Key Takeaways
- Challenges of Managing Multiple Channels
- Managing multiple social media platforms can feel overwhelming due to the constant need to switch between creative tasks, analytics, and community management.Social media requires balancing spontaneity (to stay relevant with trends) with maintaining a structured posting routine for community engagement.
- Creating an Effective Social Media Workflow
- A workflow is essentially the steps and tools involved in managing social content, from creation to publishing and analysis. It should be visual, clear, and easy to follow for team members.Workflow design should include all stakeholders involved in content creation, approval, and distribution to streamline the process and avoid bottlenecks.
- Team Coordination Across Channels
- Effective team collaboration is crucial when managing content across multiple platforms. Involve everyone who touches the content creation process, from designers to stakeholders, and clarify their roles.Tools should be streamlined to avoid using too many platforms that slow down communication and approvals.
- Adapting Content for Different Platforms
- Content should be tailored to each social media platform. While it may seem easier to post the same content everywhere, audiences engage differently depending on the platform.TikTok content, for example, should be fun and casual, while LinkedIn posts should maintain a professional tone—even for the same audience.
- Idea Generation for Multiple Platforms
- Involve employees across different departments to gather ideas and content. For example, team members on the ground can provide behind-the-scenes content or user-generated photos.Encouraging wider team participation can help ensure you never run out of ideas, particularly when employees who interact with customers share their insights.
Tools and Practical Tips
- Tools for Workflow Management:
- Plannable: A social media collaboration tool that helps streamline approvals and content scheduling across platforms.
- Trello or Asana: Use these project management tools to organize content creation and publishing schedules.
- Canva: For collaborative design, allowing team members to create visuals and approve designs in real-time.
- Tools for Team Collaboration:
- Slack: Ideal for team communication and content collaboration.
- Notion or Google Docs: For organizing ideas, processes, and workflows in one place.
- Google Calendar: Sync content deadlines and posting schedules to keep the team aligned.
- Creating Social-First Content:
- Personalize content for each platform. For example, LinkedIn requires professional, thought-leadership content, while TikTok favors light-hearted, behind-the-scenes posts.
- Avoid treating social platforms as purely distribution channels—create native content tailored to the platform’s audience and tone.
- Gathering Feedback and Refining Content:
- Regularly review the performance of posts across all platforms and solicit feedback from team members to refine content and strategy.
- Track performance metrics, such as engagement, reach, and conversion rates, to understand what’s working and what needs improvement.
These takeaways and tools should help marketers streamline the management of social media across multiple channels, ensuring consistent content creation while reducing the feeling of being overwhelmed.
Transcript (AI generated – may contain errors)
Speaker 1: Hello everyone, it’s been a long, long time. I hope you’re doing great. It’s so lovely to be able to play that music once again, to see the chat feature once again. So hello to Kirsten in Scotland, hello to Stuart in Scotland. If you haven’t already, do pop in the chat feature where you’re watching from because it would be so lovely to get a gauge on where the community are watching in from. And if you haven’t already, because if this is your first time or you just haven’t contributed to the chat feature often before, make sure that you change your chat feature messages to everyone so everyone can see your messages. The way you do that, there’s some instructions on screen right now, head to your chat feature and you’ll see a little toggle. If that little toggle presently says to hosts and panellists, switch that to everyone and then everyone can see your messages and we’ll have a lovely, lovely time. Just like Mel has in Birmingham, Samuel has in Kent, Eleanor has in Cambridge, Sophie has in Houston, Sasha is in Cambridge as well, we’ve got Tristan in Swansea. Okay, I can’t keep up, Karen, Alex, Margaret, Francesca, Miranda, it’s so lovely to see you. Thank you all so, so much for taking the time. As ever, the main challenge for today is to keep that chat feature going throughout the duration of today’s session because it just makes the session better. We don’t want this to just be a broadcast, we want this to be a conversation. Today we have Marina Dragomir, who’s the CMO of Plannable. She’s a Forbes 30 under 30, ex-Uber, ex-Oracle, and she’s one of those people who you just spend some time with and you’re like, what am I doing with my life? But you kind of don’t mind it because she’s really, really nice. So in this conversation, before we got going today, we had a really lovely chat and I think that will carry on for the rest of today’s session too. If you have any questions as today’s session goes on, do pop in the Q&A feature down below those questions. And what I’ll do is I’ve got some pre-prepared questions, but we’ll also make sure to lace in your questions too. At the end of the day, my questions are quite interesting but yours are very, very interesting. So we want to make sure that this session works for you. Before we get going, I want to say a big, big thank you to our sponsors. Now this week, the featured sponsor is Plannable. And while our guest today may be the CMO of Plannable, it’s very, very important to point out that we don’t sell speaking slots. That’s not how this works here. But when it came to curating a social media season, it was like, well, who knows about social media stuff? Well, the team at Plannable, blooming well do. Plannable is a platform where you can collaborate, post, schedule, and get your content in a place where you can work with your team to make sure that your content is produced nicely and goes out into the world as it’s supposed to. Right now, the QR code on your screen right now, they’ve got a free, ungated, login-free tool which you can use to help you prompt your social media captions, your social media comments, and so on and so forth. It’s a fabulous resource. It’s made freely available just as a great sign of how wonderful the folks at Plannable are. Also, a big, big thank you to our other sponsors. We’ve got Frontify, Disclaimer, Cambridge Marketing College, Redgate, and Scorap. We’ll speak about all of those in future weeks as we go throughout the rest of this season and towards the end of the year with our webinars, which is a little bit crazy. With all that said, that’s my introduction done, so let’s get into today’s session. Today functions purely as an interview, so it’s very, very important that we get your questions in as well because we want to make sure that we’re getting the questions answered that you do too. First question first, from your experience of working with, interacting with, and serving so many marketers, what’s the biggest challenges that you identify when they’re trying to manage multiple social media channels all at once?
