How Can Scheduling Improve Your Company?
Mike: How’s it going, guys! it’s Mike Norris.
I’m here with Katie Thompson — content and community manager of HeyOrca. Today, we’re going to talk about social media, and more specifically, some of the benefits of social media scheduling.
Katie, I’m going to turn it over to you. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself, your role, HeyOrca, and what HeyOrca is capable of doing for people?
Katie: Yes! My role at HeyOrca is basically handling all of our social media, but I also manage a lot of our agency community. At HeyOrca, our mission statement is to help agencies take their day back with our social media scheduler. We’re really agency-focused. We love the agency community. We love the #AgencyLife. We’re all about it, for sure!
Community Over Competition
A big part of my job is sharing knowledge and bringing agencies together. Another thing we like to champion is community over competition. That’s really big for us here.
We have a Facebook group called Life and Social, and we invite anyone in any social media role to join. There, we share a lot of knowledge and people ask questions that other people answer. It’s really great to see all these people in such a competitive industry share knowledge and help each other.
So, we really encourage anyone working in social media to join that group. HeyOrca itself is — I guess, on the face — a social media scheduler and planner. But, we’re really agency-focused. We focus on the relationship that you have with your clients, and we make it really easy for your clients to just go in there and approve or have a look at social media content.
We mock it up exactly how it’s going to appear on social media and directly publish it to social media platforms, so you don’t have to worry about it. And our clients can see it all in the back end. And they don’t even have to sign up! Just send them a link, and they’re able to see it from there. So really, we want to help you take your day back, make your client’s life really easy, and also improve that relationship.
Social Media is Constantly Changing
Mike: Well, we’ve definitely seen some of the benefits of that and as far as the
Facebook group goes — it’s so beneficial to have something like that
in a landscape.
Social media is constantly changing, so being able to communicate with other people is phenomenal. Why don’t you walk us through some of the benefits of social media scheduling? I know you touched on that a little bit, but let’s elaborate for everybody.
The Benefits of Social Scheduling
Katie: Yeah, for sure.
As many people working in social media know, social media moves at
the speed of light. It’s constantly changing. You can never keep up with it.
Become Consistent With Your Brand
So scheduling your social media in advance really helps you become consistent with your brand.
If you have a post, Motivational Monday, coming out every Monday, your viewers are gonna be expecting this of you and begin to rely on you as a source of media, communication, and knowledge. So, having that scheduler in place really allows you to plan out your entire month in advance so that you’re not constantly on social media having to check stuff.
That’s why scheduling really helps marketing agencies especially, but really
with anyone who’s just trying to get a hold of social media. Social media is such a huge beast in our world right now, so being able to just grab a hold of it or tame it a little bit is beneficial for everybody.
No More Procrastination
Mike: Oh yeah, and just not putting everything on yourself to think of something that Monday morning — It’s so huge! I’ve tried to do it in the past with my own personal Twitter and everything, and I ended up just scheduling stuff. When I’m in the zone, I’m in the zone. When I’m not. I’m not. Ya know?
Katie: Listen — I’m a natural-born procrastinator, alright. Like that is what I am. So with the scheduler, it just takes that out. You can have everything planned out for you. You don’t have to fret last-minute about it. It really just makes your life easier. Like I said, social media is really becoming this huge marketing beast, so to be able to control it at all, really works to your advantage.
Mike: Yeah, definitely. So, how does a live link for social approval help with client communication?
The Benefits of Shareable Links For Marketing Agencies & Their Clients
Katie: Well, clients are busy and when they hire a marketing agency, they just
want you to take care of everything online. Of course, they want to make sure that their branding is being consistent and they’re being represented correctly, but beyond that, they are putting all their trust in you. Having your brand online is huge and you’re putting a lot of trust in an agency to take care of that.
Makes it Easy for Everyone
So the clients don’t really have time to sign up and learn a new program every single time. We take that out, and what the agency does from the other side is just send a shareable link. You can choose what posts you want your clients to see, so it doesn’t even have to be the whole calendar if everything’s not ready yet.
Your clients just click the link, no signup required, and they can go in, approve, reject, or leave comments and say… Hey! Could you maybe change the wording on this? or Use this… because we all know how deadly important emojis are in marketing.
