Avoiding Burnout: Social media marketing can be easy AND effective

1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Alice ambitions of Alice ambitions consulting. And I'm going to teach a class on how to reduce burnout on social media marketing. So I hope that you'll join me in the next couple of videos. 2. Two keys: Efficiency and Purpose: In my experience, teaching social media marketing to small businesses. So there are two keys to reduce, reducing burnout on social media marketing. These are efficiency and purpose. These two things dovetail in a really nice way and social media marketing. And we're gonna talk a little bit about how you can use them separately as well as together. So first we're gonna talk about efficiency. The way that I like to start talking about efficiency is actually by talking about inefficiency, specifically, inefficient overwork. What is inefficient overwork? Inefficient overwork is when we take too much time to do something, basically three simple, more time than necessary to complete a task. So some examples of this are reading and rereading emails before you send them. Like double-checking, triple checking your work happening in hiring about how to post something or how often to post. And then the third one is by setting too high expectations. So if you grew up in a female up hearing body, a lot of times we are taught that we have to be perfect, that we always have to be on and all of our work has to be like a plus 4k. There's actually a lot of evidence of a large body of studies that show that girls in particular are really conditioned to, to strive for like a pluses it going as early as middle school and high school. And that boys are encouraged to be like the B minus students. And so that carries with us into our workspaces. And The New York Times had an article a few years ago that said, under qualified and under prepared men don't think twice about leaning in. But even when women are overqualified and over-prepared, they still hold back. Women feel confident only when they are perfect. And the way that this shows up for a lot of small business owner on social media. That our women are, that they really don't trust their instincts. They don't feel okay posting like B minus work. They can get every post has to be perfect, every image has to be perfect, every caption it has to be perfect. And what that does is it actually prevents them from posting. So what I like to encourage people to think about letting go of practices that don't actually serve you, that don't serve your work style. That don't serve your productivity, that don't serve your goals and your purpose. And we'll talk a little bit more about that in a bit. But basically, it's really good to examine like when you are doing tasks that you really don't like, like on social media, like actually thinking about your pain points and thinking about Okay, well, I hate doing fist part of it, but actually is that something you need to be doing? Because often you can either let it go or you can outsource it. So one of the best ways and my experience to create efficiency for social media marketing is to batch. Now what do I mean by batch and means to do a chunk of work at once. That's all the same kind of work so that you don't have to do it multiple times. So an example is if you own a business and you do your own bookkeeping, and instead of photographing your receipt and uploading in itemizing it once a day, once a week, you would do it seven in a row, or once every two weeks you would do 14 in a row. And that creates real efficiencies with regards to your time because you're not getting your camera out, you're not setting up the software, you're not logging into your accounting. You're not doing the itemizing one piece at a time. It actually creates a lot of efficiency. So I personally have experienced with this, I have a jewelry business and a used to take one picture of one piece of jewelry that I hit me. Then I would edit it, then I would post it on Instagram and write the caption right then. And that whole process would take me anywhere from ten to 15 minutes. But if I waited until I had 10 or 12 pieces of jewelry and took pictures of them all in the same light, and then edited them all in the same light. The editing process went much more quickly. The photos were much more consistent. And and then I just had 10 or 12 pictures in my back pocket. So if I was posting twice a week, That's five to six weeks of content and all I had to do was create the captions, which for me is an easy part of it. If for you the challenging part is Captions, what you can do is you can write captions ahead of time and then look for photos either on your phone, on your computer or even use something like Unsplash to get free stock photography. Or ask friends of yours that are photographers if they have anything that go with those themes, and you can have the caption saved in a Word document or a notes document on your phone. So that when you go to posts, you don't have to think about the captions. 3. What is batching, and what's it for?: I have one client who really struggles with captions, but she also loves to write really long captions. So on Sunday night she sits down and she writes out longhand like in a journal that captions that she wants to talk about. So that when she goes to post during the week, it's just ready for her. So for for her captions are the issue. So she batches for me photographs where the issue in terms of both consistency and just in terms of having enough content. So I can batch those other things that you can batch on social media or setting up Facebook events. So if you host a meeting once a week or once a month instead of every week going in and creating one new event. You can create one event and then you can duplicate them and change the details and have a year's worth of events pre-set up in Facebook, which makes it easier to edit them and respond to questions and things like that. You can also batch other types of work that are not social media related. Like if you have to do App's website updates, it's a lot more efficient to make notes about the changes that you need to make and then sit down and make five to