Episode Summary
We all use social networks, and each of them serves different needs. As a result, they have become a very common form of communication and a space for expressing opinions and finding work. And most of all, they can serve as a platform to create content and build a personal brand.
But it’s hard to create content consistently while you have a job. As a result, some publish exclusively work-related content, others publish only entertaining content or share their thoughts, and a few manage to create a mix of it all.
Fortunately, there are companies that can help you create content and, therefore, a personal brand. Becca Nash, Sam Hembree, and Brooklin Nash started Beam Content for this reason — to create better B2B content for their clients and a better experience for their freelancers.
In this episode of Rep Your Brand, our host Nick Bennett welcomes Brooklin Nash, the co-founder of Beam Content. Nick and Brooklin discuss the importance of creating content and balancing personal brands while working. They get into why it is critical to be transparent while creating content and talk about the different types of content you can create.
Guest Profile
- Name: Brooklin Nash
- What he does: Brooklin is the co-founder of Beam Content.
- Company: Beam Content
- Noteworthy: Throughout his career, Brooklin has worked for several organizations in a content marketing capacity while also being self-employed. After working in-house and as freelancers, Brooklin, Becca Nash, and Sam Hembree joined forces and created Beam Content, where Brooklin focuses on helping clients and freelancers.
Key Insights
- Create content while doing your job. If you want to create content on a social platform while you are employed, you will face difficulties, but it is not impossible. According to Brooklin, you can share three types of content on social media to build your personal brand. There are people who use their personal brand to sell courses and stuff, others who just share their comments on various topics, and the third group consists of those who share what they are working on. "All of my content has just been screenshots of the docs I'm on; emails I'm sending; Slack messages that I'm responding to; Loom videos that I'm recording for our team; or quotes from people I'm talking to. And there's not a whole lot of time or even extra thought that goes into that. It's just, 'Hey, this is what I'm working on today.' I thought it was interesting, and maybe other people will find it interesting."
- It's not all about reach or algorithms. Most people who publish content care about algorithms and reach. Algorithms are used on social media to sort the content in the user's feed — social networks use them to prioritize which content the user sees first in their feed. And reach is the total number of people who see your content. Brooklin doesn't think about reach or the algorithm but rather about what kind of content might attract people. "I posted something about ClickUp the other day, and I figured I could do just a text post that talks about why we switched to ClickUp from Asana. Instead, I added my changeover to ClickUp from Asana as an Asana to-do list, and I took a screenshot of that. I think it's a really interesting conversation — talking about different project management tools — but I think it's because of that image that it had a lot more engagement than if I just did a text post, for example."
- Transparency is very important in content creation. You must have often heard that the content you create should have some value. And each of us has a different view on how we can add value. For Brooklin, the value lies in transparency. "If I send an email to a potential client, I'll screenshot that and share it. Not like, 'Here's the best practice for your sales conversation as a freelancer.' That’s one perspective, but more like, 'Here's what is working for me.' And folks pull those as templates."
Episode Highlights
Balancing a Personal Brand With a Full-Time Job
“My two full-time roles in tech coincided with building a social presence. So I got into it by accident. My first role was at this tiny little sales tech startup; the head of growth left, and I was head of content, so I just took it upon myself to get more active on LinkedIn and meet sales people where they were — and we all know they’re on LinkedIn. So I just started posting and interacting more and that just coincided with part of my job as we curated content for this startup.
And then, when I moved to Outreach, it expanded from there. I was head of community content, so maybe not half, but at least a third of my job was reaching out to salespeople on the platform and engaging with sales content on LinkedIn and Twitter because we were sourcing our content from contributors and from our community rather than writing it up on our own. So it really worked out for me in those two gigs, and it was a lot of fun.”
Personal Branding at Beam Content
“We have two parts. We’re doing long-form content, case studies, articles, ebooks, and things like that. But the second part – which is a specialty of Sam, our co-founder – is pulling that through to social in a way that’s engaging rather than just, ‘Hey, we wrote this blog, go check it out. Here’s the link.’ It’s, ‘Here are the takeaways, or here are some screenshots from it, or here’s a video from the person we interviewed that people can engage with on social directly.’ So that’s a big part of what we’re trying to offer. We want to work alongside companies and help them honestly elevate the personal brand of their leadership or their SME teams or their customers or their partners — just make them the star and put a spotlight on them. […]
We’ve realized that the relationship-based sales that come as a result of ‘social selling’ help a ton. So as we build out and start scaling our revenue, we’re probably not even going to touch traditional outbound. We’re a team of four full-time people, and we’re just going to be super deliberate and consistent about all of us being present and in these conversations on social, sharing about freelancing, content, and B2B content marketing, and that will lead to productive conversations.”
Authenticity in Posting Content
“I have a very light filter on what I will and will not post. In general, I try to keep it focused on either content marketing, writing tips, freelancing, or just stuff I find funny, thinking that maybe other people will too. And that’s literally my rubric for posting content. And I think the authenticity piece comes from that last part — less on LinkedIn, but especially more on Twitter. That’s [Twitter] really the forum where I will share not just what I’m working on but also things in life, like beach photos or my walk through Antigua or things I’m cooking, or things I’m reading that aren’t necessarily ‘professional.’ And I think there’s a lot of space for that, and it all plays into it.”
Beam Content in the Future
“Sam’s doing fantastic work on making things more polished than how I’ve had them in the past, so more of that. Ideally, a lot more video content. The bulk of what we do for our clients is those interview-based pieces of content, and we wanna do that for our own content — interview actual experts, not marketers or even content marketers, but more of like data engineers and SVPs and customer success managers about what matters to them. So we’re looking to focus a lot more on that.
And then, on the flip side, a big part of what we want to offer — as an agency and as a team and myself — is help for freelancers. Something I’ve done for the last couple of years is not just focus on content marketing, but put out a lot of freelancer content as well.”