#Create: How can creators leverage social media to increase their earning potential?
Welcome to the digital age: where you can monetize your meme accounts, blast your new mixtape on twitter and become an A-list celebrity after a few fire #OOTD’s. Whatever your flavour, if you’re creating your own stuff and posting about it, you are what’s known as a content creator. Creators alike can use social media platforms to not only post their creative endeavours proudly- but can make money from running an engaging and trust worthy page, too. It’s all about scaling and branding your chosen platform to be perfectly tailored to you. But, remember: it isn’t as easy as it looks, and it takes a lot more than posting and simple engagement to actually have leverage over other creators in your niche. Social media metrics is the collection of data that gauges the impact of one’s social media activity. Creators/marketers will use this method to observe and monitor analytics on said platform, which allows them to gather information about how to scale up their brand, depending on their demographic.
Instagram is one of the initial social media platforms that creators will utilize today to attract audiences to their brand. It’s also one of the only platforms that allows you to freely check your analytics if you opt to change your profile from personal to a business. I myself am a founder of a social media marketing agency called Socialdrop that I started with my older brother and sister. We run the Instagram profiles of Snoop Dogg’s chain of merchandise, Pounds, along with other Toronto-based brands like Miix Footwear and PiCo Pizza. Since the start-up of Socialdrop, for the past year I have been diligently studying this platform and how to utilize and monetize it to its fullest potential. The analytics on the Instagram app specifically, are delivered simply to the user and are constantly updated so the creator can collect the most accurate data to achieve the best results. There are three primary Instagram metrics that are crucial to keep track of, if looking to increase earning potential for any sort of creator: Demographics, time and insights. These are the fundamentals of Instagram’s metrics, and these are the key to increasing earning potential.
The demographics are essentially the age, gender and geographic location of your followers all grouped together into one category. Knowing and truly understanding your demographic is the core of connecting your content to an audience. Without knowing who your audience is, you can’t really tailor anything for them to engage with, which depletes any sort of conversion at all. Next, is time: as obvious as that sounds. Knowing timing metrics lets the creator see when the most follower-concentrated, or “peak” timing is, letting them know when their audiences are most active and able to engage with his/her content. Finally, insights, which is a pool of impressions (number of accounts that came across a specific post), likes, saves and comments. To check your conversion rate, in other words, to check if your post successfully affected your audience emotionally, leading them to engage, is to compare the ratio of impressions to likes/comments. If your impressions are high, and likes/comments for that post are half of the amount of impressions, the conversion rate is 50%, meaning 1 in every 2 people engaged with your post. Once these metrics are collected, that is exactly when a creator can successfully leverage their social media to increase their earnings. But with all of this said, the question still may stand for some creators: how should I manicure my content so that it’s attractive and engaging with my audience? Luckily, Instagram also has a formula for successful and engaging content, too.
It goes without saying that the content needs to have an engaging aspect to it. Whether that be the colours, the composition or cohesiveness of the post itself, it needs to have an element of attraction. The key to content is quality: as in planning, execution and cohesion. After that, your content needs to go with an engaging caption, as well. That could mean use of emojis, funny one-liners or even informative and insightful captions. This all depends on what your brand is and what you think your audience will have interest in. Once your post goes live, that’s when the real magic happens. Depending on the degree of how engaging your post is, your audience, along with general users, could directly click on your page after seeing your post, and maybe even follow you. From your profile, they should see a cohesive brand-image that you have created for yourself: an aesthetic of your profile that is tailored to your brand. For instance, singers may curate profiles that post a singing-video every other post, performance/experience photos to fill in the rest of the profile. This will not only give distinction to your profile, but the curation of your page is very inviting to potential followers. The bio of your profile goes hand-in-hand with the curation of the content itself. The bio, as redundant as that sounds, must also be cohesive with your brand. For most creators, the bio is the place where metrics convert to money. It’s the ideal place to put any links to your website, any online store or any blog, to lure your followers to buy whatever it is your creating, whether that’s a service or a product.
