Influencer marketing 101 - Neal Schaffer [Interview]

About Neal Schaffer

Neal Schaffer is a globally renowned leader that helps businesses to maximize their social media marketing, from Fortune 50 companies to Grammy Award-winning musicians. He is a well known keynote speaker, and also the author of the book “The Age of Influence”. His main interests lie in marketing strategies of the 21st century, such as social media marketing and influencer marketing. Bringing with him a huge experience in these fields, we are happy to invite Neal Schaffer to our interview series.

‍

Aishwarya Jain

We have the pleasure of welcoming Neal Schaffer today to our interview series. I’m Aishwarya Jain from the peopleHum team. Before we begin, just a quick intro of PeopleHum -  peopleHum is an end-to-end, one-view, integrated human capital management automation platform, the winner of the 2019 global Codie Award for HCM that is specifically built for crafted employee experiences and the future of work.

‍

‍

‍

We run the peopleHum blog and video channel which receives upwards of 200,000 visitors a year and publish around 2 interviews with well-known names globally, every month

‍

Aishwarya

Welcome, Neal. We’re thrilled to have you. 

Neal

It's an honour to be here. Thank you.

Aishwarya

Firstly, Congratulations on your book “The Age of Influence”. It's a delight to have people talk about topics that are not talked about a lot. So congratulations.

Neal

Well, thank you very much. It was not the best of timing because it was actually published on March 17th and I know here in California, in the United States we went into lockdown on March 19. So it made it challenging to promote the book. But nevertheless, I'm really happy it's out there and just happy to contribute marketers and business's understanding of digital and social media.

Aishwarya

Absolutely. I'm sure it will help a lot of people out there that are struggling with social media marketing.

So, if you could just give us a little gist of 'The Age of Influence', that would be great.

Neal

Sure. So, companies spend a lot of money on marketing, right? And even before this pandemic and with the pandemic, we're continuing to go through this digital transformation. So people watch less TV, they watch more YouTube, right? People read less newspapers. They read more blogs and in this way, marketing budgets need to shift from this traditional marketing to where people spend their time now.

Yes, you need to be in front of your audience. So I think in, you know, in 2020 at least, digital marketing is a major force in any budget and with digital marketing, which includes social media marketing, you have a few different options. 

So obviously you need a website, right? So everybody has a website and maybe invest money in the branding, in the design you would have. After you have a website. What do you do? Well, you want to make sure that that website gets indexed in Google and you get search engine traffic. So this builds the need for search engine optimization.

It may build the need for pay per click advertising in order to get people to your website. What else can you do as a business? Well you have an email. Right. So if people aren't searching for content, they may be reading email. So you have email marketing and marketing, automation and these are you know, these three things have been around for decades. Really, like 20 years.

So over the last 10 years, we've seen mainly two new areas emerge. One is this notion of content marketing. You need lots of content. Content actually helps your company get more content indexed in search engines, which brings more traffic to your website. When the content is available, you should check its results on traffic, which you can do using the SE Ranking traffic checker. Content also helps you build leads because now we can do things like Zoom webinars.

We can create ebooks and what have you and get people to provide their email address to provide a lead so it helps our email marketing as well. It also helps our social media. That's the second area which is now we have social media marketing, and we have organic social media marketing using that content. But we can also use paid ads in social media. So Facebook ads, what have you?

But what happens over time is that number one, these platforms and social media are made for people, not for businesses. And social networks are very clear, for businesses to get a lot of attraction, it's going to be paid to play. We also know that people don't trust advertisements. So even when you do advertisements on social media, it's still an advertisement, and people see it as an advertisement and People trust people more than they trust businesses, more than they trust logos.

"People trust people more than they trust businesses, more than they trust logos."

We also have this advent when we talk about social media, visual social media. So if you look at what are the most popular platforms over the past 2-3 years, it's Instagram. It's TikTok. It's  Snapchat. It's YouTube. They're all visual. And you know, it's funny because we have all these influencers on Instagram and YouTube, especially because brands just are not good at creating this type of lifestyle visual content that is relatable and real that people want to see.

