Dave Cain: Welcome to unsuitable on Rea Radio, the award willing financial services and business advisory podcast that challenges your old school business practices and the traditional business suit culture. Our guests are industry professionals and experts who will challenge you to think beyond the suit and tie, while offering you meaningful modern solutions to help enhance your company’s growth. I’m your host Dave Cain.
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest and hashtag this, hashtag that, and on and on and on. We’re going to go out on a limb here, and I think social media’s here to stay. People use social media to connect with each other, with their favorite brands and businesses, so if your business hasn’t developed a social media strategy, you’re missing out big time. Don’t fret. We’ve got an answer for you. Rea’s social media expert Rebecca Weiand is here to tell us how we can actually use these platforms as a tool to understand our customers better. Welcome back to unsuitable, Rebecca.
Rebecca Weiand: Thank you. I’m glad to be back.
Dave: Whenever we start talking about social media and Twitter, especially in the day’s environment, I think we have to start out with our Commander in Chief and talking about President Trump and his Twitter account. That’s social media.
Rebecca: Is he active on social media?
Dave: I think he was last week, maybe.
Rebecca: Okay. Maybe. Yeah.
Dave: You and I had a conversation off air about whether or not we believe that some media, social media strategy, that he is employing. And as a professional with social media, what do you think?
Rebecca: As much as it probably pains some people to hear it, it’s probably true that he does have a social media strategy, and what he’s doing is very much planned. He has been engaging long enough on Twitter and on social media to know the reaction that he’s going to get by what he shares that a publicist or someone has probably screamed their head off by now telling them, “You can’t do that,” but he continues to do it. So whether, what the ultimate plan he has, I don’t know, but yes. If you’ve been getting the same reaction over and over again by what you share and you’re still doing it, there’s definitely a plan there that he has for the way he shares his tweets and his content.
Dave: Well, my guess is there’s probably more people today than six months ago, a year ago, that are following Twitter because of his activities on Twitter.
Rebecca: Yes. Very much. People are listening and following and want … As you and I talked, when we were looking for people to follow, we both commented that we just follow him just to see what he’s going to do, so just to see what’s the next crazy thing that he’s going to tweet about or the next thing he has to share with everyone. He’s getting people just to get people.
Dave: As we talked about earlier, the social media used to be kind of a personal platform where you would connect with your friends. And then businesses jumped in big time, and now politicians and all types of businesses are using social media, so it’s here to stay.
Rebecca: It is. What’s really nice about social media is, like you said, it does give that personal side. Looking back, Barack Obama was probably one of the very first presidents to start using Twitter. Obviously, Hillary, Bill, and George W, all of them are on Twitter, but they weren’t really using it while they were in the White House, so having Barack use it, it made him more personable. It kind of made him more relatable, and that’s what’s really powerful about social media. It also works the same for businesses.
We use our social media a lot, especially Facebook, to show the inside of Rea. What’s it like to work at Rea? We’re people. We’re not just a business. We’re people and we have this personal side, this great side, this company culture that we want to share and show, and that’s what people engage with and that’s what they want to engage with. They want to engage with that person or that … Not just the brand, but they want to engage with also the people behind the brand.
Dave: Well, as part of Rea’s social media, you’ve been very busy, very active with the recent merger with Rea & Associates Walthall CPAs in the Cleveland market, so I assume you and your team have been extremely busy on the social media sites to develop a strategy to get the news out.
Rebecca: Yes. What we did was we definitely broke the news first with a magazine, Crain’s, up in Cleveland, but we shared it on all our social media sites to also encourage and show. We were sharing Walthall’s content. They were sharing ours. What was kind of nice too is, we launched this Paws-to-Paws campaign, which was a fundraiser for the hurricanes, and we were raising money for the Humane Society, which the money raised was going directly towards the animals in the two areas that were really devastated by the hurricanes. We both launched that campaign the same time to really show that we’re coming together as one firm. What’s really great about both our firms is we’re very much about giving back.
Dave: The hurricane brought two firms together to raise funds, and I think you and your team used the social media platform to get that done.
Rebecca: To show that we have a common goal. We have a common interest, and it’s to give back and help those that need it.
