Social Media Strategy

Transcript: Social media strategy

Speaker 1:

It doesn’t matter what kind of agency you run, traditional, digital, media buying, web dev, PR, whatever your focus, you still need to run a profitable business. That’s why Agency Management Institute started the Build A Better Agency podcast a few years ago. We help agencies just like yours grow and scale your business, attract and retain the best talent, make more money and keep more of what you make. Bringing his 25 plus years of experience as both an agency owner and agency consultant, please welcome your host, Drew McLellan.

Drew McLellan:

Hey, everybody. Drew McLellan here. Welcome back to another episode of Build A Better Agency. Always grateful that you keep coming back. I think this week’s guest is going to be somebody you are very happy that you stuck around to listen to. The reality for most of us is, our agencies play in social media. Whether you are doing it for your own agency around your thought leadership, around creating a sense of your culture, whether it’s for prospecting for employees or for clients, odds are you’re there on some of the channels anyway trying to carve out a presence. For many of you, this is also a part of the offerings that you are serving clients with. You are posting on their behalf, you’re creating social media content for them. I thought it would be a great idea to talk to somebody who actually looks at the performance metrics around these social media channels. A lot of the social media channels, probably Facebook and Twitter the most, although LinkedIn has been around for a long time too, they’ve been around for a while and they have changed the rules on a regular basis.

Some of the best practices that we believe are accurate around how or why or when we should be posting or what we should be posting on any of those channels, some of that has changed. We may very well be guiding clients or our own efforts through some outdated information or beliefs. There’s a company out there called Agorapulse. They are a social media publishing software like Hootsuite or GAIN. A while ago, back in late 2016, they decided that they needed to hire someone who would do nothing more than sort of study the behaviors and success rates of different methodologies on these social channels. They hired a guy named Scott Ayres. Scott is Agorapulse’s content scientist. I love that title. What he does is, he takes what we all believe to be best practices or questions we have around engagement or audience activity or behavior, and he tests them. He tests them using the Agorapulse data. He also tests them using other accounts, client accounts, his own. He owns a business on the side, so he uses that, his own personal account sometimes.

But they’re really looking for data points that will help us make better choices in terms of how we use these social channels to our and our clients’ benefit. I thought it would be interesting to find out some of the experiments that they have run recently and what the results of those experiments were. I want to just dive right in and get to the conversation. All right. Scott, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining us.

Scott Ayres:

Thanks for having me on, Drew. I really appreciate it.

Drew McLellan:

One of the things that I find interesting about the work that you guys are doing at Agorapulse is the Social Media Lab. Can you tell the listeners a little bit more about what that is?

Scott Ayres:

Yeah. Basically, the Social Media Lab came as an idea our CEO had, I guess, about two and a half, three years ago. He wanted to create content that was different than the typical social media content you see out there where you’ll see, top five things to post on Instagram, or, here’s the 10 best list of writers and bloggers. A lot of that fluff. There’s a lot of fluff in the social media marketing space. I’m guilty of writing about 2,000 pieces of that probably over the years. He wanted something different, something that was a little bit deeper. Because what he did is, he had wrote a piece on our blog that was research based, I believe it was about something on LinkedIn. It was probably our most traffic piece for a while. It got tons of results from it and leads from it. He went, “There’s something to that. Maybe these little fluff pieces aren’t really …” Even their traffic generators, they’re not necessarily converting because it’s the wrong people seeing it. They don’t match up as our customers. He kind of sought out to find somebody to do it.

I happened to be kind of in between some stuff and we got to talking. I came on board in January 2017. The goal with this is, we’re doing long form scientific based research on many of the practices and techniques that a lot of the gurus out there are teaching. Then just stuff that people just think is correct, and maybe it isn’t. We want to test it to see if that’s true or not and then report back on whatever that data is. Sometimes we’re right, sometimes we’re wrong, but it’s all about the science of it. Making sure that when we’re done, we’ve got something that’s statistically significant so we can kind of help our listeners and our readers and our customers who tend to be agencies doing social media for businesses, what’s the best thing to do on your social accounts so you don’t have to just do a lot of guesswork.

Drew McLellan:

Obviously, one of the reasons why you can do this is because you have all of this data because you have everyone using your tool. Can you just take a step back and explain kind of what the tool is and how that generates … It’s sort of a by-product, how that generates all the data for you?

Scott Ayres:

We do use the tool for some of the data. Not always, because some of it, we just have to go directly to the social sites themselves to get the pure, rawest data. But what our app does, Agorapulse, it’s a social media management platform. If you’ve heard of Hootsuite or Sprout Social, those are our two biggest competitors. We help you manage content as far as scheduling it. But the biggest part is really helping you to manage all of that activity, the replies, the comments, the messages, even messages and comments on your ads on Facebook and Instagram. Which you really can’t do in many other apps. Just kind of helping you have all that in one space and so you don’t have to go to four or five different websites just for one customer and one client to answer all their social. Which means you’re going to miss 90% of it.

Then with the team aspects of it that we have, if you’ve got team members who just maybe handles Instagram, there’s the Instagram expert on your agency, they just go do the Instagram and then you can assign all the tasks to them and you handle Facebook, somebody else handles Twitter. It really helps the agencies speed up the process of managing social. Actually, for a lot of people who run social media agencies, it helps them take on more clients because it’s a lot easier to get in the platform and just start working immediately and keep up with those conversations and listen to a lot of conversations. The cool part I like about our app is, not just listening to the conversations coming in to us, either they’re replying to us or they’re sharing our content, but I use it to spy on my competitors. Like right now Hootsuite’s undergoing a lot of changes. They actually just put themselves up on the auction block to be sold, and so we’re going after them. We’re wanting to see if we can find some customers from Hootsuite.

