they play but like it or not as business says we need to play there too a lot of young professionals that's where they get their information and so our goal today really is to help you incorporate social media more solidly into your communication strategy so that it doesn't fall way down on that to do list we want to get it back up on the top because it really needs to be an integral part of what you're doing on a day to day basis and whether this is all brand new to you or whether you've been doing it for a little while and you're just looking for some new tips we really hope that this will be helpful in getting you moving so you want to take a look at some of the options one of the most important things we're going to talk about and if you are at the video harvey you probably heard this there as well planning planning is key when you're doing social media you want to have an editorial counter this with a little small but social media should be up in your editorial calendar it should be on your to do list every single  week right now it might not look like this this is pretty complex one where they're covering four different platforms and they've got things happening every single week on each platform yours might not look like that and that's ok one of the most important things in your planning process is to figure out what  platforms that are most useful for you and how frequently how often and how consistently should you be playing in those platforms so we're going to take a look at to today this is a test anybody recognizes there are there any up there that you don't recognize top rate anybody know what oneness that instagram again if you've got a teenager you might know about instagram if you're a retailer you probably want to be an instagram because that's where the especially the young adults are going to look for fashion that's where they're going to find out where they should be going at night when they go out that's where they want to figure out where they want to spend their money and anything else here look different or new to anybody this one snap snap chat i know about that because my babysitter plays with it with my kids and they make funny faces and it's really it's really very cute but as a business there are lots of things you can do with snap chat that can help get your name out there more so there are a ton out there and where do you start we have the same problem when we were thinking about this presentation and we had to narrow it down so we picked two twitter and linked in facebook is not on our list today and that's primarily because we're assuming that most people are a little bit familiar with facebook we're also assuming that you're able to find a lot of information about facebook already and that said twitter and linked in are going to be our focus points but we're not going to give you a how to that's not our purpose today you can google how to set up a twitter account there are tons of tutorials out there and karen and i are both more than happy to help you out if you don't have a counsel ready to you want to figure out how to set it up for more than happy to help you out but there's a lot of information out there already about that and our goal is really help you get started and to give you some really strategic tips and tricks so we're not going to really do a how to today we're going to go over a little bit about what the platforms are we're going to talk about the pros and cons of each why you may or may not want to be playing there and give you some tips and tricks and best practices at the end i've got a  activity an activity that we'd like to do and when i was thinking about this i was thinking what is the most useful thing to walk out of a presentation with and in my mind it's the next step so we're going to actually start you along with your social media plan from wherever you are we're going to help you create a plan so that when you walk out the door you've got two or three things you can do tomorrow next week so i hope that's helpful and like paul said speak up ask questions this is meant to be here day that's pretty good how about you know every day and yeah so i'm not sure who it was that walked in and said i heard that if you're not if yeah if you set up a twitter account and you're not active you might as well not have it set up in the first place it could hurt you i don't know if it'll hurt you but certainly twitter especially if you are in the more you are engaging the more you're publishing the better it will be because the further up on the feed you're going to get  twitter is kind of like the headline news of social media if you don't know about it it's one hundred forty characters that's your limit it kind of reminds me of the ticker tapes at the bottom of c n n you know when you see how much information can you squeeze into that little headline that's kind of what twitter is about twitter is also very conversational it's back and forth and the twitter game is all about how to increase user engagement how can you get people to comment to reply to reach we your information to get it out there that's really the game that we play with  twitter sorry there are a lot of numbers up here maybe that's why i skipped through it in my mind but the most and when you have a minute to sit down and look at this it's actually kind of mind blowing some of the numbers in terms of how many people are on social media here talks a little bit about their reach these numbers are actually already outdated and they think this was done in the end of last year right now we've already got three hundred  twenty plus million users on twitter as opposed to two hundred million and that increases just over the course of what six months it's kind of mind blowing but one of the most important statistics for us on this chart is this seventy eight percent seventy eight percent of small businesses now get at least one quarter of their new customers through social media it's pretty impressive high something that i think about again a reason why we need to get social media up on that to do l move on the pros and cons why would you want to be on twitter it's fast paced it's real time it's a great place again to engage in conversations i was talking to a friend of mine a colleague actually who was telling me about an interesting twitter story she said that when she was on vacation over the summer they had a rental car she's got three little kids in tow rental car breaks down she has a problem what do you do she went to the website of the rental car company to try to get some information some customer service she couldn't get ahold of anybody but she went on twitter sent them a tweet got a reply within five minutes and the problem was solved which i thought was really interesting because i usually don't think of twitter in terms of