Powerful Social Media Marketing: From Beginner to Advanced

1. Welcome!: Business needs to be on social media. When it comes to marketing, most business owners either don't know what they're doing. They don't like doing it, or they just don't have the time. Or all of the above. And that is where you come in. My name is Maggie Sara and the course you're about to take is the course I wish I had access to when I first started working as a social media manager back in 2016. Throughout the course, you're going to be following along as we create a brand from scratch on all of the various social media networks so that you'll know exactly what to do, how to do it, and most importantly why you're doing it. And by the end of the course, then, you'll know how to create a powerful brand in social media. And how to be expert, copywriter, capable of creating viral hooks for videos, and captivating captions for your posts. You'll also know how to create powerful social media graphics, gifts, and videos that capture the attention of your audience in just seconds. And you'll know how to assess the needs of any business so you can develop effective social media strategies and tailored content calendars that impress the pants off of any client with the help of my free templates, which you will find within your handy course guide, along with lots of other helpful resources. While this is a beginner friendly course. My aim is to really help you stand out from the crowd with your skills. So you'll also be learning how to train various AI tools to create more content in less time with your client's ideal audience in mind. By the time you finish here, you will no longer feel like a beginner, because in the second half of the course, we're going to focus on more advanced social media tactics like how you can set up automated bots to talk to your audience and generate leads for your clients on auto pilot. Also, when and how you can use paid ads on Facebook, Instagram, and other social platforms to help amplify the success of your efforts, and how you can measure your results and adapt your strategy to do more of what's working for you in the future. Finally, you will also understand how the work you're doing fits into your client's business as a whole in terms of search engine optimization, e mail marketing, and overall digital marketing funnels. Skills you learn here, can lead to so many exciting career opportunities from freelancing roles to consulting and strategy roles and even more advanced digital marketing roles? And yes, even teaching like I'm doing right now. And I know this because the students who have taken this course in the past, have shared with me that the exact skills that are taught within this course are what they have used to do exciting things like bland new clients and get promotions at work, and even just charge higher right so they could create more time in their schedule to spend on the things that matter most to them. Was my main motivation for chasing this career path as well as it has allowed me to work and travel and spend much more time with my family. We learn by doing, not just absorbing information. So I will be giving you lots of practice activities throughout the course and an opportunity at the end of the course to submit your project, where you will do a social media audit and strategy for a business of your choosing and receive tailored support and constructive feedback on how you can improve. So if you are someone who is ready to take action along with me and become a powerful social media marketer, and I'm so excited to show you everything that's on the inside of this course, I hope you're as excited as I am, and I can't wait to see you on the inside. 2. What to Expect: Oh, hi. Okay, so, look, I want to be honest with you. This is not going to be the most exciting lesson in the world. This is not where we do the fun stuff, like, play with various AI tools and create core videos. But it's very important because let's face it, this is a long course. And I'm not exaggerating when I say that your ability to take in what I'm going to say in this lesson could potentially make or break your experience within the course. So first, I want to start off with some expectations that you can have of this course and what you can expect from me. Then I want to talk about what you should expect of yourself or what I expect of you as well. First off, I just want to say that I have recorded this course in its entirety so many times over the years, and I try to do this every time there's any huge changes in the space. But it is actually impossible for me to make sure everything is completely up to date because there's a very good chance that by the time I actually finish recording this version of the course, before it even goes live, there's something in it that's already going to be out of date, and yes, that drives me insane. But that's just the reality of working in social media. Things happen really quickly. So because of that, I have created a course guide for you where you're going to find some resources where you can subscribe to newsletters and read blogs and tap into media sources that are constantly telling you about the latest and greatest in the social media space. This is where you're going to learn about what's trending, any latest platform changes, and everything that's happening in the social media world so that you can also keep learning beyond the time you spend with me here in this course. In the course guide, you will also find some details on the action items I'm going to be giving you throughout the course so that you can actually practice the skills along with me because otherwise, you're just not going to know what the heck it is that I said at the very beginning of the course. I have a university degree that I never use, so I know exactly what that's like. Because working in social media, like anything else is just muscle memory. You learn as you go and as you practice. So it's really important that you're able to do the things along with me like creating posts and writing captions. And yes, even going live. And I know that's really scary, and we're going to do it in a way that no one's actually going to see you go live, so it's not as intimidating as it sounds, but it means that you're able to really build your confidence, and that is the most important thing. You're not necessarily going to be a social media superstar the minute you finish this course, but it's important for you to have the confidence in your abilities. So that by the time you finish, if someone at a networking party or at a barbecue or on the train is like, Hey, you work in social media, right? You can be like, Yes, I speak social media as a second language. Let's chat about it instead of being like, Yes, I took a course once, and it was about this, and I'm not quiet. Hm. Yeah. So there's a big difference in actually practicing along with me, so you're like, Yes, I did this, No I just watched somebody do this. And while we're talking about your experience within the course, you can also use the video controls around me to help speed me up or slow me down, add some captions, and even write some notes, which can help to enhance your learning experience. Please go ahead and download the course guide from the projects and resources section of the course, or you can also access it as a link in the about section if you're on the skill share app. Inside, you will also find details on how long each section of the course is, and also when there's maybe some hands on activity that's required of you because I understand that you may not always be able to be at your computer practicing along with me uninterrupted by all the distractions that are happening around you. So hopefully laying it out like this means that you're able to plan your study sessions accordingly and not just take this course. Actually finish it because so many people take courses, but not a lot of people actually finish courses and apply the skills that they've learned. And my aim is to get you to actually finish what you've started here. So hopefully, we're able to do that together by you being able to manage your own expectations about what's coming up. Now, as you already know, this is a course aimed at the complete beginner, so I've done the best that I can to make sure it's catered to people just starting out, but feel free to jump into the discussion section and ask any additional questions you might have. With that in mind, I do want to acknowledge that impostor syndrome is something that gets to all of us at some point. It's that sort of feeling where you feel like your abilities and your skills aren't quite where they should be, and you sort of feel like a fraud, even though, like, deep down, you know you're definitely not. And it's really easy to look at other people on Instagram living their fabulous lives, allegedly making six figures while they sleep. And while I'm not suggesting that everyone is out there renting fake jets like these influencers, I can guarantee you that everyone has a story they're not sharing with the online world. While I think it's helpful to follow people who are a few steps ahead of where you are, I don't want you to get into this comparison Iitis where you compare your beginning to someone else's middle. You're not competing with these people. The only person that you're really competing with is the person you were yesterday. If you can just be 1% better than the person you were the day before, that's already a huge win and over time, that percentage of improvement is going to compound into huge success. I just want you to get excited about the fact that you're at the beginning of something really great here and not let the overwhelm take over before you've even begun something. Just keep that in mind as you're going through the course and now in the next lesson, I want to get into your overall purpose and mission and talk about why you're here. I'll see there. 3. Why Are You Here?: As the business world becomes more and more purpose driven, you're going to hear the concept of the y, get thrown around a lot in conversation. So I thought it would be helpful for us to talk about how that influences your work in social media, how it influences your clients. And look at some examples of brands that are doing a great job of building purpose driven businesses and marketing plans. Let's get into everything by first talking about Simon Cynic, who was the person who really brought this into mainstream conversation, and particularly as it relates to business growth. This ted talk on how great leaders inspire action has hundreds of millions of views across various platforms, and it has inspired a movement of people connecting with the why behind what they do, which is where he talks about what he calls the Golden Circle. So the Golden Circle essentially represents the way that most people and most companies operate, which is from the outside in. So all people within an organization will know what it is that they do. Then less of them will know how they actually do the things that they do. And then even fewer will know why they do the things that they do. So the premise here is that the most effective companies and people will work from the inside out. So for these companies, what they do and how they do it is entirely driven by the y behind it all. So the what in the how might change, but the y will always remain the same. So his example of how this can be done within a company and a product based company is of Apple. So their y is all about their belief in challenging the status quo and doing things really differently. Their how is the fact that their products are sleek and beautifully designed and really easy to use for the kind of audience that they really appeal to, so their target audience. And then what is all about the fact that they just sort of happen to sell computers, but that is not the core of why they do what they do. Google also do this by advertising their Google maps and Google business functions, by tapping into the why and the how of these business tools and their company in general. And, of course, I've provided some examples in your course guide that you can check out. But just know that everything we talk about throughout this course will come back to our why. The reason that we exist as social media marketers is because companies often know exactly what they do. Let's say they build houses in this case. They know how to do it. Okay, so maybe they have specialist trades for each area of the build. But they don't necessarily know how to make other people care about it online, which is the why would I engage with a random photo of a house in my Instagram feed piece of the puzzle. And this is where the strong connection with purpose will often come into play. So let's now talk about mission statements. Google's purpose and mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. This is the why behind everything they do. Another example here from Patagonia is for them to make products that give back to the Earth as much as they take, and they've got core values of quality, integrity, environmentalism, justice, and to not be bound by convention. The companies essentially linking the thing that makes them money, which is making clothes with the fundamental values of saving the planet. Want you to really think about your own mission statement because this is what's going to determine why people want to work with you, but it will also determine how you end up doing things and maybe even what you end up working on. So it doesn't need to be super complex, just short succinnc, inspirational statement that you can use. No huge words or really long paragraphs, so don't overcomplicate it. Here are two more powerful examples for you. Tesla's mission is to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy. Jet Blues is to inspire humanity both in the air and on the ground. Notice all of these are quite short and to the point. And now I just want to share mine with you, which is to create a better digital world through meaningful connections and captivating content. And my core values are playful creativity, simplicity, insatiable curiosity, quality, and empathy. Having this in mind has really helped me when I'm deciding on which clients to take on, which projects to take on, which brands to collaborate with. And also in terms of building my personal and professional network and where to invest my time, but also maybe more importantly, when it's time to end any of those relationships and connections and projects. So to give you an example a few months ago, I was looking to hire a video editor for my YouTube channel, and I was interviewing a particular person for the role, and it was going really well. I think, you know, we were vibing. They had a really good really good prior experience. They had a good portfolio. Their prices were reasonable. And yeah, we just had a good vibe on the interview until they said one thing that I just couldn't get past. And for context, I had literally just come off of eight months of maternity leave with my son. So I hadn't posted a video in over eight months, which, fair enough, you know, potentially could raise some eyebrows for video editors wanting that consistency. But this person had gone as far as to say that my business wasn't where it should be because I was lazy. And I know it was just a throwaway comment, but because of my mission statement and my values, my business values, this was such a lack of empathy that I just couldn't get past this one statement, especially because what the person didn't know was that prior to going on maternity leave, I was working six days a week, 13 hours a day until I was 39.5 weeks pregnant while also renovating our house so that I could take eight months off with my newborn to be lazy. And that is just something that, you know, could have provided a little bit of context as to me not being lazy, but really just prioritizing the things that matter to me. But what I will say is that, you know, me not wanting to take that relationship forward is a huge blessing for both me and that freelancer, because they can now go on to work with clients that actually really appreciate this kind of no BS bluntness. They don't need the empathy. They don't care about that. That's not really in their value system. So they're going to work with that freelancer really well, and it's going to be a positive relationship for them. Was I can now work with a video editor that has, shares my values and really identifies the things that matter to me in my business and finds a way to incorporate those in our relationship. So it's a really nice kind of checkpoint to be able to let go of things that don't serve you very quickly. So I want you to really think about what matters to you, what motivates you, and what could also resonate with others if they were to read your mission statement. And think about four to five core values that represent you or your brand. And write these down. But I know this could be a little bit tricky to come up with on your own. So I've provided you with some resources where we can see what kinds of values companies are choosing and how companies are using them as part of their mission statements. So I want you to also feel confident in encouraging your clients to do this exercise as well, because having this in place will really help them to market their business and help you to market their business more effectively. And just to be clear, to make money is not a mission. Every business is in the business of making money and driving sales. But that is not the main purpose of a business. Their mission statement should go beyond that and be something that other people can connect with, not just, Hey, we want to make money. So that's something to just keep in mind, but for yourself, I encourage you at this point to just jot a few things down, even if you don't have a full kind of mission statement phrase in your mind yet, even if you just got some ideas or some values that you think have resonated with you. Make sure to jot those down, and you can always keep perfecting it as you go through the course and even beyond that, and of course, you can adjust it as you go through your career as well. But for now, in the next lesson, I want to get into a few marketing myths that I want to bust, so I'll see there. 4. Marketing Mythbusters: So as we go into learning about marketing, I actually wanted to encourage you to unlearn a few things first because I think there are a few really big misconceptions in the marketing world that often lead people to getting really stuck in their work or worse, not getting started at all. So let's get into them. The first myth is thinking that you need to find a point of difference. So for this point, I want to encourage you to re steel like an artist by Austin Cleon. It's a pretty short book. It's not going to take you very long, and it is epic. It might actually change how you do things in a lot of ways. The main reason that I want to talk about it is because the main takeaway there is that there are no unique messages, just unique messengers. You are going to be the point of difference in your work. To put it in perspective, there are endless amounts of social media resources out there and lots of great social media marketing courses as well. But you're here learning from me, and I'm so grateful that you are, but let's face it. A lot of the stuff that I'm going to be teaching you here is not revolutionary. I mean, obviously, I'm going to try to make it really good, but it's not groundbreaking earthshattering stuff. What makes it unique is me. The reason that you're here is because you connected with something in my teaching style or my presentation style and decided to invest your time and energy with me, which is amazing. But that's kind of the point is that, you know, I'm teaching you social media, which isn't a concept I made up. But maybe the way I'm teaching it is the point of difference that you connected with. It'll be the exact same thing for you where your work will be made unique because of you. You're really just going to be stealing from other people. I mean, ethically stealing. Let's be honest. But you're going to see some awesome marketing examples out there and you're going to be like, I want to take an example from this, and we're going to do this, and I'm going to change a little bit of this and make it applicable to my client and make it your own. But what's going to make it unique and what's going to be your point of difference is that you're the one doing it. It's not going to be the work itself. The second myth is thinking that you can't run successful campaigns on a tight budget. Look, of course, things are going to be easier with tight budgets, but not necessarily more effective. I've actually found that marketers, including myself, have to get really creative when you're working with type budgets. This is an example from Squash who got a $200 billboard that was up on the way to a local popular polo event here in Australia, and they had people in their brand swimwear and fake horses stand next to the billboard to advertise the brand. This one $200 campaign led to a $6,000 spike in sales in just one day. Not to mention that this is super Australian, and they managed to upstage even big brands by becoming the top trending hashtag of the entire event. So creativity will always win over big budgets. The next myth is thinking that the results of your efforts are instant. Nothing could be further from the truth. And this is a really hard one at the beginning when you're not really used to having tough conversations with your clients, and you also don't really know what to expect at this stage. But what often happens is that you and your client both think you're going to get great results in a lot less time than you do. And they may have never actually had a social media manager on their team. They may have never had a social media presence at all. So they might look at their competitors who are doing great things, and, you know, they've got this huge following, and they might go, Okay, yeah, that's going to be us in two months. Was it might have taken them five years and, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars to get to that point. But managing those expectations and going, look, you know, we're going to increase your engagement by 2%. No 40% because you have no budget. You know, those are the conversations that you need to start having eventually so that you and your client are both not just completely deflated by the end of the quarter where you thought you were going to get these great big results, and it just didn't quite happen. Just so you know, even big digital marketing agencies, or even running paid ads, which I know a lot of people think paid ads are instant success. But even with paid ads, these agencies are charging five, ten grand a month, maybe even more. And often they will put it in their contract that the first three months of their working relationship is a testing phase. So they're sort of saying, Look, for the first three months, we're not expecting sales. We're just trying to get to know your audience. We're just trying to tweak things and see what they respond to. And this is literally expect nothing for the next three months, except for you to spend 30 $40,000 for this testing phase. That manages people's expectations very quickly because then they go, Okay, well, that's it. Three months is what it's going to take in order for us to really figure out what's resonating with our audience so that we can have long term success because that is what social media and marketing in general is about. It's not about short term wins. It's about small improvements and tweaks and data analysis so that you can see those big results over a long period of time. But just keep in mind it's not going to happen overnight. Our next myth is that being objective is easy. Okay, this is a big one. So myself and other marketers, and probably you at some point, will think that we're invincible, and we can be objective about everything. And, you know, all the experiences that have shaped who we are and how we think, based on what we've seen and heard and who we've interacted with throughout our whole lives, have no impact on how we think and feel. And that is just not the case. Being objective is so much harder when it comes to marketing work because we will look at an ad and go, That's crap. I would never buy products from that ad. But maybe that's okay because maybe you're not the target customer of that ad. But it's very hard to create for someone who thinks and works totally differently from you. So you do need to really practice being objective. I, for example, very much thought that TikTok was going to be an app for dancing teenagers, and it was never going to have any impact on the business world whatsoever. Obviously, I was dead wrong about that. But I wish that back in the day, I could have gone, Okay, if I was wrong about this, if it was going to be a huge marketing tool and a big social media platform for a lot of businesses out there. What might that mean? What would my strategy look like if that was going to be the case? And sort of play devil's advocate and just think about it from the other side of what you think based on your own experiences. So I just want you to really always practice being objective and trying to take yourself out of the equation when it comes to your marketing work because it's going to be incredibly valuable for you to do that. Social media isn't customer service. Well, users often look to social media to answer disputes, find missing items, and ask and answer questions that they might have for particular brands. In fact, 64% of buyers said they would rather send a brand a message on social media rather than to call customer service. So if your client doesn't have a strategy in place for responding to customer service queries on social media, it's definitely time to think about it. The next myth is that quality wins over quantity. This is a little bit controversial, but I actually wouldn't say that quality or quantity are better. There're just different times at which you want to prioritize each of these. But obsessing over quality at the beginning can completely stall your creativity. That's just because you can't really actually produce any quality content until you've had the practice of producing bad quality content. Trying to create the perfect Linton post or Instagram reel on your first go is like assuming you're going to win a marathon, even though you've actually never run even around the block before. To put this in perspective for you, these are some of the earliest designs I did for some of my first clients, and look, they're not great. In fact, there was so much wrong with these, but it was just a bit of a stepping stone for me to really get the practice and focus on quantity before I could get to the quality part and actually create high quality content for my clients. Next myth is thinking that your production value must be high. This is along the same lines as the previous myth, but when it comes to video content specifically. Myself and a lot of other marketers and creators have noticed that a lot of the time the videos that you think are going to be the best performing are not the ones that are. Even big YouTubers out there will often talk about how investing better production quality in editing sometimes tanks are engagement because that's not actually the stuff that people care about. This is my digital marketing one oh one video, which was filmed and released five years ago, and it literally has my headphones as a microphone that's just stuck to my shirt because I didn't have even, like, $30 to just buy a microphone from Amazon at the time. I was filming this from a hotel room while we were living in Bali. And I just thought, you know, what, I have something really valuable to share. I don't really have a way to pull this off in a high production value, but let's give it a go. And that video has almost 60,000 views now. Just remember that people want to be engaged and informed, but they don't necessarily care if you're filming this with an old webcam, stacked onto a bunch of books and not a $5,000 camera. Hopefully, with that lesson, you're starting to think about marketing a little differently. Now in the next lesson, we're going to talk about your first client. I'll see there. 5. Your First Client: Spoiler alert. Your first client is actually you. And that's true, whether you're looking to work in house and a company on an agency side or on a freelance basis. So we are going to talk about the importance of building a personal brand in a little bit. But for now, I just wanted to emphasize the importance of being able to test out your skills on yourself ideally before getting your first client. Because this is how you build up your confidence and skills, and also how you get to know your own personal style. Because you might find that you really love creating content on Instagram, but you hate Linked in. Or you might be like, static content, you know, general graphics, not really my cup of tea, but I love video, and maybe I want to learn more about that. But either way, the beauty of working in this industry is that you can get started straight away with pretty much no upfront cost, and there are not many careers where that's possible. People will study for months or even years before they're allowed to do things like practice medicine or law or fly a plane or teach a class in a traditional learning environment. So we are incredibly lucky to get to do what we do and how we do it. But I do recognize that not all of you are going to feel confident putting your own name out there yet. I definitely didn't for a long time, which is why my whole brand was initially built on living to Rome, which to me represented digital freedom through marketing, and it was also aimed at digital nomads at the time. Now, it's how I set up all of my social media handles so that I could start practicing my skills without my name being attached to anything. Especially because I was still working full time when I started. So I wasn't exactly putting things on my Linked in profile, for example. But I'm not the only one. There are lots of brands like Peggy Dean of the pigeon letters and burnt toast here that have built brands under slightly unique, maybe, you know, slightly different names that you wouldn't necessarily associate with these types of brands. But it's just to show you that people honestly, really don't care. People don't really care what you've named your business. Unless it's something totally inappropriate, I think it's best to just pick something, go with it, and you can change it later on. That's exactly what I did. I transitioned from a business brand name to a personal brand because it became easier for me to just operate under May Sara. But it took a long time for me to be comfortable with that as well. So just peak something, don't focus on it too much, don't stress about it too much so that you can get registered on the different social networks and start practicing. So we are going to now take a look at how you can do that. There are various sites that allow you to check if social media handles are taken. I'm going to be honest with you. They're not perfect, as in you will also often find conflicting information on them. So I'm going to show you what I mean. I have a brand name in mind that I'm going to be using for this course for demo purposes. So I'm going to be setting up a fake buyers agency as a real estate brand operating hypothetically here in Brisbane so that I can show you how I go about doing this for a client. And if I go to namecheck.com, it will show me the different domain names I can access if I was building a website, and then I can also check user names. So on name check, it tells me Facebook is taken, Pinterest is taken, but TikTok is A OK. YouTube is A OK. Then if I go to a site like Brand Snag and I put in Mags Realty, I know I'm really creative with that business name. It will give me some results about the platforms that it's available for, which I already know because I searched for it are conflicting with what we just saw on Name check. So this will tell me, Hey, Facebook is all good to go. Pinterest is all good to go, but TikTok is unavailable, which is directly opposing to what we just saw. So it's not a perfect system, and especially because a lot of these social media check tools won't allow you to put in different characters. That's simply because on some platforms, things are allowed. Some things aren't, for example, Instagram will allow periods to be in between words, whereas that's not allowed on Twitter or YouTube. That's why it's just best to use this as an initial checkpoint, but then you're going to have to probably go to all the different social media platforms and actually check if the user name you want is taken. Also keep in mind that it doesn't look, if in an ideal world, yes, they would all be the same. It doesn't necessarily mean that that is the B and end all, especially if you're building a personal brand. I'm under Maggie Sarah, and I'm pretty sure all of my handles are slightly different. Like there's periods in some, Underscores and others. Does anybody really care? Not really. Honestly, it's not like somebody would be like, We're not gonna work with you because you user names are not consistent. It's not really a thing. Unless you're running like a multi million dollar brand, it's not the B and end O. Just try to pick something that makes sense to you and the business that you are hoping to run, or if you're just doing this for practice purposes, then it really doesn't matter. So yeah, these tools can definitely help as a first point of call and a first check, but then we are going to go to each individual platform and set up our user names, and you'll see me do that throughout the lesson. Don't feel like you need to focus on growing your followers at this point unless you want to. But these accounts can exist for you to just practice on. I have a couple of blank accounts that I use just for testing or demo purposes, and it does take away some of that overwhelm when you are able to create without really expecting much in return. But of course, if you do want to go through and actually develop a social media strategy for yourself and grow these accounts, and maybe you're actually taking this course because you want to grow your own social media presence, then absolutely go for it. But the key here is just to build up your confidence in whatever way suits you. So now in the next section of the course, I'm really excited because this is where we're going to start talking about how you can create a brand on social media that people just can't shut up about. So I'm excited to get into everything in the next lesson and I'll see there. 6. Branding Introduction: Section of the course, we're going to talk about how to present a powerful brand online and how to find or create great content to share. So that in the following section of the course, we can then go through and take the content that we're going to create here and find here and actually start posting on the various social media networks so that you can see everything happening in action. Want to say at this point that it may or may not be your job to look after our client's branding. It probably won't be to be honest because most businesses will have an established brand presence. But with the content that you're going to learn in this section of the course, it will make you an expert so that even if your clients maybe already have something in place, you're going to be able to look at it holistically and maybe make some expert suggestions that may potentially end up creating more work for you and obviously more revenue for your business, because you're going to be able to say Hey, I've noticed on your social media that, you know, you're using a whole lot of funs and a whole lot of colors, and nothing looks the same. Obviously, not in those exact words. But then you're able to sort of make those suggestions and say, why don't we create a branding style guide so that we can make sure everything looks nice and cohesive and consistent. So when your audience sees posts from you, they'll know they're from you because they're going to have the same sort of look and feel and vibe and style. And that's going to really help you to build engagement on social media. Honestly, when I was first starting out, if somebody had said that to me, obviously, in very kind words, in constructive words, I would have probably cried of happiness because even though I was definitely doing stuff on social media, it just wasn't quite working. Plus, of course, you can use the tips here to build your own powerful personal brand. So hopefully you find it all helpful, and we're going to get into everything starting with the next lesson, where we're going to talk about what actually makes a powerful brand. So I'll see. 7. What Makes a Powerful Brand?: A brand identity is so much more than just a brand logo and some colors. It has so much more to do with the values and what people think and feel when they interact with the brand. Or in the wise words of Jeff Bezos, your brand is what other people say about you when you're not in the room. And each of us have our own personal brand that we're building actively every time we share a post on LinkedIn or an update on Facebook with our friends and family. And the way that people react to those updates and posts will actually tell you a lot about what people think of you as a personal brand. For example, when my friends and family found out that my partner, Nick and I got married by ourselves in a forest on a random Thursday afternoon, no one was really surprised. Because I'm someone who's lived out of a backpack most of their adult life, and I have no attachment to material things, so this was very much an on brand move for me. And these are the same types of connections we have with businesses who have a strong brand identity, which is really the key to getting your audience to not just buy what you do, but how you do it and why. So to me, a powerful brand is one that makes me want to really engage with a piece of content or buy a new product, not because of the content or the product itself, but because of who created it. Like how die hard Apple fans will say, I've had this phone for almost two years, so I'm waiting for the new one to come out, second upgrade. Look, what they're really saying is these phones are pretty much designed to start failing at the two year mark, and yet I'm so excited to buy the newer version. Even though it hasn't even come out yet, and I don't really know what the new features will be, but I know I'm gonna love it. And that's because Apple has developed this incredible customer loyalty. And the same could be said for any movie created by Disney or new coffee flavors released by Starbucks. People will just buy into these things because of the connection they have with the brand. Same principle applies to not just purchasing decisions, but also to social media content. I know I'm not alone when I say that there are some accounts, especially on platforms like Instagram, where if I see a particular post a real from a brand at particular brand, I know I'm already going to engage with that piece of content. I might watch it. I'm going to like it. I'm going to comment on it. I might share it with my audience because I already know historically that that brand creates valuable content for me and my audience, and that is so so powerful. Anytime you're representing a brand, whether that's your own or a clients, I want you to think about this. What do you want people to say about it when you're not in the room? How can you create content that caters to this? Even though you're not necessarily branding an individual, that doesn't mean you can't be personable when developing a brand image. You can use fonts, colors, and imagery to represent who the brand is. Take Fanta, for example, their personality on social media is so fun and so colorful, and you know exactly what you're going to get by following them online. Whereas if you look at a brand like Apple, their personality, both online and offline is super modern, minimalistic, and trendy. The key to remember is that people will buy from you and want to work with you because of who you are and what you stand for, not just what you can do for them. Because all right, let's just say I want to buy a handbag. If the problem that I'm facing in this situation is that I don't have anywhere to store my stuff while I'm out of the house, then all I should actually care about is that I get a sturdy handbag. But if you look at the Louis Vuitton handbag here, which is nearly $3,000, and this Kmart one on the right, which is now only $5. If people actually made rational decisions about the brands we choose to bring into our lives, Louis Viton wouldn't exist, or at the very least it wouldn't exist at this price point, because the bag on the left is not 600 times better than the one on the right, but its brand is associated with luxury and with status. And we know what people will say about us when we're not in the room if we buy this bag, because our own personal brand will be elevated as a result of this purchase. You can make people connect on an emotional level and connect their personal brand with your professional or business brand. That is such a powerful thing. I know we talked about the fact that a brand is so much more than just its logo and colors and all these superficial things. Those things are also still very important because they create this visual identity for a business. We want to make sure that those things are still in place, so that's exactly what we're going to look at next. 8. Make a Brand Style Guide: So as much as a brand is so much more than its logo and its colors and its kind of visual brand identity, those things are still very important. I mean, imagine if Koch suddenly switched to using the color blue for its logo. There would be a worldwide uproar. But of course, brand identities evolve along with businesses. I mean, AirBNB looks totally different from its original look as to Starbucks, and just about every other big brand on the planet. Then for every evolution of the business, there should be some sort of cohesive brand guide that tells everyone what the assets are and how they can be used internally, but, of course, more importantly externally in marketing in sales, et cetera, et cetera. So whenever you're putting together a brand style guide for yourself or for a client, some of the things that you might want to include in this type of document would be things like what are our logos? How can we use them? Where can we find them, and could we supply them in different formats? So that would be vector formats and different image formats. Then what are our brand colors and possibly supplying these in digital and print formats as well for different types of design work. Then what's our tone of voice, and what kind of spelling are we going with? If it's in English, is it UK or US English? Or is it a different language? Then do we have a mission statement? What kind of fonts are we using? In terms of attributes, it would be more about how should people feel about the brand? Are we optimistic and lighthearted, or are we hard hitting truth professional sort of brand? Then what are our customer profiles? And we'll talk about this in depth in a few lessons. So if that's not saying anything to you at this point, that's totally fine, but just know it's something you could include in your brand guide. And then in terms of other brand graphic assets, you might want to think about things like icons and shapes and anything else that might be associated with the brand in addition to the logo. Then the contact details to ask someone for more details. And that's especially key if you're working with external PR agencies or other marketers who might need to know a little bit more Then if there are any acronyms and how we're able to use them externally versus internally. Especially big corporations will have an endless amount of acronyms, and it drives me absolutely nuts. But some are actually great. For example, travel brand G adventures uses the term CEO to address their tour guides, because within the context of their brand, it actually means chief experience officer. And Starbucks refer to their employees as partners. So these are all things that are very specific to a brand, and I would definitely include it in the brand guide. Your brand guide can just exist in a simple PDF or it can exist in a website form like Uber's example here, which makes it really easy for anyone to access the assets while they're working with this brand in all their various formats. So it just depends on the client's budget and how much use case you have for something like this. Now, some companies go overboard with this. I once worked for a company that had a 67 page document. And we also spent a two hour meeting talking about one underline on one page of the website and whether it should be thicker or thinner or longer or a little bit shorter. And a part of me died that day because I think that is just a bit of corporate nonsense. But you know, sometimes this happens. In 2008, Pepsi spent $1,000,000 on their new brand logo, which, let's face it looked pretty much the same as their old logo. But the company that did it justified this enormous price tag by putting together a 27 page brand document that basically told Pepsi that their new logo is like a planet. And then there was a whole lot of things in this brand guideline that just didn't make a whole lot of sense to most people But that is to say that, yes, some companies will go overboard with this, but that's not necessarily how it has to be. And for more inspiration, you can head on over to braining style guides.com, which I've linked in your course guide. We can see how pretty much most companies on Earth have created their different style guides, and what's included in them. So if you're getting a little bit stuck and you want a little bit of inspiration, that doesn't mean that these are exactly what's used internally or externally for the different brands, but it will definitely give you a little bit of inspiration. For most businesses, especially smaller businesses, just a couple of quick pages will be enough. Basically, something that you and your client and any other team members can reference to make sure that you're doing the right thing by what you want the brand to be represented as online. And then later, we're also going to talk about how you can incorporate your brand assets within a tool called Camera, which you will likely be using for most of your social media design work. So that you don't always have to be going into your brand guide and going, Okay, what are our colors? What's our fonts? It'll all be in there for you, so you don't have to worry about it. But also, don't be afraid to evolve as the company evolves. My own brand colors have drastically changed throughout the years so that I could make my content more accessible with higher contrast between my colors so that more of my audience could actually see my graphics bore clearly. Completely changed the style of things like my YouTube thumbnails over the years. But there are just so many different reasons why someone would change their logo, their fonts, their colors. So don't be afraid to change as your brand evolves, but just be sure to not make a habit of making drastic changes really frequently, and of course, make sure to always update your brand guidelines accordingly as well. Now, one of my friends is a brand strategist who helped me with my beautiful brand logo and my color scheme and everything else. But I will tell you that it costs about $6,000 or even more for some brand strategists, obviously, as we saw with Pepsi, it can blow out a lot. For people to create your logo and put together a color palette based on your business needs, your customers, et cetera, et cetera. I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on this. I'm not a brand strategist. So we're going to be doing the quick and dirty DIY version. But just so you know, if your clients want a premium service for this, this is something they might need to outsource down the line. But that doesn't mean that you can't start with something that you create for them, and then once they have a bigger budget in the future, they can reinvest. Of course, if you're working for bigger businesses straightaway, and it's something that they have the budget to invest into, you could actually make the recommendation that they work with a brand strategist to put something together before you begin working on their marketing materials. Let's say for Mags Realty, I want to get started by looking at minimalist color palettes and see what comes up. There's a few that we can use for inspiration here. Of course, if the brand values we're looking for are bold, colorful, or futuristic, whatever words you want to put in there instead of minimalist is obviously completely fine. But this is a really good place to start for color palette inspiration. I'm going to just go ahead and get started with this one. In this case, I'm just going to screenshot this, and I'm going to bring it into a different tool so that we can use it as a jumping off point for our color palette. This is coolers. They have lots of trending palettes you can explore. Or you can start with your own by using their generator, where you can also upload an image. It doesn't just have to be an image of a color palette by the way. It can just be like a photograph. So if there's a photo that you want to use as your inspiration for color palettes, you absolutely can. It will start with something here. And then when you hit the space bar on your keyboard, it will continue to cycle through different color palettes. At any point if you find a color you like, you can lock it in place and then continue hitting space, and it will create color palettes around that color that you have enjoyed. And you can also play around with shades and do lots of really sort of fun things. Anytime you click on the color, the Hex code here, which is this combination of six letters and numbers. If you hit that, you can put in a custom hex code, or you can use the slider to pick a color that you like. But in this case, what we want to do is, yeah, you can also add colors to remove colors. I should have said that, but in this case, you can create a color palette from a photo, so that's exactly what we want to be doing. I'm going to just upload my screenshot. And then we can use the color picker to pick our color palette. I'm going to pick this color here and this one, and I'm going to go for this green, and my last color is going to be perhaps this one here. Maybe I'll add just one more color. And click next and say open and generator. These are all my beautiful colors. I do think I would play around with them just a little bit because I think I would go for slightly darker, more impactful shades. Something a bit a bit darker, green here, maybe going towards the blue. This is just ways that you can play around with things a tiny bit if you're like, Well, this is pretty close to what I want, but not quite there yet. Same with this gray, I would probably go for something a little bit darker. And a little bit more blue in terms of the tinge. Then this silver, I would actually completely replace and go for more of like a mustard yellow. I think that could be a really interesting brand color to add to this. But again, you just play around with things and see what works really well for your brand. Then once you're happy with this, we can go ahead and export this as an image or a PDF. In this case, we really just want to make sure we're saving these hex code somewhere. I'm just going to go ahead and export this as an image. This is going to be Mags realty brand colors. Of course, you may not be at all responsible for creating a brands color scheme. But because this is in the interests of you getting to practice, setting up perhaps a fake brand for yourself so you can start practicing these skills. This is a really quick and easy way to do that. But don't feel pressured to know all the ins and outs of what it takes to create a brand at this stage. We're just trying to have a little bit of fun with it using these free tools. 9. Content Marketing 101: We will be talking a lot more about content strategy development in the strategy section of the course. But for now, I want to talk about what content marketing is and why it's so important in allowing you to decide what content to create and when and where and how to actually share that content. So when it comes to actually creating your content and deciding what to create, there are a few things to definitely keep front of mind. Starting with making sure you know your brand and audience. So we already talked about this a little bit in the previous lesson, but your job as a social media marketer is to be a digital chameleon. So you're always blending into your client's brand and creating content for it as if it was your own business. Then you also want to make sure you know your platform. This is something we're going to go into in a lot more depth when we talk about each individual platform in the next section of the course. But for now, I just wanted to mention that the type of content you share will largely depend on the network that you're sharing it on. So for example, you will find names all over Instagram, even from pretty professional brands in professional industries, sometimes because that's the type of content that works on that platform. But you would be hard pressed to find a name on Linked in because even if people are sharing names on Linked in, they're probably being buried by the algorithm because that is just not the platform for it. So it's important to know your client's brand and their audience for sure, but it's very, very important to know each platform and what works on that platform and the style of communication that people prefer on that platform. Now let's talk about strategy and why people actually choose to engage with your brand online after seeing your content. This is an excellent post from Justin Welsh on LinkedIn. Four types of content builds a following. This person teaches me, entertains me, makes me think, understands me. That's about it. All of these really come down to you truly knowing your audience. What problems do they have? What makes them laugh? What makes them think? What really makes them who they are? Of course, as a brand online, you will occasionally have to also share promotional content because that's just true of any business, but that's not the content that will make up the majority of what you share, and it's also not the content that's going to build a loyal following for you. Whenever you're thinking about what content to create, remember to ask yourself, Is it educational? Is it entertaining? Does it challenge the status quo or provide motivation or inspiration? Finally, does it speak directly to the needs of its target audience? If you can take more than one box with each piece of content, then that's awesome. But you should be striving for all of your non promotional content to be in at least one of these categories. When it comes to planning out your content, and again, we will go into each of these in a little bit more depth later on. But for now, just so you know with your content, you've got a few different options. You can obviously create new content that's original. You can also repurpose your content, or you can curate content from other sources. Starting with repurposing content, you can either take an older piece of content and give it new life, or you can take a newer piece of content but posted or created in a bit of a different format. For example, marketers often do this by updating older popular blog articles to current standards or current years. For example, this is an article I wrote for a digital marketer back in 2021, which was on why 2021 is the best time to be in your digital marketing career. Then they asked me to basically revamp that article for 2023. All it really took was some updated screenshots, but the advice was largely the same. You'll also see big YouTubers doing this where they publish videos that are still relevant in the following year. They will just update the actual title of the video to say, this is the new way to succeed in the new year or the upcoming year or what have you. As long as the advice is still relevant, it's a great way to bring new life to old content. But repurposing can also be even simpler where you share a little quote from a blog article or an interview in the form of an Instagram graphic, for example, like Mel Robbins has done here. There really is so much beauty to repurposing content. Curated content for anyone who's not familiar is essentially when you're taking content from other people and you're finding a way to share it with your own audience. For example, you could share someone's post to your own Instagram stories, or you could share an industry article on Linkedin, or you could screenshot someone's post on X or Linkedin and put your own background colors on the graphic and share it on a platform like Instagram. You can see how business chicks have done this on their own Instagram account. You should always tag the original creator when you're doing this, but sometimes it's not always possible when their handle on other platforms is not the same as their Instagram user name in this case. But if their information is actually in the graphic itself, it's a little bit of a loophole to sharing this type of content, but whenever possible, always tag the original creator, of course. Don't be afraid to think creatively about how you can obviously create your own content or repurpose your own content, but also share content from other sources as well. Now in the next lesson, we're going to talk about how you can tap into all the various resources that are out there for you. For when you're feeling stuck, or you just need a little bit of inspiration. So I will see you. 10. Get Endless Content Ideas: So we're going to look at a few different ways that you can get endless content ideas. And later in the course. We're also going to look at how you can do this with the power of AI. But for now, I wanted to bring up a few tools and techniques that will become really handy to you. So starting with answer, the Public, which has the option for you to look at what's trending on Google, being YouTube, TikTok, and Amazon, where you can also go by your particular location, which is really handy. So in this case, let's just say we're going to go really broad with it and just say, let's look at real estate questions within Australia and search for that in terms of what's trending on Google. So we're not logged in at the moment. You are limited to three daily searches even on the free account. But just so you know how answer the public works effectively, gives you a sort of wheel in terms of what people are searching for by these different categories. So these are people asking, are real estate agents allowed to lie? A real estate agents rich? Ten, real estate agents lie about offers. So sort of similar. And these are all the different things that people are asking for. It's got 138 questions, 89 propositions, comparisons, et cetera, et cetera. You can save the image for later. You can also just export your information as a CSV file, which is probably more handy for the list option rather than the actual wheel option, but you can export it once you're logged in, even if you're on the free account. It's also going to give you some ideas about cost per click comparisons, which is something that we're going to talk about a little bit later on, so not to worry about for now because it's attached to advertising on Google. But just so you know, there's a lot of data that you can find within answer the public, and it's cool that they now also allow TikTok functionality. But effectively, it's going to give you a lot of ideas about certain things that you could answer with your reels, with blog posts, with newsletters, based on the questions that people are asking. We also have answer Socrates, which is competitive with answer to the public. So in this case, instead of real estate, let's just say, let's say first home buyer. Let's ask something a little bit different, but along the same lines. And then you'll notice that yeah, the questions are very similar. I claim first home buyer credit? Can I get a grant, what qualifies as a first home home buyer, et cetera, et cetera. And then on answer Socrates, you actually can download this as a CSV without signing up because they're trying to compare with answer the public. Again, it's just going to give you questions that people are asking, but in this case, it's really just catering to Google. But this can be a really great way to just get a list of sort of frequently asked questions. A really easy way to do that is also to just head to Google and just look up a question that you have. And then where it says, P also ask, anytime you use this drop down, it's going to give you more and more questions. So you'll notice that soon as I use any of these dropdowns, more and more and more questions will start popping up, and these will be the most frequently asked questions on Google. So it's just another way of getting the same data. But that can be really handy, especially if your client is maybe a new business, and they don't have frequently asked questions of their own yet. They don't know what questions their ideal customers have. This is a good way to gauge that. So that's all about the written aspect of gaining some inspiration. But now let's talk about the visual aspect. So here I am within the Meta Ads library, which is something I've linked within your course guide. And here's where you can look at any Instagram and Facebook ads that people are running. So you can look up your competitors or complimentary brands. And if they are running ads on Facebook and Instagram, you'll be able to see them here, and you'll be able to look at the ad and also any pages that they're running these ads too. So, for example, this particular ad goes to this landing page, so you can get inspiration for both the ad and the landing page itself. So you can go into see summary details. It's going to show me all the ads that are running this particular image. And then I can just go ahead and maybe screenshot this for myself. So if I'm inspired by either the image or any of the texts around it, I can screenshot that because as soon as they stop running the ad, I'm not going to have access to that within Ads library. So I want to make sure I'm categorizing that either within Google Drive or just on my desktop, for example. So on my own desktop here, I have an inspiration folder where I tend to just chuck screenshots like these ones. In this case, I would just take that screenshot and put it into Facebook ads in Spa, or I would have a client folder where I would then add that screenshot in. But in this case, it's sort of got a huge mix of everything, just random images that I've been inspired by gifts, thumbnails, et cetera, et cetera. And then I do my best to try and organize them into different categories where I might be inspired by particular Tube thumbnails, for example, that I might want to copy, and things like that that I can always come back to if I'm creating for that particular platform, and I'm feeling a little bit creatively stuck. All right. And now let's just quickly talk about how you might be able to do this on Instagram or other platforms where you can utilize the save function to do this on the platform itself. So on Instagram, if you use the save icon in the bottom right hand corner, I saved it, but then let's say I want to save it to a particular collection. So I can create a new collection. Let's say this was for a client, where I'm doing some research. Then I would make the client's name, the collection. And that way, anytime I'm then creating content for that particular client, I can head on over to my profile, head on over to saved. Then I can go to the client one collection, and it's going to have all of this beautiful content that I've researched throughout the month. So when I actually sit down to create content for this client, I'm not starting from scratch, and I'm not like, I don't know what to create. It's all here for me to go, Okay, I know I've thought about recreating sections of this particular real, this particular post And I can draw that inspiration both for Instagram and for other platforms as well. But this is a really easy way to save things in a way that, you know, because screenshots just don't always do it justice, especially when we're talking about videos. So this is a really nice way to also be able to create endless content and get inspiration from video content specifically on each platform. 11. Get to Know Canva: In this lesson, we're going to start diving into the exciting world of mva. Camba is a tool that I have a deep deep love affair with that started years and years ago, and it's just such an incredible tool that you're probably going to use a whole lot in your work, and it's a tool that continues to evolve. There's no telling just how amazing it will be in the future as well. They have so many amazing resources out there for you that continue to evolve as a tool evolves. Feel free to check out YouTube channels, their free resource library, and so many other materials that I have linked within your course guide that will help you to expand your learning beyond what you're going to learn here. But I am also going to say camera and just the world of content creation from either a graphic design perspective or video creation perspective. Just in social media creation in general is a very complex topic that we can't really cover in as much depth as I would like to in this course, because otherwise, it would be twice as long, and it's already pretty long. So I am not going to go into everything that you need to know. But that is also to say that not every single social media management or social media marketing role looks the same as another role. And for you in particular, this may not actually be part of your job description. Your job might simply be to look at the strategy side of social media and perhaps do caption writing and optimization, and scheduling, but you may never have anything to do with video creation or graphic creation. Your clients might have other team members for this particular task. So if this is not a huge part of your role, then, you may not need to invest the time. But I would say for anyone who is looking to upskill themselves in this area, there are some really great resources out there for you. If you're completely new to the world of Canva, and you want to know everything there is to know about this tool and how you can use it for social media specifically, then I want to encourage you to check out my best selling Canva course that's dedicated to this topic if you're interested in learning more. Of course, there are also amazing free resources out there that I have linked in your course guide if you're happy to go down that path instead. I've also added in some key terms and definitions to your course guide if you're not familiar with the different image file types like PNG and JPEG, and when to use each and what a vector is and all of those fun things that we'll talk about over the next few lessons. Now it's time to jump into Canva and take a look. If this is your first time getting to know Canva. I'm so excited for you. If you already know a little bit about Canva, I promise that there will be a few awesome things that we will go through over the next few lessons that will hopefully be of value to you and your existing skill set. So if you're new to Canva, you can just go through to start designing or signing up. These are your options in terms of the different payment. Sections and models, you will probably either be on Canva free or Cava Pro, and I will go through some different benefits of being on the Cava Pro account, but I will also give you some hacks for overcoming some of the limitations of a free account in terms of getting free assets from other websites. So we'll go over that in the next few lessons. But for now, I'm just going to switch over to my existing Canva account here, which is in dark mode at the moment. So if yours has a white background and you want to switch it to dark mode, you would do that in settings, but I'm going to keep mine on dark mode. So if it looks a little bit different from your screen, that would be why And in terms of what you're going to be seeing here, it really depends on how active you are within Canva. Obviously, I've been using it for years and years. So I will have a lot more designs here. If you're brand new, it might just be sort of a shell. But either way, the majority of what you're going to be doing within Ava is exploring some of the templates and playing around with some of those different things. So either you can go by these different categories here, which are, let's say if you want to go for social media, you can start there. You can also just head on over to templates here. Or if you know exactly what you're going to be searching for, you can just type it here. It will give you some recommendations here already, but then if you hit Enter, it's going to expand that for you and you will have options to search through Canvas templates or through your own projects. This is really handy if you're looking for something, and especially for me when I have thousands of designs in here, I believe at this point. Hopefully, they're all labeled correctly and I know roughly what the keywords would be. That's where I can go and search through my projects there. At this stage, we're in the template section for Instagram posts, and we've got 500,000 templates. That's quite a lot. We may want to filter that down. We can use the filters to go through the different styles if we want something minimalist, or maybe we know that we actually don't want square templates. We just want the nice, beautiful vertical portrait templates. Then we can go through just Themes, whether they're animated, et cetera, et cetera. So we can start to narrow it down, and every time we sort of use one of these filters. So let me actually just put these in place and click Apply. It's going to start to narrow it down, so we're now down to 13,000 templates. So that's a little bit more achievable. And I could continue going down that. So let's say if I'm a real estate agent, instead of searching for just Instagram post, I could search for real estate Instagram post, and that's going to help to narrow things down even further and just show me the kinds of templates that I'm looking for. So that's templates. We are going to be using those a little bit more once we start actually designing. But for now, let's head on over to our main dashboard so we can jump on over to the brand section. Now, it does depend on whether you are a Canva free or Canva pro user in terms of what you're able to access. So I'm going to jump into my existing brand kit here and you'll see I've got some sub marks. These are kind of rarely used versions of my logo, that might just act as a watermark. Then I've got my actual logo, I've got a slight variation of my logo. Now, I do have it in several colors. This is not actually necessary because these are SVG files, meaning that anytime I put this logo into a design, I can change the color of it. So it actually doesn't matter if it's there in dark or light mode. I just uploaded both, but really anytime you're using an SVG or a vector, it will naturally take on whatever color you want it to. So you wouldn't necessarily need to do that. But just this is where you can put some logo. And then you would have some color palettes. Now on the free version, you're limited to just three colors and one palette. On the pro version, you can have as many color palettes as you want. Now, of course, you don't actually want to have endless amounts of colors. You will generally just have a couple of your main colors, but there are benefits to having different variations of your color palette that are missing certain colors, and we'll go over that in future lessons as to why I've done this. There is a method to the madness, I promise. But it's essentially just like very, very slight variations of the exact same color palette that maybe take out some of the more aggressive colors. So for example, this one doesn't have my brand black or this kind of neon neon green neon yellow. So that would be a variation of that. Then you have your fonts, and you can also upload fonts on the pro version, which is something you can't do on the free version. Have your brand voice, which is something we'll discuss when we talk about AI and how to utilize this because you can do that within Canva as well where you can get a bit of AI assistance from Canva to help you create your beautiful designs. And then I've just got photos that I also use in my designs. I don't have any graphics, and then I've just got some icons, again, which are vectors, which means that anytime I put these into a design, I can change the color of them really seamlessly. That's effectively what we would be hoping to set up for Meg's real estate. Now, I am on a pro version, so I'm able to just add in a brand kit. But if you are on the free version, We would only be able to create one brand kit. In terms of logos, I've just gone and created a very basic logo here. I'm not going to be taking you through how to do this because logos are not something I would really hugely recommend people do within Canva for a few different reasons. It's something that I really would recommend outsourcing to professionals who have access to more robust design tools that are equipped for this. That being said, some people do design logos in Canva, they're happy for them to be, really basic. This is literally just a font and there's no alterations being made to this. So you can make logos within camera, technically speaking, but I'm not going to take you through the process because we're going to be using the editor within Cava within the next few lessons. So you're going to get to know it really, really well in terms of how to change the colors, how to add fonts, and things like that. This is just a really brief overview of Canva and its dashboard for the time being, but I am going to just download this logo so we can add it to our brand kit. So once you are ready to download something within Cava, and again, we are going to be going over this, but you would hit Share. And then download and within CVA, if you're a pro user, you can also download it as an SVG file. Anytime you see a little crown on anything within Canva, whether it's the templates, any images, assets, or functionality like this. It just means it's a pro feature, so if you're a free user, you wouldn't have access to it. So I'm able to download this as an SVG file, and then we can import it into our beautiful brand kit. I'm just going to jump on over to my brand kit and take that from my downloads and load it into here. So again, what that means is that it's a relatively basic logo, but if I'm using it in designs, I'll be able to change the colors of that logo if I wish. Now, in terms of my actual colors, this is where I can jump into the color scheme that I loaded in from coolers, copy over these hex codes here, and then add them into my brand kit. So I'm just going to speed this up as I put in my hex code, and that will fill up my beautiful color palette here. I'm going to leave it at that in terms of fonts and anything else. Maybe these are some things that we will develop as we start designing. But for now, I'm happy to just have my logo and my color palette. So you know this is like a very basic version of a brand kit. It's not exactly a PDF, as we talked about. But it is, you know, something that you and your team and your clients can refer to and make sure that you're only using the assets from within Canva that are placed here. So you're not using colors outside of this. You're not using fonts outside of the ones that you've selected, which we will look at in future lessons. And now that we've done that, anytime I'll be in a design like this one, I will have access to my brand over here. That I will have my beautiful colors here. And then anytime, let's say I want to edit a color like this one, I can also just head on over to the color picker or the background color section here, and it's going to have my beautiful colors there for me to choose from. I don't necessarily need to remember them or have them written down anywhere. They're just going to be there for me. So that is a huge benefit to being a pro user. But if you think you can just get away with a couple of colors on the free plan, that's totally fine. Again, for demo purposes, it's not a huge shortcoming to being on the free or pro plan. But just so you know that that is an option, and if I had further color palettes, if I had additional ones, they would all be here as well. That's a little bit of the basics of what you can expect within Canva. We're just scratching the surface at this stage. We're going to get to know so much more about this beautiful, beautiful software over the next few lessons, but I don't want to overwhelm you right at the beginning. So now in the next lesson, we're going to get to know some awesome websites where you can get some free images and other free assets from. So I'll see there. 12. Find Free to Use Content: So let's say you're within your Canva design, you head on over to elements, and you want to look for a nice beach photo. And we go on over to photos or videos, but let's say in this case, photos, and you'll see that really the photos that you really like all have this crown option, and that means that they are a pro feature. These ones don't have that, which means they're free for you to use, even if you're a free user. But let's say you want to use something like this one, which is beach at Sunset or one of these, and it's a pro photo for you to use. If you're a Canva free user, it'll have a watermark, and it'll ask you if you want to purchase that image in order for you to use it in your design. That can be an inconvenience. We'll talk about some free websites, which will allow you to download these images for free and import them into Camber. But even if you are a pro user, sometimes, the images that you'll get from within Gamber just end up looking really stock image like this one here and you're just like, that's just not right. And the searchability in here is great, but it's not as good as it will be on websites that are fully dedicated to being an image search engine. So even if you're a cava pro user, you will probably find these websites useful. Let's start with Unsplash because Unsplash has some really, really gorgeous, beautiful, very artsy minimalistic photos that are perfect for so many designs. Within Unsplash, you can search for, let's say, in this case, let's search for a beach, and you will have some that are on the Unsplash plus, you'll see a little plus there, which means that is a pad feature of the platform. You'll also see some ads, but largely you will find images like this one that are completely free for you to use and download in various different dimensions. Which is a huge, huge benefit, so you can go as large as the original image size, which in this case, is pretty much four k, so that's awesome. And then you can import that into camera by just dragging it straight in. So let's just go for a medium image and head on over back here. And now I'm just going to drag it into my design. It's going to automatically go into my uploads folder, and then I can organize it from there. Just click on it and use it straight in my design. So that's really, really beautiful. Another great option of Unsplash is if you're logged in, you can create collections. So in this case, I could just create a brand new collection, which in this case, could be something like a beach. And these are, I mean, I could make it a private collection, so no one else can see it. But let's say I'm doing this for a client. I can just spend maybe a half hour just researching images that I think they'll like. Each time I have an image like this one that I really like. If I scroll down, it'll give me related images as well. So I can keep going down these rabbit holes of collecting related images into my collection and then maybe go and download them all at the same time, or maybe even just send the link to my client and say, what do you think of these images for our next blog post or our next social media post, et cetera. So that's a really beautiful option in terms of Unsplash. If you're ever curious about their licensing, you can head on over to license here. It'll essentially tell you that all images can be downloaded and used for free commercial and noncommercial purposes. No permission is required, but appreciated. So that is, essentially, you can do anything with these images that you want, except to sell them. So you can't just take an image off of Unsplash and literally just say, pay me 40 bucks for this, and you can't create a competitive website. Everything else you can do with them. But of course, always check licenses if you're not quite sure. Moving on. I did just want to say that whenever you're in unsplash, you can actually filter your search results by the license type in terms of free or unsplash plus. So if you don't want to see any of the unsplash plus images because it's a paid option, you can just search by free. It will still have some random ads for other things. But that way you know you're only searching for free images. You can also go by landscape or portrait images only, which is really handy if you're searching specifically for images for social media posts, and you know you want them to be in vertical format. Not quite as critical with images as it is with videos, which we'll talk about in a little bit, but just so you know that that is an option within Unsplash. So Unsplash is a really great option for that. I also really, really love pexels, also because they have beautiful, not just photos, but also videos. So I largely use pexels for videos, but they also have really, really beautiful photos. So we are going to go and look for a video. And in here, I can also filter this by orientation. So let's say I'm looking for videos specifically for social media like Instagram and TikTok, so I want vertical videos only because I want them for my reels. So that's what I would use pexels for. It's really, really beautiful for that, and they do have some very high quality Gorgeous videos. And again, you would want to make sure that you are logged in so you can create collections just like you can in Unsplash. And once again, you can download in various different formats. If you are going to go through to downloading, it'll tell you you can show appreciation or donate to the creator. But again, with Pexels, there's no attribution that's required. So those are my two G two. There's also Pia Bay, which is a lot more stock image, but they've got a lot better search engine functionality. So for example, with unsplash and Pexels, you are able to get so much variation for something like beach. But if you're going to get really specific, like you want, men on Mountain or something like that, that's a little bit more specific. You might need something a little bit more stock image, and of course, they're going to have promotions here as well. But then they're going to possibly have a little bit more variation. I you are more options for you for more specific keywords like man on Mountain. Basically, the main thing you want to make sure is you're not just going to Google, putting in what you want an image of and taking it off of Google, because that's a very quick and easy way to get yourself banned off of social networks and invite a whole lot of, you know, hosts of problems. So you want to make sure you're getting your images and your videos the right way, either you're paying for them from websites like Shutterstock or you're getting them from free to use websites like the ones that I've just shown you. Or you can also pay for creative assets from websites like creative market. So there are photos and videos and things like that on here as well, but you can also search for things like Canva templates. So if the ones that you're finding within Canva are just not cutting it for you because they're not quite specific to what you're looking for, This is a really, really great website where you can find some still very affordable templates like these ones might cost you about 50 bucks, but that are a little bit more professionally designed than the ones that you'll find within Campa. But of course, that's not a free service, letting you know that there are always options for free things, like with unsplashed pixels, and then obviously also paying for more premium service if your clients have that within their budget. Same goes for music as well. Within Pia Bay instead of searching for images, you can also search for music and sound effects, gifts, et cetera, et cetera. You can also find free music from directly within the YouTube studio, which I'm going to link you to. But within your YouTube channel, which you will have, even if you don't have an active channel per se, but once you're within YouTube studio, within the audio library tab, you've a whole range of all these beautiful music. And when you check the license type, it'll tell you that there's no attribution required, and you're able to use this music. However, you want, not just on YouTube, but you can also use it on platforms like Instagram and TikTok. So this is where you can just go through and download some music. That's an easy way to do that. Or the next step up again is to use a website like beat. Now, I love upbeat because it's $7 a month at the moment, so it's really really affordable, but it's got a lot more variation in terms of the tracks that you're able to get. It's also a little bit smarter. So once you start downloading some music, it will kind of get to know what kind of music you'll like, and it'll start recommending some future music tracks that are coming out that are similar to the ones that you've downloaded before. Once again, these are all within your course guide. You don't have to write these all down. But just so you know there are always options for both free and slightly more premium assets that you can use in your designs, and you can pretty much drag them all into Canva, including audio. So if you are downloading, let's say, we download this particular music track, and you can also filter by genres both within YouTube Studio and upbeat and other platforms as well, so you can always go by genre, mood, et cetera, et cetera. So you don't just have to filter through all music. But once you've got an audio file downloaded and you want to use it in a design like a video, which is something we're going to look at a little bit later on. You can just drag it in and it's going to add it to the audio section of your uploads folder. Any assets that you find externally can always be brought into C AMVA to use in your designs, or of course, you can just search for what's within Cava if you think that's suitable. So that's a little bit on assets and where you can get them, and I've included some additional links in your course guide for websites that you can go through to see what might suit your needs. And then the next lesson, we're going to start actually designing, so I hope you're excited, and I will see you there. 