The Social Media Strategy - Build Community
Welcome to the Social Media Strategy. Oh, happy September. And I will tell you that aside from January being a nice new year refresh, I've always considered September more of a new year refresh. And I think it's because when my kids would go back to school, it was a fresh start and I always have that in my mind. In the back of my mind, September is like a mini new year and we're off to a new start on a new school year.
Helen:So come and learn with me now that I'm a teacher. I'm really going to consider it like back to school. But while I'm talking about back to school, I I'm gonna just jump right into what we're doing in the studio this month, and then I'm gonna go to my unsponsored by segment. Alright. So in the studio, we are focusing on how to build community.
Helen:So every lesson and every meeting is going to be catered around how you can build and foster community and loyalty in your followers and in your audience. It's so important because what's happening with TikTok and we know something's changing. We're not completely sure. There's a lot of speculation out there, but it's better to be proactive. And that is me trying to change my normal way of existence, which is always, well, we'll worry about it when it happens.
Helen:I'm trying to change that mindset when it comes to this and be more prepared for when it happens. So I'm taking you along for the ride. Okay. Before we get into the details about that, today's unsponsored buy, we're gonna focus on food, two food items, and one of them is the food itself, and that is my Justin's Almond Butter. I am a fan.
Helen:I love this brand, especially because of the flavors. I like and I know it's somewhat healthy. Now, I think my son would say, well, it's not really a 100% healthy because Tommy's very, very particular. But it does have sugar added. Organic powdered sugar, organic cane sugar, tapioca starch, palm oil, organic cinnamon, and sea salt.
Helen:But overall, it's more healthy than most. Like, it's it's better than Skippy and those kinds of brands. I love it because cinnamon flavored anything has got my vote. They have maple flavor. They have vanilla flavor.
Helen:And for some reason, that appeals to me. I like it. I like when I slice up an apple and I put little a little bit of almond butter on it and it's got a little kick of something. When I don't have these in the house, I will or if they only have the plain sometimes available on the shelf, I will sprinkle cinnamon on top of mine, cinnamon sugar sometimes. I'll sprinkle some spices on there to give it a kick, like even a pumpkin spice, one of the pumpkin pie spice, sometimes I'll sprinkle that on because I like how that adds to the flavor of the almond butter.
Helen:So I like Justin's. So if you like it, let me know. And I use this often. I try not to eat a lot of almond butter because I know that in general, the the nut butters do have are high in calorie. But, you know, if you eat it in moderation, everything is okay, in my opinion.
Helen:If you're not overdoing anything, like if I'm not eating this out of the jar, like my son Tommy, who literally he puts it on peanut bananas. He puts it on everything. We go through solidly two jars of peanut butter, two jars of almond butter in a week when he's with us and it's all him. So God bless the young metabolism that he can actually eat two jars of almond butter and not feel the effects in the scale. Anyway, that's that for that.
Helen:But here's the other thing that my son Tommy, he's getting a lot of airtime today, he has turned me onto something that I cannot talk about enough. So buckle up. Are you ready? It's the Ninja Creamy. What is that, you ask?
Helen:Because there's the Ninja Blender. This is the Ninja Creamy. And if you know, you know. You can make ice cream out of the most healthy ingredients and it tastes phenomenal. I'm not kidding.
Helen:This is not a lie. And let me tell you a little more about it. Because when I sometimes would, in the summer especially, everybody wants to go for ice cream, we're going get ice And ice cream at night just doesn't sit well with me. And I don't know I don't have an aversion to dairy because I can drink milk in my tea and whatnot, so I'm not anti dairy. I can have cereal and milk.
Helen:But for some reason when I eat ice cream, I don't know if it's the heavy cream factor or whatever. If I eat it in the evening, I'm done for. I feel horrible. I don't like the feeling. I can't it almost hurts me to sleep.
Helen:My stomach hurts. It's just not good. And this Ninja Creamy has solved my problems. Woo. We're doing a little happy dance.
Helen:You know what? In the newsletter, you see the guys from the office doing this in the newsletter today and I'm looking at it on my screen and that's how I'm feeling about the Ninja Creamy. You can make ice cream out of simple ingredients. It's the way the technology works. Oat milk, you can put oat milk, you can put a little bit of almond butter.
Helen:You can use, swirl banana in there. And what you have to do before you put it into the Ninja Creamy is you put it in a blender first. So you blend the ingredients. And what I have done is, to avoid dairy even, I do oat milk or almond milk. I'll do some oatmeal.
Helen:So I use gluten free purely Elizabeth oatmeal that I talked about I think last week. I use a little bit of that oatmeal. I I cook it up first and put, like, a half a cup of oatmeal in there to give it a little thickness and a little texture. Maybe a hit of almond butter, maybe not. I think I said banana already.
