Mark: Welcome to unsuitable on Rea Radio, the award-winning financial services and business advisory show that challenges your old school business practices and traditional business suit culture. On this show, you’ll hear from industry professionals who will challenge you to think beyond the suit and tie. We’re offering you meaningful modern solutions to help you enhance your company’s growth. I’m your host Mark Van Benschoten.
This week on unsuitable, we are going to talk about what opportunities you might be missing out on if you fail to utilize or underutilize social media. As a member of the Practice Growth Team at Rea, Rebecca Weiand analyzes data to identify growth opportunities. In doing so, she maintains and measures the firm’s online presence and helps educate others throughout their firm about how they can get more from their own personal online presence. Today, she’s going to unlock the secrets of social media and share how a solid strategy can help you generate leads and ultimately win new business. Welcome to unsuitable, Rebecca.
Rebecca: Thank you, Mark.
Mark: Really glad that you’re here. Can’t wait to talk about social media, but a couple questions. You like to travel to New York. Where in New York?
Rebecca: Rochester.
Mark: Rochester. You drive up to Rochester?
Rebecca: We do.
Mark: About 6 hours?
Rebecca: Yes, it is, and we travel with 2 children, a 3 year old and a 5 year old.
Mark: Is that where you’re from?
Rebecca: Yes. I’m born and raised in Rochester.
Mark: How did you end up in Ohio?
Rebecca: That’s a great question. I actually went to Walsh University. They’re located in North Canton, Ohio. They actually have a lot of alumni in the Rochester area, so they heavily recruit there, and they actually gave me the best financial aid package. I came here, shortly got a job right after school, met my husband, and we’re still here.
Mark: Here you are. I was looking at your bio this morning and you are quite active, and I just want to thank you for the time that you spend with Phoenix Rising and Big Sisters, two great organizations. I know you work, you’re a mom, and to volunteer your time I think you’re tremendous so thank you for doing that. It’s awesome.
Rebecca: I’m happy to do it. It’s great to be able to share experiences and help others, so it’s awesome to be involved.
Mark: I think people miss an opportunity that don’t volunteer. I think they’re missing an opportunity for personal growth, to give back. People say, “I don’t have time,” and I think people should be making time to do that.
Rebecca: It’s definitely hard to do and fit in. We have to find the right organization that works for you.
Mark: Correct, something you’re passionate about.
Rebecca: Exactly. With Big Sisters and Big Brothers, since I have two small children, my Big Sister, she’s about 12. She likes to every now and then when I can’t get away, she’ll come with me and hang out with my kids and she enjoys that. It’s finding those things that work for you and your schedule.
Mark: You’re setting a great example for your kids, because they’ll mirror that behavior into the future. Thank you again for doing that. We’re going to talk about social media today, right?
Rebecca: Yes.
Mark: Do you know that’s the topic?
Rebecca: I do. It’s actually a pretty hot topic.
Mark: It is a hot topic, yeah. Who does this really apply to? Who should be doing social media?
Rebecca: Just about everyone. What I like to talk, when I speak with principals or other people or even businesses, is I think it’s important for you to realize everyone should be on social media but they don’t have to be on everything. I think the fear is everyone knows Facebook so like, “Oh, I have to be on Facebook or I’m on Twitter.” I think what’s great for businesses is there’s so many varieties, you just have to research and find where your customers are.
Mark: When you say everyone, do you mean everyone at the firm or do you mean every business?
Rebecca: Every business. I think everyone in the biz … every business should be on social media and if it’s coming from internal, with Rea for example, definitely people within the firm. What’s really nice about social media is it gives you a chance to kind of … People are going to research you and people are going to want to look and get information about you, so whether it’s your business or people within your business, you want them to have a presence online because if you don’t, they might go search for somebody else. I was actually reading a tweet today and said that 72% of people make their purchasing decisions from online.
Mark: That was 72%?
Rebecca: Of people, mm-hmm.
Mark: … make their purchase decisions.
Rebecca: Through social media and online research.
Mark: That’s interesting. I don’t know, did they say for professional services, for retail purchases, it didn’t go down that far, but just 72% of the purchase?
Rebecca: Yes.
Mark: That’s kind of fascinating because I tend to think more people are not on social media than are, but you’re telling me that’s not true.
Rebecca: No. I think it’s more the opposite. I think more people are on it, using it, and I know there’s always the feeling that, like you said, professional services, “I work business to business, I shouldn’t be online, there’s no need. It works better for people that have customers.” You see big names like Coca Cola, McDonald’s and that’s great for them but it’s going back to what I’d mentioned earlier is people are still researching you. If you’re an accounting firm, like us for example, when we work with a client, they’re probably still going online and researching and trying to understand more about Rea and what we do and what people are saying about us.
