321. Myth or Fact? Organic Social Media is Critical to the Success of a Coworking Business
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321. Myth or Fact? Organic Social Media is Critical to the Success of a Coworking Business
00:00:02,"Welcome to the Everything Coworking podcast. This is your host, Jamie Russo. Thank you for joining me today. I hope you're all enjoying fall. I would like to give a giant shout out to our Coworking Startup School cohort, which starts this week. We've been enrolling folks, kind of like crazy, very exciting. So I think there are a lot of folks who are thinking about opening a space next year and are doing the homework,"
00:00:31,"so we are thrilled to have them here. I also wanna give a big shout out to Kim Lee. She is on our coaching team and she is awesome. She has been supporting these cohorts and she is a fan. She knows a lot about Coworking. She's a really good business brain, really great marketing brain, and she's an excellent facilitator. So we're super excited to kick off our second live cohort."
00:00:57,"We're doing a new live format and we love it and we think that it's working really well. So welcome to our new cohort this week and we're having our Community Manager q and a call tomorrow. Lots of good topics on the schedule. And Janelle, one of our coaches in our Community Manager University just sent me our fall and winter event calendar, which I'm gonna take a look at and review."
00:01:24,"We're gonna release that next week, I think. So, lots of good ideas for member events, some how toss some promotion, promotional images. We've been doing a little bit more like done for you content for our Community Manager group. We do lots of training on hot topics like the C M R A change changes, but we also have been doing some great done for you content around events."
00:01:53,"We're posting Google Business posts twice a month, I think we're doing now. Images, text, you just customize it, drop it in. But you gotta keep those Google business listings updated. I would guess 80% of your leads come from your Google business listing and Google likes an updated listing and it can be hard to think about what to post and just take the time to do it."
00:02:20,"So we're trying to keep that simple for our Community Manager group. Okay, so speaking of marketing, we're gonna talk a little bit about marketing today. And this has been on my mind. I've been working on this in my own business and it came up in the Facebook group. So someone posted about hiring a social media agency to work on social media for their business."
00:02:45,"So let's kinda walk through this. Okay, her first note was realizing how important the social media aspect of this business is. I reached out to someone local who does social media, and then she goes on to say she's in a small, more rural town. So to me, rural means pretty small. Okay, so let's zoom out a little bit and talk about marketing budgets for Coworking spaces."
00:03:10,"Now, the rule of thumb is gonna be 8% of revenue should be spent on marketing. So you gotta have a marketing budget. You cannot just build it and hope they come except for this person, Sarah, who is in a small town. And we have lots of folks in our programs and in the Facebook group that are in smaller towns. So that's gonna get a little bit tricky."
00:03:32,"Now her revenue will be lower, so maybe she will only spend 8% of her revenue. It's gonna be hard for her to figure out what the effective marketing tools are. So let's go back to our 8%. Most Coworking spaces are going to be better off spending that on Google ads. And why is that? So let's think about Google Ads versus Facebook ads."
00:03:54,"We do this training for our community managers. By the way, we have some great training in our program to help think about this concept and using ads for not Google ads. We do talk about Facebook ads for Coworking businesses. Okay? So Google ads are used by folks who are actively searching, right? So they open Google or they open their phone and they say,"
00:04:16,"Google Coworking near me. I saw a very funny, I think it was like an Instagram post, it was a photo of a restaurant and the restaurant's name was restaurant near me because that's how people search, right? So if I know about Coworking, I'm aware of Coworking and I wanna find a Coworking space either for the day or for the hour or to become a member,"
00:04:38,"I'm gonna search Coworking near me on Google or some other search engine. So you wanna show up on Google and you can do that by paying Google. So through ads, I always recommend, not always, there's always exceptions, but generally if you're opening in a new market with competition, you're gonna wanna run ads because you gotta get to the top of those."
00:05:01,"Search results can't be on the second page. You don't even really wanna be further than the third result down because research shows that people are looking at the top three results and taking action on those. So you probably have to pay for that spot. So you wanna focus on the people who already know you exist because that's a much easier market to target than people who do not know you exist."
00:05:23,"However, if you are like Sarah or many of you listening who are super passionate about bringing Coworking to your small town or even rural town, she says, where people don't know about Coworking, they're not Googling. So then what? What do you spend your marketing dollars on? Okay, so Sarah's gonna have to figure this out and anybody listening is gonna have to just experiment a little bit."
