---
title: Stand Out on Social Media with Jessica Perreault
date: 2023-06-08T05:00:00-04:00
author: Sean Smith
canonical_url: "https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-06/episode-13/social-media-with-jessica-perreault/"
section: Podcast
---
<!\[CDATA\[YII-BLOCK-BODY-BEGIN\]\]>[Skip to main content](#main-content)Guest Jessica Perreault
Jessica is a marketing strategist focusing on content marketing, social media, and branding for mission-driven organizations.
[ ](jessicaeperu)[ ](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessica-perreault-8383882a/)
Season 06 Episode 13 – Jun 08, 2023
40:09 [Show Notes](#show-notes)
## Stand Out on Social Media with Jessica Perreault
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[](//dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/website101podcast.com/uploads/mp3/season-06/S06-E13-Social-Media-with-Jessica-Perrault.mp3)
The ins and outs of mastering social media for small business owners with Jessica Perrault plus a predication about AI generated content for social.
### Show Notes
- How Jessica got into social media
- Tips to get started for small business owners
- Social media and content marketing
- Understand the nuances of the different social networks
- Which social network is the most important?
- How to manage the time requirements
- How to measure success - analytics
- Vanity Metrics
- Own your digital footprint
- Email list is critical
- Difficult to trust a company that is only on social - no website
- Red flags about social media
- Misconceptions about social
- Software to manage social & mailing lists
- AI In social and marketing
- Amanda makes a prediction about AI content
- Replying on social - flame wars
### Show Links
- [Own Your Digital Content](https://caffeinecreations.ca/blog/own-your-digital-content/)
- [Use social media to promote your website, not replace it.](https://belikewater.ca/blog/entry/social-media)
- [hootsuite](https://www.hootsuite.com/)
- [Sprout Social](https://sproutsocial.com/)
- [Agora Pulse](https://www.agorapulse.com/)
- [Later (Instagram)](https://later.com/)
- [Hubspot](https://www.hubspot.com/)
- [Active Campaign](https://www.activecampaign.com/)
- [Google Analytics](https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/#/)
- [Google Search Console](https://search.google.com/search-console/about)
- [Wendy's Twitter](https://twitter.com/Wendys)
- [Spotify Wrapped](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotify_Wrapped)
Powered Transcript Accuracy of transcript is dependant on AI technology.
**\[00:00\]** **Amanda:** I'll also often hear people say social doesn't work for us, but they haven't put the effort in so maybe they're pushing out press releases or they're pushing out links, you need to be consistent on social, you need to be following other accounts, you have to put the work and you have to engage with other accounts that are within your ecosystem.
**\[00:16\]** **Jessica:** Welcome back to another episode of the website 101 Podcast. This is the podcast for people who want to learn more about building and managing websites. I am one of your hosts, Mike Mella. They are Sean Smith and Amanda Loots. Hi, Sean and Amanda. How are you guys doing?
**\[00:35\]** **Sean:** Very good. Hi, Mike and Sean.
**\[00:37\]** **Jessica:** Good. So, we have a guest today. Today, we're going to talk to Jessica Perot. She's a marketing consultant from SidePony Marketing. And she's on here to tell us all about social media and everything around social media marketing plans, that kind of thing. Jessica, welcome to the show. Thanks for being here.
**\[00:57\]** **Amanda:** Hi, thanks for having me. I'm so happy to be here.
**\[01:00\]** **Jessica:** Yeah, social media is something that, of course, we all sort of do a little bit in our jobs, but no one's really an expert at it among the three of us. I know I would, if I could speak for you guys, I don't know, I'm not certainly. I don't even use social media that much, so, certainly not in my job. So I'd love to hear from an expert what we should be doing now in this landscape of social media. So how long have you been working in social media as a consultant?
**\[01:26\]** **Amanda:** So quite a while, like, I mean, way back when I was personally using MSM Messenger, ICQ, MySpace, those sorts of things, when I was a teenager, and in my early 20s, I didn't start using it professionally until I was sort of handed social media when I was in a non-marketing role in my mid-twenties. I think that's how it happened back then and that's kind of how it's happening still. So we can talk about that later about how that doesn't serve business as well. But since then around my mid-twenties, it's been a critical channel throughout my career as I moved into content roles and then more marketing-focused roles and then senior marketing leader roles over the last 15 years.
It's been a very critical channel for us. I, you'll see how passionate I am about social media as we go, but I love social. And I think every business needs it. Of course, back then, it was not done well.
The company I was working for had so many different accounts for different teams, different business lines, even different projects. And that's kind of back when we were all sort of trying to figure out social, but it's come a long way. It's gotten simpler in some ways and also a lot more complex. So I'm super happy to chat about that with you guys.
