Marketing for Creatives: How To Build Your Personal Brand Using Social Media

1. Introduction : Social media is one of the best tools to get your name out there, find new customers, and get new clients. The problem most creatives face though, is they think social media is taking some photos, and videos of their work, showcasing their cute dog, doing some selfies in the bathroom. But really, it is the most powerful PR, and sales tool at your disposal. You have to think strategically about what you're posting, why you're posting, and the content you're creating. Hi, my name is Austin Juliano. Through building my own personal brand, I went from homeless sleeping onto my car, with literally nothing to my name, to becoming one of the fastest-growing live streaming influencers, working with amazing brands, speaking on the world stage, and radically, and fundamentally changing my life. I know for a fact that anybody can do this, because I did it. I'm so excited to share this course with you. In this course, what we're going to do, is we're going to start with identifying your unique target audience, and how you serve them. We'll talk about what social media platforms to be on so we can really focus our attention. Then we'll talk about what contents you'll want to create, and we'll build an entire strategy around your social media marketing for your personal brand. Here's the thing, 76 percent of all consumers will go online, will look at your Instagram, and your TikTok, and your Facebook, and your online presence to determine whether or not they want to work with you. Three out of four people will do their due diligence. What does your online reputation say? The best thing about this online world that we live in, is we actually get to create what others see, and we get to curate their perception of us. I'll even share with you some of the secrets I've learned about how to grow, get more followers, get more engagement, create that raving community, all the tools, and resources I use every single day, and so much more. I'm super excited to share this course with you, because I truly believe that anybody can learn this knowledge, and pick up these skill sets to apply to their life. I'm really excited to see what you do with this expertise that you're about to get. I'll see you guys in the next video where we talk about the class project, and we get started on it right away. [MUSIC] 2. Your Project: Welcome to the class project. I know from personal experience, social media and personal branding has so much to it that figuring out where to start can feel like a Herculean task. Therefore, what I've done is broken down this course into a step-by-step procedure that you can go through, where we're actually going to build your entire strategy for your personal brand in this course. To set you up for success, I've created a bunch of free resources, including Google documents, templates, Excel sheets, and so much more that you can get and open up right now. Click the link in the resources section of this course. Actually, let's do this. Let's open up the first part of building our social media strategy for our personal brand. It's called the buyer persona and customer avatar. After we build our buyer persona and our customer roadmap, the next thing we're going to do is determine what social media platforms to be on. Then we're going to build out a content strategy plan for you. We'll create a strategy for building a community. Lastly, we'll discuss how to consistently improve because this is not a set it and forget it template. What you want to do is take this information, put a game plan down there, start moving forward and then learn from your mistakes. Because you're going to make mistakes, but that's okay. Open up those documents and I'll see you guys in the next video. 3. Finding and Serving Your Tribe: [MUSIC] Welcome to the first lesson. In this lesson, we're going to talk about the first of the two key fundamentals of building your personal brand using social media. This first thing is asking a very simple question; who do you serve and how do you serve them? I'm a graphic designer, I'm a videographer, I'm an animator, I'm a yoga instructor, I'm an accountant, I can help everybody. While on the surface, this may appear to be true, the problem is it's just way too broad of an audience that you can't really focus and get the results you're looking for. When you were a little kid, do you remember having a hot sunny day out, grabbing a magnifying glass, tilting it so you got that beam of sunshine, and you burn your name into some wood? Well, that's what we have to do with social media marketing. We have to amplify our results and be laser-focused on exactly who we serve and how we serve them. Now, it always helps me bringing this down to numbers. If you said you serve everyone, right now, there's 329 million people living in the US alone. If you said you had $100,000, that includes your time, your money, and your resources that you can dedicate to promoting yourself as an expert, and as a brand over the course of one year. That would leave you 0.0003 cents to reach every single person in the United States, once. Statistically speaking, you actually need to reach people 7-29 times before they decide to make a purchase. That means you have to market to them over and over and over and over again and be repetitive. If you have 0.0003 cents to reach people 7-29 times, that in essence means you don't have enough money. You will never be successful. But now let's imagine you can narrow that audience down to only 1,000 people. Say it's the CEOs of Fortune 1000s, or if you are a graphic designer, let's say you pick restaurants in the Denver metropolitan area. There's probably about 1,000 restaurants in the Denver metropolitan area. It makes it much easier to identify who you're serving, and reach them. Because then you would have what, $100 to reach those 1,000 people 7-29 times? Absolutely, you can achieve that result. Now, we know that throws a lot of numbers around at you. Just get the concept behind it. Here's how we're going to start narrowing down who we serve. In the Resources tab, I want you to pull out that blink customer avatar template I have for you. Start by giving that customer a name. The thing is, when you start working on social media, if you're writing copy directly for a person that you can name, it's going to make it a lot easier. From there, start filling out all the demographic information you know. What's their age? What's their income level? Are they married? Do they have kids? From there try and to figure out where do they consume their content? What are their worldview? What are their needs; their top needs? Leave it to three. What are their top three pain points? You may not have all this information, but do the best you can with the information you have. As you go along, keep referencing back to this document and updating it with new and better information. Now that you've started filling that out, let's move on to the next part. How do you serve them? Now, in the entire world and the service-based industry, there's only about four ways we ever serve people. Through time, money, happiness, and security. Time. Do you save people time? You hire a graphic designer, accountant, a videographer so you don't have to do it. Money. Do you make them more money? Do you hire a Facebook ads expert because it saves you time or because they're better at making more money for you. Hopefully because they're better at making more money for you, or maybe they're saving you money. Happiness. The reason we buy, most of the things we buy in this world is to increase our happiness level. We don't really need all that much in a First World country. Lastly, security. We are scared as a species, of losing whatever it is we have. We will work 10 times harder to keep something than to gain something. Security is a powerful motivator. Think about how you serve. Is it 1, 2, 3 or all of those different factors? Once you have an understanding, use a very basic formula. I serve audience to achieve result through process. Let's use an example of a graphic designer because as the first business I ran was a graphic design business, I know it pretty well. I help small businesses standout. That sounds interesting. How do you go about doing that? Well, I help small businesses stand out online, making their websites more responsive, ranking higher in Google, and generating more business for themselves. I do that through creating really engaging and captivating websites. I serve audience to achieve results through process. Really easy. Let's use me as an example. I hope personal brands build their business by leveraging their expertise and creating viral worthy content. The first key is being able to ask and answer who exactly you serve; demographic and psychographic information. That customer avatar. The second is knowing how you serve them using that formula we just laid out. Once you have all this done, we'll move on to the next video: Building your personal brand's business and marketing funnel. 