Social Media Marketing: Top Tips to Grow Your Followers & Build a Brand

1. Intro: Whether you've been trying to grow your social media following for years or this is the first time you're actually taking it seriously, stick around because this might just be the perfect class for you. I'm a brand strategist, Fortune 500 consultant, and public speaker, and none of these things would have been possible without social media. We will not only go through social media marketing as you know it, we will go through the vision that the social media space has for the future and how you can leverage and adapt to changing algorithms, changing platforms, and changing audience behaviors. We will go through the specifics of which type of audience you can expect on which platforms, what platforms, and content types are best for you, your business brand, and personal brand. We will go through the dos and don'ts of each platform, as well as analytics and ads. Don't worry, you don't have to have any background in data, analytics. We will go through it step-by-step from the beginning. Hi, my name is Sina. I'm a brand strategist and I've worked with some of the biggest brands over the last decade on building their brand exposure and reaching new audiences through social media and brand marketing. I've also worked with numerous entrepreneurs on startups on leveraging personal branding for your marketing growth. This class is really designed around my knowledge in the world's biggest brand strategies, as well as personal brand strategies, and how you can combine the both to grow your social media marketing. Whether you take this course to establish or grow a social media presence for your business or for yourself, this course is going to give you a comprehensive understanding of all the strategies that you can use for yourself and your brand, so let's get into it. 2. Class Project: To make this class as practical as possible for you, your project will not be to fill out any worksheets but instead to actually create content for social media. You're going to choose two social media platforms, and you're going to create at least five pieces of content for the platforms. I'm going to be joining you on the journey so you'll see which platforms I choose and what content I create. You're not going to be alone on your journey. I would love to see you share that content on the project tab. Instead of just sharing worksheets, you're going to share links to your social media profiles and the content you create during the class. Let's get into the first lesson. 3. Personal vs Business Branding: In social media marketing, you either are marketing a personal brand or a business brand. Either of those two are important to choose from. This course, as I said, will go into both and we will explore examples of both areas that you can use, but you need to understand that there's a big difference between personal branding and business branding and how you can use it to your advantage. Let's talk about personal branding. A lot of times people think personal branding is about a person's personal life. It is not. People do not care what you post on social media around what you have for lunch, unless you are a food blogger. You need to understand that everyone has a personal brand. The difference is some people nurture and grow it and some people don't. Personal branding is how people introduce you when you're not in the room. It's your reputation, it's what you are known for. It is the representation of your personality and your expertise. That is why we need to find the balance between personal and professional in your personal brand. We are looking at that before we get into social media marketing strategies because even if you are representing a business or you want to market a brand or business, personal branding is a huge part of doing that. What you don't want to do is only be known for the name of your business or your brand. You want to find the personality behind it that people can connect to. The world's biggest brands are led by personal brands that represent what the business values and visions are. That is how we connect with the brand, and that is how an audience understands, is this brand fit to me? Do they have the same values as I? Can I identify with that brand on a personal level? That is how you will have success on social media. Finding the sweet spot between personal and professional is crucial. If you want to learn more about personal branding, check out my other Skill-share class, my seven-day personal branding challenge. This is where we build your personal brand from ground up in seven days. If you want to learn more about that, check that out on my profile. Social media marketing is not only about showcasing your personality, it's also about providing value. Your personal brand has to find the sweet spot between personal, your personal story, identity and passion, and professional, your professional experiences, qualifications, and professional opinions. If you are too personal and neglect the professional, people will only connect with you on a human level. That means they will never be able to buy from you or be able to consult you or hire you as an expert. They will also not take you seriously because you never talk about your expertise. If you are to professional, people will not be able to become loyal to you because we all are you looking for a human connection. Whether you are a personality, so a person who wants to create social media marketing, or whether you are representing a brand of a business, personal branding is crucial for you to include in your marketing. The reason here is, of course, as a personal brand creating social media presence, that is your core. That is the core of what you're doing out here. But if you're representing brand, it's still important to understand that you need to show the personalities behind the business. Whether you're representing a small coffee shop whose owner has a very unique character, or whether you are representing a financial consulting, people want to know who is behind the business. That's why, even if you're right now saying personal branding is not really something that I'm looking for in social remarketing, please make sure that you look at those tips and you try to apply them, whether that is building a personal brand of the owner of the business you are marketing or of yourself as the representative of the business or the employees of the business. Because whether your goal is to attract new audiences, consumers, clients, or even employees, they want to know who is behind the brand, who they can connect with on a human level. Let's talk about business branding. Most of businesses using social media marketing are making this mistake. All the persons on social media are sales and discounts and new offers of what they are offering in their business. What brands are neglecting is the creation of relationships. The reason why so many businesses struggle with social media presence is because they put out content that's in their best interest and not in the audience's best interest. Audiences want something from you. They want to know that their time spent on your page or their following your page is worth it. It can be worth it by being educated, being entertained, getting some value out of it. Create content that educates and entertains instead of sales. Don't worry. We'll talk about the difference between exposure content and money making content because of course, social media marketing is there to also sell whatever you have to offer, whether that's your expertise or your business. But the most important part of this is you give value to get attention. Why should a business educate or entertain? The reason is because, number one, it shows character. Your business is competing with a million other businesses that are in the same industry and probably offer the same product with just various small differences in product quality, but what other businesses cannot compete with is character, identity, personality. The second part is, even if you educate your audiences and you say, well, why should I educate? That's exactly what I offer. Why should I give free financial advice if I'm actually a financial consultant who get money from the content that I've put out for free? People wouldn't buy from me if they get free content online anyways. Wrong. You educating your consumers is actually giving them a taste of what you offer, a taste of what your business can give them, and it also shows them that you are the expert without telling them I'm the expert. You're proving them that you are the best for them without making it a sales pitch. For this part of the project, you need to decide, do you want to use social media to build your personal brand or your business brand. It's easier if you decide for one. For my project, I will focus more on my business brand because I've used social media a lot to grow my personal brand, so I want to focus on a specific product in my business. It's one of my favorite product and its Brand Academy. Brand Academy is a women only community membership, where women learn how to build and monetize their personal brand so they can start making money from their talents. What I will focus on in this project is create social media content that drives people to Brand Academy. When you've chosen what you want to focus on your personal brand or your business brand, let's get to the next lesson, exposure versus money making content. 