How to grow your online business with Social Media in 2021 … If you want to pivot your business in this current situation and profit with the time you have as either a freelancer who really needs some social media content tips to boost your business, or if you’re thinking about starting your own online business, this article is going to be for you. And right at the end, I will reveal an exciting FREE challenge to help you get started in putting these ideas into practice to help you truly pivot to profit.
What is one of the things that everybody who is in business or who wants to grow their business, or who wants to launch their business should be doing, but not many people are doing it at all … that results in no clients, no booking or and no sales?
CONTENT
Content is absolutely every where today. Love it or hate it, it is everywhere and that is because it is another means of the huge communication vessel that runs within and around each and every one of us. And in a sense, it is the life vein of your business. Why? Because content today in 2021 is your marketing. And if you don’t do it, or if you don’t do it well, it can have an absolute catastrophical effect on your business or your positioning within the marketplace, which you are hoping to truly saturate and dominate.
How to find your ideal clients using Social Media
Here are a few things to help you find your ideal client and that is going to start with looking at the things that you should be doing to be creating good content. But before we do that, we’re going to have a look at a lot of the mistakes that people are already doing when they think they are creating what they think is ‘good content’ so that you can identify what those mistakes are and pivot around them.
The first thing people do when they think about creating content for their social media channels is to just put out anything as long as it content. How often have you said to yourself or heard others say: “Oh, I must post something on social media … I must post on Insta or on Facebook, or I must just do a live or I must just do something because it’s just going to help the algorithm, no matter what I do!” Well, sorry to have to inform you but social media just does not work like that. It may be a machine hungry for content but the competition is vast and that is why social media platforms and search engines like Google each have their own systems for what content should be seen, what is likeable and what is viral!!!
Today you can’t just throw any old graphics together with a headline and hope that will bring clients to your door. Today you need a lot more than that.
Content must have purpose - why?
If your content is not working for you and people aren’t contacting you or contacting your business, it’s as simple as this, your content has no purpose. The idea of putting out content is that it has purpose, it really is a MUST HAVE and if it’s not converting, the purpose isn’t there.
So if this is the case for you, you need to start thinking about what you’re actually doing in your content when you are creating it, but don’t worry we’re going to have a look at some of the things you can do to pivot this.
The idea of putting out content, creating content, whether it be Instagram posts, static posts, Facebook® lives, Reels, YouTube, Pinterest, blogs …. anything that you do and put on social media is content.
Whatever you are doing, your prime goal should be to support the three E’s, which are to educate, to entertain and engage. But within you you also need a fourth element that is intrinsically linked and embedded skilfully into these three elements and that is a conversion function that is linked within that language used. This is necessary to start converting viewers and scrollers into clients. So now when you are thinking about creating your content, your content should now have a purpose as the main structure communicated through the 3 e’s along with the call to action. This is the winning structure to help you pivot to profit. So you have to have a complete structure and a strategy within every piece of content that you have.
How to increase engagement on Social Media
Watch your language!
Some ideas that you could also do to increase engagement rate is have a call to action. Now, sometimes people get the kind of call to action so wrong. They go OTT (over the top) on it and it then becomes really spammy. An example of this would be: link in bio, click here, and all of these words actually, or trigger words. And if you’re on the Digi-teach email list last week, we sent out a lovely little ebook on the words not to do on Facebook and Instagram in particular, when you’re posting, even just using your post words, because they are picked up by the bots and then your posts either get taken down or the view, the reach in reduced. So in a sense, it’s just pointless. Don’t use them. But here a few incase you missed getting our FREE ebook. (shame on you you should be a website subscriber by now!)
Trigger words to avoid when posting on Social Media
Avoid using: FREE, Freebie, Giveaway, Deal!
Use these words instead: Don’t wait on this one, make your wallet happy, Make every penny count.
Avoid using: Like us, Share, Join our Comment, Like this!
Use these words instead: Subscribe, Save this, Tag a friend
Be original - Stop copying viral posts
The second point is that so much content looks the same. Now this is a little bit of naivety because some freelancers are not creatively minded and look at therefore look at what other people are doing and matter it which results in a lack of meaningful content and a lack of correlation between the educational, the entertaining and the engagement relevance to your business. And the second point is when lots of people are constantly searching for a viral posts because they think, if they create a viral post then they are going to become an overnight millionaire. Well it doesn’t really work like that either.
Social media algorithms are intelligent and they’re always changing how their algorithms work so that people really can’t fix the system – for obvious reasons. But the idea, the idea of making sure that you don’t seem the same as everybody else is by doing these three things.
How to be yourself on Social Media and WIN
Number one: Be yourself and stand out, stand up and be counted. Don’t try to be like everybody else. Don’t try to say what everybody else is saying. Don’t keep looking at what everybody else is doing in your niche and copying it because you think that’s type of thing to do. You shouldn’t be copying anyway. But sometimes when people are new it’s with their own online businesses, or they’re not seeing lots of growth and they see other businesses have a similar, a similar niche grow in, they think, Oh, I’m just going to do that. It worked for them so it MUST work for me! However everyone is different. We all have our own secret sauce of authenticity.
