Going the Social Distance: Building a Sustainable Audience on Social Media (Excerpt)

GOING THE SOCIAL DISTANCE Building a Sustainable Audience on Social Media Lyana Pearson

COPYRIGHT © 2020 LYANA PEARSON, REPHRASE.LIFE

Going the Social Distance: Building a Sustainable Audience on Social Media

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OF

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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

AUTHORED BY: Lyana Pearson

Template credit: Usedtotech.com Published by: Rephrase.Life First Printing Edition, 2020 ISBN 978-1-7351826-0-5

Dedication This book is dedicated first to the incredible and inspiring people around the globe who are guiding and invoking positive change—and secondly, to the small business owners everywhere who are actively seeking ways to improve others’ lives through their services, their products, their stories, and their unique perspectives.

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CONTENTS

Going the Social Distance Building a Sustainable Audience on Social Media ............................................ i Dedication .................................................................................................................................. iii Introduction ............................................................................................................................... ix A quick word about why you want this book....................................................... x It’s easy to build an audience on social media platforms if you know

how. ................................................................................................................................................. xi Chapter 1: How I Learned Social Media Marketing .................................. 1 Building an audience of 26,000 in less than 3 months. .................................1 Chapter 2: Effective Online Marketing Plans Include Social Media . 4 A well-rounded, effective marketing plan puts social media to use ...5 Why is social media important? ....................................................................................5 Do people follow businesses on social media? .................................................. 6 How to attract consumers to your website .......................................................... 9 Chapter 3: Other Parts Of An Effective Online Marketing Campaign10 Offer content of value ........................................................................................................ 10 Chapter 4: Using Social Media Marketing Effectively ..........................14 Creating a lasting audience that likes what you offer ................................. 15 Values that work for building a sustainable audience ................................ 16 Chapter 5: Creating Your Instagram Profile ............................................. 19 Your business will fit right in on Instagram ....................................................... 20 How to build an effective Instagram profile ....................................................... 21 Filling Out Your Bio .............................................................................................................. 21 Chapter 6: Posting On Instagram ............................................................... 24

Creating effective and engaging posts ................................................................ 24 More varied and valuable content ideas .............................................................. 27 Writing effective descriptions ......................................................................................29 The importance of hashtags in posts ...................................................................... 31 Chapter 7: Growing A Curated Instagram Audience ........................... 35 Building and Curating Your Audience ................................................................... 35 Identify your audience ......................................................................................................36 Curate your audience ........................................................................................................36 Grow your audience ............................................................................................................ 37 Chapter 8: The Top Layers of Audience Interaction ............................. 38 How “Hans Ahn Coaching� begins building an audience ....................... 38 A quick note on curating your audience ..............................................................39 Searching................................................................................................................................... 40 Liking ............................................................................................................................................. 41 Commenting .......................................................................................................................... 42 Sharing ........................................................................................................................................ 43 Hiding........................................................................................................................................... 44 Following ................................................................................................................................... 44 Unfollowing .............................................................................................................................. 45 Muting ......................................................................................................................................... 46 Tagging others with the @ symbol ......................................................................... 46 Every interaction counts ................................................................................................. 47 Digging deeper into every channel ........................................................................ 47 Chapter 9: Using Your Feed to Find Your Audience ............................ 48 Your feed is your first interaction point ................................................................ 48 Chapter 10: Using Your Posts to Attract Your Audience ..................... 52 Your posts attract like-minded people .................................................................. 52 Variety ........................................................................................................................................... 52 Inspirational quotes ............................................................................................................ 53

