Social media is often your customer’s top choice to try and solve any issues they are experiencing with your site or your product. This brings up a few challenges for big and small businesses: Customers tend to expect answers right away Your leads may give up on your brand if they find your social media… Read more »
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Social media is often your customer’s top choice to try and solve any issues they are experiencing with your site or your product. This brings up a few challenges for big and small businesses: Customers tend to expect answers right away Your leads may give up on your brand if they find your social media… Read more »
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The other day I was recording a podcast episode with my
co-host Eric Siu and he wanted to discuss something in particular.
He wanted to talk about how I got to 62,000 Instagram followers in a very short period of time and without spending any money on ads or marketing.
Eric is a great marketer as well, and when it comes to
social media, he spends much more time than me on it and he even has people at
his ad agency dedicated to helping him grow his personal brand online.
And of writing this post, he has 4,056 followers.
It’s not just with Instagram either, I beat him on all
platforms.
Heck, he even does something that I don’t do, which is smart… he continually pays for advice. For example, he had his team jump on an hour call with Gary Vaynerchuk’s social media team so they could learn from them and grow his brand faster.
So, what’s the secret to my success?
Well, before I get into it, let me first start off by saying I love Eric to death and the point of this post isn’t to pick on him or talk crap… more so, I have a point to make and you’ll see it in a bit below.
Everyone talks about strategies to grow your social following… from going live and posting frequently or talking about the type of content you should post and what you shouldn’t do.
I could even tell you that you need to respond to every comment and build up a relationship with your followers, which will help you grow your following and brand.
And although all of this is true, I dare you to try the fundamentals or the strategies that every marketing guru talks about doing. If you do, I bet this will happen…
It will be a lot of work and, if you are lucky, in the next 30 days you may get 10% more followers.
Sure, some of you will get much more growth, but you’ll find
that you can’t always replicate it and it won’t be consistent.
So, what is it then?
Luck is part of some people’s success, but not most. The problem with luck is it doesn’t teach you much and it isn’t easy to replicate.
The reality is, some people will just get lucky and have tons of traction.
In other words, luck isn’t the secret. But if you do want to get “luckier”, then you can always become an early adopter which helps a bit.
When you jump onto a social network when it’s new, it’s
easier to grow and become popular.
For example, I got to over 30,000 Twitter followers
extremely fast when Twitter first came out.
At that time, I wasn’t as well known… it happened because of
a few reasons:
But here is the thing: even though being an early adopter helps, it’s not the secret to my success.
Just look at Instagram, I am really late to the game. But I started growing fast just this year as that is when we really started.
If you can get in early, you should do so, assuming you have
the time to invest. For example, this is the time to get in on Tiktok.
When you get in early, there is always the chance that the social network may end up flopping. But if it does take off, you’ll be ahead of your competition.
Here was the secret to my growth… and it still works today. Eric Siu is even doing it with me right now.
It’s piggybacking on brands that are already popular.
When I first started, no one knew who I was. And I’m not saying everyone knows who I am today… by no means do I have a large brand like Tony Robbins.
What I did early on in my career was piggyback off of other popular brands.
For example, I hit up Pete Cashmore from Mashable, Michael Arrington from TechCrunch, Adrianna Huffington from Huffington Post, and so many other popular sites like ReadWriteWeb, Business Insider, Gawker Media, and GigaOm to name just a few.
I know some of them don’t exist anymore, but back then they were extremely popular. Anyone who was in tech, and even some who weren’t, knew about each of those sites.
So, when I got started as a marketer, I hit up all of those sites and offered all of them free marketing in exchange for promoting my brand and adding “Marketing done by Neil Patel” or “Marketing done by Pronet”, which was my ad agency back then.
Just look at the image above. TechCrunch used to link to my site on every page of their site… forget rich anchor text, it really is all about branding.
The hardest part is, I had to email and message these
influencers dozens of times just to convince them to let me help them for free.
And a lot of them ignored me or didn’t accept my offer.
But of a few said yes.
Pete from Mashable was one of the first to say yes. Once his traffic and rankings skyrocketed, his competition hit me up. Especially TechCrunch.
What was funny, though, is that I was constantly emailing TechCrunch and didn’t hear back. 6 months from my first email, they eventually accepted my offer.
I made a deal with Michael Arrington at the time in which once I boosted his traffic, he would add a logo that I did marketing for him, which you saw above.
