The title of this podcast episode should not have surprised you. The question is, are you still doing social media marketing the same way you have been doing it for years?
It's time to change.
I had the opportunity to attend the recent Meta Boost Small Business Studios event in Detroit, Michigan, and it was an excellent reminder both of the need to adjust and adapt our social media marketing strategy as well as an indication of how Meta promotes its social networks (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) to small business owners.
Listen in for my recap, and hopefully, you will begin the walk on the road of adjustment today.
Key Highlights
[01:39] Different Things You Need to Do in Digital Marketing
[3:00] The 2 Big Takeaways from Meta Boost Event
[05:19] Start Publishing Reels!
[07:42] The Focus on Mobile
[09:24] Boost Option
[09:40] Meta Blueprint
[10:18] Meta Boost US
[14:09] Messaging Tools Provided by Meta
[14:33] The Standard Functionalities of Meta Messaging Tools
[16:33] Great Case Studies on Messaging
[20:27] Instagram Stories vs Reels
[21:54] How to Create Eye-Catching Images
[22:52] Stage Your Page
[29:09] The Three Rs in Creating Reels
[32:20] Built-In Transition Effects on Reels
[36:02] Different Content Buckets
[37:58] 5 Things You Can Starts Doing Today According to Meta
Notable Quotes
Learn More:
The title of this podcast episode should not have surprised you. The question is, are you still doing social media marketing the same way you have been doing it for years?
It's time to change.
I had the opportunity to attend the recent Meta Boost Small Business Studios event in Detroit, Michigan, and it was an excellent reminder both of the need to adjust and adapt our social media marketing strategy as well as an indication of how Meta promotes its social networks (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) to small business owners.
Listen in for my recap, and hopefully, you will begin the walk on the road of adjustment today.
Key Highlights
[01:39] Different Things You Need to Do in Digital Marketing
[3:00] The 2 Big Takeaways from Meta Boost Event
[05:19] Start Publishing Reels!
[07:42] The Focus on Mobile
[09:24] Boost Option
[09:40] Meta Blueprint
[10:18] Meta Boost US
[14:09] Messaging Tools Provided by Meta
[14:33] The Standard Functionalities of Meta Messaging Tools
[16:33] Great Case Studies on Messaging
[20:27] Instagram Stories vs Reels
[21:54] How to Create Eye-Catching Images
[22:52] Stage Your Page
[29:09] The Three Rs in Creating Reels
[32:20] Built-In Transition Effects on Reels
[36:02] Different Content Buckets
[37:58] 5 Things You Can Starts Doing Today According to Meta
Notable Quotes
Learn More:
Of all the social networks that are out there, we simply cannot ignore Facebook and Instagram. Hopefully you're not ignoring them either. If you want to get the latest on how Facebook and Instagram, ie metta want you to use their platform to benefit your business? Well, I went to a Metis sponsored event in Detroit, Michigan, and I'm going to spill all the deets with you on this next episode of The your digital marketing coach podcast. Digital social media content influencer marketing, blogging, podcasting, blogging, tick talking LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, SEO, SEM, PPC, email marketing, who there's a lot to cover, whether you're a marketing professional entrepreneur, or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice. Good thing you've got, Neil, on your side, because Neal Schaffer is your digital digital marketing marketing coach, helping you grow your business with digital first marketing one episode at a time. This is your digital marketing coach, and this is Neal Schaffer. Hey, everybody, Neal Schaffer here. Welcome to another episode of my podcast, ie, your digital marketing coach. I cover a lot of different topics here, but they're all related to how to with each and every episode provide you hopefully, actionable advice. To help you move your digital marketing forward. There are a lot of different things you need to do in digital marketing. One of them is obviously social media, which cannot be ignored, and Facebook and Instagram which cannot be ignored as well. So I had the opportunity to be in Midwest last week. And although I did a lot of networking events for those, maybe some of you actually attended some of them some of my listeners, I was in St. Louis, Missouri, Nashville, Tennessee, and Chicago, Illinois, had a really, really great time met some great people. That's going to be the topic of future podcast episodes. But I also dropped in to Detroit, Michigan, where meta, ie Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, we're having an event called meta boost. This was a completely free event. I actually found out about it, because I am an Adobe ambassador, with Adobe Express ambassador, you should all be using that tool. It is the ultimate Canva killer. For those of you who think Canva is a little bit hard to use, maybe not as intuitive as it could be. I would definitely check out Adobe Express. But regardless, one of the Adobe Express ambassadors was speaking there, and I wanted to support her. But I also wanted to see how or I should say how is meta trying to support us in finding success with our business on Facebook and Instagram. So there's a lot of little takeaways I want to go through. But if I was to give two big takeaways before I go into the little ones, because I literally want to start going