Being visible: growing a following around your personal voice
As we navigate rapid societal change, your personal voice is even more important for you and for your organisation.
12 months ago, Matthew Kobach, the Head of Social Media at the New York Stock Exchange, decided to apply what he knew about building social media communities to his personal handle on Twitter. He had a following of 2K and at the time of writing, it has grown to 46K. Follower numbers aren’t everything, but a quality, engaged following is.
YOUR PERSONAL VOICE
People connect with people. People buy from or give to people. The old adage applies to social media too.
When Yahoo Labs and Georgia Tech studied 1.1million Instagram posts, they found that posts with human faces are 38% more likely to receive likes and 32% more likely to attract comments.
At a time of crisis, when our foundations are shaken, we look even more to the organisations we know and particularly to the ‘face of the organisation’ to steady us.
GROW YOUR FOLLOWING
7 essentials for communicating your personal voice effectively:
1. Quality content that inspires engagement
Know who your audience is and create for them in a way that invites them to be part of the conversation.
2. Consistency
Building an audience can take a long time, the trick is tenacity. Post consistently.
3. Have conversations
Social media is a conversational medium. Find people you think are interesting and get involved in their conversations.
4. Photography and graphic representations of you
Make sure that you are featuring images of yourself regularly and think carefully about how to use the ‘real estate’ in your bio: profile pics, covers etc
5. Videos
Learn to live with your fear of video. We all hate making them, but they are an excellent way for your audience to get to know you.
6. Be present - go live
Going live beats just about everything else for ‘being visible’ because you are as present as you can be with your audience.
7. Analyse, reflect, refine
Do more of what works and less of what doesn’t, remembering that this will continue to change.
Put yourself out there, but protect yourself out there
Draw red lines around your life. You don’t need to share every detail of your life to build an engaged community of followers. Decide what you are and aren’t willing to share online and stick within those boundaries. Your content will feel personal if you share your thoughts and feelings. You don’t need to share whatever you view as your ‘private’ life.
Protect yourself from trolling and bullying:
Choose when to respond
You have to make a judgement call. Is the comment a genuine attempt at dialogue on the topic of your content or is it malicious in nature with a goal of devaluing you and the mission of your organisation? If it’s the latter, don’t respond.
Use the platforms reporting and blocking mechanisms to support community self-regulation
Familiarise yourself with the community guidelines for the platform and report behaviour that is in breach of them.