[00:00:00] Jeff Sieh: Welcome to Social Media News Live. I’m Jeff Sieh and you’re not

[00:00:04] Grace Duffy: I’m Grace Duffy.

[00:00:05] And this is the show that keeps you up to date in the world of social media. And we have a great show planned for you this week.

[00:00:10] Jeff Sieh: Yes, Q1 2022 is over. I hope. But do you have the correct data to make decisions about your social media? Four Q quarter two and quarter three. Have you done an audit on your social media?

[00:00:25] I’m going to be honest and raise my hand. I haven’t done a full one yet. So I’m really excited about the show today because we’re talking with the rain more in Vandam about campaign planning, organic content ideas, and what you should be driving your social media strategy through the rest of 2022.

[00:00:40] So dream, thank you so much for being here. I’m so excited to have you on the show.

[00:00:44] Dorien Morin-van Dam: Thanks for having me. I was thrilled that you asked me, I’ve been watching the show for a while and I love talking about social media audits and especially as it pertains to content, right? Cause I’m a first and foremost, I’m a content creator.

[00:00:58] So I’m always looking for the piece of content that works well. And then analyzing, why did it work well? So I’m really excited to come here and talk to you and your audience.

[00:01:09] Jeff Sieh: Awesome. So if you don’t know who Dorian is, you really should. She is a social media strategist. She’s an organic social media specialist.

[00:01:17] She’s a trainer, she’s a community manager and a keynote speaker. We are so excited for her to be on here. She has experience working with a multitude of industries. She started as a local specialist working with business to consumers and B2B clients. And she currently works with national and international brands.

[00:01:36] She is a certified social media, professional and agile marketer. And you always recognize during onstage and online by her signature orange glasses, a nod to her Dutch heritage. So that’s very cool. So once again, we are so excited to be here with Doreen. So make sure you ask your questions because I telling you she’s a wealth of knowledge and we want to make sure that we use the time we have with Doreen.

[00:01:58] That’s why I do this show. Is this this is what you get to do. So you guys can ask questions and you can get your questions answered. So make sure you we’ll bring those in as we’re going along today, but I want to do a big shout out to our friends over at Ecamm who helped sponsor the show.

[00:02:15] You can find out more about them at socialmedianewslive.com/ecamm They are fabulous. I had to scramble an hour before the show and bring everything to my parents’ house. That’s why the camera and the setup’s a little bit different, but you can makes it super easy. I already had it on my laptop.

[00:02:32] I have my stream deck. I plug in right to it and I can switch cameras. So it is super easy for creating a live show. You can do presentations and other things, but I tell you, I would not be able to do the show this fast at a different location without Ecamm. So find out more about them at socialmedianewslive.com/ecamm.

Auditing Your Social Media

[00:02:51] Jeff Sieh: All right, so let’s jump into this first section here. We’re going to be talking about, I know it sounds really. Like accounting rise and corporate. Yeah. And we’re not usually this buttoned up here at Social Media News Live, but we need to talk about auditing your Social Media. Let’s just start the conversation and talk about like the content you already have.

[00:03:15] Everybody, if they’re doing business has social media in some way, some are more active than others. Some have bigger budgets than others. We have a lot of soul solopreneurs who watch this. But bigger budgets don’t always mean better outcomes or better insights. So how Doreen would you start a social media content audit with the client?

[00:03:37] What are the first questions that you ask?

Where Do You Start A Social Media Audit?

[00:03:40] Dorien Morin-van Dam: Okay. So it’s gonna depend a little bit on whether this is a new to me. Or if this is a client who’ve been working with. So if it’s a new to me, client, and I have no idea what they’ve been doing, and somebody else has been running their social media, the first thing I am going to ask them is all their social media platforms that they’re active on.

[00:04:03] Their website, of course, we’ll get that. And then I’m also going to Google their name, any variety of their name and see what pops up because as we know, sometimes they’ve had rogue employees that might’ve created some platforms somewhere along the line, and they might have a presence somewhere that they’re not aware of.

[00:04:27] That’s sitting there. So if that’s, so it’s a new client, that’s where I start. If it’s a client that I have. So for example, right now, I’m putting all the data together from Q1. I go into the channels that I’ve been doing. So then I ask them before I go give them really results because you do an audit to get a snapshot.

[00:04:53] But then you also to move forward, you also need to know what the resources are moving forward. So I’m going to confirm with a client, is the budget still the same for marketing or do I have more of a budget? Are the resources going to change? Can I still utilize the same tools? Can we, I still have access to the same videographer editor blog writers.

[00:05:15] In order to make plans moving forward, I have to know what I’m going to have. So in order to do that audit I need to not do the audit, but interpret the audit. I need to know what I have access to. But then I look at especially if.

[00:05:32] Might have a LinkedIn profile for a client. I’m actually going to have to log in as that client to see their data now I can manage their page, right? So I can get data on their LinkedIn page or Facebook page, Twitter, YouTube. There’s a lot of data out there. And if you use a tool like a gore pulse, which I use for scheduling a lot of that data, you can create a beautiful report.

[00:05:57] Of course you need to have access to Google analytics. You can create a beautiful report in something like data studio, where it gathers all the analytics. Some of it can be automated, but I still really like to go in to each and every platform and kind of see what happened there. What kind of, because it’s not just the numbers that you’re looking at.

[00:06:19] It’s also the comments, the engagement. Do you want to see what people reacted to and how are the. A little emojis or are they long, long form comments and you have bad or back and forth, so you really need to have more than just numbers. You need to really have get that human eye on it as well.

[00:06:48] Jeff Sieh: I have, can I ask the question before you go to yours? Because, so you mentioned those rogue employees. So I picked up on that when you were talking to that at the beginning real quick pivot, how do you share your information? Like I know a lot of people who are getting started and they’ve grown their social media, maybe they’re solo preneurs, or really small businesses, local businesses.

[00:07:11] And they finally have the money or the funds to hire a social media manager or, a consultant like yourself, but they give their, they just give them their username and password. And then they end up in a predicament later when they let them go or something else happened. What do you suggest for sharing those passwords and how do you do that?

[00:07:32] How do you set up profiles? All that. What’s the best way I know. Cause that’s a big.