4. Exposure Vs Money Making: Welcome to the second part, Exposure Versus Money Making Content. This is not where we go into the depths of what content you should create, but I just want you to understand the two major content archetypes. Exposure content is about showing your personality, your purpose, your vision, your character. Whether your personal brand or a business brand, we covered this before, even a brand and a business has a character. Here's all about relationship building. It's about creating trust. It's about creating a community with your audience. I know this sounds a bit, but you need to understand that your audience is not just a spectator, they are your community. They tell you what do they want to see from you? What do they like about you? What questions do they have for you? They tell you what they love about you. They tell their friends about you. Not because you're selling and showing them discounts and any offers you have and cool new products, it's because you have a character that they can personally relate to. Exposure content is any type of content that creates a relationship and a connection. Now, money making content is all about making money. It's about conversion, expertise, and showing that you are the best option for them. Whether you are a personal brand, showing your expertise, and why you're the best consultant, or the best stylist, or the best skincare expert. Or whether you are a business, and showing them that you are the best coffee shop in town, you are the best provider of skincare products, whatever industry you're in, this is all about conversion. Again, it's not about just this showing discounts, and sharing codes that people can apply to your website. It's about showing cool new products or innovations. It's about telling what secrets you have in your products, and what makes them so special. Here it's all about applying the 80-20 rule. In the beginning, 80 percent of your content should be exposure content, because you want to create a connection. You want to have an audience. You want to build an audience first. That relationship has to be strong before you can sell them. Twenty percent is money making content. A lot of people make the mistake that they go 100 or 100. They either only go exposure, and only share exciting, funny relationship building content, but they neglect money making and conversion. Social media marketing is not social media marketing if you're not marketing anything. Or the other point is they go 100 percent conversion, and just talk about the products, and why it's so cool, and why they should buy, and what menu they have, and what's new on the agenda, and they neglect building relationships. This is like cold calling someone to sell them something that they haven't even heard your name before. It just doesn't work. Play the 80-20 rule, 80 percent in the beginning, 80 percent of your content should be exposure content, 20 percent should be money making content. Over the time and over the course of your career, and your business, and social media presence, you can shift it towards a more 70-30 or even 60-40 percentage. Still most of your content should be exposure focus content, but even if you're looking for money making content, it can still have an exposure angle. We will go through this later again, but even if you have a cool product campaign that you're launching, it can still have character, it can still entertain, it can be fun. That is where you will be using fun and exciting platforms like TikTok, YouTube, podcasts, whatever platforms you're looking for, you can take advantage of using that personality and character building and relationship building aspect, to still sell things. But wherever content you're creating, always ask yourself, is this content exposure content, or money making content? If it's neither nor, you probably shouldn't post it, and you probably should not waste your time creating the content, because your content is not for you, but it's for your audience. It's for either connecting, or converting your audience. By the way, if you're building a personal brand and you want to market something with social media and you're saying, I don't even have a product to sell, it's fine. Whatever your money making is, or a conversion part of your personal brand, could also be converting viewers into followers or subscribers. It doesn't mean you have to sell a product to your audience, but it could be that you're making money in some other way. For instance, if you're using social media marketing to advance your personal brand, your money making content could be content that would attract people who want to hire you as a speaker, as a consultant, or even a full-time job. Whatever that money making content is, it has to do with conversion. Whatever content you're thinking about, don't just think about random content, always think, is this exposure relationship building content, or is this money making conversion content? In this part of the project, there is no reel to do. I just want you to brainstorm some exposure and some money making content that you could think of. Think about, what have you created so far on social media. For me, I've created a lot of exposure content, and I've never really focused on money making content. I'm going to figure out some ideas of money making content that could work to drive people to brand academy. That because I'm also promoting a product, I don't want it to be too salesy, so I'm going to brainstorm some topics that are more focused on exposure and engagement. When you're done with that, let's go to the next lesson, the rules of social media. 5. Rules Of Social Media: Let's talk about the rules of social media. There are three underlying rules that you need to understand about social media before we get into the crux of platforms and content creation. Number 1. It's all about testing. There's a cycle of test, learn that you have to go through overtime. I want to cover this now. Because looking at social media marketing courses, people always tell you the ideal format of creating content. Honestly, they are outdated the second they are posted. Because social media algorithms and platforms change over time. Audience behaviors and interests change as well, and you need to keep testing and learning. But there are specific rules of testing and learning that will stay with you, and these are the ones that we will learn today. The test, learn phase is all about your audience, the platform, algorithms, and trends. We always hear about the algorithms of social media and how they are ever changing and ever adapting, and they are just not fair, and they don't help new creators. Algorithms don't have a personality. They don't want you to fail or succeed, they just follow the numbers. It's important to keep updated with algorithms, but also don't take them too seriously, because social media is all about, again, creating relationships. If you have a strong connection and relationship with your community and audience, the algorithm is not too important. Look at algorithms like changing weather,. You need to adapt to the weather that is outside. Whether you'd like to wear a dress or a hoodie or not, you need to adapt to what is there. That doesn't mean you need to throw out your entire content strategy as soon as the algorithm has a change, but you use to understand where is the sweet spot between understanding the technological aspects in the data and understanding what you can offer within that. We will talk about the identity of each platform today and how they attract audiences and for which audiences they were creating in the first place. However, algorithms will change over time and you will have to adapt to those. People who tell you seven-second videos are the best videos for Instagram, are just behind the trend because in a week that algorithm aspect can change. It's all about testing and learning. How you can look at it is, in monthly or by monthly segments. Every month, you look at the algorithm changes and see where can your type of content fits in and how can you take advantage of the change of the data behind the platform. But the test, learn rule is also about understanding your audience and what they want to see from you and from brands like you. Trends that we have seen in the past years and are going to keep rising are the following; authenticity and identity, vision and purpose. With purpose, we both talk about inclusivity, sustainability, and making the world a better place, and community and relationship building. The next rule is finding your sweet spot. Many times social media marketing consultants tell you, these are the formats and these other rules you need to follow to make your brand stand out. However, social media is incredibly individual to who you are, what your character is, and what you want to achieve. That means your sweet spot is not what people tell you, it is what is best for you; your character, your business or brand's vision and identity, and what you feel comfortable creating. It is both personality-driven and audience-guided. Your content has to do both with your personality, what do you feel most comfortable expressing and how do you feel most comfortable expressing yourself? Audience guided. How do they consume content? How do they connect with brands? What do they want to see? Understand your audience and where they live. This is specifically important before we go into the platforms to understand, if you are in a specific industry and your audience is in a specific industry or are interested in a specific industry, they will live in the platform that best puts that industry in the spotlight. When you look at fashion and design, you will have platforms like Pinterest and Instagram. If you look at education and consulting, you'll have platforms like podcasts, Google, YouTube, or even TikTok. If you're in the entertainment space, of course, you have platforms like TikTok, Instagram. The tech space is heavily concentrated in platforms like Twitter. Even though you are not excited about Twitter but you are in the tech