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Happy Friday, and welcome to the socialized strategy. I am back in New York in my home studio feeling comfortable, feeling good, and very relaxed and refreshed. I am happy to be here to bring you the Friday edition of the socialized podcast, where we take a deep dive into one topic and cover it from every angle. And this week, I'm excited because we planned the strategy topic and then received a question, which basically is the topic. So I love that, and it was just perfect synchronicity.
Helen:So the topic for today is resources. The person asked actually asked this question. If I'm just starting out and I'm trying to learn and figure all this out, where do I start? So our topic for today is what are the best resources for you if you are starting from scratch? And some of these resources, quite honestly, I think a lot of people who've been creating are also not aware of.
Helen:So let's cover it in-depth. And let me start by saying today's newsletter and podcast is sponsored by Plannable, which is a really nice resource I am going to talk about a little bit later in this episode where you can coordinate and plan your content if you are working especially with the team. So it's certainly good for if you're a solo creator to keep yourself organized and it takes you straight from planning, sharing, discussing, captions, the whole nine, right through to posting. So it's a really nice resource. I'll talk about it a little bit further when I get to that that section of the newsletter.
Helen:But let's kick it off with somebody's new. They're trying to start out on social media or on whether it's TikTok or Instagram. The first thing you need to know is that this podcast and all of the content that I'm bringing you in tutorial form on the different apps is all available on our website. So if you go to hellosocialize.com, there is the newsletter link on the home page and then you click learn at the top. You can then sort by tutorials, courses, and workshops.
Helen:And in the courses right now, we have a TikTok course there. There will be an Instagram course added very soon. We also have the tutorials, which is so nice because they are the tutorials that I'm posting on all the platforms already. I'm posting them on Tik TOK, but you night might not be seeing them if TikTok algorithm is not feeding you that content. So you can simply go to the website, click on learn, click on tutorials, and then choose your topic.
Helen:It's sorted by TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. I think I even have Facebook there. And, there's CapCut. So you can sort and click, and then all of them are labeled. So you can and you can sort and filter newest to oldest.
Helen:So you can make sure you're seeing the newest tutorials first. And there are hundreds of tutorials there. So everything from the beginning that I have been posting on how to's are posted on my YouTube channel, which is linked now into this platform so that you can browse through and find the tutorials. It's a lot easier than trying to scroll through my TikTok page to find a specific thing even though they're labeled or going to Instagram and trying to throw it scroll through the labels over there. It's nicely organized with the nice big thumbnails on YouTube.
Helen:So you can easily see the topic of each tutorial. So if you didn't know, now you know, and that's a great place to find it. The other link obviously is courses. And so starting with the basics, if you're new, especially to TikTok, you this course is gold. And I'm saying it as the person who created it, but I'm also speaking from all the comments I get on this course every single day.
Helen:Thank you for this. It's so enlightening. Why couldn't you have taught me algebra in the 7th grade? You lay this out so so nicely and clearly. Anybody can do it.
Helen:So it's really, really very validating because I've taken a long time to create the course and that's why the Instagram one isn't there. I have this. Instagram has a lot to cover and I wanna make sure it's covered from every angle before I post it. So go start with the course there. And if you're new if you know about all these things already, don't leave me yet because there are new resources I'm gonna continue to share as I keep talking.
Helen:So the third one that is available on the website is, baboom, the workshops. Why are these nice? Because they are an hour long. Because you can attend in person. If you have questions, you can type it into the chat during the workshop itself, and you can get your answer right on the spot.
Helen:Julie is usually on there managing the chat and making sure she's answering the questions or fielding them to me to answer on the spot if there are ones that I need to answer. So it's a it's a very interactive experience. It's so much fun. We actually have tomorrow's or today's oh, today. Coming up at 4 o'clock today, I'm teaching stop motion in a workshop.
Helen:So if you haven't signed up, grab the link from the newsletter and go sign up for it. Because at 4 o'clock today, I'm gonna cover product stop motion and how to do how to make your product videos more interesting. I'm excited about this one because I was recently challenged on a work project to do some interesting shots and videos for products. And so I had to tap into my own creativity and find different ways that I was gonna highlight these products. So I have lots to tell you, lots to share, and I have work examples I can show you to back it up.
