Thanks for having me.

I was really thrown in the deep end at the time when I started. My dream was to become a TV producer. I knew since I was about 14 or 15 years old, that’s what I’m going to do and nothing else was an option.I went to London to study TV production and did a few odd jobs there to pay for my studies. Like selling popcorn in a cinema and waitressing at a pub. Then, I worked for free for few TV companies, a few TV production companies. Until I finally started working there and being paid for it.

Right in the middle of the financial crisis, it was 2009, I lost my job for the 5th time, so I was made redundant for the 5th time. I know it doesn’t make me sound too good, but that’s really what happened and I see it as a blessing now. It wasn’t at the time but looking back, it was a blessing.

I realize, there’s no way I’m going to find another job. Not when every company out there is downsizing. Definitely not in the TV industry because the TV industry is particularly small and really tricky to get in.

I called my brother asking him for help, because he’s a very successful internet marketer. He wrote a New York Times bestselling book, The Laptop Millionaire. He always used to tell me, “Forget about what you’re doing, just have your own business. Have your own internet business.”

I never really followed his advice for few reasons. Well, the main reason was, I just couldn’t picture myself doing what he was doing. I just couldn’t picture myself. It’s not really what I wanted to do and also, I thought that I didn’t have the skills he had. I didn’t …

I just also felt that there’s no way I’m going to throw away all these years of studying and working for free for to now, basically change completely my career. I just couldn’t make myself do it but I got desperate. I got desperate and bills pile up even when you lose your job.

So I call him. Swallowed my pride and basically asking for help. He said that it was the best news he had ever heard. He invited me to come to one of his seminars. He used to run some of the biggest internet marketing seminars in the UK. I went there reluctantly and I learned different strategies. The strategy that appealed to me the most out of all of them was affiliate marketing on Twitter. Affiliate marketing is basically when you sell other people’s products for a commission.

I thought, well, I don’t have a product, so that’s convenient. I can just grab other people’s products and sell them for them and make a commission. Twitter’s free to join. It was pretty handy. Sounded easy. I went ahead and did that. I implemented the strategy.

I built a few Twitter accounts. Built them up to a few thousand followers and picked a few products from clickbank.com which is an affiliate network where you can just pick and choose any product you want to sell. I started generating an income.

The first day I started promoting affiliate products, I made $21. My first $21, I know it wasn’t the most exciting $21 I had ever had. Because it was … It just was proof that it worked, so that’s all I needed really. It was a proof that it worked and all I needed to do was scale it, and that’s what I did. I scaled it. I created even more Twitter accounts. I built them up to even more Twitter followers I started promoting even more products.

Very quickly, within three weeks, social media marketing replaced the income I had lost. I started making $250. In my third week, I made $250 in a week in commissions. That’s pretty much how much I was earning at the time. It’s not a lot but it’s what I was earning at the time working full time as an assistant TV producer.

Then one thing led to another. I created my own product about Twitter marketing and information products. That did very well the first year. I made I think about $100,000 just selling that social media marketing product. One thing led to another again and people were asking me if instead of following my course, I could implement the course on their behalf like a done-for-you service.

I took on a few clients and next thing you know, I was just working Christmas day, Christmas eve, New Year’s Eve. The next thing you know, I was like doing 20 hours a day at social media marketing. I had no life anymore. I decided to hire a few people to help with the social media marketing. I started with one person part time thinking that it’s going to be plenty.

I just had one person helping me part time. That’s going to be plenty and that person became full time. Then, that person needed help. That’s how we grew and then became one of the fastest growing social media marketing agencies here in Australia.

I tell them that the first mistake to avoid is joining a lot of social networks. Because what happens is, it becomes really difficult to manage. Because social media marketing, whether you like it or not is very, very time consuming. Because it’s something that you must do manually.

It’s conversation marketing. You can’t really automate conversations. I say, just pick a social network wisely and just pick a few. One or two is plenty. Because you’re better off if you have one or two social networks by managing them well and then, bringing your return. Rather than have five and basically, they’re like billboards in the middle of the desert.

