Building an audience is essential but requires a lot of time and effort, which leads most people to look for shortcuts. Unfortunately, they don’t work.

Digital maketing today gives us more ways to get in front of as broad or as focused of an audience as you want, but even that unprecedented power doesn’t enable us to buy an audience. Sure, you can buy fans on Instagram, views on YouTube, and even put your content directly into the Facebook feed of potential customers, but that doesn’t mean they’ll ever engage with or buy from you.

Its not a numbers game. Simply reaching people, no matter how large the audience, is no longer a recipe for success.

I’ve seen this mistake first-hand, even from so-called professionals in the digital marketing industry. For example, the founder of a PR firm I had the displeasure of crossing paths with had fooled his clients into believing he was competent by purchasing thousands of followers for his social media profiles. An inexperienced client might see his “audience” and think that guy must know what he’s doing, but in just a few seconds, you can scan his feed and see that he has no engagement. Despite having 50,000 “followers,” no one is commenting on or retweeting his posts, nor are they talking about him. And for obvious reasons—they aren’t real people.

Building an audience—the kind who will talk about your company, share and/or link to your content, and even buy from you—that takes a different approach. Today, it’s essential to get in front of the right people, engage with them by creating and sharing amazing content, and communicate with them rather than at them.

So how do we achieve this?

The first step is understanding exactly who you want as your audience, and despite what some people think, your audience is never “everyone.” This is critical because it enables you to create the kind of content that will really resonate with them. Before creating this content, you need figure out both why it would matter to visitors, and what would motivate them to share and/or link to it.

The next step is to get this content in front of a that  audience. Generally, the smaller your niche, the better you can connect with them—both because your message will be more precisely tailored, and because you’ll be able to achieve more repetition.

Let’s say you are a general contractor who specializes in building homes between $400,000-$600,000. Rather than simply targeting people based on geography and income, you might further refine your audience based on additional interests.

For example, someone who watches Duck Dynasty and buys their clothes at Bass Pro Shops would probably prefer a very different style of home than someone who watches Billions and wears Calvin Klein suits. By targeting your audience based on other interests that align with your products or services, you’ll be better able to get in front of the the right people.

Finally, you’ll need to communicate with your audience, not at them. Too many people today treat. social media like a megaphone, often using a program to automate their posting and considering their work done.

There’s nothing wrong with these programs, in fact, we use one called Edgar to manage posts for ourself and clients, but they should play a minuscule role in your social media efforts. That’s because in addition to posting great content consistently, you need to also engage with other real human beings. This means following relevant people and brands, commenting on and sharing their posts, and responding to their comments on your posts.

The key here is to add value in every interaction and treat your audience like human beings rather than just a number.

Everyone with a website or social media profile dreams of going viral and becoming famous, but most people don’t have a strategy to make it happen, nor do they know what to expect, or what to do if it does happen.

If it makes you feel any better, I was in that position before. I’ve had some pretty impressive successes online over the years, but last summer was my first real viral post. I learned a lot from that experience and now I’m going to share it with you.

Let’s start with a short recap of what happened…

I was driving home after dropping my son off at daycare on the morning of July 17, 2015. This was the day after Islamic terrorists murdered four United States Marines and one sailor at two military installations on U.S. soil. For those who don’t know, I served in the Marine Corps, so this struck a nerve for me.

Thoughts swirled furiously around in my head on the drive home and when I sat back down at my desk, I dumped those thoughts into a quick Facebook post, tagged a few of the guys I served with, and hit the post button.

When I logged back into Facebook right before lunch, my post had a few thousand shares. That afternoon, tens of thousands. Near the end of the day, my post had over 40,000 shares, others had copied and posted it, and when I gave up counting, I had a rough tally of over 500,000 shares.

It was also covered by several YouTube personalities and written about on dozens of websites. I was interviewed on a few radio programs and was even scheduled to be interviewed live on CNN. (Unfortunately, the CNN interview fell through at the last minute.) Many of these also went viral, though not on quite the same scale as my original post.

It resonated with a force and scale that I didn’t expect.

