Social Media Tips and Best Practices

Let's talk about some social media tips and best practices and I wanted to hit on this because I know social media is so important for a lot of small businesses, but for a lot of them and a lot of business owners, you kind of don't know where to start, because there's so many different social media platforms you can be on, and then even within those social media platforms. There's so many things, you are supposed to be doing, and it's really hard to keep up, right.

So I wanted to touch on just a couple of main ideas that you should be taking into account for your overall social media marketing strategy, and some individual kind of tips and things that you can start to implement really easily and really quickly in your social media strategy.

So the first thing I really want to talk about is figuring out what platforms you should be on and what KPIs, you should be paying attention to. And this is something that I think a lot of business owners don't kind of stop to think about, but it is really really important to make sure that you are structuring your strategy, in a way that is going to impact the actual your actual business right because we don't want to spend all this time focusing on a social media marketing strategy. That doesn't actually get you closer to your overall business goals. I think a lot of times these two things kind of live in their own bubbles. And people think they're going to get more out of their social media strategy than they're getting, because they haven't really actually tied those things together. In biggest thing takeaway for me here is, oh what do you, what's your biggest struggle business right now. Well, I really need to get more clients I need to make more sales but I don't know how to get more leads.

Well what are you doing for lead generation right now. Well I'm just focusing on like creating really great value and posting that to social media and engaging. But if you have a tie back into okay how is the content you're creating, tying back to what you sell and educating your audience that you're building on how they can pay you and buy from you, right, and if your engagement isn't focused on building no electronics to bring people down the purchasing funnel, your social media strategy isn't really connected to your overall business strategy there, right. So when you're thinking about what platforms you should be on, should I be on Facebook should I be on Instagram, should I go on Twitter or LinkedIn or Tik Tok, right. Snap that there's a million, right. Think about first of all who your ideal customer is and where they're spending their time online, and how they're consuming the information that is relevant to you and your business, right. So, a really good example of this is, if your target audience are older women. Snapchat is not really going to be the place for you. If your target audience is really young people, Snapchat might be the place for you right tick tock is definitely going to be the place for you. So think about where they're spending their time, and then from there how they're using that platform to consume content and what type of content, are they consuming there, right.

So, you know this is really, I think a good example of this is Pinterest. Pinterest functions very much like a search engine tool, right. A lot of people, yes they might scroll through their Pinterest feed, but a lot of times they go there because they want to find out something they want to find out how to do something, and they're doing, they're like in the research phase of the purchasing journey, right, so they're actually going to Pinterest and typing a search query in. And so, that indicates to you that people on Pinterest who are searching for some typical keywords and stuff that you would be focused on there further down the purchasing funnel because they're doing research right whereas people on Instagram, or even Tik Tok might not really know they're looking for the thing that you give. They're like wanting to find out a little bit more, right. So a good example of this might be, I want to learn more about money, and personal finance, maybe I want to learn more about that, but I haven't arrived to the conclusion that, oh, I actually really want to hire personal finance coach, I want to hire a money mindset coach. I might not even know those things exist yet.

So, Instagram and Tiktok, and Facebook to a certain extent, do really well at educating that top of funnel people that they're just wanting to kind of learn about a topic and they don't really know if or what they want to buy. Eventually, right. So thinking where you would be connecting with these people and what they're using these platforms to learn about and to consume is really important and this is I think something that a lot of people are not thinking about right. We also use a similar approach when we're thinking about what platform should I run ads on right this is also a consideration as well there which I talked about in other episodes. For now, think about what KPIs, you want to measure. So this is what analytics what numbers do I care about, and it can be really easy to just focus on followers, or impressions which is number of eyeballs on your content or reach which is number of users who are seeing your content and things like that, or even comments, Right, but if you're not clear on how each of those numbers relate back to not only your overall social media strategy but your business strategy. There's going to be a disconnect there. So we've seen this a lot, you know, when people talk about vanity metrics, this is what they're talking about right. So, I don't care if you have 50,000 followers on Instagram. If those followers are not quality leads for you and none of them are converting to actually buy from you. Why do we care about those 50,000 followers, the answer is we don't, right. But if you see a trend of Ryan I have followers who are commenting on my content, and saving my content and DMing me and engaging on the platform, those, you know, what seeing, Oh, those people are really converting to be customers and to purchase from us.

So you might then say well we don't really care about, followers, what we really care about are these engagement numbers here, right, we don't really care about cat likes so much as we care about comments and saves and cents, right. So getting super clear on what numbers are actually going to be impactful for the bottom line of your business is really important here because that will help prevent you from really just focusing on vanity metrics, which can be super helpful so that you're not measuring and paying attention to and putting your effort behind the wrong things, right, because what would you rather have 1000 followers who are never going to buy from you or 100 followers who are super warm and are very likely to buy from you and work for you. Right. I'd rather have 100 followers, because what do I care about in my business, the revenue. right. The sales. So that's really important, and that is how, figuring out what KPIs are important to you and you're measuring and you're in your social media marketing and this goes, this is true for all of your marketing content right, figuring out what KPIs really matter and will actually help to impact your larger business strategies and connecting those two is going to help and for where you need to spend your time, and what you need to spend your time doing right and so you can, that's the same question of the platform question.

