Good morning, internet fans, it’s Ryan Perry. Happy New Year’s, welcome to 2015. Today is our first episode in 2015 of Social Media Wednesday. I almost forgot the name of the darn show. On the other side, I have the wonderfully talented Sarah Giometti, and she actually has some brand new news that I’m sure you’d like to share with the audience for 2015. Good morning.

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

RP: I’m doing fabulous, thank you. I noticed that your name changed on your bar down below.

SG: It did. We went through a little rebranding at the end of the year. So starting this year, we are no longer ICT Marketing, we are now Provaro Marketing.

RP: Provaro Marketing. And there’s a meaning behind the name “Provaro”, what is that?

SG: There is. It’s kind of a combo of “profit” and “launch” in Italian. So, it’s kind of a knock to my heritage.

RP: Alright, very nice. The Giometti part, I’m assuming.

SG: Correct.

RP: Alright, perfect. It is a new year, it’s January the 7th. It’s bright and shiny, at least here in Northern California. People are starting to really think about, “What am I going to do for marketing this year? Should I engage in social media? Do I want to still spend money on the phone book?” Please, don’t do it. Of course, there’s SEO, there’s pay per clicks, there’s all kinds of ways you can spend your money. And today, we’re going to talk about some trends that are happening in social media, or what we expect to happen in 2015. So that you, as a business owner, can make some smarter decisions about how you’re going to spend your advertising budget. So, as we’re moving into 2015, kind of what do we expect to happen in social media?

SG: There are a lot of predictions. One of the first ones that we’re seeing, and we started seeing this in 2014, is that video is going to be kind of the content of choice, which I know is going to make you very happy, Ryan, since that is one of your specialties.

RP: Yes, very much so.

SG: So, not only is video going to become the content of choice for people, it’s also going to be native video. So, for instance, we used to put everything on YouTube and we would link to it from Facebook, Twitter, all the other platforms. But, especially with Facebook, Facebook wants to keep you on Facebook, or they want to keep everybody on Facebook. So they’re giving a higher priority to uploading video natively to Facebook versus linking to a YouTube video.

SG: And we’re going to continue to see this trend that any native Facebook video is going to see a better reach, better viewing than linking to a YouTube video. So, what that means is put the video in both places. So, if you create a new video, upload it to YouTube for the YouTube benefits of it, and then turn around and upload it by itself into Facebook versus linking, so that you get the benefit of the views of the two different platforms.

RP: Right. And I’m glad you brought that up, because I think a lot of people don’t realize or maybe they forget that YouTube, besides being the second largest search engine behind Google, is a social media site. You can engage with users, especially now that YouTube is attached to your Google Plus account. If you’re working with people and engaging with people on that platform, it is a social media platform, so you still want to upload video to that. And then, additionally, we want to upload directly to Facebook. And what I’m hearing you saying is that by uploading it on Facebook, it’s now within their domain, and therefore, they’re going to give it more preference versus if I say, “Hey, check out my new video,” and put a link to my YouTube channel.

SG: That is correct. And I’ve been hearing it from lots of people that they are really seeing a big difference in views. That the views on a native Facebook video is surpassing when they were linking to a YouTube video.

RP: Okay.

SG: Because Facebook wants… Facebook is a business, they want to keep you on their platform, and this is a way to do that.

RP: Sure. And it makes sense. And I think what people have to realize is that Facebook is an algorithm, just like SEO, Google, Google Search, it’s an algorithm. The difference is, it’s not how you search, it’s how… It’s what information is it going to actually display in front of you. And that algorithm is always changing, it’s ever evolving and it will continue to change as trends change. So, right now, we have to follow the trend. That’s really, as marketers, that’s part of our responsibility. As business owners, that should be part of your responsibility is that you have to follow the money, and if the trend is that you…

RP: Or, excuse me, Facebook’s algorithm is preferencing that you upload video directly to them, even though, maybe it’s an extra step on your end, if the net result is more viewership, therefore, more people talking about your product or your service, and hopefully, end result is more people calling you, it’s worth a little bit of extra time in order to double dip. And that’s something that I’ve been doing… We talked about this back in November, maybe early December. And so that’s something that I’m making the transition to doing also internally, as far as my business practice. So, that is good to hear. So, besides video uploaded onto YouTube and Facebook, what else, Sarah, are we trending for 2015?

