15: Growing Your Social Media Audience by Building Community

Makers Gonna Sell: A Podcast for Creative Entrepreneurs with Cheryl Ham and Nicky Avery

It’s one of the biggest mysteries to entrepreneurs when they’re first starting out: how do I build an effective social media community? We’ve all been there, creating content and sending out posts into the wild hoping beyond hope that someone will see it and give it a like. It can be disheartening when our posts don’t get the likes you were hoping for, or the views you think it deserves. This is our topic this week: we’re going to share with you what we’ve learned building our own social media audiences.

The biggest takeaway you’ll want to absorb from this week’s podcast is what REALLY matters in social media marketing. We can create content all day long, and gaining followers and likes is a quick way to feel like you’re really accomplishing something, but take a step back and ask yourself what those followers and likes are doing for you? Engagement is the name of the game when you’re trying to build an audience. Which is better: 10k followers and a few sales or 500 followers and every one of them is a customer and supporter of your brand? We go over the whole thing in our conversation, so grab a notebook and hopefully you’ll learn a thing or two!

Quotes:

“I remember one time, I had to put a media kit together to be a potential influencer for a company. And I remember telling them that my Facebook following was small, but it was mighty. That was what my focus was when I first started: I wanted to build a community, and then it led to sales organically.” – Nicky

“We're not out there to build an audience full of people who don't care about what we're doing. We want to make real connections with people who really want to be there” - Cheryl

“At the end of the day we're trying to make a living, and we're trying to feed our families, and so we do need to be strategic about why we're doing the things that we're doing, because we don't have time to be messing around. We need to go all in with the things that we are going to do, but make sure there's a purpose behind them.” – Cheryl

“I wish I would have jumped on the reels train from the beginning, but I was in my head, and I was just like, no, I am not getting in front of the camera. But you know you can create reels where you're not even in it, so the next time you're making your product, just take a little video of just your hands or whatever. Once you try it a couple of times, you’ll start to think maybe it wouldn't be so bad to be in front of the camera.” - Nicky

Key Points and takeaways:

- Gaining followers is good, but building community is going to go a lot farther for you

- Don’t be afraid to try different things to build that engagement

- Your community wants to see you! Doing lives, stories, and reels is critical to building engagement

Have a subject you’d like us to cover or just want to comment about how much you love the podcast? We want to hear from you! You can like, subscribe, and leave us a 5-star rating everywhere you can download podcasts.

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• Nicky: Avery Lane Creations on Instagram or Facebook
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