I tell people to choose them wisely. The best way to choose which one fits is really knowing your target audience and exactly what you want to do. What would you want to achieve with your social network.

It could just be brand awareness. Brand awareness, Instagram is great for brand awareness because it gets a lot of people sharing your content. It gets seven times more engagement than any other social network. It’s good for brand awareness and word of mouth marketing.

If you want to generate traffic and leads then Facebook is probably the best social media marketing platform because there’s Facebook advertising, and I think that Facebook advertising is even more efficient or at least will become more efficient than even Google AdWords. I predict that’s going to take over really.

It really depends who your target audience is and what exactly you want to achieve. Once you know that, you’ll be able to make a more informed decision.

When you know who your target audience is, let’s say it’s women who are into arts and crafts. Then, you know that Pinterest is more likely to suit because Pinterest attracts more that sort of audience. Mainly 80% are female and they are into arts and crafts.

If you want more of the younger audience, Snapchat and Instagram tend to attract a younger audience to social media marketing. It also depends as I said on what you’re trying to achieve if you had the marketing budget. If you say, “Yes, I can afford to spend $5-10,000 a month with my online marketing.” Then, I will say, “Definitely invest in Facebook advertising.”

A lot of things have to be taken to account before choosing a social network for social media marketing.

Facebook is definitely pay to play but there’s other social networks where their advertising platform is quite new still. You can still get a lot of organic reach. I would say Facebook mainly is pay to play. The only way to really get reach for free now on social networks like Facebook for example would be, if you are really part of a movement.I always tell people. If you want organic traffic, free organic traffic, you have to either create a movement or join a movement. Because then, you can get a lot of word of mouth. A lot of people sharing your content. Therefore, giving you more eyeballs to your content for free.

Otherwise, yes, it can be really tricky and I mean, every few months, Facebook decreases their organic reach. You’re doing well one day but then all of a sudden, you’re not. Because they’ve decreased their organic reach again. Little things like that.

There’s still a few tricks to maintain a steady level of organic reach doing social media marketing on Facebook. I know that they’re trying to become the next YouTube, so they absolutely love when people upload their own videos. If you want Facebook to basically show your post in people’s timeline for free, then, upload some 45-minute long videos. There are a few social media marketing tricks but yeah, it’s getting harder.

It depends. Now, it’s 45 minutes. I mean, for me, it’s still a short video. 45-minute videos seem to be the ideal length on Facebook for videos. As long as you’re not sharing the length of the video and you’re actually uploading a video. Then, that will give you more organic reach.

That’s right.

I love Twitter because that’s really the social media marketing platform that changed my life.

Well, you have to remember that with Twitter, you can speak with anyone regardless of whether you follow them or they following you. You can initially have conversations with absolutely anyone. I think that makes it really powerful. All you need to do is put their user name at the beginning of your tweet and all of a sudden, you just start a conversation with them which I find extremely powerful.The @ mention and @ replies on Twitter is just huge. Hashtags, you can really join conversations. Thanks to hashtags. Hashtags, I mean, Twitter is the number one platform for hashtags. You can really leverage that. Your tweets can be seen by anyone who isn’t following you. Who is following you, start in conversation in Twitter. That also makes it extremely powerful.

Something else also is their advanced search feature. Twitter has an advanced search feature and it allows you to basically siphon leads, even local leads. I can tell Twitter, show me anyone on Twitter who from January the 1st to January the 31st, said that they wanted to lose weight and they live in LA.

Twitter will just show me all the people that match that search criteria. Then, you can really have targeted leads. It’s not really leads yet until you start conversations with them and they start responding.

It definitely lets you do all that for free and pre-qualify people. On Twitter, it used to be about volume. We have 100,000 followers and you “spray and pray.”

Now, with Twitter, because of their little features like the @ symbol and @ replies and hashtags and their advanced search tool. You can get what you want for free, and I think that’s very powerful.

