Social Media Tips

One of the things as a small business owner, that is so challenging is creating our social media. Most of us, myself included, would love to outsource our social media.  I have some fantastic friends and contacts that are amazing social media creators, producers and managers. In the future, I will definitely be engaging some of their services to manage my social media. But for a lot of us, we’re not at a place where we can afford to do it, or that we’re not quite ready to turn over that control yet. But it’s super intimidating when you see all of these beautiful images and graphics that are created and posted all the time. You think “How are you even going to manage that? How are you even going to make those graphics look nice?  I don’t have the time to create, post and make it happen”.  We all have days where I don’t have time to post, or I don’t know what I’m going to post. That’s a big one for me. I know my message, but I don’t want to post the same thing all the time. I don’t want to post the same links, I don’t want to give you the same information.

So, I want to share some of my favorite tips and tricks and things that I use to create the social media that you see on my Facebook group, my Facebook page, my Instagram page, and on my LinkedIn. I use a mix of different tools depending on what I’m doing. Each platform is a little bit different.

First and foremost, if you have great content ideas, and you just need to make it eye- catching graphics, or you want to create a flyer or a brochure or any kind of marketing material for your business, you need to use Canva. Canva is a simple, easy to use graphic design software. Here is a link to check it out  https://sowlesconsulting.com/Canva (This is an affiliate link so I will get credit if you sign up with them)

Canva is what I used to create all of the graphics you see on all of my social media accounts.  It is also where I created my brochure, flyers for events, packages etc. Canva has a free version which is fantastic. I have used Canva for years for different things throughout my business and personal life. It’s really easy to create an account and try the free version. I just recently upgraded to the paid version, which is not expensive.  It lets me set my brand colors, fonts, logos, to use in all of my designs. But it gives me tons more of the images to use without worry of copyright violations. For me because I don’t have a huge photo library, and I don’t want to violate copyrights by publicizing a great picture I found on the internet, and then find out that it was copyrighted.  So Canva paid, you get all of the images that you’ve can see in the posts on my social media accounts and so much more.

Don’t be intimate about designing, Canva has lots of templates for all kinds of different designs. So all you have to do is add your text. Or you can swap pictures, and you can make it look your own. But if you don’t know what to do, you can say I need an Instagram post that will give you all the templates for Instagram posts. So its the right size, they have the right dimensions and all of the graphic technical stuff that most of us don’t want to know the details on. Canva does it for you. It makes it super simple so that they fit correctly, whether it’s LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, all different kinds of things.

Content ideas were another challenge for me.  I use two different content generation services that I really value. There is one called Quuu, https://app.quuu.co that my friend Joel Daniels introduced me to. I use the free version, and this is again, you have a free and a paid version.

It is fantastic for content generation. So when you set up your account, you select what content topics you would like to see.  I selected content on HR, business management, strategic management and customer service. Every day, I log into the Quuu, and it has six articles that are found, sometimes with the podcast, sometimes the blog post, sometimes it’s an article. The best thing about Quuu is it not only goes and finds the articles, it also populates part of or all of the text for the posts for you.  I use Quuu for my LinkedIn primarily. LinkedIn is a different style of platform than Facebook or Instagram for the most part. So it’s not as important to have the really super pretty graphics.When you’re using Quuu it will pull a graphic from the article, blog post or video and use that along with the words and it works really well.

What I also do because, I use Quuu primarily for LinkedIn, if this is a great article that I could create a graphic for, that would be really good for Facebook and Instagram,  I’ll copy the link and put it into a Google Doc to use later. I have a content creation brain dump,  thank you to Danielle Seay from GSD Professionals. She did a content creation workshop and gave me that framework of putting a Google doc that has sheets for hashtags, links, quotes that you want to use all in one place.   When I’m ready for a new contest for my other platforms, I can just go to my brain dump, grab it and create what I need to create.

I just recently discovered Feedly https://feedly.com/.   Feedly is another content creation generator. Again, Feedly has paid and free versions.  I started out with the free and got overwhelmed because it gives me so much information. Feedly reaches out to all kinds of publications. And you can specifically say I only want information from these specific magazines or newspapers or these sources. Or you can say I only want information on these specific topics. But you can also say I want to have a business feed.  I subscribed to and was pulling all of this information from lots of different sources.  It goes out to the New York Times, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Inc., Entrepreneur and so much more for the business feeds.  I was getting so much information. But it was like,I don’t know if I like this, it is too much. But then I’m trying the paid version. It’s been phenomenal because they have this filter AI that learns what you want to see by what you are saving. As a result it generates better and better and better content and filters out the thousands of articles. So, I’ll have 10 or 15 articles to look through.