space, you need to explore Twitter as a platform, because that's just where your audience lives. You can't neglect were your consumers are. But you also shouldn't be only driven by where consumers are and neglect what you feel most comfortable creating. There's always a sweet spot between what your audience wants and what fits to you and your personality. Let's say you're not a writer, that your audience is on Twitter or platforms like LinkedIn blogs or your website blog, you can still create a podcast or a video format, something that feels a bit more natural to you and turn that into an article. There are tools out there that make it super easy and you don't have to compromise your personality in order to fit to your audience. But you should also not neglect where your audience is for the sake of driving your personality for it. The third rule is, of course, SEO. Some of you might already know what it is, some of you have heard of it, and it sounds super technical. Every easy way of explaining SEO is, how do people find you? SEO stands for the term search engine optimization, and a search engine as a platform like Google or even YouTube where people search for things. Just think about it as a how-to character. Whatever you are looking for; how to make a chocolate pie or how to make my own taxes. You will find answers on platforms like Google, even TikTok, Instagram, all the social media platforms, and YouTube. We will get into SEO when we talk about Google and YouTube, a lot of people do not understand that YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world. But as you might know, YouTube is used as YouTube University. People don't really google anymore, they YouTube it because people want to see a video version of how to do things. But the easy way of understanding what SEO is and understanding the rules of SEO is always think, how do people find me? Whether you are a local business and they will actually need to find you on maps, or you are a consultant, or you are a personality, an influencer, a model. You need to know where and how people find you. That stands from where and how people search for you, for the people like you, for your expertise, for your products, for your services. We will get into keywords a little bit later on, but keywords are basically just small words that people use when they search for things where you want to use those keywords, so you come up when people search for things. An easy example on a platform like LinkedIn, I can see that the keyword that I'm most searched for is brand strategist and keynote speaker, because they have those keywords in my profile. People who look for, I'm looking for a keynote speaker, will see my profile. That is a big rule that you need to understand around social media marketing. SEO is how people find you out of nothing. Now the three rules, test, learn, finding the sweet spot between audience and personality, and SEO optimization. We will learn these and apply these rules to all the platforms now. But first, let's talk about all the platforms that we're talking about today. For this part of your project, already think about the platforms that you want to be on and think about how you have used keywords so far to be discovered. Think about which platforms are most likely to attract clients or followers to you because they're already optimized. Those are the platforms you might want to focus on. For me, that is Instagram and LinkedIn because I know that if I want to drive traffic to Brand Academy, I know that on Instagram and LinkedIn, I will find my audience quite quickly. But if you're unsure which platforms to choose yet, let's get to the next lesson; social media platforms. 6. Content: Welcome to part 5. Here is all about content, content marketing. Content is any information produced for your audience. Could be educational, entertaining. We will talk about all of this later, but it's specifically can be produced in various forms and tools. It could be audio media, it could be visual, videos, images, infographics, it could be written, but the big question is, what content can you create? Whether you are looking for a personal brand or your business brand, understanding your content formats and content styles is incredibly important. Here's my number one tip for you. Pick your content themes. The biggest brands out there know exactly what themes they want to be known for. Content should not only be a niche topic. Like everyone tells you, you should only talk about one thing. No, you can have different pillars and themes. Because your brand is not one-dimensional and because you as a person are not one-dimensional, pick the three themes that people can know you for and relate to you that encompass the identity you want to bring to them as a business or as a person. Picking your themes is all about understanding what do you want to be known for, what is the image you want people to have stuck in their mind when they think about you. Let's say you are a beauty expert or a beauty business, both of those are relevant here, but the problem is you don't only want to talk about beauty, you want to talk about the purpose behind why you created your business, which was to empower women to be themselves, and also to create a beauty routine that doesn't harm the environment. Your three themes could be skincare, sustainability, and women empowerment. Now, any type of content that you create, whether that is an infographic or you create a video about your skin care routine, those should at least play into one of these themes, either skincare, woman empowerment, or sustainability. It can have an angle of those themes. If your content does not have any angle of those three themes, you should think twice whether you should post that piece of content or even created in the first place. The next step is to pick your content style. You've probably heard of these. It could be educational, entertaining, inspirational, and motivational. Understand what is your content style and you don't have to double down on one and only do that. You can have a mixture of all of these. That's about each one and what it means to you and your content. Educational. Educate your audience in a way that it will be excited to hear more and learn more from you. It could be frequently asked questions that your clients always ask you or even your friends, struggles, common mistakes. Educate your audience from your level of expertise. While content that entertains relates to people's emotions, content that educates relates to their rationality and their understanding that you are the best in the industry, you are the person or the business to listen to. Shareability is key when it comes to creating content that educates. If someone is listening or watching your content and learns from it, they will have the urge to share it with their friends, families, their own audience. Create content that educates where people want to share their new found knowledge with their own network. The next content style is inspirational and motivational. Those are obviously two different things, but they are very closely related to it. I'm going to bring them all into one bucket just so you can better understand and relate to them. Inspiration doesn't have to necessarily be a quote on a picture. Inspiration and motivation can come through understanding your purpose and what positive effect you want to have on people's lives or the world in general. The best inspiration can come from testimonials, people that have worked with you, or even your own story of failure or success, any struggles you've been going through yourself and how you came out at the end or any struggles your industry has been going through and your business was the solution to it. Don't fall into the trap of only figuring out how to create a motivational Monday post, but really understand what daily inspiration and motivation you can bring to people through your brand values. The next content style is entertaining. Company that entertains, it's funny, is super easily shareable, and it turns a company that is cool into, oh, that company is full of people that I can relate to. Content that you share on social media through your marketing that is entertaining, doesn't necessarily mean it makes you look weak, or it makes you look normal or common. It makes you look relatable. People who relate to business buy from a business. In your personal brand, of course, entertaining, funny things that show your character and your identity and your quirks make people like you more. They make people want to be more loyal to you. This aspect of relating to a business or brand and thinking they are just like me turns random visitors into true loyal followers and potential customers because you're building trust by connecting to them on a human level. Entertaining content could be everyday funny things that happen in your business or in your life and you just share those in a fun way on a video format or a small snippet. Here are examples of entertaining content that you can find on TikTok, for instance. When you look for barista, you will find Morgan Eckroth. She creates a lot of everyday scenarios of how her life is as a barista and she makes them into little skits. They're quite cute because their everyday scenarios that you can also relate with and people are excited to actually visit her in her coffee shop and find her in person and get her coffee art personally. Another example is actually a business brand. It's called Oilshore and it's managed by one of their employees. She went viral because she showed all the funny sign off emails of gen Z workers who work at the company. Then of course, there are also trends that you can be part of. Here's an example of a small candle shop that has used a trending sound in order