I knew that some of the Marines I served with would share it, but I didn’t expect much more than that. I never expected hundreds of thousands of shares reaching into other countries. I received thousands of friend requests and messages on Facebook, my voicemail blew up, and that exposure bled over to my business as well.

It was crazy because it wan’t trying to go viral. I was just letting people know what was on my mind.

I was letting my fellow Marines, past and present, know that the brotherhood we shared while in uniform is still as powerful as it had ever been. I was letting my fellow citizens know that everyone who had ever worn the coveted Eagle, Globe, and Anchor was still willing to stand between them and danger. And I was letting our enemies know that we would fight them just as fiercely here at home as we would on any battlefield.

I have no way to track the total reach, but even just counting several hundred thousand shares on Facebook would mean exposure well into the millions—and this all happened in the first 3 days! Add in the exposure from Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and radio programs, and you end up reaching an astronomical number of people.

If you missed it, here was my post from July 17, 2015:

https://www.facebook.com/jeremy.l.knauff/posts/10153027425288946

I learned a lot from this post going viral, so now I’m going to share that with you.

Going viral is a combination of hard work and luck

It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about a social post, a blog post, a video, or something else—going viral requires content that resonates with your intended audience. This is hard work because producing high-quality content that people want to share is difficult.

It also requires that enough people create momentum by sharing it, because even the best content can’t go viral if people don’t see it. This part is largely dependent on luck, but you can shift the odds by using paid ads.

As you build a larger audience by consistently producing high-quality content, it will become a lot easier to go viral because the luck aspect will become a smaller factor, but you’ll always have to put in hard work.

It’s only an opportunity

When a post goes viral, it doesn’t magically bestow the author with instant authority status. It only provides an opportunity to share your message with a larger audience.

If your new audience doesn’t find in your previous posts whatever got them engaged with this post, they won’t stick around to see if you pull off another one. Your one-hit wonder status will be on par with Chumbawamba. Remember them? Probably not.

Remember how earlier I was talking about hard work being a critical part of viral success? It ties directly in with opportunity—you need to consistently produce killer content so that when a post does go viral, your audience can find more of the same. That is how you turn the opportunity created by going viral into results.

Leverage viral exposure when it strikes

You can expect a huge wave of activity during the first few days, mostly on which ever channel your post goes viral. In my case, it was a Facebook post on my personal profile, so I was swamped with friend requests, messages, comments, tags, shares, and likes, but that activity also bled over into Spartan Media’s website and Facebook page too.

Anything I posted during the next few weeks got tons of likes, shares, and comments, but most importantly, massive exposure to an engaged audience. I leveraged that exposure to raise awareness for a relevant cause that means a lot to me—fighting the epidemic of veteran suicide. This enabled me to connect more struggling veterans with the help they needed on a larger scale.

You need to leverage your post in a way that enables you to continue marketing to your new audience after the initial wave of exposure dies off.

While you should definitely encourage them to follow you on social media, you really need to get them to subscribe to your email list. You should also create another piece of killer content to share with them as soon as possible to build on your momentum.

People loved that post—not every post

When your post goes viral, it’s because something about it resonated with people, but that doesn’t mean they’ll feel the same about your previous or future posts. In fact, it’s more likely that they won’t.

I’m not quiet about my opinions. Unsurprisingly, some of the people who had been most vocal in singing my praises a week earlier were just as vocal in criticizing some of my other posts.

People may agree wholeheartedly with one post, but think you are completely wrong on another. They might disagree with a lot of your other posts. Hell, they might even think you’re a complete idiot who just happened to say one thing that they agree with.

Don’t place too much value on the praise or the criticism, but expect to hear plenty of both. That being said, while it’s easy to let the praise go to your head, it’s even easier to dwell on a few negative comments.

It doesn’t mean very much

A viral post only means that something you said resonated with people.

You’re still just a normal person who struggles through life, just like everyone else. You have good days and bad days, make good and poor choices, experience confidence and insecurity, and make intelligent and stupid comments.

It’s not a measure of your importance, character, or intellect.

Be grateful for it, maybe even pat yourself on the back a little, but then get back to the grind because success isn’t one event, it’s a culmination of all of the small things you do over a long period of time.

