A guest post by Cara Chace

Whenever I start discussing social media strategy with a group or potential client, the conversation inevitably turns to them asking questions about which social media networks to use for their brand or business.

It usually goes something like this:

Business Owner: “Should I be on Pinterest (insert any platform here)? I really don't get it, don't like it, and don't want to learn it. Do I have to use it?”

Me: “Well, that depends…are your clients and potential customers on Pinterest?”

Business Owner: **BLANK STARE**

It does not matter which social media networks you like and/or use personally. If your clients are on Pinterest, you damn well better be on Pinterest.

How To Know For Sure Which Social Media Networks To Use

Identifying your target audience first, then determining which social media network to use for your brand based on those demographics, is the only way to know you are where you should be in the social media universe.

How do you do that? Easy.

Step 1: Look at your Google Analytics for your website and your Facebook Insights if your are already on Facebook as a business. Note your top-level demographics such as age and gender.

Step 2: Do a quick Google search to identify what the demographic breakdown is for each social media network you are considering.

Step 3: Pick 2-3 social media networks that overlap with your website traffic and/or Facebook analytics.

I typically recommend that brands only use 2-3 social media networks to start. Building a following and consistent, relevant content takes time and lots of effort. If you are trying to use 6-7 different platforms, you'll drop the ball and inevitably let a few of those accounts die a slow, painful death.

Usually what happens is a small business tries to post on every platform, but ends up auto-posting the same content everywhere. Fans are savvy – if they see you’ve auto-posted a photo from Instagram to Facebook, they know you’re not really present on Facebook and they won’t really bother to engage with you there – thus defeating the whole purpose of being on Facebook.

It is of note, however, that as soon as a new social media network pops up, or you even maybe, kinda think you might want to use it in the future – you should create an account to claim your name/business immediately.

If you have no immediate plans to use a social media account, in whichever about/info section it provides, you should let people know which social media networks you ARE on, or point to your website.

For example: “Hey peeps! Thanks for finding your way here, but my social media party is over on instagram.com/carachace – see ya there!”

The other part of this equation is that you need to consider the types of content you are going to share. Is it mostly text or mostly photos? Both? Are you talk to other businesses or to consumers?

You could come to the conclusion that you only need to be on one social media network to start – that's totally cool and you can/should rock the shit out of that network.

Regardless of how many social media networks you decide to use, remember that EACH account should align with your brand voice and brand topics. You must know the types of content you are going to share on each account – some overlap is ok, but all the same content across all accounts is not.

[click_to_tweet tweet=”Building a following and consistent, relevant content takes time and lots of effort. If you are trying to use 6-7 different platforms, you'll drop the ball and inevitably let a few of those accounts die a slow, painful death.” quote=”Building a following and consistent, relevant content takes time and lots of effort. If you are trying to use 6-7 different platforms, you'll drop the ball and inevitably let a few of those accounts die a slow, painful death.”]

Remember, the keys to any social media strategy are to 1) give more than you get, and 2) BE CONSISTENT.

If you know which social media networks make the most sense for your target audience and the content you want to share, then everything else is just fine tuning your strategy!

XO,
Cara

Cara Chace is a social media Bosslady. Cara’s goal is to empower small businesses with the tools and knowledge to end their frustrations with social media. Formerly in law enforcement, she believes in “just the facts ma'am” when it comes to creating social media strategies for clients.

She has worked with everyone from solopreneurs to a world-renowned band – at one time managing 13 million social media fans on her own.

With her creative awesome sauce and to-the-point strategies, she will bring you a well-rounded, easy to understand plan to help you use social media like a rockstar.

Find Cara on Twitter / Instagram / Pinterest / Facebook

A guest post by Miranda Nahmias

Back when I first started to use social media as a tool for my business and strategically schedule out my posts, the whole process was kind of a hot mess.

I would randomly do Click to Tweets or re-pin some pretty-looking posts, but I didn’t exactly have a strategy.

STARTING OUT WITH SOCIAL MEDIA SCHEDULING

Once I decided that I was going to take social media a bit more seriously, I signed up for Buffer’s Awesome plan (which I highly recommend) and got to work, bravely attempting to share posts for my business 20% of the time, and posts for other people’s blogs and businesses the other 80%.

This is a technique that has been encouraged by many role models within this niche, and is something that I personally very much believe in. My philosophy since starting my blog has always been to give and support as much as I can, so I make an effort to follow through with that in my social media scheduling.

I set up my Buffer to post 12 times a day at the optimal times that were best for engagement on my specific account (check out this tutorial from Nora Conrad on how to set up your Buffer like this!) and got to work!

At first, most of my “other people’s posts” were just retweets of interesting stuff that I’d found throughout the day. But I didn’t want to just do retweets!

Taking the time to personally tweet about someone else’s blog post will result in a much higher engagement and that blogger will be even more appreciative — it’s just an all around good thing to try and do. The task then became to find a whole bunch of interesting content and write a custom tweet for each one.

Enter the Pocket App

When I originally discovered the Pocket app, I honestly wasn’t too impressed. I thought it was a good concept, but couldn’t quite figure out how to make it work for ME. I would save stuff, but then never go back to it, and was only using the app on my smartphone.

Eventually, I realized that Pocket also has a Chrome browser extension. That’s when things started to get interesting.

Has this ever happened to you? You’re scrolling through your Twitter feed on your phone, find something that you want to read, but totally do not have time to read the whole thing!

Well, with this ingenious little app, you can just save it to your Pocket and access it later…on your laptop or your phone! Problem solved.

