the most underrated social platforms Twitter, it's not often overlooked, because it's, you know, people talk about it. But it's never seen as a strategic network these days, with the rise of these other visual social networks like Snapchat, or Instagram or what have you. So it's funny, I'm actually in the process of writing a free ebook on Twitter marketing. And for those of you well, if you're new to the podcast, you might not know the history. But when I wrote my second book, maximizing LinkedIn for sales and social media marketing, I had two thirds of a rough draft of a Twitter book already done, called Understanding leveraging and maximizing Twitter. This was very similar to the understanding of Regina maximizing LinkedIn book, which is my first book, but I decided to do maximising LinkedIn for sales and social media marketing, because it was more of a business focus book, rather than just a book on professional networking, it was more in line with my business. So fast forward to 2013. And not only did I get an offer to publish with Wiley, but I got an offer to publish that Twitter book with another publisher, who some social media authors have published with I will, I won't say the name to protect the innocent of that of the publisher. But at the same time, I gave Wiley, three different book ideas I had one became maximize your social. Another one was a Twitter book. And a third one was a book that I was very close to publishing in Japan, a Japanese first book, which would have been pretty cool. Hopefully, I'll be able to do that in the future. So I've always had lots of great Twitter content. And when Social Media Examiner reached out to me for Social Media Marketing World 2016, which I'm proud to be speaking out again, for the fourth year in a row, they said, Neil, we want you to speak on Twitter, you do it? Well, you teach it well, there's very few people who are really passionate about it, and are teaching others about it. So I'm really excited about that. And as a way of just generating some buzz around that I do plan on releasing this maximizing LinkedIn for Twitter ebook just like my recent maximising LinkedIn for business ebook, which hopefully you've all downloaded and have all read. So I look forward to revealing more about all of my ideas about how to maximize Twitter very soon. Next question. How did you first discover your love for everything in social? What tools do you use daily and recommended businesses large or small, to maximize their social presence without spending a ton of money? Holy smokes, you're asking for the Holy Grail here. Come on social is going to be different for every company, every person, what have you. I personally have always been an outgoing social person. So my love for social I mean, I love to meet people, new people from all around the world in the daily basis. That's, that's what I love, right. And that's what social is all about. Now, I as you can imagine, being the co founder of the social tools summit, I use a ton of tools on a daily basis, but the main ones companies should have is a social media dashboard, I'm gonna throw out some names. We all start with Hootsuite, usually, some well remained but TweetDeck I moved on to Sprout Social buffer is a great dashboard. It's a little bit different than HootSuite, and Sprout Social. But every company should have at least one if not two of these platforms for various reasons. Now, there's other great platforms as a platform experimenting with called E clincher check them out there a social media dashboard as well. I used to use something called marketing suite, they're no longer around. We have Agora Pulse gold sponsor, the social tool Summit. And they have a great dashboard, which is great with Facebook and Instagram. And also Twitter Post Planner is a buffer like platform, which is adding other functionality as well. So hey, there's a bunch of tools. And all those tools are under you know, they're between three and $50 a month. And if you can't afford $50 a month, you should probably go out of business, because hopefully social is important to your company. All right. Next question on my good friend Eric Tong marketer at BMC Software. But this question has to do with international experience in social media. Can you talk about how it's used differently, either from societal or marketing perspective in other countries that might be unexpected or unusual question. My answer is social media is used pretty similarly throughout the world. But there are differences and the stage of development differences. While Europe in general, I find I still find to be six to 12 months behind the US in general social media marketing. I expect the gap to close but it does seem a little behind. Within Europe, every country is obviously different. The German speaking countries Germany, Austria, still using x ing over LinkedIn. But LinkedIn is actually more popular in certain European countries like the Netherlands than in the United States. Facebook is universally popular. Pinterest and perhaps Instagram to some degree, are sites that are a little bit further behind than they are here in the United States. Now in Asia, it's a little bit different because Asia went straight from they just you know, we don't have time to to create fixed phone line infrastructure. They went straight to wireless, they went straight to mobile. And it's it's really a mobile first society in many of these countries. I'm speaking of like China, Japan, Korea. So in Asia, mobile, social, what I call it, if you look at my things to look out for for social media in 2013, I was talking about the rise of mobile, social and mobile, personal, but it's mobile social using personal messaging apps. And those are the predominant social media more popular than Facebook or any other Western social networks. So specifically, I'm talking about WeChat in China, and Chinese speaking Asia and line in Japan, Korea, something called Kakao Talk. So if 2015 was the year, this is sort of my prediction based, you know, leveraging all this information. If