The Future of The Micro vs. Mega Influencer – Why User Generated Content is Poised to Win for Businesses

Posted in Guest Post, Marketing, Social Media by marissapick

Guest Post from Matt Gibbs, Co-founder and CMO of UPshow

Millennials and GenZ might be the curated selfie generation, but a shift is happening, and businesses are taking notice. The cultural pendulum is swaying away from brand-sponsored mega-influencer-celebrity-endorsed posts to organic content that’s generated by people you know, or even those you feel like you know. Capturing more natural moments and promoting them within a more intimate circle of followers versus big ‘on the main stage’ posts is what’s now in-vogue. An industry 2018 Trust Barometer Report revealed that 60 percent of people no longer trusted social media and reported that immediate friends and family are better for recommendations than influencers.

That said, Kylie Jenner-esque paid posts aren’t going away, but they have become tarnished, and millennials and their younger counterparts are gravitating towards more natural interactions from those within their inner circle or for relatable micro-influencers. As a result, more brands are gravitating toward user-generated content to increase engagement and build trust and community.

According to a study, 56 percent of consumers are more likely to buy a product that they’ve seen in real-life images posted by another consumer – a shift away from the rainbow-colored preplanned photos that dominated platforms like Instagram in late 2017.

UPshow, the company I co-founded, is a social TV platform that companies such as Crunch Fitness, Cheddar’s Scratch Kitchen and ATI Physical Therapy are using to transform their customers into immediate influencers. The platform entices customers to post on social media by projecting them on big screens in-venue. As a result, friends and family, also see and are often influenced by the posts. The content and choice to participate is totally in the hands of the consumer.

Other companies also provide services that cater to this trend, such as Guest Crew and Woobox. Their platforms harness user-generated content and boost it organically. Guest Crew leverages a community of organically generated influencers and Woobox turns user-generated content into contests. Filtergrade uses professional photo grade filters (such as Adobe Lightroom presets) to help brands generate more professional quality shareable images that are unique and micro-influencers can use them too to make their posts mimic celebrity influencer quality.

It’s a new era for user-generated content and if brands want to appeal to younger audiences, such as millennials and GenZ, they need to embrace the social media trends that will improve their engagement rates by putting the power in the hands of the consumer in a genuine way.

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Matt Gibbs is co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer of UPshow, a consumer engagement platform that transforms a business’s existing TVs into its top marketing assets. Gibbs is responsible for branding, lead generation and advertising for the

company. Gibbs is a genuine entrepreneur and trailblazer in digital media with deep roots in the Chicago start-up community. Along with college friend and UPshow CEOAdam Hirsen, Gibbs co-founded SparkReel in 2011. SparkReel created a more efficient way for friends and family to share mobile videos online and evolved into a social media agency that created user-generated content campaigns for Verizon, Oreo, Condé Nast, Apartments.com, among others. UPshow was born out of SparkReel when customers wanted social media engagement screens at events. Gibbs graduated from Miami University of Ohio and resides in Chicago, IL with his wife, two children and corgi.

13Feb2019

10 SIMPLE & EFFECTIVE THINGS TO TRY WITHIN SOCIAL MEDIA THIS YEAR FOR ONGOING SUCCESS

Posted in Guest Post, Marketing, Social Media by marissapick

I’m thrilled to share a post from one of my oldest colleaguesDhariana Lozano. I’ve worked with Dhariana for over ten years and she has grown to be one of the most influential social media and digital marketers within the industry. She has setup her own agency Supremacy Marketing and often published posts on her blog as well as many industry channels.

Each week Dhariana runs a segment known as #CoffeeWithDhari on her Instagram live stream. Within the livestream she promised her viewers a list of simple and effective things to try on social media within 2019. You can read the below repurposed post below or by visiting her blog as well.

10 Simple & Effective New Things to Try on Social Media in 2019 for Success

Ephemeral content

I think disappearing content or content that is only temporarily available will be big in 2019. It will give followers an extra reason to follow your brand on the particular social media network you’re publishing this kind of content on so they don’t miss out. We’ll discuss a few of these content forms in this post.

Live videos

Live videos will not slow down in social media in 2019 and tie into ephemeral content forms we just talked about. Live videos really let your followers see more of who your brand is behind the scenes. Their unscripted nature add a different element that can contrast a curated feed. They are a great way to “humanize” you brand and drive live engagement with your audience. Live videos can also be repurposed for content later on.

