Why Social Media is Essential To Your Brand
- By Beth Naffziger
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- 24 Aug, 2018
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Below are some strategies to help you make sense of the social media circus.
A good place to get started is to recognize that the social media landscape can be overwhelming. Without some outside help or a strategy, your life will or has already become unmanageable.
You’ve seen those guys pool-side with their three handheld devices. They’re responding to and retweeting tweets while updating their Instagram feed and advertising their upcoming live podcast on Facebook. They don’t look happy.
Plus, you can see that they are so busy spraying themselves all over the social media landscape that they forgot to apply sunscreen. They don’t even know they’re burning. You cringe and think to yourself; I need help building a social media strategy.
They’re handing you a microphone, a megaphone, a whistle, a box to stand on, a hat that flashes red each time you speak, and a bunch of other gadgets. They say, “Be heard over the chatter! Use my tools!”.
Then you look around and see that everyone else has the same tools. In fact, they’re all using them. The guests are covering their ears. Some are trying to run away from the dinner...others look irritated.
If you believe in yourself (or your company or your brand), you’re going to have to figure this out. Your message is important and you want to get your message out. Your brand is attractive and you want people to know it. More importantly, you want to stay sane in the process without going deaf yourself.
Tip #1: Know Thyself
Very likely, when you started down the path of building a business, self-publishing your first book, striking out on your own, looking for a new career path — you spent a significant amount of time figuring out why you wanted to do this. Maybe you developed a purpose, mission, or vision statement. You believed in yourself enough to take this risk.
Right now, write down.
- Why you wanted to do this
- What or whom you wanted to draw into your life
- Why you want to attract them
Be as specific as you can. If you wanted to develop a home organizing business because you find joy in helping people find calm and peace in their homes, then you’ll want to bring that concept to your social media strategy. If you’re going to attract 18-year-old females who are interested in feminism, or 57-year-old executives in the auto-manufacturing sector, that will matter.
This list will help you begin choosing the right platform.
Tip 2: Choose the right platform
If you’re trying to build your brand as a communications specialist for philanthropic organizations, your potential clients won’t likely be utilizing Snapchat or Tumblr.
If you haven’t done so already, acquaint yourself with the current social media landscape. It pays to know which demographic is using which platform. Here’s why:
Maybe you’re an emerging Young Adult (YA) fiction writer. You love your work because you empathize with teenagers. You remember the awkwardness of those years, the struggles. You like being able to speak to your younger self. You want to be able to tell her it’ll be okay. That’s why you write.
In the meantime, you need to reach potential readers. Mostly they’ll be young-ish. Are they going to be on Linkedin? They're not. Facebook? Probably not there either.
I have a friend who has won multiple awards as a YA writer and has (finally) hit the motherlode with repeating contracts with HarperCollins. She practices authentic brand development.
She deleted her Facebook account. None of her potential readers or peers were using it. She wanted to use her energy to write. She did the same with Twitter. She used the extra time and energy to amp up her Tumblr posts, expand her podcast, and make current her Instagram page.
The point is, she’s making savvy, brand-boosting and identify-amplifying choices. She’s choosing the right platforms for her needs and her audience and she’s also making choices that align with her own emotional hard-wiring.That’s the definition of strategic.
Tip 3: Engagement is key
Don’t make the mistake of using social media tools with a Web 1.0 mindset. Web 1.0 was that old world where you created a static web page, updated the content occasionally, and spoke to the world like a guy in a lecture hall with half-moon glasses on your face.
A Web 2.0 world, on the other hand, is participatory. Users expect to generate content, and they are supposed to generate content. Clients and consumers expect to participate in the boosting of your identity. They want to engage with you as you’re shaping your identity. Clients and consumers expect to be in conversation with you.
Don’t be like the person who posts something on Facebook or tags someone and then walks away. Friends respond. They engage in the conversation.
