Andrea is Making Social Media Work for You (Without Letting It Take Over Your Route)

🎙️ Making Social Media Work for You (Without Letting It Take Over Your Route)

In this episode of Talking Pools Podcast, Andrea breaks down a question she’s been hearing more and more from pool pros in the field:

👉 “How are you posting so much… and still getting your pools done?”

What follows is a real-world, no-BS look at how to use social media as a tool—not a second job.

This isn’t about going viral.
 This isn’t about chasing millions of views.

This is about efficiency, strategy, and staying relevant without sacrificing your route, your time, or your sanity.

Andrea shares practical, field-tested insights on:

•  Filming content while you’re already working (without slowing yourself down) 
•  Choosing the right pools—and customers—to film at (and avoiding problems) 
•  Using simple tools like POV shots and B-roll to create content fast 
•  Avoiding time-wasting traps like over-editing, bad camera setup, and unnecessary gear 
•  Understanding how algorithms actually work (and how to work with them, not against them) 
•  Posting strategies that drive engagement without burning you out 
•  Why clickbait, rage bait, and auto-sharing can quietly wreck your reach 
•  How to stay consistent—even when you’re slammed with work 

There’s also a deeper message running underneath this entire episode:

👉 Social media should support your business—not compete with it.

If you’ve ever felt like content creation is pulling you away from what actually makes you money, this episode will help you recalibrate and take control of your time again.

Real talk. Real experience. Real strategies that actually work in the field.

📲 Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts—and start making social media work for you, not the other way around.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:53

Ha good morning. Well, actually good evening. It's it's me again. It's Andrea. I'm here. It's the Talking Pools show Tuesday. I just got back from trying a new restaurant that opened up. There's a restaurant in my neighborhood that's been around since like 2011 and uh they're gone. And there's a new restaurant that just opened up in their place, and so I went to go check it out, and it was pretty good. Service was terrible. Sat at the bar and just waited for everything. Had to ask for silverware. Not a good service experience, but the food was good. So whatever. Alright, so what I want to talk about today is not pools. I'm not gonna deviate from pools a lot. So one of the things that I have been asked about recently a whole bunch, or at least it's a question that I got multiple times. Like I would say, if it wasn't a question, I definitely got the statement several times. And in total, I think more than five people brought it up, which is why I decided to make it an episode, or like, you know, I guess this is this might be a little bit of a short episode. All right. So bear with me here. The whole my point is the whole subject is making social media work for you, not making it a second job. So that was one of the things that I kept hearing people ask me, you know, not in a not in a crappy way, nobody was mean about it. It's just like, wow, I say you post a lot of videos. How do you do any, how do you get any pools done? And that is a legitimate question because at a certain point I did start to like get behind and I had to reevaluate what I was doing and the way that I was doing it, because yes, I do post a lot. I actually pulled it back just a little bit recently because I learned some things about how Facebook especially and about how algorithms work. And so I figured I would just kind of share what I learned. So if you are wanting to monetize a page or you know, try to be active on you know something and just be active, be active on pool social media, if you will. Hopefully these tips will help you. And of course, if you have tips for me that you want to share, let me know. You know the email address. It's Andrea.talkingpools at gmail.com. Or you can message me on all of the socials that you already found me on, because I'm sure you already follow me. And if you don't, you should. Anyway, so here we go. Ready? This is making social media work, not a second job, not as a second job. I think you need to work on that title a minute. So here we go. Ready? So, and please keep in mind this is all based on like my experience and what I've been doing. I am not an expert social media person. I am not a social media manager, I am not this is not trying to help you go viral either. A hundred percent that is not it, because I don't think I've had anything that's like I mean, I've had stuff that's viral for my page or for my account, but I haven't had anything like have millions and millions of views. I've had a few thousand views. But again, I'm not trying to help you go viral. I'm trying to help you make it easy on yourself to make content or to be able to generate and film content and stuff like that while you're still working so that it doesn't interfere with your actual job, which is pulls. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 4:24

So when it comes down to filming, pool magazine is the hottest new publication for the pool and spa industry, featuring up-to-the-minute news on what's happening in the pool world in a fresh new stylized format with our mobile-friendly app.

SPEAKER_00 5:03

Pool magazine is the app for keeping your fingers on the pulse of the pool industry. You'll find featured news, editorials, podcasts, videos, and more on the Pool Magazine app. Download on Google Play and the App Store.