Videos/Vertical video

Speaking of videos, I think vertical videos will become more popular on social media in 2019. We naturally hold our phones vertically and with the popularity of Instagram Stories and the introduction of IGTV I think there might be more of a shift to create vertical content.

Instagram stories

Keep going with those Instagram Stories! I don’t know about you but I’m spending a good amount of time scrolling through stories as opposed to going to the accounts of the people or brands that I follow. While we’re chatting about Instagram stories I think you should make use of the countdown sticker. I just had to bring this one up because I love! It’s a great way to remind people of what’s happening. I’ve been using them to remind my followers of my weekly #CoffeeWithDhari live story segment.

A little bonus here: I think giving Facebook Stories a shot may be worth it. You can repurpose your Instagram Stories.

Influencer marketing (mainly micro influencers)

The influencer marketing world is shifting. I think in 2019 more focus will be placed on micro-influencers. Micro influencers are people with smaller followings (think 10k). These influencers may have a more engaged audience than some of the bigger guys.

Showing more personality

Getting more personal will be a differentiating factor for brands on social media in 2019. In the crowded space of social media marketing, being laser focused will yield more results than trying to appeal to the masses. I predict brands will continue to get personal and get behind specific social and even political causes. Not to0 long ago brands wouldn’t touch issues like this – so it’s refreshing to see the turn around. Just like in life, your personality will attract the people you’re friends with. Showing more personality is also helpful in creating more engaging content on social media.

The death of vanity metrics

I predict (and hope) that 2019 will bring the end of the concentration of vanity metrics on social media marketing. I mentioned this a little in my latest #CoffeeWithDhari session. In the new year I think there will be a stronger emphasis on engagement as opposed to paying attention to follower numbers. Likes may even be weighed more lightly. This is because with the decline in reach, making the most out of the audience you have, and reaching more of the audience you already have will have a bigger impact than just simply gathering likes.

Chatbots, 1-1 messaging

Have you interacted with a chat bot yet? The potential for brands using chatbots is immense. I ordered some items online and was able to get tracking info and updates right on Facebook Messenger. This should be a great aid to customer service. Definitely something to think about going into the new year.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn has been an all time favorite of mine. I think people and brands alike are starting to see the importance and potential of LinkedIn. The originators of the Groups feature – LinkedIn has been a place to gain super targeted and high value leads. LinkedIn has been revamping itself in the past few years and I think more people will be exploring the possibilities on this network in 2019.

Social media ads

Last but not least, and somewhat unfortunately, I think social media ads will be big in 2019. With all the saturation going on, the only way to break through may be to pay to play.

Social media marketing is an ever changing landscape. Just like you change over time, social media changes from day to day. 2018 has been filled with so many new features and innovations and I can’t wait to see where we will go in 2019. No matter what changes, just know that one thing will not – and that is the power of a strong social media strategy. I am looking forward to relaunching Building Your Brand On Social Media in early 2019! For now you can keep track of your own social strategy with my handy social media strategy checklist.

To view the full article please visit Dhariana’s Blog and subscribe today to receive her notifications. Leave a comment and let me know if you have any recommendations of what you’re looking to try within 2019.

5Sep2018

How to drive traffic through Instagram & Pinterest without spending large amounts of money

Posted in Guest Post, Marketing, Social Media by marissapick

Often at conferences I discuss the power of visual social media. We’re living during a social media revolution and as Aristotle stated well before social media existed, “There can be no words without pictures.”

The human brain process images 60,000 times quicker than text (Click to Tweet) and 59% of executives would rather watch video than read text (Click to Tweet). Having a visual social media marketing strategy is essential and in order to cut through the noise and succeed we MUST take advantage of specific strategies, tools, tactics and tips to have a competitive edge.

Visual media has always trumped the written word when it comes to winning people’s short term attention. This guest post is from Vin Clancy who recently launched his new book Ace The Game: The 100 best growth hacks in the world right now” which is a can’t miss book this year. You can learn more about Vin by visiting his website or blog and joining his growth club to receive strategies and tips to get ahead as a marketer. I found his tips to be very helpful in leveraging Pinterest and Instagram to generate traffic and I hope you’ll find it valuable as well, enjoy!

How to drive traffic through Instagram & Pinterest without spending large amounts of money

Pinterest and Instagram are two seriously powerful platforms.

Visual media has always trumped the written word when it comes to winning people’s short term attention.

