Episode 023

Shaina:                 Hello content coalition family is Shaina here, founder and CEO of repurpose house. And today we have a really unique episode for you, uh, compared to all the other interviews that we’ve done and that is because Sarah Guidice the repurpose house director of ops extraordinary has come up with a pretty fabulous idea and she is afraid to record content herself, which is going to change cause she’s getting in front of this camera. But for now you have me and what we’re going to do, what her mastermind brainchild is that we are going to do 1717. Actually we’re going to do 19 I don’t know where 17 came up, but 17 felt good. 19 feels better. We’re going to do 19 social media strategies in 19 minutes. Can’t promise it’s going to be 19 minutes because I get a little long winded but I also talk really fast so we’ll see by the end of this we’ll know how long it was.

Shaina:                 But anyway, what you’re going to get out of it is lots of small implementable things that you can do that are not expensive that you can actually make happen with your current social media strategy if you’re not already doing it. And I hope you enjoy. I’m Shana, I love dogs. I trip a lot and I happen to have a knack for making pretty sweet videos for businesses, but the more videos we made, the more questions I got about how video and other content can be leveraged to make a bigger impact in their marketing. I mean, 44% of marketers say that producing content is their biggest challenge. Get content marketing is 62% less expensive than outbound and produces three times more leads. Now I know a lot, but I certainly don’t know it all. So I made it my mission to talk with content, kings, Queens, and bosses to learn as much as I could about crushing content marketing. And I’m taking you along with me. Welcome to the content coalition.

Shaina:                 Well, hello content coalition family. Today you’ve got yours truly Shana y singer founded CEO of repurpose house. And I’m going to be coming at you with an idea that I cannot take the credit for Sarah Guidice. My director of ops extraordinary came up with this idea and I can’t promise we’re going to do it exactly the way she envisioned it because um, you know, we’re all human, but uh, we’re going to give it a whirl. So I thought this was awesome. I think it’d be more awesome for her to create the content. But you’ve got me and that’s going to change soon. We’re going to get her creating content soon, but this is, this is her master plan. Her idea. Let’s go. So we’re going to go, we’re calling it quick-fire 19 social media strategies in 19 minutes. No pressure. It will not be 90 minutes.

Shaina:                 I don’t even know how long it’s going to be, but we’re going to do our best. So anyway, we are going to talk about some super easy and really streamlined ways that you can optimize your social media strategy across all of the different platforms. Not just repurposing, but that is a part of the plan. Um, and uh, yeah, with that being said, let’s rock. So number one is going to be a link tree, l. I. N. K. T. R. E. E. There’s going to be a link for it down at the bottom. If you are on Instagram and you want to send people places when they view your posts, it’s hard to do that. So I mean you can’t put links in the posts. You have like one room for link in your social media or in your Instagram header history of header. What am I talking about? And your Instagram profile.

Shaina:                 And it’s tough because you only get one. So what link tree does is it becomes its own link. You Click it, it pops up and it gives you options to add multiple links in your profile. So like for me, for instance, when you go onto Shaina Weisinger Instagram, you’re going to click the link tree. It’s like a quick little link. It pops up, it’s branded, it looks nice and it’ll give you a link to the content coalition. It’ll give you a link to repurpose house and it gives you a link to my speaker page. Now what’s really cool is if you have like one episode or one piece of content that you want to consistently drive traffic to, you can also do that. So you can, you lay out exactly what it is. It’s not just the link out, it actually lets you describe what the link goes to and it’s super, super cool and they have a really great free version that gives you a lot of capabilities.

Shaina:                 And then if you want to go even crazier, you can go ahead and pay for it. All right, number two, I’m using square instead of landscape for video and images on social media. Okay, let’s just talk video. There have been so many paid studies that talk about how square video outperforms landscape video over and over and over again. And that’s on feeds. So anything that you’re going to scroll with your thumb, um, that’s Facebook, Instagram, linkedin, Twitter for video square outperforms by a crazy, crazy amount. So, um, it takes up 78% more real estate in the actual feed. But it’s buffered it a paid say that, like I said, there’s a handful of paid studies, but buffer’s paid study specifically said that square video got 30 to 35% more views and a view is just literally somebody stopped, they just stopped scrolling and they stop scrolling and they start watching.