ten changes at once, rather than trying to tackle one change at a time. Especially with the way that website templates and servers and things like that change. It's a lot easier if you can sort of dive in and make those changes altogether. Um, so we talked about identifying your pain points. What is it that is challenging for you in particular, for social media? Is it the captions is at the photos? Is that the engagement? Is it literally just opening it up? Is it that you don't like to have it on your phone? So how can you post without having the app itself show up on your phone? Is it responding to messages? And for each of these pinpoints, there are ways to batch to create efficiency or potentially to either let it go or outsource. And so figuring out exactly what your pain points are allows you to decide how can actually make this thing more efficient. Because the more you can reduce your pain points, the more the less burned out you will get on social media. And as a social media consultant, what I often see is people get really excited about being on social media. They try and post like four or five times a week. I had one client who's posting three times a day. I didn't they just get burned out and then they just stop. And then, and so instead of having a sort of slow and steady wins the race kind of account. They have an account that gets big fast or they just post a lot fast. And then they lose momentum and they kind of set themselves out about it. And then they just disappear for a month or three months or a year. And one of the funny things about social media is that if you haven't posted on Instagram and like three months, and if you haven't posted on Facebook and about six months, often people who use those platforms exclusively, often younger people, people under like 35 ish, they will assume that you've gone out of business or that your businesses and doing very well because they're so used to people consistently posting on those platforms. But if you just disappear, if you just go through those platforms, people will think that you've literally gone out of business and they're not going to send you a message and say, Hey, have you gone out of business? They're just going to make assumptions. Because that's while social media can be really magical and helpful and such an amazing free resource for small businesses. It can also be kind of tricky to manage the expectations of your clients. So I strongly encourage you to even if consistency for you means once a month, consistently post once a month. If consistency for you means twice a month, That's great. Once a week is even better, but you do not have to post five times a week on social media to make a difference. And I encourage my clients who are just starting out to choose a really reasonable amount of times to post. And so I encourage on Instagram approximately two to four times a month, and on Facebook about once a month, because you don't have to be quite as active on Facebook because a lot of people will actually use your Facebook page as as like a homepage where they go and they look for hours and your location or events and things like that. And they're not necessarily looking for a super consistent updates. They just want to make sure that you're still there and your hours are still accurate. So it really depends on what your comfort level is. But and you might be using Tiktok two or some other kinds of social media as they crop up. And, you know, on Tiktok, I can't tell you what the right amounts to post is. If you love making TikToks and that's how you like to reach people, then just keep doing it. But if you're not on TikTok yet, then you don't have to be. That's not a requirement. 4. Do you have to be on social media?: It's really not a requirement to be on any specific social media platform, but I would say that there is an expectation that your business will be on some social media platform. So just, if you want to pick one, that's fine. Just make sure that people know how to find you specifically on that platform. So as we're talking about efficiency, one of the questions that comes up for me a lot as a social media consultant is like, should I use scheduling apps? And this is an awesome question and it has a kind of a complicated answer. So the answer is yes and no. Um, yes. If your pain point is actually posting like you're okay with taking pictures, you okay with making captions, but like logging on and getting something posted as like very stressful for you, then scheduling apps can be really useful. So if you have a business that's very really aesthetic focus business. So maybe if you have a jewelry line or like a high-end plant shop and the aesthetics of your feed is really important, then you can actually use those scheduling apps to kind of test out your posts and make sure that as you're posting that you're getting a consistent sort of pretty feed. But for most people, for most small businesses, you don't need to have a pristine pretty fee. You just need to have like a consistently good feet. So that is the sort of the yes, Why am I be helpful to use a scheduling app? On the flip side, there's really two downsides to scheduling apps. And the scheduling apps are like later and HootSuite and also the scheduling that's right within Facebook. So if you have a business page on Facebook, you can schedule out. The main downside that I have noticed is with a lot of my clients, as well as on my page in particular. And then I've seen this anecdotally as well, is that Facebook and instagram tends to suppress posts that are planned. So what happens is you plan it and you're really excited and you have a timed perfectly and everything. And then it posts, and then you actually get really crappy engagement on it. And so we have noticed that just time and time again, that when I pre-plan posts that and actually scheduled them within Facebook, that they do not get very good engagement. So for that, I would discourage you from using those tools. That doesn't mean you can't plan ahead, right? Like you can save that picture somewhere. Save that captions in a note and notes or words, something like that. The other downside is that instagram only allows