00:05:48,"But what I do not recommend, so Sarah put some social media packages in this post, starting at 600 bucks a month, going up to a thousand dollars a month, Sarah's revenue and her profit on her Coworking space in a small town. She is gonna wanna really know her numbers. So Sarah, not that you cannot have a profitable Coworking space that's small,"
00:06:10,"but your margins are probably gonna be thinner if you have a smaller space in a smaller market. So we talked about that on the last episode. So you have to be really, really careful about how you're spending your marketing dollars and what you're spending them on. And so my thinking through what's gonna work for you here, I'm thinking that yes, you're gonna wanna do social media because your audience probably is not aware that Coworking exists."
00:06:39,"You're gonna have to educate them. How do you use a Coworking space? Maybe you're hosting, maybe people can host events there. Maybe they can buy day passes, maybe they can host meetings there. Maybe they can do their work there. You're gonna wanna tell them about this solution and how they can use the space and you're gonna wanna educate them and you're gonna wanna show them social proof of other people in town they know that are using this space."
00:07:02,"So Google's not gonna work because they're not googling for Coworking because they probably don't know it exists. They probably don't know it's a thing. Some of them do, but by and large they probably don't know yet. And so how do you get in front of them? How do you educate them? Social media is an option. However, as folks who responded to the post noted,"
00:07:23,"unfortunately organic reach for social media. So Facebook, Instagram, maybe TikTok is a little better since it's Coworking is probably not as typical on TikTok and TikTok. Iss maybe still a slightly newer platform, but organic reach is 2% to 10%. So if you have a thousand followers, then 200, sorry, 20 to a hundred of your followers are gonna see any given post."
00:07:55,"It is brutal. It's so much work for so little return. But in your case, what are the levers that you're gonna pull? You can put signs up in town, you can strike up co-marketing deals with other local businesses. You can host events and work your butt off to tell people about your business and help them learn about it. It's a lot of hustle."
00:08:16,"And so I think social media is gonna be one of the levers that you're gonna wanna pull. So my next thought for you is you might need the gold package, but a thousand bucks a month, how are you going to get an R O I on that? I would need to see your numbers and you wanna know your numbers before you spend that money."
00:08:35,"And my next thought besides, can you even get the r o i is if it's the only marketing lever you can pull, do you wanna do it yourself? Do you wanna own that at least at first so that you are sure it's done really well and you really get to know what drives the results? Here's the challenge with social media, it's a lot of work and if you outsource it,"
00:08:58,"it's often not done very well and you don't know how it works. You don't know what's driving engagement, you don't know what's driving eyeballs and you don't know how to run ads. So maybe in your smaller market, your organic reach might be higher. You would have to test and see. So how much reach are you getting when you make a post?"
00:09:20,"If you have a small audience and you're reaching like 10 people at a time, girl, you do not wanna be spending your time on that, right? So you want higher reach. So I'm gonna back up. I probably, you know, I'm not a natural at social media. As a matter of fact, I'm currently in charge of social media for our soccer team,"
00:09:39,"our soccer league, and I'm terrible at it. We had to host at a picnic this weekend and I completely forgot to take photos. I sometimes remember to take photos. But another woman was there and she shares the account with me and thank goodness she took the photos, I was hosting it. So I had a lot going on. But, and in my own business we do very little on social media."
00:09:59,"So the Facebook group is an area of focus for us. But we most, we do a lot of work on LinkedIn. We post a lot of podcast content and other content, but in general, we don't do much with social because there's no return on it. Now I have a different business than you have, but even when I ran local spaces,"
00:10:18,"organic social media is not what's bringing people in the door usually. So in a market with a lot of competition, people are searching on Google, what can social media be used for in bigger markets? So let's take a break from Sarah for a minute and talk about everybody else who's not in a small market. So brand building. So you wanna have a presence."
00:10:37,"I will say that I, at some point we'll spend more time on our brand building. I, what I usually recommend is that if you have a Community Manager just make it a part of their role. Maybe they're not amazing at social media, that's okay. We do training on social media in our Community, Manager, University. And there are a lot,"
00:10:58,"as this came up in the responses to the post too, there are a lot of AI tools that can give you ideas. So chat g P t is just an easy button for social media ideas. There's a chat G P t Canva integration now. So E, even if social media is not your thing, it's, you know, it's, it's not like your natural born passion or ability."
