Chris Norton: 0:04

Hiring the wrong people, ignoring best practices, fumbling pricing models. Emeric Ernu, founder of Agorapulse, has made every mistake in the book, but he's still built one of the world's top social media management platforms. If you've struggled with proving social media ROI or are scaling a software as a service business, then this episode is for you. Emeric bootstrapped Agorapulse without funding, going three years without a salary. He spent a decade building the wrong product before pivoting to what customers actually needed. But even then he had to battle high churn, a crowded market and leaders obsessed with vanity metrics over real ROI. In this episode, he shares his biggest hiring mistakes, costly go-to market fails and how he finally cracked social media ROI. In this episode, he shares his biggest hiring mistakes, costly go-to market fails and how he finally cracked social media ROI. Plus, he reveals why Hootsuite and Sprout Social copied his social media inbox innovation and how Agorapulse is helping marketers prove their impact today. So, as always, sit back, relax and let's hear how Emric created a social media management platform with no funding. Enjoy, emmerich Ernew, welcome to the show.

Emeric Ernoult: 1:15

Yeah, I'm glad to be here. Thanks, Chris.

Chris Norton: 1:17

So I've been aware of Agora Pulse for quite a while and weirdly we were looking through the notes and saw that you've been going nearly 15 years and so is prohibition. So that's quite interesting we've both been going about the same amount of time. How did you get into running a social media management company?

Emeric Ernoult: 1:36

it's a very, very long story, so I'm going to try to make it very, very short. I started, I started my entrepreneurial career in 2000, july of 2000. I was a M&A lawyer before that and in July of 2000, the company started a product that was already SaaS, even though SaaS was not coined as a term in 2000. It was ASP and it was already social media, even though social media was not coined as a term. It was community. So we had a software that will allow you to build your own community online and we launched it in January of 2001.

Emeric Ernoult: 2:10

And we struggled with this for many, many years because it was way too early and it was in the wrong language and the wrong country in French and France. We should have done it in the US, in English, because there were software that were doing the same thing that we were doing, but four years after us and in the US market, in English. So we fell and struggled with this for almost a decade until we saw the rise of Facebook and everybody wanted to be on Facebook. Nobody wanted to use our software and build their own community online, but everybody wanted to be on Facebook. And one thing getting to another, we started to build apps and contests on Facebook. And, one thing getting to another, we started to build apps and contests on Facebook and then we embedded all these apps and contests into one platform.

Emeric Ernoult: 2:50

That's how Gorpost was born and we realized that apps and contests and sweepstakes and quizzes were very, very bad business because it was super high churn. People were coming for a contest and an app and then were leaving. And we looked at the market and market and said, okay, who do we sell to and what do they need on a daily basis? So they don't leave. And we realized that we were selling to community managers that were buying our games and apps and contests and promos and what they needed is to reply, to respond to people, their comments, their messages, to post content and to measure if it was working. And that's basically how we pivoted the first time in Agorapulse that was focused on games and contests and promos, to an Agorapulse that was focused on social media management. That's my long story short.

Chris Norton: 3:34

Okay, and in 2025, how many social media managers are using it?

Emeric Ernoult: 3:39

We are around 30,000, with 7,000 customers, company customers and within them there are 30,000 with 7,000 customers company customers and within them there are 30,000 users, and so will your competitors be like? Hootsuite and TweetDeck Proud social TweetDeck doesn't even exist anymore.

Chris Norton: 3:59

Which one TweetDeck it?

Emeric Ernoult: 4:00

must be ZDeck. Tweetdeck was acquired by Twitter and then shut down by Musk.

Chris Norton: 4:06

That doesn't exist. It must be z deck. Yeah, tweet deck was acquired by twitter and then shut down by musk. That doesn't sound familiar, okay, um, uh, and who? So? Who sweet? Who would else be in 2025? Because the market's quite. It's true, there was loads of them, wasn't there? There's quite a few social media management tools, and I think the market has trimmed down a bit, hasn't it?

Emeric Ernoult: 4:23

yeah, a little bit on the top end, on the high end, on the bottom end, uh, a lot of players have popped up in the past five, six years from countries where labor is cheap and they could build, you know, decent software for a very low cost. So the bottom of the market is very crowded right now and it's it's especially complex and competitive because meta has its own thing. That's entirely free. It's not great, but it's good enough and for many, many small businesses it's good enough for free. So the bottom of the market has changed a lot and the top of the market has consolidated a bit, yes, and what is it about Agora Pulse then that's meant you're nearly 15 years old.

Will Ockenden: 5:01

I mean, obviously there's something about it. Community managers love you. Know what's the real value. You kind of bring people.

