Using Content and Social Media to Connect and Engage with Your Audience

hello everybody thanks for joining in with us my name is J this is Connor to my right on my screen maybe left on your screen I'm not entirely sure but excited to share this workshop with you and talk a little bit about social media and content strategy I met Connor hello is it like four or five months ago yeah right about there right about four or five months ago and he was working on a freelance business

then that as since kind of emerged and become his agency Fujita today and through that time Connor shared a lot with me about social media for sure and content strategy but also creator culture which is really fun so please make liberal use of the chat function here and the ask a question function and I'll be sure to pull in your questions and pose them to Connor and make sure that we get all of those answered Connors

got a pretty great deck here lined up he's gonna be sharing with you with some great examples and ideas but we want to make this personal and useful to you guys that are here with us live now so if you have questions about your particular business or your particular brand even your personal brand feel free to drop those in the chat or as a question and we'll make sure to get those answered we will have a

formal Q&A session at the end of this we'll probably have about 30 to 35 minutes of presentation we can answer questions at any point during that but at the end of that however much time we have left we'll leave that for Q&A if we run out questions we'll cut early we'll just use as much time as we need to so this is part of a series that I call unreal collective member spotlights unreal collective is my

business it's a community for founders and freelancers we offer a 12-week virtual accelerator to help people grow their businesses their freelance or startup businesses Conor was a part of that it was a lot of fun to work with Connor founder or freelancer and you're interested in that feel free to reach out and look talk to you more about it but without further ado I'm going to introduce the man of the hour Connor Connor boy Connor has

spent the last five years immersed in digital culture during that time he has led content and digital strategies for multiple brands worked on strategy teams on projects for both Fortune 50 companies and emerging brands and grew a fashion brands Instagram account over 200% and eight months Connor has experienced in content strategy content creation campaign strategy branding social media management and other things so Connor I'm going to turn it over to you and this very impressive Movember

mustache and you think they're awesome yeah thanks Jay I'll go ahead and share my screen there we go cool does that look good that is good all set cool cool all right so I am going to talk to you guys about using content in social media to effectively connect and engage with your audience to start off a little background about me outside of J I am co-founder of mudita creative right now we are social media content

strategy and production agency mudita means sympathetic joy in sanskrit and what we really try and do is build human connection in the digital world and really help brands both personal and commercial be able to connect with the people they want to and really develop those relationships through social media and content I would consider myself a digital and creator culture junkie like Jay had said I'm super into YouTube and Instagram and kind of figuring out how creators

and their audiences really interact with each other to be able to see how different people became big and grew followings and things like that I think it's very underplayed that people just get audiences because they put out good but there's tons and tons of creators that do amazing things that don't have audiences for whatever reason I have experienced content and social media strategy Holly and Tanager was the fashion brand I worked for Watson Enterprises a family

investment firm Inventure takes fortune 50 technologies and turns them into startups I did some work on strategy for them pure cycle technologies is one of those companies and Procter & Gamble was a parent company like a partner that we worked with hey Connor yeah what are some of the creators that you follow on YouTube or Instagram that you think do a really good job about some of the things you're talking about and people could follow yeah

I think in the business world Willie Morris is amazing at this he founded a company called faith box with Gary Vee sold it and now he represents another great creator Dan mace they're all about community and how they engage and really give back to people following them from like a pure creator perspective Casey nice that's great with you know engaging his community even though he isn't as hands-on with how he interacts with them anymore give him

he's a father and has other things going on but really really good content wise on Instagram thin for Meyer is a smaller creator he's a Instagram marketing guy big on LinkedIn and Instagram he's really really good at hosting live streams and being able to help other people yeah anyone else Jay anyone else you can think of now man you're my go-to funny things he posted some these Dan basis in our slack I thought there was one

guy who's the guy that does like the four minute and twenty second videos david dobrik yeah david dobrik is another one and he really engages his community has a consistent format and how he posts and shouts out different fans and makes it a really really immersive experience to be like in his fandom cool yeah moving on this is a case study I did while I was working at Holly and Tanager when I had got there we

had basically had right around 3,000 followers and most of them were fake from bad work from previous agency so when I came in what I really wanted to do is implement a lot of these tactics and I when I first got there I had no control over creative direction or what content they had so all I really had at my disposal was how we can engage layout DeFede and really optimize for the algorithm and through that

