Good morning, internet fans! Ryan Perry with Simple Biz Support. Today is Wednesday, June 3rd, therefore it is internet marketing or Social Media Wednesday, almost forgot where I was. As usual, I have the beautiful and talented Sarah Giometti with Provaro Marketing with me. Good morning, Sarah!

Sarah Giometti: Good morning, Ryan. How are you?

RP: I’m doing fabulous, it’s a beautiful day outside. I think we’re actually supposed to hit the 80s even though it rained a couple of days ago.

SG: And, the Dodgers are in first place.

RP: They are. Split the double header, the other day, but that’s all good. Joc’s hitting some home runs so can’t complain there.

SG: Wasn’t it Guerrero that hit a grand slam last night in one of the games too?

RP: Yeah, in the ninth inning with two outs. I don’t think it was full count, but there was two outs, so good stuff, good stuff. We can just keep on talking baseball, what the heck. It’s Wednesday.

SG: Why not? You can…

RP: It’s hump day! We’re in first place.

SG: It can tie in a social media, we’re baseball fans.

RP: It totally can. We’ll get Dodger fans to follow us. There’s going to be some Dodger fans out there that are business owners that are interested in social media, so there’s a total, complete tie-in. I’m thinking, business trip, Dodgers stadium, we could totally pay this off, business.

SG: Well, I’m headed down to LA in five weeks for a wedding and I figure I’ll catch a game.

RP: Alright, might have to join you for that.

SG: Perfect!

RP: Alright. But in all reality, we actually are going to talk about social media. Today is kind of a continuation of last week and we’re going to talk about a couple more items the following week regarding how to post on social media in an efficient and easy manner. I think the two big areas are, “I don’t have enough time,” coming from business owners, “To post throughout the day on social media,” and then number two, “I just don’t know what to talk about all the time. So how do I find content?”

SG: Yeah, those are really big hurdles that I hear all the time when I’m talking to clients. They’re so busy… We’re business owners, we’re all entrepreneurs, we’re wearing multiple hats, and we’re very… Busy is a terrible word, but we have a lot on our plate. So we’ve got a lot of things going on, a lot of balls that we’re juggling, to make sure that we are building our businesses to where we want them to go and managing whatever our services are, our clients. And so, it’s unfortunate… Not unfortunate, but social media is a big part of business, and so, business owners, even small, local mom-and-pop shops, you really need to be on social media in this day and age.

SG: It’s just a reality and it’s also a great platform for you to get your message out at one to many, and so, one of the things that we’re going to talk about is one of the scheduling tools, it’s the one that you use, that will help you kind of buy back your time. Gives you time to be able to manage your social media and schedule it out, find content, do it in a small amount of time once a week to once every other week, and that way you’re not having to worry about it on an every single day basis, scrounging Google to find content. These tools make is a lot easier for business owners to find what to post.

RP: Right, totally. The tool that I use is Post Planner, we’re going to go through… Or I should say I’m going to go through Post Planner so you’re going to hear a lot from me today, simply because it’s the tool that I use. Next week we’re going to be talking about Bundle Post, which is a tool that Sarah uses. But I’m going to go… Let me start a screen share here and I’m going to show you kind of what my routine is in the morning as I’m eating breakfast and I’m also going to show Bundle Post or, excuse me, Post Planner to everybody. So I’m actually logged into Post Planner the website, if you want to go there and check it out. It’s postplanner.com. The control board or the menu and all that is all here on the left-hand side; I’m going to quickly go through what each one of these are. So the very first one is to post where I have a place here where I can post and I can like to my various social media accounts. And then below that is what I did this morning and that is, I went through and I looked for content and I posted that content using Post Planner on my Twitter account. Now, for me specifically, small business owner, the two accounts that I mainly focus on… Well actually, there’s three accounts, is Facebook, then Twitter, then LinkedIn. So that’s my priority, however Facebook you only need to post once a day or so, at least for me, that’s what I do, so I do that manually. Twitter, on the other hand, I want to post 10 to 15 times a day.

