Your Social Media Engagement Numbers

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Your Social Media Engagement Numbers

(5 Minute Read) If your engagement rate on social media is anywhere above or even approaching 5%, you’re doing great. I did some research to see how this rate stacked up against popular social media content creators and found that they don’t do much better than 5% engagement on their posts. So if that’s what you’re at now and you’re worried that it’s low, don’t worry, because you’re doing better than Justin Bieber (No, really, you are! Read on to find out engagement rates on his mega-popular videos).

Gathering Data On Social Media Engagement Rates

I often tell my clients that an engagement rate of around 5% on social media is really fantastic. But I realized I was basing that assertion on intuition. So, I wanted to get some good solid data to either validate my claim, or change what I asserted going forward (you should always be willing to change your mind if you are presented with evidence that contrasts with what you had previously held to be true).

To measure social media engagement, I looked at posts on YouTube from content creators with large, involved followings. I took the 5 most recent posts from 12 creators, spread out across a wide variety of topics. I figured these were representative samples because they are so popular and diverse. With findings from these creators, we can measure what really great engagement rates look like across social media.

Your current level of social media engagement is probably better than you think!

Tons Of Very Popular Channels Have An Average of 5% Social Media Engagement

What I found in my research was really interesting. My 5% threshold turned out to be true, and a lot of really highly performing social media channels performed a lot less highly than I thought.

I went into my research assuming that highly performing social media channels would have an engagement rate of at least 10%. I mean, if 1 out of 10 people watching a music video from, say Justin Bieber, clicked “like” while watching the video, that wouldn’t be surprising, right? Well, it turns out only about 5% of people engage with videos on popular social media accounts. So, only half of a person out of every 10 people like popular videos.

Additionally, the data skewed heavily toward lower engagement rates, with approximately 2/3rds of the videos I sampled having a 6% engagement rate or less. In fact, at the highest point, I only found 3 videos out of 60 that had engagement rates of over 11%.

A lot of very popular content creators, with millions of followers only have 5% social media engagement rates, so it's okay if yours is a little lower.

Even The Mega-Popular Posts Have Engagement Rates At Or Below 5%

Lastly, I chose videos from channels with a high number of subscribers that had dedicated followings in specific niches. So, these videos probably represent the high end of engagement by interest. To test that theory, I also took two videos from Justin Bieber that had views in the billions. The two videos I chose also had low engagement rates of 1% and 3% (to put that in perspective though, we’re talking about 27 million and 3 million engagements on each video). So, we can see that even mega-popular videos do not have a terribly high percentage of engagements either.

Keep churning out quality content and focus on providing value, not your engagement rates.

Conclusions

Although this research was not as rigorous as a scientific study, I do believe it was enough to be representative of social media trends as a whole. And, I think these data offer comforting news: a 5% engagement rate is what, by and large, a great deal of successful YouTube channels see on their posts. If you, as a small business, or someone with less than 100K subscribers or followers is getting engagement rates at or around this number, you’re doing really well compared to a wide sample of popular social media channels.

Methodology

This is a very unscientific study. I was looking for overall trends to benchmark against, not hyper specific figures meant to represent all of social media. I’ve included my data if you’d like to take a look or disagree with my conclusions.

To begin, I chose 12 popular YouTube channels across a variety of subjects to ensure freedom from a subject matter bias. If people who watch videos on one particular subject engage with videos more or less frequently than those in other subjects, it could skew the data. To try to prevent that I chose a diverse array of channels, spread across a variety of subjects (nature, law, art, marketing, comedy, art history, real estate, economics, movie reviews, and politics).

I chose to use YouTube to measure engagement on social media because the data from views are readily available and easy to use. I measured total views and then added the likes and dislikes for each individual video to find the percentage of engagement among viewers of that video.

I measured data from the 5 most recent videos of each channel in order to standardize the process and remove the possibility of me choosing videos I liked or disliked, which could have affected the results.

