Social Media Tips from Gain’s CEO Albizu Garcia
July 20, 2023
How can you effectively manage your social media in a way that connects with your audience? In today’s podcast, we speak to Albizu Garcia, marketer and CEO of social media scheduling platform, Gain, to discuss what brands can do to stay relevant. From social media’s evolving landscape to tips on how to humanize your brand’s digital presence, this episode is full of strategic marketing tips that you don’t want to miss.
Rochelle Reiter: [00:00:03] This is The 19, a 19 minute or less podcast that brings you marketing insights aimed at improving lives. Presented by Orange Label, the leading response marketing agency for wellness brands that grow when their customers do.
Rochelle Reiter: [00:00:19] Hello and welcome to The 19! I’m Rochelle Reiter, President of Orange Label. They say not to judge a book by its cover, but have you ever judged a brand by its social media pages with 4.9 billion people worldwide using social media, according to Forbes? Establishing and maintaining your brand’s social presence is of utmost importance. Consistency is key. So when potential or current followers see your brand’s fall off of social media, it doesn’t go unnoticed. Today’s guest, Albizu Garcia, is a digital media professional and entrepreneur with over 20 years in the digital and technology space. He is also the CEO and co-founder of Gain, a social media publishing platform specifically developed for agencies. He’s led and executed successful online media strategies for global brands, including Honda, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, AT&T, Mercedes-Benz and more. And today, he’s here to share his insights on the state of social media with us to keep your brand ahead of the curve. Albizu welcome to The 19. We’re so happy to have you here with us today.
Albizu Garcia: [00:01:25] Thank you. Happy to be here.
Rochelle Reiter: [00:01:30] All right. So can you tell our listeners what led you to develop Gain?
Albizu Garcia: [00:01:35] I was a partner at an agency before starting Gain, and as many agency owners, it is a rough business to be in. Not only on the actual craft that we make as creatives, but it’s also hard business to maintain maintaining customer and your clients keeping employees happy, that sort of thing. So one of the things that we decided to do when I saw that was like, okay, let’s try and figure out a way to fix some of these problems. During that time there were. That’s when all these APIs started to come up from Facebook, Twitter, all that stuff. And that’s a different topic. What’s going on with those APIs? But we’ll leave those aside. But basically, my co-founder and myself, we decided to focus on the workflow problem. There were tools at that time like Hootsuite and bunch of other tools that help you kind of manage a lot of stuff at the same time. But if you’re an agency, you’re managing clients and you’re having to basically maintain that relationship with your clients. And we thought that the process that those tools were offering at that time were not elegant at all. So they were really confusing for the client. Typically, you had two separate processes. The agency would work on this tool and do all this work. And then when it came to organize that content and sharing it with the client, that was a whole manual process, pretty much emails, spreadsheets, even presentations that we see all the time. To this day, we still see that customers that come to us. So we thought, okay, we can do a pretty decent job here at trying to help agencies to be more organized. That also expanded to brands, their brands that are doing their own work inside their own company. So we wanted to make sure that it was a flexible enough product that an agency could use it, but also brand insight marketing team could use it. And at the end of the day, we wanted to solve was wasting time. Employee dissatisfaction like those two things were super important to us and the most important part was client relationships. We thought every time an account manager or account director is talking to a client about approve me this or approve me that, it’s a wasted opportunity where you can be talking about new business. Let’s do the next campaign. Let’s do the next work for you, right? So whenever you can remove the logistics of trafficking, your client satisfaction will also go up. So your client retention will also go up because they love working with you. And that’s an experience that we see all the time, agencies being fired and the client basically comes to us and brings the tool to the new agency that they go to. They because they really appreciate that this is so easy for them to work with their agency. We see it as almost an unfair advantage to use our product for agencies because they really can create a deeper and closer and more lasting relationship with their clients.
Rochelle Reiter: [00:04:15] Yes, More and more time for creativity.
Albizu Garcia: [00:04:18] Exactly.
Rochelle Reiter: [00:04:19] Yeah. So we have had just tremendous success using Gain with our clients. So thank you for developing the software. It’s been a huge asset to us and our brands that we work with. So, flipping over to the challenges that you see brands facing when it comes to managing their social content, what are those pain points that you see?
