FYB 115 | Podcast Social Media Plan

 

How do you create a simple social media plan to increase conversion rates for your podcast? In this masterclass episode, Tracy Hazzard hands out successful marketing tactics to make your show more visible. From targeting your market to maximizing your social assets, you can easily boost your podcast searchability! You can either figure out a podcast social media plan by yourself. Or, you can speed up the process by letting Tracy help you navigate the way with her expertise. Tune in and attract more people to find your show. You won’t regret listening to this episode!

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Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

How To Create An Astoundingly Simple Podcast Social Media Plan To Get Your Show Found

I’m talking about how to create an astoundingly simple podcast social media plan so you can get your show found. That’s the important part. It’s everything that we do on social media so that we can get some more listeners. We want to make sure that we’re getting found in the process. It’s great to have a stylized and beautiful social media and model for what we’re doing. All of that is great but if, at the end of the day, it’s not getting us new listeners, why are we spending the time and effort?

This masterclass that I’m doing is all about the plan building side of it, how we make a social media plan specifically for your podcast. Of course, you’re going to be doing other promotions and other things mixed in but I’m only talking about the podcast promotion portion of what you’ll be pushing out on social media and the assets you’re going to be creating. Also, the plan you might want to do and an audit you might want to create. This is a part of our planned social media month as part of our coaching here at Podetize and that comes with our hosting programs and with all of the services that we do at Podetize, the normal coaching. We decided to have a whole concentrated social media month.

The first class that we’re doing is Social Media Plan 101. We have other things coming up and I’m going to mention them because I’m going to touch on a little point that we’re then going to have a follow-up. There might be multiple videos or multiple podcasts that you want to listen to in the process or watch in the process. Also, other resources that you’ll be able to find. As always, everything can be found at Podetize.com. You’ll be able to find everything you need right there.

Let’s dive in and start talking. We’ve got how to create an astoundingly simple podcast social media plan and get your show found. Remember, that’s our goal. Everything I’m going to be talking to you is all about trying to make sure that we’re getting you found because it’s hard to be seen. We know that social media conversion is as low as 1.3%. That is astoundingly low and a lot of you are like, “That’s crazy. Why am I even bothering on social media?” You have to remember, there’s a ton of volume on there. 1.3% conversion is because you’re interrupting people’s day. They’re looking at gorgeous pictures of their nieces and nephews. They’re sharing puppy pictures or whatever that might be and your messages might be an interruption to that. It takes the right person to be seeing your messaging to decide they want to do that.

The reason I have Google and YouTube lump together is because Google owns YouTube. Your conversion rate over Google is up towards 13%. Linking out and linking to things that are outside, things that are in your WordPress website, things that are searchable on Google like your blogs and your YouTube videos are extremely important as well. Those have a higher conversion rate when someone’s searching in Google and we all want to be searching in Google because that’s the first place we go.

Let listeners know that you have a podcast and attract them to connect and engage with you. Click To Tweet

Remember, your odds can go way up. In podcasting, your odds can go up to 37% in conversion rate. That’s our admixing number. That’s our conversion rate over there but your odds can go way up in podcasting because there are not as many shows that are publishing live every single day or every single week. There are few shows that do that. There’s about a 73% podfade rate. Podetize has only a 7% podfade rate among our clients. We are the flip of that. There are a lot of shows out there that quit their shows. There’s not as much current and relevant information. If you’re posting every week and you’re making sure people know that, then you have a lot more likelihood of being seen, heard, found, and eventually rewarded.

Let’s get started with what’s going to be a part of our social media plan. For building a social media plan, we got to have some social goals. I’m going to start here with what I call starter social media goals because many of you may be more advanced, in particular, channels. You might be more advanced on Instagram. You might be TikTok stars already. All of those things might be going well for you and that’s great and these might not be your goals.

