264. What Is the Real ROI on Social Media for Your Coworking Space?
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TRANSCRIPTION
264. What Is the Real ROI on Social Media for Your Coworking Space?
00:00:03 Welcome to the Everything Coworking podcast, where every week I keep you updated on the latest trends and how-tos in Coworking. I owned and operated coworking spaces for eight years, and then served as the executive director of the global workspace association for five years. And today I work with hundreds of operators and community managers every month, allowing me to bring you thought-provoking operator,
00:00:29 case studies and inspirational interviews with industry thought leaders to help you confidently stay on top of what's important and what you can apply to your own role in the Coworking industry. Welcome to the Everything Coworking podcast. This is your host, Jamie Rousseau. Thank you for joining me. So we're kicking off with this episode a series for the month, your Coworking business,
00:00:59 online presence. So we're going to talk about the ROI on social media. How much time should you be spending? What can you get out of social media for your business newsletters, what they do for your business, what you should be doing, some best practices. And then we have two guest experts on, I am excited about both of them. One of them is brand new,
00:01:21 a Google business profile expert. And she's going to share with us the latest on how to allow your members to use your Google business profile legally, appropriately, and then we are going to talk about website audits with Taylor Mason. Who's been on the podcast before. So this episode, we are talking about the ROI on social media for your coworking space. So if you've heard me talk about social media before you know that I want you to be really careful about how much time you spend on social media for your business.
00:01:59 As a matter of fact, we recently did a training for our Community Manager University group. It was actually in January. I think it wasn't that recent, how to minimize the time you spend on social media while maximizing your ROI. That's really my stance. How can you do Elise to get the most out of social media for your Coworking business? So if you have a Community Manager in charge of your social media,
00:02:23 then enroll him or her into our Community Manager University program, and they can get that training. We also have training on Facebook ad frameworks and other social media training. So here's what we're going to talk about today. I think it's really helpful to continue to talk about this because we can hear it. And sometimes it doesn't totally seep in until we hear it a few times.
00:02:46 So I want to talk sort of in a little bit of a framework today about where the ROI from our Coworking business comes from and how social media can fit into that ROI. So in general member acquisition, getting more members, ROI comes from increasing the spend of a current member or increasing the lifetime value of your current members. So let's talk about member acquisition.
00:03:11 Most of your member acquisition comes from consumer who is an aware, active searcher. So someone that is solving a problem that, or has a problem that you can solve and is looking to solve it. They're aware that Coworking is a solution and actively searches like a map app or a search engine on a website browser for a local solution. So 80% of your leads probably come from Google maps,
00:03:40 your Google business profile, or paid or organic search on a web browser. Most of the time there are going to be exceptions to this probably small markets where you have to do a lot of education around what Coworking is, but in general, in sort of medium to larger markets, 80% of your leads are going to come from active searches who are aware of Coworking as a solution and are finding the best option for them nearby.
00:04:09 We can talk about different profiles of consumers and how they do their shopping. I'm actually working on a topic that is exactly diving into that for the upcoming GWA conference, but we're just going to kind of simplify it here. Hey, we'll be right back. I just want to share a couple of opportunities from our show sponsors as a co-working space owner, you are always looking to provide more resources and programming for your members,
00:04:47 right? How about access to financial education and even investment opportunities? Well, noumena is the number one community for freelancers and founders looking to grow their businesses. So noumena and coworking spaces go together like butter and jelly. We found that over 75% of our community already work in or are seeking out a coworking space. We'd like to help our members connect with you and find your space anywhere in the world.
00:05:20 So join our coworking space directory to be featured in our community and give your members access to a whole library of entrepreneurial resources and financial education programming all at no cost to you, by the way, visit noumena.pro forward slash Coworking to fill out an interest form that's N O U M E N a.pro/ Coworking. We will include that link in the show notes for anybody who's walking around and doesn't have time to write it down.
00:05:57 You can find it in the show notes for this episode at Everything Coworking dot com, noumena financing. The future of work. The amount of opportunity in the Coworking industry is absolutely mindblowing. It's projected to grow by $13 billion in the next five years, just staggering numbers. Now you've probably seen success magazine it's hugely popular and focuses on professional development, personal development and business coaching.
