Good morning and welcome to the Monday morning marketing podcast. I'm Esther
and I'm Melanie.
And today we're talking to Ravi Shickel about the benefits of using social media tools. Welcome, Ravi.
Thanks, guys. Great to be here. I've been following you guys for a while actually and just super excited to actually jump on the podcast with you today.
Yay, we have a fan on. But first, a note from our sponsors.
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We are. That's why we've got you here with us, Ravi, to give us some tips and hints and everything to do with managing and using social media tools like Agorapulse.
Yes. And how we can actually work out how important it is to spend the money to gain the benefits, because, you know, we've got startups, we've got large corporations following us. And some of them will have the money, some of them. But what are the actual benefits, Ravi?
It's a really good question. I think if I go back a tiny bit, believe it or not, one of my first actual jobs as social media manager was actually for Samsung U.K. and it was quite crazy because I went to this big building and no one told me it was Samsung because the job description, it's like they just put digital. So I turn up there and then I have this interview and they have Samsung examples. But you just don't click on that. It could actually be Samsung. To cut a long story short, they liked me when I joined customer service for a phone brand is insane. If you get five mentions a day, these guys get about one hundred or one hundred twenty five and how it segues into a social media stories. I was doing it manually by copying and pasting each comment on an Excel email in customer service, waiting for their reply, which would be over 140 characters, shortening all of that and then doing it all on social. So that was the first red flag where we needed a tool to get something done. And to answer your question, importance of a tool. The number one reason people get in the first place is to save time. And what how it saves time, depending on the tool that you have, is it can help you organise all your posts, your conversations and your customer service and even your reporting all in one place. And luckily, since that first job, I've hardly had to look at an Excel sheet in the same way. Again, I'm super glad that it was getting to the point of like four or five hours a day of just pasting people's names.
Oh, man, that's a nightmare. That would just give you nightmares that.No
You're glad you're no longer doing that. Now, you did go from there and at some stage you became a social media strategist and consultant. So how did you get into that in the first place?
Um, funnily enough, I think like when Facebook first launched, like everyone else, I just probably put a goofy profile photo and waited to see what happened, to see anyone clicked or how it worked. Right. I didn't really use it in a business plan. But then what happened is I kind of played basketball and stuff at my local park and I was like, oh, kind of set up a page there just to see just for a bit of fun. And it was kind of the first time I made like a little mini community, so to speak, where people were actually talking back. And it's quite exciting for that point. And obviously there was no social media management degree or course or anything. So I'm actually quite fully self-taught in that sense that I read a lot of blogs and done all that stuff. So it was a great way to jump into that from that point of view. But then obviously that something was my first job. But before that, I was literally using that time to read up and teach myself on social. So the first glimpse I got on it was setting up that page for the park.
So do you remember what your first photo on Facebook was?
Wow, that's a good question. And it wasn't cats or anything or anything as cool as that as probably like some random photo of me, maybe an attempt to create a profile photo. And previous experience was like MySpace, high five and stuff. So everything had GIFs or jets flying around. So this was a bit like, oh, you can't customise it. I think I left it with it standard for a long time.
You remember your first photo, Esther?
I don't. It's probably a selfie before selfies were even invented.
Do you know what my first photo was? I went dogsledding the previous months and there's a photo of me dogsledding going around the corner.
See, hers was a cool picture,
Yeah, I wish mine was so cool.
Then what happened, Melanie? No, no, back to Ravi. So like you were saying, Ravi, with Samsung, you had all these nightmares of waiting to get responses and waiting to get information that you needed to be able to reply to people.
Yeah.
So did it occur to you to come up with a tool that could help solve all these issues? Or did you do what most people do and just go and look for one that somebody else prepared earlier?
Yeah, that's a really good question. I think in because Samsung is such a big company, they don't have the air to the ground in terms of how you manage your social, a bigger organisation, unless they speak to a social media manager and they literally won't automatically realise that this guy Snowden, that he might need a tool. So the first thing you do is you have to go to your manager or director or be like, "look, we're snowed under with this and it's not working". And then to come up with a solution, I interview tools and they pitch their demos, etc. And then you find a good fit based on that. And then you kind of start with it and then you go hire about and be like "give me the budget". But if you're like a freelancer or someone just starting off, you obviously do your research to see what you like. But in a big corporation, you have to go to them and kind of say, I need this now because five hours a day is kind of killing me doing all this. So.
Yeah, yeah,
I think, you know, when you first start, I mean, I didn't have any social media tools at all for about two and a half, three years. So finding content to share of others, obviously was creating my own content and working. And this was prior to EIRIS Tech News and that sort of stuff. I it was just so time consuming.
