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Stephanie Liu: No joke!
Jenn Herman: I love you.
Stephanie Liu: I know. San Diego, come on now, let's get it together. Alright we're about to go live… Hey, what's up you guys, it's Stephanie Liu and I'm here with my girl Jenn Herman. What's up!
Jenn Herman: Hey girl!
Stephanie Liu: Alright you guys, we're about to go live and I want you guys to go ahead and start planning out your schedule, do what you guys got to do because we're going to be talking about Instagram marketing. So, if you're just tuning in, go ahead and leave a comment, let us know where you're watching from. Jenn and I are both in San Diego and it's sixty degrees. and we were just chatting about how cold it is.
Jenn Herman: I know we're the world's biggest [bleep], because it's 60 degrees and we're both dying! [Laughter]
Stephanie Liu: Oh my gosh, okay. Alright, well we're gonna have an “explicit” captions on this.
Jenn Herman: Sorry, we'll try to keep that a little bit more PG. My bad.
Stephanie Liu: Yeah, so if you have little kids around, you might want to put on some headphones because Jenn and I, we’re kind of ridiculous. But we are freaking cold here in San Diego, I'm wearing a jean jacket, I've got sweats on, I've got a heater. You were wearing a fur coat today, you're ridiculous.
Jenn Herman: I love my fur coat, people were laughing at me because they were like, “You look like you're bundled up for Canada” and I'm like, “I know cuz it's not cold, it's not.” It's literally 60 degrees and we are all dying like it's the end of the world.
Stephanie Liu: I had a client today where they're asking like, “Can we meet today?” I was like, "It's kind of cold, can we do this over Zoom?”
Jenn Herman: We need cold days in San Diego, we don't go anywhere when it drops below 65.
Stephanie Liu: That's hilarious. Hey cool, so a couple of folks that we have already checked in today. We have Rajsheda, Danny, Jasmine… Oh, Jasmine is up in Utah, what's up! Rajsheda says that she can only see [half of our faces].
Jenn Herman: ...she's making fun of us.
Stephanie Liu: Rajsheda?
Jenn Herman: She's up in Utah, right?
Stephanie Liu: No, no that's Jasmine.
Jenn Herman: I'm sorry, my bad!
Stephanie Liu: Yeah Jasmine's like, “Um, it's 60 degrees and you guys are cold. Stop it.” Okay um. let's see here. So Rajsheda, I don't know what's up, but I could see us on the other screen where I can see both of our faces. So, I don't know maybe if you're on your phone and maybe just have to tilt it, but let us know how that works out. But like I said, for those of you guys that are just tuning in, I'm here with my girl Jenn Herman and today we're gonna about to go ahead and geek out about Instagram marketing. Now, Jenn Herman is like the go-to freaking expert when it comes to Instagram and I also love her because yes, we've had other people talk about Instagram marketing on this show, but Jenn is the type of person where she does not sugarcoat stuff. She will get to the root of the problem. She talks with her hands, which means like you know she's serious about her stuff, and she's legit. And not to mention the fact that she's the author of this book! Hello, “Instagram for Business” and we're giving away two copies of this so you guys, if you're tuning in, go ahead and stay with us. All right Jenn, let's talk about Instagram marketing and, first of all, why is Instagram like your thing?
Jenn Herman: Well, it's amazing, duh! I just love it, but and see here's the thing, like and I always thought that people are always like, “How hard is Instagram, like you upload a photo.” I'm like, "Oh, if is it was that easy I wouldn't be doing this many speaking engagements and writing books and be constantly asked a million and one questions.” And that's why I actually love Instagram, because you think it's so easy. It is, it's a photo upload, how hard can it be? But the tactics and the strategies, and the way you have to be creative on Instagram compared to any other platform, where you can just drop a link, where you can be like, “Oh, share this on Twitter” that someone else shared. It's all their platforms can be really lazy, Instagram forces you to be creative. It forces you to actually be active and engaged, and part of the conversation. So, it takes more work, but it's so much more rewarding and it's so much more fun. It's a huge platform for building a community, the engagement on Instagram is unlike what you will get on any other platform. So, you really do build this real relationship with your audience and for that reason, and like so many more, that I just think it's really powerful for a lot of brands and marketing.
Stephanie Liu: That's awesome, yeah. Instagram was one of those platforms where yes, I'm on it, but I'm not religiously always on it. Because I feel like I always have to be perfect on it, I feel like I like the staged photo shoot. I literally hit on my girlfriend' and was like, “We need to have an insta date, like we need to go to UTC and have an insta date in front of that stupid green wall where everyone is taking photos at.” But yeah, I mean, what are your thoughts about Instagram and having all of your photos need to be perfect all the time? Can you just be you or do you really have to start thinking strategically of how it needs to be? Like the flat lays and all of this stuff, what are your thoughts?
Jenn Herman: It really depends on your brand and this is the thing. Some people are intimidated because Instagram has now become this super pretty platform and, like you said, everything's like these bright airy-like whitewashed photos and the perfect pastels, and the perfect flat lay’s, and you know, I'm like, “Let me just be clear, mama ain't got time for that.” I don't have time to plan this kind of photo shoots, okay? Let's just put that out there, like I ain't got time for this. But a lot of people are doing that and it can be intimidating, but in the same turn, if that's what everyone's doing, do you really want to be what everybody else is doing? You're not going to stand out that way so find a happy medium. I always tell my clients and people I work with to get YOUR best photos and create YOUR best content, which it can be images at nighttime, it can be images that are beautifully whitewashed and pastel. They can be dark contrast and high saturated colors and you can have a completely unique aesthetic of your own, but just make sure the content is YOUR best content. That is something that has definitely been edited that you've planted, that you're not just like, “Oops, snapped a photo, it’s kind of grainy, it's kind of blurry, whatever” and upload it. We want you to take time and effort into it, but it doesn't have to be what everybody else is doing. As long as it represents your brand and stays true to you, then that's what your audience can connect with.
Stephanie Liu: Love it. Okay, so Jenn, let's get into the meat of all Instagram marketing stuff. So, what are a couple of tips from you in terms of how to create a captivating Instagram account? Because yes, you could go ahead and create an account, it's easy to do. But, what are some things that some people forget about when putting their accounts together?
Jenn Herman: It is personality, really that's what it comes to. Instagram is a very personal space in the sense of you're talking to people and they're talking to you as a person. They don't want to be corporate you know garbley-gook, they want you to have a personality. So, you do have to use a profile photo with an actual photo if you can. If you are a bigger business and you can't use a person as your logo or your photo, I get it. But put that personality in the bio. I was actually just working with a client of mine and she was reworking her bio, and she was like, “There's no personality, that's not in here” and I was like, "She's a pit bull rescue, she does like a lot of recipes for pit bulls and that kind of thing, and she's like all tatted up and she does paper flowers.” It's this total dichotomy of a personality, but I was like, “I want to buy flowers from you because you are this super cool chick and you're not this like Stepford wife that makes these beautiful flowers.” So we talked about getting her personality in there. So whatever you can do to bring that out, and that translates into your photos and your caption, and your responses to people. Be engaging, be personable, have all of that content, but be a human freaking being. Have a personality, have an opinion, have some sort of unique factor about you that when people get to know you, they love you because of that personality.
