📍 Hi everyone, and welcome back to the e-Commerce Impact Podcast. It's, I'm really excited today to have our guest, Emeric Nu here to talk to us about organic social media. emic, welcome along to the podcast. Thank you, Jesse. I'm very happy to be here. Thank you for the intro.

Yeah. So why don't we start off by telling by you telling our guests a little bit about you and how you got to, to where you are now? So first software was a piece of software to help people build their own communities online.

Long story short and didn't work as, as a B2C. Like we, I think we tried to be Facebook in 2000, but too early. And then we pivoted that to B2B White label software. 

And then eventually one day we, you know, we realized that, social was becoming a thing and Facebook was becoming really, really good. That was in the, in the early 2010. And we, we built Agorapulse out of that. That was initially only a contest and promotion software for Facebook. And from there it evolved into, you know, Twitter, LinkedIn and every other social network.

And more than we were not doing contest and promotions anymore. And we understood that if we wanted to have a sustainable business, we would have to build. A piece of software that someone in the company is using day in and day out. And it's the, the, the daily tool of someone in the company, that someone in the company where the community managers in the early 20, 2011, 2012, and then become social media managers and marketers were, you know, working on social media.

So that's how the the that's how we became what we are today by. Pivoting and pivoting and pivoting and adapting and adapting and adapting to the reality. So that's what entrepreneurship is often all about. Yeah. 

So first of all, when we started Agorapulse in 2011, our homepage at the time was saying something very funny. Facebook fans aren't worth anything unless you know who they are. And that was based on the, the, the, the promise that we would connect the Facebook ID of the people who were interacting on your page with their email when they were entering into a contest or promotion on your page.

So that was how Agorapulse was born. It's like giving more. Sense and meaning and value to what you're doing on Facebook, because now you have their email and you know who they are and you can connect that to your CRM and everything else in your business. So Facebook has changed the roles of the game many, many times.

And what we intended to do in the early 20, 2012 2011, 2012 is not possible anymore, but we've never lost sight of this. This has to make sense from a business perspective. And if it's all, if it's only about getting engagement, which is great engagement is nothing, there's nothing bad with engagement, but if it's engagement along the C suite rarely understand what engagement is, is creating for their business and decision makers are when things get a little bit tough, decision makers are not going to favorably look at.

Engagement as a business metric or like comments or shares, they're going to look at business metrics that they're used to look at, which is conversion revenue and leads. And so we've never lost track of that. And I, I, and there's a story that I, that is at the origin of that, which I, which I love to tell because it's, it's a great story.

It's a, it's a story of a lady A British lady named Fiona Abrams, and she was head of customer experience for a women underwear brand in the UK, and she was in charge as customer experience as the head of customer experience of answering all the comments on social media under the. Ads that they were running on Facebook, and as they were running dozens and dozens and dozens of ads and spending a lot of money on Facebook to sell those underwear she was basically spending her days and responding to comments because many of those comments were about the product in the ad.

So many of those comments were not trolls or spam or, or a waste of time. It was actually a great use of her time. So she quickly. Realize that if she wanted to do her job as a customer experience, head of a customer experience, she, she would have to not only respond to Facebook comments day in and day out.

So she hired a team of virtual assistants in the Philippines. And she explained to them, okay, this is how you respond. This is what you respond to. And this is what I need to see in the response. And one of the things she wanted them to put in the response was, if they're asking you for a specific color, send them to the page where they.

Get to the color of the product, the product with the right color right there. They're asking you for a specific size, do the same thing. So really make their life easy. If they are interested in our product, send them to the exact page where they can actually actually purchase the product that they are looking for.

And They started to do that and at one point, her boss was very budget savvy, like all the bosses usually are, came to her and say, why are we hiring Filipinos to do that? It's, I think the budget was 4, 000 a month or something like that pounds. And she said, well, you know, it's, it's, it's hundreds of comments per day.

