Sam Olmsted [00:00:02]:

Welcome to Online Offscript, where we discuss trending topics and all things new on the Internet. I’m Sam Olmsted, Online Optimism’s New Orleans Managing Director.

Eliza Fillo [00:00:10]:

And I’m Eliza Filo, the Digital Ads Senior Coordinator.

Sam Olmsted [00:00:14]:

This week we’re talking about taking advantage of social media algorithms. Our guest is Mari Smith, premier Facebook marketing expert, often referred to as the queen of Facebook. Mari is also a social media thought leader and author of the new relationship Marketing and co author of Facebook Marketing an Hour a Day. Mari works with brands, business owners and independent professionals to help maximize their activities and presence on Facebook, Instagram and other social platforms. She is also sought after as a public speaker and often featured at major industry conferences such as social media marketing world. Thanks for joining us Mari, how are you?

Mari Smith [00:00:50]:

Awesome. Thanks for having me.

Sam Olmsted [00:00:53]:

Perfect. Let’s just hop into the questions. We’ve got a lot to cover and you are industry expert on social media how should businesses update strategies to adjust to the latest algorithm changes?

Mari Smith [00:01:05]:

Sure, probably three things. Mainly, one of the biggest algorithm changes is the fact that there’s what meta calls the discovery engine, blatantly copied from TikTok. And what that means is that meta says as much as 20%. I think it’s more than 20%. All of the content that you see in your Facebook and your Instagram and your threads now in your feed is from people you do not know, people and businesses that you don’t follow, you’ve never heard of. And the whole concept is to help you discover new people and businesses to follow. You want to keep making sure that your content is quality. It’s relevant.

Mari Smith [00:01:46]:

I would always recommend going more for quality than quantity because you never know who’s potentially going to see your content with this recommendation engine, which is AI powered. I know that Zuckerberg and team are very proud of it. Apparently it’s increasing time on site by a tiny percent, six or 7% on both Facebook and Instagram. The other thing is a big heavy focus on reels. So again, blatantly copied from TikToks, the short form vertical videos. Even though you can do up to 90 seconds right now on Instagram and Facebook, I would suggest trying to go maybe max of 30 seconds. 15 to 30 seconds seems to do really well. The third thing is potentially, if it is relevant for your business, is using a Facebook personal profile converted to professional mode.

Mari Smith [00:02:38]:

Now this is designed for creators, quote on quote, that don’t have a Facebook business page. However, anybody can convert their personal profile. The professional mode that seems to give you a little bit of a lift and reach, especially if you’re publishing regularly and favoring reels. Maybe about half your content might be reels. And what that also does, it gives you access to insights. You can see your reach numbers, you can see insights about your audience, who’s following you, and you can even boost some of your posts. So that may be relevant for some businesses.

Eliza Fillo [00:03:09]:

That explains so much because my Facebook feed recently has been having the most crazy stuff in there and I’m like, I know for a fact that I did not subscribe to this or this is not a friend of mine. So that makes a lot of sense.

Mari Smith [00:03:23]:

It’s frustrating because most people don’t know. Most people don’t even know about this thing. They’re like, why is my feet a mess? Where’s all my friends?

Eliza Fillo [00:03:32]:

Yeah, and it took me a while, I think, to notice it was even happening. But yeah, I want to also ask you a question about Facebook messenger, because that’s a whole other part of Facebook. How do you think that businesses can use Facebook messenger to not only improve customer service, but potentially sales as well?

Mari Smith [00:03:52]:

Okay, I love this question, Eliza. I am such a fan of Messenger. I swear. I think that having this one on one DM conversation is almost as good as having someone’s cell phone in texting, because it’s much more intimate. It’s one to one. You can respond with information pre sales, post sales, and you can set up a chatbot so that it’s automated and you can drive traffic from ads, from lead ads that go into the messenger and start giving your prospects, your leads information pertaining to what your offer is. And what’s also coming is Mark Zuckerberg announced just a few months ago, is meta is building what they’re calling a world class AI assistant for everybody. And part of that is going to be for businesses to be able to train up with your, in essence, your own LLM large language model and putting your own knowledge base in there for frequently asked questions, for customer support, for your prospects to come in almost like self serve, discover a lot more about your business and start interacting with this AI assistant, in essence, like having your own chat GPT inside of messenger for business purposes.

