The Community Strategy Podcast: The nexus where online community strategy meets intentionality

Episode 73: The Value of Discovery Work with Theresa Anderson

May 15, 2022 Deb Schell Season 1 Episode 73
The Community Strategy Podcast: The nexus where online community strategy meets intentionality
Episode 73: The Value of Discovery Work with Theresa Anderson
Show Notes Transcript

Theresa Anderson, Head of Agency Business, brings over two decades of diverse marketing experience to her role at Agorapulse.

Over the course of her career, she has worked with Fortune 100 enterprises, served as Program Director for the Center for Entrepreneurship at Rollins College, and managed all aspects of communications and marketing for one of the top ten marketing agencies in Central Florida.

At Agorapulse, her responsibilities include working directly with agencies to understand their unique challenges and championing solutions that work in the real world. Theresa develops and deploys peer-to-peer networking and learning opportunities, negotiates partnerships with key vendors, and works to ensure that the needs of agencies are represented at every level of the organization.


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The Community Strategy Podcast (CSP) offers interviews with online community leaders who share their community-building journey. Our podcast covers community concepts, community building, community strategy, community structure, community membership, and community management. We deep dive into the best ways to launch with platform reviews, give our thoughts on cultivating engagement, and the keys to identifying ideal members who will keep coming back and becoming super supporters.

Visit our Website Find Calm Here to learn more about working with Deb

Welcome to the community strategy podcast. I’m your host, Deb Schell on this podcast. I share conversations with leaders of purpose driven, private paid online communities that bring together like minded members for transformation to better their life, career relationships and well being as a community strategist, I help entrepreneurs build launch and grow online page communities on mighty networks and to learn more about working with me. Please visit my website, find calm here dot com. That’s F I N D C A L M H E R E dot com. I help entrepreneurs find calm in the process of launching an online community. So check that out please. I want to ask you, do you have a strategy question that you are struggling with something a challenge? Uh If you do, I want to start answering some questions uh through uh the podcast. Uh it’s a new thing I want to try so please shoot me an email at Deb at find calm here dot com and I will review any questions I get in the next episode.


I will add a answer section for any questions that I do get once I get some. So send an email to Deb at fine calm here dot com And I hope you enjoy this episode. I am super excited today for our guest with the community strategy podcast, Teresa Anderson, she’s the head of agency and business at Agora polls client. I just worked with, we did some discovery work together and really enjoyed working with her and so I’m so happy to have you on the podcast. Welcome. Thank you Deb, I’m super excited to be here. How fun I know it’s been such a joy working with you over the last couple of months and so tell everybody a little bit about what you do with the gore polls, What’s your role there? Sure. So I work for a goalpost head of agency business. My job is to make sure that our agency clients have everything they need to be successful at their jobs from start to finish. So every aspect of their interaction with us and every interaction of their success, basically every stage of their success is my business.


So making sure they have uh the education that they need, making sure that they have the tools that they need within the within the features within the tool and then also the work that you and I did, which was basically listening to them to find out what they need. So we can make sure that all the features in the tool are responsive to them and meet their needs. Very cool. Yeah, we did a lot of just asking questions about and tell us a little bit about Dora Pulse for people who aren’t familiar with that too. I would love to. So uh agora pulse is a social media management platform. So we Make were that one stop shop to make everything easy as far as publishing and scheduling and tracking and responding to all of your social media from one spot. So rather than logging into a bunch of native tools, logging in and out, you can do everything from one inbox, from one platform, from one dashboard and comparable lot of agencies out there. Be familiar with some of the other tools in the, in the space, but whose sweet sprout social is a couple of the bigger, the bigger names in the space.


Um, what we have really niche to ourselves as what we have really found our home in being a great solution for more complex social media environments like those you would find in an agency. So if you’re a growing team, if you’re a growing agency, we’ve structured ourselves to have the features at a price point that make it easy for you to grow and to succeed. Mm hmm. Yeah. So hard as a, uh, small businesses. But your your main focus is probably with larger organizations that maybe have a lot of um, of moving parts and maybe multiple social media accounts that they’re trying to uh manage all at the same time, I’m guessing. Well, it’s interesting because we have definitely found that it’s in complexity. I think complexity is the key word here. We have some, um, we have some clients that have an, an agency specifically, they have very, very robust complex social media footprints that they’re doing for many, many clients, but they themselves maybe only Have 4, 5, 6 employees.


