Defining Social Media Marketing, Part 2! Content Marketing, Influencers, & Audiences

Defining Social Media Marketing, Part 2

Did you miss the first part? Here is Defining Social Media Marketing,  Part 1 and Part 3; Social Commerce, Advertising & Analytics

Long time friends Matt Bailey and Greg Jarboe are partnering on an upcoming book from Wiley, “Digital Marketing Fundamentals: OMCP’s Official Guide to OMCA Certification.” The core of the book is defining each area of digital marketing and outlining the critical skills and knowledge necessary to achieve the OMCA Certification.

As a major part of digital marketing, social media becomes the most difficult to define. Greg and Matt discuss the definitive practices in social media, and define the difference between core skills and changing tactics.

Of course, when Matt and Greg get together, there are no lack of stories, statistics, and sarcasm. Enjoy part 1 of this delightful romp through our modern social media age.

Part 2 of “Defining Social Media Marketing” covers:

  • Kim Kardashian
  • Social Media as a content distribution platform
  • History of Social Media channels
  • Loss of distinctive characteristics among platforms
  • WordPress and Blogging
  • Connected TV and YouTube
  • Ted Turner and old movies
  • Elon Musk and Twitter
  • Donald Trump and TikTok
  • Creating your own platform and using social media marketing to build it!

Transcript

[00:00:00] Introduction: Well, hello, dear listener, and thank you for downloading another episode of the Endless Coffee Cup. I’m your host, Matt Bailey. I hope you’re having a good day. If you’ve been listening to the first series where Greg and I talked about defining social media marketing, that was a part one. It was divided into a part two. And if you listen to the first episode of that, you may have noticed that it did cut off pretty abruptly, and of course we weren’t thinking about how we were going to divide this into multiple parts. So, when you pick up today’s episode, you may notice that it starts right in middle of the conversation.

So, you may want to go back into the last few minutes of part one, just to get the context for what Greg is setting up as he talks about social media marketing and how to measure that. Alright, well now that that housekeeping is out of the way, please enjoy Defining Social Media Marketing Part 2.

[00:01:00] Matt Bailey: It’s pretty, really interesting to see what happens with Facebook because they are constantly under fire. They are constantly crossing the line, you know, and now I think everything that’s coming out with advertising and ad tech being so fraught with fraud and Facebook being one of the primary players of that, it’s going to be…

[00:01:19] Greg Jarboe: Yep.

[00:01:19] Matt Bailey: …very interesting to see how that happens.

[00:01:20] Greg Jarboe: Meanwhile, Instagram is still growing. And so, here’s one of those funny situations where, you know, Facebook acquired Instagram, but, you know, I, I can see not too far off where Instagram is actually going to end up passing Facebook in importance in social media marketing. Uh, huge number of people already use it. It already has a, a huge install base of social media influencers, yeah, yeah, yeah. Many of them started off up, uploading photos and they’re wandering around trying to figure out how to reinvent themselves.

[00:01:59] Bumper Intro-Outro: Welcome to Endless Coffee Cup, a regular discussion of marketing news, culture, and media for our complex digital lifestyle. Join Matt Bailey as he engages in conversation to find insights beyond the latest headlines and deeper understanding for those involved in marketing. Grab a cup of coffee, have a seat, and thanks for joining.

[00:02:21] Greg Jarboe: So, is social media going to help you do that or not? And if it does, great. Then what was the return on investment for the money that you put into that social media pane or that social media advertising or that influencer marketing campaign, what, however you slice it and dice it, you know, “Here’s how much I spent.”

By the way, if you want to hire Kim Kardashian to chew on your vitamin in a pose on Instagram, she’ll only charge you a million dollars. And that makes perfect business sense if you sell multiple millions of dollars of vitamins. If, if, if, if that works for you, great. But, you know, your job is not to, you know, pay through the nose to do influencer marketing or social media marketing or, or social advertising, you know, whatever. Or the new buzzword is “Social Commerce.” “I’m going to have social commerce next week.” And it’s like, “Terrific. So, how many cars are you going to sell with that?”

And once you use that as your anchor, you know, to your objective, your goal, then all of a sudden, a lot of the silliness in social media marketing falls away, and some of the serious opportunities actually begin to emerge because there are times where social media marketing pays its way. Unfortunately, most people don’t set that as its objective.

[00:04:09] Matt Bailey: Yep. I, it goes right back to, “How are we going to use this?” and rather than jumping at the platform first. And that is such a critical question, and, and it, it, it gets right back to what we talked about at the beginning is one of the biggest questions is, “How do I justify this? How do I rationalize the time and the investment that we’re making in that?” And you’re, you’re establishing a very clear connection between business goals and here is our purpose here. And without that, yeah, we’re, we’re not, we’re not impacting anything.

But what I like is how, social media, I, I call it a distribution multiplier because if I’m doing content marketing, if I’m doing other things, social allows me to distribute it across a wide variety of channels in a wide variety of media, and I can target different networks based on what type of reaction do I want, what do I want people to do? For example, if I want someone to click through, if I’m putting a strong call to action and there’s a click-through, I may not want to use Instagram because it doesn’t allow me to put a link in the post. Whereas I might use, uh, Facebook and LinkedIn because I can put a link in the post and I can put a strong call to action and make that happen.

And so, that’s what I do love about using social media as part of that larger strategy of developing those, those distribution mechanisms, but also, here’s the purpose. Here’s what I want people to do when they see it and thinking of it in terms of that, and now I’ve got an immediate, an immediate measurement based on my goal for the distribution and what’s happening with that.

[00:05:59] Greg Jarboe: And that works particularly well with the kind of products or services the people like, you know, wearing on their sleeve, you know, there are certain fashions that say, you know, “Look, look what I’m dressed in. It’s the latest sneaker,” right? It, it doesn’t work for all products and services.

I, I won’t name the brand because that would be wrong. Also, I think I’d be violating an NDA, but there was a brand that came to us who wanted a social media marketing campaign for their jock itch solution. And I had to go back to them and say, “You know what? Nobody is talking about their jock itch problem on social media, and so, they’re not going to tout, ‘Oh, look, I found a solution to it.'”

It’s like, you’re going to have to find a different way to market that puppy ’cause, you know, it’s not something people want to brag about. They may want to brag about the new restaurant they’ve discovered, or the latest movie they’ve just seen, or you know, the new car they, they are, you know, just purchased, the travel destination that they just came back from. There are a lot of things that work really well, but it’s not everything.

[00:07:17] Matt Bailey: It doesn’t fall under consumption.

[00:07:18] Greg Jarboe: Yeah, basically, basically. So, so again…

[00:07:22] Matt Bailey: What is…?

[00:07:23] Greg Jarboe: …remember the social part of social media, you know, do you want everybody to know…

[00:07:27] Matt Bailey: Right.

[00:07:29] Greg Jarboe: …that?

[00:07:31] Matt Bailey: There’s so many areas that you could go into about where people have…

[00:07:33] Greg Jarboe: I, it, it just, look, well maybe we should just move on in the outline. Wait, wait, wait, wait, oh, ok.

[00:07:36] Matt Bailey: … oh, yeah, things that people have tried to make social that aren’t social. Oh my goodness. Wow.

