Social Media Strategy Challenges

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer Nord podcast, where we work on getting better step by step professionally and personally. Let's get started. Welcome back. If you're here, you're now on the audio version. You're listening to the podcast and Developer Nord, Building Better Developers. This episode, we're going to talk about this thing we've spent a lot of time thinking about, which is creating social calendars. And how does that even apply if you're a developer? Particularly this one of those things that I know everybody now thinks social sites and maybe not Facebook, you may be younger and you're thinking about your Instagrams and things like that, but Twitter, slash X and all of those. But there is value in those. Those are our ability to advertise for free sometimes, sometimes paid, but it is definitely a way for us to get our message out there. It's the mountaintop that we get to go take our megaphone on and go talk to people. So I think this episode, this is what we're going to focus on. We're going to talk a little bit about social calendars and how do you put it together and what are some of the challenges with it? And so we'll start, just go back. If you want to just reiterate there, Michael, we're talking just before we kick this on about what prompted this for you for this month, your assignment. And then we'll dig into that a little bit. And I guess I'll start and throw my two cents in and then see where you go with it. Sure. Well, it kicked off this conversation was I am in a co-starter class with my local co-op kind of like where we work. And I'm going through this course to kind of help me refocus starting a business. I mean, it's been over a decade since I did Milosh Consulting and it's been over seven years since we really kicked off development. So the challenge that they prompted us with was to put together a social media schedule for the month of April. So it's prompted me to think of, okay, what social media channels do I really need? What do I need to post on those social media channels? And what kind of schedule do I need to do? Right? Yeah. And I think that's the, that last part is probably the first one to think about is what, there are a lot of different arguments for frequency and size and things like that. There are those that will tell you that if you, for example, if you do a podcast, you have to do it three times a week and it has to be at least 15 minutes an episode, but no more than 25 minutes an episode or a blog needs to be 500 words, but not more than 750 and you need to do it once a day. There's all of this. There's all these experts that will tell you how you need to do it. If you look at the stats and this goes to some of the people that I've followed over the years, Libsyn, Liberated Syndication that does podcasting, they in particular have got, their podcast on podcasting basically is something where they very regularly talk about stats. They look at stats and how do those move needles and things of that nature. And it really comes down to not frequency, not size as much as it is the value of the content. If you've got something interesting, people will show up. People will keep coming back to it and think about the best example that keeps being brought up over and over again is hardcore history. He has no regular timing. He'll throw one out and then a month later throw one out and then maybe you won't hear from them for a year and a half. And sometimes it's an hour and a half and sometimes it's eight hours and sometimes it's a whole series and sometimes it's one and done. But it comes down to, it's almost like in his form doing an audio book, however often that comes out, just like books. You can look at it and look at these authors that write over and over and they just like crank out books left and right versus the ones that do one every few years. But if it's a good book, then people are still going to buy it. So I think the first thing, if you're going to put together your calendar, you want to think about that frequency and length. But I think more importantly, as you step back and go, it goes back to the why again, it's like, what is in this case, if I'm going to do it for the month of April, what is the message or what are the messages that I want to get out during that period of time? Thoughts on that? So with the InVision QA, I've actually, and we've kind of had a sidebar on this a little bit through chat where I was trying to figure out, okay, do I want to do a seven day schedule? Do I want to do a five day schedule? What will kind of work within my timeframe? But also what would challenge my viewers or my listeners to come to the channel, come watch me, come pay attention to my content? What is relevant to my customer? And I've come up with a couple ideas. The biggest one being start the week off with a challenge. Do some type of use case or business challenge, challenging the business to something with QA. For instance, how is your continuous integration going with your projects? Is it going smoothly? Are you having problems? What kind of QA do you have around that to make sure that it even works? That your pipeline's working, you have alerts, things like that. And then kind of follow that up with day two, like, okay, here's some tips on how to wrap QA around your content integration. And maybe like Wednesday, do like a business use case of how this company or company X tried to implement continuous integration, it failed or how they successfully applied QA to their continuous integration. And then kind of Thursday, maybe push out like a survey. What are some of the common problems you have? And give them a couple choices to pick and maybe an other to fill in. And then wrap up the week with on Friday