13. Design Powerful Graphics: So now things are going to start getting a bit exciting because we're actually going to be designing from some beautiful templates. Now, one thing I didn't mention is when you're in the template section, let's say you find a template that you really like. Let's just use one for demo here. So let's say we found this one, and we want to save it or this one for later. So one thing you can do is you can click into the design, and instead of just going straight through to customizing it, you can start it, which means you can sort of save it for lighter. That can be a really handy way to organize your workflow because once you're then in your camera dashboard, in the start section, you will find all the templates that you've liked in the past. I found this one that I think would be perfect for us to start customizing for Mags realty, and then I've got some other ones as well that I want to look into. But for now, let's start with this one, and I'm going to go ahead and use this template. So we're now within the editor. There are a few things that I want you to be aware of when you start designing. The first thing is making sure you rename your designs. And that's just because, yeah, when you end up with hundreds of different designs, it can be really hard to know what each of them was about. So in this case, let's make this Meg's realty. Perfect helm, or something like that that lets you know what the design was actually about. Now, each of your designs might have not just one page or one design within it, it might have hundreds, because you can always add pages. You can bring in different designs from different templates. So just because this was the initial template I chose, doesn't mean that I can't access other templates from within the design section of my editor here. So I can continue adding this if I want to say, real estate, and I can find other templates that I like and just bring these into my design, add a new page, bring another design in. And then suddenly, if I click on this grid view, you'll start to see that I've got all these beautiful posts that are ready for me to download and go. Now, these don't actually look the same. They're not very cohesive, and we talked about that in terms of branding. We want to make sure everything is nice and cohesive. So we would want to make sure we're bringing these in line with our branding, our colors, our fonts, and all of that. So it all looks nice and cohesive. But just so you know that just because you chose one template doesn't mean that you're stuck with it. You can continue tweaking it, you can bring in other templates, and you can kind of make things work for you. Now, earlier, we talked about the benefit of having several color palettes from in your brand section. Now, for Mags Realty, we just have the one color palette, so I can't quite show you why that would be beneficial. So I'm just going to switch to my own brand kit so I can show you why this can be a benefit. So within this, I've got a few different color palettes and let's say for this design, I want to see what these would look like with my brand colors. What I can do within the brand section of the editor is actually click on each color palette and hit shuffle and it's going to show me what this would look like with my brand colors. But obviously, this particular color palette has some colors in it that I may not want in every design, which is why I've removed them from the additional color palette. Let's say instead, I just want to choose a color palette that doesn't have my black and my neon in the and that's the one I want to use for social media, and I can keep clicking shuffle, and it's going to continue to shuffle through my color schemes. So that is the real benefit of having several color palettes. Again, are restricted to the pro users of Canva, but not a huge thing. You can obviously manually change your colors instead. And if you just have the one color palette, you can still utilize the color shuffle feature, just like I am over here until you find one that you quite like. Going to leave it at that, and then I'm just going to manually tweak a few things. So you can also, once you find one, just say, Okay, cool, apply that to all the pages, and it's going to take the rest of these and apply your brand colors to those as well. You will always have to do some manual work because it's never going to be perfect. But sometimes when you have a document with 200 pages in it, this can be a really quick and easy way to shortcut your way to success, especially if you're maybe buying templates from a site like creative market, where you know all of the pages in one big document are actually perfect. Happy with them and you just want to update them to your brand colors. There are a few shortcuts that you can utilize within Canva that will make that really nice and easy for you. So I am going to manually tweak a few things here. I am going to swap out some of the images. This image has a rectangle behind it, but it's not perfectly aligned. If you were to zoom in we will see that actually this frame is a little bit off in terms of, you know, this is not quite as thick as the top in the bottom. So what I would do in this case is actually click on that back rectangle and hit the lete on my keyboard and same with this one and actually just take my image and add a border because that is just a much nicer way to make sure that your border is consistent across the two images, and it's also consistent across the top and the bottom and the sides. I can then change the color of this border. So in this case, maybe I'll actually go with a darker color here and then maybe my lighter color here. To make it nice and dynamic. Now, with this website here, I would probably shift this so that it's not sort of floating up and about. I'm just going to move it to the bottom. And then I would update this to, in this case, Mags Realty, which is not an actual website, but let's say it is. And now I can start to adjust things in terms of my fonts. I like this kind of minimalist font here. So Lato is a really good option, and I could just go through and look at text styles and see what different kinds of fonts are available to me. Again, some will only be available to pro users. Or you can also search for things like minimalist or trendy or handwritten corporate. Those are all keywords I could use to try and find fonts that I like. In this case, I know the font that I want is called glacial indifference, and then I can use this drop down to see all the different styles of that particular font that are available to me. In this case, I'm just going to go for regular and I'm just going to go and use the spacing option to just bring out my letters a little bit. All right. Now, this needs to be darker because it's not very accessible at the moment, so I'm just going to go ahead and put that to this color over here. It is a little bit different, so you'll notice that whenever that happens, it's probably just because the transparency is off. So in this case, I'll just bring the transparency all the way up, and maybe I'll actually change that to a slightly darker color. I think that looks quite nice. And then in terms of the fonts up here, I'm going to be changing this. Again, you could try and find the fonts that you like, but in this case, I know that the font that I want is called the seasons. So I can change all of these across my designs. So anything that had Lato in it could change it to the seasons, that can be another shortcut. And Canvas pretty clever at letting you know whenever there is a way for you to sort of find a shortcut. Now, if you're trying to change the caps on any of these kind of sentences and it's not letting you, it's probably because this feature is on. So if you click that, it's going to let you type in lower case. So I'm just going to type home. And I'm just going to say, find your dream home. And again, we're going to change that top front to. Glacial indifference. All right. And I can just highlight both of these so I can move them together. That's looking pretty good. And I'll just highlight this and move it down a little bit so that my text has a little bit more room to breathe. All right. I think that's looking pretty good already. I could bring a bit more attention to my text by hitting r on my keyboard to bring in a rectangle. Or alternatively, I could go to elements. And shapes and find my rectangle and other assets there. The hitting the keyboard thing is just a shortcut just so you know. But really, at any point, you can go to elements and find your way there as well. This will allow me to sort of bring in a little bit more color, and then I can just change my actual font styles to make sure there's enough contrast between my background and my foreground, and I can use the arrow keys on my keyboard just to move this down the tiniest bit and then change my font size here to just be a little bit smaller, so it has a nice bit of white space around my text. Think that's looking pretty good, and I can just zoom out and have a look at my graphic as a whole. I'm going to tweak things a tiniest bit just to make sure that our color contrast is where it needs to be, and I'm going to change this to a darker color as well. That's looking pretty good already, but there is a way to elevate this one step further by turning it into a gift for some platforms. I'm going to show you that in the next lesson, and I'll see that. 14. Make Captivating GIFs: So I have a folder here called demo asset. So anytime you're in the upload section, let's say you're uploading a video here or you're in the elements section, and you're looking for a video here. So let's say I'm looking for minimalist home. I go over to videos, and I find a video that I really like that I want to be able to use in future designs. So what I can do is I can click on the three dots and say, I want to add this to a folder, and I can create a new folder, or in this case, I've got a folder called demo assets, and I can add it in here. Makes it really nice and easy because in the future, let's say it wasn't over here because it's in my left hand side bar already. But let's say I've got a design here. I want to pull up that exact video in the future. I can head on over to just projects, and then I can either go to folders and find it here or I can search for demo assets because let's say I know that that's the folder that it's in, and I'll find it over here. And then I can pull up that exact video in the future. Now, as soon as I start using any of the videos from here, What Canva is going to do is going to add it to my left hand side bar for really easy access. So, don't be afraid to utilize the organization section of Canva whenever you have the option to organize things from within your uploads folder. So let's say this image over here, I've uploaded that from Unsplash, and I want to make sure that I'm moving it to a folder. So I'm going to move it to my demo assets folder and move that in. It disappears from my uploads folder, and it's moved it over into my demos. Reason this is beautiful is because then your uploads photo doesn't get super super bulky, and it doesn't make it really easy for you to search for assets, six months down the line. So whenever you have the option to organize something, please do so. Now, in this case, what I want to do is, I'm actually going to just drag this into my design and it's going to replace this image with my beautiful video. Now, it's kept the frame for me. It's kept the sort of editing that I did on that image. It's just made it into a video instead. I double click into this video, I can move it up or down depending on which part of the video I want to display on in this kind of frame. If the center of that video is not exactly what I want, I can always click into it and move it up and down, and it's going to take a different section of the video that's going to display. But this is a really easy way to then download this beautiful photo as a gift instead of an image, and then we can use that on a platform like Linkedin or Facebook. I'm going to show you that in future lessons when we're on those different platforms, but that's a really easy way that you can bring your photos to live. Let's just do one more. I'm going to be utilizing this kind of shape moving animated shape here that I've already saved to this folder. But in case you're ever looking for these kinds of shapes, you can go to elements and go to, let's say in this case, we'd say something like moving shapes, and I would be in the graphics section to find these. Now, this will be a mix of both static and animated ones. If you want to filter this down by just animated elements. This will make it much easier. Some of these will not have editable colors, though, keep in mind. For example, when I'm selecting this one, you can see that these two colors are editable, which means I can change them to my brand colors. This will not always be the case with the ones that are within amba which can be a bit tricky. In case you are wanting these animated elements and you want them to be in your brand colors, you can always head on over to apps and find lottie files. This is a free app within CMVa. It does require you to sign up. Externally, it's going to prompt you to do that. But then once you're within Loy files, you know that all of the beautiful icons that you can find within here are all editable, and you would essentially just put in your own color scheme by putting in a new palette. And then it will adjust them to your brand colors and allow them to use them within your designs. But I've already found mine here, so I'm just going to be using this one, and I also have a folder here of just photos of myself that I occasionally use in designs. So I'm just going to go ahead and grab one that's going to be easy to cut out for the kind of look that I want here. Now, this is going to be a page or a Canva pro feature. But that being said, you could always do this with just a free version by not cutting yourself out, but just adding kind of moving animated elements to your design. But what I'm going to do is essentially take this and then add those moving elements just behind me. So I'm going to go and copy this image so I can either right click to copy and right click to paste or use the keyboard shortcuts that are available to me there. When I paste this, I can just put those images on top of each other. Then head on over to edit photo and background remover. So this is a pro feature. There are free versions that will allow you to do this. I've linked them within your course guide. It's a little bit more painful to do it with them because you have to essentially take the photo, put them into a different tool, cut out the background and put it back into camera. But you absolutely can do this for free. And again, you could just get around not doing this at all. But once you use this, if you're using this feature, it'll essentially just cut you out like it has me here. Now, you'll notice that the actual animated elements have disappeared. So at any point, if you've got different elements on top of each other like this, but let's say I don't really want to move these guys because they're in the spot that I want. I can just head on over to position, and this is where I'll find anything that's on the page. That includes the background color, that includes my animated elements, the background photo, and the photo that's on top. Will allow me to then take this and move it around. I can move it just behind my cut out, and then it's like beautifully placed exactly where I want it, and then I can just adjust it and move it around so that it's exactly in the spot that I want just to give me that perfect look. Now, while I've got it selected, I can also change the colors here. In this case, I'm going to just adjust this slightly so that it's within my colors. And I can head on over to position again. And let's say in this case, I might just select these two layers so that I can move them around together. So it's a little bit easier for me. Now the way to do that is to just hold down your command key as you're using your mouse to select the layers. So that will allow you to essentially pick them both up and move them together. Same when it goes to making them larger or smaller, you can do that while they're both kind of attached to each other, which makes it nice and easy for you. So that's a really, really easy way to work with the Camera editor. I'm just going to go ahead and add a little bit of text to this. I don't have my brand fonts in here yet, so I could add them, and I can either do that from in the brand kit, where we were previously or just within the editor here. So I can just go and add in the seasons, which is what we were using previously. So if I go to choose a font, it will be in my recently used, and I can leave that at that. And then let's say my body text is going to be glacial indifference, which again will be in my recently used here. So those are the two brand fonts I would like to keep in here. And now when I click into it, it's going to add that to my design. In this case, I could say something like Can I help save you time and money? And now I can use these little sections on the side of my text box to just get it to where I want it to be. And then I could also use these circles that are in the corners to make this larger or smaller depending on exactly how I want it to look. Now, I can just select the whole textbox and bold my font here and then maybe use the spacing just to bring this together a little bit more so that It's not taking up quite as much room on my graphic. I'm quite happy with that. That's a really easy way to get a branded color gift that's really just made from a photo. It's a little bit more captivating than a photo, but a lot less complex than a video. It sits somewhere in the middle of those two, but it can be an easy way for you to add some impressive content to your client's social media profiles without having to go that extra step through to creating videos by just using gifts. We are going to be utilizing these. We're going to export them and use them on social media in further lessons when we look at the different platform. If you're not quite sure how to utilize that yet, we are going to look at that a little bit later on. But for now in the next lesson, we're going to start looking at how to create captivating videos. I'll see there. 15. Create Powerful Videos: So at this point, I want to be very clear in saying that video content is a whole other base, and I have a whole different course on faceless Instagram Reels in Camba, and I could probably have another one on camera reels and then another one on YouTube, and that's a whole thing. So it can get very complicated, but it doesn't have to be. And I see people getting very stuck in the video creation side because they think it is super super complicated when there are just really simple things that you can do, even as a complete beginner. I wanted to incorporate these lessons in this course so that I can take away some of that overwhelm and show you that even if you've never created a video for social media before, and you don't want to be on camera or you don't want to get your client to be on camera. There is still things that you can do to make an impact. So that's what we're going to focus on in this lesson in particular, but of course, I'm going to provide some additional resources in your course guide as well. So make sure to check those out, but for now, let's get creating. For our vertical video here, we are going to be playing around with the Instagram real templates within Cava. So it's going to go both on Instagram and also on TikTok, but the dimensions are the same. You can brows through some of their templates. Honestly, they're a bit basic. I don't really think that these would do very well as either reels or TikTok, but they can give you some inspiration. In this case, we're just going to start from a blank template, though. Now, before creating any kind of video, you want to be starting from somewhere, whether it's your own ideas or inspiration that you've drawn from the platforms. In this case, I saw videos like this one on TikTok that have six benefits to a faceless digital business, and then it's got the six benefits, and then to see the caption to find out a little bit more. I really like the style, and then I also have an example of girls that invest that do something similar, where they effectively show the same, five, seven second clips. You'll see this one here of the Empire State Building. It's also shown here. It's used in various different formats with different texts on top, and it's always sort of ideally then saying, you know, check the caption and providing a little bit more information in there and giving people a call to action. So I really like these videos. You can say that obviously, you know, they do pretty well if they are highly targeted to the audience that's viewing them and maybe solve a problem or pose a question or what have you, so I really like these, and they're great for beginners because they're super easy to do. So effectively, all we need is a little bit of a clip, and then something to put on the screen, and then something to put in the caption. Super super easy. Now, with these, I know that girls that invest actually just have the clips themselves, and then the text is placed within TikTok, and then it's also posted on Instagram afterwards. So this is a TikTok specific font. We're going to be creating this within Camva, but you could also do it within the apps just so you know. Within ama, because we're going for a nice branded look, we're going to be starting from here, so I'm just going to say, I G, Tik Tok, Mags Realty in this case. And I'm going to start by placing a video in the back there. So I have some in my demo assets. Of course, you could bring them in from Pexels or just go to elements and look for videos there. I already have one that I've selected here. So this is from Pexels, where I think the keyword was like minimalist home or something like that, and it's got this beautiful image of a girl flipping through a magazine. So that will show you what this could look like if you were just using a regular kind of stock image or video. But in my case, I actually do have a video that I want to use that I've shot myself that actually has me in it. Now, this is absolutely not my home. This is just a video that I shot when we were on holidays, so specifically for this purpose, actually, so that I could show you what it might look like. If you were doing this with a client, and you could then potentially, you know, send them a screenshot of something you saw online and said, Can you shoot a ten second clip that looks like you doing this? Can you shoot a ten second clip that looks like you doing that? And then they could put all of these videos into a folder for you and you could then use them for your content. So in terms of using videos, the first thing I want to do is make sure I am muting my clip so that the audio of the original clip is not there. In this case, I'm actually going to make this a black solid color in the background so that I can mute my video a little bit in terms of transparency. Just going to bring it down a tiny bit so that my text pops on the screen a little bit more than it normally would. I'm going to bring in a little bit of text here, and I know this is going to go against what we've been saying, but I'm actually going to be using a slightly different font to our brand font here. That's just because sometimes you may find that you have slightly different standards for social media graphics in terms of videos than you do for any static images. For example, girls that invest, I would say that the fonts that they use these are very tick Toki. They're maybe not Relevant to their brand, but that's just something that they use for videos. So occasionally, you may have different rules for different aspects of the business. In this case, I just know that this is a font that I would use for this brand for video content specifically because it aligns really well with the brand. So I'm just going to add in a little bit of text here, and I'm going to use a bit of an effect to add a background color to this so that it stands out a little bit more, and it's a little bit easier to read. So I can change the background color to my brand color here. And I don't want it to be rounded. And then I'm just going to make sure that the actual font is dark enough that it's easy to read. All right. So I'm just going to put in some sentences here, and then we'll talk a little bit more in a sec. Okay, brilliant. So I'm just going to go ahead and align these a little bit differently. Maybe adjust the line spacing. So it's a little bit closer. And that's looking pretty good. Might need these to be a little bit smaller. Let's actually hide the pages here, so we can zoom in and see it a bit more. That's looking pretty good. Now this is at 44.5, so I want to make sure the rest of the text is also at the same size. Now within Instagram and TikTok, you will have some elements around the sides of your clips that will cut off if you've got some texts there. I do have a template for this that is a really nice final check before you go through to posting anything, and I'm going to include it in your course guide. Essentially, what I would do at the last minute is just making sure I'm placing that on top of my beautiful image here just to see where things might get cut off. This case, for example, I can see that this particular text box is in the no go zone. There are some elements up here that mean that this might or might not get cut off. But essentially, anything that's in this transparent area is perfectly going to be visible both on someone's feed and within the reals feed and everywhere that it needs to be visible. Any text and any critical elements, captions, things like that, you want to make sure you're placing in the middle here. TikTok also has some elements. It's not as clear cut because there are different variations of what is within TikTok depending on a few different things. But TikTok is essentially less restrictive than Instagram apart from this little section over here. Either way, I'm going to give you these templates so that you've got them so that you can make sure that your designs look really beautiful on both platforms, no matter All right. So that's pretty much that. And then the last thing that I want to do is make sure that I'm also placing some texts on here that says, check the caption for more details. So I'm just going to go ahead and press t on my keyboard to bring in a little bit of extra text. And then I could say something like check the caption. For more details. Okay, brilliant. I might just bold this so that it's a little bit more visible. Now, this section, I actually don't want to appear straightaway. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to right click on this and say show timing. So I actually want this to appear. Let's say this whole video is going to be let's say in this case, let's just do 6 seconds. And this is going to appear a couple seconds. Once someone's had time to read the first couple of lines, that's when I want this to appear. And in this case, let's say I also want to animate it so that it kind of fades in and that looks nice. So I could also fade the rest of these in, but I don't actually think it's necessary. And then in this case, I would add the music within the platforms themselves. So here's what that's going to look like. I'm just going to go ahead and play that. So it's just a really quick clip. And then a couple of seconds in, it's just going to say, check the caption. So I think that's pretty good. It's ale bit quick, so I would actually maybe move this to appear on the screen for maybe a little bit longer. I'm quite happy with that as a video, and it's something that we're going to use in later lessons when we talk about how to utilize Instagram reels and TikTok. 16. Other Powerful Video Styles: So later in the course, we are going to be looking at pinterest as well. So I just wanted to show you how you might be able to utilize the same sort of skills to create a video pin instead of just a video for something like TikTok and Instagram. So we're just going to be using a template for this, and we're just essentially going to be repurposing something similar to what we just did and using the same sort of clip. This is going to be nice, quick and easy, but just to show you that your skills are so transferable across platforms with camba as well. Just going to take my demo assets and take the same video that we just used and pop it into place there. Now I'm going to double click into that so that I can adjust the section of the video that's displayed. That looks pretty good, and I'm just going to adjust a few things here, so this is going to be something like ten costly mistakes to avoid as a first time home buyer. So a little bit different to what we were talking about in our previous video. Again, this is just a demo sort of topic, but along the same lines, so on Pinterest, and we'll talk about that a little bit later on, this would go to an actual blog post or a video, where I would then talk about these mistakes as opposed to detailing them in the caption like you would on Instagram or TikTok. Case, I would probably want to make sure that this is on brand for me because this is quite important on Pinterest. So I want to make sure that it's on brand with whatever our theme is on the platform, and same goes for the actual colors that we've got going on, making sure that they are our brand colors. That's looking good, something that works with this. Let's actually use our brand color here and just dim it tiny, tiny bit. That's better. That looks really good. And then once again, we can click into our video, make sure we are muting it, and then we could also trim it, so it's not, you know, the whole 9 seconds. It might maybe start when I put my hands back there. And then, you know, it could just be a couple of seconds like that, and then it'll just sort of lop back and forth. And then this is what it's going to look like once it's live on pitst. Yeah, I really like that. I think it looks really cool. And the last thing I wanted to talk about is a few tools that will really help you for any of your clients that are especially doing on camera videos for their reels and their TikTok and their YouTube shorts. Descript is a really great tool for this, so I utilize it for my YouTube video scripts, but also for a lot of social media work. So I do want to cover it. It is a pay tool, but it does have a pretty good free plan as well, and it has a lot of really great features. I want to cover it briefly and then we'll also look at some alternatives to give you an idea of what's out there. The script was originally created as an audio only software or was primarily for podcasters, but it has evolved into so much more than that. And it is really popular for people to use for their social media clips like this one, for example. So you just drop a file in, and then it's going to give you a transcript. Now, this one is obviously already made into a real sort of file. It's the right length and it's the right format and everything else. But you can also use the script to edit your long form video. Let's say your client has a long YouTube video. You could upload it in here and actually edit it into so many different things that you wanted to be. I'm just going to wait for this to upload, and then we're going to take a look at what options we have here. Notice it's given me a really great transcript with proper capitalization, which is very different to the way that captions are done when it's on the auto caption option within YouTube, for example. So this is really great, and that's why I use it for my YouTube videos where I get the transcript from here and import it into YouTube, so it's all sort of nice and correct and formatted properly for me. But this is also helpful for your captions. So I can now basically say, Okay, I want to add in some captions over here. And I can just say what style of captions I'm looking for. So there will be some that I think are a little bit over the top for me. But obviously, these have been popularized on social media, so that is why they exist, especially these kind of one word karaoke style captions. So if it's right for your clients, of course, you can experiment with it. I would probably go with something like the classic karaoke here, so I'm just going to go ahead and add that in. And then I just click into these captions, and I've got some options here. I can click the three dots, and it's going to basically open up this whole panel for me. So obviously, at the moment, this very much not accessible. So for me, I would remove the shadow from this, and I would have the font as black, the highlight color. I would probably just add in my brain color, but just for the color picker option, let me just try and choose it here. So that's relatively close to one of my brain colors. But of course, I just want to put in my hex coats here. At the moment, I'm sort of winging it a little bit. And then it's also got the future words option here, which is white at the moment, but I could make that. Actually, let me just make that like a dark purple, as well, I'd want to be using my brand color again, but in this case, let's just leave it at that. And then I would also want to make sure that I'm changing the font style to something that's a little bit more branded for me and make that a little bit bolder. So that's already starting to look pretty good. I would probably up the size of this a little bit. And then I would want to make sure that the actual text box, though, is not too close to the edges because you'll remember that when we looked at it in the previous lesson, there will be a few things that will sort of get cut off on Instagram specifically, but also on TikTok, if things are a little bit too close to the edges. So that's how I would have my captions, obviously. I think the purple on purple is a little bit much, but let me just play that so you can see how that looks. Okay, so, obviously, the passwords are white there at the moment, so I would want to change that to make it a little bit more accessible. To probably just black. I think that looks fine. I can also go through and change things like the animations. But anyways, so that is just sort of the basic of what you would do with the captions, but you could also use the script for so much more than that. So let's say we put a raw video in here. We can do things like removing filler words. So anytime you have a ten minute video, but half of it is going to be s and s, and all of that, description can basically automatically do this for you. Can also shorten word gaps. So if you have any gaps in your content, and this could be great for doing educational content as well. So if your clients are doing any webinars or trainings or courses like this one, you know, there's going to be silences that need to be removed, and it's great that you can just upload the video in here, and descript will automatically do that for you. It can now even do weird things like changing your eye contact. So if your clients are not great at looking at the camera, or maybe they're using a teleprompter, and it just looks a little bit awkward. Descript currently, this is in Beta mode, but has an option where they basically change it so that it actually looks like you're looking directly at the camera. Can do so so so much. It even has an AI option of your own voice, where you can upload your own voice, and anytime you or your clients make a mistake in a script. So let's say here I said 5,000 students, when, in fact, maybe this was 4,000 students. So obviously, if this was me working for a client, I would literally have to go back to my client and say, Can you record yourself saying 4,000 instead of 5,000, and it gets annoying, and it's a whole process. This way, you literally can upload your client's AI voice in here. And when you correct this in the text, it's actually going to say it in your own voice, which is huge. And then it can also do things like putting together your YouTube descriptions and even drafting social posts and blog post. So let's say, I've uploaded this reel in here. I don't want to bother with the caption, so I can just say, you know, I would put in my brand voice in here. I'd put in some additional instructions, but for now, let's just leave it at that. It's going to literally give me captions that are going to go perfectly along with this based on what it determines the script is about. At the moment, I haven't given it many instructions, so I think this is a little bit cheesy, but you get the point. It just can do so so much, and this particular level of their plan that I'm on is only 20 bucks a month, which is very affordable. I've added in some extra resources to your course guide, but I really love to script, even if it is just on their free plan. Of course, there are always alternatives. Sub Magic here is probably a little bit closer to the types of captions that you're used to seeing on social media, you know, where you're able to do kind of cool transitions and that kind of really dynamic style. They also are able to insert B role, which is essentially just kind of background clips that they have of, you know, people working on their laptops and things like that. So it's not necessarily just you on camera the whole time. So sub Magic is an option for that. But also, if you just want to go through the process of doing this manually, CAP cut is a really, really great free alternative. It also has a lot of really great templates. So if there are some trends that you're seeing on Instagram and TikTok and you're like, I don't know how they've done that. Chances are, it was done within CAPCut. Anytime you see anything with a green screen like this, this is something that within CAPCut, you can insert your own image or your own video background to it and then create your own version of that sort of template. So if you are seeing anything that's sort of trending on the platforms, Yeah, chances are. They've done it within CAPCt. I'm not going to dive into CAP cut. This could be a course all on its own, but I have included some resources for this within your course guide. So if you really want to dive into the world of video editing for social media, and this is something that you really want to utilize as your skill set to make yourself stand out to clients, because these are the types of businesses that you want to be working for, then definitely check out the resources in your course guide for this and give CAP cut. 17. Develop Customer Profiles: So at this point, we've talked about how to create some powerful visuals and where you can get inspiration from. But now, it's time for us to actually talk about how to cater this to the needs of your audience, because you could create the most amazing content in the whole world. But if it's not right for the type of audience and the types of customers that you want, then it's kind of useless. So I want to bring this back to a story I once read in a book about a man going fishing who said his favorite meal in the entire world was strawberries and cream. But he was going fishing, and he was trying to catch fish and fish like worms. So he wasn't going to be trying to catch a fish putting the thing that appealed to him the most on the hook. Marketing is exactly like that. Remember earlier when we were talking about our marketing myths, we were talking about how being objective is not easy. But in marketing, you need to learn to take yourself out of the equation and almost forget about what you would want and really think about what do your customers want? What do the fish want? They want worms. What are your customers worms? This analogy is getting a little bit lost in translation. But you get it. You just want to think about Who who are the audience? What do they want? What do they need? What do they want to see? What would make them want to buy? What would make them want to engage? So that's what we're going to start to talk about in this lesson. So it can be useful at this point to help your client figure out their customer personas, their buyer personas, their ideal customer avatars, or whatever you want to call them. These get referred to as many different things, but they effectively all mean the exact same thing. Which is that these fictitious avatars and personas represent your client's target customers or a segment of their audience. So the key is to basically create these as if they were a real person that you could create marketing messages to that speak directly to the needs of this particular person. And the things that you will include will vary depending on each business and how detailed you want to be. This is also based on actual analytics and detailed audience research, which your client may or may not be able to do at the beginning, depending on how long they've been in business for, how long they've actually had an online presence for. They may not know who their customers are yet. So at the beginning, they can just go off of who they want their customers to be. And as they go through business, they will start to see some patterns of who's actually purchasing from them. And this is when they can start to evolve their buyer personas or customer avatars. If your client has been in business for a while, they may already have these, but if they don't, they absolutely should, because the key to marketing is making the user feel like you're really talking directly to them. This is an example from marketer and agency owner at Howell, which has the same video, the same offer, but two completely different messages. One is speaking directly with marketers who run Facebook ads for coaches, and one is speaking directly to the coaches who want to learn how to run their own Facebook ads. To give you a real life example, Matt from Cheat Day Design also created a reel where he showed how he would redesign a snickers bar for completely different audiences. Similar to at Howell's example, the bar on the inside is exactly the same, but the packaging and messaging is tailored specifically to each customer avatar, and this completely changes someone's experience of purchasing the exact same product. This is because 80% of customers say that they are more likely to make a purchase if they feel like the marketing efforts are tailored directly to their needs. Targeting your audience like this has a much better rate of success than if you just put out general messages out there into the online universe. So try to create around three different buyer personas for your client, which will help you to craft your social media content specifically to each of these three groups. I've included a link to this in your course guide, so don't worry about writing all this information down because it can be a little bit overwhelming. I just wanted to give you some examples of how I might do this for Mag realty. I would create investor Alina. She's 40. She's married with two kids. She's a homeowner. She listens to investment podcasts like girls that invest, and she's on the money. She's earning over 150 k and would be looking to purchase her first investment property in joint names with her husband who's also earning over 100 k. Then I have first home buyer Becky, who is 30, she is in a relationship and engaged, doesn't have any kids. She's renting in the city close to her job and loves social outings. She's hiking and outdoorsy, and she spent some time looking at tips for first time home buyers on YouTube, but feels really overwhelmed by the process. Downsizing Dan is 60, looking to move somewhere smaller with his wife now that their kids have moved out, and looking forward to retirement in a few years because he's really into golf and Sci Fi, and DIY tutorials and just anything outdoorsy. They probably want to be looking at something they could possibly rent out while they travel during retirement. For me, I would likely spend my time on Linked DI, catering to Investor Alana's needs. I would spend my time on Facebook, trying to cater to downsizing DI. And then any time I spent on Instagram and YouTube would be for my home buyer Becky Avatars. And that's just because of what we're going to learn about in the next section of the course, where we talk about the different needs and goals and audiences that are present on each network. But sometimes you'll be creating content for all three customer avatars on all the platforms that you're on, especially if your clients are only ever on one or two platforms, then they'll be trying to cater to all of their different audience segments on all the platforms, and that's perfectly fine. But just to be clear, these are designed to sort of guide your content. It doesn't mean that people who are outside of this demographic are not going to buy from you. It just means you're trying to sort of cater specifically to this person or to these people. But of course, anyone can and will buy from you. Let's say for Mags reality, it would be so easy for me to just put out generic real estate content like everyone else, that's like, Hey, here's my open house, just come on by. Or buy a house with me or any of those kind of things. But now imagine a young couple who's currently renting comes across a real like this on Instagram that is talking directly to their pain points and speaking their language by saying something like the average $1,000,000 home in Brisbane has grown by $150,000 in the last 12 months, but you don't need me to tell you that it's time to stop renting and buy a place of your own. Instead, let me tell you how you can buy your dream home this year, even if you can't afford the mortgage repayments right now. It's called rent vesting. Essentially, you get to stay where you are paying lower rent and let your tenants pay the higher mortgage on your dream home until you're ready to take over. And you'll be able to use this projected rental income to make it easier to get a loan from the bank. This way, you get into the market today and the value of your home starts growing right now, DME today to find out how I can help you achieve this. Now that's a very different piece of content when it's laid out like this. Your buyer personas act as a check for you when you're looking to publish or create a piece of marketing content where you can go, for me, for example, I could say, would first time home buyer Becky resonate with this piece of content? If the answer is no, then maybe it's not worth publishing or maybe it's worth tweaking so that I can make sure that it's catering to at least one of my three customer avatars. I've created this as an exercise for you in your course guide where you can do this for yourself by using yourself as an example and talking about the three ideal clients you would love to work with as a social media manager. You can start to think about who they might be, what industry they're in. What's their revenue and business size, and what do they like? Where do they hang out? Which platforms are they on? Those sorts of things you can really start to think about, which will then again help you if you're building your portfolio or you're building your personal brand on social media because you can start to create content for these ideal clients. And of course, these will evolve, especially if you're brand new, like I said, you know, with your clients, their avatars will evolve as their business evolves, and the same is true for you. The clients that I wanted to work with at the beginning of my social media journey are totally different to the clients that I would want to work with now. At the beginning, I was really trying to work with businesses that were in industries that I was familiar with from my offline work so that I had additional things to bring to the table from my offline experiences. Now, that's a lot less important to me because obviously I have a lot more social media work under my belt, so my knowledge of like the health and wellness industry or the mental health space is less relevant, so I can look at working with other clients and with bigger businesses because I have a lot more content to back that up. But That's just say that, you know, the three kind of ideal client avatars that you create now will likely evolve over time as your clients ones will as well. So hopefully, that's all starting to make sense. Make sure to check your course guide for some more details, and I will see you in the next lesson. 18. Make Them Feel First: At this point, we've talked a lot about the visual components of your social media content, and now it's time for us to talk about the written components. Specifically, when it comes to one key principle, which is that people tend to feel first and think second. What Disney said it best when he said, you have to entertain to educate because the other way around doesn't work. Not just about entertainment, of course. It also comes down to the factor of habituation, which means that when we see something or hear something over and over and over again, we forget to pay attention to it, or we stop paying attention to it because it's so commonplace. Things like subscribe to my channel on YouTube, or click the link in the Bio on Instagram. Those are things that people have said so often, again and again and again, that we stop paying attention to it, and people almost don't hear it anymore. You have to come up with more creative ways to get people to take action. Nate from channel makers, for example, a few years back, switched from saying, like my video, if you're liking it, just give it a. He started saying boot that L button, which is super weird for a grown man to say. I don't know how else to say it. Like, He giggled every time he said it because it was so weird. But it worked because people were like, That is such a weird thing to say. It became almost like his catchphrase. And yeah, it was different. So people paid attention to it because they're like, What did he just say? Did he say boot that button? Okay, I'm going to do it. So you have to think about how you can do things a little bit creatively and outside of the norm. As we go into talking about copywriting in the next lesson, I want you to always be thinking about how to present all of your content, but especially any text only content on social media in a way that highlights the benefits to the customer, which is the feeling stuff as opposed to just what your business actually does best, which is the thinking stuff. Anytime you're thinking about how to present a feature of your product or business in a way that's going to actually resonate with people, just put the phrase. This means that after it. So let me show you what I mean. Let's say the feature is that our computer monitor has a four K resolution and 144 hertz refresh rate. Okay, cool. Well, this means that, you will have the smoothest gaming experience of your whole life. Defeat your enemies with the help of our monitor. Another example here, which is that our lipstick is vegan, it's cruelty free. It has biodegradable packaging. This means that you will look great and feel even better knowing you're helping the planet every time you put on your new lipstick. Last one for you here, which is that we are a top rated babysitting service. This means that you and your partner can enjoy a relaxed evening out, knowing your little ones are in safe hands. It needs to either entertain them, enhance their status, save them time, save them money, solve a problem or make their life easier. When it comes to sharing content on social media, make sure you're sharing content that people can really emotionally connect with. Let me just tell you that in a world where once upon a time, people would pay millions of dollars for a digital image of a monkey. Features are rarely the thing that gets someone to buy something from you. It's all about how their life will improve with this thing in their life. Once again, I have created an exercise for you and your course guide to test this out for yourself, so you can go in and write a benefit statement to the feature statement I've provided you with And at the end of the course guide, I've also given you my own answers to these statements so that you can compare these to your own and see how you did. And now the next lesson, we'll take a look at a few more tips for writing compelling copy for your social media content, so I will see there. 19. Master Compelling Copywriting: A lot of the written content out there that you'll come across is written in what I would like to refer to as human speak. And that basically means it's just written in the exact same way that you would say it out loud. And that is great news for those of us who want to be paid for our writing, but we don't have a master's degree in journalism or English literature or any of the other fancy degrees. And it's just because Brand started realizing that, this is an opportunity for people to have a bit of human connection through written content online. But it's also something that really rose out of the popularity of voice searches. Because I can guarantee that when people ask their Google Home or Alexa for information on a particular topic, they're much more likely to say, Is Kal good for me, rather than what are the physical and mental health benefits of cruciferous vegetables? The people who create content in simple, easy to understand conversational language are much more discoverable through Google as a result. Rule number one of copywriting is that you're human writing for other humans. Just remember to think creatively about putting together words that make people think and feel as they read them. A bit of a fun fact for you at this stage, which may or may not be relevant, but I found it really fun is that people are actually much more likely to finish reading a paragraph when they found a spelling mistake in it. That is just super interesting because you will often actually see marketing agencies purposely misspelling things inside of ads, for example, because it makes people much more likely to read the rest of the ad because they feel good that they caught the mistake. They feel like they've won something because they're like, Ah, There it is. Do these guys know that they misspelled it? It's just really interesting. It's a really weird psychological fact. So a lot of the time people get hung up on these things when an e mail goes out and they're like, Oh, crap, I misspelled something, and we get in our heads about it. But actually, there are literally companies who are doing this on purpose because they know the effect that it has on people. So don't be too afraid about making things look perfect and just right, because sometimes it's the imperfection that gets us to pay attention. Copywriting really largely just refers to any written content that you see out there. So let's talk about how to make people feel and connect through your written content, starting with this particular image. Think about what an image like this might mean to you. Probably not a whole lot. But how about within this context? Now, suddenly, you're looking at this image as the meal you'll have on your next holiday. That's because words help to give images meaning. In this post from your one and only, one image, two completely different meanings depending on which logo and phrase is attached to it. Is why words can make all the difference when it comes to marketing. Even just think about the Nike swoosh. On its own, it's powerful, but not that powerful. Then if you combine it with their just do it slogan, it's a whole different ball game. Look at these ads from Nike. Just do it suddenly becomes about so much more than just buying a pair of sneakers. It's also a motto for standing up for your beliefs, for breaking out of the mold, and for living a life beyond your wildest dreams. And that is the power of great copywriting. So let's not break this down into simple steps. The first key to great copywriting is to write with clarity. So you want to use really simple words like begin rather than commence. And using specific words like facetime rather than video communication tool. You also want to use the active voice. It's much easier to read we won the game rather than the passive voice, which would be something like the game was one. And you want to use transitions, which are the words or phrases that will connect your different ideas between sentences. Using words like as a result, although wow and B. Your sentences should basically flow and feel as one cohesive story. Make sure you take the time to actually connect your thoughts. You also want to make sure you're writing honestly. If you don't have the best product on the market or the most sustainable one, then don't claim that's what it is. It might be great at something else. It might be the funniest or you might have the happiest employees. It's your job to find the thing that makes that brand unique and leverage it. Keep in mind that being the worst can also be your thing. This is the website of the Hans Brinker Hostel where I used to take my passengers when I worked as a tour guide in Europe, which was absolutely not my choice. They were just a very central hostel in Amsterdam, and they were cheap and they had great parties. But they were voted the worst hostel in the world for almost ten years running, and trust me, yeah. They were the worst. Even on their website, it said one location, low expectations. You were to then keep scrolling, you would also see them featuring pretty average customer reviews on their website with pride. Their honesty in this way made them famous, and they constantly had bed bugs. The staff were rude. Things constantly went missing. Nothing was overworking, and it was just the worst, but somehow, this kind of made them a go to destination in Amsterdam. They were always booked out Even though they had terrible reviews online and were constantly in the news for being the worst hostile in the world, and somehow this just made them more desirable because at least they played into the thing that made them horrible. But they were really honest about it. And this is just one example, probably an extreme example. Of how honesty, even if it's like brutal honesty like this, can really work in your copywriting. You also want to make sure you're keeping things short and simple. Now you can get away with writing long stories on particular social media networks, but at the very beginning, it's nice to just practice keeping things short and simple and getting your point across as quickly as possible. This is an example of how using the power of three can really help you get your point across quickly in just three points. One click, no passwords, the world's fastest checkout. Show it, say it, send it. Sure, sometimes you will write long form copy, but start with the short and sync stuff because once you've mastered that, your longer copy will also improve. Now let's talk about calls to action. What action do you want people to take when they get to the end of your social media captions, for example. Are they supposed to like, comment, share, are they supposed to visit a website? Just let them know what you want them to do because people are so much more likely to take an action when you prompt them. Don't overdo it because of course, not every single social media post has to have a call to action. But remember that the key to social media is engagement, so prompt people to engage with you whenever you can. Then you also want to make sure you're using power words. These are just words that will trigger an emotional reaction in people as they read them, and they're largely used in things like ad copy and e mail headlines, blog post headlines to be clickable. But you can also leverage them in your organic social media content. Upton Monster has some great resources for copywriters, and one of my favorites is this list of 700 power words. They're organized into the categories of the seven deadly sins, and you can find words for pretty much any occasion on this list, but of course, it has to be right for your client's brand. Then you also want to create swipe files. That's basically just a collection of materials that you have swiped or taken from other people online, and that can be Facebook ads, e mails, Instagram, captions, or anything else. You can create your own swipe files just by having a folder of screenshots on your computer or a Google Doc, where you have copied and pasted content that you found online, and this can really help you when you're feeling a bit stuck in your creative process. I used to have a swipe folder for every single client where I would screenshot their competitors ads, their landing pages, and everything in between, and that really helped when I was sitting down to work on their content. Of course, create your own, but I would also highly recommend going to marketing examples.com Forward Slash Inspiration for some great copywriting examples. And as with anything in the marketing world, there's no shortcut to becoming a great copywriter. You can study and research and do all the things. But the only thing that's actually going to help you improve is just practicing. As a little exercise, I've created an AI generated image for us to use. I want you to basically just practice writing a caption for this image if this was for your client to go on social media. There is no right or wrong answer here, but here's a little bit of guidance that I want you to keep in mind. I want you to identify the business you're writing for. Is it a restaurant? Is it a bowling alley? Are you working for a tik tok chef? Who is it that you're creating for? Then try practicing, telling some a story with your caption and giving the audience a call to action to do something. Whether it's to buy the burger, buy a cookbook, for making a ping burger, come in for a date night, whatever your call to action might be. I'll do the same and I'll be sharing it with you in just a sec. I've created a bit of a space for you to do this in your course guide, but you can also just do this with a notes app on your phone or just an old school pen and paper, whatever you want to do. Just practice writing a caption for this image, and go ahead and pause this video to do that now. At this point, I'm hoping you did the task. Hopefully, you're feeling good about it. Just to be clear, at this point in the course, no one's expecting you to be an expert copywriter. We'll be talking load more about how to hone the skill. But it's important for you to just get started and practice this. Let me give you an example of what a bad caption for this image might look like. This $20 pink burger is now back on our menu. Come in today and buy it. And now let's talk about one that I came up with, which, in my case, would be for a burger restaurant, that's leveraging something that's trending with the Barbie franchise. The last time this beauty was on our menu, Barbie herself couldn't stay away. And now that it's back, we want to celebrate by reminding you that you are Kena. And you deserve a midweek trait. So come down this Wednesday and use the code Burger Barbie for 50% off your super instagramable Pink burger. So I want you to always think creatively about how you can bring this back to your audience and imagining that they're always thinking, what's in it for me? So in the first example, honestly, there's not a whole lot in it for them. In the second example, we're bringing it back to their love of the Barbie franchise. We're giving them a bit of a discount. We're telling them to treat themselves, and we're telling them that it's going to be cool to share on their socials. So that's a big win, win win, really. One last great example here from innocent juice, which is simple and it's playful, and it's so much more interesting than any other boring plain product ad or post. Could have just said, Yeah, we've got a new juice out, but they've chosen to go for humor and that is always such a winner. Hopefully, you have enjoyed this practice activity and this lesson, and I'll see you in the next one where we'll continue talking about this in a little bit more detail. I'll see there. 20. Viral Hooks: When you create content for social media, especially when it comes to video content, you have, like five to 10 seconds to capture someone's attention in long form videos, and it's even less than that in short form videos. So there is a whole sort of science behind how to capture someone's attention. And while it may not be part of your direct job description to get involved in the video creation process for your clients, or maybe your clients might not be utilizing video at this stage anyway. But because this is such a video heavy social media world that we live in, there's a good chance that there will be a role in your future that involves some stage of the video creation process. So in this quick lesson, I just wanted to cover something that is going to help you if you're involved in the script writing process for your clients who might be doing on camera video specifically. So let's practice this now. Let's say I'm your client, and I want to make a short video for Instagram and TikTok. On the topic of buying your first house here in Brisbane, and I want you to help me make it better. So here's my current opening. The Brisbane real estate market is very competitive. But if you're thinking of buying your first home this year, all hope is not lost. The one thing that will help you get into your dream home sooner is blah blah blah blah blah. So I've added this to your course guide as well, and I'd like you to take a crack at improving it in a way that makes someone really want to stop in their tracks. I want you to really just focus on the first sentence at this stage. Imagine someone is on Instagram and their real speed or on TikTok, and they're scrolling away. And this is the one sentence that they're going to hear because it's going to be the first kind of just couple of seconds. That's going to make them go, Oh, Okay, that's different, and it's going to stop them in their tracks and hopefully get them to watch the rest of that video. I'm going to give you some examples of hooks that you can use, but of course, feel free to make up your own. And of course, there is absolutely no right or wrong answer here. And in fact, it's all really down to testing. A lot of the time, we might think of hook or a hook in general is going to work really well and it's going to really capture people's attention, and then it flops. Likewise, there are some videos that have no hooks whatsoever, I wish to really well. But the point is to just practice this because in a world where people are just watching video after video after video. Sometimes you just need to do things a little differently in order to get them to stop and listen to the rest of it. Take a few minutes, just jot down an idea of how you think we could tweak this script. In a viral hook sort of way so that people want to watch the rest of it, which, to be honest, is not, you know, it's not super exciting content. I think that's also why I chose Meg's realty and this industry because it's not super exciting. It's not, you know, but I actually think that there are so many different ways that you could approach this that would allow someone to watch the rest of the video, even if it's not the most interesting thing in the world. So here are examples of a few viral hooks that you could use. My new favorite thing to do is X the blank I didn't expect. My blank had no idea what was going to happen. You can't change my mind about blank. So I'm not going to read them all out because they are in your core skid as well. But just so you know, these are essentially examples of the types of viral hooks that people use, especially in short form videos to basically make a really impactful bold statement, right from the get go, right from when someone sees that video come across their feed. It's like, I was wrong about this. And a lot of the time, It's something that people just wouldn't expect. Like, I didn't see this coming, but being on a juice clense for a week was actually terrible for my body. So this stage, I just want you to either pick one of these statements or create your own viral hook statement that you could potentially use to make my current script better. Remember, I am a buyer's agent in the Brisbane real estate market, and my customer avatar that I'm tailoring this is the aspirational first time home buyer who's currently renting and is looking to educate herself on how to buy their first home. So how can you reel me in, No potenan, and make sure that I listen to the rest of your video. What words or what sentence can you put at the start of my script to make sure that my viewer is engaged all throughout. So go ahead and pause this lesson and give it a go. And again, the exercise is also laid out in your course guide and has space for you to write in your answer there or you can just do it in a noteap on your phone or where have you? Okay, so hopefully you've been able to do that for me? I might go with something like this. Biggest mistake first time home buyers make is not working with a mortgage broker. The Brisbane Real estate market is very competitive. But if you're thinking of buying your first home this year, all hope is not lost. Working with a mortgage broker will get you into your dream home sooner, and here's why. But of course, there's no right or wrong answer here. I could think of ten different ways to approach this, and none of them are sort of better than each other. It's just a bit of a different way to look at it. But the key is to get you to just exercise this muscle of paying almost like a disproportionate amount of attention to the beginning of something. And that's not just true for your scripts. It'll be true for your captions. It'll be true for any e mails you might write for your clients, any blog posts that you might also be helping them with. So the key is to really, even if it means that you leave it till the very end, I wouldn't recommend it. I think it's key to start with the beginning, but you can also kind of refine it at the very end once you've created the bulk of your content. The point is that you don't want to spend all of this time and energy into creating the perfect video. And then the beginning is just kind of an afterthought, because then it might just mean that no one gets to see the rest of your beautiful work. So you just want to kind of keep this in mind, especially if you're going to have clients who are going to do a lot of on camera content, which let's face it, is a lot of businesses these days. Even if they're not doing on camera content already, they probably should be at least a little bit. So this can become a really great skill because people just are not doing this effectively. They are thinking about scripts from the perspective of, like, I'm just sharing information. They're not thinking, how do I get their attention so that I can share the information that's actually critical. Okay. So hopefully, you found that helpful. And again, keep exercising that muscle and keep thinking about these viral hooks. If you see them coming across your feet on social media as well, keep saving them. If there are particular reels or tick took that you're like, that grab my attention really quickly. Save them all to a folder so that later you can be like, Okay, what was it about that particular video that really worked for me? And now in the next lesson, we're going to talk about a few different ways that you can continue to optimize your social media content. So I'll see there. 21. Hashtags and Accessibility: Getting started here in terms of hashtags. Generally speaking, these function to help categorize your content and allow it to become more discoverable by people searching for the type of content that you're creating. And that makes a lot of sense for local businesses, especially. So, for example, I recently did a brand photography shoot here in Brisbane, and I specifically looked on Instagram for the Hashtag business photographer Brisbane and Brisbane brand photographer. And that's how I ended up finding my fabulous photographer who took all of my photos for my new website. Of course, I also did the typical Google searches, but I actually started with Instagram. So it can be really great for that. Not as clear cut for a lot of businesses out there because people aren't exactly searching for things like hashtag love to find a matchmaking consultant. No to mention that this type of hashtag actually has millions and millions and millions of posts. So this type of post with that type of hashtag would just get buried in the sheer volume of content. But hashtags can be great. So let's talk about the basics here. They will always start with the hash symbol. They won't work if you use any spaces, any punctuation or symbols in your hashtags. Then you also need to make sure your accounts are public. If you have a private account, any hashtags won't actually make your content more visible. It won't be seen by any non followers, so it defeats the purpose. You also want to make sure you're using relevant and specific hashtags. If it's something that's too popular like hashtag love, it's going to get buried by the huge volume of other content, then if it's too obscure, it'll be too hard to find, and it probably won't be likely to be used by other social media users. You want to find that sweet spot. You just want to limit the number of hashtags you're using. More isn't always better, and it actually can look quite spammy. In terms of the number of hashtags you want to be using, these numbers are according to Hoot Suite. Instagram is three to five, Facebook is two to three, Twitter or x is one to two, TikTok is three to five, Linkin is one to five, Pinterest is two to five, and YouTube is three to five. I would probably argue against some of these numbers, but it is probably kind of an average across the industries. So I would definitely just research your particular clients industry and what the competitors are doing and what's best for them and their content as well. So that just comes down to testing. But this is sort of a general guideline. Just the general trend you'll notice though, is that we're not talking about a whole lot of hashtags. We're not talking about 20:30 hashtags, even though some of the platforms will allow for this. It doesn't necessarily mean that you should be using all of them. It's best to use less hashtags, but to have them be really tailored to the content that you're creating. Of course, H tags exist on all these platforms at this stage, but they're used much more on a platform like Instagram and x and much less on something like Facebook and LinkedIn, just due to the nature of how people use the platforms. But that doesn't mean that they don't have value in helping each platform understand what your content is about. In terms of finding the right hashtags for your client's business, it's very platform specific. On something like Instagram here, you could go to the Explore tab and look for something like social media in my case. And then if you head on over to tags, you can find all the different hashtags that are related to that particular hashtag. Now, you want to be looking for a sweet spot of somewhere between more than 10,000 and under 1 million uses. That's kind of the sweet spot of the types of hashtags that will be most likely to get your content seen. Of course, I would do the same type of research for every network. But if you want a bit of a shortcut, Hoot Suite actually have a hash dag generator, where we can say, Okay, I want to be on Twitter or X, and this is in English. I would describe what my post is about. So let's say how to buy your first home in Brisbane, Australia. And then the keywords would be something like first time. Home buyer. Real estate. Let's just leave it at that and just say, generate hashtags. There we go. And it's given me some hashtags. And I would probably just check on these on the platforms themselves just to make sure that they're not overly used or they're not too niche. But these look pretty good to me so far. One thing you will notice as well is that each letter of each word in the hashtag is capitalized, which is a great accessibility feature because when people are using screen readers, screen readers will be able to properly pick up these as two individual words as opposed to not really understanding what the actual word is that you're trying to say when everything is in lower case, which brings us to the topic of accessibility. You want to make sure that your hashtags look like this and not like this. So essentially, when screen readers are reading your hashtags, if each word is capitalized, it's going to make it much much easier, and that's going to make it a much better experience on social media for visually impaired users who are using screen readers. Then you also want to make sure that you're adding closed captions to your videos, and that includes both long form videos like YouTube videos, and also short form videos like your YouTube shorts, your tik tok, and your reels. You'll see a lot of creators like Ali Abdal here utilizing the closed captions feature to just bring their videos to life, and that helps people who are not just hearing impaired, but also people for whom English is not their first language, or they just don't have the sound on for their videos. Then you also want to make sure you're ensuring that you have good color contrasts in your designs. We already talked about color contrast a little bit in terms of your design and we'll talk about a lot more in a later lesson in the course. But just whenever you are designing within Canvas specifically, the easiest way that you can make sure your designs are accessible is to use Canvas built in accessibility checker. It's not a perfect tool and there are definitely more advanced tools out there that will be a lot more accurate, but it's a really great step in the right direction, and it's very easy to do as a last check with your designs. So, for example, my social media strategy document, which we're going to use later in the course, I had identified that anything in red in this document is there to sort of guide you and for you to basically delete. But actually, when running the accessibility checker on it, I realized that the colors I was using were not quite right. So if you ever want to use the accessibility checker, you can either click here or the quick action is the backslash as it's telling us there. Then we would look for design accessibility. I still have some of the previous font colors left for us to basically change. Let's go have a look at page eight. This is the color I was previously using for my font colors, and it's essentially telling me that's just not going to cut it, and it's going to give me some suggestions. I've already changed this to a darker color that I know is compatible. I'm going to go ahead and just change that. It's obviously changed the font as well, which I didn't necessarily need to change because that wasn't an issue, so I'm just going to change that back. But then we can go through and see sometimes it's not going to give us the right color as an alternative, but we know what our color is. Then as soon as that's changed, it's now going to disappear. It's perceving the bullet point there as a bit of a contrast issue. Now it's disappeared, and then we'll do the same thing for page ten, and we just want to make sure it's updating it to the right color. Again, it's updated the whole thing. We're just going to change that. And that's pretty much it. So those are all of our issues. It does also give you issues around old text, and that's much more important if this design was going to be published as a website, for example, or presentation where people might be using screen readers in order to determine which images are being used on the slides. So if you are ever putting together a presentation like this for clients who are using screen readers, then make sure you're also putting in all of your old text, or if you're publishing this as websites as well, of course. So that's it for hashtags and accessibility, and I'll see you in the next lesson where we start talking about leveraging the power of AI. 22. Leverage The Power of AI: We're now going to start getting into the exciting world of AI, and I wanted to start off this lesson by saying, I know this stuff can feel overwhelming, and it can just be, over the top amount of choices of different AI tools and how to talk to them and where to look for resources and all of that. So I don't want you to get super overwhelmed to the point where you're not using these tools at all because it is going to be your competitive edge because other people out there are using them. It almost feels like if you're not using them at all, you are possibly just doing more work than you should be. But that being said, I also want to say, you know, you should never be just copying and pasting your responses from what Chat PT or another tool gives you. That is a very easy and quick way for you to get, go by your clients because you might not think that people can tell, but trust me they can tell, just because you know, even if it's in sort of human speak, which it's pretty good at that. It doesn't have your humor, your stories, your experiences. So while you want to be using these tools to your advantage, you also want to make sure you're kind of putting in your flare at the end and making it your own. I hire people for businesses, so I know when I get, you know, out of 20 applications, 18 of them were written by Chat EPT. That doesn't mean they're not good, it just means they're not human, and that person has taken no time at the end of, you know, getting that information from Chat EPT to actually personalize it and make it their own. And people can tell. You want to make sure you're definitely using these tools. They're going to be the thing that's going to streamline your workflow, it's going to make your work faster and better, but you want to make sure you're actually putting in your beautiful creativity at the end because that's the stuff they can't replace. You're a beautiful human brain, and your creative edge, that's the thing that people want to work with, and that's the stuff that's going to make you stand out. So with that in mind, let's go ahead and get started by looking at our first AI Over these couple of lessons, we are going to use a few different tools that are going to help us out starting with copy AI. I'm just going to go ahead and log in. We're going to be using the free option of copy AI. I do think that there is use cases for the upgraded version of copy AI. But in this case, all I really want to do is get to the brand voice section. I'm just going to go to new brand voice, and I'm going to write a caption that I have written in what I believe my brand voice would be for Mags realty, and then essentially reverse engineer my brand voice. I'm going to go ahead and paste this in, which is average $1,000,000 home in Brisbane, blah, blah, blah, blah, essentially what I would actually write for this particular brand. And then I'm going to say, analyze this brand voice, perfect. So now I can save that. And with copy AI, it's going to allow me to save that so that I can use it with copy AI to create copy for social media, which we could absolutely do. In this case, we are going to go to Chat GBT so that we can sort of plan out our content, but definitely feel free to explore copy AI as well. In this case, I can just save this. I'm just going to make this Mg realty ice, and I'm going to copy and paste this into Chat EPT as well. Now there are lots of different AI tools that you can use. Chat EPT is probably the most well known at the moment, so that's the one that we're going to use. I'm just here on the free version. You could obviously upgrade to the paid version as well. But I just want to show you what the free version would look like and how we would sort of train it to give us what we want. Because effectively, there are people who are going to Chat EPT or other AI tools and just putting in something like, give me ten captions, or Instagram for a real estate business. Right? So that's the very, very basic thing you could do. It is going to give you captions, but I mean, it's super basic. Like, no one needs to be creating this kind of content for social media. It's just, you know, I mean, even just the hashtags are like, super super basic. So by taking the extra steps that I'm going to be showing you in this video, you're then going to go through and create really powerful content that is super tailored to your client's brand voice. So we do have the brand voice from copy AI that we can put in. But before we actually give this two C chat PT, I actually want to train it in a slightly different way. So here's what I would say. In a minute, I'm going to ask you to create some social media content for my business. Before we begin, I want you to fully understand my business and audience. Ask me as many questions as you need about my business, audience, and anything else you need in order to complete the task to the best of your ability. Now, I am going to give you everything that I'm writing in here. I'm going to give you in your course guide, so you don't feel the need to scramble and write this all down. But effectively, this is all about prompt engineering. So we're training Chat GPT to give us what we want. It is a few extra steps, but you will see the huge difference between what we did in a second ago and the end result of this exercise. So I'm going to go ahead and answer all these questions, and then we're going to move on to the next step. All right. So you will notice that for number eight, I was asking me if there's a particular tone or style, I want to maintain with the social media post. And that's where I pasted it in the tone and the brand voice we got from CopyAI. If you didn't ask for this, I would then make sure to give Chat GPT this in the next section just to say, by the way, I want you to emulate this particular brand voice, but it's already asked me that, so I have answered it. The only answers I didn't give it is if there are any campaigns or promotions that I want to highlight. And then lastly, I didn't want to bother with examples that I like or dislike just at this stage. I haven't gone through to that stage, but that could be beneficial for your clients as well. And then I would just say something like, are you ready for your next set of instructions? Okay, so now Chat ABD is ready for us to give it the next set of instructions. I have added this to your course guide, but effectively, what I would then say is knowing what you now know about my business, Mags Realty, or whatever the business is. I want you to act as the very best social media strategist and copywriter in the world. Your ideas can be translated into reels, post, blah, blah, blah. You know how to properly launch, c and nurture audiences on social media. With this in mind, I need you to create a content calendar with 30 posts, and these are the columns. We've got the overarching topic, a summary of the content to post caption, and then including hashtags and an AI image prompt. The last column. Obviously, that's optional, but I just wanted to play around with a little bit more AI with you. So I added that in, and then the image should include a description of the image we're prompting three descriptive keywords for the style, type of camera lens, and post processing technique. So we can now say, please generate. All right, so that's 15. We want to generate some more. So this is now starting to get a lot more specific. It will also give me ideas about the overarching topic. So you can say this topic is for first time home buyers. This one is for our investors. This one is for downsizing for retirement. So you can start to see how each of these content ideas are for my particular audience members. So that I know, you know, for first time home buyers, this would probably go on Instagram. This would go on Linked in. This would go on Facebook, et cetera, et cetera. But that's not to say that, each of these can't go on different platforms, but it is catering to the different areas of my audiences. So you can start to see how it gets really, really specific in terms of a content calendar. And now in the next lesson, we are going to look at the image prompts and video prompts as well. But this basically has given me 30 or 29 at least different ideas. I could continue generating, but for now, I'm happy to keep it at that. So additional prompts I've added to your guide that you could continue adding to a chat like this one would be something like this. So, you know, I want to also include instrum content that's going to attract my ideal followers. I help young couples who are currently renting in the process of buying their first home. Please list the top seven topics I should be making content about. Now this is sort of I guess snowballing, or it's adding on to what we've just done. It's going to give me the top seven topics that I should create content around. And then I could say something like, right. So four, these topics, please list three of the most common mistakes they're making, three fears, three desires, three frustrations, and describe each in two sentences being as specific as possible. Now we're getting somewhere. Each of these has now been broken down. You can start to see, let's say for home buying tips for young couples. The mistakes is underestimating the total costs involved in home ownership, overlooking the importance of pre approval, et, et cetera. This is really starting to get into the nitty gritty of what my ideal customers are experiencing. Then as this has generated this kind of breakdown? I can continue bringing this into more of a viral hook front so that I can get an idea of what's the bit that's actually going to capture someone's attention? So I can then continue to say, using all of these, can you please generate 24 hooks or however many hooks or strong starting statements to start an Instagram real with? Let's say I do want to create a piece of content around this. How do I actually hook someone in? I don't necessarily want to be doing that myself. I don't want to be thinking about it. So this is where Chat PT can come into play. I could leave it at that, or I can help by giving it a bit of a template. So you will remember that I've given you some of these prompts already. You could add a few more at the moment. I've just got a couple here to help it. So number one mistake that you're making that's stopping you from this, this may be controversial, but, et cetera, et cetera. And then I'm just going to generate that. So it's going to give me a couple of hooks that I can use to start my videos with if I was going to be creating videos for this particularly. So Number one mistake that you're making that's stopping you from owning your dream home. Yep, that's a perfect one, actually. Stop waiting for the perfect time to buy a home, do this instead. Yeah. That's awesome. And this is the benefit of going through these few extra steps rather than just saying, you know, make me ten captions, right? This is super super boring compared to all of this beautiful content that we now have that we could put into a content calendar a little bit later on or use for social media. So hopefully, that has helped. I have added some extra resources on the power of AI to your course guide. But in the next lesson, we're now going to continue talking about AI in terms of how to leverage it for your images and for your videos. So I will see you there. 23. AI for Epic Images: All right. So let's now talk about how we can leverage our image prompts from within Chat EVT from this column and use some AI image software to bring it to life. Now I'm going to be honest. It's not going to be perfect, and it does depend on which software you have or which AI you've got access to, how familiar you are with it. These are very basic prompts. So I don't want to get into the whole, complex world of prompt engineering and how to make these prompts better. But I will give you some resources in this in your course guide. For now, let's just have a look at some really easy ones that don't have people in them, so we don't have to worry about wonky arms, wonky legs, and things like that that can often go wrong if you don't give it the right kind of prompt. So I quite like this one, which is just an image of a crystal ball with a reflection of a city skyline symbolizing future market trends. Keywords are predictive, forward looking insightful, camera lens is macro, post processing is stickle lighting effect. Then the caption that would go with this would be something like wondering, what's next for the real estate market get ahead of the curve with our export predictions and stay informed with Mags realty. The AI I'm going to be using for this is Leonardo AI, but of course, there are lots of other options. This is just one that I really like using, but of course, feel free to use another AI software if you prefer. Within Leonardo, you will have some inspiration that you can draw on and you'll be able to see what prompts people use to generate these images. That can be a really nice and handy way to figure out exactly how to leverage this tool and make the most of it. But in this case, I'm just going to go ahead and go to image generation. Now, Leonardo AI does also have the option to add some motion, but it's relatively basic, so we are going to look at a different tool for video specifically. I did actually use a different prompt from our chart, which was an image of diverse group of investors, talking about investment strategies, and it didn't turn out terrible, to be honest. I mean, this one, yeah, not ideal. This one didn't turn out too bad. I mean, there's a little bit of a wonky hand, but it's pretty spot on. It's just I would like to avoid using people whenever possible, just for the time being because it will take a little bit of time to fines. So the prompt we're going to be using is the one that we've taken from Chat GPT. And then we can also play around with a few different things here. A lot of the ones that you will see on the home page, we'll have some of these pad features. But in this case, we've got a couple of free tokens. Let's go ahead and just generate let's say four images for this one, and then you can say what dimensions you're looking to create in. So it does depend on what platform and what use you are looking to create the image in. But let's say in this case, I might say, look, I want the width to be around 1080, and the height, let's go for 13 50, so that it's perfect for Instagram and this could also go on Linked in, et cetera, et cetera. But yeah, I'm pretty happy with that, and let's just generate that. So that's really cool. Obviously, this would be a Metropolitan, probably New York skyline here. So I could say Brisbane the Brisbane Brisbane City skyline. Yeah, let's just leave it at that. That's looking good, but maybe I'll actually make that at Sunset. Yeah. So that's now starting to look really, really good. I think that's something I would happily post on an Instagram acount or especially on LinkedIn. I think that could work really well. So that's how you can start to understand, you know, how you can use these props from Chat PT to really build and create some beautiful images so that they're very tailored to your social media strategy, and, you know, you're not constantly just having to pull images from something like Unsplash. Look, it's not perfect for every single client. There will be some clients who never want you to use AI. It's important that you communicate that with your clients as well. So if they're open to it and you say, Look, we can get really tailored images to our strategy, but we might need to use a little bit of AI. If they're comfortable with that, then great, and they might also be able to put aside a little bit of budget for you to access some of these paid features, which will again bring your content to the next level. Hopefully, that makes a little bit of sense, and it's given you some inspiration for what you might be able to do with your image prompts from Chat GPT. In the next lesson, we're going to continue looking at how you can leverage other AI tools. I'll see. 24. AI for Quick Videos: So let's now look at some options for AI for video. There are different options that will continue to pop up. In video just has, at the time of recording this an awesome free option for this. Do I think it's perfect? No. Do I think that, you know, AI generated videos are going to win out over beautifully custom made videos with real voiceovers? No, I don't think so. That being said, Is this still a solid strategy or, you know, something that can be part of your strategy on social media, and is it something that you definitely at least need to be aware of, so you know what to look out for? Yes, I think that there's definitely value in that. So I'm just going to jump into the back end of in Video AI, and I am on the free option here. Whether or not they restrict this in the future is definitely a possibility. But I just wanted to show you how it sort of works at the moment. So this is my prompt create a roughly 42nd video in vertical format, nine by 16. For Instagram Reels. The video is targeting first time home buyers in Brisbane and explaining the most common mistakes people make when buying their first home. The music in the background should be inspirational and uplifting. The video clips should showcase young couples and young families inspecting properties and moving in. Start with a negative hook and end with a call to action to book a consultation. So I'm just going to actually say book a free call, instead, probably. Okay. So we could continue writing a lot more than this. You can say things like, you know, make sure the accent of the speaker is British or Australian, et cetera. It's not perfect. In my opinion, especially when we're talking about Australian accents, it's very hard for AI to do that well. So there are things that you can continue to tweak, but for now, I'm quite happy with that, and we're just going to hit Generate. Alright. And now let's play our video. Dreaming of your first home in Brisbane? Hold that thought. Many dive in too quickly and overlook crucial details. First mistake, Ignoring additional costs like stamp duty and inspection fees. These aren't just pennies. They add up and can stretch your budget thin. Secondly, falling in love too fast. That charming balcony might blind you to the leaky roof. Always, and I mean always get a thorough inspection. Lastly, not researching the neighborhood. Sure, the house is great, but what about local schools, commute times, or noise levels? Avoid these pitfalls. Ready to make a smart move, swipe up to book your free consultation and start your home buying journey with confidence. Alright, so look, pretty good. I actually quite like it. I mean, I wouldn't say swipe up because what? That's a little bit outdated. So I would potentially go to editing some of the script. You could upload your own clips here instead of using the ones that they've got, especially because they're using story blocks and Stock, which are paid websites. So you do have to pay for that subscription or upgrade your in video account. You use your own footage or footage from sites like pixels, then you wouldn't necessarily need to. You could say, I don't actually want to include premium stocks, and it might find some alternatives for you. But obviously, that's the majority of what it wants you to use, and then you could just go through to I would edit the script at the end where it says, swipe up to book your free consultation because that doesn't really make sense for my purposes. But honestly, other than that, it's actually pretty good. If I wanted to export it, I would have to have the watermarks there. I would have to have their AI branding there, and then I could only really export Well, I could export ten ADP, which is pretty good, so I can't go as high as four K, but that's not really necessary for social media platforms. Mainly the branding side of things is the reason that you'd want to upgrade. But yeah, look, the AI voiceover is not perfect. I would definitely encourage clients to do their own voiceovers because AI is not you know, people can generally tell. Not always, though, it's getting really, really good. So there are definitely full accounts that do AI voiceovers. But if you can recommend your clients to do their own voices and also include some of their own footage, that is absolutely the kind of personal touch that we crave on social media. 25. Mini Assignment: Alright, so I know all of that can feel overwhelming, like I said before, because you might be sitting there thinking, Okay, well, if AI can do all of that, then what do businesses really need me for, right? I've definitely felt that from time to time. I'm sure I'll feel it again, especially as a course creator. There are AIs creating courses, left ride and center as well. They're not great, but they will be one day, and that can feel very overwhelming and intimidating. But the key to remember is that, especially when it comes to visual content and video content. There's just no replacement for your creativity, your flare, but it does also mean that your clients are likely going to have to get a little bit uncomfortable with being on camera because that is the one thing A I can't do at this stage is replace on camera human presence in a way that doesn't sound like an AI bought. So it's something that a lot of businesses are probably going to have to look at exploring is at least using clips of themselves as background footage as B role, even if it means they're not directly speaking to the camera, they're going to have to start looking at infusing some of their own personal content into their video content. But just so you know that original video content with your original thoughts can never be replaced by AI. But of course, AI can be a great tool for helping you to get some new ideas, especially if your client's industry is one that you're not really familiar with. But you do still definitely need to know all the information in this course so that you can learn how to work with AI to be the best social media manager for your clients. And later, we'll also talk about how you can leverage AI to help you come up with ideas for your social media strategy. So definitely stay tuned for that. But before we move into the next section of the course, I also just wanted to give you a sort of mini challenge and mini assignment to practice your skills of what you've learned up until this point, because, as you might remember, from the early parts of the course, as adults, we learn by doing, not just by looking at things and absorbing information. So your challenge, should you choose to accept it is to first think about the brand that you'll be creating something for. Unless you have an existing client in mind, I'll suggest that you make this as a post for your personal brand for you as a social media marketer. Then I want you to really think about who your ideal client is at this stage. Who is the target audience for this post? What problems do they have? How do you solve these for them? Or what are their desires? Remember that Louis V Tom Bag we talked about. Not every business is in the business of solving problems. With all of this in mind, I'd like you to create one post. It could be a video, it could just be a plain photograph, it could be a graphic you create, a gift, a casel or whatever else you'd like. But I found it's easiest to just start with a square image that's 1,200 by 1,200 pixels, which will be suitable to all the platforms that we're going to look at in the next section of the course. So this will be sort of your introduction post. And even if you're not working with blank accounts starting from zero, even if you've got accounts with thousands of followers, don't assume that people know your story or know who you are. They might have started following you yesterday. So if you posted about who you are, you know, months ago and years ago, they might not know who you are because they haven't come across those posts. So It's a good practice to sort of get into where you actually reintroduce yourself from time to time to all of your new followers. So I would recommend that even if you've got existing accounts and you can do sort of an intrapost, or an intro video, depending on how you're feeling, but let's say an intrapost for the time being so that you can actually practice your graphic skills and also your copywriting skills. So on that note, just remember with your copywriting, you basically just want to figure out a way that you tweak whatever you're about to write to make people really feel something. You want them to connect with the benefits of working with you, like the fact that you save them time and money, and working with you is effortless, not the features of working with you, like the fact that you know how to manage Instagram and run their Facebook ads. I want to encourage you to think about all the wonderful soft skills that you already possess that make you stand out from the crowd. Maybe in your previous role, you're an admin assistant, so you're incredibly patient and you're a great communicator. Or you studied psychology, so you're good at adapting to various team environments. But the point is to not be afraid to bring your valuable past experiences and traits into your new social media marketing career. You have so much value to add to this space, even if you're brand new and you're just starting out on this career path. And if you don't think that's important, I will tell you that I recently hired someone who was more expensive than the person that was in that role previously and had less experience just because they were a great communicator, because Ei is one of my biggest pet peeves when people are terrible about managing expectations about timelines and terrible communicators. So I would rather pay more for less experience just for someone who possesses this key soft skill. And I promise you there are lots of clients who would feel the same way. So now it's your turn to create your content. You do not necessarily need to be using pre made templates from within Canva. You can absolutely start from scratch, or you can just use a photo of yourself with a brands logo, whatever you want. I just find it a bit easier to start with something that you can draw inspiration from. Now of course, at this stage, we're not actually looking at any particular dimensions. It's giving us everything here. But we would then narrow this down by a particular category. Within social media. We've got Instagram post, Facebook posts. I'm going to be honest, none of them are the right dimensions because Instagram posts are going to be 1080 by 1080, which is correct for Instagram, but it's a little bit too small for Facebook and LinkedIn. So that's why we're going with 1,200 by 1,200. So in order to get the right dimensions, we're actually going to be creating our design from scratch. So we're going to go to create a design. Custom size, and then 1,200 by 1,200, or it's also the Linked in post dimensions. Then we can still continue to search for these pre made templates once we're in our design document here. Now we can look for about me or about us if this is for a company, and then we would just pick a template that we like. And customize it with our own company images, our own fonts, our own colors. And then I would also encourage you to just write a short caption that shares your story with your social media audience. Of course, there will be some platforms like Facebook or Linked in where you can get away with writing much, much longer posts. But it's really good to kind of get into the habit of just practicing how to do more with less at the beginning, because this is the most challenging thing for beginners is to audit yourself and just write less, create less, put less content in graphics, put less information in videos. Because as beginners, we want to show everything that we've learned. And suddenly, it's kind of like a platypus where you're like, Is it a duck? Is it not like, way too many ideas went into that animal, and our purposes a weird analogy. I don't know why that came into my head, but you get what I'm saying. I think it's just really hard at the beginning to be like, I'm just going to go with a really simple idea. And a really simple, neat graphic or a simple, you know, minimalist video with a little bit of a caption. That's so hard to do as a beginner. So it's something I would really want to encourage you to practice and just write a short caption, create a very basic post for the beginning so that you have something that you can utilize to practice on the various social networks that we're going to cover in the next section of the course. So happy creating. Hopefully, you can create a duck, not a platypus. Great analogy, Max. And I will see you in the section of the course. 