Dave: I think we used two nice, two very different examples, one on the political front and one where we used strategy recently to announce the merger as kind of a springboard to talk about how to use social media to better understand customers, clients, potential clients, customers, things like that. Let’s talk about the strategy that you might suggest to accomplish that goal.
Rebecca: I think it’s important when you’re starting a social media is to first gain … Is just first start following. Look for clients you might want to work with or currently work with and start following them on social media, also publications that are related to your industry. Start following them and build up the following, and then what you can do is develop a strategy to start sharing your content plus their content, because social media’s not just about me, me, me. Here’s all this great content. He’s all the great stuff. You want to share others and share success of others as well.
So start following them. Start sharing your own content. Start sharing some of theirs. And then your next step is to kind of figure out what content is being engaged with. What content is reaching the most amount of people? What’s really nice about all the social media platforms is they give you analytics, so you can go and see your reach. You can go and see your retweets, or your shares, or your clicks. But what’s also important is to also take it one step further.
One of the things that Google allows you to do is to create what they consider a tracking link. You can make a specialized link that follows the person wherever they click and if they come to your website you can watch and see. How long are they staying on your page? Are they going to other pages? That to me is a little bit more important than just the reach and the clicks, because that person, if they stay on for two minutes, three minutes, if they’re going to three or four pages, they’re engaged with you. They’re engaged with your company. That was content that was important to them or they wanted to know more about, and it gives you a set up to figure out. What is the other content to share that’s similar to that, that will get the same engagement?
Dave: Part of the strategy and you mentioned, and I didn’t really think about this as I was preparing for today is that obviously I have a plan in place, but part of that plan has to be measure, study the analytics, the results and things like that, that are going on.
Rebecca: Oh, definitely. You just can’t just put content out there and hope for the best. Now when you’re starting your strategy, when you’re starting it there’s going to be a lot of trial and error, so you are going to have to figure out what the right mix is. What is the right information to share and the best way to share it? But once you’ve gone on social media for probably a couple months, you’ve gained enough analytics to figure out. Okay, they really like seeing these tax articles that we do, or they really like it when we share office photos of … We always have one of our really proud, or one of our posts that get a lot of engagement is, we have our Medina office. They always trash Dave McCarthy’s … The last day of tax day they always trash his office, so we share that photo.
Dave: They throw that picture out there.
Rebecca: Yeah. And people like that, and again that goes back to what I was mentioning earlier, is they like seeing. We like to have fun. We’re accountants but we have fun, so it’s showing that inner side of Rea and so that’s the stuff that we try to share more of. Now we do have to sometimes share some content that’s updating, might not always be the most popular or the most wanted, but we’re still sharing that informative to show our expertise. You do have to still sometimes mix that in there, but if you mix it with enough of the content they want to see, they’ll pick up on it and it’ll help encourage that.
Dave: You’re a member of The Rea Marketing Team, which is very active and has been active the last several months with many activities including the merger. But share with me if you can. How much time during the week do you spend on monitoring social media and analyzing and watching the strategy?
Rebecca: Well, we do spend probably a couple hours a day. I do have some help. We do have Alex, who is the newest member of our team, and kind of training him and having him take over some of this. It’s probably about two to three hours a day, but we’re monitoring a lot more. We’re monitoring for various principles, for various clients, so at one company is only focusing just on their company, it wouldn’t be as intimidating or as much as what we do, but you definitely want to spend at least … I mean, it’s daily.
Dave: Definitely every day.
Rebecca: Every day, just check your accounts, maybe a couple times a day. Just go in and see how people are engaging. What’s really nice is there’s a lot of ways to get alerts to your phone so you can be notified when someone posts on something, when someone shares your content, so that way you’re not going three hours with this content, or this comment, or this retweet that wasn’t really … And then people are waiting for a couple hours for your response. You can get notified right away, so it is kind of nice.
There are tools to help monitor. We use Google alerts a lot, where we put in, we’ll have Rea & Associates or we’ll have some of our principle’s names. At any time on that web that those terms are used, they’ll send us an email we can read and see what the article’s about, and so we like to track that. We like to track to see and let people know when we’re mentioned or when they’re mentioned in the content.
