How to Optimize Social Media Profiles for Loyal Podcast Fans

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community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works today.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 feel Feed Your Brand with smart cut tactics proven to cast your original voice to the world.

Hey everyone, welcome back to Feed Your Brand and the Poditize coaching call. And we are doing a masterclass because we are mid-social media month. And in social media month here, we are talking profile optimization, 5 easy ways to optimize social media profiles and attract devoted podcast listeners, because obviously, that's really what we want to do here is, you know, we're going to update our profiles, and we're going to do all those things. But if we're not attracting the right people, and I'm making the assumption here that attracting the right people for your show is attracting the right people for your business. If that's not the case, then we probably have to have a much more complex discussion about podcast Facebook pages or channel pages on any kind of social media. And you need a little bit more complex strategy as if you're running multiple businesses and you have to look at your private profile a little bit differently. And that's one of the things that I'm actually dealing with and incorporating right now into my personal side of things because I'm a multiple host, right? I am a multi-host. I'm a host of The Binge Factor. I'm a host of Feature Brand. Tom and I have a new one starting called The Next Little Thing. All of those things are coming together. So figuring out how to optimize our profiles is actually first and foremost in our mind, and we're gonna be doing something about that right now. So I'm gonna share my screen and I'm gonna get going with our presentation on how this is, how this works and what kinds of things we're gonna look for in our profiles and going to see what might, things you might want to update as you consider and evaluate. So remember last week we did an audit, so that's really important that we check that audit and we've done all of that. So I'll talk about that in a minute and remind you how to do that. It's really hard to stand out today. Like, I think we talked about that last week when we were talking about social media in general and the bad conversion rates. But when we think about all of the profiles out there and everything that's going on out in social media and everything, there's 1.62 billion users on Facebook, right? That's a lot. And I think my number might be a little old. And 88% of them are not there to see your messages. They're there to keep up with their friends, right? They're there to keep up with their family. They're there to keep up with the hot issues of the day, whatever it is that they're utilizing Facebook for, but they aren't necessarily there to get your push messages in their face, right? They're not there for that purpose. 8 billion videos are viewed every day. 85% of them are watched with the sound off. So they're not getting all of your messages. Only 11% of Facebook posts get any reach each day to your listeners or to your viewers or to your followers, your fans, your friends, whatever you wanna call them. Livestream is 4 times more likely to be watched, and that has a 35% push on that. 1.74 billion websites are listed on Google. There's 31 million YouTube channels, and 4.75 billion pieces of content are shared every day on Facebook. You know, that's just really hard to make sure that you're gonna stand out amongst that big crowd. So we wanna really remember that we don't care about standing out amongst the entire crowd, right? We only really care about the audience that we are going for, our right fit audience, right? That we're caring about our audience, their interests and pain. So the first thing we want to identify when we're about to review our profile is actually who is looking at it. Who's the ideal person that is going to look at this profile? That's what we need to care about the most, not what we think, but what that person that we want to reach who's brand new to us. Because frankly, our mom already friended us, so she's not our audience, right? We're looking for the people who don't know us yet. Those are the ones that are going to see our profile. So when we're going for profile optimization, it's a cold calling card, right? So we know these are for people who don't know anything about us, not the people who already know us. Because how many times have you met somebody at an event and you just click friend and you don't even really review their profile because you met them at a networking event or met them somewhere, right? So you don't need that if you're already in connection with them in some way, shape, or form. You need it for someone who's searching cold and looking for things and then, and or reading a post, and then they want to say, well, who wrote that post? I'd like to see more about them. Let me click on their profile and find out more about them. So that's our ideal audience, is someone who doesn't know us yet, who'd like to get to know us. And we want to be really focused on thinking about their interests and their pain so that we attract them to it, because we have some goals. So remember last time we were talking about our overall social goals? Well, now we're talking about our social goals that are specifically to profile creation or our profile optimization, as we're calling it here. And remember, I'm going to go back because everyone has different goals. I told you I'm at a different stage where I'm starting to incorporate more of our brand, more of our podcast. I have a different set of profile goals because I've been doing this and my social media is mature because I've been doing this for, well, on LinkedIn for over a decade. And on Facebook since, I guess it would be 2014-ish, 2013-ish, something like that. Anyway, and 2011 on Pinterest. Like, so these things are pretty mature for me. They're not new, but you might be starting something brand new. You maybe you're just starting an Instagram account or you're just starting a Facebook or you're really revamping and rebranding everything. So these