facebook if 2015 was the year, Facebook started to monetize Instagram for marketing, I expect that we're gonna see them release some new business applications, marketing applications for WhatsApp, which is the closest thing to a WeChat line in 2016. To compete with these two apps, WeChat, Elian are all trying to get attention in American Europe, Facebook is obviously trying to get losing market share in Europe, in Asia. So it'd be interesting to see what happens there. I had a question about an app, which I'd never heard of. So I'm just going to pass over that because it's not worthy of discussion. Hey, here's one from Porsche. Anybody named Porsche? I'm in love, right? I mean, what a name. I don't know if it's male or female, but gotta love the name. By the way, there's a girl, my daughter's school named Mercedes. So I don't know if it's a new boom trend. I have boring names for my kids. But hey, I'm waiting to meet Rolls Royce whenever they come. So here's the question. And it's a three part question. So it's actually three questions in one tricky how some people do that. But let's get to it. Advice for startups. Growth, hack, leveraging social, right create content to attract and share in social, build a hamper community by leveraging paid social in the savvy way, build a list using like a lead pages like I was on a great webinar and lead pages today, and be helpful and push your product in an indirect way without pushing it. And I think you'll start to build up a community of hopefully loyal and passionate users. Second question, what kind of budget should they expect in but you know, budget is going to be a toughy. Right? I think it comes down to people and paid social more than tools. I mentioned all those tools between free and $50 a month, right? People and paid social are not free or $50 a month. So you don't necessarily need expensive tools, maybe a few $100 A month tops, the budget should be allocated to person, which doesn't need to be full time necessarily content creation, which might require a budget of at least a few $100 a month or more depending on how much content you want to create. And a few $100 a month of paid source to get started. In other words, excluding personnel started $1,000 a month for tools content creation and paid social combined. Makes sense? Hopefully it does. Third question, best rates for traction. Wow, that's that's a hard one. Right? If there was one best traction, everyone would be on it. There's one secret for best traction, right, regardless of industry. So social media is powerful. Only if people talk about your product, right? That's the viral aspect. Sometimes it happens organically but usually at the beginning you need to think of a creative way to get people talking about you. Some do it via leveraging influencers, others using Kickstarter, others with unique campaigns, social media, as as marketing in general, I love to say this is half science and half are you I am teaching you the science, you need to step it up, become the artist and paint a picture that works best with your own community. Hey, Portia is back again with another question. Do you believe in Facebook paid ads? Well, I'm a huge fan, anyone who knows me. I'm a huge fan of paid social in general, including Facebook paid ads. You know, if I wanted to target my ad to 25 year old males living in San Francisco who already liked Product Hunt, or like one of my competitors, I have the ability to do it on Facebook. But I can't do that anywhere else. Even on Google, obviously and other social networks. You can but can't do that outside of social. Second question, which paid ads would you use? Facebook's ad revenues are impressive, but there are plenty of articles out there. This is what Porsche is saying, right? Facebook, ad revenues are impressive. And with the latest earnings report, they got even more impressive, but there are plenty of articles out there saying that their paid ads are not worth the money. We've experienced some of the same issue as the author of The below video. I didn't see the video, but I knew I didn't have time it was pretty quick. Ask me anything. We've had issues with Instagram showing content to the completely wrong target group, and Facebook ignoring all requests investigate and respond. So let me to the best of my knowledge for Instagram. I believe that Facebook has improved an Instagram ad posting is now set to off as a default. Furthermore, not every ad format can be posted to Instagram further reducing the chance of that happening but taking that out of consideration. The ROI of a Facebook ad campaign is only as good as one you're targeting to your budget. Three your conversion definition and for the strength of your ad copy and visual to attract the relevant potential customer to drumroll please convert. Take a look at each one of these. Right targeting budget conversion definition or conversion measurement and the strength of your ad copy visual as well as just the relevance of all this and is your product and convert is your Landing Page converting whatever it is. Look at each one of these. Look for ways to optimize, experiment, measure, optimize, repeat, PDCA plan, do check action. Repeat neverending. I'm glad I got that off my chest. Alright, whose social media strategy do I do admire now in terms of campaigns or brands? You know, I can ask this a lot. Here's the thing, the challenge about social media strategy that companies don't go out announcing what they're doing, and that often it's a part of their core corporate strategy, they might not want their competition to know about, I've been a fan of a lot of different brands and what they do I love what Nordstroms does on Pinterest, the books on Instagram, I just saw a sponsored ad. And I had to comment and say, Hey, I, I bring up the books on every social media speech I do on Instagram, as I do with Nordstroms. On Pinterest, b2b brands, leveraging excellent resourceful content for social like Buffer one of those social media dashboards, and old school brands trying to stay relevant this