I wanted to give the starter people, the people who don’t know what to expect from social media and podcasting, to take a look at this and say, “What could be some realistic goals?” Some goals might be you want to attract your audience. Some other goals might be getting engagement and feedback. Some goals might be to be alive and posting. That means even though you’re not on Facebook every day but your Facebook has a post in it every day or every week. That’s how my Twitter is. I’m not on Twitter. I never check the messages. I never do anything there but I have an auto-posting that happens so that my Twitter doesn’t look like it hasn’t been updated since 2018.

I want to make sure though that if someone’s preferred mode of communication and hearing things is Twitter, they’re getting the message about my show but I don’t want to have to work at it if it’s not the strongest point and match to my audience. That’s the next thing that we want to look for is we want to match our goals with the audience. Thinking about your social media goals, take a minute or two to write them down.

The next thing we’re going to talk about is our target market. We want to be seen, heard, and found by the right people, by the right audience. Thinking about that, the next thing that we’re going to do is assess our goal and say, “We’re trying to attract an audience.” If our goal is that audience attractor piece and our audience isn’t on Twitter but it’s on LinkedIn, then that makes more sense. Now we know where to focus our efforts where to target our plan. That’s why we want to clearly think through our goals and then make sure we identify our target market.

FYB 115 | Podcast Social Media Plan

Podcast Social Media Plan: Make sure those links are matching as best you can across your social channels.

 

Hypothesis Branding

If you’re starting out, you don’t know if your market hypothesis is going to be right. I like to call this hypothesis branding. You may have heard me say that before in other episodes or previous coaching calls. I believe that I’m starting a podcast that’s all about product reviews and the majority of listeners are not just going to be consumers looking for the next cool product but the majority of listeners are going to be people developing products because they’re going to want to hear what they’re up against. They’re going to want to figure out how to get reviewed on my show.

I have an idea in my mind that the next podcast that I’m starting up has this audience that is going to be product-based business owners. That’s my hypothesis. I might be wrong and it might be 99% of consumers looking for cool trendy products. It’s going to be more than 75% product development people and 25% consumers. When I start my program out there, I’m thinking about, “Where will I find them? Where will they be? They’re going to be on Instagram. I’m going to do an Instagram strategy. That’s going to be where my plan starts.”

I’m looking at that thinking, “Will both those audiences be there?” Probably. That makes a lot of sense. If only one of those audiences is there and the other is on LinkedIn, I might need a two-channel strategy. This is why I’m thinking about this from my hypothesis, my target market and the overall goals that I have. I’m going to combine them. Here’s a place you want to write down. You might be wrong. As soon as you start getting listener’s feedback and other things like that, you can refine this plan. This plan is dynamic. That’s its most important aspect to it. I like to look at it as a 90-day plan in the initial days if you’re starting your show. A 6-month plan to 1 year-long plan, if you’re seasoned in this, you’ve been doing this a while, and you know your audience because that’s not the part you need to fuss with if you know your audience.

You might mess with your assets and you might change things up and how you post over the course of a year but you don’t have to change the channel strategy and that’s what we’re looking at first. If you’ve never started before, if this is your first time and you’re starting up all your social media channels for this particular podcast that you’re working on, start with one channel at a time. I say that because it’s stressful to try to start up all of them at once. Startup one, get it under your belt, 90 days later, start this next one, and then 90 days later, start the next one. It is not going to hurt your listenability. It is going to cascade over time into you getting to the right place you need to be by the time you hit 25 to 50 episodes.

It’ll be perfectly timed with when your show gets that season value where the residual value of continually posting is going to have a better effect anyway. I’m not worried about it at all. Start one channel at a time and take it easy for yourself. The same thing goes if you’re overwhelmed. You’ve got a big social media strategy going on for your business and now you’re throwing your podcast in the mix. Do it one channel at a time as you build it into the program.

