As a small business owner you are probably bogged down with the day-to-day running of your businesses. The things that are going to bring in money – clients. Being on the phone, working with clients 1:1, doing the actual thing you went into business to do.
You know social media is important to the future of your business, and to reach new customers daily and easily.
But you have no idea where to start, what you should focus on, what is most important and how to execute it all to actually get a return on your time.
Maybe you procrastinate and save it for another day when you aren’t so busy, or have some free time.
You might feel you don’t know enough about social media, but here is the thing, if you are a business owner, you know about social media. I’ll bet you have networked, reached out to people, talked to customers, know your audience, and what they want, need and fear. Right?
Social media is just a place to talk to your customers. A place to spark up discussions, reach your customer and talk to them, answer their questions, ask them what they want to know. This right here is half the battle. Don’t know what to talk about? Ask them…
Unlike a billboard plastered to the masses who are multitasking while driving, and very possibly NOT your ideal customer, social media is a post targeted to your people. Whether it’s a quick fun one-liner, or a deeper dive into your message. The better part is that you get feedback, whereas on a billboard you never know if you are truly making a difference and hitting your mark.
Instead of a newspaper ad reaching newspaper readers who, again, may not even been in your target audience, social media is an image or video talking to and specifically targeting YOUR audience.
Social media is the same game but so much better. Better reach, better targeting, better conversation, and feedback.
So social media needs to be a priority in every business. Stop setting it aside. Sit down take 10 minutes and do one task I list below, even if you don’t finish it, just start. Anything to get moving in a forward direction. That doesn’t mean you need a perfect strategy in place, or to have every moving part of it ready to go. It means – DOING ONE THING. EACH DAY.
- Set up your Facebook Page.
- Make sure your Facebook Page has all of your business contact information. Make sure your personal Facebook Page has a link in your about section to your business page.
- Make a list of things you can talk about on social media.
- Make a list of goals for social media – do you want to build brand awareness, get more customers, get active and engaged followers, do you want to educate your audience (show them how or why you do what you do), give your audience a look behind the scenes of your business, get them to like you or understand why they need you? Anything you want to get across to your audience, list that.
- Make a list of the platforms your customers are most likely to use. Hint: Facebook has over 2 Billion users – 1.3 Billion log in daily; Instagram has 700 Million users – 400 million log in daily; Twitter has 328 Million users – 100 million daily users. So pick based on where your customers likely hangs out. Pro Tip: Your customer IS on Facebook…this i your #1 platform. I know it seems like the younger generations are on Instagram or Snapchat, but they are on Facebook too. Now for the secondary platform. It might be Instagram if you target to those under 35, same with Twitter, the younger generations use these platforms a lot as well. And it depends on your product, if you provide a product or service that benefits from visual content, Instagram is the platform. If your are interested in posting lost of content and articles and things to read or follow along with, twitter might be the place for you. If you are interested in Business to Business LinkedIn might be your 2nd platform.
- People are using Facebook to find businesses, like they would a search engine. This is where people are finding customers, building communities, selling digital products and courses, and selling! Be on Facebook! Are you seeing the pattern – Facebook First!
- Create a photo folder on your computer labeled “For Social Media” and start saving images to it.
- Practice shooting a video – film something in your shop, share screen a project you are working on, talk about a product in your market. Practice a video. Then post it.
No sugar coating, there are a lot of steps to getting a social media strategy in place (the above list only accounts for a few things that you need to do), but if you do one small thing each day, you’ll have a pretty good start. And before you know it you’ll be posting regularly and getting feedback from YOUR people regularly.
Which leads us to our next topic What should you be focusing on?
What are the top drivers you should be focused on when it comes to your social media strategy for your small business:
- Who your customer is, what they want to see or hear.
- How your service/offer/product ties into what they want or need.
- Call to actions in EVERY PIECE OF CONTENT YOU PUT ON SOCIAL MEDIA.
- A regular schedule to post: always include images, text posts do not get much engagement. Grab an image, if you can take a photo of a behind the scenes shot, and include it with your post, that’s gold. Create a video of what is going on behind the scenes or answering a common question. Or providing a tip to something you always have to educate your customers on when they come in your door. For example, are you or your employees repeating the same thing to every client? Make a video providing the answer or information.
I am not going to go into technicalities of analytics and ads and other strategies. Start with this basic strategy to give you the most bang for your buck. The small things you can be doing each day to grow your audience, create buzz around your brand and engage people.
MAKE IT EASY. Don’t worry about the details, follow the advice above to get started…then take the next step. For now, one step at a time.
Still don’t feel like you have the time or resources for this, you can always consider hiring a social media manager, like myself, to do the job for you. Let’s set up a call click the button below.