The only problem is, is it’s hard to scale because it’s something that you do manually, so it’s quite tricky to scale. Also, it’s very time consuming. If it’s going to be free, you’re going to lose somehow and you’re going to lose your time. I guess, you’re going to not lose your time but you’re going to spend time.

No. Because, basically from my experience, I know that people won’t do it. People might do it at the beginning. They might agree that is the right thing to do. Do it yourself. It’s your voice but then, they don’t do it. I think this is a second best option is to just have it done by someone else.The person who handles your account becomes your voice. Because the person who handles your account becomes you. At least in my company, what they do is they look at everything that the person has ever produced. Any videos, any content, any blog post, any articles to really understand what their voice is. Is it friendly but informal? Is it frank, creative, adventure type voice? It’s very easy to then model that voice.

People say, “I’m always concerned. Oh, if I let go, my social media marketing will just outsource it. Then what’s going to happen, people might feel it’s not me.” People won’t realize. We’ve never had it happen where people say, “Is that really you, Mary?” We’ve never had that before.

Yes. I mean, you can do both. If you’re going to go with the spray and pray technique where basically you have a bunch of followers and you want to basically share messages with them. Then, tweet as often as you can. Maybe every half hour to make sure they see your tweet.If you want to do less but more, you can just specifically target people and just have conversations with them and it’s like a exchanging text messages with them. The only difference is that it’s free. Basically, managing maybe five or six conversations at a time, every time. It depends really on the strategy. Do both. We find that doing both works really well.

Well, definitely not as effective as Facebook. First of all because of the audience size. I mean, you’ve got almost two billion people on Facebook and on Twitter, you have between around ten million. Again, that’s a limitation because you can’t target as many people.Also, the targeting options. Not as many I guess. Not as many as Facebook. With Facebook, you can say, “Look, pick someone who just got married and is female but lives in Sydney.” Whereas with Twitter, you can’t really. Your targeting is still quite general.

You can still get traffic and leads from Twitter advertising but if you’re in a micro niche, it can be a bit tricky. Just because of the volume. You don’t have that volume on Twitter and you don’t have the targeting options that Facebook advertising has.

Yes. Before, most ads would lead to a landing page. Now, people are reluctant now to let go of their name and email. They just don’t like it and Facebook doesn’t like it either. What’s working right now is basically sending people to content that’s not gated with an alternative page and landing page. Just content, pure content.Within that content, then, you can have calls to action. I think that works much, much better. Because it’s really hard with cold traffic to basically get people to let go of their name and email. People get bombarded with landing pages. They just don’t like it because they know what’s coming next. They know what’s coming next and so, that doesn’t work as well as it used to.

What we found is, just send people to pure content and the people who are then interested, you’ve warmed them up a little bit because they’ve across your name and your content. Then, retarget them. Retarget them with an opt-in page offer with a landing page offer.

It’s going to cost you less because they’re more targeted. You know that they’ve clicked on your ads, so they pre-qualify themselves. Then, re-advertising to them is going to be cheaper. First of all, they warmed up because it’s not as cold traffic as initially. Because they know you now, trust you a bit more because you gave them a great piece of content without asking anything from them. Then, retarget them.

I think retargeting is definitely the way to go with social marketing and definitely, don’t expect anything with cold traffic at first. People run a campaign and they think that for every dollar they spend, they’re going to get $2 back. Not with cold traffic. At least from what I’ve experienced. Re-targeting is where the money is.

Something else that we’re doing right now that works really well is the one-click opt-in option with Facebook.

With Facebook, you can basically capture people’s names and emails with one click. When they click on your call to action, so your call to action on your ad can be read more, find out more, whatever. When people click on that, Facebook automatically saves the name and email into a spreadsheet for you.

Now, you can set it up with a software called Lead Tunnel so then, with that software, the names and emails get automatically uploaded to your auto-responder system. Whether you’re using GetResponse or AWeber Email Marketing or InfusionSoft or MailChimp. Instead of having the spreadsheets of names and emails, with Lead Tunnels, you can straight away upload these onto your auto-responder and these people can basically be part of your campaign. Your email campaign.

