Giving People A Reason To Follow
Choosing a Niche
What makes people decide to follow you?
When you’re first starting out, most people are going to come across you accidently as your content appears in their feed.
That might be when they’re endlessly scrolling Instagram Reels, the TikTok FYP or their LinkedIn feed.
They might engage with the content, hit the like button, add a comment or even share it but how do you convert them to a follower?
You need to decide on a niche.
Why You Need A Niche
There are two main reasons that you need a niche.
The first reason. When somebody lands on your profile they’re going to see the stuff you’ve been posting. If it’s a load of random and unrelated topics then they’re probably not going to follow you because they don’t know what they’ll get by following you.
Yes you can post a funny meme and potentially get thousands or even millions of views but very few of them will go on to follow you.
When they land on your account they need to think “this content is for me”. That is why they will hit the follow button.
The second reason are the algorithms.
As you post, the platforms will begin to understand what topics you post about and start serving that content to the types of people who typically engage with that type of content.
And the people who usually engage with that type of content are way more likely to engage with your content and follow you.
By choosing a niche you are telling the platform who to serve your content to. If you don’t have a niche, the algorithim doesn’t know who to send it to.
It’s a classic spray and pray approach.
Choosing A Niche
Your niche can literally be anything.
But my advice would be to choose something that:
You know a lot about
You are passionate about or could easily talk about every single day
Adds value to the audience
I’m a recruiter by trade, so the niche I chose was careers. I started creating content that sought to give people job search advice and careers.
For me that ticks all three of the above and it’s also suitable for the platforms I decided to post on - LinkedIn, TikTok and Instagram.
I can write about it (LinkedIn), I can create videos about it (LinkedIn, TikTok & Instagram) and I can use images (LinkedIn, TikTok & Instagram).
The beauty of this particular niche is that it’s narrow enough to be highly targeted, but broad enough theres a million things to talk about and a lot of the stuff I talk about is highly relatable.
But also, it’s something a lot of people have an opinion on. Which encourages comments, which can help drive virality.
We’ll come to that in another post.
My LinkedIn Playbook
In "The LinkedIn Playbook: The No-Nonsense Guide To Building Your Personal Brand.", I’ll walk you through the exact steps I used to grow my LinkedIn following to over 50,000 and rack up more than 22 million post impressions in just 12 months. No gimmicks, just simple, proven strategies that actually work.
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