One cannot deny social media’s power and influence today. It seems to be in the very fabric of everything we do, and it definitely won’t be going away anytime soon. In fact, it has continually been growing, which is why you should not miss this opportunity. Social media is an integral part of your platform. If you’re not everywhere today, then you don’t exist. Tracy Hazzard shares a five-step social media action plan to help you leverage social media to grow your business. Take advantage of this social media master class to really get your brand message everywhere.

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

5 Simple and Proven Steps to Grow Your Podcast Using Social Media

This is a social media class. We’re super excited. It’s a master class. We want to be really clear about it. We are not going to cover how to post on Facebook or anything like that. We’re assuming you’re on Facebook and you know everything you need to know there. This is not one of those classes. This is one about how to organize you, how to really make it useful for your business. This is how we do it. We manage a lot. We manage three different Facebook pages, we manage three podcasts, two businesses and we manage all of our clients or our agency for that. We really are doing all of those things. We’re really excited to share how we do this and what we do and how we really go a little bit ninja. That’s what we’ve been calling it lately as to how we use our podcast and the social posts to really get our brand message everywhere.

If you’re not everywhere today, then you don’t exist. We want you to think about that carefully. There are a lot of social experts out there who say, “You should only concentrate on one thing.” We don’t disagree with concentrating your effort, the part that you personally put in, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t need to be everywhere now, everywhere all the time. This happened to us. We got sick of Twitter. It wasn’t working for us. We weren’t getting qualified leads from that. We weren’t really even getting very useful messages back and forth. What happened was we can’t quit Twitter because we do have people who wait for our message and they click through and follow Tracy’s column, plus Inc. requires it. As an Inc. columnist, Tracy is required to be on Twitter. We couldn’t just get rid of it but we didn’t want to be non-existent there. We didn’t want to look like a non-poster, like a fake account. We set it up for a social automation so that it would do it and we didn’t have to think about it. That’s the kind of stuff that we’re going to really talk today.

Let’s have a little bit about why it’s so hard to be heard today. Social conversion is really only about 1.3% today. That is terrible. A lot of that is from paid ads. It’s really, really hard to be heard. There are 80 million YouTube channels, 40 million Facebook pages that are business pages. You have 32 million Twitter users. We just saw a statistic today that 25% of the ones that are following the President are fake. We’ve got a lot of noise in there that’s not even real. Then there are 800 million Instagram users. If you are doing something visual, you should be on Instagram. 800 million Instagram users are very active every day. but social conversions are really low. Let’s do stuff that is worth our time, worth our effort. Let’s just push out messages otherwise. Let’s automate them.

Social media is integral part of your platform. We talk about this a lot. We go back and forth on that. We really talk about platform. You need a big, broad platform that brands your message, brandcast you, and all the original great content that you have. Social is one part of it. Web is a significant part of it and we talked about that. We just did one about Google power. Google is about 10x the conversion rate of social. It’s very valuable to it. One of the things that we’re going to talk about here is how we connect social to send people to our website, which gives us more Google boost. All these things are tied together as a strategy in building our big, broad platform.

The third piece of our platform: it’s web, social, and in the middle there, we have what we call influencers. Those are the people we connect to. We want to just make sure that we’re rewarding those people who are influencers. We’re connecting with them. We’re networking with them. We’re adding value to them. That’s how we define our platform. The more we put post, messages, engagement in it, the taller our platform gets. Imagine it like your stage. The stage for your brand. It’s going to project that message out to a broader and broader audience. Hopefully, a really targeted audience because that’s what we want to get too. We really want to make it a part of what we’re going to call our three social goals.

FYB 016 | Social Media

Our point in social media is not to push message out, not to promote ourselves every single time. Serve to attract.

Our social goals are, number one: Serve to attract. Our point in social media is not to push message out, not to promote ourselves every single time. Serve to attract. The second goal we have is to be a power participant. We’re really getting to be a power participant with our network, with our influencers, with our clients. We do this all the time. You see on Feed Your Brand’s Facebook page, you’re going to see where we are posting out the great podcast that our clients are pushing out. We want to help them do that. That’s a power participation. You want to be alive and posting. We talked about that Twitter thing. We don’t want to be non-existent to Twitter. You’ve got to be alive and posting and posting consistently and constantly, which is also a Google reward. All those things go hand in hand.