Shaina:                 They don’t have to do anything. Actually they have to do less because they stopped their thumb from moving. So 30 to 35% more views, but then it also got 80 to a hundred percent more engagement and engagement is like they had to take action to do something. They clicked it, they commented on it, they shared it. So to get 80 to 100% more engagement just because the size is square instead of landscape to me is a total no brainer. So just go square on all that fun stuff. All right, number three, make sure you’re doing landscape images on Twitter though. So there’s all of this, like I was doing a bunch of research on the best sizes for social media when it comes to images and there is conflicting information all across the board. So you’ve got these social media platforms and some of them like Facebook, um, and Twitter are telling you, make sure that you upload it and even Linkedin, make sure you upload your images and landscape.

Shaina:                 So if you go on to any third party site or third party platforms that are going to post for you, some of the API, especially with linkedin will automatically post into landscape. But there are paid studies like I’m just talking about saying that posting and square size actually gets way more engagement. So for me, I’m going to go with the paid studies and see what actually makes you that money or actually gets the engagement and we’d have dollars that were spent to figure this out. And I know that maybe Facebook says go landscape and I could probably get crucified from all the social media folks out there, but I’m going to go with the paid studies that say that square, like, like legitimately outperformed on many levels for video and images. So I’m going to go ahead and do that. But Twitter is the only one that you, you really need to go landscape because even if you post it and square it on the feed, it’s not going to, it’s not going to show up and square.

Shaina:                 It’s gonna crop it and then you got to click it to open it up. So if you’re going to post images to Twitter, make sure it’s landscape and if you’re going to post them anywhere else, I mean, I’m telling you go square. Okay. Number four, captions, captions, caption captions. This is something that I can’t stop yelling about. So 85% of people on Facebook scroll without the volume on. If you are, if you have a video, you don’t have captions on the video, you’re missing out on the, on the chance of people stopping to actually watch because only 15% of them are actually listening. So make sure you put captions on your video in order to get engagement. And if you think that linkedin is like full of a bunch of awesome business professionals who like actually, you know, w w listen to video, they’re business professionals, but they’re also probably in their office because it’s like the only social media platform that you’re okay with like scrolling while you’re at your desk.

Shaina:                 So 80% of people on linkedin are not listening either. So make sure you have captions burned on your files, your video files. Um, and for more info on like what that even means, there’s going to be links to different posts below that we like, kind of walk you through how to do all of this stuff yourself. But captions are super, super important. Any really good content marketer who does video will tell you that all day long. Okay? Number five, linkedin articles. So linkedin articles are a really great way to show that you are an authority in your space. So there’s a handful of different ways to do that. You can take like existing blog posts that are on your blog and you can copy them and put them into um, linkedin as an article. You just cite that, you know, this, this article originally appeared on x, Y, Z blog.

Shaina:                 Um, but it’s definitely a great way for people to see the content that you put out there without having to take them out of the platform. So definitely utilize articles if you’re already creating content. We actually do articles for the content coalition. We’re a little behind on it, but we’re going to hop back on it soon. Um, and we’re able to put like all this stuff that we’ve done with all the really, really cool guests that we’ve done them with. So utilize articles if you’re already creating the content for your blog. Next is linkedin groups. So groups across the board are an amazing, amazing, like social media strategy to utilize. First of all, if you’re in a group, generally speaking, it’s with a bunch of people who are interested in the same thing that you’re interested in. So you already know you’re surrounded by a whole bunch of folks who are on the same page or possibly in your like your potential client base.

Shaina:                 Um, what I can say is don’t just go into a group and start all willy nilly telling them about your product because that’ll get you booted out of the group Real, real fast. So always contribute, like offer your insight, your thoughts, ask questions. You have to like engage outside of just promoting yourself. Because a lot of the times people just go in and promote and they get just acts really, really fast. You’re going to have an easier time from the end. I don’t even want to say promoting content, but even putting out educational content that’s branded to you if you already are building relationships within that group. But linkedin groups can be a really great way to connect with people that you otherwise wouldn’t have access to and it’s a very strategic way to post content and engage in linkedin outside of just your random feed.