Emeric Ernoult: 5:08

Yeah, well, first of all, you have to realize that what people love year two and year three is not the same thing as year 10 and year 15. So what people loved in Agorapulse has evolved over time and you constantly have to adapt and reinvent yourself. What made us successful in the early days early years that are that is, 2014 until 2017, 18 was we invented the social media inbox. So when you look back in 2012 and 2013, every social media management software were like Hootsuite in its early days and TweetDeck Collins, collins, collins, collins Collins and we looked at that and we said this is a very, very ugly and chaotic way to manage your incoming content. People are used to a way that's much more manageable, in our opinion. That's email. So let's organize incoming content from social media like an email inbox. So we built something that was chronological comments, dms, every type reviews, anything that's going to come from social. That requires your attention or you need to reply, you need to assign, you need to handle the communication and the conversation is coming in a chronological email inbox-like, and in 2014, we were the only software doing that. That led us to go from zero to 5 million revenue. However, if we had not done that we would probably be at 3, 4 million, like many others who did not invent anything, and obviously everybody copied this from us. Sprout Social copied us two years later, in 2016. Hootsuite copied us in 2019, six years later, and then everybody else and their sister is doing a social media inbox today. We're still the best because we were the first and we kept iterating on that. So I think ours is still the most efficient, the most effective, but that's what took us to 2018, 2019.

Emeric Ernoult: 6:57

Then we didn't really have a unique differentiator for the 2019 to 2021, 2022. That was quite a struggle in terms of differentiating and messaging and positioning. And in 2022, early 2022, we invented our social media ROI measurements. So, basically, connecting to Google Analytics, we're able to go very granularly telling you which message, which reply, which post, which tweet is generating, what kind of conversion, what kind of downloads, video views, like anything you want to track. That you're already tracking on Google Analytics 4. And I filed a patent for this in the US. So that was our new innovation and now that's what's setting us apart and it's part of our philosophy that social media is amazing, but if all you get is followers, likes and shares, the CEOs and CMOs and CFOs are going to not give you their best Money budget people. So we want to help social media managers really prove that what they're doing is worth doing and get the respect and the budget from the C-suites.

Chris Norton: 8:02

So that's our ambition and our vision and that's what we innovated since 2022 I've got questions, so we we've been will and I have been doing social media monitoring like since the days right back in the day, I'm sure, was it called something. Six was one called six ready in six that was it, what was.

Chris Norton: 8:48

Now I'm taking you right back to it and and in them days it was, and we used to get reports and reports and reports and we'd be looking at oh wait, wow, look at sentiment. Sentiment's really clever. We can see working in PR. I can see how a brand is affected. We do a campaign. Is the brand positive? Is the brand negative? Is what's being said, just like you just said about ROI. However, you then went, okay, okay, let's have a look at the sentiment. And then you click in the sentiment and it's so bullshit, total bullshit. So I was like this is a client would say hey, chris, I've seen your report, it's brilliant, and can you just ask us why? We've got some positive sentiment on x and then we click on it and be like this is such a shit product and you're like it didn't make any sense. So my question is this in 2025, with AI, has sentiment got better?

Emeric Ernoult: 9:43

I was about to stop you right in your track and said Radiant 6 was like almost a decade ago and at the time the LLMs were very basic and all the systems the big data system and the AI the generative AI because generative AI has not been invented by ChatGPT.

Emeric Ernoult: 10:02

It's been popularized and scaled by ChatGPT but it has been used by software for the past decade and the one that were using Radian 6 at the time were very poor and not very trained. So the very big difference today is that it's constantly being. So. Now you can create LLMs that are going to check what the other LLM is doing sentiment-wise. So you have a first one that's giving sentiment and then you train another one to go and check the first one and you can do that in Cascade and have three of them checking each other. So the accuracy right now is much better, but because you're constantly training it. Uh, at the time we didn't have the, the means and the computing power and and the ability and the llms to do the constant iteration and training. So it's it's still going to make mistakes, but because of the constant training it's it's getting like, I think, when we started ours uh, two years, our own sentiment analysis based on OpenAI, we had 96% accuracy.

Emeric Ernoult: 10:58

I think, we're now at 99.4%, so we've increased and improved the accuracy by self-training.

Will Ockenden: 11:05

Because it used to be about Radiant. 6 days was like 33% accuracy or something. I mean it's absolutely.

Chris Norton: 11:11

It was so irrelevant, wasn't it really Like? You go, oh your sentiment's neutral't it really like you go, all these sentiments neutral and it's like what's neutral, and then it'd say this is brilliant, this product you'd be like, well, that's positive yeah, yeah it's really really weird.

Will Ockenden: 11:21

So good to hear that it's moved on so, um, social media ROI is is obviously the sort of the panacea of social media, and you sort of talked about, um, I suppose, the vanity metrics. So, so you know, and we've been in a million meetings in the past where a chief exec said I want a million followers, and you would say what does that actually mean? You know, why do you want a million followers? And that? Well, talk to us, I suppose, about vanity metrics. What should we not be measuring and what should we be measuring in social media, and what is the market demanding?

Emeric Ernoult: 11:52

Yeah. So obviously you know you're not going to be surprised if I tell you that the answer is not a simple answer. It's not a yes and no or you should track that or you should not track that. Checking follower counts makes no sense if you don't know if your followers are the right ones. Checking follower counts if all I get as followers on my LinkedIn page is social media managers for company with more than 200 employees is a good metric to follow. So it's really about who are they and you can know that because you can look at your stats on your LinkedIn.

Emeric Ernoult: 12:19

I'm taking LinkedIn because that's the one I'm taking the most attention to, but you can look at your LinkedIn page and see who are they and then look at the new ones and say are they social media managers? Are they marketers? Are they from small business? Are they from the geos and targeting? So long story short. You still want to track the audience and how the audience react to what you do, because it's not entirely vanity if it's the right audience and the reaction and the engagement is positive I mean they're having thumbs up and conversations with you on that. That's still relevant and that's going to help you lead to the next step, which is what are they going to do?

