How to plan and execute your social media strategy in just one hour a week. If you’re a regular reader of our blogs, you’ll know one thing we always talk about is strategy. But strategy is a complicated word which conjures up images of 1,000 page documents in white-collar, corporate environments, not something small businesses should be doing.
The reason we believe in strategies is because – believe it or not – a little planning can go a long way. It helps give you focus on what you’re trying to achieve and the progress you are making. It doesn’t have to be time consuming, but it does need to have purpose.
When it comes to social media, it can be easy to spend all day searching, commenting and posting, only to find it’s 5pm, you’ve not sold anything and it’s time to go sort out the kids, make dinner, or go to your pilates class.
By spending a small amount of time in the early stages to plan your approach to social media, you can take a targeted and coordinated approach, that doesn’t eat up all your time and can be managed in under an hour a week.
Set objectives and results
You won’t get immediate results from using social media, so it’s important to remain patient. By applying consistency, and taking your time, you will see your efforts being rewarded through building a loyal following, paying customers, and new business contacts.
Be clear with what you’re hoping to achieve. Is it three sales through social media, or each post getting a certain number of likes/shares. Don’t focus on simply ‘getting followers’ – what good is 10’000 likes if none of them are going to pay for your product or service?
Plan your posts
There are a range of post types that you can use on social media to engage and entertain your followers. From images to video, blogs to memes, and competitions to polls, each one has a different purpose and resonates with followers in different ways.
An easy way to manage what you’re posting – and when – is to create a small table and write down what you’ll send out on social media on a given day. If you see higher trade/footfall at weekends, make sure your posts focus on giving people a reason to visit your business.
Change it up
If you’ve been doing the same thing on social media for a while, and aren’t seeing the results you hoped for, try changing it up and creating different posts on different days. Pay attention to the days, and the times, that you see the best responses and try to maximise these.
If you’ve got local competition who look like they’re doing well, see how their social media is being used and look for post types/ideas that you can replicate for your own business. Don’t go like-for-like, but look at how you can put your own spin and style on the posts.
Schedule your posts
If you’ve set out clear objectives on what you’re hoping to achieve, the types of posts you want to send out, and are keeping an eye on what the competition are doing, put one hour aside each week – like a Sunday evening – to use a social media scheduling tool.
There are various ones available – like Hootsuite, Zoho and Later – which allow businesses to plan and schedule their posts. Spending an hour on a Sunday evening – setting your posts to go out during the week – is a great way to focus and minimise your social media use.
Try sponsored ads
If you’ve just launched your social media, and exhausted asking friends and family to follow your page, consider putting a small budget behind a paid advert to generate more interest in what you do.
Take some time to learn how to run paid adverts and don’t put huge budgets behind them in the early stages. If you’re going to spend £100 on an advert, be clear that you want 250 new followers in return. Not sure what to do? Consider hiring a freelancer or an agency to help.
Add an extra hour
Okay, we said you could do all of the above in an hour a week – which you can – but it’s important to realise that you need to be as active on social media as your customers are. This means spending time to respond to questions and enquiries on your posts.
Scheduling posts is one way to ensure you’re active on social media but you may also want to do a last-minute deal/offer, or send something out that you didn’t know about when you were doing your scheduling. A balance of the two might be the perfect way forward.
How Snizl can help
At Snizl we give small businesses a single point of organisation for their competitions, deals and promotions. All you have to do is register your business, set up your offer and send it out to your followers on both the app and your social media sites.
Because your deals go directly to people following you on Snizl, they receive a push notification on their phone. Unlike social media – where people might miss your updates – this means you have an audience actively looking for promotions and deals from you.
Incorporating Snizl into your social media strategy means you can set up one post – in less than ten minutes – and send it to multiple platforms at once, meaning you don’t have to copy and paste your message across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other sites you use.
Snizl motivates people to enter your competition by giving them an additional two chances to win if they share it to their social media. 75% of followers re-share offers, turning them into ambassadors of your business and offering better results than paid ads on Facebook.
Conclusion
With the average person spending four hours a day on their mobile, businesses who neglect their social media will no doubt see an impact in sales. But businesses who spend too much time on social media will see consequences in different areas.
A managed and – dare we say – strategic approach, will ensure that you can control your time on social media, see what works, what doesn’t, and offer the opportunity to adapt new approaches that help you build your brand, your customer base, and your sales.
Click here to see how Snizl for business can help grow your sales and your social media following.
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