to promote their products. As you can see, even if you are a business or an entrepreneur, it's quite easy to create entertaining content around what you do. The next content format you need to think about is content length. There are three different content lengths that you can pick from. Long-form content, short-form content, and micro-content. Long-form content, you can see those on platforms like podcasts and YouTube, as well as blogs on Google or your website, where you create a content format that is 10 to 30 to 40, even an hour long, or blogs that can be up to 10,000 words long. Long-form content shows greater authority because you're actually able to speak about an expert and niche topic for a very long time. It drives traffic and improves SEO because the more you ride or the more you speak, the more keywords you will naturally use, and the more people will find you through search. If you take the time to create a piece of content that is 10 times longer than usual people create content for, that will show authority and it will drive customers to you because they understand you are an expert, you know what you're talking about and you're the key figure to follow in that niche and expertise. A long-form content doesn't only have to be expert content, it can also be content that you have opinions about and you go really deep into what you've experienced in that field and how it makes you feel and how you came out of it. Long-form content and is one of the important pillars of repurposing, we will talk about that afterwards, because it helps you to cut down that long piece of content into smaller pieces and put them on different social media platforms. Most social media platforms, long-form content in video format or audio format is already more than five minutes long. But as we talked about, it can also be up to one hour, one and a half hours, whatever suits your goals and your content step. The next format is short-form content. Short-form content is one minute to five minutes long. Usually, when we talk about a written format, it's about 1,000 words, 1,200 words. Anything that is under a 1,000 words is already considered short-form content, as well as a video audio format, anything under five minutes, so from one minutes to five minutes. Blogs don't necessarily have to be a long-form content, they can also be short-form content. There's an example of Seth Godin who's created a daily blog that is 100-500 words long only. Short-form content could be Twitter threads, Instagram swipe throughs, Instagram videos, could be a LinkedIn post, or even a video that is up to five minutes long. Now we go to micro content. Micro content is any short-form content that they can be quickly consumed by audience. It's usually under one minute long. It could be a tweet, it could be a quote, it could be a reel or TikTok. You also have micro content on YouTube where you have videos, short-form content that is under a minute long, content that is easily shareable, easily consumable in very big amounts and very fast. Ideally, micro content is under 30 seconds long, so it can really truly be consumed in a super-fast way. The next part is to understand your audience. We have different types of audience that you can group into different mindsets or ways of seeing the world. Any type of content that you create should at least cater to one part of these audiences. Here it's all about personality. Who do you want to attract and who do you not want to attract? Let's get back to the example of a skincare expert. Your three consumer segments could be skincare starters, beauty professionals, sustainability activists, and of course, not every single person can be categorized specifically, but they are part of one of those consumer segments. Next is content feelings. Now, not that your content has feelings, but the feelings that your audience has when they see you and see your content. What do you want people to feel when they come to your page? This will have an effect in how you pick your images, design, colors, expressions. In the example of a skincare expert, that could be, you want them to feel fresh, organic, accepted. Fresh could be represented by lemons on a picture, or by ice, or by bright color that you use in your content. Organic could be you use natural ingredients or you give sustainability tips. Accepted could be you show women without their makeup or you talk about body positivity and skincare issues. Any self-love content will make people feel accepted. Understand, if you post a content, how does it make people feel? Does it make people feel one of those feelings that I want them to feel when they come to my page. 7. Repurposing: The next content strategy is the repurposing strategy. This is one of the most important strategies for content creators who want to create long-form content, but they're struggling to create social media content on the site, on top of it. A repurposing strategy is basically visualized through a pyramid or even a flower arrangement. It's basic when you take one piece of long-form content and you structure it out and split it up into a bunch of different short-form content tools and push it to the platforms where they will work. Well, let me explain. The piece of long-form content that you start from could be one long-form video or blog, conversation, audio show, could be a podcast from which you will make the content. Let's say you have a podcast episode that is 40 minutes long, or you have a Q&A show, a video interview, or a speaking engagement that you gave and you have the audio recording from it. Let's say you take that podcast 40 minutes long and you repurpose it into short-form and micro content. You take out the most exciting and interesting parts of that podcast or show. You take those snippets out and see on which platforms will they work. You can take a quote that you took and put it on Twitter. You can take a 1, 2, 3 tips that you gave in the podcast and create a short video from it. You can take a controversial statement or a discussion piece and create a TikTok from it. Create short form content pieces from that one, long-form content and spread it out into different tools and formats, articles, images, quotes, mashups. You can even just take the audio file and turn it into a blog. Last step is social media distribution. You have the format with the idea in mind on what platforms it will work and then you will put it out, push it out to those platforms. You can either drive traffic to that original long-form piece or you just use it as content that will sustain you overtime on these social media platforms. One podcast can go on Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, even Pinterest, can go at Snapchat, emails, or website, wherever you want to repurpose it to. The idea and the advantage of repurposing your content is that you only create it once and you take content from that to feed it to different social media platforms. You don't have to come up with original content every single time. Let's get to the next part, designing your content. Here is all about understanding your identity. What feelings do you want to invoke in people? Here's a great example of how you can do that. Content design platforms that I will highly recommend you exploring is of course, Canva for any visual content, Pinterest for really coming up with ideas and creating an inspiration board of your colors and themes and the type of pictures you want to create, InShot for any video footage that you quickly have on your phone and just want to push out to social media channel, Snapshot and Lightroom for image editing and color grading, Chloro for video color grading, and DaVinci Resolve for video editing on your laptop. It's basically like Adobe or Final Cut Pro, but for free. Now we're done with content and we'll go to the branding strategies that big brands use that you can use in your personal brand and your business brand as well. In this part of the project, it's all about creating your content. Think about what content, topics, and formats can you use to engage your audience? For me, I will create content around the mindset of the women who are inside Brand Academy. Instead of just talking about these are the exciting things that you learn inside of Brand Academy, I will prepare people to be in the right mindset. That has to do with confidence, that has to do with having a growth mindset, working on your career and your personal brand. In order to engage with people, I will have a call to action at the end of my videos, where I will ask people to comment a word underneath so I can start a conversation with them. I've come up with 10 micro videos. Videos that are under one minute long. Most of them are under 20 seconds long. I kept them very simple, just straight up talking to the camera with captions underneath. I posted them both on Instagram and on LinkedIn. If you're done brainstorming and creating your content, Let's go to the next lesson, social media strategies, the biggest brands in the world use. 8. Platforms : Welcome to part 4 and here it's all about platforms. Which platforms are the best for you and what kind of platforms are the ones where you can check the right audience, create the great content, and really expand your marketing potential. I will talk about a lot of platforms here and you can choose which platforms are best for you given the type of audience you can find there and the type of content you can create there. As I mentioned before, we will start with Google, which both includes Google and YouTube, mostly around search engine and search engine optimization and how you can use those as long form content platforms. Then we will go into Meta, which has both Instagram and Facebook as well as TikTok, Twitter, LinkedIn, Podcasts, and Pinterest. 