600K Followers. B2B Brand. No Ads. Here's How.

Speaker A: I think it's impossible for a social media manager to not use AI at this point. It's all about finding efficient ways to do your job. And whether you like it or not, it's kind of like if you don't start using the AI tools, you're going to fall behind. You know, there's like so many things that happen all the time, but you kind of have to remind yourself very periodically to take a step back and look and really evaluate. Like, is what I'm creating fitting into this broader strategy that I've created for myself, I start to notice that there's a pattern. Like, oh, whenever I do that, guess what? I get more comments.

Speaker B: Can you tell us a little bit more about how AIs made it into your workflow?

Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. I am currently.

Speaker C: What's up, everybody? Welcome to Beyond Social. We have myself, Chris Cunningham. I do all things social. ClickUp. We have Reggie from Vista Social. And today our guest is Sarah, who crushes social for manychat. You haven't heard of many chat. You've definitely seen them in action. You've seen people comment. So, Sarah, welcome to the pod. We're excited to have you.

Speaker A: Thank you so much. I'm so excited to be here.

Speaker C: Yeah. And look, you guys are crushing it. You have over 600k on Instagram. Everyone's seen you. Tell us about how long you've been at ManyChat and how the journey began.

Speaker A: Yeah, so I started at manychat about a year and a half ago. I have always been a social media manager for about five years. Oh, yeah, around five years. But I always worked freelance. I never thought that I would ever take an eye to five job, ever. I was, like, very against it. I loved working freelance and I ran an agency. But the opportunity came for a, at the time, YouTube manager at ManyChat, and I was like, oh, this is so aligned. I love manychat. Um, I was using it for two years and so I applied for the position. I got it and Now I run YouTube and also Instagram @ManyChat.

Speaker C: Incredible. Which are two of your best platforms. And look, let's start with Instagram. You've grown over, what, 600,000 followers as a B2B brand? Like, I know how hard that is. It took us a while to get to over 500k as well. What do you think got, uh, you guys there? What is. What hits for you the most in engagement?

Speaker A: Yeah. So we've gone through a lot of transitions as a company and obviously I have not been running our socials the entire time our company has existed. But most recently what's really been working is when we talk about different topics within the broader creator economy. So not necessarily just creating content about our product 24 7, but really focusing in on who our audience is and finding new ways to educate them. So a lot of times we're talking about, you know, how to get brand deals, how to grow on social media. Those types of topics tend to hit a little bit more, introduce people to our brand and then they buy once they start to get a little bit more familiar about what we do.

Speaker C: I love that. So your first thing is not to go in and just say, hey, here's ManyChat. Use ManyChat. You're just helping your audience. You're just giving them value.

Speaker A: Yeah. Leading with a mission, obviously, would you say?

Speaker B: I mean obviously like at this, we hear this all the time. Like, hey, like being able to DM, um, comment to DMs and all that. Like those automations are huge for the growth. How do you feel like that's played a role in ManyChat's actual social content?

Speaker A: I mean, obviously it's huge for us as well. It's funny because I used manychat for about two years before I started working here. So just as a creator myself, from using manychat I was able to increase my engagement significantly on Instagram. And then obviously in our own post, the same thing is this is applies to that where whenever we use those comment automations we see tons of engagement, tons of comments. We see people commenting trigger words when we don't even ask them to because we are manychat and they love to do that, which is hilarious. But yeah, definitely an increase in engagement. And then also because we get so, so many DMS having as many followers as we do and we have a lot of customers that DM m us about customer service things. We've been able to automate a lot of those DMs as well to get them what they want without some of that frustration. So that's been a really big help as well. When it comes to the automations.

Speaker C: Do you have like a number that you try to do? Percentage of like posts that are trying to go after new followers versus trying to like convert them into customers? Because you know, some people just want to go all convert, convert, convert. I think that's a big mistake that I preach against. What is your kind of. I'm sure you don't have an exact number, but do you have like an idea range of like, like how many of yours are just to get new followers. Adding value versus trying to get customers.

Speaker A: Honestly, majority are the value driven ones. We rarely post like a product sales pitch post rarely ever. Sometimes we'll do like little mini many chat tutorials on Instagram. But I would say maybe like 20% of the time is like very product focused, whereas the rest is usually just broader social media education or just really showing us within the creator economy. So interviewing people at events. I do a lot of interviewing and street interviews and things like that. Really just getting involved with creators, that's kind of our main goal. So I would say maybe like 8020 on Instagram specifically.

