 Hello. Oh. All right. Yeah, good. Thank you. Hi, Malcolm. Yeah, here we are again. We have lots of people registered today. So, I'm going to give them a chance to come in. Let's hope they'll come. Otherwise, they're going to miss out. Hello, everyone. How's it going? All right. Yes, how are you? All right, thank you. Yes. What's the weather like in sunny Brighton? I'm not in Brighton right now, so I might have left off to answer that one. That's not funny, unfortunately, no. Bit dreary today, I think, isn't that? Yeah. Where are you, Sam? Crawley. Oh, okay. Yeah, we definitely don't have any sunshine. I was going to say it's always dreary there, isn't it? But I was going to say that. I can say that because I have family there, so it's okay. As usual, just a little bit of chatter, waiting around for people to get themselves organized and get in. The few familiar faces, people that've been on these sessions. Thank you for coming back and joining us again. If you can have your camera on, that'd be awesome. But obviously, you don't have to. And if you want to introduce yourself in the chat, then go ahead. Also, just a note, if your name isn't correct, you're using Shared Zoom, or somebody's coming up as Macbook. So if you can just click on the three little dots by your picture and you will be able to rename yourselves and then you can see your real identity. And we'll really, right, so about halfway there, but I do appreciate people might have had other commitments. I hope it told you as well. When you came into the session, the session is being recorded. Not going to be released for a while, but just so you know that you're being recorded. Thank you. I think we will get started. If you wouldn't mind keeping yourselves on mute until the end. And then I'm happy to take many questions as you have. You can also pop them into the chat. I've got Maddie here today co-hosting from Creative Bloom, and she's going to keep all those questions for me until the end and I'll be able to answer more for you. So this is just an overview of the series. If you haven't been to any of these sessions before, Recover and Rise is over 25 different webinar sessions of brilliant digital adoption help really. You know, lots of different topics that are coming up. This series is all the customers and marketing side of things. And then we've got some other product activity and systems coming up in the future. So we're on number four of eight in this series. And as you know, we're talking about social media and content. Later in the series, I'm going to be hosting the visitor economy session. And we're going to be hearing from a lovely lady, the owner of the artisan bakery, a business that has adopted digital during lockdown. And then the opportunities and things that that has led to and she'll be sharing our story with us. So if you are, or you know of any visitor economy, tourism type businesses that you think will be interested in that, then please do let them know that we've got that very specific session coming up on the 28th just for them. So today, yeah, we're going to be talking about social media. I am Rachel Dines. I'm a chartered marketer with over 20 years of experience in the marketing industry and I'm also a business owner. My small business is called Shakers Up Creative. We are a marketing agency in West Sussex and we specialize in working with companies under five years old. And that's to help demystify marketing and to stop them being inconsistent with their activities. I'm going to be talking about social media and social media strategy, I should say, and content today. And ideally, you might want to grab some paper as I'm going to give you a few little tasks along the way. So you just want to take a minute to grab some note pads or whatever you want scribble on. The slides rather are going to be shared on SlideShare like we normally do and sent out in the next couple of days. But it's quite nice to be interactive and actually start to build your own strategy whilst you're in the thick of it, whilst you're hearing about all the different bits that we need to include. So if you really doubt that your business should be on social media, then to start with the numbers. 396 minutes was the average daily amount of time spent on the internet by an individual via any device in 2020. Now I do appreciate we were stuck at home with not much to do. So the stats have been pushed up by what was the pandemic in the thick of it when we're all homebound in 2020. But even so, it increased by I think almost an hour. And so we're still even previous to that spending a lot of time on the internet. After that time, 144 of those minutes are spent on social media by those people that use it. Yep, that's more than two hours a day, which is actually quite a lot of our time. So we love it. And there are 3.78 billion social media users worldwide in 2021. So we're going to have a look and I will talk to you about which platforms are the most popular. Now as the stats table is worldwide, you do see the likes of the Chinese video sharing platform do you and also China's largest messaging platform we chat. But the big boys that you would expect here in the UK, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and TikTok, they're all on there too. But notice that number two spot though, YouTube. That channel was founded by three former PayPal employees and is moved from being the go-to place for amateur videos to an absolute goldmine of professional content. It was generating $14 billion, I think it was, an annual ad revenue two years ago. So goodness knows what it is now. And YouTube is the world's second most visited website overall, not just among social media. Now there's plenty of stats to support social media used by businesses too. So shoppers, they look for information on a company, they look for products, they look for special offers in the search engines, but also across social media. They're looking for recommendations and they're asking friends about things. Even if you don't use Facebook, Instagram or any of the other platforms personally, you or someone associated with your business needs to take on this task. You need to take it on to your company and be consistent with it too. So of course it's really important to know that this only applies if the target customers are actually on social media. You know, don't feel that you've just got to have it on the list if it's not something that's relevant. Now Facebook has a whopping 4.6 billion app downloads over the last 10 years. This, its largest user group is 25 to 34 year olds approximately and 56% of its users are actually male. Over on Twitter, 44% of users are aged 30 to 49. So slightly higher age group and only 32% are female. So we've got more men using Twitter and 71% of Twitter users say that they actually use the network to get their news and 42% of users have a degree. Now I'm not giving you all of these stats to kind of fill your heads up. You don't have to remember them all but it's really just to demonstrate that there is a difference in the demographic, in the usage of the people that are signed up to all of these different platforms. LinkedIn is the place that hosts 65 million decision makers profiles and makes up more than 50% of all social traffic to B2B websites and blogs. LinkedIn is the number one channel that B2B marketers use to distribute digital content. And it also stands out, stands apart from other social media companies because it's far less dependent on advertising revenue compared to the likes of Facebook and Twitter. Now Instagram's highest user group is aged 25 to 34. Yet it does compete with TikTok for the young users particularly through its Reels feature. Only 25% of teens prefer Instagram over TikTok now. There's a fairly even split of female and male users on that and it has 200 million business accounts. Companies like Gymshark, Hype and Joe Wicks, the body coach are all companies that were pretty much born on Instagram. Having profiles also adds to companies' search knowledge graphic SEO too. So despite social content not actually being a ranking factor and I can't explain what that means later if you need to know it's really good to add to credibility, trust and build up the profile of your company's existence on search. Now we have a poll. I'm just going to launch that now so that we can see. Oh, I don't think I have the one right one. Hold on just one second. There we go, social media. So I'm just going to launch