June 18, 2025 • 32 mins
What if your next sale is hiding in your Instagram comments? This week on the podcast, I’m diving into social listening and social care with the brilliant Brooke Sellas, founder of B Squared Media and host of the Social Media CX Podcast.
We get into the real reason you need to respond to those “Do you ship to ___?” questions—and how your answers could be the tipping point for someone making a purchase.
Brooke shares practical, no-cost ways small business owners can start using social media conversations to reduce churn, support sales, and improve customer experience (without hiring a whole new team).
If you’re feeling overwhelmed by all things social, this episode is packed with human-first strategies you can actually use.
🔗 Mentioned in This Episode:
Let me know what stood out to you from this episode over on Instagram @resilientretailclub!
Don’t forget to rate, review, and subscribe—and tag me when you’re listening!
Timestamps:
[00:00:00] What your customers say that you might be overlooking
[00:03:32] What social listening actually means
[00:05:46] Gen Z and millennials shop differently—here’s how
[00:07:56] People expect replies outside of 9-5. Now what?
[00:10:32] The questions buyers are asking that you might be overlooking
[00:11:46] Social listening that drives sales
[00:13:41] What to do with negative feedback
[00:17:20] A real-world example of social listening driving sales
[00:20:19] Your competitors reviews are full of clues
[00:22:23] The free focus group you’re probably not using
[00:24:00] One simple way to start social listening
Mentioned in this episode:
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
What are your customers sayingabout you online and how can
(00:04):
you turn that into more sales?
Today I'm joined by Brooke Sellas fromB Squared Media, who is going to delve
into the fascinating world of sociallistening and how you can use your
social media to improve your sales andyour relationship with your customers.
(00:24):
Welcome to the Resilient Retail GamePlan, a podcast for anyone wanting to
start, grow or scale a profitable creativeproduct business with me, Catherine Erdly.
The Resilient Retail Game Plan isa podcast dedicated to one thing,
breaking down the concepts and toolsthat I've gathered from 20 years in
the retail industry and showing youhow you can use them in your business.
(00:47):
This is the real nuts and bolts ofrunning a successful product business,
broken down in an easy, accessible way.
This is not a podcast about learninghow to make your business look good.
It's the tools and techniques that willmake you and your business feel good.
Confidently plan, launch, and manageyour products, and feel in control of
(01:08):
your sales numbers and cash flow to helpyou build a resilient retail business.
Brooke, I'm delighted to haveyou with us on the podcast.
Do you want to start us off byintroducing yourself and your business?
Yeah, definitely.
So my name is Brooke Sellas and I amthe CEO and founder of B Squared Media.
(01:33):
We just turned 13 this May, so Ifeel like we are a dinosaur in the
social media world, but essentiallywe offer social media services
around social media intelligence.
So we do management, we do paid media,and then our big service that we're well
known for is social media customer care.
Amazing, and we're gonna begetting into all of that today
(01:55):
and I'm super excited about it.
But can you just tell me a little bitabout how you got started, kind of what
led you to this arena of social listeningand customer care through social media?
Like what was it thatkind of got you into it?
Yeah, well, so I had started buildingout social media services, like, not
unlike what we have today for a womanwho I worked with back in Texas oh
(02:17):
many, many, many, many moons ago.
And it was almost like I wastesting the concept for my own
business, but I didn't know it yet.
However, my dad and my then boyfrienddefinitely knew it and they kept
pushing me to start my own thing.
They're like, you've basically createdthis whole new business for her.
You see that it works, likeyou should do this on your own.
(02:38):
I was scared, of course, as many of us areto make the leap into entrepreneurship.
But my dad tricked me in a way.
Best trick ever.
And he was like, "Hey, by the way, I wonyou a pitch with the CMO at my company."
He worked at a fintechcompany at the time.
And he was like, "But here's thedeal." And he made me shake his hand.
I remember in their kitchen very vividly.
(03:00):
And he said, "If you win the pitch,you have to do this on your own."
So like moonlighting, basicallylike having a job on the side.
And I didn't think I was gonnawin the pitch, so I shook
his hand, I was like, deal.
I won the pitch and that becameB Squared's first client.
And then once you make that littleleap, and you find out like oh,
(03:21):
this isn't going to be as terribleas I thought it was going to be.
It made it easier for me to kind ofleave the company I was at and take
all of these wonderful things thatI had built and do them on my own.
Fantastic.
So I love that.
So, I mean, what we're really talkingabout here is looking at what your
customers are talking about onlineor paying attention to your online
(03:42):
customer sentiment and social mentions.
So can you explain a little bit about howthat helps, particularly small businesses,
how it can help improve customerexperience and basically drive more sales?
Sure.
Well, I'm sure if you're listening tothis, you know that a lot of things
happen online like this show, butreally what pushed us forward by almost
(04:03):
10 years, analysts say was COVID.
Right?
When COVID happened, we all kindof collectively moved online.
Even those of us who weren't comfortablebeing online, had to move online.
That is where we lived, we shopped,we connected with our people,
and that never really changed.
And so what analysts say is thatthe online shopping of it all.
(04:27):
The way we start to research brands,look for discounts, talk to our
peers about which brands we shouldor shouldn't buy from, moved forward
by about 10 years thanks to COVID.
We moved forward very quickly inthis digital transformation and now
literally, this is the way it is, right?
"This is the way," as theysay in The Mandalorian.
(04:47):
So I think it's like 86% of US consumers,and I'm talking US 'cause most of our
clients are US, but the statistics arepretty similar around the globe, as
long as they have access to internet.
But 86% of consumers now do theirshopping through social media.
They research brands, theylook for brand conversations.
(05:09):
The younger generations, millennialsand Gen Z weight brand conversations.
Meaning if somebody comes along to yourbrand and says, "Hey Catherine, do you
have , these shoes in a size eight?"
And you say, "Oh, well yes we do,and we actually ship for free for
that price," or whatever, right?
You're engaging that conversation.
These younger generations lookat those brand conversations
(05:32):
and actually weight them as highor higher than online reviews.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, so it's really shopping ande-commerce and social commerce
have really changed the gameeven for B2B brands, by the way.
Mm. Mm-hmm.
On how people shop.
So it's so important if you have a brandthat has a presence on social to make
(05:54):
sure that presence is conversational.
So that people can kind of spike, lean in.
It's a spectator sport.
See what you're saying to people whoare asking you questions or leaving
you bad reviews, and then decideif they want to also buy from you.
That's really fascinating.
And you know, now you say that,I definitely do look for that.
(06:14):
I always find it really funny when I see abrand and I see that they have comments on
their socials and they've not responded.
I always look at that and I alwaysthink that is such a low hanging fruit.
You know, I guess I do probably passa little bit of judgment, like you
say, if you see a brand that's reallysuper engaged and they're responding,
and even if someone says, "Oh, Iwasn't happy with this," and they say,
(06:34):
"Oh, hey, can you drop us an emailand we'll sort it all out for you?"
You definitely do get amore positive picture, right?
Absolutely.
Yes.
