“LBM Talks” hosts top professionals from different sectors of the lumber and building material industry to share their expertise, with a heavy emphasis on practical, tactical strategies to help you serve your markets and grow your business.
In this episode, Sally is joined by Zach O’Brien, a fellow content marketer and social media manager. Zach is the Founder of Active NorCal, Northern California’s Outdoor Magazine, providing news and features on outdoor lifestyles. In addition to growing Active NorCal’s social media following to 200,000+ since its founding, Zach is the Head of Content for Niche Media; coordinates social media content for AIN Media Group; and is now the Founder and Head of Content Strategy for Stonethrow Media, a social media and content management agency.
Zach and Sally touch on a plethora of topics including how Zach organically grew ActiveNorCal’s Facebook and Instagram accounts, how social media marketing is tied to his business strategy, what “good” content on social media should include, the algorithm on each social media platform, and more.
If you’re interested in social media and content marketing, this episode is for you. Sally and Zach, both passionate content creators, have an in-depth conversation about this new marketing landscape and their experiences.
Connect with Zach: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zachobrien/
Please send all podcast inquires to sally@lbmjournal.com
Watch this conversation and more great content from LBM journal via our YouTube channel here.
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Prefer to read about it instead? Take a peek at the transcript below:
(Editor’s note: Transcript is AI-generated and may include some errors.)
Sally Traxler-Lacey
Zach O’Brien, hello. Welcome to our podcast, LBM talks social media. Welcome.
Zach O’Brien
Hi, Sally, thanks for having me. Great to see you.
Sally Traxler-Lacey
Good to see you again, all of our audience members. This is Zach O’Brien. I’ll let you introduce yourself a little bit. But Zach and I met actually about a year ago, and then I saw you again at a previous conference, which was a publisher’s conference. And Zach actually gave a talk on he’s given several talks on social media management, content creation, all that kind of stuff. So I reached out to him to see if he would want to come on this podcast, and he agreed. So, Zach, why don’t you just introduce yourself a little bit? Yeah, just take it away.
Zach O’Brien
Yeah. I’ll try to be as concise as possible. I’m Zach O’Brien. I essentially mostly work in media. So I own an outdoor media company in Northern California. We have a print magazine, and we also have our website and our very popular social media accounts. I also run social for a handful of other media companies with a ton of other brands and different subject lines. So I’m kind of all over the place. I do a lot of different social media work within small media companies, and then I also have a small content marketing agency, which we specialize in doing content for mostly local businesses within the tourism community here in Northern California. But also I work with events like the event that that we met at, yeah. So I do a lot of different content and social media for a lot of different people.
Sally Traxler-Lacey
Yeah. So for your agency, is that, when you say content, is that just for social platforms?
Zach O’Brien
No, we do a little bit of everything, as long as it’s within, like the content realm. Like, we’re not big into like design and stuff. But if you want to do a newsletter, if you want to do blogs on your website, if you want to do social media or video content, that’s sort of what we specialize in so, and I think that’s kind of where marketing, especially social media, marketing, is going to is just creating content for people, instead of, you know, a marketing campaign that says, hey, we’re the greatest. I think it’s better to provide your audience with insights and entertainment and education.
Sally Traxler-Lacey
yeah, you it seems like you are doing a lot. I mean, when I heard kind of all of the things you have your toes dipped in, it’s like, how is he doing all this? But kudos.
Zach O’Brien
My wife thinks I have adult add, but I haven’t gotten diagnosed yet, so I just, I like to do a lot of different things, and especially when you’re create, you’re doing creative stuff like avoiding burnout, for me is being able to hop over to a different project and work on something else creatively. So I sort of found this, this niche and and just doing a bunch of different things, and I really enjoy it.
Sally Traxler-Lacey
Oh, nice. I’m glad you are scratching your creative itch? Yes, so, so tell us a little bit about your background in social media marketing. Like, did that start with active NorCal? How did you get into that?
