15 Inspiring Entrepreneurs Who Built Careers Around Their Passions Through Social Media

Have you heard this advice before: “Follow your passions!” “Do what you love!”?

And have you thought, what if my passions are my hobbies? Things that I could never be paid for?

For some, the advice to “do what you love” seems possible only if you have a passion for things like finance or accounting or coding. Well, I’ve been happy to find that it’s possible to follow your passions into a career, no matter what those passions may be. With social media, you now have a platform to do what you love—and to make a career out of it.

I found 15 amazing entrepreneurs who built their entire businesses and careers around social media, many earning $100,000 or more. 

I’d love to share their stories with you—and how you can follow their lead to turn your passions into a career, through social media.

How to Earn an Income Doing What You Love on Social Media

It sounds far-fetched, doesn’t it?

Posting photographs or tweets a few times each day to launch a lucrative career doing what you love.

And you might be wondering how these social media entrepreneurs make money. Because after all, a career requires an income.

I’ll get into the specific stories of 15 entrepreneurs below. First, I thought I’d share the many number of ways—the specific avenues and channels—that they use to make money on social media.

1. Sponsorships

Sponsorships are responsible for a lot of the money earned through social media, especially for those just starting off. Brittany Furlan, Caitlin Turner and Shaun McBride all started with sponsorships.

Sponsorships occur when brands pay to be associated with you. When a tourism board pays Instagrammer Lauren Bath to work with them and feature their location, they are sponsoring Lauren.

Podcasts are usually funded through sponsorships as well. The sponsor will pay to be featured on the podcast at some point during the episode.

2. Advertisements

Advertisements are another popular method of monetizing social media. YouTubers like Liz Meghan use ads to make a living through their social media accounts.

Advertisements differ from sponsorships in that there’s usually not a long term relationship with the entrepreneur.

3. Selling products

If you have a product based business like an eCommerce store, this is perfect for you.

Social media can be a great place to sell your products – or, at the least, build up a following and redirect those followers to your website to buy your products.

4. Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing allows you to work with brands to help them sell their products, earning you a commission each time somebody buys through your affiliate link.

Many social media channels allow affiliate links to be placed within a post, and when the follower clicks on the link and makes a purchase through it, the poster gets a portion of that sale.

5. Promoting services

If a service-based business is more up your alley, you don’t want to look past social media as a marketing channel.

From hair stylists who post their work on Instagram to coaches who use Facebook as a platform to engage with potential clients, there is a lot of opportunity on social media to promote your services.

6. Boosting your visibility as an artist

If you’re an artist, writer, or creative entrepreneur, social media can be an amazing tool to boost your visibility.

Artists like Us the Duo, Grace Ciao, and writer Jeff Goins all have used their social media channels as methods of boosting their visibility to book gigs and sell their art.

Why Social Media Works

Creating social media content every day. Scheduling it at the right times. Analyzing what followers respond to and what they ignore. The time it takes to manage a social media marketing strategy can be significant.

Here are two reasons why the time is well worth it, especially for those looking to build a new career.

1. Social Media Expands Your Reach by 1,000x

How many people visit your website each day?

200? 1,000?

Those aren’t bad numbers. And it may make sense for you to spend time on your own website rather than social media because your website is like your online home.

But think about it:

• Instagram has 100 million active users
• Twitter has over 135 million active users
• Youtube sees over 1 billion active users each month

Even if only 0.1% of the people on those channels are interested in what you’re doing, you’ve still amplified your reach by over 1,000 times by using social media to spread your message and share your passion.

2. Social Media Establishes Your Expertise 

The lifeblood of social media is content.

Even if you’re posting a 6-second video on Vine or a photo on Instagram, you’re posting content.

When you’re consistently posting content about a specific topic, you establish yourself as an expert.

Take, for example, two mathematicians who love numbers. Who establishes herself as an expert?

• Mathematician A, who loves her work but avoids social media, or
• Mathematician B, who teaches others how to do math on Youtube and has 200,000 followers?

They’re both experts, but Mathematician B has established herself as an expert. She has built an audience, and provides value to others by demonstrating her knowledge on social media.

