Post updated 18 July 2018
How to WIN on SOCIAL MEDIA
Random ingredients and random quantity, random process and random time = flop.
Social media organic reach is diminishing. It’s getting harder to reach people simply by posting ‘something’ on your business page. Facebook has become ‘pay to play and along with Instagram, Pinterest and LinkedIn encourage you to pay for advertising and post boosts, which after all, is how they make money. It doesn’t help that businesses often make the mistake of diving into social media without a clear strategy. With unrealistic expectations, they join several social media platforms and when they don’t get the results they expect, they get overwhelmed, lose interest and decide that social media doesn’t work.
If this sounds familiar then read on because I’m going to explain How to Win on Social Media.
The Perfect Recipe To Get Results and WIN on Social Media
You need six key ingredients…
The first ingredient is CONTENT
What Type of Content?
Not just random content. Content to engage, inspire, educate, inform and/or entertain your ideal client.
Use a mix of original content: Content created by you
What do you do that helps buyers get what they need? How do you help them? What do you know that they don’t? A great way to generate content is to answer their questions in blog posts. Anticipate their thinking and desire for more information by educating them. Showcase your products/services in a way that shows them you are the solution. Include promotional content (necessary with Facebook these days). Mix it up with different formats: blog posts, video, quotes, how-to’s, infographics etc.
Use curated content: What can you share from your influencers and followers that helps your customers solve challenges?
One way is to share an interesting blog or video. Add a comment to the post expressing your point of view, or adding further insight. Another way is to curate content is to gather information from trusted sources, relevant to a particular topic, and create your own content from what you have found.
* Here’s a great post on How to Repurpose your Content.
In both cases ask yourself – Is it interesting? Is it valuable to your audience? Will it entertain them? Will it educate or inform them? Will it be something they want to share with others? Does it create controversy or inspire comment? If not, rework it.
If you’ve got content that’s educational, that creates an awareness of something your audience isn’t familiar with, or teaches them something they didn’t know, then this is what’s going to bring them back to your page again and again.
Perhaps you get lots of comments and shares when you create humourous content. Fantastic! The upshot is to stick with what works and be prepared to change what doesn’t.
Remember, you have 1-2 seconds to attract attention in the newsfeed. So try to create something that stands out from the masses.
Not all social media messages should be serious.
Have some fun. On Facebook or Instagram for example, share some insight on your business, your team and what you’re up to. Post those photos of your new office, or a couple of selfies at an event or networking group. Let your personality and the personality of your brand shine through. People love this.
Not all social media messages should be promotional.
You may have heard of the Golden Ratio. A well known guide to planning your social media content mix.
30/60/10 – 30% original content, 60% curated and 10% promotional.
Another guide you may have heard of is the 5:3:2 ratio
5 x Curated : 3 x Original (including 1 promotional) : 2 x Entertaining/Inspirational
Ratios can vary according to who you are talking to, there are many variations but these are a great starting point.
A Word on Promotional posts
Promotional posts should be subtle and blend in with a user’s experience on their newsfeed. Overly promotional or ‘hard selling’ posts turn people off. It’s good to remember that people use social media as an escape. They’re there to educate themselves, to keep up to date and in touch with friends and to be entertained. This is something to keep this in mind even when creating ads.
The second ingredient is A SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM
It’s a mistake to try and be across every platform. It can be very overwhelming and a great deal of hard work. It’s best to start with one or two and master those first. Choose platforms that suit your business, that you enjoy using and are used by your target market.
If you are considering Facebook this blog post well help you determine if it’s the right fit for your business.
When publishing your content on your chosen social media platforms, it is important to structure it in a format that suits that platform.
The third ingredient is TIME 
And lots of it. Time to research, create, edit, format, schedule and post that content to all the appropriate channels; regularly and consistently. Time to engage and connect with your audience. Which leads me to…
The fourth ingredient, MANAGEMENT
You need to pay attention to your social media. Don’t just set and forget. Be available to engage with your audience, to respond to questions and comments. Your customers expect it. Not responding sends out the message that you don’t care. Quick responses increase your credibility.
Another aspect of Social Media Management is scheduling.
Calendaring
Use a content calendar to schedule your posts across your platforms. You can easily create one using a spreadsheet platform like Excel. Scheduling helps to organise your content and ensure it’s reaching people at the various stages of their buying journey. (More on this below).