Albizu Garcia: [00:04:41] Today it’s tough. I sold my agency back in 2012. Right. And things have changed dramatically with TikTok and all that stuff. When I decided to put it together and say, okay, what are the things that are really like very big issues for agencies that need to solve? One of them that we saw was staying authentic and relevant, right? And I think that that’s more important every day. I think that people can see through the marketing messaging. So brands need to be more themselves. And that’s a tough thing for brands, you know, especially the older the brand is, right, the the harder time they have doing that in order to stay relevant. The other thing is scaling, obviously, that’s part of the things that we do, right? So we care much about how much how many clients can an agency handle thanks to automating a lot of the processes, right. So automation for us is an important part of that piece. And if I had our product back when I had an agency, things would be very different. We would probably lease less people to do the same work and we were able to create new business without worrying about the cost associated to bringing new business to the agency. The other part is complicated workflows. I think a lot of agencies, they don’t do a pretty decent job at streamlining processes, right, Because they are caught up in the day to day and they want to be able to respond to clients and provide all this work. There’s also an incentive in billing and all that stuff. So that’s a big challenge that I see that as things get more complicated with a lot of things you can automate, but there’s a lot of stuff that you can’t like a TikTok video or a lot of that stuff needs to be more spontaneous. If you add things like live videos, live streams, stuff like that, then those are things that you need to be super streamlined to be able to accomplish those things. Right. And without getting bogged down.
Rochelle Reiter: [00:06:24] Absolutely.
Albizu Garcia: [00:06:25] On the stuff. Yeah.
Rochelle Reiter: [00:06:26] Yeah. So how do you suggest that brands address some of those challenges?
Albizu Garcia: [00:06:30] To be honest, one of the one of the things that I always find interesting, which is it’s almost unfair for a lot of brands, is the need to start with a good product or a good service. I think at the end of the day, because people can see through the BS, right? You need to have made sure that your product is actually as best as it can be, right? We see this all the time, right? Like companies that they want to you know, they’re putting all this effort into marketing. Right? But when you look down deep down into what’s causing them to not be successful, it’s the product is it’s okay. You know, and they should probably put more effort into fixing that or their service instead of just dumping money on marketing and trying to do amazing things. Right. So expecting results and a mediocre service or product, you know, that’s just a waste of time, a waste of money and time, right. From not only the brand, but also the agency. It’s like an impossible job to do. So. So and I know that’s hard, right? AGain, that’s not marketing related, but it is in a way. Sure.
Rochelle Reiter: [00:07:30] Product development.
Albizu Garcia: [00:07:31] Exactly. The other stuff that I see that agencies can do to be more authentic and stuff like that is to bring their customers into their own spotlight, right? So they already have channels, they already have Facebook, Instagram channels, and they have all these social networks that they already broadcast content to that. Right. By the way, that’s a project that we have for this year ourselves as a company is to bring our customers into the spotlight, right? Allowing them to tell our story. Because basically when they when they see how successful they have been, then that basically is helping us, right? So that’s a very important thing. And it’s easier than ever to do that because of social media. So people can send you a video or something very quickly. So that to me is like a super important thing that’s not new. Right? Doctors have been recommending products forever, right? Testimonials, 1800s. Right. So so it’s basically just bringing that to the to, to today. Right. And actually kind of putting some real effort behind it. Right. The other stuff is to plan ahead. Right. And keep organizing. It goes back to the same thing. Keep organize, have a calendar that everybody can see what’s going on. Everybody knows when is the deadline, when is this going to be done, when is it due? And I think that that’s important. And a lot of people miss it. Everybody has their own little calendar and they have meetings, but they don’t share anything else on that calendar. Right. They don’t share a calendar that everybody can see what’s going on as a brand.
Rochelle Reiter: [00:08:48] Sure. So there’s been a lot of talk about artificial intelligence. What impact do you believe that these tools will have on social media content?
Albizu Garcia: [00:08:58] Yeah, So this is an interesting one for me because I’m very pessimistic about AI. Yes. And it’s not because of what most people think. It’s not about they’re going to take over and kill humans. And, you know, Terminator, it’s going to happen when it comes to marketing. Right. One of the things that I see a lot of advantages and like, for example, we are already working on an integration with AI for our product. We want to allow marketers to be able to do a quick prompt and then I will basically write something that they can use as a start or maybe use it as it is if it’s good enough. The thing with AI is that at the end of the day and think forgot his name the last person that that you guys had on the podcast.