15 Entrepreneurs Who Built New Careers Through Social Media

1. Brandon Stanton

The creator of Humans of New York

In 2010, after losing his job, Brandon Stanton began to take candid photographs of people on the streets of New York and post them to Facebook.

Self-taught, Brandon took photos that reflected his passion, and these photos quickly began to gain traction on Facebook.

Humans of New York now has over 12 million Facebook likes, and it has launched a speaking, photography, philanthropic and media career for Brandon.The revenue generated by HONY prints sold goes directly to charity, and Brandon makes a living from the royalties of books sales and new freelancing opportunities. He went into a bit more detail about the specifics in a Reddit AMA:

How are you able to pay for your daily needs? Does HONY support you financially?

I’ve said publicly that I don’t want to “cash out” or “monetize” HONY. I like to say it publicly because I want my audience to keep me on mission. HONY print sales have raised nearly $500,000 for charity in the past six months. I want to further monetize the site for non-profit ventures. I honestly want to “give” HONY to New York in some way.

Freelancing and book royalties are keeping me afloat now. I get money for collaborations, occasional magazine pieces, occasional speeches, etc. And I signed two book deals which pay the rent. Also, I live cheaply.

2. Jeff Goins

Author and Blogger behind Goins, Writer

Two years ago, Jeff Goins quit his day job to pursue his passion for writing full-time.

He now has built a tribe of over 100,000 people, and has just launched his fourth book, The Art of Work.

This is all made possible by social media.

Jeff began writing on his blog, Goinswriter.com, and continued to work in his day job. He then began to earn more on his blog doing what he loved part-time than he was in his full-time job.

My blog (which accounted for less than 10 hours per week) was now contributing more income than my full-time job (which took up at least 40 hours per week).

His first product—a $2.99 ebook—earned $1,500 in its first week, convincing Jeff that his hobby could be a business.

His blog gave him a platform to follow his passion and do what he loves.

3. Grace Ciao

Fashion Designer and Artist

Grace Ciao is the ultimate accidental social media entrepreneur.

Since she was a little girl, Grace has had a passion for fashion design, and one day, she noticed a flower a boy had given her was dying. So Grace created a fashion illustration out of the petals of the flower.

She took a photo of her illustration and posted it on Instagram, which quickly became popular.

Grace earns a living as a full-time illustrator, and has used her platform to book engagements for events.

4. Michael and Carissa Alvarado

Husband and Wife Singers, Us The Duo

Michael and Carissa Alvarado were making music before they began posting 6-second videos on Vine, but nothing has skyrocketed their careers more than Vine has.

The couple was already trying to gain more traction on Youtube when they decided to put snippets of their covers on Vine, which served them well.

They now have 4.6 million Vine followers, and signed a record deal with Republic Records in 2014, allowing them to follow their passion by getting their start on social media.

5. Rosanna Pansino

Nerd and Baker at Nerdy Nummies

If you’ve ever thought the only way to pursue your passion for baking is by opening a bakery or through feeding your family, think again.

Rosanna Pansino built a career on social media centered around her love of baking when she was egged on by friends (pun intended) to start a Youtube channel.

Rosanna’s Youtube Channel, Nerdy Nummies has over 3.6 million subscribers.

6. Justin Halpern

Comedian from Sh!t My Dad Says

“Don’t focus on the one guy who hates you. You don’t go to the park and set your picnic down next to the only pile of dog sh–.”

— Justin (@shitmydadsays) June 28, 2010

Let me guess.

It seems as if every time you open Twitter, you’re instantly barraged with links to mediocre blog posts, pictures of people’s lattes and announcements of what the newest member of oversharers-anonymous is having for lunch that day.

You could never imagine Twitter as a platform to build a career, right?

Well, Justin Halpern did just that.

He took his comedy writing career to the next level by starting the popular Twitter account Sh!t My Dad Says, where he began to Tweet snippets of conversations with his father.

The Twitter account quickly gained traction and morphed into a television series and book.