day and age like General Electric, lots of great social brands out there. Hey, here's one, who should we all be following to take inspiration for upping our social game? Hopefully, you're already following Neal Schaffer, you're already following maximize social business or M social business. And you're already following the social tools Summit, which is spelled social tools. And then smmt, my co founder, Brian gets mad at me, why don't we get the why don't we get the whole username social tools Summit? It's because there was a limitation of characters that went to over so I had to get rid of the two vowels and summit, but hopefully, that still works, you'll find find us and all three of those publish different content for different industries, and a lot of content and I think you should be following them. So who are the other people in social, you should follow? Wow, you know, some of you may even be listening and even if I could give kudos to everybody I would but you know, who are the people that I tend to follow and get a lot out of, I'm just going to go through a list here and maybe I should create a blog post around this but okay, I dal De Meyer. That's the Twitter handle Andrea evolve. She know her for Facebook marketing. Michael Brenner former. I don't think he was the CMO at SAP might have been but does a lot of great b2b Social Jan Gordon karate Jay Baer? Of course. Mark Schaefer. No, we're not related. His last name is spelled differently than mine. Jeff Bullis. The man from down under Kim Garst Madalyn Sklar, John Aguilar, especially about blogging, Pam marketing Pam Mar. Great great gal out there in Orlando in Clary, Dublin Ireland social tools Rebekah Radice dear to my heart my my fellow maximize social business alumni that is located here in Los Angeles and is doing an amazing job in social John Hayden. Especially Social Media for Nonprofits. He's out there in Boston, Mike Oulton does a lot of great stuff. Anna traffic Cafe Anna Hoffman, wonderful resource for blogging Daniel Newman, UV, Daniel does a lot of I think it's the millennial ceo.com. I don't know about the millennial part. But he has a lot of real thought provoking content about a lot of things social business, social enterprise and social media in general. I'll keep going for a few more questions here. Hey, Neal, what are Twitter's biggest challenges and opportunities? So this Product Hunt asked me anything was done right when all these executives left. So I tend not to get into this sort of ad op content, because it doesn't directly help you maximize your social. And that really defines everything I do. But if you're curious, let me tell you what I think is gonna happen with Twitter and what I think the opportunities are. So I was really shocked with all the news that all these executives lost like half the executive team lost. So I think that hint at extending the character limit, which is good for advertising revenue, obviously. And you know, immediately your stock takes a toll on your executives leave. The challenge is that tweaking Twitter to generate more revenue, it has to be done while growing a passionate community without alienating them. Facebook and LinkedIn have been successful doing this. I believe Twitter can do as well. And I think the opportunities for Twitter are numerous. because Twitter is the real time firehose of information that everyone uses. They have a plethora of tools, companies that make a lot of money through providing the API access. They're supported by celebrities, television stations, newspapers, you know, all these different entities that are making a lot of money off indirectly off Twitter. So there are many ways to monetize Twitter to a greater extent and keep everyone happy. But they should be thinking outside of the box, and do it in a different way than others have, because they are different. You can't replicate success. You can only replicate things that make sense to do for your own business, but they're going to be inherently different. And if they're not, you're probably not going to be successful. Here's what I'd love to hear. What do you think is the most underutilized but effective method of social media for business? Boy, this is hard. And I was also asked, What are your favorite social media tools to help with the process? Well, it's a pretty broad and general question, but to give a complete answer to I always try but the most effective method of social media for business in general terms right general process one, have content on one's website that is shareable to build community and social Three leveraging that social community for business objectives. And part of that is going to be obviously bringing them back to your website as part of your relationship building exercise with them. So to do above number one, have content, once content need WordPress content management system that will make it easy for you to integrate your web with the social web, or your website with the social web, I should say, to build community Social, I'm a big fan of Sprout Social, it's my main social media dashboard, I use day in day out recommend you do as well. Three, leverage that social community for business objectives, lead pages if you missed the webinar today, maybe we'll do it again in the near future. But definitely do check that out. Okay, I'm cognizant of your time. I don't want to go too far here. But there's just two or three more questions left, that I will get to as I think it might be interesting. So once again, I don't like to do op ed pieces. But hey, what do you make of the Twitter dismissals over the weekend, I was pretty shocked and worried about future I'd speculate there's disagreement about moving away from entire 40 character routes, there was disagreement, the executive team, I might be mistaken historical perspective will inform us of that in the not so distant future. But the world is changing and social media is changing, and always will be in order to survive. And this goes the same for businesses out there, you need to adapt to the present. And