Learn Social Media Marketing | For small businesses

1. Introduction: Welcome to learn social media marketing for small businesses. So if you're starting out in social media, then this is the Course View. My name is Donna Townsend and I will be your teacher throughout this course. I have about five years experience in marketing, specifically social media. So hopefully you'll learn a lot. This course is designed to be very beginner basic level, so it's a lot of overviews, but it should be really informative for you as well. So some of the content we'll be covering is we're going to look at what social media marketing at t is, why you need it for your small business. Looking at social media strategies and how to set one up, what platform is for what. So that will help you decide on where to put all your efforts. Social media management tools that are affordable to you, the types of content that you could utilize. How to plan and publish content, advertising and promoting your social media, SEO, analytics and reporting, making your content stand out. And the last lesson is all about social media tips for you. I'm just probably an overview of everything we've covered and to help you get started. So enjoy the course and let's get started. 2. What is Social Media marketing: In this lesson, we're going to cover what is social media marketing? It's a really good question. So first of all, you'll probably see social media marketing as the abbreviation of SMM. So that's what you'll see if you go on social or anything else. Most people just shorten it down to us M&M, just to make it little bit easier. What it is is a form of online marketing that uses social media platforms as a marketing tool. Social media platforms enables brands to build a brand awareness, increase your sales, builds a community followers and drives traffic to websites. So that's kind of it all summed up in a nutshell. So the benefits of them, those endless benefits when it comes to social media. So we're going to cover the benefits for us. Then I'm going to show you the downsides to it so you can kind of understand the pros and cons of it basically. So first of all, it is a direct line to your audience and allows you to interact with them so you can speak directly to your customers and your audience very easily on social media. Second reason you don't have to pay to promote substance and products. It allows you to build up an organic audience without causing anything but your time. So when I say this, you can spend time engaging, following, gradually, building up your audience. That's known as organic audience building basically. But you don't need to pay anything. It can actually take as little as 15 min a day, 5 min a day, just engaging with certain clients. So it's a, it's a pretty good way of building up your audience. Number three, it provides various platforms to tell your brand story on and gives you a voice. So you can choose what platforms that work for your business so that you can reach your ideal audience and you can tell them who you are. What do you do, that kind of thing. There's loads of platforms. There isn't just one per company. You could be on, say four or five if you wanted, if they're relevant to your audience, which is pretty good. Number four, it helps drive traffic to your website, which is really, really important, especially if you sell anything, we will have a service. It's important way of driving people to this website that wouldn't have thought to or very interested in what you do. So more engaging your posts are, the more likely they're going to want to find out more about you silica to your website. Number five, it helps with getting found on Google search engines. So if you were to type in a certain name or anything like that from social media, more than often you'll find in the search bar, like the images, though, they'll come up, there'll be shown. And this is a good thing for your what builds up the search engine side of things where basically people were typing for a specific type of business. You would be on the first or second page, which is kind of what you want. So the more active you are on social, the better you can get found on search engines like Google. Number six, it improves your brand as it humanizes your company won't building trust. A lot of companies find that they can feel a bit. Commercial people are just another business. Social media ads that human element in which people love to know. A lot of posts, you're fine for businesses. They will do social teams. They'll do like in the office kind of shots and posts about what's going on day to day. Just to give people an insight to what kind of company they are really. So it's a good way of doing that. Number seven, it can happen crucial sales, which is always really important. A lot of the time, e.g. in Scrum. Scrum, I think does it Facebook does it as well, whether you can do a shop, e.g. and it helps build up those sales. Other platforms you can send directly to whatever you're selling on a website. There are different ways of increasing your sales, which is really, really important. The final reason helps you learn about your audience, which is fantastic. Like if you're just throwing out, Oh, you're slowly growing your business. Social media isn't really working for you. Then this is the time to look at the audiences of your competitors and figure out wait, that works for them. This type of post works or the language is a bit different, or the Adrian's quite like this so that it can tell you so much about how to rach do your own social media. Basically, these are all the benefits of social media. Let's go through the downsides of social media. They're awesome, big, big issues when it comes to it. So we'll just go through these now. So first of all, security and privacy settings are a little invasive, so I don't know the amount of times you've done it. You start talking about something. Phones nearby, and Facebook ads come up with something that you've been talking about. The privacy settings is a little bit or anything you sort of Google on your phone. You often find all social media was an ad being created or pop up in your feed and your bit strange. The privacy element is a bit scary for a lot of people. It's privatizing. You need to get quite a lot of information. About yourself, for it to work. In terms of advertising as well, you need to know a lot about your audience as well. So if you don't know enough about your audience, you're going to be targeting the wrong people and it's wasting money. So basically, for it to work, you need a lot of information. Number three, every platform is different from marketing on so great that the slaves platforms. The downside is you've got a lot of platforms to be working on. So each sort of content ideas you come up with has to be adapted to suit the platform, which can be very time-consuming. Number four, it's difficult to measure leads from social media. You can track social media to your websites so you can see where the platform, what platforms that is below the time. You can't actually measure the leads and the source of it basically because e.g. if you do a post on Facebook and then it's shared by multiple people, you're not really sure where the source came from and things like that. So it is a difficult thing to monitor. Basically. The next reason is you need to stay engaged and active at all times. I haven't got the time for social media, then you might find that you are very inconsistent and that can be reflected in your sales and your level of engagement. So it's important to stay engaged, but it is very time-consuming, which is the other reasons as well. The next reason, it is very time-consuming. Building up an audience, engaging with customers, trying to grow your following. It's just a lot of time taking, which is understandable, especially if you're a small business and you're doing a lot of different roles in your business. This could be one of the most time-consuming. So a lot of people kinda outsource this all the time. And the last downside to social media is the negative reviews. So these can be really frustrating and a huge impact on your business. So a lot of people use Facebook reviews or trust Pilot though, those types of things. If you get a bad review in them, it can actually impact your business more than you think. It's really sad because sometimes you'll find that you might have people who are spamming your sites and things which are often enough, you can actually get them removed. Or you've had a bad client, but it wasn't really your fault. But they feel like they should go on websites and give you a negative review. And then potential clients will probably, they might not use you for your business. So it can be very disheartening. How much of a review you can actually impact your business. So hopefully this has given you an oversight, is basically what social media marketing is about. The good things and bad things. They kinda way up pretty well. But there is a lot of things that you need to consider in terms of the time they're going to be doing. Spending on these types of things and your level of interests and the platforms you're gonna be using. So hopefully this has helped you. 3. Why use Social media for your small business: So why use social media for your small business? So that's what we're gonna be covering in this lesson. First of all, did you know that 71% of small to mid-size businesses use social media to market themselves as significant amount of people using it. As a business. You probably know it's really important to get online. So you might have a website, you might be doing other different types of marketing, e-mail. But another avenue is social media. So we're just going to cover up some of the main reasons you should be using social media for your business. I, first of all, you will reach more potential customers. So if you think about how many people are on social media, the millions, billions that are on it, that could be potential customers for you. So it's