Pinterest

Despite mainstream opinion, Pinterest is no longer just a site for the female, mom demographic.

It’s a pool of regularly engaged traffic that is just ripe for the taking.

In fact, it is the 2nd biggest referrer of traffic online (after Facebook)

First you need to set up a profile with a niche in mind.

Make it fairly general to your niche, then use various boards to hyper target your audience.

Use IFTTT and deploy the “Repost from Instagram To Pinterest” feature (good Instagram content translates good Pinterest content)

Make your profile look awesome and schedule 20+ pins a day of viral content that has done well on Instagram (use non-copyright images without logos)

Use software like followinglike to auto follow people who would be interested in your product/service and let it run.

A word of warning though, this is against Pinterests terms and conditions so proceed with caution. Use proxies if you’re handing it to an intern and be conservative with the amount of people you follow/unfollow in a day.

Once you start seeing a spike in traffic work out which pins are performing the best then make your own that direct directly to your blog/website.

Using this method it’s not uncommon to see anywhere between 10k-250k shares!

If things aren’t going right straight away here’s a few things you need to do.

1) Do more research into what successful Pinterest accounts are doing

Use the search function to stalk influencer accounts and just copy what they’re doing
Find board name inspiration by searching boards
Look at the accounts that have 5000+ followers and reverse engineer

2) Optimise your profile

Make sure your account name as relevant keywords
Do the same to your description
Make sure you have 10-20 boards in your niche. Be hyper focussed.
Fill your board description with keywords
Create unique covers for all your boards

3) Repost A LOT to see what works well

From my coaching classes to my private consulting clients, everyone is trying to optimise the very little traffic they’re getting
It’s extremely difficult to work out what works if you’re hardly getting any visitors. Work on reposting a lot of popular pins 30+ a day if that’s what it takes to see what gets the best traction. Then optimise from there.

4) Engagement automation

Keep following/unfollow until you reach 500+ followers
If you don’t have any followers no one is getting alerts when you’re reposting all this content, thus no one is sharing it
Follow the followers of your identified influencers (unfollow when you’re following 10k)

5) Content Seeding with group boards

Group boards are boards you can request to contribute to.
Joining means you can repin content to an existing audience
This can greatly increase your follower growth and decrease the amount of time it takes to work out which pin style is the most shareable.
Find group boards in your niche and follow the boards steps to become a contributor. This may be email, commenting on a specific post, sending them a DM etc.
See if your influencers are part of group boards, it’s a good place to start.

6) Identify Content That Resonates

Now comes the waiting game, to figure what works and what doesn’t takes time unfortunately. So be patient!
Once you get a gist of what’s working and what isn’t start posting less of the bad stuff and more of the good stuff

Once the ball gets rolling that’s when you start making your copycat Pinterest content with your logo, and then you can start directing the traffic to your landing pages or ecommerce stores (from there it’s up to your websites to convert the clickers!)

Instagram

Moving on now to the platform some of you may prefer, Instagram.

In this section I’m going to explain the simple hashtag ladder strategy that you can use to drive up followers and build an awesome account.

Now a lot of you may be thinking that this will be a huge secret that is safe guarded by big brands and influencers alike…

Well it’s not.

It’s actually hidden in plain sight!

You know those long lists of hashtags some people put in the first comment of their photos? Well if used properly these lists can draw in followers from outside of your current audience.

Hashtags make up one of two main discovery mechanics on the site (the second being the explore page)

Hashtags are the mechanic that anyone can nail from the start, making them great to focus on for small accounts.

Each post you put on instagram can have up to 30 hashtags (and you guessed it, we’re going to use all of them!)

So we need 30 hashtags, but which ones?

To break into the ‘popular’ section of any hashtag search result you need fast and massive engagement on your post.

If your account has a lot of followers, this is pretty simple (especially if they have notifications for your account on).

The trouble is a lot of you don’t have a lot of followers or even what is considered ‘great’ engagement (+5%) so you’re unlikely to rank on this page.

Example: Say you’ve got 5,000 followers, so a 5% engagement rate would be 250 people liking one of your photos. Using a classical hashtag strategy, that 250 likes is unlikely to get you to appear in the popular results for most of the hashtags you’re using, they’re just too competitive. For the tags you do rank in, you may be an extra 10–20 likes, but it’s not enough to get any crazy growth.

So you need to ladder your hashtags so that you rank for the easier ones first.

The likes you receive from the easy to rank hashtags will then allow you to rank for your second hashtag.

