Welcome to Digital Podcaster. My name is Dylan Schmidt, your host, and I just had a revelation. So I've been doing this podcast for a while now. We're not on episode 30. Yet I think this is like 29 Maybe. And I had this realization that I talk about when I post on social media, I talk about podcasting. And on my podcast, I don't really like talking about just podcasting, because it just seems I don't know, it just seems it's not like what I want to talk about, to be honest with you. I mean, it's part of it like I talk about podcasting, but I don't want to make this a podcast only podcast. I don't know if that makes any sense. And so it hit me right before I sat down to record today that I'm going to share in these solo episodes, I'm going to crank out for you a little bit more things that I don't talk about on social media, for example, in today's episode, I'm going to talk about my social media strategy on specifically Instagram and Tiktok. Because that's where I'm spending most of my time at the moment. And this isn't something I would talk about on social media. So you go on social media, and you get me talking about podcasting. You go on Instagram, and tick tock, and you get me talking about oh, wait, did I say that backwards? Yeah, you go on Instagram, tick tock, you hear me talk about podcasting. You go on my podcast, you hear me talk about social media. Not that I'm only going to be talking about social media. But I realized this is the place to talk about it. And I'm pretty excited about that. So today, I want to dive in and talk about what my current Instagram and Tiktok strategy is for 2022. Because social media strategies are ever evolving. And I haven't been able to get my thoughts out for you about this, because I get a lot of people asking me, and it's something that a lot of people want to do is grow their social media. And I've grown a lot of client accounts on social media. And I'm in the process of growing Digital Podcaster accounts. And I have like, I've got a lot of accounts, not going to list them all out during this episode. So but I'll just let you know that I got a lot of accounts, Digital Podcaster is one of them being more by bigger focuses these days. And I think around 40, or 55,400 followers on Instagram right now, which is, you know, to me, that's a good size. There's other accounts have grown, which are in the hundreds of 1000s. But I started Digital Podcaster less than a year ago. So I'd say things are going pretty quick. And yeah, some accounts go faster. But also it's the an account that teaches about podcasting. So, how big can one blow up like that? I don't know. Like, that's the other thing too, is like expectations around an account that is about podcasting. Like how many people are following that, if it's posting more general themes, like personal development, or fitness, or entrepreneurship, or what else just like general marketing, or how to grow on a specific platform, like if I posted Instagram tips on Instagram, that's going to get way bigger of an audience than just posting about podcasting because there's only so many people about interested in learning about podcasting, there is like, I wouldn't say there's a ceiling. But there is definitely some type of audience size, right, the market size on Instagram, which I don't believe I've hit by any means. So what I'm saying, I'm just saying that it's not gonna, it's not gonna catch on quite the same as Instagram tips are, or comedy, for example, that's more general, right? There's a huge audience out there. There's only so many people who want to do podcasting. So, I recognize that and I'm happy with the growth Digital Podcaster has had. So what I'm doing now, on Instagram and Tiktok, they mirror each other people will argue that what you post on Instagram isn't the same on Tik Tok. I'm treating it the same right now. For the most part, as far as strategy goes, and what that looks like is I'm posting one piece of content a day. And ideally, it's a piece of content that can both go on Instagram and Tiktok. And from what I found, there isn't any huge issue of going on one or the other people I will like say what the experts say real quick, on tick tock. People will say that you need to be posting like three to 10 times they have like these ridiculous numbers. That how many times you need to post per day. I don't have time for that. I could get help to do that. But I don't necessarily see me be worth it because I just I'm not, I don't know. I just don't see it being worth it. Posting 10 times a day on Tik Tok right now, despite what the experts say. So I'm just doing at minimum once per day right now. And I've found as far as tick tacos, I'm way more loose with it. I don't feel like as many I don't feel as much like pressure to make it look as pretty On tick tock so I experiment a little bit on tick tock. And then on Instagram, for the most part, I'm posting like about 75% Instagram reels, and 25% carousels or single images. And what I've found so far is that reels definitely get more reach. Like, for example, I'm not going to, this could be a whole super long episode, so I'm gonna keep it somewhat contained. But if, if I have, say, 5000 followers on Instagram, and I post something, my all 5000 followers don't see that piece of content. If I post like a single image or a carousel, in a perfect world, they would all see that. But they don't. Unfortunately, Instagram only shows it to so many people. That's just the way it goes. That's the way Instagram is. But sometimes you can get views from people that aren't following your page. So for examples have 5000 followers, I post carousel post, it shows it to 1000 of my followers, and 500 people who don't follow me, but they see it on the Explore page. Or maybe they see it in their own feed when they're scrolling, even though they don't follow me. Instagram might be like, you might be interested in this post. So the reach on carousel posts and single images, from what I've seen, are rather low, they don't go too far on the feed when you post them like the reaches pretty low. However, on reels you get much more reach. So that's why I'm doing around 75% Instagram reels because