7. Lain Ehmann

Scrapbooker and Blogger from Layout a Day

If you’ve ever felt as if your interests or hobbies were impossible to build a career from, you may be inspired by Lain Ehmann, who built her career from a blog about scrapbooking.

Yes, you read that right.

She’s built a six figure business around a niche that is traditionally a hobby niche, teaching others how to scrapbook and holding live online events through her blog.

The power of the internet allows us to connect with people who are interested in the things that we’re interested in, and if we can provide enough value to those people, Lain proves that lucrative careers can be built.

8. Shaun McBride

Artist and Snapchatter

Shaun McBride learned how to draw by looking at other artists’ drawings and trying his hand out at the craft.

After Snapchatting his drawing/photo mashups, he was featured on some popular websites, which boosted his career.

He now can make tens of thousands of dollars from one advertising deal with a brand through his Snapchat account, according to Forbes, and “several thousand dollars per image”.

9. Shawn Stevenson

Health Enthusiast of The Model Health Show

If text or images doesn’t interest you when it comes to building a career on social media, maybe audio does.

Shawn Stevenson runs the #1 health podcast on iTunes, the Model Health Show, allowing him to follow his passion for fitness and health through a different medium.

Instead of taking the traditional route of personal training, Shawn interviews guests on his podcast, creating content and giving listeners the tools to live healthy lives.

10. Lauren Bath

Traveller and Professional Instagrammer

Lauren Bath has arguably the best job in the world. Not only is she paid to Instagram, but she also gets paid to travel.

Lauren was the “first professional Instagrammer” of Australia, and quit her job as a chef to pursue her passions for photography and travel.

Lauren works with tourism boards and brands to provide exposure through her huge Instagram account to make a living.

While she doesn’t reveal her rates in interviews, she tells Successful Blogging that she works with brands such as Nikon and Tourism Boards to offer them sponsorships:

Well I can’t talk for others but for me I charge a base rate to travel away from home and that rate includes posting whatever images I like with all content available to the client.

11. Joey Korneman

Animator and Teacher from School of Motion

Joey Korneman is the founder of  School of Motion, where he teaches his students through online courses to animate using the principles of motion design.

Most of Joey’s traffic comes from Vimeo, as he tells Pat Flynn’s mastermind group in a recent episode of the Smart Passive Income Podcast.

He has 5,000 followers on Vimeo, which is high for that social media channel, and, as he tells Pat’s mastermind group, “Vimeo is very high-quality traffic for motion design”.

Joey makes a living teaching motion design by directing his Vimeo followers to his website, where he sells courses.

12. Mignon Fogarty

Grammarian and Podcaster at Grammar Girl

Passions come in all shapes and sizes, and Mignon Fogarty’s passion is unique.

Mignon has a passion for grammar, and works full time in the field by teaching grammar principles to her rabid fans of her Grammar Girl podcast.

Through social media, she has been able to build an amazing career around grammar, as she blogs as well.

13. Caitlin Turner

Yogi and Instagrammer GypsetGoddess

Caitlin’s passion for yoga has provided her with the unique opportunity to build an entire career from it – on Instagram.

Catlin’s Instagram account is still relatively new – about three years old – but she still has earned over 220,000 followers.

Caitlin told Yoganonymous that “Instagram has definitely been a huge career chance for me. It’s connected me professionally to different brands and people I wouldn’t have found before because I had no reason to. This is my career now.”

14. Brittany Furlan

Actress and Vine Comedian

Social media has helped people like Brittany Furlan launch comedic and acting careers in a way that was never possible before.

Brittany used Vine to launch her career in comedy and acting and now has 8.9 million followers on Vine.

Brittany told The Wrap that she makes a comfortable living through her Vines.

Those videos — which include a repertoire of outlandish characters (“Ghetto Dora De Explora“), quick-to-the-punchline sketches or pranks on the unsuspecting public — are worth between $7,000 and $20,000 to brands targeting Furlan’s massive audience.

She’s now gone on to partner with Seth Green to create a sketch show.

15. Liz Meghan

Youtuber and Makeup Artist

Liz Meghan had a passion for makeup, and she channeled that passion into Youtube.