this poll now and you can tell me how confident you are about using social media for marketing and then I'll be asking you again at the end. Hopefully I'll have taught you a thing or two by then and we will get a different set of responses. So if you can just select your answer on the poll, that'd be great. And I'll be able to share that with you as well. So if you want to come in. And one of those that are hiding. Great. Okay, thank you very much. So I'm going to share those results for you and you can see that actually there's not many people here that are already confident. And obviously that's why you're here. Lots of people saying that their knowledge could be better. So hopefully by the end that will have completely flipped on his head and it will be super confident. Thank you very much for that. So I'm sure that you'll know that the latest addition to social media is called Clubhouse. This launched in March last year. It's an invite only platform and for a long time it was actually only available to people that used IOS, so Apple devices. But now it's got over 10 million weekly active users. The Clubhouse is very audio focused. That's the primary usage of the platform. How it works is all audio based and it provides a place for real time sharing stories, collaboration and chats. It offers the ability to connect and engage with professional people that are outside of your industry. So it's much more spontaneous because you've got rooms filled with real time chats on a variety of topics. The focus is on high value conversations rather than a paired produced content that you tend to find on other platforms. You create a profile and then you can connect to other social media apps too. And this is how people check you out further through those connections, you know, not just relying on the information that you're kind of presenting yourself with it in Clubhouse. Inside the app, the hallway is the app's main feed and where you discover chat rooms. So you can see an at a glance view of each room including the name of the room, some of the people that are in the room and the number of people and also the speakers that are in the room. But when you first join a Clubhouse room you join as a listener. So you join actually without a microphone and then when you're up to speed with the conversation that's happening in there, you can raise your hand and then the moderator may invite you up onto the stage to actually speak. And you can come and go from rooms as you wish. So it's easy to listen in on different conversations, some of which will have celebrities in or high profile members in attendance. And you're encouraged to make new connections as you go along. It's felt quite exclusive due to the way the invite system works, but in the future it will be open to everyone they say. So when someone joins Clubhouse they're given one invitation, they can send that to someone using their phone number. This means that members send invitations to people that they have a close connection to rather than just an acquaintance. And once someone has been on Clubhouse for a while and they spend time moderating rooms and speaking they can earn themselves more invites to send out. Now there's no ads, the focus is on building a network and raising your visibility and credibility within the space. So why should you use social media? Why should be on it as a business? Some of these reasons might already match your thoughts but all of them are important. The last point however is really important because it shows that you're going to be sticking around, that you're serious about your business, that you care about being able to communicate with your audience in this way. Obviously there's the other benefits where you're linking back to your website so hopefully for sharing valuable content people want to know more about you they will click through and you get that traffic but it also gives you a chance to learn more about your audience as well and engage them in some of the decision making sometimes that you're actually doing as a business. I've known companies that have said to put content on their social media whilst they're going through a rebrand and they've said, guys, which flow note do you prefer? There's one on this one or what message do you prefer? And they are getting incredibly valuable insight from their followers and they're voting on those and they're actually able to then use the one that's the most popular, the one that resonates the most. So there's things like that that you can do on social media that you might not have thought about using it for. I'm now going to take you through a seven step social media strategy. So even if you do have social profiles already you can definitely go back through these steps to ensure that you've covered it all and you can make improvements where you need to. So don't worry if you're already you know pretty active on the platforms I'm sure that there'll be something in here that will be a value to you. So the first point I want to make however is that your website should be your front door. So it's your core, your main place of being and social media is just one marketing tactic. It's a digital marketing activity that you know it helps build your business voice and it brings people back to your core. Now naturally over time the landscape changes you can't guarantee that any particular social media platform will be around forever. We've seen the lights of Google Plus come and go it doesn't exist anymore and there've been other names that have been tipped to be the next big thing that have just never really reached the summit. Now on your own website you have a lot more control. You can decide what's being published, what people see and how quickly they see it. Saying that on social media you essentially have the opportunity there to subliminally get in front of an extra layer of audience which then with engagement tactics will help build your following. One way to manage the two outpices to have a social media feed on your website this doesn't strictly count as freshly changing content for SEO purposes but it does give your visitors something new to look at each time they come and it also provides that reassurance that you are active as a business. When a website does to see that it does give them a brief insight into your brand voice as well and it might just keep them on your site a little bit longer. The other benefit that is often overlooked by smaller businesses is that of having user generated content displayed on your website. I'm talking about things like customers showing off those trainers they bought from your store enjoying that amazing sound which from the cafe or thanking you perhaps for helping them find the perfect gift for their mother-in-law with the right attributions the world of the happy customer is brought right in front of other potential customers' eyes. When it comes to engaging with the audience and Instagram feed can also bring your added visual stimulation to your website and it is a popular choice for retailers in particular. Now social media is a form of marketing as is your website but the difference is as I've said you own your website. Now there is an exception if you have a product or service idea and you want to test the market then you want to work early and you want to fail fast then you can use things like Facebook pages for example as a way of testing that market you can sell through your Facebook page you can glean information about your target audience and learn whether your idea has potential or not. It's cheap it's easy and it's quick to do it this way but you must remember at all times that social media needs to be included in your overall marketing strategy not a singular approach to marketing it should be used with other things and also when you're in conversation online you need to treat other people how you wish to be treated what you're doing on social media is very public so you should behave decorum just as you would in real life posts and responses can be dragged up from the past and you really don't want any effects. So step one the first part of the strategy is thinking about your social media marketing goals and is really important you don't just want to sign up to all of the platforms regardless find that they suck the life out of you and then later learn that your audience isn't even present there your initial considerations might be whether you have the time or a money commitment do you have