I eventually ended up getting more creative direction say but I worked there for about a year we had 360 posts 267,000 reach five hundred thirty thousand impressions grew over 200 percent and a lot of what I was working on was increasing traffic to the profile to bring to the site which increased three hundred fifty eight percent so I think this is really important because a lot of people what we'll go through later talk about not having

a budget or not necessarily knowing what to do creatively for content but you don't necessarily have to and you can start to build what you're doing by just being really really mechanical in how you engage and optimize what you're doing for the platform so we're gonna we're going to discuss today basically the current state of social media and audiences and go through how people interact on different platforms a which is really good to know because you'll

understand how things grow and really how to get into a community where your target audience is doing social media the wrong way a lot of brands even though they have social media just do it terribly and focus on themselves and then last we're going to talk about tips on strategy creation how you take the right mindset to engage especially if you don't have a big budget to hire a massive agency to be able to go through

and just do everything for you so the current state of social media audiences people expect brands to engage with them if they want to earn their time you can't really hide behind like a corporate facade any more on social media people want to be able to have relationships with the brand's they follow and that's really really important if you want to have any semblance of an audience because products or services don't build community you you really

have to engage to get there something that's often overplayed is social media interaction is a collection of overlapping and growing sub communities that drive growth and exposure and we'll talk about that a little bit more later but basically what this means is everything is focused on different cultures like whether it's photography Instagram or vlogging YouTube that can be separated down into you know like comedy vlogs like david dobrik or more cinematic stuff like dan.mason casey neistat

everything stems from these sub communities that grow and take on other names and niches and then different platforms have slight differences that impact how you have to approach them because it limits how people can engage and share information that we'll go through as well so something I I've talked to Jay about this more than once but it's like the neighborhood theory of social media and the fact that interaction on social media is very similar to physical

interactions in the real world think about it like your neighborhood you're in proximity you know those people you interact with those people in your neighborhood if someone new moves in they can expose everyone to new ideas they can change the community can expand around the city which would be like your niche and Instagram in social media works the exact same way but rather than that neighborhood being by proximity and where you own your house or rent

it's by shared passions and interests which makes things super super engaged and that makes it really important to know where you are where you as a personal brand or commercial brand stands in a fashion community or anything like that because your audience is going to be there and you have to find how to get in and knowing who else is around you and who you can collaborate with or leverage their audience to help you is also

really important for example influence our communities lots of influencers are friends and collaborate it's it's no secret I think H&M had a big campaign running through Coachella where there were a bunch of friend influencers that ran through them so they interact similar brand styles or industries interact with each other I know for example on Twitter moon pie and Pop Tart have really really great Twitter accounts and they interact with each other all the time you see

this in there I see this all the time too when somebody's doing like a book launch and all of a sudden the same person on all the top 200 podcasts or blogs I love this neighborhood theory and this idea that interaction on social media is similar to physical interactions in the real world because it's the same with messaging in your marketing the language that you would use the language that I would use to explain unreal collective

to Connor or what I do to Conor should be the same online whether it's on my website or on social media as it is me talking to him because the ability to share an idea and connects based on personality is not different online than it is offline yeah and I think the coolest part about it is fans know each other in these little sub communities and they know different create like when we were talking one time

Jay one of my go-to examples is if you know Casey nice that you'll probably know Dan mace from how he shadowed him for a couple months you know Dan mace you might know Ben Brown if you know Ben Brown you might know connor franta and Tim Callen there and if you know them and it just keeps expanding into bigger creators and all of their audiences overlap and part of how they grew so fast and different people

grow is by getting exposed to people that are already fans or in that sub community that get introduced to a new character totally I see this all the time a lot of people that I've become friends with and have worked with I've overlapped with in multiple products under the Seth Godin umbrella whether it's all NBA or the marketing seminar or anything else a lot of the times I meet people in his community that also turned out

to be my type of people you know if I like that and the people who also like that or gonna have similar interests as me yeah it's I'm seeing it right now with Gary Vee and his staff because you have Gary Vee then D rock and babban and Tyler they all have their own followings with it too and there's it there's a whole generation of entrepreneurs that are following them interacting with them through your theater scene

around three six eight and like Gary Vee and his team is really really cool there are some platform differences that make it tricky to be able to navigate across different platforms depending on how you really want to interact one of them being the ability and importance of reshare this almost doesn't exist on YouTube and Instagram you can reshare post to your stories that's a relatively new feature so that might change but on YouTube everything's really really

community based in comments and a lot of engagement is off of YouTube even though you can respond to YouTube comments and things like that but thinking about sharing if you share a YouTube video somewhere else you're sharing a link it often doesn't just play it's it's not as native as Facebook and Twitter and with Instagram again you can't really reshare things other than repost and it's not great to do in a really perfect example of this

