0:00
Olivia Messina
Hello, everyone, and welcome to our panel, how social media managers can fuel sales. I will be your moderator today. I am Olivia Messina, the social media and community manager here at Oktopost, and I am joined by some of the best B2B social media professionals in the game. It is an honor to be with them here today. So I will pass it on to you, Caitlin, to introduce yourselves, then we'll pass it to Christina and then we will go ahead and kick off.
0:26
Caitlin Doyle
Hi, everyone. It's nice to meet you. Sorry if my voice sounds a little off. I'm fighting a cold, but I've been working in social media for the last three years. I actually started getting into social media when I ran my sororities page back in college and that kind of sparked the interest for me and I worked a lot in freelance and worked with different B2B and B2C businesses and then I got my role at Demand Based, so. So I was there for the last two and a half years and it was a great time. We saw so much growth during my time there. I believe we started out with only 12,000 followers and grew to 60,000 by the time I left. So, yeah. But I'm really excited to be joining these amazing social media managers today.
1:15
Christina Le
Hi, everyone. I'm Christina Lee. I am the social media and community manager at OpenPhone, which is a collaborative phone tool. It's really, it's a great company, nice startup, but that's kind of my shtick. I join a lot of startups and I really get to build social from the ground up. A little bit about me is that I'm from Boston and I saw a lot of folks are from Boston. I'm an amateur photographer, mostly an iphoneographer is what I like to call myself. But yeah, so social is pretty much my life. Been in this for six years now. I don't know where we go from here. Social kind of fell on my lap. It wasn't something that I actually wanted to do as a career, but I went to school as a political communications major. So I really want to be a speechwriter of some sort. So I guess it sort of pairs together. But now this is. This is my whole thing. So, yeah, happy to be here.
2:11
Olivia Messina
Thanks, Christina. Now, look, I brought you both here today because as you know, there is no rule book for B2B social. But you two can get us pretty close. And I think what we're going to discuss here today is really going to help a lot of social media managers get a seat at the table because let's face it, Social media managers are really the boots on the ground. They have a direct line of communication with customers and prospects. And I think a lot of social media managers know that the work that they're doing has a significant impact on creating and enhancing opportunities. But demonstrating that to leadership and the wider organization is often a challenge. And at the end of the day, social media managers aren't just doing social for the sake of social. They're starting meaningful conversations. They're helping fuel the sales team and ultimately helping to drive revenue. And we're really going to be getting to the heart of that today. We're going to be discussing how social media managers can identify leads from social and create content that builds trust and really moves the needle. So with that, I want to set the scene a little bit. We hear a lot that social media managers and social media is really great for brand awareness. But long gone are just those days. Social media is now a mainstream business tool and it's a strategic asset to the business. So I really want to throw this out at both of you. Whoever wants to take a stab at it first. How has the role of social media evolved in the B2B space, particularly in terms of lead generation?
3:47
Christina Le
I can start. I have found that, you know, when I first started, it was all about ads and everything like that, right? When people think about social, they're like, let's throw up an ad and call it a day. Pretty much. Nowadays it's leaning more towards community building. And I found that especially in our space where we are very, we're marketing to business and everything like that, it's become sort of like a continuous feedback loop. So you're leaning more into your community and what you're listening to. So sales lean on us, we lean on sales for that continuous, like, conversation of what is it that the customer actually care about and what is it that prospects care about. And by having, like, that relationship tied so closely together, it's certainly gone beyond the days of ads because, I mean, I don't know about you guys, but I feel like as millennials, who are the folks who are currently the ones shopping the most, we can spot an ad from a mile away. And it's not so, like, it's so impersonal, you know, so social gives an aspect of, like, humanizing that a little bit more.
4:46
Caitlin Doyle
Yeah, I was going to totally agree with that. And just to say that Social really offers B2B brands a chance to be more authentic with their branding versus, you know, when you send out an email, you're directly telling people like oh, you should go click this. But on social, it's more about starting a conversation and being organic. And I think it's gone. Social has gone from like a nice half to a real necessity that B2B brands need to invest in.
5:12
Olivia Messina
I couldn't agree more. And I think the brands that are really being successful with it, you can see that they have integrated social into every corner of their organization, and especially for sales. I know a lot of social media managers are probably still operating in a silo. And because we're going to get to the heart of the work that we can do to really fuel our sales counterparts, I have to know, what does the relationship at your organization currently look like between the sales and the social function?