How Do You Share Sensitive Information With A Client?

[00:07:37] Dorien Morin-van Dam: Sure. So if I start with a client who doesn’t have a social media presence or doesn’t have a lot, and I after doing an audit and a strategy plan, and I know I need to get a Twitter handle for them and an Instagram handle and maybe set up a YouTube channel.

[00:07:53] What I do is I’m actually going to make them a Google. profile So I will make them like Social at like maybe, say live show, socialliveshow@gmail.com with that email, I’m going to set up the Twitter and Instagram account and all of that. And then of course, I’m going to make sure that the client has the login to that Gmail account because I want them to own it.

[00:08:21] So then anytime there’s a reset or there’s an issue, we both have access to that same. So that’s how I set it up. I actually have a funny story. a client that I had, like eight years ago, I handed over about three years ago and recently they were locked out of their Instagram account and they said they tried everything.

[00:08:40] I have this formula for socialbusinessname@gmail.com and I’m like, try that And they were able to go back in and get it all reset. Cause they, forgot, even though I’d given that information to that client, they forgot that they had that email address and they were able to get in and reset and do the whole thing.

[00:09:01] So that’s one now, as far as sharing with clients who already have an existence on all these platforms I use LastPass it’s really great. you’re able to get access, you can either share just so they can access it or actually see the password. And that works really well. I do want to reiterate this, everybody please please please set up two factor authentication for Facebook and Instagram and everywhere.

[00:09:30] Yes. Even though a social media manager it might be a little bit harder to get in. I have woken up several times in the last year with codes sent to my phone, people trying to get into my Facebook. And I get these random codes and I’m like, oh, somebody was trying, they can’t get in. They, you can’t get hacked or, shouldn’t be there might be a really teeny, tiny chance they guess something, Put that 2 FAA on there, they just can’t. They get pretty far, but they can’t get all the way there. So really important to do that, but sharing your passwords through LastPass last I have found is a great tool to get that done.

[00:10:12] Jeff Sieh: Awesome. Thanks. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry to interrupt.

[00:10:15] Grace Duffy: Oh, no, I have some, I have two questions.

[00:10:17] I want to highlight these two questions from our audience. Def one is from Richard Otay and he says, does he asked, does data studio aggregate data from all platforms or just Google analytics? He says, I’m on mobile now. So I can’t look right now. Thanks.

[00:10:31] Dorien Morin-van Dam: You can import, you can get data from other places.

[00:10:37] The thing is, if you set up your Google analytics to get all the traffic in from like Facebook and all of that in Google analytics, right? You set it up then that data is already there. Does that make sense? So you want in Google analytics, you want to. All your data sources. So you want to connect your Facebook and your pixel and all that stuff.

[00:11:01] So then when you set up data studio, that information gets in there.

[00:11:07] Jeff Sieh: Yeah. And I know this seems if you’re just getting started or you’re listening to this, and you’re just trying to upgrade your social media, this is what all this what, that’s why you hire a consultant and a professional, like a dream here to get you all set up because it can be overwhelming.

[00:11:23] Dorien Morin-van Dam: And I can tell you, I hire somebody to set up the data studio. Like I don’t, I can read it and I can interpret it because that’s my specialty. I can look at trends and I can look at what happened and I can see this is where we need to change. Or this piece of content worked really well.

[00:11:38] But yeah, I outsourced that to, there’s people that love data and love numbers and love setting that up. And so I don’t do the set up. So just, there’s people that specialize in all of that.

[00:11:54] Grace Duffy: Oh, the other question. This is from our friend, Ian Anderson Gray. Howdy. He always comes in and says howdy to us. He says, have you come across clients who have a gray Facebook account, not separate from an Ian Anderson, gray Facebook, but a great one. And he says that we have one and they’re about to lose access to their Facebook page.

[00:12:15] Any advice? This is such a good topic because I see this question a lot when people are working with clients

[00:12:22] Dorien Morin-van Dam: yes. And go to Martin Smith community, and she has given the answer in her community. She’s I forgot what it’s called. It’s a Facebook group. I’ve seen her answer that question in there, and it was actually a step by step a thing that you have to do.

[00:12:40] So I can give you a link afterwards. I’ll find the actual posts in there. I’ve seen the same question. I’ve seen some people just guessed, but there was a step-by-step solution on how to get over.

[00:12:53] Grace Duffy: Is that her social scoop? I think that’s what she calls her through. Social scoop. Yeah. So Marie Smith social scoop.

[00:12:59] Oh, that’s a great resource by the way. In general, for any Facebook questions, she is the queen of Facebook absolutely. Yep.

[00:13:07] Jeff Sieh: And you had another question too? Oh, no, that was my, those are my two questions. Okay. Okay. I think you had a follow up about what do people miss? What businesses miss on social media.

[00:13:14] Grace Duffy: Oh yeah. Sorry. I said what, so as you’re doing these these audits for your clients and, you’ve worked with a lot of different businesses. What do most businesses tend to miss when they do their social media audit? Because I, I get the sense sometimes that people think they know something or they think, but then when you start asking these questions, they’re like, oh, we really don’t know what we need to know.

[00:13:39] And I’ve had this experience myself too, as I was reaching out to a consultant and they ask some questions and I’m like, yeah, that’s really good idea that would have been smart to ask that from the beginning. So I am guilty of this as well, but yeah.

What Do Most Companies Miss When Doing A Social Media Audit?

[00:13:52] Dorien Morin-van Dam: Yeah, absolutely. The branding recognition piece one of the things I like to do is open all these different tabs, right?

[00:14:00] All the tabs of all the places that they have a presence online. And then I start with a website and I literally clicked through, and I’m going to look at an overall branding. Do you have the same logo everywhere? Do you have the same keywords everywhere? Is the bio look the same? Does it have the same feel If I’m on Instagram, you have all these emojis. Do they really go with that? Facebook profile that you have? A lot of people forget to update things like, phone numbers or, web addresses or they might have a download. So that’s the one, the first thing I would do, open all the tabs and walk through and say, if somebody is.

