104. Maximizing Your Social Media Impact: Katie's Tips for Leveraging Multiple Platforms

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Okay. All right. So we are on the third episode on social media. This is a three part series. And Katie, you graced us two episodes ago with your presence, first of all.

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But your presence as it pertains to your amazing four post social media strategy, which, by the way, we have been nose to the grindstone, not heads down, bombs up, because we've just learned that is actually an australian saying and not reckon. We have been nose to the grindstone implementing your four post social media strategy, which we actually spoke about in last episode. So this one today, we actually want to dive deeper into some questions, some struggles, some things that just came up as we were implementing that we wanted to get some clarification on. So welcome back to the podcast, Katie. Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

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I'm excited to be back again, my two favorite Aussies. So anytime I get to sit down with you too, makes me very happy. Thank you. We'll take that. So I'm also, for anyone who is not watching this on YouTube, we are also joined by my co founder, Bona Rai.

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Hey, Bona. Hello. The second Aussie in the group of non Aussie and Aussie people. Trio. In a trio.

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Yeah, we may need to edit that bit.

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Start. Katie, can you just kick us off really quickly about telling us about that book that I see right above your head, behind you, the social shift. You've been making waves on social media with this book and so I want to give you 30 seconds to tell everyone about it. Yes. So the social shift is all about bringing social media back to the way it was originally intended.

00:01:41How we were showing up and building community. We weren't spending all day on our phones. We were getting in, connecting and then going out and building those connections IRL. The four post strategy is in there and is now available on Amazon. So for those of you that are Brinkley readers or like to read on ebooks, you can read it on your favorite devices now by getting it on Amazon.

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Yes. All right, we'll leave the link in the show notes. I've got my copy and I cannot wait to dive in. It's going to be easy. Okay, let's get to the serious stuff, shall we?

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I'm going to start sort of with questions of higher level and then we'll get into some of the detail. But I remember a couple of years ago that the advice out there was all about content domination. It was very much a Gary vee thing. You got to be on all the. Platforms and I believed that.

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So I was on all the platforms and it literally burnt me and my team out. So can you tell us what your best advice is for people who are. Like, how do I be on all. The, like, what do you say to them? I think it is a really common misconception of that.

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Well, you have to be everywhere, because what if your audience isn't there? And one thing that I saw that was really cool at Capshovian's live in January was Molly Mahoney and Alicia Barr had never met Irl. And I introduced them in the hallway, and, you know, do you guys know each other? And they were, oh, yeah. Well, let's become friends on social media.

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Let's connect. And Molly immediately said, well, what's your platform? Alicia's on all the platforms. Molly's on all the platforms. But she.

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Your. What's your main platform? All of us have a main platform, and it's the platform that you go to when you're. Hey, you know what? I got an extra couple of minutes.

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I'm just going to go ahead and scroll through the feed. Which feed do you want to scroll? Do you want to scroll the LinkedIn feed? Do you want to scroll the Facebook feed, the TikTok feed, which is your feed of choice, and which one do you see the most results from? And it's not to say that you should completely ignore the other ones.

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Grab your handles there, pop in every now and then to say hello. But all of these platforms have different intention, different ways of showing up, different way of consuming content, and your audience will connect with you on the platforms that you enjoy posting on and you're creating the most content for. So just actually building on, you know, once you've made that mindset shift around, well, actually, you don't need to be everywhere. You don't need to be Gary Vee, you don't need to be absolutely on in every single platform, I think, other than the factor you talked about, which is, like, where do you feel most at home and where do you feel actually you enjoy? Which platform do you enjoy the most?

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Would you mind sharing a little bit. More about how do you decide on which platforms exactly? Because of the way that maybe your audience shows up on that? Because I think that's one thing that we had a little bit of a challenge around to say, okay, cool. We don't have to be on all.

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Of the platforms, but do we need to be on X Twitter, other than where do we enjoy being? What are some other factors to think about when deciding which platforms to be on? A lot of it does come into who your target audience is like, what's your big goal? Who is it that you're talking to? So for me, I think it's getting up there, but it's my second largest platform now, but it's LinkedIn, but that's where I get all my lead gen, that's where I get the likes, I get the views over on Instagram.