Emeric Ernoult: 12:54

What are they doing next? Are they going to my website? Are they interacting with my content on my website? Are they downloading the stuff that I'm giving them access to? Are they joining the communities that I invested a lot of money to help them? And, eventually, are they doing a free trial and asking for a demo of my product, like the low, low, low, low bottom of the funnel, and all of these you need to track.

Emeric Ernoult: 13:21

It's not that there's good and bad metrics to track. It's that there's a good way and a bad way to track it. There's a way. How many followers do we have? Don't care who they are. That's really bad. How many likes do they are? Don't care if they're coming from a like farm in India that I'm paying a cent per like to some company that's selling them. Those are going to be the vanity stock. But if you're doing it intentionally to get certain type of people doing certain type of actions, then everything that's happening next that's linked to your bottom line in your business is meaningful and is probably going to be much better, much bigger and much better in terms of quantity and quality.

Will Ockenden: 13:58

Interesting, and from your perspective, then you know, I gave the chief exec example of just wanting a million random followers. Are businesses particularly kind of leadership in businesses, getting more clued up when it comes to the potential and the power of social media, or is this still this kind of vague idea about what social media is and what it can achieve, you know, is it getting, is it taken seriously enough? I suppose is the question.

Emeric Ernoult: 14:24

no, it's not it's not and and they don't know, and mostly they don't know what they're talking about. Um, but go ask a ceo of a 200, 300 people uh software company what they know about their, their, the effectiveness of the marketing. Automation in their hubspot instance? I can bet you they don't know most of the time. Automation in their HubSpot instance, I can bet you they don't know Most of the time.

Emeric Ernoult: 14:48

But they know they get some emails sent. They know they got a click-through rate. They know they got a sign-up rate, so they get reports from those things. So they understand what's the outcome, they understand what the system's producing, but they don't understand how the system works. So if you show them social media, they don't understand what needs to be done and how it works. What they understand is okay, give me the measurement, what do we get in the end at the end of the machine? And that's why we focus so much on what can we give to social media managers and marketers who are doing social that they can bring to those people who will never understand what they do?

Emeric Ernoult: 15:22

I'm sorry, but it's not going to change and help them speak that language.

Chris Norton: 15:28

And does your ROI report then say I don't know the social media efforts from embracing marketing mistakes achieved 3,000 pounds worth of sales this month. It can do that, yeah.

Emeric Ernoult: 15:41

Now you're going to tell me and you'll be right, I'm probably doing a lot more than 3 000 pounds.

Emeric Ernoult: 15:46

And I'm going to tell you, yes, you're certainly doing more than 3 000 pounds, because when you measure stuff with analytics whatever the whatever the analytics is, even if it's hubspot and salesforce and it's perfectly tuned you're only going to be able to measure what can be measured. All the word of mouth, all the dark social, or the friends that are telling their friends that they should try oh, you should listen to marketing mistakes. It's such an amazing podcast that is maybe generated by what you do, but it's never going to be trackable anyway. And that's usually the argument that people make to not go track social media. And what I tell them is that, yes, you're going to track the tip of the iceberg. It's yeah, but if you don't track the tip of the iceberg, there's probably no iceberg. And when you're navigating in the sea of marketing, you want to know where the icebergs are, because otherwise you're going to crush into them. So my take is measure the tips so you know where are the islands of value that you can identify and double down on.

Chris Norton: 16:42

Yeah, because when we were out in social like many, many years ago, 14, 15 years when the Facebook first came out, it was 100% reach and each channel you see it. It's now a model for launching social media. Let's launch a new social media product, let's give it 100% reach, get everyone talking about it. Then let's get a couple of years in and reduce it to 80 and make it all about the algorithm 70, 60, 50, 40, 30 and eventually you get to zero percent. Well, what not point naught whatever to go viral, and if you put a piece of content out, the chances are no one's going to see it unless you pay to play. Other than a couple of channels, which are youtube and tiktok, which are discovery platforms, still work where you don't, doesn't matter how many followers you've got, you still can discover content. So does does agorapulse help with with that side of it? Because organic isn't organic, social dead uh, organic social is dead.

Emeric Ernoult: 17:38

If you're starting from scratch and you're very small and nobody knows you, yeah, don't don't have too high of a hope for organic social at your point. If you're me, we have a mini brand. We've been around for a long time. I have some level of thought leadership. I have dozens of thousands of people following me on LinkedIn. So what we do, for example, my social media manager. She creates content for me that she posts on my LinkedIn, that I validate, like I make sure it's what I want to post, and she promotes webinars for our new features, videos for our new awards. You know, whatever stuff that is social media ready she's not posting. Ask for a demo, try us for free, because that kind of stuff is not going to work on social media organically, maybe unpaid and you know, not even there, um, but all this stuff that's informational, how we have something new.