through the different presentations and the notes I took was that number one, the future of Facebook is Instagram and the future of Instagram is Instagram reels. This should come as no surprise to you. But the question is, do you really understand the implications for your business? Have you really gone all in on reels? Are you treating reels like you treat tick tock IE, and I don't know why I'm saying I found a sudden today but stick with me. Are you simply just shooting a video and putting it up there as a real or are you consuming other reels? are you consuming Tik Tok videos because that's where real news comes from. And I'll be at tick tock has a different culture than Instagram reels, although many will just try to get rid of the Tick Tock watermark and post it on Instagram and many will be successful. It is slightly different and it's more than just uploading a video now. Meta is so gung ho and real is that they are now saying over the past week, if you've read in the blogosphere, that they're ready to just simply whenever you post a photo, they're gonna make it a video whenever you post a video, they're gonna make it real. I don't know how far they're gonna go with this because there's also been some backlash from some notable celebs like Kylie Jenner saying, hey, Instagram don't become tick tock. But what the meta people said was, look, we know that people are consuming reels and spending more time on reels, and that's why they're push them in the algorithm. And guess what? The higher they go in the algorithm, the more people seem to engage with them. The longer people stay on site, and therefore, obviously, Mehta continues to build or attack tick tock or try to defend their mindshare, the amount of time on social media that we spend on Instagram and Facebook. Obviously, they're in competition with both Tik Tok and YouTube with YouTube shorts. But that's how they defend themselves right So that was a huge takeaway, to say the least, there was very little about Facebook at all, it was all about Instagram. And it was really all about reels, including an Instagram reels school, which I attended, which was sort of fun. And I'll get into that as well. But regardless, if you're publishing an Instagram, and you're not publishing reels, you really got to ask yourself, when you're going to start to publish reels, I know it takes time to learn them. Even during this workshop, it took time and it was an hour workshop, I feel a little bit more comfortable creating reels, I don't create a lot of reels myself. So I'm not the reels expert, maybe we'll have to have one on this podcast to help you. But it's simply understanding that there's a lot of different ways to create reels, there's a lot of different reels ideas, and a lot of people are just copying what a lot of people are doing. It's become a meme culture, especially with tick tock. So you know, my daughter is interning for a local company, and she would make a tick tock. And I'd say I don't understand. And she goes, Oh, what's it's a, it's a trend right now. And tick tock, and this is sort of the format. So I do believe if you consume enough of the content on social media and your students, you can begin to discern the patterns. And you can learn how to replicate that for yourself, I hope to provide you educational content going forward and how to do that. I'm not there yet. But stay tuned. But regardless, you need to go all in reals are not going away. And just as an example, I would normally post photos and Instagram, I'd still get likes 24 hours later, not say now it's more like 12 hours later, and then the likes are gone. Maybe eight hours later, I'd also say the number of likes I'm getting is one half to 1/3 of what I used to get on the other hand reels, which used to get a lot of views, and very few likes are getting way more likes. I also find that stories, there's some people to just engage more with stories, and I don't see them engaged with other content. And I believe that those are the people that are looking for your video content, because stories is generally more interactive. So the net net is, you've got to go all in on reels. If you want to get awareness, the beautiful thing is, every business wants to be on Facebook and Instagram, to get brand awareness, right. So your posts, your stories, will primarily go out to your followers, although you can use hashtags and try to get a little bit more discoverability. But those are people that are already in your funnel for people that aren't in your funnel. That's where the reels come in, because we know that you're gonna get massive exposure with them. Make sense? I don't think this is earth shattering by any means. But the focus was really, really clear. Like I said, there was very little talk about Facebook at this one day event. The other thing I wanted to point out was the mobile, the focus on mobile. So Facebook has been or I should say meta, it is the name now. And they're really trying to bring together Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp and let you easily manage all of them. Now, on the desktop, we've always had this Creator Studio. And it's been sort of a I don't know. But what's happened is that Facebook has really gone in and optimized their meta business suite app. So if this is an app that you haven't downloaded, I highly recommend that you do download it. And it gives you the ability to get notifications when you get comments, obviously on any of your business