Stephanie Liu: Oh my gosh, you know what I've been doing on Instagram is I've been leaving… I'll say something clever or witty, but then I'll just like put the little periods and I'll go down and then I'll write something really stupid. Just to see if they're really paying attention, you know. It's funny, it's kinda like a little Easter Egg and some people don't notice it. But like the folks that are still messing around with bots, they leave like stupid-ass comments and I'm just like, “God ugh, go away.”
Jenn Herman: Exactly.
Stephanie Liu: Okay, so we talked about like how important it is for you to go ahead and use a headshot or a profile photo that encapsulates pretty much your personality. Be creative with your bio. What are your thoughts about like emojis and bios? Is that is that trashy? Is that fun?
Jenn Herman: It depends on your brand, and here's the thing with emojis. Emojis don't have to be annoying smiley faces, there's like how many hundreds of emojis in the emoji keyboard? So, if you do something in the floral space you can use a little flower emojis, if you do something in the fashion space you can use the fashion emojis, if you do something in the food space use the food emojis. It doesn't have to be super ridiculous, overly cheesy emojis. You can even use the symbols that are like the diamond shapes or the squares, or the circles, just something to add color. Because when you add that pop of color and add that little bit of differentiation into your bio, it stands out. It makes people actually pay attention to it a whole lot more and that's always a good thing. So, even if you are like this super professional law firm, you could still use emojis in a very tactful and aesthetically pleasing way that doesn't make you look like a 15 year old.
Stephanie Liu: Very true, in fact you know, shout out to Kelly Duford who I follow a lot on Instagram. She's a female lawyer and she's knocking it out of the park, she does a lot of lifestyle stuff. She shows photos of her team, of her speaking at female entrepreneur business workshops, and yeah she has a lot of personality in there.
Jenn Herman: That's awesome!
Stephanie Liu: And hey, you know what? Kateryna's here, Daryl's here, so what's up you guys! If you have any questions for Jenn, notice how I say Jenn, ask Jenn. Drop them in comments that way we can go ahead and address them on this show. So, we've talked about profile photo, we talked about bios, what about links? Are you a fan of the whole… go for it!
Jenn Herman: No, I want know what you were going to say.
Stephanie Liu: I was gonna say the whole link.tree thing how you have multiple yes and no okay yeah it's here's the thing for some people linktr.ee thing with multiple links.
Jenn Herman: Yes and no. Here's a thing, for some people linktr.ee is a really good idea, it's a really good way because if you have multiple products, or if you are an account that has a lot of content in it (maybe like a news platform), or something where you're constantly posting new and relevant articles and you don't want people to like… If they see something that was three days ago now they have to dig through the archives already in your content… So, having a linktr.ee or those sorts of things can be really helpful with getting them to the right place from one source. So, in those situations yes. But, for the average small business, the average entrepreneur it becomes a little too much because you have to understand the way Instagram works. There's that one link and I realize that's really limiting, but to get people to take action to get them to your website… They probably saw the image in their feed, then they have to read the caption, realize they want to do something. Now they have to click on your photo to get to your bio, now they have to click on the link to get to your website. We don't want them to have to navigate through more steps to get there, so if you can make sure that that link goes to the right place and gets them there in one direct step versus having to now go to the linktr.ee, now they have to navigate through to find the right thing to go to the right page. It's more steps that can be disconcerting to some people. Not to mention if people don't know how that kind of page format lays out with a linktr.ee can be confusing to somebody the first time. They click on and go like, “I thought I ended up on an article I wanted to read. Now I'm on another page, where am I supposed to go?” And it can be a little disconcerting for some people. It can be hugely advantageous for some businesses, so you really have to take ownership of what you are doing, how you're using Instagram, and where you're sending people. If it's beneficial to you, great! Use those sorts of things, but otherwise just make sure that like for me I always say that mine goes to my jennstrends.com/blog because most of the things that I’m promoting I'm saying, “Hey, go check out my latest blog post.” So, if they're doing that they're gonna click on the link, they're going to land on my blog page. If they're looking for today's blog post that's the first one on the page, otherwise they can scroll back and look. But while they're scrolling, chances are they're gonna see other blog posts I've written that are probably going to appeal to them as well. So, rather than using something like linktr.ee and giving them the links to all of my blog posts, I give them one direct source and hope that that will satisfy their needs. So and that link never expires either, right? It's just there, they can always go to that page, they can always end up on my blog and be current. So, is it perfect? No. But again, this is why being a marketer on Instagram you have to be creative, you have to find those solutions that are going to work for you and use them in a way that benefits your audience as well.
Stephanie Liu: For sure. Okay and so, what's the difference between or what's the advantages of having (and P.S. by the way I totally read the book, so like I know, I do my homework), so what are the advantages of a personal profile versus a business profile?
Jenn Herman: I feel like this is a pop quiz and you've got the answer, the checklist, and you're gonna be like, “Check, check, check.”
Stephanie Liu: No, it's easy for me because I can just go down the table of contents and be like, “Oh…”
Jenn Herman: Like, “You missed one!” Okay, so here's the thing. I am a huge huge huge proponent of using business profiles because there are a lot of individual components, but it's a branding perspective. The fact that you have a business profile allows you to stand out on Instagram. Now, people freak out. They're like, “Well, I'm a business profile. I'm gonna get lower reach just like on Facebook, I'm gonna get punished. I'd rather keep it personal.” I get that, but there's been no proof, multiple people have studied this time and time again, there has been no proof that there is any difference between a business profile and a personal profile in terms of reach and exposure. When you do change between the two you will notice a change in your reach, but that kind of happens when you go from a business back to a personal, just the same. So what happens is when switched, Instagram kind of goes, “Eh!” first. “Let's just pump the brakes for a second and see what's going on with your account, make sure everything's okay.” They kind of slow you down, but within two to three weeks you're back to normal. Whether you transfer one way or the other, that happens to both situations. So, you're not actually being penalized in any way by being a business profile, so eliminate that whole fear and just go be a business profile. So, you get the the additional button by being a business profile. So, you can have a “Call”, an “Email”, and a “Directions” button, which means when someone goes to your profile they can literally click “Call” and it opens up their phone, and they can call you. If you want to talk about closing a sale, get a customer on the call! It works. So, instead you can email…
Stephanie Liu: Have you ever had someone call you?
Jenn Herman: I don't have “Call” enabled on mine because my life is way too busy. But I do know multiple people that have used that and have literally closed sales in minutes because someone calls them and they're like, “Hey, I have a question about this and I saw this on your Instagram profile.” “Yeah, absolutely!” Blah, blah, blah - done! Business done. Especially if you're a physical business, if you're a storefront, if you're a restaurant, if you're in retail, if you have a physical business location and deal with the public in that kind of way, you absolutely should have your call feature enabled. But even email, you'd be surprised, I get so many emails that come from Instagram where they click the email button, it opens their email browsers, they type up an email, and I'm booking consultations. I'm answering questions, I'm booking speaking gigs all because they have that little tiny button enabled on my Instagram because now they don't have to go and say, “Oh, I have to go to her website. Oh, I have to figure out how to contact her.” They have it in one place - you don't have to memorize, copy, or do anything. They push a button and it just works.
