Melanie
The Monday Morning Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Esther of IPA Group, bringing premier online promotion to your business.
Esther
And Melanie of STOMP Social Media Training, who empowers business owners to manage social media and marketing for themselves. And welcome back to another episode of the Monday Morning Marketing podcast. Today we're talking about FeedAlpha, Making Marketing Easier. And we're joined by Gary Evans, CEO and co-founder of FeedAlpha. Welcome, Gary.
Gary
Thank you very much, guys. Great to be here.
Esther
It's great to have you. So first of all, FeedAlpha, where did that name come from?
Melanie
I always imagine Alpha was the name of a pet and you needed to feed it. Is that, am I along the right lines?
Gary
I suppose when we came up with the idea first, it was really about feeding your social media channels, like feeding it with content. And Alpha at the time means number one. So we're the number one feed for your social. And we'd a play on words and and worked with Carlow IT a long time ago with some innovation vouchers and stuff. And we just came up the name FeedAlpha, one of the guys who now works for us, designed a logo and rest is history, really. That's where it came from. Now it got called AlphaFeed quite a bit at the start.
Melanie
I was going to say, actually, surely it would have been better to call it AlphaFeed because then it would have been found in search first with A. We're stuck with feed alpha. Search is a conversation for another day. Maybe in the phone book, maybe.
Esther
Oh, remember those days? Yes.
Melanie
So FeedAlpha, it's been around for a little while now, and so you've got several versions going. So which version are we on now for FeedAlpha?
Gary
So the live version at the moment is, I suppose you call it version 1.1. We started off really with the idea of making it nice and simple, easy to use. And that's the core functionality is still there. We've roughly 11,000 customers on board. The big challenge for us came along when AI hit the market at a rate of knots in the last year and a half or so. And that really has changed our thinking on some of the functionality we need to provide. And that's why we're now rolling into version 2 next week. So been busy for a few weeks just to bring some of those smarts into the platform.
Esther
Brilliant. So you're rolling with the times and you're keeping up with all the latest innovations when it comes to AI. So What has been some of the struggles that you've found as a company when it comes to integrating AI into your service?
Gary
I suppose the biggest thing for us really is AI is a fantastic tool, but you get out what you put in. So it really comes down and you'll see the new roles are popping up all over the world, like prompt engineers and things like that. There really is a skill involved in asking the right questions to the AI. It's just a pool of information. You ask the right question, you get the right answer. If you ask the wrong question, you get the wrong answer. And sometimes it doesn't know the answer, so it'll just make it up.
Esther
So it's like asking women?
Gary
No, no, no, no, no, I said it.
Melanie
I can't believe you just said that.
Esther
You asked me the wrong question, and I'll give you the wrong answer. True.
Melanie
Now, Gary, I wanted to ask, because there is a real skill set to learning the prompt, the correct way to create the prompt, is that something that's going to be taught by feed alpha to their clients as well?
Gary
So within the platform, an example of how we've integrated, we've about five or six hundred different custom prompts that we've built into the platform. So you think about sitting there on a Monday morning before you listen to the podcast, I need to get something out on LinkedIn and you've hit a wall, you don't know what to say. You can just go in and click, need a new post, click LinkedIn and it'll give you a list of, here's all the most popular things that you need to post. We can tailor that based on your analytics, what's worked in the past when you posted something, what's got good engagement, good traction. But we're also using some intelligence behind the AI where it starts to understand your tone of voice, what you say, what you post, tie in with analytics, what works. And then it'll help you along as you go say, right, well, I need a post about marketing strategy. So it's going to say, well, here's five different ideas. Pick one. It'll give you three different options. And away you go.
Melanie
So is it attached to some measurement of trends as well?
