If you're looking to better leverage social media for marketing, this is the one question that you need to answer to help guide you towards implementing the right social media strategy.

Key Highlights

[01:18] The One Question You Should Be Asking Yourself About Your Business

[03:43] My Laser-Focused Approach

[04:30] Where Do You Get Your Leads?

[04:47] Businesses Through Referrals

[05:26} What Can You Do In Social Media to Help our Relationships

[06:39] Where's Your Market?

Notable Quotes

• As I always say, social media, complements everything and replaces nothing. 
• A lot of us tend not to because we start a process and strategy and we get going, and we sort of get lost in it over time.
• And this is obviously where social media can help you to scale and help you develop relationships nationwide, whether it be LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.
• And the answer that really comes down to well, what is the objective who are your customer? And I think a lot of people, a lot of businesses still aren't very clear about that when they think about social media. So you have a lot of consumer facing companies, but you also have b2b aspects of your company.
• So it's easy to focus on the consumer facing side. But it's often the business facing side, that is actually giving you your sales. And it's really trying to map out both and understanding that, you know, I was talking to a manufacturer of chocolate chip cookies last week.
• And as long as you understand that, and you can answer those questions and understand that it's going to take a very, very different approach, you know, potentially different networks, obviously, different tactics and different objectives for your b2b and b2c side and learn how to shuffle your budget your resources for each one, and to be able to calculate your ROI, I think you're gonna do really, really well.
• It probably makes sense to invest more of his effort on the b2b side, in terms of social media and using that to help foster and develop those relationships.

Learn More:

• Buy Digital Threads: https://nealschaffer.com/digitalthreadsamazon
• Buy Maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth: https://nealschaffer.com/maximizinglinkedinamazon
• Join My Digital First Mastermind: https://nealschaffer.com/membership/ 
• Learn about My Fractional CMO Consulting Services: https://nealschaffer.com/cmo
• Download My Free Ebooks Here: https://nealschaffer.com/books/
• Subscribe to my YouTube Channel: https://youtube.com/nealschaffer
• All My Podcast Show Notes: https://podcast.nealschaffer.com

Building a brand in social does not happen overnight. Learn about just how important consistency in your social media efforts are and how to use paid social to help accelerate it.

 Key Highlights

[01:10] Importance of Consistency in Social Media

[03:33] Other Things You Should Be Consistent About

[04:52] The More Recognition, The More Credibility

[05:35] Accelerating Our Efforts in Social

[06:40] Consistency Supplemented with Paid Social

[06:47] The Wrong Way of Using Paid Social

[07:47] The Best Way to Use Paid Social

[08:27] Success Doesn't Happen Overnight

[09:30] Do Not Buy Fake Followers

Notable Quotes

• For normal businesses and brands that are not part of you know, the fortune 50 or consumer vocabulary, it takes time. And it not only takes time, but it's consistency. 
• See public communities have hundreds of millions of users out there. And once you engage in a relationship with them.
• And if you just sit there and talk to yourself, other people may hear you. But when you actually tap on people's shoulders by following them and sending them a social signal, or maybe favoriting, a tweet that really resonated with your content, strategy, whatever it might be, it's the consistent sending of those things, and engaging, that builds up, others engaging with you over time, and it is what I would consider a tumbleweed effect.
• Because the bigger that you become others that are looking for sources for content creation, whether it be on Twitter, on Pinterest, or Google Plus, people tend to be attracted or businesses tend to be attracted to those that I refer to as maximize your social are the role models that you want to emulate.
•  The more that you get recognized, the more credibility you have.
• But what I'm trying to say is that consistency, supplementing in the right way with paid social can really help you.
• 0ut because you lose credibility, and you get clicks when you pay for clicks that don't resonate in the likes or follows.
• And people think more followers equals more social proof.