Finally, I looked at two Justin Bieber music videos with more than a billion views each to see if the data was much different at the highest end of the spectrum. It does not appear to be different.

Data On Social Media Engagement Rates

Improving Your Social Media Reach

If you’d like to learn more about improving your reach on social media, or how to convert your 5% of engagements into more customers, shoot us an email at:

 [email protected] 

Why Was My Facebook Ad Rejected?

Picture of a woman in a confused posture with a thought bubble with test saying "Why did my Facebook ad get rejected?"
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Getting Your Facebook Ad Approved

By West Kraemer

Sometimes Facebook rejects your ad for reasons that are difficult the understand. If this has happened to you and you’re wondering what do do, wonder no longer. Here is a breakdown of a few common reasons Facebook rejects ads, and what you can change to get your adds approved.

The Most Common Reason Facebook Rejects Ads

The most common reason Facebook rejects ads is because of the use of personal attributes. Here are some examples of ads that will likely be rejected, and how to fix them. (Hover over the text to see how to fix the problem and get your ad approved.)

Hover over the text on desktop or tap it on mobile to see how to fix the problem and get your ad approved.

Using the text below will likely get your ad rejected:

Meet other black singles near you today!"

This will be more likely to be approved and serve the same purpose

"Find black singles today"

Using the text below will likely get your ad rejected:

"Are you a Christian looking to attend an Evangelical Church nearby?"

This will be more likely to be approved and serve the same purpose

"Join an Evangelical Church in (the area you're targeting your Facebook Ads)"

Using the text below will likely get your ad rejected:

Have you been injured in an accident? Call our law firm today!

This will be more likely to be approved and serve the same purpose

Injured in an accident? Call our law firm today.

Using the text below will likely get your ad rejected:

Are you a senior citizen who is having trouble with Medicaid and needs legal representation?

This will be more likely to be approved and serve the same purpose

We are attorneys who help clients with disputes over Medicaid. Give us a call today.

How To Avoid Having Your Facebook Ad Rejected

Ultimately, the best way to get avoid getting your Facebook ad rejected is to focus your advertisement on your business. What good are you providing? Highlight that.

In the examples above, all of the rejected texts referred to personal identifiers, like religion, age, ethnicity, or health status. You want to avoid referencing these and other indicators like this if you want to get your ads approved. If you focus your ads instead on how you can help people who have been injured in an accident, while avoiding using the word “you” or specifically referring to if a person that your ad is targeting has been injured in an accident or not, you’ll be much more successful, and be much less likely to have your Facebook ad rejected.

Further Reading

If you would like to go straight to the source, Facebook publishes information about how this all works, and they go into some very useful detail. Read more about how to avoid having your Facebook Ad rejected here.

Do You Want Me To Help You Buy Facebook Ads For Your Business?

That is an important part of my business. If you’d like to retain my services for purchasing Facebook Ads, email me at [email protected] and we can schedule a phone call to get you started.

Your Social Media Engagement Numbers

Picture of a cheering crowd with text overlaid saying: A 5% engagement is on posts is really good"
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Email
Reddit

Your Social Media Engagement Numbers

(5 Minute Read) If your engagement rate on social media is anywhere above or even approaching 5%, you’re doing great. I did some research to see how this rate stacked up against popular social media content creators and found that they don’t do much better than 5% engagement on their posts. So if that’s what you’re at now and you’re worried that it’s low, don’t worry, because you’re doing better than Justin Bieber (No, really, you are! Read on to find out engagement rates on his mega-popular videos).

Gathering Data On Social Media Engagement Rates

I often tell my clients that an engagement rate of around 5% on social media is really fantastic. But I realized I was basing that assertion on intuition. So, I wanted to get some good solid data to either validate my claim, or change what I asserted going forward (you should always be willing to change your mind if you are presented with evidence that contrasts with what you had previously held to be true).

