Welcome to episode 404 of Hit the Mic with The Stacey Harris.
I’m super duper excited ’cause we’re going to do the traditional, first Tuesday of the month episode where we’re talking about three things you need to know right now. We’re going to talk about Pinterest. We’re going to talk about planning ahead, and we’re going to talk a little bit about Instagram. I’m excited. It’s going to be a good one. So stick with me.
Speaking of Instagram which we’re going to do a little bit later this month, the month of June 2018. We are rocking and rolling through a live version of the Rock Star Guide to Instagram. The Rock Star Guide to Instagram, if you don’t know, is a six-module program that lives inside of Hit the Mic Backstage. It is a full front to back course all about Instagram. I know. It’s shocking. I told you guys, I’m very transparent with my naming, so we started on Friday. Our first live call is tomorrow, Wednesday. Each Wednesday of this month, we will meet live in our VIP lounge on Facebook where we will do a video, question and answer style. I will also be bringing a little bit of additional content, some extra love to the Instagram Guide, through those calls. We’re going to do some profile reviews. It’s going to be a good, good time, and you want to make sure that you’re there and a part of it. So, HitTheMicBackstage.com is where you go, my love, to join us. Does that sound good? You’re going to do it right now? Okay. Go do it. I’ll wait here.
Yay. You’re a member now. I’m excited. I’m going to pretend like in that three milliseconds you totally joined. So yeah, join us for that. It’s going to be good one. Lots of cool stuff coming up through the second half of this year.
If you want to take Instagram a little more seriously through the second half of this year, be sure to get your butt back there. Cool? Cool.
Let’s get started. What do you say? I’m excited. I’m always excited. It’s a thing.
Pinterest.
Do you see how I just whooshed right in there. If Pinterest is a part of your social media marketing strategy, cool. If it’s not, here’s what I want to talk about. You can absolutely make Pinterest part of your social media marketing strategy without it becoming a humongous time suck.
I get a lot of questions about like, “Oh, well do I really need to add Pinterest? I just feel like it’s going to take so much time, and I got to monitor comments and blah blah blah.” I want you to remove from your brain space that Pinterest is a social media network because it is, technically speaking, but if you are thinking about the steps you’ll need to take to manage it, I want you to think more like SEO. More like a search engine. Because really, that’s where Pinterest is helpful.
There are still comments. They take forever to find how to leave a comment, and I know that because honestly, I looked to make sure just for this podcast, because I wasn’t totally sure there was still comments, but they’re, legit totally, is still comments. But no one leaves them, guys, and you don’t need to worry about them.
Instead, what I want you to worry about is putting together really quality graphics or photos or whatever it is you’re going to use, a visual. We’ll just say really quality visuals and some solid keyword-driven descriptions. That’s where your bread and butter is.
And here’s the deal, guys. This does not mean that you have to be doing this every single day. I’m going to give you tools to make it easier.
So I actually manage my Pinterest stuff through eClincher where I schedule everything else. Are you starting to see why I like eClincher so much? I can do all of the things with it, guys. If you’re not yet using it, here’s a link to eClincher. Yes, it’s an affiliate link ’cause I love me some eClincher. It’s fantastic, but the best tool for the job is the one you’re going to use.
So some other really great options: Tailwind and Board Booster. I really like both of these tools. Tailwind is more attractive than Board Booster, but I have heard some people who really dove in deep in using Board Booster and got some epic results because of the way their system works and sort of re-pinning things for you. It’s something that I have played with a little bit, but we are actually looking at rolling out for a couple of clients because, again, there’s an ability in there to almost create a queue where things are re-pinned.
I’m a big fan of using whatever tool you’ll actually use though. So, eClincher, Tailwind, Board Booster, there are other ones, I’m sure of it, but those are three I want you to get started looking at if this is something you’re looking at.
And here’s the deal, guys. You’re just going to load that sucker up and let it roll. You do not have to be going in and pinning things every single day. And guess what? Yes, you can still 100% pin other people’s content and other things. All of these tools will give you an option to save it to that tool in sort of the queue or kind of like Buffer does where you find something online, and you add it to Buffer, and it shares it later. It’s the same thing.
