Defining and showcasing your brand with a side order of social media

Here’s my cheat sheet to get to started building your online community. Use these tips and resources to grow your online presence.

Getting to know your own brand

You can’t promote what you don’t know.

  • Answer your “Big Why” in 4 words. Yes this is shorter than a mission statement, but you can do it! Now start signing your email with it!
  • What are your core values? Reflect on peak experiences that hit you emotionally.
  • Who is your hero? Who is your tribe? Tell a story about one of your heroes – this is your hook

My preferred methods of growing an audience: IRL, SM, content marketing (blog with sign up button at the end, guest posts, Q&A with segment leaders), email

  • Speak to people already following using the mom test

Your website

  • The sign up button: newsletter sign up, auto login after sign up
  • Send a personal email w/in 24 hrs asking why they signed up
  • Ask: What’s the main benefit of our product to you? If our product went away tomorrow, how disappointed would you be?
  • Once 40% are “very disappointed, it’s time to grow!

UX tools

Math

Hustle

Social Media

Instagram

  • quick 150 WD bio, direct CTA w memorable URL that opens to unique high value landing page (promo code)
  • only talk to ideal user
  • reply & flood #
  • Audisense to find audience
  • Canva.com to make memes
  • hootsuite to schedule posts

Your FB group

  • Get your group going by inviting engaged FB page users and newletter subscribers to join
  • Posts to a group always show up in people’s feed
  • Paid ads need a custom audience, find it with spaceship.rocks
  • Fanpage.karma lets you track the competition’s FB page

Twitter 

  •  Send tweets when audisense bttt tells you to
  • Copy followers with tweepi
  • Build hootsuite searches on your audience themes
  • RT compliments
  • Tweet the same thing 5x/day
  • tweet anatomy: picture, link, CTA
  • tweet lots 10-50x/day

Tumblr – youth oriented, only go here if your audience is here

Pinterest – if you blog about beautiful things, audience is female 30+, remove any pin not repinned 6x in 48 hrs

Reddit – search for your niche, post in 10 subreddits

Snapchat – v. important if your company = your personal brand

Community mgmt

  • Not on Sunday night
  • Use hootsuite
  • Shorten links using bitly or owl.ly to track what works/doesn’t work

COM 405 Website Review Day

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COM 405 “Career Preparation Across Borders” is a dynamic advanced career prep course in the Bachelor of Commerce Program at the Peter B. Gustavson School of Business. The goal of COM 405 is to set each and every Commerce student up with global networks, build their resume, gain mentors, international experiences and build technical skills.

Students are required to build out a website to showcase themselves to potential employers. To help them figure out what kinds of elements to include on a personal website, they were provided with a demo website. Most students chose a Weebly template to build out from. I was invited to attend a coaching session to help students build, strengthen and showcase their own brand.

The BCOM Experiential Learning Manager and one of the course instructors, Jennifer Gill, supplied a rubric to help make sure I was providing the right kinds of feedback. Some of the students showed up with fully built out sites and others were expecting a lot more hand holding.

I shared my favourite tips on effective writing for the web and basic content layout. I also asked some of my favourite “GROW” coaching questions. These open-ended questions helped them to nail down their purpose and values, and through this, clarity about their personal brand.

My favourite component that students included was a “global mindset” page. It helped to tease out the why and how that motivated each student. By fourth year, every Gustavson Commerce student has had some sort of international experience, either as an exchange student to another institution or on an international work term.

The completed sites were revealed at the Global Leaders Festival, billed as a “reverse career fair” for employers to identify new talent.