What is social media today and more... with Catherine Carrigan

Hello and welcome to Shedding the Bitch Radio, where you can discuss, debate, and get advice on how to discover and shed the bitches of fear, insecurity, self-doubt, and negative mindsets so you can realize your dreams and life purpose and create and accelerate the riches you want in life. Join us here live every Tuesday at noon Eastern and dialogue with us at 818-572-2910. You can also chat with us at blogtalkradio.com/sheddingthebitch or share your stories on our website at sheddingthebitch.com. Whatever the bitch is that's holding you back from living your life to the fullest, it's not worth giving up the riches in life that you deserve. So call in now and let Bernadette Boas know what's holding you back.

818-572-2910. Good day, good day, good day, everyone. How is everybody on this glorious day? And if I appear to be whispering, it's because I took you on the road with me. To a women's leadership conference here in Atlanta, Georgia, and I'm standing— sitting in the middle of an exhibit hall and just don't want to create too much disturbance. But that's commitment. That's how much I love my show and I love all of you, and I'm so glad that you're with us today because we have a great conversation with a returning guest, one of your favorites, and I'll introduce her in a second. More importantly, I just want to let you know the topic that we are going to be discussing because it comes up a lot. And we tend to take social media for granted. I know I certainly do, right, wrong, or indifferent. But yet at the same time it is changing so much. It is changing so fast. And it is really important that we stay on top of it because if we are going to spend as much time as we do, whether it is for our business, whether it is for our career, our job, or even for our personal life, we want to do it smart. We want to do it effectively. We want to create results from it. So our conversation today being all about social media, what it looks like today, what strategies and tactics and tips our expert wants to provide you, and what are the dos and don'ts. And we'll cover kind of a little bit of everything. And we're also— I just want to give you a heads up because you'll probably be surprised surprise. We are typically an hour show. Today we are going to make it very focused and tight in a 30-minute timeframe. And tight I mean we are going to really get down to the meat and the value that we want to provide you from the tips and advice that our guest has. So let's get into it, shall we?

All right, Kathryn Kerrigan became a social media guru while publishing 7 books.

As you can imagine. Her 2 recent books, What Is Social Media Today? Get Ready to Win the Game of Social Media, and What Is Social Media Today? Hashtags, Keywords, and You. Oh my! She'll show you how to use social media to blast your business to great success. Now one of the things that you are going to listen for, and the rich question I want you to be thinking about is, just what do you feel you need to do or need to learn today? What can we espouse on you, especially Kathryn? And then if that question is not answered, you can always reach out to Kathryn and/or myself on Chittin' the Bits Facebook or Twitter and make sure that you get that question answered. So I'm going to kick off by also please having you go to KathrynCarrigan.com. That's C-A-R-R-I-G-A-N, Kathryn Kargan. And she also has a website which you can directly about her social media, and that is whatissocialmediatoday.com, which is really easy. So welcome to the program, Kathryn.

Thanks so much, Bernadette, and thank you everybody out there for taking your time to listen.

Yeah, well, and it is such an important topic. And like I said, I think many of us take it for granted that, you know, yes, it's changing, and one day it's Twitter, the next day it's Instagram, and maybe it's a combination of all of that. But I think that it's really important for us to stay abreast of it. So let me ask you right off the top, is what has been, in your opinion and in your expertise, the biggest changes that we need to be aware of that we may not be in social media?

Okay.

All right.

