15 Aug So you think it’s time to get social?
Everybody’s doing it and you’ve got a bad case of FOMO. Your social media presence is either non-existent or restricted to your personal Facebook feed with pictures of your cat/dog/hamster and various forgettable nights out.
But, what if the hype is real and you could make social media work for you?
It doesn’t matter if you’re a start-up or a successful business, investing in a social media strategy can drive profitable consumer actions whether your goal is sales, promotion or simply gathering more friends followers.
The key word here is ‘strategy’. Anyone can throw a few photos onto Facebook or Instagram, use a nice filter and hope for the best. However any expert will tell you every successful endeavour takes time, planning and consistency. So let’s break this down into some golden rules for starting out social…
1. Planning
Think about what you want to achieve by being active in social media. Your immediate goal might be to increase brand awareness and therefore followers, whilst your long term goal is sales of your existing product.
Plan out your timeline for achieving both these goals remembering that social media is a conversation with your existing and prospective clients, not simply a vehicle for you to try and sell things. Just like you may not get to home base on a first date, don’t expect your social media followers to give it all up for the first post. Give the people what they want – relevant, engaging, interesting content. Wine them, dine them, delight them.
2. Content
Content is King. There’s no denying it, you will not get anywhere without content that is specifically engaging for your followers. I like photos of food and furniture. Pretty things basically. And the accounts that I follow and more importantly, engage with, are ones that feed me what I’m hungry for, not what they think I should be eating.
Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIN all provide insights for business that provide information on the activity for each post – how many people viewed it, liked it and shared it as well as the best time for posting, the gender split of your followers and their age range. Use this to your advantage. Structure your post content and times around this information. If most people are engaging with you at 4pm on Tuesday don’t post your best content on a Sunday morning. Simples. For more information about best times to post on social media read this.
3. Consistency
Please, please, please be consistent. I see so many people who start social with a fire in their belly and go hard for the first month. Then the drop-off starts. The fire goes out because guess what? It’s actually a lot of hard work. Creating and curating content, scheduling, responding to messages, checking the relevant insights and metrics, tracking conversions. I didn’t say it would be easy, but I did say it would be profitable. So begin as you mean to continue with consistent posts and content. Give yourself and your business the time to make this work. You’re not going to go from zero to hero in a few days, but you can make social media work for you if you’re prepared to work for it.
Need help? Give me a shout here.
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