RP: That’s where I love Post Planner, it really helps out because I can knock all this stuff out in the morning for the most part. Then LinkedIn, again, is one of those that you want to be very careful about, and so, I will post automatically to LinkedIn myself. So for me, personally, the only reason why I’m using Post Planner is to be more efficient on Twitter so that I can post 15 and schedule it out. So what you’re seeing is my posts for today. So these have all been set up and this is based on a calendar that I set up for myself.

RP: And so, in this case, I have two calendars; I have a weekday calendar, Monday through Friday, and 8:30, 9:45, 10:31, you can see all the times that are set, all the way up through 8:30. These are my scheduled times, so if I have content, I can go ahead and put it in the queue; the first one’s going to go in at 8:30, the next one will go at 9:45, and then 10:31. There’s also a second calendar for weekends, for Saturday and Sunday, 8:15, 12:15 and 6:00 PM. And then you can create your own calendar and you may have a different calendar, maybe one for Twitter, one for Facebook, or if you’re managing multiple businesses, you may have different needs and you can create separate calendars.

RP: Then if we go into content, this is what I really like about them. They actually have three sections here; they have photos, they have top content, and then they also have status ideas and this could be questions, contests, fan-love, trivia, deep-thoughts. And one of the reasons why I decided to go with Post Planner when I was looking at all the different options available, was that it’s a great aggregate for content, so not only do they have all of these preset questions like, “Do you sing in the shower?” to kinda give you ideas, but they also… If I go in the top content, if you will, if I want to look something up, maybe something happened in the news recently, I don’t know, car show came up. Maybe car shows are hot, I don’t know.

RP: I can actually type that into this search box here where the flame is. It’s actually going to find top content that’s relevant to car shows and they have this star system here, and this star system is based on how many times something has been liked and shared already. So the idea is if content is being liked and shared on a regular basis, it must be relevant to people, therefore you may want to share it yourself.

RP: Now if I want to look and see what this is all about I can click the button here and it will actually take me to the page that this content is at. So I can go ahead and review it, “Is this relevant to my audience, and do I want to share it.” If I do want to share it, all I need to do is click this plus button, it automatically puts in the title and it creates a link and if there’s an image attached, it’ll automatically load the image. Now what’s cool about this, I’ve already reviewed it, I said, “Yes I do,” all I need to do now, at this time, is click queue and it’ll automatically put it in the queue for me, or I can click post now if I want to and it will will post there. The other thing is I can choose where this is posting to. Now, for me, I’ve set up two accounts; one’s on Twitter, one’s on Facebook. Again I’m only using Twitter for the most part so that’s the only account. If I had five accounts or six accounts that I wanted this to post on, I could go ahead and set these all up and it would automatically set up.

RP: The other thing that I think is unique and very cool about Post Planner is that if you’re using Canva, you can actually change out this image so if I didn’t like this image, I wanted to create my own, I can click on this link here and it’ll actually bring up Canva and I can create my own image and it’ll automatically post it in here. And for me, that’s really cool. The other thing is, you notice when I click car show over here it saved it down below so I can always go back and see what’s going on in car shows. Now in this case I’m not going to save this so I’m going to delete it and I can also see what’s going on with car shows today, for the week, for the month, and all, and it’s going to prioritize based on the number of likes and shares and whatnot. So typically the hottest content is going to be at the top.

RP: The other thing you can do, if there is a Facebook feed that you want to follow, you can put that link in here, if there’s somebody on Twitter you can put their Twitter handle in here. And the one that I really like is the RSS feed and I can click on this, drop an RSS feed in and it will automatically put it in here. So as an example down below, here’s one, you probably can’t see the link but it’s for Forbes, and it’s their RSS feed for entrepreneurs. And so here’s one, “Are You Emotionally Intelligent, Here’s How to Know for Sure,” it’s got five stars, it posted yesterday, it’s got 1.2… Over a thousand likes, 1200 likes, and it’s been shared, it looks like nine, almost ten thousand times, so I can see this has definitely gone viral and then I can scroll down. If I don’t want to see what’s going on for the month, but today, I just click on today and it’s going to let me know this is the content that’s starting the trend today.

