How To Build A Brand On Social Media!

1. Intro: Hey, welcome to this teaching series. My name is Everett and I am really looking forward to teaching you some incredible tips for social media success. Now, this is an introduction and first of all, I want to make sure, I do have some notes with me. This is really important stuff, there's a lot of details, a lot of small things, I just don't want to miss anything. So, I want to look at notes here and there. Now, there's a couple of things I want you to know. Some things I'm not going to do, a lot of times teaching videos are going to say, all right, coming up we're going to talk about this in that, and then you start that next video and then they go, all right, in our last video, we talked about this, in this video we're going to, I don't do any of that. I want to really maximize the time and the efficiency. We're going to move fast so you're going to probably want to write some things down. My goal through all of this is to make things incredibly simple. That's the key. When I I talk to you, you're going to say, it is going to be so obvious and you're going to think, oh my gosh, I'm totally doing that. But the key is what I really want you to focus on is you might be doing, this tip or that tip, whatever. But the real power comes in the synergy from doing all of it. That's the hard part. So doing one to 10 of these things is going to be great, but try to do as many of them as you can. Now, it's practical, simple. One of the things we don't do is I'm not focused on gaming the system, hacking the algorithm, anything like that. Social platforms, they're smart, their owners are smart and so what's going to give you success is great content, great engagement, and that's what we're going to focus on. Like I said, I move quickly, I want you to know that you have the body to ask questions. Wherever you're finding this course right now, you have the body to ask questions, you can ask them directly to me and then hopefully there should be some community areas that you're able to partake and where you're going to get answers for me as well as other people. Now, another huge point, social media, the landscape changes incredibly quickly. It's so fast, it's not even funny. There's some things that you will find in these videos that by the time you watch it, things will have changed. The good news is I get the ability to update these videos and so stay connected. You're going to want to stay connected and watch as things migrate, as a landscape changes, as the rules, so to say change, you're going to want to stay part of that. Lastly, hey, look, there's exceptions to everything. I'm going to tell you about best practices and some things that are really intended to keep, they're duplicatable, they're repeatable and so you might know, hey, well, I know somebody who didn't do it that way and they were successful and great, good for them. But what I'm here to do is not talk about the one-offs and the outliers and the exceptions, I'm talking about general rules of thumb and you know what they say about art, you need to know the rules and then great artists knows when to break them and so if you know that you think you can break the rule, great go break the rules and have fun. That said, hopefully just in this introduction alone you've seen we are going to move fast. I value your time and I value you as a student of this course, so we're going to move fast and here we go to the next segment. 2. Who This Course Is For: This course is set up specifically for anybody who's trying to build a brand online. Now, that's a phrase I'm going to use a lot building a brand. The word brand, again, is going to be all over the place. So how do you know if this course is for you? If you're involved in building brand awareness, if you're trying to build a company's presence online, if you're building a personal brand, if you're part of influencer marketing, affiliate marketing, direct sales or MLM marketing, then this course is for you. Now, let me look at my notes real quick. Building brand awareness is going to be one of the main aspects of what we're doing. So if you're trying to build brand awareness, promote or influence products, sell products, drive traffic to a website, a blog, a store, a physical store or anything. Then you're definitely going to love what we're going to go over in these videos. 3. Preface: This video is the preface. If you're reading a book where there's always like that preface and sometimes we wonder is it preface for prefix or whatever, whatever you want to call it. I don't care. But the thing is most people skip it. You don't want to skip this one. This is important. Let's talk really quickly about the origin of all social platforms. Whether it's Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube even, it doesn't matter. They're all have the same origin. All social platforms were designed originally for three main things. Those three things are so important they're almost like one thing, and is to drive connection, discovery and sharing. That's it. Connection, they are intended for you to connect with your family, people you already know, and friends. That's connection. Discovery is making connections with people you don't know. Maybe it's a celebrity or a popular artist or something, or it's just somebody down the street or the friends that you're friends already connected to. That's discovery. The last is sharing. Sharing is what you're already familiar with. You see something and you want to post it online. Whether it was an experience in your life, you want to share it with your friends or maybe it was something that you saw in the news, a cool cat video or whatever might be. You want to share it or other people sharing it, you want to keep that ball rolling. Three things: connection, discovery and sharing. That was the purpose of every social platform. Money didn't come into it. Monetizing was not part of it. Now look, definitely they wanted to make money off their platforms, but they knew that were not baking monetization into the platform just yet. That's going to come later. The key, we need to make this inseparable. That's their idea. They want to make their social platform inseparable to your life. When you can't live without our platform, that's when we monetize. Now, why did we sign up? Why did you sign up for a social media account? The beauty is you signed up for three reasons: to connect, to discover and to share. That's it. It's that simple. It's wonderful. Now, social platforms have now evolved to the point where they're now monetized. The social platform owners have to balance two critical things. They need to balance an optimized user experience, all centered around connection, discovery and sharing. They have to optimize ads, not just any ads, targeted ads. If they've send you and serve you unwanted ads, then the user experience starts to fall apart. It's like, "Why should I get on Facebook? All I get is bombarded with stuff I don't care about." Then you sign off, you don't log in or worse, you cancel your account. That's like the last thing that they want. Like I said, it's not just ads that these platforms have specialized it. I mean they're just phenomenal at it, whether you agree or not, that's their bread and butter. An optimal user experience and optimal targeted ad penetration and ad performance. The social platforms have to make money. They're public companies. They did not create these great platforms for us, just to hangout on and have fun on and goof off and play games and so on. They're there to make money. As the platforms have evolved, what did we do with them? People turn the social platforms into a marketplace. Today, the time that you're watching this, when you scroll through your feeds, what percentage of the time do you see people promoting a product? It's like every one of your friends practically is promoting some product or some service through their social media feed. There is a huge evolution that's happening right now on the social platforms. In the social platforms have to crack down on all of this. The steps that it takes for success as a marketer on a social platform is not the same as the steps it takes for success in business as we know, specifically retail. People are trying to bring retail experience onto the social platform. What's really happening is they're actually costing the user experience. The user experience is starting to suffer now. In our next module, we're going to talk about something super important. It's called Interruption Based Advertising. We'll dive into in a minute but trust me, you're going to be very familiar with it. Let's look at how the user experience is starting to suffer and what the social platforms are doing, and what you can do to make sure that doesn't happen. 4. Interruption Based Advertising: Let's talk about this concept called interruption based advertising. First, I actually thought I came up with this phrase, interruption based advertising. Then I found that there was a book written 14 years ago. Relatively, the exact same terms. Here it is. The term might be new, but the concept is it. You say, ''I want to watch TV tonight,'' and there's all these commercials during your favorite television show. That's an interruption based ad. We, as Americans especially, we reject interruption based advertising. When you say, ''I want to go get a magazine,'' there's all the ads in there. Those are interruptions. You didn't buy the magazine to get the ads, you bought the magazine to read the stories and the same with newspapers. Here's what's going on. We reject interruption based advertising. Look at the links we go to to avoid interruption based advertising. Number one, we Hulu everything. Hulu, Amazon, should we even by the thing? You pay for cable or satellite and yet you still buy an entire season, unlike Apple TV or Amazon or whatever it is, mostly to avoid the commercials. I love going to the movie theater. I love watching the previews. Now, we buy home theater systems that rival the experience that you would have normally gotten in a movie theater because you can have a better experience at home, and one of those reasons is just you get to avoid the endless commercials and previews, and everything else. Magazine's circulation, newspaper circulation, all of these are way down because we want things on-demand. We don't want interruptions in our life. Here we go to our social platforms that when originally they started, they had no advertising. Now, there's ads all over. The social platforms we covered in a prior video, social platforms are optimized for a specific user experience. They want you to love when you login to Facebook and Instagram and Pinterest, and so they want you to love your experience, and so they optimize this experience. They've got great tools for this. The other thing is they're monetized. We have to remember, these platforms are here for one reason, and it's not for our cat videos, it's for money. They have to make money. They're a publicly traded companies. When we lose sight of that fact, we lose site of a huge driving force. Here's the point. Most people who are trying to build a brand online are doing it by introducing an eruption based advertising, the very thing we reject. We go on to social media so that we can avoid the senseless stuff that we don't want in our lives. Remember, why did we sign up for social media accounts? To connect, to discover, and to share, and so any ad that pops up in your face that you did not want is an interruption, and the more that happens, the last we're going to go online, that's the kicker. Here's what's going on. Remember, the social platforms are optimized for not just ads, but targeted ads. They think they know the ads that you want to receive. Let's say I'm going through my feed and here comes my friend Tim, he posted and he's selling some weight loss supplements. I'm not interested in weight loss supplements and move on. Next person. Oh my gosh, here's what my other friend, she's selling some eye make up. I'm not interested in eye make-up. Go to the next post. Oh my gosh, and all the sudden, what am I thinking? I'm fed up with surfing online, I'm fed up with my social platform. Why go online? Now, there's two problems that are happening at this point. Number one, the social media experience is suffering, and the social platforms, the owners are not going to have that trust me. They are cracking down right now, and then the second thing is remember I said that they're here to make money. Why should you make money off of their platform that they don't get a cutoff, and you see a huge crackdown right now, and so what does this crackdown look like? The social platforms are doing, number one, they are reducing your reach. That