00:55 - Laura Roeder Introduction

01:10 - How Edgar Works

03:31 - Why should you share you own content more than once?

06:25 - What is the most effective approach to scheduling content?

09:01 - Getting Over the “Spammer” Mentality

11:51 - Scheduling

14:47 - Handling Feedback (Complaints)

16:43 - What should you be saying on social media?

19:59 - Should you have multiple accounts? Should you use different platforms for different purposes?

26:06 - How do people even keep up with social media?

30:27 - Hashtags

33:58 - Facebook Pages

36:14 - Social Media Etiquette

39:42 - The Business and Background of Edgar

42:17 - “Request Access” (List Building)

43:51 - Getting Started with Social Media

45:58 - Twitter Cards

46:23 - Email Marketing

49:56 - Keeping Up with Social Media (and targeting the wrong ones)

 

Other tools mentioned on today’s show

Picks

feedly (Reuven)
Super Spicy Media Blog (Jonathan)
Resources for DYFConf attendees by Kurt Elster (Jonathan)
Edgar (Chuck)
Hootsuite (Chuck)
Tweetbot (Chuck)
Unfollowers.com (Chuck)
Basecamp (Chuck)
Pocket (Laura)

 

I feel better but I sound worse.

hey everybody and welcome to episode 174 of the Freelancers’ Show. This week on our panel we have Jonathan Stark.

Hello.

Reuven Lerner.

Hi everyone.

I’m Charles Max Wood from Devchat.tv and this week we have a special guest – Laura Roeder.

Hello!

Do you want to introduce yourself?

Yeah, I’m the founder of Edgar, meetedgar.com. We’re a social media scheduling and automation tool that fills up your schedule for you so that you don’t just have to deal with your queue running out over and over again.

Yeah, that makes sense. I actually use Edgar so I know exactly what you're talking about. Do you want to explain a little bit about how it works and then we can talk about why you built it that way?

Yeah, so when we built Edgar there were two core problems that we were bumping into at our own company. And the first big problem was wanting to repeat our best content. So there’s a lot of content you might want to repeat on social media [inaudible] just talk about all your old blog posts. If you do any content marketing, you’ve spent months or years building up this library of blog posts, a lot of people send them out once or send them on a few times when they're new and then never again on social media and that’s just a huge missed opportunity. So we wanted to keep sending traffic back to our old content that was still really useful and relevant but we didn’t want to have to keep loading it up over and over again.

We also had a problem with getting the right mix on social media. If you're using a cue based tool like Buffer and it makes it really easy to just load up a lot of content and not have to schedule everything individually, but the problem you have from a workflow perspective is maybe you're going through all your blog posts then put those all into Buffer and then you’d have 30 bog posts in a row and then [inaudible] promotional stuff.

So we also wanted a tool that can achieve a nice mix, and the way Edgar does that is you load everything up into your library of content in Edgar and you categorize it all. So you have host in your blog, your podcast episodes, other resources that you find interesting, promotional stuff – whatever it is for your business. And then you tell Edgar a schedule based on those categories. You tell Edgar, “Okay, send out one of my old blog posts every Tuesday, Thursday at 3 p.m. and then Edgar just cycles through your library automatically to fill up your social accounts.

Yeah, I can tell you that when I came to Edgar – originally I was using Hootsuite and then I tried Buffer, and they both had the same problem and that was that it import a spreadsheet or a CSV file full of stuff that I wanted tweeted out or shared on a Facebook page and then I would forget to load it up again and so I’d go several months without anything going and being tweeted out.

Yeah, that just seems – it seemed really weird to me that those tools that other tools don’t store your content. That was so odd to me. We also had spreadsheets like you did of all our social media and like, “Why does this live in a spreadsheet? Shouldn’t this live in social media to make a lot more sense?” So that’s exactly what I [inaudible].

Okay, so let me ask you some real newbie questions here in terms of social media, which I use – I have a blog and I post to it and then from there, I send things out on Twitter and LinkedIn and Facebook and so on and so forth. I definitely see that it brings in some traffic but it seems to me like you're saying that if I’m – for every blog post – I’m posting it once, or let’s say twice in the really exceptional case, then I’m missing out on a ton and I’m just not doing it very well. Is that the gist of it?

Yeah, you're missing out on so much because for every – most of us take, let’s say, at least two hours would be a really quick time to blog post, start to finish. You're spending all this time on a blog post and the idea behind running a business and being on social media is that you have new people coming to you all the time. Your business wouldn’t survive without new leads. So everyone who discovers you this month hasn’t seen anything from July and it’s difficult for them to discover that. They definitely haven’t seen anything from a year ago, so why not keep using that great content that you’ve created and show it to all those people that are discovering you for the first time.

And so I should not be depending on other people to share it or on search engines and so forth. If I’m not active about this, then I’m basically losing.

Yeah, and there’s lots of ways to market your business. SEO is a huge source of lead gen for us as well. It’s great to have that mix, but of course if you're not putting stuff on social no  one’s going to share it either. That’s the thing we see in our company all the time; we’ll run a status update for a blog post that was written a year ago and it gets ten shares on Twitter for whatever reason people found it interesting and pitched it up, and so now we’ve just exposed it to this whole new Universe and that [inaudible] on automatically through Edgar.

The other this is is that both Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn – I’m trying to think of any other social networks that I really look at or use on a regular basis. But those are the three that I look at. People’s status updates and posts on LinkedIn, posts on Facebook, they fly by. If I’m not on at the right time, I won't see it. And so by putting it out different times a day, multiple days during the week, it just gives people more of an opportunity to see things.

And the funny thing is is that I’ve put things into Edgar and had it tweet out stuff that’s a year or two or three years old and people will still retweet it. I’ll get three or four retweets off of it where people are then going back and checking out this older content that I didn’t have to do anything to get that exposure.

Yeah, it’s really cool. The point is really important about the nature of social media. The way we use Twitter, for example, is that we sign on and we look through the feed, and that’s always [inaudible]. So if someone didn’t post something in that same five minute window, then you signed on and looked at Twitter, you’ll never see it. So it’s not even just about old/new people seeing your posts in July, it’s about people who have been following you for years but they're only seeing a tiny percentage of what you post.