9. Google + Youtube: Let's start with Google. As we mentioned before, Google is a search engine, which means just think about content that is all about how to, how to do this, how to find this, where to find this. Google is a perfect platform for businesses, business who want to create social media marketing because this is where we find you. The type of audience that you find on Google is everyone. Everyone is using Google as a search engine. There's really not one type of audience that you find on Google other than on different platforms like TikTok or Instagram, where you have a specific audience you could target. Google is really your audience is everyone and the idea of it is to be searchable, and as we know, its search platform, which means you need to be able to be found. We talked about the difference between personal branding and business branding before. Google is important for both. Just think about a personal brand, the first thing we do when we meet someone is to Google their name. What comes up when I Google your name? What comes up when a specific person, your audience, or a potential employer Googles your name? What will they find? For businesses, it's specifically important for businesses that are location-specific or have products and services, because the Number 1 thing that we look for in businesses is do you have a professional website and are you on Google Maps? This is specifically for businesses that are location-dependent like coffee shops, restaurants, or even driving schools. Content that you should specifically look out for when you want to be included into Google Maps if you are location-specific company is Google reviews. The number 1 thing that we look for when we look for a business is location-dependent, is what do people think about it? What do people think about your coffee shop, your driving school, your hotel? As we said before, here, SEO is crucial. The type of content we're looking for on Google is specifically article related because the more written content you have, the more you can optimize it for SEO. The more keywords you can put in there, the more phrases that people actually look for so there's more likelihood that people will actually stumble upon your article or your website, or even your blog or a conversation that you wrote out. The content that you look for on Google is written content. The next platform is YouTube. What a lot of people don't know is YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world. After Google, YouTube is the place where people search for things. The type of audience that you find on YouTube is very similar as the type of audience you find on Google because when you look for a question or you're searching for something, the number 1 thing that you will find on Google algorithm is a YouTube video. YouTube, you also have a very expanded audience, just think everyone, but also specifically people who are looking for long-form content or for how-to content, things that they can learn from. One of the things that needs to stick in your mind, YouTube is YouTube University. A lot of people learn a new skill or a new insight from YouTube. We don't go into articles and blogs anymore or we don't specifically buy courses, we go to YouTube first to find out things. YouTube formats that you think about is specifically long-form content. Now of course, YouTube has short-form content, Shorts, that are very similar to things that you know from TikTok or Reels on Instagram, but the most content that is pushed on YouTube is long-form content that is videos from 5-10 minutes or even 10-40 minutes. From personal, how-to formats, to interviews, to just conversations you have with a friend or around you have about a specific topic, YouTube is there for you to create content in video format that is longer. The sweet spot here on YouTube is to share your personal opinions mixed with your expert knowledge. Here's a really fun example how you can do that. There's a channel on YouTube called Dr. Lee, and it's basically two dermatologists who talk about the latest trends on different platforms and their personal expert knowledge as dermatologists. You can look for videos like dermatologists reacts to TikTok trends around skincare and you find crazy TikTok trends about skincare or using ice on your face or any hacks that seem crazy and those two dermatologists look at it and find a fun way to give their personal opinion about that trend or that skincare practice, but they also show their expert knowledge. That helps them as a social media marketing tool to show that they are experts and they are also fun and they have character and personality and drives insane traffic to their practice. That is, of course, a business brand example. For your personal brand, it can go from giving you a personal expertise around how-to. How to style modest fashion in winter. How to style modest fashion in summer, or if you are an expert in finance, how to do your own finances, how to do your own taxes, things that people usually search for. It can go to opinions and things that do you feel are fun to talk about, like the latest Netflix series and what you can learn about society and inclusion from this new series. It's really about, again, connecting your personal expertise and your personal interests and character into one and offering it as a format to your audience. Again, every time we think about this, we need to know what is exposure content and what is money-making content. What is content in your social media marketing strategy that actually drives conversion, or what is the content that simply creates a community? One of the things that I've personally experienced with my personal brand on YouTube is I've created a lot of how-to and expert knowledge content, but people are super excited to see me live my life so I started a blog, and that blog is much more successful than I thought it would be because it merges my personal life, the behind the scenes of how I create my courses, how I consult, how I live life, how I create content in places like Malaysia, and it merges it with my personal life, my character, my identity. You can really have a lot of fun finding different content formats on those two platforms, and specifically YouTube, of course, is a video platform. 10. Instagram + Facebook: Let's get to the next platform and that is meta, and we have both Facebook and Instagram. What audience can you find on Facebook? The majority of Facebook audiences are Gen X and millennials. Here's a platform that favors longer-form content, as well as community content in Facebook groups. Facebook, although it is gaining less and less important in new audience lists like Gen Z and Gen Alpha, facebook is still important for businesses because it's one of the places that also come up, aside from Google reviews and Google Maps in a business format where people see how many employees do you have? Where's your location, what is your phone number? What is your menu? For businesses a Facebook profile is almost a must because it also gives you a platform to have reviews and have people engage with your business on a more professional basis other than just comments under your Instagram videos or TikTok videos, the profile rules here on Facebook is really about explaining what a value you can bring to your audience. Your location, website, and other business information like your telephone number or your email address, and of course, SEO main keywords, the things that you want to be searched for. The content times that are working well on Facebook are mid to long-form content. Content that engages a conversation because Facebook is still a place where you can have a lot of conversations in the comments, as well as sharable content that is easily shared on another person's platform. Let's get to Instagram. Instagram really started out as a picture-sharing app and morphed more into an app that tries to do it all. But we still have to figure out how to use Instagram in the right way. Instagram audiences are mostly millennials as well as Gen Z. But you see much more Gen Z going over to TikTok and millennials taking over the platform off Instagram. Instagram has really morphed from a very aesthetic platform to anesthetic, entertaining quick platform. It is much more pushing short-form content and moved away from trying to be like YouTube to trying to be like TikTok. However, Instagram has still its own personality and type and it's mostly used by people who are sharing their content in terms of design content, arr content, and visual content in general, that merges both design personality and expertise. Instagram as a platform, is highly optimized for conversion. If you are a business there or even a personal brand who wants to tag your products or sell products, this is the platform to be. It has also moved much more into an SEO-optimized platform where can use keywords to be easily found by your ideal audience. Profile rules on Instagram is specifically understand the value that you bring and explain that in a short bio instead of explaining your personality like, I'm a mother, I'm an artist, understand what you bring to people so give a bit more context. If you are professional artist, what kind of art do you create, and for whom do you create it? Put that into your bio. Also makes sure that you insert a link, whether it's to your website or a platform that integrates different links or different resources that you want people to find in your profile. If your business, it's important to include your location either in your content or in your profile so people know where you are located and how they can find you. Content formats here are images swipe throughs, reels, which are short-form videos, as well as long-form videos and stories. 