According to a recent report by Sprout Social and Harris Insights And Analytics, 96% of business leaders agree that investing in social media marketing is crucial for success. Even more impressive, nearly half of these leaders plan to increase their social media marketing budget by at least 50% over the next 3 years! 🌟

Here are 3 key takeaways from this research:

1️⃣ Social media is no longer just a trend; it's now an essential part of business strategy. With the ever-evolving digital landscape, it's crucial to stay ahead and adapt to new platforms, changes, and policies. By investing in social media, companies can remain agile and effectively engage with their audience.

2️⃣ Hiring a social media expert who understands both the culture and business aspect is paramount. While relying on a teenager might sound tempting, a knowledgeable professional will ensure your social media presence aligns with your brand values and goals. They can navigate the complexities of the platforms and create engaging content that resonates with your target audience.

3️⃣ Investing in tools like Canva or Sprout Social can provide a significant boost in social media productivity. With Canva, you can easily create eye-catching graphics to promote your podcast or highlight your next guest. Sprout Social, on the other hand, offers a comprehensive social media management solution, assisting in content scheduling, analytics, and reporting.

In conclusion, as social media continues to play a pivotal role in business growth, it's clear that investing in this area is no longer optional but necessary. By allocating resources, hiring experts, and utilizing the right tools, businesses can maximize their social media impact and gain a competitive advantage. 🚀

TJE Communication’s mission is to empower and educate small women-owned businesses and equip them with digital solutions to level the playing field.

IG - @tjecomm

TW - @tjecomm

LI - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tonnishaenglish/

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Each week, one of The Circle of Experts talks about critical aspects of growing your podcast. We focus on marketing, social media, monetization, website design, and implementation of all of these to help you make the best podcast possible.

Have a question or an idea for one of our episodes? Send us an email at podcasts@circle270media.com.

The Circle of Experts are:

Yasmine Robles from Robles Designs

Tonnisha English-Amamoo of TJE Communications

Don The Idea Guy

Brett Johnson, My Podcast Guy, from Circle270Media Podcast Consultants

Copyright 2024 Brett Johnson, My Podcast Guy™

Welcome to The Circle Sessions featuring The Circle of Experts. The Circle of Experts are Yasmine Robles from Robles Designs. Tonnisha English-Amamoo of TJE Communications and Don The Idea Guy. I'm Brett Johnson from Circle 2 70 Media podcast Consultants. Each week, one of The Circle of Experts joins me to talk about critical aspects of growing your podcast. We focus on marketing, social media, monetization, and website design, and the implementation of all these. This week, Tonnisha is here from The Circle of Experts. Tonnisha is on a mission to help small businesses level the playing field through digital marketing solutions. Tonnisha, thanks for joining me again today.

Yes. Yes. Happy to be here as always.

Now you have found a really interesting, research, some for for next year's social media, some investment in social media, what businesses are doing. So let's talk about that.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it was a report conducted by Sprout Social in a company called Harris Insights And Analytics. So for a little bit of background about what Sprout Social. So Sprout Social is social media management tool used by every, you know, big company that you can probably think of, even to small companies like me, and then it's a place that you can essentially build out your content calendar, scheduling your social media content, and they also provide some reporting. So they did an interview, of some of the the business leaders that use the platform. And what I found interesting, which is where I wanted to talk about is that 96% of business leaders agree that in order to be successful, companies must continue to invest in social media marketing. And nearly half of those leaders say that they plan to increase their social media marketing budget by at least 50% over the next 3 years, which is unheard of if you have been working in social media since the beginning, I mean, I remember there was a time when a social media manager didn't even exist. It wasn't a real job, quote unquote, and now you have top leaders, industry leaders who now recognize that not only is social media getting overall job, but it's also something that we need to invest in if we wanna be able to keep up with our competitors.

Right. Exactly. You know, that research has so many different layers of what we need to be attentive to. It's that, well, first of all, let's talk about the level of what social media is gonna look like in regards to the the quality that's gonna be out there. That it it that the next we're gonna see the next level of social media engagement. If that much money's gonna flow into social media, that's gonna be amazing.

Because here, the interesting thing is that that's exactly why leaders should invest because we don't know what social media is going to look like a year from now, 3 years from now, 10 years from now, and you need to have people around you who are agile and who understand how to navigate quickly when new platforms come up or when changes come up, when policies change, and you need to be able to pivot fast. Because you don't wanna, you know, I remember her. I worked in an agency in my first, like, marketing job and then from there I went to a corporation In an agency line, things move very quickly versus what a corporation, we had to go through so many levels just to get things approved. That is something that businesses cannot afford to do when it comes to social media. We don't have time to sit in a bunch of meetings and try to figure out if this tweet is approved or not. We need to have people on our teams who we trust who understand the platforms, who know how they work, who understand culture, and who can get into these conversations, and be successful at it.