What I’m wondering – and this is why I do the show – so I do the show so I can talk to interesting people and then I also do the show so that I can learn something. What do you find as the most effective approach? How often should I be tweeting your post into Facebook pages and what kinds of content and things like that. Do you have a strategy that you built Edgar for or was it just so that you could have this library that you could schedule to go out?

The answer is both. How much you want to post depends on how much content you have, the size of your audience. I would say for most people, posting about five times a day is a pretty good frequency spread out all over the day of when your audience is online. So if most of your audience is in the US, browsing social media while they work as most of us do and in a nine to five range, that’s a good time to concentrate your posts.

You can’t cover everyone. This is the question I get a lot, “How do I make sure that I’m reaching people in Asia and in Europe and in the US.” Of course, the only way to do it is just to keep posting every half hour, all day long, but I wouldn’t worry about reaching everyone.

As far as a mix of content, a lot of it should be your own content, let’s say about 50% is just links back to your blog/podcast, whatever. And then maybe to use pretty loose/broad categories maybe another 25% is other interesting content. Maybe about 10-15% is more directly promotional stuff where you're linking to a book you wrote or telling people about your services or whatever. And then about 10% that’s left over, let’s say you're doing whatever makes sense for your business; maybe these little snippets of useful advice. I like to post inspirational quotes for entrepreneurs, maybe it’s funny images – other content that people tend to share on social media.

That’s like vastly higher than anything I post. As I said, I post a blog post about once every two weeks or so on my blog. And I got a site that does a daily video, so that goes out once a day. And I’ve been wondering, “Gee, should I be getting more traffic?” And the answer is, “Yes, if I were posting more frequently and actually reaching people.

Right. There’s creating the content and then there’s showing people the content and it’s not if you build it they will come, you have to work really hard to make sure that your content is reaching people, which I actually think is really cool because a lot of people they're like, “Oh God, to make those work I’m going to have to blog everyday.” And you really don’t; you can actually create a lot less content but show it to people a lot more.

And I’m not going to be considered a spammer of some sort if I’m just constantly posting the same things? At a certain point, people are going to be a little tired seeing, “Ugh, it’s another blog post from Reuven! Oh my God, I’ve seen this before.”

Because what I was actually saying, you see everything you post but the people that follow you see basically 4-8% off what you post. So to you, it seems crazy and everyone has this experience. You're like, “Jesus, these people could not possibly want to see this from me again,” because you see it every time it goes out. But actually, again, maybe only 5% off your followers are seeing it. And also you have to remember they're following you for a reason.

This is always funny to me when people are like, “Oh, I don’t want to bombard people with my blog” – why would they be following you on Twitter if they don’t want to hear about your blog? That’s the only reason that they're going.

Yeah. What I did with Angular Remote Conf, I was getting ready to launch the conference, I put all the tweets out. I had been tweeting about twice a day for the two months leading up to the conference just saying, “Hey, get your tickets.” And then I opted the week the early bird ended and the week before the conference – those seven days – and I was tweeting three to four times a day, either ‘this is your last chance to get a good deal’ for the early bird, or ‘I had a library that was so and so speaking don’t miss out’ or – we’re really excited to have this talk and I had 16 talks and then I had probably another eight or so promotional tweets. And I would get through all those tweets at about four days; I had no complaints – zero complaints about me tweeting about the conference a lot. And for me it was – I was thinking, “Oh man, if anybody –,” but nobody’s sitting there reading my feed. Nobody goes and pulls up what I’m tweeting and going, “Man, he’s tweeted the same thing six times!” because people don’t care.

Right, I love that you shared that; that’s a great use case for Edgar 1. You said people don’t care; if you see something that’s been posted before, you don’t have rage about it which is not what we imagined for our audience is that they're going to come burn our house down if they see us tweet something twice. And people who follow you, they know you run a conference; it’s no shocker that you're running a business, that you're promoting your conference, that you're promoting your blog. This is why people chose to follow you because they're interested in a conference so they're not mad that you're talking about it.

How about the Twitter folks themselves. I know on [inaudible] software had it automatically tweeting updates that were going on there, and I happen to get in trouble sometimes in that I had I had identical tweets, and it would say, “Sorry, you're not allowed to do that.” So you have to have a mix of tweets pre-set so that Twitter doesn’t dig you for that?”

That’ll only happen if you're sending out the same tweet right after the other.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah, that was the bug that I had.

Yeah, there you go.

Does Edgar – you mentioned tweeting out from nine to five roughly in your time zone. So I’m in the US so [inaudible] tweet from nine to five in the US, but I’ve seen other tools – and I don’t know if Edgar’s one of them – that actually knows when your followers are online or when you're active online and will tweet when it reaches a critical mass or some threshold. Is that not the kind of thing that you're worried about or is that interesting?

Yeah, it is interesting. What those tools are doing is actually just seeing your history and then basing times on your history which there is actually really great data within Facebook and Twitter themselves. And we have guides on our Edgar blog about how to find the best time or date to publish content.

So you don’t need a special custom tool that’s saying ‘we’re going to wait until everyone’s online and then post’. I’m pretty sure they can’t actually do that; they're just looking at the history but it is very smart to look at your social accounts and see there’s more specific times of when your audience is online and fine tune from there but you want to get started. A lot of people just make this way too complicated and I’m like, “Ugh, first I have to figure out the ten optimal times and I have to gather all this data.” Just start posting a few times a day on random times and maybe you can go in and tweak your schedule after you had some time to look at the data for what’s best for your audience.

What happens when you're actually interacting instead of just filling your feed with this automation? What happens if you start interacting with people; what is the best practice there? Should you pause your feed or something? It seems – I have an automation setup; it’s not Edgar. It’s just like a combination of Zapier and my Google Calendar that I schedule things to go out periodically. It gets weird when I’m actually on Twitter and I’m interacting with someone and then a random tweet will fire.