Helen:You can put a few maybe a couple strawberries in there. All healthy ingredients. That's it. You can you don't have to put any sugar at all, honestly. My son will do a couple of drops of maple syrup to give it a little sweetness.
Helen:So you can use organic, you know, whatever, the bare raw maple syrup, whatever you wanna put in there to give it a little maybe sweetness. You put this in the freezer. After you do the blender, put it in the freezer in the little container. You gotta freeze it, they say, for twenty four hours, but I've done it where I froze it only for twelve hours. Put that in the Ninja Creamy.
Helen:When I tell you the ice cream you're gonna get, it's bizarre how it tastes it's the texture of ice cream without the pain. It's the taste of ice cream without the calories. You can then put some toppings on it, and it's like guilt free toppings. Because when you put toppings on regular ice cream, it's like adding insult to injury. You could put some crumbled little cookie well, sometimes I'll get the chocolate crackers, chocolate graham crackers, and crumble them on there because it gives it a little crunch, like a little toppings.
Helen:Crazy. I can't talk about it enough. I'm losing it over my ninja creamy. So if you don't know, you might want one. I wish I had affiliate links.
Helen:I don't know. I really say that every week, but I'm not gonna go there. I'm telling you the things I love just purely because they are the things I love. And this one is in the summer. We use this every single night.
Helen:I don't even know. Probably going into the I only got it in the spring, so I'm sure going into the winter I'm gonna be using it all the time. It's just a really great answer to a healthy option for dessert where it feels like you actually ate dessert. This is not like Put a banana and make a little thing with a banana. No, no.
Helen:This is ice cream. It's really dessert. Okay. That's enough of that. I'm going to zip it.
Helen:Let's carry on. How can you build community? By sharing the things you love with your friends. That's my first thing. But I do.
Helen:I like to talk about this on sponsored by because it makes me feel like I'm sharing my things with you without any pressure to buy them. It's just like this is really what I love and, you know, maybe you'll just want to hear about it and maybe you're not even interested in getting one, and that's fine. But it's like just being aware of the things that are out there that might change up how you view things so that you think, oh, all ice cream is not created equal is created equal? No. It's not.
Helen:And also, I have had an ice cream maker before, the other kind, the Cuisinart one, where you put it's like a frozen block that you have to put in the freezer and then you take it out. And the only way to make ice cream with that thing is with heavy cream. There's not really a lot of recipes that are gonna make ice cream in that type of ice cream maker, but that creamy is gonna make ice cream out of literally healthy ingredients. I even it will make sorbets. It will make shakes.
Helen:It will it does all the things. We did a strawberry pineapple sorbet on one of them. It also depending on how much depending on the ratio of things you put in there, you can have almost like a cream ice. You know what that is? That's like the Rita's thing where it's like a bit of creamy combined with ice and it has that texture.
Helen:Love it. There's also a place around here in the city called Ralph's which makes a cream ice and I love that because it's a little bit of ice, Italian ice feeling with a little bit of creamy texture. I'm all about it. Alright. So back to it.
Helen:I keep getting sidetracked. How can I build community online? So I've I said this in today's meeting. We had it we had our first monthly meeting about community building in the studio today. And one of the things that I said was the most successful creators have a sense have created a sense of community in a bunch of their videos.
Helen:So I'm just gonna talk about what that is. If you want to participate in the learning for how to make your content more aligned, you can join us there. Every meeting, we're talking strategy. We're also talking about we're also putting everyone's sharing their videos in the comments so that we can all see each other's videos and say, oh, how this could be better, how this could be more community focused, how you could get your, the follow people to hit the follow button. So we're working on all of that in the studio.
Helen:I'm gonna give you now the broad strokes of what we're talking about, and if you're interested, you can join us. But these are things to think about whether you are in the studio or not. What are some of the things that you can do to build community? In an overall sense, you have to think about what gets your audience connected to each other. And it's not just connected to you, it's what the most successful videos that happen, the most viral, are when people are chatting together in the comments.
Helen:When people are either helping each other in the comments, disagreeing with each other in the comments, having interactions in the comments, those usually really do help your engagement. And what it does, it makes people feel like they belong to something. And I used an example in the studio about a woman who was talking about a garbage disposal and how everybody in the comments was her her perspective of how a garbage disposal was used was just for if things happen to fall down the sink versus other people who use a garbage disposal and they purposely put all the food down the sink into the garbage disposal and which camp you're in. And there was a huge discussion in the comments. So that's a type of thing where you want to create some foster some type of conversation in your comments to create a sense of community.