I have a Hootsuite listing set up in the app and anybody who’s complaining or upset or freaking out, boy, I’m replying back to them with an alternative solution that ends up being cheaper but also more stable. There’s a lot of things like that you can do inside the app as a competitor sort of ninja way of going after people instead of just waiting for them to come to you.

Drew McLellan:

Cool. How are you using both the app, and as you said, going to some of the social media platforms themselves? How are you typically running the experiment? Give us an example of a couple of the experiments that you’ve run, and we’ll dig into the results in a minute. But give us an example of a couple of the experiments you’ve run and how do you gather that data?

Scott Ayres:

Let’s say for example, I’ve run one here recently on adding the hashtags in a Instagram post versus putting the hashtags in the comments. It’s a very controversial method of marketing a lot of markers have been teaching. They tell everybody to stuff all the hashtags in the comments and they’ll get more views or impressions. How I would do that with the app in the first side is, I schedule all the content through our app because we schedule to Instagram. I don’t have to remember to post every day on my phone. I schedule all that through there. Then as far as the analysis on the back end, I have two options. I can go to our reporting and look at the data from a certain date range to kind of see, and then I can look at individual posts and pull that data off as well, looking at the impressions, the interactions, those things. It’s all is inside our app if you want to pull it off.

But there are times though that, like I said before, I like to just go sometimes straight to the source. That way for me, in order to be considered credible and not biased, I like to go to the actual site most of the time for our results, just so no one can poke holes in it and say, “Well, you’re using skewed results from your app.” Or something like that. A lot of times, I will pull most of the data from the actual sites. But I can do it inside our app, and a lot of times I will compare just to make sure. Which has been kind of fun to do. But that’s typically kind of how I work it.

Drew McLellan:

Give us an example of some of the experiments that you’ve run.

Scott Ayres:

Lots of different things that probably people have heard of if you’ve been around social media marketing. One of the biggest ones at first for us was testing does Facebook and/or Twitter … We’ve tested both, but Facebook was the first one. Does Facebook punish posts from third-party apps such as ours? We’ve heard that rumor over the years. If you’ve listened to like BuzzSumo or Mari Smith, they’ve kind of put something out there every once in a while saying that posting within an app that gives you less engagement and less impressions. It scares people when those results come out and reports come out. We went through and tried every app I use, all of our competitors apps and then used our own of course and used Facebook itself.

The interesting thing, when we were done with the test, which took about six weeks to do, because I posted from each one for about a week, we found that not only did Facebook not penalize posts from the third-party apps, the post from the apps actually had about 22% higher reach for whatever reason. There was no way … Now, you wouldn’t want to put that out there and say, “We’re going to guarantee you’re going to get 22% higher reach.” But I was just wanting to at least be almost even. But the fact that it was higher, was really interesting. I’ve actually retested that again just to kind of see if it’s still the same now, and it’s still for some reason, the posts from the third-party apps came at about 12, 13% higher even now a year later. [crosstalk 00:11:35]-

Drew McLellan:

Did you test that just on Facebook or did you say you also tested to on [crosstalk 00:11:37]-

Scott Ayres:

Yeah, that was just the Facebook. We’ve tested that on Twitter as well, and I’d have to get the exact results, but Twitter didn’t penalize either. I think it was about a 3% difference in the overall impression. I was looking at impressions only. That’s the thing too, a lot of the the stuff you’ll read in social media talks about how to get more engagement, how to get more likes, how to get all these vanity metrics. It’s really hard on our end to always test that and be as accurate as possible because, you may just have a hot post that comes out and it goes viral. The right person shared it and that skews the numbers tremendously.

A lot of times, trying to view what you sent them based on sentiment, doing any research on sentiment is really hard at times because you just don’t know. It hits the right person, it’s the right time of day, there’s nothing else on Twitter at the time. That’s always hard. I tried a lot of the organic posts anyway. I like to look at the reach or impressions depending on the site we’re on to draw data from. Because that can give me some good trends to know that this helps get exposed to more people. Then the likes and the engagement, all that stuff, should come after that.

Drew McLellan:

Right. I know you guys did some experiments on Facebook reach. What were the outcomes of that little experiment?

Scott Ayres:

Yeah. We did a recent one because a lot of people are, the sky is falling sort of mentality with Facebook lately because Zuckerberg made his, what a lot of people called the Facebook Zero or Facebook Apocalypse announcement last year. Or was it earlier this year? Excuse me. Everybody thought, man, Facebook is dead now. We shouldn’t be using it anymore. Because they know that the reach of business pages posts is going to be lower because users don’t want to see posts from business as much. That’s why. It makes sense that Facebook has said that. There’s something here, this was not even a part of our … We have a tool called the Facebook Barometer. It’s a free tool that we have on our site. You can find it on agorapulse.com. Just look for free tools. What it does is, we allow people to connect their business page to it and then kind of compare yourself to other pages of similar size, and then kind of just track your growth, your engagement, those sorts of things over time.

