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Welcome to the socialized strategy. Happy Friday. Before I get into the topic today, I have to tell you that my latest obsession or thing that I can't stop thinking about is the fact that there are drones hovering around the area of New Jersey where I used to live. I spent, I think 15 years, I lived in Morris County, New Jersey in Chatham, the town of Chatham specifically. And that's where the drones are.
Helen:And I'm, first of all, I'm obsessed with, you know, meteor showers. I'm like the moon. I'm always it's always been so overwhelming to me, even as a kid, the first time I ever saw a planet through a telescope, and I lost my breath. I couldn't I couldn't function almost for, like, a week. When I saw the rings of Saturn for real with my own eyes and a telescope, I'll never forget that that moment.
Helen:And that was really when one of my kids was my son was in 5th grade, and he's he's 35 now. So that's how long I've been saw that and have been moved by that. And now drones. What? And also they're not a threat, but we don't know what they are.
Helen:How do we know they're not a threat if we don't know what they are? Okay. Welcome to Helen's brain and a day in the life. So that is a problem. But I, I will say that I'm obsessed with watching these videos over and over.
Helen:So now what's happening to my for you page is it's like constantly being reminded of these drones and I need to relax. Anyway, I just thought I'd share because earlier this week, I was I was my for you page was full of the Like A Prayer thing. And now that I've been watching the drones obsessively, that's all I'm seeing. So I have to kind of revamp my for you page. I have to move on.
Helen:I have to get over it. And I have to hope there's answers soon. Cause I need answers. Okay. We need answers.
Helen:If anybody knows, please send me a message. Send me a SOS. I need answers. But let's talk about the subject at hand. Shall we?
Helen:We are going to talk about how to go live strategies for going live. I've been asked this a lot in my studio and as well lately, a lot of people asking me this in my comment section. So since that, when that happens, that becomes what we need to talk about in the strategy, because I know people are needing to do it, to sell things, to promote their courses, or even me, I have to get on there to promote the studio because I'm like, you know, I gotta tell people. And I don't like to tell people constantly in, when I'm on in the newsletter or in my content. I don't wanna make video after video about it because I just don't really enjoy being kind of a salesperson.
Helen:I don't wanna even sell it. I just need to tell people it's there. So because of that, I've been trying to be more, conscious about going live and keeping that on a rhythm in my life. Because in fact, it does help you. It helps your videos get more engagement because when you post a video and then you go live, it is proven that your video gets pushed out.
Helen:And not always will it get high engagement because it really depends on the type of video that you post. And also there's timing and a lot of other things involved about who's online at that moment watching your video. There's a lot of things at play. I'm going to explain that a little bit more as we dive in, but because it's important to go live and a lot of people now have the ability to go live with their number of followers. I want to talk about it and give you all of the tips that you need to help you be more successful on your life.
Helen:From preparation to planning and then hosting. And then after you go live, what to do. Let us dive in. All right. First of all, how do you get an audience?
Helen:People get very stressed about, I don't have enough people in my life. Well, it doesn't really matter how many people you have in your life because it's having anybody in your life is helpful because you'll people come in and out. So it's not like, you know, 50 people. When I have a 150 people in a live, they're not all there the whole time. It rotates through.
Helen:It's constantly going up and down. The numbers go up and down. It's, you know, a lot of people have not been live before. So you don't go live for the first time and think you're gonna have a 100 people in your live. That's just not reality.
Helen:You have to build up the audience who's paying attention to that and kind of looking for you to be live. So it takes some time. So a few strategies for preparing to go live and to make sure that you have people in your life. Here's a few, actually, I'll share a few strategies. Number 1, post about it ahead of time.
Helen:Maybe pick a time, maybe say when you're going to be live and then make sure you post it on your stories across your platforms. In particular, your Instagram story, where your most loyal people are watching your TikTok story and lean into the story to tell people I'm going to be live tonight and we're going to be doing this and give them some idea. Set a live reminder for people. Now there's some apps where you can set this, that people can set a reminder for their lives. So you can do that if you have that available.
Helen:But another one that's really helpful is to ask friends and family. So get people that you know that maybe are friends with you on TikTok. If you're nervous and tell them I'm going to go live tonight, will you, will you attend? I remember when Julie first was going live on her baking channel, she wanted me to attend. So it's just, I don't know.
Helen:I think it's, it's nice when you have people in there that are familiar. What's really funny is when you start to have people in there that are the, the TikTok, I will call them strangers, but coming in, then it becomes weird when you do have a familiar person coming in. I found that funny the first few lives that when I had a lot of followers and then all of a sudden there was like a a friend of mine in real life was in there. And I was like, kind of embarrassed. I don't know why.
