Transcripts
1. Introduction: Get Ready to Boost Your Brand Organically With Social Media: Hey, if you want to have more eyeballs on your business and more money in your bank, then you need to care
about social media. Even if you feel like it's a major time suck or it
just feels a bit icky, don't worry, I used
to feel the same way. Since 2000, I have been teaching web multimedia art design
and education techniques to students around the
world on four continents, in person, at universities and for non government
organizations. I'm an artist, an educator, and a design consultant myself, as well as a busy mom. I've got 1,000,001 things
to do every single day. I really don't have
that much time to be thinking
about social media, and I'm guessing
you are the same. I used to struggle
with social media. I started like everyone with zero followers and sporadically posting and not really
knowing what to post and only doing it
maybe about once a week. It wasn't until I started to
really study and understand the inner workings
of social media and to apply some simple
and easy techniques. That I started to slowly
but surely grow a base of engaged high quality fans and followers who then
later became clients, customers, friends, new
connections, et cetera. This course was created
for people who are ridiculously busy or
who are camera shy. For people that don't
have a huge budget. People who maybe
fight with computers and technology or
maybe you don't have any fancy software or special equipment in
this easy to follow. No fluff course, I'm
going to show you simple tried and
true techniques that will help you grow your
audience over time. Create a social media
strategy, know what to post, know how to reuse posts
in a smart way to actually save you time
and energy and money. And also easy ways to automate the process
so that if you go on vacation or take
a nap or want to spend an extra 3 hours
in your art studio, you can do that without worrying that you haven't
posted for the day. I'll help you know
the best platforms that you can use so
that you can reach your ideal target audience
and know where they actually hang out online so that you can speak to them more effectively. I encourage you start taking this course so
we can get started boosting your
social media impact and presence right away. I really look forward to it
and I will see you inside.
2. Simple Ways to Go From Zero to 5000+ Engaged Followers and Fans - My Story: Hey, how's it going? All
right, in this lesson, I want to tell you
a little story about my social media past. I started out in the early
2000 teaching web design, among other things, to art students and later
non art students. And I felt very comfortable
with that because I have been studying
and I've known for a long time what
makes a good website, not just for artists, but for any small business owner or whatever field
you might be in. But as far as social media went, I was kind of just
like Laba post here. Maybe a week would go by
Laba post there on Facebook. Another week would go by friends who were following
me on social media. But I wasn't getting
too many strangers on board for my
Instagram account. I started it a couple
of years ago and I think I first invited
friends and family, so I got maybe like
100 people or so, which is great and
you want to start exactly there with your
close friends and family. But then I kind of
forgot about it. And it did slowly grow on its own without me doing
anything but very little. I think a year, two years after setting it up, and maybe I had
about 700 people, then I started to care
about it a little bit. It wasn't that I wasn't
posting to it every day, but I did kind of
start to want to get more followers because I
noticed other artists, we're using Instagram with much success and they
had loads of followers. I'm like, how did they
do that? I started to post a little bit here
and there, but again, very sporadically, like maybe, I don't know, like once a
week, every two weeks or so. One thing that I did gradually is I just made it a daily habit, even though it was
very difficult at first was just to
post one thing a day. And I was mainly
just focusing on my Facebook and my Instagram
and what happened. What usually happens
after you pick up any new habit and then continue to force yourself to do it for a couple of weeks? Is it became ingrained in me and now I don't even
think about it, it's just like, oh yeah, it's
sort of like an autopilot. So it's gone to that
part of my brain where, you know your
routines, basically your habits, which is great. So now I have a daily habit of posting to my social media. I do my weekly newsletter
for people who are subscribed to my mailing
list from my website. And so I have these sort
of automatic actions. It wasn't until,
believe it or not, just like maybe four months ago, that I started to care a little bit more
about the number of followers that I had from the time that I set up
my Instagram account, let's say three years ago, till about half a year ago, I had almost 2000 people, but it was very
slow and painful. It just was never growing. My Facebook page was
growing almost on its own, and now actually my Instagram
has surpassed my Facebook. What did I do in the last
couple of months to grow my Instagram so much that it's
over 5,000 I know, again, if you look at people
with 1 million followers or even 10,000 followers, it's not that big of
a deal what I have, but what I've built
and what I've grown is my Instagram
following of people that are engaged that
like my posts that give me comments that sometimes
turn into buyers of art, prints and gifts
and other things. I just had someone sign up for a social media and web course that I'm
doing with Mastrius, based on an Instagram post
that I did two days ago. So it's not about the number
of followers that you have, it's about the engagement and the quality of your followers. And if I just look randomly
through my followers, these are very
interesting cool people. There are a bunch of
artists on there, there are a lot of coaches,
spiritually minded people, people who do energy
and healing work, massage therapists, just educators, humanitarians, like just a really
solid bunch of people. So the only thing that I did differently in the last
couple of months are the tips that I give you in
this course about attracting and engaging
with your ideal audience. And then kind of like letting it grow itself by
beautifying your garden. You attract butterflies. You don't go chasing
after butterflies. So that's basically
what I've been doing. My goal for, I would say the next six months is I'd love to get to 10,000 That
would look really nice. Again, it doesn't really matter, it's not so important, but it is a personal
goal of mine. So I just wanted to
share that with you. I started out with no followers
as well on social media, but I'm very happy with my audience and that
I feel like day by day I meet and the
kind of audience that I want to follow
me on social media, I build relationships
with those people. They then sometimes
come to my website. So anyway, this is my thinking behind my strategies that
I'm sharing with you. And I'm trying to do it in a way that I hope you can
see that even if you have no following and no
motivation to post every day, I'm hoping that this
course will help you get your mojo going with your
social media because that is kind of like the engine that then feeds into the
other things that you're doing on your
website but also in the offline world with your newsletter,
with your business. If you have a business, your
services, whatever it is. All right, I hope you
found this helpful and I will see you in
the next lesson. Bye.
3. Easily Add Engaged New Page Fans: Let's Start With a Quick & Simple Facebook Win: Hey there. All right. So one thing I've learned
over the years teaching both in person and online
is in the online version, I need to give you
a quick win to get your appetite ready for
the rest of the course. Let's, I recommend,
let's start with a little low hanging fruit and do something of a quick
win with Facebook. I'm going to go over to
Facebook very quick. When you've posted something,
I'm just going to show you. This is a, this is a post
that I posted yesterday. Actually used my post planner, but we'll get into that in
another lesson and wow. Okay, it's doing pretty well. So it's got some comments, some I still need to reply to. And these are the people who
have engaged with this post. So they've either liked it
or loved it, or hated it. Hopefully not hated it. Okay. I see mostly thumbs up and hearts, so
that's always good. So what I wanted to share with you is when somebody
likes your post, if you haven't done so already, you notice like you
see the names of people and then next
to a couple of people, you see there's this
invite button here. I'm just going to click
that sends this person who perhaps is new to my page or is just clicking on
something for the first time. It sends them a little invite. Basically saying innocuously
enough that, hey, you recently liked a post from Kristen Polana, artist
professor consultant. Would you like to
follow their page? And that's just an easy way of getting more people
to like your page. Here's another person, click
and another person Yahoo. This is all from yesterday. So let's see, what was
that? Four people. 56 people. It seems like they're spaced
out perfectly, seven people. All right. I think that's it. So everyone else
is either already following me or
has been invited. But this will then send
those people an invitation. And this is just
an easier way to gradually build organic and engaged followers on your page. So anyway, that's
the quickest way to start building your
following on Facebook. There is another way,
and that is if you click this little do here, you have this option to
invite your friends. If you have a new or not
so new Facebook page and you haven't done this in a really long time
or ever at all. I invite you to click
Invite your Friends, and then it's going
to switch you to your personal Facebook profile if you're on your
business account. And then you can manually
select your friends and family. And by the way, spoiler alert. That is the best
way to get started, especially if you're currently under ten followers or
under 50 followers. You should definitely invite
your family and friends. You need to build support
first with yourself. So like your own stuff, if you've got more
than one account, not in a weird bought sort of way or fake
way, but you know, if you've got more than
one account or if you have a spouse or a best friend, send them a quick message, hey, can you like my page? And you can also
use this tool here. So I hope with these quick
and easy strategies, you will be on your way. Hopefully to your first
100 engaged followers who love and follow what you do. Thank you, see in
the next lesson.
4. Make Social Media Work For You Together with Your Website and Mailing List: Hey, how's it going? In this lesson, I wanted to talk just a little bit
about the relationship between your social media and your website
if you have one, and your mailing list
if you have one. Now I know a lot of people don't have a website
or mailing list. Usually they've started
with a Facebook page and that is perfectly fine. But what I wanted to talk
to you a little bit about, and something for you
to think about as you grow and get more
comfortable with everything, is that you want to have these three elements,
the website, the social media, channels, and your mailing list, all working in harmony
with each other. What do I mean by that?
Well, first of all, the website your website is
a digital version of you. It's your online calling
card that works on your behalf while you are
sleeping or on vacation, or just doing other things, or maybe you're in the studio where you
really want to be. Your website should very quickly and concisely answer
the question, who you are, what you do, and why other
people should care. And preferably, in the
first 7 seconds or less, what we know that
we're completely swimming in data and
information, right? Attention spans have gone down. Everyone is completely bombarded with information
when they're online. If somebody goes
to your website, it should be really
clear right from the beginning that
if you're an artist, an artist what kind
of artist you are. For example, the easiest way to find out about
you and to contact you, I recommend even if you
don't have a website yet as you start to plan, maybe having a website
that you at least have one good landing page that
answers those questions. As well as a way
for people to learn more about you and how
they can contact you. Important for artists that your work is for sale
and how can people do that easily with
the least amount of stress and
strain as possible. You have your website.
If you have a website, basically when you visit
someone's website, usually you're going on there
because you want something. For example, if
you're in Malawi and you go to the British
High Commission website and you're a British citizen, English citizen, you're probably going on the website because
you lost your passport. Or you might be a Malawian
looking to study in the UK and you need information on how to get
the paperwork that you need. Most people, if they
go to your website, are going there
for just one time and it's because they're
looking for something. You want to make sure
that your website has everything that
they might be looking for and that it's
really clear and easy to navigate. So
that's the website. Social media is
not your website, although many people
treat it like it is. In fact, in Manmar and Malawi where I've
lived the past years, many people have a
Facebook business page and they have that
acting as their website. And if that's you,
that is totally fine. Even if you don't end
up making a website. If you have a place
that you can send people to that has all that
important information, then you can use that, a social media platform
as your website. However, most of us
use it as a tool. And we use social media as
a tool to communicate and build relationships
with people who ultimately or hopefully
become our fans, our followers, and maybe even either future
art collectors, or our customers or clients, depending on which
industry you're in. Okay, so social media people are not necessarily looking for you when they go
on social media. When people are on social media, they're looking to take a break, maybe do something before that big meeting at work.
They're looking to relax. They're looking to connect with family and friends, but oops, they've just seen
a post from you and it reminds them
that you exist. So social media is just a tool to remind
people that we exist. B, to tell our stories and build relationships
with people. It is an opportunity
to invite people to either your
website or to join your mailing list so that
they can further engage with you or buy a product or
take some kind of action. Donate vote on a
poll, whatever it is. Okay. And then finally, and this is the one that people usually
save for the last, after they've set up a
nice website and after they've got their
social media channels. In harmony is the mailing list. Mailing lists are a list of E mail addresses
that you collect of people that follow you and
are interested and love. Hopefully what you do, this
is something that you own. If for example X, or formerly known as Twitter crashes tomorrow, for example. As of the time of me
making this video, I think I have 23,000
followers on Twitter or X. If it dies tomorrow, I lose all of those followers. I have no way to contact them. Same thing with any of the
other social media channels. And you know how quickly things are changing
on a day to day, week to week basis. So a mailing list is a list
of people that you own. And I do, and I'll talk
about this more later, recommend that you send an e mail to your list
at least once a week. And if that sounds
like way too much, then maybe just start
with once a month. There was one point
where I was only sending something once a year or twice a year In my earlier days doing other
kind of kinds of projects. Now I do about a
weekly e mail anyway. So this is just a
rough overview of how the three things work
with each other. And in general, you want on
your website to be easy, for people to follow
you on social media and join your mailing
list from social media. You want to give
opportunities now and again, not all the time for
people to click on a link that takes them to your website to complete some other action. Which is maybe look
at an artwork or buy something or make a
donation or whatever. Attend sign up for an event. And then for your mailing list. You want to make sure when you send out those weekly e
mails or monthly e mails, that you're giving
people plenty of opportunity to learn
more or click on the links and the images in your newsletter to take
them back to your website. So if people are interested
in buying something, that they can do so
easily from your website or you also want to point
them to your social media. So in a perfect world, you maybe have
these three things and they're all
working together in synergy pointing at each other so that you have this
nice little loop going. And they're all working
together on your behalf, basically being
your digital self, while you're doing other things. Anyway, I hope this
was helpful and I will see you in
the next lesson. By.