Shaina:                 Okay. Number seven. I know it’s obvious, but we got to remind you all tag people who are in your content. First of all, cross promotion is such a great way to create content. That’s why so many big brands and like personal brands are doing podcasts that have guests because they’re able to have these really cool personalities that maybe resonate with their audience outside of them creating content just like this by themselves, and to not tag them in content and have them share the content. Like the content is crazy. So make sure that if you do have people in your content with you, if you’re posting content that was like a quote that somebody else said that you thought really resonated, tag them, it really can’t hurt. All that it can do is get their attention and if you like tagged properly, then you can also get the attention of some of their followers as well.

Shaina:                 So tag the people who are in your content. Okay, number eight, it probably should have been seven looking at this list, but number eight is to only use seven hashtags on your Instagram posts. I know some people get real, real thirsty and they start putting all those hashtags. Hubspot did a study and they found that the engagement starts to like creep up. One, two, three, four, five. Like it crawls, cross crawls up, up, up and it gets to seven and it peaks. And then the second a hit hits eight, it starts to drop drastically. So seven is the lucky number. Seven is the magic number for hashtags on Instagram. K number nine, invest in a scheduling tool. I no joke have spent the last like two weeks testing almost every single one that does our free trial, which is pretty much all of them, but just smart because I think everybody has different needs and uses for scheduling tools for us.

Shaina:                 Linkedin is a big one that we want to be able to schedule with, but currently their API is really, um, finished, could be a good word for it. Um, so currently linkedin will allow the third party platforms to post videos onto company pages, um, and images onto both company pages and personal pages and then links obviously, but it will not allow video to be uploaded onto a personal profile for Linkedin, which is tough for me because that’s really all one of the main things that I want to be able to utilize it for. Um, and also know that if you are posting images on linkedin through the app or through like, um, any kind of like publishing platform, it’s going to actually upload it in. It’s like one block. The aspect ratio is interesting, one dash nine one by one, which is almost like two by one.

Shaina:                 So it’s pretty much landscape ish, um, which is like a wide photo. So even if you go ahead and upload a square photo in your platform, like a buffer or polls, um, it’s going to actually upload it in a format that’s wide. So you’re going to get either white bars on either side of it or it’s going to crop the top and the bottom. So just know that when you go into these platforms to post on social media and schedule out, which is super smart because you, I mean to do it every day is, is crazy. Um, and Kudos to you are doing it, but whenever you’re on these platforms, make sure that you know what the API and the capabilities are for each of them and how they post because some of them are able to post better than others. Some of them have a restrictions.

Shaina:                 There’s one that we actually just started using, it’s called mavs social. And what I like about it is I can create one post across like six different platform, five different platforms, and I can schedule that post different days throughout the week, the month, whatever. So I can create the one post, I can adjust the copy for each platform and then I can also schedule what days I want each of them to go live and to get published. Whereas almost every single platform that I tested, and I could be wrong, so please let me know. Every single platform that I tested. Outside of that, you had to go in and create individual posts for them to post on different days. So that to me was a big time saver. So, um, for the capabilities of it, we decided to stick with maps social, but there are a ton of really, really great ones out there.

Shaina:                 It really just depends on what you need it for and what type of content you’re posting across what platforms are. Right. So then we’ve got number 10, never post the same thing on Facebook as on Twitter as on Instagram. That’s actually a really great segue from the post platforms. So we actually did a case study through repurpose house. Um, one of our clients basically let us check out his hubspot for 90 days. They are the, actually it’s on the site. We’ll link that below. It’s the endless events case study and what they, they basically opened their playbook on how they would take one piece of content and share repurposed assets out of that across the entire week, across all of these different platforms, inside groups, the whole deal. And one major thing that they continued to tell us was that you need to make sure that you’re posting this.

Shaina:                 If you’re going to post the same video on multiple platforms, just don’t paste it all at once. Like don’t post it all at once, paste it and did that. You’re gonna get that you’re gonna get the glue stick on it. Just put it on your screen anyway. Um, just make sure that you’re staggering your placements. So if you put it on Facebook at 10:00 AM you put on Instagram at 10:00 AM on a Tuesday, you put it on Linkedin at 10:00 AM on a Tuesday. Like sometimes it takes more touchpoints than just one platform or seeing at one time. So what they were saying is, okay, posted Facebook, um, you know, Tuesday at 10 posts it on Linkedin on like Thursday at 10, posts it on for like, and then they stagger that. So, even if you have people who are linked with you or know who are looking at your content across multiple platforms, maybe they didn’t see it on Tuesday and maybe they had a rough day on Tuesday or they were on vacation or whatever, and then Thursday they have an opportunity to see it.

