5 Simple and Proven Steps to Grow Your Podcast Using Social Media

Hey guys, it's Tracy here from Feed you'd Brand and Brandcasting youg and I am Facebooking Live, our social media class. And I'm super excited. It's kind of a master class. So I want to be really clear about it. We are not going to cover like how to post on Facebook or anything like that. I'm assuming you're on Facebook and you know everything you need to know there. So this is not one of those kind of classes. This is one about how to organize you, how to really make it useful for your business. This is how we do it.

We manage a lot. We manage three different Facebook pages, we manage three podcasts, two businesses, and we manage all of our clients and the agencies for that. We're an agency for that. We really are doing all of those things. I'm so glad you guys joined me today and I'm really excited to share all of how we do this and what we do and kind of how we really go a little bit ninja. So that's kind of what we've been calling it lately as to how we use our podcast and the social posts to really get our brand message everywhere. Because if you're not everywhere today, then you don't exist. And I want you to think about that carefully. It's like there's a lot of social experts out there who say, oh, you should only concentrate on one thing. And I don't disagree with concentrate your effort, the part that you personally put in. But that doesn't mean that you don't need to be everywhere now, everywhere all the time, because this happened to us. I got sick of Twitter. It wasn't working for us. We weren't getting qualified leads from that. We weren't really even getting very useful messages back and forth. But what happened was, is that I can't quit Twitter because I do have people who kind of wait for my message and then click through and follow my column. Plus Ink requires it. So as an Ink columnist, I'm required to be on Twitter. So I couldn't just get rid of it, but I didn't want to be non existent there. I didn't want to look like a non poster, like a fake account. So I set it up for social automation so that it would do it and I didn't have to think about it. So that's the kind of stuff we're going to really talk today. And I'm so glad you all are joining me here. So let's talk a little bit about why it's so hard to be heard today. And you know, social conversion is really only about 1.3% today. Like that is terrible. And a lot of that is from paid ads. So I mean, it's really, really hard to be heard. There's 80 million YouTube channels, 40 million Facebook pages that are business pages. You have 32 million Twitter users. And I just saw a statistic today that.

25% of the ones that are following the President are fake. So we've got a lot of noise in there that's not even real. And then there's 800 million Instagram users. If you guys aren't on Instagram, if you're doing something visual, you should be on Instagram. 800 million Instagram users are very active every day. But social conversion is really low. So let's do stuff that is worth our time, worth our effort, and let's just push out messages otherwise and let's automate them. So that's what I'm really going to talk to you about today. Because social media is an integral part of your platform. And I talk about this a lot on our feed you'd brand podcast. Tom and I go back and forth on that and we really talk about platform. You need a big broad platform that brands your message, brandcasts you and all the original great content that you have. And social is one part of it. Web is a significant part of it. And we talk about that. And please go to the podcast feed you'd brand and listen to it. Because we just did one about the Google power. And Google is about 10x the conversion rate of social. So it's very valuable to it. And one of the things that we're going to talk about here is how we connect social to send people to our website, which gives us more Google boost. So all these things are tied together as a strategy in building our big broad platform. Then the third piece of our platform, so it's web social. And in the middle there we have what we call influencers. Those are the people we connect to. Like I can see right now, Lillian Walker, one of a high level influencer who I value is listening in right now. We want to just make sure that we're rewarding those people who are influencers. We're connecting with them, we're networking with them, we're adding value to them. That's how we define our platform. And the more we put posts, messages, engagement in it, the taller our platform gets. And imagine it like your stage, the stage for your brand. It's going to project that message out to a broader and Broader audience and hopefully a really targeted audience because that's what we want to get to. So we really want to make it a part of what I'm going to call our three EAs, three social goals. And so I'm going to share my screen real quick and share a couple of slides with you and then I'll be back and let's see if I can do this properly. Where did. There it is. PowerPoint. So our social goals are, number one, serve to attract. Our point in social media is not to push message out, not to promote ourselves every single time. Serve to attract. The second goal we have is to be a power participant, right? So we're really getting to be a power participant with our network, with our influencers, with our clients. We do this all the time. You see on Feed you'd Brand's Facebook page, you're going to see where we are posting out the great podcast that our clients are pushing out. So we want to help them do that. That's a power participation. And then you want to be alive and posting, right? Like we talked about that Twitter thing, I don't want to be non existent to Twitter. So you got to be alive and posting and posting consistently and constantly, which is also Google rewards. So all those things go hand in hand. But I also have a couple of personal social goals. And here's my personal goals. I want to be original. I want to be the only person saying this. I also want to save time. I am a busy mom, I am running lots of businesses. I have three daughters. I got a lot to do and I'm sure all of you do too. So I want to save time. And with that time that I put in, I really want to make sure that I'm getting more and getting more. That's valuable. That's really the biggest point and place that I want to be is that's the kind of more I want. And so, you know, here's how busy we are. Look, we got three podcasts going. I write for inc. We've got a lot going on in our business. And what I want you to note is that little graphic right there, that's sort of gif. That gif. If I'm saying that right and I'm sure there's some people who are going to argue with me on how you say it, but website, social media, influencers, remember, we want that on an automated place and we want to stay in the things that we do really well like content and promotion. And that's really where the power lies. And that lies in that be original part. So how do we do it? So here's the five things we're going to talk about, and then I'll pop back out and we'll just talk about it. So how do we do it? We do. First, a snapshot of you. Where are you today on your social profiles? Then we benchmark others, but not just any others, not just top influencers. We're benchmarking the people that mean the most to your business niche, mean the most to the market that you're going after, mean the most to your targeted, targeted client base, whatever that might be. That's the definition of others for you. Then we make a post plan, because hope is not a plan, and remembering to tweet at, you know, two in the morning when you're awake is not a plan. Then we want to schedule and buffer, and we'll talk about buffers. That's actually a tool, but we want to schedule it. We want to have an editorial calendar, and we want to plan it. And then you just got to do it.