is thinking about why do politicians use Facebook and Twitter over YouTube for video content the YouTube channel accountants Amir great YouTube channel recently had a video about this and one of the main reasons is the ability to share and morality because on Facebook and Twitter you're going to get retweets and reshares to different pages and get that conversation going and that just doesn't happen on the way YouTube is structured so when you're looking at exposing the

mass audience of ideas and things like that for politicians or someone like probably Tai Lopez who's a viral marketer you would want to do Facebook or Twitter depending on how you want to share things so you might you might be touching on this in a second actually I think maybe you are I was gonna say what should a brand be thinking about then whether they should as it comes to YouTube and Instagram what types of brands

should care about using Instagram and YouTube I think Instagram is the the best social platform for anyone right now because yeah we'll go over it later on on how intimate it is I I personally don't use Facebook at on outside of the group's feature Twitter is a water cooler where it's just ideas flowing all of the time and people coming back and forth I know of brands that have like really really funny Twitter accounts but I

don't really see Twitter as a brand following outside of personal brands I know Vesey Twitter is deceivingly big and there's a lot of sub communities on twitter for comedy but yeah it depends on how intimate and how you how you as a brand want to interact with your audience I see a startups for example though they have an idea they launch and the first things they do are register a domain register a Twitter handle buy t-shirts

it's like going down that rant a lot of times people automatically just spring up a twitter and I talk to them well why do you why do you want or need a Twitter is this the best platform for you because I agree Twitter seems to be much more about a place to share ideas and maybe respond proactively to like customer support inquiries but yeah doesn't seem to be as much of a connection or engagement mechanism so

if you have any other thoughts on that let me know yeah no I definitely I think I think you would definitely want an Instagram because I think most people and brands can find a way to utilize it but I would be in the camp that would say build your audience around you know what you can really kill and are good at don't try and spread everything across every platform especially really really early on before anyone knows

about you is a inactive social media account worse than one that does not exist I don't think so that's a good question though I think an inactive one that you share out isn't good but if you just own the handle and have the branding but don't really post I don't necessarily see the harm in that cool cool so one of the other things is the ability to discover discover brands and creators and videos and this is

where Instagram and YouTube really comes into play where a Twitter recently with now that they've added you can see who your friends are liking and they'll show that because you followed Twitter is definitely getting better at discovering discovery and showing you things you will like but Instagram and YouTube hands down the best being able to show you creators based off of what you've watched your Instagram and who you engage with I know for example when I

was doing a lot of research into the Instagram algorithm it takes so much into account who you interact with so if you can find that right community in interact with them and to have them interact with you you're in a much better position to be shown to more people like that and that's the beauty of being able to discover brands and other people or content creators on Instagram and YouTube versus I don't know how you would

find someone on Facebook if you didn't find them somewhere else and so is that in the Instagram discover area you get highlighted there if you're engaging with people that someone else already follows or engages with yeah or on these suggested follow accounts things like that and hashtags when they'll show they'll show hashtags in your feed post from certain hashtags if you follow hashtags you'll be more likely to show up there too I see a lot of

people using a lot of hashtags lately and I see their follower accounts go up a lot and it's something that I personally struggle with whether or not I want to go down that path for like my personal Instagram I don't have an Instagram for my business it's all personal I do care about my personal brand but Instagram is where I have like the most intimate look into my life and so I've been kind of hesitant to

do that if I did want to use hashtags does it have to be in the description of the content itself or I see a lot of people do like the first comment they just blast with hashtags either one works I always did first comment at high end Tanager cool yeah and then the last thing which is why I think Instagram really takes the the cake on what platform you should be on and interact is the intimacy

of relationships DMS comments and direct interactions are so much more important than on on YouTube or something it's nice you post this video you get feedback you get likes and you can interact with them in the comments but that's way less of a connection than sending a DM or having a live stream and being able to answer questions and being able to directly comment back to someone who's giving you love on your latest post Twitter same

way Twitter DMS are really hot too but it's not the same content it's more ideas and texts than it is showing off something or or making cool videos LinkedIn is amazing the LinkedIn community is incredibly supportive around certain hashtags and people putting out video content which is another really good place to be if your brand or building your personal brand and yeah once you understand where people are and how they interact that's when you can really

go in and engage them rather than taking this marketing strategy of this is our target market this is kind of what they like so I'm just gonna throw this out there use these hashtags and hope people care about what we're doing that brings us to the ways companies fail and the first one is the look at me look at our products were were really cool type instagrams and a lot of brands do this thinking one if

