Duke of Digital

026 - Strategies for Increasing Organic Reach on Social Media with Brandon Amoroso

December 18, 2019 Brian Meert
Duke of Digital
026 - Strategies for Increasing Organic Reach on Social Media with Brandon Amoroso
Show Notes Transcript
Speaker 1:

Raise those pinkies because today we're breaking down tips and strategies about how you can increase your organic reach

Speaker 2:

presented by advertisement. The juke of digital will guide you through the rapidly changing landscape of digital marketing, social media, and how to grow your business online. To submit a question for the show, text(323) 821-2044 or visit[inaudible] digital.com if you need an expert to fix your ads, the friendly team at advertisement is ready to help visit advertisement. That's M I N t.com or call(844) 236-4686 to grow your business. Here's your host Brian Mitt.

Speaker 1:

Okay, I'm excited. We've got Brandon. I'm a Rosso. I get that right. Okay, nice. I'm in the studio today. You are the CEO and founder of electric marketing. Uh, now it's spelled a unique way, so I want to make sure people get that. How do you spell that?

Speaker 3:

Oh, that's a lectured with IQ at the end instead of IC.

Speaker 1:

Got it. Okay, cool. So electric marketing, you're a graduate of the university of Southern California. Um, you've got heaps of experience working with Amazon, Google, Facebook, Instagram. Uh, did I miss anything? Uh, Shopify. Oh, Shopify as well. Okay. So tell us a little bit about, you know, your agency. I know you specialize in a unique area. Tell us a little bit about your company, what you guys have been doing, um, and how people can get in touch with you.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so we started about 18 months ago. Um, I started at, while I was still at USC, I had been freelancing as a marketer since around sophomore year of high school. Um, so around my sophomore year at USC, I was sort of taking a class where they were talking, the teacher had some digital marketing experience and he mentioned, Oh, like this is a potential Avenue for actual like, uh, an actual career. So I started it during that class, um, and I kind of stopped paying attention in that class or the rest of the semester cause I was just building the company in school. Um, and so I started doing that and began bringing on some small business clients. Uh, typically direct to consumer. There's a fair around LA and sort of across the U S called Renegade craft fair, which is like artisan businesses that could have just one person or sometimes upwards of like 20 employees, but they're sort of constrained on resources. So that's where I got a lot of my case studies and initial work experience with because I'd go in and offer my services for free or super cheap because I didn't have a ton of experience either to sort of build that up. Um, and then I got it to a point where we began to work our way up market and then when I graduated in may, I was able to start bringing on a full time team, uh, sort of transferred people from being contractors to being on an actual employee and then got first office in Chinatown. That's awesome. And now we specialize in inbound marketing just as a whole. We're a HubSpot certified agency partner or whatever the specific terminology is for that. Um, and we specialize in direct to consumer e-commerce. So I'd say 80% of our clients are on Shopify. And so we focus on, uh, advertising, email, uh, social and SEO. But our sort of where we started initially was with SEO. We've been branching out into some of these other areas.

Speaker 1:

Got it. Nice. Nice. Now I noticed on, um, on your website, well they didn't said you do a lot with, uh, gen Zs. Is that correct? So, you know, can you break down, you know, what some of the differences of how you would market to gen Z's versus, you know, other, you know, you know, millennials or gen X or baby boomers or you know, what are some of the things that make them unique?

Speaker 3:

So I think that content is the number one priority for brands who are trying to reach gen Z. Because I know myself, everyone I'm associated with, we've all been just inundated with advertisements our entire lives. So we're really good at sort of sniffing out the bullshit that you get from these brands. And so you're really just trying to sell an experience. And that's our number one focus with any of the clients that we work with is developing that brand experience. Um, it can be like from the moment they touch your website, how are you communicating? Like who you are as a brand versus, Oh, we're just selling this product and trying to push it.