We dug through about 30,000 pages a year, but back in early 2017. Then dug through another 30,000 pages that we have in there here recently. The interesting thing, when it was all said and done, reach was down overall at about 13% overall categories. But at 13%, what is as high as 1,000? 1,000 is going to be so much worse than that. Because everybody’s like, “It’s all …” I know friends who just closed down their Facebook page for their business because they were so frustrated when they get thousands of fans and two people engaging. That was a little bit nice to see. The interesting thing on it was, the industries that saw the greatest drop were what I expected. The biggest one was news and media pages, had a 33% decrease in reach between the two years. Which makes sense with, we’re in the world of fake news right now and Facebook doesn’t want to put those news pages up there as high and as those medias pages up as high.

They were way, way down. But that the promising one for me, especially as somebody who has a local business and helps a lot of local businesses do social media, local businesses and that category, they were actually up about half a percentage point in reach. They weren’t down at all. They were actually up. Which is really encouraging because that tells me that Facebook is trying to focus more on that local business where you have that connection with people who either have changed pages now, so it’s easier to find where the businesses are located, all those things. That was really encouraging to see that the local businesses are still thriving on Facebook. It’s just those larger, massive pages that tend to have seen the lowest drop in the reach. Real intriguing. The sky’s not falling completely. It’s just maybe a little grayer, but not as bad as everybody thought it was going to be.

Drew McLellan:

In that study or a subsequent study, did you look at what kind of posts on Facebook business pages seemed to generate the most attention or as you said, engagement or connection?

Scott Ayres:

No. The barometer that we use doesn’t pull that sort of data. No, there’s not a way for us to see that.

Drew McLellan:

Okay. You haven’t done an experiment with that yet in the Social Media Lab?

Scott Ayres:

I’ve done some smaller ones. I would want to retest it again before I put it on your podcast and say it was good or bad. But typically, we’re still in that phase on Facebook where photos always tend to get the most reach. Videos are right behind them. Which you’d think they’d be higher based on all the noise about videos. But photos tend to still do higher. Links are behind videos. Links are great if you’ve got one to drive traffic. Links tend to not still get much engagement unless you’re a news page of some sort. If you’re a just a blogger, you don’t get much on those, it seems. But they do drive traffic, of course, but people don’t tend to come back to Facebook and comment on. Especially the way the mobile app works on Facebook. Once you go to the link and you go back, you’re on a different spot on Facebook [crosstalk 00:17:10]-

Drew McLellan:

Right.

Scott Ayres:

The engagement’s is not there. You’ve got to kind of look at what is your point of posting. If you’re just driving traffic, then links is what you want to do. If you’re wanting to get some of that engagement to maybe help your posts get exposed to some more people later, photos tend to still be the thing to do.

Drew McLellan:

Speaking of photos, it seems like everybody is all abuzz about Instagram lately. That that seems to be one of those social channels that is really sort of growing in sort of attention and popularity. I know you did some work on what kind of tactics on Instagram seem to be working. Can you tell us a little about the data that you found there?

Scott Ayres:

Yeah. Instagram is really high, so I think it’s still one of those things where the average business doesn’t know what to do with Instagram. Because it’s been that millennial playground place where you just post pictures of yourself and your coffee and your dogs and that sort of thing. Businesses are still trying to figure it out. We’ve done a lot of different tests on it, and we focused a lot recently on hashtags. I’d mentioned the hashtags earlier. Because hashtags are still that thing that gets a lot of exposure to new people, and especially on Instagram. People use hashtags to find content like crazy on it. That’s what they’ll search. It’s basically their Google in a sense. You want to use hashtags that people are looking for and try to get in front of new people. We tested 30 hashtags in the original posts versus in the comments.

Because there’s a lot of social media experts out there, and I’m using air quotes, that will tell you, “Put those hashtags in the comments. Put them in the comments because ugly in the actual post. You’re going to get better engagement and better views if you put it in the comments.” It was an old way of thinking. By testing this, what I did is, I used a couple of different accounts. I used three different social media accounts. One was our own, Agorapulse, one was my personal account and one was my local business. A good cross section of types of accounts, so we could kind of see if there was any trend or average across the board. And we looked at probably a total of about 120 posts between those three accounts to really kind of get some good stuff. It wasn’t just like, we posted once and just waited and said, “Here’s the data on it.” Because that’s not data, that’s just happenstance. The interesting thing, if we compared the hashtags in the post, let’s say the reach, which is where I always want to look at, the reach was significantly different.

The reach was 29% higher when we left the hashtag in the original post as opposed to coming back and putting it in the comments. That goes 100% against anything that any of my friends who are out there teaching, more so Instagram marketing, are teaching. There’s courses dedicated to this sort of stuff. I went back and retested a couple of times just to make sure, and I got very similar results every time that I did it. The reason I think after kind of looking into it and looking into the algorithm and changes on Instagram, in the old days, the way Instagram’s explore option, which is where you search, the way it worked is it put the order of the results based on when the hashtag went live. If I’m in the middle of your comments on Instagram and I put in hashtagdrew, it could pop up back to the top of that explore option immediately because of the way they got in there. A lot of people were going back hours later, days later and putting the hashtag in there in the comments and popping it back up to the top.

