Hello again!
So, so excited to have Meryoli Arias in our Growth Talks today! Meryoli is a social media expert with over 12 years of experience in helping brands share their stories and grow their business.
She’s worked with companies like Apollo.io and Chili Piper, driving impressive growth and engagement.
At Chili Piper, she made serious waves, racking up 1.5 million TikTok views, sourcing 7.5K applications with short video content, and boosting the company’s social following to 65K. She also hit 1 million organic impressions in a month and played a key role in Chili Piper being named one of LinkedIn’s Top 50 US Startups in 2022!
But her success didn’t stop there. Meryoli took her skills to Apollo.io, where she didn’t just grow their social media—she blew it up (in a good way, of course)! In just 15 months, she boosted their social presence by 500%, achieved a staggering 1200% increase in organic impressions, and built a thriving community of over 100,000 followers. (yup, we already know you’d love to meet her)
In this chat, we’ll explore her experiences, hear about the challenges she’s faced, and get her take on what really makes social media growth and community management click.
Let’s start:
Let’s hear more about you. Can you share your journey into social media marketing and what drew you to this field?
I studied journalism, and when I was in my internships, my mentor asked me to create the newspaper’s website, and as a young-eager professional, I did. And after figuring out how to do that with very little to no-budget, I find in social media my best friend to bring eyes to the content we were creating. And that’s how I got to social media that helps companies get closer to their business goals. You have a good product + good promotion= more + better business.
Storytelling is often cited as a critical component of successful social media marketing. How do you approach storytelling in your campaigns, and what techniques do you find most effective in resonating with diverse audiences?
For me, storytelling is key to the success of any campaign. The best approach to display a storytelling that is compelling to the masses is creating authentic, human-centric content. People like to see themselves as the hero of the story, and that’s what you need to deliver. Instead of asking yourself what do I want to say today, try asking what can I say to my community that is valuable today.
Do you believe it makes a difference whether content is written by a person or generated by AI like ChatGPT? How do you think this affects how audiences connect with the content?
Yes. I think ChatGPT can be a great asset for many manual, repetitive tasks, but when it comes to creating copy that connects, there’s always something, a little detail, that gives away that there are no humans behind the content, and that’s why the humans from your audience don’t feel connected.
If you could share one key lesson about social media marketing with businesses looking to improve their online presence, what would it be?
Serve your audience with human-centric content.
Reflecting on your most rewarding projects or experiences, what key elements contributed to their success?
I think it was focusing on what our audiences wanted to see vs what we wanted them to see. The cool thing is that there is away a middle ground between those two. Finding it is probably why I’m still in the job.
Can you share a particularly challenging moment in your career related to social media marketing, and what you learned from it?
It was hard the first time I learned that performance on social media fluctuates. And it’s okay because just like life is meant to do exactly that.
How do you decide which platforms to prioritize for your growth strategies, and how do you adapt your approach for each platform while keeping a consistent brand voice?
You need to be in the platform where your audiences spend their time. Finding which ones is an exercise of doing some social listening and seeing if the conversation around products like yours is happening, how frequently, and in which format. After that, you need to understand that every platform has a tone and a mood, you don’t go into LinkedIn with the same mindset you go to TikTok.
Building a community takes time and effort. What tactics have worked best for you in creating and maintaining a loyal online audience?
I know most people hate this one, but consistency and lots of testing and updating the strategy, to keep up with algorithm changes, and create messages that appeal your audience.
It feels like new trends are popping up every day on social media. Do you think you could predict one major trend in social media for the next five years?
I think AI is gonna make automation so easy that the human element is what we will be craving the most.
So, I’ll end up this questionnaire with the first topic we discussed: storytelling, and make it human.
