 I should just start right here. Okay, it's just one minute. So can y'all see my presentation? Okay, great. So today I'm going to be talking to you about, I'm gonna share with you five tips for more engagement, but if you listen closely, you will get so much more. So the slideshows are gonna be available for you to download, so I want all your pretty eyes on me, right? Cause I really wanna make sure you get this so that you can get more engagement on your Facebook and the Twitter's so the kids will love you as well as your customers and all the other local businesses in your area. Cause I want them to know who you are and to do business with you. So I'll have rich friends, right? Okay, so we're gonna be up here. We're gonna focus and we're gonna go through this rather quickly cause I really wanna be able to ask questions. I feel like whenever I'm out, people really wanna know about social media. It's very, even though there's a lot of information, it's still very mystical. So for those of you who I haven't met, I'm Aisha Adams, I'm a blogger and I think why that is important is every tip that I'll give you, I've used it in my own blog. So I'm not just telling you things that I've read, I'm telling you things that I've read and learned and I try, these are tried and true tested things that I know work and so I think that's one of the things that makes me stand out and my business stand out is because I'm living this social media nightmare with you Boo. I'm here with you, we're connected on that journey. And so as a blogger, I was looking to expand my blog and I found that a great source of income would be to coach other people and show them what I was doing on my blog to be more successful. So I try things fail sometimes, succeed sometimes and then I bring those things back to my customers. So we have five essential tips. They're really easy tips but we're gonna go deep in these tips in these 15 minutes. The first one is launch. The first thing you have to do is launch campaigns for your business. So your social media should be going every day, every day and I recommend from my experience I get the best feedback from my clients, customers and readers. When I'm at that six or seven times a day I really then get a lot of engagement without paying any money because people begin to look for my content regularly. They're like, she's posting, I'm bored, let me see what's up, right? So if you're posting seven times a day every day then people begin to rely on you. They wanna know what you're talking about at lunchtime or what you're talking about at dinnertime or what you're talking about at breakfast or stuff like that, right? So if you're like a blogger but in a business, if you're sharing your customer's successes, your transformational stories, if you're sharing all the great things that's happening in your business, if you're highlighting your customers then your customers feel connected to your business in a way. So you have to even as a business share out seven times a day much like normal people who share their breakfast, you wanna share what your employees are getting from you, what value they're getting from you, what they're learning, how they're enjoying their work, the positive aspects of your work. And if you're going to work 40 hours a week in your companies or you have your employees for 40 hours a week, surely you can find seven things to share a day. Surely you can. So you wanna launch a social media campaign. The next thing you wanna do is post more. And that's the six to seven times a day but not just post more, not empty posts, deep posts, post that matter, post that get people talking, post that get people engaged. A lot of my posts are questions because I wanna know more about the people I'm communicating with. So I started this small test. I asked people, apple juice or orange juice and I would get like a hundred comments. And that's when I discovered people like talking about themselves. And because people like talking about themselves, if I can get them to talk about themselves and my product, score, win, we all are winning, right? So you wanna make sure when you're posting more, you really are posting more interactive posts, more posts that speak to your customer, more posts that inform about your product, you really wanna post more. The next piece is gonna be added value. You really wanna add value in your posts. So let's talk about what it's like to really be on Facebook. So Sunday mornings, I call my mom, like, hey, what you doing? She's like, nothing, I'm like, good, get on Facebook. This is literally how I experienced Facebook. I'm like, did you see what she had on? I'm like, mom, did you see, like we literally experienced Facebook together on Sundays because we have to catch up on all the gossip, right? And I noticed that we then started sharing products because my mom lives in Alabama, so we don't get to be together every day. So she's like, yeah, I tried this new lotion here, here's the brand. So that exchange causes people to talk. Like if you look around the room, I was looking now and I'm like, we're so spread out. But really social media is about us being close together. So in order for us to get closer together, the only thing we can do is talk more, add more value, have rich, deep conversations. I really think running a business is like having a boyfriend. It's a lot of work. And it is definitely about adding value, giving more, like, isn't that what marriage is like? You just give yourself over and over and over again? I mean, that's what my marriage is like. So you just give