Lessons

Lesson Info

Planning a Month of Posts in One Day

We get to reveal how our business owners did, poor things, after just throwing them to the wild and say "Hey guys, you have the tools, "you have the resources, we laid it out, "how much of this work are you going to do? "Are you ready to do the heavy lifting?" I have to. Now you all walked in, and some of you guys were like "we're so exhausted," and I'm like, yeah I know, but how about you multiply your exhaustion times three, because our small owners were like on a wild ride, doing a ton of work, not consuming. They were consuming, and then after a long day of consumption, said, "Go and do a lot of work." So what I'm about to show you right now is what we told them to do, and then they came back into the studio the next day, messy hair, they're like, "Oh my god, Jasmine." We're gonna get into what happened the day after they planned all of their social posts. So, welcome back. After plenty of cups of coffee, I'm already losing my voice, we've been talking so much, staying up late, get...

ting the job done, but I'm really excited to reveal that our amazing small business owners have organized, planned, and executed a month of social media posts in one day. So, welcome back, and we're gonna get into the good stuff. Did you guys run into any roadblocks? How are you guys feeling? Like let's just dish it. And I told them, this morning, that I didn't want to talk to them. I walked in, I was like, "Hi, don't talk to me," I was totally rude, but I was like, I wanna get your real, genuine reaction on camera, and just as we sat down, Erin says, "So do you want us to say it was all wonderful?" And I was like, no I want you to speak your truth! If it sucked, tell me it sucked, let's work through that because people at home are going to feel the same way. So, we're gonna dish the goods. Let's start with Caitlyn. Alright, so my two main things is I walked into it like "Oh yeah, I got this," and then I sat down and blanked. (laughing) And so I was up all night, 'til five, working on it. I guess my questions were, I don't feel like it totally sounds like me all the time, but I know that I have to get my voice still and find that client, so I feel like that's the awkward stage, and this month will help know what's bringing in people and what's not, and then the disconnect for me was the 30-day plan, like were we supposed to follow those specific days to a T? And when I laid it out, it did make more sense, it wasn't as repetitive, but I was like, I can't fit it into this box. I like directions and following them exactly how you put them. The perfectionist, right? Yeah. Oh. And I was like, oh no, this is gonna go outside of that. Okay, so I felt like there were three questions there. Let's start with the last one first, 'cause I think that's the most important. Last night, we're out here, I'm tagging y'all on Instagram, you know, chatting it up, and I went back to your profiles, and I noticed that the one post that you had posted, which was your video to come to CreativeLive, was removed. And I thought to myself, "huh." I put it back, it was so that I could see my feeds in straight lines. (laughing) I know, I know, I'm a little OCD, I'm a little OCD. Okay. Which leads then, to, it doesn't fit in a box. Should I follow this to a T? Your biggest exercise is not gonna be about social media. It's not gonna be about captions, and it's not gonna be about photos, 'cause I woke up last night and I thought of you and I thought to myself, if Caitlyn wants to win, Caitlyn can't be Caitlyn of today. So what happens is, you are putting these parameters around yourself, and you wanna put out an image of yourself, what's wrong? What's wrong? I know, I know. I saw you, I think about you, because I see this. I see it. So, what got Caitlyn here, isn't gonna get Caitlyn to where she wants to go. And the accounts that you brought out to me are beautiful, they are curated, they are wonderful. But don't hold yourself up or compare yourself to where you are today to where somebody else has taken eight, 10, 13 years to get to. So, let it be un-perfect. Please color outside of the lines. We give you a guide to make it easy, but if it's causing stress because it's not following the pattern, then that's when you say, I know me, I know the business I wanna build, and I'm gonna get there. There are no rules. We at Social Curator want to make it easy to save you time. We don't wanna give you more stress. So, we give you a framework, you take a deep breath, and then you do you. One thing I did hear you say that I'm super super super-- Do we have tissues? I think Laura went out to get some tissues. So what's coming up for you? When I see somebody cry, I just wanna talk more, but I need to learn how to be quiet. What's coming up? That's like the story of my life. What is the story of your life? Not moving forward 'cause I'm like, "Oh what if they're thinking this?" Like I'm not good enough from being a mom to Instagram to whatever. I'll