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If LinkedIn is Salad Do You Need More Roughage?

Posted Under: Social Pros Podcast
Hosted By
10XMarketing

Daniel Lemin

Convince & Convert
10XMarketing

Hannah Tooker

LaneTerralever
10XMarketing

Leanna Pham

Convince & Convert
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@MissTriathlon

Anthony Juliano, the Vice President/General Manager of Asher Agency, joins Social Pros to talk about his philosophy for succeeding on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn Is SaladIf LinkedIn is Salad Do You Need More Roughage?

If social media is a buffet, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat are the desserts while LinkedIn is the leafy green salad that we’re not overly excited to sink our teeth into. People love spending time on the ‘candy platforms’ but they usually don’t consume as much “salad” as they should.
Anthony Juliano, the Vice President/General Manager of Asher Agency, states that people don’t love spending time on LinkedIn as much as they enjoy spending time on other platforms. When people go on LinkedIn, they usually get what they need, get out, and get on with their day.
However, Anthony argues that compared to other social media networks, LinkedIn has the most untapped potential for the largest number of professionals. Thankfully for Social Pros listeners, Anthony is a seasoned trainer on a variety of social media topics, with a specific focus on LinkedIn.

In This Episode:

  • 04:30 – How the demand for LinkedIn courses and programs amplified over time
  • 06:25 – How teaching methods change depending on the audiences’ relationship with social media
  • 08:01 – How social media is becoming more of a universal skill across different industries
  • 10:42 – Anthony’s philosophy of LinkedIn for business and B2B
  • 12:30 – How to leverage LinkedIn and the importance of consistency
  • 14:33 – Why LinkedIn has become more relevant today than it was a decade ago
  • 16:30 – How marketers have changed the way they use LinkedIn
  • 19:21 – Tips for creating successful newsfeed content on LinkedIn
  • 25:36 – Why you should focus less on the length of your posts/captions and more on the strength of your story

Quotes From This Episode:

“Use LinkedIn as one tool, not the entire toolbox.”@ajuliano
LinkedIn takes the leads you already have & nurtures them. Click To Tweet

Resources:

 

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Episode Transcript

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Anthony

LinkedIn is salad, and Facebook and Instagram and TikTok and Snapchat, they’re candy, and candy’s great, and it’s hard to consume a lot of salad. People don’t love spending time on LinkedIn in the same way I think they love spending time on other platforms and how they get sucked into other platforms. People go into LinkedIn, they get what they need and then they move on and they do their work.

Jay

Well, I suppose, Adam, that’s one way you could put it, that LinkedIn is salad and all the other social networks are candy. And that’s a funny way to put it from our guest this week, Anthony Juliano, who’s from Fort Wayne, Indiana. Not too far for me. He’s been in the digital agency business forever and is also an instructor and faculty member in a bunch of different colleges and universities. Great show, but he makes an interesting point here, which is that we think of LinkedIn as one of the six or eight major social networks, and of course it is, but the success path on LinkedIn is so very different than the success path on other platforms.

Adam

It is. I mean it’s one of the trinities of the original OG platforms. Our moms and our dads always told us to eat our roughage, and sometimes we didn’t want to, and I think Anthony does a really good job of explaining that, and I think in a style, and that’s one of the things about this episode, Jay, that certainly made me feel like I do want to be a student in one of his lectures, because this episode flew by. Anthony shared so many great ideas on how marketers as well as us as just individual people using LinkedIn maybe to find our next gig can benefit from that platform.

