Omer (00:11.840)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan, and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch, and grow your SaaS business.
Today's guest is an entrepreneur, startup mentor, and digital marketing strategist.
After a 14 year career at Microsoft, she founded her own company and in three years grew it from a two person consulting firm to a digital agency with offices in three countries.
She also runs the Seattle chapter of the Founder Institute, the world's largest startup accelerator program.
And she's also on the board of Women in Wireless, a nonprofit that empowers and develops female leaders in mobile and digital media.
So today I'd like to welcome Maria Dykstra.
Maria, welcome to the show.
Maria Dykstra (01:04.510)
Thank you, Omar.
Very excited to be here.
Omer (01:07.230)
Now you are also in the Seattle area and you know, it's funny, I'm just looking out the window and it's another overcast day and gloomy.
And I just got so used to being spoiled with all that sunshine over the last few weeks that I forgot that most days are like this.
Maria Dykstra (01:27.990)
Yes, we have a very typical Seattle weather today.
Last couple of summers, it was not like Seattle.
So we're back to normal.
Omer (01:36.790)
Dang.
Yeah.
Great.
Now I like to ask my guests for a success quote just to try and understand what motivates and inspires them.
Do you have a favorite quote?
Maria Dykstra (01:50.640)
I do.
Back at Microsoft, one of my mentors said, do something every day that scares you to death.
And I took it to heart.
And it was very interesting for me to see a quote from Marissa Meyer recently.
What she said is that I always did something I was a little not too ready to do.
And after the moment of wow, I'm not really sure what I'm doing.
She pushes through that moment and then that's where she experiences a breakthrough.
And I think, to me, it's a very important quote because a lot of I come from working with a lot of female entrepreneurs and female entrepreneurs tend to say, I'm not ready, I'm not going to do it.
And so we hold ourselves back.
So to me, I was trying to live by that quote a lot.
Omer (02:35.000)
Yeah, that's good.
It's not just for females.
I hear that from a lot of people and even myself personally, I think there are so many times where you're like, you know, I have that idea.
I want to go and do that, but I don't know, I'm not ready.
In fact, this podcast is a great example of that as well.
And actually I actually did do that.
Maria Dykstra (03:01.750)
Right.
Omer (03:02.070)
So, you know, a couple of years ago I would have been terrified just even thinking about doing something like this.
And now, you know, here we are, we're talking and.
And we actually have people listening to the show as well, which is pretty remarkable.
Maria Dykstra (03:19.830)
So.
Omer (03:20.870)
All right, so let's talk a little bit about your story.
And I know that we want to focus the majority of this conversation really in sort of picking your brain and learning from you on what it takes to get clients.
And that applies to a lot of people listening.
You know, as I explained to you earlier, that there are, there are folks who maybe are, you know, solopreneurs who have a product, but they're also maybe supplementing their income by doing some freelancing or consulting work.
And then there are other people who maybe have to go and try and get clients just as part of acquiring customers for their SaaS product, maybe if they're in the B2B space.
So that's really what I want to try to focus on and hopefully give people some actionable insights that they can take away and start applying themselves.
So tell me a little bit about your story and after you left Microsoft, how did you go about starting your agency?
Maria Dykstra (04:41.130)
Well, that was one of my scary moments when I spent 14 years at Microsoft and I enjoyed every moment of my job and I've learned so much and I met amazing people, but it was time for me to go.
So I walked out without having a clue of what I would do.
But I had passion for marketing and I had passion for digital marketing specifically.
And my co founder, he's built a number of successful businesses in the past.
So that's how we started with the Two People Consulting agency.
And so our first customers were really focused on some of the emerging business to business or E commerce clients and we worked with them to get them up to speed.
In about a year we realized that consulting business is wonderful and profitable.
However, it takes so much of our time.
And the second part of consulting business is that people were looking for us to really do the work for them.
So we listed to our customers when we realized we needed to tweak what we were doing.
In the year after starting the business, we started building out the company with the team in different countries.
