Before You Post On Social Media
Where should I start with my social media? Do I post on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter? Do I post once a day, once a week, once a month? Should I boost posts?
When clients ask me these questions, more often than not, they are putting the cart before the horse. Where would I start? With a whole other set of questions.
Before you start posting on social media, you need to understand your business better. Social media is changing. The users are more savvy. They need better content. They don’t like to be sold. In order to present yourself on social media, you need to know more than your latest promotion. You need to understand your business, your motivations and what makes you different. Ask these questions before you consider creating your first post.
Who is you company?
Not just what do you sale or what makes you different than your competition? But, who you are as a company. For example, ASMM is a digital marketing agency. We provide social media management, website management, email management, and content creation for our clients. What makes us different is that we become our clients. We engage our customers as though they are our own. But that still doesn’t tell you who we are. We are a woman owned business. But more than that we are a mom owned business. We care about our clients the way we care for our children. We take care of them and treat them as though they are special because they are.
But we are still more. We are connectors. We connect people. We connect our clients, our networking partners and just about every person we meet in order to help them grow their businesses. We are different because of who we are and because of that, when we go on social media we portray ourselves as marketing moms who make business and human connections.
Knowing who your are, digging deep down into what makes you different, finding out why it is your clients love your service, give you a starting point. Before you can begin posting on social media, you have to understand what really makes you stand out.
What do you stand for?
This one is harder but it’s just as important. What you stand for, what you care about, that is the stuff that evokes emotion. One of our clients is a Christian based Karate studio. They stand for Christian values. They don’t exclude or discriminate but they don’t hide their faith either. It’s important that they share their values in their social media message so people are not taken aback when they arrive in the studio and see a group of students in prayer or hear a lesson in which the bible is referenced.
At ASMM we stand for inclusiveness. Two years ago we started a charity for suicide prevention. Our message is that you are not alone. That message runs through the charity but also through everything we do at ASMM. It is our inclusiveness that helps our connections feel comfortable. They know that whether they come to us with a business problem or a personal problem we are going to sit, listen and care about what is happening with them. This shows in what we post online. It shows in the charity that we started. And, it shows in every conversation we have.
What does your company stand for? Whether it is community, honesty, adventure or something completely different, it is important to know what that is before you start a digital marketing campaign.
Why are you doing what you do?
In the book, Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action, Simon Sinek writes, “There are only two ways to influence human behavior: you can manipulate it or you can inspire it.”
We believe that your why is the second way you inspire. The first is in understanding who you are. We start with who. But we believe the second is important as well. Knowing your why can help inspire not just your clients but you and your team as well.
At ASMM, our why is simple. Ann Brennan, the owner of ASMM grew up in Wilmington, NC. She calls Wilmington the home of entrepreneurs.
“When I was growing up, I was always amazed at the number of small businesses that would open with such pomp and circumstance only to close a few months later. I was amazed by the guts it took to open a shop in the same place where three shops had already opened and failed. To be fair, that still amazes me. I think entrepreneurs are some of the bravest people I know.”
It was this admiration that lead Ann to start a marketing agency that works with small businesses. Our why is to help these brave souls to succeed more often than they fail. It’s a lofty goal but it’s one that inspired the entire team and it’s the why that inspires our clients to hire us.
Never stop questioning.
With the answers to the above questions we believe you have the beginnings of a marketing campaign and are ready to move on to the choosing a platform, deciding how often you will post and whether you should boost a post. But we don’t think you should stop examining your motives, your voice, or your motives. These things change as your business grows. Keep coming back, keep asking these questions and more and when you go to your digital platforms you can promote more than your latest sale. You can inspire your clients to hire you.