#106 - How Getting Real on Social Media Can Grow Your Business (+ Free Download)

Are You Sharing Your Authentic Self With Your Audience?

Followers online are fickle creatures, and they can sense when they are being sold inauthenticity. To maintain trust with your audience, you must learn to bring your most authentic self to everything you post on social media. People don’t like being kept at arm’s length and do not like being lied to. So is it possible to cultivate authenticity for your audience when sharing yourself so openly online might not be second nature to you? Absolutely!

Today we’re going to cultivate authenticity online and show you how to show your best self online and build connections with your audience!

How to Authentically Connect With Your Audience

To connect authentically with your audience, it helps to understand why they’re following (or would follow) you in the first place. Do they share common ground with your struggles, passions, or desires? Have you done the market research to determine which demographics gravitate to you, and what kinds of trials and tribulations are they going through that would make them find comfort, help, or entertainment in the services you provide?

Your Struggles Are Pure Gold

People crave being understood. It’s a natural part of being human. When someone discovers another person who relates to their struggles, worries, or problems, they feel less alone and forge connections. Connecting to your audience authentically requires you to be willing to share parts of yourself that are vulnerable. If you only convey your wins and never your mistakes or failures, that feels less authentic because audiences know that nobody is perfect, and no venture goes precisely according to plan. Sharing those bumps and swerves in your journey with your audience is intrinsically relatable because we’ve all been there! We’ve all struggled to move forward and experienced the grind of failure after failure toward a solution that works. Sharing those stories with your audience creates opportunities for them to understand more about your story and empathize with your journey, conveying a stronger sense of authenticity and integrity.

Sharing is Caring and It Equals Big Money

Understanding your own story and sharing it with others is essential to connecting with your audience. Take the time to sit down and map out what got you into your business in the first place and why you decided to pursue it. Get personal: have you always wanted to pursue your current business, or did you have other aspirations? What skills and experiences have you gone through to grow your existing business, and where do you hope to see it grow in five years? Were there people in your life who encouraged or challenged you in a way that steered you onto your current career path? These stories fascinate your audience, and sharing them will help build a greater understanding of who you are and why people should root for you!

How to Get Past the Discomfort of Authenticity

Not everyone is naturally comfortable sharing with strangers. Not everyone is comfortable speaking in public! That’s okay because you can learn how to improve your confidence in time and practice. Still, it does take serious practice, and you may need to work at it until you get to a place where you feel great about being open and vulnerable in front of your audience.

Actors and public speakers, for example, take classes and spend a lot of time practicing and preparing to be confident speaking in front of crowds or a camera, so don’t feel overwhelmed if you’re not there yet! It takes time, and that’s okay.

Preparedness is the Key to Skipping Discomfort

A lot of the discomfort from speaking on camera comes from lack of preparation, so the easiest way to curb that feeling is to take some time to ruin a few takes on purpose and let yourself practice talking about yourself. You’d be surprised how many seemingly improvised short videos where people are just riffing to the camera are the third, fifth, or twelfth take! As you practice, you’ll naturally edit yourself, and your thoughts will become more concise and stay ready at the forefront of your mind when you need them.

Using Video to Build Close Connections With Your Audience

Speaking directly to your audience with a video is the quickest way to share the real you online. The less scripted or rehearsed, the more honest you sound, which makes you appear more trustworthy.

If you’re not used to public speaking or recording and posting videos of yourself, now’s the time to start! The beauty of modern technology means that you can set up a mock video post whenever you want! Set up your phone and record a few minutes of yourself talking about who you are and what your company does, then watch it back and look at how you come across on camera and where your mind goes when you’re speaking off the cuff.

Video Practice is Nice, But Getting it Done is More Important

It takes practice to get good at treating a camera lens like the person listening to you on the other end of the internet, but you can erase those practice videos, and no one has to see them, so don’t worry about messing up! You’ll naturally find yourself refining how you speak about yourself and your company naturally the more you practice, which will make conversations and video posts easier the more you work at it. Eventually, you’ll be such a strong presence that you’ll be ready to try Instagram Live and talk in real-time to your audience in the chat!

So much of the way we connect gets lost in translation when we text or email. Building your confidence enough to post videos of yourself sharing your message on social media is the best way to convey who you are, what you’re about, and why people should listen to what you have to say!

The Benefits of Authenticity (Your Business will Grow)

There are so many natural upsides to being your authentic self online. Most importantly, it’s easier to keep a consistent brand if your brand is YOU! If you’re trying to be someone else or an inauthentic version of you that you think your audience wants, that’s not sustainable.

When your audience feels like they understand you and where you’re coming from, they are much more willing to go to bat for you and root for your success than if they were communicating with your brand. On social media, effective small business owners build the core integrity of their brand around their authentic drive, character, and passion for what they do, and audiences can feel that and relate to those highs and lows.

Your Vunerablity is the Key to Your Success

People want to support the underdog, the tenacious inventor, the passionate hobbyist, the risk-takers, the entertainers, the movers, and shakers! They don’t care about brands on their own; there will always be another brand to come along and do what you do in a slightly different way, but there will forever and always only be ONE of you. That makes you unique and someone worth rooting for!

Free Getting the Most of Social Media Download

By the way, I’ve got a great free download you can use to make the most of social media you can grab here! And I have a ton of other social media workbooks, checklists, templates and freebies that will help you grow your social media by leaps and bounds.

My Challenge For You

Part 1: Record Your First Authetic Video

Schedule 30 minutes to record your first authentic video
Set up your phone and record yourself speaking to the camera as if you were communicating with a new client
Tell them about yourself and your business.
Watch the video playback and try not to pay too much attention to ...