4. Creating Your Personal Brand Business: Welcome to the second of the two keys of building your personal brand. In the last lesson, we focused on building that customer avatar, and the buyer persona, and the customer journey. In this video, we're going to focus on building your business as a brand. Because unless you're making revenue, you don't have a personal brand, so generating business is really important. Now you might be saying, "Austin, I'm trying to build my personal brand so I get hired." Well, we still have to think about the activities we do, whether we're trying to get hired or we're trying to build a freelance business. It's the same process. The first thing we really need to do is understand a basic marketing funnel. Every business has something called a marketing funnel. Each marketing funnel has three stages that go into. This funnel looks like this. The three stages are awareness, consideration, conversion. Now, you can think about this as the typical customer first has to become aware of you, figuring out exactly who you are and that you even are in existence. Now, this can be done through creating social media posts, blog articles, radio, TV, digital ads, showing up on Google search. Your whole job here is, hey, I exist. The next stage is consideration. Consideration is all about the customer asking a very simple question. Is this the right fit for me? Here's the secret, for me. Now is this the best product, or is this the most popular one, is this the right fit for me? Now, how you showcase this with people is through testimonials of past customers just like them, having them fill out a few questions to get a quote, offering a free coaching your sales call to see if they're a qualified customer. The whole idea behind this entire stage is to just insert this simple question, is this the right fit for your customer? Now if we go back to the buyer persona, if you're focusing on creating content and doing everything for that individual buyer persona, then it's an easy yes. It will always be the right fit for the customer because you're specifically creating everything for this stage. The last one is conversion. This is the dollar dollar bills, you all. What's most important about this, is not how good of a salesperson you are, it's very simply removing friction from the process. Because every single person in the world hates getting sold to, but we all love buying. If you remove the friction, if you make it an easy yes, then that customer is going to say yes. We're going to come back to this awareness, consideration, conversion in a little bit. We're going to create something called a customer journey. Now, in the Google documents, I have a road that's built out. But before you build out the exact road, what I'd like to do is a little exercise, which is a lot easier to create, especially because I am not at all creative or good at graphic design or anything like that. What we're going to do is we're going to get a big piece of paper like this or a notebook and just draw a whole bunch of boxes. I got nine here, but you can have a lot more in your own customer journey, and you may need a lot more. What I like to do is I like starting at the end. Now, the end is not here. Let's see if we can shift this up a little bit. Right about here. This is where a sale is made. Cash money, money. We know what happens when a sale is made. Now, if we connect each of these boxes with arrows, what happens right before a sale is made in your customer's journey? For me, before a sale is made, I send an invoice and contract. Those things have to be signed, completed before I do any business. I recommend that you have contracts and lawyers and all that sort of stuff, too. Before that happens, what has to happen? Well, for me, I get on the phone and I go over what I do. I have a phone call. Sometimes this is called a consulting call, a sales call, a discovery call, whatever you want to do it. What is your process? Before that happens, what happens? Well, I have them fill out a questionnaire. I have terrible handwriting, and I apologize. But I want to get certain questions and answers from them before I even decide whether or not this is a good fit for me. From there, what has to happen? Well, for them to get those questionnaire, generally speaking, they have to go onto my website because that is pretty much where it's at, and it's a particular page. What page? Now, it could be on your homepage, it could be on your Work With Me page, whatever it is. How are they going to get to that page? Well, see, now this is where it gets a little bit tricky. Are they coming from a social media post? Are they coming from a Google search engine? Are they coming from an advertisement? May be there are multiple ways. We can have other little boxes over here and over here. That's like, hey, this is how you get to this particular page. What you want to do is start mapping this out. Maybe for me, it's a retargeting advertisement. What that means is they've already engaged with some of my content on social media, they've been to my website already. Some way, shape, or form, I have become aware of who they are and I do a retargeting ad in Facebook, Instagram, Google to drive them back to this Work With Me page. For them to get that, here is where the social media comes in. Social media drives the initial interest, which then a retargeting ad gets them to my page. They sign up through the questionnaire. They answer some questions. I qualify them on the phone. I run through my pricing and my packaging on the phone with them, so that way when I send them the invoice and the contract, they know what's going on. It's all very standard. I'm not trying to get any fast ones by them. They make a sale. Well, now what happens? Here's where really comes in. After the sale is made, they get welcome info. This is going to help them determine whether or not they're going to be successful because I'm leading them through the process. This is typically what has to happen, X, Y, and Z. From their, service starts, but it doesn't end. If you know your service and you can keep mapping this, you can do a whole another series of boxes and keep going on. The more specific you are in this process, the better your customer journey is going to be. Because what you want to do is make sure that each step of this equation, you go above and beyond what is normal to wow the customer and you're going to get repeat business. Once you have this mapped out, then you can go into the Google documents and make it into the fancy roadmap and actually map it out more specifically. Lastly, what we can do with this customer roadmap is go a little bit deeper into different sections. Let's slide this over to give myself a little bit more room. Let's say here the questionnaire, the Q&A section for me, what are the red flags and the green flags you're looking for? Does the customer have the budget? If you don't have the budget, I can't work with you. What is the scope of the work? We need to define that because as a freelancer, as a brand, you don't want project creep. For me, one of the big things I want to know is, what is your current marketing, in particular, social? Because if you don't have something, I can't really do too much for you. It's really, really, really difficult to get the launch to happen, but once the launch has happened, it's really easy and really fun to take it from a 10 to 100. So I don't work with startups. I only work with established people, and I recommend the same for you. What are the questions you need answered? You can fill this in in different sections. On the phone call, what is your process for a sales call? There's some really great training out there for sales calls if that's something you want to do. What is your payment provider? Who are you sending? Are you doing PayPal? Are you doing Stripe? So on and so forth. I apologize for the handwriting again, but this is where you want to get messy and specific. As a recap, take as much time and energy as you need and get into as much detail as you can building out that customer roadmap. Starting with the end, when a sale is made and working in reverse, each step that has to happen to make that sale happen. Figure out exactly what hurdles or barriers there are to move on to the next step and get as much detail as possible down. This will lead your customers through the three stages: awareness, consideration, conversion to work with you. Now that we have all this mapped out, let's move on to the next step. Let's talk about what social media platforms you should be on. 5. What Platforms Should I Be On?: In this video, we're going to talk about where you should focus your time and energy and what social media platforms you need to be on. Currently, there are 17 different social media platforms that