You need to be where your customers are, you need to be publishing content daily on those social media platforms so you can engage with them and create value.
In case you don’t know where your audience is, send out an email to your list of subscribers and simply ask them. Or you can run a poll on multiple social media platforms to find out which are the OTHER social media platforms they use.
Another great way to determine where your audience spends their time is to look at the content you’ve already posted on social media and see what has gotten the biggest response.
One other thing to consider when choosing your social media platform is what you’re selling. Depending on the products or services you sell, one platform may be more effective than another.
As you consider which platform(s) to use, it’s important that you don’t spread yourself out so thin that you end up being ineffective.
For example, We’re more active on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter. We’re not on Snapchat because that’s not where our audience is, at least not at the moment.
Stay focus on the ones that create the most value to your audience, and ignore the other ones for now.
Ultimately, you’re more effective focusing on the core few social media platforms so you master them and be able to post good content daily, consistently week after week.
You will get better results if you give 100% of your energy to a few platforms instead of 25% of your energies to a bunch of different platforms.
At the end of the day, what matters most is not the particular platform you choose but rather that you choose one and stick with it.
Optimize Your Social Media Profile
Make your profile as informative and attractive as possible. You want your profile to draw people in, not push them away. So how do you optimize your profile?
Here are some specific recommendations.
Select a professional username. Ideally, you want your username to be either your name or the name of your company.
In other words, you don’t want to create a username like TulipGirl997. This comes across as unprofessional and won’t set you up for success.
Use a high-quality profile photo. Whether you’re uploading a picture of yourself or your logo, you want to use a high-quality photo.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to hire a professional photographer, but you should make every attempt to upload a great picture.
If your business is in the fun and kids entertainment space, your picture will be very different than if you own a personal finance business.
Write a compelling “About” section. Your “About” section is where you tell the story of your business.
It’s where you communicate what you’re all about and what matters most to you. You want your About section to be both compelling and concise.
What is it that you do that sets you apart from everyone else? What do you want your customers to know about you or your business that you think will resonate well with them?
Upload a high-quality cover photo. Almost every social media platform allows you to upload a cover photo.
The cover photo spans the top of your social media profile and sits behind your profile photo.
Just like your profile picture, try to have some sort of consistent message, how you come across to your visitors is very important.
Here are some other recommendations to help you optimize your profile.
Enter all your contact information. Remember, you’re trying to grow your business using social media. This means you want to make it as easy as possible for potential customers to contact you.
In the contact section, include as many possible ways to contact you as possible.
What is the message you want to put across? As you optimize your overall profile, think about how you want to represent yourself and your business online.
Your social media profile will be the first touchpoint for some potential clients, and it’s critical that your profile feel professional.
Create A Posting Schedule
Once you’ve optimized your social media profile, it’s time to map out how often you’ll be posting, as well as what you’ll be posting.
Consider creating a social media calendar in which you map out what you will post each day during a given time period (week, month, year).
This calendar will include what you’re going to post, as well as when you’ll post it, to what social media platform, etc.
NOTE: A good idea is to use a tool like Canva.com to create the custom images you will use to post to your social media accounts, preferably to try to batch the design work for a few weeks.
When creating your social media calendar, ask yourself the following questions:
How often will you post? Ideally, you should post at least once per day. This will keep your social media profile active and show your followers that you’re engaged on social media.
What sort of content will you post? Your business will shape the types of content you share.
When it comes to determining the types of content you’re going to post, think of what will add the most value to your audience.
What formats will you use? The most effective businesses utilize a variety of formats on social media. They use text, images, videos, polls, quizzes, and more.
Be sure to switch it up and post a mix of formats to keep your audience engaged.
If you’re struggling to figure out what to post, you may want to use a tool such as Feedly, Pocket App or any other online tools that can give you inspiration on what to post.
I personally use both of those tools to curate interesting articles that I can comment on and share with my audience.
Two reasons why you should utilize a social media calendar:
- First, it helps you be consistent with your posting. One of the biggest challenges that business owners face when using social media is being consistent.
- Second, using a social media calendar “forces” you to be active on social media. In other words, you can’t use the excuse of not knowing what to post.
Begin Posting on Social Media
Once you’ve created your social media content calendar, it’s time to begin posting on social media.
If you want to win new clients and satisfy your existing ones, consistently post things that will add value to your audience.
You’re not just posting to post. Rather you’re trying to provide your audience with high-value information that will help them live their best life possible.
Your posts should help your audience:
- Think about something in a new way
- Take action like they never have
- Laugh or smile
- Learn something valuable
Consider posting things like:
- Inspirational quotes
- Tips and tactics
- Tutorial videos
- Live videos
- Pictures that will motivate your audience
- And more
When creating your content calendar and posting on social media, constantly ask yourself the following question:
Is this adding value to my audience? If it is, then post it. If you don’t think it will add much value to your audience, then don’t post it.