**\[02:36\]** **Sean:** And I think that's one of the things, especially about social media is that it is so broad and yet so specific. And so it's easy to try to do too much and get overwhelmed and then completely mess everything up. So if you had just like a couple really simple tips for like small business owners to get started, like what would those tips be?
**\[03:01\]** **Amanda:** The first one is be super consistent. Actually, you know what? The first one is make sure you have a very strong brand strategy and marketing strategy in place, because no matter what I suggest you do, if you don't have a good marketing strategy and a great brand strategy in place, nothing you do on social is gonna work for you. So that's the number one thing.
You need to understand your audience, you need to understand your product market fit, your value proposition, the gaps in your market, sort of the pain points of your customers. If you, and all of that is in your brand strategy or in your marketing strategy. So if you don't have that in place from my perspective, you're not really ready for social. It's just, it's going to, you're going to spend a lot of time on it.
You're going to spend your, spend your wheels like crazy, and just not get the results that you're looking for. If you have those things in place, you need to be consistent, consistency is important. You need to invest in channel specific social content. So having a great website with great website content, what often happens is people just repurpose content that's already from their website and they push it out on social, that's not going to be effective.
Maybe 10 years ago, that was effective. That's not going to be effective anymore. So you need social-specific content. So you need to set time aside for that.
And you need to not be afraid of video. So be consistent, embrace video if you can. Have a good marketing strategy in place and have social-specific content. Those are kind of the top things.
We can talk about analytics and your data and what to look for and what matters and what doesn't. For sure, if we want to dive a little bit deeper, but those are the top things that you would need as a business owner to see any success on social.
**\[04:43\]** **Mike:** That's very interesting. And you mentioned that you need social specific content, and not only repurposing content from your website. For each of your social channels, do you need unique content or is it okay to reuse? So like say you got TikTok and YouTube, is it okay to use the same video or should it be unique?
**\[05:08\]** **Amanda:** You can definitely use the same content and repurpose it. So I will very rarely talk about social media without talking about content marketing. Content marketing is my area of specialty, along with social media, social falls under content marketing for us at SidePony. And we like to get as much mileage as possible out of every piece of content.
It's hard to create content, right? you guys know, you do the podcast, you create a video, it's hard to create content, and then you want to repurpose that and get as much mileage as you can. So you can use the same pieces of content, but you need to repurpose it for the different channels. So maybe like YouTube, you can get away with longer videos.
I know they've introduced longer videos on TikTok, depending on your brand, depending on your content, they don't tend to perform as well as shorter videos. So you can still take those video clips, but apply them differently, edit them differently, cut them up differently, Of course, you use different hashtags, different captions, but you can still use that same video footage across many different channels. And of course, you can take your video footage too and turn that into quotes, and you can turn that into some social captions. But you have to understand the nuances of how people communicate on the different social channels.
You can't just post a TikTok on Instagram reels and then also post it on YouTube shorts or whatever and expect to see great results.
**\[06:27\]** **Jessica:** Yeah, Amanda does a lot of the sort of all those things you just talked about where we had this video And then she chops it up and puts little segments of it on YouTube and as a smaller more digestible pieces in that
**\[06:38\]** **Mike:** Amanda does so much work on that big credit and that's a lot of work. Go Amanda go
**\[06:44\]** **Sean:** Amanda doesn't like it. Oh no, and that's and that's the that's the problem too It's like it started with YouTube and then I was like, oh, well, maybe we should put some stuff on Facebook and oh well we had Twitter before we should keep that up to date. Should we be on Instagram? What about TikTok?
And then it was like I'm I'm just like an ostrich when I get overwhelmed and I was just like nope none of it. I'm done. No more things. So it took like a big effort.
It was like a decision in my mind to just be like you know what? Let's just let's just do YouTube videos and that's it. And like once in a while like on other platforms it'll be like hey check out but it's like always trying to drive traffic to the YouTube because the YouTube is always talking about the podcast. So it's almost like a substop before getting people to know about
**\[07:29\]** **Jessica:** the podcast and subscribing. Yeah actually Jessica how do you how do you deal with the question of I mean I kind of feel dumb even asking it so I assume it's not a very good question which social network is more important than another obviously I guess the answer is go where your audience is but but is there something more to that that you would say to a client when they say, oh, should I be on TikTok or Facebook or Twitter or what or all of them, like what do you say?