So, that’s weird to you; it’s not weird to them. [Chuckles] Interaction is really, really important. There’s a fancy that maybe you could just set up a tool like Edgar and then you're going to get all these leads from social media. I have not seen that happen. A tool like Edgar is great because it – basically Edgar handles all the busy work of updating your social media, but in order to grow your presence on social and in order to grow your traffic back to your website, you really need to interact with people. So you're forming those relationships; new people are finding you to follow, maybe your purchase [inaudible] in Twitter chats or things like that. So that live time is super important, and the way I see it, you want to make your time on social only live time because software can handle the rest. There’s no reason for you to go on to Twitter and think of something to say and schedule it or do it all live when software can handle that.

So talking to people is super important; you definitely don’t need to pause your feed; I can pretty much guarantee that. Again, your perspective of seeing everything that goes out, most people aren’t really checking what you're writing and you [inaudible] to them and they're like crossreferencing your feed and seeing what else you're saying. I get if they are but they just – they don’t care.

I have actually had people complain about me sending out too many promotional tweets. Maybe it’s just trolls or – I don’t know.

Yeah, you have to – whenever you do marketing in your business, you really have to not care – the feedback you're getting and if it’s valuable because there’s a certain is a level where people are just thinking that you're account feels like a spam [inaudible]. And that’s why it is important to have that mix, right? You don’t want to just have a Twitter account. “50% off today” and just sends that out over and over again every half hour.

But in our business we do a lot of email marketing and there are always people, “Why are you guys sending me all these emails? You send too much email; I hate it.” But the truth is I don’t – if they're not interested in Edgar then they're not really valuable to us as a lead, right?

This is a business; we’re not running this to entertain people. We share content in hopes that it will help you and it helps that maybe it will lead you to Edgar. So if you don’t like receiving emails from Edgar, you don’t seem to be very interested in Edgar and that’s fine – you can just unsubscribe. But I don’t really take it too seriously when people are like ‘you’re tweeting too much’ or ‘you're emailing too much’ because those people aren’t interested in your tweets or your emails with the caveat, of course, that the majority of your audience was saying, “This really doesn’t feel good; this really feels spamy,” then you would want to listen to that feedback.

Yeah, that’s fair. I’m sure this person or these people who have done it in the past are not really likely customers anyway.

Right, and we have this bias of only listening to a negative feedback because most of the positive feedback is unspoken. If you have 500 people following you on Twitter and three people told you that you tweet too much, then the other 497 are fine with it, you know what I mean? But you're not getting 497 messages from them telling you how much they love your Twitter feed.

Oh, people rave about my Twitter feed all the time.

Oh good! [Chuckles]

I wish.

Yeah, except for those long string of things about conferences. I mean, really?

I know right?

Well, I’m curious then this – maybe this is what Jonathan was asking – how much of social media that is supposed to be broadcasting interesting things for people who are possibly interested in my business so that they’ll turn into leads and how much of it is supposed to be a conversation?

I would say the conversation – the nature of social media is that you want that conversation to be happening everyday if possible. That does not mean that you spend your time every ten minutes doing it everyday. My little tip for social media is always that you want to leave a trail of evidence behind.

So the problem with social media is that it’s designed to waste time and get us to click things and watch videos, and the reason it can be tricky for marketing is that someone’s like, “Okay, I’m getting signed on to Twitter to do my social marketing,” and then you're looking through your feed and you start reading articles, you start exploring the internet as Twitter was designed to do and that is not helping your business. But if you’ve just been clicking on articles, there’ll be no trail of that. No one looking at your Twitter account can see that you just spent an hour reading articles whereas if you're actually interacting with humans, you can look at your account and you can see your @ replies; on Facebook, you can see your conversations, your comments or whatever. So I like to use that little trick to see if I’m actually spending my time well engaging with people – have I left a trail behind or have I just read ten blog posts a [inaudible]? It’s very interesting but it’s certainly not going to help grow my business.

I also just want to jump on the ‘supposed to’ – what should my Twitter feed – what is it supposed to look like? What am I supposed to tweet about? And really, what it boils down to is what do you want? What do you wand from Twitter? Some people want the social interaction so they're never going to use anything like Edgar because they just want to live tweet about stuff and they want to react to what they see in the moment on Twitter.

And then you have other people who are using it for business purposes and so you can schedule ten million tweets a day. And as long as people don’t mind following you and they don’t feel like it’s way too much and they're getting what they want out of their Twitter experience by following you, then it’s fine. So I don’t know that there’s necessarily a ‘supposed to’; I think it really boils down to what are you looking for, what are you looking to provide people on Twitter, and is it working for you? Then you can adjust your strategy as you go from there.

I love that point. I could not agree with that more, and I also think that’s hard to reason why social media marketing can seems so confusing to people because we use social media in so many ways. A lot of people love using Twitter to just chat with their friends and that’s cool. I use Facebook as a major marketing tool for my business and I also use the exact same Facebook to look at pictures or my friends’ kids and it’s all the same Facebook. And I think that can be a little confusing because what you would want to do for your business would totally make you a jerk on your personal Facebook account. [Chuckles] We never send out all these stuff to my friends, all these updates about my business; I would put pictures of my baby up on my personal Facebook account.

So you do have to see clearly how you're using these tools in different ways in different parts of your life and your business.

Does that mean that you suggest people to have separate accounts for their business and their personal stuff?

You should always use a page for your business; you should not use a personal Facebook profile to promote your business; you should really create a page for it.

What about on Twitter?

Yeah, I was going to ask the same thing. I’ve had this problem a lot.

It’s really tricky; it really is tricky because one of the most difficult things you can do is create too many accounts on social media. People often create too many and then they have three accounts to keep up with. Of course, using tools like Edgar makes this problem a lot simpler.

On Twitter – so my Twitter, I use my personal handle @lkr to promote my business. And I think that I have made a choice there where I am drawing a line in the sand. And I don’t use it as a tool to connect to my friends which I did in the beginning of Twitter; it wasn’t a tool to chat with my friends. But now there’s tons of stuff for running my business.

So if you're just there to find out about my life and chat with me, that’s not going to be a great experience. For my Instagram, I use that to connect with friends and I use that about my personal life and I don’t promote my business there at all.

