Xenia Muntean on How to Make Your Social Media Process More Efficient

Welcome to the Marketing Growth Podcast. I’m your host, Shane Barker. In this episode, I’m going to continue my conversation with Xenia Muntean, co-founder and CEO of Planable. For those joining the conversation for the first time, I’ll give you a quick recap: our previous episodes covered Planable’s marketing growth strategy and how to succeed as a tech entrepreneur today. However, today we’re going to dive into social media planning mistakes to avoid and how to improve the efficiency of your team. Let’s get started.

So what I wanted to talk about a little bit was saving time on social media planning because, as I touched on, it was a nightmare for us. We didn’t have you guys around, but you guys are here now. So what would you say? What do you think is the biggest mistake that brands make when it comes to social media planning? Brands are either trying to do it internally or they want to hire someone, but what is the biggest mistake you’ve seen in planning social media?

Boo! Excel spreadsheets. Boo, what? Come on. So 2016 or something. Come on, folks.

Yeah, spreadsheets are made for numbers, folks—equations and stuff. You can do a great equation and say, “I want my growth to be from 25% to 30% and if you change this number, it changes.” That’s awesome. But that doesn’t need to be visual, right? The idea is that if you’re trying to create things in an Excel spreadsheet, and you wonder why they don’t look good, it’s because it’s an Excel spreadsheet. I know.

No, there’s a point where you have so many people on an Excel spreadsheet and it’s like, who’s doing what? Who’s in control of what, who’s next, what’s happening next, to approve what? It’s just so confusing. When you have a small team and maybe one piece of content a month, sure, you can figure it out. But if you’re looking to scale and put out more than one piece of content—and have it be visually pleasing—it just doesn’t make any sense. So if you’re still using Excel, don’t be embarrassed; just know you need to change.

You heard it here first. Now let’s talk about the efficiencies of the social media team, because that’s really what we’re talking about: collaboration. So what do you think are some of the things that affect the efficiency of a social media team, aside from using archaic tools like Excel?

Yeah, and potential issues and errors. I mean, you can’t be the United Nations and send out something that might upset people around the world, right? There’s not a lot of room for error when you’ve got a lot of eyeballs on you, and the approval process can’t be one of those moments where someone says, “Oh, I thought you said to go forward with it,” and then you’re on CNN and everyone’s like, “We shouldn’t have put that out there.” I get it—it’s all about clearing up the fog in the approval process, content creation, and collaboration, and how you guys do that better. So, do you have any tips on how to make the social media process better? Obviously, use Planable, but beyond that, are there any other tips you can think of?

It’s funny. I have these qualifying questions I send to potential clients, and one of them is, “What would a home run look like for you if we were to work together?” That way, I know where you want to be, and we can work from there. For example, if you say, “I want to get $50K more in sales a month,” then we back out the plan from that. I think that’s awesome, because you have to figure out what you want and what your expectations are. That’s always a big thing with clients: where do you need to be, what do you want to be in six months, or whatever that is? Then we can look at that and figure out how a tool—one that has obviously worked for other companies—fits in and what the bottlenecks are. Maybe the tool is working successfully, but then you look at your organization and see where the bottlenecks in collaboration are. Even if the software is working, it’s about how your team fits into the process, where you’re dropping the ball, and where you’re picking it back up to create a more fluid system.

So I love that you guys are creating some big stuff. What is the future of Planable? Do you have anything big coming up? Are you guys going to build something like a space station for NASA, go up against Elon Musk, or what do you have going on?

Awesome. Well, you guys are definitely heading in the right direction. Kudos to you—what an incredible story. That’s why I was excited about having you on the podcast today. I’m sure our audience has learned a lot of great insights they can use for better social media planning.

However, I want to pause our conversation for a minute and talk directly to our listeners. If you need help managing and running your social media campaigns, my team can help you. You can hire us for services such as online PR, SEO, content marketing, influencer marketing, and so much more. For more information about our services, check out our website at shanebarker.com—S, H, A, N, E, B, A, R, K, E, R.com.

Now, back to the conversation with Xenia. We’re going to get into what I call the fun section. Not that we haven’t had fun up until this point—I mean, this was fun—but we’re going into the more fun section, or fun, or—I don’t even know—but yeah, we’re going in full-blown fun mode now. So, if you could travel one place in the world for free, where would it be and what would you do there? This is without COVID—well, now that we’re free to travel again.

