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Social Media Marketing Podcast
Social Care: The Path to Happier Customers and Increased Sales
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- [00:00]
Michael Stelzner
I am thrilled to announce our keynote speaker lineup for Social Media Marketing World 2025 includes, number one, a marketing futurist who predicts industry shifts before they happen. Number two, a viral video expert who has helped countless brands reach millions of people. Number three, an Instagram specialist whose AI strategies are revolutionizing content creation. Number four, a YouTube sensation whose strategies have generated over 350 million views. To discover who they are and how they can transform your marketing, visit social media marketing world.info welcome to the social Media Marketing podcast helping you navigate the social media jungle. And now, here is your host, Michael Stelzner. Hello, hello, hello. Thank you so much for joining me for these social media marketing podcast brought to you by Social Media Examiner. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner, and this is the podcast for marketers and business owners who want to know how to navigate the ever changing marketing jungle. Today I'm going to be joined by Brook Salas and we're going to explore the concept of social care. And we're going to talk about how social care can actually be a marketing and sales engine for your business. If you're just commenting on posts that you put out on the social platforms, you are really missing an opportunity. And today Brooke and I are going to unpack that. If you're new to the show, follow this show on whatever podcast app you're listening to us on. We've got some great content coming your way. Let's transition over to this week's interview with Brooke Salas, helping you to simplify your social safari. Here is this week's expert guide. Today, I am very excited to be joined by Brooke Sellis. If you don't know Brooke, she is the founder and CEO of B Squared Media, an agency that helps brands connect, converse, and convert on social media. Her book is Conversations that Connect and her podcast is the Social Media CX podcast. Brooke is also speaking at Social Media Marketing World. Brooke, welcome back to the show. How you doing today?
- [02:19]
Brooke Sellis
Hey, I'm good. Always very happy to talk with you.
- [02:23]
Michael Stelzner
Super awesome to have you. Today, Brooke and I are going to explore social care and why it's a path to increased revenue for your business. Now, before we go there, we're going to define what social care is in just a minute. But I want to start with the why case. Like, why should businesses marketers care about social care? Why should they focus on it?
- [02:45]
Brooke Sellis
Well, I would say think about where we are with social media right now. Everything's changing and that happens a lot. But algorithms shift. Trends come and go. Right the platform that we thought was gonna be like the end all, be all falls flat. Cough, cough clubhouse. Right. So the only thing that remains constant through social media is that your customers are using social media as a support channel. And no matter what channel they're using, whether it's IRL or social media, they want fast, human, helpful information when they need it. So social care isn't a strategy, right? Well, it is a strategy. Here's what I would say. Social care is a strategy that doesn't put you at the mercy of the algorithms because it's only built on direct, real time conversations with potential customers and customers. And it helps you turn those customers, if they are frustrated or looking for sales support, into more loyal customers or into, you know, from potential to actual customers.
- [03:49]
Michael Stelzner
So if done well, what is the upside? Just help people imagine where this could go if they can just really dial in their social care.
- [03:57]
Brooke Sellis
The upside that I see for our clients is it's so many things. It's helping product development, it's helping research and development, it's helping hr, it's helping sales, it's helping marketing. It's actually showing a return on your investment with social media. So, like, once we start to show a return on our investment on social media, guess what happens? The C suite starts to pay attention, they start to give you more budget. They start to be like, oh yeah, let's do this. They start to give you like that creative. You're taking off the leash. I feel like you can prove it with social care, whereas social media marketing kind of falls flat, or at least has been for the past few years.
- [04:36]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, so let's define what social care is and what it isn't, and maybe even define the CX that you use inside your podcast, because maybe not everybody understands what CX stands for.
- [04:46]
Brooke Sellis
CX is customer experience. Right. It's the experience that you want your customers to have, but also the experience that they actually have, which a lot of times are very mismatched. But when we talk about social care, what we're talking about is very different from social media moderation. All of us are probably doing social media moderation. That is about managing content more than anything else. Social care is actually about managing relationships. So to give you an example, moderation would be like filtering comments, removing spam, enforcing your community guidelines. It's reactive and it focuses on brand safety. Right. If we really think about it, social care is more about conversations. It doesn't have anything to do with content necessarily. This is where you're responding to customer questions. You're solving problems and creating meaningful conversations with people who could be your customers and your customers. And it's proactive because social media moderation, we're waiting for people to come to us. We're waiting for them to comment on our post or send us a DM or leave a review. With social care, we can answer those things too. But we use social listing to help us get proactive and find conversations where our brands, our products, our stakeholders, our competitors are being mentioned and enter into those conversation. So one protects your brand and the other one grows it. Social moderation protects the brand. Social care actually grows the brand.
- [06:14]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, so just unpack this a little bit more. I think what I'm hearing you say is what so many people do that are probably listening to this podcast is interact with people that are commenting on their posts across the social platform and interact with people that private message them or DM them across the social platform. That is kind of the table stakes is really what I'm hearing you say. Right?
