 So, welcome everybody. I'm so glad you're here. And I am excited to share a little bit about some social media stuff today. So I'm going to start with a really, really quick introduction. I spent about 15 years in the training and marketing world for a major corporation. And a lot of my focus was on learning, but I partnered with our marketing and communications team and we basically created a new kind of culture within the company together. We won some really awesome awards for innovation, for gamification, for strategy and instructional design. And I really started to kind of partner with them as we started diving into social media. So I started, you know, with just some light interest at that point and started kind of helping to create what our global strategy would be and eventually left that for some other folks to take over. I left the company in late 2017 and started working on Sukino, our float center with my husband. And we didn't open until, let's see here, November of 2018. And so in the meantime, I launched my consulting business and started helping other small businesses with training and marketing needs. And I loved working with a lot of other small businesses and folks who provided business to business service. But what I really loved the most was narrowing my focus down to wellness centers and holistic providers, float centers and other folks who are in the same space that I'm in. That's where I love to spend my time. And so I really started kind of focusing down there. During that time that we are into construction, though, I learned so much from everybody else in this community through the float collective through one-on-one conversations with everyone. And I really just wanted to be able to start to give back to the industry. So I signed up and joined the art of the float team, started taking some show notes for them. Eventually they gave me a mic and Dylan lost his mind so that I could jump on there and talk about some stuff here and there. And then last year, I volunteered for the board of directors for the float conference. And I absolutely love getting to work with everyone here. It's just my favorite thing to do. And it's really funny for me because I feel like I see a lot of you on a regular basis. So it's just cool to bring everybody else in here as well too. Last year I talked about mindful employee onboarding. And so this year I'm going to talk a little bit more about the mindful approach to social media. In order to do that, we're going to cover a couple of really, really basic terms first. And I mean really, really basic and really, really quickly. You may know a lot of these, but I don't want to make any assumptions. And there are lots of definitions that fall within some of these. Organic is really my focus. These are your non-paid activities, everyday posts. This is the stuff that you're doing every single day. Within organic, there's also Evergreen content. And Evergreen is so, so crucial. I love, love, love Evergreen content. Basically, it's content that can be used anytime. It's not time sensitive. It's not tied to a promotion or a sale or anything like that. So to use Evergreen content, what you want to do is watch your posts and watch things that actually take off, that people seem to respond to really, really well. And then reuse that post at some point. I'm not saying do it every day or every week or even every month. You might find something that works really well to post monthly. But we spend a lot of time creating something. And then if it gets traction, use it again. Especially if you're creating custom videos or if you've paid someone to create videos for you or if you've created them yourself, that's a lot of investment. And the problem is a lot of the social media content that we create has a very short lifespan. Just to throw some numbers at you, a Facebook post, the average lifespan is six hours, six hours, that's it. But 75% of the impressions are going to happen within the first, say, two and a half hours. So if you toil over creating something, and then you throw it out to the world, it's really only going to get used for six hours. The average lifespan, of course, for Instagram stories and Facebook stories is 24 hours. The Instagram feed itself is about 48 hours. And Pinterest is actually quite interesting. Not a lot of folks in the float world use Pinterest. But a pin's value is typically around three months. Sometimes they'll stick around a lot longer, but it'll get a lot of views. And you can get some shares and things for at least three months. So that's a really interesting one. I'm starting to tap into Pinterest a little bit more myself and do some testing and experimentation in there. But Twitter is really short. If you tweet, you know that. Twitter's lifespan is usually about 15 to 20 minutes. It gets thrown into the vast ocean of everybody else's tweets. And typically, you're not going to get any additional reach past that first 15 to 20 minutes. Reach, of course, is how many people actually see your content. Another word that's on here, algorithm. It's kind of the big scary mystery word of the social media world. Basically, the algorithm is artificial intelligence that determines whether or not your post is going to be shown to more people or not. How far can it go? And I'll talk a little bit more about the algorithm throughout our chat today. Efficiency is one of my favorite scores. And it's hard to find some efficiency scores. I have it in my social media platform. But efficiency is basically of the people who actually saw your content, how many of them took action in some way. Whether they clicked it, they reacted to it, they shared it, they commented on it. Efficiency. And efficiency is, it's a hard number to raise. So of those people who saw your stuff, typically 90% are not going to do anything with it. So we