Speaker 2: Right. Hi. I think, yeah, I think it’s a lot about being overwhelmed with what that really entails because, you know, at a first glance, it just sounds like creating multiple posts and publishing them, so what’s the big problem? You’ve got AI now. You’ve got so many tips and tricks to just do it faster and more of it, but I think the true pressure is a lot higher due to how dynamic social media is. It’s got, there’s so many trends going on. There’s formats. There’s constant rumors about what would help the algorithm, how you could reach more people. There’s boosting posts. There’s a follow ship that you’ve got to worry about, community management, and so much more. So it’s just, you have to switch your context so often from like creative thinking to reporting and analytics to stakeholder management. So it’s a lot of context switching that people have to do, and it’s a lot about, sorry, it’s a lot about having to balance between being spontaneous and keeping up with the trends versus keeping a very diligent routine in your social media in order to, you know, build a community and have an audience that expects something from you.
Speaker 1: For sure. It’s so hard, isn’t it? It’s one of these hard things, you know, I’ve been reflecting on it a little bit recently because I think there’s this temptation when you become a bit more senior in a marketing role that you kind of sort of end up stepping away from the day-to-day of the social media tasks. But I’ve been observing so many folks, particularly on LinkedIn, you know, sort of, especially at the real cold face of social media management, and it’s universally stressful to manage all this stuff, to keep up, to feel like you’re posting, even that sentence, to feel like you’re posting. Like, it’s so silly.
Speaker 2: It’s like you’re doing something. Yeah. And it’s also, you know, if you think about how much this role has changed, not even the role, but in general, this area of marketing, social used to be such a small little thing at the beginning. Just, you know, if you remember like the queues, just save up some links and put them in a queue and schedule them out. That’s all you have to do. Just share resources, curate resources, basically. That’s it. But now it’s so much more, like it evolved from a task to like a team’s level of workload.
Speaker 1: Fully. We visited the Innocence Movies team quite recently. And to that point, you know, they had someone specifically there for posting and idea generation, et cetera. And that was their full time job. And then we had a second person who was there specifically for engaging with the community. And that was two people’s full time jobs, you know, who had a team behind them as well. So I fully believe it. And you know what? Rachel’s in the chat here today who say, oh, the chat’s quite quiet today. And you’re right. You’re right, Rachel. People have introduced themselves and said where they’re watching from. But we’ve got and we’ve got Laura who does say I’m in full concentration mode over here. But I’d love to know for you, what are the biggest challenges that you’re facing when it comes to managing these social platforms? Because we can actually use this information to lace throughout the rest of the conversation. So I’d love to know where you’re finding your biggest challenges right now in terms of getting content across all the respective social media channels and the blocking that you’re finding. We’ve got Meg who’s sort of saying gathering content, which is right. And we will definitely come to that as a third one. We’ve got client approval of content from Harry. We’ve got organizations. Yeah. Olivia saying we found that everyone’s thinks everyone in the organization thinks that they’re a social media expert. We’ve got getting the content brand consistency, getting approval from stakeholders, multi brands and jobs and everyone thinking it’s a quick job. Let’s keep these in mind as we go through the rest of this conversation, because I don’t think these are any surprise. I don’t think so. Today, we’re going to focus on this idea of creating a workflow that makes things easy to or easier. I shouldn’t say easy to get your content out there and hopefully sort of ease the burden for some folks. But before we get going into how to create a workflow, I think it’s worth doing the definition thing around what is a workflow. So what do we mean by workflow and what common goals do you often see for social media workflows when you work
Speaker 2: with people to create them? Right. I think, well, a workflow is essentially the steps and the people involved in the process and the social media management process. So it’s just the documentation of everything that happens in order to get the content out there and analyzed and published. It’s not and it’s more than just the steps. So also like the channels involved, the communication that happens, the people, the more thorough, the
Speaker 1: better. OK, I love that. And so is that typically documented in a sort of a flow document for you?
Speaker 2: I mean, like visually, how does. Yeah, I think it’s very helpful if it has a visual format rather than like a lengthy document. So if it’s like in Canva and Miro and Figma, whatever works for you. We actually did, by the way, maybe we could send that resource. We did a Canva template that people can replicate and play around with it and make their own.