Mari Smith [00:05:11]:

So I think that we, all business owners of all sizes, need to be really leaning into the potentiality sitting right in front of us inside of the messenger inbox as well as WhatsApp for that. WhatsApp is very pertinent to a lot of businesses, internationally in particular, but it’s becoming much more popular in America, North America, and then also the Instagram DM box, of course, which is synced up with messenger as well.

Sam Olmsted [00:05:39]:

Are you finding that a lot of your clients and people that you’ve worked with and consulted with are dming people using Facebook messenger or. This is mostly that they are receiving messages from customers and are trying to figure out ways to respond to them and kind of build that audience and build that engagement in that direction?

Mari Smith [00:06:01]:

Great question, Sam. Here’s the thing, that there are restrictions, thankfully, that meta has implemented that you as a business person, you can’t proactively reach out and message people as your business page within a certain timeframe. I forget off the top of my head, it’s a certain, it used to be 24 hours. It’s a certain timeframe where if someone’s reached out to you proactively, you have a time, an amount of time to respond. Then after that you have to pay, pay to play, to be able to pay to put messages out to search and as an ad. But otherwise it’s more the part that you mentioned about responding. So you’ve got metabusiness suite, which is pretty robust and it’s free, and you basically got this condensed or amalgamated inbox that combines your Instagram and your Facebook DM’s. You can have your team members in there, you can assign chats, you can implement, they have a fairly basic automation for some basic faqs and whatnot.

Mari Smith [00:07:04]:

And then, so that’s that part about, oh, that’s where my mind wanted to go. The other you got metabusiness suite, then you could potentially instead, possibly as well, but more likely to be instead use a third party tool. Like my favorite is Agora pulse. And so Agora pulse, and there’s a zillion of them out there where you have this completely amount, whatever word I want to use, synthesized inbox, the master inbox of all your social platforms. You’re bringing in LinkedIn, you’re bringing in Twitter X, and you’ve got this ability to respond in a timely manner with a dedicated community manager. I’ve said for years that there is gold in the DM’s, there’s money sitting there, there’s low hanging fruit in your DM box. So take advantage of that.

Sam Olmsted [00:07:58]:

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It’s a much more personal connection if you can reach people through the DM’s, and I’ve noticed that as well. What about Facebook Live? Do you usually promote that as a suggested tool through the Facebook platform for businesses? And if so, when would businesses want to use it? How often, how frequently. Do they want to use it and in what capacity?

Mari Smith [00:08:22]:

So I love live streaming and Facebook live. Yep. I believe it was 2015 that they first launched it, and they were not. At first, Facebook was behind the eight ball in terms of launching a live streaming platform. But I remember when it first came out, it was only available on the phone, I would think. I was in Dallas, Texas, speaking to a big women’s conference, and I did a live demo and had them all look on their phones. They’re like, wow, it was so novel and new and exciting, and so there was this kind of almost bell shaped curve. From that point onwards, there was more and more people were doing live, and then it became available on desktop, and then with third party tools through the API, and then you could stream into events and stream into groups, and then as one of the best performing content types or formats, people see the live, they’re interacting with it.

Mari Smith [00:09:16]:

Big percentage of people catch the replay. Then inside a meta business suite, you can make clips, as they call them. You can make a little do it for you. Of course, you’ve got all kinds of third party AI apps now, like Opus clip or descript, and you can get the download the recording and do all that with it. So I’m a big fan of doing the lives, but the bell shaped curve, it’s like after several years, less and less people, fewer and fewer people are, our businesses are using the live stream. And so I think it’s one of the untapped areas of really genuinely connecting with our audience. And I will tell you that in this crazy world we’re living in right now, with AI, like, the machines are taken over, everybody’s consumed with the AI buzz that we are going to be seeing, like more and more synthetic content, and our minds are going and our guts are going, wait, is that real? Am I about to endorse something that’s not even real? Whether it’s an image, of course, writing is a whole other story, but video deepfakes and whatnot, I don’t know. But I would say businesses could have a competitive advantage by leaning more into doing live streams.

Mari Smith [00:10:26]:

It’s very hard to fake that, especially if you’re interacting live with your audience and you’re using an app like ecamm for a Mac, and you can put the questions up on the comments up on the screen. With the AI prevalence, we’re seeing like an erosion of trust. And one way to counter that is to actually to do more lives, to do more personal, more authentic, more deeper connecting. So in terms of how often Sam, maybe once a week, maybe every other week, whatever is comfortable. I know I speak for the women of the world that like to put their hair and their makeup and clothes and nice outfits and accessories and get the lighting guys, I don’t know, maybe have a little bit easier. But whether no matter what gender you are, that you want to look good, you want to look good in your stream. So that’s definitely a plus.

