Social Media’s Best Strategy Secrets, with Ish Verduzco

0:00We are back with another episode of the Marketing Millennials podcast. Today's guest is Ish, a social pro who knows how to build from zero and make people actually care. We talk about growing an audience from scratch on social, making content that people actually want to share, and how to do it without a big team or budget. This episode was recorded last year, but I swear it's still full of so much gold. Excited to get into it and excited for you to listen. 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.

0:43The one request I tell our guests, stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the f*** up. what's up everybody welcome back to another episode of the market millennials i have a special guest today he crushes it on social he's crushed it on multiple social profiles i'll let him introduce himself but welcome to the podcast thank you daniel what's going on everybody my name is ish uh i currently lead social and community at a16z crypto i've been in the tech industry for what like nine or ten years now um and i like to kind of share how i broke into tech because i have a very non-traditional background.

1:22My first job was actually leading like an assistant manager at a gym at a 24-hour fitness in Southern California. So basically doing like front sales and customer service, managing a team of like 20 people. And I was, I think, 22 years old. But marketing is something that I've always been really passionate about ever since back in the MySpace and AOL instant messenger days. I just found it fascinating. And I think the reason why is that I grew up moving around a lot. I must have moved like 12 or 13 times by the time I hit high school. And, you know, growing up, it sucks when you're always a new kid on the block and you can never like, you know, keep in touch with your friends.

1:57And like back then it was email. My mom didn't let me have an email address at the time. And then this thing like MySpace came along. I think AOL Instant Messenger came along first. And then I was able to like connect with people and keep those relationships going. So, I guess I'll pause there and see if you have anything to chime in before I kind of share how I broke into tech, which is very backdoor, you know, not traditional at all it's actually funny because like for like the millennials out there like i remember it was actually like hard to if you didn't have a community in your school or anything to like find your like people like yeah exactly even aim was just your friends and myspace was just your friends and then there were like chat rooms back in the day where you can go find chat rooms but you never really had an opportunity to like instagram and um stuff like that too and other social ones to break into like new communities online which you can fit in and so it's it was a really interesting journey if you didn't go especially when you move around so much it's hard to find your group of people when someone some people have been living in the same place with 12, 13 years.

3:09Very envious of that. People had their friends since first grade all the way to college and then, yeah, they just been together forever. So yeah, I went to school at UC Merced, a very small school in the Central Valley and I, like many people our age, was very influenced by the social network, the early days of Facebook, Snapchat, etc. And so I always wanted to work in tech. I just didn't know that tech had jobs that weren't engineers. um until like graduated college and i was like talking to people about like what i wanted to do i was trying to apply to jobs and one of my mentors was like you know if you really want to work in tech you know you can break in there's always a back door and i was like yeah but i'm not an engineer and it's going to take another four or five years in order to learn that skill set he's like no dude like you know that they hire marketers and they hire like product managers and you know i had no exposure to tech before like i'm latino i grew up the first in my family to go to college, I'm the first person to ever be exposed to any of this stuff.

4:07And so, I graduated, did not get any of those, you know, jobs that I applied to and then had to move back home with my parents in SoCal and then landed a job at a gym. But every night that I would go home, I would just apply to these jobs that I was like dreaming of. Until one day, there was a role that came up and it was like an event specialist role. And so, I basically like found somebody at the company who I always also went to school with and I just got him on the phone and was like, hey, can you walk over to whoever's the manager for this role? I want to speak to her right now. And he's like, dude, you're crazy.

4:41Like, I'm not going to do that for you. Like, like I just started working here myself. And sure enough, eventually broke him down, my friend Kevin Ali Busan. And he walked over during lunch one time and handed her the phone. And she was hiring for an event specialist and said, hey, I know you don't know me. I've already sent you an email, I've already sent you a LinkedIn message. Here's my portfolio. I know that I'm just like a hungry college kid, but I know that I can do this role better than anybody else. Long story short, I drove up the next day to San Francisco from Los Angeles. I drove overnight and then I interviewed a day and a half later.

