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Twice weekly show providing social media updates, trend alerts, original content ideas, strategy session, industry guests, tutorials and more!
Welcome back to the Muthership Creator Strategy. Happy Friday. Thanks for being here week after week. If you do join me every Friday, it is appreciated. And for today, I have a little bit of I won't call it a niche topic, but it's really about how to make a good impression when someone comes to your page.
Helen:And I don't mean necessarily just looking at your videos. Because a lot of times when people watch your videos, they actually tap on your profile, and then they go and look at the top to see what you have written in your bio to get an idea of who you are. And I think that we don't take enough time to think about that. And I will say I'm guilty of it as well. Sometimes I don't even look at my bio for weeks and months, and then I realize, oh, I should change something in there.
Helen:And it I have changed my bio multiple times over the years that I have been on the social media apps. I change them frequently depending on what I'm really leaning towards and what I want to share with people, what I changed, obviously, when I went from baking content to tutorials. I had to change and evolve. I think that we it's like we set it and forget it type of thing with our bio. So that's what I'm gonna talk about today.
Helen:And before I dig into it, I wanna start with an unsponsored by segment as always, and I'm gonna channel that. Like, pretty soon, I'm gonna have a sponsor. Okay? So brought to you today by well, not brought to you today by Easy Peasy. What are these?
Helen:Oh, obviously, you can tell maybe this is a sunglass. It looks like a sunglass case, but it is actually reading glasses. Here we go. They are readers. I'm pulling this pair out.
Helen:I have another pair here I can show you like this. And I wanna talk about this brand for a couple of reasons. One, where I'm that I'm most recently excited about. Okay? Because I learned something about myself, and we're gonna we're gonna share now.
Helen:So I usually wear contacts for I have multifocals, so I can use them for distance. I can use them for reading, and it works for me. I'm not a fan of having to every time I wanna read something or look at my phone, glasses on, glasses off, glasses on my head, glasses around the house, can't find the glasses. It just doesn't work for me. So I got contacts.
Helen:And I'm a person who can wear contacts successfully, and I have good vision in the distance now and good vision when I'm reading. So I don't need them during the day. But in the evening, when the sun goes down and it gets a little darker and my eyes get tired, I will tend to either put glasses on on top of my contacts or just take them out and use glasses. And my brand of choice is EZ PZ, izipizi.dot..dot. These, I will As with a lot of things that are discovered in my household and in my life, my husband is the first one who found these and got me hooked on them.
Helen:And I recently found out that this brand makes small face framed versions. It was I have had for the longest time the regular sized glasses. Maybe you could say, they look fine, Helen. You're good. What are you talking about?
Helen:But the difference between this size on my face and the small frames, which I'm gonna show you, almost like fits right inside. Okay? They're smaller, and they fit so much better. I think that they look better. Of course, this one is a different color.
Helen:I kinda like the little multicolor thing that I found. But I just happened to find these, believe it or not, at a stationary store, at Paper Source. And I put them on, and I went, oh my gosh. They're smaller. They fit my face.
Helen:Because I when I had chemo in 2022, I found out that my head is a child sized head. And so this even though it looks like a big head with a lot of hair, my head shape, my head size is small. And so I've come to learn that things that fit on a child size are more are suited better for my size head. Wigs in child size fit better, and now sunglasses in smaller sizes fit better. So they actually have a smaller size frame.
Helen:So that's why I'm happy about it. But you, as a normal person, most likely, who's listening, would probably enjoy to see all the different shapes. I like the case. They are reliable. They're, you know, there's tons of readers.
Helen:You know, get whatever you want. But these are good quality, and they are just my brand of choice. I have them in my I only have one small pair, so I have to go and order more small pairs, but I have lots of the regular size ones. All about the house in case I do get tired at night and want to put on a pair of readers. Alright.
Helen:Onward past the not sponsorships. Let's talk about the bio a little bit. And you may discover some things here. If you say, oh, you know, I'm not gonna listen. I already know how to optimize my bio.
Helen:This will just help you maybe relook at it and think about it and make sure that you do have it optimized. And it will also make you think, hey, you know, I should go look at my LinkedIn profile and see if I need to update that. I should go look at my Instagram profile and see. I should see what I have written on my Facebook. If you have a website, I haven't looked at my about page of my website.
Helen:Does that need to be updated? So this will beg to offer you a moment of reflection on all of the places where you have an overview of yourself and about you situation going on. I continuously forget to look at my website and say, oh, do I have to change anything? Did anything change about brands I'm working with that I wanna add? Do I a lot of times where I say how many followers I have on Instagram, oh, did I are my followers more?
Helen:Should I change, you know, how many followers I have? You we need to put in a little bit of a spot check when we wanna when we should be updating and checking on these things. Because they'll sit there, and then you'll suddenly go, my god, this is so outdated. Okay? So we're gonna start with why should you update the bio.