Sam Olmsted [00:11:18]:

I do have a follow up question about that. As an agency, we work with a lot of small businesses. These are people that are entrepreneurs, and they may not have a big staff or budget or anything like that. Live streaming seems like a way that they could just put up their phone or their computer and directly connect with their audience. I guess my question is, do you have some examples of when you would live stream? If you were, let’s say, a plumbing service or a window installation company or some of these industries that may not immediately come to mind for, let’s say, like a makeup company, you have that sense in your mind of, okay, putting on makeup makes sense in their livestream type of thing just because of where we’ve gotten to with trends and everything like that. But for some of those companies that may not have an obvious live stream answer, what would you say to them?

Mari Smith [00:12:13]:

Okay, this is great. It’s funny you mentioned window installation. I’m actually having all the windows replaced in my home right now. I’m hoping that we don’t have any banging and construction noise. Picking up on my mic in a little minute here. But yeah, plumbing. There’s two guys out of the UK just reminded me with the plumbing example. Gosh, I’m spacing their name right now.

Mari Smith [00:12:32]:

It might be just something as simple as, like, the plumbing guys. And, oh, and there’s also a gentleman. He’s really popular on YouTube, does plumbing. YouTube. He’s built a significant following. And so the type of industry. Yes, I get it. Where it’s not as, okay, we’re doing a makeup demo or we’re doing a cooking demo or something to physically show off.

Mari Smith [00:12:51]:

But I would say in terms of live streaming, they don’t have to be long. It could literally be 510, 15 minutes live stream. Where you’re on site, you’re using your phone, you’re showing off the quality of the work. Obviously, if you’re on site at a customer or client’s home and you’re getting permission, or maybe you’re in the factory or you’re back in the office, and maybe it’s more like meeting the team who’s behind the scenes or Roger. I just remember his name, Roger Wakefield. He’s brilliant. People can look him up on YouTube and he’s just so personable. He’s fun, he’s playful and he’s a really great marketer.

Mari Smith [00:13:25]:

And it’s like if you got any plumbing issue under the sun, you can go to his YouTube channel. Now, I don’t know that he does that much in the way of live, but the thing is like looking to see what is there a problem that people might be searching to solve? Those are the kinds of things you could do in just a quick short live on Facebook and then repurpose it as adding to your YouTube library.

Eliza Fillo [00:13:49]:

That’s a great point. That made me think of this. But there’s a pool cleaning guy and I don’t know if he’s on TikTok or Instagram or what, but he’s a pool cleaner in the UK somewhere and I love his videos and he’ll go on live sometimes and just professionally clean these pools and yeah, I don’t know what it is. I guess you just don’t often get to see what goes on behind the scenes, which is a value proposition there as well.

Mari Smith [00:14:13]:

Right.

Eliza Fillo [00:14:13]:

But I kind of want to shift gears a little bit and talk about return on investment. I feel like that is something that is getting harder and harder to track both on social media, pretty much any type of paid ad. So how would you recommend that in today’s world, people track that and track it effectively?

Mari Smith [00:14:32]:

Well, on the organic side, you’re going to have to use tracking links. There’s really not much other way you can go into Google Analytics and see what traffic’s coming from to specific web pages sources. You could do that, but otherwise a good tracking link, it’s going to help you there. UTMs on the paid side, for sure, you’ve got the Facebook Pixel called metapixel tracking links and correlating the data with your Google Analytics. Because sometimes meta insights, analytics and the ads manager aren’t always absolutely crystal clear. Like for example, I use lead pages for my landing pages, opt ins, sales pages, and I will correlate the data from my paid traffic on meta platforms with the metrics I’m seeing inside of the dashboard of lead pages because I want to make sure, like just kind of checks and balances. I think if you only rely on your meta ads manager analytics, it can sometimes give you that false sense of oh my God, we just generated 500 leads and you go over to your Google Analytics or whatever platform you’re using like I say, leadpages or unbounce is another good one and you’re just making sure. And then of course you’re going to go into your CRM, your marketing automation platform.

