Episode 84: How to use Social Media to build an Online Community for your Brand

In this episode of the Community Strategy Podcast, Carolyn Zick shares her community journey and offers marketing tips for new community builders. 

She’s the host of The Bad Axe Biz Club and AMIDST Creatives of the Midwest, both on the Mighty Networks platform. 

During the recording of this live interview, you’ll hear some strategies to avoid burnout and Carolyn gives practical steps to grow your online business, scale your community, and inspire others. 

Carolyn is a multi-passionate business owner and marketing nerd. She believes that you can be intentional and impactful online while respecting your mental health.  

Check out Mighty Networks to build your online community today! 

Do you want to start your own podcast? 

Check out Buzzsprout, they make it super easy to launch a podcast in minutes! 

Try Bonsai to organize your clients, manage projects, track time, send invoices, and receive payment for your services on the same day! 

Did you love this episode? Say thanks with a cup of coffee ☕

Check out PodMatch to find a podcast to share your message! 

Small business owners scale their services with Circle, learn more by clicking this link.

Transcript

Hello and thank you all for joining the Community Strategy Podcast.

I’m Callisa and I’m so happy we have a full house tonight.

We have a lot of new faces, which is really exciting. we gotta say hi to everyone, especially welcome to Denise and Kristie. Of course I am happy to introduce our incredible host, Deb Schell, creator of Find Calm Here as well as Carolyn. She’s the host on mighty networks of the bad acts biz club and admits creatives of the midwest today.

She’ll share her journey in building, launching and growing her mighty networks as well as how she helps community leaders market and promote their communities. She was on the mini wellness retreat too. So we got to see a little insight of her, brilliant. So I’m excited to dive a little bit deeper today.

So thank you all and Deb go ahead, awesome, fantastic intro and thank you and Carolyn, let’s start it up here.

We have been networking for quite a while, in fact how did we met in person, which is pretty nuts in Memphis Tennessee in March at the Community Leaders Institute expo and had a great conversation there, literally, I think it was like on my way out to one of the happy hours at the venue was it was like the close of the conference.

So like, I mean the Cli X was like a really intimate group of people, which was neat. So like, you know, everybody had kind of like seen each other in passing or been in similar like sessions, I think I probably saw every person who Was attending.

So we’d seen each other before but like had never talked and then my co founder of a midst and I were there together and we were on our way to drive our long drive back to Iowa like as we were walking out so was Deb passing and we stood for like 20 minutes and had like a really lovely chat and got connected that way.

Yeah. I feel like you were like, are you that person? Yeah. Well we, we were just in a session together. We had just been in one, I think it was s ours. He was talking about video and using video if you guys don’t follow esser and Pablo that was just on their podcast. It’s awesome. But it’s really, really interesting me as a content creator, I was really into their session Deb asked a few great questions and mentioned that she had a podcast just for mighty Networks host and that’s the platform that I build on. So I was like, we should talk because you are well versed in this area that I just dove into and have no idea what I’m doing. So that’s how we connected. Yeah, no, I just had to give the backstory on that because it’s not a typical meeting great story for my last two years because most of it’s all virtual. But so yes, so so psyched to have met you, I mistake that you were able to join us in june, she did a mindful marketing for everybody who missed that inside the fine come here community, there is an entire resource that shares with you about each section with a recording and a transcript.

So if you want to check that out, it is available inside the community which is now free, just F. Y. I. To everyone so you can feel free to join Caroline. Tell us a little bit about your scoop. Like how did you get into this community building space? I mean like my mom’s in the audience, she’ll she’ll tell you that I’ve always been trying to make more people be in one place at once, so many times where I’ve asked could just like One or two people come over and then it’s like 70 people later at our house and she was always such a good sport about those snowball type events. Community building has always been really important to me. I’m a really big extrovert, I’m married to a very big introvert. So I see the benefits on both sides of the like you know energy level or like how your empowered by other people, whether it’s you know, on the more introverted side or extroverted side, like how community can benefit both, Mental health has always been really important to me, maybe getting totally ahead of it.

But since you know, I was a kid, it’s always been really big to me to have people that I can rely on within my family without my family for different things, so I have benefited from communities so much I learned to crochet because of my family, which is something I’m really passionate about And I learned to knit because I made a friend on the Internet from Norway who taught me in the middle of the night on skype back in 2011, how to knit. So that was really like for me, like I’m passionate about the fiber arts and love that outside of marketing, and that was telling me I should get into knitting and I’m like, I can’t, I’m not, I’m not, my grand, my grandmother didn’t even that, but it’s super cool, it’s very trendy right now, especially, but anyways that, you know, I’ve benefited so much from community, so even like an online community, So I grew up in a digital native, right?

So like had internet at home from a young age, was online in chat rooms, meeting people from all over the world and just like cool stuff, right? That like having access to that is cool, and having inroads to communities all over for all different niches is super cool. So I accidentally became a digital marketer in 2015 and then from that I’ve helped a lot of different businesses across a lot of different industries show up online organically to the right people and that really dovetails into what a community is because when you’re building the way that I do for social, like audiences, I’m really focused on the relationships. So when I work with a brand, we’re not talking about ad spend, you can do that. I don’t hire somebody else to do, but we’re talking about, you know, what is your content doing?