have over 300 million users. Simply put, you cannot be on all those different social medias at the same time. You just don't have the time and energy. Therefore, we really need to focus our efforts and get the most bang for our buck. What I want to do is break down these 17 social media platforms into three different buckets. What we're going to do is choose two platforms to be on, maybe three if you're feeling extra spicy, one from each of those buckets. The first bucket is going to be your long-form content creation platforms. These are the YouTube videos or the Facebook video platforms. Podcasting, blogging slash content marketing. Because that really is a social media. We have live streaming, things like that. Anything where you create these big, meaty pieces of content. These platforms, you're asking your audience to give you a ton of time and energy, and attention. Therefore, there's certain things we have to be aware of. One, the production value just needs to be higher. For example, in the YouTube space, MrBeast is one of the largest creators in existence. Go and watch any one of his videos and look at the first 30 seconds and see how many different cuts and shots does he have in the first 30 seconds of the video? Here's a hint. It averages around 22 different shots. Now, his production value is through the roof, but he gets 50 million views per video. If you want to create engaging content, we have to focus on the platform and understand what does insanely well and really be obsessive about it, but anybody can achieve it. The second thing we have to be aware of is understanding the value we are giving the customer in exchange for their attention. They have to get a direct benefit from consuming your content. What is that benefit? Are you teaching them a new skill? Are you inspiring them with a motivational story? Are you entertaining them? What is the value and why should they pay attention? If you don't know, don't create content. Lastly, how are we going to use these platforms as a springboard for other types of content? Because we're putting a ton of time and energy to create, say, a 10-minute YouTube video, how can we also use this? For example, let's say we create a 10-minute YouTube video that's a, how to style video. What we can do is we can take that video and since we've written out the script already, we can take that script and turn it into a how to blog article and put it on our website. Maybe we can take really pertinent information that is concise and cut that down and use it for a short-term content platform, which is the second bucket. Maybe we can pull the audio from this video and put it up on a podcasting platform and also build an audience over there. Understanding the different platforms, how we're going to leverage them, and having a plan is going to be really important but let's move on to that second bucket; the short-form content creation platforms. These are the platforms like the TikToks, the Instagram reels or stories, Snapchat stories. We have Twitter, Whatsapp groups are short-form content creation platforms. Anything that's really bite-size your appetizers, you're not going to fill up on a single piece of content. If you watch 10, 20, 30 short-form videos, all of a sudden half your day is gone and you're like, what have I done with my life? These are the platforms where we're going to want to create a ton of bite-sized pieces of content and really it's great for engaging in building a community. Bucket number 3 is what I lovingly referred to as the Oddballs. They don't fit easily in the short-form or the long-form content creation platforms, they're a little bit different. First off, you got your LinkedIn. LinkedIn is amazingly powerful tool to use, because not only is it your online resume if you're trying to get hired, it's the perfect place to be but you can also create long-form content on that platform in the form of articles with LinkedIn Pulse or even 10-minute videos can natively be uploaded. There's communities you can engage with and their sales tool is so powerful in generating cold leads. It's amazing. If you're in the business-to-business space and you're not on LinkedIn, you're being just absolutely silly. The second one is Pinterest. Pinterest is one of the most powerful visual search platforms in existence. We all have done this. We've gone online, we've tried to search for something. We look for an image, we click on it and all of a sudden it's trying to bring us to Pinterest. The reason Pinterest is such an Oddball is also because it's so powerful for creating long-term traffic. An average tweet goes off a person's timeline in under 30 minutes. Whereas a really good pin on Pinterest can last for as long as a month before it disappears. That means for over a month it's just generating new traffic after traffic after traffic. If it does really well, it's a constant source of traffic. If you're in a profession with a highly visual medium, I recommend you check out Pinterest and start studying it because it can do really well for you. Lastly, one of my favorites is Reddit. Reddit is completely different from every other social media because it's called the front page of the Internet. Reddit is broken up into these things called subreddit that are specific about a single topic, whether it's silence or whether it's knitting, or whether it's dungeons and dragons. People post content related to that subreddit and they upvote or downvote it. If it gets enough upvotes, it ends up being shared to other related subreddit. It's such a powerful platform because things can go viral so fast on Reddit. Now that we have a brief overview of the platforms, let's pick 2-3 platforms to be on. In the document, I have a breakdown, a little bit more about each platform, what their benefits are, who the demographic is, so you can have a general understanding and then you can go from there. Now that we have our platforms picked out, let's move on to the next video. 6. Long Form Content Creation: In this video, we're going to talk what long-form content to create. We've picked our 2-3 platforms to be on, so let's focus on the long-form content creation. It's going to take the most resources, time, and energy, so let's start here and build our success from the ground up. Let's do a little exercise. Grab a piece of paper and write down 15-20 frequently asked questions for your industry, your niche, and what you do. We got ourselves our piece of paper. Let's straighten this puppy out a little bit. What I want you to do is at the top here, just write FAQ. I want you to make a list of 15-20 frequently asked questions for your field. Now, one of the most often question asked is, how much does it cost to hire a wedding photographer, let's say? Let's use another example. How long does it take to shoot a video? How much does it cost to hire, say, a wedding photographer? Well, of course, the answer is going to be it depends on location and venue and what they're looking for and the scope of the work. How long does it take to shoot a video? Well, again, same sort of thing. I understand these are all "it depends" answers, but these are the questions you're going to get asked all the time. What we want to do is first just start outlining what are these questions. Here's some more examples. What to look for when hiring a, insert whatever your profession is. What is the best process for working with, say, animators? Because that's a whole thing that I don't fully understand, and I'm sure if I wanted an animation, I'd want to know what that process is. Who's the best, say, graphic designer in New York City, Denver, Los Angeles, wherever you are? How to X, Y, and Z? What are these frequently asked questions? Take a few minutes and write down 15-20. That's our goal because we're going to use these in a little bit. Now that we have a basis of what content to create, let's talk a little bit more tactically about the different platforms and whether or not you should be on them. YouTube, for example, is almost not even a social media because it's built through search. It's the number 2 search engine in the world, and the number 1 is Google. Google owns both of those companies. But why I highly recommend this platform if you're trying to build your personal brand is because it's one of the few places that has native discoverability. When somebody goes onto YouTube and searches "how do I start as a graphic designer" and you rank, they're going to find you and if they like you, they'll subscribe and they'll watch more of your content. If you create content designed to help people and you put the production value in to make the content so it actually ranks, you're going to build a massively powerful and engaged audience because video is so much more powerful than reading, say, a blog article. How you go about trying to rank for that top spot is a whole course in and of itself. But there's a tool I recommend because I use it daily