If your biggest struggle is being consistent with your social media marketing you came to the right place. For a busy business owner, being consistent with social media is a huge challenge. Between demands on your time, delivering your service, the fact that you’re one person responsible for everything and the fact that social media feels like a full time job on its own, it’s not a surprise that many business owners are hit and miss. But as you’ve no doubt been told, consistency is important.
Why is it important to be consistent?
There are 3 main reasons you need to be consistent with how often you talk about your business on social media.
- Social Media is a momentum based platform. Social media posts have a short shelf life and new content is being added every second. Imagine one of those conveyor belts that goes around at Sushi restaurants. Your post is like one of those mini dishes, your audience sees it then it’s gone.
- The reach for organic social media is limited. Less than 3% of your audience will see what you post. The more you post, the more visibility you have.
- Staying front of mind. If you want people to choose you then you need to remind them that you’re there.
Consistency on social media isn’t just about being organised. It’s not about how badly you want to be successful. There’s more to it. I’ve put together a list of 12 strategies that will help you improve and maintain your consistency with your social media marketing.
- Choose what consistent means to you. Is it 5 days a week? 3 days a week? Make the decision and stick to it.
- Choose your key messages. You need to know what you want to say and how you’re going to say it.
- Plan your content. What are you talking about this week and next week? You don’t need to plan months ahead but trying to decide on the day, everyday is draining.
- Create space in your diary to create your content. You need time and energy to create the content.
- Remember your “why”. Remind yourself why you’re doing it and what your goals are. You need motivation to keep going when it’s hard, when you’re being ignored and when you don’t feel like it. Showing up everyday and talking about your business when you feel like no-one is listening and no-one is interested is a huge mental challenge but it’s one every successful business owner has had to overcome.
- Ask your audience. You need occasional reassurance that you’re on the right track and it’s not a big waste of time – regular market research will help you design your offers. Get feedback from the people your service is for.
- Get excited about what you do. You need to love your services. If you’re not excited to do the work you’re not going to be excited to talk about it.
- Have a simple, easy and obvious call to action. Every bit of content you create should have a job. What do you want people to do once they’ve read your post? Where are you sending them? What’s your offer?
- Look after yourself. You need to be well. Burnt out, anxious, tired and depressed people struggle to create. This energy also leaks into your content and you’ll find it hard to sell anything if you’re in the wrong energy.
- Have a bank of ideas. Trying to come up with ideas for posts, blogs or emails on the fly every single time you need to write is a hard way to do things. Even I have days where I can’t think of anything to say which leads me to the next point………
- Recycle, repurpose and reuse. You don’t need to create brand new content all the time. Use what you’ve got. This will take the pressure off your brain to be constantly creative.
- Use scheduling tools – you can schedule straight into Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn so you don’t even need to bother with external schedulers now. Getting content set up ahead of time means if you have a down day or you need to take a break your visibility doesn’t suffer.
You get out what you put in right?
Between algorithms and the sheer amount of content being created everyday we know that in order to be visible we need to be consistent with how we show up online but consistency is complicated. The perfect conditions to run your business don’t exist, they never will. The sooner you get into a rhythm with your social media marketing the faster you will see the results you want.
Consistent doesn’t mean constant but you can’t be a secret and a success.
My name is Clair Stevenson and I help small business owners get more visible online. I help you find the confidence, the courage and the right words to show up and tell the world about your amazing business. If you’d like to find out more about how we can work together send me an email at clair@upwriteonline.co.uk