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Informative ................................................................................................................................ 53 Emotive Imagery .................................................................................................................. 54 Entertaining............................................................................................................................. 54 Shared moments ................................................................................................................. 54 Blog posts .................................................................................................................................. 55 Events ........................................................................................................................................... 56 Videos............................................................................................................................................ 56 Reposts ........................................................................................................................................ 56 Frequency .................................................................................................................................. 57 Description ................................................................................................................................58 Hashtags ..................................................................................................................................... 59 Chapter 11: Finding Your Audience Through Your Followers ............. 61 Using Your Followers List ................................................................................................ 62 Likes and comments .......................................................................................................... 63 People who follow your followers ............................................................................. 64 People who like or view your followers’ content............................................. 65 Other accounts your audience follows .................................................................. 65 Filtering your followers .................................................................................................... 66 Chapter 12: Building Your Audience Through Your Activity.............. 68 Using Your Activity Feed................................................................................................. 68 Going up the list ................................................................................................................... 69 Finding things to like ........................................................................................................ 70 Interacting with comments ......................................................................................... 70 Going down the rabbit hole ......................................................................................... 70 Chapter 13: Widening Your Audience Through the People You Follow ................................................................................................................................. 72 Accounts you follow lead to like-minded people ........................................... 72 Sorting the list of people you follow ........................................................................ 73 Chapter 14: Using Posts You've Liked to Find More Followers ......... 76

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Posts you’ve liked are great places to find like-minded people.......... 76 Chapter 15: Digging Even Deeper: Finding Your Audience Through Search....................................................................................................................78 Use the Search function to find your audience .............................................. 78 Search (auto feed) ............................................................................................................... 78 Search (specific) .................................................................................................................... 80 Searching for specific accounts ................................................................................. 80 Searching for specific topics ......................................................................................... 81 Searching for hashtags .................................................................................................... 82 Following hashtags ............................................................................................................ 83 Using the sort functions within Instagram search ....................................... 84 Sorting options when searching for hashtags ................................................ 85 Chapter 16: Making Use of Comments and Views to Grow Your Audience ..............................................................................................................87 Comments are a great way to filter your audience ..................................... 87 Clicking on views to find your audience members ...................................... 89 Chapter 17: Using Aggregate Accounts to Find Like Minded People90 Aggregate accounts and the ‘@’ credit................................................................ 90 Chapter 18: Even Ads Can Help You Build Your Audience ................. 92 Letting Instagram ads lead you to your audience. ........................................92 Liking an ad ..............................................................................................................................92 Hiding ads that don’t appeal to you ........................................................................93 Finding like minded people through an ad ...................................................... 94 Chapter 19: Engaging With Your Audience ............................................. 95 Get personal ............................................................................................................................ 96 Be authentic ............................................................................................................................ 96 Stay positive ............................................................................................................................. 96 Make it meaningful ............................................................................................................ 97 Go direct ..................................................................................................................................... 97

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Chapter 20: Summary ...................................................................................... 98 CONTACT ME ...................................................................................................... 99 BIO ........................................................................................................................ 100

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ix GOING THE SOCIAL DISTANCE: BUILDING A SUSTAINABLE AUDIENCE ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Introduction We are living in an era of great transition, poised at the edge of so many unknowns. People are reinventing their lives and re-deciding what they want to do with their careers. Business owners are restructuring how they do business and more people are working from home.

While businesses find ways to adapt to a constantly shifting environment, building effective marketing campaigns is more crucial than ever. That also means that knowing how to market your business online is more important now than it’s ever been.

This book will cover essential and powerful, yet practical and simple steps you can begin incorporating into your daily online use that will help you grow your audience and expand your business.

In fact, these steps are so simple that you may wonder why you haven’t been doing them all along. Yet most professionals aren’t aware of just how easy it is to market their businesses online.

A quick word about why you want this book This book is not about building a huge following in the blink of any eye. It’s not about popularity contests or “get rich quick” tactics.

It’s about building a sustainable audience of likeminded people who will remain with you and help you grow.

Rapid expansion tricks don’t work. You’ll gain a lot of “followers” quickly, but they will be gone just as quickly.

Followers that you acquire through tricks are using the same tactics. These people follow you just long enough to get the follow-back. Then they unfollow you because the name of that game is to have tens of thousands more following you than you follow yourself.