a different avenue for marketing yourself because not everyone will go to your website or iPhone will search for you specifically. But this is another way to reach out to them. Number two, it encourages people to purchase from your brands. So people love seeing what your brand is about. In your posts. You need to be reflecting what you're about. So if you're say, e.g. very eco-friendly company, then you need to reflect that and what you're putting out there really, because it will encourage those people that are interested in that type of thing to purchase from you. The more you can share about what your brand is about and really be consistent in what you're doing. The more likely people will buy from you. Another reason it boost your brand awareness. So e.g. or some of the companies, if you're quite small, you will gradually become bigger and bigger rigor, that's probably your main goal. And by doing this, you need to have more brand awareness. People need to know who you are. So when they say your name of your company, then people go, Yeah. I know who that is. I mean, that's what you want to be doing because we want people to be coming to you as first port of call when it comes to the products that you sell a service you do. You'll be going straight to you. So that's another really, really good reason. I've got three more. The next one, it gives you a better understanding of who your audiences. This is a really important one as well. Because the more you know about your audience, the butter is your business writing. So you would need to do some market stock market research on who your audience is. Then that can be a great strategy, which we will cover in another lesson about social media stretchy, but this is a very big point to understand. Number for your competitors are online. So you can actually learn from them really good ideas. So your competitors are online. But if you aren't, then in theory, your competitors are getting your business. If you think about it, this is not what you want. You want to be kind of line in line with them as a competitor to them as well. So it's important to kinda sun what they're doing if you're just starting out, this is probably a good idea, is to look at all your competitors in the area, in the country and look at what they're doing. It will help you massively in what you're doing, in creating your plans and anything like that. But you want to become a competitor to them as well. So that you can take some of the business, those up, that brand awareness, so people do come to you. And the last one is you can build long-term relationships with your customers. So if you have really good customer service when it comes to social media, offer service and you've really quick on social, like I've done it before. If message, say a bank that I'm with and I missed it on social media. They respond to you, say, you're gonna be like, Oh, they really guy, you'll stay with them a lot longer because of the risk response to you. And the fact that they seem to care don't mean. So it's really, really important to think about your business and how you can get onto social media and staying consistent stuff. But we're gonna be going through a lot more lessons on basically creating a strategy, getting setup, and understanding audience a bit more as well. So look forward to you in the next lesson. 4. Social Media strategy: In this lesson, we're going to look at social media strategy, which is a really important aspect of managing social media and to help your business. So first of all, what is a social media strategy? Well, basically it's a document outlining your goals. You'll tactics, what you want to achieve, how you measure this on social media. And it will also include the channels that you'll be using to break your business on. So in a nutshell, it's got, how are you going to do everything? Why you're going to do everything? And what the main goal is. So that's basically what strategy is meant to be doing. What a trashy will do for your business? Well, it will do five key things. First of all, enhanced talk to your crush your audiences because you'll know who your audiences from creating, stretching, direct, and increase website traffic. So your post new content will be pushing that type of aspect. You'll be able to create personalized contents so relevant to your audience. Basically trying to push what you do, the interests your audience. It's going to generate better quality leads. So you're gonna get people that actually are interested in what you do. I want to know more and will more than likely purchase something from you. Do it take us up? Then lossy, it will have a direction for all your social media activity. So make it easier for you to create content by understanding what it is you want to be doing, what you want to achieve those goals. So that's basically what is that full? How to develop a good strategy? To be successful in this aspect, there are some steps that you need to take. Number one, I need to set goals. So you need to clearly define what your goals off a business as activity for each platform will differ. E.g. for LinkedIn, you might want to be posting more informative posts. For Instagram, you might want to do more video content, but they might have different sort of messaging and stuff like that. One might be trying to sell a service more than a product, just because the platforms are different. So determining that will make a difference. Then once you have those goals and you've determined what they are, you'll then have to create KPIs, which is key performance indicators to see if your goal is being met and track success. So what I mean by this is e.g. if you really want to boost traffic to your website, you might say, write, write it down. I want 20 more people a day go into my website. That is a KPI. If you're, if you're, if your traffic is building to that 20 people are more than the activities that you're doing are successful because it's doing what you wanted to. You wanted to 20 people, great. So then when you've hit that, then you will change the target. You'll change the key performance to something else. So you will have probably increase it. And then what you'll do is you'll increase the activity so you're trying to build up exercise and keep it going. So that's number one. Number two, your research, your audience. So to create personalized content, you need to know who your audiences and what they want. So a few ideas on how to do this is you need to try doing online surveys, interviews, market research, and social listening to understand here your buyers. It's really, really important step, I mentioned it in the last lesson. Knowing who your audiences is going to impact how successful your social media campaigns. In all honesty, you don't know who your audience is. You are just basically throwing posts out there with no real direction. So it's important to define that. The three is research competitors. So this is as simple as an Excel sheet together, working out what platforms they're on, understanding how many followers they've got, what kind of content they do, how often they post, what hashtags. So all those little things you can Google this time research competitors. You will find loads of links with other webpages that basically say what you need to be looking at, but look at the key things, key information that you can learn from each other. Competitors. You might even look into the services they offer, that type of thing, what people are drawn to. So it might impact on how you do. But it's really, really important step. And then the final step is to define, define your objectives, identify your target audience, workout a budget. So are you going to be using paid ads, e.g. can you include that? Can you outsource your social media? A lot of people are doing that lately to virtual systems and social media managers. Because it's such a big area, you can afford to do it. Great. It can help you focus on your business. But it's worth thinking about if you put in your budget, gather, and then sticking to a theme for your content. So you need to think about what your content is going to look like. In terms of colors, isn't gonna have logos, the style, the wording of it. So it's really important to look into that. But then what you do need to understand is when it comes to trashy, it is just a strategy that works then at the time. But e.g. if something isn't working, your objectives working, you're not reaching the target, then it's important that you can change your strategy. It's just there for a baseline, is just basically telling you what you can do. But the plan can change, so it's important to adapt it if you need to do it. So that's really important. Establish your social marketing goals. So here's just a few ideas of what your marketing goals could be. It could be to increase traffic, build relationships, improve processes, improve visibility, increase sales, grow awareness of the brand. So these are just a few sort of goals that you can have for social media. You could probably think of a lot more, but these are the basic ones. A lot of people would just want to increase traffic. A lot of people just want to increase their visibility mainly so that people know who they are. It's important to understand what your business is looking for. So how to define your target market? So, how do you define your target market? So first of all, you need to decide who your current customers are and why they buy from you. So this is a part of your research for your audience. Basically. This will help understand your audience's a bit better. So look at number one. Then number two is work out the benefits of what you do or sell. You want to be giving a solution to a person's problem. That's basically what you want to be there for. Someone can't do something, they need to understand that you can help. So understanding what you can offer is really, really important. Number three, who is most likely to buy from you? So look at the factors like age, location, gender, gender, income