Kassaundra 0:01

All this month, we're talking about showing some love. So I think this would be the perfect time to hear from all of you about some love that you're feeling for social media. I want to hear about something positive you've seen in your business because of using social media to market it. It can be something you implemented from this podcast or something you did on your own that brought you a win. And if you didn't know already, the one year anniversary of school and socials is coming up. So I would love to feature what you love about social media for your business and a special celebration episode. All you have to do is record yourself with a Memo app on your phone, sharing about something positive you've seen in your business because of social media. And then email that recording to me at Kay Foster solutions@gmail.com with the subject line social media celebration. To make it even easier. I'll leave the link right to my email in the show notes for you. I can't wait to hear all of your stories and celebrate right alongside you as we celebrate school and socials turning one year old in April. It's February. So we're kicking off a monthly series all about love when it comes to social media. So today, we're diving into how you can show your Instagram account some love to help you reach your big 24 goals. So teacher authors, go ahead and reheat that cup of coffee, because I'm your host, Cassandra Foster, and we're about to get schooled in socials. Welcome back to school and socials. I have to be honest, I love me a good theme. So I couldn't let February pass by without creating a whole series on social media love. So whether you're a social media lover, or hater, you're gonna find each of these episodes helpful in optimizing your account to help you reach your goals. For today, we're going to be focusing on six actions you can take in order to optimize your Instagram profile. Because from previous episodes, you know that when someone lands on your profile, we have like three seconds to get them to hang around. So keeping our profile optimized is the ultimate way to show some social media love for our businesses. This first action may seem small, but can have a big impact on how people identify your content. And it's updating your profile picture, we want to make sure that we have a clear branded profile picture, preferably showing your face to represent your brand on Instagram. Maybe you've updated your branding, or maybe you've had headshots taken but you just haven't gotten around to updating it on Instagram yet. Now is the perfect time to take a few minutes and get that profile picture on point. Action number two is all about revisiting your bio. You want to make sure that you're using keywords in your name field and the body of your bio that will help people find you. You want to make sure that the description in your bio is still aligned to you your brand and what you offer your audience. And you want to make sure your call to action at the end of your bio is effective for getting people to click on your link and get them to the resources or services you're currently promoting. If you're feeling a little lost with giving your bio a refresh, no worries, I've got a whole podcast episode on optimizing your bio. It's episode number four and I'll make sure that I leave that link for you right in the show notes. Now right along with refreshing that bio, it's a great idea to revisit your LinkedIn bio as well. Ask yourself if the links you're serving up to your audience are still relevant and aligned to your current business goals. If they aren't, make sure to remove them and add links that directly tie into those business goals. Also be mindful of how many links you're serving up to your audience. We don't want to give our community decision fatigue so stick to the most important links that will get you to where you want to be in your business in the next month, or the next quarter. If you want all of my thoughts on setting up an effective Lincoln bio, you can find them in Episode 14. Now moving right along down your profile. The next thing you should tackle to show your account some love are your highlights. Highlights are such a powerful way for us to show our audience what we offer and allow them to find needed information easily. So here are my top three tips when it comes to refreshing and setting up your highlights. You want to make sure your highlights are aligned to your goals. Are you sensing a theme here with this refresh? Yeah. So that vacation from last year that was super fun to share about, your audience probably doesn't need access to those stories year round. Again, think about your goals and create highlights that will help you get there. For example, some people like to set up their highlights based on the categories of their best TPT sellers, or based on the content pillars they have on their blog that they're using to create repurposed content. Tip number two, when it comes to highlights is to try to limit your highlights to five or six, any more than that, and people need to scroll to see them. And the likelihood that they're going to do that is probably pretty small, right? We know that we are competing with very short attention spans, so you want to make sure the most important information is front and center on your profile. And finally, tip number three, resist the urge to add every story that fits into a highlight topic. Yes, highlights can hold up to 100 stories. But clicking through that many stories can be overwhelming, and people are probably going to exit out of it before they get the information they want. So again, keep things concise and relevant to make your highlights user friendly. Now, right under your highlights, hopefully there are three pinned posts for your audience. Again, having three pinned posts is a great way to show your audience what you offer, and get them the information they need quickly. So make sure to pin three posts to the top of your profile. And again, review those posts and make sure that the information you're sharing there is still aligned to the goals that you're trying to achieve. Now, if you don't have any posts pinned there, what you're going to want to do is consider what information you want your audience to have easy access to. So posts you might consider pinning, include, like an introduction post, so that your audience can quickly get more information about you and your business. Or maybe post about your latest offering. Maybe it's your latest TBT resource or membership or a course or even a lead magnet, or even a post about like your latest blog post, podcast episode or YouTube video so that you can show people the value that you bring to the table. And finally, the last way you can show your Instagram account some love is by refreshing your graphics templates. Maybe you've been using the same templates for a while so it'd be good to mix it up a little bit to help your feed look fresh and to catch people's attention. When we start to see the same thing over and over again. Sometimes we tend to scroll right past. So switching up your graphics every now and then is a small way that you can help keep your audience engaged. And if you haven't created graphics templates, it would be a great time to do that, to show some love to yourself and make content creation easier. If you want to learn more about graphics templates, you can check out episode 18 as well as my guest interview with the lovely Liz Berenbaum. There you have it the six actions that will help show some love to your Instagram account and help you reach your big goals. Making sure your account is optimized is one of the best ways to increase the members of your community and have your content start converting. So I've got a challenge for you. Right now create a task on your calendar to go through and complete the six action steps. Don't walk away from this episode until you do. And when you dive in, if you're having trouble deciding how to refresh any of these pieces, know that you can always book a mini concert with me and we can work through it together to get you optimize to crush those goals for this new year. Alright, cool coffee friends. Thanks so much for listening. If you're loving getting schooled in socials, make sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode. Also, I would love it if you left a review so that other teacher authors like you can start getting schooled in socials too. All right, I'll see you in the next episode.