Podcast Social Shares: How To Pick Powerful Social Media Hashtags And Create Stronger Captions

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Hey everyone. Welcome to Monetize and Feed your brand. We are in Social Media Month and we are talking podcasts, social shares in general, but specifically today we're going to talk about how to pick powerful social media hashtags and create stronger captions. This is not a lot of people's strong suit there. I mean, I know a lot of writers because I happen to be one, so. So, you know, that's a difference. My community might be, but most of our podcasters on our network at Platitize are much more comfortable in the media world. They're much more comfortable creating the videos, creating the audios, not comfortable in the writing part. And so this can be a struggle for many people. So that's why I want to really bring this up. Because also remember, it's so hard to be seen, right? We really have a tough time getting our social posts seen. About 1.3%, especially, especially of our business posts are all that seen any given day by our community. So that's really hard. I mean, this is low conversion. So they're seeing it and they're converting on it. So the posting amount is about, I don't know, it's somewhere between 10 and 20% depending on whether you're posting in your own group or you're posting on your profiles or things like that, whether you're doing videos, you're doing stories. So it varies between that. But the conversion rate still stays the same. Someone taking action, making comments, sharing, doing those things. The engagement piece is so low, so we want to up those odds as best we can. And some of those things here are what we're going to talk about today. We are going to remind you, I want to remind you that throughout Social Media Month, we have talked about your social goals. Starter social media goals might be things like attracting the right people. So we want to make sure that everything we write matches to the right people. We want to, at the end of the day, get more connections and we want to get engagement from those connections because engagement means more listeners for your podcast. Or it might mean more sales to your business. I spelled engagement wrong. Ooh, I can't affix that anyway, build a relationship might be the other thing that you want to do. And that is, you know, you want to create a dialogue going that involves further engagement and ongoing. Ongoing posts and a theme. Ongoing. Right. So you're continually serving them, doing things that might be a series that you're teaching, like what I'm doing here with Social Media Month. So these are things that we want to do. So what are your social goals are really important to keep in mind as we move forward. So we're focusing on our audience interests and pains for your ideal prospect, right, the ideal listener to your podcast, that might be the thing as well. So we're focusing on what interests them and where their pain points are with everything that we post. So that is the focus of our writing, it's focus of our topics, it's the focus of the choices we made. Remember, we've already talked about assets and choosing assets. You know, if you're a productized customers, you've got them created already within your multimedia package. You've got video, audio, blog and social share graphics to be able to utilize. Sometimes we use the term graphics, sometimes we use assets, but we use assets because everything is so multimedia might be a video meme. So I'm just going to run through them really quick here so you guys can be reminded of what they. What they might be. So here are some examples. You might have episode art. So these might be what you're posting on your blog. They're the header, they're the square, they're the featured image, whatever you might call them. That might be something that you want to share. It might be what we call ego bait, which is a comment, a comment you make about your guest. So it's like a testimonial. It is a statement that you made during the show or whatever it is that you want to say. But it's a graphic version of that. Audiograms, we have different kinds here. Remember, those are the ones with the audio waves. Those might be something you want to use because they're. They go into social media like a video. So they can help with that sort of video formulaic thing that happens within social media today. We also have video memes. That's typically just a video clip. Sometimes they have graphics around them, sometimes they don't. Like the one in the middle here, guess, quotes, quote of what somebody says on your show. That might be something you want to share or a host quote, something you said on your show. So we're going to now write strong captions based on that and when we do, we want to consider these things. We want to consider our lead in tips and teaching, urgency and question. We want to encompass all of that into a strong caption. So I want you to understand that there are captions in different places on social media too. There are captions sometimes above. If you look at LinkedIn, that's a really typical comment above Facebook feedback, you have the caption above. So the caption is the leading things. The thing you say is the first thing they see before they see the image on Instagram, it's reversed your captions below. So just thinking about that, it depends on what platform you're using, where it's going to be. But either way, the image, the graphic, the asset you're using, they need to tie together, they need to impact each other. And the idea is that obviously you're building this in so that you will be able to get people to click through and do some more things. Right? So we want to do this in the most comprehensive possible way, but we also don't want to be really lengthy. We're not writing an article here, right. We want to lead them to wherever it is they're going. So this is much longer slide than I like to do, but I wanted to give you this so that you could have it as a takeaway. So when I talk about lead and I'm talking about like the first sentence, the headline, you can sometimes think of it, sometimes people create a like separated headline where it's like bold face that maybe has an emoji in it. You'll see that when I give you some examples coming up. You're going to treat your first sounds like a headline. You might want to start with how to. I love starting with activating words. It's something I learned in my journalist class. Right. In my journalism classes, we learn change advice, risk needs, smart, successful, top, grow. We want to use these words to get people activated to do something. That's the. The first word in our sentence that we use. The other thing we can do is just use how to, as I mentioned already, and just use how to do something. Right? How to do this. We want to keep our first sentence to like our first section of it like the lead in eight to 12 words maximum on the eight side is better, but you can go up to 12. When we have a strong headline, we want to.

