Learn about social media marketing and management for course creators with Tina Todorovic from Social Web Suite in this episode of the LMScast podcast with Chris Badgett of LifterLMS. Tina and Chris get into several topics around social media and automation for course creators and membership site owners.
Social Web Suite is a social media management tool that helps entrepreneurs with navigating the complicated and ever-changing world of social media platforms. In this episode, Tina shares some great tips and strategy for what course creators can do to manage and maintain their content on social media.
We often discuss the five hats course creators wear: expert, teacher, community builder, technologist, and entrepreneur. Social media fits into the marketing aspect of being an entrepreneur, but it also sits under the community building piece. Tina breaks down the major social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and what each one can contribute to an online course business.
We use Social Web Suite at LifterLMS, and one of the reasons we love it is that it offers a lot of versatility for automated social media posts. They have templates you can set up that will promote content, such as continuous blog posts without recycling the exact same content.
The audiences that frequent social media platforms vary greatly as well. Age groups from 15 to 35 tend to spend more time on Instagram, whereas older crowds tend to prefer platforms like Facebook. The social media marketing you’re doing should vary based on who your prospective customer is.
If you have a very visual brand, such as a makeup or art company, then Instagram would be a nice platform to lean into. If you are selling corporate training courses or another business-to-business sale, then you will want to have a presence on LinkedIn, because many people who make decisions for businesses use the platform.
Two major aspects of online course building are access and curation. The curation value is delivered in the course or membership itself, but the access aspect can be accomplished with a Facebook group where students can ask questions to you and the community.
Go to SocialWebSuite.com to check out what they have over there. They have a blog with some great content on various tools in the WordPress ecosystem. You can connect with Tina by emailing her.
At LifterLMS.com you can learn more about new developments and how you can use LifterLMS to build online courses and membership sites. If you like this episode of LMScast, you can browse more episodes here. You can subscribe to our newsletter for updates, developments, and future episodes of LMScast. Thank you for joining us!
Episode Transcript
Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re a course creator looking to build more impact, income, and freedom. LMScast is the number one podcast for course creators just like you. I’ll be your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of the most powerful tool for building, selling, and protecting engaging online courses called LifterLMS. Enjoy the show.
Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. My name is Chris Badgett, and I’m joined by a special guest, Tina Todorovic. Did I say that right?
Tina Todorovic: Yes. Awesome.
Chris Badgett: Can you say it for me?
Tina Todorovic: Todorovic.
Chris Badgett: Awesome. Awesome. Tina is from Social Web Suite, which is a social media management tool, and I’m super excited to get into a bunch of issues around social media and automation that course creators and membership site builders face. Over at LifterLMS, we use Social Web Suite. We’re just scratching the surface of what’s capable with it, but I have plans to expand and just use it more for a lot of different reasons. But first, Tina, thanks for coming on the show.
Tina Todorovic: Thank you so much for having me and I hope I will be able to help a lot of your content creators if they have all the questions for social media.
Chris Badgett: Absolutely.
Tina Todorovic: Jump right into the questions.
Chris Badgett: Awesome. Well, one of the big issues that course creators face … I call it … It’s like the main issue actually. I call it the five hats problem where they have to be five groups, five different people at once and that’s expert, a teacher, a community builder, a technologist, and an entrepreneur. I might put … The social media stuff sits under the marketing piece which is under entrepreneur, but it also sits under the community building piece. For the uninitiated, what is social media management? Who is your software the most for? What problem does it solve? What is this thing we should do around social media?
Tina Todorovic: We build our software basically to help all the entrepreneurs out there as well as social media managers. Well, we have to be more active on social media so people can see our company and our branding. We want to interact with our users and customers via social media as well, especially now during the Black Friday sales or Christmas sales or new year’s. That’s the biggest sale of the year. You want to get out there like … And I always tell people the blog posting is awesome, and it’s really good to have the content fresh. But if you don’t put it out there to a lot of people then basically, unfortunately, it goes to waste. Nobody can see it. I read somewhere somebody was like not that nice explaining that. Only her mother is going to see it, but that’s pretty much the gist of it, right?
Yes, it’s awesome if you share it on your personal wall like on Facebook, but that’s your friends and they’re going to see it and they’re going to maybe like it, but that’s not your customers. Those are the people that are your friends, right? You want to put it out there with your customers, you want to share it on your Facebook page, in your groups, on your Twitter, Linkedin, and Instagram, and other social networks out there. What we try to do is we try to help anyone that want to share, and promote, and schedule those social messages, right? Basically, because we are coming from the WordPress world, we have the best integration with WordPress. That was our main goal, to have the best WordPress integrations and then afterwards to help other people as well, not using WordPress.