Learn More:

• Buy Digital Threads: https://nealschaffer.com/digitalthreadsamazon
• Buy Maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth: https://nealschaffer.com/maximizinglinkedinamazon
• Join My Digital First Mastermind: https://nealschaffer.com/membership/ 
• Learn about My Fractional CMO Consulting Services: https://nealschaffer.com/cmo
• Download My Free Ebooks Here: https://nealschaffer.com/books/
• Subscribe to my YouTube Channel: https://youtube.com/nealschaffer
• All My Podcast Show Notes: https://podcast.nealschaffer.com

How can a B2B company find success in a social network like Pinterest? Find out how and learn some new tips, tricks, and concepts to help you Maximize Your Social in this episode.

Key Highlights

[01:11] What is Pinterest Myth?

[01:27] Why Pinterest?

[05:35] Pinterest Statistics

[06:51] What I Like About The New Pinterest Analytics

[08:34] Looking at Demographics

[11:25] Top 6 Interests of Females in Pinterest

[12:40] Other Pinterest Analytics Feature

[15:43] Social Media Marketing World

Notable Quotes

• So you know, when we talk about social media, one of the things is yes, we want to engage with people, we want to engage with influencers, we want to engage with brand advocates, with potential customers in social media. But we also want to bring them back to our website.
• And it's really bringing all this together in your mind or on a dashboard, thinking holistically as to where am I going to invest my time and I do this on a weekly basis, right?
• Businesses, do business with other businesses, but it's really people inside those businesses doing business with people inside the other business, right.
• So if you think about it that way, Pinterest, regardless of the demographic or what people post a lot of is very you know, relevant to I think every business out there.
• So that was really an aha moment that there are enough people interested in social media for what I do to be able to generate interest
• It sounds like a lot of work, it doesn't have to be you need to come down, you need to create a routine out of all this, and pick and choose the data that you're going to use, and pick and choose how you use it and make a process out of it.

Learn More:

• Buy Digital Threads: https://nealschaffer.com/digitalthreadsamazon
• Buy Maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth: https://nealschaffer.com/maximizinglinkedinamazon
• Join My Digital First Mastermind: https://nealschaffer.com/membership/ 
• Learn about My Fractional CMO Consulting Services: https://nealschaffer.com/cmo
• Download My Free Ebooks Here: https://nealschaffer.com/books/
• Subscribe to my YouTube Channel: https://youtube.com/nealschaffer
• All My Podcast Show Notes: https://podcast.nealschaffer.com

Neal takes a deep dive into LinkedIn Pulse and reveals a "hidden" back door to help you get your content featured into LinkedIn Pulse.

Key Highlights

[01:33] One of the THings I Am Writing About in the Ebook

[02:09] Why Would You Want to Syndicate Your Blog Posts Within LinkedIn

[02:42] What is LinkedIn Pulse?

[03:43] How LinkedIn Pulse Works

[05:00] How to Get Your Content to Be Seen By More People

[07:21] Have Connections

[07:41] Why You Should Never Buy Fake Followers

[08:57] Discover Tab

[10:21] Channels Feature

[10:41] Publishers Feature

[11:45] My AHA Moment

Notable Quotes

• LinkedIn is huge. One of the top 10 visited websites in the United States, sure, we'd all love to have guest blog posts on Forbes, but LinkedIn actually gets more traffic than Forbes, believe it or not. So it is a very, very lucrative and attractive demographic. And therefore if we are creating content for ourselves, our personal brands or for our businesses, it makes sense that we would want to publish on LinkedIn now what you publish on LinkedIn, obviously, you want it to be more appropriate for the demographic there.
• So you start to get a picture that not only is this a huge audience to serve both polls users on LinkedIn users, but also it's an audience, at least those 30 million people are actively consuming content. And this is where you start seeing why some people get published posts on LinkedIn that gets, you know, hundreds of 1000s of views literally. 
• So that is something that obviously if you're sharing on LinkedIn, you want to reach out to people, you want to let them know about your posts. You want to write content, that when your connections who automatically become your followers see it, they want to engage with you. 
• The more connections you have, in general, the more people it's going to be exposed to, although that's not necessarily the case. But it gives you a better chance of getting exposed to more people. But if you've bought fake LinkedIn connections, or you just you know, have fake people that are connected with you, that doesn't do any good either, because they're not going to engage with your content, very similar to why you shouldn't buy fake Facebook fans, and you shouldn't buy fake Twitter followers.
• But polls being such a huge asset, you want to get more and more LinkedIn company page followers if your business because the more followers you have, the higher you're gonna show up here in the recommended companies to follow.
• So hopefully the light bulb goes on, we need to be focusing more on a LinkedIn company page, we need to attract a bigger following.  Because all that is going to add to our company page being more and more recommendable in LinkedIn Pulse in our content from our company page being exposed more and more impulse, as more and more people subscribe to it.
• It's social media I find fascinating because all these social networks have their own little algorithms. And when you piece things together, it really is pretty incredible. And you sort of get a competitive advantage because I don't think a lot of people understand this right now. 

