Growing a social media account

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All new posts need a flair going forward
byu/JonODonovan insocialmedia

[satansayssurfsup]

Just create good content and engage with people in a positive way. I know that’s not specific but it’s not more complicated than that

[Uchnino9900]

If you’re into services or products, the fastest way to build an audience is to do giveaways. Let’s say you offer sports cards investment tips, or you sell orange juice and you want to grow your twitter account.

Offer some orange juice for free or some not so valuable sports card. Tell people to follow you and tag their friends, the highest amount of likes get to win a specially delivered orange juice or sports card to their home.

Do this once or thrice every week and watch your follower count skyrocket. Also mix this strategy with offering educational and informational content on a daily basis. Create a branded template, you can do this on canva. Be proactive.

You can get thousands of followers in a little as two weeks. This is what I do!!

[RampartAdmin]

Who is your audience?

I know your post stated that that your audience hangs out in Stocktwits and Twitter in stock market investing areas. But your post does not say who your audience is in terms of what services or goods you are trying to sell to them and why they need you. You said you had a programming background. Does that mean you are trying to sell specific software to stock investors? Are you trying to create a consulting company that will advise people on various stock investment software that they can use? Are you trying to sell your sage advice on how to be a day trader?

Or is your ultimate goal something different from all of this?

The answers to your question for each of these possible career goals would be radically different. For example, if you have software that helps people with long-term investment strategies, by analyzing market trends or possibly giving alerts as to when and invest in stock is likely to take a nosedive, then you might offer constructive tips on how to use your software. Conversely if your main goal is how to become a lightning fast and profitable day trader, then your focus is going to be on how timely and relevant the information you provide to investors is.

Again, I am not trying to stress that these are the only options that are out there. What I am trying to illustrate is the fact that until you can say who your market is, it is genuinely pointless to try and figure out how to reach your audience.

Or more precisely – your paying audience.

You might start with a generalized idea of an area that you want to move professionally into, but that is just the first baby step. You need to then sit back and analyze – as you would with stocks – what specific niche you want to fill, that you can believe you can fill, and have a specific audience that you can convince needs to purchase your goods and/or services. And your audience cannot be “everyone”. One of the biggest mistakes that people starting out in business make is they try to market to “everyone”. I am not saying you will not sell your goods and services to anyone who comes up with the purchase price, but you cannot market to everyone. Every single post, ad, feature, strategic partnership, whatever, that you engage in and utilize to advance your business, needs to reinforce to your chosen market segment that your product is indispensable in helping them achieve their perceived needs.

Let me give you an example. Let us suppose you an attorney fresh out of law school and just passed the bar exam. It would not make sense to engage in marketing that said you handled everything from traffic tickets to long-term estate planning to death penalty cases. If you did that only the truly desperate and poor will come to you for your services because they will know you have no specialty and no experience.

Instead, you are fairly certain that you would prefer to have customers who can pay your fee. That narrows down your audience to people with jobs, and the superrich who live off of trusts, or old money. If you do not have the right background and connections, the trusts and old money crowd are probably out of your reach. That is not to say you cannot eventually work your way into those very lucrative niches, but it is going to take a lot of time and a lot of work, and your massive student loans are very difficult to discharge in bankruptcy court, so you have to start making money so you can pay those off, as well as eat and have somewhere to live, rather quickly.

Now we are down to the idea that you need to sell a service to middle-class people with jobs. What are things that middle-class people need on a regular basis? Two that come to your mind are: 1. DWI representation, 2.) Divorce representation. Both of those are traumatic, life-changing events that can take an average person and threaten their entire existence. They have a job, family, and overall Life Path that used to look fairly good, but is now in danger. They will pay to have the threats they face minimized so they can still have a decent life.

For the purposes of this example, it does not matter which you choose. You can decide to become your city’s top expert in divorce laws, or DWI laws. But you have to pick one. You want to convey to your audience that it would be a mistake for them to go to anyone else. And that means, all things considered, you decide to become a divorce attorney. You could go with DWI, but in this particular case, you just decide to go with divorce.

Now your focus is a little bit clearer. You have to eat, drink, breathe, and be totally consumed by divorce litigation in your region. You have to join support groups for people that are going through divorce. You have to write about divorce laws and procedures in your county. You can even take the marketing one step further and become a zealous advocate for men’s rights in divorce, and talk about how unfair the law is to fathers, changes that need to be made, and litigation strategies that can be done to help achieve fairness for men going through divorce who are trying to obtain custody of their children.

Or, in the alternative you could become the most zealous advocate for women’s rights, and champion them against all the woes that the legal system places on women going through divorce who are trying to obtain custody.

And now everything you write, say, and present to the world deals with that specific sub-niche of domestic relations law.

Congratulations – you now have the market segment that you are going to market to. And because you have defined your market segment so well, how to market to them suddenly becomes infinitely easier to see. Your message comes into focus, and begins to write itself.

You have become a zealous champion – and savior – for the people who use your service.

You will get clients walking through the door as soon as you start to get the word out that you are the zealous advocate for their particular need.

Now take that process and apply it to your own particular endeavor that you are working on. Do you have something of value to sell to the people on Stocktwits and Twitter? What is it? What problem do they have that it will almost immediately fix? Pat Flynn, on his Smart Passive Income podcast likes to remind people that, “Business solves problems.” It does not matter what your business is, it has to solve someone’s problem, or the problem of another business, or it will not have customers. Every successful business you know solves a problem. McDonald’s solves the problem of how to get relatively quick food for someone who is hungry, or needs to pick up a quick meal for the kids on the way home. A fancy four-star restaurant solves the problem of where someone with large amounts of disposable income can spend an evening feeling catered to while eating very fine food and feeling ritzy. The Post Office gets your letter across country with minimal work on your part. Your insurance agent provides you with the most reliable policy for your car at a relatively inexpensive price. Dentists fill the cavities and prevent you from losing teeth and feeling pain.

Your audience has to have a problem, even if that problem is nothing more than the need to feel entertained. If that is their problem then you supply them with funny jokes and quips about investing in stocks. If they want to save money for retirement then your stock investment advice must focus in on that. If they want to make money in day trading, then your software that you are offering to sell them – or newsflash email alert service – must give them lightning fast, up-to-the-second information so they can simultaneously make more money while having fewer investments go south.

Know who your audience is – in great detail – and the marketing and your message become as obvious as sunlight on a beautiful spring day.

Then, and only then, can you focus on WHICH social medias help you get your message out to your audience.