In addition to that, he would tell all of his venture capital friends what I did for him and share the results (so hopefully they would share it with their portfolio companies, which would help me make money) and write a blog post about me.
He didn’t end up writing the blog post, which is fine, but he
did the other two.
When he sent out emails to VCs showing a Google Analytics graph of his traffic growing at a rapid pace, I quickly got inundated with inquiries about my marketing services.
In addition to that, I was building up my brand… and my
social media following. I was gaining “social clout” because I was doing good
work for influencers.
One could argue that boosting traffic for someone like TechCrunch by 30% is worth millions and I should have charged for my services. Although I spent countless time doing free work, I wouldn’t trade it for any single dollar as it is what made me and helped build up my reputation.
And I didn’t stop there. Even today, I try to associate myself with other popular brands. Just like how I was lucky enough to work with Robert Herjavec, who has a popular TV show in the US along with Mark Cuban…
Here’s how many visitors I was getting for my name “Neil Patel” on a monthly basis before I started working with Robert.
And this is how many visitors I get for my name on a monthly
basis a few months after I worked with Robert.
That’s a 37.84% increase in a matter of months!
By piggybacking off of popular brands, it doesn’t just help my website traffic but also helps to grow my social media following as well.
Just like as you can see below with my Instagram growth…
Now it isn’t just me who can do this, anyone can.
Just like how I piggybacked off of brands like TechCrunch, Eric is doing something similar to me at the moment.
We have a podcast that generates over 1 million downloads a month.
Eric’s had a podcast for years, but the one he has with me has more than 10x the listeners. This has helped him grow his brand a lot over the last year.
Let’s just look at the data. According to Eric, due to the podcast, he has signed up 6 clients, which has generated 540,000 dollars in annual revenue.
Now when he goes to tech conferences, 3 to 4 people tend to come up to him and mention how they love Marketing School and his work. In addition to that, it has been easier for Eric to set up meetings (people respond back to him more now), and he is also getting advisory shares in companies due to his growing brand. And the best part is, he is getting more paid speaking gigs for up to $10,000 a pop because of the podcast.
The data shows it was a good move by Eric for partnering up with me. He pushed me to do a podcast years ago and I told him no because I was too lazy. He didn’t give up though. Eventually, he got me to say yes and flew to my house in Las Vegas to record our first episode.
He did all of the work and it has been a great mutual relationship as doing this podcast has also helped grow my brand at the same time.
Now you are probably thinking, why isn’t his follower count growing fast enough?
Well, he needs to do what he is doing with me with a few more influencers to really put fuel to the fire. Just like how I didn’t only piggyback off of TechCrunch… at one point the Gawker Media network was linking to me on every page of their sites, which was seen by over 100 million unique people per month.
That really gets your brand out there!
Another example is Brian Dean from Backlinko as he did something similar with me back in the day. Years ago I approached him to write a detailed guide on link building with him and he also created videos that were on my old marketing blog Quick Sprout, which helped him grow his brand.
I can’t take credit for “making” Eric or Brian successful. They would have done well without me… and in the grand scheme of things, I really didn’t do much for either of them.
It’s like saying TechCrunch made the Neil Patel brand. Of course, it helped, and helped a lot… but one partnership won’t make or break you.
And if I didn’t continually blog, create videos, speak at events, or do any of the other stuff that I did, the TechCrunch partnership wouldn’t have been as effective.
Eric and Brian would have grown their brand in other ways because their work stands for itself, hence they would have been successful on their own. I just helped provide a little boost, just like how TechCrunch provided me with a boost.
And once more people get to know you, you’ll naturally do
better on the social web.
For example, when Will Smith created his Instagram account, he didn’t have to buy ads or anything. Everyone just knows him already and that’s why his Instagram account blew up really quickly.
And you can do what Will Smith did on a smaller scale. Similar to what I did.
But don’t expect it overnight. Will Smith has been on television for over 20 years. It’s multiple shows, movies, and connections with other famous people that have really helped grow Will’s brand.
Of course, we won’t get on TV as Will has, but you can piggyback on other popular brands multiple times to create a similar (smaller) effect.
All you have to do is help these influencers out for free.
If you are a web designer, offer design services. If you are
a marketer, offer marketing services. If you are selling a product or service,
keep giving it away for free and maybe someone will talk about your company.
