Speakers – Are You Building Your Social Media Fan Base?

Many speakers focus endlessly on giving a great presentation, and spend their promotional efforts focused on the people who book them, but are you using social media to grow your fan base?

When you give a presentation your audience is excited, motivated and thinks that you are awesome.  This is the prime time to reach out and invite them to connect with you on social media sites.

Hopefully you have a long career in front of you, so building connections with advocates can be valuable in your current situation and beyond.

Why Should You Connect With Your Audience On Social Media?

The obvious reason is that many speakers have follow-on consulting or coaching products that they’d like to sell.  While not every event is appropriate for selling from the stage, connecting with your audience through social media means that you can share your products with them after the event.

In addition, many of my speaking engagements come from people who saw me speak as an audience member.  By connecting with the audience through social media I have the opportunity to build a relationship with them and stay top of mind for referrals.

How To Build Your Social Media Connections Through Your Presentation

Here are some ideas for how you can start to build your social media connections throughout your presentation.

  1. Include links to social media sites in your bio and encourage people to connect.  This will result in some people connecting with you before the conference.  Make sure that your bio (which most events will share online before the event) includes links with an invitation to connect.  Not everyone plays by the same rules for building connections – let them know that you are an open networker!
  2. Open your presentation with your social network accounts.  My first slide includes my social media sites so people can connect with me from their phones before I even open my mouth.
  3. Put your Twitter ID on every slide.  If you have a great presentation, people will want to Tweet about it.  They may forget your user name if it is only on the first slide, so include it on the last as well.
  4. Add your social networks to your name card and name tag.  Many conferences still don’t share the social media profiles of their speakers.  I hand write mine onto my badge or name card.  This tells people how to reference me if they want to Tweet.
  5. Encourage connections on your last slide.  When I close my presentation I invite people to join me on LinkedIn.  It is the most professional business social network, so most people are very comfortable with that connection.
  6. Provide an incentive.  I often tell audiences that I will post my presentation or some of the resources on my blog – this drives them to my website where they can get more information about me and my business, and potentially connect with me online.

These are just a few tips….  How have you used your speaking engagements to drive more social media connections?

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