Shaina:                 So dripping the content across all of the different platforms and then posting it in groups later as well. Um, really, really had a big impact on their social media strategy and um, the, um, engagement and click throughs. And I mean they got like crazy site visits and crazy opt ins. So I would definitely check that case study out because we actually have a downloadable pdf or it walks you through their entire strategy. So if you want a repurposing strategy that crushes, like when we have graphs to prove it, go and download that and it’s free for you to check out and use. Um, and I’d love to hear how it works for you. Okay. What do we have next? Number 11 story cutter slash continual slash all of these little apps. There’s all these little apps that you can put in your phone, um, that will allow you to post video that is longer than one minute to a story.

Shaina:                 So we all know at this point for a while there was 15 seconds is all you had for um, an Instagram story. Um, now you can post up to a minute on Instagram and it will chop it up into for 15 second clips or as many 15 second clips as it needs for the piece of content that’s under a minute. Um, but what about videos that are over a minute? So if you want to use them for stories, then you’re going to want to download an app like continual. Sarah is a don’t use continual because it’s paid and honestly it’s got like 685 reviews and it’s like almost five stars. So for seven, it’s seven bucks just to download for good. I’m Kinda like do it because the other ones are 99 cents a month. And if you’re gonna use it for more than seven months, then you got your money’s worth.

Shaina:                 But I’m a fan of continual because it just works and it’s super simple. You literally click the video and it says, do you want me to do this video? And you say, yes please. That would be fantastic. And then it just chops it up into a bunch of little 15 second pieces. So, um, it’s a super cool app. Another thing I’m going to add a little additional deal because this is not on here, is to use ige TV. If you really want to post longer form content to Instagram, make sure you’re putting it on Ige TV. You have up to 10 minutes. But what you can do now is create a preview on the Instagram feeds. And I’m hearing from a lot of my fancy friends who are doing this a lot that the algorithm is actually favoring that for them. Um, but they’re saying that the engagement that they get on the previews that they post into Ige TV is way higher than the post that they actually put on their feed.

Shaina:                 So, um, make sure that you’re doing that well. We do for our templates as we make sure the template for stories, for stories and for HGTV, they work when they crop. Because what happens is obviously you’ve got the story size, which is the vertical in Ige TV, which I guess now is Ige TV size. But uh, what you’ll do is make sure that the content that is inside of that box, it’s going to be cropped when you preview it to feed. So you don’t want a ton on the very top or the very bottom of that piece of content. You want to make sure that all of your action is right in the middle. So we do like the headlines and the status bars and the um, the captions and all that stuff. So we make sure that it’s all going to be within the crop when you do preview it into feeds.

Shaina:                 So, and then when somebody is looking at it and they’re watching their one minute preview on the feed, they can actually click it and it will take them to the full length content. So if you want to post longer content to Instagram, that is totally the way to make it happen. Okay? Let’s talk about Facebook. Add thumbnails. All right? So if anybody’s spent money on Facebook, you all know that if you have too much text on that image or video, Facebook is going to say nay, nay, my friend and they are going to decrease the engaged or not the engaged, decrease the viewability of it or stop it altogether. So there’s a way to get around this for video, not for imagery, sorry folks. But if you have video that is done the right way, which is a big old headline, you’ve got your captions, you’ve got your call to actions, you’ve got, there’s texts on this thing.

Shaina:                 Facebook is going to stop it if you do a boosted post or if you try to run it as an ad, well you can get around that by creating a thumbnail for that video. And the thumbnail needs to be under 20% text. There’s a tool we’re going to link to that also. It’s called the Facebook overlay tool. Um, you just click it online and it will ask you to upload the image and it will analyze it and let you know if it is going to be okay when you run it. So what happens is when you upload the video to your, um, to the platform, if you’re an ads manager or you know, on the profile, you can add a thumbnail to the video, add a thumbnail that is like a cool name. I mean still make it visually attracted I guess, but, um, add an image and you know, a little bit of text under 20%.