What is the point of being online? I’m a big proponent of if you have no goal for what your marketing is going to do, like get out, like throw your phone in the river. Content for content, steak is not a thing anybody should do. And I feel like I’ve, I’ve been there done that and have like the 15 t shirts to prove that Oh yeah, well like we’re all guilty, right? Like it’s so easy to fall into the desire to make stuff just because you feel like it will help you get ahead and in like, you know, seven plus years of like teaching people how to market themselves effectively. And in an organic way, it always comes back to the people and that’s what a community is. It always comes back to making sure you’re in front of the right people and doing right by them. So what, like we had discussed that we were going to chat about today is using social media as an in road to your community and how to do that in a way that’s a, It works be not detrimental to your mental health, right?

Because I hate it when marketers suggest like, post-8 times a day. I’m like, why? I’m sure we’ve all read some blog that’s like the best way to grow on Instagram is three reels a day and 45 stories, you know, like we’ve all seen that like, sure, that’s the best way to grow if you want to hate everything and be sad. We all like our brains, our biggest assets and engaging in behaviors that detriment our brains. Like, no, thanks. Not for me, not, not my, not my plan. We have like a limited, finite amount of energy and that’s why it’s like I like when we talked about mindful marketing and how do you, you know, promote this idea of a community community concept and you have a community that you want to bring together people because you just love, you know, connecting with people, but then you also need to still have it as a business and somehow have it return on investment. So how do these two things align, Right. Which is what I really love how you talk about. Yeah.

So with that, like how they align and I’ve been doing this. So I launched bad ex biz club in january after sitting on the idea for almost a year and trying to figure out like how does it look, how does it work? I’ve pivoted like four times since then, Right? So that’s, you know, like it started as a paid community almost immediately, I was like, it just doesn’t sit right with me, it’s, you know, it’s free, there’s paid functions inside it, like there’s a class, there’s gonna be other things that are within it that you pay to get access to, but the general thing is free, so how does that make money? Right. So one of the things that I did, like this is me, my strategy that I’m still working out the bugs on for biz club is one of the biggest things that I think I did right with it is any of my social media presence, especially on instagram is always focused on modeling behaviors that would later translate really well to a community.

So I was already doing the community building on social media, so people were kind of primed, so what, that, that’s like, that’s the big goal, right? Use your social media almost like a testing grounds for community or a vetting grounds for members. So what that looks like for me and it could look similar or different for you, is I made sure that my audience was correct first and Deb does a lot of work with this for discovery and before you’ve even launched a community, making sure that the audience is right, so maybe you’re going to be launching a community that’s about your services or your skills or a niche interest, if you already have a social presence that’s adjacent to that, like, if you have your, your business right? So I have Bad Ex Enterprises is my main social media presence if I have that, I use that as the testing grounds for biz club, even though biz club is kind of its own thing, but under the Bad Ex umbrella, I didn’t make a separate social media the presence for it.

I’m like maybe someday I would, but right now I already have an audience with my existing social use that, test it, see what content resonates start there, use it for market research. I am constantly messaging my most active followers on instagram or facebook or emailing people I’ve worked with in the past and asking them what do you need, what is your biggest struggle, what is making you super happy right now, what do you wish you had more of in your life as a business owner, you tweak those questions in that research relevant to your industry and you have a free pool of data, which is what is going to make your community succeed. So after audience testing, another big thing that I use my social presence for is once I know the correct audience is showing up to my posts, I start playing with the content, so that’s like, what do people respond to?

Um one thing I started doing a lot more of that, I don’t do on instagram anymore because I do it all in my community is I started live streaming people didn’t necessarily always show up to the lives on instagram or facebook, a handful would time is hard because I have people that follow me from a bunch of different time zones, but the replays were really high value people watch those. So that was you know, an indication to me that like having the life still useful, the replay is really where it’s at and then getting people in the habit of interacting with me in a live platform or watching the recording that format. I do that in the community now those people that were watching it on instagram, I started trickling off of doing live streams on instagram as much. I’ll do one maybe once every other month but not that frequently and I was doing a weekly for a while kind of phase out of that and start redirecting to the community. That’s where the live things are happening if you liked those they’re here now.

So that’s sort of modeling of content became really important and then my my personal favorite thing was behavior modeling, so demonstrating what I want people to do within the community and seeing if they do it on my social, so it’s really important to me that people be willing to comment reply talk right like a community where I just post resources still would be somewhat useful, but I could do that on my website and save the fees for fighting networks and just put a bunch of downloadable stuff on my website. I want people to chat and make connections and get introduced to each other. I have a question about that because I think, well we see the value in that as community builders, Why is that important to you as a business owner? For them to connect? Is there a thought around that?