Emeric Ernoult: 18:30

We have a use case. We have a customer testing testifying but sharing what they've done, how it worked. That works quite well because people want to learn from pierce. So, and she used my. She uses my account, not only our brand account, but also my account and all our c levels account and all our marketers account because we have a cro, is quite well known here in france. So, like use, just not using one one uh channel, which is our brand channel, but using everybody's channel who has some reach, and then now she's able to track what I am generating, what my cro is generating, what our marketers are generating and, granularly, overall, all together we we got um dozens and dozens of subscribers to that new webinar that is presenting this new feature and she can see if I am worth the effort.

Emeric Ernoult: 19:16

She knows, she knows what my account is doing. Her account is doing so like that's where organic social works.

Will Ockenden: 19:21

But obviously it took me years to build my following and my thought leadership and for people to um uh, trust me that's quite interesting to hear you talk about that, and I think a lot of the conversations we have in the corporate world is about how not just how a brand can can shout about itself on social, but how those individual thought leaders within a business and it's the two working together, isn't it that is really effective these days? Yeah, is that true? Another platform, I mean I know on linkedin that's the case. Do you get much? Um, I suppose you know, do you get business leaders on other channels that isn't linked in using them as individual thought leadership platforms, or does it tend to be restricted to LinkedIn?

Emeric Ernoult: 20:00

Yeah, I think it's mostly LinkedIn. There will be rare cases where you have Facebook or Instagram or X, but it's really rare. I mean, the majority of people who want to leverage their team members or their leaders to spread the words about the company and its product is mostly going to be LinkedIn or it could be YouTube as well, if you do shorts, if you like to do shorts yeah if you like to do shorts, you can do youtube, tiktok and facebook. Yeah, all at once with us we'll align this.

Chris Norton: 20:30

Um well, I just put one of the clips from my, uh, our latest, one of our latest podcasts on a clip. We put a clip on my tiktok and, uh, one of the comments it's not me speaking, by the way, it's a guest and one of the comments on the video is um, I'm going to use this as my next sleep aid. Nice, actually made me laugh out loud we'll take that as a compliment yeah, it's engagement, I'm taking it.

Chris Norton: 20:56

You know it's engagement. So you, you bootstrapped the business. You haven't taken funding and things to get started, which is quite a brave move in the software as a service and with social media moving so quickly. What have been the issues that you've had with not raising funds? Or did you just grow so fast that it was cool?

Emeric Ernoult: 21:18

Okay, so this sounds very glamour. Let me tell you the truth. I didn't raise money because nobody would give me money. I like that.

Emeric Ernoult: 21:27

This is the truth, I tried to raise money because it was really really tough growing a business without any external funding, and the way we made it through was I didn't pay myself for almost three years, so my wife paid for everything. I was working for free and so my, so did my co-founder uh, for a little less than me, but for probably like a year and a half or two years. So, like, the way we made it is that the co-founders, who were both the ceo and the cto, so the two most productive people in the company when we were like five or six, were not paying themselves. So that's the only way we made it through. One we hit break-even in 2015.

Emeric Ernoult: 22:09

After that, the rest is history, because once you reach break-even, then you have cash. You can use your cash to fuel your growth and from that point forward, we kept adding cash into the bank because we kept being profitable and adding cash to the bank account. So from there, there was no need and many people came to fund us and I was always looking I don't know what to do with your money. So I don't want to delude myself because I don't know. I do not have a channel of growth where money is the lever. The lever is unfortunately time and knowledge and the right people, and that money does not accelerate that much. So for us, at some point it didn't make sense to raise money.

Chris Norton: 22:47

That's quite inspirational that you didn't take a salary for three years, yeah.

Emeric Ernoult: 22:52

Well, you have to have a wife that's very supportive. Let's put it this way.

Chris Norton: 22:58

Yeah, I haven't got that. Sorry, lisa, no jokes. Yeah, I mean it's amazing that you're able to do that, but I mean for me as a founder, like having done set out on your own, it is terrifying to know if you're going in the right direction.

Chris Norton: 23:13

You have to believe what you're doing, don't you? And the fact that, um, you did that with no money at all, because when I ran running myself I I didn't, I was on minimum wage tied because you just paid everybody else to make it work for quite a while I mean, let's, let's make it clear. I was terrified but but employees, they don't know that.

Emeric Ernoult: 23:30

Like if you're working in a market, know that no, they don't.

Chris Norton: 23:33

And in you think, oh the business owners, they've got it easy.

Emeric Ernoult: 23:36

They don't they don't have it easy, you don't. You don't want them to know that you're terrified, because otherwise they're going to run away.

Chris Norton: 23:42

Yeah, you can't get employees. I love that. I love the honesty of this.

Will Ockenden: 23:48

So one on on this kind of steep growth trajectory you've been on have have you made any you know? Can you think I know you? We don't know one makes mistakes here. But can you think of any mistakes you've made along the way that you kind of look back and think I would have done that differently?

Emeric Ernoult: 24:05

I've made a million mistakes. I mean, the number of mistakes I've made is crazy. I can probably count the number of very smart things I've done in my two hands and the number of mistakes. I would need several buddies to count them. I think I'm going to try to categorize them by families of mistakes. I think family of mistake number one is people. It's always people. The worst for every business owner and every entrepreneur. It's always people.