26. Social Media Introduction: We now move into this particular section of the course, I wanted to preface it by saying that, yes, sometimes I might be saying things that you think Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Because you know these social networks, but that might just be down to the fact that we're covering things from a different perspective. Because at this stage, it's time for you to stop thinking like a consumer of these platforms and start thinking like a business or a creator on these platforms. So if I'm over here telling you, hey, Instagram is a really visual platform, and you're thinking, Well die Then it's just because there's a really big difference between you sharing a photo of your branching on a personal Instagram account to your friends and family versus you doing that on a business account without really thinking about why or how that fits into your overall marketing strategy. So if your client is a restaurant or a food blog, then that makes sense. If they're a pet supply store or a funeral home, then that probably doesn't make sense unless it's in some bizarre context that I can't really think about. No. But the point is that we're going to start looking at each platform in the context of business use and how to approach your strategy on every platform. So we'll be starting with social networking platforms like X, previously Twitter, Linked in, and Facebook. And they fall into networking platforms because they allow people to interact with each other in a variety of different ways. And yes, you will also likely hear me mention both X and Twitter occasionally throughout the course because a lot of helpful articles on this platform still refer to it as Twitter, so a lot of people still utilize both terms. But just no, we're always talking about the same thing. Big pros of these types of platforms is that they have lots of different capabilities for sharing articles, photos, videos, and text only posts. But unfortunately, with platforms like Facebook and even Linked in, posts from friends and family will be prioritized over company updates, so it can be a little bit harder to get your content seen. Then we'll go into photo and video sharing apps, which are Pinterest and Instagram, and then we'll be going into TikTok, which is primarily video focus and YouTube, which is all about video. And yes, all of these networks will actually have the capability for you to post all the different content types. These overarching categories basically signify the complexity that it will require from you as a social media manager from least complex to most complex. And I know you might also be thinking that you're here maybe for a particular client, and you're like, they're never going to need a Linkn account. I don't care. It doesn't matter. I'm never going to have to manage an Instagram account, so I'm not going to bother with that. And I completely understand that, and maybe if you're, you know, tied on time, then go through the lessons that you need to go through, but I really want to encourage you to not keep yourself just limited to the information that you maybe came here to learn. Because knowing about all the various social networks, even if you have no intention of managing them right now or using them for your client whatsoever, that is going to just be something that is going to make you stand out in terms of your knowledge from the competition, and it might just spark something in you where you go, Oh, I've never thought about using Pinterest for my client, but actually, That is something that I think we could incorporate into our strategy later on or it's something we could outsource, and I can see that working really well. And then you can make those recommendations to your clients, and that's how you get to charge more money and to become a superstar. So I really want to encourage you to keep an open mind as you go through these lessons. And now, continuing with the theme of using social media for business versus personal use, we're going to dive into this in a lot more detail in the next lesson, so I'll see there. 27. Business vs. Personal Socials: When we're talking about social media for business, these are a few things that I want you to keep front of mind as you're managing accounts for your own business or for your clients. Starting with followers versus engagement. So, yes, it's nice to have a lot of followers, but followers don't necessarily equal fans, and they definitely don't equal profit. So when it comes to running social media accounts for business, engagement is the thing you want to be looking for. You are so much better off having 1,000 true fans who will buy every product you release from now until the end of time, rather than having 100,000 fake followers, because you can buy followers, but a relationship with your fans is built through consistent and high quality content. Now you may occasionally come across accounts like this one that was previously a travel influencer account bought by this other brand that would have essentially deleted all their posts, change the user name, and will eventually change the profile photo as well. But doing too many changes too quickly, we raise red flags on Instagram side. So you'll often see some growing pains of these types of accounts, where they look a little bit like a baby chick turning into a hen, where it's not quite sure what's happening yet. But basically, they're just buying a lot of followers here by buying this account, because most of us follow hundreds, if not more accounts, you wouldn't even bat an eye if you saw posts from an account you didn't necessarily recognize. And these guys are sort of counting on that. So this is super dodgy. Please don't ever do this. It will not end well in the long run. Then let's talk about staying on brand. We've already talked about branding in a lot of depths earlier, so you know that when we're talking about staying on brand, It just means that every piece of content is executed according to the brand guidelines. Now, I want to be clear at this point to say that for one brand, that might mean that every piece of content has a particular style, it's got particular fonts, it's got a particular color scheme, whatever that is, might have a logo, et cetera, et cetera. Another brand, the lack of branding actually can be part of them staying on brand. There's a lot of this on social media, especially for personal brands, where people are kind of just putting out content, you know, that's unfiltered, not really planned. It doesn't really have a cohesive look and feel, and there's no thought put into creating any fancy graphics or anything like that, and that is actually their brand. So it's important to know that Even a lack of branding is actually them staying on brand because for an account like that, if you were then to post a beautifully crafted, perfect Cmvagraphic, that wouldn't be on brand for them. So you just want to know that whatever their style is for your clients or for your own business, that is what you need to be following with any future content. Let's talk about evergreen versus trending topics. This is not to say that friends isn't a trending topic. For example, when they released the friends reunion, this was absolutely a trending topic. But as a show, this is something people will watch and talk about for years and years to come, whereas squid game on the right here was very much a trend. Everyone binged the show, created the memes, and then forgot about it just as quickly until the next season was released. As users of social media, we're always thinking in the now. What's right now? What holidays coming up? What celebrity couple has just broken up? Fashion trends are out there. From a business perspective, this type of content definitely has a place in our strategy because this is often the stuff that can go viral, but evergreen content needs to always be considered as well. The term evergreen comes from the evergreen trees that stay green all year round in the same way that your evergreen content is relevant all year round. So you want to make sure you're not just sharing trending content all the time, unless you actually own a MEM account, but you're also sharing content that's timeless and will be relevant, even if someone comes across it a year from now. Next, let's talk about the what's in it for me factor. So while your mom or your sister, or your aunt, or even your grandma might follow you and engage with you on accounts like Facebook. Because they're related to you and they're obligated to do that, your followers have no obligation whatsoever to do any of that. So they're always going to be thinking, what's in it for me if I follow you? What's in it for me? What can I expect from this account? I have no idea. I've just come across your post, elect it. Now I'm on your account, and I have no idea what you're about. So you want to make sure that you're always thinking about it from what's in it for me perspective. As in, if I come onto your account, whatever account, whatever platform that is, Am I going to know exactly what you're about and what I can expect from you from future content? If not, then you need to really think about what's in your bio? What's in your about section? What's your sort of pinned post? That's at the top of the platform. That's the first thing I see. Can I within the first five to 10 seconds of coming across your profile, understand what you're about and what value you will have to bring to my life? If not, it's time to tweak that. Lastly, let's talk about understanding your goals. Now, this is going to seem counterintuitive, and I'm actually going to give you some additional examples throughout the lessons we're going to be going through. But let's say I'm looking for a local plumber, and let's say I just happened to be on Instagram. I actually just need to find that plumber. I just need to find their account. I don't necessarily need to be following them. Why would I follow my local plumber? Unless they actually post engaging funny, hilarious toilet humor. Which they might. I mean, that's a niche. But unless they do that, I have no incentive to follow them, and that's actually okay. There are plenty of businesses whose goals on social media are maintenance, not growth, because they know that either they potentially sell a one off product, which means people don't have the incentive to follow them unless they maybe create tutorials on how to use that product if it's something people use all the time, or they just have a local service that people need once in a blue moon. They need the phone number, and then they're sort of done with it. So it's really important to understand what your client's goals are, where their leads are coming from, as well. Do they get their business from social media, or are they really flat out? Like, do they have too many clients to handle because they have such excellent word of mouth? They don't need social media for lead generation. In fact, they may not want it. So it's really important to know what are their goals and also be able to also potentially advise them on what their goals should be if you feel like their goals are not where they should be, because they might have a neighbor who has 2 million TikTok followers who told them that they should be on TikTok, and they should post four videos a day because that's what their neighbor does. And now they want to be TikTok famous, and then it's going to be your job to sort of bring them back down to earth and actually make them understand whether that goal has any relevance to their actual business. So that's a little bit about what to look for in terms of using social media for business versus personal. And I do want to also note that yes, I mean, some of these recommendations that you potentially could be making to your clients on all these fronts may just come with experience. At the beginning, you may not feel confident to talk to them about all of these things, and that is perfectly fine. It took me years to get to a point where I would make any recommendations like this to my clients. Don't feel like you have to know everything all at the same time and straightaway. It's just important for you to at this point, start thinking about how to use social media for business instead of for personal use, especially if you've used social media for personal use for a long time and you're a heavy user, it can be hard to switch into the business mindset. Hopefully, this lesson has helped with that a little bit. And now in the next lesson, we're going to talk about the difference of using social media for organic versus paid purposes. So I will see that. 28. Organic vs. Paid Socials: You'll hear the term organic, meaning unpaid and paid marketing gets thrown around a lot in the social media and digital marketing space. So your organic tasks would be things like researching the industry for training topics, competitive research, developing a content strategy, creating and scheduling posts, using hashtags, reposting customer produced content, managing Facebook groups, getting feedback, copywriting, video production, et cetera, et cetera. Basically everything we're covering within this course. Then your pay tasks would include things like creating sales funnels that take customers from not knowing anything about the brand at all through to purchasing their product or service with the help of paid ads, audience research, competitor research, budget recommendations, creating visuals, and written content for ads, building out the ads, managing out the ads, split testing, tracking conversions. Basically everything and more of what we're going to cover in the paid ad section of the course. And how each business chooses to implement these two strategies is so dependent upon the size of the business. So in my experience, the bigger the business, the more specialized their split and responsibilities becomes. So in a large company like Google, they wouldn't have an all rounder digital marketing specialist who would do their posts and their copywriting and scheduling and engagement on socials and also run their paid ad campaigns. They would have several specialized copywriters, then designers, then organic social media managers, and Facebook ad specialists, and Lincon ad specialists, et cetera, et cetera. At the small to medium business level, these roles and tasks often overlap because the infrastructure just isn't in place yet, and there's really also not a huge need for all of these specialists to be separated. So although just understanding organic or unpaid social efforts is already such a hot skill to have these days, if you can have a little bit of knowledge in the paid ads world, will become a much hotter commodity for a lot of businesses, and you never know this might actually end up being something that you enjoy a lot more than the organic stuff. And there are plenty of people who are dedicated Facebook ads experts or Lincon ad experts. So you just never know which area is going to appeal to you the most, and you might end up nahing down your skill set further. But either way, if you can have some knowledge across both areas of the social media space, that is going to be key to your success in this world. In essence, while an organic and paid promotion might actually look quite similar coming across your feed. The main difference is on the back end, you can't control who sees your organic content, whereas with paid ads, they're designed to be shown to people who are most likely to meet the goal that you set, which might be to get engagement or sell a product, or collect an e mail address or get people to a physical store location, for example. Both parts of the social media world play an integral role in a brand success. But of course, organic social media is just much more accessible in terms of the complexity of skills, in terms of budget, in terms of the time required to master it. So that is the key of what we're going to focus on in this section of the course. But of course, we are going to cover paid ads as well, at least the sort of, very basics and beginnings of paid ads so that you can feel confident in knowing that it's not as scary as some people out there might make it seem because the Paid Dad's world can feel very complex, and it can get very complex, but there are also ways to make it relatively simple. So we're going to cover both areas so that you can have a real comprehensive view of how this whole ecosystem works together. But before we move into everything, I also just wanted to say that I know that the social media world has a way of skewing your perspective a little bit. L et's say you were speaking on a sage, sharing your ideas in front of 100 people. You would probably be freaking out and feel super honored that 100 people chose to hear you speak. And yet 100 people online following you or liking your post somehow actually feels like you're failing. I just want you to keep this in perspective, and remember that every follower, every subscriber, every comment, every like, is a huge win. But also remember that these are vanity metrics, which is really unfortunate because this is what's publicly available. People can see how many subscribers you have, how many followers you have. These are the things that people use to measure your success. But there are plenty of YouTubers who have millions, and I do mean millions of subscribers who are completely broken. Because their businesses are non functional. And they actually post blogs on this so you can watch these people who are like, I'm a huge online success and I have no money. So it's really, really important to manage your expectations that vanity metrics, publicly available metrics are just one piece of the puzzle. And really think about what you and your client want. Do you want a business that is successful and profitable and generates leads and sales and is functional, or do you want 100,000 followers? You could have both, potentially, lots of people do. Lots of people have vanity metrics and also really successful businesses. There are also lots of people who have incredibly successful businesses from 1,000 subscribers or even less. So you don't necessarily need the huge numbers on social media in order for that audience to meet your business goals. So that's something we're going to talk a lot about. This is not the last time I'm mentioning this because I'm very passionate about this because I have talked to so many people who have these incredibly successful businesses. And if I was to look at their Facebook account or their Instagram account and be like, who are you? There's three people following you. What are you talking about? How does this make any sense? But it's just because they may not necessarily depend on the things that I think they should depend on in order to make their business functional. So it's very, very important for you to sort of take what you think. You know about social media success versus business success. Take that out of the equation and keep an open mind as you go through the course. Now let's get into everything in the next lesson, so I'll see 29. Which Platforms to Choose: I'm a huge fan of doing more with less. And I know I said previously that I would encourage you to have a little bit of knowledge on all the various social media platforms, and I do think that that is important. But when I was first starting out as a social media manager, I felt like an absolute fraud if I didn't know everything there was to know about every single network tool platform, what have you? And the thing is, it's actually impossible to be an expert on everything there is at home at the social media space, and it can be really overwhelming, and sometimes your clients feel the exact same way. They feel like they need to be on all the different networks because someone at some stage told them that that's what they need to be successful, or they're looking at their competitor who also have a team of eight people managing their accounts so that they can be present on five, six platforms. And they have you, a team of one, and they're trying to get you to do the same thing that a whole other team is doing. So it can feel really, really overwhelming. Because as we talked about earlier, if you're the size of Google, you can have a dedicated in house Instagram specialist and a linked specialist. And basically, a specialist for every platform and activity on social media. But for smaller businesses, it's impossible for one person or even just a couple of people to consistently create high quality engaging content for each platform. Practicing your own social media skills, I would encourage you to get set up on all the different platforms that we're going to talk about in this section of the course, just so that you can get a little bit familiar with it and so that you can follow along with the lessons. But then what I would do is literally just focus on one maximum two platforms because you do not have the time of day to focus on all of them. So I would even just focus on one. But maximum two platforms, really figure it out, really understand how it works, really think about how to create captivating content for that one platform or two platform. And then if you're like, I've nailed this. I have got a really good strategy. I feel like, I know exactly what I'm doing. I've got a great plan. I feel like I have more time in my day to add more platforms, then, of course, you can do that. But I would really encourage you to just narrow your focus and potentially also kind of rotate this and say, For the next three months, I'm just focusing on Instagram. And I'm really going to figure this out. And then in three months, if you're like, Yeah, that worked. Okay? I've got it, then you can go through and focus on another platform and really figure that one out. And that doesn't mean that you're going to abandon an Instagram. It just means that you can sort of maintain on one platform while you really focus on another one. But this is also the advice that I would give to clients, where If they're present on a lot of platforms, but they don't have the team or the budget or the resources to sort of manage all that. I would just say to them, look, I know you don't want to feel like you're ghosting your followers on all these platforms, so you just want to continue dedicating your limited budget to posting like three times a month across four platforms. But instead, just like that strategy is obviously not having a huge impact. Why don't we just put all our resources into posting more frequently on just one platform for the next three months. As an experiment, see how that goes and then reassess. Well, I mean, these are business people. If you can say it to them in a way that makes sense, and it's taking into account their situation, their budget, their resources, their audience, and also their kind of greatest fears, which is that their 40 followers are going to be mad at them because they haven't posted an update, then they're more likely to listen to you. As the expert in this field. So it's something I would really want to encourage you to practice on your own so that you can also get good at telling your clients that there's a benefit in doing more with less. And I just wanted to give you some live examples of what this looks like in practice. So this is Amy Porterfield, whose focus is her podcast, Instagram and Facebook. So she's got lots of followers and activity on Instagram and Facebook. But then if you were to look at her TikTok account and her YouTube account, you will notice that she's really only posting stuff on YouTube, which relates to her podcast. So it's largely just audio recordings of her podcast. It has no sort of direct YouTube strategy, and it's not very effective, which you can see from the number of views on each video. And in terms of TikTok, she was getting pretty good traction and actually built up a decent number of followers, but she decided to abandon it over a year ago because it just wasn't working for her in her overall business goals. This is Jenna Cucher, who's a photographer, an educator, and her focus is her podcast, maybe even her book, Instagram and Pinterest. So these are her main focus, her bread and butter, where she's got 1 million followers on Instagram and 4.2 million monthly viewers on Pinterest. Then if you were to look on YouTube similarly to Amy Porterfield, she just posts her podcast episodes, and her account hasn't had any traction on it since 2022. Now Think Media have a huge YouTube channel. Everything in their business revolves around YouTube and their podcast. Then Sean Cannell, who's the main face of Tink Media, really only uses his Instagram account to promote his YouTube videos. Hopefully, seeing these examples will give you a little bit of confidence in knowing that even if you or your client have a successful account on a particular platform, but it's not meeting your business goals or it's just not working for you, it's actually okay to abandon it because it will allow you to go all in on the things that really work for you. In terms of choosing which platforms to focus on, it'll really come down to who the intended audience is, what the purpose of your business is, and sort of trying to meet people where they're at. So for example, if I'm a product based business and I actually sell something that people don't need. It's not something they would ever search for. It's just kind of random stuff that they want. It appeals to their desires, but it's not something they would ever actually need around their house that they would search for. Then I would probably focus on creating content for platforms like Instagram and Facebook and Pinterest, where I can just put content in front of them, and they're going to buy it just because it's the middle of the night, and they're feeling like, Yes, you're glowing the dark fish that goes in the bath tub and is also a bath bomb. I don't know. This is why I don't have a product based business, but anyways, things that people definitely don't need, they're going to buy it anyways because it's in front of them. But if instead, maybe I have a service based business that caters to a very specific need that people actually search materials for that I can kind of target off of, or I can meet them where they're at while they're searching for it. That is a very different approach, you know, Let's say I am an education business or a psychology business for artistic children, and I appeal both to teenagers and also to their parents. But people basically searching for solutions for their artistic children. That is a perfect niche for the likes of YouTube, and maybe even TikTok, because that is the kind of content that people are really consuming and finding answers for. It really is so dependent on your business model, your audience, and a few other elements that we're going to talk about a lot throughout these lessons. As we go into each of the following platforms, we're going to talk about things like the type of content, and audience you can find on each platform, and a few other elements that are key to creating content. And now it's time for us to get started with our very first platform, which is X previously Twitter. So I'll see there. 30. X [Twitter] for Beginners: Let's talk about X, and I promise to do my very best to refer to it as X and Not us Twitter, but I'm only human, so bear with me. So why is X so great? Well, it is the number one platform for brand interactions, especially when it comes to customer service. About half of the users are on the platform to get news or be entertained. So that is important to keep in mind when creating client content for this platform. It's important for it to be engaging, not just informational. Also, it's important to note that real time conversations happen on x. Let's be honest, people are on here to argue, to share laughs, and to participate in a bit of group thing from time to time. It's a great place for fans of various sports to share their two sense in a way that just doesn't really happen on other platforms. But it's not just sports, it's politics, it's media. Even specific industries that have their own little subcommunities on this platform. So there is a lot of benefit to creating content which sparks conversation here. But in terms of where users are actually located, it's still largely skewed towards the US. Australia, for example, isn't even on this chart. So I would think long and hard about posting regularly on this platform in working for an Australian client for a local audience. But that being said, there are always particular industries in every country, including Australia, which thrive on this platform. So it's definitely worth doing your research. The audience is also skewed towards men and the majority around 58% of users are under the age of 35. This isn't on these charts, but it's also worth noting that about half of the population surveyed who were over the age of 42 didn't like x. Again, it depends on who your clients target audience is, but if they're in the older demographic or in an overly female heavy demographic, and particularly in the countries that aren't on the list of most popular users on the platform, it might not be the perfect platform for them. Let's now talk about how to utilize this platform. You can jump on pop culture trends and news, post thought provoking content, be funny and witty, which obviously has to be right for the brand, but it is an option. You can also be quite relatable, not salesy. Huge amounts of promotions don't happen on this platform. It's where people go to build relationships, and a lot of people are on X for the conversation. Having brands actually respond to their questions. Don't be afraid to have even potentially tough public conversations with your customers because it can help to build brand loyalty, and you can also go through to tagging relevant brands in your conversations. You should also be consistent and post frequently because post on x generally have a very short lifespan because it's very much about the volume of content that gets published, which is enormous, you do have to post more frequently to compensate for that. It's good to keep things short and simple. So research has shown that under 50 characters generates more engagement than copy with 50 characters or more, and two hash ags or less per post seems to be the optimal amount for engagement. So what all of this tells us is that X is meant for quick but meaningful interactions because people aren't spending a huge amount of time on the platform, and it's rarely a primary platform of focus for users. So Brands really need to think about how to leverage other platforms in addition to X as well. Let's talk about the actual type of content that does well on X. This is an example from Optist about how to keep things short and simple in the caption and maybe add some more texts to the visual element of the post instead. A few more examples here, so the one on the left is from Queensland Police here in Brisbane. These guys are absolute legends with their approach to social media. It's funny, it's light, and most importantly, it's human. And this works really well for the local Australian audience, whereas this might not be the right strategy for a police department in other parts of the world. So knowing your audience in this sense is incredibly key. Then Wendy's at the bottom there are just known for their sass on X, and Innocent on the right have a turning human factor without really crossing any lines or getting as sassy as Wendy's often do. These are all human approaches to content, but in three very different ways. Spaces on X can also be a great tool for brands to listen and learn directly from their audience and get feedback on the brand and engage in conversations to maybe build hype for a new launch, or just to give their audience an opportunity to be heard through live audio on the platform where people are already coming in for this kind of engagement in written form. We'll talk a little bit more about it once we're on the platform. So hopefully, a few of these quick tips have helped you to start getting your head around x. In the next lesson, we're going to actually go through to setting up a profile. I'll see 31. Set Up Your X Account : So, let's get started by setting up our X account and putting in some details here. I am going to just fast forward a lot of this because also X has one of the most intense capture verification processes I have ever seen. You get to answer so many questions, and if you get anything wrong, you have to start all over again. Which is just the worst. So, good luck. Enjoy. It's a pain. So I'm gonna fast forward, and then we'll start optimizing our profile. All right. So now in terms of our profile photo, we're going to jump back into Canva and download this particular logo. So I'm just going to head on over to share and download and download this as a PNG. Now, it's at 2000 by 2000 pixels, which might be too large for some platforms, but for our purposes here, that's perfect. We're going to go ahead and download that, and then we're going to jump back on over to x and place that as our profile photo. And hit apply. Now, our user name is going to be X Realty. It's available. Great. We don't need notifications. And then what do I want to see on X L? Not super critical. Because this is just a dao profile. But let's see. What are we interested in? All right, so that's not quite working for s. We're just going to refresh the page and continue working on our profile because, yeah, that's pretty much the basics of what we need. Now now that I'm seeing my profile image is quite little, I would say, actually, this is probably not as accessible as we would like it to be. So I'm going to go ahead and change that, so we're going to go to profile and update our profile image. Going to jump back into Camera. And let's see if we can use a different brand color and maybe add darker versions of this. So let's just go black on all of our elements, which will make it stand out a little bit more not quite the plan I had, but again, sometimes you just have to adjust. All right. So let's change that. And let's just go to edit profile and change our photo. Let's not talk about X headers or cover photos on other platforms. So this space is completely up to you as to how you utilize it. You'll see personal brands like Mr. Bes here who will utilize the space to just kind of show off some of their artwork, or you'll see people like Rachel Branson here who is sort of a personal brand as well. To just put a photo up there, so it doesn't necessarily need to be a custom design image, but you will see larger organizations or professional businesses utilizing the space to promote a webinar or just place some sort of a text there where it's sort of custom design. So it's completely up to you. I would just do a little bit of research on what other people in your space are doing before deciding how to design yours. Now, I've just put together a really simple template inside of Cava, where I'm just using three images side by side, and this is the cover photo that we're going to use across all of the different networks. So far, I've just designed it in the Facebook cover dimensions here and we're going to resize it for all the different networks. I am going to be utilizing the resize and magic switch feature to basically take this one design and get it into all of the right dimensions for all the different social media networks. This is a pro feature. If you are a Canva free user, I would just head to Canva and just look for Twitter header in this case or Twitter cover, either way. It's going to come up with the right options for you, but I'm also going to give you some templates that will help. And this is where you can look for some inspiration of what other people have done, or you can just start with a blank design. Then when you're in your design like this one, all you have to do is basically highlight everything, hit Command C on your MC or Control C if you're on a PC, and then pop into your other design and just paste that in by hitting command V on your MC or Control V if you're on a PC, and that'll allow you to basically just make it in the correct Twitter header dimensions. Camva hasn't actually gone down the path of renaming these designs in x, so you'll find everything under Twitter still. Now, this is not something we're going to go into in this course, because I do have a dedicated course to this, and I've linked you to resources on that. But just so that you have the option to do this yourself. I have also linked you to my custom made templates that will tell you exactly how to design everything in a way that's also going to make it not just desktop, but also mobile and tablet friendly. So for example, I've got my Twitter header here. And I've got a blank design of this, but I've also got one with text. This is what it looks like with the text on where it'll tell you the total template dimensions, it'll tell you where to avoid putting text because sometimes on phones, these areas will be obstructed. You always have a text version and a blank version of every single design like this. You'll then be able to import this into Canva to use in your designs. As your background. So let's say I'm doing it like this, or you can also right click and set the image as your background. Then you can essentially design on top of this if you are going to be putting any text in your banners so that you can make sure it's in the right area to be seen across all devices. You always want to make sure that across all the templates I've given you, that any text or any critical elements are placed inside of this kind of light turquoise area, and you're avoiding any of these areas because they will potentially be obstructed on either phones or desktop or potentially both. We're not going to worry about it too much because I'm just using photos here, so it's not that critical that things are getting cut off. It's going to look pretty good across devices, no matter what. But just so you know that those resources are there for you to use, if you choose to create covers and headers for all the different social networks for your clients that include some texts, you can make sure everything looks good across devices. But now I'm just going to jump back into my original design here, so I can show you how I would do this quickly if I was a Canva pro user, so you can always head on over to resize and magic switch and look for any of the platforms that you want to design for. And select it and then essentially say either copy and resize, which is going to create a new document, or you would just resize the design, which is going to essentially just replace the dimensions of your current design. So if you want to keep all of them separately, which you probably will, then you would copy and resize. Then you might just need to adjust how things look and where they're placed, and then you can head on over to share, make sure you're only downloading the very first page and that you're downloading it as a PNG, and you can go ahead and download that. And now we can bring that into our X header space. And apply. Now, my name is actually here. It's going to be Mags Realty. And my bio is going to be something like this. So I've got 160 characters. I've just come up with with the help of Chat GBD, actually, is empowering dreams one home at a time, guiding you on your journey to home ownership and investing in the Brisbane property market. Super super basic. And at the moment, we're just going to say, we're in Brisbane. And, I don't have a website, but let's say it would be Mags realty and let's see. I don't even know if that's a website. I'm actually curious. It's definitely not. No. I great. So it's a fake website. Wonderful. And we would want to switch that to professional so that we have a little bit more access to the tools we need. So our category is real estate. We want a business, account type. All right. And there we go. So now we've got our profile all set up, we've got our little bio, and we've got everything nice and optimized, and now we can get to know the platform. 32. How to Use X [Twitter]: All right, so I'm just going to go ahead and actually delete this first line. I think I'm just going to leave it at this, but let's say now that we have optimized our beautiful profile, let's look at how to actually make the most out of our time spent on X. So on your home screen, both on desktop and on mobile, you're going to have a four U section and a following section. So at the moment, my four use section is pretty random because it doesn't know what I like. It doesn't know anything about me. So it's showing me dogs, which are a safe bet because everybody loves dogs. But eventually, once I start interacting with content on x, it's going to start showing me accounts that it thinks I will like. And then I've also got the option to post my own content up here. So we're going to return back to this. For now, let's head on over to Explore and take a look at how we can actually engage with some content on X. So we've what it thinks I want to engage with, then we've got sort of general trending topics within Australia. So that's within politics, within sports, within everything else. Then I've got a section for news for sports and for entertainment, and then I've got an option up here to just search specifically for, let's say in my case, let's say, real estate, and I can start looking at some accounts to follow. L et's say I just go randomly and start following some accounts, so I can start really training my account to know what it is that I'm hoping to engage with on x. This makes sense for this particular brand because let's say it's Mag realty, I want to engage with real estate accounts. But let's say that you are doing some research for several clients, let's say. So it's your own account, but you want to do a little bit of research for people in the Pep grooming industry. So obviously, you don't want to populate your own account with the accounts within this industry. So that's where this list functionality can come in really handy. So you'll see there are already some lists that I can explore here. And what a list is is once you go and create a list like this one, which you can make private, by the way, so other people don't necessarily need to see it. It will allow you to have a feed of all the accounts that are in that list. So in this particular list, which is all about Brisbane, there is the local transportation account. There is some sports accounts, like fire and rescue, police. Anything that's relevant to Brisbane news is in this list, and I could then follow this list and get just updates on basically Brisbane trending topics because of this. So this is really handy. If you've got several clients that are in really niche industries, you can create some lists that will allow you dive straight into those lists and see those accounts that are in those industries so that you can do a bit of research without it kind of clouding your own feed. So that's all about lists. You've got your notifications here. Messages on X are a little bit funny to be honest because you will start to notice if you are searching for people, there will be most people will be graded out like this, who can't be message. And then there will be some people who have overridden this kind of setting and have stated that they're happy to be messaged. But it's few and far between. Unless accounts are actually following you, you will be unlikely to be able to message them unless they've overridden this setting. You're probably not going to make a whole lot of use of the messages within X, but just so you know if you are over messaging with another account, this is where that's going to appear. This is a paid subscription feature. And then you've also got the option to upgrade your x account on the premium section here. Communities function the same way as they would on other platforms that we'll take a look at. So if you've got, communities for, let's say the real estate that you can engage with and do some networking in, that could be really powerful. Obviously, this is X real estate, probably worldwide, probably, you know, heavily skewed towards the American market. But either way, is it going to be super super relevant to me as an Australian buyers agent? Probably not. So I would ideally look for some local communities instead, but just so you know that that is a section there, Then where it says more, you've got the option to run ads, and you will also have a section for your bookmarks when you save some posts. I'll show you that in just a sec. But this is where you've also got the option to create spaces. So X spaces run the same way as live streams on other platforms where you can either start a space straightaway or you can schedule it in advance, and you can essentially have a conversation with someone on X or just do it solo, where anyone can sort of tune in and listen to that conversation. One that is tuning in, you can also give them an opportunity to be invited to speak. So other people can say, Hey, I've got something to say about the topic that you're currently discussing. Can I mute myself or can I have the opportunity to jump on and talk to you about it? It can be a nice way to collaborate with people on an audio only basis, it's probably more of a functionality that you would utilize within the mobile app rather than the desktop version, but just you know that that's where you would access it. All right. And then finally, at any point, you can just utilize this post function here to create a post or you can post up here. So a few things that we can do, we can add our own media. We can search for gifts that are specifically pulled from a website called Gif. So if that's relevant to whatever we're sharing, we can also create some polls if we want to survey our audience, and we can also set up an end date for that poll. So if we don't want it to sort of continuously run, we then also have the option to add some modes, and we can schedule our post instead of posting straightaway and potentially add a location as well. So in this case, I'm going to be adding my own media. I'm going to jump on over to Cmva, and we're going to be downloading this as a gift. Now, at the moment, you'll notice that because this video is embedded within this, it's 14.7 seconds long. So that's how long my gift would be, and it would make it huge and probably wouldn't make it super relevant for it to be that long, especially because this video doesn't require it to be that long. So I'm just going to click into the video, and I'm going to go over here and make that 2 seconds and just click on Done. So it's only a really nice quick short clip. And now I can go to Share download, and I want to make sure the file tap is a gift, and I'm only looking at the current page, and I'm going to hit download. I'm going to write a little caption here. Something like it might seem like the Brisbane Property market has been wild this year, but now is actually the perfect time to buy your first home, hashtag, first time home buyer hashtag Brisbane real estate. Now, without these hashtags, chances of anyone seeing this post, considering I have zero followers is pretty minimal. Once you have hashtags involved, there is a potential that someone who's following these hashtags as conversation topics is going to potentially see your post. So that is something to keep in mind. Now, hashtags are not necessary in order for other people to discover your content. So, for example, this is on my four U section of X, but it has no hashtags, right? And I'm still seeing it, but it is a wildly popular post, so it's got 1.8 million views. So X is sort of registering this as a popular post, and it's categorized it as you know, probably G rated because it's got a dog in it. So it's a really safe post to show to new users of the platform. Just because something doesn't have hashtags in it doesn't mean that it's not going to be seen and vice versa. Just because there are hashtags and means that it is going to be seen. But because you're a brand new account or I'm a brand new account at this point, the chance of my content being seen is very very minimal regardless. So that's just something to keep in mind. You can't guarantee that no one will see your content, but you can still experiment with X. When it is a new account, you can be pretty sure that it's not going to make it very far without any followers or any activity on the account. More things that I wanted to bring to your attention. One is this little wheel or circle down at the bottom. So you can see it's kind of three quarters of the way to being full. If I was going to continue typing here, you'll see it getting fuller and fuller. So this is essentially just telling me that my character account for this post is almost up, and so we want to make sure we're keeping things nice and short on x. Then also, in terms of visual accessibility, you can always add a description as your Alt text. If you're ever not sure what Alt text is, you can always click on that here, but it's essentially just describing what the image is so that people who are using screen readers on the platform can have the same experience as people who don't have visual impairments and can actually see whatever image or gift is there. So it's a good habit to get into, we're obviously doing this for demo purposes. So I'm going to leave that for now. But whenever you are posting images, it can be really a powerful thing to add to your social media strategy so that you can make sure that every user on the platform has a nice experience. All right, so I'm just going to go ahead and post that now. And now that it's live, we can take a look at a few different things here. So if I was a different user, obviously, not myself, but if I was a follower or someone who's come across this post, there are a few things they can do. So they can hit the speech bubble and reply to this. Then they can use these kind of rotating arrows to either repost my post or quote my post. The difference is, if they just say repost, it's going to directly repost this exactly as is. As a quote, they can add their own thoughts to it. That's a really nice way if someone is also maybe posting something a little bit controversial, they can add their own two bits to it before sharing it with their followers. Then they can also like it. Then over here, this is essentially just a view count. It's going to show someone just how many people have viewed that particular post. Then this is what we were talking about earlier, which is where you can bookmark your posts so that you can save them for later, and in the future, you will find them within the bookmark section of your account. Then you can also share it in terms of copying a link to a particular post on the mobile app as well. This is where you could potentially directly share it to other platforms. It's not something you're going to utilize a whole lot, but just so you know that that is an option there. That's it, and it's really that easy to get started with having a beautiful X account, which now has its first beautiful post on 33. LinkedIn for Beginners: Linton has been a bit of an underdog in the social media space because it largely started as sort of an online resume, and maybe for people to connect with people in their professional network, but really just kind of an online resume. But it has grown into so much more than that over the years. So let's start with some stats here. Fortune 500 companies love Linkon. It's the most popular social media platform for these companies to use. On average, profiles with a profile photo will get 21 times more views and 36 times more messages than profiles without. Really, in this day and age, there's absolutely no excuse for profiles without photos to be honest. Posts on Linking that contain images have a 98% better comment rate and posts with links have a 200% higher engagement rate. Long Fm content is really popular on LinkedIn and even gets the most shares out of any content, meaning that articles are such an untapped resource on this platform. For example, when I Googled how to hire the best people for your business, the results I got on just the first page or the first couple of results were from reputable publications like Forbes and Harvard Business Review, who have spent years building their reputation to get up that high search results. But then lower on that same page is a Linked in article that only got five comments from just some guy, and that's the power of LinkedIn because the platform itself and the website itself, linked in.com ranks so highly on Google. So when you write articles for the platform, you have a much greater chance of getting seen publishing articles on Linton, even if we compare that to you publishing on your own website. And some additional stats here, 65% of business to business companies have used Linton paid ads to acquire customers, and 95% of business to business content marketers use Linkin for organic content marketing. The average Linked in session lasts about 6 minutes, which is almost double the amount of X, and means that you have a lot more time to actually capture someone's attention. So let's not talk about who actually hangs out on Linkedin. The split is pretty even between men and women with slightly more male users and largely in the 25 to 34 age range. And some powerful takeaways from the stats we've covered so far is that if the brand you're trying to grow on Linkedin is aimed at professionals or is within the business to business space, Linkedin can be an incredibly powerful platform to consider. Let's talk about how to best utilize Linkedin. The important thing for you to know is when to use a Linkedin profile versus a Linked in company page. Linked in company pages and profiles serve very different purposes on Linked in. Pages are public and used primarily by businesses and profiles are private and used by individuals, and we'll be taking a look at each in the next few lessons. Then it's also good to create posts of varying lengths. Quick and bold posts will pack a punch on Link in, whereas longer stories, maybe even an article form, will capture your reader's attention and build a relationship on the app. Both of these types of content should have a place in your linked in plan, and it's just good to test out what works best for your business. Then you also just want to make sure you're using the platform for networking. This is the one platform that will allow you to connect directly with CEOs and CFOs and other very important people and engage with them in conversation on their posts and in private conversations. It's also a great place for you personally to connect with other marketers and industry professionals like graphic designers, video editors, virtual assistants, and others who may actually be able to also refer business to you and who also kind of just get what you're going through as a beginner in this space. Lastly, you also want to make sure you are sharing external articles on the platform. Unlike other platforms like Instagram, Lincoln's algorithm will actually support external links to blogs and websites. Just make sure the content is valuable to your community. Whenever possible, credit the original author of the content that you're sharing, which is best practice, but it also gives them the ability to share it with their audience and then expand the reach of your post in doing that. Let's take a look at what that looks like in practice. On the right here, you'll see a business called Kinl who shared a snippet of an interview I did with their team and tagged me in the post, which allowed me to then easily share this with my own audience, which then helps to expand their reach. Now on the left, you'll see digital marketer share guest posts I wrote for them, but didn't actually tag me in this. The reason I knew this went live is because they also shared it on Instagram where they did tag me. So I tracked it down on Linked in, to share it with my audience. So always make sure you're tagging the person or business if they're on Linked in. Now in the next lesson, we're going to jump into LinkedIn and take a look around. So I'll see 34. How to Use LinkedIn Profiles: We'll be starting by jumping into my own personal LinkedIn profile, which is something I can't sort of make for Megs realty because there is no other Mg that I can create a profile for. So we'll be looking at my live profile for this. But before we go into it, I did just want to say that if you're building your career as a social media marketer, LinkedIn is going to be the fastest way for you to do that and build your network of other marketers and also, you know, hiring managers and chief marketing officers and people who might actually be responsible for giving you work in the future, including recruiters, if you're looking for more traditional marketing role, et cetera, et cetera. So it can be a really good idea for you to start tweaking your profile as you go through these lessons to add additional skills, add some portfolio items and things like that. Now, I want to acknowledge that there's going to be a lot of people who are taking this course who might not be in the position to be doing this. If this is the case for you where you have a different job and you're trying to switch careers, but you don't necessarily want your current boss seeing that you're all of a sudden, a social media marketer because you've added all these new skills to your profile. That's totally fine. That's exactly what it was for me. When I was learning social media marketing, I was working as a travel agent at the time and studying this on the weekends and in the evenings. So I wasn't in the position to update my Link team profile. And that's perfectly fine. That doesn't mean that you can't still network with people, have some really great conversations with people privately on the platform. But if you are in a position to change a few things, tweak a few things on your profile, hopefully, this lesson will help. So on your Linked in profile, let's start with the profile photo. The best way to go about this is to have a nice, soft, neutral kind of color palette as much as possible. Unless you have brand colors that need to be featured in the photo, which is the look that some people are going for. But otherwise, soft natural light, clean neutral background, no sort of distracting objects, not taking photos with your kids or your partner or your dog, unless you're a dog grooming business or something like that. Otherwise, you just want it to be nice and professional. This is not the space to get funky, not on linked in. It does depend on the nature of the business. So for example, more corporate headshots will look very different, also because a lot of corporate workplaces will actually have a photographer who will come in and do all employee headshots, so they will all look the same. They will all have this kind of white background. So that's something to keep in mind. Otherwise, you just want to make sure it's in color, so it's not black and white. There's a real clear shot of your beautiful face. And yeah, there's no sort of hugely distracting objects in the background. Terms of your cover image or your banner. Look, it doesn't have to be overly complicated. This is a custom made one obviously, but it can just be a nice neutral image that you use. You definitely do not have to use text there. It is a little bit hard to make Linked in banners be mobile friendly. So I have included a resource for this in your course guide because on the mobile app, the profile image will cover a larger section of this. It's nice to make sure that if you are adding any texts, it's sort of in this general area, and it's not blocked by your profile photo on the mobile app. Then you also want to make sure that your public profile and your URL are what you want them to be. So if you are signing up to Linked in for the very first time, there's a chance that your link might be something totally random, so here's where you can change it, and here's where you can also edit what is visible to the public and not just to your connections. So for me, most of the things that I have on my profile are visible to everyone, but that's not right for everybody, so you want to make sure you're editing that for your own purposes. Let's talk about the open to section. So this is where you are looking for a job, you're hiring, or you're providing services, you want to make sure that this is visible to recruiters or potentially clients in this case, you can say, I'm providing social media marketing services, and I am available to work locally or remotely. This is my right or contact me for pricing, and same goes for being open to work. So recruiters will be able to search by only looking at profiles that have this functionality turned on. So if you are flexible and you want to be contacted for work, make sure that that is turned on also a good idea for you to put in your pronouns and also edit your tagline. Your tagline is naturally going to be pulled from your experiences from your current workplace. Whatever your job title is is what your headline or your tagline is going to be. If you want to edit this because this is what appears in search results when people are looking for someone with your skill set. If you want it to be a little bit more meaty, then I would recommend editing this. There are tools like Copy AIs Free Linked in headline generator, which can help you can say something like I teach. Marketing, content, and a creator. I don't know. Whatever, it might be the case for you, and it'll give you some ideas for headlines that you could use for Linked in. Passionate marketer, teacher and creator. Sure, marketing educator with Creative flare. So it's a little bit more interesting than me just saying, I'm a marketer. Yeah, this is prime real estate because when people are deciding whether to connect with you or hire you as a recruiter or as a client. This is what they're going to see, so it can be nice to just make sure you're modifying that to your needs. The next thing someone's going to see in your profile is your about section. So I think it's the first 265 characters that are going to be visible before somebody clicks on the C More section. So you want to make sure that that is the bit that says who you are, what you do, who you do it for. Maybe some key highlights that might make someone decide whether they want to connect with you or not or reach out to you. So yeah, I would definitely spend a little bit of time on your about section, making sure that it's a nice summary of your experience and also what people can expect from you on the platform. Then have your featured section, I'm going to be honest. I haven't put a huge amount of effort into this myself. I've pulled in pretty much just posts that I have created on Linn, that have a little bit of social proof, but really, I just thought they'd be relevant to my network, and then one that is featuring my courses. But this is your chance to really feature some beautiful media. So if you've had your work published, if you've been part of some really cool projects, ad campaigns, things like that, or you just want to use it as almost a mini portfolio for potential clients, so they can see Oh, what kind of graphics you can make. This is your chance to show of your skills and use that as a mini portfolio. So you would just add in either a post. So if you have created a Linked in post, and you just want to add that to your featured section, you can absolutely do that. You can do the same for articles. So if you don't have a website of your own, but you want to write extensive blog post, this is your opportunity to do that, or you can add an external link or some media, so that can be, graphics, videos, things like that that you want to feature in here. And then if you click the little Pen icon, it's going to ask you if you want to reorder these in order of importance because obviously, you can add more than three items so that people can see all the different things that you want to feature, but only the first three will appear on your profile. So that's why you might want to reorder things. Then you have your activity, which for me is largely my students tagging me in posts if they finish one of my courses or they've gotten a really beautiful insight from one of my courses. So I would recommend that you utilize Linked in for this. It is a networking platform after all. So whenever you have gotten value from a business, and you want to tag them and share that experience, it helps them, and it helps you as well. So definitely recommend that And then you have your experience. Now, this is where you can list your jobs, but I would say, do not feel like you need to list every job you've ever had since birth. I mean, I was a waitress in Austria once upon a time, mainly so I could get free accommodation while I was snowboarding for the winter. Is that relevant to my current career? Absolutely not. Is anybody going to question, you know, a six month gap in my Linked in resume? Absolutely not. It was years and years ago, so do not feel like you need to feature everything. In fact, I should probably go in and audit this myself to be test. But I would just say, you know, feature relevant experiences. And then in terms of what to actually put under each experience, try to put a little bit of a blurb about what that role is about, and then some key highlights so that people can kind of get a sense of what your achievements were in each role or are in each role if you're currently in that role? Then if you can add any media bits, if you've written any articles for industry publications or videos and things like that, if you can add any of that and associate them with some key skills, that can really help to make your profile stand out as well. Then you will have your education, any volunteer experience, your skills, and some recommendations. So skills are going to be key, especially for roles that require the specific six skills for you to have in order to apply for a job, Either way, they can help you come up higher and search results if there are recruiters who are looking specifically for these skills. And then if you can be endorsed for those skills by your network, then that's a really great thing as well. You can reorder these as well. So I've got a lot of skills in here, and some of them have endorsements, some don't. So I would want to make sure that I'm prioritizing the skills that are relevant to my role, but also the skills that have the most endorsements because it just makes me look a little bit better. So I would definitely make sure to reorganize these and prioritize the ones that matter most. Lastly, recommendations. So recommendations can be really great, and you can obviously return the favor and give other people recommendations as well. But I would recommend that you invest a little bit of time into getting recommendations because it's the easiest way for potential clients to get a sense of what it's like working with you. And they don't necessarily need to be from past employers or past clients. It can just be from team members or people who You know, maybe a little bit higher than you in the pecking order a pass roll. That can be a really nice way to do that. So you do need to be connected with someone on Linked in in order to request a recommendation. But once you are a connection or they're your connection, you can head on over to more, and you can say, request a recommendation, and then they'll be able to do that for you, and it'll appear on your profile. That's pretty much it. That is linked in, and then you want to make sure that you are going through and actually networking with people in your industry, whether that's other social media marketers, agencies, hiring managers, recruiters, what have you? Basically, you want to just try and build your network with people who can either refer business to you, who can hire you or who can just sort of compliment your services and maybe give you a little bit of support. But do keep in mind that whenever you are looking at someone's profile on Linked in. It depends on whether or not they're a premium member on Linked in, but they will likely see that you've looked at their profile. So you don't just want to be looking at someone's profile and then running away, you want to make sure that if you are looking at their profile, like I am over here, that you're actually going through and taking the time to connect. Now, ideally, you'd want to add a note to say why you're reaching out to connect. So people have a bit of context, but you can also, of course, send the connection invitation without a note. Whether or not they accept it is up to them, obviously. Now, whenever you are reaching out to people in their DMs on LinkedIn, you want to provide a bit of context, and you don't want to be too salesy. But other than that, I think it's such a wonderful place for you to network and explore connections within this industry. Definitely go and build your beautiful LinkedIn profile and I will see you in the next lesson. 35. Create a LinkedIn Page: So with Linked in company pages, you do have to have a profile first, and then you can head on over to Linked in for business and then create a company page. So in this case, let's say it is a company. It's going to be Meg's Realty. It doesn't hugely matter too much. Let's just leave it at that. O fake. Website here, real estate. And probably would just be sole proprietorship for now. We've got a logo that we can add. And keeping in mind that on Link and is where we would target our investor customer avatars, so we want to make sure that investing is definitely in our tag line. And it's got to be under 120 characters, so we're just going to be using this one. And yes, good. We're going to create the page. Cool, and now we're just going to go to edit and we want to update a cover image. This one is 1,000 hundred 28 pixels by 191. So we're just going to make sure we're adjusting our cover photo here. Let's see if we're able to just use this and perfect career page. So that's the dimensions that we want, and we're just going to continue, and let's just resize instead of copying and resizing because I don't necessarily need the old design anymore. But of course, if you're doing this for a client, you would want to make sure you're always copying and resizing so that you can continue to keep the originals of everything, of course. Now, for a company page, I would actually probably just remove this image of me and just use something a little bit different here. So it's all just sort of real estate involved. And yeah, I'm quite happy with that. Again, super, you know, relatively basic. And of course, if you're downloading these and you're updating your client's social profiles, you want to make sure that Hey, the actual titles of the images are something that makes sense. I mean, at the moment, it says Facebook cover, Twitter header. None of those are actually what it is. It's a Linton company header. You want to make sure you're titling it with something that makes sense to your client, and then you're also storing it somewhere relevant like Google Drive, for example. That's looking pretty good. And I'm just going to go a ply. Now, if we say view as member, we can see how the company page looks to other users on LinkedIn and that's pretty good. Let's talk about what you can do with your company page on Linkedin. First of all, I would invite your connections to like your page. Obviously, we don't want to do that right now because the demo page, but if you had an existing page and let's say this was for your clients, then you want to make sure you're inviting their connections to the page. You can do this regularly as well. So that's a really nice way to grow the page. But of course, you want to make sure you've posted something on the page in order to make sure that there's something worth following. So we're just going to go ahead and grab this post from our designs that we did earlier, so I'm just going to go to share and download, and let's download this as a gift, and we just want to be downloading our current page. This is the first thing we're going to do. I did also just want to show you quickly how we can do this with a carousel post because this is a popular format on linked in, and people can get a little bit confused about how to post this type of content. I just wanted to do this. I'm not really going to go through and customize this hugely, but this is a carousel template. So we're just going to make it our brand colors, and then we can post it straight away. Let me just add a photo of myself, so we'll make it slightly more customized. Let's post this one. I'm just going to add it to the back there. Let's just crop this here. And then we're just going to change the transparency. So I'm just sort of in the back there. Again, it doesn't really matter, but we're just going to send this to the back, so our text pops. But if we were going to update our colors, what you could do with this template is, let's say we want to update this to our brand color. We could go here and select from Mags realty. And then it's going to say, do you want to change all of these to this? And I can do that, and it's done it for all of my beautiful images. And you can do the same for the rest of the graphics. So anytime you're using, let's say this color, I want to change it to my color palette here. Go to say, do you want to change all of it? Yes, I do, and it's going to update the whole template for me, which is really, really neat. But yes, again, in this case, what we want to do is we're going to share it, and I'm going to download. And in this case, I'm going to download this as a PDF. So it can just be PDF standard, doesn't have to be PDF print because it's just going on social media. But just, you know, this is how you would share a carousel on Linked in, which is a bit different to the way that it would be on other platforms. So we're going to start with the post that we had originally. So I'm going to go to add Media. And add in my gift and go to next. Now, this is just a really quick capture that I wrote. So the reason that I've written this foreign investor is because that is the market that I would be going after on LinkedIn. But of course, if I was also potentially going for first time home buyers, I would write content for them as well. But yeah, I basically just said, could I be someone for you, and this is the website link that I would add in. So I'm just going to go ahead and post that or you could schedule it for later. Okay, great. So that is now posted. And what I will say is that people don't utilize gifts on Linked in nearly enough. And I'm not saying, you know, funny gifts, but I think you could utilize these kind of professional gifts and give it a bit of an extra boost because yeah, there isn't a whole lot of them on Linkedin, but they are a lot more captivating than just a flat image. So that's a really easy way to create content for Linkedin. You can also write professional articles. It's a really nice way to get the word out there and get, you know, become a thought leader in your industry. So I always recommend that clients write articles on LinkedIn whenever possible. But for now, let's go ahead and start a post, and we're not creating an event. We're not celebrating an occasion. We want to go to more. We could also say that we're hiring. We could create a poll just like we could on Twitter, on X, sorry. And then we can add a document. So I'm going to choose a file here, and we're just going to add this here. We're going to give it a title first time home buyer tips. Got done. I'm not going to write a caption for it at this stage. But this is how it will appear. So it still appears as a carousel. If someone was going to hover over it, they can see that it's got several pages within it. It is a little bit more restrictive. This is why you don't want to have too much text at the bottom there because the slider will cover that bit. So if I was actually going to be optimizing this for Linked in, I would probably just remove anything from the bottom. This is more optimized for Instagram, not so much for Linked in, but this is a really nice way to get a lot of educational content onto Linked in. So Using PDF carousels can be a really, really powerful way to boost your presence on the platform, and I would really recommend that you leverage that. Whenever possible. So hopefully, that has made sense, and you've enjoyed getting to know Link in from both a personal and company page perspective, and I will see you in the next lesson. 36. Facebook for Beginners: All right, let's get to know Facebook for business here. So the average organic reach versus the number of page likes on a professional page is 5.9%, but for some industries, this is closer to 1.5%. And Facebook posts across all industries have an average engagement rate of 0.063% with photo posts receiving about 0.10%. Doesn't sound like much, but of course, for smaller audiences, this does tend to be a bit higher. Now video content is definitely king on Facebook like it is on other platforms, and users spend an average of 33 minutes on the app per day, which probably is just because we have a lot of our friends posting a lot of their life updates on the app. With 88% of the users coming from mobile and 500 million people using Facebook stories every day. And one third of the adults in the US getting their news from Facebook as well. In terms of advertising, 93% of social media marketers use ads on the platform, and ads have a click through right of about 2.5% and still continue to have the highest return on investment of all social networks followed closely by Instagram. But that's very dependent on industry because I think a lot of platforms say that theirs is the highest return on investment, so it just really depends on industry in that sense. But what all of this means is that your posts on Facebook may not reach a huge amount of your audience, and even when they do, the engagement rate is relatively low. But video will always perform really well on Facebook, especially reels and lives, and as we mentioned, even stories. And Facebook ads continue to be very effective for business owners, so it's definitely worth exploring this. Facebook is the most popular social network worldwide, ranked by the number of monthly active users in millions here, and it's the third most visited website in the whole world. So it's definitely worth looking into whether it's an organic or paid strategy for your clients. Then in terms of users, there are slightly more men on Facebook, and it's largely skewed towards younger demographics, which is just true of all social media. But that being said, I would argue that while there are less users in the 45 plus category here on Facebook, they're often more active in terms of engagement. So I definitely wouldn't overlook them here. And there are a lot of different parts of the platform that you might need to be familiar with as a social media manager, like profiles, pages, messengers, stories, groups, and ads, maybe even marketplace. Yeah, just a lot of parts to this machine. So you've already likely played with, and some will be brand new to you, but there's so much knowledge, help, and support out there from some incredibly smart people. So you can always feel confident in knowing that in the man, many years that I've been working in this space, I've actually never come across a problem or question that I haven't been able to solve through a little bit of in depth Google searching. Hopefully, the skills you learn here will set you up for success, so less googling will be required on your part. But when it comes to Facebook, always remember why people are largely on there, which is mainly to get updates from friends and family or to be entertained. Whether you're promoting a service based business or a product based business, storytelling, and providing a lot of entertainment and value to people on the platform, should definitely be key components of your marketing strategy. This company here could have easily just said, look by our candle. But instead, they're telling the story of the inspiration behind their product, paired with a beautiful image, and this is the kind of stuff that really captivates audiences on Facebook by making them feel something as they engage with the brand's content. Well, like type form here on the right who are software company, but still manage to weave in a little bit of behind the scenes fun into their Facebook posts here. Of course, you can use Facebook to start conversations through static or even better yet through video content like Frank's Redhot have done over here. And also just remember to have a bit of fun with it and get people involved. And luckily, the content that does well on Instagram is the content that often does well on Facebook as well. So you can often repurpose a lot of content across the two platforms, which is great. And now in the next lesson, we're going to get into creating our Facebook page, so I will see you there. 37. Set Up a Facebook Page: All right. So in order to create a Facebook page, you do have to have a Facebook profile, which hopefully all of us have anyways. But then once you have that, you are able to head on up here and say, I want to create a page. So this is going to be Meg's real team. We're going to be within the real estate category, real estate agency. And let's just add in a little bit of a bio here. Brilliant. Let's continue filling this out. Not sure that it needs a phone number exactly. Let's just say we're in Brisbane. Brilliant. We've got a profile photo. And in terms of a cover photo. This was the original dimensions that I designed in. So this is 60, 40 by 924, and I'm just going to go ahead and download the first page of my design. And we're going to bring that into Facebook. So we can just drag that straight in here. Do we want an action button? Why not? So we could say contact us is probably the most relevant, and we're just going to add in a website link. So that is what we need there. Now, we don't want Whatsapp. We're not going to be inviting any friends. In terms of notifications, I would really recommend, especially if you're doing this, managing this for clients to turn this off so you have a nice division between your personal and professional life, but entirely up to you, of course. Okay, perfect. And now it's going to give you a tour if you want one. But effectively, that is the bare minimum of what we need in order to set up our beautiful Facebook page. Before we get started on optimizing our page and looking at a few things here. The first thing I just wanted to point out is that you want to make sure that your personal profile looks good to the public. On your personal profile, if you go to these three dots and you say view as, it's going to show you what your profile looks like to the public. It's important that this looks good and there's no random posts floating about from when you were 17 and said something a bit silly because this is what your client might be viewing. This is what their audience might be viewing. If you're maybe managing a Facebook page or you're interacting in their Facebook group and you're interacting with their community members, you just want to make sure that anything that's on here is appropriate. So your profile photo can't be excluded, but everything else you would be able to sort of hide from your clients, which is nice. So you want to make sure that that looks nice and professional. And then once you're on the actual page. The first thing I want to do is head on over to settings and show you what it might look like if your client was to invite you to an existing Facebook page because chances are that they will probably already have one, and you won't be setting this up for them from scratch, but they may not necessarily know how to invite you to it. But before we do that, just so you know that I am on dark mode here, if you want to edit that to be in light mode, or if your light mode is your default and you want to change it to dark mode. This is where you would do that. Then we want to head on over to page setup and page access. So this is where your client can go to add N and search for either your e mail address or your Facebook profile. I'm going to be using it as a dummy account here, and then they'll be able to basically say, Yep, give them full access and invite you in this case to manage the page. Back and page setup is where you can also choose your URL. So we've got a name for the business, but we haven't actually set a user name. So this is where we can go ahead and do that. And this is also going to be our Facebook page URL. So when we're going to be giving somebody the URL to our beautiful Facebook page or linking it within e mails or on our website, this is the URL that we would be using. We want to continue going down here to page and tagging. So this is something that you might want to just adjust based on your own news cases, and that goes for reviews, especially because once reviews are turned on Facebook and people are able to review your page, this is not something that you can delete. So not everyone's going to have reviews on their pages. It's not appropriate for every single business, but it's something that you may want to turn off if it's not something that you want on your page. Let's talk about followers and public content. So this is where you can adjust a few things in terms of primarily hiding comments with profanity and potentially adding in your own words. So if there are particular words that you would never want to appear in any of your comments. And maybe, you know, you might be running ads and you might have hundreds of comments that are being left, and you don't necessarily have the time to monitor that because you're not always in charge of the time zone and things like that. This is where you can kind of limit the profanity that's used in the comment section of your content. Lastly, let's just go on over to permissions and linked accounts. This is where we would link our Instagram account and a Whatsapp account. If we had one. Facebook will continuously prompt you to do this, and the same is true for within Instagram. You're going to continuously get prompted to link your Facebook page. So don't worry if you don't really remember how to do that, it will continuously ask you if you want to do it in various places. So there's always opportunity to do that on the about section of your page as well. You will have the option to add some social links. So if you want to add your Instagram account, your account, and other accounts here so that people can connect with you on other networks. You can do that, as well. That's outside of the permissions that we were just talking about. That's more about posting across platforms and sharing analytics and things like that. Was this is about your followers actually being able to reach you on various platforms. And now in the next lesson, we're going to take a look at how to actually use Facebook for business, so I'll see that. 38. How to Use Facebook: So just like with every other platform, when it comes to Facebook for business, I would just look at other business accounts on Facebook and see what's working really well for them. Because you will see that even professional brands like innocent drinks here, will still be using a very friendly approach to their Facebook strategy because they recognize that this is a platform that people come to to engage with their friends and family, and that's largely what the platform was designed for. It's for friends and family updates first and business second. So a lot of the time, you will see people, they might be promoting their own brand, of course, but then they will be posting funny things and memes. Flats Shakspeare thought about renting to be or not to be. That's hilarious, and people are commenting on it, they're sharing it, they're liking it, and it's got their logo on it, and of course, it's created by them. When people share this, it's helping to promote their brand. You will also see people just Yeah, I don't know, being funny, low hanging fruit. I mean, there's no huge context to this, but it's nestled really nicely in between a lot of their company promotions and just general things that actually are relevant to their brand. There needs to be a nice balance of this friendly bantry. If it's right for the brand, of course. But there's a lot of brands on Facebook that are posting so regularly and they're just missing the mark. They're not understanding why people are on Facebook. Not really there to get your company updates. Let's be honest, even people who are following your page, they don't really care that your profit margins have increased or you have a new thing that's out. They want to actually engage with you in on the same level that they would engage with their friends and family. The more you can cater to this on Facebook, the more your followers will share your content and engage with your content, which will help to expand the reach of your content and get you more followers and lis. Like with every other network, I would start with a bit of research in your client's industry and see what's working for their competitors, and we will go even deeper into competitor research in a dedicated lesson later on. So at the moment, you're like, I don't know where to start with this. We will go into it. But just definitely spend a little bit of time on Facebook from a Facebook for business perspective, not looking at people's Facebook profiles, but actually looking at Facebook business pages and seeing what people are posting, and also how were they optimizing their page in a way that works for them. Now, we'll be honest in saying that organic growth on Facebook is very, very difficult because people aren't really discovering new pages organically very much. Reels will still be your best bet at getting discovered by new people. So the more you can engage with video content, even on Facebook, not just on the likes of Instagram and TikTok and YouTube, the greater reach your content will have. And the easier it will be for you to actually grow your page. So now in terms of posting on our page, we're just going to go ahead and go over here. And we've got options for posting reels, for posting longer form videos for going live, and posting potentially gifts. In this case, let's just go ahead and download the second page of my design here. Now I could download this as a video or as a gift for Facebook, both will work. Gifts won't work on Instagram, but they will work on Facebook, so we can just download it as a gift. That way, it will autoplay when somebody is on Facebook. As a video might potentially need to actually be clicked in order to play. So when it's a really quick gift like this one, I just like leaving it on gifts, and then we can jump into Facebook and add it to our design here. It is going to look really wonky, so don't get nervous about that. That's just a weird preview thing that Facebook has. It will look fine once it's actually posted. Now, even though it is a gift, you do have some video options to give it a title, add some collaborators. If this was a longer video, we could also add some captions and select our thumbnail and go through some optimization features. But of course, in this case, it's not all that appropriate or we don't need to bother with that because it is just a gift. So we can now put in our caption here. So I'm just going to say something like imagine walking into a space that's all yours is a place where you get to create memories, build your future, and truly feel at home. So this is quite relevant to the kind of graphic that we've created here, which is all about finding your perfect home. And then it says, find out more about our process in our latest blog post, which if this was a real blog post, and we didn't have this associated gift here, it would also pull through a preview of that blog post. But because this is not a real website, it's not going to do that, so we want to make sure we have an associated image with that. Then we've got the option to boost our post, and that's something we're going to talk about in the ad section of the course. If you're not quite sure what boosted posts are, we will talk about it a little bit later on. We can see that this is set on public, so we're happy to just go ahead and post that. Now because it is a video, it might take a little while to actually post on the page, so you might need to wait a little bit and then refresh your page. For longer videos, this can take a little bit longer. But now, That's been posted here, and we can see our beautiful gift working exactly as it should. And now, just like you'll be able to do with other platforms, you can now pin this to the top of your page. So that can be quite handy if this was something that I definitely want, especially new followers of my page to see straightaway when they get onto my page because it's a new launch or a new offer or something that I really want to bring their attention to. So that can be nice to have it in the sort of featured section. Just while we're here, I also want to bring your attention to the Meda Business suite, which is something we're going to cover a lot more in the later section of the course when we talk about ads. But this is where you can also manage your Facebook and Instagram comments all in one place in the inbox section. So you'll be able to go through messenger, through Instagram, through Whatsapp, potentially, and then also comments as well as DMs. So that can be quite nice because especially on Instagram, things get lost very, very quickly. And this is also the place where you can manage automations. So on your Facebook page, people will be able to message you and of course, on Instagram as well to ask questions and book in for calls and ask for more resources. So if you have dedicated times of the week or times of the day that you are available online, where you're available not sort of for a live chat, obviously, it's going to be a bit of a delay. No one's going to expect you to be there live waiting for a message. But this can be quite handy where you can create automations that are around the times that you're definitely not going to be available. For example, we can set up an away message, but we can also set up an instant reply for the first time somebody messages us that welcomes them to the chat. There's lots that you can do with this, including having some frequently asked questions where you have predetermined questions that you think people would be most likely to ask you in your chats and some answers that will help them out without you manually having to be there for them. In terms of our way messages, you can set this up for messenger and for Instagram or you can do this obviously separately, and then you can set up things within your time zone or your client's time zone, and you can sort of say, you know, when are you going to be there available to answer questions, and when are you going to be away? And this is especially a handy for people who have global audiences, where they assume, you know, it's Monday, midday. So of course, someone's going to be there to answer their question, but your client's time zone is on the other side of the world, so they're asleep. So this is quite handy where you can then set these hours up and do it for all the individual days, so you can say, you know, at the moment, I'm just saying from pretty much all day Sunday, I'm away. I would do the same thing for Saturday, and then I would do it for my evenings. And then when it's during this time that somebody messages me, it would then say, thanks for your message, it would use their first name. So this is something you can personalize by using their first name, their last name, and any of these other features. And then I'll say, we're wait and can't respond right now. We appreciate your reaching out. So that's a little bit informal for Meg's reality. I'd obviously make this a little bit more fun because I'm pretty fun, so I would want it to be, a little bit bantery, not super dry, but just for now, let's leave it with their sort of cookie cutter option. So this is exactly how it would look if somebody tried to message me during the hours that I've said that I'm not going to be available. Going to save those changes. And then you've also got some other options here, including are people asking for your locations? Are people asking for your contact information? Are people asking frequently asked questions that you can edit? So you can set up a whole host of things here, which will just really help to create a more professional experience for your users on your Facebook page. So I would definitely recommend setting that up. That's a bit of a crash course for some changes that might be slightly different to using Facebook for business as opposed to Facebook for personal use. Now the next lesson, we're going to get into the world of Instagram for business. So I will see you. 39. Instagram for Beginners: Of all the various social media networks. Instagram is the one I see people struggling with the most when it comes to switching your mindset from personal use to business use. And that's just because everything looks the same for a business account and a personal account from the outside in. And especially when it comes to stories, people are so used to sharing every aspect of their lives. And it can actually be very hard to know where the line is from sharing personal content on a business account. For some businesses, sharing personal content is part of their strategy, and it works for their business. But it's just important to know where that line is for each individual client. But either way, if you can get the hang of Instagram, whether you're brand new to it or you've been on Instagram for a long time, this is a really powerful platform for so many businesses. So I hope you'll join me in checking it out. All right. So some useful stats for you from a demographics perspective. 