a reluctance personally for social media outside of business if so it might mean that it's something you need to outsource or delegate do you have the tools that you need to create the creative side the imagery for the platforms or do you need to schedule some time and budget to get some brand photographs that you own you've got those creative assets you also want to make each part of your goals smart which I'm sure you've heard of if you've done lots of business talks before it stands for specific measurable time bound and this guides your activity and ensures that it leads to real business results so these are just examples of a smart goal we'll use Instagram Reels posting twice a week and get 500 click throughs by the end of the quarter now notice that I said click throughs there things like number of followers a number of lights etc yes they're really easy to track but they're also known as vanity metrics because it's hard to prove the real value so instead you want to try and focus on things like engagement click throughs and conversion rates as well you might have different goals for your different networks but whatever you choose the line with your main marketing objectives so I'm going to give you a small task now for step one if you've got some paper take a couple of minutes and just make some notes on your goals so how do you want social media to really work for you try and form three social media smart goals if you can just going to give you a couple of minutes okay okay I can see a couple of you have stopped so hopefully a few of you are done if you're not just make a note that step one is setting those goals come back to it and perhaps you'll need a bit of time to actually make them smart it's hard to do that super fast so yeah come back to it there's lots of considerations when you manage your profile so things to think about is the design so your profile header your profile image the post images make sure it's all branded content it's not just about the channels themselves but it's also about how you communicate your purpose your message, your brand and how you maintain consistency you want everything to tie together nicely you want to know that some of that content if it's just got that you know like for example ours if we have sprinkles on then hopefully it would be clear that that content is from us because it's part of our brand it's a brand asset you also want to be very sure on your response timings as well so how quickly are you going to be able to respond to messages from these various social platforms make sure that you set an auto response if it's not going to be immediately all the time be very transparent about all of these things as much as you can so that you're not spoiling expectations so step two identify your audience now if you get to know your fans your followers and your customers as real people with real wants and needs you will know how to target and engage with them on social media so it's also critical if you want to turn social media followers into customers for your business try not to make too many assumptions social media analytics can provide a ton of valuable information about who your followers are where they live and how they interact with your brand on social media these insights will allow you to refine your strategy and target your audience in a better way if you believe that the problem your product or service solves is of high importance in a customer's life you can ask these three questions to speed the persona creation up if you're not sure what a customer persona is please do ask me at the end I think there have been other sessions that have included this but those three questions are what is the first thing my customer thinks about in the morning what is the last thing my customer thinks about at night and why these questions are all aimed at identifying their pain points the simple questions could identify the pain points of a typical customer for you and notice that I did say if you're solving something that is of high importance in a customer's life if it's just a small purchase if it's more of a luxury you're probably not going to get that insight there but I just think they're brilliant questions to really think about I know if you need to ask a pool of your customers those questions and try and find out what their pain points are so again I've got another small task for you I want you to make some notes about anything that you already know about your target audience and then you can leave some space to expand on this later by looking at other data looking at some publicly available data about that type of demographic and making some additions to that so right down where you already know about your target audience there's some points to guide you on the screen spending power is something that's often overlooked especially if you're in a a B2B business environment I would say because you need to know who holds the purse strings and what the budgets are for certain expenses and purchases so it's always a good question to ask how much you will understand on this I'll just give you a couple of minutes to make those notes okay alright so you hope you've got a few things jotted down and I will take you on to step three step three is about knowing your competition so a competitive analysis of your competition will help you to find out what their strengths and weaknesses are and how those strengths and weaknesses compare to your own now it's a process of benchmarking your own results so that you can identify opportunities for growth as well as strategies that aren't performing as well as they should so a social media competitive analysis will help you to identify who your competitors are on social media know which platforms they're on know how they're using those platforms also to understand how well the social strategy is working from what you can see publicly you can benchmark your social results against the competition you can identify social threats to your business you know what's the competitive doing on a platform is getting huge levels of engagement that you're not following their videos for example instead of yours you can also find gaps in your social media marketing strategy perhaps all your competitors are on a platform that you're not learning about your competitors is not the only reason to do it either so it will give you insights into your own business and your audience which is likely to have an overlap with your competitors of course as well now here are some insights that social media competitive analysis can give you you know you mentioned the benchmark so performance benchmark so average number of followers engagement rates and share a voice ideas for the best time to post on social media because your audience are quite likely to be on line at a similar time compared to competition an understanding of the potential customer pain points as well and new and perhaps even better ideas for content that might resonate with your audience or that conversely doesn't resonate with your audience and what you might want to avoid you know if you can see something really isn't going down very well or a competitor stop doing something that's probably a reason behind that an understanding of how to communicate with your audience on certain platforms do you need to be more casual or more formal for example and ideas for ways to differentiate your brand now that just kind of hocks back to my last session on the brand session if you need more information on that you can view the slides for that just let me know and I'll get a link to you now maybe one of your competitors is really dominant on Facebook for example Instagram you might want to focus on the networks where your audience is underserved rather than trying to wing fans away from a dominant competitor so your task at this step is to note down a few direct competitors to have a look at there's always going to be companies that are doing a similar thing to you in other countries or other parts of this country even but try and think what is a direct competitor it's a similar size business similar services in as many ways as possible in line with yours even if they're not immediately local take a couple of minutes write those competitors down so that later you can go back and have a look and do a bit of your own analysis the graphic on the screen is purely this example and I just like the bit in the middle where they're actually noting that someone's got a