Hello and welcome to Season four, episode two of Let's Talk Social. We are on year number four of this podcast. Absolutely crazy. Very happy to have you guys listening today. We're gonna be talking about something that you do not wanna miss today, and this is gonna be a really valuable episode and we're gonna be going over my top tips and tricks for posting to social media. Now, I'm not gonna dive into all of these topics a hundred percent, but it's gonna be a great starting point for anyone who really doesn't have a great grasp on social media yet and posting to their page. we're gonna address some very commonly asked questions that I get all the time.
One of the biggest being, how often should I post? So, grab a pen and paper. We're gonna go through a lot in a pretty short amount of time. I'm gonna try to keep this under 25. Here we go. and I'm gonna go over really quickly actually before I start, get ahead of myself. What we're gonna be talking about.
So we're gonna talk about value versus taking up space. How often you should be posting, what aspect ratios are, the time of day that you should be posting something I call the last three customer tricks. Finally, hooks. So when we're talking about the first thing, which is value versus taking up space, this is an idea that every post that goes out to your page is in one of the two camps. The first being you're either adding value or the second is you're taking up space. So if you were to go through all of your posts right now, you could probably start archiving and deleting all the posts that really didn't add a ton of value to one of your potential customers or current customers.
it didn't have worth to them. so when we talk about why. We actually need to have value if it doesn't already sound obvious, no one's gonna like something that's not valuable to them or whether it even be entertainment value, but there's so much content going on on the internet nowadays that in order to stick out, you just have to create something that's valuable and is actually going to be something that they need.
This is no longer 2008, where there were maybe 10 of them. Hundred and 50 businesses in this industry on actual social media platforms. I mean, everyone's on it now. Everyone's posting now. So now it's a battle of attention. So if you're not providing something of worth, then they're probably not gonna be engaging with you or following along unless they're a current customer or client.
So there are ways that you can provide worth a list, some offer really quickly, if you're gonna write these down, are info inspiration entertainment. Insight and early access slash private information. So those are all things that complete our equation of if this gives value to customers. Equals we will get engagement from the actual customer. so it means more likes, more shares, more comments because we're providing value. Something else to remember, which I tell people this all the time, is that post whatever it is, the one that you didn't care that much about could be the very first time someone ever sees your business on social media and they may laugh or they may pass you or they may be offended or they, whatever it is you need to try and we need to care about these things because it's no different than someone walking up to the front door of your business and tugging on the door, or when they walk in and that first breath they take, and the first experience they have when they walk in is that post that they're gonna be getting. That's what they experience in a digital format. So that's value versus taking up space.
The next is how often to post. So this one's a little bit longer. Like I said, I get this a lot and there's not really one thing, there's not one rule that you can follow when it comes to this. It's really gonna be a merging of, of multiple variables and finding what your sweet spot is for your business.
It's dictated by a lot of things. The one of the biggest being the size of the page. So it's like, what's your audience size? How, how many people can we actually post this stuff out to? I have water in the bucket analogy. it's like, if. Enough posts for a million people and you pour it into a bucket that's only this big, which is your thousand people that you actually have so much water's gonna go on the floor and all the, all over the place.
some may even bounce in and then bounce back out. So it's like we're not optimizing instead of just gently pouring the exact perfect amount, we're just dumping the bucket. so you'll see this, I see this all the time, two posts a day. We're not getting any engagement. We only have 500 people on our page and it's, Yeah, you're beating the heck out of these people with all these posts. You know what I mean? It's like you can't go up to 50 people and show them all the same thing and expect them to like it. Even past that, you can't go up to 50 people and show all of 'em 15 things and even expect them to give you the time of day.
So when we're on social media, if you have three posts a day going out for a thousand followers versus a hundred followers, those hundred people may not even be on Facebook that day, right? Like only 40 of 'em might have gotten on that day. So if we post three times 60, like 60%, that 40 out of a hundred, 60% of people are not even gonna see them, let alone are they gonna be optimized and people engaging with them. So you gotta kind of gear back the, the frequency and number of posts that you're putting out based on how much pe, how many people are actually gonna see this now. Something else that actually helps combat that. So if you have, if you wanna be able to post more with a smaller audience and still get really high engagement, cuz that's the whole goal, right?
I got engaged. Build brand awareness and relationships, turn it into dollars. Getting that engagement is important and the more engagement, the more often you get, it actually allows you to be able to post more. So Instagram's job is to keep you on that platform as long as possible. Talk's. Job, stay on our platform as long as possible.
2022 last year, 110 minutes per person. On average, almost two hours per person. That is a TikTok user per day. I don't, I have a TikTok. I don't even get on there, so someone's taking up my two hours for me, if you know what I'm saying. So, it's ridiculous. their whole goal is to keep you guys there as long as possible.