RP: So this is really cool as far as being able to aggregate content and then again, if I want to get maybe some status ideas, I don’t always want to post other people’s content, I can go ahead and drop it in here. Oh the other thing I wanted to show in top content, you can also create folders. So I’ve created folders for social media and some of the people I’m following are Provaro marketing, as an example, so I can click on Provaro Marketing and I can see what’s been tweeted today. So if I want to share that, I can go ahead and just drop it in and then click queue. Whoops. Alright. Well, I just queued something for you. And boom it’s out there. So what do you think?

SG: So how does it handle hashtags? Like, do you have to manually go in and hashtag each one?

RP: Correct. You’ll have to go in and manually… So let me actually go to my post as an example. There are some I actually pay attention to. So as an example, I’m not sure if you can see it because this stupid purple thing keeps on popping up, but I #TwitterAds as an example. Here I did #SEO, so the title was, “Five SEO Problems Plaguing E-commerce” and I manually put the hashtag in.

SG: Okay. So, it’s something for business owners to be aware of, that hashtags are really important in Twitter, because there are something ridiculous like two billion searches within the Twitter universe every day and people search by hashtag. So you’ll want to make sure as you’re scheduling this stuff that you go back in and hashtag key words that would be important for you to come up in searches.

RP: Yeah, definitely. And the nice thing is, yes, you have to manually put it in there, but it’s in there, it’s queued, it’s all done. The other thing you can do is, I can go ahead and move to the top if I want to rearrange my post, delete stuff. The other thing I want to show you is it also has insights. So if you wanted to see what’s going on, I haven’t paid for it because I use a Google shortener, instead, that’s where I get my analytics from. But if you want to see what’s going on, you can go ahead and I think it’s an extra two or three dollars a month in order to get their own analytics. The other thing I was going to say as far as pricing goes, if you go to postplanner.com, you can go ahead and click on ‘Pricing,’ and it starts out at $7 a month for two accounts, which is the one that I have. And there is a promo code going around right now that will get you down to $5 a month. So it’s very, very inexpensive, also.

SG: It’s a great tool for a small business owner that might only be focusing on one or two social media platforms ’cause we talk about that a lot, is making sure that you pick one or two, get those going really well. You don’t need to be on all five, seven, however many there are now. So it’s a really great option, it’s a really inexpensive option, it’ll save you a lot of time. It’s worth the $5, $7 a month if it’ll save you one to two hours a week ’cause if you think about it, what’s your hourly rate? How much do you charge, especially, like, we’re in a service business. We have an hourly rate. Even if you have a product business, kind of equate, what’s an hour of your time worth? Is it worth paying this $5 a month to save yourself a couple hours a week? Absolutely, and so it’s a really great option for small businesses to get started out small.

RP: Right, and not only the cost savings as far as just being efficient, I love it… I get blog content ideas from it. So I’m not just… All those different categories that were on the left hand side, I have them for my Twitter account but I also for my clients that I need to be aware of what’s going on in their industry, I need to create content for them. I have separate folders for different industries so that I can see what’s going on at any time and then I use that to create blog content or video content for my own personal clients. So I love it as an aggregate tool, it’s a very simple way, saves me a ton of time for Twitter, I actually have a presence on Twitter now because of this tool. So not only is it saving me time but now I’m building a reputation and brand visibility on Twitter. That’s going to generate business down the road also. So for five bucks a month, totally worth it. Unless you have any quick, last second comments, our time is up.

SG: I don’t. I’d say look into it for a small business owner to save yourself a lot of time and aggravation, and utilize it to its full potential so you actually have a good presence on the social media channels that you’re playing in.

RP: Yeah, definitely. Alright, well, that’s it for this week. Remember, next week we’re going to be looking at a competitor to Post Planner, which is Bundle Post. And this is a tool that Sarah’s been using for quite a long time, very familiar with, and is very powerful in its own right. And it actually has some unique features that could be a benefit to you, so definitely check out next week’s episode. Sarah, as always, I appreciate your time and I hope you have a great week.

SG: Thanks, Ryan. I hope you have a great week, too.

RP: Bye.

SG: Bye.