profiles. But it also allows you to plan and schedule your content. If you want to know how to schedule, you know, stories and reels this would be the application to do it from it gives you insights and allows you to actually launch ads that are a little bit more complicated than just those boost posts. You can access your custom audiences, for instance, and it has a lot of other things that, you know, basically, they're trying to make your life easier. And if you want to go all in on rails, you need to be mobile first. And now they have developed an application that allows you to be mobile first and how you manage everything. So you don't really need to go on a desktop to be able to manage things efficiently. So the shift to mobile is also this other clear thing, which is natural because of obviously Instagram and WhatsApp. I'd say if there's a third thing, you know, metter really is doing their best in their own way to try to make it simple for us. So, you know, they were saying, Hey, you should actually try boost cuts. It's just so simple. So if you haven't been advertising and the ad manager is just too complicated, you do have the boost option. And I do believe in the meta business suite app. It's also a little bit more than boost. But it does simplify things. They also have free online learning. Now some of you may already know this. But if you go to facebook.com/blueprint It's officially called meta blueprint. They have all sorts of free educational content. You don't need to buy a course to be able to learn a lot of the stuff. They offer sort of blueprint certificates and what have you but if you haven't Get into it. And you really want to go deep into a lot of what I'm talking about, go to facebook.com/blueprint. Now another really, really interesting thing. You know, back in the day LinkedIn created LinkedIn groups for various industries or various like, you know, for content creators, what have you. Well, Facebook has actually created a group called meta boost us now I'm not sure if they have these groups in other parts of the country, or I should say world, but meta boost us is for us, it's for us to be able to go in and network with other business owners, marketers, entrepreneurs, but it's also staffed by employees of meta, meta boost us 68,400 People are in it, you go to facebook.com/groups/meta, boost us, m eta B O S, T U S, the M and meta the beat and boost and the US are both capitalize. Maybe some of you had heard about it before, I haven't. And I explained that I attended the Detroit event, I'm looking to network and learn from other professionals, and share my knowledge as well. And I was able to get in. So you can say you heard about the meta boost Detroit event from Neal Schaffer podcast. And you're looking to network and learn and also share advice in the community. And you should be able to get in as well. And if you can't get in, let me know. And I'll do my best. What was really interesting was that meta actually had met a support people there. So I was actually able to in person, talk with metta support people, which to a lot of you, if you've ever dealt with Facebook support, you know how hard it is to get hold of a person. Now, the funny thing is, it wasn't smoke and mirrors, per se. But the specific issue I had on behalf of one of my clients, who is probably listening, they said they could not help me and they would forward the message to their headquarters. They weren't there, they were just there to try not to actually support so that was sort of disappointing, but I appreciate their effort that if you have a business event that you want to teach and support local businesses, and marketers and entrepreneurs with Facebook and Instagram, you should have customer support there. So kudos for Mehta for doing that even though I'm still waiting for a response. I was told five business days, or three to five business days, and today is the fifth business day. So let's see what happens. So some of the things I wanted to share with you. One of the presentations that I loved was Krista and a hair NEH er, she has a wonderful soul. She's been really active in social media for more than a decade. I've known about her never met her in person. I still haven't met her I saw her speak, she did a great presentation on growing your business through conversation. So meta is not just Facebook ads. It's not just reels. It's also messenger. And she gave some really, really interesting stats. 54% of international adults said and I quote, I find traditional forms of communication, eg phone, email in person with a business can be frustrating. 72% of people agree waiting on hold to speak with someone that a business is a waste of their time to in one to 10 people surveyed believe that businesses are communicating with customers effectively. Well, as you can imagine, you know, traditional channels are notoriously frustrating, whether it is phone or email or web chat. And this is where we think about well, if we're able to message effectively with our customers, it helps us build relationships with them and when new customers. So among those who contact businesses via messaging apps, ie messenger, but it could be WhatsApp as well. 66% use messaging apps to interact with businesses throughout the shopping journey. 