Welcome to episode 229 of Hit the Mic with The Stacey Harris.
All right guys, episode 229, really excited. We’re going to talk about Edgar. Over the last couple of episodes, last several episodes, last several weeks, we’ve talked about Hootsuite, we’ve talked about Buffer and today we’re going to talk about Edgar. The reason I’m breaking these tools up is because I want you to have a clear look at what each of these does because if you listen to Buffer and you listen to Hootsuite and now you’re listening to Edgar, you’ll see that each of them really thrive in a different space. I honestly use these three tools together to really round out the tools I use for social media, which sounds crazy, but they each excel in a different place and serve a different part of my strategy and so today we’re going to talk about the three things you must know about Edgar to get started and why I use it and why it can be a really valuable part of your social media strategy. The impact it’s had for me.
Before we do that though, I do, public service announcement, want to remind you, because I know I’m going to get the emails, I do want to remind you early bird pricing for Social Pro. The last day to get that is Monday, January 18, 2016. Starting Tuesday, January 19th, the cart will officially be open. We’ll be doing webinars, the whole bring promo will be going down and that will be regular pricing, meaning the current pricing of 50% off for all three tiers will no longer be available after the 18th so starting on the 19th it’ll revert to regular price. If you want to get in at that 50% discount plus get the three month free Inside Hit the Mic Backstage, you need to get in now so head over to SocialProOnline.com/VIP.
If you’re not sure what Social Pro is, it’s an eight-week, six-module program that teaches you how to run your social media like a pro. You’re going to learn top to bottom how to build a strategy, how to hire your team, how to execute your strategy, and I’m talking everything from scheduling to knowing where to go, to the kinds of content you should be creating to choosing your networks, to ads and where you need to invest your ad time in, to building communities and Twitter chats and Facebook groups and all those things. This is the ultimate program if you want to be able to run your social media, or quite frankly someone else’s, like a pro. Sound good? Okay, like I said SocialProOnline.com/VIP is the place to go to get early bird pricing. Come Tuesday the 19th it will be long gone.
In the spirit of getting ready for all of that fun stuff, on the 21st we’re going to be doing our first live training of 2016, so that’s going to be on the 21st and we’re talking about the three steps you need to social media that works, and that’s over at TheStaceyHarris.com/FreeTraining. I think that’s all the stuff going on right now. For the next month there’s going to be a lot going on that is really cool. That means the challenge is going to be going on. We’re going to have several webinars going on. There’s going to be lots of things for you to do to engage and get ahead and really start this year off taking massive action on social media and so I want you to pay attention to episodes like this one where we’re talking about the tools that you need so that as you put together your strategy and you attend these trainings and you go through the challenge and if you grab us on Social Pro or you join us backstage, you really are empowered to put in action some of these things we talk about.
That’s why episodes like this one are so, so important to pay attention to. We’re going to go quick and dirty style. It’s a three things episode. You guys know these tend to be a little bit shorter, so let’s jump right in. FYI, there is a link to Edgar at the show notes page for this episode. Also if you just go to MeetEdgar.com you can find it.
The first thing to know about Edgar is it is not for monitoring your social media.
This is going to be a tool we use to set up updates and the piece that I like, and this is what I really want to touch on in this first part, the thing that’s so powerful about Edgar, the thing that separates it from Hootsuite, that separates it from Buffer, separates it even from another tool that you may have heard me talk about and we’re actually going to dive further into in a couple of weeks, Sprout Social, is that you can recycle your content. Meaning, you put in a library of tweets and it goes through them and as it reaches the bottom of the list, it goes back to the top and it starts all over again. This is a really powerful way to share old podcast episodes, old blog posts, guest posts, interviews you’ve done, promotional stuff. That part of your foundation that has to go out all the time.
I use this because quite frankly we’ve done, this is episode 229 of this show. That means there were 228 episodes before this one. You may have listened to all of them, or you may be somebody who is brand new and this is the very first episode you’re listening to. Either way, those 228 episodes have just as much value as this one does so I want to make sure that they are still getting some social media love, that they’re still getting traffic and so having something like Edgar in place, which I can set it up, I can put it in there, and it’s going to go out and you guys are going to be able to see it and it’ll allow me to then spend my time not crafting old content, remembering what I posted and what I haven’t posted yet and when did I last share this episode.
I can spend that time engaging with you. I can spend that time hosting the new Hit the Mic chat. I can spend that time doing Periscopes. I can spend that time doing things that are, not more valuable, okay totally, more valuable. Okay? That content is valuable, absolutely, but that engagement time is what makes you want to click on that content so whatever I can do to make more time for me to be able to engage, that’s what I’m going to do and so Edgar allows me to do that by recycling that content and putting it out there just time after time.
What’s cool about Edgar is I can set up different categories. I can have, and this is kind of how ours are set up, so behind the scenes to The Stacey Harris Edgar, we have stuff set up for different networks because different networks need content presented to it different ways, and then we have promotional stuff so evergreen programs, Hit the Mic Backstage, the Rockstar Guide to Periscope, the Rockstar Guide to Podcasting, the VIP opt-in. Those things that are available all the time, we can just make a library of content for those and then we can set it up so that it goes out and it mixes in with podcast episodes, episodes of Hit the Mic TV. We’ve been doing that show for a year and a half now. There’s a ton of Hit the Mic TV episodes. One of these days I’ll figure out how many we’ve done. There’s a ton of Hit the Mic TV episodes.
