You know that promoting your business or personal brand on social media is an essential part of your marketing. But where should you be spending your time and energy on social media? Well, 2015 is a pinnacle year to refine your focus, your content and your budget when it comes to your social media. Lots of our clients think they need to “be everywhere for everyone” because it feels like that's what their competitors are doing. But we're here to tell you that this tactic can actually work against you. There's a better way to create a strategy for delivering quality and timely content to your followers (and keep you sane!). Instead of spending lots of time on many platforms, cut back to the few that really allow you to connect with your dream clients. View it as spring-cleaning your social closet. Weigh up what works and what doesn’t, what stays and what goes.
To discover the best place to invest your time, first you need to look at your target market or dream customer (the one you wrote about in your business plan or envision as you grow your business), and ask this question:
Who are these dream customers and where are they spending their time?
- Are they on Facebook regularly engaging on your business page or mainly using it to keep up-to-date on family and friend activities?
- Are they re-tweeting your latest blog post?
- Are they searching Pinterest in a quest to buy a product like yours?
Take some time to reassess your current following and the level of engagement on each social platform. Take note of the time of day you're getting the most engagement, or the times that your feed is the most active on each platform. These will be good indicators of where and when to invest in social media for your business.
If you don't have the time or energy to do all social platforms we have good news for you: realign your focus to just one or two social platforms, the ones where your target customers spend their time. This will save you time and streamline the amount of content you are putting out on the social sphere. This redefined focus will allow you to specifically tailor that content (info in the caption and imagery) to each specific platform. Instead of doing every social platform haphazardly, focus on one or two that really count and do them well. >> Tweet This!
For example, a picture on Facebook promoting your next workshop will need to be reformatted in size to take full advantage on Twitter. Or the informal social tone of your Facebook caption will probably need to be revised when promoting on Linkedin. If you are just focusing on one or two platforms, this is much more manageable.
It may seem a little overwhelming to look and sound buttoned up online, but that's when having a great strategy or plan will really help. We help our clients create actionable plans with questions like the ones above, and execute their strategy across the best social media platforms for their brands (to find out more about how we do that, check out how to work with us).
If you don't really know which social media platform is the best place for you, you might benefit from an overview of Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and Linkedin. We will be teaching a Social Media Broad Strokes Workshop on Wednesday April 1st. This 90-minute workshop will be covering the following:
- Learn the basics of how the main social media platforms work.
- Understand who spends time on them.
- Learn how they be used for what type of business.
- Establish an understanding of where you will be refocusing your time and effort.
- Consider how to move forward and organize your time on social media.
We all need to take stock of our current situation with social media, newsletter lists, blog posts and other areas of our business every so often. So start your spring cleaning! Just think about how good you will feel after a reorganization, knowing your time and energy is only going towards productive social media that will be working for your business.
Sophie Davies is a Co-Founder of Prim'd Marketing, and our resident social media strategist.
Sophie's worked with an international portfolio of clients in the fashion world, ranging from Lacoste and Calvin Klein to independent designers, as well as consulting with lifestyle brands in the wedding, parenting and publishing industries.
Sophie Davies
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