Your Digital Marketing Coach with Neal Schaffer

Are you overlooking the potential power of video to help promote your brand? Read on about why Neal Schaffer chose to create a book trailer for Maximize Your Social - and why you should invest in video, too.Key Highlights[01:17] Reminder: Video Is Important![03:06] What Video Is About[03:43] Other Types of Embeddable Content[04:19] Why Video Is Important[05:55] Content Should Be Entertaining, Resourceful, and Shareable[06:04] My Advice For You[07:00] An Example of A Successful Video[08:51] Contact An Expert[09:38] Go Big or Go HomeNotable QuotesYou know, it's funny, in social media, we always look at the shiny new thing, you know, Facebook, or Pinterest, or Instagram, these are all actually very old by now. But it's funny that we look at those platforms. And we always will, we tend to forget about blogs, but not that much. But we often forget about video. Video requires a lot of resource if you really want to do it right. And you should do it right. There is no other medium that allows you to connect with your potential audience and video. I mean, it's you It's love. It's as close to seeing you or something in person. It has this effect and we've all grown up watching movies and TV and maybe that's part of it. It is the most powerful medium, you can create a very, very deep bond. But I think it comes down to your social media strategy, your objective, and as part of your social media strategy, you're gonna have the little content piece, what's going to be the content, right? Content in a social media strategy is always resourceful and shareable. But I think that there are entertaining ways of showing educational content. nd for me go you know, the process of working with a professional video company of actually going through the story, you know, the storyboard, what type of animation are we going to have?It's been a great experience, video is an art. If you think you can do it yourself, you're really missing out on a lot of potential. And if you're gonna invest the money and do it.If you're only going to do a few videos a year versus doing a blog post once a month, or once a week. Make a count, make those videos count. You don't need to video blog as much as you normally blog or do as many videos as blog posts. But like I said when you do them I really think you want to do them right and I think that you have the ability to get a lot more amplification of your content than a blog post for a wide variety of reasons.Learn More:Buy Digital Threads: https://nealschaffer.com/digitalthreadsamazonBuy Maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth: https://nealschaffer.com/maximizinglinkedinamazonJoin My Digital First Mastermind: https://nealschaffer.com/membership/ Learn about My Fractional CMO Consulting Services: https://nealschaffer.com/cmoDownload My Free Ebooks Here: https://nealschaffer.com/books/Subscribe to my YouTube Channel: https://youtube.com/nealschafferAll My Podcast Show Notes: https://podcast.nealschaffer.com

The background for and importance of auditing your social media, with a concrete example comparing the Facebook presence of two hotels.Key Highlights[01:16] Social Media Audits[01:45] Creating Baseline Numbers[02:29] Create a Role Model[02:52] The Notion of Audit[04:00] Is It A Good Ideal to Compare Yourself with the Competition?[04:32] Notion of Social Proof[04:46] Where the Role of Audit Comes In[06:01] Looking at the Organic Growth Rate[08:01] Number of Like Is Meaningless[08:30] Getting A Sense of the Engagement[10:56] 2 Easy Things You Can Do to AuditNotable QuotesSo part of this feeds into the fact that you have to have a plan, you have to have a social media strategy, you have to be measuring, you have to be optimizing, that's a no brainer. But part of that social media strategy is creating baseline numbers of how others in your industry are doing.But if there's a new platform that you're not familiar with, your company is just engaging and if you think it may be important for your social media strategy, how are you going to get started, create a role model, right?Look at other companies in your industry, or similar industries that have seemingly done well, it's always hard to know if a company is doing well or not in social media. Because the number of likes the number of views is meaningless. It comes down to are they meeting their business objectives, and that information is not for public consumption, obviously.And the audit actually helps you create your social media strategy. It helps you create baseline metrics. But you know, number of likes in itself is not the only metric. I don't even know how meaningful of a metric it is. But once again, with social proof, I guess there is some value to it.    Now, number of likes is meaningless. We're not going to buy likes, obviously, we're going to target our target audience.  