18 to 34 year olds make up 60% of Instagram's user base. And interestingly, Instagram is slightly more favorable towards male users in the under 34 groups, but then over 35 more women are on Instagram. And out of all the platforms that we've looked at up to this point, Instagram is definitely a platform for the younger teen demographics. Obviously, we don't have the stats for the under 18 age group here, but teenagers 13-17 make up about 8% of Instagram users. And some stats for you to look out for. People prefer stories to have a mix of photos, videos, and text, and 50% of users say they've gone ahead and actually visited a website to make a purchase of a product after seeing it in stories. It can be a really powerful strategy for you to sell your product or service just through stories. Irty 4% of people are using the app to shop every single week, and 36% of Gen Z have said that they begin their product search on Instagram, which is totally different to how older demographics actually make their purchases. The average engagement rate is 1.89, which is not surprising because there are a lot of inflated accounts on Instagram, but you're also competing with a huge amount of content. Now, that being said, reels have a reach of 30%, which is huge, and that definitely continues to be the best form of content to use on Instagram. And 80% of people said they would rather watch an Instagram live than to read a blog post from a brand. Again is massive because lives are totally scary, but they can be such an easy way for a brand to share some news or just an unfiltered, unstructured company update, instead of having to write a really polished blog post. Over 50% of users use the Explore tab each month, which is awesome for anyone wanting to get discovered, thanks to the use of hash tags, and just generally based on their content. And users are on the platform for an average of 33 minutes per day, so there's loads of opportunity for you to be seen. Half of marketers are using reels for influencer marketing, and there's been a rise in just micro and nano influencers who may actually only have a few thousand followers, but they're being engaged by brands to do deals because of their highly engaged audience. They might be smaller audiences, but they're generally much more engaged than those of bigger influencers. Finally, brands that start conversations with their customers in DMs see a 70% conversion rate, which is great news because later in the course, we're going to talk about how you can actually automate this type of engagement. All right. So what all of this tells us is that Instagram is hugely visual, largely video based, and unlike on other platforms, people on Instagram won't hesitate to engage and share their thoughts through polls and develop relationships with businesses on an ongoing basis and use the app for shopping as much as they can. Now, I want to talk about some Instagram specific myths because there's a lot of Instagram experts out there saying this stuff who aren't actually experts at all. Let's just debunk some of these things right now. You will not get penalized for having a business account. You get access to so many amazing analytics as a business account and your reach is not going to be worse as a result of changing your account type. Instagram is not deliberately limiting the reach of your content. But the problem is that businesses forget that the platform is a little bit of give and take. If you're not actually spending any time engaging with other people on the platform and developing relationships with your audience, then yes, your reach will be limited. This is why having an engagement strategy in place is really key and more on that a little bit later in the course. Now, lastly, quantity on Instagram is great, but there are plenty of Instagram accounts out there that prove that this just isn't true. Looking at this epic example here, how can you turn 62 posts into nearly 700,000 followers by creating less incredibly high quality content? Now, this is a unicorn moment. This is quite rare. And I would say that quantity definitely still plays a part for most accounts, but just know that you absolutely can still succeed on Instagram if you don't have the resources to post every single day. Then I would say that even though other people can't necessarily see likes, there's still an engagement metric that help Instagram determine if people are liking your content and engaging with your content, which then tells the platform to show it to more people. This is a no brainer, but your engagement matters far more than how many followers you have, and there isn't some magic number of hashtags to use. It's more important that your hashtags are tailored to your content than the actual amount that you're using. Lastly, you will not be penalized for editing your captions of your posts after they're live. If that was true, Instagram wouldn't allow this as a feature. Mistakes happen, so don't be afraid to fix them when they do. This is just a big, big myth. But maybe the biggest and most damaging myth of them all is thinking that you can do the wrong thing in the short run. The system, and it won't damage your account in the long run. And by dodgy practices here, I mean things like asking people to follow you in exchange for you following them back. Having groups of people promise to all engage with each other's content as soon as it goes live by leaving super generic contents like Love this or thumbs up, or just straight up buying your followers or your engagement from dodgy agencies will give you fake accounts as followers. Or using apps that will go and follow 1,000 people through your account and then unfollow them again with the intention of getting at least a few hundred people to follow you in the process. Or reposting content from other accounts without getting written consent from them to do this, which can get your account banned pretty quickly. I've personally had my Instagram identity stolen a few times with people pretending to be me and selling people on crypto schemes. So I will tell you it's not very nice when it happens to you, so definitely try to do the right thing by other people on the platform and follow best practices. All right. So now that we know what the myths are and what to avoid, let's talk about how to make sure your Instagram profile is complete. Here are a few things to include when you're setting up a business profile on Instagram. You want to have your logo, or profile, your business category linked to a website or whatever matters most to you, it could be a landing page or just a newsletter pop up that gets people onto your e mail list. Then you want to have highlights of your most relevant stories. Then you have your user name, and then you have what you do and your pronouns, if applicable. Now, in this section, I would also say, if your user name is not your personal name, it's a business name, but there's one person to contact. So a lot of businesses are one person businesses, but they will have a brand under which they operate. If that's the case, make sure that you're putting your actual personal name into the name section so that I know exactly who I'm talking about. So for example, mine says, Maggie Sara, even though my user name is Maggie Sara, if my user name was superstar VA, then I would definitely want to make sure that in the name section, I'm saying by the way, my name is Maggie Sara, so that when people are DMing me, they know who they're talking to. Then you want to have your description of your business and some ways to contact you. But, of course, we're going to go through this in the next lessons, but I've also included this in your course guide for reference. And now in the next lesson, we're just going to jump into Instagram and take a look around, so I will see there. 40. Set Up an Instagram Profile: So in terms of Instagram, we're just going to start off on our desktop to put in all of our details so that I can sign up as a new user. And I'm going to go through this quite quickly, and then later we'll move on to just using our phone because it's easier, and that's where the magic happens. Unfortunately, something has gone wrong with Instagram, as it does sometimes, and the original user name I wanted was not. Registered. It's not that it wasn't available. It registered it, but for some reason, it's now not letting me claim it because it says it's not available, but it's not letting me anywhere. It's a whole thing. What's likely going to happen is in a week or two, it's going to realize that the sign up process for that particular user name was never completed, and it's going to allow me to change this user name into the one I originally wanted without the underscore. Does sometimes happen because Mags realty without the underscore, if I was to go to it as with an Instagram is not available. So the user name is not actually claimed because I didn't actually complete the sign up process because there was an error. Anyways, so we're just going to go with what we have now and we can always change the user name a little bit later on. Yeah, that's the beauty of doing this that sometimes things don't always go according to ways, we're going to just update our profile photo and add in a little bit of a bio. Obviously, we don't have any sort of cover photo here. We will just update a few things on mobile, but for now. Let's just change a few things here. I'm just going to add in my bio here, which is a slight variation of what we have had on other platforms. So it'll just say, guiding you on your journey to home ownership, find out how I can help you get into your dream home sooner and then we'll go to the website. These are all things we're going to update on mobile, but for now. Let's just leave it at that. Now, just before we jump on over to our phone, I want you to make sure that where it says, show account suggestions on profiles, this setting is turned on. This is not something you can do on your phone. It has to be done on desktop. So just make sure to toggle that on, and I'm going to show you what that actually does once we're on our phone. We're here on our profile now, and we're going to go ahead and look through a few things. But first, I want to make sure that we cover why I wanted you to toggle that particular setting on. I've followed a couple of different accounts so we can have a look at how this works. Let's say we're on Procreates account here. You'll see this little person icon with a little plus next to it. What this does is, let's say I was not actually following this account. It looked like this. I'm going to go ahead and follow it. Now, a bunch of other related accounts that say suggested for you are all going to pop up because of follow this account. It's essentially going to say, because you've followed procreate, here are some other people that we think you'll like. When we toggled that show account, suggestions on profiles setting on, it means that we are now going to pop up in this recommended section for profiles that are similar to ours. If you ever want to also do this as part of your client research, but you're already following an account or you maybe don't actually want to follow an account in order to do this. You can always just click the little person plus icon, and all the suggested accounts are going to pop up for you. This is a really, really great tool for researching accounts that are related to your client's account, but also to their competitors account. You can go down a rabbit hole of researching what's working on Instagram for other people in your space. Let's go back to our profile here. The only other thing that I've added in is my name. If I go into edit profile, you've got the option to add in a name here. This is something you can only change twice in 14 days. It's something that you definitely want to make sure, like we've said before, that is something that is searchable, especially for local service based businesses. For me, as a Brisbane based buyers agent, I want to make sure my name is in there because my actual name is different from user name on Instagram. But I also want to make sure that it says Brisbane Buyers agent because this is something people would be searching for, and I want my profile to pop up when they are searching for it. Okay, let's now go back here, and we would add in our pronouns. And we can also decide whether this is something that we want to show just to our followers here or to everybody. In this case, I'm happy to show it to everyone. Then I can add in some links, so I could add in a Facebook profile or I could add in my website. And the title for this is a little bit more relevant if you have multiple links in your bio. But if you just have one, you don't necessarily need to give it a title, but we've done that. And then we don't have any banners. We can put in our gender. And then we want to make sure we are selecting the switch to professional account section. So we're going to go ahead and continue, and it's just going to give us the benefits. And then we need to make sure that we are selecting the right category. In this case, I would want to be in the category of real estate, and yes, I would want to display this on my profile. Now, in terms of which category you choose, you might not think that it's relevant or that it's important, but it does affect a few things. There are particular categories types that won't allow you to use trending music, for example. That can be a little bit annoying and if you've selected one and you're trying to find popular music tracks in your reels or in your stories, and you're not able to find popular music. It could be a country restriction, but it could also be because you've selected that you're in a particular category that doesn't allow you to use trending music. That's just something to keep in mind. Then in terms of the actual type of professional account we want, we want a business. Then I could put in some contact info. I don't even know what e mail address that is. This not a fifth email address I've ever had in my life. But anyways, we could just say, don't use my contact info for now because I don't need it to be publicly available. Then I could connect Facebook, but for now, let's just leave it at that. Then it's going to take you through a couple of steps, but really the main one we want to make sure that we have done is complete our profile. So now in the edit profile section, you'll notice there's a few additional things that we can see like our address. We can add in some action buttons if we had an ability for people to book a session with us, and we can go through and decide whether we want our category labeled on our profile and whether we want to display our contact info or not. In this case, we didn't actually add any contact info, so it's not going to allow us to display it. But this is the benefit of having a business account. If you ever want to switch your account type as well, or you want to switch to a business account from a different section, you would head on over to settings. In the four professional section, you've got business tools and controls. At the very very end, you've got switch account type. This is where you can switch to a personal account or a creator account. This is where you can also connect your Facebook page. This is where you can also add in some frequently asked questions that people might be Deming you. And do just a couple of different things. But for now, what we actually want to be going through to is where it says, how others can interact with you. If you go to tags and mentions, I would really encourage you to say, you know, everyone can tag you, but I would say manually approved tags. And the reason for this is because sometimes people will tag you in weird things, and you don't want it automatically going on your profile as a business. I would always recommend that people turn that on. And this is where you would then be able to review tags. If people had tagged you in something, you would just go into pending and then approve them, and as soon as you approve them, they'll appear on your profile in the tag section, and I'll show you where that appears in just a sec. Then you can say, everyone can mention you in their stories and in their videos. And you can just restrict a couple of different things here. But mainly I just want people. I would like more businesses to make sure that that setting is on. Then if we continue down in the app and media section, you've got archiving and downloading. This is something I would definitely change to however makes the most sense for you and whatever suits you. But generally speaking, I would like things to be archived on the account, not to my phone because otherwise, your phone can clog up especially with Instagram stories that can get really annoying. You want to make sure that things are not saving to your phone's camera, but they're saving within the app here. Then just underneath that, you've got media quality. This is where you want to make sure that upload at highest media quality is turned on because if your reels, especially ever look a little bit fuzzy, there's a chance that you have this setting turned off. You want to make sure this is definitely on so that you are always getting the best video quality for your reels. M sure that is definitely turned on. And now that we're on our profile here, this is where all of our posts will appear. Then I'll also have a separate tab for reels only, and then we'll also have a tab for any tagged posts. If you manually approve the tags, any of the posts that people have tagged you in will appear here. That's a crash course through how to set up your Instagram account. And in the next lesson, we're going to take a look at how to actually use the app. I'll see. 41. How to Use Instagram: Okay, so let's first talk about how to actually find the kind of content that's working on Instagram. Because we are not on a business account. We have a professional dashboard here that we can use for inspiration, for example. Where we can get inspired by particular reels, by types of audio or even accounts. So obviously, at the moment, we're not actually following too many accounts, so it doesn't really know what, what kind of accounts that suggest to us. It's just going based off of the fact that we are in the real estate space. So we'll look at how to actually find accounts to follow in a little bit. But for now, let's look at the audio section here where we can go to see more and see exactly what is actually trending on Instagram at the moment. You'll see these little arrows that are pointing up. And that means this is a trending audio track, and you'll also see how many reels have been created with this track. Obviously, if we look at number 17 there, it's got 2.8 million reels. Even though this is a trending track, if we create a reel with this audio track, it's probably not going to get picked up very easily because there's already so much content about it. Whereas if we look at number 20, there's only 6,000 reels with this particular audio track. That could be a good one for us to save so that we can create a reel with this audio track, which will give it a really good chance of being seen by more people if this is something that's trending on the platform and is quite popular for people to be viewing. So that's particular section. Under tips and resources, you also have the trending audio section as its own little section. But I would definitely start by exploring there. Then you actually want to go through to the explore section. Let's say for me, I would look for buyers agents. Let's say Brisbane Buyers agent and search. And now I can go to accounts. I could also search for audio, which in this case is not relevant. I could look at tags, I could look at reels around this particular keyword. But in this case, I would probably just look to accounts. So I can already see that all of these people are doing a great job of optimizing their names in their bios, where they've all putting Brisbane buyers agent into their bios. So if I'm searching for a buyers agent in Brisbane, these are all the people that I want to be looking to. So that is a great way to start with your competitor research and start going down some rabbit holes. And of course, you can also just go by their direct content as well instead of just accounts. Let's now start exploring some features that are available to us. Let's just click the Home icon, and we'll start to see a few things coming across our feed here based on what I've already followed. You can also click the Instagram icon and just sort this by your favorite. At the moment, obviously, we don't have any favorites. But if you had particular accounts the your lock, I definitely want to make sure I'm never missing an update from these particular people. We could create a favorites list, or otherwise, it's just going to be showing you basically everyone you follow and some potentially suggested accounts as well. Then you'll have the option to share a few things to your stories. So this is an ad, so probably not something I would be sharing to my stories, but let's say it is something that I want to share with my audience. So first of all, of course, I could like this. I could comment on it and share my $0.02. I could add in a gift. I could also engage with other people's comments in this section, or I could save it for later. So like we were talking about in an earlier lesson in terms of inspiration. So let's say, yes, this is an ad. I want to save it to a collection. So I'm going to create a new collection here. And it could be let's say add in SpO and save that. Or I could share it to my story or share it with another person on Instagram. I'm going to go ahead and just add that to my story here. Now, this yellow is a little bit over the top for me. So let's say I want to change that color in the back there. I could go and click the three dots in the upper right hand corner, select draw. And now I can pick from any of these colors to add to my background, or I can just click and hold and it's going to bring up this color picker. I can pick a color that's maybe a little bit more on brand for me. Then if I tap and hold the back there, it's going to allow me to change that to my beautiful brand color. And of course, I can use the other drawing tools to kind of draw on it and write on it and maybe even use any of the sticker functionality, which is this little smiling sticker over here to add in things like my location, maybe tag some other accounts. Ask my followers a question, add in some music, add in some poles, even add in a link for people to go to a website or add a countdown. There's so much that you can do with Instagram stories. So I would definitely recommend checking out some of the resources I've provided in your course guide because We would be here for years if I was to get into all these different functions, but just know that Instagram stories are really a way for you to connect with your followers and share some off the cuff content. Let's say I could say, this is really cool. And I'm just going to maybe change my font here, and then change this to a darker color, so it's a little bit more accessible. And then I can just use both of my fingers to squish this up or down to make it larger or smaller, and I can do the same thing with this post. So I'm just using two fingers to move this up and down and make it larger or smaller. And now I can just tap add to my story or I can tap the arrow to see what my options are here. So I've also got a close friends list and this can be a really nice way if any of your clients are prone to sharing a little bit too much personal content on their professional business accounts. You can say, Hey, you can just make a list of your close friends and only share really personal stuff with those people and maybe leave it from your strategy for the rest of your audience. Because sometimes clients just don't know where their boundary is. That can be a nice way to separate this out. But for now, let's just share that to our Instagram story. And you'll see at the moment, it also says add to highlight. We're not going to add it to our highlights from here because I want to show you how else we can do this. So I I just go up here and I'm just going to refresh this and go to our story. This is now live for my followers to see. Obviously, we don't have any followers, so no one's going to see it. But then what I can do is tap the ad to highlight option here. And let's say, in this case, this could be my marketing highlight, which is obviously not relevant for Mags Realty, but let's say it was I then have this on my profile here. And obviously, this actual cover image for my highlight is a little bit weird. So I could go in here and go to more, and where it says Edit Highlight, you have the option over here to edit your cover. So I could just add in a custom image if this was, for example, home decor tips or home buying tips, and I can make really nice and branded Instagram highlights covers. So your highlights can be a really great way to introduce your followers to your brand when they first come to your profile. So you could have a highlight that says, what it's like to buy with me as a buy agent. Obviously, that's a little bit too long list, so you could be like, buy with me, reviews. That could just be anytime anyone's tagged you in an Instagram story and you've shared it with your own followers. You could add it to that highlight. And that's that beautiful social proof that we keep talking about and having that nice user generated content where people are raving about your product or service and you're able to then use that to promote your services on your Instagram profile. So that's all about your stories, and of course, people can engage with your stories by sending you a follow up message. We're just giving you some reactions. If people reply to your stories or just send you a DM because of your profile, it will all appear in your DMs over here. You will have a primary tab, a general tab. You will have your request section. There will always be people who are trying to request DMU, but Instagram thinks it may be spam, so it gives it to you in the request section for you to then approve. Once you approve it, it will either move to your primary tab or general tab, depending on which one you choose. And your DMs can be a really great place for you to really engage with your followers by sending voice messages, by sending images, videos, gifts, and really just having those private conversations that you really can't have just in the comment section on any of your content publicly. Just before we go through to posting our reel, I did also want to mention that outside of your main feed, which will be a combination of reels and posts and carousels, you will also have a reels feed, which is only going to be largely your vertical real videos, but also some ads, and some people that you haven't formatted their reels exactly to the vertical format. But this is where you can just go through and see just reels. So that's a really great way to just find lots and lots of inspiration. And if you do find reels that are using those trending tracks that we talked about, you'll be able to click or tap that particular audio, and then you're going to be able to either save it from here or just tap on use audio and use it in your own real straightaway. So let's now head back to our profile and go ahead and actually post our reel. So there will always be a few different ways to do this. But in this case, we're just going to tap on the plus icon. And then we have the option to create a post a story, a real, or even go live. So this can be a nice way for you to actually practice going live without the intimidation of going live as well because you can just do a practice run here. Instead of going live to everyone, you could also go live to just close friends or just do an actual practice round. Doing it with close friends could be a really interesting option because you could have a friend jump on and ask you questions so you can practice how this goes in lifetime. But then whenever you're ready to go live, you would essentially just say, I'm going to go live. So of course, this is a practice round. And then this will then take you through steps of how to actually utilize the live option. So I'll say, you know, manage, see who's watching, invite people to join you, view questions, add filters, and view requests from your audience to join your live video. So this is a really, really neat option. Then we can go ahead and end that. And in this case, let's go ahead and discard our video. All right. So that's all about going live, and now let's go ahead and go to Reels, and just select the reel that we created within Camber and go next. And in this case, we want to use all of it, so I'm just going to go ahead and click next. Now, in this case, we could go ahead and just edit the video, where we can add some audio, add some text, add in some additional clips, some stickers, voiceovers, and all of that. So reels can get a little bit more complicated in terms of, you know, content format. So I've added some extra resources to your course guide on this, of course. For now, let's just keep it simple and learn how to actually just post our reels, so we're going to tap next. And in this case, we're just going to go ahead and add in a quick caption. But you'll notice we also have the option there to add a poll, so that could be great for engagement, where we could ask our followers to kind of give us their $0.02 about something that we're really curious about, but in this case, we're just going to leave the caption as is. And you'll notice I've also got a video description there. So that's just one of those nice accessibility features that we want to make sure we are doing. I haven't added in any hash tags because I'm doing this for a demo account as a demo real, and my account is public. So I don't actually want this reel to be super discoverable because it's not really designed to convert or anything. So I'm not going to be adding in any hashtags, but if I had them, I could add them there. And then I could go to edit my cover. So I could just select a cover from my reel. And then if I head on over to your profile grid, it will show me how it'll appear on my profile. So obviously, this doesn't make a whole lot of sense in terms of the text that's appearing. So I could just grab this image and move it down a little bit so that the text appears exactly how I want it, and then click on Done or tap on Done. And then I'm happy to share that to my feed. I don't need to tag people. I'm not going to add in a location at this stage or any products or a message button. Or any topics, but I could add in topics around real estate. And I don't need to rename my audio because there isn't any audio. But I've got a few different options here, including recommend on Facebook. So you won't always have this function, but it's a good idea to turn this on whenever you can. So obviously, for now, I'm going to leave this turned off because once again, I don't really want people seeing this real. But it's a really great way to just get a little bit more mileage out of your content. It won't actually post it on Facebook through your Facebook page. It will remain a part of your Instagram profile, but it will get recommended on Facebook, and then people will be able to visit your Instagram profile if they see it. Then in advanced settings is where you can also schedule this reel. If you didn't want it to go live straightaway, you could add in some captions, and then you also have the option to upload at highest quality. So if you didn't turn this on before, you can turn it on now and make sure that you are uploading the most high quality videos for your reels. So we're going to go ahead and share that, and that's now live, and it's going to look like this one it's coming across someone's feed here. And I've got my caption here, and then on my profile. It's going to be here, and it's also going to be in this section over here. So ale bit of a glitch because technically, yes, all the text that I wanted to appear in my real is appearing on my profile. But maybe it's a little bit cut off. Now, does this matter to me? It may not. Maybe my content strategy is lo fi content. I don't really mind that it's a little bit messy because I just wanted to be nice enough for people to just tap into it and view the real. But let's say I messed it up and I want to edit it a little bit. I can tap on the three dots here and go to edit. And then I could change my cover over here. So if I didn't really like what it's done, I could actually just go to add from camera roll, and this is just a separate image that I created of the same reel, where I only have a little bit of text on the image, and maybe I'll change that. I could also edit the caption. I could edit, who I've tagged, products I've tagged. Sometimes, look, we just make mistakes, and we need the chance to be able to edit those mistakes. So just know that it's not set in stone. If you feel like it didn't work out the first time around, you can go in and edit it, and maybe that looks a little bit better because now the little Reels icon is not covering my text, or maybe I didn't mind the first version, but either way, just know that you can always edit what you've done. That's a crash course through Instagram. Of course, more resources in your course guide because this is just scratching the surface as it is for every platform. But hopefully you enjoyed that. And in the next lesson, we're going to start getting to know Pittes, so I'll see it there. 42. Pinterest for Beginners: I'm a sucker for a beautiful Pinterest pin, but it wasn't really until I started working as a social media manager that I realized the power of this beautiful platform when it comes to business. And that is just because of two things. So first of all, Pinterest is a search engine. It's not a social media network. People aren't there to engage with each other and fight about current events in the comments. That's just not what it's for. I mean, sometimes people will comment on pins, but it's very rare, and it's usually like, Hey, nice pin. So That's the first thing. And the second reason that Pinterest is so powerful is because unlike every other social network, its intent is to get you to an external site. Every time you click on a pin, it's going to lead to a website. That is huge because lots of other social networks make it very hard or might even bury your content and prevent it from being seen if you're constantly linking to external sites, because their goal is to keep you on that platform, not to get you to go to external websites. So it's so key for clients who are maybe wanting to increase the traffic to their website. And that's especially true for product based businesses. So there's a lot of potential to this platform because of those two key points. And if you have overlooked it previously, I would definitely encourage you to at least come and take a look around and understand the power of it. Alright, so let's look at some demographics starting with our total users here. But if we were looking at monthly active users, Genz are actually taking over pinterest by making out 42% of Pinterest, monthly active users, which is huge. And of course, it's also worth noting that 69.4% of users on this platform are women. Is very different to the other social platforms, which are very male dominated generally. And looking at some additional stats here, so eight out of ten moms use pinterest in the US. So if moms are a key demographic for your client, especially if they're based in the US, then pinterest could be key. 85% of Pinterest users visit the platform when starting a new project. Eight out of ten people say Pinterest is a positive online space. And that is important because lots of other social networks can be a bit volatile on this front. Say the least, but people really expect to come to Pinterest to feel good about themselves. They're not here to get the news or see what's been going on. They're just here to feel inspired and great. 96% of Pinterest hop searches are unbranded, which is huge as well because you can pop up in front of people who are searching for what you have to offer, even if maybe you weren't the brand they were initially searching for. 52% of pinters users use the app to learn more about drinks and food. And Pins have an average three month lifespan, but I'd actually argue it's much more than this. My own account still sees thousands of visitors every month, and I haven't posted on Pinterest in years. Then 47% of users spend time finding products and shopping on the platform, and one in three printers shoppers have an average annual income of $100,000 or more. Makes sense since Pinterest is the number one destination for luxury shopping inspiration. Lastly, 50% of Pinterest users see the platform as a shopping destination, which means that half of the people on Pinterest are there to shop. It's a huge opportunity for your e commerce clients. What all of this tells us is that unlike other social platforms where people are there to pass the time or for entertainment, People on Pinterest are there to find something. That also means they're much more likely to convert into buyers when they actually find the thing they're looking for. It's also a huge untapped market for marketing efforts since only 28% of marketers are focusing on pinterest, but with a three month average lifespan of content or even longer, this could be a huge opportunity for businesses that have a largely female audience. Now in terms of the types of content that do well in pinterest, it's really varied. You'll have image only pins which are common for DIY tutorials or for products like clothes. Then you'll have pins with rich text titles because they lead to helpful articles or how to guides. These will also often have logos and websites shown directly on the pin. But no matter what your pin looks like, the important thing is just to have a beautiful pin accompanied by a really clear pin title. Description that is ideally full of keywords of things that someone might be searching for on pinterest that's relevant to the pin that you've created. Remember that Pinterest is a search engine, and it's not actually all that common for people to follow individual accounts on Pinterest. Most of your audience will be people who are just searching for topics you create content around. So give Pinterest a little bit of help by telling it what your pin is about. Now, finally, you also find Pinterest to be a gold mine for shoppable pins like this one here, which will allow people to find some inspiration through Pinterest and purchase straightaway. All right, that's a little bit on Pinterest. And now the next lesson, we're going to jump into the platform and take a look around, so I will see 43. Set Up Your Pinterest Account: Okay, so let's get started with signing up to Pinterest. We're just going to create a password. All right. So we're going to go next and our language. What are we interested in? Sure, home decor, interior design. Anything real estate, let's say, photography, at door living, design. Yeah. Let's just keep it at things that are related to this industry. And let's go and customize our account. So we want to make sure we're converting this to a business account so that we have the most of our analytics available to us. We are a services provider. What are my business goals? Say generate more leads, and grow brand awareness. Let's say home. I might be interested in advertising. Sure. I'm just going to say, let's build our profile so we can update the look and feel of interest and put in a bit of a bio. Let's add in our pronouns, and update our user name. Cool. We're going to save that. So that's the basics, and then we want to go over to our profile, and we can add a bit of a cover image here. So this doesn't have to be perfect at this stage. I'm going to include all the dimensions in your course guide, of course, so you know exactly what the dimensions are. But in this case, let's actually just use our Facebook cover because the dimensions are relatively similar, and I think it'll work for our use here. So that looks really quite nice. And that's our profile beautifully set up. 44. How to Use Pinterest: So let's dive into the amazing world of Pinterest. So I've got the Four section and the Explorer section in my home feed, just like you would on other platforms. You can also just search for things. So I just search for work from home lounge ware, so we can take a look at what you will actually see when you search on Pinterest. Something you will probably notice is that Pinterest is full of largely vertical images with the exception of maybe shoppable pins. So pins that you will notice have some items that you can search for and buy will sometimes be in square image formats, but otherwise, pins will largely be nice, beautiful, vertical images or videos. And because Pinterest is a search engine, it's not a social media platform. You want to make sure that your titles of your pins are keyword optimized. So work from home outfit ideas for women. That's definitely something people would be searching for on Pinterest or on Google, in which case, Pinterest would also pop up if people are searching for it on Google. And then you also want to include some of these kind of keywords in your description. So this description is a little bit brief. Perhaps they could have done a little bit more with it by saying, work from home ideas for mom, work from home ideas for women. Either way, you just want to think about what are people searching for, and how can you add that to either the title of your pin or your description? And then ideally, you also want to make sure you're adding a call to action for people to click through, find out more, something like that so that people know what you want them to do next. That could also include for them to save the pin. Which brings me to my next point. So once you've got a pin that you like, your option is then to save it. So you will have some boards on Pinterest at the moment. We don't have any because we've just created a blank account, but in this case, let's say this board could be work from home. And that's a board I could create. And now you'll see anytime I hover over any pin, it's going to tell me, do I want to save it to this particular board, or do I want to save it to additional boards that I could create here? So I can continue to save pins to particular boards. So now if I head on over to my profile, I will see this in my saved section. I've got a board here. I could edit this board and make it a secret board if I wanted to just have this as research. This is really handy, especially if you're doing research for clients on your own Pinterest account. Let's say you're creating a demo account like this one, but you want to actually save some stuff because you are collecting ideas for a particular client, but it doesn't fit with your aesthetics. For example, work from Home doesn't really fit with Meg's realty. But I still want to use this account to do some research for. Let's say a client that is an e commerce brand for work from Home apparel or loungewear apparel. So that's where secret boards can really come in handy. So you can see this lock here. It just means that no one else will be able to see this on my profile except for me, but I can still add content to this board. Further research. Pinterest is a little bit more unique than other social networks in terms of you sharing content because largely you're going to be sharing other people's content, and of course, sharing your own original content as well. But that is very different from other social networks where it's primarily your own content, and if you are sharing other people's content, it would be in things like stories rather than on your own profile. What this means is that your actual analytics on Pinterest might be a little bit skewed. Looking at a live account here from Janet ocher, she's got 88,000 followers in 3 million monthly views. Now, I don't know how much of that 3 million is her own content versus other people's content, but I think it's safe to say that a really large chunk of it is going to be pins that she has shared that are not her own original content that's going to her own website. That's okay. That is a part of your social media strategy on Pinterest is to share other people's content that's complimentary to your own. So Jenna Coer has created different boards. She's got one for small business, for probably starting a business, tips for creatives, tips for probably female entrepreneurs, that's got 8,000 pins. Pinterest is obviously a really big part of her strategy, and because she's got a very unique style for her pins, which is this kind of orange, yellow, kind of vibe. You can see that boards like this one have a mix of other people's pins and also her own pins. What that means is that if somebody follows her account because they came across a couple of pins in a particular board that they really like, it means that they're going to see the pins that she's sharing from other creators, but they're also going to come across her own pins. So that's why it is really valuable to continue sharing stuff from other creators and not just creating your own original content on Pinters. Sort of leveraging other people's authority in this way because you're providing a helpful service in a way by creating these collections or boards of content that your audience will like, that's really complimentary to your own content. So anytime you're in someone's board like this or just searching around on Pinterest, and then you find pins that you like, of course, you can save them to your own boards, and you can do that from within Pinterest, of course, but you can also do this from outside of Pinterest. To do this, you can use the save to Pinterest chrome extension. So once you have it activated in you're on a website like the one from Studio McGee here, anytime you have or over an image like this one. It's going to have the little Pines save icon there that will allow you to share it to Pinterest. So you can just head on over to the image there and say, e, we want to share it to, let's say, in this case, the Secret Board. And then we can head on over and see it now. And that has now been saved to our Pinterest profile. And it's also linked to the original Pinterest creator, which is Studio McGee. You can do this from anywhere pretty much around the Internet that there are images for you to share. So the Pinterest save icon can be really great for that. Now, of course, this image is not entirely optimized for pinterest because it's a horizontal image, and we would prefer for it to be a nice vertical image, but just so you know that that is absolutely an option and a strategy for Pinterest. And while we've got Studio McGee here, I am just going to show you that some pinterest accounts, especially, these guys are prime pinterest real estate because this is the kind of content that does really well on this platform. Their pins are really clean. They actually have minimal sometimes no text on them whatsoever. They're just photographs or just clean videos. So that's always an option if you're working with a client that has beautiful visuals. You don't necessarily always have to add your own text unless it's appropriate to do so. But now we can go ahead and just create our own pin by going up here and looking at the organic create pin section. So we're just going to pull this one from Cava that we've created earlier, and we're just going to download this one as an MP four. And we're just going to drag it in here and start optimizing a few things here, so I'm just going to make this first time home buyer mistakes as our title. Our description is keyword rich, so things costly mistakes to avoid as a first time home buyer. Are you a first time home buyer in Brisbane, which is also key. So if people are looking for home buyer tips in Brisbane, read this before buying your first home, so that's our code to action. These tips will save you so much time and money, so that's a little bit of urgency. And then we want to make sure there's a link. So this is going to be Mags real t.com. T home buyer. And it's going to be safe to our work from home board for the time being because it doesn't really matter, but we could create a new board. So this could be first time home buyer tips, and we could just keep that secret for now, as well. And then let's look for some tags here. Real estate. Not everything that you would want to have as a tag will be there, if you have done your job of adding some keywords here, the tags are not super super necessary. Then in terms of videos, you may want to edit the cover. In this case, it doesn't hugely matter because the video itself is kind of just a looping video, and they're all relatively n. But if you have a video where maybe it's some on camera, and you don't want them looking awkward because Pinterest is such a visual, beautiful platform, and not everyone has the autoplay function turned on. You want to make sure that the cover is perfect for what you want, and it looks nice. And then we are going to allow people to comment, and we're not going to be publishing this at a later date, but you could also schedule this if you wanted to. So we're just going to go ahead and publish that and so we can have a look at it on our Now if we head on over to our profile, we'll see it in the saved section. We won't see it in the created section because it's safe to a secret board at the moment. But if that was a publicly available board, then it would be there. But yeah, this is our pin. It's going to autoplay once it's in somebody's feed, but of course, it is saved to a secret board at the moment, so it wouldn't actually be publicly searchable. That's pretty much it. If you did have issues with a pin after it's already gone live, you can edit it in terms of the link, the description, or you can go ahead and delete it. Sometimes, you know, things happen. The wrong videos go out, and the wrong things happen, so you can always edit it once it's gone live. But I would really recommend that you spend a little bit of time both on the Pinterest desktop app and also on the mobile app and get to know what's going on on Pinterest, what's trending, what are people doing to share content on the platform, what kind of contents doing really well, and what are people doing to grow their accounts in terms. Board strategies and things like that, because it is quite a unique social network search engine, not really a social network, as we talked about, but it is quite a unique platform, I should say. So definitely go and browse and test a few things out because you can do secret boards. So no one's actually going to see the content that you're putting out there. So definitely definitely spend some time on the platform creating, and I will see you in the next lesson. 45. TikTok for Beginners: So as you might expect, the younger demographics are most prominent on TikTok, but older age groups are definitely coming to the platform a lot more now, as well, especially for passive entertainment, and to see what's trending out there. So let's look at some stats here. Users spend an average of 95 minutes per day on the TikTok app, which is three times as much as we've seen with the lacks of Instagram and Facebook, so that's huge for opportunities to captivate your audience's attention. According to a study, one in ten Gen Zers are more likely to rely on TikTok than Google, and lots of people use it for all kinds of research because of this. A lot of the Gen Zers are using it as their initial research stages for trips, and for product research, et cetera. Among social media marketers who build communities, 28% say that TikTok is the most effective platform for building an active community on social media. That's really cool, but I will say that TikTok has its own vibe when it comes to community building. It has what seems like it's its own language where MGs will mean something that you're not quite familiar with from other platforms and certain slang gets run around a lot. It can be a bit intimidating for people who aren't super familiar with it, but when it's leveraged correctly, it can be so so powerful. Users are 1.8 times more likely to agree that TikTok introduces them to new topics they didn't even know they liked. This is definitely one of the reasons people love TikTok over other platforms because it doesn't just show you more of what you've engaged with in the past. It actually tries to predict what you might want to engage with in the future and introduce you to new trends and new topics. The 67% of female shoppers on TikTok rely on creator recommendations before making a purchase, which could be huge for influence or marketing on the platform, and adds on TikTok viewed for less than 6 seconds produce a stronger impact compared to ads viewed for 20 seconds or more. The key there is shorter ads that have the main message within the first three to 6 seconds will be much more likely to be successful on the platform. What all of this tells us is that quick engaging content does well on this platform, but people are also spending a lot of time per day on TikTok. If your content resonates with them, they can go in and binge all of your older content as well. The engagement rates on TikTok are still incredibly high, so there's lots of opportunity for brands and marketers to leverage the power of this platform, to captivate, especially younger audiences who are currently in the stage of actually developing that brand loyalty for life potentially. They're also generally quite good at spreading the word of mouth. I don't know how much time you've personally spent with the Gens ears, but I found personally that they're amazing at shouting it from the rooftops when there's particular brands they love. Now let's talk about how to best utilize TikTok. Even though TikTok does allow for other formats, it's best to shoot in the nine by 16 vertical format and design videos to be played with the sound on. It's also great to see people using the native TikTok features like text, trending effects, and sounds because it makes people feel like you're really creating content that's purpose built for TikTok. It's important to also remember that unpolished human content with people just speaking directly to the camera with no makeup on, can do just as well as elaborate stunts and super coordinated dance routines that take people hours and hours to get right. Then you also want to make sure you're choosing applicable cover image and using hashtags to improve discoverability. Like we already talked about, you want to make sure you're reeling people in within the first couple of seconds. But because TikTok allows for much longer videos now, it's really great for you to test out different video lengths to see what actually performs best for your brand instead of just assuming that shorter content is going to be it for you. The important thing with TikTok is that it does require an incredibly tailored content strategy. For example, if you were to look at the Washington Post YouTube channel, you would see that lots of serious news about the war, conflicts, and politics are being portrayed there. But then if you head on over to their TikTok account, you will see serious topics, but being covered in a way that works best for this platform like this one about climate change. That's one business, but two very different approaches as to how to cover these types of topics. Another example is Chipotle. A brand that has done incredible things on TikTok in terms of not just their own content, but also in involving customers in creating content for them. Example here of the Guac dance challenge was a way for people to dance along to the Guacamole song in order of National Avocado day on July 31, and Gapo saw a 65% increase in Guacamole orders as a result of this one challenge. The Hashtag Guac dance currently has over 1 billion views. It's really cool to see brands leveraging this power of community on TikTok. I know sometimes it can feel really overwhelming to start on TikTok, especially if you have these preconceived notions that it's just a platform for people to dance to popular songs. But it's important to remember that all kinds of content does well on this platform. Here's a video by Sim from girls that invest, where she's just sharing the most influential books that she's read and it got 2.1 million views and thousands of likes and comments and shares, and inevitably also probably inquiries into her business, and it's only a few seconds of her doing her make paired with a trending song in the background. It's important to just not get too overwhelmed with this, and it's okay to start really simple. Now I'll see in the next lesson where we're going to start getting you set up on Tik Top. 46. Set Up Your TikTok Account: So, to get started with TikTok, I'm just going to go through a few things a little bit fast here because you don't need to sit through the boring verification stuff. This is how we would get set up on the app and put in our user names. It's going to be Meg's realty. And then on our profile, we can head to edit profile, change photo, upload photo, and add in our logo as the very first thing we do. Once that's done, we can then go through changing things like our name, our user name. At this stage, we can't change your name because we've just changed it. But if you wanted to update that in the future, you could, then you can do things like adding your pronouns, which might be useful, especially if you're the main person that people contact through the account, and then you can add a little bit of a bio. It's not letting me paste in my bios. I'm just going to type it in quickly. And we're just going to keep it really nice and simple like this here because we only have the limited number of characters on TikTok, and then we could add in things like our Instagram, our YouTube, et cetera. But for now, we're just going to leave it at that. Now, if we go over to the three lines in the upper right hand corner and go on over to account, we can then go to switch to business account. This can be really useful for your clients, but there are lots of hoops to jump through on TikTok in terms of business accounts, unfortunately. This is especially if people want to sell any products on TikTok, it's going to require some information from you in terms of uploading business documents after you're done going through these steps that I'm going through right now. It does depend on which country you're registered in as to what documents you need to upload. But it's generally quite quick with verifying you as a business. It just means you have to actually upload some business documents eventually once you're past the trial period. You will have access to the business suite. That's where you can go through things like your analytics, and you've got access to a few additional things that are going to be really handy for you or your clients as business owners. Not going to go through all of them now, but I will link you to some resources, but eventually you'll have to complete that business registration, of course. 47. How to Use TikTok: So let's go ahead and get to know TikTok. Before we head into how to find inspiration on TikTok and how the platform works. I did just want to point out if we head on over to edit profile that we now have some business information options here that we didn't have before. So we can add in things like our website here. We could also add in some action buttons, and add in our business details, our address, our phone number, et cetera. So that's quite cool, but really for now, we're quite happy to just leave it at that. But it's cool that we were able to add a bit of a link. Now, you'll also notice it's got a prompt for TikTok Studio. You can either do this from within TikTok itself to see what's trending. Where you've got creation inspirations, you could just go to view O. And see what's recommended or what's trending, and then we could go by different topics here, depending on what we're looking for. We can go by country. We can also narrow this down by creators instead of posts. So that's a really nice way to kind of start going down some rabbit holes, but there is a bit more of a tailored way to do this so that you're only looking at the types of creators that you're actually interested in based on the areas that you're looking to create content around. But TikTok Studio does also have its own app where you can go down these same rabbit holes and also use it to create your content and check your analytics, just so you know that TikTok does now have a separate app for that as well. But instead of going through just sort of general trending content, I would recommend that you go to home, and then you go through the actual explore section. Let's say we say Brisbane buyers agent, and we've got sort top content here. We've got just general TikTok that they're creating around this topic. We've got particular accounts that are utilizing this. We've got photos that we can look through. We can see if there are any lives happening around this particular topic. This is going to be a bit of hit or miss though because this is not a generally super popular topic. So it may not necessarily be about this in terms of what lives appear here. TikTok might just be giving me any lives. And then, of course, we can look through different sounds, different places, different hash tags as well. So this can be great for our research if we're looking for hashtags that we might want to add to our TikTok. Can see which ones are being used on the platform, so we can start to make some collections of our own. But this is a really great way for you to really do some in depth research on particular topics. Let's go back home here so we can have a look at how TikTok is laid out. Here we are on our four page or our four U feed. So this is essentially just going to be any content that TikTok thinks I will like. And then I've also got a section for following. So at the moment, we're not really following anyone, so I don't have anything here, but if I was following particular creators, then of course, I would see their content here, and then I also have a section for Lives. So, this can be really great if going live is a strategy that your clients are willing to experiment with. You can actually just go ahead and attend a whole bunch of lives so that you can really see how people are doing it, what's working for people in the comments, et cetera, et cetera. So I would definitely recommend just exploring the platform, just like you will with all the other social media networks and getting to know, what's really resonating with people in the comments. How are people formatting their videos, what hash sags are they using, what are they putting in their captions, et cetera, et cetera. Then in terms of particular videos, like you've got this one here, you can go to the individual creators profile by tapping on their little profile icon, and this will allow you to essentially go through and binge all of their content by just full screening one video. And then when you scroll through, it will just show you that particular creator's content, and maybe some ads occasionally. But otherwise, this will allow you to really, really go in serious depth in each of the creators content. Then, of course, you could follow them, you could message them. O in this case, you could also go to their YouTube channel or write them an e mail. Then you also have the option to like the TikTok or comment on it. You could also share it to other platforms or save it from here, or you could save it to your favorites. So we can go to manage, and this could be just sort of test collection, and we don't want to make that public. We just want that to be sort of private on our profile. Maybe we're just doing some research for our client in this case. We could also tap this little icon on the bottom right hand corner and see what sound they're using. If they're using any popular tracks here, we would then be able to add it to our favorites just like we are able to do on Instagram, and we could add that to our story or use the sound in our own TikTok. Then we also have a tab for our friends, which we don't have any friends at the moment. O that sounds so sad. We have friends, but we haven't added any friends to TikTok. So there's nothing there. And then we also have our inbox, which again, we haven't really gone down that path yet, so we don't have anything there. And then we just have our general profile here. On our profile, we'll then be able to see any collections that we create. The moment we've saved this particular TikTok, so we can start to go down that path of just content collection. And then before we go through to creating, one thing I did also want to share with you, which is a little bit TikTok specific, which is these little footprints in the upper right hand corner, which is your profile views. So I'm going to turn that on. But essentially, if this is turned on, it'll tell you that you can see who's viewed your profile in the past 30 days. But it's only relevant for people who also have this setting turned on on their profile. So if someone's on your profile, but they don't have this turned on, you won't be able to see it. Now, I don't particularly like this setting. I don't like it on Linked in. I don't like it on TikTok, but it's up to you whether you want to keep this turned on. I prefer to turn it off, but a council often have this enabled by default. So just make sure that whatever setting you're most comfortable with is set there. Alright, so let's now go ahead and create our TikTok. So we have the option to share a photo. Or just actually create our TikTok video directly within here. It can be 15 seconds, 60 seconds or up to 10 minutes. So it doesn't necessarily have to be the maximum here. It would just be up to 10 minutes, that we could just shoot directly from within TikTok, or of course, we can upload our own. And that can either be a TikTok or in this case, it would sort of say post, or it can also be a story as well. But in this case, let's go ahead and actually select post, and we're going to be uploading our own video here, and we're just going to upload the same video that we did for Instagram. So I could just squish this down a little bit to make sure that it fits, and then I would just go to next. And now I've got some options in the right hand side bar here, like my settings here. So this is sort of saying, you know, who can view this post? Is it just me? Is it friends? Is it everyone? You can also change this afterward. So if I select everyone, but I want to make it private or vice versa, we can do that afterwards. We can also decide whether we want comments to be allowed or not allowed. We can allow others to add this to their story. We can also go through, you know, and disclose things like, is it AI generated content? Very similar to Instagram on that front. Then we have the option to edit a few things like our audio track here. We could also add in some texts, some effects, overlays, and do a few different edits if we didn't already do this within Camber like we have for this particular video. Then this is where we could play around with a few sort of more advanced animation templates. But in this case, it's not super relevant for this particular video. We could add in some text here. We could add in some stickers, we could play around with some effects. But because this was not actually a video where I'm on camera, it's maybe not all that relevant, but we could also add in our voiceover, we could add in captions. And you'll also notice that it has sort of naturally added in a sound for me. And it's just kind of gone with a random sound because TikTok is always going to try to put some sort of music track in the background of your TikTok because that's just what does well on the platform. You can remove this, but, of course, TikTok without any sound are probably not going to do as well on the platform. You could just select from what's in here, you could search through what's popular, what's sort of trending at the moment. But for now, let's just go ahead and remove this because we're not super fussed about obviously this going viral or even really being seen by too many people. And we could still add this just to our story, or in this case, we could just go next, so we can add in our caption here. We're just going to paste in a little bit of a caption with some hashtags. So it's just a much shorter version of what we put in on Instagram because that's just sort of more optimized for TikTok and just a couple of hashtags there. We could also mention somebody if we were talking about a particular brand, but we're not in this case. I wouldn't want to add in a location or links, and we're happy to just leave this on. Everyone can view this post. We want to make sure that it's allowing for high quality uploads here just like we did on Instagram, and we can also make sure that this saves to our device, or we could turn that off if that's not super important to us. I would say, yes, I accept the music usage confirmation, even though this doesn't actually have any music to it, and we can go ahead and post them. This is how that'll look on my profile when somebody comes across it, and then they can tap into the caption to view a little bit more and add in some comments or interact with me there. Like I said, you can always change the privacy settings here even after it's posted, or you could tap on the three dots here, and you could do things like pin this to your profile so that any other TikToks that you post will sort of come underneath this. If this was the most important tiktok that I wanted to make sure is prominent on my profile, then the rest of them would sort of follow, but this would be the first one that somebody would see when coming across my profile. This is sort of a crash course through TikTok. And as with every platform, there are amazing YouTube tutorials out there that will always be keeping you up to date with the best practices on growing on TikTok, how to grow your followers, how to create the best kind of content for your particular industry. So as always, I want to encourage you to do more learning past this course on this topic. But hopefully you found that helpful. Okay, so what's quite interesting is that 24 hours after I posted this TikTok, it's actually got 579 views, which is quite funny because this is not optimized for views at all. It has no music in the background, and it's sort of just a dummy post. But that just goes to show that you absolutely can get some traction on content with even a brand new account on TikTok. So hopefully, you enjoyed that lesson, and in the next one, we're going to start diving into the exciting world of YouTube. So I'll see 48. YouTube for Beginners: YouTube is the second most visited website in the world after Google and it's owned by Google. So it's an incredible resource, but not a lot of people are using it for business, anyways. There's a lot of YouTubers, you know, creators, but businesses, especially smaller businesses, often still don't understand the power of YouTube, and that just comes down to the fact that creating content on YouTube is very difficult. It's the longest process out of any platform, but it's also the most powerful if it's leveraged correctly. But I just want you to keep in mind that it may never be part of your job description to manage YouTube in any way shape or form for your clients. And that's totally fine. There are usually, you know, YouTube specialists that help with script writing for YouTube videos, video editors, YouTube strategists, thumbnail designers, and everyone in between, there's so many different jobs that go into YouTube and managing YouTube accounts that don't evolve social media managers. But if your clients have a YouTube account, or you think that based on what you learned here, they maybe should explore this as a content strategy for their business, then you'll be equipped with the knowledge to be able to help them with that, or at least help to support them with their YouTube strategy. So hopefully, you find it helpful, and let's have some fun. So let's look at our breakdown here. Well, pretty much everyone is on YouTube because it's a place to search for answers, but also to spend a great deal of time watching content from our favorite brands and going down some weird, weird rabbit holes. So it's no wonder that it's pretty much popular with every demographic. Looking at some additional stats here, 2 billion users from over 100 countries are consuming content in 80 different languages on this platform. Some creators are actually making dedicated channels for their international audiences like Gary V has done with his Spanish and Chinese channel here, but he also has a channel in French and other languages. It's a very clever way to capture international audiences. What's even more interesting is that 54% of people said that they follow a creator who creates videos in language other than their own. So there's a lot of potential here for brands with global audiences. 70% of viewers have said that they bought from a brand after seeing their content on YouTube. 68% of Gen Zs say that YouTube has helped them improve or gain skills that will help prepare them for the future. So that's really, really big for any educational channels aimed at this demographic. Surprisingly, most of our users are on mobile devices, and 85% of children a to 12 are regular YouTube viewers, which is kind of a terrifying stant, but maybe worthwhile for brands looking to target this demographic through probably more so brand sponsorships rather than ads. According to a study, YouTube is the best platform for authentic and beneficial influencer content, and more raw unfiltered content is seeing traction than ever before as a result of this. Again, is great news if your clients don't have big budgets. And it's the perfect platform for both Lung form and short form content, which is great for educational content, which sort of has to be condensed into shorter clips on other platforms, where you've got 30, 60 seconds to say what you need to say. But on YouTube, you can still do that with YouTube shorts as almost a teaser, but then you could post an hour long interview or a podcast episode on your channel as well. So YouTube is a little bit tricky because yes, it is a search engine, but it is also very much a social network. There's so much content being consumed on YouTube based on people's recommendations, not just as a result of searches. There really is room for everyone on this platform. But let's go ahead and just talk about a few key things to remember with YouTube. First of all, you want to make sure you're focusing on one area of expertise. Often, you'll see channels with flogs and podcast episodes and lifestyle content and gaming all in one channel. That really confuses YouTube and it makes it quite hard for the platform to understand what your area of expertise is. When you create a new video on a vegan curry recipe, the platform won't show your content as much as it will show someone else's whose channel is all about vegan cooking. Also want to make sure that you're spending a bit of time understanding how to make clickable thumbnails and clear video titles. Now, that does come with practice by studying your data and seeing what's resonating with your audience for sure. But there's also some channels that have great information on this if you're starting from scratch. Just like with every other platform, you want to make sure you're capturing people's attention quickly. So videos that catch your audience's attention within the first 10 seconds will have a much higher success rate. So don't be spending time at the beginning with fluff and asking people to subscribe and saying who you are and why they're there. Get straight into the video as quickly as possible. Think about what your audience actually wants to watch, not what you want to create. I see a lot of people creating stuff that they enjoy without thinking if it's something that other people are also interested in. You also want to make sure you're setting realistic expectations about your posting schedule. You'll see people like Latasha here saying that they'll be posting videos multiple times a week on their channel. I think that's great if you can keep up with it, but honestly, it can be quite intimidating and lead to create or burnout more often than not. Consistency is great, but you're better off to focus on less higher quality in depth content than just pure volume on YouTube. Consistency can also mean posting once a month or once a fortnight. Just figure out what is actually achievable for you and for your client and just do that. It doesn't necessarily need to be weekly. And just like with everything, you just want to get 1% better with each video. No radically better, just 1%, because 1% over several years of doing videos will add up to make a huge difference. You also want to make sure you are promoting your paid offers on YouTube. It's a big mistake to not actually try to make money from YouTube beyond just ad revenue. Ad revenue really isn't much. Make sure you're getting people off of YouTube and onto your e mail list or booking a call for your service. The beauty of YouTube is that it's filled with tutorials on how you can succeed on the platform from people who have already done it. So you absolutely should be learning how to do YouTube from YouTube. There are definitely things that you and your client will have to do in this space, but there's so much stuff that can be outsourced to other people who charge potentially less than you do. Don't be afraid to outsource parts of this if it'll help you get more content out there faster. Let's look at a few examples. This is Brian Dean, and this is what his channel looked like when he had just posted his first 45 videos, which got him to 471,000 subscribers. His 45 videos got him hundreds of thousands, if not several million views because they were so incredibly valuable to his audience that were searching for these topics. But also a fair disclaimer that these are very popular topics to be searching for in the marketing world, but he was creating really high quality targeted videos for this audience, which is what led to his success. Whereas topics like social anxiety and confidence are less frequently searched, which is why Mike from social confidence Master At this point of his channel, had more videos than Brian Deane, but his videos had a much lower view count. That said, because these are super specific terms, and Mike sells a coaching program that he promotes through these videos, just one viewer might be worth several thousand dollar to him because they're so much more likely to convert from a viewer into buyer because this is such a niche topic. There are people on YouTube who have seen great success just by creating funny and engaging content, that may not be the stuff that people are necessarily searching for, but will get recommended to people while they're browsing on YouTube. You absolutely can see success on YouTube if you have a faceless channel. If the value is there, that's really all that's go to matter to your audience. Now, as with anything in the online world, the more effort you put into something, generally speaking, the better your return on investment. When you consider the amount of work that goes into creating one post on X or on Instagram versus one YouTube video, it's a no brainer that YouTube has better results. Now that being said, I've spent a lot of time on some videos that didn't get me anywhere at all, and that's just the name of the game. But this particular video has over 80,000 views, and it's still getting thousands of views every month. Six years after it's gone live. I'm a big advocate for testing out YouTube content for businesses if it's within the client's budget to do it. Like I said at the beginning, the reason I'm so passionate about YouTube as a topic is because there are so many opportunities for work as a freelancer. One YouTube channel might have a strategist, a designer, an editor, and maybe five other specific, potentially even full time roles for bigger channels who all work together as a team to get regular high quality content out for a creator. Of course, for smaller channels, this might just be one or two people, but YouTube can have such a great conversion rate for even smaller businesses that have valuable stuff to share with their audience, while. They're already searching for answers to their questions, and then if your client's video pops up that answers that question, it's a no brainer for them to then look into their actual paid services as well. And now in the next lesson, we're going to jump into YouTube and take a look around. So I'll see that. 49. How to Use YouTube: So in terms of YouTube, all you need is a G mail account. Once you have one, you'll be able to just go to YouTube, and it's going to automatically give you a YouTube channel. Even if you're not soup or using it for anything, effectively, you know, whatever profile photo you have attached to this YouTube channel is what's going to appear when you comment on people's stuff, and then you've got an automatic user name that you may want to change or your handle rather. So obviously, my channel, fake channel. Is a bit confusing. I have used it for demo purposes to showcase what it's like to make YouTube banners. But effectively, you don't necessarily need this unless you're going to be posting on YouTube, but just so you know, anytime you are sort of posting on YouTube, people will be able to go to your channel, even if it has no videos. So you may want to optimize it a little bit, but it's not something to hugely worry about. We are going to be using a live channel to look at the different features of YouTube just so that we can actually have a look at some past content. We're not going to be creating it for MAXs Real T because Yeah, YouTube is a complicated bast, and that would take way too long. So let's start with the home feed here. There are a lot of different ways to utilize YouTube. So you have videos that are optimized for search that solve particular problems that people are searching for. But there's also a lot of browse features where videos are just sort of popping up for people who are searching for them and aren't necessarily subscribed to them. So there are certain people here that I am subscribed to like Pat Flynn, and this may be a recent video of his that's popping up for me to view because it knows that I'm subscribed to him, and it's something I might like. But then there's also lots of people here that I'm not subscribed to, but YouTube thinks that I will like. That's why you don't necessarily need to just create keyword, rich, optimize content for YouTube because if your content is good, and it's something that it thinks people will like and people will continue to watch, YouTube is pretty clever at getting it out in front of people even if it's not super searchable. Let's go have a look at my channel, but particularly, I want to actually look at some older videos so that it gives you a little bit of hope that you don't necessarily need to have the best quality videos on YouTube in terms of your production value. But as long as the actual content itself is valuable, YouTube is going to help you out. So my video is monetized here, because my channel is monetized, that may not be the case because you do have to meet some minimum requirements in order to have your channel monetized and make money off of ads on your videos. But this is a video I published three years ago, where I literally have a webcam on top of a computer. I'm sitting on my bed in our apartment in Melbourne during lockdown. And I have a $30 Amazon microphone attached to my shirt. So super super basic video production. But it's got almost 20,000 views, which is great considering, well, at this stage, I've got 13,000 subscribers, but back then, I had maybe 4,000 subscribers, and this is a video that continues to get views for me till this day, and it links to my courses. And I have had people sign up to my courses just from this YouTube video. So it's definitely a really powerful strategy for your clients if they can manage to make long form videos on YouTube, especially because these continue to work for them for years to come. Which is very rare for a lot of social networks. Now, a few things that I really like doing with my videos is adding in closed captions, which is not technically a requirement on YouTube. There will be auto captions that will be placed on YouTube videos. They're not usually great to be honest, though. And there's lots of people who aren't native English speakers or who have hearing impairments who rely on closed captions. So it's a really good practice to get into from an accessibility perspective. And this also does show up in search results. If you have closed captions that you've added to your videos, it'll have a little CC next your video. Opposed to other creators who haven't done this. So there might be people who will choose to watch your video over somebody else's because of this as well. The next thing I wanted to bring up is that if a video is added to a playlist, you'll be able to see it here and click into that play list. And then you will also have some chapters that you will see here. So we're going to look at how these are added in. But effectively, these will act as an extra sort of keyword rich feature for you, especially on Google, because let's say a part of your video mentions something that people are searching for on Google. So your video might be about redoing your bedroom, but maybe at minute three to minute four, you talk about how to put together a dresser. So if somebody was going to put into Google, how do I put together a dresser, and might say, Oh, have you checked out this video from minute three to minute four, is where you'll find your answer. So that's the beauty of chapters is that it adds a bit more searchability to your videos, not just within YouTube, but also within Google. This particular video is quite searchable if you were to look for digital marketing clients beginner or for beginners. You might find it within Google both within the actual search tab, and you'll see my beautiful chapters there and also within the actual videos tab as well. And you'll also find it within the YouTube search engine as well, of course. But like I said, you don't always want to be creating videos that are searchable. Sometimes you might be creating videos around topics like, you know, I had a bad day if you're a blogger, for example. That's not something anyone's searching for that doesn't mean though that people aren't going to come across it, and then it's not potentially even going to go viral if it's a really good video that connects with people. But my strategy as a service provider, as an educator was always to create highly searchable videos. That's not the right strategy for everyone, but just so you know that if you are creating searchable videos like this for your clients, it has great potential not just on YouTube, but also on Google. So continuing on, you'll see the playlist that this video features in And then you will also see that I have pinned a comment, just like you can do this on other platforms. Anytime you get a comment from yourself or from other people, you can choose to pin it to the top. So for me, you know, somebody said, thanks for sharing this. I learned more in this one video than in the entire course I spent $2,500 on. That makes me look pretty good. So I chose to pin that to the top, so it's the first thing somebody sees when they come into the comment section of this video. Let's now head on over to YouTube studio, so we can have a look at how you would actually upload videos and what you can see on the back end. So this is where you would come to create videos. This is where you can upload videos, you can go live, you can create posts, create playlists, and create podcast. That's something that not everybody really knows about YouTube is that you don't just have the option to share videos, shorts, lives, playlists, et cetera, but you also have a community tab where you're able to share some polls, images, texts, quizzes, things like that with your community. And if they've got their notifications turned on for your channel, they'll still get an update about that, even though it's not a video, and it's just an additional way to engage with your community. So those are some options for you from within YouTube studio. And you've just got a general overview of your content here. But I wanted to bring your attention to the customization section, which is where you can decide which video will be featured to people who haven't subscribed to your channel. And videos that will be featured to returning subscribers. This could be your latest video, but it could also just be a video that you think is most representative of your channel or is most likely to convert non subscribers into subscribers. Then you'll have your featured sections. So for you is automatically generated by YouTube, but then you also have options to add in playlists. You have your branding, so this is where you set your profile photo and your banner image. Now, with your banner image, most people will assume that it's really just this size, and it is, but also on TVs, it displays much, much bigger, so that's why the dimensions for a banner image are enormous. But you don't necessarily need to put any sort of critical information outside of just that middle desktop area. Of course, just like for our other platforms, I have included a template for you in your course guide. In this case, you want to make sure that you're designing for the whole thing for TVs, but really your most important elements need to be in this wide zone here because that's what's going to be visible on mobile on tablet N on desktop. Then you'll have this area that's only going to be visible on tablets, and then this whole area is going to be visible on desktop. But really any kind of really critical elements need to be in this middle area here. Of course, you're also going to have the blank template for you in there as well. Then you have the option to also have your own video watermark, which if people have it over this within your videos, they'll be able to subscribe to your channel. Then in your basic info section is where you set your handle, you add in your aunt description, and then you can also add some additional links that people will see when they're coming across your