Step Up Your Social

If your social media engagement is down, you're not alone! Social media is an amazing tool to reach new people. But never forget, social media is rented land. Keep posting to your social channels, but also use them to grow on real estate you own. This can include newsletters, blogs, digital communities, podcasts and more. In this episode of Step UP Your Social, we talk about why this matters, and how you can use lead gen (short for lead generation) tools to start to move your audience from rented land on social media to real estate you actually own.

So many brands works so hard on their social media posts and newsletters, but overlook crucial comms opportunities by outsourcing important messaging to bureaucrats. When someone places an order with you, or donates to your organization, or even just signs up for your newsletter, are they welcomed into the family and made to feel as special as they are? Or simply sent a brief “thanks”? Too many brands overlook such key moments in their audience journey. In today’s episode of Step Up Your Social, we’ll look at one massive failure, and a whole bunch of successes. Hopefully this episode will inspire you to revisit your own customer or donor journey and edit accordingly!

This is a short episode, adapted from an article I wrote 5 years, about the importance of engaging with positive comments on social media. It's as true today as it was the day I wrote it. So I wanted to share it with you, my podcast listeners. If someone goes out of their way to say something nice about you on social, and you can't be bothered to smash that like button, you should re-evaluate why you are on social in the first place!

A vanity url is a memorable url that will redirect to the page where you actually want to send people. They are easy (and inexpensive) to set-up, and can help your user easily find your brand's important content and sub-campaigns. In this episode of Step Up Your Social, we delve into what they are, how to set them up, when you should use them and more. We also cover Bit.ly links and talk about when those can and should be used in lieu of vanity urls. If you aren't using both of these tools in your digital toolkit, you're making things harder than they need to be for your audience. Tune in today and learn more.

If you use the internet, you’ve likely heard of WORDLE.  According to Buzzfeed, there have been nearly 2 million tweets mentioning “WORDLE” since November of 2021.  But here’s the thing: this game, that so many people play and talk about, had only 90 users in November. Not 90 thousand… 90.  How did this viral phenomenon happen and what can we as digital marketers learn from it? A lot!

In Episode 13, we discussed why you should be blogging. Today let’s talk about how you should approach writing content for your blog. In this episode, we cover a lot of best practices for blogging in 10 minutes or less including: The Goldilocks approach to finding good topic areasHow to make your content easy to skimHow to write for your audience, even if you're not a great writerThe ideal length of a blog post (hint: it's exactly how long it needs to be and not one word longer!)And the importance of writing for Google. Or Facebook. Or both. Tune in today and then get ready to step up your blogging!

What do you do at the end of your customer lifecycle? Do you go above and beyond to ensure that the customer who is moving on never forgets just how much they love you? Chewy is a pet supply company. They know their customers will have to cancel their auto-renewal products... eventually 😢🐶🐈 But Chewy doesn't just offer canceling clients full refunds. They take their "marketing generosity" to the next level. They don’t just want to get out of the way. They want to be a part of the family. In this episode of Step Up Your Social, we take a look at how Chewy creates unyielding brand loyalty from their customers, even as those customers are canceling their orders. We then give some thought to how *you* can keep your client lifecycle going, even as it seems like it might be wrapping up for the foreseeable future.

One of my favorite podcasts, Reply All, just did a whole episode trying to track down something that wasn't showing up on Google. If they had remembered that Facebook, while it's first and foremost a social media channel, is also a search engine, they could have saved themselves a whole lot of time and energy. The Facebook search bar is more powerful than you probably realize. In this episode of Step Up Your Social, we'll walk through some of the power lurking right at your fingertips. Have any search bar tricks you like that we didn’t cover? Or find any surprises utilizing any of the above? We want to hear them!  Drop us a line at stepupyoursocial.com or hit us up on social using #StepUpYourSocial.

In this episode I cover a bunch of free digital tools you should be using, but probably aren't. These free tools will help you step up your graphic design, your writing, your video storytelling and a whole lot more. You can stream all episodes of Step Up Your Social here, or at stepupyoursocial.com. Are there any free digital tools you use that I didn't cover? I'd love to hear about them. You can email me at [email protected], hit me up on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn at Reverbal Communications or tweet at me using the hashtag #stepupyoursocial. Thanks for listening.

Step Up Your Social as a podcast exists to share quick, actionable tips to help you take your digital marketing to the next level. In this episode, we explore at 7 times the airlines blew it on social media, and talk about what we can learn from their collective mistakes so ensure that their fails become our best practices.