It can be tough to get traction when you’re first starting out in social media. You can share awesome content and write compelling posts, published at the ideal times, but if you can’t get them in front of enough eyeballs, all of your hard work can just fizzle out.

The problem is that in the beginning, you don’t have a large or engaged audience, so you rarely reach enough people. The solution is to catch the attention of an influencer—someone in your industry who already has a large and engaged audience, and get them to share your content. But that’s often easier said than done.

Today, I’m going to change that by sharing a simple, step by step framework to get their attention and encourage them to share your content, which will help you become an influencer too.

Keep in mind, when I say “simple,” I mean it’s not complicated, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. It’s still going to take a fair amount of time and a lot of hard work, but that’s the case with anything that’s worth doing. The most important thing you need to remember during this entire process is to add value with every interaction.

Step #1: Create a list of influencers

Planning is essential because a little effort preparing will save you a ton of work over the course of this campaign, so start by putting the influencers you want to engage with into a list. You can use this Google Sheet as a starting point. You’ll want to include, at a minimum, their blog and two social media channels.

Don’t just look at the size of their audience, though. Select influencers who are relevant to your goals and who share views similar to yours.

Step #2: Follow their media channels

Next, you’ll keep an eye on all of the content they produce.

Subscribe to their newsletter. This might give you their primary email address, but even if it doesn’t, it will at least give you an email address that they or an assistant check. (The email they check is probably not the same one the newsletter is sent from, but it will usually be listed in the email somewhere.) If nothing else, it will give you a lot of insight into what motivates them.

Follow all of their profiles on social networks that you regularly use, even if they don’t follow you back. And at this stage, they probably won’t. This includes:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Instagram
• Pinterest
• Google Plus
• YouTube
• Periscope
• SnapChat

Don’t bother creating profiles on social networks that you don’t already use regularly because a brand new profile with few or no posts will look spammy or creepy. (Or both.)

Finally, subscribe to their blog feed. The easiest way to do this is with RSS Feed Reader extension for Chrome.

Step #3: Keep them on your radar

Set up Google News Alerts for both the name of the person and their company with the following settings:

This will ensure that you get a notification as soon Google finds something, giving you the best opportunity to engage with the that influencer about it before others do.

Step #4: Let’s get to work!

Schedule time to engage with the influencers on your list once each day. More than that and you’ll likely give off that creepy stalker vibe. Ideally, when they are most active.

Open the Google Sheet and click the links you compiled to each social profile in the list you compiled. Your goal is to engage with each person on your list by posting useful and relevant comments on their social posts. Don’t force it, though. You won’t impress anyone with an empty “Great post!” comment, and if they see a string of comments like that, they’ll quickly tune you out.

Next, monitor their blog for new posts. If you’re using the RSS Feed Reader extension for Chrome that I mentioned earlier, you’ll see a notification in the top right corner of your browser. (I circled it in red.)

As soon as they publish a new blog post, try to be one of the first to comment on it. Just like on the social posts, it needs to be useful and relevant. Then share it on social media, and if possible, tag them.

If it’s relevant, you can also link to their blog posts from your own and tag them when you share it on social media. Anytime you do that, be sure to drop them a short email telling them specifically what you found valuable about their post and that you linked to it in your new post. Don’t forget to include a link to your post in your email so they can quickly and easily find it. (If their website runs on WordPress, and most do, they will even receive a notification in their dashboard when you link to them.)

When you receive their email newsletter, if you spot a relevant opportunity, reply to it.

Along the way, you’re also on the lookout for any mention of them on other websites, which is where the Google News Alerts will come in. When any of the influencers you set up a News Alert for are mentioned, Google will send you an email. That’s your opportunity to share a link to that page on social media and tag the person it’s about.

Wash, rinse, repeat

Once you’ve established a relationship with the influencers on your list, you can compile a new list and start this process over.

It’s important to point out that you should not view the influencers on your list as a conquest. While you do want them to engage with you and share your content, if that is your only goal, don’t waste their time or your own. People will realize you’re using them, which will cause long-term damage to both your personal and company’s reputation.