means, let's pretend I have 10,000 followers. If I'm selling these little pens right here, and I post a picture of this, maybe 1,000 of my followers. Maybe, will actually see this post even begin with. That's what reach is. Rich is, they're just saying, ''Hey, you want to post that? We're just not going to give it to anybody.'' The second thing is, and this is harsh, the removing posts, believe it or not, they own the platform. They have the ability to remove your post, and then the last thing is, we have to keep in mind, you're actually not allowed to sell through a social platform without having a business account. If you're doing that, you're breaking the rules, and they have the ability to shut down your account, and they do, they are shutting down accounts for people who are doing engaged in social selling or even promotion. For those three main reasons, you want to make sure that your social media account does not look like or feel like a commercial reel. In the video world, if you've take a bunch of bloopers together, and you make one video, you call it a blooper reel or bunch of gags, that's a gag reel. You just add this word reel to anything. Well, a commercial reel is you just take all your commercials and put them all together. A lot of people, social media accounts, if you're engaged in brand building, is simply a commercial reel, and you might think, ''Well, hey, so and so started to follow me. They want to see this,'' and the answer back to that is, ''Actually no, not really.'' They connected for a different purpose and we'll dive into that in one of the other classes. Your struggle and your challenge, and you can overcome this is, you have to remember, your social media account is a business tool, 100 percent. It just can't look like one. It can look like one. It can feel like one, and that's the context of all this teaching is going to be how to have success through social media, building a brand without looking like or feeling like a business, and I can help you get there. 5. The 2 Keys To Social Media Success: You're going to hear me say this a hundred times, maybe even more, hopefully even more through the course of this video. The key to social media success is two-fold. Number 1, build trust and make connections. That's it. It's almost number one. That's so simple. It's like, I think I already knew that. It's so important that honest to goodness, if you didn't even listen to any of the other videos, you'd say, "All right, I got it." The hard part is understanding how so many actions and micro actions are either building trust and making connections or tearing that away. That's what we're going to focus on. Every teaching mess, every teaching module that we do from here on now is all about building trust and making connections. The last thing that we also have to understand is this is going to take time. Social media takes time. Anybody who told you, "Oh my gosh, open an account and you get tens of thousands of followers overnight," there's something wrong there. If you're trying to sell something, it's not an overnight thing. I want you to know that you're going to have to build trust, make connections, and it's going to take time, consistency and all sorts of great things that are teachable and learnable and applicable that we're going to dive into for the rest of these videos. 6. Trust & Connection: Your Profile Picture: Your profile pic or your bio pic or whatever you want to call it, is the first step in building trust and making connections. Now, if you're on Instagram, how do you know that somebody new is following you? The way you're going to know is you're going to go to your news feed and it's going to show a profile picture and their handle and it's saying is following you. So started following you. It's relatively the same and on Facebook. On Facebook is going to be the profile picture and their name and it is going to say, wants to follow you or sent you a friend request or whatever. I'll tell you a 100 times. The key to social media success is building trust and making connections in your profile picture. My God, this is one of the simplest, the most duh of all the statements I'm going to make, but yet I cannot believe how many counts that I get to review and I have to explain to them, your profile picture is not building trust. Your profile picture is costing you points in the trust department. It's your very first trust point, what that picture looks like and there's some keys that you want to focus on. You want it to be attractive. Now listen, I'm not talking about beauty. I'm talking about magnetism, I'm talking about attracting, about being approachable. I'm not talking about necessarily physical beauty. You want it to be welcoming, you want it to be relatable. This is a big deal. A lot of times, what I'm looking for, is this person like me? More importantly, I'm looking for, is this person going to like me? If you are just not relatable to me whatsoever, maybe you're in another country or whatever and I can just tell from the profile picture, most people are not going to make that connection. Did it build trust? Is the picture bright? Is that a fair amount of contrast? If your business, maybe you've decided we want to put our logo in as our profile picture. In one way, that's a great idea. In another sense, it's not the best idea. People connect with people, not with objects and things and certainly not with logos. In one sense, if for brand building, that might be a good idea, but in another sense, maybe you're a sweater and you make sweaters. Put this sweaters on a person and take that picture. That's a great profile picture because people connect with people. Something else I wanted to talk about is what I call a big face. I know that sounds like horribly offensive. But what I mean by a big face is simply, take the frame, whether it's the circle that you see on a profile picture for most of the social platforms is just a circle, fill the frame as much as possible, not completely, but fill it with a face as opposed to a shot where you're like way, in the background and the faces just this tiny speck. Remember, people are largely like 90 percent of the time, they're engaged in social media on their phone. That little icon is already small to begin with. A big face gives you more of a person, more of a chance to connect with you. Make sure the picture only has one person in it. If this is a dual or joint account, it's okay to have the two or three or whatever people there. Aside from that, there's really no reason to have more than one person in your profile picture. If social media success is dependent on making connections, give me a person to make a connection with. Then lastly, listen, I already said this really overlooked. That profile picture it's huge. I'd like to say that your profile picture is your book cover. Everybody tells you, you can't judge a book by its cover. All of us judge a book by its cover. All of us do. My wife picks her books this way, she picks her wines this way, and she picks her favorite football teams this way. It's all based on what you see. What you need to do is make sure your profile picture is strong enough. That makes me want to take your book off the shelf and open you up. Focus on your profile picture is your first step in building trust and making connections. 7. Trust & Connection: Your Handle: Your handle. Now, listen, Facebook doesn't really quite have a handle in the exact same way. How you connect on Facebook is a little different than some of the other social platforms. Other source platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and even Pinterest and so on, you get to choose a username and people find you largely based off that username. They can somewhat search for your name. But the bottom line is that username or a handle or old-school term would've been a screen name, it's very transparent. It's really in your face on some of the social platforms. Like I said, Facebook is not as transparent, but anyway, that is your first trust test. If I see this picture, the profile picture, and then I see this handle says Mid-West Automotive wants to follow me, I pretty much expect that entire feed to be about automotive something, cars or whatever from the Mid-West, anything less than that, anything different from that, you have absolutely lost trust and I'm out. Here's the thing, a lot of people clever their way into losing trust. What I mean is a lot of people will come up with crazy, silly off the wall names, and bottom line is it just doesn't connect. You have a split-second to connect with the person. I know a lot of the cool handles might be gone, but still you need to have a name that it's not offensive. This is so crazy to me. I've found so many handles that are, I think, inadvertently offensive. You need to think, is there any way that my handle could be construed as offensive to the very people I'm trying to attract. Now you want a handle that's very clear as to what the rest of the account is going to be like. You want to make it memorable. You want to make it easy to understand. Then the last thing is you want to make it easy for me to say to a friend. If your handle is underscore dot, I can't even finish the rest of this as an example because if I did, somebody out there probably has that as a handle. The point is keeping it simple so that I can tell my friend, "Hey, you totally want to go follow, whatever the name of that handle is." That way they can find it. If your name is that hard, your handle is that hard, I won't remember it, I won't be able to say it. It's just not going to be easy for me to understand what that translates to content-wise. That's your key to connecting. 8. Trust & Connection: Your Profile (Bio): We're going to talk about your profile or your bio. Now there's a number of things that all go into making that bio, your name. If we're looking at Instagram, we're going to see your name, we're going to see your actual profile, the bio part of that you get the write. Then there's some room there for URL. Let's take this thing apart. I'd said before that your profile picture is your book cover. Your profile bio is the title of your book. Between the two of those, everybody is going to judge whether or not they want to take your book off the shelf, whether or not they want to open it up. Now, here's the kicker. If this book, let's say it's called Ronald Reagan. Then the subtitle is a true American hero. I just made that up. When I open it, I expect the book to be about Ronald Reagan, and I expect it to be about stories about him being heroic and so on. Your bio is your indicator for what your feed is. We're going to unpack what that means later on. But here's the key. You want to write a bio that is relatable. I've coach most brands into this. You want to write a bio that has up to five relatable interests. The keyword number one is relatable. Let's pretend you're really into basket weaving. Well, a large portion of the population just isn't into it. Leave that out of your bio. The next thing is I said up to five. The more narrow and the fewer the better. Let's say all you do is all about travel. That's great. Then just let your bio be about travel. Maybe it's only about food, your entire feed is about food. That's fantastic too. Maybe it's food and travel. That's two and you're good. But once you get past five, then you lose relatability. We think, my gosh, I want my account to appeal to everybody. In trying to appeal to everybody, we actually appeal to nobody. You get up to five relatable interests. All right, so that's great. There's a whole lot to unpack here. Your name, you have the to write your name on some of the social platforms right there also. Makes sure it's a real name. You could put your name like my name is Ever Boss and maybe I say Ever Bows spokesperson Ever Bows consultant or a lifestyle blogger, that's fine too. Again, it builds trust and it also helps make connections. I want you to sound human. People connect with people and that's what they're trying to do on a social platform. Even if you are a business, you could have your business name on there. But you want to make sure that your profile isn't what we'd normally would call business writing, you want it to be really approachable and so on. Another huge mistake a lot of people make is they're going to say something like follow me, this is my journey or follow me or building my empire or whatever it might be. The mistake that you've made when you do that is you've made your social media all about you. You're saying, I'm a celebrity, you are not. You come follow me, you come adore me. It's all about me. You are going to make it. Social media is actually about you. It's about the other person. When somebody follows me on social media is