Entreprenuer.com recently published an article that highlighted the 'Hard Reality of What It Takes to Become a Social-Media Icon'.
While it's a common fact that Social media is where millennials live today, it's a market so wide and deep and growing exponentially that continued education is as paramount to your success as your investigative skills, your writing skills, marketing skills and promotional skills. As with other areas of competence in the Products and Services pages of this site, this one skill set could/should be combined with others such as Email, Instagram, Bots, Mobile Marketing and probably a few others as well.
The people who attain acclaimed stardom on social media make it look effortless. In truth it's anything but and plausibly one of the toughest to conquer. As millennials are the largest living generation in history, they have a phenomenal spending power that's almost impossible to ignore. With Facebook boasting more than 2 billion users, Instagram with 700m (and still in its infancy), Twitter with almost 800 million and new SM applications launching almost weekly, social media is where businesses go to get their attention. And these businesses trust top social media influencers to help. See the Instagram Mastery page and the value of Influencers Here!
Becoming a social media icon is not just the dream of millennials, there are tens of thousands of Generation X achieving massive success online, and probably all generations in between the two such as those born in the early 1980's the "Xennials". In this day and age, everyone qualifies! Everyone has the same opportunities.
The attraction of having hundreds of thousands of followers around the globe waiting for you to share your activities, hints & tips for achieving whatever it is your subject matter is, ideas, pictures and even products that you have tested is a dream that many hope will come true for them as it did for you.
While the likes of Simonetta Lein (one of the top SM Icons in the industry) are already living this lifestyle, one should not be misled to assume that getting there is a walk in the park!
Here are some insights from Simonetta Lein on the backstage of social media success.
1. You need to build on something.
For most millennials dreaming of becoming a social media star, the missing link between them and achieving their dream is the "substance" needed to build a platform upon. What you're doing that makes "listening" to you and following your story worthwhile is where the substance lies.
"I started five years ago when I was launching my first novel and working as a radio speaker for one of the most important radio shows," she said in an email interview. "A social media manager heard about me and said I should have been on social media with a different approach. At that time, social media was just my way to communicate with friends and family. I immediately understood the immense value of that tool if used properly. Plus, being a millennial, everything came easy."Now she reaches more than a million followers across her social media accounts.
As we mentioned above, this is not a field that not all Millennials should follow, Instagram may be a better arena to play in, you can use influencer marketing with older audiences, and in many cases younger children, tweens and teen also.
Simonetta on how Social Media will evolve in the future.
Be professional all through.
When I asked Lein what tips she wanted to share with millennials wishing to become successful at social media, one of the tips that resonated the most was to be thoroughly professional. This includes getting training from experts and finding the right professional tools to produce better content. "Ask professionals, and use professional tools to help you. There are some good apps out there that work according to hashtag methods and can help to better find your audience."
Reaching people through social media can help young people build a brand of their own. This, however, takes a lot more work than we think. With experience as vast and impressive as Lein's, she's on the radar as one of the top influencers today.
Want to climb the heights to become a Social Media Icon? Want to learn the secrets? You’re in luck!
The 20 Steps on how you can become an Icon of Social Media!
Learn how to automate (almost) everything.
Automation has to be one of the most important tips for anyone wanting to be recognized as a social media icon, in order to achieve this lofty status, automation is the key.
Some inexperienced people in the social media world still choose to manually create their social media updates or perhaps selectively automate certain tasks. To be a true icon, you must learn to automate every social media task, at least where possible.
Use the right tools for posting across multiple SM pages/networks.
(Check the images in the left hand column for recommendations)
Automatically following people back when they follow you.
Automatic retweeting.
Automatic mentioning.
Automated direct messages and automated posts from another social media guru’s blog.
Automatic posting to LinkedIn from another Network.
It is fair to say that some less experienced social media people use some of these techniques, but to become a true Social Media Icon, you must practice them all, all of the time.
There is a belief that you should treat all social networks differently because they have have different audiences and different ways of operating with their visitors. We believe that all social networks are the same! What is important is to cross post to all your social networks at once including Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus, Instagram, Pinterest etc; etc:
All Social Media Icons instinctively know that they are the centre of their followers universe. However, it’s not enough for you to KNOW you're the centre of the universe, you need to communicate this as frequently as you can without it being boring, and promote your awesomeness to everyone you meet online.
Some inexperienced social media people regularly post links from their blog or website, or even recommend people check out something new. Unfortunately the fact that they only do this some of the time shows up their lack of self belief. To be truly effective here you must talk about yourself, your business, product or blog all of the time!
You need Reviews and Testimonials on your blog & or website. Cross post to all your networks to get all your fans to check it out! Email your following Review requests and auto post or use sites like Yext. Remember- you are incredibly important to your fans, followers and connections- so they are bound to drop everything they’re doing to check out your cool new testimonial or Review. It’s not enough to do this occasionally- you must promote your importance in every social media update!
Sell yourself- mention how wonderful and influential you are! A good test of how effective you are here is by seeing whether you would be comfortable describing yourself like this to someone in real life. For example, if someone asked me what I did for a living, I’d hardly reply that I was a “World Wide Social Media Icon & Expert and Top Ranked Power Influencer”, but it’s different online! Examples of phrases to use are:
“Social Media Guru”
“Expert”
“Global Expert”
“Power Influencer”
“World’s Number One”“Social Media Icon”
“Expert”
“Global Expert”
“Power Influencer”
“World’s Number One”
In closing, "Numbers are Everything!"
All icons are always be checking their scores, sometimes checking them multiple times per day. In particular, you need to keep an eye on your Klout and Kred scores, number of fans on Facebook, number of followers on Twitter, subscribers on your YouTube channel and number of people who have circled you in Google+
It’s the numbers that count!.
