The social media academy #1 | Intro and Six Pillars Framework

Hi there - First and foremost thanks for opening up my newsletter and a big welcome to the very first edition of the social media academy.

With this newsletter I want to help you to cut through the noise. There is a lot of fluff and a fair amount of BS with regard to social media management. The monthly social media academy newsletter will tell you what you need to know and will provide you with a number of useful and actionable tips to optimize your social media presence.

Who is this newsletter for?

The social media academy is meant for entrepreneurs, professional service providers and personal brands. If a knowledge-component is central to your offering, this is for you. If you are marketing within a B2B context, this is for you. If you are selling physical products within a pure B2C market, this is not for you.

What is this newsletter about?

On a monthly basis I will share actionable, down to earth, straightforward content that should help you and your business to get the most out of social media. In most of the cases this content will touch upon the subjects of social media for: employer branding, personal branding, company branding, and thought leadership. No fluff, no big words, no hollow concepts, and no overpriced mumbo jumbo. But actual things you can use.

Who am I and why should you listen to me?

That's a really good question (definitely the last part ??). My name is Ludwig Dumont and I founded Willow in 2018 with quite a deep understanding of the problems B2B businesses and entrepreneurs face when trying to reach their customers, prospective employees, or a wider set of stakeholders.

For almost 4 years now, my team and I have been working exclusively with professional service providers and entrepreneurs. We help with their social media presence, making it simple to understand, and easy to excel at.

The six pillars to social media success

Now we got this out of the way, I'd like to tell you a bit more about the framework that we use for social media. The six pillars is our own methodology that we use to help our customers with their social media, and it lays out how to create a winning strategy from scratch. If you want to succeed at social, this is what you should know. It's a need to have, and not a nice to have. I'll end this first edition with a short intro of the six pillars.

1. Consistency: To be successful on social media you need to be consistent. It's very important that you're able to keep up a certain posting rhythm. Every single week of every single month of every single year. You also should be consistent in terms of your tone of voice. Being inconsistent is the worst!
2. Value: Give first and ask later. Offer value on social media by sharing your expertise, insights and advice. It will help you to create trust and will build credibility around you and your brand.
3. Content mix: Refrain from sharing the same kind of content over and over. A performing social media presence has a good variation and has different content categories. Combine educational content, with promotional content and spice it up with some employer branding related content. Don't put one content category on repeat all the time.
4. Engage: This is all about the social in social media. Being successful on social media requires you to interact and engage with other people and other content. Just watching never made anyone into a success. You need to act and react.
5. Employees: If you have co-workers or employees, it makes a lot of sense to include them in your social media plans. Your employees are (hopefully) your best ambassadors. They know you, your company and your audience. Help them to help you.
6. Personal: In the end it's all about the people. You don't do business with a logo, but you do business with a person. You don't work for a brand, you work for a person. Being personal on social media will help you to stand out and will highlight your authenticity.

If you want to dive deeper into the six pillars, then I recommend you to read or download our book here. Over 2000 business owners, entrepreneurs and B2B focused professionals are using the framework for their socials. I'm pretty sure you'll like it too.

Next time

In the next edition of this newsletter I will take you on a trip into the wonderful world of personal branding and I might be using Alfred Hitchcock as a case study. For now, that's all folks.

Feel free to let me know what you think and if I can help you with anything. I love to pay it forward. So don't hesitate to reach out.

Take care now, Ludwig