[00:07:41] Greg Jarboe: Now, antisocial marketing actually, it could be the new, new thing. Never mind.

[00:07:47] Matt Bailey: Alright. So, what’s interesting, Greg, is we are, part of this is we have to give a little history of early social media channels. And what I think is interesting about the history is that, and you alluded to this with what Facebook has done, there used to be distinctive categories of social media, and those distinctions are being eliminated or adopted by every other platform. I think the greatest example of this is, that we’ve seen recently is TikTok forced Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, they all reacted by adding the features of TikTok to their platform.

[00:08:29] Greg Jarboe: Yeah. And, and before that, you know, Snapchat had everyone ripping off their Stories idea. So…

[00:08:37] Matt Bailey: Yeah.

[00:08:37] Greg Jarboe: …you know, if, if you’ve got a really cool feature, you know, you’ve got about a three-week head start and then don’t assume that it’s just your direct competitors who are going to try to knock it off. All the indirect competitors are watching, too, because again, it is an incredibly fluid area.

So, you know, Instagram stunned everybody, oh, in the fall of last year by announcing it was no longer merely a square photo sharing site. And I’m thinking, “Okay, well, you, you, you may be headed off in, into, you know, Reel, which is merely a TikTok knockoff, and, and you may think that’s your future. I’m wondering who’s going to backfill and say, ‘Well, we are now the square picture, you know, photo sharing site.'”

[00:10:00] Because, you know, yeah. The, when they, when the elephants are stampeding, the, the monkeys realize they got to get up under the trees and get out of the way, they don’t want to be trampled underground, but then, you know what? They can come back down later and, and, and, and pick through the remains. And, and so, you know, the thing that really, really, you know, illustrates this, this the best is Vine died, everyone assumed that six second long looping videos were dead too. And that was before TikTok came along. So, the answer is…

[00:10:08] Matt Bailey: Yep. Yep.

[00:10:09] Greg Jarboe: …maybe it was before it’s time, maybe it wasn’t monetized well, there are a lot of reasons something can come and go, you know, stay tuned.

[00:10:18] Matt Bailey: And it’s funny ’cause my, my kids are sort of in that odd spot where they were almost too young for Vine, but they loved it. And when TikTok came along, they’re just like, “Ah, it’s fine. No big deal. We’ve seen this before.” So, and, and it’s interesting the, these early classifications. So, like the first one was a, a social network, which I think would be more defined by I’m building networks of people. I am friends, connections, Facebook and LinkedIn are the two big ones. I think it’s interesting, too, when you chart the growth of both, uh, that it’s just this slow, steady increase.

Conversely, I think LinkedIn, I, is a, such a, I, it’s almost a mirror image of Facebook that they have had slow, steady, reliable growth. They’ve made intelligent acquisitions and the focus is a professional network, and it’s almost become a self-policing network because if you try to post anything political or try and post anything, you get called out on it. And people are saying, “We don’t want political content here. This is business content.”

And they acquired linda.com, which was a, an online professional development education, and now that’s incorporated. So, you know, you’re building connections, but what I love about LinkedIn, it’s, it’s now this is your professional profile that’s available to the world, and it’s become one of the number one spots for B2B selling and B2B advertising because of the nature of the network. It’s great.

[00:11:53] Greg Jarboe: Yeah. And another one of those categories, and this, this is how I think Facebook got away with redefining YouTube as in another category was video sharing. And in the early days, that meant YouTube and Vimeo. Okay. They’re over there. We’re Facebook, you know, we’re LinkedIn, we’re over here, different categories altogether.

And that was fine until Vimeo shrank and starved. I mean, it’s not gone, but it’s, it’s, it’s not the contender it used to be. YouTube grew and grew and grew and everyone got envious, and so, suddenly they started adding video elements. And then one of the interesting things that YouTube did was because they were monetized with advertising, to them, longer videos offered a chance to put more ads in, in, in a video. And so, they changed their algorithm in 2012, in the fall of 2012 to emphasize what they called watch time.

And by going the long video route, they basically opened the door up for people with short videos. And that included Vine six months later, it included Instagram, lately it’s included TikTok. So again, you know, the field has zigged, the field has zagged. It is still pretty robust, but boy, almost everybody, I, you know, even LinkedIn now says, “Oh, we have video too.”

[00:13:26] Matt Bailey: That’s right. You can upload anything anywhere and, and, and this, same thing. So, like the next category was microblogging, which is, it’s, you know, the big example is Twitter, which started out as 140 text characters. Well, I can upload video. I could upload images. I, and, and now I think we’re even pushing well beyond 140 characters. So, this is a great example of changing functionality to accommodate, well, this is what people want to do so, you know, we’re going to do that.

And, and it’s, the advantages of you don’t want to write paragraphs of content on a blog, you can write a couple sentences and publish it on a third-party platform, people can integrate with it. It’s still, it’s millions of people contributing, and if you just watch a Twitter stream, it’s, there’s no context to it. Unless you’re following a hashtag, there, and even still, I notice even if I follow a hashtag, there’s still no context to a lot of what’s happening. It’s, it’s a, it’s a stream of consciousness and that consciousness is the world on Twitter. And that’s what you see.

But I think it’s, it, it has been a very valuable tool, I think for, for journalists, for writers, for, I, I used to like it with politicians, but now I think it should be taken away and they should be sent back to their rooms.

[00:14:51] Greg Jarboe: Well, and then there’s the category that went away and that was photo sharing. I used Flickr…

[00:14:58] Matt Bailey: Yeah.

[00:14:58] Greg Jarboe: …extensively when I was, uh, promoting the Search Engine Strategies conferences. We would take lots of photos at those…

[00:15:05] Matt Bailey: Right.

[00:15:05] Greg Jarboe: …conferences, and boy, if we could get them up that night to Flickr, we were, we were doing okay. And then Flickr…

[00:15:12] Matt Bailey: Yeah.

[00:15:12] Greg Jarboe: …you, you, you know, they too wanted to add short videos. And, and, and their user base revolted. “No, no. We’re for photo sharing, not video sharing.” And, you know, it, it, it is amazing to watch what’s going on on Instagram now because, pardon me, they started off as a photo sharing mobile app. Okay. So, their, their wrinkle was, “We’re an app.”

[00:15:34] Matt Bailey: Right.

[00:15:35] Greg Jarboe: “We’re for mobile devices.” You know, Flickr was a desktop location and, you know, the coming and going of mobile over desktop is, is a sea change that everybody had to weather. But, and now Instagram is saying, “Oh, well, not so much anymore.” So, so again, the whole concept of photo sharing has morphed, and it really now comes down to what are we doing with this? And I will tell you…

[00:16:01] Matt Bailey: Right.

[00:16:02] Greg Jarboe: …I’ve run experiments recently, including with a guy named, oh, what was it, Matt Bailey, I think. I, I, I think he’s with a SiteLogic…

[00:16:11] Matt Bailey: Yeah.

[00:16:11] Greg Jarboe: …or, I, let’s, let’s put it this way. I, I could, I could, I could be…

[00:16:15] Matt Bailey: It’ll come to you.