Gary
Most at the moment we're really looking at we're using your analytics. So we're plugged into analytics API for Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn. Don't give you one as of yet. So we're really working on those metrics. There is options to look at Google Trends and things like that to see what's currently trending at the moment and then tie that back in. The AI itself doesn't have direct access to the Internet. So it's siloed off to some extent. You can use that with OpenAI, etc. If you want, we've chosen for the moment to keep it separate. We do have a little tick box to say, right, yeah, you can access the Internet, so we can do real time research if you want.
Melanie
Okay, cool. Wow.
Esther
Okay. You mentioned APIs there. So just going off in a little tangent here. We know that Twitter, XX, Twitter, Twix, whatever you want to call it.
Gary
Twix, good name.
Esther
They decided that they weren't going to openly share their API and they wanted to charge a lot of money. So does that mean people don't have a way to schedule to X using feed alpha anymore or is it still included?
Gary
It's still included with a caveat. Right. So the day that I mean, that announcement was coming for a long time and then it didn't happen and then suddenly it did happen. And to put it into perspective, our bill for API access to Twitter went from zero to 65 grand a month. So we just. So we literally just stopped. Now, the way we've built it into the new platform is you can set up a free Twitter app and you get access to API codes. So within the platform, you just go add Twitter. And there's two fields for your API keys to drop them in. So you can do that yourself. The reason, obviously, we're not doing it is because of the cost, because it just becomes astronomical if you do it at scale, right? For a small business who uses and is active on Twitter, it's 20 second operation for them to go and create one, copy and paste it in and away you go. They work away on their own and their only restriction is they're tied to the limits of how much they post based on their own API usage. So nobody else can scupper your plan, if you know what I mean.
So we can still do it.
Esther
So what is the limit?
Gary
Top of my head? I don't know. Good question. It could be a hundred tweets a hour.
Esther
I mean, if you're posting. That's what I was going to say. Is it like a hundred tweets a day? If you were still running a Twitter chat, would you be scuppered in that?
Gary
Well, so if you do hit the limits, you have the option you can upgrade to the paid plan. I think it's $99 a month if you're a very active user. And with that, you get an extended access API where you can use it a lot more. It's still not sufficient for our wants and needs. And that's why we've gone with use your own individual API and work away that way. But for a general small business user, you're not going to to ever hit limits.
Melanie
So talking about other platforms, one of the problems I found with a lot of the platforms that I've used in the past is they don't have access to all the platforms I want access to. And I frequently use Google business profile. It's one of my favourite platforms. So is there any coverage for that using your platform, Gary?
Gary
There will be from next week. Yes, absolutely. We've been asked for quite some time about access to business profile and we've worked with the guys and it's now there. So you can post directly to your Google profile. You can schedule posts and stuff like that to your profile. So, yeah, we're looking forward to people using that one because it's from a from an SEO marketing point of view, it's a really good angle. Someone searches for your brand or Google profile is on the right. You can see latest posts. It's an extra element that you can have on the home page of Google when someone does a search for your business.
Esther
Did you listen to Milny's podcast?
Melanie
I said, I'm basically saying exactly what she said.
Gary
But it's really underestimated. People don't understand. Maybe they just don't understand the exposure that you can get from using it. It really is a powerful tool. It doesn't cost you any money either. No.
Melanie
I think people just think, oh God, it's another flipping channel that I need to post on. But yeah, I do get it. So that's really good news, Gary. That's fantastic news. Now, something else I wanted to ask, because obviously we're trying to make the life of a marketer easy. So there must be some really decent analytics and reporting available. So how do your reporting work on your platform?
Gary
So our main analytics at the moment, and this is still a work in progress, our main function at the moment is we're pulling analytic information directly from Meta. So Facebook analytics, Instagram analytics. It's how many times you post it, how many engagement, how many likes, best time to post, what time of the week to post that, etc. And we're going to pull all that information then back into the calendar function And so when you want to post something that's going to go here, hang on a second, post this on Tuesday at 10 o'clock, because that's where you've had the most impact over the last four weeks. So we're trying to utilise all the insights that are there to say, right, here's when you should do this based on past performance. And it's it's live data, so it's forever updating, etc. The LinkedIn don't give you access to our analytics API, so we can't tap into that yet. But we do have plans to look at alternatives to see how we can gather some intelligence behind posting to your LinkedIn business page or your profile and then pull that back into the platform.
