Just to be sure, if you are in any way, shape or form unclear as to the value of social media marketing, here are just 5 reasons why it is essential as you expand your career in the dance industry. Maybe your current practice is left in the studio but your online presence has the ability to represent you and your work to a larger audience; providing more opportunity to excel. It does not have to become your overarching priority, but it needs to be in the mix. Read on for just 5 of the many reasons you should use social media to your advantage.
Reason #1: Social Media’s Huge Direct and Viral Reach
If you build a solid page on Instagram, you develop a direct reach. This means that a certain percentage of people who frequent your page will see your updates. It is true that Instagram has altered the algorithm so you will not always be featured on your audience’s feed. The solution to this is to clue people in that they can adjust their settings to receive notifications when you post. Now, for people to take the time and bother to do this, you have to offer content that is extremely valuable. This puts the focus on you. There has to be real value to your page for them to want to do this. But you can increase your direct reach by instructing people.
On top of that, when people like your content, they can share it through stories and tags. Since people on Instagram have friends and their friends have friends, this can easily have an exponential effect. In fact, even if your page only has a hundred likes, but these are real people with real friends, don’t be surprised if one of your posts becomes viral. Social media enables you to have a large direct reach.
Reason #2: Social Media is Habitual
While there has been a softening of social media usage on a daily basis for some demographics, there is no doubt that for most people the use of social media is habitual.
In fact, a lot of people check their socials the first thing in the morning. Most of us go online and check notifications before we even get out of bed. It easily becomes a habit. This gives you a tremendous opportunity to get your work in front of many interested eyeballs.
Reason #3: Target Audiences Use Different Content Formats
The great thing about social media is that you’re not restricted to just one form of content. You’re not restricted to video, pictures, links, blog posts, text, or audio files. Instead, different platforms specialize in different formats. And when you create content for one platform, you can easily make different versions of it in different formats to share on other platforms.
For example, I create a video to post on TikTok. It compliments my feed and can be shared quickly. I could screenshot any images of the video to edit and post to Instagram or simply feature it through my story for quick outreach. I could then edit a longer version to post to YouTube and easily link it to Facebook and Twitter. Therefore, one piece of content has the ability to live several different lives on each platform.
You get access to the different audiences of those platforms by simply re-purposing or recycling the same content you made for one platform and sharing those other versions on different platforms. This increases your potential reach.
Reason #4: Most Social Media Platforms Can Be Segmented
If you use Instagram, you know that when you see a picture, it usually has many different tags. If you’ve been on Twitter, you’d see that a lot of the viral tweets also use hashtags.
Those tags are very valuable. When you use a tag with your content, you are essentially categorizing your work. People use hashtags to search for their desired content.
This is a very powerful tool. People who are looking for cute Chihuahua puppies will use certain hashtags that are different from those looking for political posts. If you have a very tightly defined audience, social media platforms’ built-in segmentation tools and features can definitely help you.
You probably already know that huge audiences that are not very targeted are essentially worthless. Thanks to the use of hashtags, you can get a smaller volume of people from many different platforms, but you can rest assured that these people are actually interested in whatever it is you are saying.
These tools go a long way in helping you build a very refined and well qualified audience. This, in turn, increases your likelihood of creating a connection.
Reason #5: Sharing Content On Most Platforms Can Be Automated
Thanks to tools like Hootsuite and SocialOomph, you don’t have to worry about manually going to Instagram or Facebook and searching for the desired image or spending hours setting up your scheduled posts. You can automate your posts to publish up to six months. This means that you can set up your account to post six to ten or more times every day, but you don’t have to babysit it because you have fed the content in.
If you put these tools into practice, and have the knowledge to navigate socials properly, as a creator, your audience is nearly guaranteed to expand. With a larger audience, your opportunities will flourish and become more frequent.
