In today's episode of the Course Creator Academy podcast, Pualena dives into the basics of the five key areas to elevate your social media presence. Pua uses her own experiences to highlight mistakes to avoid and the essentials to cover if time is tight. She also gives essential tips for maintaining healthy boundaries with social media and how to tackle social media scheduling. Furthermore, she overviews the proper setup, optimization and maintenance strategies for any business wishing to expand its user reach through social media. She hopes her guide will help inspire and help get the listener started on their social media journey.
Pua clearly identifies the five areas to focus on when beginning or maintaining a social media presence. She reveals the importance of taking your time and optimizing your social media profiles. She later discusses how essential consistency, engagement and collaboration are. Each of the five factors plays a powerful and significant role in attracting and keeping clients active with your business. Additionally, Pualena explains why content is strongest when it is branded, engaging, high-quality and offers value. While listening to this podcast, you will leave having a clearer understanding of optimizing and maintaining your social media pages. And stay tuned for upcoming episodes where Pualena interviews a social media expert on the step-by-step approach to a full-length social media launch promotion.
Resources discussed in this episode:
--
Contact Pua Pakele | RBL Media:
--
Transcript:
Pualena 0:00
Using other people's audiences, and I see this a lot in the podcast world, in the YouTube space, where maybe you do a podcast episode and you ask your guest to share it with their audience. You then have that entire person or that entire business's audience, opening a newsletter that leads them to your podcast. That's so powerful.
Pualena 0:25
Hello, and welcome back to the Course Creators Academy podcast. I'm your host Pua and today we are talking about one of the most highly requested topics and a topic that I also would love to learn more about. And so I did in preparation for this episode. And that is utilizing and leveraging social media, and specifically, free and organic social media strategies to promote your business and to promote your online courses. Now, if you know me, you know that social media is something that kind of makes me cringe just a little bit. And I think that's more of a personal problem. So, I won't get into that too much here. But I don't think I'm alone. I think that there are a lot of solo entrepreneurs or small teams or small businesses that, they know that social media is important, it's useful, and not using it is just giving up a piece of the pie. So, if that's you, because that's me, I want you to know that you're not alone. And there are strategies that you can put into place, to nurture your audiences, to grow your audiences, so that you do have a platform to provide value to promote your products, your services, your courses, and hopefully, a place that does not feel so super heavy for you and a place that you can enjoy being. Part of what will create that enjoyment, or it's gonna be two things, one, making sure that you have really strong boundaries around your social media habits. Again, this is sort of more of like a personal thing. So, and I realize, like, one of the reasons why I don't like social media is it becomes a huge time waster for me. And when I go on social media, even if it's for my business, I end up just getting lost in the scroll. So, just utilizing platforms, team members, and you know, boundaries, if you have to set an actual alarm using, yeah, let's get into it. Let's get into boundaries, because I feel like that's like, tip number zero of the five. So, I use a, it's like a Google Chrome plugin. And I think there's an app also, I use the free version, and it is called. It's called Pause. Yep, it's called Pause. So, if I add in it, essentially, you can craft a list and it gives you a list of all the websites that might be distracting. All social media, Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, Facebook, or YouTube. And then like Amazon, Etsy, a bunch of stuff, like the list they have is huge. And it's actually pretty, pretty good. It's really thorough. And what it does is, when I open it, it forces me to pause for five seconds, this big screen comes up. And it says, let's actually do it. And so does this pause for a few seconds, and then there's a butterfly. So, it actually forces me to say like, oh, did I go here? Because it's a habit? Or did I go here because they actually need to go on this website? And then you can, you know, click through once those five seconds are up, and you can, you know, go on with your day. Or you can not pause that specific site for 24 hours, or you can change it on the list itself. It's really, really helped me to stay, to keep my boundaries around social media, at least from the entry point. It does not necessarily limit the amount of time that I spend on as a website, there are apps for that. And we don't have to get too deep into this but little hacks so that you can utilize the platforms but not be on them for an extended period of time. The other thing in terms of just posting content that you might want to leverage are platforms like Hootsuite or Later.com. These are scheduling platforms. So, you just go into that platform. So, I use Later for my Instagram. If you have Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and you want to use all of, you want to schedule posts for all of those platforms from one place, something like HootSuite is actually really useful. And then you create the content in there, and you don't need to go on the actual social media platform itself, to do anything, and then you don't get distracted. So, a couple of tips before we dive in.