And I mean, I know I work in this world,so I'm very biased, but same thing, like,
it's wild to me that brands still aren'tresponding to people who are coming to
their brand and like saying like, "Hey,I'm trying to check out and I can't." They
(06:55):
are literally trying to give you theirmoney and then you're not responding.
It blows my mind.
Even just doing thatby the way, is passive.
There are people who are talking aboutyour brand and not tagging you on socials.
Instead of mentioning like @Nike, theymight be talking about their Air Jordans.
They're still talkingabout one of your products.
(07:15):
They're still talking about the brand.
But you're not getting that notificationin your inbox because it's called like
a dark mention or an indirect mention.
The only way you can see thoseis through social listening.
What I know to be true is that if I seeyou not responding to direct mentions,
I know that you're not responding to anyof the conversations happening around
your brand on social, and that honestlyleaves kind of a yucky taste in my mouth.
(07:40):
Yeah.
Yeah, for sure.
Let's talk about then specificallyresponding to online feedback
or customer sentiment.
You know, you talked about just ignoringit completely, but what are some of the
other common mistakes that businesses makeand how can they maybe handle it better?
I think a lot of times when we engagewith brands for social care in the
(08:00):
beginning, what we hear them say is isoften this: "You know, our employees work
Monday through Friday, nine to five."And that's great, that's wonderful.
But as we all know, social media happens24/7 and for whatever reason, the bad
things always seem to happen after hourson weekends, during the holidays, right?
(08:21):
Your oven is always going tobreak during the holiday when you
have like 20 people coming over.
It's just the way it works.
They often, because they have thatlimited amount of time, only focus on
the negative comments that come intothe brand, and I obviously think it's
very important to talk through thosenegative comments and show face, but
(08:42):
they a lot of times they're not doinganything with the positive comments.
So all of that brand's love.
All of that what we call user generatedcontent, all of those good things that
they're saying about your brand that couldbe turned into actual reviews if you were
only to ask are getting left on the table.
You can't just take the positive and hideyour head in the sand with the negative.
(09:03):
It really is a holistic look atboth things because answering those
negative comments help you withchurn, customer churn, retention.
So keeping money.
Which is great, especiallyin times like these.
But all of that positive UGC and positivesentiment, a lot of that also has what we
call sales support questions happening.
(09:24):
Meaning where I said to Catherine,"Hey, do you have these in an eight?"
That is me showing you buyer intent.
And if you don't come through and answermy buyer intent question, I might move on.
I was ready to spend my moneywith you, if you had my size
and you talked to me quickly.
But if you didn't, I've moved on.
Jay Bear did a report called Time to Win.
(09:45):
It's a wonderful reportif you haven't read it.
It's a little older now,but it still rings true.
And he said that when the brands whoare the first to respond in these
types of questions, like, "Do you havethis in a size eight?" are usually the
brands to win the business, even ifthey're more expensive than the other
brands that person was looking at.
Mm.
Let sink in.
(10:07):
If you can be the first oneto respond faster than your
competitors, you'll likely getthe sale versus the competitors.
So we often think of justnegative comments and customer
support and saving churn.
But sales support and actually gainingbusiness is a huge part of social
care and what you can do just bylooking at the conversations that
(10:30):
are happening around your brand.
Mm-hmm.
I see.
So don't just focus in on trying todeal with the people who are unhappy.
Yeah, and I think these are theones that really boggle my mind
that people don't respond to.
Like you say, the people whoare there trying to buy from you
basically, who are saying, "Yeah,like, how long is your shipping?
Do you ship to this country?
Do you have it in this color?
Like what's the fit like,you know, what's it made of?
(10:52):
And why do you thinkpeople miss that so much?
Do you think it's 'cause theyjust don't think of social media
as a customer care channel?
Yeah.
People are still very behind on realizingthat everybody's kind of moved online.
Right?
But they're very behind in understandingthat because we moved online.
They may get that, right?
But they don't realize thatbecause of that, we're now
(11:12):
asking those sales questions.
So we're looking to buy online andthen those support questions we're
looking to get support online.
I also think, like I said, mostbusinesses work, their employees work
Monday through Friday, nine to five.
So they can service thosehours and that's what they do.
The other piece of that too issocial happens outside of that.
(11:33):
But like I mentioned, there's a lot ofindirect conversations happening around
your brand, so you would have to be usingsocial listening to find out what people
are saying, say about your products versusyour brand, if you're a product led brand.
There's a lot of nuance to it, butthe brands who do embrace this type of
customer care and social selling, let'scall it through social media channels, you
(11:57):
usually see a 20 to a 40% lift in revenue.
So if you don't need a lift inrevenue, don't worry about it.
But if you could use a 20 to 40% lift inrevenue, let's talk about social care.
Okay, and so that's 20to 40% lift in revenues.
That's coming from a combinationof addressing concerns,
(12:19):
buying intentions effectively.
People who are actually asking togive you money, and listening to
the indirect as well, it's kind oflike those three pieces together.
Yeah, you've nailed it.
You're a pro already.
See it's not really, not that hardonce you understand the concepts of
it .You know, reducing churn, reducingcustomer churn, that's really important.
And it kind of goes beyond that becauseonce you hear three times, I'll give
(12:42):
you an an actual client example.
We have a coffee brand that we work with.
They're more of an appliancebrand, but they focus a lot on
coffee 'cause people love coffee.
Yeah.
They released theirnew cappuccino machine.
And normally when they release anew product, people go wild, right?
All of the comments and the sentimentthat's happening online is positive
(13:03):
because it's this new, amazing thingand everybody's really excited.
We got flagged through sociallistening that there was a lot of
negative conversation happening aroundthis new product that we launched.
We're like, that's weird.
That normally doesn't happen.
So the AI, right, the social listeninglet us know what was happening.
But it was up to us, the humans, tocome up with a creative solution.
(13:23):
So I wanna make that clear.
The AI was wonderful because it let usknow really quickly, "Hey, something's
off," way faster than we would'verealized if we were doing this manually.
But once we went in and we sawwhat the conversations were about,
which was changing the coffeefilter in this machine, you know,
that's as far as the AI took us.
We had to come up with the solution.
So we went to the client and we werelike, "Hey, people are complaining about
(13:46):
the coffee filter and this machine.
Like where is the video and all of thaton how to change that coffee filter?"
And they were like, "Oh, that's onpage like 482 of the service manual."
And we were like, "What?" No, you can'tdo that in this day and time, right?
Nobody's gonna flip through yourShakespeare novel to find a how to
(14:08):
on, how to change... you need a video.
So we said, put together a video,quickly put it on the product
page where people buy that thing.
And then what do you do when you havea problem with your coffee filter?
You Google it and then Googlewill surface that video.
So it's not just reducingchurn in that moment.
Like we're able to say, "Hey, Catherine.
(14:28):
Oh my gosh, yes.
Here's a video on how that works.
We just uploaded it tothe product page," right?
We're reducing churn for Catherine,but we're also eliminating the
negative conversation altogether.
By coming up with that solution,nobody needs to ask ever again.
Once that video hits the productpage, so it goes beyond just churn.
(14:49):
It's kind of like eliminating the impetus.
Like, it's like we're eliminating thewhole need for that negative conversation.