Switching software that’s used for a large, critical part of your business (including SAS like Hootsuite and Edgar) can be a lot of work, so it’s not something I take lightly. You have to consider how the learning curve will impact short term productivity, how the software will integrate with your existing workflow, and what other systems may be impacted,.

We recently went through this process when switching from Hootsuite to Edgar for managing our social media. Fortunately, despite the numerous advantages Edgar offers over Hootsuite, the switch was surprisingly pain free.

Don’t get me wrong—Hootsuite isn’t horrible. In fact, it served our needs quite well for many years, but as we grew, we quickly realized it’s shortcomings.

Hootsuite’s weaknesses

The first was that since we manage a very large number of social media accounts—hundreds of accounts including our own and our clients, efficient management required a separate user for each client. We also had to pay extra to add extra social media accounts. That quickly inflated the price from less than $10/month to around $200/month.

If that were the only issue, we would have stuck with Hootsuite, but unfortunately, it was just the begining.

We typically scheduled posts for a week at a time. At first, we would open our clients blog posts in dozens of tabs in Chrome, schedule each post using the Hootlet add-on, then close that tab. It was a slow, inefficient process that we eventually replaced with a more streamlined bulk upload process, but this also had limitations.

You can only upload 350 messages per account across all social networks. This may not be an issue for most people, but a few of our clients are franchise companies and we manage social media for the parent company and their franchisees. We manage more than 34 social media accounts for one of these clients, so the 350 message limit makes bulk uploading virtually useless because we would only be able to upload about 11 posts per social network at a time.

To make matter worse, regardless of how posts were scheduled, they frequently failed to send, and contacting support never resolved anything. Instead, we would receive replies saying “We’re sorry, that must be very frustrating. We’re looking into it and will get back to you.” Except they never did, even after more than six months of dealing with the problem.

Eventually we decided to research other options and someone recommended Edgar. (Thanks, Kellie!)

Edgar saves the day!

Edgar works out to be slightly more expensive, but they are more upfront and transparent about their pricing in my opinion. It’s a flat $49/month with up to 10 connected accounts and 1,000 stored updates, or $99/month with up to 25 connected accounts and 5,000 stored updates. In our case, this means we have to set up a account for each client, but that’s OK because we were already doing that with Hoosuite anyway.

Besides, their most valuable feature more than makes up for the added expense…

Edgar lets you categorize your social posts, which are then saved in your library to automatically post based on a schedule you create. Once created and scheduled, Edgar will continuously cycle through your posts with no further effort on your part.

If you had been paying a virtual assistant $20/hour to manage your social media, estimating a very conservative 2 hours/week, you’ll save  $111 every month by switching to Edgar. But more important than the cost savings is the fact that your social media is on auto pilot, constantly engaging your followers and putting your valuable content in front of them. And every single engagement creates small, but exponential growth for your exposure.

This feature eliminates the problem most small business owners face—letting your own social media slip through the cracks because you’re too busy taking care of your customers. This was the biggest selling point for me.

It lets us efficiently maintain active social media accounts (ours and our clients) no matter how much we have on our plate, while spending more time creating killer content that followers will engage with, share, and link to—and that is the key to successful online marketing.

Other benefits include:

• A simple user interface
• A handy browser add-on for Chrome, and a bookmarklet for Firefox and Safari
• A responsive support team
• A robust help portal

The only downside I’ve found so far is that Edgar doesn’t integrate with Google Plus and there is no target date on the horizon. If you need that capability, you can try using IFTTT to copy Facebook Business page posts from Facebook to Google Plus, or post manually. I plan to test out the IFTTT method of automation—once I do, I’ll edit this post to share my findings.

If you’re starting fresh or have been using any other software for social media, you need to give Edgar a try. They even offer a free 30-day trial. We did and haven’t looked back. Now we’re looking forward to reinvesting the time we’re saving towards creating more killer content!

Social media can be a powerful tool to engage with your audience, build brand recognition, and generate sales—but only if you use it properly.