Facebook page or a business profile whether they just have a group same on LinkedIn, whether they're on Pinterest those kinds of things that's always useful when you're doing that audit and that comparison just give me a couple of minutes right so step four of your social media strategy this is about things that you can do to improve your profiles and I'm sure that there will be several things if you're on LinkedIn your personal profile does give you a completeness percentage score comes up which can help identify sections that can be built up so that's really useful but the other platforms don't tend to do that so across those platforms my general advice would be to look at these things complete all the profile fields that are available to you all those different sections remove any dead profiles now what I mean by that is sometimes I have customers and they say yeah yeah yeah we're on Twitter and then I look at this they actually haven't tweeted for like three years it's just not a revenue at all and if it's not something that they're planning to re-invigrate then just kill it off just get rid of that just don't be on Twitter if it wasn't working or you're not engaged with the platform just get rid of it maybe there's former employees for example that's still connected in some way to your profiles get rid of them now include keywords including those in your profiles is a really good idea and perhaps hashtags as well depending on which platform you're on obviously keywords is a whole other topic but if you do want to ask me any questions about that at the end then let me know and I can help you with how to work into fellows I'd also say be consistent with your branding I did mention before about how important it was for that to be a consideration on your profiles make sure that you're not just throwing up a logo that's the wrong size and it's all squished and it's just terrible make sure that it's matching across the platforms use high quality images as well that follow the recommended dimensions for each platform I'll be sharing some tools at the end that can help with that but it can just really ruin your brand if you're using fuzzy images or if you're infringing copyrights or other things so please be careful about the images that you share and also something that's missed sometimes is actually cross-linking your accounts so I'm going to show you an example of that here so in Facebook for example on your company profile page in the settings you can go down and add links to other social accounts so if somebody sometimes you can't quite get the same names on different platforms I'm very lucky because ours are pretty consistent it's only just a bit shorter on Twitter because the character limit but if a business hasn't got that consistency and they've got profiles that they can't sort out by naming and it's hard for them to be found connecting with the actual business name things like this are a great way to help people find those to actually connect and link to your other profiles via your other profiles that makes sense so your task here is to think about whether there's a platform or a particular profile even that you need to check over maybe it needs an update maybe it needs expanding as a note to self so that you don't miss step 4 you can go back and do that another time and I will just add there that I think if you have help with your social media and if you've got somebody else doing it or you're outsourcing it for example this overlooking updating it can happen so easily because you don't go on there as much as you would normally if you've got the content going out and someone else is doing that for you you might see it in a schedule or something instead but you're not always going into your profile all the time so it's always good to go back just have a little review check things out and see if we can make them improve step 5 now I'm always asked how do I know what to say on social media where do people get their content from where do they get their ideas and inspiration so step 5 is about where to find that inspiration now using your own business and selling your own products sometimes just seeing that your content is a bit too salesy or inward looking there are plenty of places outside of your business to find inspiration and there is a great tool called Answer the Public now you get a couple of free searches a day on the free version and you can just go on there and you can type in a keyword for example and the data it pulls out and produces for you either in a wheel format which is quite nicely visual or in a spreadsheet whichever you prefer is all based on real search data so if you're looking for inspiration for a blog content title or something you want to know what people are actually searching and looking for Answer the Public is a great tool for that now I'm sure there's also some guides out there on how to use it if it's not immediately clear if you're not familiar with keyword tools and things and perhaps it won't be but it is really something to use so do have a look at that there's also you'll have industry magazines, news, blogs etc that you can subscribe to or follow for their feeds and their newsletters too so for example for my business we include content from places like Enterprise Nation for small businesses Design Week, Marketing Week Moz which is an authority on search engine optimization you know all kinds of industry magazines and names so you might want to look to the news you might want to seek inspiration for the content your local Chamber of Commerce is putting out maybe there are industry specific trade media titles such as things like Pet Business World or Bakery Business for example that will inspire you to write a article on the change in your industry or you know something that's very topical and newsworthy at the moment it's really important to remember throughout this that social media was designed to be two way to be social so it's very easy to essentially shout at your audience and be constantly pushing content outwards and that leads to a lack of conversation and a lack of engagement which ultimately leads to a lack of growth and conversions so yeah just a few ideas there of places that you can have a look some general ones like half posed and medium but also think about your specific industry and where you can seek that information too now to help you further I want to introduce the four pillars of content if you've been on a webinar with me before about this kind of topic then you'll definitely see this because it's a graphic that I really like and it's really helpful so you can create or share different types of content that you fit in across these four pillars I'll give you some examples so obviously my business is a marketing agency some of the examples of what we've done across these pillars before are for the entertain we created a mini Twitter movie from photos and clips that we took going around stands at our local business show it wasn't this year it was a previous year but it provided us with a tagging opportunity that was included it also gave us a new type of content to put out and it also extended the life of our attendance at the event as well in the inspire corner well I'm often speaking at events so we can post about those also there's collaborations that I do and they're always nice to share information about there's been a few of those that I've done both through events but also on projects and for charity as well in the education bit well that's quite easy for us you know there's lots of things that we're fortunate to know that people don't know or understand about marketing so we can share top tips we can run and promote workshops and webinars to help people and we've also done live broadcasts as well don't do so much of that now it's not something that's really within my comfort thing but I will talk a little bit more about the live side of things later and then there's the last quarter there which is the convince area and that really serves as proof after you've built some trust up so things like we share co-studies we share project results testimonials and reviews that kind of thing when you're trying to convince that potential customer that you are going to be awesome to work with so of course the actual content really does depend on your target market also your style and the image that you want to project the other rule of thumb is the 80-20 principle and this is where only 20% of your posts are actually