In fact, I think Buffer Premium, you can do this with Pinterest as well, if I remember correctly. It’s been a while since I got into Buffer, but that’s neither here nor there.
So, again, you do not need to be doing this every single day. What I, instead, want you to focus your time on is scheduling a little bit of time each week, twice a month, once a month, whatever it is you want to do, whatever works for your flow, schedule that stuff out, fill up your queues and let it roll.
Again, this does not have to be something that you’re going in and engaging with every single day, so don’t stress about that. However, this can drive traffic to your site, to your products. If you are somebody who sells physical products, then do it. Okay? I just want to … I recently read this article that Sprout Social put out, which is another social media marketing tool I really, really love, but for most solopreneurs is maybe a bit heavy, and it is missing some things. I used to use it. I really liked it, but it’s missing some things like recycled content that I actually use quite a bit. So I don’t use it, but it’s another great tool, but they also have a really fantastic blog, and they actually just put out a blog around Pinterest. I’ll link to it in the show notes. It’s called Five Steps to Pinterest Marketing Strategy to Dominate 2018, and it’s a great article.
But what I wanted to mention was they included some stats from the PEW Research Center, and this is why I wanted to share this stuff with you ’cause here are some numbers, some real live numbers. I want you to understand who Pinterest users are because all the time, I hear that they’re not, guys, and here’s the deal. 16% of men are Pinterest users. 41% of women are Pinterest uses. 84% of Pinterest users are 18 to 64 with a pretty even split among the age groups, and 31% of the users are from suburban areas. So, if any of those things describe a part of your ideal client, then yeah, maybe pay attention to it. Okay?
The last thing I wanted to talk about was this. 90% of weekly pinners use Pinterest to make purchase decisions. This is what I’m talking about with physical products, guys. People are getting on Pinterest, ready to buy things, so make sure you’re using this. 55% of people who use the network are using it to shop. People are using it to buy stuff. Make sure you are a part of that conversation. It doesn’t take a ton of work. So that’s really what I want you to look at is where can you add Pinterest to your strategy, to your time because it’s relevant. It’s valuable, and it doesn’t have to be something that takes a huge amount of your time. It doesn’t have to be something that is eating up hours and hours of your day, okay? All right.
I spent longer on that than I anticipated, so we’re going to move it forward here.
Social Media Planning for Your Holiday Sales and Promos
Number two, and this actually, for some of you, may very well be linked with the Pinterest conversation, but if you are planning a holiday sale, if you are planning some holiday time off in the fourth quarter of this year, I want you to start making those plans now. If you want to have a Black Friday sale, a Cyber Monday sale, a back-to-school sale, a Christmas sale, a Thanksgiving sale, a Hanukkah sale, whatever it is that fits your audience, your brand, don’t start thinking about that in September, October and November. Start thinking about it now because I want you to start setting up the social media support, the email support, the content support. You’re making sure your sales systems and your funnels are in place for it.
Do not wait because when you call me, or you email me, or you Facebook message me, or you send me a smoke signal in October or in the first week of November and tell me you want to run a Black Friday sale, I will laugh at you. I love you, but I will laugh at you because it’s crazy hard to do that, certainly with any kind of return and success. So, if you are planning for something special, make sure you’re making those plans now.
Now, a lot of you know I take December off every year. Guess when I’m starting to figure out what’s going to happen then? I’m figuring it out right now. In fact, we’re actually going to test something this December, and we’re already figuring it out because I’m thinking about this now, and I’ll let you in on what we’re going to test, so maybe we’ll talk about it and how it went, but for the first time this year, for the month of December, there’s not going to be brand new, purely new episodes of this show because I’m going to keep Hit the Mic TV going, so that’s where we’ll have the new content.
What we’re going to do is I’m going to be repurposing, re-sharing, updating, and re-releasing some of our most popular end-of-the-year kind of episodes ’cause in the years past, we’ve talked a lot about your end of year planning and stuff like that, so that’s what we’re going to release in December is four sort of updated and repackaged episodes from the first five years of this show.