Mark: I’m not very good at social media, so how would I research a company online? Would I go on Twitter and type in Rea & Associates?
Rebecca: Yes. You can actually go to each of the sites, go to Twitter, go to LinkedIn and just type in Rea & Associates, or a lot of times what people are doing now is they’re just going to Google and they’re just typing in Rea and Associates and then seeing what pops up. While it’s good to have a web presence, it’s also going to help boost your web presence and your online presence to be on social media sites and it’s going to, again, have your name pop up and people can then click on your … If you’re on LinkedIn, they can click on our LinkedIn profile or click on our partner’s profiles on LinkedIn and then learn more about them and about our company.
Mark: I always thought that social media started just individual. Stuff about Mark Van Benschoten and Rebecca and that’s how it got started, but it seems like it’s evolved.
Rebecca: Agreed. It started way back probably 15, not that long, 10 years ago with MySpace and then Facebook. It was very focused on the individuals, just talking about what I did this weekend, what I’m eating. It started that way, but people have evolved and are using it. What’s really nice about those tools is most times they’re free, so you don’t have to pay. Websites and all that, while they’re needed and great, this is another tool that’s free to help boost you, and it gives you another, again, control where you’re controlling your message or brand.
Mark: Is there any concern about inappropriate content on social media? You hear about young college graduates, they’re going for that job and somebody does a Facebook search and they saw the pictures from the college party face down in a …
Rebecca: It does, and everyone is under the … Some people are under the astigmatism that if they keep their stuff private it’s really private and it’s not. That is the things you do need to watch, but overall, you want to keep that professional looking, even though you’re in college and of course we want to have fun and go to the parties, just remember you’re in college to eventually get a job afterwards. You have to keep those things in mind, “Do I really want a future employer potentially seeing this,” because nothing on the internet is private.
Mark: Now, you just made a lot of people nervous.
Rebecca: Yes, I know. If you think about it too, I’m sure … Even while you’re going out and having a good time, I’m sure you don’t want those images anyways to be tied to you ten years later, five years later. It’s something to keep in mind too.
Mark: I’m just speaking from a parental, I’m not speaking from personal experiences. You said it doesn’t cost anything?
Rebecca: No, just to set up basic profiles it doesn’t cost anything, and to go and post and share content doesn’t cost anything. There are things that do cost money, advertising and doing ads. I’m sure everyone who’s been on social media has seen those ads along the side and in your feed, and those do cost money and they’re definitely beneficial depending on your strategy and what you hope to gain, but to at least get started and really feel out if this is the place for you or where you should go, it’s good to create a profile and just starting.
Mark: For the person just getting started, what should their first post be, “Hello Twitter, I’m here.” What do you say? What do you do?
Rebecca: That’s a great question. What’s really great about social media is you can share content. What I mean by content is you’re either sharing … For Rea example, we write tons of blogs and tons of articles. That’s great content for you to share, and it doesn’t even have to be stuff that you personally wrote. It can and it’s great and helps build your credibility, but if you’re doing it with your business, just share the content.
Mark: Share an article.
Rebecca: Share an article. Share articles from top brand or top magazines or re-tweet or hit that share button on Forbes or Entrepreneur or those big name magazines. What you’re doing is, right now if you’re just joining, you want to start sharing content that’s hot and relevant so you can gain the followers. Once you get that, you can better engage with them, but at least getting the bulk of the information, getting a ton of information out there so when people go to your profile they can see “Oh, this person, they share all this great … this content. I’m really excited by this. I like this. I should follow them.”
Mark: I always struggle on Twitter, not that I post a lot. I do post some things. You helped me with that. The hashtag, who comes up with the hashtags? Is there a hashtag monitor out there?
Rebecca: There is. There’s a couple websites I use. There’s hashtag.org, and you can go and research it and see who uses it.
Mark: Is that spelled our hashtag?
Rebecca: Yes, there’s no actual hashtag in it. There’s other sites too where you can go in and monitor who is using what hashtags and how popular they are. Now, when you’re starting a big campaign, you can actually create one like we do for if you ever follow us on Twitter, we use unsuitable or Rea Radio. You can follow those hashtags, but you can also create them yourself. There’s no need to do something that’s already been there. You can create a hashtag and share your content, and then, you can also get your hashtag trending and people using it.
