Episode 4: Social Media Marketing for Crypto Brands with Paul McNeal

Ty Smith0:00

Hello everyone and welcome back to Coinbound where we discuss tips and tricks to marketing in the cryptocurrency industry with some of the top experts in the space. Today we will be focusing on social media marketing in crypto. Social media marketing is something probably everyone has engaged with in at least some capacity, but few really know the best and most effective ways of leveraging it from a brand standpoint, so we'll get into that a little bit. With me now is Paul McNeal, also known as the Crypto Curator. Paul is a really good friend of mine that has been in crypto since the early days and has been advising crypto companies for a long time regarding their marketing strategy, a really big part of that being the management of their social media presence. So, I'll be prodding Paul a little bit to see what techniques he finds most effective and anything else that might be helpful to you all to help you manage your social media presence in the best way possible. So, Paul, how are you?

Paul McNeal0:34

I'm doing good, how are you?

Ty Smith0:36

I am good as well. So, to start off, why don't you tell us a little bit, in your own words, about yourself and what you've been doing in crypto for the past few years?

Paul McNeal1:06

Yeah, well, I'm the Crypto Curator. I curate news and information every day simply because I love it. The crypto space is filled with, I don't know, it's just so much excitement. Every day it seems like there's something new every day. So, for the past few years, that's what I've been doing. I've been putting together a brief, it's called the Crypto Brief, Crypto Watch, and it's a curation of news, podcasts, YouTube videos, blogs, social media mentions, and it's just a way to show a comprehensive look at the market or at the industry every day. And so, the reason I do that is my prior history, we used to do that as a business. We curated news information for, I'd say, a lot of the committees on Capitol Hill, part of the White House, and some Fortune 500 companies, and I decided to apply that same skill set to crypto once I got into it.

Ty Smith2:02

Yeah, no, I get that email every morning. It's a good way to wake up and it's a good way to get a quick quick overview of the market. It's definitely helpful for me. So, you also do a YouTube live stream now called Support and Resistance. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

Paul McNeal2:11

Yeah, so while I was doing the Crypto Watch brief with the previous folks, I came in contact with a guy who is actually a certified financial technician. He does this as a day job. You don't find many of those in the world of crypto. And so, he does technical analysis, and it was a result of me talking with him and another gentleman that we just met via Twitter. Actually, it was an article that I read, and I forget the publication, I think it was like Coin Insider, Bobby Atkins. He's a former UBS manager, risk manager, used to be, not anymore, but now he's just a very successful day trader. And so, both of those guys got together and we all talked and said, 'Hey, let's create a channel where we can talk about the fundamentals of the market and the technical analysis to help those people that might be trading and those people who want to keep up on things.' So, we created this YouTube channel called Support and Resistance where we outline what their support is of the market, what we think it is, both fundamentally and with technical analysis, and the resistance. So, it's a really really fun time. It's on Thursday nights around 8:00.

Ty Smith3:18

Yeah, no, I've been following it a lot lately. It's fun to watch. You guys have a nice rapport. It's a nice mix of what's going on in the market and the TA. It's cool. So, you've also been involved in advising a lot of companies in crypto, especially on the marketing side. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Paul McNeal3:30

Yeah, I have. One of the things that I found is that, I don't know if you've ever read the book StrengthFinders 2.0, they have a test that you can do with that book. And one of the strengths that I had was a futurist, or it's called futuristic, is what it's called, is one of my strengths. And in addition to that, if you've ever read the book Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, he talks about the three types of folks. There's the market maven, there's the managers, and then there's the connectors. And so, I've considered, I'm considered sort of a connector. Give me one quick second. It's sort of considered a connector. And I enjoy connecting, I enjoy meeting new people, and as I meet people, finding ways of leveraging sort of what they do with what others do. And so, I found myself in this interesting place where I have amassed a good deal of folks, connections, via social media and also with LinkedIn and in my personal life. And as I talk to companies, I try to make it a point to let them know that, and I heard this once from a sales course, but it said you always need three things. You need to have something to say, and of course, that's where it all starts. If you have nothing to say, it's really hard, but you need to have something to say, you need to say it well, and then you need to say it often. And so, as I talk to these companies and try and help them with their marketing efforts, the last couple pieces is where I try to help them with, saying it well and then saying it often. And because I have a massive amount of following as far as on social media and other places, I like to sort of be that bullhorn for them and to help them get their message out. But I will say, I have to really be behind what they're doing or else I can't push it.