[00:16:16] Greg Jarboe: …confusing him with someone I know better, but we added photos and videos to press releases that we distributed on behalf of, you know, a, a, a new training service that he had to offer. And what we found was is the photos turned up in Google News results along with the headline. And so, the photo actually helped capture the eye to the headline, to get people to click to it when they found it in Google News results.

But the videos that we attached to the same press release, in other words, there was a photo and a video. It was a multimedia press release. The videos surfaced in Google, you know, universal search results in, in the early days around the keywords that we had targeted. And, and so, with the ability to pick and choose and Google News picking photos and Google picking videos, it was useful to have both with the press release.

[00:17:22] Matt Bailey: Yeah. There’s also a little cottage industry around photos, Greg, and I found this out from my daughter, the photographer. That she takes a lot of the photos that she shoots, she does a lot of nature, a lot of outdoor photography, and she uploads them to stock photography sites. And she is making a good bit of money on a monthly basis selling her photos as stock photos.

And, now, and it’s interesting because they create a little social site. You can follow other photographers, they initiate conversation, so it, it fits all the definitions of a social media site that’s being monetized and allowing up and coming photographers to get exposure for their work.

[00:18:04] Greg Jarboe: Yeah. So, I, I, I rarely try to declare anything dead in the world. You know…

[00:18:08] Matt Bailey: Exactly.

[00:18:09] Greg Jarboe: …maybe smoke signals are dead. I, you know, I don’t think they’re being used that much anymore as a medium, you know, possibly Morse code, although every now and then it, it keeps coming back. But by and large, you know, it morphs, it, it changes, it, it adapts, it comes back, you know, you know, Second Life, which was once upon a time considered a virtual world, you know, is no longer with us, thank you very much. But pardon me, what is the metaverse?

[00:18:39] Matt Bailey: Yep. Like, we’ve tried this before.

[00:18:43] Greg Jarboe: I think I saw this movie.

[00:18:47] Matt Bailey: Yes. Yes. And, and, and yes, we need to go back and look at all what didn’t work in Second Life, ’cause I guarantee you, they’re going to make the same mistakes, same things, all this is going to come up. Yeah. It, it, it all comes around.

The one thing I, and you brought this up earlier is blogs as a social media, and absolutely it fits all the criteria of social media. And, and I, blogs are my sweet spot because, and when WordPress came out in 2003, I was at a digital agency and immediately, so the bread and butter of the company was building websites.

And when I saw WordPress come out, I’m taking it and showing to people I’m like, “This is going to change everything.” This is going to democratize the programming, which is the most time-consuming thing is to create a, a content management system within the website, the database. And I’m like, “This is done with a click of a button, and now all you do is make it pretty.” And so, it was open source. And now today WordPress is 40%…

[00:19:58] Greg Jarboe: Yep.

[00:19:58] Matt Bailey: …of the websites on the internet.

[00:20:00] Greg Jarboe: Yep.

[00:20:01] Matt Bailey: 40% of billions of websites. So, it’s not just WordPress. There was Typepad, Blogger, LiveJournal…

[00:20:08] Greg Jarboe: Yep.

[00:20:08] Matt Bailey: …where there are long before. What WordPress did was make it easy so that non-technical people could start a blog and it simplified everything. And, and then, you know, you, I, I love to point to, an example is it also gave publishers, reporters, journalists who could go independent and create their own thing.

[00:20:31] Greg Jarboe: Yep.

[00:20:31] Matt Bailey: Great example is the Huffington Post. It started as we’re going to go independent, do our own thing. And now it is one of the top news sources.

[00:20:38] Greg Jarboe: Yeah. I, uh, I, I too am addicted to blogs. There are some things that have disappeared. Things like social bookmarks, you know, once upon a time everything had to get shared…

[00:20:50] Matt Bailey: Ah.

[00:20:50] Greg Jarboe: …to, to Delicious, and then all of a sudden it became a feature of your, you know, my Chrome browser, you know, “You want to make this your favorite?” You, you know? And, and, and so again, you know, be careful of categories because if they are just clever features, other people can knock them off quickly and will, and then your raison d’être sort of needs to get reinvented, or you, you fade away in, into history.

[00:21:19] Matt Bailey: You know what I miss? RSS feeds. I miss my RSS feeds.

[00:21:24] Greg Jarboe: Well, that’s, that’s another one that came and went, isn’t it?

[00:21:27] Matt Bailey: It is. I, I think it went away because you didn’t get the ads.

[00:21:30] Greg Jarboe: Well, no, no, no. It, it went away ’cause Google acquired the leading one in the category and then didn’t know what to do with it, ’cause you’re right. “How do I monetize this? Oh, well.”

[00:21:39] Matt Bailey: Yep. Exactly. Yeah, that was my front page was all my RSS feeds, catch up on what everyone’s written and posted, and go about the day.

[00:21:49] Greg Jarboe: Now that brings us to the blender. Since we’ve already alluded to it, you know, is this a feature?

[00:21:56] Matt Bailey: Yeah.

[00:21:56] Greg Jarboe: Is it a platform? Is it a category? The answer is, well, it depends.

[00:22:03] Matt Bailey: Yeah.

[00:22:03] Greg Jarboe: That means any good social media marketing needs to pay a little bit of attention to the lessons of history because okay, maybe it doesn’t repeat itself, but man things come back again and again that seem awfully familiar. And so, there are lessons that, you know, you can learn even if they aren’t exact.

So, the guys who may be the poster children for evolution of their definition of who they are and what they’re about are Facebook and Instagram. And, you know, some of that was forced on them. I, I would say the early days Facebook’s first crisis was when it discovered it was a desktop application and the iPhone was turning everything into mobile first world and, and Facebook didn’t…

[00:23:01] Matt Bailey: Yeah.

[00:23:01] Greg Jarboe: …know what to do next.

[00:23:05] Matt Bailey: Well, and that, and, and, and this is, I think one of those things that placed Facebook at the right time in the right place, because yes, prior to that, they were a desktop application, but now you have the rise of the iPhone, you have increase in data coverage, you have lower data costs, more people who are getting phones, the phones have more features, you have the touch interface. I, I mean, you just look at the convergence of all of these factors, and as soon as Facebook creates this mobile version, that, you know, it just happens to have a camera. It just happens to know where you are.

It just, all of these things, no wonder they became mobile first. It significantly increased, well, I will say the data they could collect, as well as it added more features for people to be able to use it on the go. And I, I think there was, you know, now we have Facebook Live, all these things that people could upload and interact while it was with them. And that, at, at 2, 2012 I think is, is a huge year in terms of everything turning mobile and active. And that’s where I think we, we, that’s where I, I think that’s the beginning of what I call our, our social experiment.

[00:24:28] Greg Jarboe: Well, and, and, and then it was followed 3 years later in, in 2015, Mark Zuckerberg, you know, came down from Mount Olympus or wherever he goes for his inspiration and said, “Okay, time to become a video first platform. And oh, by the way, not just Facebook, but we’re going to do this to Instagram. We’re going to do this to everything else that we’ve acquired.”

And the key moment in, in, in, in that epiphany that he was having was when he decided that if you have native video uploaded to Facebook, it’s going to rank higher than the YouTube video that had been shared on Facebook up until that point. Up until that point, the biggest video sharing done on YouTube was to Facebook. Facebook tried to cut them off at the pass and said, “Yeah, yeah, you can do that if you want to…”

[00:25:20] Matt Bailey: Yeah.