just have to accept that 90% are just going to see it move on with their lives. But 10% will likely engage. If you have a float center, that number is probably a little smaller. So I strive for 10% for my float center. It has taken years to get to that point where people are really engaging with our content. For most float centers and for my social media clients, I typically see folks in that 5% to 8% range of efficiency. So just know going into this, social media is hard, but necessary. And I'm going to give you some tips and things that are going to help you with a lot of that. Two other quick terms that are on here, hashtags. Very important on Instagram. Most of you know what this is. But just in case, hashtag is basically a keyword. You put the pound sign for us old schoolers in there, the hashtag. And it becomes a clickable link. That link, if you click it, takes you to other content that has the same hashtag. So it's just a quick way to search for things. I highly recommend coming up with a hashtag for your own center and encouraging your clients to use that as well. Facebook historically has not done well with hashtags. A lot of times you would see posts would come through from Instagram directly into Facebook and have hashtags and it looked kind of ridiculous. Well, over the last couple of months, you may have noticed that Facebook is actually starting to boost hashtag usage a lot more. And so you're going to see that just as a trend. Hashtags will become more important on Facebook this year. So maybe play around, start seeing what you can do. And there's a whole hashtag strategy and a big talk I could give about hashtags, but we're going to keep it pretty high level today. One other fun term is shadow banning. You won't know if you've been shadow banned. You might have some theories when you notice that maybe you're not getting a lot of reach on Instagram. But it's basically if you post certain types of content, there are some hashtags that are banned. You don't get a warning message at all. It says that it's banned. But I highly recommend doing a little research, just Google, you know, banned hashtags on Instagram. And some of them are really weird, like normal words, things that you would say every day. But you can look for banned hashtags to make sure that you don't get shadow banned. But another one that I see happening to float centers is be careful with the photos that you use. If you use something that seems suggestive or has nudity, cleavage, things like that, which are, it's floating. We're showing people in swimsuits or alluding to them not being in swimsuits so they can hashtag float naked. But sometimes that can cause a shadow ban. So whole lot in a really, really, really short period of time there. I want to get right into kind of creating a following. And a lot of you all are open already. But you can pick up some of this. But there are basically different times when you want to build your following and to maintain it. As soon as it's public knowledge that you're opening a center, if any of you out there have not opened your center yet and you don't have a social media page, do it now. I have seen some folks who've waited until the week before they open to start their social media pages. And I can tell you that at that point it's really late in the game and it's going to take you a while. So start sharing news as soon as you're under construction. One of my favorite things to do there is to ask for input. You're asking your followers to help you make decisions. Honestly, even if you've already made those decisions, people love to be heard. They love to have opinions. And so this is true whether you're under construction or not. But ask for opinions. Ask people, do you like this one or this one? Do you like this paint color or this paint color? Do you like this chair or this chair? And people love that. But it really gives them that sense of ownership and starts creating that loyalty before you even open. At launch, as soon as you open, don't just do one post that says, yay, we're open. You can book your appointment now. You have to keep reiterating that. A very, very small percentage of your followers are going to see your posts at all. So in that case, repetition is a really, really good thing. Next, whenever business is good, a lot of times folks get kind of complacent on social media. What happens if you don't post consistently, though, is that the algorithms are going to bury your page. It takes a really long time to dig back out. I am a perfect example of that. I spend most of my time creating content and posting for my clients. So for my mindful solutions, Instagram and Facebook pages, I would post maybe once every six months or so. It just wasn't a priority to me. And so recently I've started sharing a lot more and it is taking time to get my post to have some actual reach. So don't do what I did. I did it on purpose because I didn't need people to find my pages. But I've shifted my strategy a bit and I'm kind of sharing a lot more tips and a lot more information on my pages. Another one, though, when business is bad, a lot of times people won't post for a while and then all of a sudden they start posting. And that can sometimes come across as desperate, especially if your posts are saying, book now, book now, book now, book now. There are other ways to do that. So create your following, give them some love along the way. This is a really high-level marketing idea and I'm going to tap just a little bit into it, but you are basically creating a conversion funnel, your sales funnel. And the idea is that you have a cold audience who really doesn't know much at all about floating or about your center and then you're trying to warm them up to become an actual customer. So some examples. If someone goes to your website for the first time, they're probably a cold audience. They're a little bit warmer because they know that you exist. But once they reach your website, you want to try to get some kind of a commitment from them. And a commitment doesn't have to be a sale. So often we think that if we're not getting customers in, then what's the point? The sales relationship takes time. Building that relationship with someone and getting them to commit to come in to see you can take time. So have something, even if it's not just book now on your website, have some kind of a call to action. Follow us on social media. And that's a huge piece that we often miss on our websites. So asking people to follow you. Once they start following you, they're going to start learning about it. They're going to hear a little bit more, start to trust you a little bit more, and then eventually, you know, those leads become your customers. One of the things that I see a lot is that people are struggling to grow their audience. Organic growth is a slow process. You're doing really well to grow about five to 10% per month if you're just relying on an organic strategy. So if you really need to grow your volume and cast your net wider for your following, you can do a couple of things. You can ask your current customers and current followers to refer you to invite their friends to like your pages. But paid ads are probably your most effective method. And I'm not going to go into paid ads or any of that sort of stuff today. But getting some organic followers is a really great idea. Running the occasional awareness ad for getting new followers. It's not an immediate payoff, but it is in the long term strategy. Once they've committed to following you, your job is to try to keep them. You can use Facebook pixels to advertise for anyone who has been visiting your website. Anyone who follows you on social media, all of that. But the best way is to engage them. This really, really matters. So building engagement, again, don't sell all the time. A couple of things about engagement. Links often do really well. If you're sharing blog posts, if you're sharing articles, major news articles and things like that, those are great. People will often engage with that. They may read it. They may not actually say anything to you or respond. But Facebook doesn't like it when you try to take people off of their platform. So if you use a link to any other news outlet, any blogs, even your own website, Facebook is going to reduce your reach just because they want to keep everybody on your platform. So that's why you see a lot of folks who basically write a blog post and put that in as a whole entire post. It's because Facebook doesn't like it whenever you try to take people away. A couple of fun ideas, things that I have done in the past to build some engagement. And you have to be really careful with these because they can technically break the terms of service for Facebook, engagement, bait and things like that. So you have to be really mindful about the way that you're doing it. Tag a friend Tuesday. When we were under construction, we offered tag a friend Tuesday where every Tuesday we put up a post and asked people to tag their friends who they think would enjoy floating once we open. And then every month we pulled a winner out of that month's tagged friends. And so by the time we opened, we had several people who had already started learning about us. We had a really, really good following. We also do Top Fan Friday. I do this for my page and I also do it for some of my social media clients. But Facebook awards Top Fan badges based on the people that are actually engaging with your content. And again, engagement for Facebook, they might be reading your stuff, everything you post, but they don't engage and you wouldn't even recognize their names. But Facebook might award the Top Fan badge. So you have to make sure that that's enabled on your page. And what we do then is I pull the list of Top Fans and we give a shout out and say thank you to everybody. I also give them a free Salt Cave session once they've hit a month of being a Top Fan. So that rewards them for sticking around. We typically have about 70-ish Top Fans that I'm highlighting every single week and saying thank you on my Tsukino page. We've also done some giveaways, but another big way to build engagement is to go live on your page. Show people your center, talk to them. It can be a super short message. It can be a really long tour, a lengthy conversation, whatever you want, but lives do really, really well. So Jeremy, the Top Fan badge on Facebook, you go into your page settings. There's a typically a community option and you should be able to adjust it there and I can help you with that later if you like. So consistency is key. The algorithms love it. If you post every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, post every Monday, Wednesday, Friday. If you suddenly post five times a day, it's going to think that you're going to post five times a day moving forward. And if you don't, it's going to start to drop your reach. What is also great besides the technical function of the algorithm about creating this consistent schedule is it creates loyalty. People follow you for a reason. They like your content typically and want to see that. And if you suddenly go dark, why are they following you? I know I have occasionally gone through and found like all of a sudden a post will pop up from a page that I haven't heard from in forever. I'm like, wait, why do I even follow them? I don't know where they came from and I unfollow them. A lot of people do that. So if you suddenly start to post and then you get a lot of unfollows in your insights, that's probably why. It also gives them something to look forward to. A lot of people will call us out if we haven't posted something like this week. Friday was the float conference. So I was a little late with my Top Fan Friday and we were getting messages saying, hey, what about Top Fan Friday today? Because people really enjoy that. As far as a schedule for consistency, one size does not fit all at all. There's no magic rule for how frequently to post. You will find tons of articles and things that are out there that have recommended numbers. There are too many variables to say what's going to work for you in your business. It varies by your business type, how many followers you have, what your goals are, what your followers' behaviors are. You'll see major brands may post multiple times per day on every social media platform. I don't recommend that for float centers. You will just overkill. Your audience will get burned out on you really, really fast. I do recommend experimenting. See what happens. Analyze it. Create your schedule. See what happens. Adjust where you see fit. My personal experience for what I've seen works best for most float centers is four to five posts per week on Facebook, three to four posts per week on Instagram. That might be a good starting point for you, but feel free to play around. But don't play around too much. You want to give the system a little time to catch up to you and realize you're going to be consistent in this way. One of the hardest things is to be consistent, even if you create your own little schedule. There will be oftentimes days that go by and you're like, oh, I don't even know which post. Having a scheduling app helps tremendously with this. But before you start researching scheduling tools, figure out what is most important to you. Price. If you have no budget, know that the free options are out there. They may have fewer features. If automation is super important for you, you might pay a little bit more for that. If you really, really care about reporting and analytics, then look for a tool that has those. If you aren't tech savvy, look for a really clean, simple user interface. User interface that's going to be easy for you to get in there. I've personally worked with some amazingly powerful scheduling tools, but the interface feels clunky. I have to kind of dig around to get to stuff and I'm pretty tech savvy. And what I find is I mentally just check out. I don't want to use that tool, so I'm not going to use it. And therefore, I'm not posting consistently. Another couple, two things to look for if you are scheduling for your center and you have other people who are helping you in that process, make sure that you have some collaborative tools that you can use. So some of them actually allow you to pass files and post back and forth and comment on things and require an actual approval process. And another thing to look for is design help. So whether or not it's important to you to have ready-made files, something that you can just quickly click, update a template or not. My scheduling platform that I have includes that design piece where not only do I do the work for you, but I also give you other templates that you can use to create your own posts. There are countless, countless options. This is a sliver of the ones that I've tried and I actually have a spreadsheet that I've been building every time I hear about a new one or try a new one. So if you download the file links, there's actually a link to my spreadsheet in there. So you can look at those. A couple that I do recommend for float centers. They're here. You can grab a screenshot of this or, like I said, just download the files. I don't want to get too in the weeds on what each specific one does. Buffer and HootSuite are really, really common. They're basic. They're easy enough to use. A lot of float centers to use those. I personally don't because it doesn't give me enough of what I want. And one of the most important pieces is that Instagram is like Fort Knox. It is really, really hard to find a scheduling tool that is going to automatically push your content to Instagram. A lot of them will require on some sort of an integration where you're having to use yet another third-party software, like Zapier, to set up something to trigger it to go. Or it might have a reminder that comes to your phone and tells you to go in and actually post then. But these are a couple that I do recommend. I will throw in my little plug. Mindfully Social is my platform where I actually post content for float center owners in there as well. You can customize it yourself or I can do that for you. It has all the editing tools and everything there. So much stuff. Knowing your audience is huge. You've got to figure out who they are, why they float, what networks they use. And I've created a couple of little categories here to really look at. If you haven't done this already, I recommend creating what we call an ideal client avatar, an ICA. Ask yourself who they are, what do they do? Do they have a family? How old are they? Make up a whole persona. Give them a name. This isn't just the only person that you're marketing to, but it really helps you to target your marketing efforts, target your communication style. So for Tsukino, our ICA is Marnie. If you've seen any of our videos that we create, we use Marnie a lot. And she's the one that I'm always thinking about Marnie when I'm posting. She's learned that it's her job to care for everybody else. And she puts herself last. She never prioritizes self care. And she is constantly stressed out, exhausted and overwhelmed. And so I use Marnie as my inspiration. She's our ideal client. Finding your voice. So once you know who you're talking to, how do you want to talk to them? And this comes to life in everything from your branding at your center, your font choices, your colors, your overall communication style, everything there. And these are three kind of common approaches that I see for float centers. And these are not the