My COMPLETE Social Media Strategy for 2021 Exposed!

YouTube is just a sliver of my social media strategy. And after six years of being in business, we're taking our social media strategy up a notch. And spoiler alert, it does not include clubhouse. 2020 was basically a year of survival and we just did what we could to get by, meaning we just put out the content that we could get out. But through that year, we've also got more organized, more strategized, and motivated to post more content on social media because we're really looking to not only grow our visibility, but really expand our reach to more people here in 2021. For the first four to five years of my business, I 100% manage my social media accounts on my own. Seriously team of one. But in the past year I've not only been blessed to hire some contractors to help me manage all the different things in my business, but I was also able to hire my first full time employee by being able to get some things off my plate and over to these contractors and my employee. It's leaving up more space for me to focus on content creation and I honestly like it. But I'm ready to be strategic about it as well. Because the number one driver to my agency, the YouTube agency that I grew seriously by 400% last year has been social media. We've not spent a single single dollar on ads to drive leads to the agency and I also haven't updated the website or the Work with Me page that I kind of feel embarrassed to share. But the people that are finding me to work with me and my agency are reaching out on social media. So it's time to get serious because the agency is a huge revenue generator for us. But as I start to dive into more social media and creating more content for social media, I'm not gonna hire a specific person person for this. Although by the end of this year I would love to hire a social media manager. But for right now, our happiness coordinator, Erin has taken social media under her wing. So I'll be creating some of the content, but she will be getting it organized, getting the graphics made and then scheduling it for me. Then my full time hire, Erica will be taking over some more of the admin duties inside my business so I can again focus more of my time on social media. Creating a personal connection, responding and DMing and having conversations over on social media. Even hosting a live weekly show every Monday at 12pm Eastern Standard Time on YouTube and Facebook, being able to reach out and book guests for my live show for me, reaching out to other podcasts to be guests on those as well. Because of the administrative duties being taken off my plate, I'm going to be able to take that next step because right now I honestly don't have the time to add something else on onto my plate until I can get some things off. And yes, I know this seems like a lot of work, but hear me out. There's no way I could pull this off on my own and there's no way I could have done this four or five years ago. So if you are a team of one right now, don't let this stress you out. You do not, absolutely do not need to do all the things I'm going to talk about here to be successful. And I'm going to share with you my secret to be able to create more content without overwhelm. And that's repurposing. This is how I have survived so far. This is how I'm able to show up on as many platforms as I have because I repurpose one YouTube video as many times as possible. So again, if you're a team of one right now, I highly recommend you take some time to maybe pop into Canva and create templates. Templates for Facebook videos, Pinterest pins, quote cards for Instagram, Instagram TV cover photos. Create as many templates as possible. So when you do a YouTube video, you can repurpose it as many places as possible as quickly as possible with templates. Because if you don't find a way that works for you, social media is a machine and it will burn you out. So I want to run through actually every single platform that I plan to tackle here the rest of the year and share with you how I'm going to do that. I would love to hear if there's a current social platform you want to tackle this year, let me know down in the comments. Kind of. What is your one platform you want to get control of? First up, no surprise, YouTube and what I plan to do here this year on my YouTube channel. So YouTube is my pillar content. Come hell or high water. Every single week I have to get a YouTube video out, like I said earlier, because that YouTube video then becomes content for everywhere else. So if I don't get a YouTube video out each week, I don't have a blog post, I don't have newsletter content, I don't have three Instagram posts, I don't. I don't have Facebook video. Right? Everything that I post on any other social platform all starts here with YouTube because I know my YouTube content's going to live the longest. On average, a Facebook post lives about six hours. On average, an Instagram post lives about 48 hours. But on average a YouTube video lives 20 days. So I'm gonna put my eggs in the basket that lives the longest. Now I was actually thinking of doing an entire video dedicated to my YouTube strategy for the rest of 20. Let me know in the comments by saying YouTube strategy