EPISODE 22 - The Seb Rusk Show - WTF is a Social Media Chat Bot?! : Chat Bots 101

SPEAKER_01 0:29

What is happening, everybody? Welcome back to the show. I'm your host, as always, Sebastian Ruskate. We do this each and every week, or at least we try to, to help you better understand what you don't know that you don't know about social media. Just getting back in town from Southern California. I had the pleasure of MCing the traffic and conversion summit from my friends at digitalmarketer.com once again in beautiful San Diego. And boy, was it beautiful. Went out ahead of time, spent about a week and a half in Orange County. Used to live out there. Wanted to put some roots in the ground, do some networking, establish some new relationships. We did just that in Orange County and then continued to head down south for the traffic and conversion summit that took place March 10th through the 12th. And let me tell you something there's nothing like having 4,400 driven internet marketers in one place. I'm talking from content to network. We had five stages this year. I was running around like somebody was chasing me all three days. Because I would be upstairs and then downstairs and then on this stage and then that stage. And I got my workout in. I wasn't counting my steps because I don't have a Fitbit. Fitbit, if you're listening, need to get on that program. But uh it was a great show. It really was. Three days action-packed content, learning, uh, education. The networking's incredible. Of course, this is my fourth year being back, so now I'm I'm I'm seeing friends and people that I've seen from past years and connecting with people, meeting new people. Speaking of meeting new people, met the incredibly talented and awesome Marie Forlio. Where did I meet her? On my hotel floor, walk into the elevator. She was actually on her way out of town. Tried to get on the show a few years back, right when she launched her B School. Uh, she was completely slammed. There was just no availability for us to make our schedules work. But stay tuned. She has committed to coming on the show in the very near future. If you don't know who Marie is, look her up. Marie Forlio, brains behind B School, hands down, the most carefully articulated partnership launch of a product and a course that I've ever seen. She leveraged big names Lewis Howes, Jarek Robbins, Tony Robbins, Gary Vaynerchuk, all familiar names that you've heard me talk about before to actually get this launched a few years back. Awesome program. And then she opened it up for a specific amount of time, closed out. You couldn't get into B-School if you tried. I don't care if Nancy Sinatra called, you're not getting in. So excellent, excellent execution. Look her up, follow her, buy her stuff. She's awesome. And she'll be on the show very, very soon. Ran into what Ty Lopez. Ty Lopez decided to roll into trafficking conversions with his entourage of about 12, his drunk attorney and his Lamborghini. We had a chance to connect. Ty will be on the show here in the next few weeks. Had an opportunity to chat it up with him. Saw him a couple times actually. Saw him on Friday and then again on Sunday. He was complaining about it being cold in San Diego. I said, Ty, buy a place in Miami already. So uh stay tuned for that. Marie Folio, Ty Lopez coming up uh in coming weeks here on the Seb Russ Show. If you're just tuning in, hey, my name is Sebastian Rusk. I'm the host of the Seb Russ Show. Makes sense, doesn't it? We do this each and every week, helping you better understand what you don't know that you don't know about social media. Tips, tricks, tools, ideas, and coming soon, interviews. Really excited about launching the Podcast Launch Lab. I know I've been talking about it on past episodes. Oh, it's getting launched, I'd say, probably first of next week. So go to podcastlaunchlab.com if you're interested in launching a podcast. Send me your info through that form. You'll get updates on our upcoming webinar, details, early bird deets, whatnot. It's a 30-day program. Allows you to launch your podcast, the first four episodes. And we get down to the nitty-gritty. You get a condenser mic, you get a pair of headphones, you get a professional intro, you get all kinds of things, you get the whole kit and caboodle for the first 30 days, and then ongoing, uh, it's done for you editing. And we have a group coaching call, and you have access to me via email on an ongoing basis. So if that's something that tickles your interest, hit me up at Seb Rusk on Twitter. If you just look for Sebastian Rusk on Facebook, I'm kind of hard not to find. Follow me too. Said it before, I'll say it again. If you were 10 years ago, if you were following me, I'd call the police. All right, let's get right down into the content that we got up in here today. Once again, delivering some great content as always on a daily basis. My friends over at Social Media Examiner, my buddy Mike Stelzer, ran into him at Traffic and Conversions as well. Told him, thank you so much for continuing to do what you do with producing incredible content with your team because I take your content and I read it on my podcast, and I give my two cents and my insight, and I answer any questions, and it provides for