6
There are ten zillion books on social media. Go read them. Randomly pick any of the top ten books on Amazon and you’ll get up to speed on the basics of how to use social media. I recommend books by Chris Brogan, Michael Hyatt, Guy Kawasaki, Ann Handley, Gary Vaynerchuk, and a few others. Understand, no matter how much you try, you’re not going to be able to keep up with every trend, algorithm change, and feature of the social media platforms. Who knows?—by the time you read this, maybe Facebook will have shut down and LinkedIn will be a distant memory. Highly doubtful, but you get my point! Don’t focus so much on the itty-bitty details of social media, but focus on the BIG picture.
What I’m going to do in this section is give you my tips for how I use social media to build my celebrity status. Social media is POWERFUL. In fact, it is one of the most powerful ways to get attention and keep attention. Visit any of my social media profiles and you’ll see I’m always posting something. My main platforms are LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Maybe for you it’s Twitter and Instagram.
A question I’m often asked is, “Ramon, which platform should I choose?” The right platform is the one you feel most comfortable with and the platform where your tribe thrives. In my case, my community, my tribe, is not on Snapchat, so I don’t use it. They’re also not on Pinterest, so I don’t use it. Here’s my simple yet very effective method for using social media: Frequency, Relevancy, Engagement, Analytics—FREA.
Frequency
It is essential to post on social media with frequency. Does this mean to post on Facebook every hour on the hour? Of course not. That’s too much for Facebook. Does it mean to post to Twitter every three minutes? No. Unless you’re covering a breaking news story with minute-by-minute updates, it’s overkill.
Keep in mind, on social media, the platform is like a moving stream of water. You tweet at 8:00 a.m., and hours later it’s unlikely your tweet is going to be seen by very many people as the thousands of other Twitter users push your 8:00 a.m. tweet down the feed. Of course, those following you closely or those closely following a hashtag will see it, but most people will not. So frequency is important.
Here is my guide—and it’s only a guide:
You’ve probably heard the axiom “out of sight, out of mind.” This is very true when using social media. There are millions of conversations happening on all the platforms. There are thousands of conversations happening on any particular topic. If you want to be top of mind to your fans, to your community, frequency is important.
I’ve started using Instagram and Facebook stories a lot more, to add even more content to my social feed. With a “story,” you won’t clutter and crowd the news feeds of your fans. If they’re interested in you, they have the option to click on your story to see every detail that you wish to share with them. You can do five stories in an hour, and that’s okay. But don’t post five times on Facebook in an hour; that can be annoying and cause people to stop following you.
Relevancy
Being relevant to your audience is vital to establishing a tribe. My wife, Ronnie, was a homeschool mom. We’ve now fully “graduated.” Today she spends some of her time educating other moms about homeschooling and more. She’s highly relevant and focused on her community and tribe. This relevancy has caused her followers and overall engagement to increase.
We talked about engagement earlier in the book, right? My wife has a high engagement rate. She doesn’t have a lot of followers, but a high percentage of them engage with her posts.
If you’re not relevant to your community, they’ll simply stop following you or, even worse, stop paying attention to you. Always seek to be relevant to your audience, and share content with them that’s important to them.
What’s going to make them laugh? What’s going to educate them? What’s going to make them smarter? What do you have to offer that will help THEM? Focus on their needs, and use your professional expertise to stay highly relevant to what is important to them. Figure out what your tribe wants to know about, then be true to that, feed it to them, and you will hold their attention.
Can you, once in a while, post about your family vacation or show yourself doing something fun on the weekend? Sure! In fact, it’s great to get a little personal and have fun with your content, but don’t let content that is NOT relevant to your audience be what’s most important.
If you are not sure what to post, here are a few ideas for inspiration:
People who are not clear on their message and who their audience is will post the least relevant things. The more focused you are on sharing content that your audience will appreciate and like and NEED, the more engagement and interest your audience will have.
Engagement
Engaging content that captures attention is essential. It’s called “social media” for a reason. The media is the photos, videos, and audio that you share with your tribe. This imagery should cause people to stop scrolling and should capture their attention. It could be as simple as a photo of you speaking at a conference with the word “WOW” superimposed over the photo. It could be a photo of you holding up your index finger, indicating “one,” with an accompanying post about the power of one small step.
You can even have engaging content with no media. Sometimes I post with JUST text. But when I do it, I do it like this: “Why Are You Satisfied? Last week I was taking my daughter to school and saw someone . . .” See how I started the post with a question that is sure to catch attention? No image, but it’s still an engaging post.
Some traits of an engaging post include the following:
Content that’s engaging catches the eye. It’s so powerful that people want to share it with others. It’s bold and screams for attention and action. You don’t have to create every bit of content; you can also curate great content and share it with others. Think about news.google.com—there’s not one bit of “news” on there that Google creates, yet it’s a popular destination.
