The Social Media Balancing Act with Annie Schiffmann

Brent Peterson (00:04.083) All right, welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce. Today I have Annie Schiffman. She is the CEO and founder of Downstage Media. Annie, go ahead, do an introduction for yourself. Tell us your day-to-day role in one of your passions in life. Annie Schiffmann (00:18.67) Sure. I know that social media marketing and email marketing is relentless. So at my firm, Downstage Media, we help create and automate content so that way our clients can have a presence without the pressure. And so what I do in the day to day is meet with clients and potential clients and talk them through the marketing strategies that they need. before they get to the social or the email part of it and after. And then I'm usually meeting with clients or designing some strategy or creating content for downstage or writing. I do quite a bit of writing with my blog and the book that just came out. Oh, and something I'm passionate about. That was the other question. Okay. So then something else that I am passionate about, I am a huge, huge musical theater nerd. I love musical theater. I used to be a musical theater performer. I was a professional actor for about 15 years. So I am super, super passionate about musical theater, just in general. So it's one of the... Brent Peterson (01:10.511) Great, and yeah, we'll talk a little. Yes, go, sorry. Annie Schiffmann (01:38.558) inspirations behind the name of my company, Downstage Media, because when you're downstage is when you are closest to the audience. Brent Peterson (01:48.135) All right. Yeah. And I made a musical theater faux pas over the weekend. My son and I are here in Hawaii and we went to see Pipe Masters, which is a surfboarding tournament. And I mistakenly said, is this Beauty and the Beast? And they said, no, this is... Oh my gosh, what's the one? I forgot what musical was, but for me, a lot of those Disney musicals, I'm not going to say, because I'll just get a whole bunch of... social media retribution, but some of them sound the same. I apologize in advance for that. So my daughter was a musical major and she can sing every single one of the Disney musical songs still to this day and recite Hamilton while we're driving along. So anyways, let's move on. Enough about that. Before we get into content though, Annie, I would like to tell you a joke. Annie Schiffmann (02:34.39) Well, you. Annie Schiffmann (02:44.468) Okay. Brent Peterson (02:46.967) Should this joke be free or should someday we could charge for it? Now you did mention that your husband is a professional comedian. So that does set our expectations. So, um, this will be a, is there, I don't know if there's a, is there a step below amateur, but this could be one of those jokes. So here we go. And. Annie Schiffmann (03:05.546) Yeah, so there's like community theater is sort of like, I would say a step below. I mean, I guess community theater is the same as amateur. So, but either way, expectations have been set, I feel. Brent Peterson (03:15.727) Good, alright, well here we go. If you think swimming with dolphins is expensive, you should try swimming with sharks. It cost me an arm and a leg. Annie Schiffmann (03:29.014) Great. So the question is, would you invoice a company for that joke? I'm gonna say yes, yes. Because if the company is gonna pay for it, why not? Would the company pay for it? Probably, maybe not, because you could sort of see that, you could see where the joke is ahead of time. Like you could sort of see where it's going. So. Brent Peterson (03:39.548) Oh, wow. Brent Peterson (03:46.191) Hmm Annie Schiffmann (03:57.034) I think one thing that makes jokes so much fun is when they're unexpected. Brent Peterson (03:57.463) Right, yeah. Brent Peterson (04:01.555) Right, got it. All right, so. Annie Schiffmann (04:02.986) Although on the flip side, if you're doing a gig for like a company, many times they like that because they know what to expect. When I used to do a lot of comedy stuff when I was back performing before I got into marketing, so often they would not want us to improvise because they wanted to know exactly what was going to happen. So a joke like that would go over big. Brent Peterson (04:10.99) Right. Brent Peterson (04:24.807) Yeah, big. I don't know about that, but we could go down the path of, of puns and say, if they didn't pay, would I just give it to a loan shark to get paid back? But I'm going to stop there because literally we could go on forever. Um, let's, let's talk about simple social media. Let's, let's talk a little bit about social media and, and what, uh, what that means for the average business owner or, or nonprofit or. Annie Schiffmann (04:36.291) OOF Brent Peterson (04:54.769) Why should people be using it? Annie Schiffmann (04:57.654) Well, social media is a great way to be found so often because it doesn't cost anything or seemingly it costs so little. People think that that's what they need to use to market and it is a great marketing piece. It's a great way for you to get in front of your audience. It's a great way to get in front of other audiences. It's a great way to remind your audience that you are out there. So it's important, it's just as important as having a website nowadays, like where as before people might be asking, do we need to have a web presence, right? Like 25 years ago, you might be asking that question. Now it's just sort of the cost of doing business. Social media is the same way for brands. It's just what people expect, how