So you can see how on a grandscale that would be saving you a
ton of money or a ton of churn.
Yeah, and I also think that one of thethings that I often find myself saying
to clients, because obviously well,everybody I work with is just super
passionate about their business, superpassionate about building their business
(15:12):
and about servicing their customers.
And they get devastated ifthey ever get like a negative
comment or a negative review.
And I'm sure a lot of peoplecan resonate with that because
everybody wants to do the best.
But actually what I often say to them isthat if you have a negative experience
with the brand and then the brandfixes it, listens to you, sorts it out.
(15:32):
In a way, you end up feelingmore often, you'll feel more
positive towards the brand.
'Cause you're like, oh wow,these guys really listened.
So all of the people who complainedabout the filter, if you were able
to go back to them and say, "Thankyou so much for flagging this.
We've addressed this.
We've made a video.
I'm so sorry you found it inconvenient.
Hopefully this will explain it all.
(15:53):
Here's the link."
I feel like if that wereme, I'd be like, oh, wow.
That's amazing.
That's really great.
Like, because just so often you just hearnothing, or there's such like apathy from
a lot of, especially bigger businesses,I feel like, towards their customers.
That you just feel like whenpeople do show that they care,
you kind of a bit like, oh wow.
They made a video.
(16:13):
You feel special.
Yeah, there's, there is so muchresearch behind what you're saying.
I talk about this in my book too.
There's a makeup brand calledBlume, B-L-U-M-E, that you can
all follow for great examples.
They use, and here's whythe positive matters, right?
They take all of that user generatedcontent around their new products and then
(16:33):
they use it to sell more product, right?
So they're using that positiveconversation to help them, sell
more and they're using the negativeto help them fess up when they
mess up and sell more product.
So they, the example that I havein my book is they had a serum
that had a dropper and they removedthe dropper and put in a pump,
(16:56):
and people were so upset, right?
So they have a very loyal fan base.
They're all over the socials being like,"How on Earth could you do this to us?
We want the dropper back.
This is terrible.
I'm so mad." Like lots of churn, right?
Lots of churn, lots of potentialchurn, lots of negative comments.
And you would probably besitting there if you were in that
situation as a brand like, oh no.
(17:17):
It probably felt like the end of theworld, but they were really smart.
And they've always been, you know, abrand who talks to their customers.
So they said, "We hear you. We'redoing something about it." Well, they
ended up switching back to the dropper.
And to sell it, to debut it, theyactually took all of these negative
comments that people had, like,"How could you do this to us?"
(17:39):
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And then they took all of these positivecomments from people who had, very early
bought the new product and we're like,"Oh my gosh, you actually listen to us,
you care about us." You this, you that.
They put those into like a carousel onInstagram and it led to a shop button.
(17:59):
So that people saw like it was bad, butwe listened and we are just basically
are doing what you asked us to do.
We brought back the dropper because youtold us we listened and we care about you.
I bet, I don't work for BLUME andthey're not a client of mine, but I bet
they sold a ton serum in those weeksbecause just by listening, just by
(18:21):
saying, "We heard you out and here'swhat you want." That's the biggest thing
I think people miss in social care isjust giving people what they ask for.
Yeah, yeah.
It's interesting , I wonder how you workout the kind of like vocal minority.
You have to kind of gauge like what'sa normal bit of rumbling, right?
Because there's always gonna becomplainers versus like when it's
spikes, it's like an anomaly.
(18:43):
That's a great question, and yeah,you're going to start to, when you
start using social listening, you'regonna see what your benchmarks are.
You're gonna see kind of whatthose baselines are for positive,
negative and neutral conversations.
Then when things spike, you candig in and see what they're about.
Like in the instance of the coffeemachine, it wasn't about the brand,
it wasn't about their other products.
It was specifically about thismachine, which we knew was a
(19:06):
new launch and that was weird.
Normally when we launch things,it's like very positive.
So we were able to understandwhat the anomaly meant, but then
also to address it very quickly.
There are times too that yourcompetitors will have some negative
rumblings happening around their brand.
This is one of our favorite ways touse social listening, by the way.
(19:27):
It's called competitor warfare.
This is what we call it.
And let's say, Catherine's the brandand Brooke is her top competitor and
she uses social listening to listento Brooke's audience, and she sees
that Brooke's audience is complainingabout X, we'll leave it blank, a lot.
Catherine can then turn around andrun what we call a differentiated
(19:50):
campaign, saying something like, "Tiredof X with our brand? With Catherine's
brand, we do Y and Z. So you don'tever have to worry about X." And
what we're trying to do is use thecompetitors' weaknesses against them to
gain more market share for our brand.
(20:12):
I was gonna say there's a toothbrushbrand called SURI in the UK, and basically
like their entire campaign is like youknow, you go on holiday and do you even
bother taking your electric toothbrush?
'cause it runs out of charge onlike day three and it's so loud and
you know, like all of this stuff.
Yeah.
I mean, it's so smart.
We do this with the unsexy brands too.
(20:34):
We have a credit union who's aclient and they wanted us to quantify
that negative conversation, right?
You have to quantify it forthe stakeholders, right?
Which means you have to putthose numbers behind it.
You can't just be like, "A lot ofpeople are complaining about our
overdraft fees," and they're like,"Great, what does that mean, right?
So we went and used sociallistening to quant for it.
(20:56):
80% of your complaints online, no matterthe channel, no matter where in this whole
period of time, like it was a long, it wasa year basically in this particular study,
are about overdraft protection fees.
Mm.
If you could quantify that 80% of yourproblems were around this one thing X,
in this case, overdraft protection fees.
(21:19):
We were like, "Hey, so if you can changethis, if you can make this better,
if you could say, 'Hey, we listenedand we're going to fix what you don't
like.'" Which they actually did.
They got rid of 80% of theironline negative conversation.
Now imagine what that does forchurn, but also imagine what
it does for sales support.
(21:39):
Because now their customers, andcustomers that are peers of their
customers, are saying like, "Oh, you havea problem with so-and-so's competitors
overdraft fees? This bank did away withthem. They do this instead." Right?
So now you're like churning upword of mouth support, sales
support, sales acquisition.
It's such a holistic approach.
(22:00):
to the business.
Like you hear social care and youthink automatically of like social
media customer support, but really ithelps every aspect of the business.
Sales, marketing, we've changed productpackaging based on these conversations.
It helps with R and D. If you useit in the way we talk about it it's
something that could change yourentire business for the better.
(22:23):
Yeah, and I suppose it's justsuch a great insight as well.
Because you know, you think aboutbefore social media, let's say like
you used the example of packaging.
If you think about something like atoothpaste or something, you know, if
you were the executives working on thistoothpaste brand, then you would've just.
I suppose you'd see sales, like youwould basically see sales numbers.
But you wouldn't know that everybodyactually had stopped buying it.
(22:44):
'cause you changed the formulation andeveryone hated how it tasted, right?
Because where would that be recorded?
People could email in or call in.
It's such a smaller focus group.
I mean, that's what social media is.
It's the largest socialgroup, and it's free.
And yes, if you use social, soyou're gonna pay a little bit,
but the insights that you receivefor that amount of money, which it
(23:07):
isn't cheap so I'm gonna be honest.
