Is Twitter & LinkedIn the One-Two for B2B Marketers?

Transcript lightly edited for spelling and punctuation. The conversation is unabridged.

Mark Evans: Hi. It's Mark Evans, and you're listening to Marketing Spark. Now, usually, I would say the podcast that brings you insight from marketers in 25 minutes or less. But today, I'm launching a second format, mini podcast conversations in 10 minutes or less to tackle specific topics. If you've been using LinkedIn over the past year, you'll understand the power that it offers to connect and, as important, have conversations. But nothing lasts forever, and I'm seeing some people dabble with other social platforms. And one of them is Marcus Schaller, a B2B SaaS content marketing strategist. Now, like me, Marcus is a content machine on LinkedIn, but he's recently got more active on Twitter. Let's find out why. Welcome to Marketing Spark. Thank you, Mark. I'm so excited to be here with you today. Yeah, you're my proverbial guinea pig when it comes to this new format, so we'll see how it goes. That's fine. I love it. I love it. To start, let's talk about what you've done on LinkedIn over the past year and how it's worked for you. A lot of people have embraced LinkedIn and got a lot out of it. What's your experience been like? And just to give a little context, I've been on LinkedIn for many, many years before, like most people, but like most people, it was just it was just kind

Marcus Schaller: of a profile sitting there, and then I'd occasionally post a link to my blog or whatever. And I always had kind of a love-hate relationship with social media because I felt like I I was approaching it really from too much of a selfish point of view, self-interest. I wasn't really approaching it from interested in other people. It was more just how do I push out my own content. And when the pandemic hit, you know, obviously, all of us are kind of locked down, and I had an opportunity to really kind of just not just rebrand myself, but start from scratch and ask myself moving forward. You know, at the time, I was focused on SaaS copywriting. Moving forward, what would I really wanna do? If the world's stopping, this is an opportunity for me to kind of reset. And that's what I did, and I started focusing on problem-solving for marketers and things like that. And so LinkedIn is where I started that journey again, if you will, and really just kind of learning it from the ground up. And you're actually one of the first people who I started interacting with on LinkedIn in that period of time as well as people like James Carberry and people over there at SweetFish. It really set the tone differently this time because people were actually engaging in a way that I never saw on LinkedIn. Before, it was just I'd scroll down. It was just people doing what I was doing pretty much was here's an awesome post or here's a webinar and they just put a link, which is really boring after a while. My experience in the last year has been really built on that foundation of interacting with real people, being able to kind of just experiment from there, you know, doing sliders and having my own, you know, podcasts, you know, now a different one that I'm doing. So it's been such a different positive experience this last 12, 14 months despite all the COVID drama.

Mark Evans: If you're having so much success on LinkedIn, explain the move to Twitter. Why split some of your precious social time on another platform?

Marcus Schaller: That's a great question. And I think, you know, it's also, too, how do we define success. Right? It's like one of the hard things about social media. It's it's so easy to get caught up with LinkedIn envy or whatever, you know, and there's there's so many people on there that have so much bigger impact than I do, so it's all relative. But I think when a couple of things happened. One was I noticed that a lot of people who I wanted to really engage with one-on-one and start building a connection and relationship with just were not active on LinkedIn. They were kind of doing the same thing I mentioned earlier. They work for a company. They're in a marketing leadership role, and maybe they push out some content from the company, but they weren't necessarily posting or commenting on it, and there was no real opportunity for me to really start a conversation, right, or be part of that. And so a few weeks ago, I started experimenting a little bit with Twitter again and just to see how many of these people were on Twitter. And if it turned out that none of them were, then that might have been the end of the experiment. Right? But it turned out that, you know, enough of them were where it made sense, and if people like yourself who I've been, I call friend, you know, now for over a year because of LinkedIn were also on Twitter. So it's like, oh, there's something here. As far as splitting my time, I kind of look at it as they're mutually supporting because the first thing I started doing with Twitter was not just putting out text posts, but kind of using Twitter in a way that kind of supports or kind of adds on to my visual approach with content. Like, I do these kind of goofy looking whiteboard-style stick-figure things. You know? And, youn know, with LinkedIn, I get to do those as sliders. Right? So there's multiple panels, and that's awesome. And with Twitter, as far as I know, you can't do that, but you could do, you know, individual images. So what I've been doing is just having fun saying, okay. Well, how can I take those slide decks and split them up into separate tweets? Right? And just enjoying what Twitter gives me that LinkedIn doesn't and just kind of using each of those to build on the other, if that makes sense.

Mark Evans: It sounds like you're approaching Twitter differently than you might have in the past. Is it the fact that you're sharing different types of content or, as you say, those stick-figures that you like to create? Are there any different ways that you're using Twitter than what you might have done previously?