Speaker C: Beautiful. That's what I would preach. And then. So you do a lot of creation yourself. Here's what most people realize too. A lot of companies hire social media manager and just say good luck. Right? Like let's make some amazing content, let's figure it out. What does a team look like for you? Do you have some editors? Do you have agencies? Uh, how do you bring the social life? Because I think too many, too many times are social media managers get stuck doing all of this. It sounds like you do do a lot. You're doing a lot of interviews. How much are you doing? How much help do you have?

Speaker A: Yeah, that's a great question. Um, so I do manage the accounts myself. So anything that you see get uploaded to Instagram or YouTube. I'm the one there optimizing the videos, writing the captions, things like that. We, um, do have a team of editors. So we have, I think at this point like three or four video editors. Some design just for YouTube. A lot of the Instagram editing I'll do myself. Short form editing is a little simpler, but for some of the more advanced stuff they'll help. And then we also have an entire content team. We have a whole team that is built for our written content. So think blogs, landing pages. We do not shy away from writers here. I actually love that about this company. It's not like we're replacing our writing team with AI. In fact, we're hiring more. So it's pretty cool to see that human aspect remain in a tech company. And so a lot of times they'll also help out with things like YouTube scripting or you know, copy for certain videos, things like that. So I do have quite a bit of help.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's amazing. I mean on the AI front. Absolutely. I mean the AI this, AI that, or like we want to figure out ways where we can implement the nuances like the human creativity, the human experience. To it. So I love hearing, like you said, a tech company, software company, that's saying more humans love it. So on the flip side of that though, I mean, I assume your team does use AI in some way, shape or form, whether it's to figure out stuff that's working. Can you tell us a little bit more about how AIs made it into your workflow?

Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. I am currently learning a lot of new tools. I think it's impossible for a social media manager to not use AI at this point because the reality is that our job is kind of changing. Like, yes, I'm still going to be creating the content, yes, I'm managing the strategy, but it's all about finding efficient ways to do your job. And whether you like it or not, it's kind of like if you don't start using the AI tools, you're going to fall behind. So for me personally, I've been learning the different functions within, like Claude, I've been experimenting with a lot of, like, the AI creation tools. Uh, I got early access to a new one that's coming out which is super cool. Our design team does a lot of, like, AI generation for a lot of our designs, so it's very interesting. I guess, what we're able to do. I have some mixed opinions about AI sometimes, but, you know, at this point you kind of have to, you have to adapt to the future.

Speaker C: So I'm with you on the AI front. I think, uh, you know, a lot of people ask me, I think one of my biggest pet peeves about AI is so many people come to me and say, well, look, you can just do everything with AI, right? You can write your captions, you can create your videos. And I just think that's not the case for all of my best videos have gone viral. None of them have come from an AI idea or an AI script that was written. I might use AI to generate ideas, I might use AI to speed up, to know where to edit things like that. But by no means do I believe that AI is like ready to fully run content. I don't think so at all. So I think we're in agreeance there.

Speaker A: Yeah, I agree with that as well. To your point, like, use it kind of as a brainstorm partner, but I never want it to replace my creativity because that's where your content starts to look like everyone else's and you don't want that, uh, for yourself as a creator, for a brand, like, it's just not good. So I feel like I like to Brainstorm a lot by myself with like, AI as a partner there, and then finding some tools just to make life a little easier. Think like the video editing tools where you can have an AI tool edit a podcast like this that maybe doesn't need super high lift editing, um, using that to save time from the editor. So the editors can now spend their time creating a really awesome asset that, um, they don't have to be worrying about the podcast. Things like that is kind of how we're navigating it here.

Speaker C: The next thing I wanted to ask is the biggest challenge for social media managers is how do I master the content calendar? How do I make sure my calendar is great? What does that look like for you? What's the format you try to hit? Do you have, do you have content content buckets? Are you like, hey, on Mondays we post this, on Tuesdays we post this? Or are you like, you have such a good team, it sounds like you have writers, you have content creators. What does that flywheel look like to get the content created to get it on the calendar and make it smooth?

Speaker A: Oh, it depends on the content. Um, for something like Instagram, let's just say, uh, you kind of can't schedule too far in advance because, you know, sometimes trends come up. Sometimes, you know, a team throws something at you and you're like, okay, now, this is what has to happen now. Um, so I guess there has to be a level of flexibility to a short form platform, in my opinion. Um, I like to use asana to kind of plan things out, so I'll be able to, uh, assign subtasks to certain collaborators. So, like, for example, the biggest use case for this for me is YouTube. We plan YouTube way in advance. Like, if you come on my podcast, um, it's probably not getting posted for like a month because we plan very in advance for YouTube. It just a little bit easier for the long form content, um, with that, like, every time I create a YouTube task, there's like 12 subtasks that get generated automatically. It's like, who's creating the thumbnail? Who's writing the script? Who is researching on this person that I'm interviewing? Who am I interviewing? Um, who's editing the video? Like, there's so many different pieces. I think a lot of people don't really understand that, but there's a lot that goes into content. So, yeah, that's kind of, I guess, a little bit of a glimpse into what that kind of looks like.