69% said to being able to interact with businesses through messaging apps helps to build a relationship with them. The world is changing, social media is changing, communication is changing. But is your communication strategy changing is really the question here. So I'm going to keep riffing on this presentation. Basically, what Mehta provides the messaging tools they provide are obviously the business inbox in Messenger, the professional inbox in Instagram, and the inbox in meta business suite inbox and meta business suite being where all of your messages are being compiled that allow you to easily manage them. So obviously you have Facebook Messenger and you have Instagram messages as well. So one of the things that they recommended to do was use FAQs to easily start customer conversations. Fa Q's is actually a standard functionality that if you go in to your inbox, I believe Facebook and Instagram have separate ones but you can actually manage these so that if people are looking for something that everybody else is asking, they can go into the FAQs and find that information. You can also use saved replies to respond to common questions Ask with custom shortcuts. This is all standard functionality, you don't need to buy a third party messaging tool. In order to do this, you can also easily manage customer expectations with a way messages. Were here Monday through Friday, nine to five, please come back. Once again, standard functionality. One of the cool things is that you can bring people into your inbox by using private replies, to respond to comments on your Facebook and Instagram posts, reels and stories. So that's a great way to really bring that conversation. Well, for lack of a better word slide into the DM with a potential customer. So you have a lot of entry points. We obviously have an A Krista went through all of these, but it's really taking advantage of all these entry points you have and making it easy for customers to connect with your business, whether it's a messenger, whether it's an Instagram direct, or wherever it is, you can also use this with your paid advertising. ads that click the message can help your business grow while building deeper customer relationships through one to one conversations. So needless to say, there's a lot of different things that you can be doing. There was a great case study here on messaging. It was from blend jet. Since 2018 Blend jet has used the Facebook chat plugin to interact with website visitors. So you can actually inject the code on your website so that people can interact with you via Facebook Messenger on your website. In March 2021, the portable kitchen appliance brand saw the following results 15% more sales from people who engaged with the Facebook chat plugin than from those who didn't 17% higher average order value from customers who engaged with the Facebook chat plugin than those who didn't 62,000 more time spent among customers who engaged with Facebook chat plugins. So this is actually 62,000 minutes, I believe. So 11 minutes versus seven minutes. So there's just a lot of data that supports if you do it, right, it can really help because you're deepening that relationship. Another one and this was a great case study si da, which is a basically a clothing store or clothing brand. And she had basically a excess of clothes that she wanted to drive discovery for consideration foreign sales for so Cydia honestly si dia uses Instagram to showcase products connect with customers manage all online orders. So in the words of the founder and CEO Aaron kleinburg Magic always seems to happen when messaging with our customers on Instagram. Whether it's ideating on a way to collaborate getting stellar feedback, selling products or just saying hello. She basically said hey, if you're interested in this new dress, it is at this discount it is really limited the only people who message me on Instagram direct, she was able to sell 50 of these dresses in one month with orders managed via Instagram direct. So hey message me if you want it. They said hey, I want it she can send the link in Instagram direct boom got the business that's how easy it can be. Another case study I found these really fascinating was Lalo helping parents find baby products that they need with messenger. So this baby and toddler retailer showed ads that click to messenger to people who had visited its website, giving them a more personalized way to shop and achieving a 3x higher conversion rate. In other words, you can be a shopping concierge. If your E commerce with messenger they found three times higher conversion rate with ads that click to messenger 41% lower cost per conversion with ads to click the messenger 3.3x increase in return on adspend. With ads net Click to messenger and in the words of Michael wieder co founder President CMO of Lala, not only did it drive a better return on investment, it was clear early on the impact of conversations drove as customers went from messenger to our showroom in New York at the COVID 19 pandemic closed on store friends messenger allowed us to continue providing high chat sales in a more scalable way. Remember, in digital first marketing, search social email, what email is email marketing email is also SMS and text marketing email. There's also this convergence with social when we talk about things like Facebook message, Instagram direct. So there are a lot of different ways in which you can consider using messenger as part of your business. But it is definitely something that you should consider if you have not been considering it. So I also want to share with you another great presentation that was more about just general