Following on from my earlier blogs about why and where businesses need to be on social media, here’s the ‘how often’. ‘What’ will come next!
If you are a business, or a charity, or are organising an event, you need people to know about you. They will only know about you if you tell them, or if someone else tells them. So you need the maximum number of opportunities to tell people.
The best ‘someone’ to tell people about your business is in fact Google. Google truly is your best friend. Google will gossip about your website, or even your Facebook page, every time you do something there. So you need to be doing something. Obvious really.
If your website is static, and doesn’t change from one month to the next, then Google won’t give it a very high ranking, and you won’t appear high on the list if people search for your type of business. If you have a regularly updated page, then you will be ranked higher. (There are other factors that Google takes into account, but that one is important.)
Posting on social media
For Facebook, the more frequently you update your business’s page, the more often people will see something with your business name on it in their feeds. A couple of times a week is a minimum, I would suggest. Whether you’re posting your own content, links to your (regularly updated) blog, or other interesting content you’ve found elsewhere, you need to be active. Getting people to share from your page to their own will spread the word. Running a competition whereby people have a chance to win something if they share your page will help generate traffic.
If you can generate conversations on your page (or blog), or find a reason why people need to keep coming back, then do it. See more on this in my next post.
Make sure any images you post have your details clearly embedded in them – you don’t want your best cake being claimed as someone else’s!
With Twitter, the key is being part of the right conversations. If your business has customers, or potential customers, on Twitter, you probably need to be on there at least every couple of days. Daily is great, every couple of hours is fantastic, if you can spare the time.
For picture-based forums, a batch load of pictures every so often is fine, as long as the account is active. All the flowers from Saturday’s wedding, plus some ideas that you’ve seen elsewhere and want to incorporate somehow, is fine for your Pinterest account this week.
YouTube works well with a regular input, the same as everything else. If you can commit to a regular monthly item, then you’re not using up a huge amount of your time, but you’re giving your followers a reason to come back, and hopefully attracting more viewers.
Google Plus and Linked In are a little different. These can be treated as static shop windows, if you wish. However, you can get more out of them if you interact. Posting items into Linked In, making circles or connections, joining in conversations, will all bring your business to a wider audience.
But I don’t have time!
That is indeed the problem many of us face.
You could spend your whole life on social media, tweeting about relevant things, creating an amazing Facebook page, writing sharp and insightful blogs. But if you aren’t actually earning money from this, drawing customers to your online shop, or whatever your business is, you’re probably not using your time very well.
You’ll need to balance your time, so that you spend an appropriate amount of time on social media compared to what you get out of it. If you are employed to manage a business’s social media, then you probably can spend all day on it, but I’m assuming here that my audience is mainly owners of small businesses who don’t have that luxury!
If, as a restaurant owner, you’re blogging daily, and spreading yourself over social media all the time, then you may find your customers go elsewhere to actually eat, as you’re not in the restaurant, cooking, developing new dishes, and making sure your customer service is up to scratch.
You need to play with your social media. See what works, and what doesn’t. If blog post A gets loads of views, but blog post B doesn’t, then look at why. Was timing a factor? Perhaps posting in the middle of the night after you’d finished writing it may not have been your smartest idea! Was everyone else talking about the General Election at the time? Did you have a headline that grabbed attention, or was it a bit wishy washy? Did you have a good picture to go with it? Did you post it in the right place? Have a think, and try something different next time.
And see my next blog post about what you should be posting in your social media and blogs, for some more ideas.