Follower Boost – Connor Beaton
MUST HAVE RESOURCES
SUMMARY
On this episode with Connor Beaton of Man Talks, he shares some tips on how to get an online follower boost and build your tribe.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
The very first step in getting a follower boost online is understanding your authentic message, and what your gifts are.
People may have great products or business ideas, but they don’t know what their personal or brand message is.
Your name should be synonymous with the thing that you help people with.
Tips on getting a follower boost:
- Imagine that your audience is sitting in front of you and you are having a conversation with them.
- Understand why they should be listening to you.
- Understand what your gifts and specialties are.
- Be genuine and vulnerable.
Give your community a home so people can get together.
For people that are starting out, utilize Facebook video or Facebook live.
Also, YouTube is an excellent way to build your connection and get a follower boost.
Twitter can be a great place to get a follower boost but is a hard place to build an audience in an authentic way.
Finding unique ways to be personable is what’s going to build your community.
In this day and age, people want to connect with you before they pay you anything.
If you want to start taking action today:
- Get out of your comfort zone.
- Let go of the people that you’ve pedestalled.
TRANSCRIPTION: FOLLOWER BOOST – CONNOR BEATON
Kamala Chambers
In this training episode, we’re going to talk about growing your audience and your tribe.
Luis Congdon
Today’s guest is a professional at growing tribes and community and creating a follower boost. Connor Beaton of ManTalks joins us today on the Thriving Launch Podcast.
Kamala Chambers
Hey, welcome to the show. Are you ready to launch?
Connor Beaton
Absolutely.
Kamala Chambers
All right. We’re glad to have you here.
One thing that is so important in the online space is that we have an audience and we can build our tribe around us and create a follower boost. Otherwise, what do we have? We just have products sitting on the shelf and nobody interested.
What do you think is the first step in building your tribe, creating a follower boost, and make sure that you’re building it right?
Connor Beaton
It’s a great question, and I think it’s something that I’ve seen a lot of men and women entrepreneurs struggle with when they’re first starting out or even as they’re going along and they’re getting some traction.
The very first step for me is understanding your authentic message. I know the word “Authenticity” gets thrown around a lot. It seems to be a buzz word lately, but it is true. You can substitute authentic with genuine. You could even say understanding what your gift is. That’s another great way of putting it.
For most people, it’s the hardest first step. I see and hear it all the time where people are like “I just don’t know what I should be talking about,” or “I just don’t know how to present it.”
Creating A Follower Boost With Your Personal Message
Connor Beaton
Maybe they have this great product or this great business idea, but the block is they don’t know what their personal or brand message is. Without that, people don’t know why they should come in. They’ll see another product whether it’s a book, a course, maybe it’s a physical product like a backpack or whatever the case maybe.
If you don’t understand what your personal message is and your authentic message, people won’t want to come in because we live in a society where people want to connect with you.
Whether you are the brand or it’s the brand itself. But you’re still a voice. You’re still a messenger for that brand.
That is the biggest and most important step for most people is to sit down and say “What is my message around this product? Why do I want to do this? Why should people give a crap? Why should they even listen to me?”
If you’re going to start a podcast, write a book, or start a blog, why should people even listen? It’s a harsh question, but it’s an important question to ask because not enough people ask it.
In that question of “Why should people even listen? Why should people even give a crap?”, there will be some important information about your personal story narrative, what people are going to get out of it, and why they should tune into you.
Hot Tips To Create A Follower Boost
Kamala Chambers
Yeah. I look at it as if people aren’t saying, “Oh, that person is the go-to person for this specific thing to help you with this particular problem.” Then, you got some work to do to come back to the chime bar because I think your name should be synonymous with the thing that you help people with.
Kamala Chambers
I love the messaging part, and I appreciate that you didn’t skip over that because it’s so easy just to bypass that or think, “Well, if I just have an amazing product, everybody’s going to want it,” but that’s not usually the case.
I’d love to hear a little bit more from both of you and Luis because Luis is the tribe builder and follower boost man in our team. You guys are both amazing at growing an audience around you.
What are your hot tips on building a tribe and creating a follower boost?
Connor Beaton
There are some great pieces.