[00:14:41] new And they’ve been on your website, would they recognize Instagram? Would their recognized Facebook with a recognize going to YouTube? Does it look the same? It’s banners, logo, words, all of that. Then the other thing is a lot of people forget to look at the website when they do a social media audit Do you look at social media, but the website is such an integral part of that because literally the social media profile should all push traffic to the website. I always compare it to a big wheel and the website is the axle that holds it all together. So the faster the wheel spins, the more traffic comes.

[00:15:19] It all is going to go to the middle, to your website. You want web traffic. That’s where you can really sell your services and your product and yourself and your program and whatever you want to sell. So does your website. Serve the people that you’re attracting on social media. So look at how easy is it to navigate the menu?

[00:15:38] Are the buttons to click through, to social media? Are they at the top or are they all the way at the bottom? If they’re at the bottom, people have to scroll. They might not go to your Instagram or subscribe to your YouTube channel. If they’re at the bottom, instead of on the top, do you have your privacy policy there?

[00:15:52] Do you have videos of your staff of yourself on your website? Do you have pictures of smiling people working, you want to invite people to click through pretend you’re a customer pretend you’re, a 50 year old woman or a 12 year old child or a 30 year old man looking for services or a product.

[00:16:14] What do they see? That’s something that a lot of people miss. Is it easy to click through? Is it easy to buy? Is it, how is it easy? What’s the loading time of your website? That’s something that a lot of people miss when they do a Social Media.

[00:16:30] audit

[00:16:30] Grace Duffy: That’s a good insight. Those are really good insights because I, as I’m as you’re going through that list, I’m like, can I do that?

[00:16:36] If I do that, should I do that? Did she say leave the oven on?

[00:16:41] Jeff Sieh: So Gary has a great question. Cause we were talking about Facebook gray account. He’s is it, what is a gray account? Is it for people who are over 50? That’s good, but so can you just backtrack just a little bit and just really quickly explain what a Facebook gray account is?

[00:16:57] Dorien Morin-van Dam: I think I am not 100% sure. So that’s actually Ian Anderson Gray might know that answer. But I think it’s an account that was set up differently before right now you set up a personal profile. It, okay, there you go. It was a way for people to create a Facebook page without meeting a profile.

[00:17:17] There you go. So you would have, you would only have the page, right? People are funny. I used to get clients all the time. That would be like I don’t want to, I don’t want to be on Facebook. What I want to Facebook. And that used to be the option, but now you have to have an account and I tell people all the time, just because you have a Facebook profile does not mean when people see your page, they know that’s your page, they really, they don’t. So that is, is going away. Cause you need to have a personal profile in order to be an admin to the page. So I guess that makes sense.

[00:17:51] Jeff Sieh: Yeah. Yeah. And it’s probably something marketers did because we always try to screw things up and make things sneaky. We can’t, we always break, we can’t have nice things as marketers.

[00:18:01] We’re talking about, evaluating, auditing our social when we’re talking, we’re in already and it’s just blowing my mind. We’re in the second quarter and we were talking about evaluating the first quarter, but how often should we really do a social media audit? Is there a time that you say for your clients, do it every, two weeks, every month, what is the best that you could hope for and what do you want.

How Often Should You Do A Social Media Audit?

[00:18:29] Dorien Morin-van Dam: Okay. So when a new client, when I get started with them, I do a full audit, do everything, including the website and everything. And then once we start working together and I do their social media content creation and scheduling, we do a monthly reporting and a quarterly audit. I think that kind of makes sense.

[00:18:48] You need quite a bit of data to see a trend. So if you do three months and you do monthly reporting, you look at it a little bit. I certainly would recommend looking at your data every month and looking what kind of content is working well. And especially the. top posts That’s a really simple thing to do every month.

[00:19:07] Look at the top posts. What was it that you did? For example, a call an example out LinkedIn right now is working really well for me. And what’s working is documents, uploading documents. So it’s basically a PDF and it becomes like a carousel slideshow and also personal pictures with long form content, that combination.

[00:19:28] So where I tell a story so if I see that with a client and I see that worked really well say in March I’m going to make sure that an April, I might double up on that kind of content. I might put a carousel out there every week and I do a personal picture every week with long form content, right?

[00:19:47] Not to say that I do away with all the other type of content, but I want the top posts that I did before, obviously to get even better reach for the next month. I think looking at what’s working every month, but doing a full audit every three months makes sense. Now that website piece, if there’s no changes on the website, they can be a very fast is it still loading fast?

[00:20:13] How many blog posts did I that we end up accomplishing in three months and a really basic thing. But once a year you should do a big social media audit and really, look from year to year to year, especially if you put a strategy plan together and you’ve set some goals, making sure you’ve, attained those goals.

[00:20:36] Jeff Sieh: Okay. That, that’s awesome that you told us a timeline and you mentioned, things that are working, you found some things they’re working on for you on LinkedIn and all that stuff. So when do we, how long do we let things go? Like when we’re testing things before we pivot, like how long do you run a test?

[00:20:55] I’m going to try doing these long form carousel post on LinkedIn. Is there amount of time that you suggest to try it before you give up and go do something else?

How Long Do We Test An Idea Before We Pivot?

[00:21:04] Dorien Morin-van Dam: Absolutely. Yeah. Sometimes it’s immediate, right? If you do something and it doesn’t do anything. You pivot immediately and I’ll give this as an example.

[00:21:14] about a year ago, the reach in one of my Facebook groups was just dismal and I was trying to get better reach as a community manager and decided to go live every week. I went live in the group as the page, we have access as a page and myself and my profile is a community manager and I was going live in the group.

[00:21:37] Now this is a group that had over 40,000 members. I went live in the group as the page and after 17 minutes, I realized I was not a single person in my. live Okay. So I gave up on that. I deleted it. I stopped, I deleted it. I restarted it as me, all my friends in the group that were connected to me, saw it.

[00:22:01] so I’ve never gone live in the group again as the page, because that just didn’t work. The reach was not there. So sometimes you have immediate results, right? You’ve got to look at your data and other times two, three times, you check things out and you try maybe the same type of content in the morning versus at night, maybe you do it at lunchtime.