[00:25:20] Greg Jarboe: “…but we’re going to rank it low. But if you upload natively to Facebook, that will rank well.” And the wars began.

[00:25:30] Matt Bailey: Well, and that’s happening now, I believe, with Instagram and TikTok, that if you upload TikTok videos to Instagram, and I think even on Reddit…

[00:25:39] Greg Jarboe: Oh!

[00:25:39] Matt Bailey: We need to talk about Reddit. How have we not talked about Reddit?

[00:25:42] Greg Jarboe: That’s probably because it’s its own category, right?

[00:25:45] Matt Bailey: It is. It is. And I, I think it’s, it’s the most popular social media that isn’t talked about and I think it would prefer to stay that way.

[00:25:54] Greg Jarboe: Well, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Let, let, let’s…

[00:25:56] Matt Bailey: Um…

[00:25:56] Greg Jarboe: …put that, so, there was, uh, Reddit before Condé Nast and Reddit after Condé Nast. Okay. The reason nobody…

[00:26:03] Matt Bailey: Yes.

[00:26:03] Greg Jarboe: …talked about it before Condé Nast was because it was a, oh, how do I say this politely? Cesspool? Oh, okay.

[00:26:12] Matt Bailey: That was the word I was thinking of. Um…

[00:26:13] Greg Jarboe: They talk about that out in Ohio? Okay. Alright. I thought…

[00:26:16] Matt Bailey: Oh, absolutely. Yes.

[00:26:16] Greg Jarboe: You know. Alright, fine.

[00:26:18] Matt Bailey: Absolutely.

[00:26:18] Greg Jarboe: But Condé Nast has cleaned up their act. It’s now a very, very, very interesting social medium that can be mined…

[00:26:25] Matt Bailey: Yeah.

[00:26:25] Greg Jarboe: …for ideas, for, as well as, as, as well as…

[00:26:29] Matt Bailey: Oh…

[00:26:29] Greg Jarboe: …interacting with people there.

[00:26:34] Matt Bailey: Well, and everything is in subgroups. So, there are small cesspools still there. However, you can find groups of like-minded people, you can create your own custom feed based on subtopics that you want to follow. And the, I, I follow, you know, stuff like healthy eating and vegetarian recipes and quick and easy recipes. I am amazed at the content that I find on a daily basis that I’m just, I’m, “Save that, save that,” because it’s highly relevant. It’s what I’m interested in. The app just makes it, don’t even use…

[00:27:10] Greg Jarboe: Right.

[00:27:10] Matt Bailey: …the website. Use the app…

[00:27:12] Greg Jarboe: Right.

[00:27:12] Matt Bailey: …or even a third party. It, it’s…

[00:27:14] Greg Jarboe: Well, he, he, he, here, here we are sort of charting the message of convergence. “All the platforms are converging. Everything is interchangeable. You can find everything everywhere,” which isn’t true. And I saw this firsthand in the last couple of weeks, because in the last couple of weeks, two things happened that I think we are going to chart a divergence going forward as opposed to a convergence.

And the first one happened at NewFronts, which is, oh, I think the 11th year in a row that they’ve, they’ve held, it’s, it’s sponsored by the IAB, which is followed two weeks later by Upfronts, which is normally where they sell TV Time. And, you know, for a decade, those were two different events. You, you, you focused on digital advertising in one and TV advertising in the other. And for the first time this year, YouTube was in both places. And the reason they were in both places…

[00:28:15] Matt Bailey: Wow.

[00:28:16] Greg Jarboe: …is because they still have a digital advertising story to tell and, and it’s a fairly compelling one. And what, what they focused on was their creator economy. They are spending more than $10 billion a year to fund content creators making content on YouTube. And most of that comes through AdShare, but they are increasingly experimenting with, oh, whatever you want to call it. The, the kind of influencer marketing programs, although it’s currently limited to really, really, really large influencers. But most of it is, is ad sharing. So, they still have a good story to tell, you know, on that end of the spectrum. But…

[00:29:01] Matt Bailey: Absolutely.

[00:29:02] Greg Jarboe: But the reason they turned up at Upfronts is because the fastest growing channel on YouTube is Connected TV. Now…

[00:29:13] Matt Bailey: Yes.

[00:29:14] Greg Jarboe: Now…

[00:29:15] Matt Bailey: Yes. I mean…

[00:29:15] Greg Jarboe: Now, guess what?

[00:29:16] Matt Bailey: That’s how we watch it.

[00:29:18] Greg Jarboe: YouTube has a presence on Connected TV, a big presence. Who doesn’t? Facebook doesn’t. Who doesn’t? TikTok doesn’t. Instagram doesn’t. All the other social media platforms currently do not have a play on Connected TV. Now, if this were a minor platform, you know, yeah, yeah. Okay. Fine. Round, round off air. But when it is YouTube’s fastest growing platform and there’s over 130 million unique view, viewers just in the United States, which is bigger than a Super Bowl audience watching YouTube on Connected TVs, then pardon me, pardon me, that’s the big divergence.

[00:30:00] Which I think is one of the reasons why Facebook or Meta has spun off into, “Oh, we’re into the metaverse now.” And at their event, at the NewFronts, they showcased an advertiser, Wendy’s hamburgers, who had created the Wendy’sverse. And I looked and I was kind of like, “Okay, Wendy’s has a…” did, were, were they in Second Life? I don’t know. Yeah.

[00:30:41] Matt Bailey: Yeah, I think they were.

[00:30:42] Greg Jarboe: Oh, oh, okay.

[00:30:42] Matt Bailey: I think they were.

[00:30:43] Greg Jarboe: They’re back with virtual burgers.

[00:30:44] Matt Bailey: I think they were one of those.

[00:30:44] Greg Jarboe: I can’t download a virtual burger. You know what I mean?

[00:30:50] Matt Bailey: Yeah. Maybe you can download an NFT…

[00:30:52] Greg Jarboe: Possibly.

[00:30:53] Matt Bailey: …of a virtual burger…

[00:30:54] Greg Jarboe: Possibly.

[00:30:54] Matt Bailey: …and own that.

[00:30:55] Greg Jarboe: But, but all of a sudden, I think what we are about to see is one of the big players zigging, other big players zagging, other players sort of left in between trying to pick up the crumbs that are left behind. Let, let’s put it this way. You and I are about to write a chapter in a book that, that ought to be rewritten in about 18 months.

[00:31:21] Sponsor: Hey everyone, this is Matt, and thanks for listening. Just a quick break in the middle of the podcast here to let you know there’s a couple ways that you can connect with us. The first is learn.sitelogic.com.

That’s the learning site where you can see courses on analytics, courses on digital marketing across paid search, SEO, multiple disciplines, and then also you can connect with us on Slack. Go to Slack if you’re there and look for us at endlesscoffeecup.slack.com.

Connect with us. I’d love to hear from you, hear what ails you in the realm of digital marketing. Are there courses you need, information that you’d like to hear, or maybe some past guest that you’d like to hear more from? Thanks again for being a listener of the Endless Coffee Cup, and I look forward to hearing from you.