level, occupations. I would like the normal stuff that you'd look for in a buyer persona. Basically, you're looking at who your market is. Basically, the last one is to look at your competition and look at who they are targeting. So I have briefly mentioned this in times of stress she side of things. So this is a bit more in depth of what you need to be looking for, basically considerations to look at. So this is the final part of this course. So basically, you need to be looking at your voice, your tone, and the way you speak, and the way that it comes across in your posts needs to reflect your business. So try and aim not to be very blunt if you can help it, try and come across this friendly. I'm informative. You want to be very open tone, open voice. If it suits your brands. Having a very blunt and very generic kind of voice, very bland. It, it's not going to pique your interest on social. A lot of people will just ignore the posts. It needs to stand out as much as possible. Determine what platforms to use. Like I've mentioned, in the strategy, you need to be looking at certain platforms. Not all of them are going to be right for your business. E.g. some businesses use TikTok because it isn't useful to them. Whereas others, I'll say very creative types like that may cakes and things that app see huge on TikTok because you can do a lot of video editing and people off. So you need to pick out which platforms works best for you. But in one of the next lessons, we will look at the platforms, their uses, and it can help you narrow down which wants to use. Then you need to look at your overall goals. Your goals. You don't need to have like a couple of sentences. It could be bullet points of three things you want to achieve basically. And then they can be adapted. But yeah, it's important to understand what your goal is because then that helps you create the content to reach the goal. The next one is what you want to achieve. So, like I've just mentioned about goals. Goal achieves the same thing, but achieve is probably more long term. What do you want to achieve in your business? Where do you see your social media in, say, two years, years time? Do you want to be having a massive following or you want lots of engagement or as you want it just to be consistent, the ticking over and getting their sales and all time. So what it is that you want to achieve, then you need to think of do you have time to interact with others? This is a very big point for a lot of small businesses. The struggle to have the time, social media, a lot of them will outsource. It might be an aspect that you might have to do if you've got the budget to zero. And if you're struggling with time, It's something you might want to look into unless you have a company name and styles. So does your business have a very clear name? Very easily remember verbal. If you've got a logo, is it very clean cut? Is it got a nice style, same as your website. You want a consistency between your website and your social media. You'll find like if you go through some people's websites from the social, be very consistent in color and voice, and layout and tone. So it's really important to try and keep them very consistent. And hopefully this has given you a really good insight into what a social strategy. 5. What platform is for what: In this lesson, we're going to cover what platform is for what. When it comes to promoting a business on social media, it's so important to choose the right platform for what you do. As some platforms don't have your ideal audience on. Before you start setting up accounts on all the platforms, it's good to understand the purpose for each one on whether your orders will use it. You've probably heard of some of these in this list, but these are the top nine platforms that people use currently. So Facebook has been around for years. Youtube, Instagram, TikTok has been a new competitor over the last three years, two years. Snapchat is always been in the background. Pinterest, Reddit, LinkedIn, and Twitter. But we're going to go and focus on the sort of the main ones. We're going to look at Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Twitter. The reason for this is some of the other ones are more forums or the social platforms like search engines. Like Pinterest is in the class as a social media platform. It's more of a search engine, but we're going to cover the main ones. Now. First of all, we're going to look at Twitter. So Twitter as a platform for quick snappy content. That's this is because of the 280 character limit and it's short lifespan. So usually when you're on Twitter, they usually say you post one to five times per day, but it actually used to be about 20 to 30 because content was going on and not many people were seeing it. So it's very, very short lifespans. So you might find that you're going to have to post quite a lot. But the good side is, it's very snappy. What this platform is great for, it's good for engaging with customers, finding out the latest news and hashtags can help you with your search. Hashtags are really good on Twitter. When you're doing a post on twitter, always include a hashtag. I usually include about three to five. Just because it's easier way to get found. The main tips when it comes to this is it's great for news updates and short post. Mainly. You post one to five times per day. So that's basically the highlights, their view of Twitter. So if you're thinking about your business, can you get the information about your business into very snappy content, little chunks? It's a good thing to think about. If it does great. If you can have a lot of news updates and lots of informative posts, this could be the right platform for you. So TikTok, you may have heard of this. Tiktok isn't right fit for all brands and businesses. It's only recently that business. So taking to using TikTok because it's so popular, the only thing is the age for them. So a lot of people in this are about 18 to 24. There are more people say I think it's 25 to 39, 40 that are sort of using it a bit more. But not every brand is suited to this. So if you're a very creative business, then this can actually be really useful for you. So the great thing about its platform, it is great for those creative types. There is opportunity for viral. T has a huge audience and you don't need a huge budget. But like I've just said, they're all things you need to consider. The time it actually takes to create one. So if two Chuck creating videos is it's taking more time The expect, and you've got other things to do than you might have to balance out. Is it worth it? The age group is another thing. The services you provide. If they are for probably outside this group, then it's probably not platform for you. The other thing you need to consider is, do you have time to plan the content? You need a bit of a plant, figure out what you're gonna be doing daily. So those are the things you need to think about. Instagram is a very popular platform. Most businesses you'll find can easily go onto this. Totally up to what you provide and how you can utilize it. On Instagram, you will find, you can get specific with niches, which is fantastic. So when I say niches, it's very specialized businesses. So like you might specialize in a type of jewelry, then you can be very specific on this platform, which is great. What this platform offers is inapt shopping, which is great for e-commerce businesses. It's a very visual platform. So if you've got a business where you can upload photos quite regularly, this could be very useful for you. And uses engage a lot on this platform. I find this soy much engagement and people asking things. And it's a very positive space I find, especially when you're messaging like, Hey, how are you doing? Or you have people message me. It's never really horrible messages. It's always people finding out what I'm about, what I'm up to like. Thank you for following. It's a very considerate platform to be on actually. So it's worth thinking about. So there is three main considerations you need to think about when it comes to Instagram. If you can post 3-7 posts per week, That's brilliant. So for this, if you do stick to three posts, That's great. Instagram love consistency. So if you can stick to three, brilliant, if you can crank it up to seven, That's great. But it's all about what you can manage. Also depends on the quality of your content. For high-quality content, There's nothing worse than his ground when you come across a foot forward, It's very blurry or something isn't it doesn't read, write or you can't read it. It just comes up as low quality and you increase your businesses like follows. Also, you need to do a lot of engagements. So think about if you've got the time to do that. The upside of this is when you think about it. If you can set and you'll calendar every day, first thing in the morning, 10 min per day. That's probably just enough. That's the bare minimum that you can get away with doing to grow your audience and to grow your brand awareness. If you can manage that, then great, but if you can increase that throughout the day, goes on every couple of hours or at lunchtime or dead k time, half an hour or 1 h, whatever works for you, then this could be a really useful platform for you. Facebook is one of the best platforms for everything. It's got a bit of everything on there. So we'll go through them now. But it's a very versatile platform. So you can do different content. You can do videos, you can do is just introduce articles. It's, it's quite everything. It doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't have a limit like Twitter. It doesn't matter if you've got a lot of images. Show me that you can use it for anything really content-wise. So why is it good for businesses? It's got a few good reasons for this. It's good for sharing resources. So it's got a great easy button, the pressure at the bottom, which is brilliant. It offers Facebook ads, which is great to get your business in front of your audience. Facebook groups is one of the best things out there. I love. Sign me up to all these groups to do with learning and stuff. Really insightful, Great to engage with people. It's got same interests. You can sign up to as many groups as you want. Your business account can do the same, but you can push your business into those groups, which is fantastic. It helps build brand reputation. So Facebook page, business page. You'll find that he's got reviews. Most people, when they're looking at services or products, they will look at your, you know, your reviews. If they're positive. That's what kind of encourages them to find out more, go to your website or buy from you direct. So it's really important to have that. And you can easily promote events as well, which is really useful, especially if you're looking for something local or you're doing a business event or anything like that. It's a great way to do it because most people will look in the area or it might come up on their own feed. So it's really good. So a few considerations when it comes to Facebook. You need to think about the age group. 