They’re just managing social media for their clients that happen to have very robust footprints. So you know, We’re talking about some clients having 10, 2040 profiles just with one client. All it takes is like five or 6 clients for you two need a really robust tool. Right? Uh and talk about social media management. What’s your definition of a social media manager that, what’s that role look like? So for for agencies that role is uh for agencies Are two different types of agencies that I kind of have my my finger on the pulse of to uh to do a little pun there. But my fingers on the pulse of uh of two different types of agencies, you’ve got your straight up digital marketing agencies that do everything for their clients. Even the regular marketing agencies that could do, you know everything from old school letterhead to media buys to social media. They’ve gotta mix. Social media is in there. Mix. Um And they need a quick and need a quick and easy way to stay organized to to get all of that complexity under control and be efficient enough to be profitable.


There. There’s a big thing. Um So that’s kind of your your social media in the mix of a marketing agency. Then we’ve actually got a whole other category of clients that are just social media. So they do nothing but social media. Their bread and butter is social media and for those clients, social media management, it’s not just one thing they do, it’s everything they do. Yeah. And those are different. Those are totally different roles and and complexity in themselves of how do you time manage and and communication of your team of these different areas. And so part of our project actually was asking some of these agency uh owners or we talked to a wide variety of people when we did some, I helped with Discovery interviews recently. And can you can you explain a little bit about the process that you and I did and why you wanted to do uh some discovery interviews? Sure. I feel like Discovery doesn’t always get its due as far as how important it is um when you’re doing pretty much anything.


So I think that you know it’s easy to um get in your own bubble and think that you need a feature or think that you know how to solve a problem and forget that you know inside of your little echo chamber maybe what you think isn’t everything. And then I think there’s a secondary echo echo chamber that can happen if you’re only talking to clients. So if you’re only talking to your clients, your clients either love you or hate you or some variation in between. And and no matter what that variation is of their familiarity with you, it does affect their, it does affect their answers. It doesn’t affect their perception, they’re talking to you and they know you so what you and I did which was very very interesting and also very critical to our discovery process was we only focused on talking to non clients and that really gave us a different perspective. That was super important when we were doing the positioning and the messaging for what ended up being a new feature for us.


But it was, it was super critical to get that non client perspective. And then it was also very important to have you as part of that process because again, as far as tainting the results, I love the company. I think the feature is fantastic. If I’m answering the question, I’m asking the questions, it’s only natural that as a human being, I’m going to allow my emotions to color the discussion. So bringing you in as a very, you know, all of your skills as a good communicator and a good listener were applied to getting really pristine answers that weren’t tainted by any preconceived notions. And that made that discovery so valuable in our, in our process. Yeah, I think it’s such a good point to talk about people who are not your customers, not your clients because yeah, your, your clients, your customers are probably are giving you a lot of information to help you decide if you know what products or features need, they need or you know, problems that they encounter.


They’re already kind of communicating. Usually it’s problems, they’re not really telling you everything’s great. They’re only coming to you and hey, this isn’t working the way we thought it was gonna work. But to end to the point you’re saying is that, you know, whether whatever they have, they have some kind of understanding or, or background on the, on the overall brand and to talk to people who are actively doing these different roles of social media management but aren’t familiar, maybe necessarily with your with agora polls. That was the point that they didn’t really know about the, the platform or your, your organization. They actually, we’re talking about with them about their problems around the, the tools that are accessible to them today and what they use to help support their efforts in. And now we specifically, we’re talking about analytical data and we’re reviewing, reviewing those metrics to identify and some people we learned don’t various re various answers to the question of what engagement meant.


We found that, right? But just just to explain for people listening, what we wanted to do was to understand what their problems were in regards to community management around collection of data and whether the companies that they worked for the agencies or clients that they had, if their agency, if those tools were helping them design a social media strategy that was going to be benefiting the organization, whether that’s a the agency or the clients. Right. Right. Well it was, it was very interesting to how, how to your point they differed on what was success. They differed on what was metrics. They differed, they differed on what was considered a win for the social media. So like all of those things when you, when you when you stripped it all the way and said, hey, tell me how you’re telling your boss, you’re doing a good job and that. And the answer to that question was surprising how wide an answer we got to that question. So some people, what was it?