great content for my podcast. So thanks, Mike. He's like awesome, dude. So um he didn't really say like awesome, dude. I think it might have been just awesome, dude. But anyway, it's great to connect with Mike. Mike, if you're listening, what up? Uh bummed I'm not in San back in San Diego this week. Social media marketing world is going down. This is a biggin' too. So um, if you haven't been to social media marketing world, make sure it's on your calendar next year. I haven't due to scheduling conflicts, but all my friends and peers are there. Um, it is an action-packed three days of learning and really full submers in social media and learning from the best of the best. So, this link uh for this article on how to maximize Facebook reach will be available in the show notes. Show notes are available on SoundCloud. If you go to SoundCloud.com forward slash social buzz on air to this episode, you'll see the proper links, show notes, etc. You'll also find those in the iTunes uh description. When you download, if you you should have already subscribed and download this episode in the description, you'll see show notes. Show notes give you links that I'm talking about, any pertinent details that I say. Hey, if you want to find that link, find that information, find a link to Marie Forlio. It'll be all be in the show notes. And by the way, I will provide a link to Marie's uh website. Um you can follow her on Twitter and whatnot in the show notes while we're talking about show notes. All right, social mediaexaminer.com wrote a post by my good friend Mari Smith. My goodness, it just keeps getting the world gets getting smaller and smaller. I was just with Mari in the green room at Traffic and Conversion Summit shortly after I saw Mike Steltzner, and it was always great to catch up. She is uh nothing short of awesome. She delivered a keynote and absolutely crushed it as usual. So it's great to see you, Mari. Mari wrote an article here for a social media examiner called How to Maximize Your Facebook Reach. Is declining reach impacting your Facebook marketing ROI? Looking to improve your Facebook exposure. Organic reaches become harder to achieve on Facebook, and marketers are turning to creative ways to get their messages seen. In this article, you'll discover how to help your Facebook post go further. Now, I'm not going to read the entire article because it's quite extensive and very thorough. Uh, so I'll allow you to do that. You can reference that because where's the link to this article? In the show notes. But I am going to give a reader's digest and briefly scan through it and give my two cents, if you will. So let's talk about uh Facebook organic reach. Mari says, tongue in cheek, that organic reach is so 2012. It's a fact that organic reach on Facebook is at an all-time low. It's actually about two to six percent. That means anything you're sharing on your business page, only two to six percent of the people that actually like and connect to your page are seeing it. Why is that? Because Facebook wants those Facebook ad dollar bills, y'all. And it continues to decline. Uh, what may surprise you is that having a large Facebook fan base doesn't seem to be as beneficial as it once was. You can have a half a million fans, but if you got two to six percent actually engaging with that content, your half a million fans are kind of like, eh, you're all right. Large brands that have more than 500,000 likes have the lowest organic reach, down to 2%. So you're actually penalized for having more fans, more likes on your page with your organic reach. Mari suggests that number one, start with content that's optimized to generate attention and shares. Highly shareable content is the holy grail of social media marketing. Doing your best to optimize for shares is Mari's number one content creation tip. As people scroll through Facebook's newsfeed, your content has to make people pause and read. The promise of your content must be thumbstopping, if you will. What you deliver has to inspire people to respond with OMG. I must share this right now. The Facebook news feed algorithm rewards active advertisers and engaging content. So the more reactions, comments, and shares that your posts get, the better reach you're going to get. Get it? So if you post something and you don't run ads on it and you're looking for a two to six percent response, you may be towards the six percent based on the engagement. The more people like your posts, the more people comment on your posts, the more people share your posts. That is what it's all about. This is an engagement game. This is not an aesthetic, how many numbers do we have here? It is how many people genuinely give a rip about the content that you're sharing. As so much though, it makes an emotional connection with them and they share it. She gives an example here on some great animated content here. Love pop cards. You can see this again when you check out the article on your own. Uh number two, build organic traction before promoting posts with ads. So to get more mileage from your paid reach, let your post run for one to twenty four hours. This uh this way you're able to gain some organic traction before boosting it. So post something today, let it run organically, get