The number one also thing and that will be even more, we just came from the conference that they get the marketing conference in New York where a lot of big names were there. They were all saying that the number one hit for the next year will be Instagram and Video. Video is always seeing the expansion right now and next year will be even more. Basically, my advice to all your listeners is if you are not using like videos like Vimeo or YouTube, you should get right to it immediately and share it. That’s the other thing that we have, like the integration with YouTube and I found it from our users feedback that a lot of people are really happy with it. They don’t have to go now to YouTube and copy and paste to Facebook or Twitter or whatever. There are videos, they can schedule it with our social media platform. That’s the one thing as well.
The messages, we have the templates for WordPress now within a WordPress plugin. We are building templates for everybody else as well that will be in a quick sandbox. That means that you don’t have to have like one message, you can have the variations of different messages pulling out from the URL and those types of things, so you can schedule it whenever you want. What I found out as well is people like to call it … Whenever I ask people, “Okay, why are you using us? What’s the number one thing that we are solving your problems and those sorts of things?” Usually it’s like set it and forget it. People like to set up everything and they just go through their blogging and they know that everything in the back end is good, everything is sharing. They don’t need to take care of it anymore. That’s for maybe content creators, and bloggers, and small business owners.
For the social media managers they like to be hands on. Although they are scheduling their staff, they don’t set it and forget it approach. They like to schedule it for maybe every week for the next week or maybe once or twice a month because they want to have different messages all the time and those types of things. They like those variations more and they are using that things more. I hope that I answered your question.
Chris Badgett: It’s a bit perfect. I gave you a big question to kind of start with. I just want to riff on that a little bit just to tell you, the listener, how I got to social web suite, which you can see is socialwebsuite.com. I’m a busy entrepreneur or business owner. I’m not a social media manager. I do do social media and I’ve heard that depending upon who you talk to, there’s two strategies. One is be everywhere and the other is just do one platform really well and I don’t really like … I think both are … I think it’s better to just combine those two ideas together and be really good at something like … So for me, I spent most of my time directly investing in a Facebook group for or YouTube doing lots of video and a little bit of Twitter as well. But that doesn’t mean … I’ve noticed I’m just barely do some Instagram and there’s a whole … I can just tell I have a different audience on Instagram, a different audience on Facebook, a different audience on the page versus the group.
My personal twitter profile, my business twitter profile, my Linkedin, my slack group, they’re all very different and that’s what I love about social web suite is what I used to do is I was using a tool called Meet Edgar and they had a content repurposing thing where it would recycle your blog posts and podcast episodes in my case. Then I think Twitter or somebody said, “You can’t do that anymore.” And I was like, “Okay, fine. No harm, no foul. I wasn’t trying to spam anybody. It’s just I’ve made like hundreds and hundreds of audio posts, and podcasts, and blog posts, so one to recycle, but that’s cool. I can deal with that going away.” Then that was around the time that I met you and we started using social web suite.
When we do a podcast episode, instead of putting something into like a content recycle until infinity thing, somebody on my team write like five unique tweets that go out later and then we post stuff over here. I have some stuff set up that, okay, as soon as I publish a blog post, I know it’s going to my group automatically. I don’t have to worry about that. There’s still a lot I can optimize, but I see it as a great tool for just helping me focus on what I do, like a lot of manual stuff on Facebook, but I can also spread it out to Linkedin and all these other places that I don’t go to on a regular basis. That’s my story with it. Do you have any comments on the-
Tina Todorovic: Yes. That’s so true. Well, the thing that you said about be everywhere versus choose one social media platform and do it well. I have a similar … Well, it just really depends on who are your customers and where are your customers. That’s like the main goal, right? We all want to go … Well, the first thing is with social media, you want to get your brand out so you want to have more people know about you. They’d not necessarily will become your customers immediately, right? because they first want to learn more about you are and those types of things and that’s why the content is a really big thing about it. That’s why you can also use our tool and then once when you gain their trust, then they will become your customers, right?