Stephanie Liu: Which is probably what happened because you've just been on this whole entire media frenzy, I've seen you like everywhere. Like Girls on the Radio, and I was like “What?”
Jenn Herman: I know! It's been crazy.
Stephanie Liu: But I know we've had this opportunity where the Facebook algorithm updated and they reached out to you and you were talking about the new algorithm stuff, and you made yourself accessible. So that's amazing.
Jenn Herman: And that's the thing, when it comes to radio or like TV media, you don't say no. If they call, you figure out a way to be there. If they say be here in 45 minutes, you figure it damn out because you can't not be there. If you say no, they're gonna get somebody else and once they get somebody else, they're not calling you again. You gotta make yourself available.
Stephanie Liu: Oh my goodness, alright so we've got one question that came in from Rajsheda and her question was, she has about 13,000 followers right now and she had started off as a personal account and she was getting really great engagement, and then she started shifting over towards doing a social media agency. Now her engagement has dropped, so at that point is there anything that she could do to just boost engagement back up? Or is it just the fact that her audience is just different now? The content that you're putting out there?
Jenn Herman: It's probably a combination of a couple of things, yeah. It's probably A) your audience is shifting. So, if you were a personal profile, your people, your audience who were on there who were following you for personal reasons are like, “Well, I don't care about the fact that you're doing this now.” So, they're going to ignore that content because they don't care. And it's also probably a lot of the content you're creating and this is what I've been talking about for like two weeks with all these new algorithmic changes - you have to be a human being. The moment we start becoming marketers and we start pushing content on people, they disappear because they don't want to hear it. If you're scrolling through Instagram or Facebook, or Pinterest, or anything, when you see uplifting content, when you see happy content, when you see entertaining content, when you see educational content you like it because it's what you want to see. The moment you start seeing, “Hey, I've got this new program!” Err, delete, bye, moving on, don't want to talk to you anymore. So, when we as marketers do that, what do you look at their audience to do? They're going to do the same thing, so you have to find ways to compromise and get that marketing type content out there, but in a very personal way. Try using a more personal photo with a marketing message. So, an example of this, Jasmine Star does this really well and she has beautiful photography, it's a beautiful photo of her, it's a photo of her dog, it’s a photo of the beach, the photo of a restaurant, whatever it is. But then in the message she's talking about whatever the program is or how she's doing a webinar, whatever it is. She’s not turning the photo into a marketing photo, she's still making it appealing to her audience in a way that it's visually appealing, it's still contextual because she'll tie it back to the photo, you can't just be the prettiest like sunset photo and then be like, “Buy my new program!” These things don't work that way.
Stephanie Liu: “The sun sets, my program goes “bye-bye!”
Jenn Herman: That you can do! That I understand and 100% support, because you're tying it together. But when you just put a beautiful photo and then totally irrelevant content, everyone’s going to be like, “Really? It’s clickbait.” basically at that point, right? So, you have to find a way to tie them together, but the chances are is the combination of those shifted things. It’s her changing the content and the things that she's putting out there, and the fact that audience just doesn't care about that kind of content because it's not of interest to them, and that's okay. If they're not interested and that's the direction you're going, that's okay! Your new audience that will find you will be interested. So, you'll build on that new audience. You don't have to worry about catering to the old audience.
Stephanie Liu: Alright Rajsheda, aren't you so happy that you asked that question? I’m telling you guys, this is why I love Facebook live. Because this is your opportunity to tap into her brain or if you want to later down the line just tap the “Email” on her profile.
Jenn Herman: Yeah, @jenns_trends.
Stephanie Liu: Oh my god, yeah dude I was putting the promo together and I was like, “Oh instagram.com/jennstrends…” and I clicked on it and I was like that is not Jenn. It’s @jenns_trends. I was like, “Impostor! Who are you?” This is not y homegirl. Alright, so let's get into the meat of this stuff because I feel like other people are just like, “Okay, let's start talking about how to grow my audience.” What do people need to do or think about today in order to start building their audience the right way? And by the right way I mean like not buying followers and not using bots.
Jenn Herman: Exactly. There's a lot of things that you can do. So, one of my favorite tactics, and this is a little bit time-labor intensive kind of thing because it takes some work on your behalf technically, I'm sure you can set up a bot to do this for you, but that takes the fun out of it, if you ask me. But so basically, for me what I do is I stalk social media conference hashtags. So, you want to find a hashtag for something that's related to where your target audience is. So for me, I work with clients who want to learn social media, so people who go to social media conferences are kind of my target audience. So, let's say there's a conference going on. The Social Media Marketing World is coming up, which I will be at, but in theory I would stalk that hashtag. So, I would go find that hashtag on Instagram and I can either choose to follow it in my newsfeed or I can just go to the hashtag and start going through. And I'm gonna go through and I'm gonna like anything that looks good, like I'm like double-tap/scroll. I'm gonna burn out my thumb double tapping and scrolling. But here's the thing, when you do that you start showing up in all of these people's notifications you don't have to comment, you don't have to follow them, but if they posted five photos from a conference and you like five of their photos, now you're in their notifications five times and they're like who's this @jenns_trends person? They come over to my profile ‘cause I just liked all of their content and go, “Oh, look at her, she looks pretty interesting. I could probably learn a thing or two from her.” Follow. So again, I'm sure you can set up a bot that would do the liking for you and it would make your life a lot more time efficient, but I also like to go through and see the content, I want to know what my audience is creating, what are they talking about in those posts, what are things that are appealing to them most? Are they most interested in Snapchat, are they most interested in Facebook? What are they most interested in? And you learn that by going through their content, so by doing that you can gain ten hundreds of followers in a relatively short period of time, and the best thing is they're actually targeted, they're people who are your target audience and you're not going out of your way in an abusive harassing way to get in their face and be like, “Follow me! I'm amazing!” So when you get you in there and it's rewarding to them, because you just liked their content. You've just given them an ego boost and now they're much more likely to interact with you and respond. So, you’re not going to get every follower, not every one of them is going to follow you, but it's a great way to build your audience strategically, organically, and in a very targeted way. So, that's one of my favorite things. Another thing you can do is contests, and when you run a contest…
Stephanie Liu: Wait, you have this in the book! I remember reading about this. There’s a whole chapter on contests there, you guys. Seriously.