Speaker 1: Wicked. I love that. Well, my co-founder, James, is watching in today and he’s got 48 minutes to find that resource and pop it in the chat. Mate, you got a challenge. James is on it. So we’ve got that which we’ll distribute in the chat feature. And thank you, everyone, by the way, as we’re chatting through, I’m also making sure we’re watching the chat feature and the challenges that you’ve mentioned feel really relevant. So we’ll make sure to loop back to those specifically. So when we’re speaking about this workflow, what are the common traps that you see folks falling into when it comes to creating a workflow like this? Because it strikes me that especially if you’re doing it for your first time, you’re probably probably going to stumble over some
Speaker 2: things that everyone does. Yeah, I think there’s two extremes of the whole workflow conundrum. One extreme is to find it overwhelming, intimidating, like that sounds like way too much for me, like all the steps, the minutious details, every person, every message, that sounds like too much. We don’t need it. I’ll just skip over it. And then the other conundrum is putting a lot of work into designing this flawless, accurate workflow. And then going into will of death scenario, in which essentially, you do all this work to design it, you then implement it, you tell everyone in the team, people give it a try, maybe for a week or so, but then they just go back to the default that they used to do, or they forget about it, or the workflow doesn’t actually apply to some real life scenarios. And then they start skipping over it, everyone loses trust in this whole idea of workflow, sounds like too much, sounds like it’s too complicated, it feels like it’s doing, it’s creating more work rather than optimizing our process. And so let’s just forget about it. So I think, yeah, the fact, thinking of a workflow, like this fixed design that you do once you think a lot about it, and then you just respect it, that’s the biggest obstacle that I’ve found, and that we’ve done as well, like in the past, I thought that if I thought about it well enough, it has to work, and we have to be super strict about it, there’s no going back,
Speaker 1: there’s no iterations on it. I can see it, the amount of documents I’ve produced over the course of time, not many past week too, is ridiculous. But it struck me as you were speaking there, that we had Grant come in on the chat saying one of the challenges that Grant faces is that social is not just for marketing or digital marketing, it’s for PR, it’s for customer service, for cybersecurity, HR policy, employee advocacy, and marketing. And it strikes me as you were speaking there that one of the benefits of this workflow kind of thing is that you’re probably starting to think about these kind of things a little bit more rather than just marketing, you know, and getting the word out about your product.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you turn it into a more, a clearer step, you know, gathering content from all these different departments, understanding what everyone needs shared, rather than being surprised by them all the time. Hey, by the way, you know, you have your content for your entire month, that’s just a draft that no one will take into account when they have their ideas. And it helps if you have this clear step, for example, in which you ask the people responsible
Speaker 1: for the content from their department. Nice, I love it. So we’ve spoken a little bit about the challenge, and we’ve spoken a little bit about why this feels important as a solution. So I guess we should actually start thinking about how we go about creating a workflow, and one that sort of does help people not have that sense of feeling frazzled when having to create all this stuff. So what are the key steps as far as you’re concerned in creating a workflow
Speaker 2: that actually results in what you want it to? Yeah, the first step is to write down everything that happens at the moment, to interview, talk, interview, that sounds again, I feel like these terms sound like it’s going to be, it’s going to be too hard, not interview, talk to, to the people that are involved at the moment, the ones that are at least responsible for each of the steps, like who creates the content, who designs the visual, who shares the content, like from within, who proofreads, who, I don’t know, edits, approves, gives feedback, inputs, everything, publishes, reporting, community management, all those steps, talk to these people and jot down everything that they’re doing. I think the key is here is to be very thorough with the questions, like if they say, I then ask people if they have any ideas, like how do you ask, where do you ask, who do you ask, what exactly does this step entail, try to like, that you want accuracy, because what you’re looking for is to build a workflow that’s thorough and to, to find the time wasters, because usually like everyone has small time wasters, but in the end they add up to a lot more time than we think they do, because you have a few minutes a day here, a few minutes a day here, but really in the grand scheme of things, all those like pile up, and you want to skip them and you can only remove all of these time wasters by being this thorough.
Speaker 1: Nice, I love that. And how far do you cast the net? Because I’m thinking, say, for example, there’s the most senior person in an organization, you know, the CEO is probably not involved in that process, but they are probably also a stakeholder in that process in the sense that, you know, if they see something that they don’t like, they’re going to come to you and say, take that down, or, you know, they’re going to be starting asking questions. So when you’re trying to identify those people, are you identifying stakeholders of people who may see the stuff, or are you doing stakeholders of folks who may just be involved in the process of producing it?
Speaker 2: I don’t know if I would, I wouldn’t start with stakeholders at all at the beginning, I just start with the core team, because normally they know their stakeholders, they know who’s involved, either in a structured way, or like, again, if you’re thorough, you’re going to find out that, wait, actually, Lucy isn’t involved all the time, but she does message me every now and then to ask me to take something down or to add something to the calendar, or she has some sort of level of involvement. You want to understand from the core team who is spontaneously or recurrently involved. And then later down the line, the only thing that you could do with the stakeholders is get their feedback, like in the easiest, simplest form possible. Would they want to be more involved? And does the way in which they contribute at the moment, is it easy enough? Is it fast enough? Is it clear enough? Because what you want to do is make it easy for stakeholders to be involved. Like I know, side note, you don’t want everyone to think that they know social media, but you do want as much involvement as possible because you have so, like any company has so much content really in people’s minds in different departments, and that could really help you out. But again, the process has to be easy, simple, clear, accessible.