Well, basically, I'm going to be talking about my top action steps steps that you can take to win what I call the game of social media. So first of all, a lot of people are under the impression that it doesn't do anything. I have seen so many people who have their own business who literally lost their business because they didn't learn how to play the game of social media. I, on the other hand, am thriving as a result of learning how to play the game of social media. So the top, the first thing you want to do is research your keywords. So what are keywords? These are long tail phrases that when you go into search engines like Google, like Bing, like YouTube, and people put in phrases to try and find you, you want to know what those are. Now if you don't know what your keywords are, believe me, you don't know what you are doing in social media. And if you haven't done the research to figure out what your keywords are, you still don't know what you are doing in social media. So what happens is one of the big mistakes people make, Bernadette, is they just start doing something. They get a Facebook page. They get a Facebook business page, or they are on Twitter, and they just start doing something. Now it is true that in order to play any game, to win any game, you have to start playing, but you need to You want to start by understanding what are people actually putting into the search engines when they go to find you. Now once you know your keywords, then you want to use your keywords to find hashtags. So hashtags are words or phrases with a pound sign in front of them. So from your keywords you want to create those killer hashtags that you can use throughout your social media platform to create what we call your digital social signature. So that whether people go to Facebook or Twitter or Google+ or Tumblr or Pinterest or Goodreads or LinkedIn, they know you. They know who you're known as. So for example, Bernadette, you've got Shed the Bitch. Well, that's you. You own that, and that's part of your branding. And it's part of your digital social strategy. Now the 3rd thing that you want to do is you want to start with a killer website that's so user-friendly that you can do it yourself. Now another mistake that I see people doing is, and we're all busy these days, and everybody's got their area of expertise, but many people make the mistake of thinking they can hire all of this job out. Now you want to be able to use your website even if you have a webmaster, even if you have people who work on it you want to be able to get in there and do it yourself is that everything changes so fast in social media and on the internet. So for example, I had a client I was working with one-on-one and I said, "You need to raise your rates." Well, he couldn't get in there and make the changes himself. He didn't even know how to get into his website. So in my opinion, knowing how to run your website is as critical in business today as having an excellent handle on your bookkeeping. So you want to make it user-friendly for you. Now the fourth thing is your website is the core of your social media strategy because the whole goal of your social media is to drive everybody back to your website. Now you can think of your website as property you own. And the social media sites, you can develop them, but they are still rented, meaning you can get shut down at any time or people can go away. So you want to create social media posts with Bitly links, those small little links that drive everybody back to your website. Now the 5th thing you want to do is you want to think about, they call it content marketing, but this is about creating content that people want to read. They want to watch it, and they like to look at it, and like to share. Now this could be blogs. It could be video. Personally, I do a combination of videos and blogs. Now a big mistake that people make in social media is they try and sell. And do not sell. If you sell, you are going to turn everybody off. I tell people, this would be like you went to a cocktail party and you walked around the room to each person that you met and said, "Buy my stuff." Well, pretty soon you would be a complete pariah. No one would want to talk to you. The minute you start selling, you lose. People don't like to be sold to. What you want to do is you want to create user-friendly content. You want to give away everything you know, because when you do that in a user-friendly way, you'll still have plenty of business because nobody can put it together the way you do. So for example, one company used their website and the social media, and what they did was They had on their website reviews about washing machines. Well, how unsexy is that, washing machines? Well, but sooner or later your washing machine breaks down. You got to buy a new one. Well, by putting in there like ratings from customers, then people knew what to do and which was the most user-friendly washing machines. They became known for that, for having that information, and developed an expertise for that. So you want to think about giving information away. Now the other thing that you want to do is think win-win. You cannot— Okay, wait.

Oh, Kathryn, Kathryn, before you go much further, before you go much further, and we'll come back to win-win, but I want to go back to the keywords, to hashtags. I will often get the question from people that people will have Facebook posts or Twitter posts, and it's just one big lump of hashtags, like 10, 20, 30 hashtags in their post. And you sit there and say, well, that's not really quality content. So how does one use the keywords and the hashtags, I understand, but how does one effectively use those in order to drive traffic to their website?

All right, good question. So first of all, you want to create content. This would be a blog, an article. An article is at least 500 words up to 2,500 words. If you want to be known for a particular topic, so for example, I write a lot about how to get out of pain. Well, I've written 2,500-word articles Google will consider you an expert if you write an article between 2,300 to 2,500 words on a particular topic. You want to create an article and/or a video that describes, explains, uplifts, enlightens people. The hashtags are just what you put on the social media to, so that you are found. It's like the library of social media. The Bit.ly link, the link to your article is what you want people to click on to go back to your website. But you don't just use hashtags. You don't just use hashtags. You create content that people can engage in and that drives people back to your website. Does that answer your question?