We figured out how to scale some of the tough part of the agencies by putting folks in different countries and balancing the workload.
I have a team in the US that's focused on some of the high touch activities and I have teams in Russia and India that are helping us with some of the back end workload.
Balancing that out allows us to keep the pricing really low.
So that's our competitive advantage in the market.
And really one of the things about our agency that's different, that's applicable to your audience, is that a lot of our growth comes from our own practices of using social media and digital media.
So we do a lot of our lead generation and a lot of our building customers through social media.
And that's where I would like to talk to you and share some of the things that we do for ourselves and we also do for the clients to really build the customers.
Omer (06:42.570)
Okay, great.
So let's dig into that and start talking about social media.
So I think Twitter is probably the most relevant platform for this audience.
So what are some of the things that you were doing with your business to find clients through Twitter?
Maria Dykstra (07:06.960)
Well, what we're doing, we're very active with thinking of who are the influencers for us, who is a competition and really listening to the way competition conducts their business and the influencers conduct their business because a typical person on Twitter would come out and they would start tweeting and it would start pushing information out.
But I really think of Twitter as a listening tool and a PR tool.
It's the place for you to build relationships by conversing with people and it's a place for you to build an audience and ask questions.
So what we do, we proactively look for specific keywords and specific things that our target audience is talking about in interjecting ourselves in a conversation.
So we look for people who are talking about social media challenges and we build relationships with them by first following that person who may have a question about social media.
Then our next step would be to send them a question.
And when the person engages with us, it can go into a broader, more longer conversation with them and that eventually builds the connection.
I was telling you earlier today, pre interview Omer is that one of the consulting clients, for example, he listened for a person who had a question about it and they immediately got in conversation.
He lended the client with five minute conversation on Twitter.
Omer (08:33.340)
Yeah, yeah, that's pretty impressive.
So, okay, so finding you said looking for keywords and conversations, how do you do that on Twitter?
Maria Dykstra (08:46.700)
The best way for us is to set up hootsuite.
So our favorite tool is the.
It's hootsuite.
I've tried a variety of different tools that exist in the market and I still keep coming back to that and enterprise level product that maybe not the favorite of everyone, but it still really does a good job of listening to keywords.
So what I would recommend is for any, any person who's active on Twitter is to set up a HootSuite dashboard because it would allow you to listen to mentions.
So anyone who's mentioning you and your Twitter handle on Twitter, you can set up in the stream on hootsuite and you can pay attention to people engaging with you and responding.
That's a critical, important.
The second stream that you can set up in hootsuite is a stream that listens for specific keywords.
So for example, I spend a lot of time working with startup Seattle.
I have a stream on HootSuite that specifically has two of the hashtags, it has startups and it has Seattle.
So that helps me stay in touch with everything that's happening in the entrepreneurial world.
We also work with agencies.
So I have a stream that's set up for all of our agency partners.
So I know what's going on with them because I have added every agency partner to Twitter list and I have a stream in hootsuite that listens to that.
So to take that to your listener's perspective, for example, if it's a SaaS company and their specific target audience from the enterprise decision makers, that adding those decision makers or adding the target companies to the list and constantly spending time looking at what's happening with them on social media could be really good first step.
So I really think about, I have a formula, I call it 515 5.
And what it means is that as a business owner or as an entrepreneur, you should be spending at least five days on social media with at least 15 minutes trying to connect with at least five people that allows you to have consistency in talking to people and being present on social media.
Omer (11:01.980)
I like, I like that 5, 15 5.
Because I think one of the things with, I see with social media or let's say Twitter.
Well, first of all, what is it that you like about hootsuite so much?
Because I mean I have hootsuite, I don't really use it that much and I guess I should be using it more sometimes, you know, I'll just go into, I just go to the Twitter website or use a Twitter app.
What is it about hootsuite that you like so much?
Maria Dykstra (11:34.640)
Well, several things.
First is that I can consume massive amount of information side by side without having to go to different Twitter clients.
So for example, if you're trying to look with what's happening with a specific list you have to go to Twitter and you have to load that list and you need to understand what people are talking about.