Instagram got smart with that and realize that a sneaky marketers had figured out a loophole in a sense. Now, it doesn’t do that. Now, the explore tab on Instagram is in the order of when the post went out. If your post was an hour ago, it’s going to be pushed down by all the other posts that have come out with that same hashtag. It doesn’t affect it whenever you put it in. If you were trying to get results from hashtags on Instagram, you want to put it in your original post because that’s when it’s going to get put in there. If you go back and do it later, it may not ever show up in the explore option because it’s going to be pushed down so far. But that was one of those changes I think a lot of people didn’t realize and hadn’t paid attention to because everybody told them to hide it, it gets ugly. It doesn’t look nice.

Drew McLellan:

I was going to say, a lot of it is a vanity thing. [crosstalk 00:21:47]-

Scott Ayres:

It is and-

Drew McLellan:

… makes the post ugly.

Scott Ayres:

Yeah. It’s so silly because if you go look in Instagram, for one, I don’t know how many times as a user, I’ve actually read most of the updates on the Instagram post. I’m looking at the photo. The photo catches my attention, then maybe I’ll read the rest. I’m not nitpicking over that. The other part is, is you always see about two to three lines of the text from the original post anyway, then you get the dot, dot, dot more kind of situation. If you put the hashtags below, inside that, no one ever sees them anyway. I don’t think it … It didn’t affect the users. Your followers are not going to get angry at you because you’re using hashtags to find more followers. There’s no reason to go back and pain yourself to put it in the comments because it’s a pain in the butt. Because you can’t do it on the original post. You’ve got to go back and remember to do it, or you use a sketchy app, which are some out there, that will let you schedule your posts and then put in the first comment. But it’s a break in Instagram’s API.

I think it’s another reason why Instagram kind of stopped that sort of rewarding. You got to remember, hashtags are all about finding new users, new followers. You’re trying to get extra exposure. Your existing users don’t care in the end that you’re stuffing it with hashtags.

Drew McLellan:

Well, and I think after a while, if you’ve been following somebody, you sort of almost don’t see the hashtags anymore.

Scott Ayres:

No, you don’t. I mean, I can’t think of anytime anybody that I actually care to follow on Instagram that I noticed what their hashtag usage was like.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. Right. I’ve got another Instagram question for you, but let’s take a quick break and we’ll come back and I’ll get to that one. I wanted to take just a quick second and remind you about one of the core offerings of Agency Management Institute. That is our peer networks. We offer them both for agency owners and also what we call key executives. If you’re a traction follower, these would be for your integrators. These are sort of your right hand people who help you run the business day in and day out. From the owner’s perspective, imagine a Vistage group or an EO group, only everyone around the table owns an agency. These folks become like your board of advisors. They become trusted friends that you learn a lot about their business, and they learn a lot about yours. Not only do you learn from us the facilitators, but you’re constantly learning from your peer group as well. The same thing happens in the key executive groups. We bring them together and we help them learn how to help you bring your vision to life as an agency owner.

If you want to check out either of these peer groups, you can go over to the AMI website and look under the networks tab. There, you will find information on both our live and our virtual agency owner peer groups, and also our key executive group. Check it out, and if you’re interested, let us know. We’re happy to have a conversation. Let’s get back to the episode. All right. We are back with Scott Ayres from Agorapulse and we are talking about some of the results of their Social Media Lab experiments. Right before the break, we were talking about Instagram. One of the questions I had is, have you done any experiments with emojis and Instagram?

Scott Ayres:

I have and it was one of those ones that I pitched to our team and they went, “Are we really going to test emojis? We have to talk about emojis and marketing?” I said, “Yeah, let’s go for it. Let’s try it and see.” Yeah. I mean, we wanted to see, does putting an emoji, a smiley face or a heart or whatever in your Instagram update, does it cause any sort of change in engagement or impressions or reach? We sought out to do that. We only put in I think a max of two. We did a max of two emojis in the post.

Drew McLellan:

Which just proves that you’re not a 13 year old girl.

Scott Ayres:

Well, yeah. I try to make sentences in emojis and [crosstalk 00:25:48]-

Drew McLellan:

I don’t make those.

Scott Ayres:

It doesn’t look right. Yeah. I just put like a smiley or a tree or something. Yeah, we did two things. We scheduled to our own accounts with some emojis, and then we went and looked at some experts in social media and some large businesses that had used emojis in their posts and compare their posts with and without emojis to kind of see if we could come up with any sort of data on it. For example, if I look at the Agorapulse page account, our impressions or reach … There’s two different … Now, the weird thing about an Instagram on a business page, they give you impressions and reach. I guess, impressions is your existing followers that see it reach maybe, or it is the opposite. It’s weird how they kind of give you both. To me, they’re really the same. But if we look at just the impressions, they were basically, there was no difference. It was like 272 impressions versus 270. Basically no difference for us there. On my personal account, it was about the same.

We kind of went through it, and in the end, it wasn’t a major, major difference, but there was a little bit more of a advantage to having an emoji. We did something we call an interaction rate where we tell you … It’s a little fancy formula to kind of see how did our interaction rate go based on each sort of account post. With the emojis, we got maybe, this is a small number, it was 0.05% higher interaction when we put in an emoji in our business post. Not something to get me really excited about and make me feel like I should be obligated to go out there and use it more. I mean, it gives you some more engagement, but then, it’s not a lot to make me get really crazy excited about it.

Drew McLellan:

I guess the good news there is, if you are an emoji lover, you’re not hurting your content [crosstalk 00:27:58]-

Scott Ayres:

No. Yeah, that’s a good point.

Drew McLellan:

But if you are adverse to emojis, then you don’t have to sort of force yourself to use them to get better numbers.