the reach when I look at those, it reaches way more people and audiences and even further audiences that don't follow me yet. Because a lot of people will like consuming reels I've surveyed. I've done a poll on my Instagram Stories a couple times now, on what happened people or what type of people what type of content people like consuming best. And for the most part, it skews around similar to what I post 75% reels 25% images are carousels. But the thing is about reels is just because it is a video, it's a moving image. That doesn't necessarily mean it's just like no text, oftentimes, and what I've done already, is take carousel posts or single images, and then turn those into an Instagram reel, which looks like either me reading something, or like talking to the camera saying something, or there's music playing and you don't hear a voice. But you see the text on the screen that says what would be in the single image. So that's one way to post on reels. And so while they do seem different when you're saying like Instagram reels, which is a video, or a single image or a carousel, they're kind of more similar than I think people give them credit for. Well, it's just a video versus image, you can still put the text on there. And if you don't put text on your video, they don't perform as well, because people will typically watch with the sound off. And as they're scrolling, if they see text on the screen, they're going to stop for a little bit longer, and it's going to get their attention. I don't know about you, but even when I'm watching like Netflix, English is my my first language born and raised in California, always spoke English, maybe I don't always speak the best, best best, that's perfect. Maybe I don't always speak the best English or something. But it's my first language and I still watch even English shows with the captions on because it helps my brain comprehend what's being said. Just also focus better. That's people watch videos with the captions on because they watch with the sound off on social media videos, or they don't want to wait to hear what you have to say because think about how many videos someone sees when they sit down and scroll. So I just want you to know that if you're making videos, it's crucial to add captions to for the comprehension. Not to mention if someone has a disability that they're deaf, something like that helps a ton. So make sure to add captions to your videos. And then also, the one thing that I do and I found this perform really well is when you're doing any video like an Instagram, we'll for example, make a headline, so addition to the caption as some type of thing. So right immediately, like the first words out of your mouth should be adding context for what they're about to watch. I see so many people make this mistake. And I have a hard time watching videos if like you don't tell me what I'm about to watch. I don't want to watch it because it's not it's not saying hey, what am I going to learn in this video? What's going to happen? You know, so that's that's something to be mindful of and a headline like that. I have my headline download digital part. castro.com/ 365 you can use, there's 365 headlines you could use, like the dangers of doing X, you'll see if you look up any YouTube videos, most YouTube videos, you'll see that they use a catchy headline. But on Instagram, we have to put those in as text on like, somewhere for the viewer to see right away when they come across your video, or it has to be spoken out of your words, and then the text be put on the screen immediately. Because no one's going to just give you the patients that you hope that they'd give you, unfortunately. So next, I want to talk about the what I kind of covered the amount of posting so daily. And as far as times to post what times to post I look at on Instagram, I look at my insights. So if you have a believe it's called a creator account, I don't know if it needs to be I don't think it needs to be a business account. But you need to be able to see the Instagram insights, just free to have. And then you can see when your audience is most active on the app. So what do I do, I post around that time I post around, most of the time, it's around 8am or 9am, that my audience is most active. So what do I do post around that time doesn't take any, you know, rocket science to figure that one out. If it's 9am, I'll post
that like 8:30am just to get it up. But I don't not so diligent on it that if I miss nine o'clock, I miss the whole day. Now I don't worry about it. Or if I can't even post in the morning, say had some super busy schedule, well, then I'll post later, it's not the end of the world, what's most important is that you publish and posting at the right time is a little bit further down the list. Which leads me to my next point, the creative design of your video, a lot of people worry about video quality and all those things. And while video quality is, is I believe not super important. What's most important is audio quality. Even though people watch with the sound off, if they turn the sound on, they want to be able to hear you. But the creative design, a big part of that is simply just the text. So like subtitles, that could be the simple creative design you need. And one thing about that is and this is something I've struggled with a little bit, but I work to get over by becoming aware of it is the background. So sometimes when videos all look the same. They they kind of I get a single, I say this thing called Content blindness, like all your videos look the same. So people don't they feel like they've already heard the message you're saying. But there's two sides of this. So if you look at and I had him on the podcast a few weeks ago, Josh Terry, he doesn't look at the camera. And every shot of his social media videos that he posts one or two a day, they all look exactly the same. And he doesn't use some headline, but he does speak the headline and he uses captions. So he is is an interesting case study on why you don't need to change the background. And then there's someone like, let's use Gary Vaynerchuk, as an example, who's if you're not familiar with him, he's like a digital