because they want me to adore them. When I'm saying follow me, like me, like my stuff. They followed me because they want me to like their stuff and to love their stuff and engage with them. Once you say it's about you, you're out and you're just not going to build trust or make connections at that point. A lot of people are into this fade or faddish I would say I'm sorry, this trend right now to use emojis. They overuse the emojis in my opinion. Here's what you have to ask yourself. The brand that you're trying to build online and social space, is it a high trust brand or not? If you're just trying to build, I'm a lifestyle blogger, I'm fashion thing. There's not a whole lot of trust necessarily that is involved in that. But anytime that there's going be some money transfer. Maybe you're selling a product, maybe you're selling a service. Maybe you're a consultant or fitness person or personal trainer, whatever it is. At some point, money is going to have to transfer. Once you talk money, you have now moved into what I call a high trust account. There's no room for emojis in my opinion, on high trust accounts. Emojis are originally intended to communicate emotion. Think about it like this. When we communicate, when we talk, 80 percent of what I'm trying to say to you is actually communicated outside of my words, 80 percent. That means your determining what I'm really saying based off of my eyes and the wrinkles here and there and hand gestures and all that other stuff. When I'm typing in social media, and that's all that we had, typing, you can misconstrue. I mean, everybody's misconstruing all stuff. They add in emojis so that you understand, I'm saying that with a smile. I'm saying that with a wink face. I'm saying that crying while laughing or whatever. But what happened then is there's this huge trend that people start using emojis like mom of, and then have four baby pictures or something like that. Two and then has two dogs, whatever. I call it emojis as nouns, and that's just a big mistake. The bottom line is emojis, it's a judgment call and you've got to make it up for yourself. If you're in a high trust field, do you have the ability to feel amateurish? If the answer is no, cut out the emojis. If the answer is yes, okay, I don't have to worry about building trust, then you can do whatever you prefer with your emoji. That's it there. The bio is your guard rail. It is your content guide for what you're going to post and we're going to dive into that in one of the next modules. 9. Trust & Connection: Your Followers & Follower Ratio: Your next trust test comes down to your followers, especially on Instagram and even Twitter and maybe even some of the other social platforms. On Facebook, your friends list can be a little bit more hidden, so maybe it's not as important, but let's dive into this. The number of followers that you have is going to be huge. Now there's two things that apply here. First of all, if you're following me and you only have a few 100 or maybe just a few friends already, again, what we really want to think through is, is this an account that I can trust? The next aspect of it is on the opposite scale of just a few followers. What if you have 10,000 followers or 15,000, 20,000, 30,000 followers. I get this every day. All these accounts that are following me. Now, let's face it, they're following me because they want me to follow them back. They're following me, but I look and they have 10,000-30,000 followers, but they're only falling 200, 300 followers back. Now, I call that your follower to following ratio. It's a big deal. I think most recently, especially on Instagram, we've seen a major change from the platform owners. Now, here's the deal. If the key to social media success is building trust in making connections, when you follow me with your 10,000 followers and only 200 people you're following back, you're sending me a very clear signal. You're going to unfollow me. That's all there is to it. I know it. I get it. We all get it at this point. At the time of this recording, there's a huge trend, especially on lifestyle bloggers, travel bloggers and so on. This follow, unfollow technique. They follow you, you follow them back, they unfollow you a day or two or three later. Now what has happened since then is there's just a huge culture of distrust. It was so cool to think, "Oh my gosh, there's this person with 30,000 followers and she wants to follow me.'' Then they follow you. There's a legitimate depression feeling that comes from being unfollowed just a couple of days later and so on, and it's making the user experience suffer. If you are on Instagram, or you are on Facebook or whatever and you see this happening, aren't you going to want to crack down on that? That's what I think we're starting to see at this point. There's two things. Number 1, when you see that follower to following ratio really far off, the message you're sending is, I'm not trustworthy. The second message is, I'm going to unfollow you very soon. I like to coach people that even though it feels so cool to have 20,000 followers, but I'm only following 200 people, look at me, I'm an Instagram celebrity, it's not going to help you. It's not helping your business, it's not helping you at all. Keep in mind that your posts are only going out to a select number of people, and it's based on how many people you are engaging with. This is going to be cool if you only are following 200 people but you have 20,000 people following you. Your posts have a reach of arguably in 1,000 area. Far less than 2,000 of your 20,000 people are actually getting your post, and then from there they get to choose whether or not they want to engage or not. It's going to be very hard to build a brand, it's going to be hard to sell a product, promote a service, promote anything, influence or affiliate. It's going to be hard to do any of that when nobody's actually engaging with you. What I like to coach is parody. Doesn't have to be one to one. I have 5,000 followers, I'm following 5,000 people. It doesn't have to be exact, but you want to be relatively close. Now you define what relatively close feels like. So maybe you have 5,000 followers, follow somewhere between 4,000 and let's say, maybe 6,000 people back. Anywhere in there is going to be good. When I see that, when I see somebody's following me, they're following me, and they have relatively the same people that they're following back, that tells me they're interested in me. They want to follow me. They're going to comment, engage, and like with me, and you've built trust, therefore, I have no problems making connections. Make sure you have parody and keep an eye on this and see what trends we see the social platforms having with this, okay? 10. Legitimacy Test: Your Number of Posts: One of the next most important aspects of social media, building trust is going to be especially on Instagram. It is the number of posts that you have. When I see someone is following me, I check out the profiles, determine if I want to follow back and I see they have 20 posts, I'm not going to follow them. Now, the number is going to be subjective. I have a threshold, I call it a threshold for legitimacy. My thresholds is 100. If you don't have a 100 posts, I'm generally speaking, I'm not going to follow you back. One of the biggest reasons why, is lately there's been a just a flood of fake accounts. I mean, these accounts, there's just a ton of them and they have their 20 posts, eight post, nine post, maybe 30-something posts and that's it. On top of that, I've seen a ton of accounts that have like 50, 60, 80 posts, but have thousands and thousands of followers already and I just, that's going to be faked too. What I want you to do is I want you to think through what is your threshold for legitimacy? Is it 100 posts? Is at 500 posts? Whatever. Think about that, but the key is when you start a brand new account, and then everybody starts with a brand new account, you want to get to, well, you want to get to that threshold of legitimacy as fast as possible. Preferably, you want to get there before you have any followers, so you open your account, don't worry about getting a lot of followers, get over that threshold. Right now, like I said, my threshold is 100, but maybe in a month or two because everything changes so quickly in social space, it might be 200 or even 500 posts, regardless. Get to that as soon as you possibly can so that you can build trust in that area. 11. The Key To Connection-Worthy Content: We're turning the corner, we're talking about content now. Content, it's like your third tier for building trust and making connections, but it's huge. Let's face it, this is huge, it's all about your content. Now, we're going to talk about predictability. There's three major factors or facets of predictability. Number one is your content, the content itself, the subject matter, what you're posting. That needs to actually be predictable. The second part is the style. It's not just what you're posting, it's the way it looks, the style needs to be predictable. Then the last is frequency. I want to get a general sense that you're posting at a predictable rate, whether it's once a day, three times a day, once a week, whatever it is, it's okay. We're going to dive into what the optimal posting frequency is for you. But, you need to maximize those three things, a consistent and predictable content, look and feel, and posting frequency. Now, let's dive into these. 12. Content Guide: Your Signature Style: One of the first things we're going to talk about is a "Signature style", or in marketing speak, we're going to call them branded look or brand look. What that means is when somebody scrolling their feed, they should know, "Oh, my God, that's Everett," without even seeing my name. They shouldn't know just by the style, the look, and so on. You want to dial-in a signature look. If all of a sudden, one picture that in your feet, one picture is black and white, one's using this filter, another post is using in-depth filter, another post has no filter at all, this is inside, this pictures outside, this is your food, your look is all over the place. It's just this hodgepodge thing. Maybe today, you've had what you would consider maybe some success. Let's talk about unlocking big success, and you're going to do that when you have a signature look, a signature style. Think about when you go to McDonald's or if you go to a clothing store that's call a Gap, or Apple, you go to the Apple store, they all have a very branded, a signature look. You know that if I close your eyes and walk through into a store and took my hands away, you've got, "I'm at the Apple Store." Even if we took the product off the shelf, you'd know you're at the Apple Store, because it's a branded signature look. That's what your feed needs to do. Now, your look, what I want you to think of is this, number 1, our eyes are attracted to brightness. So I want you to consider posting bright pictures. One of the best ways to do that is you take your picture and then you're going to go into edit settings, take highlights and move them down, and then take brightness and move that back up. Our eyes are attracted to brightness. Now that doesn't mean you have to post bright photos, I'm simply saying you have a greater chance of people stopping. You have a greater chance of people stopping that endless scroll. They call it thumb-stopping posts. You need to stand out. You need to have contrast, and that's actually another word for you to look at. If you want your post to stand out, they have to have some contrast; a little bit of pop to them. Now you don't need to have that cookie-cutter look or anything like that. Make your own style, make your own luck. But generally speaking, you tend to want to have some contrast. You need it to be bright. Another thing I want you to consider, and this can change over time, but Instagram specifically, has filters built in that you can use to edit. Use a filter, even if you turn it all the way down. The reason is, I think we get better reach when we use their filters. There's something about the social platforms that they provide tools for us. There's something about when we use those tools, I feel like they give us better reach. Another thing is I've subscribed to a number of different analytics platforms, and they measure the performance of my posts with the different filters that I use. If they're measuring it and they're reporting it, then they're probably doing it for a good reason, then I should use it. So if you edit your photos, let's say in Snapseed, or VSCO, or maybe Photoshop, or whatever it is, it's great. Bring it in the Instagram still, and still throw a little bit of a filter even if you turn it all the way down to the point where you can't even see it. Now, here's the key. I want your editing process to: Number one, you optimize for skin tones. It doesn't matter what the rest of the picture looks like. As long as the skin looks good, you're going to be good. Then the second thing is, I shouldn't be able to tell what your filter is. I shouldn't be able to know, "Oh, you use the Ludwig filter or Hudson, or [inaudible] , or whatever filter." Your editing should be very much in the background. It should be just blending. Nobody should be able to tell what kind of filters you're using. Anyway, develop a signature look and a signature style, and you will have great success. 