We all want to increase our authority within our social profiles. Click To Tweet

Maybe you can accelerate it and you can do 30 days focusing on making sure you got your LinkedIn right and then 30 days add on your Instagram but just look at it one channel at a time. Don’t overwhelm yourself. It’s not worth it. It’s going to take the time it takes anyway. If you try to do it all at once, you won’t be successful at any of it and you’ll end up stressed about it. Do not worry, this is not going to harm the growth of your show. It’s not going to harm anything at all. Take it a little bit slow and concerted. In fact, it’s going to make it so that you can refine your plan better so that you’re more efficient as you move into the next channel.

The first thing I want you to do is to take a social media snapshot. I physically took a snapshot. This is a screen share or screen grab of me on LinkedIn. This is the screengrab of what it looks like. You can see my show banner is behind me, The Binge Factor. I’m about to update that because I’m adding a new show so I’m going to have two shows there. I’m going to have The Binge Factor and the next little thing. They’re going to show up there in that banner. I’ve made sure that the two cover arts coordinate together so that this banner looks good when that comes together.

I’ve got all my information here. I’ve got 500-plus connections. I’ve got 10,000 or something. I don’t even know where I am on that. I’ve got my tag and my information. We’re going to do five easy ways to optimize social media profiles to attract devoted podcast listeners. That’s our next episode. That’s the next thing in the social media month that we’re going to discuss. I’m going to go over these profiles but it’s a good idea to know what you have because you don’t always look at it from a new person connecting with your perspective. You see it with just your profile photo typically. You don’t get to see all of this. You don’t always know what it looks like. It’s a good idea if you take a snapshot.

In the next episode, we’ll go over improvements, the ways that you can make your social media profile listeners know that you have a podcast and help attract them to connect and engage with you. That’s an important part as well. Let’s also take a look at my Facebook page for the show. That’s a decision you might want to make. Sometimes you want to make a Facebook page and a LinkedIn page. You can do things like that where it’s just about the show because maybe you have so much more to your business and your company.

I’m the CEO of Podetize. There’s a lot of Podetize information. I have a Podetize company page. In Facebook, in particular, although I do have it on LinkedIn as well, I have a separate page for The Binge Factor, which is my podcast. This is a strategy you might want to do. This is what mine looks like. It’s super simple. There’s a header about The Binge Factor, what it’s like, what it’s about, and a little bit about me. If you don’t have one, don’t worry, you’ll use your personal profile, start there, and decide later if you want to have that.

FYB 115 | Podcast Social Media Plan

Podcast Social Media Plan: The images need to be as visually impactful as possible.

 

I happen to have 10,000 followers on this page, which merged from one brand to another. It’s now The Binge Factor, but it was a previous podcast page. Those people have stayed with me. Because there was residual value there, I decided to rebrand it and use it for The Binge Factor. This is something you might want to do. When we take a social media snapshot, what are we looking for? We want to take our direct URL. Facebook.com/thebingefactor, that’s the page here. It’s the same thing on LinkedIn. It’s consistent, Tracy Hazzard.

Checking your URL and making sure the direct link to you is similar in all the different places, that’s important. You’re going to copy and paste that. You can paste it into a Word doc, a Google Doc, or something like that. I take a snapshot of the banner and header image so I can see what it looks like for others. I also do it on my mobile device because sometimes it looks great on your computer but looks terrible on the mobile device. You might want to do that, too. I’ll take a look and review the about and description and I might copy and paste all the text over because if there are typos and things, you don’t always see it in the profile. If you copy it into your Word doc or Google doc, it’ll flash and show you all your typos and all the problems there. It’s not a bad thing to go and check that again, even if you feel like it doesn’t need to be updated.

If you have stats and you know how to look at them, because not everybody does, I don’t want you to stress over them. If you have stats, take a look. See what some of your best posts have been. See the times of day that posting has been most successful. Check them and measure up. You want to always keep that measure-up model. We’re measuring up from where you are. You might want a snapshot of what those stats look like today, especially if you’re taking this more seriously.