Beyond just really enjoying? Like as a person, I really enjoy connecting people to each other that will benefit, Like I like that, that makes me feel good, It makes them feel good. But beyond that, it’s I mean without sounding like callous or cold, it’s goodwill factor if I’m the one that brings these two people together that can support each other that is still remembered as a beneficial experience. So like for you and I for example, we only met because we both were involved with the community leaders expo I have a lot of goodwill towards that expo because I had a lot of really positive outcomes from it. You know, there are ways that you could easily focus on like the cost of that, right, cost ticket travel time away from work, hotel, food, whatever else. Right? You could list all the costs but the benefits of the relationships I built at that two day event way outweigh any of those costs in the long run.

And I’ve already seen return on that. So, I know that that’s a value provide for me, I can see how a relationship building experience gives me good will towards an entity, an event, a group, a person, if I am involved in a networking group and nothing is coming from it. I don’t have good will towards them. I’m not gonna go back to that networking group. If it’s, you know, a networking group put on by a chamber, let’s say Chamber of Commerce, something like that, I join, I show up, nothing great happens. I’m like, what’s the point of joining the chamber even? Right, So same for biz club, if people show up to biz club, they get resources from me, which is great, but they’re also connecting with each other. They’re like, biz club is the place to be. I have so many opportunities because of this and that is what makes it beyond just a resource center on your website. It’s a living thing that people feel like they’re benefiting from and also contributing to. Yeah, I think what’s great about we have this living journal in income here community and what I love about that is that we can keep connected throughout time and you can see my journey over the last year since I launched, I did a, I started a year ago.

And so now you you can see like all the iterations and the changes and the journey and so somebody new that’s coming in, it’s dropping into that space. Could literally see a timeline of Deb’s experience and then say, oh my God, and then I’m sharing what I’ve learned, right? And then she could be like, the person could be like, oh my goodness, that’s a good idea. Why didn’t, like, I’m glad that I read this so that I don’t either make the same mistake or like, learn something like a wisdom piece that like, now I know that I didn’t have to go and research or find. So I think that’s the benefit that this question here was like, how does it benefit your business? I think was his question, but I know the answer, but you want to clarify that. Sure. So, my company benefiting from the networking in two ways. So there’s a specific instance I’m thinking of when I first launched this club, there were people that I knew really well, right past clients, things like that, that joined. A couple of people that I didn’t know joined, which eventually, right?

Like, which was cool and exciting when those people joined, I started doing a little what I call aggressive friend matchmaking. So, I either the new people that I didn’t know, I messaged them and I was like, tell me about you because I have no idea who you are, are you a robot? They weren’t. And found out some about them and like what they were interested in, what they were struggling with, whatever their industry was adjacent to some of the people I already knew. I made sure that they connected. That was cool, That was great. The new person that just showed up after connecting the person I already knew talked about in private, like not like with me in the room, like they’re having a chat. They talked about how beneficial my services or my skills were. The new person was voicing frustrations. The existing person suggested that the new person take my class, the existing person wasn’t gonna take it right.

They had a lot of that knowledge. They were looking for something beyond that new person needed it. New person messages me, tell me about the class that’s $300. So that is me making a friend for somebody that has helped them with other stuff to their in adjacent industries located totally different parts of the country and they could chat about like not only their own needs, but ways that I would fit that. I also have Yeah lee posted in the chat. Super fans talk and support your company. Yes. Giving people the tools like resources to talk about my services and the things that I offer is really important and that results in money, business, but also the goodwill. Like the long term goodwill because I’m kind of in this pivot e stage of wanting to develop more on demand content that people access through the community that’s very different than what I’m currently doing right?

I do a lot of hands on work that you feel like it’s time to do. I don’t know, I don’t have, I don’t have a good reason. No, but when you, you know, I feel I’m resonating with a lot of what you’re saying here in in regards to, you know, figuring out what your bandwidth is, understanding what your what you really want to do and what lights you up versus what’s training to you. Those are key factors in identifying the content creation aspects and things like that. And the other thing I’ll go back to touch on is that you talked about how amazing it is when just because you truly want to be a connector to people in an authentic way and that shows up because you show value and provide value for others, then those people that are in the conversation in the room that you’re not in. Now, we’re talking about, oh my gosh, Caroline is amazing because X, y and z and then the other person is now subscribing. Oh, well you’re recommending her.

It’s like getting a really good recommendation. It’s like when people talk about you when you’re not in the room and they’re talking about the great things that you do because you they’ve had this amazing experience. It just all goes back to relationship building, it’s the foundation of every single thing that we do as community leaders is we build relationships and then the thing that I liked that you said was about, you got to know the members and I think that’s a lot of what people don’t spend a whole lot of time on. I feel like um it’s a lot of work and therefore they maybe don’t prioritize it or don’t even in some case, don’t even try to reach out to members to like besides, you know, telling them go to this resource, do this, go here. And instead of saying, hey, I really like to get to know you, but now that you got to know the person, then you could then authentically be like, oh my gosh, you know, like a community builder, you should connect with Missy who does community building two or whatever. Like and then that relationship can blossom based on the fact that you knew those two people and how they could benefit each other in some way.

