*10 Steps to a Manageable Podcast Social Media Plan (for you or your assistant)

This is feed you'd brand with hosts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazzard.

Hey, everyone, I'm going live today without Tom because we're doing a masterclass today. We're doing an update to our social media planning. I've got a special treat in mind for you because I am reducing this to a one hour plan. And I don't mean that I'm going to go on for an hour here. I'm making it an hour for you. That's how long it should take you to set up your social media plan for podcasting. So that's what we're going to do today here on feed your brand. And I am going to use some visual effects today, some visual aids so that you guys can see everything that we've got going on. So here's the first thing. Hey, I am using gamma. I don't know if you guys have ever used this AI tool, but this is what I use and I always try to reveal that as I'm working through everything. But this is our social media plan. As I told you, we're gonna do 10 steps. One hour, 10 steps to a manageable social media strategy. I want you to do it in less than an hour. If you're taking longer than an hour, then you're overthinking things. Sorry to be like a little blunt about it, but you know how I am, right? You're just overthinking things. We need to get started because there's so much about podcasts and connecting to the social media that we don't know when we get started. So we need to run some tests and they need to be live, we need to be posting, and then we need to see what we're doing. So this is just my starter plan. This is what I recommend that you do. Because Hope is not a plan. We want to transform our social media from a chore to a conversion growth tool. And here's the thing. If you are just publishing on social media, you're only getting 1.3% conversion rate on every post you make. So you're not getting enough out of that. So you need to have more tools in the toolbox. That's why podcasting is so great. That's why blogging and YouTube is so great. If you move to YouTube and blogs, you get 13% conversion rate. And if you move to podcasting, you get a 37% conversion rate. These are the conversion rates that happen from listening, viewing, watching, reading. Right. Like all of those things, seeing your post, the reason it's so bad in Social media is because it's so crowded, right? There's so many things, and my purpose for being on social media is totally different than what you want me to have. That purpose for my purpose might be to go see funny dog tricks. And your purpose is to promote your coaching program. So they're not aligned on social media. If I'm in Google and in YouTube, I'm searching for something. I want to learn how to develop a podcast social media plan, right? That's why you're here. And I'm looking for that. So I'm more likely to find something. And when I'm more likely to find it because I'm searching for it and I click on it, that's a higher conversion rate. But when people choose to put you in their ear, they're choosing to subscribe to you and what you have to say. And so when you recommend things like your coaching programs, your books, your tools, anything like that, they convert, and that's why the conversion rate goes up. So we need to do all these things. And unfortunately, in order to get more subscribers who will get that 37% conversion, we do have to post in social media. We do have to be Publishing on YouTube and in our blogs. And so we need to do all of that to make sure so you don't miss any other videos that we may have done on social media. We're revamping everything on YouTube, but you can click the link United Wepod on YouTube or you can click the link here in the presentation, which will be linked to the blog post for this episode and to the episode description when you're listening to it or watching it anywhere. So let's go on from here. I want to make sure that we're getting this. So step number one in our podcast social media plan is remember that this is for our podcast. This isn't for our general business. This isn't for anything else. Our podcast goals and our business goals are not the same as our social media goals. We might have social media goals that we want, you know, 10,000 Instagram followers. That's not the same thing that as what we're looking for to achieve from an outcome of our podcast content. The content that we're posting on social media needs to have its own purpose. So we might want to grow downloads and subscribers on social media. That may be one of our goals. However, that's not going to be as easy with a 1.3% conversion rate and making sure that we're getting out there and getting to other people. But are we more Likely to. If we're showing our content, get downloads and subscriber growth to our podcast, that would be a different result from the posts that we make. The posts that we make in our own Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, those are predominantly going to people who are already subscribed to us. We have to do a totally different model to get higher outreach. That's where our second goal might come in place. We want to attract high authority guests and collaborators because not only do they grow our downloads and our subscribers and they help grow our podcast, but they help grow our reach on social media. So that's where the two might become aligned in your growth goals. We might have a community like I have right here with Podcasters United. I want to create my touch points with that community. So that might be one of my goals. Or I might want to drive real visitors to listen to