Grow Your Small Business With Social Media: How to Create a Winning Social Media Strategy

1. Welcome!: As a small business owner, Do you often find social media to be overwhelming? Do you want to start using social media for your business, but you don't know where to start. Or maybe you want to learn how you can optimize your current social media strategy. If so, then this is the course for you. Hi everyone. My name is Louise and I've been working in digital marketing now, but over 12 years as a marketing manager in various industries, including inhales and marketing agencies. I have a master's degree in digital marketing communications, and I also have a lot of experience with social media specifically, both as part of my career and also in growing my own personal blog. I also help small businesses with their social media marketing strategy through my freelance projects and digital marketing courses, social media marketing can be overwhelming. There are so many platforms and on top of this, things are constantly changing. As a small business, it can be difficult to keep up or even know where to start. Social media is also not a quick win. It can take time and patience to build up a presence and to be successful, it's crucial to understand your audience and post quality content that resonates with them. In this course, I want to share my own social media strategy tips that I've learned over the years to help you feel slightly less overwhelmed and be able to make a start on your social media strategy. This class is ideal for beginners, students or small business owners that wants to learn about the benefits of social media and the ways that it can be used effectively. By the end of this class, you should have a good idea of how to start your social media strategy using the templates provided in the projects and resources section, you'll also come away with some actionable tips in order to boost social media engagement, as well as to create some awesome social media content. You don't need any specific tools to take this class, just a computer and an internet connection. I'm excited to get started. So if this all sounds interesting to you, then I'll see you in class 2. Class Project: The class projects, I would love for you to create your own social media strategy for your business. I have provided a social media strategy template in the projects and resources section, which I recommend that you go and download. Now, we will then work through the sections of this template during the course with some other classes having activities to complete at the end, at the end of this course, I would really love for you to share with the class one section of your completed strategy, this could be your social media goals, your competitor analysis, your social media audit, or an example of your content plan, please do share with the class or feel free to ask me any questions and I'll be really happy to help or provide any feedback. Now, we'll move on to the first class in this course, which is, why Should you use social media for your business? 3. Why Social Media?: First things first, why Social Media? If you're a small business, you may wonder if you have the time to dedicate to social media or if it will even be worth your efforts. Recent research of UK SMEs highlights that 48% say that social media is essential in maintaining their business. In this section, I want to run through some of the benefits of social media. Show you why you should consider including social media in your marketing strategy. Firstly, social media helps you to raise your brand awareness. In January 2023, there were over 57 million active social media users in the UK, or 84% of the population. Research by global web index shows that 60% of the world's population uses social media, with the average daily time spent on Social Media totaling 2 h 24 min. This shows the potential reach of social media and how important it can be in raising awareness of your brand and reaching new customers. If your brand is not on Social Media, then you may be missing out on potential customers that may not be able to find you. Why is this important? Well, according to recent research, 90% of people say they buy from brands that they follow on social media. And over 22% are using social media in the UK to find inspiration for things to do. And by 90% of marketers say that Social Media increased their business exposure. Social media, it gives small businesses a chance to compete with much larger companies and reach a much wider audience. The second benefit of social media for small businesses is that it allows you to connect with your customers. Social media helps you to form relationships directly with customers and build a community. 90% of social media marketers say that building an active online community is critical to success in 2023, an example of an online community would be creating a Facebook group for your business, where customers can share tips and ask questions and post pictures and talk about your products and services. Here's an example of a group that I recently joined on Facebook for Peloton members. So people that have Peloton equipment, bikes, treadmills and things. This is a really nice community where people share achievements that they've done on the peloton. They ask questions about the products, they give each other advice on motivation. And it's a really positive space and really, really good for building that connection, not just with your customers, but also between customers as well. Benefit of this is that it can really foster brand loyalty and trust amongst your customers. You can also use social media to learn more about your customers, either through looking at the insights section on your social media pages, or by asking your customers directly for feedback in your groups and community pages. Social media can also be great for providing fast and efficient customer services, which is great for retaining your customers. Social media allows for immediate customer interaction and feedback. 71% of consumers who have had a positive experience with a brand on social media said that they were more likely to recommend that brand to the people that they know. And so having a social media customer service strategy is important. Being active on social media can actually help to drive traffic to your website. Posting regular quality and useful content on social media can increase exposure and have an indirect positive effect on search engine rankings, increasing your organic traffic. According to a recent report from HootSuite, 75% of marketers say that social media has increased traffic to their website. So just to give you an example on this point, I get a lot of traffic to my personal blog from social media. And what I've noticed is recently that my activities on YouTube are now appearing in the Google organic search results for certain keywords. So this offers an increased opportunity for exposure in the search results and helps me to generate additional awareness of my brand and additional traffic to my website. Indirectly, having a presence on social media also helps you to build credibility in your industry, helping you to attract new customers. So customers will tend to research new businesses online and on social media before making their first purchase. Insights from global web index shows that 64% of internet users find out about new brands like social media. And 77% use social media to research when looking for more information on brands. This is why it's really