You know, social listening isexpensive just because the tool
itself is very expensive, the wayAPIs work and we have to pull so
many times and blah, blah, blah.
I'm not gonna get the technical onyou here, but it's not inexpensive.
But if you know what you're doingwith that data, just like you said,
if you're looking for specific thingsaround your brand that you can fix, I
(23:30):
always say start with a negative, right?
That's the easiest place to start becausethen you start to understand these are
the top three complaints you quantify.
You know, it's like the 80% story.
If I knew 80% of my complaints werebecause I'd changed the formula,
I'm gonna do everything in my powerto get back to that old formula.
Yeah for sure.
(23:51):
I mean, that brings meonto my next question then.
If you're listening to this podcastand you think, okay, Brooke, this
sounds great, and you're a smallretailer, or e-commerce brand, for
example, what would be a simple andpractical way to get started with
monitoring online conversations?
I am gonna give you the easiestway to do this, and you don't
have to spend any money.
It's just gonna be alittle bit of your time.
(24:11):
I want you to just startyourself a spreadsheet.
And then have each social mediaplatform that you're active on in a tab.
You can download thisthrough the native platform.
If you have a dashboard tool that you'reusing, you could download it there.
You could do this manually.
I don't care how you get it done, right?
But I want you to go to each one of thosesocial platforms for this year, 2025.
(24:32):
Look all the way back tothe beginning of 2025.
So we're talking about six months, right?
And I want you to look at all of theplaces where you have conversations,
whether that's someone sendingyou a DM, someone commenting
on one of your posts, right?
However those conversations are happening,and we're just talking passively, right?
The ones that are coming to us.
I'm not asking you to look outat the ones where they're talking
(24:53):
about you, but not tagging you.
Just the ones where they're obviouslytalking directly to you, and I want you
to start writing down where it happened.
Obviously the platform take thewhole conversation, like copy and
paste the words into a column thatsays like comment or conversation.
And then I want you tonote what it's about.
(25:15):
What is that comment about?
Were they just commenting on your postbecause you asked for engagement, which
is also a very good thing, by the way.
Great!
Just put engagement, right?
That's fine.
But as you start to see questionslike, sales support:, Do you
have this in a size eight?
Do you ship to Australia?
What's your return policy?
These are all sales support questions.
(25:35):
Just mark it as such.
We tag it as acquisition or retention,but you don't have to use those big words.
You can put gain or retainif you want to, right?
Or sales support, customer support.
Tag it, label it, right?
Label it in that spreadsheet, and whatyou'll start to see is the platforms,
where you have the most conversationhappening with your customers or
(25:55):
would be customers, and those are theplatforms I think you should focus on.
Like say, If you need to cut aplatform because things are tight
right now for everybody, you needto take budget down a little bit.
You'll know from that spreadsheetlike, Ooh, we, we don't really have
any conversations happening on Twitter.
Okay, put Twitter away, right?
Don't hang out on Twitter anymore'cause you're not getting any sort
(26:16):
of conversation happening there.
Then you're gonna start to see howmuch acquisition versus retention, or
gain versus retain or sales supportversus customer support conversation
is happening on those channels.
Now you'll be able to quantifysales support versus customer
support, which is really gainingpotential gains and potential churn.
(26:40):
Right.
And then I want you to keep doing thisall the time until you get your baselines.
You'll know which channelsare the most active.
You'll know where you havethe most conversations.
You'll know which channels have themost acquisition conversations, which
is really important for sales, right?
Social selling.
And then you'll know where youhave the most retention questions.
(27:01):
Now, retention isn't always about churn.
But you'll start to identify insideof those retention questions, where
the churn is, where people are upset.
And pretty soon, if you keep doing thisright, you'll know every month what
your top three complaints are about.
And if internally you're trying tofix those complaints, think of the 80%
(27:21):
of the bank story or the Blume story.
You'll know where to turn to get thatchurn to disappear and hopefully convert
it into sales support conversations.
That's such a good point.
And also it means that it'llcall yourself out if you've
been leaving them unanswered.
If that's happening, oh my goodness,yes, please start responding.
(27:43):
An hour.
Like I know that sounds fast, but that ispretty much people actually expect less
than an hour on social for a response.
Use a bot.
If it's a frequentlyasked question, use a bot.
If it's not a frequently asked question,unfortunately you're gonna have to
find some way to say it, but your "but"could also be like, "Hey, it's Saturday.
Unfortunately, our humans feellike they have to have time off.
(28:05):
They're not here right now,but they'll be back on Monday.
Tell me what you want me totell them and we'll have them
get back to you on Monday."
And then get back tothat customer on Monday.
Don't break the promise.
That's such a good point.
Yeah, I love that.
Obviously as your team grows, youcan look to outsource, but also,
I suppose the tracking will helpyou with the outsourcing too.
Because you then you'll start to seewhere it's worth your while and it's
(28:28):
gonna feel a lot more justifiableto get somebody who can work in a
different time zone perhaps, or cansupport it at hours that you are not
available, your team's not available.
That's gonna feel a lot more doableor a lot more worthwhile if you can
say categorically, well, we get mostof our conversations through here and
they're happening on this platform,and this is the number of people that
this could help clinch these sales.
(28:49):
That's the first thing.
I love that.
Like, why not?
If it's just you or if you, you don't havethat budget, then yeah, just responding.
Saying, got this I've got your message.
It's like an autoresponder, isn't it?
On your email that says,we've got your message.
This is our hours of operation.
And people are all like, okay, all right.
It got sunk in.
And I'll hope to hear from them on Monday.
(29:11):
Yeah, I mean, that couldbe a whole another show.
Setting up that bots conversationalworkflow that helps feel people like
they get that immediate answer, right.
So that they don't run to yourcompetitor, but also how do we keep
them from running to year competitor,even though we're giving them an answer.
But we're telling 'em it's a bot.
So like that's a whole otherstrategy in and of itself.
(29:32):
But yeah, setting up thatconversational workflow will
save you a ton of time and money.
It'll save you the headache or thefear of thinking like we're not there
to answer when people are, you know,when people mostly come through after
hours and weekends and holidays.
And you can set it up in like a cheekyway so that it feels like it has
personality and that does help peoplewanna stay engaged with you versus like,
(29:52):
"Hello, I'm a bot. We will get yourmessage to someone." Don't be boring.
I love that, but make it clear.
Yeah I think that people getthat they, they understand.
Oh, fantastic.
Well, thank you so much.
You've shared such great insightand I just know it's been super
helpful for all of our listeners.
Do you want to finish off bytelling everyone where they can
find out about more about what youdo and how they can work with you?
(30:15):
Yes.
So you can visit my company's website,which is B Squared, the letter B,
as in Brooke, squared.media, oryou can visit brookesellas.com.
If it's more on like a, you wannaknow more about me, the person
level, I've got those two sites.
We have all kinds of free courses oncreating some of this conversational
(30:36):
content that gets people talking.
I've got a LinkedIn learning course ifyou wanna learn more there on social care.
I've got lots of little coursesspread out around the internet
that can help you with things, butobviously you can reach out directly
to me on my website or on LinkedIn.