That’s what we do and we’re doing retargeting one-click opts-in now. With cold traffic, we’re sending them to content that doesn’t require any name or email.

Only Facebook platform, that’s what we do. You can do whatever you want but that’s really what we do within Facebook.

Yes. Pretty much, but it turns out to be cheaper because you can spend a lot of money trying to get people to buy something from you. You put their name and email and not get any results. It ends up being actually much more effective.

Yeah. Definitely volume with email marketing is overrated and I’ve come to realize that. We own four online, four different online businesses and they each have a database. I tell you, the databases that produce the most income are definitely not necessarily the ones are the biggest. I can say that with absolute certainty because I get to experience that every single day with our four businesses.

Yeah.

That’s right. It cuts the middleman which is the landing page. It cuts the middleman. They get to consume whatever it is that you want them to consume outside of Facebook but they’ve already given you their name and email with the one-click opt-in option.

I agree. I mean, marketers destroy everything.

We have to say too much and then, we have to come up with something new because it doesn’t work anymore.

I think Instagram because of course, it belongs to Facebook now and they’re starting to introduce new features. I’m keeping an eye out to see what’s going to happen next. It’s also very promising because engagement is seven times higher than any other social network.Something that I’m keeping a close eye on, Instagram ads also were introduced. Also something that’s worth pursuing. Now, that slowly, slowly, Facebook advertising is getting saturated then Instagram advertising would probably be the most obvious step. The next obvious step.

Pinterest, although Pinterest has grown slowly lately. Pinterest have allowed new features, so they’re introducing new features like affiliate link, you’re allowed to have affiliate links on Pinterest. Whereas before, you couldn’t. Little things like that, they’re really trying to appeal to marketers.

Pinterest and Instagram, I’m keeping close eye.

Yeah. That’s a big mistake. When people want to outsource their marketing to an outsourcer, it’s just the wrong thing to do because you have to remember, an outsourcer is just a person who will execute. They won’t bring in personal skill or expertise or knowledge.

It depends on what you want to do. If you just want to do someone to execute and you’re happy to micromanage the process, then, that’s fine. You can just have an outsourcer.

If you actually want to delegate the whole process without having to have too much input. Then, definitely pick a company that specializes in exactly what you’re trying to achieve. Also, a second selection criteria is don’t pick companies who just claimed they were experts at social media management or experts at SEO. Get companies who are expert at tracking.

Because I found that with all the companies we compete with, a lot of them, they’re not tracking experts. They don’t look at data and then execute based on the data they’ve collected. The main selection criteria would be well, do you know how to effectively track and measure and base on your results act accordingly?

I think that’s very, very important. People tend to hire let’s say, social media management based on their understanding of a social media platform. “Oh, you’re great on Facebook. You understand Facebook, so here. Do my Facebook marketing for me.”

Instead of saying, “Well, are you a tracking expert?” Before actually being a Facebook expert. Because anyone knows how to post. It’s not difficult. People know how to post, and it’s easy to get your head around Facebook. Everyone’s a Facebook expert nowadays because yeah, they know the tabs and they know what this means and what this does.

Really, what make someone an expert is someone who knows how to track effectively and also act according to the analytics. I think that’s the main selection criteria.

We offer social media marketing for up to six platforms. The platforms we manage for people are Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Pinterest, Instagram and LinkedIn. These are the six people can pick from.We usually tell people just pick one, one platform and then we can build on that. You don’t have to, as I said, spray and pray. Just focus on one. Only start adding more platforms when you’ve mastered one and that one is bring you results.

That’s what our advice to people is, and people can find us on our website socialmediaworldwide.com. There’s a phone number and email there. They can call the office or email us.

Or of course, they can look at our training on YouTube. YouTube.com/socialmediaworldwide. You’ll find a lot of training there. We are very transparent with what we do, how we do it because we don’t sell information, we sell the service.

We’re really generous with all our training as well, the training can be found as I said on YouTube.com/socialmediaworldwide.

Thanks for having me.