important to have a presence on social media. Make sure that your page is up to date. It has recent posts and quality content so that you appear credible when new potential customers are researching your brand. In the next lesson, we'll be looking at how to set your social media objectives 4. Setting Your Social Media Objectives: You start your social media strategy. You need to think about what your overall goals are for your social media and what your specific social media objectives will be. Your social media objectives should be clear and should always tie back to your overall business goals. Without clear objectives, you have no way to measure the success of your strategy. Some example goals that you could have for your social media strategy include building brand awareness, driving traffic to your site, generating leads or conversions in proving customer engagement or retention, improving customer service or experience, increasing revenue by increasing sales. Learning more about your customers or enhancing brand reputation. Remember, the objectives that you set will underpin your entire strategy. They all affect what metrics you track, the tactics you use, an even what platforms you select, you should always ensure that your social media objectives are smart. As this will give you the best chance at achieving success if you haven't come across the smart acronym before, it stands for specific, what do you want to achieve? Specifically, measurable, what metric will you attach to your objective? So you know what to measure? Attainable. Is the goal attainable with the current resources that you have relevant? Is the objective relevant to your overall business goals and what you want to achieve for your business. And time-bound. The objectives need to have a timeframe that's realistic for your business and current resources. Let's look at an example. Let's say that your overall business goal is to increase visits to your website. And you want to use social media to drive traffic. If driving traffic was your objective in full, then how would you know when you to achieve this? How would you measure your success? If we make this objective smart, it becomes much easier to measure. For example, I want to increase the number of visits from Facebook to my website from X percent to why per cent year-on-year in the next six months. This objective is very specific because it's very clear what you want to achieve and by when, as the objective includes specific metrics that you want to achieve, that means that it is measurable in terms of whether your objective is attainable or not, it's really important to choose targets that are realistic for your business, the time that you have available, and your budget as well. You would choose your targets based on current data that you have and what's realistic for you. This will make sure that your target is attainable in the timeframe that you've set. If you don't have any historical data to draw upon, then you could look at industry statistics to help you set your targets. This objective is also relevant because it's tied back to the overall business goal of increasing website visits. And finally, this objective is time-bound because it's saying that you want to increase the number of visits from Facebook within the next six months. And a good starting point for most realistic social media goals is around three to six months. You need to give yourself enough time in order to achieve your goal so that you don't get demotivated. So what are your social media objectives? I would advise, start with thinking about one overall goal that you would like to use social media to achieve. And then set 123 smart objectives in order to help you achieve that goal, it's easy to get overwhelmed at this point, but try to think back always to your business goals and what you want to use social media for to help you benefit your business for your class project, I'd like to you to define 123 social media objectives that you want to set for your social media strategy. Remember to tie them back to your overall business goal of what you want to achieve with social media for your business. If you haven't already downloaded the social media strategy template that I provided, then head to the Projects and Resources section and download this. Now you'll find a section which is all about setting Social Media Objectives. And I provided you with a template in order to help you set your objectives. Once you've developed your Objectives, then please feel free to share with the class for help advice and feedback. In the next lesson, we'll be talking about understanding your target customer 5. Who Are Your Customers?: Now you have your social media objectives. You need to think about your target customers, who are they, and what social media platforms do they use? This step is really important as there are so many different social media platforms available. Understanding your customers in depth will mean that you can choose the social media platforms where your customers are, which means that you can target them better. But ultimately it will save you a lot of time and resources. For example, that'll be a little point in you as a business, focusing your time and resources on developing content and a strategy for Snapchat, which tends to be used by young teenagers if your business targets males over 60. However, if your business did target teenagers or young adults than Snapchat, maybe worth consideration. Understanding your customer will also help you to develop and post content that appeals and resonates with them. This will obviously impact your success on social media as content that is useful and appealing to your target audience, more likely to generate shares and overall engagement. You also need to understand how to speak to your target audience on social media. So what tone will you use on your social media posts? What tone will fit with your brand? For example? Will your tone be serious, funny? Will you be sarcastic? Will you be formal? If you're going to go for a humorous tone with your posts, then it's really important to get this right for your audience. Because what some people may find funny than others may find offensive. As long as you get the balance right, then you can ensure not to offend your customers. To illustrate this point, I just want to share a quick example. Now, if you haven't heard of Karen's diners, they are a chain of diners that claimed to have great burgers and rude service. And the rude service is what has got them their popularity on Social Media. They have lots of social media posts showing the rude service on TikTok, on Instagram. And a lot of these videos have actually gone viral. They have over 1.5 billion TikTok views and 1.2 million social media followers. That obviously doing something right. And if you look at the tone that they use across their social media, it does fit in very well with their brand and their claim of being rude. They do use a lot of swear words. They are quite rude in the comments back to their customers, and that all fits in with the brand. And in this case, although many brands wouldn't get away with the way they speak on Social Media. It fits with their brand and it fits with what they're trying to do. So in that sense, it does work, but it just highlights the importance of deeply understanding your customer and talking to them in a way that fits with them. Social media additionally as well, the tone that they use on social media fits with their target customer. Who