 

Mari Smith [00:15:49]:

I use keep and formally infusionsoft, and you just have to have all these little touch points along the way to make sure all your data is adding up. Now, in terms of like, how are we getting ROI? I always say to people, it’s important to set your own benchmarks. And yeah, there’s industry standards out there. You can find that use AI perplexity or obviously Google it and just see, okay, what is the industry standard, cost per lead or cost of customer acquisition for your particular industry. And that would give you a sense, especially if folks are kind of new to paid or new to the business that they’re building. But the thing is, I don’t know. I’ve always said for years that if you’re not getting a solid ROI, minimum, two X, like trying to double your money, but ideally more like five or ten X, the investment that you’re making into ads and you’re doing something wrong. And you can’t blame the machine, you can’t blame meta.

Mari Smith [00:16:46]:

You’ve got to be testing and testing your copy and testing your headlines. You’ve got all these brilliant a b tools inside of as manager. And then with the audience targeting now, Facebook keeps encouraging us all to just let the machines do the work for you with their advantage plus audiences.

Sam Olmsted [00:17:04]:

I just want to jump in and say, thank you so much for listing all of the tools you use. I think that’s incredibly helpful, especially as people listen to this and they say, that’s great, that Mari can do everything, but how in the heck is she doing it and what are the tools? So listing all the landing page tools and all of the analytics and tracking tools is super helpful. We use unbounce as well for our landing pages and find it very useful. I want to shift gears and talk about Facebook groups because to be honest, I’m not a huge personal Facebook user. I’m a big Instagram user. I still a meta person, I suppose. But I don’t really dive into Facebook groups and I think similar to messaging and similar to live, I think Facebook groups are an untapped area where there’s a lot of potential and a lot of genuine conversations happening. I guess my question to you is how can businesses use Facebook groups to build a community or build up their brand or create some sort of additional value for customers?

Mari Smith [00:18:08]:

I love it and I agree with you, Sam. I do feel just like Facebook Live. That Facebook groups are sitting there is a tremendous untapped resource for a lot of companies. Obviously, some are deeply using them. I have my own groups called Social Scoop. We have about 26,000 social media marketers from all over the world, very, very active. And at that group, it took a while. It’s almost like a flywheel.

Mari Smith [00:18:33]:

Where the group starts, has a specific purpose. People know why they’re there. To me, some of the best groups, the vast majority of the content is created by the members. And Facebook loves that. The algorithms love that. They’re looking for almost, not quite ugc, user generated, member generated content and the discussions and where I don’t really have to come up with a lot of content. I pay a moderator in there. She’s in there every day to make sure everybody’s taken care of, and they’re abiding by our rules and whatnot.

Mari Smith [00:19:06]:

So it’s a great add on where people come to my public business page and they have a question for me. They just getting a much more substantial answer from the whole community inside of a group. So things like if you have a software platform or in any situation where you might have a user group, sometimes businesses use groups just for customer support. Canva is a beautiful one. Canva has a terrific group. It’s not so much user support or such, it’s more like users sharing some of their brilliant creative work with each other. It’s a real kind of peer support group. Although Canva is in there, I want to mention a book by Mark Schaeffer, one of my dear friends in the industry for 15 plus years, and he wrote his 11th book, is called belonging to the brand why community is the last great marketing strategy.

Mari Smith [00:19:57]:

And I just love this book. And Mark and the whole premise that to your point, Sam, like this, like right at our elbow, this resource. Whoa. What if, in this crazy world of synthetic media and the AI, as I just mentioned, what if we lean more into community? What if we lean more into developing closer relationships with our prospects and our customers? And so really thinking through what a good use case would be for developing and nurturing a group. Also, one other quick thing is you can use a Facebook group as your top of funnel. So you can have membership questions and you can ask for people’s emails. There’s tools out there. I will mention the one I use.

Mari Smith [00:20:35]:

It’s called group funnels. Group funnels is simply a chrome plugin, and then it takes the data from the membership questions and pops them into a spreadsheet. Then I use Zapier and that zapier pulls that over into keep and that goes into an automated email nurture sequence. So you could use a Facebook group as a top of funnel. Not everybody provides their email address and we don’t make it mandatory. We often get maybe 50, 60, sometimes even a 70% conversion rate in terms of people supplying their email address. And obviously we’re giving them some great content and free gifts when they sign up.

Sam Olmsted [00:21:11]:

So it’s a free group, right. Anyone could sign up. And you’re saying you’re getting people to ask questions in the Facebook group and then those questions automatically get turned into an email that you can respond to.

