How to do all your social media without it swallowing up your life
If you followed every marketing guru’s advice and did all the things that they suggest you do on LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, Mailchimp, Google My Business and Facebook, you’d require two full time staff to do it all.
Since you’re a small business that probably doesn’t have the resources to do that, here’s some ways to fit your social media into your week:
- Recycle a rotation of posts every 7 weeks that keeps your timeline active
- Do just one post a week that is all about what’s happening “now”
- Bring social media to what you already do, rather than making time for it
Let’s explore all that a bit more.
No one notices repeated content
There’s been a move of late, particularly on Facebook, to take advantage of the lack of organic reach for business page posts, and turn Facebook into a “reassurance” platform, rather than a promotional one.
When someone refers a business to us in a Facebook group or a real life setting, there is a tendency to go, first, to Google to look up the business and then to other platforms to see what they are up to — and if they are still actually open. Google can be slow to update on the opening hours, COVID status of availability of a business. But Facebook has a reliable telltale sign of whether a business is still alive. That business’ last post. If it was in 2016, there’s a good chance that business isn’t around anymore. But if they posted in the last week, then they’re definitely still alive and kicking.
And that’s reassuring.
While most small businesses are still yelling at an audience that never sees them, to buy more stuff, smart small businesses are understanding that you need to spend a few bucks to reach followers with those messages. Your organic posts are there for social proof. And social proof is a bit like proof of life, or proof of reliability. You’re not posting on your page to stir up your followers to buy more stuff. You’re posting on your page to show potential customers that you’re still around and still selling stuff that they might want. It’s a subtle difference, but one that releases you from having to waste so much time creating masterpieces that no one will ever see.
Just do one new post a week
While your evergreen posts are recycling themselves on, say, Thursday and Saturday, whack in a nice new shiny post on Monday or Tuesday. Isn’t it nice to have so much less pressure to produce one post, rather than 3, 4, 5 or even 7 a week? One thing that most of us have found on Facebook, particularly, is that more is not better. Less is way more.
In one experiment I ran with a client who was posting twice a day, ever days of the week, we drastically reduced their page posts down to just two per week. That’s a dramatic decrease from 14 posts a week to 2. Why?
When they were posting twice a day, their posts would be lucky to get seen by more than 20 people. And if they got just 5 likes or a comment, that would be a massive win for them. Facebook had, over a period of two years, got used to the fact that they were posting twice a day and that no one was interested in what they were posting. They had literally told Facebook to ignore them because they didn’t take the hint that no one was interested in their posts, and just kept posting more stuff that no one cared about.
After two weeks of posting just twice a week, Facebook took notice of the change and started put their posts in their followers’ feeds again. We worked to make these posts much more about the life that followers were living, and less about a sales message. Immediately, we were seeing the posts viewed by around 40% more people, and reactions increased from a like or two, to double digits. It was a small win. But it told us that more was less. And that we needed to take our cues from what the audience enjoyed seeing from us — not just what message we wanted to force into their heads.
Rather than making time for social, add it to what you already do
I never thought that what I did was very interesting. I sit around at a desk all day on a laptop computer talking on Zoom calls, making websites and designing online marketing campaigns. I know. It sounds positively depressing!
But the story that wasn’t getting told was, that I wasn’t just doing this at my home office. I was doing it in airport lounges, hotels in cities interstate, on flights, at beaches, in pubs, cafes, restaurants and client’s shops and offices. I get around.
So the story to be shared about what I do isn’t do much around the work I do or who I do it for. It’s all about where I’m working from today. For example, this past week I have been away from my home in Darwin on a trip to Perth in Western Australia. While I was building websites, writing quotes, planning marketing campaigns and doing Zoom calls, I was doing it all from a beautiful hotel with a view, from a conference (remember those?) overlooking Perth’s skyline and from forced self-isolation in a dodgy motel. The photo I shared of my portable webinar and podcast studio in front of a big window overlooking East Perth from Crown Towers generated far more interaction and questions than posting about the fact that my team can build you a pretty website.
Likewise, when I’m looking to do some content on TikTok, I don’t look to picking a funky tune and then doing a cringe pointing a tips and hints about the work I do. I simply record the view out of the window of my flight every 15 minutes and then quickly edit it on TikTok to match the music I chose and I have a video that gets viewed 100 times more than a promotional video every would.
What value do a video of my flight have for my digital marketing and telecommunications business?
It shows that I am mobile, coming to your city, working with clients in bigger cities and living a pretty interesting life, despite my work being quite dull.
The key here is that I didn’t make extra time for my social media, I just added a sprinkle of social media to things I was already doing, like setting up my portable studio, flying to Perth, operating the remote control on my hotel curtains and meeting up with colleagues I’d never met before for dinner.
The point for you is that you can chill a bit on the whole social media thing. Relax a bit. Less is more. Be a little less polished. Be a little less predictable. Have a little fun. And get a bit more out of your efforts.
Listen to this article on the Clickstarter podcast
https://audioboom.com/posts/7944708
Dante St James is the founder of Clickstarter, a Facebook Blueprint Certified Lead Trainer, a Community Trainer with Facebook Australia, a digital advisor with Treeti Business Consulting, an accredited ASBAS Digital Solutions advisor and presenter, and the editor at The Small Marketer. You can watch free 1-hour webinars and grow your digital skills at Dante’s YouTube Channel.