And then in the business perspective, carol had actually got a client from our group, she’s working with john Summers. Now he is an app developed, I don’t know what you would title his title as a software developer who’s who’s creating this amazing new tool for community builders that’s not even like available yet. And you’re helping him with that. And that that relationship was built on the fact that I decided to bring people together that our community consultants inside a collective that we meet virtually every month. And because I invited Caroline and john to that space they met and now she had a client. So that’s just one example of like this whole idea of like wanting to create collaboration instead of competition, offering a space and then shared value among the people in the room. I wanted to just share that beautiful story because it’s awesome and like some, you know, you kind of asked like what is the reasoning for wanting to do more of the on demand content first of all, I mean like I really see that my audience benefits from it doing live workshops.

I love, I thrive off of, you know, a virtual or in person room of people. A lot of business owners can’t show up at a set time. So having something where they can take on their own pace two AM two PM whenever they want. That is super important to my business, still being able to function because I was doing a lot of like live workshops known as showing up. But then the recordings were really well viewed and I’m just like, you know, get frustrated with it, but then you’re like, okay, it’s not about me and like necessarily my favorite way to interact with people that will come, I’ll have opportunities to do that and I have but really meeting people where they’re at and providing for them is going to allow me to do more of the parts that I love, right? So like the opportunity to work with john is something that had I not a been involved with your community and be started really actively thinking about who I want to work with, how I want to work with them and what my community can do to support that.

Like being able to have, even though it’s not like a ton of money yet, but having that income bringer of having a class set up that I can direct people to, if they’re like, I’d love to consult with you, like, okay, well first take the class, let’s talk. I love that like a pre qualifier because as, as somebody who’s struggling with this over this last year, I can tell you it’s incredibly hard to to to really validate or know that your time is gonna be worth a lot of the time when you get on these calls you like you do. I mean, I do a bit of research to get to know who I’m going to talk to you before I get on a discovery call. But then at the end of the day, you don’t know where that conversation is going to go. I’ve had people be like, you know, we’ll just tell me the answer and I’m like, but you need to pay me for that and that’s how this works. Oh yeah, yeah. And I’ve definitely like, I mean I have learned over time of like using a vetting process right to determine who can work with me, like or who it’s going to benefit, right?

Because there’s some people that our services, our values were not aligned, like what I’m going to tell them they won’t listen to just because not like they’re a bad person. It’s just we shouldn’t work together and that’s fine. But you know, Missy has her hand out What’s up Missy? I have two questions. The first one is So your five tips that you mentioned in the title? Is that a resource that you have an actual document for that we can access somewhere. Yeah, I’ll have that for you. That will probably be done later today and the podcast will be going live to re listen to. But yes, the typed up audience content testing mini community modeling behavior, those types of things. I can type up as a resource that Deb can then share out in the fine come here community. Great. That would be great. And then the other question I have is so I love your concept of using your social media, your current social media as sort of a testing ground.

What are you finding or are you finding it challenging as the algorithms have moved more and more to showing what I find in social media feeds as I’m getting a lot of suggested content as opposed to the communities and the people that I’ve set up to follow. I’m not actually getting those people. So how are you handling that or are you not both. Um so within instagram there’s now a feature that you can go and you can see everyone you followed. Um it’s the chronological feed has returned. If you go onto instagram and you’re in your main feed and you click on the instagram word, it’ll drop down, it’ll say like home following favorites. Um, and it’ll show you a chronological feed of everyone you’re following. That is one way that I make sure that I’m seeing what other people are posting, but also that I’m interacting with them. So that my content shows up. The other thing, I don’t care. I really don’t care if my social media performs well.

What I care at the end of the day is if a random stranger who has $80 million dollars that they want to hand to somebody like me. If they show up on my instagram, are they gonna see posts that make them go, wow. It doesn’t matter if they see it right after I posted it on my instagram is my portfolio for my brand. My facebook is the same way my linkedin. Also like if people see that content, are they getting a good idea of what I offer, who I am as a person, what I stand for and my skills and you know, like my personality as well because if they are not seeing that, if they’re seeing something that doesn’t represent me, we’re both gonna waste a lot of time. If I’m saying like I’m a full stack coder and here’s how to code an app like that is false. First of all and if they’re looking for that and we spent some time chatting and they realize I’m not that that’s a bummer for us both, right? They’ve wasted time finding the right person. So I use it, it’s like an extension of a business card.

It’s you’ve met somebody you say, check out my instagram or they remember your business name and they look it up there on your website, there, on your social, they should just be seeing a really great gallery of who you are and what you do. The amount of people who like it comment on, it doesn’t necessarily matter to me as much. Obviously you want more eyes on it, but if you don’t get it, it only takes one set of eyes or maybe even one eye to be the right person, right? Exactly. You know, it just takes one, it just takes showing up to the right person once to totally transform your whole business. So if you remember that, that helps a ton Yeah, I really like that description having your social media be a, like a portfolio for your brand. It’s a really concise, helpful way to describe it. Thank you. And it takes pressure off of you, right for content creation. You basically just go back to that question, if somebody who has a ton of money and wants to hire somebody like me or wants my product, let me think is this post going to help convince them in some way, yep, just you I see lots of people, it seems like it’s resonating with Yeah, it takes pressure off content creation because you’re like, you can look at it, you can be like, okay, well jumping on this trend help Yeah, you might get a real to go viral if the person who is your most idealist bestest, perfect ist client ever sees it is that trending real going to help you?

