By cdelprincipe@hubspot.com (Curt del Principe)

One of the most powerful — but least used — aspects of social media is its ability to turn customers into community.

Today’s master has a lot to say about how social, community, and customer marketing all work together as one. And as our 15-minute interview stretched into a 90-minute coffee chat, folks, it got really hard to distill it down into only three lessons.

But if your role touches on any of those areas, you’re going to want to see what Katie Parkes has to say.

Katie Parkes

Director of Social, Community, and Customer Marketing for Apollo.io

• Fun Fact: Katie competed nationally for Canada in figure skating and plays a dwarven fighter named Barbara Wild in D&D.
• Claim to Fame: Founding member of Shopify’s enterprise marketing team. She’s told the stories of some of the fastest-growing ecommerce brands (like Allbirds, Knix, and Chubbies), grew Shopify’s social media audience by 270% in one year, and tripled listenership for Shopify’s enterprise podcast.

  (She also moonlights as a toddler brand strategist, rebranding broccoli as “dinosaur trees” and spinach as “Hulk leaves.”)

Lesson 1: Make YouTube your hero.

Since Katie Parkes heads up social and community, you probably expect her gaze to be locked on TikTok or Reddit, right?

But when I ask her which marketing channel she’d pick if she were only allowed just one… she doesn’t even take a breath before blurting out, “YouTube.”

“YouTube is poised to have its biggest year yet,” she says, pointing out that the video giant has now eclipsed even Netflix as the most-watched streaming service on TV.

And, fun fact: YT’s audience is just a teeeeeny tiny hair smaller than TikTok and Instagram… combined.

“Use YouTube as your hero channel, and build a content engine around it,” Parkes advises. “Every video becomes the source material for dozens of repurposed assets — carousels, threads, memes, Reels, Shorts, and more.

“I think of it like this: Validate a topic with audience demand. Create a video script about that topic. Turn that video script into a blog, then take pieces and consider how it could become a carousel or short video.”

And as for the community aspect? Though YT lacks the direct message feature of most social platforms, Parkes says you should engage your audience right there in the comments.

“Priority one is keeping them on channel.”

And what do you put on that shiny new channel? Well… turn to your users.

Lesson 2: Turn power users into creators. (And vice versa.)

One of the most valuable marketing resources you have is your own user base, according to Parkes.

“The first thing you need to do is find your power users. Then turn those power users into creators. Have them create YouTube videos for your channels. Have them jump into your webinars.”

…read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron