Chris LoCurto:Welcome to The Chris LoCurto Show, where we discuss leadership and life, and discover that business is what you do, not who you are. Welcome to the show, folks. We are so glad you're joining us again today. Today, we are having a lot of fun because we are doing a couple of things. Today, we are going to be talking about social media and why it's so important to you, how you should be using it, why you should be using it, a whole lot of stuff that we are constantly working with small businesses on through our coaching programs or our mastermind groups, or strat plans to understand the power of it and understand the marketing side of it. On top of that, we are also introducing to you ... She's been with us for a little while, but we're introducing to you one of our team members, Savannah Flynn who has come on and absolutely just crushed it here in our business. I want to introduce to you, Savannah Flynn. Savannah, welcome to the show.
Savannah Flynn:Thank you. I'm very happy to be here.
Chris LoCurto:We are so glad to have you here. It is great not only to have you on the team because you've done such a phenomenal job, but we also have the opportunity for you to talk about something that you're actually going to be teaching here in a little bit. We've got this event coming up on September 25th which is what we call our 'Next Level Event'. This is for all the folks that are in our mastermind groups, our coaching groups, some of our folks that come from our Strat Plan events. This is going to be ... We do this multiple times a year where we bring these folks in and just pour into them and teach amazing, phenomenal stuff. In this event, a lot of the stuff we're going to be teaching on is sales, marketing, social media, all those things of growing your business, of how to do these things, not just the importance of it. There's a lot of people out there saying, "This is why it's important." We're teaching the hand-to-hand. We're teaching when you are selling, when you've got sales people.
This is by the way one of the biggest struggles with companies is not knowing how to get their sales people to sell well, not just sell a product. "Hey. Here's our thing. Go tell people about this", but how do you handle objections? How do you close just about any situation? How do you close different personality styles? How do you close different types of people? How do you close men? How do you close women? All kinds of stuff on sales. All kinds of stuff on marketing.
What needs to be in your marketing plan? Do you even have one? How do you do one? What's doable specifically for your business? How do you do a marketing plan for you? How do you get new customers? How should you be getting new customers? How do you build loyalty within those new customers? A whole bunch of stuff on making sure that you are walking down the right path as far as getting new customers inside of your business as opposed to doing what I think is ridiculous, which is a shotgun approach. You guys have heard me talk about that before.
Instead, being focused and intentional on that. How to look long-term so you're not just trying to sell something today, but you're also trying to figure out, "How do you take the loyalty from the customers that you've built and generate referrals? What do you do when it comes to marketing?", and on top of that is social media. We're going to be talking about the stuff that we shared today and a heck of a lot more because we don't have enough time to get into everything, do we, Savannah?
Savannah Flynn:Definitely not in this podcast.
Chris LoCurto:Not in a podcast, but folks, this is directly from my playbook. These are the things that we do that are successful. These are the things that we teach people on a consistent basis. If you are interested in this, there is a limited number of tickets. This is going to be at our office in our event center, and I'm telling you, there's a limited number of tickets. If you're interested in this, then it's very easy to get information. Text the word, one word, 'Nextlevel' to the number 33444. If you want more information about this event that's coming up, make sure you get on your phone right now and text the word 'Nextlevel', one word, to the number 33444. All right. Savannah, I love having you on because of the journey that you've had since you've been here which has been a fun one. Savannah, you've got this great perspective on social media because you weren't even doing it before coming in here.
That's not true. I mean, it was not something that was important to you. Like I remember you saying "I do social media, but I don't really care about it", but you came in not really doing it, and then you have just absolutely crushed it here. Talk about that. Talk about that transition, that perspective, and then talk about why is social media so important.
Savannah Flynn:I have a confession to make first. I did ...
Chris LoCurto:Confessions with Chris LoCurto.
Savannah Flynn:I did not like social media before I started working here. My friends actually used to make fun of me for deleting my Facebook for months at a time because I just didn't see the point of it. Then, when I started working here, I even had a similar conversation with you and Joel saying, "Guys, I might not ..." Do you remember this? "I might not be the right person for this job. Social media I snot my thing." I think that's something a lot of people think is, "Ah, social media is not my thing."
Chris LoCurto:Right.
