Engagement is King
w/ Georgia Watt – MoreFM Marlborough
One of the things that most people struggle with is social media engagement. We interviewed Georgia Watts from MoreFM Marlborough about her own experience. How she grew the MoreFM Marlborough Account by 2000 followers in such a short amount of time.
Directional
I want to start with your viral post, can you just share with us how that happen? What was the viral posts that you did that that, went nuts?
Georgia – MoreFM
There’s been a few probably in the last year, the first one was I was walking down the street and it was like seven o’clock in the morning. I live quite close to town and a deer just came down the street. The first thing I did was grab my phone out and start a video and just put it up on social media not thinking much of like. I think within half an hour, I had like 80,000 views and people were sharing it on pages like New Zealand hunting and I don’t even know how it happened. It was crazy.
Directional Marketing
Tell us a little about who you are and what you do?
Georgia – MoreFM
So I work for MoreFM Marlborough, doing the day show from 10am to 3pm. Then a part of that is also a lot of a lot of little jobs, whether it’s promotions or doing activations within the community, and the Facebook page, which has become kind of like my little side project where I love posting things on social media and even like starting to grow Instagram as well and realising more people are spending more time on Instagram.
Directional Marketing
Isn’t it the way that people are slowly moving from Facebook to Instagram. But then not everyone is leaving Facebook, it still has a place but it’s now defining what content goes where?
Georgia – MoreFM
You’re always going to have the older demographic on Facebook, I feel that will always stay on Facebook, because you know, that’s what they’ve been taught. I feel like more people are going across to Instagram because more people just want to see things they know and like, where Facebook’s becoming more of a new site to find out information about stuff. And it’s not really the people you know.
Directional Marketing
Our topic of discussion is “Engagement is King” As we have seen, and I’ve seen personally, you working your magic with the MoreFM Marlborough Facebook page. You have agreed to share with us 3 hot tips on how to help engagement. Where do we start?
Georgia – MoreFM
The first one has to be interacting with your audience. I feel like these days, social media pages are becoming more like they’ve got more personalities rather than just being a brand. If you reply to a comment, chances are people are going to come back to you and be like, you know, I want to comment on your page more. Being present within your comment section is so important because people just want to see that you’re not just a brand posting to this page and then forget about it.
Directional Marketing
Absolutely, people don’t want to see that, it’s like as a business you tick this box by putting a photo up but there is no life behind it.
Georgia – MoreFM
Correct, people actually do have decent comments sometimes, and it’s actually nice to know who you’re talking to and know your brand so you can engage correctly with comments.
Directional Marketing
Do you have any tips on when it comes to actually responding like, how quick should I respond or, do I just do an emoji or do I dislike it? Do you have any tips for responding?
Georgia – MoreFM
I’m a big fan of like, if the comments funny you’ve got to give them some credit like a ha ha reaction or sometimes a key reaction depending on what the comments about but reply quickly. People either comment and move on, and then, you know, they forget about what they commented on. So if you reply to them, and it doesn’t actually take out too much time in your day, if you post it and then just refresh it a few times, see who’s commented whatever. Then maybe if you see a few comments, more comments pop up, you go back to it.
Directional Marketing
I’ve got a question for you and this probably is, I’m gonna say the majority of small business owners out there, we have this fear. I’m not gonna say, wait, because I actually do posts, but I do sometimes have a fear. We have this fear of posting. First up, right? Don’t know what to post, what should we do? And then when we finally post something, but nothing. Now, have you ever had that happen to you? We you have posted something, and nothing happens as in no reaction?
Georgia – MoreFM
Absolutely. I’ve posted things in the past and we just looked at our stream like, cool. Let’s go zero likes, I’m great and then it goes through the mind, do I delete it? The more you get past those few zero engagements, you keep posting, people are seeing you’re being consistent and people gonna see you’re trying so people want to interact with it more. I think it’s just getting past that, first of all, well, nobody is reacting to my posts and keep posting and then slowly you get people interacting.
Directional Marketing
How often do you guys actually post?
