Join HLM's Danny Trifone for insights from his years of experience with social media of all types, covering all kinds of content for all types of audiences
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Interestingly enough, my educational background is in marine biology. I went to school in Rhode Island, and I worked in that industry for about seven years on the education side. It was actually during that, that I got interested in making content.
I would actually walk around, I worked in an aquarium, and I'd walk around and film the animals and then do voiceovers for them, and I would post those on social media. And so that was my kind of first taste of making content.
So after that, my best friend and I actually started a media company out in California. So I moved across the country, and we started this media company. He was really good at marketing, I was really good at writing. So I wrote newsletters. He would market them and then kind of through that path, over the course of a few years, we started making content for social media, and we got interested in the editing process and making thumbnails and optimizing content. And we found a niche that worked really well for us and our channels exploded.
Our TikTok channel has 350,000 followers. We've gotten several thousands, tens of thousands of followers on Instagram.
We kind of stumbled in it. We didn't really know what we were doing, and, you know, we found this success. I really loved making the content and learning about the different platforms. I'm still a part of that business, but it kind of runs itself now.
I was looking for a way to expand my reach and work with different sorts of clients in different verticals. That's why I landed here at HLM and just got really interested in helping small-to-medium businesses - that's kind of what I'm interested in. So it's been an interesting journey to get here so far, for sure.
I think one of the things that gets overlooked is a social media presence gives you an opportunity to show the world who you are and who your business is in an organic way, and you're connecting with your audience on their level where they are, and there's something unique about that as opposed to doing paid ads.
And I think a lot of people, you know, don't think about this too much, but people are sick of being advertised to, right? There's an ongoing battle for our attention coming from social media and notifications in our personal life.
A lot of us are on kind of content overload, and advertisements are just something we tend to go away from. You know, I'm sure if you're listening to this, you can think about a time you've been watching a YouTube video, and an ad comes on, there's nothing worse than that, right?
And and a lot of times, you know, you immediately skip that. So when you're posting organically, it really gives you an opportunity to give some value to the person who's watching your content. And I'll talk a little bit more about value later on.
But I think the biggest thing is just you're meeting people where they are, and it gives you this unique opportunity to have this back-and-forth where you're offering some value and the audience member can appreciate that.
And then you can kind of turn them into a potential customer through that interaction organically.
First one is time. I mean, you don't know how much time this stuff takes until you start doing it.
That's why almost every big company out there has a social media team. It's not even just a single person anymore.
That's kind of how it started in the industry. Now you've got teams. and it's because it takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of work, you know, the space is crowded. And to stand out, you got to be doing something unique and you got to be doing it frequently. So it takes a lot of time.
I think another good one is, as a business owner, you're really close to your brand, and that's a good thing. But I think when it comes to social media posting, having an outside perspective, someone looking at your business from the outside, they can see things that you might not see, with you being as close as you are to it.
I've seen that time and time again where companies have something they're doing on social media and it works. But then they hire an agency and they go, hey, you know, I think this would be great, and you see a light bulb turn on. It's that you just don't think of it because you're so close.
Another one is that, as a business owner, it can be scary to post on social media. You know, there's this mental block that that comes with putting yourself out there and creating content.
You know, what are people going to think? What are the comments going to be? What if I get negative comments? And that's all completely normal human psychology.
But I think, going with an agency, we can get over that mental block because this is what we do. And and I think that can really help get the ball rolling and get your channels going and get over that mental hump.
I think one thing I want to mention here too, for any business owners that are listening, I think a lot of a lot of folks think it's a waste of time to create an Instagram post, right? Like, what am I getting from this?
It's taking so long, what am I going to get from this TikTok video? What am I going to get from this YouTube video?
I think a good way to to frame the way you think about social media content creation is to think about creating an asset as opposed to just creating content. So what I mean by that is, if you're a plumber, right, create a video that would help your current customers.
So maybe you're getting a lot of questions about a clogged drain, right? You can make a one minute video showing how to unclog a drain with things around your house.
That's something you can give to your customers, but it's also something that you can use for social media. So you're creating an asset for your business that can be multi-purpose on all these different channels, but also, help on your website or be something you can email to your clients.
So this Asset-First Content Creation perspective can kind of help business owners get over that worry of spending so much time creating a social media post. Create an asset first. Then how can you use that for social media? And I think that can help business owners kind of get over that mental block.
Really great question. And I think I'll preface it with at some point, if you have a presence on social media, you're gonna receive some negative comments. That's just going to happen.
I think there's two schools of thought. And so let's let's talk about both. I think the first one is to ignore it. If this person is negatively engaging with you, they might not be a customer. They might just be a random person on social media.
They might not even be a person. There are lots of bots that are that are operating on social media that leave negative comments. That's a real thing.
Google has actually identified that, and Twitter came under fire for having all of these fake accounts that were run by foreign bots. So take that into consideration too.
So the first school of thought, just ignore it, kind of engage with the positive comments and the people who like your product.
The second school of thought - let's take a med spa, for example. Let's say you make a post about a massage package that you have and it's priced too high for someone and they leave a negative comment saying, you know, "Who is this for? No one can afford this." Like, "I can't believe you're charging this much," etc., etc., something like that.
I think there's a way to engage with that, especially as a small and medium business where you can say something like, "Hey, thank you so much for your comment, I really appreciate it. I understand that some of our services can be seen as being priced high. The reason we price them that way is because we have the highest quality massage therapists in all of Montana."
You know, we offer the best x, y, and Z, and we do this, that, and the other. And so there's a way to engage with that by explaining, you know?
I think both of those responses work, because if you don't respond to someone for a negative comment, they're just going to probably unfollow your page and go away.
But I have seen interactions on social media where you can change someone's mind. That is something that's possible now.
And try not to attach any emotional aspects to it. You never know who's on the other side of that screen. You never know what they're going through. You don't even know if they're a real person, right?
So going into social media posting, understanding that there's just some people out there who might be having a bad day and they might just need to say something negative about your content to make themselves feel better, just let them do it, you know? And and so going into it, knowing it's going to happen, having a plan in place, that's the best way to handle it.
If you need help with Social Media for your business, or simply don't have the time to handle it on your own, then be sure to visit our Social Media Management page to learn more, and give us a call at (888) 717-4249 or visit our contact page to speak to someone within minutes.