strategy from Tristan Sutton, who is a lead trainer with the Metis small business team. And it was as you would expect, but I thought that they were really really good reminders about having a smart, you know, specific, measurable, achievable, relevant time namely strategy, the importance of establishing a look and voice being authentic using consistent visuals and messages. He also talked about creating a posting schedule, his posting schedule included theme. This could be you know, content bucket, if you're following me format, what the visual is going to look like, what the caption call to action is gonna look like. And then hashtags tags and mentions, I thought that was a really good way of organizing in a spreadsheet what your posting schedule can be. He also obviously, and this is much more for beginners reminded you of the differences between feed posts and stories and reels that feed posts really represent your visual storefront. Stories is the way for you to interact with interactive elements, polls question stickers to truly bring people or bring your followers deeper into the funnel. And then reels allow you to be obviously discoverable. But it's also about entertaining and delighting AR filters, audio timer tools, there's obviously a lot of things you can do. There's also obviously, Instagram Live, which is way of communicating in real time. You can also add interactive elements like questions, stickers, and shopping tags, we can still do videos, right. And you can enable viewers to purchase products with shopping tags. So you could also use videos as a way to promote your products. And you can also really use video as another way of engaging a very engaging way of engaging. So other advice that he gave that I want to share with you just about video in general, it's going to help make your brand recognizable get people's attention early because it's moving image allows you to highlight a specific product or service. There's loads of free creative apps you can use to create videos, you can design videos that work with sound off, probably should. And you should be shooting your videos vertically. I think we're now in the vertical world. When it comes to images create eye catching images, meaning a single focal point, try to use contrasting colors, experiment with angles and perspectives. Highlight your product or service. Obviously, within that image. We want to use captions to encourage action get people interested, keep your captions concise, tag people's locations. And obviously use hashtags and add hashtags to reach more people. You don't need to go overboard on it. But obviously, there are many, many different ways of making your content more discoverable. So these are the basics that you should all know. But I think I just wanted to share with you what meta was sharing with us in the Javi in the audience, obviously. Now in addition to Facebook and Instagram, we can go to advertise, you have the Facebook Ads Manager and then you have the meta business suite. So we now have four different ways or four different entry points that we can use to advertise some of the other advice that Tristan gave. So before advertising, stage your page, meaning that there's a bare minimum you should have on your page, and Facebook has continually added additional functionality that you should look at and make sure is included on your page, you might be surprised that you're missing some basic information. Here's one for you, LinkedIn has recently started to support a link that you can add to your profile right there on top. So if you haven't been following LinkedIn, you might have missed that. And you want to go to your LinkedIn settings and make sure it's there go to my profile. linkedin.com/insights Neal Schaffer to see that in action. But this is just an example, if you haven't looked at how your Facebook page is set up in a while, you'll probably want to take a look and see what you might be missing out on. Tip number two. So we all tend to invite any and every friend, but we really only want to invite friends to like our pitch was similar to our customers. This is what gets the algorithm working, and it's going to increase our chance for success. So it's not about the volume, it is about the quality. Obviously, then you want to start with your message. There's engaging content is educating content, there's exciting content. And then the advice for writing, add text, does it address customers barrier that does speak to a customer's motivation? Is it shortened to the point do lead with what's most important for things that should guide your ads. When selecting a visual, make sure that's good lighting, not blurry, integrated branding, this could be just bringing in a logo or a watermark can be score or vertical videos should definitely be less than 15 seconds. And then obviously, the next step was to test out different images and test out different messages. You just do not know what is going to happen. So as part of the presentation, the recommendation was just hey, just use boost just get it done. It's very, very easy to do. And, you know, choose an audience that makes sense that was sort of simplistic, you might want to go a little bit deeper on that but basically a step by step how in five minutes you can easily publish an ad to Facebook or Instagram was was really, really trying to get more and more people to do that and to begin to generate benefits. So then we went to reals school real school was