11. TikTok: Let's continue with TikTok. TikTok is one of these platforms where people are just super nervous to get on because they're not sure if the audience that they are searching is actually there and how to truly express themselves. But I want you to remember TikTok is a platform for authenticity and one of the very original analogies that I've heard that will stick in your mind and really help you figure out what content to create on the platform is that TikTok is the video format of Twitter. It's all about opinions, is all about being yourself. It's all about not caring what people might think of you. The type of audience that you find on TikTok is of course Gen Z, Gen Alpha. It's all about opinions, jumping on trends and music and sounds, and just being there to have fun, entertain yourself and your audience. Some of the rules is test, have fun, post multiple times a day so you understand where's your audience and they can get to know you and you can still take advantage of that organic flow that you find in the recent and first use of TikTok, and work with creators. TikTok is all about working with influencers and creators on the platform, whether they are micro, macro, or mega influencers, just work with creators that you find or work with your brand, with your business. If your personal brand collaborate with other creators on TikTok, if you are a business fan creators in your niche that have you as a type of audience or that fit to your lifestyle, mindset, and values that you want to portray with your business and work with them. One of the quick wins of always keeping up with trends on TikTok is to find your niche and to search in the search buffer for your niche, click "Most recent," the last three months, and then click on "Most liked videos." This way you can see what videos in your niche or in your industry are most engaged in the most recent weeks and months. You can see what kind of trends people are interested in and what movement happened in your industry. You don't want to look at too much bag because trends are all about right now, and you want to look at more slides so you can see the engagement and videos that have a high resonance with the audience that you're looking for. 12. Podcast: Let's jump to the next platform. Podcasting. What kind of audience can you find on a platform like podcast? Podcasts are really there to engage with high-income, high-value audiences and people that want to spend time with you. This time span with a brand or a person on a podcast way exceeds the time that people spend with your brand on any other social media platform. When you look at attention spans in other platforms, you can see people's attention spans from 10-20 seconds, sometimes 30. Of course, you can see some platforms where you have a higher attention span, up to 10 minutes and people are much more likely to watch YouTube videos, for instance, for 10 minutes, but podcasts extremely exceed that attention span. People are much more likely to spend 40 minutes to an hour with you listening to your podcast. Studies show that the more we spend time with a person whether it is watching them or listening to them, the more we become loyal because we are more familiar with them and we trust them more. This is an opportunity for you to not only engage an audience but to create loyal followers and to create a community and potential clients because clients need to have a pipeline of trust established with you and in a podcast, that trust is established much faster than on any social media platform. Podcasts are especially important for people and businesses that want to become an expert in their field. An industry and thought leader. It's also a great way to collaborate because you can easily interview someone, have a conversation, record it, and put it on your podcast. 13. Linkedin: Let's get to the next platform, LinkedIn. LinkedIn formerly was known as the platform where you just upload your CV, but it has really emerged into the most important professional networking platform. The type of audience you find there are of course professionals, industry experts, and also businesses. You will find potential employees, colleagues, collaborators, peers, but also potential employers, clients, people who want to hire you for speaking engagements. LinkedIn is a platform that is relatively slower than other platforms. If you see a trend on TikTok emerge, you will see it happen 2-3 months afterwards on LinkedIn. It's a really great platform to look at trends that happened and that blew up on other platforms and figure out a way how you can merge it into the LinkedIn platform and blow up yourself there. LinkedIn is there for long form content, text-based content, really talking about your personal experience, your personal identity, your personal stories, and merging that with your professional expertise and experiences. I have an entire YouTube series on how to optimize LinkedIn from creating your profile picture to understanding what content works there. Make sure you check that out, Era of how you use LinkedIn right. 14. Twitter: Let's come to Twitter, the next platform. Type of audience that you find on Twitter are niche audiences and experts, opinions and conversations. The most exciting content that works and helps people establish a social media presence on Twitter are Twitter threads for more in-depth conversations and knowledge and education. Links to articles or any link that go out of the platform. Twitter is one of the platforms that does not restrict you too much if you use external links. As well as engagement and retweet. Really creating a community online and engaging in conversations and discussions. 15. Pinterest: The next platform, Pinterest. Pinterest has always been just the more modern form of Tumblr but Pinterest is really a platform to convert. This is a serious conversion platform for your products, your business and brand, and articles and blogs. It's a great platform to push people to other social media platforms, to your website, and actually convert people. Because a high percentage of people are going to the platform with the intention to buy. This is something you will see on no other platform out there. Some of the things that you need to look out for are trending topics, specifically seasonality. Seasonality is many things like Christmas, summer. You will see summer hairstyles, skin care products for winter. You will see International Women's posts. Anything related to a trend in time, a trend in seasonality. One of the major points of Pinterest again, we talk about SEO are keywords. Keywords is how people find you on Pinterest. Because again, Pinterest is a search engine, but it's a search engine specifically for images and visual aspects; images, videos, swipe-throughs. 16. Platform To-Do: This part of the project, choose your two platforms that you want to focus on creating content on for this week and already think about how can you optimize your bio. How can you use better keywords to make people who come to your profile quickly understand who you are and what you do? In this part of the project, I will focus on making sure that I have my links for Brand Academy in my LinkedIn profile and in my Instagram profile so people can directly click and find out more about the women community. When you're done optimizing your two platform bios, let's get into the next lesson, content. 17. Proven Brand Strategies: Welcome to Social Media Marketing Strategy is a big brands use. You should also use, I work with some of the biggest brands in the industry and here's some of the unknown big strategies that they use in social media marketing that you can use as well for your personal brand and for your business brand. Number one, Innovative Campaigns. In a campaign, you invest in extraordinary amount of money, time, energy to get extraordinary results. Extraordinary doesn't mean you have to spend 1,000 bucks on your campaign. It just means you invest more than you usually do, which is organic, zero, and innovative campaign. You can spend up to like five bucks and still get results. An innovative campaign doesn't have to necessarily be related to money. It just has some mean you invest an extraordinary amount of energy, creativity time, into a piece of content that will gain you extraordinary results and that could be new audiences, a bigger amount of audience, a wider reach to your audience results in terms of conversion, people following you, people buying from you, more sales, bigger audience, reach a wider market. Those are all the intentions of creating an innovative campaign but the number one attention is to build your brand and to become known for something that you want to be known for. The biggest brands in the industry do not invest most of their money into product campaigns. Like many people think. Or I have a new product, I have a new skincare line, or I have a new gadgets. It's about brand campaigns and brand campaigns opposites of product campaigns have nothing to do with the usability or the innovation behind your product. It has everything to do with your brand purpose, vision and mindset and how would connect to your audience's purpose, vision and mindsets but let's go back a little and talk about different campaigns you can run. In a campaign, you use a specific period of time to double down on a topic that you want to be known for and different campaigns can look like this. Content campaigns, Brand campaigns, Product campaigns. Let's start with content campaigns. A content campaign is serious of content around a specific theme. That piece of content could be a video series, it could be a podcast or conversation series. I could be an image series. Examples here could be a seasonal campaign for Valentine's Day, International Women's Day and any content you