3 Ways to Be Seen as a Social Authority in Your Niche
Gaining social authority means you’re recognized as an expert in your chosen niche. You’ll show your thought leadership through status updates or tweets, shared blog posts, video content, images, and more. Most importantly, you’ll regularly contribute to online conversations with highly valuable information.
If you want people to think you know what you’re talking about, you have to prove your knowledge. There’s real value in social media conversations in which you share profound knowledge with those who are just starting out.
But achieving this end isn’t as easy as it once was. There’s more to the process than a few social media posts. If you’re looking to boost your social authority, here are a few things you’ll need to do:
Make Content More Valuable
The content shared on social media must be enticing, valuable, and catchy to gain the credibility that will brand you as an authority. This requires a much greater investment in content creation than you may be used to.
“In the old days, you could slap up a few articles, do one MySpace post, and be the authority in search engines pretty quickly,” share the marketers at Single Grain, a digital marketing agency focused on content promotion. “The bar’s been raised waaay up since then: In competitive markets, you now need information-dense content that’s useful and compels visitors to want to bookmark and share it.”
As you evaluate the value of your content, consider these questions:
- Do you go into detail with your posts, pointing out insights that other blogs neglect?
- Is it loaded with visuals that attract attention and improve the reader’s understanding?
- Do you diversify your content to include multimedia?
- Will readers walk away knowing exactly how to fix a problem?
Answering these questions will lay the groundwork for developing content that will excel on social media. As you increase the quality and the value, you’ll gain increased shares and attention.
Consistently Engage
Engagement leads to shares and consistency shows dedication to your craft. Both are effective for building trust among your followers. With this kind of engagement with your target audience, you’ll grow a social following that will brand you as a thought leader.
Regular and consistent engagement means posting high-value content multiple times a day, responding to questions and comments within a few hours, and giving substantive feedback when required. As you provide this value, consumers will recognize it as a valuable way to solve problems, not as blatant advertising.
Quality engagement also means being on the right networks at the right time. According to Kristi Hines of Kissmetrics, there are three top networks to use if you want to be an authority: Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. If there are popular, niche-specific social networks available, you might use those as well.
Ultimately, as long as you make a clear, high-value presence on each of your social networks, you’ll create a strong impression on your audience and develop the credibility you desire.
Use Visuals to Catch Attention
If you want to be an authority, you have to be seen, which means using images. One study on Twitter revealed that in four million tweets, those with an image were 150 percent more likely to receive a retweet compared to those without an image. Visuals break up the monotony of text and bring some much-needed attention to your social postings.
What’s more, a study from Olapic revealed that people are seven times more likely to trust social photos than traditional text and ads. The photos act as a sort of social proof that make people feel more comfortable engaging with and listening to a brand.
“Social media brings streams of authentic images to consumers’ fingertips, transforming how they see products and interact with brands,” says Jose De Cabo, co-founder at Olapic. “Today’s low levels of trust in traditional advertising suggest that consumers are seeking a more honest dialogue with brands and marketers. In order for brands to increase engagement and sales, they’ll need to adapt to this changing landscape and communicate with consumers in the authentic visual language they crave.”
Valuable content, higher engagement, and more visuals are three key ingredients to any social strategy. Creating authority on social media takes careful, but essential planning, and you’ll see the benefits in higher sales, increased engagement, and better relationships with your customers.