please, if you would like me to just do a separate video on that. Because there's a lot of things that go into how I figure out what my strategy is going to be here on YouTube. One of the first things I want to focus on here on YouTube is having a monthly theme. There's a lot of reasons why. First, if I have a monthly theme here on YouTube, I'm thinking about content that's easily going to flow from week to week to week, about four weeks. That way you're going to be excited to come back for part two, three and four. If somebody finds me in part two or three, they're going to want to go back to part and it's also going to help me focus on what I can create content on on other platforms. Give me a hands up emoji down below if you never know what to post on Instagram. So if I know I have a monthly thing on my channel about analytics, I know a lot of my content over on Instagram, on Facebook and LinkedIn. It's going to revolve about YouTube analytics that month. It just makes it easier for me to figure out what to post again. This is a very interactive video for you because I love getting your feedback. So if there's any specific topic you would really like me to deep dive in like analytics, video editing, let me know because I'm looking for themes for the rest of the year. Having a theme is also going to allow me to know what I need to talk about in my live series that I kicked off a few weeks ago. So every Monday at 12:00pm Eastern Standard Time I'm having a live show and this will allow me to think about topics to again revolve around the theme and allow me to go deeper. It'll allow me to answer your questions. It will also allow me to cross promote different videos on my channel. So let's say on Monday I go live about a specific topic. I can talk about how I went into a deep dive on the week before or how there's a video coming out on Wednesday about this. So it's going to be easier for me to again get people excited to subscribe, watch Come back and watch the whole series. Another reason why having this live series is because if I put out four videos in one month, so one video a week, I can then pull all four of those videos into a compilation video. So that's another piece of content for YouTube and I can also pull all those videos into a playlist. So that's technically another piece of content for YouTube because not only would all four of my videos be searchable and popped up on browse or suggested, but I'd also have a compilation video of all of those and also a playlist doing the same thing. So really just maximizes all the content that I am creating. Let's rewind back a little bit to that live stream show that I started. So I had been thinking about this for a lot and then I talked with Restream and they were willing to sponsor my live show. And what I love about that, Restream lets me stream on multiple platforms at once. So this means I can bring a live show to Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and then I can just use my phone to do it on Instagram. So that means I now have a live video on four platforms just by going live once a week. I know this sounds like a lot, but you can see once you know how it all starts to fit together, how it can help you do it faster. The last thing I want to talk about here on YouTube that I do want to focus on more are the stories here on YouTube, similar to Instagram stories in the Community tab. I've used the Community tab a lot with you all to get feedback on videos that you want to see or content that you want to hear from me. And I love that interaction. So we're also trying to figure out ways that we can get more consistent there and bring you the type of content that you want to see there. YouTube also loves it when you use features that they have. So they have stories, they have the community tab, they want you to use it. And I've heard stories from many other creators that are using them consistently. They have seen an increase in growth on their channel. So that's another thing we're looking at here on YouTube. I could continue diving into what I plan to do here on YouTube, but if you would like to see a separate video on that, you know what to do. Let's talk about everybody's maybe love to hate platform or have a love hate relationship with and that's Instagram. On Instagram right now we're posting five times a week and most of those fives, well, four of Those fives are all coming from repurposed content from my weekly YouTube video. So we take the YouTube video and we turn it into a carousel post. So those posts that you swipe through, and we do the biggest takeaways of that video, and then we use the YouTube video to create a reel with, again, the biggest takeaways of that video. Then we also do a quote. So a quote that I say in the video. We put a quote in the post of Instagram, and we also put the video on igtv. There is one additional post that we do every single Tuesday is basically a selfie of me of some sort and me sharing a piece of my story. I realized that the one thing that I was missing on a lot of my social platforms and even here on YouTube, is letting me. You get to know more about me and making me more of this human. Basically, here on video. I can edit out all the mistakes and really kind