people will seek you out, how people will find out, will look to find whether or not you're legit. Brent Peterson (05:56.931) All right, I remember in your book, you had mentioned something between scheduling and automation. I don't remember the exact difference, but can you explain that quick? Annie Schiffmann (06:04.32) Mm-hmm. Annie Schiffmann (06:08.846) Scheduling versus automating. If you can automate, you are going to free up so much time. So I would say if you are using a third party scheduler to get your social media posts out there, see if they have an automation feature. So let me explain what the difference is. Let's say that I'm a big fan of creating posts in batches and then having them go out. So... Let's say that you've just created a batch of five different posts, and you want them to go out on LinkedIn on Tuesdays, right? So if you are scheduling your posts, then you can say, okay, I want this post to go out on December 5th at 11 o'clock AM Eastern time on LinkedIn. And I want this post to go out on December 12th at 11 o'clock. AM Eastern time on LinkedIn and I want this post to go out on December 19th. It gets really tedious when you're creating a bunch of posts in batches, which I think is the best way to free up your time. So when you automate instead, what happens is you can say to the tool, Hey, Take any of these five posts that I've created and post them on Tuesdays at 11 a.m. Eastern time on LinkedIn. I don't care which one, I don't care what order, just pick any of them. And when you run out, start all over again. So I love that for saving time. It's just the, it's the way that you can free up so much of your time, and that is one of the ways that you can have a presence on social media without feeling that pressure. Brent Peterson (07:57.811) Okay, that makes a lot of sense. You had mentioned also maybe some of the tools in the book. Can you give us the 10,000 foot view on the type of tools that a person would be looking at to achieve that? Annie Schiffmann (08:15.118) Sure, so many different tools we'll use. If you're a smaller business, MeetEdgar is great for that, or if you're a smaller agency or you only have a couple of clients that you wanna set up with it. So I really like MeetEdgar for that. That has that function. Also, I've seen if you're a larger company or if you're already in their ecosystem. HubSpot has it as well. That's another option that I have seen. And I think that there's another one called Cloud Convert that is, I think that's one specifically meant for agencies, but that does social media automation as well. So those are the tools, but if you go to, I'm always looking into new tools and updating them as this feature becomes available. And I think especially now with AI, it's going to become more and more available. So if you go to simple social media book.com, I have a whole free resources page, which I always keep that database updated. So even if you're watching this later on and you wanna check that out, I keep that fresh all the time. Brent Peterson (09:23.861) Awesome. If I'm a marketer or a merchant or somebody that's doing social, what are things that people find surprising that you point out when you're consulting with them? Annie Schiffmann (09:36.866) One thing is that people will often say to me, I'm not here and I'm not on this social media platform and I'm not on that social media platform. And I will say, that's fine. You don't need to be everywhere. It's too hard. It's too, Brent and I both, we run in similar circles. So, Brent, I don't know, did you hear Jay Klaus say that it's easier to get an A if you're only taking one subject? versus getting all A's in five subjects. Have you heard that before? Brent Peterson (10:07.895) Yeah, that makes sense and thank you for pointing out that I went to college for eight years without a degree. Annie Schiffmann (10:14.89) Yeah, okay, Bren, I've been meaning to talk to you about that. I'm glad that we have this forum to do so. So we could do that after this session here and really get into that. But yeah, I mean, so I am a big proponent of being on one or maybe two social media platforms. You can't possibly be on all of them. You don't need to be chasing whatever is the hot. Brent Peterson (10:22.679) Yeah, we'll do it after the call. Annie Schiffmann (10:43.106) social media platform, if that doesn't make sense to you. And a lot of times what doesn't people will, like most marketers, if you ask them what social media platforms should I go on, they'll say, well, go wherever your audience is. And I think that's true to an extent, but also what surprises people that I will tell them is, what is your workflow? Because if you don't have a lot of time to be shooting or editing video, then you may not necessarily want to be on a social media platform that is video forward, or if you hate to be on camera, or you can't stand the sound of your own voice, or something like that, or you just don't have time to do that, but you do have time to write things really quickly, or you know, so I'll say think about what your workflow is as well, because there's audience everywhere, there's people everywhere, there's your customers everywhere, so you really want to be strategic in which ones you choose. You don't have to be everywhere, just choose one or two of them that are going to work for you. Brent Peterson (11:46.571) Yeah, and I liked in the book that you mentioned, you know, pick the top two. Is there a way? I mean, I think. Well, maybe for us, it's more obvious, but a lot of people don't know