Speaker 1: That’s perfect. And it’s interesting, I’m just watching the chat as you come through, and we’re getting quite a few questions from folks who are saying about, we’ve got one from Louise here, for example, which is, what if you’re a one person marketing team and do everything? And it strikes me that the theory probably still applies in the same way, because even though you may be a one person marketing team, there are probably going to be other contributors who get involved in that, even if it’s a finance director or something like that, that may have an opinion. And it’s not about necessarily including them in the workflow, but it may be just noting down that they may have an opinion as part of this workflow. Is that a fair thing to say for these folks who
Speaker 2: are in these one person teams? Yeah. From my conversations in the past, I found this common thread that in solo teams, usually the problem is that very few people get involved or they have ideas, but they don’t actually help with the content ideas. The input is the problem. It’s very hard for one person to always get the ideas, the content, what’s happening in the company. In my experiences, this person is usually running around asking people, wait, I didn’t know this was happening. When did this campaign start? All of this didn’t get to me, so how can I do social for it? So the workflow part for a solo social media manager is usually how can you create a process that is inviting and welcoming for people to throw ideas and content at you and to get you involved when you would need them to be involved?
Speaker 1: I love that. No, I mean, that’s so useful. And we had a season quite recently about asking non-marketers their perception on marketing, and it was exactly that sort of thing. They want to be involved in this process or they’re interested, but it’s sort of throwing open the gates. So I love that you used the word welcoming there, because that does feel really important. Because I speak for myself here more than anyone, but I remember when I was doing this job, solo marketing manager having to post on social, and if someone pointed something out to me that I’ve done on social, I used to get so defensive. And it was because it was quite retrospective, i.e. you’ve posted that, and now I’m going to criticize you because that shouldn’t have gone out. It’s not quite representative of whatever. But if you can get that sort of input at the beginning, that feels so powerful. So yeah, thank you for sharing that. That’s so, so useful. So we’ve spoken about interviewing folks and sort of asking the questions of anyone that might be involved in the process here. What’s the sort of next sort of part of this process so we can start getting the workflow sort of brought to life once we’ve brought these opinions together
Speaker 2: from various folks? Well, next step is to start working on that visualization. So like, jot down the steps exactly. Mark down the people involved at each step. You can even go deeper, label them in a way, like step owner, and then contributors or stakeholders, and the channels on which, the platforms on which they work. So like, they talk on Slack, but then they share the work via email, but then they have an Excel in which they write the copy, but then Canva for design, all of that. The technology part is also very important. I’m not just saying that because I work for a tool. It does serve my purpose, but also, we do tend, we have that problem too. We tend to spread ourselves super thin on so many channels and you could, in theory, try to merge them a bit. Like if you do the designs, taking Plannable out of this, if you do the designs on Canva, and you talk about them on Slack, maybe you could use Canva’s collaboration feature, or maybe you could, again, unify them somehow in order to make people’s lives easier. So the technology, the people, the steps, and how the handover happens. So like the arrow and the visualization has to have some sort of element to it. When do you know that it’s, the creation is done and it’s ready for design, or the post, the content is done and it’s ready for approval? What is the exact action that marks that step? To make it clear, how does the approval, how is the approval received? So the inner steps, if you will, are important to be clarified to, yeah, to be at ease in the future.
Speaker 1: I love that. And it strikes me that that point feels particularly pertinent. So I am the worst kind of boss sometimes, and not that I really characterize myself as a boss, but going in to approve things or email things, etc. I can be quite slow on that kind of thing. So when you’re sort of speaking about those permissions and things moving through the process and being very clear about how things get approved and move on to the next stage. I love the idea of a workflow for this reason, because you can go to folks having interviewed them and having got their involvement in the process and sort of point to this and say, look, this is where we’re falling down at the moment. You know, in my case, it may be that, you know, the content’s been created, but I’m not approving it quick enough. So it’s a fair cost to go to me and sort of say, you need to approve things better or quicker or differently. And you agree to this as part of the interview process.
Speaker 2: But also asking you, because I feel like there’s a point to be made here. This is a dynamic that’s present throughout all types of work, right? Not just in social media, like getting approval from stakeholders can be very annoying, because as the person who does the job, you’re thinking, I just want to get this through the door. I just need your green light. Please do not block my ability to finalize this project and to mark it as done. As a stakeholder, you have this combination of a guilt trip between, you know, not getting to it, being confused by it, then being annoyed that you’re confused by it and it’s taking you too long and so on. And so I think we should really make it a point to understand what the stakeholder really needs. Because what we always forget, I feel like, is that that’s not the main job of the stakeholder. They have their own tasks, their own things that are occupying their minds, their own projects that they want to take off. And this is not one of those. So it’s a whole skill to make the approval process very easy. And as little consuming in terms of time and resources and mind energy as possible. And so that should be part of the feedback generation later. And it should be part of the interview in the sense that you should understand how much time each step takes. And again, remember that like the time isters, what are the blockers? And if one of them is getting approval faster or getting feedback, or the feedback is usually like takes me to step one again, then that should be investigated further. I love that. It’s, you know,
Speaker 1: it makes a lot, a lot of sense. And while you were speaking as well, it’s funny because there’s a comment in the chat here from Lydia, who sort of says about jumping on trends. And that is one of the things in social, right, that if you want to jump on trends, you know, you want to be quick, you want to be there in the first. And so when we’re speaking about workflow, we’re not speaking about things that necessarily need to take days or months or weeks or whatever. You know, if you’re doing exactly as you said, just now, and you sort of figuring out what these blockers are, this is exactly the time where your process becomes so much quicker, right? Rather than it feeling like
Speaker 2: it’s 10 steps in between creation and posting. Yes. And also you could have like, the workflow can have edge cases, I guess, like, okay, scenario one is for the monthly content calendar, because that’s usually, you know, or weekly content calendar, we do the content that’s regular, that’s based on the content that the evergreen content that we’ve produced is just about the formats, the copy, the design, all of that, that we do once per month, or once per week, we approve it on the first of the month, or the first week of the month, we need the approvals. So that’s a process. And then, I don’t know, we reserve the right to jump on trends, which goes through, let’s say, a shortcutted workflow, it goes, we create a super fast, we don’t get in between approvals, or whatever, we send it to the stakeholder. And we, we can agree on it’s either yay or nay. So no, doing 10 circles around it, because that’s how trends work. So you can have like these types of parentheses, if you will, embedded in your workflow.
