“Stop dreaming and start doing.”

When it comes to using social media to explode your business, that’s Perri Collins’ mantra. But, it’s hard to stop dreaming until you actually know WHAT you need to be doing. That’s where Perri comes in. Listen in as Bella & Perri discuss:

• What Perri loves most about social media

  

• Similarities & differences between doing social media for a university versus small businesses
• The benefits and struggles of working with millenials
• What is the COPE method?
• How can you save time and resources in social media marketing?

Perri Collins designed her first website in 1999 and hasn’t stopped playing in the digital world since then. Perri started her digital career working in the media industry, so she has firsthand experience in how to maximize digital content to reach people. She has a degree in journalism and is currently a social media specialist at Arizona State University.

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Transcript:

This is episode 68 of Bella in Your Business. Welcome to Bella in Your Business, where Bella will discuss anything and everything about your pet sitting business to help you land on target. So get ready, Bella’s got your chute. Let’s jump. Welcome to Bella in Your Business. My name is Bella Vasta with Jump Consulting, and today I have Perri Collins here. Perri Collins had designed her first website in 1999 and hasn’t stopped playing in the digital world since. Perri started her digital career working in the media industry, so she has firsthand experience in how to maximize digital content to reach people. But most excitingly, and where she is today, I think, Perri is working with Arizona State, my alumni, and I’ve known Perri online forever, but it wasn’t until recently I saw her face to face. And you guys are in for a real treat today, because Perri is an excitable, funny, bubbly, awesome person, and prepare to be excited.

Perri, welcome to the show. Thanks so much, Bella. Thank you for the kind words. For sure. You’re like one of my favorite people. You always make me smile. And like, I know that our listeners are going to hear your smile in everything that you say. You’re just the happiest person. I adore you. Thank you. So why don’t you fill in the gaps there for us? Tell us what that website was for in 1999 and kind of how did you go from that to running the social media, I mean the social media specialist at ASU. Well, like most teenagers, I had a lot of angst. And when I discovered that you can start up a website on the internet and start posting things, I got excited. So I would see all my favorite poets and writers and musicians. And I said, well, if they can do it, I can do it. So I learned how to make a website and I posted like all this terrible teenage poetry and things about how horrible life is as an 18 year old. So pretty typical.

I’m also an alum of Arizona State University. I have a degree in journalism and when they had an opening, I thought, hey, why not apply and see where this goes? And I have to say, it’s definitely one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. It is super fun working with young people. Arizona State University, for those that don’t know, is the largest four-year public university in the United States. We have over 88,000 students. Yes, it’s insane, it’s massive, but it’s so lively. It’s its own little city and it’s just full of amazing people, whether it’s students or researchers or professors or people in the community. There’s a lot of ties in and there’s a lot of really great things going on. And it’s so easy to share that on social media. I love it. And I’m sure content abound, endless amounts of content. Too much sometimes.

So before we dive deep into ASU and what you’re currently doing, you were once telling me a story about growing up on a ranch and how that kind of helped shape you or whatnot. Do you want to tell us more about that? Sure. So I grew up in the smack dab middle of Texas in a little town called Abilene and not even in Abilene. It was out in the countryside. Abilene was just the nearest town and our first few weeks there we didn’t have running water. We didn’t have electricity. My mom is a native New Yorker, but she always wanted like land and space and air to raise her children. So she moved us out to the middle of nowhere in Texas right before I started high school and I just learned to adapt to country living and learn how to milk cows and garden and farm and can vegetables and all those great things. We didn’t have internet out there until like 1999 or 2000 and it was dial up. So that was kind of crazy. But of course, you know, I took to it instantaneously. I’ve always loved technology ever since I was young.

So it’s been unique. It’s been very diverse learning about these two different dichotomies, how people in the country with limited access to technology use it as opposed to city dwellers and in places where there are a lot more businesses who use like social media and the internet to find business. All right. So you’re working at this university now, and I know that you’ve worked with small businesses too. Tell me about the differences between doing social media at a university versus helping small businesses. Well, I would say that working at a university, your audience is pretty much set. Like people understand the value that you’re providing. They have grown up understanding the value of education. So getting that point across to them, especially on social media, is a lot easier than working with a small business who might not really have their value proposition defined yet.