We want to keep our brands fresh in the minds of our fans.So I'm hoping that this gets you thinking about your own brand, or the brand that you represent, or sell to, or service or what have you. And that it gets you into a habit of doesn't have to be all the time, maybe monthly basis, maybe quarterly basis. Look around and see what your competition is doing. Create some of these baseline metrics for the few of the platforms.Learn More:Buy Digital Threads: https://nealschaffer.com/digitalthreadsamazonBuy Maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth: https://nealschaffer.com/maximizinglinkedinamazonJoin My Digital First Mastermind: https://nealschaffer.com/membership/ Learn about My Fractional CMO Consulting Services: https://nealschaffer.com/cmoDownload My Free Ebooks Here: https://nealschaffer.com/books/Subscribe to my YouTube Channel: https://youtube.com/nealschafferAll My Podcast Show Notes: https://podcast.nealschaffer.com

Engagement, relevance and relationships are as important in social media marketing as they are in email marketing.Key Highlights[00:41] My AHA Moments on Best Practices with Email Marketing[02:18] Email Providers Getting Better at Filtering Spam[02:48] What Gmail Has Done Recently[03:35] What Happens When You Send A Lot of Emails[04:06] More Engagement, Better Relationships[05:01] Make People Stay Longer in Your Site[05:30] Best Practice in Email Marketing[05:58] Create Engaging and Relevant Content[08:09] Broad Terms that People Overuse or OvergeneralizeNotable QuotesBut it was interesting, because what's happening in the world of email marketing, is that the old days of just blasting a message out and it getting into the inboxes of people are obviously gone.But really what happens is every list that is out there has a reputation that is attached to it, brands have reputations. We have social media reputations, right? Well, lists are the same. The providers are trying to deliver good service to their customers trying to keep the spam out.And they're trying to make you realize that your list has a reputation attached to it. And the higher that reputation is, in other words, the more relevant that content is to your audience that you send out to, the fewer notices of spam you get, the more clicks you get within your emails. So the more engagement you have within those emails, the better relationships you have, you know, it's about engagement, relevance, and relationships, right? The more deliverable those emails are going to come. In other words, from a search engine perspective, you would rather introduce content that is more engaging, more relevant, and therefore, people are staying on your page longer.It really comes down to that same notion of engagement. Is your content engaging or people engaging with it? Whether it's a share a link that's clicked or even a comment? And is it relevant? are they sticking around, you know, checking out your site for other pages?But the more engaging your content is, the more people show to right, it's really as simple as that. So you need to create content that's relevant. And that's something that people engage with. And you need to ask people to engage with it sometimes.  But at the end of the day, for these social networking sites to survive, because one of the primary forms of revenue that they get or generate is from advertising, they need to make sure that your content is engaging, or they're only showing engaging content.It comes down to creating engaging content and engaging with others. And from that, creating relationships, obviously, the deeper relationships you have with your readers, with your followers, the more engagement you're going to get right. So engagement, relationships, relevance, these are reLearn More:Buy Digital Threads: https://nealschaffer.com/digitalthreadsamazonBuy Maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth: https://nealschaffer.com/maximizinglinkedinamazonJoin My Digital First Mastermind: https://nealschaffer.com/membership/ Learn about My Fractional CMO Consulting Services: https://nealschaffer.com/cmoDownload My Free Ebooks Here: https://nealschaffer.com/books/Subscribe to my YouTube Channel: https://youtube.com/nealschafferAll My Podcast Show Notes: https://podcast.nealschaffer.com