With over 672,000 subscribers on her Youtube channel, Liz makes a living doing what she loves through makeup tutorials and sharing what she’s learned about makeup over the years.

Liz tells the Huffington Post that she makes a living off of her Youtube channel because Youtube pays her to put ads on her videos.

There’s no better time than now to do what you love

As these inspiring entrepreneurs demonstrate, by building a following online using social media, you can:

• Get paid to do what you love
• Establish yourself as an expert and
• Grow a following around your passions.

There’s no excuse to not get out there, pick a social media channel, and start posting.

Have you found success in building a career or a following on social media? Are you inspired by others who have taken this route to follow their dreams? I’d love to hear more about what you’ve experienced and learned in the comments.

Image sources: Pablo, Unsplash, IconFinder, Humansofnewyork.com, Art of Work Book, Ryanseacrest.com, Newmediarockstars.com, Shonduras.com, iTunes, Laurenbath.com,
Vimeo,  Gypsetgoddess.com, Thewrap.com, Youtube.com

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Book Review: What Happens on Campus Stays on YouTube

Erik Qualman’s new book, What Happens on Campus Stays on YouTube, provides great tips and stories for high school and college students everywhere.  As a college student in today’s digital age, The New Rules of Reputation are more important than ever. It’s easy for us students to think that we already know the importance of online presence when we are being reminded about it daily but this book goes beyond the typical “don’t post stupid things on Facebook” we are usually told. This book tells students how to change their digital presence to help their future, how to protect their identity online and offline, how to use social media to help their career and provides real life examples of lessons learned by individuals and companies.

Out of the 36 New Rules of Reputation, two that stood out to me were Rule #12 and Rule #21. Rule #12 is Post It Forward. Social media sites such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook are great for connecting with people. By endorsing someone on LinkedIn or sharing something someone posted on Facebook, you make them feel good which makes you feel happy and they just might return the favor for you. 

Rule #21 is Make Ginormous Public Goals. Students are always told to make goals and have goals set for themselves. Using digital tools to accomplish goals sets you more accountable for what you want and sharing with your friends and followers lets them know what you want and they may be able to help you.

All of the rules provide important lessons for students. I was able to take something from each one and apply it to my own digital reputation and digital presence.

When thinking about preparing for the real world, college seniors think about updating their social media sites by making everything super private in hopes that employers won’t be able to find them. But this isn’t how they should be approaching social media and their career. This book tells students the importance of using social media to build your network and provides excellent tips on how to update social media to showcase your work or leverage your online presence to help land your dream job.

What Happens on Campus Stays on YouTube provides real life student success stories which can inspire any student to use digital to help them achieve their dreams.  It shows how students used the power of online and their digital presence to make something happen. The real world is often a scary thought for students, but these stories can provide students with the reassurance of how the online world can help them.

This book is so important for students because it tells students how to use their digital presence to help themselves. As high school and college seniors are approaching graduation, this book has lessons they can take with them to college or to the real world.

What Happens on Campus Stays on YouTube is available now on Amazon.

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Don’t Forget Socializing Your Marketing Strategy

All kinds of companies are turning to social media to boost their marketing efforts and for good reason.

Socializing your company’s marketing strategy can help take each campaign to new heights.

With advertising advice in mind, here are just a few reasons why your company should get social with its marketing:

Next Level Brand Awareness

The main goal of every marketing campaign you create is to increase brand awareness.

Sure, promoting a new product, spreading the word about a sale, and reaching new audiences is a focal point of your marketing as well, but all of those fall under the brand awareness umbrella.

Going the social media route means you are putting your brand in the spotlight of an extremely recognizable medium.

Whether you choose Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or any of the other social avenues, social media can make audiences more aware of your brand.

Millennials to Baby Boomers to next generation consumers are active on social media and the numbers are growing. In fact, according to Pew Research, nearly 75% of all Internet users are on social media. Now that’s brand awareness.

Inbound Traffic and Social Media: A Win-Win Relationship

As the following article looks at, if you’re wondering how to create a multi-strand marketing strategy for your business, look no further than social media.

