Social Media Management

>> In this lecture, you'll learn how to effectively manage your social media accounts to market your business. You've probably noticed that social media is a huge market and can be a great way to market your business if you understand it and don't get lost in the Facebook newsfeed. Social media is a wonderful marketing tool as it allows you to reach audiences around the world with a single post. All you have to do is learn the best ways to use it for your business. But before that, I want to talk to you about the pitfalls of social media. While social media can be great for your business, it can also be incredibly easy to get sucked into social media and end up with no time to work on your business. BuzzFeed, anyone? This is why it's important to limit the time you spend on social media and set clear goals for your social media management. Every time you log into social media, you want to have a clear intention in mind. What's your intention? Are you responding to comments and messages, doing research to see what posts have received the most engagement, commenting in groups or on other pages? Before you log on to social media, write down your intentions so you can focus on the task at hand rather than get sucked into another video on BuzzFeed. For this reason, it can be extraordinarily helpful to use social media management tools such as Hootsuite or Buffer. These tools allow you to schedule social media posts in advance so you don't have to manually log in to social media several times a day to post content. Instead, you can set up posts that go out in advance, saving you time and keeping you on track to your goals. For your convenience, we've included a list of these resources in your module. Some of which are paid services and others of which are free to use. Now, let's talk about what to post on social media. This is the big question, isn't it? What you post makes the difference between whether people follow you and build a relationship with you online or not. The most important thing to remember about what you post is that it will be unique to your audience. Here are some guidelines to keep in mind when posting on social media. One, keep your audience engaged. Engagement is key. This is how posts get shared, why people comment, and what keeps people coming back to your page for more. Engagement can take the form of questions such as, what do you think about this article? And calls to action, such as, if you like this post, share it with your friends. Pay attention to what your audience responds to most and keep doing that. Number two, don't be overly promotional. While your social media accounts may be for your business, they should not be focused solely on promoting your products, programs, and services. Your followers need to get value out of their interactions with your social media. A good rule of thumb is to promote something every five posts. So if you've made four educational posts, the fifth should be something promotional, such as, an invite to a free webinar, teleclass you're hosting, an invitation to a Health History, a promotion for a product or program you're currently selling, or a link to sign up for your free gift and mailing list. Which brings me to number three, vary your content. No one likes to see the same kind of post over and over again. It's important with social media strategy to vary the kinds of content you're posting to your social media accounts. Here are the most common types of posts. Educational videos, for instance, you could share a video of a healthy cooking demonstration or how to eat healthfully on the go. Photos, they could be your own photos, perhaps, of yourself with a client or of your farmers' market finds, or they could be photos you sourced through a stock photo site. The photos you select should be eye catching and match whatever you're writing about in the post. Fun things. Show off your sense of humor by sharing a funny post you saw, such as the farmacy, where you see on the screen, patients are picking up fruits and vegetables as their prescriptions. Personal posts. Remember, your prospective clients want to learn more about you, this is why they'll choose you over another Integrative Nutrition Health Coach. Share pictures of yourself, your family, or what you've been up to as a way for your followers to get to know more about you, your interests, and your personality. Articles and videos. Articles and videos are a great way to share content and information with your audience as well as educate them on what you do as a Health Coach. It's always good to share content from other people that you admire as well as your own content. This showcases to your followers that you aren't just interested in promoting yourself, but in promoting health and wellness across the board. Questions. Questions are a great way to engage your audience. For example, you could post a picture of your breakfast and ask the question, "What do you eat for breakfast?" Or, "How many of you eat breakfast?" Promotional posts. As I mentioned, these posts should be made less frequently and should include a clear call to action such as, sign up for my webinar here, with a link to register. Of course, if you're posting on a site such as YouTube or Instagram, you're limited to posting only videos or photos. But even then, you can vary up the content. For instance, you could film different kinds of videos for YouTube such as educational videos, like the healthy cooking demonstration we talked about earlier, coaching videos, wherein you share a story about a client you worked with and a problem they had, and how you worked together