Episode 39 | Three Success Secrets for Social Media Consistency

Laura Hargrave: 0:00

Welcome everyone here at Boss It. We would love to hear from you. Join us in our Boss It community by heading over to our website, bossitclub.com and join our mailing list. As we grow, we will be launching our community of fellow Boss It BFFs, and we want you to be a part of it. Okay, Sophia Noreen, let's dig into this. I can't wait to tell them all about how we got here.

Sophia Noreen: 0:25

Welcome to the Boss It Podcast. My name is Sophia Noreen and I took an Etsy startup, and launched it in big box retailers within 12 months. As a creative with an entrepreneurial drive, I left my full time career in healthcare to find better harmony between career, family and self care. We believe you can have it all. Yes, you can launch and run a successful scalable business while maintaining harmony in all aspects of your life. We believe we can learn from each other and draw on many experiences to create the best life possible. During each episode, we will share proven life hacks that will keep you on top and striving every day.

There should be no hesitation. Make a plan. Take action. We are here for you.

Hello everyone, welcome to a fantastic episode of the Boss It Podcast. My name is Sophia Noreen, and I'm going to be your host for today.  Today, I want to talk about three strategies that we use in our business that has brought us tremendous success with social media.  I know everybody who speaks to me about how to automate their business wants to know how to automate their social media. It seems like we're on the social media treadmill that never stops moving, and in this world that we live in, the digital decade, we absolutely need to have our businesses on social media. We need some social media presence. 

The reason why is because it's becoming more and more difficult for our businesses to connect with our customers. When you're in a store, if you can recall back even just two decades ago when we would go into the store, you would get to know who the staff was in those stores. If you are a regular visitor of those stores, so imagine your corner store for example, I know who's at my corner store and we still visit our corner store actually quite regularly because the kids love to go and grab candy from the corner store. But many people don't do those types of visits anymore.

Over the past year with the pandemic, a lot of people have switched to online shopping even for their groceries. We are losing connection with our customers, and most people who are in the digital space, either as an online business selling products or services may actually never formally meet their customers.

And so social media, there is a silver lining there guys. Social media allows you to have a larger reach, and it also allows you to just connect with the community and your customers. I don't want you to always think, "Oh social media, social media, it is so hard to keep up with social media", and it is. That is definitely a fact. So the way we can benefit from social media without all of the headaches is by automating as much as possible. You may have heard of some of these strategies before, but if you have not, they are gold. We use them regularly. 

So let's get started, I'm going to give you three big strategies that you should be incorporating in your business starting even today. They're simple strategies, you don't need a lot of techs, to be honest. Some of the techs, you don't even need to pay for it. It's free, so let me get started.

If you are on Facebook or Instagram which likely most businesses are at this point because Instagram has a very good range of age groups. It serves basically everyone from their early twenties, even my daughter who's actually 10 wants an Instagram account, all the way up to 50 plus. My mom has an Instagram account, so I love Instagram for that reason. 

Facebook, it seems that most individuals using Facebook these days is a little bit older, meaning they are 30 plus. I feel that a lot of the younger generations are sticking to TikTok and Snapchat, although I don't know too many people on Snapchat. The social media accounts that we have focused on, at this point, are Instagram and Facebook. We will be leaping into LinkedIn shortly, just to basically spread the knowledge that we offer. Not just product-based business advice but we can offer advice on leadership, and how people can actually lead a team because that's what I do in my other job as well. I do lead a team and I feel like that information is valuable.

But the point is, I would find a platform and start with one. Don't try to expand too fast. We started with Instagram, so your first success tip is to start with one platform and get great at it. Meaning, make it a habit and automate it in your business so you're not sitting there trying to do all the platforms at once. We started with Instagram and then we linked it to our Facebook, so they automatically link them together.

Having a business page on your Facebook account and linking it to your Instagram will help you automate that process. You get to have two for one, and when you do your scheduling, we can automatically post our posts.  Before we get to that point, I want to talk about our second success tip, is that you should be batch creating your content. The first success tip is to pick a platform, so let's say it's Instagram for this example, and then you batch create. Meaning you pick a day of the week. I talk about chunking my schedule, so I usually do only about three things, three large things in a day. 

One of the large things may be content creation, and so I will say, "On Mondays, I'm going to content create for this business, and so I'm chunking my schedule and I'm batch creating". So I'm going to do maybe seven to fourteen days worth of creation in one day. That seems like a lot. I also tend to repurpose a lot of my posts especially things like quotes. You can go ahead and look at the Instagram account for Boss It Club. We will recycle quotes, and the reason why we do that is, on Instagram, it's the posts that were featured maybe six months ago will no longer be sitting in anyone's feed when they go to their home screen, or it will no longer be on the explore page of Instagram because Instagram continuously refreshes that content.