I cannot do that on my own and say, well, you don't have, we don't have to respond to them. There is a link in the ad. They can just go back in the ad and click on the link and find the product by themselves. And, you know. Sometimes bosses do smart things and say smart things. Sometimes they don't. And if you are a customer experience person, you're like, no, you want to respond to them.

You want to show them that you care about their question and their question matters. And the, the, the shorter, the line between their question and the product they want to buy, the more likely they will buy something from us. So she was convinced that was the right thing to do, but she, she didn't have any number to prove her boss wrong.

And what she did from that point forward is she started to ask her Filipino VA to ask UTM parameters to every single link that they were adding in the comments that they were replying under those Facebook ads. It was hundreds, a hundred times a day. Copy paste, you know, UTM source equal Facebook UTM medium.

Equal FB ad comment and so on and so forth. And they started to do that. And a month later she went into her Google analytics account and here, here it was, she looked at the medium FB ad comment and the amount was there. She had generated, I think it was 5, 000 pounds of revenue directly from the links in the comment that their team of VA was posting.

So 5, 000 pounds made it may, may not seem like a lot of money. But because her team of Filipino VA was costing 4, 000, at least now she, she could go back to her boss and say, well, it's costing 4k, but it's, it's making 5k. So at the very, very least, this activity is paying for itself. So at the very, very least, you should, you should leave me the budget.

Because it is not costing us anything. It is actually making us a thousand pounds, which is ridiculous, but it allows for that project to continue. And it allows surface, I say the tip of the iceberg there's, there was probably more, but as you know, tracking things online is not 100 percent accurate. And I, like I, I love to say if you're, if you're.

Seeing the tip of an iceberg. There's probably an iceberg down the water. If you're not seeing any tip, there's probably no freaking iceberg. So measuring the tip of the iceberg is already really, really good. And especially when it pays for the people doing the work at the very least, what you get as a return on that investment is that it is paying for itself.

So that she. She got, she came to me, that was like five years ago in 20, 2018 six years ago, and she came to me because they were using us to manage those comments on those Facebook ads, which is one of the things we do well. And she said, well, I'm Rick, this is a pain in the butt. Cause I have, my team has to copy and paste those UTMs.

And, and, and, and what she told me basically was. I don't have to do that when I'm running ads. I don't have to do that when I'm using HubSpot or when I'm using my marketing automation software, most of the software I'm using to do marketing, they are taking care of this tracking attribution thing for me.

I don't have to build a framework around it. So it will do that. And. Can't your software do that? And I looked at every software on the market and none of them were doing any of that. And I thought there's something missing here 

and that's how we got started in, in first of all, with, with this obsession or we need to help them prove that what they're doing is, is. It's beyond like comments and shares and, and it's, there is a way to do that, but it's painful as heck because it's really, really manual and very, very time consuming.

And, and it is, it is my opinion that virtual assistant in the Philippines are not the right solution. Human beings are not the right solution to a problem like that. Software should solve that. So that's the starting point. That's the story that got, that got it all started. And since then I, so I asked my data team to build a dashboard where I can see who is winning and, and, and how, and how much, and every time I see something great, I go and I contact them and I, I, I try to interview them on my podcast.

And actually it's funny you ask about e commerce because e commerce is probably the number one industry that is having success with this for, for a couple of reasons. The first reason is they are the best equipped to track everything and anything. Nobody is better equipped than an e commerce business to have all the analytic framework around their business to know exactly if this Facebook ad is, is, is ROI positive, if this YouTube ad works for them, if this partner is generating enough traffic to the website and so on and so forth.

So they have the infrastructure to, to track things, which trust me is a very important first step. And that's, that's, that's that's the first thing. And the second thing, because they are in business for a very simple purpose, which is sell stuff, right? That's why they're in business. You know, you can think of all the businesses out there.

Some businesses don't have such a clear purpose. When you're in commerce, you're just here to sell good product that you've, you've built and that changed the lives of people. And that's. That's all you care about. And the couple of examples that we have usually there's a little cheat is that they are, they address a very passionate. Crowd of people and the I have two examples.