of filter through what you get to know about me. So I realized my next step in growing my business is really sharing more about me and connecting with you on, like, a friend level. And this process has been fairly easy to manage. We, like I said, repurpose a lot of things. Aaron's been pulling out a lot of things of the videos, and I just have to write one post a week about myself. So we're ready to take it to that next level. So the first thing we're going to focus on for our Instagram strategy is more shareable content. The quotes were meant to be more shareable, because if you create content on Instagram that people share or that people save, Instagram is going to push it to more people, so more quotes. I'm also thinking about changing the templates, maybe, maybe the colors, maybe make it a little bit more simplified so that people will share it on their feedback without worrying about it being on brand. And definitely more carousel posts, because these are the posts that people save. And when people save your post, that's a signal to Instagram that you've got good content and they're gonna push it to more people. That's one thing we're gonna be focusing here on. Instagram is possibly getting two carousels out a week and maybe two quotes out a week as well. And the way we're gonna do that is I have a load of content in my content library, so it's just like going through and sifting through all the content that I've already created and getting it in a text format to share in carousel posts. The other thing I'm gonna focus on on Instagram is, you guessed it, reels. I've personally been struggling with reels because I want it to be perfect before I do it. I know, I know. I tell you all, don't worry about it being perfect. And here I am talking about it needing to be perfect before I do it. But I'm just gonna rip the bandaid off. In fact, I'm shooting some reels this week and I'm hoping to get them out and to just do it. I preach this all the time and I'm not practicing what reach. I've seen one of my clients, Virginia Kerr, explode on Instagram within the past three months. She went from about 20,000 followers. She's over 60,000 followers and she really doubled down on reels. So I see the power it is I, I just need to do it. What I plan to do, the way I plan to do that is pretty much like I do YouTube videos. I plan to batch them. Every single Wednesday for me is some type of video content day. Whether it's recording YouTube videos. Now it's going to be also alternating with reels content, but I'd like to start posting about one to two reels a week and ideally I would like to get to about five a week. I'd like to try to post five reels a week for maybe a month or two to see what kind of growth and what kind of reach that can get me on Instagram. The one little secret that I am doing to make my life a little bit easier is creating a template for my reels cover photos. So if I can just create a template, swap out the photo, swap out the text, I'm sure it'll go a lot quicker. And thanks to Virginia. Another tip that I learned from her is to edit the reel outside of the Instagram app. She uses different apps and then she can take that video, put it into reels, put it into TikTok, even possibly put it on YouTube shorts. So I'm really looking again, obviously maximizing what I can repurpose. If I focus on one 15 second reel, can I put it in as many places as possible? I don't have any goals to focus on TikTok, but again, if I'm creating content that can easily throw up there, why not next on my social media list, podcasting. Yeah, you heard me right. I am thinking about a podcast. My team's probably not gonna enjoy that. I'm sharing this little behind the scenes secret that we're thinking about. But after hosting the video reframe Summit back in February, I realized how much more of a conversation needed to be had around video content, whether it was going live, YouTube, Facebook reels. Feeling confident, I saw this missing piece when it came to content for podcasts. I don't have anything on the calendar yet. We've just been talking about it on the team meetings and thinking about what that will look like, where it will fit into my schedule, but it's definitely something in the works. Having a podcast will also allow me to reach a different audience. Remember, my whole goal the rest of this year is to reach more people. And some people are just listening to podcasts. They're probably listening to podcasts to learn how to do different things in their business. And so again, I talk about bringing my content to the platform my audience prefers, right? And even though they may be listening to podcasts, they may still want to start a YouTube channel and build a YouTube channel for their business. So I need to bring my content to them so again, I can get in front of them and they can hear my content in everything that I do. Having a podcast also opens the door for allowing me to invite people on to interview. This is another great way to connect with people, to reach another person's audience. One thing that's really tough, being an online entrepreneur is missing that kind of water cooler talk and those social or those networking type events. And so hosting people on your podcast allows