Company: First Coast Social
Website Address: www.firstcoastsocial.com
Interviewee: Tyrone Johnson Sr
We take social media off business owners’ “daily to-do list”. Now you can focus on doing what you do best – grow your business. (As small business owners in Northeast Florida, we know you have about a million things to do every day but posting to your social media pages doesn’t have to be one of them.
What makes your company unique?
We’re the only company in Northeast Florida offering a 30 Day Money Back Growth & Engagement guarantee.
How do you define success?
I believe any agency’s success is based on the success of it’s clients.
Who inspires you and why?
I’m inspired by anyone that’s successful in what they’re passionate about.
What nonprofit do you have a heart for and how do you support it?
The nonprofit I support is Epitome of Class Sorority, Inc. I support if financially and creatively with needed marketing material they may need here and there.
Wes Benwick
Hi I’m Wes Benwick. Welcome back to BluHorn TV. This is Making a Difference. Joining us today is Tyrone Johnson with East Coast Social. Tyrone, welcome to the show.
Tyrone Johnson
I appreciate it. How are you guys today?
Wes Benwick
Great. So let’s talk about what you do and your business. You’re all about social media. You’re all about taking the daily social media to do list off of business owners hands and I think that’s really important because a lot of people don’t understand how important it is to be on social media as much as possible in order to hit all of the audience that you can potentially hit. So let’s talk about what you do for businesses in that realm.
Tyrone Johnson
Well basically what we do is we try to leverage social media because it’s so powerful with higher engagement and connecting with the people that obviously that are on social media that may need or want the services that any company may offer.
Wes Benwick
Would you describe yourself as social media concierge, you’re doing the daily dirty work. Someone has to spend time on remember to do your. You’re doing with them.
Tyrone Johnson
You can’t just post on social media you know because if you’re just posting, you may get 20-30 likes. You have to literally engage with the audience out there and understand the algorithms behind the social media. We’ve figured out that sweet spot so that we can do everything together.
Wes Benwick
Let’s talk about that for a minute because I think that’s a big misconception. A like is not necessarily a good sign of engagement. How do you define engagement on social media?
Tyrone Johnson
When people start commenting and sharing, where they actually start engaging with your other customers and stuff like that. So if you’re not seeing that, then you know you’re not going to really see any results from it.
Wes Benwick
What’s the secret to getting someone to comment or share on a post. Is there something that you’d do better or different than a customer or business owner could do themselves.
Tyrone Johnson
It is making the content interesting. You know like whether it’s a picture video you know animation or whatever it is. If it doesn’t intrigue the customer or the person who’s viewing it then they’re not going to engage with it. They may just hit like because it looks good or something like that. But you have to be very creative when you’re posting, everything can’t be so bland or you know just a picture of this or picture that or quote you don’t I mean you know it has to be something that really touches the consumer so that they want to engage.
Wes Benwick
Let’s talk about some of the risks that you see first that come to the social media and post engagement. What are some of the most common problems that you see.
Tyrone Johnson
Well one of the most common problems is people when they are posting themselves, it’s not interesting. It’s the same thing every day, you have to mix things up with video pictures, quotes, things that actually get people engaged. But a lot of people what they do is they just do one thing and they think because I did this you know I did my job but it’s just a waste of time basically.
Wes Benwick
There’s good bad times of day to post as well right.
Tyrone Johnson
Once you set up your social media you have to actually pay attention to the back end with the algorithm showing the times to post. If you get you know 50 to 60 likes during a three o’clock time, that’s when you want to put your content out around that time.
Wes Benwick
Absolutely. So it’s all about testing and experimenting to figure out what makes the most sense for your business and your audience right.
Tyrone Johnson
You have to you have to because you can’t just be random with it. I say random, I mean I’m obviously doing something that is great. If you really want to see it return on your investment well whatever you’re doing which is social media you know you really have to study it and that’s you know that’s what we do.
Wes Benwick
You create a plan if you will I assume that has a strategy behind it. Correct. When someone should post them what they should post and where they should post it.
Tyrone Johnson
Correct. Basically what we do is, number one, we study their competitors and then number two we jump in and we look at the times that they posted the content that they have out there, what the engagement has been like and stuff like that. Then what we do is we turn around and we actually come up with a strategy based on competitors.
Wes Benwick
I understand that. So let’s let’s take that to the next level and talk about what are some of the good success stories that you see out there?
Tyrone Johnson
There was an influencer that just hired us his name is Octavius the Voice and he was stuck at thirteen hundred followers for about 16-17 months. Once we took over his account we told him that he can continue to post because he posted great content, but he wasn’t mixing up the content and his times were wrong. With Instagram you know you have to deal with the engagement plus your hashtags and times. On Facebook you may have to do a little promotion you know here and there because they don’t get the notifications like they used to.
Wes Benwick
Yes exactly.
Tyrone Johnson
Exactly. So you have to be strategic in that and then like on Twitter Twitter is more of a conversation type thing. You can’t be as promotional as you may be on Instagram you know. So you just have to know each platform. We taught him how to actually post during the times in a different things and and then we put the strategy behind it and then he started doing that and he’s almost at two thousand followers and it’s only been a couple of months.
Wes Benwick
Congratulations. That’s definitely a success story. And you’re not afraid to put your money where your mouth is. Talk to me about your guarantee that you offer.
Tyrone Johnson
Well we are. We offer a money back guarantee offer get engagement and growth likes it. You don’t see the engagement grow. I would say two or three days you’re going to start seeing it, because like I said one of our strategies is we attack your competitors people that actually do what you do. So we already know that our strategy is going to work, it’s guaranteed. And if it doesn’t we’ll give you your money back and it had we haven’t had a customer yet that has signed up with us. They didn’t see that growth rate like well hey I don’t see this working I don’t see that work and it’s going to work because like I said we take the time to actually study you know we literally took months and months studying these platforms to say because you know we went through those times where people’s engagement wasn’t going in there and our accounts were growing. So now we understand it and it’s like OK let’s just try this for every account you know. I mean obviously each strategy is going to be different depending on the type of business but the platforms don’t change long as you know the platforms you’re going to see to success.
Wes Benwick
So I wrote I think this is great great advice you’re willing to share a very very powerful guarantee and message as well how can someone care more about your business.
Tyrone Johnson
I think go to firstcoastsocial.com or they could feel free to give us a call. at 904-600 — 0840. We have to represent our city. You know what I mean you know we we want to see the best the small businesses around Jacksonville. You know we want to see all these small businesses succeed around us because if they succeed we succeed and we’re right here with them.
Wes Benwick
Tyrone Best of luck to you and the staff and First Coast Social. BluHorn is also based in Jacksonville. So I love seeing local companies doing great things.
Tyrone Johnson
I appreciate the opportunity.
Wes Benwick
If you’d like to learn more about us please visit BluHorn.com. if you’d like to be featured on the show you can visit our Web site as well. On behalf of BluHorn I’m Wes Benwick This is all about making a difference. We’ll see you next time.