SPEAKER_01 5:29

Generate and film content while you're still working so that it doesn't interfere with your actual job. I am one of those people who feels very uncomfortable and embarrassed when people are watching me make videos. So I can make the video and post it and be fine. That's one thing. But having an audience when I'm filming a video is not something that I am a fan of. I my first my first point of advice is to know your customers, okay? I don't mean like know them personally. You don't have to know what their favorite movie is, right? But at least like have some sort of base relationship with them, you know, like a high, know their name, be on a first name basis. I think people nowadays are pretty like ups accepting of people making content, but you know, you never know. There's people that don't want you filming anything in their yard at all. So if that's the type of person whose house you're at, maybe don't film there. So this all comes down to planning. So you want to plan whose house you're gonna film at first. Sometimes you can ask permission, you can have them sign a thing if you really want to, if you feel like you need to. I actually had one co-worker of mine took a picture from she was cleaning the pool and she stood up on the spa, but it was a raised spa, and so she stood up on the spa on the wall that was raised, and she pointed, she had her back to the house, so she wasn't even taking a picture of the house. Like the pool, the house wasn't in the shot at all, and she wasn't even taking a picture of the pool at all either. She was taking a picture of an alligator that was in a canal behind the house because it was on a golf course, and the homeowner flipped out, started yelling at her, started through her off the property as a matter of fact, and then I had to service the pool because they didn't want her back on the property. So just always be careful with who house you decide to film at. Again, you don't want to be interrupted by anybody, even if they're nice, even if you know them. You don't want them coming out to ask what the chemistry is, and it did you check the pool today? Did you val you know less interruptions means less editing and editing just like time? I mean, just like money is time. Wait, time is money, so is editing. Time is edit editing is time. Buddy, you know what I mean. So for back to planning, got off on a little tangent there. I apologize. Camera placement. So these are all things that you should already know, or at least have an idea of before you start filming. Because nothing sucks up your time more than not getting the camera angle right and you're not in frame, or the pool's not in frame, or the whatever you're trying to do isn't in frame, and then you gotta play around with camera angles. No, that is trash. You are immediately fired. I'm just kidding. So know the pool well enough to where, or at least you want to pick a pool that you know well enough to where you can already have an idea of where you want to put your recording device. I just use my phone. Some people have other cameras, that's cool. I don't, it's that takes up too much time for me. So it's this is all subjective, okay? So if it's a new account, you know, just be careful with who it is. I wouldn't recommend trying to film things at a brand new account just because it's gonna take up your time because you're you're there to do the pool. Maybe the second visit you can set up the camera. But that's I'm not talking about like POV shots where you can just I'll talk about that in just one second. So most of the time, what I do is I set the riptide up, or I mean I set my phone up on the riptide because I have that organizer tray thingy on the bar and where the test kit is meant to go, it's actually a really good place for your phone to set up and record. You need like something for your phone, which I'll talk about in a little bit. So then you have your POV shots. So this is POV shots. This is great. This is mostly what I do mostly because it's so much easier to just have the phone in your hand because you can get these um, you know, short video clips or just quick pictures real quick without anybody even really noticing that you have your cam that you are taking a picture of anything. Whereas setting up a camera, make making sure you're in frame, it's gonna be a bit more obvious, right? So while you're already walking around or you're just standing there vacuuming, or you're checking out some equipment or whatever it is that you're doing, just take your phone out and record whatever, you know, whatever it is that you're doing, even if it's your feet walking that works surprisingly well, as long as you're not bare feet for free. But you can just show what your hands are doing or your one hand if you don't know how to hold your phone without your hands. Like I said, you can show your your feet walking, you can show just an angled, just whatever's in front of you, and then you can edit those clips together later, and you can add in transitions, or you can just use a tiny little clip for a trending audio. You can literally use like a five-second clip or like less than five seconds. Some of the trending audios are like two or three seconds long, you know, depending on what it is, or you could also just post the one post them to your stories. So, like sometimes what I'll do, one of the things on TikTok that you can do is lip sync to your recommended sound, and it takes like not it's like an I mean it depends again, it depends on the length. You can pick anywhere from three to ten seconds, it just depends on the clip. All you do is you open TikTok. I