The likes you generate from this will help you rank for the third (and so on and so forth)

Now this won’t fire on all cylinders every time, so maybe think about deleting the posts that don’t quite as well.

But if you have 10 posts a day and perhaps 3 or 4 it the jackpot, then you’ll be in for a few follower spikes every day.

So how do you make these ladders?

I’d suggest that for an account below 10,000 followers, you want to find a range of RELEVANT hashtags (check the popular results to make sure there’s content similar to your in them) that have been used between 10,000 and 250,000 times.

You may even want to find multiple sets of 30 hashtags, each with a roughly even distribution of hashtag uses across this range, using different sets for different posts.

The key here is that your posts normally couldn’t rank in the popular results for the hashtags that have been used 250,000 times, but they could easily rank for those that have been used 10–20,000 times. So you get some engagement from those, which pushes you into the results for the 20–40,000 tags and so on.

Of course, the more you post (to a degree) and the better the content quality, the more success you’ll have. The key point here is that if you don’t have this hashtag ladder in place, it’s much more difficult, if not impossible to get any viral results from your Instagram posts.

What do you think of this guest post? Please leave a comment below or send me a tweet @marissapick.

17Jul2018

7 Predictions from Vin Clancy regarding the Future of Social Media

Posted in Guest Post, Marketing, Social Media by marissapick

On June 30, 2010, Mashable launched Social Media Day as a way to recognize and celebrate social media’s impact on global communication. And eight year’s later social media is now at the heart of all global communications plans and deeply integrated into many peoples daily routines and lives. With the constant changes to social media and new entrepreneurs being born everyday social media is the one component that all successful entrepreneurs, influencers and businesses have learn to understand.

Known for his cutting-edge growth hacks and genius business ideas Vin Clancy went from living on welfare in the U.K when he turned things around learning how to use the internet to make things go viral. He’s just launched his new book Ace The Game: The 100 best growth hacks in the world right now” which is a can’t miss book this year. You can learn more about Vin by visiting his website or blog and joining his growth club to receive strategies and tips to get ahead as a marketer.

The future of social media and how to know which social media platform is best to use for your brand or business

Envy,

That’s what a lot of you feel when you look at brands and influencers who generate huge amounts of traffic and sales from social media.

Don’t worry, I get it too.

Now a lot of these people are either: extremely talented, have a lot of money for ads, or have grinded their way to the top of the newsfeed. And I have the utmost respect for the vast majority of them. But saying that, there is another reason why these people/brands reached the summit of their game. It’s because they got there first.

Speed is the most valuable asset to have in this game and striking fast and hard is ideally the way to go about things. Over the past year a lot of people have asked me what the next big social platform is going to be.

Here are 7 of my predictions in regards to the future of social media.

Pinterest isn’t used to its potential and is seriously underrated for driving traffic to blogs, this won’t last forever.

With many people struggling to drive web traffic from Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn to their blog many people are beginning to give up.

Whilst I think people are seriously underating the importance of SEO, there are plenty of people I know who are KILLING IT with Pinterest. One of my ex-pupils generates 100,000 impressions a month using Pinterest a month for next to nothing.
I seriously wouldn’t underestimate this platform.

There are plenty of useful automation softwares for it IFTTT, followlike, tailwind. Use these to auto-pin content and follow/unfollow people at scale.

If you’ve got a blog or ecommerce store, and a pretty decent sales funnel, then I seriously would look at driving traffic there from Pinterest. Like I said, this won’t last forever.
As Facebook throttles more and more traffic to websites, SEO will make a big comeback.

Lots of people keep saying Facebook is killing the organic reach of pages. (I might be the first one to say this). It’s actually now been killed. Every post that a page sends out, that doesn’t have any money put behind it, and includes and external link gets seen by one, maybe even two people. What’s the point?

SEO is free (okay you might need to pay for some optimization tools, training or backlinks) but at it’s core optimizing blog posts for SEO is free.

So I reckon that more people at the bottom will be less inclined to dive into social media content marketing and more people will go back to perfecting the SEO for their articles/blog posts.

Want to get the attention of high-ticket prospects through social media? Don’t waste your time, use physical and lumpy mail. This will always be effective in my eyes.

People love receiving (cool) stuff in the mail. Do you ever get excited about a package arriving from Amazon? I know I do!  So if you can physically send something to someone, do it.

