Optimizing your social media profiles is key to building a strong brand. When someone comes across you on LinkedIn, you want to ensure that you are getting their attention. This is just one big game in a crowded trade show, and your profile is your booth. How do you get and hold your audience’s attention? Join Tracy Hazzard on today’s show as she shares the five easy ways to optimize your social media profile to attract more people. Learn how to find your audience, have a strong headline, use banners correctly, and more. Optimize your profile today so you can build a stronger brand.

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5 Easy Ways To Optimize Social Media Profiles To Attract Devoted Podcast Listeners

Welcome back to the show and the Podetize coaching episode. We are doing a masterclass because we are amid social media month. In social media month, we are talking about profile optimization. Five easy ways to optimize social media profiles and attract devoted podcast listeners because that’s what we want to do here. We’re going to update our profiles and do all of those things.

I’m making the assumption here that attracting the right people for your show is attracting the right people for your business. If that’s not the case, we probably have to have a much more complex discussion about podcasts, Facebook pages, or channel pages on any social media. You need a little bit more complex strategy as if you’re running multiple businesses. You have to look at your private profile a little bit differently.

That’s one of the things that I’m dealing with and incorporating into my personal side of things because I’m a multi-host. I’m a host of The Binge Factor, Feed Your Brand. Tom and I have one that’s called The Next Little Thing. All of those things are coming together. Figuring out how to optimize our profiles is first and foremost in our minds. We’re going to be doing something about that.

I’m going to get going with our presentation on how this works and what kinds of things we’re going to look for in our profiles. You’re going to see what might things you might want to update as you consider and evaluate. Remember, we did an audit. That’s important that we check that audit and done all of that. I’ll talk about that and remind you how to do that.

 

It’s hard to stand out. We talked about that when we’re talking about social media in general and the bad conversion rates. When we think about all of the profiles out there and everything that’s going on in social media, there are 1.62 billion users on Facebook. That’s a lot. My number might be a little old. Eighty-eight percent of them are not there to see your messages. They’re there to keep up with their friends, their family or the hot issues of the day, whatever it is that they’re utilizing Facebook for. They aren’t necessarily there to get your push messages in their face. They’re not there for that purpose.

About 8 billion videos are viewed every day and 85% of them are watched with the sound off, so they’re not getting all of your messages. Only 11% of Facebook posts get any reach each day to your listeners, viewers, followers, fans or friends, whatever you want to call them. A live stream is four times more likely to be watched and that has a 35% push on that. About 1.74 billion websites are listed on Google. There are 31 million YouTube channels and 4.75 billion pieces of content are shared every day on Facebook. That’s hard to make sure that you’re going to stand out amongst that big crowd.

Look For Your Ideal Audience

We want to remember that we don’t care about standing out amongst the entire crowd. We only care about the right fit audience that we are going for and the audience’s interest and pain. The first thing we want to identify when we’re about to review our profile is who the ideal person that is going to look at this profile is? That’s what we need to care about the most. Not what we think but what that person that we want to reach who’s brand new to us.

Frankly, our mom already friended us, so she’s not our audience. We’re looking for people who don’t know us yet. Those are the ones that are going to see our profile. When we’re going through profile optimization, it’s a cold calling card. These are for people who don’t know anything about us, not the people who already know us. How many times have you met somebody at an event and you just click friend and you don’t even review their profile because you met them at a networking event or met them somewhere?

If you're not building a relationship, you're not using social media properly. Click To Tweet

You don’t need that if you’re already in connection with them in some way, shape or form. You need it for someone who’s searching cold and looking for things and/or reading a post and then they want to say, “Who wrote that post? I’d like to see more about them. Let me click on their profile and find out more about them.” That’s our ideal audience. It’s someone who doesn’t know us yet, who’d like to get to know us. We want to focus on thinking about their interests and pain so that we attract them to it because we have some goals.

Remember last time we were talking about our overall social goals. Now we’re talking about our social goals specifically to profile creation or profile optimization, as we’re calling it here. I’m going to go back because everyone has different goals. I told you I’m at a different stage where I’m starting to incorporate more of our brand and podcasts. I have a different set of profile goals and my social media is mature because I’ve been doing this on LinkedIn for over a decade, on Facebook since 2014-ish, 2013-ish or something like that and 2011 on Pinterest. These things are pretty mature for me. They’re not new.