Jenn Herman: There’s a whole chapter on contests. So, go by the book they will tell you everything, but when you run a contest the key is that you want to make one of the criteria to A) follow your account and B) tag at least one person in the comment as part of their entry requirement. So, I currently just ran a contest on my profile with those only two criteria. You had to follow my account and you had to tag somebody in the comment telling them why you like Jenn’s Trends. So, I think I got us about 50 entrants or something like that. Not a huge number, but it did allow me to get new followers because now when the person who entered tags their friend, their friend sees notification, they come over and “Oh, I want to win the book.” So, they follow me and then they tag a friend, so it becomes exponential growth. Your first few contests probably won't be hugely powerful, you're not probably gonna get thousands of followers overnight by doing this, but if you do this once a month and you do it consistently, and you give a quality prize that's related to your business - we don't just give away iPads people, we are past that stage, right?
Stephanie Liu: Oh, those are the good old days when you could just get a freaking iPad for following or liking something.
Jenn Herman: Yeah, exactly! It's always like a tire repair shop or something, like really? Like how are these even correlated? But if you do that, you can build your audience, again, target audience, because you're making your audience do the work for you. You're not having to go out and find people, your current followers are going to tag their friends that are going to be relevant to grow your audience, again, organically, strategically, and in the really targeted way. So, those are my two best tips there's lots of other things like hashtags and we can do a full session on hashtag. Instagram Stories, using geo tags in the Instagram Stories or hashtags in Stories…
Stephanie Liu: For sure I want to touch on Instagram Stories and hashtags just because, who was it, who just asked me about hashtags? That was Tracy! Tracy was asking, “What's the process for finding hashtags?” God, I can't believe it's already like 4:26PM, I feel like I could talk to you forever.
Jenn Herman: You can legit do like a three hour call and these people would be so exhausted of listening to you and I going back and forth, but we could be here for three hours.
Stephanie Liu: Okay, let's talk about hashtags.
Jenn Herman: Okay so hashtags, absolutely use them 100%. You can use up to 30, use as many as you want. I recommend doing at least 10 to 15, if you want to go 20-25, do it. Whatever anybody tells you otherwise you can go smack them crazy. So, someone says you can't use more than five, it's not true. That's a whole other story, you can find all about it and we're going to probably mention it too. Yes, you can use up to 30, use them. The more hashtags you use, the more chance you have of people finding your content. Here's the thing, you have to be selective. You want to use about four or five really popular, and by really popular I mean at least like a hundred thousand or more posts on that hashtag. Don't use the ones that have like twelve million, that's irrelevant, you're never going to show up. But popular hashtags you wanna use four to five. These are all brand specific, related to your industry, related to your content. You want to use four to five of like moderately popular, so tens to hundreds of thousands of posts, and then you want to use your super niche specific. That's your exact ideal target audience and/or your branded hashtags, which have less than ten thousand posts on them. So for example, #socialmedia - bazillions of posts, it's too much, don't even bother using it. #socialmediamarketing gets a little bit more niche specific, #instagramexpert, #instagrammarketing - that gets really niche specific. And if I use my #jennstrends and #learnfromjenn, that's my branded content. So, you mix these in and what ends up happening is your content gets the initial burst from the popular one, the moderately popular keep it active over hours and days, and the niche specific and branded hashtag is now how your audience finds you. But the other two categories are what gave you a boost, so in the niche specific one you're ranking at the top nine because you're a highly effective and well performing post thanks to the other hashtags as well as your existing audience, they play a factor too. So now, if you start showing up in a top nine for your industry, like niche specific, guess what? That's how people find you, that's how you get new followers, that's how you get new clients. And I have a whole blogpost on this in way more detail, and it's in the book so you can find lots more in much more detail.
Stephanie Liu: Yeah dude, I didn’t buy one, I bought about two. So having said that, so all these hashtags, now where do you put them? Are you putting them in the actual caption itself? Are you putting them in the first comment? What's up?
Jenn Herman: It totally does not matter. So I'm lazy, they go in the caption. Because mama ain't got time to hit post and go back and add a caption or a comment and put them in. I'm not down for that, I'm like, “Hit that post, and done. I'm out of here.” So it’s easy, it's convenient, nobody cares, they don't look spammy, everybody does it. It's Instagram, like nobody cares I swear to God. But if you don't like it and if you want to put them in a separate caption or comment, that's totally fine! But just make sure that once you've uploaded the photo, you're immediately putting the hashtags in there because you want them to be able to rank immediately for search results. If you wait an hour, 2 hours, a day, you've lost all of that time for them to show up in a hashtag search. So, it doesn't matter as long as you do it immediately.
Stephanie Liu: Very cool, okay so let's see. So, Rajsheda says, “Is the 60 hashtag hack too much?” I think you're only limited to 30, so I'm not quite sure what that was.
Jenn Herman: You are limited to 30, I want to say it might've been Scott Ayers who now does a social media lab for Agorapulse, I think he was the one that came out with the 60 kind of workaround and it's kind of a sneaky way. Personally I think, I can't even help it sorry, like I'm tapped out by the time I get to like 18. I'm like, “What else am I supposed to put on it? I don't have that many hashtags in my life, people.” I think 60 is too many, but even then the way they do the workaround, it worked like a year ago, I want to say that I don't know if it still works, I feel like Instagram may have fixed a few things.
Stephanie Liu: I don’t know what it is. What is the 60 hashtag? Is that you put in 30 and then you delete it and you put a new 30?
Jenn Herman: Well, that's one way. And a lot of people will do this to where you put in a lot of really popular hashtags and then you can go in you can delete those ones, and then you go in there, it's an hour later or whatever it is, put in the ones you want to last longer term. So you can get the initial burst from 30 and then you can stop delete them and then put in new ones and do that. But here's the thing, I feel like, and I'm not 100% sure, so don't quote me on this, but I feel like there had been situations where Instagram is now saying once you've shown up in a hashtag it's kind of like held there, even if you delete it it's still counted at that hashtag.
Stephanie Liu: That’s a good thing, right?
Jenn Herman: Yes, I support it. But a lot of people of course who wanted to game the system and manipulate it don't like this. I haven't tested this recently to validate it, but I've been seeing and I believe that that's what Instagram does now, where if you delete it you're still considered part of that original hashtag, and I don't think you can do that like go back delete and add new ones. I could be wrong, like I said don't quote me on that, I don't have testing to prove it but I definitely understand it has a point.
Stephanie Liu: Got it. There's one more question in here so Charlotte is asking, “How many niche specific hashtags should you have?” So if we have 30…
Jenn Herman: As many as you can have, my ideal is four to five of each category. So if you do 4 to 5 popular, 4 to 5 moderately, and 4 to 5 niche specific that's your 15 right there, right? So that gets you easily into that middle range if your niche specific, if you can get you know 5-6-7-8, great! The more niche specific ones you can use the better because that's where your content is actually gonna get found by your target audience. So, if you can get 10 of those, great, use ten of them. Just remember you want these to be something where like if you are a local business, start looking at the local hashtags. So we're here in San Diego, so if you're a San Diego floral shop you would want to use everything for like San Diego florals or San Diego florists, anything like that that starts pulling in your local demographic, not just using all these super popular ones. So, there's a lot of ways that you can get that niche specific. Don't use #flowers.
Stephanie Liu: Cool, so Tracy was saying, “Jenn, what do you think about putting in 30 and deleting and putting in 30?” Tracy, definitely go ahead and go after that if you have time for it. Jenn and I we both have toddlers and it's just not going to happen.