Right. Now, so, you know, what you're talking about right there is also some training involved. Lots of different types. So let's go into what you see is potentially needed for training. All these different levels of understanding internally and externally of of what needs to

be there

to if you're gonna put that kind of money into it, you have to see some ROI.

Exactly. Unfortunately, I would say when it comes training. You can't train people to know the culture. You can't train people to understand why using this meme at this time is, like, comically, like, perfect for this conversation. Like some things can't be trained. Which is why when it comes to investing, I think one of the most important ways that you can invest in your social media is to hire somebody. And I don't just mean, like, you know, I remember there was used to be a joke when social media first became a thing for businesses. It's like just hire your, you know, sixteen year old niece to, like, run your social media. And, yes, your sixteen year old niece would probably understand the culture. But you also need somebody that understands not just the culture, but how that can relate to your business because sometimes something might be funny for you as an individual. To to post and join in different conversations, but as a business, it might not be appropriate. So you still need to have that sweet spot of somebody who understands culture and business. So I think that's the number one way you can invest. It's just to hire somebody. Now when it comes to training, I do think that, training your team to understand how to use these platforms is extremely important. And even understanding how to create content for the platform. So, you know, let's say for your podcast, you know, even if you have somebody that simply knows how to go into Canva, and create a graphic that's gonna highlight your next podcast guest. That's something that you should invest in. It's it's low hanging fruit, really, for you, as a business, as a podcaster, to have somebody around that can create the content that you need on a daily basis. Another way that you can invest in yourself, in your business when it comes to social media is a marketing tool like Canva or like Sprout Social, or even if there are tools that make it easy for you to edit down clips of your podcast. So that you can post them on social media. So I think one of those three things is gonna be really, really important for businesses over the next couple years to really think about if they wanna have a successful podcast, but then be able to get the word out about their podcasts on social media.

Yeah. I think a good example, that I can think of, I'm working with a client that just hired somebody to do some social media, mostly focused Instagram because she does a really, really good job with that, but it has taken her almost a year to understand the culture of the business. And she's had her ups and downs. She does great work, though. That that's the thing. And, and, and she's gonna get it. It's okay. I guess what I'm leading to is, anybody that's brought on board, you have to have some patience to understand that it's gonna take a bit of time. And even to the point my mind was going when you were talking about the different social media platforms, we could go to the extreme that one person is hired just to take 1 a care of 1 social media platform. One person is an Instagram specialist. One person is a LinkedIn specialist. I don't see how it cannot go that direction.

Yes. And I'm I'm so glad you mentioned that because I was thinking that when he started talking about that client and, you know, unfortunately, The this first of all, these platforms originally were not created for us to run businesses on them. Right. I always have to remember that. That's true. That's that's -- -- to be social.

That's true. That's something to remember. The basis is it's it's social media, not business media. What Exactly. And even LinkedIn is a social media platform, but tin but retained it with business oriented content. Exactly.

And these these creators of these platforms understand that there are people running businesses on them So they do make it harder for us to do that intentionally because they want us to pay for ads or pay for all these things to to get to get the word out there. Also, which we talked about in the past with the TikTok drama. Robles going through some similar issues right now with the US government as well. We are gonna keep seeing these platforms have to make changes legally, to make the platform safer for people, which means it's gonna be harder for you as a business to navigate it. So if you can hire somebody that is Instagram focused, that is gonna be super beneficial for you because this person is hyper focused. They're gonna be able to move a little quicker when it comes to policy changes or algorithm changes because they're gonna be in that platform every single day. Same thing with TikTok, TikTok, stew is the Wild Wild West, and it is a great place to grow. But you gotta understand different policy changes and things that they're doing over there. Same with LinkedIn, it's a lot different. So if you can hire a team with specializations in different platforms, that would be amazing in honestly, some of the bigger companies, that's what they do. They have teams for these different platforms, for these different Robles. So if you're able to do that, I mean, you're gonna be light years ahead of other businesses out there.

Yeah. So when a company hires a social media specialist or a team of, that sort of thing, you're talking about a 20 fourseven platform that anything can happen at any point in time, how does a business respect that team's time that they know they can't be on social media 247 to monitor, but sometimes there's just a a a an s storm that goes on, you gotta take care of it right then and there. So how would you advise or how do you look at it when you're looking at, you know, working with companies going, yeah, I know there's a 20 fourseven type of platform, but I can't be here 247 to take care of things. How how do we look at that in a healthy way?