Ty Smith5:29

Yeah, no, I respect that, and I've seen that firsthand. So, what are your favorite, I'm actually glad you brought up those three points because when we were having dinner in LA, I guess it was about two months ago, you brought that up and it really got me thinking. I'm curious what you think of the Justin Sun Tron way of marketing, because it does seem to fit into those three points, but is it is it too much, do you think?

Paul McNeal6:12

So, I have been sort of monitoring Justin and what he's done, and it doesn't fit my style of marketing, but I will tell you that that style of marketing does have an impact. And what he does is he believes in any news is good news, right? Anything to get your name out there, to get your brand out there, to keep yourself in there. Now, if you're going to go that route, you can't have thin skin. You got to have thick skin. Things roll off that guy like water on a duck's back. I mean, it's unbelievable. But he is constantly putting himself out there in the media by making these grandiose statements that turn out to be much ado about nothing. But what you find, and you would think after a point that would run its course, right? People would get sick of that and be like, 'Meh.' But with Justin, it works. A good example, he was at Consensus. He was talking to BlockTV and he said he had this announcement. He was just dropping little hints here and there, and we thought that announcement would come out at Consensus. It didn't. It came out the morning after, I believe, or the evening after Consensus, and is that they had teamed up with Opera. So, if you have something to sort of back up those grandiose statements, I'd say it sort of works, but I don't know, with Justin, he's a different animal.

Ty Smith7:23

Yeah, that's that's one way to put it. So, so, in terms of social media channels, like, Instagram and Facebook and YouTube and all that, what would you say is your favorite channel to advertise on and market on, and where do you get the most engagement?

Paul McNeal7:34

You know, and again, I know a lot of folks might not believe this, or maybe they will, depending on if they follow me or not, but I love Twitter. Twitter has always been a platform for me, and the reason that is, and again, it's sort of old school, but Gary Vaynerchuk talked about it way back in the day. I heard him talk at South by Southwest, and this has been eons ago. But what I found is what he said then still rings true today. And even though Gary has sort of probably moved on from those same methods with Twitter, I still find Twitter to be a very relevant, very active platform, specifically in the world of crypto. Why? Because like I tell a lot of folks, Twitter is the only place where you pretty much, it's like a networking event. You can walk into the room and you can walk up to anyone, shake their hand, say, 'Hi, my name is Paul,' and begin a conversation, and it's accepted and it's expected. On other platforms, that's not necessarily the case. You can't, and because those other platforms have walls up everywhere to prevent you from doing so, it makes it difficult. Twitter still remains the one place to where it says, 'It's what's happening now,' like right now. So, if you're wanting to get your message out there right now and get engagement, depending on how you word it, again, back to how you have something to say, have something to say and how you say it, depending on how you say it, you can get massive engagements. But I've also found on Twitter, it depends on who you are. If you are a personality that have a following and you have folks that really engage with you and you say things that folks really can engage with, you're going to get a viral tweet to go out. If you're not, it'll pretty much fall on deaf ears.

Ty Smith9:18

Yeah, exactly. It's sort of one of the most frustrating parts I find, and that most people find, of social media is that unless you've been on social media for a long time, unless you already have a big following, it's hard to it's hard to really get all the benefits from it. So, for people that are just starting out on something like Twitter, what would you say is probably the best way to build that initial traction to their account?

Paul McNeal9:33

Yep, and so, again, I'll leverage Gary Vaynerchuk's advice. First off, listen. This is what people have a hard time doing, not only on social media, but in real life. But you have to listen more than you talk. And Gary always said when you first start out on Twitter, if you're just starting, listen first and find where you can fit that engagement. Again, it's just like a networking event. Rarely do you walk up to a circle of people talking and just start blurting out stuff. You first have to sort of stand next to that circle, sort of listen to the conversation, see if you hear something that you can relate to and that you have some value you can add to that conversation. And if so, then you insert yourself into that conversation and off it goes, right? So, you can't just go to Twitter and just start blurting stuff out left and right and just tagging people left and right. It's unbelievable how people do that on Twitter. If you do it thoughtfully, your following will begin to grow, and you'll grow actual people following you versus bots.

Ty Smith10:33

Yeah, exactly. That's a big part of, I mean, you know what I do. I match up brands with influencers and people that have a big following on social media. And one of the first things I always look for is, you know, maybe they do have 60,000 followers on Instagram or Twitter, but how much of that is real? Because a big part of it is not, so you have to kind of, you know, gauge the number of likes and things like that on their on their things. But a lot of people go, at least try to take this shortcut of of buying a ton of followers and things like that. It looks stupid, in my opinion.

