Andréa Jones on Growing your Social Media Following | PoP 476

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Andréa Jones on Growing your Social Media Following | PoP 476

Do you practice mindfulness when it comes to social media? How can you automate and grow your social media while maintaining a personal touch? What should you do to jumpstart your marketing message?

In this podcast episode, Joe Sanok speaks to Andréa Jones about simple social media solutions to build your business’ online community.

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Meet Andréa Jones

Andréa JonesAndréa Jones is fiercely committed to helping businesses and podcasters build profitable online communities through simple social media solutions.

She’s the host of the Savvy Social Podcast, creator of the Savvy Social School, and named one of Social Report’s top marketers to follow.

Visit her website, connect on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, and Facebook.

Visit the Savvy Social School here.

Listen to the podcast here.

In This Podcast

Summary

  • Andréa’s backstory
  • Setting boundaries and practicing mindfulness when it comes to social media
  • Tools for automating social media while maintaining a personal touch
  • The Five Pillars of Social Media Content
  • Jumpstarting your marketing message
  • Internal swipe files
  • Adjusting your strategy once the growth has reached a plateau
  • Paid advertising

Andréa’s backstory

Andréa is a huge fan of social media, so much so that she has developed a love for it over the years. Her love for social media also led her to find love with a fellow YouTuber when they collaborated for a video. They connected and kept in touch, despite the distance between him in Toronto, Canada and her in Atlanta, Georgia. She eventually moved to Canada to be with him and went all-in with starting her social media business at the same time.

Setting boundaries and practicing mindfulness when it comes to social media

It’s just like they say, too much of a good thing can be bad. So, while social media is absolutely such a powerful tool and opportunity for connection, too much of it can be bad.

After about two years of social media freelancing, the anxiety from all her clients’ notifications constantly coming through to her phone became too overwhelming. Andréa took a two-week sabbatical for a complete digital-detox and began a journey of mindfulness, meditation, and being intentional about her approach to social media. She was drawn to the mindfulness meditation on the Headspace app with its focus on breath work, which brought a sense of quiet to her busy life.

She found a new approach to social media and found a way to maintain boundaries and eliminate overwhelming notifications without missing the important ones. Andréa suggests choosing five days a week and setting reminders to check your social media once a day on those days – it doesn’t really matter which five days, as long as you give yourself two days off. Having those reminders means you only log on with the intention to be in that space, leaving the rest of the time for you to do your work without distractions. Andréa’s process is as follows:

  1. Check and respond to messages (direct/private, depending on the platform)
  2. Make sure that any scheduled posts posted properly
  3. Take 15 to 20 minutes to network in your community – find new people to follow and connect with and scroll through your feed leaving likes and comments.
    Following this process, especially keeping the last step to only 15 or 20 minutes, has allowed Andréa to find the longevity and joy in social media that she was missing after being so overwhelmed before.

Tools for automating social media while maintaining a personal touch

The best tools to use are those where you can create the content yourself and then select on the tool exactly when you want it to be posted, or to repost content that has already driven a lot of engagement for your page. This maintains the personal touch of you selecting the graphic/image/flyer/video and writing up the caption, but allows you to sit down when you have the time and schedule the post for another time that works better for you. Andréa suggests these tools:

  • Later – this is a great, free tool to schedule Instagram posts in particular
  • MeetEdgar – you can automate “evergreen” content to be shared multiple times, for example, a post that always has a high engagement and can be reshared a few times without being too repetitive.
  • Smarter Queue

The Five Pillars of Social Media Content

Andréa elaborates on the five pillars for you to start with when building your social media strategy. Over time, you will figure out which pillar works best for your audience, and then build your page around that type of content.

1. Promotional

These are posts that promote what you do, for example free offers, lead magnets, advertising that you do free consultations, etc.

2. Educational

These types of posts are to position you and your practice/business as an expert in your field. For example, share foundational content such as blogs or podcasts, or simply share knowledge and resources on your page that will help your audience to learn something new from your field.

3. Community

The point of these posts is to highlight things that are happening in your community. If you’re local, you can share relevant events or businesses in your local community. If you are based online, it’s a good idea to share articles or resharing related ideas to your page while contributing your own ideas to those posts.

