How to Win at Social Media: A Creative’s Guide
From viral TikTok dances to comment section trolls, we know social media can feel like the Wild Wild West. Have no fear—Wheelhouse is here to help you CRUSH IT and put social media to work for your kickass creative business. Talk about #winning!
What Social Media Is—And Isn't
Creativity thrives on connections, and creative professionals often make a living on the basis of the community they build and interact with. Now more than ever before, those connections are discovered, developed, and sustained online. Maintaining a presence on social media can be a powerful tool for business—but only if it is approached thoughtfully and intentionally.
As a communications and social media professional with over a decade of experience in social media and public relations, I can personally attest to the power that a great social media presence carries -- and the pitfalls that can come. For creative professionals, a well-managed social media presence simply can’t be beat.
In this article, we’ll outline everything you need to know to put the power of social media to work for your creative business. Before all of that, however, it’s important to establish a baseline of what role social media plays.
What social media isn’t
Nothing can kill a great party faster than someone who only talks about themselves, and just about every social media network is much the same. Though it can be tempting, if you treat social as nothing more than a digital telephone pole to put your poster on, your effort will be less successful.
What social media is
Definitions for what counts as “social media” vary widely - and for good reason. The exact networks and functionality may always be shifting, but there is one thread that connects them all. In the end, there are people on both sides of the screen, with the network facilitating communication. As online communities, they’re also places to build relationships, share your work, and communicate. They are the digital version of a community, and need to be treated as such -- communities. Think about it this way: Facebook is a living room where you invite in your friends and family. LinkedIn is a conference networking event, where you may have informal conversations, but about business topics.
No matter what creative field you’re in, you’re already surrounded by content that tells the story of your business. Figuring out what to post just means identifying how you want to tell your own story—and sticking to it. Not-so-coincidentally, the posts that are the most successful on social media are the ones that have that undeniable ring of authenticity about not just your work, but who you are.
For example, check out these posts from Washington State creative professionals below. As these examples show, authentic posts can be short or long, personal or political. The form itself isn’t the most important thing, the sense of the post fitting who you are is.
Figuring Out What To Post
Building Your Brand
Your “brand” really is just the collection of feelings and ideas that you want someone to consistently have when they interact with you. Much like building a friendship over time, the more often someone encounters a similar experience with your brand, the more clearly they’ll understand and remember your work. If you’re not entirely sure what you want your brand to be, start by asking yourself these questions:
How do you describe your work?
What words describe the people you want to work with or who might purchase from you?
What adjectives would you hope someone uses when talking about your creative business? What adjectives should they not use?
What values are important to maintain in the work you’re doing?
Using the answers to these questions, you’ll be able to develop a brand ideal that can drive your decisions about social media -- as well as your business in whole. For example, leather workers Colladay Leather put their brand message this way:
“...we want our products to cause you to ponder beauty and inspire you in your own creative journey.”
This is effective for two reasons: it focuses on a feeling and experience rather than a specific product or service, and it speaks to the values behind the business.
Developing Your Voice
Once you understand what your brand’s about, you can create general guidelines for how you communicate for and about your business. It can be easy to get caught up in the culture of the social network you’re on and lose your brand voice. Guidelines will help ensure that across networks, your posts always sound like they were written by the same person, even if they’re not. Answer questions like:
How formal should you sound?
Do you want to use short, clipped language, or more descriptive word choices?
What kind of things would your brand never say?
What To Actually Post
So how does all of this translate to actual content for social media? Use your answers to the questions above to guide the choices you make about what to share, and how to talk about it.
A big part of sharing online isn’t just about sharing the big successes or big ideas - that only creates a 24/7 highlight reel that’s exhausting to see, and even more exhausting to create. Instead, look at the words and phrases and feelings of your brand, and then look at what happens in your everyday work that demonstrates those things.
The posts that will get the most engagement, and be the most successful for your business, are the posts that help the people out there get to know your brand better. It can be scary to think about letting others into your everyday life, but keep in mind that you’re not necessarily creating social media content for people exactly like yourself. The things that may seem very everyday and banal to you are exactly the things that are fascinating to others!
Picking Platforms
There’s currently somewhere around 50 “major” social networks. Some have proven they have staying power, while others are practically forgotten in moments. When you’re deciding where to represent yourself as a creative professional online, which networks you start with can help communicate your brand identity to the right people.
The medium is part of the message.
There are three things to keep in mind as you consider this choice:
You don’t have to be everywhere. With time and effort at a premium, it’s always better to start small and master one or two networks before you consider adding others. It’s better to do a few networks well than several less successfully.
The work you do should drive the platform(s) you pick. If you work in primarily visual mediums, then picking visual networks would be a more natural choice. If most of your work is written, networks that focus on text would be more successful.
Even if you’re not there, claim your name. Your brand name is your online identity, so it is worth protecting. Once you’ve settled on a username, sign up for accounts on most networks with it. That way, you won’t get into a situation where your username directs a visitor to a person not affiliated with your business.
Networks To Consider
Just like you’d never have a conversation with your mentor the same way you would a client, the communities that you are involved in online each have their own personality. This is why you’ll never want to cross-post the exact same content to different networks. Even if it’s minor edits, customize what you post to the community you’re in.
There are more details about network best practices in the calendar template also provided as a part of this guide.
Facebook: Ensure you’re using a Facebook Business page, rather than personal profile, for your creative business. You can also consider setting up a Facebook Group if you’ve got a strong community around your work.