Helen:But anyway, so that's fun. But asking friends and family to come to support is a good way to guarantee you have some people in there and they'll engage and they'll give you topics to talk about. Like Julie was nervous. So I was, I would ask her questions so that she would see my questions in the chat and then she would be able to answer them. So it gave her something to talk about.
Helen:And another good idea is to make it, if you plan to go live often, to set it at the same, do it at the same time and day so that your followers tend to expect it. I have noticed that a lot of times people will ask me, oh, are you always live at this time? And I can't always say yes because I'm pretty random with my lives, and I like to cover different time zones. So I purposely don't always go live at the same time. But I, you know, I know sometimes it's just, that time of day happens to be good for me.
Helen:So, you know, just do what you do, what you can, but preparing for it and getting your audience ready for it. And so that they know they may come back if they know you're going to be live always on Tuesday nights at 7 PM. A lot of creators do that strategy. So I would lean into it. If a lot of people are doing something, it usually means it's, it's viable or it works.
Helen:So pay attention to that. Now, before you go live, it's you have to prepare and the best lives are engaging and they don't leave time for the creator to sit there silently staring at their phone. Or I don't really love to watch lives where people are eating and you have to watch them eat. I don't know. It's, it's all personal preference about what you like to watch, but if you prepare ahead of time, plan a list of topics, at least if you get distracted by the chat and then the chat goes quiet, you can go back to your list and then you can get back on topic or think of, oh, and the next thing I was going to talk about was.
Helen:So it really helps you go along. I do have a video which shows what is on the screen when you're live. And I think that is very helpful because if you've never been live, the first time I went, I couldn't find the end button. I couldn't figure out how to get out of it. And I was like, I had to literally quit the app to close the live.
Helen:I didn't know where the, the shutoff button was. So my tutorial does teach you and show you the buttons. Here's where you can add people if you want to join with a guest here, you know, so I have that and that's available. And I'll, I'll link that for sure in the show notes. But planning that list of topics is key.
Helen:And then setting your expectations. So don't assume that you're going to have like a full bunch of people there. Assume that you might have 0 people there and you might be talking to yourself. And then you use that opportunity to practice as if you have people there. It is the, isn't that the easiest thing to talk to yourself when you have nobody there?
Helen:Like it's a great time to practice. So if you're live and there's 0 up there, give it a shot. Like pretend you have a whole audience and you're talking to people. I think that's like almost a great prize if it was to happen on your first time, because you wouldn't have to be nervous that people were in there watching you. You would be like, oh, nobody came, but I practiced.
Helen:That's like an ideal scenario to me anyway, just cause I'm not paranoid about being alone. It says a lot about me. I can entertain myself for hours. The other thing that I mentioned earlier, and I want to go a little deeper into this is posting a video before you go live. So I've noticed that when I post a video before I go live, it will start to that video will get traction and it will go out to followers who happen to be online at that time.
Helen:And it'll be and then shortly after, they'll see you live, which is funny. So sometimes I'll scroll. I'll see, oh, I haven't seen this creator in a while. And I see the video literally, like, 3 swipes later, I see that they're live or vice versa. I'll see them live.
Helen:And then 3 swipes later, I see one of their videos. So it is a fact that that platform does push those videos out. But the issue is depending on the time you go live, if you don't have a lot of your followers that are active in that moment, and then that video is getting pushed out, that video might not get traction because it might not be getting to your followers until later when they pick up their phone. So there's a little bit of a tricky scenario about choosing the time wisely and saying, oh, I know a handful of my followers are probably online now because they're located on the east coast and it's after work hours or something. And then you give it a shot.
Helen:So it's all trial and error and none of it is a guarantee. Sometimes I post a video, I go live and I come back and the video has 10,000 views and I almost like have a panic attack. And other times I post and I think this one's going to be lit. And I finished the live and it's got 500 views. I'm like, what happened?
Helen:So it's not a guarantee that your video gets views, but it's a guarantee that it gets sent to the, for you page. It just depends on who is live, who is online at that time to see it and engage with it and get it moving. So it's a little bit of a, you know, it's a poke and poke and poke and try this and try that. And that's, that's the only way to do any of this. Nothing is a guarantee.
Helen:You can listen to the gurus till the cows come home. Really. They're half of them are making this shit up, to be honest. And other others of them are just going by maybe their own personal experience one time when something happened. So you can't take everything at face value when you see someone just because it you think, oh, they have a following in or in their name, it says TikTok expert.
