Hashtags and Social Media Visibility: A Discussion With Saul Fleischman

Welcome to the Marketing Growth podcast. I’m your host. Shane Barker, in this episode, I’m going to talk with Saul Fleischman from RiteKit about his professional journey and discuss the importance of hashtag Marketing. Today is going to pick up the conversation right where we left off.

So let’s talk about this a little bit. I want to talk about like, hashtag marketing strategies and maybe some real world examples. I know you kind of touched on it earlier, like, people that are doing really well with it, obviously don’t want to tell everybody, right, because it’s like their secret sauce. So I don’t know if we’ll be able to get into the secret sauce, but let’s talk about that. What would be like a secret recipe? Is there any kind of a there’s anything you’ve seen over the nine years that you guys have had these SaaS products? Like, any successful hashtag strategies, like, Are there any, like, secret recipes, or anything like that? I mean, other than the fact, it sounds like the tools really easy to use, like the secret sauce, would be to right click right to get the software and right click. But is there anything else that you’ve seen that like people, like a secret recipe, or something you’ve noticed from all the clients you’ve worked with, something that maybe some, like one or two things that people could do to be more successful?

I don’t think there is. I don’t know if we have a call to action. I mean, the call to action we should be doing—what should we be doing? We should be telling them to click on the link or engaging them somehow to want them to inquire further.

And we appreciate it.

Yeah, you have to be. We’ve got the three-person team. You’ve got to—I love the fact that you guys are leveraging your own software for lead generation, right? There’s no better way to say, hey, we don’t have a 20-person sales team; we just have software that we use, and it’s ours. It doesn’t get any better than that, right? Because if you’ve been doing this nine years—trust me, I’ve helped people and done consulting gigs for people with software. Software is not an easy task. It can get to a point where it’s profitable, but between bugs—and you said you’ve had 100-plus people working to get your product to where it’s at today—it’s not easy, right? I know that for a fact. Doing a SaaS product is not easy.

Everybody goes, “Oh, it’s easy money. It’s residual and recurring, and this is awesome.” Yeah, that’s year 12, by the way—not really—but you know what I mean. Maybe after a few years, but it’s not easy to do. So in regard to the analytics and the companies you guys have worked with—plus being on podcasts and all that fun stuff—can you think of maybe one or two companies that are doing an awesome job with their hashtag marketing? Is there anybody you look at and say, they get it? Whether they’re using your tool or not, you can just tell by the way they’re picking stuff and the way they’re doing things—they’re doing an awesome job.

Hashtags are kind of over it with hash—so, a company that I remember talking about: It’s an element of social media optimization. I was impressed, for example, with Tint and what they would do. And there was another one, I think it’s called MeUndies. Ah, yes, you know MeUndies?

Yeah, because it’s like the underwear company…

This is an underwear company where they would show user-submitted, user-generated content—UGC, right? For example, “This is us in our undies.” Never mind that they’re all really attractive people, yeah, but I loved what they did, and I thought, what’s the RiteKit version of this? So I figured out to set some Talkwalker alerts (for free) for when people are talking about our products.

We have one of our things with RiteForge: you can highlight text and then generate an image—something like a Canva or a Pablo text image—and it shows who the author is. That’s all that’s in there. It’s got your logo, not ours. We could do these things for Instagram, Pinterest, and other visual-centric networks, and we’ll mix in stuff that customers or bloggers have said about us. It’s been really powerful, and then people say, “You do these things, and they look different—different colors you’ve got.” We pioneered background animations in these text images, something that nothing else does. Instead of spending six minutes to do a Pablo (one of those), it’s about two seconds because it’s all templated.

Yeah, so this is really useful. I got that from companies—Tint was one. The better one was MeUndies.

I remember that. I mean, it’s still around. They had a big influencer campaign. Once again, the UGC—the user-generated content. And once again, I do agree with you. I felt like everybody who sent something in was like a model or something. I don’t know if that’s what I look like in my underwear, but I get your point. If I sent mine, they’d probably be like, “Okay, so what are we gonna do? Give that guy a free pair of underwear, but don’t send any more of those pictures in. Please keep those to yourself.” All right, cool.

So are there any other case studies? Like I said, you mentioned one of the nicest things people have ever said to you is, “Hey, we love your tool, but we’re not going to tell anybody because we love your tool. It’s our secret sauce.” Is there any other case study you guys have, or anything else you’d like to say—any clients you’ve worked with that you’ve seen something interesting from? Is there anything else that you wanted to share in regards to that?

Yeah, RiteKit in Medium. So we have two blogs: we have our own blog, and then we have one in Medium. In the Medium one, there’s a whole section on case studies. It’s specific people and companies and what they got done, with screenshots of what they’re getting. There are a couple that have screenshots of the Rightly analytics. That’s how we get our inbound marketing—advertisements on URLs of your blog, and what exactly that’s getting for us. We can see how many people are clicking on those links, how many people click on the Rightly ad when they open it—they see that.

Looking at these case studies, I find I’m not really setting the world on fire myself. Some of our customers do better, yeah, but often it’s just about what they’re selling. There are plenty of nonprofits, churches, and even the United Nations, White Houses, the Office of Leadership, Tesla, NASA—many don’t want to share exactly what they’re doing. Yeah, I understand. So, yeah, there’s a section—Medium is a site, a blogging site, right? RiteKit in Medium, and there’s a section on case studies there.

We’ll put something in the show notes as well, because I think that would be important for everybody to take a look at. Important for everybody to take a look at, regarding the case studies you guys have. So, awesome.