Finding Leads on Social Media

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening to all of you watching live and if you're watching this as a recording, hi, my name is Val Vesa.

I am the Community Manager here at Cloudflare and the topic of today's segment is finding leads on social media.

My background is web hosting, domain registration, website security. I have a huge passion for photography and social media and I've been working in the field of social media for almost 20 years now.

I'm loving it. I'm checking my email as well if you're wondering why I look left to my left because if you have questions throughout the presentation today or if you have any comments, doesn't have to be a question, you can email us at livestudio at Cloudflare.tv that's livestudio at Cloudflare.tv and your questions will get into my inbox and hopefully we'll have enough time at the end of the presentation to go through some of them and if not, you can still email the same email address even after the live show and just mention for Val.

So the questions will get to me and I promise every question that I get even if I don't have time to actually go and respond online, I will respond via email.

Thank you so much for everyone yesterday. I wanted to take a few minutes and mention this today.

I've had 32 DMs on Twitter yesterday from random people, some of them even friends, who said thank you very much for mentioning 2FA.

If you know, for those of you who are not familiar, 2FA is an authentication method or a second level authentication method to verify when you log into any of your properties online and these folks, they said I've activated on so many, some said on my Facebook, some said on my LinkedIn, some said on my email even and I just want to say that I'm so grateful to see the direct immediate impact of what we, me and my colleagues, try to present in these live segments.

If you look into the schedule, before me, after me, this week, next week, there are so many topics that you can learn from, there are so many segments where you can experience different things, not just tech, so I welcome you all and I invite you to follow along.

Find a topic that you like, mark it down, put it in your calendar, you'll have an option if you go to clouther.tv schedule, you'll have an option to add it to your calendar just so you know when it starts and you can be there for it live.

There's a lot of live segments, there's also recordings, but there's a lot of live segments where you can actually interact with the presenters, you can send questions and again the email address is livestudio at clouther.tv, welcoming your questions.

Now also, I want to mention that throughout the presentation, I will be doing a switch from my slides to my browser so I can show you some practical searches that we do in social media and there might be a glitch there, but we'll get there, but just be warned in case you see some, you know, glitches between changing the screens, that's why.

I'll let you know when I do it, but just so you're warned.

So let's start, right? Let me see, okay. Three very important rules of the day for me, three very important rules that I live by in everything that I do on social media.

Every single day I apply these to my own activity, I recommend them everywhere I speak, everywhere I am on stage or live or webinars, I always say the same three things.

Number one, on social media, it's all about listening.

It's not so much about you trumpeting your offers and your sales promotions and, you know, the things that we see on social media all the time, but it's so much more about listening, or at least this is what I do.

Okay. Number two, or the second step, it's all about search queries.

I am astounded by the number of people that come and say, how did you find that on Twitter?

How the heck did you get to that specific post on Facebook?

Or how were you able to find the speaker for this webinar that we don't have a photo for?

Because, you know, just miscommunication in few seconds or in few minutes on LinkedIn.

It's all about search queries.

We'll get there, we'll have a practical session. Like I said, hopefully we can switch to it in normal conditions.

And the third one is it's all about being human.

Now, this is something that I hold very dear to my heart. This is not about technology.

This is not about, you know, having or not having social media presence, profiles, followers, the number of the followers you have, the amount of budgets that you pour into your social media campaigns, or anything like that.

Being human is about who you are.

Who you are as a person, who you are as a professional, how humane do you treat everything you do every day?

What are your values?

What is true and not true for you? How you check your facts? What's real and what's not real?

And so much other things that make you who you are. It's all about being human because every single day, what we actually do on social media is, like I said, listening, going through search queries, and then at the end, third level, we get all that inside of you and you react.

In a way or another, you react. Sometimes you laugh, sometimes you cry, sometimes you're astonished, sometimes you're appalled, sometimes you just, you know, say to yourself, this couldn't be true.

There's no way I just read this tweet. There's no way somebody just posted this on their, I don't know, TikTok feed, right?

It's all about being human. Let's not get carried away.

So, to summarize, it's all about listening, it's all about the search queries, and it's all about being human on social media.

Now, let's go to the first one.

It's all about listening, right? What do you do on social media all day long?

This is a question for you. Please send me an email now, if you're live, if you're watching this, send an email to livestudio at cloth3r.tv, and this is the question for you.

What percentage of your time in a day is listening on social media and not posting pictures, asking questions, telling people this is what we sell, we are the best because?

What about listening? There's, you know, we have 30 minutes, I'm not going anywhere.

But think about this. Tell me, is it 5%?

Is it 95%? Is it 100%? You know, are you the one doing all the listening and there's somebody else in your social media team or your agency that does the posting?

How much do you actually weigh in listening in all of the other activities you do on social media?

I will not be sharing any names, but all of the emails that come in, I will mention here, just a percentage.