channel, they'll be able to click into your links and connect with you outside of YouTube as well. Let's go ahead and just begin at least uploading a video here, so we can have a look at a few things that you might want to optimize during your video upload process if this is something that you might be responsible for on the client side. This is where you can add in your title. You have up to 100 characters, but under 55 characters is the ideal because anything over this is going to get cut off on mobile screens. So you want to make sure that at least the most important elements of your title are before that 55 character count. With your description, you want to make sure the most important elements are within the first sentence because this is what appears in search results. So you want to make sure it's not sort of saying, in this video, you're going to learn, et cetera, blah, blah. You want to make sure, for example, for this particular video, it would be something like the online course industry is changing. So that's something that's curiosity inducing. It might get people to click through. It's maybe not super searchable. It's not keyword rich, but it's something that's going to get people to click through. So you want to make sure you're doing that there. And then we would add in our chapters by starting with 0000. So that's really important. You would basically just say introduction or whatever is the beginning of your video. And then after that point, it's up to you how many chapters you add. It could just be one, it could be 20. Wherever there's logical next sections of your video that you think would be helpful for people to skip to if they were sort of looking for a specific part of your video, then this is where you would add that in. So I'd say online course creation, And so on and so forth. So this is where you just add in those chapters. That can just sit at the end of your description if you want. But YouTube will also add these in automatically for you if you don't do it. So, it's not a huge thing if you don't do it. It's just an extra way for you to get visibility on YouTube. Then you have the option to add in your beautiful thumbnails, so we're just going to add in one that I've already got pre made. There is an art to thumbnails, but effectively, you just want them to be really captivating on very small screens because most people will be looking at YouTube on their phones. So you don't want to have any text sets too small or really hard to read on a phone. Then you have the option to add your video to playlist? I wouldn't do this until your video is actually live. Because until it's live, if you add it to a playlist, people will still be able to view it, even if it's not super complete. For example, you know, I've got a semi created description here, and if I were to add this to a playlist, people can view it straightaway, even though I'm not ready for people to be doing that. So I wouldn't add anything to playlist until your video is published. And then you can go through things like, is this a paid promotion? Does it feature any AI content or anything that's been altered? Do you want automatic chapters placed on this video? Yes or no. And then everything else is sort of pretty self explanatory. In terms of tags, there will always be people out there who will say that they don't matter because YouTube is pretty clever in figuring out who to put your videos in front of, even if you're not sort of helping to optimize it. But you have up to 500 characters here. So if you can help YouTube out by saying my video is about plansD and putting in some really great keywords here, then it definitely won't hurt, and it might just help. So you might as well utilize the space. Then the rest I would pretty much leave as is and go to next. Monetization, again, may or may not be available to you. And then in terms of mid roll ads, which are ads that appear during your video. This is only going to be available to you if the video is longer than 8 minutes, and then you can adjust where those ads appear if you want them placed on your video. But again, you would have to have a minimum of 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time in order to apply to be monetized on YouTube. So if you're not, then you will not be seeing this option. In this section, you basically just want to mention to YouTube, whether you think that your video is talking about anything that would be inappropriate, which might affect what kind of ads are able to be placed on your video. Then we have our video elements. This is where you can add your closed captions. I would do this at the very end once the video has been processed, but you can also do it at this stage. And like I've mentioned before, I use a tool called Discrpt for this where I upload my video into Discript. It gives me a transcript of my video, and then I manually add it in here just by copying and pasting it. So I can go to type manually and then edit as text, and then basically just manually add it in here by pasting it in from D script. But that being said, YouTube will also create automatic versions of your captions that you can just edit. So if you wait for your video to be processed, so at the moment, it's only 50% done processing, but once it's complete, it's going to give you automatic captions that you can just come in here and edit manually as well. Then your end screens are essentially just the last 20 seconds of your video where you can place some additional elements for people to interact with. So for example, your profile image can pop up, and if people click on that, they will subscribe to your channel, and then you can have another element that could be either a playlist, it can be a video, it can be another channel or another link. So you can add a few different elements on top of the end of your video, but just on the last 20 seconds. Now it doesn't have to be the full 20 seconds. So for example, if in this video, I start saying just in the last 10 seconds, by the way, check out this other video, I can adjust this to only appear at the section when I'm actually talking about that. So in this case, I don't actually appear on camera about there, and that's where I would say, make sure to check this out. So I would want to make sure that I'm adjusting this until the very end where I'm back on camera and talking about people subscribing or people checking out a different video. I haven't actually specified which playlist I want people to go to, but in this case, let's just save it as that. And then cards are similar, but you can place these anywhere within your video, and these can go to your own playlist, your own videos, or other channels. So anytime you're talking about another channel as well, you could add these within your video. Now YouTube is going to do some copyright checks, and then you have the option to privately publish a video, keep it unlisted. Have it public, have it available to members only or schedule it for a future date. So at this stage, I'm happy to just have as enlisted and not schedule it because obviously, it's a little bit messy at this stage, so I wouldn't want to schedule it, but just so you know that that is the way that you could sort of preschedule all your beautiful content, and then it'll appear in the content section of your YouTube channel, where you would hopefully have a few things that would be scheduled for the next few weeks or months ahead. So that's a bit on YouTube. And in the next section, we're going to take a look at how you might be able to search for video ideas for your YouTube videos. So I'll see. 50. Video Topic Research: As we talked about in the previous lesson, YouTube isn't all about creating content that people are searching for. It can be about gaming and logs and music and so many things where people have, you know, an hour long video, just about them taking their kids to school with 1 million views. So there are so much content on YouTube that is outside of this realm. But that being said, if you have a business or your client has a business that is catering to a specific solution, and they provide that solution, your best bet is going to be to create videos around things that people are actually searching for. So if someone's like, I've got a problem. Where do I look? How do I fix this for myself? I look to either Google or YouTube, either way, YouTube videos will pop up. And if your client can then pop up for that solution, that can be hugely beneficial to then getting that person to watch that video and potentially convert them into a customer. To give you an idea of what I mean, if I search for Instagram reels in Canva, I get, 6 million results, which is extreme. I think There's probably not that much content on this particular topic, but my videos pop up relatively high up. So this is page two, not page one, but in the video section, it actually appears pretty much straightaway, so it's the third video down. So if someone was going to Google to look for a YouTube tutorial or video tutorial on how to make Instagram Reels and Cma right there in the video section. And because I have labeled my chapters really well as well, if someone was looking for how to make a tweet reel and camera or a memel in camera or a quote reel en cama, these are all categories within my video. So my video would pop up for all of those search terms as well, as well as how to how to get trending sounds for Instagram rails, et cetera, et cetera. So that's the brilliant part about optimizing your videos for search results. And then, also, if people just kept scrolling down, you'll also see that my course on this topic about making Instagram rails in Canva is also being advertised by several platforms, depending on which page of Google you find yourself in. But that's brilliant because it means people can go to this video which has about almost 40,000 views at this stage. I know to some YouTubers is not a revolutionary amount of views. But for me, because my channel is still relatively quite small, this is a really good number of people that have watched this video, and because it links so seamlessly to my Instagram Reals in Canva course, it means that I can really seamlessly transition people from watching this video, which gives them a little bit of a win. It gives them some highlights about what they can do to create Instagram Reals in Canva, and it tells them if they want to learn more and get even greater results, then they can go through to purchasing my paid course. So as I'm going through YouTube, you'll start to see a few things on the right hand side here that you may not necessarily have on your screen. And that's because I'm using particular chrome extensions that allow me to analyze people's videos and analyze my videos and also look for topics that might be good for myself and for clients. One of them is called VDIQ, and the other one is called T Buddy. At the moment, I'm not actually paying for either of these tools, so everything that you see here is completely free for me to use. So on VDIQ here, you can see what the engagement rate is for this particular video. On the two buddy analytics, it'll also say, you know, what are my channel analytics, how many tags am I using? What are the tags that I'm using? How many videos do I have as a channel with the SEO score that two buddies giving me. That helps me analyze existing videos. But these tools are also great in helping you identify which topics to create videos around in the first place. So, for example, for Meg's Realty, I would maybe look for buying your first home in Brisbane or just buying your first home Brisbane, which might be a video that I would create for my first time home buyer Becky. And then you'll see I've got two buddy here and VIQ over here in the search panel. So once again, this is just a free feature. If you were to upgrade to their paid features, you'd see a little bit more than this. But the first thing I want to look at is the overall score. It's telling me that for this search term, there's not a whole lot of competition, which is good. The competition is low, it's in the green zone, but there's also not a huge amount of volume. It's not actually telling us what the volume is. There are paid tools that do this that I have linked in your course guide that you can also upgrade to, or, of course, you can upgrade both VDIQ and two buddy to see that, but it's just giving us a general score to say, not a whole lot of people are searching for this, but the competition is low. This is not bad news. Idally, you'd want this to be in the green zone. You'd want this to be at about 65, you know, 70 out of 100 would be great, which means there would be enough volume and not enough competition for the search terms that you're looking for. But for me, as a buyers agent in Brisbane, I don't need the volume to be high. I don't want to make a viral YouTube channel. I actually just want to convert, maybe one out of every hundred, maybe a couple hundred viewers into a customer, and that's a really lucrative business model for me. I don't need huge views. So for me, this score Is great because it means the competition is low, which I know, because not enough buyers agents and real estate agents are making YouTube videos, especially not locally. So I know that there's not enough people creating content for this. And the fact that there isn't a huge amount of people searching for it doesn't really surprise me. So this is good news for me. It will also give me a bit of an average number of views per video that's created around this topic, and the average number of subscribers for the channels that are creating content around this. I will also see thanks to V IQ. How many subscribers people have who are creating content around this and how many views they have. So I can kind of go, These guys have, you know, almost 36,000 subscribers, and this only has 8,000 views. So that's not great. But, you know, this person over here has created a video that has almost the same number of views, actually more views than subscribers. And if I was to scroll down, I can start to see that actually these people have created videos that are even more popular around the same topic. So that will help me to determine, is this something that's worthwhile me creating content around? Based on this, I would say yes. You will also see some numbers here, which is an outlier score, which means, is this video performing better than the channels average video views? And I can see that yes, these videos are performing better than the videos that these channels normally post. One's performing 50 times better than the videos they normally post on their channel. So that tells me, yeah, absolutely. This could be a really cool topic for me to create videos around because, especially, you know, this person, Scott, Kuru here only has 9,000 subscribers, but this video has 33,000 views. That's huge. So once again, I don't need 33,000 views as a buys agent, but it will help me to determine whether it's something that's worthwhile. Because if I was putting a search term here and it's got 12 views on all the videos that pop up, I would probably say, that's not a hugely popular topic. I can also toggle this on, so I can see other tags that these videos have, which will tell me which other search terms these videos will likely be popping up for, which again, might help me to create some lists around the topics that I want to be creating videos around. And of course, to buddy and VDIQ will help with that as well, where it'll tell me, what are the related search terms to the search term that I've put in here, that I can also create videos around, and I can just click on it and it'll continue going down this kind of rabbit hole. There's a lot more functionality behind the upgraded features. But if you're just beginning with this and you just want to create some lists for your clients about the types of content and the topics that you think they could create content around because there are other people who are doing it that are getting really good results, but the competition is not huge, then this is a really great place to start with. Will help not just for YouTube search results, but also for Google search results, because obviously the two platforms are linked. But I do want to emphasize that this is for long form YouTube videos, not shorts. So you've got a short shelf, I suppose, on a desktop view as well. But it's primarily on your phone view where you have a short shelf, where you'll see the kind of short vertical style videos like your TikTok and your reels, which also exist on YouTube. But these are not really what you want to optimize for search. So if your client really just want to create short form videos. I wouldn't recommend targeting search terms specifically, because in search results, technically, shorts do pop up. They do pop up quite a lot lower in the search results, but they are there. It's just not something that people are really watching who are searching for in depth answers to their questions. You do need to have a slightly different strategy for your shorts than you have to have for your long form videos on YouTube. Your shorts should be quick entertaining, give people a few quick tips, and then you can always use your shorts to drive people to your long form videos. But just so when people are searching for solutions to their answers, they're probably not going to be looking at shorts to find those answers. Shorts are designed for quick entertaining, quick education, quick information, just like they are on Instagram and TikTok and then our long form YouTube videos are the ones we can optimize for the types of topics people are actually searching for as solutions to their answers. That's a little bit of a rundown on how to look for video topics on YouTube. In the next lesson, we're going to talk about how to make sense of everything we've covered in this section of the course, so I'll see. 51. Now What?: Okay, so at this point, in the course, you probably have a lot of information in your brain and considering I'm trying to be as objective as possible about these platforms. You might be thinking, Yeah, they all sound great. Let's be everything to everyone on every platform. And as we talked about, that's just not the best idea. But also considering, you know, in the future, there might be so many other platforms that are popping up. For example, we chat, Tumbler, Snapchat, Whatsapp, Clubhouse, Cora, Reddit, and Twitch, are all platforms that students have asked me about a lot over the years, and I'm sure there will be many more to come in the future. The reality is that it's actually impossible to be across what's happening on every platform at all times. But the Internet is a magical place where you can teach yourself anything you need to know from just a few YouTube videos. Don't be afraid to go and continue expanding your knowledge on particular platforms if you think your client's business can benefit from a presence on it. But also, don't be afraid to let go of things that are no longer serving you. Even if platforms might have made sense for your client's business in the past, that doesn't mean it's true in the present. So it's important to continue evaluating that as we're going to talk about in the strategy section of the course later on. And so at this point, you might just want to consider creating a bit of a summary chart for yourself with some key points for each platform we've discussed. And this will help you to have your own sort of overview when you're thinking about a client's brand so you can have bit of a refresher of each platforms, demographics, and content types, and all the key points. So I've included some key points for you and your course guide to get you started, but of course, you can add to this yourself, or you can just create your own from scratch, whatever suits you is completely fine by me. Now, the important thing to remember is that at the beginning of your social media career, you might just be comfortable doing exactly as you're told. And that's okay. So if a client who sells a physical product aimed at the 18 to 25-year-old demographic wants you to post on Linked in, you might just do it. But then once you've built up a bit more confidence, you might then turn to a client like that and say, Hey, maybe we should also explore Instagram and TikTok because you know that these platforms are better suited to their target customers. And clients will just really appreciate you bringing in your expertise like this. As long as it's coming from a good place, and you're not sort of saying, by the way, I think you've wasted two years of your life on LinkedIn when you should have actually been on this other platform. You know, that's a bad way to approach that conversation. But if you're coming at it from a place of kindness and empathy and you're just making recommendations of how to improve in the future by saying, you know, everything we've done up until this point is helping us to get analytics and build the foundation for success and all of that, you know, sprinkle some magic on it so that they feel really good about what's happened until this point, I maybe it wasn't the most efficient way to be doing things, but also don't be afraid to get a little bit weird if your client's brand can tolerate it and if it's right for their business. Now let's quickly talk about how to actually get access to your client's accounts so that you can begin working on them. Some things you may need access to some things that you may need access to will be any brand assets, which could include images, logos, graphics, and videos. And the easiest way for your client to share this with you would be through Dropbox or Google Drive, and they can just send you a link for this. Then you'll probably have scheduling tools, which we'll talk about a little bit later on. And finally, you'll have the social media platforms themselves, which you may or may not actually gain access to depending on your responsibilities. But either way, the next step will be for you to get access to everything you need access to. Through a Zoom call. Please do it on a Zoom call and do it through a password manager. Don't allow your clients to send you e mails back and forth, because what's inevitably going to happen if you're getting access to their social media accounts is that you're going to be sending about 25 e mails back and forth over the period of five days because these platforms are inevitably going to think that you're trying to hack them. So they're going to continue sending you codes or sending your client codes for you to log in. You're going to continue saying, Hey, what's the code? What's the code? What's the code for this? It can take forever, especially if your clients are smart and they've set up two factor authentication, which hopefully they have. It can take a long, long time. I want to encourage you to just say, let's jump on a 20 minute Zoom call so that I can literally go through access all the platforms. They can get the codes in lifetime, so they can give them all to you so you can log in to everything and also do it through a password manager like last pass. Cybersecurity is something I'm very, very passionate about and I have included resources on this in your course guide, but I just really want more clients out there, more businesses out there to be a lot safer than they are about sharing passwords, because you will see even big businesses literally sending their passwords through e mail and text messages and just in ways that make my skin crawl. So This is where you come in as an expert, and you can say to them, Hey, let's make this as safe as possible. Let's make sure you have two factor authentication set up on all your platforms, and you set up all the passwords, do it through something like glass pass, and then share it with my e mail, but make sure you're not ticking the option for me to view the password. What this does is that when you stop working with that business in the future, they can then just remove your e mail address from getting access to those accounts, and you will never be able to log in because you didn't know the passwords in the first place. Had them in your last pass, you could copy and paste them into things, but you didn't know what they were. You couldn't have possibly copied them. That means they do now don't have to change 20 different passwords that they shared with you. That is, again, just the cherry on top of working with you and making that process really seamless for your clients and making it really easy. So that's the first thing. The second thing, if you haven't been practicing along with me during these lessons, I want to encourage you to go and get set up on the various social media networks so that you can practice, at least navigating around the platforms, getting to know them a little bit. Hopefully, also posting, like I encourage you to do, make sure you post on all the different networks, even if you just go in and delete it afterwards, but that way, it's not super intimidating when you have to go in and do that for your clients. All right. And now in the next section of the course, we're going to start looking at pay debts. So I'll see you in the next lesson. 52. You're Almost There!: Y. Okay, I'm gonna do my very best here to not run close to the ground. But I am a huge fan of celebrating accomplishments. No matter how small they may seem in the moment. So this is my way of saying, Congratulations. You've made it to this point in the course, because I know how hard it can be. Even as a beginner, you feel like, you know, you've learned all these new skills. And then suddenly the social media world changes, and you feel like there's so much more still to learn. And I know it can feel a bit discouraging. And at this point in the course, you're probably thinking, Yeah, are we there yet? Is it over? But I just wanted to tell you you're halfway through the course. So congratulations. Look, I know it's not easy to take time out of your very, very busy day to learn a new skill, and I'm incredibly proud of you for getting to this point in the course. And I hope you're excited for what's still to come. So I'm going to get into everything in the next lesson, but I just wanted to take a little moment here to celebrate you and your accomplishment to getting to this point in the course. So I hope you feel very proud. Maybe give yourself a little bit of cheers with a beverage of your choice. And now I'll see you in the next lesson. 53. Paid Ads Introduction: As we go into exploring paid ads in this section of the course, I just wanted to say that, yes, I know this can seem like a really intimidating subject to approach. But here's what I've seen happen with a lot of businesses. They know they should run ads. They have decided this could be a really powerful strategy for their business, but it seems really complicated and intimidating, so they put it off, and they put it off, and they put it off. And one day, someone's I've been making thousands and thousands of dollars for my business with ads, and they go, Okay, cool. It's time for me to run ads. So they spend, like, $200. They press a couple of things in ads manager, and it just waste their money, and then they go. Yeah, I knew ads wouldn't work for me. I just knew it. And then they just never try it again. So that is what happens a lot because I have been inside of ads manager accounts where ads are set up in the weirdest ways. And it's just because people kind of panic and put money into something without really thinking about it. And that's okay. But the point is that I promise you these platforms are not out to get you. In fact, they want you to make money. They want you to be successful because that is how they make money. Facebook in particular and Meta, in particular, they make money off of ads. So they want you to get great success from their advertising so that you're Oh, my gosh. I'm making so much money with this. I can't wait to spend all of my profits back into ads and make more money, and everybody wins. So, it's key to remember that. They're not trying to just take your money and run because obviously, then no one would continue advertising. So it needs to be profitable in order for them to actually make a profit. But they need the magic ingredients for you to set up your ads correctly in order for them to then make it work for you. But this is also just one piece of the giant puzzle of ads. You might be surprised to find that when I was working as a digital marketing strategist at an agency level, the first maybe 15, 20 minutes of me talking to a potential ads client had nothing to do with Facebook or Instagram or Linked in or any paid ads for that matter. And that's because that time was better spent with me understanding what's going on with the business as a whole and how it's tracking with meeting its goals, what other things they've already got in place. Because generally speaking, and there are definitely exceptions to this, and there are lots of businesses who are just purely running ads and being very successful But for a lot of businesses, ads are actually going to only amplify what's already happening in the business. So if you already have other organic marketing methods happening and they're not converting for you and no one's buying from you, if you just pump money, into the same content that you were posting organically, it's not actually going to change anything. It just means more people are going to see something that's ineffective. And this is why it's not just important for you to identify the objective of what you're hoping to achieve with your ads, but also what actually happens once somebody clicks on an ad and enters the rest of the sales cycle and how everything actually works together, or maybe doesn't work together like in this example over here. Imagine someone clicking on an ad for a discount code that no longer works for a product that no longer exists. This happens so much more often than you would think, and we're going to talk more about how to avoid this. So now over the next few lessons, we're going to look behind the scenes of Facebook and Instagram ads, and then we'll also briefly discuss social ads on other platforms, but I want to preface this by saying that the Facebook ads manager changes probably more frequently than any other tool out there in the social media space. So while I'm teaching you the foundations here, it's important that if you decide that paid ads are a strategy you want to use for your client's business, that you are going beyond what's taught in this course, because this is sort of general advice. It's not customized to your situation or your client's business. You need to make sure that you're really understanding the world of paid advertising if you're going to be putting especially big money into the ad space, and not just your time. Once budgets are involved, it's important that you are subscribed to all the right newsletters, you're watching the right YouTube videos, and you're staying on top of what's happening in this space in terms of rules, regulations, at how to best utilize the skill set. So that's just something to keep in mind. We are going to cover the general knowledge of the ad space, and we're going to be starting with META ads, which will control Facebook and Instagram ads from the same place. And that's just because these are the most complicated type of social ads there are. So we're going to dedicate much more time to these. Because once you can get the hang of the ads manager on MDA, you can essentially then take that knowledge and apply it to other platforms a lot easier, which is why we're then going to also cover advertising on other platforms once you have the foundations in place. So let's get started with the next lesson. 54. Boosting an Existing Post: So before diving into the more complex world of Facebook and Instagram ads, I did just want to include this lesson, and I know Facebook ad experts out there are kind of screaming at me for putting this lesson in this course, because boosting posts is not an effective strategy. We're going to talk about why, but effectively, sometimes you'll have clients who just want to put a little bit of money behind an existing organic post to perhaps show it to the entirety of their existing audience. Because, as we've learned about, only a very small percentage of your existing audience and your existing followers will ever see your organic content because that's just the nature of it. If you have 10,000 followers, not all 10,000 of them are going to see every single post that you put out there. So a lot of the time people will boost a post to basically say, Hey, show this particular post or video. To the entirety of my followers. And that's not a terrible strategy. The problem comes into it when people try to use the strategy to target new audiences because it just doesn't allow you to customize things as much as you should. I know already talked about the fact that, you know, Facebook and other platforms are not out to get you and they're not just trying to make you spend money. I would say that boosting posts really is just trying to get you to waste money. It's basically a very quick way for people to just press a button and put a little bit of money behind their account, even if they know absolutely nothing about ads. So yeah, I think that this is a bit of a way for Meta to just get money out of people without really thinking about how effective it will be. Let's say this is an organic post at the moment. It has the little booze post button, so we can just click that and then if we put a little bit of money behind this, it's going to show us what it would look like as an ad, either to our own audience or to audiences who aren't following this page yet. There are a few things here that may be unfamiliar that we're going to talk about over the next few lessons. If not looking super familiar, that's probably why and they will over time. But you have a few different options in terms of customizing a few things like the button. At the moment it says send message, but it could also say get directions, learn more, visit page, et cetera, et cetera. And if you choose to send a message, it will also give you a messaging template that you can edit and ask you which apps you want people to message you on. Then this is just whether it's a special ad category, just because I'm in the real estate then you have some information about your audiences. So it's asking you if you just want to use the suggested audience, which will essentially just show it to people who have interests that are related to your business. If you have set up your page correctly, this could be a solid option. But generally speaking, you'd want to create your own audience even for a boosted post if you can. Now, we will talk about how to do that. But again, it's quite limited in this section, but just so you know that that is the option there. You would just select the duration, the end date of the campaign, and then your budget, and it's going to start to give you some red flags or some warning signs to say, you're probably going to get zero replies if you are just wanting to spend $8. And that is just also based on the call to action. So some call to action will be more expensive than others. Again, something we're going to talk about in a little bit. But effectively if you're saying, I want messages, it might cost you a little bit more than you you say, I actually just want people to visit my page. So then you've got some placement options and you can edit this to side, you want it to appear on Instagram and messenger on Facebook. Again, you don't have a huge control over which part of Facebook your ad appears on. That is something you want to be able to tweak. But this is what the boosted post section looks like within Facebook. Then on Instagram, you have the option with posts and reels as long as the reels are not using licensed music. You're able to boost your post and you have even less options. So instagram, believe it or not, then you chew on Facebook. You really only got the option for people to visit your profile, your website, or message you. Then you can, again, use their suggested audience or create your own. Again, it's a little bit limited as to what you're able to do there. And then you just choose a budget, and then you can say, you know, run this until I pause it or just run it for a couple of days. What's my daily budget? You're not even able to sort of manually put this in here. You just have to sort of scroll through. And then yeah, you just boost it. So look, it is not an ideal interface, but this is how you would boost a reel on the two different platforms, and of course, you can do it within the app instead as well. Just be aware that in the advertising world, generally speaking, the simpler something is to set up, the less effective it will be. This is a strategy that I see parents of kids and babies in particular use to basically show me a photo of a random child. I've never seen eating a cucumber with a caption like little cute, where they're obviously just trying to get their children to become influencer babies. In a way that's not relevant to me, whatsoever. I have no idea why I should follow this child. They look very cute, eating a cucumber, but beyond that, I have no clue what's in this particular post for me or why I should follow them. So it is not an effective advertising strategy for most use cases, but it is definitely there and your clients if they have dabbled in the advertising space, there's a chance that they would have used it in the past, so it's still good to know that that is an option. But we're going to look at some more effective ways to promote your children on Instagram. I'm just kidding. To promote your business on Instagram and Facebook. 55. Meta Ads Fundamentals: So, technically speaking, the overarching term for running both Facebook and Instagram ads is Meta ads. But most people out there in terms of tutorials, you'll find, are still going to refer to it as Facebook ads. But just, you know, they are often going to say, you know, fundamentals of Facebook ads, but they're actually talking about Facebook and Instagram ads because they're running from the exact same place. So we're going to talk about these a lot, but we're going to start with the general layout of ads inside of Facebook. The very top of this, you're going to have the business suite or the business manager, and that is where you're going to make a lot of decisions about the business account like your billing details, who can manage assets, and what they can have access to. Then underneath that, you're going to have your ads manager. Within an ads manager, you will then have an ad account or multiple add accounts, and in each add account, then you're going to have the actual ad structure, which will start with campaigns. Inside of campaigns, you might have multiple adsets, And then in each adset, you might have one or multiple ads. So at the ads manager level is where you're going to be hosting your add accounts. So it's kind of a shell for your different add accounts if you're working for multiple clients. Then in your add account is where you're actually going to be setting up and managing your ads for a particular client or brand. Then at the campaign level, you decide what type of ad you're going to be running, whether it's an engagement campaign or you want to get people onto your e mail list. That's all decided at the campaign level. You add sets are just the target audiences that are actually going to be seeing your ad. And then, of course, you'll have one or more ads per audience, which is the actual visual component of this whole process. That is the only thing that your audience will actually see. Think of this almost like a pyramid where one campaign with one objective, which might be to let's say generate gym membership sign ups to a local gym, can have multiple audiences within them. One could be men interested in team sports, and one that could be women interested in health and wellness and yoga. Then each of these audiences can be seeing multiple ads. The ads for men would be probably more focused around aspects of team sports and boot camps and training, whereas for women, they might be seeing a lot more of like health benefits, yoga classes, saunas, and the fact that they have an onsite nutritionist at the gym. While these ads might actually end up in the same place, which is the gym, it might also be multiple different services that that gym offers that might be leading people through to. They might have an offer of a free trial that they're advertising. But another audience might be seeing an offer for a three month sign up for a spa package. It might be one final goal or it might be multiple final goals, and there might be multiple website pages or landing pages that advertise these offers through the ads. That's just because every single ad and every single website or landing page is specifically designed with the audience in mind and their particular interests and what's most likely going to get them to become a customer of that final goal. I know it can be confusing looking at it like this in my kind of handmade diagram here. But you'll remember earlier in the course, we looked at this example of Cat Howels ad where she's technically advertising the same offer, but to two different audiences. She's using two very different actual caption texts and also the calls to action in her ads here. One speaking to coaches and one speaking to marketers. This is the power of really tailoring the needs of each audience within your ads. Now in the next lesson, we're going to jump into business manager and start setting a few things up. I will see 56. Set Up Business Manager: So we're going to start by heading on over to business.facebook.com. It will look something like this until you log in with Facebook, at which point it will just ask you to create an account. Now, your clients will likely have their own business account, their own business manager that they will be inviting you to, but it's a good idea for you to practice setting up your own business manager. There's absolutely no harm in doing this for yourself and basically getting invited into your client's account as well, or they might also ask you to set this up for them. Either way, we're going to go through and just create an account here, and this is going to be for Mags Realty. All right. So we're just going to go ahead and approve that on a separate screen. And that's done. You will be limited to the number of business managers that you're able to have. So if you have already created your maximum amount, you may not be able to create another one. That's solely fine. I just thought I would sort of show you what it looks like with a blank account. So the moment, we don't really have anything at all in here. We want to start off by going to business settings. Then within business settings, you want to head on over two pages, and we're going to go ahead and either add a page, request access to a page or create a page. If we hadn't created a page already, we could actually do it from within business manager. But because we already have a page, we can look for it here, so we could either put in our URL or just our actual page title there, and it's going to add it for us. You were requesting access to a client's page, you would do that over here. So it's going to, at this stage, just asked me if I want to have a primary page, so we can go ahead and do that. And then now I can request access to a Facebook page. So this is where I could find a client's Facebook page, request access, and then they would get a notification to approve for me to have that page within my business manager. The same will be true for any add accounts. So at the moment, we don't have any add accounts, but we could add one if we already have one. And that's true. Also, if we have boosted posts in the past through a Facebook page, then we will automatically have had an add account created. It may not have necessarily told you that it's created on for you, but if you have run any ads through a Facebook page in the past, you can just add the add account. You could request an add account from a client. You'll just need the add account ID. So I've got my add account ID here. I could either just give them this add account ID to grant me access or I could get theirs and add that to my business manager. So it's dependent on your client, but they can also manage this from within the partner section, where they could just add you in as a partner to share assets with. But in this case, we're just going to be creating a new add account, so we're just going to call it Mags realty. This is the part that you want to make sure your client is doing themselves and just granting you access to. You're not doing it for them, because it's really important that it's within their time zone and their currency, which are things that you could do for them, so for me, I could make this in AUD. But the thing that you can't do for them is add their payment details. So you want to make sure that this is in the client's time zone. It's very difficult to change. In fact, I don't actually think you can change the currency of an add account. Once it's already running. So you want to make sure that that's definitely the currency you want to be paying in. And then you definitely want to make sure your clients are filling in their own payment details. So in this case, it's going to be for my business. Now, I could go and give myself access at this stage, so I can go ahead and basically say, I want to be able to manage campaigns, manage add accounts, do all of that. If I hadn't done it at this stage, I could also do it afterwards. So I won't be able to run anything until I add some payment info. But that's okay. We don't really need it for the time being at any point, when you're adding people into your business managers. So you can just invite them using their Facebook associated e mail address here, then you're going to be able to give them access to everything. So once they're in here, you can say, assign assets. And then you can essentially just go through and say, Yes, they can have access to absolutely everything. Including revenue. You can go through the add accounts and continue giving access to everything, pixels, and Instagram accounts and everything else, you can just go through and make sure that each person has access to it, or you can do it individually on the page level, the add account level, Instagram level, et cetera, et cetera. So you want to make sure once you're adding people in here, including yourself that you're giving yourself access to all the assets, so you have control over everything you need to have control over in order to manage that Facebook account and the add account as well. Last thing we're going to do is just link our Instagram account so that we can also run ads on Instagram and so that we can manage everything from within the business manager. So we're just going to log in through Instagram. We don't want to be saving or log in info, and that's going to connect everything up. Now we can essentially add that to our add account and finish that. Cool. And now we can just assign ourselves to this asset as well and give ourselves full control so that I can manage everything as effectively as possible. So that's Business Manager, and in the next lesson, we're going to get into how we're actually going to go about choosing our objectives and getting to know ads manager. So I will see that. 57. Choose The Right Objective: So starting with the campaign level, this is where you'll be choosing your objective as in, what do you want your ad to do? What is its end goal? Are you looking to get your clients page some more likes? Are you looking to get more traffic to their website, or are you looking to get more engagement on a particular post? So it's important for you to know what the primary objective of your campaign will be because you will be paying accordingly. So for example, a Facebook page like is obviously going to cost you a lot less than a cost per lead, which is getting someone's e mail or phone number. And that's just because of the value that there is to the business. Someone liking my Facebook page doesn't really mean much to me. That person may never interact with me ever again. It doesn't mean I can contact them in any way. So I'm not paying a whole lot for that. Whereas getting their e mail address or phone number means I can then call that person and sell to them. So that's worth a lot more to me as a business, so I'm going to pay a lot more for that information. And likewise, your industry and your business model also will reflect the amount that you pay per lead. So for example, me as a person, I could see two different Facebook ads. I might see one from a low cost fashion brand, and that person is going to get my e mail address, and they're going to pay $4 for that e mail address for them to be able to sell some shoes to me. Then I'm also going to see a Facebook ad from a lawyer that is going to pay $100 for that same e mail address. And that means they're then going to be able to promote their services to me. Same person, same e mail, two very different costs. And the reason that they're different is because of the value that I am worth to each individual business. Low cost fashion brand might get an average order value of, let's say, 40 bucks from their subscribers or from the people on their e mail list or from people visiting their website. So it's not really my business is not worth that much to them. So they're not going to be able to charge that much for my e mail address because they're not going to be able to get that value back. Whereas a lawyer might get several thousand, if not tens of thousands of dollars from my business if I was to convert into a client for them. So Meta knows this, and based on that industry, they know that my e mail address is worth a lot to that business, so they're able to charge a lot more for that e mail. So make sure you think about your end goal as you go into this stage of the ad planning process. In terms of accessing ads manager, you can do it from within your business suite over here, or you can also do it from directly within your Facebook page or your Facebook profile as well. If you go to menu, and down here in your professional dashboard, you've got access to the Meta Business Site and also Ads manager. So once you're within ads manager, it will look a little bit like this, depending on whether or not your clients have active ads. If they do have active ads and they just want you to request access, or they want to add you to their ads manager, their business manager, this is the number that they need to provide you with, so you can request access to manage their ad account. I know we already looked at a place that you could get it from within business manager. But if they just have ads manager open and they're like, I don't know what number you're talking about, this is that number that they need to give you so you can request access to manage it. So once you're within here within your ads account, you will notice you've got campaigns, ad sets, and ads. So in this particular lesson, we're just going to focus on the campaign section. Going to head on over to create. So we're going to start off with the buying type, and I would just suggest leaving this on auction for 99% of the things you'll be doing on Facebook, especially for smaller businesses, you'll absolutely be using auction, which basically is just determined by supply and demand. Your price is determined by how many people are competing for the same ad space, and that's how the price of your ads is determined. Whereas with reservation ads, there are some use cases for it for larger agencies. Effectively these work on more of like an old school TV commercial model where you know what you're going to pay for your campaign before you go through to book it. But I don't know many Facebook ads experts that actually use these, so definitely just leave it on auction. And then you need to choose a campaign objective based on the action that you want people to take. So there is a lot of help from Facebook in here where you can look at what the campaign objectives are all about here. This will also help because campaign objectives used to be a lot more elaborate. So if you're looking at any tutorials online, especially on YouTube, and people are talking about different objectives like conversions, catalog sales, video views. These are no longer in here. They have kind of been just condensed into just these six objectives that we now see. So if you're ever confused, just make sure that you're looking at this sort of conversion chart there. But the ones that we have now are great. So you've got your awareness objective, which is one that you will probably not use a whole lot. It is one that can burn money very quickly because Facebook will essentially just show your ads to as many people as possible without really thinking, what do we want them to do? Do we want them to click? Do we want them to interact? It's essentially just saying, Look, I have 100 bucks to spare. Just show my ad to as many people as possible. Can be really great for big brands that almost don't care. No that they don't care. Of course they care. But you know, if you're Tesla, you are just putting your content in front of people at all times because you realize that, you know, it might take someone 30, 40, 50, different times that they see that ad or your marketing materials for them to make a purchase. That can be a really good use of the awareness objective. It's one that you probably won't use a whole lot, but just so you know that that is there. Video views is also under awareness, but it also falls under engagement. It's not one that you will use a huge amount, I would imagine, but it's a really nice way to just get people familiar with your brand if they've never heard of you before. Then you've got the traffic objective, which can be great for things like Link clicks, landing page views, even calls. This is one that you probably will use a little bit, but really one thing to keep in mind with all these objectives is, what do you actually want people to do? Because chances are you don't actually just want people to go to your website, you probably want them to take some action. You want them to give you their e mail, you want them to buy something. If those are your real objectives, then select the lead objective or the sales objective. Don't just send people to your website because Facebook is essentially just going to find people who are most likely to click on stuff, not people who are most likely to buy from you. But there are definitely use cases for the traffic objective as well. Sometimes you might have a brand new website and no one's ever been to it and you're just trying to get some data around who are the people who are visiting your website, or perhaps these are people who you're going to re target with ads later on. There are definitely some ways and reasons that you would use the objective. But just be aware of the fact that you might get charged for, you might spend 50 bucks on the traffic objective and really just get a lot of clicks and not get much else, which is totally fine if you're okay with that. But if your client is like, actually, we wanted leads, then make sure you're selecting the appropriate objective for that. Engagement objectives are great because they help to build familiarity with your business in a slightly more engaging way than the awareness objective. This can be great for things like video views, for people just giving you reactions to post, comments, et cetera. It's a nice way to build warmer audiences from people who have never ever heard of your business. And you just want them to kind of get to know your business without the pressure of needing to purchase, for example. So this could be the first ad you send to somebody so that they just get to know your service in a video, for example. And then once they have viewed, let's say, 10 seconds of that video, you send them another ad where they're then encouraged to purchase from you. One thing I should say is that no matter which objective you select, that doesn't mean you're not going to get other things. You might select the objective of engagement, but you might still get leads and sales out of that objective. It just means that you're telling Facebook, look, prioritize engagement, if the other actions happen, great. But this is the thing we're going for. Then leads and app promotion and sales are a little bit self explanatory. At promotions one, you probably won't use a whole lot unless your clients are exclusively creators, but sales and leads are sort of your bread and butter for conversion specific ads where you really want to get phone numbers from people, you want to get e mail addresses from people, or in the case of sales, you really want people to just go ahead and purchase from you. Now, in terms of what we see in the next steps, it will be largely determined by the objective we select. So if you choose a different objective, you might see slightly different options at the next stages, but the overall process will be very similar. I'm going to select leads in this case, and we're just going to go ahead and click next. I am going to be doing a Manual eds campaign so we can look at all the different options that are available to us. And now, I would suggest that you get into good habits with naming your campaigns and your asets and ads, which we'll talk about next. But you want to make sure that if your clients already have ads that are running, that you kind of scan your eye over their existing ads and their existing campaigns and see how they're naming them. So you can definitely make sure you're following their best practices. But effectively, the goal is just to be able to tell what that campaign is about, if there's hundreds of campaigns in your ads manager. So that you can just scan your eye over the name and you know, this is a Black Friday campaign. This is a Christmas campaign. You want to make sure that you're naming it in some distinct way so you know exactly what that campaign is about. In this case, I'm just going to leave it as that generic leads campaign, but just so you know that that's where you would change your campaign name. And in terterms of special ad categories. Now, obviously, for Mags realty, I would have to tick housing. We're not actually going to run these ads, so I'm not going to do it. But just so you know, you do have to select this. It might limit your targeting options if you select any of these, but if you don't select them and you were supposed to, it's a really good way to get your add account disabled pretty quickly. So make sure you're doing right by Facebook and definitely selecting that. These are just our campaign details. Over here, we've got an option to add in a campaign spending limit. This is optional, and it is also dependent on a few things that we're going to be doing down here. But just so you know if your client is like, Okay, we definitely don't want to spend more than $300. This is where you would put that in. Then we've got the option over here to AB test our ad. Now, I would recommend just leaving this turned off for the time being because you can still test a few different variations of your ads, even if you're not using this AB test function. It is a little bit more advanced, and I would just recommend doing it manually at the beginning while you're still getting the hang of everything. So I would leave this turned off, and then campaign or, sorry, advantage campaign budget, which used to be campaign budget optimization is something that I would turn on. Effectively, what this does is it sets your budget at this top campaign level as opposed to setting it at the addset or audience level. So let's say I will have two different adsets within this campaign. Instead of saying, Okay, one adset is going to have $20.01 is going to have ten, I'm just going to say, actually, my daily budget for this whole campaign is going to be $30. And then Facebook will determine how that money gets distributed based on what's performing best for you. This is quite nice because it just means you get to think a little bit less, and you've got just sort of a daily budget option or you've got a lifetime budget option. If you select a lifetime budget option, then the campaign spending limit here has basically gone away because it sort of replaces that. So we would just say, Okay, our lifetime budget is $300. That's all we want to spend, and then we could potentially edit a few things in terms of running ads on a schedule. The benefit of doing a daily budget over a lifetime budget is that you can increase this without having to create a brand new campaign or copy your campaign over. So let's say we're running this at $25, and it's performing really well for us, and we want to put a little bit more budget behind it. We can actually just edit this to be $30 a day instead. Was with a lifetime budget, you're sort of a little bit more restricted, you would have to copy the campaign over and change your campaign budget, and you're sort of starting from scratch in that sense. So you want to make sure that you're optimizing that in a way that works the best for you. And then we've got the option to do some budget scheduling, where we can say, Okay, so, you know, this will start from this date and end on this day. And between these days, I want to increase my daily budget by this amount. Now, you're probably not going to utilize as a whole lot, but it might be, that a holidays coming up like Black Friday. So you want to make sure that during that in demand period, you are raising your daily budget because you know people are going to be shopping a lot more. Yeah, again, not a huge use case for it, but just so you know that that is an option there. And you also have your campaign bid strategy. So do you want the highest volume? Do you want the cost per end result? You've also got a bid cap option. So this is getting a little bit more sophisticated. It basically is, if your client was specifically, like, I don't want to spend any more than $3 per lead or $10 per lead. Is where you could go and adjust that. But generally speaking, you're just going to set this to just get me the best results for my budget. Now in terms of what your budget should be, no one can really determine this for you. So you're just going to have to decide based on what your client is sort of willing to lose and willing to experiment with as well, because especially if this is a new ad account, chances are, things are not going to go really well right off the bat. Agencies that spend thousands and thousands of dollars testing a few different things. So, you know, with smaller clients, you may not have the luxury of spending thousands of dollars on tests, but they do need to be aware of the fact that, you know, not every $25 day is going to get them the results that they want because things take time, and we need to sort of tweak as we go. So they just need to make sure that whatever they're spending is their daily budget is an amount that they're comfortable with. Alright, and now in the next lesson, we're going to start looking at our assets. 58. Select Your Audience & Placement: At the ad set level is where you're going to be choosing who's actually going to be seeing your ads, which we're going to create at the next stage. And it's really important for you to really think about this because obviously, Meta is going to do its job by trying to get you the best results by trying to put your content in front of the people who are most likely going to be to perform the action of the objective that you set at the campaign level. But you have to help it out a little bit. So for example, if you're an alcohol beverage supplier in the US, and you're trying to advertise to people who are underage, then obviously your ads are not even going to get approved because they're going to know that you're trying to sell it to 18 year olds. But it can sometimes be a lot more nuanced than that. If you're selling tampons, but you haven't selected this to be only shown to a female only audience, it's going to go out to some men. You are going to spend a little bit of money basically showing this to an audience that's probably not going to convert for you. The more you can really think about this, and it can be really small details like recently, I was searching for a video editing company. And I got a paid ad for a video editing company that was advertising here in Australia, which isn't a problem because they were based in the UK, but whatever, as long as they can service here in Australia, that's fine. But then when I went to actually book into their calendar for a chat, the only times they had available for me to book in with somebody was from, like, two to 5:00 A.M. In Australia. So if you actually don't have the capability, to service clients in a particular time zone, then don't spend your money advertising to them. So you really need to think about what happens next and what kind of products you sell? Who can you sell it to? Can you ship to certain parts of the world? Should you be advertising to certain parts of the world if you can't ship there? Really think about the business holistically, and who your target audience is, where they're in the world, and what do you know about them in order to be able to advertise. Okay, so let's go ahead and get started by heading over to our aset level. And much like with our campaign level, you want to make sure that you're naming your adset by whatever it is that you're actually testing at this stage. So generally within one campaign, you might have two or more adets. Let's say this particular adset was targeting our women or let's say female based audience who live in I don't know Canada, who love dogs. And then we could have another adset that would be male. Canada CATs. I don't know. Whatever the thing is that you're testing, you want to make sure you're putting it in the ad set. And again, naming conventions in terms of how this looks for you is very dependent on how your clients prefer to set it up. If they haven't set anything up, and it's a blank account, I'm going to link you to some resources that will tell you a little bit about how you should set up your naming conventions in a way that when you look at your ad account, your lack of k, cool. I know exactly what that's testing. I know exactly where I need to turn things off and on based on performance. We have our conversion location, so you can either collect leads through website, instant forms, messenger, et cetera, et cetera. Again, remember that the easier something is to set up, generally, the less effective it is. So with instant forms, which is something Facebook creates for you based on your Facebook page, the benefit of this is you will get a lot of leads, and they will be pretty inexpensive. Downside of this is that a lot of those e mail addresses you collect will never actually receive your e mails because these instant forms will have prepopulated someone's details based on their Facebook information. And a lot of us have Facebook accounts set up with e mail addresses we no longer have access to because we set them up in high school, and we have no idea where the access to that e mail is. So that's the downside. Somebody will go, Oh, yeah, I want to sign up to that. They'll open up the instant form and they'll say, subscribe, but they don't actually check the details to edit them, and then they wonder where their e mail is, and that's just because it never arrived because you're sending it to an e mail that they don't have access to anymore. That's why website conversions for leads are a lot more effective because it means that people have to manually type in the information so they can make sure that it's their current e mail address. Yes, it will cost a little bit more. Yes, it's a little bit more of a process because people have to leave Facebook to go to your website. And it also means that, you need to make sure that your website is optimized for this kind of thing, that it's fast enough, that everything looks good on mobile and all of those sorts of things, which is a little bit more work. But the payoff is the fact that you will get much higher quality leads and ones that are much more likely to buy from you. So then we have our performance goal. Would just leave this on, maximize number of conversions. Depending on what you choose here, you will also have the option or not have the option. As is the case here to set your cost per result of the goal. So yeah, I don't know that the rest of these are all that relevant. I don't know why you would want to maximize the number of page views. There would be some use cases for these, but generally, you just want to get the largest number of results. In this case, we do need to set up our metapixel, because we are going to be using our website to drive traffic to and our website that needs to speak to Facebook to say, Hey, this person signed up, this was a lead and trigger something to say, yes, count this as a lead. We need to make sure that that's set up. For now, we're going to ignore that. Then we have our attribution settings. I would leave this as the highest attribution possible. It just means that if somebody sees your ad or clicks through your ad, if they convert into a lead within seven days or within one day, that's going to count as a lead. You have the option for dynamic creative. We're going to switch this off now because again, it's like AB testing that we saw in the previous section where you can tailor this to your own unique needs, but you can still test things without using dynamic creative here. But Facebook is really just trying to help you out. If you are like, Okay, look, I've got a couple of captions and a couple of headlines that playing around with. I'm not sure how to put them all together. You could utilize the dynamic creative function, and it's going to create different variations and see what works best for audiences and then try to just give the variation that performs the best to the future audiences. In terms of budget and schedule, we are using the budget setting at the campaign level for this, so we're not going to be able to affect it here, but if we didn't do that, then we could set that here. But we can basically say, when is this going to start running, and when is it potentially going to end? If we set no end date, it's just going to run forever until we turn it off. But this can be great for topical promotions for, let's say Black Friday. I see this a lot when I'm still getting Black Friday ads from people a week after Black Friday or a week after they've stopped actually accepting the promotion coupons or whatever it is that they're advertising. So it's important that if you're running something like that, you do set an end date. Otherwise, you might just want to have it on all the time. Then again, we would set this up within the campaign level, and we don't really want any adset spending limits here, but you could do that if you had particular adets within your campaign that you like, I actually don't want this particular adset to spend too much, you could set that up here. We have our audience controls. This is essentially who is going to be seeing the ads that we're going to create at the next level. We've got a lot of different options here, and we are going to look into this even further in just a little bit. But for now, the things that we can look at is things like location. This could be country wide, it could be region wide. You could look for things like Thailand as a country, or you could look for Asia as a region. But you can also just do, let's say, Here, there's an ICA nearby, and let's say we're advertising for ICA. But we actually just want to be looking at let's say people within a specific radius of that ICA because we know people aren't really going to travel more than maybe. I, I think that's even a little bit too much, but let's say 25 miles of that IKA. We only want to be advertising to people within this radius. And that's really great for people with physical stores where that might actually be really applicable. Let's say you also want to exclude some areas, you can do that here. You can say, Okay, this radius, I want to exclude a particular suburb because maybe there's a competitor there or maybe I have another store, and I want to exclude locations around that store out of this radius. Either way, you can add some exclusions here for that. In this case, I'm actually just going to say, let's say Australia, we're going to be advertising to all of Australia. The minimum age, we can edit if we need to. But in this case, I'm happy to keep that. Actually, let's make that about 22. Probably for me, I don't know if anyone under the age of 22 would be purchasing a home, so that makes sense. Then we could exclude some custom audiences, which we're going to talk about in a little bit. And then we have the option for advantage plus audience. So you've got some options. You can basically say, This is the audience that I would ideally like to advertise to, but I'm still happy for Facebook to determine if there are people outside of the audience I'm creating here that might respond to my ads. Alternatively, I can turn this off altogether, and then it's going to give me a warning to say, Yeah, you don't necessarily need to use it, but you will potentially get up to 33% lower cost per result if you do use it. Now, I don't really know where this comes from, and 33% lower than what? I don't know. Either way, it's just something to test out. Do you want Facebook to look for people outside of this audience, or do you really just want to be looking at the people who you're setting up here? That will just be specific on a client by client basis. For example, previously, we just said we want to be looking at 22 plus, but what about the Max cap in terms of our age range? Let's say I only want to be looking at people 22 to 50. Or if I was going to segment this by my different customer avatars, then I would say, all So I'm going to look at, let's say 22 to 35, which would be one segment of the audience. And then I might do another ad set that would be, let's say 55 plus, which would be looking at a totally different customer avatar over that kind of retiree age and people who are looking to downsize. But in this case, you know, I am just doing a generic ad, let's say, so I'm happy to advertise to anyone 22-50. Wouldn't usually recommend that. Actually, I think it's nice to segment by different age groups so that you can make sure that the ads are really targeted to that particular age group. But in this case, we're going to keep it quite broad. We're also going to leave it to all genders, and then we could include some detailed targeting. So you can get really specific with this and look at people like, you know, people who are currently expats, people who are within the location that we've selected, so they're in Australia, but they formerly lived in the United States. So I know they're expats. So let's say my business was a local American sweet shop. Want to be tailoring it to specifically people who maybe identified on their profile that they were born in America or people who are ex pats. So, you know, I lived in Canada for ten years, and this is how a local Canadian shop actually targeted me. I'm assuming anyways. So that's really beautiful for that. But you can also look at things like, you know, do people have anniversaries coming up within the next 30 days, 60 days? Let's say you know you want to target someone who's got an anniversary in three months because you know you're shipping for your product takes a little while, or you know that, you know it's an expensive product, so you want to have the time to really put your ads in front of somebody. Or you're like, actually, my product is a digital thing. It can be purchased online. So I'm happy to target someone whose anniversaries within 30 days, who's maybe panicking a little bit because they haven't gotten anything yet. Same thing goes for parenting styles, so you can look for people who are parents, who are parents of kids that are school age or preschoolers or babies. And this is how you can sort of really start to narrow down your audience based on behaviors, based on interests. So you can get really, really targeted with this, and you'll start to see this estimated audience size here shifting based on the information that you provide Facebook. As soon as you say, we want the age range to actually be down to 43, that number is then going to start to change because obviously, our pool of people that we can run these ads to is limited. I would say ideally the audience size is over 500,000. Now that's not going to be always possible, especially for local businesses. But for people who can advertise nationwide or globally, I would say 500,000 or over is ideal. It really does also depend on your budget. Because if your budget is $5 a day, Then, even running ads to 100,000 people is perfectly fine. If your budget is $100 a day, and you only have 100,000 people in your audience size, you're going to burn through that audience really, really quickly. So you want to make sure that you have a wide enough range of people that you're advertising to. And this will continue to change based on things like placements that we'll talk about, as well. So if you're advertising on Instagram and also Facebook or just Facebook or just Facebook in certain areas, this is going to continue to change. Let's just leave this fairly broad for the time being, and then we've also got our placements option. My preference is to definitely change this. Facebook is pretty good at just putting your content out there. I would say, if you're using this for a lead generation objective or a sales objective, you could potentially leave this on the advantage plus placements, so that Facebook just shows your ad in as many places as possible to get you the best results for your budget. If you're using something like engagement or awareness, I would definitely utilize manual placements, because otherwise, Facebook is just going to burn through your cache by putting your ad everywhere, even if it's maybe not going to put it in the right spot to get you the best long term results. So it will still get you awareness, I'll get you engagement, but it might not be the right kind of high quality engagement or awareness that you want. I do like tweaking this, especially because audience network puts your ads in other people's content messenger. You know, that's something that I don't play around with quite as much, or I would like to kind of be able to tweak that myself. You can go through all these different options here and it will tell you exactly what that placement is all about. In the next section when we talk about our ads, you will be able to tweak that particular placement and potentially add in a different creative for that placement, for example, you know, for Facebook Reels, we only want it to be videos. So if your ad is a static image, then for Facebook Reels, you will be able to tweak that into video format so that it's optimized for that placement. So whether or not you choose to have your ads appear in all the placements or not, it's totally up to you. You will start to see some patterns in terms of the results that you're getting based on placements as well. Again, if you're working with a blank account and you have no idea what sort of works for your client, then you may want to experiment with a few of these different placements so that you can really start to narrow in on just looking at your analytics and going, Oh, actually, we got really great conversions from this particular placement and this one than this one. And then in the future, you may choose to sort of turn off the ones that aren't working for you. All right. Now, in the next lesson, we're going to start to look at our actual ads, so I'll see you there. 59. Create Your Ad: So now we're going to get to the stage where we're actually talking about what will be seen coming across somebody's feed. The previous two levels were all about, who's going to be seeing your ad and why are they seeing it or what the goal is? And now we're talking about what are they actually going to see? Is it a video? Is it an image? Is it a carousel? What text is there? What call to action buttons are there? So you need to really think about this from a sort of testing mindset because this is likely where you're going to do most of your testing. Because there are so many different elements that you can test at this stage. So that's just something to keep in mind that, you may not be able to just run one ad with one copy, one creative element, and it's going to be perfect straightaway. It's definitely going to take a little bit of tweaking and testing. But for our purposes, we're just going to be putting together a bit of a simple ad so we don't overcomplicate things at from the very beginning. So let's get into it with the ad creation process now. So almost there, we need to get into the ad level to actually try optimizing our beautiful ad preview. So we're going to switch on ad preview. We would set our ad name as whatever it is that we're testing. Before when I was talking about split testing or AB testing. With each ast, you might have two or more ads and in each you might be testing different text. That would be your copy. Different images, or maybe one will have an image, one will have a video. Whatever it is that you're testing, that's what you would put in your ad name. For this one, it might be, real estate video, and then the next one could be real estate image or whatever makes sense to you, I suppose. So we aren't running an ad, in this case. We have our Facebook page and our Instagram account set out. Because this is one ad account might have multiple pages or multiple Instagram accounts set within it. Make sure that this is correct, because it does happen, especially if you're king with an agency where you're running it under the wrong account, so make sure that that is correct. Then we want to be actually creating our ad here. Do we want to be using a single image or video, a carousel? Or a collection. In this case, we just want to be going with a single image or video to make it nice and easy. And then you can tick the multi advertiser ads on or off. This can be really great for e commerce businesses where people might be seeing particular ads from particular businesses that they may be visited and then your ads appear next to them because they're sort of related. I think for our particular industry here, I would probably take that off, but just so you know that that is an option. And then we're going to start creating our ad creative here. I'm going to be adding a video, and I'm just going to go ahead and upload Now we're going to upload both of these because they will be useful for different placements. Okay, so a few things have glitched here, it uploaded a whole bunch of videos, but that's okay. We're just going to go with the 1080 by 13 50 portrait video for now, and then we don't need to trim this one because it's already good to go, and it's going to tell us where we need to potentially crop or replace it for different placements. For feeds, in streams, this is fine. I mean, it says one to one is recommended, so you could actually crop it, but I think for this, I'm happy to keep it as original in the slightly more vertical dimensions then for stories, reels, et cetera, et cetera. You could crop it, but you might lose some of the magic of the video. In this case, I would just replace it with one of my vertical videos. That's the correct dimensions here. That's nine by 16. That looks good. Then this is for the right column. Honestly, this is not a placement. I utilize a whole lot. But I wouldn't necessarily crop for this because this video is really not optimized for these dimensions. I would actually just replace this potentially even with a totally different video because, yeah, you can see how it looks. It's not super super impactful. But for our purposes, just for demo purposes here, I'm happy to keep it as that. So we're going to go to next Once again, Facebook is going to give you some options for their advantage plus enhancements in this case, where it might change your creative a little bit, maybe optimize some comments, and visual touch ups. This can be quite cool for blank images, where it might make the images a little bit more vibrant. It's not as relevant for videos and then text improvements. The status that it's giving you isn't actually telling you how much of an improvement this is, it's just telling you how many people have utilized this enhancement. Whether you decide to turn that on or off is completely up to you. It does say it may only apply them to 5% or fewer ad impressions. So it's not going to apply them to every single ad that's out there. But again, if you want to use that or not is totally up to you, I'm just going to leave that off for now. Now, this is just a really basic video that I shot at an AirBNB that we were saying it as a demo for this particular course. We're just sort of walk around in slow motion. So it's not anything spectacular, it's just a couple of clips of this beautiful house. And this is something really easy you could do even with videos from Pexels. There's no huge amount of text or editing. It's relatively simple, but it's pretty captivating because the property speaks for itself. Now, I would pair this with some really beautiful text. In terms of what to actually put in for your Facebook ads text, this is something that you may need to play around with a little bit to see what works ideally for your customer. Are tools like this one that will actually help you out a little bit. You can put in your URL, and it will actually give you some ad copy. So we can test this out with my website here, so I can show you what that looks like. It's gone and analyze my website and given a marketing brief to my website. And then based on this, it's given me some ad text and image ideas for Facebook ads here. So at this stage, you know it's sort of saying, Master digital marketing today, unlock your potential, joint this many students. It's pulled all this information from my website, and then it gives me an image or video concept as well. It's gone through and it's actually done a relatively good job here, and then it's also done it for Google and strategy. The other options are great out because you do need to be signed up to access those features. But it can be a nice way to just get some ideas flowing. Obviously, for Mags realty, we don't have a live website, so I would do it through a manual input here. So I could just say something like a buyers agent in Brisbane Australia. Really, really basic. We would want to expand a little bit more in order to get the best results. But of course, absolutely, you can come up with your own ideas for ads based on your own research or whatever is in your head. This is just a nice way to get some ideas flowing. I'll give you a headline, a description, and some text here and also an image concept. Yeah, I don't mind that. Affordable stylish options. I mean, I can't really control that as a buys agent, but I like the headline or find your dream of home in Brisbane. So we can bring that in here as a headline. I could also add some alternative headlines. Then in terms of my primary text, this would be the caption. Now, this is going to be a caption both on Facebook and Instagram in these primary placements. Sometimes you will find that people are putting in something like, you know, click the button above or tap the button below. And it's not as optimized for both placements, because obviously on Facebook, the caption is above the image or video on Instagram, it's below. So you want to avoid those sorts of terminologies that may not work across all the placements. Alright. So I've just sort of started typing in a little bit, and Facebook is already helping me out with their own AI in here based on what I've put in there. So I can say, All right, actually, I'm going to accept all the text variations, and it's going to basically test these out for me in different placements. I can also just edit this. So if you know, part of it doesn't work for me, or I want to alter that, I can come in and adjust it before I accept it. That's a really nice way of utilizing Facebook's own AI in there, and you can do the same thing for headlines, of course. But for now, I'm quite happy to just keep it as that. Now, in terms of your description, this won't appear in all placements. You may want to add this in, but you don't necessarily need to. It's an optional placement. But for now, I'm just going to leave that out, and then we're just going to have our call to action as let's just say, learn more. These are our enhancements, so I've already decided I'm not too too fussed about it. Facebook has given me a little bit of a warning here. Yeah, so it's not really liking my right column placement. That's totally fine. I would actually probably go back to my AdSet level and just turn that off because I don't think this video is quite right for that. But then I would put in my website. So obviously, I don't have access to Mags realty because it's not a real website. So in this case, we would just add in my actual URL here. We would want to make sure that this actually goes somewhere, and it doesn't just go to a home page, because obviously that's not optimized for conversions. If someone was going to be asking about my services, I would want it to go to a specific landing page. So make sure your clients are putting together specific landing pages for your ads unless they're maybe an e commerce business, where it's going straight to a product page or something like that. Then we have the option to build out URL parameters. This is something we're going to talk about a little bit later on when we dive into our analytics. But just know there is an option to build out some URL parameters here. It is a little bit more of an advanced tracking feature. It's something that you may or may not be responsible for. It's also something that your clients will likely have a system for. So they'll know what their particular tracking system looks like, and they will advise you on what they want to be here. But I have added some extra resources on URL parameters within your course guide if you are interested in learning more, but again, we will dive into it a little bit more Then in terms of your browser add ons, it's really dependent on what your objective is that you set at the campaign level as to what you see here, but we're happy to keep it as that. Then in terms of languages, this is something that you could utilize if you're running across different regions and you want to attract specific people in specific languages. But for us, we're going to keep that turned off. Now in terms of tracking, we don't have our meta pixel set up at this stage, but this is where you would be able to set Then you have another option to build out your URL parameters down here. And on the right here is where you're going to start to see previews of what your ads look like. This is also a nice kind of point of call for you to do a last minute check. So, for example, for this video on Instagram Stories and Facebook stories, it gives absolutely no context to somebody. Why would they want to click on Learn More? It's just a blank video. So that's where I would maybe go back to my creative option just up here. Then either I could just use the drop down and only change this for Instagram stories and reels, or I could Instagram stories and Facebook stories, or I could also change it for reels and for the entire section that requires these dimensions. In this case, let's just edit the group and say, we're going to change this video. And let's upload one that has a little bit more context to it. So this is just a little bit clearer, and it says, you know, want to get into your dream home sooner. It's just a little bit of texts that are added to the video inside of Canva. You can see that it's within the safe zone on mobile screens. And it just is, like, a little bit mysterious, but it gives someone at least a little bit more context to what that particular story is about. Could go through the creative tools over here as well to do this. If you don't want to do it within Canva, I just find that the control you get out of creating your assets outside of Facebook Ads Manager is a little bit nicer, but of course, can use the tools from within here as well. Then you may want to select your thumbnail as well. So if we want to create a manual thumbnail based on something that's from within the video and choosing a particular shot. So let's say this one here, I don't know. Just in case, basically, if anybody doesn't have the autoplay feature on, and they're coming across this in a placement where it doesn't automatically play, then this is the thumbnail that they're going to be shown. So that's just a nice little last touch, especially if you've got longer videos in these placements that you're selecting a video that, you know, is kind of captivating and make somebody want to watch the rest of the video. Alright, so let's just go ahead and click Save on that Awesome. So that is looking better. It's added it to our reels and our stories. And now if I wanted to share this with my client, I could go up here and say, share a link. I could say link sharing on for 30 days. It's going to create a link for me, and I can go ahead and share this link with my client because not every client is super comfortable inside of the ads manager world. They might panic if you send them to the back end to check something you've done and copying everything you've done into, like, a spreadsheet to share with it. Look, it gets really messy. So sometimes it's nice to be able to just share the link. And say, this is what we're planning, what do you think? And they can come in here and view it all. Of course, they won't be able to view every single option for your text variations because you will have some slight variations of copy, but it gives them a nice idea of just generally what you're planning. And then once we're happy with that, we would just be able to hit publish, but of course, because we don't have our payment methods set up, we can't do that. I would just ask me to review and publish, but it'll ask me to put in some payment details before I'm able to do that. Which again, is why you want your clients setting up their own ads manager and just inviting you to it because it needs to have all their payment details, their time zone, and everything else that's a little bit harder to change. But, of course, at this stage, we're happy to just keep it as this. Going to leave it there for the time being, but in the next lesson, we're just going to look at how you might be able to actually then expand this out with various ads and various adsets within your campaign, and we're also going to look at some advanced moves with your metapixel and with your audience options. I'll see you in the next lesson. 