18, 44 is the age group, so that's quite good. German. Most businesses look at tag team between 2040s and '50s anyway. So that's quite a big group. With Facebook, you need to be doing it one to two times per day. But if you can manage so once, once per day during the week days, that's enough. It's the same with Instagram. Consistency matters quite well. And Instagram on Facebook are owned by the same people. So they're connected as well. Which makes Facebook quite useful, especially in putting like scheduling posts and stuff. If you've got Facebook and you connect your Instagram, the two work side-by-side. So it's worth looking into and you need to be seen as active. So hence the one to two times per day. If you've got a business page, it's important to remain active as possible because sometimes Facebook will close down the pages if they seem dormant or anything like that. So it's important to make sure that you're quite active on social. It's the same with all the platforms engagement being seen quite a lot. So it's really, really important. So LinkedIn is another one. It's really important if you're going business to business. It's just a really great platform, I think. Especially from a business perspective. You can keep up to date with the latest trends sharing educational content related content. So the main benefits to this particular platform is you can showcase your work and business, share information builds up your reputation, shall job vacancies. This is quite useful if you're quite an informative business. So if you're like say e.g. you're a medical practice or something like that. And you've got a lot of informative, interesting posts to share. Linkedin is a really good resource. You can also create your own victim page separate from your personal one. And then you can kind of build up the following. I'm not, but you can share between them and things like that. So it's a useful one if you're going to be targeting businesses. It's very resourceful as well. There's always new stories and things like that on it. So even if even if you're on that just to keep up to date with the latest information, it's worth doing. The main tips with this is you need to publish engaging and viable contents and it's more personalized, it's a bit more informative. You'll find the language is very different from Facebook and Instagram are quite relaxed. Tiktok is quite funny, quite creative. Linkedin is. There's a bit of a serious time, but there's a lot more personalization you find in this. You, you'll come across posts where people talking about their successes, which is really nice to hear and stuff. But it gets the engagement because you're relatable to what's going on. Then on this particular post, you'll need 2-5 posts per week. It is not bad to be honest. If you can manage to do two posts per week. I'm like with the posts with the other platforms when we're saying the lower end, you can manage to do the low end of the posterior per week. Then that's great. Jeremy is all about consistency, which matters. So we're going to look at Pinterest in this one. So I mentioned that it's not social media platform as such, what Pinterest is, is a search engine like Google. You'll find like if such a thing in Google and go to images or you scroll down, sometimes, often are no agitation to a Pinterest board because it's relevant content. The two are quite connected in a way that benefits your businesses. It's very positive platform. It's the same as Instagram. There is some engagement been osmosis, Instagram. You'll find that it's all about being creative, very visual. You can reach a very large audience through Pinterest. You can sell products and link posts to your website. You'll find that people search through, add things to the board or they'll click through to understand something I find is quite informative ones has gotten mixed of Instagram, LinkedIn in it, the, between the two. But this is more of a search engine. Um, so the considerations for this is, do you have enough visual content? Pinterest is images. That's the whole image is in very small videos kind of content. Do you have time? Do you have the visual content to keep producing? I think it's 1-5 per day and keep doing them. This is a lot of time to build this up. In the beginning with the boards and staff of but if you can consistently do it fantastic. In the long term, it will help build brand awareness and boost your SEO. So basically where you get found long time. So it could be something depending if you like TikTok and other things. If you're very creative company, this could be useful for you. If you're very informative company. Quite serious, you do, You wouldn't have many images. It can be quite time-consuming for you, then this probably isn't worth your time and also your audiences while you've got to take into account, which is 25 to 35 years old. So that's another thing you need to be thinking about. The last one we're going to look at is YouTube. Youtube is the most popular video sharing social media network with a huge, huge audience. Most, everybody knows what YouTube is. Youtube is great for music videos, it's good for mation tutorials. Sometimes you find episodes of stuff. So the benefits to your business for having YouTube is it helps drive traffic to your website, improves your SEO, which is search engine optimization, which means you get found on Google. And it helps build up brand awareness. But the thing is you need to consider when using YouTube is, do you have the time and resources to do this? Do you have the equipment to be filming videos and you have time to edit? Do you know how to edit? Those are the types of things you need to think about. You also need to think about the type of content you're creating is going to stand out. Are you just creating something that somebody else has done about 1,000 times. You just need to kids during what you can offer people, what can you offer your audience? The last thing you need to do is think about if you can commit to regular uploading like every other platform, consistency matters. So do you have the time to always upload? When it comes to YouTube, you can set limits yourself. You could think, Oh, I'll do two videos a week. And if you can stick to that, great. If you can do one, then as long as you're doing something regularly. So if you say to your subscribers or anything, everyone's day, I'll have a new episode and it gets to Wednesday and there isn't one, then you kind of giving you false information to your audience. So you need to have that commitment when it comes to uploading videos. So hopefully, this has provided insight into the type of platforms, what they can do, whether you should be using them. Today, you've got to think about your business. I think if you've done some competitive analysis, it will also help you in determining what platforms. And then once you've determined, get setting them up. 6. Social media management tools: In this lesson, we're going to look at social media management tools with a little help from the right social media management tool. It's a bit of a mouthful. It can help you save money and energy. There is nothing worse than having full platforms and having to flip between them all to upload or scheduled stuff. It's slow, time-consuming and very fiddly. So that's where these types of tools come in. I've spent some time researching the most affordable ones. So you're not going to want a very high-end tool the minute, just because if you're starting out or very, very small, then you're not going to need one. So to start with, there are full, you can look into which is social pilots, Social be Post Planner and personally, the bottom two I've personally used, um, uh, recommend them, they're really good price, good value, easy to use, and worth giving a go. I'm just gonna go do an overview of each one, features and pricing. And then I'll leave up to you to look into which one you could use. First of all, we're going to get social pilot. The features it has is publishing and scheduling, analytics and reports. Great to see how things are doing. Engagement, collaboration and a content library, which is really useful if you're putting the grows at posts or anything like that, you can just pop them in there and then use them at a later date. What this offers is a 14 day trial, which I recommend trying if you want to have a look into this one, I do trials for a lot of them just to see how they work, how they function. If they suit me, I've recommended to, but they might not suit you. You might be looking for something specific or it might find it a bit fiddly, but it's worth trying out the trial. And then after that, it starts at 21 pound for six accounts, which is pretty reasonable to be honest. But if you keep looking, if you want to pick a team, then the pricing will go up and you'll have more users and probably more accounts. As well as the key to that one. Social be nice