Learn More:

• Buy Digital Threads: https://nealschaffer.com/digitalthreadsamazon
• Buy Maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth: https://nealschaffer.com/maximizinglinkedinamazon
• Join My Digital First Mastermind: https://nealschaffer.com/membership/ 
• Learn about My Fractional CMO Consulting Services: https://nealschaffer.com/cmo
• Download My Free Ebooks Here: https://nealschaffer.com/books/
• Subscribe to my YouTube Channel: https://youtube.com/nealschaffer
• All My Podcast Show Notes: https://podcast.nealschaffer.com

LinkedIn is not about the connections but the engagements and relationships you can build with other professionals and businesses. This episode will change your perspective on LinkedIn for the better.

Key Highlights

[01:48] Engaging on LinkedIn Differently

[02:31] What to Do When LinkedIn Permanently Restricts You?

[03:23] You Don't Need to Have As Many Connections As I Do

[04:17] How LinkedIn Restrictions Happen

[05:06] My Own Epiphany on LinkedIn

[05:48] I Am Not Appearing in LinkedIn Search Results

[07:08] What Happens When You Start A Conversation in A LinkedIn Group

[07:31] LinkedIn Is the Best Place to Engage

[08:44] Publishing Platform on LinkedIn

Notable Quotes

• Now the short answer to what I said, I said, LinkedIn is always changing the rules, right. And that's social media is always changing. Every single platform is always changing the way that they do business. 
• But still, you know, everybody should have a robust network, multiplayer age by 10. That's the number of LinkedIn connections you should have. That's the number of new people you should be meeting on the annual basis that you can add to your LinkedIn network. And it really gives you more visibility other people, you become more visible to other people.
• My own epiphany when it when it comes to LinkedIn is, you know, what sort of value are you trying to derive out of the network. If you think of adding a connection as putting someone in your marketing funnel, then you obviously have it all wrong.
• You know, LinkedIn is where the professionals are, it's about making relationships, connections. And people do business with people that they know, like, and trust. So just the art of connecting have always said was just establishing a virtual connection in a database, right, a virtual data point, for lack of a better word.
• And what happens when you start a conversation in a LinkedIn group is that often leads to a connection. And when you connect with someone, where you've you looked at their background, you have a common affinity, a common interest, because you're in the same LinkedIn group, that connection is obviously going to be extremely valuable.
• But if you're looking to build up a network of like minded people, of peers that you can call upon in the future, or bounce ideas off of which I think LinkedIn is really all about, you need to be engaging.
• And if it's gonna take a little bit more time than just, you know, uploading a database, or, you know, clicking one to one on profiles, but I think it's gonna allow you to more authentically, and increase the quality of those connections that you make on LinkedIn, so that when you want to ask for an introduction, they'll actually do it for you, because you already have rapport with them.
• But I would rather have you authentically engage with those people that you want to be affiliated with. And you want to have them as part of your network, because you can establish that relationship with them. 

Learn More:

• Buy Digital Threads: https://nealschaffer.com/digitalthreadsamazon
• Buy Maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth: https://nealschaffer.com/maximizinglinkedinamazon
• Join My Digital First Mastermind: https://nealschaffer.com/membership/ 
• Learn about My Fractional CMO Consulting Services: https://nealschaffer.com/cmo
• Download My Free Ebooks Here: https://nealschaffer.com/books/
• Subscribe to my YouTube Channel: https://youtube.com/nealschaffer
• All My Podcast Show Notes: https://podcast.nealschaffer.com

Neal introduces the concept of an anchor network and how to leverage big data through tools that analyze your own social presence to better optimize your social.

