MBA1288 Guest Teacher: Nancy Gathecha- 5 Best Practices to Simplify Social Media For Business

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Hey everybody, I'm Nancy Gadesha. Thank you for joining me today. Today I'll be teaching you five best practices to simplify your social media. So let's get down to business. Now, the very first best practice is obviously join the party. And here's why you need to consider these best practices. According to statista.com, 71% of Internet users in 2017 were social media users. That's 2.46 billion users. And that number is estimated to rise to 2.77 billion people in 2019. Now, the increased use of smartphones and mobile devices continues to make social networking one of the most popular online activities with high user engagement rates. You know how it is. We quickly scroll Facebook while we're stuck in traffic. We check into Twitter during a lunch break. We watch a few YouTube videos on the couch to wind down. For many of us, social media is part of our daily routines. And for some people, this routine includes scrolling the Instagram feed in the bathroom. But ok, I digress. The fact is, when it comes to business, these online platforms are the new billboards. Which means social media is no longer an option, but a powerful, cost effective tool to grow your business. Now, any brand that's not using these free sites to connect with potential and existing clients is making a huge mistake. So let's look at three major benefits of why you need to consider joining the party and getting serious about your social media. The first major benefit is free visibility. Remember those 2.77 billion users? What are the chances that a fraction of those people need your solutions? Which makes social media a perfect place to position your brand in front of your target audience without being super intrusive or salesy. To quote John Marketing is getting people to know, like and trust you. And social media is one of the most cost effective marketing tools available. And because it's all data driven, it's really easy to see how your campaigns are doing because you simply monitor the metrics. Benefit number two is brand awareness. Now, people don't do business with companies per se. We do business with the people who work in those companies. And social media allows both small and big brands to not only attract, but to also interact with their clients on a personal level. Remember again, the know, like and trust factor. Today's empowered consumer wants to relate to the brands that they're giving their money to. They are no longer just satisfied with being put on hold as they are calling customer service, they simply go to Twitter and the whole world gets to see it. So besides marketing, other effective ways that companies can use social media are things like customer care controlling your brand's reputation, as well as listening to and monitoring consumers and competitors in your industry. The third major benefit of being on social media is sales. Every business wants to hear about boosting sales right now. When it comes to inbound, your social media content strategy can be working for you 24, 7 around the globe, even while you're sleeping. And here's how. With an optimized sales funnel in place, you can drive both organic and paid traffic to either get leads or boost sales based on your objectives. Which brings us to the next best practice number two, Building on the right foundation. Now, you might be getting excited right about now at the idea of getting, you know, leads and boosting sales, but slow down a little bit because just like when you're building anything, we want to start with the end in mind. And many people don't see the results they desire. They become disillusioned, confused, and end up wasting so much time trying different things because somebody said this is what's working right now. Obviously, it's not wise to blindly follow someone else's plan unless you know what their big picture strategy is. It's imperative that as business owners, you and I determine our objective first based on the vision and the customer journey. Now, here are a few objectives you might want to consider. Objective number one is visibility. Your business cannot serve your audience if it's the world's best kept secret. Creating brand awareness content lets some of those 2.47 billion people know that you exist. Objective number two would be building your audience. You want to attract and grow an online community. Objective number three can be engagement. You want to connect and interact with your consumers on a personal level. Objective number four can be lead generation, which is where you start. Or grow a subscriber base so that you can nurture them. Because people are not ready to buy the very first time they see your content. On social media, that just might be the visibility stage. And people need to see content. They need to see something between nine and 15 times before they actually make a decision to take the next step. Objective number five would be marketing. Remember the know, like and trust factor. That also needs repetition. And the last objective would be sales. You can convert prospects into customers using retargeting. Now let's move on to best practice number three, which is which platforms you should be on. So once you get clear on your objectives, it's time to focus on the customers that you serve. Because whether your business is B2B, B2C or both, can we all agree that not all social media platforms are created equal? So here's a general overview of what users do when they go to the most popular platforms. When people go to Facebook, they want to make connections and create communities. Instagram, Twitter to inspire and be inspired. Twitter users want to inform and to be informed. LinkedIn is to build professional networks. YouTube is mainly to learn and to be entertained. And Pinterest is to get ideas and build relationships. And another advantage of Pinterest, it is also a search engine. Now, trying to be active on all these platforms is a recipe for overwhelm and mediocre results. So it's advisable to focus on two or three platforms maximum. But you can also have profiles on all the sites to secure and protect your username from imposters who might want to capitalize on the name of your brand. Now one of the secrets of achieving better results is to get clear on who your target audience is, where they hang out on social media and what their needs are. And these networking platforms are a perfect place to get all this data because people tend to freely overshare information, which works perfectly for us business owners who know the value of social listening. Market research has never been easier. Which brings us to the next best practice which is getting more traffic, leads and sales. Now if content is king, engagement is queen and conversions are their offsprings. Content is a great way to create awareness. You can use organic or paid traffic and you want to create content that educates, entertains, informs or inspires your audience. Be infographics, branded visuals, videos, live streams, whatever resonates with your audience. For example, posting memes on LinkedIn might not be the best thing to do. You also want to create content that speaks to the pain points of your audiences so that they can raise their hands and want to know more about how you can solve their problems. Now you also want to be consistent. You know the saying out of sight, out of mind? That works on social media too. People are so, so distracted. There is so much information, there is content overload. And so if you're away for too long, unfortunately your audience is going to forget you. So you need to have a content strategy that covers the basic objectives and then you can experiment with quality versus quantity, create different posting cycles and again look at the metrics and see how things work. Some people post several times a day, others will post daily, every other day, weekly, biweekly, some people even Monthly. But again, it depends on your strategy. Now, if you intend to go on a hiatus, you know, like Omar did, that's something different you'll tell your audience, and perhaps when you get back, they'll even be more excited about your content because they missed you conversions. You always want to have a strategy and a well thought out funnel to convert your audiences and your leads. Now remember, we're not building our business on social media per se. We're using it to build compliment other efforts. You don't want to build on social media because it is not our real estate. Your website or your landing pages. That's where you want to be driving people to. Some people make that mistake of building this huge following on social media and then maybe one day they wake up and the page is gone. Or like the other day, Facebook and Instagram were down for a couple of hours and what did they have to do? They had to go on Twitter to the competitor to announce to their audiences that their sites were down. That was pretty hilarious. But it should serve as a lesson to us business owners to always direct your traffic, direct your audiences to your email list, direct them to your funnel, direct them to your landing pages so that you have a way to connect with them and you have a way to nurture them outside of social media. So, for example, every piece of content should have the brand of your website or a call to action so that people remember not only your content, but they also remember a website in case social media is down there thinking, what was that thing I saw again? And there's a special offer. But if you've not been branding your content, it might be hard to get conversions because people don't really remember what they need to do. Now, Facebook, for example, doesn't like external links. So here's a little tip I'm going to give you. Every time you post, let's say a blog post or a podcast or something, put any external links in the first comment and that way the algorithms will not hide your content. Because here's the thing, these platforms are free, but they're always coming up with ways to hide our content. And theoretically, they want us to pay to play. Right? So remember, always have a well thought out conversion strategy, and that includes a funnel that drives people to your website. So to wrap up the last best practice we'll talk about now is the elephant in the room, which is the time factor. You're saying, okay, Nancy, this all sounds well and good, but isn't this going to take a lot of time? Yes, it is. No, secret that social media can be a time sucking hole and in fact many business owners shy away from using these cost effective platforms because of the overwhelm and the sheer amount of time and stress it can take to even begin seeing any results. Especially if you're a sole proprietor, you have limited stuff, but the good news is there are tons of tools that can eliminate the stress and save you time so that you're working on your business instead of working in your business. So instead of wasting hours looking for the right emojis or the right quote, getting distracted by cute cat videos when all you wanted to do was upload that product launch video, you can take advantage of both free and paid apps and resources to automate and manage your social media. But remember, you can automate posting but you cannot automate engagement. So you can use content templates, you can work with agencies, you can use third party apps like hootsuite or Buffer. You can engage social media managers, either have them as in house employees or you can also hire them as virtual assistants. So to wrap this up we looked at five best practices. The first one was join the party if you're not there already, we're waiting for you out there, right? And then build on the right foundation, get clear on what your objectives are and then create a strategic plan. Best practice number three was determine which platforms you need to be on based on what your business is and who your ideal audience is and where they're hanging out. Then we looked at number four which is how to get more traffic, leads and sales with content organic or paid. And remember to always drive people back to your landing page back to your website. Best practice number five was use tools and resources to automate and to manage your social media marketing. These tools can help you to track so that you can monitor your return on interaction, your return on investment and stay consistent whether that means daily, bi weekly or weekly and you will see the results you desire. Alright guys, this was Nancy Gadesha. Now if you want to learn more about how to simplify social media for business you can visit nagasocial.com mba where you'll also find a free 30 day content creation template with done for you daily prompts and ideas on of what to post in your pages in your groups because a lot of people like okay I want to get on but I don't know what to post. Well this is a 30 day time management and automation template that you can get started with while you're creating your strategy. Thanks again for joining me today. And now back to Omar we heard you.