take that, thank you. See, we here at CreativeLive, we're so high-budget we use paper towels, you're gonna chafe your face, sandpaper them tears away. That was a total diss. (laughing) That is awful, I'm like no. This is amazing, totally fully absorbent. I'm glad we're laughing, I'm glad we're laughing, but what is underlying this is what's underlying the vast majority of people on social media, because there are stories that we tell ourselves. Stories that we think that people are thinking or saying or wondering, or specifically as you're starting this new business. And it's not new. You know that you have a background, you know you have clients, but for all intents and purposes, what people see outside is that it's new, and so you wonder, what are people gonna say and what are people gonna think? When I saw that the video was removed, I wasn't like, "Oh my god, she doesn't wanna support me or CreativeLive," it was, wait a minute, you have nothing there, and you took the one post that did exist that showed you in your rawest, truest form, and that's what people are craving. My thought was, "dang it, I'm gonna get this girl," Not I'm, collectively, us, me, CreativeLive, the team, we're gonna get you through the 30 days, because you have a beautifully curated feed. I wanna know what you're gonna do on day 60, I wanna know what you're gonna do on day 90, and if you don't have a perfectly curated photo shoot, what are you gonna do? Make it work. Not only get it to work but give yourself the permission to not have the most beautifully, perfect, life and feed. I think we struggle with that. That's 100% me, for sure. And I don't know why, it's just put into our brains that-- It has to be perfect. Or your caption has to be perfectly written or the grammar should be your voice but did I put that comma in the right way? Like I haven't taken an English class in years, so I don't know, how you speak or how you write, so then we just-- So then we just question ourselves. That's probably why we were up all night. We probably could have gotten done a lot faster but it was just constant like-- Oh that doesn't sound good. She would read it to me, I'd read it to her. I had once heard somebody say that perfection is a disguise for procrastination. And we never think that way. We think, "no, we wanna get it perfect," but perfection is completely subjective. What you think is perfect, I could look at and say, "that's mediocre." Something that you just put out haphazardly, I can look at that and say, "that is perfection." So what we strive for and what we want and what we aim for on social, specifically on social, is to put forward our highlight reel, when what really really really works, not even from "let's be warm and fuzzy" but a statistical perspective, analytical, what works best on social, are the imperfect, the raw, and the real. I don't want anybody watching this thinking that what they have to do is have a professional photo shoot every single month. I don't want everybody to think that they have to have the most beautiful feed. I'm arguing the complete opposite of this. All I'm trying to do is get the fire under your butt. How do I show up in a different way? How am I also empowered to still maintain my voice? So, what you hear me say very clearly, is we give you the framework, you'll break the framework, throw it away and create your own. We just wanna show you the way. If you have an "About Me" photo as seven days in a row, you do you. You know what your audience wants, so don't back away from that. I want you to write the same way that you would talk to your dream customer, the same way you would talk to your dream customer. If you're meeting with Chrissy, she literally, for some reason... She's from Colorado? Mm-hmm. If, for some reason, she happens to fly in to meet with you in person and you guys meet at the coffee shop, and you're just sitting there talking to her like, "You know, my most embarrassing moment growing up," are you gonna be talking about the time that you did X when you were 8 years old or are you gonna talk about, "When I started my business, I accidentally sent a DM "to somebody else and I didn't," something. That level of embarrassing moment, you're choosing specifically. Your level of embarrassing moment on is gonna be so different from their embarrassing moment, because their embarrassing moment can be a lot more revealing, 'cause they're going after a specific mom, like that mom struggle. It's totally different for everybody, but remember, the embarrassing moments that you share, the personal moments, the shout-outs that you give to certain people, those are coming in relation to that conversation that you're having with your dream customer at a coffee shop. Okay, that helps, 'cause I feel like I can go back now and fix some of my captions that I've left open-ended, like, "I don't know." I think we kinda reference that a few times, last night. Like, that doesn't sound like you're talking to Lacey. Isn't it good? That's so good, it's