Not only does marketing via social media increase brand awareness, it also has the potential to increase inbound traffic for your business’s website.

Every social media account your business has leads back to your website.

Likewise, the content you share socially increases the chances of new customers finding their way to your site.

By continuously posting quality content that’s engaging and informative, you are creating more traffic to your site, which translates to more worthwhile leads and conversions.

Social Monitoring is a Huge Plus

Getting ahead and staying ahead of the competition is a must for just about every kind of business. Through social media monitoring, your business can improve its marketing intelligence and outsmart its competitors.

Social media monitoring allows your company to track mentions of your brand as well as your competitor’s brand, products, and marketing campaigns.

When equipped with this type of knowledge, you can track social trends and improve your business’s offerings based on the competition and your own strengths and weaknesses.

Brand Legitimacy

Today’s consumers perform a lot of research before settling on a product or service.

A popular research route is checking social media for business legitimacy. If your company is active on social media and has plenty of followers, then it makes consumers more comfortable choosing your brand.

By having active social accounts, a Facebook business page, and by responding to social comments and questions, you’re making your brand more legitimate in the eyes of the consumer.

Marketing at the Speed of Life

Unlike traditional marketing techniques, social media marketing is as instantaneous as you want it to be. When you’re ready to share content, simply post your marketing campaigns and you’ll reach your audience right away.

If your content to rich enough, chances are your social followers will share your content too. You can’t really say that about any other form of marketing.

When you’re ready to bring your business’s marketing up to speed, keep in mind the benefits of social media.

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Social Skills Lead to Better Career Options

The career search can be stressful. In fact, it usually is.

These days the search takes place beyond career fairs and resumes, you’ve got social media to help you.

But you need to know how to use it to your best advantage, and there definitely are some keys to knowing how to do this.

What social media to hit up?

We’re all aware of the big names and what they can do. But what is out there besides Facebook, Google+ and Twitter?

Along with the big guys, it’s also good to take a look at some social media that has a smaller following, especially ones with a niche:

• If you are in a creative or design industry, use Pinterest. Create a job board and add your own visually appealing pins. You can use infographics for you resume including charts and graphs that depict and illustrate your work self. Think of your headline as your resume headline. A board of inspiration and quotes that reflect you is a good idea, along with any links that show your talents and what you have done already.

• Try Blogging. It’s easy enough to get a blog page up and running, try Word Press or Blogger. You can write about your job search, your goals and your background. It’s a great place to have something all about you and you never who may stumble on it. Once you’ve written your blogs, put them out onto your social media platforms, including LinkedIn and you never who they may get to.

• Jobster is a smaller social network site related to careers. You can post your career profile and your resume. It’s a platform where you can connect with those hiring as well showcase yourself.

• Ecademy is like LinkedIn, but has its own advantages. You create an online profile where you share your career goals and skillset. It’s dedicated to networking rather than a place to find actual job posts, but who you know is a rather big part of the job search.

What to search and key in on…

When you are looking for a particular job, whether you are straight out of college or already a little settled in your career, you need to focus on specifics.

The Internet is too big to randomly search, and when you can narrow down your goals and what you are looking for, you’ll have an easier time finding it.

Not only can you find jobs and employment on the Internet, but you can also find related topics to help in your search, like what employers are looking for and top skills in a specific field.

Here are examples of specifics to search … tailor these ideas to fit your skills and objectives:

•           Take a look at the Top 5 career skills for architects and engineers

•           Career outlook for physical therapists

•           What are the top cities for jobs in medical research?

•           Top 5 things employers look for in education careers

The Internet is a great tool for job searching. Narrow down your field, your area, and utilize social media.

The more “socially” skilled you are, the better your search can go.

Good luck with your search! Share with us any great tips you have that got you where you want to be.

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Twitter now lets you receive direct messages from any user

Mashable - Twitter announced on Monday that all users will now have the option to receive direct messages from any other user.