People are often attracted to a business or a brand or the business owner because of their uniqueness. That in itself is what makes it stand out. So think about that.
What can you do to make your content stand out? For example, people buy from Digi-teach because it is built on real professional expereinces. From people that have all been at one point where you are now. Wanting to start a business online and be successful at it. We also keep on top of the current trends and consult and train in leading industry techniques to help freelancers and small business owners. We have made it our business to help people create, launch and grown an online business because that is what we do best.
What equipment do you need to create your own content on Social Media?
If you are looking for a great long list of ‘must have’s for the equipment needed to create your own content on social media, you are going to be disappointed. You can create everything with a decent phone and a decent graphic design app. Our recommendations would be an iPhone and Canva.
With an iPhone you can record videos and take pictures to a really high standard. You can even edit videos on the phone itself. The voice recording on the iPhone is good enough to record podcasts on or any vocal content you wish to pursue.
What is Canva and what can I use it for?
Canva is an amazing online graphic app. You can use it on your phone and also on desktop or laptop. You can create everything on Canva from social media posts, to short animated videos, ebooks and workbooks and even online courses. It is FREE but the premium version is only $10 a month and is well worth it as you get lots of stick images and icons too. It really is worth a lot more than this. Canva is the alternative graphic design tool for those that don’t want to use something like Adobe photo suite. The difference between the too is firstly price. Adobe suite is about $45 a month and Canva is $10 a month. You can do a lot more with Adobe but it is also a professional Graphic design and Photo / Film editing suite so if you have no experience in that, there will be a bit of a steep learning curve. But it is totally possible.
Don't be a ghost poster!
As you have probably guessed by now engagement is everything if you wish to build a successful Social media profile or profiles that start really working for you, bringing you in clients and helping yo get bookings and sales on autopilot. We all want people to engage with our social media posts but what about you? How often do you engage on posts or are you a ghost poster?
What’s a ghost poster?
A ghost poster is someone that posts on social media and then leaves. To really find your tribe on Social media it is hard and harder still when facebook admins in particular, seem to ban or delete any posts that stop them making a commission fee or sale somewhere and this is why optimising your social media profiles and then going into groups and pages and engaging on posts is so important. It is really important that you don’t spam in your comments but you can leave lots of useful and helpful comments. People are always curious on social media and will often go check out a profile of the person that has been posting. So this could really help you in two ways:
1) You are contributing to a post and improving engagement.
2) You are then multiplying the effects of that post for your own business when those people then start interacting with you on Social media.
Most Social Media Managers are tasked with engaging and responding on Social media platforms, it’s part of their job role and now perhaps you can see why. Human engagement even on Social media can never be replaced by apps, programs or software.
Mix up your content
The next mistake people often make when using Social media for their business is to just stick to the same platform as well as posting or creating content in the same way. This is a massive, massive mistake.
I often hear lots of people saying, ‘Oh, my ideal clients are only on Instagram or my ideal clients are only on Pinterest,’ but again it doesn’t work like that. It really, really doesn’t work like that.
People learn in lots of different ways and people consume in lots of different ways. For example, I like to read blog posts, but I don’t read them all the time.
I also like to go on Tik Tok but I don’t go on it everyday. I like to go on Instagram, I like going on Facebook.
I also like Pinterest. I go on Reddit. I go on lots of different platforms and I spend about two to three hours a day on different platforms. (Yes a lot os for research and engagement purposes) but the point is this, if you’re only putting out and creating content for one platform in one way, you are massively reducing your outreach.
What you want to be doing is using these platforms to actually multiply your reach.
For example just like my example earlier, some people love reading blogs. Some people hate it. Some people like watching tech talks, some people hate it. Some people love scrolling through Instagram and reels. Some people hate it. Some people like to go in Facebook groups and some people hate it. You get the idea.
So you really have to diversify and realize when you’re posting and creating content for your business, you’re actually doing it for your business therefore you need to mix up the content and try multiple platforms, especially at the start.
How to start using Social media to convert secret scrollers!
The next thing you have to do is to actually start converting those scrollers into clients. So when they come onto your social media, where is your call to action?
A call to action is an inbuilt process within your communication that prompts people seeing your content to take an action that leads them to more of your content.
What could that be?
Is it a website?
Is it a lead page?
What is it?
All of these things are really, really important as they allow you to directly connect with the person seeing your content. The reality of this is that that person who was a silent scroller is now going take action, engage with your content and consume (hopefully) more of your content.
If they do that, it’s a good sign that 1) They are interested in your content.
2) Your content has a purpose which supports their need.
So the chances are they are more likely to invest more time in looking at your content until they buy one of your products or services. Then the process of content starts again but directed towards supporting more of their needs to that you can continue to help them and give them value.
If this article was helpful to you. Consider subscribing to the FREE Pivot to Profit Challenge to help you put more of these ideas into practice.
