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How To Plan Content For Each Specific Platform
It’s not enough to decide you’re going to create content for a certain platform, and then expect it to grow your business. Showing up on any given platform is nuanced, and each platform has it’s own purpose. Which is why you find creators showing up on every platform and encouraging you to do the same.
But I don’t want you to do that. Instead, I want you to be informed about how to best leverage each platform so that you can choose the BEST platforms for your business, and leave the rest. Which is why today, I’m going through each type of content platform, and outlining how they work, what you can expect from using them, and helping you determine which might be best for you.
Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode:
- Need an easy way to organize your content this year? Check out my new Chasing Simple Content Planner
- Are you looking to improve your content without spending a ton of time and mental energy doing so? Whether you’re looking for help knowing what to talk about, setting up content systems, or improving your launch strategy, the Chasing Simple Shop has something for you. From A Year of Content Prompts broken up by type of content, to my Launch Strategy Mini-Course – the Chasing Simple Shop is the quick and simple way to take your content to the next level. And you can get 10% off any item by using the code LISTENER at checkout! Just head to amandawarfield.com/shop/ and again, that code for 10% off is LISTENER!
- This week’s action step: As you’re scrolling this week, start paying attention to how you utilize each content platform for yourself.
- This week’s book recommendation: Weather Girl by Rachel Lynn Solomon
- Find me on Instagram and tell me you completed this week’s action step: @mrsamandawarfield
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Have a comment about today’s episode, or a topic you’d like to suggest for a future episode? Shoot me an email over at hello@amandawarfield.com!
Rather Read? – Here’s the Transcript!
*Just a heads up – the provided transcript is likely to not be 100% accurate
It’s not enough to decide that you’re going to create content for a certain platform and then expect it to grow your business. Showing up on any given platform is nuanced, and each platform has its own purpose, which is why you find creators showing up on every platform and encouraging you to do the same.
But I don’t want you to do that. Instead, I want you to be informed about how to best leverage each platform so that you can choose the best platforms for your business and leave the rest. Which is why today I’m going through each type of content platform and outlining how they work, what you can expect from using them, and helping you determine which might be best for you.
You’re listening to episode 154 of The Chasing Symbol Podcast, and I’m your host, Amanda Warfield. This episode was brought to you by the chasing symbol Content planner, and you can grab your own at amanda warfield.com/planner.
How do I run a successful business from my home? How can I [00:01:00] possibly wear all of the hats? Am I the only one that struggles with staying organized? What am I supposed to do about work-life balance? How can I create a solid schedule and routine? How do I even stay productive? And the biggest question of all, how do I manage it all?
And can I really create a business that I love without being chained to my laptop? Welcome to The Chasing Simple Podcast, where hard conversations and actionable education meet simplicity. I’m your host, Amanda Warfield, time management coach, online educator, and crazy cat mama. My mission is to help overwhelm biz owners get more done and less time so that they have more time and energy for what matters most.
If you feel overwhelmed or occasionally lost in the rollercoaster that is entrepreneurship, I want you to know that you aren’t alone. Those things you’re feeling, you aren’t the first or the last to feel that way. The hard things you’re going through, someone else has already been there too. Each week I’ll bring you transparent [00:02:00] conversations, actionable steps, and a judgment free community to encourage and equip you.
So grab yourself a cup of coffee or whatever your drink of choice and meet me here each week for love. Practical tips and advice on simplifying your biz. Let’s do this entrepreneurship thing together, shall we?
Are you looking to improve your content without spending a ton of time and mental energy doing so? Whether you’re looking for help, knowing what to talk about, setting up content. Or improving your launch strategy. The Chasing Simple Shop has something for you from a year of content prompts broken up by type of content to my launch strategy mini course, which will teach you my entire strategy for launching your upcoming online course.
The Chasing Simple Shop is the quick and simple way to take your content to the next level, and you can get 10%. Any item just for being a listener of the Chasing Civil Podcast by [00:03:00] using the Code Listener at checkout, just head to amanda warfield.com/shop. And again, that code for 10% off is listener.