SG: Something we’re really going to see is, it’s made a lot of news, that Facebook organic reach is really declining. Again, they’re a business, they have shareholders, they need to make money. And so paid advertising on social networks is unavoidable. But…

RP: Now, just to clarify, when you say… We’re talking about business pages, of course. So, when you’re saying organic, that is if I create a fabulous video, that I think will really be beneficial to everybody and I just drop it on my business Facebook page, you’re saying not that many people are going to see it?

SG: Correct. You’re going to see, most likely… Unless for some rea… This is not always the case, there’s always the abnormal to the rule. But the general rule, for the content that you put on social media, you’re going to see a one to two percent reach. So, if people start interacting with it, that increases the reach obviously. However, it’s still going to be low because Facebook, like you said, is an algorithm, and every time somebody logs into Facebook, they have the possibility of having around 1,500 pieces of information given to their news feed at any given time. So Facebook’s gotta figure out what’s relevant to them.

SG: The advertising is just going to be… It’s unavoidable. You’re going to need to spend money on pretty much all of them. Facebook, Twitter… The ads on Instagram are coming, they’re being… They’re in beta testing right now, but Facebook and Twitter you definitely need to be using them. The flip side is… You know, everyone is panicking about it. But it’s not 2011 anymore. It’s a different game. It’s three years later. There’s more people on it, more businesses competing.

SG: It’s still the cheapest advertising that you can get. You can reach 1,000 people for less than a dollar. So, you really… You can’t beat it. So, if you have this fabulous video that you think a lot of people need to benefit, that’s where the boosting on Facebook comes in handy. Throw in five dollars on it and boost it to make sure more people see it, and get the added reach. Is it worthwhile for you to get… If you get one client from that video, was it worth the five dollars? Absolutely! I don’t know anybody who’s got one bill that is less then $500, or less than five dollars.

RP: Right. And the other thing that we should talk about with Facebook, and we’ve talked about this in the past, but I’m always going to reiterate it, simply because it’s that important, is the fact that you can really dive down into the makeup of the person that you’re looking to… That you want to share that video with. So, that’s part of, as a business owner, if you really don’t know who your audience, your target audience is… And I’m not talking about just, “Oh, I want married couples, who are over 50, who make a $100,000 or more.” I’m talking about really diving down into, “Do they enjoy sports? Do they go to the church? What kind of car do they drive?”

RP: You can really dive down into the metrics of who that audience is. And as a business owner, if you don’t know what that is, that’s where it’s really important to reach out to somebody like Sarah and go, “Hey, this is what I’m doing. This is who I think my audience is and I would like to advertise.” She can ask the right questions to really make sure that the money you’re spending is being used as efficiently as possible.

RP: And that’s really important if, 2015, we expect to pay more for visibility, and maybe ‘not more’ is not the right word, but we’re going to have to start paying if we want visibility. And that was true in 2014, but it’s going to become increasingly important in ’15. You want to make sure that those dollars are being spent wisely. And a small investment in somebody who deals with this every single day can really… The net, net, 30 days later, can be huge for you.

RP: So, we need to spend more money on social media. We’ve got about four minutes left, is there anything else you want to say about that? Or can we move on to the next prediction?