Speaker 1:

Oh, it's so true. It's so true. I think, you know, there's a lot of people that still approach advertising. Like, I'm going to create one ad and I'm just going to show it to someone a thousand times and then they'll just do whatever I want them to do. And it couldn't be further from the truth, especially with the younger, you know, with, with the younger audiences is they're like, I want to see different things. I want you to entertain me. I want to have experiences with the ads or with the products that are meaningful to me. Uh, and if you miss out on those, you know, what happens is you just get swiped over and then penalize by paying higher fees.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. And if we like it, we'll share it too, which is the great thing. So if we create like evergreen content for a client that's really informative, um, it'll get shared. Whereas if you're just creating crappy content or it's just disingenuous, then you're not going to get that long tail benefit.

Speaker 1:

That's such a good tip too is that, you know, I don't think there's a lot of advertisers did don't realize that their, their ads can get shared. Um, and that there's a tremendous value for that. And we'll, we'll talk a little bit about the, you know, the algorithm behind, uh, you know, a lot of the social channels, but I know sharing is one of the elements that has the heaviest weight. Uh, when people are sharing your content, it's viewed as very valuable to the platforms. Um, okay, well, so what I wanted to do today, you know, the topic of organic reach is declining and I mean this is, I had a conversation yesterday with another person that was, is says I'm a marketing expert. And he was like, Hey, how do we get more likes? How do we focus on, you know, increasing the following. And I was just like, man, I feel like that died like a couple of years ago. Like it was been, it's been gone for a while. You know, Instagram recently removed the likes. Uh, I mean it's something that people can still do, but it's not something that carries a lot of weight or I would place a lot of value behind. And so I wanted to have you here today to be able to talk about, you know, what are some of the things, you know, first let's talk about or can organic reach declining, which is basically, you know, you could have a million fans or followers, but if you say something, few people are able to see that. Right. Um, you know, what are your thoughts on, you know, the organic reach decline and when did it happen and what's changed over the last a couple of years?

Speaker 3:

I think it just transfers from platform to platform because over time these platforms become saturated. So like Facebook originally in like 2012 was really easy for organic reach and it died off. Then Instagram three years ago, organic reach was really easy to capture and now it's dying off. Um, LinkedIn, at least for me personally and for our business, is still really good for organic reach. So you just sort of have to shift where your focus is for organic reach and then also, um, sorta to determine whether or not you want to pay for traction on the, the social accounts that you're now losing that organic reach on. So if you're able to put like a number, like a dollar amount on that, like maybe that's something you want to invest in, but that's just like how companies used to buy like Facebook page likes or how people will buy followers on Instagram. Yeah. It doesn't really matter or contribute to your business at all. So

Speaker 1:

now for someone that is listening in that you know, maybe isn't in this world, you know, everyday living and breathing it, can you describe in simple terms, kind of the algorithm behind how content goes out? You know, cause ultimately the social networks want good content to rise up. They want boring content to not be shown. They want the platforms to be valuable. But can you explain a little bit behind what goes into that, um, from your understanding for people listening in?

Speaker 3:

Yeah. So with Instagram there's some pretty basic metrics, likes the comments, the number of times had shared via like a direct message. You can also share it onto your story. And then the immediacy with how quickly those things happen also plays a significant role because there's different lifespans on each platform of content. Like I'm still getting likes on some LinkedIn posts from two weeks ago, like as of this morning, which is crazy. Yeah. When you're thinking about Instagram, where if you post something, you have like 24 hours and then you're, the post sort of dies. So the lifespan of your content on each platform is significantly different. So that's something to take into account. Um, and so for Instagram it's super important to get as much traction as possible immediately so that it can start to show up in the algorithms. And then you can use like the 30 hashtags so that it shows up in the explore pages for each one of those. Um, like when we're working with our clients, we use a social scheduling tools like sprout social so that we can track which of those hashtags are working the best. What times we should be posting at, um, who's engaging with us most frequently. There's a lot of community management that needs to go into these things where you're actually engaging with customers and, and the number one thing is developing a real personality. So we started working with a client who had no traction whatsoever on social. They were just posting like product shots, like people just didn't really care. And we actually started to incorporate, um, like some carefully curated memes that were relatable. So they're following based on like their demographics and it just, it blew up like 10 X their, their likes and engagements just because we're posting stuff that people actually care about. And it had nothing to do with the product, but it ultimately led to people checking out the brand. Because when you have a social account, you don't want to be portrayed as a business. You want it to feel like it's someone who's actually using it and doing it. You need to create like a real personality.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Now you mentioned two things that I want to go back and touch. One was time, the other one was, um, comments. Uh, the first one is time. And this is something I don't think a lot of people grasp or understand is that the minute you post something, there is a stopwatch that's running on the backend where Facebook is, or it's Ram or a lot of these platforms are watching. And what they, they're wanting to see is does this start to get a lot of movement? Do people care about this? And they're watching that, that time period. And if there isn't, you know, they want to get rid of it. If things are moving and people care, um, then it starts to ramp up. And this is why a lot of times, you know, you'll see high points in people's lives, you know, graduation, uh, you know, engagements, weddings, uh, you know, babies, things like that, that are, that are happening. You know, everyone jumps on and starts to leave comments they like about it gets a lot of engagement very quickly. And because of that, it just snowballs up to where Facebook wants to show it to other platforms or other people. Um, so I think that's something that really is important because you need to get that momentum as soon as possible. Um, if you kind of let it go for awhile, sometimes it can just die off and never really get that, that critical mass. Um, the other thing that you said was comments. Um, and this is something that I've found to be very true is that you need to have, um, a team or someone backed. It's engaging with people. If someone writes to you and says, Hey, congratulations that, you know, you, you know, you just got engaged, this is great. If you write back to them with a meaningful comment of, Hey, thank you very much. You know, we're super excited. This is great. You know, what happened and then ask them another question. There can be conversations that happen under your content and that's another way to really get a lot more exposure, uh, that we've found, um, with, you know, not only just with organic but with ads as well, that a lot of times if you have that there, do you have any thoughts on that?

Speaker 3:

It also, I also think it helps when like if I go to a businesses post and I see that they don't reply to anybody who comments, like, why am I going to comment? Um, so it's kinda nice to see, Oh they're replying to people. So Hey if I actually comment on this, maybe there is going to be some interaction. Um, and that's super helpful because then you're not, like if there's five comments on your posts and you're not replying to any of them, then what's the reason for someone to post a six comment?

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Oh it's so true. It's just you go in sometimes and it feels like an empty room where like there was no one here. Um, and it's crazy because a lot of times people are asking genuine questions like, Oh, how does this work? Or would it work for me? Like these are really questions that people are wanting to know and it's just silent in there. Um, and it's just rough when you see that happen cause you're like, man, you had someone right there that was ready to go and you just, it's a huge missed opportunity,

Speaker 3:

especially when it's on a smaller scale like that. It's just really low hanging fruit that would take a couple of seconds to reply to you. So there's really no reason not to be doing it.

Speaker 1:

What are your thoughts on the best ways for brands to get discovered organically? Right. So is there, you know, everyone, there's a lot of noise in social, lots of stuff going on, hashtags, lots of content going up, you know, on all the different platforms. You know, what is it that brands need to do or companies need to be able to do to kind of break through that to where people take notice and they're able to, you know, reach new customers or even just reach their own customers. What are your thoughts?

Speaker 3:

I mean, first and foremost, you need to have content that resonates with your audience. That's actually cool that people care about. Um, but to sort of piggyback off of that, you, depending on where you are as a brand, um, organic reach may not be something that's feasible. So if you have like under 10,000 followers on Instagram for example, it's going to be a long and painful road to relevancy with organic reach. So you can look at, um, partnerships with other brands who have much larger followings. Um, I mean there's like the classic giveaway model that you can do where you partner with other companies. Uh, there's also something that I really like to do is to get the conversation off of social media. So if you can drive to a landing page where you can capture email addresses, cause I still email marketing still like the number one way to communicate with your customers. So if you can get the conversation off of social media, I think that's a good thing because just because someone follows you, it doesn't actually mean they're going to keep seeing your content. Because as we've been talking about, the organic reach is declining. So if you were to run a giveaway, drive them to a landing page where you're capturing email addresses so that you can take the conversation off of social media. It's really a fantastic tip. I know, you know, a lot of times it is tough to be able to get in front of the people that you want to. So I mean things like, you know, many pages that collect email. Uh, I know we've talked about SMS marketing, uh, messenger, bot marketing. There's a lot of other options that you can be able to have conversations or continue that conversation outside of social media, which is really critical where you can maybe get them in a place where it's a little bit quieter or you're sure that you can get the message through. It's great. A great tip. Um, you know, what social platforms do you focus on the most? Like in terms of getting organic content out there? Um, you know, if you're working with a client and they're wanting to be able to, to reach more people, um, there are certain ones that you start out with first, you know, YouTube or LinkedIn or Instagram or tick talk. Like how do you kind of rank them in order and what are your thoughts on, on that? Most of our clients are the direct to consumer e-commerce. So LinkedIn is typically more like co corporate style postings where, Oh, we just raised funding or like here's this interesting article about, about us, um, in a, in a press publication. So we typically don't focus on LinkedIn. Um, although we do, we will talk with like the C level team about how they can sort of leverage their own LinkedIn's to act as a springboard for their brand. Yup. And would you see with a lot of businesses where, uh, the founder or anybody on the C level team, they will sort of have their own personal brands that feed into the company? So that's one way to leverage, uh, your own personal LinkedIn. But we typically focus on, uh, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter because they really are the three main ones. Um, even in the case of Instagram, if you don't have that organic reach, it doesn't really matter in the sense that you need to have it. Like if I go on your website and you're a e-commerce brand and I don't see that Instagram in the footer or I can't go to your Instagram to look at it. Yup. Then that's sort of an immediate red flag in terms of a legitimacy. And so I like to look at Instagram as sort of a separate website page where you're portraying your best content you're putting, putting forward like who you are as a brand. Um, so Instagram definitely, and then Twitter is really good, um, for community management. So it's kinda like the wild West of social media. You can really post anything on there and it's like rapid fire and people are really engaging. So that's, that's actually fun to work with. We have a, a gaming chair client who like the sports community is super on top of that. And so like every day we're just like rapid fire tweeting with, with these people. Um, and building that sort of social aspect and community aspect where I think we mentioned product probably like once or twice a week, but people are engaging with us and so that's super beneficial.

Speaker 1:

Nice. So you said Instagram, Twitter and there was one more Facebook. Facebook. Okay. So if I, and this is a question I want to ask you because I imagine a lot of other people would have this same question. I've got a business, right? I sell a widget. If I spent two hours a day on Facebook trying to promote it two hours a day on Instagram, trying to promote it two hours a day on Twitter trying to promote it. Which one would you think would drive the most sales at the end of the day? You know, having done this with other clients, is there one that you'd be like, Oh, this is what works best? Or do they all work equally in your opinion?

Speaker 3:

So in terms of that, I would tell them to just use like a publishing tool so they can get their content on all three platforms at the same time. If you're just starting, then it's not going to be worth your time to invest in organic, like social reach. You're going to want to have the content there. But I wouldn't think of it as a form of customer acquisition. It's more of just like business legitimacy. Um, I think there's better areas that you could focus on that would provide more ROI for you. And if you are looking for immediate sales, you're going to have to spend money on advertising.

Speaker 1:

Got it. So now that brings me to my next question, which B, which would be, when do you, um, pivot or not pivot, but you know, in your strategy, bring in paid media? Like is it with every piece of content? Is it with some of it? Like at what point do you take, you know, posting something that goes up that's free and then try to put money behind it to accelerate it?

Speaker 3:

So there's really three steps in my opinion. There's the awareness phase because a good amount of the brands we work with, they don't have, it's not like it's Nike where you can just jump right to the conversion phase because everybody knows who they are. Yep. So you have the awareness phase where you have to get people like actually aware of your brand. You typically we like to use video for that. Um, and then it goes into actual traffic, which is like phase two, getting them to your website, getting them to learn more about you. And then phase three is actually a conversion. And I prefer to not run the ads until there's enough website traffic where we can actually do like some lookalike audiences. Because otherwise you're kind of just shooting in the dark where you're saying, okay, I think this is who our target audiences. But is it really that you're going to be, you're going to spend a lot of money in Facebook trying to figure out who's actually going to care about your content and your brand. So if you can start with the website traffic and create those lookalike audiences, the performances a lot better. And then we always set up the retargeting campaigns sort of right off the bat because that's low hanging fruit in terms of someone comes to your website and they view one of your products but they don't purchase. Okay, let's show them the product. Cause I think it's like a 70% increase compared to cold advertising. The retargeting, Oh I can't remember the number, but it's, it's crazy.

