Kassaundra 0:00

I'm so excited to welcome you to the first hot seat episode of the school and socials podcast, where I'm going to work with a teacher printer just like you to gain clarity on their social media marketing. Today, Christa Jones from inharmonic education is joining me. And we're going to be creating a content plan for her for 2024. Now, this plan really revolves around increasing awareness of a TPT store, as well as increasing sales of TPT resources. So if this sounds like you, and what you were looking to accomplish, and 2024, you're gonna get the most out of this episode by grabbing a yearly calendar, some highlighters, and a notebook. This will allow you to plan right along with us. 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 am so excited to have our first hot seat episode on the podcast. And today I have Krista Jones joining me. And we're gonna be talking all about kind of content, outlining and content planning for the year so that you can have a solid idea of how you're going to move forward each month with your social media planning. Krista, thank you so much for being willing to be my first hot seat guest person. And I would love for you to tell our listeners more about who you are.

Christa 1:31

Absolutely, thank you. I'm so excited to learn from you today. So my name is Krista and my TPT store is called enharmonic education. So a little bit about my background, because this helps tell the story of my TPT store as well. And my plans moving forward. But I taught elementary general music for 10 years in title one school. And this is the first year that I'm a work from home moms stay at home work from home mom, I'm still in the educational world, I'm focusing on teacher professional development. So one stream of my income is professional development for elementary music teachers. And it's something I'm still really passionate about is serving that world. But I also so when I started my TPT store, I was thinking that I would primarily serve the elementary music audience. And then along the way, also add products for like general classroom management, or eventually general classroom decor, things like that. What has happened, and this is actually very exciting, it's a great problem to have. But I have kind of pivoted my target audience in my niche because I'm seeing success, basically a niche shown to me. I love when that happens. So I started my store in April. And I've been very fortunate to have a lot of early success because general classroom teachers are seeking out my products for classroom management, like positive behavior, rewards, and incentives and things like that. And so that was already part of my plan to provide those services. But I'm basically shifting my focus for 2024 from having a primary market of music teachers and a secondary market of general teachers. Yeah, and focusing on general teachers, classroom management, positive behavior rewards. And like I said, I'm really a brand new seller. I just started in April. So I have a lot to learn, especially about social media marketing. But the reason why I'm shifting my focus here is because first of all, I'm having a lot of fun with creating these types of products. I love serving this broader audience. But also I'm following honestly, since this is a business podcast, I'm following the money as well. I, after six months being on the platform, I reached my first TPT milestone. That's awesome, really, really exciting and totally unexpected. But I want to

Kassaundra 3:51

keep that going. We want to keep that momentum. Yeah, so

Christa 3:55

that was a long story short of who I am and what I'm doing. And yeah, I can use a lot of help in planning for next year. Sure

Unknown Speaker 4:03

thing. So I love that you are getting to create things that you love that was already in your plan. And that your niche found you That is awesome. So when we start to think about putting together kind of a content plan or content outline for 2024 For you, the first thing we really want to hone in on are your big, like, general business goals for 2024. So I know you talked about catering more to general teachers with classroom management and positive rewards. But what are some of the other like a bigger goals you'd really like to accomplish in your business for 2024?

Christa 4:42

Yeah, so besides just helping teachers and serving the audience, for me, it's easiest to start with monetary goal and then backwards. So I like I said I was really, really fortunate to have early success, and so I have big goals for next year. Hmm. And so I plan to exceed the second TBT, milestone and 2024 I have a lot of work to make that happen. But that's my goal, I figure in my soul shoot big instead of, you know, dreaming small, I love that. So in order to do that, I need to make product creation, a really big part of 2024. And I need to increase my following on social media. So I would love your guidance with that on how to increase following I do have an email list. I've been a little bit all over the place because I've been trying to figure out what works for me and what I enjoy, honestly, with the business. So I did start some Pinterest marketing and but I'm scaling that back because I've realized that I just don't have enough content to put out yet on Pinterest. I believe in Pinterest. I think it can work. But I'm pausing that for now, because it's not going to suit my needs at the moment. I'm on Tik Tok, Instagram and Facebook.

