The Socialize Forecast - 6/11/24 Follow Trains
Welcome to the socialized forecast, June 11th, Tuesday, where we take you through the trends and the content ideas and all of the nuggets so that you can have a nice easy week of creating. Before I get started, I wanna make sure I address something. And instead And also And also, how this strategy would impact your own experience on curating your own feed, whether it's on Instagram or TikTok or Facebook, whatever platform you're on. So the the topic is follow for follow. And this idea of a growth train, like, you follow me, I'll follow you back, and then we have teams of people who are vying for you to follow other people.
Helen:It's coming up a lot in my comment section, and I'm I'm a little frustrated by it. And a few times, I've actually replied back, this is not a good strategy. I mean, I really need to make a video on why it's not a good strategy so that I can post that as a reply to the comment. But I wanna talk about it here because I know I try to share strategy tips and I try to share updates that little nuggets that will help you along the way. And I presume a lot of times that people listening or reading the newsletter already know some of these things.
Helen:And then I start to realize, you know, I have new people that have come over to the newsletter and the podcast. So I should recap some of these things to make sure that you all understand how these platforms work with the algorithm. So let's start with this idea. When you are watching a video and it's and you watch it all the way to the end. So let's say it's a cute puppy video or an emotional video of somebody sharing a breakup story.
Helen:You will notice that shortly thereafter you watch this video all the way to the end. A few scrolls later, you're gonna see more whether it's puppy videos if you were watching that or more emotional videos as if that's what you're watching. And that's the nature of how the algorithm learns what you like. Also, obviously, if you comment and you like and you hit the like button or you save or you watch it more than once, but watch time is a high, high metric for how you're going to be fed continuing content. So it's really great if you want to feel good and you say, oh, I really wanna have I want, my feed is so negative.
Helen:If you wanna change how your feed is and the things that you're seeing, stop on a video that's something really good, some a good vibe. Watch it all the way through, and then you'll see that your feed will start to sway in that direction. It is probably one of my favorite things about social media because then I realized when the people are talking about all I ever see on social media is negativity, I know, well, that's because you're watching those videos till the end. And so you're receiving more of that type of vibe in your feed. So if you're not aware of that, that is how the platform works.
Helen:But let's talk about even further why this follow for follow strategy doesn't work. I've I'm getting it a lot and I see it a lot and it's and it's it's very debilitating. And it's debilitating not just to you, but it's also to the person that is requesting you do the follow. So it's a two way debilitation process. Is that even a word, debilitation?
Helen:I don't know. But it's a two way street to wrecking both of your experiences. So if you say every time someone follows me, I'm gonna follow them back. But if not content that you're really interested in, you're just trying to be nice. And I did that in the beginning.
Helen:A lot of times I'd be like, oh, I gotta follow this person back. I feel bad. If you feel bad and you do that follow back and that person's content isn't really something you're interested in, you're doing them a disservice. You're doing yourself a disservice because now you're gonna see content coming into your feed that you're not really interested in. So it's gonna wreck your experience and then you're gonna probably scroll by it because you followed.
Helen:You already gave the person to follow, so you feel good about that. But now you're really not watching their videos. And if you're not watching their videos and you're not commenting or watching them all the way through or liking and and engaging, if you're not interested, you're wrecking that person's experience because now they have a follower that's uninterested disinterested in their content. So this whole idea of the way to growth is to follow everyone back. Now let's take it to yet another step forward.
Helen:Each platform has a limit to how many people you can follow, and they do that so that you're not spam following tons of people because there's a let's say somebody came to you and said, we'll pay you 50, you know, 50¢ for every person you follow because they're trying to build, sell followers. All they they make a block on how many people you can follow so that you can't do that to accounts. You can't spam follow people and and and make that experience, I guess, inauthentic for the social media platform. So because there's a limit, and I know that on TikTok, the limit is you can follow only 10,000 people. So let's say you get to a point and you're follow follow follow follow and you suddenly have a viral video.