customer service but that's  of the things that's happening there twitter is also a really great tool for researching topics anyone have a vents or conferences coming up in their space one of the first things i do with clients when we're preparing for an event is i'll twitter and i'll research some hashtags and see ok what's happening in the micro biome space for our biotech people what's happening in the yoga community what's happening here you can research  find out all kinds of recent news that's going on and it really helps to keep you informed so customer service research engaging in conversations with people one of the great things about twitter is that it's a fabulous platform for building thought leadership and if you're not sure what that means it's essentially making yourself an expert in presenting yourself as an expert in your field and twitter is a great place to do that because you can hook yourself into different conversations on topics that are of interest to you and to your business does that make sense so anybody else have any other uses for twitter that i haven't talked about so far publishing event connecting with customers there are lots of different places you can go with again there's a lot of it we'll talk a lot more about hashtags during our activity but there's a lot of other information out there that can kind of give you a little background on that  not only see it but they can comment on it so that is how they can become a follower once they comment there for their followers they can reach wade it which means they can send your tweet on to somebody else and that i mean you can imagine how that just explodes really quickly and the celebrities are infamous for that kind of thing i also heard there are some kind of election going on in the united states coming up but i don't know about you but i guess where they're all that they're all on twitter all the candidates it depends so that's an interesting question because twitter like facebook has algorithmic programming behind it that is going to determine what you see and what you don't see so if there is somebody that you really want to trac very closely you want to set yourself up as a follower but you also would really benefit from just going in and checking their direct account every now and then to make sure you didn't miss anything because just like facebook there are some things that you may not see unless you're really paying close attention does that make sense right right right exactly and so twitter does make decisions for you about what comes up and i'm not even i couldn't speak to that exactly yet you can remove yourself from that another thing that i don't want to get too far into right now but i'd be happy to talk to you more about later is there are functions out applications out there that will allow you to create lists of people that you're following there is an app on twitter you can create a list of say everyone related to the election that you wanted to follow or everyone related to you know a topic on a conference that you're going to you can make a list and then that's one way to divide those tweets up so that you can see more of what you're interested in hoot suite tweet deck they also will do that and some of them will even monitor different platforms for you know so there are ways to organize it but you're absolutely right you're not going to see everything that comes up which is probably a good thing because you might not want to but you really have to think about how you want what the most important know somebody with a negative comment there but there's no legal ramifications to be slander right now that's a really good question  what i can say about that is the most one of the important things to think about with twitter and really with also szell media platforms is to assume everything is public right so if you're going to put an announcement out about a product or something that announcement is going to be public and once it's out there the only way to edit it or change it is to delete the post completely and reposed right so i haven't actually come across a situation where i've needed to address a negative comment i imagine you could handle it by either trying to talk with the person or or make some kind of positive spin on it if you can online or delete the post and repost it again without those comments does that make sense or if it's on the feed if it's on the feed from the original post then if you take that original post out then the whole thing should go does that make sense  exactly i was just going to say you know how many of us have a full time social media person on staff nobody right so that's a really good question when you are making a plan for social media it's going to be very important to decide what is the most important content that you need to get out how frequently do you need to do it plan in advance as much as possible and make sure that those responsible parties make sure the responsibility is clearly laid out so that it doesn't fall off  one interesting thing that you can rip try to remember is that you don't always have to recreate the wheel when you're tweeting something it doesn't have to be new content you can repurpose all content that you r t have you can simply reply or comment or retreat something that somebody else has said it doesn't always have to be you know i have to spend half an hour prepping for my tweet today it can be i'm going to spend five minutes scrolling through a topic or a conversation find something that's interesting and and that could be your activity for the day does that make sense absolutely good question photos and videos are going to get you noticed a lot like other platforms other things that we're doing right now photos and video videos and visuals are key and i think we can get into that too because there are a couple things with twitter that are interesting we're jumping around a little bit and that's ok because i really want to be sure that we're addressing a lot of your questions so photos and  tag exactly say they have a purpose it's a functional purpose the functional purpose of hashtags is to get you into a conversation that is about something rio there we go hashtags can also serve as emphasis so if there's a particular word in your post that you want to be sure that people are paying expression attention to you can use the hash tag to do that hashtag can also be used to incite a tone of voice social media as text and visuals it's hard to figure out what people's tone of voice is maybe they're joking maybe they're really serious you can use hashtags for that purpose and they can also just be for entertainment value hashtag what was this one you might want to slow down i mean what purpose does that serve other than just to give everybody a little giggle there is not a conversation