are what I call the starter social media profile goals you should think about. First off, We're attracting the right people. So we understand who they are, we got their interests and their pains, and we get that they're our ideal prospect. And then we're moving to how we do attract them. The second thing that we want our profile to do is invite them to hit the friend button, right? We want to invite them to hit connect. That's our goal of our profile. And the third thing is, is over time we want it to build a relationship. So if they're seeing a lot of posts from us, they friended us sort of casually, but they're seeing a lot of posts from us and they want to learn more. Now they have an opportunity to learn more and to build that stronger relationship because at the end of the day, if we're not building a relationship, we're actually not using social media properly, right? It's social engagement, it's social interaction, social networking, right? We wanted them to turn into touchpoints and we wanna build a relationship with all of our fans and followers and our friends, right? So that's our goal, to attract the right people, invite connection, and then build a relationship from there. The next part about what we're doing here is we're really looking at our profiles as a pretty crowded trade show. This is my favorite thing from T.R. Garland. He came on my Feed Your Brand show, and I think he came on The Binge Factor as well. And T.R. Garland talks about LinkedIn like a crowded trade show, right? And your profile is your booth. How are you gonna stand out? How are you gonna stand out from the crowd there? How are you gonna get someone to stop and walk into your booth? Like, that's our ultimate goal there that we want to have happen. So how do we make that happen? And here's some things— oops, I went too far. Here's some things that we can do. We can customize the name, we can create a strong headline or a photo, We can create an impactful banner. Notice the one behind Tom, and this is us at Podfest. That is in 2020, right? That was right before the pandemic. So that's Tom at the trade show booth. You can see impactful banner, big strong headline. You know where you're at. A service call to action. The reason why everybody's standing around is we had a really good call to action, right? We were getting them into the booth. And we have an outward-focused about you description. Now that's unique because you can't talk to Tom, right? You can't do what happens at the trade show where we interact and we start having a conversation. So we have to have an outward-focused about you description on our profile trade show booth, right? So on our profile, that, that's what we're doing. So these are just some of the things that we want to revamp and we want to make sure that they're getting those standout models of things that work. So we're gonna talk about some standout tips today. So my name, let's play the name game. So we want to use the whole space for our name, right? There's a lot more room than it looks like because they have to allow room for really long names. But there's also some tricks in there, like there's former names, right? I could be putting my maiden name there, but I haven't gone by my maiden name in 30 years, so pretty much no one in business knows me by that. So why would I use that space, that great space for it. Instead, I can use that great space to do something else. So this is the way my LinkedIn name looks. It looks— says Tracy Hazard, Inc., columnist and podcast strategist. Actually, it says podcast strategist and Inc. columnist or something like that. It has a lot more characters than you think it does. And that's coming up in parentheses because there's one of those things where, you know how it happens all the time that you see somebody's first name and last name. So it says Tracy Hazard, and then it has a dash, and it might say podcast strategist or podcast producer, or whatever that is after that. When that happens and somebody goes, "Ugh, they're gonna sell me something." So when it appears on your name, when you're tagged in things, it's giving you these extra characters that make people wonder whether they should connect with you. Now that's my view of the world. There's a lot of coaches out there who say, "Ugh, I want to make sure everybody knows that I'm the best speaker coach out there." And so it might say Tracy Hazard Speaker Coach.. And so I want that there. I want that in my name. That's a strategy. It is absolutely a strategy. But I can tell you, if you want people to connect with you more, if you want more of your connection requests to be accepted, putting that in this parentheses position where they will see it but not as a dash and to your last name has been way more effective for me. So when I've run— and we've done that, some of those automated programs where you do the connection requests, I've done it where I do it manually— I have an 80% acceptance rate, right? 80% of the people will accept my friend request. And that's cold reach, right? Not people I know, but going out there. Why is that? Well, because the words in columnist are in here. Who doesn't want to friend someone who's a columnist? So I've created something really compelling in that space that not only tells them what I do but also gives them something that they want to be associated with. And so that's why this one works for me. When I had it as the dash into my last name, I dropped down to below 50% of connection rates. And so if they don't connect with you, you can't get further into the relationship building process. So my recommendation is to use this and move it into your former name. There's also an opportunity nowadays to use it like your pronouns. So you could put instead of, you know, she/her or he/him or they/them, you can utilize that. You can put something else in the space on some profiles, not on every type of profile, not in every type of social media channel, but you can use that space as well. There's also a pronunciation. So don't forget, if you've got a really hard name to pronounce, go ahead and use the pronunciation space. It's a really great thing to do. You can also just expand on your name. You can say your name