Scott Ayres:

Exactly. I mean, I think it’s fun to use because it does catch your attention. The mobile app, you’re trying to catch people’s attention and stop them from scrolling. If it does stop them for a second to look at your content, that’s your whole goal. My advice on that sort of, is mix it up. Don’t feel like you got to do it on every single post, you’ve got to come up with some creative five emojis to make a sentence kind of deal. Put them in every once so it’d be ironic, be funny. Then it depends on your audience too. If you’re a sneaker company targeting 20 year olds, they’re going to want to see those emojis probably and expect it. But if your audience is hunters or knife collectors, no, they don’t really care.

Drew McLellan:

Or those would be really creepy emojis.

Scott Ayres:

Yeah. Right.

Drew McLellan:

Right. Yeah. In all of your experiments, I have to look that you’re looking at sort of best cadence or best frequency. What are you seeing around those sort of metrics? A lot of agencies are wrestling with, to tell their clients, here’s how often you should post. What are you seeing there?

Scott Ayres:

That’s one we’ve wrestled with to be honest with you. Because we’ve seen those posts, we’ve seen those different things people recommend. I haven’t actually gone out there and tested that to be completely honest with you, because I think it’s so dependent on the individual page to get the frequency right. I’d hate to come out there and say, “This is legit.” Then it’s different for every business. I do want to test it. It’s something that we’ve actually tested it a few times and then we got different results every time. It’s like, “That’s not giving me anything in conclusion on.” It caused more confusion than anything.

I think for you as a business, you’ve got to kind of test the waters and see what happens to your engagement levels if you post twice a day, three times a day, 10 times a day, whatever it is. I actually have a admin access to a Facebook page that’s dedicated to Texas hold ’em. This guy teaches poker strategies. It’s got 20, 30,000 followers or likes on Facebook. He posts every hour of every day, 365 days a year. You’re like, “That’s against the grain of what everybody teaches.”

Drew McLellan:

I was going to say, good, golly, that’s a lot of posts.

Scott Ayres:

He gets an incredible amount of engagement though. It does well. I think it just depends on your audience and their expectations. If you’ve been posting just once a day for three years, and all of a sudden you’re up at the five or six, your followers may go, “Whoa.” They’re going to ignore half of it. You got to kind of figure out that balance. This is just a personal opinion, so I don’t have data to back it up. But I think for most businesses, especially if they’re on the smaller … They’re not a national corporation, like a [inaudible 00:31:02] or an NFL Network or something like that, once or twice per day is probably your threshold to not hurt yourself in the algorithm. Because the way that the algorithm works is, on Facebook, if I have been interactive with one of your posts over a certain period of time … Now, we don’t really know what that period of time is anymore because Facebook keeps changing it. But let’s say I don’t interact with five of your posts and it’s shown on my newsfeed.

The next time that comes up, Facebook’s probably not going to show it to me anymore because I’m not touching it. I’m not engaging it. If you’ve overwhelmed me with content and I just have ignored it, you’re going to hurt yourself along. You got to make sure the content you put out there is high enough quality to make people stop and engage with it. I would love to figure out an easy way to test that and go across the board. It may be one of those things where we just kind of post at different times for a couple of months and then go back and look at data. The hardest thing, anytime on those time of the day sort of post is, are your followers all in the US? Are they all Australia? For our page, we’re kind of across the board even. We’ve got an even mix of Europeans versus Americans who follow our page, so our results will be a lot different than the pizza shop around the corner. Because they’re not going to have people on social media during the middle of the night, like we do.

With [crosstalk 00:32:27]-

Drew McLellan:

Right.

Scott Ayres:

… it’s their day. But have you ever gone into Facebook insights, I always call it the whale. If you go and look at when your people, your followers are online, it gives you this little chart so you can kind of see what maybe the ideal time is. All the smaller local business pages always look like a whale sticking out of the water because it goes up at about 6:00, 7:00 at night, and then it goes back down and didn’t come back up to about 5:00, 6:00 in the morning. Our page at Agorapulse, it’s straight across. There’s no difference because there’s always somebody going to be on. I mean, advice on that is, and it does go … With this, and granted, I don’t have data for it, but most of the experts are telling you that post when everybody’s on. If you go look at your little, show your well chart, I call it, you see your peak. They tell you to post then. The hard thing for that is, that’s also everybody else’s peak.

Let’s say you’re in Dallas, Texas, and you’re some agency or you’re a restaurant, all of your audiences are going to be very similar and they’re going to be on the same time. I always like to look at posting the hour before or hour after that peak because I want to catch it as it’s kind of building up and I want to catch it as it slows down. Don’t try to post when everybody’s on, because there’s just too much content out there. Because everybody else is doing the same thing, so you kind of want to play with that.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. Well I think all of this is a bit of an experiment, for sure. Yeah.

Scott Ayres:

If you’re not experimenting with your content strategy, you’re dead within about three months nowadays.

Drew McLellan:

Right. Well, and even if you figure it out today, they’re going to change something so it’ll be [crosstalk 00:34:07]-

Scott Ayres:

Yeah, always.

Drew McLellan:

… tomorrow.