find that humor funny. A lot of the videos on TikTok are customers sharing their own experiences in the diner and finding it hilarious, sharing videos of them taking their grandparents or parents there. And they don't realize what the diner is about. They think it's just a regular diner. And it all, it all fits in with the joke is humorous to this target audience, whereas demographics may not find it funny. So they've obviously got the tone right and it fits with what they're trying to achieve and who they're trying to appeal to. At this stage, it's important to focus on your target customer. Some of the qualities that they have, including age, location, their typical job or industry. What interests and hobbies Do they have that income? What stage of life are they at? What challenges do they have? What are their goals? What social channels or they use? What websites do they use? What type of content do they like? And if you're targeting or the businesses, what size is there a company, what industry are they in, or anything else that you may feel is relevant. You can even give your target customer name and a picture to help bring them to life. This is often called a customer persona, and it's basically a profile of a character that fits your target customer. This profile helps you to visualize your customer and helps you to make decisions based on their needs and goals rather than yours, the customer persona should always be built on Robust customer research and data. In order to carry out your customer research, you can use resources such as your existing social media and website analytics, a database, any customer reviews you've collected, you can look at competitors, social media, industry reports and research. And if you have any customer survey data, you can use this as well in order to build your own customer profile. This will help you to target your customers better based on their needs and to refine your social media strategy, you may have several target customer groups for different products and services. But for the purposes of this course, I'd like you to select one target customer group that you'd like to target with your social media strategy and start to build their persona. You should use any research that you already have as a basis for your persona. Or if you don't have any, you can always make start and then carry out some research or adding some additional data at a later date. I've provided a template of how to create a customer persona as well as an example and, as well as some ideas on how to Carry out some customer research in the social media strategy documents in the Projects and Resources section. Once you've created your customer persona, don't forget to share with the class. In the next lesson, we'll be talking about how to Carry Out a Social Media Audit 6. How to Carry Out a Social Media Audit: It's now time to look at what you're currently doing for social media and Carry Out and audit. If you are already using social media, then this will involve asking yourself questions such as, what's working well? What could be improved? What are you posting and what is your most popular content? Who engages with you the most? How does your presence on social media compared to your competitors? What social media pages do you use at the moment? What is the purpose of each? Do your audience use the platforms that you are on? What is your audience on each platform? Do you all platforms help you to meet your business goals. Collecting this information will help you to identify any potential areas for improvement and where you should focus your Strategy. For example, it may be that you need to narrow your focus onto one or two social media platforms that work the best for you and that are where your audience. Or in order to organize this information, I would recommend carrying out a swat analysis. A swat analysis helps you to identify your current strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. I provided you with a swat analysis template in your social media strategy workbook, as well as some questions to answer to help you carry out your audit. Your swat analysis will be specific to your own business. But for strengths, you want to be looking internally and looking at what are you doing well, what strengths does your brand half? So for example, do you have great customer service? Do you have gotten Engagement on recent posts? Do you have good branding? For weaknesses? You need to look at what you might be lacking, what's holding you back, and where you could improve. This could be related to Performance on Social Media resources or general strategy. Opportunities are looking externally at what opportunities are there for your business or their new social platforms that have been launched that fit with your target audience, for example. And threats are looking at sternly about what outside forces could threaten your success. So whether that's competitors, whether that's keeping up with changes, keeping up with new social pages. These are the sorts of things that you need to be looking at. So now you've looked internally at your own business and what you're doing, it's time to look externally your competitors and what they're doing on Social Media. Looking at your competitors would also be a good place to start if you don't currently have any presence on social media yourself. My suggestion would be to identify your top five competitors in your industry and look at what social media channels there on. Look at what content they post, what seems to work well for them, what doesn't work for them? This will help you to identify potential opportunities and identify what works and what doesn't work in your industry. Best way to do this would be to list your competitors in a table or on a spreadsheet. And I provided you with a template in the social media strategy workbook in the projects and resources section for your class project, I'd like you to have a go at carrying out a social media audit using the templates in the workbook that I provided. If you haven't downloaded it yet, then download it from the projects and resources section and don't forget to share with the class. In the next lesson, we'll be looking at choosing Your Social Media Platforms. 7. Choosing Your Social Media Platforms (Part 1): Hopefully, by this point, you should have a good idea of where your target customers are, what your objectives are for social media, and also where your competitors are as well. These three areas are what you should use to help you determine on what social media platforms you should be using as a small business time is often an issue. And so you'd want to focus on the platforms where you know your audience is, it's much better to focus on one or two platforms. And these really well than to spread yourself too thin layer, you can use your customer research to evaluate which platforms would suit your audience and where they're most likely to be. You can also find stats online about the various demographic makeup of each social media platform. Consider your time and the resources that you have available in order to maintain their platforms that you select. Each platform tends to have different specs when it comes to images or video. And so it's important to bear this in mind if you're going to be planning to post across different social media platforms or further guidance then the Federation of small businesses. His guidance for companies on choosing the best social network platform for their digital marketing needs. So now