I have had this conversation four or five times in the last week alone, and because it keeps popping up, I figured that meant it was probably a good topic to bring to the podcast so that you could also hear the conversation around.
What it is that I’m talking about today, which is how to use each different content channel. So over the last week or so, I’ve been continuously having some variation of this conversation right here where a potential client comes to me and says, well, I really need help with my content, and what I want is for you to create content for Instagram for me and help me grow.
And here’s the thing. Right now, Instagram is not a platform that is geared [00:04:00] towards growth. And so this conversation that I have been having over and over again is that’s great, but I don’t wanna give you unrealistic expectations and I don’t wanna promise you something that’s just not realistic. Not because I’m not good at what I do, but because the algorithm sets us both up for failure at this point. And if you’ve been around, you know that I am very anti pleasing the algorithm right, but, and we’re not going, I’m not suggesting to try to please the algorithm, but what I am suggesting is to work with the algorithm and to understand it at a basic level. We don’t need to know the nitty gritty details of exactly how the algorithm works in order to know what is working on the platform right now.
So when we know what is working on the platform, we’re able to kind of, yes, gear our content towards what’s working, but [00:05:00] also set realistic expectations for ourselves. Because right now, if we go to Instagram and we say, this is gonna be a platform where I’m really wanting to see serious growth. I want to go viral. I want to bring in a ton of new people. It’s just not gonna work. And you’re gonna be upset, you’re gonna feel frustrated, and you’re gonna feel like you or your business is the problem when it’s not this platform at this time. It’s just not set up for growth.
So, That’s why it’s so important to understand how a platform is working and not just follow the best practices that someone is listing out there in the world.
I could sit here and tell you today, here is the best practices for this platform, this platform, and this platform. And by best practices, I mean, you know, post this many times and post this type of content, do it. It’s not gonna, it’s not gonna be helpful for, for you because one, as soon as we figure out what best practices are, the algorithm changes and I’m recording this.
Two months before it actually even comes out. But two, even if I [00:06:00] got on stories today and said, Hey, here’s what’s working on Instagram. Be sure to post a carousel post for every day. It what? Show up at this time. It’s gonna change tomorrow. It is not an effective use of your brain space to try to keep up with those back best practices and instead understanding how the platform is working.
In general, what the platform is being best utilized for, helps you create a strategy that works for you. There’s a nuanced difference there, but what I’m saying is instead of do this exact structured step-by-step thing, and that’s going to help you show up best in the algorithm, it’s more of a, what is the concept behind?
The goal and the intention I should have with my content on this platform. So let’s get into it. When you’re looking at those intentions, there are three main considerations you want to consider. Which platforms are going to help you nurture? [00:07:00] your audience. I’ve talked about this in a few different episodes, and I definitely talk about it in the book, which launches very soon.
Be on the lookout. You can go to amanda warfield.com/book to learn more, get on the wait list, potentially even pre-order by the time this episode airs. So excited. But I digress. In the book, I definitely talk about this, but there are two main things that you’re doing with your content. You’re nurturing your people and then you’re also growing your audience, right?
So Nurture, that’s the first main consideration, which platforms are going to be geared towards nurturing your people. Then the other is growth. Which platforms are going to be geared for growth and seeing that growth in your audience. And then the third main consideration is which platforms are gonna be best for selling?
And we’ll get into each of these. We’re gonna go platform, right platform. We’re gonna get into each of them in just a moment, but there’s also a. Bonus consideration that I want you to think about, and that is how do you use a platform? [00:08:00] Here’s the thing. We get so bogged down in what are the best practices?
How does this person say we should be using a platform? What, what’s working, what’s not? We get so bogged down into that that we forget that if we are actively using a platform for our own enjoyment, not just for work, but for our own enjoyment. We’re the ideal customer, so to speak. We are a great example for ourselves of how the platform is being used.