To measure social media engagement, I looked at posts on YouTube from content creators with large, involved followings. I took the 5 most recent posts from 12 creators, spread out across a wide variety of topics. I figured these were representative samples because they are so popular and diverse. With findings from these creators, we can measure what really great engagement rates look like across social media.

Your current level of social media engagement is probably better than you think!

Tons Of Very Popular Channels Have An Average of 5% Social Media Engagement

What I found in my research was really interesting. My 5% threshold turned out to be true, and a lot of really highly performing social media channels performed a lot less highly than I thought.

I went into my research assuming that highly performing social media channels would have an engagement rate of at least 10%. I mean, if 1 out of 10 people watching a music video from, say Justin Bieber, clicked “like” while watching the video, that wouldn’t be surprising, right? Well, it turns out only about 5% of people engage with videos on popular social media accounts. So, only half of a person out of every 10 people like popular videos.

Additionally, the data skewed heavily toward lower engagement rates, with approximately 2/3rds of the videos I sampled having a 6% engagement rate or less. In fact, at the highest point, I only found 3 videos out of 60 that had engagement rates of over 11%.

A lot of very popular content creators, with millions of followers only have 5% social media engagement rates, so it's okay if yours is a little lower.

Even The Mega-Popular Posts Have Engagement Rates At Or Below 5%

Lastly, I chose videos from channels with a high number of subscribers that had dedicated followings in specific niches. So, these videos probably represent the high end of engagement by interest. To test that theory, I also took two videos from Justin Bieber that had views in the billions. The two videos I chose also had low engagement rates of 1% and 3% (to put that in perspective though, we’re talking about 27 million and 3 million engagements on each video). So, we can see that even mega-popular videos do not have a terribly high percentage of engagements either.

Keep churning out quality content and focus on providing value, not your engagement rates.

Conclusions

Although this research was not as rigorous as a scientific study, I do believe it was enough to be representative of social media trends as a whole. And, I think these data offer comforting news: a 5% engagement rate is what, by and large, a great deal of successful YouTube channels see on their posts. If you, as a small business, or someone with less than 100K subscribers or followers is getting engagement rates at or around this number, you’re doing really well compared to a wide sample of popular social media channels.

Methodology

This is a very unscientific study. I was looking for overall trends to benchmark against, not hyper specific figures meant to represent all of social media. I’ve included my data if you’d like to take a look or disagree with my conclusions.

To begin, I chose 12 popular YouTube channels across a variety of subjects to ensure freedom from a subject matter bias. If people who watch videos on one particular subject engage with videos more or less frequently than those in other subjects, it could skew the data. To try to prevent that I chose a diverse array of channels, spread across a variety of subjects (nature, law, art, marketing, comedy, art history, real estate, economics, movie reviews, and politics).

I chose to use YouTube to measure engagement on social media because the data from views are readily available and easy to use. I measured total views and then added the likes and dislikes for each individual video to find the percentage of engagement among viewers of that video.

I measured data from the 5 most recent videos of each channel in order to standardize the process and remove the possibility of me choosing videos I liked or disliked, which could have affected the results.

Finally, I looked at two Justin Bieber music videos with more than a billion views each to see if the data was much different at the highest end of the spectrum. It does not appear to be different.

Data On Social Media Engagement Rates

Improving Your Social Media Reach

If you’d like to learn more about improving your reach on social media, or how to convert your 5% of engagements into more customers, shoot us an email at:

 [email protected] 

More To Explore In Digital Marketing

Picture of a woman in a confused posture with a thought bubble with test saying "Why did my Facebook ad get rejected?"

Why Was My Facebook Ad Rejected?

Stand Out Professional Branding

Share on facebook Facebook Share on twitter Twitter Share on linkedin LinkedIn Share on email Email Share on reddit Reddit Getting Your Facebook Ad Approved By West Kraemer Sometimes Facebook rejects your ad for reasons that are difficult the understand. If this has happened to you and you’re wondering what...

Read More
Why work with a professional branding company?

Why Work With A Professional Branding Company?