so annoying, but it's so good, 'cause you guys are working through it now, but good. Okay, so how are you guys feeling? What were some of the stuff that were coming up for you? I mean, similar things to her. We ran into more of, like I said earlier, our Instagram feed has been up until this point very quick, I'm gonna throw this together, good vibes on the beach. (laughing) Boom, done. To a paragraph. And turning that thought process into a paragraph and story-telling was-- Which I said it does-- It makes sense, and actually, I had a post today, I haven't put any of these photos to use, but I was like, "I gotta post one of 'em this morning," and I put it to use, just in my own. I put what I did all night last night to use this morning and I think it worked well. Okay, so, let me fill in the gap real quick. What I wanna take a quick second to say is that the Social Curator caption templates are longer than what most people will use, and we get that. But we, on the team, in our production and our ideology, is we'd like to give our members a little bit more so that they could take out what they don't want, but also, we understand the power of storytelling. Storytelling is the most powerful marketing mechanism. Storytelling mechanism, history-creating mechanism, that has ever existed in all of humanity. Storytelling has existed since the inception of people and human using words. So, on social media, we strongly know that storytelling is a thing that connects on social. Highway 3 is like, listen, our captions were "summer vibes," "life by the lake," "hashtag butterfly," and now we're having a whole yearbook entry like KIT, stay in touch, friends forever, and she's like, whoa this is so different. That's good. What we wanna do is we wanna push you so far in one direction that somehow, in the middle-- We talked about that, when we get home and then we put this more to use, we'll probably somehow put the two together. So, number one, we prefer to give you something a little bit longer so that you can parse out instead of feeling like, "oh, I'm not comfortable." And we did that some, with some of them for sure. Good. Second thing is that you guys are absolutely going to start changing your voice the more you guys talk about Lacey and the more that she becomes real to you, and three, what you said this morning, which is beautiful, is that, Social Curator, as we take our members through it, you become trained to, oh do I have the hook? Do I have the insight? Do I have the call to action? That's what we did. I said I want a poster in front of me while I'm doing it at home, like say, the hook, this, and the call to action. 'Cause I kept saying, what were the three things? In my brain, I need 'em like right here. We'll call it CIC, it's an acronym, C-I-C. Oh, CIC, wow, I need some sleep. No no no, no no, it's hook. It's H-I-C, so HIC. Hook, insights, call to action. I like that, following that was nice, 'cause then I'd be like, okay what's a good hook for this? Something to draw the person in so they'll click see more. And then I think, the only other thing, really, that we struggled with was just the, it's because we don't have a call to action at this point, like going home, right now. We have a lot of plans and ideas, but. The only thing we have now, so we're like, we'll go back and change some of these, but it was a question. So it was repetitive questions. Felt like we did a ton of questions. Hey, listen, y'all are getting on the bike and learning how to ride. It's okay. You guys wanna be in Tour de France over here, and I'm like, yo, just get on the tricycle. Having question is totally good, and that's okay, because remember, only a small fraction of your followers will actually see it, so that's okay, and then call to actions and questions, stuff like that, it could be not just "buy the blankets" or "buy the towels," it could be "leave a comment," "tag a friend." Yes and we did that, we tried to mix it up with the tag a friend and leave a comment stuff. But we do wanna get to more, "Check out our summer gift guide." And that's first thing on our list when we get home is to make a quick summer blog post of the summer gift guide and then we can link it to that. Do a summer gift guide, do a tropical beach packing guide for moms, a flight travel kit for three- to five-year-olds, and then what you do is you style out your bag, and you put the items in it, like y'all, we could just go for days for content. Days, I will eat that stuff up. Like their call to action, we were talking about this earlier, are you connecting that to Mailchimp? I know they're using their Shopify account, I don't obviously have Shopify, so like how am I getting there? I can create it with my Wix thing but is there an easier method to getting emails than just-- When you're first starting, specifically where you're at, 100%, there's so many more robust, amazing options, but where you are, Mailchimp is really awesome, and your first 2000 subscribers-- Is that how you do it? Like do you