5:14The morning of, I get a message from the manager and she's like, okay, just to let you know the role that you applied for has been filled. But there's a recruiting coordinator role if you're up for it and kind of a different skill set. And so, I applied. I applied for that role. I interviewed. And then I got a call at 5pm later on that day. And she's like, hey, so I want to let you know you failed miserably in the recruiting coordination interview. But your skill set and your passion for events shined through. So, we're going to open up a brand new role for you doing events. And so, that's kind of where I started my tech career.

5:47From there, I've created my own job, my own job role at LinkedIn, doing social media marketing and recruitment marketing. And then from there, I landed my social media lead role at LinkedIn a few years later. So that's kind of like the career trajectory, I guess. I love that. That's for people, it's sometimes a scrappy way. You have to find the scrappy ways. And sometimes I remember when I started, I wanted to work in marketing, but I was in San Diego and San Diego had like no tech jobs or any like cool company. It's all in the Bay Area. Yeah. And I was like, okay, let's just take like a market, like a part odd, like specialist role.

6:24And I didn't know what part I was, but I was like marketing technology, that might be a cool thing. And then I worked there for like a year and then finally, like I, I saw tech companies hiring for marketing ops. And then I'm like, oh, I could go work at tech. But it was like, I had to find for someone to take me for like a skillset. And then the skillset let me into. Yeah, exactly. Once you're in, then you can kind of carve your own path. You just need that trust to get into the network and then you can kind of figure it out from there. I want to go into social media marketing and social media growth.

6:58I know you're passionate about that. Let's start of how you think about growth in social media. What is your philosophy? And then we'll go into more tactical things that you do to grow. For sure. So like many other marketers on the podcast that are listening, probably understand that like without understanding your audience and your value proposition, there's not really much you can do on social or on marketing in general. So the bedrock of everything that I do is understanding who you're speaking to, what your unique value proposition is as a company, as a product, as a service, and then as a marketing arm of all of that.

7:32And then figuring out like, how can you share that in unique creative ways via social and And then layering in value add opportunities. So like if you're, I don't know, if you're building something for B2B SaaS, not all of your content should be like B2B SaaS related. It should be helpful for the people that are using that particular service. So informative, educational, informational, and humorous, et cetera. On social specifically, what I do, I'll go out and I'll find 10 profiles that I want to target and then find 10 other profiles that are similar to them and just keep branching out until I have like a thousand people that I'm kind of targeting that are in my target audience.

8:09Because it's, when you're doing it via email, it's like a, you know, a faceless name, but on social people have their social profiles online. So I can go find, find them, see what they're interested in, go through their content, go through the replies, go through their likes and get to get a good gauge of like, what are these people like? What are they most likely to engage with? And how can my brand or my product or service deliver content that's going to be shared into other people's feeds. So when you started your new role, like their social presence was not really big. Yeah, we had zero. I built it from scratch.

8:46So when you're approaching something like that, because I know a lot of marketers like are either in the stage where they come in and there's a social problem with 2000 people and half of them are like bots and half of them other things. what are the first couple things you start doing i know you the audience thing is great but what are the first couple things you start doing to map out okay i want to grow what channels am i going to be on um what what am i going to start posting what are the first things you started mapping out so the very first things that i did when i got hired is i didn't even launch the social channels i didn't even put together a social strategy i tried to speak to as many people at the company as possible and just because i was like an outsider coming in and the culture was already developed for the company, for the brand.

9:30And so, I try to speak to everybody, high level, low level, executives, et cetera, to determine what's the personality and the voice and tone of A16Z crypto. If A16Z crypto was a person, how would they speak? Who would they follow? What kind of content? Are they funny, helpful, et cetera? And then put that into a personified A16Z crypto and then develop a social strategy. So, at the very top of it is like, why are we developing a social strategy? Why is it important to the brand? What are the goals that we're trying to reach? Is it increased podcast listeners, increased blog visits? Is it just brand recognition in general or increased attention to brand?

