Transcripts
1. Let's Go!: Hello, my name is Cat Coquillette and I'm back for my sixth Skillshare class. Today's class is going to be all about social media marketing, including growing your followers, increasing your engagement, and building a stronger brand. First, let me give you a quick background of who I am and why I want to teach you this class today. I'm the founder of Catcoq, which is my illustration and design brand. I paint with watercolors and I illustrate digitally. I then sell my artwork on everything from wall art and tapestries to home decor items like pillows, betting, and rugs. I also have a large collection of apparel from t-shirts to miniskirts and leggings. Actresses Lucy Hale and Hillary Duff even have my phone cases. My work has been featured on Instagram by Jessica Simpson, Sarah Michelle Geller, and Khloe Kardashian. I travel the world 24-7 to run my business on the go. Right now, I'm at my Airbnb in Playa del Carmen, Mexico. I'm heading to LA next week and Italy next month. All of my success with business started with Instagram. Back in 2014, I began posting photos of my artwork. Within a few months, my following went from a couple of 100 followers, which were mostly friends and family, to several thousand fans. My Instagram followers began asking where they could purchase my artwork and I realized that I could actually make some side income by selling prints of my watercolor paintings. I'd never monetized my artwork like this before but thanks to Instagram, I had the potential customers ready to buy. I set up an online shop through Society6, which creates products out of artists' artwork then directed my Instagram traffic over to Society6 so that my followers could buy my products, it worked. Soon I was earning enough by selling my artwork online that I can take the plunge into self-employment, fast-forward to today. Since then, I've had years to craft my social media marketing strategy and brought in my reach across other social platforms. Today, I have a combined following of just under 40,000 followers across Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. My primary method of marketing is using these four social media platforms organically, which means original and authentic content, not paid ads. In my class today, I'm going to tell you the exact steps I took to get to this level. I'm going to share all the strategies I'm currently using on social media, which will cover my most essential tips for growing your followers, strengthening your brand, boosting sales, and driving more traffic from social media to your website, blog or online shop. First, we'll cover exactly why social media marketing is vital for businesses and brands and then we'll dive into the pros and cons of each platform so you can decide which is best for you. I'll share my top tips for crafting the perfect profile, including tips for writing a polished bio, uploading the best profile picture possible, and filling out your profile with all the key points of information that customers want to see. Next, we'll learn the key elements for whipping up content for the perfect post then we'll learn how to optimize it for each platform from Instagram and Facebook to Twitter and Pinterest. If you're getting into social media marketing, a big part of your focus is on growing your follower counts. After all, that's the title of this class and it's a big part of what you'll be learning today. I'm dedicating two entire sections for my best tips for growing your followers and getting more engagement across the board. We'll also cover hashtag do's and don'ts, consider strategies for how often to post to social media, and even take a peek at your analytics so you can understand which types of posts resonate best with your followers. To polish everything off, I put together five extra bonus tips to share with you at the end of this class. Overall, I promise that this class is going to be anything but dry. I'm a big believer in packing in as much information as possible without all the fluff, so we're going to focus only on my most essential tips and cut out all of the unnecessary filler. Whether you're starting a side hustle or growing an already established brand, social media marketing is vital for success. All of my advice today applies across the board so you'll have some key takeaways and a lot to implement when we're finished. I've got a ton of practical advice to share with you today and I don't want it to be overwhelming, so I'm breaking everything up into short videos so it's easy to follow along and digest. You can pause at any moment to take notes or skip ahead if you're eager to move on to the next section. If you have any questions, you can post them in the discussion thread down below. I read and respond to everything you post. Don't forget to follow me on Skillshare. Click the "Follow" button and you'll be the first to know as soon as I launch a new course or have a big announcement to share with my students. You can also follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest at catcoq to see how I practice what I preach. Ready to up-level your social media game and grow your following, hit "Enroll" and let's get started.
2. Fact Sheet: If you're taking this class, it means at the very least, you're curious about social media marketing and want to know how it can help you monetize and grow your brand. So, before we dive into the nitty-gritty, I want to take a moment to explain exactly why marketing on social media matters. Social media is where your audience is. They engage with their favorite brands, make purchases online, and show brand loyalty when they recommend products to their friends. That means if you're wanting to connect with a twenty-something fashion blogger, you post on her platform, Instagram, and use hashtags that will catch her eye. Last but not least, you have access to all of the data of how well your social media posts are performing. This means you can quickly establish what is and what is not working, and hone in on the content that is resonating most with your audience. Essentially, this means you're working smarter not harder. Considering all of this, social media is one of the simplest and most effective methods of marketing your business. You can appeal to your audience as well and find and connect with new customers. You can even ask questions to your followers, like if you want to gauge their interest in a new item before it hits your shop, or find out what they're most interested in from your brand. You can also increase sales, drive traffic to your website, blog or shop with just one click. You'll boost your SEO, increase conversion rates, and provide social proof that your brand is worthy. During all of this, you're growing your brand recognition and making yourself more credible and authentic. Okay, that's my pitch for why social media marketing is so vital for your brand, whether you're just starting out with a side hustle or you're already established. Now, let's dive in to a quick breakdown of the pros and cons of each social media site.
