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Wondering when to post on social media or what content catches the eye? If posting regularly is a challenge, it might be time to streamline your strategy. Social media expert Autumn Wilson offers a simplified approach to maintain an authentic and consistent online presence, ensuring you engage easily and effectively with your audience.
Streamlining Social Media Marketing Summary
Key Takeaways
- Personalized Content is Key: Content that feels personal and relatable performs best on social media.
- Use Systems to Save Time: Tools like Airtable and Asana help organize and repurpose content efficiently.
- Engage via DMs: Moving conversations to direct messages through comments can increase conversions.
- Plan Ahead but Stay Flexible: Schedule content at least a week in advance, but leave room for spontaneous, creative ideas.
- Know Your Audience: Understanding your audience’s pain points allows you to create content that truly engages and converts.
Streamlining Social Media Marketing with Episode Transcript
Rich: My next guest is a social media agency owner dedicated to simplifying the social media process. With a background in communication, she has been working within the social media landscape for over 10 years. She works diligently to develop robust social media strategies that are aligned with individual brands where authenticity leads the way.
She’s a self-proclaimed social media nerd obsessed with how the world communicates. As an avid lover of the outdoors, she wholeheartedly stands by her belief that social media shouldn’t take over your life.
Today, we’re going to talk about how to simplify your content systems and social media with Autumn Wilson. Autumn, welcome to the show.
Autumn: Yay. Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited to be here.
Rich: So let’s start with talking about how you got started running a social media agency.
Autumn: It was an accident, Rich, to be totally honest. It’s kind of one of those maybe divine intervention, the universe has another plan for you than maybe you had decided yourself. I feel like this is my entire life story.
But no, social media was always a central part of any job that I’d had. I did the usual go to university, do a post grad, try to get a nine to five, blah, blah, blah, all of that sort of fun stuff. But social media always ended up being part of the job that I was at.
So I was in radio for a while. Then I worked at the Chamber of Commerce, and then a nonprofit. And I just started diving into social media and absolutely loved it. And then became a statistic in 2020 when I decided to leave my 9-5 and start my own business. Which I think a majority of people did it in 2020. Because you know, when the world’s falling apart, why not try something new? And I went into it honestly saying, I’m never going to manage people’s social media accounts for them because it’s always better when they do it themselves. So I’m not going to even offer that service.
So I started my business just as a consultant. And very quickly realized that while it is true, social media content tends to be better when it’s done by someone who knows the business really well. The reality is they just don’t have the time. Sometimes the best person to do the content just doesn’t have the brain capacity or the time to do it.
So then I started rolling that service in, and then just through networking and marketing and all this sort of stuff, just kept adding more and more clients. And then before I knew it, I had to onboard another social media manager and was in agency mode. So that’s where we’re at now. We’re still a small team, just myself and one other social media manager, but we’re mighty and loving it.
Rich: What do you feel the pain point is for most companies when it comes to creating their social media content? Because you said, it’s always best if somebody internally or at least immersed in the brand is doing the social media content, but it’s not always so simple. What’s the pain point there?
Autumn: Time, that’s the biggest thing that I hear from everyone is I just don’t have the time. There’s so many pieces to not only creating an efficient or effective social media strategy, but to carry it out, and then to stay on top of all of the things that keep changing. There’s algorithm updates, and different trends, and how do I know what to post and what time, and what’s working and tracking everything. It’s insane. And it’s only getting more and more complicated as we get further down this line of digital marketing.
And I think a lot of, I’ve noticed at least, a lot of business owners are becoming more and more savvy in digital marketing and understanding that you have to have all of these pieces figured out if I want this to be effective, if I want to actually get leads from all of these places. And it really comes down to time.
Every business owner is juggling a million and one tasks in a day. And so usually, social media tends to take a backseat, or it gets offloaded to an intern because “it’s just putting a few posts together”, “It’s just throwing up a picture in a caption. It’s no big deal.”
But once you realize how important it is to your overall marketing strategy, then it all of a sudden starts getting really overwhelming and complicated, and just trying to figure out the time to pull it all together and carry it out effectively. I get it. My own social media content isn’t exactly the best. I save all the good stuff for my clients. So it can get really frustrating when you just don’t have the time to pull it all together. That’s the biggest pain point I see.