certain apps to be like approved schedulers. And a couple of years ago, Instagram suddenly said that one of the approved scheduler, who's no longer approved anymore, but people kept using it because they didn't know. And a bunch of businesses lost their entire accounts. And so for me, I try as much as possible to follow the terms of service, which means only using approved apps. And and, but you like, you never know if you're going to see the news that an app is suddenly not approved, and then you could lose your account because you're violating the terms of service. So obviously for me as a social media consultant where most of my business is generated on Instagram. Losing my account would be really unfortunate. So I'm not going to use schedulers or any other third party apps actually, because I genuinely really do not want to lose my account. So you have to balance. How much time does it save you? How much energy does it save you? How much does it help you be on social media against the potential of low engagement and even possibly losing your account. So that's the first section, that's efficiency. We can talk about efficiency or inefficiency. We can talk about batching. But unless you really know why you are on social media, all of those things bring a little bit hollow. So we're going to talk a little bit about purpose and mission and how that dovetails with efficiency and reducing social media burnout. So you really have to get clear on your purpose and what you would like to accomplish with your work. And there's two reasons for that. The first one is that you need to get clear on your purpose and your business and y are online so that you don't get burned out. That's number one. Number two is that if you're not clear on your purpose and your customers will not be either because your posts, your stories, your feeds, your lives, everything will not reflect your purpose. And so we're going to dive into both of those things with a little bit of an exercise. So I'm going to have you write down some things and so take your time. You're welcome to pause this as many times as you need to. And I will also put this at the end in the class assignment. So you don't have to write it down right now if you're not able to, you'll be able to copy it from the class assignment. But I want you to write down these three things. 5. Identifying your 3 core values: The first one is your three core values and business. So three things that are really important to you in business that you would like to not only hold onto, but also convey to your clients and customers. So those are, those could be honesty, dependence, leadership, the quality of your work, connection, community, family, time management, balance, adventure, risk, all sorts of things. So pick three words that really conveyed to you what your core values are in your business. The second is I want you to write down a mission statement. Now, you can Google how to write a mission statement. And there is Thousands of tutorials about different ways of writing mission statements, but we're going to do one that's specific to your purpose. So your mission semen is not what you do. Rather, it's what kind of changes you want to see in your community as a result of your work. So for example, my what I do is I am a social media consultant. I'm a small business consultant from my mission. And my purpose is to change the local economy by getting small businesses to understand the importance and the value of working with other businesses in your community rather than outsourcing outside of your community or purchasing on Amazon and things like that. So my what I do is I'm a business consultant, but my purpose is to change the local economy. And the first time that I said that, I kind of laughed and I was like, who am I to think that I can change the local economy? That's crazy. And then I kind of took a step back and I was like, why is that crazy? And the answer is that it's kind of just imposter syndrome really like, again, going back to how women are condition from a very young age to believe that like we should take on small things, we shouldn't have ambitious goals. We shouldn't dream big. And so it took me a little while to work through like Is this really my goal? It can really change the local environment. And I can tell you that in the four years that I've been in business, I have started to see those changes happening and I've started to see the real long-term impacts of clients taking the advice that I've given them and really diving deep into their community and how that has impacted their longevity and their revenue, and their ability to stay in the community. And so I'm doing it. And I don't say that as like a Bragg. I say that as you can dream big and even in a short period of time, really start to see the results of that dream really taking shape. So again, you're not saying what you do. You're saying what kind of changes do you want to see in your community as a result of your work? And that community could be your local community or it could be a group of people. So if you are a disability rights advocate, your community could be like online. Disability rights advocates. It could be people who are just for the first time experiencing disability and don't know how to navigate the landscape. It could be, you know, people who are on social security disability, right? So whatever your you can define your community however you'd like. You don't have to define it in the same way that I do, which is, which is locally, you can choose what that community is. The third thing that I would like you to write down as an elevator pitch that addresses what you do worse, so who it is for and how it's different from the competition. So your elevator pitch, you may have heard this term before is if you like, got into an elevator someone and they said, What do you do? How do you describe what you do in like 15 to 30 seconds? And it's a really useful exercise. And again, you can Google how to write an elevator pitch and fined 5000 different suggestions as to how to read an elevator pitch. So mine is just one of those. You don't have to do it this way. But the reason that I encourage you to