They're just not equipped to do that. That wasn't but they were supposed to do right, that that's not traditional advertising and brand name. So people really excel at this, and it's really, really hard for brands in this age of visual social media to even just create organic contact.

So now we have the emergence of what I define influencer marketing to be and it encompasses a few different things. The notion is that we're gonna partner and collaborate with other people in social media and have influence. Some a lot. Some may be very little, but they have a community, and we're gonna collaborate with them to help for a variety of things, not just to amplify our content, but also to maybe collaborate with them to create content. I mean, this is a great example of collaborating with an influence to create content. That's why more, more businesses are doing things of this sort.

So, when you think about it that way, we're not just talking about, you know, trying to find famous celebrities on Instagram or YouTube and reach out to them even though they've never heard of our company. I look at influencer marketing as first, dealing with the people that already know, like and trust you, right?

"I look at influencer marketing as first, dealing with the people that already know, like and trust you, right?"

Your employees, your customers, your followers and social media. Your partners. Why would you work with people that don't know you and try to convince them to like you? Why wouldn't you start with that person already like you? So we've had concepts like input employ advocacy or brand advocacy. And a lot of times these didn't work because people were not treated as if they were influencers. And the relationship was not a mutual win-win collaborative relationship.

So I consider my definition of influencer marketing to be quite new. It's redefining what influence marketing is because everybody just thinks it's about Instagrammers and YouTubers and pay someone $10,000 for a photo when it's equally important for LinkedIn or Twitter or any network.

And it can work in any industry, not just B2C, but B2B. It can work in governments. It can work in nonprofits, and really the heart of it is that every company should be building its own influencer program right. Ideally, these, they're already advocates for your brand, brand ambassadors, but build up full of people that you can always collaborate with not just for contact amplification but for content creation or for product ideas or to interview people for your content or to bring them in to speak at events.

Every company should have this sort of program, and more and more companies are starting to make those investments to build those programs. So I know that was a very long description. But when you see how we have progressed in digital media and how social media is progressing, I believe the only way forward for businesses and social media unless they want to spend a lot of money doing advertisements is to leverage people power. Is to leverage the power of other people and many of them would love to help if you had the program and you ask them for their help.

Aishwarya

Absolutely. And I love it the way you say that it's really about people, and it's not about businesses because I think that's where we really missed the bus. We're kind of targeting a lot of businesses and writing content around, selling some products or just talking about something that's not even relevant. But if you use the power of people, you know, that's gonna be so impactful. So much more personalised, right? 

Neal

Yeah. We're in our second decade of social media, so I think it's safe to say that most companies just do not create great content for social media, right? And they're not supposed to because they're really good about talking about their products, and service is right.

They're not necessarily good at talking about what people wanna listen to or what they're looking for. So if you're one of the companies that are doing really great with this. Kudos. Congratulations. Because most companies just aren't for a variety of reasons. And, you know, we talk about marketing companies need to humanize their marketing, but at the end of the day, they are for-profit companies. They're not people. Right?

So there are things you can do to humanize what you do. But I think the best way is to have other people do the talking for you, right? If every business owner I meet, they attribute their success to word of mouth marketing. The best way to incite word of mouth marketing and social media is to work with influencers.

"The best way to incite word of mouth marketing and social media is to work with influencers."

So if people are already talking about your company, great. If they're not, if we're not searching on Google, if we're not reading emails, we're on social media. You gotta be there, you got you gotta show up. You got to be active. You got to be talked about when people search your company. You want to see a lot of people talking about you. 

So if people aren't talking about you, you need to collaborate. You need to find ways of doing that. And an advertisement is not gonna go viral. Trust me, Right? But when you work with influencers who relate to what you do and who can create that relatable content that others would relate to because every influence or is a content creator, they're good at this. They know how to do it right? That's where the magic begins.

And I hope that for those of you listening, if people aren't talking about you but they're talking about your competitors, you need to do something and you know my book, I think we'll give you a lot of ideas. But even without reading the book, I think hopefully by what I've talked about, you may have little spark of some ideas about what you can do.

Aishwarya

Absolutely.