Basically, my advice is try to figure it out like try one, and then the second, and third and then figure it out what works for you the best because not every social platform or network works for everybody. It just really depends who are your customers and where are they. If they are between 15 and 35, they are most likely on Instagram. That’s pretty much it. Older than that they are on Facebook. It just depends what is your tool doing? For example, if there is some gaming gap or something like fashion, those types of things probably you’re going to find your customers at Instagram more like beauty tips, makeups, those types of things probably are going to find more customers on Instagram, right?
Chris Badgett: How would you describe Twitter, the twitter audience, what they are?
Tina Todorovic: Twitter is the trickiest of all to be honest with you. That’s really, really hard to explain. I found out that there are a lot of people there as well and I don’t think … I also think that usually it’s like older audience, so it’s not like 15 to 35, maybe from 30 plus and most of them are just trying to talk to somebody else, not sure if they are just trying to buy something from you, they’re trying to talk to you. I think on Twitter you have to do like your brand awareness. Twitter is more for brand awareness than actually trying to gain some customers. That’s my perception. I’m not sure if that’s correct, right? Everybody has their own opinion about it, but that’s what I found out with us using Twitter and with, for example, our users as well.
Our users were mainly using Facebook. Of course, Facebook pages, and groups, and Twitter. Those are the two main tools. Linkedin is not that much used unfortunately. Older Linkedin is really, really great tool for serious … Well, all CEO, VPs, and people that make decisions in any company are on Linkedin. Pretty much if you have any kind of business, you have to be on Linkedin. Otherwise, it doesn’t really make any sense to not be on Linkedin, right? That’s something that you do as you said, Facebook groups as well. Recently, in the past few months, I also … because I’m subscribed to every single blog post out there from all the social media influencers and whatever, so I’m always following up the latest trends you have to.
A lot of them are talking about Facebook groups, so that’s like pretty much if you don’t have a group for your brand, you should do it right now. That’s pretty much it. I know that you guys have an awesome group and a lot of people are really active there. Not you, but just like the other members as well, which is awesome. I think that’s the beauty of it.
Chris Badgett: I call that a four years overnight success, so our group has-
Tina Todorovic: I know.
Chris Badgett: … over 1,000 people. At the beginning, it was just me talking and then sharing links to blog posts and then started taking on a life of its own, which is a lot of hard work.
Tina Todorovic: For the group you have to put a lot of work. But at the end, I think it’s really worth it. Meaning that people … That’s what we found out. You know how everybody keeps saying, well why people want to buy from you because they like you or trust you. Those types of things, right? How do you gain their likes and trust? Nowadays in internet, you don’t know anybody. You cannot really go to anybody and like, “Hi, I’m Chris, nice to meet you,” and whatever. We go to the conferences but there are so many other people out there that you cannot really go to. That’s pretty much the Facebook groups are for. That’s where you gain their trust and likes. You share some good content for them, something that they might be interested. They ask you questions like support questions. Sometimes they ask you questions that are completely not related. I have a lot of people asking questions that are completely not related to Social Web Suite. For example, which hosting company should I use and those types of things. You know what I mean?
Chris Badgett: Yeah.
Tina Todorovic: I always reply to any questions. I am not like, “Oh yeah, that’s not my expertise,” or whatever. I always reply, especially because you know that we are hanging out. We always go through like a bunch of races and we know a lot of people out there. I always can recommend hosting companies that we are working with sometimes. That works out sometimes not as well as if somebody ask me for course creator plugin, I’m going to recommend you guys. I mean that’s pretty much it. It doesn’t have to be closely connected to you. But that way, you gain trust with your users and potential customers.
Chris Badgett: That’s awesome.
Tina Todorovic: Once when you gain their trust, they’re going to be your customers for life. That’s pretty much it and that’s the goal of everybody, right?
Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s a great point. I want to ask you a question just about Facebook specifically for someone who’s not as initiated in the world of social media or Internet Marketing. What is the difference between the profile, the page, and the group? By Social Web Suite, you can go to all those separately, but how do you … If somebody off the street … I’m always amazed when I meet somebody like, “Oh, you don’t know what WordPress is or whatever,” but it’s actually a lot of people I just … If you run into the same circles you get close to the technology you use, which may be new to some other people. I just want to ask, how do you explain the difference between the profile, the page, and the group in Facebook?