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It's my biggest following is over on Instagram, but I'm not getting a ton of leads from it for done for you social media services. Now, if people want to join a webinar, if people want my free content calendar, if they want to buy my book, that's where I see a lot of my lower ticket sales come from. Again, it's a different way of talking and showing up on Instagram than it is over on LinkedIn. And kind of what I was talking about with the four post strategy is how can you take this one idea, this one theme, and know who your audience is on each of these platforms so that you're showing up and giving value for that audience the way they best consume content and the different offers that you can sell to them? Does that make sense?

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I think that I'm still working on growing my Facebook audience, but I've found that audience is more willing to go to speaking events, they're more willing to listen to my podcast. So it's really seeing okay, if I talk about this theme and what my audience that's currently following me on this platform and the way that the platform wants me to create content, can I give it all the love and the attention tweaking of social media posts that the platform and my audience deserves? Does that make sense? Does that answer your question? I feel like it really comes down to knowing who you're talking to and really what is the end goal for me on LinkedIn?

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I want more people to sign up for done for you services on Instagram. I want them to buy my book on Facebook. I would love for them to listen to my podcast and come to a speaking event. So it's really knowing how does your audience want to buy from you on these specific platforms. Wow.

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That is actually really, like, for me, that was a bit of epiphany for me, the way that you said that, because it's so important for us to actually not just put content out there. I think we can be so guilty of that, of, like, we just think that the social media world just revolves around us and what it is that we want to say, but it's actually, what are people on there to do and how do we meet? That is, that's really, you know, and. I talked about this at Capshoviance Live, is looking at your insights to see who your audience. So, for example, I recently posted, I'm doing an in person speaking event coming up here in Denver, and I had a lot of people on my Facebook side saying they wanted to come.

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I got a lot of sign ups from that on Instagram. I got one, I got zero on. It's, I know that a lot of the founders that follow me, the people that have a CEO and CXO, are the typical job titles for people that follow me on LinkedIn. They're not going to want to come out to this event. Now, if it was a webinar or maybe a free 90 minutes strategy session or something that I was offering, they'd sign up for it, but they're not going to come out.

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So, I mean, it's really looking to see who your audience is on these platforms and the way that they best relate to the offers that you have. And now you might be saying like, well, does this mean I need to have like twelve different offers? No, but how can you take the theme from a podcast episode and tweak it so that the action is what that audience member on that specific platform wants to take? Yeah, and what I like about that as well, that implementation insight in there is almost giving yourself permission, if you don't know what that is, to actually try out different things so that you can get those insights. Just the fact that you're an expert at this and you're still testing out different things on different platforms to build that understanding to give you confidence for future weeks.

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So I love that. That's something that I think we need to take note of as well. Yeah, and also I think calling out, I just want to call this out as well, is like, what does success actually look like on social media? Because you mentioned three different platforms with almost like three different outcomes, almost, that you're looking for from each of them.

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Did you kind of have a hypothesis going into those platforms knowing what that would be, what success looks like, or did you just kind of figure it out along the way? This is where it's really going to come down. So I have a friend who I love the way that she writes. She's a phenomenal writer, but she gets a ton of engagement over on LinkedIn, and she's still putting the other stuff out on Instagram and Facebook. But on Instagram, she'll get like one, like, if that, whereas over on LinkedIn man, she has 34 comments and I'm like, wow.

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And it's really identifying that. So now she's done enough testing to see based on kind of doing this mass posting that she's been doing, she has enough evidence to say, like, okay, my LinkedIn audience loves these types of posts. I'm just going to do these types of posts with these types of offers on LinkedIn. I don't even need to worry about trying to like, I know I can just click a button to share it over there, but why? No one's engaging with it anyways, right?

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It's just white noise. Might as well just make my Instagram account have that, but basically be the FAQ section of my website answering potential problems or questions. So when anyone comes over to it, okay, now they know what I do, who I serve, and how to best get in touch with me. It helps eliminate the platforms that aren't working for you in the offers that you have. And that's a really good point as well.