You don’t have to convince people that the social media aspect of it is important because they’re already living it. They’re already millennials, right? They’ve been brought up around it. Right, exactly. And surprisingly, parents are super tech savvy as well. So we get a lot of those. My favorite is when we post things about scholarships and awards coming up that parents will tag their students and their high schoolers and college students in those posts. So that’s always amazing to see. Whereas in small businesses, you might have somebody who’s been running the same business for like 20 years and they’re not as adaptable to learning a new method of reaching out to people. Wow. I’ve never even considered that. It’s like two different worlds of people almost that you’re dealing with.

Now there’s a lot of chatter in our groups as pet sitters and dog walkers. Millennials will get a bad rep, man, bad rep. And what would you say to a business owner who’s looking to hire a millennial or bring a millennial on? What are the advantages and like the benefits of working with that demographic? I think the advantages and benefits are pretty easy to see. First of all, they have grown up with the internet, so they are tech savvy, but also they innately understand the consumer relationship with businesses because they are following celebrities. They are following their favorite brands. So they can take that information and understand how to use it for your business. And also, I just love their energy. They have such big dreams and big hopes. To me, that’s a very attractive thing. Like, I want to work with somebody who is open to learning, who has these great ideas, who can really think outside the box, because they’ve never been constrained by the box.

Whereas with some of your older workers, again, you fall into that mindset of this is the way it’s always been done. This is the way we’re going to continue to do it. And that doesn’t work for every business. Yeah, that’s such a good point. I love the whole fact that they haven’t had the constraint of the box. That’s really good. Who are the people that make up your team? Because I imagine you can’t do the social media yourself for the entire campus. So what does that department even look like? I mean, that department didn’t even exist 10 years ago when I, or 15 years ago when I was there. What does the social media department or specialists do? Like, what does your job consist of?

My job consists of really just creating fans, creating raving fans. I want to help the students have and then tell everybody how great it is and all the great things about coming to school here. So it’s kind of like grassroots marketing, word of mouth. We just want to create an amazing experience. We want to let the students know that they are valued and then when they graduate, they can tell everybody what they can expect when they get here. So as for our team, as you can imagine, it’s pretty big. I want to say we’re bordering on 24 people right now and that includes everybody from graphic designers. We have content people. We have people who write content strictly for undergrads, content for research, content for graduate students. We have people who manage our digital advertising, our website, and our PR with other local and national publications and broadcast media. So it’s pretty big. There’s a lot of people, but luckily ASU really values culture and so everyone is a really great culture fit and we all work really well together. We’re all very enthusiastic about the work so it makes it pretty simple.

That’s exciting. So what platforms are you actually engaging on every day for ASU? Oh my god, so many. Well, we’re really building our Snapchat right now and of course Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. We do some stuff with Pinterest, not as much as we’d like. And of course YouTube. We host our professional videos on Vimeo, but in order to engage the community, we do a lot of YouTube videos as well.

Okay, so you have all of these different platforms and I can feel like our listeners as business owners might also kind of feel like overwhelmed. They’re like, wow, there’s so many different platforms. Which one do I post on? When do I post on it? So Perri, enlighten us. When you are at work, is it really like you get a piece of content and you’re like, okay, this content is going to be best utilized on this platform or are you like, we need to post something on Instagram. So let me create something to post specifically to Instagram. How does that work on a day to day kind of thing? Like, how do you know when to post, where to post, what to post and where? Well, that’s pretty simple. And that’s because it’s all about the audience.

So what audience is going to value this piece of content? Is it something that alumni are gonna find interesting? Well, we’re gonna post it on the channels where alumni are. Is it something that prospective students and parents would get a lot of value of? Then we’re gonna post it on those networks where we see a lot of traffic from those demographics. And then also we have a philosophy called COPE, C-O-P-E, and that stands for Create Once, Publish Everywhere, although we don’t publish everywhere. But we’re very big into recycling content. So you can take one story and find the angle that appeals most to professors, and then twist the story and find the angle that appeals most to the students. Or take that same story, take for example, like homecoming. What’s going to appeal to alumni? What’s going to appeal to current students? What’s going to appeal to freshmen? So we can take one story and break it up into multiple sections, depending on who’s the audience and what platform we’re using.

