Hey everyone it’s Janet Johnson and Lisa Saline with Social Media Hangout Time. And as you can see we have, I’ll highlight Lisa here, Kimmy in the background today.
Yeah, she’s got to sit there you know.
Exactly. She has to participate somehow but we did take and Lisa & I are going to be discussing some stuff today but before we get into what we’re going to be talking about I’d like you to hear a little bit about Lisa’s background because we haven’t, Lisa’s not here very often with us because..
Behind the curtain with Kimmy the puppet.
Exactly, because we have Kimmy in the forefront most of the time. So I’d love for Lisa to just talk about where she got started, how she got started on the internet marketing. How long has she been doing it and what she’s doing now to help people?
Sure. Actually it’s kind of funny but I started in internet marketing in 2007. I toured around the whole US attending boot camps and internet marketing seminars and people were sitting next to me and saying, ‘how do you do that; how did you send out your tweet; what is that all about?’ And finally people were asking me if I could do it for them. So I started my own business in 2007 and I get a lot of social media training, social media management. And then just recently I was approached by a company. So now I’m helping them build out their social media management business. So that’s all they do is management for small business, small-mid size businesses. So I’m in marketing rule but I just love to teach and I love training. And I do a lot of webinars and I work with other people so it’s a very comfortable thing for me to technically explain high tech stuff to a lay person. I used to do a training and people with another person and they use to call us the Talk and the Tech show. You know I was more technical where I could sit next to somebody and teach him how to do some thing and somebody else would do the presentation. So anyway, Janet and I met and she asked me to come over and help her with Kimmy the puppet. I though I was just going to go and take pictures and then all of a sudden one thing led to another and we started recording. And then she said, ‘well because you know social media and Kimmy is a salon owner and I work with small businesses and teach them how to do that,’ it was a natural fit. Was it something that I had initially planned? Not really. But..
Being an entrepreneur you know you kind of go with the flow.
I know. But we’ve been having a lot of fun and now, I mean we just celebrated our 20th show and you know that’s exciting because it takes a lot of effort and time to make sure that we can deliver good content to our listeners. So it’s been fun and we are always looking for other social media professionals to interview because there’s just so much to offer the community.
Yup, and we just entertained. You know, if you’re looking to be interviewed and you’re watching this, you’ll never be more entertained than being interviewed by Kimmy the poppet.
Yeah, yeah, that’s funny because when Kimmy asked the one question, ‘have you been interviewed by a puppet?,’ if you can take a snapshot of people’s faces. Puts them oin this uncomfortable zone because even if they had they won’t admit it.
Exactly, exactly.
Yeah we have fun.
Yeah, we do, we do and it’s something that you know, it’s different. It’s unique. And that’s what our brand is about, that’s what the show is about – just really being unique and one thing I would tell everybody to do out there is to make sure that they are looking at their brand. And if they look like everyone else out there, it’s going to be tough to stand out. So think about what they can do. I’m not saying to get a puppet because that’s us, not you. But…
Absolutely. There’s something unique in everybody’s business and I think that you can identify who you’re marketing to and they identify with you. The one thing that I have found, not every single person’s going to like you. And that’s sometimes hard to get over as an entrepreneur because that’s what you want. You want everybody to like you. But when the right people like you then your business grows. So you just got to keep on focused on the audience.
Uh-huh, it’s not about being popular, necessarily. It’s about why are you in business in the first place – it’s to make money. And you want to have a passion about it and have fun with it. That’s a big belief that I have that if didn’t have fun with it, I couldn’t do it. But you also need to remember your main goal of why you’re in business. It’s to bring home income to your family. So, so love it! Well great! We will also, I just want to mention, since we’re not going to do typical intro on the show, if you’re an itunes user and you’ve listened to our shows and you love our shows, we would love it if you would go to itunes and write us a review. We’d really appreciate that. And if you’re new, just go back to our blog, it’s socialmediahangouttime.com and you can go back to all the past shows, watch them, listen to them. We’re on Stitcher, too. So there’s a lot of options out there to check out the different people we’ve interviewed because we’ve had excellent guests in our 20 shows.
