Discover how you can change your approach to social media, using Andréa's framework for navigating social media in a more mindful way, with simple actions to help ease the overwhelm and find joy in social media again.
In This Episode You'll Learn
- Important social media metrics to consider for measuring the success of a social media campaign
- The best way to approach creating content for social media
- How to manage social media without being overwhelmed
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Transcript
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Meg Brunson
Hey, FamilyPreneurs. I am here today with Andréa Jones, and I am so excited because we are going to be talking about social media, which is something I absolutely love, as you know. So Andréa has built an online business committed to empowering businesses to utilize the power of social media in a positive and impactful way. Positive, underlined. Without being overwhelmed and drained by it. With over seven years experience in the game, Andréa hosts the acclaimed podcast, The Savvy Social Podcast. She leads a team providing done for you service inside of her marketing agency that was named a top digital marketing agency in 2021 and serves over 200 students in her membership, the Savvy Social School. You'll be able to find her online at onlinedrea.com or @OnlineDrea on Instagram, but right now you can find her right here. So let's meet Andréa and talk about social media. Thank you so much for being here today.
Andréa Jones
Thank you so much for having me on the show.
Meg Brunson
I'm so excited. I love connecting with you. We've connected on your podcast. We've connected on my podcast. We've connected at Summits. So I feel like we have a lot of collaboration in our past and hopefully in our future as well. I love chatting with you.
Andréa Jones
Yes. The power of social media. Right.
Meg Brunson
Exactly.
Andréa Jones
To be able to connect with someone and be able to work with them virtually.
Meg Brunson
Yes. Social media has its pros and cons, but we can use it in a powerful, empowering and positive way. And I love that you focus on that in your intro.
Andréa Jones
Yes. It can feel so overwhelming because there's so many possibilities for it to be negative, from cyber bullying to feeling overwhelmed to feeling inadequate, because we can compare ourselves to everyone, to feeling like as business owners, we have to do certain things on social media feeling that obligation. So my goal is always to approach it with that in mind and not try to ignore that that's there, because I know those feelings are there for a lot of us. But how do we kind of leverage these tools, make connections, just like our connection, in spite of all of those negative things?
Meg Brunson
What are the first steps? I know you've touched on a couple of things just in that statement. What are the first steps to establishing a social media presence without getting overwhelmed?
Andréa Jones
Yeah. So I think as business owners specifically and content creators, it's deciding what role social media plays in your business and what role it plays in your life, and making that clear distinction between personal use and business use. And I think a lot of us mix and mingle those two things. And then that's where some of those feelings come from, because we are scrolling through Facebook and we see our niece and nephew, we see our friend's dog, and then we see a Facebook ad telling us that we should be doing something else in our business. And so it can feel mixed and mingled. So really sitting down and getting intentional. I like to break this down by platforms if you can, so have certain platforms that are business related. Let's say your focus is Instagram and LinkedIn for business, and then Facebook is going to be more of a personal platform for you or whatever you want to choose. You can decide how you want to do it and then from there deciding how much time you want to spend, specifically from a business standpoint, I do think it's harder to kind of determine that time from a personal standpoint.
Andréa Jones
But from a business standpoint, I think it's just like anything else in our business, it becomes a task. Now, I use Asana for task management, so I put mine in my Asana. You can write it in your calendar, you can put it in your Google calendar. But making it part of your business and part of your habits will really make that distinction clearer and will help you break away from it. So give you some boundaries, give you some, I don't know, days off from social media, all of those beautiful things.
Meg Brunson
Yeah, I'd love to throw one of my favorite tools that I've been using is the News Feed Eradicator. Have you heard of that one? Where if I go to Facebook, it blocks my feed. So it really forces me to be intentional about how I'm spending my time. But I could unblock it for periods of time, like ten minutes or 30 minutes, and then intentionally give myself time to get lost scrolling, but not like, lose my whole day.