called TubeBuddy. This is TubeBuddy. It's a Chrome extension that has both a free and a paid option. I'm going to quickly go over a little overview here so you can see some of the fundamentals and how it's very useful. The number 1 thing that I like to use on TubeBuddy is the keyword explore, which allows you to put any sort of keywords, any sort of titles you have, and it'll rank how well you are likely to get that keyword. Let's start with something big and definitely not something we're ever going to get. Just straight-up graphic design. Then here's a whole bunch of potential things. Let's say you're a graphic designer and you're like, oh, graphic design software. Which software should I use as a graphic designer? What's going to happen is it's going to run this data through its little algorithms and whatnot, and it's going to show you a few key metrics. Now, I am on the paid version, which gives a weighted overall score and it tells based off of my profile how much traffic I get, how likely I particularly am going to get it. The free version, it's going to give you the unweighted score. You can see there's a huge different. Unweighted, it says, oh, 59 weighted. It's saying 10. Huge, huge difference here. Here's a couple of things I like to look at. When I'm looking at this, I go, how much search volume? Green. This is a ton of search volume. That's fantastic. That means there's a lot of people going for it. The competition weighted is poor. That's because every single graphic designer in the world is probably making this video. But the optimized strength is really high. This looks to be something that I could probably do down the line or if I am really, really good with my editing and I have a really vast knowledge of the different software. This might be useful. But what I would also look at first before we go any further is I would hit the results. Let's see here, the number 1 search term, their number 1 video is free graphic design software. Then the two is which graphic design software is best for you. Amateur versus pro graphic designer, so on and so forth. What I do is looking at this, I go, okay, what is the titles that I'm likely to get? Here's the thing with search engine optimization, having the title closer to the beginning usually helps. Free and then it's graphic design software. Which design software? That's number 2. It's not always that and sometimes you have to put it towards the end so it reads for humans, but that's just a little trick I know. Then I'm looking at what are the thumbnails that are popping up and how could I make something a little bit better. Popping back over here, here is one last thing. You versus top ranked videos. The lowest video count found in the top ranking videos has 8,746 views, 8.74K views. On average, I'm only getting about 250 views per video. I know that I'm unlikely to get this top rank. What I have to do is I have to start going through some of these other topics on the side here and try and find one that I'm likely to hit. A few more things to look at is the number of monthly searches estimate. This is a huge one, 286,000 views. What we want to do if we're starting out and we're just trying to build our audience, is we're looking for something that has around 1,000 monthly searches. Most of the time, it's something you'll actually be able to hit if you create a good video. Because with a 1,000 monthly searches, not many of the big people are going after it, but it's just enough that you're going to be able to get that search traffic. For example, let me put icebreaker speech toastmasters. I did get this as one of the top rank searches. We come down here, even for myself, it's saying, "Hey, you're not likely to get this." I know I've already hit this video for one of the top ones. But you can see there's insufficient data. But if we come over to the results, boom, I'm number 3. Toastmasters icebreaker speech literally is like the exact title, that's number 1. But how to give an amazing icebreaker speech for toastmasters, see how it reads more human? I'm number 3. I specifically created that video for this keyword, and that's going to give me steady monthly traffic. But here are some other things. How to write an icebreaker speech for toastmasters, evaluations of icebreakers speech toastmasters, that's a really good one. I should probably create this video because that's the other aspect of it. It's not a guarantee, but it's so helpful of a tool I cannot recommend it enough. The second platform is live streaming. This is a very powerful platform if you have the personality and energy for it because you have to be live consistently every single week, day, whatever your schedule is. But the authenticity that is created through a live stream is completely different than, say, a YouTube video. Because YouTube, you're editing, chopping, and presenting a whole perfection version of yourself. But livestreaming, when you mess up and stumble and fumble and you forget what you're saying, people see it. Knowing how to be okay with that and being under that pressure is a really great way of building an audience who cares about what you're doing deeply. I started in the livestreaming space. I love it. It's not for everybody, but I do recommend you check it out because it's just so much fun. The third platform I want to talk about is podcasting. Podcasting is different from every social media because there's no real algorithm that is trying to promote content one way or the other. It's still in its infancy stage. If you do well and you build an audience through podcasting, you can just massively explode. It's also really powerful for building your network. Because if there's high-value influencers or people in your space that you've always wanted to get in touch with, reaching out to them and offering or asking them to be on your podcast is a great and easy way of building that relationship. Look for when they are doing a book launch or something like that to put that ask out there because most of the time they're going to say no. But if they're looking to promote stuff, being like, "Hey, come on my podcast, promote your book. Let's have a conversation," and then you build a network that is so powerful. The fourth one, Facebook video is the platform to be on if you also want to supplement your content with advertising dollars. We know how powerful Facebook advertising is. We've seen it in the news about the crazy things that are possible. Leveraging Facebook advertising, putting a few dollars behind your content will get you thousands of eyeballs for ridiculously cheap. I spend less than $5 a day to get thousands upon thousands of views to my content. Lastly, let's talk about blog content, also known as content marketing. SEO is so powerful because again, you're going to have that native discoverability. It's not just writing blog articles anymore, embedding your videos into your website, pulling the audio and having an audio version of your transcript of your video or of your blog article. Creating infographic or slide shares are different ways of creating content that is hugely powerful for engaging and building an audience. There's, again, a lot that goes into creating a powerful and engaging blog that's a whole course in and of itself, but a tool I recommend is Google Keyword Research. Finding keywords about your niche and your subject matter and writing content around it, trying to get that number 1 spot. Lastly, follow something called the 80 percent rule. One of the top YouTubers out there by the name of John Green talks about this rule. He says when you go and create content, try and create that content to that 80 percent mark and then ship it. Because what you're going to find is if you wait to try and get it to 100 percent, you will never launch. But when you hit 80 percent, you launch and you do that over and over and over again. Six months down the line, when you look at what your 80 percent is, you would have thought it was 200 percent of when you were first starting out. You improve so much by shipping, and then looking at the analytics and trying to improve. As a quick recap, create 15-20 frequently asked questions, then slot those into the three different stages: your awareness, consideration, conversion stage. Follow the 80 percent rule. Now let's move on to short-form content. 