So you can have two Twitter accounts; you can just choose to use it for one purpose or the other. It goes back to what Charles said, it’s just making that deliberate choice and there’s not necessarily a right or wrong.

I can say that I have people that I connect with that I know personally in Twitter. And then I also have – the vast majority of people following me is because of the podcast and I put a lot of personal pictures and stuff up there. For the most part, the people who were interested in me as an internet personality as opposed to the person that they know, they find that refreshing as well where it’s ‘oh, he has kids’ and ‘his four year old says funny things, too’, ‘he goes through hard things with his kids or his wife’, ‘oh yeah, his son has ADHD’ and ‘I can see where that’s a struggle’ or ‘I struggle with that’ or ‘my kid struggles with that’. They identify with that and so it’s not always a bad thing. If you're on there and you're consistently complaining about your life and then find to promote your business, you're probably hurting yourself more that you're helping yourself. And some people aren’t going to be interested in those personal personality tweets but other people are and I think it really depends on what that persona is that you want to put out there.

Right, what’s your personal brand? Is it sharing pictures of your family? Do you keep it all business? Everyone gets to choose for themselves but I will say, and I have the same experience where the more you share about your personal life, people really love that as a way to connect with you.

What if you had more than one business? Is that a clear point where you should have two Twitter accounts.

Not necessarily. I would always encourage people to air on the side of the less social accounts, less blogs, less podcasts just because once you’ve done it there’s obviously a lot of work that goes into growing every channel. So I’ve seen people that have a twitter account that’s their name and I use it to promote a variety of names. It depends on how different the businesses are, but I have a friend that has had, in the past, a dating book and an Ivy League graduate MBA emissions consulting business. [Laughter]

Oh wow.

Yeah, exactly. I have things that are under my name. My Twitter account’s my name and I have things that are not relevant to the same audiences. [Crosstalk]

Yes, she just used her personal Twitter account to promote both and people actually found it interesting. It’s like, “Yeah, she’s a multi-faceted person.” There’s a lot going on and it’s fun to read the blog posts about dating even though she’s an emissions coach. A lot of people think that you are not allowed to do that but it’s funny; it’s like this thing we do at business where we pretend that we’re business people and take out our personal lives. And that’s no fun; like Charles said, talk about your kid having ADHD.

We’re real people and we have kids and we have problems. You don’t have to pretend that you're this very tear down, clean version of business you. It’s okay to be a person that has more than one business.

Yeah, I can see – so there are certain aspects of what I do and who I am that definitely turn off the audiences that follow me. For example, I’m active Mormon LDS Christian person and I talk about my faith sometimes but for a large group of my audience, it makes them uncomfortable when I dig in to that. And so I don’t tweet about that as often. I tweet about it sometimes and if it bothers people then – well, it’s my Twitter handle. But I try not to put things out there that really make people uncomfortable.

And I think if you had two lines of business where one line of business would bother the other line of business as opposed to just being completely tangential to the other one, and it’s only connected because you do both. I think those would be different things. Or you could put those on the same account, it seems, whereas if you had one group of people that is completely turned off by another product that you have that you sell to a different audience then maybe you would want to split those up.

I can also say though that I have in tweet – I think I have 12 Twitter accounts on there and the reason is because I have Twitter accounts for each of the podcasts which accounts for six of them. And then I’ve setup Twitter accounts for each of the Remote conferences but I think I’m going to quite doing that. And this goes back to your point, Laura, is that those Twitter accounts who are really only interesting and active for about two or three months.

Uh-hm.

And then I’m not really promoting them until it comes around to the next year when I’m going to be doing the conference again. The other thing is that people could use a hashtag for that just as easily.

Right.

And still be participating in there because you can search on and follow hashtags. And then I can just do all the promotion and stuff from my own Twitter account and the Twitter account for the podcast is relevant to it.

Right. You don’t want to create too much work for people to try to figure out, “Okay, this guy’s got 18 Twitter accounts – which ones am I going to follow?”

Yup. But for each podcasts it makes a lot of sense because they reach different audiences. And the other hosts on each of those shows tend to like to be able to follow the conversations about their shows.

I have a question that probably has no answer.

[Chuckles] That’s fine.

I’ve been on Twitter since almost the beginning and it’s changed so much since 2006/2007 where it was much – obviously, it was much more intimate when there are few people on there that was much more about your friends and colleagues and now it’s turned into a sort of news feed or like an RSS replacement type of thing and it’s just crawling with celebrities and spam bots.

So my question is how do people even read it now? I don’t even read it anymore; I just go to the notifications and respond, go in once every couple of days and I’ll have 50 notifications and I’ll just deal with them and that’s about it. Do people actually sit there and – what do they do? [Laughter] Do they open up Twitter on their phone and actually read it?

Jonathan, I’m guessing that you have followed back everyone who has followed you or you did that for a certain period; is that right?

I’m following a lot of people but nowhere near – less than half who were following me.

But you're following a lot of people that you're not interested in following?

Well no, I’ve been on for a long time. I pretty much followed people that are interesting to me.

Okay, but you don’t look – so why don’t you like looking at your home feed if it’s people who are interesting to you?

It’s just lower priority – if I looked at it would be interesting but it’s just not a priority.

Okay. Well, I think you answered your own question there. I like looking at my home feed because I follow people that post interesting links and it’s a fun way to kill time on the internet, but not everyone does that, right? All these tools are optional. Maybe you don’t have time to look at Twitter or maybe you just choose not to. Maybe they're starting a blogging series or maybe a long – the very special people that manage not to kill time on the internet which I think we all aspire to [chuckles] but people are using it in all different ways.

I guess my question is like is it more of a desktop experience whether in the web browser? Are they using something like Hootsuite or whatever the – if they're going to – are there third party apps anymore? Or on their phone using one of the popular Twitter apps for consumption on the phone. Is it just a main Twitter app?

Yeah, I don’t know that. I’m not familiar with the stats off the top of my head for desktop versus mobile but people are using Twitter tools, you have to remember that’s mostly just people using Twitter for promotional purposes otherwise you wouldn’t really ever discover those tools. And Twitter had that time that developers hated where they should download the third party stuff which now they're trying to be like, “Wait, we changed our mind!”