as much traction as you can organically, i.e., for free, and then after 24 hours, go ahead and boost the post, run an ad on it, whatever the case may be, to drive some additional traffic to it. While increased organic reach is never guaranteed, there are ways to give your Facebook post a better chance of good reach. Here are some tips to make your content more likely to attract the views that yield shares and reach. Post more native and live video. That means it's your video that you're uploading and sharing, not sharing an existing video that's already uploaded. Video continues to hold sway on Facebook with triple the engagement and 1200% more shares than text and image posts combined. In addition, when compared to YouTube video shared on Facebook, native video uploaded to Facebook has 10 times the reach. I'm gonna read that one more time. I need to drive this point home and make sure I really land it, because this is a major key. Video continues to hold sway on Facebook with triple the engagement and 1200% more shares than text and image posts combined. In addition, when compared to YouTube videos shared on Facebook, native video uploaded to Facebook has ten times the reach. Come on, people. The numbers don't lie. One plus one will always equal two. If you get three, you're good. Listen, Facebook and YouTube are competitors. So if you upload a YouTube video to Facebook, you're wasting your time. Why? Because Facebook controls what shows up in the news feed, they control the algorithm. And they're not going to put their competition at the forefront of where they're at. That's why live video takes such presence. Post native video, create your own videos. Because Facebook's algorithm factors time spent on video as well as well as the shares it generates, you can use video to gain more visibility and reach on the platform. Pro tip. Use your video views to create custom audiences and retarget with future posts. Hmm, that's a great pro tip. Create a mix of post types. You can deliver content on Facebook in a number of different ways, including videos, slides, photos, and text. While some people may prefer and therefore share your photos, users are pressed for time, that are pressed for time, might be more likely to share a text post instead. So mix up your post and make them text, make them images, make them video, but make sure video is relevant. Repost popular posts. You can identify content that's received a lot of attention for the first time you posted it on Facebook, then repost it to capture the attention of people who didn't see it the first time. You post an image, 150 people like it, 25 people comment, a week later, you go in, you share it again, and guess what? You're gonna pick up where you left off on the previous week. Use organic audience targeting. If you specialize, if you have specialized content that's more likely to be of interest of a specific type of user, use Facebook's audience optimization tool to choose more of a friendly audience for that content. That's a whole nother episode that we'll get into, but Facebook's ad platform continues to become more and more extensive, user-friendly, and making your life easier. Tag relevant pages in your appropriate post. If you're talking about something, as you see in this post, where we or when I when I when we go Facebook Live to record this episode, I say we're recording the Seb Rush Show podcast on Social Buzz On Air. And I'm tagging Social Buzz On Air, and I'm you and I'm also tagging social media examiner as our source for the news that we're sharing and talking about. So just a little tidbit of uh detail. Number three, prioritize audience engagement. Take every opportunity to engage your audience. Talk back to people, like their comments, reply to their comments, tell them you appreciate them. Because guess what? When you share more content, they'll come back and they'll like more and they'll comment more and they'll engage more. These are the people that are driving your digital ecosystem. Be nice to them. Okay, number four, amplify your organic reach with paid promotion. So you want to let things roll organically, and then you can spike it with a paid promotion. Here's why you start to pay to boost the reach of your content to improve your Facebook marketing ROI considerably. Rather than promote everything, apply some strategic selection to amplify the established organic reach of specific posts with Facebook ads. So get creative, don't just set it and forget it, post an ad and be done with it. And uh this is a quite extensive post. Mari went in here on uh on details, but um, I I want I really want you to go review this this article because there's some videos and some examples and not everything I can cover just by hitting the tidbits here, but these are four solid points uh from Facebook Marketing Expert, my friend Mari Smith. So over at Social Media Examiner again, that link is in the show notes. Um we are uh almost out of time in about five minutes here. I want to keep it down to 20 minutes. I always talk and talk and talk, and it's 25 minutes. The show is 20 minutes long, people. Moving on to the next article, which is chatbots in social media. What is a chat bot, Sebastian? Well, I'm glad you asked. Uh chatbot