3. Pros & Cons: Today, I'm going to focus on the four social media sites that I use all the time and know the most about. Before you devote a ton of your time and effort to growing your social media presence, it's important to know when it will and won't be worth it. Each platform has its own unique set of attributes, which can be good or bad depending on how you want to use the site and what you're trying to accomplish. I want to give you a quick break down on each platform so you can get an idea of what they have to offer and the weaknesses that go along with it. Not every platform is right for everyone. So, this will help you get a good idea of which site to focus on growing. All right, let's get to it. Let's start with Instagram. Instagram is made for sharing photos and videos from your smartphone. Every user has a Profile page which contains their own images, and News Feed, where you can scroll through the images of the accounts you follow, and an Explore page, where you can see more content that might appeal to you based on the stuff you like. That's the essence of it. Instagram is pretty straightforward and incredibly simple to use. So, first let's dive into the pros. The key feature that sets Instagram apart from other social media platforms is its visual centric approach. This is perfect for brands that are visually based and rely heavily on aesthetics like mine. A picture is worth a thousand words, and if you've got a good grasp on how you want to present your visuals, you're going to do very well here. Instagram offers built-in filters and editing tools, so you can snap a photo on your phone, edit it to perfection in the app, and upload it to share with your followers, all from the same platform. This makes Instagram one of the fastest, easiest, and most efficient photo sharing methods. Instagram has the best engagement among all other social media networks. The way it's set up encourages audience participation and users are more likely to interact with your brand on Instagram than any other social media network. Now that we've covered the pros, let's talk about some cons. If your brand isn't visually heavy, you might struggle on Instagram. Visuals are the most important factor on the platform and if that's not your strong suit, you might be better off with a more verbally based option like Twitter. As of right now, you can only upload content on Instagram with a smartphone. You can still view a user's page on your computer's web browser, but you can't access most of the features from your computer, it's all mobile based. On Instagram, it's tricky to get a lot of clicks back to your website or a shop. As of right now, you cannot insert clickable links into your photo captions, which makes it an extra step for potential customers that want to go to your websites. They have to manually type in the URL you listed in your caption. There are some areas where you can add active links like in your bio. But you're limited to one website at a time. Direct messages which are called DMs, aren't quite up to speed with other platforms like Facebook, so it's easy to miss messages from your followers. I don't get notifications when people that I don't follow message me. So, it's up to me to remember to check that inbox every now and then. So, a lot slips through the cracks. The last con of Instagram is that bots are spammy and annoying and everywhere. Every once in a while, Instagram will purge their fake users which is awesome, but you still have to deal with spammy comments every now and then. All right, next up Facebook. Pros and cons of Facebook. With over two billion followers, Facebook is the world's most popular social media network. It has the largest number of frequent users which makes it the most appealing network in terms of sheer reach. Facebook is also where all your friends and family hang out. I'm not suggesting that you start bombarding everyone you've ever met with sales pitches, but if you post in moderation, you might find your immediate network wants to support you. My first handful of sales came from friends after I posted a link to my shop to Facebook. With Facebook, it's easy to embed clickable links into your posts, which makes it super simple to direct your followers to an external site like your website, blog, or shop. Facebook also has a ton of plugins which you can use. I use the Shopify plugin, so all the items I add to my online shop are automatically duplicated and transferred to my Facebook page. This makes it easy for my followers to browse my shop without leaving my page. Last but not least, your Facebook page can become the all-in-one place for all of the info on your brand. You can list your contact info, website, services offered, respond to private messages, and earn customer reviews. You can even create photo albums that contain the products or services that you're offering. Okay, let's dive into cons. For me, the biggest con with Facebook is that their algorithm changes at a rapid pace, and they favor paid content over organic content. This means that if you don't pay $5 to have a post sponsored, very few people that follow your page are actually going to see it. Because you're facing the potential of very low visibility, generating engagement can be pretty tricky on Facebook. Like the rest of the social media platforms, Facebook isn't great for B2B business. So, if you're not a consumer facing brand, it's going to be hard to gain a following. If that's the case, it's probably better to stick with LinkedIn. Last con with Facebook, negative feedback can be very visible. If a customer makes a complaint about your page, it's public and visible for everyone to see. I'll dive into how I deal with negative comments later. So, hold your breath for that one because it will be a doozy. Next up Twitter. If Instagram is the visual site, then Twitter is its verbal counterpart. Twitter is your go to for seeing what's happening in the world exactly as it's happening. Twitter is live updates always evolving throughout the day. Twitter is an online news networking site where people and brands communicate in short 280 character messages. The idea is sometimes referred to as microblogging. So, let's talk about some pros. Twitter is renowned for its brevity. Thanks for the 280 character tweet limits. This makes it easy to create and publish new content very quickly. With the limited amount of characters, you tend to get right to the points. Twitter is the best platform for having a dialogue with another individual or brands. By hitting reply, you can engage in a direct conversation with another user. The message thread is highly visible and simple. Everything is in chronological order, so it's easy for others to follow the conversation and engage with you as well. You can provide customer support on Twitter as well. People expect really quick responses on Twitter, especially compared to every other social media platform which isn't as direct. The last pro. Unlike Instagram, Twitter allows you to retweet other users posts. This is great if you're low on content and need something to share with your followers ASAP. All right, let's talk about a few cons. Twitter is the fastest paced social media site out there. So, if you snooze, you lose. With 6,000 tweets every second, it can be easy for your content to slip through the cracks and go unnoticed. With so many loud and active users, it can be hard to get attention. The defining characteristic of Twitter might just be on your cons list. This is the character limit count for all of your posts. If you tend to write a novel when you post content, this probably is not the platform for you. Next up, Pinterest. Simply put Pinterest as an online pinboard. Users collect visuals and organize them into various boards. Here's what my boards look like. I categorize my visuals into topics like typography, illustration, branding, food et cetera. I can click on most of these pins and follow a link back to the original website from where they were originally pinned. The pros of Pinterest. Pinterest users are searching for ideas for all parts of their lives, whether it's looking up dessert recipes or searching for a birthday gift for mom. This makes Pinterest ideal for clickable links, whether it's increasing traffic to your blog or directing to a product on your websites. This also makes Pinterest the number one platform for people who are looking to make a purchase. Because each pin will lead back to the original website in most cases, you can get a lot of referral traffic through Pinterest as well. Unlike Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, the content you upload on Pinterest has a much longer lifespan. Pinterest is basically a search engine, so when you create a pin it gets two lives, the moment you publish it and it appears on your feed, and again, every time someone searches a keyword that will trigger your pin. Look at it this way. The half-life of a pin is three and a half months, the half-life of a tweet is 20 minutes. Like Instagram, Pinterest is incredibly visually oriented. However, the photographic expectations are less rigid here than they are with Instagram. A lot of visual content is really just a verbal in disguise. All right, let's talk about some cons of Pinterest. Unlike the other platforms we've gone over, Pinterest has a more specific audience. While everyone and their mom is using Facebook, a much smaller portion of Internet users actually have a Pinterest account and you can only view Pinterest images if you do have one. While men do use Pinterest, it's still primarily dominated by women. If your target audience is men, this probably is not your ideal platform. Like Instagram, you cannot create a post on Pinterest without an image. The image is the backbone of the platform and you'll need one to publish anything. Another con is that it can take a lot of work to build up your Pinterest page into something solid. You'll need to create boards then populate each board with images that fit that category. It's a more intensive setup than other social media networks. Once you get everything set up and start pinning, a pin needs to be shared to actually gain traction. So, you rely heavily on your followers to promote for you. Overall, all of these platforms are free to set up and free to post content. Each of them have advertising options where you pay money to boost a post to reach a much larger audience. Ad prices start as low as $5, but you need to know exactly what you're doing to set them up. My class today is about organic content, which means free content that you don't pay for. But, if you're interested in learning about paid ads, I encourage you to do some research on that avenue as well. It's important to keep in mind that your audience can be put off by content that seems a little too salesy. After all, they're on social media for a social experience not an ad page. We'll dig deeper into this later but it's something to keep in mind across the board. There are a ton of other platforms out there, but these are the four I'll be going over today. Some other social media platforms include Snapchat, LinkedIn, Youtube, Tumblr, Google Plus, and Flickr. Now that you have a basic knowledge of each of the primary four platforms, it's time to figure out which one is best for you. Chances are some social media platforms are going to be more suitable for your business than others. If you're just getting started, it's best to focus on one or two platforms that you can devote all of your attention to, rather than spreading yourself too thin and trying to do it all. All right, let's move on.
