How to Grow Your Business with Social Media

Growing your business on social media can be a great way to reach new customers and grow your brand. But how do you get started? In this video, we give you some tips and advice on how to grow your business on social media. We cover everything from what content to post to how to reach new followers. So if you’re ready to take your business to the next level, read on!

HOW TO GROW YOUR BUSINESS WITH SOCIAL MEDIA

Hello, everybody. Welcome back. I'm super excited because today we're going to be talking about social media. I'm here today with Liz, with our social media expert, she's been managing so many accounts and I'm super excited to tell you that we just got our first account with over a hundred thousand followers. Feeling any pressure yet, Elizabeth? A little bit.
Well, what we figure is that we totally understand that there are so many businesses that want to be on social media, but especially after COVID-19, they may not have the funds to hire a marketing agency because we totally understand how it can be a little bit expensive. So we thought we're going to put together a video. I'm gonna ask Elizabeth some questions about social media and how to get started. And we're gonna provide that to you for absolutely free. This way, you can get those tips and improve your social media. Sounds like a good plan for today, Liz? Yeah, definitely. Awesome.

WHY SHOULD YOUR BUSINESS HAVE SOCIAL MEDIA?

My first question is why should businesses even care about having social media? What's important? I think the most important thing is that there's a huge audience on social media that you wouldn't reach without that. People are going on there and checking your social media, almost like your website for millennials. I see. I can totally agree with you on that because I feel like social media is the new landing page on a website. It seems like that, yeah. Every time I want to go out to eat, I always check out the restaurant on Instagram. It comes in handy for sure.

GETTING STARTED

My next question would be if you never had a social media for your business at all, what would be a good place to start? So first I think you need to figure out what platforms work best with your, um, Instagram and Facebook are usually a given, because there's so many people on there just sharing photos and videos. But then we have TikTok, Pinterest, LinkedIn. LinkedIn's really good if you're an agency like us or another business. Pinterest is really good for fashion, recipes stuff like that.

WHAT CONTENT SHOULD YOU POST?

Okay, awesome. So right now we figured out what platforms you should use. How about what content should you post? Because I know it is very stressful for a lot of people. Yeah, definitely. So I would say first you need to create a strategy, figure out what your goals are, what content pillars you want to get across. A lot of the times a good rule of thumb is one third of your content should be humanizing. What do you mean by humanizing? Yeah. So it means showing faces, showing the personality behind your brand, I guess, something that people can personally connect to. On top of that, you probably want one third of your post to be educational, which would be providing value, which is why somebody would really want to follow you, not so much for the promotional "salesy" aspect. You definitely need that in there because that's why you're creating social media, but you definitely want it not to be super overwhelming for your users.
Okay. So to recap, have one third educational, give people a reason to follow you. You do not want to just promote your product. You, you also want to humanize your brand to put a face to your brand. Okay. And lastly, just for a little bit of time, feel free to promote your products.

THE EASIEST WAY TO REACH PEOPLE ON SOCIAL MEDIA

My next question I have is what is the easiest way to reach a lot of people on social media? Because I'm know like personally I'm starting to offer some photography and videography services. And I know for me it's been super hard to grow my social media. I think it took me like a month to get to a hundred followers. So what would be the best way to reach a lot of people in a really quick way without having to pay for social media ads? So a big trend that's happening right now on Instagram specifically is Instagram Reels, which is basically like a TikTok version on Instagram. They're just short form videos and they help you reach a bunch of non-followers since you can go on your reels tab and just scroll through a bunch of people that you don't follow. Trending sounds will pop up more, so if you use a trending sound and you connect it to your niche, then you're definitely gonna reach way more followers than just with your typical feed posts.
All right, point taken, if you have a social media for your business, make reels make as much as possible, and do not just post it as a video, make sure to post it as a Reel. And the way you know if a sound is trending or not is to go to your Reels tab, scroll down a little bit. And there's going to be an arrow icon, an arrow pointing up, right by the music icon. So you can save the audio and then you make your own Reels and get that social media gains.

HOW OFTEN AND WHEN SHOULD YOU POST?

Let's see what I have for my next question. Okay, this is an interesting question and we had a lot of people asking us as a marking agency, how often should you post? So that kind of comes down to what you have time for. Of course, three to five posts a week is pretty ideal. You don't want to not have consistency and you don't want to post and ghost for a month and then come back, that doesn't really engage your followers, it doesn't let them know that you're around. But the best thing to do would be to go into your insights and see when people are most active, they actually show you days of the week and also hourly breakdowns within those days. And so that helps for timing of posts as well.
Okay. Sounds like a good plan. Another way you can find out is if you go on Google and just Google it, what is the best time to post on Instagram? And Google's gonna break it down for you Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Fridays, Saturdays, Sunday. And it actually makes a big, big difference because I know you've been making a lot of Reels for our marketing agency and what I've noticed if she posts a Reel at night, it gets a lot less interaction in comparison to if you post in the morning. Yeah, definitely I'll post it at like seven or 8:00 AM and that will give us thousands more views than it does at another time during the day. Wow. That that's a big difference. So definitely experiment. If you're not seeing results, there will be results if you just try different things and see what works for you. If you're familiar with marketing, if you know the term split testing, split test everything as much as possible.

CONCLUSION

And for my last question, I know you've been in the social media game for a long time. Now, what has been your biggest challenge managing social media so far? I think the biggest challenge would be that social media is always evolving. So there's new trends, there's new updates to the algorithm, you have to try new ways to get found. And so I think you have to spend a lot of time staying on top of those trends and updates. And if you don't have time to dedicate to that, you might be wasting your time.
Well, that pretty much summarize our video for today. Thank you guys so much for joining us once again, if you are a business, especially a small business, and you're not on social media yet, or you're not as active as you should be, please take those tips to your heart, follow it, practice it. And we hope that your followers, engagement, and everything else will skyrocket. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Liz. And we're looking forward seeing you soon. Cheers.