along with what your title is. So you can actually say a little bit more and it kind of catches everybody and they go, oh, oh, great. That's what they are. Wonderful. Now I know how to pronounce their name, and now I know more about them. So my recommendation is no selling stuff and no last name change because it creates havoc in also how you're associated, how you're searched for, how you're found. And sometimes when you have that dash and you're after your last name and somebody's looking for you, they have trouble finding you. So please make sure that you look at that and double-check it and make sure that if you do it that it hasn't hurt your searchability. And you can't search for yourself, so you gotta go have someone who's not connected to you do you a favor and search for you. And so that's also another reason why I took that out personally. So go ahead, use the former name, use the whole space, play the name game, and get this part right for yourself. The next thing and next space that you have is strong headlines. You have this section where you can put a little tagline or headline I like to call it writing a strong headline. We've talked about this so many times in Feature Brand and in Poditise's coaching calls. We talk about how important these headlines are for searchability. They are extremely important and they are one of the things that is searchable in the search engine that is all of the social media profiles. So it's not just your name and your, I'm gonna call it the former name or your, your would be like a title if you had one, right? So I'm, you know, I'm the CEO of Poditise, right? The title, those things are being searched Absolutely. But your headline or your tagline is also being searched. So what is the best way and the best formula for writing this is how do I help you? What's an authority credential that makes me uniquely suited to helping you? And where can I find you, right? Like this is where, this is how you're writing this. So you might be saying me, me, me, me, me, right? But instead think about it as being outward focused to that specific person. So here's two of my headlines that you can see because there's different types of, facial allocations. So the first one is on my LinkedIn, and the second one is on my Clubhouse. So you can see this. So obsessively focused on helping videocasters and podcasters be seen, heard, found, and rewarded. So that's what I am. I'm focused on videocasters and podcasters who— it works whether I want aspiring ones or ones that are already existing. It doesn't matter. I'm obsessively focused on helping them, right? And the coin carrier part is because I belong to an organization, and this is an indicator for the thousands of people out there. You don't need that in yours if you're not actually a coin carrier. And then the other one, that the slightly longer version of it, is obsessively focused on all things podcasting, launching and elevating ordinary and potential podcasters into bingeable podcast hosts that get seen, heard, found, and rewarded in this noisy digital world. Podatis.com CEO. Had a lot more room to work, so it helped me build in even more because I was allowed to add in my credential of being the Podatis CEO. So a little bit more space to work with. Use the maximum character count. That's what makes it. But you can see they're active, right? Obsessively focused. These are active words. So this is how we're creating strong headlines, and I'm focused outward on launching you, helping you, -ing words, right? These are ways that I'm expressing it out there. Now, I didn't put videocasters in the Clubhouse one because it's an audio-only platform. So I was also conscious of the platform that I'm putting this on, or the channel, the social media channel that I'm utilizing. I'm conscious of it as I'm creating that. Obviously, I would be putting videocasters in anything that I would do on YouTube or anything that I would do on Instagram because there's Instagram TV there. So we want to keep the videocasters and podcasters posters in there. We want to be cognizant of what the media type that we're using, the social media type, and making sure that we're well matched to that. Because if we're not, people are gonna like go, oh, this is a wannabe, and you know, this is a Twitter wannabe, right? They're gonna know that you're not really invested in the social media platform if you get that wrong. So think twice about that. Now let's talk banners and photos, because those matter, right? We want to have banners and photos that help us, right? That connect us, they're impactful, they're readable. Of course, we absolutely want that. The shape and the device matter. So when I'm looking at it on a mobile phone, it's usually very square, it has a different shape. My headshot or my profile photo might overlap a different area of the banner that's behind me or that banner image that's there. And so I really need to make sure that I look at the devices. So what I've done here is given you a link, poditise.com/social. Social-media-guide. And if you go to that, it's going to forward to a downloadable PDF that you don't have to register for anything, you just download it. That is going to give you the size guide. This is our size guide for every social media platform. We updated it not a couple of months ago. So while things change all the time and we try to stay on top of it, that's typically the exact place. So if you go to poditise.com/social-media, —guide, and you'll be able to go straight to that download and you'll be able to get our latest version of it whenever we update that. And we've gone and I think TikTok's in there now. And so there's a bunch of different ones in there. It's gonna give you the different shape and it's also gonna show you where you might wanna leave space in your banner image or not worry about overlap, right? Maybe you have a repetitive thing that happens. I'll show you mine in just a moment. And when you have that, you're not going to worry about it because your head is going to go over that space on a mobile device. But then maybe it won't be there when it's— you're looking at it on desktop. So these are some of the things that we consider. And that's why