We also have a couple of personal social goals. We want to be original. We want to be the only people saying this. We also want to save time. We are running lots of businesses. We have three daughters. We’ve got a lot to do. We’re sure all of you do too. We want to save time and with that time that we put in, we really want to make sure that we’re getting more and getting more that’s valuable. Here’s how busy we are. We got three podcasts going. Tracy writes for Inc. We’ve got a lot going on in our business. Website, social media, and influencers, remember we want that on an automated place. We want to stay on the things that we do really well like content and promotion. That’s really where the power lies and that lies in the be original part.

How do we do it? Here are the five things we’re going to talk about. We do first a snapshot of you. Where are you today on your social profiles? Then we benchmark others but not just any others, not just top influencers. We’re benchmarking the people that mean the most to your business niche, mean the most to the market that you’re going after, mean the most to your targeted client base whatever that might be. That’s the definition of others for you. Then we make a post plan because hope is not a plan. Remembering to tweet it at 2 in the morning when you’re awake is not a plan. We want to schedule in Buffer. Buffer is actually a tool. We want to schedule it. We want to have an editorial calendar and we want to plan it. Then you just got to do it.

Let’s talk about that first thing, your social snapshot. It’s not the easiest thing to figure out how to do this. There are lots of tools in Facebook and everything. We’re not going to get too techy about it. When you do that, you want to go on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or wherever it is. You want to do a snapshot in time. We like to do it either for the year or the quarter or whatever your measurement metric is going to be. Are you going to look at it every three months? Then, do a quarter. If you’re going to look at it every month, then do it on a monthly basis. You want to take a snapshot of where you are today.

We did this on Feed Your Brand. On Feed Your Brand’s Facebook page, we have 10,351 page likes. That’s pretty decent. That’s pretty good although, we find that a lot of them aren’t really engaged users. That has to do with a whole other program. We’ve done 84 posts since July because we started that Facebook page in July. Since July, we’ve done 84 total posts. We want to track the number of post we’re making. We want to track the total engagement. Here’s where you got to do some math and some fudge. Engagement is reactions, comments and shares. We don’t really have to go into every single post and read them. What we do is if you look at the metrics that Facebook provides you, they give you the post that you have. They’ll give you your reach. That’s what they call it. Reach to us is how many page likes or how many likes on that post you’re getting. The other thing that they would do is they call it clicks and actions.

What we do is we actually take all of the clicks and actions and we just add up the numbers that are there. We multiply them by ten because they are 10x valuable to you. If someone is willing to share our posts, if someone is willing to share a Facebook Live, then they are associating themselves with us and our brand. That means we resonated enough with them to be valuable to them. We’re going to rate that higher. When someone takes an action like that, when someone takes the time to make a comment to us, even if it’s a negative comment and they’re having a discussion with you or a debate with you, you still want to value that because that’s engagement.

We look at reach, just the number of people that saw it, which is the way that Facebook is measuring it, so it’s views. We don’t love that number. We think a lot of it is almost fake. You don’t guarantee somebody actually saw it just because it was fed into their feed. We’re only going to value that out of 1x. You add up all those numbers and you come to that. For us, 28,045 total engagement, which is pretty good. A lot of times we’ll do that and we’ll take it and we’ll average it. We’ll take the engagement and divide it by the total number of post and get an average. We use that as our benchmark. We want to do better than that next time. You really look at all of that and this is our measurements that we use. This is your before though.

Top Engagement, Your Ideal Who, Competition

Now, we’re going to move into a whole new process of how you’re doing it. You want to also have a measurement about where you want to go. You’re going to do that across not just Facebook but all your social profiles that you care about, all the social profiles you’re a part of. You want to start to look at that and say, “Which one of those profiles, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, wherever I am, do I have the top engagement?” That is that number that is your average per post. “Where am I getting the top engagement for my effort?” A number of post is the amount of your effort. The engagement is the conversion or the return you’re getting for that effort. That’s how we’re going to look at it.

