First things first you must have a social media plan of action. If you don’t already have a Facebook page, Twitter account, or even an Instagram account now is the time to create one of each. Remember before you leap headfirst into your social media postings, you need to have a solid plan laid out because time is money, and if you waste that time, you’ve lost serious money while you’re using free social media sites. Not a good plan. So slow down and read on.
You must have a clear goal set to measure your achievements in your social media endeavors so you can gauge whether you're successful in your social media posts and whether you’re getting a good quality return on your investment. List your goals first before starting a social media campaign. Your goals should be following the SMART Framework style. SMART means Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. Don’t just try to rack up likes for your social media posts or accounts, while those are awesome, you want to acquire customers who will buy your products not just like what you post up on your accounts. That’s how you truly measure your success with sales that render funding to support your business and yourself.
Check out your competition, what are they posting and how are they posting. Are they posting at specific times of day, or on certain days of the week? Learning what others are doing in the same type of business will help you understand the learning curves you need to overcome.
Find Inspiration that will help you inspire potential clients and offer them the opportunity to obtain your products and services. Don’t just give away information without getting paid for it. Give them just a little taste of your knowledge, then invite them to contact you for more at a price.
A social media Calendar would help you stay on track with your goals and aspirations. Your Calendar will help you to know when to post certain items or information to your pages. Use the old 80-20 rule to inform, 80%v should be to educate and entertain your potential client base, and 20 percent to promote your brand or sell specific products.
Know your demographics before you start posting on certain social media sites. For example, most people on TikTok are 18-24-year-olds along with Facebook who are also 18-24-year-olds, while Twitter is 35-65-year-olds although Facebook is becoming more and more popular among this same age group. Doesn’t matter what platform you think would be a good fit for your business, you will need to do some research on your own before you start posting to anything. You need to understand which hashtags you should use, what symbols you should use with everything, and how to micro-target your audience with your posts. So what is a hashtag, well it’s a word or phrase preceded by the symbol # that classifies or categorizes the accompanying text and when used on social media platforms can target certain audience members based on your hashtag #word. For example, if you’re mentioning a specific person by using # (hashtag) plus their name as one word, those who want to follow that celebrity will receive your post even if they aren’t following you. When you want to micro-target a specific audience age group you can do research into say who buys original art content or who follows the art world. Once you’ve narrowed down your audience you can tweet out or post out on your various platforms certain posts to encourage them to follow you. If you only sell in the United States, you’re limiting yourself to only that audience, broaden your audience to include Canada and the UK, then later open up Europe, but only if you’ve researched the shipping cost industry for your products.
Once you’re used to analyzing the research data of how to understand each platform, you can use one for gaining new knowledge, another for customer service issues or comments, and another for prospective new clients and possible sales. There are paid platforms that can help with this type of analysis such as Hootsuite. Hootsuite is a paid platform that allows you to preschedule hundreds of posts to various types of social media platforms by a calendar schedule. It used to be free and very helpful, but the costs do not warrant getting it unless you’ve got the funds to waste until your company takes off. Patreon is a waste of time and money in my professional opinion. Not everyone you know is eager to sponsor a new business or even an established one, so stay away from them. Don’t do a GoFundMe page either unless you are producing a product that needs manufacturing and beware you will need to pay heavy taxes on the money raised. So be mindful, and talk to a CPA before using either Patreon or GoFundMe in the future.
Once you’re established run a contest offering a free item within your brand, or how about raffle tickets for a specific item to help raise funds to support your company. Mention a customer or powerbroker within your network in one or two of your posts thanking them for their shout-out messages, or just because they're awesome. Use your imagination and build a great brand and social media presence. Good luck.
Author Elizabeth Kilbride is a former political operative, author, scriptwriter, historian, and journalist. business professional, creative artist, and life coach consultant. Ms. Kilbride holds a master’s in criminology and a BS in Business Management she stepped out of the loop for a while but is now back with a powerful opinion and voice in the direction of this country and our economy. As a life coach, she is available to counsel individuals to enjoy their dreams and a better life. Ms. Kilbride loves to travel and photograph her surroundings and is also a gourmet cook who loves to garden and preserve food for the winter months.
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