Paul McNeal11:15

It does. It looks incredibly stupid for people to do that. And what I would, what I get even even more sort of tweaked about is people that think that follower count matters. It's like your follower count doesn't matter, specifically if it's a bunch of bots and fake accounts. You know, root that stuff out and let's see how many true followers people have. Now, I will tell you, again, like you just mentioned, if you pay attention to the people that have the millions of followers, look at some of their tweets and look at the engagement. How many likes do they get? How many retweets do they get? How many comments do they get? Okay, now, if that ratio is above double digits, 10, 15, 20%, okay, you got somebody that's got some substance there. But if I've got a million followers and I send out tweets and I get two likes or a comment, okay, something's wrong with this picture. Either those million aren't paying attention to what I'm saying and I'm really not an influencer, or I'm just a guy that amassed a bunch of bots and fake followers.

Ty Smith12:15

Yeah, exactly. So, one way that a lot of people try, I've seen, to to get that initial traction is they add a bunch of hashtags to their posts, or they tag some, you know, major influencers in the space, and they're hoping to, you know, get some awareness that way. Some people find that works, some people find it looks sloppy and maybe is not the best way to go about it. Where do you kind of fit on that spectrum?

Paul McNeal12:31

Yeah, so, and I know probably a lot of listeners won't be able to relate to this, but as Tim Gunn used to say on Project Runway, thoughtfully. You've got to do it thoughtfully. This is the problem when it comes to Twitter. If you use your hashtags, if you use your at symbols, if you use your dollar signs thoughtfully, it's going to look beautiful and it makes all the sense in the world. But if you have one line of comment with eight billion hashtags, it's just like that's just ridiculous. It's dumb. It doesn't make sense. So, as long as you, and what I try to do, and here's sort of some of my tricks that I do. So, if I'm sending out a tweet and it mentions a company, I try to at the company because that will gain exposure because, especially if it's a brand like a Microsoft or a Google, that's a powerful brand. And if you can at them, right, now, will Google and Microsoft really pay attention to that tweet? Maybe, maybe not. It depends. I try to hashtag the right words. In crypto, hashtagging the actual digital asset, whether it's Bitcoin, Litecoin, or Ethereum, what have you, those things, and dollar signing the Bitcoin, Ethereum, those types of things, they really do work. Now, in addition to that, if it mentions a person, I try not to, sometimes I can get a little crazy with this, but I try not to at someone too much. Some of the guys have talked about it. Now, I know one person that everybody loves to at, and I'm sure it just probably annoys him to death, is Pomp. Listen, you at Pomp and you think you're going to get major traction because it's Anthony Pompliano. So, I try not to at him too much. I try not to like too much of his, you know, because I'm sure he probably gets annoying. So, again, be thoughtful with that.

Ty Smith14:19

Yeah, I've I've actually been impressed by the amount of interaction he has with things because I I don't really tag people in in things unless I have to and unless, you know, they're directly related to the conversation. But I see people that do, and he pretty frequently engages with that stuff. So, I'm I'm kind of impressed. I'm kind of, because he's a busy guy. I'm kind of impressed that he has time to to go through all that stuff.

Paul McNeal14:33

Exactly, and and that's another thing with Twitter. If you find people that are engaged and that they will engage with you and either like the things that you post or retweeted, again, be careful with those folks, especially if they're someone like Pomp. But if you do it right, you will get that traction. Now, another person that gets massive traction, and this is because he's a different type of marketer, is Neeraj. Everybody knows Neeraj. If you don't know Neeraj, then you haven't been on Twitter long enough, especially not crypto Twitter. He has some of the most incredibly hilarious tweets, very engaging tweets, things that it's easy for you to respond to. If you are a person like that and you have that level of creativity, Twitter is going to be a home run for you.

Ty Smith15:23

Yeah, exactly. And how does the engagement on Twitter compare to things like Facebook and LinkedIn and YouTube?

Paul McNeal15:26

It depends on what you're trying to achieve. With Facebook, I've done it through groups, and I've found that engaging in some groups are good, but again, here's the thing with Facebook that you have to be careful with. When you're trying to create engagement on Facebook, now, you can do ads, and I'll be honest, I haven't done a lot of Facebook ads, nor Twitter ads, nor Instagram, or anything. I haven't done any paid advertising for the most part. But when you're engaging on Facebook, if you can put together things that incite a response or engagement from folks, you're you're going to see it do well. If you're just posting news articles or you're just posting comments, most people won't pay attention to it, or most people will pay attention, but they don't have a reason to respond, or sometimes they don't even know what to say to some posts. And sometimes people think, 'Oh, did I post the wrong thing?' Well, not really. You just posted something that a person's left like, 'What do I say to that?' or 'What do I do with it?' So, that's what I found with with Facebook, particularly.

