This blog post contains the transcription of a free virtual Lunch & Learn we hosted in December 2023 titled, “Building an Impactful Social Media Strategy.” You can view all of our upcoming webinars here.
Top Social Media Tips
Who are the Top Experts to Know?
Marnely Murray is a marketing consultant on Martha’s Vineyard with her company, Shored Up Digital, that she runs with her business partner, Angela Prout. Their clients consist of brands based on Martha’s Vineyard and throughout New England as well as national food brands.
Bob Cargill is an adjunct professor, a copywriter, content creator, social media consultant and public speaker who has worked for some 500 or so different clients over the years.
Leia Owen is a Marketing & Business consultant that brings a collaborative approach to helping entrepreneurs and small business owners increase leads and sales, generate local awareness, grow their businesses, and get time back to spend on what they are most passionate about.
Where Should Business Owners Start When It Comes to Social Media?
Have a bank of content. People want to jump into starting their platforms, but you need a lot of visuals for those platforms. Build a library of content that is already high resolution edited photos and videos.
Identify your goals or objectives. Why are you here in the first place? What is the point of being on social media for your business, and how does that tie back to your overall revenue goals and goals for your business? That will help determine where you want to show up on social media.
Additionally, identify your target audience. Figure out specifically who are you trying to talk to and where they show up most frequently.
Don’t forget to listen and learn. Rather than posting right away, find where your audience is learn from them, figure out the tools, and understand the platform so that when you do have that bank of content, you’re ready to go.
See what your competitors are doing and understand what really works for them.
How Do You Know Which Social Media Platforms to Use?
Use native search tools. Most of the major platforms allow you to pretty quickly find names of your clients. You can also use hashtags and keywords and do native search on all the platforms. That’s free, at no cost to you. Listen and learn. You probably will find that your customers, your clients, your prospects aren’t on all the channels, but once you find out where they are, then that’s where you focus and start following them. Hopefully, they follow you back. A lot of them will.
Educate yourself in the platforms themselves. There’s a lot of demographic data that you can find that’s gathered by large companies like Hootsuite or Buffer that collect all this information.
Additionally, some of the platforms put it out themselves that tell you who their users are.
You don’t have to show up on every platform consistently, but you should reserve your business name on every site as soon as you get started. The bigger you get and the more you get noticed, the more likely it is that someone else might try to use the name. It may also not be available on all platforms and you want to have uniformity between all of your different handles, so find something that works on all of those sites and reserve it immediately. And then a year from now, three years from now, when you feel comfortable branching into that new site, you have that account ready to go.
The platforms you use might end up changing over time as your audience changes. You might end up adding on a new target audience and kind of serving a few different groups of people, or you might change who you’re targeting altogether.
What Types of Content Should Business Owners Focus On?
Anything that is relatable is going to perform the best. Additionally, show the faces behind your brand. Give an inside look into behind the scenes of what goes on where you work and who the people are, as that allows your audience to get to know you. The more they get to know you, the more you’ve earned their trust and people are more likely to do business with you. Short form video content is a great way to do this. Take video as often as possible. Take pictures, write things down, dictate into your phone, and create that bank of content that shows your business the human side of your business. That’s the “social” in “social media,” and you want to take full advantage of that and use it for why it exists. That’s to engage with people and to be human and be ourselves.
Follow the 80/20 principle with your content. One in every five posts can be sales based. The other 80 percent should be humanizing, storytelling, relatable, and some brand awareness too if you’re just starting out and you want to get the word out about what you offer.
But it is social media, right? So, you wouldn’t walk into a room and start telling people, “I have a promo going on right now, 20 percent off, buy right now!” You want to say, “Here’s who I am, here’s how we can connect, here’s how I can help you, and here’s the problem that I solve.” Focus on sharing that type of content. That’s the most important, and that would be that 80 percent of what you’re putting out there. There are a lot of resources online to find different content ideas. Answer the Public is a great site.
What are people asking about? What do people want to know? What conversations are you having out in the world? You can conduct market research that way and use that to inform your content as well. That way, you’re providing valuable information that people really want to hear about rather than existing in a vacuum and thinking about things from scratch or coming up with things on the fly.
Come up with content pillars, those overarching themes, that can really help to make it easier for you to then be able to think of what social media posts that you’d like to write from there.
How Do You Grow Your Social Media Presence?
Show up consistently on the same platform on a regular basis. The key to growing your account really is engaging, and there’s two types of engagements you can do. There’s inbound, which is what everybody thinks of when they think of engagement, in terms of replying to messages and responding to and liking comments. That’s hugely important, but to really grow your following, what you want to do is called outbound engagement. That’s finding your target audience and interacting with them, that’s finding complimentary brands and partners, referral sources that you work with and engaging with their content as well. That includes replying to comments on their posts, commenting on other people’s reels, sharing things to your stories, reposting on LinkedIn with your thoughts, and recommending things. Those are huge. We don’t talk about outbound engagement enough, but just a couple of comments a day on other people’s posts will really help grow your account, regardless of what platform you’re on.
What we should do on social media is what we do in person. Call people out, give them shoutouts, praise them, and support them, and it will come back to you.
t also takes time. It’s a marathon. People think growth is going to be something that happens overnight, but it takes time. Be patient with it. Engage with others and support them. If you engage with people who have a great deal more followers than you, and then they happen to tag you, that’s going to work in your favor.
Link up with other people, but make sure it’s a good fit and that it makes sense. Collaborate with them, start talking to them, start supporting their content, and see if they’ll do the same for you.
How Do You Know If Your Social Media Strategy Is Working?
The great thing about these platforms is that they’re so data driven, so you can really see these numbers. Content that will resonate and work will also feel good to you in a sense. That’s not data driven, but you need to be creating content that you feel good about.
Check your metrics monthly. You’ll want to see an upward trend of your reach, your followers, and your engagement.
Which Tools and Softwares Are Great to Use?
Meta Business Suite is free, and you can schedule posts to Facebook and Instagram and Stories. You can schedule reels and videos to Facebook. You can do it all in one place and see your calendar. Later, Coschedule, Buffer, HootSuite, and Sprout are other options as well.
Slack is great for communicating with your team and / or clients, and Canva is a huge help when it comes to designing graphics.
If you’re looking for tools for video content, CapCut, VEED, and Descript all provide closed captioning and help you edit videos.
What are the Benefits of Working with an Expert Rather Than DIYing?
They give you kind of feedback that you might not be seeing because you’re in it so much every day. That insight is invaluable to a business because they’re going to hear suggestions they never would have thought of themselves.
By working with someone, you can leverage their experience and expertise, in addition to saving a lot of time. That’s a big one. People are hesitant to spend money on it, but how much time and money do you save by giving it to someone that does it in half that time?
What is Some Additional Advice for Someone Getting Started with Their Social Media?
Take a step back and see what you did in the last year that performed really well. On the opposite end, look at what didn’t perform well, and use all of that information to plan what to do moving forward.
Being authentic and flexible are important as well.
As a business owner, come down from your ivory towers! Speak to your customers, listen to your customers, and engage with them. Get on social, listen to people, learn from them, engage with them, and start sharing about your own business and yourself. It’s going to benefit you.
Resources for Massachusetts Businesses
Amplifying Your Presence with Massachusetts Business Network
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