Shaina:                 And the cool thing is most people have autoplay on their feed, so they’re going to scroll and they’re just going to see the video start playing anyway. So really the thumbnail doesn’t, I mean, not many people will see it, um, but it gets you through that blockade and it will allow your video content that has him paid ad budget behind it to run like a dream. Okay. Let’s talk about number 14, which is Instagram copy. So Sarah used the word truncate in that I had to look it up. So, and all I kept thinking about was, this is totally off topic, but all I kept thinking about was, um, the movie America’s sweethearts, where Hank Azaria keeps saying the whole HomeKit, I have to go to the home kit. And, um, I had a few minutes of that and then I realized that I needed to do my research for this podcast episode.

Shaina:                 So here we are. Um, so be careful what you write for the first trunk, eight of the Instagram post and what that means. What I found when I googled it, um, is that the Instagram captions, the copy that you write outside of the image or the video you’re posting, um, it shows the first hundred and 25 characters. Like, I knew this, I just didn’t know what the word meant. Oh my God, I’m totally, anyway, I’m totally not a more on I promise. But, um, the first hundred and 25 characters you use are super important because that’s what’s actually going to populate below the video or the image. So make sure that you’re strategic in what you place there because that’s all people are going to see until they click the little icon on the right that says, see more, not seem more than name, but like visualize more text.

Shaina:                 We’re gonna be done with number 14. Now we’re almost there folks. We got 15 coming, coming up real fast. The lifespan of a Twitter post. Okay. The licensing of a Twitter post is super duper short. It is 18 minutes. So from the time you post something on Twitter to the time that the last person’s going to see it is 18 minutes. So you have to make sure you’re posting consistently on Twitter. So when we’re talking about, you know, all of these, like the platforms, you can use that, you can schedule posts unless you want to be on your phone all the time, which is also cool if you’re live tweeting your life, which is awesome. Good for you. Um, just make sure that you’re doing it consistently because 18 minutes is not a whole heck of a long time. So after you post that really amazing post that you worked so hard on and know that 18 minutes later it is Sianora my friend.

Shaina:                 Other platforms have higher, like Facebook is five hours, which is better. Instagram is 21 hours. Um, Linkedin has the best at 24 hours. I still get engagement after that. Um, but on average it’s about 24 hours after you post something that it will still show up in people’s feeds. So there’s your likes fans. Okay, number 16, Facebook groups. This is kind of the same as linkedin groups. Same kind of ordeal. You’re talking with a group of people who are like minded or interested in something similar. Again, don’t be the jerk who walks in there, starts promoting yourself like a huge asshole. Just go in there, communicate with people, offer your expertise. Like if somebody has questions, you know the answer to that, you know, comment on their stuff, like peoples’ stuff. Post your own things that are cool or interesting that may not have anything to do with you as a brand.

Shaina:                 Just make sure that you’re just chatting it up with these folks. And then if you want to start putting some of your educational based content out there and not your promo content, you can start posting that kind of stuff depending on the rules of the group. Make sure you check out the rules because some of them get very, very upset and stingy and you know what to each their own because they want it to be a safe space and some of them are there to promote. So just make sure you know what kind of group you’re going into and make sure that you know the rules and that you’re just engaging. Like you wouldn’t go into like a dinner party and just try to like sell your digital course to everybody there. They’re going gonna be like get the hell Outta here dude. Like we didn’t invite you for that.

Shaina:                 We invited you to hang out and chat. So just treat groups like a friendship group, like, like we’re all friends and you don’t want to be that jerk at dinner. Who doesn’t? I mean, no, no, just don’t do that. Okay. Number 17 dude, we are like three away. Are you guys ready? Number 17 is post images with body parts in them. Yep. You heard me? Right. So it’s interesting because images on Facebook with body parts like a hand holding a phone or like fingernails are they, I mean not like the hand by itself, you know, but a hand attached to a person that you can hot see those perform way better than images with people or images without them. So they actually performed 29% better than images with the full person in there and they perform 10% better than images without a person in them.

Shaina:                 So images of body parts apparently allow people to see themselves in the, um, in the content. So actually get to see themselves like doing whatever it is that the hand is doing. Like if you’re selling products, that’s a really great way to do it. Um, and yeah, that’s, that’s body parts sell people. Okay. And then we’ve got number 18 utilizing youtube playlist to organize your content. So make sure that if you have content on [inaudible], first of all, if you’re not using youtube, you gotta use Youtube. You have to upload your content there. Um, it’s great for SEO. Google owns youtube, so anything people search in Google, it’s gonna populate some sort of video. So you’re going to want to make sure that you’re using video content and you’re not just uploading it to Facebook, you’re not just uploading it to like linkedin. You’re actually uploading it to youtube, do it.

