Speaker 1: Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the guile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors, Neil Patel and Eric Siu.

Eric Siu: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

Neil Patel: And I'm Neil Patel.

Eric Siu: Today, we're going to talk about how you can engage with your social media fans when they keep ignoring you. Actually it's couple of months ago, Facebook actually just made a tweak again to their organic reach. I'm talking about Facebook, so Facebook's made these tweaks. Now, organic is even harder. Guess what that means? That means you're going to have to take out your wallet more and spend more money on paid. Let's just get this one out of the way first, paid is always going to work assuming that you do it ... Well even if you do it wrong, you're still going to get more engagement.

Neil Patel: It doesn't matter if you're on Facebook or Twitter, whatever social network that you're using, you're going to have a lot of your fans over time, or followers, that stop engaging with you. Make sure you're doing things to re-engage with them. One thing that I like doing is I test out different content format types. I used to just do text-based articles and linked to my own website. Used to do well, would get a lot of likes, retweets.
Now, I found recently that when I create videos and I put them on these social sites, I get way more reach, way more engagement and once I'm boosting up my overall page metrics, then when I share my content-based, text-based posts in the future, they get more engagement than before when I didn't have any videos on my page. Don't stick to one type of content on your social page. Test out different other formats. Then, from there, you can figure out which ones resonate more with your audience and do more of that stuff.

Eric Siu: Yeah. I've seen some creative stuff going on with Messenger Bots. We've talked about Messenger Bots in the past. With Messenger Bots, I've seen people where they run comment campaigns. Basically they're running a ad to a Messenger Bot and they're saying, "Hey. If you're interested in this, leave a comment below." Or they can say, "Type in Neil, for example, if you want this resource." Then, a bunch of people will start typing in Neil, and that increases the engagement, right? You can just re-target your fans or people that like your page. You can do that. Or let's say Neil is selling ice cream. This is Neil's Ice Cream. Neil likes Taco Bell actually.

Neil Patel: I love ice cream.

Eric Siu: Okay. Neil likes ice cream, so let's go with Neil's Ice Cream. What Neil can do is say, "Hey. If you're interested in this ... " All the fans will say ... He has 100,000 people on his ice cream page. He can say, "Tag three of your buddies if you're interested in this ice cream." It would be like the summer giveaway. Now, all of a sudden, each person's tagging three people to get in on this giveaway for 50% off or free ice cream for a week or a year or something like that. That engagement is going to explode. You can take that, even though I'm talking about paid right now, you can take that methodology and see if you can apply it to the organic stuff that you're putting up as well.

Neil Patel: What's the number one type of content that you push out on the social web?

Eric Siu: I think it's the same thing as you. It's video right now, right now.

Neil Patel: Do you do more pushing of content than engaging with your audience?

Eric Siu: Yes.

Neil Patel: I do as well.

Eric Siu: That's where we're wrong. We got called out for that, by the way, on our Facebook page.

Neil Patel: Marketing School Facebook page?

Eric Siu: Yeah. On the Marketing School page, there's a guy that's like, "You guys made this group," this guy named Robert. I responded to him, by the way. He was like ...

Neil Patel: I didn't even know we had a Marketing School Facebook group.

Eric Siu: We do. I made it just so we could have it. 800 people joined. This guy is like, "Neil ... "

Neil Patel: Oh that's cool.

Eric Siu: "Neil and Eric are AWOL here. They talk about engaging, but they're not here."
I was like, "Yeah. You're totally right. We're going to fix that."

Neil Patel: He's right. That's getting the point that I'm trying to make right now. If you want people to engage with you, engage with other people within your community. Don't just share tweets that are, "Hey. Check out my site." When people are asking questions within your industry, even if they're not following you, respond to them. Help them out. When you give in the social web, you're going to get back. That's how you really boost your engagement. Not just by showing and asking, but more so giving before you ask.

Eric Siu: Yeah. It's about changing the process too. Neil's busy. He's traveling all the time. I'm traveling. We're doing this other stuff, right? The thing is even just having someone monitor it is ... And, by the way, I engaged with this guy more. He's like, "I'm not going to be satisfied with somebody that's just filling in. It doesn't fill a void, right?" If you build a process where you're having someone manage it and then that person can outline maybe a couple of questions where Neil or myself can answer once a week, that will do the job.
At the end of the day, our process was just broken because we weren't engaging. Yes, we made a mistake. We're owning up to it. We are going to be responding to people because, well, you people listen to this and you want other ways to, well, even talk to us. We're trying to figure it out, so just give us a little more time. It's the same thing. Just make sure that you're engaging with people. You're not going to make the same mistake that we made where we just put up a page, and we just let it sit there. You actually have to use it.

Neil Patel: Let's talk about some ways that you can engage with your audience. One way is just helping people out within your space. If they ask a question, that's a great thing. Another tactic that you can do is just join groups on Facebook related to your space. When you engage, help people out there, you'll notice that people start coming back to your fan page or friend you on Facebook. You can do the same tactic on LinkedIn as well. Messenger Bots are amazing way to engage people as well. I know the Facebook one, Larry Kim recently released his Messenger Bot. It's called MobileMonkey.

Eric Siu: MobileMonkey.

Neil Patel: Yeah.

Eric Siu: You can also try using out Mobile Monkey to engage your Facebook fans. That should help create more engagement and more traffic back to your site. In addition to that, you can try using Live. There's Facebook Live, YouTube Live. Instagram has their own Live, right? Does Twitter have a live?

Neil Patel: Yes, it does.

Eric Siu: It does.

Neil Patel: They bought Periscope and now Twitter owns Periscope, so it's just Twitter.

Eric Siu: Yeah.

Neil Patel: When you use these live features, people can ask you questions in real time and you can respond to them. You can also do Q and As. Whatever it maybe, the key is just being social. You're on a social network, so be social.

Eric Siu: Yeah. The final thing I'll add before we take off is I met a guy that actually, in his Facebook group, he has his support team for the new members that actually end up joining the group. They make individualized, personalized ... They can just shoot using a phone, for example, saying hello to that person, asking if they can be helpful in any way. That video actually shows up in the Facebook group. I forgot which group it is. Going that extra mile, creating that "remarkable experience" is going to go a long way. People are going to talk more and more about the group, because nobody else is doing that because it takes time.
Neil and I right now, we're just trying to take stuff [inaudible 00:06:40] engage with people. If you can take it to another level where you're actually talking to people and showing your face, people are going to be like, "Wow. These people are legit." Anyway, before we go, go to singlegrain.com/giveaway to check out our daily giveaway and we'll see you tomorrow.

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