The Introvert’s Corner
3 Ways to Use Empathy For Building Your Online Presence
Empathy can be a cheat code if you use it correctly
What makes an online presence impactful?
- Is it follower count?
- Is it the topics someone speaks on?
- Is it the quality of the content produced?
Personally, I don’t believe it’s any of those things…
Don’t get me wrong, they absolutely sway opinions,
But what really matters is who HAS the opinion.
You know,
The audience.
Without them, effort and hard work is meaningless,
Making empathy, the skill to rule them ALL.
It’s literally the ability to understand other people’s feelings.
Using Empathy to Read Minds
1. Niching down.
- Finding a niche means focusing on a certain topic.
- Within each topic, there’s an audience that enjoys it.
- They like certain aspects of the niche,
- But might also dislike some aspects of a niche.
- This creates a divide,
- And gives you potential for an unexplored niche.
- Leverage empathy to understand what qualities that audience desires.
- In my niche, “personal branding,” people like tips and advice,
- However, I noticed that much of the advice was tailored to extroversion.
- I niched down to “personal branding for introverts.”
2. Sharing advice.
- Everyone has an ego, whether they admit it or not.
- Acknowledge that, and you’ll go far.
- Part of building an online presence is providing value.
- Sometimes, we get impatient and want to just *bleh* out the advice.
- If you do it in a way that comes off as what I call “top-down,”
- You run the risk of unknowingly upsetting people,
- Opt to remain eye-level.
- If you were receiving the advice, how would you want it?
- A step further, how could it be said to get you excited about it?
- Take a beat to articulate it in a way that can actually be absorbed.
3. Captions and headlines.
- This one is fun, but can be a little…
- manipulative *laughs maniacally* muhahahah
- Use empathy and caress the ego of your reader.
- Don’t say, “You suck, and that’s why you can’t grow.”
- Say, “You are good enough, but these things prevent growth.”
- Blame the habit, not the person.
- This requires you to understand your audience.
- Pay attention to who engages with you,
- Why they engage with you,
- How they engage with others… EVERYTHING.
- Form a hypothesis and test it.
- Once you find styles your audience likes, you have a key to consistency.