4. Entertainment

Create posts that entertain your audience, such as memes or funny videos, and perhaps some behind-the-scenes content. Many people log on to social media for the entertainment value of content, so use this to your advantage.

5. Engaging

These are the posts that you create to reach many people and drive engagement to your page. You want to post content that gets your audience to participate in discussions and give real-time feedback through likes/reactions, comments, and shares. Examples of engaging posts that work quite well are multiple-choice questions that encourage your followers to comment on and inspirational posts that encourage your followers to share.

Jumpstarting your marketing message

Andréa recommends that you ask yourself these questions to figure out exactly where to start with your marketing message. She calls them The Three Ws:

1. What do you sell?

Simply put, this is your product or service. For example, consultation services, therapy sessions, or a group program/course.

2. Who is it for?

Be specific about your target market and their psychology. For example, you could say business owners in general, but it is better to specify what stage of business you specialize in i.e. start-ups / small businesses / large corporations.

3. Why does it matter?

This is very important for your marketing message. Andréa recommends that you take the time to sit down, brainstorm, and maybe even journal about why your business matters. Focus on the feelings that people have when they work with you and the transformation between how they feel before hiring you or buying your product and after. You can use testimonials or reviews from past clients to establish these feelings.

Internal swipe files

Swipe files are a collection of phrases and content that can be repeated to build your brand, such as commercial jingles used in mainstream advertising. Andréa explains that having repeated and memorable content is important for social media too because, even though many people feel that you have to share new content the whole time on your social media, you should actually think of social media as a way to amplify that which you have already created. It may also be important for you to reshare content over time because, with so many people sharing so much content on social media, your posts are in the mix with hundreds of thousands of other posts every day and you may have to repeat yourself to be seen by more people.

Adjusting your strategy once the growth has reached a plateau

Once your automations are working and you’re getting great engagement, often the growth of your following will plateau. When this happens, Andréa recommends that you incorporate other marketing tactics into your existing strategy to accelerate growth:

  • Paid advertising
  • Email marketing
  • PR strategies
  • Advanced video strategies such as creating micro-video, easy-to-watch content or going live on social media

Paid advertising

Andréa explains that paid advertising is like adding fuel to the fire, so there must already be some kind of flame burning (i.e. an existing strategy) for it to be effective. Using a speed-dating analogy, the introduction or first impression is important for you to get this stranger to like you very quickly, so they would want to get to know you better. The same applies to paid advertising, which acts as that introduction or first handshake – you want to act quickly but leave a lasting impression so that they will engage with the ad, follow through to wherever the ad leads them, and familiarize themselves with your product or service. Email marketing can also go hand-in-hand with the paid advertising, so your paid ad can link to a sign-up form for an email campaign where, in keeping with the speed-dating analogy, you can ‘woo’ them further.

Click here to access the Social Media Success Framework – Free Course

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Meet Joe Sanok

private practice consultant

Joe Sanok helps counselors to create thriving practices that are the envy of other counselors. He has helped counselors to grow their businesses by 50-500% and is proud of all the private practice owners that are growing their income, influence, and impact on the world. Click here to explore consulting with Joe.

Thanks For Listening!

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Podcast Transcription

[JOE]:
When it comes to keeping your practice organized, you want software that’s not only simple, but the best. I recommend Therapy Notes. Their platform lets you manage notes, claims, scheduling, and more, plus they offer amazing unlimited phone and email support. So, when you have a question, they’re there to help. You get two months free of Therapy Notes today, just by using the promo code “Joe” when you sign up for a free trial. Go on over to therapynotes.com and use promo code “Joe”.

This is the Practice of the Practice podcast with Joe Sanok, session number 476.

