In the prior two lessons, I focused on factors that impact which platforms you choose to engage on. Now it's time to think about how to build an audience on social media platforms. In the opening module for this course, I included a lesson on tactics that help you build an audience. If you didn't see that, it's worth viewing it now, as in this module, I'm going to delve more into some of the specifics of how you do that. In particular, I'm going to focus on how you create engagement with your target audience. So the first thing, and sometimes it's really hard for people to get this part, you have to treat it like you're part of a community. The social media platform doesn't exist there just to serve you and for your selfish financial and commercial benefit, right? You have to be bringing value into it, and so you really do have to participate in that community like you're just one member of it. Hopefully, we'll get you to a place where you're seen as one of the more important members, but you gotta remember you're always a part of the community. So you remember in the earlier module that I did, that I showed you this notion that publishing great content and sharing it in social media, and doing PR around it, and doing outreach would get you in front of your target audience. And that target audience is media bloggers, influencers, and potential customers and other people in your market space. We're going to focus on the social media place of this, but I want you to remember who your target audience is. So the first thing is, you have to give many times before you ask. The way I like to tell the story is this. If you just moved into a new neighborhood and you get invited to the local neighborhood party for the first time, you don't walk into that audience and say, nice to meet you, can I have five bucks, to everybody you meet. It's just not the way you build the relationship, and you have to think about social media the same way. You have to think about you're bringing to the whole discussion and what value you're adding, or else you're very quickly going to be pushed to the side and people will start ignoring you. So this is one of the most important things that you can absorb within this lesson. So the other thing you want to do is share great content. Here's the concept. If you share great content from other people 80% of the time and share your own great content 20% of the time, the impact of sharing your own great content is multiplied by four times. Now okay, I don't actually have a scientific basis for the four times, but the concept is right. The more you share other people's content, the more value people will see in the content of your own that you share, and this is really an important lesson as well. Another thing to be aware of is that when you're on social media, unless you're in a direct messaging situation, every conversation you have happens on stage. So if I'm having a conversation with someone, then anybody following me can probably see that conversation as well. You're always in public. That should guide a little bit about how you behave. Another important point, be an expert, add value somehow. You don't have to be an expert in everything in your market space. You just have to be an expert in something in your market space, and that can be the key that you use to add value to the potential audience. If you're kind of just faking it like our fellow here on the right, it's going to be very hard to build anything of a real audience. But if you have a lot to bring to the party, and you truly are an expert at some piece of the discussion, your audience will grow much, much more quickly. And of course, you have to create content worth sharing. So here I'm showing a post that I did a while ago on the Mobilegeddon update which Google did in 2014, where they started to make mobile-friendliness of your website a ranking factor. We invested a tremendous amount in this content, and you can see here that it's gotten over 3,000 social shares. And that happened because people found its content worth sharing. It's really key to understand this piece too. If you don't have anything worth sharing, no one's going to share it. So here's another example, by the way, I love sharing this example. It was done by Concert Hotels and actually driven by an agency called Distilled. They created this content about the world greatest singers. And what they did is they actually went through all of the vocal recordings of those singers and mapped out the entire vocal range of those singers, and they put it into single chart. By the way, they found out that Axl Rose had the largest range of any of the well known singers that they included in the study. This thing was shared over 100,000 times on Facebook, that's phenomenal. So what was kind of neat about this is it was a very novel study, it was interesting. It was hard to do, by the way, a ton of work that went into this, and they made a bit of a bet. And I bet they were very happy with the outcome of that in the end. So another thing that you should really make a point of doing is respond to comments on your post, whether it's on a blog post on your site, a blog post as a guest post on a third party site, or within your social media feed. In all those cases, when somebody makes a meaningful comment, make sure you go back and you have something to say in return. That creates engagement. So in this case, I don't who SEO Plus is, but the chances that they might share something of mine in social media just went up because I had this interaction with them. Okay, here's one that throws people a bit. I think of speaking at conferences as being social media, and you go, wait a minute, that's offline. You're in a room filled with people. I will tell you every time I've presented a conference, I get tons of people actually start following me right then and there, and their likelihood to start sharing my content in social media goes up. And this is one of the keys, is to realize that you can't ever completely, and shouldn't ever try to completely, divorce your online and your offline behavior. And then make sure that even in your social media posts that you're posting engaging content. Here's a brand, Burlington, Vermont based company, called Seventh Generation. They focus on eco-friendly household goods. They sell things like toilet paper, and household cleaners, and other stuff that people want to write about all the time, yeah, not so much. But they have the found a way by focusing on the eco-friendly nature of what they do to actually make their content