and colorful, offers, publishing the sketch saying, analytics and reports, engagement, content approval, which is great if you have clients or you work alongside somebody and you want that feedback. I've used it in certain other platforms and that is a great thing to use. The last feature is an AI post generator, which is becoming a really big thing in social media. Especially for those people that don't have the time or struggling to say the right thing. But you know what, you want to write about Jeremy. It's useful. Very useful feature try again, 14 day trial. So you can always give it a go for 14 days. See what you think works for you. Great. Then you can continue styling prices about 16 pound for five accounts and one workspace. So it's pretty reasonable to be on as parsing. Next one is post planner. So it offers publishing and scheduling, analytics and reports. Engagement, content approval, always a big plus designed posts and discover viral content. So it's probably more aimed at once you establish scheduling tool, especially the viral side of things. Yet, this one offers a set seven day trial. What doing? I did the same. It was worth doing so I can get a feel for it. You never know which ones are going to work is a little bit pricier than the other ones. It starts at 32 for ten profiles. So it depends on how many profiles you'll be working with. Depends which platform you're probably going to choose. This one is pustules. This is one I currently use the minute it's publishing his scheduling feature, analytics and reports, engagement, content approval, a writer for each feature and recurring posts. So that's kind of a useful tool, especially for Twitter. Instagram, you will find that sometimes your content for four months ago could be used now, just rewritten. So it's worth seeing what parts about. This one also does seven day trial and starts 754, full power falls. So it all depends on how many profiles you have. What you're looking for. If you're looking for very standard or you're not really fussed about certain things. The AI feature might be useful. You might like the content approval feature to have a research of your own. Here's full that you could actually do trials on. I'd recommend doing the trials before you jump into anything. It, there is a lot of testing and stuff to see what tools you're actually going to use. You might think are all the features are amazing. But if you don't use them all, that is not really much point in having the platform will pay extra for it. So it's worth doing your own research to see what works for you. 7. Types of content: In this lesson, we're going to look at the types of content there are. There are many forms of content all with different purposes and value here, just a few examples. So you've got articles, blogs, and guides, e-books, infographics, photos, videos, and video stories, contests, and testimonials. So all of these can be used in to benefit your business. So we're going to look at the benefits for each one. So for articles, blogs, and guides, you can show your knowledge and your expertise. On LinkedIn platform. You'll find that you can add articles same as Facebook. You can link, post two blocks and guides. People love that type of content is something that helps them understand the problem. E-books establishes authority and helps you build up trust. So you could write an e-book on a specific topic. Then you can share it on different social media platforms. You could do little video clips into it. So the content side of the post side of things. You can do any type that can link to an e-book. Infographics is a really good one as well. It helps people to understand complex information in a visual way. So e.g. if you're a very informative company, very complex stuff that you do, then you can use infographics to explain. And it's great because you can use infographics on pretty much any channel to show what it is you do. Infographics is really useful. Videos and video stories are absolutely huge now than ever used to be, but they are now. Everyone uses them. It's traumas really big on them. You can do Instagram stories. Tiktok is massive. Facebook. You can do stories on. It's just massive. They're great way to captivate and engage your audience. They're worth looking into doing. Context is another way to boost up your fan base and boost your reach. So like if you're a company that sells a specific product, you could do contests on it. The more followers, that type of thing. This will help build up your following, especially on Instagram. People have competitions on there for some reason, but it works same as Facebook, actually, LinkedIn and the other platforms. Not as much. You might find that TikTok might work as well. So you've got to be really selective on what, what channels to use it on as well, and the rules, contexts as well. Finally, the last type of content you could use is testimonials. This is a great way to show your reputation and credibility. Showcase who you are, you know, show off that you're really proud, especially on LinkedIn. People show off like the reviews from some of the clients they've had. Facebook. You can do the same, you can add that overview to it. Instagram, they're all all the sides will have the same has the same purpose across all of them. But it's a useful type of content. So hopefully this is giving you some little ideas on the type of content you can do. You can do like normal, obviously photos and stuff, but these are more with a specific purpose, kinda content. So hopefully you can add this into your strategy and have stopped thinking about what you can be doing. 8. Planning and publishing: In this lesson, we're going to look at planning and publishing social media posts. We're going to look at how to plan ahead first. Social media can be such a time-consuming task to do without a plan. So learning to plan ahead is important. The key things to do are allocate time tweak to plan for the week. Or if you work better, you might do it once a month or day. You work on it. For the following month. It's entirely up to you what works for you? You also do need to look into the trends and hashtags that are popular at the time. And think about creating the content for the week. So designing it through Canva, you also need to think about the caption. So when you're allocating the time to do this, planning ahead, you need to be thinking about all the steps that you need to do isn't just creating something and then scheduling it. There are other parts to it as well. Then finally, you need to schedule posts. You might have to look into the right time to post for each of the platforms. But we will be covering this in a famous time. Planning ahead is so important, I would highly recommend it. It just gives you peace of mind and it may stay on top of everything when it comes social media and remain consistent. The right frequency is also really important when it comes to publishing content. There are many different articles Alba, they'll give you different answers. So it's a general sort of rough guide. This is how many times per day you would need to be posting. Facebook is one to two per day, Instagram is one to two per day. Linkedin is weekdays only because it's very business to business. Twitter is 330 tweets per day. We have covered that. It can be 1-5. General rule is it's up to 30. But generally most people do one to five at the minute. But if you could do more fantastic, TikTok is one to four times a day, but it all depends on content you've got available, what you got planned, and have you got the resources to do it. The last thing you need to think about when it comes to publishing everything is publishing it at the right time, the optimal time of the day. Every platform has an optimal time. There are tons and tons of guides. You can look at various ones, but you will find that you'll have to play around with this. These are a general idea of the most popular times. You can look into other guides and things and see what they do. But you'll find if you post Germany around these times, it will walk. Or you might find, you might have to adapt the times or do better testing. But this is what I've uncovered from looking at multiple sites. Facebook is 08:00 A.M. to 11:00 A.M. most people look at it before they go work. Instagram is 06:00 A.M. 12:00 P.M. 10:00 P.M. which people? Opm sort of lunchtime, 10:00 P.M. people just tell him finds before they go sleep. So I think that's why their optimal times. Linkedin seventh, eight to 834 work 12:00 P.M. lunch and five to six is usually when people doing it on the way home. Twitter is 12 to 1.4 to 06:00 P.M. working around the working day, lunchtime and after work. People tend to use their phones a lot more. Tiktok is exam 2.7 pm to 11:00 P.M. so like again, it's just working around people's work days. You'll find that 9-5 with a break in the middle. People look at social the beginning or the end of the day. So that's why these are the right times. So when you're planning out and scheduling your thing, try to stick to these sort of times. You'll find that you're probably hit more of a larger audience at these times. And then more people will be online to see your content. So hopefully this will help you in planning out your social media. 