Rich: So when people are struggling, and I hear it as well as you do, what are some of the tactics, what are some of the ways that you help your clients overcome that and actually get good, quality, engaging content out there onto social media?
Autumn: Yeah. So I found a big part that really helps in the beginning is setting up the systems that support and fit into the way that the team works. So I’ve been able to work with a bunch of different types of clients in different industries and different teams. Some people are just one person teams. Some businesses have a VA. Other businesses have an entire marketing team.
So I’ve been able to work with a couple of different teams, which has really helped me understand that the system that supports the content that’s going out is essential. Because when you have that system that works within your own team, then it just makes everything move a lot faster. So then you can have everything plugged in in terms of, okay, what emails are going out? When’s the podcast episode going out? When’s the blog going out? Everything is housed in one spot. So then you can say, okay, great. I’m going to take that, repurpose it into a social media post, and it’s all in one system. So then you don’t have to go searching around for a million different things, or you have your key themes or your key topics that you talk about all the time that you keep coming back to in your social media posts.
So when they’re all in one place, it’s a simple grab, copy, rejig it to put a new spin on it. And then put it all together and then everything’s in one place. It’s collaborative. So you can add your team members into it. Other people can see what’s going on. You can add different editors or keep it to yourself. There’s just, when you have a system that supports that, then you have all of your other content feeding into one place. Then all of a sudden that time to sit down and create something is like, Oh yeah, here, I have these five different things that I can pull from and create some posts for the next week. Great. Done. It just makes it that much faster.
Rich: And what are some of the tools that you’re using for this?
Autumn: The tool of choice for me is Airtable. I love it because it’s free. and there are paid versions of course, so you’re limited with the free one, but I use the free version for myself and all of my clients and absolutely love it. And then Asana is another really popular one and it works really well. Trello again, very similar.
So those kinds of systems that are simple, that are straightforward. And whenever I sit down to coach a client through it, I always talk about, okay, let’s figure out first how your brain works. How do you usually like to disseminate information? How do you like to sort information out? And then we look at, okay, this is what Trello looks like. This is what Asana looks like. This is what Airtable looks like. What speaks to you? What makes the most sense? for how your brain works. And then having those systems, and I like using a little bit more of a well-known system because then you can integrate it with other things.
For Airtable, for example, I can set up a Zap so that whenever I create an email, it automatically saves it into my Airtable base, or vice versa. I can have that so I can connect the different systems that I’m using and bring it all together. And so that’s why I like Airtable to do that.
And again, Asana, the same thing. You can just have everything in one place. You can have different bases, different areas, different calendars, and keep linking to different things. So you can have your key topics that you talk about, and then you can have all of your subsequent content that builds off of that. And this is the email that went out. And then here’s the social media posts that we’ve done because of it. Or here’s the blog posts or the podcast episode. And here are all the different social media posts that we can do for it. And so it all links it together.
So those are the three main systems that I found people like the most. Airtable, Asana, and Trello, are usually the ones that people tend to gravitate towards because they’re just simple and straightforward.
Rich: And how far in advance are you scheduling posts? Is this something where at the beginning… I know with my own social media manager, she’ll usually come to me halfway through the month, and she’s laid out what she wants to talk about for the following month. What’s your process for that?
Autumn: It really depends on the brand. So there’s a couple of brands who are, a couple of our clients are a little bit more last minute. But I still always schedule, right now I’m usually about a week and a half in advance. Minimum, I try to do, and then I always leave room for space when things come up. And that’s fine. Things will come up or an idea will spark, right?
So next week, for example, one of my clients is in the teaching industry. And so it’s Teacher Appreciation week coming up. So we’ve put together, the idea sparked last minute, instead of just doing the generic thing we normally do, let’s switch it up and do something a little bit different. So we’ve got different ideas. So I have things planned out, but now we’re thinking, okay, we can level it up a little bit more. So the ideas kind of come, and now we’re shifting things around. So we leave room for that kind of creativity and different things to come up, for sure.
But minimum, I’m usually about a week and a half out. Some clients, I can go a month out. It really just depends on the brand and what they have going on. I try to do it as far in advance as I can for my own content. I’m about a week out, because that just helps me stay a little bit more current, too, so things aren’t too outdated.
