If you are unfamiliar with Gary Vaynerchuk he is an entrepreneur who goes deep into social media and branding. His mantra is all about pumping out quality content to build a brand on all social media platforms. Gary wrote a book called Crushing It! which I just finished reading that opens with a little bit of philosophy and stories of other entrepreneurs who maximized social media to build their business as well as tactical advice about how to use the current social platforms. If you run a business, want to run a business, or are involved in sales/marketing this book takes an interesting perspective on how to brand and market.
Much of the first part of the book is Gary’s backstory and his reflection on his first book that highlighted how he built his family’s online liquor store. Where you need to start is understanding what you care about or what you are playing for. Once that is clear then it is about ensuring you have the right mindset and are wanting to build up a brand or business. It is important you know what you are playing for and that you have the right mindset because you will almost certainly not see results immediately. It will take years potentially to see success if you see it at all.
Content is king when it comes to social and branding. There are more platforms than ever to distribute and curate content but before deciding which ones you will focus it is crucial that you are producing quality content. The content you produce must be valuable to your audience or else it doesn’t matter what tactics you use because ultimately you are wasting people’s time rather than bringing them value.
The last piece that Crushing It! dives into are the social platforms themselves and how to optimize your content and strategy around each one. Each platform is unique in who its primary user base is, how they curate or distribute content, and the frame of mind the consumer is in when they engage that platform. Twitter is vastly different than Snapchat which is different than Music.ly and the way people engage on these different platforms should dictate what content and in what format you produce for each one. Spoiler alert: Gary thinks you should use them all and create unique content for each one to maximize your impact. Now starting off with all of them will be overwhelming but creating native (original to that platform) content is very important to maximize your return on time.
Crushing It! is very motivational, yet also gives practical tactical advice for each platform. It is clear that he thinks about these platforms a lot and how they can and do impact people’s lives. After reading this you will likely look at Social Media in a whole new light about how you could be better utilizing these tools personally and professionally.
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