what I thought I'd do is run through some of the most popular social media platforms available in the UK. Some audience stats and some pros and cons to help you decide on platforms. Although bear in mind that this changes all the time. There's always new platforms coming out. And obviously there'll be other platforms available in different countries as well. Basically, we have Facebook. Facebook is the world's most used social media platform and the second most used in the UK after WhatsApp. It has 2.9 billion monthly active users and more than 200 million businesses. With such a massive reach. It's really good for businesses to have a presence on Facebook. And it allows businesses to reach both consumers and also other businesses as well. In terms of demographics, the majority of users of Facebook in the UK, or 25 to 34. Although it's also popular with older age groups as well. And the audience is 54% female. Some pros or Facebook are that it allows you to build a community. And Facebook is one of the most effective platforms. Instagram for community building. It also allows you to share reviews on your page. You can automate responses and FAQs and things to save time. It allows you to set up a Facebook store. It's also really easy to create page as well. And if you have a budget for advertising on Facebook, then there are some really good options for paid campaigns and you can target both businesses and consumers. Downside Facebook is that it's becoming increasingly more difficult to get visibility on there unless you pay for advertising, which can be quite expensive due to the wide reach of Facebook, I would say that it's worthwhile any small business having a presence on there and having a page. You don't need to be updating it constantly, but just having a presence on there, having good reviews on there, having some frequently asked questions, some photographs, things like that. Just as an extension of your website, can be quite useful and you can also use it for customer services as well. Next, we have Instagram. Instagram has over 28.75 million users in the UK, and it's the third most popular social platform in the UK in terms of audience, it's popular with the 25 to 34 year old audience. And 56% of that audience or female. Instagram is a more visual app than Facebook. It's great for visual brands. So fashion, beauty, travel, food crafts is ideal for targeting younger audience, a female audience. So things like fashion and makeup brands tend to do well on Instagram. And it's really great for brand awareness and building your brand. And also like Facebook. If you have a budget for it, then you can also increase your reach on Instagram via boosting your Instagram posts and paying for Instagram ads. A few cons of Instagram. Obviously it's a very visual app, so you need to be creating regular, visual, engaging content, including video. And this may be more time-consuming to create. It's also better suited to consumer brands that if you're targeting consumers than businesses, targeting other businesses and other thing with Instagram is that you can't currently link on posts. So it's not great at driving. Traffic is I'd say it's more for brand awareness, although you can use in App shopping. So if you're an e-commerce site, you can link to products on your website via your Instagram feed. And you can also drive traffic via links in stories and also through the link in your bio. Next we have Twitter. Twitter currently has 23 million users in the UK, and it's the fifth most popular social platform in the UK. Although users are expected to decline, 63% of Twitter's audience are male and its most popular with the 25, 34 year-old audience. Twitter is great for both B2B and B2C audiences. And it can be really great for customer services. And it's very conversational and allows you to have real-time conversations with potential customers. Some cons of Twitter, or that if you have the budget for paid advertising, just like Facebook and Instagram, you can pay for more targeted campaigns. Although paid ads on Twitter, it can be very costly. And without paying for reach, it can be quite difficult to get that reach organically. You also, of course, limited onto Twitter to a set number of characters per post. Tiktok seems to be the thing at the moment, and it really is exploding in popularity. It currently has 19 million users and it's popular with younger audiences. So in the UK, 18 to 24-year-olds account for 40% of TikToks demographic. Some pros of TikTok, you have the potential to go viral and reach large audiences. And it's a really good way to emotionally connect with your target audience if you get it right. However, it can be time-consuming creating content regularly. Although on TikTok, the low budget short-form content tends to perform best. I think we've TikTok, if you target younger consumers and you can add value to them in the form of short-form video content, then it makes sense for you to have a presence on TikTok because it's growing so quickly. If your audience is not on TikTok, than it may be best to focus your efforts elsewhere. Because there's no point in jumping on the trend of a new social media platform. If your audience is not on there because you're gonna be wasted time and resources that could be better spent elsewhere 8. Choosing Your Social Media Platforms (Part 2): Next platform is YouTube. Youtube has 57 million users, with the most active demographic being age 25, 44, 54% male audience. Some pros of YouTube is that it's great for educational content and driving engagement and brand awareness. It can also help with SEO and driving website traffic. It's the world's second largest search engine. Some drawbacks of YouTube is that it can be expensive and time-consuming to create high-quality content. Unlike TikTok, for example, YouTube favors quality content and you need to invest time and money in creating this. You also need certain skills like video editing or you need to outsource this and then factor in these costs. You also need a consistent upload schedule, so you need to be posting regularly. So for example, once a week to grow your audience. And you also need to be creating relevant content that your audience is searching for. As a result, it can take quite some time to build up your audience and build up your subscribers. If you can dedicate times this channel though, it will reward you over time. An example of how you could use YouTube as a business is make videos around popular search queries in your industry. You can then use these videos as customer service videos, as well as helping you to start ranking in search engines for relevant queries and questions. Next, we have pinterest interests is a very visual platform. It has 165 million users every month worldwide, and it also has a 73% female audience. It's also really good for SEO and it's great if you are a creative or visual brand. And it's also really useful for sharing blog content and video content. It tends to have quite high Engagement and it's really great for brand awareness. It's used as a search engine. 