Kassaundra 5:52

Okay, awesome. You are across the gamut?

Christa 5:56

Yes. Like I said, a little bit of everything. I'm not doing anything particularly well, but I'm trying everything.

Kassaundra 6:04

And that's okay. So when we're talking today, I'm gonna give you a lot of great ideas that will work really well on Instagram and some of those you can kind of translate to Facebook and Tik Tok as well, it'll just be a little different, because tick tock is that video platform where that's all you're posting their Instagram, you can kind of post everything there. And Facebook, you can kind of post everything there. But you don't have things like stories and whatnot over on Facebook. So you want to exceed that second milestone, and you already identified some great things that we need to do with your social media in order to do that. So we know that we need to increase your following we need to bring more people into your community in order to nurture them and get them to purchase from you. So it sounds like I know, I also wanted to ask about this, like you said you do workshops and presentations for professional development. Is that something that you want to be promoting within the New Year? Or do you really just want to focus on your TPT store this year?

Christa 7:09

That's a great question. I do want to promote it, but not as a primary focus, okay. A lot of my professional development opportunities have been just organic through my personal connections and friends. So if I post a little bit about professional development, the people that I know so far, it's just how it's worked. And people that I know will see those posts and say, oh, let's schedule you to come to my school district, or let's schedule you to come to my, you know, Chapter workshop or whatever. So it's not gonna be a primary focus, but I will sprinkle those in as well.

Kassaundra 7:41

Perfect. So that gives us kind of a good frame of work to work within. So when we are thinking about setting up content for the year, basically, there are two big like phases of marketing that you can go through on social media. So the first would be brand awareness. And that kind of speaks to what you were talking about bringing more people into your community, more followers, getting more people to know who you are, what you do, and how you help them. And then on the other hand of that would be more conversion marketing, so getting them to actually purchase from you. And so when we look at the calendar, we'll look at like when you should be doing more brand awareness, marketing, and what kinds of posts you want to be putting out then. And then when would be the best times for you to be doing some more conversion marketing to get people to actually purchase from you. And since TPT, is going to be your big push for this year, because you want to exceed that second milestone, the first thing we want to take a look at is I have a little calendar here that I'll mark stuff on and sent to you as well. So that you have it is those dates when we have those TPT sales, because that's a great time to be in that conversion marketing space with your content. So we're going to kind of mark those out. And then we'll work backwards from there to work in brand awareness spots. And when there are those spots that like the sales aren't happening, and we want to move in to a conversion marketing phase, that's where we can make some decisions of if you're going to focus on your TPT products or if you want to use that as time to sprinkle in some stuff for your PD.

Christa 9:20

That makes sense. Amazing.

Kassaundra 9:22

Awesome. Okay, so there are usually four sales during the year. Three of them, we pretty much know when they're going to happen. One of them is kind of floating a little bit. So the one that kind of floats a little bit usually happens sometime around February. So for our purposes, I'm just going to mark that we want you to do some conversion marketing like those first two weeks of February, that might need to switch a little bit depending on when that sale actually happens. But usually kind of the beginning of February is when it happens, but TPT has been known to throw us some curveball. So that's the one that you might have to switch things up a little bit as you go. The other one usually happens in May for Teacher Appreciation somewhere within that first week when Teacher Appreciation Week is, and then we also have back to school sales, and they do to sales and August. So usually like the first week of August, and then like the last week of August, we'll make sure that you have some conversion marketing stuff for both of those points in August. And then they usually do Cyber Monday in November. So we're looking at kind of those middle to last weeks in November. So now that we kind of have those maps out is those big times, we want you to be putting out posts that are going to help you convert your followers into purchasers and customers, we can kind of backtrack and figure out like where you need to do that brand awareness building so that you have built up your community, and nurtured them in order to make that like a successful conversion marketing campaign. So to give a little background here, brand awareness and marketing, usually we take a look at doing it about three to four weeks at a time to help bring people into our community. And then conversion marketing, we look about like one to two weeks at a time, like as a maximum. So because that's where you're gonna go really hard with your promotional posts. So when it comes to brand awareness, we're going to look at you creating content that entertains your audience, that educates your audience. And that connects you to your audience. So for entertaining, like reels and memes that work really well to kind of show them that you know, like what their life is like, and like what their pain points are like, when it comes to education, any information you can give them where they can use music in order to bolster their classroom management or their positive rewards or things like that, how you can use your niche and your background in order to educate them to help those things run more smoothly in their classroom that works really well. And then just connecting with them. So again, showing them that you know their pain points, and you know, kind of what they're going through. And so during that time reels and carousels work really well. So if we're going to take a look at this, I would say we would probably want to take January to do kind of that brand awareness marketing. So within January, you would want to create content that is going to entertain your audience, educate your audience and help you connect with them. And the idea there is to get people to start following you so that they can see your value. And you can nurture them so that when February comes around, and hopefully TPT has their sale sometime at the beginning of February, you can start talking about your resources even more as a solution to their pain points. Right? Kind of bring them down your funnel in order to purchase from you. Yeah,