Andréa Jones
Yeah, I love that one because it's such a great way to, a lot of us use Facebook groups, for instance. So it's a great way to kind of participate and engage with the groups that you're in without feeling like you're mixing business and work and vice versa. One of my favorite ways to do this as well is to turn off my notifications so I don't accidentally see something when I'm not supposed to. I give myself the weekends off, so most of my weekends of the year, there's no posts going out. I'm not checking notifications. My team is off. I've never had an emergency. There's nothing that someone messages me on a Saturday, and it's emergency. Usually it can be responded to by Monday. So for me, turning off those notifications forces me to check manually when I need to. But also, I can actually take a break when I don't want to be on social media.
Meg Brunson
And I think that's super important, too, because the notifications can just- I mean, they distract you throughout the day, and it hinders your productivity in all areas of your business and your life.
Andréa Jones
Yeah, I even do that with email as well. I find that it's so easy to respond instantly to emails, and as business owners, we feel kind of on demand on call, so to speak. So I check in a couple of times a day, but I don't like that feeling of seeing an email notification pop up on my phone at 09:00 at night when I'm playing Solitaire. I don't want to see that I'm done working at that point. So for me, that's just that boundary that really helps me separate personal life from real life when my job is entirely digital.
Meg Brunson
I'm an iPhone user. And I just discovered, I might be late to the game. But I just discovered that you can set your phone. They have multiple do not disturb options, so you can set your phone to do not disturb. And I can't remember exactly what they call it, but because you're working and then you can mark which people you want to be able to disturb you. So, like, my husband's, calls will come through. But if you called me, it wouldn't unless you called twice. So if there is an emergency, people can get through to you. And I love that, too. I've just started kind of tinkering with it and playing with it so that I can even further restrict the text messages, the phone calls, and things like that.
Andréa Jones
Oh, that's a good idea. I have it for the opposite at night. My husband and my family can contact me after I think it's nine or ten. But if someone texts me, I'll respond in the morning. I should do the opposite for work hours too. That's a good idea.
Meg Brunson
Yeah. And there's a different setting in the iPhone, so just kind of fun tips for people who are looking for additional tips. Now, when it comes to actual content creation, do you have like, what's your approach or your recommendations for creating content for social media? Because I think the notifications and figure out where you should be is one aspect. But the second aspect is what do I post and how much do I post and how do I not spend 3 hours writing one Facebook post?
Andréa Jones
Oh yes, the dreaded 3 hours. I had someone one of my clients got stuck trying to post an Instagram reel the other day. It was their first time. I said, you should try it, give it a shot, they spent 2 hours stuck in this loop and then Instagram deleted it. And I was like, oh my gosh, I feel that in my soul we've all been there. So when it comes to creating content, one of the things I do recommend is carving out a block of time for ideas. I like to do this on Friday. So the Friday before the next week I'll sit down and plan out my posts. Now, some of them I fully plan out. So I'll write the caption. I'll go to Canva and design a graphics. Some of them are just ideas that maybe I want to explore later in the week. But giving myself that time block really helps. Now what I do to speed the process along, is I have a content bank, basically pillars of content that I'm constantly drawing from. So as a business owner, you want to think about your content either creating connection or creating conversion with your ideal people.
Andréa Jones
So what do you want them to do with that content? A lot of the content on social media is connection focus. So how do you draw them into a conversation? Are you going to share information and educate them? Are you going to talk about something interesting happening in your industry or in your life? Are you going to share a joke or a meme? So really drawing in that connection piece, that's probably about 80% of your content and then the other 20% is asking them something. Go check out this blog. Check out this podcast episode. Here's a lead magnet. I have a course, I have a service. And so having that 20% of content that actually does invite them to take the next step with you. So kind of breaking it down that way, giving yourself a plan for what that looks like. I personally like to assign them to days, so Mondays typically look a certain way, Tuesdays look a certain way, so forth and so on. But you can design this however you'd like. Some of my clients just like to have their content pillars, and then they'll move them around throughout the week however they feel inspired to.