The great thing about both Feedly and Quuu, they directly link to content schedulers. They both have a couple of different schedulers they link to.   The next part of what I am going to discuss will be content schedulers.

Now I’ve created my graphics, I’ve got all this great content coming towards me. I need some way to automate how I am posting so it doesn’t take up all of my time. I use a combination of three because I like them for different reasons. Buffer https://buffer.com/ is used primarily for my LinkedIn profile and page.  I use the free version of Buffer and it works perfectly. I love it. It lets you schedule up to 10 posts on each of 4 social media accounts. So, if you have a Facebook page and Instagram page or LinkedIn, or if you have a Twitter, Facebook page, Facebook group and Instagram, you can do any combination of four accounts and 10 posts for each account. And that’s the free version of Buffer. Quuu and Feedly can send posts directly to Buffer. You can like an article, you push a little icon and it goes over to your scheduler, like Buffer. You can set the days and times you would like things to post. So when you’re busy, or spending time with family, or you have meetings all day, you don’t know when you’ll get to post, you know, the post is done while you are doing more important things.   What I do, as I’m going through my Quuu and Feedly, I add posts to get 10. Then every day, or every few days, I go in, and I can fill that back up to 10. So I know I have essentially 2 weeks’ worth of at least one post every day, whether I have the time to make that post happen or not.

I also use another scheduler more to look at things, than post.   It is designed primarily for Instagram. It allows you to  post to Instagram and Facebook. That scheduler is called Plann https://www.plannthat.com.  I don’t use it as much as I did for a while. Thank you to Danae Sandoval for introducing me to Plann. Plann lets you see your Instagram grid. So you can plan out what your grid is actually going to look like when people see your Instagram page. You can make sure that you have a variety of posts but you also have a pattern so that your brand is displayed in a way that makes sense.  Plann is fantastic and is actually an app that works better on your phone, you can totally do it on the computer. I love Plann for the visual aspect. Because I use two other schedulers, I go into the Plann and look at what my grid actually looks like?

I just discovered another scheduler, Meet Edgar, https://sowlesconsulting.com/Meetedgar (This is an affiliate link so I will get credit if you sign up with them) that I really, really, really like. This I just recently discovered thanks to Haley Gray, who has been posting things in the Harmonious CEO Facebook group, and just did a build your tribe challenge for building a Facebook group. One of the nice things about Meet Edgar is when you create content it builds a library. This allows you to reuse posts. You create all of your wacky Wednesday’s, instead of having to recreate the same post every Wednesday and reschedule it. You can use the same post and just schedule it over and over and over. Well, the other thing that does is it lets you say I want a promo post on this day. I want a blog post on this day. I want a general post here. I want an inspirational post here. And it will go into your library and just pull posts. So if you haven’t generated new content, it will recycle posts that you’ve used previously.  You can also say,

I want to use one time and one time only. And it is probably one of the easier schedulers that I’ve used. It allows you to reuse some of your great informational posts when you haven’t had a chance to create new content.  Meet Edgar, I am falling in love with it. It does not have a free version. It’s not super expensive. I’m finding for some of the convenience features, the paid version is really worth it.

Full disclosure Canva and we advert Edgar I am signed up as an affiliate. So when you use those links to check those out and choose to do a paid subscription, I’ll get a credit back to my account.

There are also a ton of free workshops, webinars and tools to check out.

I love all of the tools that are available. And I love that most of them are free. And you can use the free versions until it makes sense to get the features that you really really want, which will make it easier.  I check out new and different tools all the time.

The right tools can save hours and hours and hours of time.

And if you have questions or want ideas, I really am happy to talk about it. I am by no means a social media expert.

I have some amazing contacts, amazing friends who are social media managers.  They can take your social media over for you.  They create the content, you give them guidelines that you want to work with, and they run with it. If you’re in a place in your business where social media is a time suck, and you are ready to connect with amazing portfolio managers, let me know I have some great contacts for you. I would love to connect you with them and not take social media off of your  plate. So it’s one less thing you have to manage.

But if you’re like me, and you’re not quite there yet, and you want to have a beautiful presence, you can use a scheduler to automate the process.  Spend a few hours batching weeks worth of posts and be done.

You still need to make sure you’re engaging and are taking the time to respond to people. If you have a post that really applies to someone in your sphere of influence, tag them in the post.

I wanted to help you create content, get the content out there without sucking all of the time, without seeming overwhelming.   These are all super easy tools to use. And I really hope everybody gets a chance to learn something new if you didn’t already use these tools.

I would love it if you would share your best social media tip. So drop it in the comments. What is your best social media tip or trick?