Helen:So you're following everybody back, all your new followers. Follow back follow back and then you reach your plateau of 10,000 followers. What happens to the followers that come now? The the 11,000, the 12,000, and you can't follow them back. You've you've kind of wrecked your mantra because now you're a person that promised I'm gonna follow for follow, and now you can't because you're limited.
Helen:So there are so many different reasons why it's a bad growth strategy. So if someone is trying to convince you to do it, or you're trying to get into a thing where, if I do this for you, you do that for me. It's just not good in the long run. You want to create your social media experience to make it good for you. So don't wreck it by hopping on to these trendy or whatever they are kind of scams really of this follow for follow train.
Helen:Alright. I'm gonna get off the soapbox about that. I just felt that it was important to address because I don't think a lot of new people on these apps realize what a debilitating process that is and that it can be to your own social media platform. So don't do it. Follow the people you wanna follow.
Helen:Make the experience great for you. And if you are a person who feels bad, I think you have to figure out a way to move past that. And I often think I should go back to because I think in the beginning, I was doing the same thing. I was thinking, oh, I gotta follow this person back. Oh, it's a new follower.
Helen:They're so nice. Let me follow them back. I probably don't even see these people's content. So I'm not being fair to them either. I just don't have the time to go back and figure out who I should unfollow, if I'm being honest.
Helen:But if you have the time, maybe curate your feed and and try and curate your following your following feed to make sure that you are doing your service to yourself by getting the content that you want. Okay, let's move on to the trends for today. The first one is things I'd rather do then. And I love this one because the person who did it was, talking about post graduation. But I think this this works for a lot of things.
Helen:It's a fun trend to show off something that you really don't wanna talk about. So this creator talks about the things that she'd rather do than talk about her post graduation plans. But other creators could be talking about, are talking about things that they'd rather do than, for example, download a dating app or then go back to high school or then, you know, go back to whatever the go back to college, whatever the things are. I think you can also do this. Think about people who have just gotten engaged.
Helen:Maybe they don't wanna talk about when they're planning their wedding yet. There's that option. Some maybe there's people who have just started a bit you've just started a business and your friends and family know about it. So they're constantly asking you about it, and you're really not prepared to talk about it or you're too overwhelmed to talk about it. So things I'd rather do then.
Helen:What you're gonna do is post a picture of yourself with that title, things I'd rather do then talk about my post grad plans. And then on the next slide, it's the to do the do the to do list? It's the list of the things that this person would rather do, and some of the things are absurd. She'd rather eat a spoonful of mayonnaise than talk about post graduation plans, for example. So she listed a whole bunch of absurd things she'd rather be doing than talking about that.
Helen:That's a really fun one. And if you're creative and funny I guess Julie should do this one. I'm not funny enough for some of these trends. So I gotta do the the nice, happy, upbeat ones, but I can't always figure I can't always be funny. I know.
Helen:She says I'm funny, but I don't think I'm funny. Alright. Now let's go to the next one, which is moments of love. This one, I can wrap my head around. Every summer, we need to embrace audio and trends to so that we can make fun videos showing off some of our summer moments, And this audio is a perfect one for that.
Helen:And you can make a video about moments of love. So this one works great for weddings, and it's wedding season. Amazing. Actually, I should mark this one for my next wedding when I do the wedding video for my niece, upcoming in August. So this is a good song for that to recap a wedding, or you can recap moments from a vacation.
Helen:You can recap moments. I love this when you when you take in a trend that's meant for love, boyfriend, relationship, and then you spin it into your niche, your business. So it could be moments of love for what you're doing in your in your business. And Tammy Nelson, who's our next guest, can talk about moments of love for when she started her her business of fidget rings and how it's going. There's so many different ways you can take this and spin it with the trend.
Helen:I always like to call out realtors once in a while because I get a lot of people going, I don't have any ideas for real estate content. This is a perfect one. Moments of love for a house that just came on the market that you're you're either representing or selling or just sold. There's so many opportunities to take any any trend and turn it to your niche. As long as you think outside the box, you have to just put your brain outside of the oh, this is for a relationship.