Mark: When I think of social media, I think of Twitter, Facebook. Would LinkedIn, would that be social media?
Rebecca: Yes, mm-hmm.
Mark: Are there other ones?
Rebecca: There are tons. Instagram is another really popular one right now. Pinterest, a lot of people use that one to share. It’s a board where you can share ideas and recipes. A lot of people use it for recipes and crafts. Instagram is one that’s coming out now. That’s another photo one. There is Snapchat. If you’re not familiar with that one, it’s kind of like Instagram. You’re sharing photos, but the photo is only there for a couple seconds and then it goes away. It’s just another tool.
Mark: Is Rea on Snapchat?
Rebecca: We are not. We don’t have the audience there yet. We’re not on there. We stick mostly with Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Mark: How do you monitor what works, what doesn’t work? How do you go through and make that analysis?
Rebecca: What’s really neat about all these social media tools is they actually all provide you with analytics. You can go in on the backend and it will show you your reach. That’s how many people are actually seeing your content, and then, you can see your engagement. That’s how many people are actually doing something. They’re liking your status, they’re sharing your status, they’re commenting on that. You can watch that. It goes all the way granular down to the individual post and then it goes all the way to how you did for the month, how you did for the week, year, et cetera, et cetera.
What we do at Rea is look at both. We look at granular to see what specific content people are sharing, liking, and engaging, and then, we go all the way up to “Well, how do we trend in July versus June? What days of the week are we seeing the most content?” Then, we can adjust our strategy based on looking at that information.
Mark: Do the analytics cost anything?
Rebecca: No. Basic … where you get good information to make good decisions, no they can … There’s tools and there’s apps that you can add to get more information, but for just a business starting out looking for really good content, really good analytics, there’s no cost for that either.
Mark: Interesting. When you mention the days of the week, if we normally release things on Monday but that wasn’t a good day, Wednesday might be a better day so you might hold it. Is that the type of decisions?
Rebecca: Yes. We can look at the … The one example that I relay when I talk to people is we look at job postings. We’re also constantly hiring here. When we have a post go out, I was watching when would be a good time. We found out evenings, which makes sense because if you’re looking for a new job you’re probably not looking during the day when you’re at your current job or at school. You’re going to be looking in the evening. I’ve been sharing those posts later in the evening to try to get the most opportunity for people to see it.
Mark: Interesting.
Rebecca: Mm-hmm. Then, we’ve done the same thing like that. During the lunch hour, we share more of the fun company information or company news Tweets or posts because on your lunch break you don’t really want to read news, you want to step your mind away from that.
Mark: That’s very interesting. I didn’t realize, not just the day but the time of the day, about releasing information.
Rebecca: Mm-hmm.
Mark: Do you … I assume you can also … Certain content would be a bigger hit to the audience?
Rebecca: Yes. We look at that more specifically by time of year. Right now, we’re sharing more of … We’re sharing good things about back to school. Last week, we started sharing a lot of information about tax-free weekend that came up this past weekend, sharing daycare … tax deductions for daycare and things like that because that’s the mindset of people right now. Going to college, so we’re sharing that content about what kind of tax deductions you can make for college education. At the end of the year, we’ll start going to … we’ll share posts about end of the year planning, getting ready for the next year, thinking about tax, what can you do at the last minute. Then, we start tax season and the we go into more tax related content.
Mark: Fascinating. What’s the … If a partner came to you and says “Give me the last three clients we got because of social media,” would you be able to tell them that?
Rebecca: That’s one of the things that can be pretty hard about social media is you can’t really see to … you can’t see who everyone … everyone that is engaging. You can see … When you go to the page, you can see who likes your stuff, but of the reach, I can see I reached 10,000 but I can’t see who those 10,000 people are. Now, there are tools and things like marketing automation that can pull that information by using IP address and things like that, and it gets scary because of the information they can have, but those tools do cost a little bit more. What’s nice is we can put things in place to track that. If they’re coming to our website, we can put in when they fill out the contact us form, we can say “How did you hear about us?” We can show them what traffic comes from the certain social media sites and then through Google Analytics, again another free tool, you can see this many people came from Facebook and they spent four minutes on our page and they looked at three pages. That’s a pretty … That’s giving value to Facebook because they’re not just coming and leaving. They are engaged. They are interested. We can’t always see the end point if it led to the phone call or if it led to them going to contact us or something, but we can at least see that they’re engaging.
Mark: That was kind of a loaded question because I think … I would hope that your response would be “If we don’t do it, our competition is doing it and we’re going to lose opportunities.”