If you don’t have anything you can offer that has value, just look at whatever influencer you want to associate with, see where they may need help, learn that skill, and offer it for free.
It’s the easiest way to become popular on the social web.
That’s my secret to being popular on the social web.
It’s also how I built a decent size company… purely by
leveraging other popular brands in the early days.
You can do the same, but you have to be patient. Don’t expect it to happen overnight.
For example, Eric’s brand has been growing but we have been
doing a podcast together for over 2 years now.
Plus, he continually pushes on his own and doesn’t just rely
on leveraging other influencers.
Remember, nothing worthwhile happens overnight.
You have to be persistent with your emails, your direct messages, your text messages, and whatever else you can do to get a hold of these influencers. Most will ignore you but it is a numbers game and, eventually, you’ll be able to associate your brand with someone popular, which will grow your brand.
And last but not least: Don’t expect an influencer to make you successful. Sure, multiple influencers are better than one, but that’s not what I meant.
If Brian Dean from Backlinko wasn’t good at link building, creating content, SEO, and educating, he wouldn’t do well… no matter who he associated himself with. The same goes for Eric.
Your skills, your abilities, your product… whatever you are
trying to brand needs to stand on its own.
So, what do you think about my secret? Are you going to
copy it?
The post The Real Secret to My Social Media Success appeared first on Neil Patel.
You know, one of the coolest things a brand can do on social media is to host a social media contest. I mean, what part of a social media contest is not fun? The sense of competition, funny and interesting entries and the best part, winning amazing prizes! The whole point of having a brand …
The social web is huge. From Facebook to Pinterest, they all command billions of eyeballs per year.
Which, of course, makes these channels too big to ignore. In other words, you have no choice but to participate in them or else you’ll miss out on traffic and revenue.
But, how much time and money should you devote to each social network?
Which ones produce the best ROI?
How much are 100 social media followers really worth?
To answer these questions and more, I polled 483 companies who are all leveraging Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.
Each company has been participating in all these social networks for at least 3 years and they have at least 100 social media followers on each platform.
Of the 483 companies, 159 of them were in the B2B space and 324 were B2C companies. And their revenues varied from $10,000 a year to $250,000,000.
Now before we dive into the data, keep in mind all of the stats are broken down based on 100 social followers.
For example, if we looked at traffic, we looked at how many visitors they generate per 100 followers.
And for the purpose of this blog post, we will focus only on organic social media traffic.
So, let’s dive into what we learned:
Compared to when each social network originally came out, it’s become much harder to generate organic traffic from each of them.
You can still generate organic visits, but of course, reach has died down. But how much has it died down?
As you can see, it has drastically decreased.
In 2015, you could generate a bit more than 3 visitors a month from the social web for every 100 followers you had, and now it’s dropped down to roughly 2 visitors per month.
I know that data isn’t shocking, but think of it this way, that’s a 38.6% drop in organic social media traffic. And based on the chart, there are no signs of recovery.
Sure, organic social media traffic might be dying as each network wants you to advertise, but which networks drive the most traffic per 100 followers?
If you had to take a guess, which one do you think it would be?
It’s definitely not a social network owned by Facebook. Both Facebook and Instagram drive the least amount of visitors per 100 followers.
Instagram isn’t much of a shocker, though, as you can only drive traffic through bio links and asking people to swipe up in stories.
But what was surprising is the amount of traffic Pinterest drives. Pinterest was the best performer, followed by LinkedIn and then YouTube.
Here’s the thing to note about YouTube… although it drives a decent amount of visitors per 100 subscribers, most people using YouTube don’t experience much (if any) traffic because they don’t link out to their site within their videos.
You can use YouTube annotations to do this.
The first chart shows that organic social traffic is slowly dying down, but how about if you increase your posting frequency?
That should increase your organic social media traffic, right?
In general, posting more often does lead to more traffic. But after 8 monthly posts on each social network, the data shows you’ll see diminishing returns.
Why you may ask?
The way most social media algorithms work is that the more people engage with your content, the more of them will see your content as you post it.
So, your goal should be to only post content people love and want to engage with. The moment you start posting mediocre content, it hurts your overall traffic numbers because that means fewer people in the future will see your new content no matter how amazing it is.
Speaking of engagement, which social networks tend to have the most engaged users?
