Small Business Talk
The Podcast to Grow your Business Faster
What Should I Post on Social?
Show Notes
Posting on social media is a constant challenge as the algorithms and rules keep changing. When posting and asking yourself what you should post, there is only 1 person you should have in mind:
Your very best customer
- Your ideal customer what are they going to find valuable?
- What would they like to see/watch here?
No matter which social platform you are thinking of, that should be your number one objective, serve your customers/your tribe.
Create Interest on Your Account
5 Ways to Create Interest on Your Account are:
1.Consistency
2.Shareable Content
3.Educational/Valuable Content
4.Branded Content
5. Ask For The Sale
Consistency
If you are a regular reader, you will have heard me talk about consistent a lot. You have to be consistent it is no point doing social if you are only going to do a post once in a while.
To grow, you need to be posting at least once a day minimum 5 days a week.
I have been following Chalene and Brock Johnson’s Instagram training (click the link to find out more) and experimenting on Instagram with increased posting. Since posting 5 posts a week over 5 days, my account has increased:
Account reach by 253%
Interactions by 198%
Followers by 1%
That is just with my increasing the quality of posting and type of posting. Now, I haven’t been as serious as I could/should be and haven’t researched new hash tags as describe in Small Business Talk Episode #092. I am already getting good results with only implementing half of the strategy. Watch this space as I put more time into it and see where I can talk it.
Facebook and LinkedIn also require consistency. Remember if you can’t be consistent with all socials, just pick one or 2 and concentrate on them. Then when you have your schedules planned there incorporate your next one. No one starts by having all the platforms mastered.
Shareable Content
What should you be sharing? Things that are already getting lots of reach. With Instagram, you can check out the top results on the hashtags that your ideal customers are using. Now, this needs to be customer focused so if you are not using the hashtags your customers are following and interested in, you need to change to them. 80% of your content on Instagram should be shareable when you are in growth mode.
Type of shareable contents are:
1. Reposting/Sharing other people’s content.
Example are:
Reposting, finding tips, tricks and hacks that your audience would find value and sharing it to your wall.
Inspirational quotes, lovely images, sayings.
For Instagram, you will need to use a 3rd party reposting app to do this and remember to always give credit to the author.
With Facebook and LinkedIn, you can share the original post.
2.Remaking, getting inspired by other people’s content and tweaking it a bit to be your own. If you remake it exactly as someone else’s remember to reference them.
You find a tip, hack o inspiring quote but the colours are too loud for your brand image or the language might not suit your tone. In these example, you can remake the info in your colours and tone. Remember to credit the original author and then post to your wall.
For Facebook and LinkedIn, the photo might work and the text not or vice versa. You have lots of option but just remember not to outright steal someone else’s work.
3.Educational/Valuable Content you have made.
The easiest way to do educational content on all 3 platforms in video whether you are doing a “live” or pre recording and adding the video (natively not via YouTube), videos often get 100’s of time better reach than other types of content.
You don’t want to add your video to YouTube and share to Facebook because YouTube is a direct competitor of Facebook and Instagram. By all means, add to YouTube but also upload natively (directly) into Facebook.
Instagram have a short videos up to 59 seconds and the IG TV. Remember when doing longer videos for IG TV, the preview will be 15 seconds and then people can click on it to watch more.
Make sure that the first 15 seconds is really punchy and don’t introduce yourself until after that. The first 15 seconds is like an ad to get your audience to watch more so make it exciting.
Branded Content
80% of your content needs to be shareable that leaves 20% for your branded content.
Now if you can brand it tastefully and subtly that people will want to share the content because it is so valuable, all the better. Big over the top branding won’t get shared unless you are a big brand with big followers.
Follow the guidelines and make it shareable. Branding is important because we want your audience to content with you as a person and a business.
Ask for the Sale
Remember social media is social and that is what people are on the platform for and entertainment is generally what they are looking for. However, you are running a business and without sales and profit, you won’t have a business for long so let people know about your product and how they can buy,
The best way to do this is by call to actions and encouraging people to go to your website get your freebee and get more information. Occasionally, you can do a direct ask curiosity works best.
Let them know the problem you solve or the results you got and then ask them to DM you for more information.
If you want to know more about the Instagram course, I am doing with Chalene and Brock Johnson, click on the link.
Now it’s time to take action.
You have read lots of tips here so now it’s time for you to schedule some time and try them out on your accounts.
For some other ideas on different types of posts, try my 47 Social Media Post Ideas You Can Use Today.
What Should I post on Social?
Next week, we are talking about values and why our guests suggests you forego which profit for value based long term gains.