That is so exciting because I keep like relating it back to business, right, Perri? So, you have this like little city, 88,000 people, right? And you’ve got staff, you’ve got the professors, you’ve got the teachers, you’ve got the parents, you’ve got the students. And then you’ve got like the young students who are just in college. You’ve got like the grad students, you’ve got the students who haven’t been students for a long time and they’re adults and families at home, online students. You’ve got all different kinds of demographics and I know this relates to business as when we’re trying to figure out okay, we have people who are dog walking clients who are working long days or at ASU all day who need their dog let out. We have people that travel. We have people that are just divorced and middle-aged and just going buck wild in Vegas every other weekend.

You know, there’s all these different demographics. I think what something that I’m always trying to really encourage people to do, Perri, is to think of people, their avatar, who are you talking to? That’s exactly what I hear you say. Like, you know, ASU might be an actual university in a mini city, but when it all comes down to it, you have those demographics and those different people. And I love that COPE method, create once, publish everywhere. I want all of our listeners to write that down or to get out your notepad and type it into your phone as a note and do not forget that because expand a little bit more on that, Perri, like what does COPE allow ASU to do by implementing that?

Well, first of all, you can definitely save time, save resources. I mean, there’s only 24 hours a day. And even though there’s a lot of content and a lot of things going on that we want to promote, we only have a limited amount of time, a limited staff, so you’ve got to maximize every piece of content that you have. So for example, in the pet business, if your customers who travel a lot are on Instagram, then you want to focus your content on travel to appeal to those people. If your target demographic who works all day needs somebody to let out their dog is going to be mainly on Twitter, then you’re going to want to speak to that on Twitter. It’s pretty much the same concepts just for business. So you just have to know who your audience is and where they are, and then appeal to them using the content that you have. If you’re at an event, if you’re partnering, collaborating with another business, gather as much as you can and then use that content in different ways across different platforms to appeal to those different demographics.

I love it, I love it. And I want all the business owners to really pay attention to that because I think it’s so super important now. It doesn’t mean that you have to be on every single platform like Perri and Arizona State University is. But it does mean that like if you want to be on two platforms, maybe Facebook and Instagram, that you want to post your blog on your website and then make a post on Facebook for it and then transition that post to maybe even a graphic or a quote from it and throw it up on your Instagram. Your Instagram can be different. It doesn’t have to be all pictures of a dog because at the end of the day, unless it’s a really amazing picture or the dog’s doing something like pooping, people are going to keep scrolling because if it’s not their dog, they don’t care.

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Speaking of Instagram, Perri, tell us your best tip on Instagram. Like what’s your best secret that you do that usually, you know, gets lots of engagement. Well, I don’t know if I’d call it a secret, but I would say the purpose behind social media is to tell a story. It’s to tell your story about your business and your customers. And if you’re only using photos and not using the captions, you are missing out. If you are only posting pictures of dogs and not yourself, if you’re only doing selfies all the time and not your clients or your business, you need to expand that. You really need to use social media to help your narrative get to those people who want to do business with you. So that would be my biggest tip is like Instagram stories are great. I mean, there’s like so many camera apps. I mean, don’t get caught up in like the little things and the little technology bits and pieces that keep changing and all the new features. I would say stick to the basics. Tell your story. Let people know what’s in it for them, why you’re so amazing, why what you do is different than everybody else.

Yeah, and you know what? Just being on Instagram and doing Instagram stories will make you different. I follow a lot of pet companies on Instagram. And what I love seeing is the stories when they go, okay, guys, we’re about to start off the day and we have 22 dogs today. Are you ready? And then they take a picture of every single dog. We’re like, number one, Zoe, number two, Bow, number three, Fluffy, you know, and it just keeps going. And then like, maybe the owner pops in with like a quick candid and it’s like, are you guys still with me? Like we’re still going and this is what we do. Or maybe they’ll pop in with a story like this is Fluffy and Fluffy’s mom works. So we visit her five times a week and then they go back to 16, 17, 18, 19, 20. Okay guys, that was a lot of dogs, you know, but that’s what a day in a dog walker’s life is.

And what I think is really even more incredible is that Instagram stories, don’t think people cope that one enough because you can very easily download that Instagram story and we’re not ASU. So we can get away with it as pet sitters and dog walkers downloading an Instagram story that’s maybe three minutes long that has all those jump cuts because they’re only 15 second videos or pictures and posting it on Facebook and reusing it and saying, hey guys, or at the beginning of the day on Facebook, you could be like, how many dogs do you think that I’m going to visit today? One to five, five to ten, ten to twenty. You know, the person who guesses gets a free visit or something. And at the end of the day, you can post that IG video and you can say count how many, know, and so and so was the winner and you could reach out to them and you could do an email blast that morning. Like, hey, want a free visit? Go to my Facebook page.