Top of mind. One is is a U. S. Company that sells garments like sweatshirts and T shirts and caps and hats and that kind of stuff that have the logo of university sports team. And every time they release a new logo, like Indiana baseball, whatever the name of their team is, they're getting hundreds and hundreds of cells, like in, in, in the matter of 24 hours and that, that that customer alone went and it's all on Twitter, by the way, because apparently Twitter, sorry, X apparently X is the place where a sports fan gather on, on about their passion or about their, their, the, the team they love and this company, okay.

gets an average of six to 8, 000 of sales per tweet. And each tweet is announcing the launch of a new, a new line of garments and, and, and for a new university sport university team. And, and every single tweet is generating at least five or six K of business, which is. Amazing. She knew that they were doing well on Twitter, but she didn't know by how much, because again, copying and pasting all these UTMs day in and day out was a pain in the butt.

But with with the right system, she was able to track that. So that's one example, but there is a very passionate community of people who are eager to buy the product. So in that case, what you want to know is you want to make sure that you know, which. Team is doing better than others. You know, what type of garment is doing better than others.

And do you want to, do you want to do a re edition of certain garments that went really well, but are exhausted that there are no more of them in the inventory and that kind of stuff. So that helps them go very, very, narrowly and granularly and what works and what didn't, what didn't work. The second one is is and they're all quite small.

Like they're, they're less than 15 people. Most of them, the one I know about a few big companies are really, really good at that. And in general, the, the small ones are much more creative and much more efficient. The second one I'm thinking about, they sell plant based medicine that, that the person who started the business came up with the recipe and started to, to have them manufactured by a third party.

And what they're doing on social is that they never try to sell on social. They're always talking about the symptoms and the infection and the disease and all the health issues that they're curing with with their product. And what they do is on Facebook is they are only using the comments under the post to start when they engage in the conversation with people who come and say, Oh, that's amazing.

Thank you. Great information. I'd love to know more about, you know, how this can be cured. You have solutions for that. It's only then when they engage in the conversation using Facebook comment that they get that they get to put a link. Yes, we do. Here's the product that we use is the product that we have in the market for this.

If you're interested, here's the link. So they leave no link in the content. The content is all about providing value. And it's only when people engage with the content because they saw value in the content, then they. They, they go and go for the cell basically, and they do the same thing on Instagram. So what they do on Instagram, and they do the same with stories.

So the story is all about the symptom, the disease, how the infection can show itself, how you can identify it. And, and at the end, there's a call for DM. If you, if you want to know more, please, you know, send us a DM and we'll be happy to help. And it's through the direct, the direct message, the one on one conversation that they are going for the cell and they are.

Getting viewers of the story to say, yeah, very interesting. I'd love to know more and so on and so forth. So it's because people ask for the, they ask for the sale. Basically they ask for the product and they use that engagement to come to close the cell and to convert. Yeah, that's really interesting.

So I think there's two things I'm getting from that. So one is, you know, the algorithm doesn't love. Sales focused content and that's because people don't love it. Right? So if people aren't engaged, don't engage as much with like, Hey, buy my product as they do with like, I understand your problem. Here's some content to help you.

So that makes sense to me because if people love it, then the algorithm, you know, picks that up. And that's what the algorithm is built on. But then the other side of it for a business owner is like. You know, even big or small, do they, there's that hesitancy to do it that way because Oh God, then I've got to deal with the DMS and it's a mess and it's complicated and they can't track it.

And I, you know, who's, who's in charge. So I guess what you're saying is like, you need a tool to help make that part of it easier, trackable and manageable so that you can use this method without. Being overwhelmed by having to log into your, your Instagram DMs from your phone. Yeah, obviously you can copy paste all that and and manually get to GA4 and identify the mediums that you've used.

Like if you use, you know, source, Instagram, medium, Instagram DM, you're going to know it's coming from an Instagram DM. And then you can, you can even, even add the name of the person, you know, Instagram DM and. Jesse and February 5 and, and, and you can, that, and then when you go in GA for it, you can find all this information.

