For better or for worse, social media is the driving force behind most of our interactions with the rest of the world today. Whether you use it just to keep in touch with your family and friends, whether it’s to help you network and contact new people, and whether it’s to popularize a small or big business – social media is a part of all of it. Or, it should be if you want to be successful.
Regardless of whether you’re pursing personal or professional success, social media is an invaluable tool, and your social media contacts – a precious resource. And as with any other resource – the more of it you have, the better. This is the essence of digital influence.
How to Build Digital Influence to Drive Your Future Success?
Whether you want to build up your digital influence for your personal needs or for a business/professional purpose, the process is more or less the same. It is also quite straightforward, at least on paper – it’s how well you execute it that matters.
1. Identify Your Goals
Why are you looking to expand your digital presence? After all, if you just want to stay in touch with the family and watch cat pictures, you don’t need to build up a digital following. Are you looking to improve your networking so you can find a better job? Do you have a small business you want to promote? Do you want to connect with more like-minded people, because you’re not satisfied with your personal contacts right now?
Pinpointing the exact goals behind your quest for a more significant digital presence is key if you want to be successful and it should always stay in focus – otherwise you’ll be at risk of starting to do more things with your account than you should and sabotage your own goal.
2. Pick the Right Platform for Your Needs
There are various social media platforms out there – from text-based platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and X (Twitter), Threads or Bluesky, through image-based platforms like Instagram and Pinterest, to video-based platforms like TikTok and YouTube. Then there are also a lot of niche platforms, such as Goodreads for books or various forums for virtually everything you can think of.
Each of these can be used for either personal or professional goals, but each is also better at something than it is at others.
Spreading yourself over too many platforms is usually a bad idea as it will both take up too much time and it runs the risk of confusing your brand’s image. Most important, however, is to pick the right brand for your needs and your niche.
And, as an extra pro tip: If you’re looking to expand your professional goals as quickly and effectively as possible, it’s also an option to not just start a new account on a particular platform, but to purchase an account that already has a sizable following from a site like Cloutpot.
3. Don’t Just Say “Hello World!” and Run, but Engage with How the “World” Responds
Many people and brands use social media in a frustratingly poor way – as just a megaphone to amplify their message and ads. While this is an intuitive way to use social media for a business, it’s also the quickest way to suppress your influence and lose your followers.
Instead of just for screaming into the void, however, social media is best used to interact and engage with the people who follow you. Even if you’re running a major business, the way to enhance your brand’s presence online is to be personable and engaged with your followers and prospective leads and clients.
4. Be Smart but Also Remember to Be Authentic
Another common mistake to avoid is to be too calculating, careful, and fake online. Especially for a business, it sounds like a good idea to be careful what you say and to always make sure you don’t say “the wrong thing.” However, people today are well-versed in spotting inauthentic behavior online and most people don’t respond well to it.
Remember that with each passing year, more and more people online are folks who have literally grown up with the Internet in their hands – they know how to spot someone being unauthentic online and most people see that as a major red flag.
5. Start Building Your Brand and Generating Leads
Once you’ve chosen the right media and you’ve started to establish your presence there, the rest is just a matter of consistency, patience, and a little bit of luck. As long as you remember points 3 and 4, however, building up your brand should be fairly straightforward.
And that’s pretty much how you can use your social media account to drive both your personal and professional success – it’s deceptively easy in principle, but quite tricky in practice – good luck!