they should either stay away from Facebook or do LinkedIn or pick Twitter or whatever, or X. Sorry. Is there, is there, is there, um, a reasoning behind which two you should choose or which one you should just go in on? Annie Schiffmann (12:14.094) So I oftentimes say don't go with two that are owned by the same company, just because you don't want to put all your eggs in one basket. So that way if your account gets taken away that you don't have to worry about losing. So like Meta, if you're all in on Meta and you've got these really big audiences and then all of a sudden for some reason you can't get into your account, that could very well affect your Facebook, your Instagram, and now your threads accounts. So that could be really, really problematic. So I do think that if you're gonna be on two to not choose two that are owned by the same company. That being said, then yeah, so it's good to take a look at where are, not only like where's your audience and what's your workflow, but where are your strengths? So for example, if you are blogging regularly, then you want to make sure that you are on a platform that it's going to be a little bit friendlier to links. So that way when you do post that blog post, for example, it's not as big of a deal. It's not as laborious to post that on LinkedIn as it might be on Instagram where you can't post links as easily. You kind of have to work around a little bit, which just takes a little bit more time, which is why I say about the idea of your workflow. So it's that kind of a thing. I used to say when I worked with a lot of people in the performing arts, if you're really good at one-liners, then Twitter is a great place for you. Twitter is kind of imploded now. You've got X, the, or as I like to say, the artist formerly known as Twitter. So you can put your one-liners up there. You can put your one-liners up on threads and just have people have a sense of what your style is. It just really depends on where your strengths are, where your audience is and what your workflow is. Brent Peterson (14:07.503) How about creating accounts for each of those platforms? And you're going to love this next one. I'm going to tell you, if I were to create one on threads but I leave it, would that just mean I'm threadbare? Annie Schiffmann (14:20.642) You're absolutely threadbare, but I don't, you know, I don't think that's, no, I, it's, Brent, it's okay. I just, I don't know how you're going to feel about yourself after that one, so I just want to make sure that, you know, you have a safe space to let that land. But anyway, yes, you would be threadbare. Here's what I think makes sense. Brent Peterson (14:25.919) I'm sorry Annie. Annie Schiffmann (14:44.77) So if you're hearing this and you're like, yes, I do only want to post on one, maybe two social media accounts, but I have all of these other open accounts, what do I do with them? So one thing that you can do is you could deactivate the account so that way it just doesn't show up anymore. But if you do want to be found on that account, if you don't want people to search for you and see you, then what you can do is just pin a post up at the top. many times social media platforms will allow you to do that and just say, or you can put this in your profile. Just, it depends exactly on the social media account, but, or on the platform, but you could just say, I am not posting on here, but here's where you can find me. You can also put a link to a free resource of some sort. So that way you're able to also grow your subscriber list. If people are like, I'm not on TikTok, I'm not going to look for her on TikTok. I don't care about TikTok, but you know, everyone has an email address, so you can always say here, you can download my, you could take my free assessment or you can get my free checklist or here's a free sample, whatever it is. So that's usually what I like to do. Brent Peterson (15:53.103) And yeah, I mean, that's just a great bit of advice right there for people. For companies, what are things that they should be focusing on when looking at social media? Annie Schiffmann (16:08.798) I think we should focus on interacting, so really getting social on social. So often we're thinking content first, but I will oftentimes say to, especially people who are higher ups in the business, who they're not necessarily part of the social team, but they wanna know how they can help support the social efforts that the team is doing, one thing to do is just to comment and share. other posts. So you can either share posts that your company is posting and then just add your two cents. Like how does what you do within the company affect what that post is about? Like share that. Let us know. You can also comment on other posts that people are creating, whether it's your company or people on your team or other companies that you work with. Like who are the other companies that are the The people in your neighborhood, I like to say, to kind of quote from Sesame Street, or just sort of your allies, like who are the people that are adjacent to your brand, and how can you support them? The easiest ways to do that on social is just to comment and share. Everyone loves getting comments, everybody loves getting shares. They will get notified that you did it. So this is also a nice way to actually build relationships with people on social. You could also do this with your followers and your audience members too. Brent Peterson (17:34.295) Yeah, I want to go into some mistakes too that I've made in the past, and it's maybe around