So you don't, you don't need a tool. It's just going to be super painful to do because you're going to have to granularly define in the URL, all the parameters that you need to know, to know what date was that, what profile was that, what person was that, what type of product was that and so on and so forth.

And at the end of the day, that's exactly how you do it. When you do advertising, right? When you do advertising, you have all this. Detail of where, what creative it was, when, when it was, was it a story? Was it a real, was it a video? Was it a photo? Was what copy did we use? What persona did we pursue? Did we go that age range or this age range?

So when you do advertising, you're, you're using all this criteria to define if what kind of advertising work best for you and, and how, how you should advertise to get. To be more successful with organic, you ideally should do the same thing, you know, what message rhythm is the best, what type of content reason is the best, who in my team is best at closing them.

You do that with salespeople. You could do that with, with on social media as well. If you have a very a very large team engaging with a lot of people on a daily basis. So that that's where the tooling is helpful is that taking away all that pain in all that manual work away from you. Yeah, yeah.

 I often have questions from people saying, you know, what should we post on social media? Well, the same thing you should post on your blog, the same thing you should post on your website, the same thing you should try to get them to tell about you in your, in your local newspaper. Like, how are you amazing? How does that look like, you know, what is the great story that your company is saying that you as a founder, as a business owner is saying, and, and, and just leverage social media to, to do that, to do, do that same thing.

It's not an easy thing to do, but that's the, there's, that's the only recipe.  Create content that people actually want to consume. And what about the channels and the formats? Thank one. For e commerce particularly, like what channels are you seeing be the most effective and what strategies on those channels, you know, is it, is it mostly short form video, Instagram, TikTok that you're seeing now that's driving the majority of traffic?

What are you seeing? So we're, the majority of traffic is still coming from Meta, interestingly enough. That's still the biggest platform in terms of traffic generation. And also in terms of advertising, there's the bulk of the advertising is being spent on meta. Interestingly enough. I, I see a lot of success on Pinterest.

Pinterest is very, is a very, very effective platform for certain type of e commerce business. Not all of them. The types that are linked to fashion the types that are linked to interior design, interior home improvement. . But if you are selling anything that people can use for inspiration and they can use like, like build a board about it and you know, watches, luxury watches, everything, fashion and luxury, Pinterest and Instagram 

yeah. So what does the strategy on Pinterest look like? Are you able to speak to the nitty gritty of like, what, what does a fashion brand do to kind of win at Pinterest? Oh, they, they, they, they use their. There. So if let's say I'm thinking about a wedding dress business that I saw having a lot of success on Pinterest.

So what does a future mate who's going to get married and wants to buy a dress start doing a year in advance, right? Getting inspired. So what, what, what is the ideal dress for me? What does that look like? So how do you, how do you define that? Where you look at a lot of dresses on a lot of women that look like you, that have the same body type or whatever.

And, and you start saying, I like this one and you start creating boards and asking your husband, your future husband, what do you think you like this one? You're like that one. And maybe your mother, your mother in law, whatever. And so what, what a brand that sells. Wedding dress can do is try to put their dresses in as many situations as possible outside, inside on a, on a white lady, on a, on a black lady, on a Mexican lady or whatever, so that they're covering every possible you know, show their their product in as many different person and person look and feel, but also in as many situations that the person who is actually looking at them is going to identify to them.

So, if you have 1, if you have 10 dress, like, find 10 people in 10 different aspects, and suddenly you have 10 multiplied by 10 multiplied by 10 ways of showing up your dress, and it's not only 10 pictures of dress, it's, it's. Now it's hundreds that people are going to be able to stumble upon and be inspired by.

