How To Build Relationships and Stand Out On Social Media with Expert Mike Stelzner

This week’s episode is an incredible interview with Mike Stelzner, the creator of Social Media Examiner and Social Media Marketing World. As an expert in the social media marketing world, I wanted to speak to Mike to find out how he uses his platform to stand out in a busy industry. We look at what makes people successful, giving his formula for creating content that people will want to engage with.

KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST

• The speed in which social media moves is one of the biggest challenges for those working in a social industry, as well as those using social media to grow their business. Luckily, it’s starting to slow down.
• You don’t have to be on every single social media platform. Instead, you need to ensure you’re putting your energy into the spaces where your customers are.
• Social media is great when it comes to tracking your results. If you’re struggling to track your results, however, you need to ensure you’re making goals to ‘stop’ things as well.
• If you want to stand out in a noisy industry is to understand exactly who you are trying to reach. Who is that somebody? What struggles do they have? What do they do? When you create something, remind yourself of the person you’re creating it for.
• Once you know who you’re trying to reach, you need to ensure you’re creating content for that person. This could be a podcast, written word, video or live and in person. Think about what you’re best at.
• If you don’t know what your customers want, ASK THEM. Once you have asked your audience, you need to see if their actions are matching their statements. Clear signs are the messages you receive from your followers.
• Not everyone is supposed to be in your tribe.
• If you’re not putting information out there, someone else is. You want to be the resource that people come to every single time they need information.
• We should all be doing stuff that makes it easier for people to remember who we are.
• The formula for success is ‘great content + other people – marketing messages = growth’. When it comes to your business you need to ensure you have amazing content, strong connections and less of a pitch. This is the Elevation Principle.
• The best way to make an impact on someone in person is to meet them in person.
• Social media is called social media for a reason. If you’re not a nice person, you won’t survive.

THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…

One of the most important things you can do when it comes to social media is be yourself. Successful people are authentic.

HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN'T MISS

• Introducing Mike – 06:00
• Social Media is Ever Changing – 12:10
• Tracking Your Results – 17:15
• How to Stand Out in a Noisy Industry - 21:10
• Creating Connections Through Details - 33:15
• The Importance of Relationships - 37:38
• The Future for Social Media Marketing World – 49:30

Transcript below

Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the podcast. I hope you are having a wonderful, wonderful week. I actually cannot believe we are cracking on so far into the year and we are nearly done. It feels like not many weeks left now. Also, I'm on episode 94. I've nearly hit 100 episodes and I've got some exciting stuff coming. I'm going to be recording a very special episode 100, which I'm super excited about. Obviously I want to see what you guys think, but it's going to give you a different view into my world and just into maybe a side you have not seen before or conversations that I haven't had before. But I am really excited about it. It's going to be extra special. So, that's something to look forward to.

Also, just while I was on this week, I just wanted to remind you that last week's episode we talked about the 2020 goal planner that I've got that it's a free download, it's a great workbook, 10 pages packed full of questions, suggestions of how you can review last year, things that you should note down, things that you should think about, and then those all important goals for 2020, and the actions you're going to need to take in the first 30 days, because obviously what are you going to do the minute it hits, and how are you going to get your year next year off to an absolute flying start.

So the workbook is there to download. Head over to TeresaHeathWareing.com/2020 as in the numbers 2020. You can get your free download there. Then, on the thank you page, look out for the video I've got on there and the opportunity I've given you to join me for a live workshop and coaching call. So I want you to do this workbook with me. I want to sit with you live on a call on the 12th of December, and I want us to work through it together. Not only that, you're going to get access to a Facebook group that's going to stay open from the minute you join until the beginning of February. So first of Feb, it will close, but the idea of that Facebook group is that I can support you going into that first year, and I've got a few little surprises and little exciting things along the way for you if you are in that group.

So I really, really hope to see you there. I want an amazing 2020, and I want all of you to have an amazing 2020 as well. Okay, on with today's episode. It's an interview, and it's a really good one. I know I say that every week and you must think, oh come on Teresa, constantly. You must have done some bad interviews. No, maybe there are some I wasn't too keen on, but this isn't one of them. This week, I am talking to the amazing Mike Stelzner. Now you may not know his name. I'm sure lots of you will, but if you don't, you are likely to know Social Media Examiner, and/or Social Media Marketing World.

Social Media Examiner is an amazing website that basically puts out content every single day written by world experts. I've been very lucky that I've written for them as well a little while back. As you know, I'm not a big fan of writing, so that was quite a job. But I have written for them. Also, they have Social Media Marketing World, which is the world's biggest social media conference that goes on in San Diego every single year and I have been flourish years, maybe five years in a row now, and I have made loads of connections. I've met loads of people. I've learned lots of stuff in the past from that event, and it's a great, great event. It was the first international event I went to, or no was it? Actually, it might have been converted. I think maybe it was converted from lead pages as my first event. Okay, I can't remember.