(Oh, and just so you know — Pocket is not sponsoring this article or anything. I just really like using it!)

Let’s Get Even More Organized

After using Pocket in this manner for a few weeks, I knew that there must be some way to harness its power in an even more effective way.

The problem that I found was that most of the posts I find, I’d like to schedule to both Twitter and Pinterest. But my Pocket was just a jumbled mess of articles, some even totally unrelated to business or not something I was interested in sharing on social media.

It took some digging, but finally I realized that you can use TAGS in Pocket! The tags pretty much work as folders so that you can separate the articles from each other, and each article can be given multiple tags.

When you’re on the page of an article that you want to save, just click the Pocket extension (or, on your phone, choose the “Share” button in your browser, then “Save to Pocket”).

To create a new tag, just type in the text area and hit enter to save the tag. If you already have tags created, just start typing in the name of the tag, and it will autocomplete. Hit enter to select that tag, and then you can add more!

For example, if I find a great article (like Wonderfelle’s recent How I Found a Niche When I Stopped Looking For It), I’ll add it to both of the tags “Twitter” and “Pinterest.”

[click_to_tweet tweet=”Taking the time to personally tweet about someone else’s blog post will result in a much higher engagement and that blogger will be even more appreciative — it’s just an all around good thing to try and do. ” quote=”Taking the time to personally tweet about someone else’s blog post will result in a much higher engagement and that blogger will be even more appreciative — it’s just an all around good thing to try and do. “]

Scheduling Tweets from Pocket

When I’m doing my Twitter scheduling with Buffer, I just pull up the Twitter tag in Pocket.

There’s actually a really fast way to schedule each post to Buffer — just click on “Share” > “Buffer” (or “Share” > “Twitter” if you don’t use Buffer) and it will auto-generate a tweet for you with the article title and blog’s name.

Personally, I don’t like doing it that way, because it doesn’t include the blogger’s Twitter handle. So instead, I choose “Share” > “View Original.” This will open up the post in a new tab and allow you to find their Twitter handle and write the tweet from that page instead (if you have the Buffer extension installed, you can do this even more easily).

If I want to schedule it for Pinterest, I just go to Pocket, open up the post’s page, and use the Pinterest or Tailwind extension!

Since Pocket is such a great tool for storing other people’s content, it’s also a great resource for virtual assistants. I use it all the time with my clients! If I come across an interesting post that I want to save and share on their social media accounts, I can simply add the content to a tag that’s specifically reserved for that person.

Really, the options are endless!

Miranda is a graphic designer who specializes in ebook and opt-in freebie PDF creation. She blogs about all things business, blogging, and graphic design over at http://www.MirandaNahmias.com.

Find Miranda on:

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/mirandanahmias
Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/mirandanahmias
Pinterest: http://www.pinterest.com/mirandamowbray

You know what's really annoying? When you spend hours researching, writing, photographing, formatting, and proofreading your work to create something you're actually proud of… and then nothing.

You know people are reading your blog or opening your email or following you on social media – but you're not seeing the sales or engagement that you want. Bummer.

The crucial element your marketing might be missing

It kills me to see people spend so much time creating and promoting their products and services and not seeing results. But the good news is, there may be an easy fix! I recently did a content audit for a client who was was struggling with getting clients from Instagram (despite having over 1,000 followers), but after making 1 little change – she booked 3 new clients within 1 week. 

She added a clear call to action.

From my experience, it's much easier to market and sell your products and services if you remember 1) most people are egocentric and 2) most people like to be told what to do. That sounds a little harsh (and I even tried to soften it with “most”), but I'm just putting that out there…

In the example I mentioned above, my client was using Instagram to promote her photography business. She had gorgeous images, was using relevant hashtags, and even had over a thousand followers… but she wasn't getting clients. Despite the fact that her feed was gorgeous – no one had any idea she was actively looking for clients! She mentioned in her bio that she was a photographer, but had no link to her website or no specific call to action to get in touch. It's such a simple thing, but the shift from “hey, I provide a service” to – “hey, I provide a service and this is how you can hire me” is crucial.

Make it easy for people to know what to do by giving them a clear call to action. 

Going back to the egocentric part, I think it's also important to acknowledge that people want to know what's in it for them. Most email sign up requests say something like, “sign up for my newsletter where you'll occasionally get tips on stuff” – sorry no one really wants to sign up for that. Setting expectations by telling (or showing!) people what they are actually getting (and when they are getting it) can make a huge difference in opt-in rates. #trust

[click_to_tweet tweet=”Setting expectations by telling (or showing!) people what they are actually getting (and when they are getting it) can make a huge difference in opt-in rates. #trust” quote=”Setting expectations by telling (or showing!) people what they are actually getting (and when they are getting it) can make a huge difference in opt-in rates. #trust”]

Using benefit-oriented CTAs makes it easy to tell someone what to do + what's in it for them when they do it.

• Click the link in my bio to read the post + learn how to plan your blog content (so you always know exactly what to write about)! 
• Join my free course for 5 days of actionable tips to help you get noticed online and get more sales.
• Schedule a session now and I'll help you create an irresistible feed that attracts your ideal audience (and actually generates revenue). 

These are all CTAs that I've used on my blog or on social media to encourage my audience to take action. Notice none of them just say “link in bio” or “submit” or “contact me” – because that would be kind of lame. Positioning your CTAs as something that results in actual VALUE makes them so much stronger. 

If it sounds like I'm a little too excited about CTAs its because I kinda am – strategically using CTAs was a game-changer for my own business and it could be for yours as well!