9. Advertising and promoting: So welcome to advertising and promoting. So we're going to look at an overview of social media. Advertising is something you might consider later on in your life. Like down the line with your business is useful. So I'm just going to go through each of the advertising platforms. All social media channels actually have incorporated advertising into their own platforms, which you'll find is one of the best ways to attract new customers, is really useful. So what you probably don't know is social media advertising can actually cost less than a typical pay-per-click, PPC and banners. So you'll see them on the sides of websites, on Google Search and things like that. You'll see them everywhere. So social media can actually cost less than that because they can actually be quite pricey. So what advertising can do, you can target geography, demographics, education, interests, age, and sex. So it narrows down all of those aspects so that you can target your audience, your ideal audience, a lot better. So I'm just going to briefly go through each of them, each of the platforms in their advertising. So first of all is Facebook. When it comes to Facebook, really easy platform to use for advertising. I've used it personally. It's pretty straightforward, but there are things you need to consider which I'm just about to go through. These are the key elements that you can alter and change and things. So we'll just quickly go through them. So when it comes to creating an ad, you need to think about what content you want to promote. Is it going to be a video castle? Oh, just a single image. So if you're going to do an add, I would recommend probably doing a video or carousel because you will get a lot more engagement out of it. There's a lot of more nation you can put on it. It's a bit more eye-catching. A single image. You might not get the response you want. And it's hard to put a lot of information into a single image. You need to think about that. Next you're going to think about, do you want people to go to your website or your profile? So which one do you want them to go to? It will give you the option to do this. The budget side of things is brilliant on this. You can do it per day or an overview. So you can be like, I want 20 pounds over seven days and it will set up mount each per day and it will work it all out. Susie has to be mapped to a pound. It stops. So it's really useful, especially if you have a strict budget. Location will be another thing that it will ask you about. So you'll have to type in locations. This is really useful if you're trying to target big cities, e.g. because you can type in the city name and then you can do the distance from it. So say 20 mi from the center. And it will do like a massive circle with the city in the middle. Which is really useful if you want to do like a large audience or you can narrow it down on there. It also tells you basically how many people that will target. So when you put it in the location, the age, and you fill out all the information that asks for. It will tell you approximately how many people that particular ad will reach. Which is, it's really useful to play around. Because like some ads might not be useful in certain areas, age groups might not be in London, might have a specific age group, but if you want to say Devin or something, they'd group might be higher, so less targeted audience. So you need to think about that. But Facebook ads, it kinda helps you anyway. Then the last thing you need to consider is, do you want the image or video, what castle on the feed or on a sidebar advertisement space. So you need to kinda thing where you want to actually going. Twitter is really good. It's been around for years and years, exploded on the scene and offers paid advertising as well. There are different types of Twitter content to borrow. You can promote your tweet, an account, a trend, or a Twitter card. So you kind of got to think about what it is you want to be pushing. Basically. Lets talk to them, Facebook, but it's still useful to use. Linkedin, also advertising different ways so you can reach a more professional audience, but they have different formats to advertise. So just a quick overview and knees, you have sponsored content, direct sponsored content, which is. Directly to specific people sponsored InMail. So on LinkedIn you'll get a message, pop-up. Text ads, dynamic ads, lead generations forms. You've got a few options there. I won't go into them. You'll have to, if you're interested in LinkedIn advertising, is worker on the website and finding out more about the various types because they all have different sorts of ways of setting up and targeting. So it's worth doing Instagram advertising. If you have a budget for paid social, you should strongly recommend using Instagram. Ads, like Facebook is really good value for money. But they also have loads of different types and formats. So you've got image ads, video ads, Carousel ads collection ads, explore at shopping ads. And real dads needs to think about what kind of ad you want to be doing. But it's great because you can choose from different Types, basically, to sue. For the user that uses Instagram. Some people tend to look for stories quite a lot. Some people look at reveals, some people love images. So it's really useful just to see what's going to work, but this might be a little bit of trial and error. Finally, TikTok. Tiktok campaigns are very targeted, which makes it really effective in driving traffic, making sales, launching a new product. But they also have different types of ads you can do as well. So you can do in feed ads, brand takeover, top view, branded hashtag challenge, or branded effects. So as you can see, I've just done an overview in all. There are a lot of information that I completely understand. When it comes to it. You just need to kind of think, well, first of all, what platform my arm to think about, what audience? Where is your audience? What they, what they like? And then you kinda look at your budget as well. So there are some considerations. This is one of the best ways to advertise. You don't need a huge amount of money to do this at all. If you've got 20 pounds a month, that type of thing, you know, that's more than enough to get a few more people noticing your business. And you know, if you consistently do each month, if that's a few more people, more people, and it adds up burdens a day. This is just an avenue to explore. When you establish self on social media. Probably not like at the very beginning of your steps of setting up your accounts, you need to have some content on your website, on your social media platforms for people to find out more about you. So it's worth looking into. Mike, I would add this into your strategy as a next step or note it down as a long-term goal to do this eventually. But it's also really good if you're organic social media is not progressing as well as as you expected. So if you're not reaching certain goals, you might turn to using this as well. So it's worth thinking about. 10. SEO: In this lesson, we're going to cover SEO. So what is SEO stands for? Search engine optimization is a way to use search terms or keywords in online content so that it can be more searchable. So the keywords that you use in your social media posts, if they're relevant to your brand, will help you get noticed, will help you when you're somebody's typing something on Google will help you get found. So that's what SEO's main goal is. Seo, however, is very complex skill that all marketeers needs to master before decent results can be seen, however. But I don't expect that from, you know, are really as a small business owner, SEO isn't an aspect even I cover, but I do understand why it matters and how to integrate it into social media plan, which we're going to cover in a few minutes time. Why does SCR matter? Scr matters as its goal is to get your web presence to the top of the search results. Therefore, pushing traffic to your website or your social media accounts. It is used to pull in a lot of customers you assign, get as many links to your site it's possible, and gives you a good search engine ranking, meaning you can be found easier. So basically, it's basically getting you found online. That's in a nutshell. That's what it's doing. Seo strategy within social media. So I've got a few tips here. We'll cover off in a second. So by having both an understanding of SEO and introduce it into your social strategy, it will help you in your ranking. In search engine results, you know, like your Google page, it will help. And to do this, there are certain things you do well, five things. First of all, you need to make sure your profile is fully optimized. So when I say this, I mean you've got the correct web address on the links. So e.g. Facebook, you can put a Lincoln Instagrams the same. You've filled out all the information about who you are, what type of business you are there, such things. So you filled out every single thing that you can fill out on a profile. So that the more information on there, the more that you're going to get fonts from Google, then you're going to bank back link your profile. So when I say this on your website at the very bottom or top corner, you will have the symbols for your social media accounts. What backlink really means is that you'll be connecting the links on your website to your profiles. You will also be pushing posts to your website. So basically you're basically creating a link between the two to show people that the two are linked in some shape or form. So that's really, really important anyway. Three, having eye-catching images, there's nothing worse than scrolling through Instagram and can be corrosive. An image can't read it. Greg, qualify. You just you just ignore you and engage in it. You want to be able to create consistent branding than reflects who you are, what your company's bow when you go from profile's, different profiles is consistent across all of them and on your website. Because when search engines kinda look into it, they'll connect to the fact that the, the design is very similar. So understand that. Now before always try to improve and analyze your own social media content. So we are going to go through a lesson on analyzing data. So we'll cover that. But what this means is you need to be looking at those posts that do really, really well and going, Oh, okay, I'm gonna do that again and see what happens. If that's working consistently, then you found what works for your audience and what works for your channel. And just keep doing it and keep improving things. If somebody suggests something, then improve on it or she finding some writings too small and prove it, change it, see what walks. At the end of the day, social media, he never gonna get right from day one. So don't expect your posts to be amazing straight away. It will grow with time. So don't worry too much. Number five, do social listening to discover new keywords to use? When I say this, that means just going online, typing in social listening, and looking for online tools. And then looking for those keywords, those important keywords that will help you stand out. So the ones that are trending, I would just go on Google, type in social listening. I would actually look for them. It might take you a little time, but there are plenty of tools that you can find the free to use. And they might send you e-mails, that type of thing to keep you on top of those new keywords, to use all those trending keywords. So it's important to stay on top of it. Because those keywords are more popular. That all impacts SEO. If you jump on them, create content that gets boosted, that gets boost your SEO. And then you get based on search engines. So everything has a knock-on effect, it's worth doing. So, hopefully this has given you an insight into SEO. If you want to learn more, there are plenty of YouTube videos out there. To look into this. I would definitely do searches for keywords to make sure that your keywords are relevant and very popular. It will help you massively. 