Social media platforms are always changing and evolving. As a business owner, you already have a boatload of tasks to take care of. You need someone that can help you utilize your individual skills and figure out where to outsource the tasks you can’t or don’t like to do.

I help you figure out HOW to market yourself on social media.

As a first-generation American of Moroccan and Iranian heritage, I love connecting with people, figuring out who they are, and what they care about. The internet is where I truly learned how to be in a friendship.

The goal is to make people feel genuinely cared about as individuals. From there they want to be a part of your journey and success. The skills I used online to make friends are the same tools I currently use to teach my clients how to get the most out of their network.

You already have people that if they saw you in real life they would trust and feel bonded with you. I’m helping you take that skill to the digital world. You as a connector already have the superpowers you need to win on social media. Know the value of what you have already created and connect your relationships of trust from offline to online.

You can get to a place where anytime you boast on social media, you have a cheering squad there to support you. The value is in the relationships - real life dependent not platform dependent.

You need to maximize the thing you are already good at and give it a platform to live.

My social media consulting journey started in high school when my online reality competition shows needed an online hub for our activities. I ran that hub as a Myspace group, crafting my social media skills long before the term was even coined.

For the last two years I have empowered business owners to do their own marketing by guiding them on how to make more out of their social networking. From consulting 200+ women on how to get business using LinkedIn to working with over a dozen business owners through one-on-one social media consulting sessions helping them reinvest in their own marketing.

My clients have been featured in Whole Foods, Techstars, and Forbes. I have been brought in to speak by State Farm, The Women’s Business Development Center, University of Illinois, Fiverr, and Trunk Club.

I am an optimistic person who is constantly looking for win-win opportunities for friends, students, and clients. I help people represent themselves using social media in order to re-engage their social networks at scale. Everything I do in life, both online and offline, is about empowering others by creating connections. This is why I gravitated to social media consulting and teaching. I earned my teaching degree from Indiana University and have used my skills in various capacities including in facilitating my own workshops and incorporating technology into the classroom.

I am not a social media manager - I am a social media consultant. I help you find a way to connect your social network to your social media, to consistently show up for the people who need you and might not know it yet. I teach you how to use the pieces that you have that are your strengths in relation to where your people are and enjoy putting out content.

I can translate who you are and how to sell that special thing about you.

I don’t just tell you what to do and send you on your way. We will learn the skill together through social media consulting. With some folks, we will even do the skill together. We will brainstorm content ideas and craft a post together in each session. And I am always a click away as needed and when questions arise.

So why do I do the things I do?

After a friendless first few years of school, experiencing some harsh nicknames from both students and teachers, something inside 5th grade me decided I had to make a change. The next few years I worked on adapting to people’s social cues, and managed to make a solid friend in the class loner. By the time I got to middle school, I seemed to become at the very least tolerable and other kids started to acknowledge me. #Progress!

By the time I reached high school, I was armed with the tools and confidence to get people to like me. But where I really found my tribe was online. I have a mini obsession with Big Brother and Survivor, and along with meeting people in myspace forums, I started to play simulated games online with a strategy formed around one to one connections.

After earning a degree in elementary education, my job hunting turned me onto a different road altogether, and I used my early online experiences building communities and forming genuine connections with people to land jobs in social media. It was during this time that a friend asked me for help with her social media. She couldn’t afford to hire me to manage it but asked if I would teach her how it all worked.

A lightbulb went off.

I realize that so much of what I taught her was directly related with how I learned to make friends both offline and online. So much of what I was teaching her was not only digital skills but how to use her own online platforms to make deeper individual connections with her ideal audience. I knew that after our first session, I was doing exactly what I needed to be doing, social media consulting. I realized I loved consulting social media even more than managing it alone. Having studied education in college, I knew there is no one more suited for this than me. Thus, YourSocialMediaSherpa.com was born.

See you at the Professional Development booth!

-Shaily (shy-lee)

PS Follow me on LinkedIn for tips all year round ⤵️