As we close out a year and enter a new one, it's time to holistically look at our digital and social media marketing strategy.
If content is the currency of digital and social media, where should we be investing our content creation efforts going forward?
Here's my advice, where I really juxtapose social media with all other content in terms of longevity and discoverability to give you a clear picture as to where to get the biggest bang for your marketing buck going forward.
Episodes mentioned in the show:
179: The What, Why, and How of Podcasting
Key Highlights
[01:19] Where Should We Be Making Strategic Investments Moving Forward?
[02:50] The Problem With Social Media
[05:55] How Social Media Should Be Displaced
[06:39] The Lifespan of Content in Social Media
[07:39] Content Mediums
[10:14] You Need to Be Everywhere!
[11:00] Which Medium Should I Strategically Focus On?
[12:06] Going All In
[12:55] Redefining Social Media Strategy
[13:28] Content Discoverability and Longevity
[14:22] Final Thoughts
Notable Quotes
It's really time to take a step back combined with obviously the pandemic that we continue to exist in. And the realization that we need to get better at creating relationships digitally, with consumers and with buyers.
If you're going to be on the content, hamster wheel, don't you want to be on a hamster wheel that has more impact, where it has more longevity, as well as discoverability.
And here's the thing, you can't just have all your eggs in one basket, you need to be everywhere.
So you need to be everywhere. And you can't be everywhere. So you need to choose your priorities.
But there's a lot of people that are looking for podcasts. And once they get engaged in the podcast, it is a very, very special relationship that you build with people.
And I think if you go all in, you can really make an impact.
And I think that the Coronavirus, forced us those that weren't as invested in digital as we should have been, to really do that I do believe this decline in social media reach should be pushing us more to do more collaborations with influencers.
They were able to create their kingdoms on these other platforms where there's more longevity more discoverability, and then translate that into a large social media presence, which continues that brand awareness.
You don't necessarily have to be posting content every day. You don't even have to post your own content every day. But it frees you up to truly engage with others and find your customers find your fans. Find your collaboration partners. And I think that is going to be the best time invested in social media.
As we look to close out another year, and begin a new one, we begin to think where should we invest our resources in visa v digital and social media marketing. I'm going to give you my advice, where I'd be investing in, in the next year and beyond. In this episode of The maximize your social influence podcast. Welcome to the maximize your social influence podcast with Neal Schaffer, where I help marketers, entrepreneurs, and business owners grow their businesses using innovative marketing techniques, leveraging the concept of digital influence throughout digital and social media. Hey, everybody, welcome to episode number 185 of the maximize your social influence podcast. How are you today, I have finally made it back from Japan. And well, that sort of explains why this week's episode is dropping a little bit late, I hope you'll forgive me. But also, last week was such a nail biter in terms of the election that we had in the United States, it sort of made sense to wait until some of the dust cleared. But I suppose the dust will not clear for some time now. But today, I want to talk about where should we be making strategic investments going forward in our digital and social media marketing, this is all about yielding more influence, which leads to a bigger audience, which leads to more engagement, which leads at the end of the day to more business. So I've been thinking a lot about this as I shift towards my next book, and do a lot more consulting and speaking on more broader topics than just influencer marketing. And don't get me wrong. influencer marketing is a key component to all this. But at the end of the day, content is the currency of digital and social media. And I believe that for a lot of marketers outside of your paid budget, and some of that paid budget may actually be for influencer marketing, a lot of content expenses, or I should say a lot of marketing expenses go into content, right. And after doing this for 10 years, we're in our second decade of social media, it's really time to take a step back combined with obviously the pandemic that we continue to exist in. And the realization that we need to get better at creating relationships digitally, with consumers and with buyers. We all know this, and you all should be nodding your head right now. But how do we do that? And I think the knee jerk reaction is social media, right? They're all on social media, we can build relationships in social media. The problem with social media, when we compare it to the other main methods, is that content, lifespan content longevity is very, very short. Now, there's also an aspect of discoverability, which is using hashtags or, you know, posting things, whatever it might be. But at the end of the day, when we think about it, right, we need to be unsearched, on social and on email. And when we think about search and social, we also think about intent. What is the intent of someone on tik tok? They want to see an entertaining video right? Now, it might be quasi educational, like with makeup tutorials, or what have you. But at the end of day, it's sort of this, you know, entertainment focused education, if there's any education. And I'd say the same for Instagram. And I think if you ask any instagrammer, when they post something self promotional, versus when they post a selfie, or when they post themselves in a lifestyle environment, what gets the better engagement, you you know what the answer to that question is, right? But think about it, right? Think about the time you spend creating content, for social media