Anyway, it was definitely near one of the first. I'm sure it might have been the first. Anyway Teresa, get on with it. So yeah, it's an amazing event. It's a great, great event. Basically, Mike Stelzner heads up this whole thing. He's almost a bit like, I don't know how to describe him. I'm sure someone could tell me, but you know when ... he's in charge of social media in the world. I know it sounds ridiculous, but if you want to get on in the social media space, you need to know Mike Stelzner, because Mike Stelzner is very influential because, like I said, he runs the largest social media website and the largest social media ... Well, I just said the largest social media website. I don't know that that's for fact, but it's very, very big.

One of the largest events in the world for social media. So yeah, he was amazing, but we had a really good chat about how could you stand out, how can you become the expert in your industry, because that's what he does on a day to day basis. He is classed as an expert, and he's right at the top of his industry. But also, he works with people who are doing the same. So what he talked about was great. We looked at ways that, what makes those people successful, how do we get to be where they are, what do we do in our businesses to get to that level? He gives some really good practical advice and also talks about how you can stand out. He has this formula that he talks about in terms of creating contact plus other people, minus marketing messages, equals growth.

You'll understand what he means by all that as we go through the podcast. Like I said, he was a great episode. I really, really enjoyed chatting with him and was very lucky the following day to have another hour call with him to talk to him about something he's planning to help him, which was wonderful. But he's a really great guy. He gave some great advice, so I really hope you're going to enjoy this one.

Introducing Mike

It gives me so much pleasure to welcome today the very formidable and wonderful Mike Stelzner. Mike, welcome to the podcast.

Teresa, thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited to be joining you today.

I am super excited. So Mike, I've already done an intro about you, but let me just reiterate and explain. Social Media Marketing World was the one thing I had on my kind of vision board when I started the business. So I have started my own marketing consultancy. I've worked in marketing for like 15 years and the start of my own consultancy was doing social media. I saw this event and I watched the video, and I was like, I've got to go there. But it was in San Diego. It's like five and a half thousand miles away from where I am. I remember thinking one day, one day I'm going to go there, one day I'm going to be sat in that room with all those amazing people and all those amazing speakers.

I remember seeing it for the first year, and the next year it came out and I just booked my ticket. I had no idea, in the early days of running my business, how I was going to afford the flight, how I was actually going to manage to go to San Diego, because I hadn't done anything like that on my own before, and how it was all going to work out, but I just knew I had to be there. I just knew I had to be in that room with everybody else. For me, especially in the UK, I had to raise myself above everybody else and go, look, this is how seriously I'm taking it. I'm going all the way to San Diego to sit in a room with these amazing experts. It blew me away. It was honestly, and still to this day, one of the best events I've ever been to, and to be in that room and meet those people was just phenomenal. So thank you.

Thank you. Thank you for making the investment. That is so cool.

Honestly, for me it was like how do I stand out? That's how I stand out. I go and sit in a room with those people. You were live there, which was great. But anyway, I've jumped straight into that. So if my audience haven't heard from you, which I'm absolutely adamant they have because I share a lot of Social Media Examiner stuff. I talk about Social Marketing World. But just let my audience know who you are and how you got to do what you're doing today.

Well, first of all, I'm a marketer. Secondly, we just turned 10 years old literally about two weeks ago. Actually, about a month ago as of this recording. I started Social Media Examiner back in October of 2009, and it was an experiment as all great things often start as. I didn't know what it would become. It was a blog, and I figured this social media thing maybe has a shelf life for three years, so let's just get on that train and start to get out of the station. Man, was I wrong. That thing just exploded.

As we started, in the early days, it was just writing articles. It turns out that that was the kind of stuff that went viral on social. So little did I know, back then you could write something about how to do social media on social media and it would get shared thousands of times on Twitter, it would go crazy viral on Facebook, and these were the easy days for things to spread. This is when Facebook only had maybe 300 million people, which still sounds like a lot, but it was really small back then. Things grew. I eventually started a podcast and eventually started getting into video, and now we have two podcasts, we have a live show, we publish articles almost every day. We have our videos on our YouTube channel that we're publishing multiple times a weekend. Millions of people are consuming our stuff every year, it's pretty crazy.

That is crazy. For me, you are the pinnacle of it. You are the ... if I ever speak to anybody or train anybody about social media and I say, this is the direction you need to go, or this is the site you need to look at, it's your site. It is amazing, and how you maintain that in this crazy busy huge world that we're in now, how you still maintain that today is amazing.

Thank you. Is that a question or a statement.

Both really. You can answer it. That's fine.