00:11:23,"You can get good enough at it to do it. And we te we actually teach a really great framework into our Community Manager University that helps you just sort of say, okay, you know, we're gonna mix and match these topics and we're gonna make a little schedule and we're gonna ask chat g p t for some post ideas and we're gonna use Canva and use some templates and we're gonna bust these out and we're gonna schedule them and we're gonna spend a fixed amount of time on social media."
00:11:48,"So you have a presence but you are not overspending on the amount of time because you have to be careful about the R O I. So we can't forget that our Community Manager time costs money and you have to watch out for the R O I on that. Now have I seen folks, so somebody posted in the Facebook group who said 50% of their leads come from Instagram."
00:12:12,"Okay, if you know that you're killing it on social and that it's bringing in leads, then heck yeah. And I would say they should be running ads. I they, they might be running ads they didn't specify. So always know what works for you. So I just started running ads to my podcast and we just got a whole, I'm sure this is not at the immediate cause and effect,"
00:12:34,"but we just had a bunch of people register for our live Coworking Startup School cohort that starts tomorrow. And I had this moment of, oh my god, maybe they're from the ads. That would be slightly unreasonable 'cause I just started running them and that would be a really quick trip down my sales funnel. So I looked some of them up and you know,"
00:12:57,"I try to track where do our leads come from? But that is the point. You can experiment and then you should ask people when they come in the door. So the person who said they get 50% of their leads from social media, they're asking. So when we host our kickoff session on Thursday for this cohort, we are going to confirm how those people got to us."
00:13:18,"Some of them I can see from our C R M what emails or what campaigns they came from, which is awesome. And that is the value of having an email list. And some of them I cannot tell. And so, let's see, maybe somebody did come from those ads. Those ads are just the podcast. They're not even like meant to be sales ads."
00:13:35,"They're just meant to get people to get to know us, which is often, for many of you, that's gonna be what social media is used for. And it's just kind of checking a box on the brand building front. Unless you're really amazing at it. And I know some of you are. So we've had some folks in our Community Manager program that just are really,"
00:13:57,"really, I think have a special talent and capacity for social media. The calling Wood Foundry has this amazing campaign that they do every year with local businesses. A huge shout out. I think they run it in February so you may not be able to find it. Workspace Collective does a great job with their social, I just know, you know, a few,"
00:14:19,"I, I don't even follow a lot along on social media. I am an Instagram user, but more for personal stuff. So, but the organic reach thing is really what does it for me. I am really focused on being efficient in our marketing spend both in time. So the PO you know, in my business, the podcast takes an incredible amount of time and it's a marketing tool for us."
00:14:42,"And then for the ads I'm gonna pay. And I will tell you, I've studied Facebook ads for a long time. We've, we did run them for our Palo Alto Coworking space. We relied mostly on Google ads though. So for both locations Google Ads was what was the customer acquisition driver for us. Too much competition in both locations at some point."
00:15:04,"And a lot of people actively searching. So always we were always Google ad runners and Facebook ads is the challenge I think for especially smaller operators. If you're a multi-site operator, then your marketing strategy, you know, it's just, it's going to look different. But you should still have the same principles in place where you're thinking about R O I and you're tracking where do those leads come from?"
00:15:30,"You should know where your leads come from so that you know what to double down on and what's not worth your time. The 80 20 rule for sure applies to marketing. So 80% of your leads are gonna come from 20% of your sources. And for most people that's Google ads. But again, back to Sarah, she can't pull the Google ads lever."
00:15:47,"So she wants to do social media, but here's the challenge, outsourcing it, it's just expensive, right? So the social media folks were good at their jobs, although these people had a typo in their, in their marketing image, so she cannot use them. But if they're good at their job and they're getting results, then they also need to charge a certain amount to make it worth their time."
00:16:11,"And that may just be high a higher fee than the r o I that you're gonna get on it and probably you're gonna be pretty disappointed. Yes, they can learn your voice. If it's a really good agency that can learn your voice and it's like you're doing it, then they're probably gonna be pretty expensive. So in terms of outsourcing organic social media and outsourcing ads for a business that is a,"
00:16:34,"you know, one location, two locations, it's probably just not gonna make sense. The r o I is not gonna be there. And you're gonna spend more on the ads management or the social, well the ads management's a better example. You're gonna spend more on the ads manager management than you can on ads. So maybe you spend 300 bucks a month on ads and the ads management's gonna spend cost you $1,500."