The truth about Facebook's recent changes: Nothing changed. You still need a data-driven approach to Facebook - and social media - marketing.Key Highlights[01:00] Recent Changes with Facebook[02:38] How EdgeRank Works[03:42] The Notion of nTime Decay and Notion of Affinity[04:05] Reintroducing Posts Into Your Newsfeed[04:48] Every Facebook Post Counts[06:36] Have A Data-Driven Approach in Social MediaNotable QuotesAnd I mean, really, Facebook uses an algorithm, okay, they want you to come back to the site more, they want to expose content that they think that you will like, because you'll spend more time on the site, and therefore, they're going to sell you or they're going to be able to get more advertising revenue, because you're on the site longer or what have you.In fact, the more you engage with content, the better they know you and the more targeted ads, they can serve you, meaning that they're going to maximize their profit as well.But, you know, perhaps the weight of the content just really isn't that important anymore. Because I don't know if you've noticed, but if you've done experiments on Facebook, recently, I find that just sending out the good old status update gets, you know, four to five times more impressions than sending out a photo or a video. But unless people really engage with them, you're not gonna get nearly as many impressions as you get with just sending out a unique status update, which forces you to be creative and forces you to be engaging.And what Facebook is basically saying is we think we know what posts you're gonna engage with. And we're going to make sure that you see those posts, even if you glance over them. So what they're doing is basically reintroducing these posts into your newsfeed.So in essence, the time decay is not as important of a factor or the time decay in terms of a Facebook post, only having a few hours of life now has a bit more legs to it.So once again, as a Facebook page manager, nothing changes, you still need to be consistently creating engaging content, I think one thing that may change, and you never know what the real objective is that Facebook has, because like Google, they're never going to share the inner workings of what they're doing.Learn More:Buy Digital Threads: https://nealschaffer.com/digitalthreadsamazonBuy Maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth: https://nealschaffer.com/maximizinglinkedinamazonJoin My Digital First Mastermind: https://nealschaffer.com/membership/ Learn about My Fractional CMO Consulting Services: https://nealschaffer.com/cmoDownload My Free Ebooks Here: https://nealschaffer.com/books/Subscribe to my YouTube Channel: https://youtube.com/nealschafferAll My Podcast Show Notes: https://podcast.nealschaffer.com

Neal Schaffer details how his social media accounts recently got hacked - and provides six points of advice to help you avoid the same fate.Key Highlights[01:03] What is LastPass[02:46] The Problem When I Didn't Change All of My Password[05:12] Digging Around[06:35] Twitter Being Ahead of Other Networks[07:29] Create Unique Password for Each Site[07:49] Change Your Password Regularly[08:03] Use Two-Step Verification[08:28] Audit Your Third-Party AppsNotable QuotesBut it's critical that we somehow figure out how to create a unique password for each social media site we have.Any dashboard that you have access to gives someone that gains access, the ability to post to several accounts, is a prime target for hackers.It's funny because even the email from Twitter said, make sure that you reset your password makes you look through all the third party apps, it didn't really talk about not just looking at the third party apps that have authorization, but those trusted social media dashboards and third party websites that have the ability to post to also make sure you change the passwords there.So really the message of this podcast and it's important, obviously, not only for yourself, but for your business is number one, to have a unique password for each site.It just gives you an extra layer security, make sure that you have two step verification on every single social network or social media dashboard that you're on.It's important to educate everybody on the security procedures.Learn More:Buy Digital Threads: https://nealschaffer.com/digitalthreadsamazonBuy Maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth: https://nealschaffer.com/maximizinglinkedinamazonJoin My Digital First Mastermind: https://nealschaffer.com/membership/ Learn about My Fractional CMO Consulting Services: https://nealschaffer.com/cmoDownload My Free Ebooks Here: https://nealschaffer.com/books/Subscribe to my YouTube Channel: https://youtube.com/nealschafferAll My Podcast Show Notes: https://podcast.nealschaffer.com

Learn about Neal Schaffer's Pinterest experiment - and the data which backs up why you shouldn't be ignoring Pinterest anymore.Key Highlights[00:49] Why Pinterest Is A Fascinating Network[02:41] What Fascinates Me About Pinterest[04:33] Pinterest Statistics[05:58] The Quality Traffic You Can Get From Pinterest[06:52] What I Ended Up Doing In Pinterest[07:29] Creating Pinterest Boards[08:18] Pinterest As A Social Bookmarking Site[08:59] How Can You Begin Using Pinterest[10:23] One Thing I Did After Creating Pinterest BoardNotable QuotesPinterest is a fascinating social network because it is a relatively small social network.But Pinterest is something that demands our attention. And it's not just the website traffic that a generates. It's also a demographic that we know has been documented is primarily female.And I sort of want to share that experiment with you