honestly, that works really well for me, just like personally, as I'm wrapping my brain around what my business even looks like, right? Because I like just did this, if not a rebrand. But I received some great advice from somebody else who was like, maybe when people come to your store, make sure they know that they've come to the right place. Right? And so before it was kind of like is this for music teachers? Or is this for what? And so I'm kind of like I just did right before this last TPT sale, I did a little glow up on my shop. And so when you get there it says, bringing harmony to your classroom, right? And things like that. So anyways, what I'm getting at is in January, that's actually perfect, because I'm still trying to define what that looks like for myself and for everybody else. Right. So that will help me explore that along the way while I'm educating my, my community. Yes,

so then you can let them know like, this is what you're actually going to be expecting from me, this is what you can get from me. And if you are this XY and Z teacher or person, this is the right place for you. Awesome. And then in February, again, this might need to change a little bit those like first two weeks of February, but you would want to move more into conversion marketing. And so there what you're going to do, you're still going to provide some content that educates people. So you're still showing them your value, but you're also going to be pushing more content that sells to them and like inspires them to take that next step to purchase your resources. And those work really well as like carousels and static posts in order to accomplish that piece. And so when We get into that conversion marketing phase, this is where you're really going to be promoting your resources and what you think teachers are going to need at that time of year. Now, this doesn't mean that during your brand awareness phase, you're not going to sell at all, it's just the percentage of your promotional posts to the percentage of your posts that bring about your brand awareness are going to be much smaller. And also, you can always utilize your stories during that brand awareness phase, in order to sell to because your stories go out to your followers. So those are people who kind of already know you and are probably further like down your funnel and more nurtured than people who are just seeing your stuff for the first time or just coming into your community. And so you can still keep moving and still be making sales, even though we're really more focused on bringing people into the community by utilizing your stories during that time, if that makes sense.

Yeah, yeah, definitely

awesome. So then kind of taking a look here, if we did the rest of February as kind of more brand awareness. So we kind of go back and forth between these two. So you, you bring people into your community, you nurture them, we get them to purchase from you. And now we need to go out and find kind of more people to bring into your community, as well. So kind of those last three weeks of February, we would kind of go back to that brand awareness marketing. And then the first kind of two weeks of March is where you would need to decide, we can start promoting your TPT resources again, or that might be a time where you want to talk about your PD. So that's kind of up to you, what are your like, initial thoughts on that? Yeah,

March is actually a good time to promote PD, because that's when a lot of folks in the music world at least are scheduling for the next school year. Yeah. And some, like I do PE for certain music education organizations. And honestly, some of them are scheduling out like a year or two in advance. But they're still scheduling in March, because it's they're wrapping up their school year. Perfect.