say what you do herself, who it's for, and what makes you different from the competition is because like if you sell candles and someone says, What do you do? And you say, I sell candles? Well, okay. If that person's looking for candles, they may ask for a couple of other questions. But if you say, I sell candles made with organic essential oils for people who have sent sensitivities. Will that person then understand specifically what you do and may actually think of someone in their lives that has a sense sensitivity or that only buys organic or that like just loves cookie exclusive things. And then you've got somebody who understands what you do and not that they can actually refer you. So when people ask me what I do, I could say I'm a small business consultant, but what I typically say is I'm a small business consultant that teaches businesses how to use social media to build their business and community. Because that Ian community part is really different from the way that most people teach social media marketing. 6. How a purposeful focus is different to "authenticity": They talk a lot about authenticity. Authenticity is always or almost always in pursuit of revenue. And that is not my approach to social media, my purchase social media is that if you focus on community and purpose, then you will dovetail with a lot of things that benefit your revenue. And we'll talk about that more in a minute. But that's sort of community first approach to social media is really unusual. And so by leaving that out of my elevator pitch, I'm doing myself a disservice because that person who's asked me, what do you do and then can't really send me clients that are well suited towards the work that I do, right? So you want to be as specific as possible without being overly wordy. So you want to find something that you can say in one sentence. And if it doesn't roll off your tongue, literally practice it in the mirror or to your partner or to your children or your dog as many times as you need to so that it becomes something that you can say over and over again without stumbling over your words, which can be a little tricky when you're talking about yourself. Because again, we are taught, especially as women, but really culturally, all of us to not be bragging, to be humble and 2, not speak loudly about the things that were excellent at. And I reject that. I think that we should all reject that because it just serves to make people feel small when in fact, most people, especially people who run businesses, have amazing talents to share with the world. And so if you sort of walking in those situations saying like, I'm a candle maker, well, then the results that you're going to get out of that are going to be small. But if you walk into those situations, you say like, I make the most quirky candles for the most picky consumers. Then people like jumps in their imagination and they can ask you more questions and kinda get excited about it. So those are the three things that you're going to write down. And again, I'll put this in the, in the class thing later so you don't have to write it down now, but it's the three core values for yourself in business. Your mission statement, which is what kind of changes you want to see in your community as a result of your work. And the third is your elevator pitch that includes what makes you different from your competition. So once you have those three things, those are sort of like your purpose ball. Like, that's not a great way to describe it. I'm sure there's a better way, but maybe those are the three pillars to your purpose. And once you have those identified, what it does is it actually opens up a whole other world of social media marketing that you probably were missing out on previously because you were probably focusing on revenue, focused posts, as well as like authenticity for the sake of authenticity rather than authenticity for the sake of community building. And so we're going to talk now about identifying your online goals and what that actually means for the kinds of posts you should be doing. So you need to identify why you are online. Be honest and realistic about your goals and your expectations of being online. Your goal to being on social media is to increase your revenue by 200% within one month, you're probably going to be disappointed. But if your goal is to provide customer service, to connect with your customers, to provide additional information about your products. Maybe to increase your revenue 10 percent over like a two to three month period to make lovely connections within your community, then you are probably not going to be disappointed because those are realistic goals that are relevant to the reasons that you're on social media. So money goals are okay, it's okay to have revenue goals and those are necessary, right? Like you can't be a sustainable business in the community if you're not making money. So it's totally okay to have revenue goals. Just be honest about what those revenue goals are and whether you also have other goals. And then how to create a strategy to get towards both of those types of goals in a sustainable way where you don't get burned out. So the nice thing about revenue strategies and goals is that there's a certain section of posts that all kind of go towards your revenue goals. So there's three types of what I would concern, revenue goals, increasing sales, making it easier for your customers to engage with you and your product and providing customer service. Those are all tie back into revenue, even if they're not directly revenue goals. And all three of these things are served by the same kinds of posts. The first one is behind the scenes. So time-lapse products, time-lapse of products being made, mistakes that you made in the past and how you fix them, how you got to your successful product fittings, how you styled, shoot those kinds of things. People love those. They are really great for engagement. 