Dave: Right. We’re talking about the social media strategy for professional services. Obviously we mentioned Rea & Associates and Walthall CPA’s professional services, but social media strategy should apply or could apply to almost any industry. Obviously we see it in retail a lot. What about contractors, manufacturing, medical? Are you seeing more and more social media strategies developing in those industries?
Rebecca: Definitely. I think a lot of times people think social media strategy is just putting out content and having people engage. There is more to it. Sometimes you need a presence on social media just to follow your clients, your prospects and see what they’re doing. What’s really mean, and they kind of call it Facebook stalking, but for contractors or manufacturers, if you have a client you want to work with or you have a current client that’s a really big client you’re working with, follow them on social media. Stay up to date about what’s going on in their business. The reason for that, it gives you an opportunity if something big happens, gives you the opportunity to reach out to them. So if they get a new CEO, you can see that and be like, “Hey. Let me give them a call,” whether it’s the current client or a new client, or a prospect client, you can call them and say, “Hey. Congratulations.” Or, they have a really great second quarter, you can then touch base with them. It gives you a reason to touch base.
Everyone loves being complimented and told congratulations. It gives you that good feeling inside. So then you’re not really stalking them, is what people call it. You’re just keeping up to date about what your clients or prospects are doing, and it just again gives you the point to reach out, because you never know what that phone call might turn into. If it’s a prospect, they could’ve been like, “This vendor, my current vendor is making me so mad and they’re missing deadlines. I’m so glad you called me. I want to switch. I want to go with someone else. Let’s talk.”
Dave: How do I know as a business owner, and obviously all dollars are tight these days, but how do I know that my content is actually performing the way that I want it to be? Can you talk to that?
Rebecca: What’s really nice is when there’s two things we kind of look at to your content. There’s reach, which reach is how many people actually saw the content. It doesn’t necessarily mean they acted upon it, but that means when they were going through their newsfeed, every social media has that feed, they went and they scrolled through and they know that they at least saw it.
And then you look at the engagement, which depends on the social media channel, or the social media challenge as to what that engagement is. Is it a retweet? Is it a click? While you do want to have a high reach, you also want to make sure your engagement’s pretty high, so you will … Kind of what you take is engagement over reach, and you get your engagement percentage. There’s tons of studies out there. It says in manufacturing industry, this is the average engagement rate, and accounting. If you Google it, there’s going to be a study. There’s going to be something that will have the industry standard and you can see how far that content’s getting and then how people are engaging with it.
Dave: Right. Earlier you talked about how to use social media and this reminds me of maybe an example you can comment on. I saw a tweet where there were some misspellings and maybe improper grammar. Now did that have a negative impact on the reader of that tweet? How do you feel about that?
Rebecca: We are all human and we all do make mistakes, but unfortunately that does have a negative impact on you, especially if you do it frequently. Going back to Donald Trump, he’s very much well known for doing those quick tweets and having misspellings or using the wrong word. And people actually look at him differently, look down on him for doing such a thing.
Now he does it quite a lot, but unfortunately there’s always going to be that one person that will read that article, even though you’ve read it five times over and over again, that will say, “Oh, you missed the word the.” So it does happen, but I think it’s more important … Definitely it’s something to keep in mind of. But if you’re constantly doing it, it will kind of hurt your credibility a little bit.
Dave: If you’re a business and you’re shooting out a tweet and you leave a couple words out, that could have an impact on the reader.
Rebecca: It could. It makes it look less credible. They click on it, they might not see the true … They might not see it as the truth, or they might think that they probably didn’t do a really good job of watching their content and they just put out sloppy work. Especially in the accounting firm, if I’m putting out all these articles with spelling errors or the grammar’s not the best. What are they going to do with my tax return? Are they going to have a zero in the wrong spot? And that could hurt me, and so yes, it does play into it.
Dave: Good point.
Rebecca: Again, you don’t have to be perfect. I do believe that some people understand that there is error, but you want to keep your mistakes very minimal.
Dave: In your opinion, and you’ve been doing this quite well for a long period of time, what’s the most popular platform of social media? Is it Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus, YouTube, Instagram? There’s so many.