And when you talk about influencer marketing, you’re also talking about the customers that organizations have, right? They can also be advocates for your brand, right? 

Neal

Yes, because you know, there's this 99-1 rule that came out maybe 15 years ago, and the author said if we were to look at that, this is before social media. But he said if we were to look at the average Internet user, 90% of people on the Internet are lurkers, 9% are Engagers and 1% are true content creators.

"90% of people on the Internet are lurkers, 9% are Engagers and 1% are true content creators."

So when you think about it, if Linkedin is 500 million users, that's five million content creators and 45 million engagers. That's potentially 50 million people that you could be working with.

So, five years ago, it might not have been the case. But when we do the math now, you know the influencer marketing industry used to define influences- you need to have 50,000 followers.

Now, they start talking about micro Influences. Okay, you can have 10,000 followers. Now they even say 1000 followers was considered a nano influencer. They have some influence, right? So when you break it down to that level, if you were to upload your customer database in any given social network, I guarantee you with digital natives, with millennials being the largest portion of the American workforce here in my country, at least there's a lot more people who have a lot more digital influence than you know, or that you think so? Yes. It could be your customers.

I'm not gonna say, everybody. Not everybody is on social media. Not everyone’s a content creator. Not everyone's an engager. There's a lot of lurkers out there, but, you know, given that probably 10% your customers might be candidates for such a program.

Aishwarya

Right. Absolutely. That could be like a community effect more than a network effect. That would really amplify, keep up fine and you also talked about LinkedIn being an important social channel but a lot of people just think it's really boring right? They like Facebook or Instagram, which is more jazzy.

So how do you leverage LinkedIn and how do you show your impact on LinkedIn?

Neal

So recently I worked with FedEx on an influencer campaign. They reached out to me. They have a small business owner grant, so apply to win $50,000 for your business. Really a great program, right? And they said, 'Neal, we wanna work with you on LinkedIn'. And for me, it made sense. Who is your target user? And what network are they on? If they're not on Instagram, they might be on Facebook, but they may not use it in a professional way.

But for this type of content, you can imagine that LinkedIn is the perfect place to work with an influencer  and actually, the content performed quite well, so, you know, LinkedIn is about business. But LinkedIn also has changed very much over the last 5 to 10 years because of the same shift in demographics that we have more millennials in the workforce. So now LinkedIn is becoming a little bit more like Facebook, and Facebook is becoming a little bit more like LinkedIn, it is what you make of it.

"So now LinkedIn is becoming a little bit more like Facebook, and Facebook is becoming a little bit more like LinkedIn, it is what you make of it."

If you think it's boring, try to post something that you would post on Facebook, on LinkedIn and see what happens. I think you have a pleasant surprise that people will engage with you.

They will engage with photos they will engage with Videos. They will engage with comedy. There's certain things you probably want to keep off LinkedIn and really, it's all about if you went to a network meeting and you were meeting people for the first time. What would you talk about? 

Some of your talk might be light banter, right, But it wouldn't be, you know, overly religious or overly political. It would be sort of neutral, right, because you don't know where these people stand on issues. It's the exact same thing with LinkedIn. If you can do that, you can run.

But loosen up your necktie and unbutton your shirt one or two buttons and just have a casual conversation, the same you would at that networking event. And, you know, yes, it could very well go into a business conversation. But, you know, I think there's no more jazzier of a conversation than the top business.

I mean, that's a business person. That's just me. And if you're in a position where you want to generate more business for your company that you have here that you work for LinkedIn is the most exciting place to be because with every connection with every person I'm talking to, they are a wealthy demographic and also a decision making demographic. So that's where I want to spend my time. 

Aishwarya

Yeah, absolutely. Because I see a lot of influencers who have a lot of followers on Twitter. But when I see LinkedIn, they don't have so many followers. So then I just think that what is it about Twitter, which is so attractive because I find that, you know, LinkedIn is much more engaging to me. So I don't understand that equation. 