7. Short Form Content Creation: In the last video, we talked about what long-form content create. Let's now talk about what short-form content to create. Unlike long form content, the platforms for short-term content are changing all the time. So what I want to do is create a high-level overview and talk about five different tried, true, and tested versions of really good viral content formula. We'll go from there. The first type of content I want to talk about is what I call the cut downs. If you are making a 10-minute YouTube video, taking that video and slicing it down into a 15, 30, 60 second video that can be put on your Instagram or your TikTok or your YouTube shorts is really good because you're getting extra exposure and extra content without doing that much work. To give a perfect example of this, go and look at any comedians TikTok page, any big media, you will see that they create these specials that they put out on Netflix or whatever and then they will take a 60 seconds of some of their strongest jokes and pull it up on a TikTok. It is so powerful because you watched that little bit you're laughing and you're like, I need to subscribe to that person. I need to go watch their Netflix special. They give you just a little teaser. If you've created a video that is doing well, look at what sections can you pull out and start learning how to natively upload those to your TikToks, your shorts, your Facebook, your whatever you're going to use, and see how it performs. The second type of content is called newsjacking. When something big happens in the news, your industry and your space jumping on that bandwagon and creating content around that trend is so powerful because they're already people looking for it. Then the algorithms get behind your content. Whenever somebody looks for something online, the algorithm goes, oh, you watch this video, well, here are 17 more videos that are just like it. If you're one of those 17 videos, chances are that person is going to click consume and now all of a sudden they are a part of your sphere of influence. Let's say for example, you're a graphic designer and a company that is big and well-known, I don't know, let's say something like Skillshare, decides to go through a rebranding, making a new logo, creating a video that's like, here is why Skillshare's logo is amazing or horrible or whatever, and then talking about it can be a really great way of generating some of that extra attention. On top of that, there's a chance that those companies like Skillshare will see it and it gets shared around their network. I've had that happen before. Say you're an animator, and it's the Super Bowl, and a Super Bowl commercial comes out with this crazy cool animation and you're like, oh my God, that blows my mind. Let me react to that and create a video, and talk about that breakdown would do really well. To give you an example of somebody who does that already, Corridor Crew is a YouTube channel of VFX artist who break down special effects that happen in movies. It's one of their most popular series and they have millions of subscribers because of it. The third type of content is platform trends. Platforms are always coming out with new tools, new types of mediums to create, new trends that are happening, whether it's a hashtag or a sound or whatever, it may be. Having your finger on the pulse and understanding what those things are and creating content with that new sound, with that new medium that they just launched or whatever it may be, is a really great way of getting extra exposure. It's a simple fact of supply and demand. There was a lot of demand for a platform. Then when a new type of way of creating content comes out, there's not a lot of supply. So when you create the content, the algorithms will lift your content higher, show you two more people and more likely to be successful. It's not guaranteed, of course, but understanding that when these things come out being first and jumping on it is a great way of getting that extra exposure will fundamentally change how you approach social media. The fourth type of content I call the contrarian. Controversy gets eyeballs. I don't think I really have to explain this to you, because if you've been on social media for even a day, you've seen controversy. So here's what I'm going to recommend. One, what is a controversial opinion in your space? What does something nobody's talking about that you're deeply passionate about? Is that something you can talk about and you feel comfortable with? Understand that when you go the route of the contrarian, you will get pushback. So can you handle that? Also, are you punching up or punching down? Punching up means going after somebody or someone or something that is more powerful than you. The multi-billion-dollar corporation, punch at them, go at it, it's fine. It's a multi-billion dollar corporation. Somebody who's doing less fortunate than you, don't punch down too, it doesn't look good. It's not my favorite way, but it does work. Generally speaking, that as long as the controversy isn't something that's going to get you arrested, it ends up working out really well for you. Joe Rogan is one of the biggest podcasters in the world. He has had a number of controversies. He came out and said that during the peak of his largest controversy, he got two million new subscribers for his podcast. When you have an audience, creating a little bit of outrage can be really powerful. But there's a version of the contrarian that I like more. It's the last one we're going to talk about. It's called the feel-good. There is too much Kafka in the world already. Creating content that pulls on emotional heartstrings and shows the beauty of this world is so much better. We'll talk about why that works so well in a later video. In general, the more positivity you bring into the world, the better the world is going to be, the better your life is going to be, and it just makes you feel better. So as a quick recap, the five tested true, viral worthy types of content are the cut down, the newsjacking, the platform trends, the contrarian, and the feel-good. Think about the content you can create that falls into one of those categories and just start putting some ideas down. Next, let's talk about creating community for your brand. 8. Creating a Community: [MUSIC] Grab a piece of paper, and let's make a list of about 10-15 influencers in your space. These are the people with the audience who are like, you follow, they're the thought leaders or whatever. These are the big people in your space. Make a list of those 10-15 and then go through and let's take a look at who their audiences are? Look at your buyer persona that you have and go, is this audience that they have? Is that my audience? Start narrowing down those influencers and maybe find 3-5 of these influencers that have your audience. This is a great place to start because they have already collected what you hope to be as your audience and so if you join these communities, and start engaging in these communities, you're going to start engaging with your audience. Pretty natural transition here. How we're going to go about engaging with this audience is these 3-5 influencers that have your audience. You're going to start leaving comments on their posts. What I would highly recommend is you turn on the notifications for those influencers, and whenever they drop a new post, go over there, leave a thoughtful and engaging comments, and look at who are the first people to actually leave those comments too within the first five-minutes. Let's say. Those people are highly engaged. Go in and respond to those comments yourself. You start becoming a power user for this influencer. They're going to start seeing you over and over and over again and recognizing who you are, and so as this community. Then take it another step further, go into that audience who you just responded to their comments. Go into their profile, look at their photos, or their TikToks, or their videos, or whatever content they are posting and start engaging with them on their platform. The best way to engage with people in this capacity is to write something that is thoughtful about the content they are creating and to also ask an open-ended question, so they can respond back and you can start having a conversation back and forth. If you're creating content like these influencers and it's good content, and you're engaging with people very natively like a human being. What's going to happen is those people are going to go, oh, this person just dropped 15 likes on my Instagram and left three comments. That's so cool. Who is this? Let me go see. Then they look at your content and they're going to be like, wow, this content is amazing. Let me follow, let me engage, and there you just gained a new follower. Now I know this doesn't seem like something that is very scalable, but it's one of these things is if you have only 3-5 influencers, you're engaging with and their audience, you can break it down into, say, taking five community members per day from each of these influencers. That's what 15-25 engagements you do a day. It takes maybe 30-45 minutes not a whole lot of time. But over the course of a long period of time, you're going to have a hockey stick like approach when it comes to your followers. It's going to be really slow at first and it's so frustrating. But you're going to get a follower here, a follower there. But all of a sudden you're going to hit this point where it just exponentially grows. The algorithms is going to kick in, it's going to start promoting your content. It's going to happen and you're just going to grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow. It's such an amazing feeling. Really, it's all about little tiny actions over a long period of time to make a tremendous change. That's how you grow a community. Real engagement like a human being with other human beings. It's that simple. As a quick recap, find 10-15 influencers in your space and look at their audience. Narrow down those influencers to 3-5 that actually have your audience and start engaging with that audience on the influencers profiles and on the audience's profiles [MUSIC]. This is how you build a community over a long period of time. I'll see you guys in the next video. 