Zach O’Brien
so I graduated college in 2010 and throughout college, there were people, you know, they’re on MySpace and Facebook, and I just refused it. I I was an in person type of guy. And when I left college and I moved away from all my friends, I hopped on Facebook and I started messing around with it. I actually got a job right out of college, working for the NBA, the National Basketball Association, and I did. I was part of the PR team, and so part of that was like doing Twitter updates and and posting on Facebook. So it’s kind of how I started dipping my toes into it. It certainly wasn’t, you know, it probably wasn’t even part of the job description when I got the job, but it was just where things were going back then, in the early 2000 10s. And then when I, when I left that my first job out of college with the NBA, I started my own media business, act of NorCal and print magazine about outdoor activities in Northern California. And, you know, social media marketing wasn’t even really. A topic that we talked about. But what we did is, every time our magazine would come out, we’d take all the articles, we’d put it on our website, and then we’d sort of trickle it out onto our Facebook page. And yeah, so we just started putting it out on Facebook, because, you know, why not? And we it started to grow. We weren’t even looking at analytics. We just, we started to like, see, oh, wow, we have 10,000 followers. That’s weird. And then, and also, like, people started reading the articles. Like, we’d have 10,000 people on our website, then 20,000 and it really was like an eye opener of, oh, this, can actually help grow the business so and at that point, we actually in 2016 some 2016 we we actually went all digital, and we just went all in on our social media pages, and we’ve since brought back our print magazine, but that’s been my life for the last 10 years is, you know, marketing content for our media company on social media, mostly, right?
Sally Traxler-Lacey
I love that kind of whole why not? Thing I feel like that’s just a great kind of mantra to have is just, why not? Like, why not post it to Facebook and just see what happens and looks like, sounds like a lot did happen
Zach O’Brien
well, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, lesson that’s can still be used today, right? Like, why not try to start a tick tock page? Why not try to throw things up on YouTube, you know, and if it doesn’t work, like it’s not the end of the world, you probably have a base business you could still fall back on. But, you know, only positives can come from it. In my you know, in my opinion, there’s not a whole lot of negatives that can come from, from jumping in and saying, why not
Sally Traxler-Lacey
totally? And that’s also great, that story is a great message of consistency, which is a LinkedIn post that I read of yours recently. Zach is on LinkedIn, and he shares a lot about social media management and content creation. Yeah, like you, you said that consistency is huge.
Zach O’Brien
Yeah, it’s, it’s just consistency is the number one thing for me. Like, you know, your your content can change, your strategy can change. But if you’re showing up, you know, every day or every week, or whatever your strategy or your schedule is, people are going to respond and they’re going to follow, you know, it’s the old marketing saying, like someone has to see your ad three times before they want to buy right? Like there are so many brands that I’m loyal to today that I saw three, 510, times before I said, You know what? I’m going to give them a follow. I actually like their stuff. So if you’re not doing it consistently, and I’m saying consistently, like year over year, you know, not giving up after after a couple months, you know, yeah, because eventually it will come. And so consistency, and consistently trying to put out good, good content is always going to work in my book. Yeah,
Sally Traxler-Lacey
I just recorded with a marketing professional in our industry the other day, and she said that those touch points, like numbers are up in the 50s, and she’s a huge advocate on just be showing up on social media so that people can find you and have those touch points. So that’s a great story about Facebook. So that’s kind of where it started, you know, and now it’s meta with Facebook and Instagram, and you also have, I don’t know how many followers you have on Facebook, and I don’t follow you there, so I actually don’t know what active NorCal is like on Facebook, but I do know that you guys have over 100,000 followers on Instagram. So what was the When did you guys get on the Instagram? And, yeah, when did you guys go over there?
Zach O’Brien
I don’t even know, you know, I can’t even recall. It was probably pretty early on and Instagrams sort of rise, and probably before they were acquired by meta,
Sally Traxler-Lacey
yeah,
Zach O’Brien
yes, I think we’re somewhere around, like, 160,000 on Facebook, and, yeah, with Instagram, it’s weird, because, like, we’re a media company, and we’re trying to get people to go to our website right? Like, that’s how we put ads on the website, and we want as many impressions on those ads as possible. Instagram doesn’t do that, right? Like, you cannot drive traffic through Instagram. So, you know, we sort of started dipping our toes, but we thought, well, what can we gain from this? And. And it really just turned into almost like a vanity play, like, hey, let’s just grow our audience and have fun and see what happens. And now Instagram is like a huge driver of revenue for us so well. So I always say, like our Facebook audience drives traffic to our website. You and I, I’ve said this to you before, but like, like link in bio on Instagram doesn’t work very well anymore, right? So we’re just trying to use it to sell our subscriptions, to put our advertising messages out there from our advertisers. And you know what’s funny is we have more followers on Facebook, but we probably do more impressions nowadays on Instagram, just because we we really focus on on giving value to people. I always say, like, there’s, there’s three things you can do on social. You can you can give information, you can give inspiration, or you can give entertainment, right? And sometimes it’s a combination of the two or two or three, but so we really are just trying to give value, value, value to our audience, and they’ve come back and and reciprocated with purchasing our products, or, you know, following our advertisers also, and I’ve told you this before, it’s that like medic gives out big bonuses now to creators so and it’s not a ton of money. We make somewhere between two and $3,000 a month on Instagram just from their their Creator fund, so that we are making money off it, and we can use both Facebook and our newsletter and a couple other mediums just to drive traffic to our website. So
Sally Traxler-Lacey
okay, so it’s a revenue social media. These platforms are revenue maker. They are I’m sure it’s just huge for brand awareness. Like as a big Instagram user. That’s where you get exposure to new brands, new products. And I’m sure that the link in bio, like, if it’s gonna work for one thing, it’s gonna work for driving subscriptions, because that’s where people know to go. Be like, oh, okay, now I finally want to subscribe to this magazine.