11. Analytics and reporting: In this lesson, we're going to cover analytics and reporting. This is a really important aspect that you need to be looking into. It will absolutely help you long-term in creating your audience, creating the right content for them, and growing your brand. So we're going to cover a few things that will help you. So first of all, you need to decide what to measure when it comes to reporting. It doesn't need to be adept when it comes to analytics at all. And I'll show you a few reasons why. Because some of the social media platforms have their own tools, but they're so easy to use and not complex in any way. But it's important to look out what you want to look at, like what you want to focus on. So you can focus on the level of engagement, which is the clicks, the likes, the shares and comments. And I mentioned, you can look at the reach, the followers, the impressions, the web traffic, and the share of voice. We can look at the conversion, which is the sales revenue, the lead position, right? And the non-revenue conversions. So there are three ways you can measure it and then you can break them down. But it's really up to you what you want to be measuring. Are you more interested in the web traffic or you more trust and followers? You can separate these out for each of them. But there's a few tools that you can use that can help you monitor this as well. So we're just about to cover that now. Here are five of the top tools. There are quite a few tools out there that you can use to monitor your traffic to your website. Platforms are sending it through that type of thing. But here are the top five. Sprout Social is really good. But see my Soho social, Google Analytics and each of the platforms themselves. They're all really useful to use Google Analytics, you do need to set it up on your website. So it's really important to set that up before we can build up your social. Can be a bit tricky, but those guides and things to help set that up. And each platform we're actually going to cover right now, because I think they're really good platforms for analytics type of things because you don't need too much information. But if you're looking for more than I'd say, try one of the other four. So first we're going to look at Twitter. So Twitter analytics tools, so easy to use, I'm very easy to understand and very informative. So what I'll show you is the number of tweets, tweets, impressions, profile visits, and new followers. But it do month by month. So you can see what the previous month was doing. It will obviously, at the top of the analytic page, it will tell you if you're up or down from the previous month, which is pretty good, especially if you're trying to grow your followers and it's going down, then you know, you need to do some more engaging Facebook analytics, insights. Very informative on this. Actually, it does a bit more information. Twitter, it looks at Reach page visits. Patient who likes, likes, age and gender, top towns and cities. So it's looking at demographic, your audience itself as well. So that's quite insightful as well. Instagram, very similar to Facebook, because the two are connected. So it looks up, reach peripheral visits, new followers, followers, age and gender. Top towns and cities. Which like I said, the inflammation is so useful, especially if you're doing targeted ads. This is a really good place to look. Linkedin Analytics helps you evaluate metrics on visitors, the followers, bleeds content and your competitors. So you can add competitors like a list of them and see how you're doing compared to them, which is pretty good. Actually. Got quite a few businesses on LinkedIn are very similar to you. You can see what they're doing and how they're doing. But they're analytics on them. You can look at page views, unique visitors, total followers, new followers, reactions, and reposts. All very useful information like the rest. I'm not sure what else you can do need to know. But like I said, each of the platforms has its own tool that you can easily access in the background. I tend to use it from my desktop just because it's easier. But it gives you enough information if you want to try the other tools than it's worth doing. And finally, TikTok analytics. So they are very similar to Instagram. So it will show you top post, follower account, reach, views, comments, likes, shares, and engagement rates. So they're quite focused on the gauge meant and how it contents daring. Whereas Facebook and Instagram are probably more focused on the audience themselves and who they are and that type of thing. So each of these platforms kinda tells you a little bit about what it is and how posts are performing, which will help you in growing your account. So it is really worthwhile at the end of each month, end of each week. Having a look and maybe crane your report, maybe write down some suggestions for next week's posts from what you've learned. So this is a really good learning tool for you. 12. Making content stand out: In this lesson, we're going to look at making content stand out. So the first thing you need to think about is content should ideally provide value. So this could be, they can be very informative. You could be talking about something that people didn't know. It needs to have a purpose. So when you create posts, you want it to be, it must be doing something. The purpose of post could be to get somebody to go to a blog or go to your website. So it's that type of thing that you need to think about. Your content could answer a question as well. Most of your posts should be answering a question or being really informative or helping your audience understand something. If that's your type of business, ask any question isn't for every business, e-commerce, Not so much. More businesses, small businesses. This could be more relevant to you because your services can be linked into answering that question that needs you. You post ideally want to be relatable to people. You want to make your language easy, flowing, Understandable, very clear on what it is you're talking about. Otherwise people just won't be able to follow. You could use a lot of personal language into it as well. So you can reach a more personal level with people. So you could be talking about a problem that you have personally. Linkedin is a very good platform for that. So is Instagram, I'd say, for talking about things that actually happened to you in your business and things like that. So it's worth kinda adding in that relatable elements into your content. And the final one, this should be for every single post that you do, it should stand out by being unique. You want your poster stand out. Amongst millions and millions, millions of posts that go around every day across all the various platforms. So you need to make sure that your content is unique. It isn't like every other person's posts or go out. So if you're a coach, you might have every coaches during this color that during this type of style, you want to come away from that. You want to be like, I'm going to try this and see if that works better, but it will make you stand out compared to them. So the next thing we're going to cover is the ways to sell through content. Basically, these aspects are things to think about when it comes to creating your content. So first of all, be as visual as possible. So when I talked about standing up being unique, this is how you do it. The visuals parser will make a post standout, make them look different if you want to, if you can. And then number two is using a mix of different contents. So this again links into being visual and unique. You want your post to stand out. So try different things. See if a little bit of animation works. Short videos, carousel, images, that type of thing play around. You'll be so surprised at what works, what doesn't. And it saves you a lot of energy into the J. Try around, try different what types. And then what I would do is look at your analytics at the end of the month. So try out for a month, see what works. Your analytics will tell you what worked, what didn't. So it will give you such a good indicator for the following, for the next few months. What type of content your audience laugh, and then that saves your long-term in gratings post not really getting anywhere and you following doesn't increase. So it's worth doing this. Number three half call to actions. Always have a binary shop now, find out more now. Download now, those types of do this now or an action so somebody understand what they need to be doing then before be entertaining. This works for some businesses, not for every, but when I say entertaining out a bit humor and some posts. But that depends on the platforms you're gonna be