For me, my LinkedIn is serious. I’ve been doing it for a long time. I’m working on some programs. I’m working on some amping up. I want to measure whether that’s working. I’m going to take a measurement of where it is before I start and then once I start posting and enacting my plan, I want to check it again and see how that is doing. Those are important things to keep in mind. We’re evaluating our channels though for the audience. The audience we had yesterday and the audience we’re going to have with the podcast moving forward might not be measured well.

We also don’t want to take our stats as hard rules like, “It’s not working.” We want to take our stats and say, “I don’t have this audience yet. Let’s see if it grows. Let’s check its growth rather than checking against the numbers.” Those are some things that you might want to look at and do. When I do a social media review for clients, and Whitney Lauritsen and I do them regularly, these are various things. This is when you’re working with us on a bigger social media program. We would insert the website link here and we make some recommendations. If your LinkedIn and your Instagram are not matching, maybe there’s a way for you to get a match together.

Curating your guests carefully and being relevant to your audience is the fastest path to a bingeable interview-style show. Click To Tweet

It’s always easy to get whatever the name of your show is with the word pod at the end of it. Pretty much you can get it because you should be the only podcast with your name. There’s always a way to do that. Make sure those links are matching as best you can across your social channels. I insert the social profile link. It’s quick and easy to pop out. Double-check something if you have a question. We’re checking profile header copy, posts review to check and see how the posts look and then we make recommendations. This is what we do internally for our own shows. We do it every 6 months to 1 year depending on the channel. You might do this at the beginning. You might not do it again for a year. There’s no requirement to do that.

Once you’ve got that into the process, and you’re checking through that, you’re able to have that groundwork set for, “This is where we are.” We want to say, “What are we going to post? What comes next?” We’re going to choose our assets. Assets are an industry term, so I want to define them here. Assets are things like graphic images with your episode title on them. They might be episode graphics that have your guest pictures on them and the quote that’s being said. We call those Ego Bait™ internally at Podetize. They might be things like video memes or audiograms. You may have heard all those terms. I’m going to define them as we move forward so I can talk about them.

Our multimedia package at Podetize, which is now what we call our bigger package that you go from video to audio to blog to social share. Those assets are included in the production of the show. This is another reason why I’m updating our masterclass on this because I want to describe what those assets look like. We spent a lot of time getting them refined so that we know exactly what the right assets are working out there or the ones that our clients are choosing.

Social Share Assets

Let’s start with some of these social share assets and what kind of thing it is. You might choose some and you might not choose others. It’s totally up to you. Your Instagram strategy, TikTok strategy, or LinkedIn strategy might be heavier in one area or another. Maybe you want multiples of certain kinds. That’s something you can do as well. Episode art is typical because this is going to go on your blog. The reason I like your podcast cover art to be as visually impactful as possible, the image is extremely important, the title is valuable here, who your guest is, is because when I share them on social, I want other people to share the blog. When they share the blog, I want them to be sharing the fact that this is a podcast. I want them to be sharing proper titles and my guests.

These are easy because all someone has to do is take the link of the page for your blog and share it out. These things autofill into social media. That’s why we want these assets. Some of you have blogs set up where it’s just an image and the title of your show comes into it based on the template of your website. That’s okay. What I recommend you do is take one of these images and set them as a featured image behind the scenes. That way, when somebody shares, it will show up in their social media feed and they’re able to do this. It makes it easy for your guests to share your blog post and your episode that way.

FYB 115 | Podcast Social Media Plan

Podcast Social Media Plan: Guests’ quotes tend to do better.

 

We want to encourage them to share your website, blog posts and not the Apple link for your show because that doesn’t do you any good. It’s not getting the circulation and getting the people that you need. Episode art is one asset that we have and it’s an extremely important one. It should go along with every show. Because of the way my website is, I have a square and a rectangle. These are from two different shows, keep in mind here. These are not from the same show. I’m showing you the square of our 100th episode and I’m showing you the rectangle. The one hiding is the actual The Binge Factor logo, which is also on that rectangular version of the episode art.