Mari Smith [00:21:25]:

To clarify when someone. So it’s a private group that people have to request to join. I don’t like public groups. I’m not really a fan of public groups. There’s a few use cases that are good, just people sharing photos or something. But I have a private group. All my groups are private. I have private groups for my paid courses where we only let people in if they’ve bought the course.

Mari Smith [00:21:45]:

And then my main one for the general public called social scoop private. And the membership questions are entry questions, so they have to respond to the questions in order to get accepted into the group.

Sam Olmsted [00:21:57]:

I see.

Mari Smith [00:21:58]:

So the conversion rate I just mentioned is about how many people will respond. Some people don’t and we don’t enforce, like, hey, you didn’t answer the questions, we’re not going to let you in, but we like it when they do. So hopefully that makes sense.

Sam Olmsted [00:22:10]:

Right now you’ve got 20,000 people with a 70% conversion rate of getting all that information about them. Right. That’s fantastic. In my opinion, Facebook groups, I always think about adding value to the customers first before you ask anything from them. And so I think making a place that allows them to learn from you and create community and then also think of you when they think of experts in the field or ways to improve their own Facebook processes. So I think that’s a great way to do it.

Mari Smith [00:22:41]:

And one other quick thing, if I can interject, would be how important it is to have very solid rules. People aren’t allowed to pitch and share their links and spam and DM people. It’s like, keep an, uphold a really high culture. And then of course, it costs me money to run that group. I pay my moderator. And so of course you want to periodically make your own offer so you can continue to gather leads and of course generate sales from the group.

Eliza Fillo [00:23:07]:

And I wonder, would you say that that would be a more cost effective way to begin the funnel. Do you think it would have an impact on.

Mari Smith [00:23:15]:

I do realize that. I think, yeah, because it’s almost like on your business page, you’ve got the wide open public. But when they’ve come into a private group and they’ve been willing to answer the questions, and especially now they’re starting to interact and engage with fellow members, they’re more, they’re a much warmer lead than, you know, just following your page and not doing much interaction, interacting yet.

Eliza Fillo [00:23:38]:

Right. I would agree with that, yeah. And speaking of saving money, how do you think that specifically a smaller business that doesn’t have a really big ad spend, how do you think that they can create paid ads and do it effectively and run a good campaign with not hundreds of dollars a day to spend on these ads?

Mari Smith [00:24:03]:

Yeah, I love this. My friend Larry Kim, he’s a former founder of Wordstream, and then he created a chatbot company called Mobile Monkey, which now he changed the name. It’s called Customers AI. It’s a wonderful chatbot company. I’m mentioning Larry because he has this brilliant strategy called the unicorn theory of marketing. And by the way, the unicorn is Scotland’s national animal. So I love unicorns. But the whole concept of the unicorn, a bit like how we apply that to a billion dollar valuation pre IPO.

Mari Smith [00:24:32]:

Applying Larry’s model to social media and Facebook content, you’re looking for your unicorn posts. Those are the pieces of content, whatever format. Be a real alive, a colored background question text image that has gotten the most reach or the most engagement or the most video views. So you’re kind of like your runaway winners in terms of performance. So then you’re going to take a nominal amount of ad budget, $10.20 3100. Whatever the budget is, you’re going to be strategic. You’re not just going to elevate something like a meme, even if it’s doing well, my opinion, I don’t like just putting money in where it’s just like, okay, unless you look, I suppose you’re just getting more awareness. But I’d recommend boosting that post.

Mari Smith [00:25:19]:

If that’s as much as people can do a small business with a low budget, go ahead and use the boost button. Otherwise you’re going to go into the meta ads manager because now you can start doing a little bit of split testing if you wanted to. Keep in mind, you can’t edit that post on the wall once you’ve gone ahead and put some budget on it. So make sure you’ve absolutely tested it and it’s got the CTA that you want. And just you’re going to elevate the reach because the reason you’re going to look for your unicorns, your runaway winner performance, performing pose, because your audience is responding, the algorithms are telling you, your audience is telling you, we love this content. This is amazing. So you just go ahead and you boost that. You amplify, I call it my amplify method, and especially if it’s video content, because now you can circle back and you’re going to be real savvy.