you to speak with them kind of like that, and could potentially get you in front of their audience as well. Again, expanding my reach. And you know what, I'm already thinking of ways that I can repurpose that podcast. Obviously, we would take that podcast, put it into a blog post, create Pinterest pins for it, do little audibles for the feed on Instagram or stories, take highlights or major takeaways for a post on LinkedIn. And I've even thought about doing these podcast recordings live in a private Facebook group just for the podcast fans. But that kind of leads me into another social platform I want to talk about here, since it kind of makes sense now. Facebook and Facebook groups. Do you enjoy Facebook groups? Are you in Facebook groups that you get value from? That's something I'm trying to determine. Also the rest of this year is how I want to use Facebook. Do I want to have a Facebook group just for the video reframed podcast? I know my video strategy. Academy 2.0 Facebook group is amazing. They're super engaging, they're super supportive. It's literally the only reason I get on Facebook now is that particular Facebook group. And I know not all Facebook groups are like that. And I'm just trying to figure out if I were to do a very specific Facebook group and give you exclusive content from the podcast or, like, special interview questions that I only ask for podcast Facebook fans, is that something that interests you or is that something that you enjoy? Yes. This all seems like a lot and a lot of video content. We need to realize video is where the content is going, and a lot of platforms are really rewarding video content. Video content literally rises to the top. So if we aren't implementing some type of video content, we're going to miss out. And I love the different ways that I can repurpose video content. But if you break it all down, I'm really only filming YouTube videos once a month. So the first Wednesday of every month, I shoot YouTube videos. Then if I do reels and I start batching that and getting into kind of a workflow in a system, I would ideally batch reels maybe every other Wednesday. So I'm only putting this face on on Wednesdays and then Mondays on my live stream. I have no idea what I want to do just yet with my podcast. I would like to do it with video, but again, still up in the air there. The last thing that I did want to talk about is my weekly newsletter. And I do send out a weekly newsletter, but it predominantly just promotes the YouTube video that dropped that day. And what I would love to focus on and have time to work on is creating exclusive content for the newsletter. I've seen a couple people who do this really well, and they kind of share, you know, more like emailing a friend what I worked on this week or what I'm reading or, you know, more personal things. So I'm trying to figure out, you know, what is the best mesh or the best mix of content that I want to share in my email newsletter. So if you do decide to give me your prized email. Right. I understand you don't just give anybody that. I want it to be valuable to you, and I want it to feel like we have this relationship. I'm sharing just special things for those that took the time to join my email list. So that's another thing I would like to maybe filter in on a day where I just focus on writing content. Again, I'm batching. I'd love to batch writing content and then also video content on another day. Now let's talk Clubhouse. We're not going to dive into the inclusivity problems with Clubhouse, but I'm going to Talk about the repurposing problems. Right. If I'm doing content, I need to find a way to repurpose it at least three or four times. And while, yes, I know you can record your Clubhouse talks, you need to get everybody's permission to do that. I still just don't find the value in doing that. I also saw a lot of my fellow entrepreneurs when Clubhouse came out getting sucked in instead of wasting so much of their time listening to Clubhouse. I don't necessarily like content that makes you have to be right there, right then. That's why I repurpose it for so many platforms. And so that's been kind of one of my biggest problems with Clubhouse. But the problem that remains supreme with Clubhouse is searchability. If I'm going to put content on Clubhouse and it's gone as soon as I hang up my call, or whatever you call it on Clubhouse, what's the purpose? If I'm creating YouTube content, I'm creating blog content that shows up on Google for years to come. And so I just don't have a reason why I would want to put time in Clubhouse right now. Yes, this sounds like a lot, and you don't need to do it. All right. I actually have a video diving into how I create those templates for Instagram that I talked about earlier. How I take my YouTube video and repurpose it on Instagram. If you want to check out how I do that and how I created those templates, watch that video on your screen right now because that video goes into full detail. And if you would like to get the exact workflow that I use for taking my YouTube video and repurposing it on all the other platforms, head to Trina Little Dot workflow. You can literally grab it in the Asana format, Trello format, or Google Docs format.