So be creative in how you display the product in all the situations is going to, that are going to make people inspired. What, whatever example can I use? So, you know, we're, we're, it's, it's a personal example, but we're buying this, this wooden floor for the exterior of our, of our home and. If you're depending, you basically want to see in all angles how it looks before you actually get to the store and drive for 35 or 45 minutes and get a sample

so basically showing it, how, how does it look like with a modern construction? How does it look like close to an old house from the South of France? How does it look like around a swimming pool? How does it, so it's, again, it's, it's showing the product in so many different. Context that there, that you maximize the chance that the context, your potential future customer want to see it into are going to be able to find it on, on Pinterest.

So that's, that's the way I would look at showcasing my product on Pinterest is like, do not do one picture in one context, like try to put, try to showcase the product is as many contexts as possible. So you get as close as possible to the context of the potential customer when they, when they discover you.

That's so interesting. There's a really interesting parallel there with, with advertising. So what we talk about now is when a brand is scaling. We need them to like provide us with ads that appeal to all sorts of different types of people. So different demographic, different, you know, race, age, size, background, but also.

You know, video versus static versus, you know, different angles. So the more, and actually Facebook meta, the company is really pushing this. They call it creative diversity. So they want, they want us to have lots of different types of creative because then they can reach a wider audience. So yeah, it's rather than be vanilla beige, something.

You know, the same ad for everyone is actually have the exact ad for the exact person for their context and their situation. And then Facebook will find it for you. So I imagine organic algorithms also working in a similar way, right? It is, it is absolutely the case. And it's also a strategy to take you know, 10, 20, 30 pieces of product and turn them into hundreds of pieces of content.

Because you're, you're putting them in so many contexts that it's, it's going to feel your content calendar for the next year, instead of you wondering, so, Oh my God, what, what should I post on social? I only have 10 different floors or wooden floors, or I only have 25 different wedding dresses. How am I going to feel a content calendar?

Well, that's one way there are others, but that's one way you can feel it for months. Is that you're, you display your product in so many different contexts that can, people can relate to that. You have hundreds of potential posts that you can, you can have. And on Pinterest. On Pinterest, it's amazing 'cause it's evergreen.

It's like YouTube, you know, your YouTube video are gonna be seen two years, three years, five years from today. They never go away While your, your pin, your, your pins. What changes are you seeing on the social media landscape? And what do you see kind of coming up in the future? across, you know, all of the platforms really, or any in particular. Yeah, well, you know, changes, you guys have seen the changes with TikTok, who came from zero to hero in a matter of like two or three years.

 And what these platforms are doing is. Not deprofessionalizing,, you know, you, you shouldn't create perfect pixel, perfect content and videos where everything has been edited for hours with professional editors and you've been, you know, you spend two hours doing the makeup and so on and so forth.

Now, it's what. Works with those networks is like very raw, very quick and dirty. I take my phone, I feel myself, I say something silly and here you go. You have an ad or you have a piece of content and I think brands and businesses are, are playing, you know, playing that game 

 They do stuff that's very, very rough and, and it works, it works because people say, Hey, that's, here's a person doing something that's nice. Nike could not do that, but the social media person for Nike can do that because we all have the same phones and we all do do the same stuff.

And, and, and we all have fun with the same thing. So that's definitely a trend I'm seeing. More and more for, for brands, like, let's not try to be too edgy and just go in rough and do. Do you think that's cause the common kind of thing I hear is that TikTok, you have to be raw and kind of behind the scenes and rough, whereas like Instagram is still more of a.

You know, aesthetically pleasing, aspirational channel. Like, do you think that is even changing? Are we seeing, I don't see that in the reels on Instagram. I see the reels on Instagram be being as raw and rough as the video on TikTok. Maybe on the, on the, on the, on the pictures and the images on the single videos, but on the real side, on the video side that is.

That is basically coming in and disappearing. Basically, you know, the reels don't, unlike YouTube, the reels are not searched. Then they don't have a long lifespan. If you are editing those to, to death, you're, you're going to suck all your budget into something that's not going to be very productive.

So I think it has to be rough because it. It goes very quickly and it disappears almost as quickly. When you do photos, because they're going to stay on your profile and maybe the video you put on your profile are going to stay there as well. The one thing I know for sure is that the digital space is getting more and more crowded, more and more noisy. And, and the social media space is following that trend. It is crowded and it is noisy.