**\[07:56\]** **Amanda:** I get asked about TikTok almost every day and I love TikTok, I'm a huge consumer of TikTok. We have an account we've been growing organically so I love TikTok and I think it has a place for a lot of businesses but you have to be very comfortable with video, you have to be super consistent
And you need help, like having one person handling all your social, expecting them to be a video editor, a graphic designer, a copywriter for social, understanding engagement, understanding analytics, being able to do research. That's a well-rounded marketer that we're describing, not a single social media person, right? So my answer is always, people always ask, should we be on one specific network more than another, which one matters the most? It depends on your business, it depends on your audience, you're right, go where your audience is, But how do you know where they are? And in this day and age, people are across channels, right? Like they go to different platforms and different channels for different things. So it really depends on your business, your specific marketing goals, your budget. The resources you can apply, video requires way more resources than, you know, Twitter, for example, like any of the video channels Twitter, you can just be pushing it content like crazy. It's a lot easier than a TikTok or Instagram Reels, for example, or YouTube, like YouTube is very labor-intensive, as you know. So channel selection is super important. Your marketing strategy should help you determine this, like where you should start. Now, I'm not a huge advocate of putting all your eggs in one basket because as you know TikTok, there could be a potential TikTok ban. And if you've spent all this time building your community on TikTok and that goes away and you haven't been building your email list and you don't have a presence on other social channels, that sucks. And it's gonna take a lot to rebuild that. Twitter, for example, we can talk about that. I haven't seen any major issues for any of our clients on Twitter, but a lot of people are really worried about it. So if you've been building a Twitter presence like Crazy and of course something happens or your community moves away from Twitter, you don't want to have to restart. So channel selection is important. I do believe in building, start with one and do it really well. Figure out what works, get your content development processes in place because it's really important to have process so you can become kind of a content machine and then build on that. Then pick your next channel. I don't think everyone needs five. Some businesses do. I don't think everyone needs like to be on every channel ever but more than one is good for sure. But picking that channel, channel selection really depends on your business, your goals, budget, all those sorts of things.
**\[10:32\]** **Mike:** So I want to go back a little bit into what you just said about how much work is involved for things You know, especially like you said YouTube and you said one person doing it. It's a well-rounded marketer now What about a small business that it's only one to say five employees? How are they supposed to do social media if it takes that much time? It's actually going to take away from their other Work that runs the business like for example Amanda was putting so much time time, we're not making money from the podcast, so she was taking away time from her freelancing business.
Like, what do you recommend for people in that situation, not specifically us, but generally like small businesses all over the place? Or us. Or us.
**\[11:27\]** **Sean:** I mean, we can take that advice, but if you wanted to use us as like a case study, that's okay.
**\[11:33\]** **Amanda:** Right. Yeah. It's really important of course it's easy for me to say that I have an agency and we run social media But I truly believe getting support because if like we have graphic designers We have and you don't have to outsource your social completely You can get someone who just does your calendar for you and helps you kind of put some processes in place So it's not so painful
But I do think it's a specialized skill for sure I think it's very poorly represented and under respected across all sizes of organizations like huge corporations down to small business owners for sure. One person can very rarely drive the social strategy, write the copy, edit the videos, do the graphic design, handle all the scheduling. So if you can offload any of those tasks to someone else, you're going to save yourself a lot of time. So I know that's not the greatest answer. There's no quick silver bullet for someone who wants to do all the social themselves. It's a lot of work to do it super effectively. And I don't want to scare people away from not doing social at all because I do think it's such a critical channel, especially for distribution and for content marketing for all businesses, it's a great way to tell your story. Maybe pick one or two goals and focus on those. So you can post a little less frequently, but be consistent, you don't have to post five times a week or whatever, like you can be, you know, less frequent but still remain consistent. Pick a couple of goals and those goals shouldn't be signups or sales. If you're not going all out on it and you don't have a really broad marketing strategy and you think social is going to be what's driving your signup or your revenue or your sales or anything like that, it's not. It's not. If you're consumer good, you have an amazing product. Maybe, maybe that'll work for you, but probably not. So I think be more realistic about the goals, like use it to build awareness, don't think that that's going to be the thing that's going to trigger all sorts of sales, which it can down the road. But again, you need a broader strategy. You need to put that effort behind it. I know it's probably not what you want to hear. It is a lot of work. You just have to do it.
**\[13:41\]** **Sean:** So then I think that that would be a really great question like how would you like how would anybody measure success on socials like is it about analytics or like if if somebody is working at like their small company and they want to talk to their boss about increasing their their social media presence like what would be some ways that they could that they could get their boss and get their their boomer boss to sign off on it.
**\[14:08\]** **Amanda:** So getting by in the very first thing, one thing that's a red flag for me is when I hear senior executives saying socials never worked for us and they're very focused on traditional marketing, it's gonna be really hard to sell that person on it. They need every single thing tied back to revenue directly, attribution when it comes to social media is really challenging. Even when we have a great marketing tech stack in place, It's very hard to measure someone who found your business on social three, six months ago have been quietly consuming your content, digging into your website, but maybe not going there through the links that you're pushing out on social, even though you're using tracking links. It's hard to tie that person who ends up purchasing.