Yeah. That that's a hard one because I think it comes down to the type of people that you hire. You have to hire people that are passionate, not only about social media, but about you and what you do. So I have a client that focuses on social justice issues, and we had a young woman, a pregnant woman, and Columbus, Takaya Young, who was shot and killed by the police. And that was something that happened on a Thursday evening and I as a social media manager had to get on top of that and we had to work that whole weekend, because we had to talk about what was going on. Fortunately for this client, I'm passionate about what they do. So and I'm passionate about my work. So it wasn't Robles for me to work over a weekend or kind of be on call. So you really just have to make sure or really just think about, I guess, the type of business that you have. And if it calls for, at times, there's gonna be something that needs to be talked about right now. You just need to make sure you have people on your team that, are gonna care more. Of course, we all wanna get paid, but sometimes it's bigger than that. So just vetting people and making sure that they really align with your mission and and what you want to be putting out there as a business owner. Sometimes it may not call for that. I mean, for me personally, I think with my business, I don't think that it would require a, like, midnight posting and less, like, TikTok blew up or something, and it was, like, something crazy than maybe, but for the most part, not really. So also be realistic. Like, the depending on what you're doing. Is it really that big of a deal that somebody would have to post sit, like, 10 o'clock at night? But if it is, make that known really make that known because, you know, I see a lot of social media managers get burnt out because we have to wear so many hats because we're not just working on social media. We're doing the graphics. And since we can do graphics, people assume that we can edit video, and we can do all the stuff. So you just you really just gotta be realistic bet people, and pay people a fair, a fair price too, for their work.

Right. Yeah. Well, this this being said, I mean, we're we're dealing with podcasters listening to this or at least focus of it. And I don't with this conversation, I don't necessarily wanna paint a picture of like, well, I might as well just toss in the towel. How am I gonna compete against this? Or even if you're a business, that has a podcast, I think it's it's looking at it recognizing that that podcast can be in a very important part of your social media and vice versa. So how would how would you take a look at, you know, if you're you're looking at a business coming on board, and you know that, okay, they're increasing budget. They're doing social media. Because of, you know, what you read, you're seeing it happen, looking at it from the standpoint of how does that podcast get involved, be involved with social media, but but at the same time, no. It's they all have their lane, you know, ultimately, but they all need promoted and cross promoted and work with each other. I guess my question really to you is, I mean, how do you approach that knowing you have a new client? They want you to take your social media and, oh, by the way, we have this podcast we are working with as well too, how do you work that in there? And and then I'll know maybe some thoughts about that knowing that the landscape's gonna change in the next year.

Yeah. Yeah. And I would approach it just as I would really with anything else. And it's all about thinking about the type of content you want to put out. And I think when it comes to investing in that If you don't wanna hire somebody, you definitely got to at minimum invest in training your team and getting the right marketing tools that make it easier for your team to take on because this may be an to roll for them. They they may not be a social media manager. They may be, you know, some, different role in the team, but now you're asking them to or help with social media, you have to, at minimum, invest in training them so they understand how this all works. Getting them the tools that make their lives easier. So whether it's Canva or any sort of editing tools tools for them to schedule that social media so that they can work ahead and then training them on the tools and then continuously providing them with professional development opportunities to continue to learn about social media to learn about the changes, just to learn about marketing in general. You have to be willing to do that if you are not open to hiring or at or at this time, you know, maybe you're not able to hire.

Yeah. How do you stay ahead of all the news with the social media?

Yeah. I'm always looking at Sprout Robles blog. So definitely check that out. They they have a great blogs. They also, at times, would do, like, luncheons. They're not really luncheons, I guess, but, like, lunch and learns. That's word. They'll do like lunch and learns and different trainings like that. We'll send a different podcast, of course. You know, even with the whole situation with TikTok, I really followed that through the dailies podcast, which is the podcast by the New York Times. And being on social media and being a part of the conversation, seeing what people are talking about, checking out different hash tags for things I want to learn about following other, people in the space and and really just trying to to stay alert. There's so many changes, so it's it's hard to keep up sometimes, but I do the best I can.

Alright. Yeah. Well, and it it does affect how you plan and what you do to understand the audience, why you're doing what you're doing with the social media with with all the content you you create. Let's look at it that way. Just content creation. Of making sure that the audience, as we know, Facebook has become older, but it's but it's it's it's a it's one of the originals. So it's gonna become older. But we're gonna start to see Instagram become older as well too over time and under and I understand year by year by year, ages. I put it like ages quicker and quicker. Yeah.