Pualena 5:06
But today, we are talking about, there's three or five key areas that you could focus on in order to elevate your social media presence, to nurture your social media, audience and followers. And doing this will allow you to have a stronger foundation for promoting your course, or anything that you want to launch. A lot of times, what we end up doing is neglecting these audiences by like not posting or engaging at all, or just doing like the bare minimum, and hoping that when we do show up and have something to sell, that people are just there waiting for you, and we'll see it and you'll be able to just use the platform and pick it up where you left off. Maybe sometimes this works. Most of the time, it doesn't though. And if you have a very cold or kind of dead audience, not only will they not be used to seeing you, and you'll actually come off as like, oh, I only see this person when they when they want to sell something. But also the algorithm will not pick you up because you haven't been active, you haven't been engaging. And you're not, you're already not showing up on people's feeds. So, it's not just going to like magically put you in front of people, it's going to start you from the beginning, if not like below baseline to get you back into the algorithm. And the only way to get back up to where you were, is to go to get some sort of consistency in your posting. And we'll get into that in a little bit. But basically, what I'm trying to say is make sure that you are creating time to nurture the social media platforms that you want to be on. This is why I tell people like you could be on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tik Tok, LinkedIn, like, it's totally possible for you to be on all of those things. But if you want to actually nurture each of those audiences, you're not going to want to be on all those platforms. I want you to choose one, choose one platform period, this is going to be where you start. This is where you'll create your content and what you will optimize your content for. What that means is, every platform utilizes a little bit of a different layout and format and strategy to deliver content. The most like, it's obvious, right? YouTube is video. If you're not creating video content then what are you going to put on YouTube? It's kind of you know, like that, that one people understand. Where people often sort of mess this up, not mess this up, but get a little bit lazy. And I admit, this is me, or it was, I'm going to stop using Facebook is Instagram to Facebook. It's very easy to share an Instagram post to Facebook, and it's not going to kill you, it's not going to, you know, destroy your social media following or the algorithm or anything like that. But Instagram content is crafted a little bit differently than Facebook content. So, ideally, what you're looking for on Instagram is something like if we're doing static posts, which I'll go into video in a minute, because video performs way better than images at this point. But if you're doing an image post, you either want it to be a square or actually a little bit taller than a square because now Instagram in the feed, it can accommodate taller images. And so we want your image to take up more of the screen. So, if it's tall, or like portrait orientation, you're going to take up more of the screen, which is going to allow your content to be viewed. Like, primarily, instead of sharing space with whatever account is before after you. Okay? On Facebook, actually, the ideal orientation is landscape. So, it's a little bit of a longer image or square, right? So, and it depends too, are we optimizing for a desktop view or a mobile view? Most people are looking at their Instagram and their Facebook on their phones. So, does that change the way that people scroll through your content?
How about the way that they read the captions? Captions on Instagram show up a little bit differently than captions on Facebook. Now, I am not a social media expert. And I will not give you specifics on how to actually craft good content on each of these platforms. I'm just sort of letting you know that there is a difference. Which is why, like this will take all of your time if you try to optimize all of your content for all of the platforms. So, choose one, choose one, learn the platform, learn how to create the best content for that platform. And if you are on something else, let's say you're also on Tik Tok, and Instagram, and you create, you know, instructional videos that you think that are great for Tik Tok, in your call to action, in your profile, in your captions, direct people back to Instagram or wherever that other platform is. Because Instagram is where you want to grow the audience, if that was where your focus is. The other platforms are just ways to capture new groups of people who may not find your Instagram and direct them there. Okay, so if you got nothing else from this long, montage. Is what it's called? Monologue, not montage. Definitely choose one platform and hopefully, that releases a little bit of pressure. Now, if you have a social media manager, if you have a team, if you have somebody who's willing to take on the social media responsibilities, yeah, sure, branch out, use LinkedIn. LinkedIn is untapped potential. Everybody's talking about it. Getting on there, it’s on my list. That's the thing, right? Like, Instagram is my platform of choice. And I just don't want to learn a new platform right now. So, anyway, yeah. Okay. So, that was content creation for like platform-specific content.