Where are we ranking? For us, LinkedIn is actually higher than Facebook but we see the value in Facebook and we look at that as we have to up our game here. We’re in the process of working on that. That’s why you’re seeing a Facebook Live from us. We’re trying to increase that engagement. We have before measurement and we’re trying to get to an after measurement. That’s really where we want to go. If it’s your top engagement and you want to keep it your top engagement, then definitely stay there. Work on that. If you have one that you want to bring up because you see a good market there for you or you see that a lot of your followers and fans or your most engaged or your most valuable clients are coming from there. Connect the two things together.

That’s the next stage. You really identify which one is your ideal who. Where are they hanging out? Where are they going? While we totally love Instagram and it’s so visual and it’s so great, we’ve actually found that the kind of people who become our clients don’t come through Instagram. That they come through Facebook instead of Instagram or from LinkedIn instead of Instagram. We said, “We still want to be there and we’ll still post there but it’s not a high part of our engagement.” We dropped it down on our list as of 2017. It doesn’t mean we’re not watching it and not seeing if there’s something we can do or it’s growing there. You’ve got to pay attention and that’s why we’re measuring that on a quarterly basis or yearly basis, whatever your measurement time is.

The next thing you want to do is follow your competition. We’re not talking about the top influencers in your niche. We’re talking about somebody reachable. That person that’s just ahead of you. The person who’s just killing it and getting a lot more engagement than you. The one who’s getting more clients than you. The one who’s always ahead of you. You know who they are. They are the ones you want to be. That’s the one you want to model. You want to take their measurements. You can’t get all of their information but you can get a good guess of it. You can see how many people are commenting on their posts. You can see how many shares are there. You can get a sense of how well they’re doing. Make a judgment call. Measure a couple of them and see where they are in each of your niches and go from there. That’s step number two.

Remember, we’re going to go and we’re making a competitive benchmark. We’re really checking that out and we want to model the best. We don’t want to model the ones that are doing the trendy things, who are always jumping on the, “Let’s make 10,000 fans on Facebook and let’s jump to this. Let’s jump to that.” We don’t want the ones who are following that. We want the ones who have been continually building organic traffic or building traffic and fans and a membership group. Whatever it is that they’re building that you want, that’s where you want to go to them and model them. We want to model their engagement and measure their engagement. We want to model their content value. That’s another thing. Pay attention to what they’re posting. We want to pay attention to their path to profit. Are they funneling people? Are they driving them to an event? What is the best path to profit? We want you to really clearly think about that because there’s a clear link between what Facebook or LinkedIn might respond to in terms of an offer. If they’re being successful, if they are getting more business, then you can see that they’re growing and you know that they’re growing because they’re in your industry, then that model is probably the best that’s working with that particular social media channel. Keep that in mind and look to that as well.

We do want to preface that by saying the reason we’re not watching top influencers and the reason we don’t want you going after there is because the top 5% of influencers that make money on their social profiles, they make money because they spend about 80% of the money that they make on ads. Organic reach is bad. Tracy is an Inc. columnist. They tell this all the time. Organic reach is just drop, drop, dropping based on the Facebook algorithm, based on all sorts of stuff. They’re pushing you in to placing ads. We really want to go away from that and say, “That’s not the model we want to go on.” We want to go on the model, the people who are really engaging and really doing something and boosting their own network and within their network.

The other thing that you have with the top influencers are a lot of them just happen to be first in their niche or have a sponsor network that’s boosting them. It’s one of the reasons why we offer up boosting within our social network for our podcasters because having that network that’s going to share things for you helps everyone rise together. You can do that in a really great way. Tie yourself to other people that are compatible with you, not in competition with you but compatible with your message and really doing good, authentic things that would be good for your market. Band together and agree to share each other’s post. That can really help for you guys.

We invite you to listen to the Feed Your Brand influencer episode. It talks about how to find the right influencers for your niche. We really dive into that because it’s really critically important not just to pick the biggest celebrity you can find.