We talked to the one woman who worked in education and she said her definition of success and I’m paraphrasing was that if her board members were out in public and they and someone commented to them, hey, I liked that social media post on the on the university website like that was that was the pinnacle of success for her. And and that was pretty amazing. And then we had other people that were still um, you know, focused on likes and comments and shares and and then we started drilling down and, and, and we did run into some people that word doing a lot of extra work to try to get to meaningful data. So I think that we definitely saw that wide breadth, but we definitely had to drill down and carve out a little space for real bottom line R. O. I driven data and that was, we had to peel back the layers to get answers to those questions because it wasn’t and easy question and answer.


We really had to define the terms we had to tell them, how are you measuring the business impact of social media and that and for us the terms that we defined as as we were going through our Discovery dead, we were inventing that as we went. We just we decided that business impact of social media has to be defined as sales leads and visitor behavior and that is what we need to know if we’re going to prove the value of social media to a company’s bottom line, likes and shares may or may not do anything for us that comment from the board member here is when they’re out on saturday at lunch and someone comes up and says they was a great social media post. That is not going to move the needle for the company. It just isn’t well it depends on what the post was. Right? Well, I am certain that them saying something to the board member about it probably didn’t move the needle unless they went and signed their kid up that afternoon. I guess that that’s possible when it was bringing in some of those comments we had from some other people, the cocoa beach lady who was on the government there was talking about awareness, their campaigns about awareness and in her community, in in in the community that they’re trying to as her role as a public information officers.


Her role is to inform the public about different programs and initiatives and a lot of community members don’t know, you know what they have access to as a community member in their government system. And so that’s what they were really, you know, that’s the only thing. They were really, they’re not trying to get anybody to necessarily buy anything, but they were just trying to get information to the right people so that the people could then go come to an event, show up at a, you know, a town hall meeting or whatever that is. Right. Right, right. But for her, she really was paying attention to visit her behavior. She didn’t frame it that way. But when we really, I don’t know if you remember we dug in with her a little bit and she’s like, yeah, we’re measuring how many people are visiting this web page. We’re measuring how many people downloaded that form and requested services. Um, so whether or not it was it was part of like the common vernacular. I think, I think we really are at the point in social media where social media is getting mature enough where we’re asking these questions.


I think up until now for the most part, social media has kind of been a necessary evil for a lot of places you have to have it, you have to dump money on it. You don’t ever get anything out of it. I think that the time is passing, that’s, that’s not going to be acceptable going forward. We’re starting to get a little bit more savvy were starting to grow up a little bit, we’re starting to expect where show me where the rubber meets the road, you want a budget, you want to hire people, you want to sit at the table when we’re making our strategies, then you need to prove to me that this is somehow moving the ball for us. And, and like I said, even though she wasn’t using those words when we drilled back, that’s what she was measuring. She was measuring her success on how many people actually took action in a meaningful way to get the resources that they needed from their community. And that was great. And that’s the key word that I like, that you just mentioned is action. People taking action because you can’t take action on what you don’t know.


And if somebody just generally says, well we need social media. So let’s just get somebody who can uh put together some posts on facebook because we don’t know anything about, you know, facebook or linkedin or whatever the instagram. So we have to be on instagram and now we have to be on Tiktok, we don’t know anything about these platforms or you know, who were, they might not even know who’s actually going there. Now. One of the comments, um, was that, oh, we know our people are on facebook, so we’re our effort and time is spent on facebook because that’s where our audiences and so they had a bit of an educated um decision that they made on what platform they’re focusing their attention on but not everybody obviously has done that and some people are just like, well we have to be everywhere so we’ll just be everywhere. Um but then what’s the purpose, what what what is the end result if you pay somebody you know social media manager or maybe if it’s like in those roles that we talk to people where there doing multiple things in social media is only a part of their role then what is how do we prioritize spending five or 6 or 10 hours a week on your social media campaigns.


And how does that, how do we justify that time versus Okay, we’re going to build sales pages or we’re gonna, you know, something specifically related to the end results of purchases of clients actually signing up for joining or whatever the whatever the the ask is. Right, Well the reality is is that if you can’t prove the things you’re talking about, if you can’t prove your bottom line value to the organization, you are an expense. And guess what happens to expenses when times get tough expenses get cut. But if you can prove that you’re adding to revenue revenue builders get more budget. Revenue, builders get more people. Revenue builders are invited into the room when important strategies are being being created. So uh this is a this feature and this conversation is, it is, it’s literally a game changer, people throw that around. But this is literally before analytics.