So yeah, the vast majority of people are using Twitter’s native app on their phone or going to Twitter.com.

I have to say, too, that back to your point of how do I follow my feed or things like that. I have used Twitter groups in the past to manage some of that so I’ll put people in the groups if I – if they have a particular topic or interest. I’ve also unfollowed people – people that I know, that I love talking to that never tweet anything interesting. And so I either curate my Twitter experience, or in some instances I’ll follow people because I want them to follow me back – I’ll admit to having done that or things like that.

Eventually, I’ll just curate the experience one way or the other and usually it’s either a list or I’ll just unfollow people because what they're saying on Twitter isn’t interesting. They’re not sharing anything that I really want; not even personal stuff that would help me keep up with what they have going on. And then what happens is my feed becomes just the people that I care about hearing back form.

Now lately, I followed a lot of people and so that list is pretty large and so I’m opting more for the groups or hashtags that I want to follow.

See, I think you know every [inaudible] point that people follow for a reason. So I might have a friend that owns a salon in Austin and she might be my bestfriend but I don’t live in Austin so I don’t care about updates for my Salon. There’s no interest to me, right? So that doesn’t mean that I don’t want to be friends with her but I’m not going to follow her twitter account. And that makes sense; she doesn’t need people following. If she’s promoting the salon, she has no interest in people in LA following. It’s all mutual so that’s – it just brings up the reason why people worry way too much about bothering people.

The [inaudible] about social media is that it’s all [inaudible] in. No one is listening to your messages that does not choose to be there.

So you guys have mentioned hashtags a little bit and I’ve always been curious about this – how important or how much does it raise the visibility of my tweets to include hashtags? How carefully do I need to think about this before putting something out with hashtags?

So you do not need to do the thing where people put random hashtags. [Crosstalk]

I love those tweets.

I’m not using random ones, okay? [Laughter]

That’s right; you go to the ones that are trending and you use those. [Laughter] “I just ate a pizza pie” #BarackObamaAteAFrog or whatever, because that’s the one that’s trending – #NBCsucks. [Chuckles]

Right, so what makes this simple is it goes back to the ‘we’re using Twitter to promote our business’. So even if you could get in front of 5,000 random Twitter followers, Twitter users – why would you want to? It doesn’t really matter if you're putting out content for people who develop Ruby and Rails SaaS app right? That’s – you're joining or not in a category.

So Twitter hashtags or hashtags in general are useful for specific conversations that you're participating in; like Charles mentioned, using a hashtag for a conference. That’s a great way to check all the hashtag for the conference you're say things on the hashtag and then people at the conference are exposed to your Twitter handle or on our Edgar Twitter account, we participate on Twitter chats which various people host a chat about social media or a chat about entrepreneurship and everyone talks together using these hashtags. So it’s a great way for us to get exposed to new people who are targeted.

So you want to use them for specific conversations like that. You definitely don’t need to search out, try to find irrelevant hashtags for every updates is what you're saying.

Let me rephrase that a little bit – if I’m trying to get an increased visibility of tweets and I know that there are certain hashtags that a certain community might use on occasions to identify things or self-identify. How much is it going to change the visibility of my tweets to add those?

So for visibility, it’s very simple on Twitter. The people that follow you are going to see your tweets and then people click on a specific hashtag. So it only makes sense when people are specifically searching it out. Like Charles said, people are not just looking through Twitter for Ruby on Rails hashtag. Unless they're looking for people to spam; that’s the only reason you would ever do that. But if there’s something like #devchat that’s happening this afternoon, then people are looking to participate in that conversation. Does that make sense?

REUVEN: Uh-hm.

Yeah, I can contribute about that. Actually, we’re not – we are recently at – I guess it was just me out of this group but at a conference and the – and these were paying close attention to the hashtag for the conference while they were there. So like [inaudible] and it was a lot of interesting things going on and people were – speakers were sharing links that way so it was a great way to keep up-to-date on the news of just that thing.

So Reuven, if there’s a conference going on that you're not necessarily at but has a hashtag and you’ve got something that’s relevant for that particular audience, that would be a good time to use the hashtag because you're putting it infront of –.

You don’t want to be a jerk about it; it needs to be relevant to what was going on in the thread if somebody’s having a conversation about something that you had – a great blog post about, for example, or you had a link to another great blog post about it. Even though you're not at the conference, there’s nothing stopping you from using that hashtag.

I don’t know how you’d schedule that in a tool but it’d be a good thing to do live, I suppose.

I want to talk a little bit about my weak point in social media and that is Facebook pages. I have no idea when it comes to Facebook pages. I know I can do some of the same things that I’m doing with Twitter but how do you gain visibility with Facebook pages?

Facebook pages have gotten really, really tough because they're so much less discovery mechanisms with Facebook pages, and then there are [inaudible] Twitter. What’s so cool about Twitter is that anyone can communicate with anyone else instantly. Facebook pages don’t talk back and forth to other pages in the same way so Facebook is definitely weird right now.

So what we did at Edgar is we actually built up our Twitter following first, and then we started on Facebook since we had an audience to carry over posting to our Twitter account, “Hey, come check us out on Facebook.” And now the reason why we have a larger presence on Facebook is largely due to ads because we do Facebook ads and we collect a certain amount of likes there.

So the deal with Facebook is that most people have sought you out to find your Facebook page.

They're interested in your brand, their interested in following updates from you so they liked your Facebook page.

You also can get exposure by your users sharing things from your Facebook page. And there are certainly brands and companies that have done that very successfully, but it tends to be a more specific type of content, like if you have funny videos – if you're a funnier guy, people are going to share your Facebook content. If you do Ruby on Rails tutorials, it just doesn’t get shared as much on Facebook.

Facebook has become a place for more entertainment content, where Twitter is not really that way. So if you want to use Facebook – to use a tool like Edgar, you have all these content anyway; might as well post to Facebook.

It’s just another channel to communicate with people. It’s good to have those options especially because these are all third party tools that you have no control over. So I think it’s smart to build up an audience in several places, and as the tools add in flow, you can adjust your strategy.