Make A Post Plan

Let’s go on to talk about post-planning. This is a fun part because we come out of a world in which we do editorial calendars. We come out of the world in which magazines and writing articles and all of those things, there’s always an editorial plan. We’ve approached social media from that same planning point. We make a very significant post plan. We look at those competitors. We see where they’re getting high engagement. We see their content, is it valuable or is it gimmicky. We look at the model for how we want to do that and we look at what’s working within our own. We look at that reach. We look at the engagement on our own post and see what’s happening and what’s engaging the most for us as well. We want to model and do more of that. That’s really where we’re going with the post-plan. We mix it up. We hit post style, post type, and we have a 30/30/30/10 rule.

One of the things we see all the time. You’re scrolling through your Facebook feed. I do it really fast. I can tell you that if something catches our eyes, we’ll slow down, go back. A lot of times when we see the mistake happen is that someone is following a branding expert. We work with lots of branding experts and we totally love them. We hope we’re not offending anyone out there but this is a huge miss and a huge mistake and we want to stop people from doing it. It doesn’t work in a feed situation. Your blog feed and your podcast feed, the same thing. When you’re in a feed situation and you think, “I’ve got to put my brand everywhere. It might be my face. It might be my logo. It might be my colors. I’ve got to have people know that it’s me in the feed.” That’s a huge mistake. If they see that again and again and again, then what happens is that they look at that and they say, “I’ve seen that before.” Could you imagine if you saw that same post week after week after week with that blue background and a headshot on the right? You’re not going to read that and you’re not going to really know if that person is new. That’s how fast we scroll through things.

This is what she said when we pointed that out to her. This is Susan Harrow. She’s a PR & Media Consultant. She’s like, “I advise my PR clients to never wear the same clothes in their videos so that people don’t think they’ve already seen it.” This is exactly what happens. They think they’ve already seen it. They think they’ve already read it before. That’s really where you get that system in which you must mix up the visuals in the feed. We do this for our clients. We provide them original graphics. We try never to have the same colors, never to have the same text style. We try to make its shape different. If the image is over to the right, maybe the next time it’s over to the left. We try to do that. We really mix it up and add great impactful images on the background. Sometimes we also mix it up in our feed at which we show no text. We try just the background image and we put the text into the comments or into the post message that you put. You got to want mix that up across everything that you do. That’s really one of those things that really can make a huge difference in boosting your engagement the fastest. You don’t really have to make different post than you make now. You just style them differently as you post them.

We’re going to talk about suggested post types. After we have post style, we got to have post types. We want you think carefully anytime you post, the number one thing is you want a why. “Why should I share this?” You want to ask that question in your head and that’s what you should write. It shouldn’t be promotional. You shouldn’t be thinking about copy. You should be thinking about why is this valuable to the person I’m sharing this with. When you think about that, that’s going to be the top thing that you’re going to do. Then, you’re going to have a specific post type that you will be sharing. Sometimes you’ll share an image. Sometimes you’ll share a video. Sometimes you’ll be sharing a header from your blog feed or from your podcast or from your post that you just made somewhere or your video you just made. Whatever that is, that’s your post type.

We go a little bit deeper in thinking about a post type. We think there are some values in doing some of these things because it helps you repurpose content you already have so you don’t have to think about what new thing to post. This is about that editorial planning calendar. We’re about to record the 500th episode of our WTFFF 3D Printing Podcast. You can imagine there’s a lot in that first couple hundred that nobody ever hears or nobody ever reads. They can’t find it because it’s so very down deep. We really push that out and we put it into an evergreen situation. You may have heard that, evergreen tweets, evergreen messaging. We took out the ones that weren’t timely but almost 95% of them are. We put them into this reposting system. We do summaries. That’s one thing we do, like the top twenty product review episodes. You can do a Facebook story where you could do three of them or something and you could put the graphics, put images there. You can do something like that. A summary is a great way to get something valuable.