Speaker 1: Love it. Love it so much. We’ve got Samuel in the chat saying, we find that with TikTok, so I have an arrangement with the manager of my business that I will approve anything that my apprentice makes for TikTok, which is jumping on a trend, which is, I think, exactly what you’ve just said. You know, so it’s great to see that, you know, sort of coming out in the real world. And, you know, we’ve got Emily to the flip side here saying a blessing and a curse, my company is always a hard no to jumping on trends, which is tough. But I guess simultaneously, you know, as part of this whole process, at least you’ve identified that. So you can kind of relax your shoulders a little bit and go, cool. You know, we’ve got our weekly content and we get that out. Maybe that’s part of the interview process. I don’t know. Cool. So we’ve spoken about interviewing, we’ve spoken about creating the workflow and making it super clear. But you also mentioned feedback. So I just wanted to loop back around to that before we move on to some of the more team coordination stuff. So with feedback, is there anything that people should be watching out for specifically? So I think we’re speaking more specifically around posting after it’s gone out and sort of getting that feedback loop to keep on improving things as part of your workflow. Have you got any tips or places where people tend to fall down in their workflows when it
Speaker 2: comes to social content here? It’s just about my only tip here is to not run from it, because I feel like that’s the first impulse that we as humans have to just do the work. And if no one says anything, fine, or let’s just let’s just go with it. Ideally, it should be a constant feedback loop. And you you do want some level of involvement from the stakeholders, because there’s no involvement. They either don’t really care, which is not something that you want, or they’re not truly happy with it, but they’re not finding the time to think too much about it or like truly pinpoint why they’re not that happy with it. Involvement usually means they care and they’re excited. So as annoying as it is when you get like, why don’t we do this, like examples of TikTok that does show that they care so that there’s a positive part to there’s a lot of positive parts to parts to getting ideas. It is a bit annoying for anyone. I’ll grant that. Like it’s annoying a bit for me, like because we don’t have time and we have so many other ideas. But it is also very positive to get all of that involvement. And we shouldn’t really be happy if no one asks or contributes. So about the feedback. Yeah, I’d ask more of it or I’d try to understand what part of my work stakeholders care about. So the CEO says, I don’t really have time to get involved in the post. It’s not what I want to spend my time on. Okay, that’s fair. Do you care at all? Yeah, of course I care. It’s my company and it’s public image. At some level, they care. So when and how do you want to be involved? So try to adapt and understand what feedback is important to get from each stakeholder or department.
Speaker 1: Love that. Love that so much. It’s so helpful. You know, I think this is, as I say, James is watching in today and this is the type of thing that we should be doing and we’re not doing well enough. And like after this 34 minutes of conversation so far, then I think we will be. And so I hope that’s mirrored by more folks watching in today, because I found this so useful. So thank you very, very much indeed for everything so far, because it’s been brilliant. Let’s take the first question from the community Q&A before heading back into my questions. But I would signpost to folks in the Q&A feature, which is found down below here. Then if you’ve got any questions, do pop them in there and we’ll make sure that we try to get to those throughout the course of the rest of the conversation. And also a big, big thank you also for the chat feature so far, because it feels like a little therapy session is going on between folks. So thank you very much for just being so lovely and helping one another in this process. And so let’s get the first question from the Q&A, which comes from actually does come from James. And I think it does speak to this idea of condensing our workloads. So James says, do you see making a piece of content different for each platform as an increasingly important thing? James is guilty of posting the same thing on lots of channels, but struggles to find the time or energy to change it for each respective platform. And I guess that feels particularly relevant right now because LinkedIn has obviously gone barmy for vertical video in the past couple of weeks. But vertical video is great on TikTok. It’s great on Reels. It’s great on Shorts, etc. So do you feel the need to adapt things or is a create once, post everywhere strategy
Speaker 2: OK these days? Yeah, I’d definitely say personalize it per channel. I think the struggle is because we still have this idea of social as a distribution channel rather. Sorry, James. Maybe it’s not important to post on all. I’d say rather personalize it for each of them in one way or another, or just post on one. Because really, if you think about, I want to post on LinkedIn, what should I post? It’s going to come out to a whole different piece of content than if you say, I have this book I want to promote. I’m going to post about it. It’s about that social first, social native content that is increasingly important. And because you have to do now zero click content and all of that, everything is pointing arrows to words, make it social first and make it platform first. And I feel like it’s becoming more different as platforms evolve, even though they’re copying formats between one another. That’s less important, not necessarily the format, but the way we express ourselves, the what works on what platform simply is probably not going to work on the other. And that’s a lot related to not even that it’s a different audience, though it is, but even if it’s the same audience, it’s different states of mind. If I’m scrolling on LinkedIn, I’m one part of my personality. One part of my personality is engaged, a professional one. If I’m on TikTok, I’m in bed, I’m at home, I’m drinking my wine, I’m in a whole different mood. I’m not going to go on LinkedIn. So I don’t want on TikTok the content that I would see on LinkedIn. So it’s just about adjusting the content to where and how people feel on that platform.
