Social media seems to be the biggest sucker of our time these days. How many hours have you spent on your phone scrolling mindlessly through your feeds each day? And then you start a business and realise you need to do EVEN MORE of this! And time is the one thing we definitely do NOT want to be wasting in business.
Perhaps you are one of the minority that isn’t even on social media, you’ve taken yourself off because you didn’t want to squander your minutes on other people’s daily showreels.
Just ‘not doing’ social for your biz is not an option my friend. The very reason you need to be on there is to be in front of all those bazillion eyeballs scrolling through their feeds every day. It is literally the world’s largest database of leads for your business, so it is doing yourself a disservice if you don’t get it all figured out, stat.
You need to tame the beast that is social media and make it start working for you, not the other way around.
I advise you to pre-schedule all of your social media posts in one day each month. Depending on your business you could even get it down to half a day per month. Then after that all you need to do is answer questions as they come in, job done. You have an active presence and your followers can get a drip feed of your pearls of wisdom all month long, keeping your brand in their sphere of influence (which is the whole point of being on there).
Firstly, you need a personal Facebook profile (you don’t need it to have anything on it, but Facebook will only let you set up a business page if it knows you are a legit person) to set up one if you haven’t already.
Then from that personal profile, you can create as many business pages as you like.
So, create a business page. Populate all the text areas (name, handle, about the text, contact details etc) and add a profile image and banner image (professional ones please! We want you to look like the real deal when people come to check you out).
Create a content schedule
Then you want a social media content schedule, it is a spreadsheet with two tabs (I use Google Sheets so its saved automatically and always live). The first tab is called POST IDEAS – there are four columns labelled US, THEM, EDUCATE and ENTERTAIN. The idea is that you spend 30 minutes or so brainstorming ideas for each column, they are meant to be written in brief, you can extrapolate when writing your post later.
Us: The posts in this category are all about you. Showcase your amazing genius. Ideas include: Behind the Scenes, Team photos, Introducing a team member, Your office space, Your services, What makes you different, A special offer, Your awards, Sales you have on.
Them: This is where we can empathise with our audience and show them we can connect with them and understand them. We can also showcase case studies here. Examples include: Discussing pain points your clients are going through, Identifying struggles/challenges they may be facing, case studies of clients situations and successes and client journeys.
Educate: This is where you flex your muscles as a trusted guide, not in a salesy way, but purely educational. So write a list of things you can teach your clients. While you won’t have enough space to give away the farm, you do want to be generous with your knowledge in order to show your audience you have the goods. These can include How-To’s, blog articles, video tutorials you have written or shot, you could also share other trusted sources articles. Anything to help your audience grow.
Entertain: This will be the easiest category to fill, but the one we need the least amount of posts of. If you ever have a brainwave or see something inspirational or funny on another day you can quickly open this spreadsheet and jot down the idea on this tab. You could find memes, inspirational quotes, cute cat pictures, good news stories to share, anything that will make people feel something (happy, sad, laugh, cry etc).
Once you’ve filled these columns, you want to create a second tab on your spreadsheet called Schedule. This will literally be a calendar of your posts – where you can write them out all at once.
This is where you will allocate a chunk of time over one or two days at the same place in each month, to sit down, write and schedule your month of content. You decide on how many days you want to schedule consistently (I recommend at least 4 x per week), then take an idea and paste it in the idea column beside the day for that post. Next to the idea, write the post content you want. Mix it up with some long with a couple of paragraphs, some short with just a few words. There isn’t any set rules – you do what your audience engages with the most. For many of the posts it’s a good idea to include a call to action, or an instruction if your reader wants to take another step. This could be very direct such as ‘book your call now’ or ‘click here to buy now’ or it could be soft like ‘check out this blog we found on how to train your dragon’. People like instructions to follow, especially if they are mindlessly scrolling social media. Next choose an image to put with the post, you could have designed images, branded images, you could be getting free stock photos from sites such as pexels.com or pixabay.com, either way, think about the post, and mark in this column once its done. Then rinse and repeat until you have the whole month done.
Choose a scheduling tool
Next you will schedule them to your desired social media platform. I like to use a scheduling tool, so I can schedule to all platforms from the same screen, I use later.com. You can also use sprout social, buffer, hootsuite, the list is endless and there are pros and cons for each.
Schedule in all of your posts, and voila, your work is done for the month. Now set aside the time for next month and all you have to do now during the month is answer any questions if they come through!
You can also feel free to post ad-hoc images or moments if they arise and you feel the need, but there won’t be any pressure as you know your scheduled posts are locked and loaded.
Relax! The work is done
Hope this helps take some of the stress away from jumping on social media every 5 minutes and trying hard to think about what to post today, and you can spend your time in your genius zone doing what you do best!