I have bad news. It's only going to get worse. Like it's we're, we're now going to go back to a world where the only three ways of communicating with your audience was radio, tv, and the phone, and, and, and snail mail, like the four ways. That world is behind us once and for all. It's not coming back.

So now we have to deal with this infinite number of channels, this inside those channels, this infinite number of media. Like you go on you go on, on Instagram, you're not only having to choose between Instagram and another social network, you also have to choose between reels and photos and videos.

 So what do you advise to brands who don't know which social channel to focus on? How should they focus on all of them? Should they pick one? What's your advice around that? I'm totally on pick one. I'm, I'm, I'm in the pick one team.

Me too. Me too. I'm glad you said that myself. I picked LinkedIn. That's my social network of choice. 

Like, even if you're running advertising, you know, don't do Google ads and YouTube ads and meet ads and.

And Quora ads and this, like pick one thing, go very deep and very broad, learn it, become really, really good at it. If you can make it work, move on to another one that makes more sense based on what you've learned on the first one and so on and so forth. But that's focuses of the essence when you run a business.

And especially when you're, when you communicate about your business if you, you should Be very loud in one place and not very, very tiny in all the places. So, yeah, that's my definitely my advice as a business owner. Yeah. And is video inevitable? Do you think for. For e commerce, particularly for product brands, you know, if there are some out here listening who aren't doing, you know, short form video content for reels or for tech talk or for short, you know, YouTube shorts, are they missing a trick should, from what the data that you're seeing, is it inevitable that they should be doing video?

No, I don't think it's inevitable. I think video is a, is a very important media. I love video as a media. I consume a lot of video myself. But there was a time in my life when I was not consuming video. I was reading content. I was, I was reading medium posts or blog posts or I was listening to podcasts.

I'm still listening to podcasts less than before. I'm more watching podcasts on YouTube now, but it's something I have changed as a, as a consumer of marketing content, because I'm listening to mostly marketing and, and, and business content, because that's my passion, of course. And the, the, the media I consume have changed over time.

And if you wanted to reach me six, seven years ago, podcast was definitely the media to go with. If you want to reach me now YouTube is probably the best media. That's where I spend most of my time. So. I, what I would argue is like try to see what the competition is doing and where they are present.

So I don't think, I don't think there is one piece of media that is so much better than everything else. And I think this is the one that you enjoy doing, especially since you'll have to do it again and again and again, and again, if you really want to master it, if you really don't enjoy doing it.

You're not going to sustain the, the, the level of creation that you have to put behind it.  What I would say to a product brand that, you know, has a lot of ambition and or is already at, you know, multiple seven figures, it doesn't have to be the founder. Right. So. And pay someone to do the right, the right type of content and video at multiple seven figure video is probably probably has to be part of your mix.

 If you're the only one doing it, you have to absolutely enjoy doing that because it's, it's going to take, it's going to suck the life out of you to create those videos. Yeah, for sure. So do you want to, before we wrap up, would you like to tell us a bit more about Agora Pulse and how it fits into what we've been talking about?

Yeah. The, the, the way it fits in is that, first of all, it's a social media management software. The most common ones are Hootsuite or Sprout Social or Buffer.

 We. Really wanted to help whoever is using us, see the value of their work. So for us, for me, the key is how do we help our users to see that what they're doing and prove that what they're doing is valuable for the business they're working for.

 Cool. And where can we follow you or find you to hear more? The best way to connect with me is on LinkedIn.

And if you send me an invite on LinkedIn and you mentioned where you got to know me, I always accept the invite. And if you have any question, I'm always happy to answer them. So more than happy to help if I can. So do not hesitate to reach out to me on LinkedIn. Great. Well, thank you so much for coming along on the podcast.

It was great to have you. Thank you, Jessie. Thank you for the time. It was great to be with you as well. And I wish you an amazing rest of, well, rest of your day.