7. Social media as customer service + creating trust: And they also actually increase the trust between the client and the business. Because what they do is they gives them a glimpse into what you're doing and who you are, and how you speak to people even and how you create products and how you create situations. And it gives them like a really good like peek into who you are and how you, how you live, your values. And so that can create an enormous amount of trust between you and your client. And that trust is really something that's very specific and unique to social media that is very difficult to find anywhere else. It is very difficult to get trust from a client through like a newspaper article or a newspaper ad or a radio ad. But you can engender and create an empowered a lot of trust with your clients and customers through social media. And part of it is that authenticity of not just always showing your successes and only showing the final products, but really showing how you got there. Challenges that you're having. Telling them you're taking a vacation and putting the shop on pause for a week, those kinds of things. So that's the first one. The second one is product information. This is so important and a lot of people focus on this. But what I've found is that it's really shallow. It's a really shallow focus. They forget that there are so many different elements to your product or your service that people really want to know about. So some of the product information that you should be sharing in your posts and your stories are the pricing, size, process, materials difference from competitors, customer images, and also what pain point your product or service addresses. A lot of times what you'll see is that people will leave pricing off a post. They'll even leave pricing off of their website because they think, because someone's told them that they should be mysterious and you shouldn't post it because then people will get intimidated by it. I am not a big fan of that strategy. I think that the more clear that you can be to your customers or fewer impediments there are to them actually purchasing or making a purchasing decision. When I first moved to the Pacific Northwest, there was a photographer that I wanted to work with and photographers notoriously do not put their pricing on their websites because I think there was a big push them to not put pricing on their websites. So a lot of people who are following those instructions, well, I went to that whip this person's website and they didn't have any pricing, like no indication of pricing levels. And I thought, well, okay, I guess this person just isn't for me. I didn't take an additional step to ask them what their pricing was, frankly, because they budget was low at that point. And I didn't want to be embarrassed that I couldn't afford it. I found out later that I probably could've afforded that, but because they didn't have it on their website, I couldn't make that purchasing decision. So I strongly encourage you to make sure that your pricing is for sure on your website. But I actually encourage people to talk about it on social media as well. Because most of the time for a lot of people like the decision will come down to, does this person who share my values, is this person in my local community and can I afford it? And sometimes if you have builds up enough trust, who you are and that you're local to them. Their budget will increase, right? They will say, I'm going to spend extra money to get this person who I really like and really resonate with. But if you have super high prices and you haven't done that legwork to create trust, then it's going to be hard for people to pay those prices. But if you don't have your prices anywhere, then there's just continue to people who will just not ask a follow-up question and you don't want to I don't think you want to miss out on this. People. Like if you are super exclusive and that's part of your brand, okay, sharp even miss out on those people. But I think for most brands like you should be accessible to people, even if you're pricing is not accessible to people, information should be. So the next, the third element that I want to talk about, our staff, photos and intros, and a lot of people miss out on that. And I think it's a real missed opportunity because again, this goes back to trust and authenticity. Who are making the products? Who's making it? Excuse me, he was making your coffee. Who's making your sandwich? Who is actually meeting you like if you're a realtor and you work with a lot of people, are you actually meaning the client or is it going to be your assistant? And if it's going to be your assistant, makes sure that you're introducing them and saying this is, you know, who I work with and here's why, and here's what I love about them. And so, like if you are a coffee shop for example, let's say you have five staff or something you could do once a month, introduce a different staff member and have them talk about how long they've been linger and also like their favorite drink to me. And then what that does is it introduces people and creates trust with the staff. But it also hearkens back to your menu, right? So you can do a lot of these types of posts that we're gonna talk about today. You can really use them to meet multiple purposes. 8. Multi-purpose posts: Oh, you know, you could have a time-lapse of a staff person making a product that's making a mistake and then fixing it, right? And then you hit like five different things that we've talked about. And you just need to make sure to hit on some of those things in the caption as well. Also, sometimes it's fun to just post like pretty pictures are just post a picture of a staff retreat or something and just say, no, we're so thankful that we can get together and plan for the upcoming year. Doesn't always have to be complicated, but any glimpses that you can give into your business and your products are going to help people make buying decisions. And what's really interesting is that I have people who have followed me for years, who've never taken one of my classes, but have sent multiple people classes and because they followed me for long enough to know who I was and know what kind of things they offered. And know how they might be useful to the people in their sphere even though they didn't need that service. I also have people who I know are engaging with my Instagram, like