marketing. Guru of sorts, owns a bunch of companies out in New York. And if you look at his videos, they are all sorts of different like the creative, almost no two creatives are the same. He has the headlines in there, but like the colors change, the fonts will change. All of that changes the background changes. Very, very rarely will you see to have a similar looking video. And he has a huge team. I don't know how many people are on his team at the moment. But I know at one point it was like 2527 people or something, just making content for his social media, and blogs and things like that. So he has a he has a huge team. And he has his own marketing agency, huge marketing agency that's all around the world, I believe, or at least all around the US. So he's not someone you want to compare yourself with. But it is an interesting case study of varying the background, because if he's varying the background, you know, you might disagree with things he says or you might not really like the things he say says but one thing you can't disagree with is the fact that he gets a lot of engagement on his videos. And he even says himself, watch what I do. Not always what I say. And looking at what he does is he posts videos with a bunch of different creatives. So what does that look like for you because you probably don't have a team 27 Doing your stuff that looks like maybe just simply shooting videos in different parts of your house or your office wherever you're at. For me I'll try to vary up the background a little bit so it feels like different. But it is one of those things that I I try to remember someone like Josh Terry, who has a huge following on tick tock and growing a really big following on Instagram, he just keeps it the same shot. So I try to remember that because you think about how many people how much content someone sees in a day, and the fact that they see your content, and we feel like we're almost posting too much or we post if we feel like we're annoying people. And then we're like, Oh, they've already seen their background so much. No, the truth is, they don't really remember our background. Like we see our video, like we consume way more of our content than our audiences. So that's something I say, but I'm also trying to remember for myself, because the background isn't the issue. There are other things that I think are more important, which leads me to my next point, and strategy for 2022 is focusing on ideas as the most important aspect of the video, in addition to the publishing and the creative design. So what does that mean focusing on ideas? Well, I've been studying videos quite a bit recently. And there is a YouTuber named Mr. Beast. If you're not familiar with him, he's the most popular YouTuber. I forget how many subscribers, followers subscribers he has on YouTube. But it's got to be somewhere around 100 million at this recording. So he's one of the big, he is the biggest. And he always talks about how he has a Google Doc or he's got a note on the most popular ideas he has that he knows that they would be super popular. Like he knows they would get so many millions of views. But he does not have time to make them. And he's always put putting out new videos. But he stresses on the importance of ideas. And from everything I've learned so far. The one thing I would like to improve on my own Instagram Tik Tok strategy. This year, before I get into YouTube later on down the road, not in this podcast episode, one thing I would like to focus on more is just the ideas. Because ideas are what carry the whole thing. They carry the hook, they carry the video, and they carry someone to press their thumb to hit that follow button and consume more of your content. Because it all starts with the idea. And you know, it's funny people have a lot of ideas, or they so they think maybe or they're like I got great ideas for a business or a product or things like that. But coming up with ideas for content is a little bit different, because you're coming up with ideas that stand out amongst other people who are creating a bunch of content. So just kind of sharing what my again, IG and tic toc strategy is. And that is ideas. So what is a good idea? One that stands out, but one is simple enough that someone could immediately understand pretty quick, what is happening? For me when I'm creating like podcast content, I guess that looks like just simple things that I don't see people talking about, like, what are the gaps here? So gaps for podcasting are a lot of people talk about gear, and they just talk about, oh, you need this microphone or that microphone. And that is boring to me. Because it's like the lowest hanging fruit. They're like, you know, it's like, that doesn't take any skill, like someone can do their own research. And I just don't feel like that's providing a ton of value when they go on Instagram just to zone out. Yeah, I mean, I get it, I see a little bit of the value. But I don't know, that doesn't strike me as like, I don't want to be a year expert. I want to be a podcast expert. So when I and that's an idea in itself. But when I think about a little bit further on content ideas, I think, you know, what, what is it that makes this stand out that looks like ideas on becoming a better podcast host ideas on creatively promoting your episodes, ideas on why you need to create email newsletters, ideas on why it's so scary to talk into a microphone. Why like those types of ideas to me stand out because I don't see people talking about about them, at least in you know, the paths that I'm crossing. So that's, that's my idea about ideas. Alright, and then the other aspect of the videos is captions. So I used to write rather longer captions just because I felt like I had a lot to say, I've used our use, I should say, artificial intelligence word copywriting tools like Jasper or copy.ai to help write captions. And I still might go back to that at some point. But from everything I've learned the most cutting edge ways of getting your content out there is now basically how to break this down. Instagram has gotten way smarter at what's in a piece of content, let's just look at Instagram for a second. So