4. The Perfect Profile: In this video, we're going to be talking about optimizing your profile in crafting the perfect bio. I'm going to go over a few key elements to optimizing your social media profile. First impressions are everything, and your audience only takes a few seconds to make a judgment on your page based on your content. Your bio needs to pack a big punch in a short amount of time. The good news is that the power is in your hands to create a stellar profile that represents you in the best possible light. Let's start with the guts of your profile, crafting the perfect bio. In your bio, the key element here is to include your actual name. That sounds obvious, but you'd be surprised about how many accounts I see that don't even include the individual's name, just their social handle. Of course, this is fine if you're behind a larger brand that isn't defined by one person, but if you're a solopreneur or freelancer, people like to know the name of who they're interacting with. Your bio should be short and sweet. Explain exactly who you are, what you do or the services that you offer. Pack in as many keywords here as possible and try to keep it short. People don't visit your bio to read your life story. They just want to get a snapshot. Last but not least, include a call to action. This is just a prompt for your followers to take action, whether it's visiting your websites, enrolling in your online course, reading your newest blog post or purchasing a product from your shop. Call the actions should benefit your audience, so give them a juicy incentive. "Get 10 percent off your first purchase on my shop. Click here." That's an example. Now, let's talk about your profile pic. The biggest question I get asked about profile pictures is that if it's better to use a personal headshot, a product, or artwork photo that represents your brand or your logo. All of the above work for different purposes. If you want to appear legit and professional, opt for a logo. I use the logo on my profile pic for all of my social sites because I want people to follow my brand, not me as a person. If you're more in the spotlight of your company, a headshot might be better. For example, if you're a freelancer or a travel blogger, your audience is more interested in interacting with you as a person, not your faceless brand. In this case, you were at the forefront of your brand. So, a fantastic headshot is perfect. Last but not least, a product photo or images of your artwork. If you're an artist that has a recognizable style, you might want a sample piece of your artwork to serve as your profile pic. This gives your audience a quick idea of the kind of work you create and can help boost sales of that particular piece that you select as your picture. In addition to your profile pic, some platforms like Twitter and Facebook allow you to customize the design of your page by adding a cover photo. I alternate my cover photos between shots of my artwork and big announcements to share with my audience. For example, on Facebook, I update my cover photo every time I launch a new Skillshare class. In the description, I also add a direct link to the class. Again, make it as easy as possible for your followers to do what you want them to do. In this case, click the link. Next up, contact information. Always include your email address. I get a lot of new work based on people finding me on Instagram. I want to make it as easy as possible for potential clients to get a hold of me, so my email address is always at an obvious spots. Last but not least, don't forget to add links to your website, shop, blog, whatever and other social media sites if you can. Facebook will let you add links to other social sites like Instagram and Twitter. On the other hands, Pinterest, Twitter and Instagram only give you one clickable link in your bio. I alternate my link depending on what my number one goal is at the moment. If I have just launched a new Skillshare class, I'll link directly there. If I've added a ton of new products to my shop and I want to boost sales, I'll change the link to my shop. If I wrote a new blog post, you guessed it, that's the new link. The point here is that your bio isn't set in stone. You can make changes as often as you want, especially if you're playing around with promoting new products, services, blog posts or whatever else.