- [06:39]
Brooke Sellis
Right.
- [06:40]
Michael Stelzner
To care, to have the word care be with there with the customer, or slash social. It sounds like it's still social. It's interactive. It's what we know as social media. But there is that care component. So tell me a little bit more about what the word care means in this context.
- [07:00]
Brooke Sellis
It's really moving past content. Like, a lot of people get mad at me when I say this, so I'm prepared. Come at me. I'm good. But we get so focused on content every year. Mike, you know this because y'all release the date of social report. You can look at all of these reports that come out, and year after year after year, we see brands putting more money into content marketing. And then every year, everybody's like, it's not working. We gotta run more ads. We gotta do this thing. Meanwhile, CX or customer experience budgets are getting slashed across the board, and yet they're being now charged with doing more things like sales and like marketing through channels like social media. So you can see where there's a big mismatch. Social media really isn't about content. Yes, it's important and you have to have it, but if you look at it with a social care lens instead of a content marketing lens, the content becomes really easy and you don't have to worry about engagement rates anymore because you're delivering what's being asked for based on these conversations.
- [08:09]
Michael Stelzner
Interesting. And for those that are curious about this report that Brooke was alluding to, it's our social media marketing industry report that we've Been releasing for like 15, 16 years. It's been a long time, you know, since. Since 2009. Ish. Okay, so what I'm hearing you say is social care is kind of like customer service on the social platforms is really what I'm hearing you say. Right. And it seems to me that it does include under its umbrella things like potentially automation, like we are familiar with things like manychat and all these other kind of tools that have automations built inside of them. It also involves customer queries and complaints that come inbound. But it also, if I heard you correctly, also has kind of an outbound perspective where we can query the Internet, the interwebs or whatever and go find people that are talking good, bad or indifferent about the brand elsewhere. Right. And we can kind of win them back if for whatever reason they're not actually actively evangelizing on our behalf. Am I hearing you correctly? That's kind of how we're defining what social care is.
- [09:16]
Brooke Sellis
A thousand percent. If you want to do social care, just handling those reactive comments that come to you isn't social care. You have to be proactive. So like you were saying a lot of times, let me give an example. If I say I just bought shoes at Nike and I love them and IG Nike on social, on any of the platforms, Nike is notified of that in their inbox. We all know that probably as people who work in social media, you get the little notification in your inbox and then you can go and decide how to deal with it. Now let's say I say something on social that says I just bought the brand new Air Jordans and the quality is horrible. I have not tagged Nike, but I am talking about Nike. I'm talking about one of their products and I'm talking about their brand reputation. You would not get that notification if you were Nike unless you were using social listening. So social listening allows you to. Here's the simplest social listening strategy by the way. It's called the BIC method. B, I, C, like the pen. Okay. Social listening allows you to put out queries, keyword listeners, keyword strings on your brand, your industry and your competitors. Right. B, I, C. So brand easy, right? Nike is going to put in Nike, that's the brand. But then they also might want to put in the names of their stakeholders. Maybe they want to put in the names of their top selling products. Maybe they want to put in the names of their worst selling products because the best selling products are A players and we need to focus on the B players. Then when you talk about industry, this would be things like running shoes or best running shoes, right? These are the words that your customers would be searching when they're looking to buy from someone like Nike or you, your brand. And then C is your competitors, which we won't get into this because it's, it's a very long conversation. But let's just say I'm doing social listening at Nike and I know my top competitor is Adidas. If I'm using keyword listeners on Adidas shoes, whatever the comparable shoe to the Air Jordan would be. And I see that the majority of the conversation around that competitor shoe is negative because I dig it. And I see why. Because the laces break after like three runs. Guess what? I can now go back as Nike and create a differentiated campaign targeting my competitor, either calling them out or not and just being like, guess what? The new Air Jordans, we've tested them with all these runners or whomever, right? Pull my line of athletes out and our laces don't break even after 100 workouts or whatever it is. So now I'm using social care or a piece of social care. Social listening to market as well. Like, are you starting to see what I'm saying?
- [12:03]
Michael Stelzner
Totally. And by the way, I'm assuming this is hypothetical. If we have Adidas listening, I'm sure that totally made. I'm sure that your laces are amazing, but I totally understand. Okay, perfect. This has been very helpful. So let's start with kind of, you've got a system, a social care methodology, if you will. So that was very helpful. Where do we begin? I think you've already alluded to it a little bit. But where do we begin the process of wrapping our head around what we need to be thinking about when it comes to social care?
- [12:31]
Brooke Sellis
Yes. Thank you for the question. Because of course, as you know, and you do know me, I love doing fun, little quirky things. So we have what's called the care method for social care. Like, mind blowing, right? It's amazing.
- [12:45]
Michael Stelzner
Love the acronym.
