You have little chance utilising social media with no budget and little feeling
10-15 years ago maybe, if you were one of those 'lucky' pioneers who saw what others couldn't and seized the day so to speak. If you shared your business with a personal video to Facebook and You tube and you could go viral with no spend at all, now however with edge rank (the algorithm Facebook uses to share your post to your friends and followers and how many) at an all time low, many new people to social media are wondering what all the fuss is about, and how social media marketing can have any positive effect for anyone's business.
May is a stunning Thai model and was quite in awe when I met her at Starbucks in Bangkok. She is about 160 cms tall but commanded the room when she walked in, like it was a movie set, it all went quiet. I noticed the admiring views from both sexes as she sat down.
"6 months ago I put a picture on my Facebook page I get 3-5000 likes , now I get less than 1000 do you know why?" she woke my reverie with the question.
3-5000 likes!! what!! I am lucky to get 100 likes on a post, I thought to myself, Alan don't forget what the Internet was made for glamour and sex, business followed later.
I asked her if she remembered seeing Mark Zuckerberg the owner of Facebook ringing the bell at Wall street to open Facebook for an IPO, she vaguely remembered seeing it, I said now they have shareholders and one thing shareholders don't like is free stuff. Now they made their paid stuff better at the cost of the free stuff, meaning; Your posts get seen less if you don't pay for it regardless of how lovely you are to behold.
I told her the way around this is to have a story, like how almost every performer on those dire reality talent shows on TV has some heartache to share, regardless of how obvious and tiring it my be to some, it's a winning formula and it's what makes the shows air year after year.
I taught her to create a blog and her idea was to be a mentor to young ladies coming into the industry and write about her experiences, especially the touch points of her industry, how important their weight is and the illnesses that can stem from their impossible waistlines, and the differences between glamour modelling and fashion modelling, and also how to keep your dignity when it all gets ugly sometimes.
Takeaway:
Being superficially beautiful is nice, but If your story touches the heart you can negate the lousy edge rank you get now, and if it starts to get shared that's how viral stuff happens. Keep it real, be yourself, be proud of what you wrote, you never know, even if it's not that well received now, a heartfelt story is evergreen and maybe 5 years later someone reads it and shares it and so on and so on. How beautiful is that?