There are many great social media marketing resources that adequately explain the various networks and how to use them. Unfortunately, they don’t do a very good job explaining how to make a daily social media plan incorporating several platforms.
If you’re struggling with social media, here are tips to making a plan that is effective without taking too much time.
Part One: Pre-Planning Your Social Media Strategy
Before you start tweeting and pinning your home business, you need to make sure your profiles are promo-ready, and that you know what results you want from social media. The first step is to visit each of the social networks you use and make sure you’ve:
1) Uploaded an appropriate picture. Unless you make bathing suits or sell travel services in your home business, a picture of you in a bikini at Cancun probably won’t work. Consider your business and audience then choose a photo that fits the image you want to portray. A photo of you will be more appealing than your logo, although you want to consider your brand image and what you want people to remember. Make sure it’s a good quality photo, which doesn’t mean it has to be taken by a professional, but it should have good resolution.
2) Completed the major profile sections. On some sites, you can get away with not filling out everything, such as your favorite movies. But you should complete all the sections that are important to your business. Each platform varies on how much info you can provide, but at the very least you should have your name and business name, website URL, and short bio of your business. If you can add other social networks or important business information, include that as well.
3) Followed influencers in your industry.Social media isn’t just about people following you, it’s about you following others, as well. Start by connecting with people who you admire or enjoy, particularly in your home business industry. Share their top content, and respond to their posts with the purpose of developing a relationship.
4) Integrate social media tools on your website or blog. At a minimum, you should have links to your profiles on every page of your website so that your visitors can follow you, plus social media share buttons so they can share your content with their followers. However, there are many other great tools you can use to save time and increase results.
5) Decide what results you want from social media. Ultimately, your goal is to have sales or clients, but posting “buy my stuff”or "hire me" all the time doesn’t work and, in fact, will result in losing followers. Instead, think about what you can post that can ultimately lead to sales, such as increasing website traffic or getting email subscribers. Some social media posting goals might be to:
1) Increase readership of your blog.
2) Get more email subscribers.
3) Find more followers across other social media sites (i.e. promoting a Facebook fan page on your Twitter feed).
4) Increase influence (credibility and expertise) with your target market.
5) Built rapport with your target market (i.e. showing you’re fun or friendly).
Every social media post you make should have an end goal result attached to it. So if you post the URL of your most recent blog article, the goal might be to increase readership and influence, and to build rapport.
Part Two: Sharing on Social Media
When it comes to social media, you have two jobs:
- Share stuff to meet your goals above
- Engage with others.
First, we’ll cover sharing.
Sharing Your Content
The challenge in social media sharing is in maximizing your exposure. This is hard because each platform is different. Some limit the number of characters (Twitter) and others involve primarily graphics (Pinterest or Instagram). Here are easy steps to planning your sharing strategy:
1) Decide what you're sharing.
Are you sharing a blog post, email sign up list, giveaway, inspiration, etc. In your planning, you should have a variety of things to share. For example, you can share new blog posts, reshare old posts, promote your newsletter, and cross-promote across social media (i.e. share Pinterest feed on Facebook).
2) Decide how you'll share it.
Will you simply post a text? Are you taking a selfie and adding a text overlay? Is it a video? While text can work, most platforms accept or do best with a graphic. There are many places to find free and low-cost graphics. Once you have the graphic you want to use, you need to edit it for posting.
The difficulty in using graphics is that each network has its own recommended size, and often those change. Resources such as Canva (which offers free and paid graphics as well) or Picmonkey make designing graphics for social media easy. Just select the platform you're wanting a picture for (i.e. Facebook) and the right size template will be provided. Next, add the image and any text you want such as the title of or a quote from your blog post, or an inspirational saying.
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