Emeric Ernoult: 24:29

It's not being clear on who you need. That's mistake number one. Not taking the time to write down okay, I need to hire a marketer. Okay, what for? What are they going to do? What do you expect for them? What is the expected outcome? How are you going to measure it? What do you want them to do day in and day out? Oh, what does that require in terms of knowledge? How can you test that during the interview? All this logic of who you need and what do they need to achieve, and in order to achieve that, what do they need to know and who do they need to be?

Emeric Ernoult: 25:01

I'm going to tell you for 10 years, I didn't do any of that, so I kept hiring people who were wrong fits because I didn't think through what I actually needed. That's mistake number one, and that's a very passionate mind. My next business is going to be about helping entrepreneurs solve for that, because it's such a huge mistake and it's so hard to do when you've never done something. How? And it's so hard to do when you've never done something. How do you know who's going to be good at doing it right? It's really really hard. The second mistake is I know it in my gut the person's not going to make it, but I'm going to hire her anyway, because I don't have anybody like.

Emeric Ernoult: 25:33

I've done this one more than I should admit because it's it's a shame, so going against your guts when you're hiring someone that you know it's not going to make it. The third one is you've done that, you've hired them and then you're going to take three times the time to let them go or you should let them go now and then you keep them and then it's excruciating for you, for them, for the team. So you're basically a horrible boss and a horrible leader when you do that. So these are the people mistakes not talking about performance, not defining performance, not being not having direct and sometimes hard conversations about what performance is for the person, what they need to solve, not coaching them, not mentoring them, not holding them by the hand to show them what's the direction, all the things that a leader should do. And when you're a new leader, you don't know how to do these things. So you, you're, you're usually a horrible person and people want to sue you and all that stuff. You don't want to be that horrible person, but you just don't know better. And the second types of mistakes are mistakes about not following best practices of your industry, like you're trying to be creative on something oh, pricing, everybody does three prices and they, they organize them this way, and so on and so forth. Let's do pricing completely differently with cursor, when you can do this and you can do that.

Emeric Ernoult: 26:50

Our first pricing was impossible to understand and people were were signing up for our product. It was back in 2013-14. They were signing up to our product and they and the drop off crazy high and we're like why are they not going on in the sign-up funnel? Why are they stopping defining the price? Because we didn't give them a price. We said oh price, it's up to this and, starting at that, find out what your price is going to be by signing up and moving cursors and giving us number of profiles and users. No, people don't't want that. They want to look at a pricing page.

Emeric Ernoult: 27:25

It's 99, it's 49, it's 199 you have this, this and that, and how many users and how many profiles. Okay, I know how much it is, I know how much I'm going to pay, I'm picking this plan and I'm signing up. So don't invent the wheel on the basics, on the things that people don't, don't want to figure out't want to think about. So that's just an example. There could be plenty of others. That's the second big family of mistakes, and then it's product mistakes, left and right.

Emeric Ernoult: 27:54

I think go-to-market mistakes are the hardest because when you've never done a go-to-market whether it's product-led growth or it's inbound or it's outbound sales, cold calling, like all these partnerships, all these different ways you can go to market when you've never done them. What you need to do as a founder, as a CEO, you need to find the people and the team who's going to be able to execute on that against that. But when you've never done this go-to-market, when you've never led your company to sell to enterprise with an outbound sales motion which is something I have never done it is the hardest thing on earth to assemble the team that's going to be able to do that. And that's where you make the most mistakes and that's where I've I've wasted the most energy, money, um, company valuation for sure, and I don't know how to solve for that unless you spend a lot of time with peers who have done it before you. You spend a lot of time with people who are cmo, cro's, vp of sales, who have done it without you and they.

Emeric Ernoult: 28:59

But I've done that too and still it's not the same to hear from someone who's done something. This is how I've done it and do it yourself, because when you've done it yourself, you know and you know it inside your guts oh, it's done, so you can really mentor and coach people. When it's coming from something someone else it's not that. So you can really mentor and coach people. When it's coming from someone else, it's not that easy. So I would say those are the three tremendous, expensive mistakes that I've made and I worry dozens of millions of euros have been wasted because of those.

Will Ockenden: 29:28

Well, we've never had a family of mistakes before, have we, Chris? That was excellent.

Chris Norton: 29:32

This is the marketing podcast, isn't it?

Will Ockenden: 29:34

The four Ps so we've got two people. What was it place? Isn't it placed? What was what the four p's will come on remind me people. Product positioning, price isn't it the four p's?

Chris Norton: 29:46

I should know that positioning was the only, or maybe positioning was that in there with the, with the little slider on the positioning side.

Emeric Ernoult: 29:52

We've not be. We've been lucky. Let's put it this way we we found a positioning that worked by random luck and that's why I usually say you know what success in entrepreneurship is? Five percent, uh, um, five percent hard work and 95 luck. Everybody looks at me and say what no, it's not true, you've worked hard, you deserve it. And I say, yeah, the the five percent hard work is condition precedent. If you don't do that, there will never be 95% luck, there will never be luck. So you have to do the 5%. But if you only do the hard work and you never have luck, or never have good timing or never had oh my God, I was a good face, good time, good people like lucky me then having tremendous success is a really, really rare thing in entrepreneurship, to be honest.

