Ep #166: How showing up is important to your image on social media Teresa Song

In this episode, I chat with Teresa Song, a beauty image coach who helps women entrepreneurs enhance their visibility and personal branding. We discuss the significance of a curated online presence for business success and the role of authenticity in attracting clients. Teresa shares her journey from makeup artist to image coach, emphasizing the importance of standing out and being relatable online. The conversation also touches on the value of mental health in social media interactions and the future of business in the digital space.

Where to find Teresa:

Website: www.growwithteresa.com

Promo: A complementary 30-minute exploratory via Zoom for those who are curious about having that change within their business! 

Transcript

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Welcome back to another episode of the Hello C is Dorsey podcast. I have Teresa Song, your beauty image coach on the podcast today. How are you doing today, Teresa? I am doing great. How are you, Candace? I'm doing well. Yay. So tell everyone who you are and what you do. Well, hello everybody. My name is Teresa and I am a beauty image coach. And I pretty much what I do is I help women be seen and be noticed and be hired. I love it. Love it. Love it. We're going to dive into that. So let's talk about the inspiration behind you starting your business. What was that like for you? My inspirations come from a lot of things. It comes from, you know, being me, being aligned to what I feel like my heart wants to do and to be out there. And it really comes down to the fact that I just want to help women grow. I want to see us go to our highest potential, what we can do. And I specialize in women entrepreneurs because I want to help women. Reach what they, where they want to go in their business and in their life. I love it so much. we're all fighting for attention, whether it be online, offline or whatnot. But being visible is, is definitely key, especially in business. So can you remember a time in your business or it could be life where you had a hello moment? Yes. Well, let me tell you how I started this. So I, my background is I am a makeup artist. I'm a hairstylist and I've been in that industry for 15 years. And I was doing like celebrity clients. I was doing working with photographers. I was doing editorials and magazines. I was doing like New York fashion week. And then I want to say maybe like five years ago, maybe, maybe six, closer to six. This was a few years before COVID. I started working with branding photographers. Okay, and these photographers were basically helping these female entrepreneurs launch their business, you know, their websites their head shots and basically helping them be noticed and making them stand out within their business. And for me they would hire me as their hair and makeup person sometimes wardrobe. And I pretty much kind of, I mean, I'm not, I don't need to brag about myself. I'm going to brag about myself a little bit. I was pretty much, you know, in charge of like really their look, you know, I Kind of made if you were to pick like one word to describe yourself as an adjective, like I was kind of like the person behind the scenes that made your clients feel that word that you described yourself as. And so that's what started for me. And then I became very passionate about it. To help women be noticed. It could, it could even be like this lady is, you know, hitting her 60th birthday, right? Or it could be, you know, just, you know, Like what I just said, like women wanting to launch their business. And ever since then, I realized like, Oh my goodness, I'm really, really good at this. I'm really good at what I do. And people are coming back to me more for advice. Like, Oh, you helped me, you know, visually, you know, you made me look like myself, but just a better version, but also very professional. And people found that very, very approaching. And so when my clients then came to me for that. Then I was like, I can, I think I can do this. You know, I think I can visually help women. Basically visually tell their clients on how they want to be seen and how they want to feel when people see them to hire them for their services. And ever since then, I've just perfected my craft. I worked on and still continuously learning, learning from coaches and branding coaches and imagery coaches, you know, just to how to perfect what I can bring to my clients. I love the details in what you do. Because we talk about branding, but we talk about it so much online as far as like a business, but not you as the brand. And I close or am I kind of like, can is you're off. That's not what I'm talking about. No, no, no. You're very close. Okay. This is the easiest way I describe it. Right. So I am like a little bit of branding, a little bit of like coaching, a little bit of imagery, a little bit of marketing, but in like the outer picture of all this is like, if you were to imagine, right, if you were imagined, I'll say I'll take realtors for example, because everybody knows a realtor in their life. My best friend is a realtor. If you were a realtor in a room full of like a hundred realtors, right. So what are you going to do? And what's going to make you different? That what's going to make me want to hire you out of all the hundred realtors in that room. And that's kind of like what I do. That's when I step in and kind of bridge that gap. I can't tell you all my secrets, but this is what's going to make you unique, you know, for people to hire you and for people to notice you, that you're going to stand out in front of all the other realtors in the room. So that's like the, the easiest description that I can say, but everybody's different. You know, every, every industry is different. Every niche is different, but generally that's how I bring myself to you. Yeah. When you say what makes you stand out? Like if a real estate agent comes to me and I, I'm a realtor as well, but I need to renew my license. That's another, that's another conversation for another day. But for me, if somebody mentioned Disneyland or cats. I mean, we're signing, we're like best friends because