5 Ways To Be Authentic And Build Trust On Social Media

At the request of one of my Instagram followers, I am going to talk about the important of authenticity in social media. Whether you’re running a business or you are your business, being authentic is essential if you want to grow. This is going to be a jam-packed episode filled with lots of tips and tricks, so make sure you have your notebook handy.

KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST

• Authenticity is the quality of being real or true. It’s a bit of a buzz word in marketing, but for very good reason.
• Social media changed everything in marketing because consumers became even more powerful. They had bigger choices and the lines to communication between consumers and brands were opened. It allowed brands to build trust and gave consumers a voice.
• User generated content is great when it comes to authenticity because it allows you to show that other people think you’re great too.
• Social media was a blessing and a curse, as people could manipulate the content that they show people. Fake marketing, unclear advertisements, paid influencers, celebrity endorsements and clickbait all led to people stop trusting brands.
• If you can build trust over time with authenticity, your customers will be loyal for years to come.
• If you are your business it is easy to show your personality within your business. If you don’t want to show your face, you don’t have to.
• Listening and responding to your audience is one of the most important things you can do when it comes to authenticity. If it helps, put people in groups and categories so that you can respond to them easily.
• Being open and honest with your audience is really important when it comes to authenticity. We are all human and mistakes are okay.
• In order to relate to your audience, you need to know who they are and how you can relate to them.
• It’s okay to admit you were wrong and it’s important to say sorry.

THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…

It is so important to have someone who supports everything that you do. Whether it’s a friend, a family member or your partner – having that support is vital when it comes to success.

HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN'T MISS

• What Does Authenticity Mean? – 07:30
• #1 Show Your Personality – 15:28
• #2 Listen and Respond – 18:00
• #3 Be Transparent - 24:30
• #4 Relate to Your Audience - 28:40
• #5 Say Sorry - 34:07

Transcript below

Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the podcast. How the devil are you? So this is the first episode of recorded since we did the hundredth episode and it was such fun. I have to say it had so much nice feedback. So many of you messaged me and talked to me about what you thought of the episode and how different it was and how fun it was for you to get a bit of an insight around I guess my family and my home and my husband and yeah, I loved it.

I was really, really pleased at the feedback and also Paul and I did a live on Facebook on my Facebook page. I'm going to link it up in this show notes and that was so much fun and honestly the people who were online were like, please can you do this as a regular thing, which I don't want to give my husband too much of a big head. He'll be taking over the business before I know it. But it was so much fun and it was really great to chat about work and answer questions and just how it all works. And again, I've got some really nice feedback from people in terms of how it might work with them and their relationships and what support networks they have.

So just really quick on this, actually, I really want to encourage you to make sure you have that support network because honestly, if I didn't have the faith of my husbands that I can do this and this is going to work and we're going to be amazing, then I don't think I would have as much. I don't know whether it was motivation or determination or tenacity to go after it. I just think if you haven't got that person at home, and it might be because they don't understand it might be because it's such a different world to theirs.

It might be cause you haven't explained what the possibilities are. And I know in the early days Paul didn't get it. You know, he, he supported me, but he didn't get it and he couldn't see what I could see. And then I started getting him more involved. He started to come to some of the events that I was speaking at. He started listening to some of the podcasts I would listen to or some of my episodes. And honestly it was, it was a real changing point for him cause I then think he saw, actually, not that he ever thought I was playing at it, but actually, Oh man, you could make something out of this. And, and the more he could see the lovely feedback I was getting and the podcast episodes increasing in terms of downloads, that's what really helped encourage him, I guess to, to be more supportive about it.

But like I said, not everyone has that. And I think you need to have that. I think you need someone somewhere supporting you in what you do because this is a lonely place at the best of times. If you don't have that, it's incredibly lonely. So actually I wasn't turning this into a sales pitch for the Academy, but that's kind of one of the reasons why the Academy is so good and why I am part of other memberships. And I'm part of other mastermind groups because even though I have a supportive husbands and and supportive children, I still like to be able to talk to someone who might be in my shoes or might have done the thing that I'm trying to do or feel the way that I might feel. So for instance, this last week, my husband and my stepson have been skiing for the week and my daughter has been with her dad and I've been on my own the entire week.

Honestly, I felt like a bit of a hermit. I felt like I literally hid in the house the entire time. But when you work on your own, and I know obviously I have calls with my team and I have calls with, uh, you know, 90 day programme people and coaching calls. So I have all that when I do talk to people. But that's a very different energy from sitting down in your house and talking to your husband or your kids or, so honestly, it was so lonely this week and it was just, it was really sad. And I'm being really honest about that. But literally you'd wake up and you would perform when you're on the calls or whatever, and then you'd just be sat there and you'd make a meal for yourself and then you'd go to bed on your own. And, and it's a really lonely place.