Marcus Schaller: Yeah, I think it starts with the fundamental issue that I mentioned earlier, which is your mindset. I've admitted in the past many times that, you know, I used to be quite—I don't know if selfish is too strong a word—but a little too self-interested when it came to social media. You know, I wasn't necessarily looking at it as what is interesting about these other people. It was more about how can I use it as a tool to, you know, advance my own agenda? And there's nothing wrong with that. It's just for me, it made the experience a very shallow and empty one because, ultimately, I'm not all that interesting, you know, compared to the rest of the world. I'd love to think that I am, but, you know, I'm interesting to my family, was the first fundamental shift. Right? So when I think about how I use Twitter differently now, Twitter was always difficult for me in the past because I felt like it would just take so much time and you're constantly trying to keep up with the scroll and all that. But now I'm really enjoying just other people's content, other people's point of view, learning from other people, yourself included, I've learned a lot from. And really having that as my foundation instead of it being how do I get people to just like and comment and all that. That's all wonderful. I'd love that. I'd love a huge audience, but that's kind of out of my control. What I can control is how much focus do I put on the people that are on there. And then the second step is, you know, what do I do differently on Twitter or how do I approach that differently is really not using it as a platform for simply pushing out links to other content. I still do that to a degree, and that's fine. What I'm trying to do now is really just have it almost as a self-contained ecosystem where every post that I'm putting out, it's tough because it's kind of, you know, short. Every one that I'm putting out is enough where it actually starts in a conversation or offers some kind of value in and of itself.

Mark Evans: One of the questions that I have about Twitter and people using Twitter in a different way or people who have been using LinkedIn is that on LinkedIn, it just seems easier to connect with people, to message them, to ask for a conversation. Can you provide some insight on how you drive connections and conversations on Twitter as opposed to simply following somebody? Yeah, LinkedIn seems to be, I don't know, the tools seem to be more intuitive. Connections can be taken to the next level a lot easier. But on Twitter—I mean, maybe I'm using it wrong—but it seems like the easiest thing to do is just follow somebody. But I guess what I'm not doing is reaching out to people as well to ask for a conversation. Is that the trick for Twitter?

Marcus Schaller: That's another great question, and I don't know if I have the right answer for that. From my perspective, though, at this point, I'm looking at it as there's kind of a bridge between either whether it's LinkedIn or Twitter and what we're doing right now or being able to reach out to Mark Evans with an email and say, hey, I have a question for you or do you know this person or whatever, where there's a relationship. For me, a big part of that has been podcasting. What we're doing right now, I've met more interesting people doing my podcast over the last 12, 14 months than I have, honestly, in the last 12 to 20 years of my career. Yeah. I kind of looked at LinkedIn and Twitter as, you know, first of all, how do you find people that are interesting to begin with. Right? And there's plenty of them. There's more than enough. What I do is I don't push myself to comment or like things that I don't feel like I should, like, I really feel like doing that. Right? So I don't wanna just be like a numbers game where I'm just commenting like, hey, spot on. That's great ideas, whatever. If it doesn't hit me, I just keep going. There's enough people that post enough interesting things where it gives me the opportunity to kind of roll with that and add something of my own perspective or ask them a question. And then based on their, you know, if they respond to me and now there's a little bit of a conversation, and from there, I might look at that individual and go, oh, you know, this person's really great at content marketing or this person really understands this specific category. I wanna talk to them about coming on to my show and/or I have a question for them or whatever it is, you know. So it's always kind of like taking it quote, unquote, offline even though, obviously, most of this stuff is still Internet-based. But how do I take the conversation off of Twitter, off of LinkedIn? Right? And then, build on that however it is. And one of the things that's been amazing for me with LinkedIn particularly and hopefully Twitter is the serendipity of it. I've had just clients come—the brand new clients that I literally had on my CRM that I was going to reach out to that day, in some cases, actually reach out to me because they saw, I saw them on LinkedIn. Right? So you just never or, you know, I looked at their profile on LinkedIn or whatever it is. Right? There is that kind of rolling the dice thing, and I'm just curious and interested to see how that pans out with Twitter over the next few months.

Mark Evans: Final question. Where can people connect with you on LinkedIn and Twitter?

Marcus Schaller: Well, the best place is actually just the marcuschaller.com website because I have the links there, but I'll give all of them. The reason I say that is my name's a little hard to spell phonetically. So it's just m a r c u s s c h a l l e r and then .com for the website. LinkedIn is the same thing, just /marcusschaller. And then Twitter, it's different: @MarcusASchaller, A as in Apple. Middle name is not Apple, but it's A. That's how you can find me.

Mark Evans: Well, thanks, Marcus, for being the, I guess, the first experiment for the new format. Oh, thank you so much. I'm glad I got to be

Marcus Schaller: the guinea pig. Hopefully, the experiment was a success.

Mark Evans: Thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. Let me know what you think about the new format. And if you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you'd like to learn more about how I help B2B SaaS companies as a fractional CMO, strategic adviser, and coach, send an email to Mark@MarkEvans.co. I'll talk to you next time.