Social marketing via media is a great method of promoting your company. It’s cheap, simple and most of the time it’s enjoyable.
The issue with social networks is it’s too large and cumbersome and it can be difficult to keep track of the results.
There are a lot of great social media marketing tools that provide a thorough explanation of the different platforms and the best ways to use them. However, they do not provide a thorough job explaining how to create a weekly social media plan that incorporates multiple platforms.
If you’re having trouble in the world of social media, here are some suggestions for creating a strategy that’s effective without spending excessive time.
Part One: Pre-Planning Your Social Media Strategy
Before you begin tweeting or pin your business’s home page You must ensure your accounts are ready for promotion, and you’re aware of the results you’re hoping to get with social media. It is the first thing to check every social network that you use and verifies you’ve got:
1) Upload a suitable image. Unless you make bathing suits or sell travel services through your home-based business, an image of you wearing bikinis at Cancun likely won’t be a good idea. Think about your audience and business and then select a picture that is appropriate for the image you wish to convey. A picture of yourself will appear more appealing than your logo. However, you should think about your branding appearance along with what would like people to be able to remember. Make sure that it’s a top image, but that does not mean it has to have been taken by an expert however, it must be of a high resolution.
2.) Completed the main section of your profile. On some sites, it is possible to avoid completing all of the sections like your most-loved films. However, you should fill in every section that is crucial to your company. Every platform is different in terms of the amount of information you are able to give however at the minimum, you must include your name and your company’s name along with the URL for your website, as well as a short description of your company. If you have the option of adding other social media or other important business information, you should include that too.
3.) Followed influential people in your field. Social media isn’t only about following people and being a follower of others as well. Begin by connecting with those whom you admire or like especially in your home-based business sector. Post their most popular content and then respond to their posts with the intention of building a relationship.
4.) Incorporate social media platforms onto your blog or website. At a minimum, you should include hyperlinks to your social media profiles on every page on your website to allow your users to follow you. You should also have social media share buttons to ensure that users can also share content with their friends. There are additional great tools you could make use of to speed up the process and improve outcomes. Like, for example, putting a “Click to Tweet” option in your blog articles (you can make use of the Click-to-Tweet generator or a WordPress plugin – look up the directory of your plugin) will make it easier for users to follow your posts. Incorporating Facebook comments into your WordPress blog can boost interaction with your customers.
There are many plugins available for WordPress that will aid in streamlined posting on social networks, like CoSchedule along with Social Warfare. If you do not use WordPress you can find additional Social media marketing tools that you could use based on the needs of your business and the platforms you are using. These include Hootsuite Buffer, Social Oomph, Smarter Queue, and many more. If you’re primarily focused on Pinterest as well as Instagram, Tailwind is a great option too.
5.) Choose the outcomes you’d like to achieve with social media. The ultimate goal is to make sales or gain clients however, using the hashtags “buy my stuff” or “hire me” every day does not work and, in reality, could result in the loss of followers. Instead consider what you could do to result in sales, like growing traffic to your website or getting customers to sign up for your email. One of the goals for social media posting could be:
1.) Enhance the readership of your blog.
2) Get more email subscribers.
3.) Get more followers on other social media websites (i.e. by promoting your Facebook fan page through Twitter feed).
4.) Improve influence (credibility and experience) in your market.
5) Build relationships with your intended market (i.e. showing that you’re friendly or fun).
Each social media post you post should have an end consequence associated with it. If you share an URL to your latest blog post, your goal could be to boost readership and influence and also to create a relationship.
Part Two Social Media
In the realm of social media, there are two responsibilities:
- Make sure you share things to help you meet your goals.
- Engage with other people.
Then, we’ll discuss sharing.
Share Your Content
The difficulty in social media sharing is maximizing your reach. This can be difficult as each platform is unique. Certain platforms limit the number of users (Twitter) and some rely on mostly images (Pinterest and Instagram). Here are a few easy steps to plan your strategy for sharing:
1) Determine what information you’re sharing.
Are you sharing your blog post, an email list of the sign-ups giveaway, motivation, or others? When planning your event you must be prepared with a range of items to communicate. For instance, you could post new blog content and re-share old ones and promote your newsletter, and cross-promote across social networks (i.e. post a link to your Pinterest feeds via Facebook).
2) Decide on the way you’ll communicate it.
Are you going to send a text message? Do you take a selfie and overlay a text? Are you using video? While the text may work, however, the majority of platforms prefer to use graphics. There are a lot of places to locate free and low-cost graphic designs. After you’ve got the image you wish to use, you will need to modify it before posting.
The problem with using graphics is that each social network has its own size guidelines and these can change frequently. Tools like Canva (which provides both paid and free graphics too) or Picmonkey help you create images for social media simple. Simply select the social media platform you’d like to design a photo for (i.e. Facebook) then the correct dimension template is supplied. Then, you can insert the image along with any other text you wish to include like the title of or the title of your blog post, or a motivational quote.
