How to Create your Social Media Strategy
Social Media Strategy is a huge roadblock for most small to medium business owners. Social media has started to significantly replace newspaper, television, emails, and over the phone conversation already with higher usage projected in the future for both Facebook and Instagram.
In the past, most small to medium businesses wrote a significantly sized budget in the marketing line of their business plan, until social media came around. Social media is considered free, which in some cases is true, but for anyone who has experience on social media, when you consider your time, frustration, and lack of ability to sell on social platforms, it is not free after all.
Being Strategic Starts Right Now
Most small to medium businesses cannot afford to hire a full-time marketing person, which is where this business fits into the mix. The key ingredients that we find people are missing to be able to do their own social media effectively are with creating social media strategy and branding effectively in a way that promotes building a community around your brand with fans, who want to purchase your products and services, because what you offer makes their quality of life better. Today we focus on social media strategy.
Using social media for business is hard enough right? You have built up enough courage to start a brand. Once you have built up enough courage to post regularly, you have to ask yourself if you are being strategic. Then when you do produce and spend a lot of time working on it, a crazy yet hilarious cat video outperforms your content. Frustration starts to set in. What does regularly mean and is any of the content you are putting out impactful? Insecurity with social media is natural. There are so many times throughout our launch and since that we have felt insecure about doing our own social media, but the good news is that it does get easier as we have seen over and over again with the brands we have worked with. Our experience comes in the form of Facebook and Instagram, which are the two social platforms we are going to focus on today. Here is what we are doing together.
A Little Bit About Us
We launched Empowered Social Media less than a year ago with a half-finished Facebook page and pulled in two clients. There was some research we had put into the business before the launch, but it was a part time work in progress that led to hiring our first employee 5 months into the business. Here are some things to think about when choosing the platforms you want to be on.
Tip: You should only start with 1-2 platforms for the first 2-6 months, before deciding if you are going to add another social platform into the mix, if you even ever do.
I feel like I have to be everywhere
Most people enter into the thought of launching their business with the idea that it has to be everywhere for people to see it. The problem is that in this scenario, unless you are everywhere, and active everywhere, it is not going to help, and will only hurt you. If I am a bakery café that offers sandwiches, smoothies, and a beer and wine selection, should that business be on LinkedIn. The answer is probably not, because LinkedIn is a professional’s network, where people look for jobs, network, and build their resume. If you are looking to build a personal professional brand, LinkedIn would be a great social network. A bakery café would be best suited to start on Facebook and Instagram, not because a place like Pinterest isn’t a great place to go, but you will need some well curated content, and they don’t have a good ads platform built into it yet. I know and have heard of brands who have built up 1M+ monthly viewers on Pinterest and haven’t been able to monetize their audience yet.
For a small and medium business, who doesn’t have the budget for a full-time marketing manager/team, we only have so much time in our lives to dedicate to social media and as you know, the possibilities feel endless. So, where do you start?
Where do I Start?
Starting with Facebook
The businesses that I have run on social, all start off on Facebook.
Here are the pros:
You don’t have to post every day and shouldn’t if your content doesn’t meet the golden rule (will discuss the golden rule later)
You can leverage your personal network to build your Business Network
Facebook has the best Advertising options and better costs than other platforms
You can accelerate your growth by using Ads effectively.
Facebook has a lot of tools and insights, so you can learn about your audience
If your audience are Millennials and older than this is a great platform for you
Cons
There are fake people and bots on Facebook as with most social media channels
Unless you are doing your research and have coaching, you could be wasting time.
Unless you have coaching or a ton of free time on your hands and have the patience of a saint, the Ads Platform can be really difficult to navigate.
Facebook doesn’t have the best reputation.
Facebook is a long-term relationship-building platform. Don’t expect results for at least a month.
Gen Z is not on this platform and if this is your primary audience, you won’t reach them here.
Starting with Instagram
Instagram is a growing social media platform that is like 3 platforms in one, which gives your business a lot of opportunity to be seen. Hashtags can help you get outside of your followers without having to pay to do it. Instagram is very time intensive because people expect updates more frequently. It is built into the algorithm that you need to post more often than Facebook, however, new research indicates that consistently is better than number of posts per week.
The Pros:
Growing platform
Has basic Ads capabilities, so it is easier to adopt right away than Facebook Ads.
Stories are the most immersive experience and the fastest way to build a relationship with your audience
Hashtags can allow you to build your audience outside of your network, followers, without having to spend money through ads, unlike Facebook.
If Millennials and younger are your demographic than this is a great platform to use.