So when it sees, oh, every time this business posts, they get a lot of engagement. you can do that twice a day, do it a third time. then if you still get a lot of engagement, do it a fourth time and like to start really. Fine tune how often you're posting and if you continue to put out quality content and it gets the same amount of engagement and you don't see it spiking downward, you can probably bet that you have the ability to, level up the number of posts.
Now, does that take more work? Yes. Does it also help the business more? Yes. The reason why is because the number of people engaging with brands per day would actually increase, even if it's that same person, the number of engagements per day goes up. If we're maintaining quality and the number of posts is going up, engagement stays the same.
So if it's, we get 5% of engagement every time we post, if we add another post that's an extra 5% for that whole day of engagement that we got, it's a, or it's actually another. 33% if we're doing two posts and we add a third and they all get the same engagement, that's a 33% increase in engagement for the entire year if we figure out where our sweet spot is.
So that's why that's important. then the other big part of that is less posts at the same time equals more quality. So if we have to make you tell your employee, Hey, I need 10 posts a week. You're already on a 40 hour work week schedule. Basically everything in the store takes up those 40 hours, but I still need these 10 posts.
Well, let's say they actually have three hours to get all those out. If that same person only had to make three posts instead of 10 posts, you bet your butt, they're gonna be way better in terms of quality. The intention that goes into 'em, the ideas behind them, they're gonna be at least exhausted from the long course of time.
So it's actually a benefit on that front. Next is aspect ratios. So first off, what is an aspect ratio? We're talking about length versus height, when we're talking about media on phones, digital print, anywhere when we're talking about pixels. So a perfect square can be any number of pixels long by any number of pixels high.
it would be a one to one ratio because it's the, they're the same length basically. So if we were to double one side, that would be a two to one ratio if we tripled it three to one and so on. So your typical movie that you'd watch at the movie theaters? Well, actually not at the movie theaters, but on TV for instance, would be a 16 by nine.
So 16 across nine down. Multiply that out by however many little pixels are in there, and that's the ratio that you're gonna get. Now when we're talking about phones and social media, there's really only three ratios that matter a lot, and it's gonna be nine by 16, so it's gonna be what we watch on movies, but vertically.
So it's when you're holding your phone this way, it's full screen. It's gonna be a. Four, five ratio, which is the biggest size that you can post on Instagram to, and then finally you're gonna have your square, which is the one by one, which is basically the least desired, but sometimes the, the last resort every now and again, you will have to eventually post a 16 by nine, the small skinny ones on there. And that's okay. It happens. You just can't crop sometimes to make it make sense and to get the message across. But the point is, and the goal is to optimize the media to be as big as possible on the. , we want to take up real estate on people's screens.
Real estate means attention. If you've been on Instagram, if you go in there right now and start scrolling, you'll see posts of different sizes pop up on the feed and the ones that are five four, that vertical upright rectangle, not the full screen, but just shorter of it, the biggest you can get on Instagram. That thing, even on my screen, almost takes up the entire phone. You can't even see one of the other posts. Whereas if I posted one of the short little like Hulu or YouTube clips or one of the things that are vertical, they're really short and small, and then you can see a post on top and a post on bottom.
So what that means is when that person even is choosing to engage with that content, there's still things kind of fluttering on both sides of the screen that could pull their attention away. So when possible, optimize the bee as big as possible on the phone. It also pulls you closer into that content, allowing you to engage with it more.
so that's another added benefit. If it's a product you wanna show details off, you wanna show the fine leather ribs, you wanna show whatever it is. When it's closer to the person, they can see it way better. So that's another benefit is they can actually resonate with the product better and with whatever it is, the fine tuning of details and the things that you want them.
Briefly, I'm gonna talk about our sponsor for today's episode, which is Shopify. We became Shopify partners in 2018, so five years ago now, which is crazy when we became partners. If you're not a partner and you're an agency owner or someone that works at an agency, try to become partners with the Shopify fantastic stuff like getting early access to developer tools.
You get unlimited free trials to build sites out on, and if you have clients like ours, which is a link, I'm. given the description below, you get discounts for their monthly rates for the actual store itself, the actual web hosting itself. So use our link down in the description below. If you wanna get started with Shopify, start your e-commerce brand, start taking over the world with your products, and use our link to save a couple bucks along the way.
Now the next thing we're gonna get into is the time of day for posting. So when should I post? What time of day, what, what day, what time of the day, how, how many, times per week, these are all the questions I get. So addressing the time of the day, it's really when people are online, it's the best time to post what we're trying to do.
When we choose the time of day, there's not like a time of day that's gonna tell the algorithm, Hey, since I posted it this time, now I get 20 times the engagement. But when we're talking about organic engagement, so when we don't pay for anything and we're just. Here you go. Algorithms. Help me out, buddy.
