Principles of Effective Social Media Marketing with JS Stansel | Ep 398

0:00Jon-Stephen Stansel:Today's episode is brought to you by Customer.io. You have customer data, but turning it into personalized marketing at scale? That's the hard part. Customer.io connects the dots. Feed it your data, start sending messages that actually feel personal. Learn more at Customer.io slash TMM. Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS marketing podcast. I'm Daniel Murray and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests, stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the f*** up. Welcome JS to the podcast. I've been following JS for a while on social media.

0:53Jon-Stephen Stansel:He talks about all things social media. So first of all, give him a follow when you can, but I'm excited to chat about social media with him today.

1:01The Marketing Millennials:Yeah, I'm excited to be here. You know, we've kind of crossed paths a bit on various platforms and I'm glad to finally connect.

1:08Jon-Stephen Stansel:I want to first ask you this question because I think to clarify for everybody out there, why is the role of social media so important?

1:19The Marketing Millennials:Yeah, social media is really the front door, front porch of your brand, right? It's where people are going to interact with you outside of your physical location. That's where they're going to interact with you most these days. And your social media manager is the one right out there who is interacting with your customers, your clients, is putting out content that represents you and your brand and talking back and forth with customers in the comments and doing community management and all of that. So it's really the front lines of your communications with whoever you want to speak with now. And I think maybe 10 years ago when I was first starting out, people thought, oh, we could put an intern in charge of it or whatever.

2:06The Marketing Millennials:But now it's just become too important. And you really need a professional who is going to handle that responsibility and is trained to do it and can do it well. Yeah.

2:19Jon-Stephen Stansel:And then the secondary question, because I think this sets up the conversation is there's people who do social media and there's a social media manager. So like, could you give like the difference between those two?

2:32The Marketing Millennials:The way I like to compare it, it's like, just because you have a car doesn't make you a mechanic. And the same is true for social media. Just about everybody has a social media account. They can post on their own, they can do stuff. But when you need it for a brand and you, you know, you need somebody to actually communicate with a large group of people, you need to have a professional social media manager who knows the ins and outs of the strategy, how the platforms work, and can craft content that's going to resonate with your audience.

3:03Jon-Stephen Stansel:I obviously I know social media has a lot of roles in the social media, and it takes a lot of different types of talent to do it. It's not only like I'm scheduling content, you talked about a a lot of things you've already posted content, strategizing of your brand, community management. There's now like editing's becoming into play, like video content's even more important than ever. So there's all these different roles that become mushed into one, but it's also one of the most undervalued, underpaid roles out there. And why do you think that is?

3:40The Marketing Millennials:Oh my goodness. How much time do you have? You know, we could go into this all day about the myriad roles we expect out of social media managers and the evolving role that social media managers play. I think we need to get to a point where a social media manager is seen more akin to a creative director who is overseeing a team of creatives to craft content for social, to help strategize, to look at the analytics and decide what to do next rather than doing it all by themselves. Now, that's not a viable thing for every single brand and every single company. You know, the teams can be smaller. You know, you do have like that army of one social media manager who has to do it all.

4:19The Marketing Millennials:I think we need to recognize how much work a social media manager does and pay them properly for it. you wouldn't want somebody completely unexperienced, you wouldn't hand them a microphone in front of thousands of people and say, hey, go represent my company without any sort of PR training or anything at all. So why do so many brands think, oh, I can just have an entry-level employee or an intern run our social media? You're asking for trouble. That's not to say that there aren't roles for interns and entry-level employees. You have to get your start somewhere, but they should always be working with a trained social media manager who knows how to represent a brand.

5:00The Marketing Millennials:So, you know, my, my pitch, you know, to executives is more about all the things that can go wrong. You know, is it, is it worth the risk to save the money on, you know, on your social media? We've seen stories all the time of social media managers going rogue or somebody making a slip up that costs the brand lots of mistakes. It causes a lot of bad publicity for the brand. So it's really important that you have somebody who has that trained experience and knowledge and is also in tune with what's going on in the social world in ways that you do not. You know, the internet is a infinite place, right?