Jenn Herman: When I hit “Post,” it’s done. I'll go back and answer comments, don't get me wrong. I'm gonna stay there for the engagement, but momma ain't got time for that. But if you do then go for it, try it, see if it works. If it works for you, then great!
Stephanie Liu: Very true, and now you are a big proponent of Instagram Stories, but also Instagram Live. So take this however which way that you want, do you want to start off with Stories, some tips and tricks? Or do you want to talk about like how Instagram Live has really helped catapult your business? I feel every time I watch it it’s like hearts [everywhere].
Jenn Herman: I know, I love it! I have the best audience, I love them. So Instagram Live is built within Instagram Stories. So there's Instagram, which is your normal feed, that's your gallery, that's like the Instagram of old, which is all of five six years old. But let's just say that's the old-school Instagram. New-school Instagram is when you go to your feed and up in the top you have the banner of all the little circles of other people who have shared their Stories. It's a completely different component, this is almost going back to what we talked about at the top of the show where like that raw content, that real, totally genuine, you don't have to worry about having super polished photos. Stories is what Instagram was when it started. It's raw, it's real, it's instant, it is definitely like a different component. It is a different audience, it’s a different level of interaction, it's very Snapchat-esque. You've got emojis and space filters, and stickers, and texts ,and doodles. You can do you know simple text, you can do videos, you can do photos - it’s a whole other component. It's literally like another platform within Instagram and they have two completely different strategies, two completely different audiences, it is definitely very different. So, you need to figure out what works for your audience. My audience likes my Stories, not saying they don’t, I just don't like creating them. I don't have time to come up one post, you want me to create seven or eight Stories in one go? I don't have time for that!
Stephanie Liu: Really? I would rather do Stories.
Jenn Herman: You are so good, you are on there every day. You are killing it.
Stephanie Liu: I was just doing the donut selfies like, “This is where I am.” That's all I was doing and everyone kept messaging me and they're asking, “What app are you using to do that?” I was like dude, I'm just like sitting at the mall I'm doing this. They are like, "Are you serious?” People are laughing at me.
Jenn Herman: I love it, but that's the thing. If people relate to that, right? The Stories is the very personable side, it's the goofy side, it's the behind the scenes. That’s why Stories are catapulting brands in a way unseen on pretty much any platform, except for Snapchat, which was a much harder platform to build an audience on. So, Stories is giving you that stupid-goofy-childish-ridiculous-fun-hilarious entertainment value that you no longer get on Instagram with the super polished, very professional, overly staged photos that we see so much more of. Stories just kicks back, it's totally random like “I'm at the park with my kid, hey here's a photo.” Like you don't want this to live on forever on your Instagram, but you don't care if it's there for 24 hours on your Stories. So, if people are connecting with brands in a completely different way as a result. I'm a huge advocate for it, I don't use this, this is one of those do what I say, not what I do type things, because if I had the time and the creative capacity, trust me I would do it. But my brain is fried by the end of the day, I don't have time to think of seven posts for an Instagram Story. But it is like when you do think about it and if you do put a strategy, if you have an event coming up, if you're doing something for your business, if you want to promote a product, if you're going somewhere doing a charity event, if you're involved in your community - like there's all these things that you can do and be like, “Hey, I can totally make a Story out of this.” Please do, you will be shocked at the level of interaction that you get from your audience as a result.
Stephanie Liu: I was going to say, what are some key things that you need to have in your Instagram Stories? Are you still putting in your hashtags? Are you putting in geo-location? Does that matter?
Jenn Herman: You and I are like on the same level, I was literally just going to say that.
Stephanie Liu: Well you know because what, I’m watching you and I'm hearing you, and then all these comments like from Yvonne and like they're all like coming in and I’m just like trying not to be cross-eyed.
Jenn Herman: I love her, I love it. So, you want to use the location tags. It's the geo-tag, but they call it a location tag in Stories, because we have to make life complicated and call these different things. But the location tag, so you can use as broad as a city, a county, a state, country, or you can use as niche specific as the companies, the physical location, the park you're at, the lake you’re at you - Story of whatever it is. But you want to use that location, the location is what's going to potentially get you in front of tons of new people. And if you tagged yourself at a specific location, like an actual store location, you may still show up in your city hashtag searches on Stories. Just because if you don't use the San Diego location tag, it's like I went to Jake’s Del Mar a few months back, we go over the summer with my girlfriends, and I used the Jake's Del Mar location tag. But I showed up in the San Diego hashtag search because they know that Jake’s Del Mar is in San Diego County, so I showed up in the large search for the San Diego. So, just because you use one tag doesn't mean you're only going to show up in that one tag search. Instagram is smart enough and all those AI things that they do to know there's more to it than that and that's when you get exposure, that's where people can find you, especially if you're that physical business. It's great for things like restaurants and bars, and retail, and all that sort of stuff because your customers tag them it would make you show up. If you're taking your stuff there, you could show up. It’s not a guarantee, but yes you can show up in enough other searches. The same thing goes for hashtags, you'll show up if you use the hashtags. The problem is people started getting slimy smarmy with it and they started using hashtags and they were putting like 10-20 hashtags in there but making them all black and putting them super super tiny, so there was like a dot.
Stephanie Liu: Wait, does it work?
Jenn Herman: Not anymore, Instagram they totally got smart to it.
Stephanie Liu: Stop! I was doing that because my hair was black and I was like I'm just gonna put all them damn hashtags in my hair.
Jenn Herman: It was a smart hack and it still works. I don't know what the cap is, but they did get smart to it and they've cut down on where like the number of… I don't want to put a number out there because I don't know if it's like what 2, 5, 10 I don't know what it is, but they've got smart to the fact that people are doing this and they put a cap on it. But I don't know what the cap is.
Stephanie Liu: Aw, that sucks.
Jenn Herman: But you should totally use the hashtags because, again, you're going to start to show up in searches. If someone goes and searches for something, whether it's the location or a hashtag, now when you see the search results you see all the normal Instagram posts for it at the top, if there are Stories in that category you're going to see Story results in the searches as well. So they are the things you want to use.
Stephanie Liu: But when you see hashtag are you saying it and when you're typing a hashtag or you're using the sticker that has a little hashtag already built in it?
Jenn Herman: You can do either or. They both work as long as when you type the hashtag, if you're doing it on your actual keyboard and not using the sticker, you want to make sure it shows up underlined. If it's not underlined, it's not hyperlinked as a clickable hashtag. So the same thing goes to mentions on Stories, if you type @jenns_trends, if you don't select me and it doesn't have the underline, then it's not clickable. It'll show up in text, but it's not clickable. So to be clickable as an “@“ mention or a hashtag it has to be underlined in your Story. And you can't underline it, it does it because it knows it's like I hyperlink.
Stephanie Liu: Okay, well let's also talk about creative ways that people are using Instagram Stories because there's the new highlights feature, right? What have you seen people doing? Cause I will tell you these fashion bloggers are driving me nuts. I was like “Damn, y’all so smart.”