Georgia – MoreFM
I found out recently, we had a storm in July last year, and we posted 65 times in a month, which is probably well above what you should do. Of course, we’re updating stuff to the local community regarding the storm. Normally, I try keep it like every few days, if you get too annoying but it’s important to be consistent. If you go a week, and then you don’t post for a few weeks, people will forget about you. Then of course, if people are interacting with your page, it pops up more on Facebook with the whole algorithm.
Directional Marketing
Definitely, it’s interesting, because it’s like any form of advertising that we do is if you’re not doing it consistently enough, people just forget that you even exist, right?
Georgia – MoreFM
Yeah, I think consistency is key with it, no matter how great or terrible it goes.
Directional Marketing
Step 1, we need to be interacting with our audience. So what’s next?
Georgia – MoreFM
The next thing is understanding your audience. We had a Facebook page where it was getting absolutely no interaction, the recipe that we use, being a local news provider. It was there, but the interaction wasn’t. I looked into our insights that most Facebook pages have, we found out 17% of our audience was in Bangladesh. For posting something local, there’s no way there’s going to get interaction when them, it’s quite a large percentage of our audience isn’t local, they probably don’t even care what we’re posting about. It was really understanding, what was our audience and how we could you know, change that.
Directional Marketing
Wow, that is so interesting. I wonder at some stage someone went hey, guys, we need to go buy some likes.
Georgia – MoreFM
Yeah, we didn’t even know where it came from, What had we posted? Sometimes if you do like stupid cat video, people jump on to that. I think that’s probably people buying likes that’s how we got the audience of aliens.
Directional Marketing
Now to clarify, do not buy likes, they do not convert. If you’re a company that’s selling something, do not buy likes, if you’re an influencer, and you want to make money, they will see right through it.
Georgia – MoreFM
We were posting real good local content, and it was getting nothing and we were thinking what was happening. Our page with 5000 people, that’s a decent chunk of people that actually, we’re dealing in likes.
Directional Marketing
What did you do? So just talk us through? What did you do once you realise that 17% weren’t even in the country?
Georgia – MoreFM
The first thing we did was lower our expectations and understand that our 1000 likes were not 5000 likes at all. It comes back to the consistency of still posting and not giving up. It just gave us a better idea of why this was happening, now we have more locals interacting because we just didn’t give up on it. We just kept posting local, so more people came to us that were local. We’d still have those 17% of Bangladesh followers, but we’re just trying to be local.
Directional Marketing
As a result of that, changing the strategy you’ve even better engagement. Have you gone back and looked at those insights again lately?
Georgia – MoreFM
No, actually, it’s probably something we need to do. We haven’t gone back in, to measure the difference. There is definitely a difference on our interaction with our posts, plus a lot more local, and it’s kind of what we’re doing from the start.
Directional Marketing
When we talk about understanding your audience a little bit more, you’ve narrowed it down, and you worked out that a portion wasn’t in the country? What else would you do when you’re trying to understand your audience? What’s that path? Or what is that process look like?
Georgia – MoreFM
It comes from understanding your brand and your business to create more a theme, we focus more on a female target. So it’s been like, Okay, what do we need to do for our Facebook to be more aligned to our target market. How do we make them know our brand and what do we want to achieve as a business? It’s going through their understanding, where you are and what you want to be able to get there. Then making a bit of a plan to be like, this is the type of people we want to target and have following which means this is what we need to create.
Directional Marketing
And this is all your job, right? No one else helps you?
Georgia – MoreFM
Yeah, a lot of people do question how I do a lot of things, to be honest, I’m one of those people who are just wired to social media. If I walk past something, I’ll be like, that’s funny social media posts, and even my work mates like, how do you think of that? I guess growing up on social media gets you into that habit of constantly thinking, you know, there’s a great Facebook posts.
Directional Marketing
Step 2, we’re interacting with that audience, and it’s really important for understanding our audience, what next?