13. Content Guide: Your Messaging Mix: Let's talk about what to post. This is something I call messaging mix. I want you to think of this word ratio. If you're cooking, let's say you're making a chicken dish and it calls for two chicken breasts, tablespoon of salt, tablespoon of pepper, and so on, and maybe some garlic, whatever it is, there is a ratio, how much chicken and how much salt, and how much pepper, and how much garlic. If all the sudden you dump too much salt in, you can still go on with the recipe. You're going to have to increase the pepper, increase the chicken, and increase the garlic. It's a ratio. It's proportionate. There's a messaging mix I want you to consider. A lot of times when people are trying to build a brand through social media, all they post about is are their brand-building posts. All they post about is their product or their service or whatever it is that they might be promoting or influencing or so on. That's not going get you anywhere. Remember one of the other videos we've talked about interruption based advertising. You want to go back and maybe re-watch that. But anyway, there is an messaging mix that when you use the right mix, there's a compounding effect. I like to call it synergy. I don't have a great definition of the word synergy or compounding effect. I like to just say it's like one plus one equals three. There's something special that happens when you dial in a good messaging mix. Key is to building your brand and your messaging mix are number one, your messaging, your posts, they need to attract. That's going to be huge. The next is they need to inspire. I'll have a definition of inspire, maybe it's a little bit, maybe it's a little different. I'm not talking about inspiration as in you need a bunch of inspirational quotes and you just feel your feet with that. My definition of inspiration is an uncommon perspective on a very common experience. Let's say long lines at the bank, we all experienced that. We understand that. But your positive outlook on the long line at the bank, now that is an inspiration. That is an uncommon perspective on a common experience. The last part of this is retain. It's one thing to attract people to my account and then I need to inspire them and so on. But I need to retain. It's one thing to get, 20 new followers, but if I had 25 unfollows today, I'm not going to get anywhere. I'm not going to build my brand through social media. The key to all of this is going to be balance. You have to find the right way to balance the product posts or services and things you offer with content that is engaging and that is attractive and pulling people in and keeping people and so on. We also want to talk about planning your posts. Most people don't plan their posts and they end up falling into a habit I call reaction posting. Reaction posting is when you just like, "Oh my gosh, I haven't posted all day", or maybe it's, "Oh, I haven't posted a week", and you hurry up and you just post something. Social media success is going to be very intentional. Plan your posts and there are lots of tools and I'll list them somewhere in this teaching you'll see there's a list of tools that help you with planning your posts and so on. You don't want to reaction post, but next, the way to find your messaging mix is going to be simple. I'm going to give you in the next teaching module, I am going to give you some very practical things that you can write down. It's for you if you are in a creative crunch. But right now, I want you to remember your bio. Your bio is your guide. If you don't know what to post, go back to your bio. I said in your bio, your profile, you can have right up to five relatable interests. Simply go to your bio. If you say, love hiking, swimming, and fishing, your next post needs to be about hiking, swimming, or fishing. It should not be your lunch. It shouldn't be, any of the other million things that you could post. Your bio is your guide. This is such a simple tip. Let your bio be your guide, let it be your guide. Let it be your filter for everything that you post. If you do that, you've built trust because remember, I saw your name, I saw your profile and your content matches the profile. We talked before about how your profile is like the title to your book. Well, each one of these post that you make is like another page in your book or another chapter in your book and so it builds trust that helps you make connections and so on. There you go. Now let's dive into some ideas on what specifically you can post now. 14. Your Bio Is Your Guide: So it's crunch time. It's time to post. What are you going to post now? There's, as I've said in the other teaching modules, let your bio be your guide. So look at your bio, let that be the inspiration. But let's just say now you're just stuck, and it's time for the rubber hit the road. What do you post? Now, I've got a silly little memory device for you that's tends to get me out of trouble all the time. You look at your left hand and here's where you go. So number one, first thing, this right here, it's all about me. Your story, your story is vital. A lot of times when we're building a brand online, we forget to write our own story we forget to talk about, what it is that you've been through or what you're about or whatever. So me, me, me, just make it about you and bring people on your journey. Remember, this is like your book it's unfolding over time into your social space and so on. So let your, inside of your messaging mix. You want to make sure that you're actually writing about you. Then next is this one. Number one, what's the most important thing? The most important thing to your brand, the most important thing to whatever the goal, your goal of your social media account. A lot of times we tend to even forget that, hey I've got a social media account because I'm trying to whatever it is. So don't forget it, make sure it's part of your messaging mix. Now the next thing, it's this middle finger, which there's no sense and putting that up. What I call inspiration, it's these little things that frustrate normal people in life. But you're not going to be frustrated by, remember I said, inspiration is an uncommon perspective on a common experience. So whether it's, 12 baskets of laundry that you have to do today or it's long lines or its rain on a wedding day or whatever it is. A positive outlook on that is an uncommon perspective. When you can do that, you've really got something, you've got relatability, everybody understands that frustration, but your outlook on it is inspiring. The next right here we have my ring finger I married and its love. What do you love? Post what you love, look at your bio and its hiking, fishing, whatever you put in your bio, what do you love about that and focus on it. Then the last thing is the little things, little finger a little pinky, the little things. So focus on the little things and maybe if you're a mom or your mom blog, it could be my wife I'm talking about like baby toes or the wrist on a baby or fat baby legs or whatever. But focus on the little things. So many times when we are building a brand, we look so big. We look at the big things, but when we allow ourselves to put on some blinders and we can just focus on small things. There's just an amazing connection and relatability that comes out of that. Now, the last part of this is going to be, there's still then your product or the service or wherever you're trying to offer. Obviously that's now six things and what you have to do is you have to determine the balance. You have to determine that mix that we talked about in another module. Are you going to post one, you can't post your product service stuff every single day, every single post. So you're going to do it one out of five times? One out of three times? One out of six times? One out of 10 times? It's totally up to you and you're going to look at your engagement rate to see if your followers are connecting with it or not. But anyway, if you let that be your guide, let your bio be your guide, and follow that method, this little five memory device thing. You're going to build that word that we talked before. We talked about synergy. There's just something powerful, there's something overly relatable and connect-worthy when you post with that style. In addition to what to post and those memory devices and tricks that we're going to use in addition to using your bio as your guide, you need to show what you care about. You need to show passion and we're not talking about this is my interest. You need to show how interested you are in it, how much of a joy these things are. Show what you care about and let that level of care be deep. There's a number of reasons why, and one of which is, it's wildly attractive. It's wildly attractive to see somebody incredibly passionate about just about anything. It's crazy actually. The other thing is, it's contagious. Somebody's passion is just, it's just super contagious. The last part that I want you to think through is that there's, for the most part, there's almost always somebody else promoting or selling the very thing that you're trying to promote yourself. So your passion and that level of care that you can express really sets you apart from the other people who are either maybe going through the motions or mailing it in a little bit or whatever. For all of those reasons, you really want to dive into not just posting it, but really sharing that deep level of passion and care and it's going to propel your brand forward. 15. Great Content Starts With Your Bio: Writing captions, it's vital. Here's the thing. One of the things I always tell people is that most of the time, especially on Instagram, people just don't read captions. However, your potential customers or clients or whatever it is that you're trying to target, they're reading every single word. Captions matter. They're really important, when you're writing on Facebook it's all that you have. I mean, yeah, on Facebook you can still post pictures or post videos or share stuff. But really, it's largely writing based. On Instagram it's mostly picture or potentially video-based, but the caption still matter. What you write it's important. I'm going to give you some tips about how to maximize it. Number one, on Instagram, don't let it get truncated. Now, truncated means when you write too much text, and so whenever you posted it, you've got part of your words and it has the dot, dot, dot. People have to click on that dot, dot, dot to see more, I want you as often as possible to never require somebody to have to hit that button. It's just a great filter to kind of get your mindset to say, hey, you know, focus on keeping it simple. There's that method they call it the KISS methods, stands for Keep It Simple, Stupid. Keep it simple, keep it short. Write it and then start slash and somewhere so that it just doesn't get truncated. The next thing I want you to do is I want you to write with an emoji in your mind whether or not you use that emoji is up to you. Here's what I mean. Emojis, like we talked about before, actually stem from the word emotion. I want you to write with a motion in mind. What are you trying to do? You don't want to inform people. Think about this when you watch the news. When you watch the news, they've got horrific, tragic events that are on the news all the time. But you don't do anything about it. You're not motivated, you're not inspired, you're not encouraged, you're nothing. You're informed. It touched you here, touched in the head, but emotion touches you in the heart and when you get touched in the heart, people are inspired, they're motivated, they take action. Your job is to tap into emotion. We're going to dive into that in a second. But what I want you to do by keeping an emoji in your mindset. I love writing with that crying while laughing emoji in my mindset, I just think humor is important. Let's dive into some of these emotions that I want you to dive into inspire. We've talked about inspire a couple of times. It's an uncommon perspective on a common experience. Think about that. Don't just