That is awesome. I didn’t even think about it. So Elon, if you’re listening, we have somebody who wants to take flight. She’s very intelligent and would be great on the spaceship—just let us know, reach out to her. All right, so what about if you had a superpower? What would it be? I mean, I know you already have a superpower because you’re doing amazing things. But outside of who you currently are, what would your superpower be?

Yeah, I hear you. So you wouldn’t want to look at the past—you wouldn’t want a “Back to the Future” scenario. You’d want to look into the future and see, like, “What’s coming up?”

Yeah, wouldn’t that suck? All of a sudden, you’re talking to your soon-to-be dad, and then you tell him to do this, and he takes a right instead of a left, and he doesn’t meet your mom. Then everything changes, and there’s nothing—what? That’s kind of weird because then you couldn’t go back to the future because you’re not really there. Interesting… That’s a lot for me to take in right now. I’m gonna go watch Back to the Future again and see how they got through that, because I think Michael J. Fox made it through, which is good—I know everybody was nervous. So, tell me, do you read books? Are you an Audible person?

So, what’s your favorite documentary? What’s one that you’ve watched, other than the Challenger one? Was that the Challenger—the one that blew up?

What was the lady’s name? Was it Christine? Oh, um…

You know, what’s funny? I can’t remember my wife and my anniversary—I know it a few days ahead, but I can remember really weird stuff. I remember as a kid when something blew up, and we were like, “Okay, what just happened?” I remember thinking that, and I vividly remember my teacher’s face as we turned it off. That’s kind of crazy. But tell us about a documentary. I like documentaries too. I listen to Audible books when I work out because if I read a book, I start thinking about what I should do tomorrow and get pulled away by Slack messages. So I try to listen to an Audible book in my car on a two-hour drive because then nobody can bother me. But anyways, it’s kind of funny—tell us about a good documentary. I’d love to add one to my list.

That is awesome. I didn’t know that—I did the Monopoly thing. I remember people collecting the little pieces, and it was kind of crazy. I was like, “Yeah, everybody just needed one piece or something.” And it sounds like the mob had that one piece. So nobody knew Guido had it, and we weren’t going to be able to get it anyway. I’ll have to look into that—it’s kind of interesting. I love those kinds of things where people dig deep into something that we’ve all heard about, like the Monopoly thing with McDonald’s, and the fact that there was something a little shady behind the scenes. It’s always fun when the mob’s involved. I mean, not fun if you’re going against the mob, last time I checked, but fun if you can read about it 20 years later. Twenty years later, you’re like, “Oh, I’m not even scared of the mob because they’re not in my neighborhood. So I should be safe, and I don’t have the winning Monopoly piece, so we should be good.” This has been nothing but fun. I appreciate you taking the time to film the podcast. I know we were going back and forth, and we finally connected. So that was awesome. If anybody wants to get in contact with you or wants to know more about Planable, what are some good details to share?

I mean, I’m sitting down. I have my seat. I had a feeling this might be coming next, but I didn’t want to give a spoiler alert. So, yeah, tell us—what do we got going?

“Marketinggrowth30”. Well, that’s going to be awesome. So let me tell you—three months is probably the time when people will finally realize that after three months, they’re going to say, “Listen, not only am I willing to pay full price, but I’m probably mad that I didn’t find out about this two or three years ago,” right, when you guys started.

I will tell you one other thing I’ve noticed with the website—the graphics, like, what you guys have put together there. I don’t know if you need to tell me who that is on your team, because somebody might try to steal them. I don’t know if it’s Nick, but I love the graphics. The person—whether it’s a guy or a girl with an Apple Watch or tattoos—it’s very hip. I looked at that and was like, “What is going on here? This is really cool.” You guys put that together so well. I’m a bit of an aesthetic person, and I thought, “God, that’s awesome.” So congratulations on that.

You heard it here—use the code “marketinggrowth30” for 30% off, and we’ll include that in the show notes with a link where you can use it. Thank you once again for taking the time today. I know I’ve already said it, but it was a pleasure having you on the podcast. I’m really looking forward to what you guys are going to do in the future, and let’s stay in touch.

Absolutely.

Okay, folks, thanks for listening to this week’s guest, and I hope there’s a lot you’ve learned from our discussion. Next week I’ll be hosting another interesting guest, so stay tuned to Shane Barker’s Marketing Growth Podcast.