Please enjoy this transcript from Feed Your Brand's Coaching Crasher podcast with Tom and Tracy Hazzard where our President, Angie Lile, shares some valuable tips for podcasters.
In this episode, I have an amazing social media expert, Angie Lile. She began consulting and managing social media sites in 2005 with MySpace. She expanded to Facebook pages as soon as they were invented. She’s always been on the cutting edge and she sees how creating powerful online content helps brands build relationships with an audience.
She also has a video production background and has created innovative story-driven content for those clients and expanded into each platform as they grew in popularity, including TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Threads, Twitter X and Snapchat.
Over the years, she’s created her strategies and continues to learn and expand from notable social media gurus but also from her great clients. I’ve brought her on the podcast because she has this amazing ever-growing client list like Deepak Chopra, Iyanla Vanzant, Neale Donald Walsch, Arielle Ford, and so many other experts and authors. She understands what it’s like to be all of you, podcasters, authors, speakers, and content creators, with the right strategies and models that will work for you. She’s always expanding her knowledge base and testing theories, which I love because that’s what I’m all about.
Angie and I are always sharing back and forth what’s working and what’s not working. We’re always looking for that next thing. I brought her on the podcast because there’s something that tends to be missing in the podcasting shares that I see out there of all your episodes. I’m constantly watching our clients and non-clients, just the podcasting industry in general, how you’re sharing. You’re great at sharing your episode but you’re not so great at collaborating with your guests and it’s a huge miss. We’re going to talk about collaborations and how we need to create that engagement piece. Angie, welcome to the show and the Podetize community. We are so grateful to have you as a part of our world.
Tracy, thank you so much for that wonderful introduction and for having me. I wish I could stay longer. I’m already so excited. I want to stay forever.
When I look at some of the influencers out there, especially on Instagram but even on TikTok as well, they have such big followerships and communities. How did they build that and not have it be fake? How do you build an engaged, authentic community?
It starts by not buying fake audiences. There used to be services out there that’ll say, “We’ll get you this many followers and likes,” and they’re fake. They’re not going to engage with your account so it will hurt your account by adding all of those dead accounts that don’t engage. Your engagement rate will go down and it’ll look like you’re not going to reach the algorithm levels of being put into everybody’s feeds like you need to be to grow a true audience.
Start by not buying fake followers and try to avoid ads when possible. Sometimes Facebook pages, I usually can say, maybe an ad to raise awareness to get people to collect the page isn’t a bad thing as long as they’re engaging with the content first. I’ll run a campaign where we’re putting out great content and aggregating all of the people who are using, liking, sharing, and commenting on that content. I’ll send ads to those people because then I know they’re real. They were engaging with my content at first.
That’s the only time that I would recommend ads to get those followers. Otherwise, it’s just content. It’s putting it out there. It’s those partnerships that we’re going to talk about. It’s constantly being real. Sometimes we don’t have as much time to do that. We talk about how we build our content so that we can do it once or twice a month and have all the content that we need to put out there.
We podcasters are lucky because as long as we’re producing weekly, we’ve got a general flow of content. It’s not easy to figure out how to increase engagement in your group and grow that group. When I entered this podcasting space, I started a brand new podcast and this was my case study way back when. I didn’t have all these followers that were in the 3D print community. I had friends and that was it. I didn’t know how to expand into a new community or that business community area. What are some of the ways that you can look for that and find the growth areas that you might have?
There are a lot of niche groups out there in all of the different platforms that you’re looking at. When I hear you talking about what you were starting with and who knew you, your friends could say, “I’m in this group. I’m going to share it with my group and say you should check out Tracy’s stuff.” You find these advocates that are already associated with different groups across the social sphere. You’ve got groups on Facebook and groups on LinkedIn especially.
I’ll look in Nextdoor if you’re a brick-and-mortar and you need people to come to your business. As far as podcasting goes, everybody loves a good podcast. I discovered a new podcaster through my neighborhood group and he lives in the neighborhood. He’s TikTok famous. I’ve seen him walking around. It’s funny how you discover people who are getting all these followers and they could be your neighbors.
It’s a common interest model. What people forget on social media is that once you enter into this group of Cocker Spaniel owners, it’s a deep dive, let me tell you.
Maybe you had a great podcast about that one time and you’re like, “I know the podcast people, the poodle’s podcasts.”