Neal

Well, Twitter began, just it's open. You can follow anyone and everyone. On Linkedin you have these connection requests, right? If you try to apply Twitter to LinkedIn, you're gonna get your wrist slap. Linkedin said you send out too many invites and many people said no to your invites. So Linkedin tries to keep it a more closed environment.

But you can follow people and link them like you follow people on Twitter and develop a relationship there. So twitter just always been very open. You get to see all the tweets. It's easy to search conversations, LinkedIn used have a tool called Signal that allowed you to do that.

It was to make LinkedIn more like the search conversations like Twitter, they got rid of it. It is easier now with the search options, but it's just not as open as Twitter.

And the more open the platform is, the easier it is for people to follow you. That's how people get a lot of followers quicker than you would on LinkedIn. And I think that's still true today. Despite its recent changes.

Aishwarya

When you talk about content putting on content and social media, do you think that putting up content very frequently actually helps? Or that's just the way, it's just psychological that the more you bombard the social media with more content, the more followers you get?

Neal

Yeah, so social networks have become really smart with their algorithms, and what I mean by this is that they want to give you content, in your news feed that might interest you. And if you're seeing the same content from the same person over and over and over again, you're probably not gonna spend much time on that social network, so they will vary out, the content that they serve.

And if you publish too much, what happens is, you know Facebook is only gonna show one piece of content to your friends. Maybe over the last 24 hours. If you're posting five times, it doesn't know which one to post. 

So each one of those pieces of content that you posted is gonna get less visibility. Maybe one will get more visibility than the others. But, you know, you're really not doing yourself a service unless you find that when you post once a day it's always getting great engagement. Then you may wanna post more frequently, but if not, you want to sort of hold back.

Twitter is very different. Twitter has always allowed you to, you know, publish as much as you want. And the algorithm that determines the frequency is a lot less stringent than it is on other networks, like on Facebook or Instagram or even a LinkedIn. So, you know, I tell my clients Twitter you can post a dozen times a day, right? As long as they're spaced out and as long as they're about you and it's probably not gonna hurt you.

Linkedin, Facebook, Instagram one a day is really all you need to be impactful to be successful and if you find your publishing once a day and you're getting incredible results, that maybe that's when you want to consider twice a day. But once a day is a very, very good target to have. And I don't think you're gonna get punished in any social network algorithm if you publish once a day.

Aishwarya

It's actually quite helpful because I think a lot of organizations really have this doubt of how many times do you post one content and then they bombard social media with so many posts and nothing really comes out of it.

Neal

When you do it every day, it gives you the chance to measure and to look at what did well and what didn't do well, which is also important to optimize because you want to say something as a company, people are there to engage with other people, right? So you're gonna find that some of your posts do better than others, and you sort of want to hone in on that content and sort of develop it further to get better engagements.

So if you do everything at once, you're just never gonna know people are gonna think it's spammy and will unfollow you there. Hide your news in their feed. You're not gonna achieve anything. And just keep it simple. Once a day on weekdays. That's fine, right? You don't have to go overboard with this stuff. Social media is a slow burn. It's a marathon, not a sprint.

"Social media is a slow burn. It's a marathon, not a sprint."

Aishwarya

And what about what about the weekends? Do you think Engagement is less on the weekends?

Neal

I think, with LinkedIn definitely, I would recommend Monday through Friday. Now, with this pandemic we're all at home working, so weekends might be a little bit better. But in general, there's a lot of people who probably do not use Linkedin on weekends. That's my guess. So I prioritize Monday through Friday, I will post on weekends because I post maybe two or three times a day.

But a majority of that would be weekdays. Now, there are other platforms, like Facebook, that do really well weekends and Instagram, so every network is slightly different. But with LinkedIn, you know that the theory is that when people get to work, they launch their LinkedIn, maybe like right after the lunch hour ends before they start work, they launch it again. Maybe before they go home, launch it again.

So, you know, you have, like, an 8 to 10 a.m. window, a 12 to 2 p.m. And maybe 4 to 6 pm. And if you were to experiment by publishing at these different times a day, over the course of a few weeks, you're gonna find what you know, which timing seems to work better.