Helen:It's pretty obvious because having an effective bio will help convert viewers into followers. And this happens when someone is watching your video, and then they say, oh, I really oh, I like this creator. Let me see some other videos. They'll tap on your name. They'll go and maybe look at other videos.
Helen:But ultimately, they're gonna swipe to the top and see what else about you they might wanna learn. Honestly, I think and I'm not saying every person. It's a small percentage. It's the ones that are thinking about if they're gonna follow you or not. So why not maximize your first impression and have something up there that makes sense?
Helen:Okay? It's the first thing someone's gonna look at to consider, like, oh, what are they saying about themself? And themselves. Themself. Anyway, you get the point.
Helen:What are they saying? What are you reading about this person that's gonna maybe entice you to follow or tell you, oh my gosh, they actually they have a podcast, or oh my gosh, she has a studio, a community? Wow. You know, I'm or there's ways to work with her. Look at this.
Helen:Oh my gosh. She has free resources. Like, all of the things. People do it. People click.
Helen:That's it. So it's really important for you to have it, and it's a limited number of characters, so you wanna use those characters wisely. Alright. First off. Now we're gonna go to the top, and we're gonna talk about, especially on TikTok, the name.
Helen:And we're not talking about your username. The username is the one that comes after the at sign, the a circle thing. Ampersand. That's the word. It comes after that.
Helen:No. It's not an ampersand. Whatever that thing is, the a with the circle. You know what I'm talking about. The at.
Helen:So the what comes after that, the at, is the username, but then your name is what's at the top. So my username is at the mothership, and my name at the top now, I've changed it through time. It used to say, I think it always used to say my name at first maybe. And then it was confusing because when TikTok was putting during lives, you'd sometimes see the username and sometimes you'd see the name. And then I'm like, oh, people don't know.
Helen:They know me by the mothership. They don't know me by name. So I said, let me change my name to match. So now I made my name the mothership, TikTok Helen. What did I I don't even know what it is.
Helen:Let's go check. It says, yeah, it's the mothership TikTok Helen. That's what I put up there because I wanted people to know. My clients were calling me TikTok Helen. I used to have the mothership TikTok teacher, but then I decided to put my name.
Helen:I might revisit the name because now I'm looking at it going, does that even make sense? Why do I need TikTok? Maybe I just need the mothership Helen. So today might be the day that I changed my name. Do you see what I mean?
Helen:I'm on this I'm on the apps for five years. And until I sit here and take my own advice, I don't even think about what's up there. So take a lesson from me, who's teaching you the lesson. For real, you forget about these things, and it's important to go back and look at them. So think about the name, and the name does get recognized by the algorithm.
Helen:So that's why initially I had TikTok teacher up there because I thought the algorithm would recognize me as a TikTok teacher. But because my content has been picked up so much with my hashtags being the TikTok teacher, I decided to take that out and put my name in there instead so people would know me by first name. So whatever. I I may revisit it, and we could we could all, take a look at our own and say, what should I put up there and what makes the most sense? And it's difficult sometimes when your username is so different from your name because then sometimes you'll land in a live, and somebody might know you by username, but then they don't know you by name, and they don't even know it's you.
Helen:So you've gotta really take a pause and decide what you want to have appearing there. Is it your brand name? Is it your actual name? Is it your the brand that you're creating? It's gonna be individual for everyone.
Helen:I'm not gonna tell you if your name is this, use this for that. You know, I nobody can dictate this. You just have to realize that there's some that that sometimes your username appears, and sometimes your name appears. So if people haven't connected the dots on that, they're not gonna know def like, okay. Cecilia is Italian posh or Italian posh is Cecilia.
Helen:No. They're not gonna recognize it. So sometimes it's there's a school of thought that they should somewhat match. They should complement each other. And I I think this is something just it's food for thought for you to think about how you want your brand seen.
Helen:If I was somebody who really wanted people to know my name but also know me as the mothership, I probably would have the mothership and then my name, Helen Palisi, at the top. But I I feel it's more important for me to push the mothership brand more. So it's the mothership and the mothership adding my name Helen after. Okay? So it's all priorities.
Helen:It's what do you really want to lead with, and then make sure people recognize if you depending on when you, when your name appears in those lives, when you're kind of commenting on a live or when you're commenting even in comments on TikToks and on Instagram. Okay. That was a really long explanation, but I'm sorry. It's important to understand the difference between the name and the username. Now when it comes to the bio itself and the profile, it's a a lot of people will write like a whole paragraph, and that's okay.
Helen:Maybe that's one strategy. But sometimes it's a quicker read for people to read bullet pointed words. So it's like, baker slash mom slash blogger. I'm making it up. I'm just coming up with things.