5. Get Solid on Your Mission & Who You Help- So You Can Attract the Right Audience: Okay, so welcome back. In this lesson, I'm
going to talk to you a little bit
about linked in. But even if you don't yet use linked in or you just
kind of use it casually, definitely don't skip this
step because I want to share something about letting
people know who you are, what you do, and why
they should care. And being really clear about that and how that can help you. Not just with
linked in, but with all your social media
channels and your website, bio or about page and
everything else that you do. So I'm going to just
go into Linked in. I wanted to share
with you my screen. So first thing I
want to mention is that with all of your
social media channels, not just linked in, it is
important that you have a picture of yourself
if possible. I know a lot of
people self included. I've always been
traditionally quite shy to be in a
picture or on video. So look at me now. But yeah, you definitely want
to have a friendly, smiling, preferably
picture of yourself. Maybe a friend can
take it for you. Don't wear sunglasses,
that makes you look a little
bit untrustworthy. And if it's between not having any picture at
all and a picture, please just put anything
even if it's a pot of flowers or some other
representation of yourself. The other thing I want to
mention about this linked in profile is you
see the cover image. There are different aspects of my art that are very visual. There's some artwork, there's some consulting jobs
I've done for the UN, like the mobile health clinic
all the way to the right. And an illustration I did for United Nations Population
Fund and my teaching, which that is in Yangon, Myanmar a few years ago with my wonderful Fallon
International School High School
students that I really enjoyed this cover
I made using Canva. But if you don't
feel comfortable making your own web
graphics or images, you could maybe get someone
else to make them for you. But you want to be
just really visual and descriptive
without a lot of text. I like to put my name in an
artist professor consultant. But what I wanted to
highlight in this linked in profile is this sentence
right here. Can you imagine? So basically what I did over
a year ago is I did a free, I think it was five or
seven day linked in challenge with a fabulous
linked in expert from the UK. Her name I believe is Helen, but I'm going to put
all the information in the resources for
this lesson and in this course so you can actually
sign up yourself if you want to delve more
deeply into linked in. But the thing that was useful
as a she guided the class to change your linked
in profile from just a personal one to a
more professional page. I forget what it's called,
it's like a followers account. You can upgrade that, You'll see it when you go
to your linked in profile. So basically what that does is it just
gives you your name, has all your visual
stuff over here. And then you have a sentence, a very limited number
of characters, and then it says, talks about. And then you can
put some hash tags of things that you talk about. You might consider,
if you're an artist, what kind of artist you are or whatever industry you're in. You can put important
hashtags industry in there. You can put your location
because it is important. Even if you're a location
independent like I am, I still very much do
things in Malawi locally, giving talks and working
with organizations, and meeting up with
students in person. So that's pretty much it, right? So the thing I want
to focus on right now is this lovely
sentence right here. So you should, in my case, I have artist professor
and consultant. So I put artist and I'm a
multi disciplinary artist. I'm a professor, but
I'm not, at the moment, affiliated with the
university because I'm in a country that doesn't have
my field in the universities. So I'm a nomad professor, that's why I'm doing
online courses and I'm also mentoring people. I'm working with
people in person, nonprofit organizations,
embassies, refugees, everybody. I would like to think I'm
more than a professor. So I'm a nomad professor. Because I do expect to
be moving again soon. I don't know yet where. And then I'm also a UN design consultant. One great thing about being a design consultant is when I do graphic design and
illustration work, that income from that then
supports my fine art practice. So I have lots of little
things all working together. Kind of like our
social media channels, our website, and
our mailing list. I like it when all things
work together in harmony. But it's this sentence, I
help weary idealists to keep striving for a better
world through art and design that uplifts and
forms and empowers. So what I wanted to
share with you is this five or seven day thing
that I did over a year ago. I spent the whole time doing nothing but
writing this sentence. And you would think
like, oh, a sentence. I can write a sentence
in a few minutes, and if you can,
congratulations for me. It took me five days, seven days just to
come up with this. But once I had it, I
said, oh, yeah. Okay. That's what I do. These
are the people I help. I help them through this thing, in this case art and design. And what do I help them with? I uplift, I inform, I empower, I educate, you want to be
really clear on these things. And then what I was
able to do is take this sentence and
I was able to work it into my bio on my website and even in
my artists statement. An artist bio which I use for applying for grants
and fellowships. But also on my Facebook page, I was able to word recraft
that little area where, you know, that talks about
you and who you are, what you do and why
people should care. Twitter or if you want to call
it Pinterest, All of them. Youtube channel, all of them. So if you can get one
good sentence going, you can kind of use this
stuff over and over again. So if you're really
clear about who you are, what you do, and why
other people should care, then it becomes easier for other people to
know who you are, what you do, and why
they should care. So I recommend you, do I help? And then here, who do you help? Who is it that you help? If you can be really
specific, if it's, um, I don't know, overworked moms who have too much
on their plate, or u struggling
neurodiverse teens who are smart but are disorganized and
everybody thinks they're stupid, Whatever it is. Okay. Try to be as
specific as possible. I know that I got in a
little bit of trouble by putting weary idealists in
the course I was taking. They wanted me to really like pick a gender,
pick an age group. Okay, so for me, an idealist, a weary idealist are other educators like me, artists, people who wear their heart on their
sleeve, Humanitarians, NGO workers, people
that really want to make the world a better place and they kind of are doing it. But it's also
really frustrating. So that's my target audience and I have so many
things going on. If you can pick one
thing, that's great. I tried to keep it mainly
to being an artist, a professor, and a consultant. And those three things
from me are tied together. But if you can be even more committed to
one thing better than me, than you are doing
better than I am. But anyway, so I help weary idealists two and then
what is it you help them do? For me, it was keep striving
for a better world. Keep just basically
not giving up. Keep showing up to work
every day, in other words. Okay, so that's what
I help people do. How do I help them? I could have made it just
about fine art. I could have made it
just about design. I could have made it
just about teaching. But for me, they're kind
of all linked together. And I feel like I do better
when I use those three things in harmony with each other
through art and design. That uplifts, informs,
and empowers. And you may have to go
into a Thesaurus and just find different ways to say that are using
emotional language. So in the end, maybe it's
not the perfect sentence, but it's good enough
for me right now. At this time, I may rewrite this sentence in another
few months and that's okay. Or I might decide to
focus more deeply on one thing and then
I kind of want to put the other things
in the background. That's okay too. So I hope
you found this helpful. I hope that you can maybe take a moment to just think about if you had to write a
sentence, what do you do? Who are you helping,
How are you helping? And through what
are you helping? Okay, so this could
be a product, it could be a service,
it could be whatever. So all right, thanks so much and I will see you in
the next lesson. Bye.
6. Who Are Your Ideal People Really? Getting to Know Your Target Audience(s) Better: Hi. All right, in this lesson, let's talk a little bit about
who you're posting for. Who are you trying to
build relationships with? Who are your people? Who's in your target audience? So you might actually, well, first of all, the number one thing that students have
told me in the past, and this goes way back
to like 2000 even, is who's your website for, what's your social media for? And most people
will say everyone. If you try to speak to everyone, you'll end up
speaking to no one. So it is a good idea, as difficult as it can be, because I've also felt
this way as well. It's a good idea to try to think about who's your main
target audience. You might have a
secondary target audience or other people, some companies, they'll actually
create a personality, like a main personality and then a second character,
a third character. Then they have
five ideal clients that are totally different. But at least then when
they're making their content, they know who they're writing for what? All right,
I'll explain. First of all, let me
just go through this. You might have more
than one audience, as mentioned, who would
most benefit from our art? Who are we speaking to?
If you're an artist, a couple things to think about. What are their demographics?
How old are they? Where do they live?
Are they educated? Not educated. High school. No school, Phd, whatever. What's their income level?
Are they rich? Are they poor? Are they somewhere in the
middle? Do they struggle? Do they not struggle?
Do they have so much wealth, they don't
know what to do with it? Nationality? Gender?
Are they male? Are they female? What kind
of interests do they have? What are their
political affiliations? Are they religious?
Are they not? So these are just, or
do they have hobbies? Do they collect postage stamps? So just a couple of things
for you to think about. And then finally, does your target audience change on social media
versus your website? Well, I'm just very quickly going to take you
to a screenshot. This is from one of
my favorite TV shows as a child, Sesame Street. And this is a screenshot
from their website. Now, just looking
at their website, you can probably surmise that their target audience
are very young children. Very bright colors,
lots of pictures, almost no text, and I'm
not live on the website. But if I were to
roll over things, there might be
little animations. Music games to play. So it's clear from
this screenshot that their main target audience
are young children, right? That's what their TV
shows are aimed towards. I think they're in like 100 and something countries
at this point. But look in the upper
right hand corner. They have a secondary target
audience here, grown ups. So if I go okay, so if we click on that, it takes us to this page. This is on their website, but here you can see that the target audience
has changed a little bit and yet it's
still very visual. There's not a lot
of text. But yeah, it's definitely for families, family resources, our
work about us support us. Very pictorial again, it's
showing us who they are, what they do, and why we
should care. And that's great. Then not to give you a trick question,
but check this out. Here's the Sesame
Street Facebook page. They've got 1 million followers, over 1 million followers. I like that they have their
intro here so we really know their mission and
purpose is their why. Our non profits mission is
to help kids grow smarter, stronger, kinder, and
more than 150 countries. I just wanted to point this out because it
happened to everybody, even accounts with 1 million
followers that Facebook recently reduced the number of characters that you're
allowed to have there. And not everybody's noticed yet, including Sesame
Street, apparently. So they meant to say something
else, but it got cut off. So just be aware that
sometimes various platforms, things change without you
realizing it overnight. And you just have to
check that you look like you're able to write
a complete sentence. But anyway, who's the target
audience on this page? Well, technically, young children are not really allowed to use social media. It's technically for
parents, educators, fans, people like me who were a kid once and are not
anymore, whatever. I just show you
these examples so that you can be aware of the different kinds of target
audiences that you might have for your service
business or brand. I'm also going to show you this customer avatar that you can look at and
maybe you can start to write down a little bit of the characteristics of
your ideal audience. I recommend just start with one. You can have up to five
different avatars, but start with one. Think of your absolute
perfect customer. It could be a customer
you've already had, or an art collector that
you've already had. Or just a fan that always
likes your posts and is really enthusiastic right
from the beginning. They could be a clue as to who your ideal target audience
is. I'll let you know. When I started making online
courses back in 2014, I thought my target audience was going to be like my
university students. Like young male and females in their late
teens, early '20s. But as I was making courses, I was getting the
most feedback from women over the ages of
like, I don't know, between the ages of
like 40.45 or sorry, 40.55 And that actually remains probably my
strongest target audience. But I was so surprised
at the time. It doesn't mean men never
bought from me or young people. Younger people because I'm also in my own target audience, I guess, but demographics. So things to think about. Age, sex, location. Are they in Europe? Are they in Africa? Are
they in North America? Are they in Cleveland, Ohio? And it's very specific, wherever it is, characteristics. What are their interests? Hobbies. What are
they influenced by? Pain. Ooh. What are the problems that this
target audience has? What are their concerns,
their challenges? Anything that might
hold them back from buying or supporting. And then finally, results. Outcomes, desires the gain. So if they were to
connect with you, how could you help this
target audience I recommend? Before you move on, just think
about this a little bit. You could also come back to
this and do some exercises. But once you really
get a sense of who your ideal target audience is when you're making
your social media post. You can write as if you're writing directly to someone
in your target audience. And you know better what images to post
and where to post, what platforms to put it on. Where do they hang
out? Are they in a particular Facebook
group? Are they? I don't know, using
certain hash tags. So food for thought. I hope this is helpful and I will see you in the
next lesson. Bye.
7. Attract High-Quality Followers. Mindset Matters and Glorious Goals.: Going. So this particular lesson is all about your mindset. And I know you've heard
the M word before mindset, and how it's so important that you come in with
the right attitude. I wanted to just
talk a little bit about what you can expect, what kind of results
you'll get from taking this course and learning
more about social media. Who it's for, who it's not for, what it can help you with,
what it can't help you with. So what do I mean
by all of that? Well, a lot of people feel that they know nothing
about social media. Maybe they are never
posting at all, and maybe they're just posting once a month or once
every two weeks. They get frustrated
because nothing happens, and then they go away Again, this course will help you, but only if you treat
your social media page. Even if you want to just
focus on one platform, Facebook or Instagram
for example, or three. But you basically need to
treat it like a garden. You wouldn't plant a garden, water it one day and then go
disappear for three weeks, and then try to water it again in three weeks. Nothing's
going to happen. The other thing that might
happen is you may actually start giving some attention
to your social media garden. But then after two
or three weeks, you kind of go away for a week. And if you don't water it, everything that you
worked so hard to plant just starts
to slowly wither. So I want you to kind of get a long term vision of how you see your social
media garden happening. And we're going to be talking
a little bit about you beautifying your social
media garden so that you can attract the
people and the followers. They're going to come and engage with you and that
are going to care about what you do and be the people that you want in your
garden, your butterflies. Okay, so if we go
with the metaphor, if you go around
chasing butterflies, they're going to go away. But if you focus on making your garden beautiful,
they will come to you. So this is true, and I know a lot of people
on social media, you'll see a lot of
stories like, oh, I made this one post and it went viral and I got 10,000 followers overnight from this one
kick *** reel like that's amazing and great and I do hope it happens to you
once in a while. Some of my stuff
goes viral, Great. But it's not a silver
bullet kind of thing. It's not like if you
make one magical reel, all the planets align,
the stars align, and all of a sudden
it goes viral and you get 10,000 new
followers that you don't then have to
keep showing up every day and watering your
garden, That's not the case. So I do hope that you
have some moments like that that's very fun and
amazing when it does happen. But if you just go
with my example about following a
few 1020 people, 100 people in a day. That are the kind of people that you want to
follow you back. So you're basically
following the kind of people that you
want to engage with. People who love what
you do over time. It may not be that all those
people follow you back, but if you do this a
little bit every day, you'll see like, oh, okay, after a couple of weeks
I've got 200 new followers. And they're not just
bots or fake accounts, but they're actually
people that I want to have in my garden. So for example, as I was saying in another lesson
with my Instagram account, I really only have been paying proper attention to growing it. I mean, really just like
growing the numbers of engaged followers the
last couple of months. So now I have a system
which I share with you of adding about 500 to 1,000
new followers per month. Even if I don't have a post
that goes viral or a real, or anything fancy, if I just do everything that I'm
doing right now, nothing big. Just little baby steps every
day and ten months go by and let's say over ten months I have 1,000
new followers a month. That's 10,000 followers. That's going to look
fantastic when people go to my Instagram and
it's not going to be fake unengaged accounts, but actual people that
really care about what I do. And on one hand you've got all of this people
who love what you do and they're commenting on your stuff and
liking your things. But it also looks good
when you're as an artist. For example, if you apply
to be in a gallery show, or for an award, or for
a magazine feature, or to be featured in a podcast. And those gate keepers that are looking
at your stuff then go to your website and to your social media
pages and they say, oh, wow, this person, it's not just a hobby for them. They've got more
than 100 followers. This is somebody who, you know, someone is home, right?