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Katie around, I think as we get even more granular into implementing the strategy, I know one of the challenges, or I guess things we've had to think about is, and a lot of our listeners as well, I suppose, would have this. You almost have like as experts in the space or thought leaders or people who are looking to build credibility, you have your personal brand. So I guess for yourself, you'd have Katie Brinkley. For us, Deirdre is the face of the brand. So you have Deirdre Shen, but then you also have your business brand.

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So that could know in your case, the more done for you stuff and people are buying into you still. But there's almost like a company brand as well for us. That's one of the, I guess things to think about is like, okay, what would Deirdre speak about on her social media and what should we be mindful of? Kind of distinguishing for capture social media, but they're still kind of cohesive, so it's not totally random and different. What are your thoughts on that?

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Yeah, and I think that when you do have someone that's the face of the brand. Like, I'm the face of my know, but there's five people that work with it's. But I'm the face of. So when I'm selling the opportunity to work with me and my team, and so same for Deirdre. She's selling the opportunity to work with her and her.

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But you did, you're speaking on podcasts, you're speaking on stages, you've written a book, you have all these other things to elevate you as to why people can trust you. And that's where putting that out of this is a podcast that I spoke on. The end goal is to maybe go listen to that podcast, or maybe it is to sign up for cap show. But you can use the brilliance that you shared on somebody else's podcast as part of that strategy. Leaning up to on maybe Facebook, it's to sign up for Cap show.

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And on LinkedIn it's to buy your book or something or listen to the show or whatever so you can just tweak it based on that. As far as cap show is concerned, I think that this is where this podcast is going to be an incredible driver for content, for the cap show, know, user generated content people share. I mean, I love me some cap show. So, I mean, you can know there's Katie Brinkley talking about Capsho on her podcast again, sharing the user generated content and the success that a lot of the users have seen by using your product. So I think that you have the opportunity by having your own podcast and so many users that use Capsho to put that out on the Capsho account.

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Whereas Deirdre, she's the thought, no offense, Bonna, but she's the thought leader behind Capsho. This is why you should know, like and trust her. Look at, she's doing all these things and this is her product. Does that make sense? Yeah, that makes sense.

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So it's almost like the real focus on your personal brand should be about really very specifically, like, your voice and your perspective, and then almost your business brand, in our case, is the product, but it could be something else for those of people who are listening, it's really making your customers and your clients the voice as not just the community post, but truly the voice of the brand, in a way. Yes, exactly. Wow. Okay, this is cool. You know what my mind goes to, we talk a lot about posting for post social media strategy.

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And seriously, since we've been working with you and implementing everything that you've been teaching us, the posting now has almost become like, oh, is this it? It gets to be kind of simple. It gets kind of a little bit easy. And so I kind of want to then now extend the conversation from just posting, because I know in my mind, I'm like, well, now, how do I get new people to see this great things that we're posting? So what are some tips, hacks, things that you found have worked?

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And maybe we can drill into those three, because I know you talk about Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram, because I'm sure that there's maybe a different strategy or way to do it, but I'd love to know what it is that how do you get your content in front of new people? It's playing the way that these algorithms and these platforms want you to try their product. So YouTube, I know I talked. I'm throwing YouTube in there now at you guys. YouTube.

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Taking this and doing a ton of shorts. I was able to grow my Rocky Mountain marketing podcast, YouTube channel from like 70 up to, I think I'm at like 2100, only using shorts now, YouTube, at the time of this recording, about a week ago, they released vertical going live. So going live in portrait mode, not in just horizontal landscape. You should be using that. Go live vertically on YouTube because nobody else is doing it and it's a new thing and they want people to see it.

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If you want to have the opportunity to potentially go viral, grow some more audience, go portrait mode live on YouTube right now on Instagram, they introduced the poll feature. Include a poll in your reel. So instead of having a hook and all these things, your hook should be like, tell me what you think by voting below and clicking the poll so you can actually have a poll in Instagram now that's attached to a reel. There's new features that these platforms push out. Kind of trying to test it and see what people think of it when they release these new features.