we've put out this guide for you to help you optimize your profile, because these banners are complex graphics. This is my LinkedIn snapshot. I'm showing you what it looks like. You can see because it's repeating the binge factor. And I'm not showing you what the mobile looks like, but my headshot is in the middle on the mobile. So in the mobile version, you get my headshot overlapping the binge factors, middle one of the binge factors. So it's repeated 3 times across the banner and it's overlapping there. I have sponsored by Poditise in the bottom corner so that people see, oh, it's a sponsored show. Like, they start to think, what's Poditise? I'm curious about that. So it just gave me a little place to do that. I used to have my Ink logo here. I don't anymore because I'm a former Ink columnist, that's the word that was added into my name and title, as you can see here. And so you can get a sense for how this looks, but look how bright and bold this is. Look how you just go on LinkedIn and go find Tracy Hazard with two Z's, and you can look at this straight on your phone yourself or right on your computer yourself and see the snapshot I've created for you. We look at the Facebook pages, our profile photos are down towards the bottom. We have lots more space to work with. They're a little bit taller, so you've got more room to work with to put things in. You can segregate them. When this is on mobile, it looks a little bit differently. Sometimes it cuts off one side, but it's scrollable, so that can work as well. Our Instagram snapshots, you know, on Instagram you basically see your profile photo and a little bit more title about you. I operate that one a little bit differently, and in fact, we're starting to update all of these profiles as well. Twitter, it looks just like my Facebook one because I wanted to, I, that, you know, that's an overlap. But now you can see where the profile photo is overlapping and why there's this extra space that we created at the bottom of it. It's because we use it in both places. So that's why that is working for us. This is my Pinterest. It's a little bit more personal. It's a little bit different. And I haven't updated the profile photo yet here so that it looks like all the others. That's one of the things you wanna audit and do. You wanna start making them all match up and look more similar as you go through that. I've always treated Pinterest a little bit differently and a little bit more personal because I've been doing it a pretty long time, since 2011, and I have a lot of followers and a lot of views of my pins that happen every single day. So just a little bit different profile on how I run it. You can make an exception if you understand the Pinterest followers are just a little bit different, or you understand a specific social media channel just looks a little bit different, then you may want to make a deviation. But make a purposeful deviation because you understand the audience better. Clubhouse profile, really at the end of the day, your little head matters the most. I've got a microphone behind mine, a swoop of color. We're about to update this one so it's red like it is everywhere else. Purple was a color we were working with on my personal profiles for a while because my personal website has purple in it. But now that we're sort of making sure the binge factor and then the next little thing come to the forefront, that red is becoming more and more predominant. And so that's going to be there. And it's more impactful, so it's gonna stand out and look great. Let's talk about that next tip, that next section. We wanna create a call to action that actually serves, right? We wanna create a compelling call to action, something that we can get them to do. They're not gonna necessarily do it right away. The first thing we want them to do is just find us, right? We wanted them to friend us and find us and, and do all of that. So that's what the main profile is there for. But if you're gonna have any call to action, you're gonna have a website, you're gonna have a link to something, you're gonna have a button that's a call out that get somebody to do something. We want to do the right thing. We want what the right audience really wants. What are they really focused on? What's most important for them? Is it a download that you give? Is it a call with you? That might be a little bit reaching. So I always think about it as like a service-first focus. So making sure I'm giving them what they really, really want. My listeners and viewers and my social media friends, using the friends in the broad term, my business friends, my network out there, right? The people who choose to follow me, they are following me because they want my tips, right? So I have to keep putting my tips out there. I have to keep putting all those things out there and post because that's what they're looking for. So if that's what they're looking for from me as a follower, then I really want my call to action to have that in it as well, to have that factor of whatever that tip service is. So it might be a tip sheet, it might be the social media guide like I just gave I'm giving to you all here, right? It might be one of those things that is going to give them what they really want. The second thing is it needs to build trust. So for me, I want it to not push you into a sales funnel model immediately because I want to create that trust that you can trust me to give you tips free and clear of any kind of sales model because I know at the end of the day, when I give you those tips and you become successful, you're either going to refer someone to me or you're going to come back and ask me how you can work with me. It happens all the time. It's exactly my model. It's how I choose to work. You may not want that, but if you can put some factor of trust building into the process by either creating success for them, because that does build trust, or create some kind of model that just shows the ethics of how you work or the integrity of what you intend to do, that you show up and you do what you say you're gonna do, you're going to build a greater trust factor faster And those touch points are going to get stronger and stronger throughout the