The Cons:
You have to post 1-3 times per day in your newsfeed to be considered relevant.
You have to be posting in your story throughout your day to be considered relevant.
If your audience is Baby Boomers and older, you won’t be maximizing your time on this platform.
You have to be able to navigate native tools like boomerangs and filters through the newsfeed, stories, and IGTV to maximize your growth potential.
There are limited Ads capabilities using this platform
There are fewer insights than through Facebook.
This is much more time-intensive than Facebook.
Using both Facebook and Instagram
Depending on how much time you have allocated to social media, which we will discuss next, using both platforms will be advantageous, because some people in your future audience are primarily on Facebook, others on Instagram, and a fair number use both. It makes your brand look more holistic and able to engage your audience dynamically, while reaching the most people in ways that allow you to eventually sell to them.
How much time is enough time?
How much time do you have to work on social media per week? Is it 3 hours, 5 hours, 10+ hours? Only you know, and make sure you are realistic. To put out a B- quality post, which is my recommended quality to produce on social, it should take between 30-60 minutes per post. This is being strategic, checking off that it meets the golden rule, is on brand, and building a relationship with your audience. The good news is that when you have more experience creating content, you eventually streamline the process, and that cuts down on how long it takes to produce good quality content. These 30-60 minutes, don’t include the time you will spend responding to comments and commenting on other pages/posts that will help to grow your network.
3 Hours a Week Camp
If you are in the 3 hours a week camps, Facebook is where you should start. You spend 2 to 2.5 hours creating your content, which may be between 3-5 posts. You spread them out over the week and target them at night. Somewhere between 7-9 PM is the peak time for most pages, because it is the time right before bed that people check their newsfeed. This also helps with brand recognition later. Whenever someone comments on your post, you respond to their comment using 4+ words, yes that number is important to signal the algorithm that you are creating meaningful conversation.
5 Hours a Week Camp
If you are in the 5 hours a week camp, you have two choices you could make. You will be able to produce between 5-10 newsfeed posts. If you are efficient with your time, you will be able to cover 3x a week Facebook and 7 days a week on Instagram. This is not including Instagram stories. Instagram stories are what is happening in between your newsfeed posts and allow for a more intimate experience. They only last for 24 hours, unless you choose to turn them into a story highlight strategically, so they can be less pressure to produce perfect content. Stories can take less time to produce, because you don’t have to worry about hashtags, however, there is some strategy involved. Events are more in depth than your regular post, because of all the details necessary and ticketing options to choose from and set up. So, here are your options
Option 1: 3x a week Facebook and 7x a week Instagram newsfeed with no stories (Community Maximizer)
Option 2: 3x a week Facebook and 4x a week Instagram newsfeed and 1-2x a day in Instagram Stories (Holistic Engager)
Option 3: 5x a week Facebook and 5x a week on Instagram no stories. This is the stage where you can add Facebook Events into the mix. Facebook events are hit or miss on whether they are going to get decent engagement and reach, which means that it could negatively impact your brand in the algorithm if you have less than 5 posts per week. (Balanced Builder)
Tip: Stories don’t help you to pull in more people initially, but they keep your audience more engaged, and that improves your brand’s performance in Instagram’s algorithm, which includes future newsfeed reach.
10 Hours+ a Week Camp
If you are in the 10 hours a week camp, you have much more flexibility in choice. This is where you can feel comfortable with Facebook Newsfeed, Instagram Newsfeed, Instagram Stories, and IGTV. IGTV is Instagram’s long form video platform, future competition to YouTube’s video platform. IGTV allows you to upload longer form content and post a shorter 60 second clip to your newsfeed. Win Win. This also gives you the option to create a Facebook Group. Facebook Groups are extremely important to your presence on Facebook, create a more intimate experience, allows your community to post and engage for you, and have reach and engagement that rivals ads without spending any money. Here are your options:
Option 1: 5x a week Facebook, 5x a week Instagram newsfeed, 7x a week Stories 1-10x per day, and 2x a week IGTV. This allows you great presence on all platforms. (Holistic Engager)
Option 2: 4x a week Facebook, 2x a week in Facebook Groups, 5x a week Instagram newsfeed, 7x a week stories 1-3x per day, and 2x a week IGTV. (Community Maximizer)
Option 3: 4x a week Facebook, 3x a week in Facebook Groups, 5x a week Instagram newsfeed, 7x a week stories 1-2x per day, and 2x a week IGTV. (Group Concentration)
Tip: A typical Facebook post may reach between 10-25% of your audience if your content is really engaging, and 35%+ with your best of the best content, which may feel low, but is actually best-case scenario. This does depend on industry, because restaurant, travel, and health and beauty typically get more reach than other industries. The Facebook Groups I have run are getting anywhere from 60-90% reach. A HUGE difference and it is all organic.