You're not out to lunch. So this is a good thing
on so many levels. So even though even in my
own Instagram for example, Journey, I only have about, I think, 4,300 followers
as of today's recording. But I know for effect,
unless you know, the world gets hit
by a meteorite or an asteroid or something
weird happens, I know that as long
as I keep showing up every day, posting
heartfelt content, connecting with my audience, liking other people's things, every now and then, finding followers that I want to follow, that then decide
to follow me back. All of those things
that I tell you about, if I just do those little
things and I show up every day, or if I miss a day, but I then come back the
next day, no problem. I know that everything's
going to grow. My beautiful garden is
going to go from like a few beautiful flowers
to a field of flowers, to vegetables, to
feeding the world. Who knows? But I just
know that we tend to overestimate what we
can get done in one day and underestimate the impact
that you can have in a year. So if I think about like, what are my social media gardens going to look like
a year from now? Wow, They're going to be
beautiful and yours will be too. So I hope this is helpful. I just want you to think
a little bit long term. It could be that you are wildly successful with just a few posts,
and I hope you are. But if you're not,
don't worry about it. It's a long term game that we're playing and we're
not playing just to have a bunch of fake
bots and people who don't care about
us as followers. We're actually just trying
to build an audience, connect with people, create relationship, share our stories. And with time, those people may decide to become
art collectors, or clients, or customers, whatever industry
that you're in. All right. I hope
this was helpful. I hope you're
having a great day. And let's move on to the
next lesson. Cheers.
8. Instagram Booster: Attracting More Engaged, High-Quality Followers Organically: Welcome back. Okay, so in this lesson we're going to
do some low hanging fruit. Hopefully, a quick win for your Instagram profile
if you have Instagram. So I'm going to go over to my Instagram the first thing you want to do and
we'll get into this later, so don't worry about it yet, is you want to make sure
that you have a page or an Instagram profile that looks attractive to your
target audience. So we'll get into what all of those details
are, but it should, again, be really
clear who you are, what you do, and why
people should care. There should be also
like a nice link for people to click on
back to your website. But again, that's
another lesson. But a quick win here is if you want to grow your
followers organically and you want to have people
that are active on Instagram and they actually engage with you and
love what you do, then I recommend, and again, we have other lessons about
who your target audience is. But if you already
have an inkling of who your target audience is, what you can do is
you can do a search. And you can search maybe one of the hashtags
that maybe you're using. So for example, I do a lot of artwork that's
sacred geometry art, so I'm going to just do hashtag, oops, and let me make
sure I can spell it. Right. So the sacred geometry
and sacred geometry art. Let me just click on
the sacred geometry art and let's see what comes up. All right, So now I
get a whole bunch of recent posts and you
can kind of roll over to see how
popular they are. And what I'm doing is I'm
looking for the kinds of people who like content
that is similar to my own. I'm just kind of, I mean, there's so many things
I could click on here. But let's say, I don't know, I like this Rainbow one, but it looks like it
was made with AI. Let lot of tattoos in here. I'm going to go with
this hand drawn one. Somebody is doing a
work in progress. I'm going to click on it and
I can do a couple of things. One I could decide just to follow the person
who posted it. Okay. Doesn't hurt
me if I do right, then we can also scroll down
here and if we wanted to, we can actually make
people follow us or contact us just by leaving
a little comment here. Because we are
relevant account that does something similar to
this picture or this image. I might say something
like beautiful. And of course I mean it, I'm not being fake beautiful work, I love to also draw sacred
geometry shapes in my art. Okay, so now I've complimented sincerely the
person who's drawn this. And I'm leaving a comment. And this makes it more likely that people are
going to see my comment. They'll know that I am engaged
and active on Instagram. They might just like my comment. They might decide
to come over to my page and see my
sacred geometry. That's one thing. They
may start to follow me from that way. That's
one way to do it. If you do that, don't
do it too much. Because if you do too
many similar actions on Instagram within
the same hour, they start to think
you're a bot. So don't get crazy about it, just here and there
if, if it strikes you. But then the other
thing that I would do that's a little bit sort of less targeted is I look at all
the people who liked this. So I'm just going to click on
the people who liked this. Okay, it looks like I'm
already following two of the people here
and I recommend, don't overthink this, but
if you have the time, try to follow some
of the people. Try to kind of avoid the
ones that either don't have a profile picture or if they look like a
woman in a bikini, I'm not really interested. So anyway, I'm going
to just follow 12345. Sometimes it'll be
a private account and it'll say Requested 12. Anyway, I'm going to do this
but I would recommend don't do more than 40 of
these per hour. Because again, you don't
want to accidentally get banned and put
in Instagram jail, even if it's just for
an hour or a day, we're going to
follow these people. Don't worry too much. I know it's sort of like
human nature that you want to curate a little bit more of
who you're following. You can do that later,
but for right now, we just want to
follow the people that like something
similar to what you do. And then chances are
they will either immediately follow you back
or they might ignore you. Which happens actually more
often than they follow you. But what we're doing
is we're trying to find people who
like what we do. So that our overall audience, I'm going to just
quit out of here. We'll be full of people
who love what you do. As of today's
recording this video, I have a little over
4,000 followers and I'm following just over 3,000 What I usually do is once a day, if I can, maybe a couple
times a day, I'll just go in. I'll spend a little bit of time zooming in and doing a
search for my people. And I like their posts, Maybe I follow a few of them. I try to do that every
day, Not too much. I find that then my followers
start to grow organically. We start to comment on
each other's things. Sometimes you get a message, sometimes it's all spam. So don't worry about
the direct messages, but once in a great while, you get a direct
message and it's actually a real opportunity or someone really interested in buying something
or collaborating, or whatever it is. I do recommend though to be careful because as you go along, you might find that
you're following way more people than
are following you back. What you then need to do
every once in a while, even if it's just once a week, is you go in to the people
who are following you. Usually, I don't
know, it's giving me this weird order right now, but I usually go when
I'm on my phone, it'll say least interacted with. And I will click
on that category. And then you will click on the person that you're thinking
of not following. And then, oops, here we go. I actually love
our house Africa. I'm only going to
temporarily unfollow them, just to show you what happens when you unfollow someone
who's following you. If you want to keep them, you just click back
on follow back. So I don't want to
throw away Elson, he's very talented
Malayan artist and I admire him very much. But most of the time
you'll click on Unfollow and it'll show
just a blue follow button, and they weren't
following you at all. And then you can
feel good about just saying bye bye and
that's it, you know, end up with 10,000 people that you're following and only 100
people following you back. So I hope that makes
sense. This is kind of like pruning your
social media garden. And you want to do
that. Try to do that once in a while just
to keep things going. The other thing I just
wanted to mention about my own follower account is I only started doing this
about two months ago, and in two months I've basically doubled my engaged followers. So I think when I first
set up Instagram, it took me maybe like
23 years just to get 700 people because I wasn't
really engaging with it. And since two months ago, just by doing this a
little bit every day, I've been able to grow
my followers by about 1,000 engaged
followers per month. Some people are
going to unfollow you as well, and that's okay. You just want to make
sure that more people are following you
than unfollowing you. And if you are getting people
that love what you do, then it's less likely that
they're going to unfollow you. Only the bots, you know, fake accounts and accounts. They're trying to
make money from selling followers and
having fake accounts. Those are the ones they might follow you or there
might be scamers, see that you're not
interested and then they're going to unfollow you again,
so don't worry about them. But yeah, now that you
know what to do if you do this little thing every
day or every other day, or once a week,
you're going to see over time that your
account is going to grow. And it's not just going
to be fake accounts, it's going to be real
engaged followers, people who love the
things that you do. So I hope this was helpful and I will see you in the
next lesson. By
9. Instagram Booster Part 2: How to Get Your Ideal Audience to Come Right to You: In this lesson, I want
to talk a little bit about making your social
media garden beautiful. Right now I'm taking you to my Instagram page, our
Instagram profile. And most of these tips, not all, but most of these tips I
got from art store fronts, They have a lot of free
marketing resources for artists, but they're also useful for anybody else in
other industries. But I just want to share
with you a couple of things. Number one, and I'm starting
with Instagram because it doesn't have the big cover image that some of the
other platforms do. So when you go to Instagram, and it may have changed, when you watch this video
from today's recording, it gives you a profile picture, it gives you your name, it tells you how many times
you've posted followers. And then this space here, this is always changing. So I'm just going to share
the principles with you, but I will put in the resources. As things inevitably change, I will keep those up to date. The principle stays the same, and that is you should
always try to have a picture of yourself in
your actual profile picture. Definitely avoid not having anything at all
because it looks fake. It looks like a bot and
people don't trust you. Okay, so that's step one. Step two is don't wear sunglasses because also
we can't see your eyes. We're less likely to trust you if you have a lot of artists, they just throw their work in there and then they
hide their face. Once in a while you'll
get an artist who's done a self portrait and they put
that in there, that's okay. But for most of us, you should put your
face in there. Or if you're a team, put
team members in there, Try to avoid a logo, unless you really can't
think of anything else. We're more likely to
follow an account if we see that there's a person behind it and we can trust them. Logos are a little
bit impersonal. I know some people, they
will just rather put nothing for the people. Just put a pot of
flowers or a microphone. Just put something, Show
that someone's home. Okay. So step one is putting something in your profile
image on Instagram. You have a limited amount
of space here for artists, but you can also, if you're
in another industry, think about how this
applies to you. But art store fronts
gives the suggestion that if you have won awards
or a specific award, or had like a really big show, put that in there first. You know, like Guggenheim
retrospective. You know, I wish, but anyway, I actually have all kinds of different things and I
spent so much of my time, the past two decades
as an animator, so a lot of my stuff
is like film festival, so I just put the generic
yet multi award winning, award winning mixed
media artist. So put the kind of artist you are if you're a jewelry store, put the kind of
jewelry store you are, if you're a nonprofit, put you know what kind of nonprofit. Okay, so just try
to be descriptive. I have three things in here. So I have award winning mixed media artist,
Nomad professor. It's a lot less
complicated than saying, I move around a lot
and I was here and I was there and I was ten year tear and I was full time there. But now I run my own classes here because it's not
offered in the universities. That's very wordy. Nomad
professor does the job. I'm also, when I'm
not making art, I'm either teaching
or I am doing design preferably for UN agencies
because the pays the bills. But anyway, so I have my
three things in here. And that also goes
with my website, artist, professor,
and consultant. Notice that I've got
these emojis here, which on the face
of it, doesn't look very professional, does it yet? It's considered at the moment, at the time of me
making this video, it's considered
industry best practice because they act like little bullet points to help the viewer's eye
scan who you are, what you do, and why
they should care. So you can use within
reason a few MOGs. I got 12344. This just came with
the link there. Okay, I also have
a little tag line, uplifting art for
weary idealists. It's shorter than usual because I'm making this during
my Black Friday, November sale, which is like the most salesy
I am all year. So I used this important
real estate character count just to let people
know that I'm having a sale with this Emoji. That then points to
my link on Instagram. There's a big
rolling debate about should you have one
link or multiple links. Should you use a link tree? I recommend if you can
commit to one link, pick one link because
it's clickable. And if people click on it, they're going to your website and you're getting
them on your website. If you send them to a link tree, you're sending them to
a third party website and they might not click
on anything else there, you're more likely to lose them. You're twice as
likely to lose them. Okay. The other option is Instagram now
allows you to put. Multiple links, but I find
that you click on that. It then takes you to an Instagram page with
all your links. So it's kind of
like the link tree. The other option, so yeah, another option is make a
page on your own website. If you have a website
that acts like a link tree and then you can put the different things
that people can click on, it doesn't matter then if they don't go to
the other things, at least you've gotten
them to your website, you get credit for, you know, that's good for your search engine optimization
and everything else. Okay. So that's this
whole area up here. You may have noticed I've
got something called highlights these act almost
like if you're on a website, you know how you have
your navigation items. So I do recommend whatever
industry you're in. If you haven't about me or about us or our mission,
something like that. If you sell something, put some best sellers or
popular, something like that. And I recommend if you can have a contact as your three
highlighted items. I'm an artist, so I
put recent features, podcasts, shows magazine
articles, et cetera. I have a section
for my commissions, new work I've done
and my courses. But what these
are, are basically collections of
Instagram stories. You can make a highlight
from existing stories. The about me was recommended by art store fronts.
Check this out. I made these in Canva
and they're just like, it's like a deck of
seven little cards that tells my story. I tried not to put
too much text, it's still a little bit of text. But anyway, I've
just gone through my own bio on my website
and I try to pull out some interesting tidbits from each of those things to create a little visual story that
just tells my story about, you know, awards and my history and why I do what I do and
what kind of artist I am. This is my UN consultant page. And then the next one talks a little bit more about
the kind of art that I do, a little bit from my
artists statement. Once this is over, it's going to automatically go to
my best sellers. And these are my artwork, but visualized in a room. So this is a suggestion
specifically for artists. But anybody, if you sell
chairs or wherever it is, we don't want to
just see the thing, we want to see it in a space. It's like if you go to Ikea, if you've ever been to an Ikea, they always have these rooms with all their products in it so you can visualize
your stuff in the space. There are free rooms in Canva. There's also V, which is CNV Y, which is where I
made most of these. I'm also using an app
now called Art Placer which lets you visualize
art in a room. So you can do that
from anywhere. All right, I'm going to get
out of my highlights now. Whoops, It would
have kept going. But anyway, so
there's highlights. And then not to make this
too long winded of a lesson, but I just wanted to
share that Instagram, this doesn't come
from art star fronts. This is me noticing
that most of the, most of the Instagram
accounts that I follow and I admire,
you know what they do. They have 12 or three
pinned items. This helps. So when people see
this screen full, they get a sense of who you are, what you do, and why
they should care. So if you are an
artist or a business, you might want to
highlight a couple of things that are going to stick to the top of your
page to help draw people in. So I have, this
actually goes to a post where people can enter
to win a free art print. And what they do is they give
me their e mail address, they then add them
to my mailing list. And then every two months I do a random drawing and
somebody wins and they get an e mail and they get a nice shiny art print
in the mail from me. So that's my first one. My second one is a real music my look really, really dumb. Anyway, it's just some
video, some reels, some stories of work that
I made over the past year. And then it kind of
cycles through again. And then my third pinned
post are my best sellers, but this is the one
that has Sound to it. Okay, I'll try not to dance. But anyway, so those
are my first three. So think about
featuring something because all Instagram
posts allow you to pin and then
everything else are just like recent things. So my most recent
stuff goes in here. If you're familiar
with Instagram, you know there's a
section just for reels and you can decide if
the reels are going to actually go and be
with your posts or if they're just going
to be in their own category, saved and tagged. All right, I hope I gave
you some awesome ideas. It was a lot to digest. Don't feel like you have
to do all of this today. It's more, I'm just showing you some things that you
can think about in the future and maybe over the course of the next
few weeks or days, weeks, months, you
can slowly start to add and enhance your
Instagram profile.