Zach O’Brien
And to your point, they’re probably gonna see 100 of pieces of content from us before they they decide to do that, right? So we’re on there constantly, you know, three, 510, times a day, giving them content and reminding them that we have subscriptions they can buy
Sally Traxler-Lacey
with that 100, with those over 100,000 I mean, combined, that’s almost 300,000 followers on Facebook and Instagram. What was the content strategy that got you there? It was the content so, yeah, what was your strategy for it
Zach O’Brien
all again, it’s inform, entertain or inspire, right? So we, there’s, there’s a lot of different things we do, right? So we can inspire people to, like, go visit waterfalls. Here’s a cool video to go to go inspire you. Oh, I want to go visit this waterfall. That’s one we can inform like, water in my neck of the woods in California is like a big topic, you know, we, some want to build more dams. Others want to, you know, want it more free flowing for salmon runs. So we talk about those controversial topics without taking sides. That’s very important in this day of this political age, and then just entertain as much as possible. And hopefully both the inspirational stuff and the educational stuff entertains. So that’s really it. You know, as as like a media company, as news comes in, we try to repackage it the best, most inspirational, most entertaining, educational way possible. That’s really, I wish there was, like, a more specific way I could put it, but, you know, I think, like for us, there’s, like, a lot of legacy media out there. There’s newspapers and, you know, local news stations, and we’re just different. We’re trying to reach a younger audience. We’re trying to have more fun. We’re not talking about, you know, I don’t know war in the Middle East, or stuff like that. Like, we’re just, we’re trying to, we’ll talk about controversial stuff, but you know, it, we’re not going to frame it with these crazy click bait type stuff. We just try to be a positive for the most part media company.
Sally Traxler-Lacey
So those are kind of your content pillars, like that’s what you’re trying to do through your content. And you guys, you believe, and you’ve seen providing values, just strictly providing value, not really asking for anything in. Return has helped you grow your business.
Zach O’Brien
Yeah, I don’t know if you’re familiar with Joe Polizzi. He’s the founder of the Content Marketing Institute, and he always said,
Sally Traxler-Lacey
yeah, yeah, Content Marketing Institute.
Zach O’Brien
he sold it for a lot of money. He’s a he’s a very rich man now, but he his whole he had a 311 strategy. And essentially it’s, you better provide three pieces of value for your audience before you ask them for any sort of sale, right? So, and I think that was, that’s an older model. I think nowadays it’s more like five to 10 to one, where you know, if you’re not giving, giving, giving, then don’t expect anything in return.
Sally Traxler-Lacey
And do you really think? Do you think that that prominent form of marketing has risen because of social media, like, because people are now just online so much and consuming that way, that like now we have to provide value, because that’s where they are.
Zach O’Brien
Yes, I also think people are sick of traditional marketing, um, treating. How do I put this? You know, people don’t want to, don’t want to be treated like they’re stupid, like if you tell me you’re the best company in the world, well, why would I believe that? I know what that meant, who that message is coming from, right? But if you, if you, I mean, it could be any, any business, the lumber business, you can, you can tell people information why you should buy this lumber product instead of that lumber product, and provide that information for free, right? And then someone who is really familiar with Lumber Products says, Oh, they’re right. I should work with this person, because they’re an expert, not because they told me they’re an expert, because they proved to me that they’re an expert. So it’s kind of a show, don’t tell. And so I think just consumers in general have just gotten a lot smarter that and I do believe still in traditional advertising, don’t get me wrong, it’s another touch point. It’s an important touch point. But you know, you do just need to provide value and to prove to people your expertise before you could ask for a sale.
Sally Traxler-Lacey
Totally. People want people in general, not even like just calling them consumers. People want to be able to trust the brands that they’re buying from, or like relating to, which I would say is probably, like, also from social media, like, kind of that wall being broken down, like, we’re gonna give you behind the scenes look and all that. So yeah,
Zach O’Brien
I like authenticity is huge these days, right?