[00:32:17] Matt Bailey: Well, it could be rewritten as soon as we know what happens with Elon Musk and Twitter.

[00:32:22] Greg Jarboe: I don’t even want to guess at that.

[00:32:24] Matt Bailey: I, I, you know, and, and that is going, that statement there will date this podcast faster than anything else, whatever happens with, with his acquisition of Twitter. Here’s a question, Greg, and this is a tree falling in the forest question. If I watch YouTube on Connected TV, is it still social media?

[00:32:44] Greg Jarboe: Well, it depends on what happens next.

[00:32:47] Matt Bailey: Because I can’t leave a comment…

[00:32:49] Greg Jarboe: Oh no, no, no, no, no. Here’s what’s happening next because…

[00:32:54] Matt Bailey: Oh.

[00:32:54] Greg Jarboe: …YouTube has already started the experiments on social commerce. And so, if…

[00:33:02] Matt Bailey: Yes.

[00:33:02] Greg Jarboe: …the video that you’re…

[00:33:04] Matt Bailey: I’ve seen those. Yes.

[00:33:04] Greg Jarboe: …watching includes a, oh, a car, and if you can click…

[00:33:11] Matt Bailey: That’s right.

[00:33:11] Greg Jarboe: …on a link and it will take you, oh, to the car dealer where you can then sign up for a test drive, you know, no, you’re not downloading the car from your television, but I’ll tell you what. You are no longer just supporting what you are watching with advertising, which, oh, by the way, YouTube sells a bundle of and can monetize with the advertising.

But they are increasingly experimenting with social commerce. And one of the interesting things that they’re doing is they’re pulling their YouTube stars or creators or influencers, whatever you want to call them, into the game. So, how would you like to have the star of, oh, let’s say Mr. Beast, okay, driving your car or giving away your car in his next promotion. So, so, yeah…

[00:34:06] Matt Bailey: That’s right. Yeah.

[00:34:07] Greg Jarboe: …today you may look at it and say, “I don’t get it,” but I remember, I, I’m that old, when Ted Turner bought up a lot of old movies and, and people thought, “Ted, what are you doing?”

[00:34:17] Matt Bailey: Yes.

[00:34:18] Greg Jarboe: “These are old movies.” He said, “Well, I’m going to create the Turner Classic Movies channel.” “Why? Who wants to watch old movies?” And the answer is if you’ve got the content…

[00:34:27] Matt Bailey: You’d be surprised.

[00:34:29] Greg Jarboe: …guess what? The eyeballs will follow. We are at that moment again, where YouTube has got more than one horse in this game. And a lot of other people are going to have to figure out how they zig or zag next.

[00:34:45] Matt Bailey: Well, and that’s great. I mean, I love it because you, you know, YouTube. When I look at what we do in the evenings, when we sit down in the couch to watch television, one of the first places we go is YouTube. We, we, we love a couple of British shows. We can’t access it any other way, but it’s on YouTube. And so, we’re watching long form video content on YouTube through the TV, and that, it speaks to it. And yes, I do now remember seeing some ads that had interactive elements.

[00:35:14] Greg Jarboe: Yeah. And when it comes to optimizing those videos, ’cause that’s the other game that I play, it turns out now your thumbnail is crucial because the title and thumbnail…

[00:35:26] Matt Bailey: Yes.

[00:35:26] Greg Jarboe: …are the only things people will see on a Connected TV. They will not see the snippet of the description that you’ll see in a smartphone or, or a desktop device. And so, again, the, the, the nature of the game shifts to, you know, part of it is still running a good, optimized headline, but part of it is now creating a thumbnail image for your video that people can look at and say on their Connected TV and say, “Ooh, I want to watch that.”

[00:35:53] Matt Bailey: Absolutely. That is everything, I can say that. You know, when we’re deciding, it’s that thumbnail, the thumbnail and title are everything to, to that decision. Oh, fantastic stuff. Fantastic. Alright. This next section, I think I, I’ll call it the spittin’ facts section.

[00:36:10] Greg Jarboe: Spit ’em, spit ’em fast.

[00:36:11] Matt Bailey: Um, because it is a, it’s top social media channels today, which is hilarious. This, this gets you, you making fun of that title.

[00:36:19] Greg Jarboe: Well, of course. Of…

[00:36:20] Matt Bailey: Just…

[00:36:20] Greg Jarboe: I, I, I could have said, “This Hour,” but, you know, today seemed, you know.

[00:36:26] Matt Bailey: Yeah, yeah, there we go. I, I, not so much a fact, but here’s where we are right now. Facebook isn’t growing. They have the same target audience of, of the generation that started using it. The kids have moved on. It, it is now, I, I would call it the legacy social network. It has, as you said, it’s endured. However, with privacy, content, fake news, hate content, you know, I think they have a, a, a, a, a bimonthly appointment before a congressional panel.

It’s pretty, really interesting to see what happens with Facebook, because they are constantly under fire. They are constantly crossing the line, you know, and now I think everything that’s coming out with advertising and ad tech being so fraught with fraud and Facebook being one of the primary players of that, it’s going to be very…

[00:37:12] Greg Jarboe: Yep.

[00:37:12] Matt Bailey: …interesting to see how that happens.

[00:37:13] Greg Jarboe: Meanwhile, Instagram is still growing. And so, here’s one of those funny situations where, you know, Facebook acquired Instagram, but, you know, I, I can see not too far off where Instagram is actually going to end up passing Facebook in importance in social media marketing.

A huge number of people already use it. It already has a, a huge install base of social media influencers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Many of them started off up, uploading photos and they’re wandering around trying to figure out how to reinvent themselves. But, you know, those who could migrate to video have, are discovering that Reels is now getting, like 20% of the time people are now spending on Instagram is spent watching Reels, which, which is their knockoff of TikTok. Stories is their knockoff of Snapchat. Oh, you know, somehow or other, I suspect Instagram is the Meta platform that will continue to play a pretty significant role in social media marketing today.

[00:38:23] Matt Bailey: Yeah. And I alluded to this before, LinkedIn, you can’t leave them out. They are the largest business-to-business social network. If, if you’re trying to do anything business-to-business, LinkedIn is it. I, there is not even a close competitor to LinkedIn.

[00:38:38] Greg Jarboe: And then we have YouTube, and you know what? YouTube is, oh, I don’t know which metaphor I want to use, but let’s put it this way. They are the underdog redheaded stepchild that some people don’t even classify as a social medium that actually is taking off. It is growing. According to the Pew Research Center, it’s actually more people in the United States will visit YouTube in a month than will visit Facebook. And we’re talking, you know, that’s not a bad market to be number one in. And oh, by the way, similar things are happening in other countries around the world.

And it, it, it’s also one of the interesting things that YouTube is doing is saying, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. We’re monetizing our content creators,” which is something Facebook never wanted to share with anybody, “and we’re sharing over $10 billion a year, so go ahead. Announce a hundred million, you know, influencer fund.” Yay. Yay. You know, that’s noise level compared to the $10 billion that we fork out to more than 2 million creators are making a living creating YouTube videos, but it is an economy to itself. So yeah, I expect YouTube…

[00:39:55] Matt Bailey: Absolutely.

