How to Create a Plan for a Standout Social Media Content in 2024. You're short on time, it feels like there's a million platforms. You're trying to grow in multiple places at once. Do you need to create new content for each one of those platforms? What about recutting and repurposing? What's working and what's not?
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go to Insta Club Hub.com-forwardslash-trial. Again, that link will be down in the description, but right now while you're listening, you can just open up your Safari browser or whatever internet browser you use, and just go to Insta Club Hub.com-forwardslash-trial. Today, in this episode of Build Your Tribe I, Shalene Johnson, and going to share with you my personal
social media strategy process, the content plan that we're following currently. And fingers crossed, let's hope that it works so far, so good, but as you know, algorithms change, and when that happens, so too often does our content plan. But I want to share with you some things that we've tried that did not work, including hiring a social media agency. I'm also going to share with you what I think is the easiest way to produce multiple pieces of content per week,
and I'm going to share with you my exact strategy and process. They say content is king or content is queen. The content is also a pain in the butt, especially because you are the CEO, you are the business owner, you are the business creator, you are the person who comes up with the idea, as you're the person who manages the staff or the team, you're the person who writes the emails,
probably you are the entrepreneur, who is the machine behind the business. But you're also in most cases, the content, like it's you who people want to see on camera, it's you who people want to see on stories, it's you who people, they want to read your words. And so the idea of outsourcing you is not even like a thing, even though I tried desperately to do that this year. So because my goal, we have five different businesses that I basically am the CEO of those
businesses. Of course, my husband is, we call him the CFO, but he's the co-CEO. But in terms of like the managing of people and certain expertise are my lane and certain things related to operations and numbers are his lane, and it requires a lot of time. It requires you being engaged and involved with your team and looking at strategies and coming up with ideas and sometimes reviewing
emails. And it's a lot, right? Just running a business is a lot. Also to create content for YouTube, for audio podcasts, for TikTok, for Instagram, for X, for like all the other platforms, that is a lot too. Because even just one platform like Instagram is a beast. It's not just posting a video, it's posting stories, it's posting pictures, it's going live, it's captions, it's a lot. And the content can no longer, in my opinion, just be repurposed to multiple platforms.
Oh, I forgot to even mention Facebook. Can't forget Facebook. Facebook is still a really big thing. I mean, my target audience, a lot of my target audience is on Facebook. And I don't live on Facebook. I really know Instagram. I really know TikTok. I really know YouTube. And I feel like I've lost a little touch with Facebook. So I'm just going to be honest with you and tell you, I'm not going to share much about my strategy today on Facebook because I need to revisit it.
So I'm just being honest. So today what I'm going to share with you is YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. And when I'm looking at these five business centers that we've really wanted to grow this year in 2023, I made the initiative that I was going to step back from content creation and spend more time devoted to being a better CEO. In order to do that, that meant that I need to bring on more people to help me create content, to take my content and repurpose it to all these other
platforms. And it has been a very interesting process to say the least. Man, if we made some mistakes, I look at people like the Hermoses or Gary Vaynerchuk and the amount of content that they produce. And it's so easy to compare. And that's what I should be doing to. But the fact of the matter is what other entrepreneurs are doing. Who cares? Honestly, because we don't know their level of happiness. I don't care what somebody makes. I don't care how popular somebody is.
What I really want to know is like how happy is someone? How much downtime? That's how I define success. How much can I step away and actually enjoy going out to dinner with my husband or just chill about with my friends and still have the things that I want to have? Can I still live the life that I want to live by the things that I want to buy? Enjoy life, but truly enjoy it? That's success to me. There's no way I can look at any of those names I just mentioned and know
if in fact they get to enjoy life. All I know is if I'm trying to keep up with them, I can't. So one of the things that we decided to do was to hire an agency. An agency to take my YouTube videos, chop them up and turn them into reels or YouTube shorts. And we hired, I took the advice of a friend who I loved his reels. And I said, who are you using? He's like, all right, I'm going to tell you who I use.