It's hard to tie that first point of contact back to social. So this is where I do like vanity metrics and this is so controversial because you hear so many people being like marketers that use vanity metrics or garbage. But I think that it really matters. Vanity metrics are super helpful in kind of measuring your brand's impact.
And I think that-
**\[15:07\]** **Mike:** What is a vanity metric?
**\[15:09\]** **Amanda:** Oh, great question. So vanity metrics are things like follower growth, engagement on your socials, and website visits. Those would be considered vanity metrics. And the reason why I think those are really important, especially for small businesses, who maybe don't have the tech stack in place to be able to do attribution really well, or the team, or the analysts, or whatever, right? Like if you're a single person, you're not going to do all that.
are full-time jobs. So I think vanity metrics are helpful in that instance because you know you're driving traffic to your website. So you can say, well, because of social and we've used some tracking links, those are easy to set up. We've increased our website traffic by 10% or something like that.
And then, you know, you do see more sales or you do see more conversions. And if you don't, it's not that social is not working. You're getting the traffic there. Maybe you have landing page challenges. Maybe your UX isn't great. Maybe there's something else happening once they get there that you need to look into.
But if you're someone who's trying, if you have a boss or senior exec who is open to social, but they're really struggling with the ROI of social, that's where I think it's important to focus on brand. Like brand leads everything in this day and age. And social media can help you measure the impact of your brand. That's where vanity metrics like follower growth engagement and website visits help you tell that story while our brand is impactful. People are interested in what we're selling. They're consuming our content or whatever.
And I think that that can help you get a little bit more buy-in on social. But there are some people that you're never going to sell on it. For us, from an agency perspective, I typically know within the first conversation if they are on board with social or they're not.
And I won't even go down that path with them. But that's shifting, right? Like as the demographics in the workforce are shifting, people are more. And we're all consumers of social. I'm horrible for buying things off social. Horrible. It's a real problem for me. But I think most of us have either went to a website or found a new product or found a new service or researched something through social media, right? So I think it's just important to kind of help them understand the impact of social and understand that you can't always tie it back to revenue and you can't always tie it back to or attribute it, like attribution is hard when it comes to social media.
**\[17:25\]** **Jessica:** That can even be hard in the work that we do as web developers, because I know, for me, the first thing, if I get a new client and I start asking them, what do you want out of this website? They all just say, more visits. We want more people to visit our website. And I have to push them to dig deeper, who cares? If a million people visit your website, is that going to recruit donations or volunteers or whatever you're supposed? What do you really want?
So how much do you, at SidePony, influence or try I sort of have a handle on the actual websites of your clients versus just their social outreach. Do you actually start talking about landing pages and that kind of thing when you work with someone?
**\[18:08\]** **Amanda:** I absolutely do, because again, I don't want to just sell someone on social media if I've done a quick audit of their website, and I can tell from a quick glance that their website's not serving them well. Like I can tell, you can usually tell pretty quickly, especially with small and medium sized businesses who haven't put a lot of time behind their user experience and they're not tracking.
And oftentimes a lot of small, even medium size businesses come to us and they don't even have Google Analytics set up. So if we can't pull any of that information from your website, it's going to be really hard for me to tell you that your social's performing really well, right?
And it's hard for us to know where to even start, like how are people finding you? Because that's kind of one of the levers we'll use to create a social strategy for you that is going to support all of your other efforts that you're putting behind marketing.
Also, if someone, yeah, so yeah, basically, if their website's not performing well, we don't start them with social. If their brand isn't performing well and their messaging's not clear, or they're coming to us saying, oh no, well, our product or services is great for everybody. Those are red flags for me, all of those things.
And we need to sort those out and have those conversations before we say, like of course we can sell you a social package, but it's never gonna get you what you want, right? And I would hate to do that, I don't do that. so we start kind of with them where they're at.
**\[19:27\]** **Jessica:** Yeah, the general public is not an audience.
**\[19:30\]** **Amanda:** It's not an audience. Hahaha.
**\[19:37\]** **Sean:** Hi, Amanda here. If you're enjoying the website 101 podcast, we would love it if you could give us a positive review on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. Reviews help new listeners find out about us and allow us to keep doing the show.
**\[19:50\]** **Jessica:** Thanks. Yeah, I know there's a lot of companies that I encounter, that their entire business is just their Facebook page. They do not have any other presence online. They do their communications with customers through Facebook Messenger. It's like Facebook is the internet to some companies and some individuals. I mean, do you have any comments on that with regard to Facebook specifically? Cause I mean, at that point you'd have to redirect someone from one social network to another if that's kind of where you're at. I mean, what are your thoughts there?