You might be starting something brand new. Maybe you’re just starting an Instagram or Facebook account or you’re revamping and rebranding everything. These are what I call the starter social media profile goals you should think about. First off, we’re attracting the right people, so we understand who they are, we got their interests and their pains and we get that. They’re our ideal prospect.  We’re then moving to how we do attract them.

The second thing that we want our profile to do is to invite them to hit the friend button. We want to invite them to hit connect. That’s our goal of our profile. The third thing is over time, we wanted to build a relationship. If they’re seeing a lot of posts from us, they friended us casually and want to learn more. They have an opportunity to learn more and build that stronger relationship. At the end of the day if we’re not building a relationship, we’re not using social media properly. It’s social engagement, social interaction and social networking. We wanted them to turn into touchpoints. We want to build a relationship with all of our fans, followers and friends. Our goal is to attract the right people, invite connections and then build a relationship from there.

Stand Out

The next part about what we’re doing here is we’re looking at our profiles as a pretty crowded trade show. This is my favorite thing from TR Garland. He came on my Feed Your Brand show and on The Binge Factor as well. TR Garland talks about LinkedIn like a crowded trade show and your profile is your booth. How are you going to stand out from the crowd there? How are you going to get someone to stop and walk into your booth? That’s our ultimate goal there that we want to have happened.

How do we make that happen? Here are some things that we can do. We can customize the name, create a strong headline or a photo and create an impactful banner like the one behind Tom. This is us at Podfest in 2020. That was right before the pandemic. Tom was at the trade show booth. There’s an impactful banner and a big, strong headline. You know where you’re at. The reason why everybody is standing around is we had a good call to action. We’re getting them into the booth. We have an outward focus on your description.

That’s unique because you can’t talk to Tom. You can’t do what happens at the trade show where we interact and start having a conversation. We have to have an outward-focused about-you description on our profile trade show booth. On our profile, that’s what we’re doing. These are some of the things that we want to revamp and make sure that they’re getting those standout models of things that work. We’re going to talk about some stand out tips.

Let’s play the name game. We want to use the whole space for our name. There’s a lot more room than it looks like because they have to allow room for long names, but there are also some tricks in there. There are former names. I could be putting my maiden name there, but I haven’t gone by my maiden name in years. No one in business knows me by that, so why would I use that great space for it? Instead, I can use that great space to do something else.

This is the way my LinkedIn name looks. It says, “Tracy (Podcasting Strategist and Former Inc. Columnist) Hazzard.” It has a lot more characters than you think it does. That’s coming up in parentheses because there’s one of those things where you know how it happens all the time that you see somebody’s first name and last name. It says Tracy Hazzard and then it has a dash. It might say Podcast Strategist, Podcast Producer or whatever that is after that. When that happens, then somebody goes, “They’re going to sell me something.”

 

When it appears on your name when you’re tagged in things, it’s giving you these extra characters that make people wonder whether they should connect with you. That’s my view of the world. There are lots of coaches out there who say, “I want to make sure everybody knows that I’m the best speaker coach out there.” It might say, “Tracy Hazzard, Speaker Coach.” I want that there. I want that in my name. It is a strategy.

If you want people to connect with you more, if you want more of your connection request to be accepted, putting that in this parentheses position where they will see it but not as a dash into your last name has been way more effective for me. We’ve done some of those automated programs where you do the connection request. I’ve done it where I do it manually. I have an 80% acceptance rate. Eighty percent of the people will accept my friend request. That’s cold reach. Not people I know but going out there.

Why is that? It’s because the words Inc. Columnist are in here. Who doesn’t want to friend someone who’s a columnist? I’ve created something compelling in that space that not only tells them what I do but also gives them something that they want to be associated with. That’s why this one works for me. When I had the dash into my last name, I dropped down to below 50% of connection rates. If they don’t connect with you, you can get further into the relationship-building process. My recommendation is to use this and move it into your former name.

There’s also an opportunity to use it like your pronouns. Instead of she/her, he/him or they/them, you can utilize that and put something else in the space on some profiles. Not on every type of profile or social media channel, but you can also use that space. There’s also a pronunciation. Don’t forget, if you’ve got a hard name to pronounce, go ahead and use the pronunciation space. It’s a great thing to do. You can also expand on your name. You can say your name along with what your title is. You can say a little bit more. It catches everybody and they go, “That’s what they are. It’s wonderful. Now I know how to pronounce their name and now I know more about them.”

