Using Social Media to Connect With Your Users, with Bill Vieux

By Published On: October 30, 2018Categories: Blog, Podcasts, The CTO Studio

Social media is an everyday part of our lives, and there are some major advantages to using social media to connect with your users. Here to explain those advantages and the best ways to tap into your marketplace via social media is Bill Vieux.

Bill is the CTO of Casual Fridays and the co-founder of Tack. On today’s CTO Studio, he tells us what each of his companies provide for their clients, some simple tools to help you better reach your existing loyal users and personalize your connections with them and new users. You’re going to hear all of that and more on this episode of CTO Studio.

In this episode, you’ll hear:

  • Why individual features alone won’t make you successful.
  • What are the two ways you should be tracking your audience at a minimum?
  • What sort of impact has the Facebook API changes had?
  • How can you combat a lower organic reach online?
  • Should you have a different style for your content on Facebook versus on LinkedIn?
  • And so much more!

He’s the CTO of Casual Fridays, co-founder of Tack. Casual Fridays is a social media marketing agency that he and his business partner run. Their remote team around the United States works with a lot of hospitality and entertainment clients doing everything from social media strategy to publishing to community management to advertising.

His other company, Tack, is a software product born out of pain from within their agency. Tack allows marketers to go out and request legal permission to use content people are posting on Instagram and repurpose that content for marketing. It provides a great feedback loop and a content source for marketers.

For example – I’m at the pool at the Marriott and I’m filming my kid jumping up and down in a crazy-looking pool. Tack sees the video and contacts me asking for permission to use it, when I say yes then Tack acts as the broker between me and Marriott.

Bill says it simplifies the process for businesses like Marriott. A business could do it themselves but once they start making more than one or two requests it becomes difficult to track.

Tack takes care of all of that plus they provide analytics and insights like who are the people with lots of influence or people who are frequently talking about your company. You might not catch all of them and all of the mentions of your company over the last 3 months, but Tack catches them all.

They started with the permissioning around user generated content and made that workflow really successful while helping businesses build and grow their communities.

But they have also seen a lot of growth around how to tap into influencers – and he defines influencer as someone who is influential within their group of people and/or on a more local level, not only people who have millions of followers. There’s a lot that Tack is doing to help better facilitate the influencer/content creator type connections for their clients.

Tack is starting to build out actually identifying these influencers who are talking about their clients’ brands and then managing those campaigns. A lot of their clients also want them to manage and report on those campaigns including how much reach they got and how much engagement. Tack works to streamline all of that into one workflow, rather than what typically happens right now which is gathering them ad hoc and via email.

We switch gears on today’s episode of CTO Studio next and talk about how to help the CTO who is thinking of ways to get their SaaS products out there. I asked him to name a few things that are no-brainers that CTOs should be doing, some things that may not be as obvious for those of us not in the social media marketing trenches as he is.

Bill says the biggest thing is to think about your customer life cycle and your customer journey outside and beyond of what they are doing in the product. Then incorporate that into your product development and your plan and your technical road map. All too often we tend to get focused on this next technical feature and we build those as quick as we can, but those individual features alone aren’t what will make you successful.

Instead think about your customer’s journey from their first touch points: how do they find out about you? To answer that you can put things on your web site to track your marketing, at a minimum you should be adding Google analytics and Facebook pixels.

Doing so helps you find out what kind of audiences you are attracting, what kind of marketing materials they are consuming so you can already understand those segments better before they even get to your product. Before they even think about signing up for your product you already know so much about them – versus treating them like an anonymous brand new user who has never heard of you. In other words, you are able to personalize the content you put in front of them.

Bill goes on to explain how you can communicate with your audience on a more personal basis throughout their life cycle with your product, even if they cancel and/or stop using it.

He also gives his advice for founders and tech people who want to integrate with Facebook’s API and whether he thinks this is the beginning of a post-Facebook world. We wrap up our conversation today with a chat about the process of incubating a product while operating as an agency. Listen in to hear Bill speak to those topics and more on today’s CTO Studio.

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