If you’re not sure which types of content add the most value to your audience, try experimenting with different formats.
You might find that videos perform better than photos, or that your audience really likes tutorials and tips.
You may be thinking, I don’t have time to constantly be posting!
Using a tool like Buffer or Hootsuite, you can actually schedule weeks, or even months, of posts in advance.
NOTE: We use SocialPilot to manage our social media calendar and posting schedule, we think the price is reasonable, the support staff is great, the features are great, and we’re very happy with it.
Engage With Your Followers
The real power of social media is that it creates conversations between you and your followers. At least, it should create conversations.
Remember the “social” in social media, which is fundamentally built on the desire to have conversations across the world with like-minded individuals.
Hence, using social media to engage in conversations with potential clients is the key to ultimately getting more clients through social media.
If you want to build relationships and gain clients through social media, you need to be having conversations, not just publishing new content.
You want to authentically engage with your followers.
Another reason to engage with followers is that social media platforms tend to prioritize the posts with the most engagement.
The posts with the most likes, comments, shares, and overall engagement get shown more frequently than those posts with very little engagement.
It’s important to regularly, consistently engage with your followers. Respond to comments, answer questions, solve problems, and more.
What are some ways that you can create conversations with your followers?
- Ask questions.
- Do live videos in which you talk directly with your audience.
- Conduct polls.
- Ask people to comment on a specific topic.
- Make statements that will get people talking (just be careful about being too controversial).
Focus on being as real and authentic as possible on social media and you’re guaranteed to create conversations with your followers.
Follow The Right People
In the business world, there are hundreds of thousands of people putting out content daily. Of course, is impossible to effectively follow all of them and consume their content.
This is why is important that you ONLY follow a handful of individuals and companies that are in your direct industry and truly put out amazing content.
If you own a gym, follow and engage with trainers and companies in your space only, not financial advisors or veterinarians, focus your efforts on the ones that will add value to you and your audience.
If you’re a life coach, try to connect with other life coaches.
Once you’ve started following them, interact with the material they share online. Comment on it, repost it and share it with your own followers.
Additionally, consider being part of groups that are related to your industry.
Both Facebook and LinkedIn have robust group features, and there are literally millions of groups about every subject imaginable.
When you join a group, focus on adding value, not promoting yourself.
As you follow influencers in your industry and take part in groups, take note of the valuable information that others are sharing.
What sorts of posts do others share that resonate deeply with you? This is the kind of content that you want to be sharing with your audience.
In addition to joining online groups, there are also several platforms that focus heavily on answering questions that are posted by users.
For example, Quora lets any user post a question and then other users try to answer that question.
Use Hashtags
I’m sure you know what hashtags are, but just in case…Hashtags are words with the “#” symbol before them. For example, #MondayMotivation or #CrossfitLife.
Hashtags are used as a way of grouping posts by subject.
For example, if you search on Instagram for the hashtag #SocialMediaMarketing, you will see a list of ALL the posts that have been posted on Instagram using that hashtag.
In other words, if you add a hashtag to a post, it will be grouped with all the other posts people have made using that hashtag.
If you see a post with a hashtag, you can click on that hashtag and see all the other posts with the same hashtag.
Some sites, such as Twitter, highlight the most popular hashtags, giving you a sense of what’s trending at any given time. You can also follow hashtags to regularly see posts with a given hashtag.
The power of hashtags is that they allow you to get your content in front of a broader audience. By adding the appropriate hashtags, you can get them seen by thousands, if not millions, of people.
How exactly do you use hashtags?
Typically, it works like this…You create a social media post, and at the end of the post, you add a hashtag that is somehow related to the post.
Here’s an example post to put it into perspective: “Before you do any Crossfit workout, spend at least ten minutes getting warmed up and stretched out. #Crossfit #CrossfitLife #CrossfitWorkout”
One thing to be careful about. If your hashtags aren’t really related to the content of your post, there’s a chance you could turn people away from you.
As much as possible, keep your hashtags closely related to the content you’re posting, and don’t go crazy using a dozen or more hashtags, only use the ones that are truly relevant to that specific post.
Experiment With Different Ideas
If you truly want to succeed on social media, you’ll need to experiment to see what works best. Different types of content will resonate with your audience.
You may find that videos work really well while inspirational quotes don’t perform as well.
Experimentation is especially critical since social media platforms are constantly changing. Currently, Facebook gives preference to posts that keep people on their site, such as videos.
But this could change. In the future, Facebook may give preference to some other type of content.
Be constantly testing to see what works most effectively. You’ll discover what adds the most value to your audience.
Then, you can post more of this type of content to generate significantly more engagement.
It ends up being a virtuous cycle that helps you connect with more and more people on social media.
Conclusion
Social media is always evolving, what worked last week may not necessarily work as well anymore, so you need to always stay on top of the latest changes and applying them to your marketing efforts.
If you have something that will benefit our readers, please share your thoughts on the comment section below.
