Ryan Kelly:
Hey, welcome back to AI on the Fly. My name is Ryan Kelly, and I’m your host. If you’ve seen episodes in the past, you’re probably thinking to yourself, who is that in the car with Ryan? Let me introduce you to Kasey Trap.
Kasey Trap:
Hello.
Ryan Kelly:
Kasey helps lead our creative division over at WSI Smart Marketing. When it came down to the topic of social media posting and tactics and strategy, it made a lot of sense to say, well, let’s bring the specialist, and that ain’t me.
So, Kasey, I have some questions for you. Let’s start with this. We know how important E-E-A-T is, the experience, expertise, trustworthiness, and authority, when it comes to writing content in websites and blogs and white papers and press releases. It really is the same in social media. Could you give us some examples of what a good posting would be and maybe why for each of these? So let’s start with expertise.
Kasey Trap:
Sure. So for expertise, we want to see the final result, the craft of what you do. Think how-to’s, educational types of posts.
Ryan Kelly:
OK, very nice. What about experience? How would you create a post that shows that you have lots of experience in something?
Kasey Trap:
Yeah. So this one’s all about the process. Thinking, for example, about before and afters, showing the state of change and really painting a picture of what it is that they’re going to experience from start to end with your product.
Ryan Kelly:
OK, nice. I know that for me, whenever I’m searching to hire anybody or do anything, I care a great deal about their trustworthiness. How do you flex your muscles for trustworthiness in social?
Kasey Trap:
Yeah, I think being predictable and having your team show up, showing what you’re interested in, what kind of community events that you partake in, what makes you you on a consistent basis. Really humanizing your brand and making sure people understand who you are, what you represent, what you’re like, all those things. Not just that you show up to jobs on time.
Ryan Kelly:
Absolutely. Who are you? Interesting. All right, cool. And then the last one, authority. How do you build authority in social posts?
Kasey Trap:
Yeah. So for authority, you don’t want to always be the one saying we’re great. You want other people to. This is where you would pull reviews, testimonials, case studies, other people saying what it was like to work with you and what they got out of it. We like to call this social proof.
Ryan Kelly:
Social proof. I like it. All right, let’s crack into tactics. Now that we understand what kind of posts we should be creating to accomplish building trust and authority and expertise and experience, what are some helpful tips or tricks to making those posts actually work and be digested by AI?
Kasey Trap:
Sure. Two things come to mind. First, it’s this idea of optimizing your profiles for discoverability because AI can now search your profiles. A couple quick things you can do right now is to go to your bios or go to your profiles and update the information on there. Make sure that there are keywords that explain exactly what you do so people can find you when they search for you. You can add those keywords in your captions. You can add what’s called alt text to your images that describes what it is if for some reason the image didn’t load, but it says information in the back. Those are things you can start with for visibility.
The second thing I would say is make sure you’re taking advantage of each platform’s specificity. If it’s LinkedIn, maybe a thought leadership post or angle to your content. For Instagram, think visuals. People are on there to see the pretty pictures with captions that are a little bit more skimmable. As long as you make use of each platform, your message will get across further.
Ryan Kelly:
So it’s kind of like write toward your audience because the audience on LinkedIn wants thought leadership, and the audience on Facebook wants conversation, and the audience on Instagram wants before and afters and imagery. That’s really, really interesting. OK, those are great tips.
What about strategy? What about predictability? How can brands be predictable, and why does it matter?
Kasey Trap:
Yeah. If you’ve ever managed social media, you know it can be tough to reinvent the wheel every week. Strategy is where you have repeatable systems. The number one system that works is the content calendar. You plan out all your posts for that week, that month, even up to three months around particular themes that you’re going to recreate. Maybe it’s a review every month. Maybe it’s a case study that you plan for. That way you aren’t reinventing the wheel.
Second, it’s about engaging with your audience so that they engage with you back. Think about building relationships. Another facet of that is looking for your power partners and who is going to collaborate with you, not just on this one post today, but long term so that you can synchronize your growth together.
Ryan Kelly:
OK, I’m going to throw a curveball at you because you know we prep for these videos just a little bit, so she does not know this is coming. Kasey, if you could give a brand, an organization, a marketing director, a social creator, or a social coordinator one tip, one thing that they could do right now that would make things better, what would it be? Something that would maybe be low work but high impact.
Kasey Trap:
Go on social media and engage with the people that you look up to. Make sure that you’re following other people and giving back to that ecosystem because it will come back to you when you put some energy into it.
Ryan Kelly:
I love it. OK, if you found this video helpful, please like it. Subscribe to the channel. More videos to come. If you have a question, direct message me. I would love to answer you in an upcoming video. Until next time, buckle up.