When people are online, is that the best time to post or really right before they get online? So if you see a spike from six to nine o'clock, post that sucker at six, and then everyone that gets on for those next two or three hours is gonna have the opportunity to see you if you posted it at four or at one in the day. You're gonna be farther down in the feed and they're gonna have less of an opportunity to see you. As you can imagine, just like TV space during the Super Bowl, when there's more attention, it costs more. It's harder to get the attention. All these variables start coming into play cuz everyone's playing at that level.
So that's why all of these things are super important. . So how do you find the best time of the day? It's a big question I get. It's literally provided by every platform on the platform, on Facebook. Go to your meta creator business suite. Go into your insights. It'll be in there, Instagram. Go to your settings, go to insights or if you actually have a business profile set up, normally your insights. Button is right there. then same with TikTok. Go to your settings, go to your I forget what it's called, account reporting or insights, whatever, and on there. So I'll use Instagram for instance. It will show you with a bar chart all seven days, Sunday through Saturday, which days are the most popular. then if you click on one of the days, it will show you the times and it'll show you which times are the most popular. so, Just typically in general, a rule of thumb is 7:00 AM noon, 3:00 PM, 6:00 PM, and 9:00 PM. Those are like the top five times I would say, but it's gonna be specific to your page and it's gonna be specific to your page by each platform.
So that's why you need to look on Facebook and on Instagram and on TikTok. For our clients that we post stuff to, we posted their pages for them on their behalf. We will literally have the same picture going out to Facebook and Instagram, but they might be two hours separated just because. . That's what's gonna be what maximizes organic engagement. so that's important. Again, when we're playing at a high level, every little bit is the law of diminishing return kind of thing. But every little bit helps you set yourself apart and differentiate. Next is our last three customers' tricks. I'm flying through this stuff. I feel like we're killing it.
Hope you're keeping up on pen and paper here, or typing stuff out. The last three customers trick. Write this one down. So imagine who your last three customers are that were perfect customers. So if I am a retail store and I sell chocolate out of the place, I don't know, it's gonna be the person that buys high margin items.
They come in on a regular basis. They're pleasant and friendly to deal with. Like who's the person that you don't have to sacrifice anything for? if anything you would like. Pay almost to have more of them coming in. If you can think of three of them, do that. then the next time you go to caption a post or to caption a bunch of posts, act like you're writing two of those three people.
So every time Joe comes in, he is super friendly and whatever. I'm typing up a caption about our new Valentine's Day special for chocolates. What would Joe think is good about this caption? What would I say that would get him to be like, ah, that's good. That kind of thing. That's who you need to be thinking of.
This is a really good tip and trick that I've seen. Help me and a lot of our page managers that have worked underneath me really come to identify with the customer base and be not robotic marketing people. Today's Valentine's Day, day 20% off whatever button to really get into the shoes of the person and to think about them, face to face. What is this person gonna think if I just showed them this on my phone? so you being a manager or an owner of a business and still managing your page, you have a big advantage here when it comes to. being able to resonate with your customers because you know them and you deal with them on a regular basis.
so if someone else is doing your posting for you, this might be something you need to pull 'em into the store. Let 'em see some of the interactions, show them some of your meetings. Let them listen to one of your phone calls. Let them hear how you deal with people, how they deal with you, and listen to your tone and your personality and all these things and bring that forward to the post and to the captions.
Huge trick. Last three customers trick. Try that. Very last thing here. Literally don't even have notes down about this one because I know this, like the back of my hand. It is the hook portion. So for video content, if we're making video content for Instagram reels, TikTok, YouTube shorts, if it's going on LinkedIn, if it's going anywhere.
Most of all of these platforms seem to have a similar algorithm built out now, and I have a whole episode about this. I'm not gonna get into it, but I've seen in Facebook's reporting that this is true, that they monitor the progress of your video at the three second length, the ten second length, and then regard however long it is. Whatever's 90% of the play through is, and so they monitor these and this is how the algorithm works when it actually comes to serving your post out to new people. Do people stick around for the first three seconds and learn about what the video is? Cool they do. Okay, let's serve it to more people.
Do they stay for those next 10 sec, those next seven seconds up to the ten second mark. Oh they do. Okay. Let's serve it to more people. then if they watch all the way through in a high percentage of people have a lot of play through, they watch 90% or more of the video. That is those videos that get out to the world and are the ones booming out there that are really taking advantage of the algorithm and like doing really well.
so, When I talk about three seconds, 10 seconds and play through with that 90%, those are three benchmark places that you need to be curating content around as you make the content. we're gonna call the three second one, the primary hook, the ten second mark is gonna be our secondary hook. then the full one is the play through, like I said, play through.
