Heroes in Business - Your Content Needs to Be Better!

Episode Date: March 31, 2021

Check out the astounding stats of what happens every minute on social to understand why your content always needs to be better and stand out above the noise. I also name the top 7 errors people make on this episode of Social Media on Steroids with Dan Shinder.  

Hi, and welcome to the Social Media on Steroids podcast. I'm Dan Schindler, and I created the Social Media on Steroids brand of education, training, consulting, and services to help others learn from my experience of achieving extraordinary results with content marketing on social. I attracted a following of over 1 million people and reach millions more online each month, 100% organically. In this series, I share the strategies that helped me cross all the milestones it took to get there and that we still use. And please, before we dive in, take down my email address in case you have questions. I answer all questions and I take suggestions for topics to be covered in this

series. You can reach me directly at dan at advancedsocialmarketing.com. And of course, the website is the same URL. Follow the blog there and the Advanced Social Marketing YouTube YouTube channel. Okay, let's jump in. Wow, welcome to episode five already. This is why your content needs to be better than it is. And I don't care how good your content is, that statement is always valid because we should always be improving our content. Every day I look at ours and I say, how can we make this better? How can we get even more reach? How can we get even more video views? How can we even get more comments,

more shares, more email lists, signups, drive more traffic to the web? It should always, always, always be striving for better. And by the way, be sure to check out more episodes that you may have missed by searching Dan Schinder, that's S-H-I-N-D-E-R, on the Alliancer.com network. That's the Alliancer's broadcast network at Alliancer.com or your favorite podcast platform. This is on about 40, so it's pretty easy to find. And this series is for everyone from those who are

new entrepreneurs to seasoned and veteran entrepreneurs to C-suite position holders with companies of all types to teams who work in the marketing department of any size companies in any industry. What I teach can work for anyone from someone who makes specialized made-to-order pound cakes to gold to platinum artists in the music industry to leaders in carbon composite materials selling B2B to the biggest mines and refineries in the world. And yes, I have all those types of clients and many more. This bleep works. So I was going to call this episode why your content needs to rock, but instead I changed it to why your content needs to be better because everyone thinks that their content rocks and a lot of content does rock. And even that should be better than it is.

So this series will give you insight to how to improve. And if you want to work with me one-on-one, focusing on your business, your challenges, your journey, leveraging your successes and growing more, I would be honored to have the opportunity to work with you. But for now, let's do this. And in fact, the next episode, by the way, episode six is titled Stop Following Everyone Over the Cliff. And I use that term a lot in my courses and workshops and consulting. I say stop following everyone over the cliff because that's what a lot of people are doing. They're copying the person who's about to fail the test. There's this herd mentality. And in

that episode, I'll debunk the myths about hashtags and spin your world around and show you how they really work, as well as correct other common herd mentality based errors that I see in content marketing on social. five right now into why your content really does need to keep getting better and better and better. And we're going to start with some statistics to begin to give you an idea as to how much noise is out there that your content really needs to start out from. So the first one I'm going to go through is I'm looking at a infographic that is showing every minute of every day of what occurred on a bunch of platforms in 2020. Now, some of these numbers jumped up a lot because of COVID and more people working at home, more people just fooling around on social. But a lot of people who had to pivot, maybe they lost their jobs and now they're going to become entrepreneurs. So they're marketing themselves or, you know, there's so many reasons, but that doesn't matter. The reason why honestly isn't

important is the facts of more content being put up. So let's just go through a few. YouTube users uploaded 500 hours of video every minute of the day. Those 365 days. That's crazy. Instagram users posted 347,000 stories. Zoom hosted 208,000 participants in meetings. Facebook users uploaded 147,000 photos and the videos are even higher than that. And that's what's really important. Video gets more engagement. We'll save that for another episode. Let's see. What else? What else do we have here? They've got Instagram again.

Business profile ads saw 138,000 plus clicks. Remember, this is every minute, every minute. LinkedIn users applied for 69,000 jobs. But actually, let's look at LinkedIn some more. And then we're also going to talk about where your content should be, give you some insight to some of those ideas. But right now, let's go to, this is actually on Hootsuite. This is a blog of LinkedIn statistics. And I'm going to start with LinkedIn saw a 55% increase in conversations among connections in 2020. Again, a lot of it because of COVID and the

changing dynamic and everything. And I said, that's a year over year calculation for Q1, first quarter of the 2021 fiscal year. With connections unable to meet in person, they are messaging each other more than ever on this business social network. The next statistic says content creation on LinkedIn increased 60% in 2020. Companies and individual LinkedIn members have ramped up their LinkedIn content to stay in touch with professional contacts and colleagues in this unprecedented year. Now remember, all these numbers are to help you understand how much is going out there on social, whether it's related to your industry or not, has nothing to do with it. It's all these different things are coming at