And like I said, I think if you haven't got someone to support you in the business, you need that community. You need people around you who can go do you know what? You're doing an amazing job and you are brilliant and you can do this. And I, I am thinking of people who I know who will listen to the broadcast, who've reached out to me and I swear you can, I wish I could just name all these names right now, but I don't embarrass you. Um, but I know you listening to this, you know, I know you, I know you're going to be brilliant at this and sometimes we just need that bit of support around us and just that help in mindset to help us shift into believing in ourselves. Because if we don't believe in ourselves, then you could have the best everything in the world.

You could have the most perfect product, the most perfect marketing, and you could still fail when actually, and I've said this before, but when I look at the people who are super successful, when I look at the people I look up to, like Michael Hyatt and James Wedmore and Amy Porterfield, they just literally were the most tenacious people and they just kept going for it and going for it. And they had a good support network. Amy Porterfield, Amy Porterfield's first ever webinar, a main webinar was done with, um, um, well not in conjunction with, but with the support of Louis Hayes, who it well is now is massive, but you know, we're still very big then. So she had that support. So you need those supports too. And the people who are around you and your community they had growing with you. So I urge you, if it's not the Academy, that's fine, but I urge you to make sure you've got someone or some people or, and it's not just about having the support of your husband or your partner or your wife or your, you know, best friends.

It's about having people who can understand what you're going through too. Because like I said, my husband is so, so very supportive, but he doesn't get what it's like to be doing what I do all the time. He does understand a huge amount of it and I don't want to take that away from him. He's, you know, he's fantastic like that. However, he hasn't run his own business, so he might not know what it's like that your brain never actually turns off and you can't stop thinking of things. And some days you wake up and you're ready to kill it and other days you wake up and you're like, I just want to hide in bed today and I don't want to do it. And who did I think I was? And you know, who am I to try and do this for my audience? So I just, I just wanted to, I didn't mean to take up so much time talking about this, but honestly I was really touched by all the feedback and then by the honest feedback of some people that were saying, I don't have that.

And and how important that is. So anyway, I just thought I'd talk about that because I thought that was really important. But today what I'm going to talk about at the request of someone on Instagram, so it was actually PIP, social pip on Instagram who saw me post about an event I was speaking at last year and my title of my talk was the importance of authenticity and social media. And she said, Oh, that's a real shame. I'd love to have seen that talk. So I thought, I know, I'll share it with you today and I will go through what that talk was and tell you why it's important to be authentic on social media. So what do we mean by authenticity? Well, if you give it a Google and you have a look at the dictionary, it will say the quality of being real or true.

What Does Authenticity Mean?

And it feels like a bit of a GoTo buzzword, if I'm honest. Like in marketing, you hear a lot about being authentic and authenticity in marketing, but what does it actually mean to be authentic in your marketing and why to consumers crave it so much? Because they do. So if you're thinking, well, I don't want to be, not, no one wants to be not authentic, I hope not. But if you're thinking you'd want to put yourself out there and show that through our authenticity, it's not just the you that you're doing it, it's for your customers. So basically, you know, little bit of a, a kind of background, social media changed everything in, in marketing. Literally being in marketing for like 16 years now I might even be 17, I'd need to do the maths. Um, it did, it changed everything. What I started doing, what I did my degree in was not like we do today and I've had to move with the times because of that.

And that's great. I'm happy to do that. But basically social media changed for the consumers because suddenly the consumers became powerful. The consumers had the opportunity to see so many more options. You know, obviously really, really long ago it literally used to be you would go down your high street and you would buy whatever was off your high street. You didn't have the option, you couldn't do the comparisons. And then obviously the internet came along and Amazon prime in all its glory and people could have much more bigger choice. They could look at reviews. But what social media did for customers was it actually opened the lines of communication. So it was a two way conversation. So it put a face behind the brand and even the big brands. So even the likes of, you know, your Coca-Cola's and your McDonald's and your, it opened this communication that you never had before and it validated who these brands were.

It built trust and it gave the consumers a voice ne, I will happily admit that not all consumers should have a voice because sometimes people just want to say mean things for mean sake. And that's not really my bag. But obviously it gave them that voice. So if they had bad experience they could go on and tell the world. But brands, it also opened the line of communication. So no longer were they having to do really ridiculous research through um, questionnaires and online forums and focus groups. When I was at uni, we were made to do a focus group. So obviously being at university and a bit of a scaredy pants, I just got people I knew it was the hardest or most stupid thing I've ever done because I remember my brother in law who to this day is still a bit of a fool and hilarious, but he just wouldn't take it seriously.