Chris Norton: 30:36

Some good hot tips in there. Despite mistakes and hot tips. I've got a product question for you. So your Agorapulse does it work with LinkedIn? Then he measures all the LinkedIn and what sort of bits and pieces can you get out of LinkedIn that you can't get out of if you just delved into LinkedIn analytics, because I use LinkedIn extensively for promoting the pod and doing and I've done for for years and I'll look in the analytics to see what sort of types of people levels. I've got newsletter in there. So what, what extra bits does yours do that you get from the API that I don't know, that you can't get in the analytics that a normal person can get?

Emeric Ernoult: 31:16

Yeah, the one thing that you're going to get with us and you're not going to get in LinkedIn is that if I post something promoting one of our webinars, I'm going to know how many webinars attendees that I generated, and that's giving. That's giving my um, uh, my team, uh, the right level of motivation to keep posting through my accounts, because my accounts is generating signups's, it's generating people who are actively doing stuff on our website for actions that we care about. I love the likes and the engagement in the comments, but at the end of the day, I want the, the leads yeah, so can't relate to that at all.

Chris Norton: 31:48

I was just thinking you're making me and will think, actually, then if you could track your own, track your own effectiveness right down to an actual ROI result, that's actually quite powerful because we've got HubSpot as well and we use that and I'm in the report section of that all the time. But to tie it to my own personal LinkedIn would be quite interesting.

Emeric Ernoult: 32:06

Justin Welsh does that ring the bell? He's a LinkedIn influencer. Yeah, yeah, I've heard his name. Yeah, we've worked with him. Tracking is posting every day and he's posting always a link to his training program and so once you click that link, you can sign up to his newsletter or sign up to his training program. That's $200 a month, I think, or not $200 a year, one shot. And then he has other programs and now he's able to track every newsletter sign-up and every $200 he sells through every single post.

Emeric Ernoult: 32:39

And of course, he knew that LinkedIn was working for him and he got people sign up and that was his only channel and stuff. But now he can know what topic, what type of post, what type of time of the day, day of the week. So he goes much more granular and, being very data-driven, onto okay, what works really really well for me, and now he can do that. So we're not revolutionizing anything else in terms of measuring the engagement, but we're really adding this layer of okay. Now let's talk about what business this is generating and can we see any pattern by type of content, day, time of the day, targeting and so on.

Chris Norton: 33:13

And so if you were a marketing manager and you're in a B2B business, because we've got B2B listeners and B2C and they've got let's say they've got I don't know six business leaders in their small business and can they plug all six LinkedIn's into your tool and track them all through? One thing for the web Is that how you're doing it for your?

Emeric Ernoult: 33:32

own, yeah, and also what they can can do. If the company posts something on its brand brand account, they can then share it with all the leaders and say, can you go, as they can do things. They can either share it with all the readers to say, here's my post on linkedin, so once the post is published, they can ask people to go and engage with it and comment and share it, and so on and so forth. So you basically take an existing post that the brand has done and you ask the team to go and engage with the post and share the post, or you're sending them the content and you're asking them can you post this on your own linkedin? So then and you can track both like you can see if additional engagement is getting you more reach, which is the case.

Emeric Ernoult: 34:07

I think we measured almost five times more more clicks on the post that were were engaged with by the team. So. So the brand was posting something on LinkedIn and we asked the team to engage. When we did that, the post got five times more engagement and clicks and results. And the other way to do that is like you're asking everybody to share and then you have an individual shareable link for everybody. So you know one thing I find it very fun to do we use that with HR. So when we're hiring people, we obviously post a job, a job, um, a job ad on linkedin and then we put we push that link to all the teams that are relevant. So we're, if we are hiring a developer, we ask all our developers to share the post on their own linkedin. If we're hiring a marketer, we ask all our marketers and then we look at who brought which candidates.

Will Ockenden: 34:56

Right.

Emeric Ernoult: 34:57

And our ATS, which is called TeamTaylor. You can create a dedicated link and you use that dedicated link for each post and you're able to know who in the team brought which candidate and you can basically give prizes and rewards to hey Chris, you brought the candidates that we hired. Good for you, here's a weekend to Vienna, so you can start having fun with that kind of stuff.

Will Ockenden: 35:20

Interesting, so um this might be a difficult question to answer, but at a real macro level, um, from your experience, what social network is best for organic engagement is? Is there what you know is? Is there one that's terrible, one, that's amazing? Or are they all about?

Emeric Ernoult: 35:37

you know, all about the same these days obviously it's not the same for any kind of business. I think for a b2b business it's a, it's linkedin, for sure. Uh, b2b businesses are doing very poorly on on on facebook. Uh, they're doing very poorly on x. Uh, they can do okay on instagram, but not usually not so much, and really the ones that are really working is LinkedIn.

Emeric Ernoult: 36:03

But if you are a fashion company, pinterest can be amazing. Obviously, instagram is a no-brainer. You have to be on Instagram if you're in fashion. If you're in travel and hospitality, instagram absolutely is crushing it. Linkedin's not going to do much. Pinterest can be amazing for hospitality and travel as well. So it really depends on the industry you're in. But the ones we see declining all over the place is X. X is going down for sure in terms of engagement uses, use usage by brands and businesses. Brands and businesses are using x less than s? Um. They're trying threads, they're trying blue sky, but it's still early on, it's still in their infancy, so it's really hard to make big bets on those um. I think it boils down now mostly to instagram versus linkedin think it boils down now mostly to instagram versus linkedin.