I’ll tell you, Edgar – we’re much more focused on Twitter right now and we use Facebook more for the paid advertising.

Hm, interesting.

I have a question on Facebook also which is Facebook etiquette. This is semi-random but I got a friend request on Facebook about three or four months ago, and I do not use Facebook very much. I’d go on it but, sort of, approve friends every so often in a batch. I get a message from the guy the next day or two days later saying, “Hey, I friended you; why haven’t you approved it yet?” [Chuckles] I was like, “What the heck?” And he said, “You know it’s really rude to ignore someone’s friend request.” And I said, “Well, I’ll get to it when I get to it,” and he resending the friend request.

[Laughter]

If I am a social media monster then he maybe ought to be or is he just a psychopath or both?

Yeah, I would not worry about that guy. Everyone gets to choose how to use these tools. Most people I found that friend people they don’t know on Facebook have come to regret it because it no longer makes Facebook an enjoyable experience. Because I’m someone who put myself in the public eye in the small business realm doing podcast and writing blog posts or whatever, I get a Facebook requests from people I don’t know every single day as a friend request and I ignore them because I’m not interested in connecting with people I don’t know on Facebook. There’s other ways that you can connect with me. And you can’t – this stuff could get out of control, right? These are tools that millions of people have access to simultaneously; you’ll have to create filters on them. That’s just the nature of it.

You see this on Twitter as well; people start following – people follow 10,000 random people to try to get some follows back and then – that’s why I was asking Jonathan ‘did you do that’, ‘is that why your home feed is not interesting’ because you are just following spammers if you're doing that. And I’ve seen it really ruin the experience for a lot of people and they're like, “I hate Facebook; I hate Twitter,” and it’s because they have inadvertently put themselves in the spam world which is no fun for anyone.

That’s right. I was just looking at my followers right now and I’m trying to figure out why I’m following so many people. And it is actually all people and the reason I’m following them, now that I look at it, is because we’ve met somewhere in person and I want them be able to DM me which I

don’t know if that’s still a rule but there’s a period there where you can only DM someone if you were mutually following each other.

Right. That actually has changed a bit. Now you can adjust your settings for what you want there.

Yeah, but to Reuven’s point, I had a rule for a really long time with Facebook is that I would only friend you on Facebook if I knew you well enough that if I ran into you to a restaurant, I’d sit down at the table with you without even being [chuckles]. So it was a very small group and I’ve sensed – expended a little bit outside of that but it’s almost all people that I’ve actually met in real life at least, and not people I only know from online.

And you're going to offend some people because some people use Facebook differently than that. Some people – if you chat with someone on the podcast, he had a good time, he might send a Facebook request because it’s their way of being like, “Hey, let’s get to know each other better.”

So if you have the rule of ‘only people you actually know in person’, they could not like that and that’s unfortunate and that’s just [inaudible]. That’s all these new tools that we’re figuring out.

By the way, if anyone feels bad about Reuven not being their friend, I just send them a friend request on Facebook [laughter]. So if he likes you, it only takes him a couple of minutes. [Laughter]

It’s actually during the podcast votes; that’s right. [Laughter] I was wondering who this weirdo Chuck was but I said I’d approve him now.

Oh yeah, scary guy. [Laughter]

I’m also curious to hear just – Laura, tell us a little bit about your business and how long has it been going? Because you mentioned before we started recording that you have thirteen people working in the business. So this is not just a fun little thing you're doing on the side; this is serious stuff. So how long have you been doing it? How did you grow it? And would you suggest this product business to people who are doing consulting?

Yeah. Edgar launched July of 2014 so it’s been going for almost a year and a half now. We have 3,000 paid users; it’s grown really fast and we have 13 employees now. It’s a Ruby on Rails app that I am not a developer on. I’m [inaudible] close up but I don’t really know much about that side.

I come from the social media training world and this was my idea for a product. Like I mentioned in the beginning, that kind of prove some of the problems that I had with social media software from a marketing perspective.

I’ve done consulting in the past. I love having a product business. I love it a lot more than training. It’s that dream of recurring revenue which we have at Edgar. It is not passive recurring revenue; I don’t know if anyone’s really cracked the code on now, but it is a recurring revenue and it’s a great business model and it does a lot for you to take time off.

I mentioned before the podcast started that I took a three months maternity leave earlier this year.

And it’s a great [inaudible] business where I can do that; it’s really truly good.

Was there a point that you did something that really hockey stick the growth or has it been a slow build?

It’s been more steady. So I mentioned that I had a social media training business before so I had a massive light app because I’ve been building up a business for five years. That business still exists in various forms but we’re shifting on the attention over to Edgar. So spending five year building a list of entrepreneurs interested in social media marketing is my growth hack of the day. So we had huge momentum to grow quickly in the beginning, but we’ve just been doing pretty typical online marketing. We do social media marketing, we do content marketing, we do paid advertising with Facebook ads and now we’re starting to get on AdWords. I’m on a podcast like this. From the product’s post – we’re not doing anything super innovative; we’re just making great products that people tell their friends about and that people love. It’s such a huge part of why we’ve been successful and doing some good old fashion online marketing.

I love that five years of list building for instant success. [Laughter]

Yeah.

So I see on the website that you're call to action is ‘request access’ – what’s that all about? Is it you're in beta? You can’t be so in beta so what’s the concept there?

Yeah, so that’s actually something we’ve been testing recently. So I’m a huge believer in building a list and in email marketing. And I think, for everyone listening to this podcast and maybe has a software product, this is the huge keys that so many software products are missing. It’s crazy to me how many software businesses either don’t have any email list or have not focused at all in building their list. And most people who come to your site are not ready to buy at that moment; that’s just the nature of it. We do research, we take time, so many websites – if someone comes to your site and they're not ready to buy your software right then, their out of the universe. You haven’t collected their email, you haven’t tried to get anyway to stay in touch with them.

So at Edgar we use a request invitation or request access where there’s actually split tests running right now where that button says to get started. We’ve tried different ways to phrase it but really what it is is we want to stay in touch with you. We want to get your email address, we want to keep you updated about Edgar and then you can do your research and you can buy when you're ready and not forget about us because you forgotten to take the action to come to our website again.