5. The Perfect Post: In this video, we're going to be talking about the elements that make a great post. Regardless of which social media site you're using across the board, content is king. It's more than just writing a couple sentences, and adding the link. Your posts will be so much more effective when you learn a few little tricks to take your post to the next level, and get the most bang for your buck. First things first. It's important to determine the type of content that you want to post. Sales posts are aimed to encourage your customers to purchase products. I keep promotional content to about one third of my content overall. This feels like the healthiest balance for my brands, plus my followers don't like marketing messages drowning out their feed. As a general rule of thumb, post enough promo content to just fall under the radar of being too spammy. Another standard post type is for general brand growth. This is where you showcase aspects of your brands like new work, behind the scenes or gorgeous photography of things that relate to your brand. Next up, newsworthy contents. This is if you have something to share like a blog post or recent mention by another brands. Another content type is when you encourage engagement. This is when you ask questions. Here's an example. You can also post giveaways and contests. This is great for a follower growth spurts. There are different types of contests you can host. But the important thing to keep in mind is to make them brand-specific, and give away prices that are related to your brands. The main focus of this class is growing your following. When someone sees that an account has gotten several thousand people to follow them, they must know what they're talking about, right? Twitter and Instagram contests encourage users to engage with you, and promote your brands. After you've got an idea of what sort of content you want to post, it's time to optimize for each platform. First, let's talk word counts. Every platform has a word count, sweet spot when it comes to getting your audiences' attention. On Facebook, 40-80 characters is an ideal length. Anything less gets overlooked, and anything more gets cut off on the user's feed. Twitter is more strict. Being short and succinct is how you're going to succeed on Twitter. Just make sure to leave some extra characters, so that people can retweet, and add messages or tag their own friends. Instagram captions, getting maximum engagement at around 150 characters. The star of your posts on Instagram will always be the image, but the captions will provide context, and can convince people to engage. I sometimes go off the deep end, and make really long Instagram posts, which do surprisingly well. The key here is that I don't write a novel every day. Just when I have something I want to share. On Pinterest, the sweet spot is 300 characters for your pin description. Load your description with keywords because Pinterest algorithm will give post more exposure when people search those same keywords. It's great to use a URL shortener when you're adding links to your posts. I use bitly, which allows you to track how many people are clicking your link, and where they're coming from. On Twitter, bitly also generates more retweets than any other type of URL shortener. Instagram doesn't allow clickable links in the captions, but you can still type out a bitly link in your caption. If a follower really is incentivized, they can manually type it in themselves into the browser. On Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, you can use mentions to prompt influencers to engage with you and respond. Mentions are when you use the @ symbol to tag another account in your post. For example, I tag Skillshare in my post, so that they can see it and engage. Hashtags are enabled on all four platforms, but they only perform so so on Facebook and Pinterest. However, they are vital for Instagram and Twitter. We'll dive into hashtags more later on in this class as well. Now that we've got your copy covered let's go over images. You need to have an image if you want to post to Instagram and Pinterest, but it's a good rule of thumb to use an image whenever you can on Facebook and Twitter as well. Posts that have images attached, typically get more engagement than text only posts. Even on Twitter, which is the king of short text snippets, finds that posts with images get about 150 times more retweets than those without. Also, on these platforms, vertical images will perform better than horizontal. The key ratio here is four to five vertically. If you're unsure, just go with the square image because it's standard across all platforms. I use VSCO to edit nearly all of the images that I post to social media. VSCO is an app that allows you to edit your photos, and share them with the VSCO community. I skip the second part, and I only use the app to edit my photos. There are a ton of great filters you can use to make your photography pop, whether it's shot on your iPhone or your DSLR camera. Keep in mind that if you're posting an image to Pinterest, it's best to keep faces out of the shots. Pins without faces get shared about 20 percent more frequently. I keep my image style fairly consistent across the board. I photograph in bright light, and my photos are saturated with color, and they're always clean, and not overly cluttered. I also like to give my photography some variety, which especially makes a difference on an app like Instagram, where you see everything created together. I alternate between travel photography, macro shots, my artwork, videos, and products. This gives my page a well rounded feeling, as well as showcasing the different aspects of my brands. If you want to get an exact image size for a specific platform, my best advice is just to Google it, like optimal Facebook cover photo size. Each platform is constantly making changes to their events size, so it's not always easy to keep up. This usually isn't a big deal though, since each platform will resize your image to fit their standards. When it comes to the vibe of the images you're posting, keep it on brand, entertaining, and interesting, and high quality. You want your image to peek at a user's interest, and provide value to them in some way. If you think, "I'm not sure this photo will look good," then you may want to table it for now. I only post images that I'm 100 percent certain about, and I don't post anything that I know my followers don't really care about. For example, people follow me to see artwork, cool travel inspiration, and new products in collaborations with fun brands. They don't follow me to see what I ate for breakfast or a new outfit I just bought. There are social media accounts specifically for both of these things, but it's not what my brand is about. If you diverge too much from your brand, you'll lose consistency, and followers. I'm saving the best for last. Quality over quantity. The goal with social media isn't just to pump out content to the masses. It's to provide quality content that encourages interaction, and grows your community, and brand over time. Quality content is key here. This is what builds trust, authenticity, and a following. Part of your social proof stems from the content you're putting out there. So, keep it on brand, and engaging. There are times when I haven't posted to social media in a few days, and I feel like I should put something, anything out there, but I try not to post anything that doesn't feel authentically me. Now that we've covered the basics with putting together a perfect post, let's move on to what everyone wants to know, how to grow more followers?