Rebecca: That is an excellent … That’s a great point is that everyone else … they’re doing it. If we aren’t there for them they’ll go to the next person.
Mark: It’s opportunities for new hires …
Rebecca: Mm-hmm.
Mark: … for new talent, and also for new clients I would think.
Rebecca: Yes, that’s correct.
Mark: It’s one of those things, if you’re not going to do it because we didn’t any clients, you don’t know and you’re going to miss out on opportunities.
Rebecca: You are. Like I said and I stress this a lot, people research now and they look. You want to be there where they’re looking and you want to make sure you have that content, you’re showing your expertise, and you’re showing your knowledgeable and know what you’re talking about. If you’re not, then yes they’ll go to the next person.
Mark: Also to show your brand, to show your personality. It doesn’t have to be all technical.
Rebecca: Right, I agree. On our Facebook page … Facebook is more the avenue where it’s the more personal, fun. You’re not going to share a lot of the real in-depth articles and information. We do like to have fun. We’ll show what the different offices do because of that reason especially with new potential hires. They can at least go to our Facebook page, understand our culture, and make that help them decide if that might be a place where they want to work.
Mark: Do some companies you work for, for the Practice Growth Group at Rea, do some people house this in the IT function because it’s all computer related?
Rebecca: No, I think it’s very much understood that it’s a marketing or a practice growth function. I have never ran into a thing where “Oh, this is something IT related,” in my career.
Mark: I didn’t want anybody to think that, that “Oh, this is an IT function that Joe Welker posts or something.”
Rebecca: I think they understand the importance of it’s part of your brand, it’s giving your message, so yeah it’s part of a marketing role.
Mark: Somebody getting started, what’s something that they should watch out for. As you get started and you’re adding, you’re sharing and liking articles and so forth, how should they … what should they be concerned about, “Oh, don’t do this,” or “If you see this happening.” Is there any advice you could give us there?
Rebecca: I think the biggest thing I can suggest or recommend for anyone just starting out is really research who you’re going to follow and who you’re going to share because unfortunately there’s so many … Just like you get spam in your email, there are spam Facebook pages, there are spam Twitter accounts, and you don’t want to be linked to those because they’ll hurt, again, your credibility and it will also hurt people following you because they don’t want to be part of you because you’re sharing this link that … and they’re like “Oh, re-tweet this and you’ll get $1,000.” That right there is very obvious that that’s something spammy, but when you’re sharing content from other people, read the profile of the person you’re sharing or about to follow.
What’s really nice about Facebook and Twitter is they put the little blue check mark next to people so you know that that’s an actual, that’s truly that page, they’re not pretending, they’re not spamming. Start following those pages and sharing their content because you can get yourself in a link where you click on something that’s not what you wanted to click or people then will see that you’re sharing a bunch of stuff just to share.
Mark: … and damage what you’re trying to create.
Rebecca: … you’re image, yes.
Mark: We’re running out of time here. Before we wrap up, I want to ask you the question that we ask every guest and I assume you’ve listened to these.
Rebecca: A couple times.
Mark: You know what the question is going to be.
Rebecca: I’m ready.
Mark: If you could have one superpower what would it be?
Rebecca: Mine would be, as you mentioned in my intro, is data, looking at numbers.
Mark: We already got a Captain Data.
Rebecca: I’m going to be Captain Data. I want to be a Human Google.
Mark: A Human Google.
Rebecca: I just love knowing information and knowing the answers to things. I’m very much that person, if I don’t know something I’m whipping out my phone right then and Googling what is this or what is that. I would love to have a knowledge and be able to instantly recall, and if anyone asks “What’s this mean,” I would be like “Oh, I’ll tell you. It’s this, this, and this.” I think that would be really neat.
Mark: That would be really neat. I agree with you. That would be exciting. Thank you again for joining us on unsuitable today, Rebecca, and a big thank you to our listeners for tuning in.
As usual, we have some additional resources and insight available online at www.reacpa.com/podcast. While you’re online, take a minute to find Rea and Associates on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter. Rebecca, are we on Tinder?
Rebecca: We are not on Tinder.
Mark: We’re not on Tinder. Pretty much everywhere but not Tinder.
Of course, you can subscribe to this podcast on SoundCloud and iTunes. We’d love the opportunity to connect with you while helping you grow your network as well. Until next time, I’m Mark Van Benschoten for unsuitable on Rea Radio encouraging you to loosen up your tie and think outside the box.
