Hey you awesome business owners, how has your week been? Are you looking forward to a long bank holiday weekend? To be fair, at the moment there isn’t a lot of difference to many of us, but hey the sun is shining and I get to spend an extra day with my yummy husband, so that’s awesome!
I want to talk to you about social media and how to jazz up your accounts. The majority of business owners have business pages for their social media and the main ones used are Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest. I want to talk to you about the first three as they are my favorites, or at least the three I use the most. I hope to give you a few hints and tips which might help you boss your content.
Consistency
For all you fabulous business owners who want to make your social media sparkle, it’s important to be consistent. You need to have regular good quality content going out. There’s no point being sporadic and posting 3 times one week and then nothing for a month, consistency is key. That’s why you need to set time aside in your schedule to take care of your social media. As a rule you should be posting a minimum of 3 times a week, but more if possible and you can expect for it to take a couple of months to see any results.
Imagery
Next is the images that go with your content. The majority of posts perform better and have increased engagement when they have an eye catching image with them. It’s always better to use your own images done by a professional, however I know that budget can be an issue and if you can’t hire a photographer to do this for you now, then spend time taking photos on a camera or your phone, edit the lighting, crop them and make them look completely awesome and then keep a library of them. For the occasion when one of your images just won’t do, then spend time gathering good quality stock images. Good sources for these are Pixabay and Pexels. They are both free to use and the images are not watermarked. Lastly get to know Canva. You can use it to keep your social media graphics in line with your brand and again it supports the previous point of consistency. Stick to the same colours and fonts and then create some templates that you can rotate. Go look at my Instagram or Facebook for examples. If you aren’t creative or would struggle with this I can help.
Timing
Did you know that the time of day that you post can effect your engagement and reach. Think about it this way, what time of day would your target audience be online and scrolling through social media? For a café it maybe 11am just before lunch, for a bar it maybe evening, for business owners looking to outsource it might be part of their working day. Some of the social media platforms actually let you see what time your audience is online in your analytics. At the moment the prime time for Facebook and Instagram is around 11am, this has changed recently and possibly due to Covid19 and more people being at home. LinkedIn is different and you will need to find what works for your audience.
Scheduling tools
If you want to boss your content and support the first three points (especially consistency) then scheduling your content is essential for most (not all) businesses. Chances are when you are being super awesome carrying out work for your fabulous client’s, you haven’t got time to stop and quickly write a social media post. Chances are if you do, you won’t spend time thinking about good quality content and the images that go with it. With scheduling tools you can write your content and schedule it to go out over days, weeks or months. There are lots out there such as Hootsuite, which is one of the more expensive ones, however you have everything under one roof, or Later. You can use Creator Studio for Facebook and Instagram, which is free and Postfity is the one I have used for LinkedIn. Scheduling my content means I know I have content going out regularly, whether I have time during the week or not. Of course I post ad hoc when I think something is worth posting, but I always have consistent content going out a minimum of 3 times a week. It is always better to post directly to that platform, so if you can use Facebook Scheduling Tools that’s better, but it takes a little longer to copy the content from one place to another.
For me I do this once a month, I will spend a couple of hours planning content, writing it, designing the graphics to go with it, sourcing images or uploading my own, researching hashtags and scheduling the content to go out. For my client’s, I usually do a couple of weeks in advance. Put it in your diary as an essential task, like you would your bookkeeping, emails to clients and basic admin.
Contribution
This is as important, if not more than posting and having content going out regularly. Most social media platforms, particularly LinkedIn and Facebook want you to engage with other people’s content and be a contributing member of their community. What I mean by this is take the time to go through your feed, read other people’s content and comment on the ones that interest you. Don’t just ‘like’, actually write a comment. It is a social media platform after all, so be social. If you take time to comment and interact with others, not only will they make an effort to do the same for you, but it will make your content more visible to your audience. The platform sees you are contributing and making an effort, therefore they will let more people see your content.
Content
You want to boss your content, you want it to be interesting, informative, relevant, sound like you and most importantly be so scrumptious that the people reading it want to eat it up. I spend time sitting down and planning the subjects to my posts way in advance – I have 6 months worth sat on my spreadsheet at the moment – boom!
Think about your ideal client, what would they like to read, what would engage them, would they appreciate a bit of humour, maybe some emojis, or how about a link to an interesting article? Make your content relevant to what you are doing, so look through your diary and see what have you got going on? Are you zooming, or networking next week, do you have a really interesting project coming up, are you launching a new product or service, can you offer useful hints and tips, what’s going on in your business right now? And remember that time old saying people buy people, so yes your pages are to promote your business, but people want to know the person behind the business too. What makes your business unique is YOU! You are an awesome sparkly rainbow unicorn so let them know that. When planning your content have 80% work related and 20% personal.
Hashtags
Hashtags can make a real difference on the right platform. This is important, on LinkedIn and Instagram #’s can improve the visibility of your post and the engagement on it, on Facebook not so much. For LinkedIn the ultimate number of #’s to use is 3 and make sure they are relevant to your post and what you do. For Instagram you can have up to 30 #’s. Spend time researching hashtags on Instagram, see which ones have bigger followers, which ones are trending and use a variety of the most used ones Vs some lesser uses ones. Think of it this way, if you only used ‘#love’, which is one of the most used hashtags on Instagram, then you will fall into a see of 1.8 billion other posts and fade into the background and darling you were born to sparkle! So use a mix of frequently used ones and other relevant ones. If you can put the #’s into the comments great, however you can’t schedule this.
Right you gorgeous lot, that’s my contributions for this week, I could literally write you a massive essay on hints and tips to support your social media. If you feel like you need a little help with yours, or feel like you have had an information overload after reading this then get in touch. I offer fully serviced and management social media support, or I can help you by giving you a one off social media audit for the totally bargain price of £150, just drop me an email hello@cherryblossommanagement.co.uk
Now go forth and boss your content!
