Don't Do This as a Content Creator in 2023; Do This Instead!

[00:00:00] Tim: So 2022 is in the books, and 2023 is upon us. That makes it a great time to reflect on the year that's been and what our social media strategy could be for the year going forward. 

[00:00:09] In 2022, I think there were a lot of positive things to come out of my efforts on social media. I had the opportunity to connect with a lot of other content creators; even collaborated with a few of them. My Twitter account started to pick up some momentum towards the end of the year. I got started with launching this podcast, and just learned a lot about social media in general. 

[00:00:28] However, some of that learning took place as a result of mistakes that I made along the way. And in this episode. I wanna share two of the bigger ones with you in the hopes that you can avoid the same, and that's gonna help you grow your audience even faster in 2023.

[00:00:40] Alright, then let's do this.

[00:00:45] Okay, so mistake number one was changing strategies too frequently in an effort to chase daily or weekly results, instead of picking one strategy and committing to a process. 

[00:00:55] When you put a lot of effort into your latest video or weekly plan, it's only natural that you want to see positive results once you put that content out there. But if you're checking your metrics too frequently and putting too much stock in those results, it's really easy to get caught up in chasing short-term gains versus developing a coherent long-term strategy. 

[00:01:16] As content creators on social media, we're also often bombarded with advertising about different tools, courses, or resources that promise to help us blow up our account within 90 days, 30 days, two weeks, you know, whatever. And that can also tempt us into changing our strategies too frequently. 

[00:01:33] I mean, it's good to experiment to some degree, especially as you're trying to define what your strategy is going to be. However, you need to make sure that each approach that you're trying has been given enough opportunity to succeed. Because otherwise what happens is you end up switching from one thing to the next too quickly, and you don't really get a definitive answer about whether something's actually working or not working, or whether you just haven't given enough time yet. 

[00:01:57] It's also important to remember there are so many different factors that can affect the performance of any individual post or video. Things like how good were the hook and title to the video. How active were you on social media leading up to the publication of the video? How well did the topic resonate with your audience? How much competition was there for that topic? All of these factors and more can affect the performance of any individual post video or weekly plan that you have.

[00:02:23] Another thing that happens when you're changing strategies too frequently is that you tend to lose any momentum that you do have, because you're spending so much time learning new tools and techniques and not enough time applying what you already know. 

[00:02:35] But as I found out this year, knowing these things intellectually and actually shifting out of that mindset can be two different things.

[00:02:42] And reflecting on that, I kind of realized one of the things I needed to do was to shift more to a long-term perspective. I mean, if you think about a lot of the big creators in the content creation niche, including people like Peter McKinnon, Katie Stackley, and Sean Cannell, they've all been at this for years. Not weeks or months, but years.

[00:03:03] A couple of benefits of shifting to the longer-term perspective are: number one, it takes a lot of the pressure off in the short term, because you know this is gonna be a long-term endeavor; and number two, it helps to reduce the importance of any short-term setbacks because, again, you know this is a long-term game and any short-term setbacks are really just that - temporary setbacks. Recognizing this really made me think back to the process of earning my doctorate.

[00:03:30] So there's a process that took 11 years, from the start of my bachelor's degree to the end of my PhD. And because I knew the goal was so far off in the distance, and that it couldn't be accelerated in any way, I just committed to the vision and got up every day and worked towards achieving it. So my goal in 2023 is to try and adopt the same kind of mindset as a content creator.

[00:03:50] That brings us to mistake number two, which was a lack of strategic focus on a specific platform. You might know what I'm talking about. You're out there on Instagram, you're on Twitter, YouTube, and maybe even a bit of TikTok. You're everywhere. But because of that, you're really nowhere. 

[00:04:09] I mean, in practice, we just have to recognize that it's gonna be very difficult to keep that many balls in the air and do everything effect. And that's especially true if you're just one person with limited time to invest. 

[00:04:21] You know, for a while I was thinking that with the right set of tools and resources through automation, outsourcing, and artificial intelligence, it was gonna be possible to do it all. But then I realized that even if you can get it to the point where each individual activity doesn't take up very much time, managing the whole thing does take up mental energy.

[00:04:42] And then I thought, what if you took all of those resources and efficiencies that you've developed and you pointed them towards one or two things instead of five or six things? You're probably gonna get a lot further with those one or two things. 

[00:04:55] Well, that then leads into a really hard question, which is, of all the platforms out there, which one or two platforms are you gonna focus on? And it's hard to pick, which is why I think we put this question off. But in the rest of this episode, I'd like to propose three that I'm gonna focus on because I think they offer the best advantages and they fit really well together. 

[00:05:17] Maybe not surprisingly, the first platform I'd recommend is a podcast published on your own website. This gives you the opportunity to do a deeper dive into various topics, and creates a vehicle for collaboration with other content creators. You can also have other things on there like a blog where you talk about different tools and resources or strategies that you use. You can also have links to things like freebies for your email list or even a link to a merch store.

[00:05:43] But I think the best part of this is that you own the traffic that goes to your own website. You don't have to worry about intermediaries like third-party platforms, where let's say ownership structures can change, algorithms can change, and those things can really affect your ability to connect to and grow your audience.

[00:06:01] Now, the downside of your own platform is you gotta generate your own traffic for the most part. And that's where my second and third platform recommendations come in. 

[00:06:10] And for your second platform, I think that YouTube can be a great choice, especially when combined with a podcast. If you always record video at the same time as you're recording audio, you can publish all of your podcasts as YouTube videos. YouTube videos also can be found on Google, where they can be discovered organically by new audience members. Videos are also just kind of fun to make, and you can get additional traffic to your channel and your podcast through publishing things like YouTube shorts. YouTube is also well known for having a generous partnership program for content creators, which is definitely an added bonus.

[00:06:44] This brings us to the third platform, which for me is Twitter. Tweets to promote your videos and podcasts are relatively easy to create and distribute. The number of impressions and profile visits that you can generate relative to the effort is really good too. 

[00:07:01] So those would be the main three that I'd recommend focusing on. If you have access to an automation tool like Repurpose io, I might consider repurposing your shorts as Instagram Reels or TikTok videos. But I wouldn't try and grow those platforms in any way. And I think, again, you have to be really careful about not diluting your focus too much. 

[00:07:20] So that's the strategy for 2023. If I could boil it down to one sentence, it's to take the time to define a strategic focus that you're gonna be happy with and stick with it for a while. There are always gonna be other strategies, other opportunities out there, that might do better or worse than what you're currently doing. But if you give into chasing those shiny objects or you're trying to be on too many platforms at once, it's gonna be hard to make progress anywhere, as I found in 2022 here.

[00:07:50] I hope you found this helpful. If you did, consider subscribing and we'll see you in the next episode.