5:42
Caitlin Doyle
I can go first. Well, during my time at Demandbase, I really always viewed sales and social as partners. And I worked really hard to have an open dialogue with our sales team. Whether that was like me shooting content to them and saying, do you think this is relevant to our audience or brainstorming with them. And thankfully, we had a lot of sales people who were creators on LinkedIn and had a large following. So they were even able to share their insights from what their audience was talking about with me and work with me on creating content that that came off as more authentic that we could push out through not only our brand channel, but through their channels as well.
6:21
Christina Le
We have a very collaborative culture here at OpenPhone. Our entire thing is about building a better customer experience for all. And how we do that is, again, I don't often hear what's going on at the bottom of the funnel. I very much am all like, my goal is to increase brand awareness and audience engagement from the top and I lure people in, but it's understanding that entire train on the way down. So actually have a slack channel that's dedicated to the social and the sales team and the csms to kind of get together and throw all of our feedback in. Again, it's that constant feedback from having that conversation week by week. So our relationship, we just, we feed off of each other.
7:01
Olivia Messina
Perfect. Well, that leads us beautifully into our next question for you, Christina. Staying on the topic of sales, we know that sales cycles can be long and complex. So I'm so interested to hear your take on this because I know you have a very strategic approach. So how are you using social media to identify leads and guide them through the sales funnel more on the corporate side?
7:23
Christina Le
Yeah, I use tools like social listening to jump into a conversation. I typically, my whole thing is I'm a very competitive person. So therefore I listen a lot to negative competitors sentiment. That being said, I lean a lot into community conversation. But what I do is with that proactive engagement as the brand. Of course, at the end of the day, I recognize that people aren't as interested to talk to the brand as a faceless entity other than talking to the people. So I generally, whenever I see a conversation as an opportunity to learn one of our team members, to actually reach out, and we don't have a specific employee advocacy program per se, but because we are such a small company and we're very horizontal, it's so much easier to be like, hey, you know, someone from sales, maybe you guys can answer this question and they'll jump in and give their own personal touch to that answer. But if I were to talk from the brand's perspective, I generally like to stick to the humanizing sort of like energy, you know, I don't like to talk like I'm a walking marketing pamphlet. It's just not open phone. And yeah, I think later on too, what I started noticing is when I start building these relationships with the community, what ends up happening is that community members or our audience end up jumping in to potential prospects and they're like, actually to throw in some more credibility, open phone's really great for xyz. So when you start treating people less like a transaction and you treat them more like there's just another person on the other side of the screen that ends up fostering a much better sales relationship throughout, from the beginning, all the way, you know, once they get down the pipeline.
9:13
Olivia Messina
Caitlin, do you have anything to add there?
9:15
Caitlin Doyle
No. Christina summed it up great.
9:18
Olivia Messina
Yeah, that's, I completely agree. And I think that's where building those relationships and trust really is so important because we know that people trust people over brands. And actually Forrester conducted a survey that came out in May and they found that over 90% of B2B buyers completely trust their peers and in their industry. So whenever we talk about social media in the sales cycle, we're talking about employee advocacy and the power of starting your personal brands and really getting content created for your sales team so they can really fuel their personal brands and make those relationships with prospects. So I would love to know, I'm going to throw this out at both of you because I'm sure you're both are doing this and have done it in the past. So how are you enabling your sales team and other customer facing teams to build their personal brands, become those thought leaders and ultimately engage social selling?
10:13
Caitlin Doyle
Yeah, While at Demandbase we were not afraid to do a little internal competition. People love incentives. So it was a great way to start. Like during September we had a whole like sales Persona based campaign and to help boost engagement and everything with the brand, we actually joined forces with our SDRs and had an internal competition where we said, oh, post a video about anything sales related like that you think is relevant to your audience. Whether that's like sales tips or we have one. We had one sell salesperson who would write original songs and that's how he would like target prospects. And that was a great way to start getting people more engaged with social. And we even like we would quarterly every sorry once a quarter we would have a whole week called Shark Week where it was just like a sales blitz. And during that week we partner a lot with our sales team internally and do internal competitions through our employee advocacy tool and basically just boost, ask them to boost these posts and whoever boosted the most posts and reshared the most posts on our advocacy tool would win like a doordash gift card. And I think that got people really invested and interested in social. Whereas like, which is unfortunate that they need incentives to do it but like everyone's busy. So I think the incentive aspect really helped.