We have lots of episodes for instance on cool 3D printed items from Halloween. We did it for three years in a row. A summary episode would be a great episode of the top 3D printed Halloween items. It’s something we can easily pull without a lot of work. That’s one of the ones that we like to do. Get your older stuff moving because you have new fans. You have new followers. Just because it’s old to you doesn’t mean it’s old to them. That’s a way to mine that and repurpose that.

The other thing that we do is we do a “Where are they now?” We have a lot of people we’ve interviewed, guests that we’ve interviewed or people we wrote about in articles. We do a “Where are they now?” I bumped into someone who I wrote an article about. I’d never met him in person and I just bumped into him at Michelle Young’s event. I want to do a follow-up on them. It’s a great chance for you to just pop them a message, which is a great way to network with those influencers and those guests that you’ve had. Pop them a message and say, “I’m about to repost our article. Is there anything new that you’re doing right now that I could say, that I could hype up for you?” They will respond back and they’ll be so excited that they’ll re-share that repost. That also helps you as well.

We also pull out great quotes, stuff we might have said, stuff guests have said. Pull out great quotes and stuff. You probably have seen us post multiple times, “Hope is not a plan.” This is what we’re talking about. This is not hope here. What we’re doing is we’re really planning it. That’s one of our key messages we send out all the time. We pull quotes like that every single day from every single episode that we do. We have them on file so we can make cool visual graphics of them. We tag the people who say them so then they share them again and that’s continuing engagement.

The other thing we do is we do new content. We’ve got a new episode. . Today’s episode on Feed Your Brand is how Tracy became an Inc. columnist. Wouldn’t you like to be one too? We would post out a message on our new content. Ego bait, we know there’s some of you out there who haven’t heard of it before. We do something we call Ego Bait™. It is fun and awesome but basically it’s a great testimonial that you cannot help but share and embed in your website.

“What you missed?” This is the other type of post we really do. They may have scrolled to your feed. They might be the percentage that didn’t get served up what you posted from Facebook because of the algorithm. At least once a week, we post a “What you missed this week?” We also send it out in email to our email list and remind them of this post and these things that we’ve done this week. A lot of what we base in putting into our emails is what we saw is highest engagement from the previous week. You get that kind of ideas. Social’s a great way to test this out. Is this worth putting in my newsletter? Will it get a good response? This is a great way for you to do this. You’re not reposting something, you’re reminding them that they might have missed it. We try to mix it up so it’s not the same image every time either.

Two things that we want to mention to you here when you’re doing post types, one is don’t always put the link up in when you put your post message. Put it in the comments. Do the same thing when you’re tagging someone who authored it or who did that. Don’t always put them up in the top. Sometimes put them in the comments. Mix it up on there because the Facebook algorithm is changing all the time and you’ll find that you might get different engagement based on that. That’s a good way to do it.

Never send anyone anywhere but your website. Remember that Google 10x power. We want to harness that. Never send anyone anywhere but your website. Get yourself a shortener link that is your website or do a refer. We can do BrandcastingYou.com/SocialMaster, which is going to be the message here. You want to keep Brandcasting You in there. We want to keep reinforcing our website because that’s where people can find out more about us than is on our Facebook page. That’s where they can find more about business. That’s where they can engage with us there. You want to reinforce that in any post that you do if you’ve got that link. You want to just do it because that visual, that click through that’s reinforcing that for you and you don’t have to keep saying it. If they need to remember something, they’re just going to say, “It’s on that Brandcasting You website.” They’ll just go there. That’s another way for you to do that. That’s where you brand you most predominantly in your social and keep that consistent.

The 30/30/30/10 Rule

Let’s talk about our 30/30/30/10, that’s 100%. The 30/30/30/10 rule is 30% of your own stuff. That’s all you’re going to post, 30% of your own stuff. 30% share of other people’s stuff; other people that matter, other people that are good. Honestly, we don’t share CNN and we don’t share stuff from that. That’s not in our business plan model. We don’t mix in those kind of shares. If you’re on our personal page, we absolutely share cute things that my daughters did. You will totally get that there. In the business sense, and that’s what we’re talking about here, you’re going to share people who matter to your niche, people who matter to your audience. We want to share specifically that stuff. Not just cool stuff we found.

