How to Leverage Digital Media to Become a Health & Wellness Influencer If you are a good writer, focus on Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn and if you are an instructor, focus on audiovisual platforms like YouTube, Instagram TV, Facebook and other platforms
By Mickey Mehta
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Being an influencer in the digital age is both, an exciting opportunity and responsibility. It's a very young field and almost anyone who has anything relevant and credible to share can build a community without the support from established media.
It is almost impossible for any 1 person to be an equally successful influencer in all platforms. If you are looking at making a career as Fitness or Wellness influencer, you should start with identifying your strengths and objectives.
If you are a good writer, focus on Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn. If you are an instructor, focus on audiovisual platforms like YouTube, Instagram TV, Facebook and other platforms.
YouTube can help you monetise your content without many efforts, but you would need either a team or self to create great quality content, professional editing and smart use of that content. Checkout BeerBiceps YouTube channel. It was started a few years back by a young boy from Wadala Mumbai. Most of the initial content was created by friends in their apartment context and now it has a strong following it's popular amongst young fitness enthusiasts (1.9 Million followers).
If you can write smartly, engage your audience and are good with photographs, Instagram could be your key to success. Kylie Jenner has about 130 million followers, she is also the world's youngest self-made billionaire. It is believed that she makes about 1 million US$ per post.
What do all these people have in common and what can you do to be in this category. Here are some suggestions. Try them on your social media profiles:
Be relevant in the current moment (Checkout Anand Mahindra's Twitter Time Line, it's a great example of being relevant, informative and engaging)
Have consistency and continuity. (If you are building a community around Yoga or Pilates or Bodybuilding, keep most of your content around that)
Engage, Engage & Engage. Make your posts as dialogues, a 2-way communication. Let it not be just a 1-way communication or preachy
Be regular - Maintain a frequency of updates. Be it once a day or once a week or twice a week. Avoid doing 5 posts in 1 day and then nothing for 1 month.
Quality over Quantity. Better to ad 1 high-quality video or picture versus 5 low-resolution videos or pictures.
Copy & Hashtags: Copy is your message to the reader. Avoid grammatical and structural errors. Hashtags allow new users to find you through keywords.
Don't spam: respect your audience, try avoiding flooding their timelines with tons of content. If for some reason you are going to add 10 videos/pictures of an event, gives a heads up and let the community know why so much content on a single day.
Be polite: Even though you may be an expert in your field and maybe older to your audience in the real world, treat your community with respect and affection. You get what you give.
Use content that is relevant to users and also for search engines. If you are a cardiac surgeon and writing about Heart Attack, while you can also use the word myocardial infarction or MI, most probably your users are not going to search Google with myocardial infarction as keyword. They may start with Heart Attack. If your copy/content/post does not include Heart Attack, that post will not appear for anyone who is filling the #HeartAttack keyword.
Focus on data, not intuition - All social media platforms give you tons of data on your community, including similar pages. Analyse the data to understand your audience and its demography. Ensure that your language and content is consistent with the community.
Be aware of trends - there have been many new video platform and social network. They seem to be a new craze. Because of the falling cost of smartphones and easy & economical access to high-speed bandwidth, there is a growing community of users who are creating and engaging users with short video content including platforms like Tik Tok. Study them to understand what are the new tools and options. You may or may not use these tools, but no reason why you shouldn't be aware of them.
Re-purpose your content - each platform has a different content format (video, audio, images - even in images it could be vertical or horizontal). Be smart with your content, re-purpose it based on the platform
To be an influencer online is no different from being an influencer in the real world as both require a certain amount of presence, honesty and a dedication to further the particular area of expertise while keeping the greater good of society in mind. Be true, be yourself.