In less than a month, Next Level Practice doors will be opening. I am so excited about this. Next Level Practice is the community if you’re starting a practice. And so, for people that are, from the moment you’re starting a practice all the way up till you probably have your first two or three clinicians that you’ve added to the practice – so, under $100k – this community is for you. You get access to experts, you get access to a community, and small groups, and accountability partners. We have live events where we talk about what’s working in the private practice world. And what’s really cool is that, especially when the pandemic hit in early 2020, this community was so helpful in helping people transition very quickly to telehealth. We brought in Clay Cockrell to do some individual coaching in a group setting, he’s from onlinecounseling.com. We were able to work with Therapy Notes to try to get telehealth going. And most of our next level practice people were thriving, they were doing better during the pandemic than they were before. And so, it just shows the power of community learning, of supporting each other, of sharing what’s working. Because when you have these high achieving therapists, they say I don’t want to have a practice that just rocks it out. I want to be in community with other people that are rocking out private practice and get access to experts and tools and all these things. It really helps you know exactly what that next step is for you. And so, I want to really encourage you on August 24th, Next Level Practice is going to open back up, and you don’t want to miss this, because this is the community that really will help you get to that next level with your practice. And so, it’s only $99 per month. We really wanted to price it that, if you got one client that came once per month, that it would pay for all this: 30+ E-courses, tons of community events every single month, a vibrant Facebook community, ask the experts and people that are just there to support you. You know, so often, when you’re in a Facebook group that’s one of the free Facebook groups, someone will say something and ask your question. And there’ll be this giant debate where you end up leaving more confused than if you had just, kind of, looked at it yourself. That rarely happens in Next Level Practice – people are really tracking together, growing together, and saying, this is the best solution, or these are the two or three solutions to help narrow down from the 20 options that you have. And so, I really want to have you sign up over at practiceofthepractice.com/invite. We’re going to be having some webinars where we talk through what it is so that you can make a solid decision to look for the return on investment for your time and money. But it’s really important that you know about the kind of experts that we’re having. So Andréa Jones, who you’re going to hear from today, she’s talking all about social media, and she’s going to be one of our experts, and I think it’s September or October, and you’re going to get to pick her brain. She costs hundreds of dollars an hour, and she’s going to come in and really share behind-the-scenes even deeper than what you learn today on the show. So, without any further ado, here’s Andréa Jones.

[JOE]:
Well, today on the Practice of the Practice podcast, we have Andréa Jones. Andréa is fiercely committed to helping businesses and podcasters build profitable online communities through simple social media solutions. She’s the host of the Savvy Social podcast, creator of the Savvy Social School, and named one of Social Report’s top marketers to follow. Andréa, welcome to the Practice of the Practice podcast.

[ANDRÉA]:
Thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited to be here.

[JOE]:
Yeah, well, this episode’s going live in July. We met back in March at Podfest, which, at the time of this recording, we’re still in quarantine, which is bonkers to think back to in-person events. Hopefully by July, things have shifted a bit in our world. But I want to start with, no matter what kind of happens with our society, social media is going to be, just, like, a huge part of our businesses, of our lives. And you’ve kind of taken a different approach around mindfulness and social media, and we were just talking about that before we started recording and I want to start there. What has social media been like for people? Why is mindfulness now a part of that? How did you discover, kind of, mindfulness and social media? And, like, let’s dive into the mindfulness side of it.

[ANDRÉA]:
Yeah, absolutely. So, just a little backstory… I am a huge fan of social media, and I actually met my husband on YouTube.

[JOE]:
What?! I have never heard of someone meeting their husband on YouTube. Let’s start there, forget my initial start.

[ANDRÉA]:
Yeah, I think that just provides some context into how into social media I am, like, I’m loving it, and I found my love through it. But we were both collaborating, just like we’re doing on this podcast here, and we were collaborating with each other on a YouTube video, and we just connected, and we kept in touch, and we kept talking. I lived in Atlanta, Georgia at the time, he lived in Toronto, Canada. So, I ended up moving to another country to be with him, which was a wild journey. But my love for social media caused me to go overboard with it. So, I started my social media business with that move. And, two years in, I was feeling completely frazzled, because I had a nice book of business as a freelancer, and I had an assistant working with me at the time, but I had all of these notifications, all of my clients’ notifications from Facebook and Instagram and Twitter, and emails coming in. And this was the beginning of 2017. I was feeling at my wit’s end, I was like, I can’t do this anymore. I actually thought about quitting my business because I was feeling so much anxiety at the sounds that were coming from my phone. So, I took some time off, I actually took a two-week sabbatical, completely detoxed from everything digital, and became really intentional about my approach to social media. And through that journey, I discovered meditation and mindfulness. I’d heard of meditation but never really explored it before that point. Completely changed my perspective on myself and my relationship with social media.

[JOE]:
And let me pause right there, what kind of meditation did you start doing?