Tina Todorovic: Facebook is … because of this latest problems that they had with data security breach, so they changed it a lot of things this year. This year, a lot of things have changed. For example, they’re not allowing third party tools to post to the personal profile anymore unfortunately. That’s why we cannot really post any more from Social Web Suite. Basically, what they wanted you to have … If your personal wall and your personal profile is just for your friends and that’s pretty much it. You post staff engage with your friends, you say happy birthday, share pictures, and those sorts of things. If you have a business, open up a business page and that’s their goal. If you have a business that you want to raise awareness about your brand and your business and you want to interact with your customers, open up a page. Basically, that’s where you should post a lot of things about your business. Group is more engaging and more interactive.
Page can also be engaging, but not as much. When you share content, people just say, “Okay, I like this or I don’t like this.” And that’s pretty much. There is not that many … Typically, there is not that many questions underneath. In a group, people are more relaxed, I think, more engaging environment, especially if one person starts talking about something and then everybody jumps into a conversation. It’s more like organizational. Group is also great actually, especially if you’re just starting out simply because you will gain a lot of feedback from your users there and we all want feedback because that’s the way we’re going to grow and improve our products and services. That’s the way and that’s something that I recommend to everybody. You should immediately jump to the groups because yes, you will gain a lot of trust, people will know you better, like you and other co owners and those types of things because that’s how they became customers.
Other people is going to share their experience using your platform. This is also really, really important because what I found out, although we develop the path room and we can sort of idea how you should be using it and what you can do and those types of things. There is always a lot of other things that we didn’t really think of and that people are using it for.
Chris Badgett: Like what?
Tina Todorovic: For example, Bob W, he’s always using you wouldn’t believe. When he said, “Oh yeah, I’m using this, this, this, this.” He sent me a message and I’m like, “Oh my goodness, I really didn’t think that you can actually do that or you can do this,” and those types of things. He’s the one that always try to do different things to see what works, right? Basically, he uses … Immediately when his post is obviously published, then it’s shared to all his social networks, right? But it’s not like that as well as recycling, so he uses that. He uses recycling the post because he has a huge amount of post, like several thousands. Basically, that as well as he’s updating those posts periodically. It’s not really an old, old content. It’s all still relevant plus he uses the WordPress templates that we have like the custom messages as well as … On top of that, he also says like, several messages for each blog post differently. He uses everything that … It’s possible over there and that works well for him. He likes that abroad to have different staff everywhere as well as … On Twitter because there is so much going on you have to share like at least four times daily, even more. On Facebook, you don’t have to share like that much content on a profile or a group on Linkedin as well. It’s lik different things, right? Basically,
that’s why he uses like all those things combined. For example, when we developed, I thought, “Okay, so you have the custom messages in WordPress, you have their own publish or update or whatever scheduled in WordPress, things you can recycling and that’s all set up immediately, right? You don’t have to do and go and manually type different messages because you already have everything set up unless you are not using WordPress. Bobby is using WordPress and then he wants to use everything else as well as he … For example, writes for other blogs, like for GoDaddy garage for example and for other blog posts. He shared that blog post via our RSS feed integration, so he scheduled them like that. So-
Chris Badgett: Can you just for somebody who’s new to blogging, explain the RSS, what it is and what your RSS integration does?
Tina Todorovic: Basically, that’s a tricky question. The RSS feed … you can share each blog post with RSS feed. Pretty much if you go with the WordPress, for example, already on a blog post, if you type the URL of the website and then slash feed, you can immediately pull up the feed of that site.
Chris Badgett: It’s just ongoing, like this is the feed, this is what’s happened in the order that it happened?
Tina Todorovic: Pretty much, yes. You have to set up stuff. For example, in WordPress I believe the default settings is only I think 10 or 20 blog posts showing up-
Chris Badgett: In the feed?
Tina Todorovic: Basically … Yeah, in the feed. If you want to have more or like recycling and those types of things, you have to set it up manually. With that feed, you can … Well, that’s a really good thing because you can connect it to any other platforms out there and basically just schedule it, then share it from your side. You don’t have to go manually and share like the links and whatever.
Chris Badgett: That’s what we do with the LifterLMS Blog. If somebody subscribes to our blog, I don’t write. Basically, we send them an email with the new blog post. That’s all handled automatically. It’s like an RSS type of thing. You’re saying with Social Web Suite, you can say like, “On Tuesdays at 5:00, check the RSS feed and if there’s something new, post it to Twitter or this Facebook group-
Tina Todorovic: Post it to everywhere else.
Chris Badgett: … which is super helpful from an efficiency standpoint.