Sally Traxler-Lacey
yes. So I kind of told you a bit about our industry, LBM dealers, lumber dealers. We have massive companies in our industry. We also have small companies, and they’re all trying to do the same thing. What you’re trying to do, what I’m trying to do, is to use social media well. So do you have any like, tips or ideas for content. For some of us in this industry, like some of the things that I see are these lumber dealers, a lot of the times, maybe they’re promoting their products and like or the products their menu, the products that they sell, they’re not their products their employees, maybe just like company culture and all that kind of stuff. So do you have any ideas for that?
Zach O’Brien
Yeah, so. And I think when you talk about the different size businesses, I think what’s really cool about social media and going to like, to your point of why people should consider social media is these people can be in the same arena, right? Like, like, you could be the biggest lumber company in the area, and you could be the smallest, and the smallest could, in theory, out do the bigger one by having a good content campaign in terms of content, everyone’s different. Everyone’s objectives are different. I’m just a big fan of authenticity and putting your people, your employees, your managers, on camera, right and and really, my guess is, and correct me if I’m wrong that a lot of these Lumber Products are similar, and of course, there’s probably some differences here and there. So you’re all fighting the same fight to sell the same product to the same consumer, right? So is that consumer going to be. Likely to buy from you if they know who you are, if they trust who you are, if. And here’s a really silly example. I just recently on Tiktok. I came across this trucking company in Indiana, and their entire Tiktok page is the girl, the intern, try they set up a basketball hoop in the door, and she’s trying to dunk on the general manager, and they’re always trying to trick him. And, you know, I think about stuff like that, I think like, Okay, I don’t need a trucking company in Indiana, but if I did, who am I going to think of first? Right? Interesting and, and not only that, I call them up and I the intern answers like, oh, did you dunk on the GM today? You know, I think that sort of connection to an audience can be so valuable to getting a sale. Any sales person will tell you, like, what’s the number one way to get consistent sales from a customer? It’s relationships. Well, you can build these relationships by by showing who you are, what you believe in your authenticity in the office place. So I think that’s that’s a really good idea within any niche, especially for the smaller people, maybe trying to fight the bigger companies, or what have you. I just think showing your face personifying is what I call it, personifying your content. And I think that’s sort of the best way in an industry. It’s hard, it’s hard to show lumber, right? As, like, a super interesting visual. It’s funny, I was taught. I was talking to a client the other day, they’re trying to promote plexiglass, and it’s like, that’s like, the worst thing you could put on camera, right? It’s just a piece of glass, yeah? So, you know, the idea is, like, let’s put someone behind that plexiglass to show you what it is and who’s selling it to you. So just as a generalization, I would say that would probably be my biggest recommendation for these companies,
Sally Traxler-Lacey
totally get in front of the camera, show these people who you are, 100% and we have some there are companies that do that well, and that’s also something that I try to do through LBM journal, because I want genuine connection with our audience, like I want them to comment back at me and to start the conversation and to ask questions, yeah,
Zach O’Brien
yeah, yeah. And like, you know, I post a lot on LinkedIn, and that, really, I think, is like just driving connections with people I do business with, you know, and I get a lot of compliments on it. And sometimes I think to myself, Oh, this type of content is terrible, and I get compliments on it, and I do think it’s helping me, you know, deep in relationships, and that could be done from person to person or from business to consumer.
Sally Traxler-Lacey
Yeah, and like, another thing with that being a genuine person behind the screen, that being just a great driver for the social presences is like, when you don’t really have your brand personified on social media. It’s like maybe people are less likely to comment because they just feel like they’re throwing it out into space, and that maybe it’s not going to anybody and they’re not going to get a response. And sometimes people don’t because they don’t have someone you know going on there and genuinely engaging with their audience.
Zach O’Brien
Yeah, yeah. And I understand the companies that don’t do it. It’s hard to do it. You’re putting yourself out like, it’s, it’s just, it’s like, I’ve certainly gotten pushback on, you know, my larger pages from putting my face on there, and people are gonna call you names, and they’re gonna do this and that. But you can’t let the squeaky wheel get the grease right. You have to know that. You know, a lot of people are really appreciating it, and it’s growing those touch points, and it’s growing that trust over time,
Sally Traxler-Lacey
yeah, and it’s all about like, finding what works best for you. But I think that the overall message is authenticity. 100% did you have any content examples you wanted to share from the research you did on your own in the industry?