So we want to make sure that when you're those first couple of weeks of March, you are going to focus on promoting your professional development workshops and presentations. And then again, we'll go kind of go back into that brand awareness if phasing for the next four ish weeks. So that brings us to the middle of April. And I'm just taking a look here, because we have that sale coming up at the beginning of May. And so that might be a spot where we want to just do like a one week kind of conversion marketing phase. So we have a few more weeks to do some brand awareness before we hit that big Teacher Appreciation sale, if that makes sense. So like the third week of April, we could do some conversion marketing. And again, that could still be TPT, or PD, that's up to you, I think. But since your big goal is TPT, that might be something that you want to focus on there. So some resources that would be really great for people to have in April, as they like move into the spring time in their classrooms. And then we hit those kind of first few weeks of May, where we have Teacher Appreciation, we're going to have that sale, you're going to do that conversion marketing. And then we can finish up in May, with some more brand awareness, I'm just going to kind of go through like the whole year here and see how it kind of shakes out to see like how many phases of each we can work in here for you. So then that means that we can spend kind of those first two weeks of June doing some conversion marketing. And it sounds like the time for like scheduling PD might be over by then. So TPT would probably be your way to go there. And then I'm just looking ahead to August and how this is going to work out if we did two more weeks. That brings us to mid July. And again, we can kind of do the same thing like we did in April. So maybe just a week like a mini really big hit app promotion for your TPT store and then back to bringing some people into your audience so that we can hit those back to school sales in August. And then August between those two sales. We'll just go back to some of that brand awareness to bring a few more people in if you need to. And that brings us to September. And so I'm just going to work backwards here from November. See. So it looks like probably, if we took September and did like a good four weeks of brand awareness, especially as like new teachers are coming into the classroom in September who might not know they need you yet. That might be a good time to do that because probably We everyone who already knows about us purchased from you in August. And so in September, we can work on kind of collecting those new general education teachers who might not know that they need you yet, and then doing some more selling the first two weeks of October, and then taking the end of October, and like the first week, week and a half ish of November to do like that brand awareness, and then we can hit that cyber monday hard. And then I'm just taking a look here, if we did, and then I might do kind of a little bit of an extended brand awareness through December, like the last week of November kind of through December, just because I think that's a hard time for every, everyone, we're very busy with the holidays. And it can be kind of hard to sell in that season. So really hitting November, that Cyber Monday sale as like your really big piece. And then in December, since we're gonna do like an extended brand awareness phase, what we can do, we'll take a look in just a second. I'm like, how often you want to be posting and like what percentage of each we should be doing during each phase. So December might be a time where we do a little bit more promotion during that brand awareness phasing just because we're doing like that longer stretch, if that makes sense. Yeah, yeah. Any questions so far?

Um, I'll hold my questions, because I think we're going to answer some of them

as we go. Awesome. So we've kind of just mapped out kind of the whole year outline of like, the phases and campaigns that you're going to go through. And so now what we need to talk about is your social media capacity. How often do you think you're going to be able to show up and post on social media?

Yeah, so I think with the use of a scheduler, like, have you used the meta business suite? Yes, yes. I'm thinking about starting there just because it's free, and it's available. And then if I if my needs grow, I'll move to later or another one that you've you've recommended. So with the help of a scheduler I plan to post once a day. Okay, does that seem reasonable, but then going to my stories more often than that, yes.

So I would say, kind of industry recommendations are to post at least four times a week. So if you start out doing seven days a week, and it feels like too much, just know, you don't have to keep that rate up. If you don't want to, you can back down to kind of four days a week, and that has been shown to kind of be like this sweet spot where you go from like, not enough content to like, bring people in and nurture them to like enough content to bring people in and nurture them. Ready to take your Instagram to the next level. But maybe not so sure about where you should start. No worries, I've created a free resource just for you. The DIY Instagram audit will help you tidy up your IG account so that it can reach its highest potential filled with checklists, tips and brainstorming pages. The DIY Instagram audit will help you take a deep dive into your current account. So you can see what's working, and what's not allowing for you to easily make tweaks to your strategy to meet your goals. Once you've completed your audit, and implemented the suggested changes, you will feel confident that you're on the right track with your Instagram account. You can grab this freebie right now in the show notes and get started today. So if we look at you just hypothetically right now, seven days a week, posting on your feed, then let's take a look at some like percentages of like how many posts per week would be what so how many posts a week would be focused on like brand awareness how many posts per week will be focused on really nurturing people to get them to know that you have the solution for them? How many posts per week could we use to promote. So during that brand awareness phase, usually we look at somewhere like 70% of your posts are going to be around brand awareness. So things that you are entertaining people connecting with people so that they know that you understand their pain points, and they can come into your community and you can help them with those pain points. And then we kind of look at probably about 25% of that being like nurturing so this is where you're going to be educating people and showing them the value that you can bring to the table. So things that they could like use right now in their classroom to help them improve their reward. system or their classroom management, so that they can see you as an expert in that space in using like a music in order to do that,

right? And what some of that include, like I'm imagining some of the educating would include just concepts are like strategies and things they don't have to buy. Right, right, exactly. Does that include the like, also, you could buy this thing? I are like, Hey, let me explain something that you could do. By the way, if you want it ready to use, I have this product ready for you? Does that include it? And that's it.

