Do you have the time to DO social media? What about concerted social media marketing? Nope…I hear you! I worked full-time managing very busy animal hospitals and it was impossible for me to fit in task of what I thought social media marketing was. It was just too big of a job…I thought.
Before we can schedule your social media marketing you have to know who it is that you are marketing too. Prospective clients? Current Clients? Referring practices? Future employees? Who is it that you are most interested in capturing the attention of?
Once you have a fix on who your intended audience is we will call them our target audience. Everything we do from now on will be targeted to YOUR ideal audience. This will help you keep the mindset of them and not you. It is easy to slip into the way you think and see things and how you feel about stuff instead of remembering to channel their thoughts, feelings, and attentions. Once you have fix on that mindset you can create your social media content and aim it in the right direction.
Let’s get to the brass tacks of this post though. I want you to have more time in your day so we need to get this task under control and easy to do.
So here are the ways I keep organized with my social media:
- Set a schedule to DO IT. I know it’s hard to find the time during the crazy Monday morning or Friday afternoon rush. Don’t do it then. Pick a time during the week to set aside a few hours (start smaller if you need too) to work on your marketing. Close the door, don’t take calls. It’s important to remember that you are establishing a lifeline from your practice to the social media world where your clients live.
- Create a content calendar. This is not as hard as you think. I have one created as a sample that you can start with. It is full of holidays, weird holidays, and animal related holidays. That is where you start. Create cute posts about “National Donut Day”; Better yet, bring donuts to your staff on National Donut Day and take pictures of all the fun, the POST IT ONLINE! You can follow this link or the one above to see my 2018 Sample Content Calendar. I’ll be posting 2019 Sample Content Calendar soon!
- Use a content warehouse. I call it warehouse because you save all your cool content ideas in one place then go copy and paste it into your social media platform and boom you have it. My favorite warehousing tool is Trello. The sample content calendar is on Trello. Trello is free to use but you can upgrade and get more goodies. You can use Trello for anything. I have recipe boards as well as work related stuff. If you use my recommendation link for Trello I get additional upgrades. You can then recommend Trello to your friends and colleagues and get upgrades too!
- Link your Social Media Accounts. I am not recommending one platform over another but I will share that the platforms do have more inter-connectivity than before. For instance you can link Twitter and Facebook to your Instagram account. This allows you to share your super cute post about your donut day shenanigans on Instagram and then automatically it pushes to Facebook and Twitter! 2 birds, one stone.
- Use a scheduling tool. There are a few online and you can do a little research to see which one suits you best. I personally like Hootesuite. It’s easy to use and free when you only link 3 accounts. 3 accounts is actually pretty good. You could link LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. It integrates well with other programs. I have the extension in Chrome as well so it give me a little owl (that’s their mascot) when I move my mouse to something that could be scheduled to post on my social media. You could set your posts up to hit your platforms when you want them to. Then you just need to stay in tuned to the engagement on those posts.
There are a lot of other ways to get organized and stay on track with your social media programming. I like these and use them faithfully. I really like them because the starter pack for these programs is FREE! I love FREE! It makes me really happy! Even if you grow and want to expand the capabilities with upgrades it is still very affordable so you won’t have to change everything later on if you don’t want to. I’m a set it and forget it type of girl. Once I have my system I want to be able to interact with my followers and focus on the engagement side of social media.
If you would like to reach out to me for more ideas or help getting set up on social media please do. I am happy to do chat with you on the phone for an initial consultation and attempt to point you in the right direction. Don’t worry my initial consultations are always FREE! Email me at rhonda@dogdaysconsulting.com to get started!
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I am one of you and my heart and talents are working to improve small business success and performance!
Many blessings!
Rhonda
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