Rich: Sure. And I think that makes a lot of sense. I liked the idea of you have a pulse. So if anybody comes to your social media profile, they can see that you’re actually alive and existing. But then when something comes, and I told you this right before we got on the air, today was our 27th anniversary of being in business for flyte new media. I walk in and my team had put together a bunch of balloons, the big 27. So of course we had to take pictures of that and then post that to social media. That little bit extra that adds that personality.
You mentioned the Teacher Appreciation Day or whatever it was called. I’m just wondering as you look forward, are you using a tool that kind of suggests different types of content that might be relevant for different industries, or how do you get ideas or know what’s coming up in the coming weeks or months that you want to leverage into your social media plan?
Autumn: Yeah. It’s all part of the onboarding process I do with my clients. And this is what I would do in a social media strategy with anyone. And I just do my own research. I haven’t figured out a system that plugs it in automatically. I’m sure it exists out there, but I just do my own research and just do a quick Google search.
And there’s awareness days and holidays and all things like that. There’s different websites like that all over the place. And you can find some really obscure ones if you want to have fun with it. So then I just create a calendar and I do it for the entire year. I say, okay, in January, these are all the things that come up at the beginning of each month, then we know what we’re going to have coming up that month.
So we tend to keep it light like that, but then, it gets approved by the team. So everybody knows, okay, this is what’s going on. These are the ones that are important to our audience. Maybe not even necessarily to us, but this is what’s important to our audience. So I make that list for the full year in advance. It’s ready and it’s there to go to every single month when we go to create content.
Rich: All right. And you’re working with so many different types of clients in different industries. I’m just wondering, have you seen that certain types of posts tend to get more engagement than other ones? And whether it’s ones that are focused on employees, ones that are focused on the work that’s being done, ones that are focused on holidays, is there a trend that you see that you’re like, we need to make sure that we’re doing these kinds of posts?
Autumn: Yeah, I would say it feeds into the content ideas as well. Because it’s nice to have those kinds of awareness days because they’re almost like freebie content, right? It’s just an easy post that I find that those don’t tend to do as well, unless you put a personal spin on it. And that’s what I will say across the board in all of the brands that we work with. The more personal the content, the better.
And I know that gets tricky when you’re talking about a brand that maybe sells a product if it’s a retail store. Or we’ve got a company that sells software, so it’s really hard to be personal when you’re talking about those things. But you can’t forget that there are people behind the brand, and no different than walking into a retail store and wanting to see someone’s smiling face, wanting to support you. We want a similar experience when we’re interacting with that brand online as well. So sharing some behind the scenes things, that’s why things like stories are so fun and effective because you can have a little bit more fun and freedom with what you share there. So we always try to put a personal spin on it.
So for example, like that teacher appreciation week, everybody on the team for that brand, I’ve had them all record a really short video saying, “Hey, we appreciate you.” “Hey, you’re doing a great job.” Really quick clips. So it’s every single person on the team. So you get to see their face. And then we’re just going to clip them all together and then it’s going to be a nice 30 second reel of these really fun, nice, uplifting, encouraging messages.
So that just takes it to a whole other level rather than just a stagnant graphic that says, “Happy Teacher Appreciation Week. We appreciate you.” No matter how beautifully written that caption is going to be, that graphic is not going to capture a lot of attention typically. It depends on the audience, but typically it won’t, versus having a video with people’s faces on it, smiling and saying, “Thank you, you’re doing great. We love you. We appreciate you.”
It just takes it to a whole new level. So we always try to put people in the pictures as much as we can and really get the people of the brand involved in the content as much as we can to really give that personal feel. Because it always, nine times out of 10, almost 100% of the time, performs way better than anything else we could create.
Rich: And I guess maybe you’ve touched upon this, but I’m thinking about one of the first words you used was “authentic”. And sometimes it feels like if we’re planning things out a week or a month in advance and we just are making sure that we’re putting out some content, that it’s not feeling authentic. So what are some of the tactics that we can use to make sure that our social media messaging is authentic to the audience we’re trying to reach?
Autumn: I always come at it from the perspective of, if you were in the right headspace when you’re creating that content and that you want to serve with each post that you create, that’s the first step with authenticity. And when I talk about authentic content, it’s just having a good intention behind it, and saying it’s not just about a sales post or just “we have a sale” so we need to put this graphic out that says this is a sale that’s coming up.