So if it's five, if it's 10, if it's 25, if it's 50%, I want to know, I want to know what sort of social media you do.

There's no good or wrong answers. There's no better or worse answers.

I just want to know who you are and how you do it. You might be on the side of the consumer, let's say, so the person who actually sees the tweets and the messages and you're informing yourself.

Maybe it's news. That's definitely listening.

That's definitely listening if you consume news. But let me know.

Very curious. What about using, where do you feel your brand's website protection is at today on a scale of one to five?

I put that in green just so I can visually encourage you to go into this sort of approach instead of, you know, whatever brand's name, product, can secure your website like no other solution can.

These are two very different approaches, right?

I had a conversation via email, I think, about three weeks ago.

I was on a Sprout Social online conference. And I mentioned in the chat there that if anybody wants to talk about social media, about the way I do it, or the way I feel is the better way or a good way of doing it, since everybody there was more or less a social media manager, expert, advisor, member of a team that does this in an agency, and so on, I was open for discussion.

And somebody came to me, I'm not going to say their name, but if you're watching, you're welcome to confirm via email as well, if you want.

They said, I just joined this company that is into defense, you know, military technology and all that.

And I'm new to this field. I'm coming from news and coming from sports. I don't have the verbiage, I don't have the wording, I don't necessarily have all the, you know, ins and outs, or all the insights.

What is the best thing for me to do?

And this is exactly what I sent to this person, maybe with different words. But I said, instead of going out there and saying, our product, you know, product name is the best for you, because nobody else is so good.

I mean, come on, think about yourself.

Scroll through your Twitter feed, look into your LinkedIn feed, go over your Facebook feed, go over any social media platform feed that you're using and you're present on.

When you see those types of messages that we are the best, there's nobody like us, we have the cheapest prices, or we have the best prices, or we have the most, I don't know, astonishing feature, or the specific service that we have, nobody else sells in the world.

Now, how trustworthy are these sentences, these messages?

We hear them all the day. Every single day, there's somebody, there's a tweet above a tweet above another tweet that says, I'm best, I'm the best, I'm the best.

How do you judge? How do you listen? How do you process information when somebody's saying that?

I don't know about you, but for me personally, I'm just like, okay, I'm just gonna move along.

I'm just gonna move to the next tweet.

Maybe there's somebody that has, go back to third step, a humane approach to this.

And then if I see something like, what do you feel your brand's website protection, because we're talking about this, me working at Cloudflare, and so on, but it can be of any other type of service that you provide for your customers, be it that you're a DBA, you're, you know, one man show, or you work in an agency, or you work for a big company, it doesn't really matter.

But if the type of messages, where do you feel your brand website protection is today on a scale of one to five, that's sort of a sync thing, doesn't it?

You start, actually, you stop before you start, you stop in your feed, and you're like, let me look at this closer.

Why is this resonating? I have X amount of websites, and we have just one website.

We're going to talk about website protection now, because again, this is the circumstance that I'm in, but it can be anything else.

And then you let that sink in and think, okay, so I have a registrar account, which we talked about yesterday, how to secure, you can find that recording and look it over if you didn't participate live.

I have a web host company that actually takes care and holds my service, my website.

What else am I missing here? If I'm being attacked, if my online property is being under a massive attack, a DDoS attack, if my business depends on that online existence of my website, what am I going to do?

Where am I on a scale of one to five, one to 10, one to 11, one to 15, doesn't really matter.

How aware am I of the possible threats that could jeopardize my income stream?

This sort of message, see how many questions, how many inner thoughts you can get when you see a very good messaging sent to you?

It stops you in your tracks and you're thinking, I'm a father, I'm a mother, I'm providing for my family.

How protected am I?

How good do I know the market? How many of my competitors are better than me just because they work harder or they search better or they put in more time or just because they speak more humane?

They feel more natural. Their messaging is being listened and mine is ignored.

Why is your ignored? It's not because it's got typos, your grandma is wrong.

I'm not a native English speaker, but I try hard every day to start and be every day, I mean, start every day, see, not a native English speaker, be every day better than the day before.

Learn more words every day.

My kids, I'm watching them learning English, German languages, and I understand because I've done it since high school and middle school.

I know how difficult, but how useful is to learn new words, express yourself in new languages.

But the people listening to your messages, they will know he's not a native English speaker.

Hey, you know, there's no chance he was born in Britain or in Germany.

If your Germany is, you know, learned, you can be very good, but you cannot fake anyone.

And then, that's what I'm saying, be yourself. And then when you ask questions like that, listen for their answers.

And let's move along. Number two, it's all about search queries.

Same search query on different social platforms can show you very different results.

And now we're going to try to be practical, like I said, and this is the moment where we're going to share the other screen.

I'm watching the clock just to make sure I don't go over, we have 15 more minutes.