want a crude behind that, for instance, an interview series with inspiring woman in the industry around the seasonal moment of International Women's Day. You run that campaign for a week or two. Every day or every second day, you post another video, another interview with a woman that talks about women empowerment, that talks about any type of content that has to do with your brand. Let's go back to the example of a skincare expert. It could be a series of a woman with different skin types and skin conditions and how skincare empowers them to be more of themselves. You run a six part series that you post on your YouTube, TikTok and Instagram and that is a campaign that you run and get them to engage with you in that special moment, we will talk about ads and investing money behind your campaigns in the next section. Here we just want to talk about the concept of running innovative campaigns. The next campaign type is a product campaign. and here it's all about showing the value of a new product or service, the value that people get from it. What makes it special? What can people learn from it? How can people benefited from it? How was the creation process of it and the technicalities and the innovation behind it, and why do people need it? Product campaigns are highly driven by social proof so not only talking about the exciting aspect of your product, but also using influences, creators or clients and customers to show how they benefited from that product. Now we come to brand campaigns. The most important part of innovative campaigns. He is all about the purpose, vision mindset that connects your brand to your audience, or in your personal brand that connects you to your audience. Think of the huge campaigns like, Think Big, Just Do It, Impossible is Nothing. Those were all brand campaigns. They did not talk about the innovative and technicality and the crazy usability of the iPhone or the Jordan, or the Superstar. They talked about the vision and purpose behind the brand and how it connects to a group of consumers that the brand wanted to attract. The second social media strategy that the big brands use that you should definitely take on is to be controversial and spark a discussion. Now, controversy can look different for different brands or people, but it's specifically is focused on trying to attract one consumer and target audience without the fear of driving another target audience away because that auditoriums is not really your target audience. Being controversial can look like having a very different opinion than the rest of the world. It can be speaking out about social or environmental or industry topics that people usually back up from. It a could be talking about taboo topics and shedding light on that but it specifically makes you the leader in the industry, but being different to the mass in your industry. Here's some examples. Two innovative and very controversial campaigns that I'm sure you've heard about is number one, Nike dream crazy, and number two, always run like a girl. Those campaigns have both reached a wide audience, but also sparked a lot of controversial discussions. Here's how you can use that in your industry. What is a popular opinion that everyone seems to have in your industry that you highly disagree with? What is an opinion that you have, other people might disagree with, that you can push a bit more to the controversial side and spark a discussion? The idea behind this is not to create a conflict or find ways to get hate comments just for the sake of it. The idea is to spark discussions and attract an audience that highly connects to you. Just because you share your opinion, just because you are bold enough to go against the grain, just because you decided to go full on your purpose without the fear of losing followers or losing credibility. It's about showing that your vision and values are more important than what are the industry or the audience expects from you. That type of authenticity is the key to becoming a leader on social media because even if people disagree, social media is not a nuance place, you don't need to be harsher or you don't need to start a conflict or discussion, you just create the piece and let people discuss with the comments, hate comments, also conscious engagement and most importantly, if you stand up for something your audience beliefs in, they stand up for you because they believe in you. For this part of the project, I want you to focus on brainstorming and creating an innovative campaign. It might sound very difficult, but it's quite straightforward. Every innovative campaign has to do with storytelling. Your story needs the beginning, middle, and end. Here's what I'm trying to do with brand academy. I'm going to look at all the big brands that I enjoy and I like and I admire, and I'm going to see what parts of their content can I use for my own campaign? One of the things that I want to use is I want to show a transformation. I created a video that shows the transformation from a stagnant mindset to a growth mindset. Someone who just lives their life and let's just things happen versus someone who actually acts upon her dreams. The innovative campaign frames brand academy as a way to help them go from the stagnation to the growth. Instead of having to do it all by yourself, you can do it through a community of supportive women. I just shot the video in my living room and in my studio and then I tried to cut it down in DaVinci Resolve and add some captions as well. Don't overthink this. Most of the time, innovative campaigns come when you're in a creative state instead of trying to overthink how it should look, try to just go with the flow. Remember, done is better than perfect and when you have outlined and created your innovative campaign, let's go to the next lesson, Analytics and Ads. 18. Analytics & Ads: Welcome to analytics and ads. This is the part of the course, but we'll go into the depths of reaching a wider audience by using data analytics and insights to understand what works best for them and where can you reach them? How can you reach them best? How can you optimize your impact? For many years, the idea of organic traffic and organic growth has become a way of saying anything that is not organic is fake. Analytics and ads have nothing to do with faking it or buying followers. They have everything to do with you believing in the potential of your brand and investing in widening go reach because you know your audience is out there. They just have to find you. You can grow organically and you can take the next 10-20 years to build a brand from scratch and just not engage in any ads. But why would you do that if you know that your brand and you believe in your brand's potential? Why would you not help other audiences and your consumers to find you? Has really help you to understand where is your audience? Where can you invest more time and energy and focus into? Then how can you reach that audience in a meaningful way? We will go through ads and analytics on different platforms and I we'll walk you through the basics. However, this is not a masterclass on analytics and ads. I will walk you through everything that is basic and try to give you the best resources that I have used myself as a non data analytical person that has helped me tremendously to optimize the world's biggest brands campaigns. Let's get into it. Welcome to the beginner's guide to ads and analytics. First, let's talk about analytics. Analytics is the process of gathering and analyzing your data to make better decisions. For social media, you want to gather data on your followers, including demographics, engagement rates, and reach. You will find things like location, cities, what type of day they're mostly active on, and what content they engage with most. To do this, you'll need to set up analytics tool, like Google Analytics, or go to your social media platform like Instagram and go into your insights. Once you have the data, you can use it to optimize your content and make more informed decisions. For instance, a lot of my content on social media and a lot of my products like brand academy are geared to women because 96% of my followers on Instagram are women. However, on a platform like LinkedIn, it's much more diverse. People from all over the world and a lot of men also are following my content. This helps me to analyze what content could resonate on which platform. Now, let's move on to ads. Social media ads are a great way to increase and reach an engagement. Here's how to run ads on the three main social media platforms. On Google, to run ads on Google, you'll need to create Google Ads account. From there you can choose your ad types, set your target audience and post the ad creative. Ads that are run on Google are mostly connected to people that are actually searching on Google for what I want them to find. For instance, I'm a keynote speaker and a lot of my clients come through word of mouth or through a Google search. While I use social media like LinkedIn to also attract speaking engagements, a Google ad can also be very helpful. What I focus on our keywords that people search, the location that I want to be seen as as a keynote speaker. As I'm currently living in Germany, I want to do keynote speaking in Germany or around Germany. Then I put keywords in that can help me stand out from my competition, such as female keynote speaker or purpose-driven keynote speaker, or other keywords that people are searching for. Facebook. To run ads on Facebook, you'll need to create a Facebook ads manager account. From there you can choose your ad objective, set your target audience, and create your ad creative. Next, Instagram. To run ads on Instagram, you'll need to connect your Instagram account to your Facebook manager