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And you're like, hey, I'm kind of stuck on growing right now. Try the new feature on LinkedIn. I still am a huge fan of polls. I think people tend to overcomplicate them. I haven't seen your guys polls from the last couple of weeks, but I mean, this is where take your polls.

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And if you're not getting engagement in them, you can push it out to your email list for me. I have a very small but mighty email list. If anyone wants to sign up for it, just go to cagementally.com content calendar. But I have about a 60% open rate, which is great for. So, I mean, I'm essentially reaching around 1800 people that want to open up and read what I say.

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So if I want to make, I mean, I'm not relying on an algorithm, then I can then say like, okay, you 1800 people, I really want you to vote in this poll. Maybe they're not following you on LinkedIn. I can attach the poll in there and be like, okay, now I can maybe get some new eyes on this. And if they click and engage on it, well, then guess what? LinkedIn's algorithms, like 2014 Facebook.

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It's amazing. So now it's been pushed out into their audience's feed, you're getting more eyes on your content. So take these other, like, if you have email, if you have that, there's new features coming out and you're seeing things kind of flatline. See if there's a new feature that you can incorporate in. See if you can share something with your email list, if you have an engaged list.

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There's multiple ways to kind of cross pollinate your audiences without cross pollinating your content. That was really cool because we have tried that. It's almost like having, and I know you suggested this to us, but almost sometimes when you might be stuck to what to say in an email, but you've got the overall, you're following the forepost social media strategy, so you have the overall theme. And then to your point, we did the same thing where we just take a screenshot of the poll or an article that we've written, a LinkedIn article that we've written, we know we don't have a lot of engagement there, but to your point, just drive people over there to engage and then you can almost like, you know, definitely click throughs to LinkedIn is higher than interesting. Or, you know, you link the Facebook Live that Didi would have done in the email and just kind of get a sense of where your email list may be.

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But then you also alert them to the fact that you do have a social media presence. So that's worked quite well for us. We should do that more. But that's a really good point about just leveraging audiences you already have, not on social media. And I think that what have you guys seen as far as doing that?

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Have you seen a kind of bump in engagement or has it kind of been like, I think, sort of different. Results across the board? Like, for example, there was one time that we sent people over to the poll had done quite well on LinkedIn, and we just actually shared the results in the email to say, well, 75% of people said, this is actually really difficult. And then we actually sent them to more of a call to action. So it was an action email.

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And then we definitely saw the spike in the registrations. There's been times when, yeah, we've done a spontaneous Facebook live and didn't have a lot of engagement while being on Facebook, but we sent our email audience there. Whilst there wasn't a lot of comments in the replays, definitely there were a lot of click throughs on that. So we're like okay, we should do that periodically. Not too much, but periodically.

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And then the third example was we did a bit of a shorter email and we said, hey, read the whole thing over. By the way, did you know we have a LinkedIn newsletter? We haven't done a very good job of sharing about it, but go check it out. And we did see a spike in subscribers for the newsletter. So we're seeing, I think, varying sorts of results, but just good things to experiment with.

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Because worst case is that it's a highly engaging email. Best case is a highly engaging email and you get some eyes on your social media content. So I think it's a really good strategy. Yeah, I think that not everyone follows me on. Maybe I get a lot of opt ins for the content calendar from Instagram.

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Like, I can see the UTM link. This is where they're coming from. They're mostly coming from Instagram, but maybe they're really not on Instagram that often. They just happen to stumble across me. LinkedIn is their main platform.

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What if I share a poll that I could do some more engagement in? And email person's like, I didn't even think to follow her on LinkedIn. Or maybe I thought I was, I'm going to go engage with her poll and now I'm going to follow her. And now they're seeing the type of content that maybe they're a better fit for other than the stuff that I'm posting over on Instagram. And that's why they haven't bought the book, because they don't need a book, they just need social media done for them.

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And they didn't know that. It wasn't even an know. Yeah, this is so cool. Okay, I think I have one last question. I want to go into the posting strategy.

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So back to the four posts. By the way, if you don't know what we're talking about when we say four, post social media, you have to know. So go back to two episodes ago, because Katie just literally went 1234, super clear. One of those is the community post. And I think that this is probably the one that I, and maybe a lot of people would most likely struggle with, because I know that I don't love talking about myself, for example.