if you create really high quality content that can get you a following but it's not going to engage people and it's only going to get you so far you really need to put in the effort you should always give more than you asked this is a textbook Gary Vee value providing you shouldn't be asking them to swipe up or click links or to buy your products more than you're posting things that they can get value from

whether that's entertaining informing or educating you should always put out more than you're asking your community to do an engaged audience doesn't just appear like I said before you have to give them a reason to care about you people aren't just going to see what you're doing and immediately fall in love and always have the media company mindset a lot of people don't put out as much content at the highest quality as you can or have

the budget for and see what sticks iterate on it and and try and really find what people like and what you like doing as a brands you've used the phrase high quality content a couple of times are you talking to the production value or are you talking to yes what is actually in the content itself production value I've you want to get the highest production value you can out of things but it's not always the most

important especially depending on what you're doing sit down and shoot videos are completely fine especially if that's in your budget but if you have the ability to do higher production things even if it's behind the scenes that's always just going to reflect better than you know having bad audio or a shaky camera or things like that you can build a following without at that high production value but that's always the goal and just in case people

are unfamiliar high production being like Connor said good good audio yeah high-resolution video what else would you put under the good production value umbrella editing so not just one continuous unless it's like in interview being able to cut it and tell the story through the video rather than just kind of shoot and put things together yeah I think it's it's mostly the visual quality and how the video comes together and all another thing a lot of

people don't do they don't engage with people that are engaging with them this the thing that annoys me the most about brands or even content creators that don't respond to comments on instagrams every comment on an Instagram is a chance for you to connect with someone who took time to comment even if the comment happens to be fake because Instagram does have a big problem with bots and comments right now it doesn't hurt to take the

time to do it because it might not be a bot and people want to be noticed and brands taking the time out even if it's just a social media manager to respond to them is a really big deal and for someone in the food industry or anything like that people are more likely to look at your Instagram and go through comments to see how you're interacting than you might think I know I'm friends with some people

that run a fashion brand and when they were out in New York doing interviews with Burberry and some publications in all four meetings they had the first thing they did was pull up their Instagram the first thing the companies they were talking with did was pull up their Instagram to look at their content their following and how they were interacting with people on their social media seeing what people are saying so it looks really bad if

you don't give back to people that are showing love to you yeah even if it is a bot or a fake comment if I'm a real user or real customer of your brand and I look and I see that you're not responding to comments I'm probably not going to take the time or I'm less likely to take the time yeah yeah it's yeah responding encourages more as well which is great for the algorithm not being a

proactive member of the community this kind of goes along with the look at me if you're not out liking you know your followers posts or searching for people and engaging on other Creators or brand posts that you collaborate with or our fans of that's not good you know that's not how you expand your audience you you can't just sit here and let everything happen on its own you have to take that effort to go and look

for people to engage with like your current followings pictures like comment and DM other people that like similar content to what you're putting out or similar brands to who you are that's really really important then only showing the final product this is a weird one so now a lot of people just want to show how awesome they are and had the awesome things they do whether it be a finished handbag or you know a video for

a service company but this never really comes off as transparent if you're not showing the process and the behind-the-scenes of how you get somewhere the journey is a lot more interesting than when you finally get there and people like following along and that shows a very human side to a brand if they can see how it operates day-to-day and runs into problems and solves them and just the entire process behind doing a campaign or something like

that hey Connor mechanically here that you just kind of gave me an idea that I hadn't thought about before of this engaging with people who are currently following you and their photos I use more than use Instagram but let's take both Twitter and Instagram because I think it's relevant here what what's the mechanical way of doing that without following literally every single one of the people who are following you go through who's liked your picture and

click on their profile and like some of their photos every now and then and I know at least I notice from when I was running howleen Tanner's hollien tanagers account you start to recognize a lot of people who engage with you frequently so you could probably search them and but going through likes or favorites is probably the easiest and then just going to their profile and the people who engage with you frequently is more important to

continue to engage with people who you feel like you already have a really strong relationship with or to spend time trying to get more people into that bucket it's a good question I think you could spend it both ways really really focusing on the engagement you have is always beneficial because one the more you interact with someone from like this is from an algorithmic perspective on Instagram and Twitter the more you interact with someone the closer