- [12:46]
Brooke Sellis
Yes. The first letter. And think of it as a flywheel. Right? When you're thinking of care, think of it as going in a circle. And that first piece is C for conversations. Because I want you to listen to this really closely. Engagement isn't a metric, it's a relationship. If you are trying to make connections and form relationships through social media, engagement is the most important metric, period, on social media. So instead of treating like social, like a megaphone, like we've been talking about content, content, content, content, content More content, Right. I want you to start treating it like a telephone because these conversations that you're having with these potential customers, these would be customers, even these complainers, is helping you build trust, uncover customer needs, create little advocates, bring people into the fold, find tip top, amazing, wonderful community people to even manage in many cases with our clients, like become the community person on the customer side that leads that community. When you focus on talking with your audience and not just at them with content, content, content, content, content, you turn your passive followers into active fans. And it's almost like a second layer of word of mouth because so social is a spectator sport. And when you're having these conversations publicly on social, the world is watching.
- [14:23]
Michael Stelzner
Interesting. So the first step in your process, and this is a flywheel, as you mentioned, right? It's to see, it's the conversations, how do we create content that spurs conversations? And let's talk a little bit about some tips to do that. Right. Because obviously some of us struggle with this.
- [14:38]
Brooke Sellis
Oh, my gosh. Well, you can follow me on LinkedIn. I do this a lot, but I, I shared one earlier this week that just said unpopular opinion. Social media isn't forever. And then in parentheses, I said, that's okay. And I went on this really long opinion rant about social media. And look, I was saying that as somebody who literally built a social media company, I have built a career on social media. So what I was saying could be conceived as controversial. But what happened was I think my impressions today were up to like over 3000 on this one little text only post on LinkedIn because so many people weighed in on this conversation. It's not hard to create conversations like this. Like conversational content is what we call it that are adjacent to your brand. These are things like if you're not doing this right now, start with polls. Every single one of the social media channels has the poll option. Start to run polls that are adjacent to your brand and fit. Fun. But eventually and literally this is what we do for some of our clients. Sometimes it literally comes to what we're going to produce next, like product development and going to market with a product by asking on social, our customers which product they want to see next or do they want to see it in silver or gold? And then when they give you what they want and you give them that, you see things like selling out of products. So it's just thinking about ways to share your opinions and your feelings as a brand, but you also have to solicit the opinions and feelings of your audience. Right. So like, what's your opinion on X? What's your opinion on Y? What's your feeling on Y? It doesn't have to be serious. It could be really fun. LinkedIn, the actual LinkedIn social media page on LinkedIn does a really good job of this. HubSpot does a really good job of this. There's a lot of brands that are, you know, big brands, but also a ton of small creators who are creating what we call conversational content and what you'll start to see. If you start creating this type of content, your engagement will skyrocket.
- [16:46]
Michael Stelzner
Yeah, talk to me about Bloom, because I think that was when you mentioned we were prepping.
- [16:50]
Brooke Sellis
Yes. Okay. So Bloom is a makeup brand. It's B L U M E and they are amazing at taking user generated content. So this is content from people who, you know, buy their makeup and it's from all over the social media channels, right? From everywhere. And they take little snippets of like Brooks saying, oh my God, I just got your new fancy Dancy lipstick. And I'm amazed. Not only does it say on it's super soft, it doesn't dry out my lips, right? They'll take all these things and they take all of this user generated content and put it into their own content. So they're using customer conversations to drive their own content on their own channels. And not only did they use it as a content strategy and obviously they're asking questions along the way to like, see how their audience feels like they're using the user generated content to then sell new products. So I'll give you a quick example. People love this one scent that they have, I forget what it's called, but let's just call it the scent. And so they took all of the user generated content of people saying, you need to make a the scent deodorant. Like, this smells so good. I want to wear this, like adds deodorant. I want to wear it all the time. They took all of those little UGC snippets and they put it into a carousel on Instagram and then the carousel led to Shop More. So they were literally using user generated content to sell this thing. They're like basically saying like, hey, you all said you wanted the scent deodorant. Guess what? We created the scent deodorant and they show all this social proof, which is just their customers saying they want this thing. They're saying that they listened and they made the thing and then they have the link to the shop more and guess what? It sold out like, I don't know, a few weeks later.
- [18:43]
Michael Stelzner
Do you ever feel like no one understands your marketing challenges? Do you wish you had people you could talk to about AI content creation or marketing strategy? That's exactly what you'll find at Social Media Marketing World. Mallory Bezit said, quote, I love the overall atmosphere and that everyone was so willing to share and network with each other. Imagine having a network of expert marketers you can turn to whenever you need advice or inspiration. This becomes your reality when you attend Social Media Marketing World. Don't go it alone. Grab your tickets now@social mediamarketingworld.info you also had mentioned in our prep that and I think Even today that LinkedIn is doing some interesting things. Talk to us about what they're doing.