I know that because I already know what my content and time off looks like, and the reason I know that now is because I’m going to need to start prepping some of that very soon.
I start prepping my December content in August because I’m not around as much in December. Now, I will keep Hit the Mic TV live happening on Thursdays at 2 p.m. We are going to keep doing that, so I will be around a little bit, but I don’t want to have to worry about the podcast too, and there’s a ton of really great episodes, and guess what? Nine times now, we’ve talked about how to do your end of the year planning. I don’t need to tell you guys that stuff again.
So, that’s what we’re doing, but I know that because I’m doing this planning now. We are looking at potentially doing a Black Friday special, a Black Friday promo. We’re actually going to rock it out for the week of Thanksgiving. It’s not going to be something I currently offer. It’s going to be something that’s exclusively available that week. I don’t do discounts very often. I have occasionally done like a random coupon code only to my email community and Backstage members, but I don’t want to do that kind of sales, so we’re going to actually have an exclusive bundle that’s going to be available the week of Thanksgiving.
I’m putting that together and planning that now because I don’t want to have to be trying to figure it out while everybody else is already running their sales. So figure out what that looks like. Figure out what you want to do, and figure it out now.
The thing I want to close up on is talking about Instagram.
We’re talking about Instagram in Backstage a lot this month because we’ve got the Rockstar Guide to Instagram that we are working through.
The big question I’m getting, and we’ve done on episode on this, so I’m going to point you to that episode is stories and where they sort of fit in your overall plan, remember that your stories are a massively valuable way to connect, to have conversations. I get so much more quality engagement on my … I’m laughing because I think about some of the kinds of engagement I get on my posts that just go to my profile, and a lot of it’s robots and spam and like thumbs up emojis. It’s like, great. Or, it’ll be a text quote graphic, and it’s like, “Oh my God, this image is gorgeous.” And it’s like, it’s text on a pink background. Settle down bot. Versus the conversations, I’m having based on people responding to my stories, whether that’s through a pole or actually sending me a direct message. They’re quality conversations that are meaningful and valuable for, not just me as a human and the person sending it as a human, but from a business perspective, like straight up cold logic and fact here, guys. It converts.
So be paying attention to how you can make yourself available in a way that is comfortable with you, is inline with your boundaries, but it’s also accessible and valuable and available to your community ’cause that’s a huge engagement point.
Also, start paying attention to Facebook stories. It doesn’t mean you have to create new stories just for there, but you can now create them through the desktop, and I actually just share my Instagram stories to my Facebook page as stories. So, I’m creating content there, but I’m not having to create content there. For right now, that’s working. I’m not saying it’s going to work forever. I’m not saying this is the way I will do it forever, but for right now, it’s super valuable to do it that way. So figure out what works for you, and start testing this stuff out. Cool? All right.
That’s our show. That’s everything. Like I said, Pinterest, pay attention. If you’re doing anything this holiday as far as sales, start figuring that out now. I know it’s June, and it feels really far away still, but now really is the time to get that planning done, guys, and then talking about stories and the connection available there, yeah. It’s valuable, and I, for one, really enjoy it, and I think it’s great, so I hope you do too.
If you have any questions, hit me up in Hit the Mic Backstage. Be sure to join me live on Thursday for Hit the Mic TV Live. I’ve got a guest this week, once again. We’re talking to Rachel. We talked to Kyle last week. We’re talking to Rachel this week. Both are co-founders of Wright Wellness Center. They’re also married, and we’re talking about relationships and being a business owner and finding ways to shut off the work part of your brain so you can be present for your partner and all of those kind of things. It’s going to be a really good conversation. I’m really excited to talk to Rachel. She’s going to make me talk about feelings, I’m sure, which is not my favorite topic, but it’ll be fun. It’ll be good.
So, join us life on Thursday at 2 p.m. Pacific. I will see you there. Thanks for joining me today. Again, any questions, Hit the Mic Backstage is the place to be. See you soon.
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