Guest Ego Bait™ is another one that I found extremely important. I found it back from my days writing for Inc. magazine. The guest Ego Bait™ is one of the most important things you can do to get your show shared. That is where you’re sharing a quote that you say about your guest or you say about a product or you say about the topic if you don’t have a guest. We want to make sure that this is broadly termed. You are able to do some of those and I’ll show you what quote graphics look like next. Guest Ego Bait™ is specifically for guests that you’re having on your show. If I were having Tom Hazzard on my show, I would say something unbelievably amazing about him. That’s the quote that would go and that is exactly what is going to be on The Binge Factor’s website as well.

Cross-Links Between Your Website And Your Guest’s

The image is put into our image library on our website, not necessarily the blog post. Sometimes I use them in blog posts as well, but that’s up to you. If I put that in my image library, then I share it out with them with that link to it. I’m creating cross-links between my website and my guest, their website and social media. I’m creating a dynamic, highly linked environment that is going to help improve my searchability both in Google, which is going to help raise that because my searchability is based on the value of my cross-links. I’m also going to be creating great social media linking as well. Who isn’t going to want to share this on social when it says something amazing about themselves?

What I found is, the more celebrity guests I had or the more celebrity features I wrote in my Inc. magazine column, they wouldn’t share it if I put a quote of what they said. They were more likely to share it when I said something about them. It felt too promotional to say it about themselves. That was interesting. It’s like, “I’m on the show.” Instead, there’s like, “Look what happened on The Binge Factor. Look what someone said about me.” For some reason, that is more viable to people out there. They like to share that because it’s like a testimonial about them. It’s third-party validation.

We all want to increase our authority within our social profiles. It’s also a goal for many people to increase their authority over time and these kinds of things do that. What we found is by having both pictures on there, we increase the share. Unless your podcast logo has your picture on it, then it counts as a picture but if you only have your podcast logo and the guest’s photo, they are less likely to share it than if you have your photo and their photo side by side or top and bottom. Some people like to use rectangles or squares. You can have whatever you want based on what social profile you’re going to share them in most often because you’re going to share them as well. You want to share the guests that were on your show. You want to be able to tag them and you might use them in an Instagram story.

Engagement with your audience is really important. Click To Tweet

There are all different ways of which you can use them. We want to make sure that you are absolutely getting the size and style you want. At Podetize, you get to choose what that is. Most often, people tend to use it in a square but we have been seeing more vertical offerings, so longer vertical ones which are probably more suited to the shape and size of your phone. You’re filling up that screen better.

When you don’t have a video for your show or you don’t want to use the video for your show because sometimes, it’s better to link it to being a podcast and emphasizing that as well, we use an audiogram which is a WAV file. You see the audio words go across and you see the wave move at the bottom. It technically is a video, but it’s a video file created from an audio file. It’s a static image, but the audio file moves at the bottom and the captions move as well.

These do well. You can see the longer, more vertical one. That’s the one we typically use in Pinterest a lot and it does extremely well over there. Audiogram seems to do well there. They were doing well for a while on Instagram and they still will because Instagram is putting more of an emphasis on video and they are a form of video. If you like the audiogram model or if you’re not producing a video for your show but you’d like to do this as a part of it, audiograms are a viable solution and they’re typical things that people are comfortable with and used to seeing with podcast shows.

Both your guests and your images and the title will be on there. Usually, these are one-minute or fewer clips. We rarely use a full-length audiogram. We might do a full-length audiogram if, for some reason, the video was bad in a particular episode, but I’ve tried to run video on all my episodes. If that happened occasionally, I might run a full-length audiogram and insert it into YouTube. That’s a rarity because that’s a lot of captions to read over time and listen to.