Then 30% of it needs to be an interaction of some kind, somewhere where we’re tagging someone, we’re sending it to someone. Please don’t do those ridiculous posts in which you tag 100 people in there. We’re not valuable if you’re tagging 100 people. No more than three tags and they have to be included in the content or personally referred to. If we refer to multiple people in an article and it might be, we’ve done it before where we had six people featured in an article, we will do three and then we’ll do a second post with another three. Do not do too many people in there. It looks spammy and it annoys people. They don’t add it to their timeline and they don’t share it. You’re just going to get lowered engagement. It’s not going to be helpful for you. Anyone who started sending out that message that that was a good idea on Facebook doesn’t know what they’re talking about and we should stop following them.

The last 10%, this is the fun part, that’s a uniquely you. We highly recommend the weird stuff. We can tell you, when we put out stuff on our 3D print page, like 3D printing, just like the oddest things that you’ve ever found or the geekiest things that you’ve ever found. We did one on 3D printed fidget spinners and it blew up. We were like, “We’re so sick of these fidget spinners, we just want to keep stashing in the drawer at home here.” But they were pretty cool and we started sharing them and they went crazy for it. Uniquely you or weird things, those are great. That cool stuff, it reflects good on you that you have an interest in things and you’re out there looking for things. You’re not just following some social plan here. You’re being you as well there. \

We want to mention Tracy’s Inc. rules. These are the rules that Inc. has given us that we follow really carefully about really understanding what’s working on your Facebook page and what you decide to share to your Facebook page. You need an ideal understanding of who your audience is. Tracy’s Inc.com followers who follow her column are aspiring million dollar businesses. That’s what they’re doing. They’re building big businesses. That’s what they want. Tracy is on the innovation inside. She doesn’t have a lot of inventors who follow me there who just want a license and sell their ideas. They want to build a business.

The other thing is timeliness and content mix. We don’t like to do a lot of timely things because you get that stress of, “Something just happened. I need to post about it.” We just avoid those. We just say, “It’s not our place to be commenting about something unless it’s personal.” An example of that is Tracy’s sister was in Las Vegas at the shooting. We decided it was timely and important for us to say a message about bump stocks being 3D printed because they are dangerous. People could get hurt. If you design them, then you should be liable for something that happens having designed that. That was us being very political, unlike where we usually are. We stepped out because it was a time to say something like that. We had a platform by which I could say it. We could use it for good to help promote Tracy’s sister’s event that she’s doing in Orange County. We could do some good with that. That’s one of those things that you’ve got to think carefully about it. Is it valuable to you? Are you tapping your audience for the wrong things? Are you doing it for the right reasons and for the right things that are valuable? Think about that when you do that.

The quality of the post matters, if the image is bad. We don’t share somebody if their website, every time you go to it pops up this thing like, “Sign up for this and sign up for that.” You end up with all of those pop ups. We hate that and we won’t share their stuff. You’ve got to think about the quality of that and what matters to you.

We like things with the strong bias and opinion and so does Inc. It plays really well. You have a viewpoint. You have something that’s original about what you’re saying. It’s not the same thing everybody else is saying. Having a bias to something, while it sounds like a bad thing, bias is a bad thing, it’s a good thing because it shows original thought. That’s really why people are following you. That’s why you get fans, fans that engage.

Past performance matters and trending topics matter but not as highly. They’re just there. They’re things to check against because if trends are down on something, you should stop doing it.

The most important thing that we really want to say here is no clickbait or overpromising. Inc. post out 27 to 30 posts per day on their Facebook page. If they’re doing 27 to 30 posts per day and you’re doing two, this is why we have a hard time being heard. In their 27 to 30 posts per day, they find if they do something that’s at all slightly misleading or if the headline is just not right or if somebody clicks through and then starts reading it, they get pissed. The fans get mad and they get cranky. We want to avoid that because it doesn’t serve your brand well in the long time. It’s hard to engage fans and get them to stay. The last thing you want to do is annoy them in the process just because you think, “I’ll get a good boost if I put this title on.” That’s where it goes. We try not to do that.