10. Facebook Magic: Attract Your Ideal Followers with a More Optimized Page: Hey, how's it going? All right, In this
lesson, I just want to talk a little bit
about setting up your Facebook page in a way that attracts your butterflies, the people that you
want to follow and be attracted to your beautiful
social media garden. So I do recommend that you have a cover image and have it be as visual as possible,
not too much text. If you're going
to have any text, have it be your name and
what it is that you do. Make it be really
clear, even just from the images, what
it is that you do. So for me, I have artist
and I like to think that that's clear by the studio
and the artwork professor. There's the picture of
me teaching in Yangon, Myanmar and consultant one of my UN jobs on creating
illustrations for United Nations
Population Fund for a fleet of mobile health clinics that were used here in Malawi. So I have my cover image
which I made in Canva. If you are able to do
it yourself, great. If not, maybe you could have someone create that
for you in Canva. But I recommend you give it a try yourself because
it's not hard. If I go down, you see I
have my image and my title. So it's really clear who I am, what I do, and why
you should care. Now this bit here
where it says Intro, I only have three lines. So I tried to be
really clear and it used to allow
you to write more and then one day yank,
they took it away. So it could change. And it's always changing. So at the time of
making this recording, this is the space
that they give you. And I tried to put the
kind of artist I am, so I'm a mixed media artist. I have many different
kinds of awards, mostly animation festivals,
but also in fine art as well. More recently award winning
mixed media artist. Then this is, the
second line is actually a condensed version of my linked in sentence that I told you
about in another lesson. So healing art that uplifts. So I really was
limited on characters. I tried to get the essence
of it in a few words. And then shop art and
gifts at website link. You want to be really
clear if you sell something that it's
obvious, right? So shop art and gifts
at the website link, which is just below here. Okay. One thing is you may notice there's these
little emojis here. I used to think, oh, that's
kind of unprofessional, but it's actually a
best practices thing. It helps lead the viewer's
eye to your different things. It's like if you're
looking at a magazine and there's like a bulleted
list or a headline, or an isolated quote. It just kind of helps the
eye move through and scan because we're so starved. No, we're actually bombarded with too much information
that we need to be able to look at your Facebook page and scan it in 7
seconds or less, and get a sense of who you are, what you do, and
why we should care. All right, So other
things that are on here, it gives you the opportunity
to put your information. We can do view if we're
not viewing it as me. Okay. This is what
the page looks like to anyone visiting. Sorry, the birds are
extra loud today. Okay. There we go. Okay.
Everything's here. The other thing I just wanted to mention is that in Facebook, you get this real estate
here at the very top. It allows you to
feature content. So in this case, I decided to feature the joint mailing list, image and graphic that I have. So basically anyone hoops. So basically if you
were to click on this, it would show you an image. It would talk about how
everyone who signs up for my e mail weekly e mail list is automatically entered
every other month or so to win a free art print. So that's my hook to get people to give me
their e mail address. I like to think it's
a good exchange. And I also put a couple
of other things in here. A podcast that I
was on recently. I have some recent work so you can decide what you
want to feature here. But it's only I
think the first two that you're going to
see on first glance, and then also people will see recent posts, recent photos. We're actually doing
this on Tuesday, the day after Cyber Monday. That's about the most salesy I am all year is with
like Black Friday, Cyber blah, blah, blah. So I had a post about
that. But yeah. So in a nutshell, you want it to be really clear from the moment people land on your Facebook page who you are, what you do, why
they should care. It should be really visual. There should be a friendly
picture of you to show that there's an actual
person behind this account. And there should
be a website link and a little bit of
information about you and maybe a couple of featured things. Have
you done that yet? If you have a moment,
maybe you want to make a couple of improvements today. You can already get started with that, just tweaking things. It may be a week before,
you're really happy with it, but just make a few little
improvements and you have time to make this just as you want it in the days,
weeks, months ahead. All right, thanks so much,
seeing the next lesson.
11. Facebook Niche Bonus Tip: Find Your Audience and Gain More Quality Followers: Hey, welcome back. All
right, so in this lesson, I just wanted to show you
another thing that you can do in Facebook to connect
with your audience, get more followers,
and really find those butterflies
that are going to be attracted to your beautiful
social media garden. And I swear it's just
a coincidence that I'm in a Facebook group called
Sacred Geometry United, and it just happens to
have a beautiful sunflower with the little spiral
pattern going on here. But I believe I mentioned in an earlier lesson that if you, if you take a moment and
think about the kind of people that you're
trying to attract to your social media garden and
where they might hang out. You might start to join
a few Facebook groups. So in this case, I'm
just taking you to one, I recommend try to find
groups that maybe have about 3,000 or more followers. If it's a really specialized niche that you have and there's only 500 people in there but they're really
dedicated and active, then that is totally fine too. Sometimes less is more. This group has about
over 30,000 members, and I just wanted to
show you that yesterday. It looks like 18 hours
ago I just posted a artwork that I have that obviously
belongs in the group. Remember, don't put a link. So it's just an image. And I just talked about what I was thinking about
when I made it. I'm not trying to sell anything, I'm not trying to
get anyone to visit a link or sign up for
anything, nothing like that. I'm just sharing in the
spirit of the page. This page, there's certain
groups that you could join. Some are more
active than others. This one's only
moderately active. So it's got about five
likes at the moment. And if I click on it right now, I've invited, I must have
done this yesterday. All the people who liked it so far to like my Facebook page. So if there was
someone new in here, there would be a button
that says invite. And I would in click and I could invite them to
like my Facebook page. And only about 10% of anyone that you
invite on these groups, especially if you're
new to the group, are going to actually
like your Facebook page. But again, it's
another great way to grow your following and
attract those butterflies. So that is all that
I wanted to share. I try to do this
about once a week. I don't let this
take over my life. This is one of those
things you could spend the whole day doing. I try to just do it
once in a while, join a few groups, post once or twice a week to
these different groups. Public groups tend to work
better than private groups, but sometimes private
groups are great too. I hope this is helpful
and I hope you'll think about maybe a couple
of Facebook groups that you might join where the people that you
want to connect with are hanging out and you can
engage with them in a non creepy, non
advertising, non. I've got to get something out of this way to genuinely
build relationships, connections or just
share what you're doing. If I've had this happen before, if people are interested or oh, I love this, you know, sacred geometry of footprint. How do you sell prints? Then you can, in a direct
message or in the comments, you can direct
them to your page, your website, where they could have a look at
it, maybe buy it. Who knows. All right, hope this is helpful.
See in the next lesson.
12. Make Your Audience Fall in Love With You. What to Post + Content That Resonates: In this lesson, I
just want to give you a couple of ideas
for what to post. And if you already
have a strong sense of what you do and basically, why do you get out of bed in the morning? What
is it that you do? What uniqueness are you bringing to this world so
you know your purpose? And if you know already a bit more about who your
ideal target audience is, or your ideal client,
or your people, then you can start creating content based on those things. So a couple of ideas. Now, this slide is actually
from a live course that I do that covers the
website and social media. So this kind of gives
you a couple of ideas about what to feature on
website and social media pages. So the kind of things
to post about, well, you can always do posts
reiterating who you are, like let me reintroduce myself or your
contact information. Or if something has changed, like you are a business and you have new hours on Saturday, you could definitely
have a post about that. Hey, new hours alert. D, D post. Okay. So, up to date about and contact
information are essential, then other things you
could post if you have actual events that
take place live in person, or even if they're online webinars like how we're meeting, you could post about upcoming
events or workshops. If you're an artist,
you may have a live or online exhibit that's either going on
right now or coming up. Any activities open
to the public, Any events that take
place in real time. If they're an event that
take place in real time and it's going to be recorded and then there'll
be a recording available. You could also
post that as well. That happens a lot with
the online stuff news, so any new products that you might have if you
have a business or new services that you
may offer if you're a coach or educator or
something like that. If you are a shop, any sales or promotions that you have going on during whatever
time of the year. It might be for artists,
but also for anyone. Work in progress or
a day in the life. So for example, if I'm really
stuck on what to post, I could show my art supplies. I could show something
that I'm working on. I could show a technique
that I'm doing. I could do a little tutorial. Somebody who has a
jewelry business could show a craftsperson
who's making silver, bla, blah, blah by
hand, whatever it is. Or a day in the life, like a few minutes before I
started recording this, my cat was mewing in the
background and I had to edit that out so that
could be a day in the life. My assistant Amara, who likes to sometimes help
with making videos, so if you have a pet or it could even just be
like the weather outside is being really weird. Or I could, you know, I could
take you and show you what my studio looks like
inside or outside. I mean, a lot of
people would love to know what Malawi looks like. It's really beautiful actually. So just some options
for a day in the life. You could also tell stories. Your audience loves stories. They could be about you. That
could be about your work. Whatever it is
you're working on, your technique, your materials, your creative process,
and people love bloopers. One of these days, I probably, I'll edit it into this video. But I was giving a course a
few months ago and a bat flew in that my cat had
brought in because the window was open
and it was hot. And that was the why
the window was open. And she had never done
anything like that, at least at that time before. So a bat came in
and was flying in the background and that
was a major blooper, but it was also a great ice
breaker for a live course. But yeah, any kind of bloopers like I also had one where I had set up my camera and I was talking to the camera
and it almost fell over, so I went to grab it and I actually ended up using
that in one of my reels, and it was kind of funny. So people love bloopers. Why? Because they show
that you're a real person. You're authentic,
you make mistakes. You're not perfect. We're
not on some Hollywood set. We don't have Oprah's team
of hairstylists I wish. And makeup people. Right? So you don't need to have a proper
Hollywood production. In fact, people will
connect with you more if you're relatable. Okay. This then
ties in with video, so a lot of people, especially when they're
new at social media, really run away from video. If you look at my older courses, you'll see that I actually don't do many of these talking videos. I really hated them so much. I might put a picture of
myself and a voice over. I tried to avoid the
camera at all costs. Now I feel more
comfortable with it, but people like
these face to face things and it's a great stand in for being able
to talk in person. Videos are important
because they're basically the next best thing
to sitting down with you in person or you giving
a live presentation. So there's you live and then there's your website with
like all your stuff on it. And the happy little
medium between that is a video of you talking
to your audience, connecting with people if
you make enough of those. And some entities
like art star fronts, they recommend you do one
live video a week minimum, or a few reels a
week on Instagram. This will help your audience
connect with you much faster than if you're never on camera,
then you're really shy. But that said, some
people are really shy. I know I've had to
overcome that as well. A couple of
alternatives to having your beautiful
face on camera is, and I do this a lot in my Instagram videos and
reels is I might just, I might be using my phone and I might be drawing and
I'll just every now and then I'll do like a little video of me working on something
and you just see my hands, so you don't have to
have your face in there. You can have your
hands. You could show something
you're working on, or I may show my sons running around playing
football on a Sunday. So you can decide, but this really helps people connect with you.
That's pretty much it. I'm going to also add some
resources to give you some ideas on what
to post for me. Two other things I do when
I don't know what to post, an inspiring quote
is another option. Sometimes I might post a link to an article
that's related. It might be about
some art opening in some museum somewhere or something going on
in Malawi or something going on with artists,
Whatever it is. Sometimes I might
post a cartoon. I don't do those as often, but just once in a while
when you don't know what to post and
if you're really stuck sometimes what
I do is I'll find a post that I made four months
ago that did really well. Just grab it and
I'll post it again. And I may or may not change the image or the text
or both, but yeah. So when in doubt, just grab
something from the past. It'll be a flashback Friday
or a throwback Thursday. All right. I hope
this is helpful and see you in the next lesson.
13. How to Use Images Online the Right Way (So You Don't Get in Trouble!): In this lesson, I just
wanted to give you a friendly neighborhood
reminder that obviously any images that
you post on social media, it is best practice that it's your own photo that you took, it's your own original artwork or it's from a
royalty free website. What is a royalty free website? There are loads of
them and you could also using an app or
a tool like Canva, or in video or other free places where you
are able to create content. They'll actually give
you an image library of royalty free content. Royalty free content are basically images that you
are allowed to use for free. So just to give an example, let's say I'm going to
use my son as an example. He has a report due on
apples of the world. He goes and does a Google
search for apples, and all of a sudden images of apples come up
from everywhere. He's got so many to choose from, he decides to use
one of those in his report and he presents
it to his teacher. Now you can do that if whatever it is that
you're presenting is only in an academic setting, it's only in a classroom. But if he wants to, for example, make artwork with that
apple photograph, change it in any way, or publish a book that has Apple
as an illustration. He cannot use that. Just
grabbing an image off of Google is not a
good thing to do. And it could even get you sued
or in trouble in some way. The very next best
thing to that, like having your cake
and eating it too, is go to a royalty
free image site and do a search and you'll be able to find images that you
can use for free. Usually, sometimes for
noncommercial use, sometimes for commercial use. I'm going to give you a
whole big list places that you can get free images. For example, if I needed
an image of a lion, I could go out into the bush
with my camera and a stake, and see if I can lure some lions over so I can get
their pictures. And then it's my own
original photograph. But chances are that's
very dangerous. And I should instead go to a royalty free image
site like the ones here. I'm giving you just
on the screen here, three of my favorite ones. Pexels.com is really great for all kinds of photos you
can search and they'll give you royalty free images that you can use for free and all of your projects without worry of copyright infringement. Pixabay is especially nice because not only does it
have all kinds of photos, but you can also search
illustrations and icons and graphics
and vector images, logos, things like that. So if you're looking
for that sort of thing, that's a really good option. And then I personally
have always loved gratisography.com
because the guy who runs that one
takes really funny, sort of unusual
whimsical pictures. So if you want
something that feels a little bit
different and silly, then you could go there as well. But like I said, you
could also go to Canva. And when you're searching for images to put
in your templates, they'll actually give
you within the app itself all the royalty
free images you can use. There are also paid
sites as well, like stock and a
bunch of other ones, but unless you're like a professional graphic
designer and you have no professional
photographer to work with and
you're in a pinch, I don't think you really need
those paid image services when you have so many
great free options. The other option, and
it's in my photo here, is you can make your own image. So when I was giving my talk at the British High Commission, I was trying to look for
images around the house, that I could take objects, but I was also looking
in Pixabay and Pexels for things that said
Malawi and the UK together. And I found some things, but they were really
generic and lame. I decided in the end to
just make a screenshot of the British High
Commission's website on my laptop, put it on my desk, and get some Malawian
Chtenji placements and baskets and you know, like beads and different things and just kind of
place it around. So I basically created my
own image from objects. So we're always
often so fixated on getting people people Mountain, mountain, mountain,
sunset, sunset, sunset. But you can also use objects, and for those of
you that are shy, also just about
appearing in pictures, this is great for you as well. So you could take a picture of your studio if you're an artist. And that could be a
kind of self portrait. Or sometimes when I'm
giving this course live, I'll ask a student
like dump out your bag and the objects in their
bag could be a portrait. So you can also create
those options as well. Basically, take a bunch of objects and that
could be your image. It would be original anyway. So try to think outside the box, even though the
expression thinking outside the box is not really
thinking outside the box. But I digress, just
try to be original. Try to think differently and just don't do what
everyone else is doing. All right? I hope
this was helpful, seeing the next lesson.