It’s about switching the conversation to say, “We have a sale coming up. Why does my audience need this product/service so badly? How will it serve them? How will it make their life better?” And that’s the position that we create the content from. To say, we are coming here to help you, to serve you, to make your life better, or to entertain you, or whatever it is. It’s about the feeling behind it, versus just the sale or the lead.
That’s obviously the intention. We want to get some leads, absolutely. But when you come at it from a place of, we genuinely know that this is going to serve people, then you’re just in a little bit of a different headspace when you go to create that content. So you write it in a little bit of a different way, and you think a little bit more creatively. And again, a little bit more personally, if you actually have a person in mind of who you’re speaking to.
I always like to visualize a friend that I’m talking to, or my ideal client, I have that person in my head when I’m creating content. I visualize them as if I’m talking directly to them. And then it makes the content easier for me to write, because it’s a little bit more conversational and it flows easier and then it comes across.
I’ve had people say to me, “Wow, your stuff sounds exactly like you.” Thank you. That’s because I’m actually writing it. That’s good to know. So when you come at it from that perspective it’s a lot easier to be authentic when you just start actually remembering that there are people behind, that you were trying to get in touch with. And I find when you come at it with that heart, then the rest follows, right? There’s all the, of course, checking the boxes and getting the keywords and doing all the algorithm things and that sort of thing for sure. But I think that absolute first step just needs to come from a place of just genuinely wanting to serve someone with this content we’re putting out.
Rich: All right. You mentioned Stories earlier. And Stories and Reels are obviously very hot, very powerful forms of communication, which I absolutely hate and never make any time for. So what advice do you have for me if I wanted to start creating more Stories or more Reels, but yet I feel completely overwhelmed? How can you break it down for me?
Autumn: So the first thing I do is just create the system. Normally I’d sit down and we’d have a conversation about what’s stopping you, what are the roadblocks here? Normally it’s. “I don’t have time.” Okay, sure. Maybe, but there’s usually something deeper.
And I went through this with another client of mine, and I said, okay, what’s stopping you here? Why do you not want to, I know you don’t have the time, but I know you can make the time. She’s a coach. So I was giving her a taste of her own medicine. So I said to her, “I know you can make the time to do this. So what’s actually stopping you?” And she’s okay, yeah, you’re right. I said, “Is it the messaging? I’m scripting these for you. So is it the messaging that’s bothering you?” She said, no, I like what you’ve scripted. I think it’s totally on point. Okay. How are you showing up? What are you doing right before you go to create your videos? How are you setting it up?
And then that’s when she realized, I’m not really giving myself the space to be in the zone. And she found out that a lot of it for her was just that she felt she didn’t really have the confidence to show up on video. She felt a little weird and out of place. And so I was able to help coach her through that.
So I usually try to drill down to, okay, what’s the real reason behind you not wanting to get in front of the camera. Is it a confidence thing? Is it an appearance thing? And so something that I do for myself is, I won’t want to feel like creating video if I’ve had a bad day or if I’m really busy or if I’m running around trying to get a million things done. So I set aside my video day and I know, okay, this is the day, the same day every week. It’s always on a Thursday when I record my videos. And so I set my day up for success knowing that the biggest thing I need to accomplish that day is my videos. So I will do whatever is required for me to be in that headspace. And I make it a little bit of a me day. So I’ll pamper myself a little bit in the morning, maybe I’ll exercise and get really pumped up, and just get in the zone and do some really great things, fun things that kind of get me feeling really good.
So that’s the barriers that we’re trying to overcome. Getting to the bottom of that first, I think is really important. And then realizing, what are the systems to support that? Because you could have a great system set up, time blocking, habit stacking, all those fun things. But if there’s a bigger reason why, all the systems in the world aren’t going to make you do it because there’s a bigger reason there. So once you get those kinds of barriers out of the way, then you’re able to say, what’s the best system for me to do this? I’ve overcome all the barriers. I’m confident. I’m ready to do this thing. What’s the best system for me?