And I was like, come on, I'm into doing this. Seriously. But anyway, it was brilliant. So yeah, they don't have to do any of that now. If they want to know about something, they just put it on social media and go, what do you think? All the feedback they get off social media is massive. So you can really kind of get to know who your customers are without having to do big research. Also, it creates a community. It creates a sense of belonging, which again, for big brands, I know lots of you listening aren't big brands, so don't, don't worry, I'm getting to to ask stuff. But for those bigger brands, it did help that community, but also for the smaller brands, but for small businesses, for solopreneurs because like I just said, I didn't intend this to match it. So wow. But it is lonely.

It is lonely being in business when you work for yourself on your own, in your office even, you know, I have a team but they're virtual and again it is different, you know, so, so it sense, it gives you that sense of community. It's nice that your customers reach out and they feel part of what you do. It's a great way to get testimonials and also use a generated content. So I know that there are people listening here that I've got products, I know that obviously you guys listened to the podcast, you post on Insta stories, which I love and I share every single one of them. User generated content is brilliant because your content is saying, Hey, look how good I am. However their continent content is, Hey look how good she is. And that holds a lot more weight to it than necessarily you just saying, I'm brilliant.

So, you know, that's another great thing, which we didn't have back then. However, it was a beautiful, lovely thing for a long time and it kind of went all a bit wrong because brands and influencers decided that they could, Mullin manipulates and see this is authenticity, want to get the word wrong and manipulate social media. So they started to see that this was an amazing tool for them. But then what they started to do was manipulate that and, and make it work even harder. So instead of just being so grateful for the lovely new things that social media brought to them, it actually then started to try and make it work even harder. So fake marketing came up, unclear ads, paid influences that weren't being clear about the fact that their main paid for it. Celebrity endorsements, click bait, fake news. All of these things led to consumers, not trusting brands.

And in the presentation, because it was an academic presentation I gave, it was mostly university lecturer type people. Um, and in fact, actually, can I just say just a little bit of a fangirl moment, uh, when I went to university, and I think I might have said some on the podcast, the book I learned from was Philip Kotler you like he's the, they call them like the father of marketing. American guy wrote a gazillion books on marketing. Like I said, if you're in university, you do marketing and learn from him. And it was his event and I spoke on the same stage as him. Unbelievable. Anyway, slightly digress there. So in the presentation I put like loads of examples of marketing week saying consumer trust in brands and social media fools, um, as uh, between marketing and noncommercial blurs trust and social media platforms is eroding, you know, customer trust and social media is declining.

So I gave loads of examples as to why, um, you know, this was actually really happening and then checked in some stats that was like, you know, 54% thing that companies don't operate with their customer's best interest in mind. And 78% of consumers trust each other more than they trust advertising. And like I said, it wasn't just the brands, it was the fake influences. You can buy followers on every single platform. And luckily this is being clamped down on, which is brilliant news. And secondly, if you're smart enough, you can, you can see what's fake. You can see whether if they've got like a know 10 20,000 followers and they're getting 50 likes on a post and two comments, they're not real followers or they might be real followers, but they're not the right followers because you would engage. So yeah, so they were able to do that.

They could show inflated popularity and they were doing unclear ads. And again, you can buy engagement. So, so all of this added to the fact of being authentic was so, so important because the more I can show you my true and honest self, which I hope I do, um, I won't show you with like makeup because quite frankly, no one needs to see that. And not even my husband like me. I'm definitely one of those people that seek makeup, uh, and need it anyway. Um, you know, they need that authenticity. They need to know that you are real because the more they can see that, the more that they can trust you and the more that they're likely to do business with you. And although we can take some time to build that trust when you've got it, as long as you don't mess it up, they're going to be your customers and fans for life.

So this isn't a quick win type thing for marketing. This is definitely a slower process, definitely a longterm burn. But when you get it, it's going to add up and it's going to pay dividends. Okay? So how can you actually be authentic on social media? So I'm going to give you five ways in which you can be authentic so that you can start to build that trust in your audience.

#1 Show Your Personality

So number one, show your personality. Now this is really easy to do as a person, as in if you're, you are your business because your personality is you. And luckily you don't need to train for it. You don't need to learn anything, you don't need to do anything. It's entirely you.

Now, there are people out there who run businesses in my world who I'm not keen on and I'm, my personality doesn't relate to their personality and they're not for me and it's not, I don't do it that way or I don't like it that way and that's absolutely fine.

There are people that don't like me and that's absolutely fine because what you're going to do is if you show your true personality, if you show the real person behind the brand behind the business, then you're going to attract like minded people and especially if you are selling a service where you're part of that service, you want to attract like minded people. If people don't like you and don't like what you do, you don't want to work with them. So being honest about who you are, and I don't get me wrong, you know, there is still an element of, there's a Teresa that's in my lines in what I was going to say in like joggers, but that's a lie. I have never worn joggers. I'm like, you know, relaxing or slightly drunk on a Friday night with too many gins that isn't the Theresa I'd show online obviously.

So obviously I'm tempering it a little bit, but what you see of me is absolutely, genuinely me....