Physical mail has a 95%-100% pickup rate, especially if it’s something large like a box.  Tip: Call up the office of your prospect (influencer/CEO) and say to their assistant “we want to send x a free pair of shoes what is his/her size?” Then buy the high ticket prospect a nice pair of shoes but only send them one. Tell them in a nice letter “Now I’ve got my foot in the door, I’ll happily give you the other shoe if you agree to go for a coffee with me”

Very cheeky and everyone wants the other shoe.

4. Learn how to grow a Twitch account, this will conquer the earth in the next decade.

This platform will be huge in the coming year, not just for gamers but for everyday folk too.  In fact, it’s huge now! The Amazon owned platform now has 100+ million unique users every month.

The channel IRL (In Real Life) has people live streaming everyday things from: painting, drawing, playing music, building things.  So why not get there first for your niche and find some new customers.

Maybe I should set up the first live growth hacking channel before someone else does ….

5. People gave up on Facebook chatbots too quickly and no one has done them right yet. Everyone will have them eventually so make yours the best.

When Facebook chatbots came to town everyone went crazy for them, but I’ve seen less and less people rave about them.

For those of you who don’t know chatbots are essentially FB messenger broadcasts that pages can send to anyone who signs up to them.They’re super powerful with many still boasting a huge open rate.

Because people wanted to treat them like an email list they burnt out a lot of people who don’t want marketing messages in their Facebook messenger every other day.

Some of the best bots I’ve seen impart REAL value that people want in their inbox 3-5 times a month MAX. What a lot of brands haven’t realised is that people have joined your bot it’s because they’ve trusted you.

They’ve allowed you into their inner circle that was previously reserved for their close friends and family. Don’t betray that by selling to them everyday. (MsgHero and ManyChat are among for favourite chat bot providers)

Too many businesses are always looking for the next shiny object

A lot of startups and businesses come to me and say “You’re the guy that can get traffic out of thin air using social media? Help us!”

While there are a lot of ways to grow their traffic I always ask to see their current traffic, conversions and email list first. There’s normally a lot of things that people aren’t already doing with their current customers.

So look at your current methods before embarking on completely new strategies.

7. People are still using Twitter wrong

It’s not a broadcast network. It’s a one-to-one network at huge scale. The half life of a tweet is so short, and the feed moves so fast, that hardly anyone following over 200 people will see your one tweet a day.

So use to either send out 24 tweets a day or just simply @ the people you want to contact instead! There is software that will help you do this in an organic and human way (don’t go overboard), but this will allow you to scale and hit many people at once.

I reply to nearly everyone who tweets @ me and I’ve seen many a celebrity and influencer do the same. Start using it right.

That’s a wrap for the predictions (I’ll put my crystal ball away now)

So those are my predictions and observations about social media marketing in 2018.

Whilst this is the way I believe things will play out, It’s important to look back at times and check yourself before you decide to massively change course. If it isn’t broken don’t fix it, this is also known as the “Learn, implement, review” system. This ties into you should work out which social media platform is right for your business.

To be perfectly honest it’s actually quite simple. To start with you should already know the major places your ideal customer hangs out online and that should be your starting point (if you don’t then you have bigger problems to address first!)

Most people try and go for a multi-channel approach and hit all bases. While I too recommend this, it’s very difficult to execute right from the off if you’ve got a small team or work on your own.

If you spread yourself too thin and don’t go in hard on one platform you won’t get any results. I suggest picking one main channel to focus on, and then a secondary channel a little later down the line.

You need to then look at the competition and work out if they are having success by using this platform, then work out how you can start to attract people to your brand instead.

What do you think of Vin’s predictions, leave a comment below or send me a tweet @marissapick.

18Nov2016

Five Social Media Tools for Marketers

Posted in Social Media by marissapick

Social media is constantly evolving as are the tools available for marketers to improve their brand and audiences within their social media channels and campaigns. Below I’ve outlined the Five Tools I’m using currently using or have my eye on to leverage within my 2017 plans.

1. Tweriod: One of the questions I get asked all the time is how to find out when your audience is online within Twitter, and what the best times to tweet are. Well, I stumbled upon Tweiod a few years back and have been spreading the word ever since! Tweiod gives you the ability to start tweeting when others are listening by providing you the best times to tweet. The tool analyzes your tweets and followers tweets and provides a detailed analysis of when your audience is active, and when you should start tweeting for maximum visibility and engagement. Paired with a scheduling tool this is a marketers dream to amplify engagement and build long term success!

