There are many great social media marketing resources that simply explain the various networks and how to use them. Unfortunately, they don't do an excellent job of explaining how to make everyday social media plans incorporate multiple platforms.
If you're struggling with social media, here's a tip for creating an effective plan without taking too much time.
Part One: Planning your social Media strategy
Before you start tweeting and polishing your home business, you need to make sure your profile is ready, and that you know what results you want from social media. The first step is to visit every social network you use and make sure that you've:
1) upload the right image. Unless you are making a swimsuit or selling a travel service in your home business, your pictures in bikini in Cancun may not be working. Consider your business and your audience and select a photo that matches the image you want to draw. Your photos will be more interesting than your logo, although you want to consider your brand image and what you want people to remember. Make sure it is a good quality photo, which doesn't mean it should be taken by professionals, but it must have a good resolution.
2) Complete the main profile section. On some sites, you can get away without filling everything, like your favorite movies. But you have to complete all the important parts for your business. Each platform varies on how much info you can provide, but at least you should have your name and business name, website URL, and a short bio of your business. If you can add another social network or important business information, including that as well.
3) Follow the influence in your industry. Social Media is not just about people following you, it is about you following others, too. Start by connecting with people you admire or enjoy, especially in your home business industry. Share their highest content, and respond to their posts with the intention of developing relationships.
4) The integration of social media tools on your website or blog. At a minimum, you should have a link to your profile on every page of your website so your visitors can follow you, plus a social networking share button so they can share your content with their followers. However, there are many other great tools you can use to save time and improve your results. For example, include the option "Click to Tweet " On your post (you can use this click to Tweet the generator or plugin Word-Search plugin directory of your plugin plugin plugin plugin) making it easy for your readers To tweet your content.
There are a wide variety of plugins for said confessing that can help you stream your social media share, such as CoSchedule and the Social War. If you're not using WordPress, there are many other social media marketing tools that you can use depending on your needs and the platform you're using. These tools include Hootsuite, buffer, social shock, smart queues, and more. If you're focused on Pinterest and Instagram, Tailtwind is a great choice as well.
5) Decide what results you want from social media. Finally, your goal is to have a sale or a client, but post "Buy my stuff " or "Hire me " All the time does not work and, in fact, will result in loss of followers. Instead, think about what you can post that can eventually lead to sales, such as increasing website traffic or getting email subscribers. Some social media objectives may be to:
1) Raise your blog readers.
2) Get email subscribers again.
3) Search for more followers on other social media sites (i.e. promoting a Facebook fan page on your Twitter feed).
4) Increase your impact (credibility and expertise) with your target market.
5) Foster good relationships with the target market (meaning you are fun or friendly).
Every social media post you create must have the final result of the GOAL attached to it. So if you post the URL of your latest blog article, the goal might be to improve your readers and influence, and to create relationships.
Part Two: Sharing on social media
When it comes to social media, you have two jobs:
Sharing your Content
The challenge in social media sharing is to maximize your exposure. This is difficult because every platform is different. Some limitations on the number of characters (Twitter) and others involve the longest graphics (Pinterest or Instagram). Primarily here are easy steps to plan your sharing strategy:
1) Decide what you are for.
Have you shared a blog post, email register list, giveaway, inspiration, etc. In your plan, you should have a variety of things to share. For example, you can share new blog posts, reshare old posts, promote your flyers, and promote cross-across social media (e.g., Pinterest intake on Facebook).
2) Decide how you're going to share it.
Do you just send text? Do you take a selfie and add text overlays? What is a video? While text can work, most platforms receive or do the best with graphics. There are plenty of places to look for free and low-costs. Once you have the graphics you want to use, you need to edit them for the post.
The difficulty in using graphics is that each network has its own recommended size, and often those changes. Resources such as Cava (which offers free and paid graphics too) or Picmonkey create graphics for easy social media. Just select the platform you want the image to be (Facebook) and the right size template will be provided. Next, add any images and text that you want like a title or excerpt from your blog post, or the adage inspirational.
If you want to use the same image on the platform, you need to resize them to fit. Cava offers a change in the paid service. Alternatively, you can use the mixing image as it is in social Sprout or Internet Ninja, to crop and adjust your image to any network you use.
3) Share your posts on your network at the time of posting.
