5 Tips to Help You Build Stronger Social Media Presence
Your audience is like a garden. You have to tend to it, nurture it and grow strong roots
A lot of professionals cringe at the idea of putting energy into social media. Unfortunately there also seems to be an age gap between who’s active and who is not when it comes to having an appreciation for the power of social media.
I tend to fit right inside of a middle space of Social Media, where people older than me don’t value it while people younger than me see it as everything.
It’s unfortunate that people in my age group tend to be largely inept at how to use social media.
My friends were always like, “I saw your post on social media. It was cool.” So you didn’t interact with it at all? No likes, comments, shares… nothing. This is the worst. Dealing with a 40+ year old audience sucks. They don’t know how viral works and most spend very little time on social media interacting.
Social media rewards creators for interactions. No interactions means your post must not be useful or interesting. This is something younger people have down. So the first thing you need to do is target a younger audience for action, while also speaking to your target market, that can afford your services.
Let’s start with how we can understand Instagram engagement basics. We’ll save TikTok and Linkedin for another day. And let me tell you… If you haven’t realized Facebook is dead, relegated to the Boomer status of Classmates.com then you’re way behind.
So here goes. Instagram engagement activities work like this.
Likes: doesn’t mean much. It’s a cool number. Some people judge you Black Mirror style off the number of Likes a post has. But Instagram allows you to hide likes, so it’s clear that it doesn’t really value them and is more of a psychological element.
Shares: these are super important. This signals that your post is something people want others to see. That means a lot and contributes heavily towards getting you in front of other eyeballs.
Saves: these are internal. It means someone valued the content and might want to revisit it later. They rarely ever do. But it still signals that your content was save-worthy. My thoughts on this and something I tell my audience is “if it’s save-worthy it’s share-worthy”. Stop being a hoarder to yourself and share my shit!
Comments: Comments trigger engagement on a post. It signals that people are talking about your content. Unfortunately, people think that leaving emojis is enough to engage with your content, but real comments and statements that are 5 plus words give you way more of a boost than a simple fire emoji.
With these things in mind, how can we build a better social media audience?
1. Prioritize Saves:
In order to prioritize saves you have to make content that is save-worthy. What does content that’s worth saving look like?
Informative content. Make sure your content is something that is informative and gives information to people. There’s an old adage known is “givers gain” and that’s where you receive in return over time from all that you give out freely of yourself.