If you apply the principles and guidelines laid out in this book you will grow your audience quickly, but that audience will be made up of people who want to see what you have to share.

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It’s easy to build an audience on social media platforms if you know how.

Social media accounts are free and if you’re not making use of them as a business owner, you’re leaving behind a valuable set of tools that could be working for you— expanding your audience and increasing your revenue.

In this book, we’re going to focus on highly effective ways to grow a sustainable audience on Instagram. These techniques can be used on just about any social media platform, like Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube and TikTok, for instance. There are also a wide variety of other online venues you may not be aware of, that you can make use of to market your business.

Download from my website, a free PDF “Seeding the Internet” for more on that topic.

This book is about building an audience of like-minded people who will remain with you and help you grow.

Each platform has a slightly different way of guiding account users through the interaction process, but if you understand the general principles I’m going to teach you in these chapters, you’ll be able to transfer your marketing skills anywhere that people congregate on the Internet.

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GOING THE SOCIAL DISTANCE BUILDING A SUSTAINABLE AUDIENCE ON SOCIAL MEDIA

GOING THE SOCIAL DISTANCE: HOW TO BUILD A SUSTAINABLE AUDIENCE ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Chapter 1: How I Learned Social Media Marketing

Building an audience of 26,000 in less than 3 months.

I discovered the techniques I’m about to teach you unintentionally. In fact, building a large audience was a by-product of simply being myself, living by my own set of values. Some of you will remember MySpace. In 2006, I was one of many artists sharing music on what was then a ragingly popular social media platform. Within the first three months of uploading my first few songs, I gained an audience of over 25,000 ‘friends’.

I wasn’t talking about my music and never asked another person to come visit my profile. I simply answered my inbox messages, made comments on other people’s content, and voiced my appreciation for what they were doing. That’s it. I was engaging in comment spreading in other places around the Internet as well; a process I later coined (and taught) as “Seeding the Internet.” However, the majority of my activity was within the MySpace platform.

I lost access to my profile twice—because MySpace was ripe with opportunity for hackers, phishing artists and virus spreaders, and PCs were notoriously vulnerable to attack. Each time I lost my account, I had to start all over again. Each time I started over, my account grew to 25,000+ ‘friends’ in less than three months. (Looking back, I’m sensing a ceiling theme there.) Before MySpace started losing people to Facebook, I had over 26,000 again.

Now, my music wasn’t very good then, so it wasn’t a big draw for people. What is it that got people’s attention and made them decide to give me the gift of friendship?

Anyone can find and use a cute profile picture. Mine was accompanied with a lot of joyful, enthusiastic and genuinely positive comments. I made it a point to connect with people in a personable way.

I had some things going for me. I had natural commenting techniques that I will share with you a bit later on, some values about how I engaged with people (which I will also share with you), and a friendly personality. Ok. I also had an attractive “girl next door” profile pic.

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Three things that were going in my favor: •

Attractive profile image

•

Interesting content

•

Genuinely appreciative and engaging comments

In chapter 4 we’ll take a closer look at my own personal ethics about how I engage online with other people. These techniques work for me, and they can work for you too.

Chapter 1: How I Learned Social Media Marketing

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Chapter 2: Effective Online Marketing Plans Include Social Media

Before we dig into how you can build your sustainable audience on social media, let’s take a look at the bigger picture. To effectively market your products and services online, you need to be doing more than just social media.

The whole purpose for using social media as a business, is to let people know that your products or services exist—or, if you’re an established business—to build relationships and keep your brand in front of potential and current consumers. But social media is only one crucial piece.

If your offerings are available online, you most likely have a number of tools at your disposal for driving traffic to your website. Once you get people to your website, you still need to keep them engaged. If your marketing plan makes use of a full set of marketing and customer engagement tools, it’s much more likely to result in sales.

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A well-rounded, effective marketing plan puts social media to use As the world around us changes, successful businesses are changing the way they engage with their consumer or client base. Even reluctant business owners are beginning to realize the need to market their services or products online, and what better way to do that, than to make use of the very platforms where consumers gather every time of day, seven days a week?

