For my birthday I posted a photo of myself as a baby from 1970, chubby little legs and bald head.

More than 234,000 views. Nearly 24,000 engagements, 85,000% more than I normally get.

Meanwhile the post inviting people to join me at the Stevie Awards in New York, the one I  agonised over, sat in the corner like me, at 10, waiting to be picked for the softball team.

That birthday post didn't sell a single seat to New York. It was never going to. So why bother? Nobody scrolls past a chubby seventies baby and thinks right, sign me up for an awards trip. 

That post is a breadcrumb. One of 1000s I've dropped over the years, On its own it does almost nothing except for giving me warm fuzzies that so many people enjoyed my story.

But someone sees it and gets a bit curious about who is this woman?  They have a sticky beak through my profile, and trip over the awards, the writing, the books… all the crumbs I've dropped. I'm no longer the woman who writes award submissions. I’m a whole person, and whole people are far easier to trust.

People aren't deciding whether to buy your service. They're deciding whether they trust the person behind it,

Sometimes we struggle with what to write on social media. We're told to be vulnerable but not too vulnerable. We labour over a single post. We do silly videos hoping people will notice. We get attached to the metrics and judge our impact on who is engaging.

Many of my business posts feel like there's more crickets engaging. I could get hung up on the numbers but I've learnt it's the posts sharing thoughts and experiences that draw people in. 

While that may not drive sales, it does drop another breadcrumb that helps people add to their perception of me. That’s what marketing is really all about. Perception. The slow, unglamorous business of shaping what springs to mind when someone hears your name.

Business posts are a broadcast: here's what we do, here's why you should care, here's the call to action. Nobody engages because there's nothing to engage with. 

The thought-and-experience is  a door open, an invitation rather than an announcement.

Every breadcrumb that shows how you think, what you notice, where you draw the line is doing the work of making the eventual buying decision feel obvious. By the time someone enquires, they've already decided. The post that converts is rarely the post that sold them. It's a culmination of how you show up.

You want people to know you in a way they can't quite articulate. Trust comes from a feeling. We think when people buy what we're selling that they've used logic but that's not always the case.  People buy because they see you, they follow you, they get to know you and when they're ready to buy, you're their first pick. Because you've banked trust by dropping breadcrumbs that build perception of who you are, what you do and why you do it.

Trust, infuriatingly, can't be rushed. It comes from the trail people followed to find it.

By Annette Densham

Keywords: Business Strategy, Personal Branding, Public Relations

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