Then you have to log out of that and you need to search for specific keywords and get information on that.
And then you need to see who mentioned you, who engaged with you.
So all of those actions can be set side by side in hootsuite.
So all I need to do in the morning, I get my cup of tea, I log into hootsuite and I see everyone who's engaged with me.
I can get a quick snapshot of what my partners and competition and customers are talking about because I have three streams set up for each of those.
I can also look at the specific keywords that I'm listening for outside of the audience I already defined.
So I can get it done in 15 minutes and move on with my day.
Social media.
Another flip side of social media is that if you're addicted to it, you can spend hours just looking at all the different pieces of information and won't be as productive as you set yourself.
15 minute time box.
You got into hootsuite, you've accomplished a lot of productive communication interaction.
You moved out, maybe you do that again in the evening.
And the ROI of those actions, this action is huge compared to trying to get into each individual stream.
Omer (13:07.310)
And so when you say try to connect with five people every day, what does connect mean?
Because I mean, it feels like there's a lot to get done in 15 minutes in a day, right?
I mean, you could easily spend 15 minutes just looking at the dashboard you just described and not engage with anybody, right?
Maria Dykstra (13:29.460)
When I say engage.
So I think of that as any retweet any favorite, and you reply to a person, that's an engagement to me.
And it's impressive how much influence that one small engagement carries sometimes.
So I'll give you an example.
I was trying to connect with the partner that was a big strategic partner of ours.
We have been engaging with that person on Twitter and then we saw a blog and we commented on a LinkedIn blog for that person.
And that combined engagement over a course of a week immediately returned the conversation.
The partner was interested in talking to us, engaging with us, and we actually signed a partnership deal.
It was a very strategic, lucrative for the company.
That's the person that I have heard from others, they tried to reach him by calling, emailing, communicating with them in a variety of different ways.
But just having that structure set up and where we followed that person on Twitter, the decision maker or the partner and That's a critical thing.
You have to find decision makers.
Otherwise you'll be spending a lot of time just retweeting posts from a company that may have a social media intern managing their communication.
So really think about who is your decision maker.
How do they communicate on Twitter or potentially on LinkedIn?
There's a lot of people writing LinkedIn blog posts and they like to have comments.
So what we do, we start on Twitter by favoriting, retweeting, replying to some of the communication and posts that our strategic connection to partners or potential leads have, and then we move that conversation down the stream.
It could be a LinkedIn conversation or it could be an email conversation.
And that works beautifully, is if you really think about the cold calls that you have to make.
You would have to dial for six hours straight just to set one appointment, and that's not effective anymore.
But having that connection that we have established through the list by favoriting, tweeting, retweeting and then sending an email, that works beautiful.
Omer (15:35.920)
Now, you said that some of the lists that you described or the streams that you described that you'd set up in hootsuite would be about you and your brand and any mentions or Seattle startup was a hashtag that you used or lists of agencies.
But how, how are you identifying potential clients?
And you also talked earlier about maybe helping people solve problems or questions.
So how do you do that?
And what could folks listening to this episode do themselves to try and figure out how to reach the right people?
Maria Dykstra (16:26.130)
Well, there are a couple of things.
First, you can think about who is your competition.
You go to Google and you type for us, it's the digital media agency.
And then you immediately get a list returned of top digital media agencies.
So from that you can analyze their social media presence.
And that's what we do.
I look at the top social media agencies, I look at the top social media with digital media influencers, and then I go to Twitter and I look at who follows them.
That's the first indication of the audience that may be interested in listening to what I have to say, because they're already listening to other folks who are influencers in my field.
And so following them, following followers of the digital media influencers would be first step to find audience.
So that's an example.
If you're in this, in the virtual reality space, it's very hot right now.
If you're building games, so who are the top competitors in the gaming world?
And then look at the audience that follows them on Twitter, and then you can Start reaching out and following them yourself.
So that's one of the ways to do it.
Another way is to really search on LinkedIn and think about who are the decision makers and consumers of your information.
