How to grow your newsletter through social media (full playbook)

By now you know the value of a newsletter, but how do you actually get newsletter subscribers from social media? My friend Josh Spector is here with us to walk through his social-to-newsletter playbook so you can grow your subscriber list and your social media following at the same time. This session is about how to use social media to grow your newsletter and vice versa. So why am I framing this like a playbook? You need the right play for the right situation, right? So when it comes to content on social media and newsletters, there's a million different ways to do things and you want to use the right tactics based on what you're trying to accomplish. The other thing I would say is I'm going to show you, this full session has 20 different plays in it. I'm going to show you 10 of them, but just know you don't have to do everything. And the truth is you can't do everything all at once. So please do not be overwhelmed thinking, oh my God, there's all this stuff and how am I going to do all this? And then these plays are platform agnostic, right? So I use Twitter and LinkedIn a lot. So you're going to see some, some of those examples, but just know these could be adapted for basically any social platform that you choose to use. There's 5 truths about newsletter and social media that I think you need to wrap your head around for all of this, right? So the first is your followers do not know your newsletter exists. I know you think they do. I know you feel like you talk about it and promote it all the time and they're sick of hearing about it, I promise you, you will be shocked to find out how many of your followers have no idea you even have a newsletter. And we'll get into that in a second. The second truth here is your followers also don't know why they should subscribe if they already follow you, right? I hear this all the time, right? Why would I subscribe to your newsletter? I follow you on social media. I follow you on Twitter. I'll see what I need to see. I don't know, you know, what's the point? And again, we'll talk about that. Another truth is that you don't need different content for your newsletter and social media. I think a lot of people somehow think that because they posted something on LinkedIn, they can't share it in their newsletter, or because they posted something in their newsletter, they can't share it on LinkedIn or Twitter or Instagram or whatever. And the complete opposite is true. I actually think all your content that you're putting in any of those places, almost all of it should be repurposed on the other one. Another truth here is that people don't subscribe because they want your newsletter. They subscribe because they don't want to miss what you have to say. And this is really important, right? A lot of times people feel guilty about promoting their newsletter because they're like, oh, they probably saw it where I shared it elsewhere. Well, just because they follow you on social media, they don't see— most, most of your followers don't see most of your posts, right? The reason for them to get your newsletter, even if you share similar content, is so that they make sure that they don't miss the things that what you have to say, and they're going to want that because you're saying such smart things. That's why they follow you in the first place. And then the last truth here: your newsletter can help your social channels more than your social channels can help your newsletter. Uh, I mentioned this a bit earlier, and again, there's a common misconception that people use social media all the time to try to grow their newsletter, but they forget that they can use their newsletter to grow their social channels. I actually have more newsletter subscribers than I have social followers. Right? And lots— I don't know, I don't know if I'd say the majority, but possibly, probably the majority of my social followers first discovered my newsletter and then followed me on social after that. And again, you want to do both, basically. So okay, so let's get to the 10 plays that I have for you today. And these are all going to be very tactical things that you can do. So the first is you can measure awareness. This gets back into, you know, how eye-opening it will be for you, how few people know that you even have a newsletter. A really simple thing to do: post a simple poll, have the question be, did you know I have a newsletter? Have the options be yes, I've read it, yes, but I haven't read it, or no. And prepare to be shocked. Uh, for example, uh, I talk, you know, I can't even fathom that people follow me and not know I have a newsletter because it's everywhere. It's in my bio. I talk about it all the time. A lot of the people that follow me first subscribe to my newsletter. And yet every time I do this, I have around 10% of people who say, no, I didn't know you have a newsletter. Uh, I found when other people do this where it's not as obvious, it's very common for that number to be 15, 20%, or even higher who don't know that you have a newsletter. Another great thing about this poll post is you can do it again every few months, and it's a really simple way to measure whether awareness of your newsletter is growing amongst your social followers. And it should be growing if you start doing some of the other things I'm about to tell you to do and promoting your newsletter more. The second thing, optimize your social profile. So I believe that your main goal should not be to get followers, it should be to get email subscribers. And so the best way to do that is to link directly to your signup page in your social bios, not to your homepage, right? And in your bio, you want to give them a clear call to action and a reason to join your email list. And then your bio link drives straight to your email list or newsletter signup page. You don't wanna just send them to your homepage and let them surf around and hope that they're gonna find it, right? You wanna very specifically tailor your messaging to get them to go sign up to your email list or newsletter. A lot of people like Linktree or Linktree type things, which you can, you know, use as your bio link and it allows you to put a bunch of links in there. I'm not a big fan of that. I actually think it works against you because you should have one clear step you want people to take. As opposed to sending them a page with a bunch of options. And what will usually happen is they won't click any of them because they'll be like, I don't really know. You should have