How to use social media for your business

Do you need to use social media? How important is it?

What exactly is social media and how does a small business use it?

Is there a special trick that help my social media efforts?

What is the best way to use social media for my business?What can I gain from using social media?

Should my posts be about selling my products, or should they be about valuable or interesting information for my followers?

What does it mean to “provide value” to your audience, and why this is the ultimate goal?

How much time should I spend creating social media posts?

How long will it take to build an audience using social media? 

Does social media guarantee that you’ll become successful?

What is digital content creator and why is that an important part of using social media?

Which social media sites should I use for my business?

How should I start? This is overwhelming!

What exactly is social media and how does a small business use it?

Social media is the collective term that encompasses all the social websites you’ve heard of such as Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, and others.  Generally, they allow people with similar interests to find each other and share and communicate about their interests.

A business can use any or all of the social media sites to engage their audience. If you are a landscape designer for example, you might post all kinds of landscape designs, ideas, possibilities and discuss all the techniques and pros and cons of all of them – the idea is to provide value to your potential clients and users. 

Is there a special trick that help my social media efforts?

Yes! And it’s kind of simple… do everything in your power to be sure you’re creating value for your viewers.. good content is VALUABLE to your users. It’s content they want to engage with, learn more, see more of, share, etc. This is the key to social media growth.

Learn all you can about why content that contains VALUE is so critical. It’s the most important thing I can tell you about social media… value is king.

What is the best way to use social media for my business? 

First, become familiar with the various social media sites. Get accounts on all of them and spend 15 minutes each day looking at content, and perhaps commenting, interacting, etc. This will give you an idea about how they work, what people tend to do, and post, and the overall benefits of each.

Next, decide which ones might be the best fit for your business. For example, YouTube might be best if you need to make videos to explain things to your audience, such as giving guitar lessons or showing how to make pottery, etc.   If ideas are the backbone of your business, perhaps Twitter might be best due to the short, concise posts users are forced to create. You’ll get the idea after using each service for a few weeks.

Next, pay attention to the types of posts that you enjoy the most. Are they faster paced? Slower? Are they funny? Do they have text overlays or do they ask engaging questions at the very beginning, etc etc?  You can google “How to make YouTube posts that get clicks” or “How to write an engaging Twitter thread” or whatever… there are tons of posts on how to succeed on each platform.

Next, begin creating content. Make sure your videos (if you make them) are WELL LIT, not dark, and that you look as good as you can on camera and that your audio is loud enough and clear. Nothing will sink your post like a dimly lit or hard to hear video! Get help from a friend on how to light and create a professional looking video if needed, it will pay off for years.

Lastly, you need to have PATIENCE. It can take a year or two to build up a significant following. It won’t all pay off quickly.. There will be months that you think you’re just wasting time. But after 6-12 months you’ll start to see some progress and things can often grow much more rapidly after 6-12 months. 

What can I gain from using social media? 

You are gaining followers, which is sometimes called “eyeballs”… it means you have people looking at your content, which means you can market your services to them.

One awesome thing about most social media is that posts are “evergreen” meaning they are as good a few years from now as they are today. The process to learning pottery, or baking, or fixing your golf swing, or how to record music or whatever is usually basically the same today as it will be in 5 or 10 years. So people can continue to find your content and it will continue to be valuable. 

Over time you build up say tens of thousands of followers or hundreds of thousands. This is incredibly powerful when it comes to selling whatever you sell. 

Should my posts be about selling my products, or should they be about valuable or interesting information for my followers?

Generally your posts will all be valuable information for your followers, but in about 20% or so of your posts you should mention at the end of the post that you can help them if they need your services. It’s OK to remind them to contact you for help, if they need consulting or to hire you, etc. 

But keep those reminders to about 20% of your posts and those posts don’t need to be all about selling and  “Contact me for help!” …the “contact me for help” part can be the last part of your post, just to remind people that you run a business and are there for them if needed. It’s a soft sell.

What does it mean to “provide value” to your audience, and why this is the ultimate goal?

Providing value to your audience is your goal. From there, you gain followers. They are there for your free advice. But what happens is that you develop a relationship with these followers and they begin to trust you. Then if that day comes where they need your help, they ask you for it (this is where you sell your goods or services). 

So you do that by providing valuable content to them on a daily or semi-daily basis. They become interested, they follow you, they get to know your business.

How much time should I spend creating social media posts?

In the beginning of your business it will take up more of your time because you really need to do the work of creating a valuable collection of content to attract people. Plus, you don’t have that many customers yet, so you probably have more available time.

At the beginning, you’ll be much slower at creating content and posts because you’re getting used to the process and the software needed to do it. But it speeds up and you start finding shortcuts. Google terms like “How to speed up my social media posts” and “How to efficiently do social media posting”.