6. Get More Followers: Let's face it, if you're getting into social media marketing, a big part of your focus is on growing your follower accounts. After all, that's the title of my class and it's a big part of what you're learning about today. When it comes down to it, numbers matter, social proof is real. When users see an account with a large following, they view them as trustworthy, professional, and worthy of following. For example, if I'm deciding between two wine bars and one has thousands of Instagram followers, gorgeous photography that shows their specialty drinks and their atmosphere, and loads of positive comments and five star reviews. Chances are I'm going to pick that restaurant over the alternative with a couple of hundred followers, mediocre content, and a handful of so so reviews. It's true that followers aren't everything. Content and engagement are the crux of your social media brand, but a large following is still far from worthless. Whether you like it or not, people make a snap judgment about your brand based on your follower counts. Your numbers of followers can also make the difference between someone deciding to hit follow or leave your page. I'm going to break down all of the strategies that I've implemented to grow my social media following to just under 40,000 across my combined platforms of Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, let's get started. First up, everything I'm covering in this class today, like optimizing your profile, crafting the perfect post and strategizing your content, will all help you boost your follower counts. But there are a few specific strategies I want to draw attention to in this lesson. The most important thing is to give people a reason to follow you. What is the incentive for someone to click follow when they see your page? For me, it's a variety of reasons. First and foremost, they like seeing my art. A good chunk of my content is related to the artwork that I'm creating every day. This is the foundation of my brand and it's how I got started on Instagram. Second, my audience likes seeing the behind the scenes of my life. About 25 percent of my content is lifestyle related. I share pictures of my travels and write about my experiences in each place. I snap a picture of what my office of the day looks like. Usually, my laptop in a coffee shop or co-working space somewhere in the world. Third, my audience is interested in my advice and resources for other creatives. A large portion of my brand is dedicated to helping out fellow creatives and small business owners. This might even be what brings you to my Skillshare class today. Lastly, I frequently provide discount codes to my shop. Everyone likes an insider deal, so every once in a while, I'll post a discount code or free shipping offer that is exclusive to my social media followers. People don't follow me to see selfies, food shots, fitness advice, outfits of the day or whatever else. There are social media accounts dedicated to this content and they're thriving, but it's simply not part of my brand. It's important to understand why people follow you and stick to that content. I might take a selfie that looks really good and I'm tempted to share it, but unless I can tie it into the staple content that I've listed above, it's best to post that on my personal Facebook page not my business social media accounts. Consistency in your visuals, message, and voice is absolutely crucial. My next strategy for growing your followers is to follow relevant accounts. This is important for a few reasons. One, it's great to see what other people and brands are doing in your arena. I love seeing what other painters are up to and what content they're sharing with their audience. It can give me ideas of how I can better interact with my following as well. Two, if you're regularly engaging with another account, they might just follow you back. You can find relevant accounts by searching hashtags on any platform, browsing, the discover page on Instagram, and using search functions on Pinterest. You can also snoop on the influencers in your niche and see what accounts they're following. On Twitter, you can see if these influencers have public lists. If so, you can subscribe to the public list which means that the tweets from the accounts on that list will pop up in your feed as well. From time to time, I also Google best artist accounts to follow on Facebook or whatever platform I'm interested in. This takes me to blog post with curated suggestions. My next step is to be active and engaged. You're going to hear me say engagement a million times in this class and there's a reason that it's so important. When someone makes a comment on your post, reply to them even if it's just a simple thank you. When you engage in a conversation with your followers, most social media algorithms will prioritize your post and boost it where more people can see it. More eyes on your content will translate to more followers. It's also crucial to be active within your inner circle. Like, comment, and share other accounts posts, be an active member of your community. This will give you more exposure which will directly lead to more followers. When doing this, it's important to focus on the community that contains your core audience. If you're a makeup artist, comment and engage with that community because those are the followers you want for your own brand. Next step, be personal. I post a range of content that's geared at appealing to my core audience. But overall I found that any post that includes a personal anecdote will get loads more likes and interaction than a generic post about a new IPhone case that's available on my shop. I try to add a little bit of my personality to all of my social media posts, whether it's a quick recap of where I was when I painted a particular illustration, or a full blown story at that time I got to swim with baby otters and I started crying in the pool, because I was so happy. I love sharing these stories and my audience enjoys reading them. For me it's not a chore to post on social media, I genuinely enjoy getting to share aspects of my life and brand and interact with the people that follow me. Having genuine content has been a huge factor in people deciding to click follow. My next tip for growing your followers is probably something you've heard a thousand times but it's vitally important, post frequently. The cold brutal truth is that if you stop posting to social media, your followers will forget about you. The general rule of thumb is to post 3 to 15 times a day on Twitter, which to be honest I rarely do, so my Twitter following could definitely use some improvements. 5 to 12 times a day on Pinterest, and 1 to 2 times a day on Instagram. The timing of your posts also matter. Even though most platforms use an algorithm instead of chronological order to decide what appears first on a news feed, the timing of your post also matters. Even though most platforms use an algorithm instead of chronological order to decide what appears at first on a news feed, the time of your post can make or break the interaction you receive right off the bat. Times vary per platform and per audience, but for me I get the most interaction, likes, and follows when I post in the evenings. This is even more evident when I'm in Thailand, exactly 12 hours ahead of everybody in the States. If I post in the middle of the afternoon in Chiang Mai aka 3:00 in the morning in America, my posts struggled to get any attraction. Most of the time I get a post ready the night before, then publish it as soon as I wake up so that it will hit my American audience around dinnertime when they're most engaged in social media. Next up, use hashtags. This one is so crucial that I'm dedicating an entire lesson to it, so more on hashtags later. I just wanted to mention that here because it's a make it or break it factor when it comes to promoting your post and gaining followers. Okay, so more on this later. A quick word on bots. They are pretty much worthless, 1,000 active and engaged users are better than 10,000 fake bots. Bots aren't going to buy your products, read your blog, or purchase your services. The only thing they do is bulk up your following which does increase social proof until people realize half of your following is fake. My next piece of advice, promote your social media channels whenever you possibly can. If I'm doing a speaking engagement guess what's on the first slide as everyone is taking their seats and chatting. You guessed it, my Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest handle. If I'm going out with friends and I meet someone new and we get to chatting about what I do, they usually like to see my artwork. So, I suggest they check out my Instagram for a snapshot. It's shameless but it works. I also share my CatCoq Facebook posts on my personal Facebook page about once a week. This boosts my post amongst my friends and family and they're the most generous with likes than any other group. If you do go this route, just make sure that you share sparingly. A few posts a week is great. Most of your friends like to know what you're up to after all. But I don't overdo it because it can be super annoying for everyone else when you bombard everyone's news feed with your brand's content every single day. My last tip is to include your social media handles and your email signature. That way a clickable link directly to your Twitter goes out every time you send an email. Also along the lines of promoting your social media channels at every opportunity, include them on your website preferably in the header, footer, and you're about us page. Make it as easy as possible for people to follow you on every platform that you're active. You can even cross pollinate your channels like posting a link to your Instagram page on Twitter with a relevant photo or by pinning a photo from your Facebook page to a Pinterest board. I even weave social media mentions into contracts with clients. For example, if I'm working with a high profile brand that has a massive social media following, I usually stipulate that they give me three or four mentions on social media as part of our payment terms especially if their audience aligns perfectly with mine. This is a great bargaining chip because it's essentially free for them to give you and it can make a huge difference in your following overnights. After working with fabFitFun, I gained 2,000 followers in a week. The last time Skillshare mentioned me on Instagram, I gained 300 followers overnight. Another strategy that's along the same lines as this is to partner a brand and promote each other. They'll publish a post that links back to your account and vice versa. This collaboration can be incredibly effective in mutually growing your following. I really like to use the term 'hacks' when it comes to growing your following. These are all genuine strategies to grow in your followers organically. Authentic growth doesn't happen overnight, it takes time to build up a strong following of people that are interested and engaged with your brand. These are the types of followers that will be purchasing your products and services, reading your blog and converting it into actual customers. If you follow these steps, you'll be able to build a following that is both large and valuable.