frequency and it's different by platform. So one thing to think about, especially maybe with LinkedIn, you would like to comment on people's, but you don't always want to repost those posts because you can then sort of as your own person, not screw up your algorithm, but I think LinkedIn at some point penalizes you if you post too much. Annie Schiffmann (17:41.91) Yeah. Annie Schiffmann (18:03.882) Yeah, exactly. And also there's those sort of things that are helpful for you to do just to have a presence. And then when you really wanna play the game, because maybe you've got a launch of something happening, you've got a new product that's coming out, there's a big announcement that you wanna make, then you may need to make sure that your organic efforts specifically have even more juice behind them. And that's where you're gonna play by the rules a little bit more. But sometimes if you're just trying to like overall just have a presence that you don't cringe when you are at a networking event and you have to give people your handles for where they can find you and stuff, you just want to feel good about the presence that you have. And you don't have a ton of time to create new content. And so you're going to share it, you know, it's not best practices or you know, it's not best practices per se to share that blog post on LinkedIn because maybe they're going to penalize you for putting a URL in your post. fine, but you're doing it, you're keeping that muscle up. It's the same sort of a thing where it may not necessarily be the best workout at the gym, but it's important that you get there because you're building certain muscles and you're building certain patterns. And then when you really do have something that you want to get in really good shape for, or you want to really look a certain way to either people around you or your audience, or you want to really optimize what you're doing. then you could start to play by the rules a little bit more. But most of the time, you know, we're, this is just sort of, so that way you can just have a presence that you could be proud of on social. Brent Peterson (19:41.715) Is there a reason to choose a channel by your, what you do on it? And I guess the other, the followup to that question is keeping your business life and personal life separate. The obvious answer is like, don't be, you know, people don't post their family pictures at Disneyland on LinkedIn, but they'll do it on Facebook. Is there a strategy on building your personal brand versus your corporate? brand and where you should be posting. Annie Schiffmann (20:15.006) Well, I think that is up to you. First of all, how much you want to be online or how much you want to be on social. So that is something to think about. But if it's a personal brand, oh, were you gonna say something, Brent? Okay, so if it's a personal brand, another thing to think about too is if you have children, like how much do you want your kids to be online? How much do your kids want you to? Brent Peterson (20:29.388) No, no, go ahead. Annie Schiffmann (20:43.742) use them in the posts that you put up online. Like all of that kind of stuff are questions that people are asking now that they weren't asking five years ago. Like even in terms of like children's consent and stuff like that. So if you are going to post so all that stuff is completely up to you. But yeah there is some stuff that just and this is why it's important that you're only on one or two platforms because there's some stuff that you're going to see just doesn't fit in. on certain platforms. It just looks weird. It's not necessarily against any sort of rules, but you could just tell from hanging out there, like, yeah, that doesn't really work. I've seen people post pictures of Disneyland on LinkedIn because it's usually about how that trip to Disneyland that they took got them thinking about their work in a new way or got them thinking about some aspect of things. And so they usually will relate it to their work. So... That's where it's really helpful. I think too, like having a personal brand is great and you just wanna figure out how much of your life you're going to share. I always think less is more in terms of your actual life, especially like as a woman, there's only certain, like I don't want people to know too much about like, obviously I let people know that I live in New Jersey, but I just think it's good for safety wise and things like that too to not. I usually don't post when I'm actually in a place. I will wait until I've left that place. And that's just stuff about just for safety sake too. Brent Peterson (22:22.707) Yeah, that makes sense. Absolutely. Okay, so last question. In terms of when you choose your niche or what you're going to be posting about, I think most of the platforms will want you to, back up the algorithms within the platform, which may be your goal on social media is to try to get some more people to look at it. If you're too spread out, on what you're posting. So let's just say I'm posting a free joke and then I'm posting a running event and then I'm posting something about my professional life and then I'm posting something about my trip to Disneyland. There must be a strategy around picking a niche and going after that niche so people start to see you as a resource in what you're posting and why you're posting it. Is that a valid strategy? Annie Schiffmann (23:20.998) Yes, for sure. And I'm going to relate this to my life when I first got out of college. So when I was in college, I went to NYU and I studied