14. How to Use Effective Calls-to-Action to Get Better Results: In this lesson, I
just want to talk a little bit about
calls to action. These are just very
simple statements where you're telling the
people when you're posting, what it is that you
want them to do. It sounds weird
like who wants to be told what to do,
but believe it or not, they have a very strong
psychological effect on people and a typical
call to action. I'm just going to go
through some recent posts. So a couple of days ago I
had a sale on my website. And just simple stuff, right? Cyber Monday deals save 30%
nude new art, not nude art. That'd be a whole other
category ends tonight. Here's the link. And then here it just says
visit ends tonight. Visit, visit in this case
is the call to action. Let's try another one here. Okay, Sometimes I just put more because I'm not
trying to sell anything. But let's get a
better example here. Okay, so in this example, see more explore, visit now. But other calls to action
could be sign up or subscribe. Now if you want someone to
come to your mailing list, I'm going to look for
another example shop. These are the salesy posts
that come in November. And I actually am using
an art marketing calendar that has suggestions because I am not naturally this salesy. And I'm still
working on marrying the need for marketing with authentic wording
coming from me. All right, so in this example, I have a section on my
website called Made in Malawi where I work
with local businesses. And another call to action, Learn more, and then
there's the link. So a couple other call to
actions that you might use. Contact me, donate, sign up, it could be book, now book
an appointment, subscribe. So these are just little
action words that you can end your posts with
to kind of implant the idea of taking some sort of a call to action for
your fans and followers. And you don't
necessarily have to do this with every post,
but every now and then. It's good to have
on your website. It's good to have it in
your social media posts. And it's good to have
in your newsletter when you send out to your e
mail list. All right. I hope this was
helpful. Start using call to actions. See
what I did there.
15. Sanity Saver! Make Your Posts Go Further so You Don't Lose Your Mind: Welcome back. All
right, let's talk about how you can make your
content go further. Or use one thing that
you're posting about and make it stretch across
different platforms. Or even re, use
it again, months, weeks, years later and
give it a new life. Okay. So I'm showing you a
slide I grabbed when I was doing a talk on social media for the British High
Commission here in Malawi. And I just grabbed
a screenshot of one of their recent posts, which was on Facebook. And it was about a
visit that they made to Malawian coffee
and cocoa farmers. So my example then is if you visit a farm and you're
with an embassy, or with a British High
Commission, for example, you can share that as a post on your Facebook
page like they did. You can take that
same exact text and share it on Twitter. Instagram linked in
Pinterest, et cetera. Obviously, you are going
to change it for Twitter, which doesn't allow
as many characters. We'll talk about hashtags and another lesson, But in general, I tend to either don't put any hashtag content or
just put one to three, except on Instagram,
where at the time of this recording it's more popular that you
could do 15 hashtags. But anyway, don't
worry about that. So yeah, you have your post of the day, you
have some pictures, you have your text,
You have maybe three hash tags
and you post them. The other thing
that I like to do, so that's my post for the day. But maybe I'm also
getting ready to do my weekly newsletter
to my e mail list. In that case, what I learned, actually from art store fronts, and I kind of like this, and
I use this now all the time, is they recommend, oh, you don't know what to
do for your newsletter. A lot of people, they try to post everything that
they did in the month, but that's considered a no, No. You should only make a
newsletter about one thing and they recommend have a
look at the past posts, daily posts that you've
done for the week. And was there one post
in particular that got a lot of engagement
or reaction? If so, grab that one and repurpose that and make that
your newsletter content. So, for example, we could
take our visit with farmers from the
British High Commission and that could go in
our weekly newsletter. Hey, this week we
went and visited the cocoa plantation and
coffee plantations in Malawi. And we met with farmers, and here are their
stories, et cetera. Right, So that could
be your newsletter. I then tend to take
my weekly newsletter, and I don't do this more
than once or twice a month, but I'll grab a
newsletter that I think did particularly well grab the same content and in that could become a blog
post on my website. If I have a website that I am updating every week
or every month, that's also good for the search engine
optimization and Google, It shows that someone's home on my website and that things
are constantly being updated. So boom, sorry to say boom. I sound like a bro
marketer when I do that. But boom, you take
your daily post, you turn it into a newsletter, and then it could also become a blog post on your website. Then the next item here is, is there a way to
make this post, this one post with
the farmers visit, a real a story or
a Youtube video. So for example, I
could take still images and put those
together in a reel, put some music, a little text. And now I have a reel which
I can use on Instagram. Again, it's the same content. I'm not reinventing the
wheel, I'm just repurposing. And then with that reel, I can download that and
I can also share that as a story on Facebook or maybe put it as a short on Youtube. It's all about trying to get
everything to work together. Are you linking
between your website, newsletter, and social
media platforms? It is good that they're all
pointing to each other. All right. One thing that I do, especially on really busy
days when I'm teaching and I do not have time to
think about social media, I might go back into my old
posts from five months ago, find something that
did really well. A particular image or a photo. Could be my kids, could be an artwork and I'll
just repost it. And I may or may not even change the text If I'm doing
that with a real, I may use an old reel and then put new music and
new text in there. So it's totally up to you. But you know, like
we said before, most of your audience
is never going to see your content because the
social media channels, they want you to buy a boost. They want you to buy Facebook
ads or Instagram boosts so that it will reach more of your followers,
however many you have. So this is a nice way
to repurpose content. And if you're worried
about being repeat, nobody's going to call
you out and be like, hey, five months ago you posted this and I can't believe
you posted it again. Don't worry about that.
Nobody's going to do that. And if they do, who who?
They're a little weird. Okay. So just think about maybe re using something
that you used before. The other thing I recommend is can you make your
post interactive? So, for example, can you
ask people a question? For this particular example
for the UK High Commission, they might ask, hey, what kind
of chocolate do you like? You might give them a poll, Do you prefer dark chocolate, milk, chocolate, or
white chocolate? Or ask your followers
a question. So sometimes I'll have an artwork and I'll
know what it's about, but I won't know
what to name it. So as it's being
released into the world, I may ask my audience, hey, can you help me
name this artwork? If I choose your name, I'll send you a free print. And then that always gets
a lot of engagement. The more likes and comments
you get on your post, the more it's going to
organically reach your farmers. I almost said reach your
followers without you having to pay for a Facebook ad or an Instagram boost
to get it out there. If you can get a conversation going about your
post, that's amazing. If people do comment, make sure to thank them or
continue the conversation. That further boosts
your posts and gets it in front of more eyeballs and it goes out into the
world for free. Other ideas are, ask a question, start a poll, do an AB
comparison before and after. Like oh, look at this farm. Before we were using
organic fertilizer. Look at it now, something like
that. Get people talking. It makes your posts go further, it increases your visibility. Finally, niche focus.
This is a big one. This is like a
whole other lesson. But in this particular example, maybe the British
High Commission social media person
might want to join some Facebook groups that
either have to do with Malawi or pets in
Malawi from the UK, or farmers, agriculture
or chocolate or whatever. And you start posting
to these groups where a concentration
of the people that care about said
thing hang out. And all of a sudden
you're getting new eyeballs on your stuff. In my case, sometimes I go to a sacred geometry
Facebook group. I may have joined a few, and then every now and then I'll post a new sacred
geometry artwork. I'll be like, hey,
without a link, I'm not necessarily trying to
get people to buy anything, I'm trying to just
reach the people that care about that thing. And then I'll get a
bunch of people that like my artwork and I can also invite them
to like my page. So you want to make
sure you're doing this from your Facebook
business page, if that's the route
that you're going. Some options are finding Facebook groups
and joining them. You could also do this on Instagram by
searching hash tags, sacred geometry for example, or cocoa farmers in this case. And you can try to really look for those people who like
the thing that you do. All right? The other place
to do it is read it, which we haven't
really talked about. It's kind of a social
media platform, but it's more of
like a discussion forum where people hang out. But that's another really
tried and true method, especially recommended
by art store fronts. That you go read it, you join a couple of groups
related to your niche, you post in there. You're not trying to
promote yourself, but you're trying to
connect with those people. I hope this helps
you get some ideas on how you can
repurpose and reuse your content and make
it go further without reinventing the wheel
20 times a day. All right, thanks so much. See you in the next lesson.
16. Instagram Video Time: How to Make an Easy "No Talking" Reel in Minutes: All right, so I'm going to show you how to make a
quick and easy, real Instagram using
the Instagram editor, which is basic and buggy and sometimes it
crashes and is annoying. But I like it actually after all this time because
it's intuitive, It's quick, it's there, it's
pretty straightforward. And it's part of
Instagram, so you don't need to buy
anything, which is great. All right, so what I'm going
to do is I am going to click that little plus sign
and I'm going to make a reel. When I go in to make a reel, you see that Real is
already selected here. What I'm going to
do is I have pre recorded already
some little clips that I'm going to put
together in a real. If you've already shot
video on your phone, then you can grab something. I have some non talking videos. Usually what I do
when I'm drawing in my studio is I record myself with my left hand using the camera,
right hand drawing. Just to get a couple of seconds of where I'm at in any
particular drawing, I am going to just grab
a couple of quick clips. 123. I also afterwards set up my tripod and
took a few shots. I just basically hit record and then just looked
at the camera. So it was more than just my end. I'll pop one of
those in there and maybe go back to like
another stage of drawing. Maybe I think the
last one is this one. And then I'll end with
that other full body. So great, I'm going to hit it. Apologies. My audio was drowned out by the
music in this part. I just wanted to say
that you can choose your audio in the search, and if you see an upwards arrow, it means the sound is
trending and if you use that, your video is more
likely to go viral. I actually don't have
that option in Malawi, so don't worry. It's optional. It's basically put my
clips all together in a time line and then below that is my sound. This is great. What I'm going to do, I'm just spreading my fingers apart
here to make it bigger. Then I'm going to click
on the first one. And maybe I'll just
start it a little bit when I'm already drawing. I'm just going to click
on each of these. I'm going to click
on each of these, just to shorten
them a little bit because I don't need a
big long honking reel. I just want like
10 seconds or so, but I don't know. I think you can do
more than 30 seconds if you want to. It's up to you. This one is quite a long one. Make it shorter.
Same with this one. Oh, that's a really long one. I'm just going to shorten
that and bring it. Yeah, It's moving around on me. I'm drawing again and
then it ends with me, I know that I turn around and now you see the
back of my head, which I don't like, I'm
going to just cut that out. Make this nice. Sops,
that's too short. All right, great. So this is ready to now, I'm going to add some
text at the top here. Under text, I'm just
going to say Happy Bread. That's spelled wrong. Sure.
You don't have any typos. All right, And then I'm just
going to change the colors on that blue. Great. I'm going to drag that
where I want that to go. Make sure you follow the margin
so you don't accidentally have your stuff cut off.
Okay, that's great. If I go under edit video, you will see I have a text
layer now underneath my sound. Let's make it it doesn't
start right at the beginning. Let's maybe just
have it go like to about 4 seconds or
something like that. Great, then maybe I'll add a
little bit more text here. Click going to add Text. I'll just say work in progress. See caption, You can ask people a question at the start of your video
and then answer it, and that will create
engagement and multiple views. Or you can have some hook statement that gets people to
watch and then tell people to go to
the caption to get the answer or whatever
wisdom you're imparting. I'm not really worrying
about this too much, I'm just going to do that. Let's just put it
over here somewhere. Let me just check,
because I don't actually want this to take
up the whole video. I want it to be more towards the end, something like that. Okay, let me just move this just so it's not
covering up the stuff. All right, this is great, but it's adequate. That's it. I'm going to say next, I'm going to keep
the cover as it is, but you can go under edit cover. You can choose something. Great, we'll say done. Now you can add a caption. I'm just going to do a
simple one right now. This is a demo on how
to make an easy reel. I can edit that later. I'm just going to
keep that for now. Okay, I would put my link in, my hash tags or
view link in bio. So I'm going to say, okay, then I can add my location here. It asks me about topics. I usually put art
related topics. I'm going to do that
later. That's it. I can share this now
or I can save a draft. Let me share this now and then I'll edit it to make it nice for Instagram, but that's it. An easy way to make a Instagram video is by
making some quick clips. You don't have to talk, just put them together
in the timeline, add some sound, add some text. It's going to be annoying and difficult the first
time you do it, but as you practice, it will get easier and easier. I hope this was helpful. Alright, take care, bye.