We recently tested a more typical SaaS ‘start with a free trial’ and that performs dramatically worse than the access path.

Wow. That makes a lot of sense to me; yeah, that’s really cool.

So let’s say someone wants to start ramping up on social media. They know that they want to get more people to their site; they know that they should be building a list and the list is actually social media, but one of the first text someone should do given that you’ve now said, “Oh, you should really be doing all these different things.”

What are the first steps with [crosstalk] which part exactly?

I would say mostly with social media. What are the first steps that we should take if they want to start getting the word out with social media besides using Edgar, of course?

Using Edgar is genuinely a huge shortcut just because people find category framework really useful because we give you these categories the you can fill in which just makes it feel a lot less like you're just starting with this blank slate and you have no idea what to say.

So I would do what we did at Edgar which is start with blogging, start with content marketing and maybe blog once a week, once every two weeks if you can’t manage once a week, and start following people on Twitter. Set up a Twitter account for yourself for your company to look for people in your industry, things that your customers have in common, people who write blogs that your customers read, influencers in your industry. Start following these people; start talking to these people; start sharing great content from your blog because content marketing is so important because people don’t so often just share links for something to buy. You have to be really enthusiastic about something to say all in your Twitter account unprompted, “Edgar is so amazing; you should go out and buy it. Here’s the link.” You have to have a mega fan to just decide a post set on Twitter.

But a lot of people are going to post valuable content; that’s what we do in social media. You drive people to your site via your blog and hopefully it’s relevant to them and they’ll explore and they’ll develop an interest in your tool or service or whatever you're selling. So that’s a one minute version.

And when you're there, you give them the option to opt in your email list?

Exactly, so you can stay in touch with them. So you're not asking the customer to do so much work to be like, “Hey, why don’t you remember us and why don’t you seek us out and why don’t you do all the research to find us?” Maybe it’d be easier for them.

Have you [inaudible] Twitter cards at all or does Edgar have any – is there any relationship between Edgar and Twitter cards which I guess do have now, a one click email sign ups and one click purchases and things like that?

Yeah, so you can’t do – that’s more like Twitter advertising based; so we’re an organic tool but I think Twitter cards are definitely a cool thing to add into your arsenal for sure.

You’ve mentioned email marketing a bit quite actually – how do you see email marketing with a tool like Drip which reminds me of the email version of Edgar a little bit. There seem like some parallels there. How do you see those two things interacting with each other or playing on each other or playing off each other?

So ire ally – the way I see it in my head is I just imagine it as different ways to reach people. Again, to make things both easy for your prospects and your customers and to make sure you're heard in such a crowded world. So when you're reaching people in their inbox and they follow you on Twitter and they follow you on Facebook and you're using Facebook ads to show up to them; when I say that it might feel like a lot but to a user perspective that just means you're there.

It doesn’t mean you're everywhere – that’s what it takes, honestly, to get noticed at all. And I know that can be a little intimidating to a small business but that’s why it’s so important to use these automation tools because that’s just the truth of the only marketing landscape.

So using autoresponder is using direct campaigns; using Edgar to automate your social media, the more you can automate this to have messages going out automatically with relevant, useful content. That’s how a small business, that’s how an entrepreneur can manage social media.

So many people give up because they're like ‘it’s way too time-consuming’ because it is if you're doing everything manually. So I just view it as a lot of different ways to reach people to make it easy for them to find you and consume your content.

So in a landscape like that – a marketing landscape like that and in a world where mobile has become the primary computing platform, does SEO matter anymore or is it – is that number three behind email marketing and social media marketing? What do you think?

It’s still huge; that’s a huge source of leads for us and Edgar. You can decide its business how much emphasis you're going to put in various places. I will always place a very high importance on SEO because that is just traffic coming in that you haven’t actually done anything for.

The most active is something like a Facebook ad where as soon as you stop paying for – the most active from your perspective I mean – as soon as you stop paying for that ad, 100% of your traffic is done. There’s no residual traffic from Facebook ads. Organic tools like social media tools, you build up an audience, you don’t have to be poking on everyday for people to discover it. You don’t have to have it turned on like a Facebook ad and then SEO; you definitely need to do things to maintain your SEO but once you get into Google’s machine and you have fallen into the favor of Lord Google for various reasons, your leads can continue to grow and grow and grow and be just a huge source of revenue for your business that really is more passive overtime based on the active work that you're doing.

And the cool thing is SEO is becoming smarter and smarter to how people are using the internet. You can’t really gain an SEO anymore like, “Oh, just stick it in your title tag and then people will follow you on Twitter,” which is frustrating. People follow you on Twitter, people find your website which is frustrating for people that they can’t do these little tricks but what I like about it is Google is getting smarter in recognizing what genuinely makes a good website and it looks for clues like are people sharing this on social media, which people tend to share good stuff.

So what’s cool about SEO now is if you follow this general online marketing landscape and deal with these different thing, at least you don’t necessarily have to know this SEO hacks to start to show up in search results.

So Laura I have a different question. So I have three kids and my eldest two are 14 and 12 and they have their phones and they have social media. I don’t know what it’s like in the US but certainly in Israel, kids starting in fifth grade already – four t firth grade already have social media accounts typically on WhatsApp and they're constantly communicating with one another. But they are no longer interested in Facebook or Twitter. [Chuckles]

A few days ago, I mentioned to my kids that I have a Snapchat campaign and they're like, “You? You have a Snapchat camp?” I said, “Yes, all cool people have Snapchat accounts.” And they said, “That’s why we’re so surprised.” [Laughter] And I realized that we’re using social media here for business but is there a danger that we’re targeting the wrong social media or that we missed the vote in our dyno [inaudible]?

There’s a danger in targeting the wrong things. And like you said, you do need to be aware of which platform people are on. So Instagram, if you're targeting 50 year old male executives, a lot of them are not yet on Instagram. It’s becoming more and more mainstream but they're not there so you’d be wasting your time there. Pinterest is still more female happy. If you sell primarily to men, Pinterest is probably not the best use of your time. If you saw the twelve year olds stalking on Facebook, like you said they're not there anymore. So you do want to be aware of these larger trends but the good news is the few mainstream tools are the few mainstream tools. It’s just that people stress so much about, “Do I have to be on Periscope now?” Now Meerkat’s a thing, now Periscope’s a thing.