Melanie
That's interesting.
Esther
Brilliant. So you can post from feed alpha to LinkedIn X, Facebook, Instagram, Google business profile, anywhere else?
Gary
Yeah, we added in Pinterest as well. And that's probably a really, really underrated platform. The exposure that you can get from Pinterest. Some people certainly still look at it as just a place to look at pictures, right? But I mean, we've linked in accounts and they get hundreds of thousands of views. And it's a really, really, really good driver of traffic, organic traffic back to your website. Because think about it, when you put up a picture, your caption, where to find it, there's a link there back to your website. So you could be doing a post about marketing. You put up a nice picture, bit of commentary, link back to your website. At the end of the day, Pinterest is a very, very big search engine and it's used an awful lot. So it's not just arts and crafts, it's for everything, really. So we've added that in. Tiktok is on the way. It's just not ready yet. So we have to roll in with the young kids as well, you see.
Melanie
Now, going along the lines of TikTok, you've mentioned you do have the opportunity to post and schedule to Instagram. Is that including reels and stories as well?
Gary
Absolutely, yeah.
Melanie
So how far could you schedule for all of these platforms?
Gary
Well, we don't limit our calendar to say you can only post for a month. You could technically post for as long as you want, right? Until you stop clicking next, next, next. We also added in a function that sometimes you want to post the same thing a couple of times a year, like maybe once a quarter. So when you go in and you schedule a post, say, right, this goes out the first of March. I also need it to go out the first of July. So you can just go add date and you can add in multiple dates then and have it scheduled for the four times in a row. The one thing you need to watch is when you when you're multiple, when you post a thing multiple times is if you do within a certain window on top of my head, I can't remember what the limit is. But you have to change the information. It can't just be the same repetitive post because you'll get a slap.
Melanie
One of our favourite platforms is Missing Letter, and that takes excerts from either a podcast or a blog. Just like you said, you don't put up the same bit of information each time. Is there a facility similar to that that's coming on board maybe in the next update?
Gary
So So in the in the existing, let's call it version 1.1, we do have that function where you can drop in a URL and it'll go and examine the content of the URL and it'll give you three or four different snippets of information out of that content. Where we've taken that out for the minute for version 2 because we're reengineering how that works. There was a couple of little intricacies that just aren't quite ready. The idea being that it'll create a headline on the headline of the post or whatever your podcast is called. And then it'll be able to read the content and analyse it and say, right, here's three really important things that are mentioned within that. Let's pull those into three different posts as draughts, assign an image to them, and then it's generating your content for you.
Melanie
Okay.
Gary
But it's not. I'm not happy with the performance yet, so we haven't. That's not quite ready. But it's it's just going to be rolled out secretly once it is.
Melanie
And then everyone gets. Secretly.
Gary
Keep everybody happy.
Melanie
It was always here.
Gary
It was the behind that menu there.
Esther
It's the Mandela effect.
Gary
Exactly.
Esther
So you mentioned images. So with images and AI, do you have a function or is there going to be a function in the 2.0 that the AI suggests or creates the image, or will it be made by the the person who owns the platform or the the one who pays you for the platform? Or what way do images... Because a lot of companies now scheduling companies also link in with Canva. I mean, there's lots of questions in that one question. So try to figure out.