If your ideal client is spending time on a platform, but they're not going to that platform to consume content and learn about the product or service you provide, should you spend time on that platform. So if you're in a b2b business. If your ideal customer is you know just a consumer, but that consumer is you know, a 33 year old business professional right. Do you want to spend time on LinkedIn, this is a question for you, right, because, yes, while your 32 year old professional young professional is spending time on LinkedIn. If they're not going to LinkedIn to find out about laser hair removal because laser hair removal is great, and it's gonna save you time in the long run and they have that disposable income and so there's, there's some overlap there right, but if they're not going to LinkedIn to find out and learn about and consume content around personal care habits that can help save them time and energy. LinkedIn might not be the place for you. Right, so that's a really good example of how you can think about it, that is going to help you to make some of those decisions. So when we're talking about some of the more specific social media, you know, strategies and stuff.

It can get really overwhelming right because what platforms are we supposed to be on. And then within that platforms have multiple features and functionality. So a perfect example of this is Instagram. It's not just Instagram anymore, right, you have Instagram feed posts you have Instagram Stories, you have reels you have HGTV you have lives now they're doing some sort of I think clubhouse competitor where it's like audio rooms but they're not they're drying out. So that's how a lot of things, I mean it's almost like it's functioning as multiple platforms on a single platform right. So figuring out, okay, I've figured out what platforms I need to be on. But, what things, what tasks, even just within that single platform, do I need to be doing right how do I decide that, so I wanted to just touch on a couple of those things here. One thing that you should really be focusing on and that a lot of platforms are starting to add is alt text, And what alt text is, is it tells the platform, it tells Google, it tells any of these crawlers right that are just code and they're just consuming your content. It tells them what is the content that's contained on an image, right. So we used to look at this old text from an accessibility standpoint. So on your website if you had an image on your website, you would and should still include all text on there, so anybody who is visually impaired who's using a software that reads the webpage to them.

The web page will read the alt text, which is typically a description of whatever is happening in that image, so that they can fully consume that content right and that's still a really important piece for accessibility, but it's actually a really important piece of for social media and for search engine optimization, as a whole. Because Google and these platforms. For now, cannot see that image. They can't see that video really right. So you should be including alt text to indicate to Google or to that platform, this is what's happening here. So, you can include alt texts on Pinterest now you can include alt text on Instagram. There's a few other platforms that are rolling this out, but anywhere that you can include all text, you definitely should. The platform's want you to be doing it so they will like that and it will help them to serve your content to users who will find that content relevant. So make sure that you are taking a second to go in and add that all text to images, and I think they're starting to roll this out for video as well.

So definitely make sure that you are utilizing alt text, and when you're posting that you're going in and adding all text, not just from an accessibility standpoint, but from a discoverability standpoint, it's super super powerful. So the next thing that I really really want to hit on is reels igtv His wives carousels, these are all different types of content that are on Instagram but also other platforms have them as well. Right, so if you are posting a carousel on Instagram you can also post like a multi image multi slide post on Facebook right to your Facebook page. So different platforms on Pinterest, you can have a pin that swipes and it's like multiple pins right and what all of these different time reels right reels tiktoks They're all the same. And then I GTV would be like similar to your YouTubes and to other things like that and then lives would be also kind of similar to YouTube you can go live on Instagram you can go live on Facebook but what all of this content does is basically keeps users interacting with consuming and seeing your content for longer periods of time, and the longer your content, a user is consuming your content. That indicates to the platform that it's valuable, right, for example, If someone's watching and igtv of mine. And it's not good, and it's not, you know, the title is social media tips and then I start talking about what I did on Tuesday night. It's not relevant to what they expected so they're going to leave, and so that indicates to the platform okay there's some sort of disconnect here, what people think they're going to see, and then what they're actually seeing on that content.

And it could be that that content is not actually that valuable, versus if content was valuable, and I was talking about social media tips and just like now you're watching that, you know you're listening to that or watching that video or swiping through all those, You know, parents of slides right, you're spending more time on that content which indicates to the platform that that content is valuable to you, right and you're enjoying that content. And what that does for the platform is it says Okay, great. Let's continue to serve this content to more people. So he gets your content in front of more eyeballs and more discoverable example like just to bring this outside of the social media realm is with SEO search engine optimization. When someone when you come up in a Google in a Google result right somebody's Google something, and then your website comes up and they click on your website, right, and they come to your website and the exact information that they thought they were getting that they were looking for is right on your page, right, and so they're reading through that content versus somebody who searches for something, your website comes up, they click on that website and it just brings them to a page that is completely irrelevant to what they were searching for. So, what are they gonna do, they're gonna leave, they're not going to search all around for that content look all over the website, they're gonna leave, which indicates to Google that they bounce which indicates to Google that content wasn't relevant to them, which is going to hurt you and Google's gonna say okay this content isn't actually relevant to this thing so we're not going to serve it as much.