What wasn’t mentioned here?
Above we didn’t mention a couple different posting types for a reason, because unless you have previous experience, they require additional strategy to maximize the results. Facebook and Instagram LIVE, polls, native tools for Instagram, and videos in general.
When Does Video make sense?
Video is a must for all businesses. However, if you don’t have any experience making videos, there is either a time investment into it or money investment with finding a third party to do it for you. Content that isn’t polished actually does better on social media along with funny, inspirational, and entertaining content. So, it is actually better to pay a small fee for an app, like LumaFusion, watch some tutorial videos and start producing videos yourself. When you upload videos, you are going to have some options, including tags, like women’s health, and caption, which Facebook will auto populate with a 95%+ accuracy rating. This does depend on the audio quality. People watch video on Facebook in between things and usually don’t have the volume on, so having captions is necessary to stand out and keep your audience engaged. Video makes most sense if you have 5+ hours a week to work on social media.
Tip: Have movement and pull people into the video in the first 8 seconds by drawing out questions and content throughout the video. Don’t frontload everything and give your audience no reason to continue watching. Ask yourself, why would someone want to watch the next 30 seconds, each 30 seconds.
When Facebook LIVE makes sense?
Facebook LIVE is a great tool to engage with your audience in a more meaningful way and if you can tell, a meaningful way is important to Facebook and Instagram. Before doing a Facebook LIVE, you have to have a purpose behind it. Maybe it is behind the scenes, or in the mind of, or you’re on your way to an event, or a quick tip and lesson learned. Facebook LIVE gets more reach and engagement than a regular video post, however it does play by the same rules as a regular Facebook Post with some additional thoughts. Does it fit the golden rule? Timing matters, which means that if you start a LIVE video at an off-peak time for your audience, you are going to get off peak results.
Facebook needs time to pull in your audience. Once you go LIVE, a notification is going to pop up in Facebook for some of your followers, if your Facebook LIVE is only for a couple minutes than it may not get to enough people in time to signal the algorithm that your content is engaging. People don’t expect perfect, so know that mistakes are actually great, because it shows that you are human and people love that. Facebook LIVE makes sense, once you have an understanding for your platform and what your people want to hear about. You can put out a post to see what they would like you to discuss LIVE. Facebook LIVE makes sense if you feel that you can engage with the audience during the LIVE, which means that people may ask you questions during your Facebook LIVE and you can answer their questions or tell them that you will find them the answer. You should choose to post your LIVE video to your page after you have finished.
Tip: Schedule your Facebook LIVE out and let your audience know. This doesn’t mean that you use the Facebook LIVE scheduler tool, because unless you have tech experience and are really handy with a computer, this will frustrate the hell out of you. This means that you let your audience know that on Thursday at 7:30 PM, you are going LIVE with a specific subject, and remind them about it. If you have the skills to use the Facebook LIVE scheduler, do it, because it will remind people that has said they are interested that your event is upcoming.
When does Instagram LIVE make sense?
Instagram LIVE makes sense once you have started with Instagram stories, because it will post to your stories. Keep these short, because the stories platform is a shorter form video and content platform that typically allows only up to 15 seconds of content. If your video is too long, people will skip it, and then it will signal to Instagram that your content is not engaging.
Tip: Welcome people as they join your LIVE video to create a more engaging experience with your audience.
When do polls makes sense?
The answer is never and sometimes. I do not recommend using the poll feature through Facebook. Instagram is a different story (pun intended). The poll feature through Facebook has not accurately represented that posts engagement in the past, which means that people who participate in the poll, don’t give your page engagement credit, thus polls can send negative signals to your Facebook Algorithm, unless you add commenting to polls. Adding this into your social media game makes sense when you have a question you need answered. It works best in groups from my experience, because people feel less judged about commenting in a private group. The poll feature creates a great engagement experience on Instagram stories.
Tip: Instead of using the poll feature. Upload a picture of the options and tell people to comment with their respond to the poll. This will give you a huge boost to your Facebook reach and engagement ratings, which gets to more people and gets your better overall results, and if you respond to each person’s comment, it will drive that post even more.