is uh well, bot is short for robot. And if you've ever sent a message to a brand on Facebook and you've gotten a message back immediately, and it seemed somewhat automated, but still made sense, that my friend is a chatbot. Chatbots and social media new research here from our friends at social media examiner. Taking a quick swig of vodka. There's nothing wrong with vodka on Tuesday morning. I'm totally kidding, that's water. Chatbots and social media, new research. Are you considering including chatbots in your marketing and customer support? You should be. Wondering how consumers are responding to chatbots, in this article, you discover new research that shares consumer reactions to chatbots and the issues businesses should address before integrating chatbots. So, chatbot automation, great, gives that human touch, gets back to customers right away. There are some downsides, as with any new technology. That's what this article is going to cover. I'm going to skim over, hit the hit uh hit the uh major points, and again, you can refer to this link in the show notes and go back and read it thoroughly. Read it twice if you'd like. Take some notes. You should be taking notes right now. Statistics would tell us that those that take notes are able to absorb information and consume it significantly more. Okay, chatbots and social media. Number one, millennials are the biggest group of early chatbot adopters. Chatbot adopters. Uh millennials. I can't say that I'm shocked. According to a recent study by technology by technology company Rit Rital Retali, 58% of 500 millennials surveyed have used chatbots. Of the 42% of respondents who have not used them, 53% were interested in using them. 26% had no interest in using them, and 20% were neutral. It's no surprise that nearly 60% of millennials have used chatbots. They tend to be early adopters of the latest technology advancements. Ain't that the truth? While chatbots and artificial intelligence itself have been around for decades in one form or another, it's only in the last few years that companies have really started to embrace using them in their interactions with their customers. Number two, businesses must choose their chatbot platform carefully. Chatbots are found predominantly on platforms that rely on conversations as the primary way to interact with customers. So developers are limited in where their chatbot can reside. But as social media marketers already know, you must go where your customers are. And your customers are chatting you up on your Facebook page. Number three, consumers have concerns about the accuracy, security, and privacy of chatbots. This is where the challenge comes in. You may think it's an effective way to communicate with your customers and prospects. How do they feel about that? There's some challenges. Although 79% of respondents to the Retali survey report that their chatbot experiences were positive or neutral, there are still concerns and frustration among all users. For example, 55% of millennial users reported that the accuracy rate or lack thereof is something that could be improved, and 28% said the ability to have the natural sounding conversation could be more enhanced. That said, the nature of artificial intelligence, the technology that becomes smarter over time, will go a long way toward addressing that specific complaint. The conclusion, while chatbots are a helpful addition to a company's marketing repertoire, they're just that, an addition. Some people worry what chatbots will take away jobs from those in customer service and sales. However, those fears have been around pretty much as long as artificial intelligence itself. The bottom line is that a computer is only as smart as the human that programmed it. True story. When computers can become smarter with more human interaction, they're not a replacement for assistance from an actual human with reasoning ability. True story. So let me know what you think about that. Have you created a chatbot for your business? Do you even know what a chatbot is? Maybe it's the first time that you're hearing the word chatbot. Send me a tweet. Let me know. But your business should have it. It allows you to, and if you don't, your competition's definitely not doing it. And you're listening to this podcast right now. Shows where your priorities are regarding your digital strategy. So why not have the first mover's advantage? Be the first in your industry to put together a chatbot. And who knows? It may convert to long-term profitable customers. Well, we know what that sound means. We are out of time. Again, my name is Sebastian Rusk, and this is the Seb Rush Show. We do this each and every week. Helping you better understand what you don't know that you don't know about social media. Make sure you're connecting with us on Facebook, social buzz on air. Find me on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and follow and connect and send me a tweet. Ask me at a tie a bow tie. At Seb Rusk is where you can find me. And questions, thoughts, concerns, ideas? Again, without you guys, this show does not go down. So I appreciate each and every one of you. Well, I'm Sebastian Rusk signing off from our studio here inside Business Miami. We'll talk to you next time.