But compared to Twitter or Facebook, when you post on LinkedIn, it takes time to get engagement. It might take a day to get engagement sometimes, so it's very different than the other networks. But try out those different times and see how they work for you.

Aishwarya

So it's just about experimenting and doing A/B testing to find out what works for you.

Neal

Exactly. You have all these experts say they can promise you this or that. No, because everybody's audience is different and you're content is different than anybody else. So The only way to know how the algorithm works is through testing and getting data and continual A-B testing.

"The only way to know how the algorithm works is through testing and getting data and continual A-B testing."

Even if you were to work with 10 influencers, they're all gonna deliver different results. So you first need data and you only get data when you experiment and I think then you need to leverage that data, right? And you need to act upon what you see and optimize it, and you continue to do that. And then you get greater and greater and greater over time. 

Aishwarya

Absolutely. So there is a lot of analysis that needs to be done when you're doing social media marketing to find out what works for you.

Neal

If you want to do it right, yes. And that's why there's a whole new option for people that are in data analysis to actually join marketing departments. More and more marketing departments are looking for people that can help them spot trends in content engagement. Because not every marketer was built for that analytical part. So yeah, I mean, analytics is more important than ever right now.

Aishwarya

What about Hashtags? You know what's the mechanism of Hashtags and does it really help?

Neal

So hashtags depend on the social network. So what was your question specifically to linkedin?

Aishwarya

No, just overall.

Neal

Okay, well, you need hashtags on Instagram because that's how people search. They have only find you if they use the hashtag and Instagram allows you to have 30 hashtags. So the advice is use all 30 of them, right? If they're relevant. So Facebook, I don't think Hashtags are relevant. They never became popular, so I wouldn't worry about hashtags on Facebook.

Twitter? Yes. Hashtags are important. You can search by keyword, but a lot of people do search by hashtags. And that's where hashtags really started. It was on Twitter. So, you're not gonna wanna put 30 out. Say, 3 to 5 really good hashtags are enough.

And on LinkedIn, my original advice is you don't really need to use them. But what Linkedin does now is every company has a company page and your company page is like a Facebook page. You can't engage with people from your company page right? You can't go out and friends selling on Facebook from your page.

You can't, you know, connect with someone on LinkedIn for your company page. But what Linkedin has started to allow you to do is, you can pick three hashtags that are critical to your company. And when those hashtags are mentioned in news feeds by people, you can engage as your company in those three hashtags.

"But what Linkedin has started to allow you to do is, you can pick three hashtags that are critical to your company. And when those hashtags are mentioned in news feeds by people, you can engage as your company in those three hashtags."

So this is really very, very critical and strategic for companies. If you really want to make a splash and really get out there, choose three hashtags and use them to leverage. But also, when you publish content in a similar way, Twitter, I'd say 3 to 5 Hashtags. Linkedin, I'd say 1 to 3 you don't really need to go overboard.

You don't need to overthink it, but it's just a natural thing at the end of each post, you know, just to add a few. But I think it's more important from a company page perspective to maybe once a day, maybe once a week, try experimenting with engaging in other people's posts that are posting with those hashtags and see the results.

Aishwarya

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

And what about these startups and small organizations that are looking to launch a campaign and they kind of use unique hashtags? Do you think that really works? 

Neal

Yeah. Unique hashtags work if you're trying to start a movement, right. So, like the ice bucket challenge or what have you. For most companies, unless, I mean, if you're a Coca Cola and you're doing TV ads and using the hashtag, go for it. But for most companies, the idea of a hashtag is it allows your content to be found. So that notion of using the hashtag as one your hashtag is fine.

Maybe some other people that join the campaign will use it. But, if you have a specific campaign, I'd say go for it. I wouldn't use it as a sole hashtag. And don't think it's gonna get you all the results that you think it might because yes, it adds to the brand of the content but it's not necessarily gonna help you get found unless people are actually looking for that hashtag.

For instance, like my book, I don't even have a hashtag, right? So my book is called 'The Age of Influence'. I use the #AgeOfInfluence, but I'll use the #influencermarketing way more because I want the content about my book to be found by what people do that search.

