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Welcome to the socialized strategy. Happy Friday. Fun topic for today and maybe a lot of people will enjoy it because don't we all love to talk about pet peeves? Well, this is a little bit like that. We're gonna cover common influencer mistakes and you've seen them from some of the very big influencers.
Helen:And also probably there are some of these things that you've done unknowingly yourself. So we're gonna tackle that topic. But before I do so, I wanna shout out to our sponsor, Premium Ghostwriting Academy. And why is writing a perfect fit for today's sponsor? I always love when the sponsor ties into the topic of the newsletter.
Helen:And I think it fits because all the content we create on video does have thought behind it. No matter how quickly it's done or if it's done slowly and measured, writing is at the root of it. Because if you think about it, you always have to think about your hook, your story, the content itself, whether it's told with speaking or with text on screen or if it's voice over or just purely a spontaneous performance. Ultimately, there's a message underneath that is being conveyed. And so a good writer who gives thought to that message upfront will definitely have an edge to get your viewers attention.
Helen:So if you are a good writer, I'll shout out the sponsor all the way right now. The academy is an opportunity for you if you're a person who might want to make a nice side hustle, some lucrative money on the side. You don't need startup capital. You don't need a big social audience and you don't need decades of writing experience. You can do this premium ghostwriter academy with 5 simple and then with these 5 simple skills, you can actually earn money as a ghostwriter.
Helen:So check it out and the link will be here in the show notes and also in the newsletter. Now let's keep going because I do love this idea that writing is at the root of everything we create, even if we don't realize it. And a lot of times, I'm gonna be honest with you, when I'm making a tutorial, I'll instead of just starting with here's how to do such and such, I try and think of a different way to start it. Because I'm like, first of all, is my audience bored? If they're scrolling and every time it's a tutorial, it's here how to do it.
Helen:So I try to be a little creative about why I'm teaching the thing or maybe start it off a little differently just from my own head. I get sick of saying the same opening as well. So thinking about your content from a standpoint of a writing perspective is a really good idea just to stop, pause. If you were a writer of a show, you would and if show is video, you're watching a show, it still has writers behind it thinking about how it's going to be funny or how it's going to be interesting or how they're going to tell the story. So don't discard or disregard, not discard.
Helen:Don't disregard the idea that writing is involved in all of the content you create, even if you don't like to think about it. I really get frustrated because I don't think of myself as a good writer. And when I have to write the caption, it's torture sometimes. I'm not a fan of the written word and having to come up with the the text for my videos. I have much easier time just coming up with a video concept and creating.
Helen:So if you really take a minute and put yourself in the writer's seat and put your writer's hat on and try and think about how you can make your content more interesting, it's gonna help you just really rise to the top, honestly. So let's keep going and get into the topic for today. And we started off by saying it does seem like influencers have been around forever, but only in the past few years has the influencer space really, really turned into what it what it is now. It's unbelievable when you think about it because it's whenever something comes into being, you can't remember life without it. Just like when the Internet came and a lot of us like me, I remember no Internet.
Helen:But it's hard for me to remember no Internet. Like how did I find out things? I don't even remember now. We had to go seek things at the library or we had to look things up. I don't even honestly, it's almost for somebody who lived through it.
Helen:It's still difficult for me to remember a time without it. So in the same way, we really almost can't remember life without influencers where there were people in our phones talking to us and sharing things with us. Think about it. Where did we learn about the things that we purchased? It's it was just a different time.
Helen:But now with the prevalence of influencers, there is so many there are so many creators aspiring to be influencers now. So we wanna share common mistakes just so that if you're trying to get into the space and you're building an audience and you've got a community happening or you're building for your brand, you know what to think about and to how to keep your content primo so that you don't have no engagement on your videos for the wrong reasons. Alright. So let's start from the beginning. And my first I'm gonna go with this one as a pet peeve because it really is.
Helen:Creators who complain about their views. If you are an influencer and you've been doing this for a long time and all of a sudden now we all are experiencing it. The views are terrible. I am telling you with the following I have on TikTok, it is terrible. I have videos sometimes that don't even get to a 1000 views and for a creator with that many followers, that percentage is such a low amount.
Helen:And so I could be a person that could be complaining about it or frustrated by it or aggravated and getting on my soapbox. And I have never made a video about it. I just am not interested in complaining. I am here to show up for the 1,000 people that make it to the to the views. You know what I mean?
Helen:That's what I'm here for. So if you turn your mind around and think, oh, well, this is this is what it is right now. And I'm gonna show up in my best way for the few people who are seeing my content. And that's how you have to look at it. So don't waste time.
Helen:Don't waste time and energy and putting yourself into that negative space, about something that you really have no control over and none of us do. So the big thing is to focus on creating that good content for the viewers that you are getting. And you can always look if a video doesn't do well, you can always say I'm posting it again in a week or wait a month, and I'm gonna post it again in a month. And maybe the algorithm will do its wavy thing where you're on a roll. Sometimes I get on a roll where a bunch of my videos are getting good views and all of a sudden back down, and then they're getting crappy views.
Helen:Whatever. This is the roller coaster we're on and we can't control the ride, unfortunately. We just have to keep getting on it if you're interested in riding roller coasters that is. Okay. So the next one is to eliminate that high guys mentality.
Helen:And this is not necessarily because you're saying the words, hi guys. It's the idea that you're talking to a group of people who are all together in the same room when in fact we are all individually looking at our phones. So we are alone. So when you're talking to me as a creator and you're like, oh, guys, guys, guys, you're not gonna believe this. I mean, maybe I'll listen to that.
Helen:But a lot of times I'm just like, guys, I'm here by myself. Who are you talking to? You know, so I think maybe this idea that these bigger creators have gotten into where it's like my people, my posse, my family, like talking to everybody as a big group. It can work if you're still personal about it, but it could also backfire if you suddenly are thinking that it's this large group that are sitting all together in a space when actually it's just you and that person. So try to really think about yourself.
Helen:Like, what do you like when you're viewing? Listen to the creators who you're watching when you scroll and decide for yourself. Do you like when someone's referring to you that way? Or do you rather when someone feels like they're talking to you 1 on 1? And maybe you're a person that get that gets creeped out if you think someone's talking to you 1 on 1 and maybe you like the group thinking.
Helen:Everybody's to each his own, honestly. So this is not to say this is right and this is wrong. This is to say that try things to see what your audience grabs onto more likely because you'll see a pattern if if you're constantly, doing like a big group talk and then you suddenly do one video where you're going like mano a mano talking to one person and that one does better. Maybe that's what your audience has been missing. Maybe they've felt that you weren't they were not important.
Helen:When I hear big creators say, guys, guys, guys, you know, blah blah blah. I'm always like, I I stop and I hesitate. And I think, you know what? I'm not here for this. Like, I'm not one of I'm not one of your fans.
Helen:I'm I I look at it. I think so many of us have a parasocial relationship where we don't wanna think we're one of someone's many fans in a lot of cases. And maybe that's just my personal thing. I don't know. I like a 1 on 1.
Helen:I like to feel connected with the person that I'm watching. You know what? Who's a really good person to maybe think about related to this? But I'll notice that there are creators like a Bethenny Frankel type person. I don't know if that's controversial to mention her.
Helen:Whatever. But she's she will talk like as if she's with her fans. Okay? So it's like, you guys gotta believe you guys and for some reason that doesn't disturb me coming from her. And I don't know why.
Helen:And I think if I try and think about it hard, it's like maybe because I think of her in more of a she's been on reality shows, so she is in that kind of celebrity ism. So she's appreciating her audience as her fans. And so maybe there's some value there to her being like, you guys are so important to me. And so maybe then I can be accepted as one of the people that she is thinking. I don't know.
Helen:But I think it really depends. So think about maybe you personally, how you're connecting with your audience and decide if that high guys mentality is could work for you. It's not a hard pass. It's just a mat matter of maybe who it's coming from. I think I'm having a therapy session here all by myself.
Helen:So thanks for listening because I'm really trying to figure it out. What don't I like about it and why am I always advising against it? And I think because maybe for me, it has worked out to be more like I'm a one on one teacher for my each one of my viewers versus, I'm in a whole classroom with a bunch of people. And when I do TikTok lives and when I do workshops, I am in a classroom and my whole tone changes. And you'll notice that on my workshops.
Helen:If you listen to the workshops, I'm in with a whole bunch of people. But right now, I'm just here with you in this moment for this podcast. So maybe you could help me out. I would love feedback on this. I would I wish, at some point, I wanna have a community discussion forum thing that's gonna be coming soon where I can get some feedback.
Helen:Like, do you really do you agree with this, or am I crazy? Or what's your take on it? And I would love to have some sense of that. So maybe, hit reply on the email if you want for now and tell me. Alright.
Helen:Now the next one is not creating an audience first type of content. So what is audience first content? It's really flipping it around and making it not about you. So I'll use myself as an example. I like to throw myself under the bus whenever I can.
Helen:But if I started everything, every piece of content, and I said, I'm gonna teach you how to, or I'm gonna show you blah blah blah, or I'm going to, or I'm the TikTok teacher, and I'm gonna explain how this is done. I don't think that would resonate as quickly as the ones where I say, if you wanna learn how to do an outfit transition like this, or here's how you notice the you versus the I. And it's a such a simple shift. You can do it with any piece of content. Think about what you were gonna say and then say, okay.
Helen:Now think about it from the person the view of the listener, the point of view of the listener. And so think about what is valuable about what you are sharing, what is valuable to them. I just had a really funny arrangement with the word valuable. Valuable? I don't know what just happened.
Helen:Thanks for taking that ride with me. Anyway, if you think about your audience first, think about what they need, think about what your content is doing for them, how it's making them feel. Is it gonna teach them something? Is it going to enlighten them? Is it gonna be something relatable?
Helen:And put it into a you versus a me. And this, of course, circles back to being a good writer about it. So analyzing your content from a writing, how is it how is it written? Even though maybe you're not writing it down when you're saying it, there's words. So how is it written?
Helen:And then thinking about flipping it, flipping it around, because you don't necessarily want to be consistently highlighting yourself and what you're doing, and then not being able to be relatable to your audience. Hopefully, that explained it. I don't know. Yet another soapbox. Sorry about that.
Helen:But sometimes I get in I get in it. Alright. Next one. This is probably one of my favorites, but poorly edited content. Don't be the person that is pressing the record button and talking before you've got it fully pressed or letting go before you finished and cutting your words off.
Helen:Don't be that person. Record a little extra and then edit it. Edit it. Tighten it up with editing instead of recording and letting go too soon and losing the last word or losing the first word, please. Because it's so annoying to listen to content that it's chopped weird.
Helen:I I understand tight editing. I love tight editing. I'm a fan of, like, even cutting out the breaths on some things, you know, and sometimes when I go I do a little that or I breathe, and I wanna tighten those up sometimes. But so I'm a fan of the tightening. I just don't I'm not a fan of over tightening where it's like you don't finish the sentence and then you're onto that.
Helen:And then and none of it makes sense because you haven't finished the word on the last sentence before you're talking about the next sentence. So that's a big that is definitely classified as a pet peeve for the mothership. I can't stand it. I will immediately scroll the minute the first sentence is clipped. I'm out.
Helen:So you're losing me. If you're not losing anyone else, fine, but you're losing me on that one. The other thing is while we're at it, I have to give a shout for the microphone problems that I'm noticing. There's so many people that are not setting their wireless microphones to mono. And so their sound is only coming out of 1 headphone, and that is a huge pet peeve.
Helen:When I am scrolling and promoted content is coming out of one of my headphones, like, this is a professional ad. Didn't they hear that and fix that before they because you can once you do it, it's hard to fix it. But I know that there's an editing program I can use to to fix it. But don't don't have your head your sound coming out of one headphone. Because what's weird about that if the person is wearing the other headphone, some people just wear one headphone.
Helen:If you're only coming out of this headphone, your video is gonna have no sound at all because the person's wearing the wrong headphone, which is also weird. But I know this is asked backwards, but mono means everything is recorded on both channels. Stereo means you might have a pair of microphones and one of them is recording on one channel and the other is recording on the other channel. So depending on which microphone you are wearing, you're only gonna come out of 1 headphone. It's crazy bonkers backwards.
Helen:I don't write the rules. I didn't make up the words. I'm just telling you how it is. Okay? Make sure your little plug that goes into the phone is set to mono so that you come out of both phones.
Helen:Just think opposite and then you'll be fine. It's like think backwards. So that's it. We don't want poorly edited content. You don't want long long breaths in between lots of pauses.
Helen:You wanna be tightly edited but you don't wanna over tighten to the point of chopping off your words. Okay. Another mistake a lot of influencers make, oh my goodness, is getting excited about collaboration requests and then accepting every single thing that comes by their email or they get reached out to for. So when you start creating consistently and you are getting noticed by agencies and brands, it's exciting. And you think, Oh, yes.
Helen:Yay. I'm gonna make $200 here and $200 there and ding, ding, ding, and you're $50 here and a free product there. What happens is your content will get cluttered with use quote selling products and your audience is really going to start to get annoyed. And then if you start doing things where they're not even things you really use, you're not even going to be seen as authentic anymore. So there's, like, just a combination of problems that happens when you start to get these opportunities.
Helen:And I'm gonna share a tip from Lorraine Laddish, who's a big influencer here, and I mentioned her often on these podcasts. Thank you for letting me, Lorraine, use your name again and again. But she's she has been an influencer long before and much sooner than a lot of the 2020 and beyond influencers have come out of the woodwork. She's doing this much longer than that, like, 10 years from from now. So we're back we're talking back in 2014.
Helen:She's an early influencer. And she still only posts 10% of her content as influencer as sponsored content. So she still does 90% authentic herself, her life, her family, things she really does like, things that are not sponsored. So this way her audience knows immediately when something is sponsored and also has enough of a vibe of her to know why she's promoting a thing or that there are some things she just really likes and she's not even getting paid to promote them. So just it's a really tough it's a really tough one.
Helen:I'm gonna say that there's a lot of influencers who struggle with it because we know you have the audience and it's time to monetize. It's like you've gotten this far and it's time to make it worth your time, but it could be really, really messy and it could start to have your loyal followers falling off, unfollowing, not interested in your content. So doing collaboration any collaboration that comes your way could be a mistake. So stick with authenticity, trust with your audience, keep that trust by being yourself, being true to yourself and and and trying to be mindful of the balance of your content. Alright.
Helen:Now, lastly, I'm not gonna I'm gonna not gonna sign off without answering a couple of questions. But I just wanna say as an overview for this message of of today about mistakes influencers make, there's many more that you might wanna add to this. There could be influencers who move out of their lane. We can, like, I can run off and say, why is an influencer about fashion all of a sudden now going into talking about some kind of public scandal that's happening. And a lot of people do that because they get swept up.
Helen:And the next thing you know, you're not sticking with your expertise or your niche or why you've come to your audience. And so I always say, look at your core belief, your North Star. Why are you posting and what's your audience with you for? And stay true to yourself. Because if you start just hunting, pecking into every different area just because you think, Oh, everybody's talking about this now, I gotta talk about it.
Helen:And you will get pressure a lot of times as you grow. Creators will come into your comments oftentimes and ask you, what's your take on such and such? I don't know. It's not my area. A lot of times I just wanna say I don't have a take on it because my take doesn't matter.
Helen:It's not where my expertise lies. If you wanna ask me about sound quality, about video, how things are done and you want me to weigh in on something like that, I'm all in because that's my area of expertise. You wanna ask me about production, content creation, tips, and strategy, and things like that. I'm in for that. And I'm even in for things like give me I'll talk about baking tips because I like to bake.
Helen:But there's certain things that I'm not an expert in, and I'm not gonna start spewing out my audience about something that I'm not well versed in. So always think unless it goes to audience first. Think about what your audience is following you for and what do they wanna hear from you about. And you don't have to talk about something just because everyone else is posting about it. That's all I have to say about that.
Helen:Okay. Let's get to the questions. Hooray. I'm off the soapbox. Two questions for today.
Helen:How can you not show your face in a duet? Love it. Love the question because when you tap duet now and a lot of people will say, oh, my gosh. The only option I have is to record in real time. And actually you can do something as simple as taking your phone and putting it down on the table.
Helen:So it turns to black on the Duet side. So the cam or put something over the camera. So you can flip the camera and put it down or you can put something on top of the camera. And then you can just record the Duet and put titles on it. But I've noticed that some people are gonna have this green screen option.
Helen:So when they tap Duet, you can tap green screen and then you can put a photo. You can actually insert a photo in front of, in front of your on your phone. So you don't even have to have your have the black screen there. You can have some photo there and you can do that. Obviously, there's different layouts for duets.
Helen:Just be mindful when you do a duet. It's a good idea to do something that so that it's not just taking that person's video and then not putting anything with it to change it because the algorithm doesn't really push videos out that are not. It it looks like you're stealing content in a way. If you're just using green screen and putting someone else's video up there and not doing something to add to it. That's the whole strategy on duets in general.
Helen:They want you to be enhancing someone else's content or being with someone else's content versus just sharing it and not showing your face or showing something else on the side. And then the next the next big final question is, well, I don't have an answer for it. No, I do have an answer. My followers are not seeing my content. Help.
Helen:And also this flips to I'm not seeing the people I follow as content. So you can look at it both ways. But I have posted, oh, this week a tutorial to explain how to do manage collections, and you can do this on TikTok and on Instagram. And what I urge you to do is if you are not seeing someone that you follow's content and even when you tap on followers and you're just watching the following feed, if you're not seeing their content, when they do come up and appear on your page, take one of their videos, put it into a collection, call it favorite creators or something. Pick your top 10 who you don't want to miss.
Helen:This way you can check-in on that collection, tap on those videos and then tap on the username and you can scroll through some of their updated most recent videos. So that way you can be in touch with your favorite creators, even though the algorithm on the For You or Following feed is not sending you their content. But if it's the opposite where your followers are not seeing your content, it's equally as frustrating and it's obviously harder to manage. What I might suggest is this is be mindful and careful about this, but perhaps you can send one of your videos to a handful of your followers and say, oh if you haven't seen my content recently check this out and maybe add me to your favorites. And so you can prompt your followers to be reminded of you and then consider putting you into their favorites.
Helen:So and I would do this carefully because there's nothing worse than having somebody sending you every single one of their videos when they post something. It's horrible. You don't want that. You don't wanna do that to someone. You don't wanna be that someone that's constantly every time you post a video, you're sending it to a bunch of your followers in a direct message.
Helen:That can be annoying and that can cause someone to unfollow you. But done strategically, carefully, mindfully, cutesy and demure. I had to. I'm sorry. I wanna say something about that before I leave too.
Helen:But do it in a way that's not obnoxious so that you don't prompt someone to unfollow you. Alright. Lastly, because I did say demure and cutesy, I have to say one more thing before I leave you. Oh, this is a long one today. Sorry.
Helen:But these trends that come out of nowhere and they go hard like the demure cutesy mindful trend. I just wanna say that it's really great when it happens and it's so fun because you can hop on it really fast. But what happens with these types of trends is they go so hard and then they're gone so fast. They go so hard or whatever people hop on it so fast, honestly, that they are done quickly because people jump on it and then the For You page is flooded and then everyone's sick of it quickly. So just one of the things to think about is when you hop on one of those trends, if you hop on it early enough, you're gonna be in the wave.
Helen:But if you wait too long and then you're hopping on it a week later, you might be in that that bucket of people where people are scrolling now because they've seen the trend and they've it's been done to death. So as always with trends, it is a it is a fine line between being on trend and being too late to the trend where it's it actually does you a disservice. So just think about that. And it's another fun thing to think about bringing a trend back that you haven't seen in a while because maybe people will welcome it if it's if they are sick of one trend, and they'll look back to an older one. So ponder that as an idea and have a really good weekend, and I'll see you next week.
Helen:Thanks for being here. Have a good one. Bye.