7. Get More Likes: In this video, I'm going to be focusing on how to get more likes, shares and comments. If getting more followers is your primary goal, chances are your second is to get more likes, shares, retweets, comments and overall interaction on your posts. In this video, I'm going to go over the surefire ways to increase your engagement. You've probably heard this a million times, engage with your social media community. There's a reason you hear this parroted by anyone who's found success in social media, it's because it's true. First off, let's break down what engagement actually means. There is a massive difference between broadcasting your content and actually interacting with your community. Strictly speaking, engagement comes in several forms: liking, commenting, and sharing content. On Instagram, it's liking, commenting and re-posting. On Facebook, liking, commenting and sharing. Twitter, replying, retweeting and liking. On Pinterest, you save a pin and you comments. You can also add mentions, follow other artists, and tag others in your photos. Two terms you might have heard before when it comes to engagement are reach and impressions. Reach is the total number of people who see your content and impressions or the number of times your content is displayed no matter if it was clicked or not. When I post Instagram, only a small fraction of my followers are actually going to initially see it. However, my post receives a lot of engagement in the form of likes and comments and I respond back. Instagram is going to prioritize my posts and push it up on everyone's feed, so that more of my followers will be able to see it. A lot of this happens within the first hour of hitting publish so it's crucial that you're extra responsive immediately after you publish any new content on all platforms. Here are some other surefire ways to boost engagements. Tag brands and people in your posts. Whether it's a mention on your post or tagging other people in your Instagram photos. Two, like and respond to comments on your own posts. If someone takes the time to comment on your post, thank them and respond. Three, you can also ask questions in your post and encourage a conversation. For example, I might ask him one of my posts, "Which color palette you like best?" Everyone has an opinion and people like to share their thoughts, give them a platform to do so. Not only does this boost the metrics for engagement, it will also give you a straw poll of what your audience actually likes. People will engage in like more often when images are included with your posts. For example, on Twitter where copy is king, tweets with images still receive nearly double the retweets than those without. Another engagement tip for Twitter, try not to use more than 100 characters. This leaves room for others to add their own messages when they retweet. Similar to what we covered in growing your followers, the time of day in which you post is vital. Optimal times can vary depending on your audience and the platform you're using. You can check the stats on each platform to see if there's a certain time of day when you get the most engagement on your posts. I'll talk to you through how to do this later when we cover analytics. If there is a big event or holiday, take advantage of that and curate your social media posts around that topic. My most liked Instagram post of all time is a digital illustration I created and posted on International Women's Day. The quote is, "She believed she could so she did." In the caption, I gave a shoutout to my mom who is the most inspirational woman in my life. If you post timely content that aligns with holidays, celebrations, or current events, chances are you're going to get more of a reach out of your content. So, get ready for National Donut Day on June 1st and prep your social content for the festivities of Squirrel Appreciation Day on January 21st. For me, personally, I get the most likes on posts that convey genuine excitement and optimism. With the exception of Pinterest, the copy is always the most important element in everything I share with my followers. When I'm excited about a brand new collaboration or I'm floored that my new class has reached 10,000 students, I share that enthusiasm with my followers. This ties in with what I was saying earlier about being genuine and authentic. No one wants to follow a faceless brand with zero personality. I found that when I open up and share big news with my followers, they engage right back with encouragement and enthusiasm. Because of this, I've been able to cultivate a community behind my content. It might also help that I use a lot of all caps, exclamation marks and emojis. This class is full of tips that will help you grow your social media game overall and all of these will translate to more likes and engagements. Now, let's move onto the thing you either love or you hate, hashtags.
8. Hashtag Dos and Don'ts: Everyone loves to diss on hashtags, but they are arguably one of the easiest ways to organically expand your reach on social media. Whether you're on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest, implementing hashtags is an incredibly effective method in getting more eyes on your posts. If you're relatively new to the social media game, hashtags can seem confusing, especially when you see them being used everywhere. Both online and everywhere else around you, there are magazines, billboards, signage, even on the packaging of products that you purchase. Essentially, a hashtag is a key word or phrase that's precedented with the hash symbol. When it's used on social media, it can turn into a clickable link that shows you other posts on the same platform that use the exact same hashtag. This allows you to search among all of their posts with a similar keyword. For example, if I search the hashtag for sketchbook, I scroll through literally millions of posts that incorporate the exact same hashtag. This matters because, by using hashtags in your posts, you're opening the door for a much wider audience to see what you're posting. By adding a hashtag into your post, your content will be accessible to all other users who search for your hashtag even if they're not yet following you. Essentially, hashtags have the power to expand your reach, increase your impressions, and help grow your following. The best part, they cost you nothing. Be strategic with your hashtags selection. It's not just about slapping random hashtags on every post. They need to relate to your brands, your content, and your audience. Vague hashtags won't be as effective as taking a more strategic approach. Start by doing a little research into popular hashtags in your industry. Then, mix it up with a combination of broad versus specific hashtags. Broad hashtags like artist, love, and cute are incredibly popular, which sounds great. But, this means that your content will be competing in a pool with millions of other posts. In this case, your post will appear at the top of the listing for about a millisecond before it's replaced by newer content. If you use the hashtag that is more specific like watercolor artist, alpaca love, or cute manicure, then you'll be hitting a narrower and more specific audience, and your post has a better chance of catching people's eyes for a longer period. Like I mentioned, I use a combination of ultra broad and ultra specific hashtags, and this helps mix it up a little bit. You can also use hashtags to build communities and campaigns. Lettering artist, Lauren Hom did an amazing job with this when she encouraged her followers to post samples of their own lettering project with the #homework. This hashtag took off, and now she's built a community of 30,000 Instagram posts by followers that are inspired by her lettering style and want to try it on their own. This is a popular tactic in the corporate world as well. It's called trending hashtags. Coca-Cola started #shareacoke. Charmin toilet paper started the hilarious #tweetfromtheseat, and DiGiorno Pizza went viral after it started the DiGiorNOYOUDIDNT movements. If you don't quite have the following to start a hashtag community, you