We were lucky to catch up with Steven Larson recently and have shared our conversation below.

Steven, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?

I learned what I do now by diving right in. Fully immersing myself into the cultures of social media creatives. What I found was that there was quite a sub-culture of individuals creating content in my niche area which revolves around supporting local businesses and more specifically those in the food, beverage, and travel industries.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

What I do is support local brands by sharing my experience in their business. I recently did a live TV segment on Arizona Family where I reviewed a pizza from a local shop on live TV and I referred to myself as a “consumer consultant”. Which I had never used that term before, it was a spur-of-the-moment phrase but I do think it really rings true. I built a following on Instagram of nearly 14,000 followers who look to me to provide direction on their experiences with local businesses. That is how I got my start essentially was doing a lot of freelance work and sharing my experiences. How I was creatively developing content online and sharing my personal experiences spawned into local businesses wanting to work with me and leverage my platform to highlight the great things they’re doing in their businesses.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

For me, my primary audience is on Instagram, so for my business, building relationships is very important. From the start, I took what I was doing very seriously. Very serious in the way that I wanted to communicate with interested/like-minded people. I made and still do make it a very intentional purpose of mine to respond to all (authentic) messages and comments from followers. I am just as curious about how their experience was or is going to be at a particular establishment that I recommend. I think it’s those kinds of interactions that really grow roots when building relationships with followers or clients.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

A lot of what helped my brand was keeping it authentic. What I mean by that is authentic to my brand in the way that I support local and really stick to the rule of “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything”. Sticking to that core value helped me develop a reputation that I am truly here to support local and keep an identity of helping local business owners grow their social media footprint.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @Wizard_of_za