Jay

Yeah, this is a really crisp, fun, tight episode with a lot of knowledge and some amazing sound bites. You’re going to like this one from our friend Anthony. Thanks as always to our friends at Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Adam and his team put together this new ebook. I want you to download it. It’s called 50 Social Media Best Practices. 50 Social Media Best Practices. We should have a test on those. You’re going to learn a lot. It’s really terrific. No obligation, no cost. Download it. Get on it right now. Go to Bit.ly/tips50social. Let me spell that out for you. It’s a little complicated. B-I-T dot L-Y slash T-I-P-S-5-0-S-O-C-I-A-L. Bit.ly/tips50social. Grab that 50 Social Media Best Practices from our friends at Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Jay

Also, if you’re working on a brand new social media strategy or you think you might need a new social media strategy or you want to compare your social media program to those of your competitors, need a workshop, maybe my team and I at Convince & Convert can help you. We work with some of the most interesting and iconic brands in the whole world to make their social media strategies better. Maybe we can assist you. We’d love to talk to you about how to convinceandconvert.com. Before you do that though, please listen to this incredible episode of social pros with Anthony Juliano.

Jay

Anthony Juliano, my friend, my Indiana brother, welcome to Social Pros.

Anthony

Thank you, Jay. Great to be here.

Jay

Tell us a little bit about your work. You’re the VP and general manager of the Asher Agency, also the founder of Point Six Four Consulting, which is your consulting biz on the side. Tell us a little bit about work you’ve been doing and we’ve got a bunch of questions for you.

Anthony

Sure. I have a blissfully complex professional life. I do three different things. Been at Asher for 15 years. Work with a great team there. We work with midsize to large businesses when they’re looking for help with their most complex marketing problems, so I bring a team with me. I do project management, help bring the right resources to the problem, and do some strategy work there. Digital is a big piece of that, of course.

Anthony

My consulting business is very small. That’s when people need just me. Sometimes it’s LinkedIn training. Sometimes it’s someone doing social media implementation. A lot of times, it’s professional services folks, attorneys, financial planners and the like, who just need someone who can be available to them when they need them, but they don’t need a big machine. And then the third thing I do is teach. I teach both on the credit and non-credit side, teach a number of marketing classes as well as a social media professional certificate course, teach LinkedIn classes. And I love it. It all works well together. A few years ago I decided that I was embracing the chaos and it’s really more blissfully than blissful than complex and keeps me busy, keeps me happy.

Jay

Let’s talk about that notion of teaching. It’s amazing to think there is a LinkedIn course and increasingly there is social media programs in the curricula of lots of different colleges and universities. You have seen the metamorphosis in that regard, from nobody was teaching nothing about nothing to now it’s a de facto part of a lot of curricula. Talk little bit about that transformation and your [inaudible 00:04:59].

Anthony

Yeah, I was fortunate to work with a couple schools that got ahead of it and they knew that they needed to provide something because people were asking for it. When we were hiring folks in digital five, 10 years ago, we were hiring English majors like myself, Russian history majors, people with no background in it because it didn’t exist, and the institutions I work with got ahead of it. They said, “Employers are looking forward. Students want to learn this and as marketing evolves we need to provide it.” I love to teach, so I will stand up in front of people and talk about just about anything I know, and social is something that was a passion of mine and the timing was great. People needed it. I needed to learn and it’s a great way to learn if you’re going to teach something and bringing that to people who really need the information is one of my favorite things I do professionally.

Jay

I think this is true, correct me if I’m wrong, that you teach some courses to what we would consider to be a traditional university college audience. They’re younger people in their late teens or early twenties and other programs more to professional, non-traditional students, et cetera. Does that sound right?

Anthony

Correct, correct. Yeah. I just, Thursday morning I taught a class where the oldest person in the class was probably 20 years old. That’s traditional college environment, but I also do short-term, on-demand training for the incumbent workforce. What that means is helping people who already have a job get better at doing their job.

Jay

I find that fascinating, Anthony. Anthony is our guest this week on Social Pros. Anthony, I find that fascinating that you’re teaching similar subjects to very different audiences with very different historical relationships to social media. Traditional college students literally grew up with this stuff and then old dogs like yourself and myself and Adam, it’s a much different generational approach to social. How do you change and vary your teaching style when you’re coming at the same topic to these manifestly different audiences?