But as a business, you don’t want to be the first one there. You want the huge audience. You could spend your time on Periscope but everybody’s already at Facebook and on Twitter so why don’t you just chill out of Periscope for a little bit. You can see if it actually gets that larger adoption and less specific to your niche and less of your world, everyone in your little world, they are the ones that have adopted Periscope then maybe it makes sense but you don’t have to stress about keeping up with the latest greatest thing unless you're selling to twelve year olds, then I guess you could. [Laughter]

Alright. Any other questions before we get to out picks? Is there anything we should’ve asked Laura that we didn’t have the insight to bring up?

I think we covered a lot of ground. I think it was cut.

Alright, well let’s do picks then. Reuven, what are your picks?

Sure, so I’ve got just one pick for this week. So I do several blogs, newsletter sorts of things. I’ve got my daily tech video site, I’ve got my mentoring weekly site that I do for students of Chinese and so I’m constantly trying to sort through lots and lot of feeds. So I’ve been using Feedly for the last six to eight months or so. And I’ve been using – because I’m a [inaudible] scape – I’ve been using the free version, although I’m thinking strongly using the paid version so that I could go on to programs. I just find it to be really convenient, easy to use. They seem to have all the feeds I’m interested in. I’m just very happy. And truth be told, I’m interested in possibly paying them a token out per month if they want, both to hook in to some programs that I could write to automate things, and also just because I feel like –.

You know you’re doing a good job; I might as well support them as well. I know there are lots of readers out there but I’ve been pretty happy with Feedly.

Alright Jonathan, what are your picks?

Well, in the sphere of the social media theme of this episode, I’m going to first pick – Mojca Marš had a website called Super Spicy Media and she helps people who are maybe struggling getting their heads around social media understand how to set up a Facebook ad or when the best times to tweet are. She’s got – she has some services around that but she has a great blog. She has touched tons and tons of excellent posts on. So people are thinking about doing more social media marketing, check out superspicymedia.com/blog for tons of great tips.

And also Kurt Elster has a page that he put up for his speaking gig at ---freelancing conference.

And on his list the MeetEdgar is on his list or Edgar – I guess it’s the actual name.

You can all it either.

Okay. So Edgar’s on his list, Drip’s on his list, Wufoo, etc. but he’s also got a bunch of other great tips for people for taking a lot of grunt work out of running your business. So you can go to kirtelster.com/DYFConf and I’ll put these on the show notes.

Alright, well I’m going to make a couple of picks here for the social media stuff. I actually use Edgar; I really like it. It just provides me with what I need. I have used Hootsuite in the past. In fact, I still have my Hootsuite account because it costs five bucks a month and it’s easy for Many to manage a lot of the social media stuff live that way so she can tweet stuff out on multiple accounts and things like that. So it’s pretty handy.

I also use Tweetbot and I use it on my phone and on my desktop. And I just – I really, really like the notifications and so that has worked out really well.

One other pick I’m going to put out there – and this is kind of a – it may or may not be officially sanctioned by Twitter and it might get you in trouble [laughter] but I have been using Unfollowers.com. The way that it works is it allows you to follow a whole bunch of people at once. So Twitter’s terms of use say that you have to click the button to follow people so you actually have to click. If you follow a hundred people, you have to click the follow button a hundred times, but you can look at followers of other accounts and then follow them – I think it’s like that. And I found that it’s a really effective way to get people to follow me back which is interesting.

Some of them see me pop up in there – “Charles Max Wood has followed you on email or on Twitter” again because they’ve listened to one of the shows then they’ll follow me back. The other part of Unfollowers.com that it does is it then sends them an automatic direct message that says, “Hey, you listen to one of the shows?” And unless they’ve been on the show, it doesn’t really feel automated and I really do want to know, and then I can start following up from there. And so I usually have, during any given day, about thirty or forty interactions with people through direct messages on Twitter and this is all because of Unfollowers.com.

I know that they're trying to keep people from spamming other people, but in my case it has actually worked out that it’s been a really, really nice way for me to find people that I otherwise wouldn’t be able to find, who listen to the podcast and get value from them and then be able to have a conversation with them. So I’m going to pick Unfollowers.com as well.

My last pick is – and I know that this has been talked about on the show before. I think Jonathan was talking about the way he uses Basecamp on a precious episode and it got me to go back and try it out and I’ve really been liking the way that it has influenced my workflows and I can upload videos and stuff. Some of the social media stuff that I do, like I said, is through Hootsuite or something and it’s not actually me tweeting but I do take advantage of the opportunities to interact as I said before. And so Basecamp allows me to upload a video that says, “Hey, here’s how you use this tool” or “here’s how you tweet this out” or “here’s how you compose a tweet that I won’t put out there”. I can put that directly on the to-do that I hand off to either Mandy or my other assistant Gerald. So those all work out really nicely and I’ve been really, really happy with the way that this has gone so that I can automate a lot of these stuff. And then do the follow up interactions myself which is the part that I really enjoy. So those are my picks.

Laura, do you have some picks for us?

Yeah, my pick is my all-time favorite app, Pocket, more specifically how I use Pocket. So I have their browser extension and whenever I see anything on the internet that I want to read, I save it to Pocket because I admit to spending time/wasting time on Twitter and Facebook, but it helps me in ways last time because instead of reading an article that looks interesting, I just save it to Pocket and then I have my little Pocket reading times later so I can focus on work when I’m at my computer. And then when I feel like reading some blog post, I can go to my Pocket app, usually on my phone and spend some time catching up so I love it.

Very cool. If people want to follow up with you or find out what you're up to and check out Edgar, what do they do?

Yeah, so our website is meetedgar.com. We’re also @meetedgar on Twitter and on Facebook, and my personal Twitter is @lkr.

Alright, well thank you for coming. I think this was really helpful for people for people who are trying to figure out what to do with social media. We’ll catch everybody next week.