Talking Content Marketing With Ian Cleary
Talking Content Marketing welcomes a well known face from within the world of social who provides a helping hand on evaluating the best tools to make our lives easier, Ian Cleary from RazorSocial.
Ian is on a mission to help businesses around the world become more effective on social media by using the best tools and technology.
Lets have a chat about how Ian has built his audience and I can’t let him go until he’s said the best social tool to use!
How important has building a community of subscribers been to you?
From day one I started building a community across multiple channels but the most important channel to me was email subscribers. This has been the most effective channel to motivate my audience to take action.
I love the RazorSocial community I am part of because it’s full of smart, friendly people that are looking to grow their presence on social media.
I love traveling and connecting with people so having a community of people all over the world is very exciting for me.
Your role is very much as a ‘teacher.’ Is this the mindset more businesses need to adopt to educate their audience (no matter what industry)?
Pushy advertising doesn’t work as well as it used to so to attract attention and build a loyal community you need to provide value to your community and good content is one way of doing this. Jay Baer‘s book ‘Youtility’ is the new form of marketing where you stand out by being useful.
I don’t believe this is different for any industry.
Do you think many people/businesses have become too focused on collecting numbers ie. followers, likes (as an ego massage) rather than looking to build a meaningful relationship with people who are interested in what you stand for?
I don’t think there’s a lot wrong with looking to build a lot of followers, fans etc but relevancy is key. I’d prefer 10 followers that were very relevant to my business rather than 100 that is not relevant and has not connection with my potential audience.
Once you have the relevant followers then you need to focus on building the relationship.
As you say, there are too many people that just focus on the number.
To build authority, should we build who we are as people who speak for our brands, rather than hiding behind a logo that dictates to others?
People want to connect with you as a person.
They want to know more about you, your background, what you do. Who cares about a corporate. On one email to my list I shared a picture of my family. I got so many positive comments back about this. Content is important but YOU are just as important.
How do you learn to then share on Razor Social?
I’m always looking for ways to improve my online presence and when I test out tools and tactics and they work then I share them on blog posts. I also get feedback from my audience and people we train (online training) and this leads to further content. I also subscribe to a lot of other blogs and podcasts where I find new content ideas.
I always had a hunger for learning and I doubt if that will ever change.
What’s the best social media tool, just to keep track of everything and being part of the conversation?
Hootsuite has a great free offering and supports so many different platforms it’s hard to ignore. It’s the one tool that I have stayed using for several years.
Many thanks to Ian for his views and insight. Why not connect with Ian in his space:
Ian on Twitter: click here
RazorSocial: click here
