Have you used Instagram Reels? With the everchanging Instagram algorithm and the competition from TikTok, Reels continue to increase in popularity. These short trendy videos are the perfect opportunity to reach new audiences and boost engagement. Although they can help you reach your target audience, these posts do take a little more time and effort than simply posting a photo. In this tutorial, learn how to create and customize an Instagram Reel.
Plan Your Concept
Before creating your Reel, make a plan. What is this Reel going to look like? Here are a few questions to get you started:
Create the Reel
Now that you have an idea of what you’re going to create, begin piecing together the content you want in the Reel. You can use both videos or photos that were previously recorded or edited, or you can capture new content inside the Instagram app.
To begin the Reel, click the “+” button at the top right of your Instagram home page. A menu will open where you can select the “Reel” option. Now you’re ready to add your content.
To record a video, press and hold down the recording circle in the middle of the screen. To add videos or photos from your camera roll, select the icon on the bottom left with a blue “+” sign.
After adding the photos and videos you want to be featured in your Reel, you can edit each clip’s length and position in your Reel before moving forward. If you need to add more clips, press “done” and you’ll be taken back to where you first started. If you’re finished editing clips, click “preview”.
Add Effects
After you have your video content ready, now comes the fun part! Instagram allows you to add a variety of effects to your Reel. Let’s dive into the different ways you can make your Reel unique!
Looking at the menu from left to right, you have the options to save the video, edit the sound, add effects, add stickers, draw, and add text to your Reel. Add music to your Reels if it fits with the nature of your content, as it can boost your engagement. Adding closed captions also makes your Reels more accessible.
Share the Reel
After putting the finishing touches with effects on your Reel, now you can share it! At this point, you can change the cover photo of the Reel, add an eye-catching caption, and edit the preview of the Reel that will be displayed on your profile grid. Make sure to tag accounts and add your location if applicable as well!
Now that you have the basics, it's time to create! Reels are a great addition to any business Instagram marketing strategy and can increase your online reach, connection with your audience, and the overall trust of your brand.
The founder of Lady ChangeMakers, Jessica Bargenquast, joins us on this week’s episode of the Hello Frances Podcast to discuss her business and the inspiration behind it. Lady ChangeMakers is an exclusive eCommerce platform for women-owned businesses to gain visibility and sales. Jessica explains how she came up with this business venture, the different types of businesses you can find on the platform, how it has evolved since its inception, and how it’s different from similar platforms like Amazon or Etsy. If you want to learn more about Lady ChangeMakers, give them a follow on Instagram or check out their website to sign up to be a vendor!
Meta Business Suite is a free tool where you can manage all your business’ Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram activity in one place. You can respond to messages, create and schedule posts, stories, and ads, and analyze insights. Here are a few of the latest features that are rolling out for Meta Business Suite.
Moments
As the name suggests, these are upcoming moments in time that could be important to your social media strategy. These moments are a variety of holidays, including national and international observances. Moments can be seen in the planner mode, both on the right-hand side and at the top of the weekly or monthly view for their designated days. These are a great asset to social media marketers because sharing something a post about holidays such as National Pizza Day can be both light-hearted and also connect to your business’s mission and vision (especially if you sell delicious pizza)!
Goals
You can also set goals for your business’ Facebook on Instagram and track your progress of achieving these goals. Right now, you have the option to select whether your goal will be to increase reach or grow followers for either Facebook, Instagram, or both. After selecting your goal type, you can decide the amount of reach/new followers you would want to achieve as well as the timeline for the goal. Creating goals for your organization’s social media marketing is a great way to gauge your success as you are working towards the goal. Tracking this allows you to make changes for your content along the way instead of looking at insights at the end of your set timeline.
Insights
With the new insights feature you can toggle between an overview, results, content, and audience dashboard that gives you key data for each category on Facebook and Instagram. You can also easily adjust the timetable for your insights at the top right corner, whether you want a custom timetable or just want last month’s insights. On the content dashboard, you can choose what content types to filter the data from, and choose to look at just Facebook and Instagram stories. Users can see likes/reactions and sticker taps data for Facebook stories. Unfortunately, you cannot see any data for Instagram stories at this time, but we can’t wait to see those insights when they become available!
What features are you most excited to implement as part of your social media strategy for your business? Let us know in the comments!
Have you planned your social media strategy for 2022 yet? It’s not too late! In this week’s episode of the Hello Frances Podcast, we’re discussing three current social media trends you should consider when creating your content. Do you prioritize bite-sized content? Do you partner with influencers to promote your products or services? Do you take advantage of selling directly from your social media platforms? Listen to the full episode to learn more about capitalizing on current social media trends.
The Adobe Creative Types test is an exploration of the many faces of the creative personality. Based on psychology research, the test assesses your basic habits and tendencies to help you better understand who you are as a creative person. As a creative, you have a little bit of all eight types inside you. Let’s dive into the basics of the types our team matched with!
The Visionary
The Visionary’s creative strength is being full of big ideas, and the ability to see potential and possibility everywhere. Emotional, passion-driven, and full of ideas, they combine a vivid imagination with a desire for practical solutions. Their untapped potential is using their visions to fuel consistent daily action, and their ideal collaborator is the Thinker.
Our Visionaries:
Shantelle P. Dedicke, CMP, President/Chief Creative Officer
Hillaree Durso, Senior Director of Content & Marketing
Jodie Warner, Research Coordinator
Nicole Malley, Events & Content Coordinator
The Dreamer
The Dreamer’s creative strength is their connection to emotions and imagination as well as their empathy and sensitivity. They’re deeply emotional and intuitive, with a vivid imagination–the quintessential idealistic and romantic. Their untapped potential is using their dreams to fuel real-world action, and their ideal collaborator is the Innovator.
Our Dreamers:
Janae Erickson, Art Director
Kelsey Doar, Marketing Manager
Gregory Dedicke, Digital Marketing Specialist
Morgan Milikan, Graphic Designer
The Thinker
The Thinker’s creative strength is intellectual curiosity and the ability to find or create meaning. Ever the perpetual student, they experience the world as an endless opportunity for learning, discovery, and truth-seeking. Their untapped potential is bridging theory and practice and applying ideas in real life, and their ideal collaborator is the Adventurer.
Our Thinkers:
Kayla Koger, Design & Social Media Coordinator
The Innovator
The Innovator’s creative strength is their ability to generate new ideas and innovative solutions. They feel most like themselves when they’re using their intellectual and creative powers to solve problems and dream up new and improved ways of doing things. Their untapped potential is mastering the art of executing ideas, and their ideal collaborator is the Maker.
Our Innovators:
Jacie Chandler, Intern
What’s your creative type? Take the Creative Type Test and share your results with us!
Photo and Content Source: mycreativetype.com
This week Shantelle shares our team’s recent discovery of the Adobe Creative Types test. We have taken many personality evaluations before, but this Adobe test shares insight into your creative personality. Through a series of 15 questions, the assessment not only determines your creative style but also shares your strengths, untapped potential, and ideal collaborators. Take the test at mycreativetype.com, then head to our social media outlets to tell us your creative type.
Photo credit: Abobe Create
By Hillarie Kay
The key for you to overcome burnout is hidden within your own unique internal operating system. The way to connect with that internal operating system is through a personality framework called the Enneagram. How can a personality framework help you avoid burnout? Well buckle up, and get ready for a fun ride!
Unlike other personality tools (I’m looking at you Myer’s Briggs and Strengthsfinder) the Enneagram goes beyond your strengths and weaknesses and offers a comprehensive look at your internal operating system, emotional patterns, and more.
Burnout is a state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion caused by excessive and prolonged stress. It occurs when you feel overwhelmed, emotionally drained, and unable to meet constant demands.
That’s where the Enneagram can come in and be the self-development tool you need to reduce burnout. How can you stop yourself from burnout before it happens, or if you’re already in a burnout stage, how do you reverse it and get back on a path to health? The Enneagram has so many helpful components to get to a place of awareness and ultimately correct that path! Here are 3 next best steps on how to use the Enneagram to fight against burnout.
1. Connect with yourself by learning about all five of your connection points within the framework.
This is where you will start to become aware of all the different facets of your personality, some of which fast-track you to burnout if not careful. As you’re learning about your connection points, write down the characteristics of each type. Awareness of our connection points allows us to create alarm bells in our brain which alert us we need to take action, either to keep going, or to halt to avoid burnout. So what are the connection points?
Your Main Type. This is the core type from which all the other connections come. This brings awareness to your core motivating factor, fear and emotional pattern.
Connections two and three, your wings. Your wings help give you a more robust understanding of your personality type.
Connection four, your health type. When you are in your health line, that means in addition to the everyday behaviors and patterns of your core type, you pick up the positive attributes of that type as well.
Connection five, your stress type. When you are in your stress line, that means in addition to the everyday behaviors and patterns of your core type, you pick up the more negative attributes of that type as well. These are the characteristics you need to be most aware of when trying to fight burnout.