West Kraemer

Part 1: Why work with a professional branding company? Because we help you gain career security. If you want the career security that comes from building a network of people that you provide value to and who know you as a resource in your field, you’ll need someone who can...

Read More

Client Interview: Jeremy Dover, Attorney

West Kraemer

Jeremy Dover, Esquire is a founding partner at the Demesmin and Dover Law Firm. He mainly practices Civil Litigation, with a focus on both Personal Injury Protection and Personal Injury Lawsuits. Jeremy is an ethical scholar that focuses on finding innovative arguments for helping his clients, and through his zealous advocacy, he...

Read More

Why Was My Facebook Ad Rejected?

Picture of a woman in a confused posture with a thought bubble with test saying "Why did my Facebook ad get rejected?"

Getting Your Facebook Ad Approved

Sometimes Facebook rejects your ad for reasons that are difficult the understand. If this has happened to you and you’re wondering what do do, wonder no longer. Here is a breakdown of a few common reasons Facebook rejects ads, and what you can change to get your adds approved.

The Most Common Reason Facebook Rejects Ads

The most common reason Facebook rejects ads is because of the use of personal attributes. Here are some examples of ads that will likely be rejected, and how to fix them. (Hover over the text to see how to fix the problem and get your ad approved.)

Hover over the text on desktop or tap it on mobile to see how to fix the problem and get your ad approved.

Using the text below will likely get your ad rejected:

Meet other black singles near you today!"

This will be more likely to be approved and serve the same purpose

"Find black singles today"

Using the text below will likely get your ad rejected:

"Are you a Christian looking to attend an Evangelical Church nearby?"

This will be more likely to be approved and serve the same purpose

"Join an Evangelical Church in (the area you're targeting your Facebook Ads)"

Using the text below will likely get your ad rejected:

Have you been injured in an accident? Call our law firm today!

This will be more likely to be approved and serve the same purpose

Injured in an accident? Call our law firm today.

Using the text below will likely get your ad rejected:

Are you a senior citizen who is having trouble with Medicaid and needs legal representation?

This will be more likely to be approved and serve the same purpose

We are attorneys who help clients with disputes over Medicaid. Give us a call today.

How To Avoid Having Your Facebook Ad Rejected

Ultimately, the best way to get avoid getting your Facebook ad rejected is to focus your advertisement on your business. What good are you providing? Highlight that.

In the examples above, all of the rejected texts referred to personal identifiers, like religion, age, ethnicity, or health status. You want to avoid referencing these and other indicators like this if you want to get your ads approved. If you focus your ads instead on how you can help people who have been injured in an accident, while avoiding using the word “you” or specifically referring to if a person that your ad is targeting has been injured in an accident or not, you’ll be much more successful, and be much less likely to have your Facebook ad rejected.

Further Reading

If you would like to go straight to the source, Facebook publishes information about how this all works, and they go into some very useful detail. Read more about how to avoid having your Facebook Ad rejected here.

Do You Want Me To Help You Buy Facebook Ads For Your Business?

That is an important part of my business. If you’d like to retain my services for purchasing Facebook Ads, email me at [email protected] and we can schedule a phone call to get you started.

Start With Why

Digital Marketing Philosophy

My digital marketing philosophy, start with why, is taken from the 2009 Simon Sinek lecture “Start with why, how great leaders inspire action.”

I also believe brands should play to their strengths and provide value by communicating with their audiences frequently. These ideas are informed by two other thought leaders in the digital marketing space, Alex Becker and Gary Vaynerchuk.

All of these ideas come together to form the following, overarching philosophy:

 

Start With Why

In this video Mr. Sinek discusses how there are a great deal of benefits that accrue from beginning your brand’s messaging with “why.” One of these benefits is that you can grant your business a great deal of leeway in terms of your product offerings. In some cases, you can even sell products that your brand’s competitors otherwise could not. For example, you’d never buy an MP3 player from Dell Computers, but you’d buy one from Apple, because Apple isn’t a computer company- they’re a company that produces great products that happens to sell computers.