And so, for example, I know that when I’m listening to podcasts, I’m usually multitasking. I’m not sitting down listening to a podcast, right? I am driving, I am cleaning, I am out taking a walk, and so I know. Most likely, most of my listeners, most of the people listening to my podcast, they are also probably multitasking.
They also are probably not clicking links and worrying about [00:09:00] looking things up in the, you know, it, it’s a very passive, almost. And because I listen to podcasts, I can look at my own habits and realize that same thing with social media. I know for a fact that when I go on Instagram, I’m not looking at anybody’s feed, I am not looking at reels.
And the first thing I go to, and really the only thing I look at is stories. Does this mean that everyone uses the platform in the exact same way? Of course not. Obviously people look at reels and obviously people look at the feed, but we can get a decent indicator of what people are doing on a platform by looking at our own habits.
So those are the main considerations as we go through. What I want you to be thinking about, let’s talk about YouTube first. YouTube is incredible for nurturing because not only do you have someone’s ear? Not only are they listening to your voice, but they also can see you. And [00:10:00] we all know if we’ve ever done Zoom calls, the difference between a zoom call where everyone’s camera is on, and you can see people nodding and making faces and the difference when everyone’s camera is off and you’re just kind of sitting there hearing what people are saying, there’s a large difference there. So the more they see of you, the more nurturing you’re doing.
YouTube is also a great growth platform because it’s so heavily SEO focused. SEO is search engine optimization, and anything that is SEO focused is going to have a larger ability for you to see growth simply because when people search for terms, you might come up in it, whereas if you look at, again, we’ll take Instagram for example here, that’s not SEO focused. They have a search bar. But you going into Instagram and searching for how to do something it, you are just not gonna do that. It’s not gonna pull up what you’re looking [00:11:00] for as easily or as thoroughly as a Google search or a YouTube search, or a TikTok search, right?
So YouTube is so heavily SEO based that it’s also great for growth because they can bring in a cold audience. through that sel. And then YouTube is also great for sales because it’s, it’s got this ability to add clickable links and all kinds of extra things within YouTube. And YouTube doesn’t really penalize, obviously, they want people to stay on YouTube longer, but there’s not a huge penalty if you are sending people to a sales page or something like that.
So YouTube really hits all three check marks there. It nurtures your people, it gives you audience growth, and it also is great for sales. Now a podcast. On the other hand, it is good for nurturing because it’s still, you’re still listening to my voice right now, right? We have a relationship because you listen to my voice week after week after week, and you’re hearing me talk and you hear the [00:12:00] inflections and the tones and my miss stumbles and all of that stuff, right?
You, you hear my voice, but it’s not as strong of a nurturing platform as YouTube. So for me to sit here and think, okay well, I’m doing crazy nurture. It’s nurturing, but it’s not. It’s a step down. It’s just the realism of podcast versus YouTube. I chose podcasts because it is easier and less time consuming to create, and I took that into account when I made that choice.
Yes, I’m maybe not nurturing as much as I could with a YouTube video, but it’s so much easier for me to create that. I knew I’d be more consistent with it. But when it comes to growth, a podcast is not, it’s not SEO at all. There’s no SEO search when it comes to podcasts. When you pair a blog with a podcast, then you can get some SEO traction through Google, but a podcast itself not gonna do a whole lot for your growth necessarily.
And [00:13:00] then sales wise, I touched on this a bit earlier, but I know that unless I am super interested in something, I’m probably not going to actively click on links, make purchases, or anything like that as I’m listening to a podcast. But if someone talks about something over and over and over and over again, eventually I may be intrigued enough by it.
It’s just not going to be as easy and as simple to convert. Into sales in this scenario, because again, looking at how I use podcasts in my own life, I recognize that, you know, I probably don’t have the capacity to stop and make a purchase, make a sale while I’m driving or walking or cleaning my house.