being, you know, kind of do a video cast or a full cast and say, hey, okay, let's walk through the use case. Let's do a full deep dive, maybe about 30 minutes long. And then kind of fill in with what Envision QA can bring to the table to help their company if they don't have the QA, if they're struggling with this problem. That's an interesting... The way you lay it out, there's a couple of neat things about that. One is that you have sort of a... And we did this way back when we started, I think when we did IT for recruiters, even before developing, or is that we had a... So you have like a theme on Monday, a theme on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. So each day of the week, whether you do it five days a week or three days a week, that you have sort of a theme. So, and there's more than a few places I've come across that will have like, you know, tips Tuesday and wild things Wednesday or whatever it is, they have some sort of a theme. And it's a little bit of a, you know, a little bit of a cliche, a little gimmicky, but it also works. And it also gives you... I like the... The thing I like about it is it gives you something to sort of like a starter for your topic for each of those days. And that's something that considers you don't have to do the same format, the same style, the same thing over and over and over again. You can mix it up a little bit and keep it interesting for your viewers, for your audience. The other thing that's really interesting is the way you've laid it out is those are easily multiple media types. You could do that audio, you could do that. You could have some blog stuff in there. You could have some video stuff like you mentioned at the end. So it gives you things that, which is something I think everybody needs to think about a little bit now is like, what is the medium you're going to use? And if you're going to use a couple that are not the same, for example, let's say you'd use YouTube, but you're also going to have a blog. You can put the YouTube videos on the blog, but the written side of the blog, you want to have content that feeds or that fits written material better. And in the video side, obviously you don't want to be talking code because it's not going to be very useful. So it does something also to think about is not only your schedule, but what are those mediums that you're going to use and then matching those maybe to some of the platforms are going to be the best way to deliver that medium, be it video, audio, written, smoke signals, however it is you get your information out. Exactly. And I've started initially, so I'm kind of following the model we did with Develop Nurse. So I've got a YouTube channel set up, got LinkedIn, I've got X, I've got Facebook. I am playing around with the idea of doing Instagram. I'm not sure if I want to touch TikTok since that's become a hot political topic at the moment, but it kind of stick to those channels and then figure out, okay, do I want to just do daily text to X just kind of to drive it? Like here's links to this or do I want specific messages tailored just to X, but have something different go out on Facebook? That's kind of one of the challenges even with the podcasts that we're doing here is what message can I fit with the channel that we're delivering to? So it's like X, unless you pay for the premium version, you're limited to like 156 characters or something along that lines. I don't know the exact character off the top of my head, but whereas with LinkedIn, we've got like 500 plus, you could almost put a whole blog in there. So those are kind of the things that I'm trying to figure out this week and hopefully I'll have something more definitively defined going into next week. The other interesting thing for those that bumped into for Twitter slash X and then also LinkedIn is, and even sometimes Facebook is not over talking about yourself. Is it mixing in articles that are not just selling your service, your product, talking about yourself, but instead are items of interest for your community, for your audience. And that's something I found was really nice. And that's actually ended up originally we had back when we first started developing our, I think we had a buffer account and that was really nice because you could connect up to RSS feeds. You could pull information in and you could easily set it up so that you could go sort of browse RSS feeds, look at some news that's out there, find something that's interesting, turn around, copy it, basically just generate a post, throw some post text around that and be like, hey, I saw this. It's great, great topic starters, conversation starters and ways to just sort of help your, as we're doing research, help your crowd out, your audience out and say, hey, this is something I've run into a bunch. Maybe you've run into it. Here's an article that tells you how to solve this problem. The nice thing though is, you know, buffer, you see that and then they drop that off of it. But there are ways you can do that, whether you use a buffer or the other ones that I forget what Hootsuite and some of those, or that's why I ended up just building my own little tool at one point that all it does is it just, and I think we've definitely used it for develop and nor we've used it for RB consulting, where it just feeds in. You just assign an RSS feeds, pick articles. We can also, you can treat your YouTube as a RSS feed. You could get RSS feed out of your blog. So you just stream everything, essentially stream everything in through RSS, select the articles you want and then pick and post where you want to while you're in one tool instead of having to log into different places. So a good tool is going to be, I think, very helpful. And if you use one of these, like, you