Anthony

Well, one of the things that I’ve learned that’s a huge help to me is to ask questions. Ask questions even before the class. When I’m doing the social media professional certificate class or a LinkedIn class, I send out a questionnaire and basically ask people, “What do you want to know? Why are you here? Why are you taking the class?” And I do that even in my for-credit classes. I learned a number of years ago, because I do a lot of public speaking as well, that your slides are a guess at what the audience wants to hear, so why guess? Just ask them. If you have access to the roster, reach out, “How can I help? What are you looking to know?” And you can learn that in Q&A, but you’re already almost done, so why not learn it beforehand?

Anthony

It’s asking questions, it’s understanding the class that I’m teaching. The marketing class I’m teaching to traditional college students, these are non-marketing majors, so I’m bringing in things about the consumer experience to keep them interested, to keep them off their phones during class, quite honestly. It’s meeting them where they are, and I have so much passion and interest in the topic that I can hit it from a number of different angles. But what’s always most important is what’s the audience’s interest, what do they need?

Adam

Anthony, it’s great to have you on the show, and I tell you, when I do my show prep, I was thinking, “Okay, I’m going to ask Anthony about LinkedIn. I’m going to ask him certainly about his consulting agency,” and I was going to ask you a little bit about your teaching and your adjunct professorship. And quite frankly, that’s the one that’s … It’s funny how we start with that, because it is such an important and interesting topic. It is the future art of our industry. So real quick, one of the interesting things that I have found is exactly what you found. I started working with my alma mater, the University of Tennessee, about five years ago, and along with my employer, Salesforce, we were able to to build a social media command center and empower all the marketing and comms students with access to Social Studio, because like you implied, social or communications, PR, marketing students with social experience are worth so much kind of when they get in their first job.

Adam

My question for you is I did that in the college of communications and information, which is where I graduated from, but as we see social media evolve, I’m seeing this need for these skills to be in the business school, to be in the school of library sciences, to be in psychology, the law, the medical school. I’m curious, with your vantage point and who you’re teaching and instructing now, where do you see this going and how does that imply the future of our industry?

Anthony

Well, I think it becomes as woven into every program as other skills, like leadership skill, things that are soft skills in effect that are being woven into the curriculum. That’s what’s happening with digital literacy, if you will and social media. I mentioned that the students I’m teaching in my Thursday class are non-marketing majors, so I got to look at an IT major and say how is he going to be interested in it? Let’s talk about security, let’s talk about privacy, and hit that so it’s relevant to them. But the institutions are really catching up to business and saying we have to equip students to be ready for this world.

Anthony

I have the benefit of teaching in a number of different departments. One of the departments I teach in is organizational leadership. I teach a customer service class. Jay’s actually been a guest speaker for that class. And even in that class, we’ve got to be talking about what the leaders need to know about social. You don’t have to need to know how to do implementation necessarily, but you need to know how it affects hiring. How does it affect your capacities as a leader? How can you communicate with people? It’s really weaving it into everything we do, and I think you’re going to see that become more common as it has a greater effect on the way people communicate, the way people lead, and the way they manage.

Jay

Anthony, one of the things that we wanted to talk to you about in this episode, Adam alluded to it, is your work with LinkedIn. You’ve mentioned you do a fair bit of LinkedIn advising and consulting. You wrote an interesting article on LinkedIn not too long ago that you believe that LinkedIn is much better for sales velocity than for prospect and than for pipeline development. And I think everybody out there who is a Social Pros listener and we love each and every one of you, has experienced the blind groping in the dark amongst sales professionals who use LinkedIn in lieu of cold emails now, and that probably doesn’t have a tremendous amount of success to it and it’s also kind of irksome. So talk a little bit about your philosophy of LinkedIn for business and for B2B.

