What a #BigSocial! Sam Flynn and Mari Smith

by Melanie Boylan
Event Write Ups and Takeaways

It's a new week and normality has struck after the #BigSocial last week. Such a tremendous build up leading up to the day and I can truthfully say it didn't let me down. I am writing several posts on relevant speakers and things I have learnt from them to give to you my readers over the coming months, I hope you find them useful!

#BigSocial

Dr John Ashcroft was the inspiring organiser of this event and with the able assistance of Alexandra Kington, Sam Booth and Nicky Humphress made this conference the success it was. He made it possible for small to medium business owners and companies, to have access to the best minds in Social Media today. The whole day went without a hitch in a perfectly sized venue with the best AV team I have come across frankly. Let me give you an overview of what the event brought over the two days!

Thursday 8th July 2015

Sam Flynn had been given the auspicious job of starting the conference day off and explained how actually selling less online would help sell more. A strategy of using the "social" aspect more than the "media" aspect was implied and she illustrated quite nicely using your "brandonality" (steady now, that's her word - don't pinch it!) can be the lynchpin for your business model online.

Sam Flynn The Big Social Media Conference 2015

My "brandonality" if you like; would be to the point, punchy answers to your problems. It's how my brand and myself work, hence why I like "STOMP" so much.Sam suggested putting offers out there with a deadline too, ensuring that you always add keywords and of course customer reviews to improve your brand image too.She had a 7 step plan to a successful social strategy and she suggested the first of MANY APPs that might be of use to help get that, namely: Tweetreach, Sendible, Tweriod, Twubs, Salesforce, Buzzsum, Social Mention, Sproutsocial and Followwonk. I am familiar with some - not all of those! I will need to check these out and see how useful they can be for me and my clients.

Mari Smith was up next with her characteristic smile and bouncy personality! I personally had been looking forward to seeing Mari as I have been learning from her webinars and pages for several years now. She also shared her slide show, so please check here for the full one and, of course, all her others.

Melanie Boylan and Mari Smith The Big Social Media Conference 2015

You may have noticed recently that there is a response rate now added to Pages regarding Messages through the page, we found out from Mari that in order to get a badge confirming how great you are, you needed to respond within in 5 minutes! It will be quite a feat that any small business owner can achieve this, so would love to know if any of you have. Worth knowing also, you don't need a Facebook Page to use messenger any more and it's actually a fantastic way to contact people directly for business.

Then she went on to Facebook native video and now this now has got the best reach organically, way more than Youtube and it has now overtaken it by quite a mile. With autoplay and ad targeting to add on; it could well be a very strategic move for business. She stated that mobile video traffic will grow approximately 55% each year until 2020, so you must take that into account when scheduling your content.Ensure that your content is also very visual. Everyone remembers things so much better when using an image - her takeaway suggestions were of course Canva but also Vionic, I must look into that one.

Content is King Mari Smith #BigSocial

Useful Nuggets:

  • Did you know that Twitter now allow 10,000 characters in it's DM's (direct messages)? So you can now happily query and complain by DM wordy style.
  • She confirmed that Facebook have now partnered with Shopify so it should be worth watching how this changes their platform now too.
  • Organic reach has now dropped to 1-5% on Facebook, so time to set up Facebook Ads and promote and boost posts folks!
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