Georgia – MoreFM
The next thing we’ll probably move on to is something I mentioned earlier, which was making a plan. You can go through your social media and I do often just absolutely wing it week to week and being like, oh, yeah, this is cool. We might post it here and there, but that’s where the consistency falls through. Where if you make a planning, look at things coming up, like Valentine’s Day, St. Patty’s Day key moments in the calendar, and you plan ahead of what you can do and create content pieces for those days, because people want to. Creating a plan is so crucial.
Directional Marketing
It’s interesting, because I know myself, previously, I worked on a day to day, so I’d wake up in the morning, and I’d do a post for my clients, and then, you know, go on, and it all it takes us for something to go wrong in your day, and you’re missing that critical time slot to post. Planning and scheduling just allows you to kind of look at the content on a on a, like a holistic approach, like a high level, with everything that you’re doing.
Georgia – MoreFM
Yeah and sometimes, especially at the moment, there’s not much content happening. If you’re planning that here, you’re still going to have that stuff there and when you do plan ahead, it frees up your brain to actually think of the cool stuff.
Directional Marketing
Very true, you’re not worried about not panicking about what you need to do. Now, one of the things I find when working with businesses is they get to a point where they go, I just don’t know what to post, do you have a magic method of what to post or is this just internal sense that I’m going to take a photo now and that’s going to be something that I post?
Georgia – MoreFM
One of the key things I do is follow other brands and see what they are doing well. There’s a few brands I know throughout like Toasty Picton, they nail their social media. We’re not always posting so you take little bits and pieces from other brands, you enjoy what other people are going to enjoy as well. As most people do interact with the same content that we tend to follow. My tip would be to take bits and pieces of what other people are doing. Put it on your own brand and then you have a good social media base.
Directional Marketing
The photos you use, what are you using to take photos?
Georgia – MoreFM
I pretty much work off my phone these days, 100% of the time, like even creating videos. There are platforms like Premiere rush, you can use Canva and I actually use Instagram as well, the story function sometimes, which is terrible to edit photos on but it’s so easy
Directional Marketing
We have to do a big shout out to Canva, because oh my god they just keep updating and improving their platforms. Now you can edit video. What I love about it is, that it’s very user friendly and a user sharing, friendly platform. If I get a client needing help with something, I can create something and send it to them. As long as it’s not using any of the premium assets, I can send it to them. And then they can then continue on adding the fonts, the data. I love it, especially when you’re doing, say, a Facebook post and then you want to convert it to a story, it just resizes it for you.
Georgia – MoreFM
Yes, and it’s user friendly in that you don’t have to google help to find what size is an Instagram story, it has always been there for you. It also has, real good sharing options where you can share it to Facebook, share it to Instagram, it’s just such a handy thing.
Directional Marketing
I want to ask you, so we’re talking about making a plan, but to make a plan, sometimes we need to have tools. So if you’re doing your schedule posts, or do you kind of only look at a couple of days ahead.
Georgia – MoreFM
I am the I don’t want to say the worst person at scheduling, but I’m so obsessed with scheduling posts, when coming into Christmas, it’s when events were happening. I knew I was going to forget them like, I’d wake up and that’s the last thing I’m thinking about. I just put it out on our side, and just put all my social media posts together and scheduled it for the days that needed it. It was the biggest relief to see these posts pop, not having to worry as everything was scheduled, scheduling is so important.
Directional Marketing
Now tell me, do you use the native scheduling tools in Facebook? Or do you have a platform to use?
Georgia – MoreFM
I have tried to use them a platform, but personally, myself, I find them quite difficult, where at MoreFM we use all our pages on business suite. it’s actually really handy thing where you can schedule Facebook and Instagram at the same time.
Directional Marketing
Yeah, we work on a paid platform but we also do a lot of scheduling in business suite as well, because what we’re finding is we’re paying for is actually the ability to pull out really detailed reporting, where you can’t get that detailed reporting out of Facebook. Not without have to manually doing a lot of manipulation of data. Especially when we, you know, we’d like to make sure that our clients know what we’re doing. They can see how many posts we have done, they can see the engagement, and we have some tools around brand awareness. So how their brand fits, or how their message about their brand is getting recognised through social. We have little metrics that we use, but I’m a big lover of business, suite? The other day, I actually was on someone’s account working with them on Facebook, they hadn’t been given business suite yet.
