In this episode, we talk with Tim Fargo from Social Jukebox. He is a two-time Inc. 500 winner, an entrepreneur, an international speaker and bestselling author and the creator of Social Jukebox. We are paid users of Social Jukebox and use it on a daily basis to promote the Communities That Convert podcast. It may even by why you are here.

Tim shares with us some of his best tips and practices to get the most out of your evergreen content. Social Jukebox is an automated content delivery system. So it’s essentially Buffer that just keeps on going, When you get to the end of one of your content databases on Social Jukebox, the content will keep recycling over and over again like an hourglass that just keeps turning over.

Question: What is Social Jukebox and why did you create it?

Answer: In 2013, I published the book Alphabet Success. I was trying to build an audience to promote the book and found the process of scheduling posts to be mind-numbing things. You could carve your tweet on a granite tablet and send it on horseback to be delivered. The person receiving it on Twitter will have no idea that ever happened so they don’t care how it got there.

As a result, I started looking around for a more efficient way to deliver the content. I ended up calling my former head of IT from Omega, that I sold in 2003, and asked him to build a tool to help me deliver my content to the social media sites.

I didn’t intend to sell it, but I quickly found people were much more interested in why I was posting 24 hours a day then they were my book. I thought maybe it’s time to abandon the book and try the software business. So here we are.

I just shared it with a few people in the beginning and it had a lot of utility. It just didn’t look very nice. So for people that are thinking about starting something, don’t get too hung up on getting it perfect. Just go for “good enough” when you’re getting started.

Question: When you started, it only worked with Twitter, but now you have added a few more platforms, correct?

Answer: We added the other two biggies in my mind, which are Facebook and LinkedIn, where most people have at least some presence. Almost everybody I think has a favorite go-to platform whether they’re doing a lot of Facebook marketing or whether they’re Twitter-centric. So we added those two platforms and, of course, we continue to look at other platforms to possibly add in the future.

Question: What is evergreen content in your mind? Can you give us some examples?

Answer: World Cup scores are great to share live or comment on. I have a connection with Sweden because my kids are half Swedish and Sweden’s actually South Korea right now as we are speaking. So that’s a great thing to live tweet because the game is happening now. It’s not a great thing to put in Social Jukebox because in a couple months it’ll be like, yeah we kind of know what happened with that event (Sweden won that match 1-0).

Things that make great evergreen content include a social media tip, a great graphic, podcasts, blog posts are very often great, especially if they cover leadership or management.

A good example is a plumber that creates videos about how homeowners can take care of jobs that are super easy, like how to tighten the washer onto someone’s sink can then be put in a Jukebox to be shared on Facebook and Twitter to develop a social community.

It’s anything that would resonate with your audience on an ongoing basis.

Today everyone’s their own media company. Media companies have editorial calendars and you can have an editorial calendar, too. You can create a Jukebox to share seasonal items only at a certain time of year.

For instance, you could have content in a Jukebox for Black History Month, if that is something that would resonate with your audience.

Question: For people that have not been on the tool yet, can you describe how it works?

Answer: Jukeboxes are basically miniature databases of content that post over and over in a random pattern.

When people quiz me as to why I chose to do it this way, I tell them that every time I tried to accurately predict the perfect time for the perfect content I was almost universally incorrect. If you have a particular kind of content that you want to share at a certain hour of the day, then that’s great, but don’t get too hung up on it being a specific post. In the Jukeboxes, the content is randomly going, and we also have a calendar for targeted posts where you’ve got a greater level of control.

There are actually three different ways to schedule things:

1. Auto-schedule allows you to decide how many times per day you want something to post from each Jukebox. It does it all for you and spaces out the posts.
2. You can set a specific schedule for an entire Jukebox to be used over a specific period of time.
3. You can also visual schedule, which looks like a giant excel spreadsheet. You can move posts around on that for people who want to tweak and get more specific with the time slots. What I recommend for those people is to use auto-schedule to create the massive schedule to start with and then go into the visual schedule and pinpoint different times.

Question: What is the effectiveness of the system?

Answer: The effectiveness and engagement will depend on the content. If you have a post that’s great, it’s going to get picked up and shared, but if you have a post that sucks, it’s not going to go anywhere. No amount of wizardry is going to make and uninteresting piece of content resonate with people.

Think back to the TV shows Friends and Seinfeld. The whole idea was to get eyeballs and once you have those eyeballs, have enough trust generated that those eyeballs will stick around and watch the commercials.

There’s lots of different ways to skin a cat and I think driving engagement comes from different ways, right? Some of the ways I have seen work include:

• Helpful content
• General interest content
• Things people find interesting or amusing.

Interesting content could be just facts or something that you share that might be relevant to your audience and develop some pickup. Other things could just be pure entertainment. The key is going to be in what does your audience care about.

