Welcome to the Digital Media Branding Podcast Episode 017 How To Grow Your Social Media Influence Hello, I’m your host Carlos Quintero and I own a full service digital media branding and marketing company based out of Fargo, ND called MediaOnQ. Today we’ll be talking about How To Grow Your Social Media Influence. At MediaOnQ when we work with clients to help them come up with their social media strategy. In doing so, we always keep a single point in mind and that is, we want our efforts to produce engagement. Engaging content helps us build trust and once we have the trust we cross over toward being influential. Before we go on, I’d like to make a point. There are a lot of companies and individuals out there who consider themselves to be social media experts. Many have their own strategies that they deploy with their own clients. I’d like to suggest that there is No Single Cookie Cutter approach toward social media for all companies and not even for all industries. Could that be true? Yes because after all we are dealing with people. And to top that, people in different markets. So it all has to start with who is our target audience? Once we pinned that down, we can begin to look at how we should structure our social media marketing plan, with the objective of building trust and influence through engagement. I’d like to make one other suggestion. Before you accept the advice from anyone including me, ask about their own strategy. I really do mean that, because I believe that this is a question that is important to you as a small business or marketing professional who is about to spend time, effort and money on this journey. Think about this. Let’s say that you wanted to grow your YouTube subscriptions. Part of that strategy would be to produce a video or web video series right... If you hire an agency or consultant to produce and launch this for you it will require time, resources and finances to get it done. So, wouldn’t you want to see or know that they’ve had success implementing their ideas in on their own YouTube channel? Or would you feel comfortable simply giving out your hard earned cash in hopes of getting results? This of course would be true with any kind of Social Media Channel. If someone is giving you advice on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube and so on...take a moment to ask them about their own efforts and check out their channels. Hopefully you’ll find that they are exactly who they represent themselves to be. So now, let’s go through the 10 steps to help build your Social Media Influence. #1 Do It All At Once What I mean by do it all at once is to work on building your brand, building your product and promoting yourself all at once. You don’t want to do this in steps because if you do, you will lose valuable time. In other words, no one can build influence over night. Every phase or aspect takes time to build. So while you are building your product, you should be building your brand and promoting yourself, so that once the product or service offering is ready to launch you won’t be starting from ground zero. #2 Understand What Each Channel Has To Offer Not all social media should be used in the same way... While this may seem a little obvious, it is surprising to see how many small businesses and companies out there misunderstand this. So let’s break it down. Facebook. Facebook targets people you already know. Family & friends and maybe even customers. So with Facebook, understanding that you are really asking people you know to recommend or endorse you is key toward driving engagement and building influence. Twitter. Twitter is more of the personal perception. The one-on-one connection with you or your company. Think about that for a moment. How powerful is it to know that you can connect directly with an individual? How cool is it for your client base to know that they have a direct line to your business? Allowing people to connect with a person or a company representative through Twitter, helps build trust, delivers one-on-one engagement and helps build influence. Moving on to Google+. Google+ is a bit different in that here you have the ability to connect with people with similar passions. So with Google+ you are not targeting people you know but rather people who share interest, or industry peers. The common drive, goals and inspiration is what drives the engagement and allows you to build influence. Now let’s talk about Pinterest. Pinterest, for all of you who are still ignoring Pinterest, you should check out the Digital Media Branding Podcast Episode 6 where we discuss how to use Pinterest for Business. And another great resource which I would strongly recommend is Cynthia Sanchez and her Podcast Oh So Pinteresting. You can find her on Google+, iTunes or at her website OhSoPinteresting.com. I’ll make sure to include links to all this in the show notes. Pinterest is all about pinning right. What does that mean? Well pinning allows you to express yourself. Pinning allows you to explore and find new stuff. How does this translate to you and your business? Well pinning allows your audience to interact and engage with your products and services. If you can show how your product or service is a part of your customer’s life or how your product or service interacts with your customers then in my opinion you’ve hit a grand slam with Pinterest. That type of engagement will build your credibility, trust, brand and influence. The last social channel that we’ll discuss today is LinkedIn. LinkedIn allows you to show off. LinkedIn is a place where professionals get together to talk shop. This is the ideal place to show off your products, services and experience. Think of it as shameless self-promotion because it is ok if everyone knows that you are great at XYZ... This now leads me to #3 Create a Great Profile Seems obvious right? Again, amazing how many companies and businesses don’t or have not taken the time to do this. With social media like most other things in life and business, you can’t simply go through the motions. If you have a business page, on a social channel and you don’t have a profile, what does that say about your business? Just last week, I had a consulting call with a new client who basically said. Carlos, I have 6 kids, own my own business and have all the friends I need so I don’t have time to complete all these profiles. He is not in a unique situation. And frankly, I