There’s so many ways that you could just very easily connect it all. So what I’m saying is a lot of us are already taking like doing Facebook lives or a lot of us are already doing Instagram stories or something, but use the COPE method that Perri just told us about, the create once publish everywhere, and take that to heart. You could even take that Instagram story and you can make a blog post out of it because you say what’s a day in the life like a dog walker or on your services page that says dog walking and it says want to see what an actual day looks like? Click here and it goes to the blog post and you’re telling about it and you’re showing that video. Again, like the name of the game isn’t to just keep working so much. It’s to repurpose it and to create that evergreen content.

Okay, so that was Instagram, Perri. What would be like your best thing for Facebook? What do you think about these Facebook lives? Does ASU use that at all? Yes, absolutely. Especially for on campus events. The semester just started, so we had our annual fall welcome event where we welcome all the students back to campus. And that’s great because people who aren’t here, they’re able to see the excitement. They’re able to see Sparky, our mascot, come on stage. They’re getting excited. The president of the university speaks. There’s balloons, there’s t-shirts. It’s like a big party. And the great thing about Facebook Lives is that you’re not able to just tell. You can show. And a lot of people are very visual. Stories are great. Blog posts are great. But the great thing about Facebook Live is that you feel like you’re right there. You can be there without actually having to physically be there.

So I say use them. Facebook’s algorithm boosts your Facebook Live posts to the top of a feed. So whenever you do that, you’re getting just a little bit extra organic reach. I say do it. I love all the live stuff, Instagram stories, Snapchat. I think video is definitely going to continue to make an impact and you want to play with it now and learn how it works and find your style and find your mojo. And when the internet is nothing but video, you will be a pro. Exactly. And that is where the internet is going. There have been so many, and I don’t think it’s fluff, like a lot of studies are coming out saying by 2020 it will be like 80% video content consumed as opposed to text, which is what it is right now. I mean, we’re going to have this, who knows when you’re going to be listening to this podcast. It could be even a year from now. And you’re like, yeah, we’re already doing that.

But right now as we’re recording August 31st, 2017, it is like pulling teeth to get people on Facebook Live right now. And I’m telling you that if you can get your brand on it now, you will be ahead of the game. You will be rewarded by Facebook. And there was something else that someone told me that I really liked. Because you don’t get as many views on Instagram stories, Instagram stories is a super awesome place to go do dress rehearsals, to go try to get comfortable and used to doing your live feeds and creating your stories and then move it over to Facebook stories or start doing your Facebook lives.

So you guys, while the platforms can also help promote and market you, you can also kind of do dress rehearsals on the ones that don’t get as much traction maybe. You know, and if you’re not comfortable doing live, do a recorded video first. And another tip for Facebook is that you can set the number of people that you share your Facebook live to. You can only share it to a certain group or a certain person if you want, or you can even make that video private. So if you want to practice a few times first until you get comfortable, do it. You have every opportunity. My personal philosophy is stop dreaming, start doing. I believe that action speaks louder than words, and you’re never gonna learn it if you’re just sitting there reading tutorials all day. You have to take the bull by the horns and do a couple of videos and you will figure it out. Stop dreaming and start doing.

That was fantastic. So you guys, I want you to reply or post or wherever you found this podcast, I want you to leave a comment and tell us right now what you’re going to do to take action to stop dreaming and start doing, how you’re going to use the COPE method, create once, publish everywhere, to really make an impact on your business.

If you want to follow ASU, we’re at Arizona State on Facebook or Arizona State University on Instagram or ASU on Twitter. Plus every college and school has pretty much their own handles as well. And if you want to follow me personally, I’m Perri Collins on Twitter or you can search for my company, Collins Digital Media on Facebook or Instagram.

It’s been such a pleasure having you today. Thank you for joining me. To all of our listeners, I would love it if you could go subscribe and like and leave comments on iTunes or Stitcher. And remember to always keep jumping. Thanks for jumping with Bella in your business. For more information, free articles, free coaching sessions and more, go to jumpconsulting.net. And remember, Bella’s got your chute.