This week we’re talking about all of the ways you can save time whilst managing your social media channels. In a busy industry it’s important you’re doing all that you can to grow your social media, without having to spend hours and hours on your phone. There are so many vital parts to running successful accounts and you need to be sure you’re able to them, without forgetting to engage with your followers too. Luckily, I have lots of tips and tricks to help you!

KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST

• LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter are really good for interacting with personal and business accounts, especially if you own the account.
• The first thing you should do is think about the aims for your social media platforms. Are you trying to grow your following? Are you trying to connect with your audience? From there, you should think about your target audience. Chances are, this will be the same target audience that you have for your business.
• You should write down a list of keywords and hashtags that your customers are using. People often think that they should be using hashtags that show what you do, however, your customers won’t be looking at that. This will help you find your audience.
• It’s important to think about your competitors and places where you customers might be.
• When it comes to staying on top of your social media, you need to ensure you have content scheduled. Depending on how often you schedule your content, you need to ensure you’re checking within enough time.
• Liking and sharing other people’s content every single day is incredibly important. Using the hashtags you’ve collected, you’ll be able to find plenty of content to share. Have a number of posts in mind that you want to engage with and ensure you do it every day. This will help you reach out to your audience and people that may want to follow you.
• When engaging with other accounts, make sure your comments are meaningful.
• Occasionally, you might want to carry out an account clean up. This means getting rid of accounts that are no longer active or accounts that no longer align with your values.
• Every now and again, you may want to review your ‘About Me’ section and links.

THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…

You need to check notifications at least three times a day, minimum. Make it part of your routine and you’ll soon get used to it.

HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN'T MISS

• Which Platforms Are We Covering? – 05:15
• Where Should You Start? – 06:00
• Moving Forward with Your Accounts and Being Proactive – 09:00

Transcript below

Speaker 1: (00:33)

Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the podcast. I am so very grateful to have you here. How was your New Year and your Christmas break? Did you have a wonderful time and managed to get some rest? I did actually, which is fairly unusual if I'm honest. I don't often take a lot of time off but I'm not sure if it entirely helped this time because I felt like I took quite a bit of time off, tried to relax and then I really struggled getting back into it. So it's really interesting cause I thought it would make me really motivated to get going again but it didn't quite have that effect. So I am working super hard at the moment in terms of trying to get my motivation up and trying to get going. And it's hard sometimes when you work on your own and you work from home and that sort of thing.

Speaker 1: (01:15)

So I'm sure if you do those things then you can appreciate what I'm saying. Although I do actually love getting back into a routine. So I think once my daughter's back at school, which she's not yet, she will be soon because I'm recording this fairly early on in the year. I think I'll feel better then. So yeah, fingers crossed to that. Okay. Before we get on with today's episode, which I think you're going to really enjoy, cause we're talking about how to save time while managing social media, because honestly I know what it's like. It's such hard work. But before we get into that, I want to tell you something exciting because over on Instagram I am running a competition. So I want you to head up to Instagram and take a look at it. But basically what I'm doing is I'm giving away things that helped me in my business and help me be productive.

Speaker 1: (02:03)

So I'm giving away a wall planner that I designed. I'm giving away some notebooks that are really only for Academy members and pens that are only normally for Academy members. And then I'm also giving you some of my top business books that I've read that have made a big difference in my business. So I've got in there couple of Michael Hyatts books. So Here's Your Best Year Ever and Free to Focus. I'm also including Building A Story Around by Donald Miller and a couple of other books that should be cool and there's going to be other few little stationary bits and bobs in there which will just sort of fill it out and a few nice to have bits. But I wanted to start the year off with a bit of a giveaway just because like I said, I've used some of these things in order to help me in my business and I thought that it would be a great start for you guys.