Now, how often should you post? Now that you know what you’re going to post about and now that you have your post type or style, you figured out where you’re going to post and who you’re going to post to, you understand that all in your head. Now, we’ve got to figure out, how often should I post? We’re going to say up your frequency a little bit from what you are because you’re competing against media influencers who post 27 to 30 per day and have a million page likes or more. That’s hard to get heard because it goes to less than 13% of your followers. You got to really up that just to get your actual followers, the ones who care. Because followers today, we now have to actively choose to see you in our feed. It’s really getting harder and harder for that to happen.

How Often To Post

It’s channel specific as to how often to post. We certainly wouldn’t do more than two posts a day in LinkedIn. It would be too spammy. We have people who do and we unfriend them or we move them off my feed. We mute them. You can annoy your audience even if they care about you. You want to think about it in times per week and times per day. You want to look at it as type mix. You want to schedule it and Buffer it. We have a spreadsheet. It starts with the first column as outlet: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, whatever the outlet is that we’re going to post into. We have a schedule. We might do two times a day on Facebook seven days a week. We find we have good engagement on the weekend. There’s no reason to not post on the weekend. We have a manager for it. Alexandra, our COO and assistant, she will make sure that we have stuff in the feed and if we don’t, she’s going to yell at us and make sure that we provide it for her.

We have a post type plan. My seven post types that we put in the plan are quote, an image of an evergreen post, not the header with the type face, just the image that was behind that and then the title of what it will be somewhere in the post part of it or in the comments part. An Inc. article because one comes out at least every week or mostly because Tracy do six a month. There’ll be an Inc. article, header plus a link. We’ll Ego Bait™. We’ll put out a testimonial or something great why we had our guest on, guest from our show or someone who is featured in one of Tracy’s articles. We do one of those a week at minimum. Sometimes we do more. A news share; really important to have a news share in there. If there’s news going on in your industry or there’s news that would be valuable, you want to put that in there. We have live stream or webinar or funnel. We want to let people to know that they can take action with you. We have that as one of our seven for the week, a mix of that. We have two posts per day so there are fourteen posts per week. We also have seven partner shares per week, one per day. We’re going to share somebody else’s stuff every single day of the week. We have to plan for that and there’s a rotation schedule and there’s a feed.

That’s our social media action plan. We use some tools to back that up. We use some tools to help us out with it and to manage it as a team. We’re lucky we got our Brandcasting You team. We’ve got our team that generates the content, makes the graphics for us, does all that stuff. We have a lot of assets available to us and that’s a really powerful part. That doesn’t mean you don’t have them. They’re probably on your website. You can grab them. You can use a tool like Canva to create a graphic for yourself. All of those things are available to you.

We highly recommend something; we use it everywhere, we use it on our phone, we use it on our desktop, and it’s called GetPocket.com. It’s cheap for a year. We don’t even think it’s $30 for the year. We would pay for the premium because you could archive stuff. We save articles there and tag them all the time. We have a specific tag that is for doing news post that will be for Feed Your Brand. It will say Feed Your Brand news or it would say Feed Your Brand image idea. We’ll save it with something that is relevant for us. We also save things that give us ideas for the articles. There’s a whole way to categorize that. When we go to sit down to write the article, we go through that whole feed that’s in the Pocket and it’s just saved links. We don’t have to think about it. We didn’t have to remember where we put them. We didn’t have to post it immediately because we were afraid we would lose it. We get to put it there and then when we need it, we’ve got it all ready for me. That’s where we use that plus we share Pocket as a team. Anyone can access it together. That way, we’re all sharing at the same place. We use it like a team tool.

We do pay for a tool to post on social media. We know that’s a little controversial from some social media experts. Let us explain our thinking on it. Our thinking is we’re busy. We haven’t got a lot of time. We know that native posting is more valuable in Facebook. We know it’s more valuable and you have to do it on Instagram. Native posting, which means you go into Facebook, you go in Instagram and you post directly from in there or you use an auto feed from outside in, a service that goes outside in. We use Buffer. It’s $50 a month. We use that because it allows us to have all the feeds from all the different resources we have from all our different podcasts, all our blog posts everywhere, all of our clients. People use Evernote and other things like the Pocket, which is a good tip there.