write about common experiences, write about the common experience, but give a different outlook, a different perspective on it and you're really going to go far. Another one is humor. Humor is incredibly powerful. Incorporate humor in your captions. You can't really incorporate humor in your picture all the time, but you can incorporate some humor. Maybe it's a state of fact and then have a funny little perspective about the end of it or something. Then emotion, emotion is just huge. The way I want you to talk about emotion and how you get that in there is a lot of people will say, when you're posting, let's just say it's a family trip to Disney. You're at Disneyland and you take a picture of Cinderella's castle, and you write in your caption, totally loving our day at Disney. That's normal, that's a common post. Instead, what I want you to do is I want you to consider post a picture of you, post a picture of you smiling, laughing, high-fiving, having fun, whatever it is, crying, it doesn't matter? Then now you write totally loving my day at Disney. It is a whole different ballgame at this point. When you add emotion, you separate yourself from everybody else. Most everybody else's informing, like got these shoes half off. Don't forget to pick them up today. You're informing, and people don't buy based of logic, people buy when the emotional part of their brain has been activated, not the informational part of their brain. You want to tap into a emotion. The other thing emotion does is it builds connectivity. It deepens that connection when you move me, I am deeper connected to you. That increases loyalty. That means, I'm less likely to unfollow you anytime soon. You also interrupt my day. When you use emotion, you just totally transform my day. You make me feel what you're feeling and that is great. Everybody loves that. Emotion is great, when you talk about, maybe you're going to post something like, great, the peppermint bark latte is back at Starbucks. That's information. Instead, if you showed this face of like, whatever, you showed your excitement about how excited you are about that, or maybe you show your calendar, and how you've circled it on your calendar three months away or whatever it might be. Tapping into emotion is going to be powerful and it really propose your brand. I want you to keep in mind, inspire captions, try to inspire through your capture, try to use emotion, try to use humor and then lastly, this is just a duh, grammar. I mean, think through if your brand, if you're trying to build a high trust brand through your social media. If you are, grammar is vital. There's no room for bad spelling, bad grammar, and so on. Today, I mean, write your caption in a different application, if you need to like a notes app or whatever, copy and pasting because that will reveal any spelling errors. But anyway, bottom line, no room for bad grammar. Be relatable. I want you to be relatable in your captions. Remember, we don't all share the exact same experiences, but we do share the exact same emotions. Focusing and anchoring on emotion is just going to be huge. Anchor on those emotions, find relatable points, relatable perspectives, relatable moments, emotions, feelings, whatever it is that you can in there. When you do this, you really maximize that caption space. Not everybody is going to be reading your every single word, but like I said, your potentials are reading every single word there. They're hanging on every word of this. Put some time, put some effort into making those captions powerful, you'll really advance your brand that way. 16. The 3 Most Important Things You Need To Post: The three most important things that you need to post are, people, people, people. It's as simple as that. Now look, I understand. Maybe if you're running a travel blog or travel account or maybe it's all about food or something, you're the one that gets to escape by without having to incorporate people. Aside from that, people connect with people, not with objects and not with things. So maybe you sell or you're promoting supplements, maybe it's fashion, maybe it's weight-loss, maybe it's workout, it doesn't matter what it is, you need to incorporate people. People connect with people so I am looking at your feed, I'm going like, ''Are you like me? Or are you like who I want to be like? Are you like what I aspire to be?'' Whatever it might be, people connect with people. While you're trying to post, don't just post about your product or your service, you want to show people enjoying your product and service. We'll talk later on about how your feed should show what your product and service enables people to do. We'll dive into that in another post, in another module but the bottom line is incorporate people even if it's not the entire person. Maybe you're promoting jewelry or whatever, show the watch on a person. If you're promoting jeans, show jeans on people. Don't just show jeans stacked or flat lays, they are incredibly popular right now. Don't just do the flat lays, there's some room for that but for the most part you want to get mileage with every single one of your posts and you do that when you incorporate people. 17. The Key For Attraction, Connection, and Inspiration: One of the simplest things to incorporate in your posts that people often overlook this is so silly. It's smiling. Can you believe that? If you are feeling like a bit of a slump in your engagement rates or wherever, I want you to think about how can you incorporate smiles more? Now, here's this great quote. Dale Carnegie says, the expression one wears on one's face is far more important than the close one wears on one's back. Think about people that you know, maybe in the style world, fashion bloggers, style bloggers, lifestyle bloggers, whatever it is, think about how much time and effort they put into hair, makeup, clothing, and so on. But don't even smile. That Smile is one of the most attractive devices that anybody can use when posting. [inaudible] , when you first meet someone, what's the first thing you notice? 47 percent of the people said their smile. Again, we spent so much time focusing on hair, clothing, and even makeup for some people and don't even put the attention. The number one thing most people are looking for is a smile. Focus on those smiles. There's a couple of things. Smiles are contagious when I'm smiling at you, you typically are smiling back. That's crazy. Another thing, studies have shown is actually hard to frown. When somebody is smiling and they're looking at you and smiling, I just think that's crazy, and so the next thing is smiles transmit feelings. When somebody is smiling, there's a million different smiles. You feel what the person who's smiling was feeling at that time. That's craziness to me. But studies have shown it, psychologists have proven it and I think that's crazy. Smiles make people feel better. Now, it's not just any smile. There's a difference between a real smile and a fake smile, and scientists have been able to figure out that there's some muscle groups that are involved in smiling. There's a muscle group that's involved with this part of the mouth right here, the corner. There's names for this and whatever, and then there's another muscle group, it's actually up here in the eyes, and so they have shown that when you smile with this right here, the corner of the mouth, that's actually considered a fake smile. But when you smile with your eyes up here, that is the real smile. Now here's the real kicker. Women are incredibly perceptive at telling the difference between a real smile and a fake smile. Number one, you need to incorporate smiles, but number two, it has to be the real smile. When you do that, you make a deeper connection and don't go and try to be fake or anything because people can tell the difference. Why smile? It's simple, because smiles connect. 18. The "Boiling Point" for Connection: This module is about excitement. Excitement connects. Remember, your goal in social media is to build trust and make connections, and excitement connects. Keep in mind, nobody is going to have the exact same level of excitement that you have. Whatever your level of excitement is, your followers are only going to have a portion of that. Now, I like to look at it this way. I like to look at it like when you look at water. Water has a boiling point, so water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit. Anything less than 212 degrees Fahrenheit, and all you have is hot water. What's it going to take to get water to 212 degrees Fahrenheit? It's going to take a flame that's hotter than 212 degrees. Whether it's a flame or some sort of electric burner, it doesn't matter, the heat source has to be higher, way higher actually, than 212. The water's not necessarily going to get much hotter than 212 degrees. In the same way, there is, that what I consider, a boiling point for purchasing, or a boiling point for conversion, a boiling point for brand loyalty, or whatever the goal is that you're looking to achieve. You need to achieve it through excitement. You don't get activation without excitement. Now, you can't have this level of excitement, you have to have over the top excitement because people only have a portion of your level of excitement. I want you to think about some commercials, maybe some of the infomercials from like Billy Mays and OxiClean. You've seen that guy's level of excitement was always off the chart. You could just hear his voice as soon as he'd start. I loved those ShamWow infomercials. I think the guy's name is Shane. I don't know if I'm wrong or right on that one, but that dude's excitement was always off the chart. If you said, "Hey, Everett are you interested in this shammy cloth?" The answer is no. But that dude could sell me just about anything because of his level of excitement. Excitement is contagious and excitement connects. Dial into it and it will really help your brand. 19. Conversation, Not Conversion: Your goal in social media is to make a friend. I know that this sounds somewhat silly, and I don't mean make a friend like a Facebook friend, I mean make a friend. Focus on friendship. Now, if you come into this social media with bit of a sales background or sales familiarity, you're familiar with the word conversion. Everybody wants to talk about converting, converting followers, converting leads, converting conversion, conversion, conversion. I have a twist on that. Your focus should not be on conversion. You're focus is on conversation. Nobody, I mean, listen, is going to be incredibly, incredibly rare. Nobody goes from stranger to customer. They go from stranger, to friend, to customer. Your goal is to enter conversation with as many people as possible. Look for ways to get into conversation, and I don't mean conversation about your product or your service. Any conversation. In fact, if it's not about your product and service, that's a deeper anchor than if it's only about your product or service. There's a phrase, "People don't care what you know until they know how much you care." But what they really are saying, the phrase is, how much you care about me. Dive into conversation that should be just such a goal of yours, is to get into as many conversations as possible about as many topics as possible. Remember, one of the things that you want to do is you want to get people to drive the questions back to you. So you're asking them about themselves, about their day, about whatever it might be, at some point they're going to say, "What do you do? Or what is it about your blog? Or what are these products that you are promoting?" They're going to ask you a business leading question. That's when you get to come back and start giving them business answers back. But until then, you're just driving conversation. Now I want you to think through this concept that I call it "Earn the right to be heard." So many people think, "Oh my gosh, they're following me, so I can send them a direct message." No. "They liked my post. I can now send them a direct message." No. Earn the right to be heard, and the way you earn the right to be heard is by focusing on friendships. You can take this word friendship and maybe interpreted into the word relationship. Focus on building relationships. Whether you call it a relationship or a friendship, the key is build the foundation, and that foundation is going to be through friendship or relationship. 