[ANDRÉA]:
So, I tried a bunch of different things and really landed on the Headspace app, and the type of meditation I like, it’s just a lot of breath work, like focusing on your breath, I think it’s called just mindfulness meditation. And I really enjoyed the quiet that it brought. So, for me, that was really, really impactful to how I approached my business. So, I actually turned off all of my notifications, and turned off all of my email notifications, all of my social media notifications, and just got really intentional about social media. So, what that meant, though, is that I had to create a system so that I wasn’t losing notifications, like, I don’t want someone to message me and not get a response. So, because of that, that’s where a lot of the framework that I’ve built now have come from, they’ve come from that space of always feeling frazzled and overwhelmed by this thing that I used to love and now becoming overwhelmed with it. And I had to create a system to kind of manage that whole thing.

[JOE]:
I want to dive into that system in a minute, but I want to pause on that whole, kind of, feeling frazzled with it, because for me, you know, if I’m on Facebook and doing Facebook Lives while I’m working, I never jump on Facebook personally, because I’ll do personal things on there during the work day, but it’s like, I feel like I want to just step away from that world. How do you, in having a love for social media, even finding your love on social media, and then having a business around it, do you have specific boundaries for yourself that, kind of, make it so that you don’t lose that excitement for it?

[ANDRÉA]:
Yeah, and it’s just like they say, too much of a good thing can be bad. So, while social media is absolutely such a powerful tool and opportunity for connection, too much of it can be bad. So, what I do is I give myself five days a week. For me, that’s Monday through Friday, if you’re listening to this, and you decide to do Wednesday through Sunday, or whatever the case may be, and take Monday and Tuesday off, that’s your choice. So, you choose those days, and I do recommend taking two days off, and set yourself a notification every day to check social media, so you’re logging on with the intention to be in that space and then the rest of the time you’re doing your work.

[JOE]:
And literally just once a day, or you’re doing it a couple times a day?

[ANDRÉA]:
Once a day.

[JOE]:
And what does that look like when you’re checking social media? Like, take us through your process for that.

[ANDRÉA]:
Yeah, so the first thing I do is I check my messages, and my direct messages, and, like, any private messages and that sort of thing, depending on the platform, and respond to those. And then I take a look at the posts – we’ll talk about my posting strategy in a sec, because that’s outside of this kind of checking in strategy – but I’ll take a look at my posts, make sure they posted properly, and then I will actually start networking. I give myself about 15 to 20 minutes to network on social media, and that’s my time to, like, be in my communities, find new people to follow and connect with them, scroll through my feed and leave some comments for some people who I’m already following, and just participate in social media. And it may feel like a small amount of time, but what I found is that doing that consistently has actually created longevity and a joy in social media that wasn’t there previously. So now I look forward to that, you know, 15-20 minutes that I’m going to spend networking, rather than being distracted if a notification comes in and feeling like I need to respond to that right away.

[JOE]:
Yeah, so you’re kind of batching your time when you’re focusing on social media as a strategy, rather than maybe social media just interrupting whatever you’re working on.

[ANDRÉA]:
Absolutely, and that’s the key. And I like to think of it like working out. So, sometimes, when we start our health and fitness journey, we look at people like CrossFitters with their big muscles, and we go, I want that. And so, we may be approaching social media in the same way; we look at these people who have all of these followers and we go, I want that. But in reality, it was the daily habit, the daily practice that gets you there. And for most of us, if we’re talking about working out, that’s like, you know, walking for 30 minutes a day, or doing some small habits like that. Whereas the CrossFitters are working out five hours a day, that sort of thing. So, when we’re looking at our social media strategy, we want to take it from the practical aspect of, we’re doing this for the health of our business, and we’re committing to these small bits of time because that’s what’s going to keep us healthy. You can commit more time, I’m not saying you can’t, but once you start committing more time to social media, something else has to go. So for me, for instance, when I want to spend more time on social media, I’m outsourcing things like accounting, bookkeeping, I’m outsourcing other things like email management, because there’s so many things that go into running a business, social media is just a part of that. So you can spend more time, or spend the small amounts of time and then outsource social media if you know that that’s something you want to outsource and things start picking up or you start to notice that you need to spend more time there. You have to either outsource social media or outsource something else so that you can spend more time on social.