Andréa Jones
But having those pillars will really help guide your content creation process, and this helps you from not getting stuck in that process. Now, the twist to this, as I mentioned, that client who spent 2 hours on an Instagram Reels, you have to be strict on the time limit with yourself. And I think sometimes we get like, it's pot-invested. I think where you feel like you already spent 30 minutes, so you keep going, you have to give yourself a cut off. Like, I've spent 30 minutes on this. It's not working. I need to move on because it's so easy to spend hours and hours on something. So you have to give yourself that time limit, be strict with yourself because it's easy to get caught up in that. I think a part of this is leaning into how you like to communicate. So I prefer video and audio. It's a lot faster for me to get out my thoughts that way. So I tend to create a lot of audio and podcasts and video like YouTube videos and Reels and TikToks. If you asked me to write down a post, it's going to take me longer.
Andréa Jones
So I've learned that about myself over the years. So my content is kind of geared towards that. So you'll figure out what works for you, which will cut down your time as well, because you easily can spend a lot of time on this. And this is where we feel that, regret with social media, like, we're not getting the investment back based on how much time we put into it.
Meg Brunson
Yeah, too much time creating and not enough time actually engaging and interacting with people, which is an important part, right? It's social media. You got to be social, not just creating content or consuming content like I do in TikTok. Yeah.
Andréa Jones
Oh, I love TikTok. Oh, my gosh. Tiktok is my favorite. But it is, you're right. It's social media. There's a media piece which is creating your content, but the social piece, which comes first, I think it's more important, which is the networking and engaging and actually talking to people piece.
Meg Brunson
Now I feel like the next step, like the logical next step. If you put all this content out, how do you determine what's working and what's not working so that you can adjust your schedule or adjust your strategy as you go?
Andréa Jones
Yeah. So depending on where you are and what platforms you are, this does vary. So do you have a few different kind of checkpoints and things to look for because your audience is also at different stages in their journey with you. So some people have just met you today. Some people have been following you for a year. So you want to keep that in mind. But generally speaking, I like to start with how many people are even viewing this content piece. So look at impressions and reach. If you don't see those numbers continually going up, then you need to reach more people. So that means networking more, socializing more, using more discoverability placement. That means Instagram Reels, for instance. It's one of those places where when you put content there, Instagram is going to show it to new people, people who don't follow you. So same thing with something like a Pin on Pinterest. Most of those pins are seen by people who aren't connected to you or don't follow you. So you want to start using some of those placements where people can actually find you. If you're not seeing reach and impressions go up.
Andréa Jones
So that's kind of the top of the social media sales funnel, so to speak. Then we have the middle piece, which once people find you, are they following you? So are you seeing your follower number go up? And I'm really focused on quality here, especially in the beginning. You want to take a look at the people who are following you. If they're robots, which we can't do anything about these, like, fake accounts, they're annoying, but they're there. Or if there are people who are like, why would this person follow me? Then you may want to take a look at where those reach and impressions are coming from and if they're the right people and then from there, based on the people who follow you. Now we're looking at engagement. So the general rule of thumb right now is that about 10% of your audience will engage with your content. So 10% of your Facebook page followers will engage with the post, 10% of your Instagram followers engage with the post. And that percentage actually goes down the more followers you have, it can go down as low as 1% or half a percent, depending on the size of your audience.
Andréa Jones
So looking at engagement, for instance, will help you know if your audience is actually tuned in to the content that you're creating. So are they liking? Are they commenting? Do they share? Do they save? looking the whole big picture of that content piece to see if that's working or not. If you notice that at this point your posts aren't getting engagement, you want to take a look at which posts are the top performers and double down on those content pieces. It varies per industry. I had one of my clients who nothing we posted about questions of the day or tips. They never worked. We just talked about their products and people always love commenting and sharing them. So we just made 95% of our post talking about the product. That's what works for that client. Some clients are the other way around. So you kind of have to look at your analytics in your insights and see what works for you and adjust based on kind of some of those numbers that you're seeing.
Meg Brunson
Now when you talk about looking at analytics and what works for you and things like that, are you looking at it first from a perspective of content? Like, what are the topics you discussed versus like, is it a video post versus an image post versus do you know what I mean? Like, are you looking at the delivery method or the content, and which should you focus on first?
