Since 2018, I've taught over 40,000 students how
to develop social media and digital marketing strategies for their own businesses and for their
clients. And while there's a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot that changes in the quicksand world
of social media, the seven strategies that I'm going to be sharing with you in today's video
are ones that are working really well right now. I believe are going to continue to work well into
the future as well. Make sure to let me know which of these strategies you are really resonating with
for your own business in the comments below this video, and let's get straight into them. And the
first tip is just to do more with less. I'm sure you've heard this a lot from myself and from other
marketers, but please, please stop trying to be everything to everyone on every platform, unless
you have a team of 20 or more people working behind the scenes of your business.
It is
humanly impossible to continue to be updated on all of the changes on every single platform
and create unique, engaging content for every platform. As an example, Sean Cannell, and
the think media team have a huge presence on YouTube with nearly 2 million subscribers
and they largely ignore their Instagram really only using it to promote their YouTube stuff.
Even though they do have a huge team. Still, they choose to focus all of their efforts on
YouTube because that's where their influence is most powerful. And likewise, you'll see
TikTokers who are huge on the platform, really only taking their content and repurposing it for
Instagram because they know where they have the most impact and where their time is best spent.
So now is the perfect time to look at your social media content and your overall social
media strategy. And think about a few things like where's your audience, most likely
hanging out. What kind of content do you enjoy creating? Where are your competitors
and what's working really well for them. And finally, where are you actually having the
most impact on your overall business goals? What's the kind of return on investment on each
platform in terms of the time you're spending on creating the content and the results you're
getting.
And for those of you who are doing this on behalf of clients as social media managers
or digital marketers, I really want you to feel confident in advising your clients to either ditch
or automate the stuff that's not working for them. And double down on the stuff that really is
working for them. The next step is all about getting cozy with paid social. Continuing on with
the topic of doing more with less. I want you to really think about how much time it would take
for you to create five Instagram posts, let's say, and then promoting those Instagram
posts to your stories and doing all the stuff that comes along with it.
And then think about taking that time and really just create one really awesome Instagram
posts and putting a little bit of budget behind it to promote it to your existing audience online.
And this gives them a chance to engage with it, interact with it, love it, and see it, which let's
face it.
You can't trust the organic algorithm to show it to your existing audience or all of your
existing audience anyway. So it's a post they might not have come across organically without
this kind of promotion. And then what you can do is take that post with all this gorgeous
engagement. And promote it to an audience that hasn't heard of you yet, but obviously seeing
all that engagement and that social proof on this post will make them really engage with it as
well and become curious about following your business online.
This is a really great way
to stop obsessing over quantity, consistency, frequency and all the things that kind of drive
people nuts in terms of having to show up on social media all the time, every single day, and
continuously become a content production machine, and really just focus on the quality
of the posts that are going out there. Not to mention that creating this kind of social
paid social campaign is one of the easiest strategies in the Facebook ads world. So it's
really simple and easy to set up if you haven't explored this part of your business yet, and you
kind of want to get your feet wet first, and then once you're ready to create some more complex
Facebook ads and Instagram ads strategies, we can move on to the next point, which is all about the
strategy of making ads that don't feel like ads. This is an ad for Google home about a dad who
is looking up things online about Australian rules football as his daughter is learning
to play.
Now I've seen this a million times and it makes me tear up every single time
because it's so wholesome and emotional and I will never stop loving it. And I will
make sure to link you guys to it in the description below for inspiration as well.
And that's the power of ads that don't look like ads, whether that's on TV, on
socials or anywhere else out there, if you can make ads that really make people
think laugh, cry, empathize, really feel the emotions of what you're trying to communicate.
People will really buy into the story and then buy into your product or offer as a result as well.
So don't make your ads about the product or the offer, make it about the people who are using that
product or offer or better yet.
Let the people who use your product or offer actually make the ads
for you. You might remember Chipotle's infamous guac dance challenge on TikTok that resulted
in 250,000 video submissions and over 1 billion views of the hashtag just during the six day
campaign, which resulted in Chipotle using 68% more avocados due to customer demand.
That's an extra 420,000 pounds of avocados across their stores! And while TikTok specifically
says don't make ads make TikToks – this philosophy can also be explored more broadly across
all different social networks to say, "Hey, make ads that don't feel or look like ads"
And now let's move on to embracing collaborations. It's never been easier to leverage the
authority and the audience of other creators and brands out there to grow your own brand
awareness and add value to your community. Some of the more obvious ways that you can do this
would be either influencer marketing or actually inviting people to collaborate in on your content,
like what you can do with Instagram collabs, where once the post is actually created, it will
essentially take it out to both of your audiences, expanding the reach, and also just kind of
making sure that both of your audiences know about the other account, which really
helps, especially if your audiences are really aligned with each other's content.
And also another great way to do this is by inviting people to be guests on your video
interviews on platforms like YouTube, but on other platforms as well, where it will then allow
people to actually share this content with their professional and personal network once the video
is live, thus expanding your reach, but it doesn't just have to be the case with prerecorded content.
You can also do this with something like Instagram lives, where you can have multiple people in
a live room.