With Buffer, we do this where we’re using those feeds. It’s just really easy to share it and write it right there and schedule it out and have a view, which you can look at it in calendar view or you can look at in week view or day view. You can really see it and you can schedule your time slots. It will tell you when you’re getting your best engagement so you can shop for your time slots. It really does a lot for you. For us, we want to get to 30 days in advance for the planning and then we just slot in the special news ones and the other ones. We just slot those in that we are actively responsible for each week. We do whatever we can to keep that Buffer full so that something’s always posting in case we are busy, we forget that things are going on. We try to keep that 30 days out and full of that.

Here’s the controversy thing, native posting versus Buffer or versus Hootsuite, which is another tool, is the number of followers. If you’ve got 1 million followers and Facebook gives you 1% to 2% less engagement or less reach because you’re not natively posting. That’s the latest number. It might be racing up and being closer to 10%. If we had 1 million followers, 10% loss of reach when it’s only reaching 13% of that audience to begin with is a lot of people so we might care. When we have 10,000 followers, we might have 100 people less who see it and 100 people are not worth the effort it takes for us paying a big team to be able to natively post every single day within Facebook or schedule them all within Facebook or go into every single one of those social profiles and post that way. That’s really where we draw the line. They’re not making it worth our time to go natively and post. Facebook Live is different. Obviously, we’ve got to come in and do it there. You spend your time in the areas at which you do.

Services and Tools

Now, we’re getting to five. We’ve got to do this. You’ve got to do it. You’ve got to get off your social media rollercoaster where you post, post, post, and then you forget to post and people aren’t engaging with you. You’re missing in action. While we all need a good social media fast, if you didn’t mean to do it and now you’re at the bottom and crashing to the bottom of your revenue rollercoaster, you’re in big trouble. We want to keep just doing it and we want to do it in a way that is as automated as possible. We want to make it simple and follow our system. Follow our plan. Only do what works. We want to do what’s working for us. We want to measure that every month, every quarter and every year. We want to measure that and drop what’s not working and dive into what is. We like to try new things. We always have a little percentage of stuff that we’re experimenting on but we don’t waste our team’s time experimenting on it. We try it ourselves and see if we can hack it or figure it out or whatever that is. That’s us, we’re willing to spend a little bit more time than most people on that but not everybody is that way. Keep that in mind. You’ve got to do what’s right for you. Engage in the areas that’s working for you.

We want you to imagine yourself getting more from social media. There are days where we feel like, “Why am I even posting today?” We’re sure you all feel that same way at times in your business. Then there are other times where we’re like, “I’m at the greatest event ever. I’m having a great time,” and you post like crazy. You want to really look at that. You want to be able to say at the end of the day, the amount of time you spent on social media that you’re getting more of what you want. Maybe you want more stages. Maybe you want more media. Maybe you want more qualified leads. Who doesn’t need those? You want more sales and conversions in your funnel. Maybe you just need more credibility. Maybe you’re a brand new author and you need more credibility to get more publicity. Maybe you just want some time back. Do this. Make it easier for yourselves so you can get some time back. We want to do less work. Wouldn’t that be ideal for all of us?

This will be in video. If you can’t find the link, you can always email us at Hello@BrandcastingYou.com. It’ll be on our Facebook page and you’ll be able to find it. We’d like to invite you to get the SlideShare from this because there are lots of images, there are lots of bullet points. There are a couple of examples so you can physically see these things that I’m talking about. Those are free to you. It’s BrandcastingYou.com/SocialMaster. I also mentioned that I have media and PR tips and that Ego Bait™. It’s going to send you to the same place and you can download those as well there. Lessons learned from being an Inc. columnist and a podcast host, it’s just got lots of extra stuff that we talk about that really are the ways that we have been able to use our social media, our influencer network and our podcast, our content production on our website to be able to give ourselves that big, broad platform. We hope you are ready to be super social masters and start Brandcasting You. Thank you so much. We had a lot of fun today.

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