Whenever I hear businesses talk about social media, one thing that always comes up is the overwhelm that is associated with having to be on every platform. With so many different platforms it can be difficult to keep up. Well, here is the good news, you don’t have to be on every platform. You don’t have to be everywhere all the time. The key though is knowing where to be.
Ask yourself some questions
There are a few questions that you need to be asking yourself when thinking about your social media.
1. Who is my ideal customer/target market
2. What is my social media goal? Is it to get people aware of my business, is it to sell directly through that platform, or is it to build connections. We all want to use social media to help us grow our businesses but you also need to recognise that sales come when a customer knows, likes, and trusts your business. Building that know, like and trust, is what social media is really great at doing.
Thinking about these questions will help drive which platforms you need to be on.
It all starts with your target customer
Understanding your target customer is important for so many reasons. In terms of social media, it can help you find where to focus your efforts. Gaining a deeper understanding of your target customer will help you to create content that resonates with them. If it resonates with them, they will engage with your business. If they engage then they will see more of your content and when they see more of your content they start to know, like, and trust you. One thing I always recommend is to create customer profiles. These are detailed profiles of your ideal customer. By creating them and thinking about what motivates them it helps you to understand why they would engage with your business. By thinking about their demographics, you will be able to get a clearer picture of which social media platform resonates with them. If you’ve never created one before I have a free template that you can download and use here.
Once you know a bit about your target customer, you can think about what platforms they are on. You might love posting on LinkedIn but if your target audience is on Instagram then it’s probably not the best use of your time to be posting every day on LinkedIn.
I know my audience, now what?
You also need to consider the type of content for each platform. It’s easy to think that a post that performed well on Facebook can just be copied across to another platform. The challenge with doing that is that each platform has a different audience. Even if your customer is on multiple platforms they might not want to see the same content from you. For example, their reason for being on Facebook may be different from their reason for being on LinkedIn. So seeing your same post that they may well have engaged with on Facebook might not be relevant when they are in a different mindset. For example when they are thinking more in “work” terms on LinkedIn.
As a small business owner, the world of social media can seem overwhelming but the key element is to understand your customer. By doing this you can engage with them on the most appropriate platform with great content that appeals to them.
If you want to understand more about how to feel less overwhelmed by social media and be able to leverage it to reach your target audience, get in touch here, and I’d be happy to have a chat.