10:14And then once those are kind of mapped out, then okay, well, what social channels are most likely to drive growth in those areas? So for us, that was Twitter, X now, and LinkedIn. And a third channel, which is called Farkaster, decentralized social network, decentralized network and a social platform later on top. Within the crypto and community, the crypto and Web3 community, there can be a lot of hate and a lot of back and forth, especially in the replies. So one of my personal goals was just let's try to get 90 % of our replies to be positive. And over time, if they get better and better and better and people start saying like, hey, this is very helpful.

10:52This is educational. I appreciate this type of content then that's like a huge w for me so i can get more tactical if you'd like i kind of i've written a few threads but i think i think one thing that i want to dive into that you so important that you said was i think a lot of people just think like hey you need a social like presence like i think the first step knowing like why we even need a social presence is important I don't think like sometimes like that's not shouldn't be your first like focus and like it might be good to like have like a as a landing page but it might not be something you want to grow so it's so important to like know why we're going on social and then the goals of what we're trying to achieve so then you set up for success because I think they just want to have social because everybody has social which is usually like an answer a lot of people have it's how you gets weird.

11:48Every social media manager's worst nightmare is when the head of marketing or the founder says, hey, I want to be on this new social platform just because it launched or because everybody's on it. And you're like, well, our audience is not even on there. The content that we produce is not going to really work well for that platform. And we're putting so much energy into this other platform that's already producing great engagement. Why not just double down there? Most of what I preach when it comes to social media marketing is like, the more focused you can be, the better. And that's with your content.

12:16That's with the platforms that you decide to be on. That's with your engagement strategy to be as focused as possible because it's very easy to be on like five platforms at once and give each of them like very little attention to detail. Yeah, that's why it's all important you said. I started Twitter or X now. Once I've learned X, I... Branched off to LinkedIn. And the different audiences and different tones as well. But you can pull what worked from Twitter, which is what I do. Twitter is kind of like where I start. testing something works really well i'll figure out how can i craft it for the linkedin audience which is slightly different a little bit more serious a little bit more mature than like the crypto audience on twitter which is very like funny or like you know faceless names on on the screen also it's why i like how you said it started x at least for your audiences like real it's such a real-time feedback platform where linkedin takes a while to like you could like throw up like 30 posts and like where like LinkedIn, you wouldn't have like one or two a day to like.

13:21Yeah. You got to put out the bangers on LinkedIn. There's two things that I think will be helpful. The second one is going to be the, like what I, what's working for us right now for our growth. The first one that I think we can dig into right now is like my Twitter strategy. So when I got to A16Z Crypto, I talked to a bunch of people, I put together a doc and then like I figured out this is the voice and tone. Next is outlining exactly what I'm going to do and how I'm going to go tackle this goal. So, if you're kind of building the social presence from scratch, start off at the very top, obviously, your goals.

13:52So, it could be like increasing your following, driving traffic to your website, being positioned as a leader in the space. Next is voice and tone. So, determining like, are you helpful? Are you playful, supportive, knowledgeable, insightful? Kind of figuring out like if your brand was a person, how would they speak and who would they be online? Next after that is like the different audience segments that you're speaking to. A lot of people sometimes will say like, oh, well, I only have one target audience and they're like this huge generic blob of people. But you can oftentimes break it down into more specific audiences, which is helpful when you're developing content because you can say like, all right, if Web3 founders are the majority of people that we're speaking to, well, what are other ones?

14:32Web3 enthusiasts, people trying to break into Web3, you know, Web 2.5, Web 2.0 people, people in tech, big tech, etc. Media, industry influencers, et cetera. All of this helps you craft like your content strategy. Next category is content cadence. How often do you want to post on Twitter or whatever social platform? And do you want that cadence to go up over time, down over time? And then what are your, what are your, you know, success metrics? Are you measuring based on replies, bookmarks? Do you want more reach? So you're measuring based on impressions, retweets, et cetera, figuring out like what your success metric is.