5:42The Marketing Millennials:You know, I work in the entertainment industry now and it always surprises me. I feel like I'm a very online person. I'm very knowledgeable about various influencers, what trends are big. But no matter how much you know, there's always some YouTube creator who has millions and millions of followers that you've never heard of. So you need somebody who really is online and understands the online environment that your customers are in, where to best recognize them, what trends are in, what things are not good for you to post. I always say it's kind of hard to quantify a negative of like, but how many times I've saved brands by saying, hey, let's rethink posting that.

6:27The Marketing Millennials:You need that person. Yeah.

6:30Jon-Stephen Stansel:Yeah, I mean, the one point too is, like you said, there's so many pockets of the internet. And especially now, there's so many micro, micro communities that if you're not in that micro or understand that micro, micro community, you could speak out and say the wrong thing. or just be tuned out because you're not speaking their language or speaking how they or posting a trend that they don't care about or like going down a path that you might turn them off of your brand for a long time if you do that i want to go also so i know there's a pitch for you to tell me why leadership should care but how can and there's a lot of social media managers who listen to this How could they advocate better for themselves internally to make sure they are getting the right treatment, getting the right pay, getting the right respect internally?

7:24The Marketing Millennials:Communication and training. Those are two of the biggest things. Share both your wins and losses honestly with your higher ups. Let them know what's going on. Sometimes I would even on a Slack channel, you get those comments that say, give your social media manager a raise or somebody says something nice about that. screen cap it and send it. It's cringe. It doesn't feel comfortable doing it, but no one else is going to advocate for you, right? Your boss, unless you share with them the good things people say about what you're doing, their chances are they're not going to see it. So you need to be the person putting that in front of them.

7:59The Marketing Millennials:And then just education. One thing I did when I was the social media manager at Texas State University is once a semester, I would hold a social media training session for anybody in the in at the university who wanted to come and learn more about what we did in the marketing office with social media, why we did it. You know, if you have an event that you want promoted, how to get that promoted on our social media, all the things that entail the decision making process behind every post. And those were very well attended. People would come and, you know, I had a few that were standing room only.

8:33The Marketing Millennials:But that helped out a lot in people understanding that it wasn't just random posting, that there was a strategy behind it. And that word got out around campus as well. So you've got to get out there and really educate people about what you're doing. Ask your boss if they have time. Have them shadow you. Say, hey, I honestly believe that social media managers should be in the executive inner circle. Invite yourself to those meetings. you know, whether those decisions are made. One thing that really helped me get in with, you know, executives in some of the companies and organizations I've worked with was, as terrible as it is, is crisis comm.

9:17The Marketing Millennials:You know, I've been through floods, tornadoes, all sorts of things. You know, I started my career doing higher ed and, you know, it felt like there was a crisis almost every other day. But being in those meetings and showing our, our VPs and president, this is what we're doing on social media. Here's a report of what's going on. Whether you ask for it or not, here it is. And slowly but surely, they start to understand the impact that you're having.

9:43Jon-Stephen Stansel:I think that skill you just said, I think every market could think about doing that because I think internal marketing for any role now, especially ones that are undervalued is as important as what you're doing as a social media manager and getting the brand out there. So those trainings, those internal communications, the sharing of the wins, you have to be your best PR person internally. Otherwise, like you said, nobody's going to do it for you. Maybe if you have a good manager, they might do it, but you can rely on your manager to

10:19The Marketing Millennials:do that for you. Oh, exactly. You know, I, when at one university I worked at, you know, my boss led the media relations department and, you know, professors, when they would go out and speak at conferences or whatever, and, you know, they would send a little thing to us to make a press release about and put it on the front page of the university website. And I'll be honest with you, nobody read those except other people at the university. So, you know, once I spoke at a conference and it's like, hey, why are we not putting this on the front page of the website just like we do for professors? And he's like, that's like, if my boss said, you know, to like, we don't really talk about our department.