So what we want to think about during the brand awareness is more of what we call soft education, which is where you kind of give them the whole concept that they could use right away. And then as we transition into conversion marketing, that education piece that we're going to include in there is called push education, where you're like, here's this idea, guess what, I have this thing that's going to help you do exactly that. So yeah, you're on the right track there. So during the brand awareness phasing, we're going to kind of give them everything they need. And as we transition to more conversion marketing, we're still going to educate them. But now the education is going to be like, here's this thing. And here's my resources. That's going to do it for you. Yeah, yeah. And then 5% would kind of be promotion. So I'm just going to do some quick math here. So if we are posting seven days a week, so it looks like we would want to do four that really focus on brand awareness during that brand awareness, phase two that really focus on that nurturing that educational piece, and then one that is like straight up promotion where you can promote one of your resources. Does that sound doable for you?

I think so. As we're talking through this, realistically, I probably, so I didn't want to set goals that are realistic, right? Yeah. But I also want to set big goals. So I can, like stretch myself. I think if I'm being honest with myself, I'll probably end up scaling it back to five days a week. Okay, perfect. I think I could start with seven days for last a couple months, and then probably run out of juice. Yeah, so

let's, let's focus on five because we don't want you to run out of juice and stop being consistent, because that happens a lot. So let's just do the numbers for five and see where that lands us. So in that case, you would probably do like three of your posts would be more focused on brand awareness, one of them would be focused on education, and then one of them would be focused on promotion. And that would give you your five for the week. And you could use that educational post even though you give them kind of everything they need in that post and follow it up with a promotional posts that might be related to that piece of education to kind of warm them up for that. Right.

And do you have a recommendation of you know, a percentage should be static posts or carousels or reels. So,

when we're doing brand awareness, I would say you would want the majority to be reels and carousels, where they can be when you're doing your promotional posts. If you want to use that as like a static post that would work fine. Static posts have actually shown to work really well as promotion. So if you're thinking about that, so four of your posts a week you would want to be real sir carousels so you could do like two reels into carousels and one static a week if you wanted to.

Great. Yep, that makes sense. Yeah,

the more that we can figure out ahead of time, the easier it's going to be when you sit down each month to like, put it together. So perfect. I will make sure that that's in the notes for you.

This is so helpful. Making an actual plan is helpful to me, right? Yes,

yes. Okay. I'm so glad I'm always so afraid that I will, like overwhelm people with like, all the like social media strategy, background jargon stuff,

bring it on, I want to know all of it. Love it. Okay. So now,

we're going to look at conversion marketing. And so this is where we're going to spend more of our time selling. So here again, we're probably going to want to split it between education, educating people and selling to people. So if we did that, I would probably do like a 7030 split, like we did again. So that would be three promotional posts during the week. And two, like educational posts, but again, you can use that like push education, where you say, Hey, here's this thing I want to teach you a little bit about and here's this resource you can use to actually follow through and do it in your classroom. So they're, you're looking at carousels and static posts. So I would say you could do, I would probably do your education as carousel, so at least two of those. And I might even do like one of your promotional posts as a carousel to kind of show off, I'm sure you have like, some bundles or some resources that have some different components, you could show like each on a slide. So if you did like three carousels, and then two static promotions,

right each week for that, yep. Awesome. Okay,

now I do you want to take a look. So it looks like from our plan 1-234-234-5678 910. So you're going to have 10, conversion marketing phases that you go through throughout the year, one of those is going to be for your PD, and nine of those are going to be for your TPT store. So I think that balance really helps you get to where you want to be because your main focus is hitting that second milestone on your TPT store. So that means nine times of the year, we're really super promoting TPT. And then not that you don't again, during those brand awareness phases, you just do more of it in your stories versus on your feet. And then we have that one in March, where you're going to talk about PD, because people are going to be scheduling during that time. So you can catch them and make sure you keep up with that side of your business, as

well. Absolutely.

