The Power of Social Media – Own your social platform

If know anything about me, you might have come to realise that I am very passionate about social media and marketing communications. Hopefully you read my previous blog ‘The Power of Social Media – Why you should be using it and how to use it’ (not being biased, but, if you didn’t, you definitely should). In this blog I discussed how rapidly social media is changing, growing and I also provided some very interesting stats surrounding the power of technology and social media. https://risu.al/ayQj

Moving away from me trying to persuade you to be a social worshipper like myself, I’m going to now focus on how you can really own your social platform (and of course, this will include a few examples of individuals who are really creating their own world on social media).

So, I guess I need to start with what I actually mean when I say ‘own your social platform’ rather than just repeating it and hoping it makes sense. This blog is going to cover how you can kick start your social media journey and ensure you’re using it the right way, using it to your advantage and supporting you in building an initial platform to grow from.

First of all, I’m going to start off with showing you a few examples of various Instagram accounts to give you a bit more of an idea of how huge you can be when you really take control of your social channel and steal the show. (I have also included Microsoft and risual Ltd Instagram accounts to give you a bit of an idea of the difference in audience and number of followers).

Currently, the top 20 Instagram Social Accounts are:

  1. Instagram – 245 million followers
  2. Selena Gomez – 141 million followers
  3. Cristiano Ronaldo – 139 million followers
  4. Ariana Grande – 125 million followers
  5. Beyoncé – 117 million followers
  6. Kim Kardashian – 115 million followers
  7. Kylie Jenner – 113 million followers
  8. Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson – 112 million followers
  9. Taylor Swift – 111 million followers
  10. Justin Bieber – 102 million followers
  11. Neymar – 101 million followers
  12. Lionel Messi – 97 million followers
  13. Kendall Jenner – 93 million followers
  14. National Geographic – 90 million followers
  15. Nicki Minaj – 90 million followers
  16. Nike – 79 million followers
  17. Jennifer Lopez – 78 million followers
  18. Khloe Kardashian – 77 million followers
  19. Miley Cyrus – 76 million followers
  20. Katy Perry – 71 million followers

Last year I presented at risual Head Quarters discussing all things social media, and I gave some examples of various Instagram accounts that have completely different target audiences, different content – but all one goal.

People and businesses from all over the world are using social media as the first ‘go to’ tool when building their own platform and empire. I want to start with Kim Kardashian-West. Kim KW is absolutely huge on social media at the moment (and the more you learn about me the more you’ll realise how much I keep up with her life better than I do my own) and continues to grow and grow – currently Kim has one of the highest social media followings in the entire world. Kim KW is constantly changing, launching new products, and advertising her reality TV show (Keeping Up With The Kardashians) – she keeps up with her audience and continues to build her brand to grow her empire.

A social media influencer is an individual who has a huge amount of credibility in a sector and uses their social media platform to reach out to their large audience, persuading them with their own authenticity.

Here are our Top 3 social media influencers.

  1. Michelle Obama – Former First Lady of the United States of America, Lawyer and Writer.
  2. Malala Yousafzai – Activist for female education and the youngest Nobel Prize laureate.
  3. Huda Kattan – Makeup artist, beauty blogger, and entrepreneur.

Without me going into detail on what these three social media influencers do, and what they focus on you can immediately notify that they all have different target audiences, different passions, different interests, different brands and more. This brings me onto asking if you can guess what every social media user’s one main goal is? It’s brand identity.

Social media is currently being used by many people from across the world to get noticed, promoted, connected and build a brand – it’s the perfect tool to create new opportunities and new contacts. But why? Well, in the last 60 seconds there have been over 276,000 tweets, 246,000 Facebook posts, with 1.8 million likes, and 72 hours of YouTube video uploaded, and about 120 new LinkedIn members – crazy, right? This is exactly why it is becoming more and more relevant that businesses or individuals who want to get recognised and established, do it through the help of social media.

Now you know how huge social media really is, the amount of people that use it to connect and build a platform of success we can now start talking about the exciting stuff.

Building your own social media empire.

Like any business, it’s all about growing a platform and helping yourself to grow and expand. The world today is huge, and with 40% (3.196 billion people) of people in the world being currently active on social media (each individual has an average of 7.6 social media accounts), there really isn’t another way to gain such a huge reach.

You know I love my stats and facts about social media so here is one more, 1 in 3 people check their Facebook and Twitter account every single morning before they even get out of bed. Social media is officially one of the most powerful ways to reach your current audience and create a bigger reach. Going back to our top 3 social media influencers, at number three we have Huda Kattan who is massive on social media. Huda started her presence on social media as a beauty blogger on Youtube, delving into makeup tutorials, showing tips and tricks and new products and now she has her own business and own beauty products line. It goes to show, when you begin to build your brand, reach out to the right audience you really can make something huge with social media and take control of your own platform.

Know your audience

You need to understand who you are reaching out to, who you want to be following you and who you want engaging with you. Understanding who your audience are and their interests is key – you want to make sure your content is suitable to them and of interest to them to keep your engagement rate high.

Consistency

Viewers need to understand your brand, and you need to ensure you make it visible what your brand is. Stay consistent throughout all your channels with the tone, colours, imagery, voice and personality to make it easy for the audience to understand who you are.

Engage

The audience want to hear from you. It’s not always just about the content your posting – try and reply to some comments and messages. Try and engage with the audience by building conversations or posting polls, stay involved.

Character

What is your character? What’s your businesses character? Are you fun? Are you friendly? Are you outgoing? Don’t forget to portray that on your social media channels.

Tone and language

Your tone of voice and language used is a huge part to owning your social media empire. You need to find what your tone is, what language you will use. The audience are looking at your channel without speaking directly to you – you want to showcase your fun, exciting and kind personality – use the right tone and language to keep your audience coming back and wanting to stay up to date with you.

Purpose

Sometimes it can be easy to get lost on social media, and even easier to maybe forget about the purpose of why you are there. Continuously remind yourself and set new goals to understand why you are there, what you need to do and what you want to show your audience.

Interactive

A key tip to owning your empire is to stay interactive. Social media has added very exciting new features to almost every platform recently to build the interactive side of it. Instagram has recently added in a poll section, live streaming and a ‘ask me anything’ section – keep your audience entertained and involved as your grow and develop. The audience will love coming on your journey with you, and it will create more loyal viewers.

Personality

And last but certainly not least, showcase your personality. Use visuals, images and GIFS to keep everyone involved, show them what you’ve been getting up to, and let’s be honest – who doesn’t love a good GIF? People need to trust you and want to be involved with you. Continuously come across positive, open and honest to build new relationships and own your empire.

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