10:56The Marketing Millennials:I'm like, well, we should, we need to, let's get that out there. You know, there was one we put out that, you know, a professor appears on a podcast and I had been on like six podcasts that year. I was like, we need to let the university know what we're doing, especially when you're working with faculty and professors who are incredibly smart, but they're going out and presenting and doing things at conferences. And we needed to share, hey, we're doing that too. We're also professionals in our field. So yeah, you've got to toot your own horn. And it feels weird to do, but no one else is going to do it for you.

11:30The Marketing Millennials:Even still, every time I post a win on LinkedIn, I feel like, oh, people are going to think I'm braggy before I post that. But no one else is going to do it for you. So you got to do it.

11:40Jon-Stephen Stansel:I know you're coming out with a book soon and I want to just, you don't have to share all the nitty gritty that people could get, but I know it's 10 principles of social media marketing, if I'm correct, but what is one or two core principles, if you could share, that every social media manager or every social media team needs to know to be successful in social media?

12:07The Marketing Millennials:Yeah, I sure can. Yeah, the name of the book is The Ten Principles of Effective Social Media Management. It's coming out in September, and each chapter covers a different principle that I think is core to effective social media management that is never changing. The challenge of writing a book on social media management is that by the time it's written and printed and published and gets out to the consumer, it's outdated. So I tried to think of core principles that just will be universal with social media management, fingers crossed, for a very, very long time. But things like, you know, there's one chapter about social media, effective social media management needs a budget, right?

12:45The Marketing Millennials:It's free the way a puppy is free. You can go to the animal shelter and pick up a puppy, but you've got to feed it. You've got to take care of it. And in that chapter, we really break down all the things that you need to spend money on for social media management from not just the paid social side, but like what equipment your social media manager needs. Professional development opportunities for your social media manager. Because we need to go out. The field changes so often that if we're not constantly learning, we're falling behind. Another effective principle is that social media management is a team effort.

13:19The Marketing Millennials:And we talk about all the different roles, kind of like we were talking earlier, what sort of team structure that you have in ways that smaller teams of one, it's still going to be a team effort. because everyone, if you only have a social media manager on your social media team and nobody else, it falls down to other people at your company are going to have to start taking on a few roles to help them out, to help share possible stories, get them content ideas, help represent the brand on social media. So those are two big ones. Another one that we talk about is accessibility and being sure that your social media content is accessible to people with hearing impairments and visual impairments and how making accessible content makes the content better for everyone.

14:04The Marketing Millennials:So we cover, you know, I was going to say, we cover a lot of principles, but we cover 10 big ones. So the ones that I think are the most important. So those are a few of them.

14:13Jon-Stephen Stansel:I want to go down the first one you just said, because I actually was at a conference a few weeks ago and Gary Vee was on stage and he said that like the brands that are not investing basically like 20 of the marketing budget on social media creative and content that's organic social media that you could test before you put it on paid or anything like that is those brands are going to fail because we're in the era of like the algorithms are changing to intent-based algorithms like there are ways that things are going to go of hour and if you and like you're just wasting money if you just put a random creative on a paid social that would never work on organic and think it's going to actually work on organic so what are your thoughts on how much of the marketing budget should actually be dedicated to this organic social media effort what is your thought on that you're sitting on a gold mine of customer data and it's doing nothing for you.

15:14Jon-Stephen Stansel:That's not a data problem. That's a tools problem. Customer.io connects your data to every channel you already use. SMS, email, push, in-app. Then it uses AI to build workflows that used to take weeks. Every message feels like it's written for that customer, not blasted at them. 8 ,000 plus brands already made the switch. Learn more at customer.io slash TMM.

15:41The Marketing Millennials:oh man and again that that organic people think it is free but it is not just because you can make the post and hit send on it or the thing that that really gets under my skin is the oh it's just social media and besides lo-fi content does better anyway it's not the fact that the content is lo-fi or low quality or feels like somebody just did with their phone it's the story you're telling, whether it's, you know, a low production value or a high production value, like it, it's the story behind it. Like it's not, that's not an excuse to have subpar content. Right. And you need talent to do that.