I think I'm going to come out of it. Did I do it right? Did I do it right, Alex? All right, my team's telling me that you guys can see me again. So, so good. So let's talk about that first thing, your social snapshot. So, you know.

It'S not the easiest thing to figure out how to do this, and there's lots of tools in Facebook and everything, so I'm not going to get too techy about it, but if you want that, we're going to make this SlideShare available to you, and I'll give you a URL at the end. You can go to and you can just get the SlideShare that I have, because I have a full slideshare. I'm just going to try and do this much more personally, though, and you can have that and you can take a look at what we do. But when you do that, you want to go on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or wherever it is, and you want to do a snapshot in time, and I like to do it either for the year or the quarter or whatever your measurement metric is going to be. So are you going to look at it every three months, then do a quarter? If you're going to look at it every month, then do it on a monthly basis. And you want to take a snapshot of where you are today. So I did this on Feed you'd Brand right this morning. And on feed, you'd brand's Facebook page, we have 10,351 page likes. That's pretty decent. That's pretty good. Although I find that a lot of them aren't really engaged user. And that has to do with a whole other program. But we've done 84 posts.

Since July because we started that Facebook page in July. So since July we've done 84 total posts. So we want to track the number of posts we're making, and then we want to track the total engagement. And now here's where you got to do some math and some fudge because engagement is reactions, comments, and shares. And I don't want you to have to go into every single post and read them. So what we do is if you look at the.