don't think it works, doesn't work for Facebook and Instagram, it doesn't work for reels, it's TikTok specific, but you just open TikTok and you go to record, and before you hit record, you hit the sound, you hit add sound, and then you just pick either the first sound or the second sound, and it's usually someone talking, someone making a joke, or like someone saying something silly, like one of them was um, what do you do if it is your circus and it is your monkeys? And it was literally like a five-second clip. It took me maybe five minutes to get the timing right. I didn't like, you know, it's four words, it's one sentence that you have to memorize. It's really not that hard. And it takes a total of probably five to eight minutes to make like one little clip like that, because you do need to get the timing right, so that is important. But that's just a short little thing that you can do to add to your story, um, to keep up your views and your engagement and basically like keep your account active and relevant, right? So uh b-roll footage. This is great because again, you can just film whatever is in front of you. I don't know what my dog wants. Just film whatever you're doing, and then you can just use it again, like I said, for something that just has a viral sound, trending audio or a viral text. Doesn't even have to be really anything that takes a lot of effort. And then once you get your algorithms trained to show you videos that are like that, then you'll get more ideas. You don't have to sit there and like, maybe I should do this, or maybe when it comes to you, you when like that sound comes to you, you can just be like, oh, let me just do this sound real quick. I don't did that make sense. Did I just ramble? I feel like I rambled. I guess I'll figure it out later when I replay this. So yeah, b-roll footage doesn't take a lot of effort to film, and you can actually use it for a lot of different things. So you can take a couple sections, add it in as a transition clip, you can do all that stuff. And I I cannot do anything about this dog because if I stop recording now, everyone's gonna come home and through that door and it's gonna be noisier and louder than the dog, and I'm gonna have to stop. So we're just gonna blow through, ignore the dog. She's fine. Okay, so back to my outline here. If you do set up your camera or your phone, this should not take more than a few seconds before you start walking back to the pool. You wanna make sure that you have everything set up, any recording accessories ready to go. Uh, I have a gimbal that I use sometimes. And so what I will do is put I will put the replay, I will put everything as content. So film, everything, setting up the camera. Let me, let me, I digressed for a second. I'm sorry. I was talking about the gimbal that I have. Make sure the point I'm trying to make is make sure that you have everything that you are going to record with charged, set up, ready to go. And by setup, I mean, like I said, if you're gonna use a gimbal, have it in there because you don't want to be wrestling with your phone or camera for too long. Now, if your camera is set up very far away or from a very far angle, you can zoom in on the frames you want to emphasize later during your editing process. Someone called it like Gen Z zoom or whatever. I don't know. You don't you don't have to worry about you just zoom in on the frame in your editing app. You don't have to like worry about getting a close-up or zooming in with your actual camera. You just zoom in on the frame. That's why it looks a little blurry, and I wasn't sure if that was good, but apparently that's the thing to do. So it's good to emphasize, like, you know, stupid facial expressions and dumb things that happen. Something that's funny. You want to emphasize the humor with a zoom. Phone or camera accessories will take a minute to set up or two. Uh, will take a minute or two to set up. Sorry, it's late. Uh, but these do give you the best angles and they keep your phone safe and they keep things from shifting and moving or falling. So, like I said earlier, I will just I tend to just set my phone up on my riptide thing, but sometimes the phone shifts, it falls a little bit, it gets, you know, if I move if I knock into the riptide or pull the cord or something like that while I'm setting something up, there's a mosquito hoe. Tripods or something similar will keep your phone safe and also will keep your camera angles safe. So you can use, like I said, a tripod, a selfie stick. The gimbal is nice, it is kind of a pain in the ass sometimes and a little bit not worth it sometimes, just depends on what you're trying to do. So the one that I have has a tracking feature, but for the tracking feature, you have to download the app and then you have to use the app to use the camera, and it's a little it it the gimbal is a bit time consuming, but you do have the stabilizing feature, which is nice if you're going to record while walking. Also, it does like these little turn rotation things automatically. You just click the button a certain way or a certain amount of times, and it has like the one that I have will do like an inception mode. So you click the I forget which button it is, but you click a button, you triple click the button, and your phone rotates like this, just like my hand did rotates all the way around. So it's kind of cool for effects, but again, it is kind of time consuming, and I end up not using it all that much. TBH. You do have ring lights, which I don't think really many people use anymore. I don't think those things are super popular, and they