Jenn Herman: There’s a lot of people out there getting really creative and basically the highlight is… We all know Instagram Stories disappear after 24 hours, they're gone, poof, bye-bye. Well, people were creating all this awesome content and then it was disappearing and they couldn't repurpose it. So, highlight actually allows you to now save any of your Stories that you want to albums on your profile. So if you go to my profile you'll see my bio and then you'll see three circles, and then you see my normal content. In those circles, I think I have one for blogs and books, IG news, and IG tips. So when I do a Story talking about a new Instagram update that came out I can now turn around and save that to that highlight for IG news, so if you come to my profile six months later when you go to that highlight, you can tap through all of the Stories that I've ever done and saved in there with all the Instagram news and updates.
Stephanie Liu: Oh, brilliant.
Jenn Herman: So, it becomes a long-form retainer of all of your short-form Stories, but it becomes one big giant album. So you want to be smart about it, you’re not saving every Story that's irrelevant, but you want to put them in category. You do want to break them out, so here again like the fashion bloggers you want to have one that maybe all for fall fashion, you want to have one that's maybe just for shoes, you want to have one that's just for maybe affiliates that you're associated with or something. You can get creative with where you create these different albums. If you're in a service industry, you don't have physical products, maybe you have different types of things that you offer, different services. Or you have things, it's like me, I provide education. You can take your content and educational content, make that an album. You need to get creative with it and find ways you can package the content that if someone goes in there, it's now A) valuable in a sense that it's relevant content, but again it's bland relevancy you're turning around and saying, “Look, I have all of this content to share with you. These are all things that you need and want. I’m giving it to you all in one place.” And they're like, “Wow this person's super awesome and I need to follow them. I need to work with them.” It's a chance for you to create a marketing funnel in a lot of ways and that's the thing, with business profiles with over 10,000 followers you can do the “Swipe up” on your stories, right? So you have the clickable link only if you have more than 10,000 followers in your business profile, but if you have that that link stays active in your Instagram Stories and your highlights. When I have a blog post I can turn around, be like, “Click on the link” or “Swipe up to go to the blog post.” I go and repurpose that into my highlight album, guess what? It’s there for anybody who comes at whatever time and they're not having to navigate, they can tap up right there on that post in my Instagram highlights and they’re all in that exact blog post.
Stephanie Liu: So Yvonne says that she’s using Story highlights as well and she features things like her planners, shoes, her favorites, things of that sort. So that's so smart. I've seen someone also do you like frequently asked questions. I think you could even do that for yours because people hit you up all the time, they send you DMs, all that good stuff. Alright, so let's talk about Instagram Lives. How do you make Instagram Live successful? Because you are absolutely crushing it, like I said, every time I see you go live and there's just like hearts galore and the comments pop in and you're all up in it, you get right to it. So, what are some tips and tricks on how to nail your Instagram Live?
Jenn Herman: So, it's like live anywhere else. It's like Facebook Live, it's like Periscope, it's like Snapchat. Whatever you want, wherever you go live it’s live. So you have to be on it, you have to be ready to go. My biggest thing when it comes to live in any capacity is you have to have some sort of an outline. I don't want you to read bullet points point for point in your live videos, but I want you to have structure because when you're on a live video it is so easy to go down rapidly, it is so easy for the customer, the audience who are watching you to like throw in questions and comments, and you get distracted and you're like, “Where was I going?” You started off talking about a certain topic and ten minutes later you don't even know what you were talking about. So having that outline to keep your structure that “Okay, I'm going to come back to this” and keep your path because your audience will appreciate that. Your audience showed up for a reason, they want that content, so give it to them you want to keep it on track. That being said I'm a huge proponent for advertising in advance. Put an Instagram Story up 24 hours before you go live, so that lasts for the 24 hours leading up to the time you go live. To tell people “I'm going live” I post it on my Instagram, I put it in my newsletter, I put it on Facebook, I put it in my Facebook Groups. I’m putting it out there, I'm going live at 7:30 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday, people.
Stephanie Liu: yeah, I’ve seen you do that.
Jenn Herman: You have to, because people are busy. They don't remember. Again, it's getting them to know that you're going to be there, they'll show up, they'll make the time for you, but on top of that it's consistency. I'm there every other Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. Eastern every other Wednesday, like clockwork. It took me months, I’ve been doing this for almost a year now and it probably took me six months to build up any consistency of audience showing up regularly. Because they're like, “Okay, I happened to be there. Jenn was talking, okay. Cool.” But it's like when you're there every single time they're like, “Oh it's Wednesday. Jenn should be going live.” You have to realize it takes effort on any platform, the same thing with Facebook. You go Facebook Live it's going to take you months to build solid audience participation. You need to be prepared for that time commitment, don't just do it, try it for like two or three episodes, and be like, “Wow, it didn't work for me” and you abandon ship. You have to give it time, you have to make a commitment to it, and then you have to think of it like you're on a radio show. You have to realize people are tuning in at all different points of your show, they're not coming in at exactly time you start and staying until the time you end. So, I always greet people as they come in, this shows up on the stream when people are joining. When I take a pause in the topic I'll greet all the new people that came in, I'll remind “Those of you that came in late tonight, this is what we're talking about, just so you know if you miss anything, come back and watch the replay” cause they're going to want to catch the first half of this episode. You've got to think of it as a radio show and don't just feel like someone sat down on their DVR to watch the entire episode in its entirety.
Stephanie Liu: They’re going to binge watch.
Jenn Herman: Exactly, That’s for the replay, that's for the YouTube channel uploads. But you don't get that, like on Facebook Live they can come back and watch because it stays on your profile. Instagram doesn't do that and your Instagram Live can not be uploaded to your highlights, which really sucks! Just they know, I hope that… oh man. Can you imagine my Instagram Lives?
Stephanie Liu: That would be insane. Wait, so can you save your Instagram Lives?
Jenn Herman: Yes, at the end of your Live when you’re finished you can hit “End Broadcast”, and you can only talk for an hour. It will literally will cut you off, you can not go over.
Stephanie Liu: I like how you know this from experience? Every dang week, every dang week I go like, “Oh my god, I only have 20 seconds left!” But you literally get an hour and when you're done you hit “End Broadcast” and you get to your final screen, it's going to say how many people tuned in for the live show, and then at the very top right corner it will say “Save.” You must hit “Save” right then. If you don't save it, then you've lost it, it’s gone, you'll never see it again. But then you can with the big blue button to share it for 24 hours, BUT once you hit “Share” you cannot go back and save it as of right now, they might change this. They’ve been testing features back and forth, so they might change that. but once you hit “Share” you can't go back and save it, it's gone. So unless you have a way to like download it off of like a recording on your phone with some high tech gizmos basically it's gone, but if you hit “Save” it'll save to your Camera Roll and you've got it, and you're done. Then you can upload it to Dropbox, upload it to YouTube, whatever you want to do with it at that point.
Stephanie Liu: So how often do you go live?