everybody from all directions. So your content really needs to scream value, really needs to be valuable to people or they're just going to stop paying attention. really needs to be valuable to people or they're just going to stop paying attention. Next one. Oh, this is a good one. LinkedIn live streams increased by, are you ready? This is the most astounding fact out of everything I've read so far. Ready? LinkedIn live streams increased by 437% in 2020. That's a year-over-year calculation for October 2020. LinkedIn live launched in February 2019, but really took off during this year of finding alternative ways to connect. The number of LinkedIn live streams increased 89% from March to June alone in 2020. Quick detour, live broadcasting, whether it's on LinkedIn, whether it's on Instagram,

whether it's on YouTube, whether it's on Vimeo, whether it's on Facebook, live streaming is the number one relationship builder with your followers. It's a way to connect. It's one of my, if not my very favorite thing to do on Drum Talk TV. I love interviewing the artists. I love interviewing people that I grew up emulating and going to see in concert. I love interviewing the newcomers that are just breaking through and the innovators, makers of great gear, producers, attorneys regarding the music business. I love doing the interviews. I love curating music for our fans from all over the world, videos. I love doing the documentaries, but I truly, truly, truly love that just sort of down home, town home meeting of Drum Talk TV between

me and the followers that catch me on the lives. And we do a few live series, but the one that's mine is Dan's Almost Daily Vlog. And it's so much fun because it's just like sitting around a coffee table with beers, coffee, whatever your thing is, and just talking about music and drumming. So you all have that opportunity in our industry. We've already got a long list of live stream ideas

with that one company I mentioned, who is a carbon composite leader in manufacturing and installation that works with a lot of the biggest refineries and mines around the country and around the world. And we've already got live streaming ideas for them. So it's very valuable. We'll do a whole episode on just that. Another one, 57%. This is important. 57% of LinkedIn's traffic is mobile. Not only that, half of the approximate 3 billion users on Facebook use mobile devices as their primary device of choice. What's important about

that is not just that it's being used on these different platforms on a smaller format and a format that's missing some other features on each platform pretty much across the board, but the other thing is the fact that it's a lot easier to just scroll past things in the feed. Social media marketing, content marketing is a visual experience first. If the photo or video preview image or autoplay video does not catch their attention right away, it's not going to compel them to read the title let alone the body of the text let alone click the see more to expand it it all starts with the visual aspect and if there's no visual whatsoever shame on you no one cares most people are scrolling right past that especially on mobile

so very important very important we've got to consider the different platforms our content is being viewed on. Let's see. One more. LinkedIn has 15 times more content connecting and conversations and building those relationships. There's a feed just like on Facebook, just like on Instagram, just like on many other platforms where we're all posting our content and we're able to see everyone's content whom we're following through the feed, which is really cool. And of course, it's much more. Well, it's all hopefully it's all business related, whereas Facebook is a mix of everything. And if, by the way, if you're averse to Facebook because of all the other, let's just say drama and garbage, and I'm going to use a technical term, bullshit. There's a lot of bullshit on Facebook as well.

Don't let that dissuade you from using the largest online marketing tool that's free. You can be successful without boosting posts. You can be successful without posting ads and pay for them. Now you can, and there's a right way to do both. But for now, I'm just going to talk about organic content. I don't use Facebook anymore that much as a consumer. Very little. I use it so much for business. And we

have over a million followers on our platform, on Drum Talk TV. And I did that 100% organically. So learn from me, please. That's why I created Social Media on Steroids and this podcast and the company Advanced Social Marketing is to help other people achieve great results and flourish in their business with the strategies that help me do that with mine. So let's go back to, let's see, let's talk about, we got through some statistics and everything. Oh, you don't need to be on 10 channels or 15 or 20. Sometimes I see in an email signature, literally someone's got 10 to 20 channels listed. You really don't need that. Depending on your business, depending on what you provide, depending on whom you serve and

what industry that is, will kind of help dictate what platforms are better for you. You don't want to be on just one, but you don't need to be on 15. I think for most businesses, you've got to be on LinkedIn. And I don't mean just be on these platforms. You've got to be active. And I'll get into that in a moment. In fact, the last episode four was all about when to post the real answer, best times to post, how often to post. I'll touch on that in this as well, very briefly. So LinkedIn for sure, YouTube for sure, Facebook for sure, whether you like it or not, Instagram for better or worse. I cringed that because Instagram, you need to use at least one third party tool to drive traffic with it. Man, when people say,