The setting was originally introduced in fall 2013 but only rolled out to a small subset of people. This time around, Twitter will make the option available to all of Twitter’s 288 million monthly active users, with the social network rolling it out to people throughout Monday. Users can eventually check off  ”Receive direct messages from anyone” on the “Security and privacy” settings page.

For Twitter users who didn’t have access to the setting until now, direct messaging was more limited: You could only send messages to users who followed you, and you could only receive messages from any user you followed.

While the feature may be trivial, it’s another small tweak in Twitter’s recent attempts to have users just plain message each other more, and in turn, boost engagement — particularly among brands and businesses. Twitter’s going to need them if it wants to reach its bold, “strictly hypothetical” goal of $14 billion in annual revenues within the next decade.

Over the last few months, the social network has rolled out a number of new features and tweaks. In January, for example, it introduced group direct messages, as well as the ability to share and edit video inside Twitter. And earlier in April, it officially revamped its retweet feature, making it easier for users to plug other people’s tweets and add their own comments.

Article by JP Mangalindan for Mashable

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Google is making a giant change this week that could crush millions of small businesses

Business Insider – On Tuesday, April 21, Google is making a major update to its mobile search algorithm that will change the order in which websites are ranked when users search for something from their phone.

The algorithm will start favoring mobile-friendly websites (ones with large text, easy-to-click links, and that resize to fit whatever screen they’re viewed on) and ranking them higher in search. Websites that aren’t mobile-friendly will get demoted.

About 60% of online traffic now comes from mobile and Google wants users to have a good experience whenever they click on a mobile link.

The company announced its impending changes back in February, giving webmasters nearly two months and plenty of information to make the changes necessary to keep their sites from disappearing from mobile search results. But the update is still expected to cause a major ranking shake-up. It has even been nicknamed “Mobile-geddon” because of how “apocalyptic” it could be for millions of websites, Itai Sadan, CEO of website building company Duda, told Business Insider.

“I think the people who are at risk are those who don’t know about it,” Sadan says. To him, that mostly means small businesses.

“Come April 21, a lot of small businesses are going to be really surprised that the number of visitors to their websites has dropped significantly. This is going to affect millions of sites on the web,” he says.

Businesses that depend on people finding them through localized search — like, if someone typed “coffee shops in Sunnyside, Queens,” into Google on their phone — could see a decrease in foot traffic as a result of this update, Sadan says.

“Google has always been about relevancy, and content is king,” he says. “But that’s changing. Yes, they’re saying content is still extremely important, but user experience is just as important. It’s not sufficient to have all the right content — if people come to your site and the content is there but it’s not readable, that’s not good.”

It’s not only small businesses that are going to be affected by mobile-geddon though.

Marketing company Somo released a study last week that found that a bunch of big brands, like American Apparel, The Daily Mail, and Ryanair, will all get punished when the change takes place, unless they update their sites before Tuesday.
Article by Jillian D’Onfro for Business Insider 

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How I Manage a Social Media Platform of Over 11 Million Followers Every Day

Big or small, influencer or newcomer, everyone looking to get more followers and more likes on social media—more engagement, period—seeks out strategies that work.

And what works with a platform of 11 million followers tends to work for platforms with 100, too.

Social media is a moving ocean of posts, images, tools, ideas, and content that flows at a fast pace. You can find success by building your own social media strategy and keeping it fluid by checking and rechecking what’s working.

I’ve had the chance to check and recheck dozens of different social media strategies in managing a social media platform of 11 million. How do I do everything that I do? And what do I do, specifically? Well, I’d love to share the details with you!

My network of 11 million

I’ve had the privilege to assist Guy Kawasaki, chief evangelist at Canva and former evangelist at Apple, on his social media marketing, and I’ve worked on building a social media following for myself.

I manage a huge social media platform across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+. I started at zero on all my accounts, just like you, and I’m not a celebrity or household name. This is how I’ve worked to build a great social platform – and you can too!

What I manage:

• An audience of 10,637,540 for Guy
• An audience of 935,793 for me

Total: an audience of 11.5 million people

I’ve had the opportunity to take the skills and tricks I’ve learned along the way, managing my own social media platform and applying it to Guy’s social media and for clients we work with, and implement them in some exciting ways. Fortunately, a lot of the strategies have worked! And if things aren’t working, I find a different way to do them.