Scott Ayres:

Yeah, and that’s a dilemma too with our tests. Is like, okay, we’ve got to make sure that … Especially the hot ones like the one the hashtags in the comments versus posts, probably in three or four months, I’ll need to test that again to make sure it’s still the same and nothing has changed. You got to constantly test and retest. Once you get stale on the same sort of content, that’s when you’re probably going to see everything drop, so you got to change it up again.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. I think one of the most valuable social media platforms on the B2B side and certainly for agency owners and leaders is LinkedIn. I think a lot of them use LinkedIn for a lot of different things. People are using it to find new employees, they’re using it to hunt down prospects. But I think a lot of agencies are starting to get more aggressive with actually posting content and trying to attract an audience. Have you done some experiments on different post types and what seems to work best on LinkedIn?

Scott Ayres:

Yeah, we have. LinkedIn, for me, is the oldest social media site that I’m still a member of. Because I was a member of it before I was a member of Facebook. There’s so much power still in today. I think people are starting to go back to, like you said, because they’ve gotten frustrated with Facebook. We ran a test on different post types to see which one performed better. Because I’ve been a Facebook guy all this time, so I would’ve assumed based on that that it be very similar. Where the photo posts would kind of be your best post. Because text only updates on Facebook are just awful. You don’t get hardly any … If you go out and just post a, “Hey, what are you doing today?” Or ask a question on Facebook, it bombs pretty much for every business. No one pays attention to it. We were kind of challenged by a lady named Melonie Dodaro. She actually wrote a book on LinkedIn. She’s one of the biggest LinkedIn markers as far as teaching others how to do LinkedIn out there.

She wanted us to test because she was starting to see an interesting trend on her content. We tested photo posts, link posts and just raw text posts and just kind of on different accounts. On my personal account, on Agorapulse, and then we used Melonie’s account as well to kind of see if we could see any trend throughout the process of it. I’ll just give you the raw numbers. The percentage is just ridiculous. If you look at the average views when we put all three of those accounts together, link posts had the lowest amount of views. It was about 5,800 views on average. Photo posts were about 6,000 views on average, so very close. They were real similar. Text only updates, and this number is just stupid, it’s 69,000 view on average. Percentage wise, it’s such a ridiculously high percentage number, it’s 1069% higher when it comes to the views. It blew my mind on that because I’m the guy who’s just posting photos and links everywhere. I never post text updates anywhere.

We tested it multiple times, and I’ve even done it now again, and it still keeps coming back where texts updates are doing really well. Now granted, it’s subject to change because LinkedIn changes all the time too, but it does very well. It kind of, when I step back and go, “Okay.” Because part of our goal is, okay, now we have data. Now, what do we do with it? How can you apply this and why is it this way? Linkedin is so different. It is so focused on your industry, that you’re able to have these active conversations around thoughts, around kind of mini blogs, around questions on LinkedIn, because people want you to … If you’re a realtor, you tend to connect with other realtors or people in the mortgage lending industry or something like that. You can have these conversations, and you’re not talking about your cats and you’re not sharing funny memes and those sort of things. The conversation is so much more quality on LinkedIn. I think that’s why these text updates have performed so well.

That was a real interesting study for us to kind of look at, and it’s what Melonie had thought was going to come out. She wanted someone to help her justify her making the switch in teach it, and so were able to help her out with that.

Drew McLellan:

Well, it’s interesting, we did a little bit of an experiment like that at AMI with a bunch of agency owners. We found that even the text post with a link at the bottom of the post, versus a text post with the link in the first comment, you’re right, the text only posts outscored everything else we did. We were not as rigorous with our data collection as you are certainly, but anecdotally we found the exact same thing.

Scott Ayres:

Interesting. Yeah. That’s good to hear because it helps me justify it.

Drew McLellan:

Well, what I think it makes sense when you think about the kind of conversations people want to have at LinkedIn and the kind of searches people are doing and the engagements, it does make sense that that’s the one place where people want to dig a little deeper into the conversation. As opposed to just like a picture and move on.

Scott Ayres:

Exactly. Yeah. I think that’s silly, because Facebook has all been … If kind of look at all the sites, they’re getting very segmented even more. I think it’s a good thing. Facebook is all about that. I’m talking to my neighbors, my cousins, my high school classmates, college classmates talking about your kids, your life, that sort of thing. Instagram is just that instant, like it’s supposed to be, here’s what’s going on right now. Here’s what I’m doing right now. Then LinkedIn is just that very business specific, almost a place to go to learn more about your industry and kind of expand your knowledge. Then I’ve got a friend of mine who’s in his 50s, never been on social media hardly at all, and he’s looking at changing careers. He’s been at the same career for about 20 years and he’s just tired of working there. He’s like, “What is LinkedIn? What’s the best way to go find a job.” I’m like, You need to get on LinkedIn. Your industry you’re in would be great for that.”

He’s hopped on LinkedIn and he’s already like … He told me yesterday at church, he’s like, “I’m loving LinkedIn. It’s just, I didn’t know social media could be like this.” Because he’s kind of tired of all the rhetoric and memes and people arguing about news and politics on Facebook. Where in LinkedIn, he can just go talk with other people who are like him doing the same job. That’s a good sign for LinkedIn and getting on there as a business.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. I think so too. I think it’s interesting and maybe telling that the one sort of mainstream social media channel we haven’t talked about yet is Twitter. What kind of experiments have you been running with Twitter and what do you think of it as being relevant today?

