Often we receive calls from business owners or start-up owners who want to giddy-up go on social media for their business. They rattle off five or six social media channels that they hear others speak about and they want to jump in. What they fail to consider in this initial wave of excitement is that all the different channels take time and that they may be better off focusing on just a few to get started. This will give them experience with managing and responding to a few channels – so they can be strong at these efforts, instead of trying too many and diluting the effort and ultimate results.
With that in mind, the question then becomes: what social channels should you use for your business? And the answer is that it depends. The heavy hitters of social media we all are familiar with are Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and YouTube. We also should include Google My Business on this list as well. Trying to jump start all of these at once would be overwhelming and most likely unsuccessful. Instead, a good idea is to select one or two channels to start with. To choose the best one or two social channels to start with, think hard about your target audience. Your audience consists of your active and prospective clients and customers, and you need to tune in and think about them deeply and decipher what social media platforms they use. What do they look at, and what sites do they visit everyday?
Once you decide what one or two channels you are going to start with, create your business accounts for these channels and read up on the requirements for each of them. These include the type of content, content length, image size, etc. Once your accounts are created and branded, then create a calendar for the content that you want to post and how frequently you will post on these channels. Using a calendar is a wonderful way to plan and be ahead of time. Otherwise, you wind up rushing to post and will not always have your best content. There are also tools that you can use to pre-schedule your content. We happen to love and use Hootsuite but there are others as well. In your plan, you also have to implement who will be monitoring the social channels for comments, shares, likes and your responses.
As you settle in on these first social channels with a system in place, you can now think about advertising on these channels and/or adding additional channels to your mix. Implementing social media takes some time, but it can be fun and more importantly a highly beneficial way for you to stay in front of your existing clients and customers and also a way to attract new customers. If you want help in setting up your social media plan and channels, reach out to Yes You Can Marketing to get you set up and on your way to a successful social media presence for your business.