Influencer Marketing Archives - The Social Media Advisor

February 15, 2023
Blog, Brand Storytelling, Content Marketing, Relationship Marketing, Social Engagement, Social Media Strategy, Video in Social Media

Influencing the Culture of Your Social Media Followers

Social media is an excellent tool for demonstrating a positive company culture, grabbing the attention of your ideal clients, and attracting and retaining talent. The following tips will help you use social media to demonstrate your company culture and co-create your social media experience with your audience!

Be Transparent

It’s a well known fact that most social media accounts aren’t being managed by the business owner. Or that the posts are being scheduled in advance. And while both of these means of outsourcing can be a great thing for small business owners, it’s important to do this the right way. Your audience needs to know you are there for them. That who you say you are and who you actually are align. That you’ll be there for them if/when they comment and engage. If you want to build trust with your followers, it starts with your authentic presence. You don’t need to show you audience everything about your life, but letting them in here and there will showcase that you are a real person, with real feelings, looking to make a big impact on the world – and they’ll love you for it!

Create Culture-Lead Content

People will be drawn to your online persona based on your content. The type of content you create will have a direct correlation on who follows you and how they engage with your posts. Each post should be designed and each caption written in a strategic manner. Begin by asking these questions about your content:

How do you want the viewer to feel?
What transformational impact are you delivering with this post?
What action do you want the viewer to take after seeing your content?

If you want a highly engaged audience culture, you’ll have to focus on encouraging your audience to respond, reply, and share your post. This isn’t easy. Often simply asking can work but not all the time. You’ll want to create excitement and interest to stop the mindless scrolling and get people to interact with your work.

Connect

One of the best ways to lead the social media culture of your online presence is to be present. If you can schedule time to have live conversations, Q&A events, educational videos where people can comment, ask questions, and engage in conversation with you in real time – they will start to feel truly invested in what you are building. They’ll feel connected with you and your brand. Schedule times to show up and just talk to your people. Yes, there will be trolls but those are easy to block, delete, or ignore. Your target audience will be there too and that is an opportunity worth showing up for!

Anyone can build a Social Media Page, but do they know how to build it correctly with the right social media marketing story and strategy for business, the right keywords and really target your ideal client? We build brands, write searchable copy for your profiles and develop strategies to expand your reach and build relationships using solid Social Media Marketing techniques. Since 2008, our team has provided support to clients Nationwide in online marketing. Find out more at our website.

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Hollie Clere of The Social Media Advisor is a “#BeAwesome” Developer, Social Media, Brand Builder, Content Manager, Trainer and Author in LinkedIn, Facebook, Blog, Google+, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, and the tools to manage them.

Click here for Social Media Training, Speaking and Strategy Consultations.

December 13, 2020
Brand Storytelling

Can Your Customers Make You an Influencer on Social Media?

Not only can your customers build your influence online, your social proof and online presence means very little until your audience begins to show up for you and shares your content on their own feeds and with their own followers.

What are some things you can do to convert your followers from people who simply like your posts into brand advocates who champion your brand often?

Content That Inspires

Brands that find success on social media incorporate and promote audience participation. It doesn’t have to be every day, but coming up with something weekly that encourages social engagement, interaction, and participation are super impactful for businesses online.

Posting content just to remain consistent has its place but really growing an audience requires engaging content that motivates people to interact. Pay attention to previous content you’ve shared that has done well and evaluate what aspect of that post made it so appealing? What encouraged people to engage? If you don’t have any content, check out other profiles online and pay attention to what does well.

Encouraging Engagement

If you want more people to see the content that you’ve created, you have to get creative about sparking conversations and interacting with people on your social media channels. For example, on Facebook, the first 30 minutes of a post are crucial. The more people that like, comment, and share your post in that time will ignite the algorithm to show that content in more feeds. As your engagement on that post grows, so does that content’s reach in your audience. So, if you know that a great post goes live at 9:30 a.m., it makes sense to be available and present – responding to comments and talking to your audience. This is the path to building an engaged audience and becoming an influencer online (and it doesn’t require that you have to be present 100% of the time).

Building Brand Loyalty

The whole purpose of marketing is to get in front of people so they will consider purchasing your products or services, right? The path to purchase starts and ends with trust. Your audience needs to trust you before they are willing to do business with you. Here are some marketing activities that build trust with your audience:

Consistency – Showing up online often and setting expectations for when you will be available.
Community – What are you doing to build a community around your audience – allowing them to connect with you directly but also benefit from interacting with each other?
Generosity – What are you doing to be generous with your time and your expertise? How are you serving your audience?
Authority / Credibility – What are you doing to improve your online credibility so that when someone does a search on you they can easily and quickly see that you are a trusted expert in your field?

If it seems like a lot of work to become an online influencer and expand your reach online, that’s because it is. If becoming an influencer was easy, everyone would be doing it and would find success right now. The first step to online success of any kind is finding and growing your audience. These recommendations will help you create more content that gains attention, grows awareness of your brand, and builds trust with your audience.

If you are using social media, you are probably only engaging with pages that share relatable content. Are you wanting to define your story and build a long term relationship with a loyal audience that finds YOUR content enjoyable and relatable? Let’s do a Discovery Session to see which Social Media Advisor programs best fit your needs.

Be sure to Follow us and Let’s Engage!

Hollie Clere of The Social Media Advisor is a “#BeAwesome” Developer, Social Media, Brand Builder, Content Manager, Trainer and Author in LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Blog, Google+, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, and the tools to manage them.

Click here for Social Media Training, Speaking and Strategy Consultations.

December 6, 2020
Brand Storytelling

Are You an Influencer With Your Brand?