46% have discovered a new brand via Pinterest. I think pinterest as a social media platform is often underrated, but personally, I've seen great success on Pinterest. It's the highest traffic driver to my personal blog. If you have a blog, it can be really useful to send traffic to your site. Or if you have an e-commerce site, there are shopping features built-in. You can include video. Bear in mind that it is a very visual sites that often works well for visual industries like fashion travel for example. And also has a very specific female audience. It can also take time to grow your presence and grow traffic to your site via Pinterest. But I think it's worked well for me as most of my blog readers are female. And finally, we have LinkedIn. Linkedin has 35 million members in the UK and 56% male audience, 52% or 25 to 34, LinkedIn is really good for targeting businesses are networking. Paid advertising can be expensive, but it has really good targeting options and engagement. It also has members in 200 countries and regions worldwide. So if your customers or other businesses, it's a no-brainer. You need to be using LinkedIn. Currently, LinkedIn is the main business to business social media platform in the UK. There are of course others social media platforms available in the UK and worldwide. And obviously I can't cover them all or else the course would be very long. So definitely do your own research and take the social networks that fit your business, your target audience and your goals are also new platforms coming out all at the time. For example, Instagram has recently launched threads and what I'd say as well. So it's great to keep up-to-date with the social media platforms available. And two, explore new platforms. Don't feel like you have to jump on every trend. Just make sure that it's relevant for your audience, relevant for your business and your strategy. While the class projects, I'd like you to head to the social media strategy template in the Projects and Resources section, and head to the social media platforms section of the templates. And here I'd like you to just list two to three social media platforms that you'd like to focus on initially, and why you've chosen them and how you're going to use them. Don't forget to share with the class. In the next lesson, we'll be looking tips for creating content for social media 9. Tips for Creating Social Media Content: In this lesson, I wanted to cover some of my more general tips for creating content for social media. Tip one would be to mix up your content, whatever platform you're on, it's important to create a mix of content that either educates, informs, inspires, entertains. You don't want every posts to be overly promotional as this will look repetitive and more than likely drive your followers away. Common strategy for posting on social media is the 80 20 rule. This suggests that only 20 per cent or content should be promotional. The other 80% being content that informs, inspires, educates what entertains. This is because many studies show that one of the main motivations for pupil using social media is for entertainment as well as networking and to help with boredom. Therefore, if you're creating content that meets these needs, you're more likely to get better engagement and a more loyal following. An example of a small business that has a really good mix of content on social media is treat box. Now, treat box or a small business that provide letterbox gifts on their Instagram page, for example, they have a really good mix of actually showcasing them products with the personal side of their brand. They have a lot of behind the scenes videos, packing boxes, and showing their staff and the warehouse. And they also have inspiring posts and they have humorous posts as well. It's not just all about selling their products. And I think that works really well and they seem to have a lot of engagements. My next tip when creating content is to remember your objectives and your audience for you post a piece of content on social media than it's important to ask yourself, will this piece of content help you to meet your goals for social media? Does it fit your brand? Does it fit your niche? If not, then it's better not to post it. Remember quality over quantity. Tip three is to remember your social media audit when thinking about what type of content to post on social media, have a look at what Content worked well for you in the past. Is there a theme or a type of content that will help you to meet your goals. Use your analytics to help you guide your content. You don't have much of a social presence at the moment. You can also look at your website for inspiration. So look at your most popular pages, your most popular content. If you've got a blog, what are your most popular blogposts? What do people search for on your website? What are your most popular products and services? These are the things that you can create content around on social media. Or for example, if you've got a really popular blog post and you could create a video out this and then use that across YouTube or social media tip for, is to consider your most frequently asked questions, what most frequently asked questions in your industry in general, what people search for when they find you, and what are the challenges of your audience and in your industry in general, you can then use these insights to create content around these areas and help to answer your audience's questions. This can be really useful to help to boost engagement and uncertain platforms like on YouTube, for example, if you're creating video content around a frequently asked question in your industry, then this can also help you to rank in search engines for this question as well and to help generate traffic to your websites, my next tip is to stay consistent. It's important to stay consistent when posting, as this generally helps with the algorithm. So this doesn't mean that you have to post every day, but tried to find a realistic posting schedule that works for you and try to stick with it and be consistent. My next tip is to be visual. There are many studies out there that show that posts on social media with images and video, and media in general tend to perform much better. So you should always try to include some visual elements, even if you're posting on a platform that is less visual, like Facebook, design is not your strong point then don't worry, I'll be sharing some tools to help you with creating content later in the course. My next tip is to be authentic and personal. So here you could share the realities of business life. You could share behind the scenes. You could share how you package your products a day in the life of running your business, when things go wrong, challenges of running a business tips, people like people that they can relate to and that are authentic and this sort of content or is as well on social media. If you are comfortable, then show your face and do log. For example, people like to see the face behind the business as it comes across as more personal. If you're not comfortable with showing your face, then that's fine. There's a lot you can do. You can do voice-overs instead and film clips of you doing different things and then edit the voice-over. Afterwards, I personally follow many small businesses on Instagram and TikTok because I really like the content and I really like the people behind the business. So now I just thought I would share a quick example of an account that I've recently come across on TikTok or small business called pep talk pebbles. What I liked about this page as soon as I sorry, is that she's not trying to obviously sell their products. She's using TikTok to raise awareness of Hebron and their products. But the majority of our videos are blogs. Blogs are very much centered around her business in terms of behind-the-scenes of her day and packaging of products and things that she does in an average day. These videos, I