If you are working on building your social influence, you may think you have tried everything under the sun to build your personal brand and following. You have probably tried a lot of things, but maybe there are a few small ideas that are really so simple you simply skipped right over them. Let’s review some insider tips on growing your social media presence, which in turn bolsters your social influence.
Insider Tips to Growing Social Influence
- Get really personal
We all know that the more personal we can be with our audience, the more effectively our personal branding is received. But just how true is this, and what exactly does “get really personal” mean?
This is going to be different for everyone.
We all have a threshold for what is personal and and for our boundaries of public sharing. That said, when you can push just a little past your personal comfort zone you might find the influencer sweet spot. Take Tara Milhem, for example, a now popular lifestyle/ travel/ food blogger I had the opportunity to interview this past week. During the interview she revealed that although she had been blogging for 4 yrs., only this past May did her following really pick up and skyrocket to over 61k on Instagram. Tara said that her strong following grew as a result of posting images of herself after nearly 3 yrs. of only food and other posts. Prior to that, no one knew what she looked like. Plus her content turned more personal which was a huge draw for people.
Then there’s the example of an 18 year old fitness model influencer from New Zealand, Abbey Jessop, whose audience blew up over spring of last year (she explained during my interview with her, to be released next week). She attributes the growth of her following and her influence to the fact that she started training for a fitness competition and posting her progress, and noted that very few young people like her are openly doing that.
What is your edge, and what will your personal story be? Is it compelling enough to draw huge amounts of influence?
- Go for gold
A great tip Jessop suggested was to consider people in your similar industry or vertical that you admire tremendously. Follow them, see what they do, how they do it, and aim to build your personal brand better than them. Don’t just find one person you look up to, pick a few and figure out your unique angle. Social media and influencing is no different than competing in the Olympics in a sense – the training takes many years, an unprecedented amount of discipline, endurance, and dedication, and your aim to go for gold.
- Network like a boss
As an influencer you happen to know how influencers’ minds work. You love it when people reach out to you to collaborate on content, to do an interview with you, to invite you to a live event, to thank you for inspiring them (aka they feed your ego, in a sense). Use the mind of an influencer to your advantage to network with other, more popular influencers, who are in a position to give you exposure to their audiences.
That might mean you join or even create your own Facebook group for “Fashion Influencers”, or a Twitter party with influencers from your vertical. Be creative and think of some way to get other influencers excited about sharing one another’s content with their own audiences so you can help each other grow.
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