11:47
Christina Le
I always like to get buy in from leadership. I often any company I join, my first thing is to encourage leadership to really sort of like kind of lead by example. The entire thing that I always like to push forth is that, you know, at the end of the day the brand is being carried by the people and you see companies that do it really well leverage into their employees, personal branding and really you got to make it also about the employees as well. Like how I position it. When I try to ask employees to share anything, my teammates or anything like that, I'm just kind of like, look, this is actually really good for you to lean on building yourself in your portfolio. Because at the end of the day, like how I like to say things is, you know, I can talk about the things that I work on with open phone but through a social media mindset because that's my community, that's my, you know, connections and everything like that. People trust me to say, hey, I'm building an audience in open phone. This is why a salesperson might say here are my sales tactics on how I got prospects for, you know, open phone. This is how I build our pipeline. This is how we got to X ARR and all this other stuff like that, you know, so it's really like leaning in on them to Talk about the things that they know and that will naturally build the audience for the brand. And I think a lot of companies, it's a complete remiss for them to not trust their employees to build themselves and encourage them to do that because that's just like a total positive brand move for them. And it's free actually, you know, to say, hey, you guys can do this. It's good for you, it's good for us. Like, let's, let's celebrate all your milestones as like an individual and that will in turn help the brand.
13:23
Caitlin Doyle
Yeah, sorry, Olivia.
13:26
Olivia Messina
No, go ahead.
13:27
Caitlin Doyle
One thing that I always wish I was able to do at Demandbase was just hold like a big, like, meeting of people who were interested in learning more about building their personal brands. And it just kept getting pushed to the back burner. So I, like Christina, that you said how important it is to get leadership buy in for it, because it really starts at like the top of each team and how important their leaders view social.
13:49
Olivia Messina
Yeah, I completely agree with both of you because I think at the end of the day, it's your people's stories that is what drives the brand forward. And we're talking about social media and building relationships and building trust. When you trust another individual by default, you start to build trust in the brand they represent. And that's why it's so powerful to, even if they're not doing it on their own, to provide them with resources or encourage them and allow them to enter the conversation, because that's where the true magic is. And speaking of trust, I want to talk to you about this, Caitlin, because We know that 84% of B2B executives use social media to make purchasing decisions. So trust is currency. So I'd love to know from you, from the work you've done in the past, how can B2B brands establish trust and credibility on social media, especially in industries with long sales cycles?
14:44
Caitlin Doyle
Yeah, I think the key to building trust is definitely through spotlighting your customers. Excuse me, Whether that's from. Whether that's a testimonial or videos or weekly spotlights. At Demandbase, I worked a lot with our community manager who she made these amazing programs called DB Champions. And it was to award our customers who advocated for the brand and advocated for demand based. And we would do weekly posts spotlighting a demand based champion each week and those performed great and boosted a lot of credibility with, excuse me, with not only like, our audience and helped grow our audience. And we had a lot of conversations about, you know, people wanting to learn more and people contacting our customer marketing team wanting to learn more about these people's stories. And I think for content that we use like asset wise to promote those, we found that carousels are really helpful because we would just pull bits from the interview that were like key, good key points to highlight and share those on social because I always wanted, my goal was always to like, if someone can't click on the link right now, I want them to still take something from the post and maybe save it and come back to it later. But I definitely think just focusing on promoting your customers is a big thing.
16:09
Olivia Messina
Yeah, I completely agree. And I like how you mentioned the carousel because I think especially now as a social media manager, we have to be very aware of how people like to consume content. And people don't really Want to leave LinkedIn when they're scrolling through, they're coming to LinkedIn to scroll through. And if you're providing them with valuable content that they can relate to or they find value in right on the platform itself, I think that is really powerful. And I want to stay on the topic of thought leadership and encouraging your colleagues to build their personal brands. I got a question on do you have guidelines for employees on building thought leadership, how to speak to topics, tone, content and formats like that, or is it free range since it's their personal brand? So I know for us here at Oktopost, I have hosted workshops on this where I have the whole company on and I go over how to find your social media voice and tone and some topics that they can write their own content about and how to personalize their own message if they are grabbing it from the Oktopost employee advocacy board. But I want to throw it at you both because I know, Christina, you're also pretty tactical in encouraging your employees to share. But when you guys are talking through and same with you, Caitlyn, are you giving them guidelines when they're creating their own content outside of what you're creating for them?