Helen:And the next way to do it is going live. So when you are going live and you are creating that connection and you are guiding, you're almost like leading your audience in a discussion. And that's what it's like. It's like you're a moderator for a community when you go live. I love it.
Helen:It's kind of one of my favorite things when I'm when I'm, you know, ready to wrap up my day. I'm like, let me go live because I really get charged from it. I I feel that I'm leading a discussion. And I think that's part of what creates that vibe of people coming together. Listen, I always talk about this.
Helen:Back when I lived in the burbs, in the suburbs, I feel like it was like a million years ago, but it's about ten years now, a little over ten years. I used to have these dance parties where women would come and hang out, music would be blasting, and then we'd have a dancing night with no judgment. It was actually no husbands included, so the wives could just come. It was mostly couples out there in in the burbs. The wives would just come without any significant others and just dance the night away.
Helen:And what I learned at those parties is that I didn't even necessarily know everyone or get a chance to talk to everyone that came. But I created a safe space for them to come together and have connections with each other. And the common thread was they all somehow knew me, and that's how they got invited to this party. It was through whoever whoever. But the connections that were made and the vibes that happened at the party didn't depend on me.
Helen:Okay? And I think that's the part that we all don't realize that we as creators and sometimes as leaders, as moderators, we can create that among people and have them, I guess benefit from knowing each other. And that's the whole idea of creating community. It's not just for you to give them information and back and forth, the end. It's for you to give information, you to inspire, entertain, whatever it is that you're doing on your content, and then creating a a family inside that that appreciates it.
Helen:And so they enjoy you, but they also enjoy enjoying you with each other. So it's it's definitely a triangle. It's not just a two way street. And going live is really, really helpful. And the last thing that we're gonna be covering, so that's where we're gonna cover the second week in our because we do in the studio a three week rotation.
Helen:So the first week, it usually covers the topic how to create your content. Our topic is how to create content that fosters community. The second week, we're gonna focus on live and live strategies and how you can foster community in your lives. And then the third is gonna be how to foster and build a community offline, elsewhere, how to move a community, how to shift them somewhere else in case this platform ends up going away, this platform called TikTok. Okay?
Helen:So we're going be focused on that. And I think, I've always been the person that just waits for something to happen and then reacts. I really want and I have learned that, you know, four years ago when I started a newsletter, I didn't start a newsletter thinking, oh, well, at least I'll have emails if TikTok goes away. That never even came into my mind. But because I did it, I actually do have that as a backup plan.
Helen:Like if TikTok goes away, I still have a newsletter community that is engaged and reading my newsletters every week and enjoying my podcasts and my content and my vibes in general. And I'm so, so grateful and appreciative. And I also want to give that value back. So I have also been, and I've talked about this a little because we have a new feature on TikTok with DMs, how I'm using that to foster community on my own page, in my own count. And those are the types of things when we're in these meetings, we're brainstorming together.
Helen:So if you do have any interest and you wanna join us, this is the month for community. Join now and get in on it. But if you are not into jumping into a studio situation, this is encouragement for you to start assessing your own content. It's always helpful to assess your own content when you hear other people talking though because you go, oh, that applies to me. Oh, yeah.
Helen:I did that once. Or, oh, yeah. That's a good idea. I can try it on this. One of our studio members hi, Betsy.
Helen:She posted a video while we were in the meeting talking about it. She post she pulled a video that she thought would that did pretty well, I think, on YouTube, and she said, I'm gonna put it over on TikTok, and was getting inquiries to work with her while we were in the meeting. Hello. So it works. And I love it.
Helen:It was kind of a really good win. I also had one of our studio members, Linda. Hi, Linda, if you're listening. She had a major, major viral video hit on Instagram where she had a whole conversation happening in the comments about her because she was she played two characters and people thought that it was her sister or her twin or something. And they really didn't think it was her.
Helen:And she had 2,000,000 views and went from 700 to something like 16,000 followers practically overnight. So the successes are real. We are all applauding each other. It was so much fun for her to share that news in the meeting. I hadn't even known.
Helen:I had seen her video. I talked about it in the meeting. I was like, you had a video recently. And I think it was doing pretty well when I saw it. How is that going?
Helen:And when she told us it was like, poof, amazing. So like I always say, in, my what drives me and what makes me feel great about what I'm doing is when I see the successes coming from the suggestions, coming from the learning, and the inspiration that I'm helping people find in themselves. And that just makes me feel really happy and it drives me to keep going and it makes me want to continue to build my own community. Alright. So if you're on for the ride, join us.
Helen:If not, I'll see you next week as always with a smile and a product. Here's to Justin's and my Ninja Creamy. See you next week.