Speaker 1: (02:52)

So it's all around the podcast. Basically what you have to do is head over to Instagram, check the posts that I've put up and on that post you have to tag in some friends who are going to maybe enjoy the podcast, might be interested in it, say some of your business friends maybe, and then you can share a post on stories or on your feed. And if you tag me in. Every time you do any one of these things you get ended to the competition so you have a chance to enter more than once. And like I said, I will pick one lucky winner out of a hat and they will get that bundle of marketing and business goodies in order to help their business drive forward this year and have an amazing 2020 because I think I've talked to a fair bit about the fact that this year I have really sort of, I don't want to say knuckle down cause I do every year, but I've really kind of focused this year on my goals and I've written them all out and I've made them S.M.A.R.T. So that they're specific and measurable and those sorts of things that go into the smart sort of acronym.

Speaker 1: (03:50)

And also I have made a real point of including some personal goals which I've never really done before. I've always done the kind of business only goals, but I'm really trying to focus on that as well this year. And I feel so positive about it. My word for the year, cause I also have a word for the year and I'd recommend that you guys do is action. So you want to be taking action as, or I want to be taking action as much as possible. So everything that I do, is it driving me forward? Is it helping me with those goals? Am I taking action daily in order to achieve those goals that I set out? So yeah, that's kind of where it's all going. So like I said, competition, go and enter it and then I will send this bundle of business goodies out to someone. So go and find all the details over on my Instagram.

Speaker 1: (04:37)

Just head over to Instagram and search Teresa Heath Wareing and you will find me. Okay. Let's get on with today's episode.

Which Platforms Are We Covering?

(04:45)

So this is something that I talk about a fair bit and I've realised I don't think I've really done an episode on it, but it's so important. I'm surprised I haven't as to date. This is all about how you manage your time using social media, how you make the most of all these platforms, however you don't spend hours on end on them and how you manage your time. So you can be really strategic without being kind of not doing the engagement bit. This is actually talking about how to do all the proactive stuff and it's something we do in the business all the time. So I want to talk to you about that and I want to talk you through our process that we use.

Speaker 1: (05:20)

So when I'm talking about this, I am mainly talking about LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter only because they are really good for interacting and they're interacting off personal and or business accounts. Although LinkedIn you can't do this from a page. So these are really good when you are the person that is having that account and it's not necessarily the business account, although it's fine on Instagram and it's fine on Twitter. So before I get into the process, there's a couple of things that we do from a groundwork point of view that I would highly recommend you do because it's going to make a big difference when I'm talking to you about the proactive activity that you can do daily.

Where Should You Start?

So the very first thing I do is have a quick think about what are the aims for that platform? What am I trying to do on Twitter or what am I trying to do on Instagram?

Speaker 1: (06:07)

Am I trying to grow my following? Am I trying to connect with my audience? What am I trying to do in order to actually be running those in the first place? Then the next thing, and I just write a few words down, I don't write too much. And then the next thing I think about is who's the target audience of that platform? And basically this is your target audience for your business. So presumably the people you're trying to talk to on a social media platform are the same as the people you're trying to sell to and your business. So again, you should have this, if not, I will link in the show notes to the episode I did all about creating your avatar, your perfect customer avatar. So then what I do is I write down a list of keywords or hashtags. Now this is particularly appropriate for Instagram and Twitter and actually is becoming more appropriate for LinkedIn as they are using hashtags more recently.

Speaker 1: (06:56)

But what you're trying to do is you're trying to get a list of hashtags or keywords that your customers would use and this is often where people go wrong. They think to themselves that it's their hashtags. So for instance, if you are a carpenter you might hashtag carpenter, will be only people hashtagging there are carpenters. Whereas if your customer was a business owner that was a mum, then you might want to look at a hashtag like Mompreneur although saying that that's a very big hashtag and although we're not going to go into hashtag strategy today, maybe that's one for an episode. You don't want hashtags that are too big. You want to keep them as kind of medium range as possible. Cause if they're too big like Mompreneur, then you're never going to get found and you're going to struggle. But it might still work for the examples I'm going to give you today.