So I found a really easy way is I plan my content on one day. I film it on the second day, and then I edit everything together on the third day. Chunking it out makes it a little less cumbersome for me. I only have to do little bits of time here and there. Maybe it’s an hour each day instead of taking an entire afternoon. And then having that plan makes it so when I sit down to record something, it’s super-efficient because I’ve already planned it out. I’ve written the script, I’ve got the idea, and it’s just a sit-down and record. I’m going to be in this area here. I’m going to change my angle here. I’m going to change this outfit or whatever.
You plan it all out so that when you go to record, it’s the most efficient you can possibly be. So having that plan. And again, why something like Airtable or Asana is so great, because I put that plan right in Airtable. And then I’ve got that up on my computer, this is the first one I’m recording, this is the script. And as soon as it’s done, then I change the status to ‘ready to be edited’. So I know the next day when I’m going in which ones are going to be edited. I go into CapCut, I do my thing, and it’s done.
So having those systems to break it up, I found really beneficial. Other people find it effective to do it in one day. Sometimes it’s just easier if they can just block their entire schedule off for an entire afternoon and do it that way. But it’s really about finding out, tapping into what works best for you, how your brain works, and how you respond to the demands of creating content. Sometimes it’s just too much to do it all in one day, so if you give yourself that little bit of leeway, that it can be a little bit easier to create it.
Rich: Okay. We’ve talked a lot about the creation of content for social media, but obviously social media is supposed to be more of an engaging way of conversing with people. So what are some tips or tactics that you’re talking to your clients about, about getting that engagement from people, the likes, the comments, the shares? And on top of that, once we start getting them, what kind of approach should we have in terms of responding to people who leave comments or share our content?
Autumn: When it comes to the different kind of tips and tricks for engaging content, again, you can get really granular and talk about hooks, and your enticing graphics, and what’s really going to capture attention. And of course those are really important.
But at the end of the day, when, your target audience really well and you can speak directly to their pain points, then you’re going to be able to hook them a lot easier, right? So that’s really what it comes down to, I find, is the best way to really create that engaging content is knowing what makes your audience go, “Oh yeah”, or, “Oh my God, I get that”, “I need that”, or “I can totally relate to that”. That you’re relating to them on that personal level. And that’s what I have found has been working lately for really getting engagement up.
I will say as well, I have noticed more and more in certain industries, so far in the coaching industry, that there are more people who I call ‘lurkers’. They’re lurker followers where they don’t engage publicly with the content, but they will private DM my client, or they will share the content in private Facebook groups.
So we’ve had to shift our strategy a little bit because we wanted to boost engagement, we wanted more comments, we wanted more likes. And then we realized, this isn’t happening. Why is this not happening? You know your target audience perfectly. We are nailing the content perfectly. We know that the message is there. And so then we had to drill down a little bit deeper. And then she was starting to get all of this feedback from people. She was sharing with me, she’d have screenshots and private Facebook groups, and conversations that other people were having in their DMs about her content.
So then we shifted. It’s okay, engagement isn’t what we need to go after. She’s full of ‘lurker’ followers who just take the look, share privately, but they don’t want to comment for whatever reason. We think it’s just because it’s a little bit more vulnerable kind of content we’re putting out there, which is fine. So now we’re focusing on more impressions and reach are maybe the metrics that we’re going after. But for a lot of people, that engagement is what’s really key. So having that relatable type content that makes your audience laugh or say, yeah, that person really gets me, or something that’s really speaks directly to what they’re going through I find is really effective.
I just had a client of mine, we have a meme that has been going viral on her account for weeks now. And it’s just this really simple, but it made people laugh, and it’s just hitting the funny bone for her target audience. But again, we needed to know what it was that would make them laugh, what it is that they would relate to, to make that happen.
So again, when we have the system like Airtable or Asana, we’re keeping track of all of those things. So we’re looking at, what are the things that are hitting the mark, and we will mark that down. So there’s a way that you can tag it in Airtable or Asana to say, okay, this was a top performing post so we know there’s elements in this post that we need to repurpose. We need to do it again. And so we keep track of those, and they go in a separate section. So then we know what we need to keep going after.
And then it’s a constant kind of testing game on social media, right? What works one month may not work the next month. So you just keep iterating and keep trying it. But when you’re able to track those things and then have the system that measures it so you can easily just go in. I open the tab and see these are all the top performing posts. These are the ones that we’re going to repurpose and do again, because we really hit the mark on it. So when you’re able to have that set up, then it’s a lot easier to track it and then recreate that success over and over again.