That's where I hang out the mostand ask me any questions you have.
I'm always happy, happy, happy tohelp because I feel like people
(30:59):
should know how to perform insocial the way social works today.
Amazing.
Thank you so much, and we'll make surewe link to all of that in the show
notes and thanks so much for joining us.
Thank you for having me.
Thank you so much for listening,and thank you so much to Brooke
for sharing those amazing tips.
Don't forget to like, followor subscribe the podcast.
(31:19):
Depending on where you listen, you'llbe the first to know about each new
episode, and if you have a momentto rate and review it, that makes
a huge difference to us getting thepodcast out in front of more people.
Have a great week andI'll see you next time.
What are your customers sayingabout you online and how can
(00:04):
you turn that into more sales?
Today I'm joined by Brooke Sellas fromB Squared Media, who is going to delve
into the fascinating world of sociallistening and how you can use your
social media to improve your sales andyour relationship with your customers.
(00:24):
Welcome to the Resilient Retail GamePlan, a podcast for anyone wanting to
start, grow or scale a profitable creativeproduct business with me, Catherine Erdly.
The Resilient Retail Game Plan isa podcast dedicated to one thing,
breaking down the concepts and toolsthat I've gathered from 20 years in
the retail industry and showing youhow you can use them in your business.
(00:47):
This is the real nuts and bolts ofrunning a successful product business,
broken down in an easy, accessible way.
This is not a podcast about learninghow to make your business look good.
It's the tools and techniques that willmake you and your business feel good.
Confidently plan, launch, and manageyour products, and feel in control of
(01:08):
your sales numbers and cash flow to helpyou build a resilient retail business.
Brooke, I'm delighted to haveyou with us on the podcast.
Do you want to start us off byintroducing yourself and your business?
Yeah, definitely.
So my name is Brooke Sellas and I amthe CEO and founder of B Squared Media.
(01:33):
We just turned 13 this May, so Ifeel like we are a dinosaur in the
social media world, but essentiallywe offer social media services
around social media intelligence.
So we do management, we do paid media,and then our big service that we're well
known for is social media customer care.
Amazing, and we're gonna begetting into all of that today
(01:55):
and I'm super excited about it.
But can you just tell me a little bitabout how you got started, kind of what
led you to this arena of social listeningand customer care through social media?
Like what was it thatkind of got you into it?
Yeah, well, so I had started buildingout social media services, like, not
unlike what we have today for a womanwho I worked with back in Texas oh
(02:17):
many, many, many, many moons ago.
And it was almost like I wastesting the concept for my own
business, but I didn't know it yet.
However, my dad and my then boyfrienddefinitely knew it and they kept
pushing me to start my own thing.
They're like, you've basically createdthis whole new business for her.
You see that it works, likeyou should do this on your own.
(02:38):
I was scared, of course, as many of us areto make the leap into entrepreneurship.
But my dad tricked me in a way.
Best trick ever.
And he was like, "Hey, by the way, I wonyou a pitch with the CMO at my company."
He worked at a fintechcompany at the time.
And he was like, "But here's thedeal." And he made me shake his hand.
I remember in their kitchen very vividly.
(03:00):
And he said, "If you win the pitch,you have to do this on your own."
So like moonlighting, basicallylike having a job on the side.
And I didn't think I was gonnawin the pitch, so I shook
his hand, I was like, deal.
I won the pitch and that becameB Squared's first client.
And then once you make that littleleap, and you find out like oh,
(03:21):
this isn't going to be as terribleas I thought it was going to be.
It made it easier for me to kind ofleave the company I was at and take
all of these wonderful things thatI had built and do them on my own.
Fantastic.
So I love that.
So, I mean, what we're really talkingabout here is looking at what your
customers are talking about onlineor paying attention to your online
(03:42):
customer sentiment and social mentions.
So can you explain a little bit about howthat helps, particularly small businesses,
how it can help improve customerexperience and basically drive more sales?
Sure.
Well, I'm sure if you're listening tothis, you know that a lot of things
happen online like this show, butreally what pushed us forward by almost
(04:03):
10 years, analysts say was COVID.
Right?
When COVID happened, we all kindof collectively moved online.
Even those of us who weren't comfortablebeing online, had to move online.
That is where we lived, we shopped,we connected with our people,
and that never really changed.
And so what analysts say is thatthe online shopping of it all.
(04:27):
The way we start to research brands,look for discounts, talk to our
peers about which brands we shouldor shouldn't buy from, moved forward
by about 10 years thanks to COVID.
We moved forward very quickly inthis digital transformation and now
literally, this is the way it is, right?
"This is the way," as theysay in The Mandalorian.
(04:47):
So I think it's like 86% of US consumers,and I'm talking US 'cause most of our
clients are US, but the statistics arepretty similar around the globe, as
long as they have access to internet.
But 86% of consumers now do theirshopping through social media.
They research brands, theylook for brand conversations.
(05:09):
The younger generations, millennialsand Gen Z weight brand conversations.
Meaning if somebody comes along to yourbrand and says, "Hey Catherine, do you
have , these shoes in a size eight?"
And you say, "Oh, well yes we do,and we actually ship for free for
that price," or whatever, right?
You're engaging that conversation.
These younger generations lookat those brand conversations
(05:32):
and actually weight them as highor higher than online reviews.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, so it's really shopping ande-commerce and social commerce
have really changed the gameeven for B2B brands, by the way.
Mm. Mm-hmm.
On how people shop.
So it's so important if you have a brandthat has a presence on social to make
(05:54):
sure that presence is conversational.
So that people can kind of spike, lean in.
It's a spectator sport.
See what you're saying to people whoare asking you questions or leaving
you bad reviews, and then decideif they want to also buy from you.
That's really fascinating.
And you know, now you say that,I definitely do look for that.
(06:14):
I always find it really funny when I see abrand and I see that they have comments on
their socials and they've not responded.
I always look at that and I alwaysthink that is such a low hanging fruit.
You know, I guess I do probably passa little bit of judgment, like you
say, if you see a brand that's reallysuper engaged and they're responding,
and even if someone says, "Oh, Iwasn't happy with this," and they say,
(06:34):
"Oh, hey, can you drop us an emailand we'll sort it all out for you?"
You definitely do get amore positive picture, right?
Absolutely.
Yes.
And I mean, I know I work in this world,so I'm very biased, but same thing, like,
it's wild to me that brands still aren'tresponding to people who are coming to
their brand and like saying like, "Hey,I'm trying to check out and I can't." They
(06:55):
are literally trying to give you theirmoney and then you're not responding.
It blows my mind.
Even just doing thatby the way, is passive.
There are people who are talking aboutyour brand and not tagging you on socials.
Instead of mentioning like @Nike, theymight be talking about their Air Jordans.
They're still talkingabout one of your products.
(07:15):
They're still talking about the brand.
But you're not getting that notificationin your inbox because it's called like
a dark mention or an indirect mention.
The only way you can see thoseis through social listening.
What I know to be true is that if I seeyou not responding to direct mentions,
I know that you're not responding to anyof the conversations happening around
your brand on social, and that honestlyleaves kind of a yucky taste in my mouth.