just hook Mailchimp? I've never done email lists. At my old business, I was like, "I'm not doing email lists." People think I'm crazy. This is fantastic. On the inside of Social Curator, so you guys will get access to the private Facebook group, we have tutorials on how to create a freebie and connect it within Mailchimp. Amy Porterfield was a contributor for how to use social media, isn't she amazing? Like she's just the boss babe, I freaking love her. She came in and was a contributor on how to create freebies, and then we had to choose your email service provider, which is what you're gonna do with Mailchimp, and then we have tutorials inside of the group of, number one, how to get your freebies, how to segment your list, all on Mailchimp, so you're fully covered in that regard. Sounds good. Okay, so, do I think that all 30 people in this room, and the 14 or 15 thousand people watching online, are gonna go home right now and post a month of content in a day? Probably not. I wanted to show it was possible. Sometimes we need people who prick us from behind to make us jump higher and run faster. I showed people again and again how I created content for a month in one day. And it wasn't enough. They said, "that works for you." And so what I decided to do is, I believe it works for anybody, and we have proof that two business owners did it for themselves in a day, and then we have proof on the inside of Social Curators that we have women who spend one day and build up two months of content. Now, we have people who spend one day a week to plan three days of content. That's fine. I have no horse in this race. You're gonna find your cadence. All I'm asking you is that in order to save you time and stress, you must create a plan. That's all. You're gonna find your cadence, and I'm gonna explain to you my cadence. Every single month, do I plan out an entire month of content? Sometimes. This month, as we're going into recording, we just came off a massive promotion for Social Curator, I then came into CreativeLive and creating a ton of content, I returned home to speak at the Girlboss Rally in Los Angeles, and then two days later, I'm leaving town. That is not whatsoever for the faint of heart, and I do not have time to just casually be strolling through my phone like, "Oh, my life is so fabulous, "I'm totally gonna be posting something." No. Going into this month, I sat down and said, this is going on this day, this is going on this day, this is going on this day. Did I shoot everything? No. So, a real-time example is, when I looked at my content calendar, I said, on day one, I have to post a photo of the pre-shoot we did in May to be featured in June, which I did. And then I said, on my content calendar, I have to show a real-time photo of me in the classroom, which we did, me here, everybody behind, from my iPhone, 'cause I wanted it on the camera, but I was like listen, I ain't got a lot of time, we're using it on my phone. Show up. Does it look funny in the feed? No, I don't think so. I think it looks just fine. Then yesterday, when we went out to lunch, I was like, oh snap, I have to do my post and it's gonna come at the end of today, JD can you bring out the camera and shoot real quick? But because I had the plan, I wasn't like, at the end of the day, "Oh my god, I didn't get what I needed." So, I plan a full month of content if I know I'm going to be very busy and I can't connect with it. At the end of the day, I'm gonna show you what I do on the regular, and it's 45 minutes a day, six days a week. Okay, now, at the end of this, what you just saw was us hoping for big things. All of us are waiting on bated breath. And I have to say that we worked with two very different types of businesses, and wherever you are in the spectrum, I need to take a second and let you know, the bigger your business is, the more successful, the more team members, the more followers you have, you're going to need a lot more concerted effort to change where the boat goes. We were working with two businesses, one was like a power motorboat, and one was like a cruise ship. It takes a lot more time to redirect a cruise ship, and so if you're watching at home and being like, "How long is this gonna take me?" It depends on the size of your business, it depends on the size of your team, and it depends on the overall strategy. So, we hoped that big stuff would happen for them, but we didn't know. The thing, as we get into the results, is that just because they had a plan and strategy did not mean we guaranteed success. And just because you go home with a plan and strategy and you plan your content and you're doing the thing, because you do that, does not mean it is a guaranteed success. Every twist of the dial is one step closer to where you want to go. Now, the only thing that we could do to measure success would be to understand engagement. Earlier in this session, we talked about how we figure out engagement, and to bring everybody up to speed, engagement is likes on a post, plus