Overall, the biggest benefit of starting with “why” is that your brand’s messaging connects with people in a much more effective manner than if you start with “what” (“what” being what you’re actually offering.). So, I like this messaging strategy because it is, ultimately the most effective way to reach people and it allows your brand a great deal of flexibility

This is my favorite content distribution strategy. Put simply, it involves creating a large piece of “pillar content” and then creating and distributing several social media posts based on this larger piece of work.

A piece of pillar content should be where a brand goes into an idea reflecting their values in some significant depth. Gary Vee is a content monster and creates one of these via a podcast basically every day. That is more than most brands can handle, which is fine. I have found that creating one piece of pillar content a week and then distributing information from that over the course of that week via social media posts is sufficient for communicating with a customer base.

Another idea that Gary Vee constantly comes back to is the idea that you should be providing value with your content. Why should someone consume your content if it isn’t helping them? Providing value and connecting with people regarding the “why” of your business is an effective way to stand out in a market place of ideas that is usually bereft of actual value.

Play To Your Strengths

We each have a unique skill set. Some of us are more math oriented, others are more creative. Some are both. Whatever you skill set is, you should use that to your advantage. Trying to emulate the success of others can be a fools errand if you’re trying to do something you won’t be good at.

If you’re out there trying to provide value to people with your posting, the value you’re providing is based on your expertise. You can’t provide something worthwhile to someone else in the field of math if you’re really just not good at math. This Alex Becker video makes a really strong case for why this is true.

Conclusion

If you want to reach people effectively, you need messaging that grips them. To do that, you need their attention. The best way to get someone’s attention is by communicating value through shared beliefs. Logistically, communicating that message works best when you communicate in a way you are good at communicating.

I’ll leave you with my philosophy again below. If you’d like help implementing this strategy for your brand, Stand Out Professional Branding can be reached by email at [email protected].

Values Marketing Builds Long Term Relationships

Values-based relationship between a business and a consumer create loyalty. Marylin Manson is a rock and roll singer, who has been popular among his fan-base for the last 30 years. He has gone through several reinventions in that time, with his musical style varying wildly, all the while staying true to a set of values that his marketing has centered around.

Fans have stayed with Manson through several musical genre changes because they’re not really there for his music, they’re there for his values. They’re there because he embodies a certain kind of weirdness that they identify with and like seeing performed. When they buy a ticket to his show, they’re not thinking about the money. They’re excited to be participating in something outside the norm.

Using Values Marketing To Build Loyalty

So, values are important because they facilitate relationships between businesses and customers, with the result being long-term customer loyalty. As long as you stay true to your values, your business relationships will remain solid over time.

If you’re building a personal following to gain career security, or one for your business, you want loyal business relationships that last a long time. That’s where security comes from. Those are the kinds of business relationships that last through recessions, and frankly, those are some of the only business relationships that are built during recessions and bad times.

When I work with someone at Stand Out Professional Branding, the first thing I do with them is establish their values. Everything else, including their social media communications, the events they organize, and even the companies they look to do business with, will be informed by those values that they establish.

The Results Of This Strategy

The end goal from this process is to build the kind of long-term relationships between businesses and customers that Marilyn Manson has cultivated with his career. Those relationships have lasted through several genres of music, fluctuations in popular trends, and even different lineups of the eponymous Marilyn Manson band due to the consistent values on display. To build relationships with the same kind of loyalty, you need to be using your values consistently.

I Know What I’m Talking About So You Should Hire Me To Build Your Brand

My Prediction Came True, Quickly. It Shows Why You Need A Personal Brand

In April 2020, I saw a video of an app developer called Kilo Loco I follow on YouTube saying he’d been laid off. And I wrote an article here saying that I was sure he’d get a job soon because his personal brand and large following means he has career security. 

It turns out I was right and I know what I’m talking about when I say building a personal brand results in career security (so, you should probably get started building a your personal or business brand with Stand Out Professional Branding today, eh?)