self-promotional or salesy and the remainder is a mix of the other types of content now I did write a while ago a couple of years ago in fact an article about this on my blog Maddie's going to pop the link in the chat in case it helps you just understand that 80-20 principle in relation to content and the work further so your activity at this stage is to take a couple of minutes to jot down some ideas content that fits into these four pillars for your business so perhaps you might even want to make a note of trying something new on one of your profiles that you haven't done before you could jot down some places that you could subscribe to or follow to get that inspiration from and you can also make a note to check out what national day applies to your business and how you can piggyback these example of the top of my head is today is World Ballet Day so there's a hashtag around that if your business was related to you know dance dance for all those sorts of things you would absolutely be posting content today that aligns with that national day, that world, that world day so just take a few minutes to look at that graphic try and find some ideas for content that fits into those four corners and I'll be back with you soon so it's hard to know how long to give people just give me a thumbs up if you're ready to move on yeah okay cool we'll do that thank you very much so this is an example content plan and this is step six where you actually put everything together and you form your content plan to guide you so you can customize with the columns that you need for example in this one yes it's an old screenshot but it's the same it doesn't matter if you might want to target particular keywords you might have a blog that you're highlighting you also might always have an offer you should definitely always have a CTA which is called to action in there but there might also be customer offer as well your social media content plan or the calendar is the perfect place to plan all of your social media activities so from images that you're going to use to the links that you're going to share to blog posts to the hashtags that accompany that post now it includes both your day to day posting and also content that might be for specific social media campaigns your calendar will ensure that your posts are spaced out appropriately as well and also published in the best times to post do ensure that you determine the right content mix for your business make sure that your content strategy and calendar reflect the mission and the goals that you've assigned to each social profile you might have different goals for each platform and everything that you post is working to support your marketing activities this is an example we did a few years ago for a client which actually tied in their social media content with their news that's a plan so she always had she was a holistic therapist she always had a treatment focus there was always a special offer and it made sure that we could put social media posts around what was going out to her database so it's just another way of doing it whatever works for you, if it's a spreadsheet if you can't stand spreadsheets something more exciting and graphical you want to present it why should you plan it well you can choose which platforms to have a presence on based on your objectives combined with your why and also who your target audience is think about who this target audience is uses social media and what they're interested in so what type of content they prefer, who they are in terms of the gender, the age, location yes it's hard but it's easy for a business that's been trading for a while and it has that pool of customer data I know that it might be something like a hefty workload and I guess with social media that is pretty accurate but don't try and do it all yourself give some responsibility to other people in your team or share the load maybe even pay a young family member to help you which can be a good movie if you're not comfortable with some of the social media content types like stories or reels for example Gen Z are awesome at this stuff so having grown up amongst all the technology technological answers is just like bread and butter to them I've met lots of business owners whose teenage children actually help them out with their content and it works really well for them so you are planning essentially to not miss opportunities to not be infrequent and inconsistent to not be off-brand to stay on brand and have everything brilliant so that you avoid falling behind your competitors and also so that you just you don't lack any trust are people worried about whether you still exist or whether you are still doing a good job now of course we're not going to actually write the content plan right now so just making over step six is to basically pull everything that you've got together so far into that content plan build it up and I would say reserve yourself half a day you know to do your first version of this you can plan ahead for the time that suits you if you want to plan a couple of weeks ahead and then do it again that's a good approach if you need to do it longer and you've not got like 50 posts a week to plan then you can do it for a month or something but honestly whatever works for you is totally fine happy to share some more advice on that later on I will now introduce some tools to you so step seven is about finding tools maybe help you with your time saving automation really is becoming increasingly essential so everyone is so busy especially a small business owner you don't want to be dipping in and out of social media all the time you just kind of need to block out do it let it send itself out now are any of these tools familiar maybe some some are scheduling tools some are about profile management and one is actually about design help if you're at all about that so the one that looks like a bit of a timer there is the Facebook business suite and that was formerly called Facebook pages manager if you own a page or you're in charge of perhaps more than one page on Facebook for a business that's a really good tool to have is just an app on your phone Canva is awesome if you're not a designer and you need templates inspiration you don't know what size to create things in just register with Canva the free account will do everything you need if you are a bit of a bigger business or you want to make it a bit more easier for yourself bit more easier then you can sign up to Canva on a paid account and that will allow you to do things like upload your brand kit so that all of your color hex codes are just right there for you and you've also got your design assets and your fonts and everything like that for a small business the free account is totally fine so yeah just some tools to look at there I have shown a couple of things from Hootsuite which is that owl tool just because I see a lot of their content because that's the one that we use this is a screenshot from inside it and I would say that scheduling is an absolute must I can recommend Hootsuite also one called Buffer there's free versions of most of them the free version of Hootsuite has decreased recently which is a big shame it does allow two social channels and scheduling of up to five posts so it's not much I have to have a paid account because I've got too many accounts to manage but it allows you to create streams so you can quickly see what's going on across your channels you can see what you've scheduled you can see what you've posted already and also who's interactive with that post all in one place so if you have anything for Instagram and Pinterest then there's one called Tailwind you might want to take a look at and that will allow 20 posts I think per month so just take your task at this stage I think it's your last class don't worry is to note down some of the tools that you think might help you that you're not already using so it might be some scheduling software it might be the design tool to help you create your content it might even just be your calendar to get that scheduled started there's other things called TweetDeck which will help you manage your Twitter activity if you don't know obviously what tool just write down a tool to help me with X I'll just give you a minute to do that okay so moving on the keys to success how do you make it all work for you you definitely need to balance your content so make sure that you've got that mix that it's not just promotional considered