So I'm going to try to do a new share and hopefully, so just bear with me, please.

And we did it.

Okay. So let me just pull this. Hopefully, you're not seeing any black spots on the screen, but if you do, I'm sorry.

So what I did here is I entered this search query, looking for a graphic designer.

I tried to take something that is very generic, but can also be applied to multiple exercises that you can do.

This is LinkedIn, but this is my own account, LinkedIn.

The keyword here or the search phrase here is looking for a graphic designer, going back in Facebook, looking for a graphic designer, going back to Twitter, looking for a graphic designer.

My favorite platform, Twitter, but this is very biased, but let's go in LinkedIn.

So if you go looking for a graphic designer, again, remember, search queries are very specific to each platform.

You cannot necessarily say, okay, I'm going to be using the exact same search query, and I'm going to get the most results or the best results in any of the searches or on social platforms, because you can.

So if we go to see all results for looking for graphic designer, we're going to see, you know, 2,000 and some, 100 and some results.

Graphic designer, graphic designer, graphic designer.

People results for looking for a graphic designer.

Maybe not the best. And then you have digital graphic designer for jobs, graphic designers, like the name of the company and the city that they're looking for.

Company results for looking for a graphic designer, if the company has any, you know, any similar names in their naming and so on.

So LinkedIn, if you go for looking for a graphic designer, doesn't necessarily give you people who are looking, so employers who are looking for graphic designers.

But if you go and just delete this, looking for a, and you just leave graphic designer in the search, and then go to jobs.

Now, this is what LinkedIn is best for, right? It sorts your getting emails.

Okay, I'm not going to say names, but we have like this 50%, 25%, 31%.

I don't know exactly how you calculated that, but okay. Again, thank you so much.

And somebody else who says 70%. That's as far as we have today, the best result, like the most listening.

Thank you. There's something else.

I thought there's another, there's another answer. So again, LinkedIn is the, is best for this, right?

You put the exact job title, you get results.

They tell you if it's promoted or not. Some, some of them even show you how much money you can get.

It's an easy apply if you want to apply, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Good. Let's go back to Facebook, looking for a graphic designer. Now you can even see the filter results.

They're, they're a bit different. And it says post from anyone or from you or your friends, what type of posts.

But if you look at this, this is a page looking for a graphic designer.

Now, I don't know if I'm looking for a graphic designer and you, your page name is looking for a graphic designer.

Maybe you're an agency, HR, something like that, headhunting. Maybe I'm not going to click, but if I see groups like graphic design, hire freelance graphic designers.

Now I know I can get into these groups. I can join them. And most likely, if I say, I'm looking for a graphic designer for this project, I'm going to get comments.

I'm going to get people saying, you know, I can do this for you, or you can even get other people saying, Oh, by the way, I have a friend, or I know somebody, or I've worked with this person and they are great at graphic design.

So you might want to go and hire them. And then again, you can even go and see marketplace.

Yeah, not the best. Let's see graphic designer only. So do the same thing as LinkedIn.

Oh, and now we have open for any commissions. I don't want to click that, but so we do have a result on the marketplace.

If we go for our results, now you can see, because I'm in Romania now, so there's going to be a lot of very tailored search results to my geographic location, to my profile, because I'm Romanian and so on.

You might be getting different results, but these will be the type of results that you're getting.

And actually, I'm hoping you actually see the screen.

And going to Twitter, this is a whole other thing now. Looking for graphic designer.

Twitter looks in the text that they tweeted, in their name, in their bio description.

So, but just scrolling through, let's do on latest. So we see the latest or the most fresh results.

They are looking for a graphic designer, more seasoned in spelling, I hope.

I don't know if it's like an actual job ad. Are you a writer who wants to pitch us for an article, a graphic designer, photographer, blah, blah, blah, please email.

So this is definitely a job ad. So if you're looking for a graphic designer, you're not going to do anything with this one, because they're actually looking themselves.

But if you go and delete everything in front of graphic designer, and just do graphic designer, now we start seeing results of like, this is somebody's recent work.

Hello, I'm Tristan, the owner of blah, blah, blah.

I'm working on design sector. So it could be an offer. Here's a price. Oh, here's a Fiverr listing.

Hi, I'm a graphic designer, I can do what you require.

You know, discovery biggest followers, blah, blah, blah. Good. Now, if we go even deeper, for those of you who have been here before, you'll know what I'm talking about.

For those of you who haven't, Twitter has an advanced search. Oh, I love this one.

We'll go to TweetDeck. We only have eight more minutes.

I hope we're not going to go over time, because I'm going to get disconnected.

Just look at this, there's a plethora of possible search queries combinations here.

So you can do all of these words, like what's happening contains both what's and happening.

Let me tell you, all of these words will not necessarily have a very precise result, but it will still give you a more broader possible choices to pick from.

