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 in. You have to engage with other accounts that are within your ecosystem.

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 Lutz. Hi, Sean and Amanda, how are you guys doing?

Very good. Hi, Mike and Sean.

Good. So we have a guest today. Today, we're gonna talk to Jessica Perreault.

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.

Hi, thanks for having me. I'm so happy to be here.

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. 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?

So quite a while. I mean, way back when I was personally using MSN 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-20s.

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-20s, 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 super critical, a very critical channel for us.

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.

Well, 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 a couple really simple tips for small business owners to get started, what would those tips be?

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, 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. You're gonna spend a lot of time on it.

You're gonna spin 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 gonna be effective. Maybe 10 years ago that was effective.

That's not gonna 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 wanna 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.

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?

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? Like, you guys know.

You do the podcast, you create video. It's hard to create content, and then you wanna 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, 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.

Yeah, Amanda does a lot of the, sort of all those things you just talked about where we have this video, and then she chops it up and puts little segments of it on YouTube as a smaller, more digestible pieces in that. Amanda does so much work on that. Big credit to her.

I was gonna say, and that's a lot of work. Go, Amanda, go.

Amanda doesn't like it. No. And that's the problem too.

It's like, it started with YouTube, and then it 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 too? And what about TikTok? And then it was like, I'm just like an ostrich when I get overwhelmed.

And I was just like, nope, none of it. I'm done. No more thanks.

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 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 sub stop before getting people to know about the podcast and subscribing.

Yeah. Actually, Jessica, 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 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?

I get asked about TikTok like almost every day. And I love TikTok. I'm a huge consumer of TikTok.

We have a, I won't say what the account is because we use it for testing. It's an account we've been growing organically. So like, 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 Twitter, for example.

Like any of the video channels, Twitter, you can just be pushing out 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 wanna 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 that 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 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.

So I wanna go back a little bit into what you just said about how much work is involved for things, 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 gonna take away from their other work that runs the business. Like for example, Amanda was putting so much 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.

I mean, we can take that advice, but I'm not- If you wanted to use us as like a case study, that's okay. Yeah.

I think get support. It's really important. Of course, it's easy for me to say that.

I have an agency, we run social media, but I truly believe getting support because 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 gonna 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 wanna 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 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 gonna 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 a consumer good and 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 gonna be the thing that's gonna 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 wanna hear. It is a lot of work. You just have to do it.

So then I think that, 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 wanna 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, get their boomer boss to sign off on it?

So getting buy-in, the very first thing, one thing that's a red flag for me is when I hear like a senior executive 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. Like if they are, if 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 are 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- What is a vanity metric?

Oh, great question. So vanity metric 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?

If you're a single person, you're not gonna do all that, those 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 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 just, you're never gonna sell on it.

Like 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 kind of 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.

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 like dig deeper, like who cares if a million people visit your website, is that gonna recruit donations or volunteers or whatever you're supposed, like what do you really want? So how much do you at SidePony like influence or try to 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?

I absolutely do, because again, I don't wanna 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-sized 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 service 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.

Yeah, the general public is not an audience.

It's not an audience.

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.

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?

That with regard to Facebook specifically, because I mean at that point you're 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?

I have seen some service-based businesses where they have like 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 they're leaving themselves open to a lot of risk first of all if 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 it's not an owned platform like you need to own your digital footprint right and that's where I think a website is critical an 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.

I have a blog post called own your content.

Oh perfect. I have one too called that social social media is a satellite not your home planet We'll add both mine and Mike's to the the show notes. Yeah big proponents of sending people back to your website where you control everything and we feel like that's really good.

Yeah like the worst thing that could happen is if all your business is on 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 recourse you lost everything 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 trying to 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're 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 going to help you no no doubt

I also just don't I have trouble trusting a company that their only presence is on Facebook or Twitter like 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 I feel the same it might be more the older people that are the ones that are only on Facebook these days that's yes Facebook is the oh people are there but I'm the exception and older and older and older yeah once your parents get on social media networks that virtual media network is not cool anymore that is true so red flags and misconceptions about social media any anything there that people should look out for tips that you have for people

like that in that area 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 they're 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 define 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 like 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 so social to someone who's very new in their career which I understand why that makes sense for sure because they're very younger people are super tech savvy they're 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 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 strategy it's an 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 like if you we still have clients who we've been working with for a couple years who are like we're not getting as many webinars signups as we want we're like they're gonna come don't worry this is the cycle you know 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.

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 go right to the source and and create the the posts on on YouTube and Twitter and Instagram and etc and then the same with the mailing list do you have like a mailing list campaign software that you like using that you recommend to your clients?

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 so.

We also get nothing.

Perfect we also get nothing. That's great 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 Agorapulse that's what we're probably going to 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 Agorapulse is great for that being said we do 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 and 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 and 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 its CRM capabilities as your email marketing gets more sophisticated with your drip campaigns and nurturing sequences it does all of that it ties into and 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 Agorapulse, 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 you 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. 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 in that area?

Yeah I get asked about this a lot actually from our clients and I think it 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 like ChatGPT4 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 ChatGPT 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 you know facts added and be fact-checked and all those things so I think there's a place for it.

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 BARD content yeah yes because because Google's making BARD and ChatGPT is Google and all the other companies anyway heard it here first.

I think it's a distinct possibility but I'm wondering how they'll be able to figure out which one comes from where.

Yeah I have that concern as well.

Well no but the same way 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 they're gonna they're gonna 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

well yeah it should 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 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 brain like I think it can help copywriters 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 non-profit organizations with like a one-person comms team they need help and they don't have massive budgets to bring copywriters 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

yeah right Jessica how do you feel about replies on so 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 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 what's your your tactics there around replying on socials 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 um during COVID they were running an information sessions around COVID-19 vaccines and other vaccines in general just information sessions um 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 um because everything else was in place so I'm not saying go to social ads right away I'm 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 like anti-vaxxer vortex um 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 um 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 uh it could be amazing but it can 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 guidebook 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 um 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 it's case by case basis but generally

ignore the 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 like a great response i'm thinking particularly of tweets by wendy's i can't remember the right ones but i amanda just laughed they're they're gold they do good they're 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 um 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 um don't have to go up the chain of command for a lot of the 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 um 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 um 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 um community and feeds your revenue i think that's probably one of my favorite campaigns remember how excited

we were when we got those spotify wraps that's all i was i was gonna say that yeah we cut them

up into little bits and shared them on youtube it was so cool to watch that animation it's such

an amazing campaign also i felt a little bit of shame with mine because i'll play it in like 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 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 right

okay well this has been really informative as as always and uh 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 don't i'm not responsible for this stuff in my job because i 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 it will pay off for your business but again i think my biggest takeaway is it's not your silver bullet it needs to be part of a broader marketing strategy um right and if you look at social in that way it can be so effective for your business

so one extra tool in your tool belt not not the giant hammer that does everything exactly

okay jessica thanks so much for joining us today i really appreciate it it was great having her

thanks jessica thank you so much

the website 101 podcast is hosted by me amanda loots you can also find me online at amanda

loots.com and by me mike mela find me online at be like water.ca or on socials at mike mela

i'm sean smith your co-host you can find me online at my website caffeinecreations.ca and linkedin at caffeine creations

(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.)