I specialize in building in-person tribe and creating a follower boost. The ManTalks podcast does very well. We had some great guests but where I try to focus in is when you’re building this online platform, I will take the perception or the mindset of what if these people were in real life? What if I was having a conversation with my audience in real life? They are sitting in front of me. They’re in my living room, and I’m having this conversation. How would that shift the way that I’m talking or what I’m talking about?
That’s first and foremost.
4 Steps To Get A Follower Boost
Connor Beaton
- Imagine that your audience or clients or customers are all sitting directly in front of you because sometimes it’s easy to remove ourselves and just create all this online content that doesn’t land on a personal and human level.
- Understand some of the reason why they should be listening to you.
Are they coming to you because you’re solving a very particular problem? Are they coming to you because they think that you’re attractive? Are they coming to you because they believe that you have the answers to some potential health problems, marriage problems, or whatever the case maybe?
Understand exactly why they’re coming to you.
- Understand what your gift is and what your specialty is.
Because once you know why they’re coming to you, you can tailor some of that stuff, the messaging and the content you’re creating specifically towards them.
It is the biggest piece that I’ll add in here that some people might not like. I cannot stress enough how important it is to be genuine and to be vulnerable online and to be vulnerable with the people that are interacting with you.
Connor Beaton
That doesn’t mean that you necessarily need to post a video of yourself crying when you’ve had a crappy day or photos of yourself breaking down or anything like that. There’s a point of potential overshare but to be vulnerable with your audience and to be able to say, “This is my story. This is how I came to where I am,” and to be able to say “You know what, sometimes, I don’t have all the answers but I’ll be able to figure it out.”
That vulnerability with people goes so far and will set you apart from every other person out there that’s trying to network market and push their product out and sell the idea that they have all the answers.
Being Vulnerable Creates A Follower Boost
Connor Beaton
Being vulnerable will draw people in and invite them into the conversation instead of forcing your message unto them.
Luis Congdon
That’s powerful. I love that piece about being authentic and vulnerable.
When Kamala and I were doing our work together, one of the first things that she pushed me into is being vulnerable. Within my first few months of working online and building a tribe online and creating a follower boost, I started to amass a lot of friends. I began to create a community and had a follower boost, but I didn’t know how to get vulnerable and authentic and let people know who I was.
One day, we drove to this park. Three – five years ago, at one point, I was homeless as an adult, and I slept in a park a few times. Then, Kamala asked me to take her to this park. We got there, and she said, “I want you to do a video talking about what it was like to sleep in this part here.” I said, “I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to talk about that part of my life.” She said that’s the part of your life that people should know that you were homeless as a child as well. You became homeless as an adult.
Now, you have a thriving community of people who want to get to know you. This could be a great way for you to connect with them. That was a very vulnerable share, but because of that share, I got an opportunity to open up some great dialogue and connection with people that had never before reached out to me and talked to me or people that had similar stories that said, “Wow. I saw your article. I’ve never shared this publicly, but this happened to me.”
Creating A Space For A Follower Boost
Luis Congdon
Being vulnerable is crucial, and I appreciate your tip about not needing to overshare. You want to have some discretion. If you’re going through a divorce or something like that, maybe you don’t want to get into the full details of what’s happening with that.
You can be vulnerable yet be discrete in some fashion. We don’t need to do the Hasselhoff video of him eating a burger, drunk, and sad about his divorce. We can find some classy, safe way to be still vulnerable and healthy.
The other piece you hinted out but I just want to bring it out even stronger is giving your community a place.
If you’re going to grow community and have a follower boost within your city and you’re hosting meet-ups, have a regular place and a regular time of month or year where people meet so that they can all congregate and get-together because a tribe needs to have a home. As a leader, you need to be someone that leads people to this space. Otherwise, they’re lost, and they don’t know how to connect with you and with each other.
For me, one of my favorite places to do that is Facebook. Creating a Facebook group is a fantastic place to say, “Hey guys, we can all come here. We can chat. We can comment. We can all exchange information.” After that, the even better level of that is taking it offline and hosting live in-person things so that we can connect on a deeper level. Give your community a home.