Anthony

Yeah, it’s about using LinkedIn as one tool, not the entire toolbox, and knowing that there’s a lot of things you have to be doing in order for LinkedIn to work. I always compare LinkedIn to a gym membership. If you have a gym membership and you’re eating Twinkies and hot dogs and pizza, which I love, by the way, if you’re eating all those things and you’re working out at the gym, you’re not going to get the same results as if you’re doing the things you should be doing in the real world outside of the gym. Well, the same is true on LinkedIn.

Anthony

What I see LinkedIn doing best is taking a list of leads that you already have and nurturing those, not being the like fairy and going about LinkedIn and liking everyone’s post, but strategically saying, “Who should I be engaged with? Who should I be continuing a conversation with? What can I learn about my prospects based on what they’re sharing on social?” It doesn’t sound like rocket science, but it’s so much the exception and not the rule of what I see. So many people, they want it to be a magic bullet that they’re going to log onto LinkedIn and all of a sudden generate a prospect list. And my experience with my clients is it just doesn’t work that way.

Adam

Anthony, one of the things you told us right before the show was the fact that you get excited when your clients get results from LinkedIn, because it can be so frustrating for them. I want to carve in and talk a little bit about that word frustrating. What do you think is frustrating for your customers and your clients with LinkedIn, and how are you converting them and helping them to see the light and the efficacy of LinkedIn? Is there a magic wand? Is it one or two things or is it a little bit more complicated than that?

Anthony

Well, I’ll first confess to I’m a LinkedIn nerd. I’ve loved LinkedIn for a long time and I just get it and it’s always been very intuitive to me. But what I understand is it’s not as intuitive to other people. I loved what Amber Naslund said on your show a few episodes ago when she talked about consistency being the key. That’s it. But it’s really strange to me that people who get Facebook, they understand Facebook, and then I talk to them about the importance of content on LinkedIn, and they look at me like I have six heads. Like, “Well, what would I ever say on LinkedIn?” And I’m like, “You just posted a picture of your salad on Instagram, but you don’t know what to say on LinkedIn, and you have such a rich professional life. There’s so much you could be talking about.”

Anthony

So it’s really in a friendly way, in a diplomatic way, making that case, saying that you don’t have to hit a home run every time you communicate something. It doesn’t have to be earth-shattering information. You just need to put yourself in the news feed and be consistent so that you’re top of mind. And to me, that’s really easy and really simple. But to a lot of people it’s still brand new because they don’t work in the marketing environment every day, so when they get it and then seeing the results they get is one of my favorite things that happens professionally is when people say, “Oh, now I know how to use LinkedIn and now I know why I’d rather spend time on LinkedIn than time with other digital tools.” It all works together and every tool has its role, but LinkedIn is, I think, where there’s still the most untapped potential for the largest number of professionals. I think it’s where there’s still the most upside, and helping people realize that is something I try to do every day.

Jay

Despite the fact that some people are annoyed or irked by some of the ham-handed prospect list development techniques that you sometimes see on LinkedIn, I think it’s safe to say that LinkedIn is having a moment. It is by pretty much all measures more popular than it’s ever been. To your point, Anthony, professionals are spending more time there, creating more content there, et cetera. Why do you think that is? What is the tipping point, if it is a tipping point, why is LinkedIn, which is by no means a new social network. I mean, in some cases it is the oldest of all the ones that we use today. Why is it now becoming more important, more relevant in comparison to four or five, six, nine, 10 years ago?

Anthony

Well, I think some of it’s critical mass. I think more people are getting results from it, and a crowd draws a crowd. When something is working, people hear about it. But I think it was a slower burn than the other social media platforms. This’ll be my second reference to salad in the podcast and that’s unintentional, but LinkedIn is-

Adam

Got our headline figured out.