Scott Ayres:

As far as being relevant, I think it’s trying to get back around to relevancy. Twitter has finally gotten smart and tried to clean itself up a little bit. Probably because the shareholders are not too happy. Jack’s gotten a little more active in the company. I think it still has relevancy. I think the conversation is still really hard there. You’re seeing more of it, especially in what’s called Twitter chats. You can get a lot of good conversation around Twitter chats. But it’s more of … I think they’re going to be that news aggregator type site better than the other channels. Facebook tried that for a little bit. If you remember a year and a half ago, they had trending news. They got rid of that because they realized for one, they couldn’t be completely unbiased with it. Their algorithms or their human hands that were putting things in there weren’t being unbiased. They didn’t want to get tricked like Twitter was. Twitter got tricked on what was trending by all the fake accounts that were out there making a hashtag trend in a bunch of fake accounts.

Things that we’ve tested, we tested a couple of things on there. The ones that I kind of liked the most, there’s was a couple of different ones. We tested something called, and businesses probably have seen this, there’s a feature inside Twitter called Twitter promote. Which is a way to run ads kind of hands off. You give Twitter $900 for a month and they promise for that month to promote up to the first 10 tweets that you put out per day that are not quotes or photos [crosstalk 00:42:39]-

Drew McLellan:

Right.

Scott Ayres:

… it’s typically the links. They kind of held … They say, by using this, you should get about 30 new followers per month on average. It’s, a, more for someone that has got less than three or 4,000 followers, what they kind of initially aim it at. It’s an interesting way to do it. You have no control though of what they promote, how they really target it. You just pick a couple of categories and you just kind of let it go. I ran the test on my personal account and on Agorapulse account. Just, I mean, for me flat out, it was just a waste of 100 bucks. We didn’t hardly get any followers. Our Agorapulse account got about 18 new followers. They say it’s based on using the Twitter promote. There’s no way of even seeing how they correlate that. My personal account got a whopping four new followers out of it. Four. Like, “Really? Just four?”

Drew McLellan:

Those are expensive followers.

Scott Ayres:

Yeah. The number, I even did the calculation to see, the average cost of new followers on the Agorapulse account for that time period is $5 and 50 cents. Which is not horrible, but pretty high. For my personal account, it’s 25 bucks per follower. For that alone, it wasn’t worth it. Then the other part that was really strange and kind of made me question what Twitter is up to here is, they give you data based on … They show you a graph, is all they really show you, of when the tweets were getting promoted and kind of what the engagement looked like on this graph format. On both accounts, it almost seemed like, in the beginning, the first half of the month, there wasn’t much activity happening on these promoted tweets. Then all of a sudden, at the end of the month, it skyrocketed and it went way through the roof. Almost like, you loaned them that $900 and they realized at the end of the month they had to spend it to kind of show you something. They just throw it all out there really quick at the end.

To which kind of was a little disheartening because you expect that to kind of be across the board the whole month. That’s the whole goal of it. For me as a business owner, man, it was an awful use of my money. I could gone in and done a very targeted Twitter ad instead and gotten much better results and at least known that the people who they were targeting are 100% targeted. Because the thing that was interesting on it, is you can either do two things to target. You can either do it by location or you could do by category. I mean, if you just said category, who knows? It could be users across the globe that are never going to buy from your agency or whatever it is. That was really a waste of time and money for me. You’re better off doing it on your own, doing it as targeted as you can.

Now, if you’re a new Twitter user, maybe it’s a new business account and you haven’t tried ads, maybe it’s a way to dip your toes in the water and try it out and you kind of see what it looks like, because you don’t have to do anything. But if you want to be serious about it, you can spend $900 a lot better and target certain links only. Because the bad thing would’ve been is like, during that time period, if I just retweeted or tweeted a link of a friend’s blog posts, that didn’t lead back to any ROI for me, that tweet could have got promoted and I just could have paid for an ad for somebody else.

Drew McLellan:

Right. Yeah, it sounds too loose to be useful.

Scott Ayres:

Way too loose. It’s a money grab for Twitter, in my opinion. They want to just try to grab $100 from everybody and try it out. Smart on them, but it isn’t really … The results were just horrible.

Drew McLellan:

Twitter chats are something that were hot back 10 years ago when everybody was just sort of emerging into social media and blogging and all of that. They’ve sort of made a resurgence. Are they a useful tool based on your data?

Scott Ayres:

Yeah. We did a test, and this was a little different than most tests. A lot of times … We kind of went back and forth how the test is, because Madalyn Sklar, who she uses #TwitterSmarter and she does a bunch of Twitter chats, she speaks to social media marketing world about their Twitter chats, she wanted to kind of test because she was seeing really good results. She’s got her whole brand based around doing Twitter chats. We looked at about 10 different active Twitter chats, most of them in the social media space, some of them in stuff like education, a Twitter chat based around running, one around technology. They do get great results. I mean, you’re getting a lot of engagement, you’re getting a lot of activity during that time period that you’ve got the Twitter chat running. I do think if you run a Twitter chat, you’re going to get higher amounts of reach and impressions while you’re doing it. I think it all depends on your audience and how you kind of encase it and do it.

I think, for me, the Twitter chat thing is … Because we’ve toyed with doing … We do one on our own or we just kind of be active in other Twitter chats, and I’ve done both. If you’re going to do a Twitter chat and run one, you’ve got to be incredibly consistent with it for one. You’ve got to guests on it and [crosstalk 00:47:57]-

Drew McLellan:

It’s almost like hosting a podcast or a video show or something like that.