watch. The full length blog post has every detail to it. And so I might want to drive them to the blog post for this episode rather than just the video or just the clip. I want to drive them off of that and get them to go on my website. Because then when they go on my website, they would see my subscription services or they'll see my newsletter. They'll see something in there that they also want. So I want to drive them off of Facebook, off of Instagram and into somewhere else. Now, some social medias make it easier than others, but if you have content for them to view, it's more likely you'll be able to get them off of that. So one little tip here that I'm going to add to this starter podcast business goal is, is whatever that goal is, this is going to end up being your call to action, where you're going to drive them. So if you're trying to drive visitors to your website, then you're always going to use the blog post link, the website link, the website podcast page, whatever that is you're going to use that you're never going to use Apple and Spotify. I don't want to ever see anyone ever doing that anywhere who's a podcaster. It is a waste of your link. It is a waste of a click through because they are not going to you, they're going to Spotify and they're going to Apple and you don't get to know who they are. So we want to drive everything to us and that's why we have to know what our business goal is so that we know where we're going to drive them. In the end, it helps us choose our content and do all of that. So step number one, starter podcast business goals. Make sure you know what it is. This is your starter goal. So we only want one. You're going to choose one as your first one. What's the thing that you need most right now that you started your podcast for? The thing that you need most and then you're going to reevaluate this every six months and you're going to change your goals. So there's also an extra resource in the presentation that I'm bringing you here. This the click throughs on all of this document, the PDF that's going to be attached to the blog post for this episode. You're going to see down there. There's social media star versus podcast authority to pass the power you. It's another episode. It's an episode that Tom and I talked about as. Talking about what? If you have the purpose of being a social media star, your podcast needs to be different than if you have a business growth plan for your podcast. So those two things aren't aligned and it might give you different business goals here. So if you haven't made up your mind about whether or not you're looking to be just a social media influencer and your podcast is a vehicle to do that, or you have business goals and influence goals that are outside of that, maybe you want to watch that or listen to that first. I'm not going to go over every single one of these little footnotes here for you, but they're here for you as extra resources. Step number two in our social media plan, our podcast social media plan. Step number two is really know your audience. Now, this isn't just a I want women. I want men who are over 50. Like I want all entrepreneurs. Mm, mm. No, we're dialing it in deep because we need our content to resonate. We needed to attract their attention. So we not only need our demographics, we need to know their age, their gender, their job title, anything that is profile identifiable traits. So in other words, wanting to be a podcaster is not identified in your LinkedIn profile. It's not, but a speaker is. So I may want someone who identifies as a speaker, as an author. Those might be things that they put into their profile that I could identify that that then LinkedIn could identify. Right. And LinkedIn will then serve up my post to them. So if it's not profile identifiable, it doesn't belong in your demographics psychographics. So the psychographics that we have here is a really cool tool to think about life Stages, challenges, mindsets. And I, I have it down here. It says Juliet's Persona template question mark. We're going to be doing an episode on that. When we do it, I'm going to bring you back Juliet Clark, our favorite author expert who always is on here and she does like a monthly check in with you guys. She's got a really cool Persona thing she uses with authors that we're looking at using for podcasters. And I just did it and it's awesome. I'll share you an example of it in the blog post for this episode. I will link to it in this as soon as that episode airs. It's coming up in the next month, we're going to do it and we're going to also have the person on who created this AI tool for us and he's going to come on and talk about it as well. So that's going to be coming up. But that's why it has a little question mark here because it hasn't been added yet. It's coming soon. Behaviors and triggers so in addition to knowing the psychographics, knowing where their life stages and challenges, we need to know who they follow, how do they react, how do they get moved to action so that we can create a call to action or pull out the thing that we know is going to get them to react and do something. Maybe watch the whole episode, listen to the whole episode, click through and read the blog post, get your downloads, whatever those things are from the content, we need to understand what motivates them. If you're building a really good social media plan, when you really know your audience, it sounds like you're talking directly to them and you're curating things directly for that ideal audience. That's how they know that you see them and that's how you get a higher