being spoken by by Darlene or darlin, Darlene Halina, who is also a lead trainer from the small business. Seema Mehta, very, very talented. You know, some of the more interesting stats that she shared that I want to share with you, 42% of people surveyed strongly associate Instagram with discovering local, or small brands, it might be hard for you to get discovered on Facebook, easy on Instagram, just because there's more visibility for your content in the feed, should you choose the right formats for visibility. So there were lots of different things talked about. But because this was a Rails workshop, it was all about using reels to help get your business discovered by new audiences, there were lots of very, very specific, product centric reels that were shown to us. But you know, another thing that was brought out is Instagram is the most popular platform for building relationships with brands. Now, when compared to other platforms, that sort of makes sense, because Instagram is so visual, you're creating a deeper emotional relationship than you might be on other platforms where it's just a static image, or just text or a link. So really, the whole concept of this reels workshop was to include your product as part of your reels. And to show it off, bring your products and services to everybody build community, and inspire engagement. There's also a lot, obviously, of sound and magical effects that you can do. I'm not going to go through, you know all of this, but there's some really cool things that can be done. And like I said, we're gonna have to talk about this more in the future episodes, use fun effects, transitions, and text to shop your products. If you have been watching reels or tic TOCs, you know exactly what I am going to be talking about. And this is a great quote. Instagram is like your gym for creativity. So bring your creativity to Instagram, in your reels, experiment with music drops, and creative tools, even tools like remix, to stand out. And you know what if you do not have the creativity, or the skills to do it, either learn or hire someone who does. And I will let you know that, you know, even high schoolers and college students, they may not know how to represent your brand. But a lot of them know how to create really great reels and tiktoks. And you might want to consider engaging with them. Especially if you have a child or know someone who is of that age. Some more stats that were shared 58% of surveyed Instagram users agree it's important for brands to post real slash raw slash unpolished content. So we know it's all about I mean, that's really the greatest way to define authenticity is real random, unpolished, right, so it doesn't have to be fancy. But by spending a little bit of time on the reels app, watching some tutorial videos on YouTube, I think you're gonna get the hang of it. 40% of respondents said they're more likely to purchase from brands that post light hearted, humorous content. YouTube is where people go to get educated. There's obviously some entertainment but clearly, reals tick tock YouTube shorts is where there's a lot of entertainment. There's also more and more educational content there as well. But that's the place where you want to do humorous content. This is Mimi stripling, the tiny tassel, just a quote, we recently had a new dress design that we launched in a real and it was very casual. We didn't really expect it to do that well, but we sold through almost half of the inventory that was from one real, okay, obviously, you can make your real shoppable to move from discovery to purchase your if you are on Shopify, it's very, very easy to get your shopping catalog, inside meta, and then you can tag whatever product you are featuring in your reel. Another interesting stat was that 44% of people surveyed used Instagram to shop weekly. So help people find your products and make a purchase by sharing reels in more places. Another really, really interesting guideline that was shared was the three R's. So the speaker said that great rules follow simple principles. Number one recognizable I'm familiar with it in other words, you want to align and adjust with how other rules are being consumed. You don't want it to stand out and look weird. You don't want to look like a boomer made it. You want it to be recognizable. I'm familiar with sort of the look and feel and the meme or just the the nature, the theme, the environment that that real is showing and once again, this is about sticking in right. Number two relatable. So if recognizable is not about I'm familiar with the look and feel number two relatable. Oh, this is so me and my friends, can you make something that's really related? able to your target audience, and then repeatable, that's going to be key. The repeatable aspect is, I can make more of these because now I've created a template, I've created a style that I can now replicate going forward. And you know, there might have been a little bit different explanation of that. But create reels that blend in to standout, nail the hook up front with a title card experiment and excite with transitions. Make it vertical. Remember to design with sound on Don't forget your CTA, show off your brand. So there was a lot of different things talked about, we actually went then into creating our own reels, I didn't publish mine. But to give you an idea, if you go to your initial screen, where you're creating a reel, the way that it was described was pretty much tap