So today what we’re going to cover is tools. We want to kind of keep this real basic but I bet some of you haven’t heard of some of the tools that are out there. And I think tools in the world of this complicated online marketing social media, any tool that can streamline your time and energy is appreciated. And so we want to talk about the tools that we use in our marketing today. New tools are always popping up but these are the ones that, some are brand new that you’ve maybe never heard off. And some are going to be ones that we’ve used for a few years and we’ve stuck with them. So let’s get into the different social media tools with Lisa and I’m gong to have her start with the first one.
You know one of the first tools that I was introduced to actually was Hootsuite. So we’re going to talk a little bit about Hootsuite. It’s been fun to see them develop overtime but I love Hootsuite because I can manage and monitor all of the people, what people are saying about me on different platforms. So there are lots of people that use a whole team to publish their content on the different platforms like they can publish to Facebook or LinkedIn, Twitter, things like that. So you can monitor the different conversation that are going on but you can also publish your content to the different platforms. I like it, personally I don’t like to automate a lot of my posts at would go out to every platform all at once. To me that just not seem real and social media is about being real. But you know some people would beg to differ. But I like, you know you can schedule your posts on different platforms but Hootsuite for me is being able to have it all on one dashboard to see all of the activities going on in my multiple platforms.So that allows me to go and respond to that person that made a comment or thank them for re-tweeting something that I’ve done. Or mention an article on LinkedIn. So I do like the Hootsuite platform.
Yeah. And it’s used for, I think multiple people, experts we’ve interviewed also are using Hootsuite platform. So we’ve heard this over and over again, there are a lot of people that recommend it. And if you’ve never heard of it before, it is free for up to 5, is that correct Lisa, 5 different
Yeah, yep, platforms.
So you could have, yeah, the platforms. You could even have a Google+ page, not profile, a LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Facebook page. You can even have a Facebook page and profile, I won’t suggest doing both at the same time. But you can choose 5 that you like or if you paid for it you can have even more which is fantastic because what I do is I manage a couple, I help out with some blogs of some companies and then what I do is post those blogs through the Hootsuite platform that I can get out to all their avenues. So I think I have about, oh I don’t know, 15+ in there. So…
Oh that’s great!
Yeah it’s way that to manage multiple platforms for multiple clients or if you’re using, like we, we also have Kimmy the puppet as our Twitter handle and then we’re, we have, I have my Janet_Johnson, I hate that one.
And I’ve got my LisaSaline. I got clients on there, too. And you know another thing that’s great about Hootsuite is they have Hootsuite University.
Yes.
And they really do great training on social media. So if you take that Hootsuite University class you really don’t have to figure out how to use it. And I think that’s what holds a lot of people back is they think “oh my gosh, it’s another learning curve. I don’t know how to use some of these.” But the tutorials on all these platforms are terrific. You learn a lot.
And then there is also the other avenue that I don’t use enough of but I know that they do offer analytic and statistics, too, so you can get reports if you pay x amount for… if you realize it.
Yeah, it’s inexpensive.
Yup.
That leaves me into saying because I don’t use it for scheduling so much on Facebook I think you have something that you wanted to talk about on how you schedule on Facebook.
Yes, yes and the majority of time this is how I schedule on Facebook. I schedule within Facebook. And maybe most of you out there know about this but I’ve done a couple of consultations recently where the people I was consulting didn’t even realize that there is a schedule right inside Facebook. And what it is is if you start a post there’s just a tiny, tiny, little clock icon on the bottom left. If you click on that, where you’re posting, not on the page but where you’re posting right within that post, so you click on that it opens up a calendar. And then you can pre-set. I do pre-set some of my static ones for a whole month in advance. I work a whole month in advance for certain pieces and I do fillers in between. And some people do weekly but you can really put a lot in there and it’s, they, now the Facebook scheduler has improved. It was very tedious in the beginning, they didn’t have the calendar that popped up. It was odd. So I would suggest trying and see what it’s like. You don’t have to do it all the time. You could mix up between the Hootsuite so you can get it to multiple platforms and then just do the Facebook for certain Facebook posts, too.