You know, none of these words, these hashtags, so you can specifically look for just that hashtag, and who posted on it.

Languages, if you don't want to just go, default is English, but you can go, sorry, it's any language, but you can go for English or whatever, you know, Finnish, German, Greek, whatever.

And this will be maybe difficult, like you can actually, let's say, I'm just going to go back into the actual result.

And what you can do here is save search, right?

You can save the graphic designer search, and then you can go back to it later.

But I strongly recommend you use TweetDeck. Now, this is my actual TweetDeck dashboard.

So I have all my personal accounts here in the front, and I have Cloudflare ones, Cloudflare help, so on.

And I can go for the actual keywords.

So you can see here, some mentions of the Cloudflare TV, huge cyber attack, if somebody specifically says that, and then WordPress, and the DDoS, all of the searches that only are comprised of these two words, or have these in them, Cloudflare generic.

But this has a trick here, specifically in the engagement submenu, you can go at least 30 retweets, at least 25 likes, that's what I do, but you can go higher or lower.

What this does, it shows you, again, everything I showed you here is free, there's nothing to be paid for.

So all of these tools, specifically TweetDeck, who was acquired by Twitter some years ago, and it's just an amazing tool.

If you don't want to pay for anything else, I strongly recommend you install TweetDeck, you'll be set for Twitter.

Again, if you set a minimum threshold of how many retweets you want to get into the search results, so if this specific search that has a Cloudflare keyword in there has at least 30, or whatever else your number is, that shows you virality potential, right?

So that shows you that it can, okay, people are talking about this specifically, let me see why.

Okay, and let's see if I can go back to the actual advanced sharing. And we're back, hopefully.

And again, it's all about search queries, like I said, and you have to pay attention to news shared on social media, that's very important.

There's news agencies, there's bloggers, there's vloggers, there's so many people producing news content, and I'm not talking just about BBC, CNN, Fox News, or CBS, whatever you're watching, but I'm talking about people who actually are very close to what is happening.

I have to interrupt, there's somebody who says 1%. Maybe it's just a joke, I don't know.

Like I said, I promise no names will be named, but 1% listening on social media, okay.

Thank you for writing in, but I'm not really sure what that means.

If you're a website security company, that's what we do.

Maybe you're in the field as well.

Look for website security related, DDoS related. Go for the keywords that actually mean something for your field, and try to have news, like you can go for security breach plus news, or you can go security plus breach, and then get all of the content that talks about security breach.

Or you can go for DDoS alone, you can go for DDoS plus attack, you can go for DDoS attack and website, or website DDoS attack, and get even more search results, and then you can filter through those.

If you're an HR agency, like you have examples here, you can stop the screen and look at the actual text.

News about companies laying off employees, I mean, look in Twitter, look in the news.

So many companies, because of the current situation, are laying off people.

If you're an HR agency, and you can actually go through these searches and find people who either say I've been laid off, or you can find news about a company actually saying that.

Unfortunately, we have to lay off X amount of people.

And then what if they open a new branch in a new city, maybe yours, maybe you were actually headquartered in a city that just has 1000 people being laid off from this company.

Now there's an opportunity for you not only to be, you know, remember what I said, be human, go back and actually help them get new jobs.

You're a marketing agency, you know, people are looking for a marketing campaign, or just a marketeer, or just social media management services and so on.

Maybe you work in a museum, public spaces now opening up, we'll have people looking for things like is plus museum plus open or opening.

And then if you go for those strange for those search queries, most likely you can find people who are looking for a museum that is open in your city.

And then you can go and actually respond and say, Oh, by the way, we're going to be opening in, you know, two days, or we already open between such and such hours of the day, please welcome.

restaurants, people planning to travel asking if they can find particular food in your city, right?

If I'm planning to travel to, I don't know, Frankfurt, I might be doing this on Twitter asking, Hey, is anybody in my list?

Or does anybody following me live in Frankfurt or has been in Frankfurt, and has a very good recommendation on a good restaurant there.

By the way, if you're in Frankfurt or anywhere in Germany, do let me know live studio at Cloudflare.tv.

I'd like to know what good places to eat are in in Frankfurt or any city you're in, you know, send me and I'm a very, very professional food eater.

If, if that is even a thing, I don't know.

I like to eat, love food. Moving forward. The last thing for today, we were like two minutes down for one minute.

It's all about being human.

You can't be good at social media. If you don't genuinely love people, and I'm going to repeat this, you cannot be good at social media.

If you don't love people, there's no way you can maybe fake the listening, you can maybe fake or be very good, you know, it's search queries.

But if you're not human, you can't fool anyone.

Respond when not asked. If somebody is in a very bad situation, go and respond.

Ask how they are. Is this somebody just say, I have a new job, go and send a tweet and say congratulations.

Send in a good word. It's not about selling every day.

Thank you for your time. See you next time. Transcribed by https://otter.ai