there's all these things are travel size now, so like you can get you can get little little tiny fold-up tripods that are do that are also selfie sticks, and so they double. That's the word I was looking for as a selfie stick, they double as a tripod. You have a magnetic ring, like on my phone here, so it's magnetic, and then the ring comes out like this. So this is a stand. Oops, this is a stand, but also I think I'm breaking it, it's just a little stiff, so yeah, and this rotates like this. So this one's cool. I got this on the Amazon. Looks like I need a new one. I just bought this tripod one where it was so I thought it was the magnetic one because they make those now. When I wrote this, I didn't know they had those, but they have the magnetic tripods that just clip on like that instead of the stretchy guy where you have to stretch the thing open and then it doesn't fit on any cases, and you have to take your phone out of your case. That is bull crap. So if you're gonna get a stand, if you're gonna get a tripod or something like that, look for the magnetic version, and that is so much easier because then you just clip things in and out or or magnet clip them or whatever. And then you have your suction cups, which I don't like that. I don't like those. It sounds weird even saying it. Okay, so a couple of different things you can do on your actual phone to help you with recording and saving time and stuff like that. You can on a okay, so this is specifically for Android for Galaxy phones. I will be honest, I don't know if you can do this on an iPhone. I didn't do the research apparently, but I think you can do it on both. Let me know, iPhone users. I'm sorry, okay. You can separate the app sounds so I can record video and record my voice and talk while listening to while having earbuds and listening to music. So the the microphone records from the phone instead of from the earbud. And I need this because I have to have sound in my ears. I also have to be able to answer my phone. And if I don't have the earbud in, I won't be able to hear the phone ringing if I'm on the other side of the pool. And so the separate app sounds for me is amazing. Also, because if I'm recording a longer video, I still want to be able to listen to music or a podcast or something like that because it's still boring as hell to stand there by myself vacuuming a pool in silence. So that helps. I would say it doesn't help you save time, but it helps in general. It helps you like not be bored while you're recording something. I don't know. It worked for me. I threw it in here. So then you can also use gestures to start recording. You can use a timer so you don't have to actually physically press the button. And then at that point, it doesn't matter what's in the beginning of the video or the end, you just trim it off, right? Another option you can do, which I have and I do sometimes, but I have a couple of problems when I use my it's a second phone, is what I'm getting at. You can use a second phone, or you can get a separate camera, like a digital camera, which are those are coming back now for some reason. You can get like a GoPro or like just a cheap faux pro or something like that from the from the Amazons. So this way you can set up one camera to record, and then you can use your phone normally if you are a person who gets calls from customers, or if you're a person who gets a hundred calls from their boss or their mother or someone else. Uh, this is sorry. This is also really good for just getting the B roll because you can just, you know, that one's your you don't have to worry about it taking up space or storage or memory or whatever on your main phone. And then that way you can also just leave it set up on your tripod or your gimbal or whatever. And then for me, it reduces my phone anxiety, reduces my phone anxieties. So now you got recording and editing. Now, depending on the type of video that you're making, you want to decide ahead of time. Most of the time, sometimes you could just wing it. But you want to just decide if you're going to record it in the app itself later. So and then depending on the type of video that you're making, it's really hard to use the editing features inside the app. I downloaded a couple video editing softwares to try. You know, you got your Adobe's, you got your cap cuts. A lot of them require payment or subscription or something like that. There's some free ones, but there's ads and they're kind of crappy. So it all just depends. If you have a longer video, do not try and sit in your truck at a pool and edit and post it, because depending on what you're posting, it actually could take quite a bit of time to get a post out, even if the video is edited and done, because you still have to think of a caption and add hashtags. Or, which my next point is music. So choosing music can be time consuming. So you can actually just skip it all together if you want, anyway. Or if it's on like reels, they the that doesn't automatically start with the sound, they start on mute, and not a lot of people will go and unmute it, maybe unless they see you talking and your voice moving. So I feel like you can always skip the music, and it doesn't really add anything to help your views or your engagement unless it's something like where you are using a trending audio on TikTok. And in that case, anyone who clicks on that sound will be able to find your video just from clicking on the sound, which I think more people do on TikTok than they do on Reels. Let's be honest here. Reels, audios, and sounds suuck. Okay. If you do not know this yet, I'm gonna hold you by