My recommendation is no selling stuff and no last name change because it creates havoc in how you’re associated, how you’re searched for and how you’re found. Sometimes when you have that dash after your last name and somebody is looking for you, they have trouble finding you. Please make sure that you look at that, double-check it and make sure that if you do it, that it hasn’t hurt your searchability. You can’t search for yourself, so you got to have someone who’s not connected to you, do you a favor and search for you. That’s also another reason why I took that out personally. Go ahead, use the former name, use the whole space, play the name game and get this part right for yourself.

LinkedIn is like a crowded trade show, and your profile is your booth. Do what it takes to stand out. Click To Tweet

The next thing and space that you have is strong headlines. You have this section where you can put a little tagline or headline. Writing a strong headline, we’ve talked about this many times in Feed Your Brand and Podetize as coaching episodes. We talked about how important these headlines are for searchability. They are extremely important and one of the things that are searchable in the search engine is all of the social media profiles. It’s not just your name, your former name or your title if you had one. I’m the CEO of Podetize. It’s the title.

Those things are being searched, but your headline or your tagline is also being searched. The best way and the best formula for writing this is, “How do I help you? What’s an authority credential that makes me uniquely suited to helping you? Where can I find you?” This is how you’re writing this. You might be saying, “Me, me, me,” but instead, think about it as being outward-focused to that specific person.

Here are two of my headlines that you can see because there are different types of spatial allocations. The first one is on my LinkedIn and the second one is on my Clubhouse. You can see this, “Obsessively focused on helping videocasters and podcasters be seen, heard, found and rewarded.” That’s what I am. It works whether I want aspiring ones or ones that already exist. It doesn’t matter. I’m obsessively focused on helping them.

The coin carrier part is because I belong to an organization and this is an indicator for the thousands of people out there. You don’t need that in yours if you’re not a coin carrier. The other one is the slightly longer version of it. It’s, “Obsessively focused on all things podcasting, launching and elevating ordinary and potential podcasters into bingeable podcast hosts that get seen, heard, found and rewarded in this noisy digital world. Podetize.com CEO.” I had a lot more room to work so it helped me build in even more because I was allowed to add in my credential of being the Podetize CEO.

Use the maximum character count. That’s what makes it. You can see they’re active. These are active words so this is how we’re creating strong headlines. I’m focused outward on launching and helping you, -ing words. These are ways that I’m expressing out there. I didn’t put videocasters in the Clubhouse one because it’s an audio-only platform. I was also conscious of the platform on which I’m putting this or the social media channel that I’m utilizing. I’m conscious of it as I’m creating that.

I would be putting videocasters in anything that I would do on YouTube or Instagram because there’s Instagram TV there. We want to keep the videocasters and podcasters in there. We want to be cognizant of the social media type that we’re using and making sure that we’re well-matched to that because if we’re not, people are going to go, “This is a Twitter wannabe.” They’re going to know that you’re not really invested in the social media platform if you get that wrong, so think twice about that.

Banners And Photos

Let’s talk about banners and photos because those matter. We want to have banners and photos that help connect us. They’re impactful and readable. We want that. The shape and the device matter. When I’m looking at it on a mobile phone, it’s usually square. It has a different shape. My headshot or my profile photo might overlap a different area of the banner image that’s there. I need to make sure that I look at the devices.

What I’ve done here is I’ve given you a link, Podetize.com/social-media-guide. If you go to that, it’s going to forward to a downloadable PDF. You don’t have to register for anything. You just download it. That is going to give you the size guide. This is our size guide for every social media platform. We updated it. While things change all the time and we try to stay on top of it, that’s typically the exact place. If you go to Podetize.com/social-media-guide, you’ll be able to go straight to that download and get our latest version of it whenever we update that. TikTok is in there. There’s a bunch of different ones in there.

It’s going to give you a different shape and show you where you might want to leave space in your banner image or not worry about overlap. Maybe you have a repetitive thing that happens. When you have that, you’re not going to worry about it because your head is going to go over that space on a mobile device, but then maybe it won’t be there when you’re looking at it on a desktop. These are some of the things that we consider. That’s why we’ve put out this guide for you to help you optimize your profile because these banners are complex graphics.