Andréa Jones
Oh, that's a good question. So I think it is a little bit of a combination moving, a little bit of an art form because each post actually serves a different role. So on the post level, if we created a post for conversion, for instance, so we want someone to go listen to a podcast, they're probably not also going to like and comment and share. They're actually probably just going to go click the link in the bio or click the link in the post. So when you look at the success of that post, you want to make sure you're measuring it against what you're asking for, what your expectations are in that post. I think that's first and foremost. And then secondly, you can look at the type of content as well. Right now, for instance, video just tends to work best on a lot of platforms. So you may just notice your video posts get more impressions or get more comments because those placements are what a lot of the platforms are kind of featuring right now. That being said, the quality of the content piece will outweigh the delivery. So one of my clients does a lot of these carousel posts really in depth carousel posts.
Andréa Jones
The videos don't perform as well as the carousel post, so we just stick with those. So really leaning into what works for you and your audience, and hopefully that matches up with how you like to deliver content.
Meg Brunson
And I love that you mentioned Carousel post. And just in case there's somebody who isn't sure what that means, it's when you have more than one image, so there's like three to five to ten images and you can kind of click through. It looks a little different on Instagram versus Facebook, but it's kind of the same concept. And I love that you brought that up. I feel like that's one area where I'm constantly struggling to get engagement is on Carousel posts, and it makes me so frustrated because I love the creativity that goes into designing them. But for whatever reason, my audience just does not seem to care. So that's just one of those lessons I've had to learn for myself and my business. But it's important to remember that something that works for one person is going to be different than the other person. I think that's a trap that a lot of people get stuck in because they're listening to this person or that person who's delivering strategies that are supposed to work. But it's different. It's always going to be different. So I love that you recognize that and take that approach, that everything is a very unique and personalized strategy and you can draw inspiration and ideas from other businesses, but you want to be really careful that you are looking at those numbers and making decisions based on your own audience.
Andréa Jones
Yeah. And make a date with yourself to look at those numbers. I like to think of it as looking through, like my QuickBooks reports. If I save it till the end of the year, it's going to feel like such a huge project. I like to look at it weekly for my bookkeeping. For my social media, I like to look at it monthly. First of every month, I'm looking back at the previous month, and I only pick five or six metrics to look at because there's so much in there. So just pick five or six where you're like. These are the ones that matter the most to me and my business and then keep track of those every single month. And that will give you a lot of insight into what's working and what's not.
Meg Brunson
And I love that I do the same thing monthly because any more than that, I feel like it would be too. You wouldn't have enough data, for me, I'm posting like once a day, but I know that varies, too. I feel like that's a whole other. What do you typically recommend as far as frequency?
Andréa Jones
Yeah, it depends on the person, and it depends on the skill level. This is what I've learned, too, with social media is that you take someone who's new to it and you say post once a day. That's going to take five to 10 hours a week to create that content because it's an entirely different skill. It's a new skill to create social media content. So this is why I oftentimes recommend an hour, like time limit versus a post limit. One to 2 hours a week is where most of my students are because that's enough time to really put energy into it, but not to take away from other parts of the business. So some people are only posting once a week, once or twice a week. Some of my students are posting daily because they have that routine. They built up the skill to do it. Honestly, it is true. The more you post, typically there is a cut off point, but the more you post, the more attention you'll get. But most of the people I talk to aren't full time content creators, right? They're not like dancing on TikTok for a living. So they have other things in life.
Andréa Jones
Yeah, imagine that. So that time limit will help you develop the skill to actually get better at social media posting instead of spending way too much time, not having enough time to actually do the things that you want to do it with your life. And then feeling that resentment. And what happens is they spend, let's say, 5 hours a week, and then they go, I'm not going to do this again. And they go like three, four weeks before they post again because it just took so much energy.
Meg Brunson
I love that you used time as that measure of success. I feel like that's something I've never heard of, and I'm sure other people say it, but I'm like, oh, that's brilliant because it also as you get going, it's going to challenge you to be more efficient and you're going to increase in a way that's natural to do. I love that. I feel like that's going to be my biggest takeaway from this episode.
Andréa Jones
I think it's a good timing, too, because the social media algorithms are getting smarter. So because they're getting smarter, they're helping deliver your content to more people. So I actually don't think we need as much content as we used to on social media because the algorithms are trying to get people to find it. They want people to find interesting, unique content that they will actually engage with. So I would rather see you spend time on quality content than just trying to struggle to get that one post a day out.