Ty Smith16:27

Yeah, okay. Yeah, so, my my next question was going to be about how much time you spend on on paid because there's two main forms to social media marketing. There's organic, which you're sort of the expert in, and then there's paid, which it sounds like you don't spend too much time in. Is there a reason you don't spend much time in there?

Paul McNeal16:35

I haven't really went went down the path of researching it, understanding how to do it and do it well, to find out if it will actually pay off. I know a lot of folks have courses on it. A lot of folks have definitely touted and said how great paid advertising can be on these platforms. A little bit of it comes just because I'm like, you know, come on, it's like, you know. But I know the platforms have to monetize, and that's the way Facebook monetizes, as well as the others. So, I just I just haven't done the work to to to do it. I've I've gotten some good response from the organic, so I haven't really myself went that direction. Now, I have advised businesses that I've worked with, if they have the budget to do so, it does make sense to at least try it out, give it a try. With with paid, you have to do the research to find out what demographic you're trying to reach, make sure you're crafting the ads properly so that you can get it because, again, back to what I said at first, if you don't have anything to say and you can't say it the right way, you're not going to get any engagement from it, and it's a waste of money.

Ty Smith17:39

Yeah, another thing to keep in mind that I'm just realizing now is that until recently, I mean, it still is actually, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, they all have these these kind of sweeping policies that make it really difficult that if you're in crypto to advertise on them. I don't know if you were following that thread I had on on Twitter recently regarding my process of trying to advertise on Facebook because just in the past week and a half, they started saying, 'Oh, by the way, now you guys can start advertising crypto-related things as long as they don't have a token attached.' They started being okay with the ancillary services, which I tried running a campaign through, and I mean, I got to say, they're kind of they're kind of full of it because I have spent the past week and a half trying to run a campaign, and I have been emailing back and forth with Facebook, and they say, 'Yeah, what you're advertising is fine. You don't need written approval to do it.' And then I go to run a campaign, and then it says, 'You need written approval to do this.' And it's just like I I don't know who to believe. It's like the software is giving me the wrong information, so I have to go to a person. The person is giving me wrong information. So, after a lot of time, I finally was able to run a campaign, and even that didn't go well because about about an hour and a half into it, you know, I got a a notification, 'Your ad has been approved,' finally, after I appealed it a couple times. And it ran for about an hour and a half, and then I got another notification saying, 'We've stopped your campaign. It violates our cryptocurrency policy,' which I had already spoken to several Facebook representatives about. So, even from that small sample size of, you know, an impartially finished campaign, the the ROI was terrible. I mean, it only let me run like about $12 worth of this this campaign, and I think it hit like 100 impressions. That's that's awful. That's that's terrible. That's over $100 CPM, cost per mille, which is a cost per thousand impressions, for people that aren't familiar with that term. With influencer marketing in crypto, which influencer marketing is of course very different than the kind of marketing that you do on Facebook. When you market on Facebook or on Google AdWords or something like that, the user knows that it's an ad. It's very obvious that it's an ad. When it comes from an influencer, it's a much more organic and native sort of way of getting the message out. So, because of that, it's typically a little more expensive. Um, but even even with influencer marketing in crypto, which is, you know, my life, which is my specialty, really, we see between $10 and maybe $22 on average. That's a kind of big range, but, you know, depends on on the influencer and their size. But yeah, I mean, just the whole process of going through Facebook was a pain, and the results were really underwhelming.

Paul McNeal19:39

Yeah, and again, this is what I say right now in this current environment, I would advise a lot of businesses, specifically in crypto, stay away from trying to, you're just going to waste and burn energy, time, effort, frustration, the whole nine yards trying to make it work.

Ty Smith20:35

Yeah, exactly. So, in terms of helpful tools and softwares, is there anything out there that you use for social media marketing?

Paul McNeal21:15

Yeah, so, when it comes to marketing for social media, I really haven't utilized a lot of different tools. For the most part, Twitter is the place that I, is sort of my go-to platform when it comes to social media. Uh, and there's a lot that you really can do with Twitter. I don't know if you're familiar with Gary Vaynerchuk and his whole thing, but he taught a lot of people back in the day how to really use Twitter, and I don't think people still get it today. And Twitter is one of these platforms where you can reach the world. Other platforms, they sort of truncate what you can do and limit what you can do, and their algorithms prevent what you can do. On Twitter, it's not the case. You say something and the world's your stage. So, for the most part, you can hear, I mean, you can you can you can reach anybody on on Twitter.

