It can be really overwhelming when you start thinking about what you need to do on social media to promote your business. You have all the questions you ask yourself … How often do I have to post? What platforms do I use for my business? What kind of content do I need to post? How do I create the content? Where am I going to get the time to do all this? I don’t have the skills to do this! Help!
The best thing you can do is have a social media strategy. A well thought out plan with suitable business goals to make it worthwhile and if you need to get someone else to do some of it … that’s ok.
Below you’ll find a well laid out plan to come up with your social media strategy.
Step 1 – Decide on Your Social Media Business Goals
You don’t want to get busy on social media platforms just for the sake of it. If you don’t go in there with a plan and a set of business goals, you will be wasting your time and hard-earned money.
First you need to understand the purpose of social media. This is not a platform to sell on. Rather, social media platforms are used to build a tribe of loyal fans, increase brand awareness, add value to potential customers and to let people know how your business can improve their lives.
With this in mind, you need a definite set of business goals that are measurable and will help to grow your business.
Consider these statistics…
This should give you some good things to think about in relation to why you would want to add or improve your social media presence for your business.
With regards to what social media can do for your business, these are some of the benefits of using social media:
- Stay top of mind with potential customers
- Grow brand awareness with the general public
- Become an authority in your niche
- Increase visitors to your website
- Promote your content to add value to prospective customers
- Boost sales
Step 2 – Decide Which Social Media Platforms To Use
There are many different social media platforms to choose from. The number can be overwhelming. You may not have time to focus on every different platform there is. So you need to focus on what you can comfortably maintain, whether that is you or a staff member.
Each platform has a difference audience. I’ll give you a summary to help you decide which ones you think you need to be active on for your business.
Facebook: With Facebook you will reach the over 35s. Just about any industry will find their potential customers on Facebook, being the social media platform with the biggest number of accounts.
Instagram:
LinkedIn:
Pinterest:
Twitter:
YouTube:
Step 3 – Get To Know Your Audience
If you want to connect with your potential customers, it’s really important that you get to know them. This is called creating a “customer avatar”.
The best way to do this is to picture in your mind as if you are talking to just one person. That person being the ideal customer you want to serve in your business.
An example would be a 40-year-old female mother of 2 with an executive job, no time on her hands and needs to look her best for her career. There are several other things you should learn about them such as their biggest fears, their wants, needs and frustrations. If you give this person a name it makes it easier to picture.
If you’d like a worksheet to help you figure this out, you can find our customer avatar worksheet here.
Once you’ve gotten to know this ideal person well, it’s much easier to write social media content that speaks to them, that will connect with them and make them feel like you understand them. This builds trust and rapport.
Step 4 – Optimise Your Social Media Platforms
Now you know what platforms you need to start using, and who you’re speaking to, it’s time to get the platforms set up. If you have already created your social media accounts, you may need to make sure you’ve got all of the elements of these accounts setup correctly to maximise their performance.
To have a look at a list of tips for optimising your Facebook Business Page have a look at this free download.
Step 5 – Create a Social Media Content Plan
Now is the time to the decide what type of content you want to get out to connect with and grow your tribe of loyal fans and followers on social media. Let’s dive into the planning part of your social media strategy.
You might like to create a one-month plan and repeat that every month. It might look something like this…
This is a basic monthly plan idea. It’s somewhere you could get started from. Get creative. Do something individual for your business. Make it fun. Engage your tribe. Grow your following.
Step 6 – Create Content
When it comes to creating content, there some questions you need to answer.
- What kind of content do I want to create?
- Do I have the skill to create it myself?
- What platforms do I want to create this content on?
- Should I pay someone else to create my content?
Let’s look at these questions.
What Kind of Social Media Content to Create
You have a few options here. Basically, they are text, image or video.
TEXT: This one you pretty well want to steer clear of because social media is very image based and you will get a lot more engagement if you include an image or a video in your post. You will, of course, need to add some text to your image and video posts.
IMAGE: Images are the scroll stopper on social media. Imagine someone sitting on public transport scrolling through their Facebook news feeds or Instagram feed. What stops them and makes them click to see more? It’s the image.
The majority of your posts will include an image, so it’s important that these images are of a high quality and grab attention. The other type of image that works is one that looks like someone took on the fly. An image that doesn’t look posed or forced.
VIDEO: Videos are the most engaged with type of post on social followers media and the majority of them are watched with no sound. In fact, 92% of video views on mobile are watched with the sound off and 80% of consumers are more likely to watch them to the end if they are captioned.
As you would imagine, video is an important part of a good social media strategy. So, it would be great to include some of these in your planning.
The other three questions are somewhat reliant on each other, so I’ll address these ones together.
How to Get Good Content Created
You know your business better than anyone else. You probably have a good idea of your ideal client as well. If you don’t, I’m sure it wouldn’t take you long to think about the qualities of a person you would be really happy to take care of all day every day. That is one consideration to take into account.
Are you savvy on your mobile phone? Are you comfortable recording videos on it? Are you comfortable being in those videos? If you answered yes to all of these questions …that’s awesome! You will be able to create videos yourself for your social media platforms.
When it comes to images, are you tech savvy and do you have a creative side to you? There are two parts to this one. You can have technical ability, but if you don’t have a knack for the creative, your images will probably turn out pretty rubbish!
On the other hand, if you are creative and can work your way around a computer ok, then you can probably do these yourself… as long as you have the time.
There are a number of programs out there to create images on. My favourite is Canva. They have a free and a paid account. You can do a LOT with the free account.
If you know you won’t have the time or you don’t have the skill set, you may have to pay someone to get these done for you.
We have some social media image collections you could have a look at. These are instantly downloadable, and you can use them as much as you like on your social media platforms. They are designed to fit with Facebook and Instagram. You can check these out at the links below.
Step 7 – Schedule and Post
The next piece of the social media puzzle is getting this content you create online. You don’t want to be stuck loading every piece of content manually every single day. Who’s got time for that?
So instead, let’s see what options you have.
You can set aside some time each week and schedule ahead for the whole week. You do this inside Facebook with their scheduling tool.
You need to post daily on Instagram and there isn’t really much in the way of other options to do this but to do it manually on a daily basis.
Let’s Talk Scheduling Tools
If you have some great image and text posts that are timeless, meaning they never go out of date and the information will always be current, a great option is to use a scheduling tool to recycle or re-use these posts. It’s a great time saver.
Of course, you wouldn’t want to recycle posts if you only have a few of them as that would look really silly to your tribe. If, on the other hand, you have 60 great posts and you were posting one per day for example, each post would only be seen every 8 weeks. That would be perfectly fine.
My favourite tool for this is RecurPost. You can have up to 100 posts in their system and 2 social media profiles and the account is still free.
You can schedule posts on Instagram in there but there is a manual step you still have to do everyday from your phone. You need to install the RecurPost app to make that happen.
There are heaps of different scheduling tools out there to choose from. RecurPost is just my favourite and love that you can have 100 posts in there for free.
Step 8 – Engage With Your Audience
Now that you have a posting plan and strategy and your content is created, the only other thing you need to do is engage with your audience. Social media is no longer just about posting up content, but it’s about engaging with your audience.
What does it mean to engage with your audience?
- Respond to comments
- Use emojis and gifs
- Ask engaging questions to evoke responses from your audience
- Run competitions to encourage engagement from your tribe
Social media platforms are not a place to just announce to the world what you do. They are a place where you need to listen to your tribe. Respond to your tribe. Show them you care.
So be social. Create great content. Engage with your people. Grow your business. Enjoy social. <3