engagement rate. So step two, really know your audience. And if you don't really know it, we're going to give you some tools in a future episode on how to get to that. But do your best right now. Remember that when you're starting out, you don't always know who's going to be listening to your show. When Tom and I started our 3D print podcast, WTFF, we weren't really sure who our listeners were and we thought they might be like 14 year old boys in their garage. It turned out to be like, you know, Midwestern teachers who were struggling to put 3D print in the classroom. So you never know until you get started. So this is just our starter. It's what we think is the audience at the very beginning of our show, we're going to refine it, we're going to learn more about it as we go forward. But step two is to really know who we want to target and put that in here. Alignment. Podcast hosts are my ideal guests, but they're also my ideal audience. So I want to make sure that I'm making my tone, I'm making everything. I know exactly who they are. Sometimes our guests and our hosts are the same thing. So if there's an alignment there, make sure you use it. Step number three, we're going to choose one platform. I know this is really hard. I know it goes against all other experts out there who are all like, you need to be everywhere, everywhere, all the time. No, if we're starting out, a good plan creates a model by which it's repeatable in the future. And so unless we know what that model is and it's already working for us, we don't want to be repeating it elsewhere, because then we don't know where the failure point. Saw her. We call this a design of experiment. When we try to change one variable at a time. And in this case, I'm telling you to choose one variable at a time. So you're going to choose one channel, one platform, one social media. To start with, you need to decide which one is matched to the type of podcast you have and that ideal audience. So you want to choose two things. You don't want to choose the platform you like the most, you want to choose the one where your audience hangs out the most, and you want to choose one where your content is going to be aligned with it. So if your content is very short, video focused, then you maybe want to think about TikTok and YouTube, and if it's very topic focused or business focused, very professional focused, maybe you want to be on LinkedIn. If it's really style focused, maybe you want Pinterest or Instagram. Pinterest, surprisingly, is a really good channel for a lot of podcasters. So don't discount it when you hear that in your head. If your ideal audience is on Pinterest, then you should be on Pinterest, and you can target that as your first platform. Tom and I did a big episode on this, so I'm not going to go into any more detail why you should begin your podcast on one platform. This is what we've said again and again for decades, is for a decade this has worked, and this is the way to go to start your design of experiment. And Start your social media plan. So as this is the starter social media plan, choose one platform for now. Then once you choose that platform, it makes it a little easier to choose your visual asset types because remember, some of those platforms are a little more visual focused, some of them are video focused, some of them are topic focused. It helps you choose your different asset types. You should choose more asset types than you need because you might want carousels, multi image posts, you might want things like that. So we want to look at those topic graphics, ego bait, which is what the guest is about. That's a whole nother episode we'll do for you. Quote graphics tip Graphics quote clips, tip clips, questions, takeaways, all kinds of things that you might want to have and you want to choose them. If we're going to do a seven day plan, we're going to want seven of them minimum, but I'd say at least three to five. Make sure you have three to five per episode that you've picked here that you feel really comfortable with and you can always add on as you go forward. Then we're going to remember that with those assets, if you don't over brand them, you're going to make your life simpler. Don't use brand colors as your accents. Beyond your accents, I should say use brand colors as accents. But don't go overboard branding over branding everything. Don't use company logos, use a watermark of your show or the name of your show. Don't put your face on everything unless you're making a guest ego bait where you're supposed to be side by side with your guest and it's something you said about them or it's a tip that you said, then you can go ahead and put your picture on that. But let's keep our picture off of everything else. Let's keep it simple because people want the content on social media. They want the information, they want the impact of what you said, the statement, the video clip. They want real humans and everything over branded and over template says corporate. It Sundays you're using AI tools. So we want to simplify that. You can create canva templates, they're super easy to use. Opus templates. If you're doing video clips, all of those, you can make them really simple and keep them streamlined so that the opus templates just have a little watermark of your show and the captions, and the captions are dynamic. Those are what are really gathering people. The canva templates. Use them for your guest because you really want to be professional about it. But you don't need to go overboard with having big frames around everything. You're wasting space. Let the video clipping