[00:22:23] Look at your analytics. For example, my groups do really well, Thursdays and Fridays, so instead of posting Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, maybe I do two posts on Thursday and two posts on Friday. So you just constantly. Pivot and change and look at data and see what works.

[00:22:43] But as far as the type of content, two, three times. And if you get no results, if people don’t see it, people don’t comment, people don’t react. The reach just isn’t there, the engagement isn’t there, I’ve done some beautiful posts where nobody commented. And then I realized, I forgot to put a call to action.

[00:23:02] Yeah, that happens to the best of us. But if you look at paid, if this were the question about paid content, which I don’t, I’m not really in charge of I partner with Facebook ad agencies that run the ads and I do the organic. So if it’s paid, they might have 10. ads Or 12 versions or 20 versions of the same ads.

[00:23:28] And, once they start gaining traction, if you have one or two that do really well, you’ve got to turn off all the other ones. Don’t waste money. If you, especially, if you have say six ads with the same image or the same video and six different types of copy, you’re going to go with the one that does the best, why waste your money?

[00:23:47] So you the most important thing to tell you is to monitor, to monitor often and to see what’s.

[00:23:54] working

[00:23:55] Yeah.

[00:23:56] Jeff Sieh: So before Grace asked her a question, once again, I have another question from your audience, the amazing Gary Stockton, he says is there a place where I can find the standard sizes for all the banner graphics on different channels?

[00:24:08] I know this is a question that a lot of people ask them that it does get confusing. When you go through what does Pinterest want? What is, Twitter went and all that stuff before you answer dream, I do know one of our faithful viewers, Dustin stout, he publishes a guide almost every couple of months.

[00:24:24] So if you search for that, Gary Dustin stout he’s got a bunch of really cool, a infographic that he puts out on a regular basis. But during where would you go to find the answers to.

[00:24:37] Dorien Morin-van Dam: Definitely Google LinkedIn cover banner 2022 image size. That brings usually, if you put the D the year in it, it brings up the right, but I use a tool called Canva to create all the graphics and they are usually pretty good about having the images up to size.

[00:24:57] Now, just remember that it’s going to look different on mobile versus on your desktop. So it has those gray margins around it. So you usually want to make it a little bit bigger. You know what it might be on mobile. So there’s those lines out there. And here’s the thing. If you use a tool like Canva and it doesn’t look quite right.

[00:25:19] I sometimes have to go in and readjust it, move some things around, but yeah, I usually just Google it and put the year behind it. If you’ve never done that before, instead of putting in, LinkedIn banner size, you might get up some older stuff, but put the date in or the year end, and then you get the most up-to-date.

[00:25:38] And then I do have friends like Dustin Sapp, who have these guides that you can find for sure enough.

[00:25:48] Grace Duffy: If you’re not going to interrupt me anywhere. Now, this is a dance people. It’s a dance, it’s a dance. It’s a dream in your latest episode of strategy talks live, which is your own show. You talked about improving your content with data analysis with your guests at Tim Campbell Smith that is available on more in media.com, how to improve content with data analysis.

[00:26:10] So as you in this conversation, I would love to know what type of data do we need to enhance our content, especially for companies of any size. We tend to these things always tend to focus on big companies with big budgets, but a lot of the people watching the show, listening to our podcasts tend to be solopreneurs or they’re on their own.

[00:26:31] So what type of data do you really need to know to enhance your content?

What Type of Data Do You Need to Improve Your Content?

[00:26:36] Dorien Morin-van Dam: That’s a great question. And I think a lot of people would answer. You need to know everything and that’s really not what you need. What you need to start with is your. goal You don’t know what data you need until, you know what goal you have of being on social media.

[00:26:51] And this is where, as a strategist, when I, and as a social media manager, this is where I start my conversations with every single client. I need to know why you want to be on social media, because it’s gonna affect what content we create, what data we look at, what we produce, what platforms we’re going to be on and everything else.

[00:27:16] So if your goal is to become an expert and to have people call you, you might need to be on Google my business, because you can create all kinds of images and copy that gets you ranked in Google. You might also want to be on LinkedIn where you can rank yourself as an expert. You might want to start a podcast, right?

[00:27:41] So then you would look at data like. downloads And subscriptions. So that answer is sorta tricky. Because I think people are just overwhelmed with data and they don’t know what to look for. So if that’s you and you’re watching be honest with yourself and say, give myself two or three goals, why am I really on social media?

[00:28:04] Do I want web traffic? Do I want sales? Do I want conversions? And then once you know what you want, do I want to sell my book? Do I want people to grab my download? Do I want to grow my email list? Those are all different. goals And to reach those goals, you have to do different tactics. So then you go down to, depending on what your goals are, you can the number of downloads, right?

[00:28:32] If you have a podcast or video views, if you have a YouTube channel subscribers, reviews, reach and engagement, web traffic, conversion clicks, those are all different things, and then you go to, growing your audience, growing your Facebook group community there’s so many different things you can look at, but some of them don’t matter if that’s not part of your initial goal.

[00:28:57] goal Those are great points. Great points. So I have a question from the audience, from the amazing, Ian Anderson, gray, I guess he has amazing. Yeah, I’ll give him that. But it follows it up to, I have a question, that’ll go right into this, but he goes, I’m finding my engagement and reach are much lower than previous years.

[00:29:16] Jeff Sieh: LinkedIn is really low. And I think the issue is that I don’t engage with other posts. Do I need to spend more time doing that. And so I guess that’s a broad question. You talked about LinkedIn, but also like just in general, isn’t do I have to go and spend all my day engaging on other people’s posts if I want to see reach.

How Often Do you Have To Engage Before You Increase Your Reach On Social?

[00:29:36] Dorien Morin-van Dam: Yeah, but strategically and so again, start with the goal. Who do you want to come to your content? Who is your content for right. That’s number one, figure that out. Who are you trying to reach, make a list of that? What are their titles then go to LinkedIn? And if you’re not connected to those people find a whole list of people that you would like to be connected with, go to their profile, ring their bell.

[00:30:04] That’s the first thing. There’s a little bell next under on the right side of their profile ring, the bell. Then you’re going to start getting notifications when they post. Then your action is when you go to LinkedIn every day, five minutes at a time, maybe morning and evening, you see those notifications, you go to that content and you engage with their content and not just like an emoji, but have a good answer.