As you’re boosting your brand, you cannot walk away from conversations you’ve started. Such activity feels disingenuous to your audience. Not staying engaged also squanders a remarkable opportunity.Your social media following is an essential element to building your brand.
The thing is...
There is no universal perfect plan for using social media. There is the plan that is right for you, right for your life. Stay tuned for my follow on article outlining which social media platform is best for you! We’ll step through each one so you will be able to select the right platform for your business.
You’ve got so much to do, what with building the business and brand. It’s okay to ask for help. It’s okay to reach out to someone who does this for a living to help you discover your goals, target audience, and life-affirming choices.
I’m happy to sit down with you and create a strategy that is manageable and effective. Together we can build a strategy that will free you up so you can be poolside, sunscreen applied, enjoying the sun and not scrambling to manage a chaotic or ineffective social media portfolio.
Contact Me to get started!
The year was, yeah, you don’t need to know that, and my college internship was as a promotions coordinator at a now-debunked radio station in Minneapolis. Now I can imagine you are reading this thinking, you lucky girl, I bet that was fun! If you consider driving a massive van around town, filled with crap and a million empty cups, going to events in weird places, and hauling things around, well, then yes, I was lucky. Now there were some perks. I met a few celebrities and did taste what it meant to be an event coordinator, which I wanted to do after school. It was an unpaid position, but I did get college credits for it, and more importantly, it was a job close to what I wanted to do, in the market I wanted to be in.
This experience was so valuable, even if at one event I had to sit at a used car dealership for a live remote or haul hair dryers in the Mall of America. It taught me responsibility, what an office setting is like, and that work is well, just that work. But most importantly, it helped me meet connections and get my first real career job when I graduated from college.
Forbes quotes a study that says a college graduate and working at a paid internship shows, 60% of the time, that internship will turn into a job offer.
If you are a parent of a college-age kid, have you asked them about their internship plans? If you are a college kid reading this, what is your plan? Have you started applying? Internships bring real-world experiences and help fill up a resume. Ideally, look for a paid internship and one that t college credits can be used to. Make sure to checked in with the career services department to understand credits and look for opportunities with alumni. Can you make any introduction to anyone in your network to see what openings they have? Ensure you or your student knows what areas they want to work in, which helps reach out to your network. The more specific you can be, the better.
Indeed lists of their top 12 reasons internships are beneficial. To get these beneficial internships, a quality resume is necessary. Do you have a resume that will stand out? Parents, does your child have one?
Make sure the resume is:
- Free of errors
- Shows a little personality
- Clearly articulates their jobs and activities, Captain of the golf team, make sure to list that!
- The resume should highlight the course load, any employment, volunteer positions, and collegiate sports.
If you are ready to start applying for internships, reach out to beth@naffbranding.com for a review and feedback for $49. Let’s tell your story and get you that first job.
Stay tuned for part two of this series as I discuss why you need to hire interns.
It’s the holiday season. For some, it means putting up decorations, fretting about family coming over, more holly, more jolly and more obligations. It means that you will be out and about more. Are already dreading your partner's company holiday party? Let’s think differently about the holidays. Focus on your career strategy, don’t focus on how many more calories you are going to eat.
In today’s modern digital world, very few job seekers have the opportunity to physically bring a resume to a potential employer. Gone are the days of being able to take advantage of that initial face-to-face interaction with a smile, a handshake, and a witty anecdote.
Instead, you upload your resume and hope like bloody heck that it will make it past a gatekeeper and into the hands of someone who is in a position to hire you. I am here to help. I can give you advice and tips to improve your resume and get past the gatekeeper. Contact me for help in making your resume stand out and be the best that it can be.
The truth is, you likely have about one minute of someone’s attention once your resume lands in front of them, so make it count. With all you have to think about as you craft your resume, don’t lose sight of the small details that matter. Little things like the proper use of punctuation and capital letters are critical in this 60-second window. Don’t miss out on a job opportunity just because YOU COULDN’T CAPITALIZE PROPERLY. (Like that. Don’t do that.)
