Social Media Tips to Move Your Career and Project Forward

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A content creator recently asked me for advice and tips on how to utilize social media to advance his career.

So, I started with the basic questions that everyone should start with: Who are you and what do you want to say? Online, that is. These are basic but important questions to ask because everything and anything you post online could follow you — and even 10 years from now might still be searchable. Some companies use what is called a Q value to establish general audience sentiment, a score that includes how many followers you have, how engaged your audience is and if there is a general appeal from said audience. These factors are compiled and totaled into one score.

You are a brand. Your content is an extension of yourself — and social media is where you need to be building your brand.

The first step my content creator colleague needed to take was to establish a presence on the leading social media platforms. This is a fundamental step that is needed before you can start building and crafting your online brand. This creator owned the rights to a film he acted in on location and helped fund. I suggested he gather all the good photos (set stills) he had from production. From there he could create a “behind the scenes” (BTS) series, a location-based series and a talent series to post on social media.

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Here is the general formula for how a behind-the-scenes (BTS) series breaks down.

For BTS, there are different points of view (POV) to consider. Since this content creator was starting out on social, I suggested he find who on his team had the most followers and use that position (e.g., cast, crew, etc.) as the POV. This is a strategic way to engage an already established following that’s familiar with the content you’re looking to post. I recommend seeing how many images you have that can speak to that POV. If you have 10 images, you may want to post once a week on a Monday to kick off your social media campaign. Let your audience know each post will be part of a series (e.g., Monday Behind the Scene Series 1 of 10). Get descriptive, tag the person (e.g., @JohnstonSusan) and caption it with what steps they took to take the shot.

For the next series, once you figure out how many different location images you have, isolate the ones that are high quality and use the same formula as your POV series. Figure out how many you have, and post them over the course of a few weeks. If there are a lot, you could post daily and use a scheduler. There are free tools online that can help you instantly create a cadence that works for you. Let’s say my content creator colleague had 30 images, this could be a daily scheduled location post where he tags each location. You can tag many things — the people in the shot, the physical location (e.g., statue name, park name, events happening, etc.) the town, city, country or weather — you get the idea.

For the talent series, use the same formula as above but then think of who else you can mention and tag other projects they are in. All things lead to each other. A simple tip: Ask people to like and share, it is an actionable item that generally works and feels good all around. Speak authentically.