app and let the content and the images speak for themselves. Keep it really subtle and don't bother to do subtitles and don't bother to do captions. If it's too much work, just let the social media app do it for you. Whatever we want, we want this to be so simple, so stupid simple that anyone, any assistant, anyone could do this for you. You could get your kids to do this for you. Right? We don't want to overwork this. We want to make it simple because we're testing it number one. And it's really about that content, not the visual. And if the visual is getting in the way, it's not helping us. By the way, I mentioned Opus. We do recommend Opus. There's a click through for it here. You want to go to that. They've got some really cool new tools going on there. I've getting in a beta over there. So there's going to be some cool new things coming. Post intentionally, we want to be anticipation or promo focused that they can't miss this. And then once it's aired, we want to look what you missed. So we want to tease, release, promote. We want to talk about who, why and how. Those are the simple things we just want to go through to make sure that we are getting everything we need to post and we want to be intentional about it, make it focus, make it the tone, make everything sound human. Right? We want it to be about us, we want it to be a human and we want to make sure that we are doing the best we can with our post to make sure and keep that reference to the episode direct. Right? It's great that we're talking about tips and other things, but let's not be distracting about all the other things. Our goal needs to be aligned with what we post. Remember that for our goal from step one. So we want to be really intentional about it. But here's the thing. As long as you're being human here and you're being you and the expert that you are, you're going to be just fine. Now we got to start and keep posting. I have a seven day social content template for you. All you got to do is plug your social channel in here that you're going to use, plug the asset types that you're going to use. I even have a list of asset types, some examples for you. This is super simple. You don't need to start with buffer, meet Edgar Co schedule or Hootsuite or any of those things yet. You, you can if you want, but you don't need to start with them because you're only going to be posting one channel. Use the native posting. If you already know how to post on LinkedIn, you're in luck. You already know how to post in Instagram and use it and do it that way. Keep it simple for yourself. Just because you're only doing one channel, you can keep it simple here. You might want to though, get some experience with Buffer because you're going to be using it. Or you might want to get it started and then turn it over to an assistant and have them put that first channel into Buffer and learn how to use it. And then you're going to expand it to more. But the most important thing is that using this plan, its goal is to keep you on schedule. Make sure you're posting as many days as you want it to. If you want to post seven days and post seven days, make sure you're posting three days. If that's what you wanted. Just make sure that you're posting on the schedule that you set. Because a consistent schedule is the best way to grow your social media. When social can count on you to post at 9am on LinkedIn every single day, then you are going to get more circulation. That is exactly how all their algorithms work. They want people they can count on and they're going to boost the traffic of the people they can count on. So this is a key to not only getting more visibility for your podcast, but but getting more visibility on social media. Step number eight, comment and collab. You can't just leave it at I posted this stuff. You've got to go further and collab with your guests. You've got to go further and comment and build community, leverage your groups, use hashtags, partner up and get groups and others to help with you. Sometimes we call them pods, which is a little confusing to podcasts, but you can create an Instagram pod where everybody's commenting on every other stuff. So there's lots of ways to grow this and comment and collab. We've done many, many episodes on them, so I've got four on this slide. And I'm going to make sure that they're in the blog post for this episode so that you can go to these exact podcast episodes or videos, whichever you'd like to watch or listen to, and make sure that you go deep dive into this. If you don't already know how to comment and collab Step eight is really important because that's how you create engagement and that's how then you get your posts circulating out even more. So because we're only doing one social channel, this is a critical factor to learn how to do. Then I want you to repurpose like a pro. This is step nine. This is your future. This is only if you're a pro or only if you know what you're doing. Once you've got that one channel going, your social media plan is going to explode. You're going to expand that channel and you're going to treat the plan that I just gave you like a one step plan for your next social channel. So if you started in LinkedIn, now you're going to try it for Facebook and then a couple of weeks later, or a month later, you're going to try for Instagram, and then a couple months later you're going to try it on TikTok. You're going to build it and grow it where you want to grow, not everywhere. But if you grow this plan to seven channels, so you do seven posts a week in one channel and you go to seven channels, that's 49 