20. Understanding the Impact of The Algorithm: You may already know that most of these social platforms have what they call an algorithm based feed. An algorithm based feed is simply the almost not opposite, but it's in contradiction to a chronological feed. A chronological feed is simply, I post it right now and you hopped on right now so you saw it and then you start seeing in reverse order the most recent post from all your followers all the way down to the oldest post from all of your followers. Well, that's a chronological based feed. Most social platforms, they just don't do that anymore. Twitter doesn't, Instagram doesn't, Facebook doesn't. Although there's a way to turn it back on in Facebook. That's another topic. The point is, there's an algorithm. An algorithm simply is a math. It's some equation that some geniuses have come up with where the social platforms basically say, we're really smart and we want to give you the content that you want the most. They think they know what you want better than what you know what you want and they're going to give it to you. The hard part for you as you build a brand is how do you break through that algorithm? How do you make sure your posts are actually being viewed by your followers? You can have 5,000 or 10,000 followers, but only a small fraction of them are actually seeing your content. You need to break through that algorithm. Now, we're not talking about crazy ways of hacking this thing or something that's potentially going to get your account banned. Instead, you just have to post great content. That's step number 1. Step number 2, engage. You must engage with them and they hopefully will engage back. When they engage back that is a cue to the social platforms that your content is the stuff that they want to see. If you don't do those things, if you don't post great content, if you don't engage and seek great engagement back, your posts are just not going to go anywhere. If your post don't go anywhere, you're not going to be able to build your brand online. 21. Two Key Follower Strategies: So let's talk about followers. This is somewhat complicated, somewhat tricky discussion here. So there's really two schools of thought. I'm not going to tell you which school you need to do. I want you to evaluate both. So the first school of thought is, "I want as many followers as possible." If I can have 5,000, 10,000, 50,000 and five million, doesn't matter, I want as many followers as I can. I just want a huge, huge number of followers. That's one school of thought. Another school of thought is I want target followers. So any followers in the world that's easy to understand, No need to unpack that. They can be male-female, any country, any age, any anything, doesn't matter. Target followers are somewhat different. Target followers are you need to know who you are. You need to know, what is your business goal, are you trying to drive sales, trying to drive traffic, trying to drive, signing up for an e-mail, is it brand awareness? What is it? You need to figure out who that is or what your goal is. Do you have a target person that you have in mind? Maybe you're trying to target women that are 24 to 34 years old. Maybe you're trying to target men and women that are working out. It doesn't matter what it is, but you might have to drive a target. So the target follower strategy, which personally I think is much more effective, simply says that when you identify your target, those are your income-producing potentials. So your focus is not on sheer numbers. You're laser focused on those people. So your content should be attracted to those people and you need to seek those people out. Now, how do you get more followers? Not by hashtags. There's a whole section on hashtags will dive into that in a second. Hashtags are only tools for marketers. So if you want to get more marketers, use hashtags. Again, we'll talk about that later. How do you find them? It's simple. Just serve, just look around, look at the people that are already following you and start following, and go to the Explorer tab, do whatever, but find somebody that is a target follower of yours. You just simply have to think it through with a mindset that says, let's just say I'm a single dad. So I find another single dad, and then I look at who liked that post. It's simple, I can simply go, "well, if he liked that post, my posts are similar, so he's bound to like my content too." Follow him, or she liked that post of him being a single dad. So that means she's likely going to follow, she's going to like my content too, my content's great. Don't follow followers, follow likers. Likers are active in social media. So I'm not going to say, well, here's another single dad. I'm going to follow all the people that he's following because he might be falling celebrities and all other things that don't make me money. But instead follow the people that are active. If they're commenting on his post, follow them, if they're liking his posts, follow them. Now, take that same application and apply it to you. Maybe your lifestyle blogger. Find other lifestyle bloggers that are similar to you. Find the people that are liking those posts and go follow them. It's that simple, follow them and follow people back, when somebody follows you, if they are a target of yours and target follower, follow them back. Don't try to be an Instagram celebrity, you have 20,000 followers but you are only following 200 of them back, follow them back, because we've already talked about in another teachings. You're going to have to engage and you got to generate conversation in order to turn them into a customer, so that's it. Follow strategies are simple, just follow the people that are your target, or follow as many people as possible, and hope those many people in the world follow you back. But target followers are definitely going to be the way that you're going to get the most traction. 22. Why Your Hashtag Strategy Is Not Working: This is actually one of my most favorite topics, is one of my biggest pet peeves than social media, it's hashtags. If you know me, if you followed my teaching and my training, my consulting, you're going to know, I absolutely hate hashtags. I think there are waste. Hashtags used to be way, way, way back when social media platforms are infinite, They were the way that like-minded users could find other like-minded users. Maybe I'm interested in cats, so I'm going to search the hashtag for cats. I'm going to find other cat lovers and so on. Hashtags have wildly evolved since then. Now, I don't know a single quote, normal person that actually uses hashtags and when I see normal person, let's think about this. There's marketers, people are trying to make money off on social platforms and then there's normal people. People just use the social platform for keeping up with friends, family, and making new connections. People who are just using social platforms to keep up with friends, family, and make new connections. Don't use hashtags, they just don't do. But marketers do, for a number of reasons. Number one, it's hard to measure if you're doing a good job. They would use a hashtag because it's something that they can measure. It's basically a way of justifying their jobs or their budgets to the people who are in charge of their jobs and their budgets. Another thing is it's a way to measure some orality. It's a way to, maybe it's just nonsense. There's another huge reason why to avoid hashtags. It's such a move to automation right now and it's bad. Literally while I'm making this video this week, just two days ago, Instagram shut down a major automation service that a lot of people have been using. Automation. A marketer or someone who's trying to make money off of social media is using automation and bots to search for people who have been using hashtags, so they can follow them like them and so on. All, it's not real, it's not organics, not authentic. But the problem is the only people that are using those hashtags, so that other people are marketing is basically, you're getting marketers to let your marketing messages and you're basically liking marketing messages of other marketers. You can't make money this way. If you insist on using hashtags, here's what I say. Number one, use no more than seven hashtags at a time, preferably 3-5. Number two, if you're going to use hashtags, use silly ones, not real ones. Don't hashtag whatever the name of your product is or whatever it might be. Hashtags, something silly like can't get there from here, or hashtag that was the last time I go buy ice cream at mid night. Hashtag anything funny and silly that you want to be. You're not really trying to make your posts discoverable by that hashtag is just a way of being silly and funny. You can do that all data online, that was whoever. But aside from that, don't use hashtags. Another thing people will use on Instagram. Today, you can put up to 30 hashtags on one post. There's two things people do. One, they write their caption and then they have their 30 hashtags, your post, go nowhere. They're going nowhere right now. Go ahead look at your Instagram insights. Look at your reach, and look at your impressions and you're going to see it's a fraction of your followers when you max out on those 30. The other thing people will do is, they write their caption and then the very first comment, they put their 30 hashtags. Again, your posts are going nowhere, they're just there. Instagram, the founder, of Instagram has recently come out and said, our hashtag system is broken right now and we don't have the resources to fix it. Number 1, I don't think it's broken like accidentally. Number 2, I truly, truly don't think they don't have the resources to fix it. What they're saying is we broke it, we don't want to use it anymore. It's not working the way it should be and we're not fixing it. What they have said is if you want to grow your account, you need to do it through great content and great engagement. The very things that this whole teaching courses all about, great content and great engagement, voting trust and making connections. Do not rely on hashtags. That said, on Instagram and Facebook, you get to tag people. On Facebook, you just use the art symbol and start typing their name and it'll auto fill. You can also tag in a photo, a one unit always tag people in the photo. You get great reach. Great compression boost. When you do that on Instagram, you can put an at in there in the caption. Let's say at we talk social, and so now you've tagged me. You didn't really tag me. You mentioned, that's actually called a mention. But, when you're editing the post, you actually have a feel on their tag and when you tag that account, when you tag an account, you have the ability to have your posts show up in their feed. Now you unlock some great virality. You unlock some great things. What I want you to do is I want you to start thinking through who can you tag in your post. If you're wearing a certain outfit tag the makers of the outfit. Tag, the stores that you bought it. If you bought some of the home decor from Target, Target style or Kohl's or Michaels' or whatever it might be, home goods tag them. If you can get them to like your posts while you've really unlock some stuff. Some of them will actually feature your post in their feeds even better. Hashtags no, people tags, yes. Let the arguments begin. 23. Strategy: Business or Personal Accounts: I get this question a lot. Do I need a business account or a personal account? Well, if you're trying to build a brand through social media, you typically need a business account. There's pluses and minuses to both, but we're going to cut through it super fast. Here's the bottom line. Whether you need a business account today or not, is a somewhat debatable. I say go business anyway, there's a number of reasons. One, on Instagram and on Facebook, you actually get some insights. You can pay third parties to get some insights, but especially on Instagram, you get an incredible Instagram insights and analytics and so on that you don't get if you're not a business account. Number two, remember I said, the social platforms have an algorithm based feed. Then on top of that, we've talked about how if you're and trying to make money through social media but the social platforms are making money off of you, they're going to limit your reach. Bottom line, you're posting about your products and services, but nobody is seeing your posts. By having a business account, I feel like and I stress the word feel like because it's not absolutely proven. I feel like you actually today might have a little bit better reach, but Facebook has already come out and it just flat-out admitted, they call it organic reach. They say your organic reach is just not going to be very strong unless you're paying or boosting, promoting. Those are all different words for the same thing, paying for your post. What that means is, if I'm writing about my business and I'm posting it to my business account, if I don't pay for it, practically nobody's going to see my posts. People will say, well, I want to stay a personal account and as long as possible because I don't want to pay to play, that's the phrase. My response back is, you risk jeopardizing your reach, you risk jeopardizing your account status, all of that stuff by not converting to a business account now. If you're truly trying to build a brand online on social media, convert now. Make it a business account, bite the bullet, get used to it. You don't want to be one of those people caught off guard months from now or even a year from now. I don't know. I actually think about months from now. I think we're months, maybe even weeks away from the social platforms literally flipping a switch and saying, all non-business accounts, your post go nowhere. They know when you're posting about your product and service, they know. It's in your pictures, it's in your videos, it's in your wordings and captions and so on. Those posts go nowhere. You might even be penalized for it. Don't get caught behind the ball. Go ahead and make that conversion now. If instead you want to stay personal, it's okay. On Instagram today, you can go from personal to business and back to personal again. You can make that flip-flop and so on. Don't feel like it's an all or nothing make a break kind of a move. You can make that anytime that you want. My encouragement to you, you're building a brand, make it a business profile. 