Key Highlights

[01:12] Back to School Time!

[01:23] How to Use Big Data to Optimize Your Own Social Media

[02:06] Two Things You Need

[02:20] My Preferred Tools

[03:07] What is Preferred Network

[04:21] Example of What I Do on Twitter

[06:32] What I Do in My Newsletter

Notable Quotes

• And I think the back to school time is always a great time to look at our options, and really delve into some great books. And, you know, get to the next level wherever we are in our social media. 
• And one of the keys here is you need to have a tool that allows you to analyze and allows you to compile all of that big data. And I say big data, we're not talking about, you know, terabytes of data here, pulled from the cloud, or, you know, Google servers, we're talking about data that we're accessing, from social media, on how people are engaging with our social media accounts. 
• But once you have your preferred tool, now you need a preferred network. And what I mean by a preferred network is, if you have one network that you can use as your experimental testbed to try to get ideas as to what sort of content engages your audience, it's going to help you optimize your content across other platforms. 
• Now, if you have unlimited resources, you obviously want to be optimizing your content according to each platform. Because each community is different. And they will all have different needs, right? 
• And the more frequent you post, the more the bigger the data set you have to work with, the more you can really see which are the posts that come to the top when it comes to content that gets clicked or liked or commented on.
• So what I'm trying to do is really put my best foot forward and say, This is the content that my fans, my followers have said, is the most engaging.
• I think the content and analyzing the content that works, especially if you're curating a lot of content, each piece of content that you curate is not only helping you establish your thought leadership, but it's also testing the waters for content that's people will engage with and will maybe that's content that you should also start creating. 

Learn More:

• Buy Digital Threads: https://nealschaffer.com/digitalthreadsamazon
• Buy Maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth: https://nealschaffer.com/maximizinglinkedinamazon
• Join My Digital First Mastermind: https://nealschaffer.com/membership/ 
• Learn about My Fractional CMO Consulting Services: https://nealschaffer.com/cmo
• Download My Free Ebooks Here: https://nealschaffer.com/books/
• Subscribe to my YouTube Channel: https://youtube.com/nealschaffer
• All My Podcast Show Notes: https://podcast.nealschaffer.com

When looking at optimizing your social media program, are you asking the right questions? Neal will provide examples of a holistic mindset to help you ask the right questions that will truly help you Maximize Your Social.

Key Highlights

[02:11] How to Tell If Your Facebook Efforts Are Paying Off?

[02:39] Experiments

[03:33] How Do We Expand Our Reach for Our Page?

[04:49] Is Facebook Really Tied to Your Business?

[06:15] What Differentiates Me from A Lot of People

[06:55] Looking At Social Media As A Whole

[08:31] Are You Asking the Right Social Media Questions?

Notable Quotes

• And as you know, well, if you listen to my podcast from last week, and read my recent blog post on six social media productivity tips and 23 tools to help you, you'll know that I like to reserve time for content creation and engagement. And I urge my listeners this podcast and brands to do the same. 
• And it was a great reminder. And it sort of echoes well, he gives you a specific, you know, tactics that you can do to see what works.
• So my response was basically, well, there's, you know, there's a few things you can obviously do, you can promote posts with paid social, which is obviously going to expand your reach, if that's what you want to do, you can post more frequently, which will tend to improve your reach, you can optimize your content, you can obviously try to post different types of content, and you can do an experiment or campaign.
• And it really comes down if you've read the chapter maximize your social on social media ROI and social media metrics.
• It equates to how effective your social media is, and how you might be wanting to do better at it. But it doesn't equate to this primary objective, it doesn't feed directly into the reason why you have a social media program. 
• So if we were to look at social media as a whole, it's not just Facebook, right. And it's not just reach and Facebook, either. It's a lot of different things. 
• You need to think holistically. Different news feeds work differently, different types of fans, on different networks engage differently with different content.
• There's loads of communities where your brand can get new engagement, new brand awareness, what have you. So really my question for you. Okay, is are you asking the right social media questions? 
• But if you're just asking the wrong question, you're digging yourself a hole. And I don't think you're ever going to be effective with your program because you're chasing after the wrong thing.
• So let's stop asking, let's start doing and think about the questions that you have. Are they the right questions?
•  Think of the entirety, think of business objectives, lots of different networks out there lots of different things you can do.
• And if you're looking for ideas, by all means, read, maximize your social again, from front to back. And that will help sync your brain with what I'm trying to teach through these podcasts. 