about you might want to slow down but it's kind of funny up a good point about research if you have a lot of times when i'm helping a client get ready for a conference one of the first things i'm going to do before we start laying out a media plan is research on topics related to that conference so you can input  twitter search function input a harsh tag to see ok what are people talking about here what should i be prepared for for this conference and what kinds of things should i be tweeting on my own so research is a really great thing for  so you know hash tag and that is not going to do me any good unless i want to create a conversation around that and quite honestly frozen aliquot digs not a huge topic right now that i would want to do that on so i wouldn't have to type that does that make sense a good rule of thumb is to maintain between three and five or two and three hash tags her posts you really don't want to go to much more than that only because it gets kind of annoying to people to look at and the hashtag doesn't have to be separate from your post it can be embedded in what you're saying so you can write your sentence don't miss us at yoga twenty six t in watertown for example yoga two thousand and sixteen is the event you definitely want to hash tag that and watertown you might want to have that so there you go you don't have to add anything separate on the end it's just part of your sentence does that make sense and well to we'll get into more hashtags because when we start talking about planning i want you to think about h you might use you know photo video sorry charlie chaplin photos short videos twitter is pretty flexible about what they will accept the videos we tend to default to about thirty second videos if you want to create a gift another words a looping video like this there are some apps out there that will allow you to do that as well and they always increase and gauge mut so i forget what the statistics are but it's something like three or four times more engagement with photo and video than without so of course of course you have to be careful about what you're posting again the rule of thumb is everything assume everything is public so if you don't want something associated with your company you don't want to come back to you just be careful what you're posting and engage in conversations so there are lots of different ways that you can do this one thing to kind of monitor as you get into twitter is to look at your notifications every now and then who's to who's talking about you not just who do you want to be talking about but who's been mentioning you and how they've been doing it are they re t just mentioning you in a comment take a look at your notifications and twitter and that will tell you where you've been mentioned and what's happening around your business name and i think having this get through the next one a little bit we've talked about a lot of this the only one we haven't talked about is personalizing tweets you don't want to look like a spammer just like anything else so be careful about how much you're putting out and when you're putting it out make it as personal as possible because people are going to start you guys are going to start to glaze over and they're not going to be paying as much attention if it's just a generic piece a piece of spam just like in the move on to link to it because i am watching the time and i want to be sure we talk at least a little bit about it because you know all the number of tweets per day three to five tweets yeah rea company page and it's really where people are going now for networking they're going there for recruiting people are going there to find out information about your company if they're interested especially if they're interested in investing or working with you on some kind of level a lot of people are not going to necessarily go to linked in if they're consumers you're going to find more on twitter and facebook they retail consumers are going to play more there but linked in if you don't already have a personal page or and or a business page it's probably a good idea to have one and like all social media the the more you publish the better it is but linked in is a lot slower i guess than twitter a gal must get nervous because you feel like you have to be doing it all the time right as high pressure and the focus on linked in is really for business to business consumers so for example if you are if you are a financial services company and you are trying to promote your retirement accounts to young adults who are now just starting to have some money in their pockets linked in is a good place to really focus one of the disadvantages of linked in though is that it is slower so that means it also takes a lot longer to build up your network twitter again is very fast paced people are engaging a lot on twitter and linked in tends to take a little bit more time to build up that network it does have a lot of flexibility like twitter to support all different kinds of media to linked in will also allow you to post p d s which twitter does not believe and one of the other problems w is that you have to kind of be careful about sales pitches a lot of people will put a lot of sales pitches out over linked in and it's important to kind of weed through some of that and also if when you're posting be aware of that piece of it you don't want to be doing a lot of self you also have to pay for some of the subscriptions on linked in so depending on what your needs are you may need to weed through that a little bit the very basic level is pretty basic but it's still worth investing your time in so let's talk about some  one of the best places to go into discussion groups find groups that are in your industry if you are in marketing for example there are lots of different marketing groups out there that we follow to try to see you know what are the trends in marketing what are people talking about one of the events that are coming up take a look at some of the groups that are out there in your industry and see which ones you want to be affiliated with and which ones you want to be playing and make sure you take a go because there may be some out there that you don't want to be affiliated with so just be careful when you're looking through the brutes and again publish or perish linked in like twitter is a place that you can repurpose  information other collateral that you have a few have brochures if you have or some other examples of things you could post only to white papers websites you can always link to your website on linked in because you're not limited to one hundred forty characters you've got a lot more breath and what you can post does anybody have any stories about linked in or things that they've encountered yeah he careful that you change your log ins