He tells me who he uses. And we end up spending. I'm going to give you prices and everything. We end up spending I think was about $150 if the reels had been good. It would have been $150 per reel. We were giving them the clips. We couldn't ask them to watch a 30 minute video of this meant that we were, someone on my staff was watching the 30 minute video, finding the like one to two minute clip,
finding different pieces, sending that those little clips to them. And then they were piecing them together, putting captions on top of it and sending it back to us for $150 each. Okay. And we had to sign a pretty decent size monthly contract that promised us like two to three of those per day. They were so bad. They were so bad. So I came to how bad they were. And this is one of the top agencies. So then we tried another agency, then we tried another
consulted. And maybe it's because I'm female, but everything that we got back looked like everybody else's stuff. It was just so like, you know, the flying graphics and the emojis and the bright colors and though, like, it was just like, I don't know, it just feels like white noise. It did not feel like me. And meanwhile, we gave our editor and the agency a lot of specific feedback. I said, I don't want this to look like all the dudes on YouTube. I don't want this to look like
all the other reels I'm seeing. I don't want this to look like a podcast talking head with all the flying colors and the bright green and the yellow and the I want it to feel like me. A woman needs to watch this and relate to it. A woman wants, I need female colors. I don't want to be cheesy. And they just, it didn't matter what editor we used. It kept coming across like all the other crap that's on Instagram. And even when we did, I rarely post it any of those because I'm like,
I hate this so I'm even posting it. But on a few instances, I'm like, in case I'm wrong, let's just post it and see turned out to be crap. It just was terrible. Okay, so that didn't work. So then we went back to the drawing board and we're like, okay, this repurposed podcasting content, that was ideal for me because I film a YouTube multiple episodes, right? So I do a build your tribe. That's what you're listening to right now. And I also do a Shaline show YouTube. And I do,
I was at the time doing three of those week. Then we come back to two of those. And now we're only doing one of those. Why are we only doing one? Because it's working. And the other one is just audio. Okay, I digress. So I film all those videos. That takes a lot of time. The idea was that we would be able to find the right editor who could really chop up one of those like great little comments, a sassy little mic drop moment and put that in a reel that would work. And it felt like me.
It didn't feel like regurgitated this like weird thing that's happening on Instagram right now. It took us a while to figure that out. We finally got that down. But it ultimately it boiled down to my team. When we tried to outsource this to an agency or an editor, they just didn't get my
humor, my timing, my audience, my avatar, and my intention with my audience. So when you're giving your content to an editor, if they don't know who it is you're trying to reach and what it is you're trying to say and the overarching message in general, then you have to spell it out for
them every single time that takes more time than it saves you. We ultimately after probably nine months of trial and error, got to the point where it's like, okay, the person who edits my YouTube videos is now also working hand in hand with a social media strategist on my team who is helping them select the right clips and then editing that piece of content so that it can work on Instagram. But it still feels like me and it doesn't feel like a regurgitated chunked up, chopped up,
sliced up, diced up, podcast, slapped on Instagram. It feels like content that I filmed for Instagram. So that's step one. Step one is we have someone on my team goes through time stamps, the parts where it's like, okay, this could be a standalone clip. Then our editor comes in and puts in B-roll, B-roll that I've approved B-roll that they know fits with my avatar.
We have a working relationship and I know like you might be thinking, now that might not be in the budget for you at the moment, but I'm not talking about you necessarily hiring a full-time person.
This is just somebody who like you regularly work with them. Maybe it's a part-time person, but you have a long standing relationship with them so that they really understand you, your brand, your message, your sense of humor, where it is you're going, your strategy, your cadence, like all those things, it's so much easier when you have a working relationship with somebody.
And again, it does not have to be full-time. So that's our first line of defense. It's like, okay, so now we've got one real, at least one, probably five reals will come from each video. In addition to that, we were trying to take that piece of content and posting it on TikTok. That does not work. What TikTok wants is long-form content. Like TikTok is really I think running for Instagram. Okay, so what are we doing on TikTok? I'm going to tell you what we're doing.
So the message or the bullets or the main points of the YouTube video that I create, my social media strategist will then send me a follow-up text. That's the only way I can communicate. I hate Slack and I hate email. So she will send me a follow-up text that will say, like, here are five things that you talked about in this video. All I need is that quick little reminder than I open up my phone and I talk direct to camera to TikTok recording it in the TikTok app.
And I will go anywhere from two to five minutes. TikTok loves long-form. TikTok loves for you to post horizontal video. They will push your content if you're doing that. TikTok doesn't want it cut up. They don't at the moment, 2024. They don't want you to edit. They don't want jump cuts. They don't want B-roll. They don't want flying captions. They don't want anything that looks like it belongs on Instagram. They want you to open up the phone
and have a conversation. It's almost keep you company type content. And so we started doing that. So I was like, okay, so I've got these five points. Again, it still kind of stems from the original YouTube video. But I get those five points and then I just riff on one of them. And now I have five different topics that I can riff from on my Instagram. Now what my team does is I download, I save the video before posting it to TikTok. I save it to my camera roll. Then I upload it to Dropbox.