Native Tools for Instagram
If you haven’t expanded your brand on Instagram yet, there is a lot to cover. Hashtags are the holy grail to reaching people outside of your community. You have the option to add up to 30 hashtags on each of your posts, which you should. You can create a list of core hashtags to make this process easier. Boomerangs are short video clips that repeat an action the person being video takes, it will make most sense, when you see it for yourself. Filters are ways to make your stories posts more dynamic, either by adding dog ears to everyone in the picture and video or adding effects to the screen. You can tag your location and a business similarly to Facebook in Instagram stories. The tag shows up in your picture. Superzoom is a pretty hilarious way to use the zoom in feature on your camera and rewind plays videos in reverse.
Tips: Don’t try all of the tools at once, because it will become way too time intensive. Add one of the new tools each week or every other week, so you can get more comfortable with them.
When to Post on Social Media?
Each platform has slightly different time guidelines and each audience is slightly different, so this is not a catch all.
Facebook Newsfeed – Across my brands, the best time to post has been between 7-9 PM at night. This is the right before someone goes to bed zone out wave. This is what BuzzSumo came up with for timings across 777 million posts data.
10 PM (Best based on BuzzSumo research)
9 PM
11 PM
8 PM
7 PM
InstagramNewsfeed – This piece we sourced from research results produced by a company called Social Sprout using over 240,000 customers’ data. Here is a day by day breakdown:
Sunday: 10 AM – 2 PM CDT
Monday: 11 AM – 5 PM CDT
Tuesday: 5 AM, 9 AM – 6 PM CDT
Wednesday: 5 AM, 11 AM, 3 PM CDT
Thursday: 5 AM, 11 AM, 3 – 4 PM CDT
Friday: 5 AM, 9 AM – 4 PM CDT
Saturday: 11 AM CDT
Tip: Get a scheduler tool like Later, so you don’t have to wake up at 5 AM to post. If this isn’t in your budget yet, do your best to post as close to these times/timeframes as possible. Once you get an app like Later it will give you analytics on your specific brand to guide on when the best time to post for your specific brand is and what hashtags are working best for you.
Instagram Stories – Post throughout the day when things are happening. You don’t have to wait to post on your stories. You post as you go.
The Golden Rule
It’s time for the Golden Rule when it comes to posting content on Facebook and Instagram. Whenever you post content it should have strategy behind it. Businesses who post just to post can fail to build their voice, be cohesive, and waste a lot of time. Every post should either Inspire, Educate, Entertain or be a combination of them.
Inspire
Each business goes through their own challenges and stories that make them who they are. Highlight a challenge that your business has had to overcome and make sure you don’t do it in a showy way.
Joanne the car saleswoman example
Scenario 1: Too Showy - “I just hit the 1000 cars sold mark” to show off a huge milestone.
Scenario 2: Grateful - “I want to thank each and every one of the amazing people I have worked with and helped to get into their car over the past five year. It has been a pleasure and am truly grateful for you all helping me to reach the 1000 cars sold milestone.”
Inspiration, is the act of giving someone an opportunity to want to take action somewhere in their life. Inspirational quotes are huge on social media, but only if they really capture the voice and personality of your brand.
Educate
Each brand has something to offer. Last year I met a lawyer, who was trying to build her brand on social media. We met and I told her about the golden rule. She asked me how she could do that as a lawyer, because the law can be complicated. I told her that she should create a one-minute quick tip video on specific laws that she was looking to service with clients. She happens to be a cannabis lawyer, which is really appealing on social media.
Whatever field you are entering into with your brand, it is important that you show that you have a voice and authority in that field, or people would represent your brand with the field. This is where education is key and not just anecdotally. Many brands give opinion and talk about what has worked for them in the past, which is not a bad thing, as long as they provide research or have done research along the way to that opinion. Social media can be informing, but there is enough miss-information on the internet that we should have a vetting process behind any education we offer.
Entertain
One of the main reasons we use social media is to be entertained. People like funny videos, hilarious memes, and ways to feel like a part of the conversation. In my experience, the best performing ads are the funny ones by over 300% when I compared it against a more serious ad both using a videos view objective.
We entertain people with funny, surprising, and captivating content. Enter into the health and fitness world and advertising for a local gym. Our best video ad was with a man on an indoor exercise sled, called the tank, not easy to imagine I know. If we think about obvious things he could do, did he push the indoor sled? No. Well then did he do an exercise on the sled? No. Did he try to do an exercise on the sled and miss? Although that may be pretty hilarious, no. He stood on top of the sled and used the handles to dismount off of it and onto the group like an Olympic gymnast, finishing with his arms in the sky. How does this have anything to do with fitness? It doesn’t make any sense until you see the ad copy.
Actual Ad Copy - We may not be professional gymnasts, but we have fun, are all about camaraderie, and challenge ourselves every day as a community.