the multi clip shutter button to capture and stitch together multiple clips within your reel. So you tap it whenever you want to create one shot, you can upload video or stills from your camera roll in the bottom left hand corner. And then we went through all the different things on the right hand side you have audio, so you can select the song from the instrument music library to be featured on your reel, which is very much similar to what you might find on Spotify, you choose a length of 15 3060 or 90 seconds, you could choose the speed up or slow down your video. It's set at 1x by default, but you can do 0.5, you can do two, you can record a clip using Instagram effects. There's also the Layout button. So we did something where we had a top and bottom. So you basically shoot the top, and then you shoot the bottom. So we first shoot at the top of us raising our head up, looking left looking right and then lowering our head. And the bottom, we just did a steal video of a coffee cup, or a cup that we had in front of us. And when you put them together top and bottom, using the layout tool, it looked like my head was coming up from a coffee cup looking around and then going back inside the coffee cup. So this is there's a lot of different layout options, but something you might want to think about. And then there is the timer so you can use the timer to help you record hands free. So that's pretty much you know, what I wanted to share with you my main takeaways. You know, there's some other I guess, advice that was given that I'll go through really quickly here. So did you know that reels already have some transition effects built in, so make sure you click on there's like three stars or three plus signs three diamonds, I don't know what you call them. But if you open the Instagram real Tap the camera icon, tap the effects icon, there's some pretty cool things you can do there. You'll want to search transition, so you can search for new effects. One of them is like transition spin. So if you see people that in between frames, they have some sort of spin in the transition. This is what they're using. There are tons of different transitions. Anything you might be looking for, you can find there. So we looked at the transition spin. Obviously, for a fast time lapse effect or slow down play with the speed feature. Did you know that you can also play with the speed of videos from your camera roll so you don't even have to record it in Instagram to be able to speed it up or slow it down. What is the secret of a great joke timing, so place your text and deliver your punchline at the right time. Very important, you can enter your text in sections. So when you start typing your first section when the blue blinking cursor appears, once you've typed the first section, tap done on the top right hand corner to enter the sub second section, tap again. So this is how you can have multiple captions on your reels by tapping, getting the cursor entering then pressing done and then doing the same thing again. Finally, there is the timing. So there are dark rounded triangles on the bottom, you can select the section you want that you want your text to appear in the real, this is considered more of an intermediate hack that you'll see people post reels where they they have text on the top. And then after that they have text on the bottom. You can also have a robot voice, replace your own voice. So there is audio recognition. I'm not going to go into that. But there are different voice effects that you can do as well. And did you know you've probably seen this a lot. But if you post a video, this also works with stories and with reels there is a sticker where you click captions on and it will automatically transcribe what you're saying. And it will also show that and you can choose the various text options. So I'm sure you've already seen that probably already know about it, but it bears reminding. One last thing here is that you can follow Instagram for Business on Instagram. That's one word Instagram for Business for more tips on reels. So these were for me, the main takeaways of the event. You know Tristan talked really about that core strategy, some really, really good reminders. But it was obviously about reels about mobile, but also about messaging that really caught my eye that I wanted to share with you. Also very, very interestingly, there was one more presentation that I went to it was more of a really about Instagram strategy. You know, use reels, use shopping, bring your account to the next level, you know their recommendations for sharing content. So for the feed, they said three to five times per week, for stories five to eight times per narrative, you have to figure out what that is real is two to three times per week live once per month. I'd say that's pretty aggressive. I don't think you need to go that far. But you know for the feed, post photos and videos, highlights posts that prompt discussion stories is about in the moment updates, interactive stickers like polls, reels, inspire and amaze your audience of entertaining content. Show your case your product and creative ways to tutorials and demos, participate in trends by putting your own creative spin on popular content, live audience q&a, live selfie style conversations. And one more here because there was also this description of different content buckets, so events and occasions. Hey, sidewalk sale post your picture of the sale last year. Fourth of July