think a very powerful because they're relatable. Those videos that are relatable and more likely to be engaged with unshared and watched. My next tip for creating content on social media is to repurpose posts. If you have a popular articles or blog posts on your website, then don't be afraid to share these multiple times with slightly different copy. You can also create multiple posts for new contents. You can also repurpose content across platforms. So for example, if you've created a YouTube video, then you can create a slightly adjusted version for reals or TikTok so that you can use the same content across different channels. But just remember to think about this when you're filming so that you can adjust content as needed. This can really help if you're struggling for new content ideas. Another tip is to share successful content in your industry or share content from key opinion leaders in your industry. You can also share user-generated contents. So customer reviews and testimonials can be quite useful and also look really good on your social media pages. Tip is if it's relevant to your industry, you can also tie content into relevant awareness days. There are plenty of calendars and things online. It's definitely worth having a look to see if there's any that are relevant to you and your business and then planning content around these. It's also important to consider your competitors and have a look at what they're doing, what does well for them in order to generate ideas for your own social media pages, it's also important to consider your brand when posting on social media. So ensure that all of your social media channels are branded. So they've got your brand colors, your brand fonts, your logo, and that everything looks consistent. And my final tip is to experiment. Yes, it's important to draw upon your audit and your research and your audience and competitor analysis. But it's also important to test what works for you on until you start posting. It's very difficult to know exactly what's going to do well for you. What's not going to do well, but don't be afraid to experiment and learn what works over time. And that will allow you to refine your strategy as you go along. So now it's time or the class projects. And in this class project, I'd like you to go to your social media strategy template and write down five ideas for Content for your business that you could post on social media that either educates, informs, entertains, or inspires. In the next lesson, we'll be talking about Content Management and frequency 10. Managing Your Social Media Content: So now you have some ideas for content. But Ledi start, my suggestion is to create a content calendar and try to plan around a month or two months in advance. Remember With Social Media Content, It's always quality over quantity. So only planning for what you can consistently manage, it's much better to have less frequent high-quality content and daily Content. Low-quality. I tend to use Google Sheets and I'll just plan out the next couple of months. I'll fill in any public holidays, any awareness days and anything that I want to focus on for the next couple of months and planet ball out in advance, I've provided you with a template in the projects and resources section which you can use to help start planning your content. A good tip to save time on creating content is to batch create contents. So you could spend some time once a month just planning out what you're gonna be doing for the month ahead and schedule some time to actually create that content all in one go. Depending on how you work. You could create content for the whole month or you could have some time set aside each week to batch create your content. There are also tools that you can use to schedule your content in advance, which I will go through in one of the upcoming lessons such creating content and scheduling content and advanced can really help to save so much time, which is really important when you're a small business owner. So next, how often to post, it's really important to test, learn over time what works for you. For your business. There's really no right or wrong when it comes to how often to post. And as well, you need to think about your own time and resources and where your time is most best spent, what is realistic for you. So whatever is realistic for you, then just try to stay consistent with that posting schedule in terms of when to post, it is more beneficial to post when your audience is more likely to be online, you should be able to find some statistics around this in your insights on your social media platform. However, if you don't have any insights yet, then this is again something that you can test. You can test different times and see how this impacts Engagement. Yes, there are best practices, but things are constantly changing and it really does depend on your specific industry and your audience. Again, there are tools that can help with this and help identify when your audience is online and when are the best times to post, which I'll go through in the upcoming lessons for the class projects. I would like you to use a template provided to plan out a month's worth of content or your business? 11. Tips for Boosting Social Media Engagement: In this lesson, I will run through a few general tips on boosting your engagement organically on social media. Just bear in mind that each platform has its own best practices and these constantly change. So my advice would be to familiarize yourself with platforms that you're going to be using and what is best practice for those platforms. But this lesson, we'll cover some general guidelines that are relevant to most Platforms. Spears tip is to use relevant keywords and hashtags. Hashtags aren't relevant for all social media platforms, but they can be useful on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Twitter to help people to find your content. But just bear in mind not to overdo the hashtags as this can come across as spammy, I would advise to use a mix of popular and less popular hashtags that are relevant to your business and industry, but be careful not to overdo it. Social sites like Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest keywords are really important. So use as many keywords as you can to describe your contents. Make sure that you use keywords in the description, in the title, in any alt text on images as this can all help your content to be found. Tip number two is to keep an eye on trending topics. So what songs are trending on Instagram Reels on TikTok, what topics are trending? And if relevant to your business and your industry, then consider making Content around the trending topics, but only if it's relevant because you don't want to jump onto a trend if it's not relevant as that can actually have a detrimental effect. But I'm platforms like TikTok or Instagram Reels. It can be useful to use trending audio if it fits with the video that you're making. So for example, or if you're doing a day in the Life vlog, you could put some trending audio behind it or use a trending filter or effect. And these can all help your videos get increased engagement and visibility. My next tip is to always respond to comments where you can really important to respond to comments and engage in conversation. Not only does this help you form a better relationship with customers and make sure you look responsive as a brand and a business. But also it can help boost the visibility of your posts. So uncertain networks like LinkedIn, for