Social media is an ever-changing landscape, and it can be challenging to determine how to leverage these platforms to help grow your business. We sat down with supplier partner, PromoKitchen Chef and social media all-star Charity Gibson to get her best practices for building a social media presence. Here are three key takeaways from our conversation.
1. Building an audience starts with building a good, authentic story.
“I think building your audience first starts with building a good story and ensuring that your content is solid first. You have to have a foundation, and then start bringing people on. It can be discouraging at first, because you’re not getting a ton of attraction and engagement while the house is being built, but that will do two things. It’s going to:
- Make sure that when people show up, they stay and
- ensure that the community you build is organic and engaged.
There’s something to be said about viral content. It goes viral because it’s good content. People are human and they like to engage with content that relates to them and makes them emote in some type of way and that’s important.
A key approach is to share your content and ask a question. Give people an opportunity to interact with you! Make the people that are watching part of your story. It’s important to have consistency, not simply in the amount of content you share, but in the quality of the content you share. If something is consistently boring, it doesn’t matter how often or when you post. It’s better to post less frequently and have great content every time.”
2. Social media is as much of a listening tool as it is a broadcasting tool.
“It all comes down to knowing your clients and where they live online. What platforms are they engaging on? What private groups are they a part of? The magic of social media is that you can double down on getting into those niches so that your message spreads farther faster. Join private Facebook groups, and find out which Instagram hashtags your audience interacts with.
Something that people often think about social media is that it’s a broadcast tool, and it is, but you could have a social media profile and never post anything, and social media could still be a very successful tool for you. More than it’s a broadcasting tool, it’s a listening tool. Do you know where your buyers are hanging out on the internet? Do you know what they’re posting?
For instance, let’s say your client posted a picture of their favorite book. Instead of sending them a promotional product, you can send them a copy of the author’s latest book and say, “Hey, I saw on your Instagram that you love this author, I do too. Here’s something I thought you’d enjoy.
“There’s something magical about using the information we’re getting from social media—we have access to more information than any lead list can ever get us. Target your 100 dream clients and use social media to gather intelligent data and then make your move. It’s one thing to hear, it’s another thing to act, and I can guarantee you that 99.999% of your competitors aren’t using this information to their advantage in a very authentic way. Be the 0.001%.”
3. Maximize your content across platforms
“Use your content across all platforms—keep it simple! Especially in the beginning, it’s a great place to start. As you learn more, you can do different things. One of the things I like to do is post content to Instagram in the morning and let it post to Facebook as well if it makes sense, and from there, I take the content and post it in reverse order on LinkedIn and Twitter. That way, your followers aren’t seeing the same exact thing all day long, but a variety of different content across different days on different platforms.”
Thanks for your time, Charity!