Rich: Autumn, one of the first things you talked about was leads. And organic social is notoriously tough to generate leads, depending on the industry, or even to get people to visit your website. Because very often, the platforms don’t want to lose traffic so they de-emphasize posts that might include links. And then Instagram, unless you’re doing ads, you only have one link and that’s in your bio.
So what are some of the ways that you’re working with your clients to get people off of the social media sites and into their email inboxes or website or pick up the phone?
Autumn: I’m finding that DMs are a really effective format right now, and that seems to be across the board. Meta’s reporting that across the board, too. When you’re able to get people in the DMs, they’re more likely to convert. So we’ve been using automations like Manychat. There’s a lot of other AI bots out there as well. So setting up those automations so when people comment a specific word, we’re directly into their DMs, sending them the information. And we’re doing that on Facebook and Instagram, it’s working well on both. Some clients, that doesn’t really work that well on Facebook, but it works really well on Instagram. So again, it’s just a matter of kind of testing it out for each one.
But I found because that’s easy for people, it’s just a simple comment. It’s one word. It’s very quick and easy. And then it’s immediately in their head, in their messages or in their DMs. They can pop it open and then that allows you to have multiple follow-ups. And then Manychat and all the other AI bots out there will have opportunities for you to tag people. Oh, okay, they were interested in this topic. So you tag them, and then you’re able to follow up with them.
And then you can set up an entire sequence, and then you can deliver, if it’s a freebie, you can deliver it straight in those DMs, or you can sync it up with Active Campaign or MailChimp, or whatever it is that you’re using for your emails. Sync it up and add them into your email list that way.
So there’s a whole kind of system that you can work that way. But it’s really effective because you can actually then pull your sales team into it as well, because then Manychat keeps all of those contents or contacts.
So then you’ve got all the people who clicked on for this specific webinar, they clicked this webinar, let’s say. So now we know these were all the people. So now we can go in and follow-up with them again and say, hey, we know you attended that webinar last month, what did you think of it? And then you start the conversation. Then it’s almost like a sales call, but it’s super casual because it’s in the DM. So it’s just a natural kind of conversation. It just adds a little bit more of a personal element. Again, the more personal you can get, the better. Because it just removes, I think, a little bit of that pressure.
So we found some really good success in getting some conversion rates from when we get people into the DMs. And then we’re starting to expand and say, okay, then what’s the customer journey from there? And then how can we pull them along that customer journey even more, to then not only stop at just the freebie delivery, but then how do we get them into maybe something else? Then we get them into maybe a a low-ticket item that we’ve got. And then how do we get them into our membership? Then we’re looking at the entire customer journey.
So you can take people through that journey in the DMs. And so you’re not really yet taking them off the platform. But even if you did want to, again, it’s a lot easier once you’re in the DMs. You just deliver the link and say, “Hey, here’s the thing that you were asking for. And we know, like on Instagram, it just pops up as a slider. It’s not fully opening up a new window even, so it’s still a little bit easier for them. So I found that to be a very effective method.
I’ve got one client right now who has a very active Facebook page, and external links on her Facebook posts are still performing really well. I was shocked, but her page has been around for a very long time. So I think the older pages, man, those people that originally got in on Facebook pages at the get go are just laughing right now. Because they’ve built up that audience and they’ve primed them really well.
Rich: Interesting.
Autumn: We’re not all that lucky.
Rich: This is some great advice. If people want to learn more about you or your agency, where can we send them online?
Autumn: Yeah. Thank you. Instagram is my main platform where I usually give out all of my good stuff. And I’m autumn.j.wilson on Instagram. You can also find me at the simplysocialmediasociety.com. That’s where my community hangs out, where my membership is, and where we’re doing some pretty great things in there as well.
Rich: Awesome. Autumn, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it.
Autumn: Thanks, Rich. I appreciate it so much.
Show Notes:
Autumn Wilson helps her clients simplify the social media process to eliminate the overwhelm of creating content and consistency. Be sure to check out her website for freebies that will help with your social media strategy. And be sure to connect with her on Instagram for excellent tips and inspiration.
Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, a web design & digital marketing agency in Portland, Maine, and founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his 25+ years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.