the pool brush and tell you this. Reels sucks for audio, especially. Okay, we'll move on. So you you can leave the original sound, especially if there's some sort of ASMR quality or aspect to it. Those tend to be very popular, and even I find myself watching them, even though I don't profess to be a fan of that type of thing. It just is something that kind of sucks me in and holds me there. So think about that. Also, some people, I'm some people will skip a video because they do not like the audio. That's I'm some people, I will do that. If I if I hate the song, I'm not watching your video. Sorry. That's why I try not to pick audio, I try not to pick songs that are my favorite songs because they may be my favorite songs and they may be really good, but not everybody feels that way. And they may not understand my taste and so. Another thing about music is that it is much harder to find audio long enough for videos over three minutes, especially on reels. On Facebook, they don't give you the length of the song. So sometimes it's happened to me before where my sound ran out and there was like a minute or like 30 seconds of silence on the reel, and it irritated me. Um, I know that some creators, some some content people will use the same royalty-free audio on every video. And again, since a lot of people watch these things with no sound, it doesn't really matter, I guess, unless you're like me and that irritates you. So watch out for that. And that my advice, I would just like go without the sound. You can add captions, you just click on that button, and the captions will generate everything that you're saying. That is very helpful, and people will watch longer if they can read what you're saying, if they can understand you. Text on screen is key, that is very important. You want to have some kind of text, you wanna you want to hook in the text on screen immediately, especially if it's like some kind of technical thing that you're doing that's gonna hold people in there. You want that within like the first, I would say the first three seconds, if not sooner. Voiceovers are very popular, helpful, they're very helpful. You want you want a narration in some videos, especially if there's a lot going on. Narration voiceovers are big. So for captions and hashtags, beware of using the AI generator inside of the app because then it will flag your content as AI content. So if you need to use it for captions, then do that outside of the app and then copy it and paste it if you need to. You know, probably don't. Just caption something, you know, it'll be okay. Make sure you're using hashtags though, because that gets you to the correct audience. So, like if you don't want your videos to go to homeowners, don't use the caption pool party, pool time, stuff like that, because that I made that mistake and just homeowners were seeing my videos and it wasn't fun. So now we go to clickbait or rage bait. These seem like good ideas, and it's actually kind of easy to fall into a trap if you're not careful. Clickbait will hurt your engagement, and then you're gonna attract a lot of bots and a lot of spam, which looks bad on your account. So, like for everybody, like people won't want to go to your account, and also you'll get like the algorithm will suppress you. Um, rage bait is fun. I get accused of rage bait a lot, but I promise you it's not. Well, maybe like not maybe like a 1%, maybe some like half a percent. It's really good for engagement, but people get like really mad. So be prepared for hateful comments, and people will call you out and be like, you're just trying to rage bait. People tell me that even when I'm not rage baiting, though, so whatever. If you feel like arguing, I guess, do what you do what you want to do. One of the things I started doing for hashtags, especially, and also I was doing it for captions, so you can copy and then paste the captions and the hashtags to the different apps. So they're not gonna flag you for that, but it is better for your it is better for like views and engagement and stuff to use different hash or um not hashtags, to use different captions across like Facebook and Instagram. I think TikTok doesn't really matter because TikTok's not a part of meta. Um, so that's it's kind of irrelevant. But for Facebook and Instagram, they know if you use the same caption. I think it not that it hurts, but I it's just slightly better if you change it just a little bit. Like if you just add or take away a word or you, you know, put one if you like rearrange the sentence somehow, it's a little bit better for you that way. But I did have at one point, I did have a document or like I had a note in my notes app of a bunch of hashtags that I wanted to use, and then I would just go in there and copy them and then paste instead of typing out every single hashtag every single time because that that got real real real old real real fast. Facebook does not limit the amount of hashtags currently. You can go off and post as many as you want. TikTok and Instagram both only allow you five hashtags. So, with those two, you want to be specific on what you want to hashtag and also be picky because you only get five. So make sure they are representing what you want the post to attract, who you want to attract. So, as far as the length of captions go, TikTok usually will prefer longer captions and they prefer as much information as possible. Usually a question is good. Um, Facebook and Instagram prefer slightly shorter captions, they like it to be, you know, direct and to the point. Questions are still good though. You still want to ask questions, that's going to