Pinterest does the exact same thing. So all of these different types of content are serving as a way for you to get people to interact with your content a little bit longer. but what does that mean for you. Do I need to be creating all those different types of content, not if you can't, not if you don't have time. But just when you're creating your content, think about how can I get people interacting with this content for a little bit longer. How can I make sure that this content is relevant for them and getting them the information that they need, but they're kind of staying long enough for it to indicate to the platform that this is valuable, right, so with tick tock and real, this is like completion rate and YouTube as well. Right, so like how long you watch that video for do you watch that tick tock or real, all the way to the end. That's good. If you do that, that's a good indicator to the platform, same with YouTube, right. So be thinking about that just when you're creating your content, how can we create this content and present this content or this message, or this value in a way that's going to keep people interacting with it for a little bit longer. Right.

And so, user generated content is another thing that I want to just hit on really quick because for a lot of business owners, you might not have a lot of imagery or video and you might struggle to create imagery and video to be used on social media right so you know what you want to talk about on social media but you don't have the visuals to go along with it, and user generated content UGC is a great way to fill that gap a little bit. Not only is it exciting and fun for users to, you know, this is great for consumer brands right fragrance brands makeup and home related thing fashion right, it's like fun and exciting for a brand that you purchase from to post your picture that you took right with permission and they credit you and everything that's kind of exciting. So that's really great and it builds relationships there, but it also gets you using visuals, and those visuals often connect really well with other users, it's like five different people for the people right it's created by users. And a lot of times it helps other users to connect really well to that.

So if you're struggling to have visuals if you don't have the budget to have a brand photoshoot and you're kind of shooting your own stuff, but you just don't have time to do a ton of it or you're really struggling with it, definitely take a look at. Do you have any users who are posting content about your brand and the visuals that they're posting about their brand. Can you reach out to them and see if you can use that in your marketing. And that can be a great way to fill that gap a little bit.And the other thing that I really want to hit on is just content repurposing and content recycling. It is so hard for business owners to create all this content right especially if you're creating all of the content yourself you don't have any support around that it's really hard.

So make sure you are looking at your content and figuring out okay how can I take this one piece of content and flesh it out, and have it exist as multiple pieces of content without me having to create you know 10 pieces of content right how can I morph that content transform that content into different platforms, different areas of that platform to really meet people and users where they're at, without it, causing so much extra time and effort from me, right, and content recycling is the same thing right. Don't think that just because you posted something once everybody's thought and they're gonna remember it and you can never post it again, you can be reusing, recycling and updating and keeping your content relevant, but recycling it out. You don't have to create all of your content fresh from scratch, forever. Content repurposing and content recycling is such a game changer for so many business owners, and even if you are outsourcing your, your content and you have a social media manager, my social media manager, you should 100% be using this for your clients right because it totally makes sense. It saves you time which is gonna save them money, and it's super impactful and guess what, even, you know, people need to you need to post about something. A lot of times, for people to see it, and then they need to see it or hear it multiple times before they're actually going to remember it and commit it to memory.

So think about that a little bit when you're doing your content creation schedule. When's the last time I talked about this. Do I need to talk about this more should I, you know, create, you know, a few different versions of this post, slightly different versions of this post, and are all kind of hitting on the same thing or promoting the same thing and then and then you know make sure I'm talking about them every month or every week Right. Look at that, and that's going to really cut down time on your social media content creations, schedule, and look at where you can repurpose that content. Can I take this blog post. And can I just record a video of this instead and then have that video be transcribed into a blog post, and then I can take snippets from that blog post, and have that be content that's going to go out in Instagram feed posts right. Can I pick out snippets from that video that I recorded and have that be an IPTV or ID stories, all of those questions it's going to save you massive massive time, and it's still going to be getting the content and the information that your audience needs to them where they're at, where they're consuming that content, but the result is you're not spending all of your time and energy creating that content, or not a ton of business results. And so that is something that is really really important. And so I hope this is really, really helpful. If you have any questions around any of us, hit me up on Instagram, it’s Sam Di-Ni-Col-A.

I hope you found this really really helpful, and if you've been enjoying this podcast, definitely make sure you go and leave a review every single month, we choose one reviewer to win a free coaching call with me so this is the easiest and cheapest way to get my eyes on your business, and we can really look at, you know any of your questions around what platforms you should be on what KPIs should you be focusing on you know what strategy should you be employing, so definitely leave a review if you have already.

If you are really ready to up your content repurposing game, and your content recycling then check out my content to clients course you can find it on my website Sam DiNicolaDigital.com, the content time course goes all into how you repurpose your content, how do you recycle your content, how to use pillars and themes to tighten up what you're talking about your content and when you're talking about it how you're promoting your products and services. It has all of that information there for you and it will save you massive amounts of time. When it comes to content creation so definitely go check out my content to clients course on my website. If you want to learn more, and I will catch you next time on no fluff. Small Business simplified.