Get Noticed by Companies on Social Media

Secure a Partnership Series

Hello everyone!

Many of you probably don’t know this, but my 9–5 job involves the creator economy. To give you an oversimplification of what I do, I work for a content monetization platform and part of my day to day involves scouting out creators that my company wants to partner with. It’s great because I get to interact with so many varied creators on a consistent basis, but it also forces me to be constantly evaluating how creators are presenting themselves in a business sense.

Being a creator myself, I know how valuable it could be to know how companies scout for talent, and what people like myself look for in a creator before reaching out. So I wanted to peel back the curtain a little bit and write about improving how you present yourself and interact with potential partners as a business.

In this section specifically, I want to share some tips on presentation and what I look for, so you guys can go from an empty inbox to getting emails from people like myself looking for a partnership. My hope is that with this series, I can help course-correct at least one person’s social media strategy, and help them get their first partnership or sponsored opportunity.

Easy to Contact

One of the most important things that I look for, regardless of platform, is do you have an email and how many hoops do I have to jump through in order to find it. With many companies, the standard procedure for communicating with potential partners or sponsorees is through email. Most of the people that are doing the recruiting don’t have company branded accounts, so if you’re relying on the official brand account for a company sliding into your DMs, you’ll be missing out on a vast majority of opportunities.

If you’re a creator that wants to build their content into a business or make money through sponsors and brand partnerships, you should have a contact email advertised on your socials. There are several ways that you can do this, so let me outline what the best set of options would be.

Methods

The “one and done” solution would be to incorporate a LinkTree or similar link in bio service in the bio of all of your socials, and have your email listed there. This is the go-to method for creators that utilize multiple platforms for their content and already have a busy bio on their profiles. If you don’t have a busy bio, you can also include your business email there in its own row of text, but if you go this route you should have it on all of your bios.

I will always check the link in bio service or website of a creator if they have it listed, and every platform nowadays has a place for a link in your bio, so there’s really no excuse not to have one in today’s creator economy.

There are also some platform-specific options for presenting a contact email, so if you only use one or two platforms there are other options that are just as effective. If you’re on YouTube, you can have a business inquiries email on your channel’s about page, Instagram has contact details that you can display on your profile that include options for email, phone, WhatsApp, and more, and Facebook has similar information that you can include in the about section of a Facebook page. The only asterisk I would put on any of these options is that for Instagram, the contact information is currently only visible on the mobile app, so if recruiters are using the desktop site they will not see that you have anything there.

I also want to note that as of recording this, TikTok and twitter do not have any specific “contact” section like Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube have, so putting an email in your bio or in a LinkTree type service is still the best option.

Contact Info Mistakes

The biggest mistake I see creators make with contact info is only having it on one account. More often than not, I find myself jumping through hoops just to find a way to contact a creator that I want to work with.

For example: I find them on TikTok, love their content and the engagement that they get, go to check for contact info aaaand nothing. No link in bio service, no email in their bio, and usually no other socials linked. In these scenarios, there is no way for me to professionally reach out to them on behalf of the company.

What I end up doing is searching their name, username, and any potentially identifying info that I could scrape up from their content into google to try and find them on another platform. That only sometimes works, and even then I still might not find contact info. Not all recruiters will go through this much trouble to contact a creator, and many will see this roadblock, cut their losses, and look for someone else.

When other socials are linked, and I see that the creator has their contact info listed elsewhere, the first thought I have is “Why wasn’t this other platform important enough to have this info, and why did I have to go searching for it?” I mention this because I also see it happen with creators where the “no info presented” account is their most popular, so leaving it out has the chance of costing them a lot of potential opportunities.

Make Yourself Searchable

This by no means applies to all companies, but many will search for creators in very specific genres for their partnerships. As an example, Nvidia likely wouldn’t be searching for woodworkers to partner with, they’d be looking for gamers, PC builders, people who’s work or content subject requires high-performance computers, etc.. If you’re one of those types of creators, you need to optimize your account to be found if someone is searching for that type of creator.