get people commenting. And comments are one of the bigger drivers of engagement and reach because if you get people commenting, algorithms are gonna push it to more people. External links. You should not post these in captions on Facebook. Sometimes it's okay, it depends on what you are posting about. I think that they I think like one or two like a month is generally okay. For TikTok and um the Instagrams, I think they do not let you do that. Uh, you can post them in like your bio or you can post them in the comments. Facebook, it's better to post the link in the comments and then you can pin the comment to the top. Any anything that gets you away from that app is something that they don't like. So you want to avoid doing that. Asking questions is a big, big helpful engagement helper. But again, you want to just avoid the clickbait because nobody likes that. You can schedule posts in all three apps. I'm not really talking about YouTube. I should though. I don't really know much about YouTube. I just started a channel and I like haven't really done anything actively on it. I I'd have to double check. I would imagine you can schedule on YouTube. I may be wrong. So don't quote me on that one. But you can for sure schedule posts on the other three on the TikToks, the Instagrams, and the Facebooks. Instagram will not let you schedule something if you have a what it won't let you do it if you if it's like a sponsored post. So if you're like trying to promote a product or something like that, it won't let you schedule it. But if it's just a normal reel or a normal post, you can schedule it. You just have to go to the more options. You have to click on more options. It's like at the very, very bottom before you click post. A tick or a TikTok you can schedule absolutely. Facebook you can absolutely schedule. And you can do this all on your phone too. You don't have to do it on the desktop apps. They made it a lot easier recently. And so what I've been doing is because I learned that you have to give your posts time to breathe, which I might talk about later. I don't know. Yeah, I did. But yeah, you can schedule the posts. So when you want to take a break or you are posting too much, like kind of like how I did a little bit, and you don't want to let the idea go, you still want to put the post in there, you just schedule it. You're good. So all of these three apps have options where you can auto-post in between the other apps. So like each one will be like, oh, you can auto share to Facebook, you can auto share to Instagram, you can auto share, auto share. So that is good for saving time for you. And if you are not concerned about more reach and more engagement, then go that route, then auto share. But I would advise to start with Instagram and auto share from Instagram. It just works better with the algorithm that way. I did a little bit of research on it. If you do it the other way, if you post from if you post to Facebook first and then auto share that to Instagram, it hurts your Instagram kind of a lot. And I think that's where my Instagram problems lie. It's because I was doing it that way for a long time. Again, if you don't care about monetization or anything like that, and you just want to save time and you want to auto-share, please by all means go ahead. It is super easy to do, and you just post once. I don't think it works for TikTok. I would I would have to check because it's been a it's been a while since I've done it. But you can share TikTok posts to Facebook and Instagram as well. Now, when I've done it that way, the Facebook post got zero interaction, like zero. And then so I deleted it and then just reposted it natively to Facebook, and then I got it, you know, it actually had traction and stuff. So just be mindful of that. I I wouldn't advise auto sharing from TikTok, but if I were if you're gonna auto share, do it between do it on uh post to Instagram first and then auto share to Facebook, and then you only just have to make a new post for TikTok if you even use TikTok. Stories definitely turn auto sharing to stories on for Facebook and Instagrams. You can't do that for TikTok, you have to share your story yourself. It reduces yeah, so sharing between Facebook and TikTok within those apps reduces your visibility. And so I stopped doing it because I wanted to work on my monetization. And then as I said, you can copy and paste the same caption, but it's better if you change it slightly. So you can just copy and paste the whole thing and then just, you know, tweak one or two words, one or two sentences, put a space in there somewhere, you know, something like that. And it does the resharing for you, and it it just does that little bit of a work for you. A couple big creators on TikTok that I follow uh recommended that or stated that they use it and it helps them, so I figured I would add it in there. I would probably do it too, but I just can't justify spending money on that because I don't make thousands of dollars from this, which would be nice though. Okay, so tips for driving up your engagement. Um, your visibility increases when you have high engagement. So you want comments, you want shares, you want people talking to each other, you want people arguing with each other. That's why rage bait works sometimes. I'm not saying rage bait, I'm just saying sometimes it works. So posting frequency. Now, here's where it gets a little weird because I've heard lots of people say that you want to post as often as possible, but not so often that you get, you know, flagged for spam or for being a bot. I've heard a lot of marketers talking about posting