00:06:30 Well, they're branching out with their own franchised Coworking business called success space. It's actually a brilliant franchise model with three revenue streams recurring and on-demand revenue from Coworking memberships, a full-service cafe and success-certified business coaching for small business owners to executives to learn more about this exciting new Coworking business opportunity. Check it out at success. Co-work dot space. That's success,
00:07:03 co-work dot space. We will link that up in the show notes as well. So here's the challenge with acquiring members through social media. Social media is generally not a search platform. Now I've heard a little bit about some trends of people. I understand like hashtag searches and things like that. But if I'm looking for a coworking space near me, it is generally not yet consumer behavior that they're going to Instagram or tick-tock to find that right.
00:07:31 So it's really in social is an interruption platform. So we're putting ourselves in front of people on social, through ads generally, or we're getting them to follow us somehow through hashtags, through other promotions on other channels. So it is not a platform where, you know, the end user knows they're trying to sell something and is going to look for it.
00:07:55 Here's the other issue with social? The average organic post on Instagram or Facebook will get in front of roughly 10% of your audience. That means if you have a thousand followers, 100 of them will see any given post. So you cannot rely on social media to communicate important messages. 90% of your audience will not see your organic messages. So in order to get your social media posts,
00:08:21 video real in front of your audience, you have to pay for it. And that is just a reality. And when I say pay for it, please don't boost your posts. If you're going to run ads, you need to use ads manager and learn how to run Facebook ads, Instagram ads in quotes, you know, sort of the right way.
00:08:38 The boosting is not going to get you what you need. It's just it's. Anyway, that's a whole separate conversation with somebody who's more of an expert than I am in Facebook ads. I will tell you that I have trouble in my business as well. In terms of member acquisition. I spend very little time on social. I put a lot of time into LinkedIn because you know,
00:09:00 when I look at my reach on Instagram and maybe if I spent more time on Instagram, this would be kind of more of a, maybe it needs more of an investment, but the algorithm still is not going to favor organic posts. So can you increase that 10%? Maybe can you get it to 50? You can't with organic, you have to pay for it.
00:09:22 So, you know, we were spending a lot of time on custom video posts to promote our podcasts on Instagram, because it's a different size video. And, you know, we were getting like 40 views. I mean, that is really depressing. Whereas on LinkedIn, when we post a video, we get hundreds of views. So it's a much better investment to go to LinkedIn or our Facebook group,
00:09:46 which has over 2000 people in it. And the algorithm is a little bit friendlier to private groups. So it is just a reality that you just are not getting a lot of bang for your time and effort when you are posting organically to Facebook and to Instagram. So you want to invest minimal time and resources in social until you've nailed your website. SEO,
00:10:13 you have an active blog on your website, updated with relevant content that contains relevant keywords every single month. And you have both a member and marketing newsletter and you've paid Google and Facebook ad. So essentially you don't want to invest a lot of time in social media until you've really gotten down the other channels that are far more likely to have a return for your business.
00:10:39 So of course there are reasons to be on social. I'm not saying don't be on social. You want to minimize your time. My recommendation is two hours a week, and we'll talk about how to do that. So again, thinking about, you know, your ROI in your Coworking business comes from new members. So member acquisition, that's hard to do on social.
00:11:00 I'm not saying nobody does it. I hear people say that they do it. Most people don't. The other ROI for your Coworking business comes from increasing the spend of a current member. So what does that look like? A member upgrades to an office or a member starts booking meeting rooms with you, or they host a paid event with you in addition to what they're already buying.
00:11:20 So essentially, you know, they have some membership with you and they buy more things from you, meaning rooms, event, space, you know, they add folks to their team and get more seats. So increasing spend of a current member is a great ROI. Do we do that through social? No. I mean, maybe they could become more aware that you have meeting rooms and events based by seeing your posts on social,
00:11:45 but we're still running into the 10% issue, which is that anytime you post on social, only 10% of your audience sees your posts. And it may not be your current members. They just may not fall into that 10%. So in terms of increasing the spend of a current member, your best bet is your newsletter, your member newsletter. If you don't have one yet gotta,
00:12:06 and if you need help getting started with one, we do detailed training on that in our Community Manager University. So sign up your team and get them to start it for you and things like in-house signage, right? Like super analog approaches to increasing the spend of current members. And then the third area for ROI is increasing the lifetime value of your current members.