Speaker 1:

It's always, it's always been my favorite thing to do. Like when it starts out as like get remark, retargeting set up, everyone's happy when that's running at full capacity. It's just the first thing probably anyone should do when they're running digital ads. Um, you know what, uh, when it comes to kind of, you know, engagement, are there any strategies that you use to encourage engagement from users? Meaning I know for a while people would be like on Facebook they'd be like, Hey, yeah, leave a comment below. And then Facebook's like, we're going to penalize you if you say that or you ask someone to leave a comment below. Um, and I know that you kind of mentioned before that you know, it's all about content and great content that resonates with people. How do you get people to talk or to engage or to share the content that you guys are creating.

Speaker 3:

So something I like to focus on is user generated content. So incentivizing your fans and your customers to actually post about you on social media because that helps with all of your like social ranking factors. And so you can have things like a monthly contest. Like we used to have a monthly photo contest for a wine company that we work with where the best submission of that month would get a free, like you're not allowed to give away wine for free. So it was a free wine accessory pack basically with like a$200 value or something along those lines. And so we get like 50 submissions a month with the hashtag of the brand and all these people sending in photos. And then we select one each month. Okay, this is the best photo, let's send it out to them. But then the flip side of that is we just got 50 new photos of content that we could actually use and leverage on our own site or within the platforms themselves. So that's one way is to incentivize that in the form of contests. You can do things where, um, we're working with a music festival company now and they are launching an initiative in a couple of weeks for a sticker design. So they're going to be taking in user submitted sticker designs and they're going to get posted all over social media by the people who are submitting into the contest. Um, another example is we work a for sports nutrition client and Costa Mesa. They're really heavy into the Spartan races, like obstacle course racing. And one of our sponsored athletes is going to be racing people as a part of a challenge on the 21st. And so we posted that on social and people had to actually record a video themselves and use the specific hashtag in order to apply to race, um, the racer. So these are all just ways that you can get people actually posting about you and your brand. And engaging with you and then once they post and send that to you, you need to go comment on their posts and say, Oh, like awesome picture, thanks for submitting or whatever it may be.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah. It's, it's crazy. I always refer to that as like making friends, like you have the ability to, to talk or have conversations with people. It's incredible. You know, user generated content I've always found works really, really well with paid media because it doesn't, people create it not trying to create an ad. There's trying to have fun. They're trying to make someone smile. They're trying to do something interesting or creative. They're not trying to necessarily sell a product. And a lot of times, you know, when, when advertisers get into what we need to create an ad, well, it needs to have these things and a call to action and make people do what we want. It just, it looks like an ad. It smells like an ad. And people were just like, Oh, it's an ad. And they scroll past it. But when you have that organic type of content of someone just having fun, how they would interact with a product in normal real life, where they come up with the old ideas. Uh, we've seen a lot of those perform very, very well.

Speaker 3:

And there's now on Instagram you can have, um, can't remember what the specific term is but like sponsored accounts. So for the athletes that we, um, that are partners with us, they, when they post something, we can go into ads manager, take that post from their account and, and boost it. So it's going from their personal account and being advertised through their personal account. But it's driving to our website. Yeah. So that's sort of like the in between of your, you still have some control over the content because you're telling them what to create. Um, but then it's being shown as their own individual content and then you boost it.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. There's just so many creative ways that I think you can utilize, um, you know, consumer generated media or, um, you know, the type of endorsements that you have. But I mean, a lot of times we've seen stuff where you just take two images of two different people that posted something and put like a or B and be like, Hey, it's your time to vote. Who did it? Who wore it better? Or who would you vote for? Um, you know, and a lot of times everyone has an opinion. Um, if you give them a good question, uh, and they'll share that. And I think that's a great way to be able to get feedback from people. Like, what do you think? Who would, who would win this?