Tina Todorovic: It is, it is, yeah. Basically, we go rom the newest to the oldest post on your site and share it. Whenever something is … You just share your post, publish a new post, then it’s going to go immediately up on publishing it as well. It’s pretty much similar to WordPress, right?
Chris Badgett: I think that’s the strategy of … If you want to be everywhere and let’s say you know you’re going to like manually go into Facebook and write a bunch of custom stuff, you can let the RSS thing just handle all of some of your other outposts that you don’t check in regularly. You can be everywhere, but you’re not necessarily. You set it up once.
Tina Todorovic: That’s the thing. You have to try and that’s the thing that we talked about at the beginning for a different social network, right? You have to try all of them to see what actually fits you the best, your customers, and your brand and you don’t really necessarily have time. Nobody has time to try them all, right?
Chris Badgett: Yeah.
Tina Todorovic: As you said, we all were like so many kids, you cannot really do that. Then with us you can actually try them all and then see what fits you the best, where is your traffic coming from? We have the Bitly Analytics with us and that’s why I suggest everybody to use Bitly Integration because you can take it out like the link links as well as we have the UTM from Google Analytics. The Google Analytics is … Well, it’s my personal number one choice of analytics actually and I think everybody should use it because you have the answers to so many questions that you want to know and it’s free. I don’t know if you’re not using it, you should start immediately.
Chris Badgett: I think that’s really important to make, especially when it comes to social media marketing investments of your time to make data driven decisions. You find it’s easy to be like, “Okay, well how much traffic did I really get from that social media thing?” You also have scheduling and a calendar tool. I was wondering if you could speak to doing social media well through time, like into the future on the calendar because if you don’t really have a plan for that, what I notice people do is, let’s say they publish a post or make a video. They’ll just go everywhere and post it within 15 seconds of each other and then you see nothing from that person for like a month. What do you recommend for calendaring or let’s just say for a beginner? What are some just good rules of thumb of spreading it around through time?
Tina Todorovic: Well, it really depends how many posts you have and how many messages. Let’s go with that. At least, you should have like … Well, if you don’t want us to share it everyday, there are a few times that you should do it. For example, it depends. Different analytics says different things. There were a lot of blog posts written about it and research behind it, but mostly the other thing is also really important. That’s why I said Google Analytics because not everything works for everyone. It just really depends where are your customers in which time zone as well, not necessarily in your time zone, right? That’s also really important thing to remember most of the time. Basically, on Facebook people are more engaged on a Thursday, Friday, and over the weekend. That’s what a bunch of research shows.
If you want to do it once a weekly, Wednesday is the time. Wednesday is the day for all social networks. Don’t ask me why. There’s like a bunch of scientists-
Chris Badgett: That’s what the data say?
Tina Todorovic: I swear to God. No, because I read a lot of scientific research behind it. If you want to do it like once a week, like Wednesday is probably the way to go. If you want to do it like more than once a week … For example, on Facebook, a lot of people found out that as I said a Thursday, Friday, and weekends are good to go. Mostly Facebook and Twitter have the highest engagement between 12:00 and 3:00 PM or after maybe on Facebook be between 7:00 and 9:00 PM when people are at home relaxing. Linkedin is a little bit different because it’s for business professionals, right?
Linkedin is not over the weekends, nobody’s really tracking Linkedin over the weekend, so Monday to Friday is your best bet, right? Monday to Friday usually it’s either lunch break, like 12:00 to 2:00 when people are on lunch and then they’re checking Linkedin or maybe around when they are traveling, like commuting to work or coming back from work. Those are the times when Linkedin works the best. Linkedin, you should post once a day. You don’t have to go more than once because there is not that many content on Linkedin scale, so people can still see your post. Facebook pages as well, usually once or twice a day. Group also once or twice a day. It really depends how engaged your group is. But on Twitter, if you want to be more engaged, you should post at least four times a day at least.
Chris Badgett: That is some solid, solid tips.
Tina Todorovic: We’re going to write a long blog post about it as well as with our version two that is coming soon. We will have our recommendations for our users, for the posting by best times. Basically, those recommended times varies by research and then if you want to do it, we can just set it up everything for you. If you don’t, you can also change whatever works for you. But after this, I also want to have that. Please take this with a grain of salt. Try it for one week or two weeks and track your Google Analytics because you might find that these times are not really working for you. Well, we have some users that they are … and they told me that. They are most engaged people. They’re mostly on Facebook. For example, one user I have he is on Facebook. That’s his primary social network.