they don't exactly share how their algorithm works. But I'll give you based on what I've seen my best idea. So you have the video. And then you have what happens in the video. And then you have the caption, and then you have hashtags. From what I've seen. And this may be, this is a little bit of speculations what I've seen, I study a lot of this stuff in the video, I believe that because cap there caption generation is so good. For example, you can make your own captions right there on Instagram reels. Like you don't have to use another app, you can make that right in there. I believe that Instagram, the app has some type of they know some type of thing that you're saying. So if you are saying something that is, say like I'm talking about podcasts in a video, they know that even if they don't read the caption, this may hunch. And then in the caption, they know what the text is. And by they I mean their Instagram machines, the Instagram algorithm. And then in the hashtags, they use those so that you're using all these data points to correctly distribute your video to the right audience. Because Instagrams goal is to keep people on the app and keep people engaged with content, because that is going to then have more attention on the app. And that will make the advertisement prices go up. Which is their whole goal is to get people to spend money on ads, like businesses to spend money on ads. So the more attention that's on the app, the better for Instagram. Well, how do they do that they show you the right content. And his data has gotten a little bit more sophisticated on how they can extract that they can't read into your phone as much as they used to were like they were able to be as for lack of a better word creepy, on what they could extract from you, and your phone and your data. Apple has made that harder. I'm not sure about androids privacy policies. But I know, Apple and the iPhone has made it harder for them to extract that data from you. So I say that, because when you're uploading a piece of content on Instagram, the ball is now in their court as far as what they can extract from that content. So they know if you're posting like if I'm posting a podcasting, they know that. And the more I confuse their data points, the less likely they are to push that out to the right audience, or they're less likely there to push that out to anybody. Because if I'm talking about podcasting, and then something like food recipes, and then news, and like the Oscars all in like one video, it might be very confusing for the algorithm to push that out. Not saying it won't, but it's might be a little bit less, it'd be like less easy for it to push out rather than if I'm just talking about how to podcast that's going to get pushed out to the right audience a bit easier, because it's clear. So what I see I don't, I don't want to do for myself is confuse the algorithm or make it any difficult for to be pushed out. So how do I do that, I make sure my videos are clear. And then I make sure in the caption, I keep it focused, I don't want to talk about something that has nothing to do with the video while still having my own personality in there. And then as far as hashtags go, I make sure to only use really focus hashtags that have to do with what I'm talking about on some level. Because if I'm talking about podcasting, and then I say nothing about banking, in the video that I'm posting on Instagram, and then I do hashtags about banking. Well, I'm confusing the algorithm, because now they're like, huh, this time of podcasting, and every time I post, this is not how the algorithm thinks is me, giving a human element to the algorithm, but it's going, he's talking about podcasting in the video. And this has hashtags about banking. I'm not really sure who to show this video to. So I want to make that clear. So in the hashtags ago, podcast tips, podcasting, things like that. And that's as simple as I can make. How my short form video strategy is, as far as images go, personally, I'm best just been using text on images, things like that, because I want to make it simple and clear. And sometimes I just want to say things that I don't know it's kind of a nice break from videos sometimes, which you can't post images on tick tock so on those days that I post an image on Instagram, on tick tock, I'll just make a quick little video that takes me you know, two minutes to post and I will say just as far as to And on a mindset note is, when I'm creating this content, I'm not judging if it's going to do good or bad, much, I'm like, Just 10%. Maybe, as far as my energy levels go on like, this is going to do good or bad. Because I honestly don't know, it's like the cont, the effort that you put the most amount of effort into a piece of content it's going to do doesn't seem like it does that good. And then when I don't put much effort in a piece of content, it is super good. So that is my 2022, Instagram and Tiktok strategy. If you liked this style of, of rant or or information I'm giving you, I would really appreciate it if you could just email me hello at Digital podcaster.com. And let me know because your feedback is much appreciated. And I want to keep making valuable content for you. And one of the best ways I can do that is making this a two way conversation, which is you letting me know that you liked it. And all you got to do is send an email to hello at Digital podcaster.com. If you are looking to start, grow and monetize your own podcast, make sure to go to digital podcaster.com. To learn more how you can do that. If you'd like to see me implement this strategy and watch what I do. Make sure to follow Digital Podcaster on Instagram and Tiktok. Again, I'll share more in the future on other platforms that I'll be diving into but I wanted to make it focus today short form video primarily Instagram Tik Tok. That's what it is. And last but not least, if you enjoyed this podcast episode, make sure to check out the other episodes and it means the world to me if you could just leave a rating and review on Apple podcasts or Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts. And I hope to hear from you soon and I'll see you next episode.