There’s a lot of people that their learning one platform before they move on to another. So if you can maximize the Facebook platform and that’s what you live on, you might as well schedule stuff. Because the biggest thing, specially now on Facebook pages is the content. You need to have a lot of content.
Yes.
And that would help if you sit down on a Sunday afternoon, you can bang some of that out and schedule it and get it out there. And then you don’t have to really worry about what am I going to post at 2, what am I going to post at 4. So if you could do that with your content calendar and create themes then it’s a lot easier to get somebody else to help you with that, too.
Absolutely, absolutely. That’s exactly what I’ve taught the clients that I worked with is, you know, their jaw drops when they hear you should be posting minimally once a day, I mean that’s minimal.
It is minimal.
Very minimal. But they’re even in shock with that and so I said you know what if you plan this out you can do that in less than 2 hours a month. It’s just a planning curve so you do have to plan ahead, I completely agree. And let’s get in to your next one because we’re talking about all these schedulers so let’s go into another scheduler that you like.
I love Buffer, the bufferapp.com. That one is great because as I’m tooling around the internet or on my phone I find a piece of content and maybe that content is something I want to share on my platforms. Could be of a blog post, it could be an image, it could be another Facebook post but I don’t want to do it immediately. So what I can do is I can click on a little button that says ‘Buffer This’ and it will put it in to a holding tank and I basically log in to Buffer and I say, release anything that’s in this application at a certain time. So I know that my readers are out there later in the evenings and Sunday afternoons, well I’m on the internet almost all day long. So during the day I might not want t publish that immediately so I just start building my content in the buffer app. It allows me to post to LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. So that for me is good and I can identify certain things that I want to go out. But you can change the schedule. It’s just a little flip on your desktop and you just hit this little icon that says Buffer. So you don’t even really have to think about it, that’s pretty cool.
Yeah, yeah. And I’m a Buffer user too but I tend to be more Hootsuite than Buffer so it’s just, I think people just need to try them and see what they like best. Both are good products.
Yes, very similar.
And the next one we’re going to continue talking about schedulers. This actually is not a scheduler but it’s a way that I have found to get to the Google+ world with a personal profile to get out to other platforms. The one thing with Hootsuite, Buffer, none of them are able to post, which has bugged me to death but it’s something with Google, to a Google+ profile. And so in order for me to post on Google+ profile I have to go the other direction. So I found this product called Friends+Me. And so if I post on Google+ and I choose to post on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, why am I zoning in on the name LinkedIn, I can choose to post on those or choose not to but it will automatically I put it on Google+. And I can say #L and that means it will include LinkedIn. Or I could do #FT it will include Facebook and Twitter but it won’t post on LinkedIn. So it’s all guided by hashtags. The only issue I have with this company, with Friends+Me though, is like for kit. Even when I’m sharing content from somebody else’s Google+ suddenly I share somebody’s and forget to do and it goes out to all my other sites. So when I go oh, I don’t want that on Twitter. So you have to think about it when you’re posting. But it streamlines it and kind of pushes me to use my Google+ more. I love that platform but I know that I forget about it sometimes, I think we all do. So if you want to go it down to Google+, it’s something to think about.
You know its interesting that you talked about hashtags and hashtags were developed long ago in the computer industry. That’s how they did their searches when the DOS applications were in place, when the computer programmers were in place. So people often ask me about hashtags and what’s a hashtag. It’s really the phone sign and a keyword search term. It’s not something that’s brandnew, it’s been around for many many years. But now these platforms are adopting them and it allows you to narrow down your search. And so identifying what hashtags are popular, sometimes when you do a #ilikeyou or something like that, you don’t know if that’s what people are looking for. So there’s a tool out there that’s called Hashtagify. And you can show you the trending hashtags. So if you want to pop in and have a conversation around those hashtags, Hashtagify is kind of fun.
Nice, nice.
So you can see what’s trending like World Cup. It was blowing it up. People were talking about that and of course being in the United States that was pretty darn exciting that they won the soccer tournament. So anyway, Hashtagify, I’m sorry if I butted in but I thought
No, perfect, perfect.
Don’t always understand what hashtag means.
Well I think it’s a good place to, yes, and you’re exactly right. This goes by hashtag, I think the Friends+Me does but hashtags are actually used in different formats and that’s what you just explained.
