52 Weeks of Plan, Do, Track - Week 25: Building Connection & Community While Strengthening Your Personal Brand on Social Media

Week 25 Focus – Building Connection & Community While Strengthening Your Personal Brand on Social Media
Focus Question: What does building connection and community mean for you? Why is this important?

Description
Connection and community are yearned for by many operating in the virtual and small business space. What are the ways you want to build stronger connection with others, and create more community? This week’s focus is on using social media as an avenue to build more connection and community.

As a virtual business it’s likely that many of your days are spent operating solo, bouncing in and out of virtual calls with people who might be hours, and time zones, away from you. Isolation is often seen as a downside to virtual work. Virtual and remote professionals may be more proactive in exploring various avenues for creating community and connection.

In building community consider these questions:

• Who is important to connect with?
• What topics or focus areas do I want to be in regular dialogue around?
• What can I contribute to others?
• Needs I have in order to do my work most effectively are…. I might be able to find them ____________.

In building connection within the virtual space, it may be a mix of:

• Push versus Pull: Here’s what I have to offer (PUSH) VS. Tell me what you need (PULL)
• Social Media vs. In-person Environments: Social media often gets a bad wrap for the time involved, yet it may be the communication flow for many virtual professionals. Different platforms can serve different purposes and historically have attracted different audiences. For example, consider LinkedIn’s focus on professional issues vs. Instagram’s visual story telling. We’ll be exploring tips for leveraging these two platforms in the coming weeks so stay tuned.
• Building time for meaningful connection: On a regular basis, consider having an offline conversation with people you are meeting. This might involve having a virtual coffee for 15 minutes or connecting around a shared interest to swap resource tips.
• Social media community involvement: What’s the purpose of joining different groups? What can you contribute? What time do you want to offer?

Six Questions

1. How much time do you want to dedicate to social media?
2. Which platforms do you want to be present on? (Consider your strengths, passions, clients etc)
3. What’s the message you want to share?
4. What do you want to track?
5. What does value add and engagement look like?
6. What is important to keep in mind?

Activity
Review or create your strategy around social media. What’s the purpose? What are you doing to do, WHEN?

What can you do to magnify your message? Consider how you can magnify and repurpose. What can you share different spins on the same item across platforms? For example, if you have written an article on something, could you pull out a couple of quotes to make it a tweet, or serve as a quote graphic?  Could that same article become the seeds of a presentation?
Review visibility tips.
Consider what your strengths are and what your key message is.

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Connection to the Workbook and Planner
The Monthly and Daily Trackers in the planner section of the Coaching Business Builder and PlanDoTrack can be used to track how much time you are spending on promotion, the different channels, as well as what impact you are getting.
Use the Content Planner to make a plan you can execute on.
Check out the Don’t Just Do it Once! Tool in the content section so you can think about magnifying your message.

Download a one-page copy of this week's 52 Weeks of Plan, Do and Track here.

Best wishes, 
Jennifer

Read and download the initial weeks of the 52 weeks of Plan, Do and Track

​Jennifer Britton - Potentials Realized
Check out the Weekly Planning Hack Facebook Live each Wednesday or Thursday here. Be sure to like our page to be updated each week!
Author of PlanDoTrack (2019), Effective Virtual Conversations (2017) and From One to Many: Best Practices for Team and Group Coaching (2013)