Social media is the go-to place for growing your business. If you don’t have at least one social media account, you’re missing a humongous opportunity.
There are tonnes of different social media sites for different purposes, the most well known being Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and Pinterest!
However, if you haven’t used social media in a business context before, this can be a daunting prospect. In this blog, I’m going to walk through a few of the most important points when setting up and running social media.
Branding
When you’re creating your social media, it needs to reflect your branding. If you’re yet to settle on a particular look for your brand, here are the basics you need.
Firstly, and probably the most fun part of it, choose a colour pallet. Here’s a tip: google ‘house colour pallet’ to get collections of colours that look good together. If you like a particular colour, like green, you can also just put ‘green colour pallet’ and it will find colours that work with green! Once you choose your colours, note down their ‘hex’ values so you can always find them again.
Then you need to choose a couple of fonts. When you’re choosing a font you should always choose ones that you like, however, some fonts have specific connotations that you should be aware of. Certain brands have used specific fonts so you may end up reminding people of them if you chose those fonts. It’s just worth googling it before you use it.
Now you’re set up with fonts and a colour scheme, use them to keep your posts all looking cohesive and ‘on brand’.
Scheduling
Once you have some great content created, you have to post it. Scheduling posts makes your life easier because you can block out a portion of time and finish it all in one go. You can plan weeks, or even a month, in advance. No more stressing about what you’re going to post on the day.
It’s also beneficial as it means you’re looking at all your content in one go so you’re more likely to post coherent content that makes sense and is varied. You should plan to post at the times your audience is most active. I use Hootsuite to do my scheduling.
Engagement
Now you’ve got your posts going out, it’s important to engage with your audience no matter what social media platform you’re on and you need to do it regularly.
The best time to engage is 15 minutes before you post and 15 minutes after. This means that the algorithm is less likely to think you’re just posting and running and therefore, show your post to more people. You should also engage with everyone’s comments and go and comment on a post on their channel too. This is a great way of building a community.
More than just engaging though, you need to be contributing quality content. If you contribute valuable content to other people, then they’re more likely to contribute valuable content to you. Which is what we want!
Community
If you’re posting content that is valuable and entertaining, you’ll quickly start to build an audience. What we want to create is a community.
To me, a community is a collective of like-minded people who support you with no ulterior motives. We’re all here for our own reasons but the least we can do is support each other with love and compassion because at the end of the day, what matters is human connection. Not money, not followers, not influence but real meaningful relationships.
Stats
It’s important to track the progress of your social media and the best way to do that is through statistics. Here are a few important ones.
Firstly, followers. You want to keep an eye of your followers and connections because this will give you an idea of what you’re doing well and what people enjoy and what’s not working so well. It also shows the progression of your profile.
Next is audience engagement. Even if you have only a few followers, what’s important is that engagement. Say you have 100 followers but get like 30 comments on each post, that’s amazing engagement and is really what you want. Concentrating on followers alone is more of a vanity number.
And finally audience information. This means, how old is your audience? What gender are they? What time are they active? This information will help you to target them better so they feel like you’re talking to them. It also means your content won’t be missed by them.
Ideas
Posting regularly to social media can be hard because the well of ideas is not endless. Here are a few tips to help when you’re stuck for ideas.
The best way I’ve found to make sure your ideas are always flowing is to separate posts into different types i.e. personal, educational and promotional. This way you can make sure you’re posting a good variety of posts and it gives you some structure too.
Next tip is to repurpose content. A lot of your older posts will not have been seen by the majority of your audience so you can easily bring them back. Or you could take the idea and update it with more information that you’ve learnt now. You can also repurpose content across social media. If you’ve posted a website blog or a Facebook post, you can bring it across and reword it for another social media.
My last tip is poaching. I know this is a controversial idea, but hear me out. You can look through other people’s feeds that you find interesting and valuable and use them as inspiration. You cannot copy them word for word as, of course, this is plagiarism. It’s about noticing what they’re posting and thinking how you could add value to that based on your own experiences.
Comparison
Finally, because we’ve talked a lot about social media I want to take a moment to talk about the dangers of comparison.
It’s easy to look at another account and think, “Wow, they’re doing so much better than me. They’re getting more likes, more engagement, more work. What’s the point in me even posting?” If this rings bells, don’t worry we’ve all been there.
If those thoughts try to sneak in, you have to be louder than them and tell yourself:
“Don’t compare your weaknesses to someone else’s strengths.”
“I am worth more than my social media numbers.”
“My story is unique and different.”
I hope these tips are helpful and make the world of social media a little less daunting! And remember, if starting up in social media feels overwhelming, just send me a message and let’s have a chat about how I could help out.
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