“Sheep are always looking for a new shepherd when the terrain gets rocky.” - Karen Marie Moning (Author)

There was an Instagram account with over 30,000 followers and it looked great. Well, until you took a closer look and found that about 50 people were engaging on an average post (.167%) AND the account was losing about 300-500 “followers” a month! There may be a few reasons for this which we can talk about some other time. The important takeaway is to strive to build a following of engaged followers interested who you are as a person, a brand or concept.

“I’d much rather have 500 engaged followers than 10,000 who don’t give a damn” - Marc Zdanow (founder, Social Wizard)

At Social Wizard we start working with our client’s social media presence by looking inward. The first step is to reflect and come to an understanding of who you are as a brand and who you are as a business. The second step is to decide about your subject matter. You’d think this would be a no-brainer but it’s an important step. We recommend breaking it down into “Tent Poles” or the main areas of ongoing discussion and sharing. These tent poles should be directly related to the personality, experience, brand, goods & services and customer/client experience. This is very specific to each client and is customized for each one.

Social Media posts are not advertisements - well, not directly. We don’t post to sell anything. We post to share who we are and to engage. It’s the first glance, the handshake… there will be time to “sell” your goods and services.

"To build a long-term, successful enterprise, when you don't close a sale, open a relationship." - Patricia Fripp (Author)

Now we draft up some posts. Depending on which social media platforms a client will pursue, we’ll put together a number of posts for each (usually about 2-3 per platform). These will be based upon what we’ve learned from our conversations with the client and additional research. The goal here is to get on message. We tend to have an image with every post. It’s worth noting that using licensed photography is a must, check out “The Beginner's Guide to Using Stock Images Without Getting Sued” by Jeff Rojas for Entrepreneur. Once our client approves the first batch of posts, we go ahead and create the next calendar of posts. During the calendar our focus is on engagement rather than posting. Of course there are things that happen where we need to do a post on the fly, but we’re generally engaging followers & potential followers.

*see this article, What is Social Media