Speaker 3:

Twitter polls are really good in terms of they get way more impressions engagements than any like regular posts that we'll do on Twitter. So I always found that interesting. And they typically, they don't have anything to do with the brand and be like, okay, I'm like, I think that Nash, the best game of the year was released a couple days ago. So one of the questions we posted on Twitter is like, who do you think will win? Like, super simple and it gets like thousands of people to vote on it. And so I think, I think a lot of companies forget that there's people just talking, like imagine walking down the street and you can ask people questions like, Hey, how was your day? Or would you rather have a hot dog or a hamburger? Like everyone's going to have thoughts on that. But so many times we see, you know, companies come where they're like, I need to go and be like, Hey, what's up? Buy this, buy this, buy this, buy this, give me your money, give me your money, give me your money. And they forget that they're people that would talk to them in a normal way. Um, if they didn't come up and just hold a sign and say, buy this right now. Yeah. There's sort of two things. They're like, you want to treat your brand social media accounts as if it's your personal account. Um, because it seems more authentic that way. You just engage in comment with people. Normally everyone knows that there's someone behind the brand account anyways. So why are you going to try and pretend that this is like some corporate entity? And then also, um, on the flip side of that, we've taken over accounts before where they're so focused on how much traffic they can drive to their website that they'll, an example is they're posting like three times a day on Instagram. And so yes, they're driving more traffic per day, but you can slowly see it start to just steadily decline. And then each individual posts the reach is declining as well because people don't want to see that same thing over and over again. Go buy tickets now. They want actual like content that is relatable to them. So what do you think, um, you know, in the next year will be some of the big changes that will happen, you know, in the world of social media, you know, from what you've seen happen over the last year, what's kinda coming up? Is there anything that you're excited about or you think it'll go in a certain direction? I mean, part of what I'm going to be doing over the winter break period is looking at a tech talk a little more in depth. Um, I see, uh, my family friend who's like 11, he's all over that and his entire like generation is super into that. Um, and it starting to work its way more into ages that are currently purchasing product. Yeah. So that is an area that I definitely need to focus on a little bit more and I think brands in general can look at it and then assess whether or not it makes sense for them. Um, because it's sort of like vine 2.0 and there's a lot of, um, impressions and engagements to sort of hanging out there for people to capture. Yeah. I think in terms of social, it's definitely got the critical mass that it's now becoming a full fledged force in the social media world. Yeah. So I think that's going to be something interesting to look at for 2020 at least. It's great. Um, other than that, in terms of organic social reach, I think it's just gonna continue to decline. Um, they, I mean Facebook is basically dead organic reach. You're not going to reach anyone organically. And then Instagram, it continues to lower and lower. So you just need to focus on other aspects of your business and then also think about how you can utilize paid advertising to supplement. That's great. That's great.

Speaker 1:

Great advice. Um, anything that's words is we're kind of winding down, um, for other business owners out there that are, you know, struggling to, to be able to reach people or you know, there's a lot of things going on in their day and they want to do it right. Uh, any final tips or advice you'd give them?

Speaker 3:

I'd say you can easily get lost in hearing all this stuff about social media. Um, but once you actually take a look at it, does it really make sense for your business? Like, I wouldn't get super stressed out about it if you don't have a ton of engagement on Instagram for example, cause it doesn't necessarily translate to anything for you. It doesn't necessarily translate to sales. Um, a lot of times people will see social media and they're like, Oh, I need these three presences, like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and they invest a ton of time in it, but they'd be better served focusing on other areas of their business. So whether or not you sort of jump head first into that, um, you have to assess for yourself and your business if it makes sense. Cause it could be a ton, like a huge waste of time. Yeah.

Speaker 1:

Great tip. Um, well thank you so much Brandon for being here today and for sharing your advice. Uh, if you're still listening, you can check out his website and electric marketing with a electric, with the IQ at the end, uh, electric marketing.com. Thank you guys so much for hanging with us and we'll catch you on the next episode.

Speaker 2:

Thank you for listening to the Duke of digital podcast with Brian Mitt. Want to network with other business owners. Join our exclusive group at facebook.com/groups/duke of digital fancy the Duke. Leave a five star review on your favorite podcast app. And you can be mentioned on the show. The Duke of digital was produced by advertisement and recorded in Hollywood, California. All rights reserved.