After analytics, we can we can mark the line right here and what’s going to end up happening because dad as much as we’re, you know, we’re we’re focusing on the, on a couple of the people that that uh you know, maybe weren’t as sophisticated. We’ve talked to a couple of people that were advanced level analytics. Spelunkers is the word that came to my mind. But like these are people that are diving into google analytics headfirst, swimming through the ocean of crazy Statistics to find the one little golden pearlie nugget that they need out of it and come back with something valuable. We definitely talked to people who are putting a lot of time and effort into digging that data out of google analytics in order to in order to be able to take that to their clients and two there and to their bosses. And for those people, I would say they are on the front edge of doing this, they’re on the front, you know, the on the front line, the front edge of doing this.


But we’re all no one is going to be able to escape it. It’s coming. Like if your boss isn’t asking for those numbers. Now, your boss is going to be asking for those numbers. Like it’s it’s not something that we can put off as an industry well and to uh most of the listeners that probably possibly either own their own company or entrepreneurs because a lot of people might be entrepreneurs that listen to this podcast, they’re the they’re the owner. So they want to, they don’t have a lot of time. They’re trying, they’re doing their sales, they’re doing their marketing, their, you know, they could be doing pretty much all the hats they’re wearing, all the hats, maybe they have a virtual assistant that’s helping them with something like, you know, social media creation in Canada or scheduling on their scheduling apps. But um you know, that’s that’s even a rarity. So they have to justify, because they’re paying somebody else to do that then if they hire a virtual assistant that it’s costing them bottom line money each month or each annual year, whatever you’re looking at there.


So they have to figure out whether whether their investment in in in in someone is worth it or their time. If they’re doing it themselves as a startup, uh is my time valuable or should I be on client calls? If I can charge x amount of dollars for a client call, I don’t want to spend three hours working on my social media campaign, which which is a, I don’t know if I’m gonna get clients from this or not. But if I get on client calls, I know I could convert people because I know that, you know that’s going to equal dollars in my bank account at the end of that call. Hopefully if you, you know you’re doing a sales conversion call. I mean that’s where the rubber meets the road Deb. And and if if you’ve been hiding out in that necessary evil brand awareness, you know uh if that’s where you’ve been hiding out as a social media person like oh well we’re just here for brand awareness, oh well we have to be here. We have to have a facebook page. Like I would, I would challenge you to start thinking about this differently. That now is the time because what’s going to happen for that for that segment of the, of the population for the people that are doing social media or offering social media management services.


The time is coming when you’re gonna lose clients. The time is coming when you’re gonna lose jobs to other people. If you’re not able to prove these metrics, if you’re not putting on your resume, I increased conversion from uh from facebook to the website by 30% in a year. Like those are gonna be the numbers that they’re looking for on resumes on pitches. It’s coming. Yeah. Oh and uh the community industry. So we talk about social media uh and and community is the buzzword in 2022 that’s all what I talk about is is community building. And a lot of people ask me, well how do I get people to my online community and I specialize in the muddy networks platform, which is an intentional uh connection platform. It’s not social media, it’s that different altogether conversation we’re having inside these private paid spaces and but people say, well how do you get people there? And a couple, there’s a couple of ways we talked about that, but I wanted to just go back to Discovery is really important to see who is my ideal client, who is my ideal member in my community.


Where are they hanging out what social media platforms are they on? So it really goes back to a part of, part of the equation is about Discovery and the other part could be where am I promoting my offer? Once I get clear of my offer, I have to talk to people and I have to know where they’re hanging out. So it kind of all lines up together to say, okay, I know my my ideal members are probably mostly on linkedin. So I’m going to connect with those people who are already in my existing network. I’m gonna talk to, you know, maybe I’ll put up a post on linkedin and say, hey da da da da da and then the people that respond to me, I’ll ask them, would you like to get on a call with me and that’s how they do Discovery. They get their ideal member on the phone and actually talk to people and then maybe they do a survey because part of our project was putting together a survey so that you can collect other big data. So those things all add up to the product that you’re offering now, you’ve got validation because people have told you we need something and this product is solving that problem in some way, right?