SG: We can move on to the next prediction. Another one that I found really interesting is SlideShare. They’re predicting… And ‘they’ are the industry leaders for social media. They’re predicting SlideShare is going to be the YouTube for business-to-business, which I thought that was very interesting. So…

SG: Something that… It caught my eye, so I thought I would throw it out there. For those of you that are a B2B company, which I’m a B2B company, Ryan is a B2B company, which means we’re businesses serving businesses, we’re not selling directly to consumers, that SlideShare is… They equate, as Facebook is to LinkedIn, YouTube is to SlideShare for businesses. So, that is something that I’m definitely going to look into more and watch it watch… But it’s putting presentations out there and it’s another way to doing the SEO, ’cause SlideShare stuff comes up, getting SEO for what you’re putting out there, putting your presentation out there for… So you’re getting the information out and it drives traffic to your website. So, that going to be something that’s really interesting to watch and see if that does take off the way that they’re predicting for 2015, for B2B businesses.

RP: Yeah, I just… I mean, SlideShare’s been around for years, but they’re like down… I don’t know, they’re like this much of the market, maybe? So, very interesting. Well, that will be something I’ll be curious to see how that evolves and where you think that goes and if it’s something that we, as B2B people, need to start spending some time and energy in.

SG: Absolutely, and let’s see, I think… And one last one is your content. So, there’s nothing wrong with re-sharing your content. If you wrote a really good blog post three months ago, there’s no reason you can’t put it out there again and kinda give it new life, as long as it is still relevant. So, don’t view your content as a “one and done and it’s gone.” If it’s something that’s still relevant or if the topic comes back around and it’s a great time to re-post it, go ahead and reference back to the content. You want to make sure… ‘Cause having the videos, having the blog posts, they’re there forever. And so you can give new life to it and use your social media platforms to give it some new life and new blood.

SG: But there is a content overload, so it’s making sure you’ve got the high quality content so you can kind of get through all those filters and all the other masses… The 1,500 pieces of information that people are bombarded with on Facebook every time they log in, it’s making sure you have that high quality. But since you’re up against so much competition, reusing some of the content, you’ll pick up different people. You’ll pick up different viewers. And so go ahead and… Don’t just post it once then forget about it forever. Go ahead and look through some of your stuff in the last few months that you’ve written or did videos of and repurpose it.

RP: Yeah, and that makes sense because the reality is… And this had been trending for the last couple of years is that quality is king. Quality should always be king but especially from an SEO point of view, once Google made some changes to their algorithms, gosh, I’m trying to think when Panda came out, quality really became a driving factor for content. And so the issue is, “Okay, if I have to create quality content, I need to spend more time, I need to put more energy in. But if I’m not getting a significant increase in visibility because of that… ” ‘Cause the reality is, there’s only going to be so many thought leaders in the industry and typically, those thought leaders are the ones with the huge audiences.

RP: For those of us who are small business owners, just starting out, the reality is our audiences are much smaller than those thought leaders. You want to take the time, put together quality content and I love what you’re saying is that, “Geez, I spend so much time and energy on this,” to just put it out once, is kind of frustrating to a business owner because it’s every week or every couple of days, we gotta create new content.

RP: So, I love the fact that we’re now at the point where it’s, “You know what, it’s okay to repurpose.” I think you said, what? It’s 15,000 pieces of content can stream down from Facebook at one time. I would hate to know what that number is on Twitter, it’s gotta be mind boggling. The reality is, if you post something out there, a very small percentage of people are going to see it. So, why not repurpose that content? And I love that idea. With that, it’s 10:00 AM, that means our 15 minutes is up. Any closing thoughts?

SG: I think just keep working at it. Facebook is an ever changing model and so you just need to keep plugging away and staying on top of the changes. And if you’re really having a hard time, reach out to one of us. We’re more than happy to help you stay on top of the social media, so that you can really outshine your competition.

RP: Right. Or just keep on watching the videos here. Keep on tuning in to our episodes. We’re more than happy… Or I mean, it’s what we love to do, so we stay engaged and try to keep our thumbs on top of what’s going on in the industry and share that information with you. Sarah, thank you very much, as always. I appreciate your time and energy that you put into getting these episodes off the ground.

SG: Thank you very much, Ryan. It’s always a pleasure.

RP: Alright, you have a great day and we’ll be talking to you all next week. Take care.

SG: Thanks, bye.

RP: Bye.