yourself over and over and over again. And that's the same thing you guys do in your business. Right? And then the fourth tip is respond. And the fifth tip is adjust. So now we're gonna go deep into each subject. So when I say launch, this is what I mean. And if you caught my talk earlier, we talked a little bit about this. So I'm gonna use this example again. So we talked about how at Walmart, they follow us on a journey. They send us on a journey. Like you go on Walmart and you're like, it's Christmas already. Cause they pull all the Christmas stuff up. Or you go in and you're like, it's Valentine's Day already. Cause they are planning their stuff on a retail calendar. Right? As small business owners, you have to launch your products through your social media on a retail calendar. Right? So you have to launch. And you're gonna be sharing every day these six or seven times a day that we talked about. But now you're running a sale on websites. That's an individual campaign. That campaign needs a goal that matches with your other business goals that you have in your business. So that it's not just something that's floating over here in the air that doesn't matter. It needs to be tied into your goals. But also, it needs to be distinguishable. How do we do that? We add a logo. We use the same colors. We do something different to show this is a group of posts. And my outcome is to get six conversions with websites, three conversions with websites from these six posts. And well, this one post a day or two posts a day to be integrated into those seven posts. Does that make sense? Is everybody following me? Okay, good. So you wanna do that. You want to make sure that you launch on a retail calendar. Because that's how people buy. School starting back. Back to school sale. Right? How many people do you know? Like I'm starting college. I'm gonna do a blog for my college years. Back to school blog sale. Right? How many designers I have in the room? You're going to be right. Back to school sale, I have slideshows that I have to do. I need templates. Back to school sale. Teachers, back to school sale. I need cool plugins, cool things that work for me in my classroom that make it more effectively for me. So you definitely have to ensure that you are launching on a retail calendar. If you need a retail calendar, you should be able to find one online. I definitely have one in my digital store, but you can create your own by going into your customer's journey and finding out which holidays are important to them. The next thing I told you was we were gonna talk about posting more. I find that when I meet a business owner who is extremely frustrated about the number of sales, we have to have this conversation. Did you ask anybody to buy? Did you ask? I meet so many business owners. They're like, I do all the things. I got the Facebook, I got the website. I went to the networking event, but you didn't tell anybody what to buy, so you actually have to ask people to buy more. You have to ask, because I'm just not gonna throw money at you. We are not in a strip joint. I'm going to need to know what you want me to buy, right? And I need to know what I'm gonna get exchanged for my money, because this is not a throwing money situation. This is business, right? So it's really important for you to make sure you're asking people to buy more. You're sharing more consistently. You have more content on diverse platforms. And when I say more content, you cannot do this. Do not connect your Facebook to your Instagram or your Twitter and share the same information across three platforms. You come across lazy. You come across not ready. So you have to post diverse content on diverse platforms. I have a formula for that if you need a cheat sheet and you want to talk to me about it, I'm happy to share it, but please don't share the same picture all across, because if I follow you on all three platforms, it feels like spam. I've never heard anybody say that in a conference and I've always wanted to tell people. Add value. I think the most wonderful thing a person can do in life, business or not, is add value to other people's lives. I feel like that is really where we grow as people and that's what makes life beautiful, is because we are able to add value to other people's lives. So in your social media, you have to add value. What do I mean by that? If I go on like a teetic social media site, I can stay on there for hours. Like literally, not even know what happened to the day, because I started watching this one talk about evolution and then I started watching this talk about love and then I started learning about brain science. So I'm on there and I'm consuming content. I'm eating it like it's soul food, right? Because it's good content and I can go on that Facebook page and be there all day. Another good example is HuffPost. You can go on their social, you can be there all day. They have such great content. Why are people coming to your site? What makes them stay there? What makes them come back every day? What makes them say like, I need to see what this company is doing this morning, right? And the way that you do that is always add value. I like to be the statistics girl. Yesterday, there was actually one of the sponsors came up to me and she said, should businesses be using Twitter? And like, because I provide value on my website, I was like, I just read that 32% of Twitter users are 32% of Americans who make over $75,000 a year on Twitter is that you're a price range that you're looking for in your customer. But I knew that not because