Helen:So professional professionalism meets the, average TikTok poster because I really do this professionally, but I have learned how to do it with my own phone by myself, without a crew, without lighting and without the whole production scene. So you're getting a professional who's teaching you in the skills to put it right into the palm of your hand. And I'm so excited about it. So that's the workshop. And if you go on the website, when you click the the learn and then you click the workshops, all of the workshops we have ever done are posted there.
Helen:And they're nicely labeled. So if you're new and you wanna learn how to edit, start with editing 101. You'll see that you start it starts right at the beginning, and then each one adds on to the next. Just like tomorrow's is number 7 added into the editing series. In addition, there is a small business workshop posted there.
Helen:There is a special transition higher level workshop on transitions posted there. So if you are already seasoned and you already know how to edit, there are new things that you are can learn in it on more of an expert level. So go check out the workshops. And the funny thing about to me about the workshops is you can see my entire hair growth experience. Because there was times I was doing workshops and I was going through chemo and I had wigs on.
Helen:There are it's the before. It's the during. So it's it's a it's a fun little adventure. Sometimes I forget that those are there. But that's the story with the workshops, and we will be doing them once a month.
Helen:The next thing to tell you is that we are really diving into these expert workshops. And I am so pumped about the next guest we are having on our expert workshop. Boy, oh, boy. I'm very excited about it. The first guest we had was Gina from Skinnytaste.
Helen:Now I picked her. I've been following her forever. I adore her. She I know she I knew she would have so much to share, and she was so enlightening and amazing. So if you haven't listened to that one, check it out.
Helen:But each time we do one of these expert workshops, we learn so much. I personally learn from these experts. I choose them because I know I can learn from them. And if I can learn from them, so can you. I don't know everything.
Helen:I've been doing this for 4 years on TikTok and Instagram even a bit longer, and I still learn things every day. It's we can't possibly know because these apps are changing. Things are the world is changing. The way people are creating content, the things that have gone viral are changing. So things are constantly evolving and we're constantly learning.
Helen:And that's why I love to have people in that have different kinds of experience than I have. So I might be really, really good at production and transitions than some of the creators that I'm having, on as guests. But the things I'm learning from them, I don't even know about. When I spoke to Gina and she was talking about how she got ads on her website when she first started out. I mean, all of that was very interesting that one of the apps she uses to to automatically respond to her comments was really, really and that was a great resource, by the way.
Helen:So I'll talk about that coming up. And the next guest we had was my stylist colleague, Alicia Lincoln, who talked about styling for camera and how you can think about putting yourself on camera in a different light with your with your fashion choices and upping your game there. That was a great one. Upcoming next week, if you have not signed up, please sign up. It is going to be Primo.
Helen:I'm having Austin Tosone. I think that's how we say her last name. I guess I should ask her before that before we meet in person. I met her in person at an event. It was a fashion event for Nuuly, the rental platform where you can rent clothes.
Helen:And she was there as an influencer. She came up to me and she's like, oh my god, mother ship. I've been following you forever. It was so fun and adorable. I I adore her.
Helen:And I looked on my phone, I said, oh, I'm following you back. This is so amazing. So that's a rarity sometimes when you get someone where you both know each other. So it was super, super fun to meet her. And as soon as I after I left her and we had been talking for a while about how she monetizes her content, she has been doing influencing full time as her full time job for a couple of years.
Helen:I think I I'll I'll find out exactly when we talk, but she's a creator with 20,000 followers on TikTok. I think about 16,000 followers on Instagram. I wanna say above the 10 k mark on YouTube. So she's a nice sized creator, but she's not a creator with a 1000000 followers. So what I was so inspiring to talk to her because you realize that it's not about a huge number.
Helen:Huge. Huge. It's not about a huge number of followers. It's about the quality of your followers, the engagement level on your content. It is way more important and possible for you to monetize with the metrics if you can't get over the idea that you have to have this massive amount of followers.
Helen:I know that I am going to learn so much on that podcast next week that I hope I'll let people ask questions because I have so many questions. There's gonna be no time for everyone else's questions. I'm just kidding, of course. I will let you ask questions. But I have so many for her, and we're gonna dive deep.
Helen:And she is not I hope I mean, she doesn't have a a time limit on how how long we're gonna talk. We're gonna probably do a 30 minute interview followed by 15 minutes of a q and a so that we can have plenty of time with her and find out all the angles of what she does. Even the few things she talked to me about when I met her in person, I was like, oh, that's so smart. I mean, she's just she's really lovely and she's super intelligent, very she has her act together. She has a really nice website.
