How to 5x your social media engagement with creator coach, Kristen Bousquet
What's the path from side-hustling influencer to making $450K+ from brand deals in just a few years? And how do you turn online charisma and social engagement into cold hard cash for yourself?
We sat down with Kristen Bousquet (@kbousq), creator economy expert and founder of Soulcialmate, to find out. Kristen's not just teaching modern creators to monetize—she's cracked the code on turning followers into a thriving community.
Her smart social media engagement strategies have earned Kristen over $450K from sponsorship deals with heavy-hitters like MTV, Crest, Shutterfly, HelloFresh, and Thinkific—all while nurturing her own engaged community.
Kristen is laser-focused on empowering talented creatives with the social media and business savvy to achieve real financial freedom. After seeing the demand for her 1-on-1 coaching, she leveled up by adding:
- The Soulcial Scoop podcast, diving deep into creator economy insights
- The Soulcial Suite—a membership community obsessed with helping creators build wildly profitable personal brands
In 2023, Kristen was named one of Business Insider's "Creator Economy Experts to Know."
Now, she's pulling back the curtain to reveal how she turned her side-hustle into a multi-six-figure empire by mastering authentic influence—and teaching you to do it, too.
The goal
Hands up if you’ve ever been frustrated by your social performance? 🙋🙋🙋🙋🙋
We’ve all been there.
Whether it’s changing algorithms, trends, or just… human behavior, being a creator (and making real money) can be challenging.
Most creators use social media to push their followers into their owned funnel—email, products, memberships, coaching, or courses. It’s genius, but posting good-enough content isn’t enough.
Because every like, share, follow, and DM means more money for your mortgage, your kids, your travel, and your dreams. So if you can 5x your social engagement, you can add fuel to your funnel, and see the results on the end of your bank account.
The assessment
What makes for content that people want to engage with? Here’s what Kristen has to say:
The playbook
If you want to “stop the scroll” and get people to slow down enough to engage with you, Kristen has 4 recommendations to increase your social engagement.
1. Dig into stats for attention insights
As someone’s business teacher once (undoubtedly) said, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.”
For creators, this hard and fast business rule turns a science into an art—but it’s still the starting point if you want to better understand your audience and what captivates their attention spans.
Here are two key metrics you can track to identify your best content, uncover gaps, and come up with new ideas:
1. Retention rate or average watch time: how long are people watching a piece of content for? How long is the average watch time compared to the full video duration? Where in the video are you losing people?
Ex. If duration of the video is 9 seconds, and average watch time is 8 seconds, that means on average people watch 8/9 seconds of this video—which is great.
A 30 second video with an avg. watch time of 6 seconds… is not great. But it is a massive opportunity for you to analyze how to do better.
2. Accounts engaged: How many individual accounts are interacting with your content? Which videos are garnering the most engagement—and why? What common threads do you see between these videos?
Ex. If 4/9 top posts contain info about personal life, that’s a huge sign that your audience is invested in your lifestyle journey. The best way to make better content (and get more engaged commenters) is to pay attention to the signs that your audience is already giving you with their attention.
“These two statistics are going to give us a really clear picture about what our audience is actually enjoying from us when they come to our page,” says Kristen.
“If people aren’t paying attention, or watching your videos all the way through, they can’t really engage with your content. What are they going to comment on?”
📊 Kristen’s Creator Tip: Check your stats at least monthly, and track your results. This data can help you create more of what your audience wants to see when you sit down to plan content for the month—and score more brand deals based on your numbers.
2. Be a friend to your audience
“Social media is social,” Kristen emphasizes. That’s why she won’t let go of her DMs or interactions—even as she hires and outsources parts of her growing business.
You can’t lose your heart, your personality, or your relatability in the process of building your personal brand as a creator.
“I want to really show people that I'm on the same level as them. Or maybe I'm a couple steps ahead; but I was them. I've been through the same things. I can connect with them on that level,” says Kristen.