Ty Smith21:43

Yeah, yeah, it definitely has a a very robust suite of tools, Twitter. And a lot of social medias do, but yeah, I agree with you that Twitter seems to to lead the platforms in that. Not a huge fan of Gary Vee. I don't know if you are. I I don't know, maybe it's just a personal thing, just not my kind of style. Um, but that's a different conversation. Do you use anything like, I know a lot of a lot of big people on social media use tools like Buffer and Hootsuite and things like that for planning it, so you don't have to manually be there and entering it at optimum times? Nothing like that?

Paul McNeal22:28

Yeah, you know, I I've I've been in the past, I sort of played around with them, but to be honest, because, and again, I'm sort of unique in this, most marketers probably use a lot of automation, and it probably makes sense for me at some point to begin to use some of it, but I like the actual, you know, it's called social media for a reason. I like being social. So, I enjoy that aspect of me being able to reach out, interact with people, and engage with people on all these platforms, whether it's Instagram or Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter. Uh, you get the, for me, I get a sense of enjoyment out of that engagement. If I automated that entire process, I'm missing a lot. And so, some people would say, 'But you can also gain a lot as a result.' You can. But what I found is a lot of people sort of ignore automation anyway. Listen, I get people with those automated DMs on Twitter, and I just completely ignore that stuff ten ways till Sunday. I can tell when things are coming across automated on LinkedIn, and I shut it down immediately. I just don't like the automation. It's not perfected right. So, while I can use those platforms to sort of help me do what I do better, I've found them also to be a complication and a hesitancy to do it. So, even when I'm working with other brands, I tell them, 'I'm behind your Twitter accounts. I'm going to actually be the person engaging with that. I'm going to be engaged on LinkedIn or, you know, Instagram, what have you.' So, it's it's a thin, it's a thin balance.

Ty Smith23:44

Yeah, yeah, and like you said, you are unique because a lot of people don't have a full-time social media manager. They're they're, you know, entrepreneurs who are juggling a lot of different tasks. So, for those people, I mean, I use, I use Buffer. I like Buffer. I've tried a bunch of different ones, but Buffer is where I found the most value. Um, but I really like the fact that you can plan tweets in advance and build, they call it a queue on Buffer. It's a whole, so, so, you can set a certain number of, you know, the maximum number of tweets you want to have in a day and what times you find are optimized, and it actually helps and recommends the most optimized times to to post tweets. So, once in a while, I'll just, about once a month, I will, um, just write out a ton of tweets, just, you know, for engagement purposes, and schedule them all. So, I I kind of am able to put that on autopilot, um, and I do recommend that for for a lot of people. Also, it, you know, Twitter and things like that have their own analytics built into them, but Buffer adds another layer to that.

Paul McNeal24:47

Yeah, and see, for me, in the world of crypto, things move so drastically fast. Like, if I schedule a bunch of tweets, it's like by the time those tweets go out, they're so old. It's like go away with that old stuff. It's like, dude, we are on to other things. So, I like being in the moment when it comes to crypto. And again, I'm unique. I get to do this all day long, thanks to crypto. I get to do it all day long, and I don't have any other responsibilities to worry about, so I get to really immerse myself in it. But the way I see thing doing, especially with crypto, is that it moves so fast. Listen, if I send out a tweet about some news that broke, or if I sit down one day and schedule a bunch of tweets, I just, I don't know. To me, it's just, it's limiting.

Ty Smith25:35

Yeah, no, I I understand that. Um, I I, I mean, I'm the same way. There's there's definitely a different need for different software for different aspects of of a business. When it comes to just, I mean, like like you said before, what were the three things? Have something to say, say it well, and say it often. For the say it often part, sometimes, uh, it's it's fine to automate. But I agree that, um, for really top engaging content, you do need someone behind the wheel, um, who who knows what's going on in the market.

Ty Smith25:52

All right, so, coming to the end here, where can our listeners find you?

Paul McNeal26:20

Sure. The easiest way to find me is on Twitter, @_cryptocurator. If you hit me there, I promise you, I will find you everywhere else you live on the web because that's what I do. I use Twitter as sort of my, the top of that funnel. Once you come into my Twitter orbit, I just completely extract everything I can find out about you, and I follow you on LinkedIn and and Instagram and Facebook and any of the platforms you might be on. I most likely will connect to you on there.

Ty Smith26:37

All right, perfect. Well, thanks again, Paul.

Paul McNeal26:39

Hey, you're welcome.