Mari Smith [00:26:07]:

You’re going to create a custom audience based on the video views, because that’s going to be a warmer audience than just a cold audience. And now you can do a little bit of retargeting, a little bit more sophisticated, but doesn’t take a lot of budget to warm people up and start taking them through your customer journey.

Eliza Fillo [00:26:23]:

I love it. Retargeting. Switch around. And then from retargeting, you could consider like a lookalike audience from there.

Mari Smith [00:26:29]:

Yes.

Eliza Fillo [00:26:30]:

And I just love that you can kind of like recycle. It sounds like this one post or video that just did really well. And you can, I mean, it just keeps going and going and going, which I really like that idea.

Mari Smith [00:26:41]:

Yeah. And the thing is, you’re going to produce organic content anyway. And my recommendation always is to produce what I call boost worthy organic content. So everything you do ideally would be worthy, potentially, of putting some budget behind as opposed to. I see a lot of small businesses where it’s like they’re pushing stuff out there and it’s like somebody just checked a box. Okay, we did our social for the day and it’s not necessarily relevant. The meme, it’s like, you know, happy blue sky day or whatever it happens to be.

Eliza Fillo [00:27:12]:

Right. And would you want a meme being the thing that blows up and then what? You’re gonna pay so much money to keep circulating this meme again and again? Like, do you want that as the face of your brand? Which some brands might, but I get where you’re coming from, and that may not be the best. The best thing to start with my.

Sam Olmsted [00:27:32]:

Old job, my old position was our search and content director. So I focus a lot on SEO Mari, and I have a question about that, because we all know how powerful Facebook is as a platform, and we also know that people look to Google when they look for answers. So a lot of times Facebook links will pop up on Google search results for businesses and be one of the first few links that appear. So the question is, how can businesses use Facebook as a tool to support their search engine optimization and content marketing strategies, and how are those working together to help businesses expand their online presence?

Mari Smith [00:28:11]:

I love this because from the beginning of the launch of Facebook business pages, they’re all public. Everything on your business page is public. It’s findable, it’s searchable, it’s surfaceable on these Google searches. And probably now I know perplexity. A lot of people are favoring perplexity over Google in terms of finding information, asking legit questions. And I personally have always been quite verbose in my content. I write kind of mini blog posts on my Facebook business page updates. I mean, they really could be blog posts.

Mari Smith [00:28:46]:

Some are longer than others. And so thinking it through that all of this is in essence keyword rich content. And so you’re going to hear different schools of thought out there. I’m a great believer that there’s no like one size fits all. There’s no real like, prescriptive formula to get your social media correct or right for you. You’ve got to test and iterate. But you will see different reports out there where they say, you know, shorter is better, five words, like an image or a video with just, you know, one sentence. And I’m like, okay, try that test that.

Mari Smith [00:29:23]:

Also test up longer captions, hashtags. Hashtags are actually very relevant still, who knows? It might phase them out at some point, but absolutely relevant on both Facebook and Instagram. Now back to your SEO question, though, in terms of like, including those hashtags in your post, maybe going for a longer narrative. Keyword rich and relevant hashtags. Not too many relevant hashtags will help you with your SEO on Facebook. So if people are searching, people don’t search as much, but the relevant hashtags could also feed into what we said earlier in our chat today with the meta’s discovery engine and where it’s recommending your content to people. And yes, I’m a great fan of just really thinking through having a multi purpose strategy of getting your content found.

Eliza Fillo [00:30:19]:

Are you writing those quote unquote blog posts, not actually Facebook posts with specific keywords in mind? Or are you just thinking this is going to catch the genre of this category? I guess if that makes sense.

Mari Smith [00:30:35]:

It does make sense. And here’s the thing. I know that vast majority of people are skimmers. People don’t read every single word. So your first one to two to three sentences are vital in the post because it’s going to draw people in. You’ve got like a video, you’re doing your reels, you got 3 seconds or less to hook people in. So those first few opening words lines are critical. So making it super obvious, like a YouTube title of your video, it’s like thinking it through.

Mari Smith [00:31:05]:

Like, what would people be searching for? Does this make sense immediately when people are just scroll, scroll, scroll, boom, ah, stop the scroll. This thing, thumb stopping. It’s made sense to me, it speaks to me. I want to know what this is. And then it draws them in and they’re reading more. So yeah, I definitely am strategic in how I craft the wording of my posts.