it's, I guess it's that personal, that personal level, personal touch. Or if they're wearing something like, and I know real estate agents aren't supposed to be wearing stuff like this, but maybe if they have like a a Mickey sock or something like that, or something related to that, that kind of like, yeah. Ship my focus and be like, Hey, I want to talk to that person a little bit more, even though it's a whole bunch of people in the room. So yeah, I get it. I get it 100%. I love this so much. Let's switch here. So we have a lot of People who have online businesses, who's predominantly online. They're trying to, you know, be seen and heard in a crowd. They're not offline, but they're more online. Let's talk about the importance of being visible more. For online business owners. Oh, great question. I feel like this is the question that I feel like most of us are. I feel like we're afraid of. Because it's an online presence we're more vulnerable online than what we would be not offline. Right? And I want to, like, start off before I even touch that topic. I want to start off that the future of how we are as business people in general, that this society and this generation is moving towards online. Okay. Everything is social media based. Everything is, you know tick tock based. Right. I say that as the younger generation, you know, so everybody is online now, you know, everything that is accessible by our phones, you can do anything with your cell phone nowadays. Right. And so if you are not out there physically promoting your butt off about your business, about your product, about your service, how are people going to find you? Right. Right. How are people going to find you? And now there's, there's many platforms out there. You know, there's Facebook, there's Instagram, there's tick tock, there's LinkedIn, you know, other types of networking stuff. There's lineable, there's meetup. Like, what are you doing to make yourself be seen and be known? And how active are you on there? Right? So it's, it's. It's important just to think moving on in the future that this is how it's going to be, you know, and we do have to in a way cater to our future, you know, that unfortunately people aren't doing in person things as much anymore. Right. And I think COVID after COVID this just spiked up for all of us. So, your online presence is huge. I think it's almost needed. You don't need to have everything, you know, but just Narrowing down onto one specific, you know, internet platform for yourself is very important and building your community within that is very important. I agree. Totally and in the matter of, like, building a community, definitely, you know, Facebook is, Facebook, I will say, is definitely number 1 as far as like, building some sort of online community. And then we have the offline communities at school, but finding your tribe, finding your people, and putting them in one place. I, I'm starting to think about that now. How important it is because, you know, like you said, so many different things and going on. So I'm like over here on Instagram. I'm over here on TikTok. I'm over here on YouTube, but everybody is so scattered and just like bringing those people together and having that community. And I definitely think that that will definitely help you stand out in a sea of Sharks is like really bloody waters. And you know, it's funny. I was just having this talk with another colleague of mine the other day and we were talking about the different platforms of social media, right? And we're talking about like the age demographics. So like I always, you know, invite any entrepreneurs. To think about like the demographic on each platform, right? So let's just say if your target clientele are people in their twenties or maybe females in their twenties well, maybe Instagram is your niche is your main source of platform because that's where women are. Okay. If you are, let's just say if your target audience is maybe a mom in their thirties. You know, okay. I think maybe Facebook that's, you know, that's probably where you want to be marketing yourself. Right. And if you're maybe like that tween like the teens, the tweens, I call them take talk, you know, just infomercial, you know, and just people that want to click, click, click, click, you know, then take talk is probably where you want to be, you know, and then it's like LinkedIn, LinkedIn, I feel like is, is like a range, but LinkedIn, at least to me which I'm most active on is it's just business professionals. You know, it's it's a huge network of, you know, everybody and anybody, but it's a business platform, you know, so it's like, it's interesting to think that, you know, every single platform has their own type of demographic of people and who's on there, right? It's definitely controlled because not everybody, I mean, I'm not on there that much, but when I do scroll through it I see a rant once in a blue moon. But people are definitely on there being intentional and especially being intentional with their posts. Like it's no fluff. Like they telling you market updates and telling you how the economy is. They send them videos. It's informative. It's an informative platform. Very true. Yeah. I need to get on there a little bit more, but you know a lot of past employers on there and I'm like, don't be snooping around. What? Okay. Well, just remove them from your connection. It's always like I was telling somebody, so then continue with that conversation. I always tell people, you know, you make your social media the way you want it to be made, you know, it's not a negative thing. It's only negative because you made it negative. Unfortunately, sorry, this might hurt some feelings, but. You know, so like my feed is, you know, you know, plants travel food, you know, motivational quotes, you know, dogs, you know, gardening, because that's what I choose to watch. And that's what I choose to put on my feed. You know, even like my personal page, even though on the backside of my makeup artist, I don't follow any makeup stuff. You know, I follow my friends. But I don't really want to see, that kind of content. Like, I prefer to see some travel bloggers. I prefer to see chefs cooking, but that's