[JOE]:
That’s awesome. Well, let’s talk through some tools that you think are good to use for kind of automating some of that social media. Because I think that I’ve had times where I’ve automated so much that it was clearly, like, not personal, so you can overdo that. And so, what tools do you like in regard to automating social media but still keeping that personal side of it?

[ANDRÉA]:
Yeah. So, when it comes to tools, one of my favorite free scheduling tools is Later.com, especially if you have a platform like Instagram as your primary platform, and what it does is you still have to input your posts, so, you’re still going to put in your caption, you’re still going to put in a graphic or an image, or like a little flyer or something like that. But then Later will actually post that for you at the time that you tell it to you. So, what that means is you can sit down on a Friday for an hour, create your posts for the following week, and then that tool will post them for you at the time that you need them posted. So, that’s a little bit of an automation that will actually help streamline your entire process. And it cuts down on, kind of, like, the weight of having to decide what to post every day, because you’ve said it for yourself to post for you. There are a bunch of other tools out there that can help you with automations as well, if you want to have, kind of, like, a repeated bucket of content that’s evergreen, that can be posted at any time, tools like MeetEdgar are great for that, or Smarter Queue is another one, so there’s a lot of tools out there and they can really help, kind of, streamline and automate some of your scheduling processes.

[JOE]:
Yeah, MeetEdgar is what we use. One thing we found, though, is that on Facebook, at least right now, those posts, it seems like, whatever their algorithm is, that they don’t post those to as many people as when we do just a kind of original post.

[ANDRÉA]:
Yeah, we are starting to see some of that. So, what Facebook wants right now is original content. So, if it kind of sees something that’s recycled a little bit, they are not giving it as much priority, but engagement trumps that. So, what we’ve seen is, if a post does really well with engagement, that’s when we’ll put it in MeetEdgar and then we’ll repost it, let’s say, in three months, and it still gets a lot of engagement again because we’ve already determined that it’s a highly engaged piece of content. And so that’s another workaround for some of the algorithm things that are going on with Facebook.

[JOE]:
Oh, that’s awesome. Now, when people are thinking through what to post… How do you help people understand what’s gonna work for their audience? What’s not? How do you think through what to post?

[ANDRÉA]:
Yeah, so I recommend starting with what I call the five pillars of social media content. So, the five pillars of content. The first pillar is your promotional posts, and those are the posts that promote what you do, promote your practice, promote maybe a free offer, like, lead magnet, or promote the fact that you do free consultations, or whatever the case may be. So that promotional post is asking your audience for something, and it’s one fifth of the types of posts you can share. So that’s the first pillar – promotional posts.

The second pillar is an educational post, and this type of post is to really position you and your practice/your business as an expert in your field. So, you’re going to share your expertise in this post; if you have, kind of, foundational content, like blogs or podcasts it’s a great place to share those, but you can also just share some knowledge, share something that people may not be aware of, educate them in some way, and you become a resource to them.

So, we’ve got promotional, we’ve got educational, and then our third pillar of content is a community content piece. So, the point of this content piece is to highlight something that’s happening in your community. So, if you’re local, you’re sharing other things that are in your local community. If you are virtual and you have a digital business, you’re sharing articles from other places, or re-sharing ideas from other people adding your ideas to them. So, an example would be if you found an article on Mind Body Green that you really liked, maybe you’re going to share it out with your audience, maybe add a few ideas that you can amplify, add your own spin on it, and really showcase that you’re not the only person talking about these concepts, and that there are other people out there kind of exploring these things. So, we’ve got promotional, we’ve got educational, and community.

The last two pillars are entertainment – so, this one’s just a fun one. A lot of us log on social media because we like to see funny names, or we want to see something behind the scenes. So, think of a way that you can engage your audience and entertain them in some way – and then we have the engaging pillar. So, the engaging pillar is for the algorithm that we talked about before, and it’s to, kind of, prompt your community to participate with you on social media, the beauty of social media is that it’s a two way dialogue. It’s not, like, a billboard or a radio ad where you’re blasting things out, you can actually get feedback in real-time. And so, questions work really well in this pillar. And lately, we’ve been seeing multiple choice questions worked really well, so you can give them a list of options and ask people to comment below. Or you can use things like inspirational quotes, people love liking and sharing those, but really think about how you can engage your audience so that you can participate with them, and give the algorithm what it wants, which is likes and comments and that sort of thing.