If you want to make sure that your YouTube channel is consistent with your podcast and consistent with what had been there before, and you have one that’s missing a video, then this is a good way to do that. Video memes are another version of this. Sometimes people confuse audiograms and video memes. Video meme is exactly a clip of the video. We’ve been playing around with some different styles. You all get a sneak peek at the next little thing branding.

FYB 115 | Podcast Social Media Plan

Podcast Social Media Plan: Buffer is a super simple scheduling tool.

 

You can see the podcast episode title goes at the top and the video clip goes in the middle. There’s the two-liner sub, which means the caption that goes there and there’s the branding for the show. In this particular case, you can see there’s no picture of us because we will always appear in the video. There’s no reason for us to have our pictures anywhere else on this. Ninety percent of the video memes, we do have no branding around it at all. I have The Binge Factor and Feed Your Brand behind my head. If you’re looking at that, you see that I’ve got my brand in there anyway. It’s already integrated into the image that I’m projecting. The full-size video is doing better on Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook in general.

Sometimes we use branding and sometimes we don’t. It depends on how we’re going to use the video meme itself. Keep that in mind. You can do it any which way you want. You can have branding around the image that I’m showing in the center. We like to use what we call pure video. Memes are clips. They’re not long. They’re usually 1 to 2 minutes maximum. Sometimes they’re 30 seconds depending on where we’re using them.

Guest quotes are a little bit different because we’re just quoting. What we’ve discovered is that these guest quotes tend to do better if there is a person space associated with it. There’s a name of who said it. You might want to put it where it was said. I might say, “It’s a quality of engagement I want to create. Penny Zenker, host to Take Back Time,” as said on The Binge Factor. That might be something you can add to it and do it. The one on the left is me being quoted, so it’s me within my channel, even though The Binge Factor channel doesn’t say Tracy Hazzard on it. That is why my name is on the quote here.

We’re trying to create these options where you’re creating a statement. The reason I like these is because these can be great options for creating engagement. They can be great options for asking a question that goes along with the image that is here. If I were doing the first one here, “The number two places most people find podcasts are from friends and Google.” I might put in the caption, “Where did you get your last podcast recommendation from?” I might ask that question to my audience and try to generate a social conversation and engagement opportunity.

These guest’s quotes can be great ways for you to create that engagement and get them to come back and listen because they’re like, “I want to know more about that.” Bree Noble here is saying, “Sometimes there can be some embarrassing moments when you say the wrong thing, but that’s endearing to your binge listeners.” You might want to go, “What kind of wrong things? Did she give an example? I’d like to check out that show. I’d like to hear what she said.” It might draw people in as well, so you give them a fear of missing out by using these quotes.

Start with the one channel you feel most comfortable in. Click To Tweet

Those are a couple of ways that guest quotes can be useful, even though they don’t have a picture of anyone on there and the fact that they’re not video. They can also be used in Instagram stories. You’re mixing multiple things where you have the guest’s picture, you have this and maybe you have a little clip. You’re doing something where you’re creating that story through that, that is creating an opportunity for someone to have a conversation with you and check it out.

Most importantly, what we’re trying to do here is get people to listen, so we want to get them to check it out. These are some of the ways we use guest quotes. These are some of the ways we use host quotes. We’re making quotes from the show. Typically, this is something that I’m saying. We are putting this because my picture on The Binge Factor channels like The Binge Factor Facebook page and The Binge Factor Instagram, my name is not directly present, but I have a large following that can be tagged.

On The Binge Factor page, I utilize one of these quotes, what I said as a host, “Curating your guests carefully. Making them relevant to your audience is the fastest path to a binge-able interview-style show.” I made a post that’s talking about how to do that well, but this is the quote taken out of it. I might be able to invite a lot of engagement and my page can tag me, which allows me to cross-link between the people who are friends with me being able to see what’s being posted on my page.