What is social strategy?

Your social strategy is the plan that’s going to make your social media work.

It’s a combination of content creation, content curation, creativity, and organization.

Random acts of social media won’t do a darn thing to help people find you or to be known for a topic area. To build your authority in your niche, you need to create a solid social strategy that will help people find out who you are, what you do, and most importantly how you can help them.

Answer these questions before you begin the work on your social strategy:

1. What need will you fill for the people who will follow you?
2. Why should they follow you?
3. What will you consistently provide to them?

Let’s use the Buffer blog as an example since their wildly popular blog helped put them on the technology tool map. (Here’s a look back at the blog in late 2013.)

First they created their great product, Buffer, then they started their blog to help get the word out. Leo Widrich started early awareness for Buffer with an extensive guest blogging plan; this was before Buffer had a big team. They’ve since moved to an in-house blogging method with a team of great writers and a social media plan to get their message to as many people as possible.

Their goal was to find people to use Buffer. What they did to achieve that strategy was guest blogging with social media to boost it and they’ve scaled it to match their growth.

You’ll need to be willing to grind it out to make your social media strategy work. Nothing works unless you do.

There are different elements to the social strategy I work with. I’ll go more in depth into each of these:

1. Content creation
2. Content curation
3. Social media amplification
4. Social media conversations
5. Social media listening

Content creation & content curation

What is the difference between creation and curation?

Content creation is creating your media in the form of writing, graphics, design work, video, or any combination of these together.

Creating the media to share and express your blog or brand is very important to help build awareness and trust with your targeted audience.

Content curation is finding content that other people have created to share on your social media accounts.

From Buffer’s Complete Guide to Content Curation:

Content curation is sorting through a large amount of web content to find the best, most meaningful bits and presenting these in an organized, valuable way.

You’ll want to find content that matches the message that you’re presenting with your own content creation. Your curated content should boost your created content and work together. This is what you use to feed the content monster every day – a mixture of your own content and your curated content.

If you’re an artist, you might want to share curated content about art, creativity, and being an entrepreneur. The items that you curate and share are woven into your own social message so what you share is as important as what you create.

There are three ways I’ve found to make creation and curation as efficient and effective as possible:

1. Be organized
2. Load your tool belt
3. Automate what you can

1. Be organized

Organization is the most important cog in the wheel of your social strategy – a world of planning means nothing without implementation. Keep this in mind when choosing what to do so you can plan time in your schedule to get it all done. Being realistic in your time, motivations, and ability to implement is key.

2. Load your tool belt

• Buffer – Social media scheduling
• Canva – Quick and easy image creation
• Tailwind – Pinterest management
• Feedly – RSS
• Zapier – Automation
• Pinterest

This screen shot is from Feedly. I’ve set up my Feedly profile so I can batch process my content curation and easily find content for different accounts. For example, the highlighted accounts show Guy’s LinkedIn. I have RSS feeds set up to go into Guy’s LinkedIn folder based on the appropriate content for his LinkedIn account. You can choose an article, read it in Feedly and quickly send it to Buffer.

One key to great curation is to not share things all at once – let Buffer work for you by filling it in batches and sharing at the most optimal times.

Chrome extensions are invaluable to me. They are quick and efficient allowing you to do more in less time. A few of my must-have extensions:

• Buffer
• Bitly
• Eye Dropper Tool
• Pinterest Pin it Button
• Awesome Screenshot App

3. Automate what you can

• Big list of IFTTT recipes to grab:
• Big list of Zaps from Zapier

Using IFTTT or Zapier to streamline repetitive tasks can save you time. Both of these services link other app services together. My favorite IFTTT recipe shares my Instagram photos to Twitter with the image. If you don’t use this to share images from Instagram to Twitter, it will tweet but without the image.