of creating that perfect, Instagram graphic, or photo, or the perfect video. And the lifespan is very, very short. And I think to myself, and I find it with my own business, you know, the time spent in content creation for social media, if we could use that to create content for networks or entities that have more longevity in terms of the content lifespan, as well as greater discoverability. Isn't that a greater investment? Now, getting back to search social email, right? Email is something a little bit special email obviously in terms of developing a better relationship. We need to be utilizing email. It is one of the main communication channels that we still have and we can't ignore it. But Email, our content only gets discovered if we have already built a relationship where we have acquired an opt in, you know, GDPR compliant email address. So we're not going to talk about that today. But in terms of the search social, and I'm again, gonna get into the content meanings as well. Okay, just give this a lot of thought. And this sort of comes back to for those of you that were able to join my presentation for the meltwater social media festival, if you couldn't, well, whenever I talk about doing these events, you'll want to make sure that you're subscribed to my email list, go to Neal Schaffer calm, you can't miss either a widget on the right hand side, or on the bottom of your mobile sign up so that you find out about these events, because I do do them quite often, they're free, but they are time limited. And you're either on the list or you're not on the list, right, you're either gonna find out or not find out. But here's the thing, I talked in that presentation. And this is, like I said, conceptualizing my next book. And I've already talked about where social media really should be displace not necessarily to market and promote what you're going to do anyway. But really, as is an amazing place to find people to collaborate with. And some of them might be your customers, some of them might be your fans. So working off that, if we can leverage user generated content, or influencer generated content or fan generated content, whatever you want to call it, if we can leverage that for all of our content, on social media, that's awesome. And this, indeed, is what a lot of brands do. Therefore, we can focus our content on platforms that have a little bit longer longevity. And I use Instagram as a prime example because it is the second most popular social network. And we know on Facebook, the lifespan of contents even shorter, but even on Instagram, it is getting shorter and shorter, you would publish something new, and maybe 24 hours later, you'd still get likes on it. These days, it's more like 18 hours or 12 hours. And there's just less likes to go around it is supply demand. And like every other social network, Instagram is hitting this period of maturity. Where you know that great engagement you might have gotten just a year or two ago just is starting to dry up slowly by slowly. This is social media. Really, it's it's a timeline. It's what's happening now what's happening today, it's there. And it's gone. Not to say that you can't build traffic, and engagement and brand awareness and social media still great for that. But in terms of core content creation, what are the other options we have? So when I talk about influencer marketing, and we'll talk about digital marketing, it's the same thing. Where do you want to yield influence. And it comes down to content mediums, it comes down to we have obviously, photographs, which we tend to think Instagram First, we have videos, which we should be thinking YouTube. First, we have textual content, which is a blog. And then we have audio, which is what you're listening to right here a podcast. So four major mediums. The thing with photos is, it's primarily social media. And that's where the lifespan of that image is going to be very, very short. Now, when we have a blog, it's pretty incredible. You know, the lifespan of a blog, I still get traffic from blog post I published more than 10 years ago, believe it or not, yes, it does happen. And I think there was a study done that said, most content in the top page in terms of Google search results comes from like, at least a year and a half ago. Obviously, they're outliers. But you know, if you've ever done a search and seeing results and say, why is that content from two years ago, still in the top 10? Well, once you build authority on something, the lifespan of your contents reach in search engines, at least in terms of Google actually gets longer. It's pretty crazy. So you kill yourself because you're on this hamster wheel of content creation that a lot of people talk about when I think of content creation negatively. I think it becomes part of your infrastructure, same as me showing up every week podcasting. But if you're going to be on the content, hamster wheel, don't you want to be on a hamster wheel that has more impact, where it has more longevity, as well as discoverability. And then if we think of search intent, that people are on social media to engage with other people, not businesses, yet people searching on Google are looking for a solution to their problem, or they're looking to make a purchase. and if we talk about Amazon even more, so but even on Google, that's still the case. It is a completely different paradigm. So it's really funny. I subscribed to a bunch of podcasts that I'm sure you do. And it's really interesting hearing a lot of Instagram marketing podcasts that I've listened to, and hearing them at first talk about these hacks and how to get lots of followers. And then they start talking about these tools that they use, and a lot of them are sort of bots. And then maybe they get suspended by Instagram and they need to change the way they do things. And then they all they talk about About as you know, organically do this. And then they start to talk about will, you sort of need to have, you know, an email list and you need to have a website. And now, they're not even talking about Instagram as much, they're starting to talk about other social platforms. And