Meg Brunson
And I've tested this. I always testing different things on my own, my own accounts. And in the past month or so, four to six weeks, maybe six to eight weeks, I've reduced the number of posts that I've been putting out and my engagement has increased. And I think that the quality, I think is better, to be honest, because some of the posts that I was using were recycled content. They get stale. It doesn't feel authentic, but the quality is better and engagement is going up. And I think that's the other thing for me at least, is that we always have to be testing. Like, we can never get comfortable with what we're doing because social media is always changing.
Andréa Jones
Yeah, that's the hardest part, I think of social media is unlike other marketing avenues, like email marketing or even like traditional marketing, like flyers and things like that, pretty stable, social media. It changes. The strategies we're talking about today may not work a year from now. And so that does add an extra added layer of complexity.
Meg Brunson
Right. It's always been testing. And that's also why it's great to have somebody like you that you're keeping up on all those changes. So now you just have one point of contact, because I think that's another problem or another aspect that can get complicated if you're trying to follow all the people and all the things you can't keep up with everything. So it's finding that one person that can give you the information you need and guide you through the changes that are happening.
Andréa Jones
Oh, yeah. And really the changes that matter to you. Honestly, this is my full time job. I've been doing this for eight years, and it's still a lot for me to sift through. So my goal is always as I'm sifting through it, does it really matter? Will this really make a difference? Because there's a lot of updates out there that you don't really have to, like, change anything for, and some of them you do. So that's how I approach it is for my audience. This change that I'm observing, does it have an impact on them? And how can I help them navigate that change?
Meg Brunson
Yes, it helps them figure it out. And if it doesn't just skip over it, they don't need to know. Yeah, they don't need to know. Awesome. Well, I'd love to take a few minutes. Can you talk about all the places where you are where our listeners can continue to connect with you? I assume your podcast is on all the places wherever they're listening to this podcast. They can find your podcast. And I do love your podcast because I am such a social media person. So I love that. And I love instances like this where you get two social media geeks in the same room, and then you can just kind of geek out over those things and you learn new things from each other, even if you've been in the game for a while. So I love that your podcast provides that insight.
Andréa Jones
Yes. And if you like this kind of conversation, definitely check it out. You can find it. Savvy Social Podcast is what you're going to search for, and we release episodes every Tuesday, and we're on all the apps.
Meg Brunson
Perfect. Can you tell me a little bit about the school?
Andréa Jones
Yes. So our Savvy Social School is our membership program. If you want to take this training even deeper. One of the things I mentioned, for instance, was all of the changes that happened on social media, we just released a private podcast in the membership really breaking down those changes and which one business owners should focus on but we have courses on platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Facebook, all the platforms done for you posts, guidance from my amazing team and actually we're going to be raising the price here in spring of 2022 so now is the best time to join and lock in the best rate and get that hands on support. That's the thing that we're really big on because it is nuanced so we give you the bones and then we want you to come to us and say.Well, here's my business how can I make this work for me and we'll work it out together.
Meg Brunson
And I also want to ask you about the social media rock star framework. Tell me about this.
Andréa Jones
So, if you want to get the Costco sample size version of what's inside of the school, this is it. The framework is free. It's our approach to social media. It walks you through building out a strategy. We also have some samples of our done for you content so caption swipe files, graphics you can just edit in Canva, kind of give you that jumpstart so you can find that at onlinedrea.com/free and that will give you your sample, your taste and then hopefully you'll enjoy the whole buffet.
Meg Brunson
Awesome. I love it. Well, I want to thank you so much for being here today. Here's where I'm going to bring up the fact that before we hit play and started recording, a bird tried to kill me inside of my tent and so I am just relieved that the bird got out and did not come back and interrupt this recording.
Andréa Jones
Yes, we made it.
Meg Brunson
We made it. So thank you so much, Andréa for being here and for your patience as I navigated a bird and for bringing so much value. I always love connecting with you and you are always welcome back in my community so thank you so much.
Andréa Jones
Thank you so much for having me on the show.
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