By Larisa Love (@larisadoll)
Adding value to your social media content first comes with finding your passion. When you discover your passion, it will become much easier to find your niche and showcase the value of your passion. You can start by uploading step-by-steps or how-tos that you were personally and professionally excited to create; then, you can see how your audience reacts to that content, and move forward from there in future posts.
Your engagement will show whether you’re moving in the right direction, but don’t be discouraged if your engagement isn’t as high in the beginning as you would have hoped. Remember, everyone starts with zero: zero followers, zero comments and zero content. As soon as you begin posting and creating content, you are forging a path toward success.
Many people ask how I got started on Instagram and grew my community to more than half a million. If you want to stand out and grow your community on social media, you must first and foremost begin with authenticity. Just being yourself allows others to connect with you and want to follow and engage with you. If you are trying to replicate and follow the “formula” of other pages, you will blend in with the crowd and won’t reach your goals.
To sum up, using social media to help build your business success boils down to these three key points:
[1] Add value to your content. Find out what your audience wants to learn from you or specifically why they are following you.
[2] Figure out what type of audience you are trying to reach. Be specific with your desired audience goals, and become an expert in what content that particular audience wants to see. For example, my followers are hairdressers and clients, too—that’s why I create videos for both audiences.
[3] Be authentic. Above all else, be authentic! Your audience is following you because of you. There are many people that could be creating similar content as you, but your audience chose to press the “follow” button for you because of who you are as a beauty professional and as a person.