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And for some people, it's really easy to be like, oh, this small thing happened in my life. I'm going to make an analogy or draw parallel to the topic that I want to talk about this week. So for people who maybe that's not second nature to them, do you have any advice in terms of how they can come up with really great community posts. The community posts are the funnest posts because it's you. It gets to show a little bit of your personality, a little bit of the behind the scenes for you.

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You guys have such a cool way of showcasing your community posts, whether it's you speaking at an event, the three of you sponsoring an event. There's so many different ways with community that it's just taking you out of the sales cycle for a minute, just being like, really? I'm not trying to sell anyone anything here. Take yourself out of the sales. And where were you at when your ideal client was facing a similar struggle?

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I deal with impostor syndrome all the time, and even when I'm speaking on stage, I'm like, oh, my God, I can't believe I'm speaking with these people. But this is where sharing that, like, okay, well, I couldn't believe it when I was speaking on stage, so I recently did a post. So I spoke at social media marketing world. That conference changed my business four years ago, and the fact that I could be there speaking is like a testament of like, okay, if you do these certain things, success can happen, and it's really just taking yourself out of the, hey, don't you want to sign up to work with me and I can do your podcast? Strategy and social media, it's.

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Look, four years ago, I was just like you. I was sitting in the audience learning as much as I could, and really telling the story I spoke with was the you know who chad is, right? Yep. He's a story catcher. And I was speaking with him and just on how powerful stories are and the more stories that you can incorporate into your social media is what's going to differentiate you.

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I know I'm talking with some AI people right now, but in this world of AI, your story is going to be that differentiator. It really is. And how can you bring your story into this world of AI? Because right now, LinkedIn. I just did a LinkedIn post like, do you want us to rewrite your posts with AI?

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And I'm like, not really, but let's see what it looks like. And soon we're going to have AI and the many chats and the stampede socials out there. We're going to have AI talking to AI and responding with AI. What's the point of even being on social media anymore? And it's you.

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It's your story. And these should be the posts that you look forward to every week because they should be the easiest posts, the easiest ones to find pictures of, to find the videos of, because it's just you sharing you. I love that reframe, actually, just even what you said there, which is like, this is the one that you should be looking forward to. I'm like, you're right. And if I just approach it not from like, oh, gosh, like a defensive kind of like, what if what I share isn't good enough or people don't care or all those things that you tell yourself, and I just approach it from like, well, this is just me.

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This is who I am. This is what I did. This is what we got up to. And it almost doesn't matter in a way, if people don't. This is the opportunity for people to really fall in love with you.

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And if people don't like you, then they're going to unfollow you. And they weren't. Okay. You don't want their money anyways. Exactly.

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This is the opportunity I was really afraid of. I make a lot of weird faces and I was always so self conscious about. I'm like, oh, God, I can't turn my camera on or for a podcast. I make weird aces when I talk. I talk with my hands all the time.

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But once I was like, well, that's just who I am. And now I'm like, if I do a picture where I'm just smiling, the engagement on it is like, so so. But if I'm like, on it, or like, people are all in on it, they're like, oh, there's Katie and her weird faces. I'm not saying that you got to be goofy, but that's just show up as you and the right people are going to connect with you. They're going to want to do business with you.

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They're going to want to. Yeah, I'm her. I'm in her community. I'm in her circle. I get that.

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She's been where I am. I can get there, too, or she can help me get there. You're going to find your people. Like I said, your community posts should be your favorite posts every week. Yeah.

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And that's so true, because honestly, without your weird faces, Katie, I don't think we could have been friends and not only be friends, but actually be doing some really cool things together, which I am so excited to be sharing more on in due course. Yeah, we're doing a ton together, which is so exciting. But I want to thank you once again. This has been amazing. You have definitely personally helped us and I'm so passionate about having people hear what it is that you have to say because you can help so many more people.

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So thank you for being on win the content game, and please tell people where you want them to go. Yeah, well, connect with me on your favorite social media platform. You can see all the@Katiebrinkley.com and hopefully we can, we can connect further from there.