Zach O’Brien
Yeah, so you sent me a couple people, and I won’t name names, because, I, yeah, I, I think I was surprised. And I think you probably sent me these, these people, because they do pretty well. You have some lumber companies making some really good content out there. And, yeah, and it’s, it’s cool to see. I think. Think little guys like trying to actually have a caught, like, actually being funky and be having fun. Like, that’s super fun. So, so what I actually went through some of the I think you gave me four or five of them I went through, and almost every single time, the ones that the videos that did the best on Instagram, where I watched them, was just employees having fun. I what I would, I would like to say, like, just constructive criticism on them, is, I think, in my personal opinion, content should always be as tight as possible. We’re living in a generation of people like you have like, three seconds before that person scrolls past, right? Totally. So nowadays, and this is, this is like, what I call the tiktokification of marketing and social media, nowadays, you really need to grab people’s attention within the first three seconds. So the only my like, the what I would say is to to tighten up and to have a hook at the beginning. Hooks are really easy, if you like, put it in chat, GPT and just ask, tell them what your content idea is, and ask for a hook, and it’ll spit out a bunch of hooks, because if you’re just, if you sit there and you have a 10 second opening, you’re just going to lose your audience. So that’s, that’s what I really liked. I also noticed a couple that teamed with influencers, and I thought, and obviously, when you, especially on Instagram, when you team with an influencer, and then you, you know, you do a collaboration on the post, you’re obviously going to reach their audience as well. Influencers are super powerful, and they’re depending on which ones I’m assuming, you know in the lumber industry or people in the local area of any lumber business is probably not that expensive, right? And or you could, you could simply trade them products for some sort of piece of content. And like there was one, I saw someone do a DIY project with their with their lumber, and it sort of shows, like what you can do again, if you show just like a normal piece of lumber, it’s kind of boring, right? But if you show all the different things you can do with it, that’s super powerful, so that that’s, that’s really, you know, without, like, naming names or anything, that’s kind of, what I saw is like, I thought a lot of them did a great job also, of like, mixing up content, a mixture of reels, photos, carousels. I’m not a fan of over editing. So like and I say that after I said, tighten it up. But what I mean by that is graphics and the Creative Commons business songs in the background that that just does it. It looks to me like, like an old advertisement you’d see on television, where you really want to differentiate yourself from that, right? Like we talked about the change in marketing, where you don’t want people to think it’s an ad. You want people to think it’s content, right? So I would just say, you know, like you want your you want it tight, you want to edit it tight. But also, like you don’t need all the funky graphics and everything like that, like, just be real and authentic. And people will respond,
Sally Traxler-Lacey
yeah, just to piggyback off that we I think there was one that I sent you, there’s several that I sent you that do a lot of really great collaborations on Instagram, and I think that there is a lot of opportunity to use that collaboration figure, which is a feature which is on Instagram, where you can collaborate with other accounts, because, like, lumber dealers are in the middle of this, this building material chain. So like, we have our suppliers of the product, and then that goes to the dealer, and then the dealer sends it to the builder, sells it to the builder. And so, like, there are some in our industry that are collaborating with the builder, and there are some that are collaborating with the supplier. And then, like you also mentioned the influencer, which is, there are some, yeah, in our industry that are doing that, and I totally forgot about that. And so, yeah, just some really great opportunity and things that they’re doing well.
Zach O’Brien
And I am a big fan of mixing up your content so it doesn’t all look the same, right like and so when you go through someone’s feed, and what sticks out the one that’s a little bit different. And so if an influencer is creating content for you and and essentially doing marketing for you, and that could be based off pay or trade, um. Um, it just catches your eye because you’re, wait, what am I looking at? So I, you know, any, I don’t want to call it shock value, but anything that you can really just, like, get someone’s attention, like, oh, what? Oh, I thought this was LBM journal, and it looks a lot different, you know, yeah. And so I think that’s another thing to, like, catch their attention for three seconds and stop the endless Doom scroll.
Sally Traxler-Lacey
Totally Well, thank you for looking at those that I sent you. I’m sure we all really appreciate that. That was really great of you. But to segue just a little bit, I wanted to segue to different platforms, specifically LinkedIn and Facebook. So you are on LinkedIn, on your personal page, which you are quite active on. There are individuals in the Alabama industry, I mean, sales reps, owners, lots of people on LinkedIn, building their network. You probably also have some experience with company pages. And then I also read one of your LinkedIn posts was about your Facebook revamp. And we can kind of do these in segments, but yeah, I just was kind of wondering about any strategy tips you have for these other platforms also. And maybe we can start with LinkedIn, just like what the value of they are, what the value these platforms offer and strategies.