This is what my LinkedIn snapshot looks like. It’s repeating The Binge Factor. My headshot is in the middle on the mobile. In the mobile version, you get my headshot overlapping the middle one of The Binge Factor, so it’s repeated three times across the banner and it’s overlapping there. I have ‘Sponsored by Podetize’ in the bottom corner so that people see, “It’s a sponsored show.” They start to think, “What’s Podetize? I’m curious about that.”

It gave me a little place to do that. I used to have my Inc. logo here. I don’t anymore because I’m a Former Inc. Columnist. That’s the word that was added to my name and title. You can get a sense of how this looks. It’s bright and bold. Go on LinkedIn and go find Tracy Hazzard. You can look at this straight on your phone yourself or right on your computer yourself and see the snapshot I’ve created for you.

 

If we look at the Facebook pages, our profile photos are down towards the bottom. We have lots more space to work with. They’re a little bit taller, so you’ve got more room to put things in. You can segregate them. When this is on mobile, it looks a little bit different. Sometimes it cuts off one side, but it’s scrollable. That can work as well.

On Instagram, you see your profile photo and a little bit more title about you. I operate that one a little bit differently. In fact, we’re starting to update all of these profiles as well. Twitter looks like my Facebook one because I want it to. The profile photo is overlapping. There’s this extra space that we created at the bottom of it because we use it in both places. That’s why that is working for us.

This is my Pinterest. It’s a little bit more personal and different. I haven’t updated the profile photo yet here so that it looks like all the others. That’s one of the things you want to audit. You want to start making them all match up and look more similar as you go through that. I’ve always treated Pinterest a little bit differently and a little bit more personal because I’ve been doing it a pretty long time since 2011. I have a lot of followers and views on my pins that happen every single day. Just a little bit different profile on how I run it.

You can make an exception. If you understand the Pinterest followers or a specific social media channel looks slightly different, you may want to make a deviation. Make a purposeful deviation because you understand the audience better. In the Clubhouse profile, at the end of the day, your little head matters the most. I’ve got a microphone behind mine and a swoop of color. We’re about to update this one, so it’s red like it is everywhere else.

Purple was a color we were working with on my personal profiles for a while because my personal website has purple in it, but now that we’re making sure that The Binge Factor and The Next Little Thing come to the forefront, that red is becoming more predominant, so that’s going to be there. It’s more impactful, so it’s going to stand out and look great.

Call To Action

Let’s talk about that next section. We want to create a call to action that serves. We want to create a compelling call to action, something that we can get them to do. They’re not going to necessarily do it right away. The first thing we want them to do is to find us and do all of that. That’s what the main profile is there for. If you’re going to have any call to action, you’re going to have a website, a link to something and a button that’s a call out that gets somebody to do something. We want to do the right thing. What does the right audience want? What are they focused on? What’s most important for them? Is it a download that you give? Is it a call with you? That might be a little bit reaching.

I always think about it as a service-first focus, so making sure I’m giving them what they want. My listeners, viewers, social media friends, business friends, network out there and the people who choose to follow me are following me because they want my tips. I have to keep putting my tips, all those things out there and posts because that’s what they’re looking for. If that’s what they’re looking for from me as a follower, then I want my call to action to have that factor of whatever that tip service is. It might be a tip sheet, social media guide that I gave to you all here or one of those things that are going to give them what they want.

The second thing is it needs to build trust. For me, I want it to not push you into a sales funnel model immediately because I want to create that trust that you can trust me to give you tips free and clear of any kind of sales model. I know at the end of the day when I give you those tips and you become successful, you’re either going to refer someone to me or you’re going to come back and ask me how you can work with me. It happens all the time. It’s exactly my model. It’s how I choose to work.

You may not want that, but if you can put some factor of trust-building into the process by creating success for them because that builds trust or creates some kind of model that shows the ethics of how you work or the integrity of what you intend to do. You show up and you do what you say you’re going to do. You’re going to build a greater trust factor faster and those touchpoints are going to get stronger throughout the process, so they will follow up on your next call to action, which might be a bigger ask. It might be an ask for a phone call.