Gary
It's fresh in my mind because at about half eleven last night, I was updating one of the pages on the It's soon to be launched version 2 website, and it's all about images. So multiple different options there. First and foremost, you can upload your own image. Second option is there's an AI image generator. So you just click a little magic star and you type in a caption, what you want the image to be, what size you want it to be. Press go. Takes about 20 seconds. It will generate the image and assign it to the post for you. The next option is we have an integration with Canvas. So if you have a Canva, can't you just press the Canva button? It brings you into your Canva where all your designs are. You can edit, change, and then just go post. It'll then flick it back into free alpha. We've also integrated with Adobe Express. So if you're an Adobe Express customer as opposed to a Canva customer. You just press the Adobe Express button instead of Canva and it gives you the popup and the same idea. Brilliant. So we have images covered as much as we can.
And the other thing that we added this time around, which we didn't have before, is a really easy way to manage all your images. So there's a whole storage element to it, which is 500 megabytes, whatever, or half, whatever. And all your images are there. You can display them, you can go in and you can edit them. And when you hit Edit, it'll open up Adobe Express. So you can add captions to it, you can change them, all that stuff. Save them. And then they're in your image library to select whenever you want.
Esther
Brilliant.
Melanie
So we've talked about the owner of the platform manager managing all of this. Can you add on team members and can you add on maybe your client for post-approval, that thing as well?
Gary
Yes, absolutely. And we've had teams functionality before. We've rebuilt it now to give much more granular control to the, say, the manager of the team. So for example, if we have client A, they set up an account, they then want a social media person, be it an intern, someone in-house or an agency to manage it for them. They can then assign them, add them as a team member, and give them as much or as little access as they want. Where, say, if I find the agency providing images to Company A, I can create all the content, put it in draught, send a note, or you'll get a little notification in the dashboard to say there's new stuff there for approval. We've a chat functionality now built into the platform, so we can go back and forth. We're trying to get rid of emails back and forth all the time. This is supposed to go out on Monday, you haven't approved it. It's not going to go because it's now 5:00 to 9:00 on Monday morning. And if you're not going to put it, we can't put it out because it's not approved. So little pop-ups and notifications to say, look, there's something in there for approval.
And then the client can look at and say, can We just changed that image because it's all brand. With what we do, we'll get in trouble for using that one. So nice easy workflow. And again, the control thing is really important. Say, here's what you can do, here's what you can't do. You get a multiple people managing the same account. The critical point of all setting it up that way is that when a client signs up, they authenticate their own social media accounts. There's no access to the agency to passwords or anything like that anymore, because that's obviously breaks all the terms and agreements of all the social platforms. So client sets up their own account, they then assign me access where we can go in and publish on their behalf or create jobs and manage it. So, so, yeah, that was a significant piece of work. I mean, the girls in the office here are using it and they love it because it's just so easy. So I've been told.
Esther
Well, there's so many features, but there was another one that I wanted to ask about because as marketers, we're always telling people to share other people's content and not just be talking about yourself. So what about curated content, something that other people have written? Do we have to go and find the link and put it in, like you said, and get the three or four options for that? Or is there options already there of, I see you're talking about marketing. Why not try sharing these blogs that other people have written?
Gary
So at the moment, there's a couple of ways we look at content. Obviously, priority number one for customers is their own content. What we've lared onto that then is we've RSS feed automation. So if you have an active blog with loads of posts on it, go into the automation process and you just drop in the RSS feed for your for your blog. It will automatically pull in all your blog posts over the last. Since day one, if you want, start with the latest and work backwards from there. Then you can set a posting schedule and say, right, well, I want to I want one of these to be published automatically every six hours or two days or once a week so that it's constantly dripping that content out for you. You can also do it. You can do it for any URL. So if you have a blog like social media marketing, blah, blah, blah. One of those blogs that you read all the time that you always share the-.
Melanie
So Social Media Examiner or Kim Gast or something like that?
Gary
Yeah, you just drop the URL in and it'll share the latest blog as it comes out.
Melanie
So you don't need to say anything?
Gary
Well, it just creates a post and shares it. So you can if you want it schedule, you can then say, right, I actually want to add a bit of commentary in here. So because that's where you add the value to the conversation. You drop your own bid in. But you can just drop in, copy your URL to anything, drop it in, say create new post based on this URL. It'll go and pull in the feature, the image, the headline, the extra paragraph. And then you put in your bit of commentary and you say, right, I want this on LinkedIn and Facebook and whatever. And it'll do it.