know, where you can schedule stuff. So you have three slots a day, seven days a week. You just start filling that in with some of that material, whether it's stuff that you've generated or stuff you've found in your research. So that gives you a little bit more of that sort of, it's a timeliness and it's awesome. It's also just being there on a regular basis because a lot of that stuff, it shows up and it's gone. If you're, you know, you can have that thing go out at 8 a.m. on a feed and nobody's going to see it past 8 0 5. You know, particularly like Twitter and some of that where there's just so much noise. You have to figure out how to do it regularly enough. And eventually, you know, the key there is to get them to follow. So then they'll start seeing your stuff and not just everybody's. And that's an interesting point. You know, with Develop an Earner, we have a set schedule. We drop our podcast and we drop the video. Then when we also do our social media posts with this or with really with anyone, you know, with anyone watching this, what typically, what are like the top three things to keep in mind for timing to directly hit your audience? You know, I know we've done things like multiple posts during a day, things like that. What are your thoughts on that? Timing is a I love MailChimp from a timing point of view. If you're going out like newsletters and emails and blasts and stuff like that, it has its own scheduling algorithm based on your mailing list. And so if you're going to do something that's this is a little side note from the social side, if it's not a social, but if it's more like a newsletter or something, take a look at MailChimp. And it's the it's the paid version. Yeah, it's a paid version. But you can depend on the size your mailing list. It's and even I guess, regardless of size of your mailing list, it's it's money well spent because it can it figures out when is the best time to send that with your audience. This is where your avatar becomes, I think, a very big piece of it. One of them, if you go back back in the day, John Lee Dumas, when he did Entrepreneurs on Fire, one of the things is when he was talking about his entrepreneur, it was he had the it was a guy. I don't remember the age, but a certain age. And this is what he did. And this is when he went to work. And this is what his commute time was. And that was how he figured out what he wanted his podcast length to be, because he figured people had about a 25 minute commute. And he made sure that he would release it. I think it was on the West Coast time or whatever. He basically released it. So it hit at like 730 a.m. West Coast time. So you would have it in your podcatcher, whatever your your tool was. So when you got to your on your drive to work, it was there and ready to go. Something like that is what you want to do. If you. I think what you want to do is particularly podcasts are easier because that's just going to show up on their on their tools. So you can usually do those at midnight, one a.m., two a.m., something like that. YouTube is sort of the same because they're going to be they're probably going to catch it as fall. They're going to be subscribed to it. So then, you know, they're probably going to see it whenever they next go to your channel. So it's maybe not as the timing may not be as critical. But if you get to particularly Twitter or X or LinkedIn, then I think what you want to do is think about your avatars. But likely there's going to be things like either drive time, lunchtime, start of the day, end of the day. And those are the areas that you've you're probably going to figure these are the times are most likely to be browsing. And the other thing you may want to do is like think about if your avatar is a parent of small children, then they're probably out on a sports field on a Saturday morning into afternoon. So maybe you can throw some stuff out there while they're looking at their phone, while they're watching their kids play whatever the sport is. Those are the things you need to take into account is what is your understand your avatar and what their habits and their frequencies are. And then that's going to help you define what your habits and what you should your delivery schedule should be. Great points, Rob. I agree with a lot of that. One of the things that I've been looking at, which is interesting, is with the scheduling apps, you can like like Buffer and Hootsuite like we talked about, you can actually set up for multiple posts within a day. The only concern I have with that sometimes is you're flooding your channel. So people are only subscribed to a few people. They're really getting flooded. So when you repost your message, you need to do it in a consistent way that is not basically just copy and paste. Yeah, reposting can be a problem. I don't I think they've changed it for a while. Twitter did not allow you to post the same thing twice in a 24 hour period. If it was the same post, they would just block it the second. They would just it would just disappear. They wouldn't warn you. It just it just would not show up. And that was just a known thing. And it was it was in their standards of use and their guidelines. It was like, hey, we're just it's not going to happen. You're not going to be able to do it. And they did that in particular when you would have some of these tools that would allow you to post from five different accounts at the same time or close enough to the exact same post, trying to get the activity on it, things like that. So I agree. You need to be you need to think about that as well. If somebody misses it. And this is this goes into sort of the scheduling thought I had. If somebody misses it and let's say I'm doing let's say I do three times a day. I do beginning of day, middle