like seven times a day or like more. I post quite a bit. I'll post probably around that, four, five, six, depending on how excited I am or how bad somebody's pissed me off that day. Lately I have pulled it back though because I had looked up some information and had learned that you need to give the posts space because each post gets its own little testing window, so to speak. And so if you post too soon, you interrupt the that post test or like its push or whatever. So you want to give each you want to give like an hour or two in between posts, maybe a little bit more depending on like what the post is doing. If it's like super active and you're getting a lot of comments and a lot of interaction, wait a couple of hours before you post something else. And that's where your scheduling feature comes in. Because if you have an idea for something and you recorded it and you got it edited, you know, you can schedule it. Uh again, you don't want to post too frequently because it's hard to keep up. If engagement and views and monetization is something that is a goal for you. Posting too frequently, so it's unsustainable, is gonna hurt, it's just gonna hurt you in general because you're gonna be going up and down and you're gonna lose momentum and and the algorithm's not going to know where to categorize like what category you belong in, where to put what type of creator you are. They're not gonna know who to show you to. So you just wanna be consistent. Um, and then so another way you can help your views and engagement is to reply and to react to comments. And you want to reply to as many comments as you can as soon as they happen. And if you miss a couple, you don't need to reply to every single comment. You want to you want to reply to the high value comments and the comments that are going to continue the conversation or maybe like bring in others to keep that conversation going. And then you also want to interact with com uh content from other creators, from similar creators. Put a meaningful comment. Like, don't just put, you know, nice. Don't just say that. Put something meaningful, ask a question, give a compliment for God's sake. Okay, that's gonna show your content to similar pages or to people that are interacting with those same pages or similar pages. So here's a couple of tips. If you're posting a reel or a TikTok, you want to have some sort of magic trick within the first 1.5 seconds. I try to make this happen within the first 1.3 seconds. I feel like that's better. I don't mean a transition either. I mean like makes literally make something appear in your hand, you know, appear on screen. Hello, okay, make something disappear. Snap, you know, do something like that. You can even snap and just have text appear on screen. It doesn't have to be anything crazy. Again, it should be different from a transition. So don't have like a green, I mean, you can have a green pool and then a I mean a and then a clean pool, but that's a transition. You could do like a foreshadowing, you know, like whatever. I'm getting ahead of myself here. Another thing that helps is to put the end of the video first. So like put the clean pool at the beginning of the video and then show the process of cleaning it. Don't copy anyone's posts, but you can recreate something and put your own spin on it. Um, and repurpose it, uh, repurpose trends to fit the pool industry. Like I did the salt, I did the one where it was like the Bo Burnham song with the microwave and the door. I was like, add water to the pool. What water? The water from the hose, right? So it was it was fun. That one took a little bit of planning because I had to figure out who wasn't gonna be home to watch me film this video. I had to do it in a couple of takes. So I did it at a pool where I knew it wasn't going to be very dirty and it wasn't going to take me a very long time to clean so that I could spend time playing around. But and then my last tip is that it doesn't have to be all pool content all the time. If you're trying to build up an account, post other stuff, post cooking videos, you know, post a video of yourself making breakfast. If you play some sort of instrument or whatever, do a music post, anything, crafting, pets. This will help you keep up your posting frequency without infringing on your work time. And people want to see, like if you have a good following, people are gonna want to see what the rest of your life is like. So show them. Um, and the last thing I just wanted to add is because I forgot to add this earlier is be careful, don't just post some if you do TikTok videos, don't take your TikTok video and then just post it to Facebook because it will flag you for licensed music, even if the song is available on Facebook. So you want to just you can do it. You want to just mute the whole video and then choose a sound from the Facebook reels section. So that's it. That's my tips. Yeah, that's it. That's the that's my whole that's my whole jam. And uh thanks, thanks for listening. This one turned out to actually be way longer than I wanted it to be or was expecting it to be when I s when I started talking. So go and that's that's really it this time. You know all the things to do. Follow me, follow the podcast on all the podcast things. You can email me at Andrea.talkingpools at gmail.com. You can email Rudy and the rest of the talking pools hosts, hosted shows at talkingpools at gmail.com. I forgot the address for a second because my brain just went shows and hose. Sorry. Yeah, I guess I'm done. I'm tired, it's so late. Thanks everybody for listening, and we will see you next Tuesday. Bye.