That will then alert everyone's audience to say, "Hey, these people are all going
live. Do you want to go check it out?" And then once it's turned into prerecorded or evergreen
content and it's own someone's actual profile, then the other collaborators can share that
to their audience and expand the reach. But you can also leverage other people's
existing content through things like TikTok duets and even Instagram reels where you're
potentially jumping onto a trending video and the original creator might share it with their
audience as well.
And lastly, I love the idea, of social media takeovers, particularly for
larger brands or brands that are looking for unique ways to show people behind the
scenes. So in this example, from Hootsuite, we can see that the travel brand, By The Way,
sourced 50 local reporters and authors from destinations around the world to do an Instagram
stories takeover. And once again, you are able to then tag the people who are collaborating on a
project like this, and then they can share it with their own audience, expanding the reach of your
content once more and now onto the next tip, which is all about getting to the point quicker.
Attention spans are getting shorter and shorter. So make sure to audit your content. And whenever
you think you've cut out, just enough fluff. Go ahead and cut out more fluff and then
maybe cut out a little bit more fluff. My best performing videos in terms of audience
retention and engagement are ones where I have an introduction that is around 30 seconds or less.
So get to the point quicker when you're doing your videos on YouTube and other platforms,
you may also want to include some timestamps that will nicely form into chapters that
people can skip through and they can kind of skip around.
Back to certain points if they
think they miss something. And then YouTube will also really nicely put this into chapters
for you at the very end of the description. And this will also appear on Google when people
are searching for particular topics that might be in your video, that aren't necessarily the
title of the video. And this goes for any kind of written content as well. So this post is
very, very long, but Brian Dean, who is the founder of Backlinko has done this really
cleverly, where he has included chapters of these super, super, super long posts where I
can just kind of go or what am I interested in? I'm only interested in the video equipment
checklist and it's just jumped me down to the portion of the article that talks about that
particular topic, which again helps with my short attention span.
Then on platforms like Instagram,
I really want to encourage you to experiment with just using shorter captions, not necessarily for
every post, but using really, really quick and easy digestible, funny, entertaining educational
hosts, and an accompanying really short bite-size caption, but even if attention
spans are getting shorter, don't go abandoning long form content just yet. Google
and YouTube will still continue to rank videos and blog posts that are longer as long as they're
action packed and valuable for the intended or. Even Instagram and TikTok have increased the
length of their short form video content. Not to mention people will listen to an
hour long or even more podcasts episode about celebrities reflecting on old episodes
of themselves on TV, like Zack to the future. And I've even seen this with my own content.
One of my most popular Skillshare courses is nine and a half hours long on a platform where
most of the courses or the average length of a course is between 20 and 40 minutes long.
So don't be afraid of long form content, as long as it is valuable, educational,
entertaining, and captures the attention of your old.
A great example of this is an
Instagram account called sh*t you should care about where they often post long form content in
the form of a carousel post where that long form content is hidden in the graphic itself.
And the company in caption is actually quite short and succinct. And this is a really
clever way to sort of trick people into engaging with something they would otherwise maybe
scroll past if it was in the caption itself. And now let's talk about why you should get
comfortable with being uncomfortable on video. If you're not doing videos yet for your business,
I totally totally get it.
It can feel really overwhelming and complicated, not just in terms
of jumping on camera and feeling confident, talking to yourself in a room and pretending
there's other people around, but also in terms of, you know, what cameras should you get?
What microphone. How do you edit things? What do you say? How do you script stuff in a way that
it's engaging. And there's just a lot that can go into just feeling super, super overwhelmed with
the process, which is why I want to encourage you to just start small, even if you don't
necessarily post things, but just practice the art of making videos for your business.
And getting into the habit of thinking about how to incorporate video into your strategy,
because it really is going to become such a powerful tool in your business.
So you can
start with things like, you know, just turning voice clips that you record on your phone into
videos, or you can make little animated videos within Canva just without your face, without
any audio, just kind of created an creating animated posts, but I would also encourage
you to actually practice getting on camera. Even if you don't post things, you can just
record on your phone, you know, every single day, just get into the habit of doing a 30 second video
sharing something really powerful. Something you think your audience would really like to
know about your business or your industry? Then once you're a little bit more
comfortable, you can get into doing things like Instagram stories, which are just
15 seconds and they disappear in 24 hours. So even if they totally suck, it doesn't
really matter. And honestly, if I look back at some of my early videos and even my course
content, the videos are a little bit glitchy, a little bit out of saying, and it's just
me sitting on a bed with a webcam and a $30 microphone from Amazon.
But the important thing is
just to start and share it with the world and just get 1% better with each video you put out there.
So that's it guys. Those are my seven tips for what to try out with your social media strategy
this year. And for those of you who are still really worried about trying to make. Perfect.
When things are going out. I just want you to really embrace the imperfections of
this process because people are loving, authentic, unfiltered human content.
Right now.
That's not perfect. So, you know, typos, glitches or posing with
people online with your underwear hanging out. I thought it looked great. I love these guys until
I saw the photo more closely. I didn't realize that my… that, that do you think anyone could
have told me though? NOPE!. These are all just human things that people love to see because it
makes them really understand that brands are human and connect with them on a deeper level.
Thanks so much for being here, guys, and watching this video.
I'd love to hear from you
in the comments about which of these strategies you'll be trying out for your own business. And
I hope you'll consider subscribing to the channel so that you can catch my next video, have a
great day and I'll see you in the next one!.