Wimbledon’s finished, football is finished, it’s not actually sunny and so bit of a doldrums week. So time for some social media, time to cheer ourselves up and get in and see what everyone else is doing.
But are we using social media correctly? Are we thinking about it in the right way? Now I am never going to profess to be a Gary Vaynerchuck of social media, or Peg Fitzpatrick; some people are just epic, they are natural.
But, I have a feeling that most of us are more like me in that we possibly feel forced to use social media because it’s not natural to us.
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It’s not something, we’re not the type who needs to phone every one every five minutes or text people all day long, so it didn’t come naturally to us to constantly have to chat to people.
But there are ways to use it for business and it is important. This is the thing is in or seven P’s in our perpetual sales cycle the second P is “Profile”, people will search for your profile, people will look you up on social media, so you need to have something going on.
So I was chatting to Phil Pam, a great brand strategist and he uses it very effectively. He explained how he used Pinterest, he picked on Pinterest and decided to attack Pinterest with a strategy and he spends like five minutes a day doing this.
He is a brand strategist, so he shows people how to improve their brands and how it can all work.
Now what he does for Pinterest, because generally, Pinterest works for fashion, makeup, food, things like that, travel, decorating very visual things, all that kind of thing.
But what he did was he simply set up a lot of boards on his Pinterest and he puts pins of interesting branding examples.
Now this can translate to anybody’s business of any type, shape or form and it can be used on many many platforms.
So Instagram is going to be similar to Pinterest, but the reason I’m talking about Pinterest here is because in Pinterest, you don’t need to be doing it every day, there is nothing that says oh, they didn’t put a pin up for days; unlike Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and so on.
And so Pinterest you can set up boards and you can find things and you just simply pin them.
Now on your desktop, you can download an addition to chrome or Firefox browser or Safari or whatever you’re using and you can simply pin stuff up.
But most blogs have a pinning button that’s very easy.
So if you are in the landscape gardening , how about all examples of lawns, of borders, of patios, of garden furniture, of kids’ garden furniture, of fences, of walls. Do you get what I’m saying?
Of flowers, of flower beds, of plants, of perennials, of shrubs, I think those are the words I can think of to do with landscape gardening; of equipment.
`How difficult would that be? And of course you need to be doing this, you can outsource this and systemize it so just do a few of them, write down what you do or even do a video screen cast online.
If you have got like an Apple Mac, it has Built-in QuickTime. You can actually do that for free with QuickTime on your Mac, screen cast, yes you can. And you can record voice or not record voice, it’s up to you.
Do that, send it off to somebody who is going to do it for you who is going to spend five minutes a day doing that.
And Phil went from, did he say something like five hundred odd followers to like twelve thousand, or something like that in a year.
You can even schedule pins. There are things to schedule pins as viral woot or another one, I can’t even think what they are all called now, but you can Google things like that and find them.
Now if you are doing that for Pinterest you can do something similar for Instagram. Again, stay on topic.
On Instagram, did you realize you can put short videos, little snappy little videos up there. So, if you are going to record a longer video explanation put it on YouTube or Put it on Facebook.
You can do a short one or cut the front off and put the message at the end, “To see the full video, Go to our YouTube channel at…”
And tell them where, don’t just hope they will guess what your YouTube channel is. Or a Facebook page at and put a message on there like a little template.
And you think, well how would I do that? Well, there are templates, there are tools that do it, it’s very very very simple. You’re thinking “I am not technical”.
You don’t have to be, once you have figured out how to do it once you do every single one of the same. So you can show people examples of a great garden you have just seen or great garden you have just read about, it’s numerous.
And once you do that, you can do the same on your Facebook page, you can put examples of great things but you can ask people for comments on Facebook .
You can say, “Here is an example of a fantastic garden, what’s your favorite garden?” You can even put a Facebook poll and question them and put some suggestions.
Which part of landscaping is most important to you? The grass, the borders, the flowers, the furniture? Ask people for polls, You can find out information. But you get people involved.
And if you’re wondering who, because I haven’t got any followers, well go back to Twitter. Twitter is the one of all the social media tools that is the most media friendly and the most social friendly because it’s the only one where you can search, you can actually search for stuff.
So you can search for landscape gardening, you can search for garden furniture, you can search for perennials, for lawns, for whatever and you can find the people are talking about these things, top people.
You can find hash tags to use and you can friend them and you can follow them and you can share their stuff, they will then for you and share your stuff and then you get, by association and you also find some clients.
Potential clients who follow those people, they will wonder who you are, they will come and have a look and they would see what you have got going on.
So you can use these, you can post, by the way, when you’re posting on Facebook, I wouldn’t put too much effort, Facebook has just announced that they are reducing even further the number of people who are going to see your business page.
You have to be there, I’ll give you an example. Recently my staff were going to use a top servicer to hire someone. And when I left it to them, because I don’t manage my business, they run the business for me, and I actually thought they used this company, but it turned out when they reviewed it, they decided not to do it because they didn’t feel comfortable.
They found in May, or probably in June, that the last Facebook posts from this business was about at Christmas, in December. Now it doesn’t need to be up to date with that my own staff decided not to use the service that I told them to use because they didn’t feel comfortable. I know the owner of the business, I have actually since told him about this.
But people have opinions, people form opinions, so your things need to be up to date . But Facebook, one to three percent of people that you think are looking at your stuff are seeing it because Facebook doesn’t show them because you are not paying and that’s going to be reduced.
So if you’re going to put stuff on Facebook, don’t put too much effort because not a lot of people are looking, but you do have to be there. More likely, put the good stuff on LinkedIn And then share it across the Facebook. Just a suggestion, but think differently about social media,okay.
Tuesday Toolbox Tip
Now it is Tuesday and it is time for a tool box tip. I have been trying to remind you of tools that you should be using that I have mentioned before. And today like for social media, is Buffer. It is free, but there is a paid version. I use the paid one, but the free one is fabulous. You cannot believe how easy it makes life for scheduling stuff ahead for the whole week. So you could schedule stuff on the Monday for the entire week and that is all your fixed social media stuff done. Click here to instantly download our FREE Book “The 71 Ultimate Marketing Tools”
You only then need to dive in and make comments to real people occasionally on Twitter, on Facebook and like some stuff, share some stuff and say “Hello” to people, but all of your posts and so on are scheduled. Buffer, you’ve got to be using it.
Oh, by the way tomorrow, the interview is fabulous, Andy Crestodina, if you do not know who Andy Crestodina is you need to be listening.
He is everywhere, he is such a nice bloke, from Chicago. But lovely, lovely, really enjoyed talking to him, it’s a fabulous interview, he does not miss a trick and he has lots of nuggets for you to learn from.
I’ll be back then with another daily one on Thursday.