Anthony

Yeah. LinkedIn is salad, and Facebook and Instagram and TikTok and Snapchat, they’re candy, and candy’s great, and it’s hard to consume a lot of salad. People don’t love spending time on LinkedIn in the same way I think they love spending time on other platforms and how they get sucked into other platforms. People go into LinkedIn, they get what they need and then they move on and they do their work, and that just takes more time for people to get results when they don’t have tons of time to devote to the site or when they don’t spend tons of time on the site. Some of it is a mystery to me, to be quite honest. You mentioned LinkedIn as the oldest of the major social media platforms. It’s been around since 2003 I think, and it’s just taken time for people to see how it fits into whatever it is they do. I’m glad it’s happening. I’m glad people are seeing it, and I think there’s much more of that to come, but it’s just a slower burn than some of the other platforms and their emergence.

Adam

Part of, I think what has happened, Anthony and Jay, throughout this whole journey with LinkedIn, as the platform has evolved, it’s evolved from how we as marketers and communicators used it. Certainly, and I think we initially were using it from a recruiting standpoint, HR/recruiting, then we began to say, “Oh wait, there’s an opportunity here to communicate from a B2B standpoint.” But today, its use and its value is so much more broad than that. So Anthony, two questions. Number one, do your customers realize that? And secondly, if they don’t, how do you help them understand the more broad benefits that LinkedIn and a LinkedIn marketing communications platform can bring their organizations?

Anthony

Yeah, Adam, great question. Yeah, I think there’s still a large number of people who think of LinkedIn as being only about job search and recruitment. That’s certainly something LinkedIn does really, really well. But I always tell people if you’re not looking for a job, don’t treat your LinkedIn profile like a resume. I was working with an HR consultant, very successful, great HR consultant, had a great story to tell, but her LinkedIn profile had her entire career, half of which she was a music teacher, half of which she was an HR consultant. And I asked her the question, I said, “Do you want, in 2020, do you want the world to think of you as half a music teacher and half an HR consultant?” She said, “No. Why would I want them to think that?” I said, “Well, that’s the story you’re telling on LinkedIn.” So either deemphasize or omit the stuff that doesn’t move your story forward and emphasize the stuff that does.

Anthony

I think there’s still a huge number of people who say, “Well, LinkedIn is just like a resume. I’m going to treat it that way,” and it doesn’t serve them well. So really what changes their perception is showing them results, other people who have done it, who are using LinkedIn effectively, who are driving real business opportunities with LinkedIn and showing them that and showing them that and showing them that. The other thing that’s really hard, Adam and Jay, is we’re talking about habit change. LinkedIn, one of the things I love about is it doesn’t have to take hours a day to make LinkedIn work. I tell people you can be effective on LinkedIn if you’re consistent. Again, going back to what Amber said, if you’re consistent 10 to 15 minutes a day, sure you’re going to get more results if you’re on there for a couple hours a day, but you can do okay with that small amount of time. But the key is to be there consistently.

Anthony

So many times it’s about that content creation, about doing more. On LinkedIn people say, “Okay, I have a profile, I have some connections, now I’m going to sit back and wait for good things to happen.” That doesn’t work, and people are starting to realize that. They’re starting to see the results others are getting and then they’re modeling that and adapting that to their own business needs. But again, it’s been a slow burn. I’m surprised it’s taken as long for LinkedIn to have its moment as Jay said, but I’m glad to see that people are realizing its utility.

Jay

Anthony, what do you advise clients on LinkedIn to the participation in this ongoing showing up to the gym and eating your salad on a day-to-day basis to continue this tortured metaphor. What do you advise in terms of a “short form” LinkedIn newsfeed content creation versus longer form use of LinkedIn articles, which is really more a blogging platform. Where do you fall out on that differentiation?

Anthony

Yeah, I try to keep it really simple for people to make it actionable. I say one status update, one post, one short form post a day, one article a month, start there. I think you can get way too noisy in the newsfeed on LinkedIn, so once a day I find is a good sweet spot. You’re consistent enough. And again, all of this depends on the size of your network. But going back to what I was saying about it being a habit change, I tell people to put it on your calendar for the first few weeks, just like if you’re trying to start to go to the gym, you got to put it on your calendar for the first few weeks until it becomes muscle memory.