Social media platforms that once catered only to networking among friends, family and colleagues now offer a variety of high tech and interactive advertising options to help businesses market their products and services. Of course, advertising is optional on these platforms, and there are a number of ways to build awareness (and an audience) without spending a penny.

Why is social media important?

Social media has become an important part of any business marketing plan. Why? Because this is where you’re going to find a large segment of your audience. As the number of people who own mobile devices grows, so does the amount of people using social networking websites.

If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve undoubtedly noticed the sheer volume of people who spend a good

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deal of their day focused on a scrolling screen of some type of mobile device. These people are your audience and they are as varied in their interests and needs as are the amount of different products on the market. There’s someone for everything, and you’ll find them in social media apps and websites.

Do people follow businesses on social media?

They do when those businesses consistently offer content of value. The smartest businesses that are successfully making use of social media are those who are offering a variety of content that people want to see: •

Beautiful

•

Adorable

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Informative

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Useful

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Inspirational

•

Comedic

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Entertaining

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Everyone likes cute animal and baby pictures. If yours is doing something adorable, snap a pic and share it. People get a glimpse into your world and you’ve just become a more personable, relatable business.

Other ways that companies are successfully making use of social media to grow their businesses include sharing content that: •

Speaks to their audience’s desires (fast, sexy cars gliding along winding beachside roads; or long, sleek, and glossy tresses flowing enticingly down a curvy backside).

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•

Provides them with answers to their questions (how-to videos and DIY walk-throughs).

Find or create content that speaks to you in some valuable way and share it. It’s likely to hit a chord with other people too.

Sharing a simple photo that illustrates a beautiful moment you’re experiencing breaks up your content, making it more interesting and provides a peak into your life, values and interests.

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Going the Social Distance: Building a Sustainable Audience on Social Media

How to attract consumers to your website Companies and individuals who are the most successful at selling their products or services are generally creating a wide and varied marketing campaign that includes social media, paid advertising, frequent blog or article posts, and email marketing. They also employ strategies for earning repeat customers and turning those customers into advocates.

Even small business owners with limited resources and time can make use of effective strategies that drive traffic to their website. However, a social media campaign alone is only going to be so effective without other pieces in place.

Getting people to your website, inspiring them to purchase and keeping them coming back is a large topic that requires a lot more time than this book can cover.

However, growing a social media following is a large piece of your marketing plan, and doing it well is a big step toward making your business a success.

With that said, let’s take a quick look at some of the other pieces a well-rounded marketing plan might include.

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GOING THE SOCIAL DISTANCE: HOW TO BUILD A SUSTAINABLE AUDIENCE ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Chapter 4: Using Social Media Marketing Effectively

Before we dig into the specifics of marketing your business on social media platforms, let’s touch on some important ethics that will serve you well—both helping you market your business more effectively, and build a lasting audience.

Let’s face it, there are a number of tactics you could use that would help you build a quick audience of people who are using the same tactics to build their own audience of people who are using these tactics to build their own…yikes!

That’s not what this book is about. Those audiences remind me of the swarms of zombies in the Brad Pitt movie ‘World War Z,’ piling up rapidly in a crazed frenzy to get over some perceived barrier. These followers do pile up quickly but they disappear just as fast.

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Going the Social Distance: Building a Sustainable Audience on Social Media

Creating a lasting audience that likes what you offer I want to show you how to create an audience of people who appreciate what you offer and are like-minded enough to stick around. Buildings that are erected on a solid foundation are more likely to remain stable and continue to stand for years to come. This is the type of audience you want for your business. You might still grow your audience

Only interact with content that aligns with your interests, your values and your message.

rapidly, but the ways I’m going to teach you to go about finding your followers will help you create a following of like-minded individuals who are more likely to stick around while you continue to grow your business.

These people follow you because they like what you share.