Engaging content takes many shapes and forms. It’s not “just a blog” post, but content that includes podcasts, memes, videos, images, lists, and surveys in addition to blog posts. If you make a video, you can convert the audio from that video into a podcast, turn that podcast into a blog post, create a few images around the content, and more!
I’m always on the lookout for engaging content that will illustrate something. Organic (natural) content, infused with a message is a WIN. As I type this text, here’s a list of the imagery I observed just in the past few hours:
These are just three of the engaging images I’ve seen in the few hours I’ve been awake. Be observant, and use the world for inspiration. Part of capturing engaging imagery is just to be aware of your surroundings and not keep your head down!
Analytics
Measure what you’re doing. On a regular basis check your social media statistics to see which content performs best, what times your audience is most engaged, and the demographics of your audience. If you use a tool such as Buffer or CoSchedule, it’s great for seeing statistics on your social content. You can also use Google analytics to check the traffic of your website—what pages are read the most, who is referring content to you, and more. Many of the business versions of the social platforms have analytics built into their platforms.
I can use Buffer, for example, to see which content was most popular over the past seven days. I also use AddThis to enable my audience to share content from my websites. AddThis also provides analytics so I can see which content was most popular with my audience.
You don’t want to post content just for the sake of posting content, but you want to post content that resonates most powerfully with your audience. Understand what content is most popular. Some things will trigger your audience to take action and some things won’t. Use analytics to listen to your audience and provide them with the content they want.
I post lots of video on Facebook, and using Facebook analytics I can see which posts, which contained video had the most views. That’s the FREA concept.
Frequency. Relevancy. Engagement. Analytics.
Try it. You’ll like it, and you’ll see it give a dramatic boost to your personal brand.
LinkedIn is currently the most powerful platform for connecting with other business owners. You won’t find kids on there. You won’t find grandparents sharing photos of their newest grandchild. You won’t find middle-aged women sharing their baking secrets. Nope, you’ll find people who are in business and want to connect about business.
While LinkedIn is a powerful way to connect one-on-one with a particular professional you want to meet, it’s so much more. I use LinkedIn to post substantive educational content. I don’t post updates about what I ate (I do that on Facebook and Instagram from time to time). Instead, I post videos giving business insight to my community, or I might pose a question to be answered to engage with my following.
You’ll notice that LinkedIn is encouraging people to use hashtags. This is a relatively new and good thing. Hashtags let people find specific content on LinkedIn and the other platforms as well. While YouTube and, more recently, Facebook are leaders in video content, I’ve found that LinkedIn is becoming an oasis for good, quality, business-focused video content.
Beth Granger is a personal friend, and she is a LinkedIn and social media consultant. I asked her to share her best tips for using LinkedIn as a platform for your personal brand.
Too many times I’ve seen professionals include photos of their kids and spouses in their profile photos. Don’t do this unless it’s directly relevant to your business. Instead, use a professionally taken or at least high-quality photo that helps you look your best. Remember, people form opinions about you based on how you look. If you’re a web developer, let people focus on YOU as a professional. Using a blurry photo of yourself and your three nephews distracts me from considering YOU.
You can use a nice action image as your background. Use something exciting, not boring. This is your “hero” image that people will quickly glance at, but it will make a positive impact in people looking further at your profile.
Remember, the person looking at you on LinkedIn is probably quickly browsing on his cell phone and has a short attention span. Your headline is that snippet that encapsulates who you are in a short statement. Be thoughtful about what you put here. In some of my bios, I weave in my love of burnt pancakes and bacon AND that I’m a global keynote speaker. Yep, it sounds kind of corny, but this headline stops people scrolling and gets them to take notice long enough that they want more information to consider working with me.
When we write summaries about ourselves, we often think only of ourselves. While Beth guides us to write from the first-person perspective, I suggest trying a different approach by breaking this rule. Even in my posts on Facebook, I often use third-person perspective. Such as “Ramon is looking to hire . . .” or “Ramon learned this important lesson . . .” Why? I find that third-person captures more attention. The person reading it will know what the forthcoming information is about. Also keep in mind that you don’t have to use a full, grammatically correct sentence. It’s okay to write something like “Lawyer for startups. Ramon helps high-growth companies scale.”
Blogging used to mean creating a WordPress website and adding content on a regular basis. While blogging still means frequently updating content, you can blog from anywhere. Regularly posting content on LinkedIn is a form of blogging. Sure, it might not be indexed by Google, but you can repost it to another platform. Articles on LinkedIn are often longer and more substantive. Post or updates should be shorter and more to the point.
I love using Twitter. It’s a great platform for microblogging. It’s also the only platform where it’s acceptable to post five to ten times a day. Since Twitter is a steady stream of short nuggets, you pretty much have to post several times a day. If you post something at 8:00 a.m., only a small percentage of your community will see it throughout the day. Posting often is a good thing so long as your content is engaging and useful for your audience.