15:09So you can kind of determine if you want to increase or decrease. The next thing on my doc is content. So what kind of content do you post? Do you have an editorial team? Do you have, you know, founder stories that you want to tell? Figuring out what are the buckets of content. And oftentimes, if you have a marketing organization, all this stuff is already there, like events, news, community, etc. It's just a matter of like outlining it. And then at the very top is what's the most important content that we want to share and how can we make it social first? Next is content pillars, the different types of content that you're going to...

15:42And this is not meaning like video, short form, etc. It's more like for us, it's like DeFi, NFTs, gaming and metaverse. All of these things are like subsets of Web3, but they're things that we want to talk about regularly. I get really, really in depth with my stuff just because I'm a social team of one, which usually this is the case. And so I want to make sure that whenever I'm out, whoever's running the social channels can look at this doc and be like, okay, I know exactly how we're going to speak. And Ish gave me examples of like, you know, the voice and tone, et cetera. I outlined content examples.

16:13Specifically, how would you write on Twitter? And for us, it's like I wrote examples for like the helpful tone, editorial tone, promotional tone, supportive tone. This is how we speak. These are the emojis that we use. These are the things that we don't use. And so, the next category is like, okay, how do we... Like, what are bad examples of content that if we push that online, we would be pissed or somebody would be pissed? So, you know, the content do's, the content don'ts. I'm going to rush to the last couple. Content to avoid. Community management. This is actually really important to our growth strategy.

16:46When do you reply or like to content? Do you like every single comment that you get online? Do you like some of them, only the positive ones, the neutral ones? How do you respond to people? The specific words that you use, the emojis you use, the gifs that you use, the memes that you use, etc. And then examples for each. The last category that I have is like the follower strategy. So for each specific platform, we don't follow everybody. What are the types of people that we do want to follow? You want to be very strategic with them. How do we reach out to them? Do we DM them? Do we try to build relationships with some of them?

17:20And all of this can be like, you know, translated to a business. If you run a business or CMO at a company, you want to have all this stuff outlined because it's kind of like your sales funnel at the same time. That's kind of like my social strategy. You can kind of use this for any social platform. I love the breakdown of it. I think it's super helpful for anybody who wants to start kicking up. One question I wanted to go back to is when you started at A16Z, how did you know you wanted to start at that company to build a social? If someone's going to get a social media manager, it could be different things.

17:53Some people are great at social media growth. Some people are great at keeping a great account. How do you know this is the social media manager role for you? Yeah. This took like a lot of like self-development work and just kind of like reflecting and like listen to books and podcasts, et cetera. But one thing that I've learned about my personality, and this is like true since I was a kid, is I like to go from like zero to one phase. I don't like to like maintain things. And so, when I've like reflected into different jobs that I've done or different projects that I've started, I get so much energy from like the ideation, the creation, the building and like the initial part of the scaling phase.