The poodles, the Cocker Spaniels, or whatever they are. That is it as you start to enter them. The problem is you can’t just like a group, follow a group, post your podcast in there, and expect anything to happen. What are great ways to do that authentically, in a way that isn’t pushy?
You want to follow the group’s rules. Everybody’s got rules for their groups like what you can post and not. The best way is if somebody’s posting it for you because it’s not like you’re pushing your brand. I frequently do that in my neighborhood groups. It’s unsolicited on my behalf but if you find somebody in your neighborhood who’s already in a group and they’re posting all the time, stuff like that, maybe get to know them a little better and get them to share your stuff. Don’t be afraid to reach out.
This is where we talk about influencers. Here’s the thing- this is a great guest strategy. We are very lucky in the podcasting world that many of us have guests on our show. Maybe we don’t take as many as we used to. In the guest model, that’s an opportunity to find one of those types of people who are influencing a group, invite them on your show, and then you know they’re going to share it. Why wouldn’t they? Especially, if they have a great experience on their show, which they should. That’s a great way to do it. What are some good practices there, Angie?
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With a lot of people, what I’ve found is it’s not that they don’t want to collaborate but they don’t necessarily understand what it is or how to do it. It’s a technical thing. A lot of people think that the tagging thing is collaborating but it’s not. It’s a whole nother level of tagging somebody. As far as I’ve seen, it’s only available profusely on Facebook and Instagram.
On Facebook, I’ve noticed that you can do a collab post if you are uploading your video with your computer. There’s an option but you have to open up additional options. There’s a tiny little carrot there when you’re scheduling it all out. There’s an option for you to add to the page that you’re trying to collaborate with. This is more likely to happen on Instagram where everybody’s using that to be an influencer.
On Instagram, I’ve only seen that option. You have to add the video to your account with your phone. When you are getting ready to put the copy and all the captions, there’s an option to tag. Some people think that tagging is like, “I’m going put their handle in the copy and call it good, that’s tagging,” but it’s not. You have to open it up, tag the content, and make sure that their account shows up and that they show up as a tagged person.
In that same window, there’s a collaborator option. In there is where you click collaborator. You can collaborate with up to two people with your account. When you choose that option and they accept the request, that’s the second part of it. They have to know that it’s there. You might want to send them an email and say, “Check your tagged post, look for a collaboration request from my account, and then please accept it.” They have to click that review button and accept the collaboration.
What happens is it magically appears on both of the accounts together. When somebody’s looking at the content, both names show up together with the content. It boosts your reach and engagement. The algorithm goes nuts and loves collaborations. If you happen to be collaborating with someone with a higher reach, that’s going to be great. Don’t be afraid to collaborate with someone with a little bit less reach either because that also boosts your algorithm. I would try it out.
This is the thing that I hear from a lot of my podcasters out there. They’re like, “That’s more work.” It has very effective results. Changing the model of programming the post through your Buffer or whatever it is that you’re using for scheduling like Hootsuite so that it sets an alarm because you can do that. It alerts you instead of posting for you. It reminds you to go to your mobile phone and submit it. That’s something you can do but the effective results from that lead to the thing you want the most, engagement and follower growth.
There’s a reason why that collab post gets so much better reach and engagement. That is the one reason that you have to be on your phone to do it. They want you on your phone, your app, and Instagram doing it. They will make sure that those posts get better reach because they’re incentivizing you to continue to do that.
It’s so important for us to remember most of these algorithms in our AI world, which Angie and I talk about all the time on the side. We won’t go down that deep dive right at this moment or this will be a very long conversation, which we don’t have.
It will never be done.
There are these things that incentivize human connection and collaboration is one of them. We’ve seen them on YouTube for a long time, just not in a formal way like they are where it’s inviting you to collaborate in the app already. That’s how YouTubers grew. The influencers would model up together on a topic and then it would be a circulating topic. It would be almost like YouTube was creating a trending topic by having them collaborate. What they’re doing is getting everybody to spend a lot of time on YouTube.
Do you know who uses that also? It’s the Marvel movies. When they do those whole crossovers or even in the TV shows, those things go through the roof because people like to see their favorite character from another show get onto the show. It’s the same deal. When those YouTubers started collaborating, they would show up in each other’s videos and get good reach. It was good for them.
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