17. Use ChatGPT and GenAI to Speed Up Your Process (*In a way that's not yucky!): Welcome back. In this lesson, I just want to
touch a little bit on how you might use chat GPT as a tool to help you
write your social media posts. For example. There's
a free version and there's a paid version. The one that I have the
example on is a paid version, but it works just as well. The free version works just
as well as the paid version, just that with this version
it's a little bit better at doing research online and
a couple of other things. But whatever version you use, you can just get a
test. Ai and Chat. Gpt kind of has a bad
reputation with artists because there's a lot of artificial intelligence
out there. Things that maybe
would have taken a digital artist two months can be done in about 2 minutes. Now that's not what
I'm showing you. I'm basically showing you, hey chat, GPT, I don't know. Write a inspiring linked in post about the importance
of making time every day or every other day for your own artistic practice
or to be creative. I know I could have said
that more eloquently. And look, I've got
typos and everything. Okay. Hit return O linked in
posts tend to be longer, more long winded, but I'm just reading what
it's writing here. It's actually looks pretty good. So chat GPT should not become a plagiarism
machine for you, but it can give you
some great ideas. Wow, okay. Because
I said linked in, it's giving a very
sort of business, wow. It's giving me a very businessy
post that I could use. It's giving me hash tags. It's telling me, it
says this post is designed to resonate with
a wide audience on linked. In highlighting
the importance of creativity in leadership and personal growth while aligning with the principles of
the United Nations. It aims to inspire, engage, and encourage sharing and
discussion among your network. Now we happen to do a lot of projects with
the United Nations, so this version of chat GPT already is familiar
with our questions, so that's why it had that
particular spin on it. The free version of
chat GPT wouldn't have gone that much in depth
if I want it to be like, hey, I don't care about the United Nations
for this example, you rewrite the same, but make it a short Facebook post for other
aspiring artists. Make it friendly and fun. Let's see how friendly
and fun AI can be. All right, so All right, so it's kind of came out with something a bit longer
than I was thinking. But yeah, it's basically,
it's more friendly. It's sort of like more casual, a lot more emojis. It's basically written in a way that you can
scan really easily. It's meant to be inspiring, it's friendly, it's casual. In this particular case,
I think it's too long. I kind of just had like
a couple of lines in mind so I could
say, this is great, can you make the same but
sum up in just a few lines. Let's see if I can do that, huh? Look at that. That was sort
of the length I had in mind. But anyway, again, I'm
not saying you should then copy exactly what
chat GPT gives you, but use it as a starting
point to give you ideas. You could copy it and then maybe change some words
around or, you know, add your own picture
or, you know, use it to help you
caption an image. It's just a great for
generating ideas. I'll show you a little secret. We'll go to my
website for a moment. I have multiple websites. I have my main website. I have my shop website
which is also linked here. Then I have a secret website which I use for applying
for grants and fellowships. That's simplified. This is the landing page. It has a little bit about my
work on artist statement, artist resume, portfolio, blog, there's contact and
everything else. But I just wanted to show
you when I was writing my artist statement
earlier this year. I wrote everything
myself. At one point. I did send it to Chat GPT just to see if you could
give me some suggestions. That's when I was using the
free one and it was horrible. I didn't like what it wrote. I think Chat GPT
sometimes uses words like explore the world of
Kristin Planas masterpieces. Envision a world
where, you know, like it's just really badly
written. It's not my voice. But there was one phrase, let me see if I can find
it In my first paragraph. My first paragraph, I wrote this myself but I don't
know if you can spot there's three words
that Chet GPT wrote for me that I love that I would have never
thought of on my own. So I draw the world
not as it is, but how I wish it could be. I use symbols, icons, and patterns with cross
cultural significance, combined with color
psychology to help soothe, heal and reinvigorate
weary idealists. Inspired by the lofty
mission statements and development goals used by the
world's top organizations, my images are a call to action to visualize better
outcomes for our lives, communities, and the planet. Okay, so the part
that was written by Chat GPT was this
call to action. My images are a call to action. I would have never thought to
actually use that phrasing. And so even though
Chat GPT wrote this big long winded
lame thing that I hated, there was that one little part in there that I was just like, oh that's it, that's it. So don't completely, pooh, pooh. The idea of chat GPT
or AI assisting you, again, it's just a tool and these tools are
constantly changing. But I don't know,
just give it a try. You can also use it to help you read through things that
you have already written. Like if I'm applying
for a grant, I'll say, hey chat GPT, Do you think
I answered their question? Here's the question,
here's what I wrote and then it'll
analyze for me. Or it can make a social
media post for me. Or watch this last thing. Give me an idea for a social media post
I can use today for art lovers that is
short and visual and goes well with
a colorful artwork. I don't know, I have no ideas. That's why I'm asking Chet
GPT embrace the spectrum. Every color tells a story. Here's a piece that celebrates the vibrant spectrum
of life and art. What emotions do the colors
in this work evoke for you? Again, it's not perfect, but it does help spark ideas. Just use Chet GPT like your trusty faithful
virtual assistant. I promise you if you let it read the stuff
that you wrote, it'll also compliment you
sometimes and tell you, wow, this is engaging,
compelling content. Good job. I would only suggest and then it'll give
you a suggestion. All right. I hope this is helpful and seeing
the next lesson.
18. Supercharge Your Impact: How Often to Post on Social Media: How's it going. All right, so let's talk a little bit about how often you should
post on social media. This is the part that
people agonize over, and I'm just going to
go to my screen here. So this is a part that
people really agonize over because either they post
almost never at all, maybe once a month, or they completely
neglect social media. Or they are posting too often or worried that
they're bothering people. So how often should I be posting on the different
social media platforms? That, of course, depends on you and where you and your
audience are hanging out. First of all, I don't want you to feel like you have to post to ten different places
every single day because that is really
not a good idea, especially if you're
trying to get yourself to be more consistent and
showing up, et cetera. So I recommend pick one, maybe two, maybe three, social media platforms that you're going to concentrate on. And I'm giving you
this best times to post on social media
from Social Pilot.com I got this a couple
of months ago and the reason I bring
that up is because the recommendations
are always changing. I don't want you to
really overthink this, just that I'm just going
to give you a couple of general guidelines and some I agree with, some I don't. So in general, it's recommending that it's different for
every social media platform. We'll start with Instagram. It's saying three to
seven times a week. If it's seven times a week,
that means once a day. If you already are
familiar with Instagram, you probably already
know that there are posts which are often just a picture or it
could be a video, and then you have stories which can be multiple
times a day. For Instagram, I recommend
if you can every day. A post or a real That's great. Or every couple of
times a week is fine. Stories are when you are posting just things that are happening but they
go away after a day. It's the same thing on
Facebook with stories, they're like
disappearing messages. The difference
between these things are that on Instagram, when you are doing a post, your followers might see it, or a small percentage of
your followers might see it. But when you send your post and make it a story so you can
reuse the same content, more of your followers
will see it. The thing about reels on Instagram is when
you make a real, it actually goes to people
who don't follow you. That's a great way to reach out and get these new followers and connections that are outside of your pool of people
already following you. Okay. So that's the rundown
on Instagram, for Facebook, I recommend if you are
trying to pick one platform to really focus on
and you're really new at this and it's maybe
very intimidating. I say go with Facebook
because that's really the one where everyone hangs out
for better or worse. I guess my kids might say the old people hang
out on Facebook. But you know what, I don't spend so much time on
Tiktok because that's not where people are necessarily looking
to buy art, right? Like 12 year olds, 14 year
olds and 16 year olds. However, if I happen to have a business that caters
to that demographic, then then I am going
to be on Tiktok. It's not even actually
in this list right now, but that's okay. And
who knows Tiktok? They're always threatening
to ban Tiktok. But let's talk about Facebook. I personally post on Facebook at least once
a day, sometimes twice. I recommend the same for you. If you're again
someone who's a bit overwhelmed and hasn't
been posting in forever, then maybe every couple
of days, at least weekly, just start small and see if you can slowly build up the habit.
I mean, that's the thing. This is really something that feels new and
scary right now. But as you get used to posting once a day or every
couple of days, it becomes habitual
and then you're not really thinking
about it so much. I'll show you in another lesson. Easy ways to post daily
and how to repurpose your content so you
don't feel like you're reinventing the wheel. And personally,
when I make a post, even if it's on
multiple platforms, it might be the same content.
Because here's the thing. A lot of people, they worry about posting
to social media, that they're going to
be bothering people, that it's going to be too much. But the sad truth is,
especially on Facebook, you may have 1,000 followers
or even 100 followers, but only 5% or less of your audience is ever going to see anything you post
on any given day. So if you post on
Facebook that day, but you take the same
content and also post it on Twitter,
on Instagram. If you have those channels, then you know more of your
audience are likely to see it. And it might be that
some of your audience hangs out on Linked in and another bit hangs out on Instagram and another bit
hangs out on Facebook. It's just a way of
trying to reach people. It's like if you're a store and you're having a
sale around Black Friday, you might have a
newspaper article. But then later you may also have a radio announcement and then you may have a
social media post. It's the same store is trying
to reach different parts of their audience in
different ways and they're more likely to
actually reach them. All right, so we
talked about Facebook. Facebook and Instagram. I personally try
to do once a day, sometimes more with, you know, Instagram doing a reel, and I also repurpose content. So if I've gone through the
trouble of making a real, I'm going to download
that reel from Instagram and I'm going to
make that my Facebook story. Or I might actually pop that on my Youtube
channel as a short, but we'll talk about that later. So for Twitter, if
you use Twitter X, they actually don't
even categorize themselves as a social
media platform. They are considering themselves to be almost like
a news platform. So Twitter has a much
shorter shelf life, and that's why you'll see it says one to five tweets a day. Actually, I have my biggest
following on Twitter, but oddly enough, I really
don't use Twitter that much. I actually schedule
my posts and they are basically repurposed content from my other
social media posts. I use a post planner, which is another lesson
that we'll get into. But I post twice
a day on Twitter, some people post ten
times a day on Twitter. It's up to you. Um, I find that it's a good place
to put my stuff, but I don't overthink it
and I don't worry about it. And then finally linked in. I didn't realize that people
post it to it so often, but yeah, one to
five times a day. I personally only
post on Linked in about two times a week minimum. Sometimes if I have
something going on I might post a
little bit more. That's my issue because I'm still transitioning
from Kristen Plana, the tenured academic professor
with a salaried job. To being location independent,
having an art business, doing these trainings that are coming from a more
independent place. So I feel like a lot
of employees hang out unlinked in a lot of my former bosses and former students. So I tend to post things
that are a little bit more professional because linked in is more of a
professional platform, so people even use it as
their resume or their CV or, you know, for
recommendations, et cetera. So you can at any
point do a search about the best time to post on the different
social media platforms. The recommendations are going
to constantly be changing. I'm just giving you
a recommendation and I'm telling you what I do. So if you really want
to dive into this, you should look on a daily basis and see what the
latest advice is. But for now, I recommend, if you want to simplify it, let's just make it once
a day and pick two, maybe three, social
media platforms. And use that same post on all 12 or three of those
platforms daily. And once you get in
the habit of that, it's going to get easier
and easier and easier. You're not going
to think about it. It's not going to feel
so much like a chore. You're going to
feel like, oh, I'm connecting with my people, my peeps that I've been actively trying to cultivate
and grow organically. People that love what
I do and they care, and I'm connecting with them and I'm building relationships. All right, I hope
that was helpful. Seeing the next lesson.
19. Maximize Your Visibility: The Best Days & Times to Post For Each Platform: Okay, so we've been talking a little bit about when to post. Let's talk about the
best times of day to post for you and your
audience. What works for you. So I'm going to show
you a whole bunch of recent research on
the best times to post on various social
media platforms. However, I don't want
you to become so obsessed with this that
it takes over your life. Because the truth is like
with the last lesson about how often to post and how the algorithms help
you or hurt you, this is constantly
changing as well, and the recommendations
are going to change. So if you want to know
the best time to post, you can do a Google search
or a chat GPT search right now on the latest research
for today's date. And you might get something totally different than what
I'm about to show you. However, there are some
general principles that you should keep in mind
for the best times to post. So I'm going to start
without further ado, I'm going to start
with Facebook. All right, so we mentioned
already that we're aiming to post on
Facebook once a day. Now I live in Africa. I live in Sub Saharan Africa. That's actually the
same time zone as Rome, Italy where I used to live. But that's still six, 7 hours ahead of North
America where most of my audience of art collectors and friends and supporters live. So it's important to
pay attention to where in the world are you and
where is your audience. If you're a local business and you and your audience
are in the same place, then you want to focus on that. If you're like me
and you live in a part of the world
and your audience is in a different
part of the world, you might want to then post in the time zone
of your audience, even if it's a
weirder time for you. So for example, what
does that even mean? Well, if I'm sending an e
mail to my newsletter list, one of the best times to
post an e mail is 10:00 A.M. on a weekday. So 10:00 A.M. in North America is
going to be four 05:00 P.M. for me in Malawi. So I schedule my post or my e mail to go out
at four 05:00 P.M. So that people in North America, in the east coast anyway, because then you
have all the other time zones in North America, but at least I know okay. People on the east coast
at 09:00 in the morning, they're going to get
my e mail delivered to their e mail box right when
they will be opening it. This is just an important
thing to think about. So in general, for Facebook, the best times to
post are Weekdays, usually the worst times to post. Mondays and Sundays are kind of considered less
good time to post, but still can be a good time to post because then you're not competing with so many people. But in general with Facebook, I tend to post things in the late morning before
people go to lunch. So 10:00 A.M. 11:00
A.M. et cetera, or when people are
coming back from lunch. 01:00 P.M. 02:00 P.M. These are good times to post. Generally, the worst time to
post across all platforms are like 03:00 in the morning
when people are sleeping. Yeah, so basically you want to try to catch people
when they're awake, especially if your audience lives in a particular
part of the world. So that's the general
recommendation for Facebook. One thing I wanted to
mention on Facebook, if you have a Facebook
business account or Instagram, et cetera, there'll be some
analytics that will show you when your target
audience is on there. So I did my own research
and it showed me that actually the most
active time for my audience. And again, it's not like I just have people
in North America, it's just that I have most of my audience in North America, but I also have a
bunch in Europe and Asia and Africa, et cetera. So I found my audience is
actually most active at 09:00 A.M. Eastern
Standard Time in the US. That means that 03:00 P.M.