if the algorithm thinks you are and the algorithm is always trying to show you posts that you like and it thinks people you're close with so that's more of a lock-in so that's important to maintain that and kind of get that credibility so they'll tell their friends and kind of expand you into their friends lives but it's also very important to be able to look at and who's liking other people's photos that's a similar brand or

a similar content creator or something like that to go and try and engage with them if you think it would be a good fit now we're gonna get into some of the tips and the mindset of how you should approach social media the biggest thing I see when brands are starting their Instagram they focus so much on what are the other brands in MySpace doing and that's a terrible mindset for the reason that you're competing for

attention when people are following you on social media they're following to hear from you and to see the content you put out it's not mutually exclusive that they're gonna follow one handbag brand over another handbag brand it's are they going to watch your brand's videos over their friends or over another brands or over a celebrity's you're you're competing for the attention and it's not a zero-sum game so you're really looking to build that up and what

your competitors are doing or that competitive aspect like market share or anything like that in any terms of Business and Finance does not apply to social media you need to act like an individual again you can't hide behind just this corporate wall and act like this very very formal brands it just doesn't work anymore people don't feel connected to brands that way and the way to fight that is acting like an individual and you do that

by what you're showing the behind-the-scenes content having you know the CEO or founder or other workers talk and humanize that side of the brand that this brand is made up of living people and their social media acts like it with how they engage and talk to their customers or followers you need to give people a reason to care like I said before products and services do not build community you have to put in the effort and

it's a lot of effort going through and engaging with every comment and being proactive every day takes a lot a lot of effort but it pays off engage more than people engage with you this is just another tactic of put out more than you're getting and in the long run it's going to pay off and really set the tone and people start to notice this is a big one that a lot of brands don't understand when

you're on social media a lot of your audience and who will be your audience isn't necessarily your direct target market and a lot of them are never going to buy anything from you but that's great because those still be loyal brand advocates if you support a brand and they put out great content like let's say for me I'm a big fan of the shoe brand Koyo I have a pair but I got them as a present

but other than that I'm not going to buy another pair because of the high-end nature but I will always advocate for the brand I really like their creativity and their mission but I'm not their target market I'm younger and I don't have the finances to be able to be a consistent supporter but I'm always going to advocate for them and there's another interesting case on this there's a YouTube channel called legal eagle and it's this lawyer

who has this this company called legal eagle where he helps law school students and how they should think like a lawyer to try and beat some of the stereotypes of law school and he has a YouTube channel where for the first two three months he was posting nothing but tutorials I was getting maybe 5 to 10k views and then he started to realize he did he does the series now called lawyer reacts where he'll take famous

courtroom scenes from TV shows and movies and dissect how good are the legal arguments how realistic is it he's ballooned up to I think he's right around 250 K subscribers right now and getting half a million to a million views on videos bringing that audience because his content is very cool and it expands his reach on he might not have ever saw any anyone that could have used the legal evil course if he had not expanded

his reach by attracting audience that really liked the idea of it even if they're not going to be a part of that class I love that and I see that with our up side podcast Twitter account we have many more Twitter followers than we do subscribers right now to the show from what I can tell podcast analytics pretty bad and we love it is all those people we continue to try engage with we use lists a

lot on Twitter and those are pretty underrated and I just want to interrupt here because I think this is a really good slide for you guys that are watching if you have any specific questions about your work in your business or your brand that you have questions about this slide or any of these slides remember that you can always leave a comment in the chat or ask a question and we'll make sure that we get to

that cool awesome so now we're gonna get on to the tips and tricks and again like what Jay said feel free to ask questions the more specific I can get with certain situations I think the more you guys could get out of this um Instagram DMS are your best friend I would guarantee you it's it's super underplayed how how many people respond to DMS I guarantee if you deemed a hundred celebrities with a million plus followers

you would get responses from three at at the very least and those are the top top people that might not even run their accounts Instagram DMS are the best way to communicate with people and it's super intimate Willie Morris and then door Meyer who I had mentioned before they'll send video DMS to people that follow them or viewed their stories or saw them in a last name thanking them and asking them if there's anything they can

do for them I've seen brands send special discount codes or information through DMS Emily Weiss did this for glossier for a little bit when people would DM them they would send out promo codes and things like that to kind of encourage that interaction give some behind-the-scenes video DMS packaging products or if you happen to know the handle of a specific person that you are packaging their products send them a video DM of the founder or whoever's

packaging it up actually packaging it up and telling them that it's on the way responding to questions through video is another really really good way to engage and it's important you want to take the time to personally respond chatbots can be great if they're done really really well but typically it's easy to tell when something wasn't personal or done by a person so I would err err on the side of actually taking more time to personally

respond to things and then DM other brands are people to collaborate DMS are almost always open you'd be surprised about the connections you can meet on Instagram by just shooting a DM you need to relentlessly engage especially with an early following respond personally to every single comment and message until it's just taking too much of your time and then find someone else to do it this needs to be consistent there's a brand called iconic from Jeff

