My podcast with Hannah Brown

 Last semester in Principles of PR we had the same assignment as we do now with the podcast. At that time I had no idea who would be a good guest for me to have but luckily Dr. Aggie hooked me up with an excellent person in Hannah Brown. She is a PR practitioner who works with pretty much exactly what we talk about in this class; social media and marketing along with PR too, of course. I enjoyed douing this podcast because I feel like I had more flexibility to dig deeper into social media and even she said there is a big difference from the PR side of things stricly to the social media side. 

Considering that this podcast only had to be 5 minutes at the least, I came up with 5 questions for her. Link: https://soundcloud.com/user-698512429/principlesofsocialmediapodcast?si=832f844e5af244c7aaa09a51b1e05b09&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

The first question I had for her was simply asking what social media marketing is. She explained, "It is essentially leveraging social channels to achieve your marketing and brand goals, such as promoting a product or service." As I heard her explanation, it all made sense. It was a very light definition but definitely hit the nail on the head. Social media marketing is exactly that, using channels to build and achieve goals. I believe we discussed this on the first day.

My second question had to do with her goals and how she measures success. I asked her this directly trailing my first question because she mentioned achieving goals. Most of what she said had to do with metrics. Likes, comments, shares and engagement really shows how successful you and your page are. 

After this question I quickly followed up with asking about, specifically, what metrics she follows most often and she gave me around the same answer as before. Depending on either organic or paid, you will have different metrics to pay attention to and I thought this was very interesting. She mentioned that if you fail to see a solid click-through rate (CTR, which is how many times your ad recieves click divided by the amount of times it is shown) then something is not resognating there. 

I immediately followed by asking what you should do if you find yourself in this situation and she said, "You should do A-B testing to see if you change your content and make it speak better to your brand and your specific audience. This could help your CTR ranges overtime and if this doesn't help then maybe your audience isn't warm enough and needs to learn more about your brand." 

Next, I wanted to know how social media could benefit a company. In class we recently talked about building our personal brand and because of this I expected to hear some of the same things and I did. She mentioned reputation and product service and loyalty right off the bat. This was really good to hear because of the similarities. Another important note she touched on was mentioning how social media is a very cost-effective way to support your brand goals. "60% of the world's population is using social media."

I ended this interview by lastly asking about a social media calendar. Knowing her profession, I would've assumed she was not only very busy but also very organized. No average person can do the work she does and be successful. So, I wasn't the least bit surprised to hear her explain the importance of a social media calendar and how it keeps her on track. It does no harm at all to utilize one.

This podcast really shined light on the importance of social media and social media marketing. It was really cool to hear her talk about her experiences with her own company and clients. Her job definitely doesn't sound easy whatsoever and actually kinda fun. She gave me a lot of good information in such a small amount of time.