Speaker 1: It’s so true. And it’s a bizarre thing, isn’t it? I mean, I don’t think you’ll necessarily have an answer for this because I think it’s just an observation. But I think we all kind of intuitively know this. And yet a lot of us will continue to plug away, you know, for example, my LinkedIn stuff, just going on TikTok for the sake of it and not solely doing a great job. And it’s like, oh, you know, I’ll just pop it there, you know?
Speaker 2: You’re thinking, you know, I think like, OK, we do social first content, but when we have something to push out, we’re thinking, OK, this is more LinkedIn ish, but it can’t hurt if I post it everywhere, can it? OK, it’s not going to make people unfollow you. Probably it’s not that bad. But I’d still rather go with the one platform that I feel like this is perfect for that platform than post it everywhere just to not dilute the purity of my presence on each platform.
Speaker 1: I love that. You know, properly, properly solid advice and, you know, combine that with the workflow element of things, which makes things clear about how we work, but also having to post in less places. You know, we built this about a session about how to make things easier to be on more platforms and or not more platforms, but post across various social channels. So hopefully these are two very, very clear ways that folks can start to reduce their workload in a sensible way. And Nicole is absolutely right as well in the chat, you know, dig into your data. So, you know, it is, of course, worth sort of checking that your TikTok audience aren’t there for marketing,
Speaker 2: et cetera, et cetera. But it’s. Yeah. And as Nicole said, it’s not about the different essence of the content that you’re promoting. It’s just about the way you’re promoting it. You can still be, as Nicole said, professional on TikTok, but just funner with a twist, an edge, something that doesn’t say, you know, put your glasses on and get your laptop out.
Speaker 1: Hang on. I love it. Cool. Let’s let’s head back into coordination with the team. So we’ve got two sections. So we have three bullet points for today. We had creating workflow, we had coordinating with our team, and then we have never running out of ideas. And then I can see that we’ve got nine open questions as well that we’d like to get to in the remaining time. So I think we’ve done quite a lot on coordinating with the rest of the team so we can spend a relatively little amount of time here. But one of the things I did want to ask is when it comes to social media activity specifically. So that’s collaboration, planning, producing, et cetera. Where do you see a lot of the mistakes coming with folks when it comes to coordinating social media activity across various departments or regions or even just social media activity in general? Where do
Speaker 2: marketers tend to fall down? Yeah, on the on the multi-location regions scenario, the common mistake is similar to what we just talked about, just copying the corporate main content and putting it everywhere. Usually if you have a local presence, then you have a local flavor, audience. So what we see, we have a lot of customers that are multi-location and personalize the content locally. So the best scenario that we see there is that they have a platform, let’s call it plannable, in which they unite all the teams, the local teams, and the core team does give access and transparent in-time access to the content that’s being planned out for the main brand. And then give liberty to the local teams to create their own content and to adapt the main content in the way that they want. So kind of bring it all together and creating a flexible but transparent place to create the content. Nice, that makes perfect sense.
Speaker 1: Let’s leave the coordination element there, but if folks that feels more important and you’d like to dig into that more, do pop it in the Q&A and we’ll make sure to answer any specific questions that you have on coordination between the teams. And Mark is not a plant in the chat feature here, but Mark just says, have you got any recommendations for how to manage multiple social media accounts? Either how to format it in the calendar or as a piece of software? Well, plannable. Give it a go. So we didn’t ask Mark to do that, but I’m happy to do that job. Thanks, Mark. Good job. Let’s head into idea generation and then we’ll make sure to get as many questions asked from the community as possible. So one of the things that I noticed at the beginning in the chat feature was folks really seem to struggle with idea generation and coming up with new ideas for content and sort of never running out of these things. So how do you see sort of really, really good marketing folks consistently generating good new ideas even when they’re managing multiple platforms?
Speaker 2: I’m going to sound like a broken record here, but I do believe the biggest lock to unscrew, I guess, is to invite, to find a way to get access to the people that have customer facing roles and product facing roles, which I don’t know if this term exists, probably not. Anyway, I’m coining it now. Usually the social media people are quite isolated in that way. So that’s the biggest challenge of creating content. They don’t have direct access to whatever the service or product is or to the customers. So that’s a big problem. For example, if you have bars, gyms, anything that happens in a physical place, you’re at your desk, but everything is happening out there. People are having fun drinking at the bars or going to the gym in person. It’s very hard for you to get the content and to get even the vibe, the feeling. Of course, there’s always opportunity to go on the field. But ideally, again, you find some sort of way to involve the people that produce the product or offer the service or are close to it, closer to it involved and ask them for any sort of ideas or just to loop you in when they do things. I’ll give an example here. Sorry. We had a client that had lots of clubs. So they had this problem, obviously, who’s going to get the content, who’s going to get the pictures. So what they did was sort of like a program in which bartenders or waitresses would get some sort of… I have no water. Anyway, so they would get some sort of bonuses or compensation if they get the content and they upload it.