Then we’ve got blogs, not awesome for nurturing, so there’s no voice, there’s no video, there’s just words, and that [00:14:00] doesn’t do a whole lot to help people get to know you. You can have your brand voice, it can be witty and all of those things, but at the end of the day, a blog post just isn’t gonna nurture as well as someone listening to your voice or seeing you and seeing your face, right, but the growth capabilities of a blog are pretty large because of the seo. Again, SEO does take time. It’s not gonna be an immediate, I put up a blog and now I see a ton of growth. It’s gonna be, I put up blogs for a year or two, and then I started to see some growth, and that’s okay. But there is that ability to see that growth. And this is why I really recommend, even if you’re doing YouTube, even if you’re doing a podcast, transcribe what you’ve created, pop it all into a blog.
I’m just throwing that out there. But blogs can be great for sales conversions because it’s so easy when someone’s sitting down to read a blog, they are sitting down most likely to read it, and they are actively in that. Hunter mindset, [00:15:00] they, if you’re researching blogs and you’re reading blogs, you are likely gathering information and you’re in that, okay, well I am hunting down this particular thing.
And if you have a resource that can help someone for what it is that they’re looking for, well you’re more likely to make a sale. So blogs can be great for convergence. So those are the big three, the long form content platforms, YouTube podcast, blog, with those three main considerations, they all. Pros and cons, right?
YouTube is gonna be the best all around if you are wanting to really see nurturing and growth and sales. But YouTube is also very, very time consuming, and most likely you’re gonna wanna have a team to help you produce YouTube content that just, it is the way it is. It is very time consuming. A podcast is more of that middle ground.
You can do it solo, you can have a team. You can do [00:16:00] it in a very time consuming way, or a not very time consuming way, but it also gives you more middle of the ground nurturing growth in sales, right? , and then you’ve got the blog. The nurturing is going to be the least effective, but the growth in the sales ability is there, and also time-wise, they’re the fastest and easiest to create.
So when it comes to this, the long form content channels, when you’re deciding where you wanna show up, you wanna consider those three things, nurture, growth, sales, but you also wanna. Where you have the capacity to show up and. You have to take all of that into consideration in order to decide where you wanna show up and how you want to show up and what your expectations are for your content.
Because what we don’t want to do is to show up and think, okay, well, I’m creating [00:17:00] blogs every single week and now my business is going to take off. That’s not how this works. We want to have those realistic expectations of. Here’s what I’m utilizing this content for, and there are other things I need to also do to work on growing my business.
So those are the long form contents. Then we’ve got email, email marketing over and over again. I’ve said this, but if you haven’t listened to other episodes, email marketing kind of exists in this bubble all it’s own. We’ve got long form content, you’ve got short form content, and then right in the middle is email marketing.
Email marketing is so unique in how it interacts with people, how it helps your business, and. The way that other people interact with it, that it really just has its own sphere. When it comes to nurturing, email is great because you’re showing up in their inbox. They have invited you into their internet home basically, and said, yes, show up.
Great for nurturing. Even though there’s not the voice aspect or the video aspect, it’s great because they’ve invited you in and you [00:18:00] can send them to those. If you do YouTube or have a podcast, you can use your email to directly link to those things to help. Further nurture, right? Growth, incredible for growth because you can say, here’s a freebie and go into other people’s audiences and share that freebie and bring in new people to your list.
Incredible for growth, and the same thing for sales. If someone is sitting there reading email, they are most likely. At their desk or sitting down on their phone or their tablet or whatever, and potentially ready and able to make a sale. Make a purchase. And so it’s great for sales as well, especially because it gives you the ability to explain why someone might be interested in your offer and easily gives them the ability to say, okay, yes, I am interested.
What’s the next step? Whether it’s fill application, purchase the course, whatever that may be, they’re able to quickly and easily do that through the email you sent them. So email [00:19:00] marketing all the way around. Incredible for all of those things. Nurture, growth and sales. If you’re not email marketing, you need to get on it right now.
period point blank. It’s time to get started because it really is, it’s so pivotal. Probably the most important, I would say, definitely content channel. If you do nothing else, get an email list and start working on growing it and showing up for your email list. Then we’ve got social media, and this is where things get very interesting because email marketing and the long form content types, those are fairly stable.