17:28
Caitlin Doyle
Yeah, we gave them guidelines. Well, depending on what the campaign was. If it was just like a reshare on our advocacy tool, I mean we would say we would encourage them to write their own copy and give them guidelines of what they could or couldn't say in like the little note topic at the top. But as far as when we worked with our sales team or SDRs to create content, we basically were just like, no, don't be inappropriate, but like be creative. Like there's no wrong thing to share. Because I think that like, you know, you Wouldn't something that you wouldn't initially think would perform well? Like, I mean, writing a song about sales is kind of random. Like, who would think to do that? But this guy Christian did it and it performed amazingly.
18:10
Christina Le
So I, for our team, it's very much like we give people free range to do what they think is best because is our entire thing is that if we're, we're asking people to lean into their personal brand, we want them to be their authentic self and it's kind of hard to be our authentic self and we're kind of restricting them to being expressive. I think naturally, like the common sense is, you know, obviously don't drag the brand. Like, yeah, you know, but I, I generally lean to the whole. Like, I don't give unsolicited advice, but everybody, I'm always open to giving any sort of tips if anybody had any. And I have had teammates, you know, go really want to actually Talk more on LinkedIn. Do you have any sort of like advice on how to get started? And that's generally what I hear. But I, I want to always, like, make sure that the tone of voice that I'm using with everyone's like, just be encouraging because it is scary if you're not in this field, if you're not used to talking about yourself because it takes some level of confidence to be able to share your thoughts. Especially when you're like, who is gonna listen to this? You know, So I know how nerve wracking that can be. So just being encouraging, being like, you know, just come forth. You clearly have a great story to sell. Like, talk about it, just share whatever it is that you know, because at the end of the day, people are going to believe you when they can. Because people can smell. Oh, I don't know if I'm allowed to say that. So sorry.
19:35
Olivia Messina
No, you're fine. I completely agree. Yes. I love it. Yeah, I think you completely nailed it. I do also want to mention, I forgot to mention this at the top, but this is recorded and will be sent out to everyone. I saw some questions in the chat, so if you don't have a pen and paper handy and you weren't able to take notes, don't worry about it. It will be recorded and sent out. But I completely agree with what both of you were saying and I know something that has worked for us and we have a lot of customers who are asking this question as well. And for those that maybe are in a more regulated industry or have to provide some type of guidelines, we found that Having like a green light, red light system. So topics that are red that you probably should not talk about and like green light topics that are like full game if you're talking about yourself or new learning or something that inspired you this week. And then more red topics where it's like, might not be a place to talk about that in the context of the business. So that helps provide a little bit of a framework for those companies that have to provide that. And it still gives the employee advocates free range to kind of write their own content and share their take on social. And Christina, I want to throw this question at you because as we know, engagement doesn't just stop once a prospect becomes a customer. So I'd love to know how social media plays a role in customer engagement. Post sale for you at OpenPhone and the kind of things that you are doing after someone has converted and became a customer.
21:08
Christina Le
Yeah. So at OpenPhone.
21:10
Caitlin Doyle
Right.
21:11
Christina Le
Our part of our mission is that we are enabling and I have this phrase burned into my head so hard, but our entire thing is that we're enabling our customers to build better relationship with their customers. So to do that we kind of got to walk the walk ourselves. Right. So we're all about building customer relationships here. And a big chunk of that is support related. And when I say support related is providing the support for our customers, meaning when there's a problem that comes up when something's not working, when they have a question, they often more likely will come to social and ask like the faceless Twitter or you know, Facebook or anything like that. And they're like, hey, something's going on. What the heck? And as the person sort of like behind the screen, it's really important to answer them almost like as quickly as possible. We I just developed a social support escalation system with our support team and now I'm working like very closely with them as well as like almost every team. But it's really just all about like, how do we make sure we take care of these folks and to let them know that we're here for them when they have any sort of question or problems that come up. And I've always, I've always believed that people are more forgiving when something is broken. But as long as the support is there, they will continuously support you through the end of time because they're like, if you're going to take care of me, like you, obviously you're paying attention to my needs. I'm going to continue being a customer here. Like my loyalty stays true similar to how, you know, if something, for example, just as a consumer, you know, if, let's say Oktopost post doesn't give me something that I like. I'm still going to stay here though because every single interaction that I have with every single employee has been nothing but wonderful. So that's how we keep the customer engagement going. And that's not just with social and support team. That's across our entire company, every single employee, whether we tagging them in for, you know, the very top of the funnel engagement for people who don't even know us versus all the way to the end. Like you'll never hear a customer just say they don't care about us, us because that's, that's the one thing we don't want people to feel.