This is really hard to estimate how much time to spend exactly. But I’d suggest that you spend a couple hours a day planning and executing your posts during your first 6-12 months and perhaps an hour a day after that, just to give you a rough idea.

Does social media guarantee that you’ll become successful?

No it doesn’t. There are no guarantees, however using marketing strategies like social media are always necessary, and without marketing you’re basically doomed to fail. So you need to market your business.

Social media is still the best way for a number of reasons:

1. It’s normally free to post on all social media sites …but it won’t be free forever I think, so take advantage now
2. You can instantly reach an enormous audience for free just by posting
3. The content you post is typically there forever, so it can help you forever. It’s a hassle to do the work up front to create the content, but it can work for you for many years to come as people continue to find your old posts
4. Every major company in the world uses social media to communicate their brand to the world. You should too.
5. Every social media channel offers different types of value: some are text based, some video based, some favor short form content, some favor longer form content, some favor teens, some favor geeks, some favor older people, etc.  Take advantage of these differences to leverage your business and brand to your specific audience.

What is digital content creator and why is that an important part of using social media?

A digital content creator is a person who posts online, generally on social media sites. So anyone posting anywhere is a digital content creator. It’s another way to understand your posts.. they aren’t just messages about your business. They are content, that your audience watches or consumes.  

Think about yourself as a network, programming for an audience. Your social media channel is just that, a channel, that carries programming intended to engage your audience. 

If you’re posting, you’re a digital content creator.

Which social media sites should I use for my business?

Every social media channel offers different types of value: some are text based, some video based, some favor short form content, some favor longer form content, some favor teens, some favor geeks, some favor older people, etc.  Take advantage of these differences to leverage your business and brand to your specific audience.

TikTok – Teens, millenials, Gen Z, short form videos, a lot of pizzazz and wow-factor will help you gain views. Provide captions too so people can watch your TikTok with sound off

Instagram – General. All ages, other than older people. Videos and still photos. This is the main channel that everyone needs. 

YouTube – Longer form videos, informational, instructional, more details, more in-depth.

Twitter – Short 140 character posts, mainly text. Excellent for sharing quick concise thoughts, ideas, opinions. You can also create long threads for more complicated communication. Twitter is an amazing platform to learn from others doing what you want to do. 

Pinterest – Mostly images, and links to other posts online. Mostly female users. You can (and should) build a Pinterest store if you’re an online retailer. Build a lot of vision boards here that might attracted your specific users.

LinkedIn – Tends toward business and people doing business. Don’t overlook LinkedIn, a lot of people I know say they get more traffic from LinkedIn than most other places.

Medium – Wonderful for any business, text article based. You write essays or articles and post them. Catchy headlines are KEY. Lots of amazing information here, tends toward slightly older audience, millenials, Gen Y or X.

How should I start? This is overwhelming!
There are so many channels and possibilities it’s overwhelming for sure!

Start by choosing one or two channels that you know will be good for your business. Instagram and perhaps one other. Everyone needs Instagram, it’s sort of the gold standard for social media.

Research like crazy for a couple weeks by googling things like “how to start using social media for business” or “best practices for social media marketing” or “how to gain a huge following on Instagram” (or TikTok, etc)

Really learn all you can so that you don’t just start wasting time. You might as well become savvy about all this before you begin. 

Go and look at all your competitors’ social media to see if they have big followings, how often they post, what they post, what do their images look like, how do their posts look when you see them all together (do they look cohesive? or disjointed?)

Create a list of things you can post about. This list will become really important and will need to continue to grow. Finding ideas to post about will become harder over time, but there are lots of tricks to keeping this going.

Create your first few posts and post them! Hope for the best.

Make sure to TRACK your social media traffic to your site. Use Google Analytics to do this. A lot of the social media sites also provide you with data about your user engagement and traffic. This way you can see what’s working and what isn’t.

Carve out time in your schedule each week for social media post creation. If you don’t do it consistently, you won’t gain a following. You’ll need to carve out minimum 10 hours a week. These things take time. 

Look for people that can help you with things you’re not yet good at… artwork, graphics, video, sound, video recording or editing… things like that.

Analyze your results… see which posts had the most engagement or traffic. Lean into that type of post.  Make adjustments as needed as you go.

It will take time. Don’t become discouraged. Give it a year or two.
I follow a lot of people who are hardcore digital marketers and content creators on Twitter. You should go follow a bunch of these people too in order to see what they are doing, what they think works well, and doesn’t, etc. etc. 

All these people indicate that it took them between 6 to 18 months in order to begin to see some real results from their content creation. So you have to know that it will take some time. 

Do everything in your power to be sure you’re creating good content, with a lot of VALUE. This is the key to social media growth. Valuable content that people want to consume.