Many businesses use social media and some do it well, but most have a lot of room to improve. The good news is that it’s not complicated, it just takes some hard work. And anything worth doing is worth doing well, right?

In this article, I’m going to share with you 9 ways to take your social media to the next level so that you can engage with your audience, build a brand people recognize, and earn the income you deserve.

Create and follow a plan

It’s easy to lose focus without a plan—especially when it comes to social media.

Without a plan, you end up frantically looking for useful and engaging content to share at the last-minute. Often, this leads to getting lost down the social media hole, and after hours of digging through Facebook or Twitter, you realize you haven’t accomplished anything.

A plan enables you to find the perfect content to share and craft the ideal message to go along with it—efficiently and ahead of time.

I like to plan out social posts for a 12 month period based on strategic goals, existing and new content themes, holidays, and relevant industry events, leaving some room for last-minute additions.

Tailor posts for each network

Each social network has its own nuances and what works for one may not work for another, so forget about just posting the same thing everywhere. You need to tailor your posts specifically for each network, both in terms of frequency and content.

Twitter

Users (individuals or businesses) follow each other and interact on Twitter in 140 character messages. This leads to rapid-fire posting in an informal setting. You can reach a very broad audience, but also have the ability to interact with an incredibly specific audience through the use of hashtags or searching for specific keywords or users. While sharing valuable content and engaging with your followers is important, it is also important to post frequently because the sheer volume of posts on Twitter means each one is buried quickly.

Facebook

Individuals use a personal profile while businesses and other organizations use pages. Facebook users are usually more selective about the pages they interact with, so quality is paramount—especially since the level of engagement has a direct impact on how many followers see your posts. If few followers like, share, or comment on your posts, they will display in the news feed less frequently. Try to focus on crafting your posts in a way that encourages people to engage, such as posting a question, something controversial, or a valuable resource.

Google+

You’ll find a lot of the same functionality on Google+ as you will on Facebook, but this network tends to draw in a mostly male, tech-oriented audience as found in the gaming, SEO, and maker communities.

Pinterest

While Google+ is more male-oriented, Pinterest leans heavily in the opposite direction, appealing more to women-focused markets like crafts, interior design, and fashion. This is an underrated social network that can, in many niches, drive obscene amounts of traffic to your website with little competition. The key is to create appealing images to go along with your pins. Posting frequency can be higher than Facebook due to how they are displayed, but your emphasis should still remain on quality.

LinkedIn

Much like Facebook, users on LinkedIn interact from personal profiles. Similarly, it offers pages for business, but they are virtually useless. (You should still secure yours, but don’t waste a lot of effort on it.) LinkedIn is generally slower-paced, more formal than other networks, and geared towards individuals interacting directly, so take it easy.

Periscope

Imagine being able to Facetime with your entire audience—that’s what Periscope is all about. Unlike other social networks, your posts on Periscope are automatically deleted after 24 hours, which kind of sucks, but the fact that your audience can see and interact with you live in real-time makes up for that. This takes engagement to a whole new level and helps you to build trust with your audience. The most important thing is to be yourself and share something valuable.

Look outside your industry

It makes sense to watch other companies in your industry, for several reasons, but emulating their social media strategy is not one of them. If you copy your competitors’ strategy, how can you expect to differentiate yourself from them?

Instead, look at companies who are crushing it in completely unrelated industries. For example, if your company sells drug testing, you might try looking at what people in the fitness industry are doing on Instagram for a totally fresh perspective. Remember, your goal is to stand out and create brand recognition, and you can only do that if you’re doing things differently than the other people in your industry.

Use hashtags properly

A few days ago, a client asked me to explain hashtags. I told him to think of it like a description that people can use to find posts related to a particular topic. They can use the search feature to find all posts with the same hashtag, or they can even click on a hashtag and be taken to a page with all posts containing that hashtag. His response was “Oh, then should I just use a hashtag on every word in a post?”

When it comes to hashtags, fewer is better. I usually recommend no more than three—and only where it is relevant. For example, on Veterans Day, we tweeted a link to a post about veteran-owned businesses with a killer marketing strategy. Highly relevant because 1.) it was veterans day, and 2.) the article highlighted veteran-owned businesses who had a unique approach to marketing.