23:13
Olivia Messina
Yeah, I love that focus on building the relationship because I think it's so important. So I'm really glad you highlighted that. And Caitlin, you mentioned authenticity early on and I, I want to talk about how you're balancing that on social because there is often this struggle of balancing personalization while also continuing to put forth a consistent brand message. So I'd love to know what role personalization plays in your social media content and how you are striking that balance of, you know, keeping it personalized while also maintaining the brand message throughout the funnel.
23:50
Caitlin Doyle
Yeah, I think a great way to really like hone in on personalization is like responding to every single person who comments on your things or reshares your content. I that was one of my favorite things to do always was respond to people, but just tailoring your response to them specifically, like look on, it takes a few seconds to look on their profile and see like if they have certain interests or anything that you could tie into your response to them. And that's a really key way to make people feel seen because they really love when brands respond to them. But I remember one challenge that I had pretty early on at Demandbase was we would always try to cater to a lot of different Personas based on the campaigns. Obviously we've all dealt with that. But one way that I found that I could cater to that Persona while still maintaining the brand voice without totally switching it was by using social listening and just finding the topics that for example, we did a campaign about our data software having an update. So I went in and used our social listening tool and looked at what different brands, what different people were saying about our data software as well as our competitors data software. And I kind of tailored that messaging into the campaign while still maintaining our brand voice. And I Tried to have a good, like, riff. If someone else. If I saw someone comment something that I'd already seen on social listening that was talking about the same topic, I already had that prior knowledge, so I was able to kind of rip back and forth with them on it, if that makes sense.
25:26
Olivia Messina
Yeah, that makes sense. And I think being able to do that provides your audience with the best possible content, because right there you're getting it straight from them and you're providing them with content that is useful. I was just writing a post about this the other day. The way to break through and cut through all the noise in 2024 is going to be providing value and actual useful content that people can consume and immediately implement. Because everyone can go into ChatGPT, have it, write a post, but the true value is giving your audience something is actually going to help help them. Not just a list of tips, but like something. Start this today, do this, test this, and this will help you with X, Y and Z. That kind of content is extremely useful. And speaking of content, I really want to get super tactical and granular. If you guys listen to my podcast, you know that I'm always asking my guests to get extremely granular. And we're going to talk about content, specifically campaigns that have converted or led to leads. Because as social media managers, we obviously care about engagement, but engagement, you know, is a part of our job and we want engagement, but if that's the only thing that ever comes with it, you know, we want our audience to convert and we want our prospects to become customers. So I'd love to hear from you, what campaigns and content have you found really successful in moving the needle?
26:47
Christina Le
I can take this one first course. I think, when I think off of the top of my head, all of the content that performed the best in any campaign that we have created has involved our employees somehow. And one of the ones that more recently was that our company celebrated our five year anniversary. Now, this is normally a typical time that we could say, look at us and all the things that we've done. But what we've actually did was we leaned into different employees where we did this really cheesy sort of passing the cupcake video. And it shows different team members, even though we're completely remote. We just sent cupcakes to everybody to do this one video and they're passing the cupcakes back and forth. And what you hear in the background is our co founders not only sharing the story of how we got to where we are, but also to make it filled with gratitude. And thanking our employees, thanking our customers. And everything that we do is like really just all about, you know, being like, we wouldn't be here without our customers. And what I've noticed is like the shares on that video, because it was something feel good and it was something that people could put a face to. Something the levels of reshares and engagement on there was almost through the roof. And what I've noticed is like our sales form ended up getting filled out. A lot more people click to the website to read the blog. And you know, that positive sentiment, I think really resonated with people. And that goes to like, that goes with any content that we share. Anytime it involves a person's face, people would rather click on that more so than they would click on, you know, my text post about. Here are the five tips that you can use to communicate with your customers. They're like, but that same five tips, if, you know, I use staff or social person from my team, she were to deliver that tip, they'd be like, yeah, no, I love this way more versus, you know, that personalized touch.