Jenn Herman: I go live twice a month, I go every other week on Wednesdays. This has been a busy two weeks, I went live three times in a week and a half. I was like, “Dang are you guys tired yet?”
Stephanie Liu: I remember seeing that! I saw that in your post like “I hope you guys aren’t tired of me, but I’m about to go live. Yes, again.”
Jenn Herman: I've never gotten to live this many times and one like short period of time, but there was a lot of that went on that needed to be talked about. But yeah, it's showing up, it can be once a month, it can be once a week, it can be every day if your audience can take in that amount of content, if you have that kind of content to deliver. But it has to be content that your audience wants. I do webinar-style, it's very educational it's like, “Here's learning tactics, here's real events, it's news updates.” It's not just me talking randomly for an hour, no one wants to listen to that and if they do, I don't need them in my life. So you want to give that content value and if that means going live for 20 minutes, then go live for 20 minutes. But find the time and the content that works for you and your audience. My audience, those are going to be there for an hour. They'd make the time or they know that on the replay they're going to need to devote some serious time to their audiences to listening to it, but if your audience isn’t prepared to do that they may only want 10 minutes of contest. That's fine, do 10 minutes three times a week and that's 30 minutes of content. Do it however works for you that your audience is getting the content that they want and that they'll respond to.
Stephanie Liu: I love this because your tips are very similar to livestreaming on Facebook as well. I always tell people that if you're gonna go jump in front of the camera, people are busy. Give them a heads up about what it is exactly that you're going to talk about and, fortunately, over Facebook Live I could always say like, “Here are the three things that you're going to learn” and then I just follow that schedule, so that's always super helpful. For those of you that are just joining in, I've got my girl Jenn Herman here and she is the Instagram marketing expert. She’s also the author of “Instagram for Business” and I am giving away two copies of the book, so just go ahead and look at the description to figure out how you can win it. I will be announcing the winners tomorrow, so Jenn I might have to steal you away from work. We can announce who the winner is going to be. If you guys are loving this episode right now go ahead and leave the comment “Subscribe” that way RoboSteph can go ahead and notify you the next time that we go live. Alright, so just to recap, we've talked a lot of stuff. We’ve talked about profile photos, the importance of writing a bio, why it's important to be yourself because you’re the best version of yourself when you're being yourself and not trying to be somebody else. We’ve talked about branded photos, we've talked about Instagram Stories, highlights from those Stories, Instagram Live, freaking hashtags, which I feel like everyone was just blowing me up like, “Talk to me about hashtags.” Let's talk about scheduling. Are you using a scheduler right now?
Jenn Herman: No, I do not. I don't have enough content that I need a scheduler. I'm like, “I haven’t posted all week, maybe I should actually create something.” I'm down to schedule anything. So here's the thing, schedulers are great, they work, they're very helpful especially for brands and businesses. We actually have a strategy, again do what I say not what I do, when you actually have a strategy of content, you know you're gonna post three times a week and you want to get the content out there at the right time, absolutely use a scheduler. It's nice to work in a dashboard where you can manage everything, I'm a huge proponent of Agorapulse. I’m not an affiliate with them, but I'm a huge proponent of Agorapulse (A-G-O-R-A-P-U-L-S-E).
Stephanie Liu: I didn’t know that they schedule, really?
Jenn Herman: They do and the best part about them, which is why I love them so much, is if you're a business they give you an analytics report. You can literally hit “Print Report” and it puts it into a beautiful PowerPoint that you can then go and share with your boss, you can share with your client, you can put your branded content on there with your logo and your colors and it gives you all your data in one beautiful PowerPoint, and all you have to do is hit “Print Report.” You don't have to do anything, so if you have an agency, you have clients and you want to give them a monthly report on their Instagram’s, boom. Done! If you work for a company and you have to show your board members, your boss, whatever it is, a report, boom. Done! It's so easy, which is the reason I'm like obsessed with Agorapulse because I'm all about making my life easier. You can use all the other ones - Planoly does it, Later does it, HootSuite does it. There's a bunch of other ones out there. Here's the thing though you guys, and this is super important that you guys understand how scheduling works with Instagram. Instagram has our API locked down, which means the only way you can schedule a post is to actually go through Instagram directly. Meaning whatever tool you use, you create your post in that app dashboard and you say, “Schedule it for Saturday at 3 o'clock p.m.” You have to have push notifications in that corresponding app enabled on your cell phone and you will get a notification at 3 o'clock on Saturday on your phone to post it. You say yes, and it's going to open up, it's going to put that post on Instagram, and then you have to hit “Publish.” You can't just be like, “Oh, scheduled at 3 o’clock" and be done with it, you can't schedule at 2 o'clock in the morning and be done with it because you still have to physically authorize it through that third-party app and then open it up in Instagram. It's already populated, your caption’s in there, your hashtags are in there, the photo’s in there, it's all beautiful - you're all ready to go, you’re just hitting “Post” and actually pushing that to Instagram. That is because Instagram insists on this, this is the way their API is set up. There are apps out there and there are tools out there that will tell you they can do this and they will post for you and you don't need to authorize it. Here’s the thing: A) they're violating Instagram’s API, okay? They found a workaround, you're gonna get a workaround, they need your username and login. They're basically logging in as you and posting on your behalf, so if you're comfortable giving away your username and password to a foreigner in another country that who knows what they're doing, go for it! I'm not okay with that and I'm not giving away my clients’ information away to some random stranger, and I'm not getting my company information to a random stranger. Nope! So, there are workarounds, I am NOT a proponent of them, I have them reach out to me all the time asking me to pump their products and I’m like, “Nope, nope, not going to happen.” I'm not associated with you guys, I don't care how trustworthy you say you are, not going to happen. Because it's not comfortable with me to do that sort of thing. So scheduling tools are great, they make your life easy. Absolutely use them, just have an understanding of how they work and the restrictions that are involved in them.
Stephanie Liu: Agree, so if you guys are gonna be using any type of scheduling app, if for some reason they're asking you for username and password so that they could post on your behalf, just be very aware that you should be getting your push notifications. I actually use the Plann app just because I love the fact that I could sneak on what my competitors are using for their hashtags. Because girl, like you and I said, I ain't got time to research 60 hashtags. I'm just going to go ahead and see like what Jenn's posting.
Jenn Herman: Exactly, that makes life so much easier! I’d do that too, like man I'm running out of hashtag ideas, what is everyone else doing? I'll be like, “Oh, I should use that one!”
Stephanie Liu: Alright cool, so you guys we've been talking about so much today. If you guys have any other questions, go ahead and start dropping them into the comments that way I could go ahead and feel them over to Jenn. Jenn, do you have the comments open? It's okay if you don't cause I’ve been looking at them. Go and leave a comment, if you want to go ahead and subscribe just leave a comment “Subscribe.” If you have more questions about Instagram marketing, whether it's the hashtags, which I feel like hashtags is probably like the bane of your existence now.
Jenn Herman: I mean it is and it isn’t. It gets fine, everything's good, it's not the end of the world. But the question comes up endlessly, it's fine. It always happens and I'm totally fine talking about it. I'm a record on repeats when it comes to so many topics, it's totally fine.