60. Advanced Audience Tips: So let's say our campaign is all set up, and we're happy to keep the budget that we have for the campaign, but we want to test out a few different audiences, so a few different adsets in here. Now, the first thing we want to do is make sure that we are testing something at the ad level. Now, can you just have one ad running for each ad set? Absolutely, you can. So, in this case, we've got the one ad that's running across the different placements. You could leave it at that. And you can also because you're experimenting with the different headline options in there and all of those sorts of things. So if you're happy to keep it at that, that's totally fine. But if you do want to experiment with a few different creative options, so for example, maybe this was just the one video, and you're happy to keep all the text options the same, but you want to swap out this video for another one to see which one performs the best for you. So we would just go ahead and duplicate this, and it's going to duplicate it within the original campaign and within your original adset as well. So at the moment, it's literally just real estate video copy. Again, you would want to make sure that you're titling this in a way that makes sense to you. But essentially, all you would do is possibly just delete this and change it into a different video that you would upload in here. So at the moment, we don't have any in there, but let's say you upload a totally different video and you go through the whole process, and then you're able to test out which video performs the best for you. Then what you can do is say, Okay, so I'm testing that out with my female Canadian dog lovers. But what about the male audience? Or let's say we are only testing this on a female audience? Let's say, let's look at women who live in Canada, but who like cats instead. So we would go ahead and duplicate the adset. And again, we just want to put it into our camp. One. And then we would go in here and we can see everything over here. So this is all of our original content. This is our duplicated content. And whatever the thing was that we were changing, we would then put in the title of the aset. So let's say, I know at the beginning, we didn't actually set this to be female, but let's say we did, and now we're going to be changing it to only men or in here. Let's say we put they must love dogs. Now we would put in cats as an interest. So this would be our men. Let's say they're still in Canada, who like cats. That's the thing that we're testing in this particular ad set. Again, we can't publish anything, but then when we look at this, we can start to see some results on the right hand side here once our ads are actually running. So it does take a little while for your ads to be approved. Also, in case they don't necessarily get approved, and Facebook flags, something in your ads. Don't panic. It's sometimes just a really small thing, like, maybe you put a wine emoji in your text and you're advertising to an audience that's less than 21 in America. Yes, it really can be that petty. I've had ads not approved because of something that small. So don't panic. Usually it's something that Facebook just wants you to fix. But then once it's fixed, let's say your ads are running, this is where you're going to start to see your results, and you can tweak what's shown here as well, so you can go over here. And have a look at the different column options that you can create into a new preset. So if you want to start to see some different results here, again, that's getting a little bit more complicated. I think at the beginning, you just leave things as they are and just see how your results and how your things are tracking, so you will be able to test whether this audience or this audience is performing better. And then you can narrow this down even further to see whether this particular ad for one audience or this particular ad for the other audience is testing better. And then Facebook is going to be quite smart with this because you have set your budget at the campaign level. So it is going to start distributing more funds towards the adsets and ads that are performing the best for you based on the objective that you have set. So you don't manually have to do this. Even though all four of your ads are running, if Facebook determines after a little while that actually men who love cats who live in Canada really aren't resonating with this one ad. It's eventually going to stop showing it to them, and it's going to start putting the money behind your other assets. Now, I do want to talk to you about audiences. We can look at a few things without connecting our Facebook pixel, which is something we're going to do in the next lesson. But there are going to be some options that are going to be limited because we're not able to connect it yet, so we'll look at a live account for that. But within your audiences section is where you can do a few cool things, like you can create a custom audience where you can upload a customer list. So let's say your client has a newsletter subscription, so they've already got a customer database that they can just upload in a spreadsheet. If those e mail addresses are matched up with Facebook profiles, you're then able to target those customers on Facebook. Likewise, if you have the metopixel set up on your website, you can then target your website visitors. So you would have absolutely seen this yourself whenever you're, you know, checking out a pair of shoes, and then you go onto Facebook or Instagram, and suddenly, those shoes are there following you around. So that's how the Pixel works, where it just starts, retargeting you with things that you have already seen with ads for that product or service to see if you might want to come back. Can also do lots of other things by retargeting things like your Facebook page followers or people who interact with your Instagram account, even people who interact with particular videos, whether they're organic videos or ads. At the moment, if you were going to click on video, we can say, create an audience of people who have viewed at least 3 seconds of a particular video, and then it's going to ask you which videos you want to be looking at. At the moment, it's showing us our Instagram account, but we do have a video here on our Facebook page, so we can say, this is the video that I want to re target. And as long as people have watched at least 3 seconds of it, or people have watched 10 seconds or a percentage of this video, and let's say just in the last 30 days. And then we can save this audience by saying something like video views. Let's say, real estate video, 30 days. And it just needs to make sense to you. And then I could advertise to this audience with my Facebook ads, because maybe this was a video that was showcasing an upcoming webinar, or maybe was actually a recording of a webinar, and people who watched at least 50% of that particular video, I want to show them my offer, because I know they're interested in what I have to sell, so I could then run ads to those people with the next stage of my customer journey, which would be an offer for something for them to purchase. That's custom audiences. You also have the option to just create saved audiences, which effectively is the same or very similar process to what we were doing within our ads section within Ads Manager, but you are able to then save this so we can reuse these audiences, so you don't have to make it from scratch every single time. So once again, this could be, let's say, Oz, women who love travel. Or a particular celebrity as well. So if you've got competitors that you want to target off of, as long as they're here as an interest. So, for example, let's say, Oprah, might be an interest, and you'll start to say, this many people in Australia, like Oprah on Facebook. So let's say Oprah was a competitor of mine, then I can target off of her audience. In this case, I also said travel. So these would be people who are either frequent travelers or just enjoy travel. I could also say, Okay, look, they've just returned from travel. I don't know what I would be looking to sell them. But These are either behaviors or interests. And then in this case, I would say English. And I said just women, and I'm just going to keep the age range. Anyway. So this is how I would go about saving audiences and then keeping an eye on the estimated audience size. So the moment it's pretty good, it's 1 million to 1.2. So that's pretty good. But then I could narrow this down further, so I could say, only show me people who like opera and also like dogs. And then I could narrow this down further by saying people who like opera and also like dogs and are frequent travelers. This is such a weird audience. I don't know what I'm advertising to these people. Well, this is where you can start to see, okay? Women in Australia between these ages, there's only about 92,000. That's actually high than I thought to be was like, This is very nice. But either way, you can start to see how I could narrow this down. And the reason that this works really well in terms of exclusions is because you could have one audience that says, show this to people who are frequent travelers and also like dogs. And then the next audience could say, show this to people who like dogs, but exclude anyone who's a frequent traveler, which means that One person who is in one ad set would definitely not be seeing the ads in the other adset because they've been excluded from it based on their interests. So that does get a little bit complicated, but just so you know, you can really, really start to narrow a few things down by using saved audiences. And then you also have the option to create lookke audiences. So you could I mean, we don't have a source at the moment, but let's say we've got our Mags realty as a Facebook page, and let's say it's quite an active Facebook page. We could then say, Okay, look for people within Australia. Who are similar to people who lack my Facebook page and are the most similar, so within a 1% similarity or a wider range. So the higher the percentage you go here, the larger the number of people, but the less similarities they'll have with your original audience. So the top 1%, at the moment, it's showing me just 230,000 people, it's totally guessing because obviously this is a page that doesn't actually have any followers, but anyway, let's say we do Then it will create an audience that is most similar to the people who are already engaging with you. And this is great for website traffic in particular, so we don't have our Facebook pixel set up at this stage. But let's say we did have a Facebook pixel set up. We could say, find me, people who are most similar to people who are already on my website or people who have already purchased from me or people who are already on my e mails. So look alike audiences can be really, really powerful. And let's just now jump into an account that has a little bit more data to play with so that we can see what we would do in terms of creating a website audience. So we would just go to create audience, custom audiences, website. And this is where we can do it from website visitors in particular. So you could say, All right, create me an audience from people who have visited, let's say specific web pages, which can be really powerful for retargeting ads. So let's say we've got a particular landing page that we're currently sending a lot of traffic to. And we want to re target people who went on this page. So let's say it's something like come for slash sale. But then we want to exclude people who have gone to Maggie sara.com forward slash thank you. So what this does, and then, of course, we can say contains equals, et cetera, but contains seems to be the safest anyways. So, what that means is that if I was to create this audience and run adds to it, I am running ads to people who have checked out my sales page, but haven't actually purchased because they never went to the Thank you page. So when I'm running these ads, they could say something Hey, I noticed that you checked out my item, but you didn't actually purchase. And I can be sure that people who are seeing that ad never actually purchased from me because they didn't come to this thank you page or whatever, you know, post purchase page you have set up. So this is where we can get really, really specific with it. I'm not going to save this because it's on my actual account, but this is how you can then pull these custom audiences from within Ads Manager when you're actually creating your adsets, instead of doing, you know, interest targeting and things like that, you can actually pull in your saved custom audiences that are really specific and based on people's behaviors. So hopefully, that has given you a little bit of an idea of how you can create some more elaborate audiences from within ads manager. Again, you do not have to be doing this stuff straightaway. If you just want to start with, quite simple behavior or interest based targeting, that is perfectly fine. But just so you know, if you are running ads and you want them to, let's say, only go out to people who you know are already engaging with you on social media or are already on your website, then this is the way to do it. And the next lesson, we're going to have a look at how to set up your Facebook pixel, your metapixel, so that you know exactly how to create these kinds of audiences. 61. Meta Pixel Basics: So in order to set up certain custom audiences, you do need to have a meta pixel setup on your website, and it will actually prompt you to set it up as you're doing this from within here. If we head on over to this, it will basically say, you don't actually have a pixel. So you can either do it here or if you're within here, you can go to your events manager up here or over here, and it'll ask you to connect some data sources so that you can get this set up for your account. So we're going to head on over to data sources. And actually, let's just go to connect data sources over here. So we want to connect a website. This is going to be Mag realty. I'm going to be using my actual website here because Meg's Realty doesn't quite work. And then you're able to either do it yourself and manually install your pixel or you can get guidance based on your platform. So honestly, it's not actually all that difficult to do it yourself. Either your clients will likely have a developer or someone who's maintaining their website who can easily do this if you haven't already, or you can get guidance on doing it yourself. They're going to ask you a bunch of questions that they just want to know about you. And, are we tech savvy? I don't know. Either way. So it's going to ask you if you want to do this with a partner, as in, do you have wicks or word press or Shopify, square space, whatever your platform is, it's going to ask you if you just want to set that up really, really easily, and it's going to take you through the steps based on your platform. Alternatively, you can just manually install the code, and there's heaps and heaps and heaps of resources of how to do this depending on your platform. So if you know exactly what kind of platform your client has their website on, you could easily set that up for them or at least hand them the code. This is something that they should really do themselves or do through a developer. It's not a super complicated thing, and again, lots and lots of resources out there. It's basically just a little piece of code that you then create and place on your website so that you're able to see some events happening in lifetime, see people tracking your website, maybe checking out products if you have an e commerce store. And then ultimately also becoming leads and sales, which is what then sends data back to Facebook to say, this person has signed up for the mailing list, so track that as a lead conversion, or this person has purchased from this business, so track that as a sale. And it'll also say how much they actually purchase. So within ads manager, you'll then be able to see, okay, I spent $100 on my ads, but these people have purchased $100 worth of products on the website. So I know roughly what my return on my investment is. Then once you're done with your setup, you want to make sure you're downloading the metopixel helper as a Google rom extension. Then when you're on any website out there, if they have a metopixel installed, this chrome extension is going to show you that that is installed, and it's working and potentially some action items as well that they're tracking. So you can do this, of course, on your client's website to make sure that their pixel has been installed correctly, and you're also going to start to see some data in here that's going to show you that everything is tracking correctly on the website. So that's all about the metopixel. And in the next lesson, we're going to have a look at one cool hack that I wanted to share with you before moving on to the other platforms, so I'll see. 62. Why Engagement Campaigns?: So earlier we talked about why boosted posts are not generally a good idea. And I think engagement campaigns are a nice sort of middle ground between running, you know, really complex ads on the one end of the spectrum and boosted posts, which are at the very simple, you know, beginning end of the spectrum. And the reason I like engagement campaigns, especially for new accounts that have never run ads before, maybe you've literally just started running ads. It can be a nice way to build up into a warm audience. So you can kind of get people to engage with your content, get to know your brand a little bit, but you're not really asking for them to do anything at this stage. You're maybe asking them to just look at your videos. You're asking them to watch a couple of seconds or a minute or two of your video, get to know your business. And then later on, you could potentially then re target this audience that has engaged with your brand through these engagement campaigns and retarget them with something a little bit more substantial like asking for their e mail address or asking for them to actually do something, go to your website, purchase a product, what have you. So I like engagement campaigns for that reason, and they're relatively easy to set up, and a lot of companies, especially big companies are continuously running engagement campaigns. At the same time, while they're also running conversion campaigns and campaigns to actually drive lead generation and all of the kind of things that actually impact the sales in their business. So it can be a nice little strategy. So I wanted to share it with you, and obviously it's up to you to determine whether it's right for your client's business, but hopefully you'll enjoy it. So when it comes to engagement campaigns or doing what we're about to do, you can just publish something, so that's the first way to do it is just to actually create a post that you think would work both as an organic post and as an ad. So, for example, one like this where it's got a little bit to it. And then it's also got a call to action for people to visit the website or give me or send me a message. So that would be a potential ad, but also work as a post, and then I could go to more and then maybe adding a button for people to send me messages. So then people would be able to do that both organically and also if this was a paid ad. So I'm just going to post that on the page so we can have a look at how I'd go about not boosting this, but promoting it on the back end. And then we will jump into a different ad account, so I can show you how you might be able to take this one step further. For now, let's go on to create. And in this case, I would want to run an engagement campaign and go to manual engagement campaign. I'm going to go through this relatively quickly because it doesn't hugely matter what's going on there. Yes, the conversion location. In this case, I would actually want to just get engagement on my ad, and the engagement I want is post engagement. So likes, comments, shares, that kind of thing. And I would just go with a lifetime budget of, let's say, 20 bucks. I wouldn't want to spend a huge amount. And I'll only run this for just a few days. It can run all the time. Now, in terms of the location, at this stage, because all I'm looking for is engagement, I don't mind too much. I would actually just be trying to show this to my audience. So I would be creating a custom audience that is basically anyone who has engaged with my Facebook page in let's say the last 365 days or maybe a little bit more recently. So let's say the last 90 days. Wouldn't worry about including or excluding people at this stage. This could just be Facebook 90 days. So that would be the audience that I would be targeting with this. And in terms of placements. Yes, I would want to edit this because I wouldn't want to be running the same ad on Instagram and Facebook. I would actually just be running this on Facebook and only in particular feeds. Because I don't really want to be running this in search results and stories and vertical formats because it's not really going to get me the engagement that I want. So I'd probably only run this in a Facebook feed and Facebook video feed because that's the two places that people can really engage with these kinds of posts. And then I would just be using an existing post, and I could go through to selecting it here. So I can go ahead and select the post. And I can see exactly how that would appear in the video feed and the Facebook feed, and I could potentially add in some alternate variations of the text, but I'm happy with that. That's pretty much it. And then what I could do after that point is potentially then turn this ad into another ad in the future. At this stage, because I'm just running this for engagement with my existing Facebook page because maybe this is a particular post that I definitely want to make sure that people who are followers of my Facebook page are going to see, then I could do it this way, but really at this stage, my aim is just to get that nice social proof. Because once you start gathering a little bit of social proof on your ads, you can then turn that existing ad Into a lead ad or a conversion ad of some sort, and it makes it look much more impressive because you have all of your wonderful Facebook followers who are going to jump in and say, Yes, Meg, saved me so much time and money. Thank you so much. You're so great. I'm going to share this blah blah, blah blah blah. So that kind of user generated buzz is much more worthwhile than you just saying, Hey, I'm the best. That's why engagement campaigns can be a really nice introduction into your funnel. And then it's nice to be able to take those ads and move people further along. Obviously, we're not actually going to have anything running because this is not a real business, so I'm going to jump into a different account. That's no longer running anything, but it has some existing ads that we can take a look at from the past that have social proof in them and then look at how we would then turn that into an ad in the future. So I think there's one here that I can think about that had a little bit of social proof on Now, keep in mind, whether you are using an existing post or you're actually creating the ad within the Facebook ads manager, it will have a post ID. So if you've created it in here, and instead of saying use existing post, you actually just made it in here with an image and text and all of that. Once it's running, Facebook will treat it exactly the same, and you'll be able to follow the next steps regardless. So you can see, it's got 147 shares, some comments, some reactions. And because it did run, I can say, right, I'm going to see the Facebook post with comments. I want to see that. And at this stage, what I want to do is I want to click on the date here. And when you click on the date in the search bar, you're going to see the post ID up here. This is the number that you want to grab. So that all of this beautiful social proof here, you know, almost 700 people have engaged with this post, that's what you want to be copying over. So we've got that post ID, and now let's go ahead, and again, this is not an existing account. So nothing's going to run, but we're just going to go ahead and create a lead campaign here. I'm going to go ahead and do this. We're just going to leave everything as is. And I would probably be a website conversion at this stage. Again, it depends on how your actual post or your ad is set up, if it's set up to be converted through messenger, then obviously, you would choose a different objective there, or a different conversion location there. And then, yes, I want to just maximize the number of conversions. I have my website pixel here, and then it would be a lead as a conversion. Attributions, I would just leave as. And then my budget would be a let's say I had 100 bucks to boost a post. So I've spent 20, and then now I want to spend 80 on just testing what's going on. I want to make sure that I'm not running this ad until the engagement ad has finished. So let's say this was the second step of running my previous ad, and it finished its engagement campaign on the sixth. I want to make sure that this doesn't start running until the day after. And then I want to run it, let's say for one week. And I'm just going to run that for 80 bucks for one week. So I'm happy with that. Now I would want to get a little bit more specific with my audience, because obviously, if I was running this for Meg's Realty, I'm a Brisbane real estate agent. So I would want to make sure I'm only going to be showing this particular ad to people within the Brisbane area and maybe within, like 50 miles because potentially people outside of this area are looking to move to Brisbane. So those are still relevant people to me, but I wouldn't want to be advertising it elsewhere because those are not my leads. Then in terms of the audience, again, I could just really go through the same steps as we would for anything else, where I'm trying a target based on behavior, and all of the things that I know about my ideal customer avatars, I would go through there. And then my placements, I would edit this to really only work with the placement or with the actual ad that I'm running. So again, you know, it does depend on if social proof is important to you. If it's not, then you wouldn't go through all these steps. It's just that I found that this is a really nice and easy way to just get a bit of momentum for your clients if they're on a strict budget. So if they don't have a whole lot of money to blow on advertising, this is the best way to kind of get a lot of bang for their buck. And this way, I can also just make sure I'm splitting this out by putting one outset as an Instagram placement and one outset as a Facebook placement. So I'm happy to have it as a Facebook feed, Facebook, profile feed. I don't know about that one, to be honest, not Facebook Marketplace, definitely not Instagram, and not the right column. Yeah, again, I will just keep it to Facebook Feed and Facebook Video feed. I'm happy with that. And I would be using the existing post. I would obviously put in my website and everything else. But in this case, I just want to enter the post ID here and click. Okay. And it's going to bring in that ad. Obviously, it's going to have some red flags for me because this ad ran a few years ago, and it's probably not up to scratch in terms of Facebook's current policies. But you can see that all of that social proof is running through this new ad. So again, you know, it's demoing from a different account, but imagine that this was Meg's realty. We ran it for a little while. And all these people who are my engaged followers on my Mags Realty Facebook page, have commented, shared, et cetera. And now I can use the same ad to then promote it to brand new audiences that have never heard of me, but there's a little bit of social proof to sort of back up the fact that I know what I'm doing. They don't necessarily know that it's from my existing audience. And people kind of expect it either way, but you just happen to trust an ad that has social proof on it much more than you would an ad that doesn't. So, that is just a really nice and easy way to stretch your client's budget because they will get cheaper leads, and they will already be a little bit more receptive to what you have to offer because they've seen a little bit of social proof from other people in the comments. So it really is much more effective than just clicking the Boot post button. And it's something that I would definitely encourage you to just play around with. I know it can get a little bit complicated. But really all you're doing is either you're creating just a post on a Facebook page like this, in which case, you're then able to use it directly from within ads manager. So would actually be here. Instead of entering the post ID, you would actually just select it here. Or if you're just running it from within Ads Manager, then you would go through and grab your post ID the way that we did it by going through and seeing the Facebook post with comments and all of that and then grabbing it from here and adding it to your new beautiful ad. So hopefully, you found that helpful. Again, feel free to ignore all of this if you're like. This is just a little bit too complicated for me for the time being. Please make sure you know your own limits, but just don't be afraid to experiment because there are always a few neat little hacks that you can experiment with even if you are not working with a huge, huge budget, like a lot of other brands out there might be. All right. And for now, that's all on Facebook ads, and I will see you in the next lesson. 63. LinkedIn Ads: As I said at the beginning of this section of the course, meta ads are going to be the most complex ones that you'll probably encounter in the social media marketing space. But then the good news is that other ads on other platforms are going to just seem a lot simpler. So I wanted to incorporate a few other platforms that you could leverage paid advertising on, and hopefully you're going to start to see a little bit of overlap in some similarities with what we just covered. So let's jump into it with the world of Linkedin ads. So to get started with advertising on LinkedIn, just sign into your personal profile. Of course, you do have to have a company page set up in order to advertise. But once you do, you can head on over to the advertised section. Now, we're going to be utilizing my actual live page, not Mags reality for this just because it does make you go through a few steps in terms of billing and two step verification and a few other things. Obviously, we would also want to make sure we have the tracking setup and everything else. I'm just going to be doing it on this page, but I actually haven't run Linked in ads on this page in a few years. So it's pretty much a blank slate anyways, and we can just look through the system and you can get to know it a little bit. Once you're inside of Lon's campaign manager, as they call it, you'll start to see some similarities with Facebook's Ads manager. There's one additional sort of level above the campaign level that you saw inside of Facebook ads. So Facebook ads would have campaigns, ad sets, and ads. Inside of LinkedIn, we have campaign groups, campaigns and ads. But actually, all of your audience details, so what would be your ad set actually exists inside the campaign level within LinkedIn. The campaign group is just an additional kind of shell on top of that. But really most things happen on the campaign level and then you've got your ad level. We're just going to start creating and then we'll talk through things as we go. We're just going to create a campaign group, so we can start to see how things look there, but that's just going to be a test campaign group. Status is active. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to be running by the way. It just means it's on, and then we choose our objective at this level. Your objective is set at the campaign group level, not the campaign level. The objectives are quite similar. You've got brand awareness, website visits, engagement, video views. The one thing that's specific to Linton is job application because obviously that is a big part of the platform that you don't really see on Facebook. But otherwise, everything is pretty similar to what you would see. I wouldn't really run engagement. Campaigns on Lincoln. I mean, there would be some use cases for it. But Lincoln ads are much more expensive in my experience than Facebook ads. So I wouldn't necessarily spend the budget on engagement campaigns unless your client has a huge budget to spend. Otherwise, you're most likely going to be kind of doing either lead generation and probably website conversions, job application, even messaging, but really something that's actually going to give you some return on your investment rather than just engagement. This case, let's just select generation for now, and then you can decide whether you have your budget optimized at the campaign group level. So in this case, let's just say we're going to be doing it here. And then as your daily budget, if you try to set it at like $4, Linkedin is going to basically tell you that it's probably not going to run depending on the dates that you set. Generally, it'll tell you your daily budget minimum is about, I think about $30, but it does depend on when your campaign is running from until. Yeah. If we try to create it, it's going to say, we can't do that. We need to have a minimum of $30 for our daily budget. And then yeah, we barely just want the maximum delivery. We're only going to run this for a day, or we could run it continuously. Just going to go and click Create. Now, it's essentially just created a shell here. It's going to make us jump back into this campaign group to create the campaign. It says it's active and you can see that other things will say they're active. It doesn't mean that it's actually running though. We're going to go ahead and we could either create a campaign here or we can just create it up here, but in this case, let's just create it within our campaign group. We've just created and go to next. We could just say test Legion. And this is where we then select our audience. So much like Facebook, we can go based off of location. We can also exclude particular locations. I'm just going to keep this on Australia for now, but you could narrow this down by particular cities. And then you can go through either Linked in audiences, which are, you know, things like event planners, financial planners, for me, marketing professionals could be an interesting one, or you can kind of go based off of your saved audiences, or you can just go ahead and create a new audience. So that's very, very similar to Facebook as Manager. And in order to save an audience, if you find one here that you'll like, you can then save it for future use as well. So if you create an audience here and you're like, Oh, actually, that would be a good one to use for future ads, you can save it so that you can use it a little bit easier next time. So target audience, it has a few things leftover in here in terms of job functions. So it's got, you know, marketing business development, but I could just remove that. And that's just because that's what I've used to target off of in the past. If this is all blank, you would just go either off of your existing audiences. So things like your website audiences, you could upload an actual list of your customers. You could create look alikes of people that have visited your website. And you need to make sure you have your what's called the Linked Insight tag, uploaded onto your website, and much like the Facebook or the Metal pixel, it will effectively transfer data back from your website to Linkin to say, this person visited your website or this person converted on your website, so Linkin knows what's what, and that will also allow you to run re targeting a. If you don't really have audiences to work with, you could actually just go based off of things like education, interests, traits, job experience, even. That could be down to job title. Let's say I am looking to just go and look at recruiters, human resources managers, basically people who would be in charge of hiring me if I was running ads for people to hire me. I don't know if that's the thing that I would be running ads for, but it could also be CEO. CFO, people who might be more receptive to me if I was doing B to B sales to people at the C suite level. So there are lots of things that you can target off of, and that also comes down to company. So this is where you can get quite sneaky and actually go off of like company names, and I could just basically target people, I mean, obviously, CO at va. That's a very, you know, I mean, it says 110,000 people. That's just not right. And that's just because it's at CO or mva. If I was going to say CO and CVA, it's basically going to say, no, you can't just run adds to one person. So, yeah, this is where you can start to narrow things down, but eventually it will kind of tell you that your audience is too small because it does need to be large enough to run. So we can just say, yes, run Canva or CEO. And then that way, we're at 110,000. But anyway, so you could actually just upload a list of the companies that you're looking to target, and that can be super super powerful if you know who the companies are that you're going after. Likewise, you could then exclude certain audiences or attributes and then maybe remove the audience expansion. If you're like, actually, I just want to save what I've got. Then you could save your audience if you wanted, or you could just keep it for this particular ad, and then add formats are very similar to the way that they are inside of Facebook as well, where if it's a single image ad or carousels, video, et cetera. Got your URL tracking parameters similar to your UTMs inside of Facebook Ads Manager. And then you can choose to only have things placed on LinkedIn or the audience network, but in this case, it's not actually possible for us to do that. Now, conversion tracking that it's setting up at the moment, it's just pulling in a particular event that I signed up or that I created within Lincoln a few years ago. So obviously, at this stage it's not actually firing, so LinkedIn doesn't recognize it as a conversion. I would want to make sure that I'm creating a conversion that is relevant, so it would be a new lead or a new sale or what have you for the different objectives that I would be choosing. And I would want to make sure I'm saving this. And then that's it. Obviously, I would create a new ad here, but in this case, let's just say we're going to pull something that the page has created. So this is just a random sort of post that I have on the page, and I could just go ahead and add that to the campaign. Of course, I would want to make sure that I'm creating things from scratch, but in this case, let's just say happy with that, and then it's going to ask me to create some variations as well. Potentially, because of the way that I've set up my campaign, it's going to require me to just make some adjustments to this. But for the time being, we're just going to click on next, and it's going to basically say, no, this isn't quite where it needs to be. Anyways, we're not actually able to launch the campaign because there are a few errors that we would need to work out. But that is pretty much all the steps that you would need to take to go through creating a Linton ad. And it is very similar to the way that Facebook ads manager is set up. It's much simpler. There really aren't as many techniques and tips that you can tweak within Lincoln ads as you can within Facebook ads. So if you can get familiar with Facebook ads, then all the other ad types are going to become much, much easier. But I just wanted to show you around so that it's not this big overwhelming thing if you ever are to jump inside of Linton Ads Manager. 64. Pinterest Ads: When it comes to Pinterest ads, one thing I want you to be very aware of is that this is where we really need to understand what's happening in your client's business as a whole, because you as a social media manager might be designing this beautiful pin, and, you know, you've got the perfect text accompanying it. And everything in the actual ad section is set up perfectly. And it's tracking really well on the Pinterest platform. Everything's going really well. Pinters is a very visual platform, and people are there for the beautiful pens. And if you've done your job correctly, but then your client's website looks like it was created in the 90s as a school project for a ninth grader, that's a problem. And people aren't going to just go from this beautifully created pen into this website and actually do what you want them to do unless there is a bit of a connection between the two from a creative perspective. So it's important that your client's website is up to the challenge of matching that beautiful aesthetic that's happening on Pinterest. The second thing to keep in mind is that people are often on pinterest, to browse through ideas and DIY and travel plan and all that good stuff, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they're there to purchase. Lots of people are there to purchase, as we talked about when we were talking about pinterest on an organic basis, but there are lots of people who will still purchase from you, but maybe not necessarily through pinterest. They might gather ideas and inspiration on pinterest, but they might actually purchase from you at your local, physical brick and mortar business. But it's still a really, really important part of your strategy to be present on Pinterest if you think the audience is right for your business, but just be aware of the fact that the conversion itself might actually come from a different place. But that's actually true for any paid social effort. That conversion might come from a different ad or an organic post or a physical store location. It's just worth noting that there are definitely businesses that advertise on pinterest, knowing that that conversion might come from somewhere else, depending on the type of business, of course. But there are lots of businesses that absolutely swear by Pinterest ads and talk about it being their best performing ad strategy. So it's definitely worth checking out. So in terms of Pinterest, once you're on Pinterest, you'll be able to head up here into ads, and you could just go straight through to create a campaign. But let's just look at our account overview. So at the moment, we don't have anything running, but if we did, this is where we would see our results of our campaigns, so we can just go ahead and create a campaign. We can create an automatic campaign. We're just going to go through two manual campaign so that we can actually look through the different options. Then just like we saw within Facebook Ads Manager, you've got the different objectives and similarly to Linked in, you've got it in the awareness consideration and conversion stages, but things like video views are in the awareness stage as opposed to consideration. Things are a little bit different in terms of Pinterest categorizes it, but the objectives are relatively similar. The thing that's unique to Pinterest would be catalog sales, but the rest are quite similar. So if you had video pins, video views could be an interesting awareness objective. Consideration is potentially the one that you will utilize quite a bit because that's the one that is going to get people to actually click on the add on Pinterest and go to your website, which is a good goal to start with or alternatively to actually get people to convert on the website. But because I'm on Meg's realty and not my actual pinterest account, it says I haven't actually set up my pinterest tag. So that's the little piece of code that is similar to the Lincon Inside tag or the metapixel. So it's a little piece of code that needs to exist on my website in order for me to use that objective. For now, we're just going to leave it at consideration for the time being. We're just going to leave the campaign name as is. I'm going to say just pause it once it's all done so that it doesn't start running. And similarly to the other platforms, we have a lifetime budget or a daily budget, so he could say, we only want to spend 20 bucks and only want to run it on these particular dates. So let's say we only want to run it for one week, and click continue. Now, instead of an ad set, it's called an ad group within Pinterest. But you can essentially do similar things where you can re target people who have visited your website, people who are on your email list, or use dynamic retargeting, which is a little bit more relevant for e commerce businesses who have products on particular sites, but then you could also find new customers. So instead of lookke audiences, these would be act alike customers, or then you can just create your own audience just like we do on the other platforms. You can do this by things like interests and keywords. You can also, of course, use existing lists, but let's say we're just doing this based off of interests, and we can just add these in here. At this stage, our audience is quite large because we haven't really narrowed anything down. But let's say we want to go and look for home. So let's say home decor, maybe let's actually say real estate, 'cause home decor is potentially a rabbit hole. We don't want to go down. So we might want to go down real estate buying and selling. But yeah, we could just browse through depending on yeah what we need to go through. There might be something within Home Decor. I mean, I guess if people are looking to purchase a home, the house moving could be a section, just going through it and finding ones that are relevant. And then you could also alternatively just go by keywords. So these are things that you think, maybe aren't in the actual interest categories, but there are things that people would be searching for. Now, if you go down here, it'll tell you how you can format your keywords. I wouldn't worry about this too too much. This is Google Ad Speak, which will allow you to really narrow in on, do you want someone who is looking for first time home buyer tips exactly or closely related or broadly related, essentially. But really, at this stage, it's totally fine for you to basically be using what are called broad match keywords, where you're just putting in the kind of general terms that you think people would be searching for on Pinterest. So let's say something like first time home buyer tips, buying my first home, things like that. And then just keep making a list. You could also look for house. So house design, house plans, house renovation, house inspiration. I mean, it's going to continuously tell you that it's got 5 million monthly searches. Whether or not that's relevant is yeah, not sure if that's exactly correct. But anyways, you could start adding in a few different keywords based on the ones that you think are relevant to what you're hoping to search for. And then you can continue narrowing it down by things like your location. Ages. So you could pick specific locations. In this case, I could just say show it to only people who are within basically all of Brisbane. And now it's starting to kind of really narrow it down because it knows that I'm only looking for people in this particular area. Then I could just go down by potentially languages and whether you want to actually be recommending it to people who are just logging in to their pinterest account or people who are actually searching for it. In this case, I would just leave it as basically all for the time being. We've already done our budget and schedule, whether we want it to be optimized for pin clicks or outbound clicks, I would have this as outbound clicks because it's more important to me that people actually go into my website. Then yes, bidding will just leave as is, and then you could basically select from pins that you already have on your profile, or you could create a new ad. We could just go in and select our pin. We're just going to leave this as is. Obviously, we would want to add an old text to the video and choose a cover image and then potentially add in some tags, and we would want to make sure that this goes to MEG reality. Of course, it would go to a specific lining page. This would be something like I'll state, it would have to go to a specific landing page so that it's optimized for conversions. But for now, we would just go ahead and publish that. Right. So we have to actually add it to a board, or we could just say it's an ad only pin so it doesn't have to go onto a board. So it's not actually going to be visible unless it's part of the ad. And now it's going to give me some additional options in terms of, you know, do I want to have a quiz? Do I want to showcase some images that could be cool for e commerce businesses? In terms of the ad name, this is just really for me to know what the ad is when I'm looking at reporting and my analytics. So I could just go through to publish because the ad is actually going to be paused once it goes through. It's not actually going to go live, so that's fine, and I actually don't have any payment details set up, so that's totally fine. But just so you know this is essentially the process of setting up a interest ad. And then once you have an ad running, here's where you would look at the results of your campaign. That's it. Then once someone is scrolling through their pinterest feed, or they're actually searching for something like, let's say, in this case, first time home buyer, they would see any promoted pins like this. It would say promoted by Mags Realty, and then it would just have the title, and this one in particular is a carousel. So we can scroll through. Of course, we could make our Rs into a carousel as well, or it could just be a video like this ad over here. Then hopefully, we've done a good job of making the pin enticing enough that somebody would want to click through and find out more on the client's website. That's a little bit about your Pinterest ads, and I have added some extra resources in your course guide so that you can continue your learning past this lesson. In the next lesson, we're going to take a peek at the world of Google and YouTube BAD, so I'll see there. 65. Google & YouTube Ads: Okay. So Google search ads, the ads that you will see inside of Google when you search for things are definitely not part of the social media ad space, and it is a little bit of the odd man out in this course, so I want to say that I acknowledge that, but your Tub ads are going to be run from the same place, so I needed to include this a little bit. And also, I wanted to include it, so we could sort of talk about it. Because just because it's something you're not going to be responsible for as a social media manager, doesn't mean that there isn't benefit in having the knowledge to potentially advise your clients to say, Hey, Have you thought about this? Should we explore outsourcing this to a Google ad specialist? The reason I want to cover it is because Google Search ads, not talking about YouTube ads for the time being, Google Search ads can be so powerful for your client's business because the search intent is so incredibly high. I often see people playing around with social ads when they really should be running Google search ads. I'm not saying that both are not beneficial, but if I was a lawyer and I've seen this with lawyers, insurance brokers, mortgage brokers, everyone in the service based industry, that's so incredibly specific to people at a particular time in their life when they actually need that service, and they're running Instagram ads when really they should be running Google Search ads. So if I am looking for a lawyer near me, and I see a Google ad pop up for someone saying, Hey, been in an accident or, you know, have a dispute, whatever I need a lawyer for, and that pops up. I'm so much more likely to convert because I actually need a lawyer, I search for one, and here's a lawyer advertising to me versus that law firm. Putting $500 a month into Instagram ads for people who may or may not have a need for their services. So there's definitely a use case for you to then come in as an expert and say, Look, I know you really want to be advertising on Instagram, and we can definitely try it, but why don't we put some of that budget behind getting a Google ad specialist to also run some search ads for us and see how it. True, whether people are searching for your clients services specifically or maybe even one of their competitors. For example, if I was looking for the Asana Project Management tool, which is one that will cover a little bit later in the course, you'll see that monday.com is advertising for this particular keyword and for this search term, to say, Hey, you're looking for asana, actually, monday.com is so much better. And because they're paying money for that, and Asana is not paying for their own search term, I'm actually much more likely to click on this because it's the very first search result. So I thought I was here to download Asana and get to know Asana, but actually, maybe I'll explore monday.com because it's the very first thing that's popped up You'll see that this particular landing page actually has an analysis of comparisons between asana and monday.com, which will help me choose monday.com as the alternative because it's a clear winner in all these different areas. The conversion on those ads is going to be much higher because that person who's clicking on that ad is much more targeted. So yes, you might get a $5 lead running Instagram ads, and it might cost you $50 to run in Google Search ads and get a lead from there, but that lead is going to be much warmer and much more likely to convert into a client. Now, again, that's for specific businesses. I'm not saying, if you're a dog tree company, you may decide that you don't have the budget, and you also don't think there's a need for you to run them, and that's totally fine. I just wanted to talk about it. So again, you've got the knowledge there. And then we're also going to talk about Tu bads. So UT bads can be brilliant because you can essentially tap into someone who's searching for a solution to their problem and pop up as an ad on an organic video that gives them a quicker solution to their problem. So someone here in Brisbane, let's say me, is trying to fix their car. There's something wrong with it, and I'm like, Okay, look, I'm going to try to fix it myself. Let me look to YouTube to fix my engine, let's say. I am not a car person. Can you tell? But let's say that's YouTube video that I'm searching for. And I'm about to do it myself. And the first thing that I see is an ad for a local mechanic who says, I'm going to fix it for you at a low low price of 100 bucks. Honestly, I'd be like, Sweet, okay, I was going to do this myself, but this seems like a much better deal because they can advertise to me on that video just in my local area. They can just say, only show it to people who are searching for the search term in the Brisbane area so that they're not advertising to people in Toronto, where they can't service them. So it's absolutely brilliant for that. And there's so many ways to leverage UT bads, and not enough people are doing them because they do require video format in order to run. And a lot of people are scared of that, but don't be scared of it. Definitely, let's just look at how powerful UT bads can be so that you can recommend them to your clients. Get started with Googled, you can go to adstock google.com, or if you're within your Gmail account, you can just go to your settings and scroll all the way down until you reach Googds. Either way, you're going to end up in the same place where you're going to be able to either sign in or start now. Now Google is quite good at getting you the support you need with Googled. At the moment they've got you can get $600 in add credit. If you spend $600, you can also chat with experts for free. There's a lot of support if you're getting stuck and there's also a lot of resources with Googds as well. Once you click through to start now, it's going to take you through the process of setting up your billing and creating an ad account, and then once you're on the back end, it's going to look a little bit like this. Then you're going to be able to go through to create eight, and we're going to be creating a campaign. Now, you could choose your objective at this stage, or you can create a campaign without a goals guidance, which is what I'm going to select for the time being. And here's where we're going to select video, but of course, you've got all your other Google add options in here as well. Now, in terms of the actual campaign subtype, it's completely dependent on your goals. Obviously, driving conversions is the most obvious one. With the driving conversions, the one thing you can't do is place your videos on a particular channel or a particular video. So you can't just say, put this video on this particular channel with this particular objective, unfortunately. So we're going to be using, let's say, the efficient reach objective for this or the campaign subtype so that I can show you how you might be able to do that. But just so you know that what happens in the next steps might be affected by what you select over here. Just going to click on Continue. Then it's going to ask me what kind of ads I want to run. So in this case, I would probably just want to run, let's say, in stream ads, maybe in feed ads, but definitely not shorts ads for this particular one because the video that I'm going to be using is not really suitable to the vertical format. In this case, my BID strategy can't be changed because I've selected reach as my campaign subtype. So CPM, which is the cost to reach 1,000 people. O YouTube is going to be the strategy. Then I have either a campaign total or a daily total. In this case, let's just say I want to spend $50 across the whole campaign, and we're just going to run it for two days. We're going to keep going. The networks can be adjusted for some campaign subtypes, not all of them, though. In this case, I'm happy to just keep it on YouTube and remove Google TV and video partners. Again, if we chose conversions, then these were not able to be edited, so it does depend on what you're choosing, whether or not you're able to actually select and remove a few things there. Then I could just go all of Australia, or if I was doing this for Mags Realty, I would just go and find my local areas. So let's say Gold Coast and Brisbane. And I would say just people who are searching for videos in English. I could add in some related videos. If I had maybe a collection of videos that were related that might help to, again, like Google is saying here, maybe create a more immersive experience for my viewers, but in this case, I'm happy to just leave that as is. If I click into additional settings, I can also change things like the devices You know, that can be definitely helpful, especially because I have found that tablets and TV screens don't convert very well, especially TV screens because a lot of the time you can't really click through properly. So I would just keep this on mobile phones and computers. Then in terms of frequency capping, look, this is something that I wish more advertisers did because I have some advertisers I've had potatom 20 times in a day, and it's the worst. And I don't know how they've set up their ads, but I end up basically saying, Look, this is a spam at this point. So yeah, definitely depending on your budget and also how large your audience sample is. So you may want to cap it if you think people are going to see it more than once or twice a day. But for now, I'm happy to leave it as that. Your ad schedule, you're probably not going to touch that unless you're maybe running ads for a brick and mortar business who wants to get phone calls, for example. So then you definitely don't want to be running your ads middle of the night or on a Saturday, Sunday, so that's where that would come into play. And then in terms of third party measurements, there's no vendors or anything like that, so we don't have to worry about that for the time being. Now, we can continue narrowing down our audience, whether we want to maybe just target, a slightly more mature audience, so we could go ahead and just start tweaking things a little bit. Are they parents? Are they not parents? Household income is something that's only available in select countries, and it's not 100% accurate, but if you were specifically maybe an investment firm, and you really only wanted to target people who are in the top sort of ten to 20% of earners, you could go ahead and target that. Again, if it's the data's not available, it's just going to sort of ignore that targeting on Count. Then this is where we could go through and look at interests. For example, we could look at only looking at business professionals or for me, in the marketing field, social media enthusiasts sales and marketing jobs. Maybe people looking for that. And you can just go through and either search or browse depending on what's relevant to you, and that could come down to the same sort of things as what we saw inside of Facebook ads manager where people are getting married, purchasing a home. Moving, things like that that are big life events that you want to target off of, because that's relevant to your ad. In this case, I'm happy to just leave it as that. Again, you could add your own data there. But really, for me, I want to get into this bit, which is search intent. So for me, it doesn't hugely matter who the audience is as much as it matters what they're actually searching for. So this is where I could look for things like people searching for digital marketing, how to create an online course, online course creation. Or I could actually put in a related website and it would pull through those keywords for me. Then I can add in additional topics. So again, that would be things like online courses. And that may or may not be a topic, so it might just come down to education. I may not find as much luck with the topics as I will with the keywords. But again, if you've done your research and you know the YouTube channels that you want to actually put your videos on, then that's all that really matters. So you could browse, or you could actually just enter the URLs of the YouTube channels that you want to look for. For example, for me, I know Pat Flynn talks about both marketing and online courses. So that's definitely someone I would want to use in order to market my content. Then I also know there is a YouTube channel called Wit and Wire that talks about online courses. Again, so I would want to make sure that my content is being placed on their YouTube channels. You could actually go a little bit more specific and just look at the videos that make the most sense for your ad, because for example, Pat Flynn talks about a whole lot of stuff he talks about, like, Pokemon. And podcasting and things that are not really relevant to me, and probably wouldn't be relevant to someone watching that particular video. So I could actually just narrow it down further and only look at the videos that are relevant to my ad as opposed to the entire channel. But for now, I'm happy to just keep it as that. But just, you know, if there are particular videos that you're like, I really want my videos only on these videos, then this is where you would go and continue narrowing it down. It is going to expand this out if that means that my audience is now quite small because if I'm only looking at people who are located in Brisbane and GO coos, who are between the ages that I've selected who are watching these channels, it might get very small, even with my limited budget. So it will probably go outside of that. But just so you know this is how we would go about it, and then we would put in our video. Would definitely encourage you to study YouTube ads and see how people are actually utilizing, especially the first sort of ten to 20 seconds of an ad because YouTube ads are not created the same as any old YouTube video. Obviously, I'm just going to be using a YouTube video link here because I don't have an ad ready to go, but I would definitely recommend that your clients create specific video ads specifically for their YouTube ad campaign. And that's especially true if they're going for the conversion objective. So now here I would just put maro.com in this case. And again, you know, the actual landing page would be something very specific to what I'm trying to get at. And then I would have my long headline and description, so it would be something like time to create your first line. Of course. Then we've got our tracking in here as well so that will help with analytics. And then we've got a companion better option, which will allow us to have a little bit more real estate. And again, that's something that I would really recommend that people do create custom and don't just auto generate. So one thing I would maybe add is a call to action of some sort. So let's say your year. Let's just say this is your year. Call to action would be something like, probably learn more. So it's already starting to sort of show me what that looks like, and I can copy that link and have a look at what this will look like on YouTube. There we go. And now because we've got this call to action here, it will now say that and it will basically allow me to click through to this ad and go to the website. So this is what it'll look like on a phone. This is what it look like on desktop, and on a TV. I mean, we've not made it available on TVs anyway, so we would just be looking at the mobile experience and the desktop experience there. Could then also add different variations of your video, especially if you were using the shorts placement. So you'd want to make sure you're adding in a vertical video that's suitable to that placement. But for now, that's a really quick crash course of how you could potentially run YouTube ads for your clients. Even if Google heads are not your cup of tea, it's a little bit too complex. You'd know that YouTube ads themselves are not all that complicated, and it's possible to run them, even if you're not super experienced in this area. 66. Ad Tips & Takeaways: We're now at the end of this particular section of the course, and hopefully you're feeling a little bit more confident in your knowledge of the ad space so that if your client comes out of the blue and says, I want you to run ads, that you don't just completely panic and start sweating profusely, which might still happen to be honest. Like it's intimidating. But at least hopefully you're can feel a little bit more confident than you did before. Other thing I wanted to mention is that at some stage, you will probably use a tool like the Meta Ads library to see what the competitors are doing, and you might see that people are running like 300, 500 ads at once, and the wheels in your head naturally start to turn and you start to think about how the heck you're going to pull off running this many ads by yourself. Let alone where you're going to get this kind of budget with your clients. Now when that happens, I just want you to stop, breathe and regroup. These guys will have a team of strategists and writers and graphic designers and video production and video creators and everyone in between, and it can just get really overwhelming. So just don't feel like you need to compare yourself to what other people are doing in the ad space. But also don't feel like you need to offer paid ad services at all. It's absolutely fine at the beginning, if you just want to focus on organic efforts. It took me a long, long time to start actually running ads for my clients. And I did actually practice a lot of my own accounts so that I could get familiar with the ad space, even if it meant, you know, putting $5 a day into an ad campaign. But that way, at least, I could practice without the fear of, you know, wasting my client's budget because even if it's just a couple of bucks, For some reason, it does feel really intimidating knowing your client is paying for you to really basically go through a bit of trial and error. So I absolutely understand how intimidating it is. And if you feel like you just need to kind of dive very slowly into the social media marketing world with organic efforts only at the beginning, that is completely fine. If you're running ads on behalf of another business and talking to them about their goals, and they say that their goal is to get more traffic to their website or get more people onto their e mail list, just don't believe them. These are not goals. They should be specific and measurable, but they should also be clear on what kind of people we want to actually take these actions. Because if I was to say that I can get you 10,000 or even 100,000 leads onto your e mail list and pretty inexpensively and quickly, if you really want that if that's the goal, but they might be the wrong kind of leads. It's like saying, I want to be healthier. What does healthier mean? What healthy habits do you want to incorporate into your daily routine to stay on track? What are the measurable goals? What's the timeline, and what's the final outcome you're hoping to achieve? It might be to lose ten kilos for a big event in three months time, which is a very different objective than just being healthier. You need to get to the bottom of exactly what the real goal is that they're going to be happy with if you accomplish it in order to then understand what steps you need to plan to get that audience to that goal. You'll notice I said Smart goal here, and we will continue talking much more about what Smart goals are and how to help your clients come up with their smart goals for both their organic and paid efforts in the strategy section of the course, so more on that in a little bit. Let's also briefly talk about increasing the budget for well performing ads because this is also a big mistake that Facebook ad marketers often make where everything is set up really well and their ads are performing well at the campaign budget of $20 a day, so they decide they're going to pump that up to $200 a day, and they're expecting to receive the same return on their ad spend. Unfortunately, that is just not how this works. That campaign was optimized to perform really well at $20 a day. Multiplying that budget by ten is just going to throw things out of whack. The best thing you can do is to just increase this budget little by little every week by about ten to 15% of your budget, or you can just start a brand new campaign with the new budget already in place. This is sort of an oversimplification of how this all works. I've linked you to a more advanced article from John Loomer, who is a legend, and this is such a great resource for like it says in his tagline for Advanced Facebook ad marketers. So I would definitely recommend checking out this article and a lot of John's other stuff for more advanced strategies when it comes to Facebook and Instagram ad marketing. While I know this stuff is really overwhelming, the great news that I will tell you is that there are no master's degrees in Facebook ads. And that, I know it sounds, really insignificant, but it actually isn't. It just means that literally every single person you know out there who is a Facebook ads expert, people running multi million dollar campaigns inside a Facebook ads manager. Taught themselves, the same way that you're teaching yourself right now. Everybody is just learning from each other, and we're all kind of faking it til we make it. Everyone's just testing stuff. Even people who've been doing this for years and years when they're jumping into a brand new client account are sort of starting from scratch because they don't know just because they have run something for all of these different clients in the past, doesn't mean it's going to work in the future. So, that is really great news, actually, because it just means everyone's on a bit of a level playing field. And also just know that there are so many great resources out there. You can look to YouTube. You can look on Google. You can continue upskilling yourself with people who are specializing in creating content in this area, and you can even do things like As Chat GBT for help. For example, let's say, I wasn't quite understanding what return on ADSPen meant. So I could say to Chat GBT. Explain to me what return on ADSPen means in the world of Facebook ads like I'm a 10-year-old. Then Chat GBT is going to tell me that perhaps I have a lemonade stand. I decide to spend $10 on colorful posters to tell people about my loan Aad. Because of the posters, I end up making $50, and now I want to figure out spending the $10 was a good idea. I then basically just divide the money made, by the money spent and get a return on ad spend. It means for every $1, I spent on the posters, I made $5, and that gives me a ROA of five, which is pretty good because it shows that I made a lot more money than I spent. In the world of Facebook ads, it's the same idea. So don't be afraid to leverage AI to help you really break down complex topics like this. This is really great because as a beginner, when you're looking for help online to get answers to your questions, often you'll find a lot of articles that are written by people who have been doing this for ten plus years, and they think they're talking to beginners, but really, they're just using so much jargon that's really hard to comprehend when you're at the beginning of this. So it can be really useful to look to AI because they can be kind of like that friend in the back of the class that you had in high school, who would sort of let you cheat off them from time to time when you didn't really know what was going on in your particular lesson. And that doesn't mean that you still didn't know your stuff. It just means you needed a little bit of help. So absolutely utilize AI tools for that to simplify really complex things in the ad space, but also in the organic space. And now, in the next section of the course, we're going to start talking about social media strategy. So I will see you there. 67. Why You Need a Strategy: By this point in the course, you've learned about what makes a powerful brand on social media, how to create great content, and the ins and outs of each of the individual networks. But now it's time for us to actually think about the strategy of it all and having a bit of a plan of attack because I've seen so many amazing businesses that are posting amazing content daily. Sometimes even multiple times a day, and it's not actually getting them anywhere because they haven't really thought about why they're posting it and what the strategy is and what they're hoping to accomplish. So that is exactly what we're going to focus on in this particular section of the course. There will always be clients who will hire you, and they just give you a list of tasks that they want you to complete, and you won't really have to think about anything because it'll be very task driven rather than actually strategy driven. But they might also have their own strategy in place and just need someone who is going to help to make that a reality. But then there will be bigger and more growth oriented businesses out there that will want to know what your thoughts are. Sometimes it can be hard for people to see their own flaws and issues in their business, and they just want a fresh perspective from a new pair of eyes. They might ask you to put together a strategy when you first begin working with them so that you can decide how you actually want to approach your work together in their online space. This can include a strategy for organic only efforts or paid ads as well. I know it can seem a little intimidating. But just, effectively, all we're looking at is, how have they done things so far? How has that worked for them? What are their competitors doing? What's happening out there in the industry, and how can we make improvements for the future? Or alternatively, maybe you're starting from scratch, which means you don't really have any data to look at, which can be really fun in itself as well. And how you approach a social strategy will be based on who their customers are, their industry, their business model, their goals, and their budget, as well as their capacity to actually dedicate resources to their social media efforts. Let's say we're talking about an E commerce brand that sells just one thing, $100 electric scooters. Now this is a high ticket item most likely aimed at trendy Millennials and Gen Zers who have the money to invest in this. A company like this would likely have the budget to invest in a lot of social media efforts, but at the end of the day, a brand with just one product probably can't expect people to follow them on social media past the purchasing decision unless they have something to offer other than just their product. They might largely shift their budget toward paid ads that are designed to convert that only go out to audiences in the areas where it's actually legal to ride electric scooters instead of spending time growing their organic following. As a bonus as an E commerce brand, they can also very clearly see that if they spend $100 on paid ads and they convert three customers, then they've made $3,000, so they have a profit of $2,000, and their success is so much more transparent as a result of that, then it will be for a service based business. Was another brand, it might be a local service based business, that's an indoor trampoline playground, and their customers would primarily be kids and teens coming in for a $50 session, and they might also have memberships and maybe classes for people to learn trampolining skills at $500 a pop, and maybe a few offers in between those two price points as well. Their strategy will likely involve a lot of video content to show people how much fun they can have. Their organic strategy would likely be aimed at teens and enzers and using a lot of localized hash tags, while their paid ads might be focused on local parents of younger kids, as well as teens, and Maybe their budget would also ramp up around school holiday times when people are looking for stuff to do. Kind of knowledge does come from experience and working with many, many clients across such a variety of industries, and no one's going to expect that from you as a beginner. But in these lessons, we're going to just focus into what goes into developing these strategies so that you can feel confident in incorporating this into your social media work. This may be controversial, and I know we talked about this a little bit in a previous lesson, but not everyone needs to be super active on social media. I once met a client when I was working at the agency who had been in business for 30 years. And was running a multi six figure business without so much as a business card, and zero social media presence, no website. Everything for them was word of mouth. And they ran a really successful business. So it's very hard for us to then look at a business like that and be like, Yeah, you should be super active on social media, because whatever you're doing is working. Now, that is also to say, is it going to be working in the future? Hard to say. So it's very important for a client like that to still definitely get set up on all the various social media networks and maintain some sort of a presence on these networks, even if it's not necessarily for lead generation or sales at this stage. But it's important to just maintain a reputation, maybe post some customer reviews and testimonials and build up that trust factor. So if somebody looks that business up online, which everybody pretty much does before proceeding with actually engaging with a business, word of mouth will only get you so far these days. So it's still important for them to be online. But is it important for them to be posting three times a day? Absolutely not. So It is quite important when you're thinking about a strategy to think about so many different elements, not just their industry, their business model, but also what's working for them and what do they want for their particular business. No just their business model, not just their particular service, but their actual business, what works for them, what doesn't work for them, and what do they need out of their social media presence. So those are all the things that we're going to look at starting with the next lesson, so I'll see there. 68. Get to Know the Business: A Note every client is going to require you to create an audit of their business before you start working with them. In fact, a lot of them won't. But knowing the basics of how this is done can be super beneficial to you not just working with clients, but actually landing clients, because a lot of the time, you will do a sort of social media audit of their presence in order to then make suggestions for improvements. And that's true for contract or freelancing roles, but it's also true for doing just kind of real life interviews if you're looking to work in house or agency side. It can be super impressive for you to come into actual interviews and say, I did an audit of your current social media presence, and obviously, you don't have all the data because you can't access the back and analytics, but you can look at someone's overall social media presence online and go, Okay, cool, here's what's happening. Here's what your competitors are doing. Here's what I think we could do better. So knowing how this is done can be a really powerful skill for you to leverage. Some things to look for would be like their branding. What's the tone? What's their mission statement? What are their brand colors? Are they using all of this really consistently across their different accounts? Do they have a brand kit, or do they maybe need one created? Then in terms of B to B or B to C, are they looking to reach other businesses, or are they marketing directly to consumers? Then who is their competition and what are they doing well? Maybe what are they not doing so well? Are they starting from scratch with their platforms and expecting you to choose the platforms, or do they have a presence already? If they do, have they picked the right platforms, or should you be encouraging them to focus their efforts elsewhere? Terms of the type of content, it would be good to know if they're posting videos, photos, stories, are they going alive? What are they doing with their content? Then how frequently are they actually posting? Are they consistent with their posting times, or are they just posting ad hoc content whenever they can? Are they only using an organic approach, or are they also using some paid advertising? Then are they using hashtags and are they using them correctly? Finally, are they using any industry specific keywords for social media? For example, like a Sidney photographer or Brisbane dentist, things that are very locally specific, but also industry specific? Once you've gathered all this information, it's time to focus on making some recommendations for improvement. First, make sure you fully understand their goals. Do they have social goals in place and how are they measuring the success of their efforts? Are their social goals also linked to their overall business goals? This is super super important because I think a social media managers our first instinct is to assume that everybody wants to grow their follower numbers. That's not actually always the case. Their business goals might be to increase customer retention by 50% over the next year. They maybe want to focus on nurturing their existing audience on social media a lot more than attracting new audiences or new followers. Don't ever assume what someone else's goals are, try to get them to communicate these two no matter what goals you choose to focus on, should be smart goals. They should be measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely. A specific goal, if you were looking to increase engagement, for example, would be a 12% increase in engagement. Then think about whether the goals are measurable. If they aren't, then they're probably not specific enough either. Instead, put a timeline on your goal to get your 12% increase in engagement in three months, let's say. It's also important that you're setting goals that are realistic and attainable. Doubling your engagement is likely unrealistic, but 12% is a pretty good start. Set benchmarks that you and the client are both comfortable with. Also important for your goals to actually be relevant to your business success. An increase in engagement is increasing brand awareness and most likely driving traffic to your website. Perhaps that's enough for your particular business. If their business goals are all about increasing revenue, then a social goal attached to this might instead be a 20% increase in sign ups to the e mail newsletter or a 10% increase in sales through Instagram or through Facebook or another social media platform. Finally, you want to make sure that you're deciding on a time frame for each goal and sticking to this as closely as possible. For example, if your goal is to increase engagement, you'll be focusing on interacting on your client social platforms and posting a lot of conversation starters and polls and engaging content. As if your goal was to increase the number of leads your client gets to their newsletter, then your content would cater a lot more to sending people to their website and getting them to sign up through giving them some free content in exchange for their e mail address. At this point what I do want to say is that you may not hit all of your goals. You may not hit any of your goals. Hopefully, that doesn't happen, but Just know that setting goals is still really important because you need to know what you're working towards. Otherwise, you're just sort of posting for the sake of posting, and you don't really know how you're measuring your success. So in your course guide, I've included a little questionnaire which might be handy for you to use when you're first starting to work with a business. This is something you could give to a client to fill out and then discuss their answers on a Zoom call prior to beginning working on their business. And of course, you can add to these, but this is going to give you a really good place to start. I've also got a small exercise in there for you to test out your strategy skills at this point, where I've given you an example scenario and given you some action items based on this scenario. Now, as for anything in the social media space, there's no one way to approach this, but I have given you some thoughts around what I would do for this type of client based on the information we've been given in this exercise, and you'll be able to find those details at the very end of your course guide. So go ahead and jot down some ideas and see if we're thinking similarly about how to approach this type of client, and I'll see you in the next lesson where we talk about how you can check out the businesses competition. 69. Get to Know the Competition: So in terms of spying on your competition, we've talked a little bit about the Meta Ads library, so I'm just going to pick someone I know is going to be running ads at the moment. Now, of course, there's 990 ads that Amy Porterfield is running at the moment. So it can be a little bit difficult to kind of pick and choose, but this is a really good way to kind of be able to come in here a screenshot, gather some data and maybe think about ways that you can use it to inspire your own ads. And you can do the same thing within Linkedin ads library. I could look for anyone working at Canva, and let's say only advertising with in Australia. I can go ahead and search that. It's going to pull up all the beautiful ads that Canva is currently running. It has also pulled in some ads from Canvas. But essentially we've got 4,000 ads to look through, so that is quite a lot. We could continue to filter this down by a particular keyword based on what we're interested in. But again, it's just giving you an example of what they're running on Linked in. And you can do the exact same thing with TikTok ads. So, let's see if Canva are running some TikTok ads as well, and we're going to be running them with them in Australia. So we can start to see these might just also be ads that are run by other people, not just Canva themselves, but it'll give you an idea of what kind of ads you could copy off of TikTok specifically. Pinterest do have this as well, but it's incredibly limited in terms of the ad category, in terms of the countries that are available as well. It's really only at this stage available within Europe. So it's not great. Honestly, I haven't found it to be super useful. With Pinterest ads, I found it to be much more useful to just look for specific keywords that you're interested in and actually see what pins are being promoted. In terms of how to actually collate your ads. Look, there are different ways to do this. There are paid apps like four play.com, which allow you to essentially create swipe files with the Google Chrome extension where you can save ads, including video ads all into one library, which can be useful, especially if you're working in house with corporate clients who have bigger budgets. This is definitely something that would be worthwhile for you to do because it will allow you to have this in place. Also, if you bring on other team members, it will always be there as a folder of inspiration. Means you don't have to worry about doing, screen videos for any video ads because of course, you don't want to just save the link to an ad because people might stop running it, and then you lose that asset. So this is a really great thing for anyone who has got the budget. Otherwise, of course, you can just screenshot or take screen recordings of video ads and create your own Google driver Dropbox folders in a way that works for you. Then in terms of organic content, you could obviously just go onto people's profiles and screenshot a few things, maybe write down, you know, what's going on for them in terms of engagement, but it can get messy and time consuming to be honest. So it's good to use analytics tools like metrical here. We're going to talk about metrical when we talk about scheduling. But for now, I just wanted to show you that whenever you have a profile linked, you can head on over to the competitor section. This is available, even if you're just on their free account at this stage. You can only add up to five competitors, whereas on the pro plan, you can add up to 100 competitors. But even with just tracking a couple of competitors, it's really really worthwhile. So I've just put in a couple of people that I know have quite an active Instagram account. Are somewhat related to my niche, and it will basically tell me how many followers they have post reels, et cetera, et cetera. Their average sort of engagement rate. But then this is where the magic happens. You can go to the post list and maybe sort this by overall engagement score, and it'll tell you out of all of your competitors, or you can obviously go by each competitor, what is the highest engaging post or real that they have created recently? So you can see the type, whether it's a reel or just a post, Then the engagement level or the engagement score, and then how many interactions, comments, likes, et cetera it has had. Then you can actually see the full caption there, you can copy it to your clipboard, and you can actually view this on Instagram. This is a really, really easy way to do some research, and of course, you can do the same thing with Facebook and other platforms. So you can once again head down to competitors. I've just added in a couple. And you can head on over here. You can't download this as a CSV unless you're an upgraded member. So at the moment because I'm on the free plan, this isn't alone. But again, it's just a really easy way to kind of go through and find what are their best performing posts, and how can we use that and leverage that for our own strategy. Now, lastly, there's a tool called Social blade that is generally considered to be quite a good one for spying on your competitors on YouTube. Do do other platforms as well. I haven't found it to be super effective for other platforms, but of course, it is an option. But for YouTube, it is generally pretty good with everything except for the earnings. So, you know, someone with 1.26 million subscribers is definitely not earning $158 from their ad revenue. I don't know why. I've even looked at my own channel. Like, it's just so inaccurate for this particular This particular thing. But everything else, it does seem to do a pretty good job of where you can see, how many video views particular videos got, how their channel is tracking. And that's a really nice way to kind of give you a leg up from the competition. You can look at, you know, future projections, detailed stats, and you can even use this to analyze your own account in a little bit more detail than what you can do through YouTube Studio. Those are just a few of the ways that you can use to get to know your competition to help you shape your own strategy so you can see what are they doing well, where are they falling short, and what can you use for your own growth? Now, the next lesson, we're going to continue talking about this in terms of doing some collaborations and partnerships as a part of your strategy. I'll see that. 70. Collaborate With Others: At this point, it's really worth mentioning that social media does not exist in a vacuum on its own. It just means that, if there are successful social media accounts out there, they are likely doing some collaborations. They might be doing podcast interviews. They might be doing media outlets, a bit of PR. All of these different things in conjunction with their social media efforts. They might be out there on reputable podcasts in their industry or doing live video interviews on YouTube and Instagram with people who have much bigger follow accounts than them to promote them. They might also have books or influencers promoting their products. They might be writing guest posts or doing 1 million other things that essentially just allow them to leverage the big audiences of other brands. Now, this may not be part of your social media work, but it's important for you to at least know about it, so you can make some recommendations to your clients, because being proactive like this is how you get paid the big bucks in this field. Let's take a look at some things to keep in mind when it comes to collaborations and partnerships. First of all, only pursue brand partnerships that align with your brand. If you were trying to grow your foodie account and get other people to promote your new cookbook full of meaty recipes, then don't reach out to vegans or beauty bloggers, for example, because you want to attract the right people back to your brand, so choose partnerships with brands who have a similar audience to you. If you're ever on social media reaching out to people, please please make sure to give them context for who you are, why they should care, and what you want from them, and how it benefits them as well. One of my biggest pet paves is receiving messages on Instagram with zero context as to who the person is, why they're reaching out to me or why I should care, and they're already asking me for something before they've even given me any context to any of this. All right. So now with that in mind, let's look at the types of collaborations you could look at for yourself or for your client's brand. Some of the more obvious ways that you can do this would be either influence or marketing or just actually inviting people to collaborate in on your content like what you can do with Instagram collabs, where once the post is actually created, it will essentially take it out to both of your audiences. Expanding the reach and also just making sure that both of your audiences know about the other account, which really helps, especially if your audiences are really aligned with each other's content. Also another great way to do this is by inviting people to be guests on your video interviews on platforms like YouTube, but on other platforms as well, where it will then allow people to actually share this content with their professional and personal network once the video is live, thus expanding your reach. But it doesn't just have to be the case with pre recorded content. You can also do this with something like Instagram lives, where you can have multiple people in a live room. That will then alert everyone's audience to say, Hey, these people are all going live. Do you want to go check it out? Then once it's turned into pre recorded or evergreen content, and it's on someone's actual profile, then the other collaborators can share that to their audience and expand the reach. But you can also leverage other people's existing content through things like TikTok duets and even Instagram reels, where you're potentially jumping onto a trending video and the original creator might share it with their audience as well. Lastly, I love the idea of social media takeovers, particularly for larger brands or brands that are looking for new and unique ways to show people behind the scenes. In this example from Hoot Suite, we can see that the travel brand, by the way, sourced 50 local reporters and authors from destinations around the world to do an Instagram stories takeover. Once again, you are able to then tag the people who are collaborating on a project like this, and then they can share it with their own audience, expanding the reach of your content once more. Now let's quickly talk about press and media opportunities. Even if you maybe don't have the budget to outsource PR to an agency or have the internal resources to allocate team members to this full time, it may still be worthwhile for you to just make a list of industry publications, podcast, YouTube channels, TV networks, or any other form of media that's relevant to your client's industry, and see where you might be able to add value to their audiences through the lens of your expertise. And pitching for guest features is only as complicated as you make it out to be. Of course, the bigger the media source, the harder it will be to get in. But if you can get a few smaller sources to feature your story, it will be much easier for you to then use these and leverage these for the bigger publications. So, for example, I wrote a guest publication submission to the lead pages blog and the go daddy blog, which were relatively easy for me to get into. They don't get a lot of submissions, so it was a pretty easy pitch because I also knew what their audience liked, and I could tailor my pitch to that. Was easy to get published in those publications and then leverage those publications in order to get myself featured in bigger blogs like digital marketing.com. So you might need to work with your client if this is an appropriate strategy for them, and it's something they want to explore. And most importantly, is it something you want to help them with because it may not be your job to do so. They might have a whole PR team or a PR person who would handle that. But if it's something that you're like, Oh, I could really see this working for you, then you might just need a little bit of help from them to understand what the relevant publications are in their industry in order to do this. And then alternatively, if they have a budget and they're happy to throw a little bit of money behind this, instead, they could do something like getting featured in relevant newsletters that are already going out to their ideal customers, and that way they don't have to do the hard work of trying to, you know, be featured in media publications, they can actually just pay to have their business featured in these newsletters, which can be a really powerful strategy as well. There are lots of newsletters like nice ads here, for example, or even marketing examples, which have over 100,000 subscribers and allow sponsorships. So I know this isn't exactly within the social media realm, again, but it can be a good idea for you to just know about the possibilities here so you can help elevate your client's brands, even if it's not your responsibility to then execute on this. But even if you are just sticking to social media, just using influencers can be such a powerful strategy, especially for local businesses. Additionally, there are also businesses like Colabators here that are dedicated to helping brands connect with other brands for collaboration. Just have a think about the tactics that we talked about in this lesson and see if there are any opportunities for you to leverage any of these strategies. In the next lesson, we'll start talking about how to incorporate an engagement strategy into your overall plan, so I'll see. 71. Your Engagement Strategy: While having a good content strategy is key, it's also important for you to think about having a strategy for your engagement as well. This may or may not be something that is part of your job description. It might be something that's taken on by a different team member. But knowing the tips from within this lesson is going to be key to making sure you incorporate this as part of your overall social media strategy. T overarching types of engagement on social media. Inbound, which is the stuff that's coming to you, which might require you to reply to DMs or see some tags in stories or posts that you can then respond to and engage with your audience. Also sharing stuff like this and getting tagged and stuff really helps the algorithm. Make sure you're encouraging people to actually share your content and tag you and everything. Then there's outboard engagement, which is the stuff that you have to actively seek out. This would be things like following thought leaders and influencers and maybe even location tags for you to actually proactively go out there and like and comment and share and engage with these brands online. More than anything, this includes contact with your existing audience because active community engagement can be such a powerful strategy to help not only amplify your content, but really get to know your audience and maybe even gain inspiration for future social campaigns. This could be done through things like this where you're getting your audience to ask you questions and then you could answer them in your stories or even through your posts. Stagram also makes it really really easy for you to build excitement through event reminders that you can build straight into your Instagram posts, and then you can also have countdown timers on your stories, the app is essentially designed to help you build better engagement. Don't be afraid to utilize all of its different tools. You could also do this on Linked in through polls or just by asking your audience questions and getting them to answer in the comments. Finally, you want to take people behind the scenes of your business and make them feel really involved with live video. If there's anything to be learned from watching the show how it's made or basically any tik talk video, is that as humans, we love knowing how things work behind the scenes. So don't be afraid to get a little bit raw and vulnerable and involve people in this. And also, just remember that sometimes getting engagement on social media requires a little bit of out of the box thinking. So Matty McTech from Setup Spawn leverages weird engagement hacks with his videos like this one here, where he'll often be showing a website, and the tab next to it will say something really weird. Like this one, for example, the Tab says best place to hide a body as a Google search. And he purposely gets things wrong in his videos like he talks about Captain Kirk's legendary green light saber, which has all the Star Wars fans going nuts in the comment section. And he goes as far as mispronouncing things like daly instead of Italy and calling Leonardo Da Venti, DaVinci and all of these sorts of hacks that make people in the comment section absolutely blow up his engagement. So this absolutely isn't right for every brand, but just know that sometimes thinking outside the box is the key to succeeding with engagement on social media. Really think about how much time and resources your client is able to allocate to inbound engagement, but also outbound engagement because it's going to really drive a lot of what happens with your social media accounts. And there will be instances, like, for example, if your customers are tagging your business in Instagram stories, which are only available for 24 hours, and you only then have 24 hours to repost that to your story. That you could potentially share it on your own profile. If you miss that 24 hour window, that story is gone forever and you're never going to be able to get that back. Potentially, that was a customers sharing that they really love your product or service, which is a very powerful form of user generated content, which is what we're going to talk about in the next lesson. But the first thing I wanted to say is that some of the engagement that you are able to have on social media is something that you can also automate. So we're going to talk about in a later lesson where we talk about, you know, how you can set up automations with a tool called MdyCat. So if you've ever seen on Instagram, for example, people saying, like, comment the word Pineapple, and I'll send you my free checklist or comment the word Pineapple to ask me questions about blah, blah, blah. Anyways, we're going to get into all of that in the automation section a little bit later on. But for now, just try to think of different ways that you can incorporate that more hands on engagement in your social media strategy. And now in the next lesson, let's look at some user generated content ideas, so I'll see you there. 