comments, not your own, comments that are left, divided by your number of followers times 100. So what we're gonna go into right now is a video gauging what we want in the future to happen in regards to growth and engagement. We're going to that now. Good news is that you guys have done the heavy lifting. You guys have done the hardest, everything else is a coaster ride down for the next 30 days. So the things that I want you to focus on: growth and engagement. So now that you have a plan, now that you have a vision, you guys are gonna tweak, and I love that, find your way, but the thing I want you to focus on is growth and engagement, and the way that you're going to get growth and engagement, is you're going to give the type of engagement that you want. And the way that the algorithm works, both on Facebook and on Instagram, is that when there's conversations, they will appear in friends of friends' feeds. People will see conversations that are happening, "Oh, who's this person that left a comment "on my friend's account?" And when you go to the explore tab, certain posts will pop up based on interest. So, there's a lot of stuff for you guys to do, so your main goal, now that you have the plan done, is go home and actually get to the work. So as we kind of focus on your average rate of growth. We talk with people, and they're like, "I want more followers, I want 1,000 followers, "I want 10,000 followers." That's great, but let's actually do a little bit of math to ground what we can actually think is healthy, good growth. Now this is not growth for a video going viral, this is not... We're talking about good, healthy growth. I believe that slow growth is good growth. This class does not promise you 1,000 followers in a month, like let's be very clear about that. So, inside of the group we have curator conversations. People are asking us questions that we kind of parlay and we scale into empowering our business owners to go deep with their business. People say, "How can I gain hundreds of new followers in one month?" Well, let's get into a little bit of math. Let's do an example with Karly. The question that I ask business owners is who are you trying to attract? This is question number one every time I have a conversation. Good news for us, we already went there. We know, Chrissy and Lacey, that's who we're trying to attract. But for Karly, she was focusing on attracting a female who's 27 years old, she's single, and this female is just starting a blog or a business, so she's getting into that branding, social media, education space. I said, great. I said, how do you want this person to feel? The question that I asked you guys yesterday is, what do you want your followers saying about your accounts? Do you guys see this pattern of like, this is the way my brain works, this is the framework, this is what we're laying it. So we want people to say, what is that? And Karly defined that as, "When she lands on my site I want her to feel excited "to see a starting point to grow the blog/business "of her dreams, and know that I sell courses "on blogging and branding." Cool, now we know who we're targeting, now we know what we want them to feel, let's get into this. I said, what's gonna make this a win for you? She says, "Over the next 30 days, "what I would consider a win on Instagram would be, "number one, increase my followers to 3,000, "that would be a 500-follower increase, "and number two, increase the number of meaningful comments "on my photos." Cool. But now let's ground this, let's just see what's actually possible. The average Instagram follower growth rate is 3.2% per month. Now it's just math, we can dive into it. According to DB Influencer, follower growth rate is a little on the slower end. Anything from no growth to 2.5% growth is poor, somewhere in the middle, is 2.5-5%. That's where the vast majority of people are residing, between 2.5 and 5%. Good growth, or very good growth rate, these are people who are creating content, brand new, on their own, on the daily, getting stuff to go viral, you're hovering around that 5-7%. That's for people who are just like next-level growth. For us, we're gonna aim between at 2.5 and 5%. On average, 3.2%. That's gonna be the number that we are gonna be focusing on. So, I said Karly, how many Instagram followers do you have now? She has 2,515. The average growth rate according to 3.2% would be 80 followers. Her predicted followers by the end of the month would be 2,595. We miss her goal, but she pulled out a goal out of thin air. Unless you were doing something so massively different, then 3.2% is where we're gonna grow. Makes sense. Okay. But, we're not talking about what y'all have learned. You guys could have a slightly higher growth rate, so we're gonna get into that in a second. Now, average Facebook growth rate is .64% per week. So, if we use this type of math, I went through and quickly ran some numbers. Projected growth rate for Highway would be 84,149. Now these are based on the numbers that