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Good morning internet fans. It’s Ryan Perry, Simple Biz Support. It is Wednesday, therefore it’s Social Media Wednesday. It is September 16th and I have Sarah Giometti with Provaro Marketing on the other side, and today we’re going to talk about the four different types of content that you can post on your social media accounts. Good morning Sarah.
Sarah Giometti: Good morning Ryan, how are you?

RP: I’m doing good. You’re not in your office?

SG: I am not in my office.

RP: We can’t really tell, but I’m assuming there’s tropics and palm trees and hula girls somewhere.

SG: Yes, there are. Unfortunately, the view kind of blew out the background behind me, so I had to turn around and have a wall behind me, but I tried to give you the tropics view.

RP: You need a lot of light to offset any backlighting that you’d get, so… That’s okay, you don’t want to make me jealous anyhow, ’cause I am still here in the office. We got some rain finally last night, so things are looking up a little bit in California. Today though we’re going to talk about the four different types of social media. If you go on Twitter, as an example, people typically are just pushing out 140-character tweets. You go on Facebook, getting a lot of pictures and video. Instagram and Snapchat and all those typically are picture-related, but the reality is, as a consumer, somebody who actually views social media and follows different people and companies online, if we always send out the same type of content, it can get kind of boring, so we want to mix it up. And sometimes I think as business owners we get a little lazy, and we kinda get in a groove of things and we’re just like, “Oh, I’m just going to post this. Oh I love pictures, so I’m just going to keep on posting pictures that I think are really cool,” and that maybe isn’t… Won’t create the engagement that you could be by mixing things up a little bit.

SG: Right. And we’re excited on this. We were talking a couple of weeks ago that we might not have ever gone over what really and definitely the four types are, and when to use them, why you should use all of them. ‘Cause you’re absolutely right, it gets stale if you’re using the same thing. I’ve seen pages where, they do nothing but links, and that’s not a page I want to follow; I don’t always want to read an article, I don’t always want to click through. And so this is a way to make sure when you’re doing your strategy, that you are employing… Especially on Facebook and Twitter, you are employing all four types of posts that are available to you, because if they’re there why not use that? And they also have… They get different engagement rates. People… When you spice it up a little bit, people are more likely to interact and more posts, when you’re giving them some variety.

RP: Let’s go ahead and let’s talk about what those four different types are, so let’s describe what they are and then let’s go through each one independently.

SG: So, especially for Facebook has the most variety. There is just straight text, no links, no pictures, just text. Then you also have pictures, you have links and you have native video. So the difference with native video is not linked into your YouTube that’s technically a link, but uploading the video directly into Facebook, which is very valuable. So let’s start with the easiest one which is text, this is strictly just text, and a lot of the ways that just text works is, you might do a lengthier one. They have found really short ones and really long ones, posts work really well on Facebook pages. And the really short ones would be a fill-in-the-blank or asking a silly question or something is really short like that when you’re asking them to a page and link them and they read it like, “What book changed… Blank book changed my life,” or “My favorite food is blank.” These people just naturally go, “I don’t want to tell everybody what my favorite whatever is.”

SG: But also you can do the longer narrative posts, and I know I’ve seen stuff about notes coming back, or it can operate a little bit like a native blogging platform. But this is not the notes part of it, but doing a long post where people have to click more, and especially if you’re telling a lot of information or engaging story, something that happened, maybe some great client success story and you just want to, not do a blog post of it but do a long post on your Facebook page.

SG: So, the text is a super, really powerful one to use both ways, the short and the long. The next type is pictures, and pictures are powerful. We are visual people.