account. Once connected, you can choose your ad objectives that your target audience and create your ad creative. On Instagram and Facebook, my biggest advice would be go to a piece of content that already works very well organically, so that has high performance organically, that has high engagement, or has attracted a lot of followers, at least more than the average amount of followers, and then click on boost post and start creating a new ad. Choose the objective of awareness and the beginning so more people can see your content before you actually get into ad objectives like conversion or website clicks. Choose the target audience and location that you already know works well for these posts, and create a target group that you can use over and over again for common interests posts. For me, for instance, here you can see a day in a life where I worked with a brand like Adidas, and it shows me as a consultant and keynote speaker. My channel, for example, I saw a video that I posted, is a day in a life flock of me working with Adidas as a brand consultant. I could easily run an ad behind this because it already worked very well organically. I know that if I choose the right audience, it could also blow up with an ad. The same video also blew up organically on LinkedIn, it had over a million impressions. I know that if I put a little bit of money behind it, it can already have a big result and I can attract more people and engagement and traffic to my social media platform. Remember, Instagram and Facebook is all about creative content that you know already works well for your target audience, and Google is all about keywords which are performing and which aren't. What words do they use for searching you, use those also in your ad. Here's a big note. It's not about a big budget and a small period of time, it's about a small budget over a long period of time. Even if you only use $1 a day on Instagram over two weeks or one month, that can help you get better results than throwing out your budget all at one. This way, you can get to know your audience and adjust your ad as you go along and learn, test and learn is the key. Don't be afraid to experiment with different ad formats, targeting options and messaging. Start small, check the results and make adjustment based on what you learn. With patients and persistence and really a willingness to get to know your audience, you can create ads that drive results and help you achieve your personal brand or your business goals. In this part of the project, I want you to run an ad behind a very well-performing post on your channel or behind your innovative campaign. I chose my innovative campaign because I think it can resonate with a wider audience other than just my followers. What you want to do is you want to start boosting a post or running the ad. You want to choose your audience to understanding where they live, how old they are, what interests they have, and the type of audience that I believe will be attracted to the content. Then I want you to run a small amount of money as an ad behind it for one or two weeks. You also want to make sure that you organically share this content on your own channels so that when people interact with the ad, they can already find organic engagement on there. Of course, when the engagement comes in, make sure you interact with your new followers, interact with your new commentaries. Don't be afraid to test and try if you don't see anyone coming in after four days, you can change your audience and maybe change the location or add a bit more interests and you can adjust from there. When you're done with that, we'll get to the next lesson; social media planning. 19. Calendar: Welcome to the last part of this masterclass, and here it's all about optimization and automation with our social media planning. Let's talk about content batching and planning. Content batching is when you group type of task together so you can get into the flow of the task and produce content in order to use that later on and plan that within your week, your month, or your year. Batching content helps you to get into the flow of the task of creating content and it helps you save time. Time that you would usually use setting up your equipment, filming your story or your content, then taking away the equipment, editing. That all for one piece of content, better group all of these tasks together, set it up once, create your content, create 10 pieces of content, 20 pieces of content, and then edit them all in one row, and you have your content planned out for the entire month or even quarter. Batching and planning also helps you to plan the year ahead in terms of taking the best out of trends and seasonalities. Personal brands, it's a great platform to also plan out your collaborations, and for business brands, it's a great way to understanding what moments do you want to work with, what influencers and creators. Here's how you can batch an entire month of content in three days. I have a full video on how to batch content and how to create one month of social media content in three days on my YouTube channel. Make sure that you go there and check that out and then you can come back to the class. Now let's get back into the mindset of planning. Whatever content you create, a lot of times we create content on the go and you feel like you need that as a social media platform just because you need content for today. The important part is that you always look at your checklist. We talked about this before, is it money-making content? Is it explorer or content? Does it work with my themes? Does it work with my audience, with my style? Here's the checklist you need to look at. Does it contribute to my objective? Is it exposure content or money-making content? What is the impact that it will contribute? Does it make a big difference in the product or the expertise that I want to be known for? If those two are no, you shouldn't post. Let's talk about automations. Automations is a way to plan your social media and your engagement with your consumers without having to be on your phone 24/7. Automations and auto replies. Platforms like Instagram, Facebook, all have the version of auto replies where you can send someone a message as soon as they follow or as soon as they ask you a question, and you basically tell them a specific wording, whether that is, welcome to the page. This is what you can expect from us. Whether that is, if you're looking for the FAQs, here they are. Or whether that is, we have a week off because we are on holiday, so you will hear from us back next week. Whatever auto replies there is, you should definitely use them whether you have a business or personal brand. The next is FAQs. Platforms like Instagram also have FAQs where people ask questions or they can pick from a row of questions and you have a pre-edited and pre-created answer for them. That helps really well in terms of, where is their product? How much does it cost? How can I become a client to you? Do you offer speaking engagements? When is that product back in stock? All those FAQs, you can automate them, so you don't have to answer everyone's question every time. The next are review automations. This is specifically important for businesses and local businesses. Let's say you are a gym and you want people to review your gym on Google. Every time they come to your gym, they get a free water in return for a Google review. That is an automation you can set up with your in store employees and they can automate any content and traffic that will then come over Google to your page, to your business. For this part of the project, I want you to create a content calendar for at least the next month. You can use that calendar whether you put that on your email address, or your laptop, or you can write it down on a piece of paper. For me, what I and my team use, we use Notion to plan out content. I like a platform like Notion because it gives you the possibility to move around things, to put in international days like International Women's Day or Earth Day, so I know exactly what comes up, and I can plan my content ahead. I can already put that content inside the calendars on the day that I post I just have to copy paste and put it out. Of course, if you want to go one step further, you can schedule your content. That's what I do with apps like Buffer, or Hootsuite, or now you can actually also schedule your content inside apps like Facebook, or Instagram, or YouTube. If you want to go the extra mile, also start to batch creating your content so you have content for the next month setup and you don't have to think about it every single day. When you're done with that, you're done with your project. Make sure that you share it on the project tab inside the Skillshare class so other people can follow your social media channels and engage with your content. Then we're already at the end of this class. I'm so proud of you. But I have one more thing to say. 20. Conclusion: Now, we came to the end of our masterclass. I'm so proud of you for going all the way with me and learning all those things and applying it into your class project. I'm excited to see your class projects in the links below. Make sure that you post them, that you share it with others so people can engage, they can also already start following. If you have any questions, please make sure that you send me a message, you DM me, follow me on social media, ask questions in the comments. This is a way for me to find out what else do you want to learn, how do you want me to update this course? You will always have access to the newest and freshest information. If you like this course and you learn from it and you got value from it, please review it and share it with someone that you think might benefit from it as well.