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About Heidi Dean:

Heidi Dean is known as the industry's top social media strategist for actors and the creator of Marketing4actors.com. She's a social media writer for Backstage Magazine and a frequent speaker at film festivals, SAG-AFTRA, AEA, conferences, podcasts and universities across the country. Her clients include Emmy Award-winners, Broadway stars, series regulars, directors, producers, casting directors, voice actors and audiobook narrators. Heidi turns social media rookies into ROCKSTARS!

How the heck did you get into doing social media with actors?

The tweetable version is well, I really got my start in social media marketing and I was actually running social for my husband who is a Broadway and television actor and now audiobook narrator.

And a lot of the things we were doing for him and promoting his album and everything, just started taking off. And of course, working actors know working actors, and I started running social for other people, for actors, producers, and casting directors.

What I started to realize is that I was not just running social media for them, I was acting like them, and the people interacting with me had no idea I was this person. They had no idea. So it was enlightening to me because I realized that actually, nobody was helping actors with their social media.

You had to be like an A-lister and have media training and social media training and really have someone running your social media to actually get that kind of education.

And so that's when I started my blog, Marketing for Actors, now 2015. And really just talking about the mistakes I was seeing every day, as people interacted with me when they thought I was this producer, this casting director, or this big actor, and that's when the blog just took off because no one was helping.

And there was a need that nobody was fulfilling unless you paid thousands of dollars every month to have someone run it for you.

How important is it for actors to be on social media?

It's important for so many reasons, and I feel like the conversation gets stuck on followers all the time.

I love that you're asking this because, like I said, I think this conversation of like, How important is it? Why is it important?

It tends to get stuck on this conversation about followers and I think it's the wrong way to approach it and it's not even the most important reason to be on social media.

So let me give you a couple of reasons why I think it's important and hopefully, that's going to help reframe some things for your listeners. Yeah.

First of all, it's like almost 2024. You may be listening to this in 2024 and social media is just part of the world. It's, and it's becoming part of your job, right?

Your next gig is probably going to have posting guidelines. They're gonna have some guidelines about when you can post, when not to post, what to post. There may even be posting requirements in your contract, which, just so you know, it's actually a powerful thing. If they require you to post, and you have any kind of audience, ask for more money.

This is powerful, okay?

So you may have guidelines, you may have requirements. Your next job could have an Instagram takeover or they could ask you to go live or do live tweeting.

These are all just reality.

So it's becoming part of your job.

It's also part of your first impression. We know this business has gone virtual and people are looking you up all the time. It's a business of referrals and also, people, they need to know who you are.

So they're going straight to social, they're going to Google,