Zach O’Brien
Yeah, each, each one offers something different, obviously. And I, the reason I post a LinkedIn now so often is because I actually have had some success with company pages. And and I wanted to be on the platform more to learn what worked. So me challenging myself to post every day is is part of me trying to get better at it, but so, yeah, I’ve had some success, but, but just overarching really quick, like, as I looked at those Instagram pages that you sent me, if, if people just simply started by sharing those reels on LinkedIn and tick tock, you could do YouTube shorts, anything like that. There’s nothing bad that’s gonna happen from that. Like the only it could only benefit your company to try to just throw those, that content you plan for Instagram onto those pages. That’s not the best strategy in the world, but it’s, it’s like the least amount of effort, if you don’t have, you know, a lot of money for a whole content team. LinkedIn is really interesting because, I mean, I go back to, like, authenticity, I think, and I work with some businesses and some companies on this, we really try to give the employees the resources to post on LinkedIn themselves, and then we’ll share it to our main accounts, right? So, you know, I think, like for a lumber company, like any insights into the lumber industry is, as in general, is always helpful. And I’m sure each sales representative or GM or anything has a lot of insights on that that people want to know. And if you’re talking about that stuff on LinkedIn, like, you’re not going to get a million people reading it, but you don’t need a million, right? You just need that, like, important, couple 100 that are decision makers within your industry that want to do business with you, right? So it’s a smaller size audience you’re typically going to get on LinkedIn, but it’s a more powerful audience. And again, like, it’s really good for, like, salespeople, hey, I’m going to be at this convention, you know, I’ll be at Booth such and such. Or shoot me a DM, and let’s connect. You know, also, like, you know, for some of the companies I work with, like, if we’re at a convention, we’ll take a picture of our booth, say, the booth number. Show everyone that’s at the booth. It’s just like, hey, this is where we are. Come see us. This is who you’re gonna see when you get there. So, like, for anyone that’s doing B to B, and I’m sure a lot of the lumber industry is doing business to business transactions. Yes, LinkedIn, super powerful. And they’ve just recently sort of launched their vertical video. I don’t even know it’s some sort of launch that they did. They’re really diving into vertical video. So again, if you have stuff on Instagram or Facebook or Tiktok, you could just simply throw it on LinkedIn and hope it works. Facebook. Facebook is a little bit Facebook’s, you know, it’s, it is still the biggest social media platform on the planet, right? It has the most viewers and and Like. I know, like you, I’m a I’m a millennial. Like I I am Facebook out right?
Sally Traxler-Lacey
here’s my beef with Facebook. Yeah, every time I go on there, my feed is just like these random accounts, and they’re just showing me this, AI, or literally, the most random content ever. And I don’t want to see it, and I don’t know, I just, it’s like the stupidest thing ever to me.
Zach O’Brien
Yes, so here’s the benefit of what you just said. They’ve really gone from being a, you know, you’ll only, it used to be you would only see content from the companies you follow your friends, you know, your grandmother or whatever. Now they sort of taken a all of these social media companies are recommending content, and Facebook actually tripled down on that, sort of like Tiktok, Tiktok, you know, Tiktok funny, because you don’t even, you don’t even follow people anymore. If you like a piece of their content, then they’ll just keep showing it to you until you’re sick of it. And Facebook really took that from Tiktok, and so they’re they’re just showing you a bunch of random stuff nowadays. Now, the reason why that’s that might be annoying to me and you, but it works for businesses, because they really, if you create good content, they’ll put it front of a lot more people than it used to be. Yeah, the like, the it used to be really hard to get new followers on Facebook. Now it’s, it seemed to the trajectory of it has just sped up so and and in that regard, Facebook is dying for top notch content, because most people have really tripled down on Instagram and Tiktok and YouTube, you know, and so they’re really dying for good content. So if you can put good content on Facebook, you can grow really easily. So I completely understand your frustrations with it. I certainly don’t. I very rarely go on it personally, except if I get the notification that my mom tagged me in a picture or whatever, you know. But other than that, I just think it’s a good place for businesses to grow, also, like if you’re doing I don’t, I don’t want to talk about like age too much, although age is very important in the social realm, because age really dictates, for the most part, where people are. But if you are looking for sort of older decision maker type people, they might be on Facebook looking for pictures of their grandkids or something, or, you know, so it’s not the worst place to be, and younger generations might not be on it at all, and that’s okay, because you do want to be where everyone’s at. And so if, if people are on Facebook, which, again, is the largest social media platform, you kind of have to be there, right?
Sally Traxler-Lacey
Sure, yeah, maybe it’s because I when I go on there on my personal Facebook page, it’s not like that, but when I go on the LBM journal feed, it’s just junk after junk. So yeah, maybe it’s just the business page,
Zach O’Brien
because you’re probably not following a lot of people, right? So there’s not a lot for that algorithm to pull, yeah, and it’s, I mean, and you know, Zuckerberg came out, they’re not fact checking. They’re not they’re kind of doubling down on political content. So it really can be like a cesspool in a lot of cases. But again, there are, there is a lot of opportunity for businesses on Facebook. So and Facebook, it being the biggest, is still going to continue to evolve and change with society. So I don’t see it going anywhere. So I think for younger marketers, like us, like we want to ignore it, and it’s, it’s just not a good idea to ignore it. You know, you do have to be where your audience is.