can always join in on one. This way, your posts will be seen by the other people that are involved with that community, who hopefully are your target audience as well. Only do this if your post provides value to that specific hashtag community. Otherwise, it'll just be overlooked. When it comes to placing your hashtag, there are a few different options. Here's what I tend to do. On Instagram, I utilize all 30 hashtags, which is the maximum allowed, and cram them into the very bottom of my post after a flood of ellipses. I do this because it's not really that important for my followers to see exactly what hashtags I used, I just want my posts to appear in the search functions. I'm more conservative on Twitter, where it's not as easy to tuck them away from your contents. When they're as visible as they are on tweets, I usually only add one or two. On Facebook, to be totally honest, I don't even bother using any hashtags. Still, it's best practice to use one or two, but I personally haven't really seen a boost of engagement with Facebook hashtags. One place where it can make sense on Facebook, is if you have a brand specific hashtag that you use throughout all of your social media posts. This helps unify your campaign. When it comes to Pinterest, hashtags and accounts descriptions, board titles, board descriptions, or profile names aren't clickable. The only place you can click and search hashtags are in a pins description. To be frank, Pinterest doesn't utilize hashtags with the same method of efficiency as on Instagram and Twitter. Using them won't hurt, but don't go out of your way to relabel all of your existing pins with hashtags because the amount of effort probably won't pay off. When in doubt, as with most things in business strategy, just see what your competitors are doing. You don't have to copy every single one of their hashtags, but it will give you a good idea of the path that you want to go down. You can also check out Hashtagify, which helps you find the most ideal hashtags for your content. A little research goes a long way. Overall, just remember this, you want to use hashtags that will resonate with your audience. If you're a cake baker, use hashtags that your audience will be following, like sweet desserts, cake decorating or culinary DIY. This way, you're targeting the types of followers you want for your brands. These are the people that will be the most interested in your content, and most likely to engage with you on social media and purchase your products afterwards. Next up, let's talk about the frequency in which you should post to social media.
9. How Often to Post: All right, a moment of real talk. When it comes to social media, I put the most time and effort into Instagram. To be honest, I just love this platform more than any other, so that's where I direct most of my energy. I post thoughtful content here multiple times a day, and I enjoy scrolling through and seeing what everyone else is sharing and I like interacting with other users. This probably isn't a surprise, but I'm a bit of an Instagram addict. I put the second most amount of effort towards Pinterest, then Facebook, and then Twitter. So, it's not much of a shock that when it comes to followers, they range from most to least in that exact order. Simply put, whatever platform you're the most active with, will probably be the one where you grow the most followers. In a perfect world, you could have infinite time to dedicate towards posting on every social media platform multiple times a day with a variety of engaging and well-thought out content. But, the reality is that we've all got other things on our plate and our lives are about prioritizing our time. So, I'm going to go over the optimal amount of times to post to each platform per day, but take it all with a grain of salt. I definitely don't post to Twitter as often as I should, and sometimes I recycle content from Instagram to Facebook, which isn't really best practice, but that's okay. All right, disclaimer over, let's dive in. Here's the breakdown of how often the experts say you should post on each platform. Instagram and Facebook, one to two times per day. Twitter, three to 15 times a day, and Pinterest, five to 12 times per day. Of course, how often you post to each platform also depends on your brand. If your brand is highly visual like mine, you'll probably be utilizing the visual centric platforms like Instagram and Pinterest more frequently. If you're a copywriter or a blogger, your strength is with words and you're probably going to be owning the Twitter game. Also, tweeting three to 15 times a day doesn't mean you need to prepare original content every single time. You can also retweet other users posts. This is a great workaround and a two for one bonus. One, it's super easy and requires minimal effort, and two, it shows that you're engaged with the community by promoting others content. Just make sure that whatever you're retweeting is consistent and on message with your own brand. The same thing goes with Pinterest. The vast majority of my pins aren't my artwork, they're just cool visuals that I love and relate to my brands. I'm an illustrator and designer, so posting inspirational typography, patterns, paintings, logos, and gorgeous photography, all relate to my brand and appeal to my audience. Each platform moves at its own pace. Twitter is a high volume and low value network, which means that you can share other users content more frequently here than other platforms. Facebook is the exact opposite. Low volume, high value. So, on Facebook, you're only expected to post once or twice a day, but the stakes are higher here on the content, which needs to be more valuable and interesting to your audience. Another cool metric to look at is the half-life of your social media posts. Half-life is a reference to the amount of time it takes for something to fall to half of its initial value. In social media, this is a way to look at how long your post will be relevant before users stop seeing it and it becomes irrelevant. Tweets have the shortest lifespan across all social media platforms. This makes sense since Twitter is so high in volume. The entire basis of Twitter is for people to quickly share their thoughts. So, for Twitter, the half-life usually kicks in about 15 minutes after your tweet was published. Compare that to the half-life of a pin on Pinterest, which kicks in after four months. Pins are also 100 times more spreadable than tweets. This is also the nature of Pinterest, it's a visual search engine. So, time relevancy is less important than on Twitter where breaking news is more important. Instagram's half-life is generally under an hour, although this has been changing recently as they prioritized posts based on engagement, not the published dates. You get a little longer on Facebook, generally about 90 minutes before the half-life kicks in. The reason I'm breaking all of this down is so that you understand why it's important to share your message multiple times. A lot of people are hesitant to re-post the same info more than once because they don't want to annoy other users with redundancy, but the truth is that the vast majority of your followers don't even see your post. Especially if they weren't logged into Twitter in the last hour. So, if you're publishing a new product or promoting your freelance services, get that message out there as frequently as you can. Stay on top of your posts. By publishing new content frequently, your account will continue to reach your audience and remain relevant. That being said, I do take social media breaks every now and then. If I'm on vacation and having an awesome time, I'm probably not going to be logging into Pinterest. When it comes to the time of day to post, some experts insist that timing matters, while others dismiss it entirely. Algorithms change constantly, so there's probably some middle ground here. Personally, I found that any post during the day or evening, generally does well. But post in the middle of the night see drastically less engagement. So, as long as you're not posting at 3:00 AM every day, you should probably be fine.