Helen:Anybody could put that in their name. So just be, be careful, like who you listen to and try and try and, it's just like if you were interviewing a babysitter, you're not going to, you know, you're going to check their references. You're going to make sure that they're qualified to take care of your kids. At least I am where I did. So I want to, I want you to think about that in the same way.
Helen:I always like to relate social media things to real life, because that's where I feel we get our best answers. Like, what do you do in real life? And I just had this happen today too. Oh my gosh. I have to digress.
Helen:1 of, my colleagues, Maayan Gordon, who is our studio manager at the, in the socialized studio. She is really, really good on LinkedIn. And so I was telling her, I want to post this thing on LinkedIn, but I'm not sure how to word it. And she's like, you know, you have to think of LinkedIn. And this is like brain buster information.
Helen:Think of it as networking in real life. Like, would you walk into a party and immediately start saying, here's what I am. Here's what I do. And here's our moment. And here's what I did.
Helen:No. You would socialize, like you would get to know the person. So, oh, why do you like to go to events? What is the most thing you, what do you, why do you, why are you here and who do you know? You would approach them in that way.
Helen:You wouldn't immediately walk up to them and do a sales pitch. So that was a very enlightening thing for me as a content creator to realize about a platform that's different. Because I was thinking of LinkedIn, like I better get my message across in the first three seconds. And she woke me up to say, not necessarily like that's social media. You got to get your point across in the first three seconds, but LinkedIn is like, you're building a network.
Helen:You're not going to immediately barrage someone with a sales pitch. So I love that info. And I just wanted to share that while I was thinking of it. But in the same way, I think about social media in real life. She had me thinking about real life and relating it back to my LinkedIn.
Helen:So that's how that all ties together. All right. So now while you're on your live, what should you do? Okay. Besides making, besides making a list of topics.
Helen:So you can, first of all, you want to pretend you're on a FaceTime with a friend. You don't want to still think you're talking to a 100 people. Don't act like you're talking to a 100 people when you're practicing with 0. Pretend that you're talking to a one person, 2 people, a couple of people, the handful that might come into the chat. The other thing is engage in the comments, but don't read them out loud right away.
Helen:I have been burned by this. It's terrifying. Sometimes if you're just reading the comments and then people put tricky words in there to make you say something that you didn't mean. So be careful about reading things out loud, reading them in your head first. You don't have to read the comments out loud at all.
Helen:People can see them. They're reading too. So you can read a couple. Like sometimes I'll call one out if I'm going to answer a question, but I don't sit there and just read the comments. That's a waste of lifetime.
Helen:You want to engage with the comments. You want to offer value. You want to be confident and be knowledgeable about whatever it is you're talking about, but you don't want to just be reading a laundry list. And so have a plan. The other thing I've seen people do that I kind of love, and I did this one time.
Helen:I did a trivia. I did social media trivia, TikTok trivia. So I had a bunch of trivia questions so that when things got into a low, I did like, let me, let me see if anybody knows the answer to this. And I threw out a trivia question. Things like that are fun.
Helen:Get sometimes people do guess this song. I don't know how much it's a good idea to play music on your live because it comes out of the speaker in a weird way. But think about ways to be engaging with your audience, get them excited about something. Maybe there's like a little game you could play or, like asking questions back and forth. It's great to ask people to say something in the chat, like, where's everybody from?
Helen:Put it in the chat. Or what's your favorite thing about TikTok, put it in the chat. Cause that gives you things to talk about. So thinking about that interactivity and that back and forth, you're hosting a party. You have a bunch of friends over.
Helen:Are you just standing in a corner? Are you just like lecturing them? No, it's an interactive conversation. You're like, so what did you guys so what'd you do last weekend? Oh my God.
Helen:And then here you are. Think of hosting in real life. Again, real life related to social media. Okay. Now let's talk about after you go live, what to do.
Helen:Yay for you. You went live, pat yourself on the back. Woo. If it was your first time you did it, get over the hump. You're excited.
Helen:You did it. What you want to do is see if there's anything from that you want to save and use as your social media content. So if you did something on your live, you shared how to bake something. Maybe you can pull something out. If something funny happened when I'm on the street of New York, let's say I saw a rat and I was filming it.
Helen:I might want to pull that piece of content out. I can't believe I just said that. I haven't seen a rat in years in the city for the record, but I just thought it was funny to say it because of that rat TikTok. You know, the one, if you know, the, the rat guy in New York city is always showing the rats. But if you see something funny and then you say, gosh, I wish I was recording that instead I was live.
Helen:You can download it and so you can have it. So maybe save a piece, use a piece. Now, TikTok has a thing where you can pull a 60 second clip from your live. So you don't have to even download the whole thing and edit it. You can just slide along find that 60 seconds.
