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Episode 14: Creating Content Calendars and Social Media Strategies

Meet the Guest: Carolyn Cohen

Carolyn Cohen is the Senior Marketing Manager- Social Media at H&R Block on the Marketing & Experience team. She manages a team who is responsible for social channels across three lines of business, and works collaboratively with our .com, blog, PR, and media teams.
 
In Carolyn’s role, she is uniquely positioned to work with both field marketing and corporate marketing teams- building plans for activations and IRL events across the country. She also leads H&R Block’s Employee Advocacy program, in its fourth year with 6,000+ participants. Carolyn works with Go-To-Market teams on yearly plans and overarching content pillars.
 
Prior to H&R Block, Carolyn has more than a decade in content marketing leadership both at Garmin, Barkley and VML.
 
Follow Carolyn on LinkedIn. 
Headshot of Carolyn Cohen

Podcast Episode Notes

Takeaways:

Here are some of the biggest takeaways from this episode:

  • Flexibility in Content Planning: For seasonal brands like H&R Block, a dynamic content calendar allows for quick pivots, ensuring timely and relevant content.

  • Cross-Functional Communication: Regular communication across teams ensures consistent messaging and efficient content creation, avoiding redundant efforts and confusion.

  • Utilize Comprehensive Tools: Tools like Khoros are essential for managing social media publishing, sentiment analysis, and customer service, providing a unified platform for all social media activities.

  • Approval Process Efficiency: Establish a tiered approval system within the social media team to streamline content review and ensure timely publication.

  • Engagement Focus: Prioritize engagement, positive sentiment, and impressions for organic content, while tracking traffic and conversion for paid content.

  • Error Prevention: Implement multiple review stages to catch errors in content before publication. Use tools like Grammarly for checking spelling and grammar.

  • Content Customization: Create unique content tailored to each social media platform to maximize engagement and effectiveness, even if it means higher resource allocation.

  • Weekly Performance Review: During peak seasons, conduct weekly reviews of content performance to quickly adapt and optimize strategies.

  • Customer Service Integration: Collaborate closely with the customer service team to address user comments and issues promptly, ensuring a positive brand experience.

  • Organize Content Ideas: Use features like TikTok Collections to save and organize content ideas and trends for future reference.

  • Efficient Photo Taking: Utilize the iPhone Burst Mode to take multiple photos simultaneously, providing more options for content selection.

Mentioned Tools & Resources:

These are the tools and resources that were mentioned in the podcast episode:

  • Khoros – A comprehensive tool for social media publishing, sentiment analysis, and customer service interactions.
  • Google Sheets – Used by Carolyn for managing blog content calendars.
  • Grammarly A tool for checking spelling and grammar to avoid errors in published content.
  • TikTok Collections Used by Carolyn to save and organize content ideas and trends for work purposes.
  • iPhone Burst Mode – A feature that allows taking multiple photos quickly by holding down the camera button and sliding to the left.
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Episode Transcript

Ashley Segura: All right, let’s kick things off. When you’re not at your desk and you find yourself in the kitchen, what’s your go to dish to cook? 

Carolyn Cohen: I would like to call myself a little bit of a baking aficionado. And I have a cookie recipe that I actually discovered during COVID when there was actually like a flour shortage and shortage that it’s eggless chocolate chip cookie recipe, but it’s.

It’s shockingly amazing. And it’s ready in 15 minutes. Always perfect. So highly recommend. Wow. Okay. I 

Ashley Segura: have so many questions just on this alone. So eggless. Is it still rising and chewy and gooey or what kind of texture was, I would say it’s definitely 

Carolyn Cohen: chewy, but they’re really big cookies. They do. It’s a fork cookie.

Oh, gotcha. Yeah. Yeah. So I’m a full visual. Definitely need some ice cream on top, but it’s great. I pre prepared the dry ingredients and left them in little Ziplocs, like [00:01:00] portioned out for four cookies or something. And so I could just whip up four in no time at all. Cause I already had it prepped. So that was a smart move.

I need to replicate. 

Ashley Segura: Yeah. Very smart move. Cause otherwise you have 24 cookies and you’re going to eat 24 cookies. 