7 Veteran-Owned Business with a Killer Marketing Strategy https://t.co/AwKGPBRk1A #USMC #veteransday

— Spartan Media (@SpartanMediaInc) November 11, 2015

You also need to ensure you use hashtags in context. Don’t jump on a trending hashtag just to get your name in front of a lot of eyeballs like Entenmann’s did when they used the #notguitly hashtag, which was trending as a result of Casey Anthony’s “Not Guilty” murder verdict. The resulting PR backlash was not pretty.

Engage with your followers

The whole purpose of social media is to be social—that means communicating with your audience, not just vomiting a steady stream of links to posts on your own website.

Ask questions to find out what they care about, respond to their comments, share their posts when relevant. The idea is to create a two-way dialogue. Think of social media as a way to leverage communication with your entire audience, not to broadcast your message.

Sure it takes time, and it’s not easy, but most of your competitors aren’t doing it, so it will put you that much further ahead of them.

If you need motivation, consider this: all relationships are built on trust, and trust comes from getting to know someone. (Or an organization.) The more your audience trusts you, the more likely they are to do business with you.

P.S. There are also ways to automate some aspects of engagement using IFTTT.

Mix up the content you share

Don’t just share links to posts on your own website. Share links to other websites, ask questions, post content directly instead of linking out, share images…you get the idea.

People generally have a short attention span, so by mixing up the content you post, you keep them interested. You also increase the chances that more people will engage because everyone responds differently to different types of content. For example, I usually prefer text and will rarely play a video, but other people would prefer video over reading. By offering different types of content, you give everyone in your audience a reason to engage.

Batch social media activity

Social media has the ability to suck you in and waste hours of your valuable time if you aren’t careful, which is why I batch any time spent there.

When I see a link worth sharing or have an idea for a post on social media, I simply drop it into our project management system (Basecamp) and when it’s time to work on social, my team posts anything we’ve added. It’s far more efficient than “multitasking” which has been scientifically proven to reduce productivity by up to 40%!

Since we track everything down to the minute, I know exactly how much time this has saved us. Batching social media (and all tasks, for that matter) allows us to perform better in less time. That’s a win for Spartan Media as well as for our clients!

Most small businesses should do just fine by setting aside a block of 15–30 minutes each day to handle social media marketing, as long as you’ve developed a solid plan like we talked about earlier.

Be authentic

Be yourself. Always.

Most people avoid that because they’re afraid of rejection, and if someone rejects them while they are being themselves, they take it as a personal rejection.

Guess what…some people will never like you. No matter what. And that’s OK.

If you try to please everyone, people will think you’re full of shit, and they will be correct. I’m sure you’ve noticed that politicians do exactly that, always trying to stand on both sides of an issue, which is why Congress has had a single-digit approval rating for as long as I can remember.

People have far more respect for someone who unapologetically stands on who they are. Speaking from first hand experience, I have a few friends whose political views are a polar opposite of mine, but I have more respect for them than the people who share my views but hide them.

People decide whether to do business with you based on you as a person, and if you’re trying to put on a show, they will see right through it. Be yourself and the right people will gravitate to you. Pretend to be someone who you aren’t and you’ll attract the wrong people, making business miserable and more difficult.

I’ve outlined some great examples in a previous post titled Your Brand Sucks Because You’re Trying to be Someone Else! You should check it out.

Create a stalker list (But not in a creepy way)

There is a lot of work with little to show in the way of results when you’re first getting started on social media. You can post the most amazing content in the world, but with a small handful of followers, few people will see it. As you incrementally build followers, your reach grows exponentially, but there is a way to leverage other people’s’ audience to jump-start that growth.

Simply create a list of influential people in your industry and make it a point to engage with them in a meaningful way ever day. Answer their questions, share their posts, and offer feedback where appropriate, and before long, you will be on their radar. Nurture this like any other relationship, and you will quickly build a strong ally who can multiply your exposure by sharing and commenting on your posts.

And remember to pay it forward when you strike it big by helping other people just getting started.