(07:40):
Yeah.
Yeah, for sure.
Let's talk about then specificallyresponding to online feedback
or customer sentiment.
You know, you talked about just ignoringit completely, but what are some of the
other common mistakes that businesses makeand how can they maybe handle it better?
I think a lot of times when we engagewith brands for social care in the
(08:00):
beginning, what we hear them say is isoften this: "You know, our employees work
Monday through Friday, nine to five."And that's great, that's wonderful.
But as we all know, social media happens24/7 and for whatever reason, the bad
things always seem to happen after hourson weekends, during the holidays, right?
(08:21):
Your oven is always going tobreak during the holiday when you
have like 20 people coming over.
It's just the way it works.
They often, because they have thatlimited amount of time, only focus on
the negative comments that come intothe brand, and I obviously think it's
very important to talk through thosenegative comments and show face, but
(08:42):
they a lot of times they're not doinganything with the positive comments.
So all of that brand's love.
All of that what we call user generatedcontent, all of those good things that
they're saying about your brand that couldbe turned into actual reviews if you were
only to ask are getting left on the table.
You can't just take the positive and hideyour head in the sand with the negative.
(09:03):
It really is a holistic look atboth things because answering those
negative comments help you withchurn, customer churn, retention.
So keeping money.
Which is great, especiallyin times like these.
But all of that positive UGC and positivesentiment, a lot of that also has what we
call sales support questions happening.
(09:24):
Meaning where I said to Catherine,"Hey, do you have these in an eight?"
That is me showing you buyer intent.
And if you don't come through and answermy buyer intent question, I might move on.
I was ready to spend my moneywith you, if you had my size
and you talked to me quickly.
But if you didn't, I've moved on.
Jay Bear did a report called Time to Win.
(09:45):
It's a wonderful reportif you haven't read it.
It's a little older now,but it still rings true.
And he said that when the brands whoare the first to respond in these
types of questions, like, "Do you havethis in a size eight?" are usually the
brands to win the business, even ifthey're more expensive than the other
brands that person was looking at.
Mm.
Let sink in.
(10:07):
If you can be the first oneto respond faster than your
competitors, you'll likely getthe sale versus the competitors.
So we often think of justnegative comments and customer
support and saving churn.
But sales support and actually gainingbusiness is a huge part of social
care and what you can do just bylooking at the conversations that
(10:30):
are happening around your brand.
Mm-hmm.
I see.
So don't just focus in on trying todeal with the people who are unhappy.
Yeah, and I think these are theones that really boggle my mind
that people don't respond to.
Like you say, the people whoare there trying to buy from you
basically, who are saying, "Yeah,like, how long is your shipping?
Do you ship to this country?
Do you have it in this color?
Like what's the fit like,you know, what's it made of?
(10:52):
And why do you thinkpeople miss that so much?
Do you think it's 'cause theyjust don't think of social media
as a customer care channel?
Yeah.
People are still very behind on realizingthat everybody's kind of moved online.
Right?
But they're very behind in understandingthat because we moved online.
They may get that, right?
But they don't realize thatbecause of that, we're now
(11:12):
asking those sales questions.
So we're looking to buy online andthen those support questions we're
looking to get support online.
I also think, like I said, mostbusinesses work, their employees work
Monday through Friday, nine to five.
So they can service thosehours and that's what they do.
The other piece of that too issocial happens outside of that.
(11:33):
But like I mentioned, there's a lot ofindirect conversations happening around
your brand, so you would have to be usingsocial listening to find out what people
are saying, say about your products versusyour brand, if you're a product led brand.
There's a lot of nuance to it, butthe brands who do embrace this type of
customer care and social selling, let'scall it through social media channels, you
(11:57):
usually see a 20 to a 40% lift in revenue.
So if you don't need a lift inrevenue, don't worry about it.
But if you could use a 20 to 40% lift inrevenue, let's talk about social care.
Okay, and so that's 20to 40% lift in revenues.
That's coming from a combinationof addressing concerns,
(12:19):
buying intentions effectively.
People who are actually asking togive you money, and listening to
the indirect as well, it's kind oflike those three pieces together.
Yeah, you've nailed it.
You're a pro already.
See it's not really, not that hardonce you understand the concepts of
it .You know, reducing churn, reducingcustomer churn, that's really important.
And it kind of goes beyond that becauseonce you hear three times, I'll give
(12:42):
you an an actual client example.
We have a coffee brand that we work with.
They're more of an appliancebrand, but they focus a lot on
coffee 'cause people love coffee.
Yeah.
They released theirnew cappuccino machine.
And normally when they release anew product, people go wild, right?
All of the comments and the sentimentthat's happening online is positive
(13:03):
because it's this new, amazing thingand everybody's really excited.
We got flagged through sociallistening that there was a lot of
negative conversation happening aroundthis new product that we launched.
We're like, that's weird.
That normally doesn't happen.
So the AI, right, the social listeninglet us know what was happening.
But it was up to us, the humans, tocome up with a creative solution.
(13:23):
So I wanna make that clear.
The AI was wonderful because it let usknow really quickly, "Hey, something's
off," way faster than we would'verealized if we were doing this manually.
But once we went in and we sawwhat the conversations were about,
which was changing the coffeefilter in this machine, you know,
that's as far as the AI took us.
We had to come up with the solution.
So we went to the client and we werelike, "Hey, people are complaining about
(13:46):
the coffee filter and this machine.
Like where is the video and all of thaton how to change that coffee filter?"
And they were like, "Oh, that's onpage like 482 of the service manual."
And we were like, "What?" No, you can'tdo that in this day and time, right?
Nobody's gonna flip through yourShakespeare novel to find a how to
(14:08):
on, how to change... you need a video.
So we said, put together a video,quickly put it on the product
page where people buy that thing.
And then what do you do when you havea problem with your coffee filter?
You Google it and then Googlewill surface that video.
So it's not just reducingchurn in that moment.
Like we're able to say, "Hey, Catherine.
(14:28):
Oh my gosh, yes.
Here's a video on how that works.
We just uploaded it tothe product page," right?
We're reducing churn for Catherine,but we're also eliminating the
negative conversation altogether.
By coming up with that solution,nobody needs to ask ever again.
Once that video hits the productpage, so it goes beyond just churn.
(14:49):
It's kind of like eliminating the impetus.
Like, it's like we're eliminating thewhole need for that negative conversation.
So you can see how on a grandscale that would be saving you a
ton of money or a ton of churn.
Yeah, and I also think that one of thethings that I often find myself saying
to clients, because obviously well,everybody I work with is just super
passionate about their business, superpassionate about building their business
(15:12):
and about servicing their customers.
And they get devastated ifthey ever get like a negative
comment or a negative review.
And I'm sure a lot of peoplecan resonate with that because
everybody wants to do the best.
But actually what I often say to them isthat if you have a negative experience
with the brand and then the brandfixes it, listens to you, sorts it out.
(15:32):
In a way, you end up feelingmore often, you'll feel more
positive towards the brand.
'Cause you're like, oh wow,these guys really listened.