Being Respectful Creates A Follower Boost
Connor Beaton
Yeah. I was going to add one thing. I love all those points that you were talking about like the vulnerability and the David Hasselhoff thing. I like that analogy. I think the piece that I would just tie into that is the word respect.
Vulnerability should always be respectful. It should never come from a space of trying to overshare. They should never be disrespectful to the other people that were potentially involved in the situation, and it should never be disrespectful to your audience. I think that’s the biggest piece.
If you’re sharing things that you potentially would never want to hear and that person shares with you, that might be disrespectful to your listeners and your audience. That’s a critical piece to keep in mind.
Kamala Chambers
Great stuff here guys.
Another thing is we all have our spaces that we resonate with most whether it’s Twitter or Facebook groups, or Snapchat, or something like that but I’d love to hear a little bit more about where to find your tribe, and get a follower boost, and how to know what the right place is.
Connor Beaton
I think it goes back to understanding who your audience is and what they’re looking for.
We specialize in in-person events, so ManTalks has events in almost 12 cities around North America. It’s a much more challenging task to create community and follower boost in-person that is online because online, you can have viral videos and you can post things on Facebook and have it spread like wildfire but to build in-person communities sometimes is a little bit more challenging. Understanding where those people can be hard.
Place To Create A Follower Boost
Connor Beaton
If you want to create an in-person or online connection, I would say the best way to go about things right especially is Facebook. It’s utilizing Facebook video or Facebook live. There are much traffic and traction in there. You can get across a message to your audience. You can build it up on a public level very quickly. That would be my first place to go for people out there that are starting out.
Then, I would take a serious look at YouTube. Whether you have a podcast or you’re launching a book or a product or whatever the case maybe, take a solid look at YouTube and find ways to integrate that and build traction.
If you have a podcast, you can post it on Youtube and link it back. It’s a great way to build your connection.
For me, I’m less of a Twitter guy. I tried, but I just can’t get on board with it. I think Twitter in the next couple of years is going to struggle. A lot of social media analysts are talking about that. Gary V is talking about it constantly. It’s a hard place to build an audience in an authentic way.
Most of the time, if you think about your Twitter audience, somebody will add you on Twitter, and you add them back. Then, you get that annoying spam message. Your inbox messages on Twitter is just full of people being like, “Hey, check out this free thing.” The majority of people don’t look at that. It’s not spam. It’s just not personable.
Being Personable Creates A Follower Boost
Connor Beaton
The more that you can be personable with your audience in genuine ways and find unique ways to connect with them, no matter what your platform is, that’s what going to build your community, to bring people in, create a follower boost, and to spark conversation.
For me, I’m less of a Twitter guy. I tried, but I just can’t get on board with it. I think Twitter in the next couple of years is going to struggle. A lot of social media analysts are talking about that. Gary V is talking about it constantly. It’s a hard place to build an audience in an authentic way.
Most of the time, if you think about your Twitter audience, somebody will add you on Twitter, and you add them back. Then, you get that annoying spam message. Your inbox messages on Twitter is just full of people being like, “Hey, check out this free thing.” The majority of people don’t look at that. It’s not spam. It’s just not personable.
Luis Congdon
Yeah.
In reading and talking to people that worked for large organizations like Coca-Cola, Pepsi, General Motors, and all these big companies and some of the things that they’ve told to me is taking some of those big corporations in trying to make them feel like a person. So that when people go to this company’s fan page, they’ve got a story of a person. They’ve got a story of somebody that works there.
Now, in the day and age where people want connection and people before they go to your event before they engage with you online or offline or before they pay anything to be involved with you, they want to connect with you. It doesn’t matter if you’re running a team of several thousand people or it’s just you and your partner, or you and a couple of other people.
People want a personal connection.
Talking about where to find people, I completely agree with you that Twitter is a place where it’s tough to connect with people. One strategy I have with Twitter is I connect with them, and I drive them over to Facebook where I find less limit of characters and the fact that people can’t post a thousand times a minute, it all helps. So, I drive people back to Facebook and into other methods of connecting with people.
Being Consistent Creates A Follower Boost
Luis Congdon
Another thing to goes back to what you were saying at the very beginning as far as building a tribe and creating a follower boost is know what your message is. Know who you want to connect with or who you want to be out in the world, and the value that you’re delivering and what you’re bringing and then, consistently show up with that.