Speaker 1: Nice. That’s perfect. And, you know, it is exactly that. It’s, you know, sort of finding those opportunities. Bless you. It’s always at the worst moments, isn’t it? You know, find those moments to get that employee generated content. It feels like it’s the real theme at the moment, you know, across TikTok in particular, that employee generated content stuff, which is potentially lower production value, but far more authentic. And it seems to be the authenticity that people really seem to relate to. And so you just can’t escape, you know, you can’t escape getting out there and watching people speak to people, understanding them in their context. Bang on. I love that. So thank you. It reminds me actually of a conversation I had with a copywriter over here called Dave Harland, who he sort of phrased it like he thinks like a comedian in the sense that he goes around the world. And it was one of the comments in the chat here with just like a little notebook and they all just observe things and they’ll try to make connections between those two things or switch it and try and make it funny in one way or another. And it is that sort of going out into the world and observing things. The last last thing that I can recommend on that, and it sounds like a silly thing, but I don’t think it is, is taking your headphones, if you usually walk with your headphones on or a podcast, taking those out and sort of listening to the actual world, because the amount of conversations I’ve had in the past few weeks and months with people that I wouldn’t have had otherwise if I had music or a podcast in that have actually made me a better marketer is, you know, it’s really, really interesting. So I definitely recommend that too. Let’s head into the Q&A because there’s a bunch of open questions and a bunch of very, very good ones. So folks, if you see a question that you would like answered, do give it a thumbs up in the Q&A and we’ll try to focus on those for the last quarter of today’s session. So first things first, and this came up about halfway through today’s session, but I think it’s a really good question. So the question comes from Anonymous and they say that the business they work for mainly uses LinkedIn, but they want to break into Instagram and YouTube, i.e. producing video based content to increase brand awareness, which I love, by the way, to actually have a specific goal. I think that’s really important. So good for you, Anonymous, for having the goal here. However, none of them have done it before and it feels like a new thing and honestly a bit daunting. Do you have any top advice or tips and tricks for getting it right when heading into new platforms and what can they look out to avoid? Well, yeah, first of all, I do think
Speaker 2: video content can be daunting. It can take a lot of time and it can be like a huge commitment, especially if you like brand it as a show that you’re going to launch weekly. First of all, it depends on the size of the brand. So if it’s a super reputable brand, you’re going to be forced into creating some sort of show or identity around it. You’re not going to be able to just shoot and launch. But if it’s not like if you don’t have 20k subscribers or something like that on YouTube already, if you’re starting small, I’d treat it as an experiment. That’s my lesson learned because when Playable was, I don’t know, one year old, we didn’t have distribution channels. We didn’t have any subscribers on YouTube or anything, but we did this whole production level videos like we bought background camera, all the professional equipment, and it died after a few months because it wasn’t scalable and because people weren’t watching. So treat it as an experiment at first and try to minimize the amount of effort you put in, especially in the production. Put more effort into the content ideas like what are you testing, people talking, animations, all of that. Decide on the things that you’re experimenting and after a while you’ll be able to invest in the production. But a lot more comfortable like we know this is what works. We just want it to look better
Speaker 1: and feel like a top level product. Nice. I love that. And I mean, on that production point, it does feel like you’ve got two schools of thought. I mean, you’ve got those highly polished TikToks, you know, I’m big into my cooking, you know, and so it seems like there’s a big competition in cooking to produce the highest quality cooking stuff. But then simultaneously videos that are super low production value seem to fly as well. Do you have any reflections on that? Is it just that both are okay and, you know, is the content quality that will shine through or are you seeing any trends through Plannable, etc?
Speaker 2: I think, I definitely think like authenticity flies a lot better lately than it used to, at least. I mean, back in the day, no one was authentic. It was all like this, Jesus, you had to have an agency, a video production company, everything. It’s clearly a lot more accepted and appreciated now. I think now, at this point, because it’s not required, being super professional and super techie about the videos that you create is can be part of your personality as a brand. It’s not required. But if that’s something that you’re super good at and that comes naturally to you and you think you’re like, when I’ll do my transitions and videos, it’s going to be like the best of the best. Then, yeah, you should do it. But if it doesn’t come naturally and you don’t have like that next level talent, I’d skip it at
Speaker 1: least at first. I love that. So useful. Genuinely, just as I love the testing mentality gives people so much freedom, but then also to lean into what you’re good at. So thank you. That’s really, really great advice. There’s a second most popular question here from Miranda, which I want to come to in a moment. But I’m going to ask Miranda a question here, which is Miranda’s question is how can a small business create an effective social media strategy with limited resources? It’s a quite broad question. I think it’s mirrored by a lot of folks in the chat feature today. So would you be able to provide two or three bullet points, a series of folks, if you want to, on the specific challenges that we can help you with the limited resources so we can we can really nail into what you need rather than sort of speak generally about small businesses. In the meantime, let’s come to the top question in the Q&A presently, which is my company is also mainly on LinkedIn, but we’re looking to become more creative across our two brands and all platforms in general. Are there any tips for making B2B social media posts more engaging and diverse?
