In our previous article, we discussed why your business needs a blog. Chad wrote up a thoughtful entry on the various reasons why it’s important for businesses to have a content strategy. The same is true for utilizing your social media presence.
But where do you get started?
Lock in the name
More often than not, business-owners choose a name for their company that means something to them, but means very little to their customers. Assuming you’re already established and not looking to name a new business, there are great tools to help you secure all your social and online profiles.
NameVine is a great tool that allows you to search your desired business or social profile name and instantly get a list of available profiles.
We’ll use Venture Studio as an example. We want to know all the available social profiles and even domains available. As you can see below, the name is secure across almost every platform they cross-check.
Namevine also provides a long list of recommended alternative and available domain names.
To Schedule or Not to Schedule
Talk to any agency and they will likely tell you that you need to social media calendar. This can become overwhelming real quick.
Now we have to think of daily posts, weekly blogs, a podcast, when to tweet, who to follow on Instagram!?
I believe that a schedule is very important – it’s what keeps everything running. Your social media presence is no different. Perhaps the question for you is, “how rigid is that schedule going to be”?
For a small business, it’s not likely you’ll have a back catalog of blog posts to reference and use for posts. See why having a blog is important 😉
This is where a schedule or calendar becomes helpful. For example, you could have a blog post go out on Monday and that is shared across your social platforms. Tuesdays are used for tips, “Tuesday’s Tips”. Create at least one post on social media that day with a helpful and insightful tip that resonates with your customers / followers. You see where I’m going?
Posting content everyday should be the goal. A minimum of three posts a day on your social media – where ever you decide to focus – will create a consistent schedule and reliability of content for your fans. They know they can count on every Wednesday hearing a great podcast.
Scheduling ahead
Sometimes, the best ideas happen on the spot. You get inspired that moment to share something on social media that’s relevant and topical. Having that flexibility in your schedule is also important. While pre-scheduling posts is very beneficial, having a post that resonates in the moment is really impactful.
Anchors Aweigh!
Before “social media marketing” and “social media gurus” were a “thing” – I came up with a little catch phrase called The Social Media Anchor. Hipster moment, I know. “I was on social media before it was cool”.
The idea behind the social media anchor was to illustrate that your website – not your social media – was the anchor upon which you should focus your marketing. Your social profiles serve as an arm of that anchor. Hmm, perhaps we should call it the social media octopus?
Your business website is where people should ultimately end up.To either buy something from you or sign up for one of your services. Of course, there are tools now that allow people to take those actions on your social media. But when it comes down to it – most consumers still either buy from your website or retail space.
This is where creating meaningful social media content comes in. Just because you have a blog or social media, doesn’t mean you’ll attract customers.
Just start posting, first and foremost. Don’t overthink it or overanalyze your schedule. Just come up with one and stick to it.
