Tracy Hazzard explains what a personal or professional "platform" truly means — not merely social media follower counts but the active audience that will show up and take action for your events, purchases, or calls-to-action. She outlines how different media (podcasts, videocasts, website, email lists, social media) combine as parts of an owned platform and advises building and ultimately owning that platform rather than relying solely on others'.
Chapters
A lot of people turn to podcasting for building a platform and what a platform means. And you may have heard it from publishers or from the social media world, what a platform means is basically, who do you stand in front of? What stage are you on, how big is that stage, how broad is that stage, how big an audience in front of you is it? It wants to know. When someone asks you about your platform, they want to know how many followers do you have, how many fans will show up for you? And they really are asking that in terms of active, meaning ones who would show up if you had an event and sit in the seats. Think about it that way. So if I send out an email, how many are going to respond and buy my book? If I call for a virtual event, how many are going to show up on Zoom? And so really, we're looking at applying platform is defined by that. But most people say that their platform are the number of followers or friends they have on social media. That's actually a wrong implication of it. It's the wrong use of the term platform. But your platform is also all the ways you reach that. So your podcast is a part of that platform. Your video cast on YouTube might be a part of that platform. Your website is definitely a part of that platform. Your email lists, all of those things build up that platform. And of course, your social media following fits in that as well. But it's the vehicle by which your voice, what your message is, gets out to that active audience that's going to respond and take action. And that's really what a platform is. And basically, I used to joke about this on stage, but sometimes when we're starting out, the best we can do is a pair of platform heels. So a few inches of height is all we can do. And then maybe we jump on somebody else's stage and we're using somebody else's platform to get our reach out. And then we start to build our own community, our own stage, our own platform over time. And that's the ideal. The ideal is that you should own your platform. It should belong to you. That's why you should have your own website. That's why you should make sure your social media brands you and your company and, and really make sure that as you're building this platform, it's not only getting broader, it's getting taller as well. So you're getting higher up and you're commanding more attention and more conversion from that audience.