Helen:I think it's only allows you 60 seconds. I don't even know. But you can pull just that clip. So you can use that feature to save some things. It's just a good way to be able to repurpose your content without a lot of extra work.
Helen:So download. And then on Instagram, you can actually post your whole live. You can, and that's cool. Oh, let me give you an Instagram tip. This is so important.
Helen:Oh my gosh. When you're on Instagram and you're doing a live, my recommendation, because at least as far as I know, you can't edit the live before you post it. When you hit post, it shares the live exactly as is. So rather than on your Instagram live waiting for people to come in, think about if someone's seeing that live later and they're scrolling on your page, you don't want to get, have someone come to your video and you're like, Hey, hi. All right.
Helen:So, oh, let's wait for everybody to come in. No, you want that video to be what's happening. So what I would recommend is as soon as you hit go live on Instagram, state, what you're talking about on live state, what the live is about. Hi, we're live today. No, not where.
Helen:Hi, I'm live today. And here's what I'm going to talk about. I hope you join me and do some kind of an intro. Have a prepared intro. This is frigging hot info right here because I can't stand when I'm on Instagram scrolling and right away, I know I've hit somebody that's like just posted their live and it's like them waiting and waiting and waiting for people to come in.
Helen:And I'm like, I'm gone already. I'm not watching that video, but I might've stayed if I knew what the topic was. So hot tip for my Instagrammers state your thing right away so that when your video put, then you can wait for people to come in and get into talking about it. But at least when you catch someone in the scroll and they hear the topic like, oh, today, we're going to talk about my, the, my favorite apple pie and why it's my favorite apple pie. Or today we're going to talk about how to put on, foundation.
Helen:So you can't tell that you're wearing foundation. I don't know. I'm making it up. I'm trying to think off topic. For me, I'd be like, today we're gonna talk about tips for going live.
Helen:So stay with me and let's wait for a few more people to come in and we'll get into the details. Let me ask you a few questions in the meantime while we're waiting. What is your biggest struggle for going live? That's what I would do if I was, if I was going on a live, I would state my topic, start asking questions of my audience to get them to listen and stay engaged. And then I would start giving my pearls of wisdom and getting people in the chat to talk.
Helen:Okay. So that is my last, that wasn't even in the newsletter today. That was just a hot tip right off the bat, right off the top. What else is new? And I've just gone on for much longer than I expected as usual.
Helen:Why do I just love podcasting now? And thank you for listening. For everybody who writes me and says, I love your podcast, I really, really do appreciate it. And I can't thank you enough because it's one of the things I enjoy the most right now. The studio, I'm having so much fun in the studio and teaching people and getting feedback from students who are doing things and successful and happy.
Helen:And then they're they have a video that goes viral because they took a piece of my advice or they're changing their style of content. Yes, mister Yep Yep. I'm talking to you. Changing their style of content because maybe they did a video. And I said, my gosh, you're really, really good at that.
Helen:Like lean into that a little more. And then all of a sudden I see him like flourishing into this new way of creating content. I can't even tell you what it does for me. It's like I have goosebumps. Legit.
Helen:I'll show you. Look at the hair. You can't see hairs on my arm because my hairs are light, but my hair, the hairs on my arm, arms are sticking up because I love when I can show someone something and then they can successfully do it. It brings tears to my eyes, in such a good way. All right.
Helen:I'm going to leave you on that one. So if you enjoy the podcast as much as I do, leave me a review. I would love it. I enjoy the feedback. I love when you write me in the YouTube comments and I don't know how you can I don't really know how the podcasts work on each different platform?
Helen:Some of them you can leave a review. Some of them you just hit 5 stars, but whatever it is, wherever you're listening, if you can do a little something to cape, to make this one rise up in the chain, I would greatly appreciate it. And let's get ready for the holidays. Look, I have my Christmas tree earrings on. I have, I didn't wear the jingle bell ones because they make too much noise when I'm recording.
Helen:But look at the Christmas trees, they're little spiral Christmas trees. So the spiral Christmas trees are a new, a new thing while I was at the market here at Union Square and as were are my gloves, my star gloves. Because I'm channeling. I don't know why I'm channeling stars, but I love space as you noticed in the beginning of the video. So in the beginning of this podcast.
Helen:Alright. That's it for today. Have a great weekend. I hope that your shopping is done because mine is not. I'm going to be paying much closer attention to getting that all wrapped up this weekend.
Helen:Thank you for being here. And as always, I will see you after a wonderful weekend. Bye.