Like maybe it makes you more human, more relatable, but like doesn’t provide value. one of the things that I loved, I want to point in, one of the things that I love that you said during the mindful marketing session was about longevity and time commitment to platforms that offer longevity. So when we say that, explain to everybody what that means for us. So this is also, I mean if you want to join in the fun journey of seeing me do this and take my own advice in real time and struggle and fail and have success and get frustrated with platforms that promote the long life of your content are better use of your time. Right? So what platform, if anybody wants to type and chat, what platform social media do you think gives your content? You make a piece of content on this platform? How long are people going to see it? Or discover it, Joanne was like right on it, she’s like immediately she’s like interest and it’s funny because I just met a pen arrest via and was blown away by the amount of people on interest because I haven’t been on, I want to say five or six years because I did it when I was like in my photography business.

But then when I, when I transitioned to tech sales and then now in this, I just, it wasn’t in there. But yeah, she’s right on the pin arrest thing there at least is not facebook Christine, not facebook nope linkedin. Not really. I mean when you think about how content even looks on the platform, right? It’s getting covered right? It’s like layers of rock, you can get back down, you can go find the fossils at the bottom. We do that. Paleontologists do that. Like that’s the thing. But if like the best stuff was right at the surface, it’s a little more useful and it lives a little bit longer. Like people see it more, right? So Pinterest is a search engine. It’s not a social media platform and it performs the best for length of content. The one that is better is Youtube. So unfortunate for everyone who hates video. It’s the best platform. If you’re making content and its video content and you’re putting any amount of effort into it.

Youtube is the one that’s going to give you the most length of time for your content existing. Youtube is also a really great place to build community. People keep coming back for your content once they start interacting with it, it’s got a lot of potential. I mean like we probably all have a content creator that we follow on Youtube whether we’ve actually subscribed or not. But you know, we watched their videos were interested in their journey. We’re curious what they have to say. I have like, I mean yarn Youtubers, podcasters, I’m a car nerd. There’s a bunch of car restoration ones I follow and it’s owned by google. Yes, on the excellent point. It’s owned by google. So you know, its search engine works really good. Optimizing your content for Youtube. It takes a little bit of time to learn and it can be frustrating. I kind of decided this year, I’m like, I love making videos and I know that I should be on Youtube.

So this year I’m like, I’m just doing it. I’m just going to do it. So this year I’ve been really dedicating a lot more time and content bandwidth to actually developing a Youtube presence and so far so good. Slow. Like it’s a long haul Joanne said hit 20 subscribers and have some work to do to get there right it to monetize. It takes 1000 subscribers and 4000 watch hours on youtube, but who cares about monetization if they’re going to your community and buying your stuff like those, 20 people making a purchase within your community or on your website or hiring you, I have to keep reminding myself that because I really do want monetization but also like, you know, I Think it’s a good point to say that we tend to like think about the monetization aspect first, but we don’t realize that there’s other way. There’s other ways to monetize a YouTube channel, like the one you just demonstrate. There’s other ways to monetize a podcast than having sponsors.

I had a client that listen to a podcast and then hired me for $4,000 project. That means I monetize my podcast. I had somebody explain this to me and I was like, Oh yeah, that makes sense. I get it now. Adi has the questions I want to pop over the body. So my question is more since we’re talking about the Youtube, um, I used to use tube body to help me, but I canceled that and I just got morning fame. I wanted to see if you’re familiar with it because even though I was told it takes a little time to for the keyword searching. But in the last two days I’m ready to throw my computer against the wall because it’s frustrating. I’m not getting the letters. If you’re familiar with morning fame, what it should be to move forward to set up the description of videos, but I just wanted to ask if you’re familiar with it, if there’s any tricks and tips so my computer can survive.

I don’t want you to wreck your computer. So I used neither. I’ve watched a lot of demos of both. I understand how they work functionally for me I’m I’m maybe not the best one to ask for advice on this because it’s this is within my skill set doing S. C. O. Writing really strong keyword rich descriptions, developing titles like that is what I do for clients all the time. So figuring out how to optimize it on Youtube really wasn’t that steep of a learning curve for me figuring out like what words Are going to work for. My audience is still taking time. But I’m like I know max out characters, make sure every description is you know, has this formula one thing that I would suggest and you can kind of see I will drop my YouTube channel. You can see I have an auto populated half of the description because for YouTube videos you have 5000 characters. That’s so many.

So I have a huge chunk that’s like here’s my community, here’s my instagram, here’s by my e book, here’s this, here’s that, here’s that, here’s that here’s that like all of these things that are on every single video as well as like a link back to my channel, a link to my website like billions of links because on most social platforms you can what post one link, I mean facebook, you can do several but I’m going to take advantage of that. I think it’s really, really useful. So for me I don’t use any of those optimization tools because some of them aren’t really built to necessarily assist with, like the call to action side, right? They’re built like how do you get eyeballs on this? I’m like, okay. But I, as a marketer and chronic over thinker, I’m like, what’s the next step? Somebody watches it, what are they doing next? And I’m the one who has to figure that out. So that was, that was kind of my fifth tip for today. So Excellent. Thank you for suggesting that the fifth tip that I had for today after modeling behavior is map the journey for your customers.