That’s where these host quotes can be valuable if you’ve got a separate podcast page in LinkedIn, Facebook, or wherever that you do that, or you have multiple Instagram accounts. Those are ways in which you can use these host quotes. Those are the different types of assets. I know that was a lot. You need to start thinking about these. These are post types. Now I have all these post types. I have an Ego Bait™, video meme, video memes from past episodes, Ego Bait™ guests, audiograms that I might want to use and the straight share from the blog post that I might want to use.

Four Different Types Of Social Assets

This is an example of how you might want to organize it. On the left side, I put the social channel that I’m targeting. I’m not working on Twitter well, so I’m not that interested in it. I’m going to have an auto-post and share 1 to 3 posts a day. I’m likely probably only going to do one, but I’m going to do that 3 to 5 days a week. It’s super simple. I’ve got it set up to automatically do it every time I post a new blog, it’s going to automatically do it. I might have an auto-tweet from whenever I post on Medium, which is something that I do as well because I turn my podcasts into articles. It auto-posts from there as well. That’s where I get up to this auto posting 3 to 5 days a week. It just happens.

FYB 115 | Podcast Social Media Plan

Podcast Social Media Plan: You have to plan out your schedule.

 

I might set out different types. I might go through all of those assets and number them, and say, “Number one, our Ego Bait™. Number two, our video memes. Number three, our audiograms. Number four, host quotes.” I number them for myself and say, “We’re going to do post type 1, 3, 5 on LinkedIn. We’re going to do 2, 4, and 6 on Instagram,” whatever it is you’re going to do and start to set yourself up here. I’ve also made this easy for myself because my concentration is on LinkedIn and Instagram. It’s not that I don’t care about Facebook. What I share is not as important because it typically just already works on Facebook because I have a larger number of followers there. It’s a little bit easier.

I can take what I’ve already done for LinkedIn and reuse those posts. Generally, I don’t reuse them on the same day of the week. If I had Ego Bait™ guests on a Monday, I won’t have Ego Bait™ until Tuesday or Wednesday on Facebook. I shuffle them around. That is something that I also do and you can do that as well. This is how we use our plan. We decide our channel, how many days of the week we want to be posting and the frequency per day we want to post. I assign them to someone. If I’m not posting myself or if I’m not doing that but it’s going to get scheduled by my assistant, my assistant might be there, but they might be on Instagram because I need to do it from my mobile device. Maybe that has to be assigned to me to be loaded up from there.

Videos don’t always work in any of the posting tools. You have to typically load them up manually yourself in Instagram. There are some tools that are getting better at that and they’re working that out. Speaking of tools, here’s some that we’ve used or are using or testing out. MeetEdgar and Buffer are my two favorite go-tos because they’re super simple to use. MeetEdgar has a great evergreen tool on it, so when your posts are in the system, they’re already in there in the evergreen being able to reshare them.

I have two articles that I wrote that are perfect for May 4th and they’re Star Wars related, so May the Fourth Be With You. I have these two articles that I continually share on May 4th, scheduling them, finding them, and getting them through. They’re super simple in MeetEdgar. Buffer has some similar things where you can draw in feed, so you can have your blog feed automatically in there and be able to make a quick and easy post from there. Buffer is a simple scheduling as well. Both of them are low cost. It doesn’t take a lot to use the posting tools.

I know a lot of people use Hootsuite. CoSchedule is a lot more complicated and more expensive. If you’re running a network or an agency model or you’re juggling multiple businesses and you need to combine them together, you might want to try CoSchedule. They’re the one that has my favorite headline tool. I do use them. I just don’t use them for posting. Many people use HubSpot. HubSpot has a posting tool as well. If you’re already a HubSpot member and it’s already your CRM of choice, then you might want to use that.

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Lately.ai is our new one. We’re testing that out. I don’t know how to describe how to use it yet. There’s a lot of complexities to it, but we’re going to give you a report in the future on it. There are some cool things happening there. That’s one that we’ve started checking out. It’s quite pricey, but there are some features that might be worth it as we test that out and find out for you.