in Malawi and Europe, people are also engaging. So I might then, with
that information, experiment a little bit and
post a little bit earlier. 09:00 A.M. is a little bit
earlier than the 10:00 A.M. I was going for in
the e mail example. So the best way to kind of test all of this out is
to just start posting. Don't overthink this,
but also keep an eye on certain days and
times and see if they perform better than others. So one day for example, for me I might want
to post at 09:00 A.M. But maybe another day might
be 09:30 A.M. 10:00 A.M. 11:00 A.M. And just
kind of see those go. All right. So that's
Facebook is Instagram. Instagram is very
similar to Facebook. The best times to
post are Weekdays, usually in the morning or before or right after
lunch in the afternoon. Saturday and Sunday are usually, weekends are a little
bit less popular, but I found some of my most
popular posts have been on a Sunday where I didn't feel pressure to really make
this art related post. So I'll just post, I
don't know, a video of, you know what's outside
my window like, oh, look at this bird, look
at this weird snail. Or look, my kids are
playing football right now. I hope you're having
a relaxing weekend, so sometimes you can
kind of use those less. Popular times to take a little
pressure off yourself and just post something that's more of a snapshot of your life. You know, materials
that you use. What's the weather
doing outside? Oh my gosh, it's snowing in
Malawi. Is it the apocalypse? Let me show you. So just
to give you some ideas. Okay. So Instagram is
very similar to Facebook. Now we go to Twitter, Twitter again, anytime
from 09:00 A.M. to 03:00 P.M. on
Monday and Friday. It says, I find that on all
the social media channels, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and
Thursdays are the most popular. Monday is a little bit less so because everyone's trying to get out from their mountain of work that had piled
up over the weekend. Fridays, people are
planning for the weekend, and weekends or weekends
you see worst time to post. It says weekends all day
and Mondays and Sundays. I recommend again on Twitter you could do if you're posting more than once
a day on Twitter, which you tend to do
because it's more posty. I tend to do one in the morning
and one in the afternoon, say around 02:00 P.M. 01:00
P.M. something like that. It says actually Wednesday,
five to 06:00 P.M. Very popular. All right. Moving on to Youtube. Youtube is a little bit
different because a lot of people are watching
their favorite shows at night after work. They're not really checking
Youtube during work. If you're watching
Youtube videos at work, then you're probably
going to get in trouble for Youtube if you
are posting a video. And honestly I
don't tend to make so much unique
content for Youtube. Actually may post a few
sample course lessons to Youtube that
are a bit longer. But I tend to grab my reels from Instagram and then repurpose
them as Youtube shorts. I don't really worry too much about when I'm
posting on Youtube, but if you are an
aspiring Youtuber like maybe my sons are, it is a good idea that if you
have new content to post, put it in there
around two to 04:00 P.M. Give the Youtube
algorithm a chance to pick up your content
and then push it out to their audiences when they're actually coming on
at 06:00 P.M. seven, 08:00 P.M. 09:10 P.M. at night. Okay. So that's the
recommendation for Youtube. Again, these recommendations
are always changing. But as of right now, this is what should
be done. Tiktok. Tiktok, I sadly don't
use so much, but again, a good weekday sort of platform, and it looks like limited
times on Saturday and Sunday are also quite popular for
all of these platforms. Try to avoid the hours
when people are sleeping. 04:00 A.M. 01:00 A.M. And try to focus on either
the early morning, it looks like for
Tiktok it's more like before work or the
hours right before work. Or you could do something
like right after lunch one to 02:00 P.M. or
03:00 P.M. for Linkton, Linckton's a little
bit different because most people are at work. So, the worst time to
post Mondays and Sundays. Best time to post actually Mondays and Fridays
and Tuesdays mornings right before people go
to lunch or right when people are leaving lunch
or coming back from lunch. Linkton is a little
bit more socially acceptable that people might be using at work just
to kind of check in. Or they might be
secretly looking for a better job and they don't
want their boss to know. But at least you linked in. Looks better than
Facebook or Instagram. If your boss happens
to be walking by. And then Pinterest is kind of interesting because
it's sort of like a weekenders social
media platform we talked about in
an earlier lesson. It's a lot of like do it
yourselfers and people planning parties and trying
to do special projects. It's a very female
dominated platform. Older over the age of 35, maybe like in the
40 to 60 range. So this is a great time to
post on Pinterest would be on weekends in the
afternoon or in the morning. Worst time to post would be weekdays during
working hours. A little bit about when the
best times to post are. Again, I don't want you
to become paralyzed with trying to get so much data on the very best times to post. The more important thing is
that you are posting at all. Any time with time, you'll kind of get
into the rhythm. You'll kind of see like, oh, that post performed
particularly well on that platform at that time, and then you can kind
of build from there. So don't worry about
this too much. Just something for
you to be aware of that people do
obsess over it. But again, it's just
more important that you do post and try to
post frequently. If that's every day
or every other day, that is what you're aiming for. All right, I hope
this was helpful. I will see you in
the next lesson.
20. Daily Social Media Sanity-Saving Tips! -How to Best Focus Your Own Time: How's it going. All
right, in this lesson, I'm going to share a
neat little graphic that I use daily and has
made such a difference in the past year in terms
of my own art practice and my art business and how
I focus my limited time. So I'm going to take
you to my display here. So basically I'm going to
focus on the question, where do I focus
my limited time? Now this graphic comes
from John Lechner. He's a photographer
in Australia and he also runs several art businesses that are very successful. He's been my mentor, one of my mentors for the
last year and a half. And this is his graphic, so I take no credit
for his graphic, but I'm sharing it with you because he has some
free resources online, which I'll put in the
resources section. But also I found this to be so incredibly helpful and
it's just really simple. Sometimes the most
powerful actions you can take are also
the most simple. He's made this little
where to focus, your limited time graphic. It specifically targets artists. However, I also have
shown this graphic to business owners and
individuals and non profits. It doesn't really
matter, to be honest. But the only thing
about this graphic, it's kind of like the opposite. If you're an American
and you're used to the USA food pyramid, usually they put the thing on the top that you're
supposed to do the least. And the thing on
the bottom is what you're supposed to
do the most of like, I think it's greens and cereals, and then on the top is
like lollipops and candy. Just ignore that and invert it, and that's how we
can get started. In John's graphic here, he's saying, the
most important thing you should do when
you're an artist, and maybe you've finished working in your studio
and now you're turning your attention to your art
business for the day or your marketing efforts or
whatever industry you're in. The number one thing you
should do before you do anything else and should be your top priority is reply to any e mails that
you may have gotten. Either from someone commenting on something like
your newsletter, maybe somebody responded, or
maybe someone's inquiring about your hours or a product
or how to buy something. So that should be your
number one priority. Replying to any E mails
that come your way. Number two, and
if you don't have a mailing list yet,
then that's okay. But the next most
important thing is to prioritize writing and sending a weekly E mail
to your audience. In Malawi and in Myanmar. Actually where
I've lived before, most businesses don't
really have a mailing list. They'll have a Whatsapp
broadcast list. So it depends where
you are in the world. But I find that the
Whatsapp broadcast list almost serves the purpose
of the mailing list, in that you've got a bunch
of people's phone numbers. You're sending them a
week, hopefully not daily, hopefully not hourly message, just to engage with
your audience. I have recommended,
even for businesses in Malawi that have their Whatsapp
broadcast message list, that they also start
a mailing list. If you don't have one
yet, that's okay. But if you do have one, try to get in the
habit of sending a weekly E mail to the
people who follow you. And if that seems like
too much to start, then just start
with once a month, bi weekly, until it
becomes a habit. And then you'll actually
believe it or not, enjoy making them and
sending them out and then hearing back
from your followers. So that's the first two things. The next most important
thing according to John's list is scheduling
daily Facebook posts. He in particular prefers
Facebook to Instagram. Other entities that I
work with are much more into Instagram than Facebook. It really depends on
you and your audience, where your audience hangs out. If I were trying to engage with 12 year olds, I
should be on Tiktok. If I want to engage
with, I don't know, women ages 35 plus, who are doing some kind of do it yourself project or a big event. Then I would go to Pinterest. My husband, for example, he is with a big
UN organization. He's on linked in.
So it just depends. But for me and for John, Facebook is kind of like
where most of the magic happens in second place, distant second
place is Instagram. So making sure that you're
posting at least once a day and you're not always
selling to your audience. That's a no, no. You want to be building
relationships, telling stories. I know we talk about what
to post in another lesson, so I won't get into
that too deeply here. Okay, so you have
replied to any e mails. You've started planning
your weekly newsletter. You've done your
daily Facebook post, or you've scheduled it. So the next thing you
can do down on the list here is scheduling
other social posts. If you also use Twitter, X linked in Pinterest, Youtube, whatever
it is, Instagram. I usually prioritize
Instagram next. The Twitter then linked
in everything else. Pinterest, I have, but I don't post to as often
as the other ones. Linked in, only post
maybe twice a week. Youtube maybe like once
every once in a while. But anyway, we'll talk
about those later. So if you have Instagram, you want to make sure
that you're also posting daily or every
couple of days, finally. And this is the one that
sometimes people get sucked in and they end up
spending way too much time on. And then it is replying to
social comments from fans. So if you are on Facebook and
you've posted an artwork, for example, if you are an
artist and someone says, wow, I love that,
that is so beautiful. I would love to have
that right now. You can reply. Thanks so much. I'm so glad it
resonates with you. It's also available
link to your website. If the links not already there don't constantly be
selling in your posts. That should be like
maybe 5% of the time, 95% of the time should be
building relationships. But just be careful, you don't get sucked
into, you know, if one of your reels, for
example, on Instagram, goes viral and you get
like 1,000 comments, you're going to spend like
the whole day just replying. Try to keep it simple like thanks or like an
emoji or something. But every time that
you comment on those, on their comments,
it actually boosts your engagement in the
social media algorithms. So if it's Facebook
or Instagram, every time you like
someone's comment, and preferably with a heart or a wow as opposed to
just a thumbs up. Thumbs up is okay, but the stronger emotions
actually help the social media
algorithms and push your content out further so
that more people will see it. And just make sure
to always comment, even if it's just an emoji, Even if it's just thank you, even if you're being redundant. But if you can keep the
conversation going like, oh, thank you, what
did you like about it? Ask them a question and then they're going to have
to reply to you. And again, social media algorithms love keeping
the conversation going. It then pushes your content
out to even more people that otherwise wouldn't have
seen your content, okay? And then finally he says doing other shiny
marketing stuff. So shiny marketing stuff according to John
Lechner of Australia, whose amazing is like that new fancy thing
that you heard about for artists, it
could be like, oh, I'm going to finally
experiment with NFT's or I'm going to
play around with AI, or I don't know, my
cousins, brothers, sisters, girlfriends, cats, dog recommends,
and then little B. So you can do that, but don't do it unless you've
done all the other things. And if you do it, just pick one shiny new thing
to experiment, experiment with it, and then either continue or move
on to something else. So this is something that
I've found personally, really helpful for
me, especially in the last year and a half. And I love to share it. And as I share it, all credit goes to John Lechner. And I will also put some resources where you might follow him
on social media. He has a lot of free tips
especially for artists, but useful for anyone. All right, thanks so much. I will see you in
the next lesson.
21. How to Use a Post Planner (An Overview & Case Study) "I Want to Go on Vacation!": All right. You made it this far. So let's talk a little bit
about making your life easier by using a tool that can sort of step in
on your behalf and post for you when you are
taking a vacation, when you're sleeping,
when you just need a digital detox and you want to take a break
from social media, what am I talking about? A post planner. And there are many free and
paid tools that you can use. I happen to use buffer. They got me with a free
trial a few years ago. I think they got me with one of their features that
then they monetized. I am actually on a
paid plan with them, but I'm happy with
them, so it's all good. But there are still free
versions of buffer. There's Hoot Suite is
another popular one. Facebook has a free post planner that works with
Facebook and Instagram, at least at the time
of this recording, so you might want to
look into that one. And I have a friend acquaintance who's also a wonderful course
creator and she's created her own company called
Tech Madic and that also has a post planner built in along with all kinds of other
tools that you might use if you are running an
online business or doing online courses, et cetera, et cetera. So I will give you a bunch
of resources to check out. But meanwhile, let me just show you enough
about the details. Let me just show you what is post planner and how does it
make your life more awesome. All right, so let's
go to my buffer. So what I'm showing
you in buffer, just be aware that
what I'm doing is available in other
kinds of post planners. And maybe as I'm
recording this video, a new post planning app or whatever tool is being
invented right now. So you should always
just do a bit of a Google search just to see
what the latest tools are. Something free, something new. But in any case, they all
kind of do the same thing. So I'm just going to
show you with mine, so I'm going to log in. You can see, all right, so basically what it does, it's taking me to
the dashboard area. And if you look on the left, you can see all the
different fricking things, so many channels and platforms that I have hooked
up to my post planner. So if you are a beginner or you just want to
really learn a lot more about social media before having 20,000 platforms on the mix, I recommend just do
Facebook, maybe Instagram, maybe Twitter, but no
more than three if you can or linked in wherever
your people hang out. Okay, but you see I
have more than three. So I'm just going to
point at them here. I have my Facebook page, which is my business page. My creativity is contagious. Private group and a lot of my online students from my
creativity course are in here. But also other artists and creatives and people
who don't think that creative are all in there. It's just a place to
share work and be like, look, here's an inspiring quote. Look, here's a cool article, Look, here's a sketch I made. Yeah, actually you should
join if you want to. I have my Pinterest, which I don't use that
often, but it is there. You see that I have nothing
scheduled in it right now. So you see for my Facebook page, I've got 12 things scheduled. My group, I've got
21 things scheduled. These all don't go
out in one day. This is over time.