[00:30:32] I have a fun comment. I guarantee you, those people are going to take note of who you are, what you’re saying, they’re going to come to your content. But it has to be with intention. I have found that if I do that and I’ve been doing that systematically for about a couple of months my engagement and my reach on LinkedIn is way up.

[00:30:54] I’m getting a bunch of followers. People are coming when my content goes out, they’re engaging with the content. And then the other thing you do is when they do comment, do you comment back and ask a question? So I had a post the other day with 63 comments. Half of them were mine, but that doesn’t matter right to the algorithm.

[00:31:12] That’s still 63. Because I was commenting on all the comments that I got. So yes, you have to do more of that, but it doesn’t mean aimless scrolling through LinkedIn. I would definitely recommend not doing that because that’s just wasting time. Then you’re going to play into LinkedIn’s algorithm. What you want is you want to take control of the algorithm on LinkedIn and you want to tell LinkedIn, this is a kind of content that I want to see by looking for people by their roles or where they work, or what their titles are, and then connect with them, ring their bell, see their content, interact with our content and be real specific.

[00:31:52] And you can have several buckets. I have people that manage events cause I’m a speaker, right? I’m going to interact with their content and with our upcoming event. So maybe I’m not speaking at their event this year, but maybe next year they’ll ask me. I interact with people or. I have a new podcast.

[00:32:10] I want to be on their show. So I’m going to interact with their podcast episodes and their content. I want to connect with people own small businesses because I might want to be hired as a consultant. So I’m going to find people now in the Northeast, because I live in Vermont that have, and I know specifically what kind of business I’m looking for.

[00:32:29] Medium-sized five to 12 employees, you’ve got to know your business, you got to know your ideal client, but then interact with them and they will come to your content. Then of course you have to also produce the content that they want to see, but that’s the first step be really strategic about it.

[00:32:44] So yes, but it doesn’t have to take a lot of time.

[00:32:48] Jeff Sieh: Awesome. Awesome answer. This I’m really interested to get your take on this because you specialize so much in organic. So a lot of reports that have come out like in this last week, like rival IQ, Convince and convert just had an article about this and it says big surprise, organic reach and traffic are declining for brands.

[00:33:09] So what should businesses do other than hiring Doreen? So do we all need to start learning TikTok dances to be relevant? What do we need to do with this declining reach? This has been a problem that we talk about all the time on social media is it’s declining. It’s declining for organic.

[00:33:27] So what do you tell clients who don’t have this big budget to spend a bunch of money on?

How Can We Increase The Effectiveness of Our Organic Social Media?

[00:33:32] Dorien Morin-van Dam: All right. There’s a couple of different things. First and foremost, if you’re going to do social media and you are your brand, you’ve got to get buy in from the highest level possible. That means your CEO has to get on LinkedIn.

[00:33:48] Your CMO has to be active on LinkedIn. Your CFO has to have a profile on LinkedIn, right? It’s the most important thing to remember even brands it’s people to. If you’re doing business with a corporation, there’s still going to be a person writing that check or, saying yes to working with you, signing that contract.

[00:34:10] So you have to get the buy-in from the highest level possible potentially to CEO. So brands that have activity, for example, on LinkedIn page, but they have their CEO, the COO, the CFO, the C all the C-suites people and all the managers being active on LinkedIn and interacting with their LinkedIn page are still seeing a lot of organic reach.

[00:34:37] So that’s step one. Another thing to remember is that for example, on Instagram go to the features that are newest. So on Instagram, that will be real organic reach on Instagram is great. If you do reels, you don’t have to do dances. There’s plenty of people out there that have created content that is not.

[00:34:59] People dancing. It could be, for example, I have an example, somebody had a company of carpet cleaning and they did a really cool reel of, like a, fast-forward like a time-lapse of cleaning that carpet, it was obviously a really dirty carpet and it’s fascinating to watch it.

[00:35:18] It was like 20 seconds. And within 20 seconds, the whole carpet gets clean. Now that’s a brand being on Instagram as real. So look for the newest features on those platforms. Then the other thing to remember is, brands. Yeah, they might not do that organically say in a Facebook page, but they can have great reach and great engagement and great understanding of who their audience is by say a Facebook community, right?

[00:35:49] A brand can start a page hire community manager, or have somebody within the company do that. And the cool thing about that is that versus, instead of talking at people, you’re talking with people, you’re having people in these communities where if you have a new product or service, that’s launching, you can get feedback, you can do surveys, you can find your next brand ambassador and influences in your own community.

[00:36:14] So that’s all organic, right? So that’s all organic. And then the other last thing to remember is that organic works better. If you run Facebook ads, if we’re talking about Facebook, if there’s paid and paid works better, if there’s organic. So find that. And that’s really a couple of years ago.

[00:36:33] That really was my epiphany is that I’ve been doing only organic. And when I started working with a Facebook ad agency their ads perform better and people were happy because I would go to the page and see that I was out there engaging with them. And I had cool, content out there that wasn’t ads, that actually there’s a person talking and then vice versa. Find that balance of organic and paid and make sure that there’s human beings behind your social media, that you’re not just pushing stuff out, but you are asking questions and you have that engagement

[00:37:13] Jeff Sieh: piece. So on that question about the work paid for and organic working together, do you take organic and boost it and make it paid?

[00:37:22] Or do you have two separate kind of.

When Do You Boost Organic Posts With Paid Advertising?

[00:37:25] Dorien Morin-van Dam: Sometimes depends on who I, how I work. If I have a piece of content organically that did fantastic, of course, I’m going to tag their Facebook manager and say, Hey, this did really well. They can see it. Why don’t you run an ad, with that same type of copy and the same image or video that makes a lot of sense.

[00:37:47] And then vice versa. If we have an ad that does really well, I’m going to look at that copy. Even if it’s salesy, maybe I will not take the copy or take parts of the copy, but I might take that image that they created or the video, and then post it organically, absolutely work together.

[00:38:04] Jeff Sieh: Awesome. Awesome.

