Social media…. How the heck do we use it in our business? That’s what I’m tackling today!
Okay so no doubt you’re using social media, or you’re wanting to use social media for your business but you’re trying to figure out where the hell to start or what to focus on.
The truth is that when you’re starting a business, especially an online business, social media is going to be the number one platform that drives traffic to your website. They’re going to be the main way that you get traffic to your website or your landing pages really quickly.
When you’re more established, yes, you’ll still be driving traffic from social media to your website, but the focus is going to be a little bit different because you’re going to be focusing on engaging and interacting with your audience on those platforms instead.
Now you should still be doing this when you’re in the early stages but most of the time we’re just trying to get traffic back to our website to see our offerings, to see our posts so that they can get to like us and sign up to our lists and buy our products. Right? But, where do you start?
That’s the big thing for people. It’s so overwhelming, there’s so many platforms, where the hell do you start?
PICK ONE OR TWO PLATFORMS TO WORK WITH ONLY
I know that sounds scary because most of the time we want to be everywhere but it’s just damn impossible to be excellent at all of the social media platforms. When I started, I focused predominantly on Facebook, specifically in Facebook groups not on my business page, because I found that I was getting the most traffic coming in from Facebook groups because I was actively interacting in these groups and I was promoting my business all the time and for me that strategy was working really well.
So, I focused on it, I got really good at it and I drove lots of traffic to my website. There was even a couple of days where I would have over 100 people subscribe to whatever freebie I was offering at the time from these groups. So, it was a huge driver of traffic for me.
The next platform I focused on was Pinterest. I was slightly dabbling in it before and I was getting a good amount of traffic from it but once I started dedicating myself to this platform and to a strategy, holy crap! Pinterest shot up to be my highest traffic driver and still is my highest traffic driver today.
So that’s what you need to do. You need to pick one or two platforms and go deep with them. You need to get in there. You need to learn as much as you can about each of these platforms and go high for it.
And, if for whatever reason these platforms aren’t working for you, if you’re not getting the results that you want from these platforms, that’s alright. Move onto another one. You’re not going to figure it out unless you actually try. So, pick one or two, and see how you go with that.
USE AUTOMATION TOOLS
Okay so these are like the holy grail of keeping up with social media coz, oh my gosh, I don’t know how you would be able to do it manually if you were on all platforms?! Or even just two platforms; it’s just too damn hard!
Automation tools are basically like programs or apps that you can use to preschedule your content for social media. And you can use this with different platforms, but for me, before I hired my virtual assistant, I was using Buffer to schedule my Facebook posts on both my page and my group. And for Twitter, I was using Buffer; I found it so easy to use and I loved that you could schedule posts if you were browsing around on the web and you saw something you like, you could schedule it from that post.
For Pinterest, before I hired my strategist, I was using Boardbooster. Boardbooster is amazing, you can do so many things with it. One of my favourite things was looping my posts, so you could have a board, and say you had like a thousand pins on that board of your content and other people’s content, you could actually loop it so that it kept repining itself so that there was always new content being shown to your followers.
Another one is, if you were in group boards, you could schedule pins from one of your own boards, say it was a board that had only your content in it and you could schedule it as many times as you wanted per day (but not abusing it!) to have one of your pins, pin to these group boards. And if you’re a member of heaps of different group boards then your pin is going out to like thirty, fifty group boards every single day on autopilot!
For Instagram I use an app called Later and this is really cool because you can set this all up on your computer or on your phone. I like to do it on my computer because you can upload more photos at one time than on your phone where you can only do one but, it’s great because you can actually schedule your content for at least eighteen days in advance on the free plan.
And what happens is, you just set a time that it’s meant to post then, once that time comes up, it sends you a notification to your phone and you can open Instagram in your phone and it has the post and the picture all ready to go. So that’s one thing I really love!
Now without these tools, I honestly have no idea how I would have been able to keep up with social media. Seriously, like how the hell do people do it manually? I really don’t know! So check out those automation tools and if you’re not on them, get to them right away; they’re going to save you a lot of time!
SET ASIDE A TIME TO SCHEDULE ALL OF YOUR POSTS
So, it can be really easy with automation tools to just kinda schedule as you go along each day but that is just not a productive strategy. You need to set aside some time, maybe two to three hours every two to three weeks scheduling your content in advance. It’s going to seem like a chore at first, but it is going to keep you organised and it’s going to save you a lot of time in the long run. So, make sure you pick a couple of hours, every couple of weeks to schedule your social media posts.
And to help you with your social media, I have an awesome download for you that is about my social media hacks. It’s going to show you the social media hacks that I’ve used in my business.
NOW I WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU: WHAT TWO SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS ARE YOU GOING TO FOCUS ON AND WHICH AUTOMATION TOOLS ARE YOU GOING TO TAKE SOME TIME TO LEARN?