You can go into Google and you can type digital marketers site, a column, LinkedIn, and we'll bring all of the information of who the digital marketers are on LinkedIn and will give you information on how to connect with them.
And so that's another way to really think about it.
But you have to start with really understanding who your customers are.
So if your listeners don't have a very clear description of who their customers are, who their competition is, and who their potential partners are, then none of that will work, right?
Omer (18:19.820)
Yeah, sure, yeah.
I actually wrote a blog post recently which was kind of sharing my own personal experiences of what happens when you are building a product and you are so kind of jaded because you think it's such a great product that everybody is going to want to be your customer.
Maria Dykstra (18:40.960)
Right.
Omer (18:41.240)
And then you're basically talking to nobody that way.
So, okay, so let's assume that people know who their target customer is.
They have a sense of the competitors in the market.
So the things you described, I think are actually really good ways of figuring out, you know, who, who they can start to follow to try and create, you know, build some, some engagement.
How do you feel about what some people do?
You know, like, you know, going and using tools and go and follow like, you know, 100 people every day or something like that.
And is, is that, is that really a, a useful way to spend your time on Twitter?
Maria Dykstra (19:29.470)
I think it's incredibly useful if you're very careful about who you're following and you're strategic about following people who are active on Twitter.
Otherwise you'll be wasting your time.
So the first step is to, yes, it's fine to follow 100 people, but what do you do with them after they followed you back?
I think that's the most critical question because if you just build hundred more new followers, it's not going to do you any good unless you engage with the followers.
So we take that one step further and for anyone who follows us, we'll reach back with a question.
And that could be a different question depending on what the audience is and what the people are talking about.
So if I'm thinking about, for example, we're working with an E commerce customer right now, and they're building a new E commerce product for tea subscription.
And so for them, for any customer who follows them, we Ask them questions about tea and how do you, how do you drink your tea, how do you consume your tea, what's difficult about drinking tea or making tea.
So that's another really good way to validate the assumptions that the product has built into.
For example, with the Tea E Commerce, we had an assumption thinking that drinking tea is difficult, the loose leaf tea, that is.
And we've asked a number of customers on Twitter, followers had followed us back and the response came back saying it's not really that difficult.
So that's an assumption that we moved off of our list right now.
So really think about, yes, following people is a good mechanism for you to build your audience.
But don't step, don't stop there, continue to engage with them after they followed you back.
And the best way to engage is to ask the question.
And to me, it's very interesting to see how many people will respond back and how many people will offer additional information and or would be willing to try your product again.
In that example of tea e Commerce, they haven't launched yet.
They're one of the companies going through a founder institute program and they get about 70 new subscriptions a day.
And that's an interesting way of building your customer base by just asking questions.
We never ever promote.
We don't ever send people back to the website.
It's just the fact that we're talking to them.
It's an engaging opportunity for them.
Omer (21:49.850)
So they get 70 email subscriptions through their website every day.
Maria Dykstra (21:55.050)
Right.
And we attribute a lot of that to Twitter because we haven't done any other marketing really, other than the founder going and talking to people and getting feedback in person and doing Twitter activity.
Omer (22:08.330)
So when they follow you back, how do you ask them the question?
Are you tweeting specifically to each person and asking the question?
Do you do some kind of auto reply?
What's sort of the mechanism that you use to ask these questions?
Maria Dykstra (22:27.460)
There's several ways.
The best way is to really respond to each person with individual question.
And what we do.
We have a list of about 50 questions that we think are applicable in general to our audience.
And every time a person follows us back, we would respond back with a question that's applicable to them.
So it's asking about industry trends, it's asking about challenges with specific stuff.
It's just welcoming them.
Sometimes you don't even have to send a question.
It's welcoming them and saying that you were very grateful that they followed you back.
It's a matter of acknowledging, recognizing and responding to the person More than the content of the question.
There are some tools and I have seen people abuse the tools, so.
And that completely turns me off because there's nothing worse than somebody who's using an automated tool and sends the same question or the same response to everybody.
