Gavin Hammar is the founder and CEO of Sendible.com, a leading social media management platform designed to make it easier for businesses and agencies to effectively manage their presence on social media. We recently sat down with Gavin to discuss current social media trends and how to leverage them to improve your business.
Tell us a little about yourself. How did you come to establish Sendible?
Before social media was even a term, I noticed that there were more and more social networks cropping up, each allowing users the ability to post updates. Facebook was just starting to gain momentum and Twitter had not yet become mainstream. I had the idea to build desktop software to allow users to post to multiple services at once, thus saving them the hassle of having to log in to multiple services and post updates manually.
I used my experience having built banking integration systems to develop a robust platform that could integrate with any API. This meant that it could evolve to support all social networks, blogging platforms, and even email and SMS. The reason I chose the name Sendible was because it made sending any type of message possible (send-ible).
Having developed the core engine, I then built a basic website around it and released it to the public for free in the middle of 2008. Shortly after launching, articles were written about Sendible on Techcrunch, Mashable, and ReadWriteWeb.
Let’s talk about some of the latest trends in social media. What platforms are the most successful for businesses who want to generate leads? And what are the platforms that teens and millennials are using the most right now?
I still believe that the top platform for generating leads on social media is Twitter. This is because Twitter is all about listening to conversations and adding value. Twitter gives you the ability to easily locate potential customers by monitoring specific keywords within your niche. Not only that, but you can also find influencers within your industry and connect with their followers to spread awareness about your business or service.
If you’re a B2C business, it’s becoming more and more difficult to reach teens and millennials who are spending more and more time on private social networks such as Snapchat and Whatsapp. For this reason, it’s important to start building a following on Instagram, which is also gaining in popularity among the younger demographic.
At what during the evolution of a site or business should the owner consider obtaining a social media management tool?
As soon they find themselves managing more than one social profile. When you’re managing accounts on more than social network, it becomes very difficult to successfully achieve your social media goals without a tool. Updating multiple profiles, responding to comments from multiple feeds, and monitoring streams for opportunities is extremely time-consuming. Without a social media social management solution in place, it is also difficult to gather all the data needed to report on results and track success.
If someone were to say to you, “I don’t need a social media tool to publish content on multiple sites or platforms – that’s what cut-and-paste is for,” what would your response be?
I would question how much that person values their time. Would they rather be spending all their time signing in and out of multiple social networking sites to publish updates, respond to comments, and generate reports? Or would they prefer to spend that time creating great content? I would suggest that they should seriously consider investing in a social media tool so that they can put the time they save on these administrative tasks towards producing engaging content that resonates with their followers.
What types of businesses or websites tend to benefit the most from having a strong social media plan?
I always say: before you create a social media plan, you should start with your content strategy. Without a content strategy, your social media plan will not be nearly as effective. Once you have a content strategy in place, you can start designing your social media strategy to help distribute your content.
Your content should be educational and engaging and should also drive readers to an email capture form. You can also utilize retargeting to bring visitors back to your site. So, for that reason, any business wanting to drive traffic to their website, generate leads, and expand their reach would benefit from a social media strategy, but it’s particularly well-suited for a business with content in place already.
Name one thing that the owner of a website, blog, or small business can do this week to improve their social media presence.
– Set up a Twitter search stream to monitor people mentioning pain points that your product or service can solve.
– Respond to each person sympathetically and maintain a list of all the pain points mentioned, as well as the Twitter handle that mentioned them.
– At the end of the week, produce a short 300 – 500 word article that lists the pain points and discusses your solutions.
– Publish this to your blog.
– At the end of the week, go back to everyone on Twitter and share the link to your article with each person individually.
When it comes to social media analytics, what are some important things to keep in mind?
Before considering the social media analytics that are important to you, it’s essential that you come up with your social media campaign goals and objectives. These goals and objectives will inform the analytics you choose to monitor over the duration of your campaign. For example, if your goals are to build brand awareness, you may want to measure your reach and audience growth over a given period across each of the social networks you manage.
What do you foresee for social media in the future?
I’m really excited about virtual and augmented reality and the impact this will have on social media. We’ve already seen Facebook acquire Oculus Rift and the success of Pokemon Go, so we are likely to see more innovation in this area in the not-so-distant future. With the uptake of virtual reality, people will be able to have virtual social experiences together, which will take social media to a whole new level. I can see brands developing these virtual social experiences for users to try, which will introduce a new market for virtual experiential marketing.
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