[00:40:00] Greg Jarboe: …will only be around more than longer than today. But they, they’re making the strategic investments in content creation, as well as being on the new emerging channel CTV, as well as being a dominant player on the old channels, the, the, the mobile platforms and yeah, yeah, yeah, to extent that it, you know, anyone goes there anymore on desktop devices.

[00:40:23] Matt Bailey: Yeah. Well, number five on our list, Greg, is Twitter. And having talked about Elon Musk already, maybe by the time the book comes out, we’ll know what happens. Now, two things, one, I thought Twitter was going to die in the mid 20 somethings, but with the election in 2016, Twitter was Donald Trump’s primary media, uh, platform, and I thought for sure Twitter would die, but this is, I’m going to put it on Donald Trump.

He resurrected Twitter and made it a, a top five social platform. That’s where his conversation was, so a lot of people, I think, went there and that reinvigorated it because you just, even look on Google Trends, the amount of people who look at Twitter, it was going down, it goes back up at that point. It made Twitter relevant again. Now Elon Musk is doing it. And, and what I think he, he has brought up something that, I, I, to me, Greg, I’m just getting popcorn…

[00:41:26] Greg Jarboe: Okay.

[00:41:26] Matt Bailey: …and I’m watching this movie. I, I don’t have a dog in the fight. I don’t care how it goes, but Elon pressing Twitter on the subject of bots is just a, a wonderful showdown because he’s asking the question I think advertisers should have been asking from day one. “What am I buying? How many real people are on this platform and how many bots are there pretending to be people?” This is what advertisers should have been asking a decade ago, and he’s now asking it and I’m just going to, I’m just going to…

[00:42:00] Greg Jarboe: Well, and, and Donald Trump also played a role in what I think is going to be the rise of TikTok, because if you remember, he tried to break them up. He, he tried to ban them in the United States.

[00:42:11] Matt Bailey: Yep.

[00:42:11] Greg Jarboe: He, he, he hated them because they were pranking him by signing up to attend rallies and then not turning up so he would then turn up in a location that was empty. And one of the interesting things is it is not particularly well used by social media marketers now, and part of that is because I’m busy, but one of the things that TikTok has just done again within the last several weeks is they’ve announced TikTok Pulse, which is going to be their way of providing an ad revenue share to their top 4% of their content creators.

And two weeks later, they announced what is called Branded Mission, which is their way of helping influencers who have more than a thousand followers monetize their content. So, a high, low strategy, if you will.

[00:43:01] Matt Bailey: Wow.

[00:43:02] Greg Jarboe: And, you know, ironically, all the opposition they got from Trump back in 2020, seems that have made them cool.

[00:43:14] Matt Bailey: All the way.

[00:43:14] Greg Jarboe: You know, it’s, it’s where all the cool kids hang out now.

[00:43:18] Matt Bailey: Well, conversely, the next on the list, Greg, is Snapchat. And this one, I, I, I had to explain to my daughter why I would not allow her on Snapchat years ago. And I explained the history of Snapchat, that it was created for one purpose and one purpose only. And any platform that deletes images within seconds after being viewed, and, and I told her, I’m like, “No. You, I don’t care if your friends are on this platform, you will not be on the platform.”

Now, this is still many years removed from the founders falling out, suing each other. I read all the court documentation. I mean, it’s, it’s very clear, but this is when my daughter, my oldest daughter first complained, “Why am I the one with the dad in digital marketing? Because all our friends can get away with it and their parents don’t know anything, but I have to have the dad who says no.” I don’t know why Snapchat is even considered top 10. There’s still people on it, still people using it. I don’t understand why. Uh…

[00:44:21] Greg Jarboe: I, I, I think it is, uh, appropriate for social media marketers who are targeting Gen Z. So, if I have…

[00:44:28] Matt Bailey: Yeah.

[00:44:29] Greg Jarboe: …even a college or university who is trying to get high school seniors to consider them as a place to spend way too much money to go to college ’cause boy, college tuition is rising faster than inflation. But anyhow, if, if, if I’m trying to persuade, you know, that target audience, you know, high school juniors and seniors that I’m the cool place to go to college at, boy, I better have a Snapchat game.

[00:44:58] Matt Bailey: Yeah. I, it, it, which is interesting because TikTok’s the cool place, but I, I still don’t, you, you know, it’s where you’re at, but what’s interesting is what didn’t make this list and I’m adding one, Greg. I’m, I’m going to add we…

[00:45:11] Greg Jarboe: Oh.

[00:45:11] Matt Bailey: …I’m going to add WeChat.

[00:45:12] Greg Jarboe: Oh, okay. Fair, fair enough. Fair enough.

[00:45:14] Matt Bailey: Uh, WeChat. WeChat has over 1.2 billion users, and WeChat, I call it the Swiss army knife of apps, because you can use it for messaging, you can use it for payment, shared payment, payment to restaurants, payment to friends, you can do order takeout and delivery, you can do ride sharing, bicycle sharing, check out library books, access public transportation. That’s just some of what you can do with WeChat. And by the way, it’s a messaging app.

So, it is largely in China and in Asia, but I mean, I’ve got it on my phone, and I use it to message lots of friends and acquaintances in the area and that is the app as, as soon as you get out of the Western world. That, it, so, that’s one I, I felt like we need to add that there, ’cause that is, that’s a significant app.

[00:46:09] Greg Jarboe: It, it, it, it, it is. It is. And there, there are others. I happen to be very fond of Pinterest and, and so…

[00:46:16] Matt Bailey: Yeah.

[00:46:16] Greg Jarboe: …uh, yeah. Yeah, this is not an exhaustive list. This just happens to be a list that the folks at Social Media Today compiled just a month ago and said, “These are the top seven that social media marketers are currently using.” And I think one of the, the messages you and I agree on, although we don’t agree on everything, is, is that whatever list you have today, make sure that it’s adjustable and flexible because you’ll need to change it tomorrow.

[00:46:47] Matt Bailey: Yeah. Yeah. And, and like we talked about, it, a lot of this is going to depend on your audience, who you’re trying to reach, maybe Reddit is a great place. If you’re trying, I, I was looking the other day. I was, I was doing some link building, creating, you know, developing content to teach link building, and I’m seeing Reddit links pop up and you want to talk about a high domain value?

Wow. I was really shocked at how valuable those links were in contributing to a, a profile. So, and, and those are good links. Most other social media isn’t really able to provide that kind of a link to your content. So, that gets into cross-platforming and how I’m able to integrate some of this into smaller strategies.

[00:47:32] Greg Jarboe: Well, well, yeah. Before, before we move on to cross-platform, which is a huge issue, one of the other places that I look at for the list of, you know, social media platforms that I need to go learn about, because I think I know about them all, but I don’t is, I, I, I, I subscribe to The New York Times. And one of the things that The New York Times has is a little feature that says, “Would you like to, you know, share this article?” Yeah, yeah, fine. So, you can share it via email or Facebook or Twitter or, you know, LinkedIn and Reddit. Okay. Those are all options. There are a couple here, though, that we haven’t mentioned yet. One is Telegram and, and you can now share…

[00:48:15] Matt Bailey: Yep.