Savannah Flynn:That really doesn't mean anything, because social media is just a tool. It's a tool that anyone can use and grow their business with it. For me, personally, when I started doing research and looking at different social media sites and influencers, and really started to gain perspective on it, it got really exciting because I started to see our numbers change, and I started to see measurable differences in our site traffic and how that would affect our revenue. Then, it really clicked for me, "Wow. You can use social media and utilize it in a correct way to grow your business and to encourage your clients and to do all kinds of things that people would dismiss by just thinking, 'Social media is not my thing. It's just a tool'." Like many tools you have in business, it's one that is really phenomenal to be utilizing right now.
Chris LoCurto:You came in looking at it going, "Okay. I really don't even like this." We brought you on. You've got a phenomenal background, an exciting background. You've got a background in international business. You've got your very entrepreneurial which of course I love, and thank you so much to your dad who's done a phenomenal job teaching you business as well, because there's considerably different stuff that you learn through school and stuff you learn in a business.
Savannah Flynn:Yes.
Chris LoCurto:We know that, but you came on going, "I don't even like this. I don't care about it. Holy cow. This can do a lot of stuff", and from that point on is where it really exploded like watching your transformation in that process of going from "This is kind of cool" to "Hey. Let me show you these numbers, these stats, the stuff" every time we have our meetings that we're talking about social media, we're talking about the marketing stuff that you guys are reporting. It's phenomenal.
Savannah Flynn:Yes.
Chris LoCurto:I mean, it's stuff that has just blown us out of the water. Let's start with an avatar because I think people don't really understand the importance. They go, "Oh, social media is try and get as many people as you can and promote your stuff to them" which is absolutely not what's important about it. Talk about avatars, the importance there, and also talk about vanity numbers and building loyalty.
Savannah Flynn:Yes. I'm so glad you brought that up because there are a lot of empty numbers on social media, and you would be amazed at how much people pay for followers and for likes.
Chris LoCurto:Yes.
Savannah Flynn:When it comes down to it and you're trying to promote your brand and sell your product, they're just not going to be interested, and that's why there are vanity numbers. They don't mean anything to your business and how to get good numbers that actually convert to revenue and traffic to your site is when you really know your customers. When you're sitting at your computer, you’re about to type out that tweet, who's it going to? Picture in your mind it's a living, breathing human with a personality and an interesting you on the other side. Yes, they have money, and that's great, and that they have a vested interested in your business and in your company. A really interesting thing about avatars also is that you can have different avatars for different platforms on your social media.
Chris LoCurto:What is an avatar?
Savannah Flynn:An avatar is that person that you are trying to connect with to get to understand your brand and to eventually buy your product or your service.
Chris LoCurto:Kind of somebody who fits the demographics of your specific business.
Savannah Flynn:Absolutely. Absolutely. The more that you can learn about that person, their age, their gender, what they like to do when they're on social media, and any information you can pull about them makes you incredibly effective at marketing to them through social media, and getting them to see a tweet or see a post and say, "I totally relate to that. Yes, I need that product", or "Wow. That really resonated with me. I'm going to go share that with ten of my friends", and that's when you start to see that engagement build and your followers and your likes grow because people are genuinely interested in what you're sharing and what you're offering because they feel understood, and they feel like you get them. That's where the real engagement and the sale comes through and is genuine. That makes it very authentic. It makes it a win-win relationship for both the business and the avatar you're trying to target.
Chris LoCurto:I'm trying to think of avatars that don't work with us. Who would we not promote to?
Savannah Flynn:Maybe a 17-year old girl flipping through Instagram, looking for, I don't just, just funny images and inspirational quotes on fashion.
Chris LoCurto:Right.
Savannah Flynn:That wouldn't be what we'd be putting out.
Chris LoCurto:She's most likely not going to come and learn about leadership. Most likely.
Savannah Flynn:Most likely. I wouldn't want to totally rule her out.
Chris LoCurto:Right, because if it's you, then absolutely. You would be somebody who wanted to learn about that kind of stuff. That is not somebody we need to be marketing to. When you're talking about these folks that are spending crazy amounts of ... I've seen people spend tens of thousands of dollars to grow their Facebook numbers to gain all of these likes, and those are empty. Those people aren't going to do. If you gained a teeny-tiny percent of them, it still doesn't really create much loyalty or revenue for you, so making sure that you understand who your avatar is on each platform because each platform is different, understanding that helps you to gain the loyalty, and then they become kind of walking billboards, don't they, because if I'm loyal with the Savannah Flynn brand, I want all the people who follow me to know about you as well. Right?