So, the five pillars of content – promotional, educational, community, entertainment, and engaging. And if you can give yourself those five pillars as a place to start with your strategy, that’s a really good, kind of, starting place for you. After a while, you’ll see which of those pillars perform better for your audience, and it varies per audience, even within the same industries. So, you’ve kind of got to test it to see. But that will give you a baseline and a variety of posts that you can start sharing out. And when you’re just starting as well, I do recommend just doing one a day. So, five days of the week, you’re going to have a pillar content going out, and then you can start seeing… so, one of my clients, we’ve been doing this for two years, and in the past few years, we’ve whittled it down to being primarily promotional posts, which is odd because, for most of our clients, it’s either, like, engaging posts that do the best, or those community posts, but this particular client is promotional posts. Anytime we promote their products, people love it. They’re liking and commenting and sharing. And so, the only way we could figure that out, though, is by testing. So, you’ve got to be able to test those five pillars with your audience and see what works for them.

*START OF COMMERCIAL
[JOE]:
I remember when I first started my private practice, and… I just got an email actually, that really represents that feeling of how many questions you have. This person emailed me and said, you know, now with COVID, how do I do all this online? You know, do I have to change my address? How do I do new marketing in my city? Do I keep my local address? Do I close my office? Do I have a virtual address? How do I jump into telehealth 100%? And how do I even market that? You know, these are the kind of things that we cover all the time in Next Level Practice. Next Level Practice is a membership community of over 400 clinicians starting and growing their private practices. So, if you are wanting to grow, I want you to sign up this August, when we open Next Level Practice again. On August 24, we open it back up and I want you to join it. Head on over to practiceofthepractice.com/invite, you will get all the details about this amazing community, specifically for people starting and growing a private practice. Again, that’s practiceofthepractice.com/invite.
*END OF COMMERICAL

Wow. So, when you’re working with somebody that wants to grow their social media, how do you help them really define their message around those five types of posts? Because I think a lot of people, they’ll hear it and they’ll say, Okay, yeah, I can do a couple of those. But how do they, in an ongoing way, keep coming up with new content? Because I think a lot of people feel like, “What do I have to say?”. They don’t really realize just how much knowledge they really have. And how do you help pull that out of people?

[ANDRÉA]:
Yeah. So, where I like to start is with what I call the three W’s. It’s just, basically, three questions that will help jumpstart your positioning, your marketing messages. So, the first W is ‘What do you sell?’ – that’s easy. It’s like, consultation services, therapy sessions, maybe you have a course, if you have a group program, if you have some products. So, ‘what do you sell?’ is the first W. The second W is ‘Who is it for?’ and get really specific here on the psychology of those people. So if you can really answer, like, for instance, you can say business owners as a general ‘who is it for?’, but if you can really drill down into, like, what stage of business they’re in, that could really help the ‘Who is it for?’ W. So, ‘what do you sell?’, ‘Who is it for?’ and the third W is ‘Why does it matter?’ And this ‘why does it matter?’ is really important to kind of dig deep, maybe do some journaling, take an hour, and brainstorm the Why does it matter? And this will give you your marketing messages for social media. And when you’re thinking about your’ why does it matter?’ You want to focus on the feeling that people have when they work with you. So, focus on the feeling, so how do they feel before they hire you or before they purchase your product? And how do they feel after? So, the before and the after, and you’re really focusing on that transformation. So, if you have testimonials, you can use those to jumpstart you. But oftentimes we know our clients and customers, we’ve been working with them, we know what they’re struggling with, and we know how our offers can help them. So, if we can really dig into those feelings, that could really help.