So no, when they’re interacting with your social content, what have they done immediately before and what should they do immediately after? So for me a lot of times I’ve met someone in person and then they’re on my social or virtually I’ve met someone and then they’re on my social, so they maybe have had an interaction with me for my Youtube. I have likely never met them. They know nothing about me. So what do they need to do next? They need to either watch more videos, join the community or get to know me on social media more. If somebody’s on my email list, what did they do before, they probably worked with me, they maybe were on my social media for a long time. They do not need to be going back to my social media, my call to action in an email should never be follow me on social, that is a step backwards. So knowing at what point people are interacting with your content that you’re creating on their journey right?

Like you always kind of want to be moving people towards a level of more intimacy with you even if they cap out somewhere and they’re like, okay, I can never pay her, I’m never gonna hire her. But I want these resources, they’ve capped out, they shouldn’t move backwards. So I hope that kind of makes sense with, especially with Youtube right? When people are seeing those videos, what have they likely done before, that informs my descriptions, my titles, everything more than you know, what’s the best thing on Youtube that I can do like strategy wise, it’s kind of like taking the strategy and twisting it to your own devices lens through which to look because it really is more intentional. And the way we talk about marketing and how we, you and I Caroline have talked about this in the past of like just wanting to be more intentional about how we spend our time making it more meaningful and impactful and then What does that look like? And I think well YouTube is the long game and you don’t need to spend a lot of time on this.

I feel like it’s just you just need to start one of the things that I did was like I just started in 2020 and I just started doing these videos and I was doing all of these workshops and I was really on social media a lot And I think I got like 40 something subscribers, like randomly without even really trying. But then, you know, like my mission changed and my focus changed and then I was like, well, I don’t want to spend another time time building a whole, another YouTube channel. And I even bought a course last year, which I went through like two sessions and then haven’t finished about like how to have a successful youtube channel when I realized I don’t really want to have a Youtube channel, the more I think about it and realize I don’t have to like stop everything I’m doing and like spend 10, 10,000 hours, you know, making my Youtube channel amazing. It’s like more incremental investment of time. Uh, so one hour a week, you know, 15 minutes every three days, whatever the time is that I want to decide to commit to.

That. It’s more about just structuring my time in a way that, okay, I’ll just make sure that I, you know, upload a video after we’ve, you know, after we’ve done the recording sentence there and, and then, you know, going back to just building more habits around it. So it’s not so over whelming, right? I mean, you can look at somebody who has been on youtube since the beginning. You can look at the john and hank Green’s of Youtube and see like how far advanced they are and the volume of content they put out and like they have a whole team, you know, like comparing that. It’s unfair and it, you know, like that’s great to have trajectory towards if that’s the way you want to go, but just starting. Yeah, it’s important. Okay, Christy asked a question. Stop comparing yourself to people. You have like a team of social media marketing experts because You’re doing just fine all of you. 20 amazing followers.

Yeah. It’s, I always think about it too. Like this, right? Like sometimes you can get really down about that had like five views or zero. I’ve had my last two videos have had to and I think one of them was me on another account. So I and I’ve had ones that have gone really well and it’s frustrating when it’s like, okay, well this content I know has value, that’s all that matters. It doesn’t matter who views it eventually it’s gonna work. So looking at it from that lens of like the again, like using it as a portfolio. It’s also a time saver for me if I talk about a topic and somebody comes into the community and I already have been doing this and they’re like, I don’t know if I have the right audience. Well, guess what Caroline in the past made a five minute youtube video talking about that, you can watch it, watch that, that’s great. And let’s talk in more depth if you still have questions which you will be a short video and that’s an endless topic. But having it as a resource for community members has been really helpful potential clients lee was asking that question about creating content.

Lee did you want to ask to just clarify, I didn’t know if you wanted to ask or if you just want to ask it, it looked like that Caroline was taking her social media or youtube stuff and creating a path of your own funnel to to finally get to a point where having social interaction, which is kind of cool. Yeah, I mean sometimes it’s sometimes it’s reverse, it goes from social interaction into it. But yeah, like for me it’s super important to know the journey that my clients are taking because how can I serve them if I don’t know what they’ve already seen. And I I’m not, I wasn’t thinking about that. And I see a lot of people that send me emails all the time that say this is my social pages, you know? And somehow they know you they’re emailing, you must know your socially right? Yeah. And it’s I’m not saying you can’t put your social links in emails, but that shouldn’t be your major call to action. Yeah. But yeah, like knowing where people are on the path. Like if I were to, you know, email somebody I’ve worked with for years and be like, you might not know what bad acts is like?