So every instance I use #ageofinfluence but I'm also using #influencermarketing. I might also be using #marketingbook. I might also just use #socialmediamarketing and #digitalmarketing. So yes, I might use a unique hashtag. But it's one hashtag of a few that I used together. 

Aishwarya

Yeah, that that makes a lot of sense. And I also want to understand about Facebook ads.

Right now, there is a lot of speculation that Facebook ads are, it's not really genuine, and you have bot traffic coming on Facebook ads. So is that true? And do you really need to use Facebook ads?

Neal

So, if you want to incite word of mouth on social media, the best way to do that is through influencers. If you already are using paid media, you're doing Google ads, doing other ads. It makes sense to do social media ads because of the target options. So, point in case one of my customers, we're doing a campaign. It's for targeting software developers. right?

So one of the things we're targeting is like remote software development. When you do Google ads for these, you get a lot of clicks. But then when you look at the keywords of people, if you choose broad match, people like remote TV controllers or completely irrelevant things.

And obviously you add negative keywords to optimize, you try to do your best, but there's always gonna be a sense, there's always gonna be hard to 100% target the best person just by keywords.

If you just do an exact match of very niche key words it's not gonna be a lot of volume. So you know Google, we know people searching for something to buy on Google, social media is different, right? They're not searching for something to buy, but with, like LinkedIn, it's really powerful.

If we want to sell into an organization, right? We can target VPs of engineering or CIOs and every company with over 100 employees in the United States. That is what you could do with LinkedIn which is really powerful. With a Facebook ad, if they've liked our competitor’s page right, we can target them. If they have a certain interest, we can target them.

But really, where the money is at with social media  including Facebook, is the ability to have custom audiences. We can upload our email database and we can advertise to these people on Facebook, we can re-target those that have come to our website.

We can build look like audiences. So if these people come to our website, you know Facebook will say, well, here's 1,000,000 other people that are very, very similar and demographic that might be interested in your product. So it is a very powerful mechanism.

Don't get me wrong. Influencers have their value, you know, paid social, as we call it, including Facebook ads. That's half its value because of the targeting function and because we know that in sales it takes multiple touches in order to convert someone.

So this notion of sort of retargeting people that are on your email list, retargeting people that have visited your website, your building, those touches. That's why paid social Facebook ads when you do it right and you reach the right people and it could be very cost-effective.

Aishwarya

Yeah, that's really insightful.

And tell me Neal, when you have to kind of put up content which relates to all generations, right from the baby boomers, the millennials, Generation Z to kind of craft to campaign around, all of these people?

Neal

That's really hard to do. But I think social media and marketing in general, it comes down to that target persona. Who are they? So if you have multiple personas, like many companies do, you're gonna have different types of content, just like you might have different categories of content, if you offer multiple products and services for each one of those personas, you're probably gonna create different content based on the target persona. But if they're millennial you might just focus on Instagram to engage with them. If they're baby boomers, you might just focus on LinkedIn or Facebook.

So if they're Gen Z, you might just focus on TikTok. So, based on that target persona, you might just say we're just gonna use Instagram just to engage with Millennials. And a lot of consumer brands do that exact same approach. So it's not about creating one message and posting it everywhere, that's not gonna work here. So you tweak the message for its demographic, tweak the social network in which you post for each target person and demographic as well.

"So it's not about creating one message and posting it everywhere, that's not gonna work here. So you tweak the message for its demographic, tweak the social network in which you post for each target person and demographic as well."

Aishwarya

When people try to create personas, which is really fake, it's just somebody was really very ideal and, you know, has a universal name. Does this actually help?

Neal

It helps us as a starting point. If you don't have a plan, you're not going to succeed. So start with that idea and try to speak to that person in every post that you make and every ad and what’s gonna happen over time is, you begin to get some analytics.

So the ad platforms will tell you these are the people that are clicking on the ad and you're going to see in your you know, hopefully your leads or in your email database or when the when you get customers, you're gonna start to see who are the demographics that engage with that the most. And are they alive with the target persona or are they not? And if they're not, you may want to redefine that target persona.