Carolyn Cohen: Over a couple of days, I’m not bringing it to the office, so I need to control the amount of cookies I have in the house. 

Ashley Segura: Yes. Smart, smart. Going from cookies to content calendars. So a big part of your current role is creating content calendars.

Could you walk us through what your process for creating content calendars at H& R Block looks like? 

Carolyn Cohen: Yeah, absolutely. So we are a little bit unique in how we build our content out in terms of timing. So not surprising to most, we’re a seasonal brand. We have. Three, four months of the year that are really heavy consumer focus, media by content, as you might imagine, messaging, everything.

However, that said, our social media and our [00:02:00] content is year round. So we ebb and flow with the business to match whatever our objectives are. One thing we learned though, is that the sort of traditional, whether it’s a week or a month content calendar didn’t really fit our business style because in those, I think it’s 105 days of tax season starting January 1st, we have to pivot so often that it was really hard to plan further than just a few days, honestly.

So we have a habit of establishing like a stock and flow, if you will, where we have. We set content that we develop, sometimes at a quarterly level. Things we know are going to happen, messages we know we want to get out. We’ll develop those, go through the whole legal review, have them ready to rock. Then we are constantly adding in new messages.

Those could be new because of business related pivots. It could also be new because of a content trend or a new style or a new [00:03:00] feature that one of our favorite platforms left to just sprinkle in, in the middle of our work. And we want to take advantage of a new poll, but we don’t have that in our big quarterly plan.

We don’t want to wait and not be able to test that out. So we are merging those two buckets of content to build out. What our week looks like that definitely has some pros and cons that if somebody asks me today What’s going out next Thursday? I don’t have that answer today but I have all of the content that’s going to go into that and we’re also able to just Make those decisions.

And I think unfortunately in the state of the world, there’s so much going on all the time where we’re like, today we’re going to pause posting or today we need to put out a net new message that we weren’t planning on. So we’re really good with it, which I think is surprising to some, just given maybe the style of our business model, but it’s worked honestly better than I expected [00:04:00] it to.

I was very surprised when I came into the role and I was like, where’s the calendar? And they’re like, well, we can manage it in a funky way. 

Ashley Segura: Yeah. It sounds like it. Does that almost make it more stressful because you have to be so on the fly and, okay, we need to create this piece of content now, or is it actually the opposite in a little bit of a breath of fresh air?

Because you can be so flexible. 

Carolyn Cohen: I think it’s a bit more of the latter where I feel comforted knowing that we always are going to have some content that’s ready to go. And that there’s also going to be a pipeline of new content that we’re going to be sprinkling in. And we have weeks where it feels a little bit where we’re just putting out our regular planned content for three or four days straight.

And then other days where it feels like everything is brand new. It does keep us on our toes in terms of approval flows because we’re never really done, right? There’s no, okay, April’s approved. We got [00:05:00] three weeks break and then we’re going to kick off the next month. So we’re always reviewing and approving something.

Ashley Segura: That makes sense. What does that approval process look like? Do you have a large team size as you go to a different department? And how far in advance, especially with. content that’s a couple of days away, how fast can you get it approved? I’d imagine that alone is like its own stress. 

Carolyn Cohen: Totally. Yeah. I think for us, the approval process, it doesn’t typically go too far outside of our team.

It stays really within our social team. And then we’ve developed a tiering system for our work with some very specific thresholds. of Who Sees What, because we have an incredible CMO, great VP, great leadership, and they love to be involved, and they love to see what we’re working on, right? That’s one of the most exciting parts about working in marketing, is seeing the work.

But if we had our CMO reviewing every single piece of social [00:06:00] content, We would never be able to get anything out the door. So those thresholds allow most of the work we do in social to stay in our lowest tier, where often I’m working with kind of a creative strategist who’s a peer to me. Really, her role is looking at it from a full brand POV.

Does this align with our messaging? Is this targeting our audiences? Is there anything in here that feels off or that we would never want to put out? And then we do run through legal as well. We have a great relationship with our legal team. For a subset of our work, we work with a bank partner. So that adds additional several people in the mix, but we’ve gotten to a pretty good flow with that as well.