we're having success on our LinkedIn, it's doing wonders for us. Really? What's happening? Well, our posts are getting lots of likes. That statistic is not success. I think I'm going to have to do an episode on exactly what statistics to keep your eyes on and which ones don't matter on a few of the top platforms. But anyways, let's go back. I digress. You need to be on LinkedIn. You need to be on Facebook. You need to be on YouTube. Go ahead. Be on Instagram. Vimeo has its merits depending on what business. Twitter does as well, but those are really the top five or six. I'm in love with TikTok as a consumer. We have two channels that aren't published yet because we're staging content, revving that up. But as a

consumer, I am in love with TikTok. It is nothing that I thought it was. Nothing that I thought it was. I really enjoy it. They're just short bursts, easy to digest, a lot of intriguing stuff, a lot of funny stuff. That's why I watch it. A lot of how-to stuff, which is great. My wife and I build a lot of just, we build a lot of crap in the yard outside and do gardening. Great tips for that. Great funny stuff. Great cat videos, dog videos if you're a pet person.

Anyways, that's my consumer platform of choice, as is YouTube. YouTube is great for research as well. So there are a few reasons why you want to be on multiple channels. And one of the reasons is because content is consumed by the consumers differently on different platforms, even the same content. And I'll give examples in a moment. Another reason is different places to be found. People have different channels that they prefer to spend more time on, even if they spend time on five or six. As I mentioned, as a consumer, I'm on TikTok more and YouTube more now than anything. In business, I'm on Facebook and LinkedIn. I'm hardly on Instagram as a consumer whatsoever,

hardly at all. We have a business presence there though. And just, you never know when someone's online. Forget your statistics, you know, what your analytics say. You don't know where they really are, when, and how they're coming across which content. So I'll get more into that, but let's go back to talking about the differences of how content is consumed. So let's take video and let's start with YouTube. I love using my wife as an example, and I guess I'm kind of the same way too, but Anja will be like most people on Instagram and Facebook. She'll watch just a little bit of a video and then keep it moving to scroll past it. Whereas on YouTube, she'll watch just a little bit of a video and then keep it moving, just scroll past it. Whereas on YouTube, she'll put on an hour-long documentary or an hour-long vlog, which is basically a video blog or podcast that you can view. And she'll do that or two

hours even and listen to that or watch it while she's working or something. So you could have a five-minute video on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, the same video, and it's going to be consumed differently on each one. Another reason why you want to be on these different platforms and how they're used differently is that YouTube is more of a hunting tool. What I mean by that is you're hunting for content. You're looking it up like you might on Wikipedia. It's the video of Wikipedia in some ways. It's the Google of video search, literally, because Google owns it. It's the second largest search engine. So that compared to Facebook, where content is more fed to you, those are two of the differences. So YouTube, you want to be there just because it's another great way to be found.

Facebook is great because you could spread your content from your channels to other channels organically to be found by more people who otherwise wouldn't know about you. And it has the largest population of people on any one social platform. That should be reason enough. And don't think for a moment that your target market isn't there. They are. Listen to my episode two, which explains what ages are where, what ages are on which platforms. Basically, all of them are everywhere. And you want your content to be better so that people will share it for you. You want your content to be more and more and more and more compelling every day so that people share it with like-minded people.

Drum Talk TV had 47,000 fans in the first seven weeks. I know brands that have been on Facebook for five years that don't have that many. 47,000 fans in the first seven weeks. This is before video, which reaches more people and is more compelling. How did we do that? With my systematized method of sharing into groups very strategically. I'll talk about that on a future episode as well. And I teach it in all my courses. So we need to be in different places for those different reasons. And going back to all those stats that we went through on all the different platforms from last year. We need our content to constantly be better so that it stands out amongst all that other noise that people are

making. So here's some different errors at all levels of social media and content marketing aptitude, at all levels, in all industries, even legacy brands and agencies are making. These are all common herd mentality errors. One is frequency. If you're not posting frequently enough, you're not getting enough reach. The algorithm's not kicking on. Listen to my episode number four, when to post the real answer. Another one is only selling. Selling, selling, selling, selling, selling, selling, selling. That's what most people are doing on social. There's no value in that. People will stop following you because they're tired of being hit over the head with the same thing over and over. What's for sale? What's for sale? There's zero reason

to follow you for that. So give value 70 to 80% of the time, sell 20 to 30% of the time. Here's my biggest, and I'm going to talk about this in that next episode, episode six, hashtags. Everyone on the internet, unless they've taken my course, is using hashtags incorrectly. Everyone. And when you listen to episode six and I talk about the real myth and debunk what everyone thinks hashtags are doing, it will truly blow your mind. You'll never look at other people's posts or your own the same way. The good news is you can correct your own. And I say this with all the love in the world, with all due respect, you're doing it wrong. You've got to listen to that one. Here's another one. Using tags, tags of all kinds, at mention tags, the hashtags, the different at sign tags, there's different uses for that. Using those in the lingo of posts, text is just ridiculous.