Get an early eyeball on your post by getting it online when ready.
4) Schedule repost content over the next few days.
You don't need to share your content once and then forget when you create new content. Instead, you can repost past content repeatedly. For example, you may Tweet your various blog quotes with a link to a post once a day for the next three days. After that, you may post again once a month.
When posting, watch that you do not post to a particular network. For example, you can get away with sending a lot of tweets (various contents, not just your posts) a day, but it doesn't work well on LinkedIn, where more than posts can annoy your followers.
Read: How to Display Your Products in Cardboard Window Boxes
Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick in their book, Social Media art (getting textbooks as printed versions do not have a URL for all the resources mentioned) recommend a casual social Media user to Facebook 1-2 times, Google + 3-4 times, LinkedIn 1 times, Pinterest 6 times and 8-12 times a day. These numbers are double for hard core users.
Finally, don't forget to schedule content for your followers on the other side of the world, especially on Twitter so they're more likely to see it.
5) Create a calendar or other written plan.
Ruth Soukup of the Elite Academy blog and LivingWellSpendingLess.com, has a color code spreadsheet for Pinterest where she has scheduled what pins are posted to the Board group when. And that's just Pinterest!
Having a social media calendar will help you remember to post as well as figure out what you should post. There are social media tools that allow you to schedule content. For example, you can set up a blog post to share once a month in the next six months on any and all of your social networks. Some social media tools, such as CoSchedule and smart queues have automatic Repoter options, so you don't have to reschedule posts manually.
6) track what works.
Google Analytics and social media tools will tell you what social media posts achieve results. Furthermore, your analysis will tell you what's popular on your blog or website, so you can schedule social media posts from those pages to safeguard your traffic.
Engaging social Media
This is an area that many home business owners don't pay enough attention to, but it is crucial to the success of social media. Post your content all the time without noticing what others are doing is the same as being at a party and just talking about yourself. So along with preparing content to go out, you need to have a plan to comment on, share and engage with others. Here's a tip for doing that.
1) Sign up for a social media management tool, like Hootsuite, that lets you view your feeds in one place, as well as posting schedules.
Read: How to Create a Marketing Plan for a Home Based Business
If you're using Hootsuite, add Hootlet to your tool bar so you can easily share the content you find online. Use social media tools that offer scheduling for you to share (including ReTweets) content at different times, as opposed to posting them at once. Another advantage of the tool is that you can follow people and feeds that you want to engage with, and filter out the sounds that distract you.
2) Choose one or two times a day to engage in social media engagements.
Plan for 15 to 20 minutes a day full (not including preparing your post as shown at the top). Put a timer on it so you don't end up spending an hour on Pinterest or Facebook. Your goal during this time is to engage with your followers and those you follow.
3) Share 2-3 a plot for your network.
Use RSS intake readers such as weak or content curators like AllTop to find content in your industry that your followers will be interested in.
4) Share 2-3 Three social media posts from the people you follow (i.e. Twitter retweets, Pinterest, etc.).
Sharing other people's content is a great way for them to share yours.
5) Comment on 2-3 posts from your followers. Be part of your "friends" conversation.
Again, this is a great way to improve relationships and the likelihood that your friends will be involved and share with you.
6) Reply to others who share or comment on your post.
Not responding to comments others make for your post is disrespectful. It's like ignoring the people who talk to you. Today, people prefer to work with a responsive business, so make sure you're responding to your followers.
7) Like the content of others when you come across items that interest you.
"Like " (Facebook) or "Favorites " (Twitter) and other same single click engagements are not packaged like sharing or commenting, but are still in the engagement process. "Liking " is not in the comment position 2-3 above (#5), but in addition.
8) Repeat every day.
Social Media isn't the task of "set-it-and-forget-it. " You need to post and get involved every day. But with the plan, you keep social media from taking too much time and making sure you get the most out.
Should you hire a social media assistant?
It is possible to hire a social media assistant to manage all or a specific platform or platform (i.e. Pinterest). It can help you save time in prepping graphics and posts from your content, and share content from others. However, social media is social and there is hope that people interact with you. So if you hire an assistant, you still want to share your own thoughts and ideas on occasion, and you really need to engage with others by commenting on or responding to comments on your posts.