He posts on his Facebook pages and groups and he found out that for example, he is, he’s living in the Pacific time zone and the best time and users are engaged, are like 10:00 PM to 2:00 AM, which all the scientific research behind it says, “Oh my goodness, nobody’s ever at that time.” It just really, really, really depends, right about your customer, your customers, when are they most engaged in those types of things. Go with scientific research for two weeks and then track Google Analytics. That’s pretty much it. That’s where you will see the spikes and not spikes in the shares.
Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. In my experience, one of the things I’ve found is sometimes your audience is really local, like they might be like US and Canada if that’s where you live or Brazil if that’s where you live. But a lot of these online course and membership site folks, I have a global audience. One of the things I do with our software, I mean, we have a ton of customers across all kinds of different time zones. I just try to make sure that I don’t ignore the people and my night might be prime time for them or whatever, so it’s an interesting challenge.
Tina Todorovic: It is. That’s why I said you have to keep in mind the time zones, right? Because if you live in some small country and your time zone is completely different. Then, for example, all your customers are in US, you have to abide by either Pacific or Eastern. That’s pretty much it. There is no other way for you to gain more customers. But there’s-
Chris Badgett: Then there’s morning and evening people. I mean, there’s people that go to bed like on Facebook or social media. THere’s other people who they’ll get up bright and early and they’ll [inaudible] and they’ll do it there.
Tina Todorovic: The other thing that we are doing with our version tool what you should be posting in the morning and what you should be posting afternoon. There is a different content-
Chris Badgett: Interesting.
Tina Todorovic: … if you want to get better engagement, right? Basically, in the morning everybody is just waking up, so they’re still full of energy and those types of things and they’re still want to learn. You should post some instructional stuff.
Chris Badgett: Oh, interesting.
Tina Todorovic: In the middle of the day, you can also do that or for example, promote your products and those types of things, but at the end of the day, everybody is exhausted. They don’t-
Chris Badgett: They just want to sit back and entertain, so Video.
Tina Todorovic: Internet, yes. Videos, entertaining staff, Happy Thanksgiving and those light stuff. That works best in the evening. That’s pretty much it. It’s all psychology and science, right?
Chris Badgett: Awesome. Well, go to socialwebsuite.com and check out what they’ve got, check out the blog. I want to leave you, Tina. We’ve got about five more minutes with a really hard question.
Tina Todorovic: Oh. Well, I’m going to [inaudible].
Chris Badgett: In sales and marketing, there’s this concept of AIDA where someone goes from awareness to interest to decision to action and buying your product. Our friend, Chris Lemme, talks about the buyer’s journey, which I believe he does from unaware, problem aware, solution aware, product aware. These are like the different kind of phases people go through as they warm up to the idea and then some of them potentially buy whatever your business offers. How should we market to people who are … How should we use social media marketing like a couple of those different levels to someone who hasn’t even heard of us versus somebody who’s aware of us and we were trying to create content that might help them make a decision to buy or whatever?
Tina Todorovic: Well, that’s the thing that I said when I said brand awareness because at the beginning, nobody’s going to love you. Your mom and dad knows you and that’s pretty much it. Few of your closest friends and that’s it. Nobody knows what you are doing, right?
Chris Badgett: Yeah.
Tina Todorovic: At the beginning, you should market to everybody especially. The other thing is, what people doesn’t like if you just promote your products all the time.
Chris Badgett: It’s like a billboard and all that.
Tina Todorovic: The other research out there is maybe you put the other content or your valuable content, meaning like trying to count people how to be better in a course creation for example, for your users. It’s like really good because they are all course creators. Then for example, if you find another tool that helps them in, for example, video promotion or something like that, that will compliment your tool, you can always share them, “Oh, I found this cool tool. You can really create useful details, really easy and free.”
Chris Badgett: Like this podcast episode about Social Web Suite-
Tina Todorovic: For example, yes.
Chris Badgett: … which is one of the reasons why we have this podcast is to help add value and introduce people to the tools that we respect and use ourselves.
Tina Todorovic: I think that’s the best way to go, right? Because you’re trying to help your audience by actually offering them a solution that you trust and value and use yourself. That’s the first thing. Basically, those are the things that you should be sharing 70 to 8% of the time. Only 20 to 30% of the time, you should be sharing your stuff. Your staff meeting, “Oh, we have a Black Friday Sale, checkout our newest feature.” The really important thing in trying to get the brand awareness is that you have to have at least one blog post, at least 10 messages about each of your features because what we found out is that not everybody’s going to use the things that you think are most valuable. Some other people might find some other feature more valuable than the other and not everybody knows everything that you have, even the people that are using.
