Audio only
Developing a Following
Facilitated by Brandon Weekes
Intro
- Get your voice out there—share your message.
- What’s your purpose? What are you trying to achieve?
- Sometimes you need to ask these questions several times to understand your core purposes.
- If you want to be successful, you need to define your purpose in terms of goals and expectations (interaction, revenue, etc.).
- Research is an ongoing step.
- Target audience.
- Product development.
- What’s trending.
- Which key words/hashtags are being used.
- We need to understand the audience members enough to engage them.
- Need data to do that.
- Key performance indicators
- Are you reaching qualified people?
- Are you engaging with qualified people?
- How many start interacting with you/become customers?
- All social media platforms contain this type of data.
- Need to know more than how many Likes.
- Number of clicks, shares, mentions, comments, profile visits.
- Sign up for Google alerts.
- Reach doesn’t mean people even saw your post. But reach is still beneficial for increasing audience size. Make sure you’ve defined your reach before you use ads to increase reach.
- Understand website traffic.
- Use Google Analytics.
- AdWords is a powerful tool.
- Type in keyword to start with and have the tool analyze your site. You won’t be charged for AdWords unless you buy an ad.
- Will identify what topics it thinks your site is about. Use it to make sure your site is saying what you want it to say.
- Will provide keywords that seem relevant to your content and that you might want to focus on in your site.
- Make your content remark-able: content people want to share.
- Don’t worry about starting with a small audience. When your content is sharable, your audience will expand.
- Create audience personas (descriptions of your target audience members). Think about these personas when creating content. To build personas, look at data you’ve tracked (via free Domo tool, Excel spreadsheet, etc.).
- Be consistent in how frequently you post content. Use posting calendar and then a program that will automatically post for you (e.g., HootSuite).
Final Thoughts
- Make content that’s easy to find.
- Build a bigger story. (Give a large thing in bite-size chunks, or post an entire article and highlight pieces later.)
- Niche your marketing.
- Focus down: Focus on the 10 to get to 1 million followers.