Helen:Instead of I am I love to bake, and I do vlogs, and I have mom of three. And so a lot of us absorb bullet points quicker than we do a paragraph. So that's why we recommend to make, like, short statements with, like, slashes or something in between so people can digest the mess the the information a little better. But, again, that's personal. It's a bit of a personal, preference, I I guess.
Helen:But I think that you you just it's likely people will digest better in bullet points. So I would recommend leaning toward that, although I wouldn't demand it. I would just say what makes you feel good? If a paragraph explains what you do better and you don't have lots of different things you want to share, then bullet points maybe aren't needed. Maybe just one statement is needed.
Helen:So it's a little bit, you know, individualized on that one. But I would say if you wanna think about it in bullet points, you would think about what you do, how you can help, and then a call to action. So that's a way to think about why bullet points even if you're one niche. So what do you do in your content? And then how do you wanna help people?
Helen:Or why are you here to help people? Or what are you sharing that's gonna add value to their life? And then ultimately, what do you want them to do? So I might revisit my bio after this episode. We'll see.
Helen:It's also nice to use emojis. Sometimes emojis are, a quick visual reference to someone. So if you're a filmmaker, having a film camera, for example, would make would make sense. That really depends. But you can do it for fun.
Helen:It's just, again, those are characters. So think about how you wanna use them wisely. And sometimes they're nice on Instagram because they kind of, will stack. They don't stack as neatly on TikTok, so it's also app specific, platform specific. Okay.
Helen:Now let's talk about the things that are problematic for a lot of people. Having an email or a link in your profile in on certain platforms, this is not as easily done. Now Instagram, I believe, does allow you to have a link right off the bat as a new account. But TikTok, you you don't get a link in your profile until you hit, I wanna say, third a thousand followers. I don't know what the new requirement is.
Helen:But it's problematic, and a lot of people will then just become a business account. And then a business account automatically gives you a place for people to contact you. I think it's an email. Maybe it's a link, but it look I think a lot of most of the people I see that they have an email there. So if so this is a we're gonna weigh it out now.
Helen:Do you wanna be a business account because you feel it's really important to have that link in your profile when you have less than a thousand followers? Or or or, big or, would you rather have access to trending music, access to all the commercial sounds as you build your account up to a thousand followers, and then you'll get your link? Because it is harder to build when you are a business account because you're not having you don't have access to commercial the commercial music. It becomes really challenging. A lot of the creators in the studio will say to me, I can't use this sound.
Helen:I can't do any of your trends because I'm a business account. And so they do have a workaround where they have a personal account. They post this is, credit to Tina who mentioned, at Fable Cosmetics who told me what she does is she posts the trends on her personal account, and then she shares it to her story on her business account. So therefore, she's able to use that trend, and it's only on the story, but her most loyal follow our most of our loyal followers tend to look at our stories. Okay?
Helen:So hopefully that helps her because then her loyal followers are actually looking at her story and get and seeing the trends. But it is definitely a problem, and it is and you can understand why because musicians and people who create music, they don't they're not getting compensated for you using their song to promote your wares. So there's a reason for it. There's a reason why copyright laws exist, however frustrating they might be for us. So understand that when you have a business account, yes, you get a link in your profile, but you are losing access to the trending music.
Helen:And conversely, if you have a creator account, you can use all the trending music, but until you have a thousand followers, you won't be able to have a link in your profile. But there's always a workaround because I before I had a link in my profile, I put my email address up there, so if people were gonna contact me, they could find me via email. So you can just type it right in, and somebody will type it in if they wanna try and get in touch with you. You could just type your website in if it's easy enough. Make sure it's readable.
Helen:A lot of people will type, like, a lot of words and they all run together. So if you are, like, I'll use, I'll use Commando as an example, but we are commando.com. It's hard to read w e a re commando. It's confusing to read all lowercase because I actually read that completely different. Don't ask me.
Helen:My brain doesn't work that way. So WForWeA for r, a r e, and then capital c for commando, right away, a person would be able to then go to their computer or go to their phone and type it in. If it's in if you could see the words clearly. If it's a bunch of letters run together in lower case, it makes it a little more challenging for some people. I'm raising my hand.
Helen:Okay. Then when you do have access and can have a link in your profile, here's where we get a lot of people in the studio asking me about how do I put multiple links in there, etcetera. Can you help with a link tree? Da da da da da. When you have you only have the ability to add one link.
Helen:So to be able to lead people to different things, either you're working with people privately, so you want them to have a link to contact you for a one on one, or you have a link to something you want them to download, or you have a link where you want them to go to your website, or you have a link where you wanna share your podcast. I'm making this up. I'm just coming up with things. But a lot of people wanna send people to the Amazon store, to their Amazon storefront or whatever. I don't know.
