Boost Your Social Media Impact: For Artists & Idealists | Kristen Palana | Skillshare
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Boost Your Social Media Impact: For Artists & Idealists

teacher avatar Kristen Palana, Artist | Nomad Professor | UN Consultant

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction: Get Ready to Boost Your Brand Organically With Social Media

      2:29

    • 2.

      Simple Ways to Go From Zero to 5000+ Engaged Followers and Fans - My Story

      5:17

    • 3.

      Easily Add Engaged New Page Fans: Let's Start With a Quick & Simple Facebook Win

      3:37

    • 4.

      Make Social Media Work For You Together with Your Website and Mailing List

      7:10

    • 5.

      Get Solid on Your Mission & Who You Help- So You Can Attract the Right Audience

      9:09

    • 6.

      Who Are Your Ideal People Really? Getting to Know Your Target Audience(s) Better

      7:04

    • 7.

      Attract High-Quality Followers. Mindset Matters and Glorious Goals.

      6:46

    • 8.

      Instagram Booster: Attracting More Engaged, High-Quality Followers Organically

      8:35

    • 9.

      Instagram Booster Part 2: How to Get Your Ideal Audience to Come Right to You

      10:28

    • 10.

      Facebook Magic: Attract Your Ideal Followers with a More Optimized Page

      5:14

    • 11.

      Facebook Niche Bonus Tip: Find Your Audience and Gain More Quality Followers

      3:26

    • 12.

      Make Your Audience Fall in Love With You. What to Post + Content That Resonates

      7:15

    • 13.

      How to Use Images Online the Right Way (So You Don't Get in Trouble!)

      5:16

    • 14.

      How to Use Effective Calls-to-Action to Get Better Results

      2:34

    • 15.

      Sanity Saver! Make Your Posts Go Further so You Don't Lose Your Mind

      8:32

    • 16.

      Instagram Video Time: How to Make an Easy "No Talking" Reel in Minutes

      6:35

    • 17.

      Use ChatGPT and GenAI to Speed Up Your Process (*In a way that's not yucky!)

      8:20

    • 18.

      Supercharge Your Impact: How Often to Post on Social Media

      8:15

    • 19.

      Maximize Your Visibility: The Best Days & Times to Post For Each Platform

      9:54

    • 20.

      Daily Social Media Sanity-Saving Tips! -How to Best Focus Your Own Time

      8:46

    • 21.

      How to Use a Post Planner (An Overview & Case Study) "I Want to Go on Vacation!"

      7:02

    • 22.

      Automate! Schedule Posts With a Post Planner for Multiple Social Media Channels

      10:44

    • 23.

      How to Deal With Trolls (Like a Boss) on Social Media

      6:50

    • 24.

      Thank You for Taking This Course & Continuing Your Social Media Journey

      1:42

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About This Class

Do you hate social media and wish you didn't even have to bother with it? Does posting to social media take up too much of your time and leave you feeling UNSEEN and unheard?

If you are an artist, creative, educator, coach, author, wellness professional, or a small business owner looking to connect with your ideal audience, showcase yourself and your work meaningfully, and build relationships that will also boost your brand and bank balance, then you are in the right place.

Allow me to take you by the hand and help you transform your social media from an intimidating daily chore to a dynamic, community-building tool. Reach your core audience and get them excited about your heart-centered business, brand, or service and build relationships with your fans, followers, and future customers the quick and easy way.

What Current Students Are Saying:

Hear directly from students who've transformed their social media presence with this course:

"I've taken several of Kristen's courses and have enjoyed them all; she has such a knack for taking complex or in-depth subject matter and breaking it into little hacks so her students can use the information immediately. For instance, among other things, I learned that I need to fix my LinkedIn profile STAT! Thanks Kristen - I'm on it!"
-Deborah W
--

"I've taken many of Kristen's courses and she is such an AMAZING teacher. I've been struggling for years to try and understand how to succeed with social media by myself and have been left confused and frustrated. Somehow Kristen seems to know exactly what her students need and delivers it in a smooth, comforting voice that fills them with confidence and leads them to success. Learning doesn't get any better than this."
-Gidget H.
--

"I love Kristen's totally nonthreatening, but simultaneously very encouraging, style of presentation and the clarity with which she presents the aims of the course. I feel as if I am sitting right there with you, Kristen!"

-Silke H.

--

This easy-to-follow course is perfect for beginners, tech-shy creatives, or anyone looking to make more of an impact online even if you have limited tech skills, time, or budget.

You will discover how to:

  • Transform your social media presence into a vibrant community where your brand thrives.

  • Choose and utilize the best platforms to resonate with your brand.

  • Destroy your social media fears.

  • Gain confidence online so you can shine as your beautiful, authentic self.

  • Craft engaging content and schedule it for maximum impact.

  • Foster a vibrant community and communicate effectively with your audience.

  • Learn organic yet powerful long-term strategies to grow your audience, build solid relationships, and eventually convert fans into customers.

  • Explore Generative AI Tools to speed up your workflow and help spark new ideas, get useful feedback, and conduct social media research.

Imagine effortlessly connecting with your ideal audience, turning followers into fans, and fans into customers, all while expressing your true self. Discover how mastering social media can open doors to new opportunities, enhance your personal brand, and create lasting connections.

About Your Instructor:

My goal is to empower ordinary people to do extraordinary things.

I'm an American/Portuguese award-winning artist based in Malawi. I've taught at universities on four continents (since 2000), including at The American University of Rome, where I co-founded the Film and Digital Media BFA. I also have been teaching over 80,000 happy online students from 191 countries around the world (since 2014).

My experience with diverse groups, from refugees to diplomats, has uniquely positioned me to design this course with your needs in mind. My warm, down-to-Earth teaching approach ensures you receive the most relevant, impactful information that you can apply instantly. Taking complex topics and making them simple and easy to use right away is one of my superpowers!

What Sets This Course Apart:

Continuous Learning: New bonus lectures and resources are added regularly, ensuring you stay ahead of the curve.

Engaged Learning Community: I'm here to support you through discussions and direct feedback, fostering a nurturing learning environment. I love to help! I'm happy to assist you with your specific questions via the discussions area.

Exclusive Offers: I'll be adding periodic free bonus lessons and extras such as e-guides, journals, templates, and social media prompts, to help make your social media life even easier.

Take the Next Step:

Empower yourself with this clear, fun, and massively useful social media course. Don't let another day go by feeling overwhelmed by social media. Start watching now and start the journey to social media mastery today!

Unlock Your Social Media Potential: Strategies for Authentic Engagement, Community Building, and Brand Amplification

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Kristen Palana

Artist | Nomad Professor | UN Consultant

Teacher

My goal is to empower unapologetic idealists through art, design, and education.

I'm an American/Portuguese interdisciplinary artist recently returned to Rome, Italy after eight years in Asia and Africa. After decades of experience as a digital artist, in 2021 I reconnected with my fine art roots. My mixed media drawings are inspired by the ambitious mission statements of the world's top organizations and serve as a call to action to visualize better outcomes for our lives, communities, and the planet. My time living in Myanmar and Malawi from 2016 to 2024 also informs my art, as I highlight diverse symbols and patterns with crosscultural significance and explore themes of unity and oneness. My earlier animations have screened at over 75 international film festivals, earning ... See full profile

Level: Beginner

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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.