9. Science of Social Media: [MUSIC] With their basic plan in place, let's take a deep dive into the science of social media. This will help us create better content. First off, let's do a high-level overview. Every single social media has three parties. The platform/the algorithm, us, the consumer, and the advertiser. Now, when I say the consumer, understand that any social media that is free, the consumer is actually the product. The real consumer is the advertisers. The longer we stay on those social media platforms, the more money the platform makes, and the happier the advertiser ends up becoming. Now, obviously, this is not a new and revolutionary idea. Understanding it though helps us understand why and how to create better content. When we engage with a piece of content and an elicit an emotion, the algorithm learns and then feeds you more of it. Therefore, we have to understand our goal in content creation is to elicit emotions and capture attention. Watch time is the number one metric for every single platform. If you imagine your life as a standard bell curve. Now I apologize because I can't draw really well. The majority of our life trying falls within this middle range. This is emotionally speaking, the average day. You go to work, you do what you need to do. You come home, you eat some food. Nothing really exciting happens. This is the far majority of our days. Some days, something amazing happens. It's over here. This is when we have a new kid, our birthdays. Something amazing in our life happens. The other end of the bell curve is the worst days of our lives. Worst, best. Social media algorithms are designed for this and this. But the far majority of posts and the far majority of our lives are here in the center area. Our social media posts that are like this do not get engagement, but our posts on either ends get a ton of engagement. But us as human beings, are not designed to live in these two extremes. This would be like the worst version of bipolar you could ever have. We need these middle days so how do we go about creating content for the best and worst human emotions without constantly being in those places and that's what we're going to talk about next. It's called creating a radically authentic persona. Because honestly, that's what it is. It's a persona of ourselves. It's a version of ourselves. Like in spinal tap, turning the music up to 11. That's what we're going to do here today. How we go about doing this is a self-discovery process but there are some key factors. We're going to create a little Venn diagram over here. Let me make the circles 1, 2, 3, 4. Shift this up so we can see this. In one of these circles, we've already discussed it. This is our FAQ. This is the content that's going to drive our business that our customers need to know. This is that content we've identified already. This is the business version of content. Doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be a part of our persona, but we need to be aware of what this is. The next is what people are searching for. A lot of that may already be an FAQ, but it could also be that trend jacking or that platform jacking. Those two things right here, the content that drives business and it's searchable, is a really good place to start for creating any content because it has the eyeballs and it's answering a question and giving the value to the consumer. But if we want to create a radically authentic persona, we need to add two more things in here. In one of these, it's content we're passionate about. Well, we have a ton of passion. It's also being searched for and it drives business. We're going to create a ton of authenticity. We're going to create a ton of engagement because we love passion but to make it one step better, we have to add in the last circle, wisdom. There is a lot of people on the Internet who will passionately talk about any subject, but have never once actually done whatever it is. That thing is that they're talking about. When you come from a deep well of wisdom and you speak passionately about a subject that people are searching for and it drives business. You are going to create such a viral-worthy content and then it can become an easy, radical persona of your true self because it's something that is so much fun to talk about. Now I can't tell you exactly what content to create to hit this perfect Venn diagram to be the most authentically you extreme version of yourself without burning yourself off or becoming like a hollow shell. It's a form of self-discovery, but having an understanding of what it takes, we can start aiming for it and working our way towards creating content that fits that perfect little circle. [MUSIC] Now that we have this understanding, let's move on to creating explosive growth for your brand. 10. Creating Explosive Growth: [MUSIC] In this video, we're going to talk about the four different techniques to create explosive growth for your brand. Those four techniques are, being first, being the best, being controversial, and paying money, that's it. Being first is always the easiest, whether it's the first on a new platform that is launching, the first on a new trend that is happening, the first on a new medium that the platform has launched, being first will get you so much more results. The problem or challenge with this is you don't know whether or not that first is going to hit or not, so you're putting energy in and it might not have a return and that's scary. But back in November of 2007, this little-known graphic designer by the name of Jacob Cass decided to start writing about graphic design, and for 15 years, he put out content. Today, he is one of the top ranked graphic designer in all of New York City because he was first, he ended up becoming Number 1 in New York City. That's crazy. Be first, shoot for that goal. By far the easiest to achieve. But if you can't be first, being the best is always the next best thing. No matter how saturated the marketplace is, if you are obsessive about creating the best content for the platform and for your community, you will be successful. It just takes time. I talked about Mr. Beast a lot because he's a huge inspiration. He has been on YouTube since he was a kid and has thousands upon thousands of terrible videos. Go look at his first videos that are up. They are bad but what you will notice is that he was obsessive about being successful on YouTube and he talks about it on a podcast, I forget which one. But for a year, him and three other people got together every single day and talked about every single aspect of the platform, what worked, what didn't work. Because when you create contents yourself, you can only learn from your own mistakes but when you have other people around you also doing it, you can learn from their mistakes and their successes too. I do recommend that if you want to be successful in any of these platforms, find other people to be your accountability partners, create content with and learn from and collaborate with. The third is being controversial. This is highly effective as a way of growth. The best example of this is a little known artist you may not have heard of by the name of Kanye. The final technique is paying money. Social medias are businesses, therefore, giving them money to get yourself extra exposure, extra views and eyeballs and clicks is super effective. Now, if you want to go down this path, I do recommend you go onto Skillshare or some other platform and learn all you can about advertising. It's a whole, entire field. There's some great courses, I have one up here on Skillshare, but it's not difficult to do. Here's an example. Say you're an animator and your audience happens to be YouTubers, you go, these YouTubers need an animated intro at a low-cost price point that I could sell. What you do is you create a lead generation ad for this low-cost YouTube intro, you sell them on this and you make a little bit of money, but you're not making a ton of money, but you deliver a fantastic product to them knowing that down the line, they're going to go, hey, I really need more help with my YouTube because there's all this animation that I need to have done, can you