28:37
Caitlin Doyle
So yeah, yeah, I totally agree. That makes me think of this campaign that we did last year. We had a, a webinar at the end of the year where we did Christmas sweater giveaways and we posted. I just posted like a quick little like tick tock on our LinkedIn of me and the sweater. And our comments were just like filled like, how do I get this sweater? What do I do? How do I get this sweater? And then we had a social competition after we had the webinar and people that attended got the sweaters and everyone was posting the sweaters and saying, like, what was one thing that they learned from the webinar? So. Or like one thing that they learned in 2023, which was like a really positive thing. One other campaign we did recently, actually, in August, we had a series of LinkedIn Lives where we discussed Demandbase's upcoming product buying group, AI and the goal of the LinkedIn Lives were just to kind of spark the conversation and bring the buzz around again because we had done the initial announcement back in June. So we're like, how can we keep this conversation going leading up to the launch? And so we did a series just kind of breaking down the basics of this new tool based on Persona. So we had what analysts need to know, what marketers need to know, and what salespeople need to know. And I think seeing like the faces of our own leaders, like break down not only the basics, but how you can Prepare your own teams to use this tool before it comes out was really, really helpful for people and gave them a lot more context. And we actually had several conversations that turned into leads from that based on those video. Those LinkedIn lives.
30:15
Olivia Messina
Amazing. What you both are talking about is really reminding me of the LinkedIn 955 rule and kind of speaking to what you were saying, Christina, about being personal and adding that personal touch. What LinkedIn talks about a lot is 95% of your audience is not currently in market to buy, only 5% are. So if you spend your time building those relationships and providing them value and making them think of you like that video, you said, Christina, they'll remember you from that. And when they are ready to buy, they'll think of you because you'll be top of mind because you put in the work to build that relationship and foster community. And I'm seeing some questions come in about tracking social media and perfect segue into our final question. And this is where I really think we're gonna end up with the bang and provide a lot of impact here. So I have to know what are you guys doing on the measurement side? So what key performance indicators are you looking at to prove your impact on the wider business? And feel free to again get as tactical as possible here.
31:20
Caitlin Doyle
I know at Demandbase we focused a lot on our engagement rate, but obviously engagement rate is good. Are people going to your website? So we looked at the click through rate and the website traffic and I saw Christina saying the chat like you set those pri, you set those goals prior to the campaign and hope and you strive to meet them. But yeah, just, just based on those different factors is how we measured it.
31:46
Christina Le
We, we lean heavily into sentiment reporting. And that's really because I've noticed from the beginning where you know, we can get a lot of engagement and followers and everything like that. And this is, this is actually for myself, you know, growing more into my role. I've learned that like audience growth and engagement is one key aspect of course. But then it's like what are people saying when you're not around, like when it's not you talking, giving them a platform to speak, what are they saying to their about you? So we, we've had to figure out a way to build a sentiment report that not only listens in onto, you know, social listening, but also like try to use any sort of like referral tracking forms meaning any lead gens, like how did you hear from us? And because that's the tricky part, especially with organic social is Very hard to prove worth, especially when it goes such towards the bottom of like revenue talk, because it's hard to, you know, know, track the first click all the way until the end. Because sometimes people might see a post and then they'll just not engage with it, but then they've, they've seen you. So, you know, there was that opportunity there. But I, I found that the thing that, so that, that's the easiest, not easiest, but it's easy to talk to leadership about is like, what are the customers saying now about us? Or if the prospects are saying, like when they're mentioning a business phone, is it something good? Like when they're saying support stuff, is it negative? How do we turn that negativity around? And on that report, I really like to see the trends. Like if we have an outage, for example, you can assume that the negative sentiment is going to go up. But once we handle that outage and the week after, do you see that sentiment curving up to more positive route or do you see it staying down? And if it stays down, why? And being able to have that report there and ready. In the beginning I had to build it manually. Now I build it through Oktopost. But, you know, so I got really savvy with the whole Google sheet side of the world where I had different dashboards going. Hopefully anybody who's looking to build a sentiment report, they have a data team that's able to build a much better visually appealing one and you could just throw information at them and go from there. But it's really being able to tell that story and answering the questions. When people are like, why are they mad at us? That's always the important thing. Like, why are they mad and how do we fix it? And as a social media manager, being able to already be tracking that, you could say, well, here are some of the key things that people are saying. Like we're missing this feature. We are. This feature is actually broken XYZ like that. So sentiment report is very important.