Builds Relationship With Client
That really helps build that relationship with your client, because you’re not requiring
them to do any extra work. You’re showing them exactly how it’s going to appear online and they’re able to make the edits in the backend before it goes out online. Because we know screenshots exist. Once something’s out there, it’s out there.
Mike: Oh yeah. It’s funny. Before HeyOrca, we used to use Google sheets.
Improves Client Collaboration
We would send it over to the clients and it just didn’t work for long. They couldn’t see the image with the post and really get the full context of everything. With HeyOrca, we’ve seen it really help with client collaboration on top of organization as well.
Katie: We just paint the full picture, right? Clients are easily able to see it and say Okay, I love how that looks! or Hey, could you change this? Could you change that? We make it really easy to keep that client communication open. Here, in the mock-up, everyone’s on the same page. Everyone knows what it’s going to look like online, and that’s so important when building trust and communication with your client.
Mike: Yeah, absolutely! Can you talk a little bit from the agency side as well. How does it streamline things for someone like us?
Katie: For sure! Really what it does is keep everything in one place. Our calendar is the front page, the first thing you see.
I wasn’t actually a HeyOrca user before I joined the pod, and I loved it! The first time I went in, I was like… “This is so easy!” Like this is what we want, right? I want to be able to schedule a post, move it around, see exactly how it’s gonna look. So it just takes all the work out of having to imagine a mock-up social media post, and instead, puts it right there for you.
There are also client roles in HeyOrca, so everyone’s assigned a different role. They know exactly what they’re doing in the platform and even have an audit trail feature to show you who interacted with that post, what time an image was placed, and
what time a text was put in there.
It’s real accountability for marketing agencies as well, which I think is something that a lot of our agencies try to champion. Accountability is huge, so from that standpoint, it gets everything on the same page and that’s really important when you’re handling someone’s brand.
The Future of Social Media
Mike: Yeah, absolutely. Speaking of people’s brands, social media, and all that, I’m gonna put you on the spot here.
Katie: That’s alright!
Mike: Where do you see social media going in the future? Obviously it’s taking some turns in the past. It always changes.
Katie: Yes, of course! I mean that’s part of my job. I really try to stay on top of social media trends and it is overwhelming. I’m sure a lot of people in the marketing world can empathize.
Mike: Oh yeah!
Katie: Definitely overwhelming. The exciting thing about it (this is why I really like it) is that yeah, every day is a little bit different. And every day, you see new trends and people trying new stuff and not making its way into trends. I really, really love that. In terms of the research, I’ve been doing and seeing where things are going. Video is huge. Video is massive and every social platform loves videos and love putting it in their algorithm.
Big things we’re seeing is Instagram stories and Facebook ads — video posts. Those are two really hot marketing topics that are just going to get bigger. Also having a look at TikTok, which is this interesting social platform that’s seeming to be taken over by tweens. Us old folk — I’m only in my late twenties — but us old folk are trying to understand it.
Mike: I know I am!
Katie: Exactly, right. It’s crazy when a 13-year-old has way more social media knowledge than you, and that’s your job, but it’s actually interesting. I think it’s really changing the way people view videos because they offer short clips.
It pretty much combines successor, but they harnessed it a bit more in a marketing way, where you become the videographer in TikTok. You’re cutting up these videos and you’re putting together this little masterpiece on social media, which you couldn’t really do beforehand. I didn’t make a video outside of social media and put it up, but to make it in that specific platform, I think it’s gonna be really big though.
Mike: That’s an interesting take. I keep hearing about it, but I’ve never actually used it myself. I probably should.
Katie: Yeah, I just downloaded it on my phone, but I haven’t touched it — I’m too scared!
Mike: Haha. Well, great! Thank you so much for your time today and thank you for your
perspective on everything. I think we should all go check out TikTok! Any last words?
Katie: Just thank you guys so much for having us! We’re real champions of the marketing agency community. We love helping agencies take back their day and I just want to say for anyone working in social, join our Life and Social group! It’s a really fun group where we just have interesting discussions every day, people help each other out. It’s a really
nice community, and I would love to see more of this in such a competitive world.
Mike: Perfect, well thank you so much for your time today. Thank you all for watching as well.
Happy Wednesday!
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