all to get you thinking outside of the box about Pinterest, because we all know, and I've talked about this many times that social networks evolve, and the people who use them and how we use them is always changing and the same as Pinterest.But the other thing is, it's generating a lot of website traffic, but it's the quality of the traffic that people that are going from Pinterest to another site.So Pinterest originally and one of the reasons why StumbleUpon I believe has sort of decreased in popularity is that Pinterest at the heart of it. It's a social bookmarking site. It's a social bookmarking site for visuals that you know what Pinterest is, it's that pin board visuals that you see on the internet that you want to pin to a virtual board.So you begin to see that there are different ways of using it. And at a minimum if you as an experiment, if you're not a Pinterest user, I recommend you take a look at some of those boards I've created and consider you need to use it yourself to get it right.And at the end of the day, for businesses that want to generate traffic from Pinterest, you need to have pinnable images on your own website.There's a lot of buzz and everybody likes to look at the new shiny thing and what have you. But I think at this point, with that data showing just the the incredible referral traffic that Pinterest is generating, it behooves me if you're not thinking about how to use Pinterest as part of your social media marketing, if you haven't been already, I'm hoping that this podcast sparks some ideas.Learn More:Buy Digital Threads: https://nealschaffer.com/digitalthreadsamazonBuy Maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth: https://nealschaffer.com/maximizinglinkedinamazonJoin My Digital First Mastermind: https://nealschaffer.com/membership/ Learn about My Fractional CMO Consulting Services: https://nealschaffer.com/cmoDownload My Free Ebooks Here: https://nealschaffer.com/books/Subscribe to my YouTube Channel: https://youtube.com/nealschafferAll My Podcast Show Notes: https://podcast.nealschaffer.com

What does it mean to be an influencer in social media? Why is it important to businesses? And how can people become influencers?Key Highlights[01:43] Have A Social Scoring[03:21] What is Publicly Available Data?[04:23] The Interesting Thing About Cloud[05:56] How I Look At Social Scoring[06:39] Become the Center of Influence[07:47] Carve Your Own Path[08:58] Be Natural[10:19] Be An Influencer and Add Value[10:49] Be An UtilityNotable QuotesAnd it really comes down to, if you're a business and you want to get more amplification from your message, or you want to better segment your audience because you're bombarded with 10s Hundreds 1000s of app mentions direct messages a day, obviously, having some sort of social scoring can be very, very convenient, it can actually help the efficiency of your marketing help the efficiency of your customer service and what have you.But what it really comes down to I find, and businesses also want to become more influential, but people want to yield influence.It really comes down to yielding influence means yielding influence for the public to consume. And what are the platforms that are open to the public? On the other hand, if you've only been active on Facebook, and really haven't done much on Twitter, it really limits the potential and it makes sense because Twitter as a real time search engine is probably number two, or number three in the world only behind Google and perhaps YouTube, if it's not ahead of YouTube.But the message that I really want to give you all about influence and how to become an influencer is don't follow the influencers, don't necessarily retweet the influencers, become the center of influence become an influencer.And what you find is that your past relationships that you have in your past friends and fans, you can leverage for whatever new things you want to do on any site.And that's why a blog is a central part of any social media strategy that I create. But above and beyond the blogging, it's not only sharing your own point of view, but it's also in the type of content that you share, or curate, and who you curate, from what social signals you send, who do you engage with? But really, if you want to engage with someone that's sort of high up in the influence chain, and you want to get the right Just be natural, read their blog posts, comments, send them a tweet every once in a while retweet their content, share their content on Facebook, tagging them.And it's this sort of like, do it yourself, be inspired to do something to add value to the world and whatever passion you may have.Learn More:Buy Digital Threads: https://nealschaffer.com/digitalthreadsamazonBuy Maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth: https://nealschaffer.com/maximizinglinkedinamazonJoin My Digital First Mastermind: https://nealschaffer.com/membership/ Learn about My Fractional CMO Consulting Services: https://nealschaffer.com/cmoDownload My Free Ebooks Here: https://nealschaffer.com/books/Subscribe to my YouTube Channel: https://youtube.com/nealschafferAll My Podcast Show Notes: https://podcast.nealschaffer.com