I was shocked by the engagement stats because I assumed that Pinterest would have won in this battle as they are driving the most traffic per 100 followers to websites.
But I was wrong.
Pinterest did perform really well, but LinkedIn won.
Instagram also did extremely well, which I wasn’t shocked by as most of the people I know who use it do so as a “personal” social network instead of leveraging it for work.
That’s why the engagement is so high on Instagram.
One thing to note is that posts not containing a link, such as images or videos, tend to get the most engagement.
This is also because social sites tend to promote content that keeps people on their social sites as opposed to driving their visitors off to your site.
If you aren’t producing videos, you should definitely consider starting. Even though videos don’t rank well on Google, they are the future.
It’s why I create more video content each week than text-based content.
With video, there are 2 main types of videos… one that you just upload and ones that are live.
Let’s see how the different video types stack up against each other.
When you look at the chart above, it’s easy to say that Instagram produces the best results for videos. Then come LinkedIn and YouTube.
But there is something that you have to keep in mind… Instagram auto-plays videos while YouTube is much pickier about what they count as a “video view.”
None-the-less, if you’re going to create video content, you should post it on all of the social networks out there, but I would first focus the majority of your efforts on Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube.
YouTube won’t provide amazing numbers in the first 24 hours of uploading a video, but through YouTube SEO, you can continually get views while you won’t see that happen on any of the other social networks.
For live videos, the results are similar in which Instagram and YouTube lead the pack.
But what is interesting is that live videos don’t generate as many viewers as just posting and scheduling them.
When we dug into why the main reason wasn’t that social sites don’t want live content, it’s that with non-live videos, businesses spend more time leveraging keyword research and optimizing their videos for the maximum amount of views.
While on the flip side it is a bit harder to do that with live videos.
If you want to get the most views from your videos, use tools like Ubersuggest to see what keywords are popular.
Putting keywords in your title and descriptions isn’t enough, though. Social media sites are able to decipher the sound to see what your video is really about.
Now let’s get into the best part… conversions and sales.
Have you heard the saying, the money is in the list?
If you aren’t collecting emails, you should start right away. Because once you have an email list, you can always market to people on your list and convince them to buy your products or services.
LinkedIn has the best conversion rates from a visitor to an email subscriber. Pinterest and YouTube also perform really well.
You may think that most of the people on LinkedIn only care about B2B but that is wrong. Remember everyone on LinkedIn is also a consumer. They buy everyday products just like you and me.
What was interesting with the email collection numbers is that the majority of your social media followers won’t ever convert into email subscribers. But as you share and post content on the social web, the followers of your followers may also see your content, which then increases the likelihood of getting more traffic and email subscribers.
Whether you love or hate social sites, they do drive revenue. And no you don’t have to spend money on ads to generate revenue.
Ads do help, of course, but here is the percentage of revenue that each business generated from organic social media traffic.
It’s been declining over the years, but the numbers are starting to flatten out.
The decline isn’t just related to social media algorithms becoming tougher, though. It’s that businesses are also diversifying their marketing approach. They are taking an omnichannel approach which means they leverage more channels. Because of that, each one also makes up a smaller portion of their revenue.
Social media is still strong and kicking. You may only be able to generate 2 visitors a month for every 100 followers you have, but that scales as you grow your social following on every network.
Plus, the brand effect you can get by doing things like uploading videos will also help significantly.
Now before we wrap things up, I thought it would be interesting to see what percentage of social media traffic is generated from organic efforts versus paid:
There is a huge trend of companies spending more and more money on social media, which aligns with the stock price and financials of companies like Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter.
None-the-less, don’t be discouraged by your social media traffic dwindling down.
If you get a bit creative and follow this, you can spike your numbers.
So, what are your social followers worth to you?
The post New Study: What 100 Social Media Followers Are Really Worth appeared first on Neil Patel.
The social web is huge. From Facebook to Pinterest, they all command billions of eyeballs per year. Which, of course, makes these channels too big to ignore. In other words, you have no choice but to participate in them or else you’ll miss out on traffic and revenue. But, how much time and money should …
Editor’s note: This post was written by our wonderful Paper.li publisher, Ann Smarty. She includes many insights that are helpful to small businesses and entrepreneurs wanting to have success on social media. According to a collection of statistics from Iron Paper, by 2015 a full 54% of B2B marketers had used social media to… Read more »
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