**\[20:22\]** **Amanda:** I have seen some service-based businesses, where they have one or two very specific services that actually can do well and their funnel is driving people straight from social into a landing page and they convert.
And that works really well for them. I don't really work with those types of businesses because I think that they're leaving themselves open to a lot of risk. First of all, something happens with that social media channel or whatever. The second thing is, I don't love Facebook.
I don't hate Facebook. We have lots of clients that use Facebook and it's very effective for them, especially in the not-for-profit space. Facebook is great. But building your whole business on a social platform is not an owned platform.
Like you need to own your digital footprint, right? And that's where I think a website is critical and email list, especially in Canada, is so critical. So those are my thoughts. I don't think it's a great idea and I know a lot of businesses do that, but it's so risky.
**\[21:22\]** **Mike:** I have a blog post called Own Your Content.
**\[21:25\]** **Amanda:** Yeah, perfect.
**\[21:26\]** **Jessica:** I have one too, called that same social media is a satellite, not your home planet or something.
**\[21:31\]** **Mike:** We'll add both mine and Mike's to the show notes.
**\[21:35\]** **Jessica:** Yeah, big proponents of sending people back to your website where you control everything and we feel like that's really good to you.
**\[21:41\]** **Mike:** Yeah, like the worst thing that could happen is if all your businesses on Facebook and Facebook changes the algorithm or they ban you for some mysterious reason. Guess what, you just went out of business. You have no records, you lost everything.
**\[21:57\]** **Amanda:** Everything, all that customer data, like everything, you're sunk.
And that actually happens on Facebook a lot and they're not quick to get back to you. Like, we have some clients who end up coming to us and they've lost access to their Facebook page for something really silly.
And we have to go through that process of trying to get their Facebook page back for them, their company page, it takes a long time, it takes a lot of effort, and it's scary for those businesses. Luckily, when they come to us, we are all in on helping them build their presence everywhere else, like not everywhere else, but get that website going. Let's build your email list, all those things, but yeah, so risky.
And Facebook isn't gonna help you.
**\[22:36\]** **Mike:** No, no, no, I also just don't, I have trouble trusting a company that their only presence is on Facebook or Twitter. you want me to do customer support through Facebook chat sorry I'm not I'm not buying anything from you you're not not you are not legit maybe I'm just old but no it's not legit in my opinion I feel the same it might be more the older
**\[23:00\]** **Jessica:** people that are the ones that are only on Facebook these days that's Facebook is the people are there that I'm the exception and older and older at older. Yeah, once your parents get on social media networks, that
**\[23:15\]** **Sean:** virtual media network is not cool. Yeah, that is true. So red flags and
**\[23:22\]** **Jessica:** misconceptions about social media, anything there that people should look out for, tips that you have for people like that in that area?
**\[23:30\]** **Amanda:** For sure. So if you are looking to social media again as kind of your silver bullet, or your gut instinct is to say we need to increase sales, we need to post on social media more. That's a huge red flag. You need to pull back and look at your broader marketing strategy.
That's not going to serve you well. That's probably going to hurt your brand. So when someone comes to me, that's one of my red flags. Is there like, we need to increase, we want to add more social media to our marketing strategy, but they don't want to invest in social specific content or again they can't explain their value proposition clearly or their market or how they're different from competitors.
Again we need to take a step back. So if you can't do those things and you can't define those things very clearly you need to hold off on social media. When they come to us and they say we want to grow our email list that's amazing. As soon as I hear that I'm like yes we can help you do that.
That's so great or get more signups but again they can't to find their audience, we have to take a step back. I'll also often hear people say social doesn't work for us, but they haven't put the effort in. So maybe they're pushing out press releases or they're pushing out links. That's not putting the effort in.
You need to be consistent on social. You need to be following other accounts. You have to put the work in. You have to engage with other accounts that are within your ecosystem or your community.
You have to really build your presence. It's not just pushing out promos. You don't even really want to do that on social. that's not really what it's for.
You can do that, but you have to balance that with content that your audience actually is looking for and that they want. You need to understand the problems that you solve and speak to that, speak to pain points. Or another red flag is that they have outsourced social to someone who's very new in their career, which I understand why that makes sense, for sure, because their very younger people are super tech savvy, their digital natives, a lot of them are great on their own personal social accounts, but social for business and social for your personal accounts, totally different. You don't need a strategy, really, for your personal accounts.
And they often are lacking that broader and marketing experience. So if they're not being provided with content or information around the business or the support that they need to be effective, they also don't know what to ask for. So social is not going to be effective. If that's what you're looking to do, It's not going to work for you.