If you wish to use any image on multiple different platforms it is necessary to adjust the size to accommodate. Canva provides resizing as a paid-for service. It is also possible to make use of an image resizer, such as the one available at Sprout Social or Internet Marketing Ninjas to crop and alter your images to fit on every platform you’re using.
3.) Share the post with your networks during the time of posting.
Start getting attention for your article by making it up and running when it’s done.
4) Repost the content in the coming days.
It’s not necessary to share your content only once, and then forget it when you come up with new content. You can instead republish the same content over and over. For instance, you could Tweet your favorite blog quotes and include a link to the blog post every day for the three days following. Then, you could publish it once per month.
When you are posting make sure you don’t over-post to specific networks. For instance, you could manage to post a large number of tweets (various types of content, not only your posts) per day, but it’s not a good idea to do this on LinkedIn where excessive posting could be a source of irritation for your followers.
Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick in their book the Art of Social Media (get the ebook , as the print edition doesn’t include URLs for all the resources they mention) suggest that people who are not social media experts post on Facebook 2-3 every day, Google+ 3-4 times, LinkedIn 1 time, Pinterest 6 times, and Twitter 8-12 times per daily. The numbers increase for those who are hard-core users.
Last but not least, remember to plan content for your fans on the opposite side of the globe, especially on Twitter to make them more likely to be able to view it.
5) Create a calendar or another documented plan.
Ruth Soukup of Elite Blogging Academy and LivingWellSpendingLess.com has a color-coded spreadsheet for Pinterest on which she has scheduled what pins are posted to what group boards when. That’s not even counting Pinterest!
The use of a calendar for social media can help you remember when you need to post and determine what you should publish. There are tools on social media that allow you to create a schedule for posts. For instance, you could create a blog post that will be shared every month for 6 months on all of your social media platforms. Certain tools for social media, like CoSchedule or Smarter Queue have automated reposting options, meaning that you don’t need to change the schedule of posts manually.
6) Monitor what is working.
Google Analytics and other social media tools can tell you what posts on social media have produced results. Furthermore, your analytics will inform you what’s most popular on your blog or site and you can plan social media posts for these pages to ensure that your site is generating traffic.
Engaging in Social Media
This is an area that many small-business owners aren’t paying sufficient attention to yet is vital for the success of social media. The practice of posting content continuously while not being aware of what other people do is just as dangerous as going to a gathering and just talking about your own personal life. In addition to preparing the content for your next event, it is essential to create an approach to engaging, commenting, and sharing with other people. Here are some tips for accomplishing this.
1) Register for a tool for managing social media like Hootsuite which lets you see all your feeds all in one place and also schedule posts.
If you are using Hootsuite, add the Hootlet to your toolbar, so that you can easily share content that you have found on the internet. Utilizing a social media tool with scheduling features lets you post (including Retweets) content at various time slots, rather than posting all of it all at once. Another benefit of using the tool is that you can be a follower of the feeds and individuals you would like to interact with and cut out distractions that could distract you.
2) Choose at least two times per day to conduct Social Media Engagement.
Set aside 15 to 20 minutes per day (not including the time to prepare your posts according to the previous section). Set a timer to ensure that you don’t end with an hour spent using Pinterest as well as Facebook. The goal of this time is to interact with your followers as well as the ones you follow.
3.) Share three or four pieces of content suitable for your community.
Make use of the RSS reader like Feedly or a content curator such as AllTop to discover content within your field that your fans are likely to find interesting.
4.) Share three to four posts on social media that you have seen from those you follow (i.e. Retweets on Twitter, Pinterest Pins, or Pin).
Sharing content from other people is an effective way to convince people to share your content.
Five) Comment on 3 posts posted by your followers. Join in you “friends'” conversation.
It’s an excellent way to improve relations and increase the likelihood that your friends will be engaged and even share their experiences with you.
6) React to other users who like or comment on your blog posts.
Refusing to respond to comments that others leave on your posts is considered rude. It’s like not responding to people who are speaking to you. Nowadays, people prefer working with companies that respond, so be sure to respond to your fans.
7) Similar to other content when you see things that you like.
“Like” (Facebook) or “Favorite “Like” (Facebook), as well as the “Favorite” (Twitter) as well as other similar single-click engagement, doesn’t carry the same impact as sharing or posting comments, However, it’s still a form of the same type of engagement. “Liking” does not replace any of the two comments mentioned in the previous paragraph (#5) However, it’s in the same way as.
8) Repeat daily.
Social media isn’t a “set-it-and-forget-it task.” You must be active and post regularly. With a strategy it is possible to prevent the social networks from taking up too long and you can ensure that you’re getting the most out of it.