So when I make a video now, almost every video we make, if it's vertical for a client, for us, whatever the reel that you saw on Instagram probably was the same. The first three seconds have to be a hook with like a ooh, a wow, a ah, a Zang, a bang, a z, a zip of that. Something has to open. You have to be introduced to something.
Something falls. Something has to happen in those first three seconds that keeps people and it's like, whoa, what's that? That's that first three second battle. If people are swiping past that, those first three seconds right there, that's those videos that you post out when you have 2000 followers and you get 20 views. That's the video. That's why it does that, if you don't make it past that three second benchmark. When you make it past the three second benchmark, then you get to the 200 or a thousand mark, make it past the 10 seconds. That's how you get to go quote unquote viral and have the algorithm doing what you want it to do, serving you to new people.
Let them engage with you. They become customers. The ten second mark, that three second to ten second for the secondary hook is where you're supposed to basically explain what the rest of the video is, but do it in a way that's gonna keep them watching to the end. So we've got our first goal, to create something crazy, wacky. Wow. Or. , you better. You've never guessed how this is or something like that. For instance, I could say these are three things on social media that you didn't know how to do. That's my first three second hook right there. The next seven seconds after that are gonna be what I can get you to do, what I can say, to get you to watch to the end of the video basically.
So I might say, Here's three tips that you didn't know you should do on social media. The first tip is gonna be based on Instagram and blah, blah, blah. It's gonna have a huge impact on your sales and finances. Here's what it is, and then I can go into it or whatever, and then hopefully, after hearing that, we'll watch even past that.
Now, my goal is not to have you notice that I'm doing these things and you watch the video. You're not supposed to notice there's a hook and that there's a secondary hook, and that I'm doing these things to just really trick the algorithm into serving me to more people. But that's what we're doing. So what's the platform?
I said this earlier in the episode, what's the platform's goal? Right? They want you to sit on that sucker for two hours long and be sitting there forever waiting and watching content basically. so the videos that have the play through, they're gonna serve to more people because it gets their goals done, which suck people's lives away into the platform, basically. So, it's like a, probably a bad human for telling, all of us as marketers, how can we suck people's attention and suck their lives away into the phones and to make that two hours on TikTok three hours? But ultimately, this is what we need to do in order to be able to leverage this content for our businesses.
Like I said, when everyone's playing on a really high level, This is what it is, this is what it takes now, and I promise you, if you go watch any viral video out there, go find a video with a million views on it. I guarantee you, for the most of them, there's gonna be some version of a primary and secondary hook on it, and then whatever the climax of, or whatever the result is, the, FTO, the finish that we beat, the boss kind of thing that happens is gonna happen toward the very end of the video because that they need that 90% play through for you to actually, for them to get served really far out for the a.
So that is all of my things that we went over. Like I said, we went over value versus taking up space aspect ratios. How often you should be posting my awesome sponsor Shopify, and the time of day you should be posting the last three customers' tricks. then finally, the hooks again. I have a whole episode about hooks.
Very exciting topic. If you wanna go listen to it, I would love to have you, gimme your input and feedback on it. Leave us comments or likes on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, wherever you see us, let me know. I'd love to engage with you guys. That's one thing I wanna do better on this page even is get more feedback from you guys.
Answer real world questions that you have. So if you have something that you've been dealing with for a month or a week or a day, and it's a question you don't think anyone's gonna answer, you. Send it to us. I promise you, I'm gonna answer you as long as you don't seem like spam or a bot or someone trying to sell me something.
So thank you guys so much for listening. Like I said, super exciting fourth season, episode two. Now down in the books, let's roll the outro.
Summary:
In this episode, Rich shares his top tips and tricks for posting on social media. He covers a range of topics, including how often to post, finding the posting sweet spot, aspect ratios, and the best time of day to post.
Firstly, Rich emphasizes the importance of consistency when posting on social media. He recommends creating a content calendar to plan out your posts in advance, which can help to ensure that you're posting regularly and keeping your followers engaged.
Rich also discusses the concept of the posting sweet spot, which refers to the optimal frequency of posts for each platform. He advises experimenting with different posting schedules to find what works best for you, taking into account factors such as your audience's engagement and the platform's algorithms.
In terms of aspect ratios, Rich notes that different platforms have different requirements for images and videos. For example, Instagram's square format is well-suited for showcasing products, while landscape or portrait formats may work better for certain types of content.
Finally, Rich discusses the best times of day to post on social media. He advises taking into account factors such as your audience's time zone and daily routine, as well as platform-specific data on when engagement is highest.
Overall, this episode offers valuable insights and practical tips for anyone looking to improve their social media posting strategy. Whether you're a business owner, influencer, or social media enthusiast, you're sure to find something useful in Rich's expert advice.