post wish everyone a happy holiday with the graphic and announced when will be open national Friendship Day share an employee I'm grateful to also have as a friend and take a picture of them in the store. So these are some pretty interesting content ideas for the content bucket of product service highlights and demos, show how to replant your plants in our specialty lucky shrub planters via video. Right we're talking about product service highlights and demos show all the different types of succulents we have in a carousel photo carousel of different parts of beautiful hibiscus plants like the twist that stems the flowers, the shiny leaves. Then we also have another content bucket of social commentary. Share plant this is obviously very important, especially for younger generations share plants that can help increase oxygen in your home while working from home. Share how we're maintaining social distancing in our stores, with the graphic with text, comment on the need to protect our rain forests, forests and Earth, which if we're selling succulents, that is obviously very appropriate. And then there's also inspirational or motivational quote about getting outside or into nature in a graphic quote about flowers, not competing with other flowers, over a picture of our flowers, and maybe a time lapse video of a plant with a moment of calm. So I thought those are really really interesting ideas. It's all about the creativity. And it's all about processing everything I've talked about today to really push forward and lean a little bit more in on meta, if you haven't been. So the conclusion. And this was the last presentation I went to and I'm literally looking at my photos. Because right after this photo, I have a photo of a beautiful Greek lagger called mythos if you haven't had that beer, I highly recommend it. But according to metta, the five things you can start doing today, for your Instagram to improve upon it is to build a strong foundation. This is make sure you have your highlights, your your your bio, even including hashtags in your bio, something they recommended. Number two, start using your hashtags, your own branded hashtags, non branded hashtags, obviously, create a stories poll, get the conversation started, check out your professional insights, figure out reels versus stories versus videos versus posts. What is it that people are engaging with? What should you do more of go live, create a reel, try new things that was really, if anything, that was the message here. You know, it's really interesting that Facebook talked more about reels than they did about ads during the day event. And this gets down to Instagram will meta. Clearly, they find that the only way they're going to beat Tik Tok is by having more of us create reels. And the more reels we create, the longer people stay on the platform, and the more ad revenue that at the end of the day Facebook is able to generate. So it's about keeping people on the platform. It's about encouraging you. And it's about rewarding those that create reels with greater discoverability, greater visibility, what you do with it comes down to your creativity, your content, and your audience. And that, my friends, is the conclusion of my report. From the meta boost event. I don't often do podcast episodes where I do these reports. But this was a really, really good educational and free show. And I wanted to share with you because I think meta was really authentic in wanting us to succeed on the platform. And it's almost 2023 It's time to really do a reset on how we do that. So I hope you found this valuable. If you did find it valuable. I'd love your feedback. You can leave a rating on your favorite podcast app, you can leave a comment. You can tag this episode and share it on the socials or you can just email me right Neil at Neal schaffer.com Or you can go to my website Neal schaffer.com slash contact and reach out to me. Either way, I want to improve our conversation. So I really do appreciate I, you know, there's some of you that send me direct messages. Hey, Neal, you know, just subscribe. Just give me a five star rating on Apple podcasts. And that is why I podcast right. As I mentioned before, I am literally staring at a wall when I'm recording these in my home office. So just getting your feedback really means a lot to me. And your feedback isn't just reviews and tags, what have you. It's also the fact that you subscribe, and I see that in the download numbers. And I see that in the charts around the world. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you, shisha. Merci. How do you get those IMS and whatever other language I know I'm missing my apologies. I need to learn more donkus out there. Yeah. But thank you. Gracias. But thank you so much, and I look forward to serving you on the next episode. As always, remember to keep your eye fixed on that goal. And we'll speak with you next time. This is your digital marketing coach Neal Schaffer signing off. You've been listening to your digital marketing coach, questions, comments, requests, links, go to podcast dot Neal schaffer.com. Get the show notes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes, and Neal schaffer.com to tap into the 400 Plus blog posts that Neil has published to support your business. While you're there, check out Neil's Digital First group coaching membership community if you or your business needs a little helping hand. See you next time on your digital marketing coach.