16:22The Marketing Millennials:You need people who are creative. You need, you know, I think it's so funny. We, we're talking about all the roles we ask of social media managers, you know, from being able to not just understand every single platform, what's working, but we We also ask them to be graphic designers, video editors, also good writers. And on top of that, for a lot of brands, we ask social media managers to be funny, which is a completely different skill set entirely. Not everybody has, right? We don't recognize that as a skill like we do, like understanding Excel or, you know, whatever, being able to put together a good slide deck.

17:00The Marketing Millennials:Humor is a skill. So there are so many things we ask them to do, and we need to pay them fairly for that. You're not going to get the funniest person or somebody that knows social media and pay them peanuts and have them stay for a long time. So you need to invest in a good social media manager because not only is it the skill of a social media manager, your social media manager understands the ins and outs of your brand. They know the brand voice. They know everyone at your company, right? You know, they know when I'm coming and I say, okay, I need to get something and some photos from you or something like that.

17:40The Marketing Millennials:We kind of know where the bodies are buried. We know the things not to say on social. So when you lose a social media manager, when they move on, the institutional knowledge that you lose along with that is so hard to replace. So it is worth it to pay your social media managers well. And I'm not talking about just an enormous salary or anything like that, which would be great. It's fantastic. But something reasonable that it's not an entry-level salary.

18:11Jon-Stephen Stansel:It's funny because a social media manager can't hide behind a paid spend budget for the creative. Like a paid social person could put a creative, put spend behind it. It can get a lot of impressions, but doesn't mean that creative was good. Like a social media manager is like tied to like having to know that this will resonate with my audience, resonate with the algorithm. This format works on this platform. Or this is the type of content that is going to, it works with our brand. Also, what you said, like the institutional knowledge. I've been so many places where if you post this, the CEO would ream the marketing team.

18:51Jon-Stephen Stansel:And not many people will know that. Like the CEO might ream the market if you say two or three words wrong or something.

18:57The Marketing Millennials:Yeah, exactly. You know, like in higher ed, there's a whole sort of lingo that, you know, the housing doesn't like you to say dorm. They want you to say residence life or residence hall, which I think with the audience, it's confusing, but that's neither here nor there. But we do have one of the few jobs at any company where everyone from the CEO to the intern in the mailroom see the product of your work and have a very strong opinion of it. That's to say nothing of your customers. Imagine if every email that you sent out was seen by everybody in your company and all of your customers and scrutinized for every little mistake, error, or typo.

19:38The Marketing Millennials:That's what social media managers do every day, basically. Every post we send out is absolutely scrutinized. So it's a high-pressure job. It requires a lot of talent. There's very little room for error. Mistakes will happen because just the sheer volume of it. So I think brands need to understand that and social media managers should be compensated accordingly.

20:00Jon-Stephen Stansel:A couple of questions, just like general question, because I know these come up with asks that social media get. So what are your, like if someone came up to social media manager and says like, hey, we need to be on XYZ channel or we need to be on these five channels to be successful. Like, and you know, as a social media manager, you really need to be on Instagram and LinkedIn, maybe like, what, how do you go push back and say like, Hey, like we don't, we don't need that to be posting there, or we don't need to be investing all that time when I can be really successful on these two channels and help us grow the business.

20:37The Marketing Millennials:It kind of comes back to that education, uh, and building that rapport where they, you know, you need a boss that kind of trusts you a little bit of like, when I say no, I'm not saying no because I don't want more work. I'm saying no because this is not going to help us. It's not a good use of our time. And I have the reason behind that. It can be kind of tough to push back, especially on higher ups. Oh, my nephew said we need to be on TikTok. So why aren't we on TikTok? And it's like, well, we sell accounting software, which there can be, but it may not be the right for your specific audience at that time.