Stephanie Liu: Yvonne says, “You don't want to know what I use.” So if there's any questions, go ahead and drop them in the comments. Marie, it's so good to see you. Christy is here too, so Christy was actually one of the previous guests I had on Instagram marketing, and so she was the one that told me about the whole like, “Hashtags, put them in my hair.” But Christy, apparently Instagram has caught onto that, so sad panda. Oh! Which by the way, the new thing - you could put GIFs in your Stories or transparent GIFs?
Jenn Herman: Yeah, it literally just came out this week. So now, and my daughter just showed up, she discovered us. She's making a guest appearance for the end of the show, she’s so shy. Say “Hi, Stephanie!” So yeah GIFs just came out this week, so you can do like animated GIF letters, you can do a little GIF stickers, so add a whole new layer. I haven't had a chance really to go in and try them, but I'm seeing lots of people using them. It's super fun, it adds to that whole creative flair that we're used to seeing with Instagram Stories. So go in there, do that absolutely, and inside that announcement that came out, which is what I'm super excited about, is that now - you know how they have to crop to a 9 by 16 portrait style image to fit in Story? So if you have a landscape photo you get that tiny little narrow sliver of your photo? So annoying. Not no more! Now you're going to be able to upload any image size, so what will happen is if you have a landscape photo, you can choose a custom gradient color to fill the background. So just think of the applications of this to put a photo in the middle and then have a custom gradient whatever color you want, you can put your text now around that, you can put stickers around that, you can use any image size in a Story. So that's the new thing that came out along with the GIFs in that notification. So, I'm super excited about that cuz that's gonna add so much versatility to the whole idea. It’s going to be amazing.
Stephanie Liu: That’s cool! Well, as I mentioned you guys, if you want to learn more about Instagram marketing, by all means please go ahead and check out Jenn's Trends, @jenns_trends because there’s an impostor out there! I don't know who she is, she's probably like a really sweet person.
Jenn Herman: There is some girl out there that was on Facebook that had like Jenn's Trends already on Facebook and she was like a fashion blogger or something, but her account’s been dead I swear forever. But it was taken, so on Facebook I’m Jenn’s Trends Online and then I became @jenns_trends on I think Instagram first, then I changed my Twitter to match that. Whatever, but i'm at @jenns_trends on Twitter and Instagram, it’s very easy to find me.
Stephanie Liu: Very cool yeah it's funny, there's another Stephanie Liu out there and she's also a fashion blogger. And I guess she goes on all these… Yeah, they’re all fashion bloggers. Damn you fashion bloggers for taking all of our names! And it's so funny because she went to like this femme tour and they were tagging me as the person in the photo. I was like, “I wish I was wearing that, I wish.” Alright you guys, it has been an absolute pleasure Jenn having you on the show, I know that you've got the babes there, so it's time to wrap up. Momma time, you made me miss my baby. If you guys have any questions about Instagram marketing, again Jenn Herman she's the one to go and talk to. Go ahead and leave a comment, I'm sure you're gonna pop in whenever you can, but definitely go ahead and catch her on her Instagram Lives. She goes live about twice a month, but I don't know she's kind of like the energy bunny this week, so maybe she'll do another one.
Jenn Herman: Maybe I'll squeeze one in if something big comes up, I'll squeeze one in.
Stephanie Liu: Alright you guys… Oh wait! Sorry, one more thing. I totally forgot that I was going to do this, but if you guys want to win Jenn's book (let me go ahead and pull this up real quick). Do you still have babes over there? So cute.
Jenn Herman: She stops over at my office and puts everything on the floor, it's gonna be amazing.
Stephanie Liu: I know! People always laugh because they're like, “Oh your office, it's so nice when you’re livestreaming.” And I’m like, “Yeah, but you haven't seen the bottom of my floor cause the bottom of my floor…”
Jenn Herman: Speaking of Instagram Live, my best Instagram, while you pull this up, my best Instagram Live ever was a real life. I was doing full-on webinar-style, I'm ready to go, Im ready to do my thing, like the doorbell rings, it's a maintenance guy - it was just everything that could go wrong in that hour video went wrong. It was a disaster, I was like, “You know what you guys, welcome to my life. This is my chaos, here's my life.” I picked up my camera and I showed them the floor of my office, which again it looks like this, it's all beautiful. Like no, my floor - you can;t even see the carpet, there’s so much stuff on my floor from my daughter and trash in my office, So, to this day everyone still talks about that live. They’re like, “That was so real. You always come across so perfect and polished, and I realized you weren’t.” And I'm like, “You can see my floor anytime you want if that makes you like you better, but I’d rather not show you.”
Stephanie Liu: Yeah you guys honestly, this is all nice, but if you look at the floor, if you look behind the monitor it's just complete chaos. But, as I was saying, if you guys want to go ahead and win a copy of Jenn's book I do have two copies - “Instagram for Business.” You still have time to enter, basically you just like our Facebook pages and then that gives you an opportunity to go ahead and win two copies of the book. And since Jenn is actually here in San Diego, I'm gonna have to hit you up and figure out how we could go ahead and maybe get the book signed!
Jenn Herman: Yeah, absolutely. Let's do it. I'll totally do that.
Stephanie Liu: All right you guys, I'm gonna go and let her go. So, we'll say bye now. Thanks so much!
ABOUT THIS EPISODE
If you’re like most entrepreneurs and have been trying to hashtag your way to more followers, Jenn's Trends, the globally recognized Instagram expert and co-author of Instagram for Business for Dummies is here to help.
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU'LL LEARN
- How to Create A Captivating Instagram Account
- Secrets to Building And Growing Your Audience The Right Way
- How to Improve Your Instagram Hashtag Strategy
ABOUT JENN HERMAN
Jenn Herman is the Social Media Consultant and Trainer at Jenn's Trends and a globally recognized Instagram expert. She co-authored Instagram for Business for Dummies and can help you make your business a success using social media marketing on this growing platform!
- Website: http://jennstrends.com
- Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/jenns_trends
Plus, we're giving away two copies of her book, enter for your chance to win here: https://gleam.io/fb/ZFg2y
UPCOMING EVENTS
1/27: Social Media Online Summit 1/27 - 2/4: http://bit.ly/2mf1rvH
2/17: Femargent Femboss Video Bootcamp: http://bit.ly/2D9CKJ9
2/28: Social Media Marketing World 2018: http://bit.ly/2vWVGJC
ABOUT STEPHANIE LIU
Stephanie Liu is one of the most sought-after speakers on Facebook Live video, known for her dynamic stage presence and cutting-edge Facebook engagement tactics. As an ad agency veteran, Stephanie has helped Fortune 500 companies and small businesses skip the guesswork on how to build their brand online with social media. She has spoken at Interactive Day San Diego, Social Media Day San Diego, Social Video Con and coaches small business owners on how to leverage live video in their own business.
STEPHANIE LIU'S LIVE STREAMING SETUP
MUSIC
Luvly by Joakim Karud
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