Instagram: Combines many types of content into one network. The Instagram Feed does best with a new post each day that uses hashtags to call to a community. Instagram Stories are best filled with less-produced, more personable content, while Instagram Reels offer you the ability to share videos.
TikTok: Short-form, quick-cut videos with engaging music provide excellent discoverability and energy.
YouTube: Longer-form video content is best here, and it’s better to focus on higher quality content less often.
Pinterest: This is the network for aspirational, inspirational content that has some visual pop.
LinkedIn: Very business-focused, this network is a great place to make professional connections and participate in professional group communities.
Reddit: You can find a community on Reddit for just about everything. This is an excellent place to talk through and work out challenges, help others, and celebrate their successes.
Tech Tools
In social media, the tools that you choose to use can make your life easier. There are three areas where technology that works for you can help: planning, content, and metrics. While there are paid options that can help with all of these, starting out with free options to figure out what works best for you will lead to a better result.
Planning
The best content is both consistent and intentional, which benefits from structure and planning. It can also save you quite a bit of time to plan ahead, because you can batch-create part of your content.
There are two ways to approach your planning—with either a content focus or a network focus. A content focus means listing what things you want to post about, and then placing your posts about those topics on a calendar. A network focus means planning day-by-day what you’ll post on each network.
Generally a content focus puts what you’re communicating about your brand first and foremost, and allows you to vary what you post across whatever networks work best for you. This is what our free week-by-week social media template calendar starts with-—but figure out what works best for you. Google Sheets, a calendar, or even a set of post-it notes across the bottom of your monitor can all be used to plan what you’ll be posting each day based on the content you have available.
Organizing that content in some way is key. Our calendar can help here, too. Facebook and Instagram allow you to schedule your posts ahead of time.
If you decide to use a social media scheduler, there are several free and paid tools that can serve you well:
Content Creation
Most social media networks have content creation tools built in, but most social media pros use additional tools. No matter what tools you use, it’s helpful to have a folder in Google Drive, Dropbox, or another backed up storage solution to keep track of what you create.
A few to check out:
Snapseed for editing images (free)
Pixlr for creating collages and editing (free and paid)
Canva for creating both photos and videos with templates and drag-and-drop tools (free and paid)
Pixaloop for animating static images (free and paid)
Filmora (free and paid)
Metrics
The performance of your social media should help guide your strategy. Most networks will give business accounts access to some kind of metrics.
First and foremost, pick which metrics you want to focus on. Depending on your goals in social media—selling products, reaching a new audience, nurturing an existing community, or maintaining visibility—you may be looking at different metrics.
Sales, reach and impressions, engagements, or audience size could all indicate success. Review your metrics with those key performance indicators (KPI) in mind. If you have posts that consistently do well, try testing out more posts like those. If you have posts that consistently under-perform, try something different. Either way, your metrics can help guide what you plan.
Intentional Interaction
Now we know that on social media the content you put out is a major part of what leads to your success. But the interactions you have with others on the platform matter just as much. Changes to algorithms have also meant that the interactions and communities you build are essential. With that in mind, you should spend at least as much time interacting as you do creating content.
There are three primary elements to interaction: building a following, directly interacting, and handling conflict carefully.
Building A Following
No matter how good your content, without a following, it may be falling on deaf ears. Building a following on social media can be a slow process, but consistency will win in the end.
No matter what network you’re on, the formula is generally:
Set up your profiles completely.
Comment and interact as your business.
Talk about your social media off social media. Tell people you chat with in person (or over video chat) to find you on social, include the logos on your website and business cards, and discuss it with your friends.
Use discoverability tools available to you. On most networks that aren’t Facebook, those tools include hashtags. On Instagram, Reels are shown to accounts that don’t follow you. On LinkedIn, posting articles can help. For Facebook, your fans sharing your content usually serves as the best way for your content to be found.
Interacting With Your Community
Across just about every network, interacting with your community is the number one way to build a successful presence. You can do so in a variety of ways on each network, but it comes down to four basic steps:
Respond. When someone comments on your content, say thank you, reply to their question, or at least “like” it.
Follow. Follow-other creative businesses and individuals who are a part of your target audience. Don’t unfollow them days later, either -- stick around and be a part of their community.
Save and share. Rather than posting only the content you create, expand your feed with content from other creators as well. No matter how small your audience, use it to boost other’s voices
Comment. Reply to questions, comment on people’s posts, encourage others, offer advice when it’s asked for, and generally be a positive force in the community you’re a part of.
Handling Conflict
While it’s usually the number one fear of creators on social media, complaints present an excellent opportunity for you to change a negative to a positive. Research says that most social followers are willing to give your business the benefit of the doubt when you respond, and it helps show that you’re listening to your potential customers.
There’s a few major things to keep in mind:
Though it feels very personal, most complaints are about an unmet expectation of some kind, so just listening and empathizing goes a long way.
Know where your boundaries are. Consider—before it happens—what arguments or debates you’re not willing to have and what kind of community you are trying to build. Then follow those guidelines.
Respond only twice. If a conversation is going nowhere, stop responding after two exchanges. Anything more is not helpful.
You Got This!
Social media is one of those tools that can give back three times more than you put into it, as long as you treat it as the community it is. With a strong sense of your brand, the right tools for the work you want to do, and intentionality blended with authenticity on your side, your creative work can truly benefit from the social community.