drama. And when I was at NYU, I made a point to study acting and directing and musical theater and film and television, because I wanted to be well rounded. So when I graduated from college, I was able to get a meeting with one of the biggest casting directors. in New York City and I was so jazzed for this meeting. And so then when I met with him, he was like, so tell me about the kind of stuff that you like to work on. And I said, anything, I can work on anything. I can do film and TV, I can do this, I can do that. I can do comedy stuff, I learned Shakespeare, I can tap dance, I can play trombone. I can do all of these things. And the trouble was that casting director had no idea. what I was going to be a good fit for, because I said all of these different things. And it's not that different in social media. Like it or not, it's easier for our brains to know that this person solves problems about this or that, and maybe this, that, or the other thing. But we can't really hold too many other things in our head. So you want to be the go-to. for this, that, and maybe the other thing. You wanna be the go-to for your audience for that, and keep it really consistent so that way it's easier for them. You don't want to confuse them with all of these other things. It also will be easier for you when you're trying to come up with content ideas, because you can riff on the same themes over and over again. And the platforms will make sure that they have enough different features that you can say that riff in a whole other way. So if you think about Instagram, you could go on Instagram Live, you could do an Instagram story, you could create a reel, you can do a still shot, you could just send it to somebody in a DM, right? There's so many different ways that you can say that same message. So not only is it easier for your audience to know. Annie Schiffmann (25:35.714) who you are and whether you are for them, whether you are going to help them survive and thrive. It's also that it's easier for you to know what kind of content you're gonna create so you don't feel like you're sitting down in a blank screen trying to come up with content. Does that make sense? Brent Peterson (25:56.099) That's great. Yeah, thanks. And again, all this is in your book. Annie Schiffmann (26:01.194) All this is in simple social media. Yes, it is, Brent. Although not that little nugget about Bernie Telsey, the casting director. That was a little Brent Peterson podcast exclusive. Brent Peterson (26:04.216) Yes. Brent Peterson (26:08.683) Now that would have been a good story to include. Yeah, so Annie, as we close out the podcast, I give my guests a chance to an opportunity to do a shameless plug about anything they'd like to plug. What would you like to plug today? Annie Schiffmann (26:26.326) I will plug Simple Social Media. So you could pick up the book for you, for your clients, for your team at simplesocialmediabook.com. And like I said before, there are plenty of free resources there. So if you want to dive in, they will help amplify what you're reading in the book, but they certainly will work out of context as well. So you could go to simplesocialmediabook.com to get all of that. Brent Peterson (26:50.711) That's great. And I will make sure that we get those on the show notes. And I would also like to, we didn't get it. We didn't get time to talk about the pager method, but if, if we could also put that in the show notes or I actually, well, there will be a blog post that goes along with this interview. It would be great to give a, you know, a high level view of what pager method is. And, and actually we, you know, we still have a few minutes left. If you want to take two minutes to give us the pager method, or do you think that we should just let people read it out of the book? Annie Schiffmann (27:21.11) Oh, let's do it. No, I'll give it to them. I'm more than happy to. Okay, so pager. Each letter of pager stands for a different kind of content that you wanna create. So if you are looking to post five times a day, say like the artist formerly known as Twitter a couple of years ago, you would wanna post that many times a day to get traction. So then you would post a P, A, G, E, and R. Each letter once a day. Or if you want to post four or five times a week, you get P, A, G, E, and R during the week, just one of each of those content buckets. Or you could do the same thing. If you just want to pop in, say on LinkedIn once a week, then you'll do each one of those letters during the course of the month. And P stands for promotional content. A stands for articles content. G stands for general. And E stands for engagement. R stands for random. In the book, I talk about what each one of those letters, really, you know, like how you can get into it, how you could create content for it, but that's the basic idea. If you cover that, that's gonna help your business because each one of those letters maps to a different business goal that you might have. Did I do it in two minutes? Brent Peterson (28:36.399) That's great. Oh, that was so good. You did it in like a minute and maybe 47 seconds. Yeah, that's really good. Annie Schiffman, it's been such a pleasure to speak to you today. We'll make sure we get all these in the show notes and I hope you have a great weekend. Week, weekend, it's hump day, week. Annie Schiffmann (28:56.766) I hope you have a great weekend week. I hope that you have a great everything, Brent Peterson. Thank you for having me and thank you for listening, everyone whose ears I happen to be in just now.