No, they know exactly what it is. That that’s really almost like bad, bad, bad, bad, bad customer service at that point, like, you know, put your marketing in the right direction. Um Christy asked a really good question. Currently using social media, specifically linked in at the top of the funnel, um, have a personal page in a business page. Should I be focusing my attention on both or just my personal page where I have over 1000 followers, I personally do both. Right, so bad acts still posts the content that I plan out. Carolyn shares it. I get way more interactions when Carolyn shares it, But that it’s coming from bad acts, I always want to show like it’s coming from that that protects me in the future as well, because if I suddenly have a knitting pattern that goes completely viral and I make $2 million night. I am going to be like, that was fun being a marketer, I’m going to go roll around and yarn for the rest of my life and hope that I can design something that goes viral again.

But Caroline can still exist. Bad acts as a business is separate from me as a human and me as a human loves bad acts and I share it frequently and I talk about it and I get more relationships and interactions that way. But the content always coming from the business side and having zero impressions, even though there’s a lot of followers, you know what I mean? Like Lincoln’s a weird world. But yeah, always like kind of giving yourself the freedom to exist and to pivot. It’s another thing to with like um facebook, right? Because you have your personal persona and your business. I have business owners that will ask me like, how often should I share it to my personal page as up to you. It’s you know, it’s we are a whole human, we’re interacting and everything. You don’t just like shut off part of you. But online you need to protect yourself in a way that like you’re not putting yourself in a place where you are your brand entirely.

Even if you are even if it’s just you you need to have that layer of protection that you can be like, maybe Caroline doesn’t want to talk about bad eggs today. Maybe we’re in a fight. They were frustrated and bad acts can just post it stuff. I don’t have to do it. I love that. Maybe I feel like that was fine. Come here sometimes. I mean like upset with fine come here. But right, well, and like I, you know, I personify that’s an easy way to figure out like your brand voices to like personify it, right? And like think about like, okay, what is bad acts like? It is me at the end of the day, it’s always me, but it’s also it’s own thing. Like I could conceivably remove myself from it. It would probably not work. I want to have also a comment in Christie s about yes, I do this too. So I post on, we use buffer for our social via scheduling, so we schedule things out on buffer and then it goes out to our twitter, instagram linkedin and facebook pages of my business for the fighting, common hair brand.

And then I go in to linkedin and then, and I’ve specifically changed my strategy around this. I only focused really on linkedin. I don’t do it much on facebook, I used to do it more on facebook, but now I’ve switched to Lincoln So I I then I go over to my go to share it and then I shared on my personal page now it happened that I try to tag some people so that they like to bring their attention to it because then that ends up getting more views and one of the things I recently did and I think it’s a it’s a matter of context, right? So I wanted to ask a question to try to get feedback from people from my book that I’m writing. So I actually shared a question as Deb because I had authentically had a question about a book I’m writing, but then like I have content where I want to drive people to either read my blog post or listen to a podcast or whatever. And so then I would share this fine calm here and then Deb would share it. Right? So there’s different practices for different things. And I also have um I read I keep going back and forth about should I have um different aspects of my life on linkedin, for example, I went to school for journalism, I have a background and a photography and for journalistic degree and experience there.

I won three keystone wars that nobody really cares about anymore. But like I had a really successful career as a journalist for a while. Then I went to tech sales and did tech sales, then I became A artist and I had over 20 exhibits of my photographic artwork and then I did commission sales for hotels and then on top of that I was in tech sales. And then on top of that I launched a business in 2020 called Com Here. So Deb is very layered of a person And there was there was and I think most people are like that, but it’s like I had this block around it of like, OK, I can’t show Deb, everybody has to know Deb as the person who is a community order. Now, we can’t talk about Deb who was the photojournalist 10 years or 20 years ago. And now I’ve really shifted that opinion and perspective to be like, no, this is Deb is like over time, it’s not like transitioned into a whole another human being. I’m still like with my experience and the fact that brings the layers of my experience into my business.

So now I started a business page for my photography business. Just to say that, hey, I’m still doing photography and some people in my linkedin really loved my photography and now you can guess what, you can still follow my photography because I still do photography. I just don’t do it as a specific business anymore. Right? So I think that’s a good point to say that there’s multi layers of us that we have and I think it’s okay to share and then just putting people in the pockets where they like, people put you in the pocket where you belong. So if there’s certain people that just remember me as a photographer or a writer or there are certain people that remember me as the tech salesperson. So that’s okay. But I’m multi faceted in those aspects. Sorry, I just went on, you know, and that like, I mean that as service providers that’s like a huge benefit. Like, I don’t know how many times I’ve been able to actually like really relate with a retailer because I did a startup for a year, I ran a yarn shop, like a brick and mortar yarn shop with a friend from high school and it was awesome, great experience.

But that, you know, not every marketer has started up a yarn shop or run a business besides a marketing business. So it gives you a perspective and like what the day to day is, what it’s like to be on the other side of that. I know we only have like three minutes left, but Joanne asked what my thoughts about Tiktok were and I love Tiktok. I really do. Um, I hated it for so long. The technology is absolutely terrifying and it’s really, really bad for your mental health. Um, it’s a super addictive platform. You have to set timers. I, it’s currently deleted off my phone. Um, because I went for like my typical self of like a three week spree of being really active there. I have to Tiktok accounts. I have one, well three, technically I have three Tiktok accounts. One for my fiber artistry. That’s recently started. Like I recently started that one because I was already making reels on instagram for that stuff. So I was like, that’s silly. I should also use them on Tiktok and there’s a big Fibroids community there, one for bad acts, which I don’t really use that much.