Yes, definitely. For the people that I realized it was a need. So the people that were out there spelunking through google analytics, they saw this as a huge come up. Now I can get all this information instantly without having to go spelunking fantastic. But we also realized that we had an education job to do on the other people who weren’t even in the right, they weren’t even in the right cave, ghost plunking. They were they were out on the beach somewhere picking up seashells and the they weren’t even in the right cave. So we did realize that yes, we have a solution for that person to, but there might be a little piece of education to get them to where they see the need. I think it’s what were, you know, talking about bringing out to light this whole concept of No, it’s more than just being, having a profile on a social media channel. It’s more than that, it’s actually creating engagement and conversations with people because not there’s there’s no lack of content, There’s an over those are an oversaturation now of content.


The internet is massive with many, many, many, many places to find many, many, many, many things. Right? But how do we filter what we need to learn or what we need to view or we need to consume and and how is that being filtered to us? And social media is a good example of those algorithms that you’re fighting to try to get seen as a business owner are the very things that we’re talking about is how do we talk about measuring the success of social media? It goes back to all of those things kind of connect to um validating what we’re doing. So that then we can measure the success and then go back to the company and say, hey yeah, we’re actually this is what worked or learning the this is what didn’t work. And so we’re going to make sure we don’t spend, you know, a whole bunch of money doing facebook ads because we just learned, you know, over the past year that they just weren’t giving us the results we needed. Right. Right? Absolutely. And I would tell you for your for your people in the audience that are smaller businesses that are doing this. Um I’ll just, you know, throw this out there, you tm codes while they are a beast to wrestle.


They are the way that you’re going to be able to track back whether or not that white paper you wrote actually made anybody visit your website. So if you haven’t done any investigating into U. T. M. Codes. Um even if you aren’t using agora pulse even if you aren’t using our social media measuring feature on the platform. You can you can be a data warrior. You can figure out you tmS you can stick them on your downloads and on your posts and in your and and then you can go to google analytics and you can start to track those things yourself. Um If you want to have if you want to be able to make data driven decisions about where to spend your time that you have to be able to track. And I would point you in the direction of U. T. M. Codes to start your tracking journey. Yeah I think it’s a good point. A lot of people ask me and since you’re more of the social media queen than I am in that in that realm you know what social media is, where should I be, what social media should I be doing?


And do you have people come to you with that question? I’m curious. You know I have I have friends and family that come to me and asked that question. I think that um I think that if you’re if you’re a social media professional or if you’re a marketing professional you you kind of second nature know the the demographics and the attraction of each of the platforms. They all have their own kind of unique appeal and you and you kind of know what that is and you and you at very at the very outset you have to make an educated guess. I think this is where my people are gonna be and then see what kind of traction you get. You know that that’s that’s a that’s the trial and error part of this. So I think that finding the finding a platform and testing things out is a process that everybody has to go through. The small business owner and the social media professional. They’re all making it, they’re all making posts on chosen platforms and they’re hoping you know that they have outcomes but it’s it’s in those it’s all hopes and wishes until you stick a U.


T. M. Code on it and you know for sure otherwise you continue to be moving around in the dark unless you are are able to like really measure because because we actually have case after case after case. Some people will produce some produce something on organic social media. So they’ve they’ve put out a question or they put out a topic and they’ve got some answers and they see a lot of traction around it. Lots of likes, lots of comments when they and and so they think oh that that was successful. I should do more of that. But once they attach the U. T. M. Codes to it. Once they’re able to really track is this really moving the needle? Am I getting leads? Am I getting sales? Am I getting visitor demographics? That makes sense to me. They’ll see that posts that generate a lot of likes don’t necessarily generate a lot of downloads. There are a lot of clicks or a lot of measurable action and post that they thought we’re nobody really liked that but they got to downloads out of it.


So I think that there’s there’s there’s that part of it too. If you’re not if you’re not tracking that action all the way back to something that you are deliverable that matters to you. The social media can be misleading. The social media likes and a gate and like the likes and the comments and that quote unquote engagement, it was defined something different ways that can be misleading. Mhm. And if if you want to know the real story, you have to track it well and I I will say for are you even listening in the start of your journey as an entrepreneur startup? This is not necessarily time focused, good time to focus on that in the beginning, it’s more of a let’s get everything set up and built and and let’s build out um you know the system, the baseline, right? Um but as you grow as a business And as you have these metrics that then you can look back on and it takes time. So just to explain to people that this this is not like a 90 day thing, this is a longer time to review to really get an idea of what platforms are working, what posts are working and that’s kind of the the you know the nitty gritty of what people are are trying to identify as what are we going to do with our social media strategy, what does that mean for us in the next quarter or the next year based on what what we’ve done and so that takes time but and it’s helpful to have somebody in your either your organization that’s an expert or at least somewhat of familiarity with things like google analytics.