34:22
Olivia Messina
Amazing. All right, well, we are nearing the end of the panel here and we will leave time for Q and A. So I'm going to ask everyone to hop over from the chat to the Q and A because we are going to go over questions in just a little bit. But I want to leave everyone with just one more piece of advice. So, Caitlin and Christina, if you had to give your last words, your best advice for social media managers that are looking to fuel their sales team and get a seat at the strategy table, what is your best piece of advice? Here to really help them get the seat at the table.
34:56
Caitlin Doyle
I would say, you know, don't be afraid to go to your leadership with your ideas, like, whatever they are. Don't be afraid to experiment. And I know Christina talked about this a lot, but, like, collaborating with across your teams is really going to enable your brand to not only boost on the brand channel, but boost throughout social because your employees can feel more empowered to create their own content. And that in turn will help boost your brand visibility.
35:29
Christina Le
My piece of advice would be to ask. Ask everything. Ask questions when you don't know something. Ask to join a meeting that you weren't invited to. Ask to, you know, experiment on something that you were interested in. And you'd be surprised how often just by speaking up and asking, you'd actually get your way. So, yeah, just ask.
35:49
Olivia Messina
Amazing. I love that. Well, thank you everyone for tuning into the panel. I highly recommend following Christina and Caitlyn on LinkedIn. I have their QR COD here, so you can scan and follow them. We do have a few questions coming in, so I do want to allocate some time here for questions, so I'm just going to go through and pick a few. Let's see. All right, so what are your best tips for community building? My company is very niche and we're still trying to crack the code of creating a vibrant community.
36:25
Christina Le
That's a very great question because it's something that. So this is actually my first community title in my role. I've always been a social media manager, but what I didn't realize is that social and community tie so closely together because all you're doing is engaging with people all day long. And when it comes to building a community for your brand and making it interesting right now, I can give you a specific where we're leaning towards Reddit it because that is a very technical base and our product is very technical in the sense where we have an audience that actually cares about, like things like API and all this other stuff. So it's leaning into an area that we know our audience is going to be the most or our audience, our customers are existing the most and jumping into that conversation because I think it's very hard to when it comes to community building. And like, I mean, I think anybody could give you the five steps that are the principles of building a community, but at the end of the day, you know your brand the best and it's where your customers and your audience are and then just listening in on them and be an active participant in that community yourself. You know, because that takes a lot of time. Community building isn't going to happen overnight. I mean, unless you are working with a big, well known brand at the beginning, you kind of got to make a name for yourself. So just like having that brand name tied to your name and then just engaging more, that that's actually really like the key.
37:51
Olivia Messina
Yeah, I really agree with that. And I saw someone ask a question that their company is very risk averse and they cannot foster community via comments and replies. And I think this really goes back to what you were saying Christina, about going on to Reddit and other things. Because I think the best way to create a community when you can't foster community in the comments and things like that is with your content. Because if you are providing content that directly speaks to someone and they can relate to it, hits one of their pain points and then you provide them with value, that's creating community right there. Because I know for me there are pages that I follow on LinkedIn, there are products, I don't even use the product, I've never used it. But I feel a part of that community because they are posting content that that relates to me, that is funny, that makes me laugh, that makes me feel an emotion. And I think when you can do that through your content, it will already start to foster community without having a closed community group or even engaging in the comments and getting personal. So I think you can do a lot of this through your content as well. So I'm really happy you highlighted that, Christina, because I completely agree with that. And I have another. I had another question come in for you, Christina. Someone is asking you what tools are you using to measure the sentiment and how closely are you monitoring it? Daily, weekly, monthly? Could you just share a little more information about that?