What helps is to match the content you’re creating with 🤝 your audience’s wants, needs, interests, and pain points.
🥳 Bonus: 7 proven content ideas to try for yourself
One of Kristen’s recent “about me” posts got so much engagement that she decided to break down what worked about it—so you can make it work for you.
- Fun facts about you
- Your journey
- The emotion behind a decision—like refusing a certain brand deal, choosing a different path for your business than the typical ones, etc
- A situation you and your audience may have both gone through
- Shared struggles and pain points
- Day-to-day life
- The good, the bad, the ugly
✨Kristen’s Creator Tip: She likes to create one of these “lemme introduce myself” posts every 6 weeks or so to “meet” new folks in her audience, and tighten some of the bonds she already has to her community members.
3. Create repeatable + recognizable content
The Soulcial Suite members know it’s Kristen everytime her videos pop up because of:
- her trademark pink hair
- her black/white background
- her font/text/caption style
For fashion influencer Remi Bader, it’s her intro: “Back again with another realistic Zara haul.”
For TikToker Khabane Lame, it’s the sarcastic filming style and his hilariously judgmental eyes.
What do Remi, Khabane, and Kristen have in common?
Their content is repeatable 🔄 and recognizable 🔔. People know what to expect, and the creators double-down on the styles and trends that are working for them.
Repeatable: a content style that can be repeated or iterated on many times
- Hauls
- Talking head
- Tutorials
- Behind-the-scenes
- Days-in-the-life
- Interviews
- Conversations
Recognizable: your audience is familiar with your look, feel, and vibe
- Brand colors
- Fonts
- Filming locations
- Outfits
- Phrases
- Hair color
- Captioning
- Editing style
Repeatable, recognizable content helps people know exactly what to expect from a video—and, most importantly, stops the scroll.
4. Build a community
If you’re being a friend to your audience, building a community will feel natural (which doesn’t mean it won’t take work.)
A community can help you break through the overwhelm of advertising, the aspirational “highlight reels”—and offer something of deep value to your followers.
Connection.
Here’s how Kristen has focused on building her Soulcial community:
- thoughtful comment responses
- direct messages
- interactive stories and polls
- connecting community members
- engagement-based content
- building a community space
The results
Kristen started as a creator in 2018, began monetizing in 2019 after she sold her hair and makeup company, and a few short years later, has earned nearly half a million dollars from brand partnerships alone.
Nevermind the podcast and membership that’s become the lifeblood of her business.
🔋 All powered by: her community.
Kristen’s learnings
- Outsourcing can help you spend time on your business vs. in your business. Thanks to hiring a podcast producer, community manager, and virtual assistant, Kristen can now focus on having the conversations, and building strategic relationships with people and ideal brands.
- Relatable > professional. Kristen thought that her most engaged-with posts would be the ones about the nitty-gritty of her business breakdowns. Instead? They wanted to get to know her. That changed her whole perspective on her content engine.
“How can you show them that you'll be a good investment? It's really showing them that you care.” - Kristen Bousquet
Key takeaways
- Building a business on social media has to be strategic. But it doesn’t have to be stuffy. Remember that social media still needs the social aspect to it: the conversations, relationships, and authentic engagement.
- Your stats are feedback, insight, and guidance all at once. Stats can help you see what’s resonating, identify trends, and show you the path of most success—if you make the time to pay attention and understand them.
- It’s okay to scroll for research purposes. Kristen gets some of her best ideas for videos from comments and questions that her followers leave on her videos, and through other content that inspires her to put a “creator spin” on things. Don’t be scared to scroll (but also know when to put your phone away).
And if you’re a creator looking for an all-in-one community platform?
You’re in the right place.
Circle brings together your members, discussions, events, courses, and content—all in one place, under your own brand. Plus, you get access to our customer community full of handy resources and over 10,000 community builders on the same journey as you.