I believe that's exactly what Twitter is trying to do by extending that character limit. Okay, let's see here, one to two more questions. And that'll end this episode. What is your opinion of the social selling tools, they're around social CRM, big fan of nimble, open to hearing more, other than using LinkedIn directly, of course, which I do. So I'm in two opinions regarding this number one, and I need to do a lot, I do a lot of social selling trainings and speak on it, I need to share more content with you all on the subject, I have a lot to say. But anyway, number one sales people, even in this age of social media still need a CRM, you need a tool, your management needs a tool, and you need to append that CRM with social data. So you have everything in one tool and you're looking at a contact nimble is the best representation of that by far, if you're not familiar with Nimble, do a search, go to nimble Social CRM, do a search for that in Google, you'll find them, especially with the social appending of information. Of course, using LinkedIn Sales Navigator directly is another option. But you're limited to LinkedIn, nimble grabs from all around social media and all around the internet. But on the other hand, this is my part to two part to answer to the question. On the other hand, just like social media, marketers need to use many tools to get the job done, perhaps salespeople will need to do the same. I recently started using I never use the CRM before, because I never had to prospect for business. For social tools, summit and sponsorships that's a little bit different. And I started using something called pipe drive as a CRM. And I must say it's brilliant, it's really, really great app, if you're looking for a CRM in your small business, and you want to break off from Excel, I would definitely check out Pipedrive. It's a real eloquent tool. But I can't manage my social contacts through there. But I do that to a separate social media tool, like Sprout Social. So it might be a little bit less efficient than using one tool. But I feel like I'm in better control to the information. Because CRM is just don't do social, right? And then was the closest but it is still different than managing my social context to a dashboard like Sprout Social, there's still Delta there. So I hope that gives you some insight. And the final question, dear to my heart. If you were to fundraise a startup today, how would you go about doing it and Porsche love yet? Another question from Porsche. So I would work on first being very clear. Okay, this goes beyond social. What problem are you trying to solve? Who the competition is how you can defeat them? What the total market size and sales profit estimates are. And having a solid well thought out business plan is obviously the first step. I assume you already have that if you're looking to fundraise your startup for the next step, I tried to gather attention through free user signups lists signups etc. To validate the idea is there demand for you're never going to know when to experiment, you don't need to even have a product to start, you can have a landing page and give something away, have a real simple beta tool that reveals 5% of the functionality promises more to see how many would sign up. There's a lot that's already been said about this. But only when I validate the idea that I like to raise money because you have a solid plan, assuming that you already have a prove that you can develop the product itself, as well as some data now that supports your plan. And I wouldn't look to social media for fundraising, but connecting with venture capitalists and Angel investors in person through networking and maybe using social media to help in the connection. But this comes more down to a b2b person to person, relationship type of cell. And it's a great example and it's a perfect way to end this podcast as I probably say once in every podcast that social media replaces nothing and complements everything. You know, just because you have a big social media community doesn't mean that you can easily monetize it, as I talked about in the last podcast, which you should listen to if you're interested in that subject. You know, it comes down to really where can we use bits and pieces of social to help us knowing that social can't replace anything else we're doing it can only help Add to it and augment our efforts but it all comes with having a product that's sellable that investors want to invest in social help you build a story if you play your cards right hope this all makes sense. Hey everybody, hope you enjoyed this episode of maximize your social if this question like this you want answered, I've actually just signed up to a pretty cool new platform called wise like, why SC li ke go to wise like calm slash Neal Schaffer and the Al das sh FF er, you can subscribe and ask me questions which I will answer. People have already asked me 17 questions that I've answered to what can be done to create more awareness regarding the importance of social media marketing to new and small businesses? How did social media become what it is today? Should a writer consider like or share a higher honor and why? I've already answered this question. So check out that site. And I look forward to getting your questions which I can reveal on this podcast. So hey, I'll be coming back to again from my home office here in Irvine, beautiful Orange County, California. But until then, I realize it might be cold out there. Man, when it's cold outside, it's good time to be productive inside. So I hope you're ramping up to your 2016 and as I like to say with all my podcasts, wherever you are in the world, make it a great social day. Until next week. Bye bye. Thanks for listening to maximize your social. We appreciate all of your iTunes subscriptions ratings and comments. Please also make sure to check out Neil's new community, the Social Media Center of Excellence at social media ce o e.com. As well as Neil's social media conference, the social tools Summit, coming to Boston on April 12.