How can you benefit from your social media audience? - Part 1

Companies and individual creators today are monetizing skills and growing businesses through social media followers. This is because, for any kind of consumer business, social media is an invaluable asset. It allows you to connect with your customers, get immediate feedback, form communities, create an army of followers, reach out to people in your industry, spread the word about your brand and so much more. Read on to know about some of the ways in which you can benefit from your social media audience.

1. Develop your Brand Identity

One of the mistakes that you can make is using your social media pages to explicitly advertise or run clickbait ads. Social media is a space that requires and enables as much experimenting as you like. Cracking the correct social media strategy requires work but you should start out on the right foot. Instead of directly trying to sell your knowledge or product, you can develop and convey a larger purpose behind your endeavor- something that would become associated with you, your brand identity.

You must talk about what you stand for, what you represent, and try to inculcate that picture in the minds of your audience. The goal should be to try to create a narrative, a message that sticks around for much longer than the actual product is in front of the viewer’s eye.

For example, a scented candle brand develops its brand identity by telling its followers that its products are organic because they believe in creating a lap-of-nature type environment with their products. So, in the future when a person thinks about either purchasing a candle or bringing a natural touch to their homes, they will recall this particular brand.

Similarly, financial educator Prashant Desai constantly reminds his followers how his life changed when he discovered the potential of investing in the stock market, by telling them his life story. So, when a person thinks about investing, the stock market, or life change, they are reminded of Prashant’s story, and hence the knowledge that Prashant offers.

2. Give Free Knowledge and Build Engagement

The space of social media gives a creator access to an audience of unimaginable magnitude and dimensions. Many creators and educators use social media to give free education to their followers through live stream classes or recorded tutorials. Without worrying about monetization, they simply give and give more. This has come to work massively in their favor in the long run. By building an audience that trusts their knowledge, they are setting the stage for any ongoing or future monetizable projects.

Fitness trainer Karan Singh told SocialBoat that he conducts live workout and training sessions for free to give his social media audience a sneak peek into his fitness community. This definitely attracts more customers.

Similarly, Shravan Tickoo, who educates the masses about Product Management through social media, told SocialBoat,

“I want to get people excited about products via the high-quality content I post on social media. But, that is just a teaser,”

adding that he is planning to start with paid cohort-based classes in the near future.

3. Growth through Healthy Competition

By being aware of your competition and potential competition in the market, you can learn and grow. Since social media is a space for one and all, it promotes a healthy and open competition that comes with a bunch of benefits.

Among all other things, a social media audience, both quantitatively and qualitatively, acts as a parameter to measure the growth of a particular business enterprise. But comparison and competition give a chance for self-evaluation and therefore, make a large room for improvement and learning.

Keeping an eye on what your fellow creators are doing can be inspiring as it pushes you to do better. The goal is to create a collective ecosystem that inspires. Plus, there is always the possibility of collaborations that have proved to be a powerful tool in reaching a new audience. Raj Abhisar, a financial educator on Instagram, in an interview, told SocialBoat that Instagram Live sessions with fellow creators have unprecedentedly increased his followers.

Social media has become one of the key spaces that need to be covered. It is an excellent way to grow your brand and become more well-known in your community. It also allows you to send out information about your business, keep in touch with your customers, and make you believe that you are a part of something bigger than yourself.

The benefits of social media are many. These were only some of the many ways to avail them. Stay tuned for part two on the same topic covering other such significant and insightful aspects.

For more insights on how to monetize your skills through social media, visit SocailBoat.