I’ve written countless guest posts, podcast interviews, so I can actually build those different libraries and then lay out, okay so at this time I want something from this, at 2:00 a.m. I want something from the podcast library to go out. At 5:00 a.m. I want something from the promo to go out. At 9:00 a.m. I want something from the guest posts library to go out. At 10:00 a.m. I want a Hit the Mic TV episode to go out. I can actually have that laid out and what’s really nice is it’s a calendar format and so you can very quickly say, I want this kind of content to go out here.
You can also build libraries for quotes and tips and questions. It’s not always going to be about driving traffic, but it’ll allow you to build in some of those engagement points so that you don’t have to sort of go, “Okay, what am I going to say today? What am I going to do today?” That’s really powerful and so that’s the first thing I want you to know about Edgar is it’s going to allow you to really shift into the next gear as far as how you’re putting your content out, how you’re sharing content and how you’re broadcasting your information on these networks.
That’s how we use it, and I will say that as an experiment I paused our Edgar queue for one week because I wanted to see, I paused all the queue, I wanted to see without the Edgar, how traffic would drive. We still did Hootsuite, we still did other people’s content, the new episodes went out, I scheduled in stuff for upcoming webinars, things like that, but I wanted to see how the content would do without that extra level of past content, promo, things like that. My traffic took a big hit. It turns out that a lot of that content is what drives traffic is that old stuff, that stuff I created months or years ago. That is really, really valuable to see. Not to mention, my overall engagement went down because I was having people who were retweeting or sharing or responding to things I said in Edgar, and those engagement points, those touch points were no longer there.
It really can, this recycled content, this past episode, promo s, tips, those things, having them absent can really make a hit and yes you can absolutely schedule them using Hootsuite or Buffer, but then you have to track them. You have to put them in every week. Using a tool like Edgar, it gives me a little bit more of an ability to set it and forget it. Now, obviously I’m not forgetting it totally because I’m going in and engaging and we’re adding to it all the time and making tweaks and as maybe something gets outdated it gets removed from the library, especially in the space that I talk about in social media. It’s definitely not completely like okay, I never have to look at it again, but it is a lot less time consuming than every week going, okay, what haven’t we shared recently? All right, pull that from the Excel doc, schedule it in at such and such time. That’s incredibly time consuming so this is actually a big way for me to hit those numbers that I want to hit as far as content going out and stuff getting to you guys. Okay? That’s the number one thing.
Number two, and the big question for a lot of people, is what does it work with?
It works with Facebook, your profile, your page, and groups you admin, as in only groups you’re an administrator of. It works with LinkedIn, profiles and company pages, and it works with Twitter. No Instagram tie-in, no Google+ tie-in. Those are not available there. No Pinterest tie-in. What is here is Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
I don’t use it with Facebook to be honest with you. I don’t populate a lot of old content. I think I’m thinking of some ways I might use it for the group, so like I can make sure Winning Wednesday always goes out, but I haven’t decided what that looks like yet for me. Although we do have Facebook attached to the account, we don’t actually use it to populate to Facebook but we do use it a lot for the LinkedIn company page, the LinkedIn profile, and the Twitter profile. That’s really where the bread and butter of that site pays off for us, for me, for The Stacey Harris.
Those are the networks, and that’s the second thing. First, basically what it does is your recycled content piece. It’s really, really valuable in that space. Number two, what networks.
Number three, why is it different? Why is it the option I choose?
For a long time I used SocialOomph, which is another option to do the same thing. You can build libraries, you can have recycled content. For me, SocialOomph was a little less attractive. I mean, it’s a little less intuitive.
The separation for me, the reason I went Edgar, is I really liked the calendar layout and the way I could move things around. I can say I don’t want this kind of content to go out every 24 hours, I can say I want it to go out Monday at 2:00, Wednesday at 4:00, Thursday at 9:00, Saturday at 7:00, and I can actually lay out when I want specifically what kind of content to go out so that I can really mix it up. It doesn’t happen that at 8:00 a.m. every day a Hit the Mic TV episode gets broadcast, at 11:00 a.m. every day a promo piece goes out. I can really mix and match and touch on the days when things do better, and I can really hit high times with certain kinds of content and that’s really powerful. That’s a really, really powerful option and I can do it in a really visual way, which I really like. That’s why I chose Edgar.
Those are the three things I wanted you to know about Edgar.
First, it’s all about the recycled content and yes, it has a huge impact on driving traffic and conversions and building relationships and even the engagement part of my social.
Number two, it works with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
Number three of course, why I chose it is it’s got a really attractive, easy-to-use interface.
If you are somebody who is not particularly comfortable with these tools or tech-savvy or however you want to phrase that, this is going to make it really easy for you to make a big impact really sort of intuitively. I really like it for that.
Again, I will say as I always say about any tool, there is no one tool that works for everyone. Everyone has their preferences, everyone has their differences, so I suggest trying it out. Edgar does have a free trial. Go to MeetEdgar.com, you can request a demo, you can get started with a free trial. It’s a really, really powerful tool, again, if you take advantage of it.
Okay? All right, so that’s Edgar. That’s three things you need to know about Edgar. I will see you next time.
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