However we did have people that were really familiar with google analytics and still struggle with this platform that they were certified with google analytics. So all the people out there listening that are like oh google analytics um I must be an idiot. No, no, so many people are like that is the most confusing thing ever. Yeah, I mean over and over again people try, they do everything they can to avoid google analytics. You know that you’re you’re absolutely right that pain is real and I empathize and and I have to say that pain is one of the reasons why we developed this new feature was to try to take the sting out of that because I have to tell you google analytics is for me anyway is definitely something I have to kind of like I have to like pump. I have to like like give myself a big pep talk like okay we’re gonna get in there and we’re gonna look around and we’re gonna try to find something that we can use. All right, let’s go team because it’s not changing it again. Like everybody’s freaking out. They’re Moving to G.


four. I don’t know if you’ve heard that whole thing but like now there’s this big movement of foot they’re gonna upgrade upgrade you here. What you see my quotes, it’s they’re gonna upgrade it and you know everything now that you knew you don’t know and you have to start over again. So yeah it’s a that’s a real thing and that’s what’s channeling about tech tools in general of any tech tool that there’s always many different ways to do things and many tech tools out there. And so uh you know startups are also trying to figure out where their dollars are going to go and how how to best utilize which tech tools to use. And and so I would also say I was I had built my WordPress website. I’ve been working on improving the S. C. O. In the past two months of just adding, working on keywords and getting a better understanding of of these metrics and you kind of because of our work together. I got more interested in google analytics and I’m like okay I need to start kind of learning about this and I got some notifications about. There’s updates and I’m like okay, well this is a good time to learn because apparently some things are happening.


Um but I will say it’s not when you’re starting out, I just want to keep reiterating that people feel like anxiety about this. And so part of what I help people with and finding calm is that we talked about, well you’re not really, this is what’s the bottom line, is this going to help you get? Like what’s the big Goal? Do you need 4000 dollars a month in revenue consistently or 10,000 dollars or 50? Whatever it is. Well if that’s not going to help you get there, we don’t need to focus on that right now because whatever, you know, having a perfect social media presence does not equal dollars in your bank account. Great, it can over time, right, definitely, and it can definitely be part of a mix, but you’re right, it’s definitely, I don’t think you can start a business anymore without least asking yourself the social media questions. I feel like social media is now is integrated enough into business that there’s no leaving it out of the conversation, there’s no leaving it off your checklist when you’re just starting out.


Um but I definitely think you need to, you know how to eat an elephant, I think you definitely need to see it as a long term goal, you need to see it as a, as a substantial undertaking and you do have to um not overwhelm yourself, that doesn’t help anybody. You definitely have to find your calm. You definitely have to phase it out in a way that makes sense and doesn’t overwhelm you, but it also doesn’t do you any good. Um it doesn’t feel good to throw your effort into the wind either and and not know if it’s doing doing you any good. And so sometimes these google and google analytics or seeing the actual impact of something that you’re doing good or bad, at least it’s not shouting into the wind at least you’ve got some validation that something’s happening. You can make an educated and educated and informed next step and say, okay now from an educated place, I can make this happen, right, Right.


And I don’t feel like I’m just wasting time. Otherwise you’re what are you gonna do being linked in three times a week and not really and and and not really feel like it’s doing anything for you because that also is frustrating. Like you said, if you’ve got a limited amount of time, you’re starting a business, you need to see a certain amount of money coming every month. And it’s tough to it’s it’s it doesn’t feel good to do something if you don’t know it’s meaningful if it’s making any difference for you. So I don’t even think emotionally, it’s like, okay, something’s happening here and I can see it and I can see the needle moving and I can build on that? Yeah. Because even if I get, if I pay for people to like my facebook page And I have now 5000 people that are followers on my facebook page. But then the analytics and all that are the metrics and all the things that block that facebook, the algorithms is the word, the algorithms that facebook uses or linkedin or whatever are blocking basically anybody from seeing it anyway.