Yeah,
it was massively time consuming, but I just didn't have the budget, not initially. But now I don't think I could go back. I've got so used to my tools. I'm an early adopter of Agorapulse and I'm an early adopter of a couple of other platforms actually. But, you know, it's been so. It saved me so much time, you know, I'm reporting this is something that I really enjoy being able to produce for my clients as well, especially as, frankly, let's face it, the CSFI downloads that you get from most of these platforms are shocking. And, you know, it turns from gobbledegook to something, you know, mostly sensible when you download it from reporting. So, you know, it's I guess in my opinion now you'll get 20, 20 vision at the after the fact. That way is it's actually really worth spending the money, getting at all, even if it's just one. You know, you don't have to have hundreds, but from the get go do you?
yeah, exactly, I think with that, you don't also know if you're going to like using a tool without using it, where if you were scared by the price or it was too complicated, you would never know whether how it actually worked until you started using it. So I think the scary thing for most people is the fact that they don't the learning curve could be daunting because they see as new technology. But once they get used to how to post in the schedule, they realise it's very similar to how the sites themselves work and then they obviously can't live without it. So phase one would be just kind of trying something out before you dismiss it.
Yeah, hence the free trial.
Exactly.
And a lot of these tools are intuitive, aren't they? You know, and if you look around, you'll find that there will be self-help videos and you know how you know. Q and A's and most of the websites will have areas where you have a chat facility or something like that. And I think people just daunted by the fact that there's all these avenues and they don't know where to look. I mean, how can we fix that? How can we make it easier for people?
Yeah, that is the million dollar question, I guess, what would be I mean, in an ideal world, you would type in like, I don't know, jula with this much money showed me what I can get for my money and the tools would just kind of roll through. But because in all honesty, most social media tools obviously offer the same basic things that you can do. It's hard to be like wise, one better than the other in terms of the thing. But then the easiest way to start is have a look at what platforms your business is on right now. So is it Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest? And start with what tools can manage those channels? The last thing you want to do is pay for a tool and then have to pay for an add-on for like three other channels, which you didn't know was part of the package. So rather than do that separately, try to find one that can manage the channels you already own. And then if you do need to grow in the future, you know, you can probably do it as an adult.
Yeah, that's a great tip, and I was going to say to em, if you have you know, if you're going to use a free trial on one of them, don't use five free trials at the one time. So don't try out five platforms at the one time. You're just going to get confused as to which one works best and which way. You know, if you're if you're in a hurry to find a platform, do your research, narrow it down based on, like Ravi says, what platforms they can handle, which ones they work with and then, you know, do one or two free trials. But if you're doing six or seven free trials, you're just going to get confused into which ones actually worked better and which one didn't. And then if you're in a busy month with your own work anyway and you're not spending the same time, it just it's a vicious circle. Just go with one. Stick with it. I know I've I've used other ones, which we're not going to mention because they're not bad, but they just weren't up to up to standard. But I could have used them for two or three years at a time and then outgrown them and moved on. That can also.
That's the other thing. Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's a very personal thing, isn't it?
It is.
You know, what I find good for me doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be good for you, does it.
Yeah, exactly. And we are in the marketing space that there's people that love numbers and then there's people that love creating fancy, funky looking graphics and then there's people that just love copy and writing. And so the platforms each do those things differently in terms of how they can be used. That finding one that you basically enjoy using is going to be key, because let's be honest, you'd be using it every day since social media is not a Monday to Friday business
Isn't it?
Well, with your smartphone, with your smartphone, you could argue it's not it's not technically 24/7. I think on my phone personally there's a, an Apple iPhone also have that kind of reminder how long you spend on your phone. And since that time is that is quite scary. You can see how many times you're in your phone every day because you probably think it's like 20 minutes when it's like three hundred seventeen. But acknowledging that it's a huge thing.
Yeah. Managing the notifications, I always find that's the first thing that I turn off. Right. I got a new platform into the phone. It's like no, do not want any notifications because especially on the phone you've got enough popping up with I.
That's the other thing to take into account. If you're going to have a platform, make sure it's got an app facility as well, you know, a social media platform that can support your social that you're doing either for yourself or for your clients, because if you don't have an app for it, it's much harder to stay on top of, in my opinion.
Yeah. And you're tied to your desktop or laptop.
Exactly.
You know.
Yeah, exactly. That's a good point. Especially when a customer says something and it's like 7:02 PM and you just want a quick reply. You don't want to log back in. You have to be like you. That's fine. You'll get it tomorrow on your phone. You can probably just do that in five or ten seconds.
Yes, that's the expectation as well, isn't it? People expect a response
immediately.
Immediately.
Yeah,
Especially from big businesses and brands like Samsung. They won't wait until nine o'clock the next morning.
No I think I read some data which was like, if it's not within 30 minutes, a customer can get put off. It depends on the type of business. If you're retail, yes, you might go buy your shoes elsewhere. But depending on what you do, some do wait. But others are just like I can probably get it somewhere else if they reply quickly.