Metrics that Facebook provides you, and I'm trying to think of exactly where that's located on Facebook, I'll have to remember that. But it gives you, you the post that you have. They'll give you your reach. That's what they call it. And reach to me is how many Page likes, right? Or how many likes on that post you're getting. And then the other thing that they would do is they call it. I can't even read what it says here. Clicks, actions. That would be the other thing that they call it. Clicks and actions. And so what I do is I actually take all of the clicks and actions and I just add up the numbers that are there and I multiply them by 10 because they are 10x valuable to you. If someone is willing to share my post, if someone is willing to share this Facebook Live, then they are associating themselves with me and my brand. And that means I resonated enough with them to be valuable to them. So I'm going to rate that higher. So when someone takes an action like that, when someone takes the time to make a comment to us, even if it's a negative comment, and you know, they're having a disappointment discussion with you or a debate with you, you still want to value that because that's engagement. Right? And so we look at reach, just the number of people that saw it, which is the way that Facebook is measuring it. So it's views. I don't love that number. I think a lot of it is almost faked or it's, you know, you don't guarantee somebody actually saw it just because it was fed into their feed. Right. I scrolled through my feed really fast. So we're only going to value that at a 1x. So you add up all those numbers and you come to that. And so for us now, I hid my number that I had sitting here. Oh, 28,045 total engagement, which is pretty good. And so a lot of times I'll do that and I'll take it and I'll average it. So I'll take the total number of posts and divide it by the engagement or the engagement and divide it by the total number of posts and get an average that's going there. And I use that as my benchmark. I want to do better than that next time. So you really, like, look at all of that. And this is our measurements that we use. So this is your before, though, because now we're going to move into a whole new process of how you're doing it. So you want to also have a measurement about where you want to go. So of course you're going to do that across, not just Facebook, but all your social profiles that you care about, all the social profiles you're a part of. And then you want to start to look at that and say, which one of those profiles, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, wherever I am, do I have the top engagement? That is that number. That is your average per post. Where am I getting the top engagement for my effort? Right. So a number of posts is the amount of your effort. The engagement is the conversion or the return you're getting for that effort. And so that's how we're going to look at it. So where am I ranking? So for me, LinkedIn is actually higher than Facebook, but I see the value in Facebook, of course, and we look at that as we have to up our game here. So that's actually, we're in the process of working on that. And that's what you're seeing a Facebook Live from me. So this is. We're trying to increase that engagement. So I have a before measurement, and I'm trying to get to an after measurement. And that's really what we want to go. So if it's your top engagement and you want to keep it your top engagement, then definitely stay there, work on that. And if you have one that you want to bring up because you see a good market there for you, or you see that a lot of your followers and fans are your most engaged or your most valuable clients are coming from there, Connect the two things together. So that's the next stage is you really identify which one is your ideal who. So where are they hanging out? Where are they going? And while I totally love Instagram and it's so visual and it's so great, we've actually found that the kind of people who become our clients don't come through Instagram, that they come through Facebook instead of Instagram or from LinkedIn instead of Instagram. So we said, well, we still want to be there and we'll still post there, but it's not a high part of our engagement. And so we dropped it down on our list as of 2017. Doesn't mean I'm not watching it and not seeing if there's something I can do or it's growing there. You got to pay attention. And that's why we're measuring that on a quarterly basis or yearly basis, whatever your measurement time is, then the next thing you want to do is follow your competition. And I'm not talking about the top influencers in your niche. I'm talking about somebody reachable, that person that's just ahead of you, you know, the person who's just killing it and getting a lot more engagement than you, the one who's getting more clients than you, the one who's always ahead of you. You know who they are. They're the ones you want to be, right? And so that's the one you want to model. You want us take their measurements, and you can't get all of their information, but you can get a good guess of it. You can see how many people are commenting on their posts. You can see how many shares are there. You can kind of get a sense of how well they're doing. And so, you know, make a judgment call and measure a couple of them and see where they are in each of your niches and go from there. So we call that. That's step number two. Remember, we're going to go and we're making a competitive benchmark, so we're really checking that out. And we want to model the best. We don't want to model the ones that are doing the trendy things who are always jumping on, oh, let's make 10,000 fans on Facebook, and let's jump to this and let's jump to that. We don't want the ones who are following that. We want the ones who have been continually building organic traffic or building traffic and fans and a membership group and whatever it is that they're building that you want, that's where you want to go to them and model them. We want to model their engagement and measure their engagement, and we want to model their content value. That's another thing. Pay attention to what they're posting, and we want to pay attention to the path to profit. Are they funneling people Are they driving them to an event? What is the best path to profit? And I want you to really clearly think about that because there's a clear link between what Facebook or LinkedIn might respond to in terms of an offer. And they. If they're being successful, if they're getting more business and you can see that they're growing, and you know that they're growing because they're in your industry, right. Then that model is probably the best that's working with that particular social media channel. So keep that in mind and look to that as well. Now, I do want to preface that by saying the reason we're not watching Top Influencers and the reason I don't want you going after there is that because the top 5% of influencers that make money on their influencer, on their social profiles, they make money because they spend about 80% of the money that they make on ads. So organic Reach is bad. I'm an Ink columnist. They tell us this all the time. Organic Reach is just drop, drop, dropping based on the Facebook algorithm, based on all sorts of stuff they're pushing you into placing ads. So that is really the way that we really want to go away from that and say, that's not the model we want to go on. We want to go on the model of the people who are, who are really engaging and really doing something and boosting their own network and within their network. So the other thing that you have with the top influencers are a lot of them just happen to be first in their niche or have a sponsor network that's boosting them. It's one of the reasons why we offer up boosting within our social network for our podcasters, because having that network that's going to share things for you helps everyone rise together. So if you can, you can do that in a really great way. Tie yourself to other people that are compatible with you, not in competition with you, but compatible with your message and really doing good, authentic things that would be good for your market. Band together and agree to share each other's posts. That can really help for you guys. So I invite you to listen to the feed you'd Brand Influencer episode. We just did that one pretty recently. Episode number nine, I think. And I want to invite you there because I'm not going to go into great detail on this because I don't want this to last forever here and I want to get to the other stuff for you, but it talks about how to find the right influencers for your niche. We really dive into that because it's really critically important, not just to pick the biggest celebrity you can find. So let's go on to talking about post planning. And you know, I actually, this is a fun part for me. And because I come out of a world in which we do editorial calendars, I come out of the world in which magazines and writing articles and all of those things, there's always an editorial plan. And so I've approached social media from that same planning point. And so we make a very significant post plan, right? We look at those competitors, we see where they're getting high engagement, we see their content valuable or is it gimmicky? We look at the model for how we want to do that and we look at what's working within our own. So we look at that reach, we look at the engagement on our own posts and see what's happening and what's engaging the most for us as well. And we want to model and do more of that.