And then a member of my team takes that long-form video that I posted to TikTok that's direct to camera. So I'm not using a podcast mic. It's just, you know, open camera, right? And it feels much more raw. It feels much more authentic. And they take that video and they chop it up short. Tight ad captions. And that's additional content for Instagram. The next step is to take that same piece of content. Let's say I riff, for example, on the importance of strength training for women over 40.
And I'm just riffing on TikTok. Okay. So now we've got the TikTok video. Then the team cuts it up. And now we have an Instagram reel taken from my TikTok, right? Now that same content gets sent to a member of our team who takes it and now uses AI, artificial intelligence to just make me sound a little bit more polished and turns my rant into individual thoughts that are carousel posts. Again, to use that same example, I've done a TikTok. I've talked about the importance of
strength training for women over 40. It gets chopped up. And now we have a reel that's a little bit tighter with captions on the importance of strength training for women over 40. That gets sent off to a strategist or a member by team who then takes and goes, okay, how can we turn this points that she makes in this video into a carousel? And let's say the first point is that muscle becomes your metabolic
spanks. Okay, that's one carousel post. The next post might be that women over 40 can build muscle at equal or greater the rate of a woman who's in her 20s or 30s. And then the next one might be that if you want to increase your metabolic rate and improve your metabolism and decrease body fat as you're aging, you've got to include strength training. So like each one of those is like a little carousel, even though they're like their points that I made in the video, but now they've turned
them into a carousel. But you can't, at least for me anyways, my content can't always look the same. It has to look fresh. It can't look like I outsourced it to an agency. Okay, so now I've got, let's see, before counting backwards, we've got the original podcast, the original YouTube has been cut up and that's on Instagram. Then we've got the TikTok that's been cut up from the points I made in the original Instagram. And now we've got a real from that. Then we've got the carousel from
the original piece of content. Now the fifth piece of content is to take like one really sassy quote and turn it into a quote card. Easy, simple. And the sixth piece is sometimes, and we're just experimenting with this, is doing a two part carousel, which is almost like a cover where it might be, for example, a two slide carousel. The first slide is what I would call the thumbnail or the cover of the carousel. And it's just making a statement that makes people want to swipe. When they swipe,
what they're getting is just a single clip. And that clip also came from the same podcast. So we're getting six pieces of content from one singular idea from one YouTube. Now some additional things I want to share with you that I think is important. I don't think I'm ever going to get to a stage where all of this could be outsourced and I'm not looking at it. And I'm doing a deep dive right
now on my Patreon related to Dave and Rachel Hollis. And you know, one of the stories I find very interesting is what happened when they got so busy that a lot of their social media was being outsourced. And a lot of controversy surrounded that because there were quotes that were not attributed to the original author. Rachel was accused of plagiarism. And when she apologized publicly, she said, you know, I didn't post this. My team posted this. And certainly not the right way to
apologize. But it just made me realize if it's your content, you are responsible for every single word. If it's representing you, if you're posting as you, one poorly timed meme, one wrong comment, one, even the wrong word in the wrong place where it's like, yeah, I've used that word, but not in that context or that's almost the way I would say it. It can really have a tremendously negative impact on your brand. So I don't know that I will ever get to a place where I completely outsource
all of this. I need to see it before it gets posted. And maybe you disagree with me, but if it's my words, even if it's my words, even the way it's cut up, I still need to see it. And I think nobody knows what's going to land with our audience. If you really know your avatar, if you really know your girl, your guy, the person who's following you, you know what's funny for them, what's going to resonate with them. You know what words are cheesy, what words disconnect. And I personally think
it's really important that I spend that time there. And it's time consuming. And as much as I have spent the last nine months trying to find a way to pull myself away from this and to let somebody else run that machine, I think if nothing else the last nine months have taught me, that's just unrealistic. It has to be me. It has to be my voice. And I hope at some point, like I don't have to spend as much time doing this. But for now, this system has freed up a lot of my time. Now instead
of having me have to go like, I've got to think of six new pieces of content. Now it's like, okay, I'm filming one video. And from that video, we're able to create these different types of content that work on these separate platforms. Because each platform is very different. What works on YouTube shorts is not exactly what works on TikTok. It is not exactly what works on Instagram. So I know it seems like a lot. I want you to be encouraged. I want you to know that there are ways to make this
easier, but you've got to be strategic. Don't give up. Be creative. And I hope that this is helpful for you. If it was, do me a favor and let me know if you want me to break down my entire content strategy. And I mean, how many emails we send per week based on all the different brands that we operate, how many different stories I produce, lives, the different Instagram accounts and TikTok accounts we have for each brand. If you want me to do like a really in depth review of all of the
moving parts, I'd be happy to do so. In the meantime, it is my goal to be brief, to be bright, to make it fun and then be done. We're done. Thank you for being here. Bye.