White Creators: How to Welcome People of Color on Social Media (Part 2)

What's Happening

In honor of Black History Month, I’m sharing ways to support Black creators (as well as other minority groups) and promote diversity on your social media accounts.

If you haven’t yet read Part 1, I encourage you first to read how to welcome people of color to your social accounts with your visuals, including your emojis.

Now that you’ve tidied up and made sure your new visitors feel welcome. In Part 2, we’ll focus on sending out the invitations. How will they know there’s a party if you don’t invite them?

Use it for Your Business

PART 2: Support Black Creators

To continue the analogy of throwing a party, most likely, you’re not going to invite strangers. So, you gotta get out of your comfort zone and meet some people. This isn’t as intimidating as it may sound.

1. Retrain Your Algorithm

As established in Part 1, there are more Black and Hispanic adults than white adults that have at least one social media account. They are on social media; however, your algorithm may not be suggesting their posts to you because it’s trained to suggest posts from people who are like you. You need to retrain it.

A few tips:

• Dig into the feeds of hashtags relating to your industry.
• Find Black creators and interact with their posts.
• Find the social accounts of other people in your industry.
• Look for Black creators to follow.
• Look at who is commenting on their posts.
• Interact with their posts if relevant to your industry/niche.

2. Support

Once you’ve met some new friends in your industry, get to know them better. Begin to support them on and off social media.

Ways to support Black creators:

• Join their email list and respond to their emails
• Purchase their products or services
• Tell your friends about them
• Follow them on all the socials
• Engage with their content with likes and comments
• Share their posts to your stories, retweet, etc.

BONUS: Not only will this help you meet some really cool people, but many people will reciprocate the support and, thus, diversify your followers. #WinWin

3. Collaborate

Now that you’ve gotten cozy with Black creators in your space, it’s time to deepen the relationship with a few. The next step is collaborating or partnering to strengthen both your platforms. There are many ways to collaborate, from low commitment to long-term high commitment partnership.

Ways to collaborate off social media:

• Podcasts (being a guest or inviting guests)
• Guest blogging (hosting on your blog or appearing on other blogs)
• Submit articles for publication
• Feature in email newsletters

Ways to collaborate on social media:

• Reels (use the Collab feature)
• Go live with up to 3 other creators
• Story takeover
• Feed profiles
• Contests

Spoiler Alert: The above is no different than the advice I would give anyone wanting to grow their network. Growth takes intentionality. You’re going to have to reach out and collaborate anyway, so why not also support Black creators as well?

My Experience

I started this effort by being intentional about who I invited to be a guest on my live show. Then, I made sure the posts I shared in my weekly Sunday Saves Stories featured creators from diverse backgrounds. The change was gradual, but after over two years, I’ve noticed that the people who like my posts are more diverse, as well as my new followers.

My experience on Instagram has more depth. I’m seeing posts and trending audio I would have never discovered before if I hadn’t retrained my algorithm.

Relevancy Rating

Just because it's new doesn't mean it's worth your time: For white people, is inviting people of color into your social presence worth your time?

Yes: I give it 5 out of 5 thumbs up.

The effort is very small, and the reward potential is great. I’ll take those odds any day!

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