Did you see my last email with a list of the sites that
got me the most signups last week? If you missed it, you can still read it by clicking here.
Have you been reading my series of emails about how to be more productive and get more important things done in your business each
day. We continue today by talking about how to use social media correctly and how to avoid it taking more time than it is worth.
The most important thing to remember with social media, like Facebook, or Instagram, in your business is exactly what role it is supposed to play. Social media is not a place to sell, it is a place to make
connections.
The goal of your social media work in your business is to make groups of people aware of your and your business, and then encourage them to connect with you by following you and the information you post.
It is simply another way to find prospects and start to warm them up to be
customers.
Of course, like most ways to find prospects, there are ways you can do it for free and ways you can pay for exposure. Free is not really free, because you have to trade your time for exposure instead of your money.
Here are some tips to use social media in a productive
way, maximizing the connections you make for the time you are spending.
1. Pick one social media platform at a time and focus on it until it is generating results. Spending a little time on a few platforms will not be as effective as spending all that time on one platform.
2.
Set a time budget on how much time you will spend each day or week. Schedule a time each day to work on social media and don't let it take over time from more important tasks.
3. Focus on places where people are engaged, not just present. There are Facebook groups where you can post ads, but these are usually a waste of time because everyone is posting ads and no
one is interested in reading them. You want to find groups or pages where people are actively making comments and getting into discussions. You can't post ads there, but you can make friends.
4. Be a publisher, not a consumer. It is easy to lose hours in Facebook or Instagram looking at other people's content, but that doesn't help your business. You need to publish your own
content in a group or on your feed and then try to find ways to get more people to see it. Be a creator.
5. Turn off all your notifications on your phone and computer so that social media doesn't interrupt your other work. Keep it restricted to just the time you have set aside for it.
6. Don't follow any of the "I follow you and you follow me" schemes. The number of followers you have is meaningless. What matters is how many people are actually reading and interacting with your content. IF someone is following you and 10,000 other people, they will never see the content you are posting. Focus on quality, not quantity.
Building an audience
in social media takes time and patience. You have to work at it consistently for a long time to create a group of people who want to see what you are posting. Once you do that, you can post information that will encourage them to subscribe to your email list or check out your website or blog.