24. Strategy: Public or Private Accounts: Simple question. A lot of times I'm asked, should I have a public or a private account? On Instagram, you get to choose public or private, and on Facebook, you get to choose your level of privacy for every single post. If you're building a brand online, listen, you have to go public. Private accounts, I love them for the security aspect element and so on, but the reality is you're building a brand. You need eyeballs, you need spread, you need word of mouth in your reach, you need to get put in the popular feeds, and discover, and suggestions, and all these other things, I just don't see any way around it right now, you have to go to public. On Facebook, just limit. You can change your post. Maybe you're posting about something very personal, your kids, family, or whatever, change your privacy for that post and then switch it back to more of a public post whenever you're promoting more about your business. But if you're promoting about your brand on Facebook, most of the time, you're going to have to do that through your Facebook business page anyway, that's going to be wildly public already. Bottom line, if you want to build your brand through social media, you're just going to have to do it publicly. Private is just going to be too hard, I just don't see any way that you're going to be able to really get the traction that you're going to need for growth and sustainability if your private 25. The Importance of Second Level Connections: So I want to talk to you really quickly about something I call second level connection, and the second level connection is just simple, simple principle. Simply, it means you have two ways that you are connected to somebody, at least two ways. So think about it this way, maybe I know somebody in real life. Maybe you're a soccer mom or something and you see that there are a mom at the soccer, they have a soccer child also. So a second level connection is you guys are hitting it off, and then all of a sudden say, hey, we should connect on Facebook, and now you connect on Facebook, but that's a second level connection. Similarly, maybe you're connected to somebody on Instagram. You have a lot of mutual likes, maybe even some comments, maybe even you've gotten to the point where you can do some direct messaging with each other, that's great. Then you say, hey, let's connect on Facebook too, Boom, second level connection. Here's the genius of this second level connection is powerful. Second level connections are way harder to break when you know someone in real life and social media or you know somebody on three different social platforms, it's so hard to break away from those relationships. So you have loyalty, you have trust, and it's just amazing. The next thing I want you to think of in a second level connection is it builds legitimacy? So let's say again, I'm a soccer dad and you're a soccer dad also, and we talk and all of a sudden we're like talking about cooking and I go, oh my gosh, I love grilling, and you say you love grilling too and oh my gosh, I grill all the time. Oh, I grill all the time too. I got the best grilling recipes and so do you. We should connect on Facebook so that we can share some of our recipes, and then you say that's great, and then I send you a friend request, you accept it, and the second you accept that you see, oh my gosh, my entire feed on social media is all about trying to sell some product. Boom, lost you, I broke trust and now I've lost that connection. Social media is a legitimizer, so instead, I say I love grilling you love grilling, let's share recipes, let's connect. We connect on Facebook and you connect to my Facebook, and what do you see? You see pictures of me, my family and my grilling. You see my wonderful grill and my great food in my recipes. Now, I have been legitimized trust goes through the roof, connection is even deeper and it's the way to go. So I want you to think about striving for second level connections, and second level connection can even be outside of traditional social media. Like maybe you have them on Facebook or a newsletter or maybe it's your website or something else that might be. But strive for second level connections because especially when you're building a brand, it's going to really take that to a whole different level. 26. Tell Your Potentials What To Do: If you're trying to build a brand on social media and you need people to comment or connect with you and somehow, you need to use something called either a default action or a call to action. It's the same thing. Here's the background. The background is, if you don't tell people what to do, they will do nothing. So it's so easy as a marketer, or as an influencer, or as social seller, whatever you might be, you're a brand builder, it's so easy to think, I'm going to make this incredible post. Here's this great picture, wonderful caption, and people are just going to comment if they want more information, or they're going to send me a direct message, and they don't. The biggest reason that they don't is they didn't know what to do. I know that's crazy. You're like, I don't care what they do. They can comment. It doesn't matter. Tell people what you want them to do. You need to let them know it's okay to reach out. It's okay to comment. It's okay to direct message me. It's okay to sign up on my email list, go to my website, whatever it is, it's an often overlooked thing. Now you don't want to put a default action or a call to action, whatever term you want to use, you don't want to put it on every one of your posts, because all of a sudden now you're just business, business, business. Watch the segment on messaging mix and ratio and all that other stuff to get more information about that, but the bottom line is, every now and then you want to sprinkle in what that default action is. Now, the default action can be simple. It could be like, comment with a heart if you want to know more, or use an emoji, comment with a word, tag a friend, share this with whomever. Whatever you want it to be. But if you don't tell people what to do, that's exactly what they'll do. They'll do nothing. Tell them what you want them to do. You'll see a huge bump in your success. 27. How Often Do You Show Your Product?: You're trying to build a brand on social media and I understand it. You're going to want to try to show your products and your services as often as possible. Again, I understand that. But go back to the message where we talked about messaging mix. Go back to the video about messaging mix. There's a ratio. How much can you show your product? That's the part that makes it a little bit more challenging and difficult. Here's what you're trying to balance. Number 1, does your account portray itself as a business or as a person? If you are a business, then you go for, dial in your mix, talk about those five things that we talked about earlier in one of the earlier videos, and let your products or your service be one of those things, if you're a business account. If you're actually more of a personal, like your account looks and feels like it's a personal account. Like, "Oh, here I'm with my family. Here I'm at the park." Here's these whatever products it is that you're selling. There's no end to the number of products that people are trying to sell through social media right now. If you're trying to do that, I need to caution you on how often to show your products. Those people who are typically not selling services. Now, let's just talk about there's anything from hair products, makeup products, weight loss products, supplements, workouts, regimens, shakes, cleaning. I mean, the products are off the charts, the number of different products that there are. I'm not picking on any one product whatsoever. I'm simply saying this, if your feed is all about that product, you're not going to gain traction. You're not going to gain more followers. If your follower account is going up, I challenge you to look at your followers because they're probably bots, they're probably fake accounts, because people don't subscribe to that. Go back and watch the video that we talked about, interruption based advertising. Your account needs to be relatable. We talked about that in other videos. You're going to be relatable, and you're going to be personable, and you're going to show emotion, you're going to inspire. Products that empower your life, it's just one aspect of your feed. At that it's actually a smaller aspect of your feed. When you do it right, when you dial in all those other parts, then they will eat up whatever product messages that you want. But I want to make sure you understand. Do you actually have to show the product? My answer back is going to be, at times, but most of the time, no. I'm going to talk in the next video more about how to get that product message in there even better. But I want you to think about some of the bigger brands. Let's look at Apple, for instance, and the most recent Apple ads. They've got some these great commercials. One is on the new wireless earphones or EarPods, whatever they call them. You see at the beginning of the commercial, you see the guy open them up and, I think, take them out of the case. That's it. You'll never see the product again. On some of the iPhone commercials you see the phone come out at the very beginning or maybe at the very end and that's it, you'll never see it again. We're going to talk about that in the next video. But the point is still this, most people, I think it's Sprout or Sprout Social has a great graphic out there that explain the number 1 reason people unfollow people. It's because too many promotional messages. Again, you're going to have to dial in that messaging mix, you're going to have to dial in, how often do you show the product? Lastly, when you show the actual physical product, there is a lot of elements on a physical product that the social platforms are able to pick up and go, "Oh my gosh, that's the whatever product." They just flat out limit your reach. Promoting those products through the social platforms without paying to do that, they have the ability to not give you any reach whatsoever. They have the ability to delete that post, and they have the ability to shut down your account. Therefore, promote those products, but promote those products in a unique and in an innovative way that's not going to put you in jeopardy of bad reach, bad impressions, or shutting your account down. Now, in the next module, we're going to talk about how. 28. Show What Your Products Enable You To Do: How do you talk about your products without actually showing the products all the time? Remember, I'm not saying you can't show products, I'm saying you want to severely limit how often you show products. What do you do? Remember one of the earlier modules we talked about, your bio has up to five relatable interests or passions of those, that's what your entire fetus. Let's just pretend it's hiking, biking, and swimming. That's what it's about. If you have a business that count and it's clear this is a business, you got your logo, you talk about your business all the time and so on. You have a little bit more leeway to show product. But what if it's not? It's more of a personal brand that you're building is more affiliate or influenced or marketing or social selling, social direct sales, MRM, whatever you want to call it. All of those are