I think a lot of the misconceptions around social really stem from four different areas. People just have a lack of understanding around social in general, the different channels, how to use it effectively, the analytics, how to write content for social, selecting their channels, how to staff it properly is a huge one. There's a big misunderstanding or lack of understanding around that. And also, where social fits into your broader marketing strategy.
So social should never stand on its own. For us, and I'm speaking in generalities here, like of course, if you're a consumer good and you're selling one thing, social can stand on its own, for sure. But in general, the clients we work with, social doesn't stand on its own. It fits into your broader marketing strategies and amazing avenue for community building, building trust, brand building, one of the distribution channels you can use for content marketing.
And it's an important way to really showcase your brand. but a lot of the misconceptions around social have to do with people not understanding those things. So those are all red flags and misconceptions for social for me. If you, we still have clients who we've been working with for a couple of years who are like, we're not getting as many webinar signups as we want.
We're like, they're gonna come, don't worry, this is the cycle, we've been doing this for a long time with you guys, they'll come in. But their first instinct is to be like, push out more social. It's like your audience has seen it. If they've already seen it four or five times and they're not signing up, pushing more out is not going to have the effect you're looking for.
So helping people kind of understand that is a bit of a challenge, yeah.
**\[27:26\]** **Sean:** So I was wondering from a technical perspective, do you use any software like Hootsuite to help you with your clients pushing out content or do you go right to the source and create the posts on YouTube and Twitter and Instagram and et cetera? And then the same with the mailing list. Do you have a mailing list campaign software that you like using that you recommend to your clients?
**\[27:52\]** **Amanda:** Totally. And I don't do affiliate links, I don't do any affiliate marketing, so I get nothing for these and I pay for all these products.
**\[27:59\]** **Jessica:** We also get nothing. Perfect.
**\[28:01\]** **Amanda:** We also get nothing. So we're totally unbiased, and I've tried a lot of them. I'm currently using for social, Sprout Social, and I do like it as a listening tool. I don't think it's realistic for small and medium-sized businesses.
I have an agency, so it makes sense for us. It's very, very expensive. I will recommend a Gorapulse. That's what we're probably gonna switch to when our contract ends with Sprout Social.
They're amazing for reporting and for attribution and I just like their model. I like their tools. I think a Gorapulse is great. For that being said, I use later for Instagram exclusively.
I just love that tool for posting on Instagram for engaging for hashtag research. I think it's really, really good. It's better than the other ones that do kind of everything. YouTube, we post natively just because we focus on the SEO side of YouTube a lot, so kind of when we're doing our post on YouTube, we're also going in and we're doing all the SEO components of it at the same time.
So we'll post natively for that. So that's what we use for social. Now, as far as email marketing, I think If you're a small business and you have to focus on, you know, you have limited time and limited budget, the combination of email marketing on organic social media for small businesses cannot be beat for driving growth. It's super cost effective.
It's very, very effective for growing your business. Again, you need to be able to effectively build your email list. You have to have a strong brand, a great product, all those things, but if you have that in place, email marketing on organic social combined is such a great growth tool for small businesses. I love HubSpot, but again, like Sprout Social, that's not realistic for a lot of small businesses.
Active Campaign? I don't hear a lot about Active Campaign, but I love it for small and medium-sized businesses. It has a lot of functionality for the price point, all of the functionality it has, and even at CRM capabilities, as your email marketing gets more sophisticated with your drip campaigns and nurturing sequences, it does all of that. it ties into an integrates really well.
Of course, if you're a developer, you probably, you don't tend to care about that as much. But from a marketer or a business owner's perspective, you need those native integrations because it just makes your life easier. Active campaign integrates with most of the tools you would use as a small business. So those are the two big ones.
Agorapals, active campaign. I think those are great tools for everybody. And then, of course, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, those are free, but they're super important. need to have those set up and then, you know, there's of course the million other tools we use in marketing but I think those ones are great to get you going.
**\[30:44\]** **Mike:** Awesome, cool, thanks. So I'd like to go slightly different direction now. Do you use any AI tools for social or marketing and what do you think about the future of AI
**\[31:00\]** **Amanda:** in that area? Yeah, I get asked about this a lot actually from our clients and I think it has has a place for sure. There's a lot of AI tools that have been out there for a while, and they're not great. Chat GPT4 is not terrible.
It's not, I won't say never, it will probably eventually replace writers for sure, but currently it's a great brainstorming tool, but I can tell you when I look at someone's social accounts, it takes me two seconds to spot someone who's just used Chat GPT with a single prompt and they're not using mega prompts or anything else, and I'm like, no, and it's only so long before people who are using that for their blog posts, For example, Google will, right now, apparently, they're not penalizing people, but as long as the content is solid. But a lot of the content you're generating from even ChatGPT4 isn't that solid. It needs a heavy edit. It needs to have facts added and be fact checked and all those things.