Melanie
There you go. Yeah, it's pretty good.
Esther
Yeah. So it seems like it's very much a one platform does all so that people don't have to be going into all the different social media is to get their information. What about reporting?
Gary
So it's on the list, right? At the moment we have analytics. There's no magic button to press, generate a PDF on all of this. Reported from a client point of view, importing is obviously really important because they like shiny reports once a month to see how they're going. When you log in to analytics, it's very visual. It's a dashboard. We just need to build a workflow to generate PDF report. It just hasn't been done yet. So that's coming. Again, we did a lot of work and changed our engineering team and everything. We have a new CTO. Everything's going at 100,000 miles an hour. So we have a list. We have a list of a load of things we want to do. And we're working through based on what customers have told us they want us first. So everything is going to change and it will keep coming.
Melanie
Just for those people who heard the siren in the background there, that's how impressed I was with that bit of news.
Gary
Delighted to hear it. I better make, I better move it up the priority list a little bit.
Esther
But okay, so taking a step back. So Feedalpha, you're the co founder with your lovely wife. Yes, Jane. So it is a small family run business in Ireland, which now serves the world. Is that fair to say?
Gary
We've customers pretty much everywhere now. We also on the new version, it's multilingual, so you can press a button. Yeah, it's there. I'm just looking through the screen to remind myself. It just flicks change the language for yourself.
Esther
So what languages do you have?
Gary
Let me hit the...
Melanie
You put them on the spot now.
Esther
Yeah. Well, I need to know because I work in multi-languages.
Gary
I go into my account The language hit the drop down. Loads.
Esther
To find out more, you need to sign up.
Gary
I need to talk to my CTO to make sure that that functionality is going to be live on Monday. But the plan is obviously we started off in Ireland. We We have customers, Ireland, UK, US, South America. Our CTO is based in Argentina. So we have a nice office here that's empty today because I'm real nice and let everyone work from home on a Friday. It's normally really noisy in here, but it's nice and peaceful today. We have customers everywhere and that's our plan. We're not restricting ourselves any different geo. It should be the same for everybody.
Esther
Brilliant. I like that.
Melanie
So just one last question. How do people learn more about... Obviously, it's not launched yet at the time of recording, but it will be launched a couple of weeks at the time it goes out. So where can we learn more about this product and all its new shiny updates?
Gary
So when I pushed a button on the new website, just feedalpha.com, that list out all the features. One of the things we did this time is We took away all the real fancy graphics and images and K's catalogue pictures and all the people staring into space and use screenshots and a bit of animation stuff from actual product shots. So the platform itself. So it's what you see is what you get. I'm really proud of the work that the guys have done to put it together. So hence why there's massive big screenshots everywhere to show what it looks like. So feedalpha.com is the website. We're on all the different social channels. It's not me posting on all the different social channels because a lot of really creative stuff happens on Instagram. That's definitely not me. That's Lisa and the team doing all of that. So you'll find us somewhere. Or you can grab me on LinkedIn for any questions. Just drop me a question, I'll answer it.
Melanie
Brilliant.
Esther
Thank you so much for joining us today, Gary, and we look forward to hearing more about feed Alpha in the coming months.
Gary
Brilliant.
Melanie
Thank you very much indeed. Well, that's all we have time for today. But thank you so much for joining us, Gary. This has been a long time coming trying to organise this meeting. We know you as Gary Bunny Hop Evans.
Esther
That would definitely be coming in a different episode.
Melanie
But it's been really interesting. We're glad we pinned you down at last. But we'll be back very soon with another podcast. Speak to you guys soon. Say bye, everyone.
Gary
Bye-bye.
Esther
Bye, everyone.
Melanie
See, I made him wave as well.