You can set this up. Twitter I have as well. I've got my linked in,
I've got my Instagram, which I usually do manually, but sometimes I do schedule
a post through Instagram. And then I have a
group for As House, which is my archived
crowdfunding website, which I was using well before all the crowdfunding tools
came into existence. And I still do
crowdfunding projects, but now I use more modern tools. But that's sort of like an
archive of past projects, A lot of money raised anyway for good causes. Those
are my channels. And at the moment
you see I've got my Facebook business
page selected and it's just showing me what I already have scheduled to go. I have something for my art mentorship group with Mastrias. You should also join if you're an emerging artist and you need a little bit of
help and guidance. But anyway, that's in here. Below that, I have
just a artwork when I don't know what to post. When I'm looking
for things to post, I usually go through my
catalogue of different images. And I'll just talk a little
bit about the piece, what it means, and I'll just
kind of pop it in there. It looks like I didn't mean to have two things
scheduled for tomorrow, but sometimes that happens. You'll see that if you
make a mistake like that, you can just edit it. And over here I can schedule this to go
further into the future, maybe sometime in December. Then I can hit Save. Now you see it's gone. I've just got something else
scheduled for tomorrow. These are just some images and I've only got the
next couple of days covered every now and then if I'm about to go on
vacation or something, I'll just pop in here, I'll schedule all my
things and then I can have a vacation and
not worry about it. Or if I'm on vacation and something spontaneous
happens that I do want to post about, I can do that in addition to the things I've
already planned. So it's a really nice way, you can even get
that balance between preplanned and
spontaneous or timely. If something happens,
you see how easy it is for me to
move stuff around. So, I have a couple of
prescheduled things in here. Some things we're
going into December. You'll see that the times in here are already been
pre planned by me. This is me doing research on the best times to
post for my audience. So that's my Facebook. I mentioned in an earlier
lesson that on Twitter X, I post twice a day. For most of my social media
channels, I post once a day. I think for Linked in I
only post twice a week. So, you know, like on a Monday and a
Wednesday, for example. You can decide how often and
at what times you want to post. Here's my Twitter. And you see for today I have a talk that I did for Mastrius, about social media for artists. That is now a free Youtube
video that is also available on my Twitter today at 09:31 A.M.
Eastern Standard Time. Then I have another
image from my catalog, the Sankofa Bird, which is
going to go out at 03:00 P.M. Eastern Standard Time. That's pretty much how it works. So these are the things
I've already scheduled. But if you're new
to post planning, you probably want
to know, well, how do I schedule something? All right? I hope
this is helpful and I will see you in the
next lesson. Bye.
22. Automate! Schedule Posts With a Post Planner for Multiple Social Media Channels: These are the things
I've already scheduled. But if you're new to post planning, you
probably want to know, well, how do I schedule
something, What you do? I always usually start
with my Facebook and I'll just click the
Create Post button. And I don't know, I'm just
going to grab an image. All right, I'm going to go
with this image that I have of my Chakra series
that I made in N V, which allows you to visualize images one or many in a space. I have put that in there. Okay, so there's my image. I could actually also put the individual images because
I'm doing a quick lesson. I'm not going to spend the
time to do that right now. But anyway, this is the
image and what I'll do is I'll just go to my
website, Macalulu Studio. That's where I sell my
art prints and my gifts. I do have a section called Special Offers that
goes with this image, and these are just
special deals. This is one of the higher end ones because
each of these metal prints, if you buy them separately, they're about like $100 each. There's actually value to getting them all
in bulk like this. I just set up this set of seven metal prints that can be arranged
however you want. And I think I have yeah, small, medium, and large. Anyway, at least I
have the link, right? So I'm going to grab
the link and I'm going to pop it in here. Usually I start
with the textbook, I'll just start with the link, see more, and then I'll
put the link in there, and it's going to automatically
shorten it for me. Isn't that nice?
Theoretically, I could, because now it's
seeing the link. I could also pop in some
other incarnations of this. Maybe I'll do like one close up and maybe
like one inside, one outside,
something like that. And then you get a little
preview over here. That's great. Let's see, let's do it like, let's
do like one vertical. One horizontal. Oh yeah,
that's nice, love. All right, so I'm just
going to grab some of my own text and copy it. And then I'm going to paste it in here just to make my post. Okay, there's that, right. And then I'll just put a
couple of hashtags in here. Shara art, wall art gift, I don't know, meditation
because that goes with that. Okay. I've got my hash tags, I've got my image,
I've got my text. Yeah, everything is
all set up here. Great. What I'm going to do
before I add it to the E is I'm going to take
this same post and I'll turn it on in Twitter. Maybe I'll do
linked in for once. I almost never do linked in. I don't think I have this
image in my Instagram either. Just to show you,
it's as easy as turning on the
different channels. But now what I have to do is click on each
channel for Twitter. I have way too much text. I'm going to just get rid of a sentence and see if that
does the trick. All right. I'm just trying to make it
so that my hash tag show up. Okay, great. So now
Twitter is okay. I'm going to click on Instagram. There's some subtle differences
between each of these. Here's Instagram. The only
major difference with Instagram is you can
have more hash tags. Artists on Graham Spiritual. I think I spelled it wrong,
didn't I? Spiritual Art. Okay. Artist Sara healing yoga. Just because people who like yoga might actually like
this particular art, I'm also just trying to think about the people that
I'm trying to attract to this met made in Malawi, sometimes works pretty well. Did I do gift gift
idea is always a good one idea,
recharge whatever. I'm just throwing in a couple of more hash tags
just for Instagram, for all the other
social media platforms, three is usually fine, Some people don't even use
them at all for Facebook. Okay, wait a minute. It says to post images
with an aspect ratio. Okay. So it doesn't like one
of my images I have to see. I don't remember which of
these is very vertical. It could even be this
one. Is it this one? Let's see, does the
message go away? All right, I'm going to
maybe get rid of that. I wonder if it'll let me see. I think this one should be okay. This one. This one. Okay. Hopefully it'll go away when I go to edit to the cue and then finally linked in,
everything is fine here. All right, so here where
it says add to Q, hang on. I'm just going to
make this smaller just so you can see
what happens here. So when I go to
edit to the queue, it gives me three options Share. Now immediately
it'll go to all of my channels all at the
same time instantaneously. But since most of
my audience is fast asleep right now
in North America, I am not going to
do that share next, it goes to the front
of the que wherever the next scheduled post
is supposed to go out. Or I can pick a specific day. I could say January 21 at
09:00 A.M. Da, Da, da, da. So you decide I'm
going to do share next and it's thinking about it. La. La. All right. That's great. So that's been
scheduled and it's going to be if I go
to my Instagram, say I only have the one for
today in Instagram linked in, I also it's going
to go out tomorrow. And I had something else
scheduled for tomorrow. So I'm just going to move
that to another week anyway. There we go. So I'm not going to go through
all of them right now. The last thing I want to share with you is just
about scheduling. Picking the days and times. Okay? I showed you how to do it, how to make a new post, to
use multiple platforms. Whatever tool you're using is going to have its own dashboard, but they all pretty
much work the same for mine. For buffer. I'm just going to show you, here's my Facebook page again. When I actually moved that
to the front of the queue, it put two things for tomorrow. I could maybe
reschedule this one. I'll just tell it to show
up sometime in December. My rhino, Great. Sometimes you just need
to keep an eye on that. But anyway, I'm going to go to settings and there's a couple
of things in my settings. I really like this
feature of buffer, which is shuffle que. I'm not going to
press it right now, but if you are
scheduling things all on the same day in
different platforms, it's a good idea to go
in and shuffle the cue. You know, it appears that
you have some variety. And if somebody
does happen to see your post on two
different platforms, at least they'll be seeing
something different. But I wouldn't really
worry about it. It's just I'm a virgo, I'm a little bit of
a perfectionist, so I like mixing them
up a little bit. So these are the
general settings. There are other things as well, but I tend to use the
shuffle cue the most. The other thing that I use
is the posting schedule. So here you can see how I
have everything set up. I have it right now set to
post seven days a week. So my Monday,
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday,
and Sunday are all on. And these are the times
that I've selected based on my research and
current best practices and what my audience is doing. But if I wanted to, for example, add another day, let's say I want to add another
day to Wednesday. Wednesday is a popular day, I'm going to add
another Wednesday. Right now I have
Wednesdays one 02:00 P.M. Maybe I'll do an AM. Let's do 09:30 A.M. add
posting time. Okay. Now I've got two slots for my Wednesdays. That's
how easy it is. And you can go into each of your platforms once you've
hooked them all up, and you can create
days and times, you can make some
platforms more frequent, others just once in a while
like I do with my linked in some of them I pretty much just do manually
like Pinterest. But I like having it in my buffer in case I do
want to schedule a post. It just, yeah, it makes your life a lot easier.
I will say this though. People not familiar with post planners might
start to think, and this is a side effect
that you are super human. I had one of my colleagues at the American
University of Rome, who does marketing come up to me a few years
ago and she said, my gosh, how are you able to
post in so many different? Because she's following me on
these different platforms. I basically was on vacation and I was flying
over the Atlantic. And so I got back
to her and I said, oh, that's my post planner. I am not super human
and neither are you. But with a post planner
and scheduling, it definitely makes
your life easier. And yeah, you can
actually then spend 1 hour a month and plan
the whole month and then, you know, you can
focus on other things. I'm a big fan of getting this stuff out of the way so I can do
things that are more fun. All right? I hope
this is helpful and I will see you
in the next lesson. Bye.
23. How to Deal With Trolls (Like a Boss) on Social Media: Hey, welcome back. All right, and this lesson I just want
to talk a little bit about the best ways to respond to people who
comment on your post. 99% of the time, thankfully, you're going to get positive
feedback on your stuff, but once in a while you're
going to get a jerk. They may say something that has nothing to do
with what you posted, just trying to start a fight. They may say
something provoking. They may say something
that's totally not true. I often get this question, so I just want to
tell you a couple of ways that you
can deal with it. Okay? So I'm just showing you
a recent post that I made. This was another thing that
you can do when you're trying to think of what to post
called the humble brag. And that's when you get
an award of some kind or selected for an
exhibition or something, went well, or even somebody bought something
and you have like a quote from that person. Those are really great things to post on social media because people like to know
that you're doing well with other people as well. Yeah. You could put
items that sold, you could put shows
that you got into. I have something here
with a drawing of mine. It says, a big thanks
to Fusion Arts for selecting me
as a finalist in their sixth annual Women
Artists Exhibition 2023 with my mixed media drawing, Unity Earth Dance Meditation, Visit the exhibition
up through December. And then I have a
link, and then I have my three hash tags, and this is not
even 24 hours old. And I've got 55 people to click and say they liked
or loved, which is great. I don't see any anger
symbols or sad faces. Just FYI, for your information, when people click on your posts and they click
a thumbs up or a heart, or a care, or a wow. Those more intense emotions will actually push your post out further so that more of
your audience will see it. That's why you may have noticed. When I respond to the
people who commented, I almost always respond
with a heart or a wow or something rather than
just a thumbs up because that actually pushes
the engagement further. So you may not have control over how people
respond to your stuff, but you can control how
you respond to them. Okay, So I recommend when
anybody comments on your posts, you should like their post, but preferably love their post if it's industry appropriate. If you're like, I don't know, a politician or a bank, maybe a heart would be
a little bit too cute. But in any case, just
to go with the flow. And then you should also reply. If you can't really
think of what to say, you could just say
thank. That's it. If you've said thanks too much, you could just put
like a smiley face. But whenever possible,
if you can try to engage people into commenting further, that's even better. For example, I could have said, I just put thanks so much
because I think I was tired. But thank so much, I'm so glad this
resonates with you. Do you like other art works with lots of color and pattern in them or
something like that? You could just ask a
question, whatever it is, but just try to get
them to respond to you because then that keeps
the conversation going. And that then gives you more
free engagement without having to pay for a Facebook
ad or an Instagram boost. It's also why on
Youtube, for example, you may notice a lot of
arguments in the comments. A lot of that is the
person who actually posted the video will have
some fake account somewhere. And they'll start
an argument and goad people into fighting. Because they realize
the more people fighting on their video, the more controversial
and negative it is, the more money they're
going to make. So try to use your social media superpowers
for good and not for evil. If you can, we have enough negativity in the
world, don't you think? But speaking of
negative, so sometimes, so you can control how positive or negative you
are, but you can't control. Somebody might come
in with a comment. Thankfully, no one has yet. It's mostly just
congratulations. Yeah. But once in a while, I'll get something like
this, artwork sucks. This is the worst artwork
I've ever seen or whatever. Something really nasty. Now, I recommend always take
the high road if you can, so there's a couple
things you can do it if you're a business, for example, and let's say, I don't know, like a customer
is upset because they came to your shop and it was closed when the sign said it
was going to be open. You should definitely respond
to that in a polite way, apologetic, and offer
to make it right, like, oh, I'm so sorry
that happened to you. We had a family emergency. Please come back in the next
week and tell them Kristin sent you and you'll get 10% off on your next
coffee or whatever. Okay. So you want to
try to adopt this. Customer is always
right attitude. If they are blatantly being
abusive or insulting, if they are calling
you names or they're just being jerks on your post, you can delete that post. You can ignore that post. You can block that user so they can never come
to your page again. Your social media page is yours. So you have some
administrative privileges which you don't always
get in real life. If someone flips you a birdie
in traffic or something, you can't just block that
person from your life like you can on social media.
So take advantage of it. The only downside to
that is I don't know. Let's say some of your
people in the post are arguing with each other and maybe you remove
unoffensive post. The person may then
come back and be like, hey, they're censoring me. I was complaining about this and they didn't
want you to see it. And so you have to just be a little bit
careful about that. You could just then
block them and delete that one too,
and you ain't gone. But you know, it's
something you have to just kind of see on a
case by case basis. What is the
appropriate response? I recommend always
be professional, even if you're
personally feel hurt, insulted, aggrieved, you don't necessarily
have to show that. Try to take the high road. Try to think about
like what would a really professional,
respectable business do? And you could also look to other businesses as role models that you think handle
these things pretty well. All right. I hope
this was helpful. May you always have
positive comments and good vibes coming your way,
see in the next lesson.
24. Thank You for Taking This Course & Continuing Your Social Media Journey: Hey, did you make it this far? Congratulations, I hope
that social media, and having an online presence
as a creative person, as an artist or a
business owner, or even if you think
you're not creative. I hope that things are much more easy now for you moving forward. I hope that you have a better
sense of what to post, to whom you're posting, where to post, how often,
all of that good stuff. And I hope it's more fun
and simple and clear. If you have any questions
about anything, please do. Let me know. I love to help. If you have ideas for future lessons or new
courses, just let me know. If you could take
a moment and leave a review for the course. That would be so amazing
because that would help others learn if this might
be a good course for them. Finally, I loved helping
you in this course, but this is just a tiny, tiny pocket of things that I talk about and help people
with all around the world. If you want to work with me either in a mentorship
group or live, or in a one on one
session where I can help you specifically
with your website, your social media, your art, your business, Then you should definitely get in touch because those are also services that I offer when I have
the availability. I would love to connect
with you further. I just want to
thank you for being a student in our
online classroom. I hope I will see you again
soon in some shape or form. That's all for now. Have a
wonderful day and good luck. Take care. See you next time. Bye bye.