watching my stories, but do not follow me. Who then go on to take a class or refer someone to a class. So the idea of engagement being really simple, like how many people, like, how many people comment is not always true. There's a lot of engagement that happens kind of under a veil. Either people who don't follow you, who come to just look at your profile and look at your hours or how to get to your shop, those kinds of things. And but all of those posts that you do, like the, the, the initial engagement that you get, the likes and comments. That's one positive part of it. The other part, positive part of it is it builds a story over time. So someone can come over to your feed and look at the past 10 to 20 posts and really learn something about your business, then find your hours and be like, yeah, I'm going to go there right now, but they never follow you. They didn't even like anything that in comment on anything, but they still use the information that you are providing on your website I'm sorry, on your social media to make a purchasing decision, or at least in this case of visiting decision. So the last thing that I want to talk about today is how wayfinding can support both your your purpose schools and your efficiency goals and help build revenue and community at the same time. So what are we finding? Wayfinding is a term that comes from urban design. And it's essentially how easy is it to get from place a to place B if he didn't have a map. So let's say you're in a new city and you get out of the subway, you come up to the surface and you need to get to the hospital, but you don't know where the hospital is and you don't have a map. So can you see the hospital like over the other buildings? Is there a map like when you get out of the subway? Or are there signs with arrows? Are the streets really clearly mapped? Or maybe even are there red crosses that have arrows that bring you to the hospital. Those kinds of things are basically guiding people to the end product or guiding people to that location. And so I use this a lot with my clients in social media, because most people who use social media, most small businesses are really bad at this. And I stay. That was lots of love, but they're really bad. Guiding people to making decisions. And I'm not talking about click funnels where you're manipulating people's psychology to get them to purchase the next thing. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about giving them enough information about the product or service that they're wanting to purchase or wanting to look into for them to actually make the decision and say, Yes, I'm going to do that. So wayfinding is useful for both those revenue goals and that you can share more about like where you're located, for example, like the corner of it, you're on businesses that are near you, things like that. But it's also good for sort of emotional or psychological refining where you're sharing information about who you are and what your purposes so that people who are looking to purchase from businesses with the same values know where you stand and know who you are. And maybe five to ten years ago when I was really getting setup in business, the sort of going advice was to leave politics out of your business. And about four or five years ago, you can probably guess like around what time? How was I kind of said F that and I'm going to be sharing a lot more about my belief system and what I think we should be doing with this world. And how the businesses in my community are playing into that and how I'm supporting other businesses that are doing good in the world. And I probably lost like maybe a few customers and I gained so many because they could see a lot more quickly. Like this was someone that they wanted to work with because we shared values. 9. What is wayfinding?: So to go back a second, we finding as making every element of your products and purchasing so clear to the customer that they don't need to ask follow-up questions. And again, there's sort of a belief that like it's good to make people ask questions. But there's a whole chunk of people who just will not ask follow-up questions and you're just going to lose them if you have that strategy of just trying to make everyone asking follow-up questions. What this means in practice is reminding people of your location, your hours, which days you ship quirks about your website and where they can purchase your products at stores, things like that. Now most of your posts should promote way-finding. Meaning they should provide useful, helpful information that makes it easier for a customer to make buying decisions. And the more complicated your business is, the more complicated your service or product is, the more your posts need to focus on wayfinding. Now, the great thing about these wayfinding poses that they promote revenue generation. They promote customer satisfaction, they promotes trust between the business and the client. So these wayfinding posts have multiple benefits and that's why I encourage you for the majority of your post to be focusing in some way on wayfinding. So that could be back to the revenue goals where you're talking about who your staff is or mistakes that were made in some ways, those are both wayfinding posts as well. But there's also another way to use wayfinding posts, which is to support and build community. And this is one of my favorite parts of social media that I feel like is left out of a lot of the conversations. That makes me so sad because there's so much to be gained on social media by focusing on community and focusing in your local community. Or if you're looking at digital advocate focusing on that digital community. So one way that you can weigh, find to support your local community is by sharing about your local partners, for example, who you buy materials from, who carries your products. If you don't have any, that's actually something to examine because a lot of businesses start out and they buy from Amazon and they ship their products all over the country. But they really don't focus at all on their local community. And that's fine. You can absolutely do it that way. But I encourage you to think about figuring