18:31like going from literally zero followers to let's just say a hundred thousand followers or a million followers. And then after that, the thing is going to grow itself. You don't really need to add that much more creative work in order to get the momentum going. Um, and so kind of reflecting when I was at LinkedIn, we had 400 ,000 followers when I started and I took us to 1.2 million. Um, and that was really fun for me because I have more than double X, you know, I, we got over to a million, which is really awesome. But then after that, I was like, okay, well, what's the next big mile so we can get to like five maybe two or three so i guess speaking to like a potential social media manager or other social managers out there is like finding the brands that are like aligned with your interest or the industry is aligned with your interest and then figuring out would you rather build from zero to something or find a brand that's already doing really well or decently well and trying to like one-up it which oftentimes is pretty difficult i think knowing that too is a great thing because for me i'm i'm in your boat i i'm more of a growing thing phase i also don't like a lot of red tape so so i can't i can't i don't want a lot of peripherals to get things out i want to be very because social is a very quick game so you have to be you can be stuck in reviews for you can have 48 hour sli turn around um so i think that's so important to know who you are as a person in your career to say like also like what type of company you want to work with do you want to work for like a startup and mid-phase stuff like that there's all these different things that you should know before you go go in your career so i think that's important also one thing i want to nail down that you said that's so good is setting up a sow um or like statement or whatever you want to call it sop standard operator it's not so w sop of like hey this is how we run social so like if i so you can take a break as a social manager most social media managers are so burnt out because you're the only person that could do your job so you you want to be somewhat replaceable or at least like somebody can step in if you need to take a day off you know yeah i think it's so important to have that even even if as you grow as a social manager say like you you end up hiring a team um now you have like an sop to just hand off to your next hire and be like okay this is how we do it um this is what we do so then you can go focus on the next phases of the strategy um so i think that's so important and i made that mistake a lot early in my career with marketing operations i was like the only marketing ops so i was like i built it all myself and then i was people i started hiring people and they're like i had to keep telling them what to do and i should have just made one documented everything so it's such an important point and i learned the hard away because when i was at linkedin i was still a team of one leading social for like their biggest business line talent solutions and so whenever i would take days off i would be like literally sitting on a beach like stressing or like checking my phone um my manager always had my back but i you're still a team of one i didn't i hadn't i didn't have things as documented as i have as i do now like you can probably pick up my document and still run the channels like decently well at least so that nobody notices that i left you know yeah that's the key that's a key part i think and it's also i think for you is that writing down the tone and make sure that that's what i i've done like even for like the marketing millennials we started documenting so if anybody was going to come and post on twitter or instagram or anything it was it's like okay here's how we talk here's how we don't talk these are the words we say this is the words we don't say like this is how yeah for sure so you got to get really specific and just for anybody who doesn't do social like this level of specificity that we're talking about it's like it sounds it sounds like common sense or sounds kind of just like oh i do that i already know but like you know your brand is the entire persona is going to be if you have hundreds of thousands followers even like a few hundred or thousands it doesn't really matter the size like one word misplaced or one use of emoji or like one meme that's out of place like your audience will for sure notice it just gives them kind of like a cringe or like you you're you know your brand equity loses a ton in just that one post so i think that's why i'm so like you know so strict on it especially in very like very strict niches like crypto or if you're marketers oh for sure and you're not talking like a crypto person and you're talking like someone who doesn't know anything about crypto oh man they'll drag you on crypto twitter they'll drag you if you don't if you don't like one word you could say something like like for example like the talk like when you say someone write like sass with like two capital a's for example exactly like that little thing that little industry will track you yeah exactly so like you got to make sure like you understand those things and we don't say spell sass like this we don't say this like this otherwise someone who doesn't know like it's not a bad like bad thing that they don't know but if they put it on twitter the whole community like Like, are you, do you guys even understand us as an audience?

23:46Exactly. If you put, so it's, um, I just would give a quick example. I bet there's a bunch of crypto examples, but that's, I just seen a lot of people who try to put things out on social that understand that you can read between the lines that they don't understand what they talk about just because of one word they put out. Um, last thing I want to ask you is what is a marketing hill you would die on? Okay. I have one. And a lot of social marketers would agree with me, but outside of social media management, you kind of people like scratch your head. A social media manager's job is not to do everything.

24:20Our job is not to like do analytics, growth, five platforms at once, you know, editorial, blog, memes, design work, community management. And it's gotten better in the past couple of years. but when I started my marketing job or social media marketing job like six, seven years ago, we were expected to do it all. Like, okay, this week you're going to write a blog post, but make sure you write, also do 40 pieces of content across five different social platforms and don't forget to engage with everybody. And, you know, we need you in this email marketing meeting because social is going to be included as well.

24:58And so, we were being like stretched so thin, social marketers, because we were doing five jobs at once. And a lot of social media managers will complain about this because it still happens today, especially at startups, unfortunately. The bigger organizations are starting to figure it out. They're like, why not get a more specialized marketer that's great at social media, but they're fantastic about copywriting, specifically on Twitter. And then I'll help them by getting a designer that's good at doing memes and creating infographics, et cetera. And then I'll hire a contract to do blogs or something like that that are over podcasting whereas before and it still happens today like one person is expected to do it all and people don't understand it's different skill sets a lot of those things being able to edit videos being able to create i've edited some shitty videos before i'm not very good at it be able to edit videos design community manage copyright understand technology analytics growth it is growth like all these things are are different also brains like sometimes like some social media managers are highly creative doesn't mean they're like the best at understanding numbers like this and you have to like find the what they good at and then figure out how to like build at least even if it's not on the social team Like you can have like a head of content feeding social people, social content, and you can have a video team feeding because they're already doing video for the company, feeding social some of that video content.