00:12:32 So the number one way to do this is to have the right product, the right pricing and the right location. So if you have those things in place, then it's going to be easy for you to attract members. It's not easy to get all those things, right? But once you do, it'll be easier to attract members. So that has nothing to do with social media.
00:12:53 But after you get those things right, helping your members to feel a strong connection to the community can help with this. Then, you know, helping your members develop relationships, that's probably the community managers, job hosting, member events, things like that, but highlighting those aspects of your space and the member experience on social might help. So member features maybe inside jokes member,
00:13:21 event, photos, et cetera. I'd still argue. These things are best done through your newsletter, but you can augment them through social. The, this also helps with the FOMO that the folks who haven't joined yet might have, but again, remember the 10% issue. Anytime you post only 10% of your audience is going to see these posts. So you have to post frequently,
00:13:46 you have to post repeatedly in order to get your message out through social. So you want to have a multi-channel approach to any really important messages. I see people post about this. It's so true. We feel like we're repeating ourselves over and over again. When we talk about something, don't we, if we say something in a newsletter, we think everybody heard it and they're over it.
00:14:09 If we say it again, that is not true. Your newsletter open rate, I see some really stellar internal newsletter, open rates. Ours used to be really high, incredibly high, but still even if you got 50%, 60% open rate of your internal member newsletter, that's half of your members you haven't seen or heard that message. So also put it on social,
00:14:33 repeat it in your newsletter, put it in your blog post, put it everywhere. So what is the ROI that you can get from social? I would argue the top approach you could take to get ROI is to build your email list. So we're going to talk about your newsletter later in this series. I think it's super, super critical. It gets a much higher open rate and it's really engaging and you own that platform.
00:15:00 So it's critical to have one. So build your email list, using your social media platform, give people reasons to join your email list. And you have to do that through using things like link tree, or really simple URL is to get people to opt in through posts that you're putting up on social, but you can get member engagement. So again,
00:15:22 it's hard to recruit members through social, but you can promote your members. You can tag your members. You can engage with the external community, which might lead to more brand awareness in your community. You can create a brand presence so that when potential members are researching low local Coworking options, they get a feel for your brand. That is in addition to what they're going to get from coming to your website,
00:15:47 which is probably what they're going to do first, probably their first stop is your Google business profile. Then if that looks good, they're going to go to your website. And if that looks good, they will check out your social links and start following you for awhile. And hopefully if they're kind of on the fence, they might subscribe to your newsletter and get to know what's happening in your space and get a sense of do I fit in?
00:16:08 Is this a good solution for me? So there is some ROI from social, but it doesn't do the primary three sort of things that we're looking to do in our business. Get more members, get our members to spend more and increase the lifetime value. It can contribute a little bit, but it's never the best approach to achieve any of those three things,
00:16:31 but it can be on the list. So let's talk about a few things here who should do your social media. So the owner should try not to, it's not a high ROI activity. And so the owner should try to not be the person who does it on that being said is not easy to outsource social media because your tone and your vibe is important on social.
00:16:54 Otherwise, you know, if it's comes out as sort of bland and doesn't have your voice, and doesn't really tell people who you are, if they're not worth doing so, who were the best candidates to help your Community Manager? If they can, if they have a time, I know community managers wear so many hats. We include social. As I've mentioned a couple of times now in our Community Manager training,
00:17:17 we assume that community managers are in charge of social. And we find that most of the time they are, it could also be an intern that's physically present in the space. Social can be a great opportunity for an intern to contribute that being said, they need some content guidance. And we'll talk about kind of the planning grid that we recommend. It could be a member that spends time in the space.
00:17:40 This is super important though. I hear a lot of people talk about doing a trade with a member. So think about who you trade with. Don't trade with someone in an office, because if you think about spending two hours a week on social media, so two hours a week, the only way you can do that is if you post in advance.