I get response from somebody on Twitter saying, hey, Maria, thank you for following me.
I really enjoyed your website.
And then it has a via unfollowers.com so I know for a fact that the person never even looked at my website.
So to me, it turns me off immediately.
So I will never engage with that person.
So be thoughtful if you automate.
Omer (23:42.180)
Okay, great.
So generally you're saying automation isn't the way to go.
It could be, but you have to be very careful if you do that.
And I get that all the time.
I mean, I think everybody's had that, right?
You follow somebody or follow them back and then suddenly it's like, hey, thanks for following me.
Go and download this thing from my website.
Maria Dykstra (24:08.650)
Okay?
Omer (24:09.210)
So, yeah, anybody does that, Marie is going to come and give you a slap on your wrist.
Maria Dykstra (24:14.250)
Right.
Another thing, don't start selling right away because I think LinkedIn is another fantastic tool to build relationship and ask questions.
But I see it all the time.
Things land in my inbox and a person never even learned about what I do, but they immediately start selling the services.
Sometimes it's the same services that we do and that's completely inappropriate.
However, on a different flip side, flip side of a coin, I have seen people coming to me and asking questions and really trying to understand what I do in LinkedIn and I would engage with them and I would have a conversation and can lead to a partnership down the road.
So really be thoughtful about what you do and what's appropriate to do on social media.
Selling on social media is not appropriate, at least not right away before you establish the relationship.
Omer (25:03.200)
Okay, so asking questions is great and I think that can be a really good way to engage and get feedback on, on a whole bunch of different things about your business and how you can just do a better job to fulfill a need or help people solve a problem.
But you, you also mentioned something about helping, you know, helping answer questions or solving problems for people.
How do you look for those kinds of things?
Maria Dykstra (25:38.800)
I look for what people are tweeting about and what are the top questions that keep coming up on social media.
So really, if someone is talking about a specific problem, there are a lot of things you can do with it.
And talking about specific problem is that we go back to the hootsuite I have a dashboard and I have specific words that we're listening for and we're looking for.
So once that question comes up on social media, we can respond to the person and engage with them right away.
Another thing to really consider is that compiling those questions and turning them into your content strategy.
Because the best way to create a content strategy is to write about the problems or questions that your audience has, because that will for sure resonate with them.
Rather than blogging by trying to come up with random topics all the time, think about how can you listen to what your audience is talking about and then pull out the questions that they have and write a blog post about those questions.
So for us, our content strategy is largely centered around what are the top questions that people have, top challenges and top struggles, and then we write a blog post about that.
Because another point of your social media is to build the relationships, but to also get people to come to your website and to potentially sign up to your email list, if not to sign up to buy your product and making sure that you speak the language of your customers by first understanding what they say on social media, what they're talking about, and then converting that into content blogs or short email newsletters that go out to the customers, that's an incredibly critical, helpful step.
Another way to really listen is that if you know who your partners are or who your customers are, look at their favorites on Twitter, take a look at the things that they're favoriting, because you will be able to quickly understand what resonates with them and the favorites, especially in the e commerce businesses or in the consulting businesses.
Looking at the favorites of the customers or potential partners gives us a lot of insight to understand what are the top problems or questions that the customers are having.
Omer (28:02.470)
Okay, that's a good one.
I had never even thought about that.
Yeah, I can say I can see a lot of value in that.
Because it's not only going to give you feedback on the kinds of problems they're dealing with, even just by seeing the kinds of tweets or general content that they find valuable enough to want to favorite or maybe keep on file or use to reference at some point will give you a much better sense, I guess, of this is the type of information that they need.
Maria Dykstra (28:39.910)
Absolutely.
Another way to do it, you can, you can search for mentions of your competition.
I know a lot of people do that in the e commerce and services business.
So if you're searching for mentions of your competition, they come up and it's an unhappy, dissatisfied customer.
Or a customer asking questions and your competition is not responding to them.