Helen:She does a newsletter. She's got it all going on, and I am really excited to meet her. So please, please check out our expert workshop next week and sign up for that. I am pumped. But that is something that every month we are going to be featuring an expert.
Helen:I already have somebody else lined up for after her, so I am ready to go. We're we have we have got the guests lined up for that. Okay. Obviously, you know about this wonderful podcast, so I'm not gonna talk about that. If you're listening, you already know about it.
Helen:But I did put it in the newsletter today that we do this podcast every Tuesday Friday. I love it. On Tuesday, we talk about trend alerts, social media updates, original content ideas. I I do music suggestions. I put tutorials in there.
Helen:Anything that you might miss on your app, you're getting spoon fed in your email. I love it on Tuesdays. And then on Fridays is when we do the strategy deep dive. So today, it's all about your resources. Alright.
Helen:Next up. And this one is so big that it can be expanded into its own newsletter, but I'm gonna keep it in a paragraph here, which is creator tools. As creators, we are as good as our brains are keeping ourselves organized, but it's so helpful to use some kind of tool to keep yourself on track. And especially if you're someone who works with clients, if you collaborate with others, if you're running social media for your small business and you have others working on it, You would not believe some of the questions I get from people who will tell me, oh, I was making I'm making the drafts, but my colleagues can't access the drafts. No.
Helen:Because the drafts are only stored locally on the person's phone who is creating them. So there's a strategy. There is a, plan, I guess you might say, a system that needs to be put into place where you're all sharing that content. So the person who creates it needs to save it, needs to put it into a platform where everybody can look at it, where you can access it. So someone else is maybe in charge of posting.
Helen:It can't be living on the person's phone who made it if that isn't the person who's posting. So if you're working on a team, creator tools are super important. And one of the ones who is sponsoring this newsletter, Plannable, is excellent for that. And what I love about it is you can also communicate right in there. So we've always talked about different types of tools you can use.
Helen:For example, Airtable and Notion or Google Drive. And maybe you you use Slack to do messaging. But what's really nice about Planable is it puts it all in one place for you. So you can upload your content, put the captions, a lot people can hop in, approve. You can have conversations in there.
Helen:You can keep track of who's doing what to who at what time. You have you can assign tasks. It is really, really useful. And it also then posts your content. So you can take it all the way through.
Helen:It's a full one one swoop right through from beginning to end. And that's why we, wanted to use have it as a sponsor here. So love it. Check it out with the link that is in the show notes and also in the newsletter. Let's think.
Helen:What else? So what else was I saying about creative tools? Oh, yes. The one more was just, a little tip on if you have the automation needs where you want to, let's say, do something and you want people to be able to get this link to a thing in their direct message in Instagram. This doesn't work for TikTok, unfortunately, because I really wish it did.
Helen:But in Instagram and Facebook, you can have you can use an app called ManyChat. And in that app, you can there's a free version. Unfortunately, the free version has one little limitation, and I will tell you what that is. It won't allow you to say, use this automation for your next post. It has to they have to post the thing first and then you have to hurry up and then post the automation.
Helen:So for example, if you wanna say, if you're a person with a recipe and you wanna say, type in the word tortillas and you'll get the recipe in your DM. I'm sure you've seen this happen in other other, people's content that you watch. So the way that works is they set up the word tortilla in a ManyChat automation. And so then it attaches the link to the recipe. And the minute the person types tortilla into the comment, they get a DM, which gives them the recipe.
Helen:So it's excellent. But the free version won't let you create the automation until the post is posted. So you've gotta be really quick. What the paid one does, it allows you to say, use this automation on my next post. And therefore, you can set up the automation.
Helen:It's all ready to go. And then you can post the video and it'll happen automatically. It's a little scary to say that in your comment and then have to hurry up and create the automation quickly and then publish it. So that there might be a 5 minutes where you're setting up the publication and somebody's already post commented tortilla, and he might have missed your opportunity to get them the DM. So it's a little stressful on the free version.
Helen:That's the limitation. But of course, all the apps are gonna have one little thing that you can't do in the free version because they want you to buy it. Anyway, that's my story from, from any chat. Okay. What else?