Um what’s the point of that? So I just paid for people to like be a follower so that I have to pay facebook because I can see so that they can see it. And then hope that on top of the fact that I’ve invested in that, that they will then see what I’m doing and become a customer or a client and that’s a lot of expectations that are not facts or results. And so it’s good to, well, it’s, it’s part of the equation. Social media obviously is a part of your business strategy no matter if you’re a startup or somebody that’s been in business for a long time, but it’s insightful and meaningful relationship with, with your social media strategy and some people don’t even, we talk about community strategy and similarly, some people that people that don’t think about their community strategy before they launch it, not on my community in the same respect. They don’t really think about their social media strategy and saying, okay, well what am I actually gonna do before I go out and you know spend six months creating facebook posts and then realize, oh and nobody’s really on facebook like my people are over on instagram or something, you know like and I wasn’t really focusing my time there and so now that then you feel like I’ve just, you know wasted a lot of time and effort and probably income by paying either it’s taking an entrepreneur time that they can’t, they can’t do something else.


It’s like what are you saying yes to that? You’re saying no to something else. So they if they’re doing that or if you’re high, you know, you’re paying somebody then that’s obviously coming out of your, your budgets like you’re talking about. But yeah, it’s it’s interesting. Social media is like such a an interesting topic. It is an interesting topic and it doesn’t have to, you know, I think that you there is good advice into in seeing social media as a necessity but not overwhelming yourself with it in the beginning. And I think I if I had advice I would say I would much rather you um make your best guess on what the right platform for you and Start with that one platform, you know, you don’t have to spread yourself out among all the social media platforms and hit all of them and do all of them. I would much rather you Do one really really well. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. And so I think that even when you’re starting out that’s good advice, pick where you think is the best place to put your eggs.


We’re guessing now we know we’re guessing we don’t have any metrics yet. We’re making a guess but put your eggs in that basket and and and conserve your energy. Don’t be all over the place, wasting your time and wasting your energy. So I think even in the sea of social media it’s like high that’s how my brain works. Debits like the chinese food menu of business activities. Like there’s so many things to choose from. There’s so many platforms. It’s just it’s ad Infinitum. Infinitum too many choices and then nothing gets done. So I think that you know paralyzing. Paralyzing. Paralyzing. I think that focusing your efforts even in the beginning is good at life and I think that’s that that’s something you just can’t you just can’t be everywhere and at all and you can’t be a master of everything at the very beginning and uh it’s okay not to be it’s okay not to be it’s actually but but as I said I would much rather you if you picked up facebook as your platform then do facebook well.


And then my second part of advice on this would be. And doing facebook well is if you’re linking to anything take the time to put the U. T. M. Link in there because if you don’t I mean again I’m I’m now saying to you okay don’t worry about twitter, don’t worry about instagram don’t worry about linkedin. You’ve decided to focus on facebook and part of doing facebook well is making sure that all your links are trackable. Yeah focus your energy don’t all the time that you’re saving by not being on instagram do facebook Excellently. And that includes you’re you T. M. Codes right? Yeah that’s good and and there’s lots of resources I’m sure on how what what that all means and how to figure that out. So I’m not going to go down that road. I do want to come back because I didn’t we talked we’ve been talking about it but the audience doesn’t know about your product and the product that we were doing discovery for. So I want to make sure we cover that. Well it’s it’s it’s a lot about it. Obviously it’s a lot of what we’ve already kind of talked around to your point. Um So what what are your pulse basically from our discovery with our own internal clients and discovery that you and I did with non clients we did identify this as a problem specifically for um are ideal clients which are those more calm.


You know this problem gets exponentially bigger the more complex your social media footprint is. So um so for our ideal client who has this complex social media footprint this is a pain point google analytics, pain point, you tm codes pain point being able to prove the return on investment for social media pain point being able to justify bigger, bigger budgets pain point. So once we identified all those pain points then we went to our brilliant engineering engineers and said how can we solve it? And so what we’ve basically done, um if you if you are able to add this feature to your, to your subscription with your pulse, what it allows you to do is it automates a lot of this so it just takes it off your plate. So you tm codes if you guys get to get into that and look around into that, it’s a lot of administration behind creating a U. T. M. Code. And so what this does is it automates the creation of the U.


T. M. Codes right inside the platform. Then it takes those links and it allows you to automatically shorten them with right inside the platform. You don’t have to leave huge time savings, then it makes it easy for you to share that you tm code because I don’t know about you but the minute I copy and paste something, I run the risk of missing a letter or dropping something and so copying and pasting you tm codes also challenging. So they in the new feature we made sure that the U. T. M. Codes live forever in a drop down. So if I’m sharing it with you you’re grabbing it right from the dropdown no chance of copy and paste problems. I mean you sound like very little things but it’s just each one of these things is just shaving time and complexity off the process. And then once you’ve got your U. T. M. Codes and you’ve put it where you want it wanted it. Now we’ve made it so you don’t have to leave the tool to get the information from google analytics that google analytics information is gonna be served up right inside the tool right inside your dashboard and you’re gonna be able to generate a report and again you just didn’t you didn’t have to leave you didn’t have to go out and come in.


