3 Ways to Make Social Media Work for Your Brand

Guest post by Elizabeth Eames

If you have been following Rachel’s smart marketing advice for dancers, dance companies and fitness professionals, you know how important it is to identify and maintain a commitment to your brand.  Engaging in consistent, clear and effective marketing enables you to keep that brand commitment and to see results.  For dancers, dance companies and fitness professionals, social media is one of most effective places to focus your marketing efforts.

The question becomes, what to do once you have jumped on social media.  The wait-and-see approach that many social media users take is not the most effective.  What is effective is building a consistent presence that takes advantage of all that social media tools have to offer without taking up too much of your time or pulling your focus from what you do best.  Understood correctly, social media marketing should support your career goals.  Your activity on social media should be geared toward helping you to build relationships and create and act upon the opportunities you need to succeed.

To build a consistent presence on social media that helps you promote your brand and achieve your goals, plan your posts strategically and diversify the kinds of posts and the types of content you share.

Share Images

As Rachel explains so well on this blog, creating and sharing images that communicate who you are and the unique value you bring is critical to articulating and sharing your brand in a way that is clear, relevant and actionable.

Make sharing your professional images on social media a priority.  Do so consistently and across social media channels.  Use your images to help tell your story, promote your brand and engage with the people that matter most to you.

Share Your Experience, Insight and Ideas

As you have seen on this blog, your images are a great way to telegraph your personality to artistic directors, choreographers, funders and prospective clients.  Your unique voice is another way to demonstrate who you are and what kind of value you bring to those with whom you work.

Create and link to your own unique content, including blog posts, observations, and conversations that you want to start.  Use social media to connect your audience to your work across platforms, both online and off.  If you are a dancer, talk about your performances and your classes and share ticket and event information to help engage your audience directly with you and your work.  If you are a trainer or fitness professional, talk about the classes you teach, your training plans and successes you have shared with your clients.

Let your work and the brand you build around your work be the central point of conversation, always bringing your audience back to you as someone who provides real value – someone with whom they want to work.

Share Content that Matters to You

Sharing third party content, images, articles and blogs created by someone other than you, shows your social media audience that you are plugged in to your field and that you are engaged with new performances, emerging styles, new technologies and relevant art, fitness and wellness news.

Using your social media platforms to share third party content lets your audience know that engaging with you provides value for them.  It also allows you to share content created by your audience, colleagues and prospective partners.  All of this enables you to participate in the collaborative and mutually supportive opportunities that social media creates.

Sharing third party content, posting and sharing your own unique content and sharing your images all help you to leverage social media to build your brand, create and maintain productive relationships and communicate in ways that demonstrate your unique value by engaging your audience and motivating your audience to act.

Elizabeth Eames is the owner of Contemporary Communications Consulting (eeames.com) a communications and marketing firm in Brooklyn, NY.  She writes about small business strategy, communications and social media for Businessing Magazine.