So that's really where we're going with the post plan. And we mix it up. So we hit post style, post type, and we have a 30, 30, 3010 rule. I know that sounds like a lot, but I'll touch on that real quick. So one of the things that I, you know, we see all the time you're scrolling through your Facebook feed. I kind of go do it really fast right here. I got my phone here, right? And I'm scrolling through it really, really, really fast. And I can tell you that something catches my eye, I'll slow down, go back, right? But when, a lot of times when I see the mistake happen is that someone is following a branding expert. And I work with lots of branding experts and I totally love them, so I hope I'm not offending anyone out there, but this is a huge miss and a huge mistake and I want to stop people from doing it. Because it doesn't work in a feed situation. Your blog feed, in your podcast feed. Same thing when you're in a feed situation and you think, oh, I've got to put my brand everywhere. So it might be my face or it might be my logo or it might be my colors, whatever that is, I gotta have people know that it's me in the feed. That's a huge mistake. If they see that again and again and again, then what happens is that they look at that and they say, oh, wow, I've seen that before. And so I'm gonna actually, you know what, I'm gonna pop out. I'm gonna pop out real quick and Share this with you, because I think this one's really valuable. And I'm gonna just jump ahead real quick. Oh.

There we go. Okay, watch this. This is.

See how. This is her. This is her blog. This isn't on social, but could you imagine if you saw that same post week after week after week with that blue background and a headshot on the right? I mean, you're not gonna read that, and you're not gonna really know if that person is new. And that's about, you know, that's kind of how fast I scroll through things.

So this is actually what she said when I pointed that out to her. And this is Susan Harrow. She's a PR and media consultant. She's like, I advise my PR clients to never wear the same clothes in their videos. Lillian, I bet you would agree with that. So that people don't think they've already seen it, right? That this is exactly what happens. They think they've already seen it. They think they've already read it.

And I think, I'm not there, I'm back. So they think they've already read it before. And so that's really where you get that system in which you must mix up the visuals in the feed. So we do this for our clients. We provide them original graphics, and then we try never to have the same colors, never to have the same text style. We try to make shape different. So, like, if the image is over to the right, maybe the next time it's over to the left. And so we try to do that and we really mix it up and add great, impactful images on the background. But sometimes we also mix it up in our feed at which we show no text. We tried just the background image and we put the text into the comments, right? Or into the post message that you put. So you're going to want to mix that up across everything that you do. And that's really one of those things that really can make a huge difference in boosting your engagement the fastest. So you don't really have to do make different posts than you make now. You just style them differently as you post them.