Speaker B: That's huge. Uh, the workflow is a tough part, right like especially what you're talking about, it's auto created, like that's saving you guys a lot of time. But some people don't realize is that what you might see on a creator's feed video, uh, that looks off the cuff, they're walking, they're talking in their car and it just looks so free flowing. This is meticulously planned, right? There's a concept, there's a message that we want to get across in that specific video. You've thought about the hook, you've thought about whatever, right? To get that video to that finished state. And it's definitely an underappreciated skill. I'd say when we talk about wanting to get either a creator or a brand social, uh, media manager that's trying to get that content calendar, the content strategy to be better, to reach more people, to connect with their audience, we want to figure out like, is there a playbook, is there something that we're missing? That if there's like this one or two key things that they can just turn on and start thinking a little bit differently, it would make waves in the way that their content performs. What do you think those couple of things might be?

Speaker A: Hmm, that's an interesting question. I don't know, I don't know if I'm going to answer it exactly how you wanted me to. But I think the biggest thing for me is always remembering to take a step back and look at the broader strategy. Because I think in someone who's someone in my position as a social media manager or a content creator, it's easy to get caught up in, okay, I have this event next week, I have this trend that I just saw, so I'm gonna go film it right now and post it. And you know, there's like so many things that happen all the time, but you kind of have to remind yourself very periodically to take a step back and look and really evaluate. Like, is what I'm creating fitting into this broader strategy that I've created for myself. And if you haven't created that broad strategy, because as somebody who started freelance, I used to jump in and just do whatever the client, you know, they'd be like, okay, we need to post right now. So I'd be like, okay. And I would just jump in. And there was no like, broad strategy. It was like, okay, I'm going to film and you're going to edit. I was like, okay, let's do it, we're going to post it. But taking a step back is what really gets you the results like, if you're constantly just running, running, running, running, running without really evaluating, like, is what I'm doing making sense for our goals, for our ideal client, our ideal audience? Are we seeing growth? Like, am I evaluating, uh, the metrics on like a monthly basis to actually see if. If my content's making waves? That would be, for me, what I think is very easy to forget to do on a regular basis.

Speaker C: I love that point because I think one of the reasons why I went on social media is because I evaluate and I evaluate in such a big way. Like, I am always looking at the end of the M, always looking at what hit, what didn't. I'm, um, giving reports to our CEO, to our COO and saying, you know, hey, this worked, this didn't. This is the next swing I'm taking to make sure we get, you know, more views next week. How are you getting your analytics? How are you getting good reporting and making those proper decisions?

Speaker A: Yeah, so I typically am looking at certain, I guess, metrics within, like, my insights on the platform. I don't. Maybe I'm like late on this, but I don't really use many M, like, outside tools for reporting. Um, if I do, maybe you can educate on me on which one you like. But I like to look inside of the native platform and I look at things like watch time of the videos. Like, are people dropping off, um, right in the beginning. Like, you know, what's, what's the watch time there? I look at engagement as a huge metric. I think we all know this, but like, followers isn't super as important. Like, it's important, but it's not really as important. So engagement rate is usually like what I'm looking at. I like to see what gets views and what doesn't. And then the watch time, I think those are probably the biggest for me. And then because we're manychat, I look a lot at comments. Uh, yeah, yeah. If we notice that we're getting a ton of like, comment replies from a certain thing, maybe I'll use that keyword again. Maybe I'll promote that type of thing again. I'll use the same type of hook in a different way. Things like that.

Speaker C: You know, I'm the same as you had a hard time with every tool. I tried Sprout, I tried later, I tried Dash Hudson. That's actually I ended up meeting Reggie, uh, because I ended up becoming a customer. Well, to tell you after, but, uh, Vista does a lot of. They do my reporting. That's how I get it edited.

Speaker A: Okay. So maybe I have to start using you then check it out.

Speaker C: That's the beauty of it. And then. Oh, uh, yeah, Regiel lets you dive deeper, deeper on that one. If you wanted not go to my next question.