That's a great opportunity to engage with somebody who's ready to buy, who has a question or has dissatisfaction with the specific problem or specific customer interaction that they had with the customer or the with the partner or competitor.
And that's an easy way for you to interject in a conversation and try to add value because the beauty of that is that you get the customer at the time when they're ready to engage or to buy.
And that's a very precious moment because a lot of things that we do on social media, we interact with potential clients, but they may not be ready to buy or engage with you.
Omer (29:41.490)
What are some of the buying signals that people can look for to say this person is ready to buy?
Maria Dykstra (29:49.970)
Well, I'll use one of the examples that I ran across.
It's not necessarily something that we have done, but I thought it was genius From a local services perspective.
There's a locksmith and that's the person who is very active on Twitter.
And what he did, he set up a Twitter notifications.
So every time somebody says I'm locked out of my house on Twitter, he gets a notification and he immediately dispatches, sends a tweet back, I will be in your area in about five minutes.
And that's a very interesting example of a hyper local interaction on Twitter for any of the local services.
For consulting business.
Think about somebody saying, so if you're in a software consulting business and someone saying I am having issues with my blah, whatever that product could be, whether it's the I cannot code, I cannot complete that.
If you're listening for those types of conversations and you get real time notification again, you can respond with a tweet to say, hey, here's a blog post I wrote on that specific topic topic.
And that's how you engage in the software type of business.
Same for marketing.
If someone is talking about challenges with the website or challenges with the social media campaign, responding to that person immediately.
It's more of a real time marketing and real time conversation one to one.
Because that's where we're all headed, right?
We came from a place where it was push marketing to now a lot of that is pulled.
But now we're smarter.
We're getting bombarded with a lot of things.
So it has to be marketing in the moment.
And that's what Twitter really does for you.
It shows you that immediate time where somebody is ready to engage in the crisis mode, if you will.
So they will buy from without doing the normal checks of seven times you have to interact with me before I make a buying decision.
So you're really bypassing a lot of the traditional marketing rules of landing the client by doing this one on one interactions.
Omer (31:49.770)
Okay, now you mentioned, you know, once you've got an idea of the kind of problems these potential clients have, there's an opportunity to feed that into your own content marketing strategy and create content that's, that's highly relevant for them.
But, but before we talk about that, how do you then make that content available?
How do you start driving people over to your website?
I know you mentioned, you gave one example just now saying if somebody's talking about a specific problem, you can always reply back and say, hey, here's a blog post that we wrote which, which will hopefully answer your questions.
And that's, that's one way to do that.
How do you feel about this sort of the business of, you know, promoting or regularly sort of like, sort of like the buffer type approach.
And I know hootsuite does this as well and sort of like just scheduling a bunch of your blog post content to be tweeted out every day or every week.
So is that a good thing to be doing or not?
Maria Dykstra (33:04.170)
It is a good thing to be doing as long as that's not the only thing you're doing.
I really think about social media promotional calendar in terms of 60, 30, 10.
So 60% of what you are sharing in social media should be about somebody else and it should be adding value to your customers and it should not be your content.
So if you're buffering and it's another reason why I love hootletsuite because I have a hootlet installed in my browser and I read a lot and every time I read and I find very interesting article, I would hit that hootlet button and would auto schedules it for me in Hootsuite.
So I'm building that 60% of content that's valuable that's not mine, that will be auto scheduled by hootsuite so I don't have to worry about trying to put in schedule in a certain time.
So the 30% of the things you share, that's where it's okay to share your own content and your own blogs as long as not as long as it's not the same blog over and over again.
So if you have five blogs, you probably won't be able to do 30% of that as part of your overall social media mix because it will start being very repetitive.
But 30% is okay.
Of having your own blogs and only 10%, that's where it's a call to action and that's where you can have people pay attention to specific promotion you're doing.
Maybe it's an event that you're doing, maybe it's a conversation you want to drive people to.
So no more than 10% of that.
Omer (34:37.030)
Okay, so the 30% where maybe you promote a link to a blog post, that's a separate kind of call to action in the way that you're describing this.