Georgia – MoreFM
What is that like? 2019?
Directional Marketing
It’s interesting because, we have to remember that business suite is an extension of Facebook, and it gives you all those really cool features and those business features that’s about your account, but they only roll them out when they are ready. Not when you ask for it. You know when their ready?
Georgia – MoreFM
Does it have to be receiving no likes to the page? Or not many likes? To not get business suite?
Directional Marketing
Look, I don’t actually know the answer. I have a funny feeling, it’s got a little bit to do with likes and activity on your pages. If your pages are a little bit dormant, and just like you said before, it’s about consistency of posting. If they haven’t actually been posting regularly, then I think Facebook treats them as the last ones to roll over.
Georgia – MoreFM
Yeah, right and I think as well, some people, if they’re not sure how to use business suite or how to get it like 90% of what I’ve learned has been learnt from Google.
Directional Marketing
Yeah, Google and Facebook. Definitely. I’ve heard lately that people love watching Tik Tok to get little, tips as well.
Georgia – MoreFM
It’s like, YouTube. You’re right.
Directional Marketing
It is totally. Now for someone that might be starting out they’re like, okay, these are really good tips. What advice would you give someone to just motivate them to get back onto using Facebook or Instagram?
Georgia – MoreFM
I think the best part is enjoying it and like if you’re not enjoying it, then you’re not wanting to be posting you’re not wanting to be on social media. If you’re doing content that you really enjoy, like just seeing stuff and posting it and then social media is great because it goes well you get that instant like you know you’re doing well. Enjoying it and just not taking it too seriously is key, because that’s definitely a way to notice your Facebook brands moving. If you take things too seriously, people don’t want to read it, or react with it. These days, people are looking for that escape to have a laugh. If you have a laugh with your audience, you know, they’re going to enjoy it a bit more.
Directional Marketing
It also coming back to authenticity. Being authentic with what you’re posting, being real, being raw, is really important.
Georgia – MoreFM
Yeah, and as probably authenticity been a huge thing, probably in the last six months, brands are becoming more authentic and just showing the realness. And that’s what people want. People just want to see what’s behind it because people don’t want, the some routine.
Directional Marketing
I was listening to a podcast out of the States recently around social media. One thing as businesses that we tend to do is we try to sit behind the business we don’t put ourselves forward and instead push the brand. No one knows who is behind the brand and people want to feel that, familiarisation about who you are and what you do before they come and experience your products. We know you do that already Georgia, we have seen that you were quite foot forward footed with putting your face along side your branding. And it is scary for any business owner to do that.
Georgia – MoreFM
It is scary, if you’ve never really use social media, you kind of think what is it and it’s a huge world, you don’t really know what’s happening. It comes back to enjoying it! Like the reason why I started posting more personal stuff is because I thought it was funny. My friends and family thought it was funny. I was like, Oh, someone else would think it was funny and if you’re doing it to make someone else laugh, then you’re going to get that interaction and you’re going to just enjoy posting.
Directional Marketing
If anyone does want to laugh, please go look for the Mills Bay Muscle video that Georgia did eating her first Mills Bay Mussel
Georgia – MoreFM
The reaction is priceless
Directional Marketing
When we think about the small business owners, they’re probably in you know, 35 – 40s. You know, some have dabbled in a bit of Facebook and Instagram and some have done nothing at all. They feel like it’s a millennial game. What advice would you give to someone that is terrified of posting on Facebook, but has a business.
Georgia – MoreFM
It’s a hard thing because older people, are heavy set in their ways and they don’t want to be using social media because they think it’s a huge big world. If they come back to knowing their business and just starting small, even if it’s just posting a photo. It’s just comes down to doing the simple stuff. I feel you don’t have to go out there and download Tik Tok, even I don’t really understand that app. Really? It’s just simple stuff.