Savannah Flynn:Correct.
Chris LoCurto:Talk about that a little bit and how do we make sure we're marketing to those people? How do we make sure we know what our demographic is? What's our demographics?
Savannah Flynn:It's really interesting because this is another way to use social media is to find out who those people are because you're engaging with them on a very personal level. It's a relationship, so we know from our data that it varies by platform. On our Facebook, we know that from our data, it varies by platform because on our Facebook, we have pretty equal men and women as people who've liked our page, and on Twitter, it's something like 76% male, so knowing your avatar is incredibly important and social media can help you figure out what that avatar is and what that looks like. What is also really important from a social media perspective is something called 'Native posting'. It's just a fun way to say that certain things work on different platforms, so something that I would post on Pinterest, I would not then post on Twitter. To give that a little more explanation, Facebook first of all has 1.5 billion people actively on it.
Chris LoCurto:That's insane.
Savannah Flynn:Facebook is set out for businesses to be successful the way it's set up. There are already 30 million business pages on Facebook, so it's very ...
Chris LoCurto:Really?
Savannah Flynn:Yes, so it's very user-friendly. If you haven't gotten started ...
Chris LoCurto:Most of those aren't doing a good job promoting anyway, so ...
Savannah Flynn:Sadly no, but if you haven't gotten started with social media, Facebook is a great platform to start with, because of its reach, but also because this is really interesting. It has the most evenly distributed demographic, which means you're going to find almost as many 50-year olds on Facebook as you are 20-year olds. When you think about your product and your avatar, it's really a great place to brand yourself and push your product, and Facebook's native posting to use that term is all about sharing. It's connecting with your community and sharing status updates in what you're doing, sharing quotes, sharing images. It's a very easy way to promote your product without coming across as salesy. When it comes to different other platforms for Twitter for example, it doesn't have quite as many. I mean, 300,000,000 I guess you can't say. That's plenty. Twitter is much more fast-paced. People post a lot more frequently. It is a great place to post if you have any podcasts or blogs, quotes, things like that, and the information tends to be more current events and articles.
Those are two that I would say definitely start out in if you're looking to invest in social media and growing your business that way. Facebook and Twitter are great places to start, and they also come with a set of analytics which is really important, and I will talk about that in a little bit is measuring your return on investment for your social media. Those are two great platforms to start on, and one I definitely want to mention is Pinterest. The reason I bring this up is ...
Chris LoCurto:All the guys listening will be like, "Oh my gosh."
Savannah Flynn:Wait. Wait. Don't. Don't turn off the podcast. Pinterest just came out with a feature called a 'Product Pin'. If you haven't heard of this, it's something to look into and get really excited about, because if you are a small business and you are trying to sell products, people can now buy directly off of Pinterest, and there are some companies that are really utilizing this and doing a fantastic job. I know if you want to go online and look at some examples, Dr. Josh Axe does a really good job with this.
Chris LoCurto:Josh is phenomenal.
Savannah Flynn:He does a fantastic job with that, and it's just really important to be cognizant of the different features that these different platforms have and posting for your avatar on each of these sites.
Chris LoCurto:Now, you bring up something that I think is vitally important for people to understand, like you just said you got to understand the native posting. There are things that absolutely flop on Pinterest. I mean, get nothing.
Savannah Flynn:Yes.
Chris LoCurto:As people like it on Pinterest, you did something last week. I mean, the report came through, and I'm like "Goodnight." We had a ton of activity there, and it's just so stunning, but it was the right thing. It was the right thing that you did. It wasn't ... There's a right way to post at Twitter. There's a right way to post to Facebook, and being the monstrously negative person is not going to help anywhere, and posting the same exact thing to Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, and we're only really hitting four things today because there's other things that most people aren't even prepared for.
Savannah Flynn:Yes.
Chris LoCurto:If you can't get these down, we don't want to talk to you about Periscope yet because if you don't understand Instagram, that's going to be difficult to try and say, "Okay. Here. Push your business here" if you can't use Pinterest correctly, and not everybody needs to be in Pinterest. Correct?