Boost Podcast Promo: Social Media Collaboration with Angie Lile

Want your podcast and videocast to be seen, heard, found, and rewarded in this noisy digital world? You are not alone. Join the nonprofit community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works today. Get ready to Feed Your Brand with smart cut tactics proven to cast your original voice to the world.

Thanks everyone for joining us. I'm Tracy Hazard here on Feed Your Brand, and I have an amazing expert. I have Angie Lyle. She began consulting and managing social media sites in 2005 with MySpace. She expanded to Facebook pages as soon as they were invented. She's always been on the cutting edge, and she sees how creating powerful online content helps brands build relationships with an audience. She also has a video production background and has created innovative story-driven content for those clients and expanded into each platform as they grew in popularity, including TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Snapchat. I don't think there's a social media she's experimented with— Threads, and I don't know, we're all trying to figure out Twitter and the X. Who knows that? But over the years, she's created her own strategies and continued to learn and expand from notable social media gurus, but also from her great clients. And that's really why I've brought her here, because she has this amazing ever-growing client list. Deepak Chopra, Ileana Van Zandt, Neale Donald Walsch, Ariel Ford, and so many other experts and authors. She really understands what it's like to be all of you. Podcasters, authors, speakers, content creators, all of you out there with the right strategies, with the right models that will work for you. She's always expanding her knowledge base, testing theories, which I love because that's what I'm all about. So we're always sharing back and forth what's working, what's not working, and we're always looking for that next thing. And today, why I brought her on is because there's something that tends to be missing in the podcasting shares that I see out there of all your episodes. I'm constantly watching our clients and non-clients, just the podcasting industry in general, and watching how you're sharing. And you're really great at sharing your episode, but you are not so great at collaborating with your guests. And it's a huge miss. So we're going to talk about collabs and how we need to create that engagement piece. Angie, Welcome to Feed Your Brand. Welcome to the Poditise community. We are so grateful to have you as a part of our world.

Thank you so much, Tracy, for that really wonderful introduction and for having me. And I wish I could stay longer. I mean, I'm already so excited. I just want to stay forever.

Well, good. Well, let's start about thinking through— when I look at some of the influencers out there, especially on Instagram, but even on TikTok as well, wow, they have such big followerships and such big communities. How did they build that and not have it be fake? How do you really build an engaged, authentic community?

It starts by not buying fake audiences. I know there used to be services out there that'll say, we'll get you this many followers, we'll get you this many likes, and they're just fake. They're not going to actually engage with your account, so it will hurt your account actually by adding all of those dead accounts. That don't engage, and your engagement rate will go down, and it'll just look like you're not going to reach the algorithm levels of being put into everybody's feeds like you need to be in order to grow a true audience. Start by not buying fake followers and try to avoid ads when possible. Sometimes Facebook pages, I usually can say, all right, maybe an ad to raise awareness to get people to like the page isn't a bad thing as long as they're engaging with the content first. I'll run a campaign where we're putting out really great content and we're aggregating all of the people that are using and liking and sharing and commenting on that content, and then I'll send ads to those people because then I know they're real, they were engaging with my content first. That's the only time that I would actually recommend ads to get those followers. Otherwise, it's just content, it's just putting it out there, it's those partnerships that we're going to talk about, And it's just constantly being real. And sometimes we don't have as much time to do that. Then we talk about how do we build our content so that we can just do it once or twice in a month and have all the content that we need to put it out there in every—

Well, us podcasters are lucky. We've got the— as long as we're producing weekly, we've got a general flow of content. That part's the easy part for us here, but it's not the easy part to figure out how to increase that engagement in your group and how to grow that group. When I enter in a space, I start a brand new podcast, and this was my case way back when, I didn't have all these followers that were in the 3D print community. I had friends. That was it. I didn't know how to expand into a new community or expand into sort of that business community area. What are some of the ways that you can look for that and find that growth areas that you might have.

There's definitely a lot of niche groups out there in all of the different platforms that you're looking at. And when I hear you talking about what you were starting out with and who knew you, your friends could say, well, I'm in this group, I'm going to share it out to my group and say, hey, you should check out Tracey's stuff. You find these advocates that are already associated with different groups across the social sphere. You've got groups on Facebook, there's groups and LinkedIn especially. And I look at Nextdoor if you're a brick and mortar and you need people to come to your business. But as far as podcasting goes, everybody loves a good podcast. I discovered a new podcaster through my neighborhood group and he actually lives in the neighborhood and he's TikTok famous. And he actually, I've seen him walking around. It's really funny how you discover people that are like getting all these followers and they could be your neighbor.

It's a common interest model. And I think that's what people really forget on social media is that Once you enter into this group of like cocker spaniel owners, like there's— it's a deep dive, let me tell you, right?

Yeah. But maybe you had a great podcast about that one time and you're like, hey, I know the podcast people, the poodles podcast, the poodles, the cocker spaniels, the whatever they are, right?

Exactly. That's really it is, is as you start to enter them. But I think the problem is, is you can't just like a group, follow a group, and then post your podcast in there and expect anything to happen. What are great ways to really do that in an authentic way, in a way that isn't pushy?