Directional Marketing
One of the pieces of advice that I give businesses is just picking a number of how many posts you will do a week, it’s not zero. So don’t make it zero. It’s one or two. HubSpot, which is a company that does well, they do scheduling as well as other CRMs systems, they came out with a report last year that they recommended that you do a minimum of three posts a week, but I’ve seen some fantastic results when people have posted twice a week. People tend to forget when it comes to social media it can drive people to your website. You can draw people there and that’s another form of engagement. So if you’re actually encouraging people to look at your website, there’s what goes on from a messaging point of engagement such as likes and shares, but we’re also looking at how many people do we move across to our website to actually interact with the website as well.
Georgia – MoreFM
And social media is not going away anytime soon. It’s only getting bigger and bigger. While people you know, hunkered down at home on their phones, that is the one thing that is seen as social media. That’s why it’s so important for people just to do anything on social media. Chances are one thing I was always told when I was first starting out is news, is never as good or as bad as you think it is. You may do a post, you think it’s terrible, but it could go really well, without you, you know, expecting it.
Directional Marketing
Yeah, I think we must remind ourselves that you must think about some of the stuff that you’ve watched and have been stuck watching. Then you’ve gone, I’m never going to get that time back in my life, but you’ve just helped the algorithm. Facebook has gone, oh, great, they’ve just sat there for 30 seconds on a one minute video, they’ve watched 50% of it, we’re now going to serve them more of that out.
Georgia – MoreFM
And like you said, a really good point about people watching the stupidest things on social media and think it seemed designing, so any posts a business is gonna do, it’s like, surely can’t be worse than, you know, someone cutting sand, I watch those videos quite a bit, you know, like the cutting sand ones.
Directional Marketing
Therapeutic, they’re really therapeutic.
Georgia – MoreFM
But, like, it can be so simple, and it’s never gonna be as bad as you think it
Directional Marketing
Correct. As this interview has been about engagement in which you’ve really outlined some really good points. We forget about stories? People are now starting to engage with our stories as well. So not just our posts, but they’re getting you now make comments on your stories, they’re liking they’re putting emojis in there, and this is another layer of engagement. For some people, they’re like, I just want to do one post, and I want to walk away but stories is another great place, isn’t it?
Georgia – MoreFM
Stories is a fantastic place because you can actually see who is seeing your post, and how many people are seeing your posts straightaway. One thing that I do find, if I do want to do a post a real like I do the post real simple thing, share it to your story because that is like people are still going to see it and you, scrolling down Facebook, Instagram, I feel like more people are watching stories these days, because it’s that kind of people are seeing that quickly.
Directional Marketing
And it sits at the top of the feed. So it’s easy to click, I think if you looked at heatmaps to see where people are clicking and most often they are on the top. Also now, the changes to iOS. Apple software, and not being able to track what people do. The Facebook algorithm is now working overtime to make sure that it can try and serve you as much content and, you know, give you the right content. While it doesn’t always you know, sometimes I look at some of the content that I get served and I’m like, really? What did I do in a past life? I’m not sure.
Georgia – MoreFM
Or what am I talking about in the last 24 hours? And why am I saying this?
Directional Marketing
Is that a conspiracy? Do we all think that our mobile phones can hear us?
Georgia – MoreFM
I think so. Yeah, they can, definitely, hear us because that some of the stuff that appears you like what?
Directional Marketing
Coming back to engagement. You’ve got any hot tips that you want to share, like gold nuggets, I mean, you’ve already given us three really good gold nuggets there. But any last parting words that you would like to share with surrounding engagement?
Georgia – MoreFM
The key to it is having fun, don’t be serious, like and just enjoy the process. Because if you enjoy the process, you’re going to keep at it and social media is not as big as scary as we think.
Social media is only getting bigger and bigger, and it’s growing and if you just look at how many businesses are doing well, because they focus everything on social media.
To keep up with Gerogia Watt follow her at MoreFM Marlborough Facebook page
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