Let's Crush It!
Hey, this is Toni with Crush Your Social podcast. If you're here, you're looking for Instagram or social media help, and you don't know where else to go. And you want to work with someone who's been through the trenches, who's made all the mistakes, and who can prove that they know what they're talking about. If that's you, then you're in the right place.
I'm going to start this podcast with an intro about me and how I got to where I am, because it was brought to my attention that if I'm talking about being credible online and being legitimate and being authentic, I'm going to have to prove that for people to trust me. And so if I want you to trust me as a listener and to be able to take my advice, I need to show you how I got where I am and tell you about the stories that got me to the thoughts that I have now. So I'm going to start with, I'm not a young spring chicken.
I've been around the block a while. I started out in corporate sales back before the internet was a big thing, selling fiber optic network connectivity to users of large data. What I found was it wasn't really sales because we were the only game in town. What we needed to do was build brand visibility,
and we needed to be credible. We needed to show them that we could be trusted with their big data. So I learned about building brand visibility, getting recognized and remembered for what you do. And I learned about how to build trust. And so I brought that with me throughout my career. And then after that, I moved up to Washington, became a mom and I became a college professor. And I had these two courses that I taught that were intro to business and intro to marketing. And I thought, what have you built a little bit of a foundation?
And so I had my students write a business plan for the business class. And then when they came to my marketing class, they brought that with them and they wrote a marketing plan. And what happened was the students that had come from my business class and wrote the business plan first did much better than the ones who hadn't. The students who had been in both of my classes and wrote the plans and the strategies did better in all of their other business courses. I had guests come into my marketing class. And one of my guests was a local celebrity. He was an athlete. And my students would say, "Hey, I want to grow my Instagram. And how can I do that?" And he would say, "Be authentic. Be yourself."
I had just gotten on Instagram like six months prior to that. I had been posting things about myself, like he said, and it didn't work. I wasn't getting any followers. Nobody knew that I was out there. And so what I learned, you can't be yourself until you're a recognized brand. You have to build trust and credibility first because nobody cares about you. They care about how you can help them. So that's what I learned about that. Then I came to Instagram for business and I wanted to be good at it. So I took a design course and the designer was great. She did a great job teaching me. It's Kat Couroy. She does a lovely job of teaching design. And I learned about flat lays and making pretty content and things like that. That didn't work either. So pictures of me didn't work. My life didn't work. And content that was pictures of other things didn't work either. And motivational content also didn't work. But what I learned later is that there's a place for personal content, but it's not in the posts. But that took a long time to figure that out too. And then I learned some other lessons in the early years because I was posting for over a year before my account started to grow. I was getting crickets and I didn't know why I was doing all the things I was posting, all the things people said to do. And then I learned about engagement and that you had to talk to people and you couldn't talk to people you wanted to sell to because they don't want to hear from you. The bottom line is nobody wants to be sold to, nobody wants to look into their DMs and see some stranger trying to sell to them. So I thought, well, what if I engage with people in my industry? Would that be a thing? And it turned out it was a thing. People in my industry were also interested in engaging and their content helped me, my content helped them. So I started to grow this community. I also got invited to some engagement groups and I learned that those don't work because the more connected you are to people in your niche, in your industry, and where the engagement is and where the content is, the better your content will get pushed out to people that don't know who you are and your potential clients. Luckily, I did not make the mistake of buying followers and engagement only because someone told me about it. I saw it in a post. I thought, "Oh, you can buy followers. That would be a fast way to go. You can buy engagement." And somebody else said, "This is why you don't do that and it will ruin your account." Basically, and I've fixed several in the last few years of people who did because when you buy followers, as soon as you stop buying them, they go away. When you look at the quality of the follower, it just doesn't build trust. So I learned some valuable lessons on my journey from four years ago. As I've been building my Instagram community, I also learned that when you have high engagement, if your content is terrible, then it won't matter. So you have to have valuable content, you have to have a profile that's optimized, and you have to have a community.