Sally Traxler-Lacey
That’s a great reminder. And, you know, I actually do think that there is a like Facebook is a quite a great platform for our industry, because what I notice is with some of these LBM dealers being maybe smaller, more localized companies, they can they use their Facebook page as more of you know, like it’s, it’s for the community. And a lot of community members will just like, stay up to date and follow local businesses. They can share news that way. So I think it is a powerful platform for a lot of our audience members, and that’s how I kind of use it too, like say we have a dealer profile that we do a story, and it’s those stories where I’m posting pictures of employees that. Get the most traction because the company reposts it, and then everybody in the community is like, I know that person and all this kind of stuff. So I, yeah, I it is. There’s potential there. It can just be quite annoying.
Zach O’Brien
yeah, that’s like, active norcals page. You know, we have 150,000 160,000 followers. Like, we could get up where words of 20 to 30 million impressions in a month. Like, just to sort of show you its power, we never go below 10. So it’s definitely sharing our content with our audience, but also with other audiences. So again, it’s, it’s powerful.
Sally Traxler-Lacey
just to kind of get a few more of your thoughts, you mentioned that Facebook is itching for good content. Is what you say. What is good content for Facebook? In your opinion?
Zach O’Brien
I think everyone’s different, visually, visually stimulating is always best, right? If you’re going to put some sort of message to your audience on Facebook, you want some sort of accompanying image even further than that vertical video never disappoints. Facebook now has its its reels page where you can scroll, kind of like Instagram or Tiktok. So it’s dying for vertical video to throw on there. So anything, any sort of photo or vertical video, I think, is good and and again, it goes back to like, not when you’re editing a video for, like an Instagram reel, not to put a ton of graphics. Don’t put a ton of graphics, don’t, you know, don’t like design some weird looking flyer, like, just put a really good picture to go with your messaging. And that in my what, from what I’ve seen, this does the best. Typically,
Sally Traxler-Lacey
I am wondering so you, I think you were talking about the AI V aviation something. What is it? AIAN, AIAN. So this is a company you make content for. I think it was their Facebook reels that you were talking about in your LinkedIn posts that really did well. So when I am posting reels to Facebook, I feel like they don’t do well. So do you think it’s more of like, the videos that you’re posting are kind of more for the masses, like they’re very entertaining, versus like when you’re posting these short, vertical videos that are going to be in the reels feed, and I don’t know if that’s the same as the Facebook feed, that when they’re just for your audience, they’re, you know, pushed less by the algorithm, and maybe that’s why they don’t do as well.
Zach O’Brien
Yeah, so yes and no based on, like, the question about to the masses versus to your audience, it’s been super interesting because, like, so, like, a i n like, we report mostly on private jets. It’s a media company about, like, private jets, essentially. So I’ve spent the last five years going around the world and getting video of the best private jets. So that makes for really good content, like just showing a exterior interior of a private jet. Obviously works great people, you know, it’s like when you hear about the lottery, like people just want to dream that they could be in it and fly in it. But also, we take that video and we put our news on it, right? So if there’s big news coming out of Gulfstream, we could take that video of that really, you know, sexy aircraft, and we could put news over the you overlay it on the video and say, Gulfstream is doing this. Gulfstream is doing that. So it’s both like, I think we’re reaching both the people who are hardcore into the B to B industry, but people who also want to see private jets, yeah. But you know, again, it’s just putting really good content on Facebook. I just think it lacks a lot of really good content like nowadays, it’s kind of hard to break through the noise on Instagram and Tiktok, because there are so many good content creators on those platforms where not so much on Facebook. So if you can, if you’re you know, if you can make really good content, both for the masses and for your audience, I think you’ll probably succeed. Yeah.
Sally Traxler-Lacey
So just visually stimulating, entertaining and informative, whatever. Those kind of pillars where we talked about earlier, delivering value through your content, okay?
Zach O’Brien
And if anything else fails, like just vertical video, vertical video, vertical video, like all these platforms are moving to that. So just if you make good vertical video, you’re probably going to have success.
Sally Traxler-Lacey
Got it? I. So I have, I am going to start to kind of wrap it up. I have kind of a question that I’m going to finish this out with, but there is something I just want to ask, because I think it could be helpful for myself and for others. I am really just curious about your content creation process. I think that as content creators, you know it is creative, and I find myself like having to sit down and turn off my phone so that I can focus on trying to be creative. So I’m I’m just kind of curious, like, what your brainstorming process is like.