So all of the people who complainedabout the filter, if you were able
to go back to them and say, "Thankyou so much for flagging this.
We've addressed this.
We've made a video.
I'm so sorry you found it inconvenient.
Hopefully this will explain it all.
(15:53):
Here's the link."
I feel like if that wereme, I'd be like, oh, wow.
That's amazing.
That's really great.
Like, because just so often you just hearnothing, or there's such like apathy from
a lot of, especially bigger businesses,I feel like, towards their customers.
That you just feel like whenpeople do show that they care,
you kind of a bit like, oh wow.
They made a video.
(16:13):
You feel special.
Yeah, there's, there is so muchresearch behind what you're saying.
I talk about this in my book too.
There's a makeup brand calledBlume, B-L-U-M-E, that you can
all follow for great examples.
They use, and here's whythe positive matters, right?
They take all of that user generatedcontent around their new products and then
(16:33):
they use it to sell more product, right?
So they're using that positiveconversation to help them, sell
more and they're using the negativeto help them fess up when they
mess up and sell more product.
So they, the example that I havein my book is they had a serum
that had a dropper and they removedthe dropper and put in a pump,
(16:56):
and people were so upset, right?
So they have a very loyal fan base.
They're all over the socials being like,"How on Earth could you do this to us?
We want the dropper back.
This is terrible.
I'm so mad." Like lots of churn, right?
Lots of churn, lots of potentialchurn, lots of negative comments.
And you would probably besitting there if you were in that
situation as a brand like, oh no.
(17:17):
It probably felt like the end of theworld, but they were really smart.
And they've always been, you know, abrand who talks to their customers.
So they said, "We hear you. We'redoing something about it." Well, they
ended up switching back to the dropper.
And to sell it, to debut it, theyactually took all of these negative
comments that people had, like,"How could you do this to us?"
(17:39):
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And then they took all of these positivecomments from people who had, very early
bought the new product and we're like,"Oh my gosh, you actually listen to us,
you care about us." You this, you that.
They put those into like a carousel onInstagram and it led to a shop button.
(17:59):
So that people saw like it was bad, butwe listened and we are just basically
are doing what you asked us to do.
We brought back the dropper because youtold us we listened and we care about you.
I bet, I don't work for BLUME andthey're not a client of mine, but I bet
they sold a ton serum in those weeksbecause just by listening, just by
(18:21):
saying, "We heard you out and here'swhat you want." That's the biggest thing
I think people miss in social care isjust giving people what they ask for.
Yeah, yeah.
It's interesting , I wonder how you workout the kind of like vocal minority.
You have to kind of gauge like what'sa normal bit of rumbling, right?
Because there's always gonna becomplainers versus like when it's
spikes, it's like an anomaly.
(18:43):
That's a great question, and yeah,you're going to start to, when you
start using social listening, you'regonna see what your benchmarks are.
You're gonna see kind of whatthose baselines are for positive,
negative and neutral conversations.
Then when things spike, you candig in and see what they're about.
Like in the instance of the coffeemachine, it wasn't about the brand,
it wasn't about their other products.
It was specifically about thismachine, which we knew was a
(19:06):
new launch and that was weird.
Normally when we launch things,it's like very positive.
So we were able to understandwhat the anomaly meant, but then
also to address it very quickly.
There are times too that yourcompetitors will have some negative
rumblings happening around their brand.
This is one of our favorite ways touse social listening, by the way.
(19:27):
It's called competitor warfare.
This is what we call it.
And let's say, Catherine's the brandand Brooke is her top competitor and
she uses social listening to listento Brooke's audience, and she sees
that Brooke's audience is complainingabout X, we'll leave it blank, a lot.
Catherine can then turn around andrun what we call a differentiated
(19:50):
campaign, saying something like, "Tiredof X with our brand? With Catherine's
brand, we do Y and Z. So you don'tever have to worry about X." And
what we're trying to do is use thecompetitors' weaknesses against them to
gain more market share for our brand.
(20:12):
I was gonna say there's a toothbrushbrand called SURI in the UK, and basically
like their entire campaign is like youknow, you go on holiday and do you even
bother taking your electric toothbrush?
'cause it runs out of charge onlike day three and it's so loud and
you know, like all of this stuff.
Yeah.
I mean, it's so smart.
We do this with the unsexy brands too.
(20:34):
We have a credit union who's aclient and they wanted us to quantify
that negative conversation, right?
You have to quantify it forthe stakeholders, right?
Which means you have to putthose numbers behind it.
You can't just be like, "A lot ofpeople are complaining about our
overdraft fees," and they're like,"Great, what does that mean, right?
So we went and used sociallistening to quant for it.
(20:56):
80% of your complaints online, no matterthe channel, no matter where in this whole
period of time, like it was a long, it wasa year basically in this particular study,
are about overdraft protection fees.
Mm.
If you could quantify that 80% of yourproblems were around this one thing X,
in this case, overdraft protection fees.
(21:19):
We were like, "Hey, so if you can changethis, if you can make this better,
if you could say, 'Hey, we listenedand we're going to fix what you don't
like.'" Which they actually did.
They got rid of 80% of theironline negative conversation.
Now imagine what that does forchurn, but also imagine what
it does for sales support.
(21:39):
Because now their customers, andcustomers that are peers of their
customers, are saying like, "Oh, you havea problem with so-and-so's competitors
overdraft fees? This bank did away withthem. They do this instead." Right?
So now you're like churning upword of mouth support, sales
support, sales acquisition.
It's such a holistic approach.
(22:00):
to the business.
Like you hear social care and youthink automatically of like social
media customer support, but really ithelps every aspect of the business.
Sales, marketing, we've changed productpackaging based on these conversations.
It helps with R and D. If you useit in the way we talk about it it's
something that could change yourentire business for the better.
(22:23):
Yeah, and I suppose it's justsuch a great insight as well.
Because you know, you think aboutbefore social media, let's say like
you used the example of packaging.
If you think about something like atoothpaste or something, you know, if
you were the executives working on thistoothpaste brand, then you would've just.
I suppose you'd see sales, like youwould basically see sales numbers.
But you wouldn't know that everybodyactually had stopped buying it.
(22:44):
'cause you changed the formulation andeveryone hated how it tasted, right?
Because where would that be recorded?
People could email in or call in.
It's such a smaller focus group.
I mean, that's what social media is.
It's the largest socialgroup, and it's free.
And yes, if you use social, soyou're gonna pay a little bit,
but the insights that you receivefor that amount of money, which it
(23:07):
isn't cheap so I'm gonna be honest.
You know, social listening isexpensive just because the tool
itself is very expensive, the wayAPIs work and we have to pull so
many times and blah, blah, blah.
I'm not gonna get the technical onyou here, but it's not inexpensive.
But if you know what you're doingwith that data, just like you said,
if you're looking for specific thingsaround your brand that you can fix, I
(23:30):
always say start with a negative, right?
That's the easiest place to start becausethen you start to understand these are
the top three complaints you quantify.
You know, it's like the 80% story.
If I knew 80% of my complaints werebecause I'd changed the formula,
I'm gonna do everything in my powerto get back to that old formula.
Yeah for sure.