Yeah, that's it's managing expectations, it's what we've always been saying on the podcast, so you have to manage your clients expectations and put on your social media. "I am available from 9:00 to 5:00" or "I am not open Saturdays and Sundays", you know, because I say especially Google my business. You can modify your hours and put in even put in your lunch hour and everything, you know, manage those expectations well in advance of people saying,
you put this down, but people still expect a response.
They will,
Especially on Twitter. Let's say, you know, I've had a problem with somebody trying to send me some belts a couple of years ago. And Melanie, before she got her take and asked to query about it and directly to the the company obviously can't mention them. And her face is saying, oh, go on, no, I'm not going to. And nothing came of it. And I was so I waited another couple of days. I'd already waited 14 days. What was another two, you know.
Yeah.
And a message to the guy at this time, I sounded a little bit more insistent about it. Nothing. And a mutual friend of ours that you probably know actually Samantha Kelly tweeter goddess. She didn't actually have a blue tick at the time, but by golly, she had a large audience. And I said, Sam, would you mind retracing this for me? And eleven minutes. Eleven minutes is all I had to wait for a response
Being on the inside of quite a few big companies. Some of these tools will actually flag based on followers. And you go right to the top of the notifications with a red checkmark or something. So it's not to say that it's the fair way to do it, but does grab their attention when a big hit kind of says something because they feel like the urgencies that otherwise that brand reputation is at stake, but is the wrong way to look at it. But it's just the way it works. And, you know, the people that monitor the inbox that way.
See this this is the time that your vanity metrics actually do pay off.
We did a podcast about that recently. Sorry.
OK, so how did you and give us sorry. Give us five top tips, Ravi, on why and which social media tools to use.
Yes. So the first one we kind of briefly covered, which is basically to find a social media platform that allows you to schedule on your channels that were based in the channels you already have. In terms of the features, look at what's more the most important for your business and make sure that they have those within the package that are for example, I mentioned Samsung, but if you're a retail brand and you're very customer service friendly, you need a good inbox managing system. And or if you really data heavy because you care about every impression region etc, then you need a reporting platform built in. Um, the third one is also ease of use. Like we talked about earlier, you do need a mobile app or mobile friendly version because you are going to be managing things on the fly at the time of this recording. We're not out and about everywhere, but it will happen soon. And when it does happen, we want to be able to do stuff on the go. So having a mobile solution is definitely key. And that also applies to a website being mobile friendly as well as people are social. Going on site next is probably the elephant in the room, so to speak, which would be pricing. And we know that people don't have unlimited budget. But look at what you get for your money, because with a lot of solutions similar to buying a car, you could get a car for five hundred pounds or five hundred thousand. But again, with the pricing, what you get for your money and for example, if your business has five social profiles, but the free plan only gives three, you know, by paying a little bit extra, you can manage all five rather than struggle with both just to get a bargain. So look at the long term value in terms of why you need to spend the money and how it's going to help and then base your pricing decision on that because you will end up paying more in the long run if you take the shortcut with an offer which runs out, which you then have to rebuy down the line. And lastly, look at all that you can really invest in in the long term social media tools. Although they're shiny, they can seem like they might help the Christmas rush. But just look at a tool that can help you manage all your channels on a long term basis. So for the month, month, look at the long term packages.
You know, we haven't cracked a funny the whole way through
Such a serious topic. No. But I for one, you know, find that, yes, it saves a lot of time just to have everything on the one platform I open. One tab well done, well,
you don't have one tab.
You really don't, I don't, but in theory, in theory, I have my tab open and it means I don't have to open Facebook and LinkedIn and Instagram and Twitter, you know, but does Agorapulse have for Pinterest as well?
Well, at the time of this recording is perfect because we're actually on the road map to come out, so expect to see that very soon so you will be able to use Pinterest.
And that might be worth mentioning why we're asking you this.
Yes, exactly. The reason I'm getting asked Agorapulse questions is because I'm the country manager for U.K. Ireland Agorapulse. And that means I look after all the marketing and events and activities Agorapulse in the UK and Ireland. So if anyone listening does go to any events or virtual events, you may see our name pop up or you may see my face so that we might say hi.
And it's a very nice face, I know you can't actually see the podcast, but, you know, Revy, thank you so much for today. We wanted to educate our listeners that there are a wide range of tools available to them that would be put off by the price. It really does save you time. And, you know, it might be even worth considering looking at purchasing for the year because sometimes it's cheaper annually than is monthly. But obviously try for a few months first to see if it fits your requirements. Well, that's all the time we have for today. But thank you so much for coming in and talking about social media platforms. And Esther, thank you for, you know, just being you. You know, just a special sweetie. And thanks for listening, guys. And do come back next week. Bye
Bye.