using. But you can sort of tweaks and the stuff that you're doing to be stand down and be quite funny if you want. But it all depends on your business. So you don't need to necessarily do this as long as your posts are very Engaging. Number five, use intriguing titles. This is really good, especially on Instagram things. You'll draw people in more by having a very interesting title. If some things like the five top ways to such and such, you're gonna be like Uber. But if you start rattling off like a really dull title, you just gonna be bored. You're not going to want to know more. So make it stand out, it gets short, make it snappy, make it. You could even look at your competitors and see if they can. The wording that they use titles to inspire a bit more. But play around same as different content. Just play around, see what works, titles wise, what draws people in. It's really important just to experiment quite a lot in your early stages of social media. Number six is always add links, everything, whether it's your website. I would ensure that you've always got a link at the bottom of every post, made sure on your platforms you've connected. So e.g. on Instagram, you can put in a link to your websites in the profile. Make sure there is a link that makes sure you've always got links to your website from different platforms is so, so important. You need people to find you and be able to go straight to your content easily. Really important, number seven is regular posts. This is one of the biggest ones, I'd say we've mentioned it low throughout this course about regular posting. So if you're a small business owner and you're really struggling to find the time to do regular posting. Try and just aim to do one post to post a week if you can do it. Having that consistency, you'll be surprised, does really help when it comes to growing your audience. Because when an audience does come onto your platform and your profile, but having a nosy and they post all the time, they're very active company. It just reflects really well on you. So it does help until that time when you do have that time to post a bit more than it just helps create that foundation. Number eight, have small and digestible information. Tweets. You tend to do this quite a lot. You'll short snappy. We do at the platforms can do the same. You can do like long-form captions and things. But if you are starting out trying to aim to do a few sentences, you to understand what it is that you're trying to push which services are a bit more information about who you are? Try and stick to small sentences, paragraphs, that type of thing. Easy to read. I use bullet points. A lot of my posts. I think it's one of the best ways to adjust information. Because a lot of people asking readers, if you're starting out, kind of stick to this kind of role. When you become a bit bigger, you might find that your post will have more substance, a bit more to them. But for now, just stick to small. I'm finally think about your content goals. So when you create your content, it's good to have some goals in mind. You're going to look at showcasing your brands and building relationships, sharing of products and services, attracting new customers, driving sales, illustrate benefits and build up your reputation. So these are all types of goals that you can look into. So you need to be thinking, well, my goals, what do I want to do? Do I want to drive sales? Do I want to attract new customers? What is your key goals that you want to accomplish from social media? If you're looking to attract new customers, then your posts are going to be very focused on new customers. It's got to be very the type of wording you use, the type of content you use. You might do benefits to what you do. You might do offers that type of thing 15% off. If you do this such as such, the language is going to be very different depending on your goals. So you need to have a think about what it is you want to do. You can have multiple goals. By the way, you could have all seven of these goals if you wanted. But the content for each goal is going to be slightly different if you know what I mean. So hopefully this has given you some insight into how to make your content stand out. And good luck with it. 13. Social Media tips: Welcome to your last lesson. So I've just done a bit of an overview of everything you've done in this course. So hopefully these last social media tips will help you get started in your journey. Once you've worked out the right platforms for your business. So hopefully you were at that point now, you've figured out which one's going to be beneficial to you. Here are a few tips to get you started. So first of all, you need to think about planning in advance. We've covered this previously, but I can't stress it enough. It will make your life so much easier. So don't create content on the fly if you can help it. It's one of the most common mistakes made and causes a lot of stress. So make sure you set some time each month or week to plan out all of your posts, it will save you time and keep you organized, organized. In your diary. I would say allocate some specific time, say whether you're quiet on a Friday afternoon, making sure that that afternoon is used for social media for the following week. All week do is do a dedicated day once a month and be like, That's my day to create apps, everything for the following month, whatever way works for you. I'd definitely do it. Pop up on your calendar, put in your planner. However, where you work, try and do this as well. So it gets scheduling. We've covered in the previous lessons about scheduling tools. So depending on your number of platforms you use, you could be better off using a scheduling tool like closely or HootSuite as they do save you a lot of time. We have gone through, I think for, for platforms to choose from, you will find, say, e.g. if you are going to use for platforms or something, scheduling tools will be so easy for you. Help you in putting all your post together. You can manage it a lot easier. You don't need to flick between accounts, honestly, is such a time saver, honestly. The next thing you need to think about is committing to interacting. As much as it's great if what you post your schedules, you've planned everything. You do need to still engage daily. So you need to be making time daily to engage on social media platforms to see the results. So this includes commenting, answering questions, and interacting with your customers. This is the only way that you follow me is going to grow. The more you talk to people, the more you're out there, you're engaging and you're seen as being very active. The more you're following is going to grow, the more sales leads and everything will be driven. So it's so important to make time for that. So for this type of thing, I would say five, 10 min per platform per day. You could do it first thing in the morning. You could do it just before you go on lunch or just before the end of the day. It's entirely up to you, but I would allocate this is same as planning your content. Please pop it in your diary is the best way to keep you on track with this type of thing. But five-minutes minimum per day is all you need. But it can make a huge impact. So the next thing you need to do is keep it on trends. You don't need to jump on every mean, but by paying attention to sign up becoming popular content, it helps you to create your own. So e.g. if there is a National Women's Day coming up, that's gonna be a very popular day. You can think right? I can jump on that. I'm going to create a post dedicate to the women in the business. If people who have inspired me, helped me That type of thing, you can jump on that sort of trend because you know it's coming. But have a look on online tools, Google, trends and things like that that can help manage up and coming trends. You can get e-mail notifications. You can set Google Alerts, that type of thing, that you can stay on top of them. If you've got a lot going on than eight, understandable, you can't jump on every trend, but a few here in that it can help boost your engagement. So it's worth doing. I'm finally use analytics as much as possible. Use analytics. In previous lessons, we talked about traveling and error, social media posts, the types, the timings, that the consistency of how many posts, There's a lot of things going on at the same time. So it's really important to understand. Is your efforts doing what it's supposed to be doing. Analytics basically works out if your posts are reaching the right audiences. And everything that you learn from analytics will help you in creating future posts and working out what worked, what content didn't. So, so important, it's just one of the best ways to do it. You can either do it through the tools that we've discussed in some of the other lessons. Well, you could just go through platform to platform. They all have analytics of their own. I personally use each of the platforms analytics, it's easy to use. Twitter's is really good. I can see how many followers I got from last month compared to this month. Facebooks, the same, facebook and Instagram are on the same page. And a lot of the other ones you can just go into the back-end on your phone or on the desktop and it won't take you long to look at, but every month, just have a look simple wiped. It will really impact what you'll be doing for the future. So hopefully you've enjoyed this course. There is a project to do which is a lovely worksheets that you will be completing. Its got a lot of aspects to it. If you top pop into the projects, download the PDF, the dogs, even. And you can go through it, you can add details to it. It's going to look at competitive analysis, is going to help you figure out the different aspects of social media marketing. So everything we've covered in throughout this entire course is in that project. So hopefully you'll enjoy it. Hopefully it will give you a better understanding and help you get started in your journey with social media marketing.