So, I’ll give an example with one of my products. So, I have a membership site, it’s called the Savvy Social School, and when I first started marketing it, I would say all of the technical aspects of it; we’ve got an Instagram course, we’ve got these posts, they’re ready to post for you, and that’s how I approached the marketing. But when I really started digging into the feeling that people had before they joined and after they joined, that’s when I started to see a drastic increase in interest for this product. So, the ‘before’ for that is, they’re feeling anxious, confused, they feel embarrassed, they don’t know how to find Instagram stories on Instagram… All of those things are the feelings before. And then the ‘after’ is, they feel confident that they can post, they know what to post, they know when to post it. And those are feelings. I could dive into the technical aspects of, like, I have, you know, hundreds of videos, and all of those things. But the feeling is really where that transformation happens, and it’s really what convinces people to know, like, and trust you, and to give you money for the things that you’re offering. So, the three W’s is a really good place to start. And then I also encourage people to create their own internal swipe files, and this is a technical term, but it basically just means, like, think of, like, the commercial jingles of what you do. What are those little phrases that people will get stuck in their head? And you literally have to play them on repeat, like a commercial. The reason that we get, like, the Folgers song stuck in our head, from the Folgers commercial, is because…

[JOE]:
Which hasn’t been stuck in my head since the late 80s. Thank you so much.

[ANDRÉA]:
Oh, you’re welcome. Now it’s gonna be stuck in your head.

[JOE]:
Yeah, now it’s gonna be stuck in my head again.

[ANDRÉA]:
Exactly. The reason we have that in our heads is because we’ve heard it a million times. So, when you’re approaching your social media strategy, you’re gonna have phrases that you’re going to repeat, you’re going to repeat them, you’re actually not going to have a lot of new content. And I think sometimes when we approach social media, we think Oh, we have to post all of this new content, and I want you to, kind of, switch your thinking a little bit to think of social media as just amplifying what you’ve already created. You’re re-sharing what you already have shared. In the same way, maybe someone else is singing the commercial jingle, but it’s the same jingle. So, when you approach your social media, it may feel repetitive to you. That’s good. You have to remember that your posts are mixed into hundreds of thousands of other social media posts. Just because you said it one time doesn’t mean someone’s going to remember it, in fact, they probably won’t remember it. So, you may have to repeat yourself. And I think that’s okay, and that’s a good thing, and you can breathe a little sigh of relief because you don’t have to create all of this new content all the time. So, when you have your three W’s, you have your kind of internal commercial jingles, and you have your three W’s, you can then spend that one hour a week creating your social media posts for the following week, and it’ll be a lot faster because you’ve built out a foundation for yourself that helps you create that content.

[JOE]:
That’s so awesome. So, where do people… once they, kind of, get to that level; so, they’ve got the automations going, they’re engaging, it feels like, at least for me – and maybe this isn’t true for you or your clients – but it feels like there are definitely times that it goes up and there’s other times it plateaus. And so, where it feels like, is this as big as my audience can get? And so, when people have had that growth… Because when you first go from “I don’t have very many followers at all” to “I’m going to do an active strategy”, you usually experience a pretty rapid growth. So, going from zero to 2000, that oftentimes doesn’t take a whole lot. But then a lot of times you start to plateau. During that plateau time when you’ve got these systems down, what can you do then?

[ANDRÉA]:
Yeah, so I have, in the social media success framework, kind of, four stages. And we talked about the Build, the Create, and the Growth stage. So, when you’re building, you’re talking about the swipe files, you’re doing the three W’s. When you’re creating, you’re in the five pillars. When you’re growing, you’re spending those 15 to 20 minutes a day networking. But there are some things you can do to accelerate that growth, which are, kind of, advanced strategies. So, once you have the foundation set, there’s a lot of things you can do to start moving the needle. And there’s things that you can combine with other marketing tactics. So, an easy one is to start looking at paid advertising. Sometimes it’s a really great way to accelerate growth. But I like to think of paid advertising as adding fuel to the fire – you got to have a flame first before you start adding fuel to it, you kind of have to know what’s going to work. So that’s a great way to start accelerating that plateau. But there are other things too, like some PR strategies, even doing some more advanced video strategies on social media, like creating micro video content, or even just going live on social media, can really kickstart some more growth for you.

[JOE]:
And then, how, like when you think about paid advertising, or using pay-per-click or things like that, within social media… when is that worth it? When is it not really worth it?