implementation and by that I mean your frequency of posting the relevancy of everything that you're posting your visual tone what features of any platform you're deciding to use are you using reels for example on Instagram the voice and the style which all comes back to your branding what's coming through on social media should match that and you should have an internal policy of live lines on that and it might be things like are we using emojis on social media are we using acronyms on purpose or accidentally lining people with jargon that kind of thing a lot of small businesses will believe that the social media strategy is simply how often to post and on which channels and when I'm delivering social media training this is what I'm asked alongside what on earth do we write about where we have to post all the time so this is absolutely an important aspect but a true social media strategy as you've seen goes deeper than that and it really takes the desired outcomes into account and that's where the success comes so larger companies will have an overarching social media strategy and then they will have aligned strategies for each of the social media platforms rather that they are using now if you're just going to have that top line overall strategy then it needs to include the why you want your brand to be on social media first of all and then it goes back to the goals that we were talking about near the start there are nine objectives that you could have and you'll likely have more than one and they might be things like to increase brand awareness to drive traffic to your website to generate new leads to grow revenue to raise branding engagement to build a community around your business to provide customer service via social media to increase your press coverage or to listen to conversations about your brand and that is a whole art in itself which has its own tools and it's called social listening don't think something you need to worry about too much if you're a small business so I haven't covered it today but just so that you know what that is and I did promise that I would demonstrate what good content looks like so what does good content look like now aesthetically pleasing is one thing so Instagram is very visual and it's really good to decide on a style and the type of images that you'll be creating for your grid and you can see some really good ones right here some people do sections that create a larger image too when they're pieced together and if you want to do something like that then there are tools to help you do that for the text part on Instagram you've got 2,200 characters and up to 30 hashtags limits to play with now a thorough content strategy is brilliantly integrated across lots of channels so this example I'm going to go through is from Hootsuite again one of the social media scheduling tools that I mentioned so they will create detailed blog content around a subject relevant subject for their audience then within the R-School it will link out to other related relevant and useful R-Schools within their own blog so I say link out it's an internal link but it's linking from that main piece of core content out into like sub topics and sub information they will also embed video in there to support educational points that are made within that blog content then if we take a look at for example their YouTube channel it's broken down into content sections including things like client stories, social media educational videos training content and so on and well made video is a key part of the content strategy and it just simply continues on like that throughout their social channels so like this post for example this tweet from Twitter where they're talking about Twitter but it's linking back to one of their R-Schools now I do understand that this is a big business example and that you're all smaller businesses but understanding the needs of your customers and then mapping out content across channels to answer their questions or introduce your solution your products is an ideal approach to deliver on your strategy so I hope that you can see that really just this theory around that can totally apply to what you're doing something like a blog which is at the heart of your content I also said I talk about live stuff so a live video post or live stream is one of the features that son off on big platforms and it is something that you should try and use so it might sound a bit scary it can definitely feel a bit vulnerable it essentially turns the broadcast into a conversation and it doesn't have to be a full length feature film you can definitely keep it brief so generally the algorithms will love live content and that means that they prioritize it in the news feeds and stats have shown that live videos actually get six times more interactions than pre-recorded so going back to the conversation point viewers can comment on them they can like and react during a live so you're actually getting real feedback and responses in real time. Live content also has this way of just demanding attention so notifications will pop up and followers feel compelled to click in case they miss something sometimes lives are scheduled too of course and we're going to be you know doing more lives hopefully when I get a bit braver so sometimes when I've got a lot coming up I'll help on Facebook and do a live about those things just to highlight them a bit more but you don't need any special equipment you can just use your smart phone and you can be live in a couple of clicks so if you're suddenly feeling brave you can just get on and do it straight away you can even go live on Facebook and Instagram at the same time because they're both owned by Facebook so do consider what's in your background for you always important I think we've all learned that from all of our zoom conversations over the last year or half year and a half or so and make sure there's no background noise as well people need to be able to hear you and just have a plan you know even if it's a few notes on the side which is what I tend to do so that I don't forget all the things I want to say in that video there is a good guide on how to go live on each of the platforms from different devices unsurprisingly on the Hootsuite blog so there's going to be a link just popped in the chat for you again just about that okay so the advertising side of social media might be part of your strategy it does require some significant budget you might already dabbled in it already if you would like to try out social media ads it's really important to first think about why you're advertising and what you'd like to achieve so by setting some goals again you'll have something to measure your constant and your success I should say against and this will also help you when it comes to choosing the right objective if you're getting started with Facebook ads so some examples might be that you want to increase your traffic rating you need increase the reach of your posts perhaps on Facebook or maybe to increase the likes for your Facebook page and grow your audience once you've done that then you need to go to the Facebook ads manager don't just click boost on Facebook it gives you a way to advertise very quickly it's a very quick money maker for Facebook it doesn't give you brilliant advertising and it also uses a post that you've just created before it's not specifically created but to do try and avoid just the boost go into the ads manager all of Facebook ad campaigns run through the tool which you can access directly at facebook.com or you can click manage ads in the drop down menu on your Facebook account page so this is the best way to do Facebook advertising and Facebook will probably continually suggest to you as a page owner that you might like to boost posts but it's just not very targeted it doesn't let you create something as I say so when you click to create a Facebook ad you'll go to a page where you can then choose the objective for your campaign can be a bit overwhelming there's 15 options here alone for what you might want to achieve that can be a bit of a scary start but if you want to break down of those there is an article over on buffer which gives you a guide and again the link will be in the chat for you all the Facebook business advice ads advice sections themselves pretty helpful sometimes to get to grips with it but an ad campaign will usually sit within one or three categories and that might be awareness so working with