When I first started with this, there was nobody listening and it wouldn’t matter how loud I tried to yell, people would have trickled in either way. But, as long as I kept going out there and consistently sharing a message, being consistent and persistent, people started to show up.
I was very clear that I was somebody that was very interested in connection with others. I wanted to provide a space for my community and my tribe and getting a follower boost, and that’s what it did on a consistent basis. I said “Here I am. I’m providing a safe space. Check it out, guys. I’m over here if you want to be a part of it” and anytime anybody came into it, “Hey, it’s nice to meet you.” I made sure to connect personally.
This gets a little harder the bigger that we get, but nonetheless, we try to keep that as much as possible.
Getting A Follower Boost Without Traditional Marketing
Connor Beaton
There are some great insight and information in there for people who are starting out or even for people that have a solid foundation.
I just wanted to loop in on what you say. I used to work at Apple for a while, and I learned a lot there. I was building ManTalks while I was working at Apple.
I think for me, the one thing that Apple does right and the reason why such people will sometimes say “Oh, you drink the Kool-Aid like the Apple Kool-Aid.” Because they have a follower boost and the reason for that isn’t because they have the traditional marketing. They don’t use social media at all for marketing, and it’s just recently that they’re starting to enter into that conversation.
For the most part, the reason why they’ve been so successful over the last 15-20 years is that they’ve built the brand in a very personal way. They’re having a very personal conversation whether they are giving a keynote presentation about a new product or whether they’re doing a little bit of advertising in traditional senses.
It’s interesting because I was going through a negotiation a couple of years back and the guy across me that I was negotiating with said the classic, “It’s just business. It’s not personal.” I chuckled and looked back at them, and said, “It is just business, and it’s completely personal.”
If we can just keep in our brands that it’s just business and it’s all personal, then our messaging and our content, no matter what platform we’re using, will be very directed and intentional.
Step Out Of Your Comfort Zone To Get A Follower Boost
Kamala Chambers
This has been fantastic. I love hearing both perspectives and getting a real full spectrum of building the tribe and growing an audience.
Is there any last tip like take action today you’d recommend go out and do?
Connor Beaton
A couple of things I would say is get out of your comfort zone. That’s one of the biggest things I see a lot of people with the excuses, “Oh, I’m not good at public speaking,” “Oh, I’m not good at doing the video thing,” and, “Oh, I’m not good at writing.”
If you want to do what you want to do, put your product out there, and build an online presence, you got to get over those excuses. You have to move through that obstacle, and it takes practice.
Connor Beaton
It’s just like learning to ride a bicycle. You probably suck the first time that you got on a bike, and you’re probably not going to be amazing the first time that you go on Facebook live, and that’s okay.
Just because there are people watching, which there might not have been when you got on your bicycle the first time, doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t go for it anyways.
- Get out of your comfort zone.
- Let go of the people that you’ve pedestalled.
Find Your Message And Get A Follower Boost
Connor Beaton
What I mean by that is what I see a lot of people do is they start entering the space of “I’m going to build an online product. I’m going to have a follower boost. I’m going to build a personal brand.” They go out, and they study all of these people like Tony Robbins, Brendon Burchard, and Gabby Bernstein. They go out, and they study all of them, and they watch them and then, they just become followers who are trying to replicate what they have done.
What I tell most people is if you want to stand out, you need to turn that off a little bit. And so, it’s okay to study those people for 12-18 months and see what they have done and how they interact and then you almost need to take a break from it because you need to find your own message.
You need to let go of these self-help books and the constant news stream on your Facebook.
Find your own internal messaging and when you start putting products or services online, they’re going to stand out because they’re going to be your own. They’re not going to be a by-product or a replication of something that somebody else’s said.
Those are two biggest pieces that I think I would leave people with and I hope that serves them well to get a follower boost.
Kamala Chambers
They certainly do.
Thank you so much.
We’ve been here with Connor Beaton. You’ve been listening to The Thriving Launch podcast. Keep thriving everyone. You’ve got a lot to go out and implement to build your tribe and create a follower boost.
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