Understanding how you best make decisions can help you achieve better flow in the decision making process. It’s this understanding that most people don’t realize can be brought to you through the Enneagram. The Enneagram is broken down into what’s called 3 intelligence centers, and these centers are where we get the information to help us best make decisions and take action.
There are three: Head (logic), Heart (feeling) and Body (Intuition).
The Head Center. This is for types 5, 6 and 7. These types do best when they take action or make decisions by observing the world. They do best when they rely on logic and reasoning to help them work toward a solution. Positive ways to use the head center are to gather information, generate ideas, engage in mental processing, Rational analysis and planning.
The Heart Center. This is for types 2, 3 and 4. These types do best when they take action or make decisions with their feelings or emotions. They do best when they rely on their emotions, memories, images and dreams to help them work toward a solution. Positive ways to use the heart center is to experience feelings, relate to others emotionally and be sensitive to the feelings and reactions of others.
The Body Center (this is also referred to as the gut). This is for types, 8, 9 and 1. These types do best when they rely heavily on instinct and intuition. They do best when they allow themselves space to become present with a situation and reduce any potential anger to help them work toward a solution. They use the body center in response to the emotion of anger. The body center is best used when the person can move around to think, experience physical sensations and when in control of their environment.
Having an awareness of the things we’ve talked about is one thing, but applying the knowledge is something completely different. The application of the knowledge is where the real self-development takes place and how you can overcome burnout. YOU are the key to your success. You have everything you need, right inside you. It’s just about learning how to access it.
When you realize you’re in burnout, here are the questions you can ask yourself to help you overcome burnout and apply what you know!
Question 1: What can your health line’s strengths bring to the table?
Question 2: How can your intelligence center and the intelligence center of your health type help you?
Question 3: What can the strengths of your wings bring to the table to help compliment your core type and offset the challenging traits?
To help you get started in learning how to answer these questions and apply the knowledge, here is an example using type 6.
Type 6:
Just like anything else, using the Enneagram to help fight burnout takes practice, and practice makes progress!
To learn more about fighting burnout you can download Chapter 4: Fighting Burnout for free from my book Unlock Your Potential at Work: A Beginner’s Guide to Using the Enneagram at Work by clicking HERE.
In this week’s episode of the Hello Frances Podcast, we interview self-proclaimed Enneagram Burnout Coach Hillarie Kay. Hillarie shares how to unlock your potential by utilizing the Enneagram as a tool to learn more about yourself and how you handle stress. She shares how each Enneagram type acts when burned out and she discusses the burnout cycle which starts with stress, then overwhelm, then leads to burnout. Listen to the full episode, and let us know your thoughts. To learn more, follow Hillarie on Instagram.
Creativity is all about solving problems and approaching situations in new ways. Are you struggling to keep your creative thoughts flowing? We’ve done the research and found three different ways that you can boost your creativity!
Learn Through Collaboration
Collaborating with and learning from others can boost your creativity! Great innovators excel when they discuss new ideas with others. Many major innovative ideas were created by teams of people who stayed together to both conceive and execute the idea, plan, and brainstorm for those projects. People who value collaboration will find it easy to work with and learn from others.
Do Something You Love
When you truly love what you do, you are naturally going to be more inspired and enthusiastic about creative problem-solving. Tasks that you have set aside for yourself are going to be very easy to approach with a positive attitude. If your job is not something that fuels your creativity try finding a hobby that can be your creative outlet. Creative hobbies can range from playing an instrument, painting, reading, or even playing a sport.
Understand the Importance of Non-Time
Non-time, according to Steven Kotler, is the vast stretch of emptiness in the early morning hours before those around him wake up. Because no one else is interrupting your alone time in these hours, this non-time belongs only to you. During this time, there’s luxury for patience, silence, and concentration. Whether your non-time is in the early morning or late evenings, building this space into your schedule will help you daydream freely and see alternative possibilities.
What is your favorite method for boosting your creativity? Are you trying out any new methods?
Our Design & Content Coordinator Kayla Koger gave you the basics of using Canva for your brand in our Canva 101 podcast episode. This week on the Hello Frances Podcast, our Digital Marketing Specialist Gregory Dedicke interviews Austin Miller, the Customer Engagement Director for Modlite Systems, to learn how his organization implements this tool into their content strategy. Gregory and Austin discuss how productivity has changed since using Canva, how their brand cohesion has improved, how it benefits his team, and more. Listen to the full episode now and let us know how Canva has helped you!