Cole and Mark must Rhonda Gary Vee and Scooter Braun had just invested to them their print canvas art it's a couple hundred thousand followers if you go on now and look at their Instagram they respond to nearly every single comment I'm assuming some of the stragglers they don't but brands with hundreds of thousands or millions of followers are going to go through and respond it's it's super important to get that I can't stress enough how annoying

it is when brands say they don't have an engaged audience when they're not putting in the work to respond to people you not your audience around a shared idea or purpose not a product or service so when you're putting out something you really want to tell the story of your mission and what you're doing and have people unite not around your product or necessarily your service but why you're doing what you're doing as a personal brand

it's your mission and your growth and as a commercial brand it could be you know what are you trying to do as far as as far as a larger purpose in this space X I think most successful companies especially ones with big audiences all have that I guess philosophical quality to them this is the mission they're trying to solve it's not just oh they make great makeup or something like that and from a creator side a

great example of this is the yes Theory guys who I highly recommend they're a group of youtubers that have a crazy story but they refer to their audience as the good Illuminati and their big thing is seeking discomfort and growing personally by putting yourself in uncomfortable situations and grow and their community is so strong they could legitimately put pull together a group of 5200 people in most countries around the world to put together an event or

go help something and it would happen that's how strong their community and Facebook group is around this shared passion of trying to grow personally by seeking discomfort learn to pay attention to how you and others interact and behave on social media this is where I started to notice I was getting most of my information from I I started to really pay attention to what I was doing on social media and specifically what other people were doing

to me I guarantee on your Instagram or Twitter every now and then you'll get you'll follow or like something and you'll get random follows or random likes from accounts and that that really intrigued me so I started to think about every time that happens what did I do on the platform to lead that like or that follow to me because chances are it wasn't just showing up in Discovery if you're not posting a lot it's usually

something you did and people trying to people or BOTS trying to find likes or other accounts that you engaged with which is why they're engaging with you and what that allows you to do is reverse-engineer results if you see that did it work did it not work you can start to evaluate how you can approach social media evaluating the effectiveness and understanding why things happen from both human and platform perspectives because let's say it's a bot

that went and liked and followed you well that bot was targeted to a certain account which was shown to this other person so it's a mix of figuring out how people interact and other people are engaging and also what does that specific platform allow them to do you need to tell stories especially if now if you're not like a racing company or sports or something like that that just has inherently cool content to put out because

of the nature of it you need to get personal and tell the stories behind your company anything that makes your company cool and interest you will probably interest someone else even if it's not a mass audience you can build really engaged niche communities by just being more vulnerable and telling stories through your eyes of this brand the process always more interesting the finished product and there's this really interesting story I was listening to Gary Vee one

time I know I'm messing him a bunch but he was going through consulting with an accountant and they were talking about how do you create Instagram or video content around an accounting firm and the more the story is you have to find what's cool or interesting or unique to you and there's happened to be they had a funny mailman that came in like every Tuesday and would kind of do office comedy and stuff like that well

turn that into an IG TV or a story series and in like just show the human side of your brand in that this is someone who exists day to day and this is kind of what we're up to and the cool things that happen then the last thing I believe doing the mechanical things right as much as I love strategy and I love telling stories through content and things like that always do the mechanical things right

because they're easy that's learning a little bit about the different algorithms to see what can you do to increase your chance of exposure posting times hashtags making sure your profile is discoverable using location tags on every single Instagram post because if you don't and you're trying to get exposure that's a huge mistake but just doing everything to optimize and increase the chain any post could get exposed to the most number of people how do I determine

the optimal posting time or hashtags for my audience posting times if you have a business account you can look at when your audience is most online and typically your best posting times are going to be when the most people are active but I would always a be test at heileen Tanager so I had a spreadsheet down of different days and different posts and I would keep track of the engagement the reach in the impressions across a

couple months just to see if things lined up and when when there are consistent better posting times on certain days than others I'm looking at my page here I'm seeing if I can I've actually never looked at the insights page of my Instagram account so I'm gonna see here alright so it looks like maybe I should be doing this all right so I see this followers bar chart that has times of day so you're telling me