[00:48:15] Greg Jarboe: …your articles in the, in, in The New York Times to your network and Telegram or WhatsApp. That’s the other option that you have. So…

[00:48:24] Matt Bailey: Oh.

[00:48:25] Greg Jarboe: …so the answer is, again, you know, who’s your target audience? What are you hoping they’re going to do next? Ultimately, what do you want them to do down the road? And, you know, a, a, again, keep your peripheral vision open.

[00:48:44] Matt Bailey: Yeah. Yeah, I can’t stress enough WhatsApp. As soon as you get outside of the U.S. WhatsApp is, I believe it’s the number one app in the rest of the world.

[00:48:53] Greg Jarboe: Oh, oh, and, and, and…

[00:48:54] Matt Bailey: Uh, they use it for everything, uh, so…

[00:48:55] Greg Jarboe: …and, and, the people that I’ve been working with lately in Ukraine are using Telegram extensively. It’s, it’s, it’s one of the…

[00:49:03] Matt Bailey: Yes.

[00:49:03] Greg Jarboe: …the few social media that can reach into Russia where, where they’ve been blocked on a number of the main social platforms, they can get their message to Russian families. You know, “Your, your son’s been taken prisoner. You should oppose the war,” using Telegram.

[00:49:20] Matt Bailey: Wow. Crazy. Tell you what, Greg, let’s, we’re, uh, we’re two hours in.

[00:49:25] Greg Jarboe: Well, you, you had said, “What happens if we have 10,000 words?” I’m going for 15.

[00:49:32] Matt Bailey: You’re going for 15, alright. Tell you what, let’s, let’s finish this last section here of, of cross-platform.

[00:49:39] Greg Jarboe: Fair enough.

[00:49:39] Matt Bailey: Yeah. Let’s do that.

[00:49:40] Greg Jarboe: We’ll pace ourself.

[00:49:41] Matt Bailey: And…

[00:49:42] Greg Jarboe: Okay.

[00:49:43] Matt Bailey: Yeah. Yeah. And then…

[00:49:45] Greg Jarboe: Alright.

[00:50:00] Matt Bailey: …if we need to come back and finish up, we’ll do that. Alright. So, back to cross-platform content, we, we, we jumped in and, and amended our list here with some, from additional channels here. But as I said, if I can integrate social in a way that helps me with SEO, in a way that helps my blog, in a way that helps other platforms, but ultimately, I want them to converge onto something. And so, if I’m launching a new product, right, I mean it’s, how do I go cross-platform?

[00:50:16] Greg Jarboe: Well, it turns out, Matt, you and I have both worked on a campaign that we don’t think we were working on the campaign. So, I’ll, what I’m going to tell you is a case study that you know intimately that you will think, “But I didn’t do that.” The answer is, “Oh yeah, we did.” And the answer is the New Media Academy, which is based in the United Arab Emirates. You and I are both instructors there, so…

[00:50:38] Matt Bailey: Oh yeah.

[00:50:39] Greg Jarboe: …call it what you will, you know…

[00:50:40] Matt Bailey: Yes.

[00:50:40] Greg Jarboe: …we’re part of the content creation community. We, we play a role somehow. Occasionally. I’m, I’m certainly teaching tomorrow. I think you taught today.

[00:50:50] Matt Bailey: Yep. I, I think we’re peeking out from behind the curtain and waving to the audience as the new talent is on the stage.

[00:50:54] Greg Jarboe: Oh, ok. Alright. Alright. So, I, I’m looking at new students. Okay. So, interestingly enough, when the New Media Academy was launched two years ago, and it was launched, frankly, in, in, in June of 2020 in the middle of a pandemic, thank you very much, they did a couple of things that were cross-platform. They created a YouTube channel, they created a Facebook page, they created Instagram accounts, they created Twitter accounts.

You know, basically they were trying to let, you know, students in North Africa and the Middle East realize that, “Yeah, yeah, we’re teaching in English ’cause a couple of the instructors here are English speaking, but we’re, we’re focused on bringing all these digital marketing skills here. You, you, you, you, you can get your certificates, you can get your advanced degrees, whatever.” Alright, fine.

So, when they launched their YouTube channel, obviously it had zero views and when they launched their Facebook page it, and, and they started uploading videos there, it had zero views. Today, their YouTube channel has 140 million views, those videos have gotten 8 million engagements, and they have 1.7 million subscribers. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m making this a case study because whoa, not bad for two years later, right?

[00:52:29] Matt Bailey: Oh, Greg, you’re cutting out. I’m not hearing you here.

[00:52:31] Greg Jarboe: Oh, by the way, let’s look at their Facebook presence, and I’m just going to look at their videos because that was all I was sort of focused on that, that they obviously, so, uh, post text content and content with images. But just their videos have 79.2 million views, 2.9 million engagements, and they’ve gotten 643,000 page likes, which is the equivalent to a subscriber. And so, you’ve got to…

[00:53:01] Matt Bailey: Hey!

[00:53:03] Greg Jarboe: Do we crash the system?

[00:53:04] Matt Bailey: I think so. Just as you launched in, it just froze up and, and I was like, “Oh no.”

[00:53:13] Greg Jarboe: Maybe I said the magic word. I don’t know.

[00:53:14] Matt Bailey: Yeah. Wow.

[00:53:17] Greg Jarboe: Well, do you want to call it all here or do you want to keep going?

[00:53:21] Matt Bailey: Let’s, tell you what, yeah, we’re right up on the two-hour mark, and so, let’s see what we got here and if we want to, if we want to come back and I, I think social media advertising was the next big thing. My only main point that I wanted to get into with platform, cross-platform, so, I wanted to get into the, the trend of using social media to build a community…

[00:53:45] Greg Jarboe: Yes.

[00:53:45] Matt Bailey: …that I own on my platform.

[00:53:48] Greg Jarboe: Bingo.

[00:53:48] Matt Bailey: Um…

[00:53:48] Greg Jarboe: And that’s, that was what I was going to segue into. How did the New Media Academy pull off this coup?

[00:53:57] Matt Bailey: Yeah.

[00:53:57] Greg Jarboe: And do, do you know the, the secret answer?

[00:53:59] Matt Bailey: I, I’m not sure.

[00:54:01] Greg Jarboe: It’s Al Daheeh.

[00:54:05] Matt Bailey: Oh.

[00:54:05] Greg Jarboe: His…

[00:54:06] Matt Bailey: Oh yes, yes.

[00:54:07] Greg Jarboe: The comedian.

[00:54:08] Matt Bailey: Yeah.

[00:54:09] Greg Jarboe: He, he pokes fun at science.

[00:54:12] Matt Bailey: Yes.

[00:54:13] Greg Jarboe: And…

[00:54:14] Matt Bailey: Oh, he’s fun to watch.

[00:54:15] Greg Jarboe: Well, particularly if you speak Arabic, but that is the program that took them from 0 to 90 miles an hour in a week. So, a year ago, I mean the first year of their existence bumping along, bumping along, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then all of a sudden, his show is canceled in Egypt on television. They say, “Fine, relaunch it here on our YouTube channel and Facebook page,” and the rest is history.

And they now have an audience that is theirs, that they can then communicate with, introduce other shows, you know, provide other information. “Oh, by the way, we also have courses,” you know, but the, the, the, the point is, is that talking about yourself, “Hi, I’m an educational institution. I’ve got these courses,” was a snooze.