Those are the three things I like to talk about is how to do those things because they're so hard to do and they take so much time.
This is why I'm qualified to talk about social media because I've been through the hard knocks. I've made mistakes so bad that one time I lost my headline section because I had keywords in there because it's one of the only searchable places on the platform. I was ranking number two in a search and I got a little cocky. I thought, "I'm going to change the words here and see if I can rank higher." I changed them and it ranked lower.
I thought, "Oh, I'll change it back, but you can only change it like twice in a two-week period." So I was stuck with those words. So I thought I saw a button that you could delete it. I thought, "Oh, I'll just delete it and start over." But when I deleted it, you couldn't add it back for a whole month. So I had no search ability for a whole entire month and nobody could tell what my headline was. But I made all the mistakes and learned all the things that can make your account grow with legitimacy, with authenticity, and make it organic. I've never bought an ad and I have almost 30,000 followers in basically two years because it took me about a year and a half to figure out just the basics before I knew what I was doing.
It's not a fast process, but it can be a lot of fun. Some of the stuff I want to talk about is the relationships I've built that are now helping my business and all the tips and all the things that I learned along the way. What I'll be doing is breaking down the different parts of the Instagram platform and what they are and how they work, talking a lot about the algorithms and then where do you find the data and what kind of data works. For instance, I'll be talking a lot about how you drive behavior through content using algorithms and metrics like engagement metrics, how to brand your page so that you attract the right people. So that's not about your favorite colors. Pink is not my favorite color. It's not about me. So it'll all be about a lot of technical tips and the stories behind how I know those things. How they like the story behind like I'll be talking about my branding story that there's a story that is kind of funny about how I ended up with magenta and indigo and black as my brand colors. And it took several iterations. So it'll be my journey and the mistakes that I made and what I learned along the way so that if people want to know about, oh, I want to optimize my profile, they'll go to this episode. Oh, they want to know about this particular part of the algorithm. They'll go to that. So they'll be able to pick and choose what they're struggling with and go get help with those things based upon my mistakes. Well, I think it's important because what's happened in the last couple of years is like my account has been cloned several times and they go into the DMs and try to sell my followers Bitcoin. So I had to get it meta verified to protect it. So if you don't see a blue checkmark in the if you're if I'm in your DMs and you don't see a blue checkmark, it's not me.
And my content is stolen. Like I had this post. I was the first I was the first creator to create and it was totally by accident a list post which are now really common. And it was I was panicking about a post. I pulled it off of a course I was creating and I threw it up there. But the thing is that post was 44 ways to talk about one topic. And it was taken from all of my content. So I'd looked at my account and figured out how many ways have I talked about engagement because I was an engagement specialist at the time and I found 44 posts and I thought I can give the dates and times and people can go look at those posts to see why they worked or what my spin on that was. And I put the topics in the list that that post is copied all the time. And and it actually reached over half a million people accounts for the reach. And I only had 12000 followers at the time.
So I want people to know why I know what I know so that they know it's legitimately me. It's like I'm just not stealing other people's words. Like it happens all the time. And I my words are stolen on a daily basis. And a guy who just hired me hired two more people who were using my words in their talking and they didn't know what they were doing. So later he came back to me and said, I know you're more expensive. But these people said the same thing you did and they didn't know what they were doing. I looked at your account. So he came and hired me because he realized I walked the talk. I want everything that comes out of my mouth on this podcast to be there's legitimate proof of why it works or why it doesn't. Maybe it's not always true. Everything changes all the time. But this is what was working then. And this is why it worked. You know, if you're a small account, you're coming in, you want to copy what I do. It won't work. The content that I create I can get away with and I need to do a different strategy than someone who's brand new.
So if you want more information or you just want to absorb my free content, come follow me at Crush Your Social and drop me a DM so that I know it's you and tell me that you found me on my podcast and then I'll be able to support you back. But don't just follow me to follow me. Be part of my community and I will be happy to support you as well as I can. I'll see you next time. Let's Crush It.
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