Helen:It doesn't have to be. It could be a relationship with something else. It could be a relationship with food, a relationship with your children instead of a romantic partner. So just think about going pushing yourself, push that net, break the glass ceiling and and get out of the mindset that you can't do a trend because it doesn't because you don't have a partner or a boyfriend or whatever it is that the trend is requiring. Move past it.
Helen:Alright. The next one is this is so funny. Grab only the important things. I haven't even seen this trend. Julie found this one on her f y p.
Helen:It's a fun trend that's been taking over the small business or the corporate side of TikTok, which is what you would grab from your office if it was on fire. And people are finding humor and grabbing the funniest things. 1 person's grabbing the snacks or the coffee maker. You've got, you know, things you've got a lot of opportunity here for very simple group fun. I'm thinking of Lisa Sharefax for you.
Helen:Whatever. Share I never know how to say her her name. Share anyway, the Sharefax Lisa. If you're hearing this, you should do this with your company. It's a fun one to do with with corporate people who are I can see, you know, working at whether it's a bank or a a shop, a retail shop, let's say people that are working in in an office, what are they gonna grab and take with them?
Helen:There's so many fun things you can you can think of. So and especially if you have funny people at work that don't always wanna be on camera, but they're the ones with the great ideas. So grab one of those people and see if you can think of some fun ideas to make this one. I will be looking forward to that. So tag me so I can come and show you some love because I don't have a corporation job a corporate job where I can do that one.
Helen:Maybe it'll just me be me running out of my apartment multiple times with the things as if I'm different people. So Helen, the accountant, walking out. Helen, the producer. Helen, the director. That'd be fun kinda funny.
Helen:Maybe I should do it. It's all about time. You know, sometimes I have ideas where I wanna do some of these trends, and then the week goes by and I didn't get to it. So maybe maybe one of these one of these upcoming trends I can do this week. Alright.
Helen:Next up is just a mention of our expert workshop which is coming up on June 17th. And Tammy from my conquering the fidget rings that I was just showing you, she is going to come on and talk about how she exploded on social media, launched her well, how she launched her business first and managed to make her name for herself on social media because she is all over my f y p. I don't know about you guys, but maybe because she's a friend and she's and I did one collab with her recently, but it's like I see her videos constantly, which is fantastic. So she's doing something right. Let's let's hear what she has to say, what she can offer us in terms of expertise.
Helen:I love learning from these experts. Everybody has a different skill set. And if we all come together and we share the skill sets, we can be greater than the individuals. We can be better. So I wanna bring them all to you so that you can learn from everybody because I don't have all the answers.
Helen:And I wanna bring to you people who have answers outside of what I can offer. And our next workshop after this one is going to be, I mentioned already, a talent agent who represents influencers. So I'm very excited for that one. So we have a really nice batch of experts lined up. So tune in, sign up, join.
Helen:The reason to join live is that we do have a really good camaraderie feeling of the workshop, and it turns into a podcast later. But in that moment, we're answering questions. We see people in the chat. It feels like it's like a live sort of a live recording or a live show, and we're able to get feedback. And I love it because it really helps us to know what if we're hitting striking a chord with someone or if there's something that we haven't touched on that we can we can answer.
Helen:So if you come there live, you can get your question answered. And they're not heavily attended, so it's not like you're coming in and there's no chance of having your quest question answered. So I urge you to to join 1. Let's talk original content ideas. First one is to share a pro tip.
Helen:And I am inspired because a couple of, because a couple of weeks ago, I've I kept seeing over and over a creator who always ends the end of her sentences and cuts off the words. So she tightens up her content, but in error, she tightens it up and takes off the ends of her words. So all of her content doesn't finish the sentence, and it never sounds like it is finit. Okay? And it is a pet peeve of mine.
Helen:And I listened to it, and I've tried wanted to figure out how the heck do I teach how not to do this in a tutorial without showing someone as an example? And I decided, okay, I'm gonna use myself as the example. So I recorded a video and I edited it, making the mistakes at the end, and then I show how to fix it so that you do not show those mistakes. So that is me sharing a pro tip. And I thought of it ages ago, but again, I've just finally gotten around to filming it because I didn't wanna use another creator's video to show an example, at least not without their permission.