The only other spot we haven't talked about is December where we're going to do like that longer brand awareness campaign and changing those percentages a little bit. So you can get a little more promotion in there. So I would probably suggest if we broke it down to like 60% brand awareness. And sorry, I'm doing math in my head right now. And like 15% from promotion, and then that would leave us that will leave us with, like 25% of nurturing content where you're educating them. And so you can get a little bit more promotion in during that time, just because it's a longer stretch where we're not like really hitting promotion hard just because of the time of year. And teachers tend to kind of really be fatigued during that time of year, as I'm sure you, you know. So that would be the only spot where I kind of tweaked it a little

bit. Right? Um, stories. So how is there a recommendation for how often to post daily to post on stories? How many times a day? Yeah,

so definitely daily can be helpful. I see a lot of people will maybe do like five times a week, if they want to, like take the weekends off from social media. So you could do that as well. Or if you wanted to do once a day, that's fine to what you want to think about is like no more than six slides, because that's when people tend to get lost and just kind of click through to the next story. So if you're thinking about talking about one of your resources to help sell it, just kind of keeping it within like six slides, at least usually three works really well to kind of educate someone about a resource, show them kind of what it looks like, and then like give them the link so that they can go and purchase it. Right. And again, I would say you could use the majority of your stories to sell during that brand awareness time period. So if you're gonna do, let's just say you're gonna do five stories a week, like you could make three or four of them about selling and like one of them about like educating or like nurturing your audience to like, show them that you know, their pain points or like a behind the scenes of what you do so they can get to know you more,

if that makes sense. Absolutely. And then as far as posts, like actual posts, yeah, you have any recommendations for times of the day or days of the week to post? Yeah,

so what you're going to want to do is go in to your professional dashboard on Instagram, and go into the follower section. And then up at the top, you're able to change kind of the date range. And so if you change it to 90 days, that's going to give you more data points to look at. And if you actually scroll down that followers section where it has like all the data about your followers, like how many followers you have, how many are men and women, it will show you down at the bottom of that. How many followers are online at what time of day. And so if you take a look at that, what we want to try to do Post just a little ahead of like when your peak followers are online, so that your post has a chance to kind of get into Instagram get into the algorithm. And then hopefully, with the majority of your followers online, you'll get more interaction with your post. And kind of like a really watered down version of how the algorithm algorithm works is, the more of your followers that like interact with your posts, the more likely it is to push it out to people who aren't your followers, which is definitely what we want Instagram to do for you. So that is, what I would do there is I would go look in your insights, change it to 90 days. So it has like a big, bigger data, more data points to look at to give you a bigger picture of when the majority of your followers are online. And you can look at it by day. So you can look at it by time of day, and you can look at it by day. So you can see like, Wow, a lot more of my followers are online on Saturdays, right? So if you wanted to do your five days a week, you would want to make sure like one of them are Saturday's Saturday. And then you could look at Saturday specifically and say, wow, people are a lot of my followers are online at like 9am on Saturday, so I could post at like 845 on Saturday mornings, and hopefully the majority of my followers would be able to interact with that post.

Amazing. That's incredible. Okay, so that brings me to my next question. To gain followers on Instagram. Yes, it sounds like the secret sauce is getting people who are already my followers to interact more with my posts. And then, so I need to include more call to actions where they interact with my posts like comments to tell me what your favorite song is for the classroom. Or, you know, whatever your favorite pump up Damn. Yeah. And that will then hopefully push my posts out to more people that aren't currently my followers, right. And also,

