Love it or hate it, these days being on social media is a must, especially if you run a business as a solopreneur.
It feels like centuries have passed since the advent of LinkedIn, a platform for uploading CVs (2003), or Facebook, a platform for networking with friends (2004).
Since then, the world has shrunk. With a single click, we can reach out to people on the other side of the planet. We constantly discover new realities, different cultures, and fresh ideas. New and evolving social media platforms enable us to engage with larger audiences than ever before. This is a dream situation for anybody who runs a business.
However, not everybody is techno-savvy, and as a solopreneur, you have to juggle different aspects of your business. There are constant calls on your time, and it’s easy to get overwhelmed.
First, you have to choose the right platform. Which one is the best showcase for your business? Then there’s the question of how often you should post, followed by what you should post.
Each platform has its own set of rules and conventions and its own collections of weak points and strong points. You have to sort out what is what if you want the best results.
You have two possible solutions: post randomly on a few social media platforms and hope for the best, or pay somebody to sort all this out for you. The latter option doesn’t come cheap.
This was what I was faced with when I started using social media. Budget-wise, I didn’t have much to spare. If I wanted to tell other people that I could help them with their businesses, I needed to sort this tangled mess of communication out.
I needed to identify the social media platforms where my target audience preferred to hang out.
Then I needed to understand exactly what it was they were looking for. Were they looking for new ideas? Were they searching for answers to their problems? Were they seeking more information?
I came up with something like this (you can download it here)
In my particular case, I chose three different platforms: Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
Then came the tricky question of how many times each week I should post, and on which day. Unfortunately, there’s no simples answer to this. It’s more a case of try-it-and-see. What’s most important is to be consistent about when you post, both the day of the week and the time of the day. To get an idea of when your content is likely to reach the largest proportion of your audience, it’s advisable to do some trying out.
Post regularly on a specific day of the week at a certain hour. Then, after a couple of months, change the day and the hour. After a couple more months, check the stats to see if the change has made any difference.
It can be helpful to check similar businesses with high numbers of followers to see when they post and what they post.
There’s no magic rule you can apply to this, just patience and perseverance!
But what if you simply don’t have the time to spend each week doing all that posting? This was a problem for me, too.
There are available different platforms that offer a solution. They offer a single place where you can upload all your posts for various social media at once.
You can choose the month, day, and time when each post will appear. This comes in handy when planning your content strategy or media campaigns.
Don’t be put off by the technicalities. The majority of these platforms are quite similar. What does differ is the layout and the number of social media platforms they cover.
The time spent understanding how they work will be repaid later when you’re free of the burdensome anxiety of planning your social media strategy.
I’d suggest trying a few of them out before committing to any paid plan.
Here are ten awesome platforms you can try (in alphabetic order):
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