- [19:34]
Brooke Sellis
LinkedIn's so good because they ask a lot of questions and you'll see this probably from other brands too. But one of the ones that stuck out that LinkedIn asked me was like, we've reduced the budget. Name another marketing horror story in four words or less, right? And a bunch of people came in and commented like, oh, you know, whatever the four words were, but here's where you're doing it. Like next level. Like this is graduate level. They then looked at all of those horror stories and they knew what was top of mind for their audience. Like what's top of mind as far as like a pain point or a challenge. Then they went and created pieces of content after they shared that comment based on some of those top mentioned horrors. You know, like the client won't get back to me or the client's changed creative 768 times, right? So you're not just asking to ask. You're not just asking for like the engagement bait. You're asking because you want to do something with it. And that's in two ways as the brand. So LinkedIn went and created that content, but you also have to do it for the customer. So if the feedback is we hate the way you have parking structured at your event, do something about it, right? Start to quantify what those complainers are saying and you'll understand who's complaining to complain and where. There's actually catalyst for change. And when you say that you listened and make that change, you will build a loyal audience.
- [21:05]
Michael Stelzner
Are there any cool tools that help with this? Because it sounds like it could be kind of a nightmare to manage all these comments and look for all these trends and stuff inside of a comment thread that might have hundreds of comments.
- [21:17]
Brooke Sellis
Yes. So obviously I love AI and you could probably build something with any of these out of the box AI tools that would help you. We use AI a lot with conversations. So even if you were just to go take your, like, go to your Facebook page and download through native analytics all of the conversations, DMs, conversations, comments, you can download all of that, take all the other stuff out, just leave the conversations.
- [21:41]
Michael Stelzner
Ah, and then ask it to analyze it for you.
- [21:44]
Brooke Sellis
Ask it to do a gap analysis. Yeah, ask it to tell you like, hey, what's the trending top conversation? What are the top trending things? What are the top good things? What are the top bad things? What do people DM us about the most?
- [21:56]
Michael Stelzner
What tools are you using? Are you using Claude or ChatGPT?
- [21:58]
Brooke Sellis
I use ChatGPT. We have the paid version, the pro. Love it. But a lot of social media tools now even have AI built in. So for social listening we use Sprout Social. There are a ton of tools that use it. I'm not by any means, I'm tool agnostic. Use whatever you want and whatever fits your budget. But there are so many tools that now have AI advancements within them and also offer social listening which then the AI can tag the social listening as it comes through to kind of help take that off your plate.
- [22:28]
Michael Stelzner
Love it. Okay, first letter in the acronym CARE is conversations. The second letter is A. So talk to us about A.
- [22:35]
Brooke Sellis
A equal. I feel like we're on Sesame Street. A equals acquisition. And this is huge because, you know, I've been in social media now for almost, oh my God, almost almost 20 years. We're old for dinosaurs. And I've heard for 20 something years, like social media doesn't have a return on investment. And it really chaps my hide because it's not true. So acquisition is looking for those conversations when they come to you, but more so proactively because you obviously see and know what's, what's coming to you. Like when somebody comes to the social media Examiner's page and they say, hey, how do I get a ticket to social media marketing world? We know that's a potential customer, but we've been waiting for that person to come. Right. Not social Care. What we would do instead is go out and look for all of those conversations that are happening around bic, brand industry competitors, and then we could passively collect that voice of customer data. Yes. Like, here's how many people that are out there in the world or in the US or. Well, I know a lot of more than the US Visit the social media marketing World. But you know what I'm saying, these are how many people are looking for a social media event. You know, we can quantify that, but how then can we go and be proactive and enter the conversation?
- [23:55]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, now this is where I want to ask you. How the heck do you do that? Right.
- [23:59]
Brooke Sellis
Yes.
- [24:00]
Michael Stelzner
A, where do you look? B, what tools do you use? Because obviously that could be a nightmare it sounds like. Right?
- [24:05]
Brooke Sellis
I mean, you call it a nightmare, I call it a goldmind.
- [24:08]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, there you go. There you go.
- [24:10]
Brooke Sellis
So your customers are already talking about you or about something similar to what you do, more than likely. And if you're listening, so using social listening, then you can find every question, every comment, every mention where they're not actually tagging you.
- [24:25]
Michael Stelzner
Right.
- [24:25]
Brooke Sellis
A dark mention.
- [24:27]
Michael Stelzner
So what are the tools that you use for this?
- [24:28]
Brooke Sellis
I use Sprout Social for social listening. It depends on the clients too. We use Sprinkler, we use Amplify, we've used Agora Pulse. There's so many.
- [24:37]
Michael Stelzner
Let me pause and ask a little bit about how these tools work. Do you have to like first find the places like Reddit, Discord. I understand once you've got something set up to monitor, it can watch it. But how do you find the sources in the first place? Do you understand what I'm asking there?
- [24:54]
Brooke Sellis
Yes. So when you set up social listening through a tool, it will tell you what sources the tool is able to source, essentially.