So I think there's a place for it.
**\[31:53\]** **Sean:** In the future, this is my prediction. Everybody put money on it. My guess is that in the future, Google will penalize ChatGPT content, but boost up barred content. Yes, because Google's making Bard and ChatGPT's Google and all the other companies anyway, heard it here first.
**\[32:12\]** **Mike:** I think it's a distinct possibility, but I'm wondering how they'll be able to figure out
**\[32:17\]** **Jessica:** which one comes from where I have that concern as well.
**\[32:21\]** **Sean:** Well, no, but the same way that right now, Jessica in the know who has the experience of good content can look at not so great content and know that, like she just said, that that came from a single query on ChatGPT.
**\[32:33\]** **Jessica:** They're going to be able to tell. Yeah, I certainly agree that anything you use AI to generate, just put your own spin on it after that. Go in and make some changes. Don't just spit out.
**\[32:45\]** **Mike:** Well, yeah, the content should be in your own voice. You can use whatever your AI to generate bullet points, but then you need to write it yourself.
**\[32:55\]** **Amanda:** Or help you format it for SEO. Like it's great for that. It's an amazing brainstorming tool. If you're writing some content and you need kind of that brains, like I think it can help copy writers and content developers become more efficient, for sure, and maybe faster at what they do.
But currently right now, it's definitely not replacing them. So I think it has a place. I'm very cautious in recommending it to people, but some of our small business clients and nonprofit organizations with like a one person comms team, they need help. And they don't have massive budgets to bring copy writers and all that stuff in.
So I think there's a place for it, and it can really help you, but you just need to be smart with how you use it.
**\[33:37\]** **Jessica:** Right. Jessica, how do you feel about replies on solar? How do you, I guess, direct your clients and what advice you give about replying on social media? Like you always hear about these flame wars or whatever, or someone says something on social that's a reply to some company, and it could turn into this big disaster for the company if the wrong person starts engaging, what's your tactics there around replying on socials?
**\[34:05\]** **Amanda:** It's a case by case basis. So a lot of those like inflammatory posts or bots, they're not even real people, depending on kind of what vortex you get sucked into. A good example is we had a client, they work with vulnerable families and marginalized communities across Canada and they were running during COVID, they were running in information sessions around COVID-19 vaccines and other vaccines in general. Just information sessions.
Not, you know, standing on one side or the other, just trying to get information out to these communities in different languages and providing different resources. And we put some ads behind those because everything else was in place. So I'm not saying go to social ads right away. I don't advocate that at all.
You need to have great performing organic Before you even think about ads, that's another conversation. Anyway, we ended up being sucked into this anti-vaxxer vortex with their ads. So there was just like hundreds, like every hour, there's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of comments. And you could tell just by digging into them, they were not real accounts.
Most of them, like it was just, it was crazy. In that instance, we were just blocking and deleting, blocking and deleting, blocking and deleting because we didn't want to stop running the ads. We did start a new ad set to kind of get out of that rabbit hole we ended up in. But in general, with trolls, like Twitter can be crazy.
It could be amazing, but it could also be crazy. A lot of the time our advice is just don't respond. Like they're not worth it, don't respond. You could actually do more damage and that's what they want.
If it's a legitimate concern, like a customer service issue or something like that or broken links and someone's being a little salty about it, definitely address those. For sure, professionally, we usually have kind of a guide book on like with a bit of a map on if this is the instance, this is how you handle it. We help our clients kind of map that out, but we take it on a case-by-case basis. But if they're just trolls, just saying inflammatory things, we tend to either delete the comments and ignore, and it's hard, right, especially for small business owners who are very passionate about what they do and the products they're offering, it's hard to sit back and not address those comments, but often you're just making it worse.
And then you're amplifying it, too, right? So it's better to just... it depends. It's case by case basis, but generally ignore the...
**\[36:25\]** **Mike:** Don't feed the troll. Yeah, exactly. Do you have any social media, like famous social media responses by companies that you consider like just golden as a great response? I'm thinking Particularly of tweets by Wendy's. I can't remember the right ones, but Amanda just laughed. They're they're gold. They do good. They're gold So what do you have any favorite ones as a professional in the field? I do like the Wendy's ones a lot
**\[37:01\]** **Amanda:** Who doesn't they're great like whoever that and that's a person that's not like their brand team or anything else like that's an individual who is so witty and so on it, and clearly they don't have to go up the chain of command for a lot of their replies because they're so, they're so, they're so timely on them. So timely, so timely. So that is a marketing team that has their processes dialed right in, and I love that. But I will say the campaigns that I like the most are the Spotify wrapped, like Spotify, I think it's a great example of just doing something for your community and for your audience that they love.