help me up? You sell them on a bigger package. Using advertising to generate customers and getting more growth for your brand works so well, I highly recommend it. Those are four tried true tested ways of getting explosive growth. Being first, being best, being controversial, or paying money. Now, let's talk about competitive research, my favorite 11. Competitive Research Tools: [MUSIC] In this class, we have created a baseline of what content to create. We have some ideas for long-form content, we have some ideas for short-form content. Now let's dive in deep and really get to the nitty-gritty of what content to create. We do this through competitive research. Competitive research is one of the fundamental steps to being successful on social media. Because we get to see what other people are doing well and what other people are doing poorly and learn. If you try and recreate what everybody else is doing, you're not going to get results. Think about it. How many motivational quote, accounts have you seen on Instagram? There's 10,000 of them, creating another motivational quote account isn't going to do that much. Sure you'll get a little bit of an audience, but you're never going to be the number one person. Why? Because there's already plenty of people doing it. What you want to do is be like Gregg Gillis. If you don't know who Gregg Gillis is, he's better known as Girl Talk, The Musical Artist. He got famous for taking everybody else's work, mashing it together, and creating something wholly new and original. He'll take Hip Hop and pop and R&B and electronic music, sample it all, put it together, and make an entire album. You want to be like Gregg Gillis. What we're going to do is use competitive research to find what other people are doing in our space and other spaces and try and pull from those other spaces, and put it to our own. Let's talk about this in a practical sense. When coronavirus first started and we were all going crazy trying to figure out what to do with our lives, I decided to create a YouTube channel. Now, being in the social media marketing, personal branding space, there are other creators out there who have already been doing this for a long time and who are doing it well, I love them. They're friends of mine. Therefore, me creating the same thing isn't going to do too well. What I did is I picked up that program TubeBuddy that I talked about. I started searching through myspace to try and figure out what to create. I figured there's this little note niche that nobody is really talking about. Public speaking, something I'm deeply passionate about. In particular, Toastmasters. It's an organization that trains public speakers. I created my first couple of videos around Toastmasters and my journey. It did pretty well. I looked at the analytics and I said, this is doing decently well, but I need to do something unique, different, and original. I went, who's a creator I really like, and what are they doing? There's this creator by the name of Patrick H. Willems. I went to high school with him. He does video essays about movies and different techniques and movie making because he desires to be a director. It's fascinating to watch his content. I know nothing about movies or being a director and I learned so much and I went, I really like that style. I'm going to create a video essay. I was like, but video essay public speaking, that's weird and hard. I don't know how to do this. I need to pull something else. I started thinking about things I like. Another passion of mine is Dungeons and Dragons, the tabletop role-playing game. There's a series of creators in the Dungeons and Dragons space by the name of Critical Role, which is the largest creators, the largest live stream, and their dungeon master, the person who runs the game is a gentleman by the name of Matthew Mercer. He's a huge inspiration for me. I took Matthew Mercer as a subject, the Dungeon Master for critical role. I created a video essay around different techniques you can learn from him to apply to public speaking. I took three separate little ingredients, mash them together, and created something wholly new and original. When I posted it, I had less than 100 subscribers and I got like 1,600 views within the first hour. I had about a 50 percent retention rate, which was 2-3 times more than what I had beforehand, and it was massively successful. That's our goal with competitive research, finding different things that may work, and then testing them out. Here's some tools I recommend. TubeBuddy for anybody who wants to get into YouTube, Google Keyword Research, if you just want to get into blogging, or anything that may have some search intent. Understanding search is hugely important no matter if you're going for search or not. Because if there are people searching for it, then more than likely there are people who are interested in that topic. BuzzSumo is an amazing tool because what you can do is you can put a keyword in, and it will show you every single piece of content. It will rank that content based off of how many shares it's gotten. You can see what content is being shared and engage with the most. You can steal those ideas and recreate that content to make something better. Coschedule Headline Analyzer. Headlines are the number one thing to improve when it comes to your content. Headlines and thumbnails. That's because eight out of 10 people will only read the headline. Two out of 10 people will actually click through and actually read your article, engage with your content. There was a test that was done to back this up. They made a headline and no content just to see how many people would share it. It was crazy how many shares this piece of content got with no actual content behind it. It's just by the headline. Knowing how to write captivating and engaging headlines is going to do so much for making your content improve. Lastly, good old pen and paper. Going through and looking at 10-15 influencers in your space, and then outside of your space too, and writing down everything that you see that they are doing well and see what they're doing not well. Is there any themes, color patterns, styles, looking at how much they're doing in editing, what songs are they using? Why are they using it? What emotions are they eliciting, are their descriptions long and in-depth? Are they short bullet points? Are they click-baiting? How are they click-baiting? Just keep asking questions and writing it down. The more you do that, the more your fingers going to be on the pulse and you're going to start generating ideas like crazy. Take some time and start doing a little bit of competitive research and start putting some ideas out there. Remember, you don't actually have to nail that idea perfectly, just trying and shooting for that new idea you have, you'll grow and gain so much just from that alone. Those are the five competitive research tools I use every single day. In the next video, we're going to talk about what the analytics tell you. 12. Analytics: In this video, we're going to talk about analytics and the hidden story behind your analytics, learning how to read them and learn how to make better content from those analytics. Now I've said in other videos, the most important metric is watch time. That's because we, the people, are actually the product and the advertisers are the real audience. The longer we're staying on these social medias consuming content, the more money these platforms make because the more these advertisers get to put ads in front of us. Not every social media shows what that watch time is, so sometimes we have to make inferences based off of the analytics we give you. But let's do this. Let's actually dive into a platform and let's start looking at what these analytics are saying and learning how to read them. If we move over here onto my YouTube platform that I have over here, this is my analytics. I started this up during coronavirus with no following whatsoever. But what you can see at the general overview is the first thing is I'm getting about 3,000 views every 28 days. Now, I'm not posting that much content, I'm not pushing very hard, and I'm still getting 3,000 views. We can look over here on the right side and see what's generating those views. My top three performing videos are right here. Now, with YouTube, I've stated before that YouTube is a search-based platform. That means these three videos are generating about 200 views every 48 hours or 100 views every 24 hours based off of search, which I'm steadily gaining subscribers, my audience is steadily growing. We can come down here and we can see what these top videos are and the view duration, how many views they're getting, so on and so forth. Now, why this is important is because what has generated success in the past is a good way of looking at what to do in the future. I'm getting views for things like Toastmasters, becoming a TED speaker, stop stumbling over