10. Quick Peek at Analytics: A lot of people skip over their analytics entirely because they can be overwhelming to decipher and understand. But trust me, you're doing yourself a huge favor by spending a couple minutes a day looking over your data. Otherwise, you're basically flying blinds. By guessing, you're missing out on a serious understanding of your brand, what types of posts are and are not working. I'm going to give you some simple tips that will help you demystify your analytics and get a solid understanding of which posts work in which flop. Most platforms provide you with InApp metrics. If you have a company account versus a personal account. Here's where you can find them. Let's start with Instagram. As of right now, you can only see your analytics data from the mobile app, not your desktop. You need to have a company profile in order to access your metrics. If you already have one, click the bar graph icon at the top of the screen on your profile page. This will open your insights. Here, you can see a ton of data. You can have access to a lot of different information between activity, content and your audience. Under Activity, you can see your total number of interactions for the past week as well as profile visits, website clicks and emails. Your Discovery shows the accounts that you've reached for the past week as well. It divides between reach and impressions. Under Content, if you click See All, you'll be able to see your most popular posts sorted by impressions for the past year. If we go back to Audience, the final tab, you'll be able to see your total number of followers as well as how many followers you've gained in the past seven days. Under Locations, you can see where most of your followers are from between cities and countries. The Age Range will show the age of your audience. My primary audience are women ages 25 to 34. Lastly, under Followers, you can see when your followers are most active between the hours of the day and the days of the week. Now let's take a look at Facebook. Analytics on Facebook are called "Facebook Insights." This is available for all page admins. Facebook Insights provides you with stats for your posts, your page fans and reach. Just a quick note, in order to access your Facebook Insights, you need to have a brand page, not a personal page. On your Overview page, it will show you a page summary of the last seven days. Here, it will show your key data points, your actions on the page, page views, page previews, page likes, reach, recommendations, post engagements, videos and page followers. Of these, the ones I pay the most attention to are reach. This week is great, my reach has been increasing as well as post engagements. When I post content to Facebook, these are my two primary goals, boost my reach and boost my post engagement. On the left hand side, you can dive into all the nitty-gritty details. This can be really helpful as well. But right now, we're just focusing on the overview. Now, let's take a look at where to find your analytics on Twitter. Click on Twitter Analytics. This provides you with a 28 day overview of your performance on Twitter. On your Summary page, you have access to your tweets, tweet impressions, profile visits, mentions, followers and a lot more. You can even scroll down and see your top tweet of the month as well as your top mention. Scrolling down even further, you can see your top follower of the month, including how many people follow them. You can also see your top media tweet and how many impressions you earned. For me, it was this tweet promoting one of my last Skillshare courses. You can dive into this information and focus on whatever aspects you like to for your brand, but for me, the things I look into most are my tweet impressions and mentions. My tweet impressions did great this month but my mentions are down, so that's something that I do want to focus on for the next month to come. Lastly, let's take a look at Pinterest, Pinterest Analytics. The Pinterest dashboard provides insights into followers, impressions, audience stats and engagement. You can view detailed reports to gain a better understanding of which boards and posts perform best. Analytics are available for personal and business pages. As you can see, with analytics, you can measure pretty much anything. It's easy to get caught up in analyzing all the intricacies in your posts and every bit of data that comes along with it. But for those of you who are just starting out, you only really need to focus on a few things. One, let's start with conversions. A conversion is basically getting someone to respond to your call-to-action. So, if you upload a picture of a tote bag on Facebook and include a link to your shop in the post, each person that clicks on that link is a conversion. A conversion could also be someone clicking like on your Instagram photo or someone replying to your tweet. Really, a conversion is whatever goal you set up for yourself and your post. You should also take a look at your reach for each post you make to see which post performed better than others. Reach is the size of the audience that you're able to communicate with. You can compare your post to see which ones scored the highest reach and learn which content will get you the best rankings. Three, engagement. Engagement is the total number of interactions, likes, shares, comments, retweets or whatever on a post. My engagement tends to go up whenever I ask a question in a post or share a piece of artwork that really resonates with my audience and they want to share or tag their friends in that post. These are the top three things that I personally track. There are a ton of other data points that you could analyze, but I like to keep it pretty simple. If you're interested, you can also track impression, follower growth rates, unique visits, referral traffic, bounce rates, influence scores and loads of other data. So, if you really want to dive in, you can go down that rabbit hole as well. But I promised a quick peek at analytics to you guys, so we're going to keep it simple and sweet.
11. Five Bonus Tips: We're covering so much today. I organized this class based on broad categories like the elements of creating the perfect social media posts and hashtag do's and don'ts. In this section, I'm going to share a few of my vitally important tips for social media success. Of course, this entire class is vitally important information, but I'm going to fill you in with the bits of advice that weren't covered in the general topics. One, a lot of people ask me how I edit my photography. For 90% of the photos I upload, I use the VSCO app and edit and enhance my photography there. VSCO is a mobile app that allows you to edit and share your photos. I use it for editing but skip the sharing parts. I already have enough social platforms to manage. Two, what do you do when your light on contents? This happens to everyone. The well runs dry and you don't really have anything new to share. Don't stress, you can simply retweet, repost, and share old stuff. I have a strong suspicion that throwback Thursday #TBT started because someone needed something to post and was drawing a blank. Three, let's talk about negative comments. I'm going to give you my personal experience here. Negative comments don't happen that often, but when they do, they hurt. If it's something personal, non-constructive, or just playing mean, I delete.
Cat Coquillette, Artist + Entrepreneur + Educator