They agree with your services or like your products, and are more likely to become your best advocates. They will share your products or services with their friends, family, colleagues and even strangers.

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Sprinkling in spontaneous images of things you’re experiencing (especially when you think those moments might inspire someone) can add more value to your content, and makes you more relatable.

Values that work for building a sustainable audience When thinking about how you want to engage your audience, it will serve you well to remember what most people want: to be seen and to be loved. If you can make another person feel good in a way that is authentic to you,

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you’ve not only made the world a brighter place (good for you!), you’ve also quite possibly made a new friend.

Here are some specific rules of thumb I use that have helped me build a great audience: •

Be authentic. Being true to your values and your interests is the most effective way to build relationships.

If you remain true to yourself, and always speak in a positive, uplifting and compassionate way, you’ll gain respect and make lasting connections that show integrity—which serves you, your business and your community.

•

Be genuinely appreciative. Finding a way to genuinely acknowledge someone’s efforts in a positive way will help you gain trust, likeability and connection. It will also provide a side benefit: it leaves you feeling good. There’s always something to appreciate or be grateful for, and always something about the other person that is worthy of praise. This bears repeating: remember that most people want to be seen and to be loved.

•

Be humble. You can share your expertise, your experience and knowledge without sounding like you’re bragging.

Being willing to learn from others and acknowledge when other people have good ideas (even when those ideas differ from your own) is a sign of a good leader, a good business owner, and a good friend.

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•

Be selective. Only interact with content you personally agree with, find inspiring or useful, and want your business associated with. Not only does this help hone an audience that will be in alignment with your business, it will also limit the content you have to sift through in your own feeds, to find the businesses and consumers that match or compliment what you stand for.

•

Be mindful. Be kind, compassionate and uplifting in every interaction you have. This was already mentioned before, but can’t be overstated. Making use of positive, encouraging language is an essential part of building a sustainable, supportive community of consumers and like-minded individuals.

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GOING THE SOCIAL DISTANCE: HOW TO BUILD A SUSTAINABLE AUDIENCE ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Chapter 6: Posting On Instagram

Instagram users who see the most engagement from their audience are people who post valuable content often. This can mean posting once a day, several times a day, or a few times a week. For my own social media use, one post a day feels reasonable. It keeps my content in my audience’s feed without inundating them. Frequency will depend on your business offering, your amount and quality of content available, and your availability. My general recommendation is to test varying frequencies to see what your audience responds to.

Creating effective and engaging posts Offer a variety of social media post content that keeps telling a visual and interesting story. Make use of keywords and emotive, engaging and personable language that speaks to your audience. In other words, talk to them like you would your neighbor or your friend. Be okay including your 24 |

Going the Social Distance: Building a Sustainable Audience on Social Media

passion about a cause your business supports, inspirational quotes and images, or a positive mindset you want to share.

Ben showcases some of his best work and again uses his free Instagram profile as an advertising platform.

Sprinkle in do-it-yourself tips, or concepts and simple practices you’ve learned. You’ve got knowhow that you don’t even remember you know—bits of information that you now take for granted because you learned these tricks of the trade so long ago, they’ve become second nature to

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you. Your audience doesn’t have your experience or expertise, and may find your tips and insights incredibly useful.

Share wonderful or interesting places you’re going. If you filmed your trip to the dog park and your pooch did something unexpectedly funny or amazing, share that!

Share the breathtaking sunrise you snapped a picture of and pop one of your favorite inspirational quotes into (or accompanying) the image.

The idea is to share a wide variety of content. You’re not just selling products or services. You’re building engagement.

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Going the Social Distance: Building a Sustainable Audience on Social Media

Share inspirational quotes from famous teachers, philosophers, poets or your own guardian angel.

More varied and valuable content ideas •

Offer a variety of product posts, interspersed by messages directly from you to your audience (Happy Mother’s Day is a great example), promotions when you have them, and a famous inspirational quote

Chapter 6: Posting On Instagram

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