something you want them to do. And even if it's not your newsletter, even though in most cases I think it should be your newsletter, but even if it's not your newsletter, there should be one specific thing you want someone who's checking out your profile to go do, and you want to drive them there. Include a CTA. Like I said, you know, you'll, you'll notice that my newsletter is giving them a specific reason to sign up. And I think that's another key here, not only in your bio, but in your newsletter signup page and all of that. You want to be— give specific people a specific reason to subscribe. Don't just talk about what your newsletter is about. Talk about how it helps people, what it helps them do, what the transformation is that it helps them make. Another question I get a lot is on a brand versus a personal profile. I recommend, and, you know, once upon a time I had a separate newsletter profile. I think it creates just a lot of confusion and you're better off just having a personal profile. When you have both, you're sort of splitting your followers and all of a sudden you're not sure where, you know, are you posting the same thing on both accounts? Are you only posting about the newsletter on the newsletter account? It creates a whole bunch of problems and friction that are not necessary and don't help you., so in general, I recommend just using a personal account or just using a brand account if you choose to go that way. I just don't recommend using both. The third play here is you want to optimize your pinned posts. So again, your pinned post, especially on Twitter, a big opportunity to promote your newsletter in a different way. So what I recommend here is give people a different reason to subscribe. So your bio has given them one reason to subscribe. Your pinned post can give them a different reason or a deeper reason or more examples. Pin tweet can work well if you share examples of the content that you share in your newsletter. That's kind of what you see Nathan Barry doing there. You can also use it to share social proof, talk about, you know, maybe a great testimonial from someone that subscribes to your newsletter or something like that. You can use it to tease the next issue. This is what I've been doing a lot of times. Tell them what's coming up in the next issue. So they're going to be more likely to subscribe then. Or if you use a lead magnet, your pinned post is a great place to put the lead magnet. Another key here, alignment is going to make everything easier, right? So a lot of times you'll see people run into this problem where the content they're sharing on social media is different than, is not really even on the same topic or same transformation that their newsletter is about. And that's not really on the same topic or transformation as the product they're selling. That, and then they wonder why things are not working, right? So your social media content, your newsletter content, your audience, the messaging, the positioning, they all need to be aligned. And what, what's clear, what's important here is you want to align the transformation, not just the topic, right? So it's not that you're just talking about self-improvement on all these platforms, it's that you're talking about a specific bit of self-improvement for a specific type of person, right? Right? You're helping, for example, maybe your target audience is moms who are CEOs who want to improve their work-life balance, right? And all of your content and all of your messaging is about that. It's not just generally about self-improvement. The other thing is you want to mirror your language. So whatever terms you're using to describe your target audience or the things that you're doing should be the same everywhere, right? So if you decide that your target audience is entrepreneurs, you should not be calling them creators on your Twitter bio, and entrepreneurs on your newsletter signup page, right? You should be using the same terms everywhere again so that it's aligned. And then you want to consider the logical progression, right? So you want to think through someone who discovers a tweet and then follows you. How are you— they're going to— what's their journey like? What's the reason for them to go subscribe to the newsletter? And then once they subscribe to the newsletter, what's the reason for them to buy your product or service or whatever sort of journey you want to take them on. The fifth play here is promote your newsletter more. Again, I said it before, I'm gonna say it again. People, including your audience and your loyal followers, do not know your newsletter exists. So you want to talk about it more, you want to share it more, you want to promote it more. You can even do things like, I will occasionally do what I'll call a skill sessions week where I'll do a massive sort of theme promotion for my skill sessions and all my content that week all my social posts, all my newsletter, my podcast episode, everything that week is going to be about skill sessions. That's that kind of focus burst of promotion is really effective. So you might want to at one point say it doesn't have to be for a paid product. You might go, okay, I'm going to— all I'm going to talk about this week on all my platforms is my newsletter, and I'm going to focus that and make it impossible for anyone who's following me anywhere not to know I have a newsletter and why they should sign up for for it. Uh, along with that, you want to give clear, specific reasons to subscribe. Again, don't just tell them it exists, but tell them why and how it's going to help them and what it's going to help them do. Uh, you want to remind your social followers that the algorithm is working against them. You want to— they, again, that assumption they have that, oh, I follow Josh, so I'll see all this stuff, I don't need his newsletter— you need to remind them that they're missing most of your stuff, uh, and that the only way for them to really see it all and make sure they don't miss stuff is to get your newsletter. The next play is promote before you publish. So a lot of times when people do promote their newsletter on social media, they do it after it was published. So they do this thing where they go, oh, you know, here's the newest issue of my newsletter. That's fine. But there's not really an incentive for people to subscribe. There's more of an incentive to subscribe before they can actually see the issue, right? So if you tease, here's what I'm going to share in my newsletter tomorrow, Now there's a reason for people to subscribe