Speaker 1: (07:48)

But just bear that in mind if you're using it on your posts. So, like I said, write down a load of hashtags and a load of keywords that you can use to find your audience or your audience might use. And then the last bit of sort of grind work I do is I write down some competitors and I put them down not to necessarily go and steal their ideas or anything. I put them down because you'll see how we use competitors going forward. Not just necessarily competitors but places where your customers might be. So I always use the wedding example because it's an easy one to use. If you're a wedding photographer, then if you look at a wedding florist, then your customers are going to be there even though they're not a competitor to you. That's where your customers are also going to be.

Speaker 1: (08:33)

So try and think of the services and products that compliment you and what you do and then put them down in the competitor area as well. So like I said, so far you've written down some aims, you've written down the target audience, you've written down a list of keywords and hashtags and you've written down some competitors.

Moving Forward with Your Accounts and Being Proactive

So the next thing to do is to look at the proactive activities that you're going to want to do going forward for the your accounts. So what we do is we have a checklist and I'm going to give you the opportunity to get this checklist if you haven't already. Got it. If you head to the show notes for this episode. So teresaheathwareing.com/99 as in the numbers, not the words you're going to get the opportunity to download this checklist with all these details on.

Speaker 1: (09:18)

So you don't need to panic to write all these things down. But what we've done in the checklist is we have a list of activities and then we have daily every other day, weekly, monthly, and other. And then we have a section for notes. So we decide as we're going through these activities, how often we want to do them. And I'll explain to you what can impact on that really. So one of the first things we do is we check that we have content schedules. So if you're scheduling content, then obviously you're going to just want to give it a quick look to make sure you're scheduled ahead. So you've definitely got something coming out and depending on how often you schedule your content will depend on how often you want to pencil that in for. So for instance, if we do our content weekly, then every week we need to check we've got enough for the next week.

Speaker 1: (10:06)

Does that make sense? Hopefully it does. The next thing we have on our list is changing scheduling times. So that's to do with the content as well. So basically the scheduling times we will update every so often if we're using a scheduler, just because again, I try and keep it looking as natural as possible. I try and mix it up a little bit so that you know you haven't had your content going out on the same schedule for the past 12 months for instance. So again, that might be a quarterly thing or a monthly thing or an every other month thing. And like I said, you just go through and you tick which of these things, which box represents which ones? So I do, I check my content daily or weekly or monthly. Do I change the schedule weekly, monthly, quarterly. Then the next thing we've got on there, which actually we do three times a day as a minimum, is we check notifications.

Speaker 1: (10:57)

So we will literally schedule in our diaries because once we've done this, this all then gets translated to an online to do list. So literally first thing in the morning, middle of the day, last thing in the afternoon, we will go through and check the notifications. Now we have to do this because we have to be really strict with ourselves because you know what it's like when you're managing your own stuff. You literally sit there, you're working away, your phone pings, someone's done something on Instagram, you go to it, you start looking at it, and then you get tied into it and then you start looking through Instagram posts and stories and then you comment on someone's something and then basically you just spent the last 20 minutes messing around on Instagram just because you saw a notification. So what we try and do, and sometimes it's easier than others, I'm not going to pretend that we get it perfect every time, but we do schedule it in our calendars to check it.

Speaker 1: (11:47)

First thing, it's actually now part of my morning, my work morning routine, and then I check it middle of the day and then I check it later on. And for me, I'm happy to check my own stuff in the evening obviously. So, but we schedule those times in and those things you literally go in, look at, there's a notification if there is, you respond to that notification. So if someone's commented, you comment back. If they liked it, then we don't tend to do a whole lots of that. If they've shared them, we'll thank them, but we'll do the appropriate response immediately. And then the minute we've done the notifications would come out. We do nothing else because the other activities we're going to schedule in as well, but we don't need to be doing them every morning, every lunch time, every sort of afternoon and evening. So then the next type of things that we do is we like and share other people's content and this is where your hashtag keywords and competitors is going to come in really handy.

Speaker 1: