Meet Your Hosts

Kathi (00:01.45)
Well, hey friends, welcome to the Writing at the Red House podcast where we gather the table to break bread and tell tales with some of our favorite writers and creators who share their wisdom to help us all share our story.

And guys, I am back with Tenille and Tanya. These, Tenille Register is the social media director for all things, Kathy Lipp. Tanya Kubo is in charge of membership and they do a hundred other things, but this is really where their energy lies and what we’re gonna be talking about on today’s podcast, because we’re talking about how to create a social media habit. And I promised in our last podcast that today,

we were going to get super, super practical. And so, Tonya, I would love for you to share a little bit about we are doing a social media challenge in our paid group right now. And I feel like, and I’ve gotten some personal messages from people. In fact, one of them I got today was I am now officially over my fear of social media. Yay!

Tonya Kubo (01:11.102)
Mm -hmm.

Tonya Kubo (01:25.086)
makes me so happy!

Kathi (01:26.506)
Yes, yes. And I will tell you, this is somebody who I had no idea she had a fear. She’s in our private mastermind group, Sarah. She would not mind me saying Sarah from our private mastermind group, but she’s like, I have been showing up and I have been doing it. And she goes, I’m really excited to keep going on. And so.

Tonya Kubo (01:38.366)
Mm -hmm.

Kathi (01:54.122)
Can you talk a little bit about what we’re doing and then how can people do this on their own?

Tonya Kubo (02:00.286)
Yeah, so the social media challenge that we’re doing in the Red House Writers Collective and also our Mastermind members are participating in that. So, you know, we all have gifts, right? I happen to be, interestingly, not intentionally gifted at creating social media prompts that work to not just increase engagement, but also help to develop good relationships between the poster and the people who see the posts.

And so we craft, so here’s part of the problem though, is most of us, when we go to learn about social media, we are taught all about broadcast model methods, which means post this, don’t post that, post, you know, worry about your selfie, worry about your video. And what isn’t taught is the flip side of social media, which is how to be a good follower. And so in this challenge, we have, you know, everybody gets a daily prompt.

that helps them think about how to best show up and serve their audience. Cause most of them don’t have the miles on them to know what their audience needs to hear on the average Wednesday, like Tenille mentioned at the last episode. So it helps them get in the right frame. But then the other side of the challenge is we all share our links to our posts. And then you go and you comment and you leave, I tell people a meaningful comment on at least three other, other accounts so that they get to see what that

feels like first of all, I need people to be aware when we talk about being a good follower, Kathy, how much time it takes to actually leave a meaningful comment. Because back to what we talked about the last episode where we get sad if we only get one comment, I think it’s because we don’t recognize how much time and energy it takes to leave a thoughtful comment. So when you have to leave three a day and you go, my gosh, that took me 15 minutes.

Kathi (03:47.754)
Mmm, yes.

Kathi (03:54.762)
Right.

Tonya Kubo (03:56.126)
Then you start to say, one person actually thought enough of what I had to say that they spent five whole minutes with me. three people did? I captured 15 minutes of collective attention today. And so that’s what I think is most powerful about the challenge that we are running right now.

Kathi (04:06.154)
Mm -hmm.

Kathi (04:17.29)
So how would you guys see somebody says, okay, great, but I’m not part of your membership. I don’t have access to your calendar. How would you encourage somebody to start thinking about those meaningful posts? I love what you just said. You could just spend 15 minutes commenting on three other people and that’s half the challenge friends. It’s not just about what you’re putting out there. It’s what you’re responding to.

Tonya Kubo (04:41.086)
Mm -hmm.

Kathi (04:47.498)
And I have followed people because of their comments. I’m like, okay, well, that was a wacky post, but the person who responded with a thoughtful comment, I’m like, and they have that little follow button next to them. I’m like, okay, I need more of that in my life. And so how would you, how would you help somebody create this challenge on their own?

Tonya Kubo (05:15.006)
Yeah, that’s a really good question. I’d love to hear to Neil’s thoughts too. But for me, I would say your first step is if you’re gonna build a daily social media habit, you actually need to show up on social media daily, right? So there’s that piece. So I would start by find five posts a day to comment on that aren’t your friends and family. Because that’s the other thing we like to do, right? We like to say, I spent an hour on social media. Okay, an hour scrolling people’s grandkids does not count.

Kathi (05:44.298)
Yeah

Tonya Kubo (05:44.798)
So go out there and just search. I mean, all of our social media platforms now operate as search engines. So figure out what you’re interested in. Okay. If it’s anxiety, right? Christians with anxiety, throw that into Facebook search bar, throw that into Instagram search bar, see what comes up. And I’m not saying you have to comment on everything because some things honestly are not worth commenting on, but find three to five and

Kathi (06:07.818)
Right.

Tonya Kubo (06:10.59)
leave those thoughtful comments and get in the habit of that for a few weeks, doing that regularly, understanding how much time it takes you because maybe I can leave five comments in 15 minutes and spoiler alert, I can’t cause I’m a wordy birdy over here. So like five comments would take me half an hour, but you know, however long that takes you. And then that gives you a sense of how much time a daily practice would take. And then after you’ve started doing that, you’ll start to just naturally absorb.

how people talk and behave on social media. And so when you get ready to do your own posts, you’re actually gonna be five steps ahead from the people who just started out of the gate with what does everybody need to hear.

Kathi (06:52.394)
Love it. Okay, Tenille, how would you answer that?

Tenneil (06:53.518)
I love that. I want to, yeah, I want to piggyback on with Tanya that I always in a social media workshop start with having them go right then in the workshop to go comment on others because it takes away the imposter syndrome. When we scan social media and all we do is look and lurk, that’s when we start to feel less than when we comment and we engage. That’s a relationship.

And then we start to be motivated to create our own relationships. So once you have that habit of going out and being a meaningful participant, I would say come up with three needs that you know your audience needs. Like three needs they have for sure. Just top of your mind and consistently three weeks in a row, do three posts on those three needs and build from there.

so that you are committing that you have three specific topics. If you post more because you post a picture of your dog or your kids or your grocery cart or whatever, great, but specific to those three needs every week for three weeks to get started. If you’re doing this alone without a group to support you.

Kathi (08:07.114)
And I would say find a group, find a couple other creators that you could say, hey, can we post on each other’s stuff? And I really, I believe in the power of responding. I really do. Because I think it trains you to understand, like if you have a comment that gets,

a lot of interaction or starts a discussion, why not post about that on your own social media to start that conversation? On TikTok about two weeks ago, I put a comment up, you guys, it’s had 20 ,000 reactions. Should I perhaps make some content on that? That might be a good thing for me to do, but you have…

Tenneil (08:51.63)
As your social media manager, I say yes. Yes, you should.

Tonya Kubo (08:54.814)
Yeah

As your social media manager, Tenille would like for you to share the URL to that post so she can look at it.

Kathi (09:01.29)
Yeah.

Tenneil (09:01.966)
100 %

Kathi (09:05.578)
It’s a very funny, quippy comment that doesn’t really have a lot to do with what I do. But you know, it’s like, to see that those kinds of comments can really get some interaction and get a conversation started is so, so important. What do you think about, I’m gonna ask this specifically to Tanya, what do you think about those content calendars that you can find online?

Tonya Kubo (09:21.95)
Mm -hmm.

Kathi (09:33.61)
because you said that your content calendar is really designed to create interaction and so like how would you evaluate a content calendar online?

Tonya Kubo (09:41.566)
I’m going to go to bed.

Tonya Kubo (09:47.294)
it’s so hard to evaluate them. I mean, most of them I would say are like, first of all, people pretty much just sell you a content calendar, right? They don’t really tell you what’s in there. So, you know, I’ve had, I’ve bought ones all, let’s just say $27 and they’ve been everything from a prompt, which is a post about this thing to I’ve seen ones that are one to two word labels, favorite thing, favorite color.

Kathi (10:04.33)
Mm -hmm.

Tonya Kubo (10:15.87)
movie you last watched, right? I’ve seen them be that basic and honestly that useless. Two ones that are madlib style, a full 20, 30 word actual sentence or paragraph with like little brackets of filling in the blanks. I think, you know what? You cannot scroll Instagram for longer than I would say 15 minutes before you will encounter some posts somewhere sharing.

a content calendar. In fact, Cathy, you know what? I will put, I will create specifically for this podcast, I will create a one month works any month calendar that we will give as a resource to Neil, hold me to this, because you know, as soon as we get out of here, I’ll forget, I promise this, we will have one so they can see similar to what we had in the challenge this month, what those prompts look like. So we’ll do a prompt.

Kathi (10:55.562)
What?

Tonya Kubo (11:11.422)
and then I’ll actually have a little further explanation so that they can walk through what we just did in the collective. How does that sound?

Kathi (11:18.218)
Dude, you could have just offered a week and it would have blown everybody’s mind, but now we’re… Yeah, that’s true. Yeah, you’re right.

Tonya Kubo (11:24.19)
week is they don’t see it in the overall context, right? You need to see a month and see how like, that’s kind of the same question on the 28th as it was on the fifth. Huh, you can do that? Go ahead, Tenille.