just me. And I love being on my feet. Because it makes me happy. I love this. Thank you so much for pointing that out. That is definitely important. Yeah, because mine is personal. My personal feed is more of Disneyland and cat videos. Yep, I got Disneyland too. I follow a Disneyland food blogger and she tells you all the places to get all the good food at Disneyland. You know, and it's very important, I don't want to see, what influencers doing what in the Turks. Again, with what designer bag she's wearing and what she's buying. No, I don't care for that. Yeah. I don't get sucked into that, so make, your social media what you want it to be, please. If you think about it, it is the truth because like, that's where a lot of, I say emotional anxiety, people say, you know, I have anxiety. I'm like, don't claim that. But when you're on Like the phone, I can feel it like creeping up, especially when you're scrolling through, you know, the, the feed and everything and things pop up and you compare and you're like, Oh my gosh, I'm not where this person is or that person is, you know? And that causes a lot of emotional stress, anxiety, depression. And like you said, make your feed what you want it to be. And I don't think that a lot of people understand that you can actually do that. If you don't like a certain content, don't like it. If you don't like a, you know, you can actually say, I'm not interested, or remove this. I had a lot of things that really touched me personally, especially political stuff, that I was just like, I don't want to see this ever again. Like I don't even have anything related to politics in my feed, you know? But I agree with you was unfollow. Exactly. Exactly. Let's see. Here's the thing. I'm not even following these people. Yeah. Hit those little three button or three dots on the corner and just say, hide or like, yeah. Hide. Yeah. Yeah. I did a social media cleanse and I unfollowed a lot of people. I deleted a lot of people on my Facebook purposely. Just, I mean, quite frankly, it's not that I don't care about you guys, but I take myself. I put myself first. That's right. Because I have goals of where I want to be. That's right. No, mental health is huge. It is very important. It is. I really want to present like, I love my family members, but I deleted them as well. So, any last minute advice you have for our listeners out there. Well, one, going off of what we just said, please cleanse your social media. You can thank us later. Please cleanse. I don't care if you're following 2, 000 people. Take that time, split it between a few days, and just cleanse out your social media. It's gonna do you so good. And I guess, like, lastly, I guess, like, You know, like, I'm an image coach, right? And we're here talking about social media. And I believe that I'm talking to that. Maybe those few people that can hear me to say, like, it's so important to go out of your comfort zone and out of your element just to even make some kind of presence for yourself, because you have to think that if you are service based. Okay. If you're a service based business owner that people are going to hire you for you. Okay. Let that sink in. Okay. Let me, let me repeat that people are not hiring because of your services. They're not going to buy your jam or your marmalade that you just made that, you know, is off the charts. They're going to buy your jam and marmalade because they. Like you as a person, because they believe in what you do, you're a relatable person. They believe like the products that you use, or maybe locally organically sustained. So, like, remember that, you know, and that's kind of like my expertise is people hire you. They don't hire you for your products or for your services. You have to be relatable for them to want to hire you. Okay. So rewind and replay what I just said. Okay. People hire you. Okay. And if you need another breakdown, it's think about the last time you hired somebody for their service. Okay. So it could be maybe a nanny. It can be your plumber, it could be the photographer for your wedding. Like, think about the reason like that last reasoning factor of why you hired them. Most of the time, I feel like the answers could be, Oh, their expertise, they're relatable they have good like a history, but it's going to be all about them, not the service that they offered. It could be because the plumber was an expert in what he does, you know? So think about that. We get hired for us. For us being ourselves and being authentic, not for what we do. It's so funny. You said think about the person you hire. I was thinking about our landscaper and, you know, we met him and everything years years ago. But I think the 1 thing that reason why we kept him on and we like him so much is because he's so humble. He's very humble and. He goes above and beyond and is not how much he charges. Cause we always overpay just because he's so helpful. He gave us tips, you know, he we don't need, we can be sleep. And he, when he's scheduled to come, he'll be. Outside, he'll just start working and we're like, well, you're going to knock on the door and let us know. He just starts working and, you know, getting everything together. And he's very humble about it. Nice. And, you know, son as well. So we keep him around and we don't mind paying him way more than what he's asking. Cause we feel like he's worth that because, you know, he'd given so much value. Mind you, everything you just described Has nothing to do with his landscaping skills. No, I want people to think about that. Please think about that. Yes. Yes. That's a good point. Okay. Another pockets. I'm going to have you come on. Maybe about three times. Love this conversation. So where can everyone find you? You can find me on my website. It's grow with Teresa. com. It's Teresa with no H. And I always offer like a complimentary just exploratory session with everyone who's even interested, or maybe I've caught your interest somehow, you know so just shoot me a message on my website and we can get that started. Awesome. Yes. And we'll definitely link those up in the show notes. Well, thank you, Teresa, so much for coming on the show today. You're welcome. Thank you for having me.