SG: We are visual people, so we do want to… And we definitely want to make sure we incorporate pictures, because people… A lot of times people, they’re just… They might be just sitting for an appointment, they’re just scanning their Facebook page for pictures… So, people, they can… If you have small amount of text and a picture, if it’s a funny picture, it’s something people can consume fast, and so that’s a great way to just kind of get engaged with them and put some of your humor in there, humor works really well, ’cause I think I did… Somewhere I read, MIT did a study that we consume a picture like 1.6 milliseconds or something as tiny like that, that we can process the picture way faster than we can process words, so you definitely want to make sure you incorporate pictures into your strategy. And we talked in previous episodes where you can use Canva to create your own pictures, or you can use something like Post Planner to look for pictures of people who already created that you can share, so that way you’ve got that incorporated. Or you can do a mix of inspirational quotes, just general information you want to do, funny… Pictures are a great way to show your corporate, or your company culture and personality, and have that show through and have people relate to you.

RP: Right. The other thing I wanted to say is that, between the two things that we’ve talked about, when we talk about all four, is that also always understand who your audience is. And this is whenever you’re creating content regardless of what format or what type of content you’re creating, if you understand who your audience is, you want to shift your focus. You may do 80% images if that’s what triggers your audience, just because there’s four types doesn’t mean you want to break it out and go, “Okay, I’m going to do 25 of this, 25 of this, and 25 of that.”

SG: Absolutely right, that’s a great point, that you want to watch and see what’s working and what’s not working. And you also don’t want to do text, pictures, link, video; text, pictures, link, video, because then it gets repetitive. And so, you still want it to look like you’re on the fly and it’s all jumbled up, but you are thinking about it behind the scenes, about making sure that you have some variety. But you’re right, if your audience interacts a ton with pictures and never interacts with links, you may want to shrink the links down and keep it to just your own blog post when you’re doing the links. But that does bring us to the third one is links, where it’s links to YouTube videos, links to your blog post, links to other educational posts.

SG: So I know Ryan and I are both in an internet market, we post to content from industry leaders, that put out really good content for what we do. So that’s something that you want to look at is, who are your industry leaders, not your direct competition, although Ryan and I are direct competitors and share each other’s content. If you have a relationship like that, absolutely utilize their content. But who puts out really good content who’s not a direct competitor or threat to you that would be good information to share with your followers, especially if it’s somebody who’s out of your area, they’re not going to go buy from that person, so there’s no harm in sharing the information. But links are a really good way on the educational scale when you’re doing a variety of… Types of content and subjects, links are the best way to get out the education. The fourth one is…

RP: Yeah, the other thing I wanted to say about links is that links is also a great way to share your input or you ideas. So if somebody else has written and article, and you have an opinion about it, positive, negative, indifferent, whatever it is, it’s a great way to take somebody else’s information and expand on it. I’m trying to think of the organization, the news organization, Huffington Post. They editorialize other people’s content like crazy. And essentially it’s… Newsweek Today wrote an article about X, Y and Z, and then Huffington Post will editorialize, they’ll make a paragraph about whatever this article is, and they’ll link to it. And that is great to do. The other thing you could do is, if you want to create visibility and you’re trying to build credibility within the community of thought leaders, is respond to the content they’re making out there, and again, you don’t have to agree with them, but you can always add your own opinion, your own insight. Maybe they missed something, and by sharing it to them by linking to their Twitter account, or using hashtags, or however it is that you want to do that, make it visible so that they have an opportunity to see it, and it’s a great way to possibly engage in communication with those people. And if you can engage in communication with thought leaders who have a huge following, you just increased your visibility 10-fold, 100-fold, whatever.

SG: Right, and it also increases your authority, because you’re showing if your followers are seeing it, you’re interacting with the thought leaders of your industry, then they’re seeing that you’re staying on top of what’s going on, so you’re looking more authoritative and more like an expert, because you are interacting with the thought leaders, and you are following what they’re putting out there, because they should be putting out the best content for your industry.

SG: So interacting with them is a great way just to get… If you want to build a relationship with one of them, the best way to do it is interact with them where they’re playing, and if that happens to be social media, then on Twitter, and on Facebook especially, you can interact with them, you can comment on their posts, you can ask them questions. On Twitter you can put them on a list, so you’re almost seeing what they’re doing, you can re-Tweet their information. So that’s a great way. But the editorializing is also great too, is that if they put something out… And it’s a great way for you to ask a question. So if you’re doing a paragraph to editorialize this link for an educational article, you would end it with a question like, “What did you find useful?” Or, try to encourage the engagement for them to give you feedback, because remember, these are… They’re not your clients already, you’re hoping they’re prospective clients, that if they’re giving you feedback of what their biggest issue was or problem, it’s a way for you to reach out to them and say, “Well hey, how could I help you?” So it helps them self-qualify it for you.