- [25:01]
Michael Stelzner
I see, okay.
- [25:02]
Brooke Sellis
And then you can niche it down. You could say, oh no, I only want to look for mentions on Twitter or X. But generally we don't do that. We want to listen everywhere we can listen. And obviously it can't listen in situations where like say I am mentioning your brand, but I have a private Facebook profile, it's not going to be able to pull that private mention of me talking about Social media marketing world.
- [25:23]
Michael Stelzner
Well, and some Facebook groups that are private it won't be able to get access to.
- [25:26]
Brooke Sellis
Right. So there's limitations, but it's just as simple as putting together a Boolean search, if you know what that is. It's like a query for your brand. So it'd be like Social Media examiner and then that would be the B, the brand. And then we would put in any sort of like brand related things that happen around Social Media examiner, like social.
- [25:46]
Michael Stelzner
Media marketing world, that kind of thing.
- [25:48]
Brooke Sellis
I would probably make that its own. But yes, that could be part of it. I would put Michael Stelzner in there. I would would put the society in there. Right. All of the branded things. And then if any of these things are mentioned around that brand topic, those queries, the machines, the tool, brings it back to your inbox, and then you can decide, do I just want to collect this voice of customer data or do I want to join the conversation?
- [26:13]
Michael Stelzner
You know, there's a side of me that even thinks AI is going to be taking on this job pretty soon here. Right? Because you start to think about how chat GPT has search capabilities, and I would imagine Google Tools, probably by the time this is coming out, are going to have it and Claude will as well.
- [26:29]
Brooke Sellis
Yeah.
- [26:29]
Michael Stelzner
So I would imagine you can eventually be able to use AI because it scrapes the whole darn Internet, you know what I mean? And potentially set these kind of things up for you. So once we discover these things, how do we actually turn these opportunities, as I'm calling them? You called it a gold mine, right? I called it a nightmare. You called it a gold mine. How do we mine gold in these opportunities here?
- [26:52]
Brooke Sellis
It's really simple. You listen and then you join in. You answer that product question. You offer that solution. You send a link to a how to video. You have to be present in the moment and turn those conversations into customers. So you've got to have that mindset. But I'll give you a really funny example of this with competitors, right? So Epson is a printer brand, and somebody went on X Twitter and they were complaining about Epson, and they tagged Epson in the tweet and they were like, your printer sucks. Like, I cannot print two pages before there's a jam. And then I'm working on it for three hours, and then I print two more pages and then it jams, and then I print three pages and it's like, you're out of magenta and I can't print in black. You know, it's like the typical printer complaints. Well, funnily enough, Epson didn't come answer this guy, which is really sad. And I'm sorry, Epson, if you're listening, but call me, call me. What happened? Was HP a different printer brand, must have been using social listening, must have had keywords around Epson, because they jumped in and they were like, hey, Mike, so sorry to hear your Epson sucks. We should probably talk over here at hp because we don't have those problems, right? And this is literally what we do for our customers through social selling. But ours is a little more like, we don't necessarily get into the competitor warfare, but we would get in there and say something like, hey, I'm looking for a printer that's compatible with Alexa. We could jump in and say, hey, Mike, our printer's compatible with Alexa. Here's how that works. Oh, and if you're interested, here's a code for free shipping or a free ink pack when you buy. And then if Mike uses that code, it's attributed to my team, and we collect revenue for the company, and then a percentage of commission goes to our team.
- [28:43]
Michael Stelzner
It's interesting because I can imagine, obviously, if you're a brand and you're monitoring your competition, you want to be careful about how you sell. But if I was hp, I might be like, really sorry you're having problems with your jammed Epson, maybe with a wink emoji or something like that. You know what I mean? Just as kind of like a nod.
- [29:03]
Brooke Sellis
Like a cheeky little.
- [29:05]
Michael Stelzner
Without a nod to actually anything other than it's HP responding instead of Epson. You know what I mean?
- [29:09]
Brooke Sellis
But that spoke volumes, right? I mean, that to me, just watching, I wasn't even as a part of the conversation. I saw this. I was like, holy crap, this is so good. And this is so important. This is why everyone should be doing social setting and everybody should be doing social care, because they might have just lost that customer to hp. And I don't know about you, but I don't go around buying printers every year like you. You have just lost somebody who's been with you forever and is now going to go be with that other brand forever.
- [29:36]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, so on the acquisition side of things here, what I'm hearing you say is that it's totally okay, and some of us do this on our own social platforms, like I know we do. If I'm writing a post about a challenge I'm having promoting social media marketing world to other marketers, sometimes people will ask, like, well, when is it? And of course, I'll respond back with the details.
- [29:56]
Brooke Sellis
Right, right.