Here’s a timeline of those events:

March 27, 2020: Kilo Loco posts on YouTube about his firing.

April 10th, 2020: I post about how his personal brand would help him get another job.

May 11th, 2020: Kilo Loco posts on YouTube about getting another job.

Proof That I Know What I'm Talking About

I Know What I'm Talking About And Can Help You Build A Personal Brand

Stand Out Professional Branding exists to help people and businesses build their brands to develop career security.

Here’s how that looks in practice:

  1. Develop a personal brand by providing value consistently over social media and in real life, over a long period of time to make connections with large groups of people. I’ve got lots of free guidance for how to do this in the articles on this website.
  2. There is no step 2.

Developing A Brand On Your Own Is Difficult, But Career Security Is Worth It.

I started Stand Out Professional Branding because I know what it’s like to have career insecurity and don’t want anyone else to go through that nightmare. I graduated from college into the financial crisis of 2008, which was no picnic. Since then I’ve spent the last decade+ learning how business, digital marketing, and branding work and how to leverage them effectively.

When the job market started tanking again recently because of the Covid crisis, I knew I had to do something so that job seekers wouldn’t go through what I did in 2008. 

To get started building your personal brand and and gaining career security with Stand Out Professional Branding, email us at: [email protected] or fill out our contact form here and we will get back to you ASAP.

DeafTone Digital: Connecting Values In Practice

Making Connections

I am grateful that I have the opportunity to connect with lots of different people in the digital space. And for me, the important part of connecting professionally is providing value. Recently I connected with the founder of DeafTone Digital over the idea of connecting your values to your messaging. He looked through some of the articles on this site about the subject and then wrote a piece for his blog on his process connecting his values to his messaging. I think this is a terrific example of why connecting your values to your messaging can be good for your business. I present to you that piece in its entirety:

Connecting My Values

By DeafTone Digital

Figuring This Out Was Enlightening And Fun. 

When Stand Out Professional Branding first approached me about doing some contributions for the website specifically on the subject of connecting my values to my brand, I wasn’t entirely sure of what my values were to begin with. The irony is that I have helped several businesses define this very question and create their own set of values and mission statements. I have even helped my local fraternity chapter with the same.

To be honest, I didn’t really know where to start when it came to my own brand. Even though I have done this for several other businesses, I have never done it for my own brand, and in a way I felt like I had come too far. Then I followed West Kramer’s guide on the Stand Out website and voila, a set of values and a mission statement. 

As West puts it, 

“to figure out your values, mission statement, and slogan, start with the question: why do I want to help people? Once you have an answer to that, the mission statement and slogan will flow from the values you decide on naturally.”

So I did that, and here is what I came up with.

Why? 

I love Hip Hop and music in general, but the more music I come across outside the mainstream, the more I am disappointed with the marketing efforts. I really think most artists need some kind of guidance. A lot of good talent goes to waste because it is not properly promoted. 

DeafTone Digital Marketing seeks to improve the quality of marketing in hip hop, music in general, sole proprietorships and small corporations. 

See, I’m a big fan of corporate marketing. I love coming across big, national ad campaigns or social media campaigns. It feels like “the pros” to me… kind of like the NFL of Marketing, in a way. So I want to bring that corporate feel to the smaller businesses. 

For some reason, it seems like the smaller the business, the worse the marketing quality is (except for some obvious marketing experts, and creative businesses). And I can totally understand since small business owners are usually swamped with enormous piles of workload and rarely have time to sit down and think of marketing strategies. 

The same is probably true for musicians and artists. They might be so busy with their own craft that they pay little to no attention to learning to promote. 

That’s Why Went Into Marketing. 

When I first started in marketing, I was just lucky to land a pretty cool, fun job. I graduated high school with the idea that I was going to be a writer and a rap artist. It’s a weird combination, I know, but it made sense in my head. 

A friend of mine suggested I became an expert in a subject an write about that instead of pursuing a degree in English to be a “writer.”