39:12
Christina Le
Yeah, sure. So right now I'm using two. I'm using Oktopost and I'm still using my Google data sheet that I've built. Oktopost is really great because you can do things like social listening tags well, you can track your sentiment there and it gives you like a general average sentiment report, to be completely honest. Sometimes it's a bit skewed because I think Oktopost is working on it and I'm going to put a plug here. But sometimes, you know, the sentiment measurement, it's more often than not right. But sometimes it is like it'll measure something that's neutral when it's actually positive so it doesn't give the ability to switch just yet. That being said, sentiment goes in all form, not just social. Listening. So I like to use inbox and I create specific tags for the messages that are coming in or like any comments or anything like that. And I tag the sentiment itself, positive, neutral, negative. And then I go a level even deeper than that where it's like, if it's negative, for example, why is it negative? Is it like an inquiry negative? Is it just, just brand or is it support related and we can get as granular as you want. I, I always advise people to try to not go too deep because when you go too deep in the reporting, you're going to find yourself doing this like every hour. So I generally do a thing where every single morning I check to look at the thing. I tag things real quick. And you know, when you have a great social media management platform like Oktopost, it's very easy to just tag and then it'll build the report itself because it has a whole customer care section.
40:45
Caitlin Doyle
So yeah, awesome.
40:47
Olivia Messina
Thanks, Christina. And we have some more time for a couple of questions and I'm seeing one in the Q and A and also in the chat we have some people asking about how you are onboarding older colleagues and people that are maybe not as excited to engage on social media. So have either of you dealt with this and do you have any tips for other social media managers who are trying to onboard those social curmudgeons, we like to call them here at Oktopost.
41:18
Caitlin Doyle
I actually have a bit of experience with this. So I remember the first year that I was at the man base, you know, it was still kind of like the COVID lockdown era. So there wasn't, they weren't enabling us to travel a lot to the different events. So I wasn't able to go to
41:31
Christina Le
a lot of them.
41:32
Caitlin Doyle
So I would have all of the events people come to me and ask what, how to like use social media to post about the event or like how to add it to stories, how to like do xyz. And I actually that was the one time that I was able to actually hold a session to kind of walk people through, you know, using social for your personal brand or using social to boost the brand. And I just had like a zoom call with a bunch of the people who were interested and I put it in like the general chat and I was like, we have some interest in people who are trying to get used to using social tools. If you want to join, you can. And people did and it seemed to really work. And I got really good content from the events because I couldn't go, but I gave them very Vivid instructions. And then, And I think it boosted their interest in social too, because a couple of those people have since like gone on to be very active on LinkedIn. So, yeah, I think just sitting down and having patience because I think a lot of people who are like millennials or Gen Z, like, we, it's like a natural reflex for us with social media. Whereas, like the older generation, you just have to be patient and give them time and. But it's really cool to see it click for them too. So.
42:47
Olivia Messina
Yeah, definitely.
42:49
Christina Le
Yeah. I generally find one, it's my older colleagues. I used to work for a fuel company, so almost 95% my teammates were, you know, 50 plus. And so I often hear the whole, like, I, I don't do the sharing on, on the social or the tick tock or the Twitter or they, they say the tweet or something like that. And I, I usually like, I find myself in my own sales mindset. I find myself always selling social to people where I'm like, why not? Why don't you like to be on it? But then they'll be on Facebook sharing photos. And I'm like, you could do the same with the company, you know, And I think it's a matter of like really leaning sales strategy when you're talking to your teammates or you're kind of like, look, this is good for you, good for us, like, let's help each other out. And having that open dialogue about the benefits I think is really helpful. And yeah, to, you know, piggyback off of what Caitlin was saying, sometimes you really do have to be sort of like prescriptive with what you're saying where you're like, I'd like you to like this post. Here's the link. Just hit the thumbs up button. And it works wonders. But I actually find that, you know, when they do get it, it's very, it's very endearing to see the excitement because now they're like, okay, well now I can do this on my own. You're like, that's right, you can.
44:07
Olivia Messina
Yeah. I think once they also, yeah, they start to see those engagements coming in and the positive feedback, it really motivates them to keep going.
44:14
Christina Le
Yeah, that dopamine hit right there.
44:16
Olivia Messina
Yeah, definitely. Well, that is all the time we have for questions. And I want to thank everyone for joining us here today and tuning in. I want to thank you specifically Caitlin and Christina. You guys provided so much value. You. So thank you so much for joining. Thank you guys all for being here. We really appreciate it. Don't forget to follow Caitlyn and Christina, and I guarantee you will love their content.
44:37
Christina Le
Thanks for having us.