Pualena 11:27
And when it comes to the actual content itself, the videos, the graphics, the images, the photos, the captions, we want that to be branded, engaging, high quality, and valuable. Branded, engaging, high quality and valuable. When I say branded, I don't necessarily think that you need to paste your logo across the picture. Or, you know, in the videos, what I mean is we want it to be brand aligned. Okay, so are you using brand colors or brand themes, this can, this can actually be really fun. So, let's say that you are doing video content, you don't have to have your logo on a poster behind you in a video. Or, you know, I see a lot of people doing like virtual backgrounds. And they have all of their business information that can be kind of cool for Zoom or whatever. But social media, you don't need that. What could be really fun is wearing a brand shirt, or a shirt that has one or two of your brand colors or hat. So, get creative with how you weave your branding into your posts. And again, you don't need to be super, super obvious and just use your logo on everything. But I do think that it's worth tying in different elements of your brand, using your brand fonts, your brand colors in many different ways. Something really cool that Canva just came out with, is you can, if you have like a pro account, so the paid Canva account, you can search in the elements by color. You can search for photos, that have the color hex code in the photo that is like the same color as your brand. So, for example, I have that like pink in my brand, in my logo. And I can grab that hex code, pop it into the search filter in Canva. And I'll get photos that have that specific shade of pink in the picture. And I can use that for my content. It's so cool. And it just creates that underlying sort of subconscious brand trust across all of your content. Okay? We want it to be high quality. So, there's nothing worse than seeing a picture on Instagram or anywhere else and it's super blurry. That just really, really it knocks your credibility, it shows that you haven't given thought or like you just didn't pay attention. And subconsciously, people will think that if that's how you treat your content, that's how you'll treat them as clients. So, it's really important to make sure that your stuff is very crisp, it's very clean. It feels very intentional. We don't want anything to feel like an accident or like there's no intention behind it. We want it to provide value. Now this is a tough one to swallow because we know how quickly people scroll. And if we spend an hour creating a post in a caption that has so much great value. It's gonna fall on deaf eyes, deaf ears and blind eyes because it's just going to be scrolled through. That's why this is a full-time job, because people's entire careers are around creating captivating content that's going to stop people from scrolling long enough that they might want to read the caption in than if they read the caption, they might want to do the call to action, and go to the link in your bio, and then click on the link in your bio, and then scroll through the LinkedIn bio list and then go to your website, like, it's a lot. Oh, and by the way, when they get to your website, they're going to want to have to stay on your website, because you want to retain their information or their attention, give them more information, and then turn them into a paid customer. That's a lot to ask of an Instagram post. So, this is why social media becomes such a heavy lift. Now, don't think that every post that you make has to make all of that happen, you're gonna have posts that get 3 likes, you're gonna have posts that get 300 likes, you're gonna have posts that get 3000 likes. You don't have to nail it every time. Because what is equally as important as the content you create, is the consistency at which you post it. So, consistency is what plays on the algorithm. Value is what plays on the human on the other side of the algorithm and you need both. Now, every single post does not have to deliver value in the form of a full-blown transformation. It can just be a little tip, or a quote, or something that makes someone smile or something that makes you memorable as a brand. Weaving that into more instructional or informational things, can help to create a well-rounded social media feed, that when people who are new to your business, visit your social media profile, and they click on something, they're going to have a good experience. Okay? That was a lot, that was all number one content creation. Again, this information is meant to inspire. If you're feeling overwhelmed, don't worry, just listen passively, find one or two nuggets that you want to take action on and just do those one or two things. That's all. If it's just like committing to being consistent, that really is the one that's going to open up all of the rest of the doors for you. So, start there, then from there, you can start making more value in your content, right? So, you know, choose one thing anyway, moving on.