So how does it work? You sign in with Twitter allowing the tool read access to get a list of all of your followers and their tweets. The tool runs it’s analysis and when finished will Direct Message or Email you an update. It provides a breakdown showing the most exposure when you tweet over a specific day, weekends, or a combined view. They provide an upgrade to their premium plan depending on the number of followers you have ranging from $3.99-$15. I run an analysis every quarter or so and adjust my tweets accordingly.

2. Livestream provides the ability to broadcast live to a wider Facebook Audience. They announced recently the ability to install the app within your company Facebook page and then choose whether you want to broadcast from your smartphone or computer. CFA Institute has been working with Livestream since I joined to broadcast high quality sessions from our global events to a wider audience. We’ve got a channel full of broadcasts we’re always working to integrate these into our social media audience and raise visibility to a wider audience.

Once you’re live you’ll be able to engage viewers though comments and your users will have the opportunity to engage with each other providing an interactive broadcasting tool. Following the end of your event your broadcast will continue to be available for people to find and engage with. We’ll be integrating this into our 2016 Events Strategy and I will report back on how this works within our mix.

3. Click to Tweet: If you’ve visited by blog before (or have paid any attention to this post) you’ve already noticed I’ve included click to tweet buttons within a good amount of my content. As a content producer my goal is to make it simple and easy for readers (like you!) to share my content across social media (and Twitter). Click to Tweet is hands down the easiest way to promote, share, and track your content within Twitter. You login and create the message you want tweeted including hashtags, handles, etc and it generates a basic link for you to paste into your content. You can simply hyperlink the words click to tweet or develop a visual image to easily drive engagement.

We recently integrated this into one of our marketing campaigns within an email an saw almost 500 tweet from our click to tweet button in the email within the first 12 hours, a total success for our first try. The free plan allows your five links with auto shortening and tracking and upgrades range from $5 monthly for unlimited links to $500 a year for an enterprise plan to manage multiple accounts (ideal for a business).

4. Rafflercopter: One of the tools I have my eye on to integrate into my social media marketing mix this year is Rafflecopter. Social Media is all about engagement, and Rafflecopter provides an easy way for you to create a content to get people engaged with your account and build your following. I’m a sucker for entering any raffle where I have a chance to win something (really, anything!) and this tool keeps popping up within my feeds! I see endless opportunities for brands and marketers to incorporate this into tool into their strategy to mix things up and make it fun. Hey, after all everyone likes a chance to win something with 51% of US millennials would share information with companies in exchange for an incentive (USC Annenberg Center for the Digital Future). Click to Tweet.

It’s easy to get started, signing up takes a matter of seconds and once you’re logged in you can setup a giveaway within a few minutes. You first choose your prize and decide how people can enter through numerous options (and yes, you can click more than one!). Next you’ll setup a time parameter and set your contest live! They’ve got a free trial you can easily get started with, and it’s inexpensive to continue with their upgraded plans.

5. Pablo by Buffer: The human brain processes images 60,000 times quicker than text and 90% of the information transmitted to the brain is visual. Social Media Platforms and Images go hand and hand for success with research by Twitter sharing that adding a photo URL into your tweet can boost retweets by an impressive 35%. Click to Tweet.

Pablo by Buffer makes it easy to design engaging images for your social media channels within minutes. The Buffer Blog (one of my favorite sources of content) has a post here about how to get started and integrate into your mix.

The tool provides ready to go templates, images, and quotes for you to use and it makes it fun to style you image adjusting your font or color, switching the photo from blurred to black and white, and adding a line of text or an icon in. It also allows you to upload an image of your own to overlay with text. We use this all the time during events to highlight speaker quotes in live time and drive engagement online. Once you’ve developed your image you can easily share to your social channels, download, or add into your buffer scheduling matrix. The only downside is they’re desktop only, hopefully a mobile version will come soon for those of us on the go, but to make life better, it’s completely free to use!

What do you think of the tools I’ve suggested? I would love to hear if they’ve helped you at all, and please take a moment and share your favorite tool with me within the comments or send me a tweet!

17Aug2016

4 Tips for Building a Social Media Strategy for Your Personal Brand

Posted in Social Media by marissapick

This September I’ll be speaking with April Rudin during CFA Institute’s Alpha and Gender Diversity: The Competitive Edge Conference in Boston. We’ll be delivering a pre-conference workshop on building a strong personal brand through social media. In a nutshell social media is the crucial piece for managing and establishing your personal brand online. Not only is social media free it also provides accessible tools to communicate with infinite “niches” to fit into. It allows us to stay hyper networked 24/7 while gaining instant access to information. After our session in Boston we’ll be able to connect with conference delegates and stay in touch and continue conversations in live time.