26:34There's like you have support functions that also help the social team do their job. And like you don't even always need to hire somebody to like compensate for the weaknesses of that social media manager. You can also do like contractors. You can use online tools. You can strip away the stuff that like is not really moving the needle, but you're just doing it because that's how it's always been done. Like you don't need to do video. You don't always need to do podcasts. You don't always need to do blog. You don't always need to do X, Y, whatever that is. It's just kind of like double down on your strengths.

27:04If you can hire a contractor or hire an agency to kind of fill in the gaps. And if not, then just do what's going to work for your brand and your audience. Going back to what you said earlier is it's focus. at the end of the day the way you grow a great presence is be great at the one or two channels first and then um once you've graded one or two channels and you understand and it's like an always-on channel that is can keep going um you can start branch out but also what you said at the beginning a lot of the things that scale you at first are very unscalable ways of doing it So things that take you to scale are very unscalable.

27:43Community management is like one of the, even if you put it in a software that helps you, it's still unscalable. You still have to reply to all these people. Exactly. Even if you put macros in, you're still replying to all these people. For sure. I did every single response myself for, I mean, I still do. I don't reply to every single tweet now because we get so many of them, but I try to like as many of them as possible. But early on, I would get like, at one point our notifications on Twitter was like hundreds every time I checked it every hour, just hundreds of new things coming in, new notifications.

28:15So definitely unscalable, but it obviously worked, you know, to get at the initial base of following. Most of the things that grow are unscalable at first. And that's just the, especially on social, is what you said at the beginning, all the things that you were saying in this beginning are unscalable things, but it takes you to get to the point where when you're at 20, 30K, you can scale easily. But reaching at finding 10 profiles and then finding those, that's unscalable, but it will help you scale. Replying to people, it's unscalable, it will help you scale at the end. Doing that research and getting in-depth and all the comments and all the community is unscalable at first, but it will help you get to where you are.

28:59But you have to do those things at the beginning. Otherwise, you're never going to scale. unless you get really lucky and Elon Musk retweets you or something. I did a presentation, like a masterclass on social media marketing. I'll send it to you. Maybe you can include it. It's like a 30 minute, 20 minute video on YouTube. I started off with a meme, but then one of the things that I said is like, there's three ways to grow a social presence. One, you could be famous. Two, you can be controversial. I don't recommend that one because it can usually end bad, even if it grows a following. And number three, you can be helpful.

29:31this is the route that i usually recommend and let me tell you why and i kind of dig into it but it's exactly to your point like if you're famous or you have like an established audience somewhere else then yeah of course it's easy you can throw shit at the wall and it'll stick but like most people like us you kind of have to like figure it out the hard way which is the not scalable way you know yeah and being helpful usually is very unscalable um but it's also great it also builds a great thing so you have to live and die by what you really want if you really want to grow you have to commit at least like the first 10 000 20 000 followers are going to be very unscalable things you do um until you get into an operating rhythm where you're like okay i get i have 30 people that i know like are retweeting this that are like high profile people who are great and or like are in the crypto community that are that i know will have audiences that will start doing it but until i get there i can't i can't really do anything so yeah for sure.

30:31Uh, well, this has been great. I want to also ask where people can find you and where people could find your stuff. Yeah, for sure. It's just Ishverduzco, I-S-H-V-E-R-D-U-Z-C-O on Twitter, Instagram. Um, I'm going to be more active on LinkedIn. So if you guys are active over there, um, check me out there and yeah, this has been really fun. I know I appreciate it. Finally us, uh, getting on a call. Well, this has been great and thank you so much. Yeah, man. Cheers. Thanks so much for listening. Keep tuning in to hear more great insights from the coolest marketers from around the world. If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe and follow the Marketing Millennials podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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