Pualena 17:10
Number two, optimize your social media profiles. Optimize your profiles to reflect your brand. And if you're selling a course, if you are a course creator or a coach, have it also reflect the course experience, your coaching experience, right? You want to have a really, really good profile picture, maybe it's your logo, maybe it's a picture of you. If it's Facebook, or YouTube or LinkedIn, you want to have really, really good cover images that are also brand aligned. Again, I'm not going to give you specific strategies here because I don't know them. But I've seen a lot of different banners, some have, you know, information, some have calls to action, here's my website for my free course go here, or join my community go here. And all of that is sort of in text form on the banner itself, in the image. Those are legitimate strategies. And then in the profile itself, include links to wherever you want people to go. Again, you have to tell people what to do, they're not going to think to do it themselves. If in your caption of your posts, you're not saying visit the link in my bio to learn more, they're not going to go to your bio. It's as simple as that. They're just gonna keep on scrolling. They're gonna say, Oh, I wonder what Oh, but what is this down here? People are so distracted, and they're so distractible. So, tell people what to do. If you are launching, if you have a fixed launch window, where you have a cart open and a cart close, do not bother with link in bio stuff like, you know, the actual like link in bio. What is it called, Linktree? Yeah, don't bother with that, or anything like it. Give them one link to click on, that will take them to the lowest barrier to entry. Most of the time, this is going to be your landing page or your sales page for your course. If you're doing a fixed course launch, point them to your course sales page, use that link in your bio. And then when the launch is done, change it back or change it to your website or whatever you're launching next. You want to give people the easiest way to get what they want. That's why if you have a product, and you connect Shopify or whatever that platform is that you use, you can link directly to the individual product that you're posting about from Instagram. I think that's so cool. So, use the tools that you have for sure. And do that in your stories. You can add links to your stories. Send them directly to your sales page or your webinar registration or you know, whatever. Don't send them to your homepage of your website where they're going to have to find it is what you're talking about.
Pualena 19:58
Okay, number three is consistency and we did talk about this a little bit. And I will say it again, because it's just that important. Consistency is so key. If your algorithm is tarnished, and you haven't posted regularly, or you're sort of in and out, and you know, you reuse hashtags, is Shadow banning still a thing? Can somebody tell me? Someone sent me a message and let me know if that's still a thing. It used to be that if you reused hashtags, or captions, and you sort of acted spammy, the algorithm would shadow-ban you and actually, like, severely limit the people that you were exposed to. I don't know if that's still a thing. If it is, though, I mean, and you're not being consistent, and you're acting spammy, and you're reusing captions and hashtags, it could hurt you tremendously. So, be authentic, use real content, and just be super consistent. What I highly recommend is scheduling out about 30 days of posts at a time. And again, Hootsuite, Later, all of those things you can use to schedule out Instagram or social media posts. That way, you can just focus on engaging and know that they're being released on a schedule. And that is like, as consistent as you can get, it does it automatically. Now, I've heard that certain platforms actually don't give you as much reach if you've scheduled your posts, through a third-party platform, you get better results if you post directly in Instagram. Now, if you're gonna tell me, Okay, I'll do that. But I won't be as consistent as if I could schedule it out and just batch and do it one day a month. I'd go for the consistency over the like little edge that it gives you to post on directly on the platform, you could do both, you could create the content and set it like an alarm for yourself. Later.com has, there's two options, you can auto-post, or they can send you a notification that will alert you that it's time to post. So, you could really, really optimize it that way. Again, maybe this is for somebody on your team or your social media manager. If you're paying to get your social media done right. Yeah, you want them to do all of these things. If you're on your own, and you're doing this because you know, it's good for your business and you want to have as good of a feed as you can without totally just destroying your mental state and your mental health, then these strategies will be helpful for you. But consistency is key.
