Social Media is Meant to Be Social – A Chat With Nicole Holland

Nicole Holland is on a mission to help experts grow their audience, impact, and influence quickly and easily by leveraging podcast interviews.

As host of The Business Building Rockstars Show, she interviews successful entrepreneurs about what it really took for them to reach Rockstar status. She also hosts The Business Building Rockstar Summit, a free online event for service-based entrepreneurs.

After Nicole and I started following each other on Twitter recently, I received this:

Then a few days later, Nicole got my attention and impressed me again:

When I replied with the news about my new free e-course for wellness professionals, Nicole was kind enough to share it with her audience.

In a recent chat I asked Nicole about her approach to social media, and some of the results she’s seen. Aside from building up an impressive 8,500+ followers on Twitter in just over a year, she’s also made important connections.

Social media should be social

Nicole and I also had a lot of fun comparing our social media pet peeves, which above all were people who used automation to be everywhere, without making any time or effort to actually engage with people.

Think before you post

Business bloggers and wellness bloggers often tell me how excited they are to discover tools like Hootsuite, Buffer and CoSchedule that let them promote new blog posts instantly across multiple social media platforms.

“Hold on there,” I usually say, because blasting the same message at the same time is not usually the best strategy. First of all, there are character limit differences between what you can share on the sites (Twitter is the most restrictive as 140 characters). More importantly there are cultural differences, e.g., a message for your Facebook profile might not work for your LinkedIn company page.

Here’s what Nicole had to say about automating your social media engagement across multiple platforms:

Batch the tasks, make the time

There’s no doubt that authentic social media engagement takes time. That’s why Nicole says she is most impressed when highly successful, influential and busy people still take the time for personalized – not automated – interaction.

I’m a big fan of templates, structures and processes that help me remember important steps and be efficient and consistent with tasks in my business, such as this template for blog post publishing and promotion.

Nicole batches tasks AND messages. For example, she included several new followers in her original message to me, but there was still a beautifully personal touch in how she added a visual message.

Once a week, she and her assistant identify and thank her new followers. This is a manual process, so they can weed out any fake accounts or others she wouldn’t want to be associated with. Then, they further hone down the list to people Nicole might particularly want to connect with, whether for collaboration and networking, to be a potential guest on her podcast, or some other reason related to her business.

That’s where Nicole’s own template comes into play – a list of 20 or so conversation starters she’s compiled in a Google spreadsheet. They don’t just rotate them automatically, though. They review the person’s Twitter bio (also making every effort to find the person’s first name, if it’s not in their Twitter handle) so they can match their question with the person’s background, business, and interests.

Listen as Nicole distinguishes carefully between using automation for putting content out, but never automating or outsourcing her own engagement once people respond to her.

Thanks so much to Nicole for the wonderful chat. Check out her podcast and upcoming telesummit for strategies and motivation for your own business. And if you want your own personalized welcome message, follow her on Twitter!

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