Maria Dykstra (34:50.470)
Right, right.
Omer (34:51.990)
Okay, got it.
Maria Dykstra (34:52.790)
It's more adding value rather than calling to action for a buy or a download or show up in my event things.
That's a distinction.
There's value in the blogs that you're writing.
At least that's my assumption.
Another thing we have done that was fairly successful is that I strongly believe that writing a book is not that difficult.
And a lot of people believe that having an ebook, it's a huge proposition of taking months or if not years to write.
So what we have done in our business, we actually wrote a book and I have a blog where we talk about you can write a book in two weeks and get it published under $200 budget.
And we've done it for our Twitter ABC book and we published it on Amazon and we have built a number of different links that point to our content on our blog.
And so every day I have a book that sits on Amazon and I'm getting leads to our website where they subscribe to download some of the additional lead magnets, as we call them that we have placed in our blogs.
So that could be.
We have social media sample plan that is a downloadable, downloadable file on our website that we have a link to in our book.
And so I get that from Amazon people coming and downloading, they becoming my customers.
And then I also engage with them on social media.
So I follow that loop of talking to them so they continue to build relationship with us.
Omer (36:26.860)
Okay, I found it.
So it's called Twitter abc, the ultimate beginner's guide on in the Kindle Store.
And so does this book cover.
Presumably it does a lot of the things that we've been talking about here.
Maria Dykstra (36:43.260)
It does.
It's more of a beginner book.
We're actually writing the more advanced version.
But for anyone who's just starting on social media, that's a really good book to get the started.
This is how you find audience to follow.
This is how you engage with them.
There's some of the formulas and the content and some of the Formulas in terms of engagement that we have discussed today.
There are in that book.
Omer (37:04.080)
That's a really great idea.
Okay, we have got so much to talk about here.
I just.
I'm not sure where to keep going with this.
Okay.
So that you've really given me and the audience as well, I'm sure a lot to think about when it comes to using Twitter.
I want to spend some time talking about what to do next, but is there anything else that you want to just kind of share with the audience as far as Twitter goes?
Before we talk about other stuff, I
Maria Dykstra (37:39.540)
would just want to say that the secret to mastering Twitter or any of social media is being consistent.
It's not a race, it's a marathon.
And pace yourself.
That's the most important thing that you can do.
Do it consistently, do it in small chunks, and you can see over time how your impact grows.
So 28 tweets can potentially make a huge impact in the course of a month.
But if you don't do it, then nothing will happen because I see lots of people starting and then quitting because they don't see immediate gratification.
And social media is not about immediate gratification all the time.
Omer (38:17.090)
Okay.
And one last question on Twitter is, other than hootsuite, are there any other tools that you use for Twitter?
Maria Dykstra (38:27.010)
We use quite, quite a bit of tools.
I like Twitter analytics, just looking into the numbers and mentions.
Tweetonomy is a great tool in terms of helping me understand the performance of all the different types of tweets that we have sent out.
Because if you see which of the posts perform better, then you can use that later in your content strategy as well as you can do more of certain things.
But I think these are probably the top ones.
The scheduling tools, hootsuite and some of the Twitter analytics tools.
We have also used tweepi in terms of building the audience because it allows us to understand who the influencers are and who their audience is.
So when you build, we're trying to follow somebody, using tweepy is one of the helpful ways to find the right people.
Omer (39:19.360)
Because.
Because you said not only finding people who are following influencers or potentially your competitors or people like that, but also figuring out how engaged they are.
Right.
So that.
That's probably one way to do that with using a tool like that.
Maria Dykstra (39:35.920)
Exactly.
Omer (39:37.120)
Okay, that wraps up part one of this interview with Maria Dykstra of Trade Digital.
You can get to the show notes for this episode by going to ConversionAid.com 82 in the next episode or part two, we're going to cover content marketing.
So we're going to talk about what do you actually do after you've started building this presence and authority on Twitter?
How do you start getting that traffic over to your website, and what are the right ways to generate leads from that traffic and eventually convert those leads into customers or clients?