You didn’t have to figure it out on your own. It was all there it’s just it takes a lot of the complexity out of it. And I love I love the automation part which a lot of people are very interested in hearing anything When you say the word automation they’re like yes I want to learn how to do that more because I want to take more control of my time and I can tell you personally I just rebuilt my entire website in the last few months and the copy and paste and link link testing um big deal. If your links don’t work that could ultimately mean that you miss out on a lot of sales or revenue depending on where you’re linking to what’s happening or if you’re you know if there you’re not linking to pages I learned all about like linking from internal pages because that bumps up your S. C. O. Because then google can read that better. All these different things that you feel like, oh they might not be important, they’re actually kind of important but it’s taking it in a in a in a step by step way of phasing in like how am I gonna spend time on something? And it takes more intentionality again about um how am I investing my time and and how can I better use my time?


And and to your point around one of the things we learned was that people didn’t want to go to facebook and then to go to twitter and then to go to this or that all these different platforms and then try to understand google and with You make it easy. The biggest thing I’m learning in 2022, I can tell you anything that you make easy. Like that person just people are we talked a little bit about this and in some of our conversations people just have no ability. If it’s not like easy, easy, easy, like like easy button simple if I have to figure something out and it takes me more than A minute, two minutes if I’m not Like three or 4 minutes into figuring something out, I’m done. I’m like peace out. This is too complicated. That’s how people are now. Right, right? And, and, and again, if you’re a busy entrepreneur, if you’re a busy social media manager, I mean anything that we can do to reduce that administrative work, which is just such a grind, I don’t know about you, but administrative work, that mindless copy and pasting, that mindless administrative work logging in and logging out that just wears on your soul.


It’s just time suck. It. It’s soul sucking. It’s, it doesn’t feel meaningful. It doesn’t feel important. It doesn’t feel good. Doesn’t make you feel like you’re good at your job. I feel like a monkey could do it, you know, so as much as we can get a computer to do it for us, as much as we can automate those, take them off our plate, make our lives easier. Um you know, it sounds like a little, it’s just some copying and pasting. It’s more than that. It’s, it’s being groove. It’s being, it’s, it’s a lot of time, it’s being taken out of your groove. It’s being taken away from meaningful tasks to do drone tasks and that’s there, there’s, there’s value, like you said there’s as much as you can make your life efficient and streamlined, that can be the difference between success and failure, especially if you’re starting out, beautiful way to wrap our, our conversation up beautifully in the light, nice little bow, uh lovely, thank you so much for being here on the community strategy podcast.


Hopefully everybody who’s listening. Got some really good, amazing value out of our conversation around discovery and social media. Can you tell us if anybody wanted to connect with you or you know, maybe reach out to you where they find you, sure they can find me on linkedin. So I’m on there, Teresa Anderson agora pulse or you can email me directly. I’m happy to get any of your comments and questions. I’m Theresa T H E R E S A Atago repulse A G O R A P U L S E dot com. Well make sure make sure you watch your email, your email right out there. I’m here for it. I want to hear what everybody has to say. You heard me say it right here. Oh man. Well be prepared. You might get some responses on that one because it’s all the way at the end. No one’s gonna hear that people really want to know about. How do I do social media the right way And that, that’s easy. That like literally I can just press a button so they’ll probably, you’ll probably get that question if anybody is bold enough to ask.


But thank you so much. It’s always a pleasure. I appreciate you so much and thank you for all your hard work. It would not have been the same process without you. I really wouldn’t have. I am so glad to have connected with you. Hopefully we can work again in the future um for by listening. Please make sure to subscribe to our podcast. Check out the show notes. Uh There will be I just start adding transcriptions to our website. That’s part of what I was. The monotonous work I’ve been doing for two months is moving the podcast to the fine calm here dot com website and uh been working tirelessly on backlinks and all of those fun things. Uh so please go to my website. Find. Come here dot com. Thanks, Theresa. Have a great rest of your day for everybody listening. Take care until the next time. B

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