objectives that generate interest in your product or your service consideration stage objectives that get people to start thinking about your business but then look for more information about it or conversion so objectives that are encouraging people already interested in your business to purchase or to use your product or service the minimum recommended spend is £10 per day I say for Facebook you're unlikely to be able to meet your targets for a lower spend than that and the Instagram and Facebook ads are available on your channel and you can find your links through the ads manager if you want to do something like LinkedIn ads then you need to do that directly through LinkedIn for Twitter you can select whether you like to promote individual tweets or you can run an entire ad campaign with a specific purpose just like Facebook and you can target certain interests or certain user types for example engagement if you focus on building up a ton of followers that you forget about engagement you're going to run into problems either you'll end up with many low quality followers more followers than you know what to do with or you'll struggle to get any followers at all you must remember that getting engagement widens your net so it increases your views so say just 10 of your followers like comment or retweet to their own your content can then be seen by more than 100 additional potential customers so you can see the expansive reach there and that reaching increases further when you get into the habit of engaging back by replying to comments retweeting and so on now Facebook's engagement rate will consist of a total number of clicks likes comments and shares and you can check your engagement on Facebook by opening the insights page then you just select posts you scroll down to the section titled all posts published where you'll be able to then see how many people your posts have reached and your engagement data there as well and you can check insights for individual posts if you want to do that now when your audience really engages with your posts Facebook shows into fewer people over time therefore you want as much engagement as possible so that your posts are shown to as many people as possible and I do appreciate it's a chicken leg situation sometimes it's a great idea to spam together a few core customers or supporters to kickstart that engagement for you on Twitter the engagement figures are found in the analytics section and they'll be there for up to the last 28 days and on Instagram business insights will show you how popular your posts stories and reels have been here are just some general tips on building social engagement so share highly visual content share emotional content as well things that can resonate with people promote your accounts in presentations in newsletters and other places other marketing research the best times to post which you can do within England system data or within industry data online engage to say thank you respond to things like things utilise your hashtags and you can also research these two there are hashtag research tools which will show you whether one particular hashtag is more popular over another very similar hashtag encourage participation as well so you can do things like polls you can ask open questions and get comments back and replies to that and share promotions as well and if you want to run competitions and things so measurement the most common metrics to analyse the success of a social presence are split into both post-level engagement and page-level engagement so post-level engagement will include things like likes shares and comments the most basic metrics for social media engagement will track user interactions with each post they'll tell you whether the post was interesting enough to grab the audience's attention clicks are then the next level up so the number of clicks for each post show a user's interest towards that post likes and shares will happen on the social platform then a click will send users to your company's page or out to your website which will bring further marketing opportunities page-level engagement covers the growth of followers and mentions measuring the consistency in the number of new followers can help you examine whether the strategy is successful so the number of mentions a social profile receives can indicate the success of the content and then there's analysis of how active a community is so it's not just about seeing an increase in the number of followers but also about tracking how active they are and how they react to each post each of the platforms provide their own analytics facilities for business profiles allowing you to check in on performance over time as we've talked about you can see the last month as standard but you can expand that time frame if you want to and on Twitter you can see what your top tweets were your top follower how many profile visits you received amongst other things over on LinkedIn you'll find post analytics update metrics and mentions and also other expected engagement figures on there too so with company page analytics you can even compare your page with similar company pages which will again help you inform the strategy to monitor the journey and followers from social media to your website and measure ROI return on investment Google analytics is recommended so if you have a website you should have this free tool connected to it and you just need to have a free Google account and then verify ownership of your website once your account has collected a pool of data then you'll be able to look at whether social media is available to people to your site and then where they are going on there once on the site so that's the end of the main presentation I'm going to talk to you a little bit more about digital champion in just a second thank you so much for your time and your attention today and your contributions feel free to connect with me or my company via any of these methods or you can sign up to receive our latest blog articles via our newsletter on our website I'm just going to run that poll that we did at the beginning and let's see if your knowledge has improved hopefully hopefully it has there we go there we go oh ok you can split confident and could be better so maybe there's a few questions here and that's totally fine I can answer those at the end thank you very very much for sharing your results with us so just a little bit about the digital champions offer I know we've got a few of them on the session today and I am one as well there is free digital support to help you with your digital adoption if you're a business in West Sussex everyone that comes to these sessions and these webinars can get up to eight hours of pre specialist support from one of seven digital champions a team of experts and business owners that can help advise you if you need a particular skillset or advice so things like digital technology strategies training members of your team on digital skills utilizing new technology improving your productivity having the right tech team all of those things that we can help you with how do you access it really really easy business.org.uk link again is going to be in the chat in a second you can ask any of us here today if you have any questions about that or you can just drop an email to that email address on the screen growthhub.hub.hub with a few details of what you think you need help with you don't have to know all the answers at the outset they will help assign the right digital champion to you and we can spend a day helping you for free with your business so do utilize that support the other things that are on offer is partly matched funding from the business hot house which is a 6040 so you pay 40% they pay 60 no that's the way around you pay 60 they pay 40 you can apply for that funding through them there's also low case which will help businesses adapt improving their climate change and eco goals all those sorts of things I think grants available there as well and rise which is all about innovation and research products do you get in touch with any of those it's something specific that you think the digital champion support can't help you with but you would like some support on next up in the series we have got data security and GDPR which is the latest this week I'll be assisting Jo in that session she is an absolute expert on GDPR so I'm sure there will be some real gems in there and I know it's a topic that some people have a bit of