Pualena 22:47
Engagement is also kind of key. So, you can't just schedule your posts, and then close your Instagram for a month and never go back. You do want to make it a habit to check your DMS, check your comments, and reply. If you're a small business, if you're a course creator, people like to know that you're a real human, and they want to actually engage with you. They want to have a conversation with you. They want to ask you questions. Answering questions will allow people to know that you are the expert, and that you are worth investing in. Now this becomes a little bit of a slippery slope when you get big enough to get like trolls and spam and hate mail and whatever else people do behind a keyboard that's really disappointing for humanity, but something that we live with. If you're at that point, my guess is that you have created a brand and a company and a reputation that is large enough that you can invest in an in-house social media manager, who will help to filter through those things so that you don't have to read them. If you're at the point where you're getting rude comments, hateful comments, and it's really affecting your mental health. Find a way for you to not look at your comments. It's so not worth it. With that being said, though, I do think that it's still important to comment back and engage with people who are truly trying to reach you. There's nothing like commenting on like somebody that you admire and having them comment back or answer a question. Even if it's sort of random like if you're so huge that you just can't reply to every single one. Replying to a few, will show people that you're there but you might be busy or you know, it's just, do your best. But I would say when you're starting out, you have your circle of friends and maybe some strangers and some clients and you know you're getting a few, like a handful of comments on each post. Do your best to comment back, drop a little emoji something.
Pualena 24:55
Okay, number five, this one is sort of like next level and we can talk a little bit more about this. But collaboration with social media can be really fun, it can also alleviate some of the pressure that you might feel to create all of your own traffic and your own engagement and your own reach. Utilizing someone else's audience, who is has a similar audience to yours, can be really, really useful. So, now on Instagram, you can actually post on behalf of yourself and someone else. So, if I want to do a collaboration, say with Kajabi, and I post social media, or I post on Instagram that, you know, Rebel Media and Kajabi are together here. And they, you know, I think they have to approve it. I don't know how that works, because I think there's some sort of gatekeeping to that, but using other people's audiences, and I see this a lot in the podcast world in the YouTube space, where maybe you do a podcast episode, and you ask your guest to share it with their audience, you then have that entire person or that entire business's audience, opening a newsletter that leads them to your podcast, that's so powerful. And those are brand new ears, and it can create such a great ripple effect. Something that businesses also leverage quite a bit, if you are a product-based business is allowing, what we know of as influencers, which I think that word is a little bit cringy at this point, but I like to use user-generated content, that's the phrase or that's the term that I like to use. And basically, it's like, hey, you know, I hope you enjoy this product, please feel free to post a picture of you using it, or wearing it, or sharing it, you know, whatever it is on social media, and we will repost it, we'll follow you. User-generated content, it can be really powerful and it's almost like a testimonial. So, I, as a potential customer, can see that, in addition to what you create as a brand, you also have people who are using your stuff, consuming your content, taking your courses, enjoying it enough to post about it, so that I can see that you're a legitimate business, and that other people are getting results. Okay?
Pualena 27:27
I feel like that was already a lot. We can, and I'm actually going to have a social media expert on the podcast to dive deeper into some of these because it's probably so super worth providing some, like real grounded strategies that you can actually follow to do, to like, go through with a full launch promotion. And this stuff will get you started. The stuff we talked about today is, it's really just maintenance. It's like proper setup, optimization and maintenance. I would love to dive into launch strategy and how to leverage social media to promote a specific product or course, or experience, or coaching opportunity. And if you know of an amazing social media person, who could provide some cool content and some cool tips for you folks. I'd love to be introduced to them. So, feel free to reach out to me on Instagram because that's where I like to hang out. RBL.media. Send me your questions. Let me know if you enjoyed this. If you have any episodes that you want to hear, any guests that you want to have on. I am so open to providing that for you and I look forward to talking to you again soon. All right, keep crushing.