Even when we are talking, you don’t know everything that we have all the features because you’re not using it and you’re not interested to learn more because you’re already overwhelmed and that’s normal. But how would you find it if we didn’t share it, right? You wouldn’t find it. That’s the way to go as well. Try to share those types of things with people. Not just like in promotional-
Chris Badgett: Not just, buy now, buy now.
Tina Todorovic: Not just in promotional or sales way, but more explaining to people how they will gain value by using that. That’s the way to go. The car salesman days are long over. There are so many tools out there nowadays and the buy now, buy now button, it’s okay. But not that many people are really buying from buy now, buy now people. As we said at the beginning, they want to like you and trust you first and then they’re going to buy from you. That’s pretty much it.
Chris Badgett: But it is okay to sell on occasion but I agree with you-
Tina Todorovic: Of course. I mean, that’s the whole point, right?
Chris Badgett: My internal role is like at a minimum three to one, but more preferably like nine to one of like, I’m just trying to create valuable, helpful content or introductions. But, “Hey, we’re having a Black Friday ,” or whatever something or, “Hey, we just launched a new product or new feature.” That stuff does come out from time to time.
Tina Todorovic: You have to, you have to. That’s not really a sales pitch as much as like it’s valuable pitch to people who are already using your products.
Chris Badgett: Oh, interesting.
Tina Todorovic: They know. They know like for example, “Oh yeah, we just released this features.” If somebody is using your product, “Oh, this is cool. I should check this out,” those types of things. That’s the other thing like raising awareness and letting people know what features you have. That’s the most important thing because if you don’t let them know and if you don’t raise awareness about your brand and your product, nobody will know about it, right? You should do that all the time. Then you can … Bob also has a really good blog post about how you should do a bunch of stuff regarding how you should promote things and how can you use your one below post for so many messages and so many other things like updating and making into the course. For example, making into video or infographics. Infographics are big, right? Everybody is visual. They like to see everything. Those types of things you can also do. If you are helpful and trustworthy, everybody is going to come. That’s pretty much it.
Chris Badgett: Awesome. Well, thank you, Tina, so much. Go find that article on Bob WP. Just Google Bob WP social media. What do they call that? Repeating content.
Tina Todorovic: I think so.
Chris Badgett: No, no, content repurposing, something like that. You’ll find it. Bob WP is also using Social Web Suite. You can find Tina’s app Social Web Suite over at socialwebsuite.com. It can dramatically increase your ability to automate some social media and schedule things out in the future. A little pro tip every time before I go on some kind of vacation or I use Social Web Suite to get a bunch of stuff like going out while I’m gone so that my business can still be working while I’m away. You also have a philosophy where I use social web suite to work for me on the weekend. Plenty of people check their Twitter or their Facebook or Linkedin on the weekend, so that you can be there. Somebody happen to see what’s new while they’re there Saturday morning just hanging out, checking out what’s on the phone. It’s a really powerful tool. Tina, thank you so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. Any-
Tina Todorovic: Thank you so much.
Chris Badgett: Any final words for the people?
Tina Todorovic: Thank you so much for the kind words, Chris and we leave there as well. I’m hoping your audience is already using LifterLMS for course creation, right? If not, they’re missing out a lot. The final thing, well, if anybody has any questions, you can always find me. We have a draft or live chat and I’m the one replying. You can also send an email at tinasocialwebsuite.com. That’s my direct email address. Any of our pages groups we have … If you want to learn more about social media with WordPress, we have a group that we recently started and we are not promoting anything and actually the promoting is forbidden, so it’s social media marketing with WordPress and we are sharing their knowledge about WordPress and social media. That’s pretty much it. Thank you so much, Chris. I’m looking forward to hanging out with you in Nashville at Word Camp US soon.
Chris Badgett: Awesome. We’ll see you there. Thanks, Tina. That’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I hope you enjoyed the show. This show was brought to you by LifterLMS, the number one tool for creating, selling, and protecting, engaging online courses to help you get more revenue, freedom, and impact in your life. Head on over to lifterlms.com and get the best gear for your course creator journey. Let’s build the most engaging results, getting courses on the Internet.