72. Leverage User Generated Content: Seth Godin famously talks about the concept of people like us do things like this. And how this is what drives every decision we make. So it's the reason why someone in Australia would happily order a steak from a menu. But if they were brought a guinea pig as a main course at a restaurant, they would freak out. While someone in Peru would think, Yeah, cool, that's just a normal meal because guinea pigs have been eaten there since the 15th century, so it's not a weird thing. And this is essentially why our environment and who we believe ourselves to be in that environment are driving every decision we make and how we respond to our environment. And nothing is more powerful, especially to our purchasing decisions than getting recommendations from people like us. Fact, 79% of people say that user generated content on social media significantly impacts their purchasing decisions. Getting people involved in developing your social media content is so powerful in developing this trust in your brand, but it's also a massive game changer when it comes to actually getting other people to convert into buyers as well. As an example, more than 6,000 Gro tagged videos are uploaded to YouTube every single day, and largely, they've been really successful because of their focus on entertainment, on sparking engagement and conversation, and creating authentic content by really showcasing people and their stories. These guys are not a camera company just like Bd Bull, who they draw their inspiration from, are not an energy drink company. They are a company that stands for exploration and adventure, and a sense of belonging within a community of adventure seekers. Really feel that because I actually bought Go Pro many, many years ago when I couldn't really afford it because of seeing all their amazing user generated content and thinking, travellers like me have a camera like this. With that example in mind, let's talk about some other ideas for user generated content that you can use for your social media strategy. You can interview your users on an Instagram Live, YouTube Live, Facebook Live, or any other kind of live. You can also have them as a guest on a podcast. You get them to write about their personal experience on a blog that you can then turn into social media posts. You could also get them to give a testimonial that you can repurpose for social media. Here's an example of how entrepreneur Marie Folio does this on her website, where she has all of these amazing customer stories told by them with their own image attached where they tell their story of success through her program, which is really really powerful. Then if you get all the way to the end, it'll say add your story, which is a really easy way to give somebody a link and say, if you want to join Hi page of success and add your own story, here's where you can do that. Then this is something you can then also repurpose for social media marketing. For example, when you request a testimonial or review from a client, generally, you'll get a very cookie cutter answer full of features like I loved working with Maggie because she was fast reliable and goal oriented. And I remember earlier in the course, we talked about the fact that what we really want is that this means that moment. So if I was jumping on a call with somebody and asking for a testimonial, what I would probably say is If you are trying to recommend our product or service to a really close friend over a cup of coffee, what would you say? That really gets them to start thinking about things really differently and give me the benefit statement instead of just the kind of features list that I really don't want as a testimonial. It's not human speak, and it's not the powerful stuff that's going to really engage people. S are people will then say the actual benefit statement, which might be something like this. For the first time in a long time, I felt that I could stop obsessively checking my stats because I knew Maggie had it handled. I got my weekends back and I swear I haven't slept this well in years. This testimonial will really connect with people on such a deeper level. Now aside from testimonials, as a brand, there are lots of different ways for you to get user generated content. But the easiest and quickest will be to actually pay people to become reviewers of your products or services. So I'm going to link you to this list because it's quite comprehensive, and it also has pros and cons of different platforms where you can post jobs to say, this is what we're looking for and find creators who are willing to apply for the jobs to create content on your behalf. So it can be a really great resource for clients who have a budget for this. And now the next lesson, we're going to continue talking a little bit more about your content strategy and your content calendar. So I'll see you there. 73. Create a Content Calendar: As we now start to talk about content calendars, I did want to mention that this is where people will often get stuck. And that's just because all of the beautiful knowledge in your head is bouncing around and trying to really narrow down what all of this looks like in practice. Should you post on Instagram five times a week? Three times, two times. Should you do videos? Should you not do videos? Should you write long bullock posts, captions, something in between. And it's a lot. But the good news is that there is no magic answer to any of this. Don't put too much pressure on yourself for the first few months of creating content for any business because this is more of a testing period than anything else. This is the time for you to put something out there and see what works and just do more of that in the future. Some of you might have clients who will just say, I just need you create 20 graphics for Instagram, no mention of strategy or planning or any of that. Then others will want to know what you recommend. That's where a content calendar can be really handy because it's something that's visual that a client can use to plan ahead and know it's coming up and what you're planning. But keep in mind that the kind of content you're able to suggest will also ultimately depend a little bit less on what's actually engaging and align with the business goals and more so on what the client can afford and their resources. Just keep that in mind because there's absolutely no point in creating the perfect strategy and the perfect content calendar, if you know, they'll never be able to afford to execute it. Just be mindful of their situation as you go into this. The content planner I've made for you is built with notion. If you haven't used notion before, it's okay. It's completely free for you to use, and all you will do is follow the link that I've provided you with head on over to duplicate and it's going to prompt you to sign up for a notion account, so you can add this to your own notion. Once you're within notion, it's going to look a little bit like this. This is in light mode that was previously on dark mode because you can access notion both on the web and within your actual MAC app, which is what I mean at the moment. It's going to look a little bit more blank. Obviously, it's not going to have things on the left hand side here, but you can also always explore their existing notion templates, which might really help you out. The quarterly concept planner is going to automatically be added in, and it's going to look exactly like this. So a few things that I want to point out to you, you've got your brand assets here. So anytime you click into anything, there's always a few things you can click into, and you can just click and drag some images in here. Or any files that you want to add, or at any point, it's going to tell you you can write something, you can press space for AI help or use the Backslash to see what other options you've got here, so you can add in some texts, you can add in some images, audio, files, tables, et cetera, et cetera. So I would add in some brand assets. That's a really good place to sort of keep things. Then to get back, you just go up here or in the left hand side bar into your quarterly content planet there. We've also got a space for your customer avatars. So this is quite basic at the moment. So just make it as tailored to your business as possible. It's a good idea to have some information about who your customers are for when you're planning content. Then, likewise, for your goals, if you will have some short term goals and long term goals and maybe platform specific goals you want to put in here. I've also added in a bit of a section for any key or critical dates for events, or launches, webinars, anything that's coming up for the business that you think would be worth mentioning because maybe your social media content will have to tailor to it. That also includes things like holidays. Then you've got this little drop down. It may not be relevant to all of you. But it can be a nice way to put in some content from other people that you could repurpose as part of your content plan. For me, for Mags Realty, I've put in the name of the business is Domain. The content type is an article. The title is Dellsford is the perfect tree change for city dwellers, which is tailored to my investor Alana Persona. This is the link, and I would share that on Linked in. Then I would probably put in some additional notes about you know, the caption that I want to go along with that or any details there. For this, as well, I kind of just written Investor Alana here, and I've added this as a text column. You can always change this by clicking into the column and saying dit property. And then in the type option, you can change this to be select or multi select. So select would be the option that I would add in, and then I would write in the names of my different customer avatars. So at the moment, you know, Investor Alana is one, then I would have my home buyer Becky, and keep adding those in so that when someone was in here, they could just select the particular avatar instead of having to type it out. But for now, I'm actually happy to just keep this as text only because I obviously don't want you to have to bother with my customer avatars. I want you to put in your ones in, so just so you know, at any point, you can change any of the columns so that it's got that option. Likewise for platforms, this is on a multi select. So when you just click into this, you can add in the different platforms, and you can obviously add new ones as well. You can also add in media at any point, so you could just open that Up. And we could say something like this is going to be re post of tweet or post. But let's say in this case, it's just let's just call it And then I could just click and drag a tweet in that I've maybe taken from X, and then just talk about how I want to repurpose this. So that's always an option in the content type section is where you can open that up and add in some details. For now, I'm just going to leave that blank because obviously this is just your template, so I don't want to be messing it up, but just so you know you can add in some media that way as well. So that's your repurposing section. Then you've got your new content ideas section. This is where you just sort of brain dump everything. And then again, you would put in your audience, the type of content, the links, any extra notes, and then whether it's not yet being made or it's scheduled, et cetera, you could add that in, the platform it's going out on and the date you wanted to go out on. This is really just a brainstorm section. Don't take it too too seriously, but you could add in some new ideas, and then you're going to basically move that into your actual content plan, which is where you also put in the dates that you're going to schedule it out on, which is then going to actually give you your content calendar here, which is something that your client can then come in and look at and see everything. Notion do actually have a content calendar as well, that can link to this. If your client doesn't want to bother with all of the rest of this, but they just want to see the calendar itself, you can say, open this up in calendar and maybe that's the only thing that they see so they can review all the content that you have planned and they don't have to see the rest of it. That's always an option. But that's pretty much the basics of it. At the bottom here, you also have your different platforms. If you need to add a new platform, you would just do that here. But these are the ones that you would select over here, so you can see that these ones are set to go out on these particular platforms, but I could also just say, Okay, it's actually also going to go out on Instagram, or no, I don't want this to go out on YouTube. And in your content plan, you can just go by the board. You can go by the status. So whether it's an idea, it's something you're planning, filming, editing, et cetera, or you can actually just go by the platform. So if you just want to see what's going on with Instagram, YouTube, et cetera, Then this is how you would view that instead. So let's just look at it as a board for the time being, so that I can also show you how you can drag things from just your idea brain dump into your actual content plan. So let's go over here and make a new content idea. This one is just going to be something that I actually have posted on Instagram recently so that I can actually show you how this would plan out. So I'm just going to go ahead and this is going to be a video. I don't have any huge links here, and it's going to be going out on Instagram. But again, it's not super relevant to be putting that here. Really the main area that I want to make sure I'm actually outlining all of that in here. But this is where I could put in things like my caption. So this is going to be my caption. And then this is going to be my first comment if I was going to have hashtags in comments instead of the caption, that's entirely optional. And then I might need to put in a bit of the actual media. So I could just drag in my image, so that's the actual cover for the reel that I want to be making, and then I can put in the actual reel over here. So won't let me drag in the video because it's too big, but instead, we're just going to embed the Google Drive link. So I'm going to put that in here. So that way, it can live inside of Google Drive or Dropbox, but I can have the video actually playing inside of Notion, so my client can click into it, see the video playing there. Then I would put in, you know, a little bit of details about this would be my cover. The video itself, the caption, and the first comment, if I had one. So that's that. And now I can just go through. I'm going to switch this over to status. It makes it a little bit easier to move things around, and I can just take this and drag this straight down in between these two. Now it's in there as an idea. Obviously, it doesn't have the rest of these elements because I haven't actually selected the platforms that it's going to go live on. So I'm just going to click into it now. And now it'll say Add platforms, and I can say, this is going to go on Instagram, and let's say I could say it's also going on TikTok. So the moment it's only in here as an idea, but I could actually take this and let's say, we're going to say it's scheduled, and let's give it a date. So we can actually see how it'll pop up on the calendar. And then this is where you can see your whole content calendar, and it's nice and scheduled. Then once you're ready for it to be archived, because it's already been published, you could select archive, and it's going to appear in the archives here. So that means that you're not kind of constantly clogging things up with old content that's already gone live. Pretty much all there is to it. Hopefully, that has made sense. You can continue to move between ideas and the content plan if you think, Oh, there's something here that I'm like, I'm not quite sure. I'm actually going to move it back up here. You can continuously move between these two areas. Don't feel like nothing in notion is irreversible, essentially. But the reason that I've labeled this a quarterly content planner instead of just a content planner is because some people just prefer to work in quarters. So they just plan all the content for the quarter ahead, and then they prefer to sort of start a new by just going through and then duplicating this for the next quarter. It's completely up to you how you go about it, and also the volume of content that your client actually has. Maybe some platforms that require more advanced content planning than just what's in here. So, for example, my YouTube content looks like this. It's a lot more advanced just because I've got, you know, what's the topic? What's the title, thumbnail ideas, status, priorities, you know, all of this stuff. And then the actual scripts themselves are a little bit more complex, you know, in terms of having things different colors based on what my editors need to do and different media embedded and everything like that. So it is a little bit more advanced than what just a regular content calendar would be able to handle. But this is just a really nice place to start. And then you could continuously kind of evolve it as your business or your client's business requires. So hopefully, that's a really nice place for you to begin your content planning journey, and I will see you in the next lesson. 74. AI for Strategy: All right. So while I think it's really important that you understand everything that goes into developing a social media strategy. We absolutely can use Chat GPT and other AI tools to help us out with this a little bit. So these are the prompts that I've included in your course guide that I would like you to leverage. So it's sort of saying, I'm looking for a personalized strategy to grow my businesses, in this case, Instagram following, but of course, you would change that to whatever platform. I would probably go platform by platform, not to say social media following because each platform requires its own sort of plan. And then you would provide all this information about your business, your audience, your present, current business goals, with this platform, your resources, your unique selling points, any competitors, past marketing efforts, budget, so that could be for ad spend. Then brands you might collaborate with and any plans for user generated content. And then saying, you know, just based on the information provided, please provide a comprehensive and tailored plan for growing my following with a focus on achieving my business goals and leveraging available resources. Already done this for Mags realty, so we can have a look at how this would look. So it's just Mags realty, real estate buyers agent based in Brisbane Australia. These are this is my audience. I've kind of gone a little bit lazy with it. I don't have a current Instagram presence. I don't have it past marketing efforts. I've only really listed one competitor, but I think it would be worthwhile to list a couple. And then I've just given myself a budget of $500 a month in addition to also having a social media freelancer who can work 10 hours a week to dedicate to this. So camera equipment, audio equipment, just a few general things, and then I don't have any brands that I want to collaborate with. And in terms of user generated content, I would want to make a plan for just repurposing photos of customers in front of their purchased homes. And that's it. Let's have a look at what it gives us. It starts off by telling me my profile setup and optimization. So it's giving me a little bit of a bio. I think that's really quite cool. Let's got a call to action. And then we've got a content strategy in terms of the types of content it thinks I should post the hash tags. It's selected for me, which are really handy post timing as well. I think that's just going to come down to your analytics and seeing what's working for your audience. And then these are just kind of general plans and guides. So I think this is a really nice place to begin. I think it could be hashed out a little bit more in terms of just the time and effort and resources allocated to each individual area. But I think it's a pretty good start in terms of hashing out a bit of a strategy. I mean, you're going to have to do the hard work, of course, but it's a nice way to kind of get going, and it's given us an example content calendar for one month, as well, which we already know from earlier lessons that we can do this in a much more elaborate way using Chat CBT. That would be a really good place to start. I would also actually recommend that you do this a few times because you might get different answers from CAG EPT and also doing it with other AI tools. You will absolutely get different results from Gemini clawed other AI tools. I would recommend that if you're doing this for a client, you do it a few times and you do it with a few different tools, slightly tweaking your answers and trying to give it as much information as possible because you will generally find different results and you can pick and choose whatever makes the most sense. I know it has given us a bit of a bio at the beginning of this. But actually, one thing that I wanted to show you as well, which you can do with Chachi BT, or you can also do with Gemini, which is that you can upload a screenshot of your existing bio and get help optimizing it. I purposely did a bit of a basic bio with Mags RLT just to set up my accounts so that we can find ways to make it a little bit more juicy using AI tools at this stage. Here's what I would say. Acting as a social media strategist, I want you to analyze my Instagram bio, knowing what you now know, about my brand. What improvements could be made. What type of content would you expect to see on an account like this? Please rewrite my bio accordingly and include a memorable tag line. And then I would actually say, this is optional, but please note that this is my brand voice. And you'll remember how in the previous lesson, we went to copy AI to get our brand voice. It's not hugely critical for a bio, but it can make a slight difference in how Chat GPT actually writes your bio. So I'm just going to go ahead and hit Sen and see what it comes back. So it's got, you know, a bit of an analysis and areas for improvement, and then content expectations based on the bio. So it's revised Bio is Meg Realty, Brisbanes trusted buys agent, your guide to first home, smart investments, and perfect downsizes. Chat with us today to unlock your dream home, your home, your future, your Megs realty. Really like that, actually. I think that's like, it's cheesy, but somehow that just really works for me. So I love that. I think I would definitely implement that. It's something that I think could work really well, actually for a client. I hate when Cha GBG makes something better than I could ever come up with. Anyways, but this is why we're doing this, right? So I would definitely recommend playing around with this. Obviously, throughout the course, you would have created a social media profile of your own or for your client, and you've been playing around with a few things. So take a screenshot of it, load it into Chat PT, and use the prompt I provided you with. I have added it to your course guide as well, so you've got it there not to worry. And you use that to potentially revise what you've got. And hopefully, it really helps you just as much as it's helped me. 75. Present Your Strategy: In your course guide, you're going to find this template. That is a Cava template for you to present your social media strategy. Now, it's completely dependent on your setup with your clients, whether you're working in house, whether you're working agency side, whether you're going to need anything like this. But I just thought I would put it together for you in case you are required to present some sort of strategy to a client, or you're hoping to win a client over. It's still a potential client, and you want to have something to go off of. So, of course, make this your own beautiful brand colors and fonts and make it your own. I have put on the second page, you know, this is to be deleted, and anything that's in red in the guide is really there for you as a guide, and it's designed to be deleted or tweaked. So just briefly on the first page is where I would put a photo and a little bit about myself. Obviously, this is something you would replace with your own photo. And this is especially key if you're doing this for new clients. Obviously, if you're presenting this to your manager in house and obviously, don't need to introduce yourself, so I would just delete those pages. But just if you are doing this for a new client, it can be quite handy. Then you would have a bit of a summary statement page, perhaps where you talk about what the presentation is all about, what your findings are, what you think the business is doing well, what's maybe not doing so well, or where you can see improvements. And then you start with the audit of what's currently happening. So this is obviously to be deleted. It's just a guide, but it will give you an idea of what you could do for each network. You'd put in the network, how many followers you have, how many posts are currently going out? What is the top content? What's the percentage of engagement with this audience and any kind of notes and improvements and recommendations that you can assess on this individual network. Then you would essentially duplicate this for every single network that they're on. Of course, you may not be able to get these analytics if you're not able to work on the back end. So if this is for a potential client, you may need to adjust some of these, and you could do that by using the three dots here, so you can add rows or delete rows and same with the columns, you can add rows and delete columns. And yeah, you can do a lot basically the way that you would with any other table. If you think some of these are not appropriate, for example, engagement, you may not be able to pull engagement stats if you're not able to actually access the back end or access analytics tools. So just make it appropriate for you or if you don't think that this is relevant for the strategy you're going with, of course, just delete the pages as well. Then it's time for competitor analysis. This is the page that I've created for you. You can set it up however you want. It doesn't also just mean that you just have a place for three individual photos. You can do as many as you need and you can keep duplicating the pages for each competitor. For me, I might do Amy Porterfield. This is just a screenshot of a linked in post that I took. For any static post, it might be easier to just bring in some screenshots. So you would just screenshot it on a platform like this one. Then you would bring it into your uploads folder, or of course, you would organize it. And then yes, you can bring it in and just drag it straight in, or if you think that it's a little bit longer like is the case in this one, so it's not going to work with the placeholders, I'll just delete the placeholders and put some screenshots around it. Now, for videos, you might find it easier to just embed them, especially if you're presenting this live to your client so that they can actually see the videos that you're talking about. So let's say we're doing this from Instagram, and we're just going to grab one of the reels here and use it from the URL here. And now we're going to go on over to apps and search for embed. And drop in our link here and add that to our design. Now, it's important that you know that not every single real or every single video that you're embedding is going to allow you to embed it and have it autoplay when you're presenting. Some of them will require you to then jump into Instagram. So it'll either say, watch on Instagram or it'll look like this, which will allow it to play as soon as you're presenting it. So that's just something to keep in mind. Not all of them will autoplay. I don't actually know what determines whether it's going to autoplay or not, but that's just something to keep in mind. And with this one in particular, I can essentially just play it, and it's going to play right in the presentation for me, which is quite handy if I'm presenting this to a client live, And then I would, of course, add in some more additional screenshots, maybe duplicate this page, and keep kind of gathering assets. And then I would just write in a little bit of a blurb about what I think they're doing well, where I think there might be opportunities for improvement. What can we learn from this competitor? And then it's time for you to go through the business objectives and social goals. So first, in here, I would just say, sort of looking back, even if you haven't been part of the business so far, I would just say, has there been social media strategy, and how has that planned out? What sort of happened over the last 12 months so that we know kind of where we're at. And then moving forward, you can say, what are our long term objectives? What are the sort of short term initiatives that we want to include? What are our smart social goals? And then again, of course, similarly to before, you can add rows or delete rows and add columns, however you want. Also, anything that is in red, I would just make sure that you're actually changing the font color. Of course, you don't want any kind of, you know, you don't want anything to be red on the template once it's actually a proper strategy. So that's just something to keep in mind, make sure you're changing the font colors. And then you have a bit of a space for branding. Again, you may not be responsible for anything to do with the company's branding. But if you have some thoughts, Just remember to be kind because you never know, even if you think that their branding is terrible, they might think it's the best thing that's ever happened to the world. So just don't ever be brutal when it comes to people's branding because it might rub them the wrong way. So always just know how what their attachment is to the branding. You know, they may have designed their logo themselves, or it might have been their daughter that designed it, and they're super attached to it. So it might just be a little bit of a sensitive topic. That's just something to keep in mind. But this is where you can, you know, drag in some images. So if you're like, Okay, we want to go with, let's say minimalist home. We're going to look at some photos, and then it could say, these are the kinds of photos that we want to be using on socials, and I will just drag those in, and it will just snap straight into place. And then same with a color palette, you can just choose the colors that you think the brand could embrace. Any fonts as well. If you've got ideas about those, if they're within camera, or you're able to upload them within cava, if you're on the pro plan, then I would just choose them. Otherwise, you can also just drop in screenshots. Then we have our content pillars, and how specific you want to be with these is completely up to you. For Mags realty might go with something like. Let's say pillar one, it could be investing. And then the topics that would fall under that would be first time investing, long term investment strategies, what to look for an investment, et cetera, et. Then Pillar two would be finance or financing, and then it would be something like how to pick a mortgage broker. Or working with a mortgage broker would be its own category and then how to pick a mortgage broker would be a subcategory of that. Essentially, your content pillars should just be overarching ideas that are really relevant to your brand. So not like motivation, inspiration. These are not actual direct content pillars. They need to be very specific in terms of what your client's brand can create content around. We're going to move on to the division of resources. So it is up to you how you choose to do this, whether it's your responsibility to decide this. This is just a slide so that if you need to make recommendations, where you go, Okay, I think we're going to post this many times a week. Let's just try this as a strategy, and I think 80% of our posts are going to be educational and entertaining, and 20% are going to be promotional. These are just different ideas of the division of resources. So you may give a bit of guidance to your client based on that. Then you have space for paid advertising, and it's entirely up to you whether you feel confident on actually offering this as a service or making recommendations on this. But this is where you could just jot down some ideas. And again, you can expand on this. You could add in some screenshots of ads that your competitors are doing. And you could pull some stats if your clients are already advertising, and you could say, Okay, this is how we're tracking currently, here is how we think we can improve or what I think we could do in the future. And this is your space to do that. And then success measures. So every client is probably going to want some sort of a report on what you're doing, how you're tracking with it. Is it working? And this is where you would just kind of lay out a little bit of detail about when they can expect a report. You know, Is it weekly? Is it monthly? Is it quarterly? I mean, probably not weekly, that would be a little bit much. But this is where you would just say, you know, we're going to be reporting on the success measures. Here's what we're going to be kind of looking for, and it's your way to sort of close off the presentation. Then in terms of actually presenting these to your client, obviously, you could just send it to them as a PDF. It does make it a little bit limited because of course, you can put in things like videos, which might make this really nice and dynamic. So, for example, if this was for I don't know, Mags Realty, you know, I would potentially replace these images with some nice videos, which makes it a little bit nicer for my clients to look at. So that's an option, and that way, you can present it live or send it to them as a link. So either you present it using the presentation option here, or you can also just share Then you can choose to publish this as a website or just have a public view link. If you're not seeing them there, they will also be over in More. You will have the public view link and the website option for a presentation like this one. I think the public view link option is more than enough. And then you just copy that. Unless you really want to customize this as a website, I think it's enough for it to look like this. And that's quite nice for your client. They can then just go through everything. I'm just going to go through to the very end, so I can show you just two things that I would do with a public view link like this one. One is to add some animations that will look like this when people are scrolling through your presentation, which just adds a bit of a dynamic element to it. And the second thing is, this is what the videos would look like. So it just makes it a little bit nicer for people to look at. And in terms of animations, one thing I'd say is sometimes you don't want to animate everything on the page. So a page like this one, for example, if I go to animate, in page animations at the moment, if I am looking at all the page animations, it can be quite intense to animate, especially all of the text. So instead, what I would do is I would animate individual elements. So in order to select individual elements, you just click the first element that you want to animate and then hold down shift. And click all the elements that you want to animate, like I have in this case, and then you would go to element animations, and let's just select rise here, which is nice and simple, or we could go with breathe, also quite cool. I quite like that, and then you just decide whether you want to scale in or out and how fast you want it to go. But then if we now refresh our view only link and go to this page and click next, you'll now see the animations taking place. That can be just a nice way to add a little bit of a dynamic element to your presentation. Check that out in your course guide, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 76. Craft Consistency: I have a little bit of a different view of consistency in my business, just because I appreciate having creative freedom to sort of create content when I feel like it and not create content when I don't feel like it and I don't want to force it. And that's why I don't really go above and beyond to manage people's expectations to say, I'm going to publish a new video every Wednesday, and then they're kind of waiting for it, and I feel stressed out if it's not there, so then I create somewhat mediocre content just publish consistently. And that's just because yes, one thing, creativity can't be forced, not in my brain anyway, not for my own business. And things happen. People get sick. Wi Fi connections get interrupted. Global pandemics get in the way. Not to mention that creative burnout is a real thing, and some days I literally just cannot imagine sitting next to my computer, let alone filming a video. So I really like having the freedom in my business to create when I want to create and to do other things when I'm not really feeling it. But of course, when it comes to other people's businesses, we do not have the luxury of choosing to create when we want to create and not create when we don't feel like create. So that's why two things are going to become very crucial in your social media management journey to make sure you get that lovely consistency going. One is batching, and the second is scheduling. Batching content is essentially just the art of sitting down and pumping out multiples of the same content in the same time period. That serves the purpose of allowing you to just focus on one single task and be at your most efficient. If you had to think about creating a single Instagram post every single day for a month, it would just eat up so much of your time. Especially when it comes to then client approvals and going back and forth with any changes, it just takes way too long. If you sit down once a month to write out 30 captions and 30 images and 30 videos, then you'll have the rest of your month to focus on other things. But it's not enough to just create this amount of epic bulk content. You also have to make sure that it's going to get out to your audience, which is where scheduling tools will come in really handy. To save you lots of precious time and energy, we'll be looking at some scheduling tools that will help to speed things up for you. These tools will also help you to track improvements and report on successes back to your clients, which is something we're going to cover a little bit later. Thing I want to mention that will be consistent across all of these tools is that when you're scheduling content for your clients, it's really important for you to keep time zones in mind. The first thing to make sure is that all of your scheduling tools are in the right time zone and they're in your client's time zone and not your own so that posts are going out at the right time. Then if you need a little bit of extra help with time zones, world Tim buddies a great free tool for this where you set your time zone and then you can set in multiple time zones as well. If I was going to book a call on 7 April at 3:00 P.M. My time, can see that it's 1:00 A.M. In Toronto and it's 6:00 A.M. In London. So if I had a Canadian client that was based in Toronto, this is probably not the right time for me to be booking a call with them or scheduling one of their posts. When it comes to scheduling tools, there are so many options out there. We could not possibly cover all of them. So we're just going to cover a couple so that you can get quite confident with how they work, what they look like, what they do, et cetera. Then if you've got other options you want to explore, just know there are so many great resources out there. Pretty much every scheduling tool will have a YouTube library of their own features that you can go through, and of course, blogs as well and other people creating and using them and talking about it online. So don't feel too intimidated by if your clients are using something you've never heard of before. If your client says to you, we use the Hoot Suite Scheduler, do you know anything about it? You can literally just say, No, I'm sorry, I'm not familiar with it. I've not used it, but I've used X Y and. And I'm pretty confident that I can get up to speed before we begin our working relationship. I'm happy to take a little bit of time, you know, without getting like time out of your day, without getting paid for it, without charging the client to upskill yourself on their particular scheduler so that you can get up to speed before you begin working. Clients are going to appreciate the honesty most of the time. Honestly, don't lie to them, just say, Yep, cool, I've got experience with scheduling tools, just not the one that you use in particular. And I know that can feel intimidating as a beginner, but literally clients will not expect that you know every single tool and software out there. It's perfectly fine to say, I have never worked with the particular software that you use, but I've worked with one similar to it, and I'm really confident that I can make it work. Great hack for this is if you're ever on Google, you can put in the name of the scheduling tool in terms of the URL. I would have to be like hoots suit.com or buffer.com, Hole in, and then your question. Then it'll only pop up with results that are from hoots suit.com, which is really really handy. If you're looking at how to schedule a post and then you have to browse through infinite search results, or you have to try and browse through the actual help sections of the particular scheduling tools. It can take forever. This is a really great way to let Google do the search engine function, but only of the tools you're looking for. You can do this for any tool or any website really and it's going to just search the actual website. If you're ever looking for any support with a particular scheduling or any other tool that your client is using that you're not super familiar with, this is a great lifesaving hack. Now in the next lesson, let's look at some matching tips and then we'll go into our different scheduling tools. 77. Batch Your Content: So let's not talk about batching, because the hardest thing. One of the hardest things definitely as a beginner is information overload. You are just looking up something like how to post something on Linkedin. And suddenly 3 hours have gone by because you've gone down a rabbit hole of information overload and absorbing everything there is to know about posting on Linkedin and abook. Instagram, because all these videos got recommended to you, and they all seemed great. So you just decided to what all of them. And that kind of information overload, can just suck up so much of your time, especially when you're in the beginning phases. Batching is going to be such a key to your consistency because it's going to allow you to tune out the rest of the world and focus on just one task at a time. So for now, let's say, I just want to batch a whole bunch of stuff for Instagram for the upcoming month. And I would first break that down by figuring out if there's anything that I need to be aware of that's specific for this upcoming time period. For example, are there any product launches, business, growth, press releases, holidays, collaborations, anything like that. If there were, I would work backwards from that, but let's assume there isn't for this time being. And then in terms of the actual content, I would want to be creating four posts a week for four weeks for a total of 16 posts. I would then break this down into three categories, content pillars, content topics, and the content formats. My first content pillar is education and some topics that I could create content around would be things like updates in social media. Favorite tool or software, accounts to follow for advice and industry news, case studies, or trending topics. My second pillar is all about expertise. So I could create two posts around my wisdom or my experience and then perhaps create two industry tweets, screenshots that I would make into a post. Then my last pillar is all about motivation. This stage, I could just create some really simple quote graphics with motivational and inspirational quotes. Lastly, this is not really a pillar, but of course, you want to be promoting your business as well, so I would create four posts around promoting my actual product or service. One type of post I could create is a testimonial. Then I could maybe share a course promo video and then maybe do a giveaway. And maybe share a student win or a student project. Then in terms of formats, it's entirely up to you. So these could all pretty much be just graphic posts or just image posts, and you can share the topic in the actual caption itself. It doesn't have to be presented in the visual element of your post, but you could then highlight, updates in social media would make for a really good carousel. And accounts to follow would also make for a good carousel because I could have four or five accounts. And then me sharing my wisdom could actually just be me jumping on camera and doing really quick 32nd clips of me sharing something that I've recently learned or tried out. Then I think motivational quotes are really easy to turn into rails or videos on Instagram as well. And then business promotion will depend on the format that these things are in. So my course promos would obviously be videos, but my student achievements would likely just be static images. That's exactly how I would go about planning a whole month's worth of content for one potform. But what I do want to say is that this is a very generic sort of plan. Obviously, these content pillars are not real content pillars, like we talked about, when we're talking about presenting your strategy in an earlier lesson, content pillars should be really specific to your business. So for Mags realty, this would be, investing, it would be finance, not these kind of general themes here, but this is just to give you an idea of what we might do for this type of content plan. For me as a marketer, not for Mags realty. I would then create a visual for each of these or get it from my client or perhaps guide them to create for me. This is especially true if your client is maybe a local business in a different country or a different state than you're in, where you can't take any of the photos or videos yourself. You can then say to them, hey, can I get a photo of the outside of the restaurant, the chef, some food, close up shots, et cetera, et cetera. But be very specific and maybe even provide them with examples of what you're looking for from other businesses. Otherwise, you may not get exactly what you want because keep in mind, these guys may not be the experts. Some clients might just need a little bit more guidance than others. With other forms of content like video content, this process is going to be much more involved depending on the level of complexity, the length of video, and also the different levels of approval that you have to consider when it comes to video creation. And that is just because it's so much easier to change something that your client may not like about a static graphic. You can change the background or the font. But it takes a lot to change something about a video. If you just kind of create something and your client doesn't like the finished product, you could have potentially wasted a lot of time and money on not sort of getting approvals along the way. And while video content is a totally different skill set, and it's not something you would be expected to do as a social media manager, you might be expected to sort of direct video content from an ideas perspective or a strategy perspective. But the actual filming side of it may not be something that you're responsible for. But for those of you who might be going down this path, because you're really intrigued by video content on TikTok or Reels or YouTube, and it's something that you really want to get into and kind of bring this skill set into your repertoire as a social media marketer, then this kind of stuff might really help What I'm referring to here is the video on the right here, which might have a script, different graphics, some talking headshots and more complex elements like that. You can also create super simple animated videos like this one on the left. I would put those in the same level of complexity and batching strategy as static graphic images. But for more complex videos, you may want to batch things like your video research for ideas, your rough outline of content, the more detailed script, and maybe some storyboard ideas, where you go over any other elements of the video that you might want to add in, then the actual filming, the editing, thumbnail or video cover, and then the optimization stage, which would be things like the title, the description, and Haag. In terms of approval processes, it's just important to talk to your client. Every client is going to want something different. I've had some clients who are literally happy for me to plan, create the strategy, create the post, create captions, do everything, put it into a scheduling tool and then send it over for them to basically approve and set to go live. And they're happy with that. Whereas other clients are going to want a full blown content calendar so that they can see exactly what's going out, where? What are you planning? Does it make sense before anything actually gets created. You just need to talk to them and say, Okay, how much do you want to micromanage this effectively? And that also might change as your working relationship progresses because at the beginning, maybe they want to have a little bit more control over your creative process. Maybe once you're working together for a few months or a few years, they might already know you well enough and know that you understand their brand and their business, that you can be left alone to do what you need to do, and they can have minimal input. So just talk to them about that so that you're both on the same page. And then it's going to be time for you to actually go in and schedule your content. So that's what we're going to look at in the next lesson, and I'll see there. 78. Schedule Your Content: Let's first address the elephant in the room. No, you will not get punished for using external scheduling tools for your content. A lot of the time people think that your content is going to reach less people because you're not using the native scheduling tools within the platforms themselves, but you're using an external provider. That's just not the case. These tools exist for a reason, and the platforms allow them to schedule content on these platforms. So obviously, you're not going to get punished for using them. Now let's just talk about a few things to keep in mind when it comes to schedulers. Starting with getting access from your client. Some clients will want to have their own tool that they pay for and give you access to. Others will be happy for you to use your own scheduling tools and they'll just have to grant you access to their social media profiles. My preference was always for my clients to have their own tools and I would just come in and manage everything. Which also made it easier for me to eventually leave and for them to retain control over all of the past content that I created and all the analytics, which made it much easier for them to then onboard another freelancer, and for them to be able to see everything that's already happened and continue working on it. But for agencies and some social media managers who are maybe dealing with three to five clients, Maybe they're just creating content for the same platform over and over again. It might be easier for them to have it all in one place in a tool that they pay for. But I would say that that's very sort of agency specific, and I've seen some freelancers do this, but for the majority of use cases as a solar freelancer, my preference has always been for clients to retain ownership of their own tools, pay for their own tools, and just invite me in as a user. But just confirm with your client what their preference is. In terms of the review process, it's also important for you to communicate with your client what they want on this front. In my experience, every client will want to or at least appreciate having some form of control over the content, especially at the beginning when you're still getting started and getting the hang of things and you're getting to know each other. But it might just come down to having a trial period where they make sure that you are getting the brands tone of voice right and the branding right, and you're getting exactly what they want from you. And then after that point, they might just trust you to put out content that represents the brand accordingly and are happy for you to do your own. Exception there is with any businesses that have a higher liability like lawyers at doctors and anyone dealing with really confidential information, they may actually need to approve every marketing material that goes out for the duration of you working with them. And now over the next few lessons, we're going to start looking at your options for your scheduling tools. So I'll see in the next one. 79. Meta Business Suite: So getting started with our scheduling tools, we're just going to kick things off with the Meta Business suite, so you can either head to business.facebook.com, or you can also access it from within your Facebook profile. If you just roll down to professional, you can access it from there. So Meta Business Site, you know, it's free, and it's still a great tool that I'm g that they've provided. It's not hugely used by people who also have continental other platforms, because if you're also scheduling for X for Linked in, for other platforms. You're going to use a different external scheduling tool because obviously you can only schedule for meta platforms, which is Facebook and Instagram from within here. You probably will not utilize it a whole lot, but it's still good to know that it exists because there are some use cases for it. If for example, you've got a very budget conscious client who only wants to use free tools and they're only focusing on Facebook and Instagram, then perhaps this might actually suffice. Meta Business Site, obviously, this is where you have things like all your comments, which you looked at earlier. You've also got your analytics, which we'll look at in a little bit You've got your planner. You've got all these things, but really the things that we want to focus on is the fact that you can create a post, create a reel, create a story, go live, and also create a few things here, and also create ads, but yeah, I wouldn't necessarily do that from within here. So in terms of creating a post, the one thing that's quite handy with this is that it allows you to customize your caption, even if you're creating for both platforms. I would probably steal go platform by platform. So I would just create for Facebook, do everything, especially if I'm scheduling it. And then go through the parle process again and schedule it for Instagram. But just so you know, if you are sort of doing it for both, you can customize the caption for each. And then you've got in terms of scheduling options, again, you can break it down by Facebook and Instagram. So this is where you would put in your caption, you would add in a photo or video. You've also got some really cool video templates. So Video is sort of a YouTube competitor if you're not super familiar with them, but it allows you to potentially add in some video templates. If you've got a static post, and you just want to add in a little bit of animation, it will allow you to do that. It's not working at the moment, so I'm just going to exit out of it. But just, you know, if you're only working with static images and you want to add a little bit of animation to it, it will allow you to do that from in here, then you can schedule it and go through the privacy settings as well. So pretty simple. It's similar to just doing it through the platforms themselves natively. In terms of reels, it's a little bit more fiddly, because also with reels, a lot of the time the appeal is the music. Of course, if you're adding in your own music from within Cava or other tools that you've used to maybe drag into Cava, then it's not a problem. If you're already uploading a video that has a music track to it, then great. So we're just going to be using the video that we prepared earlier, which actually doesn't have any music at this stage. It shows that there is some, but really, there is no music to it. It's probably just a default setting there. If you want to add our own music, it's a little bit clunky from within here. We'll get to that in just a sec. We're going to add in our caption here. And I'm just going to space things down a little bit. Maybe this is a little bit of a benefit, especially when it comes to Instagram. It's a lot harder to do any kind of formatting within the Instagram app. So that can be a benefit of using the real here or the caption within the scheduler here. Now, when it comes to the thumbnail, it doesn't allow us to split this out by Facebook and Instagram. On Facebook, it's much less critical in terms of what the thumbnail is versus the cover on Instagram. That's why you might want to actually split this out and only go and post this on Facebook and then do it separately for Instagram so you can make sure the cover is exactly how you want it. But in this case, we're not going to worry about that too too much. We can just choose a frame, and then you could add in a collaborator if you had one as well. You also have the option to look for hashtags. We're not going to do that at this stage, but you can search for hashtags in here if you're looking for a little bit of inspiration. And we're just going to click on next. And this is where we come through to to add in a little bit of music. It's pretty good in terms of, recognizing how your Instagram account is set up and giving you access to a lot of even modern tracks. But if you actually try to search for a particular kinds of audio that are trending on Instagram, chances are you're probably not going to find it. So It will give you some options. If it's super super popular, you might find it, but if it's something really specific, that's trending, but it's maybe made by a smaller creator, you're probably not going to find it here. That's why I don't hugely like scheduling reels from within here. I think it's probably best done from within the app if you're going to be using a particular kind of audio. Then you do also have the option to crop your video here. Add in some texts. Look, this is super super clunky. If you start writing, you can see how it appears here. It's actually ridiculous because this would get cut off when it's posted on Instagram, their own tool doesn't actually work. I don't think they're depending on anyone using this. It's also quite fuzzy. You have no options to change how the text appears, except for maybe the opacity, but no options for like styles or anything like that. This is clearly here as a use it if you must, but we really prefer that you don't sort of thing. Then you've got audio enhancement, which again, I'm not sure is something that people would utilize a whole lot. But anyways, so that's that section. Then you've got the option to share now, schedule or save as draft. Also, of course, you've got the option to share it to your story, add it to playlist, allow remixing, embedding, and also making sure that it's public. In this case, we're just going to go through to schedule, and we're just going to schedule it for a couple of days from now. Again, you can't actually divide this out between Facebook and Instagram. It's going to go out on both platforms at the same time. It's going to have the same caption, it's going to have all the same things. So it is a little bit of a glitch in the system as opposed to the way that posts are scheduled from within Meta Business Site. It's just not exactly perfect for scheduling reels, but it is an option. That perhaps the one cool thing that is within the Meta business suite, which is not within other scheduling tools that I have seen is the AB testing or split testing feature, which will allow you to create a couple of different versions of your posts and reels to see what's resonating with your audience. I haven't personally explored this option too much, so I don't really have a way to say, like, yes or no on this. But it's just something that you could play around with if your clients have the time. I've generally found that clients struggle to set aside enough time and budget to create one post, let alone like three or four. Split testing is probably a little bit more useful with things like thumbnails on YouTube videos rather than posts. But if it's something that your clients want to play around with, absolutely, feel free to explore this particular area of meta business Site. Now the next lesson, we're going to take a look at some more scheduling tools so I'll see there. 80. Schedule Through Metricool: So now in terms of more elaborate scheduling tools, there are other options, but Metricol is the one that I'm just going to cover here so that you have some sort of exposure to more elaborate schedulers, and then you can sort of choose the one that's best for your client. In terms of pricing, I think Metricl is quite competitive because you can do a lot on the free plan, including planning up to 50 pieces of content per month, which might actually be more than enough for some of your clients who might only be posting a couple of times a week. Can still analyze five competitors. You have access to some analytics in terms of the last three months, which again, might be enough for your clients. There's a lot that you can do just on the free plan, and then the other plans are still quite affordable once you need to move up to the next stages. Once you're on the back end, it's going to look a little bit like this. You could then go to your brand settings to connect to different accounts. So there will be some things that are only available on the pro plan, including a linked in account. But everything else pretty much, you can do and schedule from here, including ads, which is pretty incredible is that not only can you actually see analytics of ads from in here, but you can actually build out things like your Google Ads campaigns from within Metrocol in a way that's a little bit simpler than it is within the Google Ads interface. So you can do an enormous amount from the scheduling tool. So just going on over to our first section here, so this is where we would have a summary of all of our analytics for our different pages. Then we have the ability to manage conversations. Then this is where we would actually be able to go to plan a few things. So on the calendar view, we can actually look at what the best times for posting are. At the moment, it's kind of guessing because we don't have any active followers. So it doesn't really know when the best times for us to post are. This is probably just generic based on Facebook audiences in general. But let's say we say, you know, percentage of active followers on Facebook, it's going to give us that breakdown. And then we can say, Okay, Friday, 3:00 P.M. Seems to be a good time to post, even better to post at 7:00 P.M. On a Friday. That may or may not be a good time for you and your clients. It depends you might be in a totally different time zone to your clients, or, you know, they might be in a totally different time zone to their audience. That happens sometimes where I'm in Australia, my client is in America, but actually, their brand is tailoring to a South African audience. So in that case, you want to make sure that whatever this is set to makes the most sense for you and your client, whether that is for this to be in your time zone, in your client's time zone or potentially in the audience's time zone. It's going to be very rare that your clients and their audience are not going to be the same. Generally speaking, though, if you're working for a client in the US, and their audience as American, you want to make sure that this is in their time zone. So if they're logging in here, it all makes sense to them and not just you. So that's how you can determine what the best times to post are on different platforms, based on your followers, and then you can go through to creating a post. This stage, you could decide, is this a post? Is this a real? Is this a story? And then we're just going to create a really basic post here from just a static image based on one of the designs that we created. To keep it nice and simple. There's no movement to it. We could go through to editing the image using metricals editing, but in this case, we're happy to keep it. Then I'm just going to put in a really quick little caption here. Then I can see how this is going to display on Facebook. Then I could also tick this to go onto Instagram. Once again, I can choose is this a post a real or a story? In this case, it is a post, and then you can see now it'll tell me, this is what it's going to look like on Facebook, and here's what it's going to look like on Instagram as a post and in the feed. That way, I can see especially if this was a real that I was posting, and then I actually realized that in the feed, it's not going to look very good. That's my chance to go in and edit my cover and do those kind of last little tidbits. So it's really, really handy for that. And especially when it comes to the caption, we talked about this in terms of Facebook ads, but sometimes you might need to actually tweak the caption if you're saying something like you know, click below on Facebook. And then on Instagram, you're saying, Oh, check the link above or whatever. It's more relevant to ads because in ads, you're going to have some buttons there for them to tap through to. May not be as relevant for organic posts, but this is your chance to potentially edit this by network. If you think, for example, on Instagram, you know, this link wouldn't be clickable. So in this case, I would actually say, all right on Facebook, I'm going to leave it as is, but on Instagram, I'm actually just going to remove this, and I could say, you know, check the link in the bio in order to do this. DME, a specific word to find out more and then go through the automation process, which we're going to talk about in a little bit. But for now, I'm happy to yeah, leave it as is so that we've got it specifically with a link on Facebook and then on Instagram, that link is not quite there. Then we have the option to, you know, add a MG's. Also add a first comment, which is quite handy, especially for Instagram. If you're putting your hashtags in your first comment, then this is a chance for you to actually schedule it in advance. Also adding in a location. So we're just going to leave that all as is, and then we could add in some hashtags if we needed to. But in this case, we're just going to go ahead and then we can schedule this and choose a time. So let's say, let's go a couple of days in advance. And hit schedule. Now within our calendar, if we go to the relevant date, we can see our posts are scheduled there, and then we can also see it in list form if we are within the right date range as well. We can see that that is pending. Now, one thing that you will have been able to see as well, instead of schedule, you could on the upgraded version, send this to review instead. That's a paid feature, but can be really great for some clients who are really wanting that extra level of approvals so that you are not actually able to schedule anything unless they've approved it inside a metrical. Lastly, you also have the option to create smart links, which you can use as your link in bios for different social platforms. You can create multiples of these. If you have one specifically that you would like to activate during a launch. So when people click through your Instagram bio to this link during a launch, it's really kind of honing in on advertising something during that launch period, and then once that launch period ends, you could change that. And of course, you can utilize these in a few different ways. But that's a cool little extra feature of metrical because obviously that could be an additional tool that you're paying for if you're using something like Linktree or Link in bio. Just before we finish up, I am actually just going to go ahead and pulse this instead of scheduling it so you can see how it comes through on the front end. So instead of putting this in the caption, I'm actually going to put this into the first comment so we can have a look at how that all works, and accept. I'm going to remove it from the caption here. And I'm going to go ahead and actually schedule. Or sorry, publish this now, so we can have a look at how it appears. And now, if we just go to our Facebook page and we refresh it, and go down. We can see our posts here. And then if we click into it, we can see that the first comment has pulled through nicely. Now, on here, it obviously says published by metrical. Again, this is not something that anyone will be able to see. It's just because I'm on the back end of my Facebook page, and it's just so that if there are ten, 20 people managing a page, you know who's published something, who's written something, but you won't actually be able to see this as a regular visitor of the page. So definitely feel free to go and experiment with the lack of metrical because you can do so much on their beautiful free plan, so you can get really comfortable with it before you start using it with paying clients, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 81. Automate Engagement: Let's now get into the world of automated engagement with ManyChat. I want to preface this by saying that ManyChat is likely going to change a lot over the years because they're experimenting a lot every single week, things seem to be changing. So things might look a little bit different on your screen as with anything in this course. But ManyChat is essentially a tool that's going to allow you to create these kind of DM automations like you might have seen on Instagram. With reels like this one, that's say, you know, comment a particular word to listen to the full conversation. Then you comment the word, and then the creator will send you some information through your DMs or initiate a sequence of events for your DMs that then sign you up for something or potentially even make a purchase. So ManyChat is the tool that's going to allow you to do all of that. So you can essentially just go through to get started. It's going to ask you to sign up through Instagram or through Facebook, and go through all the different steps to connect a particular account, and then you will be able to set up your automation. Once you're in, you're going to have this little banner that says you need to activate a free trial. It can be a good idea to activate this just so you can test this out, even if you're just doing this on test accounts, so you can see if your automations are working and how it all works. Once we're in this, we're just going to be going into automation, and you can either start with their existing ones or the kind of general ones that they've got over here or you can start from scratch. We're just going to start from scratch so we can see exactly what this looks like. You can zoom in and out at any point. Also, sometimes things get a little bit messy, so you can use this to arrange the steps so that it kind of makes your giant spider web into something that's a little bit more logical and a flow. And then at any point, you can preview the steps. So we're going to start creating and then we're going to hit preview, and then we're actually going to publish a post and see this in action. So we're just going to start by saying, this is going to be either if somebody clicks an Instagram and comments on a poster reel, replies to a story, uses a referral, rank, sends a message, et cetera, et cetera. So in this case, we're going to say we want it when someone is or commenting on a poster reel. And at this stage, we're just going to say it's going to be the next poster reel. So this is quite handy, especially if you're scheduling something at like 3:00 A.M. You don't want to necessarily have to come in here and set up your automation, set it to go live once your post has already gone live. So this is really handy where you just say, whatever the next poster real it goes out, that's the one that we want to be going off of. In this case, I'm just going to add the word dream as a keyword and then potentially any misspellings that you think people might have. So, for example, they might leave out the A or it could be dram, either way. As long as these are not actual words, I think that's kind of where sometimes I've seen creators get stuck when they say something like comment the word me in order to get the link. That's a bit tricky because a lot of the time people will comment. That real and just say, like, for me, this doesn't make sense. They're not actually wanting whatever it is that you're sending, they're just using the word me because it's a very commonly used word. So it's a good idea for these keywords to be something that's not super super common for people to say, otherwise, you might just be sending it to people who don't actually want your stuff. So that's going to be that. And then once people comment on that, do you want to also auto reply or auto comment to their comment in the comments? That was a lot of the word comment. But anyway, so this is just an example of the type of replies. So yes, something like awesome s your link. Check your DMs. And then, of course, you can use emojis at any point. And then, yeah, I might say like done. Check your DM. O. Awesome. Anyways, you can go through and depending on how many comments you think you're going to get, you can continue to add in replies, but for now, I'm happy with those, and then that's pretty much everything we need for that section. You could also give this a different title, so you know what it is, especially if the automation is going to be huge. It can be a good idea to just rename this to say something like comment dream. Cool. Awesome. And then the next stage is to then send them a message in their DM. So you have a few options. You could just keep it really generic, or you can use these pre populated options within many chat to use their first name, for example. Look, this can be a little bit tricky, especially for Instagram. It's something that I would utilize for Facebook much more so than for Instagram because people don't necessarily use the right information for Instagram as much as they do for Facebook. So it can be a little bit tricky, but definitely test this out. I'm happy to just keep it relatively generic. Then it's going to have a button, and that's going to go to a website, and then this is just going to be, well, let's just use an actual website for this so we can make sure that it works. Then obviously, this would be a real legitimate landing page, not just my main website, let's co just say something like this, and potentially added MOG, why not? Could also then add a tag to this. But again, we just want to keep things nice and simple for the time being. So that's pretty much it. And then you can preview this to basically see, y tat Blow to find out how I can get you into your dream home sooner, and then you can see that it opens up the right website. Obviously, we're going to test that out with an Instagram itself. So it's not super dramatic for the time being. And that's pretty much it. And then you could obviously preview that. At this stage. This is a really simple automation. So there's not a whole lot to preview, and we're going to do that within Instagram itself. But for now, we could just set that live, so we can test things out. I'm going to actually just publish this post through metrical so we can do it from our desktop instead of the mobile app. But effectively the actual caption is the same as what we had before, but now it says, comment the word dream to find out how I can help you get into your dream home in as little as six months. We're going to publish that and then test out how this automation works from a different account if I was going to be messaging Meg's realty. Now me under my regular Instagram account, I'm going to say Yes. Awesome dream. And post that. Now Many chat has done its thing and has said, Yeah, also sent that over. Check your DMs. Now if I switch on over to the app and go to my messages, I can see it in my DMs here, and I can click on that, and it's going to go to the website that I had set for it. Y. 82. More ManyChat Automations: So that's a sort of most basic version of this, but you can get really complicated with this, and I'm not going to go into it too too much, but effectively, instead of doing, so we're going to say, use your comments on poster real, and let's just say next poster real, and we're just going to say dream. Not going to bother with the actual responses here. So for now, let's just leave it at that. The additional trigger to that could also be a story, so we could say if somebody also replies to a story and contains the word dream. A let's leave it at that because we could also share that post to our story and say, by the way, if you DM me the word dream, I'm going to send this to you, then it can send this message. But instead of using it as a comment reply, we could just say within the 24 hour window, and it's going to give us some different options here. Instead of just giving them what we were going to give them, we can now additionally add next steps. You'll notice when I just say comment reply, that's the end of the automation there. Within the 24 hour window, we can add some additional steps. We could say something like here's your link, and then this could just go to Cool. Then we could add in a bit of a delay. Let's say at this stage, we just want to wait maybe 2 hours because we don't want to overwhelm people, so it's going to wait 2 hours, and then it's going to say, another thing that's going to say something like. And then I could have a delay of just a couple of seconds and then add in a bit more text. So it actually looks like I'm typing it. You can use this time. Any questions you have about purchasing your first home? And another delay. And then we're going to add in a bit of user input instead of just text. So I could say interested in booking a call. And then the reply type would be your e mail. So I could say interested in booking a call. Let me know your best e mail to send my calendar link to. That is going to then opt them in to an e mail. So that's pretty good. And then it's also going to have the option to basically determine whether they're putting in a fake e mail or not, and you can decide how many times it tries to get their right e mail. I'd probably say maybe one or two times. Three times seems to be a lot. If they haven't given you the right e mail after two times, maybe you don't actually want it. Then you can do a few things from here where you can wait 24 hours or even wait five, 6 hours, and if they haven't given you their e mail, you could ask for it again. And you could do all sorts of things. So let's say if they haven't responded yet, we could just go through to sending them another message. And in this case, let's say we actually send them a video because maybe they don't actually know exactly what to expect on the call, so I could have a quick video where I tell them a little bit about what to expect on the call. Not quite sure what to expect on our call. I play to find out. And then could also continue to add in a little bit of text here and say ready to book that call. Let me do your best email. Something like that. Cool. At this point, I could just abandon everything and just not worry about it, or I could just send them my actual booking link directly within My without getting their e mail address. That's totally fine as well. Or I could actually just go through and then just send them a message to say, Awesome. Looking forward. To chatting with you, check your e mail for my calendar link, and let me know. If you have any questions, cool. And then I would just link these up because effectively they'll all end in the same place. Then if we preview this, we can see how that's going to work. And then I could say, Yeah, cool. That's pretty much it. Right? That's like the best case scenario. Otherwise, it would wait for a little bit, would wait for 2 hours and then prompt me again with the video. So that's the slightly more complex version, but again, it can get really, really, much bigger and more intense than that. People also do sell automations that you can purchase that are pre built for you, so I'll show you what some of those look like. They can be absolute base where you're kind of got all these different paths, you know, yes, no paths. And it can get very, very intense, but it can also save you a lot of time. So don't be afraid to use other people's automation templates. You can import them directly within many chat. And again, you can test all of this out even on dummy accounts if you're not super comfortable with going live at this stage. Now, the benefit of getting people's e mail addresses is obviously, there's lots of benefits, but you can set this up directly within many chats, so it's really easy to get people into your e mail marketing software. That's a whole another kettle of fish, and it's not something you would necessarily be responsible for. But if you head into settings and integrations, you'll find that there are a few e mail marketing platforms and CRMs that are already natively in here. So things like Clavier, which would be great if you have any G commerce clients, active campaign, mail chimp, help spot and convert it are already natively within MedCat. What that means is that you can get someone's e mail address directly with this automation and it automatically adds them to your email marketing platform and allow you to send them e mails, and it's all really really seamless. If your particular e mail software is not within here, there are still ways around this, so you can still add them in. I will link you to some more resources in your course guide because this does get a little bit more complex. But hopefully, that was a nice little crash course through many chat, so you can start to play around with the tool on the two week free trial and really start to kind of understand how it works, so you can get a bit comfy with it if your clients are able to utilize this for their social media strategy. 