Will Ockenden: 37:00

Interesting for some. Facebook, I was gonna say, is there? Is there, you know? I mean, is there still a role for facebook for marketers? I know everyone's still on it.

Emeric Ernoult: 37:06

We have a customer that's, uh, a ski resort and they're doing amazing on facebook. So, um, because their their population, their followers, are on Facebook. They're people like me very young, right, jen said In their 40s and 50s, so they are mostly on Facebook and they are the people who have the money to take their families to ski resorts and stuff. So they're doing really well on Instagram as well, but they're still doing really well on Facebook. We don't do really well on Facebook, so our own experience is not really good on Facebook, but I see businesses that are still crushing it on Facebook.

Chris Norton: 37:45

I think if you B2C business to consumer you're going to do okay, like you say, if your demographic is a certain age. But Facebook does feel very old school and hence why they changed the name to Meta. They thought that they foresaw the the world was going to be all about multi in the metaverse and actually it's ended up being the ai verse, which is they just did it. I think they got. They got caught with the pants down there. It just came from nowhere and gazumped them. Mind you, it goes up google as well, didn't it? They just didn't see ai being this big new revolution that it is. And AI feels like the new social media, it feels like the new buzzword. Do you remember when? I remember when social media when there was people like leaving engineering to become social media consultants and I was like what are you talking about? Like oh yeah, and they look at the process and talk about you know, and now you've got tools like what you guys do which is doing the process and talk about.

Emeric Ernoult: 38:43

You know, and now and now you've got tools like what you guys do, which is doing the process, which makes it a whole lot easier. Yeah, video I I I had a thought a video works works really well for people who have knowledge to share. So, if you are in the knowledge, knowledge business and and you can share knowledge online tiktok, youtube, really really powerful. Um, so, if you are in education, universities, training, that kind of stuff, really good, obviously, every influencer, it's all knowledge and content to share. Um, so we, we, I know we are pretty active on on youtube and our our content video content creator is doing a lot of shorts and and we see the results improving bit by bit, but it's, you know, it's no overnight success. It takes a big investment and a lot of time.

Chris Norton: 39:19

We interviewed a YouTuber on the podcast last week which is going to come out soon. That episode and the gist I'm getting is if you want to be good on YouTube, you've just got to love the medium and just stick to that entire channel. Like you're talking about LinkedIn. You've got to be obsessed with youtube to be a success and not and not do anything. You know. All the other stuff is like window dressing. Pure focus on on youtube and you'll.

Emeric Ernoult: 39:45

You can still win, and especially if you're a good storyteller and you you're good at making videos, basically two examples on video and especially youtube, but they also probably spread their videos on Instagram and TikTok and Facebook and everything that has vertical videos. My coach used to be Dan Martel, so Dan Martel used to be my coach. Better this way, he's a business coach, saas coach in Canada and a good friend as well with Alex Ramosi. I don't know if you've heard of Alex Ramosi. He's very famous on YouTube. He has like 3 million followers. All he talks about him and his wife, leila. They talk about business, business, business. They invest in businesses. They sold their first business at like 32 for 55 million. They're immensely successful. So is Dan, and Dan is almost at 1 million followers on YouTube after I don't know three, four years.

Emeric Ernoult: 40:36

It was very slow in the beginning. Now it's moving very fast. When you see the amount of money and means and teams that they have behind them to create that content. You're closing near a million dollars per month in terms of content creation, team and everything, but they produce like 300 videos per day. The volume is crazy. So when you think about video creation, you're and you're a brand. You're competing with these guys. Yeah, it, like you said, it requires 100 commitment and budget, people, strategy and a very, very clear focus on where you want to go with that but the amazing thing about those platforms like tiktok and youtube is there's still discovery platforms, whereas facebook and other platforms aren't.

Chris Norton: 41:19

You can't really go as viral you can if you, I I do think the algorithm is watch each other a little bit as well, so if the video is doing quite well on one platform, suddenly it pops up on another. Um, but yeah, it's sort of tiktok, the entertainment side and YouTubers are all entertainment or knowledge sharing. It's fascinating where it's gone, but the YouTube just hasn't really changed. I know it has changed, but it hasn't really changed that much has it. But it's still there up at the second biggest website. It's crazy.

Emeric Ernoult: 41:49

Well, you know what are you using YouTube for? I use YouTube for information on electric cars, catamarans and vacation. Those are the three things I I love geeking about. Or I'm dreaming of buying a boat one day or that kind of stuff, and I watch videos of people testing, trying. Oh, here's a water maker that does x liters an hour and this other water maker like this is not entertainment. This is me like, like geeking out, learning about stuff I want to buy at one point and obviously, if you're selling water makers for boats, then it's a good place to invest. Right, it's probably better than a blog. Uh, so it it can be really good, but it you have to be very, you have to know exactly what you want to achieve with that and be very, very laser focused on it for a long period of time so I'm sort of looking ahead then.

Will Ockenden: 42:40

So you know you talked about, you know, the enduring role of youtube, facebook's potentially plateauing a bit. You know aging demographic x is probably on its way out. You know what. What will the social media landscape look like in the next five years? You know what are you seeing, what's your predictions?