And of course, it results in returns down the road. But I think it's an amazing way. That whole campaign showcases amazingly well, how building community and providing your audience with value just feeds your brand and feeds your community and feeds your revenue. I think that's probably one of my favorite campaigns.
**\[37:57\]** **Sean:** Remember how excited we were when we got those Spotify rap stats? So I was going to say that.
**\[38:05\]** **Mike:** Yeah, we cut them up into little bits and insured them on YouTube. It was so cool to watch that animation.
**\[38:11\]** **Amanda:** It's such an amazing campaign. Also, I felt a little bit ashamed with mine because I'll play it in just the background, so there's songs coming up that I'm like, I don't even like that. But it's just popping up in my wrapped. But I think that that's a great example of how you can provide your community with value or entertainment and see how it just feeds your brand, right? Because people share them like crazy. You look forward to it.
**\[38:34\]** **Jessica:** Right. Okay, well this has been really informative as always and it's really appreciate you being here. I certainly learned a whole lot about social media and I also learned that I'm kind of glad that I'm not responsible for this stuff in my job because I don't want to have to do all this stuff that you just mentioned. It's so complicated you know. It's a lot of work but it's definitely worth it.
**\[38:57\]** **Amanda:** It will pay off for your business but again I think my biggest takeaway is it's not your silver bullet But it needs to be part of a broader marketing strategy. And if you look at social in that way, it can be so effective for your business.
**\[39:12\]** **Mike:** So one extra tool in your tool, but not the giant hammer that does everything.
**\[39:17\]** **Jessica:** Exactly. Okay, Jessica, thanks so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it.
**\[39:22\]** **Mike:** It was great having you.
**\[39:23\]** **Amanda:** Thanks, Jessica. Thank you so much.
**\[39:26\]** **Sean:** The website 101 Podcast is hosted by me, Amanda Loots. You can also find me online at AmandaLutes.com.
**\[39:36\]** **Jessica:** And by me, Mike Mella, find me online at belikewater.ca or on socials at Mike Mella.
**\[39:43\]** **Mike:** I am Sean Smith, your co-host. You can find me online at my website, caffeinecreation.ca, and link down at caffeinecreations. You
Close Transcript
Have a question for Sean, Mike, and Amanda? [Send us an email](/contact).
[](https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93ZWJzaXRlMTAxcG9kY2FzdC5jb20vZmVlZC5yc3M%3D)[](https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/website-101-podcast/id1449510012)[](https://open.spotify.com/show/3rmSM1R9t6q1U8DmYWJRSO?si=NrYPMgDaRV6Dd56PjEaPow)### Season 06
- 1 [ Tools of the Trade](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-06/episode-1/tools-of-the-trade/)
- 2 [ Website Contract Advice From an Actual Lawyer](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-06/episode-2/website-contract-advice-from-an-actual-lawyer/)
- 3 [ Choosing a CMS](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-06/episode-3/choosing-a-cms/)
- 4 [ Tips for Website Maintenance](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-06/episode-4/tips-for-website-maintenance/)
- 5 [ Working with Conflicting Personalities](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-06/episode-5/working-with-conflicting-personalities/)
- 6 [ Building an Online Course with Jane Atkinson](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-06/episode-6/building-an-online-course-with-jane-atkinson/)
- 7 [ PodCamp Toronto 2023 Recap](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-06/episode-7/podcamp-toronto-2023-recap/)
- 8 [ The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly about RFPs](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-06/episode-8/the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-about-rfps/)
- 9 [ Here's how to work from paradise](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-06/episode-9/heres-how-to-work-from-paradise/)
- 10 [ Rebroadcast: Pimp Your Typography](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-06/episode-10/rebroadcast-pimp-your-typography/)
- 11 [ Internet Privacy with Michael Geist](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-06/episode-11/internet-privacy/)
- 12 [ Lessons from a plugin developer with Ben Croker](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-06/episode-12/lessons-from-a-plugin-developer-with-ben-croker/)
- 13 [ Stand Out on Social Media with Jessica Perreault](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-06/episode-13/social-media-with-jessica-perreault/)
### All Seasons
- [Season 01](https://website101podcast.com/season/01/)
- [Season 02](https://website101podcast.com/season/02/)
- [Season 03](https://website101podcast.com/season/03/)
- [Season 04](https://website101podcast.com/season/04/)
- [Season 05](https://website101podcast.com/season/05/)
- [Season 06](https://website101podcast.com/season/06/)
- [Season 07](https://website101podcast.com/season/07/)
- [Season 08](https://website101podcast.com/season/08/)
- [Season 09](https://website101podcast.com/season/09/)
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