Figure out the compelling part of it. So if we have how to, we want to, how to import, how to stop, how to identify, like, we still want an active word there. So it's going to be there. It's just going to be after the how to. We don't want to forget to put that when we bing. We can also begin with a number like X number of ways or why this number? You know why 5. Five tips to do this right there. Those are always the best. Whatever the 10 best ways. Those are all things that you can use as well. A number plays in that. Then we're going to move on to sort of like the meat of our caption, right? So we want to move on to things that are tips and teaching. They do much better on social media. They are, you know, people are out there, especially in this business. This is not advice for creating influence in terms of like it's all about me, what I think, what I'm selling. This is about your unique perspective, but it's combined with being helpful so that it sells your business or what you have to offer just a little bit different twist on it. This is our business focused view of this. So you want to take your unique perspective. How different? You don't want to give the same advice everybody else gives. You want to give your twist to it, give your unique direction, your unique angle on it. What do you say that not other people say. If you can find that, start with that. It's also not a commentary, it's not a statement. You're not telling the whole story. That's for the podcast, that's for the video. That's for all the other things that are going to follow. But this is teaching through quick tips and experience. Maybe a story, but a really quick story. You know, it's, it's this happened to me and this is why I did this, right? And then what I learned from that could be a list of bullets, it could be a thought provoking sentence. We want to keep it short. We don't want this to be the whole thing. We don't. I mean people, you're already with the headline, you're barely covering before it will click to read more on almost any platform. So you almost always have to click down to see this section of it. So that leading paragraph really has to or that leading couple of sentences has to really bring you in so that they'll want to check what you you say next if you can. So that visually you kept the lead. In short, that next sentence shows you're leaving them hanging. They want to see what the whole sentence is. So if you write the next ones as well, you might be able to capture their attention even more and get them to do that. Expand it. Read more, scroll down, whatever it requires. I don't put links in my teaching area ever. And if you're linking your podcast, the image is linked, so you just delete that. We never, we never put that in there. We're going to put them in other areas and I'll talk about that in a few minutes. The next thing we want to talk about is urgency, right? We really want to have an urgency to our post, right? Because I'm scrolling through social media, I'm really busy, and if I'm slowly going through your post and you have something for me, what's going to make me stop? Why should I stop for you? So making it timely, making it really relevant to me, getting me urgent so that it requires me to know about this right now. Read this, listen to it, I'm going to get it. Because if somebody just saves my post, they will never come back to it. Or if they think, oh, I'll come back, I'll go check out that podcast later. But they didn't click through and subscribe to you or do anything like that. The chances are you've already lost them that it will be hard for them to go back and find the post. It's almost impossible to find the post later. So we want to make sure that you're capturing them right at that moment and making something so urgent and timely want to give them a fear of missing out. Serious FOMO going on here. So then the last thing we want to leave them is a compelling call to action. Asking a question is a really good call to action. The easiest way to get an engagement is to ask for input for their experience, for their thoughts. As long as you're very specific about what you want. You know, we try posts and you'll see some of the examples where we go, what are your thoughts? And you get terrible. You get terrible answers. But if you're really specific about it is what are your thoughts about hashtags being used for business purposes, like really specific, then you're going to get a lot more detailed response. So the other thing is that of course, at the end of our caption, we're adding our hashtags in and I'm going to talk about those after we finish this caption section. I decided to go with the caption first because the hashtags tend to be at the bottom. Some people lead with them, but most people put them the bottom of the post because of how they're a searchable item. So here's some examples. This is a good lead in example, I Love the phrase that's put here. I didn't write this. This is from a team, but this is what we do here. I train my team just like I'm training you right now, so that they can write for me when I'm unable to write. So any post that you see that came out about the binge factor show feed, your brand show didn't come from me. I did review them, but it didn't come from me directly. So the posts that you see posted by me are totally different. But the posts that we do here to just promote the show, I got to have a team. I'm really busy, and you are too. And so this is what I train them in to do. So monetizing your podcast is one of the goals of every podcaster, but the question remains how. Now, this is on Instagram, so there's a little bit more that shows, and it talks about getting sponsors to a show, talks about Crystal o'. Keefe. So she's tagged in this. It talks about the clip out. It talks about her husband Tom, achieving a sustainable business model. And then the text cut off, cuts off, and you see the image. It's a great place to be cut off. Because I was like, well, what's a sustainable business model? I got to know this. What about monetizing? What does that have to do with anything? They're more likely to read the rest of the post and click through it and stop right there and listen to the clip, because there's a video clip that goes along this along with this. They're likely to do that because.