Nicky Saunders has tips and tricks to scale your digital presence.
Saunders, a content strategist and CEO of Deeper Than The Brand since 2018, understands firsthand what it takes to build online. Called “the voice of content branding,” her platform offers helpful content creation suggestions that can be beneficial to businesses and content creators. Of late, she has heavily geared content around the various ways technology can be a resource, such as using an iPhone to edit live photos or artificial intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT or Opus Clip. The latter allows users to repurpose long videos into shorter clips with one click, per its website.
Thanks to her expertise, Saunders has built an online following of 12,000 subscribers via YouTube while impressing on Instagram with 187,000 followers at the time of this writing.
Furthermore, she has duplicated her success to benefit others, including Eric Thomas — who wears hats including world-renowned speaker, pastor, and author— by helping him with his social media pages. While featured on the “Black Tech Green Money” podcast with Will Lucas, she explains taking over Thomas’ Instagram account, @etthehiphoppreacher, while it was at 300,000 followers. It has grown exponentially since then to 2.2 million followers. She also helped grow his YouTube presence, which sits at 1.49 million subscribers and Facebook, which has reached 1.9 million followers from 200,000 followers.
Sharing the formula for success while working with Thomas, Saunders explained, “I concentrated more on what people wanted than necessarily what the algorithm wanted or even what he wanted. So if people are looking for bars from him, I’m going to do that. The easiest way that we made from where he was to the first million was I figured out the best quotes, the best bars that everybody was loving, and I posted those things. So anytime that he had a speech, anytime he had an event, I would post exactly what the audience wanted… if you cater to what your audience wants, they’re going to share it.”
She added, “So I’m going to always do different clips based off what people said. If there is a sports event that just happened, then you’re going to see some images of that with E’s voice on it that makes it more relevant. So figuring out the trends, whether there’s a sports event, whether there’s something political, whatever people are talking about that can be related to what he’s saying, I put it together. So between that and trends, it grows, but I concentrated more on the content, the body of that instead of just the tips and tricks of the platforms.”
Prioritize Consistency To Grow Your Audience
While on the “Black Tech Green Money” podcast, Saunders also shares some additional tips that can help others win in the social media landscape. Simply put, consistency is among her key points and will be rewarded by the algorithm and simultaneously win over the loyalty of users who are witnessing the journey.
“Any platform respects consistency. And once they start seeing you post more and more, they’re like, ‘hold on, lemme push you out because you’re here every single day now. Hello, I kind of like you now. Before I wasn’t taking you serious, but now I kind like you, so let me post it too,'” she explained.
Furthermore, Saunders explains that as time goes on users can examine their content performance to understand how they can improve.
“Your day one to your day 25 is going to be completely different. So you’re going to now start having data of what works and what doesn’t,” she said. “And you’re going, hopefully, you’re going to change up some of your content based off ‘this got seven views, this one got 5,000 views’…Between the platform taking you serious and then you figuring out exactly what your audience and the platform wants. On top of that, you’re building a community because people love journeys. They’re either A, trying to champion you, or B, trying to see if you’re going to finish or not. But they’re going to watch you.”
Quality Content
Beyond consistency the next greatest asset to audience growth will be how content is displayed and its quality. Saunders suggests experimenting with different forms of content beyond video such as articles, long threads, or photos — or even consider a change of scenery.
She also stressed quality as a factor although it is not always a deal-breaker, referring to creators who have found success through their stripped-down offerings. This includes Keith Lee who is known for his food reviews shared on TikTok — with 16.6 million followers and 771.8 million likes — which are often captured from his car simply using his cellphone.
@keith_lee125 Flavor Hive taste test 💕 would you try it ? 💕 #foodcritic @flavorhivetruck
“Your audience is going to care more about the presence than the quality. Now, the quality does matter when you’re trying to be taken a little bit more serious,” Saunders mentioned. “I will still grab my phone and do a green screen because I connect with the people more. You don’t want to be too highly produced because then you lose a connection with the community. But you don’t want to just do lower quality all the time because then it’s like, you haven’t really grown.”
She added, “If we look at Keith Lee, Keith Lee will forever do the phone videos, but he’s taken a little bit serious because other content that he’s collabed with has the highly produced content. He’s doing series, he’s doing shows, he’s doing commercials and all these different things. So there’s still a level of high production, but still, let me keep to the core of how I grew my audience to over millions of followers. So Keith Lee is a perfect example of how production isn’t necessarily needed. It’s great for balance, but it’s not needed to really have the brand that you want.”
Watch the full episode of our “Black Tech Green Money” podcast here.