On Twitter you don’t have to post only original insight, you can retweet (RT) great posts from other people. Some people have been quite successful by sharing or retweeting other people’s content along with their own original posts. Liking and re-sharing can be just as important as posting original content.
Here are two ways I use Twitter to polish my personal brand and gain visibility in front of my core community:
Sara Wolkiewicz, writing for Mention.com,25 gives five pointers on using Twitter for brand building.
I’ve been using Twitter since 2007. For most of you reading this book, that’s a long time. Here are a few things I’ve learned from my Twitter years. Your profile matters. Be sure to have a profile image or photo and a header image that can capture attention and best represent you.
I change my images every so often to keep things fresh. After I speak at an event, invariably there are a few photos of me. If the pictures are awesome, I use them. Have you been to an event or an experience where they offered free headshots? This is a great opportunity to get a nice new set of photos for Twitter and other platforms.
While you’re analyzing your profile, give some thought to your profile description. Roberto Blake puts hashtags (I use #CelebrityCEO, for example) in his Twitter description. The purpose is for people who are searching for this hashtag to discover him.
The handle you use to define yourself on Twitter is important. I’m pretty happy with @ramonray. I know some people have all sorts of things—@Jenny587girl or @SurferDude87. These are okay for the everyday person. For business purposes, though, you should have a Twitter handle that best reflects your personal brand. If you have invested a lot of time into building a nondescriptive Twitter handle, you’ll probably want to keep it. If you are just starting out, see if you can get one that is more descriptive of who you are today or who you want to be.
Now that you’ve set up your Twitter profile, let’s think about your day-to-day usage of Twitter. It’s important to follow people or brands that you are most interested in. You want to do this so you keep up to speed with what interests you. You will also find content to share with your own Twitter followers and begin engaging with others who can promote your content and brand.
On Twitter you can build curated lists of other Twitter users, so you can more easily and quickly keep up to date with their content. These are called Twitter lists. I have a few lists for news, another for all things small business, one for various small-business journalists, and more.
I have also found using Twitter mobile notifications very useful. While I can’t keep up with the steady stream of tweets coming through my Twitter news feed, I am notified each time certain people tweet. I do this to keep up to date on what’s important to them and so I can retweet and comment on their posts. This is what social engagement is all about. When you engage with others it encourages them to engage with you.
There’s no perfect way to create content on Twitter. But here are a few things you want to consider. It’s what I do!
I find that with Twitter I can post as frequently as I want and people don’t mind. People expect a steady flow of content through their Twitter feeds, as opposed to Facebook, where they don’t want a steady flow of updates about your life. So on Twitter you can post several times a day if the content you are sharing is of value to your community.
Sometimes I post on Twitter several times an hour or minute! When? During conferences I “live tweet” the presentations. My audience and community love this. They can’t be there, but appreciate the live updates I share during the event.
When live tweeting an event, here are a few things I do, which also work well when sharing live updates from an event:
PHOTO TIP: When taking photos, hold your camera at an angle a bit higher than everyone’s heads. It’s more flattering to many people. There are no double chins or other things that many people might not like.
Twitter is, like all other platforms, very image friendly. It’s great to take an interesting picture and share it on Twitter with related content or information. For example, don’t just take a photo of yourself standing in front of a wall. Maybe hold the camera at a slight angle with a nice picture or other image behind you. It makes a less boring background and one that’s more eye catching.
Video, of course, is powerful on Twitter as well. At events, I often take a short (two minutes or less) video of the presenter and share that with a quote about what he or she said. Try to anticipate what the person is going to say so you can capture a nice nugget of his or her thoughts. Part of using Twitter successfully is just sharing great content. It’s also about sharing other people’s content and tagging them.
Here is another Twitter tip: ASK. From time to time I email friends (or direct message them on Twitter) and ask them to retweet something I’ve tweeted. If you’re promoting something new, like a product, book, new service, or even a fresh blog post, you can do this. Don’t do this a lot, but from time to time it’s okay, especially if you’ve been very giving and have shared their content as well.
Instagram is powerful, and it is growing. While every social media platform is best optimized by posting engaging content with either video or images, on Instagram it is a MUST.
I find that my biggest success in using Instagram comes from using hashtags. People are actively searching to connect with other people’s profiles on Instagram, and hashtags are how they do it. When you post, be sure to use relevant hashtags. On all platforms you can use hashtags to help people easily find the keywords you’re posting about. However, I find that on Instagram (and Twitter) hashtag use is much more popular than on Facebook or LinkedIn.