Scott Ayres:

Yeah. Because once you stop doing it, it falls off and you can’t come back. Because I had one a couple of years ago we used to do. It was great, and then we all got other things going on and we stopped doing it. Six months later, we tried again and it was dead. It was like starting over. But it’s all about … I think the ones that I saw the most success with, the ones that are getting the most activity, tend to be those ones that bring on a guest and ask them questions and have them put their answers out and everybody else puts their own answers out as well. If you’re just try to do it on your own, I don’t think you’re going to get as good a result. It’s all about having that guest. Like Agorapulse will be a guest on Twitter smarter here coming up in a week or two, and we’ll get a lot of engagement. In fact, it’ll boosts our engagement. Being that guest on that Twitter chat will help [crosstalk 00:48:46]-

Drew McLellan:

Sure.

Scott Ayres:

… tremendously. It’s the same sort of thing as, right now, I’m a guest on your podcast. We hope that other people come listen to us after being on your podcast and find it [inaudible 00:48:56]. That’s the whole goal of Twitter chats, is you’re hoping other people will find you. If you can be guests on it, maybe that’s your first way you get in Twitter chats, is just go be guests on the Twitter chats, go be active in those Twitter chats. I will say in the social media space, there’s way too many Twitter chats, but there are five or six that are really good. I mean, I’ve gotten clients through that for Agorapulse and I’ve gotten just really good ambassadors for our brand because of it. There’s a lot of people now who fell in love with those because I was really active in these Twitter chats. It’s an hour long typically, and it’s hard to keep up if there’s a real active one, and it can be a time-suck if you’re not paying attention. Your hour is just gone and you’re like, “What did I just do for an hour?” You want to be strategic and-

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, you want to be smart about which [crosstalk 00:49:47]-

Scott Ayres:

Yeah. Definitely. But I do think there’s still value in it today. It’s just a little bit different than what it probably was years ago. There’s a lot of people who are pushing them back up and trying to get people active on them again. I know in the social space, there are so many of them. The bad thing about them, I will say is, it’s half of the people are the same people on every chitter chat. It’s like, you got to kind of see, are you getting a new audience with each one of them? I like the ones you have a completely unique audience. Maybe a little bit of crossover, but you want to kind of diversify where you’re being active. But if you want to run your own, you got to be smart, but you got to plan way ahead. Can you get enough guests to fill once per week for a full year? Because if you can’t commit to it longterm and give it that time … At the beginning, it’s going to be awful. You’re going to have five people, 10 people, but you hope it grows over …

Especially if you get that hashtag the trend, that’s really where it starts to really pay off.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. It’s an interesting idea for agencies to think about in terms of their clients. Some of their clients are probably so specialized, it would be a great topic for a Twitter chat. I just wonder today if a podcast or something else isn’t equally as valuable and perhaps a little easier to distribute to sort of repurpose. The downside of the Twitter chat is, when it’s done, it’s done. It’s hard to [crosstalk 00:51:10]-

Scott Ayres:

Yeah. There are some ways to … I mean, I’ll go back to Madalyn Sklar. I don’t know if you follow Madalyn at all.

Drew McLellan:

Yep, I do.

Scott Ayres:

The cool thing she does, is she’s so super smart. She does the Twitter chat, her Twitter Smarter chat. Then she goes and she takes that guest and does a Facebook live video of it. Then she turns the Twitter chat and the Facebook live into a blog post. She takes it on a couple of different levels, which is pretty cool to kind of watch and see her do it. She at least has some shelf life to it that’s a little bit longer than just, the hour’s over sort of thing. But it’s kind of like with the podcast, you can take this and put it in different channels. You can write about it. You can make a video out of it. You can do a lot of different things. You got to be smart with the content for sure.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, absolutely. This has been fascinating. I appreciate you sharing all of this data. As you said on the outset, that everyone is trying to figure this out. The needle keeps moving and so everyone is sort of scrambling. It’s nice to know there’s resources out there where people can see some data. If folks want to follow your experiments and they want to see what you’re up to next, what’s the best way for them to do that?

Scott Ayres:

Yeah. We basically have a room on the house, is what I always say. You go to agorapulse.com/socialmedialab, that’s where you’ll find us on the website. Then anywhere on social, we’ve just decided to simply be Agorapulse everywhere. We kind of do the lab and our regular stuff on the same accounts. But we’re hoping you take a look at those experiments. You can go to anywhere you listen to podcasts and you search for Social Media Lab and you should find us.

Drew McLellan:

Okay. Awesome. Scott, if folks want to track you down, what’s the best way for them to find you if they have questions?

Scott Ayres:

Yeah. I’m simply @scottayers, AYRES on Twitter or Instagram.

Drew McLellan:

Okay. Awesome. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise and all of your interesting experiments with us. It was fascinating.

Scott Ayres:

Yeah. Thanks for having me, drew. I appreciate it.

Drew McLellan:

You bet. All right, guys, this wraps up another episode of Build A Better Agency. I will be back next week with another guest who is going to help you think about your agency and the clients you serve a little differently. In the meantime, if you are looking to track me down, you know how to find me. I’m [email protected]. You can go to the website there to find out what we’re up to in terms of workshops and other podcast episodes and all kinds of other things that we do to help agencies make more money and keep more of the money they make. I’ll be back next week. Thanks for listening.

That’s a wrap for this week’s episode of Build A Better Agency. Visit agencymanagementinstitute.com to check out our workshops, coaching packages, and all the other ways we serve agencies just like yours. Thanks for listening.