because they want to make sure that they don't miss it, right? It drives curiosity and FOMO. You can also incorporate social proof into that. So on the right-hand side, you can see a recent example where I tease what's coming in my newsletter. I told them they could sign up to get it. And then I have a little screenshot of Justin Welsh talking about how much he enjoys my newsletter. All of those things are going to help encourage people to sign up. And again, play up the result of reading it. It's not just what you're talking about, but what they're going to be able to do after they read it. And again, promote specific issues as opposed to just promoting the newsletter in general. And one other thing you can see that I did here on the right, if you have a curated newsletter, I have that shout out there to Chanel and Wes because I linked to some of their stuff in the newsletter. I tag them in that post because I want them to know that and then maybe they will like it, engage with it, share it with their audience. So that's another advantage of curating stuff is other people may help you promote it if you let them know that it's happening. Here's some other examples of how other people with big newsletters do this. Again, these are all teaser posts and you can, you know, you can see very similar, right? They're promoting the newsletter in advance. It's good to promote it after it comes out as well, but promoting in advance is going to be way more effective. So this is promoting after you publish it. So after your newsletter comes out, don't just put a headline and a link to the newsletter and say, oh, here it is, right? Instead, post content from your newsletter natively on the platform, right? So that's what Chanel's done here on the right-hand side. She created a whole thread that is basically telling you the highlights of what was in her newsletter. If you have multiple different types of content in your newsletter, like different articles, different curated stuff, that actually gives you multiple opportunities to promote it. Because for each of those things, you could post it as a standalone social post. Again, give people a clear reason to subscribe and tease a connection between this issue and the next one. So the Chanel post that starts here on the right-hand side then goes into a thread, and she's literally telling you a bunch of the sort of key things that are in it, and then at the end, promoting the, the issue itself where you can go read the full thing. Way more effective than had she just put a link to the article and said, hey, here, here you go, read it. So pull that content out and post it natively, which leads into repurposing your content. Always a good idea. Take anything you put in your newsletter could potentially become social content, and any social content could potentially become part of your newsletter. So what you have here is a tweet I had posted. The hard part isn't getting started, it's pushing through the messy middle. That tweet performed pretty well, so I took it and I made it the intro of my next newsletter. Right? So I'm using social posts to actually test content that I'm then going to put in my newsletter. And I can do the opposite. I could write a newsletter and take it and turn it into a social post. So when you're doing this right, there's a synergy between your social content and your newsletter content that is making it not only more effective and getting you more value out of everything you create, but it's actually making it much easier for you to create both social content and newsletter content. The 9th play here is you want to make it easy to subscribe, right? Have a very simple signup page. Sometimes you can even invite people to just DM you, say, hey, if you want my newsletter, just DM me your email address and I'll send it to you. I know it seems like it's not that hard to click a link and enter your email address, but you will be amazed. Sometimes people just don't want to do it and they'd rather just message you or give you their email address or reply with their email address. On Instagram, if you use Instagram, you can use in stories, you can use their, their survey or their poll form thing and just invite people, say, hey, if you want to get my newsletter tomorrow there, I'm going to talk about whatever, drop your email address in this form and you'll have to manually add them to your list. But you will be amazed that people will sign up who otherwise, again, just didn't want to click through to the page and sign up. Somehow it's easier for them to drop their email address in the form. So Again, the big takeaway here is make it as easy as possible for people to sign up for your newsletter. But the last tip in this sort of mini version of the session is direct message your news— your new followers, right? So when you get a new follower on social media, very easy to send them a direct message and let them know you have a newsletter and invite them to check it out if they want. Don't assume that they know it exists. These DMs can also boost your social reach because when they interact with you in a direct message, even if they say no thanks or whatever, uh, it's showing the algorithm that they're more closely connected to you, which makes them more likely to see your future posts in their feed. So on the right-hand side here is just a template that Yong Soo Chung, uh, used and had a lot of success with. Again, you don't have to do that. You can do whatever you want, but the, the basic idea is thank them for following you, let them know you have a newsletter and, and how it might help them, and invite them to, to to join if they would like to. There's a lot more where this came from. 10 more plays in the full newsletter social playbook session. I also have a skill session called the newsletter booster, which is about ways to grow your newsletter in 5 minutes a day. I have the subscriber to customer converter skill session, which is all about how you turn newsletter subscribers into buyers. And I have about 15 other sessions available to members. On everything from how to get clients, how to write blog posts, the sentence collection, which is how to write the 30 most important sentences in your business, all kinds of stuff. You can check it all out at joshspecter.com sessions. That's also where you can join to get access to all of it as a member. I also do monthly group coaching calls called Jam Sessions, so you can get one-on-one help there. And then my free newsletter, fortheinterested.com/subscribe. Feel free to check that out.