RP: Right, definitely. And, ’cause we’ve got about three minutes left and I’m sure you want to go back to sleep is… My favorite, which is video.

SG: Yes, Ryan’s favorite is video. I know we focus a lot on Facebook. So on Facebook, you would do best if you do videos, put them on YouTube natively for your SEO purposes, but upload them directly into Facebook. Facebook gives it more juice and more reach if you’re uploading it natively versus sharing the YouTube link. On Twitter, the videos are live, so you can’t schedule the videos on Twitter, you have to… In the Twitter app on your phone, is to record a 15 second video and then post it.

SG: Instagram is 15… Wait. Twitter I think is 30; Instagram is 15 or 16 seconds. They all did it differently so they could stand out and then nobody can remember what they are. But Instagram you can do short videos, about 15-16 seconds, those are also are done better live, not scheduling out. But Facebook you can upload them and schedule them like you schedule anything else, and it’s a really powerful way for people to relate to you. In video your personality, your behavior, your mannerisms, all that comes through, and so people have a better opportunity to relate to you while watching a video. It’s kind of a lazy way to consume content too, because they just have to watch it; they don’t have to read it and process it, they can just watch it or listen to it and zone out, and so it’s a really powerful mix. If you’re not doing video it’s something you should really consider, and utilize it across the four platforms, which you can pin them to Pinterest too.

RP: Yeah. And the one thing that I started doing… Gosh, a couple weeks ago is, on Twitter anytime somebody follows me, I grab my phone, I go into the application, and I will do a quick video thanking them, and that has done wonders because it’s unique, it’s original, it’s personal, and it’s actually opened up a few doors for me in possible relationships. So just me getting out, who knows what’s going to happen, but… And that’s just simply saying thank you, that’s all I did. It took me a couple of seconds, said thank you. So that’s a very powerful tool, if you’re on Twitter I would consider it. I’m also trying to figure out how I can do a morning quick tip of the day type of deal, maybe through Twitter on video. But, with that, why don’t you wrap up, we’ve got… It’s 10 o’clock already. The trash man’s still there, or somebody’s still there.

SG: I know, it’s been a quiet street this whole time I’m here, except for apparently 6:30 in the morning.

RP: Yeah, well of course. That’s the way it’s going to be. As soon as we went live all the noise comes on. You’re going to go back and relax, all the noise is going to go away. It’s the joys of doing a live broadcast sometimes.

SG: And it’s not in a location that I am used to where I can control the surroundings. Okay, so the four are text, links, video and pictures. You can use all four on Facebook and Twitter. Instagram is just pictures and video. Pinterest is pictures and video. LinkedIn, I think is all four also. So just make sure you’re watching your analytics and you’re paying attention to what your followers are consuming, and adjust your strategy accordingly.

RP: Okay, perfect. Well with that we’re going to end the show. Next week I have, “How to Get Very Responsive… How to Get Very Responsive to Messages Green Icon on Facebook?” I have no idea what that means.

SG: There is… On Facebook pages you’ll notice if you are very… There’s a green ‘very responsive’ icon, if you happen to be a very responsive page; so people sending you messages or asking questions, or comments, if you respond to comments. If you’re very responsive and you respond really fast, it’s a green icon. So your followers know that you’re very responsive.

RP: Okay, very interesting. Deanie did not even know it existed, so looking forward to learning more about that next week. Sarah, as always, I appreciate your time and enjoy the rest of your vacation in Hawaii.

SG: Thanks. It’s always a pleasure Ryan.

RP: Alright everybody, we’ll see you next Wednesday where we are going to go live and we’ll be talking about the green button on Facebook. That’s why I wore green today I think. Alright everybody, take care.