So I'm going to talk about suggested post types, because after we have post style, we got to have post types. And really, I want you to think carefully. Anytime you post, the number one thing is you want a why? Why should I share this? You want to ask that question in your head, and that's what you should write. Shouldn't be promotional. You should be thinking about copy. You should be thinking about why is this valuable to the person I'm sharing with this, sharing this with. And when you think about that, that's going the top thing that you're going to do. And then you're going to have a specific post type that you will be sharing. Sometimes you'll share an image, sometimes you'll share a video. Sometimes you'll be sharing, you know, a header like from your blog feed or from your podcast or from your post that you just made somewhere your video you just made. Right? So whatever that is, that's your post type. But we go a little bit deeper in thinking about our post type, and we think there are some values in doing some of these things because it helps you repurpose content you already have so you don't have to think about what new thing to post. Right. This is about that editorial planning calendar. So we have a lot of things. So Tom and I did five. Almost done. We're about to record the 500th episode of our WTAFF 3D printing podcast. 500 episodes. So you can imagine there's a lot in that first couple hundred that nobody ever hears and nobody ever reads, right? They can't find it because it's so buried down deep. So we really pushed that out, and we put it into an evergreen situation. You may have heard that. Evergreen tweets, evergreen messaging. Well, we took out the ones that weren't timely, but almost 95% of them are, and we put them into this reposting system and we do summaries. That's one thing we do, like the top 20 product review episodes or the top 20, you know, and we'll. We'll do like, almost like you can do a Facebook story, right? Which is kind of like this rotating little sideshow where you could do like three of them or something. And you can put the graphics, put images there so you can do something like that. So a summary is a great way to get something valuable. So we have lots of episodes, for instance, on cool 3D printed items from Halloween. And we did it for three years in a row. So we have, you know, a summary episode would be a great episode of the top, you know, the top 3D printed Halloween items. And so it's something we can easily pull without a lot of work. And so that's one of the ones that we like to do. Get you get your older stuff moving because you have new fans, you have new followers. Just because it's old to you doesn't mean it's old to them. And so that's a way to mine that and repurpose that. The other thing that we do is we do a Where are they now? So we have a lot of people we've interviewed, guests that we've interviewed or people I wrote about in articles, and we do a Where are they now? So I just, I bumped into someone who I wrote an article about. I'd never met him in person, and I just bumped into him at Michelle Young's event. And so, you know, I want to do a follow up on him. And so it's a great chance for you to just pop them a message, which is a great way to network with those influencers and those guests that you've had. Pop them a message and say, hey, I'm about to repost our article. Is there anything new that you're doing right now that I could say that I could, you know, hype up for you? They will respond back and they'll be so excited that they'll reshare that repost. And that also helps you as well. So we do that. Where are they now? We also pull out great quotes, stuff I might have said, stuff Tom might have said, but stuff guests have said. Pull out great quotes and stuff you probably have seen me post multiple times. Hope is not a plan, right? This is what we're talking about. This is not a plan. This is not hope here. What we're doing is we're really planning it. That's one of our key messages we send out all the time, but we pull quotes like that every single day from every single episode that we do. And we kind of have them on file so we can make cool visual graphics of them. And we tag the people who say them so then they share them again, and that's continuing engagement. The other thing we do is we do new content, of course, because I've got a new episode that's coming out this week. I think today's episode on. Yeah, today's episode on Feed you'd brand is how I became an ink columnist. Wouldn't you like to be one, too? Right. So I would put post out a message on my new content, Egobate. Okay. I know there's some of you out there who haven't heard of it before. We do something we call Egobate. And it is kind of fun and kind of awesome. But basically it's a great testimonial that you cannot help but share and embed in your website. And so when you go to the link to download this slideshare, you can totally check that out and find out more about that as well.

What you missed this is the other type of post we really do because you know, they may have scrolled through your feed. They might be the percentage that didn't get served up what you posted from Facebook because of the algorithm. So at least once a week we post a what you missed this week. We also send it out an email to our email list and remind them of these posts and these things that we've done this week. And a lot of what we based in putting into our email is what we saw as highest engagement from the previous week. So you get that kind of idea. Social is a great way to test this out. Is this worth putting in my newsletter? Will it get a good response? So this is a great way for you to do it is you're not reposting something, you're reminding them that they might have missed it. And we try to mix up so it's not the same image every time either. So that's another way that we do it. Two things that I want to mention to you here when you're doing post type. One is don't always put the link up in the top up and when you put your post message right, put it in the comments. Do the same thing when you're tagging someone who authored it or who did that. Don't always put them up in the top, sometimes put them in the in the comments, mix it up on there. Because the Facebook algorithm is changing all the time and you'll find that you might get different engagement based on that. So that's a good way to do it. Never send anyone anywhere but your website.

Remember that Google 10X power we want to harness that. Never send anyone anywhere but your website. So get yourself a shortener link that is your website or do a referrer. So.

I can do braincastingyou.com.

Social master, which is going to be the message here. That's Social Master. So that's going to be the link for you guys to get this slideshare. So you want to keep brand casting you in there, right? I want to keep reinforcing my website because that's where people can find out more about me, more about me than is on my Facebook page. Right. And so that's where they can find more about business. That's where they can engage with me there. And you want to reinforce that in any post that you do. If you've got that kind of link, you want to.