example, commenting on your post can boost your posts and the visibility of the post in other people's feeds. And just in general, commenting shows that you've got an active account and it can really help with overall Engagement. Another way to boost engagement on social media is to tag people that you mentioned in your posts. So if you're talking about a particular company or person, than always tag them because then they're more likely to share that with their own followers. You can also collaborate with the brands and influencers and your industry, which can be another great way of increasing your reach and also increasing your overall engagement. It's another way to boost engagement is to create content that answers popular questions that you get on social media and popular searches are really good example of this is on TikTok. You can actually be video responses to people's questions and comments. This type of content works really well on TikTok because it's more personal and you actually engaging directly with your audience. Tiktok seems to favor this type of contents. And I've found with my own posts on TikTok that the posts where I'm answering questions and they literally take a few minutes to me, I've actually outperformed some of my other posts that have taken a lot longer to produce. So it's definitely worth creating posts around audience and customer questions, whether that's a TikTok or YouTube Q&A, or even an Instagram live where you answer some questions. These type of posts can really help to boost engagements. Another tip to boost engagement, which I touched upon in the last lesson, is to use media in your social media posts. Whether that's images, video, gifts, because anything visual like that can help to boost engagement, images typically result in two times higher comment rate and a video gets five times more engagement on LinkedIn. Live Video gets 24 times more. That just goes to show how important interactive content is to Engagement. Another tip is to use a call to action in your content. So whatever you want the audience to do as a result of view new content, whether you want them to save the post for future, wherever you want them to, like comment, follow, download something, visit your website, try and include that as a call to actions. If you're doing a video, you can include it in the end. You can say follow for more. Or if you're doing a graphic on Social Media, then you can put it in your caption or on the actual image itself. Another way that you can boost engagement is to be interactive. So aside from video, there are other ways that you can be interactive on Social Media. So for example, on Instagram stories, you can do things like ask questions. You can put event reminders, you can use stickers. There's a lot of things that you can do to increase interaction. Another way to boost engagement is something we've already touched upon. But to make sure that you post at the most optimum time for your audience. So basically posts when you know that they're more likely to be online. This can obviously differ by industry, different time zones as well. Pasting when your audience is online rather than just posting randomly can really help to boost your engagement. And finally, make sure that you look at what's worked for you in the past and look at what works for your competitors. And you can then repurpose the types of posts and the themes and the formats that work the best for you and your business. It's also important to test and find out what works for your industry, your audience, and your business. And just don't be afraid to try something new, obviously for increased reach and engagement. You can also use paid advertising on social media and most platforms will offer this feature as paid social media is a whole other topic. I won't be covering it in this course that if you'd like to learn more about paid social media, then I will be creating a course on this in future. So please give me a follow on Skillshare to keep updated. In the next lesson, I'll be going through some social media tools that I find really useful and that can help to save you time with your social media strategy 12. Helpful Social Media Tools to Save Time: In this lesson, I will run through some free social media tools that I personally use on a daily or weekly basis that helped me with my own social media strategy. There are obviously many tools out there for managing, publishing, scheduling, and creating content for social media. So please do your own research. Chances are if you're struggling with something, someone has made a tool to help you. The first tool that I use much on a daily basis is Canva. Canva allows you to plan and create social media content so easily. It's something that I have only recently started to use. And to be honest with you, It's been a huge lifesaver for me. I do have the paid pro account. But to be honest with you, I think for the price, it's really good value for the amount of time that it saves me. I think it's definitely worth it. However, there is a free account and there's a lot that you can do using the free account. So you don't necessarily need to have the Pro account to benefit from combat. Some of the benefits of the pro account that I like include being able to schedule content directly from Canvas, being able to plan out your content in a content calendar, again directly in Canvas, and being able to add your brand kits. So being able to add your brand fonts, your logo, and your colors so that they are easily accessible and you can just click a button and update any template in Canada with your brand colors, font, and logo, which is really very useful. There are templates for literally everything that you can just adapt and use, as well as some pretty cool AI features that you can use to make content design quick and easy. You can sign up for free and access a lot of the features, but I would definitely have a look at the pro business teams account. The next tool that I use on a weekly basis is buffer. Buffer is a useful tool for scheduling content across different social media platforms. And you can start with a free account. It can help you save a lot of time by allowing you to schedule in advance across multiple social media platforms. It also gives you suggestions for content and hashtags, as well as suggestions for the best time to post in order to get the best Engagement. It also has some really good analytics and some features for helping you to repurpose posts is worth noting that you can shed your social media posts directly from the platform, usually with Instagram, Facebook. If you've got business account, you can check your posts in advance. But the benefit of buffer is that it keeps everything together in one platform and makes it a lot easier to manage. There are lots of other scheduling tools out there. Some others that I've used in the past include HootSuite, which I have used before. Now I haven't used HootSuite paid subscription personally, but I do know that there are some really cool features that can help you save a lot of time included. So things like the provide AI generated social media copy. So if you're struggling to write copy for your social media posts, then there tool can help you come up with ideas as well as suggesting the best days and times to post or different goals. So, for example, it may suggest a different time if you want to generate Engagement to, if you want to raise awareness of your brand on the topic of AI, there are lots of tools out there, some