Before you hire an intern or call up a social media consultant, first ask yourself these 5 critical questions to give your social media for business plans a reality check.Key Highlights[01:24] My New Book -- Maximize Your Social[02:13] How I Talk To My Potential Clients[02:35] How Can I Help You With Social Media[03:22] Determining Business Objective[04:46] Perceived Benefits of Social Media[05:48] Perform A Simple Audit[06:36] How Do You Reach Your Business Objective?[07:36] The Killer QuestionNotable QuotesIn this case, the illness is either the use of social media or the perceived use of social media utilizing best practices for your company. So if you think about it that way, if you're asking someone for help, you're not going to get an answer into divulge more information.And that's how we start to derive our ROI from our activities and social media. Because we have that objective. You know, not everybody's using social media the same way. This comes down to sort of the expectations if you're going to hire someone, right? Or if you are going to invest in social media, what do you expect to get out of it? And that's a good starting point, in addition to obviously, where does it hurt? What are your business objectives?But anyway, with your social media, what do you think is working? And what do you think isn't working? So you know, this is sort of like the audit is a self-audit of you telling me how you're doing.Without understanding that because as I always say, social media doesn't exist in a silo. It just helps complement everything else you do.What is the potential benefit to you in money, and that's important? Partially, it's important from a sales perspective, to help understand how much I can charge because we call this in sales extra in the budget, but on a deeper level.If we're looking at the social media ROI, and we're looking at trying to reach a business objective, how much did we invest? How much did we get back? It comes down to okay, this is what it's worth to reach our objective.  So that really hits home, the proposition of utilizing social media for your business is no different than hiring someone for SEO for pay per click for web design, hiring an administrator hiring a new employee, hiring a new salesperson, it is exact same thing, business comes down to sale and profit, and how you invest your money to maximize your sales to help you maximize your profit.Learn More:Buy Digital Threads: https://nealschaffer.com/digitalthreadsamazonBuy Maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth: https://nealschaffer.com/maximizinglinkedinamazonJoin My Digital First Mastermind: https://nealschaffer.com/membership/ Learn about My Fractional CMO Consulting Services: https://nealschaffer.com/cmoDownload My Free Ebooks Here: https://nealschaffer.com/books/Subscribe to my YouTube Channel: https://youtube.com/nealschafferAll My Podcast Show Notes: https://podcast.nealschaffer.com

If you're on LinkedIn for sales, business development, or marketing, you need to realize that everything you do on LinkedIn leads back to your profile. Here's advice on how to improve upon it.Key Highlights[01:02] How To Better Leverage LinkedIn for Business?[01:39] The Second Demographic[02:41] LinkedIn Demographics[03:18] Think About What Social Media Can Do for You[03:59] It All Comes Down to Your LinkedIn Profile[05:43] Why It Is Critical to Put Time and Effort In Your Profile[06:55] Put A Professional, Well-Branded Headline[07:32] Expose Your Personal Brand In Your Profile[08:31] What to Put In Your Profile Summary[10:36] Data Points that Show the Power of LinkedInNotable QuotesBut from a b2b sales perspective, you haven't figured out how best to align it with everything else you're doing to help you find new clients or better engage with your current clients.It's not everybody. And therefore, when you think of using LinkedIn as a sales tool, you have to understand that you're not going to get access to everybody, right? It is one more tool in your toolbox. How did you get leads up until now? How did you close business up until now, if it's still effective, keep doing it. If it's not as effective as it used to be, think about what social media can do for you. And if you're already on LinkedIn and see the value, and you just want to see how to apply that value towards b2b sales. But the point I wanted to bring up today is if you want to use LinkedIn as a serious tool to help you get business now, whether it's for b2b sales, if you think of yourself as a salesperson, or maybe you're in the marketing department, or you think yourself as a marketer, and you want to get more inbound marketing leads from LinkedIn, or you want to