They change some. , but in the scheme of things, they are incredibly stable. If I was a scientist, I would make some reference to , some kind of, um, something in the periodic table that was stable in my mind. That was a great joke. Anyways, um, so they’re very stable. They don’t change a lot, and those three main considerations don’t change a [00:20:00] whole lot.
Social media on the other hand, is always changing. It’s always changing. I mean, we just look at Instagram. A few months ago they came on and said, okay, we’re moving back to a picture app after we spent all this time pushing reels. And everyone was like, okay, great. Awesome. We love that. And then this last week, again, I’m recording this in February, this last week, they announced that they’re doing these chat channels.
I don’t know. I don’t know. But all the comments on the reel where they shared this information was like, this is not what we asked for. , what happened to becoming a picture app? Again, we don’t want this. We wanna be a picture app. So it’s constantly changing. Literally, it feels like the drop of a hat. And so this is where you’re gonna really want to kind of put your detective cap on because each channel is constantly changing and then it’s never a surprise when a new channel pops up either.
So Instagram, again, currently at this moment [00:21:00] in time as I’m recording, we’re not seeing growth. Our content is not being shared out to new people, but what we are able to use Instagram for really, really well right now is nurturing the audience we do have. And so when you look at how you use Instagram, if you’re like me, you really focus on stories, not by any choice, but just because it’s the easiest way to get an inside look into someone’s life, right?
And so, That means that using your stories to nurture people is going to be an incredible tool for you. You’ll have seen if you follow me on Instagram, that I have moved to a static grid where I’m not, I’m not putting posts on my feed really. I have the ability to, but I’m not, I’m just not focused on it.
When I batch out my content for the month, I’m not doing it. I just have this static. Three grid at the top that gets pinned, and if I feel like posting something, I post it [00:22:00] in the moment, but I’m not doing that even on a weekly basis. That’s maybe once or twice a month, but I am focused on showing up on my stories because I know my feed wasn’t getting any results.
I tried strategy after strategy, tactic after tactic. Nothing was working to really boost that engagement. And so I said, why bother, , it’s not helping me and it’s taking up my time. So I’m just gonna stick to stories where I do get engagement and I can see that this many people are seeing it fairly consistently.
And so currently at this moment in time, Instagram’s great for nurturing and I like to send people from all of my other content channels to Instagram so that they can. Get to know me even better through my stories. That’s my goal with Instagram at this time. On the other hand, if we look at Facebook groups, they are, they’re actually.
Working really well. [00:23:00] SEOs, if you have the capacity to start a Facebook group. Facebook pages, though they’re not getting traction, they’re not, um, they’re not doing a whole lot for anyone and they just kind of show that someone has an active business. Basically. The only time I ever personally look at Facebook groups is if a business doesn’t have a website or their website is garbage.
That is the only time. And again, if that’s how I’m using. , there are probably a lot of other people utilizing it in the same way, right? How, how are our habits, how does that showcase what other people might be doing as well? So Facebook groups potentially, if you are focusing on SEO and bringing in a large, a large audience, potentially with really specific but also.
Not too specific. It’s a really weird balance to hit. Um, those can be great for nurturing and for sales. At this point. [00:24:00] The nurturing tends to be best and growth as well. Because of the SEO function, you can bring in people that have never heard of you before. Sales. They’re easily clickable. But also because it’s tends to be a colder audience if you’re using the SEO function, that can make it, um, a little bit slower with sales.
But if you’re seeing that growth, it’s worth putting it out there always, right? It’s always worth putting the sale out there and the promo out there, so Facebook groups can be good for that. Bringing in a colder audience and starting to nurture them and sending them to other channels where they can be even better nurtured.
Like your YouTube, your podcast, your email list, your Instagram. Then we’ve got TikTok. TikTok is probably the best social media short form channel for growth right now at this time because it’s very, very, very, Very heavily SEO based. They, they’ve put it a large, [00:25:00] large emphasis on seo, and honestly, TikTok is more of a competitor with YouTube than it is with Instagram at this point.