Just because the 14 year olds are doing it doesn't mean you need to do it as a car dealership or as a life coach or a health and wellness provider. It's like, I did a hashtag workshop with at sign Whole Foods buyer regarding hashtag organic, hashtag bananas. And it was great. It's like the brain was not taught to read the English language that way, or any language for that matter. The brain can't seamlessly digest that information. I mean, we're challenged anyways. But seriously, it causes disruptive thinking. So stop putting tags in the lingo of posts. It makes you look like you don't know how to use a platform, or like you don't know content. And I know right now, a lot of people just now jumped off of this podcast. I know that, and that's okay. Some people don't want to hear what they need to hear, but if you're still

listening, I commend you. You're special. You want to learn. We all need to learn. I'm constantly learning, constantly growing. When we think we're at the end of that, we go down the tubes. constantly growing. When we think we're at the end of that, we go down the tubes. So let's look at a couple others. Skipping lines. What's with this new practice of writing one sentence in a post and then skipping five or eight lines with a dot or an emoji so that people have to click see more? Guess what, folks? Most people are not clicking see more. It's not bait. It's not bait. It's not bait that's working to do that. You want to have as much of your compelling story or byline or whatever it is to suck people in to be compelled and inspired by your content above the fold.

And in this case, above the fold means everything that precedes the words see more. Because if it's not compelling, they're not going to click on it and, oh, let me read more and see if then I'll be interested. Think about that for a moment. Hopefully you'll go online after this and you'll look at posts and see them differently. Here's two other things that people are missing the boat on. Here's two other things that people are missing the boat on. Lack of video and lack of live streaming. Lack of video is killing your productivity and your reach and engagement because video on average gets three times more reach and five times more engagement than static posts. And in our world on Drum Talk TV, it gets about 30 times more reach and a hundred times more engagement than most other brands, even with their videos, because I know some secrets that I'll talk about regarding video, but regarding their static posts,

absolutely. So you got to do more video, got to do more video. And after that, more video. And lives are important on whichever platform you have the most followers and whichever platform is most indicative of the use for how you're using it. If it's for business, it's probably going to be LinkedIn or in our case, it is Facebook. I'm going to start doing lives now with Turn Talk TV, but with social media on steroids on LinkedIn. Live streaming is the number one relationship builder between you and your followers. It's the number one relationship builder. You got to do live streaming. Don't be shy. Don't be afraid of the piece of plastic with some wiring i don't know why some people have a complex about i don't want to be on camera i don't like being on photos you're not shooting video are you

what's with this microphone in my face i don't get it i know it's like we're all wired differently i get that if you can get up in front of somebody, a person, a group of people, and talk about what you do, why not in front of a device that'll help you get it to more people? Come on, can we all sit at the grownups table? Seriously. So check out the previous episodes. Look up Dan Schinder on Alliancer.com. That's S-H-I-N-D-E-R. Or on your favorite podcast network, listening platform. Check out the Advanced Social Marketing YouTube channel. And apply what I teach and begin getting better results, guaranteed.

Much more to come to be covered in more episodes. Look at the backlog if you haven't seen the ones preceding this. Sign up for the newsletter and get my six steps to daily success PDF at advancedsocialmarketing.com. Get notifications of other free webinars and seminars I'm doing as well as how you can work with me, with your company, or you individually with my workshops and or courses and consulting. Many of them have follow-up mentorship programs. And if you want to learn more, need to train your team, or if you just have questions, just send me a question.

Reach out. Visit advancedsocialmarketing.com or contact me through the site or pop a message to me through LinkedIn. All right, thanks. We'll see you on the next one. Can I have some music, please, for this next part? So remember, if you're serious about what you do,

get serious about how you market it. You can reach me directly at dan at advancedsocialmarketing.com and see how I can help you further at the same URL. Check out the blog there and follow the Advanced Social Marketing YouTube channel as well. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn at linkedin.com slash in slash Dan Schindler.

Happy marketing.