Helen:There's lots of links you can make within one link. If you have a links page, like a link tree, or if you have a Squarespace and you create a hidden link in your Squarespace, or you have a Stan store, which I actually like, except it costs money every month to have a Stan store. It costs each one of these platforms, even your own website. But if you're already paying for your website, you can make a hidden link, and it doesn't cost you more. But for a Linktree, you've gotta pay for a subscription.
Helen:For most of these, like Camp Fire or whatever the heck there there's a bunch of them that are a Link based, I don't know what they're called, like Linktrees. And those, they are subscription based, just like everything else. So we have to decide what are we paying for, and what is what do we need to pay for? What's worth paying for and what can we let go? Because the monthly charges really get to be a lot when you're a creator.
Helen:So, you know, you have to have something that's making it worth your while. So if you are, in my case, like, having a stand store makes sense because I have enough one on one coaching sessions that will cover the cost of that. And so then it's like, I can accept that cost. But if you're not making money and you're just starting out, know that you're gonna you are gonna have costs involved with becoming this type of creator. And so you wanna be able to fund that if you if you wanna do it in the correct way.
Helen:Otherwise, you have to just do it the lightweight way until you can get to that point. Like, put one link, and that's it. Or decide, I'm gonna make I'm gonna take the time, make a Squarespace website, and everything's gonna go through that one fee that I have is the Squarespace website. So there are ways to do it. It's just really about deciding where you wanna spend your money and deciding how efficient you want those links to be and what is the most important.
Helen:That's a lot. Alright. Now let's keep going because I'm not done yet. It's good. It's a good idea, and I find this still baffling that I will tell people go to the link in my profile, and they still can't find it.
Helen:I have to I have to like go, I wonder. Because I purpose I have a line that says, join the Mothership Creator Community, and I have four arrows. I wasted characters, maybe five. I wasted characters on arrows pointing to the link. Right here.
Helen:You know what I mean? And I still have people asking me, wait. I don't see the link. And I'm like, yay yay. There's arrows pointing to it.
Helen:I don't know what else I could do. I don't know except come over to your house and press. I'm laughing. I am laughing, and I mean it all in good fun. But it's arrows help.
Helen:Check out the link to my Etsy store below. Check out the link to my to learn more, put an arrow. So, yeah, that's you know, having a call to action in your profile is a good idea if you if that's what you're doing, if you're trying to create a business out of it or gather emails or here, join my free email list, whatever it is, because we know email lists are important, as I said last week. Anyway, so whatever it is that you're trying to get people to do, you know, maybe an arrow. Maybe an arrow.
Helen:Alright. So we talked about the nonclickable links. So I'm just gonna leave you with the the thought that if you have a website, you're not and you're still a small creator, and you have a few 100 followers, and you don't have a link in your profile, but you want people to go quote to your store, your website, your wares, your Etsy, whatever, instead of becoming a business account, try and stick it out. Try and focus on making the content and be less worried that people aren't gonna be able to find you. Because typically, people are very resourceful.
Helen:So if you even talk about something in a video, the ones who can't find you, trust me, they will comment. And that happens to me all the time. I will say, click the link in my profile. They go, I'm trying to join your studio, I can't find the link. They comment it.
Helen:It took them longer probably to type the comment than it would for them to go click and look for the link. But this is life. You know? This is what we're dealing with. And you gotta laugh about it, and you gotta also roll with it.
Helen:So just trust that when even though you think, oh, it has to be the path of least resistance, and it does for sales, you do wanna have less clicks. But if someone's really looking for you on the other hand, they will definitely take that extra step to find you. Okay? So trust that trust that you're on a journey, and it's gonna take some time. So if you're trying to get there and you're still going like, know that it takes it takes a while to figure it all out.
Helen:And anytime, you can change what you're doing. Anytime, you can change your bio. You can change your username. Obviously, you can only change your username once every I think it's thirty days or something like that. You can change your name.
Helen:Change that. Edit edit that profile as much as you want because that you can do as frequently, and you can try something different every month. You can have, like, a flavor of the month kind of profile. You know? This month, I'm gonna promote this thing, and I'm gonna see if that hits.
Helen:Next month, I'm gonna promote that thing, see if that hits. I don't I think we get stuck, and we forget to go check. So if there's anything you take away from today's episode, it's just go check on it. Go see what your about page is on your website. Go see what's your what's in your profile on all of the places.
Helen:Check your LinkedIn. See if your job is updated. I'm just kidding. But seriously, you wouldn't believe the things like I would find, and I go, my god. That changed so long ago.
Helen:I completely forgot to take it out. Alright. So take this as a sign to do that. Have a great week. Enjoy a fabulous weekend.
Helen:Yay. And I'll see you next week. Bye.