My posting rule. I call it my 30/30/30/10 rule. This is my idea about how I utilize things and how I mix things up. Feel free to make it 25/25/25/25 or whatever. Adjust it for yourself based on the number of posts you’re making per week or whatever that is. In general, I like to have 30% of my own stuff. When I say own stuff, I mean my podcasts, articles and any promotions and offers that I might make. They all count in that 30%. If I need to up my game because I’m promoting an event that’s happening, I will down the number of posts on my podcast for the week. I don’t want to mess up that ratio of it. I want to keep it fairly straightforward so that my audience doesn’t feel sold too much. That’s my personal view of it. This is why I call this my rule, Tracy’s rule.

You may feel differently about it. Your coaches may feel differently about it. Your advertising partners may feel different about this, but I have found that if I keep this down, then I’m serving more. That comes back to people being more likely to be selected when I do make an offer. That’s the way that I have found that works for me. Thirty percent of it is other people’s stuff. In the case of your podcast, you’re sharing with other people. The Ego Bait™ is other people. Quotes from your guests are other people’s stuff. Even though it’s on your show, it’s still other people you’re sharing other stuff.

That’s where I come in and say, “Those ones are 30%.” In a way, you’re sneaky getting 60% of your show in there. You can absolutely do that. Thirty percent of what I post then, out of all of that, an additional 30%, I need it to be interactive. This is where I’m asking questions. This is where I do offer calls to action. Maybe micro-commitments of things like, “Do you think I should do this, yes or no?” Whatever that might be or, “Which one do you like, 1, 2, or 3?” Interactive engagement with your audience is important.

Ten percent of everything that you post in a week should be weird, uniquely you, or anything like that you can think of that is expressing you. Typically, you’ll find that I’ll put pictures of the dog podcasting with me or sleeping while I’m podcasting because that’s typically what happens or my girls will do funny things like pretending to be on the microphone or interviewing each other. They’re imitating their mom. That’s uniquely me, too. We might want to share some of those things. Share some things that you think have your unique sense of humor and different things like that.

I’m cautious. I don’t share politics. I don’t do any of that. If you’re looking for insights into any part of me about those kinds of things, they’re not going to be on my social media. You’d have to be my real friend to know those things. It’s still crafted as part of my social media view of me, but it gets you a little more insight into the personal side of me. Thinking about those rules, it also might be something you want to throw into your social media schedule. As I go back to that, you might want to have number five on your LinkedIn as something personal. For me, typically, it’s an article share. It’s something that I found interesting that everybody else will. That’s my view on LinkedIn. It’s a lot more professional, but it is a unique view and insight into what I’m reading at any given moment. That might be great.

Instagram and Facebook are going to be pictures of my kids and my dog, pictures of us out in an event, having some fun, meeting some fans. Those kinds of things might be coming up in there. A little different model based on how I’m treating the profile, how professional it is, and what my mix of friends is. On Facebook, I’ve got lots of family and friends from events, networks, and things that I have across the country. I do want them to see those things now and again. That’s why I had that policy of doing this 30/30/30/10 rule and making sure that I at least throw some of those things in every single week.

I hope this was helpful for you. I’m sure there’s going to be some questions and everything. If you want to reach me personally on social media, you’re going to have to go to LinkedIn because that’s the only way that I will answer it myself in a timely manner because I check my LinkedIn twice a day. Everywhere else, I don’t. If you want to ask some questions, tag me in the post as these are shared on social and I’m happy to answer them. The same thing on YouTube, you can tag me in there and I will check that out. Thanks, everyone, for reading the masterclass on social media on how to create a more dynamic and astoundingly simple podcasting social media plan so you can get your show found. I’ll be back next episode with the next follow-up in our social media plan on ways to optimize your profile.

 

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