Since Instagram is first and foremost a visual platform, should you create a short video with great content that’s fun and engaging? Yes. Should you post an image with text overlaid on the image? Yes. There are so many tools and apps you can use to edit your images and videos. I use an app to add text over my pictures before posting.
Instagram is all about “vertical” content. When you take videos that you want to share on Instagram, your camera must be vertical. This platform is primarily viewed on mobile devices, so content is created to fit an upright phone screen.
Before you use Instagram, and this is my advice for all platforms, be sure you know what platform your audience is on. If you’re not sure, for a few days post actively on all the major platforms. See where you get the most response. This is how you’ll know which platform or platforms to focus on. You need not be on all platforms, but at least focus on two.
Instagram has a “business account” option that has added features beyond a regular Instagram account. While you’ll get far by just using a personal Instagram account, you’ll find that you can enhance the audience-engagement features and other cool options with a business account. In particular, you will have access to insight, statistics, and analytics.
Instagram stories are very popular. As you build a strong community, they will want to hear more and more from you, and for whatever reason, they’ll be interested in your day-to-day activities. Stories enable you to be authentic, or “real.” You can give people a peek inside what’s happening “now” or “today.” I’ve found that, with stories, community members (fans!) who are extremely interested in you can follow you up close and a bit more personally.
Think about the celebrities you follow online. Notice how many people like to know what they cooked, where they went shopping, and what their days were like. As a celebrity CEO, your fans are interested in you too. I don’t document my entire life on Instagram. When I’m out and about, maybe at an event or travelling, I use Instagram stories (which I share to Facebook stories via the Instagram app) as a way to share about the day-to-day portion of my life.
For example, maybe I’m getting into an Uber or just leaving an event. I’ll use Instagram stories to share some quick insight with my community. I’m not clogging up their feeds, and I know that only the most interested fans will click the icon to see what’s going on in my world.
Facebook is the mother of all social media platforms. It’s the biggest, most popular, and most used platform as of today. How can you leverage its power to your benefit to build and boost your personal brand?
By simply posting great content that is engaging and relevant on a regular basis, you’ll be on the right path. You can take things up a notch by using video. Facebook (along with other platforms) loves video. Don’t link to videos that are on YouTube or any other platform. Instead, upload the videos directly to Facebook. This is called natively using the app. Let’s say you’re at a client’s office and you do a three-minute video interview with her about how she’s using your product to help solve a problem in her business. Your first inclination might be to upload it to YouTube. Great. Upload it to YouTube and add descriptive remarks in the description, using keywords in the description and the video title. In addition, take the video and upload it directly to Facebook. Consider creating a shorter version, about 120 seconds, and sharing it on Twitter by uploading it directly to Twitter through the app. Platforms are selfish. They give more weight to video that’s uploaded directly to their platforms than shared via other platforms.
Live video is very popular on Facebook. If you do use live video, let your audience know ahead of time—schedule it. Use it as a way to answer questions, to get feedback, and to showcase yourself while shining the light on your fans.
Facebook Groups are very popular and are an easy way to build engagement with your fan base. A Facebook Group is like a club; use it to share special offers or news with your raving fans. Successful groups have clear rules of engagement. For my Smart Hustle Community Group, the rule is that you can only ask a question about your business. I don’t allow promotion or advice, for the most part; just a simple question. I also moderate each post to be sure this rule is followed.
Your group might be different. I’m a member of a group where there is no moderation, but all the members are thoughtful about what they post.
A group such as the National Speakers Association, with thousands of members, is moderated. When someone posts in the group, it can take a few hours or more than a day for it to be approved and to go live in the group.
A Facebook group is a great way to enable your fan base to have discussions around your brand and what your brand services. Let’s say you’re a fashion consultant. Your Facebook Group needs not be all about your consulting, but it can be about all things fashion.
As your community grows, you’ll get more and more comments. Respond to these comments, and other user actions, as best you can. Facebook’s design encourages lots of comments, messenger chats, replies, and more. Be sure that YOU are engaging on Facebook (and all social platforms). If people ask you a question, respond. If someone critiques or compliments you in a post, respond positively and constructively.
Remember as a celebrity CEO, part of the way you build your community is to respond to your community. If you feel you won’t have time for your community, it might be best to not create a community. Imagine inviting people to your birthday party and when they come, you don’t show up, or you ask them not to sing “Happy Birthday!”
Tips for Every Social Platform
Here’s a summary of tips for every social platform:
I hear over and over and over again, “Ramon, you are everywhere.” These people are not complaining, but are complimenting me on how they’ve seen a rise in my “celebrity status” online. Of course, I’m not literally everywhere, but it sure does seem that way. Since I post a lot of content on a variety of platforms, and other people tag and reference me and I tag and reference other people, the illusion of Ramon being everywhere is created.
As you seek to be a celebrity CEO, steal a few tips from my playbook and you’ll be seen as being everywhere by your fans as well.