Anthony

So if I tell people once a day with a post, a few engagements, a like, a share and a comment, and a long form article every month, that’s memorable and it’s actionable and it seems to work pretty well. I always steal a page from George Thorogood. I tell people when it comes to engagement, it’s not one bourbon, one shot, and one beer. It’s one like, one comment, and one share every day. It’s the George Thorogood School of LinkedIn, but something that’s memorable and actionable I think helps people at least get started.

Adam

Anthony, I want to ask you a very similar question to what Jay asked, and a question that’s going to be similar to the question, one of the big two questions that Jay will ask you here at the end of our program. I mean we’ve established you know social, you know advertising and marketing, you know the [inaudible 00:21:07] life, you know LinkedIn, you know recruitment. So my question for you is what would you tell someone trying to get a new job in the social media space? Either they’re fresh out of college, like one of the students that you are instructing or somebody trying to move to the next rung. What would you tell them in terms of what they should be publishing and curating on LinkedIn? Would it be very different than what you’d tell a brand leader?

Anthony

Well I think the place where I would suggest a difference is in how they build their network. For someone who’s mature in their career, I think you can be more selective in who you choose to connect with and who you choose to engage with. For someone who’s just getting started, it’s a bigger tent. It’s really being open to the possibilities and connecting with others. I mean, people tend to forget. You can always disconnect with someone on LinkedIn if they’re abusing the connection. I tend to tell younger people really be open to new connections and learning from people. That’s the biggest difference I see is in how you build the network.

Anthony

The cadence might be a little bit different, but I tell college students, for example, you are some of the best prospects for sharing great content on LinkedIn because you’re learning so much every day. One of the best ways to establish yourself as a peer to the people who are always working in that profession is to share what you’ve learned, to share your expertise. You can post on LinkedIn a few times a week by just sharing the highlights from the classes you’re taking and all of a sudden people instead of thinking of you as a student, they’re going to think of you as a marketer or an HR professional, whatever that is, because you are sharing the same types of content that your incumbent workforce peers are sharing.

Jay

Anthony, we had Allen Gannett on the show recently who’s done such a great job with his weekly one question, LinkedIn videos and has built a tremendous audience there. Our mutual friend, Marcus Sheridan has done the same thing, been really effective with short form LinkedIn video. Now more and more people are getting the opportunity to post to LinkedIn using live video as that rolls out across the network. How much are you using video for LinkedIn and would you advise people to dig into that side of LinkedIn or do you feel like that’s a bridge too far for most?

Anthony

I am not doing it as much as I recommend people doing it. I think this is the place where I need to eat my own salad. But I think clearly it’s where you’re seeing the most engagement. Clearly it’s what the audiences want. So yes, people should be doing it. Do it before you’re comfortable with it. Try stuff, get feedback, and improve, but don’t let perfect get in the way of done. And that’s advice I have to take myself, because I don’t do nearly enough with video, and that’s one of my goals for the coming year is to get better at it and to do more of it.

Adam

I know another project, Anthony, that you’re proud of is one that has a couple of years on it, but it was your contest for Twitter. You told a story in 140 characters that I thought was especially special. I’ll read it because I don’t know if you probably know it off the top of your head, but this is one of the Anthony 140 character stories.

Adam

“Tony was a snitch, so I wasn’t surprised when his torso turned up in the river. What did surprise me though was where they found his head.”

Anthony

When your name is Anthony, I don’t think you have a choice but to come up with a story like that, but it was a contest where you had to use exactly 140 characters back in the old days of Twitter, so I actually changed the person’s name to Tony because it gave me the exact number of characters I needed, but it was fun. It was a fun little exercise.