When you think of an influencer you may be imagining an individual that spends their time and online presence promoting the products of other companies – in exchange for free merchandise or paid sponsorships/endorsements. This is the way influencers are depicted because it’s proven to be a successful strategy for social media folks who’ve been able to build an audience around their chosen interests or niche.

However, as influencers have grown in popularity, many marketers have discovered that any brand can present themselves as an influencer in their industry. Many of these businesses are considered micro-influencers and while they are promoting their own products or services, they are also growing their audience and influencing their followers.

The question we are asking you today is… are you simply posting about your business or are you positioning yourself as an influencer with your social media marketing?

Creating the Content

When you sit down to create content for your business to post on social media, what’s your mindset? Are you focused on creating content that converts to sales OR are you creating content to intentionally connect with and nurture your audience?

This is really the first step when it comes to positioning yourself as a credible source, expert, authority, or influencer. Businesses who approach content creation from the mindset of generously showing up and helping their audience are more likely to become influencers than brands who spend the bulk of their time attempting to convert cold leads into warm ones.

The real trick to this is: when influencers show up for their audience in a generous way they discover more success when selling their products and services than those who do not.

You Define the Culture

As an influencer in your industry, you are setting the culture – the expectation – for what people can expect when they follow your brand. Newer companies often forget about the culture they are creating when they show up but there’s power and impact in being intentional about the type of environment you are creating for your audience. Also, truly successful brand influencers are creating a culture that is authentic to them and doesn’t mirror or copy any of their competitors. People are drawn to something original, unique, and real. Create a culture that is appealing to your ideal client so when they do find you, they are excited about sticking around.

Setting the Stage for Social Engagement

If you are going to build your brand on social media, please don’t make the mistake of posting content and then disappearing. This is more common, even today, than ever before. Either a brand doesn’t understand the commitment necessary when building out a social media platform or they’ve given up and abandoned their online channels leading to an influx of businesses with zero presence online. If you want your audience to show up and engage with your content, your presence is essential! People are savvy and they can tell if you are absent when it comes to your online marketing.

A consistent, welcoming, engaging presence that commits to responding to the audience and being available speaks volumes. If you want an audience to commit to being there for you, you must first show up for them. Your followers need to be able to quickly uncover when you will show up, how often you show up, and where they can find you so they can make it a priority to be there for the brand.

Much of transitioning from a business who uses social media marketing to becoming an influencer has to do with the mindset, approach, and strategy for the content you create and share on your social media channels. Be there for your people and they’ll show up for you.

Be sure to Follow us and Let’s Engage!

Click here for Social Media Training, Speaking and Strategy Consultations.

June 7, 2020
Social Media Marketing

How to Become an Influencer in Your Industry Using Social Media

My guess is there are at least a couple of people or businesses you follow online and look forward to when they go live, post content, or schedule times to connect with their audience. It could be someone as big as Oprah or a small, local business where you enjoy spending time or shopping. Whether it’s a coach, an expert, an entertainer, a podcaster, or an author – we all have a list of people we enjoy following and connecting with online. These individuals are called influencers and influencer marketing can be a highly profitable model for your business.

What is an Influencer?

Influencer is a popular term, basically labeling you as the expert that people think of first, in your industry. As an influencer, your audience will look to you for tips, ideas, value-added education, and connection. They will rely on you to provide timely support, engaging responsiveness, and thought leadership in your field. It used to be that becoming an influencer required that you had hundreds of thousands of followers, but it turns out now that even a small audience works if they are engaged and look forward to your online presence.

Social Media as a Gateway to Influence

One of the major reasons that digital marketing is so popular is because, in an online space, the potential for audience growth is boundless. In-person networking can be profitable but it will never scale the way a successful online marketing campaign can. Since online influence is so much about connecting with people, social media marketing is the ideal tool for building influence and growing a massive audience. People are already on social! You don’t have to convince them to sign up or join, they are there already. Billions of people log into social media platforms every day. This means the potential to use social media as a platform for your message is immense. The challenges lie in getting the attention of your audience and convincing them you are someone worth following.

Courageously Consistent

Influencer marketing is incredibly successful and there are multiple streams of income that may develop from getting that bigger audience, outside of your normal products and services. Everything from affiliate marketing to sponsorships to membership groups opens up when your audience expands.

However, to become an influencer on social media, you are going to have to commit to two extremely important efforts… consistency and presence. To keep your audience engaged, and to maintain their trust, you have to be consistent. Many small business owners have good intentions but just aren’t making their social media a priority on a consistent basis. If you promise your audience that you are going to go live every Tuesday at noon… well, that’s exactly what you have to do. When building influence online, the people who follow you will notice when you don’t show up. Do that enough, and you’ll lose them.

The Power of Presence

The second commitment you’ll need to make is to be present. Social media marketing is not a post it and come back in a week type of project. This is especially true for business owners trying to build their audience and influence online. The more present you can be, even when your audience is small, the more loyalty you will earn in return. This doesn’t mean you have to be tuned in 24/7. Schedule 15 or 30 minutes a day to engage with other people online and start/participate in conversations. That will go a long way in building your influence and social proof.

Influencer marketing isn’t for everyone. It does take a certain level of passion for creating and building relationships online to be a successful influencer. You can find success with social media marketing without making becoming an influencer an end goal. Some super successful businesses on social may find that they stumble into becoming an influencer just due to the size and engagement of their audience.

As a social media user, I bet you have noticed that people engage more with social media content when they relate to the post or resonate with the message. As a small business, are you ready to define your story and build a long-term relationship with a loyal audience? Sign up for a Discovery Session to see which social media marketing programs best fit your needs.

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Can Your Customers Make You an Influencer on Social Media?

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