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Thank you so much, Nancy, for that amazing lesson and thank you so much for the gift that you're offering our listeners. Make sure you check out Nancy's website, nagasocial.com that's n a g a social dot com. And for the gift, go to nagasocial.com MBA. You don't want to miss out on that 30 day content creation template. Two major takeaways I took from this lesson that I want to reinforce. Different platforms, different uses, different needs. You can't just do the same thing on every platform. You can't just, you know, blast out the same stuff on Twitter as you do on Facebook. It's not always gonna work. Sometimes it will, but you need to make sure it's nuanced for the platform or for the people that are on that platform. And of course, Twitter has a character limit. And if you're on Instagram that focuses on images, you get the point. Make sure you make a note of that in your strategy. The other thing I love is the idea of consistency. Being consistent is important no matter what that frequency is. Once a week, every day, five times a day, nothing works when it comes to content marketing if you're not consistent. Whether it's social media or a podcast or a YouTube channel or a blog, Consistency means you're professional, means that you take it seriously. And it also allows you to get better faster because you're producing this content, advice, whatever it is, on a regular basis. Thanks again, Nancy, for that amazing lesson. Check her out@nagasocial.com and subscribe to our podcast Design youn Success Podcast. It's a fantastic personal development show, guys. That wraps up today's lesson. Thank you so much for listening. Make sure you hit subscribe so you don't miss a beat. By hitting subscribe, you make sure the next lesson, the next episode, is downloaded to your device automatically. So it's ready for you to listen wherever you are, whether you have WI fi or not. We're on every platform. Stitcher, Spotify, Tunein, Apple Podcasts, Himalaya, Overcast. Hit subscribe right now. And before I go, I want to leave you with this. Set a time aside to work on social media and try to stay within those boundaries. Nancy was joking about how people, you know, they check their social media on the toilet. All that kind of stuff. Don't let it consume you. Make time for it. Especially because you're focusing on how this can help your business. Whether you spend 30 minutes a day or an hour. Whatever it is, put it in your calendar and stick to it. You don't want to jump in and out of social all day long. All right, thank you so much for listening, and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. Until then, take care.

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