I should be looking at like this 9:00 a.m. and this is all pretty even but obviously I'd want to avoid like 12 to 6 it's like yeah yeah if if that's what you want you you want your followers to be most active and the reason for that is the especially on Instagram the algorithm prioritizes early engagement really heavy to expose to more people so you could have something awesome but not have great early engagement but end

up with the same engagement as another post that should have been way there if it were posted at a better time because it would have gotten more likes quicker and what did you say you use to find good hashtags for your brand I do I just I did a lot of research looking at what other accounts are using actually going through and seeing how many posts are under that hashtag hashtags with too many posts if you're

not a big account and get a ton of engagement your post is just gonna get buried so you want to look anywhere like the optimal optimal for me was anywhere from like thirty thousand to seven hundred thousand I've had posts featured at the top on those ones so you want to mix between mass exposure and really niche to get people to see what you're doing it's a lot of trial and error is there any reason to

do like three hashtags versus fifty like is there some magic number I always did the max there's some talk I'm not sure how true it is about using the full 30 hashtags sometimes the Instagram algorithm will see that as spam and D prioritize your post I don't know how true that is but every hashtag you use is an opportunity to get exposed to more people and so if you look at it that way you should always

use the maximum I kept it between 15 to 25 typically listen then go ahead let's say you had 25 hashtags using the same 25 for like just about all your posts is there any way of knowing which one of those is pulling the most weight you want to rotate hashtags otherwise you'll get marked as spam and D prioritized okay but yeah there's no way to tell like I know every time I post a vlog boss that

it does really well for me you can't you're kind of just guessing that like between all of them you're doing well yeah I it's funny you bring that up because when I was at hollien Tanager I tried to figure that out by keeping track of pretty much all of the data behind every post and running regressions on the hashtags and I just didn't have a good enough data to like definitively say which one it was but

usually you have a good idea of some powerhouse hashtags that your content will do well in and you want to use them more frequently but it's pretty much trial and error and see what works cool awesome now one of the biggest parts if you don't have a budget a lot of people will settle for less than satisfactory content strategy and social media presence because they hide behind the fact that they don't have a big budget and

you don't need one great content and a team to execute hundred percent worth spending the money on but I get if it's not possible and that shouldn't limit what you can do one of the things you can do spend the time to find someone young undiscovered or just someone that's going to buy into your vision if you're doing something cool as a personal brand or have a cool product or a cool story as a commercial brand

to do that work cheap there's people out there Craigslist d-roc Gary B's cameraman if you need a videographer DM him and let him know and chances are he'll shout you out and look for one for you there's a lot of resources it takes time but if you really try and look you'll find someone you need to get personal tell your story if you're a founder bootstrapping your company talk about it and do sit-down vlogs you can

easily sit pull out your phone and just sit and shoot again it doesn't have to be that high production cuts really really hot audio the you want it to eventually get there but it definitely doesn't have to start there to be able to build your community and then even if you do that there are a little like how Casey nice that really revolutionized the vlog game was how you enter and leave scenes and you can do

little walk-ins with a set up phone or a DSLR that makes the video look so much better than just starting and you have him to talk like hey what's up guys that type of thing so you can research just very very little easy things to do that take no skill that make videos look better want a shout-out here if you guys want to do some of your own video a great resource is mark Pasternak who is

a Columbus guy also a member of unreal he launched a bunch of free videos and resources for creating really high quality content just your phone any video you see that he does he did completely shot and edited on his iPhone and they look fantastic so if you want to learn some yourself website is in the chat yeah what smartphones can do with their cameras these days is pretty incredible document over create creating something like a campaign

or you know I guess a fictional video or something really artistic is super super hard and most people can't do it and most of the best vloggers or content creators or brands that put out content are more along the lines of telling what's actually happening rather than going out of their way to make something happen so you want to tell the story of your progress highlight the interesting things that happened a today like the accounting story

with a funny mailman get creative with the behind the scenes you show in just how you present it like banter in the kitchen of a restaurant or something like that there are interesting or funny moments dates day of any company or anyone that's trying to do something just get creative with how you present it and then this is the very end I have nothing else to say but for listening and if you want to talk more

or you have more questions that didn't get answered I'm offering and would be happy to talk for an hour do a brand audit with me and my team to talk about your specifics of a personal or commercial brand what you could be doing talk through any issues you might be running into and see if we can help you guys out in any way to do that you can shoot me an email Connor at mudita creative comm