Yeah, how do I maintain is it the question. So first of all, it's being aware of the challenges that are faced by our core audience which is marketers. So the main audience that we're attracting is a marketer, typically whose job is marketing in a small business typically, less than 100 employees. Some of them are solopreneurs or own agencies, but the vast majority of them struggle with the java marketing, and social is a key part of what they do. It's not all that they do. The reality for us is we're keeping up on the news, so we have to kind of watch what Zuckerberg changes with Facebook, what's happening with up and coming platforms like TikTok, and then of course we also have to really be aware of our core audience to what their challenges are, which means we have to survey them every year. We have to really understand the customers that belong to the various ... we have a professional organisation called the Social Media Marketing Society, which thousands of marketers belong to, and there's a Facebook group.

We kind of study what are they complaining about, what are their struggles, what are their challenges? We kind of look at all of that, and then of course I interview people on my podcast every week who I think are doing it right. They tell me things, so all that data comes in, and then we kind of make projection and hypothesis about what we think our audience is going to need for the next couple of months. Then we go ahead and develop the content, recruit the people to be on the show and, dot, dot, dot. We just kind of are always ... if you will, we're like a ship out to sea looking at the weather patterns. When the weather pattern changes, then we need to change the direction we're going.

Social Media is Ever Changing

Yeah. I think you hit on a couple of things there that, one, the speed in which it moves is just ... in fact, and I'd sent you a DM and you replied to my DM once when I did a Ted Ex talk. I quoted you in my Ted Ex talk because you said, at one of the events I'd been to that we're in one of the fastest moving industries in the world. We are. It doesn't stop. I think that is a challenge itself. Secondly, for all these marketers that you're dealing with, the overwhelm in this industry is just immense. Do you ever see it ever changing or ever slowing down, or ever feeling a little bit calmer?

I will say that, over the last two years, it's slowed down a little bit, only because Facebook has been so distracted with lawsuits, all the world and government inquiries, that they have not innovated as much. As a result of the largest social media platform not innovating as much, the competitors slowed down their innovation. It's only now that we're starting to see a lot of new stuff coming from Facebook's fastest growing platform, which is Instagram, and that's going to begin the competitive wars, if you will, across the social platforms as other platforms are beginning to say, all right, I'm going to add this or I'm going to do this just how Facebook does it.

But yeah, I always say internally that, as long as social is changing, we have a very solid business model. Because the moment it stops changing is the moment when pretty much we're not in a good spot.

We've got nothing to say.

Yeah. But it's slowing down for sure. I think that, as a result of it slowing down, there's a little bit going back to basics with a lot of marketing right now. Rather than just going here because it's new, now the deeper questions are being asked, well what is this doing for the business, what's the actual trackable ROI for something like this. I think a lot of marketers right now are using this slightly slowing season to kind of make smart decisions about what to stop so that they can start something new.

I totally agree. I think sometimes what happens with the social space is that everybody thinks I've got to be on everything, I've got to do everything. You mentioned TikTok. That comes out, everyone's like, oh God should I be doing that, should I be on it. Actually, sometimes for me, and when I speak to my audience, it's more about doing what you do with consideration and being consistent at it, and being where your audience are, and focusing on that platform, and doing what you can manage, because otherwise you will completely overwhelm yourself with all these platforms and try and do all these things, and keep up with all these changes. I think all the platforms have got so many amazing things that they can do, and probably you might agree, disagree. Lots of businesses are just scratching the surface of it.

I would agree. Most marketers are doing social wrong or bad, and that might mean they're doing just Facebook ads for example, and it's kind of working, or it might mean that they're going live on LinkedIn or using LinkedIn video, but they don't really know if anyone's watching. But yes, I don't even remember what the original question was. What was the question?

Just the fact ... I've forgotten as well.

Yeah.

[inaudible 00:15:24].

The reality is we are in a changing world, but I think what a lot of us need to do is step back and answer the question why first. Why go do this? Why continue to do this? One of the things we've done at Social Media Examiner over the last year is we've stopped some things. We've decided we're no longer on Pinterest because, in our particular demographic, it wasn't spurring our Christmas objectives. We've also scaled back some of our use of live video, and instead we're producing podcasts and we're doing live taping, if you will. It just really comes down to cost benefit analysis. We have a team of X number of people in the company, and I think there's five people in our marketing department, which is a decent sized marketing department, but they're all overworked and overwhelmed. It's like there are a lot of things that we'd love to do more of, YouTube being one of them, and we just haven't been able to do it because we've been distracted doing what we've always done.

So one of the things that I keep preaching to people is, if when I ask you why, you say it's because that's the way we've always done it, that's a legitimate reason to stop, because that means you don't really know why.

Right.

The hardest thing in the world for a lot of people to do is to stop something just because they've always done it. You almost feel like you're compelled you must do it. I say you actually must consider whether or not that's a complete utter waste of your time, because you will never be free for the next big thing when it does approach.

The other thing ... sorry.

Yeah, go ahead.

Tracking Your Results

So the other thing I was going to say that's really interesting. When you have been in marketing a long time ... when I did my degree 15 years ago, well one, marketing then and marketing today looks nothing the same. But we couldn't prove this stuff. We couldn't prove whether ... I used to head up...