to find a solution to that problem, Q and A videos, where you take a question from one of your followers and answer it in a video. The possibilities are endless. We recommend checking out other YouTube channels by successful people in the health and wellness industry to get an idea of the kind of content you could create for your own YouTube channel. Next, let's talk about how often to post. How often should you post on social media? Is there such a thing as too much posting or not enough posting? Again, it depends on your audience. We want to encourage you to use what you learned about your audience to pick the right social media platform or platforms to focus on with your social media marketing. A general rule of thumb is to post three times a day for a site such as Facebook where popular posts will stay in the newsfeed longer, and five times a day for sites such as Twitter where there are constant updates to the newsfeed. If you're posting on a content site such as Pinterest or YouTube, you can get by with maybe posting less, once or twice a week. We've included in this module, a social media counter template that you can use to start planning out your social media post using these tips. Now that you have your social media content strategy in place, let's talk about other ways that you can optimize social media for your business. Number one, respond to comments and messages. Customer support engagement is crucial to business success, especially in the world of social media. We recommend logging into social media at least once a day to respond to any comments and messages that you may have received. Number two, comment on and share other posts. Take some time while you're online to comment on and share other posts, including those of other people in your industry. If you're on Instagram, this is called reposting, on Twitter, it's called retweeting, and on most other forms of social media, this is just called sharing. Make sure you're using your business profile for this. This will help you get seen by other people and build relationships with other people in your industry, which may lead to future referrals or opportunities to partner together. Number three, join online groups. Some social media sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook let you join groups with other people who share similar interests. This is a great way to start interacting with your ideal clients. For example, if you work with emotional eaters, you could join a Facebook group for emotional eaters and comment on some of their posts with your insights or coaching advice. This establishes trust and rapport with the members of the group, which will make them more likely to check out your business page. Just make sure that this kind of interaction is not against the group's guidelines as some groups don't allow promotion of any kind, even if it comes in the form of coaching advice. Number four, use hashtags. Have you ever seen words or phrases with the pound symbol in front of it? These are called hashtags. Hashtags are used on social media to help people find content with similar themes or messages. For example, if you look up the hashtag HealthCoach, you would find posts by health coaches. Similarly, if you were to look at the hashtag fitness, you would see posts related to fitness. Hashtags can help you build your audience online as many social media users are actively searching for posts using hashtags that they follow. We recommend using a hashtag research tool to help you find the hashtags that relate to your niche so you can build your following online. Resources for this are included on a handout in this module. Regardless of what you choose to include as part of your social media strategy, aim to spend less than 30 minutes a day on social media. You can do the whole 30 minutes at once or break it up into two 15 minute segments. This will keep you from getting caught up in the world of social media to the neglect of other tasks that will bring you clients. One last thing to remember, marketing yourself on social media is not just about the number of fans or followers that you have, it's about how many of those fans and followers are becoming paying clients. Once a week, sit down and figure out the answer to the following questions. One, how many of your followers are signing up for your mailing list or clicking the link to buy one of your products? Two, how many of your Health Histories are coming from social media? Write down the answers to these questions and if you aren't seeing sales coming from your social media accounts, revise your strategy to include more promotions and stronger calls to action. Also, make sure that you are finding other ways of bringing in clients to your business outside of social media. And lastly, I want to remind you that if social media isn't your thing, that's 100 percent okay. You can outsource this part of your business, focus on only one social media site, or skip it altogether in favor of marketing yourself in person. Throughout this course, we want to remind you that the way you market yourself and your business is unique to you. So if social media isn't working for you, don't worry about it. To recap, we talked about managing your social media accounts and how you can schedule posts in advance to save you time. We talked about how easily it is to get lost in the world of social media and how to avoid that time trap. We also talked about what to post on social media and how often to post. Finally, we talked about other ways to use social media to market your business. How will you use social media to grow your business? I'm excited to find out.