Recently in the You, The Entrepreneurial Clinician community, I’ve been teaching the members how to use each other’s social media posts to help with their own positioning.

I’m a member of plenty of Facebook communities where there is a thread once a week that says: “Share your social media” but it doesn’t explain what to do once you have decided to follow someone.

I’m always curious to know what people intend to do with a collection of followers on their social media platform who are also their peers.

The questions I have are:

1. Are they going to be offering something that their peers will love? i.e are the communicating directly with their peers?
2. Are they hoping by some random chance that their peers will see a post and think, hey I need to refer someone to this social media account because of this one post?
3. Are they thinking, if I can get to 10K followers on Instagram then I can unlock all those cool features like the blue verification tick?

If this is your social media strategy can I ask – what is your expected result?   What do you expect to gain from this?

When someone wants to grow their social media influence, they need more than followers. They need engagement.

And this this day and age, engagement needs to be more than clicking like – its needs to be comments, it needs to be shares, it needs to be saves.

So why aren’t we then commenting on our peers and colleagues’ posts; or sharing them or even saving them?

Here are 3 reasons why (not an exhaustive list but who will read a list of the 300 reasons anyway?)

1. We don’t know what to say, so we say nothing – in saying nothing we cannot make a mistake and therefore we can save face, and still be perfect.
2. We don’t want our comment or share to make our potential client choose another person to work with instead of us (you know the fear of that sense of competition).
3. We quite literally don’t understand how the platforms work, or are thinking they work like they did 10 years ago (so we are not actually competent – gasp did I just say that?)

It is no secret that social media can be an amazing source of potential clients for all of us. However, if we don’t know how to get the best bang for our buck or time or energy- then we are quite simply wasting our time, energy and money. We are all tired – let’s not waste any more energy ok.

What you may not understand is this:

1. You will always have something to say – simple things like ‘thank you for this reminder’, or ‘wow what a great way to think about this issue’, or ‘what an amazing graphic’. However, your comment might be the comment that starts an entire conversation, that makes a post go viral. Better still your comment might make someone who is suffering and really needs help have the confidence to reach out and ask for it.
2. When you share the posts of your peers and colleagues you are showing the online world how connected you are. You are showing potential clients how resourced you are. You are showing peers your area of special interest or expertise, that you become increasingly well know for.
3. People will want to reciprocate. If you engage first, people want to reciprocate (it’s a law you can read about it here). So instead of liking someone else’s page, profile or whatever, hoping they will like you back, why not be a person who understands human behaviour and actually engage with the post, and become memorable (in a good way) so that your generosity will be repaid over and over again.

As for the value-added strategy that was taught to the members of You, the Entrepreneurial Clinician, well that’s for people who are a part of this dynamic and growth oriented community.

Has this blog post helped you to rethink your approach to using social media? Let me know by adding a comment.

Go be your awesome self.