Hearts, not hands
Many of us default to a more mentality, striving for more clothes, more money, more food, more friends, more, more, more…The problem with constantly grasping for more is that it often doesn’t accomplish what we set out to achieve: a sense of happiness and accomplishment.
Your social media strategy is a perfect example of this. The classic misconception is that more followers equals more people interested in your services/product/business. While the math sounds logical, the human truth is much different, because many of those people might be tuning you out completely.
Don’t try to collect followers. Instead, refocus your efforts to engage people in conversation with the goal of creating a community of like minded people. Make your goal to building relationships with engaged followers. The community you foster are the people that will most likely get in touch for work or purchase your product.
Rather than trying to gather a large number of followers on your social media account, try creating communities of like minded people and foster those relationships.
10 tips to building a community with social media
- Don’t spread yourself thin. Focus on three social media accounts only. Select a primary account where you dedicate most of your time. This should be the place where you have the most activity and spend about 50 % of your time. Engage with people on your secondary account about 40% of the time and tertiary account about 10% of the time. The priority of your accounts is up to you. Here at Needmore we do the following: 1. Twitter 2. Instagram 3. Facebook. (Although Facebook is fast being usurped by Pinterest, so the jury is still out there.)
- Talk to people. Social media is a conversation, not a pulpit. So, it is important not to just be a mouthpiece for your own work. Ask questions. Be curious about what other people are doing.
- Give. Share content that provides some value (information, laughs, insight) . If you’re interested in something, then your community will be too. Spread the word.
- Make your granny proud: be polite. Try to reply to people when they mention you and let them know you appreciate their retweets and follows and friendship.
- Show, not tell. If you have a product to sell, make sure you show people what is special about it. Let them see why you are spending your valuable time and money creating this one thing.
- Search for like minded people. Meet people out in the real world that are interested in the things you are and get to know them better online, too.
- Create new content and share. Don’t just be a DJ for other people and their ideas. It is good to share what interests you, but also make sure you are creating a percentage of the content yourself.
- Be yourself. Your thoughts matter. Be your authentic self (unless you’re an asshole, then just go to therapy to work that shit out).
- It’s okay if you make mistakes. Be honest if you got something wrong and move on. We are all human.
- Don’t give up. It will feel like you are giving a lot away at first. That is good. Stick at it. People will start to notice.
A sense of community is extremely important in all realms of life. The people you surround yourself with are the ones that bring value to your life. These are the people that actually care about what you are doing, share with their friends, and are more likely to support your endeavors.
People aren’t simply numbers, so don’t treat them that way … build dialogue!