Descriptions are a way to reach people, not to vomit everything about you to them. Click To Tweet

I like to make the call to action on social media because everything is so cold. You don’t know them. They only see some of your posts, not everything. I like to make it as free and frictionless as possible, which is why I usually do something forwarding that might download or more often than not, this is the perfect place for you to utilize a podcast. This is a perfect thing for me to send you to because it is totally frictionless to tell you, “If you want more, subscribe to my podcast.” It’s super easy for you to do because you’re already on your phone. You might be searching your social media feed. You just flip over to your podcast listening app and click Subscribe to The Binge Factor.

It’s super easy. It didn’t cause you any problems. You didn’t have to sign up for anything, go into a new account, download a new app or do anything complex that you weren’t already doing if you are already a podcast listener. If you want them to go to YouTube and subscribe to your YouTube channel, you can do the same thing. It’s super easy. They’re bookmarking things in a way. They’re able to check you out and then they’re going to get more because you become bingeable.

They’re going to binge on your show, so they’re going to see a lot more in that space and get push notifications on your show. They’re going to get all that from the app. You don’t have to do any of the heavy lifting or any of the work there. That’s why that one’s my favorite. It’s free, frictionless and super easy to do. “Subscribe to my show.”

About You Descriptions

Calls to action are good, but they might want to know more about you. That’s why descriptions or the About Me section, whatever they might call them in the different profiles, are so important. Here’s the trick. I like to call them descriptions and not About Me because they aren’t all about me. They’re not all about you. These descriptions are outward-facing. You must look at them as a way to reach people. Not to just vomit on them everything about you but to show them, “I help you with your pain and aspirations, plus giving you authority credentials as to why I am an expert and why you and I should be connected.” That’s all that a description is about.

If you’ve gone through my program and done anything with us and launched your podcast, you know we have a podcast description exercise. I like to use the same model here. What’s your audience? Who are they? What is their pain? What are their biggest pain points? What are their aspirations? What do they want to achieve? Remember, mine are videocasters and podcasters who are struggling to get seen, heard, found and rewarded. That’s what they want and that’s their struggle at the same time. Luckily, mine are aligned. It makes it easy.

Who am I? I’m someone who’s launched 600 shows for clients. I have seven of my own shows so I know what it’s like to do this every single day. It got me in the Inc. column. It gets me keynote speaking opportunities. It’s leading to those things. My credentials get to slot in there as stories of how podcasting and videocasting can work and be successful for you. It’s not a, “Here’s my resume, where I was when I started my first job or where I went to college.” Remember, all those things are in there anyway if you’re using LinkedIn, your college associations. Even on Facebook, you can choose to add those things in there. They’re already there for you.

Remember, your profile sections are like a crowded trade show. Your profile is creating your booth. You want to get your name out there. You want it to be strong and make sure people can find you. You need the name customized, so it’s searchable. You want to have a strong headline and photo for yourself. You want that strong headline below and near your photo. You want to have that impactful banner that is making everybody go, “What’s that? I’ve never heard of The Binge Factor. I’ve never seen all those shows on the Podetize banner.”

 

 

Whatever those are, you want it to be impactful. You want to create a service or an outwardly focused call to action. The same thing with your about you description. You want it to be outward-focused and look at it like a description. The last thing that you want to do is make sure that you use your full character counts everywhere you go, your name, headline, call to action and about you’s or your description sections.

I want to remind you that we still have more of social media. Anyone who’s watching us on Facebook in the Brandcasters’ Facebook Group and if you’re a Feed Your Brand follower, you can join those unless you’re a client just by hosting with us. That’s all you have to do to be able to be a part of our community and get this kind of advice. You’re going to want to do that because we’re doing podcast Instagram TV advice with Whitney Lauritsen next time. How to share your show on Instagram TV and grow new listeners? That’s the next session. I look forward to you joining me for that one.

I have one more social media session. We’re going to talk about hashtags and writing great copy as our last one to wrap up our social media month. Thanks, everyone, for reading. I’ll be back next time with more tips, tools and all kinds of things to make sure that you can be seen, heard and found with your podcasts and videocasts.

Important Links:

• The Binge Factor
• The Next Little Thing
• TR Garland – past episode
• LinkedIn – Tracy (Podcasting Strategist and Former Inc. Columnist) Hazzard
• Clubhouse – @TracyHazz
• Podetize.com
• Podetize.com/social-media-guide
• Pinterest – Tracy Hazzard profile
• Brandcasters’ Facebook Group

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