can see why he would feel that way... My response to him was simple. Why then should anyone take time out of their life, because we all have busy lives right? To follow you, endorse you, trust you, promote you or even buy from you? If you don’t have time or the resources to get this done, then outsource it. Hire a company who can help you get it done. Skipping the Create a Great Profile step will diminish your social media efforts and it will make it very difficult for people to engage, trust or view you as an influential source. #4 Become a Curator What does this actually mean? For your industry, I would guess that you are not the only provider of goods, services or information. I would also guess that there are other items that relate toward your offering. Some of these may be of value to your own customer base. If you organize the valuable content for them and make it easy for them to find what matters to them, you become a valuable resource. When your community views you as a resource for more than just your product, services or information you’ve crossed over to the influential side of social media. Now this does not mean that you copy someone’s content and post it as your own. It means that you mention the content and link them to the source. #5 Leverage Social Sharing If you’re providing value to your community or target audience, then why not ask them to share that value with their friends? If you ask, you will most likely get. Here’s an example. I purchased the RODE SmartLav a while back. During my testing I decided to make a video to show how it performed outside of a studio in windy conditions. I posted the video on YouTube and as of today have had more than 660 views. I also Tweeted that I’d just posted this video and RODE Microphones favored my Tweet and Shared it with their followers. How awesome is that? Instantly, I was able to reach a far greater number of people thanks to their engagement with my content. And now #6 Show Some Restraint What I mean by this is that not every post should boast about you and your business. If you are following along, we want to create value beyond our own service offerings here since that allows us to increase our social influence. So, I would suggest that one out of every ten post should be about you and the rest should focus on bringing some sort of value to your community and target audience. I am not suggesting that you could not bring value with every single one of your posts but rather that when you make it about them they are more willing to accept and support the messages that are all about you. In other words, your social media channel will not come across as spammy. If any of you marketers out there disagree or have a different take on this please let me know. You can email me at studio@mediaonq.com #7 Use More Than Words Here’s what I mean. When you post something on your blog or any of your social media channels how likely would you say people are to read a 1,500 word post? Now let’s say that the same post has pictures in it. If you are scrolling through your social channel and notice a picture that call for your attention...aren’t you more likely to see what it is all about? So I’m suggesting that if you are taking the time to add a post, don’t settle for just words, add a picture or video to support that post. Doing so, will help you get the most out of your efforts. #8 Don’t Be Silent I work with a wide range of clients and some are better at this than others. When someone engages with your content, you have to respond. You can’t allow yourself to be silent. Social Media is not like traditional media, where you put out a message and push out information and that is where it ends. Social Media is just that, social. The goal is to create engagement, so when people engage with you give them the curtesy to show that you are thankful for their engagement. This will help build your social influence. #9 Link Back To Your Own Site If you take the time to create content or bring value to your community and target audience then you should consider this content to be an asset. If it is your asset, then it should live somewhere that you own and control. So when you post on the social channels it is ok to link them back to your own website for them to consume the full version of the content. Doing this, also allows you to share other resources and content that they may be interested in while building your own website traffic. #10 Repeat Your Posts It is ok to repeat your posts. Most of us know how fast Twitter moves right. So what are the chances that everyone who follows you is going to see the post at the exact time that you post it? If you use Twitter, do you check for updates every minute of every day? Or do you make time to go through all of the post that you missed that day or that week? I am guessing here but I think that most of us don’t. So I am suggesting that it is ok to post multiple times in an effort to maximize your reach particularly with Twitter. So how much is to much? Consider your community or target audience, factor in time zones and I would say that tweeting 4 to 6 times over 48 hours is about the right mix. At MediaOnQ we’ve experimented with that quite a bit. When we post multiple times, say 3 times we get 3 times the amount of sharing and content consumption. The opposite is true too though...if we post 6 to 8 times, we get people who drop off and unfollow. We’ve just covered 10 Steps To Help You Build Social Influence. #1 Do It All At Once #2 Understand What Each Channel Has To Offer #3 Create a Great Profile #4 Become a Curator #5 Leverage Social Sharing #6 Show Some Restraint #7 Use More Than Words #8 Don’t Be Silent #9 Link Back To Your Own Site #10 Repeat Your Posts Do you have any other tips or techniques that can help us achieve social influence? If you do, I’d love to hear about them and share them with our community. You can share your tips and techniques by email us at studio@mediaonq.com I hope that you found this information useful. If you did, please subscribe on iTunes, share it with a friend and leave us a review as this helps spread the message out to others. Join me next time where we’ll continue to discuss a variety of digital media branding and marketing techniques to help you compete in today’s web economy. Until next time, I’m Carlos Quintero. Thank you for listening.
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