83. Other Useful Tools: And now, in addition to the tools that we already talked about, let's talk about a few more that are really going to help with your workflow as a social media manager. So I'm just going to start with the most obvious, which is that you should absolutely have either a Google Drive or Dropbox or somewhere where you can store things outside of just your laptop. Once you're working with client assets, you cannot afford to lose them just because your laptop has crashed or it's gotten stolen. So definitely make sure that you're constantly backing things up to Dropbox or Google Drive. Both of them have automatic backups so that can essentially make sure that your laptop is constantly being backed up to the Cloud, even as you're working on different projects. So they both have a free plan up to a certain size, but it's definitely worth paying for it to make sure that you have a peace of mind in knowing that your stuff is not going to get lost. Then I also really want to encourage you to download the grammar Chrome extension. Even the free extension is still already quite helpful, but then the paid extension is just that level above, especially if you are conducting business in English and English isn't your first language, or even if it is, honestly, we can all use a little bit of help when it comes to our grammar. And this is just going to help to make sure that your work is professional and you're able to write the best captions and design the best designs without any errors. Then I want to talk about raindrop dot O, which is a free bookmark manager. Now, bookmarks are definitely handy when it comes to working in Google Chrome, where you can bookmark anything that you see on the web, and you can add it either to a bookmarks bar or you can actually, organize things by different categories. And, you know, you can search through this in a limited fashion, but it can be a little bit hard to know where things are, especially if like me, you've been organizing things inside of your work Marks manager for years and years. And it's hard to know what's going on where. So, this can really help with that. Inside of rain drop, you can import your existing bookmarks, and it will create the exact same folders for you, and then you can view these by just a regular list, by cards, by Moodboard, by headline, I'm a much more visual person, so I prefer the cards or the mood boards, and then it'll tell you, what are the things that you want to actually include in each. You can of course, search for any details of the articles or the websites that you've saved in here, but you can also tag things. If you have anything saved, that is a document, it's going to automatically detect that, so you don't even necessarily need to search for it. It will tell you, these are the documents that you have saved, which is really, really nice and handy. Now, obviously have not tagged things properly, but you absolutely can include tags. Instead of using folders, anytime you save a website, you can actually just tag it, and that makes it nice and easy. And then, you know, you've got links, you've got articles. It does categorize things really nicely for you. I just really prefer it over the native bookmarks option within Google Chrome. It just comes as a neat little chrome extension that you click every time you want to add something to your raindrop. Then let's talk about pomadoro, which has an online version. It has apps, and it has an offline version as well. The pomadoro timer or the pomadoro technique is essentially just designed to break up your big day into smaller chunks of time so that you can stay on task during smaller chunks of time rather than trying to sort of be distracted and multitask for longer periods of time. It's something that definitely works. It's quite effective for a lot of people, but it's completely up to you whether you think it's something that's going to work for you. Personally, I have this, which is a physical version of it. It's called the time timer. I really like it. So you basically just put it to, let's say, in this case, 25 minutes. It's just going to count down, and then you can decide whether an alarm actually goes off at the end of this or not. It doesn't necessarily need to. You can set it on mute. But I love this because it's a physical analog device, so it doesn't require me to have an app. Or something on my desktop. That's another thing I need to track. I just look at this as a visual representation of the fact that, you know, I have 25 minutes to work on one task, then I take a five minute break, and I set it to another 25 minutes. And that's something that works really well for me. The next tool I want to talk about is called screen Castifi. It's just a cheaper alternative to Loom, if you're familiar with Loom already. And it's got a really good free plan as well. The reason I like it is because all of your videos automatically save to Google Drive, so you know you're never going to lose anything. And again, I think it's just a little bit more affordable. So once you're signed up to screen Castify, whether you're on the free or pro plan, you'll have this as a Google Chrome extension. You can click that and then decide whether you want to record just your browser tab, which then won't include any tabs that you have open. It will just be the one screen. Or your entire desktop, which will record basically anything that you do during that video, and then you can also go webcam only. If you're recording your desktop, you can also choose to embed your webcam, but that is completely optional, and then you can decide whether or not you want to have your microphone on or off. And then if you've got various microphones, you can also choose from that there. Then you have also other options in terms of countdowns and whether or not you want to show your drawing tools. So I'm going to leave that on just so I can show you what that looks like. I'm just going to turn my microphone off for the time being. Just going to record our screen here. So these are my drawing tools here. What that allows me to do is if I'm ever going through a website like this and I'm explaining something, I can grab the pen, for example, and I can say, Oh, you could just look at the monthly plan here or you just get started for free here. At any point, I can just clear the screen and go back to using just my mouse, explaining everything, and then, you know, continue doing that again and again. So that can be quite handy. And then once I'm done with filming my video, I can just the recording. And now because I've already linked this to my Google Drive, it has automatically already saved to Google Drive, but it's also giving me some options here. So I can edit the video, so I could trim a few things, I could crop it, I could do all those sorts of things, or I could just say, yeah, that looks pretty good, and then I can share that. In terms of my share settings, I can decide who's able to see this. In my use cases, I'm generally leave this on anyone with the link. And then I'm happy to track the analytics anonymously. It's mainly just so that I can make sure that if I'm sharing things, especially with like my video editors and strategists that they're able to view it. And then I can click this link for them to be able to see the video. On that video preview link, they'll also be able to leave some comments, and I could potentially also use this to ask questions, add captions, do all those sorts of things, and then also export the video if I wanted to save it to my computer instead of Coug Drive. That's screen Castif. It's super super handy, and the next to I want to talk about is scribe. You'll find scribe at scribhw.com. And again, I will link everything within your course guide, but this is such a handy tool that you're going to learn to love when you're working with clients. It's something you might utilize a lot at the beginning and maybe not as much moving on, but it will allow you to put together really seamless processes. So for example, I've got one for YouTube keyword, The way that scribe works is essentially, it allows you to do step by step processes of what's happening on your screen. So I was able to basically create a new scribe document and say, you know, navigate to YouTube. Click on this image. Click on YouTube Studio, click on Analytics. Click on Advance mode. Click on traffic source, click on YouTube search. And then expand, et cetera, et cetera. So it makes it really, really easy for my clients to basically just follow along with the process. And it's a little bit easier than me just doing a video walk through for them because it allows them to just get to the information they need. And the next time they need to reference it for whatever reason, it's there in document form rather than them having to actually look through a whole video. So the way that scribe works, let's just go ahead and capture a scribe from our browser here. We're going to go off of Business Manager. We're now capturing the browser, and anything you click on is going to be captured as a step. Let's say I want to show my clients how to add me into their Meta business suite. I'll basically say, you click here, you go to business settings, And then I would still, even though we're already on people, I would just click on it again, so it captures that as a step just in case. And then I would say, you want to invite people, and then you want to enter my e mail. Click on next. Click on Full Control. Click on this. Scroll down and go to full Control over everything, and that's all done. Now I can click my Chrome extension and say, stop capture. Now I could customize things like the title, and then obviously, this particular link is a little bit too long. I actually only needs to be up to there. That's just because it's already logged in as me. I would just tidy a few things up. It's going to go through everything step by step, and then I could go to share this and make sure it's set on anyone with the link can view. I can then copy this. Then anyone on the web who has this link, including my clients, will be able to basically see this as its own web page and follow the step by step instructions. That makes it really easy to basically onboard your clients and say, all right, the next steps are, you need to do this, this, this, this, and it's super seamless for them to work with you because of scribe. Lastly, in terms of your project management flow, it's completely up to you which tool you use. There's click up asana monday.com. Your clients might even have some that they already pay for that they just invite you to. But Asana is my preference because it has an awesome free plan. I've never really felt the need to upgrade for my own personal use. And it's just great. I mean, this is where it's my second brain. This is where all the information lives. Once you're logged into it, it can also act as a desktop tool, so you don't necessarily need to access it through the web, but you can You can then have all of your different projects over here. You can have various team members, so you can invite clients in. I would definitely keep things separate, so I would definitely create a separate team if you're going to be working with clients in here. And really, I would actually encourage them to set that up and invite you to it rather than you setting it up, so you're not the owner of anything. Then working with SNA, you can essentially start projects, and you can do this by using a template. You can start from scratch. So if you are doing a template, we could say, Okay, this is an editorial calendar. Sure, let's use that as a template, and we're just going to leave it as that. It can have a start and end date, or it really really doesn't have to. It can just be an open ended project. And then you'll have a bunch of different views up here. So you can view your tasks in a list in a board where you can kind of move things around in a timeline, which is an upgraded feature. So I don't have access to that, but same with your dashboards, you can see things by completion rates, and that's something that might be useful to your clients if they want to pay for that. Within just the list form, you can do things like assign this to team members. Put in due dates. Put in priorities, do all sorts of things, and then within your actual my task section, you're then going to see all of your different tasks based on your actual calendar here. So I'm just going to scroll all the way down and then see how we would go about just creating a task that's outside of projects here. I would just click in and say, Test task. And then we can click into it. I'm going to full screen this so we can have a look at what's over here. At the moment, this is assigned to me, but I could assign it to a totally different person. I can change the due date, I can add it to projects, and I can put in a description of what this is about, which is where I can, you know, add in bullet points, I could also tag people. So if I wanted to mention teammates, I could do that. I can add in subtasks, so this would be task one, task two, and each of these can have individual assignees, which means that, this could be a big task like editing a YouTube video, but then there would be a section of that that would be just making the thumbnail, just doing the script, and that would be assigned to a different person and a different do day as well. Can also within the comments, do things like embed videos, add in audio, add in charts, and all sorts of things, and also obviously to tag other team members and collaborators on tasks as well. So Asana is really clever, but it's not the perfect tool for absolutely everybody. And everyone has their own preferences. So definitely explore the different tools that are out there. As long as you have a way to keep yourself organized, that's really all that matters. So hopefully, some of those tools were helpful to you. And then the next section of the course, we're going to get into how you can measure your success. So I'll see you in the next lesson. 84. Measure Your Success: It's important for you to check your analytics. I don't want to say frequently, is it not too frequently because nothing changes in a 24 hour period, but a lot changes in a three month period. So periodically, let's say you want to periodically check what's working, what isn't working, so that you can adjust your strategy as you're going through it. It's also important for you to learn to I don't want to say lie to your clients, definitely a lie to your clients, but let's say spin the negatives. Because marketing is so much about trial and error, and not everything will always work. In fact, a lot of the time, a lot of things won't work. I'm sure the first person to create a social media account based around their dog didn't think, Yeah, this is a multi million dollar idea. But hey, you know what? It turns out it kind of was. So when it comes to measuring your success, you want to make sure you're highlighting the good stuff, minimizing the bad stuff, making improvements where you need to make improvements, and managing people's expectations about what's going to happen next. We're going to talk about how to present this information because a lot of your clients will want some sort of progress update as to what you've been up to, how is it tracking? How is it meeting our goals? How do we need to adjust our strategy moving forward and all of those sorts of details? Everyone will have a very different way of doing this. There are plenty of tools like metrical out there, which will pull these reports together for you. So I've just gone back through and linked my actual live accounts, so we can see how this would look. So in the summary stages here is where you'll have just a summary of each network. You could actually just take a screenshot of this for free. It's obviously got the metrical watermark in the back there, which is a paid feature to remove this, and you also have a bit of a paid feature in order to not just remove the watermark, but access data that's older than three months. But if you're reporting on a monthly basis or even a quarterly basis, then hopefully this shouldn't matter to too much. So you could just go through and take screenshots of this to include in a manual report, which is what we're going to do in a sec. But otherwise, on the paid feature, you can also just pull a report that is beautifully customized, branded for a custom period. You could create your own template, so you could do this for each client and Then you can also decide which sections matter to you and, you know, what you want to sort it by. What are the metrics that are the most important? So you could sort it by likes. You could sort it by impressions, you could sort it by saves or shares, depending on which metrics you think matter the most to your client. And then you could even set this up to go to you automatically, you get sent to your e mail every month. So I can actually generate this because I'm on the free plan here. But we can look at the demo report here just so you have an idea of what this might look like. Obviously, these are not my stats. But this is how it'll generally look where you can determine which analytics matter the most you, whether you're tracking particular keywords. It also depends on which accounts your customers have set up or your clients have set up, whether they have a Google business profile, whether they have particular social networks. So it will look totally different for every single client. But I would say paying for these types of tools is well worth it. And, of course, that's something that your clients would be paying for, not something you would have to pay for yourself. So hopefully, your clients will have a tool that does this for you. You're working with a smaller client and they only want to track a couple of things on maybe one social network, and they're happy to keep it quite minimal, then you may want to do this manually, or they may want you to do this manually. In which case, I'm going to show you how to do that in this lesson as well. So in your course guide, you're going to find this fully customizable Canva template that you can use for your purposes. This will tell you a little bit about how to use the template, and of course, you would then delete this page. You've got a bit of a summary page where you'll just talk about a bit of an overview of what you're reporting on and how to went. You have a bit of a success snapshot. So this is great for you to really highlight anything that has gone really well, so you kind of prep the client by starting on a high, and you can, of course, adjust these networks. So the moment I just have it set up for Facebook Instagram and Linked in, but you can adjust this to be as many networks as you need, and of course, then you would put in the right data. So at the moment, it's just tracking fake numbers, but this could be follower growth, it could be engagement growth, whatever suits your purposes. Then you have the actual data tracking where you talk about how much content you post to this past Have we gained followers, lost followers, what's our percentage of engagement, reach and any other notes that you want to add in. This could literally just be notes that you want to talk about for each network. If you think that column is not relevant, of course, you can add columns, delete columns as per usual. I always have explanations of what I would actually include on each page in case you get stuck, by the way. And then I just have, you know, pages like this one, where again, it's probably just like highlights pages where I would maybe pull out a bit of an impressive stat to put over the top of this image. And then I would just kind of go, Okay, these are the highlights for these particular networks. And then these are some other highlights. So like I've written here, sometimes the numbers don't fully capture the results of a campaign. S in, you may not have received kind of surface level metric success, but that doesn't mean that we weren't successful overall. So for example, you could talk about any giveaways that you ran, where there any impressive user generated content status that you can share. These don't necessarily directly impact business or sales numbers or just the kind of general metrics, but that doesn't necessarily mean that we're not succeeding on other fronts. Make sure to track those kind of things as well and add them in there. And then I've just got a bit of a section for you to go network by network. These are just examples of what I might do for in this case, Instagram. It would just be, what was our goal with this particular network, what were the KPIs we were measuring, or what was our general strategy? Is that relevant to you? It may not be. You may not want to include all of that. But then you could include a bit of a screenshot of just overall, how many accounts we reach, how many accounts engaged? What's the number of total followers that we're looking at, and then maybe pull out some impressive stats over here. Then I would actually include some screenshots of particular posts or reels and how they track. I've written here, if for example, saves and shares on Instagram were an important KPI for me, I could include a screenshot of a video like this one that performed really well on this metric. So it got a decent amount of saves and shares. It got under 10,000 views, which is a lot less than this real, which got over 30,000 views, but it had significantly less saves and shares. So this real does have more views overall and more comments, but fewer saves and shares. So it's important to know, as I said here, which metrics matter most based on the business goals, and I would pull content screenshots in here based on the content that I think performed the best on those metrics. I would potentially look at the account overall. How did it perform in the last month or the last quarter, based on the metrics that matter most. These are just my reels based on reach, but you could go by views or saves or shares or whatever, and then pull a bit of a screenshot here and then maybe put in some observations and go, k, this is how we're tracking with the content we're posting and what are we feeling about how that's all working for us. Then I've just done the same thing for YouTube, where I would just take screenshots of my YouTube analytics from the back end, and I've just written some observations in there for you to show you how I would go about analyzing this type of data to say, traffic from YouTube search is 63.8%. So organic search is continuously improving. So that would be really, really great because I could then say, Okay, these are the search terms that people are searching for on YouTube, and that means that we can continue to optimize our videos for search and start creating more videos around these types of content keywords. In likewise, I would also have some screenshots of maybe thumbnails or maybe even comments if there were any particular comments that I felt like were noteworthy to show and share with my client. But in this case, I sort of pulled a couple of screenshots of thumbnails to say, this one had a pretty good click through rate, but this one did better. So that's something that you could do with something like YouTube, and then you could also go through paid stats in a report like this one. But with paid stats, you would probably include screenshots of your Facebook ads manager because it's a lot more detailed and it's a lot more involved than what just Canva templates can allow for. If you're just maybe running one campaign, then this could actually suffice. Then I would pull through the most important overall summary statement about how our campaign is performed, and then I would go through some nitty greedy general stats here. I would also add in a bit of a conclusion as in what did we learn? What are the positives that have come out of this particular reporting period? And what can we do a little bit better looking into the future and moving forward with our strategy? Important thing to remember is that you don't necessarily need to go into every data point, especially for clients who are not super analytical. There are lots of people who aren't. Me, as a client, I don't want to know every little piece of information. I just want to know what I want to know, and the rest can kind of stay off of the report. But it's important that you are sort of talking about some things that didn't go well to provide a little bit of context to that. So, you know, if, for example, there was a campaign you launched in the month of December or any organic posts didn't do so well in the month of December, you can just tell them that and say, Look, historically, December is a pretty bad month for social media engagement because people are off on holidays. So that's a really nice way to bring your client back and just go, a, this didn't go well, but here's why, and they're really going to appreciate that as well. Then in terms of the actual presentation of the information, it's super dependent. I've had some clients who are happy for me to just update N Excel spreadsheet every month because they don't care about the visuals and the hoopla and all the fluff. They don't want it. They don't want me spending time on it. They're just happy to literally just get a couple of numbers every month. They may not even want a meeting to talk about it. They just want to see the overview. Then there's going to be some clients who are going to want all the bells and whistles, and they're going to want to see a beautiful report with pie charts and all the things. So it's important to just know what is it that your clients want from you, what do they expect, and how can you best cater to that? Now in the next lesson, we're going to continue looking at where you can actually look for analytics. So I'll see. 85. Analytics Deep Dive: So let's not talk about where to actually grab your analytics from. Of course, like we talked about in the previous lesson, if you are using a scheduling tool or any kind of social reporting tool, you'll be able to get all of your analytics from in there or most of your analytics anyways. If you're not using those tools, you can either use free tools like the Meta Business Suite, which will obviously only work for Facebook and Instagram or the individual platforms themselves. Within Meta Business Suite, you've got an Insights tab, and of course, you would have this individually on Facebook and Instagram specifically as well. So you could always just include screenshots from directly within those platforms, but you can also do it within this dashboard. You can then change your date range, go by a particular platform here, and then look at the things that matter most to you. Obviously, at this stage, I'm not actually posting on Facebook, so I don't even understand how I'm getting any results. It's probably from old videos, which is hilarious. I should actually Look into that cause I haven't posted on Facebook forever. But anyways, then you could go through and look at things like reach, visits, follows. You can also export these particular reports as PDS, S PNGs or just take screenshots and include them in your reports. In terms of benchmarking, as well, this can be quite handy, where you can look at other businesses to watch. So at the moment, the only real active business that I have in here is Amy Porterfield, but it'll allow me to sort of see, you know, what's happening with this particular business, how much content are they publishing? What's the change in page likes. Then I could go to their actual page or profile and look into it a little bit deeper. And then I can also look at my content specifically. So if there are particular content types that I want to look at, I would just narrow this down by post, probably not hugely worried about what my stories are doing. And then we can have a look at how many minutes we're watched of this particular real. And, what's the average minutes watch, how many impressions did it get, how many plays, reactions, et cetera, et cetera. So you can look at this, and then, of course, at any point, you can export this as well. So that makes it nice and easy for you to pull into maybe a customized report like we talked about in the previous lesson. And in terms of each individual platform like Pinterest here, they will all have their own analytics. So the same is true for Linked in and for X, and TikTok, and every single platform will have its own version of this, where you can have a look at whatever date range you want. Again, not posting on interest a whole lot. So all my metrics are just going straight down, but that's okay. Oh, thank goodness. I'm not my own client. But this is where I could pull through, you know, what's my top performing content? How many impressions am I getting? And then yeah, just look at the metrics that sort of matter most. I could also export straight from here. But I would likely just look at Maybe just creating some screenshots of my own, so I could go by engagements, pin clicks, outbound clicks. That's probably what would matter the most to me. I could just take some screenshots of this and pull this into my own report platform by platform. But again, it's quite likely that you're going to be using a scheduling tool like metrical, which will do all of this for you on all the different platforms. But just so you know that you can go by individual platforms if you wish. But the main thing I really want to focus on is Google Analytics because You could create the most amazing viral content on social media. But unless it's actually converting into leads and sales for your clients on their website, it's not all that worthwhile. You could have all these views and impressions and shares and saves. But unless it's actually having an impact on your client's business, it's not great. So you won't be responsible for setting up Google Analytics. It'll be a digital marketer or a digital marketing strategist that does that, or they might actually have an analytics person who does that. But one thing that you do need to keep an eye on and should be across is how to create You are a links that allow things to track correctly within analytics. It's something we've talked about briefly throughout a few lessons in this course, but we've never actually looked at it from this end. So I wanted to take you through Google Analytics so you can have a look at how it actually all works. So Google Analytics, much like every other platform that we've looked at, would have a little piece of code that goes in your client's website to track how many users are on the website, how are they tracking through the different as of their website? How are they signing up? How are they purchasing things? And that would all report back into analytics. So we're looking at my website here, which has just gone live a little over two months ago, so there's not a whole lot of interaction going on it, but this is the same way that you would do it for any website. So you'd go into reports and under acquisition, you've got traffic acquisition, and this is where you can start to see how are people actually getting through to your client's website? So where are they coming from? This area, I would go by session source and medium, and it would then tell me that 157 of my users have come from organic Google searches. And then I've got people coming in from YouTube and Pinterest and Facebook and my Lincoln buyer, which is on Instagram and a few other sources. Now, you've got this little direct nu section, which is where everything that doesn't really have a category will fall under. And that's a shame because it can be quite a large percentage of your users that you're not really tracking unless you're using UTM parameters. UTM parameters might look like this sometimes, where the actual link that you're going to on someone's website, we'll have a string of all of these characters attached to it, which are pieces of code that will basically report back to Google Analytics to say, this person came in this case, an e mail. It was a newsletter, and the campaign was end of financial year. This helps us to know that if somebody lends on our website and purchases something or signs up to our e mail list and they use this link. We know that they came from an e mail that was a newsletter about the end of financial year offers. I have gone to this link so I can show you what that actually looks like on the Google Analytics side when somebody clicks on that. Of course, they wouldn't see anything different from just my regular website, other than the fact that in the URL, it would have those UTM parameters, but it doesn't change which website page they land on. It just allows me to track them better. In the Session source and medium, I would actually just have this, I'll leave it at Session source and Medium, but I'm going to add the plus here and add in campaign session campaign here. So that we can see what the session campaign is. Now obviously, these are very generic because they don't have appropriate UTM parameters. So at the moment, it's only showing rows one to ten of 24. But in this case, I know it's got the word e mail in it, so I can actually just go through and find it by typing it in. So the session source and medium is newsletter and e mail, and the campaign is end of financial year. So it's just me as a user, but I did click on this link three times. And then it's going to show me some other data, including some total revenue numbers if I was then going to go through and actually purchase something on my website from this link. So that makes it really nice and easy for people to track exactly what's happening from newsletters. But of course, this would also be the same thing for social media. Links and the same is true for any paid ad campaigns. You'll remember when we were looking at Facebook ads and Instagram ads that it had the option for you to add some UTM parameters, which will allow you to not just say, they've come from a Facebook ad, and this was a campaign, but you can actually see exactly which variation of your ad they've come from because you can track this so specifically. Some things that you can track with your UTM parameters would be things like your medium, which would be organic. It would be paid, it would be social, video, e mail, affiliate, what have you. The source would just be where are they actually coming from, whether that's a website, it's a newsletter, it's Instagram. The campaign would be likely something like end of financial year or Christmas or Black Friday or something like that. The term and the content are not really something that you'll see people utilize a whole lot. This is where you can get really specific with it, especially when it comes to content because you can get really specific with what you're actually testing. For example, you could have the UTM parameters be exactly the same. For two of your Facebook ads, but the actual UTM for content could be whatever you're testing. For example, if in one of them, you're testing a red background on your image, and in one of them, you're testing a blue background on your image, then you could put this in the URL. Within Google Analytics, you can then say, Oh, okay, The people came from the red background ad actually purchased, but only one person who came from the blue background ad purchased. Of course, you can also see this within your Facebook ads manager. But in Google Analytics, you can also see stats, not just from your Facebook ads, but also from all your organic content, in your e mails, and everything else all in one place. So it makes it really nice for you to actually look at everything holistically and see where your efforts are having the most impact on your overall business goals. You can easily build out your own UTM links by using Google's own native URL builder here. You just need whichever website URL you're going to want people to go to. This is just going to my home page, but of course, it could go to a particular blood post or a particular landing page, just keeping it simple for the time being. You've got the option for a campaign ID, but it's not a requirement. You'll see anything with an asterisk is a required field. Anything that doesn't have one is optional. Our campaign source, in this case, would be newsletter, And our campaign medium is e mail. Instead of newsletter, this could also be a workflow, it could be an automation. It could be something else. So we don't just have newsletters and e mails. That's important to remember. And then we could continue going through this depending on what's relevant to us. So for example, for us, we want this to be an end of financial year. But in this case, let's just leave the rest as is. But like we said, you know, we could identify different ads if we were running ads for this. But either way at this stage, we've got our UTM link here, so we could just go ahead and copy that. But if we also wanted to use this in maybe our captions on something like Linked in and Facebook, we could also use Bite to shorten this link. You do have to sign in with a BIL account and then authorize Google Analytics to be able to use it. Once you do that, this will then give you the option to shorten U URLs. We don't necessarily need to pay for BTL in order for this to work. All this means is that whenever you're using this shortened URL, it's going to go to that long link with the UTM parameters in place, so then Google Analytics will be able to track it accordingly. If you ever get stuck and don't quite remember what's happening with each of these, then you've got some additional resources here, and I've also added in some additional resources to this resource in your course guide as well. So I know this can be confusing, but I promise the more you use UTM parameters in your links, the easier it's going to become. So that's a bit of a low down on your analytics, and in the next lesson, we're going to talk about what happens once you actually get your analytics, as in what do you do? How do you decide how to move forward? More on that in the next lesson, and I'll see there. 86. Make Adjustments: So it'd be really easy to just say, we're all done at this point, but analyzing the success of your efforts is actually just one piece of the puzzle. The next step is to actually use that analysis to make improvements in the future. So let's say you thought educational or informational post would do really well for your client. But you actually found from your data analysis that video performed really well. But let's say the client doesn't have the budget for video. Maybe you posted lag one video all month, and the rest were static graphics because that's all that the client has budget for. So because you can analyze the data and realize where your efforts are actually having the most impact, you can then make a suggestion to the client and say, This is our budget. Maybe we actually post less frequently and create less content, but have it be video content because that's what's performing really well for us. That way, we're still sticking within the budget, but we're posting less frequently, but with more higher impact content. In this adjustment period, you're basically looking at the stats and thinking, what should we stop doing? What should we start doing? What should we maintain or keep doing? What can we amplify and allocate more resources to it because it's really working for us. A bit of a bonus one is also, is everyone in the team happy with what they're doing and how they're doing it? So this is more relevant for people with bigger teams, but just because someone was hired to take over a specific area of the strategy or the team doesn't mean that this is where they're going to thrive once they're actually going to be responsible for executing it. So it's important for people to see past just job titles and job descriptions and the list of duties that are supposed to come along with that job title and actually recognize when someone could potentially really thrive if they were just given a challenge in a different area. And you can involve your clients in these conversations depending on the nature of your working relationship. Will be some clients who want nothing to do with it. They may not even understand social media. They don't really care. They don't want to be involved in the social media strategy. They just want you to tell them what's going to happen and why. But there will be some clients who perhaps this is something they actually manage themselves until the point that they hired you. This is very common. They might want to get involved. They might want to brainstorm along with you and go, Okay, let's look at it. Once a quarter, let's sit down for an hour. Look at what's happened in the last quarter and make a plan for moving forward. Honestly, these are kind of my favorite clients because you can get so much done when you just put your heads together and you can actually have a little bit of a creative brainstorm. I love it. Again, some social media managers hate that client input. So it does depend on what the client wants, but just so you know, there is the possibility and the scope for you to involve them. And they might actually kind of feel a sense of accomplishment when they're a bit more involved with the social media strategy. So it can really benefit that as well. But either way, it's so dependent on each individual client. And now, in the next section of the course, we're going to talk about some bigger picture stuff as what's happening in the business outside of just the things that you're directly responsible for. But this is the knowledge that's going to make you an even better and greater, more unstoppable social media superstar. So I'll see you in the next lesson. 87. Business Fundamentals: So very clearly, marketing can be an incredible way to grow a business, but if the business itself is fundamentally flawed, then all the marketing in the world is not going to fix that. And if you don't believe me, watch the Fire Festival doc on Netflix to see an amazing example of exactly what happens when you have incredible marketing that brings thousands and thousands of people to a business that isn't prepared or functioning. I want to encourage you to continue upskilling yourself in areas like sales and entrepreneurship and business because otherwise, you might become an incredible marketer. But if you don't truly understand what it takes to run a successful business, even though it's not your job to fix your client's business, but knowing what it takes to run it means that if you're just focusing on marketing, you're going to just bring thousands and thousands of people through your marketing efforts to a potentially completely disappointing experience, and nothing's really going to work the way it should. Afterwards within a company where the marketing team and the sales team were so disconnected, that the things that the marketing team were advertising was not actually even remotely related to what the sales team was able to offer, which was incredibly frustrating for both parties. And this is not just a problem of sales and marketing, obviously, in bigger companies, this kind of disconnect between departments can happen, especially with bigger teams. But it can just be down to the fact that your client's website is broken, or they don't have any sort of customer service in place. So you bring in all these amazing customers, but they have no plan for actually retaining those customers, so they're losing out on repeat business because there's no plan for this. At the beginning, just focus on doing what you know and what you feel comfortable with and just improving that 1% with each task and each day, like we talked about at the beginning of the course. Don't overwhelm yourself by trying to be a master of everything because it's just too much. But over time, as you get a bit more confident with your work, t to your clients about other areas of the business. Let them know that you would maybe like to just make sure that you are having the most impact with the time that you're spending on their business currently. The best way to do that is for you to understand as much as possible about the ins and outs of the entire business, not just the area that you're responsible for. Be silly to say no to that, and if there are any red flags, you'll see them very quickly most of the time. My first week with a particular client, I noticed that they had spent over $100,000 on Google Ads without any measurable results. 25,000 of that was actually going to a page that didn't actually even exist. Now, it may not always be as extreme or as obvious as that, but it will give you a good idea of where you might be able to offer suggestions for improvement to really help your marketing campaigns do better in terms of delivering your clients the kind of results that they're really. Really, for so many reasons, it really cannot hurt you to upscale yourself on areas of business and entrepreneurship, especially if you are planning on freelancing as a social media marketer because then you are effectively a business owner. So even though you may not think of yourself as a business owner, it's something that's really important. So I've linked you to some really great resources in your course guide. There are awesome podcasts out there, books you can read so much great stuff. But for now in the next few lessons, I actually want to focus on not just business, but digital marketing as a whole ecosystem. So you can understand where social media actually fits into the greater picture. Starting with where Google actually fits into all of this in the next lesson, so I'll see there. 88. SEO & SEM Basics: Going to get a touch technical here with this lesson, but I just wanted to cover the basics here, even though you may not be responsible for these areas as a social media marketer and you likely won't be. But there may be areas here that you might be able to help advise your client on or at least understand if your clients are talking to you about these areas of their business. So let's talk about search engine optimization and search engine marketing. SEO is about helping search engines understand your content and helping users find your site and make a decision about whether they should visit your site through a search engine. Now in terms of keywords, ranking at the very top of the initial search result of Google for a term like Facebook is nearly impossible. But Facebook marketing strategies for dog walkers, the chance there is much higher because the competition is pretty much non existent, and there is so much more that goes into why Google chooses to show one website over another from how fast the website loads to how many other websites have linked to your website, and I don't want to get into the nitty gritty of it here, but the reason I wanted to cover because there are small ways which you can help your client with their SEO strategies. And that's especially true for local service based clients. So you could advise them to think about what their clients are likely putting into Google to find services like theirs. And think about including these keywords on their website and on their social media as well, of course. So you do not have to go as far as this tire restaurant that has literally rebranded for this purpose. But for example, if I was looking for a photographer to take new website photos, I would Google personal brand photographer in Brisbane. And you'll notice that the top pages here are all well tailored to this keyword. But because I live in Brisbane and I operate in this space, I know for a fact, there are a lot of other brand photographers that are excellent that just haven't really thought as far as optimizing for this particular keyword, which could make or break someone's experience and decision to actually choose one photographer over another if they can't find them. I could also then go into the map section to see reviews of these various services, which then brings me to my next point. Which is all about the Google business profile, which is essentially just what it's called when someone has a business listing on Google. And this is something you absolutely can help your clients with if it's relevant to them. If they're an E commerce business, for example, then no, they probably wouldn't have one of these, but if they're service based business, they absolutely should have one of these. I've provided some resources in your course guide about how to set this up if your clients don't have it set up already. But this can be a huge tool for you as a social media marketer because you can then use the reviews that your clients get on these listings and repurpose them for marketing materials. And finally, let's also talk about paid Google Ads. Search engine marketing or SCM is the practice of using paid ads to appear on the search engine results pages. You might hear these being referred to as CRPs, and they're triggered by the keywords that people are putting into Google or other search engines. They'll appear either at the very top or the very bottom of the organic results, so they kind of sandwich them in, and they're also known sometimes as PPC or pay per click ads because you only pay for these ads when someone actually clicks on the ad. So you're not paying to show them to people, you're paying for the clicks. Like I said, you wouldn't be responsible for these as a social media manager, but it can be a good idea to know that these exist and roughly how they work because sometimes it's also our job to maybe push back and educate our clients a little bit. So if for example, I had a client who ran a business insurance company say to me that they want to advertise on Instagram, I might actually go to them and say, absolutely, yes, we can do that, but I think it might also be interesting for us to explore the world of Google Ads because you can then get in front of people who are actively searching for your particular solution to their problem. And I know that you might be thinking that in this way, you're talking yourself out of a job, because you wouldn't be responsible for managing someone's Google Ads. But this is how you actually get more work with your clients because you have their best interests at heart, and you develop that trust and you're making sure that they'll be able to get results with the strategy, which means then their business makes more money, which means they can then reinvest more into other social media efforts that you really can help them with that you know are going to get the results. So you will be creating more work for yourself in the long run. Hopefully, knowing some of this more advanced terminology will help you just feel more confident in knowing how that actually applies to your clients if you ever hear these terms being thrown around. And now in the next lesson, we're going to continue talking about something that is sort of adjacent to our work as social media managers, which is e mail marketing. So I'll see. 89. Email Marketing Basics: Email Marketing is kind of the step sister of social media, and we're not quite sure how she became such a large part of our world. And she's not really part of the family, but no matter how much we try to fight it, she's here to say, and she kind of makes the family whole. So that's a weird analogy, but you get the point. E mail marketing is a very important part of social media because this is where a lot of sales happens. This is where a lot of the conversions happen for our social media efforts. So if you can be a part or across at least a part of the e mail marketing space, it can really benefit you as a social media marketer because you're going to stand out from the other social media marketers that do not offer this as a service. So we're just going to cover a couple of things in this lesson that would be key for you to really know about this. Now, I know this can be super intimidating. I think I was about two weeks into working for one of my first clients when she put me in charge of sending her e mail newsletter. And I sent an e mail with the wrong attachment to 60,000 people. Now, was there anything scandalous, and we fixed it by just sort of sending a follow up e mail with one of those like Oops, here's the right link, sort of e mails, and it was fine. But it was still a very frightening moment. So I know exactly how intimidating this can be. It was the first time I had sent any kind of e mail. I had did no practice on any of my own sort of blank accounts at all. And yeah, I still remember how stressed out I was. But the point is that for the large part, your clients are going to be the ones pressing send. They're going to be the ones doing the final checks. Your job might just be to sort of put it together. And potentially your job might also be to set up automated e mails if you're running Facebook ads, for example, or you're adding any kind of links into your bio on platforms like Instagram where people can download free resources. You might be the person who's going to be in charge of putting together an e mail that people get with that free resource. We're not going to get too far into e mail marketing here because that is not what this course is about. But I just wanted you to know what options are out there that you can especially maybe play around with if you just want to get familiar with what an e mail marketing platform looks like. Mail trip is a great option, both for freelancers and clients because they have quite affordable pricing where they actually have a free plan. It is quite limited in terms of what you're able to do, but it's enough for you to just jump in, get to know the interface, see what forms and landing pages they have, see how you can create some e mails, and what it all looks like because once you get really familiar with one e mail marketing platform. The rest of them are much easier and Mailchimp is probably the most user friendly platform that I've seen. It is a little bit more difficult to customize, which is why most clients don't stay on Mailchimp for very long and they move on to more sophisticated elaborate rules, but it's a great place for you to just go in and play around with a few things. And we're not going to be going into the back end of mail trim at this stage. We're going to be going into a different tool. But before we do that, I did just want to bring your attention to Clavio as well because some of your E commerce clients, especially, might be using Clavio, because it is incredibly sophisticated in terms of the triggers based on behaviors where if someone has added something to cart, but they haven't quite checked out, it can send them an SMS, it can send them an e mail. It can really track every single behavior somebody has taken on your website and categorize them accordingly. It's also incredibly sophisticated when it comes to analytics and data, but it can be a little bit overwhelming. So if your clients are using Clavio, I would really suggest looking to YouTube and upskilling yourself before you start working inside the software. But like I said, that's very specific to largely e commerce clients and also larger businesses. For smaller businesses, I personally really like flow desk because its pricing is really competitive in the sense that it doesn't cost you more for additional subscribers. You pay the same amount every month, no matter if you have 100 subscribers or 100,000 subscribers, which is very unique because most softwares, like Mail chim, Clavio, and others, will absolutely blow out in price the more subscribers you have on your e mail list. And then on the back end of flow desk, it looks a little bit like this. So I just thought we would navigate our way around so we can get to know some of the terminology, and also just keeping in mind that the terminology will be quite different depending on which software you're using, but the general structure will be the same. So you've got your e mails or your newsletters, which are sort of one off e mails that you can send out. And you might have different templates for this that you just send out every single time and you just sort of update it based on the content of that particular newsletter. Then you have your forms, which will act as the initial point where somebody puts in their name and e mail, and then a work flow in this case, or it could be called an automation and different software, will then trigger a sequence of events. These could either be stand alone pages like this one, which look like this, where if somebody clicks on that link, they go straight to this beautiful page and have my gift that I just made inside of camera that show them what they're signing up for. They'll put in their name and e mail, and then once they click, get it, it will go to a thank you page, and it will trigger a sequence of events. Or it can also be an embedded form like this one, which will live on a website like it does on my home page here, and the same thing will happen as soon as somebody then puts in their name and e mail, it will trigger a sequence of events. These forms are attached to particular audience segments. Within my audience, I've got what I called segments, which is essentially just me saying, if somebody becomes a member of this particular test audience. Let's say, let's just call it a test audience. If they become a member of this test audience, then trigger this particular workflow. Then the work flows look a little bit like this. For this particular workflow, I have set up this landing page, and I have said to this landing page, when somebody puts in their name and e mail, add them to this particular segment, which is the Cava template online free course, something, something. When they put in their name and e mail, they'll be added to that particular audience segment, which doesn't actually do anything, it just holds their e mail address, and it serves the purpose of then going through and taking the rest of these steps. Once they enter that particular segment of my audience, it sends them this particular e mail, And once it sends them that e mail, it also adds them to these segments, which are just interest segments for my own personal use. So I know if somebody is interested in this particular template, they're also interested in creating online courses, and they're interested in AVA, because that is what this opt in is all about. These don't actually trigger any workflows or automations on my end. I just have them so that if in the future I release a course about va or a course about creating online courses, I can say, send that e mail to everyone who has an interest in this topic. So that just adds a little tag to their e mail address to let me know that they're interested in that. Then it goes on to ask whether they're also in the segment completed welcome, which means that they've received all of my welcome e mails in the past, because maybe they've downloaded something else from me in the past, which means it has triggered my welcome sequence. I don't necessarily need it to send them my welcome e mails again. If they have received those in the past, thing else will happen. If they haven't received my welcome e mails in the past, it's going to start the welcome workflow, and then that's pretty much it. And then that welcome workflow is a separate workflow, where they'll receive at number of e mails that are introducing that person to my branch. So that's a little bit complicated perhaps, but it's just a couple of steps. It's basically saying, they've given me their e mail, which means there added to an audience, which then triggers a particular e mail where they're able to download that template. And then it just does a few things on the back end to trigger a few different additional things. This type of thing can get really, really complicated in some softwares, where it's not as simple as just a couple of steps. They're just these giant spider webs in terms of the workflows, and it can be really overwhelming, but you would not be responsible for this as a social media marketer. This is more on the digital marketing front. I just wanted you to know that it's not super overwhelming. Feel overwhelming when you know there's all these different steps within the e mail marketing softwares. But generally, your clients will already have something set up, and your job is not necessarily going to be to do any of this. Your job might really be just to send out really simple e mails. Your clients might give you all the texts and the images, and it'll just be your job to sort of format it for them. And every software will have some sort of templates, whether your clients are already using their templates, or you might be able to use the ones that a software like Flow desk will have. So for example, let's just have a look at what a template looks like here. So it'll show me what it looks like on desktop, and this is what it looks like on mobile. And then I would just go through to customize that. I could delete anything that's not relevant. I could update it with my own brand colors. I will add it in all of my own images. And then, of course, there's always test e mails. So it's not like, you know, anything you do here is just going to go out into the universe. You will always have the option to send a test. So you will know exactly what it looks like in your inbox. You can check it on mobile, you'll check it on desktop, and make sure everything looks good before you go through to the next steps where you choose an audience and actually schedule your e mails or send them. If you're feeling a little bit stuck on what to actually create for your client's e mail because maybe they're giving you a bit of a plank slate, they're not giving you all the content, then I would head to mill.com, which has e mails from 114,000 brands that you can look through for inspiration. Of course, look through the e mails that you're actually getting to your inbox, sign up for your competitors, e mails, do all of that, but this can also be an additional nice thing to go through so you can see People are styling their e mails. What are they putting in, even just in terms of their footers? What does it all look like? So you can gather a little bit of inspiration. And of course, you can search for all the brands. Hopefully you'll find some competitor brands in there, but mil.com is an absolute gold mine for that. So hopefully you found that helpful. And in the next lesson, we're going to continue talking about things in terms of your digital marketing funnels. So I'll see there. 90. Digital Marketing Funnels: So the more you can understand about what's happening in the digital marketing space for the business as a whole, or maybe there's actually nothing happening outside of what is going on in the social media space, which is a problem in itself, and your clients might actually really appreciate your knowledge to say, Okay, cool, you actually hired me to create a weekly Instagram post, but you don't have an e mail list. Would you like one? Maybe that's something that could be beneficial to your business. And you start to go down this rabbit hole of essentially creating more work for yourself with each particular client. Because I've seen a lot of freelancers specifically say, Oh, I'm not really interested in working with that client. All they really want to pay me for is, you know, 10 hours a week for X Y and Z. That doesn't necessarily mean that they wouldn't be willing to give you more work. It just might mean that they think that all they need is 10 hours a week. And you are able to hopefully come into their business and look at it holistically and go, actually, you also need this and this and this. And it may not be your job to execute on those areas. They may need to outsource it to someone else depending on not just your capabilities, but also your interests. You might have no interest in taking over the things that you know they might need. But being able to assess it like this is where you come in as an expert and add a lot of value to the business. It's a bit deceptive because marketing funnels actually look like giant spider webs a lot of the time, not so much funnels, but the reason they're called funnels is because they have three main sections that go from the largest number of people who will see the initial top of funnel content as it's called, which will be your social media post, blog posts, and videos through to less people seeing the kind of content that is designed to develop a relationship with the business through e mails and DMs, and SMS marketing that's a little bit more intimate all the way through to someone actually becoming a customer and purchasing from the business. So for every, let's say 1,000 people who see your Instagram Reels or your TikToks, maybe one of those people will ever become a customer, which is why we call them funnels because people are sort of funneling through the different stages of that customer relationship with you. Let's talk about what a digital marketing funnel might look like for Meg's Realty, starting with our Investor Alana Avatar here. So I would likely start by creating some longer YouTube videos for this avatar, which would be about investment strategies in Brisbane, and then the scripts for these videos would then be turned into blog posts. So let's just draw a little pencil icon, which looks Fantastic. And then, in addition to the blog post, I would probably just repurpose these long form videos into short form videos and educational carousels. So I would probably go with some short form video content and some carousels on Linked in. So let me do my best to do the Linked in logo. You know what, that's not bad, actually. I am pretty chaff with that. So that would be for Linked in. And then I would also probably experiment a little bit with some Instagram reels. Okay, so that's my best Instagram icon there. But again, my main focus would be my long form YouTube videos here, and then everything else would sort of be repurpose versions of that. But in addition to the video content, I would definitely want to make sure I have a tailored networking strategy on Linked in because this type of customer avatar would definitely be spending their time on the platform. On these platforms, I would create really great educational content and then lead people into the thing that actually gets me their e mail address, which would be a 20 minute free training about the five ways to guarantee a profit with your investment property, which would then talk about the successes I've had with past clients and how much money they made, et cetera, et cetera And then that would then encourage them to book in a free call. Okay, so that's my best drawing of a calendar. I don't know what that is like a cheese grader. But anyways, it would have a little calendar for them to book in a free call with me, where I would then sell them onto my paid services, which would be priced at, let's say, 20 k, in this case, or more, also depending on their house purchase budget. Some agents would take a percentage of the sale, but as Mags reality, I would do this for a flat fee. Okay, so at this stage, let me just link a few things up here. So this blog post, YouTube video, Linking content and Instagram content are all going to get people to the free training, which is then going to get people to book in a free call with me. But of course, not everyone that watches the free training is going to book that free call. There will definitely be some people who need a little bit of extra convincing, which is where we would then have a series of e mails reminding them to book that call. So I would say, for anyone who has gone to this free training, but has not actually gone to book the call with me, I would go through and send them an e mail, which would just be a reminder to book a free call. And then hopefully they do that. So that's a, Yes, they've done it. But then if they haven't, I could continue going on and sending them another e mail. And that one could be a reminder, but it could also just be another value add. So that's where I could just say, you know, some additional investment strategies. So it could just be me showing my expertise. So I'm not actually continuously trying to get them to book the free call. It could just be here some tips or here are some successes we've had or some testimonials. And then also hopefully getting them to eventually book that free call. Anyways, Now, there's also a potential that somebody has come to the calendar page, but hasn't actually booked a call. So they did technically go from the free training to the calendar page, but didn't actually make it through to the next step, which the next step, if someone was to book a call, would be a page. So if someone made it to the calendar page but didn't actually make it to the Thank you page. So they kind of got stuck somewhere along here. I could also just run some retargeting ads for them. So let's say I choose to run some paid Instagram retargeting ads to get them to book that free call. That's an optional step. Of course, we don't necessarily need to run ads, but that would eventually encourage them to just go straight back and book that call. Okay, so things are starting to get messy here. But essentially, all I'm doing is just moving people from one stage of the funnel to the next stage. And then anyone who has a little bit of trouble moving through to that next stage. I'm using any marketing strategies that I have up my sleeve to try and gently nudge them in the right direction. And for some businesses, of course, this process might be much longer or even shorter and involve a lot more or a lot less steps. Every funnel looks totally different depending on the business. And even for me, this would look totally different if I was doing this for a different customer avatar. If I was doing this for my first time home buyer Becky, I probably wouldn't be looking at Linked in as a strategy, so I would remove that from the initial stages of my funnel. The opt in I would be using, of course, wouldn't be about ways to guarantee profit with an investment strategy. And the reminder e mails also wouldn't have additional details about that. So there would be some changes that I would have to make to make it worthwhile to Becky. So instead of Linked in, Becky might be someone I would target through TikTok instead. And I may actually not really do the blog post thing with her. Maybe the blog post would be something I would really only focus on with my investor Alana Avatars. But I could do YouTube videos if it's something that I thought was appropriate for this avatar. And then my training would likely be so much more about something like five things you have to do before buying your first home. And then that second reminder e mail would be about first time home buyer tips. But again, it would then go to my calendar and go through to booking a free call. In this case, potentially, my fee would be less, but in either case, that second half of the funnel would look the same. It's just those initial stages that might be really targeted to this particular avatar. I know looking at it like that can seem really overwhelming, but just remember that all you're really doing is moving people through the three main stages of your funnel. You're taking people from not knowing anything at all about your business, which means there are what we would call a cold audience who knows nothing about you, so you're just creating lots of engaging content, entertainment, value. You're just trying to get them to know you a little bit, understand what you do, how you solve their problems. So lots and lots of content and a much larger audience at that stage, then you're taking them through to becoming a warm audience. So a smaller percentage of your cold audience here will then move down the fun on. To becoming a warm audience, where they then want to give you their e mail address and they want to slide into your DMs for the lack of a better word. And they want to continue those conversations and really get to know your business to decide whether it's the right fit for them. And then an even smaller percentage of your warm audience will become a hot audience, which is where they actually come through and decide, will I purchase from this business? Is it the right fit for me? Does, do I trust this business? Essentially, that's where you will have the smallest number of your audience that will actually become customers. And then, you know, in the future, hopefully, also repeat business and repeat customers. So that's the dream, you know, and that's not relevant for every single business, especially for sort of Mags realty, you know, people aren't purchasing multiple homes, even investors. It might take years and years for people to become repeat customers. But instead of becoming repeat customers, it could also be that they just give us excellent word of mouth marketing because they're advocates of the business, they had such a great experience. So that's sort of an additional step of the funnel where we would want people to continue growing our business in that sense. But that's all it is. It's really just sort of, one, two, three steps where you're creating marketing messages at each stage of this funnel to move people along and bring them closer to the end goal, which is the sale of the business. The more you can understand about your client's business as a whole, the better you'll be able to do your job. But not only that, this will actually help you to get more work with every client because they might think they only need help with their weekly Instagram post. But actually, if they only have 100 subscribers on their e mail list, then they also probably need help in creating some offer to get people onto that e mail list, and suddenly you start to see how you become an invaluable asset to any business because you're proactively thinking about how everything in their business works together, not just the bits that you're responsible for. It's on the business side, but also on a personal front, there are so many niche specific jobs in the digital marketing space that you won't really know about until you involve yourself in those areas of your client's business or practice on your own. You might actually realize that you want to be a pinterest expert. You only want to be a pinterest marketer. You have no interest in the other platforms, you have no interest in paid ands. You just want to come up with pinterest specific strategies for businesses and execute on them. Or you might become a video specialist, or you might become an ad specialist. You just don't know whether you actually prefer to be a sort of social media manager all rounder, or you want to become a specialist in any of these areas until you actually get a little bit involved. So there's a lot of benefit in understanding how it all works. 91. Make Social Media Better: So as we're now nearing the end of the course, I also just wanted to take a little bit of time to talk about how to make social media a better place for you to be, but also to make it a better place for your audiences that you're creating content for. Because like Zig Ziegler famously said, you can have everything in life you want if you will just help other people get what they want. So let's start with you because mental health might just be your biggest asset in business. When your mental health is stable and healthy, that's when you can be really creative and attentive and focused and do deep work. And when it's not quite where it should be, that's when things can start to fall apart very, very quickly, especially when you're working in such a creative field as we are. So You know, we all have a bit of a different baseline and a different starting point when it comes to our mental health, and there are definitely things that we can and cannot control. But one thing I will say that I am certain about, which is that as soon as you start working with social media, for business, not just for personal use, your relationship with social media has to change. So first of all, try to keep business and personal separate. I've made it very clear with every client that we will not be Facebook friends and I will not be working outside of the hours we agree on at the beginning. Then you want to unfollow toxic accounts. This, of course, includes negative accounts, but it just includes anyone who doesn't make you feel good in your own skin. It's of course good to follow accounts for inspiration within your industry, but I try to keep those separate from my main account and only look at them when I'm in research mode if I feel like it's going to give me a little bit of imposture syndrome. Then you want to engage with content that you want to see more of. Algorithms are pretty freaking smart, but you have to help them out a little bit. If you see a post that made you happy or added value to your life in any way, like it, comment on it, subscribe, ask a question, save the post. That is the best way you can make sure that you get to see more content like it in the future. Then you want to manage your notifications. There is no such thing as a social media emergency. The wrong post goes out, the caption has a non clickable link or the image is a bit blurry. All of these things are just things that will inevitably happen to every single one of us, and none of these classify as an emergency. I want you to get the but what if this and this and this, talk out of your head and turn off your social media notifications outside of working hours, if it's something that you think is going to affect you negatively. Also need to accept that you will never be 100% on top of everything. There will always be a new tool or new feature or a new platform that you haven't heard of or don't know anything about and that is just the reality of working in an industry that doesn't sit still. Finally, I want to encourage you to set dedicated times for learning and research. For me, Fridays are my write off days, and it's the one day a week where I can watch hours of CAT videos and take new classes or spend a full day on take talk and call it research without the guilt. Doing this has allowed me to be so much more focused during the rest of the week because anytime I find something that has the potential to completely derail my focus and productivity. Save it as a Friday task. Now you may not be able to commit a full day to this, but it might just be a couple of hours a week or a month to let your brain wander and go into full research mode and so you can be incredibly productive in the time that you have outside of that. Now let's talk about how to make social media a better place to be for the people who are going to be viewing your content. Starting with accessibility, one in 12 men and one in 200 women in the world are color blind. 466 million people worldwide have some form of hearing loss, and 43 million people are living with blindness and 295 million people are living with moderate to severe visual impairment. It's not going to happen overnight, but it is up to us as marketers to try and do better to make the digital world a better place for these users. Here are just a few things that you can do to help. You can make sure that the graphics you design have a high contrast between the elements so that they can be seen easily by people who have trouble distinguishing similar colors. I've included a resource for this in your course guide for more details. Can also include custom closed captions and videos online whenever possible. YouTube Instagram, Facebook, and other platforms, we have automated captions, but they're usually not that accurate. Whenever possible, try to create your own captions for videos to make sure that you are providing a good user experience, not only for users who are hearing impaired, but also for users who aren't native English speakers. Include all tags on your images or provide an image description in your caption to allow screen readers to describe any visual elements to visually impaired users on social media. It's really easy to do this in blog post, but it's also quite easy to do this in apps like Instagram, where if you're just creating a new post and you go to advanced settings, you are going to be able to scroll down to the accessibility tab and write the old text. If you're not sure what to write for old text, you can also have a look at some examples of people who have also put the image description in the actual caption or in the comments of their images. On the right here, you'll see digital picnic has an image of some books, and the image description is at the very bottom of the caption where it says, piles of books, sit on a white table with the TDP office out of focus in the background. You'll notice that there's no mention of images because people will automatically know and screen readers will know that this is an image because it's an image description or it's in there as an old tag. You don't need to write the word, this is a photo of or an image of, say what it is that it's on there so that people can understand the context of the caption in relation to the image or the video. Let's talk about inclusivity and representation in marketing materials. This is a big one because as we've already talked about, as marketers, we often fall into the trap of assuming that the people we're advertising to or creating content for are like us, which then results in us potentially using images and videos and assets of people who look like us in our marketing materials. And that's when things can start to fall apart because we talked about this from that perspective of people like us do things like this. We need to really keep that front of mind when we're creating marketing materials, and that is why the demand for representation in marketing is higher than it's ever been. Some things to consider in your marketing materials would be the lacks of race, gender identity, age, disability, sexual orientation, body positivity, and family structure among other things. But it's also really important to make sure that these values are actually present in the business you're representing internally, not just externally in the marketing materials, because otherwise, it's just not a genuine approach, and people will see straight through it. But also remember to be kind to yourself in this process and remember this is a marathon, not a sprint. Great change will not happen overnight, but every step in the right direction definitely counts. But with that in mind, also, you will never please everybody. If you are creating the kind of content that does not spark conversation, Yeah. Okay, so you're upsetting no one, but it probably means you're not actually sharing your true values with the world, which means maybe no one's actually feeling heard or seen or represented in your content because you're trying to put out really bland vanilla content that no one can argue against or be upset with. And that is not a great social media strategy. It does depend on the business, of course. There will be some companies that choose to never take a stand on anything on social media because they don't want to rock the boat and there's not much you can do about that. But in this day and age, there's so much opportunity for so many companies to really stand up for what they believe in on social media and make it a great place to be for so many people if they just choose to be brave enough to do that. So hopefully, you found a little bit of inspiration within this lesson, and of course, you can continue to educate yourself far beyond this course. So I've added in some awesome, really fun bonus materials for you in your course guide on this topic, and I will see you in the next lesson. 92. Project: For the purposes of executing on this lesson, you can either use yourself an existing client or any business out there that you can use to analyze and go through all the different steps with me. So that's exactly what I've done. The way that I went about finding my fictitious client was just on Instagram. I look through some hashtags, particularly the hashtag marketing agencies or marketing agency because I know historically, unfortunately, marketing agencies don't have the best marketing of their own. So I know this is a good place for me to start where I can find some accounts that might need some improvement. I came across these guys and I saw these particular posts which had that particular hashtag. And I saw this post as something that could use improvements and I could make some suggestions on how to improve this type of account. I then went and looked at their website and other social profiles and determined that this was a good fit for something that I could use as an example. If you are struggling to find a brand to use for this type of project, just look to Instagram for some inspiration. Once you open up your template from within your course guide, it's going to look like this and it's just going to have a whole bunch of red prompts that will tell you exactly what to do to fill it out. Now I've already filled mine out with my example customer, but just so you know that yours will have prompts throughout that will help you to fill everything out as you So on the second page of your document, you will have some instructions on how to share this with me for feedback. If this is something you would like to do. Now, throughout the document, at any point, you can update the text, you can change the colors of the text. Just go in and customize it to your needs. Now let's get started with my own project using logic inbound as my fake customer. I started with their strategy ideas and I've got their name there. They exist as a marketing agency serving businesses across the US, that is on their website. According to the website, they also cater to healthcare, enterprise, E commerce, and small business owners. They have a UTube presence and we're going to have a look at that in just a sec. But if they can use it effectively, that could be really great for them because of who they're targeting. And because of their industry. Anytime you're in marketing, YouTube can be great because you're providing solutions that are really searchable for people. They do also have a Twitter account that's got quite a few followers, No engagement from the looks of it or very little engagement. Potentially some dodgy things going on there as well. But Twitter could be great for them in terms of engaging in a little bit of thought leadership in their industry, especially because they have a US based audience. Then I would just recommend that they focus on those two platforms and anything else is a really nice to have, not a need to have because they do have a lot of things that are not looking so great on their social media profile, so I would just focus on really getting those two right before moving on to consistently posting on other platforms. On their website, we can see that they offer SEO and Google Ad services, website development, and conversion optimization. They can use those as their content pillars and then there's hundreds of topics underneath each of these categories, they can create content around, and then they can narrow that down specifically to their target audience buckets. They have doctors, and E commerce, business owners, so they can create Google Ads to grow your medical practice Google ads for E Commerce, and these would be really great YouTube videos that people would likely be searching for This is a screenshot of their Facebook page here. The pros are that their but section was pretty good and filled out. They've got their contact details or hours of operation and all of that. The cons is that their banner is blurry and just incorrectly size. It's hard to read. They don't have a pinged post at the top of the page, that is the first thing that somebody should be referring to when they come across the page. This is something that can't be seen from this screenshot, but I went into their reviews and they seem largely fake and very outdated. They're about four or 5-years-old, and they do seem like they were bought reviews. YouTube channel is great in terms of having an intro video in place that tells me a bit about the company, and that's their channel trailer. But they have no clear branding anywhere in the channel with the thumbnails, nothing has any kind of consistent branding. Their bounce section doesn't really tell me what they're about. They don't have any playlist or any sections of their main feed. The channel banner is completely irrelevant to their industry, and then videos are vague in their thumbnails and their descriptions, and there are no keywords anywhere to be found. In their Instagram account, they do have a logo in their profile photo. They have a good amount of content on their profile, so they do have 433 posts. But the account does seem to be bought. They don't have any highlights, they have no website in their bio. They again, just have no consistency in their brand identity. They are not using the full capabilities of Instagram with videos, reels, or any stories that I can see, and they have a lot of followers, but no engagement on their posts. We can see they've 9.5 thousand followers, but if you go into any of their posts, they have no interaction on it. Then when we go into tagged, we can see that it is mostly teen Wolf fan stuff. From my estimation, this was a Teen Wolf fan account that this agency just bought and then rebranded, they've got all the followers, but obviously they're fans of Teen Wolf, so they probably have no interest in inbound marketing, especially for a professional sector, which is what their target market is. Now moving on to my next slide here, which is the Instagram bio, that's the bio I used on the left hand side. Is their existing one, and then my proposed bio is just a little bit more broken down into who they serve, how they help, and then a call to action to book a free consultation and then having a website link. Now, again, this is just a brainstorming exercise. If I was actually putting this in place for them, we would probably talk about, do they have a free opt in or something they want to advertise in their bio Do they want to focus on the other audiences or just health practitioners? The reason I put health practitioners there is because currently all their Instagram content is targeted to this audience and no one else, which is why it makes me think that was their strategy with their Instagram account. But of course, I would consult a client. This is just so that you can go right. What's their buy at the moment? How would I change it to make it look a little bit nicer for the platform and make it a little bit more actionable as well? These are two screenshots of their image posts on Instagram and their captions. These are not designed for the Instagram platform for One, there are no clickable links in Instagram post. For two, this post has the same title as it does in the caption. They're also including their e mail address in the caption. They've clearly just not really thought about what the Instagram platform is all about. I've just redesigned these to look a little bit more in line with what would work for Instagram. So I've just got this one as a how do I write a blog post for SEO versus all of the text about ranking on Google because this is just way too much text and I have no idea what's going on here. This is really simple and something that would be engaging for Instagram. Then in the caption, I've just written a much more story based and beginner focus caption about the actual latest post on their website. Saying search engine optimization or SCO can feel complicated, but we're here to make it simple. In our latest post, we'll break down 11 of our best tips for writing blog posts that Google will love. This means they'll have a higher chance of appearing in search results when your customers are searching for the solutions you provide. What are you waiting for? Head on over to our blog by Link in our bio and start implementing these strategies today. This now speaks to their audience. Same with this. The original post was my approach to weight loss and using an unrelated photo, which also had these black bars at the top and bottom, which is just my perfectionism kicking into overdrive, but I really hated it. And so I've made this a lot more focused on the actual healthcare practitioners because I checked out the actual video that this is referring to, and it's so much more about doctor Tessa Stark talking about how she's growing her medical practice by sharing her expertise on Instagram and how other doctors can do it too. So this is now much more relevant to those doctors. And then as a call to action, you can say, head over to our YouTube channel, by Lincoln our bio to learn more. Now, on my next slide, I've said, stop using relevant hashtags, stop posting for the sake of posting, stop doing consistent branding, low quality of images and videos, and using bad practices like buying Instagram accounts and potentially Twitter followers as well. They should start a consistent posting schedule and do competitive research to understand what's working well for others in their industry. They should start a brand new Instagram account because there's just isn't going to pick up any engagement because the poor practices have basically resulted with them having 9.5 thousand followers of Teen Wolf. Who are just never going to engage with medical marketing content, and I would create systems and processes around their content marketing and get very clear on who the customers are. Because like I said, from their social media presence, I feel like it's all just doctors, but then on their website, it also says they serve other people. They need to really understand who are they catering to and is their content doing that? In terms of keep doing, I know this seems very bare. But they are doing some things really well like their video content. They're putting out a lot of video content. They're just not optimizing it correctly. They do have quite a bit of activity on Twitter. It's not recent, but they were really consistent with posting on Twitter, which is great. And they are engaging with their existing customers in the form of interviews and videos on their YouTube channel. That's really really great as well. Go and fill this out for a business that you see out there online. Try to find a business that has some room for improvement, not a business that you love because it can be easier to offer suggestions to a business that's not doing so well. Which is why I pick this example. But that's great as well because if this was a client that would approach me, I could then say, Yeah, you're doing some things really well, but here are things that I would suggest we improve upon. A lot of the time, honestly, clients just don't really know where to go with their own social media presence, which is where we come in. Again, just remember the goal is imperfection here. The goal is just to get you to start because that is the hardest thing and it's nice to put all of your beautiful knowledge into action as soon as you're finishing this course so that when the time comes for you to work with paying clients, you'll be ready. 93. What's Next?: Earlier when we were talking about paid ads, and we talked about how even if you're running the same kind of ad to two different businesses, you will get charged potentially a lot more or a lot less just depending on the industry that you're in. Well, being a social media marketer is a little bit like that, where you might be able to charge five, maybe even ten times more, depending on the industry that you're focusing on and the type of business that you're working with. And that is just because the amount that you're able to charge for your services depends directly on the impact that you're able to have on that business and the value that impact holds. So it's really important for you to actually remember that you are in control of how much you charge based on the value you're able to provide to a business, not necessarily based on your experience, because a lot of the time people assume The more experience you have, the more you're able to charge, and that's not necessarily true. Entrepreneur Steven Bartlett talks about this in his book on the 33 laws of business, which I've linked within your course guide. He was once offered a contract by a biotech company to be their social media manager and help to lead their team for the nine months prior to their company IPO, which was going to be worth somewhere around $8,000,000, including stock options when they went public. Means his salary was effectively somewhere around $900,000 a month for this position. Now, of course, he did have a great deal of experience at this point, but that experience was not 300 times greater than that of somebody charging $3,000 a month. He was just operating in a space where the value he would potentially bring to a business like this could be worth millions if not billions once they went public. Versus someone charging $3,000 a month to a fashion brand might just be helping to generate maybe tens of thousands of dollars to that business. So that fee is just proportional to the outcome. It's sort of the same thing as a local brand photographer getting paid $100 a session versus a photographer for Vogue might get paid, I don't know, 20 $30,000 per session. Or just remember when we talked about earlier in the course that Pepsi paid $1,000,000 for a logo that looked pretty similar to their old logo. That is such an important lesson to learn that your success is entirely within your control, and you shouldn't compare yourself to anyone else because certain things are just circumstantial as well. And of course, to succeed in any business, you have to be resilient. It takes a lot of hard work, it takes a lot of practice, and it takes a lot of mistakes through practice that we like to call opportunities for growth. But really, you know, things just don't always go your way. And in order to be great at something, you have to be willing to suck at it first. Of course, I'm here to help support you as much as I can through my content. So make sure to check out my social media content creation and Canva course, as it perfectly compliments what you learned here by showing you how to create designs for all different platforms, how to create videos, memes, gifts, and content that will impress your social media clients and their audience. And if you are someone who wants to go out as a freelance social media marketer, I would also recommend checking out my dedicated freelancing course, as this is where we're going to cover the ins and outs of finding work, working with clients, sending proposals, invoices, managing your finances, and everything in between. Remember to check out your course guide for additional tips on expanding your learning past this course. Because now that you're a social media superstar, the learning never stops. It's also important for you to remember that the digital world never sleeps, and there will constantly be new platforms popping up and platforms getting shut down and new features getting released, and inevitably, your clients will panic, and they will call you, and they'll say, what's the plan? This huge thing has happened. And a lot of the time, you won't know what the plan is because you just learn the information at the same time as they learned. So the important thing to remember is to just not panic and approach difficult situations like this with your clients with a sense of calm and a huge care factor moving forward, where you can actually just say to them, Look, I'm not sure. I'm looking into it. I will let you know as soon as I know. That sometimes is enough. To know that your client is aware of the fact that you know this, and you've got it handled, and they can put their trust in you. This course has been a mammoth learning journey for you, and I hope you're feeling incredibly proud of yourself for getting to this point. Hopefully, you've been able to practice along with me and you're feeling really confident in your skills, and you've retained a lot of the information that we've talked about throughout, because yeah, it's a lot. I know it might just seem like a couple of hours, but I know very well that a couple of hours very much stretches out when you've got so much other stuff going on, and you're not able to just dedicate your life full time to studying. And fortunately and unfortunately, as a social media marketer, the learning doesn't stop here. It's going to continue. So definitely make sure to continue checking out the resources within the course guide. And if you would like to connect with me on other social networks as well, I've provided some links for you in your course guide about how you can do that. And of course, I'd love it if you would follow me here on Skill Share, so you can be the first to know when I release new classes or have new content to share. If you enjoyed the course and could leave me a review and share your thoughts, that would go a long way in making sure that other students are also able to discover this content. I'm so incredibly honored that you've chosen me as your instructor for your social media marketing journey. Thank you so much for being here. I had a lot of fun. I hope you found it useful, and I can't wait to see you in my next course.