Helen:I don't need to throw anyone under the bus unnecessarily. That is not what I'm here for. I'm here to help you, not to poke fun or show you what you're doing wrong. I want to show you how to do things better. So if you have a pro tip that is in your niche, share your expertise.
Helen:Maybe somebody outside your niche would find it really helpful. It could be a simple tip or a complex tip. And then just taking the time to explain it from your perspective could really help your audience. What's next? Answer FAQs about yourself.
Helen:Oh, my God. I kind of like that if you use the word FAQs or the text FAQs about me on the text on screen. I hadn't really thought about that when I first read this one. So if you get a lot of the same question, which I I was getting a lot of that question, how do you know all this? And I get it all the time.
Helen:But I think it would be funny if I made a video and specifically made it about FAQs. So FAQs about the mother ship, and then I answer some of them all in one video. I think that's a good one. That's that's I'm gonna put that one on the list for myself and make sure I make that happen. So you can talk to the camera.
Helen:You can make a photo carousel. You can do this however you wanna do it. You can do it as a a text on screen list and just answer them in voice over. So you can have the text show up and you could be just answering with your voice over instead of being on camera. Lots of different creative ways to do it because text on screen does does keep people engaged.
Helen:So maybe that's a strategy. The other one is, the third idea this for this week is childhood favorites. So tapping into something nostalgic, thinking of some of your favorite things from childhood, and you could recreate maybe a form favorite food or that you remember from childhood or an outfit, something that you might have forgotten about. And if you really, really think hard about this, like, think about your childhood, maybe you can call up something that you might have just be might have forgotten about. It might be latent and it's back there.
Helen:You didn't totally forget, but you forgot recently about it. So maybe think about that. And you could also pull up some throwback photos and videos of yourself and recreate the moment and show what you did. I love that one. I'm gonna have to think if I have a childhood favorite that I can share.
Helen:It's my childhood is further away from than a lot of people. So it's harder for me to pull up just the content. This is the beauty of me being a mom who was a content creator back in the day because I was taking pictures and videos of my kids. So my millennial kids and Julie younger than millennial, whatever that is, Gen z, she has the receipts. She can come into my photo boxes or even into my my, digital photo files and find things, and she can recreate her memories.
Helen:So I've done a good service to my kids as as a content creator. And before before it was a thing. And let's talk tutorials. This week, I noticed and I noticed these things. And sometimes I'll be oblivious to a new feature and I'm suddenly I'm like, somebody will point it out and I'm like, yeah, that was there the whole time.
Helen:I didn't even notice it. But this one, I noticed the minute it popped up. When I was commenting on a video, underneath the comment, there used to be that little circle with the repost. So you could comment and repost at at once. And now it changed to the little bubble says add to story.
Helen:So you can make a comment, tap the little add to story, hit the enter button or the send button, and it puts that video on your story with a little with the comment above it. And it's a quick way to do a story post. So I've been using it consistently. I'm just like I'm I'm powering it out. I'm like, every time I have a story posted on the socialized TikTok I'm sorry.
Helen:Every time I have a video TikTok posted on the socialized TikTok account, I'm sharing it to the story with a comment for a couple of reasons. Number 1, I want people to know that the socialized TikTok is not somebody stealing my content. It is our TikTok. Julie and I have a TikTok together where we post socialized content about the newsletter, about the podcast, and such. So I I had a few people saying, oh, someone's stealing your content, and they would tag me in the videos.
Helen:And I'm like, no. That's my other account. And so now I wanna make sure that that's obvious. So I'm making a comment, tapping add to story, and making sure it shows up on the mothership story so that people know this is also my other account. So that's one nice one to use, and you can share your own videos to your story with a comment as well.
Helen:So it's a little bit like that Instagram thing where you can share your own story to sorry. You could share your own video to your story. And this way, you can maybe send people there if they haven't seen it on there for you page. So give it a shot because I do like the feature. Believe it or not, Sometimes new features on TikTok, I don't love.