So, What Exactly is Personal Branding? Within Barry Feldman’s Blog Post he nailed it: You, my friend, are a brand. Therefore, personal branding is the process of managing and optimizing the way that you’re presented to others. While self-help management techniques are about self -improvement, the personal branding concept suggests instead that success comes from self-packaging (i.e. You’re a brand. I’m a brand. We’re all brands, whether we aim to be or not.)

Below I’ve outlined a summary of our presentation sharing Four Tips for Building a Social Media Strategy for Your Personal Brand.

Tip #1: Determine Your Area of Expertise

Before you can establish your personal brand it’s important to determine what sets you apart from others. The world of personal branding is flooded so you just can’t choose a general field like “marketing” or “social media.” It’s more beneficial to focus on finding a specific niche so you’ll have an advantage to prove that you know what you’re talking about and stand out. Although your audience might smaller, it will also be much more relevant. Your area of expertise should be something you’re authentically interested in. After you determine your 1-3 areas of expertise it’s important to prioritize becoming a thought leader-producing content regularly and staying on topic and therefore gaining trust. Before long you’ll have proof of your expertise!

Tip #2: Remember that your digital reputation stays for life! Treat it as if it were permanent.

Sharing across social media will help draw others to you and help grow your personal brand. Although social media can be overwhelming and confusing remember that it was initially setup as a forum to start conversations, providing the perfect forum to add value and drive engagement. While it’s important to take a proactive approach to generating social media engagement by getting involved within your community. However, be smart along the way and remember that so much depends on reputation- so you should guard it with your life.

It’s important to build a personal brand because it’s the only thing you’re going to have. Your reputation online, and in the new business world is pretty much the game, so you’ve got to be a good person. You can’t hide anything, and more importantly, you’ve got to be out there at some level.- Gary Vaynerchuk

Gary Vaynerchuk stated it well, it’s important to remember that a reputation is your greatest asset follows you everywhere you go. The web is permanent, and anything you say is etched into a digital presence that isn’t easily removed. Being thoughtful in what you publish and engaging others tactfully goes a long way in positioning yourself in the right light.

Tip 3: Assume Everyone Can Help You

Think of being and influencer Like Being an intern, everyone MUST prove themselves. As you work on building your social media footprint and generating engagement it’s important to remember to always respond and assume that your followers, fans and connections can help you. Social Media 101 states that engagement and conversation always outweigh self-promotion. It’s important to have an opinion, ask questions, and follow people back on social media (really…it’s okay!). When you get unusual followers, specifically the good ones, always reach out with a personal comment/message. I’ve been fortunate to amass a large social media footprint by actively participating in conversations within my community and taking time out of my day to retweet, share content, and engage with my followers. Remember, social media has little to do with what we say about ourselves, and has everything to do with what people say about us.

Tip #4: Understand Exactly What NOT to Do on Social Media:

Although this may seem like a given, and I’ve covered some basics of what to do, it’s also important to address what NOT to do within social media.

Don’t complain about your job, co-workers or your boss (hint: see tip #2)
Don’t share too much information- think about how you can separate your digital & personal life
Don’t have an incomplete social media profile (if you’re not going to take the time to set it up then why bother keeping it active)
Don’t have an inappropriate, blurry, logo, or unprofessional photo (hint: a selfie or photo of you with drinks isn’t suited for your LinkedIn profile)
Don’t reference illegal activities- anything you wouldn’t do or say in front of a police officer shouldn’t go on social media!
Don’t be too self-serving or phony- remember You eventually become who you are who are on social media…You can only fake it for so long. If you are a pain in real life, you will be a pain on social media.

Conclusion: Hopefully these tips have been helpful in thinking about how you present yourself online. Establishing a personal brand on social media is something anyone can do, start small, stay focused, and drive engagement through your actions. Social media is a powerful way to amplify your message, whatever that message may be, whatever the audience.

I would love to know which of these tips might work for you, leave a comment below or send me a tweet @marissapick. As a reminder, you can follow the conversation online during CFA Institute’s Alpha and Gender Diversity: The Competitive Edge Conference September 14-15th by following the #CFAWomen hashtag.