Part 1: The Foundations of Social Media Marketing with Rand Fishkin
Episode Summary:
In part one of this two-part episode, we’re joined by Rand Fishkin, Co-Founder, and CEO at SparkToro and Best-Selling Author of ‘Lost and Founder’. Rand tells us about the advantages small businesses and brands have over their larger competitors, the way in which they can optimize their approach to social media marketing, and how to make an audience resonate with products or brands.
Key Takeaways:
- Small businesses and brands have a lot of advantages, such as being innovative, willing to take risks, and not needing to engage in marketing channels with enormous market plans. They can use these qualities to their advantage while competing with big-name companies that are more conservative
- As a small brand, the optimal way to approach social media marketing is to focus on a few channels that are a good fit for you. That way, the audience that most resonates with your product, brand, and unique value proposition is on those channels and interacting
- You don’t need a large number of clients as a small business. You can afford to go one by one with the new customers you get from each channel you invest in. You can target your influencers to reach a certain audience and gain a modest number of clients
Part 2: The Future of Social Media Marketing Strategy by Rand Fishkin
Episode Summary:
In part two of this two-part episode, we’re joined by Rand Fishkin, Co-Founder, and CEO at SparkToro and Best-Selling Author of ‘Lost and Founder’. Rand discusses how the reciprocal nature of the social media landscape might be a useful metric to be aware of in terms of long-term ROI. He also discusses how his team uses SparkToro to find unique insights to focus on. Finally, he speculates on the future of social media, which will be determined by the actions of governments around the world.
Key Takeaways:
- Small challenger brands in a start-up environment that don’t have the bottleneck of a corporate-style organization may benefit from being more metrics-informed rather than being metrics-driven. Allowing curiosity about what works and being informed about that flexible approach might be a creative step toward a long-term ROI
- Content Marketers can use social media to amplify data through the following three levels:
- Share the content that you create
- Repurpose relevant elements of the content you’re making on your own website or webinars into native content for the social media network of interest
- Take the information or topic that generated engagement on these social media platforms and turn it into content for your websites, with a thread that connects the social media platforms to your website
- The future of social media will be very different, and it will be determined by the actions of governments around the world. More particularly, the regulation of mergers and acquisitions