The second success tip is to batch create, so do fourteen if you can, or even a full month worth of creation. It depends on you, and it depends on how you are going to go ahead and repurpose, and also chunk your schedule. So don't do so many things in one day. When you sit down, put a good two hours aside or three hours aside for your content creation, and that will help you get in a rhythm.

Every week, you'll have a new calendar. If you're doing a side hustle right now and you're still working a day job, you can say to the family, "You know what, tonight is my content creation night. I'm going to work from seven to nine o'clock at night, for example", that I'm going to get my content creation done for the next seven days.

What is our next tip? Our third tip for you is to find a scheduling platform. What that means is you can auto-schedule your posts, so they go up without you having to physically do it each time. You will schedule it so it will automatically post. So that way, if something comes up during the day and you don't have the opportunity to post, you don't have this guilty feeling inside saying, "Oh my gosh, I completely forgot to post today".

That also will make you feel like you're not doing your best as an entrepreneur, or your best as a startup. I want you to go and look into a few of these platforms that will help you automate your posting schedule. There's later.com which we use for a long time. I do like it because it helps you post to multiple sites including Facebook, Instagram, they now do TikTok and they were doing Pinterest as well. There's a free version for that, and there is also paid versions.  Later.com allows you to post videos with the paid version, and then the free version is just posted.

Go ahead and check out that platform. There's Hootsuite, which is also a great tool and it gives you more analytics, but we have actually transitioned away from the paid models and we now use Facebook's free scheduling platform. Facebook has a completely free version to help you automatically post your posts to Instagram and Facebook, and it allows videos.

It's called Publishing Tools. You'll find it on your Page Section on Facebook, so if you set up a business page for your business and you look off to the left-hand side, you should see Publishing Tools as an option. You can go ahead and use that feature to automatically schedule your posts. They go up when you want them to go up, rather than you having to sit there every day trying to post your content. 

There you go guys, those are our top three success secrets for you when it comes to social media posting, and how it can become so easy for you to consistently post and engage with your community.   So let's go through them from the top. We talked about sticking to one platform because if you do too many platforms at once, it will become overwhelming and you will not be successful with any of them.  Second, we talk about batching your content and chunking your schedule. Find one day of the week, so you're chunking your schedule, or two days of the week if it's better for you, and then batch create. Meaning, do multiple posts in one day so they're ready to go, and then finally, we want you to schedule your posts using one of these platforms that we've discussed that will help you automatically post so you have pre-populated your week with your posts and then you can sit back and watch them go up.

There is one more tip that I want to share with you,  that Instagram and Facebook, those two platforms specifically, and I wouldn't be surprised if Twitter and LinkedIn also have a similar algorithm. The whole point of social media is that you can't just post and walk away, you need to actually sit there and engage with the audience. A few ways of doing that is by commenting when somebody comments on your posts to have that conversation, and then also going and visiting their posts and checking out their profile. Instagram and Facebook notice when you just post and you leave. It will actually show the platforms that you are taking an active approach to be a content creator on those social media accounts, and then your account will become more and more visible.

Remember only 30% of your followers see your posts when it's posted.  In order to boost it up, it's your responsibility to sit there and engage with your audience. Okay guys, so that is the last tip I have for you. Make sure you use social media to be social, and not just post and walk away and trust me, we grew our entire company on Instagram. It is an amazing platform.

Obviously, you want to use organic growth. Don't get sucked into those bots or any of those Follow Me trains, because those individuals may not actually be your ideal audience and your ideal customer, and they may actually never purchase from you anyways.

Again, a follower or follower accounts are not as important, what is important is that you're genuinely grabbing the correct audience who would be somebody interested in your product or your service that you are trying to provide.

Okay, guys, that's all we got for now but remember, we want you to take action so make sure you take one of those three tips, and my suggestion is to first look at your schedule and start chunking it. Try to find a day of the week that works for you. The time of the day that works for you, and mark it down in your calendar. Then go ahead and figure out how you're going to make your content, is it going to be for the week? Is it going to be for the month?  Make sure you put the plan in place. Try to get that done in the next week, trust me, it'll make a huge difference. 

Remember, if you have any questions you can always contact us at hello@ bossitclub.com, and we'll see you next week. Remember, make a plan and take action, and yes you can have it all. Bye for now.