Speaker B: Yeah, all good. Yes. So I mean, the retention graph is something that you mentioned. You know, watch times and all that. And that's one of the things that we keep hearing about consistently here. This is, it's like, yeah, the hook. And that's fantastic. I want to, I want to say something that's a little bit different. I want to have maybe a visual hook that's really, it's going to stop the scroll as they're going through. But trying a bunch of things that other people are doing is one thing. Another thing is to dive into your account. Like you're saying, let me look at the analytics, let me look at the retention. The last five videos that I've published. How has that translated for you? When it comes to drop offs at certain points in the video that translated into maybe trying new strategies at getting people hooked in the first couple of seconds and making sure that's still on brand, it doesn't feel just off for people who's used to watching manychat.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that's exactly it. To be honest with you. It's like if I start to notice that certain videos are doing better than others, I will 1000% look at why. And a lot of times it's not necessarily like the trivial things like, oh, I used to this hashtag or oh, I used this trending audio. So I'm gonna reuse it. Like, it's not usually that. It's um, the fact that there was like some really good visual hook. And so I'll take that hook and I'll reiterate it and change it and make it into something different so I can say the same type of thing or do the same type of visual or whatever in a new way. Or maybe my CTA was different. Like for example, I said the, you know, comment the word blah, blah, blah, blah on the video instead of just in the caption. And all of a sudden I saw that tons more comments came because I actually said it versus just putting it, you know, at the bottom of the caption. Things like that. Like, if I start to notice that there's a pattern like, oh, whenever I do that, guess what? I get more comments. I'll start to notice those things and then, you know, use them going forward.

Speaker B: Is is creating trial reel content like a part of that strategy of testing those things? That you're talking about or how often do you guys do that?

Speaker A: That's so interesting that you asked that. Um, yeah. So trial reels are definitely interesting. I think it's a great way to test out content that you don't. I don't know if it's gonna work. So I have done a little bit of trial reeling. Probably need to be doing a little bit more, to be honest.

Speaker C: I'll tell you why. Some of the videos I post, I'll have one that I change. Maybe just the hook or the headline or the text on screen. I do it for every video religiously. And the reason being is it's like I get three or four different shots and one of them might get 20k, one of them might get like 100k on the trial. And I posted live. That's the difference of getting 100k versus like 1 million views. Uh, I would definitely try more. I know we're getting close on time. So there's one question I really wanted to ask you. How do you look at creative partnerships? How do you know what influencers to choose? Because you die. You guys doing amaz job of that. How do you figure out who you want to work with and how do you work with them?

Speaker A: Yeah, that's a great question. So, just for transparency, I don't run our influencer campaigns, but I do work very closely with the team who does. I know that we basically look for creators who have a similar audience to the audience that we want. So we're not just looking for creators with tons of followers. We're looking for who actually follows this person. So, like anybody who is a, um, you know, marketer, teaching other creators how to grow their business is always something that we kind of gravitate towards. Or any creator who's creating anything that's like really, really high quality, where we know there's a lot of other creators following them, we tend to gravitate towards that as well. So that's been our strategy as of now. We lean into like, who is this person and who's following them. And then also we look at their engagement rate a lot more than we look at their follower count.

Speaker C: For sure, I'm big time on engagement. Engagement rate too. Uh, the followers don't matter as much to me. Someone can have millions of followers and get less engagement than me and my 20K.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, someone could also just buy a bunch of followers. It really means nothing.

Speaker C: It means absolutely nothing.

Speaker B: I was going to say, you know, I'm just grateful for you stopping by and like jumping in here with us to ask answer some questions about your content. I just repeatedly keep hearing from our customers, from marketers, from creators, like, hey, I need to understand this stuff changes so often. I'd love to have a space where we can hear a little bit more about what's working really well from the creators. And the marketers are out there. They're just killing it. So being able to have someone like you on here sharing a little bit about the nuggets of wisdom, of what's really working, what are the things that you're playing with, it's huge. So we really value your time.

Speaker C: Yes, sir. So nice to meet you too. Uh, I'm glad we glad we connected on LinkedIn. We'll take care of this. We'll do a lot of the editing, we'll chop up some stuff for you, we'll tag, share whatever you want to do. But we appreciate you also make a playbook from this that we can post and comment below and use automation to get people to go further on it. So I really do appreciate you.

Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. Comment playbook and I'll send you the playbook.

Speaker C: Exactly. Comment in the chat. We'll send it away.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Comment Sarah is the best.

Speaker C: That's how we really get extra comments. There we go.

Speaker A: Thank you guys so much. Seriously, it's great to, I guess, just talk with people who understand. Um, you know, social media can sometimes be a little lonely because people don't really get it, but it's nice to have other friends that are in the same industry and definitely understand the struggles, but also the coolest, cool job that you have.