Tenneil (11:42.67)
In the last episode, we talked about planning ahead because you have to hit the same message multiple times. And the glance at a month is going to give you that feel.

Tenneil (14:00.274)
You’re not creating 30 totally separate and unique pieces of content to do for the month. These are going to go in a cycle and it’s going to repeat the same theme because people have to warm up to the idea and hear it repeated times before they can make change for themselves. And that’s really the goal, right? To meet the need of the audience so they can make the change that they want to make.

Tonya Kubo (14:02.494)
You said gay.

Kathi (14:29.418)
It’s so good. Okay. So we’ve got some content ideas. We are, we are readjusting how we measure success. But now I have to go do it. And guys, I will tell you, like one of the things I am doing right now is I’m reminding myself that creating content will not kill me. I don’t think. But I,

I’m doing three brave things a day and one of them is creating content because I don’t know why I have this hang up. I’m unpacking it, my psychologist and I are unpacking it. I’m not really, but I’m gonna, I know that if I just do it every day in a month, it’s going to feel like second nature. But right now it feels terrible and I hate Tenille and she is the meanest person I have ever met.

And I want to hide every time I do this. So what is your advice for me? And I already know your advice, but tell me who is listening what your advice is for me.

Tenneil (15:42.83)
Remember your why? Why is this important to you? And then I also want you to picture the woman who’s standing in her kitchen, right? Because the content you’re working on for videos is a lot of cooking, right, Kathy? I want you to picture the woman in her kitchen completely overwhelmed. She doesn’t know which ingredient she has. She doesn’t have enough time to do this. The kitchen’s a mess. Her mind is a mess. And reach out to her in your videos, right? Because you’re not cooking just…

Kathi (15:57.226)
Right.

Tenneil (16:12.27)
so that another professional chef can borrow your recipe. Your goal is to help take the clutter out of meal prep and planning. So you have a heart for this person and I want you to picture her in the kitchen with you when you turn that video camera on.

Kathi (16:30.25)
Yeah, it was so interesting the other day. I was telling Roger about my people in Clutterfree for Life. And he said, well, could you postpone? I’m like, I can’t. They need me. I said, I just picture their smoochy little faces, and I’m excited to be with them. And he goes, I feel like that for nobody. And that’s not true.

Tonya Kubo (16:51.486)
hahahaha

Tenneil (16:53.646)
You can tell Roger I’m personally offended. I thought I was that person for him.

Kathi (17:01.418)
He would not smudgy your face. Yes. He loves he he loves you guys We talk about our deep love for you guys often, but he does not feel the smudgy face for anybody, but I do Yes, exactly. See there you go. Okay, and that’s how I feel and you’re right. I need to picture those people tanya What’s your best piece of advice for those of us who are like? This is so hard. This is this is like if it it taps into every

Tenneil (17:03.918)
Let’s go.

Tenneil (17:10.894)
Let’s get ideally good paint touched.

Tonya Kubo (17:14.206)
Yeah

Kathi (17:30.826)
fear and insecurity and everything that somebody has said about us or we’ve said about ourselves. What is your advice?

Tonya Kubo (17:40.318)
Well, first of all, there is nothing anybody can say that is worse than what your own internal critic says. The meanest person is always inside your own head. And it’s all an experiment. You know, Tenille and I are on this show as quote experts on social media. And we would be the first to tell you we aren’t experts, because guess what? The rules change all the time.

Kathi (17:49.45)
It’s so true. Yes, yes.

Tenneil (17:53.934)
Right.

Tonya Kubo (18:09.982)
They change for us as frequently as they change for you. None of us has the secret bat phone to meta and they call us and give us like a 30 day heads up on changes. So we’re rolling with the punches like everybody else. So remember that it’s just an experiment. What works today may not work next week. And that’s okay because guess what? What didn’t work today might work next week, but you won’t know it if you don’t keep at it.

Kathi (18:20.298)
Mm -hmm.

Kathi (18:37.194)
Yeah, it’s so true. And there is no way you are going to find your people if you’re not reaching out to them. Because we would love to think that everybody is just going to come to us and say, I need what you’ve got. But if they don’t know what you got, how do they know that they can get that need met from you? To Neil and Tonya, this has been so valuable. And thank you for my personal counseling session. We just need to do this once a month, if that’s OK with you guys. OK? OK.

Tonya Kubo (18:45.598)
Mm -hmm.

Tonya Kubo (19:05.598)
Sounds good.

Kathi (19:08.266)
Friends, you’ve been listening to the Writing at the Red House podcast. I’m Cathy Lipp. Now, go tell your only you story of God’s extravagant love.