Anthony

One of the things I always tell my students is that in your professional life, a lot of learning is unlearning habits you learned as a student, and English majors, of which I am one, are the worst, because you learn to write with assignments like give me five to 10 pages. What are you going to do when someone says that? You’re going to use the longest word, the greatest number of adjectives, and that doesn’t work in the working world. Twitter is a way to help you be more concise if you use it that way, and that was the lesson of that exercise. It’s kind of goofy and it was fun to do a contest, but I liked the challenge of, okay, I need to say something. How do I do it with brevity? And that’s one of the things I think Twitter does best.

Adam

Yeah, I think we all need that forcing function every now and then to make us more concise.

Anthony

Yeah, for sure.

Jay

It reminds me of the greatest short story ever, that Ernest Hemingway approach, “For sale, baby shoes, never worn,” which is you’re like, “There’s a lot of backstory there that I’m not being told right now.” It’s really good.

Anthony

Yeah.

Jay

But now, of course, Twitter isn’t 140 characters. It’s 280 and now not only can you do fairly long LinkedIn posts, and as we mentioned a moment ago, you can do LinkedIn articles and Facebook lets you go on and on, and a lot of posts that are actually successful on Instagram are super duper long “captions”, so I feel like we have some somewhat misplaced or set aside this notion that that brevity is the soul of wit at least when it comes to social. Do you think that’s on the whole a good thing or a bad thing?

Anthony

I think it’s all about knowing the strength of your story. One of the big misconceptions about video is your video has to be less than two minutes. Now there’s videos out there that are hours long that people will sit there enraptured by if the content’s good. If you don’t have anything to say, don’t say it.

Adam

There’s three-hour podcasts out there. This is isn’t one of them, but there’s shows like the Jocko Willink show, some of those other shows, Joe Rogan show’s, which is by many accounts the most popular podcast in America. Those episodes are two, three hours, right? Sometimes longer.

Anthony

Yeah, 100%. I mean, it’s knowing the strength of your story and knowing your audience of course, and knowing their tolerance, knowing what medium’s going to work best for them, but if the right link for a video is two minutes, make it two minutes. If it’s not, maybe it’s six seconds or maybe it’s six hours. It’s really understanding what you’re trying to get across, the medium in which the audience is going to be consuming the content, and then again, strengthen the story. So yeah, we are still seeing the evolution of that. One thing I’m fully convinced of is that attention spans are shrinking. It’s way harder for people to read long form than it used to be. It’s not impossible, though, if you’re compelling in the story that you tell.

Adam

I think one of the things I was interested about and I posted on Twitter about this a week or so ago was Quibi’s turnstile announcements, and they were talking about how they were going to create content that you could watch and consume on your mobile device, but turn your device from landscape to portrait and see different things. What was more interesting to me was what you’re alluding to and that all the content on the platform is going to be snackable, episodic, seven- to 10-minute content. Do you see this again as confirmation of that trend is the whole idea of the 30-minute program or the 60-minute program a thing of the past?

Anthony

I don’t think it’s a thing of the past. I just think the bar is getting higher and higher. If you write a book today, it’s got to be better than it was 30 years ago, because there’s so much more competing for the audience’s attention. It’s something I’m extremely aware of as a teacher. I teach a class sometimes that’s three hours long, and I’m talking to traditional college students. How do I keep them engaged? One of the ways I do it is bring in a guest speaker, show them a video, have them do an exercise. Because if I lecture for three hours, I’m done. Even if I’m the best lecturer in the world and I’m not, I’m just toast. If I try to do that to an audience that’s used to consuming TikTok content, Snapchat content, it’s not that I can be hitting them with six seconds of content at a time, but I got to read the audience, and when they start to check out, I have to switch gears and do something different if I have any prayer of keeping their attention.

Anthony

That’s what I think it’s all about, is be an agile, listening to your audience, talking to your audience, and looking at the metrics, what’s working and what isn’t. That’s really what it comes down to. Now we have the data to understand that. That’s helpful, but a lot of it is just human-to-human understanding. Where is your audience and when you need to adapt?