Rochelle Reiter: [00:09:33] Paul. Paul Roetzer.
Albizu Garcia: [00:09:34] Yes. Paul Yes. One of the things that that I found interesting was that he I think he did a good job at explaining that is basically just a model that tries to guess what’s next. Right? And that’s basically what it is. And that’s how he puts together a sentence. It just starts guessing, saying, oh, I think this word makes sense here. And at the end of the day, it’s going to give you a cohesive phrase or a piece of content that makes total sense. But at the end of the day, what it’s doing is just mimicking other stuff that they have seen, the model has seen out there. So it’s basically reading and consuming content from the web, which happens to have been created for humans for many years right? Now short term that’s great, right? You can create a ton of content, makes things very fast and really move things along. And that’s kind of the positive thing that I see long term, though, What happens when the feedback that’s happening here is going to be AI seeing other content and they keep basically redoing each other. At the end of the day, it’s going to be a mish mash of content that they see on other places and everything’s going to sound the same, right? So I think that there’s a space for AI probably to use as a base to work on stuff, but it’s never, I don’t think, going to replace like copywriters and people if you want to get above the noise, I don’t think it’s going to be able to do that long term, but I might be wrong. We work with new technologies. Yeah, it could be new technologies that fixes that issue. Right. And I don’t know what that means, but I think that if the model is a model, that’s just guessing things and its end goal as a model is to create a piece of content that looks like other pieces of content. They’re just going to be copying each other.
Rochelle Reiter: [00:11:14] Yeah, there’s no originality, right?
Albizu Garcia: [00:11:16] Yes. Well, maybe. Maybe it would be, right? So I’m happy to be wrong because don’t don’t have any issues with. I think AI is in a way when it comes to to the dangers of it and stuff like that personally. But I think it’s very cool and very helpful, especially the image. The image size I think is going to be pretty interesting.
Rochelle Reiter: [00:11:35] So how do you you believe that technology and tools play a role in the creative process?
Albizu Garcia: [00:11:42] Like I mentioned right now? Right. Embracing those technologies is important for rising above the noise floor to be able to do your best work. And and there’s a lot of tools like. Right. That you can use to basically create unique content based on it because one thing that could be interesting is if you have this tool of AI, you’re basically augmenting what a copywriter could do because the AI can trigger some ideas in copywriters brain to allow that person to basically create an interesting story for this brand. So see that being curious about those new technologies is very important to keep up and stay ahead of the game.
Rochelle Reiter: [00:12:23] Yeah, for sure. So what trends are you seeing right now besides AI? What trends are you seeing in the social media space?
Albizu Garcia: [00:12:30] Yeah, it’s the same ones that I’ve already seen, you know what I mean? It’s the same thing early on when I had the agency, right? This was the age of and I’m really, I’m dating myself. Maybe at that point it was all about Facebook applications and games and gamification of this contests and all that stuff of Facebook because there was an there was this new. So it was really cool for geeks like us to go build stuff on top of Facebook. But I think people nowadays, they see through all of that. I don’t think people respond to like contests and stuff like that as they used to before. I think people can see through the messaging. That’s why authenticity is such a such an important part. The other stuff is that people just no longer have any time for that. You know, attention span has been shortened by seconds. Now. Right now we’re talking about I don’t know, you have three seconds, maybe two seconds on TikTok to grab somebody’s attention and that’s it. Go beyond that. Forget it. So, you know, when you look at the whole, humanity’s time or a person’s time. You’re competing for that little piece of attention at any given moment. But the thing that I found interesting is that we used to speak about that before, where brands would be competing for the attention of the person and competing with another brand for that short span. Today you’re competing against everything. Netflix, you know, so it goes way beyond social media. And that one trend that I’ve been seeing is just people such as the new generation aware of the dangers of social media. Right. The addiction causes. So a lot of those people are using different options to manage that, either taking their, you know, being more conscious about how much they use an application in social network, cutting the amount of time that they spend on a social network at any given time, making the opportunity for a brand to reach them even tougher. But the part that I found more interesting is people moving away from the traditional social networks and moving to things like Mastodon or Bluesky or other social networks in search of sanity, to be honest.
Rochelle Reiter: [00:14:33] Yeah.