[00:38:06] Grace Duffy: So building on that idea of using different types of content, there is the situation where there are content gaps. We have gaps in our content and then also understanding. What to do when you find them, but not all content gaps are the same, obviously, depending on where you’re, what you’re using, what platforms you’re on.

[00:38:27] And whether we’re talking about website or social, but identifying and understanding them is the key to fixing this ongoing issue. So during what is your advice on identifying these gaps in your social media content or on your website, and then knowing which ones to fix and which ones to prioritize?

What Do I Prioritize First With My Social Media?

[00:38:44] Dorien Morin-van Dam: Oh, I love that question. So it starts with a competitor’s analysis, right? So when I start with a client, one of the things we do as part of the strategy is a competitive analysis. And I always ask the client who is your competitor? Now I’m going to do my own research, but I’m going to ask them because I really want them to tell me who their competitor is.

[00:39:09] I usually ask for four or five, five is IBM. And I will do a complete competitor’s analysis. I use a tool called social insider for that, but I also use my, again, my own eyes and I go to all the competitors, Facebook pages, LinkedIn pages, a website. And I use my eyes to see, how, what is their branding?

[00:39:30] Like? What kind of content and they’re posting. How often are they posting? When are they posting? Are they running ads? What are they doing? What platforms are they on? And when you have your own social media, And then five competitors. You now comparing six people within the same industry, six different brands, and you start to see trends.

[00:39:51] You start to see gaps. So then as far as if I’m missing something, I’m going to look for the quick wins, right? If everybody’s doing reels and they’re doing really well, and we’re missing reels, it’s that’s an easy one. We need to start doing reels. They’re all doing reels and they’re all having success.

[00:40:08] Why are we not doing that? Now, if four of them are on Pinterest and they’re all, maybe pinning once a month and not doing anything, but one of them is running Pinterest ads and doing really well. We can say, Hey, maybe we need to be on Pinterest and put some money behind it and do a better job than all the other people.

[00:40:27] And that could be another quick win. So you, when you have, multiple people within the same industry serving the same audience, then you can really find that. Quick wins by looking at trends and what’s happening and what’s not happening. That’s a recommendation that I would give. And so the other thing would be if all of them have blogs but they’re really not logging very often.

[00:40:52] And they procreate content. That’s not very engaging, not very good. It doesn’t really serve their audience. You can do a quick win by saying, Hey, we’re just going to double down on blogs. We’re going to answer every question that our customers have. We’re gonna publish three times a week for three months.

[00:41:08] See if that makes a difference of our web traffic. It starts back up and, drive a lot more traffic. You’re going to have this download ready. We’re going to have this whole funnel and see as blogging three times a week, we’ll, move the dial. It’s going to depend on what your budget is, but that’s really where I would start competitor’s analysis because they’re serving the same audience.

[00:41:31] They’re in the same industry. What are they doing that you might’ve missed? And that’s an easy way to say.

[00:41:37] Jeff Sieh: Awesome. So before we move on to the next section, I want to bring up some questions from our amazing audience. Mark asks, what content do you recommend for brands on Google business profile?

What Type of Content Recommended for Google Business Profile?

[00:41:50] Dorien Morin-van Dam: Your best content that’s doing. I would, I do for my clients. I don’t create specific content for Google my business. But I offer a service that I will take the best LinkedIn content, the best Facebook. The best videos and sprinkle that in, on their Google, my business account twice a week.

[00:42:11] So that’s what I do that works really well. This is also clients who do blogging I’m on a WordPress blog, so they make sure we hit the key words there. Make sure, Google my business for the low it’s for the local clients that I do that make sure that we hit the keywords the local keywords and local, maybe the county or the city or the neighborhood.

[00:42:34] And this is for a B2B, like the example that I’m mentioning is for a B2B. And so I just take the best content that’s evergreen from the last month or two. And I start repurposing that and I use a scheduler. So instead of creating something new and making that a big ask or investing a lot of money I use the best evergreen content and that put it on there and it’s all about.

[00:43:00] Jeff Sieh: Awesome. And Amy, I know this question gets asked quite a bunch, but I w I think it’s really pertinent. She goes, can you post the exact same content on all social media platforms, or do you need to change the look for each platform?

Can I Post The Same Content on Different Social Platforms?

[00:43:14] Dorien Morin-van Dam: All right. So that is a great question, Amy. Amy, you can absolutely take the same idea for a piece of content.

[00:43:24] It should look a little bit different for each platform, and it could be an example of say it’s of your lips coming up. It’s springtime here in the U S my tulips are blooming. I’m a social media manager. I might put on LinkedIn the picture of the tulips on a Monday morning and say, Hey, I spent the weekend gardening.

[00:43:50] I’m excited to start my week. What are you working on? I’m working on writing some new plans for some of my clients. Blah-blah-blah. I might put that picture on Instagram and say, Hey, spring is a time for renewal. Have you done a social media audit yet? Hire me. If you want to get better results with your content, I might take that picture and put it on my Facebook page and said Hey, happy spring.

[00:44:16] So you take the same concept, the same idea, the same picture or the same type of content, but you’re going to talk to the audience on each platform a little bit different. And then you also don’t want to do it on the same. If you cannot change the copy, if you must have the same image, the same copy, because that’s all you have the resources for.

[00:44:39] And that sometimes happens, especially with smaller companies, at least do you know, figure out what platform is the most activity at what time? So Monday morning, eight 30, maybe on a Facebook page and LinkedIn might be Tuesday afternoon at four, and then on Twitter on Thursday night at nine, and then on LinkedIn personal profile Friday morning at 11, just you can use the same content.

[00:45:02] You can use the same poppy, but don’t put it. Don’t schedule everything at 10:00 AM on Monday morning at five different platforms because I get the notification all at the same time. And I get an F I’m following you most likely on four of the five platforms. So the answer is yes, you can. If you must, it’s better to create new copy and to create a different story based on who you’re talking to.

[00:45:27] But if you can’t. Spread it out and put it at different times and different days, even different weeks.

[00:45:34] Jeff Sieh: That’s great advice. And with tools like AgoraPulse, which we use to push out our stuff is you can have different cues that you can set up and they can go out. And the different platforms have different ways that you can change the copy.

[00:45:45] One thing I will say that we have found and this is for videos, which is a different animal, is that I like to make square versions of the video because they work really well on both Facebook and LinkedIn. And so if you see the clips like on Twitter and everything, that’s taking a square video and then I repurpose it in different formats and they look different on the different platforms.

[00:46:05] And Gary and I have talked about that a little bit but yeah, Gary agrees super great advice. Some other super great advice is, do not forget our amazing sponsors. Ecamm at socialmedianewslive.com/ecamm. In fact, they allow us to, if you have noticed, we’ve talked a lot about engagement and.

[00:46:23] But commenting on people’s questions and making a conversation. And that’s what Ecamm does really well with live video. So if you’ve noticed during the show today, we’ve been pulling the comments and we’ve been pulling them from everywhere, YouTube, LinkedIn, all the different platforms and able to talk to you, our fabulous audience, which we love to do.

[00:46:42] So if you haven’t checked out Ecamm, make sure you go, go to socialmedianewslive.com/ecamm And check them out. I just, can’t not say about our amazing, a great interactive audience. Like Dustin, we talked about his great guys. He’s actually throwing another one together as we speak.

[00:47:02] And he’s been dropping that in the comments and Dustin, if I w I don’t know if I can bring it up, but he says it’s on his personal blog. I think that’s dustin.tv. And then it’s the image slash image dash sizes. I’ll try to, if that’s Dustin, try to draw, if you can drop in. Actual personal blog.

[00:47:22] I’ll make sure to mention that for the podcast listeners, but once again,

[00:47:26] Grace Duffy: our community, I think he was trying to drop it and

[00:47:29] Jeff Sieh: Yeah, YouTube is being kinda crazy. And Kate goes deep to grow poults rocks. So yes they do Katie.

[00:47:36] Dorien Morin-van Dam: So Katie or yay, another Vermonter. Yay. So

[00:47:42] Jeff Sieh: as we were going to talk about this and Grace really wanted to talk about this because she’s all about this.

[00:47:47] A Grace, I wanna make sure you have time. We only have 10 minutes. Let’s talk about cultural.

[00:47:51] I’ll

[00:47:51] Grace Duffy: be really quick. Cause this is something I’ve been very fascinated with is the as trend watching, right? So there’s like there are trends watching this trend Watchers for every industry. So even in our social media marketing industry, there’s Pinterest projects which they, which is their annual report that they publish of all the things that people are interested in based on their own data.

[00:48:14] Snapchat just released something called a report called Snapchat generation, providing key insights into its users. And of course we all, we always have the daily, weekly, national local trending topics on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. So that is something we always hear about in our industry. And we also hear a lot about it in the.

[00:48:32] Fashion, mainly because clothing trends are constantly changing and always being pushed at us. Fashion is very visible, is very tangible. You can go to target, go to Walmart and go to Nordstroms and human rights. It’s all out there, but what isn’t always evident and accessible to consumers to regular consumers, regular people are like consumer trends, especially when it comes to media and movies and sports and astrologists.

[00:48:58] Part of our role is to be cultural trend Watchers. So how do you stay in the loop of what will dominate social media space or the culture or the conversations within the coming year, or even if you’re planning quarterly, the.

How Do You Stay In The Loop on Social Trends?

[00:49:18] Dorien Morin-van Dam: That’s a great question. I look at one of the ways, I subscribed to all of those blogs, right? The Facebook has a blog Instagram. So I read a lot of industry news. I tune into shows like yours. There’s quite a few of my friends have shows and they have different guests on who talk about different things.

[00:49:41] I also look ahead to the big conferences, the social media conferences. So I just attended social media marketing world. And it was fascinating. Somebody just said, Hey, there was no session on Twitter. And I think if I remember there was no session on Pinterest, so are. Out. But it doesn’t mean they’re out, but it means that the focus is on other things and what the biggest sessions were including the keynote was about the metaverse write about web three, about NFTs, about crypto and social media examiner announced that they’re going to have a conference in the fall about crypto.

[00:50:19] So to me, that’s if a entity like them as is going to do a conference that kind of tells me a lot. And I’m looking ahead to inbound, inbound is huge marketing conference in Boston. In September. I’m looking to see what sessions they are going to highlight. I’m looking to content marketing world.

[00:50:42] That’s also in September, I believe looking to see what they’re publishing. So I’m really trying to keep a finger on the pulse of conferences. The people who run those events are going to look for the hottest, newest speakers. Type of content. They want to learn people in and sell their tickets.

[00:51:03] So they need to be right on top of all those trends. So that’s one of the ways that that I say up-to-date, I really look ahead to conferences and then a person like mark Schaefer, who really is a futurist, I think what is he writing about? What is he, writing his next book about, that’s really where I go people within, colleagues within my industry.

[00:51:27] And then for the newest changes, the newest updates I follow shows like Amanda Webb has a Social show every Friday. My friend Christian care Savage, and Sarah Monroe have social chatter every Thursday and they just give you all the latest updates on every platform. So I follow them, even if I don’t watch a show, I look at the show notes and see, what’s coming.

[00:51:52] And that’s really how I say it.

[00:51:55] Jeff Sieh: One of the things I will say, because I heard you say something like they’re trying to bring those people in and whatever conference you’re looking at, or even what report you’re looking at. Look who the end user is. Is it marketing to marketers or is it marketing to people who are just like small businesses?

[00:52:13] Is it marketing to, the end users? And so I always like to ask my kids cause I’m like, they know they’re like dad, that’s just, nobody uses that anymore. And that demographic. So I think it’s really important that we you don’t, you just dig into what the conferences are saying, but look at people like what Doreen is saying is like, what is working right now for this business?

[00:52:33] What is working right now for this group? And so you have to be, it’s easy to go after those flashy conferences. And I want to go to inbound somebody, a Nicki says that she wants to go to inbound. I’d love to go to inbound. But always look at the data. Like we mentioned before, rival IQ and convince and convert and mark Schaefer.

[00:52:52] Those are the people we trust because they have a track record of doing that. And same with these conferences, what are these conferences doing? Where are they spending their money on? Who are they bringing in to speak and why? And that’s really good point. The other thing I wanted to mention that tool but we’re talking about, and it’s a lot of people don’t know about it.