paid or some free, help with crafting content and copy for social media. I don't have a lot of experience with these tools yet, but I'd say it's definitely worth and look, if it can help save time and energy. Another tool that I use on an almost daily basis is Trello. I absolutely love Trello for planning and organizing my ideas, tasks, and contents that are of course, other tools you can use. I know tools like Notion or very popular. But I personally, I've always really liked to use Trello having some kind of tool or system that works for you that helps you to organize your ideas and your tasks and time can be really beneficial. I find that Trello helps me to feel less overwhelmed and I have a board for my current projects and what I'm focusing on now, as well as boards for my ideas and also for client campaign's as well. I find it really useful to separate the board so that I don't have everything that I need to do on Show All at once. As that would just be too overwhelming. Then for planning social media content, I will use Google Sheets and just put everything into calendars on Google Sheets. If you're creating content on social media, then you may need access to free stock images and videos. The I use quite a lot is Pexels. This has a lot of free photos and videos that you can use your social media, and it's all royalty-free. I find that's a really useful site. This also Pixabay as well. And if you use Canvas, there are lots of videos and images that you can use within Canva as well. Then in terms of researching content, your social media, I would recommend a couple of free tools. There's one being answered the public.com. And so the public is a really useful site where you can search for any topic. It will tell you search volumes and questions that are asked in relation to this topic. So this can be really, really useful to help generate ideas for content because you can see what people are searching for, what sort of questions they're asking about any particular topic that you're interested in. It also provides you with search volumes and keywords and also cost-per-click as well for various keywords. And other tool that you can use that I find really useful is Google Trends. Google Trends is really useful in finding out what search terms and topics are trending in a certain country or in a certain time. And this can really help in planning content around different topics that are popular are of course, lots of other tools that you can use. Many of them are paid for, but it's definitely important to do your own research and find tools that work for you and the platforms that you want to use. Because obviously, some tools may be better for some platforms than they are for others. But I've listed all of the tools that I've mentioned in the link section of the social media templates in the Projects and Resources section. In the next lesson, we'll be talking about monitoring performance 13. Monitoring Your Performance on Social Media: Finally, it's really important to monitor your performance on Social Media. If you didn't monitor your performance, you won't know what's working, what's not working, and where you can make improvements. It's really important to continuously monitor and tweak your content, test your content in order to get the best Engagement possible. So the metrics that you choose to focus on will depend on your overall goals and social media objectives. In order to set your metrics, you need to think about what your original Objectives works and what do you want to achieve with social media. Some example metrics that you could monitor include website traffic, impressions. Engagement metrics reach leads generated from social media, convergence generated from social media, the size of your audience, and the growth and the trend of how you're growing. Clicks on Social Media, click-through rates and social sentiment, I would suggest breaking down each objective and choosing a few metrics to measure for each objective. And then using tools such as Google Analytics or your social insights to monitor your metrics on a weekly basis. If you're posting links on Social Media, then it's really important to include tracking on those links so that you know whether your activity is helping to meet your objectives. I would recommend using Google Analytics and then adding on Google Analytics tracking onto the end of all your social media links to that you'll be able to see how much traffic your social media activity is generating, which platform you're traffic is coming from. You can then keep an eye on what's working, what's not working. And then you can tweak your strategy and your content as you go along to continually improve performance using the social media insights, tools that are available within each social media platform is a really great place to start, because these are obviously free and they're really easy to use and they have a good level of detail for somebody who is starting out with social media. If you need more granular social media stats, then there are many tools out there that can provide these for you, although most of them are paid full tools. So definitely do some research. This is something that you would need, but I find that the tools that are built into each social media platform, as well as using Google Analytics is enough for me to monitor my performance of social media to the level that I need. There are also more advanced things that you can set up and monitor in Google Analytics ending on your objectives, you may want to configure Google Analytics to measure how many leads you've had from Social Media, How many event registrations you've had newsletter sign-ups, products bought, then you can directly attribute Social media activity to conversions. And you can't work out whether social media is working for you and what channels are working the best in terms of conversions. For me, Google Analytics is a really powerful tool and I would recommend to any small business to have Google Analytics set up. If you want to learn more about Google Analytics, I have provided some links in the links section of the social media strategy template in the Projects and Resources section 14. Final Thoughts: That brings us to the end of the class. Thank you so much for taking time to take this class and I really hope that you enjoyed it. And you learned something new about social media strategy that you can implement into your own business. To recap, we have learned about the benefits of social media for a small business. We've looked at how to set your social media objectives, how to understand your audience, the different types of social platforms that are out there. Practical tips to boost your social media engagement and ways that you can measure success if you take anything away from this class than it is. Don't be overwhelmed by social media. Start small with a couple of social media platforms. And always make sure that the platforms you choose are relevant to your target audience. It's also important to test as much as you can. And also to remember that quality content is more important than the quantity of content that you post. Don't forget to post your projects in the project gallery. And if you've enjoyed this class, please consider leaving me a review because it really helps me out. Also makes sure that you're following me on Skillshare so that you'll be the first to note when I released a new marketing course. Thanks so much again for taking my class and I look forward to seeing you in the next one.