Do you have visions of building a loyal community of social media fans? Do you want to sit behind your laptop and build a virtual empire?
Have you figured out how to go about using social media to prove you know your stuff? That you’re an expert in your field?
Social media is an incredibly powerful marketing tool that can help you to reach a potentially unlimited number of people with the very minimum investment in terms of time, money and effort.
While social media might be incredibly powerful, it’s still only going to be as good as the strategy you have in place.
If you haven’t first established yourself as a credible authority then you’ll find that everything you do falls on deaf ears.
To improve your effectiveness, you should make this one of your biggest focuses. Here are ten ways to build your credibility using social media.
1. Create a Blog (or Podcast)
If you’ve heard it once, you heard it a thousand times by now. Maintaining a blog is one of the most important ways to position yourself as an expert in your industry. Then fill it with well-researched, in-depth and informative posts and share them on social media. This is content marketing 101 and one of the best ways to establish trust and authority. If you can’t write, hire someone who can to do it for you.
PS – My blog is my hub, and my number one tool for demonstrating my expertise to clients, prospects, and social media fans alike. I practice what I preach!
2. Build Followers
Unfortunately, if you have a social media account with 14 followers, you will have a hard time convincing people to put stock in what you say. Of course it shouldn’t necessarily matter but it does.
People listen to what authorities have to say. Therefore, it’s only natural that we see your social media following as an indicator of your authority. So get to work growing those numbers!
3. Be Personal
People like to know that there’s a real human being behind a social media account which can help to build trust and therefore credibility. Every now and then posting a personal image will help to build that connection with your fans.
A few examples of ‘personal’ can include behind the scenes photos. Or maybe you tweet about a wonderful luncheon you’re attending. Are you visiting a special landmark during the weekend. It’s ok to post about your leisure activities. It allows people to get to know the person behind the profile.
4. But Not Too Personal
That said, a drunken rant or a tweet about your bathroom habits can also seriously undermine your respectability. You might think it’s amusing/poignant but your business account is not the place for that kind of content.
If you follow me anywhere on social media, you’ll notice I never tweet about my dogs taking a crap, or puking when I had the flu. Just sayin… nobody wants to hear that when you use social media for business.
5. Branding Should Be Consistent
Your social media pages should have strong branding that utilizes high definition images and well written information. Make sure that everything says ‘quality,’ not sales. Fans should be able to recognize you from one social media platform to the next.
6. Spelling Matters
Does a misspelling necessarily mean that your interesting fact isn’t true? It shouldn’t do really but to a large portion of your audience it does.
And please, turn off the auto corrector (or whatever the thing is called) on our phones these days that causes us to look like idiots when we post the wrong word. Misspellings do not help your brand. Don’t be afraid to proofread your social media posts before you hit the send button.
7. Post Regularly
If you go days, weeks or months on end without posting then your social media will look like a ghost town which suggests it’s not a professional account. Or worse, you look like you’ve gone out of business.
If you go weeks or months without posting on social media, you look like you went out of business.
Click To Tweet
8. Network with Authority Figures
One of the easiest ways to be persuasive is to appeal to another authority on a given subject. If you can get a referral from another big social media account then this will help you greatly.
With this said, you can’t tweet me out of the blue (or any other influential figure you don’t know) and ask them to share your stuff with their fans. Why not Miss Kemya? Because that’s spam! Instead, work to build relationships with key influencers, by liking, commenting, and sharing their social media posts. Relationships are key.
9. Provide Solutions
Communities on social media give you a chance to answer questions and demonstrate that you know your stuff. You should consider this almost as an opportunity to ‘advertise’ your expertise and know how.
An easy way to do this is to hold office hours on social media. An example could be something like “Hey, I’ll be on my Facebook page answering questions from 2-3pm. Come on ovah.” Or perhaps you want to host a Q&A Twitter chat. The point is to provide a public opportunity for people to ask questions so you can demonstrate your brialliance!
10. Deliver Quality Information and Resources
Most importantly: make sure that all your posts are interesting/entertaining and that you are consistently delivering quality and value.
Ciao,
Miss Kemya