I, I have found there’s. There’s certainly no defined policy for this, but I have a few people I use as a gut check and people that are a little bit removed from social, a little bit removed from the extremely [00:07:00] online internet culture that I might flag something to say, does this make any sense to you? Or if you had no context, is this inappropriate or something like that?

Because I think the nature of tick tock and a lot of the channels. There’s content that is so niche and so specific, and we love that, and we love to play into it. But I also have to know, at the end of the day, a lot of consumers might see it that maybe that’s not on their For You page. They’re not seeing that trend.

So I’ve got a little committee that I use for those like, hey, just a go or no go on this, right? Just make sure we’re not going too far. Off the rails, but I’m definitely lucky to have leadership that empowers our decision making and empowers our guardrails that we worked on together so that we have more freedom throughout the process.

Ashley Segura: That’s fantastic. I absolutely love that you have a group of people that you can go to that’s separated from this, that you can get outside opinions to. I’m always trying to preach, especially with [00:08:00] content, like it’s so important to sleep on it and get a fresh pair of eyes. But if you have colleagues like outside of your internal departments, but friends, families that you can like bucket into a colleague basket to be like, Hey, If I publish this, do you know what I’m saying?

Especially with taxes, technical, it’s very technical. It’s very complicated. And so we can understand our messaging really well, but it’s so easy to forget that. Oh, is a user going to understand this at all? Is someone outside of the tax realm that’s in this messaging every single day going to get the point that we’re trying to make?

Exactly. Yeah, it can definitely be challenging. Engagement is always really big. What kind of KPIs are you tracking the most? 

Carolyn Cohen: Yeah. Generally, we are focused pretty intensely on engagement. I would say engagement, positive sentiment, and then impressions. And I’m speaking [00:09:00] specifically to our organic content.

When we’re tracking it through paid social, of course, we’re going to be talking about traffic conversion a little bit more hard hitting KPIs. But what we’ve found is that if we can become that resource for folks where they are engaging in their commenting, they’re tagging their friends, they’re sharing it in their stories.

That’s really like the golden ticket to. Bring them in. No one wants to follow a brand. That’s just brain message, promo brand message, back to back. If we can share something educational, entertaining, useful, something they want to tag their dad in because we’re making a joke about dads helping with their taxes.

Then in two months, when we do have something that maybe is a little more product driven, they’re more likely to see it in their feed because they’ve engaged with us previously, but they’re actually also in a better state to consider us as part of their generation set. That makes 

Ashley Segura: lot of sense. So then are you primarily [00:10:00] tracking, Like on a, a week to week basis, or how often are you going back and measuring, like how much type you need?

Cause you do have established audiences. So you’ll get data a lot faster than say a brand that’s brand new. 

Carolyn Cohen: Sure. During tax season, we are looking honestly weekly, if not even tighter than that on some areas that have just a few day kind of window to be relevant outside of that, absolutely looking monthly.

And then we also do quarterly reviews of. every KPI top to bottom just to ensure we’re tracking appropriately. But those weekly pivots really help us during tax season to be able to say, Hey, we tried this. It wasn’t a huge lift. It didn’t really do much. Let’s make sure we try something else next time. So it can be a bit overwhelming when we start talking about volume.

During that short window of the year, large volume, both organic and an aid social, [00:11:00] and in all the other areas, we have contact going out as well, but that’s what we need to get the data to understand what’s working and then optimize. 

Ashley Segura: Yeah, definitely. How connected are you with those other organic channels?

Are you putting in 10 percent of our content calendar needs to be specifically to drive traffic to a new piece of content on the side or to an opt in form? Like, where do you factor in engagement versus is? Specifically like traffic from organic social. 

Carolyn Cohen: Sure. We, this past year have stood up a content center of excellence that I lead.

And that essentially has one representative from each group. So we’ve got email, we’ve got. com, we’ve got our blog, really all of the relevant consumer channels are represented. In that meeting and the goal there is really to create efficiencies because if we’re creating content in an email about The child tax credit we’re probably also making blog [00:12:00] content.

We’re probably also making a video for social We’re probably also making an sms campaign And so ensuring that we’re being as efficient as we can but also letting each other know Hey, i’m working on this. Could you use this or could this be beneficial? How do we like double dip? In a lot of our areas, because while we all sit under the same umbrella as any big company, there are silos, whether you want them to be there or not.

And it, it would be easy to just say, emails over here, they work on their stuff, dot coms over here. But we have found when we do talk, our messaging is more consistent and we’re able to, uh, Squeeze more out of it. 

Ashley Segura: Yeah. I found that like, wouldn’t the last team that I was on weekly meetings were huge. It was just a 30 minute all hands on deck of this is what I’m promoting and someone from every department, this is what we’re focusing on.

So then we could mirror it and it would give from a content perspective, it would give me so many ideas of, Oh, sales is focusing on this right now. We can totally create [00:13:00] some sales enablement content to compliment that. It always shocks me when I hear. So if you’re different stakeholders, not communicating with each other, and everyone’s working on individual projects, of course, everyone’s busy, but it’s so important with content to everyone be on the same page, like you said, with messaging alone.

It all needs to tie it together. 

Carolyn Cohen: Right? Yeah. I specifically remember this was a while ago, like maybe even four years ago, being in a meeting and hearing someone in another department say, Hey, They were wrapping up a messaging campaign because it’s no longer relevant. And I thought to myself, I have something planned to go out with that message next week.

So like we were so not communicating on the right cadence for certain messages. And I was like, okay, that’s a big unlock of this is a way we need to work better together. 

Ashley Segura: Yeah. It is 

Carolyn Cohen: going to improve the [00:14:00] consumer experience because a lot of those people getting the same message from us in different.

mediums, and we don’t want to be confusing our own audiences. 

Ashley Segura: 100 percent you see something on social and if you can click on it, if you’re on the platform tour, you can click on it. Or if you go to the bio to click whatever that action looks like, and then you land on a page or a site that has completely different messaging.

That’s where you’re having the pogo stick effect and they’re going to bounce right off and go right back to their comfortable social media platform and just ignore that. It’s not going to resonate with them at all. And it’s a complete missed opportunity. 

Carolyn Cohen: Absolutely. 

Ashley Segura: I’m curious how you go through like content calendars or.

Really complex. And it sounds like as fast as you have to change yours or be ready to add new content, this would be a step that would be even more difficult to add to the puzzle, but how do you go through a content calendar and edit it, make sure that everything’s error [00:15:00] free, the specific requirements for each platform are met.

What does that process look like for you? 

Carolyn Cohen: Yeah, it’s a great question. We just like any social team, it’s like that fear inducing, no one wants to publish something with a typo or on the wrong channel or any of that. So we definitely have a few safeguards in place that help us prevent that from happening.

But broadly speaking, I would say it’s just having multiple eyes and not leaving it to one person to be the sole owner of A to Z with that piece of content. It is going to be seen by multiple folks, it is going to be reviewed by multiple folks, and then before it goes out, it’s going to get a secondary check again.

So it’s definitely a good question because it’s a common problem, unfortunately. I think we’ve all probably, I know I have way back when, been the victim of even just a simple copy paste, weird spacing, like you’re not doing anything wrong. You’re [00:16:00] not in one of the crisis situations where you’re posting something that you thought was on your personal account.

Ashley Segura: All the brain 

Carolyn Cohen: count, but still that room for error is there and it’s real and And part of what comes with publishing content, but anything we can do to help prevent that or lower that risk, we try and do. 

Ashley Segura: Has your skin gotten a bit thicker through being in this environment and getting the feedback of, Oh, why did you say this?

Or, Oh, this is spelled wrong. Even though you read it a thousand times, you did grammarly, like it just happens from a human perspective. 

Carolyn Cohen: Yes, definitely. Skin has gotten thicker. And I think my just worldview of the. Not to say how much it matters, but Hey, something happened. We caught it within two minutes.

We have fixed 

Ashley Segura: it 

Carolyn Cohen: all as well. People make the comment like, it’s PR, not the ER. There’s not as catchy of a phrase for content marketing. I like that one. I like that. I really like that. You do have to sometimes level with yourself and be [00:17:00] like, it’s okay. I have a horror story from several jobs ago where in an internal document, mapping out some content and this was a brand that their competitor’s name was like a Kleenex situation where people often say Kleenex when they mean tissue.

Yep. I would have made that mistake in this internal document. It would have been very easy for the client to just say, Hey, Edit this . Yeah, totally. But it into a big, if you made this mistake, what other mistakes? Oh no, no. You must not understand our brand. Or you must not have attention to detail. And it was like, okay, let’s take a breath here.

Yep. All will be well. And that’s also part of being early in career is just understanding. Okay. Yeah. That’s also a little bit of like knowing personalities and knowing, uh, who you’re working with and making sure that everything is appropriate for the right recipient. 

Ashley Segura: Yeah, that’s a really great point because mistakes are going [00:18:00] to happen no matter what, no matter you’re in the social seat, the SEO seat, the design seat, like it’s bound to happen, even with AI, there’s a thousand mistakes happening, if not even more now.

And so it’s. That level of how bad was the mistake? What does our PR move need to be, if at all? Or is it as easy as literally just going in and editing the copy real quick? Like you said, like two minutes. Okay. That’s not that big of a deal. Sure, eyes may have seen it, but it’s not like heartbreaking. At least now they know that there is a real human behind this.

And there was like a slight error, but have you ever had an issue to where it was like a big PR mishap to where you had to come out and publish like a, 

Carolyn Cohen: Hey, we didn’t mean that or not as a result of content necessarily, but I’d be remiss to say we have not had customer service or scenario where we’re having like a response from the brand [00:19:00] to put out and talk about stress.

Obviously those scenarios. Are inherently stressful and it is always though a good show of the all hands on deck and figuring out who the right people are in the room and when to bring them in again. Lucky to have a very well oiled external PR team and comp leads that we work with as well as legal and other entities that we’re working with whenever there is the light, we need to put a statement out.

Yes. Get the core, let’s get the core group together. 

Ashley Segura: Is there usually, do you have a quote unquote, like a PR policy on how fast a response time needs to be, even looking at this from an angle of people commenting on content and having negative sentiment, like how do you address that and how fast? Do you try to address it?

Carolyn Cohen: Yeah. So my team works very closely with our customer service organization and they [00:20:00] have agents dedicated to social media and actually use the same tool that our team uses for publishing. So that helps certainly because we’re all in the same tool environment and can pass things between if we need.

Their SLA is pretty good. It’s. It’s usually during tax season, even when we’re getting heavy levels of comments, one day is really what we’re trying to get to. And understandably, our focus is going to be on resolving issues first, and that’s always going to be the priority. Someone’s locked out of account.

What do I do? We’re going to help someone like that first before we’re going to help. There’s a priority system to help Wendell from a customer service standpoint. 

Ashley Segura: Do you 

Carolyn Cohen: have 

Ashley Segura: specific tools for brand sentiment or is that all within like your content calendar tool does that as well? Like, what does your tool stack look like?

Carolyn Cohen: Yeah. So right now that tool stack for [00:21:00] customer service, social media response, publishing, reporting, social listening, sentiment, a lot of that all falls under Khoros is who we were using. And that includes. Pretty much all of the data that we need in terms of sentiment, understanding, competitive set, what people are saying about us, all of the above.

Ashley Segura: And that’s Khoros? Okay, perfect. I love hearing about new tools. I haven’t heard that one before. And that’s not scheduling, that’s just more for the sentiment? Both! Nice! Amazing! Khoros used to be called 

Carolyn Cohen: Spreadfast. 

Ashley Segura: Okay. That rings a bell. Yeah. That definitely sounds more familiar. Yeah. Okay. Awesome. How did you go through the process of deciding on that tool?

Because I’ve tried so many content calendar tools. I’ve created a thousand different content calendars. Like I have a Google sheet now that I use for all of our blog content calendars because tools just weren’t doing it as much as I tried to manipulate them into what we need. [00:22:00] So how’d you land on that one?

Carolyn Cohen: Yeah. I think. When we were evaluating that, this is probably like three, four years ago now that we’ve been with them. We’re really looking at tools that can do from A to Z that we’re not having to parse out different parts of the tool, right? There are tools that just do calendars. There’s tools that just do reporting.

We have found a really big benefit by keeping it all under one roof because like I said, we’re able to cross reference the content and our, the care side of it. So I can So I can pull a report out that shows me top performing content, and in the same report, I wouldn’t do this, but I could if I wanted to, combine what pieces of content garnered the most negative sentiment comments.

Right? Like, I can cross reference the data sets from our customer service and our marketing side of the tool, and then same with our social listening. We can pull in some of the data from our own channels, but it’s also going to be reaching out and [00:23:00] getting information about. Like I said, competitive stats, industry, other keywords that we’ve set up.

Ashley Segura: That’s really interesting to be able to identify what pieces of content are getting the most negative sentiments and to then use that information to dictate, okay, avoid this kind of, you Whether it was the imagery or the copy, like it at least gives you a pattern, like with SEO, there’s, there’s so many patterns that are a lot easier to see with the data.

But with social, I think you really have to dive in and read the comments. What was the level of negativity? Did they just not understand it or are they really mad about 

Carolyn Cohen: it? Right. And I think too, like it’s that added layer to the analysis with a lot of the content. And because I’ll say one of the things, one of the sort of content types that we’ve tried out a bit more this year, specifically on Facebook, organic only, is these like text posts.

So no image, there’s no additional copy. It’s just, and it’s a style Facebook promotes, but it’s [00:24:00] text on a solid color. That’s that. It is unbelievable the response we have seen from posts like this. If your cat got your refund, what would they spend it on? Hundreds of comments. Really? It’s crazy, but what’s been interesting is that we’ve actually now had to give our customer service team a heads up when those are coming, because we know, we have learned that those are going to garner a large volume of comments, but that almost all those comments are not customer service, right?

Those don’t require a 

Ashley Segura: response, 

Carolyn Cohen: maybe or a positive. Reinforcement from the brand, but those aren’t like red alert, this person needs help. And so we had to get in the pattern of saying, Hey, something coming this week. Just so you know, you kind of can disregard these 300 comments that are going to come in all in the same day.

Ashley Segura: Yeah. It’s not going to be a red flag situation, most likely. Yes. Yes. Yeah. So [00:25:00] it’s the text on, gosh, I can’t remember what Facebook calls this, but it’s just the text. You can change the background. Like it could be tie dye. It could be the black or the white. Okay. So it comes across as in terms of content medium for Facebook, it’s just text.

So the algorithm shows that more versus image. 

Carolyn Cohen: We know when. 

Ashley Segura: Um, 

Carolyn Cohen: platforms introduce a new anything, they’re going to push it heavier to your benefit to play into it. And I think there’s other brands who’ve done this too. We’re not the only one who’ve ever tried that, but it’s definitely been surprising to me how much response, but also just like how positive it was that we’re asking a question.

People are literally answering the question. Whereas you could easily see a situation where we’re trying to push a product saying, Hey, go check this out with a link that’s not going to garner much engagement. And if it does, it’s probably going to be like, get out of my feed or totally on my mapping. So it’s been a [00:26:00] nice way to offset any negative that we are going to get and enforce, not enforce, but add in some.

Positive sentiment in the mix. 

Ashley Segura: Yeah. And also gives you an opportunity to really humanize the brand and have that playful fun aspect, which when it comes to content, you’re either doing something informative, entertaining, or you’re selling and no one wants to selling content unless it’s some like great coupon or discount code or something for free, then they’re like, Oh, now I’m interested in going to jump in this bucket.

Carolyn Cohen: Yeah, 

Ashley Segura: exactly. When you’re planning out your content calendar, are you scheduling the same amount of content per channel or do you have specific requirements? Facebook will have X amount of posts a week, whereas TikTok will have half that amount or what does that usually look like? 

Carolyn Cohen: Yeah, they are different.

And we’ve played with that certainly since I’ve been at block just to, you know, understand what’s the right amount and what’s the right frequency on all the different channels. I would say [00:27:00] generally we post the most on TikTok and then followed by probably like threads slash Twitter when it was Twitter and then Instagram and then Facebook.

So really he’s, he’s very different. And we’ve also made. A concerted effort in the last year plus to really try and make unique content for each platform. I think most content marketers know that is the right thing to do, but it’s hard to do that. And so not only as the resources to do that, I’ll be the first to acknowledge it takes more resource to do that.