Eliza Fillo [00:31:26]:

Mm hmm. That makes a lot of sense. I feel like throughout this call, we’ve talked so much about how much Facebook and just social platforms in general have changed. So how do you think that a business could keep up with those changes and maybe not even keep up, but like stay ahead of them? Is it a matter of researching? Is it a matter of just knowing the news very well? What would you say?

Mari Smith [00:31:50]:

Well, I would say the bottom line is that great content will always win the day. So even if a super busy small business owner feels like, oh my God, I just don’t even have time to keep up, people in my audience are always saying that, oh my God, how do you keep up? Facebook, meta, Instagram, they’re always changing things. But if you know your audience well, you know what kind of content they respond well to and obviously it’s pertinent to your niche. You just keep producing great content. I mentioned about how important it is to do a little more emphasis on video, especially reels. And with the short form vertical format, both Facebook and Instagram doesn’t have to be a lot, but at least some of your content should be the reels format. And so great content will always win the day. But I’ve had this saying for 15 years that content is king, but engagement is queen and she rules the house.

Mari Smith [00:32:44]:

So if we only focus on good content, it’s like old school. So 2005 push marketing. You’re just pushing the stuff out there and you’re not engaging with your audience. We were talking earlier about the DM’s. DM’s is one place to engage for sure. You got your comments, you’re responding back. It’s a timely manner. Maybe you also have a Facebook group.

Mari Smith [00:33:06]:

You’re really building the community then in terms of keeping up. Yeah, you’re going to follow some industry experts. Folks are welcome to join my social scoop group and get on my email list. I’ll certainly keep you up to date. There’s a lot of great sources out there, podcasts. My good friend Mike Stelzner over at social media examiner certainly follow their blog and their page. I know they have a society that they train folks, a great community there. So the thing is that we follow trusted sources.

Mari Smith [00:33:34]:

You’re going to keep your hand in the game. You’re not going to be so far behind. I do see them, to be honest with you. I see pages where, you know, somebody might come to my course and I do like these hot seats and I put people in the hot seats where it’s like I just look at their Facebook page or Instagram account and I’m going to start giving them some feedback right away about like how they could make some changes and capitalize on low hanging fruit. And one of like a really dated strategy is posting way too often because people are not up to speed with the algorithm change and they’re thinking that more is better. But now they’re competing with their own selves in the feed. Their stuff’s not getting seen. And another one is posting too many links or just posting nothing but link posts.

Mari Smith [00:34:19]:

And link posts get the lowest reach. So I recommend doing with your reels, videos, lives, images, put your link in the first comment.

Sam Olmsted [00:34:32]:

Perfect. And that leads me to another question that I just made up. So forgive me, but Mari, I want to put you in the hot seat, but kind of in reverse. The question is, let’s say from this podcast you get a fantastic 22nd video clip. It’s a vertical video clip that you love. You look great, you’ve got some insider knowledge that you know is going to perform well and you’re really excited about it. What are you going to do with that 22nd clip? Where is it going to live and how are you going to distribute it and connect with your audience with that content piece? And are there any spinoff pieces that you would make as well?

Mari Smith [00:35:08]:

Oh, I love this question. Nice one. Instagram reels and Facebook reel. I personally don’t cross post on the reels format because I like to tweak it a little bit. The interesting thing is in your reels on Facebook, you can put clickable links. Instagram is the bane of all of our lives. You still have to say see link in bio. I don’t know why they don’t give us links in their feed posts, but certainly that would live on both Instagram and Facebook reels.

Mari Smith [00:35:39]:

I would also either put it as an independent story, both Facebook and Instagram, my business page, I would probably also put it on my personal Facebook page. A Facebook profile, excuse me, as a story. And I don’t do a whole lot with YouTube shorts, but this I probably would recommend people do on Facebook shorts. Excuse me, YouTube shorts. And then what I also do, and I always do this when I have one of my own unicorn posts. I’m always going to drive traffic from my email list. So my weekly newsletter, I was going to ask that feature it in there. I probably would make a little animated GIF version of it so people will see the movement in the email.

Mari Smith [00:36:18]:

I’m going to say, hi, have you seen this little clip? And I’m going to directly drive them to a specific. More than likely, it’s always going to be my Facebook page, directly to the post. I probably would either share the Facebook post, the Facebook reel into my social script group, or I would do it as the native reel in the social script group. And invariably, what I do in my email newsletter is I say, come and join the conversation and I’m going to drive them to the exact permalink of the post in the group.