here's the thing, you can't just have all your eggs in one basket, you need to be everywhere. And now, even podcasters, talk more about well, you know, I'm going to start to create show notes on my website for the podcast, and I'm gonna create more blog content. And it's, it's an absolute no brainer. So you need to be everywhere. And you can't be everywhere. So you need to choose your priorities. If you only have so much time in the day, I am betting and I'm more and more strategically investing in those areas where content I believe is more discoverable and has more longevity. And that is everywhere, outside of social media, in all honesty, whether it is blog content, whether it is a podcast, or whether it is on YouTube. And if you were to ask me, where I would strategically focus over those areas, I'm still very bullish on podcasts. You've heard me recently talk about podcasting here, the, you know, the what, why, and, and how of podcasting will link up to that in the show notes. But you know, it's supply and demand, there's only like 1 million podcasts out there. And there's a lot of competition. But there's a lot of people that are looking for podcasts. And once they get engaged in the podcast, it is a very, very special relationship that you build with people. Like hopefully I'm building with you right now. YouTube is still very prime as well go onto YouTube, do a search for things that you're an expert at, or your business sells in. And I think you'll see that a lot of the top results for that keyword in YouTube. They're either old videos, or they're bad videos, they don't really offer much substance. And that's why I'm still really bullish on YouTube. Because I think up until now, similar to podcasting, only a small fraction of people or businesses have really invested in it. And I think if you go all in, you can really make an impact. And once again, the discoverability and the longevity of that content, just kicks you know what, over, you know, almost every social media network, you know, there are networks like Pinterest, where your content can live longer. But even networks like Pinterest these days, are telling you you need to have fresh content, because they're going to start to prioritize more recent content, like every other social network does. And here's the thing with so much content being published in social networks, the most recent content is like today or yesterday, whereas on a website, or in a podcast, or on YouTube, that can be much longer. I mean, I'm getting caught up on Pat Flynn, Smart Passive Income podcast, I'm listening episodes in 2015. Once again, you're not gonna have that in social media. So I think, as we enter the new year, and as you do an audit on your content, we're always needing to be sort of like pivoting. And really redefining our strategy for all of this. And I think that the Coronavirus, forced us those that weren't as invested in digital as we should have been, to really do that I do believe this decline in social media reach should be pushing us more to do more collaborations with influencers in the type of influencer marketing that I talked about an age of influence, I see the next shift in terms of that discoverability and longevity of content. And it's funny, and maybe you've seen them to businesses, or speakers, what have you, they're real successful, they do very little on social media, they don't really need to, because they've built on a blog, or a podcast or YouTube channel, they've been very smart at creating lead magnets bringing people into their email list. And that's how they've generated business without you even knowing it. And social media to them, is well, I'm not gonna say it's an afterthought. But it was not part of the strategic plan. They were able to create their kingdoms on these other platforms where there's more longevity more discoverability, and then translate that into a large social media presence, which continues that brand awareness. I hope this all makes sense. It's really, like I said about this, this tiny little pivot, and this tiny little way of re measuring, and really rethinking about social media. Because if you can do this, and focus on the content creation in those networks, it actually frees you up to use social media. You don't necessarily have to be posting content every day. You don't even have to post your own content every day. But it frees you up to truly engage with others and find your customers find your fans. Find your collaboration partners. And I think that is going to be the best time invested in social media. Now and well into the The future as well. Alright everybody, I hope you enjoyed this episode, we're going to try to get back to our normal schedule over the next week or two. So sincere apologies for the delay there. And, hey, if you enjoyed this podcast, as always, I'd be honored. If you could just take a minute, go over to Apple podcasts, wherever you listen to this, just post a one or two sentence review, and then send me an email, let me know, it really means the world to me. It is it's the fire that keeps burning inside me, that helps me generate more ideas and more advice for these podcasts. I'm not here to hard sell you anything, you know, the way they operate. I just really hope that this content, helps you get to the next level and at the end of the day helps you maximize your social influence. We'll be back next week with another interview, make sure you subscribe so you don't miss any of the upcoming interviews. And I Well, I'm gonna be around the United States. I may be going back to Japan, the end of the year, we'll see. But I'll be around. So we're getting back to normal life here. And I know that some of you have already reached out to me I talked last time about this fractional CML or outsourced cmo service that I have. So if that is of interest to you, please do reach out to me. I'd love to help your company and yourself above and beyond what I provide you in this podcast that it's applied to your own specific situation. All right, everybody. That's it for today. Wherever you are in the world, make it a great virtual day. Bye Bye everybody. And sale nada