Stop Marketing, Start Engaging: How to Get Social Media to Really Work

Do you use social media marketing to grow your business?

Are you wondering how to get others to say great things about your brand or product?

To discover the common mistakes social media marketers make and how to fix them, I interview Scott Stratten for this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast.
More About This Show

The Social Media Marketing podcast is a show from Social Media Examiner.

It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

The show format is on-demand talk radio (also known as podcasting).

In this episode, I interview Scott Stratten, author of UnMarketing and co-host of the UnPodcast. His latest book is QR Codes Kill Kittens.

Scott shares how marketers can improve social media by engaging their audiences.

You'll discover how to use social media marketing effectively, and how brands can get talked about in a positive way.

Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below!
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Stop Marketing, Start Engaging
Why did you decide to write your first book, UnMarketing?

Scott explains how he used to look at business books in bookstores, and they would all have the same information, just a different title. He always thought there was a need for his book, but he didn't want to publish it without leverage. He wanted to wait for a publisher to come to him.

Once he had built his blog, someone from Wiley contacted him to ask why he hadn't written a book. This led Scott to write his first book, UnMarketing.

The book was aimed at entrepreneurs. People who were able and willing to shift their minds to do things a different way. You'll hear why Scott was surprised when it caught on with corporations.

In 2009, when social took off to another level, Scott realized that he would have to become more focused. So he started with Twitter. He'd already tried Twitter in 2008 and didn't think much of it, but in January 2009 he decided to try it for 30 days. During this period, he tweeted 7000 times.

At the start of the month, he had 1200 followers and by the end of the month, he had 10,000. This made him realize that not only was there potential on Twitter, but there was great potential for conversation. He's never stopped tweeting since. To date he has over 100,000 tweets and 165,000 followers.

Scott says that one of the biggest mistakes people make with Twitter is that they create a lot of content first and then go onto Twitter with no followers and expect to pitch it. Instead you should give to the network, rather than go out there and sell. When Scott started out on Twitter, he didn't have a blog, so he had no content to share on Twitter.

You'll hear how back in 2009, Twitter was more about people talking to people. The term social strategy wasn't even around. Scott believes that if he used the same strategy now for a month, his results would be a lot different than they were back then. The platform has definitely migrated and shifted.

Listen to the show to find out why Mitch Joel calls Scott a storyteller.

The story behind the Instant No Button

The Instant No Button is a 7-minute project that Scott threw together about 4 years ago. He loved the Instant Fail button sound and decided to do a "No" version.

To date it has been clicked 20 million times. Scott says the funny thing about it is that most people have seen it, but are totally unaware that it's his. This type of project goes to show that people share great content, even if it's funny or stupid.

The free No Button app has recently been launched in the Google Play Store and has already gotten 30,000 downloads. Scott has Google AdWords on there and he says that he makes fun money off of it.

Listen to the show to discover the amount of money it makes in a year and why it's ...