very engaging, like here, have a right to know what's in our household sprays, soaps, and cleaners. Makes sense to me, and you can see why people would engage in that kind of content. And of course, as I mentioned earlier, do make a point of responding to those comments in social media. And then last, although that's not the focus of this module, that's actually the focus of the next module, is building relationships with influencers. As I've shown before, they tend to hit large audiences and they have influence. And by that I mean if they share something of mine, people are more likely to pay attention to it almost more than if they see it from my share of it or someone else's share of it. Because that's why we call them influencers, people listen to them more. And they can help you grow your audience as well, and it can help drive links for you in the process. But you do have to be attentive to your other relationships too. It´s not only about the influencers. I'm going to tell you another party story. Imagine you're back at that party for the first time in that local neighborhood, and I go and I recognize someone I want to have a close relationship with. Maybe it's someone that I'm interested in dating, if I'm in that stage in my life. Been married a long time, it's not me. But anyway, or it's somebody that I think is a good business person and I want to strike up a relationship with them because they might be able to help me. If I spend the entire party sitting in the corner of the room talking to them and no one else, guess what? Everybody gets creeped out. They can tell that I'm in it only for that one relationship and I don't care about anybody else in the room, and I'm over focused on something. It doesn't work in real life and it doesn't work in social media. You have to pay attention not just to the influencers and potential business relationships, but really to the whole audience. So now, I want to share with you some lessons from six top brands. These are all brands where I was involved in interviewing a prominent social media person within the company. So one thing is, you've gotta have clearly defined objectives, and I'll talk about that some more in the next lesson. But what are you in it for? Are you in it for mentions, or impressions, or views, or reach, or whatever? You have to be clear about what you're trying to get out of it. If you're not clear about what you're trying to get, you can't tell when you've been successful. So here's some that make sense to me. If social media can help me drive major media links and brand mentions, okay, that's gold. Or really, other links and brand mentions, it doesn't all have to be major medias. As long as they're all organically given, these are the kind of links that Google loves, right? If it can help me grow my audience, that's good, because that increases my chances of getting more mentions in links later, and if it can help me cultivate influencer relationships, that's good too. And then online sentiment isn't a bad thing to look at as well. All of these things can help you with social media supporting your content marketing campaigns. Another thing, if you're part of a larger organization, you can leverage your employee base. You might have your social media accounts as part of your brand, and you may be doing great stuff with them. But if you get your employees also sharing stuff and communicating on your behalf, that's great. Just be careful, though. There are Federal Trade Commission guidelines if you're in the US, and probably similar things in other countries about disclosure if your employees are sharing your stuff. You want to make sure that they understand what those are so they do it in the right way. But if they do, it's a chance of getting in front of their audiences, and that's a good thing. And also, consider building the brand of your experts. Look what Cisco does, they actually give really good visibility to some of their internal experts. Here's one where they actually take the time on their blog to tell the story of a Cisco social media ambassador. So giving extra visibility for them, hey, that actually starts to help them become a bit more of an influencer, give them a little bit more influence, build their audience, and then when they turn around and share your stuff, helps you more. So that's a great thing. And also, when you're engaging on social media, just realize that there are many paths to creating good connections. You could start the conversation about something that has nothing to do with your business. If you see that someone shares something, let's say about a recent sporting event, and you can make some connection about that. Be careful to not make the whole relationship about that. But if you have a good initial contact that starts that way, that can actually be a good way to open a door to things that are more concerned about well, your business or maybe just content that you're sharing. So remember I talked before when I talked about doing presentations and that being part of social media. Social media happens offline too. Here I'm showing something that Whole Foods does. They are actually really good at getting people who work inside of Whole Foods, and giving them actually paid time to go out and participate and do projects in the community. And again, it's like wait a minute, that's not social media, and you might be thinking that, but guess what? You're building relationships. Social media is all about relationships of the image you're creating, the brand you're creating, your reputation, your visibility, and you know what? Doing these projects in your community helps a lot with that. And then finally, there's this notion of focusing on relationships that you can influence. So this is actually from a conversation I had with Walmart, where they recognize that there's some people who are commenting on their posts online who just are intractable enemies of Walmart. And no matter what they do, they're never going to be able to turn them into someone who is friendly towards Walmart. So you have to be careful about how much time you spend with them because it can become a deep rat hole. Now it doesn't mean you should ignore these people entirely, but you need to recognize you're never going to turn them around. In this lesson, I focused quite a bit on relationship building and the role that plays in building audiences on social media platforms. In the next and final lesson for this module, I plan to present you with two specific use case studies relating to businesses on social media.