I believe Jay you added that button at the bottom of the chat room too yes and it is shown now so that we'll go to Moody's website is is emails obviously on the screen that's super super generous to give a free hour of your time so I recommend you guys take them up on that 100% we went kind of long here because this is really good and I didn't want to interrupt your flow and I had

a lot of questions as week when I and you can leave that up on the screen if people want actually put in the chat email Connor and medida creative comm we had a couple questions that came in to chat late we got a couple minutes so I'd love to get your take on this cool June asked and I'm actually gonna combine our questions into one she says in regards to personal branding does it hurt to bleed

your interest into your accounts and she says as an example if I'm selling myself as a tech person but also ramped and have strong opinions about politics can I talk about both or does that become risky at some point to be too personal if you have a personal brand that relates to the work you're doing I think you should always involve your interests because that's part of what you're doing and your personal brand is always going

to be an extension of you how personal you get really depends on you and how much you want to share politics is tricky I know someone like Gary Vee doesn't branch into politics because when you do you you might you have a good chance of alienating 50/50 of who might be following you but there are also other content creators that are very very political and are open about what they do so it's just if you share

be aware that some people might take an issue with that and if you are okay with that then that's more than fine to help build your brand I think I'll get my two cents here to June in my experience it's great to be to show like your full well-roundedness on all your own channels especially if you are self-employed and in control of your own destiny I think where there becomes a little bit of a wrinkle is

if you are employed and at times representing a company that has its own its own brand to protect but for me as as I've been out on my own the more I've shown about myself the phrase that I like a lot is your vibe attracts your tribe and I think that's been true for me and everything that I do yeah I would agree all right we just got one more question that came in going to call

that done Alex asked what would you say is a solid baseline tactical system for doing social media let's say it's an early business no ability to have a dedicated social media media person the founding team has one to two hours a day they can put into managing social media what should they do something like you know what's what's the recipe some number of comments some number of DM some likes etc always always respond to DMS so

I think if you're early on especially if you are looking to get work like if it's a service business or if you're looking to collaborate then spend your time DMing because at that point it's going to be a numbers game but for building your audience any interactions comments are going to be better than likes because you're you're getting that personality out there so comments always responding to DMS trying to get that intimate connection I think one

or two hours is definitely enough time if you dedicated that per day to be able to do that I think you could see like a nice solid baseline alright well anything else on that question cool I don't think so unless there's a follow-up which you guys can feel free to enter into the chat now but otherwise that's cool we're right here at the top of the hour Connor thank you so much for sharing all that that

was great I will I will send a follow-up to everybody who registered for this there is one more question I'll get to here in a second I will send it follow-up to everyone who registered for this via email Connor will be copied on that I'll have his information so if you want to take them up on the one hour audit please do I'm going to allow Connor to you guys one email as well but other than

that we won't we won't Spani or anything like that I would certainly take them up on that offer because it's it's pretty generous we have one question from Jay different Jay is great information Connor thank you for sharing these insights a follow-up question is something you touched on what does early engagement look like while you're still figuring out who you are and what you do yeah that's a really really good question so as a personal brand

I think it's anytime you can start to see people really connecting with you so you know even if you're not getting a ton of likes if someone shoots you a DM or is consistently engaging with you and and telling you that they like you and support what you're doing that's always really really good anytime you can have someone like that loyal in there for a brand a lot of its offline conversation and people saying how how

much they like the brand and how much it's resonated with them for example early on and Holly and Tanager at this point we probably only had 5,000 followers but I had cleaned up a bunch of the old ones and we did a Women's Day or on the anniversary we did something about the founders and there were so many comments about the inspiration of the story behind H and T that there were two people that were actually

trying to start into like fashion design and starting their own brands from part of what we were doing so anytime you can get that real connection I think is going to be way more of an indicator you're on the right track than any amount of like likes or comments or something like that cool J I hopefully that answer your question and I guess I'll also tag onto that if you're just kind of figuring out who you

are and what you do that's part of your brand itself kind of the question we add to June's point be honest with that that's kind of a natural behind-the-scenes sort of point that you can be documenting because you're almost certainly not alone in that so as much as you feel comfortable sharing you know that's part of the process when I when I started writing again I was very much not sure I was gonna do I was

employed I thought I was gonna do something on my own when I first shared about unreal to the list I thought it's gonna be an events company that's not what happened and people stuck around and they enjoyed seeing that journey so I think sharing anything that you're comfortable with is good mm-hmm all right I'm gonna cut this off you're Connor thanks again for joining us guys we'll be in touch but certainly reach out if you have

any more questions