My favorite Zapier zap posts my pins from Pinterest to my Buffer account. Once they are in Buffer, I can edit the description to customize it for a tweet and add a hashtag. I don’t want all my pins to go to Twitter so this gives me a chance to select them or I can edit the Zap to share only pins that I post to a certain board.

Creating your own social media shortcuts with IFTTT or Zapier can save time but make sure that you’re vigilant and check what is being processed on your social media accounts to make sure everything is going smoothly. You don’t want to share suboptimal content to save time. Quality is always important when posting.

Engagement [Social Media Conversations]

The wind beneath your wings for your social content.

A big part of the social media magic happens in the comments and conversations that take place on social media channels. When you post on social media, be prepared to have conversations with people. Scheduling your content frees you up to do other work and provides you with time to respond to tweets and posts.

Automating your content isn’t a free pass to be offline and unavailable. People will notice. While you don’t have to be online all day long unless you’re a social media pro or community manager, make sure that you plan several times a day to check your social media.

When you post new blog content, you want to make sure you’re available at that time to respond especially succinctly to comments or discussions that pop up around your new article.

Typically, I like to respond on each social platform. If you like to streamline tasks further, find a way to see and respond to the comments on each social platform that you use. A few that I like:

• Tailwind for Pinterest
• Hootsuite for Twitter, Facebook, and Google+
• Iconosquare for Instagram

Cleaning house [Social Media Comments]

While you’re busy checking your comments, make sure that you take the time to sweep out all the spam comments from your posts. These come in different forms by platform.

• LinkedIn published posts are being plagued by the LIONs (LinkedIn Open Networkers) spamming the comments with “invitations to connect.” Remove these comments from your posts to keep it clean for real comments and thoughts.
• Facebook posts get spam in post comments leaving requests to like their page or some other off-topic link.
• Instagram spammers leave their messages and requests to visit their page and follow them.

Keeping your community spam and profanity free makes it nice for other people to be there as well as encourages positive commenting. This is a daily, on-going task that shouldn’t be ignored.

Build a reciprocal network [Social Media Amplification]

A big part of my overall social media strategy is to post great content that people will love to share whether I write it or share someone else’s content. I feel that this creates a social media presence that people will love to follow and look to for great content to share.

I don’t advocate begging people to share content or bugging influencers to share your content. Simply share great content and people will find it. I have a solid distribution process for sharing my own content and don’t ask others to share it.

I use the Social Warfare plugin on my blog because how things are shared when I’m not there to do it are important! It takes time to load the images into the plugin but it’s worth it for fantastic social sharing and it reduces the load time of the page since the images are behind the scenes.

This is a little of what I do when I publish new blog content. Guy calls this “Pegging a post.”

1. Create images for social sharing:
   > Pinterest 735 x 1102 pixels
   > Facebook 940 x 788 pixels
   > Twitter 1024 x 512 pixels
   > Instagram 640 x 640
2. Create blog graphics (560 x 315) for Open graph sharing
3. Pin blog post on Pinterest first
4. Share on Twitter with an image
5. Schedule later in the day for LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google+
6. Schedule tweets to go out on future dates for more traffic
7. Add relevant hashtags to content based on the social platform and what’s acceptable.
8. My posts go automatically into Triberr
9. I also use Comment Luv on my blog so my latest blog post is shared when I comment on blogs.
10. Add click to tweets into Social Warfare with quotes from the blog post

It’s important to customize the text and style on each social media platform. Dumping a link everywhere at the same time won’t get you social conversation or blog traffic.

Final step: Lather, rinse, repeat.

Being consistent with your social media and blogging is essential to success. I publish once a week on my blog and every day on all the social platforms that I’m active on.

Getting started on social media may seem like a big task but that’s just the beginning. Sticking with it and sharing great content every day is what creates social media platforms worth talking about.

Over to you

I hope this peek into what I do every day gives you some ideas to boost your social media efforts. If you want more, grab a copy of The Art of Social Media: Power Tips for Power Users and really get serious.

Have you tried some of these tips with your social media strategy? What would you add to the list here that’s worked for you? It’d be great to hear from you in the comments.

Image sources: Pablo, UnSplash, IconFinder, Wayback Machine

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