Social Media Marketing: Love It or Quit It

Good morning and welcome to day 10 and chapter 10 of the Itty Bitty Visibility book, 15 Chapters to Marketing Made Easy. So chapter 10 is all about social media, and I hear all kinds of stuff from my different customers. They either love social media or they hate social media. As a business owner, you probably have a love-hate relationship with social media as well. If you wanna get traction on social media, you need to take it seriously. And you need to post and you need to engage and comment and interact with people. You need to be building relationships or just don't use social media at all. There, there is no gray area. You're just wasting your time. So what I actually wrote in the book is that many business owners have a love-hate relationship. That was me. I used to love to post, then I got tired of it and I hated to post, and then I decided to post again. I've been like this with social media myself. You continually balance preserving your privacy with wanting to get leads for your business. There really is no balance there. Either you're using it or you're not, and you need to make that decision and then stick with it in your business. If you decide to use it, you need to fully use it. Now, it used to be, especially on Facebook, which is the most common one, you would have a business page in which you would put all your business stuff. Then you would have a personal profile in which you would post stuff that your friends and family would, would want to know about you and what's going on in your life. However, it's been many years now that business profiles get no traction unless you pay. They really are pay to play. And that's not what I'm all about. I don't want to have to pay Meta. To get a basic post out to the people that say they want my posts. It just simply doesn't work. I hardly ever use my business pages on Facebook. Any post that you see there is posted from automation. It is not posted by me personally. I have converted my personal profile into a professional profile, which is just a toggle within your settings that allows it to be public instead of private. It allows things to get indexed in the search engines and it gives you more traction trying to get more people to see your message. I've found that the more you use it, the more Facebook likes to get your message out to people who are not following you or are not your friends. They call it the undiscovered people. Isn't that a great name? But having a personal profile that's converted to a professional profile and then using Reels, stories, and regular posts and video posts and doing lives, doing all the different things that they want you to do, you will get more traction. More people will see you. If you just say, I'm gonna do this for a week or a month, and then I'm just gonna not do it anymore, and then I might jump back in. There's no point. Don't even start because all you're doing is wasting your time. Keep in mind, if you set your account to private or friends only, then they're the only ones that are going to see it. And again, unless you've got a huge friend base that is also your client base, which most of us don't, then there's no point in jumping in to social media if you're going to already cut yourself off at the legs. So to speak. What platform should you be using? I get this question a lot. Which platform is the best platform, Dotty? And the reality is it's whatever platform that your potential clients are already on and already using. If you want to force somebody to start using something else, it's pushing a heavy rock uphill. I'm not even going to go down that road. I tried it once, not happening again. So wherever your people are, is where you want to be. So for me, that's Facebook and it's LinkedIn. And because I do video, I put them on YouTube. And because I repurpose, I then repurpose my videos and put them on TikTok and Instagram and Facebook Reels. I'm not a big Instagram user. I'm sure lots of people get lots of traction on Instagram. And that just kind of goes to the point, if you're not using the platform, like all you're doing is posting and you're not actually getting in there and using it, engaging with people, creating relationships, you're not going to get much traction. And Instagram for me is that. I just, it's never clicked. It's never made sense. So I don't use it. I post on it, but I get nothing from it. And again, those posts are automatic from Facebook. So that automation is set up for me, but I might ask myself why, why bother? Kind of what I'm telling you, if you're not gonna use the platform, don't bother. How to find time to post on more than one platform. Use the tools and plan. That's really the two big things. You should have a marketing calendar that has all the holidays on it. It has all of your events, your webinars, whatever you have scheduled within your business. All of that should be on there and you know what you're posting around. You know what the topics are each month. And that way it's easier to come up with the content that you're going to post. You know what you're promoting and you know what you're doing. If you don't have that calendar, you struggle to stay on track. At least I do. I struggle to stay on track. I struggle to figure out what I'm promoting that month and it may change in the middle of the month. So then there's no consistency in it. And when you're doing that, you don't get traction. So that calendar. Will help you, and it could just be an Excel spreadsheet. It doesn't have to be anything fancy. And you want to, at least I do my content in batches, and there's two kinds of content. There's evergreen, which means it's true no matter what. It's going to last through time and you can post those more often. You can post them more than once and they're going to still be true if it's event-based, date-based, seasonally based. That is not evergreen content. That's the second kind, which is not evergreen content. So for me, I have tools. I use GoHighLevel and I create evergreen content in batches and I schedule out the entire year. I usually do enough to get me past 4 months, once a day for 4 months. Then I recycle those 3 times and that gets me throughout the whole year. Those again are evergreen. Now it doesn't mean that you're done posting. That's automated. That's what goes on my business profiles. If you see that stuff there. Now that, that doesn't mean that that's all you can do because you can, I want to say override automation or add to automation. That's a better, better phrase. Your automation is going to run no matter what you do. You can go in and do whatever you're inspired to do that day. Or whatever you're in, whatever you see something trending, you've participated in something, maybe you've got pictures of you and a client you want to put up, maybe you finished a project and you want to rave about that in social media, whatever, whatever it is, go ahead and do that as well. The more you post, the more traction you're going to get. That's the bottom line. They want you using those platforms and they want you keeping people on the platforms. So every time you're linking to something else and sending them somewhere else, they don't like that. And they will not give that sort of a post the same visibility that they would ones without links. And I'm sure you've heard this, don't put a link in a post, put it in the comments if you wanna do that. And there are reasons why I do that. For example, when I create a blog post, I then take the image I use for the blog post, put it in Facebook. Do a little summary for the post, and then in the comments I'll say something like, to read the whole article, go here, and it links to the blog post. I do that for inbound links in SEO. That's why I do that. And clients or future clients or whoever's on the platform that's interested can now get the full story by reading the whole post. But my real reason for doing it is search engine optimization, and that's a separate thing from the reason you wanna use social media. Using social media is a great way to build relationships with future clients, to get referrals from existing clients that are referred through the social media platform. And if you're tagged, you'll see it. If you're not using the platform, you won't see that. It's another reason to actually use whatever it is that you are, you know, whatever platform it is that you're on. And The other thing about using it is seeing the tags, of course, but then being able to respond and participate in those conversations. All of that will get your post seen by more people. And you might wanna start doing posts that will pull people from the platform to your email list. So a lot of times if I create an opt-in for something, I will go to Facebook. And I will say, hey, I've got this PDF that tells you how to do blah, blah, blah, blah. Do you want it? And the people that say yes, I then DM them using yet another system of the platform. And I send them to my opt-in form. Once they get whatever that is, now they're in my CRM. So that's a way that you actually get leads because now I can market to those people without being on social media because people don't see everything that you post, just like you don't see everything from everyone that you follow. Your feed would be just so full. And all these platforms try to limit what you see to the things that they really think you're interested in based on your activity on the platform. So that's a general overview of social media, and tomorrow we are going to go into video marketing, which that should be a fun topic. If you're interested in that, come back tomorrow and I will say everything I know about video marketing. If you want to get your own copy of your Itty Bitty Amazing Visibility book, 15 Chapters to Marketing Made Easy, go ahead and check out either the YouTube description or the comments and there will be a link. See you tomorrow.