Emeric Ernoult: 42:57

yeah, my prediction is that linkedin is not going anywhere. For people for whom linkedin is the right spot now, it's going to stay the right spot. So b2b is still going to be mostly on linkedin. Thought leadership is going to be mostly on linkedin. Execs c levels, they're going to be mostly investing on linked LinkedIn to represent their companies and their businesses.

Emeric Ernoult: 43:19

I definitely see Instagram staying very strong because it has remained strong in the past four years. There has been no decline. It's still going up. I do believe video is already big, but it's only getting bigger by the day. The reason why TikTok has been so successful so quickly is it for the consumer.

Emeric Ernoult: 43:39

It's lazy, it's. It's lazy to watch a video. It's. It's. It takes effort to read a text.

Emeric Ernoult: 43:46

I don't know about you, but when you have to read a tweet or a long facebook post, okay, let's take a minute, let's. Let's go to the restroom and read my facebook post watching a video. You're in the, you're in the subway, you're walking, you're on your treadmill, you're not time to kill because you're waiting in the line. You just watch videos and scroll, scroll, scroll. It's crazy. I see my wife and I sometimes at night. Not good, you shouldn't do that, but we're in bed and we're like scrolling like stupid, silly people because we're it's laziness, silly people, because it's laziness, and that's not going to change. People want to distract themselves and they do scroll for videos. It doesn't mean the videos are all distracting. Some of them are interesting or insightful or they are the kind of stuff you want to learn. And that's where brands like us or like yours have to think about how can we be in that feed of scroll, scroll, scroll and make them remember us, because we shared something with them.

Will Ockenden: 44:41

It's like oh, that's interesting.

Emeric Ernoult: 44:43

I didn't know, I didn't think about that. So that's the one thing that I think my team is doing well is thinking about how can we be there and be relevant and do more of that. Um, so tiktok not going anywhere unless donald trump thinks it shouldn't be in america, but I'm not sure he's going to up the balls to do that. Um and and any, any video. So the reels on facebook, uh, the reels on instagram. So the, the, the cousin of the TikToks that everybody started their own.

Emeric Ernoult: 45:19

Apart from that, the threads in the blue skies, ie the next potential next step, liberal step or not? Elon Musk version of Twitter X? I don't know. It's hard to say right now because it's definitely it's not growing. It's growing and there has been spike because of the election of donald trump and all that, but sustainably. I wouldn't bet on that. I, I I'm a very bad predictor. I don't want to give you predictions because I've made mistakes in making predictions all my life, but I wouldn't bet on that I predict that elon musk will still be coming out top in everybody's um on twitter profiles.

Chris Norton: 45:55

If so, I've won. How can one man get so prolific on one platform? I'll just buy it because, like he seems to appear in everybody's feeds now on twitter on uh, what do you call it now? On that, I want to call it. Everyone still calls it twitter, uh, but x.

Chris Norton: 46:10

Yeah, it's now he's just such a bad brand yeah, he's, he's really ruined it, which is a shame because it was a brilliant brand. I think Blue Sky will win, because I think Blue Sky is a better product than Threads Threads, but then, yeah, it'll be interesting to watch because Threads have got meta behind them. So, who knows, who knows?

Emeric Ernoult: 46:28

It's hard to make a good bet on those two, for sure.

Chris Norton: 46:31

I'm genuinely interested in testing out your LinkedIn measurement tool. I think I won't mind giving that a play. I've never, we've never used it. I might have to give it a. Is that just? Is that a premium user that does that?

Emeric Ernoult: 46:43

yeah, I can I can cut something out for you, oh okay, well, we'll give it a test to see how.

Chris Norton: 46:50

Um, because we use linkedin, we'll do it for this podcast episode and see how it goes I can.

Emeric Ernoult: 46:54

I can give you the friend and family discount. Oh right, Okay.

Chris Norton: 46:57

Excellent. That's why you were bootstrapped, so you could hand out friends and family accounts. Oh well, if people want to get a hold of you, Enric, what's the best way to do it?

Emeric Ernoult: 47:08

LinkedIn is the best way to get a hold of me.

Chris Norton: 47:11

And now that you've been on the show and we've let you get away, you gave us quite a few mistakes. Actually, If you were us, who's the next person you'd have on Embracing Marketing Mistakes and why?

Emeric Ernoult: 47:28

Who's the next person I would have on Embracing Marketing Mistakes and why it would be. Guillaume Moubeche is the founder and CEO of Lemlist. That's a French startup that's very, very famous on the sales tech space. They are at 30 million AR, I think, and he has an amazing journey, very successful, and he's really really good at just sharing the successful bits of it. He's really really good. So when you listen to him, it's like, oh my God, he's so successful. It's amazing. But I know because he's like you, is like me, he's made a ton of mistakes and I'd love for him to share them.

Will Ockenden: 48:04

I would love to find out what they are.

Emeric Ernoult: 48:05

I can make an intro. I can make an introduction.

Chris Norton: 48:07

Yeah, yeah make an intro. We'd love to get him on the show if he's good at telling stories. That's what this is about. That's great, um, I thought that was brilliant.

Will Ockenden: 48:14

Yeah, that was excellent. A little bit different, but really, yeah, really helped. Really good, really interesting.