Sam Olmsted [00:36:50]:

Fantastic answer. I love it. One clarifying question. Would the video exist in the newsletter as something to watch, or would it be a link that goes to that specific post, as you said?

Mari Smith [00:37:02]:

Well, I don’t think a video can live in a newsletter. Only an animated gif. They would have to click to go watch the full one.

Sam Olmsted [00:37:10]:

That’s what I thought. I was just curious.

Mari Smith [00:37:12]:

Yeah, yeah, perfect.

Sam Olmsted [00:37:14]:

I love that.

Mari Smith [00:37:15]:

Let me add one other piece here, Sam, because see, my brain just goes immediately the strategy. So that’s great for awareness and engagement. But what would be the call to action? See the call to action? Yeah. Okay. Watch the video or go over here and watch the full clip, or go listen to this podcast. That’s great. Well, then might say, okay, if you enjoyed this podcast, you know, here I got this course coming up, or I’ve got this free webinar, whatever it might be. So there’s like a.

Mari Smith [00:37:39]:

Here’s a piece of content and then what’s next? Thinking it through to the kind of the end game, if you will.

Eliza Fillo [00:37:45]:

Speaking of end game kind of endgame, I’m really curious about what you think. Not like changes that are happening frequently, but what are some long term trends that you are predicting or that maybe you’re seeing right now and you think that they’re here to stay.

Mari Smith [00:38:01]:

It’s funny, Eliza, earlier we talked about synthetic media. I’m about, oh, I can feel that in my gut, my heart. Wow. The impact of artificial intelligence and how that is potentially eroding trust, because all of the synthetic media is only going to get more intense. The volume of content we’re going to see in our social feeds. And then the brain kicks in the gut, the intuition going, wait, is this real? Am I about to endorse something that’s not even real? And so I’m here to tell you all the listeners, and I’ve put this in a few of my keynotes, that authenticity is making a comeback. And the reason I say come back is because in the early days, 06789, probably up to 2010, the word of the year constantly was your social media had to be authentic to the point that word got bandied about so much. The actual interpretation, the true meaning, became deluded.

Mari Smith [00:39:01]:

And it’s like, okay, what’s authentic? Authentic is relative. Okay, fine. But now it’s like, wow, if you can put this really transparent, personal approach to your social media, a big thing right now, it’s a big buzz, is to make sure that you have a generative AI policy, clearly publicly available on your website, that clearly shows, okay, here’s what we use generative AI for. Here’s what we don’t. Here’s what we’ll disclose if we’ve made an image with it, we’ve made a video with it, we’re going to tell you we’re not trying to pull the wool over anybody’s eyes. And then a second component, Eliza, that I do want to mention is a profound quote recently came to light by Sam Altman, of course, the head of OpenAI company behind Chat GBT. And Sam said that 95% of what marketers use, agencies, strategists, and creative professionals for today, will easily, nearly instantly, and at almost no cost, be handled by the AI. And he predicts that to be within the next five years.

Mari Smith [00:40:07]:

I’ve heard other people say it’s going to be much longer. So just in terms of being a business owner and or an agency, the more you can add that personal, humanized, real relationship touch, the better you’ll have a competitive edge.

Sam Olmsted [00:40:26]:

Perfect. I think that was a great answer. A little scary, but definitely relevant as we’re talking about how things are changing and how to stay up to date on those, on those changes. We are getting close to the end here. We want to make sure that you pitch any places where we can find you online. I know that you’re an author and you’ve got a ton of content and media out there as well, so please let us know where we can find you and how we can engage with you and connect even more.

Mari Smith [00:40:52]:

Oh, thank you for the invite. Certainly. My website, mariosmith.com, the best places, though, is the Facebook account Mari Smith with the blue check. And then my group, which is connected to the page, is just Mari Smith’s social scoop, and they can join the newsletter through that group or on my website. We’ll be honored to connect with folks.

Sam Olmsted [00:41:13]:

Perfect. We really appreciate you taking the time. This has been invaluable and a lot of nuggets of insight and truth. So thank you so much, Mari.

Mari Smith [00:41:22]:

Oh, my pleasure. Thanks for having me. Thanks, Eliza.

Eliza Fillo [00:41:26]:

Thanks for joining us today. Be sure to subscribe and rate the podcast. And if there’s anything that you’d like to hear us discuss, reach out on Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn.

Sam Olmsted [00:41:35]:

And as always, stay optimistic.