Zach O’Brien
It’s different than that. I would I would say it’s chaotic. I i have learned that when I’m feeling inspired to create, that could be at two o’clock in the morning, that could be at, you know, five o’clock at night. It doesn’t matter when I really have an idea that I’m passionate about I get to editing a video or to writing the content. A lot of my videos, unfortunately, like I travel a lot internationally, so a lot of them are like laying in a hotel room bed with jet lag, right? So I make a plan, but it’s a loose plan, because, for one, I never know what’s going to happen within the industry. What kind of news. So for me, it’s really hard to plan out in advance. If something major happens, we sort of have to shift right? So have some sort of plan, whether that’s, you know, create a weekly video, create a daily video, that sort of thing. But for me, what works in my chaotic brain is just when, when I think of something and it won’t get out of my brain, I just do it immediately. And that’s worked for me. But, you know, I think, I think most importantly, like, when you’re creating, like, just create something you want to watch. Like, have fun with it. You know, ultimately, I think if you’re a content creator for one, you should be on like Instagram and Tiktok and getting as much inspiration as possible. A lot of times when I’m when it’s not working for me, in my brain and I’m having trouble coming up with stuff, I’ll get on Tiktok, or I’ll get on Instagram, and I’ll search the topic that I sort of need to to create for, and I’ll scroll through and find interesting stuff to inspire me. So you do have to have some sort of way to inspire yourself, which is hard, and there is burnout. Burnouts real, like, that’s that’s why I don’t force myself to do it. You know, all day, every day, because I know when it comes and I feel good about it, and I want to create that. I make better stuff. So, yeah, create some sort of calendar. Try to stick with it, but, but ultimately, like, whatever your fun meter is telling you to do, like, go do that and have fun with it.
Sally Traxler-Lacey
Yeah, I love that. Okay, well, there’s kind of a question that I ask at the end of all of my chats, which we kind of just touched on with a little bit of your advice. But I guess it would just be, what would you Zach, what kind of advice would you give to maybe an independent LBM dealer who is just trying to use social media for their business, if you have anything else to add,
Zach O’Brien
social media is what you make of it, right? Like, like, if you want to commit to a weekly post, great, you’re going to get weekly results. If you want to commit to posting daily, you’re going to get daily results. If you want to commit to posting five times a day, you’re going to get results five times out of the day. So it really is you get out of it, what you put into it that also in terms of investment, like, if you want to be successful in social and you don’t invest in, say, the right equipment or the right people, it’s just not going to work. There’s so many people who just want it to work without investing in it, and there’s just so many really talented creators nowadays that are in every single industry, in every single niche that you’re going to be competing with. I always say, like, you’re not competing with your competitor. You’re competing with, like, pictures of my kid, you know. So if I post a picture of my two year old. On Instagram, and his grandmother sees that like she’s not going to care anything, what you’re what, what content you put out. So, like, social media is emotional, it’s fun, it’s educational, it’s entertaining. So you just have to, like, think about what makes you happy on social media? What brings you value on social media? And try to mirror that with your content, and just have fun with it. Like, I always think, like the director, Quentin Tarantino, I saw this behind the scenes with him. He was making a movie, and, like, they stopped the cut and he said, Okay, we just got, we got the scene. Like, it’s good to go, but we’re gonna do it one more time, because we love making films, right? Oh, yeah. And so I think about that like all the time, like, if you’re not loving what you’re doing, other people aren’t gonna love it either. So however, you need to turn that around with your strategy, or how you create your brain do it, because otherwise, if you’re laboring to put out content, it’s going to people are going to see right through it, and they’re going to see that it’s not fun for you. So that would be my number one thing, have fun and just show up consistently.
Sally Traxler-Lacey
Totally. I don’t have anything to add to that, but if you guys, if anybody wants to connect with Zach, you can find him on LinkedIn at Zach O’Brien. If you want to check out some of the content that you guys share on Instagram, just kind of the value that they’re sharing, you can look up active nor Cal as in Northern California and go check out kind of what Zach is up to. So, yeah, anything else to add?
Zach O’Brien
No, no. Thank you for having me. And I think this is great what you’re doing. You know, we talk a lot about, like, creating communities, and you’re creating your own little community with this podcast. And I think that’s really cool and really helpful for just everyone within your industry. So thanks for having me. I hope people can learn from like, I know I’m way outside your industry, but I do think it’s all connected. So anyway, kudos to you. I think this is great what you’re doing, and thanks for having me.
Sally Traxler-Lacey
Well, thank you for the compliments. That means a lot. And I think this was great. We appreciate you coming on, Zach.