[ANDRÉA]:
So, I want you to think of paid advertising as an introduction, like a handshake. So, let’s use the dating analogy, for instance. So, like, everyone you connect with is not going to become a potential partner, right? Like, in fact, most people won’t. So, when you’re thinking about paid advertising, I want you to think of it as, like, just going on a speed dating networking thing. You’re trying to get someone to like you very quickly who’s never met you before, but you’ve got to be able to have some next steps for them so that they can grow into liking you more if that instant connection makes sense. So, taking the dating analogy, for instance, if you go on a speed dating thing, and you go, “Wow, I really like you. Let’s get married.” That may feel you know, like a little quick, little extreme. I don’t know, maybe that’s your thing, but that’s not usually how it goes. Usually, it’s like, “oh, I really like you. Let’s go on another date.” So, if you think about paid advertising, you want to have, like, the second and third date as the next step and not marriage, not your offers, not your services. Typically, that’s not a great way to get someone to purchase. You gotta have some dating in there. So, usually with paid advertising, you can either set up, like in Facebook ads, you can set up specific funnel. So, like, if someone engages with an ad, then you show them another ad that helps them get to know you better. And then if they engage with that, you can show them another ad. And then maybe, after they’ve seen a few ads, you can ask them to purchase something. Another great way to do this is through email marketing. So, the social media element of it is ‘just getting to know you’, and then you ask for the sale in email marketing. Typically, those go hand in hand very well. And that way, you’re not spending all of your time trying to get people to marry you on Facebook and asking for those huge commitments. And you can kind of ‘woo’ them a little bit in your email marketing strategy.

[JOE]:
Hmm, yeah. That’s so great. And so, the last question that I always ask is, if every private practitioner in the world we’re listening right now, what would you want them to know?

[ANDRÉA]:
I think one of the most important things for social media is consistency. So if you heard this today and you go, man, I can’t commit to five posts a week, or I can’t even commit to 20 minutes a day, pick that number, whatever it is for you, and commit to that. So even if it’s one post a week, I’d much rather see you post one post a week consistently, than to try to do five, get overwhelmed, and then give up. I would much rather you post that one and then you can put your energy into that one post and it can be really great post, let’s say all you want to do is do that promotional post, I still think that the consistency of showing up that way is so much more valuable than, you know, trying it and then taking two months off, and then trying it again and getting overwhelmed. So, consistency is like one of the best ways to really tackle social media. So small little bits, consistently.

[JOE]:
Ah that’s so awesome. And you’re giving away your Social Media Success Framework to the audience for free. Can you talk a little bit about that and what they’ll get out of that?

[ANDRÉA]:
Absolutely. So, if you want to learn more about the five pillars, or the three W’s, or you want to talk more about where do you find your audience? How do you grow your networks? I’ve got a free course called the Social Media Success Framework that outlines that there’s also a workbook that comes with it as well. So you can take notes and follow along, but that’s available at onlinedrea.com/free, and it just gives you some insight into how I approach social media and how I teach social media inside of the Savvy Social School. So, if that sounds interesting to you, definitely check out the free course. And I hope to see you there.

[JOE]:
Awesome. And if people want to connect with your work or follow you, what’s the best way for them to connect with you?

[ANDRÉA]:
I have been absolutely loving Instagram lately. It’s been a lot of fun. And one of their newer features is you can send voice messages. So, if you follow me on Instagram, you may just get a voice message back.

[JOE]:
Awesome. What is that? I’ll follow you right now.

[ANDRÉA]:
Yes, it’s @onlinedrea.

[JOE]:
Awesome, I will do that right now. And thank you so much for being on the Practice of the Practice podcast.

[ANDRÉA]:
Thank you so much for having me. It’s been fun.

[JOE]:
For the last several months since I interviewed Andréa, which, you know, I’m recording several months in advance at this point. I have been kind of quoting the types of social media that she talks about her five-step formula, I have it set for my consulting clients, we’ve talked through it. It’s something that we’ve tried to implement more and more. So, if you want access to Andréa, as one of our experts, you got to sign up for next level practice. The sign up is gonna start in late August, on August 24th. It’s going to go for just a couple days. And so, you really want to jump into that. If you’re not sure, join the list. Then you’ll get information all about it will come out walk you through all the questions we get head on over to practice of the practice comm forward slash invite, and we would love for you to consider joining next level practice on August 24. Thanks so much for letting me into your ears and into your brain. Have an awesome day and I’ll talk to you soon.

Oh, I forgot to say therapy notes is our sponsor their amazing therapy notes calm use promo code Joe. If you want to get two months for free and if you’re a next level practice, member you get six months for free. Thanks so much. So yeah. Special thanks to the band Silence is Sexy for your intro music. We really like it.

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