Learn More:

• Buy Digital Threads: https://nealschaffer.com/digitalthreadsamazon
• Buy Maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth: https://nealschaffer.com/maximizinglinkedinamazon
• Join My Digital First Mastermind: https://nealschaffer.com/membership/ 
• Learn about My Fractional CMO Consulting Services: https://nealschaffer.com/cmo
• Download My Free Ebooks Here: https://nealschaffer.com/books/
• Subscribe to my YouTube Channel: https://youtube.com/nealschaffer
• All My Podcast Show Notes: https://podcast.nealschaffer.com

Neal reveals his "aha!" moment from his recent blog post on LinkedIn and offers advice on better understanding the unique demographic that is viewing your blog posts on LinkedIn.

Key Highlights

[00:40] Understanding the Audience for Your LinkedIn Blog Posts

[00:56] My LinkedIn Resources

[01:54] How I Consider LinkedIn

[02:11] My AHA Moment

[02:53] My Free Ebook

[03:47] What I Did to Introduce My New Ebook on LinkedIn

[05:48] The Power of Comments on LinkedIn

[07:35] LinkedIn Is A Unique Community

Notable Quotes

• There's a lot of people who say, Well, I have a blog, I don't want to create special content for LinkedIn, that's just a waste of time, I'll just, you know, republish my own content on LinkedIn. And you know, there's a lot of people that are doing that, in all honesty, and some of them have been really successful, I have not taken that approach. I love the approach. And if you're going to make content, make it work. And if you're going to publish the same content, at least, you need to rephrase it for the LinkedIn community. 
• I'm not saying that I copy and pasted a particular blog post and publish it on LinkedIn for the first time.
• But it's really interesting to see the quality and the power of the comments I got, because they weren't coming from just blog readers who happen to find me on Pinterest or stumble upon these were coming from decision makers, former CEOs and CMOS on LinkedIn.
• So to me, I'm just giving a preview of what's coming in mainstream corporate America, but on LinkedIn to others that are not part of the social media world that I'm in. It was quote, unquote, a thought provoking piece. 
• And it's sort of repeated what I thought are reiterated what I thought that is, if you're just gonna cut and paste what you blog, on your blog, or LinkedIn, it's not gonna be nearly as effective if you have the topic and the tone and the perspective that these decision makers are looking for on LinkedIn.
• B ut once you guest blog somewhere else, whether it be on LinkedIn publishing platform or on someone else's platform, you need to retool your content, your perspective, even your call to action for that unique community. But regardless, it just goes to show you that you blog for your community, if it's on your own blog, you none, you understand your community, your target user.

Learn More:

• Buy Digital Threads: https://nealschaffer.com/digitalthreadsamazon
• Buy Maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth: https://nealschaffer.com/maximizinglinkedinamazon
• Join My Digital First Mastermind: https://nealschaffer.com/membership/ 
• Learn about My Fractional CMO Consulting Services: https://nealschaffer.com/cmo
• Download My Free Ebooks Here: https://nealschaffer.com/books/
• Subscribe to my YouTube Channel: https://youtube.com/nealschaffer
• All My Podcast Show Notes: https://podcast.nealschaffer.com

Spending too much time in social and achieving too few business results? Let me share with you my favorite social media productivity tips - and a plethora of tools to help you and your business improve your social media productivity by leaps and bounds.