the other part of that secret sauce is using reels and carousels, because Instagram has said that they tend to push those content types out to more non followers, then static posts. So definitely, if you're doing reels, definitely don't be afraid to like ask people to come follow you on your reels because likely the majority of people who are probably going to be seeing your reel might not actually be following you yet. And once you start posting consistently for a little bit, you can kind of go in and see which content types are being shown to more non followers, if that makes sense. So if you go to your Instagram, and on each post, it'll say View insights, you can view those insights and it will tell you like how many people saw it overall. And if you scroll down a little bit, it will tell me tell you how many of your followers saw it. And how many of your like non followers saw it. So you can kind of gauge which content of mine is actually be being shown more to non followers because that's going to be your big goal for the year is bringing more people into your community so that you can nurture them and have them purchased from you. So I would say like at the end of January, or maybe even after that first conversion marketing phase that you go through when TPT has their sale, typically in February. If you go in and look and see. Look through like your carousels look through your reels and say, okay, which ones of these are getting to more people who aren't following me. And if it's real, then you might want to make some more reels versus carousels. If it's carousels, maybe you decide you're going to make some more carousels versus reels.

Amazing. Okay, great. Okay, I have one more question, of course. And it is I saw I've heard, I mean, who knows, but I've heard that on Tik Tok, at least it's important to interact with other people who are like in your community. So for example, if I post on Tik Tok, I'll go and search for other teacher talk people, and I'll watch their videos. I mean, partly I just want to but right. It's also, you know, part of the business. So I like will watch your videos, comments, leave a meaningful comment like it, whatever. And, of course, part of that is developing community and connections and things like that, and supporting each other. But the other part, from what I've heard that people guess, is that it's also helping to train the algorithm, so that the algorithm knows that you're on teacher talk, and that's the people you're trying to connect with. Do you know if that might be true on Instagram? Is it important for me to seek out other people and interact with their posts as well? Yeah,

so I think when it comes to Instagram, you want to make sure you're interacting with people who are your target audience. So just making sure like those people who comment on your stuff who answer any your polls and your stories, you're like, commenting back To them, or reaching out into DMS to like respond to what they responded to you for. Because those are signals that show the algorithm. Okay, this person makes connections with, you know, gen ed teachers who teach kids who are, you know, third through fifth grade or whatever, like you're targeting there. So step one is always just interacting with the people who interact with you, as long as they are your target audience. And then you can do some of that engaging within your niche too. As long as like you've said, it feels authentic to you, right? So scrolling through Gen Ed, teachers or teach other teacher printers who might work on like classroom management and things like that. And then if you just see something that were kind of really speaks to you, and you want to leave a comment for it, going ahead and doing that. So like, the first step is making sure you're interacting with your ideal audience. And then the second step is just authentically interacting within your niche as well. Right? That was so helpful. Good, awesome. So any other questions? For me, what I'm going to do is I'm going to type this all up. So you'll have your nice little calendar. So you'll know, like when brand awareness should happen, when conversion should happen, what each of those look like when it comes to like the type of content and the media you want to use. And like those percentages that we talked about. So you know, like how many posts per week, you want to be divvying up between those incredible

Yeah, I can't promote your promote those podcasts, other people promote this. Thank you coaching because this has been so incredibly helpful. So bad. So like I said, just like kind of all over the place, which is fine, because it gave me the space to allow a niche to find me, right, but at the same time now going into 2024 It's time to like take action and make a real plan and follow through on it. And this has been so incredibly helpful.

Good. Yes. And I'm hoping that like having this outline and this structure is going to make creating your social media a lot less stressful for you and 2024 Because we know where you're going each month, we know that those things are already aligned to your goals. And you know, like what kind how many of each kind of posts you're gonna be putting out each week. I'm so glad that you found it helpful. Thank you so much for joining me for the first hotseat episode. I really appreciate it and I cannot wait to see what you put together for content for 2024.

Yeah, thank you so much. I really really appreciate it.

A huge thank you to Krista for joining us for this episode. If you're interested in learning more about her resources you can find her on Instagram at in harmonic education, and I'll leave the link to her TPT store for you below in the show notes. Now, since this podcast is driven by what all of you want to learn, I would love to hear your thoughts on this first hotseat episode. Was it helpful? Would you like to hear more? Would you like to be part of a hot seat episode? Or could you do without them? Shoot me a DM over on Instagram and let me know your thoughts. 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.