(23:51):
I mean, that brings meonto my next question then.
If you're listening to this podcastand you think, okay, Brooke, this
sounds great, and you're a smallretailer, or e-commerce brand, for
example, what would be a simple andpractical way to get started with
monitoring online conversations?
I am gonna give you the easiestway to do this, and you don't
have to spend any money.
It's just gonna be alittle bit of your time.
(24:11):
I want you to just startyourself a spreadsheet.
And then have each social mediaplatform that you're active on in a tab.
You can download thisthrough the native platform.
If you have a dashboard tool that you'reusing, you could download it there.
You could do this manually.
I don't care how you get it done, right?
But I want you to go to each one of thosesocial platforms for this year, 2025.
(24:32):
Look all the way back tothe beginning of 2025.
So we're talking about six months, right?
And I want you to look at all of theplaces where you have conversations,
whether that's someone sendingyou a DM, someone commenting
on one of your posts, right?
However those conversations are happening,and we're just talking passively, right?
The ones that are coming to us.
I'm not asking you to look outat the ones where they're talking
(24:53):
about you, but not tagging you.
Just the ones where they're obviouslytalking directly to you, and I want you
to start writing down where it happened.
Obviously the platform take thewhole conversation, like copy and
paste the words into a column thatsays like comment or conversation.
And then I want you tonote what it's about.
(25:15):
What is that comment about?
Were they just commenting on your postbecause you asked for engagement, which
is also a very good thing, by the way.
Great!
Just put engagement, right?
That's fine.
But as you start to see questionslike, sales support:, Do you
have this in a size eight?
Do you ship to Australia?
What's your return policy?
These are all sales support questions.
(25:35):
Just mark it as such.
We tag it as acquisition or retention,but you don't have to use those big words.
You can put gain or retainif you want to, right?
Or sales support, customer support.
Tag it, label it, right?
Label it in that spreadsheet, and whatyou'll start to see is the platforms,
where you have the most conversationhappening with your customers or
(25:55):
would be customers, and those are theplatforms I think you should focus on.
Like say, If you need to cut aplatform because things are tight
right now for everybody, you needto take budget down a little bit.
You'll know from that spreadsheetlike, Ooh, we, we don't really have
any conversations happening on Twitter.
Okay, put Twitter away, right?
Don't hang out on Twitter anymore'cause you're not getting any sort
(26:16):
of conversation happening there.
Then you're gonna start to see howmuch acquisition versus retention, or
gain versus retain or sales supportversus customer support conversation
is happening on those channels.
Now you'll be able to quantifysales support versus customer
support, which is really gainingpotential gains and potential churn.
(26:40):
Right.
And then I want you to keep doing thisall the time until you get your baselines.
You'll know which channelsare the most active.
You'll know where you havethe most conversations.
You'll know which channels have themost acquisition conversations, which
is really important for sales, right?
Social selling.
And then you'll know where youhave the most retention questions.
(27:01):
Now, retention isn't always about churn.
But you'll start to identify insideof those retention questions, where
the churn is, where people are upset.
And pretty soon, if you keep doing thisright, you'll know every month what
your top three complaints are about.
And if internally you're trying tofix those complaints, think of the 80%
(27:21):
of the bank story or the Blume story.
You'll know where to turn to get thatchurn to disappear and hopefully convert
it into sales support conversations.
That's such a good point.
And also it means that it'llcall yourself out if you've
been leaving them unanswered.
If that's happening, oh my goodness,yes, please start responding.
(27:43):
An hour.
Like I know that sounds fast, but that ispretty much people actually expect less
than an hour on social for a response.
Use a bot.
If it's a frequentlyasked question, use a bot.
If it's not a frequently asked question,unfortunately you're gonna have to
find some way to say it, but your "but"could also be like, "Hey, it's Saturday.
Unfortunately, our humans feellike they have to have time off.
(28:05):
They're not here right now,but they'll be back on Monday.
Tell me what you want me totell them and we'll have them
get back to you on Monday."
And then get back tothat customer on Monday.
Don't break the promise.
That's such a good point.
Yeah, I love that.
Obviously as your team grows, youcan look to outsource, but also,
I suppose the tracking will helpyou with the outsourcing too.
Because you then you'll start to seewhere it's worth your while and it's
(28:28):
gonna feel a lot more justifiableto get somebody who can work in a
different time zone perhaps, or cansupport it at hours that you are not
available, your team's not available.
That's gonna feel a lot more doableor a lot more worthwhile if you can
say categorically, well, we get mostof our conversations through here and
they're happening on this platform,and this is the number of people that
this could help clinch these sales.
(28:49):
That's the first thing.
I love that.
Like, why not?
If it's just you or if you, you don't havethat budget, then yeah, just responding.
Saying, got this I've got your message.
It's like an autoresponder, isn't it?
On your email that says,we've got your message.
This is our hours of operation.
And people are all like, okay, all right.
It got sunk in.
And I'll hope to hear from them on Monday.
(29:11):
Yeah, I mean, that couldbe a whole another show.
Setting up that bots conversationalworkflow that helps feel people like
they get that immediate answer, right.
So that they don't run to yourcompetitor, but also how do we keep
them from running to year competitor,even though we're giving them an answer.
But we're telling 'em it's a bot.
So like that's a whole otherstrategy in and of itself.
(29:32):
But yeah, setting up thatconversational workflow will
save you a ton of time and money.
It'll save you the headache or thefear of thinking like we're not there
to answer when people are, you know,when people mostly come through after
hours and weekends and holidays.
And you can set it up in like a cheekyway so that it feels like it has
personality and that does help peoplewanna stay engaged with you versus like,
(29:52):
"Hello, I'm a bot. We will get yourmessage to someone." Don't be boring.
I love that, but make it clear.
Yeah I think that people getthat they, they understand.
Oh, fantastic.
Well, thank you so much.
You've shared such great insightand I just know it's been super
helpful for all of our listeners.
Do you want to finish off bytelling everyone where they can
find out about more about what youdo and how they can work with you?
(30:15):
Yes.
So you can visit my company's website,which is B Squared, the letter B,
as in Brooke, squared.media, oryou can visit brookesellas.com.
If it's more on like a, you wannaknow more about me, the person
level, I've got those two sites.
We have all kinds of free courses oncreating some of this conversational
(30:36):
content that gets people talking.
I've got a LinkedIn learning course ifyou wanna learn more there on social care.
I've got lots of little coursesspread out around the internet
that can help you with things, butobviously you can reach out directly
to me on my website or on LinkedIn.
That's where I hang out the mostand ask me any questions you have.
I'm always happy, happy, happy tohelp because I feel like people
(30:59):
should know how to perform insocial the way social works today.
Amazing.
Thank you so much, and we'll make surewe link to all of that in the show
notes and thanks so much for joining us.
Thank you for having me.
Thank you so much for listening,and thank you so much to Brooke
for sharing those amazing tips.
Don't forget to like, followor subscribe the podcast.
(31:19):
Depending on where you listen, you'llbe the first to know about each new
episode, and if you have a momentto rate and review it, that makes
a huge difference to us getting thepodcast out in front of more people.
Have a great week andI'll see you next time.
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