00:16:57,"You know, it's lopsided like that. So it's tricky. So learning how to do Facebook ads is, or Instagram, same company, is not hard. It's getting much easier. There's some really good courses on it. Somebody actually, one of our Coworking Startup School students teaches social media and she mentioned she's kind of work thinking about working on a course and we should talk about that because I love that idea."
00:17:24,"That's really specific to our industry. 'cause I think that can be really relevant. So I will tell you that I actually just did a Facebook ads challenge and I had signed up for the challenge in July and I did part of it. I recorded the video, I did a little bit of the work and I just didn't get it done. And I think they took down all the videos and I got sidetracked."
00:17:51,"So this time I said I'm doing it, I'm gonna get a darned ad up. And so I did, I went through the challenge and it was awesome 'cause they were really like short videos and they kind of got you through the technical things. I have run Facebook ads before and outsourced them. So my ad account was set up already, which was a huge hurdle."
00:18:10,"So you could always pay someone to set up your ad account and get through the technical pain of that part of it. So I was good to go. I didn't have any, you know, errors in my account. I had my pixel placed, I had all that stuff in place, so I just got it done. So you might see podcast ads in your feeds,"
00:18:30,"you might see me in a video. I actually hate the video, it's so awful. But I force myself to put it up. It's up and it's converting and maybe we're getting links to the landing page and hopefully people are listening to the podcast and maybe they're purchasing the Startup school from it. We'll see. Anyway, back to social media, it's super."
00:18:51,"So this is, I would say, Sarah, this is an assumption and a myth for a lot of locations. Your first sentence saying, realizing how important social media is for this business. Don't confuse social media impact or activity with community building. I get that it can be related. So the Collingwood Foundry is a great example and the campaign that they run every year,"
00:19:17,"I think for the month of February, they do a giveaway with local businesses. So it costs them money and they're featuring a local business every stinking day. And how amazing is that? And they're engaging in the broader community and that is super special and a part of their brand and they're also in a smaller market. So it works for them and it's probably part of their ethos."
00:19:42,"And so all of those things, right, it works. And for them that statement might be true, that social media is important for their business. It is an important brand driver, it is a discovery tool. People find them because they're engaging with other businesses and cross, you know, tagging and, and all those things. So for them it may be a really important discovery tool,"
00:20:03,"but they know it. So they've tested it and they know it and they know what works and what they should kind of double down on. And they know, you know, it's important to either outsource that or have their team build that competency. But don't assume that it's important. 'cause I can tell you for my Palo Alto location and for lots, lots of my members,"
00:20:23,"I work with hundreds of operators and community managers every single month. And for most of them, social media is simply not driving membership. And it's not 'cause they're not good at it, it's because organic social media has a tiny reach. But for some of you it does work. And so it's worth testing, but test with your eyes wide open and you need to understand it as a platform before you outsource it."
00:20:46,"So in my opinion, you gotta study it. So take a class, listen to podcasts, like try get into it because it's not hard to understand sort of the strategy and some of the metrics around it and figure out whether it's working or not. Do that before you're spending a thousand dollars a month for somebody to do organic posts for you get to do it."
00:21:09,"And so for Sarah, I would say if it's that critical for her business, if it's the one lever she can pull in her smaller market, she should own it for a little while and get to know it really well and how it works and how it works best for her and then she could potentially outsource it. What my favorite is to have a member who does it,"
00:21:30,"I don't love trades because I think that is just fraught with challenges. But you could essentially do a money trade and trade. You know, if your membership's 300 bucks, trade it for $300 worth of social media work every month or something equivalent, but actually trade the money that way. Everybody's accountable and delivering what they're supposed to deliver. But I love having somebody in the membership who's doing it because then they have the app assets,"
00:21:59,"they understand your brand, they're a part of the community and you're giving business to one of your members, which is awesome. So keep that in mind. But it can be very tempting and I think there are probably Coworking spaces that are doing well on TikTok. And if you are one of them, I would actually love to talk to you because I think we could probably share some best practices with other Coworking spaces."
