Top 8 Tips That Will Help You Dominate Any Platform
Take this from someone who made this mistake twice
Facebook was the place where I had all the power, I was getting friend requests as many as 50 per day. Consistently spitting out lyrics of popular songs made me the happening girl on Facebook.
My timeline pictures were, as we called it in those days, “the bomb”. I was known far and wide, my classmates knew who I was on Facebook. Our neighbours gossiped about my popularity.
Someone even said I was “going crazy” because I had 4,000+ friends in the early days. You could call it a cult-following because they always had a compliment for any content I posted.
Then Twitter came out, and I made the leap.
Twitter was (and still is) way more sophisticated than Facebook. There were new slangs, interesting content, savage replies, twitfights and the ‘lists’ that came out every month.
I was eager to dominate, to show my prowess and bring my eminence into this platform. I started to get the hang of it as I used it. I got followers, I even trended a few times, all the while, ignoring my minions (sorry, friends) on Facebook.
I even made real friends and learnt a slang or two. As you would guess, my popularity on Facebook decreased, while my followers on Twitter increased.
A few years later, I heard about this new platform making, and just like I did with Facebook, I left Twitter and ported to Instagram. Slowly but steadily building my popularity.
It took more than a few years before I realized my mistakes and tried to salvage what was left of my popularity on the first 2 platforms. You shouldn’t blame me, I wasn’t building an audience, I didn’t even know what that meant at the time. I was just enjoying life.
After making the mistake twice, I was ready to build an audience on a platform and stick with it no matter what new popular site came out.
The good thing about making those mistakes was that I learnt a thing or two about how you can dominate any platform that you currently are, especially if you are a business owner.
How Can You Dominate Your Online Platforms?
If you are a business owner, don’t even think twice about using your social platforms for anything else except building your personal or business brand. This isn’t to say that you should only promote your products or services and shove your offerings down people’s throats.
What building a brand on social media means is creating awareness about your business by providing content that will attract your target audience to you. Create value and offer relevant information.
Use these 8 steps
1. Consider The Nature Of Your Business
Before picking an online platform to build your brand, you need to first look at how the platform will benefit your business. Since you want to create content to attract an audience, figure out whether the online platform you want to choose will be a good fit for you.
For instance, consider the social media platform, LinkedIn. It’s a platform that is best suited for corporate organizations and individuals who want to rise up the career ladder, or who are looking for jobs. If you are a resume reviewer or your business is about helping people succeed in their careers, then the platform is the best for you.
If you run a kiddies literary club, you might want to pitch your tent on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram because LinkedIn might not be the best for you. So it pays to consider the nature of your business before choosing a platform.
2. Consider Who Your Target Audience Is
This is similar to point one above. The online platform you choose to use will be best determined by your target audience. You want to go where your audience is.
If you want to build an audience for your business, it’s in your best interest to go where your audience is, wherever that may be, even if it’s a platform you don’t like. Consider your audience demographics; age, gender, interests, occupation etc. to help you understand them better.
Go there, consume the platform’s content for some time, get a feel of it and know what makes the audience tick. Then go and come up with strategies on how you can create content that will appeal to that audience. Remember, it’s all about your audience, not just about you.
3. Research Your Competitors
If you want to dominate any online platform, you want to make sure you know where your competitors are already dominating. Go to their platforms, look through their pages and find out if they are already an authority there.
If you think you can do better than they are already doing, go for it and start using that platform too. But it’s ill-advised to use a platform just because you want to beat the competition. Your only reason should be to reach your audience and build your brand.
Look through your competitors’ platforms, see what content they are posting, how they are posting it, what copies they are writing for their creatives and how they are getting people to engage with them.
4. Focus On Your Core Target Audience
It’s very easy to create content that speaks with many people. But if you want to succeed on any online platform that you’re currently using to build your brand, you should make sure that you’re focusing on your core target audience.
For example, Although Nike’s target audience is ‘all athletes’, yet they use segmentation to define precisely their target audience, which is people between the ages of 15–45.
Don’t deviate from your core target audience if you want to start focusing on a new demographic, you should create a strategy for that. Don’t confuse your audience with your content.
5. Create A Consistent Brand Strategy
To dominate any online platform, build a consistent content strategy across all platforms. A huge part of creating a strong and recognizable business brand is to create a consistent feeling across your online platforms.
You want to make sure that your bio on Instagram tallies with your profile on Facebook and Twitter. You want people to get a feel of who you truly are no matter what platform they meet you.
Even though you shouldn’t share the same content across your platforms, make sure that your audience grabs your message because you’re saying the same thing but just in different ways.
6. Build A Website
The best online platform you can ever have is your own website. Having a website for your business is a great investment because apart from the fact that it’s the hub of your business on the internet, you will have control over it.
Your website is the cornerstone of all your online marketing strategy and it’s ultimately where all your online platforms will span from. For example, you will need to grow your email list by using an opt-in on your website, etc.
But don’t rush to build a website yet, you want to make sure that you create a masterpiece, one that won’t just be sitting ducks on the internet, but will be converting visitors on a regular basis. Check out this post to get started.
7. Create A Lead Magnet
A lead magnet is something that you give away in exchange for a visitor’s name and email address. You have signed up for them many times. They are usually so irresistible that you drop your email address quickly.
Your lead magnet may be an eBook, a workbook or a checklist. It is usually something that will be highly valuable to your audience with respect to your business.
Once you have gotten email addresses with this magnet, you can then start growing your list steadily with quality email newsletters containing information that your audience will not find anywhere else.
8. Share Behind The Scenes
Not every time structured content, sometimes, sharing spontaneous content will really create a deeper relationship between you and your audience. People love to know that they are relating to humans on the other side of the platform.
If you can really put yourself out there, posting behind-the-scenes shots of what a day in your life looks like, your vibe is going to attract your tribe and you’re going to be able to dominate your chosen platform.
Conclusion
To sum up, the best platforms I will advise that you start with is a website, an Instagram account and a Facebook page. Don’t get it twisted, you still need to do audience research before making a decision.
I recently started an email blitz on how best to create a brand identity for your business on the internet, you can join the tribe here