Speaker 2: I definitely think work fun is on a huge ascending trend. So I don’t think it’s easier and easier like work memes. Yeah, go with the engagement can be created by by like super informative educational content or super funny. And you can’t be super funny unless you’re insanely relatable, which is a very big issue of B2B because I work in B2B, so I know. So the biggest problem in being relatable as a B2B company is that you’re usually not around your audience, right? So like if you talk to, I don’t know, salespeople, if you have a sales tool, so your audience is salespeople, you’re not a salesperson, you’re a social media manager and you probably don’t hang around with them as much and you don’t understand their day to day because that’s the that’s what brings in the fun with B2B work memes or work fun content to really nail into like the true problem that those people have. What I do is I lurk a lot, like I hang out in groups with social media managers like in WhatsApp chats and communities on Slack anywhere and I just read what they write to get to know them. Really, it’s not the most effective or easy to do advice, but that’s something that I do. Yeah, nice. I love that. We’ve got Niamh
Speaker 1: in the chat saying yes with with an exclamation mark at the end. I’m a B2B marketer and our people content performs best, you know, so exactly to your point about the relatability and it’s probably no surprise. We haven’t had Miranda come back to us just yet on the specific things on small businesses, so folks in the chat if you want to nail in on two or three small business things then we’ll make sure to get that question in in the last five minutes of today’s chat. In the meantime, we’ll go back once again to the Q&A because you mentioned zero click content earlier and I think that is one of those terms that is topical but maybe something that not everyone in the community would have heard of or engaged with. So could you speak briefly to zero click content and why it’s important on social in particular?
Speaker 2: Of course, so zero click content essentially means that the content that you give on social has the value right there embedded into it. There’s no need to click or go somewhere else to get the value. Of course, there can be added value. You can add a link where people get more value but it’s not needed to get something if that makes sense. So yeah, I think on LinkedIn that’s especially important. You can see it on all the platforms but on LinkedIn it flies less and less if you just share a link these days. It has to have some substance to it. It is easier with personal profiles, I’ll just say that. It’s a lot harder with company profiles. You have to blend, try to blend in or you can just let go of the company page and try to start using the personal brands of the people within the company like the CEO, the executives, manage their accounts and try to get that type of engagement.
Speaker 1: And that actually does loop perfectly into a question from Sophie who’s given us some more specificity on the small business question here. But I think it’s something that a lot of people will feel and it relates to your answer as well here which is as part of a small business we often don’t get time to get photo or video content with leadership and I would extend that to the wider team. When I was a marketing manager in a PPC agency I was very aware that they were the experts and not me and so I was always trying to corral the team into sort of getting involved in content. And I think we’ve spoken a little bit or quite a lot about this with a workflow, a clear workflow from folks where we’re saying, you know, I need you to get involved here and if this part doesn’t work then the rest of it doesn’t work. But on a more human level how do you get folks or how have you seen folks get the rest of their team involved in social media content? Because that feels like a whole skill in itself to use your term from earlier. Yeah it is, it is. It’s
Speaker 2: usually falls through if again you make it too rigid or too complicated. Like for us for example our CEO has a lot of TikTok ideas. At some point our social net manager said, look we’ll build a Notion page where everyone can pull in their ideas. Sure but for each individual that means when I’m on TikTok at home I have to go to Notion, find that document in which you said we’ll put in our ideas, copy the link, paste it there, add some sort of notes. That’s too much work. When I’ll see the next TikTok I’ll keep scrolling because I’m not in the mood. If you say DM them to our brand account, well that’s easy. So that’s why that’s an example of what I keep saying like making it super easy. That doesn’t always mean that it’s going to work it just means that you try your best to get the stakeholders involved and to get the video content again have everything ready. Like you can set a meeting that’s how our social manager does it. They set a meeting like five or ten minutes on one day. They have everything set up like the person that is interviewed or takes part only has to show up, do three quick things and go away. That’s it. Ten
Speaker 1: minutes is super easy to do as long as yeah. Love it. So so important but absolutely bang on. Thank you for this whole hour and thank you in particular for persevering through 15 minutes of a tickly throat at the end as well. It was so wonderful. There was so much practicality there that I hope folks I know that for us we’re going to have a takeaway which is like just going away and inspecting our workflow in particular. That feels really important but there was so much more right there. So I’ve walked away from today feeling absolutely brilliant and this is mirrored in the chat feature as well for you. So thank you very much for providing your wisdom today.
Speaker 2: Thanks so much for having me and I love the questions and the interactions. I was trying to
Speaker 1: keep up with everything. It’s just lovely. Honestly we’ve got such a lovely bunch of people. It’s endlessly, endlessly appreciated folks for you just being completely wonderful. Just as a as a quick one, two things to let you know about. First of all our conference tickets go live tomorrow. First day of the conference. Not tomorrow, Thursday. I won’t panic James and Elle watching in. So Thursday morning our conference tickets go live. So check that out and likewise for next week’s session we’re looking all at B2B social media. So I hope that’s useful too. With all that said it’s been such a thrill to have you all back today for today’s session and it’s after a long summer break. So thank you all so much for being here and have a lovely, lovely day. Everyone take care and thank you a lot for today
Speaker 3: as well. Bye-bye.