Who your customer is. I mean, some of the the Gen Z or Stink Instagram is old. And played out, and then I'll like it.

Already? That that's what I'm saying. It it it ages so social media ages so quickly that you have to understand, okay, maybe this is not my platform anymore for what we do to promote the content that we create. Via podcasts or video or whatever the case might be. And it also you have to look at it as how and what the content is looking like and how you present it as well too. So, yeah. Yeah. Talk about a very fast moving target. It's exciting, but I can I think that's your point, the burnout? I I, you know, I I I am amazed that those I I can see why it's such a younger, culture because of you know, they don't maybe they have the hours to put in, they love it. But, boy, how many how many years can you do that without going? You know, I need a life. I have to have a life. I want a life back. To be respectful of it. So that's that's really insightful too. Yeah. Exactly. Well, if if, the listener wants to get ahold of you, talk about, you know, Next year, they're thinking about it. I I I'm looking at investing as well too. Maybe contacting you to talk about, okay, I have this budget. What's the best way to use it and and what are your advises? How can they get a hold of you?

Yes. Yes. I offer free, 15 minute consultation and you can book one of those. Just by going to my website at tjecommunications.com. You can all So find me on instagram @tjecom. So tjecom. And then across social media as a Tonnisha English-Amamoo can find me on LinkedIn. Facebook and, I guess, now it's called It's not Twitter anymore.

Yeah. But

I am on x.

Or I'm seeing X X Formerly Twitter. I mean, I don't know how long that's gonna last me. That's more

of a

a media thing anymore. Like, so that so people know, oh, we mean Twitter when we say that sort of thing. Exactly. So, yeah, I'm kinda surprised it stuck around. I thought that was kind of a a Elon Musk whim at one point in time. I was like, oh, no. He's serious about this, isn't he? It's like, okay.

Everybody still calls it Twitter. I mean, it's weird to just say x. I don't know. It's kinda

-- It's that's strange. -- because you still tweets. Doesn't really roll

up the tongue.

It doesn't. It doesn't. Yeah.

And he changed it from tweet to post.

Suppose. Okay.

Pusha supposed.

So the so that's generic. Oh my gosh. I didn't know that. So so that's that's generic to everything else as well too. Oh my gosh. Oh, Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I don't think that, yeah, I think he bought the wrong company.

No. No one calls it that everybody still calls it Twitter.

Right. Right. You know exactly.

I kinda retweet, or I tweeted this. Like, nobody's gonna say

-- It's gonna

take -- -- x this.

Right. Right. It's gonna take it's gonna take a long time for culture to change if it ever does. He he may be he may be pushing a rock uphill on this one. Exactly. Yeah. Well, you you I

think that's a perfect example of, like, not understanding culture.

Yes.

Not listening to the people, not following, you know, what what the people are advising you to do. I mean, that that that was like, you didn't even have to hire or create any focus groups. I mean, the focus group was right there.

Yeah. Yeah. That's that's a that's a that's a good point. You you always I always scratch my head when when brands and companies change logos or change -- Mhmm. -- phrases and and it's and and I know I've got history because I'm older, and I've heard that phrase over and over with certain companies and and and and and brands and businesses, but you kinda go, why are you changing that? That was so good that Jingle was so good. That logo is so good, and and you kinda see that I think with Burger King, we're kinda off on a tangent, but but I think Burger King's kinda coming back to an older logo, an older look that got rid of that king king guy, whoever, I mean, that was that was a waste of money. But it looks as though they're kinda bringing it back home to what it used to be. And then it's just a solid type of of of fast food, and and and the branding they're doing, but it's just it's always a head scratcher. I'd love to be a fly on the wall when it's presented, and and they go, love that idea. And then, you know, it fails in 2 years. So

It it always all these things typically happen when there's not enough people in the room that understand culture.

Yeah. The people that buy their product or use their service, they just don't understand what's going on with them. It's it's -- Yep. It's not looking at research and understanding it or they're like an Elon Musk come in in a bowl and a China shop and go, you know what? I'm changing it. Don't care. They will follow-up because we are who we are.

Right. Right.

Doesn't work nine times out of 10 -- Yeah. -- if that high. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting.

Yeah.

Well, if you need to get a hold of me, you can go to my podcast guy.com. Check out my calendar. I've got, website as well to circle270media.com. But, mypodcast guy.com will get you there too, to, get ahold of me for podcasting. Look forward to talking to you next time we meet, Tonnisha. Thanks.

Yes. Of course.