a headache over and then the one after that is all about how to measure your marketing return on investment with Stu and Ollie so do book on to some of the other sessions and I hope to see you and I hope that was really helpful I'm going to stop sharing my screen and I'm available to answer any questions that you might have thank you very much so Maddie, is there any questions that popped up earlier that I haven't seen that you want to yes there was a couple someone was asking about good video editing platforms sort of like Canva but with more video specific okay yeah there are the names don't spring to mind only because I don't use them but I can definitely send you some so if you want to just do you know who asked that question because I can come back to you I've got a scroll back okay that's fine or just drop me a tweet or I think it was Vicky okay no worries okay um god my chat's all small sorry um someone asking about losing organic reach once they've used paid ads that was from Matt oh really did you want to unmute and talk a bit more about that Matt are you there potentially not maybe we've lost him yeah I just need to know what the question oh he's in the chat okay okay if you want to a specific question about my chat and there's another question there as well are there any websites which are known to social media growth data are you competitive do you mean if your own profiles I think competitors yeah there was a couple of questions asking about whether there's any platforms that give you more insight into like competitors engagement and things I know I think this is a bit of a manual task I don't have any that you can do that but I might be wrong yep I don't know sorry is it possible to see growth without any money spending any money it is but it requires a great deal of time lots and lots of engaging content and I'd say you want a real journey there do you want to be sure where people are clicking through to where they're signing up to from the content you make sure everything's integrated it just takes a long time but yeah I mean you can especially if if your content you're putting out so it's in a particular style it's really captivating for people when it goes viral you know you can do that in a free and paid did you want to ask something Malcolm I saw a hand there yeah I've got a question it's about this this year's sort of big hot topic on social media which has been the IOS 14 update and I wanted to ask you as a marketer what impact have you seen on people's kind of targeting and or performance and what possible countermeasures have you employed or deployed or advised on to help people still keep on top of all of their metrics and their performance yeah great question yes it has had a huge impact on the ad this is on the paid ad side of things because it's all about tracking the conversions where there's a cookie in store so what we've done is actually we've tended to separate out ad campaigns into IOS campaigns and Android campaigns so that we can look at the measurement slightly differently it's mainly affecting those with longer consideration purchase window so purchases that aren't just a quick put in your basket and buy but take a bit more thought and consideration because the cookies obviously aren't staying in place long enough so it needs some proper setup by an ad manager that really really knows what they're doing with all the right tracking in place and then yeah separating out those campaigns where you need to so that you can do some extra data research on the IOS side to try and pull back some of the data that's being lost through that update okay cool great thanks so Vicky your question is it just on Facebook it was actually it's not just on Facebook because it's about the IOS platform cookie so it affects Facebook and other channels but it's only where you're spending budget and there's tracking needed so it's mainly Facebook and Instagram but yeah I think Matt clarified his question I don't know whether that makes sense but oh right I read online someone lost their high number of organic lights and they paid for an ad and then afterwards the lights dropped massively let me say that's my question okay I mean you know I don't know about that specific instance it sounds unusual I would say especially where someone's got to go in and take the action to actually unlike that page I don't know why an ad that's set to increase things and build things would have a negative effect like that I'd really have to have some more detail on it but it's unusual I wouldn't panic or worry about something like that happening do you still recommend Facebook pages the engagement seems extremely low even for pages with millions of followers you're absolutely right Lugna it's an absolute pain because growth is very tricky on Facebook for a business page it's not designed for businesses to promote themselves and get customers you know it's very much a people consumer based platform they want your money but they're not very good at helping you grow your following so again I would say yes you need a presence I would spend more of your strategy and time on the platforms that are generating a better return just to maintain that presence on there as part of the strategy overall and you just need to invest the time where it's right for you you know it's all about management how can you find the best time to post on Facebook and how do you use the page so the best time to post on Facebook if you've already got an audience and you go into your insights you'll be able to see when your customers most sites will be online and when they're most engaging with your content now the problem comes if that isn't your target audience as such you know if you've made a change and actually you're trying to reach a new or altered audience that data is obviously based on the followers that you've already got so I would say do some googling try and find some benchmarks for your industry and do it that way just be aware that you know that insight data you're looking at inside the platform is all based on the followers that you already have in terms of how to apply keywords to the page you can't really on Facebook to be honest it's just really about using them within the content it's not there isn't like you know a meta description area or anything like that it's just about using them in the about section in your posts in making sure your page is titled appropriately all of those things you can't really optimise it as such so yeah sorry if I confused you there but you can do that more so on Facebook or Instagram because you've got the hashtag usage there any other questions anybody want to unmute and ask something we do have the Q&A session as well at the end of the the series so if you suddenly think of anything after we've ended the session you could always join on to that and ask something there yeah would you say that due to the high number of Facebook ads people are leaving the site yes that's my preference isn't it you know I think a lot of the travel is where are quite adverse to saying yes to cookies on sites whereas actually that's going to serve you more relevant ads so and that's what people don't realise you know they think that they're going to be spammed with all sorts of things but actually you're going to be presented with things that are more relevant if you agree to those things so people might be leaving because I've had after the amount of advertising and it's just not a platform they're enjoying anymore but it's just we're on really personal preference you can turn things off to a certain extent you know within your settings so yeah cool okay well thank you so much we are nearly out of time anyway so I will let you all go get some late lunch thank you for joining us please sign up to this on the other sessions please utilise the free support it's on offer to you and connect with any of the digital champions that are on the programme they're all listed on the post capital sites and all of the recover and rise events are listed on event rights so thank you so much take care thanks Rachel yay I actually felt the time very pleased that was good loads of questions at that time people seemed really engaged yeah weird questions yeah some of them were a bit I'm actually connected with Vicky so don't worry I can check out some video tools in the centre today no worries lovely to see you again hopefully again soon alright have a good one see you next time alright see you later bye