Going up The Social Media Ladder
To gain a social media following, cutting corners to get to the top is just not an option, and Lavina Israni knows all about this. Lavina is the brains behind Esrani.com, a website created to review new restaurants, places and activities around Dubai.
Lavina’s inspiration came from noticing a gap in the market for bloggers and decided to put her time and creativity into something productive. As a couple of months went by, Lavina started getting recognised by bloggers and brands, and her social media influence grew stronger.
Lavina sat down with Share This to give her insight on what it takes to build a social media following.
Meeting blogger, Lavina Israni
Collaborations
Getting noticed is the first step to anyone looking to bring attention to their blog and their selves as a social media influencer.
Lavina shares the main trick to getting more followers and becoming noticed in the social media world: “I kept collaborating with whoever I could. I would message brands and asked if they wanted to collaborate, making videos for them to post on my Instagram page”.
“The brand would see that video and re-post it, so all their followers would become my followers because they would see my video.”
“Content is King” says Lavina
The quality of content is something that will make a new blogger and influencer stand out from the crowd. Lavina sets the record straight on what happens when a writer has poor content: “Clients only care about the content you produce. There are a lot of amazing food bloggers with great pictures but they have no personality. They don’t stand out.”
Content does not just stop at writing, because as the saying goes, pictures speak a thousand words.
Lavina confirms this when she explains that there have been times where she has been unsatisfied with the photographs she’s taken at events, even admitting to having a ‘test account’: “Everything that goes on my Instagram page gets tested on this fake account and if it looks good, then it goes on online the next day!”
"Someone once told me you need to be on platforms that are the highest used in this region"
Be active on more than one platform
Having just one social media account is limiting the chance of reaching different demographics and audiences.
“Someone once told me you need to be on platforms that are the highest used in this region. People here are huge on Instagram and Facebook. Different age groups will like different platforms. If I’m on all those platforms, I’m reaching new audiences”, explains Lavina, who makes use of Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat to interact with her followers.
Don’t take hate personally
Hate can be discouraging, especially when first starting out and taking it to heart is sure to knock down your confidence.
Lavina vividly remembers her own experiences with this, sharing times when people had come up to the blogger and told her they hated her: “I didn’t want it to get to my head, because if one person hates me, there’s 99 people who like what I do”.
Eventually, Lavina learnt not to take it personally: “I just laughed it off, I don’t let it bother me because hate will be there all the time”.
Be different
Now that the market for blogging is becoming competitive, standing out and being unique with content is key to gaining the attention of potential new followers. Lavina becomes upfront and honest about what she has noticed in the blogging community:
“There is a low demand for bloggers because a lot of them are doing the same thing. The advice I would give to someone is, if you have something different, something that doesn’t exist, only then start a blog.”
