We live in an age where it’s all about first impressions! When someone sees your brand for the first time what do you want them to think and feel?
Fortunately, social media plays a large part in how we get seen and are heard no matter if you’re a business owner or a content creator. Social media platforms are one of the easiest ways to gain exposure and invite new people into your space.
With that being said, it can be overwhelming and quite an exhausting job, especially when you’re just getting started or not too sure what to post.
Let me help you!
Let’s talk about first impressions on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn
Facebook is all about connecting with friends and family. This is a great place to introduce your business to friends of family or friends of friends in a more casual setting. When you’re building your page keep in mind that adding your email address, website, while having other profile handles readily available for possible customers to see all sides of your business is very important. You will seem attainable, genuine, and down to earth making your new customers comfortable.
Instagram is where all of the fun happens! This is where most of your customers and potential customers will see the creative and colorful side of your business. If you have a cool logo, most definitely make it your profile picture, so that it becomes your identity and becomes recognizable. Also be sure to make your profile a business profile so that you can check out your analytics.
Pro-Tip: Keep your business profile in the “Entrepreneur” category while you’re growing so you’ll still be able to access all the trending sounds.
LinkedIn will be your professional space. This where you’ll curate a profile that is about education on your brand and networking with potential collaborators, investors, and employees. A great tip is to make sure that you keep your profile picture consistent and clear so that you become recognizable.
Now that you can create the right first impression on these specific social platforms, what type of content do you put out?
Creating Content that is Purposeful and Effective
On Facebook, you want to get the word out on new products, events, and communicate all of the most recent news. A great way you can do this is to post videos, photos, text only page photos, and always ask questions to get and keep a conversation going.
Instagram should be full of fun high quality photos, short captivating videos, lives with complimentary accounts, stories with fun quizzes or questions, and carousel posts with important information or a few photos that tell a story when shared together.
Then, on LinkedIn, you should focus on posting blogs, sharing other people’s content, branded photos, photos with text over it and straight up plain text. You want to create a space that’s human and down to earth but still informative.
You know how to create a first impression, you know what to post but now, how do you grow? It’s definitely not buying followers and it’s not participating in engagement groups. If you want to build a community of people that support your business they need to be REAL people that engage with you and buy your products.
How to Grow Organically
Across all platforms you want to make sure that the visuals you post are high quality and clear so that it’s eye-catching and makes the person want to like and follow for more high quality content. Then when you write your captions you want them to be entertaining, relatable, and have a call-to-action so that the person viewing your content has a no-pressure opportunity to engage.
Your social media audience is your digital community and we friends don’t leave friends on “read.” It’s so important to respond to comments and direct messages as soon as you can so that way the algorithm can see that there’s a lot of activity going on with your posts.
The longer you can keep people’s eyes on your content the better. When starting to out focus on posting carousel posts, engaging videos, and graphics that tell a story. If you are going to post one photo, you might as well post three. It makes a big difference!
Remember, you want people engaged in reading or watching your content!
There is a lot of talk around hashtags, but you should be using them on Instagram (5-30, well talk more about this on another blog) , Facebook (5-10) and LinkedIn (no more than three, choose wisely).
Now, that you’ve got all of this information, it’s time to reflect.
Three Questions to Ask Yourself Before You Start
- How do I want to educate my audience this week?
- How do I want to inspire my audience this week?
- Do I have any new products or news that I’d like to share?
All of this can be really demanding but rewarding if you stay consistent and the passion is there! Your social channels will grow and thrive right before your eyes.
If you’re looking for a more hands on workbook that can give you even more great information about handling the beast of social media and owning a small business, please check out my workbook!
It’s full of golden nuggets of information and can be downloaded right now!
Feel free to follow me on social media @queenlyconsulting.co to see more of out content and learn about growing your business using digital marketing.