out ways to bring more local interior business, whether it's sourcing things locally or just collaborating with other businesses or donating to. Charity auctions are like mutual aid fundraisers by joining your products or services. Because the more deeply tied into local businesses you are, the more your business will have longevity. I've been teaching this for years. And unfortunately, the pandemic was great case study for whether I was right. And I knew that I was right because there was studies from years ago saying like the more connected you are into your local community, the more your business is likely to survive the downturn, right? So I already knew that it was probably right because that's what the study said. But then when COVID hit and I was watching past clients and other businesses in the community and how they were interacting with the community during lockdown and how they were shifting to meet their clients needs. It was really obvious which businesses were going to close and which businesses were thriving in which businesses were at least surviving. And the ones that were surviving and the ones over thriving were the ones that were able to make changes to serve their local community because they already had really trusting relationships with the local community. And they were able to ask their local community what they needed and then make those changes as needed. You can also share images of your location, whether that's your neighborhood, your city, or in the surrounding area, just basically showing off where you, where you work or where your business is located, but also getting people to think about where you are located. So for example, if you're new to an area like you're a new shop, what I would do is like once a week, feature another business that's on your block or in your neighborhood, and take a picture of it. You can take a picture of you in front of it or the business owner in front of it, or just the front of the business or the inside of the business and share a little bit about it, why you love that business? And also mentioned like, I love that this place is only a three minute walk from the shop. Because not only are you doing something nice for that business, but by like calling them out and tagging them in that post. You're also reminding people who walked by that chopper drive by that shopper are going to pick up from there that you're also in the neighborhood. And then they can think, oh, I should actually go visit that place as well. 10. How hashtags play into your new strategy: If you would like to use hashtags and that's a big if they are, they used to be incredibly important. Now they are, I would say they are moderately useful if you know how to use them. I actually strongly encourage that you start with local hashtags. So if you live in a small community, for example, piu all of Washington, you can just do like hashtag piu all up. Because there's not going to be like a ton of competition within that hashtag or like Lee Coie, Lacey, Washington, something at that. If you live in Seattle and you're using will go hashtags. If you just do hashtag Seattle, your post will very quickly get buried in a long list of other post. But you could do something like Seattle business or West Seattle or Soto, or Seattle made things like that. So experiment with local hashtags. Because not only do you then support your local community through doing that, but when other people are clicking around through location hashtags and also location pins, then they can actually find you. So I have a significant number of clients who have come to me because they found me on Instagram using either a location pen that I had made. Like I had tagged myself at a local coffee shop when I was working there or through a local hashtag that I had used. And that's how they found me. And then they decided that they wanted to work with me. And so it can be incredibly useful for people who are new to your area, are new to social media. One other way to be much more visible locally is to ask customers that you trust and, you know, are really good, consistent customers to provide reviews on Facebook or Google because it increases the likelihood that you will show up in search results. So I know that was a lot of information, but it really boils down to this. Why are you online? How does that dovetail with your purpose? And how can you do what you're doing online more efficiently? If you sit down and look at the three things I asked you to write, the three core principles, your purpose and your elevator pitch. And you write those down. And then you write down your goals for being on social media. It creates very quickly obvious post that you could be doing that align with your purpose and meet your goals or meet your needs online. So I encourage you to write down, once you've written down your purpose and your goals online, to write down a list of five to 10 posts that you would like to post over the next few weeks or few months. That could be staff instructions. It could be showing people the outside of your building, inside of your building, the parking lot to your building, your next door neighbor of those kinds of things. And have, you know, ten posts because kinda ready to go. Because once you get that muscle flexing of how can I use my posts to provide information to people that actually helps them make decisions like not just the color ways or the prices, but also where we're located or how our website works. Once you start flexing those muscles, you will get better at it and social media will get easier. But social media, if you don't understand what your purposes is, just kind of an inherently challenging place. So I encourage you to get really solid and what your purposes and what your goals are in social media. And then how you can use posts to promote not only revenue generation, but also trust building and also community growth. 11. Closeout: If you have any questions about this, please feel free to reach out. Don't get to do the assignment listed below. And I'm dropping my website if you'd like to look at any additional courses or workbooks, and I hope that you enjoyed being here. Say thank you so much.