Okay, that's perfect. Okay, so now you can go back to— we talked about keywords, hashtags, killer websites, your draw to bitty links to get back to your website, creating great content, and then you were going on to the win-win.

Right. Now the thing to understand about social media is that it is social. So in old-timey advertising, you would simply broadcast. You would buy a billboard. You would put an ad in the newspaper. Paper. Social media, however, is interactive. Now, the more that you play the game with other people, the more you are going to win. So how do you do this? Let me give you an example. This morning I made a video with a friend of mine. So we regularly make videos together. We put them on her YouTube channel, my YouTube channel. I blog about it. I include the actual video in multiple places on my website. And by doing this, we build both of our audiences. Now, another way you play the game in a win-win way is by sharing other people's information. So for example, if I want to succeed on Twitter, one of the ways I go about doing that is I will go through new followers and simply share the information that they have posted that I feel might be relevant or useful to my followers. So the more that you play in a win-win way, the better off you are going to be. And the more you cross-promote, share, and like, the more successful for you will be. Now there is also a strategy—

Well, yeah, but keep that thought where you were going. So the question is, a lot of people do a lot of serving others in their social media. And yet I would say in the past 18 to 24 months 4 months, what I've heard is, "I don't get a lot of interaction. I don't get a lot of people. I mean, I get a lot of people who seem to view my content," because sometimes you can see that and whatnot. "But at the same time, I'm not getting that dialogue back and forth." And some people say, "Well, don't worry about that." And other people say, "No, you're failing if you don't get that interaction." So you're creating great content, You have the hashtags. You have the keywords. And yet, what do you tell people if they are just not getting the dialogue, so to speak?

Okay, so first of all, the measure of how successful you actually are in social media is how much interaction you get. People could look at how many followers you get, but the real key of success, the real benchmark is interaction. So there's a website called Klout, K-L-O-U-T.com, Klout.com, and you can go to Klout, you can log in and put in all the information and you can see how successful you are. I personally am in among the top 5% of internet marketers in the world, and part of this is engagement. So how do you engage? The first step is if you are not getting engagement, more than likely you are not engaging back. So sharing is one thing, but interacting, asking questions, actually responding. So again, it is like any conversation. People are going to talk back to you if you talk to them. So sharing and liking is part of it, but actually communicating, because we have to realize that you build your audience and you build your business one customer at a time. I'm an author, I build my readership one reader at a time. Now there's a particular strategy that I have used, that I have used to great success, because as I said, I'm among the top 5% in the world in internet marketing and I run a small business out of my home in Atlanta, Georgia. I have this kind of business everybody would love to have because I'm a medical intuitive and author. So the first thing that I do is when I write a blog, because I'm an author so it's easy for me to write, so I end up writing a lot. Although, as you're going to hear about in a minute, the wave of the future is actually video. So I'll just explain to you what I do. So the first thing I do when I write a blog, I'll hit publish and my article automatically gets posted to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Google+, and Path. If you have a WordPress site, there's a plugin that you can use that automatically blasts out to all your social media sites. It's very efficient to do that. Now once I do that, then I also post it on Pitter— Pinterest. And then I copy and paste the article onto 3 sites, Goodreads, which is the largest social media site for readers and authors, LinkedIn, professional site, and Medium, which is like an online magazine. Then I go through and I share the link to my article on all my relevant Facebook groups and also all my Google+ communities. Now Google+, a lot of people have never even heard of Google+. But Google+ is associated with Google, which is the number one search engine in the world. I cannot tell you how many articles I've gotten to the front page of Google simply by posting and taking care of my Google+ account. So Google+ is a big secret to getting to the front page of Google. So getting to the front page of Google is an actual marketing goal. So once I do those things, Bernadette, then I go to Hootsuite which is a social media dashboard, and I will write 8 to 12 different headlines with a bit.ly link back to the original article on my website, and schedule out those social media messages to be distributed throughout my social media platform every couple of hours throughout the day.