I had always had a knack for sales and working in an advertising agency immediately after high school introduced me to a world I would soon fall in love with. I decided to become an expert at sales and marketing and write about that. 

But My Passion For Hip Hop And Music In General Never Ceased. 

As I climbed through the ranks in marketing, I always kept well in touch with my artist friends, and when a really close friend of mine, Dcplina, released his own album and joined a small independent label, I wasted no time in helping him and giving him advice. 

That lead to Dc introducing me to Matt M (Junkroom Music), and I suddenly became an authority locally in South Texas Hip Hop Marketing. Since then I’ve worked with other artists including Jay Barr (noimnotwhite), and Midnight Militia

When COVID-19 hit, I was laid off from a director position I held at a dentist firm. Luckily I was prepared mentally for this. I quickly sprang into action and started my blog for covid entrepreneurs and hip hop artists. 

This pandemic was a silent blessing in disguise for me. It pushed me to go all-in and pursue what I’ve always thought I’d be great at… being a writer but like my friend suggested as an expert in a field. 

Slogan: 
“Seriously Fun Marketing.”

The slogan I came up with, I already had for quite a while actually. When I first started my rap career, I wanted to stand out and be different. I pushed every button I could just to get attention. I became more of a troll than a serious artist, and somehow that fueled me. 

So I went more, and more ridiculous every time just to see what I could get away with. Then I realized the more ridiculous, the better… so I went “8 Mile” and started making fun of myself, and that’s when things started to really pop. 

In the movie 8 Mile, Eminem’s character wins a rap battle by dissing himself leaving his opponent with nothing to say, and that is kind of what I was going for when I came up with my rap slogan, “I’m serious about being a joke”

It was a ridiculously fun coincidence when I worked at Vector Marketing for a couple years and THEIR slogan is “Work should be fun, seriously.” 

It seemed like a no-brainer to use “Seriously Fun Marketing” as my slogan.

In Conclusion.

I came up with my first set of values, mission statement, and slogan. This is a process I have helped many businesses do, but had never done for myself. Now that I have this, it will narrow down all my targets and I will be able to get more of that sniper action I’m focusing on lately.

Click the image below to listen to my podcast:

DeafTone Podcast

West Kraemer On: How To Build A Brand Basics Part 1

Hi, my name is West Kraemer and I’m here to show you the very basics of building a digital brand for yourself during your job hunt.

Start With A Website

The first thing you want is a website. You’ll publish your tent pole, or “pillar” material there. That kind of content usually breaks down along the lines of “audio” (podcast), “written” (blog post), or “visual” (video). 

So, if you’re making a podcast, you’ll publish your podcast on your website and send it out to the streaming services from there. If you’re writing a blog, you’ll publish your blog posts there. And if you’re making videos, you’ll use YouTube to host them (because YouTube is free), and embed them onto your website from YouTube. 

You’ll build this project on WordPress, which is free. Your website will be “hosted” on Bluehost.(“hosting” means the website’s files will be located there. You’ve got to pay for that. It’s about $80 a year, give or take depending on how much data you use.).

Posting Schedule

Once you’ve got your website and pillar content going, you’re going to start posting it on social media. You’re going to want to post a piece of pillar content once every 4-5 days. In between posting, you’re writing new pillar content, and posting small snippets of information from your previous “pillar” post.

This in-between period is also a great time to post content documenting your process. Overcoming struggle is a compelling narrative, so if you’re frustrated with a process and want to Tweet/IG/LinkedIn about how you overcame that challenge, go for it.

Between these posts of snippets, documentation, and pillar content, try to post at least once a day.

Next Steps

Now, with these tools in your belt, you’re almost ready to start building your brand online so that employers can see why they should hire you. 

But, what are you going to post about for all of this? In Part 2 of this series “West Kraemer On:“, I’m going to write about how you first establish your values, a mission statement, and a slogan, then use those values to shape your message and ensure you always have something to write about.