[00:53:09] It’s trends.pinterest.com. So if you’re looking for trends that’s a really great place to go and get some insights of what’s working. And of course I like Pinterest, but I like it because it’s not so much. It’s all in use DIY it’s people buying stuff they’re going there to purchase. And so that’s when you’re talking about e-commerce and stuff like that, I really like to look at those trends because that’s what people are looking at right now.

[00:53:34] Grace Duffy: We’re going to have a followup show because this is the main thing I wanted to talk about was trying to think. No, because I am very curious because you hear. This all started because I heard about this trend Watchers talking about movies. And so there was like after nine 11, there was a lot of hero movies, like superhero movies and antihero movies.

[00:53:59] And as people were grappling with this idea of like heroism after the credit crunch, it was about there were a lot of zombie movies, right? Like a lot. And then now we’re in this weird post pandemic. And a lot of it is like alternate timeline topics. And so this was just about movies, the movies that I realized as I was thinking about what I’d watch in each of these time periods in my life, like I w I am watching a lot of alternate timeline movies right now, and I would love to have a followup conversation of how to take this, these trends, these cultural trends about movies and art and music, and translate them into Social Media content or marketing content, because it is part of the culture that we’re all in.

How To Be Agile As A Marketer

[00:54:43] Dorien Morin-van Dam: Yeah. I think that conversation is really about being agile as a marketer. And I would love to have that conversation with you. It’s yes, you can plan ahead. Especially if you have a bigger team and you plan ahead, you get to editorial calendar, six months out, in August you should be planning your holiday calendar and all of those things, but when something culturally happens, you see that shift.

[00:55:05] How are you as a team? How can you respond to it? Do you have that freedom two days there, budget left for that and have fun with that? Absolutely 100. Jump on those things. And that’s where all of that testing comes in, but the best companies are the ones who think outside the box, right? The best marketing is when you do something that is different.

[00:55:26] And when you have cultural references in your videos or in your content or pictures I saw somebody do something with Wordle they had, and it was hilarious. And I think it was literally, I think it was an adjunct company and it wasn’t the words, but it was the sticky notes. And might’ve been posted notes that did that, and they almost looked like a Wordle, but it was their sticky notes.

[00:55:51] It was like, like perfect, like perfectly executed, but that wasn’t. I think by the seat of our pants, like quick thing, because I’m sure that wasn’t on their editorial calendar when they, when they planned out their year, right? So you have to be able to be agile with your team, be able to have these daily or weekly conversations and check-ins, and say, this is what’s happening now.

[00:56:15] Do we have space for that? That we have room? Do we have a resource? This team go and take this one thing and do it. And if you, as a marketing team have the freedom to do that, you can create some amazing things, this

[00:56:29] Grace Duffy: kind of stuff that got me into advertising. By the way, when I started my adult life, I was like, I really want to go into like advertising.

[00:56:36] And this is the reason why is what you just talked.

[00:56:39] Jeff Sieh: I haven’t entered my adult life, but it’s been decided that Doreen is going to come back and we’re going to make the thing that she’s going to come back and we’re going to be talking about the trends. This has been a fascinating show.

[00:56:50] Once again, you guys have done an awesome job with your questions. Hopefully we gave you some great resources and some tips from Doreen. Cause she’s just, as you can tell, she’s super smart about this organic and strategy and all the social stuff. She has been for years, so make sure you go follow her everywhere, but I want to do a big shout out real quick to our friend, Dustin stout, who said he can find the imagery sources@dustinstout.com forward slash image dash sizes, Dustin stout.com/image test sizes.

[00:57:17] He did that on the fly people. How amazing is that? We have a great community here. But before we go dream, tell us where people can find you what you’re working on. All the Doreen landing stuff that we need.

[00:57:30] Dorien Morin-van Dam: All right. I’m most active right now on LinkedIn, which I love during more in VanDamme.

[00:57:35] You’ll see my orange glasses everywhere. So follow me on LinkedIn. If you want to connect with me, you just there’s three little dots next to more and then scroll down. It’s I think the fourth or fifth option is connected with, to say, Hey, I saw you on the live show with Jeff and Grace. I would love that.

[00:57:52] I also have a new podcast, a new live show every Tuesday at 10:00 AM. It’s called strategy talks. So I have a LinkedIn newsletter called strategy talks it’s every other week where I share my strategy. Then I have a strategy. Talk show where I bring in an expert and I’m really hoping to get audio room soon so I can have everybody else talk about their strategy and have a panel discussion.

[00:58:17] So that’s my strategy. Looking ahead. It’s strategy talks, a podcast is available on all major podcast platforms. So check that out and yet just connect with me on LinkedIn. That’s probably the best place. Awesome. You should

[00:58:31] Grace Duffy: try. You should try and volley for your audio route. Don’t wait for audio.

[00:58:34] Let’s do it on volume with us.

[00:58:37] Dorien Morin-van Dam: Check

[00:58:38] Jeff Sieh: it out. Social Media News, Live dot com forward slash chat. Go ahead. Grace.

[00:58:43] Grace Duffy: Tell people that’s where we’ve been. That’s where we’ve been doing a lot of these strategy talks and our friend, Tim Schmoyer who owns a video creators already created. On volley.

[00:58:54] So I kudos to him. So there’s a lot going on there. And of course we have several friends on there. I am Grace. You can find me here every week with Jeff. And and I’m also the video content manager over at restream. And I have been very active on LinkedIn lately as well. I finally accepted all of my notifications and requests yesterday, and there were a lot of people there they’re like, I saw you on the show and I’m like, oh, thanks for watching that three months ago.

[00:59:18] Jeff Sieh: I’m getting caught up. We’re

[00:59:19] Grace Duffy: finally connected. Yeah. We’re finally friends. I will finally be seen with Tufts, LinkedIn

[00:59:25] Jeff Sieh: official. That’s right. So if you want to see us, make sure you tune in next week, Friday, April 15th at 11:00 AM. Eastern 10:00 AM central. You’ll always find us on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Amazon live.

[00:59:36] Thank you guys so much for being such great audience today. And thank you Maureen for being here and we will see you guys next week. Bye.