How Voice Actors Can Toot Their Trumpet Without Blowing It
“You have to do a little bragging on yourself even to your relatives — man doesn’t get anywhere without advertising.”, said former Vice President of the United States John Nance Garner. However, it can be difficult to gauge whether you are just sharing your voice acting milestones or you are already crossing the line for bragging it blatantly. Thus, as a voice actor per se, you should master how to act your achievements the proper way be it in the flesh or online.
Here are the 5 proven tips on how you can share your voice acting success stories online without sounding like you’re boasting about them:
Your Content and Intention
“While it’s fine to sprinkle brag bites in your posts, make sure you have a good mix of content that doesn’t just focus on you.”, says Peggy Klaus, executive coach and author of Brag!: How to Toot Your Own Horn Without Blowing It. Instead of self-aggrandizing that definitely annoy your audience, why not plot your story in a way readers will feel you deserve your success? When communicating your competence in voice acting and your successes, you should maximize the value you provide to your followers by citing tips and sharing lessons you’ve learned from accomplishing your goal which is rather inspiring and worth sharing.
Whether or not you turn off your followers lies in your intent and the pair of words you choose to speak about your successes. It should be clear to you that your intention is not to arouse envy, jealousy, or the like. It follows that you become warier on making your point in your post by avoiding words or phrases that could make you sound like you’re shoving your greatness to your followers’ faces.
Frequency of your posts
Many articles suggest, posting too often is downright t annoying. Oversharing aimlessly puts you in the risk of actually looking like an automated ad people tend to hide from their newsfeed. No doubts that you should limit your posts, especially that not all your audience is a voice actor or is related to one. But actually, the posting frequency is not black and white. Post too often and you’re annoying. Post too seldom and you’re not worth following. To stay on the safe side, you can have a maximum of 2 posts a day for Facebook, 1-2 a day for Instagram, and 10-15 a day for Twitter.
Customize your audience settings
When you brag about your voice acting success, it’s important to consider your listeners. You should anticipate who will likely to buy your words and who will tend to mute you off their newsfeed. Tweaking your settings to share it only with people you already know will appreciate addresses this challenge. Target followers who you know can relate to voiceover and who you know have a vested interest in stories that can inspire them in their voice acting career.
Avoid Humblebrags
What is humblebrag? You know someone’s practicing humblebrag when he’s trying to appear humble or even humiliated on the surface, with the actual intention to boast. In today’s era, humblebrags are everywhere. It is kind of tough to avoid sounding like you are humblebragging. While you try hard as you can to show humility, you don’t want to compromise your main intent which is to self-promote. Say, you auditioned for a cartoon film. You were chosen out of 20 auditions to work on the succeeding episodes of the show. Out of genuine excitement, you would like to share the news with your Facebook friends. It can be read as humblebrag if you word it like this: “I’m not really skilled at narrating a cartoon, I cannot believe I was chosen to be the actor of the lead character!” You’d definitely turn off your audience if you veil your brag with false humility. Better yet, own your success and brag outright accompanied with an inspiring catch.
Tweak your story a little
Nobody would know who is really talking behind your posts. And you have the prerogative over how to utilize your social media account to promote yourself. Hence, you can try to frame your content through someone else’s word because it’ll make it easier for everyone to join in and cheer you. For example, instead of posting “I just got a residual check!”, you can rather say it like this “My coach told me he’s proud of me for getting a residual check!”.
Bragging about your success is easy. The challenge you have to overcome is to how not to annoy your social media followers when you do so. You are not trying to please them, but you are trying to be someone they can look up to. And that’s how you nail it when you are promoting yourself online.