process. So they will actually follow up on your next call to action, which might be a bigger ask, right? Might be an ask for a phone call. I like to make the call to action on social media because everything is so cold, right? You don't really know them. They only see some of your posts, not everything. I like to make it as free and frictionless as possible, which is why I usually do something forwarding that might download or more often than not, this is the perfect place for you to utilize a podcast, right? This is a perfect thing for me to send you to because it is totally frictionless to tell you, if you want more, subscribe to my podcast is super easy for you to do because you're already on your phone. You might be searching your social media feed. You just flip over to your podcast listening app and you click subscribe to The Binge Factor. Super easy. Didn't cause you any problems. You didn't have to sign up for anything, go into a new account. Download a new app, do anything complex that you weren't already doing. If you are already a podcast listener, you can do the same thing. If you just want them to go to YouTube and subscribe to your YouTube channel, right? Super easy. They're just bookmarking things in a way they're able to check you out, and then they're going to get more because you become bingeable, right? Because now they're going to binge on your show. They're going to see a lot more in that space, and they're going to get push notifications on your show They're going to get all that from the app. You don't have to do any of the heavy lifting or any of the work there. That's why that one's my favorite. It's free, it's frictionless, super easy to do. Subscribe to my show. Calls to action are good, but they might want to know more about you. That's why descriptions or about you, the about you section, about me, whatever they might call them in the different profiles, why those are so important. But here's the trick. I like to call them descriptions and not about me's because they really aren't all about me. They're not all about you. These descriptions are really outward facing. You must look at them as a way to get to reach people, not to just vomit on them everything about you, but to really show them how I help you with your pain and aspirations, plus giving you authority credentials as to why I am an expert, right? Why you and I should be connected. That's all that a description is about. If you've gone through my program and if you've done anything with us and launched your podcast, you know we have a podcast description exercise. I like to use the same model here. What's your audience? Who are they? What is their pain? What's their biggest pain points? What's their aspirations? What do they want to achieve? Remember, mine are videocasters and podcasters who are struggling to get seen, heard, found, and rewarded, right? That's what they want, and that's their struggle at the same time. So luckily mine are aligned. It makes it really easy. And who am I? I'm someone who's launched 600 shows for clients. I have 6 of my own shows, about to be 7. So I know what it's like to do this every single day. It got me an Inc. column. It gets me keynote speaking opportunities. It's leading to those things. So my credentials get to slot in there as stories of how podcasting and videocasting can work and be successful for you, right? It's not a, here's my resume and here's where I was, you know, when I started my first job and here's where I went to college. Remember, all those things are in there anyway if you're using LinkedIn, right? Your college associations, even on Facebook, you can choose to add those things in there. They're already there for you. So anyway, just gonna— I'm gonna skip back real quick to the tip page one more time and make sure that we cover these again. So remember, your profile sections are like a crowded trade show. You are creating your profile, is creating your booth. You want to get your name out there, you want it to be strong and make sure people can find you. So you need the name customized so it's really searchable. You want to have a strong headline banner photo, a strong headline and photo for yourself. So make sure your profile photo is updated, but you want that strong headline below and near your photo. You want to have that impactful banner that is making everybody go, ooh, wow, what's that? And ooh, I've never heard of this binge factor. I've never seen all those shows on the Poditise banner, right? Whatever those are, you want it to be impactful. You want to create a service, an outwardly focused call to action. And the same thing with your about you description. You want it to be outward focused and look at it like a description. And again, the last thing that you want to do is make sure that you use your full character counts everywhere you go. In your name, your headline, your calls to action, and your about yous or your description sections. You want to make sure that you use the full character count. Sorry to go too fast. Oh, there we go. I want to remind you that we still have more social media. I'm going to answer some questions shortly with the audience of all the clients that are there in our coaching call and anyone who's watching us on Facebook in the Brandcasters Facebook group. And you know, if you're a Feed Your Brand listener, you can't join those unless you're a client and you can join just by hosting with us. That's all you have to do to be able to be a part of our community, get this kind of advice every week. And you're gonna wanna do that because next week we're doing podcast Instagram TV advice with Whitney Lauritzen, how to share your show on Instagram TV and grow new listeners. That's next week's session. So I look forward for you joining me for that one. And we have one more social media session. We're gonna talk about hashtags and writing great copy as our last one for our, to wrap up our social media month. So thanks everyone for listening to Feed Your Brand. I'll be back next time with more tips and tools and all kinds of things to make sure that you can be seen, heard, and found with your podcast and videocast.

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