do better that whatever you do on LinkedIn, you're more successful on LinkedIn to generate new business. It really comes down to your profile.It is your homepage on LinkedIn, because anything you do on LinkedIn, whether you're posting a status update, whether you're asking For an introduction, you're sending an InMail, you're in a group, you're looking at LinkedIn news, or you're posting a comment on a LinkedIn company update, it all comes down to your name, we're whatever you do on LinkedIn, whatever engagement you do is think back to your profile. LinkedIn is where the business decision makers are, I recommend you don't get cheesy, because I don't think those people look down favorably on cheesy things that don't want to be sold to in a professional headline. So you want to put down a professional headline that is well branded, that will get the right targeted people wanting to click through wanting to say, hey, I want to know more about this person, I want to get to know this person, don't try to make a sale, through your professional headline.Learn More:Buy Digital Threads: https://nealschaffer.com/digitalthreadsamazonBuy Maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth: https://nealschaffer.com/maximizinglinkedinamazonJoin My Digital First Mastermind: https://nealschaffer.com/membership/ Learn about My Fractional CMO Consulting Services: https://nealschaffer.com/cmoDownload My Free Ebooks Here: https://nealschaffer.com/books/Subscribe to my YouTube Channel: https://youtube.com/nealschafferAll My Podcast Show Notes: https://podcast.nealschaffer.com

What is the value of guest blog posts on your website? Learn about the history of Windmill Networking along with advice on what type of content you should try to source for your website blog.Key Highlights[01:07] Moving From Windmill Networking to Maximize Social Business[01:29] How I Started Windmill Networking[03:43] From Personal Blog to Collaborative Blog[04:18] What I Realized with Guest Blogging[06:13] The Story of the Term Maximize Your Social[07:05] The Bigger Benefits of the Switch[07:17] My Advice[08:05] The Key Thing on ContributingNotable QuotesReally, the Concept of windmill networking came about when I was in the shower, in all honesty, and I write about this, I think in the preface of the book, of trying to find a visual concept, if we are windmills and we plug ourselves into this grid, that is social media, we can receive and share energy 24/7 worldwide, something that, you know, maybe something trivial to us could be a godsend to someone else.And that's really, you know, my base for helping businesses promote social media comes down to that concept that when you are engaging in social media as a brand, it really comes down to those people.You know, the branding from a business perspective was never any good.Blogs want to invite guests to blog so that they have access to content and people who want to move their way up in the chain, or in the blogosphere echo system want to be seen on blogs that offer bigger platforms that they have.But I realized, as I was doing this, and I've written about this, it was almost like a one night stand, people would come contribute a blog post, and that was it. It offered temporary value to my readers, but it didn't really offer any lasting value.And I realized that because of that, I needed to create a new website that really strips the brand name from my personal brand, it wasn't fair to the other contributors, that yes, they do get value from the platform, but the platform still is tied directly to my personal brand.But it's completely taking my personal brand, any potential ego that I have, out of the play, insane, subscribe to us read our content for the content. And I think it showcases more of the actual authors of each content, because if you go to share it on social media. If you have a company blog, you want to bring out the voices of those in your company, I want to have an advisor that is blogging on my site for any industry or any discipline that a potential company might have a problem in. And that's really the core concept. But I believe with Google authorship and the trends I see out there for content marketing, and Gary Vaynerchuk, now tripling down on content, although there's some debate about that, if you read what Scott Mani said, but it leads to a very, very interesting question as to At what point do you separateLearn More:Buy Digital Threads: https://nealschaffer.com/digitalthreadsamazonBuy Maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth: https://nealschaffer.com/maximizinglinkedinamazonJoin My Digital First Mastermind: https://nealschaffer.com/membership/ Learn about My Fractional CMO Consulting Services: https://nealschaffer.com/cmoDownload My Free Ebooks Here: https://nealschaffer.com/books/Subscribe to my YouTube Channel: https://youtube.com/nealschafferAll My Podcast Show Notes: https://podcast.nealschaffer.com