Social Media: What’s the Point of Social Media with Matt Edmundson (episode 019)
by April Buencamino-dyMatt’s been in eCommerce since 2002, running his own eCommerce business – Jersey Company which since 2006 has global sales in excess of $75m. In recent years he’s branched out to help others and now hosts the eCommerce Podcast and coaches many eCommerce businesses via his masterclasses and masterminds.
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Getting Started With Organic Social
Matt started playing around on social media on his personal accounts when Facebook first launched.
He says that they quickly realized the power for business and have been working on it ever since.
In the early days, Matt says you were guaranteed that everyone who followed you would see your posts, but that’s absolutely not the case anymore.
So while social has become more competitive it remains a soft touch marketing practice and people who have been in marketing for longer or are from an older generation may have a harder time adapting.
Business or Media Outlet?
The argument has been made that businesses need to be more like media companies now than ever before.
The question about where to put effort and money can be tricky in this new paradigm. Is it better to leverage an existing platform that someone else has built or work on building your own?
Matt says that it can be hardest to grapple with the fact that if you use someone else’s platform, the people buying ultimately aren’t your customers.
The best solution will be different for every business, but it’s an important question to ask and have clarity around.
How to Start With Organic Social
Getting started is always hard, so Matt makes it simple — start where your customers are.
It may sound simple, but a lot of people get caught up in trying to use all the social media platforms and spread themselves too thin.
Matt argues that you should choose the platform that your customers use most regularly. If you have a very young audience, Snapchat and TikTok are going to be a better choice than Facebook.
The fact is, social media is a huge time investment, so it’s crucial that you focus your efforts.
What is Considered Social Media?
There is a much broader understanding of social media than most people recognize.
Matt suggests that rather than immediately going to Facebook and Instagram, a great first step is actually building really rich content on platforms like blogs and video.
It’s difficult to build a tribe by just talking about a product, so starting with content building actually builds a foundation for more social media.
Matt argues that it’s actually easier to cultivate leads through rich content like youtube and blogs than it is through social media, even if you have a lot of followers.
How to Measure Value
Matt says that the purpose of social is really to build a tribe and measuring that is all about engagement.
Knowing that, the things that he prioritizes in an effort to measure value is by looking at engagement and volume of shares. It’s not as easy or straightforward to measure organic social success as it is to understand ROI on paid ads.
If you do want to track traffic you can translate through to Google Analytics and understand how much your social traffic is running through to email signups and other on site activities.
For Matt, product sales remain the number one goal for his company, but email signups is number two. Interestingly, getting people to sign up to your email list is actually much easier than getting people to share your post.
Matt says that this phenomenon is actually becoming more prevalent as social media users become more and more resistant to sharing.
Top Content if You’re Just Getting Started
- Content that builds confidence and trust with your customers.
- Content that tells your customers who you are
- The one place you CAN compete with huge goliath marketplaces is by adding in personality. Crucially, put a face to it and make it personal.
Insider Tips
If we’ve inspired someone to take their first step with Social media Marketing – what do they need to know to give themselves the best chance of success?
More than anything, social media requires consistency. Whether it’s blogging, YouTube or Instagram, pick a routine and get stuff out there on a consistent basis.
Video is a great way to do this since it has your face and personality in it.
Once you’ve started of course you’ve got to ‘keep optimising’! So what’s your favourite way to improve social media marketing performance?
Respond to the comments! And learn from them. Social media is a place for really absorbing and reacting to your customer feedback.
It’s impossible to improve our marketing unless we’re monitoring the performance – but the list of stuff we could monitor can be overwhelming. So what, for you is the number one social media marketing KPI?
Measure engagement above everything else
Crystal ball time – what’s coming up in the next 6-12 months that we should be getting ready for in social media marketing?
Covid has changed the game in everything including social media, but ultimately people want to be more connected in a more genuine way so people who can connect with people
Interview Links
Matt on Social media:
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