words. That's getting a lot of views, and that's a short. So maybe this signals to me I should probably create a video, a long-form video, not a shorts video, that's about not stumbling over words. So just looking at my analytics, I see that's a potentially good piece of content to make. But we can go in a little bit deeper here. Now, looking at the reach, we can see this metric right here, impressions and click-through rate. I'm averaging about a nine percent click-through rate. That actually means I'm doing poorly. The larger that click-through rate is, the better so what I can infer from this is if I wanted to potentially increase my views, my subscribers, I could just simply work on my thumbnails and put those up there and see how that changes and see if I can grow just from that small amount of change. If we look over at my engagement, we're seeing that my average view duration is about three minutes and a half. So that signals to me that my audience is not really going to stay around for 10, 15, 20-minute video. What I want to do is make sure I hit that sweet spot of around five minutes to gain more subscribers and gain more brand awareness and trust with my audience before I try and push them into a larger video that is 60 minutes. Now, with that being said, it may be worth me trying to put out a long form video that is more in depth and just see how it performs. There's a good chance it won't, but it's always worth trying new things. Coming over here to the audience, we can see our returning viewers, our new viewers, who subscribed, where they're coming from. We can see a lot of specific information. My audience is 25 to 34-year-olds, 78 percent of my audience. In particular, about half of them are males. So that's a good thing for me to recognize. That's who I want to shoot for. If we're not sure when we're making our buyer persona and our customer journey or age demographic, looking at who's actually consuming it is a really good way for me to signal in. My buyer persona needs, say, is 25-34 years old. If I had them set at, say, 18-24, I'd be off. So it's just good way of getting some feedback. This is the general overview. Let's actually go into the content. We're going to start with my highest performing video. My highest performing video has generated about 15,000 views so far and it's gotten me about 316 subscribers over the course of whatever time frame. But let's come down here. As we scroll down, this is really interesting. We have a couple of things here. This graph right here shows me that at the start I have a large drop-off, about 30 percent, by the 30-second mark. So what I need to do is look at that and go, why is that happening? The first 30 seconds are clutch when it comes to creating your videos. So I can start going back through here and go, what am I doing wrong here? I know from this video, because I've gotten feedback, that my volume of my music was just too loud and people just get blown away and they decide to leave. Happens. I'm learning, I'm trying, I get feedback. From there, what I can see is I actually have pretty decent retention time till the end here where it drops down to about 20 percent. It's slowly going down, which is normal in the sense that that happens. We want to try and maintain a much higher percentage of people retaining all the way through. But I'm not seeing any massive dips. I'm not seeing any massive upswings. So this is just a really solid video, and it seems to be ranking pretty well. My average percentage viewed is about 40 percent, so they're making about that midway mark. So this is a good video to base off of what's going well. But if we come back out here and we go a little bit deeper into some of my other videos. Let's go back. This Matthew Mercer storytelling one has done insanely well. Why I say that is because if we come over to the average view duration and come over and down to this graph. Look at this, while I do have a large drop-off in the beginning, drops down to about 65 percent. It maintains that percentage very, very high until the very end here, at the three-minute mark. It's only a four-minute video, 4 minutes, 14 seconds, and at about four minutes, it really starts to drop off at the end. So if I were to come up and I'd go, what am I doing wrong with this video or what am I doing right? Well, this is a video essay that I talked about. This is where I smashed them all together and I have a very high retention rate because it's very dynamic, very engaging. It's really specific in its target market and that target market likes to consume that type of content. The only downside I have to this video is my ending. I did a recap. People get the recap. They're like, "I got the video. It wasn't that long. I don't need it. I'm out." So I could potentially, with my next video essay, have a much smaller recap and end it much quicker. That way that retention time stays at that 50 percent mark and doesn't drop off at the end. Do you see how we're learning from the analytics here about what's working, what's not working? Hopefully, because looking at other people's successes and failures, I have found to be a really great way of learning. Now, what we can also do is look at what are some of the videos that are doing the worst. Here's one I didn't post for a long time because I was moving and let's see how this one is doing. Now, not a lot of views. It is getting a little bit of traffic. That's interesting. Not a lot of traffic, but we can start diving in a little bit further. So we come down to the reach and maybe we can see where am I getting my traffic from. It's not showing me any keywords. Where's my engagement? Well, it's at one-and-a-half minutes. Look at this huge drop-off. This isn't doing well. Why? But there's a couple of spikes here. What's going on here? How can I learn from this? It's about taking the time to go in and looking at what works, what doesn't work. So I might actually redo this entire video Five Tips for Public Speaking and see how effective it is. I actually created this video for something else. So I'm not surprised this doesn't do well, but it's definitely worth looking at and going what can I do better. To make things a little bit easier for you, if you haven't already, make sure to check out the KPI marketing template. In this marketing template, right up here, you're going to have your different ways of generating revenue. We're going to have our expenses, our profits, how we're getting our sales. You can change up all of these. This is just the baseline, but what you want to do is start looking at, how many subscribers do I have? How am I gaining, losing? How many monthly views? What retention time, and what's my retention rate for my videos? Monitoring and tracking what you're doing month over month is how you're actually going to consistently grow. Because if you're consistently taking a couple of metrics, say average retention rate and you're only focusing on that, what you focus on will improve, period, end of story. So use this to start monitoring and growing your social media platforms, looking at the analytics, tracking them. Remember your analytics, tell that story. So make sure to track them, and I'll see you guys in the next video. 13. Conclusion: Congratulations, you've made it through this course. Now, I know there's a lot that I gave you throughout this course. Let's do a brief recap. First off, remember pick 2-3 platforms, know more when you're trying to build your brand, you want to be really, really focused. Use competitive research tools to look up what content is being done well, and what others are doing in your industry and what other industries are doing, so you can grab ideas and steal like an artist. Remember, you want to do something original, unique and different, so don't do what everybody else is doing. Try something different, mash up a bunch of different things, throw it together, have some fun. The third thing, remember, the most amount of growth comes from being first. Do something new, unique, original. You got it. Finally, remember to look at those analytics and ask yourself, what story are these analytics telling me? What can I infer about my content from this? Try something new and test and see what comes about. Most important of all, do not allow your self-worth to be tied up in social media. It's a game. That's it. You should never feel bad about losing a game. If you are playing Monopoly and you lost, it doesn't mean you're destined to be destitute and poor. It just means whoever is playing the banker, cheated. Make sure to check out all the resources in the Resources tab, post your final project in the project area below. I'd love to check it out, I'd love to review it. If you found this course to be helpful, please give it a review. I deeply appreciate it. Check out some of my other Skillshare courses, follow me on all the social medias. I can't wait to see you guys in the next video. Be good to each other.