Um, and then one for my kind of like personal, right? Like I made the personal one first that I used to explore the platform because I’m like, people were asking me about it. I didn’t have an account. I was like, I need to know what’s happening here. It’s my job. So I made it, I really like it. I really think that there’s a lot of potential there. If you’re already making videos, if you hate videos and they make you upset, don’t get a Tiktok and don’t try to force it. It can be a lot of fun. It can be a really lighthearted, interesting, cool place the way mathematically that it works and shows you content. I find fascinating. Like just how like people joke. It’s like, oh yeah, Tiktok diagnosed me with, you know, whatever, like behavioral disorders and things like that. But it really can figure out what you’re into without with very minimum input from you, which is because of face recognition software, which is fine.

The robots on everything. We’re all trapped now. Skynet, it’s fine. That’s uplifting. But yes, I think it’s an interesting platform. But don’t add a new platform. If you’re not ready to make the content for it, don’t start a youtube. If you hate recording videos, don’t get a Tiktok if you hate it. If you want to check it out and see what it’s like, go for it. Make make an account, you don’t have to make it a big thing. Just check it out. See set timers deleted from your phone. Yeah, it sucks you in. But those great conversations, there’s so many good questions and social media is the one thing that, you know, we think as business owners we have to be doing, we have to be really active and we have to build this gigantic audience and well that can be helpful to get people to know you like on a wide audience level. We also have to be really concerned about our own personal needs and putting those first. So I am the really the person that has been spent a lot of time and energy creating lots of content because I honestly wanted and enjoy doing it, but at the same time like it’s sacrificing my mental and physical health, which now I’m like okay, I need to like put the brakes on a million things and really get direct and focused on what’s going to really bring me the return on investment for the business when I’m working on my business and then giving me enough time that I can walk away and say, okay debs going camping this weekend and we’re gonna have away from my computer weekend and that’s going to be fantastic.

The key here is knowing yourself. I think the biggest takeaway I found like from today was just like do what feels right and what lights you up and what you get what you want to do, not what people say you should do. Yeah. And like again, your brain is your biggest asset. You melt your brain, You have nothing left to run your business with like keep keep that protected at all. Thank you all for being here, I’m super glad that you could join us again, continue the conversation in the fine come here community, I love for Caroline if you could share your resource in the fine come here community for people so that they can like dig into that you can create an article or just a pdf, whatever it is, just throw fine come here community and and they can all grab it there for everybody who is listening to this recording on the podcast. If you’re interested in joining our sessions, all you need to do is send me an email at Deb at fine calm here dot com and I would love to have you join our conversations, we are doing more live interviews, we do have two coming up in august lisa could you remind me of what the podcast, live interviews that are coming up in august are we have coming up leading a global mindfulness community and that’s with Elijah yep, that’s the end of the month and then we have um building a community of strength right?

And so going, starting in august we are going to be having live events every other friday, so that will be our consistent, like kind of come and connect with us uh when you’re inside the community, so I just want to point that out and thank you so much for everybody who has a shared and connected and reached out to us today. If you want to get a hold of Caroline Caroline, where can people find you, if they are super excited to talk? Um I think one of the best ways, I mean you can message me on any social platform, I see, I got some requests on linkedin, that’s awesome, I’ll be approving those and messaging you guys back later. Today, biz club is free to join. If you want to talk more mindful marketing, I can throw that link in here again, that is another really great way to interact with me directly and your community is free. Right, am I right Free to join? The paid features are classes and working on a 30 day challenge that will be self paced as well, that pay a little bit to join and there’s prizes and fun stuff like that.

So biz club, that’s a really great way to interact with me, meet some other people, stuff like that, thank you, thanks so much for sharing and yeah, super excited to have you coming up, like I said, Fridays are going to be every other friday, our live workshops, our theme for august is community structure, so we’re gonna be talking about, what does that mean? Meaning, what are examples of community structures? Examples are a challenge, which Caroline just mentioned, of course is another one alive, of course is a different one and many other community structures, so if you have questions, bring them to our sessions in august because we’re gonna be talking all about community structures posted in the fine calm, your community, your questions share what your structure is and what you really love about it. What’s working If you’ve got like a more simply event that people really show up to let us know, like I’d love to hear more about what’s working with you and so that’s what we’re going to talk about with Elijah. He launched a daily dose mindfulness community bonus twice a day with with instructors that has turned out to be really positive experience for his community, which has over 8000 people, probably 9000 people at this point.

And then the other person, we’re gonna talk to Allegra who is an expert with, with you Map, which is a certification and assessment program to better identify your strengths so you can really focus on leading your business or your community with your strengths. So those be coming up and until the next time, I hope you are finding calm in this day, evening after june morning Wednesday at one, enjoy your day, have fun until the next time. Take care and we’ll see you later. Have a great day. Bye!