Helen:The other one, and also, by the way, while I'm talking about that feature on TikTok, let me just say that is a great strategy on Instagram. If you're not using that strategy on Instagram where you're sharing your hosts, you're sharing your reels to your story, you're missing out. Because a lot of times, the feed is not feeding people your reels. But the story is where your loyal followers are capture are catching everything that you're posting. So you can create engagement because maybe your loyal followers aren't watching the feed.
Helen:They're watching your stories, and they're not seeing it in the feed. But now that counts as a view on the reel. So then it helps your reel get more views. I'm gonna explain that a little bit again to make sure it was clear. When you have if you post a regular post or a or a Reel in your Instagram, and then you hit the little arrow button underneath and you share it to your story.
Helen:The people who are viewing it on the story, those views count as views on the reel. So process that for a minute, because you can almost double your views. If you post it on your story and those same people are seeing it on your feed, that does count as 2 views. So what the heck? Double up your double your money, double your fund kind of thing.
Helen:That's an old commercial. But post this in the story and see if you get some extra views on it. And also, it'll increase engagement so that it will get sent to more people in the feed. That was bonus info. The second tutorial I will add here into I will add into this podcast and also it is in the newsletter is how to link a video in a comment.
Helen:A lot of people ask it. They think that you can click and link a video in the comment, but in fact, it needs to be done by making a video reply to the comment. And I make this very clear in the tutorial, so I'm not gonna elaborate here, but you can click on that tutorial and learn how to link a video in your comments. Hooray. Those are my updates for this week.
Helen:I will ramble a little on some one other thing that's a little bit important, which is I have been I have been lucky enough because of my TikTok following to have lots of opportunities coming my way. People are finding me on TikTok, and they're hiring me for production projects where I normally would not be working on that particular project. So our this newsletter is designed to help you to get the tools so that you can potentially grow your account to enough, and you don't have to have millions of followers to be discovered and find out. I told you on LinkedIn, I post I've been posting consistently on LinkedIn to a minimal number of views there. And I had a very important VIP from a company say to me, oh, I I love I feel like I know you because of your videos, and she's hiring me for projects because of it.
Helen:So it doesn't matter the size of your following. It matters if you're sharing your expertise. And when you do that, you even if you're not monetizing on the platform, I'm not making a lot of money on the creator program, whatever the heck the thing is called now, the creativity beta program. I'm not making much money on that at all. I don't have views that qualify.
Helen:I don't try and make long videos just to get more views and so I can get more money. I just don't pay attention to it. I post what I wanna post. And if that money I consider that money, you know, bonus money, but I don't wanna be obsessing on that because then I'll be posting for the wrong reasons. So I have used social media to increase my credibility to have more opportunities come my way.
Helen:And that is the purpose of the brand, the socialized brand, Hello Socialize, this newsletter, the podcast, this podcast, and why we're here trying to build it because you can be successful in your niche and monetize your life in a different way than you ever thought possible because of social media. So it's not about selling necessarily or sponsorships necessarily. There's the opportunity is just wider. The tentacles are wider. And you have so much there's so much potential.
Helen:So I just want to make sure you have the tools, because the first thing is being able to use your voice in video and figure out how the videos are going to portray what you want them to say about you. And that doesn't mean you have to be speaking. I I wanna be clear. How you edit videos, it could be music videos with titles that talk about what your expertise is. You can open up doors.
Helen:I'm just gonna I'm just gonna leave it at that. And I'm gonna wish you a happy Tuesday and the rest of the week. And I'll see you Friday. So thanks for listening because I don't know where you are if you're in your car, if you're in your kitchen, if you're laying in bed, wherever. I'm with you.
Helen:And I feel that I'm with you. And I I'm just happy that you take the time to be here with me. Don't forget to leave a review if you had fun listening. And if you have comments and questions, please submit them because I love to answer questions, especially on Friday. So hit that little submit question button on the newsletter and send me something.
Helen:I dare you so that I can answer it on Friday. Okay? Thank you. See you soon. Have a great one.
Helen:Bye.