I thought this was our target audience, but we're really getting a lot of business with this target. Maybe there were five years old or five years younger. Let's refine that target persona that you know that we were targeting.

So I think you know, it's a great place to start because if they have no place to start who you're gonna talk to in your messaging. So it's great for that, But I wouldn't just stick to that if you see the results coming in to be very different. And that's why, just for the sake of A-B testing, you probably wanna have a target persona. It's right so that you can do that AB testing and find the perfect one. 

Aishwarya

So you can basically look at data. Look at how people engaging with that persona and then kind of see what's best for you.

And you've been to a lot of countries, Neal. So do you think that it's kind of different, it is spread out, the social media strategies that people use in different countries?

Neal

Yes, you know, I think that social media is global. Social media as you know people doing it is a global thing right now, right? But based on the country, people do use it differently. You know one great example cause I do a lot of business in Japan is that LinkedIn just never became popular there, so professionals use Facebook as if it was LinkedIn.

In other words, I'll go to business meetings and I'll get Facebook friend requests that night from business people in their thirties and forties, and it blows the minds of people when I tell them that in the United States. But this just goes to show that every network is used differently. You know, in Germany and Austria, they have that professional network called Zing, which was competing with LinkedIn.

I don't think that's the case much anymore. In Russia, you have the Contact. In China You have all sorts of their own unique social media systems.

But outside of that, when we talk about LinkedIn, when we talk about Twitter, when we talk about Facebook, Instagram they're very global, and I think that the way they're used is there's a lot more similar about them than dissimilar. Around the world, we still do have a few networks in a very American-centric, I would consider Pinterest as a social network that really never got popular outside the United States. I think Snapchat is the same.

I don't have the numbers on TikTok, but TikTok is evolving into becoming more like an Instagram, sort of like a global entity. So the great thing is, if you're overseas and you're trying to market yourself to another country, you can do it right. And there are countries like I've heard the Philippines, people just click away, right? They'll just like everything in their feed. So there are certain countries where people are just more engaging and maybe spend more time than other countries.

They may be more engaging or less engaging. So these are also some things, and they may be more open to new connections or less open to new connections. These are just some things to consider. Every country will be slightly different, but I wouldn't let that scare you away from not leveraging social media.

"Every country will be slightly different, but I wouldn't let that scare you away from not leveraging social media."

Aishwarya

It's very, very interesting. Thank you so much for that insight and I'm gonna come to the last question.

If you have any advice or any important sound bites that you'd like to leave for our audience?

Neal

My advice when it comes to social media in general, whether it's for businesses or for people, is there's a quote by an actor called Woody Allen. He's not thought of that good these days. He did some bad things. But the court is waiting.

You know, 80% of success is showing up, and it's so true. You know, if you're not showing up on social media, other people are. Your competitors are there winning the hearts of social media users, and the other quote is from a famous hockey player named Wayne Gretzky. You missed 100% of the shots you don't take.  So if you're not showing up and if you're not trying, you're not gonna benefit.

"So if you're not showing up and if you're not trying, you're not gonna benefit."

So whether you know it's for a business or whether it's for yourself and for your career or for your side hustle, I encourage you and the beautiful thing, you know, in the midst of this crisis were in, we can now invest more time into relationships because we have more time on our hands and more people are doing Zoom calls.

More people are lonely. More people are looking for advice. So as a company This is a great time to invest in content for customer education and in content to develop relationships with influencers and people around you.

"This is a great time to invest in content for customer education and in content to develop relationships with influencers and people around you."

And for people, it's a great time to learn and to network.

So those are my ending notes. I assume this will be aired sometime. This pandemic is not gonna go away in a few weeks. I mean, no, it's gonna be around at least for a few months. So hopefully those are words that will inspire you to action.

Aishwarya

Absolutely. Thank you so much. And most if it is free, so why not leverage it to make relationships better? And thank you so much for being part of our Influencer marketing. It's really great to have you on our channel.

And it was a pleasure, talking to you Neal. It was so much fun and, you are very engaging. I loved the conversation, so thank you. 

Neal

Well, thank you very much. It was an honor. And hopefully, we'll do more together in the future.