Rebecca: Yes. There are. It really looks into generations. I would say right now Facebook is probably still one of the top. The top three would probably be YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Now the younger audience are coming in and they’re using more Snapchat and Instagram and YouTube still, but where we’re seeing, especially within our industry, we’re seeing more Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, so it really is dependent on the generation you’re looking at the industry you’re looking at. But overall, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
Dave: Right. Right. You talked about using social media to better understand your customers and clients. We talked about the content performing. You touched briefly on: Who should you follow? We just touched on that. I want to spend the last few minutes talking about who you should follow. Address that a little bit if you would.
Rebecca: Sure. As we talked about mostly is clients and prospects, but I think it’s also important to follow publications. Think about your content. Where would you like it published? We’ve actually had some success on our end if there’s specific industry publications, like the dental industry for example. We started following them with our dental account and started sharing some of their content, because what it does, it alerts them that, oh hey. Who’s this Rea CPA that just retweeted us? So they’ll come back, look at our profile and see all this dental content we share and think, oh. And they’ve actually have reached out to us and asked us to write articles for them. So keep that in mind too. Where do you want to be published? Share articles that would be great in the publication and then share their publication articles so they’re seeing that you’re engaging with them, and then they’ll more likely engage with you back. I think that’s very important.
And the same with trade industries, especially if you … Like with us in the accounting industry, we follow a lot of the trade industries for the industries we work with. I’m not just referring to accounting, which is also great to follow your own trade industry, but your clients. What trade industries are they involved in? If you start sharing their content, they’ll probably share yours, and then their followers might see your content too because they might start retweeting it. Very much like you said, it’s about personal relationships, so if you are building and sharing content of others, they’re more likely to do it of yourself, and it’s just helping you get seen by more people.
Dave: This social strategy, media strategy, is getting bigger and bigger and should be a large part of everyone’s budget, not only dollars, but time. Like you said, it takes a lot of time to monitor a lot of the things to get it where you want it to be.
Rebecca: It does. There are definitely … There are tools to help, as I mentioned earlier. You can get notifications to your phone. There’s also Google alerts, or Hootsuites, or TweetDuck. There’s a million platforms like that where you can pull in a certain list of people you follow on Twitter. We have a manufacturing list publication, so it’s a list of just manufacturers publications’ Twitter accounts, so we can just directly see their stuff. We also have search lists created where we can see we’re searching for Dave Cain, and we can see any time Dave Cain is mentioned or Rea Radio. And so there are tools like that, that will make it a little bit easier so you’re not just looking, going to Twitter, and going through the whole feed. You can kind of segment it down to what you really want to see, so there are ways to make it a little bit easier, but yes, it does take some time and some commitment.
Dave: Our guest today has been Rebecca Weiand with Rea & Associates marketing team, and she is a social media expert as testimony to your presentation the last few minutes. Much appreciated. Before we wrap up, we always like to ask a fun question to get a little more insight into the minds of our guests. We have a little question for you. Are you ready for your question?
Rebecca: I’m ready.
Dave: All right. This afternoon, what if the White House calls and they’re looking for some social media strategy. What would your response be?
Rebecca: My biggest thing, my biggest advice would be to listen. I think, and this is just based on currently who’s in the White House, is they’re pushing out a lot of content, but are not listening to what they’re getting back in response to the content they’re putting out. It goes back to looking at, when we mentioned earlier, you want to find the content that people are engaging with. While yes, the content that’s coming out of the White House now, people are engaging, but it’s not the right way. It’s not the right kind of engagement.
Dave: There’s engagement.
Rebecca: There is engagement, but you want to make sure it’s the right kind, so really listen to what people are saying, what people are asking of you and respond by sharing that content or responding to them. Just don’t ignore them. It’s a two way conversation.
Dave: Good piece of advice. Thanks again for joining us on unsuitable today, Rebecca. Great insight.
Rebecca: I’m glad to be here. Thank you.
Dave: I think this is a good time to point out that many social networks Rea is currently on and the fact that you can use hashtag Rea Radio to engage with the firm. Listeners, feel free to check us out on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Plus. We also have a YouTube channel with videos and you might just see a tribute to Tom Petty. Thanks again for joining our weekly podcast episode. You can also engage and subscribe with unsuitable on Rea Radio on SoundCloud and iTunes. Until next time, I’m Dave Cain encouraging you to loosen up your tie and think outside the box.