Jay

Anthony, and particularly well said. Well, what a terrific episode of Social Pros. You dropped a ton of knowledge on the audience today. We really appreciate it. We’re going to ask you the two questions we ask everybody here on the program. You know what these questions are. You’re a listener to the program. We appreciate that. What one tip would give people who are looking to become a Social Pro?

Anthony

Have a life outside of social, get some sleep, do other things, meet people who don’t work in social. Yes, dive in deep, continue to learn, but go to bed. There is always going to be one more thing to read. There’s always going to be one more tweet to post. There’s always going to be one email you can send, and there’s so much celebration of the hustle culture in 2020 I think it’s nuts. I mean, the best decision I ever made was to get eight hours of sleep. I’m so much better. I’m so much more attentive to my clients when I have energy, and some of it is learning from people who don’t do what I do, talking to people who don’t really have an interest in social, who are actually averse to social, understanding what makes them tick. I have a lot of students. A lot of people think young people automatically gravitate towards digital tools. I have a lot of students who are burned out on it, and listening to why that is helps me shape better strategies for my clients.

Anthony

It’s understanding that today, if you work in social media, if you work in any digital media, if you work in marketing at all, a big chunk of your job is learning, and a big chunk of your job is teaching in addition to the doing of the work, but one of the biggest imperatives you have is to get away from it and go do other stuff. That’s when you’re going to have your best ideas. It’s kind of a cliche, but it’s absolutely true.

Jay

Boy, Social Pros listeners, I hope you hear what Anthony is saying, that there is a life outside of the next Instagram post. If you want to drill down on that topic a little bit more, listen to our episode with Lori Byrd-McDevitt from a few weeks ago about social media burnout. That was an arresting episode of Social Pros, and I was a little shook after that one. So tune in the back catalog for that one as well.

Jay

Anthony, if you could do a video call with any living person, who would it be?

Anthony

Dave Grohl.

Adam

Nice.

Anthony

That guy is so much cooler than I am and he’s always entertaining. I’ve seen Foo Fighters twice live and they were very different shows, once in 1998, once in 2015. They were awesome shows, but every time Dave Grohl has the chance to be in front of an audience, he’s just awesome, and I would love to hear his story, but he would just make me laugh the entire time. I would love to do that. There’s a lot of other people I could name, but he’s the one, if I had the chance.

Jay

That is the Dave Grohl reference on the show.

Adam

Yeah. It’s a good one.

Jay

I’m pretty sure it’s a really good one. Dave Grohl is seemingly hilarious, by all accounts, so I would, as a contemporary of Mr. Juliano’s and Mr. Adam’s, I think we would all be in on that.

Anthony

Yeah.

Adam

A very enthusiastic thumbs up.

Anthony

Yeah.

Jay

Yeah, we’ll work on that. Truly, Foo Fighters, will be in Fort Wayne eventually, right?

Anthony

Let’s hope so. They were. That was the first time I saw them. The second time I had to go to Austin, Texas, so hopefully I don’t have to go further away to see them a third time.

Jay

Well, hopefully we can have you back on the show soon enough and talk more about your teaching and your consulting and all the things that you’re working on. We really enjoyed this episode. Thanks so much, my friend.

Anthony

Well, you guys are great. Love the show. It’s an honor to be part of this and among all the other great people you’ve had on the show, really appreciate it.

Jay

Now our pleasure. On behalf of Adam from Salesforce Marketing Cloud, I am Jay from Convince & Convert. Thanks as always to everybody for listening. Don’t forget, you can get all episodes of the show at socialpros.com. We got a back catalog of more than 400 episodes, so if you’re looking to take the next three months off and listen to podcasts, you can do that. Just dial us in on whatever delicious audio platform you prefer. Thanks as always to our sponsors, including Salesforce Marketing Cloud. This has been what we hope to be your favorite podcast in the whole world. Tell your friends, leave us a rating, leave us a review. That would make us so happy. This has been Social Pros.

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