Thomas Green here with Ethical Marketing Service.
Today I would like to take you through my social media strategy. The various platforms that we are on, cover what I do and why. Also let you know about the paid activity if that’s applicable.
A big part of the reason I have taken it to the next level on social, is because of a marketer named Frank Kern. There is a couple of things he shared which made me change my approach. Which is what I will share with you now.
First is something he used to refer to as “results in advance”. I think he would say you demonstrate how you can help people by actually helping them. That concept alone has really influenced how I go about my approach on social media. Because it’s actually quite rare that I put out a video or a piece of content which doesn’t add value first. Then lets the consumer of that content know what they can do if they want to get in touch.
I think that approach helped me personally because putting out a pitch with no added value on a regular basis, would be unsustainable for me. I do like to be helpful, so if no one enquired at all I still get a kick out of the thank you comments I get.
He also mentioned that because he was a direct response guy which I am. He had overlooked social for anything which wasn’t a direct return from ads. It was the exact opinion that I had and he had started using content plus remarketing to add value and then make offers to people who were interested. He added that content consumption is going up, so if people are consuming content. They might as well be consuming yours.
Since then I have been creating video content every single day and in 2 days we will be at the three month mark. I have been doing video content for Ethical Marketing Service since 2015. But I have never put out this much content every single day.
YouTube is probably where we had focused the most and a video goes out every day now on YouTube and it’s typically “How To” marketing or business information and then at the end it’s “if you need help with the topic in that video to visit our website”.
We also launched The No-Nonsense Google Ads Book and that helped producing some of the content, some of the videos around the topic of the book are now promoted using paid activity, so we are promoting those using video discovery ads and this helps with increasing subscribers, finding a new audience on YouTube and also the book sales.
The most enjoyable thing about the Youtube videos is making myself look as ridiculous as possible in the thumbnail images.
With Twitter for a short time I was linking to the Youtube videos in tweets and that’s it. But I quickly learned that Twitter isn’t going to give any reach to a tweet which isn’t uploaded directly to Twitter. Since changing that, I have gotten a lot more engagement and following from Twitter. I have also started to tweet on relevant trending topics. You can pick up a few extra followers from that. I also use the images that I create for instagram and tweet those out. And the videos created for TikTok and tweet those out – So I look busy on Twitter!
For Pinterest I made a video recently, highlighting that with new video pins out.
Monthly reach has gone from around 300-400 a month to around 100k. Again to make the most of this, you really need to upload directly to Pinterest. But using the videos from YouTube and the videos created for TikTok. The reach has seen the biggest increase of all the social platforms combined (excluding paid). The pins with images don’t appear to get much reach at all.
TikTok was not on my radar at all and I had quite a low opinion of it. But after questioning my preconceptions, I realised that I could use it for repurposing video content. It has a maximum length of 1 minute for each video which means I put out a minimum of 1 video per day. And have gotten up to 5 videos uploaded in a day because you can just extract parts of your existing videos and upload them to TikTok.
It has been easier to get organic engagement on TikTok than almost all of the other platforms. But I think my content approach is a little early. That being said… I think there is only so much time someone would spend on that type of app before they want something more than just shallow surface level content. I haven’t spent a lot of time being a consumer on it. But I think it has a lot of potential from the point of view of keeping people on the app, the videos play automatically. It’s very easy to just swipe for the next piece of content.
If you thought social media was addictive before TikTok, it takes it to a whole new level. But the quality is pretty low. And I think the platform will have to start rewarding those who provide the best quality or the consumers won’t stay. I registered to do Ads on TikTok, but I don’t think it is fully out for everyone yet. So I am still waiting.
Instagram has IGTV which allows you to upload videos up to 60 minutes with the portrait aspect ratio of a phone.
Naturally, I am taking the videos I create daily, changing the aspect ratio and uploading them to IGTV. This gives a great impression for anyone who comes to the profile, but doesn’t seem to do a lot for reach. Images seem to work much better on Instagram, so I have started creating my own quotes on marketing and business and posting them as images.
My personal opinion is, make sure they are unique if you decide to do this, if you are quoting other people everyday, that’s an approach which is very easy to replicate by someone else. Add value by creating your own quotes, it takes some thought, but it’s worth it.
For about 2 months I tested promoting videos on instagram, the reach was great, but when I compared it to promoting images, there was no contest. You can get likes on instagram images for 2p. The promotion of images on Instagram far exceeded video, so we will be doing a lot more of this. Ideally your images need to be interesting. The first one I promoted was a box of my books before I shipped them to Amazon. It was a good picture as it’s news worthy. When you are using ads, you can also add a learn more link. So whilst I am promoting my instagram profile, I am also driving traffic to the book listing.
I also do Instagram stories on a daily basis which is essentially the 1 minute TikTok videos shared from one platform to another.
At the same time you can also share those stories to Facebook. Facebook gets daily stories, the quotes as images and videos uploaded directly onto the platform (that’s important). I have heard multiple times that Facebook groups perform really well, so we may test that soon. Of all the organic activity on Facebook, the only real results we get from it at the moment is from the paid activity.
If you haven’t tested as much as you can using Facebook Ads, you are probably missing an opportunity. Of all the content I am producing, I am running ads to just build a following. At the moment they are engagement video ads and also ads to get people to like the page. The idea being that I am constantly producing new content and the more people that like the page. The more people get exposed to the new content I am creating.
Facebook has really innovated their ads platform and it’s still got great potential for businesses.
Linkedin is perfect for us. Because it’s a business to business platform and we post as much there as we do on Facebook (excluding the stories). It also is one of the social platforms which still has the potential for reasonable organic reach. I created a video previously about Linkedin ads being expensive which I think is accurate. But the video views campaigns being just as reasonable as any other social platform.
We have been running video ads on Linkedin since then and the average cost per view has been 3p. When you consider the type of targeting you can do on Linkedin e.g. business owners of a particular size. My perception is that’s a complete bargain. I am going to be focusing on the ads side of this platform the most. As for our business, I think it has the potential to get the best results.
Thinkspot is a platform I have recently joined and am still testing things. You do have to pay to join if you are a creator. So there is no ad platform, it’s the opposite of TikTok, as currently it’s more for intellectual types. So when I have a piece of content that’s interesting and meaningful, I will typically post it there.
The main reason I post so much on Social Media. I really think that building an audience on these platforms is the modern version of a list. Previously you might have a direct mail list or an email list. Now your list is your subscribers or followers. There is great potential on Social for the vast majority of businesses.