- [29:56]
Michael Stelzner
It's March 30th to April 1st in San Diego. And here's a link. Right? And no one's going to think that's odd. Right now I'm responding as the CEO of the company, which is probably even better sometimes than the brand. But it is my comment, and I figured I may as well respond to it. But that is. I think I understand that, that. That you can use this to acquire. Do you recommend taking this to DMs? I mean, ultimately, to try to do the close of the sale. Because it's one thing to just like, kind of subtly provide information. It's another Thing to actually close a sale.
- [30:29]
Brooke Sellis
Yes, it depends on the conversation. So the way our social selling program is set up is that we look for intent signals and we help use AI with this. Once we have a certain level of intent, then we will go in for the kill. Right. We're not just selling right away. We're waiting for that intent to happen and then we'll go in. And it also depends on the customer if we're taking it to deep DMs or not. Because say it's like a small product that costs, you know, $20 and we're sharing that code publicly for you to get like free shipping or whatever. We don't care. And the client doesn't care if people see that code, grab onto it and then go get free shipping because it's just selling more. Right. And people love that, by the way.
- [31:09]
Michael Stelzner
But if it's a special deal, you might say DM me so I can help you out a little bit. Right?
- [31:14]
Brooke Sellis
Yes. We have some very exciting, expensive clients. Like they market to luxury. There's a luxury brands that market to, you know, high affluent customers. We do not share those codes publicly. That happens in private.
- [31:27]
Michael Stelzner
Okay. So so far we've talked about the C is conversations in the care acronym. The A is acquisitions. What is the R? Tell us about that.
- [31:37]
Brooke Sellis
Well, it comes with acquisitionist retention. Right. And this is what most people think social care is, by the way. Most people think customer support when they think about social care. Like it's just customer support. Well, no, because we've already gotten into conversations and content. We've talked about acquisition. So now we're going to talk about what everybody knows or thinks it is, which is retention. Right. Your customers do not, or I should say today's customers do not stay loyal to brands that ignore them. Like, they just don't. You can see it in all the reports that come out. Consumers are more willing since the pandemic to leave a brand after only a couple of mishaps. So you really cannot afford to ignore your customers. So I want you to think about retention happening in the replies when you show up and you solve problems or you answer those questions or you make them feel valued, even if it's somebody like Brooke coming to the social media marketing world page and being like, hey, I just want to say, like, I had the best time. Thank you so much for all that you do. A lot of brands will go through and like that. And I'm like, are you kidding me? That person took the time out of their day to comment to you. A brand. And you're just gonna like the comment, like, keep the conversation going, like, hey, thanks, Brooke, which was your favorite part, because remember, it's a spectator sport. So you're not only making Brooke feel valued and retaining Brooke, you're probably helping pull in other people for some of that a, that acquisition or that gold mine. So every single interaction can turn a one time buyer into a lifelong fan. And you have to remember that because sometimes I get it, you just want to be like, thanks, and that's it. But try not to do that because that one little extra step can make me buy again. And where in a world where our competitors are like literally a click away, Social care isn't just a support option. It's a loyalty strategy. Right, so it's not just customer support. It literally is your strategy for customer loyalty.
- [33:44]
Michael Stelzner
Let's talk about, like, how to do this. Well, you already mentioned promo codes and stuff, but how can we retain someone, you know, like I heard you say, like, publicly engage them with a really thoughtful comment when they give you a very thoughtful comment. And as a customer, that makes total sense. But how can we take it even further? What are your thoughts?
- [34:04]
Brooke Sellis
So we actually beg our clients to give us what we call a bar tab. So if you've been to a bar, you've probably seen this happen. Or if you've been to a busy bar, I should say the bar is packed, the bartenders are slammed. This, this always happens at like when we go out after Social media marketing world, right? The bartenders are slammed and you're standing there like waiting forever for a drink. And maybe it takes like 20 whole minutes. And sometimes the bartender comes over and says, hey, look, I am so sorry that took so long. We're completely slammed tonight. Your first round's on me. A lot of bars will do that. And so we try to convince our clients to give us their social care team, what's called a bar tab. And what that means is we have so many dollars or so many points or so many thingies that we can give away a day or a month or a year to really make people's experience great. So if Brooke tries to go buy a social media marketing world ticket and for whatever reason, it keeps timing out, no, won't let her. And she's like, she's frustrated. She goes and she tweets and she says, I can't do it. So frustrating. She like, oh my gosh, I'm so sorry. That happens. I'm going to book that ticket for you, Brooke. And DM me Because I've got a little something special for you. And Brooke's going to obviously be like, well, what do you got? And then maybe it's as small as, like, hey, when you show up, make sure at registration you let them know your name because we're going to have a hat waiting for you or a T shirt or whatever it is. You already have that stuff. Right. It could literally be something that's already in the supply closet, but it goes so far.
- [35:32]
Michael Stelzner
Or it could even be a discount, right?
- [35:34]
Brooke Sellis
It could, yeah. It could also be a discount.
- [35:35]
Michael Stelzner
Yeah. Here's a discount on your next whatever. Right.