Got it. Okay, so a couple questions. For those people listening, what is the app, the WordPress app that distributes your content in all those various places?

It's called Jetpack. So Jetpack is the plugin that you can use. And all you do is you install it on your site so that when you hit publish, it immediately gets distributed throughout your social media platform.

Perfect.

Okay, and then you mentioned Goodreads, LinkedIn, and what was the third one?

Medium.

Okay, that's even a new one for me. Medium. Okay, so Medium.

Yeah, Medium.com.

Okay, so everyone may take a look at that.

If you create content, you want to have it on your website, but your website as good as it is, and as many followers as you have, When you create this content and you share it in these other sites, these other sites, Medium, LinkedIn, and Goodreads, have literally millions of readers. So this would be like the difference between getting published to your local newspaper and being in the New York Times. So simply by publishing to these larger platforms, you're going to reach a larger audience. And while you're there, you're going to have a paragraph at the end saying, "Gee, if you like my stuff, visit my website. Call me for a consult. Buy my stuff." That's where you put that information. That's where you sell, at the last paragraph. Yeah.

Right. Okay, everybody, go to KathrynKerrigan.com while we're still talking. Obviously, she has a wealth of information. And please check out both of her books, All Around social media, and you can find them on Amazon. So she has What Is Social Media Today? Get Ready to Win the Game of Social Media, and What Is Social Media Today? Hashtags, Keywords, and You. Oh my. Alright, so KathrynKerrigan.com everyone. Now the other question was going to be, do you use like eSign or self-publishing? Growth, do you publish there? Or do you find that these 3 sites are the most popular for folks?

That's a great question. My answer is anywhere you can publish, go ahead and publish. If you're a member of any place where you can share your information, if you take the time to create content, you want to share it. It's almost like a farmer. Spread your seeds as far and wide as you can. Yeah, right, exactly. And I use the same strategy if I create a video. If I create a video, I'll publish it to YouTube. I'll write a blog about the video. I embed the video in the article on my website. I share the video all over my social media, and share it as many places as I can. So whether you're creating written content or video content, you want to do that. And what you'll find, Bernadette, is that video trumps written content every time. But you have to remember that the average person watches just 6 seconds of your videos. Now when I create videos with my friend Maxine Tabbler, we are typically making videos 25 minutes long, and we actually get people to watch the whole thing because we are creating again useful reader-friendly information. Again, there is no selling. Right, absolutely.

Right, absolutely, and I want to get to that, but we might have— wait, wait, wait. I want to get to videos and I want to get to that. We might have a caller because I knew this topic was going to be very important to some folks. So we are going to open up the lines, and if anyone that is listening has a question, just shout out Bernadette and we will make sure that we get your question answered. Does anyone have a question? All right. Hi, does someone have a question? Okay, no. Oh, wait, maybe.

No.

Okay. All right, that's okay, no problem. Hopefully you're hanging out and you're listening and taking all of this in because she's giving us a boatload of content in a very short period of time which we greatly appreciate. So, all right, now, okay, so we were getting into videos. And you were talking about the fact that even though attention spans are like 6 seconds, you are 25 minutes, it's all about value. It's all about quality content. So what else do people really know about the fact that we are moving from a written content to more of a visual video?

Okay, well here's a really important tip. If you do Facebook ads, you have to understand that Facebook gives preference to video content. And a really smart strategy to do if you are trying to get response in your Facebook business page is to make 1-minute videos. So how do you do that? You can go to Amazon.com and purchase a Rode microphone, R-O-D-E microphone. You attach that to your smartphone. So I've got an iPhone, and I've got an R-O-D-E Rode microphone that I think is about $60 on Amazon. When you have a combination of an iPhone and an R-O-D Rode microphone, you have better technology to record videos Spike Lee did when he created his first movie. So then, then you make 1-minute videos. Again, they're going to be short. You're going to give people user-friendly information that they can use in their everyday life, in their business. And they— when you post it on your Facebook business page, you're going to notice you're going to get skyrocketing success the moment you start doing videos and make short videos. They can be funny. They can be uplifting. They can be useful. But for God's sake, make videos because you are going to get way bigger response than you do writing articles.

