How to engage your online business audience
In last week’s blog, I introduced the concept that there are 5 critical skill sets that are needed to build your online business successfully. The first key skill is Building an Audience and you can learn about it by visiting last week’s blog here.
This week, I’ll cover key skill #2 which is Engaging Your Audience. Of course, as you grow your audience, they are new connections for you. They don’t yet know you very well, and therefore they may not like or trust you yet.
Well, the only way to grow that know/like/trust is to engage with them! The more they get to know you, the more rapport you will build with them. And the more you show your true self, the more you’ll attract “your people” and the more you’ll repel the wrong people for you.
So many people are afraid to use their personal brand (who they really are) and the law of attraction in their business because they’re afraid of repelling anyone. But if your “ideal client” is a single mom with a positive outlook on life, do you really care if you repel a married man who’s excessively skeptical and negative? I hope not!
Attracting the right people and repelling the wrong people is exactly what you want!
To learn more about the basics of Personal Branding, click here for a free introductory training. If you’d like to dive in deeper, you can get an the pro-level branding course here.
As you build your audience and share your personal brand, you’ll want to share engaging content to engage with them. This seems a little obvious on the surface, but there are some important nuances to doing so. How you define “engaging” can vary from person to person, but there are quite a few content types to choose from as you start moving from ad-hoc to purposeful and strategic posts.
As you can see, this is a pretty long list of choices! Even within the “Social Media Posts” category, there are a handful of choices between Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. so this single category could keep you busy for quite some time. You could focus exclusively on this section if you want to!
Similar to last week, the trick is not to put your energy around all the places where you can share engaging content and to multiply your efforts across multiple platforms, but rather to FOCUS on how to share engaging content in just one location.
Once you master finding your own voice and engaging with an audience successfully in one location, you can broaden your approach into other places.
Again, similar to last week, let’s assume that you are starting your learning on Facebook. To streamline, simplify, and FOCUS your efforts, you can zero in on making posts to your personal FB page, providing commentary on other people’s posts or on other content you see, and sharing live videos from time to time.
Of course, if Instagram (or another platform) is your favorite go-to social platform, you’ll want to start there. But regardless of what platform you start with, I strongly encourage you to include live video into your mix of content.
So many people are afraid of using live video, but here are some stats that might surprise you:
Video posts get 59% more engagement than other types of posts
Videos outperform photos by 73%
People comment on Facebook Live videos 10X more than regular videos
On social media, video generates 1200% more shares than text and images combined
Businesses using video grew their revenue 49% faster year over year than non-video users
If that doesn’t get you excited to start using video, I don’t know what will!
In next week’s blog I’ll cover Key Skill #2: Communication. In the meantime, think through key skills #1 and #2 and identify areas where you can streamline and FOCUS to increase your odds of success.