I had when we first started connecting with each other. I grabbed that, used these numbers. Facebook would be 24,223. Now this growth rate, this is consisting growth rate for y'all, that would be projected. But you guys have learned a lot more. You guys have a lot more strategy, you have a stronger foundation. So I would love if you guys can kind of marinate for a little bit and say, huh, what do you want? Like what do we really want? Do I think you guys can get to 150,000? Anything is possible, but, can we beat this number? And if we can, how much do you think we could beat it by? So, give you a couple seconds for that. For projected growth for Indigo Tide Market, here's the thing, there's no shame in this, this is beautiful. No, I was like, oh good I can work towards this goal. I can handle this growth! I can take a breath, yeah. Okay so, just basic on math, will be average growth rate would get 10 followers, and then on Facebook, you would have three people like your page. We know we're beating that, we know we're beating that. I'm a firm believer in dreaming big, dreaming huge, but having your feet on the ground, too. What we have in our business is "good, better, best" goals. Right? So what I would love for you guys to do is figure out some good, better, best goals. We're gonna give you guys a couple minutes, I don't want you guys to get stressed out, but what would it look like for you guys to dream big? So our good, better, best, and let's talk about how many likes would we like per post, on average? How many comments do we want? What kind of growth rate are we looking for? So we're gonna give you guys about two or three minutes, just kinda brainstorm, and this is only to measure how effective you are when we come back, the 30-day. So, what we just did 30 days ago, or it's been 30 days and some change but we only measured it between 30 days. So in a matter of 30 days, we had projected growth rate for Indigo Tide Market. This is where we started, 30 days ago, we had said she was going to have 10 Instagram followers and three Facebook followers on her Facebook page. That was what was projected. The actual growth rate in 30 days was 272 followers on Instagram and 11 followers on Facebook. (audience cheering) That's why I don't ever want somebody to say, "I don't have enough followers." "It's impossible for me to be seen." We have somebody who proved that 272 people saw her account and said, "I want to follow, and I wanna learn more from you." But here's the frickin' crazy thing. She got three new clients in 30 days. Now, I wanna be 100% disclosure, she was fostering a client prior to her coming into CreativeLive, but he ended up closing the deal when she got home. Two clients, brand new, came to her within the 30 days and hired her for her services, and some of her previous clients had said, "Can you start managing our social media? "Because yours looks really great." This is 30 days. This is from a girl who sat on a couch and said "I'm so worried that it's not gonna be perfect, "that people aren't going to look at my business "and think that I can do for them "if I am not doing for myself." Rachel Miles said, "Caitlyn, you are all of us." Kasha: "All hearts and Caitlyn. "You are more than enough." Joy: "Caitlyn, you are not alone. "I am right here beside you. "It's hard comparing yourself to everybody else's "highlight reel, can I get a tissue too?" So, I am so happy that there was somebody who was okay in her own skin to say "I don't feel okay." Because she vocalized what so many of us struggle with at the same time. So what I am so proud, beyond all else, forget the 8000% growth that she experienced. That what she just did is carve out a path for people to say, "Sometimes I don't feel okay, "and in 30 days, I can have 8000% growth." Clap that on up. Yes, yes! Big shout-out to projected growth for Highway 3. Now they already started, this is their cruise liner, right? They have what most people want, right? We're like, dang girls, where are you going from here? 84,149. That was projected, and projected Facebook was 24,223. I am so impressed, because they beat this projected growth rate. They've gone up, in 30 days, to 84,800 followers on Instagram, and look at the jump on Facebook y'all. This is where we thought their mommas were to begin with. They didn't pick up .64%, they picked up thousands. Over 27,000 people, now, in 30 days, had increased on their Facebook page. Yeah, no kidding. That was huge, that was huge, that was huge. Remember when I started and I said, imagine having a dead Facebook page where nobody's talking back to you, you're not getting any engagement, and then on the first day back, you get 15 likes and 10 comments within an hour of posting. That was a very clear, universal indication on Facebook saying "there's still action here," for them. Is it for your business? I don't know. But what we can say is that for them, they grew the fastest on a platform that they weren't even leveraging. What does that say moving forward?