Key Highlights

[01:35] Social Media Has Never Been Free

[02:11] 6 Social Media Productivity Tips

[03:20] The Beauty of Content Curation

[03:46] Content Curation Tools

[04:41] 3 Different Communities of Content Creator that Help Promote Content

[06:03] Schedule Your Posts

[08:11] Use A Dedicated Browser

[08:45] Stick to A Daily Routine

[09:33] Get Analytical

[10:25] Turn Old Into New

Notable Quotes

• So the whole advent of paid social, why do we have to pay to get noticed in the Facebook newsfeed and to be honest with you, social has never been free, it's required time, it's required someone's time, right?
• At the end of the day, it's the human resource cost that is there. And therefore, if somehow we can be more productive with our use of that time, visa vie social media, that's money in the bank, from my perspective. 
• If you're going to curate content, why not curate content from people that are actually creating the content, I think you're going to be able to create more direct and engaging relationships than just curating content from the mass media.
• Find your vehicle that helps you discover relevant content quickly.
• The important thing is to find the tools that work for you that are helping you find the most relevant content and make it easy for you to control when and where your content is posted in the most efficient way. 
• I think if you can create these daily weekly routines, you're going to be all the better and if you can create those social media boundaries, as I like to call them, and you stick to those daily weekly routines, you're going to get a really really good idea as to how much time you're spending doing what where's the ROI and therefore better at relegating things to a daily or weekly task and therefore becoming more not only productive but effective with your social media.
• You can reuse your content for a variety of content marketing, mediums, infographics, ebooks, revising them to create new blog posts, podcasts, you don't always have to reinvent the wheel when you're creating content.
• While there are certain things I do to increase my productivity, the engagement always has to be organic, it always has to be natural.
• This leaves you time for the actual engaging with other social media users, or actually creating unique content, which I think are two of the most important things that you obviously cannot automate.

Learn More:

• Buy Digital Threads: https://nealschaffer.com/digitalthreadsamazon
• Buy Maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth: https://nealschaffer.com/maximizinglinkedinamazon
• Join My Digital First Mastermind: https://nealschaffer.com/membership/ 
• Learn about My Fractional CMO Consulting Services: https://nealschaffer.com/cmo
• Download My Free Ebooks Here: https://nealschaffer.com/books/
• Subscribe to my YouTube Channel: https://youtube.com/nealschaffer
• All My Podcast Show Notes: https://podcast.nealschaffer.com

A look at why unplugging from social media is a critical component to a social media strategy as well important to understanding the ROI of social from a business and personal perspective.

 Key Highlights

[00:43] The Personal Side of Social Media

[03:50] Why Social Media is an Ever-Changing Landscape

[06:21] Social Media Should Not Be a Burden

[08:31] Make Every Post Count

[09:04] You Don't Need to Be On All Platforms.

Notable Quotes

• But the important thing is, and as I come back from Japan, I see the increased use of these social networks that were designed primarily for people to communicate, often talk about social media being the convergence of information and communication, right.
• The important thing is, the more people spend in these messaging apps, and they bring social media back into the personal realm, the less they're spending on social media platforms.
• This is why social media is an ever changing landscape. And you really need to be monitoring things and adopting your social media strategy on a regular basis.
• And I really feel good about doing it, it was almost this burden that I felt that I had to do something. And that's what social media should not be about whether it's for people for businesses, right.
• This is something that people should not be doing. It's something that businesses should not be doing, especially when you don't see the ROI. And when you do see the ROI, you're obviously going to put in a more concerted personal well, as human as a brand can get effort into reaping the benefits of engagement on that platform, right.
• It's important for businesses also to realize, you know, this may be the day where we need to unplug or extremely lessens our presence in the platform because the ROI is not there. But we see the ROI on another platform.
• Really think about, you know why you're on social media, and businesses should be thinking the same thing. But if you're not seeing the ROI from network, unplug from it. 

Learn More:

• Buy Digital Threads: https://nealschaffer.com/digitalthreadsamazon
• Buy Maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth: https://nealschaffer.com/maximizinglinkedinamazon
• Join My Digital First Mastermind: https://nealschaffer.com/membership/ 
• Learn about My Fractional CMO Consulting Services: https://nealschaffer.com/cmo
• Download My Free Ebooks Here: https://nealschaffer.com/books/
• Subscribe to my YouTube Channel: https://youtube.com/nealschaffer
• All My Podcast Show Notes: https://podcast.nealschaffer.com