So what Friends+Me did is just use that whole computer programming thing and said we’re going to basically programming, your telling it where you want to send your contents using hashtags so it’s very relevant.
Yeah, love it. And I noticed this is a little, speaking of hashtag, on Google+ if you are using that platform, they automatically pull in hashtag. They automatically hashtag the content that you wrote. So I noticed one of the tutoring centers that I work with, they post a lot on Google+, they do use it through Hootsuite so they are forgetting the hashtag and it’s funny because they hashtags that were pulled in were not really the hashtags that should have been pulled in. So it is something to think about. It’s important because you want to guide it right with those hashtags and you don’t want to just throw it out there because I think one of the keywords that came in was happiness. What is really happiness matter for a tutoring center? So you just need to make sure…
Well when you have a kid that needs tutoring, happiness is a big deal, you know for the parents.
Well that is a good point.
Yeah. It’s true though. But they won’t pull in hashtags if you have them there, right? It will just overlook it?
Exactly.
Yeah so it just take a little effort.
Yep, something to think about. So let’s get in to, I’d like to actually go into then I’ll have you talk about the other ones since we’re talking about different fun tools like Hashtagify. ShareGrab is a fun one that I learned about recently and that’s specific to Facebook so now were kind of moving around a little bit here. But that one I use on a weekly basis now since I found it and maybe even more than that because my page has gone to from here in engagement down here. And I go hmmm, you know I need some good engaging content and your brain’s dead sometimes. What am I going to do for an engaging content? You can go to ShareGrab and you can follow specific people maybe in your industry that you don’t mind sharing their content; people that you, other companies, it depends on what/who you follow. But you want to find really good Facebook pages that create engaging content that would be your audience would like to see. Then you go and see it shows you, it actually grades it but you can see how many shares, how many likes in the past couple of days specific images or posts had. Like I followed George Decay for instance. I don’t share much of his stuff because it’s whacked out, you know, it’s a little crazy.
Yeah, and he’s not your style.
But… nah, not really, I don’t think it’s my audience either. But if it was related I definitely would. I just followed that one more for fun. But other social media professionals, Social Media Examiner. Post Planner has some great stuff and I’m sharing their content all the time. So anything that we know has already been engaged with and already shared a tad, like sometimes there’s thousands shares. Well you know what if that had a thousand shares and I share it to my page, you know what happens? It gets liked, commented on and shared. And so then it ups the engagement again. So that’s what I use ShareGrab for. I love that product so just dig in, it’s free. Once again it’s free.
I have to try that, that’s a new one I haven’t been exposed to. So thanks for the insight.
Yeah, it’s fun. It’s fun. It’s a blast and it’s fun to see what’s really, you know, viral out there, too.
Yeah, well that’s awesome.
And then I’m going to let you go on to your next couple ones.
I’m gong to do, you know what I like is there’s so many, there’s so much great content on different platforms. And one thing that I’ve just discovered in the last, actually I’ve been on it for almost 2 years now and it’s fairly new but it’s up and coming. It’s called RebelMouse. RebelMouse literally could be your website and what that does is you go and aggregates all of your social media content on one page. And so if you go to the RebelMouse website you’ll see content that comes from Google+, content that comes from Twitter, Facebook or Pinterest. And you can set up different theme pages. So if you have a love for dogs you can go out and pick different dog Twitter channels or Facebook. So that it aggregates all of that content into one website. Now I can also put it on my website as a separate page. So all of your content is coming back to the website. People can share, comment and tweet and re-tweet those things. But it’s a very dynamic website basically but a lot of the news channels are using it just because there’s so much information out there. You can customize it with your brand and just love that system.
Yeah. You have been a big fan of RebelMouse. I think we need to do a whole, we need to interview them. And
RebelMouse.
Yeah, because I think I have used it some but not enough. Kind of one of those platforms that walked away from. And when you talk about it it sounds really neat so I think people should definitely dig into that.