Whether that is an in house team, an agency, Whatever your source is for your content, you’re going to need more of it. If you’re trying to say, I want one thing for TikTok, one thing for Instagram, one thing for Facebook, one thing for threads. Now, sometimes it’s the same theme or it’s the same concept, but it is literal different assets.

So even still, it’s going to take more time than if you were just to say back in the day, when we used to say, Oh, same image, [00:28:00] Facebook, Instagram, just plop it everywhere. I can call it good. Times have definitely changed in that regard. But I like that because The more we differentiate our channels, the more we’re learning about what works and what is tracking with our audiences.

Something that kind of like hits on TikTok. We may do it another three or four times to solidify, Hey, this is a thing, or like people are latching onto this before we bring it over to Facebook. Smart. So you’re able to test it. And we know which platforms are better for testing and which platforms we need to keep a little bit more like in their sandbox.

Ashley Segura: Yeah, because something like TikTok, you’re going to have probably a better reach and get more data a lot quicker than Facebook’s algorithm. That’s desperately, we’re trying to reach people, but it’s really hard to create so many different types of content and even coming up with different topic ideas per platform.

It, if you at least have the same message, but change the [00:29:00] box that it’s in for every single content. Social media platform, then that’s at least reasonable. But for those smaller person content teams, like it is so difficult to come up with five different ideas for three days out of the week, every week, it’s not always realistic.

So if you have the resources to do it, you’re right. It really is the best for the platforms and the users. Exactly. Yeah. As we wrap up, I definitely want to dive into what your secret sauce is. So what is your current strategy, tool, resource, maybe something that you just recently learned that you’d love to share?

Carolyn Cohen: Yeah. I’ll give maybe a little bit two different answers. So my secret sauce of late, I feel like in the last. They have been just saving content like crazy, and I’m the person who uses the TikTok, Saved, and then the folders, I think they call [00:30:00] collections. Yeah. So I have one for work. I’ve got one for books.

I want to read all kinds of things, but I use it. I really go back to those and go back and track. I was. Joking with someone the other day that TikTok needs a, I’m on TikTok for work right now, toggle, as opposed to I’m on TikTok to just read content or watch content, because it is hard to be saying to yourself, I’m looking for what is the latest trend, or I’m looking for what, how other brands have handled this, and then 20 minutes later, you’re like, oh my God, where have I been?

That’s my invention that I’ve not made yet. Thing I recently learned. Which I feel like I need to show you, and knowing it’s a podcast may be hard to explain. I learned it from a TikTok. But, for people who are taking a lot of content on their phone, weather for work, for personal. Okay? When you’re taking a picture, if you hold down the white button, as you’re taking a picture, and slide it to the left, you’ll [00:31:00] see a number and a line, and that number’s gonna go up the further you drag it.

So if you drag it just a little, it’ll say 3. If you drag it all the way, it’ll say 40. It will take that many pictures. In that moment and yes, and I was like, what? And so if you’re somebody who is taking a lot of photos and you want to have a lot of choices to look yeah Again, it’s not or for work. My mind was blown and I was like, I need to try this immediately and it worked So something I learned recently Was a trick for taking photos on your iphone that could be used for work or personal basically When you’re taking a photo, you’re holding down the white button and you You pull it out to the left, you’ll see a little line and it’ll show you a number.

And the further out you pull it, the higher the number gets. So if it says three, we can pull it more to say 20. And when you let go, it will take that many pictures all at the same time. So kind of like burst mode, but yeah, a little bit more specific and great for if you want to have lots of options to choose from.

So I thought that was a very nifty [00:32:00] trick and I did not know that before. So that was my, that’s my trick of the moment that I’ve recently learned. I 

Ashley Segura: love it. I love that. You can like choose how many photos too, because especially if you, you want to do like a little bit of a pano and move with it too, you can do like a few different ones, or if you have someone taking a photo of you, you get options and you can move around.

Like love that. That’s a really great tip. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for everything that you shared today. Really appreciate you being on the show. 

Carolyn Cohen: Yeah, absolutely. And thank you so much for having me.