I'm a fancy dancy business person, but because I share value, I learn and it's valuable for everybody. So when I'm learning and reading and sharing value for my customers, I become a resource for them so they can be for their customers. And that's really what this thing is about. So I wanna make sure that you know you have to add value. Adding value does not mean giving away your products for free. You can talk all around your product and add value, okay? Because again, this is not a throwing money situation, but you wanna let people know that you're knowledgeable. So if they can go to your Facebook or your Twitter or your Instagram and get a lot of value from you, what I notice is they will come to you when it's time to spend money. The next thing is respond. This is like my number one social media pet peeve. It's a social pet peeve and it's a business pet peeve. So let's just talk about it. All of us got that friend where we like all of their statuses, we share, we comment and then they just don't do anything back, right? Businesses do the same thing. It's not cute. Like here's the thing, back in the day when I was growing up, you could be important. Like the world was like this. There were people at the top who were important and people at the bottom. We don't live that way anymore. We live in more of like a side-by-side society. Like anybody can get it. Rihanna, Beyonce, like we don't know. The world never knows who's in trouble. Like Twitter is on fire. People are in trouble every day. So you really wanna be sure that like you are responding and not just responding in like that automated way. Like you clicked on my site so now I gotta pop up that says hey, thanks for the letter. Like not that, we hate that. Nobody's telling you all that, but we actually hate it. I was on a post and it was like 10 things to be a better mom or something. And when I clicked it, it put me on a mailing list. I immediately unsubscribed, put a nasty note in the comments where all the other 30 comments and all of the other 30 comments were the same thing. We were all mad. We felt like it was clickbait. Don't do it. Make authentic time to connect with your customers in a way that builds relationships. And I know you're busy, but that 30 minutes that you're waiting on your child to get the blood test at the doctor's office, or that 30 minutes that you're standing in line at the tag company, or the 40 minutes you're on hold with your tech support, pull out your phone and engage with your customers. Ask them how their children are. Ask them how their business is going. Let them know that you're really there, not in just that automated way, but in a real way. I've learned people do business with people. That's who they do business with. So if you really want people to do business with you, you have to be a person. And this is the pro tip. This is the biggest tip. I should have put it in the slideshow. It should have been six tips. But my final tip that I really wanna talk about before we take any last questions or anything is this. You can be on social media all day, every day. There are people who get on social media, they get a million followers and they live happily ever after. The statistics of that happening to one person in here is so low. It's like minuscule. So you gotta do the work, right? Like everybody can't be the type of person that connects with someone and then they are like, there's a million followers. You gotta do the work. So you have to do, your online campaigns, your online business have to show up in the real world. And that is something that we don't talk about enough in social media. So for example, you're doing an online crowd funder. You need an event, a live event to go with it. You get 10,000 followers on your Facebook. You need a live event to celebrate. You have to connect your online to your offline or it's fake. Let's say you have a digital business and you only do digital courses. You're looking for talks live so you can connect more people to your digital talks because you have to connect with people. It is the same for every industry. You cannot be behind the computer. You, we gotta know you. Like that's the new thing, right? Like I have to know who you are, what you're about. I mean, I kinda wanna know like who you invest with, who's invested in you. Is your business eco-friendly? I wanna know all these things about you. So I need you to be a real person. And I think those are the best tips for social media in 2018. Posting a lot, sharing good information, connecting with people honestly, like seriously connecting with them, caring about your customers, caring about their journey and providing it through that online platform is super important. And you also like another tip that I have just because I'm standing here and I have a minute is like take a stance. Take a stance in the world. Don't just show up, like I know a lot of people, they're scared for their business to take a stance. They're like, don't wanna stand up for LGBTQ rights. Don't wanna stand up for environmentally conscious. Like pick something, stand up, your customers will love you for it. They'll support you and you will make the world a better place and that will be awesome for you, your business and the world. Like pick something to stand on. Don't try to be like, a lot of people are like, I'm on social media. Everything needs to be perfect. Before I can put up a video, I need to back, like just pick something, do it. That's really the best tip that I have. Does anybody have any questions? We got like three minutes for questions.