While much of this can boil down to hashtag usage on social posts, I do have some Instagram specific tips I can give you in order to appear in specific searches, as much of the prospecting that I do is on Instagram.

According to Instagram’s own about page, “the text you enter in the search bar is by far the most important signal for Search. We try to match what you type with relevant usernames, bios, captions, hashtags and places.” For our purposes, remember that Instagram searches pull from not just your username or the hashtags you use, but also information in your bio and the captions of your posts. Including keywords in your bio that are specific to your content genre is incredibly beneficial in the context of companies searching for creators to partner with.

Going back to the Nvidia example, just posting about building PCs isn’t enough to show up in a search for “PC building.” Incorporating “PC Builder,” “Making Custom Computers,” etc. into your bio is going to help your account populate in their search. When doing this, it’s a good idea to incorporate this language in the “name” section of your bio, as that will be the short text that appears below your account in a search and can help recruiters easily identify you as an account of interest. This will also appear if someone is searching within a follower or following list of an account, which is important to know because companies will also search for who is mutuals with or followed by large/reputable accounts in the genre, as well as creators that they have worked with in the past.

Post Consistency

When searching for creators to partner with, one of the checks that I do is if their posts are consistent. As I go through their last 10 posts, for example, is there roughly the same amount of engagement post to post, do video views tank for half of them, are they riding high from a viral post or is their audience retention good across their content, and are they posting on a fairly consistent basis? These are all questions that I ask myself as I go through an account, so they should be questions that you keep in mind as well.

When it comes to posting consistently, this could be every few days, once a week, a few times a month, etc., but the main thing I look for is is there consistency in the timing of your posts. I want to clarify here that consistent does not mean constant, and you shouldn’t be trying to put out as much content as humanly possible in the hopes of getting noticed. It’s more important that your content has enough quality to attract, connect with, and build your audience, and you should be forming a posting schedule around how long it takes for you to make content that lives up to that standard of quality.

Encourage Engagement

The final thing I want to talk about today is encouraging engagement within your content and audience. While companies would love to run promotions in front of as many eyes as possible, many will also take into account the quality of the eyes that they are presenting to. Translating this to social media terms: views and likes are not enough, you need to have a well-engaged audience. Many companies in the creator economy have long-discovered that a smaller creator with a high engagement rate will give them a better return on investment than a large creator with a low engagement rate.

With this in mind, you should have a secondary goal in your content to get your audience engaged with both yourself and each other. Run polls, have the audience choose topics you cover next, showcase audience responses in content, start discussions and be an active participant in them, like/pin/reply to comments, there’s a LOT that you can do to boost engagement with your audience no matter what platform you’re using. Just remember that engagement is a two way street, so you can only get them to engage so much if you’re not engaging back.

Conclusion

So let’s recap what we’ve gone over today:

1. Make it easy for people to find a business email on all socials, the less hoops the better.
2. Optimize your account(s) for your platform’s specific search engine, take advantage of its features.
3. Have consistency in your content’s performance and schedule, don’t confuse consistent for constant.
4. Encourage engagement with your audience, and make sure to engage back.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, and what I do when scouting for creators will never be what every recruiter does, but these tips are some of the best ways that you can get a recruiter like me to not only notice you, but also reach out about a potential partnership opportunity.

I hope that this has been able to provide some valuable insight for you guys. Like I said in the beginning, if I can help just one person make the changes they need to start getting noticed by companies then this will have been a success in my eyes. If I’ve been able to open up your eyes about anything or you were able to get reached out to because of this, let me know! I’d love to know that this had a positive impact. I’d also love to know if any other recruiters watched this and if my experiences/mindset to prospecting are similar to yours.

Otherwise, I hope everyone has a great day, night, evening, whatever your time zone says it is, and I’ll see y’all later.