So three literally is the magic number when it comes to running your social media. Here are my top three tips, as shared at my Digital Women Live talk last year.
Let me know what you think!
The first tip is that you don't have to be on all social media channels all of the time. There can be a massive pressure to feel like you have to be on everything and you have to be posting every day and you have to be creating seven stories a day and you have to be posting on Instagram three times a day and you have to be posting on Facebook every single day. That just isn't true.
What is true is that if you have the capability to create kickass, amazing, fantastic content, that means that you can be putting it out on social media channels every day, then go for it.
But you know what? Most of us don't have the capacity to do that.
So the first thing is to think about what is the content that you can put out there and how can you actually add value to your customer's ads. And that's the starting point. All social media channels work on an algorithm. And if you create kind of less than great content and you post out continually and people just scroll on past, they're going to stop seeing your stuff because the social media channel will decide that they're not interested in you anymore.
So it's much better to post less often, but higher quality content that adds value to your customers. I know a couple of people who are on Instagram and they only post once a week, they have tens of thousands of followers and they can get between five and 15,000 likes per post. And that's just posting on Instagram with one great piece of content once a week. So it's not true that you need to be posting every single day.
Although of course if you've got loads to say and it's really relevant, put it out there.
The other thing is that you don't need to be on all the channels. Pick the channels that your customers are on and the channels where you're most likely to enjoy and to want to put stuff out there and resonates with you. So it's a mixture of those two things. Unless you are trying to teach people how to use social media and that's your selling point, you don't have to be on all the things. That's just going to make you overwhelmed and have lots and lots and lots of work. So the first social media tip, you don't have to be on everything all of the time.
The second thing is that you don't own any social media channels. And this is a big one. Imagine you create an enormous audience on Instagram and then next year a new social media channel comes along and everybody goes, "Oh, Instagram, shit, I'm going to go off into this new one." You've lost all of your audience, plus Facebook has lots of rules about what kind of stuff that you can put on Facebook and not all of them are that transparent.
I know of a lady who was much, much bigger than me. She had tens of thousands of Facebook followers. She had a Facebook community that hundreds of thousands of people pay to be in. She broke one of Facebook's unknown wheels and they shut her account down effectively shutting her business down. It took her six months to get that back. And that's the reality. So you don't own the social media channels.
Please don’t just rely on them to build your business. Have an email list. If you can have an email list as much as possible and get people on there, that will future proof your business. Because if everybody decides to leave the channel, you still have their email and you can still market to them. And that is super, super important.
Of course you need to know who your customer is and all that stuff to know who to put on the email. And yes, you need a content strategy to know what you need to send in that email, but start thinking about how you can get people off social onto an email because you don't own that social media channel.
And then the third thing is... my third social media tip is the work starts within. So you can know how to do everything, you can have a fantastic strategy. Maybe you create content ideas in advance, but if you can't break through the insecurities of being vulnerable and visible on social media, that will stop you being your best self and getting out there and showing people how you can help them.
There is a lot of work that we all need to do in putting ourself out there. I was chatting to a client earlier this week who said, "It's really interesting that you can be comfortable speaking in front of the conference, in front of 250 people, but I still find doing social media lives really tricky." And I thought that's really interesting. I would quite happily stand on a stage in front of loads of people, but I find doing lives hard. But when I do do them, I get great engagement and people respond. So the work begins within.
So just to recap, number one, you don't have to be on everything all of the time. Number two, you don't own the social media channel, so don't rely on it. Future proof your business. Get an email list. And number three, the work begins within!
Did you see my blog on how it’s so important to take time out of your business? Check it out here.