Well, I mean, obviously you want to follow the group's rules. Everybody's got rules for their groups and what you can post and whatnot. And the best way is if somebody is posting it about you, for you, because it's not like you're pushing your own brand. It's somebody else says, hey, if you like this stuff— and I frequently do that in my neighborhood groups and it's unsolicited on my behalf, but If you find somebody in your neighborhood who's already in a group and they're posting all the time, stuff like that, maybe get to know them a little better and get them to share your stuff. I mean, don't be afraid to reach out.

This is where we talk about influencers. And so here's the thing. This is a great guest strategy, and we are very lucky in the podcasting world that many of us take guests on our show, and maybe we don't take as many as we used to sometimes. You only take one a month or whatever that might be. But in the guest model, that's an opportunity to find one of those types of people who are influencing a group, invite them on your show, and then you know they're gonna share it, cuz why wouldn't they? Especially if they have a great experience on their show, which they should. That's a great way to do it. But sometimes when we are sharing and saying, hey, your episode post, we're not doing a great job of that collaboration model. What are some good practices there, Angie?

With a lot of people, what I found, it's not that they don't want to collab, it's that they don't necessarily understand what it is or how to do it. It's a technical thing. A lot of people think that the tagging thing is collaborating, but it's not. It's actually a whole nother level of tagging somebody, and it's really, as far as I've seen, only available profusely on Facebook and Instagram. On Facebook, I've noticed that you can do a collab post if you're uploading your video with your computer. There's an option, but it's like you have to open up additional options. There's like a tiny little caret there when you're scheduling it all out, and there's an option for you to add in the page that you're trying to collaborate with. This is more likely to happen on Instagram where everybody is using that to be an influencer. On Instagram, I've only seen that option when you have to be adding the video to your account with your phone. And then when you are like getting ready to put the copy in and all the captions, there's an option to tag. And some people think that tagging is just like, oh, I'm just gonna put their handle in the copy and call it good. That's tagging, but it's not. You have to actually open it up and tag the content and make sure that their account shows up and that they show up as a tagged person. But in that same window, there's a collaborator option. And in there is where you click collaborator. You can collaborate up to 2 people now with your account. And when you choose that option and they accept the request, that's the second part of it. They have to know that it's there. So you might wanna send 'em an email and say, hey, check your tagged post and look for a collaboration request from my account and then please accept it because they have to actually click that review button and accept the collaboration. And then what happens is it so magically appears on both of the accounts together. And when somebody is looking at the content, that both names show up together with the content and it boosts your reach, it boosts engagement. The algorithm goes nuts, that loves collaborations. And if you happen to be collaborating with someone with a higher reach, that's going to be really great. But don't be afraid to collaborate with someone with a little bit of less reach either, because that also boosts your algorithm. I definitely would try it out.

This is the thing that I hear from a lot of my podcasters out there. They're like, oh, that's more work, but it has very effective results. Changing the model of just programming the post through your Buffer, your MeetEdgar, whatever it is that you're using for scheduling, Hootsuite. Whatever it is that you're using for scheduling so that it sets an alarm, because you can do that so that it alerts you instead of posts for you and reminds you to go to your mobile phone and submit it, right? That's something you can do. But the effective results from that leads to the thing you want the most: engagement and follower growth.

There's a reason why that collab post gets so much better reach and engagement, and that is the one reason that I mentioned is that you have to be on your phone to do it. They want you on the app. They want you on your phone, on your app, in Instagram doing it. They will make sure that those posts get better reach because they're incentivizing you to continue to do that.

It's so important for us to remember that most of these algorithms today in our AI world, which Angie and I talk about all the time on the side, and we won't go down that deep dive right at this moment, or this will be a very long call, which we don't have.

Never be done.

Right, exactly. But there are these things that are incentivizing human connection, and this is one of them. Collabs is one of them. And look, we, I think we've seen them on YouTube for a really long time, just not in a formal way like they are where it's inviting you to collaborate in the app already. But in YouTube, I mean, that's how YouTubers grew. The influencers would, would model up together and then on a topic, and then it would be like a circulating topic and it would be almost like YouTube was creating a trending topic by having them collaborate together. And what they're doing is they're getting everybody to spend a lot of time in the app, right? They're getting to spend a lot of time on YouTube.

You know who uses that also is the Marvel movies, because when they do those whole crossovers or even in the TV shows, those things go through the roof because people like to see their favorite character from another show get on to this show. It's the same deal when those YouTubers started collabing. They would show up in each other's videos and it would just be— they would get really good reach. It was really good for them.

Well, we only have a short, short time with you, Angie. So we're gonna jump off the Feed Your Brand podcast, but we are gonna have you back in about a month and a half. And we're gonna bring you back for a deeper dive as we head to the year-end sort of planning for social media and what we're gonna do and how we're gonna expand. And I think that's a great topic for us to come up with as next. Thanks everyone for listening to Feed Your Brand. I'm Tracy Hazard here with Angie Lyle, and we'll be back again.

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