- [35:38]
Brooke Sellis
And then you make sure that that's primed to your social care team so that they get the credit for making that sale.
- [35:44]
Michael Stelzner
Talk about that a little bit.
- [35:45]
Brooke Sellis
You really need to be looking at social care as like a sales team. I mean, the way social media is going, it's becoming really more of a shopping platform, quite honestly. I mean, that's why I think content is having such a hard time, because people are there to research brands, find out about brands, review brands, shop from brands, and all of the content is saying, sell, sell, sell, buy my stuff. But that's not what they're looking for. Right. They're looking for these conversations. So I just think if you really want to do social care correctly, you have to. You have to start thinking about ways to use social media to sell, whether that's to a returning customer, R to a new customer, a if it's saving the day, which is, you know, customer support or crises, PR crisis. Right. Any and all of that is what social care is. It's literally everything. It is everything. It's the crux of social media. It's the way to use social media and so few people are doing it.
- [36:45]
Michael Stelzner
I know we've been talking about AI a little bit here. Do you have any other cool AI examples that you've been playing around with on the retention side of things?
- [36:52]
Brooke Sellis
I would like to give a shout out to your bot for. For social media marketing world.
- [37:00]
Michael Stelzner
For the record, she said my bot, in case somebody heard that wrong. My bot.
- [37:04]
Brooke Sellis
Your. Your bot?
- [37:06]
Michael Stelzner
Yeah. Yeah. What? Explain to everybody what I showed you.
- [37:09]
Brooke Sellis
Yeah. So we were playing with the social media marketing world bot and it's really cool, called Scout. Scout.
- [37:16]
Michael Stelzner
Yeah.
- [37:16]
Brooke Sellis
And you could have do all kinds of things like tell you what the AI tracks are, help you build like a little schedule. I, I though, being the cheeky person that I am, wanted to get a little quirky with it and I asked it, who's your daddy? I said, who's your daddy? And it was like, well, I don't really have a daddy, but I guess my daddy would be. And then it talked about you, Mike, and, like, went on to explain who you were and how cool you were. And, I mean, it's really very cool. Cool. I was. I was definitely trying to trip it up with a few of my questions. But, no, it knows a lot.
- [37:49]
Michael Stelzner
Well. And what it is. Now. AI has gotten so good, and I have another show called AI Explored that we use it as a sales and also a customer service. So it's been trained up on all of our FAQ documents and all of our sales pages, and it retrains itself every 24 hours when we add something new. And people can ask it literally anything. You can ask it in a different language. If you ask it in French, it'll respond back in French, which is really fascinating. And really what it is, is on the back end, it's an AI system. Much like all the AI systems we're familiar with. It's just had a training set. And what's great about it is it's available 24 hours a day. It answers 90% of people's questions, and then if it can't answer the questions, it suggests either they open a ticket or schedule a call with an actual sales agent.
- [38:34]
Brooke Sellis
I love that part.
- [38:35]
Michael Stelzner
Which we call a conference advisor. So that kind of stuff, I think is great on a website. I would imagine it's probably coming onto the social platforms as well and DMS and stuff like that.
- [38:45]
Brooke Sellis
Oh, yeah. This is all coming so fast. I think we're going to get there really quickly. But I love that to your point, I love that A, when. When you can't have a question answered, it's somebody's going to be there to help you. You schedule with someone. But I also love from the sales perspective that you called it a conference advisor and not a salesperson. Right. Because it feels like I'm going to go on with my own personal conference call concierge and get my questions answered. And I mean, isn't this what we all want? I mean, customer experience? Everybody thinks customer experience is about, like, doing the next biggest, greatest, and most amazing thing, and it's not. It's just about taking the burden away from your customer one click at a time.
- [39:26]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, so we talked about C conversations. We talked about A acquisition. We talked about R retention. The acronym is care. So what is E? What is the E in care?
- [39:38]
Brooke Sellis
I said it earlier, but it's engagement. It's the most important metric on social media. And if you think about that little flywheel, right. Engagement brings you back to conversation if you're doing it the right way. So a lot of people think about engagement as, like, likes and shares, and that's great. That is part of the engagement metric. But you know what likes and shares don't do? They don't create a connection. So I want you to start thinking about deeper engagements. And by the way, I used AI to come up with an engagement optimization score that actually looks at deeper levels of engagement. Very cool. We'll nerd out on that a different time. But think about it this way. If you go for those deeper connections, the conversation. Right. Getting back to see, the more you interact, the more visible and vocal and valuable you become, the more people will continue to engage with you in those conversations. So whether it's through social care or through your content, whatever it may be, answering those questions, joining those conversations, showing off a little bit of personality and fun, you're building all the things that everybody says they're constantly looking for. Trust, community, and advocacy. So keep engaging so that you can get back to conversation and then start the wheel again.