They’re not worried about Instagram, but they are worried about and competing with YouTube so, That has kind of become, honestly, the new YouTube for Gen Z when they, and I even have fallen into this too. When I wanna look up something, I wanna know how to do something. I want more information on something.
I go to TikTok and search for it now. But very SEO based, so it’s great for growth building community has not proven to be. all that simple there, it, it just doesn’t have that same feel as an Instagram story does. So it’s great to grow, to bring in new people and then send them back to Instagram or send them to your email list.
TikTok also is one of those platforms where, again, it’s always worth asking for the sale. You probably aren’t gonna see mega, mega mega sales though, because it [00:26:00] actively discourages people from sending people away from the app. So at this point in time, it’s best for using for growth and then trying to funnel them to other places where you can get better nurturing and better sales in.
So those are kind of the main short form content types right now. There are always gonna be other ones, and the way that these are used are always going to change, which I know is frustrating. But remember, go back to paying attention to how you use each. And that’s going to give you a good indicator of how to structure your own strategy, especially when you are not able or not ready to hire someone who is deeply immersed in this every day not ready to hire marketing strategist.
Paying attention to your own habits is going to help you craft your own strategy and realistic expectations for how you’re using each and every platform. So what I want you to do, and here’s the really important part of this, it’s great to sit down and you’re listening to this [00:27:00] episode and you’re probably not taking notes because like we said, you’re most likely multitasking, but you’re you might be thinking, okay, well this is what I’m gonna do and this is how I’m changing my expectations for the next month, and I’m gonna be ready to go. And then what’s probably going to happen is you’re going to keep doing that until you get frustrated and overwhelmed by your marketing again. Instead, what I really, really encourage you to do is.
To stop sleepwalking through your marketing creation and in order to stop sleepwalking through your marketing creation each and every month. When it comes time to set up your next plan, your next strategy for the next month’s worth of content you’ve got to review. This is something that I was really intentional about laying out inside of the Chasing simple content planner.
After each month, there’s a review. And then in the beginning of each month, there’s a prep page where we’re kind of reiterating the same things you do on the review page [00:28:00] in just a different way and with a different forecast. So with the review, you’re looking back, what did I do in this last month? And what worked and what didn’t.
And then with the prep, you’re looking forward and going, Hmm, this is how I wanna do things based on what I learned in. The last month, what I just reviewed, this is how I’m gonna make changes moving forward. In that way, you’re not spending a ton of time, it’s maybe 10 minutes outta your month where you’re reviewing and deciding how to move forward, but you are taking the time to review what’s going on and to make a plan, and that’s gonna help you stop sleepwalking through your marketing.
Goals and do your marketing creation, and so that you’re not just churning out content each month without any real strategy or plan behind it. So your action set for this week is as you’re scrolling, start paying attention to how it is that you utilize each content platform for yourself and start thinking about how you can take that information to make changes to your own [00:29:00] content.
This week’s book recommendation is Weather Girl by Rachel Lynn Solomon, and I am just a sucker for everything she writes. It’s so good. The stories are always incredible. They’re always a meet cute, right? Which I love regardless. But she’s so well written. The stories are great and fun and different. And then also the fact that they’re based in Seattle always makes me really, really happy.
But even outside of that, if you don’t care about Seattle at all and you like me cute, you’ll love this book. Highly re. All right, my friend. Until next time, I hope that you’ll go out and uncomplicate your life in biz.
Thank you so much for joining me here today, friend. If you loved this episode, it would mean the world to me if you’d leave a rating and review. This is a great way to help spread the word about this podcast and. Help other wonderful women like yourself find it. You can find this episode show notes as well as tons of other great resources over@amandawarfield.com.
And if you aren’t following me on Instagram yet, I’d love to connect with you over there. [00:30:00] I’m at Mrs. Amanda Warfield. Shoot me a DM and tell me what you love most about this episode. Thanks for being here, friend. I’ll see you next time.
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