A Social Strategy for Real Life from Katie Brinkley

The pressure to post more and more on social media can drive creators to exhaustion. Katie Brinkley, CEO of Next Step Social and Tilt Publishing author of The Social Shift, shared her tips for getting more engagement with fewer social media posts at Content Entrepreneur Expo.

Here are five things you can do to find success without devoting all your time to social media:

1. Make a bio that resonates: It’s too easy to write your bio or profile on social media and forget it, but it helps people determine who you really are and what you do. It’s critical to keep your bio current with what you do the best and who you serve. Tell people why they should explore your social media and other content.

2. Engage your audience directly: “The DMs are where the magic happens,” Katie says. Having direct conversations with your audience or even personalizing one or two messages goes a long way toward getting them to take your preferred action, whether that’s buying a book or simply tuning into a podcast. 

Moving the interaction from public comments to direct messages (without them being dismissed as annoying spam) can be as simple as implementing a few calls to action. For example, rather than including a link to your latest podcast episode in the comments of your Instagram post, tell your audience to comment something like “PODCAST” to receive a link to it in their DMs. Even easier than that, comment on people’s Instagram Stories to show up instantly and credibly in their DMs.

3. Follow a four-post framework: Katie offers a simple model for turning one topic into four engaging posts that guide your audience toward your end goal. The first post’s purpose is awareness. You identify the pain point or problem your audience has. Design it to be seen by people passing by and ask nothing from them. The second post elaborates on the problem. 

The third is the community post. It explains how you have overcome this problem or guided someone else through it. The fourth and final post asks your audience to potentially leave social media and take the action you set out for an end goal, such as joining an email list, consuming your main content, or even purchasing something.

4. Don’t mix platforms: Each social media platform has a unique culture and its own ways of creating content. Don’t resort to making one post you use for every platform, or you will never get the most out of each one. For example, the best way of getting non-followers’ attention on Instagram might be through video, but on Facebook, cleaner one-sentence graphics are more popular. 

Knowing who your audience is for each platform is critical as well. Different audience segments may follow you on different platforms, so make sure your content is tailored to the platform and audience.

5. Use AI to add to your content. If you have a podcast or a live show, use Capsho or another generative AI tool to help formulate written content, like your show notes or a LinkedIn article. It even learns your voice so that your written content reads like your recorded content. 

For authors or bloggers who might be a little camera shy, Syllaby helps creators get started with video content by writing draft scripts or providing clones to read them. Chat GPT and similar tools can serve well to generate ideas, and can be especially useful because they can be trained to tailor your voice to specific social media platforms. 

How do you do social media in your content business? Reply to this email or tag us on social #TiltPublishing.

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