- [40:52]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, so I'm starting to understand the distinction between conversations and engagement, and I'm going to tell you what I think it is, and I want you to tell me if I'm right. Conversations are happening with or without you, and they're happening all over the place. And your opportunity is to try to create content that spurs conversations. But we went down a deep rabbit hole in the conversation section on engagement stuff. And technically, engagement is separate from conversations. So conversations are creating conversations. Engagement is actually actively engaging with the people that are having these conversations, right?
- [41:30]
Brooke Sellis
Yes.
- [41:30]
Michael Stelzner
Do you have any tips? Like, I know we talked about a jewelry brand that you thought was doing it really well.
- [41:35]
Brooke Sellis
Yeah. So we worked with a celebrity jewelry brand, and as we were doing their social care, we kept hearing people talk about this necklace, right? It was this necklace that always sold out, but it was only available in gold and silver. And people were asking about rose gold. Rose gold. We need it in rose gold. Do it in rose gold. Right? We're constantly quantifying this information for the client. Client. And then we're like, hey, everybody wants this necklace in rose gold. And then finally, you know how it is with clients, y'all. Like, they have to be the ones that came up with the idea. They're like, hey, you know what? We should create this necklace in rose gold. And we were like, yeah, yes, you should. And. And once again, here's all that data, we have to quantify that. So that's what they went to production with and they sold out in 24 hours.
- [42:21]
Michael Stelzner
Very cool.
- [42:22]
Brooke Sellis
That's what engagement means. On a deeper level, when you're having these conversations, when you're engaging in these conversations, it's taking that voice of customer data and then doing something with it. Like Bloom did, like this jewelry brand did, like HP did on Epson's post.
- [42:38]
Michael Stelzner
Who should own the social care role? Is this the marketing department? Is this the social media team? Like, who owns this responsibility inside of a business?
- [42:50]
Brooke Sellis
I would love for us to have an answer to that. Here's the reality. It's very disjointed in all of the brands that we work with. One brand, it may sit with social media, which makes a lot of sense, but one brand, it may sit with cx. Like some of the brands that have like a Chief Experience Officer or cxo, it might sit in that department and that makes sense. Sometimes it sits inside of customer support. I don't love that necessarily. If it were up to me, there would be like, it's the three circle. It'd be marketing, sales and customer support. And there'd be like a. A bubble in the middle. That was social care.
- [43:25]
Michael Stelzner
Like a Venn diagram.
- [43:27]
Brooke Sellis
Yeah. And that's not how it works. But in a perfect world, that, to me, that's how it would work because it is customer support, it is marketing and it is sales.
- [43:36]
Michael Stelzner
Brook Sellis, you will be speaking at Social Media Marketing World, which we're really excited about. If people want to connect with you on the socials, where do you want to send them? If they want to work with you, where do you want to send them? Please share.
- [43:49]
Brooke Sellis
Yes, you can find me on LinkedIn. That's where I hang out the most. Just look for Brook Selles. I think I'm the only Brook Sellis on the plan. If you want to meet up with me at Social Media marketing world again, LinkedIn me, email me, whatever it takes. I would love to meet you there. I.
- [44:03]
Michael Stelzner
What are you talking about?
- [44:04]
Brooke Sellis
I'm talking about what we're talking about now. I'm talking about how to build the ultimate dopamine machine with your social media pages. And essentially this is what we're talking about, how to get that engagement based on not more content, more conversations.
- [44:17]
Michael Stelzner
Yeah. And then if people want to work with your business, is there somewhere you want to send them?
- [44:21]
Brooke Sellis
Yeah, you can check us out at B Squared Dot Media, B Squared Media. Or just you could Google Search. B Squared Media.
- [44:29]
Michael Stelzner
The letter B.
- [44:30]
Brooke Sellis
Yes.
- [44:30]
Michael Stelzner
Like Brooke spelled out B.
- [44:32]
Brooke Sellis
Yes, exactly. B like Brooke.
- [44:33]
Michael Stelzner
B Squared Media. Brooke Sellis, thank you so much for sharing your insights with us today.
- [44:38]
Brooke Sellis
Thank you for having me.
- [44:40]
Michael Stelzner
Hey, if you missed anything, we took all the notes for you over@social mediaexaminer.com 655 and and if you're new to the show, be sure to follow us. And if you've been a longtime listener, we would love a review on whatever app platform you're listening on. And would you do me a favor and let your friends know about the show as well? And do check out the other shows we have the AI Explored Podcast and the Social Media Marketing Talk Show. This brings us to the end of the Social Media Marketing Podcast. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner. I'll be back with you next week. I hope you make the best out of your day and may your marketing keep evolving. The Social Media Marketing Podcast is a production of Social Media Examiner. We're in the biggest shift in marketing history with AI and social algorithms transforming everything. That's why Social Media Marketing World 2025 isn't just a conference. It's your complete marketing transformation. Whether you joined us in San Diego or virtually, one breakthrough could change your entire career. Secure your spot today atsocial media marketingworld.in fox.