And how often are you publishing those as opposed to like your typical blogs, or does it go on the same schedule?

So I recommend that you create content for your website at least once a week. So you want to— one of the things you want to do to keep your social media presence alive and your website alive is to create new content on your website at least once a week, and you blast it out and share it with your social media following at least once a week. If you can do more than that, great. The more frequently you post, the quicker you are going to build. But whether you are creating articles or creating videos, you want to do it at least once a week. Now every post that you place on social media needs to have either a photograph, a video, or an animated GIF, because posts with visuals get about a 5 times greater response. If you just put words in social media, even if you've got a bunch of hashtags, people are not going to respond the way they will if you've got these graphic images.

Right, okay, sweet, love that. And what is the big don't, do you think? What is the big don't that you are finding people are doing out there that really shouldn't be doing?

Not knowing what your keywords are, not knowing what your— Hashtags are broadcasting without engaging. I think that selling instead of being a human being. So I think those are the big mistakes that people are making. And the last one is not realizing that you can make serious money by learning how to win the game of social media. Some people think that social media is just an awareness issue, and it does help people to be aware of you, but the more that you engage human to human, the more you're going to build your tribe, build your audience, and create customers for your business.

Absolutely, absolutely. And I want everybody to go to KathrynKerrigan.com and look at all her resources. Look at what she does. And go to Amazon.com, put in Kathryn Carrigan, and you're going to see all of her books. The 2 books that we're talking about today, all around social media, are out there. And I highly, highly, highly recommend that you purchase them and you take in all this great advice. All you need to do is even Google Kathryn Carrigan, and you're going to see why, people, and why she is the top 5% of internet marketing because she knows what she's doing. And she's leveraging that in order to instruct you. Now, benefit of my relationship with Kathryn is she's my neighbor. So I wanted to provide an opportunity for you to even learn more from Kathryn. So over the next, you know, in the coming weeks, I'm going to sit down with Kathryn and get a video interview done all around social media because I think You're spending a lot of time with it, everyone, and we want to make sure that you're successful and productive in doing that. So we'll be doing that as soon as the two of us land on the same ground. We'll get that scheduled, and we'll make sure that you're aware of where that video— and even we'll chop it up so we get into Kathryn's mindset of whether it's 1 minute or 25 minutes, it'll be quality content. And we will make sure that we provide that to you. But Kathryn, thank you so much for being part of the program today. I so appreciate it. I know you are on vacation, and yet you wanted to provide all this great information to our listeners, and I so appreciate that.

So thanks everybody out there for listening, and you can find out more at whatissocialmediatoday.com.

Oh, she did my closing.

Thank you.

Thank you. So whatissocialmediatoday.com. What is socialmediatoday.com? And that's actually even more specific to what she is doing with social media. And I'll tell you what, I wrote a page and a half of notes and tips that we will be sharing out throughout this week and next week. And then we will definitely get our interview, video interview with Kathryn to where we are supposed sitting down and really diving into all of this. So for everybody here at Shedding the Bitch Radio, thank you so much for being part of today's program. And we'll be right back next Tuesday at noon Eastern time for our complete 1-hour show. And we will also be announcing by then potentially a schedule of when Katherine and I will get a video interview done for all of you in regards Social Media Today. Go to KathrynKerrigan.com for more information. Go to Social Media— I'm sorry, say what that site is again. I just lost it.

What is SocialMediaToday.com and KathrynKerrigan.com.

Thank you, thank you, thank you. And I want to thank everybody. Thank you, Deborah Parker of Parker House Virtual Services, who is out there producing our show today and tweeting and Facebooking with all of you. We appreciate that, and we'll talk to everybody this time next Tuesday at noon Eastern time. Thanks everybody.

Thank you for listening to Shedding the Bitch Radio with Bernadette Boas. Join Bernadette every Tuesday at noon Eastern as she helps you shift your bitches to riches. And the dialogue is always going on at sheddingthebitch.com. See you next week.