Take the home shopping network, for instance. By my estimation, that whole channel is spam, right? But it’s a business. They don’t exist for no reason. There are people who sit at home and call the place up and order stuff. If they didn’t they go off the air.

So it’s all about serving your audience and that’s the key. All that my tool can do is deliver that message to the audience you have.

You can automatically add a hashtag to every post in a Jukebox by just adding it once in options instead of adding it to every post in the jukebox, which is much more efficient. But it does always go back to don’t try to put lipstick on a pig.

If you don’t have good content you need to focus on fixing that because getting a new tool isn’t  going to take you across the goal line.

Question: Twitter has new policies in place when it comes to duplicating tweets. Does your tool violate any of these new rules? Can you talk a little bit about the new Twitter policy?

Answer: Twitter has had a no duplicate policy since 2009. I don’t want to tempt fate, but the amount of resources that it would require for them to check every post that’s coming on against everything that’s been posted on your account before–you’re talking about a gargantuan amount of overhead.

We run an algorithm now to make sure that people aren’t duplicating content too quickly as it goes out because we’re enforcing a 72 hour rule. I’m sure that if I contacted people at Twitter, they’d say it’s absolutely forbidden. But I haven’t heard from anybody that’s having a problem.  

My impression about these rules and what they were trying to combat is the rise of fake news. Particularly on Twitter where we’d see trends pop up and it was a six word phrase. How does the six word phrase trend? The only way a six word phrase trends is because a bunch of accounts are coordinating the posting.  

I could add a wrinkle to Social Jukebox where you could update a thousand accounts because you’d have a shared jukebox between all 1000 accounts or 10,000 accounts for 100,000 accounts.  There really isn’t an upper limit as long as you have the server resources and you can automatically have that post go out to all those accounts more or less simultaneously.

That is something Twitter specifically talked about when they were reaching out. And I’m sure it was the same for everybody that has a posting tool for Twitter. They were very keen to know how you could move content back and forth between accounts, how quickly it could be shared, things like that. So my impression, and I think it’s correct, was they really wanted to find a way to limit people who are trying to make something look as if it was news. And if and if you can have something trend and the articles look newsworthy, people only read the headline and don’t necessarily click on the link but that message becomes the takeaway.

I think from Twitter’s perspective, you don’t want to be caught in the middle of this kind of chaos, with people putting out things that are just patently false on your platform.. I’m pretty sure what they were really after was to prevent that kind of thing.

And by the way, they don’t like repetitive stuff, so I do think there’s going to be a higher level enforcement where you have to maybe wait, say six or seven hours before you can repeat a post and I’m sure the time table is going to continue to increase. But the idea that you could never share the same post again, I’m not saying never. I said I don’t want to tempt fate, but I don’t see that happening.

Question: What makes Social Jukebox standout over similar services on the market?

Answer: I like to keep the platform somewhat simple. I think there’s a tendency among almost all software tools to keep adding stuff until you have a product that is so complicated that you need a master’s degree to turn the thing on.  

It’s great to add features, but at the same time you add overhead to the process, you add complexity to the product, and as a result it very often it becomes intimidating to use it for the simple task that it was made for from the beginning.

I’m much more interested in having it be really effective at the things that it’s really meant to do.

I’d even include in that having a predictive tool about the best time to tweet is an idiot’s game. All you do is take everyone’s followers and tell them that at 8:00 AM in your area, most of your followers are online.

Wow, that’s a real insight.

And by the way, it’s not like you’re buying super bowl airtime.  You’re adding posts, so why wouldn’t you post around the clock just with the idea that maybe you’ll get a great client from Malaysia? Maybe you’ll find somebody that’s really interested in what you do in New Zealand.  

Don’t be parochial and think that just because your existing audience is in a certain time zone that you should restrict yourself to that. In the ideal world, you’re not just serving who you’re talking to now. You’re expanding the number of people you’re talking to. At least that would be my key to marketing.

I would say really our key is just keep simplifying the tool. I’m not saying take things away, but just try to make it easier and easier to use. If you ever have a support question for Social Jukebox, you get me, there is no support department.

If you create a support department, they will do what you’ve mandated them to do. They will give great support on the product. Right? Very rarely are they going to try to figure out a way to eliminate their own job. And the reality is clients don’t want great support. They want a product they understand.

And if you keep getting the same questions from customers, don’t figure out a great support answer, figure out a way to redesign the product so that the person doesn’t have a question anymore. That is my mindset. I’m incentivized as the entrepreneur because not only am I the one who’s going to have to ask the questions, but I’m also the person that can affect change. For me that’s a really important distinction, making sure that you’re constantly trying to eliminate the number of questions people might have about something rather than just try to find great ways to answer those questions.

Tools, Apps and Links Mentioned:

Social Jukebox

How to reach Tim:

LinkedIn