Helen:So coming soon, excited to say, we are going to do a premium membership, and we're hoping to launch this May or June where we're gonna hopefully do a situation where we give you access to a full content library with 5 over 500 ideas so that you can tap into anytime you want. So you can pop in there and say, oh, there's new ideas in here. Let me grab some of the new ideas. It's gonna keep a running total of things that we're talking about in the newsletter as well as other ideas. And then we're going to do this is gonna be really fun for me.
Helen:Specific tutorials requested by people who are that are a little off the beaten track. So what happens to me on TikTok and Instagram is I will see somebody will comment, oh, teach us this one or send me they'll send me a video and say, can you teach us the tutorial on this? And I get this so often, and I have to pick and choose. I can't teach every single tutorial. I'd be spending, you know, the whole day and night over here making tutorials for for requests.
Helen:So what I'm planning to do is, on that membership thing, respond to that and get some exclusive tutorials that maybe are a little more high end, a little bit more niche, where somebody specifically wants something that's a little bit not so hard trending that it's not gonna be something I would post on, my regular feed. So keep an eye out for the announcement on that. Very excited to launch that in the near future. And so Julie and I are working hard on that one. So so I'm putting the pressure on her to get that going.
Helen:But before I wrap this one up, I want to answer a couple of questions because I did not do that when I was in Puerto Rico. And now that I'm in New York and I have some extra time, I'm gonna make sure I answer some questions. The first one was what this newsletter answered, which is being new to the platform. What are the resources? So answer that in deep form here for that creator who asked.
Helen:The other question that we got this week, which I I love, is as and this one's a great one for a lot of people. One of my friends who who zooms in on her phone, her font is so big on her phone because she's you know, the screen, she can't see the font when it's small, and she refuses to put the readers on. So anyway, this one is for those folks. As an older user of the platform, this person says, I find the small screen of the phone very troublesome. Do you have any tips on how to get it on a larger screen?
Helen:This is also a step by step for What does she say for the Jones generation users who wanna understand how it all ties together? Is there a place to learn how to set up accounts that are personal and for those that are business and how to have both? So there's a lot of questions in one question here, and I'm gonna attack it. The first one is this phone size. And, yes, it is a problem on many levels to work on such a small screen.
Helen:I just shot a tutorial yesterday. It might be posted by now. We're not sure. But I just shot a tutorial yesterday. That is that was so difficult to to edit on the phone screen because the edits were point one seconds.
Helen:And even even even though I zoomed in, there were so many edits, and I wanted to be able to cut duplicate and then reuse a scene. But because the phone's so small, there were so many edits. There were so many cuts. I couldn't even find them sliding. I don't remember which order this is in.
Helen:It's very tricky to edit certain things on the phone. I felt this so deeply when I read this person's question. So I will tell you, if you are a person who has a laptop handy and you can go to capcut.com and edit the same things on your laptop that you do on your phone, you're working with a much bigger screen. It's much more user friendly. I personally prefer to stay on the phone with my edits.
Helen:I like to keep it on the phone. It feels less like work, less like a job to me. The minute I put it on my laptop, I feel like I'm at work. When I'm in my phone and I'm editing on the go and I'm standing online waiting for who knows what. I'm at a doctor's appointment and I'm in the waiting room.
Helen:I can edit. And that I like because it makes it very user friendly for me to be able to do my work on the go. That said, if you are a person who's sitting anyway, and you're on a phone sitting on a sofa, or you're at your desk and you're scrolling in on your phone, move it over to your laptop and work on a bigger screen. Why not? You can also, and I don't know that I would recommend this per se, but you can also screen share to your phone.
Helen:So you can use your phone as a mirror just like you can use your TV. That's another thing. Just air, AirPlay it to your TV. In an iPhone there is a setting that's that if you scroll into your control center, it's called something, which I can't remember now, but it's like airplay, window. What is it?
Helen:Screen mirroring screen mirroring. And you can play the thing that's on your phone right up on your TV screen. So you can be watching on the big screen. You're still editing on a tiny phone in your hand. So it doesn't solve all the problems, but it does solve that you have a bigger screen.
Helen:So we'll start with that. That's one thing. Now step by step for the Jones generation, I love that this thing Jones generation users wanna understand how it all ties together. That that I will tell you to this lovely Smith fam for you team who sent in the question. It is really by doing.