of the day, end of day. Then what I'm probably going to do when I rotate out and repost something like I'll start maybe at the beginning of the day and then a couple of days later, I'll do it the middle of the day and a couple of days later, I'll do it at the end of the day and then maybe repeat on different days of the week or so. It depends on how much content you're putting out and how often you want to do it. But if you're doing even. You know these days, if you're even doing a half dozen posts a day, that's going to be that's really not going to be that much. So you could easily and maybe that's a good rule of thumb. If you're going to go five days a week. And maybe what you do is you have five slots and the Monday one goes to slot one on Monday, slot two on Tuesday, slot three on Wednesday, and you just sort of roll things out that way. Then you're more likely to catch people and then see how that's going to and see how it works. As you can see, look at your follow your stats and figure out where are the biggest engagements coming from. So with that, let's tackle one additional topic on this because you touched on one thing there that I think really kind of touches on this as you're doing your social media schedules, as you're putting this content out there. Make sure you follow up with the analytics and look and see how your posts are doing. But tags are doing well. Initially, when we first did this, we were clueless on what we should be putting out there, so we were throwing tags left and right. Some were good, some were bad, some were more completely. So from experience, we've learned that, you know, be more conscious with the SEO, be more conscious with your audience, be careful with what tags you do use. You know, if you're talking about technology, don't put TVs in there and just have people shopping for TVs to your blog that want nothing to do with it. That would be a false, false positive. So you want to be careful with your targeting of this content. Yeah, I think that's a that's probably a good book and is you start out as you make sure your content is make sure you're producing content that is useful and entertaining to your audience. Maybe more useful and entertaining, but it depends on what you what you want out of your audience or how you expect them to come back and how you want to appeal to them. So make sure you've got good copy and good content. But on the other side is I think it is it is worth it to delay initially launching your content to really think about your your analytic strategy, for lack of a better term. And this is where it comes back to sort of your why is like, what's the message I want to get across and how do I want to get that across? And then that is actually going to inform what your tags may be. What are the things that people should be searching for that I want to be found when they're searching for that? And so I want to make sure that I'm using those keywords that I'm putting those tags into tagging my articles properly. I'm doing the links, all of that piece and look at what's out there. Spend some time with Google Analytics. If you haven't in a while, if it was like a couple of years, it was before the version four came out. Go take a look at that, because they have changed stuff around. I would I would also recommend that everybody and I think now they still give some amount of money. They like the first when you first open a Google ads account, they'll give you like one hundred free dollars of ads for if you spend one hundred dollars, something like that. It's well spent to go. Spend a little time in the ads and SEO world, Google being what I mean, Google's the monster that everybody uses, but spend a little time in that and understand what it is that is essentially grading your content. And if you're like if you're on YouTube, go look at the YouTube stuff, go spend a little time listening to listen to podcasts or watching blogs, videos, reading blogs about SEO and content and how to do that, because I think that's going to allow you to jump into it with a lot better plan with something's more organized, that something's going to hit faster as opposed to just throwing a bunch of content out there and then trying to go back and massage it, which is honestly sort of where we got here is we just finally had a point. We've thrown so much stuff out there. We said we need to essentially reboot the site and everything else because we just we've been, you know, you've been spraying the fire hose too long. Now you want to get back down it because fire hose and Internet doesn't really matter. It's like fire hose on the ocean. But if you can get something that's much more focused, then you're going to be able to go find your audience. And so speaking of audiences, I want to thank you if you've been listening to this for the last 25 minutes or so. As always, if you have any questions, shoot us an email at info at developer.com. Check us out developer.com. You can also go see the video side of this. If our faces don't scare you, you can go check us out on YouTube at the developer channel. We've got this plus a lot of other content out there, a lot of tutorials. We've got some of our old masterminds and mentor presentations. So there's there's quite a bit of information out there, depending on what your your topic de jure is. We've got a lot of database SQL stuff. We've got a lot of Java. We've got a lot of Python. We've got some PHP back there. We got a little everything. So for now, we'll wrap this one up so you can go back to safely driving your car. Go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Noor Podcast. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts. We are there. And remember, just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success.