similar. They're all in the same boat. If you're trying to do this, like I am a person that had just happened to also sell these products too. Then what you want to do is, you want to show how do your products enable those passions. You said in your bio that you're a lover of hiking, biking, and swimming. You want to show how your products help you hike, bike, and swim. That's it. It's as simple as that. If it's a product that is not going to help you hike, bike and swim, don't show that product, show something different. I want you to think through the products, have to enable the lifestyle and the passion and the joys, and the interest that your account is based up of. Otherwise you'll lose trust. There's another side, a lot of times these social sellers, again, direct sales, M-R-M influencers and so on, might actually benefit by signing up other people to be a part of their program. You not only do you want to show how do the products fulfill your passions, the products enable your passion, but so does the business opportunity, like I'm able to go hiking this weekend because of my job that allows me to do such and so on. Don't always show the product, the actual physical product. Don't have too many promotional messages. We talked about how most people are un-followed because of too many promotional messages. Instead, show what the products that enable you to do, draw people in that way, and you will just make an incredible traction, and you limit the social platforms ability to limit your reach, shut down your account, and even delete your posts. Show with the products enable you to do. 29. When Not To Send A Direct Message: Here you are. You're super excited. There's a potential that maybe they commented on one of your post or something and you want to message them. Here's the deal, I want to encourage you, do not message people through a direct message. As much as possible, you don't want to answer questions through a direct message. Instead, you want to answer questions that have been sent to you on comments, you want to answer through the comments, not through a direct message. Number of reasons why. Number 1, you want to broadcast your answer. If one person had a question, you can pretty well bet that a lot of people had the exact same question. Number 2, remember the key in social media success is to build trust to make connections. When people ask you a question on social media in a comment and they see how you answer back, they go, oh my gosh, wow, look at that answer, they're approachable, they're friendly, they're kind. Now, I'm not afraid to ask a question because I saw how they already answered that. That's the other reason that's just going to be amazing. The next is, when a lot of times what I see, is somebody will ask a question in a feed in social media and the owner, the account owner's going to say, "Oh, I'll pm you or I'll send you a direct message or whatever." There's a lot of people who are just shy and you know what? I'm not ready for that. It's crazy to think like our relationship isn't that close yet. It's social media for goodness sake, but still, people will go, ''I'm not ready to take this to a DM level or a private message level or whatever.'' Answering questions in the feed, just do so much, you build so much social equity. When as much as possible, answer it through the comments, answer through the feed. Try not to send things to the direct message. Now listen, this is going to take restraint because you're going to really want, oh my gosh, they're ready. They're probably not ready to jump that close. But anyway, now if you are going to direct message someone, make it a conversation, don't make it about your product or your service, or whatever is that you're trying to promote or influence. Instead, be conversational. In fact, talk about them, don't just talk about you, don't talk about your products and services, talk about them. When you do that, again, social equity. You're building social currency, you're gaining trust, you're gaining connection, and you're gaining loyalty. It's the way to go. Trust me on this. 30. The Importance of Inbound Engagement: Engagement is hugely important and I'm going to break this into two different things I called inbound engagement and upon engagement. Inbound engagement is the level of likes and comments that you are receiving. This is important. Here's the deal. If you can't receive likes and comments, you're just not going to be successful building a brand through social media. You have to have engaged where they content, you have to have engaged where the post. Ask questions in your posts and seek that engagement when somebody comments to you, comment back and so on, so that's going to be important. Also, people vote what their likes. If you're tracking your posts and you see, hey, this post is getting great engagement in this post does too, but these just aren't, it's okay. Don't post that. The one that just isn't getting much engagement. Don't post that that much. If you have to post that kind of a thing, minimize how often you are doing it. Remember, there's a whole video module on messaging mics, so just minimize that in your mics. If you have two possible eliminated, measure your performance. There's something that I like to call a target engagement rate. It's simply says that no matter what I post, I want a certain percentage of my followers to like it. If they don't like it, that means my content is not engaged worthy with my followers. Now, if you're not getting great engagement, there's only three reasons why you're not getting grade engagement. Number one, you're posting at the wrong time. Everybody who gets bad engagement thinks, "Oh, it's like I'm posting at the wrong time." That's the simple thing is probably not completely accurate, but it's the easiest scapegoat. Number two, you have the wrong followers, maybe you have a travel blog and there's a whole travel fee than social media and nobody is liking your posts will maybe if you go back and you look, the people that are following, you are not interested in travel, so then you have to change your followers. Lastly, number three, you've got bad content and by bad content is simply mean content that is not attractive to your followers. It's as simple as that. There's nothing else to it. You can say, "Oh, well, I have a lot of people that I'd just like to follow their ghost followers. They follow my feed, they follow my count. They just don't engage." If they're not going to engage, they're also probably not going to buy or sign-up or shop on your website or whatever it is that you're trying to do through social media. You've got to get engagement. Look for ways to drive engagement, look for ways to measure your engagement. Keep track of the engagement that you're getting. The next video we're going to talk about your level of outbound engagement. 31. The Secret of Outbound Engagement: Let us talk about outbound engagement. This is the engagement that you are doing on other people's posts. This is huge. This is so big. All these teaching we are talking about how important it is to create and post great content. The level of your engagement on other people's content is almost as important or more important than the content that you post. The level to which you are engaging other people is almost more important than the content that you are creating. Maybe you are creating mediocre content, but your outbound engagement is awesome, you actually have a chance of good social media traction and success, as opposed to the person who has amazing content but your engagement is just horrible. You are possibly going to have a hard time. Here is the thing. Remember, why did people sign up on social media? They signed up so that they can connect with friends and family that they have already known to discover new connections and to share. If you are not going to engage with me, I'm not interested in connecting with you. The thing that goes against all this is celebrities. You are following Kim Kardashian because you just want to follow her life. That is great. You do not expect her to comment and like your posts, we understand that. But there is so much room for celebrities in my feed. There is an old phrase and it says that, "People do not care how much you know, until they know how much you care". In today's world, liking and commenting is caring. If you are not liking and commenting, you are not caring for me. If you are caring for me, I'm in a relationship with you but in my relationship with you, I'm not going to buy from you, subscribe to you, I'm not going to do any of the things that your brand-building goals are trying to achieve. Liking, commenting, and engaging is just vitally important. It is going to give you better reach. If your engagement on the posts that you are posting is going down, start liking , and engaging and commenting on other people's posts and your engagement will go up. There is something else to keep in mind. Turn on post notifications for people you follow often on Facebook, Instagram or whatever that way whenever they post, you will always get a notification, you get to see it, you get to go comment and like. It is really important for people that you think are going to be your potential client, potential subscribers, it's huge that way you do not miss a post and you keep that engagement at a really higher level. 32. Tracking Your Potentials: If you're building a brand through social media, one of the things that you're going to really want to do is track your potentials. Whether you call it a potential customer, a potential lead, a potential client, whatever it might be. If you are trying to build your brand, you're probably going to need a track your potentials. Now how you track those potentials, it's completely up to you. Maybe you're a pen and paper kind of a person. That's great. Get a notebook and a tablet, get some paper, whatever you want to do, write their names down there. Their handle if you need to. Other people, I'm a spreadsheet kind of a person. There's also something called a CRM. The CRM is just a fancy tool that, where it's just all digital, where you can keep all their contact information. It'll log every time you connect it with these people. I've found a few tools that I played around with in somewhat like, but none of them have been really great. In these videos, I'm not really mentioning tools specifically because they change so quickly. But check the tools section of this and you'll see any new tools that I can recommend for a way to do tracking. But if you're working in a team, I really like Google Sheets. It's a spreadsheet application, it's online, but it's collaborative. That means you can be in it at the same time as others. Also I do like, it's called zapier, Z-A-P-I-E-R. It's really cool for automation, but all that to say, keep track of your potentials. I like to call them on Instagram. I like to call them insta hopefuls as people that you want to continue to engage with. If I didn't already say, use the notes app on your phone, it's another great way to keep track of them anyway. Keeping track of potentials tells you who to follow up with, especially if you're engaged in social selling. 33. Closing: In closing, I want to thank you for following this course. I'm just really glad that you are part of this. Please, reach out. If you have questions, ask those questions. There's ways to ask questions to me, the group and so on. Look, there's a lot of tools out there right now. There's some legitimate tools that are really, like I said before, I don't comment on the tools that are available today. I don't put them in the videos because it changes so quickly. There's tools built into the social platforms. There's third party tools and there's tools that aren't affiliated. There's just lots of tools. We'll get into that in a written format later on. But ask your questions. Thank you for participating. There will always be updates. I'm going to update these videos, whether it's update like a writing or a message or whatever. Stay tuned to this platform that you found this video on because I'll give you updates. I always say, social media changes so quickly. The landscape changes. The rules change and so on. I will continue to update this. Follow on Facebook or follow the the business page on Facebook. Join the community group on Facebook. That's where I can give great engagement to you and really help you and push you along and encourage you and soak in the group as well. Updates all go really, really quickly there, too. Really glad that you are part of this. Really hoping that this is going to push your brand in the direction that you need it to. Looking forward to more teaching and more time with you. Thank you so much for being a part of this.