Helen:As you go day by day and you learn, you will not remember that you didn't know. That's the one thing. It's just like kindergarten. Do you remember not knowing the alphabet? It's hard to even know.
Helen:We know the alphabet now. We learned it and we know it. So it's really hard to put yourself back to not knowing. So you have to realize as you start posting, as you start doing the first thing, take the TikTok beginner course, see how it all ties together, see how things work. Then you add on the next thing.
Helen:Then you add on the next thing. Each time you add something, you will start to see how it all ties together. There's no magic pill that you can take to see it immediately. But doing it step by step, day by day, you will say, oh, I remember when I didn't even know that. You might not even remember when you didn't even know that.
Helen:So the thing about anything with social media is doing it every day. I'm gonna throw my mom, not under the bus per se, but she'll say to me, oh, help me log on to all my accounts and sit with me and show me how. That's all well and good. But if she does it with me that day in another she's not gonna do it again for another 2 weeks or a month. And then when she's by herself and she said, she's not gonna remember what happened 2 weeks ago that I showed her how to click here and do that and do that.
Helen:When time passes and you're not doing something every day, it doesn't stay in there. There's no room for it to be stored. And then all of a sudden, boom. Oh, yeah. I'm gonna remember that.
Helen:I'm gonna remember every step. No. If you're not doing it every day, the things move to the side in your memory and you don't need them, so you move them over. So the big thing about social media is getting in there every day, trying something every day, seeing what you can learn day by day, baby steps, just the way I am learning Spanish. And I have very little patience for myself.
Helen:Sometimes I get very upset with myself because I'm like, I'm not learning fast enough. But so that's why I feel it. I feel it deeply. I feel this question deeply because I think I'm not learning anything. And then I remember when I barely knew how to put a sentence together, and I can do that now.
Helen:So, of course, I'm progressing. It just doesn't seem like it because I still see this vast, vast thing in front of me of things that I don't know. So what I say to you is step by step. That's what my teacher says. We're gonna take our time.
Helen:We're gonna do a little at a time. You're gonna learn 5 words a day. You're gonna progress through that way. Just you're gonna do the same thing on social media. You're gonna take 2 minutes a day, 10 minutes a day.
Helen:You're gonna make sure you're on there, you're posting, and you're learning. And that is all you need to do for yourself because time will pass and you will suddenly know a lot of things. But yay. Alright. The last thing is this, last part of the question.
Helen:This was like a multilevel question was, is there a place to learn how to set up accounts that are personal and those that are business and how to have both? And this is really gonna be a topic for a newsletter. As a matter of fact, next week we are gonna talk about, let's see. Is it next week? We're gonna talk about music and the different ways you can use music, how to attack music on your accounts.
Helen:And personal and business is a big deal when it comes to that. So we will be covering that in-depth. But, yes, you can have multiple accounts on your phone. In your account settings, you can choose if it's a business and account or a personal account. You can toggle between accounts.
Helen:You can do this in Instagram. You can do this in TikTok. You can do this in Facebook. You can always toggle between accounts. So you're not stuck with just having one account on your phone.
Helen:And you can have your same account on multiple devices. So you can have your account and all these other accounts on an iPad, on a second phone. So accounts can live on multiple phones. But again, when you make drafts, the drafts you create when you shoot content only stay on the phone that they were created on. That was a lot.
Helen:I am going to end it with that question since I think that question covered so many things. I more than covered it today in the question department. I hope you enjoyed the podcast. If you happen to land here just because you were scrolling podcasts and you saw our new thumbnail yay, Julie. Thank you for the new thumbnail.
Helen:We got a nice new clear thumbnail that describes more about what this podcast is. So if you happen to land here from the gorgeous new thumbnail, make sure you're subscribed to the newsletter so that you get all the links of the things that we mentioned and alerts for the new workshops when they're posted and all the things. You definitely want the newsletter. The newsletter can be subscribed to at hello socialize.com. And that's it for this week.
Helen:Thank you so much for listening. Have a really fun weekend. I hope the weather is lovely. Right now, it looks a little gray here in New York. Hopefully, hopefully it turns for the weekend.
Helen:That would be nice. And I hope you enjoy it, and we'll see you next week on Tuesday for for the socialized forecast. Have a good weekend.