so that you have to have to sign out of your personal account and into your company to post but that's a really good point actually on all of these platforms don't mix up your personal and professional be really careful i've heard a lot of stories about people who will you know were intending to post something on their personal twitter account and it went out to their whole company be careful what you're doing with that and again the the list managers like hoot suite will monitor and help you separate those out to make sure that those mistakes don't happen but that's a really good question right don't think that's a good question i don't think people leave linked in i think they use it for a different purpose one of the projects that we do at our point is at the venture caf we interview entrepreneurs every month out there got right we we do video interviews there but it's a huge networking about and one thing we found is that people there a lot of them are really young they don't carry business cards and i think the assumption is that when you leave you're going to look them up on linked in and connect with them on linked in they're not passing out business cards so it's it's really a networking tool that people are really using and i don't think i don't think that's going away i don't think that they would go to link and i found somebody who i used to work with fifteen years before reached out and we were still in action and we didn't reach out and say hey you know how familiar are you with this person at this company do you think you can use me so that i could have a set of information interview and right are you my are you modern thinking enough are you tech savvy enough to be with our company if you're not in this space and it's kind of it's an extension of your resume in many ways and i like that you brought up a personal indorsements does everybody know what those if you go on your personal page at the bottom you can list different skill sets that you have or want people to recognize that you have and people that you're connected with can go in and endorse you on different skills and that information shows up so you know it's really valuable not only for future employers but for people that you might want to be connecting with on a business level if they want to know are you really an expert in this like you say you are that that might be one place that they go to look and recruiters are going there too i know even when we were looking for some videography help on a particular program up in canada i went to link to look for a videographer so you know it's a really it's an important tool both personally and professionally depends on your purpose so if your purpose is to find a new job in a particular industry and you're going into up to your profile then you may want to adjust the language that you're using and make it a  general i tend to err on the be a succinct as possible side less is more obviously but you can tailor that information to really speak to whoever it is you're really trying to reach and i got i think it's about your purpose if you you know i don't know about you but i actually haven't updated my linked in page in her long time i really need to go on and do that because you know i've got stuff on their program long time ago that it's time to get rid of because it's no longer relevant to what i'm currently doing and that kind of stuff isn't important yeah exactly exactly  yeah i mean and i don't know there are no rules about it that i know of but when you're industry and if you want to connect with a lot of people then the more connections you have the more the way the algorithms work i was told if you have less than fifty hits you're not going to be it's not really effective not to say that you need five hundred but it really does depend on what you're doing and how many people you want to reach so it's purpose to get what you're saying my own personal strategy is really use facebook for people and is separating out social connections with professional connections i think that's a really good point yeah so i'm noticing the time and i do want to give you a chance to take a look at this on this worksheet i've just given you an opportunity to think about and talk with some of the people around you about what you're already doing think about what are some things that you could be doing in the next week some new new posts that you can put out on twitter and linked in i'm going to hand you some markers so if you come up with a good hash tag come put it up on the more it's kind of like grew up on the internet which it's kind of weird because it's a great part where you can connect with people on line and it's quick it's fast paced but it takes away from that social interaction that face to face but being able to connect and then kind of go meet people is what i lease my company to i'm sort of pro we do home research and a lot of times people don't know that we offer more than just fire for water damages we offer something called the art piece for retail businesses well for businesses in general where if you have a loss or a disaster we already have all the information you don't really have to go through the steps of calling us anything like back so  of making people where much every month there's a different i would say like national holiday so next month is going to be fire prevention week so we're spending a lot of time making people aware of the different things that they can do in their homes making sure you have two different ways of making sure you check your smoke detectors monthly so we use a lot of our social media to kind of give people i guess i am i would say like do those don'ts tips and tricks just to make people where it's a good thing that there are a lot of kids on social media also because their parents aren't necessarily on social media but they can see something and then you know mom that i've seen this and make their parents aware of different things so it's just kind of i guess balancing what's  you what contact you should leave out especially with the twitter thing being it's only one hundred forty characters there's only so much you can say but i guess twitter is more interpersonal while facebook can be a little bit more business like i don't really use length and i feel like when i was growing up facebook was like an adult thing and now that  i'm basically trying to find that balance of like who is important for what content and kind of trying to sort out what how to say the things in the best and the shortest way so you're anybody else have anything to share any tips or tricks hashtags you think are good we're always here if you have any questions my email address as their if i can help you get started on anything let me know just send me a quick e mail i can point you to some tutorials if you need some