[00:55:19] Matt Bailey: Right.

[00:55:20] Greg Jarboe: “Hi, I’ve got a comedian who pokes fun at science and oh, by the way, we happen to be a Institute that offers courses,” you know, putting your audience first is, is the recipe for success. That was my message.

[00:55:38] Matt Bailey: Yeah. And, and I’ve seen this, we’ll just go ahead and finish this section ’cause…

[00:55:43] Greg Jarboe: Oh, well damn.

[00:55:45] Matt Bailey: Yeah. So, I’ve…

[00:55:45] Greg Jarboe: Okay.

[00:55:45] Matt Bailey: …seen this happen more and more, and this is, I, I think this is the advice for this new era of social media, and by new, I mean probably within the last five years, is you can’t rely on your organic reach in social. They want you to pay to reach audiences. And so, you can’t, you, you’re not portable. You can’t take what you’ve built on one platform and move it to another.

And so, really the solution then becomes, build your own community and then use social media to populate that new community where, you know, my, my, so for me, you know, the website. I focus people on the website, and I use social to drive people to the site. Same with the podcast. That’s my community. It’s my destination and the listeners I get are mine.

I think one of the greatest examples is during the pandemic there was already a YouTube channel that was doing well in the yoga community, Yoga with Adriene. And, but once the pandemic hit, searches for yoga, fitness, and everything just went crazy.

[00:56:57] Greg Jarboe: Yep.

[00:56:57] Matt Bailey: It exploded into popularity. Now, here’s the thing. She has a YouTube channel and it’s her main social channel to expand her audience. She, and while during the video she encourages comments and subscriptions, but she directs people to the website. And on the website, you can get branded clothing and yoga equipment, you can sign up for the newsletter, but you can also join her community on an app. And it’s estimated that this membership-based app drives more revenue than her YouTube channel…

[00:57:35] Greg Jarboe: Yeah.

[00:57:35] Matt Bailey: …which has over 10 million subscribers. So, she’s created her own community on her own platform. And now she’s moved people from being a passive subscriber on YouTube to a paying community member. And now she can do whatever she wants.

She’s not subject to the policies, the algorithm changes, anything that will affect her monetization of her app. And she uses YouTube now to build her audience and develop her own community independently. That, I think, is the, this is what’s going to distinguish companies moving forward in the next decade with social media.

[00:58:18] Greg Jarboe: Strange as it sounds, and this is coming from a Wolverine, I find myself agreeing with a Buckeye, which means I need to go back and check my assumptions, because if we’re in agreement, we’re missing something.

[00:58:31] Matt Bailey: I think we’re in agreement a lot more than we’re in disagreement here.

[00:58:35] Greg Jarboe: Oh man. Well, yeah. Okay. As long as we can disagree one day a year during a football game, then I think we’ve got…

[00:58:43] Matt Bailey: You’ve got it.

[00:58:43] Greg Jarboe: …we’ve got the right parameters.

[00:58:45] Matt Bailey: You’ve got it, Greg.

[00:58:46] Greg Jarboe: Alright.

[00:58:46] Matt Bailey: Hey, we certainly didn’t touch on everything, but, you know, we might do a follow up and, and covers, ties in measurement. Oh, measurement. How? Oh my goodness, Greg. Yeah, we’ll have to come back together.

[00:58:55] Greg Jarboe: Well, measurement, the article that I wrote on measurement, I said, “Here are the 30 things you need to measure in social media marketing.” I’m not even going to touch on all 30 of them because you know what?

[00:59:06] Matt Bailey: Yeah.

[00:59:07] Greg Jarboe: I, I’d fall asleep halfway through.

[00:59:10] Matt Bailey: Absolutely. But here’s the key. You can buy the book and, and, and the book is going to be, Greg, do we have the, what’s the official, it, it’s like, “The OMCA Guide…”

[00:59:20] Greg Jarboe: Oh no, no, no, no, no, no. It’s…

[00:59:21] Matt Bailey: There, no it’s…

[00:59:22] Greg Jarboe: “Digital Marketing Fundamentals.”

[00:59:25] Matt Bailey: “Digital Marketing Fundamentals” the…

[00:59:27] Greg Jarboe: Is the title. And then the subtitle is, “The Official OMCA Guide.”

[00:59:33] Matt Bailey: “The Official OMCA Guide to Digital Marketing Fundamentals.” For those of you who want to become OMCA certified, this is what’s going to get you there. All the information in the book, we’ve got multiple authors, experts contributing content across a wide variety of subject areas. Mobile content marketing, paid search, and, and, and paid media. So, that’s half written on my other computer right now.

[01:00:00] Greg Jarboe: It’s half written. Okay.

[01:00:01] Matt Bailey: It’s half written, half written.

[01:00:02] Greg Jarboe: Well, the, the next time you want to do a podcast, maybe we could write the other half.

[01:00:08] Matt Bailey: I think that would be ideal, Greg. This is…

[01:00:10] Greg Jarboe: Alright.

[01:00:11] Matt Bailey: …this was a lot of fun just to cover the basics. And, uh, I, I, this was just a lot of fun. Always a pleasure having you on and, and I love your stories, Greg.

[01:00:20] Greg Jarboe: I have stories? This, this, this is just the truth. I only, just the facts, man. Just the facts.

[01:00:27] Matt Bailey: Well, anytime I need a Paul Revere reference to illuminate social media, you’re first on my list. And, uh…

[01:00:32] Greg Jarboe: Well, I, I can’t help it. He’s a local. He’s a local. I mean, Dr. Samuel Prescott who finished Paul Revere’s ride, not only did he reach Acton, where I live, not only did the Acton Minutemen turn out, they are the ones to turn the tide at the Concord Bridge. And the statue of the embattled farmer that’s in Concord, which gets all the tourists, is Captain Isaac Davis of the Acton Minutemen. So, I’m sorry, this is a local boy. I know this story. It’s personal. We get none of the credit. It’s the Battle of Lexington and Concord that was won by the Acton Minutemen.

[01:01:14] Matt Bailey: Alright, dear listener. Where else can you learn about social media and the American Revolution and the actual facts behind Paul Revere’s ride? Nowhere else but the Endless Coffee Cup when Greg Jarboe has a chance to, to, to educate us and launch into, I love it.

[01:01:31] Greg Jarboe: A tirade.

[01:01:32] Matt Bailey: I love it. You, you can’t get any respect here. You, you’ve got to set the record straight.

[01:01:37] Greg Jarboe: Oh, I never had respect. You know, I gave up on that a long time ago.

[01:01:41] Matt Bailey: Dear listener, thanks for hanging with us. And this will probably be a two-part episode, so we’ll be wrapping up part two here. Thanks for joining us on the Endless Coffee Cup.

[01:01:53] Bumper Intro-Outro: This podcast is heard along the Marketing Podcast Network. For more great marketing podcasts, visit marketingpodcasts.net.

Featured Guest:

Greg Jarboe

CEO & Co-Founder, SEO-PR

LinkedIn: Greg Jarboe | LinkedIn

Twitter: Greg Jarboe | Twitter

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