It’s also possible to use a third party platform. There are many available, Buffer, Hootsuite and Sprout Social are popular, particularly for companies and agencies that post a lot of content daily.
Scheduling is very time consuming, perhaps the most time consuming of all the social media tasks. It requires commitment. But by getting it all done at once, say a month in advance, it becomes a great way to free up the rest of your month!
A Note on Facebook Scheduling
Facebook prefers that you post directly onto the page (known as ‘native’ posting). You can also schedule your posts directly on the platform. They will penalise you for using a third party app to schedule posts by restricting the reach of your post. The ability to schedule directly onto the Instagram platform (owned by Facebook), is in the works too. Though there are apps to do this, Plann is a great one!
Monitoring Your Posts
After you’ve created, scheduled and posted all this amazing content you probably want to see how it went. To do this you need to analyse the data, to evaluate what worked and what didn’t. There are various ways to measure this data, depending on what platforms you use. At the vary least Google Analytics can tell you how your website is performing. Facebook Insights will reveal how your posts are doing. Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, Twitter – they all have analytics data.
How much time to you need to win on social media?
Well that’s up to you. How much time are you prepared to put aside? If time is a rare commodity, perhaps you need to consider hiring a dedicated social media manager or outsourcing one.
The fifth ingredient is CONSISTENCY
Posting once a day across all your platforms is optimal. However, as a small business owner with limited time, this can be a challenge. It’s far better to post one piece of great content, that’s valuable to your audience, than 5-6 of ‘average’. Do what works for you. If what you are doing is getting engagement and fulfilling your goals, then stick with it. If not it may be time to reconsider your commitment.
The sixth, and final ingredient is STRATEGY
To really WIN on Social Media
You need a plan, a purpose – a strategy for everything you plan to do and hope to achieve for your business using social media.
A social media marketing strategy is a plan of action that helps your business grow using social media. It gives your content purpose. It guides your actions, gives direction to your goals, highlights any resources needed and through regular monitoring, lets you know if you are succeeding or failing.
A strategy for your business goals is important to success; whether that’s to
- get more likes and shares,
- connect with your audience
- increase engagement
- drive traffic to your website
- increase sales
- promote your product or
- get people to your event.
Every action you take on social media should be part of your larger social media marketing strategy.
Set realistic goals on what you expect your strategy to achieve. Most businesses give up on social media because they have unrealistic expectations. When they don’t get the results they expect, they lose interest deciding that social media doesn’t work. Be patient. It takes time.
Social Media – How Should We Use It?
It’s important to remember that social media is a customer service tool. Social networks are the perfect platforms for 2-way conversations with your customers. Social media is not about selling. It’s more subtle than that. It’s also not about telling people how good you are. Too much selling or self promotion could lose you followers.
Over the past 5 years marketing has changed.
It’s a fact that today’s consumers are savvy and they don’t like to be sold to. Marketing is no longer about pushing your product in front of the customer; it’s about managing the customer experience, it’s service focused; it’s about improving lives and being useful. It’s individual marketing instead of mass marketing. Bottom line – It’s about creating perceived value through product features, services and information. Today’s businesses must have customer satisfaction at their core.
To gain a client or sell a product is the ultimate way to win on social media!
To achieve this it’s important to create content for your customer at each of the 3 main stages of their buying journey.
Stage 1: Those at the awareness stage – when the buyer recognises that they have a problem.
Stage 2: The consideration stage – the buyer has defined the problem and has begun researching options to solve it.
Stage 3: The decision stage – the buyer starts looking for a solution.
For each of these stages vary your content. Write blogs, how to’s, lists and top 10s, use quotes and images, videos or slides – mix it up for variety and see what gets the better results. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Start with a blog and use the information from that to create the other content formats. Just make sure you create the type of content that your customers want and are likely to engage with at the relevant stage of their journey.
Stuck for content ideas? Here are some tips:
- Expand on your FAQ page. Write an entire blog for each question/answer
- Keep a record of questions people ask about your biz
- Research question and answer sites like quora.com and https://www.answers.com/
- Download my free ebook and get 35 Tips and Post Ideas to Increase your Engagement on Facebook.
So there you have it. A winning recipe for social media success. I hope it helps. If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to leave them below.
Happy posting!
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