touch points you are creating across all social channels, across everywhere. That's 49 touch points for one single episode that you've created. Imagine that 49 times a week you can touch and get out the message about your podcast. Imagine how many subscribers and downloads you'll be able to get from that. I have this also in a plan, in a PDF, in a document for you in a Google Drive. So you can go and you can use the template. So this is also something that's available to you when you're ready to repurpose, when you're ready to go beyond your first 7 posts and reuse them again. We always have to measure. So step number 10 is making sure that you set a time, you set a date, you set a way to measure your starter goal at a six month point. That's when we recommend it, is that six months you're going to go back and you're going to look at your social metrics and you're going to look at your goal metrics. This is something we do every year, sometimes twice a year. You know, once you get into your show for a while, maybe you're only going to do it once or you get your social, social channels and they're mature, you might only do it once a year. Totally up to you. We have a feed your brand episode. We usually do a new one every year. This One was at the end of last year, leveling up the podcast game tips on how to evaluate and improve your show. This includes looking at your stats, looking at the goals of what you did on social media, and reviewing all of those things and deciding what's important. So this also might give you some metric ideas for what you want to measure. So if you got stuck on number one, maybe you want to listen to this episode as well. So number 10 is, remember, we're going to measure our results. We're going to make tweaks. When we don't see it resonating, when the audience, when we don't see engagement happen, or when we do see engagement happen, we're going to like tweak it up and do more of that. That's why we want enough posts. We don't want it to be an anomaly. That's why we say six months. Typically, six months for most people is 25 episodes at one a week. Right? So when you hit a 25 episode mark every time you do that. So if you're running once a month, you're not going to be able to measure this every six months. You're going to want to wait a year to measure it or more, maybe even wait longer. So keep in mind, the more episodes you do, the more posts you make, the more often you need to review. So step 10, measure results and tweak it. Don't forget to tweak it. Remember, this is a design of experiment and every time we tweak something, we, we're going to tweak one thing at a time. So if we're going to decide, we're going to take the branding that we put into our assets, we're going to take it off of them and see how that does. Give it time. Make sure that you've given it enough time for that to go out there, enough for you to measure that change before you make the next change again. All right, I've got more resources for you to optimize your channel because don't forget, if your channel isn't set and your channel doesn't promote your show, you, you might need to update that as well. So we do have some tools for you to do that, ways to optimize. We have a size guide that not only tells you how to make sizes for your posts, but it tells you all the limitations on the usable area. You do not have to reinvent everything. And right now I have added to the size guide the ability to be able to look at our Canva templates and use them if you'd like. So that's coming for you. I'm creating Canva templates for you for the future. I've got five easy ways for you to look at your social to update your profiles, different ways to update your LinkedIn how ways to look at that Going beyond videos setting up your YouTube channel, these are all podcast episodes and videos that we have for you as well. So those will all also be linked in the blog post for this episode. It's going to be chock full of resources for you and sectioned all off into the different steps so you can go through them one by one. And don't forget for more free tips and events, make sure you join us@podcastersunited.org join and come and get our next whatever's next in social media we do social media about once a month. We cover some topic related to social media. We usually cover a topic related to video. Sometimes social media might be once every six weeks or so, but we're always eager to cover more things for you at any given time. So make sure you reach out and ask us. So did this really quick. I want you to spend one hour developing your plan following our 10 steps. Make sure that you cover all 10 of the steps planning in the tweaking date, the measurement date. You're not going to actually do that measurement. Step 10, you don't even have to do. Step 9, you don't even have to do. You just have to plan in time for them. So you really only have eight steps to get through in order to get started and posting. So make sure you set a time aside, put an hour to it, set an hour, set a timer for yourself. Start your steps. Go right through this. Make a plan for your podcast because if you don't tell anyone about it, they're never going to know it exists. So feed your brand. We exist. Obviously we're here. We're here live every single week for you. Want to make sure you also share us out there. Let everybody know we're here. That's the best favor you can bring us. So Tom and I will see you live here back next week. Thanks everyone for listening. I'm Tracy Hazzard. We'll be back next week with another episode of Feed.

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