Albizu Garcia: [00:14:33] \So then how are brands supposed to reach there? When those things are not centralized, you know, they’re completely federated. It’s a completely different experience. So I think it’s a super interesting time for marketers. And this is where, you know, creativity is going to be able to reach those people around this bigger social networks. It’s the only way.
Rochelle Reiter: [00:14:51] So how do you recommend that people stay on top of those trends?
Albizu Garcia: [00:14:55] So trends are too short nowadays, too, because right now you have something on TikTok and in two days it’s gone. Don’t know if you or any of the listeners have used Bluesky, but Bluesky is a social network that aims to replace the Twitter experience and trends. They’re, they rise and die in hours. So a brand looking to get on top of that not only it’s almost impossible to be honest, but when they do, they cringe factors are going to be really hard. Right? So so so in a way that’s going to be interesting. You know what? The future trends just don’t last that long. And the other thing is that you need to be super genuine and really be into the social network that you’re aiming to produce content. And I think that’s a challenge too, for brands and even agencies because you kind of need, like I call them internal mini influencers that live inside the brand that can be the face of the brand to be able to to cut through and be able to catch your attention in two seconds, three seconds on TikTok. There’s no way a brand on its own is going to be able to speak the language of person. And I think that that’s an interesting thing. This is an interesting job role. It’s like an internal mini influencer, right, for brands. And so that’s going to be really interesting. And it’s really tough nowadays.
Rochelle Reiter: [00:16:10] Right. Well, what one piece of advice would you give to brands about effective management of their social media, whatever platform they’re using? What what’s the one piece of advice you would give?
Albizu Garcia: [00:16:22] I think agility is going to be the key. And finding tools that allow you to be agile is going to be key for anybody trying to keep up on the marketing side of things, Right? And that means that newer agencies can adopt those things easier and agencies that are older, they need to get on it and don’t be afraid and jump in and and allow those tools to be implemented or at least tested internally. Right. And you can come up with ways of doing that. Obviously, the bigger the agency it is, it’s a little more complicated. I think being genuine is another another thing that’s important. They need to be less marketing sounding and just be more transparent. This is how we are. This is a product. We’re an old company and that’s fine. We embrace it and move forward. Instead of starting to dressing up your brand and trying to be the cool kids because everybody can see through that stuff. So that to me is very important. You can be an old person and still be cool, right? We see this all the time, right? So that’s something that’s very important to me in the last part is using the tools to simplify process. Because when I and this is something that I’ve been wrestling as a CEO of the company, is that what value do we actually bring to the world? For example, right. When you look at our product and you say, okay, so the only thing we do is we have a product that allows you to sell more stuff to people. That’s not a very high goal. In a way. We were internally thinking, okay, what do we do that’s bigger than ourselves? What do we do that’s bigger than marketing? And it all came down to humans and people and what they do. And we’ve implemented things in our company to four day work weeks to make sure that we believe that people do their best work when they have time to be the best selves outside of work. So for us, that’s what guides us as a company, right? And I think it’s a it’s a it’s a thing that agencies can do, not necessarily using our product, but any product or any technology is to allow people to do their best work by removing all the friction of getting the job done so they are able to leave and and go outside, you know, spend the weekend, be happy, not think about work. So to us, it’s always been the goal of not having a social media manager on a Friday at 10 p.m. waiting for a client to get approval. That was is that the person that we don’t want to see there? We want everything to be so smooth, easy to do that the client will approve at any moment and there’s no waiting. If there is, it’s really easy to take care of. And at the end of the day, keeping employees happy means they do better work. That’s that’s the bottom line at the end of the day.
Rochelle Reiter: [00:18:46] Well, you have definitely done that for Orange label. So thank you so much you for being on our show today. We had a great time hearing about your insights and really love what you’re up to as a company.
Albizu Garcia: [00:18:57] Thank you. Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak to you guys.
Rochelle Reiter: [00:19:03] Thank you for listening to The 19 with CEO and co-founder of Gain Albizu Garcia to follow insights on social media marketing from Albizu and its team, visit blog.gainapp.com. To learn more about Orange Label’s strategy, data analytics, media, social content and design services, visit orangelabelmarketing.com.
Rochelle Reiter: [00:19:25] A special thank you goes out to our contributors Creative Services Director Kelsey Phillips, Copy and Content strategist Ashley Andreen and Design and Sound Director Micah Panzich. Be sure to subscribe to The 19 Marketing Podcast by Orange Label on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review!