Yup. You can have people sign up for any content that comes to your page so it automatically sends you email and sends ‘here’s some new content’ and so it can be coming from anywhere. It’s almost like a newsletter list and then it will automatically share from RebelMouse on Twitter. So whenever you have mentions on things like that you don’t have, I’m getting thank yous a lot and it’s like oh I forgot that that ones out there. So it’s pretty cool. It’s a great tool.
So it helps the engagement process, too.
Yeah, definitely.
With Twitter. Nice. Well let’s finish up with talking about images. We love talking about images and we have interviewed the CEO of Canva. And Canva is the product that we use quite often. And I have seen the growth with Canva has been incredible. They provide different layouts and different images for anything social media. They just came out with the Google+ headers now.
Yeah, that’s awesome.
And so, yeah, they have a lot of things and Canva is something, it’s really kind of hard to explain, it’s more visual. So I would suggest anybody to use it, it is free. You go there and you choose, let’s say you wanted to do a Facebook cover image. You choose that and they have a whole bunch of layouts, you could choose a different background, you could bring your own images in. I’d suggest a png. I do this quite often where I have a png of Kimmy. We’ll stick her in the corner, put some words on it and boom, there’s an image post. So it’s that simple but they have beautiful background, they even have filtering where you can make it look Instagramy. It’s just a cool cool platform. And they do make stock images, too. And their stock images just go on and on and on. I was looking for a dentist. I just punched in dentist, for instance, and it just went on and on and on and on and how many you could choose from and then only $1 per stock image so it’s even adding stock image or gorgeous backgrounds. The other thing I’ve used I built when we put together our website, I found a stock image that I paid a dollar for that did the whole background of the website. So you can do, you can change the sizing to download a huge image. And so it can even, there’s so many uses for it even beyond just the social media post.
Well.
Go ahead.
If you don’t have Photoshop, I mean we have experts in the office when they do social media. We have a graphic designer. When I introduced her to Canva that’s when a lot of the interns are using because they don’t have the Photoshop software and it just gives them extra step because they don’t have to think about the sizing, the design elements. So if you, especially if you’re familiar with Photoshop it makes it really easy. So I’m not a graphic designer and I will be the first one to admit
Me neither.
To tell you what looks great. But for me to pull in the elements I need something to start with. So Canva’s great because it gets me some of the template. I already know it looks decent, right? It’s just changing words out, putting some pictures in there.
Exactly. And then they have a weekly email that teaches tips on what colors that work best together. So like let’s say your company is looking to redo your logo or something like that and you don’t know what colors to go with, they teach all of these too. So they have that all on their website every past post that they put out. It’s a great great stuff with Canva.
Yeah.
And I suggest anybody go try it. And then if you are looking also for free images, because images, you’ll have to catch our past shows that we talk all of and there’s 2 different ones Lisa and I had discussed all about different ways to use images. And using stock images is great and I’m going to give you a link to one that had I believe it had free images. But I believe it had, I will put this in our show notes also, believe it had something like 51 different free sites and it was the Buffer, Buffer blog. So it’s blog.bufferapp.com/free-image-sources-list. I know that sounds long but I will put it in there. But if you’re listening I’ll say it once again because this is a fantastic list, blog.bufferapp.com/free-image-sources-list. So that is a great place to find your stock images. So we talked about a lot of different and what’s funny was when Lisa was talking and I was talking I thought of even more tools that I just didn’t think about before that. So it’s kind of, it’s crazy how many are out there like even Chrome extension and different things that just are so easy and can save your time. I actually just did write a blog post also all about 9 of my favorite apps for my iphone and sad to say, sorry Lisa but half of them weren’t available on other devices other than iphone.
And not… you’re such a brat! Not fair.
Sorry .
Oh well
Maybe there’s always going to be something similar possibly, too, so you never know. But I’d love to do a show all about apps but these were 9 apps that streamline your time. So that’s it, it’s fun! Apps are fun, too, so we can definitely save time with apps also. So we’d love sharing these.
Maybe Kimmy needs to get an iphone then so she can start snapping pictures in the beauty salon, instead of an Android.
And have her hands with work on it but
Yeah, no kidding. Those little mini ones.
Yeah exactly. Well awesome. Well thank you very much Lisa for sharing your tools with us and thanks for joining us and we will see you guys next time.
Alright. Thanks Janet.