00:22:23,"So let us know if that is working for you. I feel like I talked to somebody recently who said that TikTok was actually working really well. TikTok not for everybody. I have never post, oh, I posted one time during the pandemic on TikTok, one of those stances that I made my daughter do with me, but never for business. And it,"
00:22:41,"it could be a gap. We'll see, I also would not underestimate LinkedIn as a platform. So we have heard, so I participate heavily on LinkedIn. I think it's a great professional platform. I think you still, sometimes I do feel, feel like, you know, it's a lot of circular folks supporting each other and not necessarily driving customer acquisition or driving awareness."
00:23:10,"So you have to be careful about that. So again, just because it, you know, there's a lot of activity, doesn't mean that it's actually driving leads, but platforms like LinkedIn have really robust search features and tools that you can use on the backend. Actually somebody just left me a voicemail on a voicemail, a voice message, an audiogram on LinkedIn,"
00:23:30,"indirect message. And that I think is brilliant and I am going to use that because it was really powerful. She had taken our Community Manager University course, she was applying for the job and just wanted to drop me a thank you because she felt like it was gonna give her a real, you know, boost. And she enjoyed the class and she left for me an audiogram and I was like,"
00:23:52,"wow, that is really impactful and I'm going to use that. And it's also unique. It's not everybody's doing it. So think about some of those things as well. Okay, that's it for now. So I think if I was gonna give you some takeaways, I would say always remember Google is for people who know about Coworking and they're actively searching,"
00:24:12,"buy ads on Google and try to show up in the top three search results. Facebook is to get to people who don't know Coworking. They're not actively searching, you're trying to interrupt them. Oh you know what, sorry, I have to interrupt. I was just having this conversation with someone from Pacific Workplaces. We were talking about how great the current industrious Facebook ad campaign is."
00:24:36,"They have videos of their members and the members are small business owners and they're telling their stories and it's so compelling. So I see the ads all the time probably for San Francisco. I don't have an industrious very close to me. There's also a Facebook ads library. This is a little bit of a tangent, but if you wanna see what other Coworking spaces are doing on Facebook,"
00:24:57,"you can search for Coworking ads in the Facebook library. So just Google, Facebook library and then search for Coworking ads. The thing you cannot tell is if they're working now, industries has always spent money on Facebook, so I assume they know what they're doing and that they're tracking their r o I and that these campaigns are working. And I'm telling you it's very compelling."
00:25:19,"It makes their brand feel it. It gives their brand like a warm fuzzy feeling for me versus being sort of a, a bigger brand that's kind of not as personal. Those people in those videos make me feel warm and fuzzy and like wanna be a part of that community or some community. Do you know what I mean? It really highlights that awesome community vibe and the people,"
00:25:44,"you know, they talk about the facilities, but also how great it is to walk into an office and the hospitality and the other humans in the space. It's a great campaign. So if you're thinking about it, take a look at their campaign. If you're not, if it's not already showing up in your feed. Okay, so takeaways. Google ads are first active searchers."
00:26:02,"Facebook. We're teaching people about Coworking or Instagram, sorry, I always say Facebook, I don't know why I do that. But social platforms are, are, are for interrupting. And the reach on social platforms is 2% to 10% organically. That's if you spend no money and you just post. And that is really depressing and not a great use of time."
00:26:25,"So you wanna pay for ads, take a class and learn how to do it yourself. And if you're stuck on the tech, pay someone on Upwork to set up your ad campaign for you. I will say that is one of the things that like really, I had, you know, kind of done the setup. I wasn't sure if it was right,"
00:26:41,"I've always had my pixel Placed. You need to have your pixel on your website in order to run ads to make sure that gets taken care of and track know where your leads come from because maybe social is the way you're getting leads. Even if you're in a big market, the person who said they get 50% of their leads is in Minneapolis, which is in a major market."
00:26:58,"So you gotta know where your leads come from, make sure you're, whoever's doing your tours or running your C R M, that field has to get filled out. That's a non-negotiable. You gotta know where they come from. You gotta be able to run reports on that and then respond accordingly. So, okay. And pss, if you're using TikTok,"
00:27:17,"send me a note. Okay? Hope everybody's doing well and I will see you same time, same place next week."
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