only three just to be clear on that. But if you, if your center feels very clinical, then your language should also be fairly formal, very professional, crisp, clean, minimalist, just really sharp and kind of dialed in to just the basics. If your center feels a little more comfortable and approachable using language that is very friendly, a little more casual, and you're really trying to elicit that feeling of like just being with your friends or people that you know really well. A lot of centers have kind of a chill laid back vibe. The that should also come through in your language, you know, super duper relaxed, you might use more casual language, like super casual language, slang, a lot more means, things like that. And again, you know, one of the things that I sometimes see is a mismatch where folks are sharing really lighthearted, fun things and means and they're on their social media, and you go in and it's a very clean polished facility. People have a hard time reconciling the differences whenever your social media doesn't match your actual persona. Thank you, Flux. Really quickly, because we're running out of time, but we will be moving into a think tank here in a little bit, some ideas on what to share, blogs, photos of your space. This is huge, and it's something that I bag my social media clients to send me. People love to see your facility. They love to see your tanks, but also health and wellness tips. Cross promote with other businesses. Talk about events that are happening in your town. Some quotes are fine, but it basically comes down to two categories, value content and sales content. When people choose to follow you on social media, they are looking for value. Don't sell to them all the time. In fact, a good rule of thumb is 80, 20. We're about 20% of the content that you share is about sales, your packages, your promotions, your retail products, asking them to book appointments, those sorts of things. 80% of your content should be entertaining, providing value, education about floating float tips and things like that, or even things that are like local news and events. A really, really, really quick note on ethics. It is hard to have such a concentrated industry where we're all really sharing kind of the same things and maybe saying it in different ways, but I encourage you not to steal other people's work. It's not fair to the person who created it, it's not fair to the person who is possibly paying for it, but what you can do is be inspired by it. What I like to do is keep a note on my phone every time I see a post that I love. I write about it in my own words and say something like infographic with five top benefits of floating with an icon. That way I can look at that later when I'm trying to come up with an idea of what to post without stealing their work or being so inspired by it that it's really just ripping it off. Really quickly platforms, get to know your audience. You don't have to do social on every single platform that's out there. There are a ton. Most float people go with Facebook and Instagram. You might find better success on YouTube and Pinterest. Really do a little research and figure that part out and know that you shouldn't post the same content at the same time to different platforms. Why would somebody want to follow you on multiple platforms if you're going to be posting the exact same thing? You can mix it up and maybe post something on Facebook on Monday and then share the same thing on Instagram on Thursday. That's totally fine because you're probably not going to get to the exact same people according to the algorithm. Couple of really quick takeaways as we wrap up. First, create your schedule. Just figure out what you want to post and start simple if you need to. You don't necessarily have to call it this, but if you're struggling to come up with a category or a schedule, float Friday, massage Monday, wellness Wednesday, tip Tuesday, start with those sorts of little catchy things that can help you to just get that first schedule created. I really recommend investing in some sort of a scheduling tool. Facebook Creator Studio is free. It's through Facebook, but honestly it's really unreliable. I've tried it several times and I just don't think they've worked up the bugs yet. Be really, really social. If somebody walked into your center and said, hey, I had a great float, would you look at them and turn around and walk away? We wouldn't do that in real life, so we shouldn't do that in social media either. We often get into this robot zone and honestly, most of us as small centers really do need to engage and be sociable. If you have thousands or tens of thousands of followers, that expectation kind of goes down just a bit. Really quickly, last night in one of our conversations, someone asked about having a global community for float enthusiasts. So I created it. It's called Why We Float. I'm including a link again in the show notes as well, or show notes. I think the art of the float. In the presentation notes, if you download those, you can also just search for Why We Float. That's somewhere that we can all gather but also invite all of our guests, our members, and just talk about the experience of floating, increasing that awareness for all of us. I'm going to skip that one. I have been sharing a lot of tips and things on my Facebook and Instagram pages. So if you look up Mindful Solutions, a lot of the stuff that I have talked about today, I share on social media and I'm trying to put in little bite-sized tips and things. I am launching Mindfully Social. It's my own platform. I've been helping float centers for a couple of years, but Mindfully Social takes it to another level where you can also use my scheduling tool. Create your own posts if you want to or just use the content that I provide for you. Thank you so much for joining me.