Shaina:                 But once you’re doing that, you can utilize playlists to now segment the type of content you’re creating. So we have multiple playlists on the repurpose house. Youtube, we have one playlist that’s the content coalition, that’s every episode that’s full length of the content coalition. You can go into that playlist and see all of them and if it’s easy to navigate through, we also have another playlist that’s knowledge bombs by the content coalition. So it’s tiny little clips that are up to two minutes that whoever the guest is or yours truly said that was super impactful. I don’t think I said anything under two minutes, but we’ll see. We’ll get to the knowledge bombs, you know later and see how it works. But um, you can always like, we also have one that’s like marketing tips. We also have how to, so it’s really easy to kind of navigate and go through the different types of content set of that just being a huge mess of like random content that doesn’t have a place or makes sense.

Shaina:                 All right guys. Are you ready in number 19 I love it. This is how we’re going to end it. Repurpose the content that you’ve already created and utilize it on social media. I hope at this point that this has been a no brainer. If you haven’t listened to the content coalition before, welcome. Go listen to literally every single episode somebody mentions repurposing content. We all know it’s a hot topic if you’ve already made it, make it work for social, like everybody. Let’s not everybody, but so many people, let content die. That is awesome. Like if you had podcasts episodes from way back in the day, that still evergreen like the contents good, the people were awesome. Why not chop it up into a bunch of little pieces and create awesome, impactful assets for social. If you have blog posts and you’ve got really cool stats and you’ve got it to like a hundred words or so of something that you can turn into a text motion video for social media and then drive traffic to the blog post where you have your cool optins and all of that fun stuff, like why not do that?

Shaina:                 You don’t have to create a new blog post that you’re linking to. I mean you should obviously continuously make content, but you should still be able to utilize the old stuff to fill in the blanks of your social media strategy and to continuously send people to the original content. It’s so funny because I’ve heard multiple times, many, many times people were like, oh, everybody’s already seen that. Everybody already read that blog post. Everybody already listened to that podcast episode and I’m like every like, are you that popular that every single person that could potentially find interest or potentially see you as a valuable resource center? Like they’ve all seen it. That is a ridiculous statement. Maybe some of them have, but everybody come on our networks expand daily and if they’re not then you need to be working harder to do that. But ultimately like if your networks expanding then it’s everybody that is in your network or who sees your content now has not seen what you posted last year.

Shaina:                 So utilize repurposing content for your social media strategy and then do all of this stuff that we just talked about to make sure that it all works really, really well and you get a ton of engagement and everybody can live happily ever after in their awesome social media rockstar world. So thank you guys for, I don’t need, I don’t even know if it was 19 minutes. Where are we at? 26 minutes. Not Bad. I kind of felt like I ran out a little bit there but we’re at 26 minutes. I appreciate you guys. Hopefully you can implement some of this into your strategy. In the show notes we’re going to have a ton of links to like content that goes through some of these points more extensively so you can learn. There’s a ton of like how to videos that are also in channels on her youtube.

Shaina:                 Um, but you’re going to be able to get a lot more information out of this then you would, I’m just listening. So make sure that you go in, you click the links. Well, we’re going to do is repurpose in theory. Here’s the mastermind behind it all. Sarah decided that we are going to repurpose every single one of these 19 now 20 points that I did into individual one minute assets for social media. So we’re going to do it ourselves, but do hey, do this, do this short little blog post about 19 I don’t know, 15 cool things that you’re like an expert on and now you’ve got 15 posts for social across all the different platforms because you’re going to stagger the photos and it’s going to be awesome. So you guys have an awesome week and I’m, I’m excited to see you guys next time. Bye Bye. Thank you so much for checking out this episode of the content coalition. Now, whether you’re listening or watching, make sure that you subscribe to the Youtube Channel and to whatever platform you’re listening to it on, because you’re not going to want to miss out on the incredible things that I’m learning with these amazing content marketing pros. So make sure you subscribe and we will talk to you next week.