00:17:59 So you're going to batch your posts. You're going to line them up in a platform like Lhuillier buffer, and then you're not going to look at social again. You can go in and interact a little bit here and there. You should set a timer. So that's eight hours a month. So if you're attempted to do a trade with a member, you should make sure you value it appropriately.
00:18:19 So let's say social media work is worth 30 bucks an hour. That's a little bit arbitrary. If you outsource it to an agency, you will certainly pay more. But let's say you had a really strong VA. Then you're paying the VA $30 an hour. You're allocating eight hours a month for this work. That's $240. So that's about equal to a full-time Coworking desk.
00:18:43 So if you're going to trade with a member, then 240 bucks is about what you're trading. So again, don't trade a $600 office or an $800 office to get your social media done, unless you have tested it. And it really does drive member acquisition. Organic social media is what I'm talking about here, not paid. So kind of talking about content and how to get it done.
00:19:07 Hey, I just wanted to jump in really quickly before we continue with our discussion. If you're working on opening a coworking space, I want to invite you to join me for my free masterclass three behind-the-scenes secrets to opening a coworking space. If you're working on opening a coworking space, I want to share the three decisions that I've seen successful operators make when they're creating their Coworking business.
00:19:32 The masterclass is totally free. It's about an hour and includes some Q and a. If you'd like to join me, you can register at Everything Coworking dot com forward slash masterclass. If you already have a coworking space, I want to make sure you know, about Community Manager, University, Community Manager, University is a training and development platform for community managers.
00:19:55 And it can be for owner-operators. It has content training resources, templates from day one to general manager. The platform includes many courses that cover the major buckets of the Community Manager role from community management, operations, sales, and marketing, finance, and leadership. The content is laid out in a graduated learning path. So the Community Manager can identify what content is most relevant to them,
00:20:21 depending on their experience and kind of jump in from there. We provide a live brand new training every single month for the Community Manager group. We also host a live Q and a call every single month so that the community managers can work through any challenges that they're having or opportunities get ideas from other community managers build their own peer network. We also have a private slack group for the group.
00:20:48 So if you're interested in learning more, you can go to Everything. Coworking dot com forward slash Community Manager. Social should just leverage your core pieces of content that you create. It doesn't need to be original unless you're running like a really original campaign through social. That make sense. And you're not sort of recreating that on your blog or in your newsletter or podcast.
00:21:16 So an example would be a member feature. The member features the original content. It gets amplified through social media, but it lives in your blog and it lives in your newsletter. That's just an example. In our Community Manager training, we give some deeper examples on that. So two hours a week on social media post it in advance in our Community Manager training,
00:21:40 we share a planning grid that really, really simplifies how you approach social media and makes it specific to your business. So essentially you pick categories and you assign them two days and you create themes. So that you're sort of just filling in the blanks cross-referencing themes and topics for each day of the month. So you could literally sit down and pre-batch all of your posts for an entire month.
00:22:14 It would take you a few hours, but you could do it well in advance. So we teach that in our Community Manager training, but do you want to take that approach? There are a lot of social media planning grids out there that you can leverage if you just do a Google search, but we recommend using a grid, a planning grid and posting in advance,
00:22:35 batching and posting in advance so that you're not waking up you or your Community Manager waking up every morning and trying to figure out what are you going to post? Do you spend so much more time when you're doing it in the moment than if you have a framework that you're using with strategic topics and themes that you're just kind of mixing and matching throughout the month,
00:22:58 that's the way you outsource it also, and make sure that the content that's getting posted is aligned with the type of content that you want to create for your business. So that is it on social media. And we're going to talk about newsletters next week. You heard me say today, I think newsletters are super, super critical. A lot of you have them.
00:23:18 We'll talk about some best practices. If you don't have them, let's make that a goal to get a newsletter in place in 2022. So we will see you next week. Thank you for listening to today's episode. If you like, what you heard, tell a friend, hit that subscribe button and leave us a rating and review. It makes a huge difference in helping others.
00:23:44 Like you find us. If you'd like to learn more about our education and coaching programs, head over to Everything. Coworking dot com. We'll see you next week.
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