VIDEO RECORDING:
https://youtu.be/hf9GQKfSELs
RELATED LINKS:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/balancedbusinessleaders
https://linktr.ee/liminalclarity
https://www.liminalclarity.com/podcasts/
TRANSCRIPT:
Hello everyone, welcome to the Balanced Business Leaders Podcast hosted by yours truly, Claire Jones, owner of Liminal Clarity. We are a business development agency that helps small business leaders scale and grow without burning out.
This is the next podcast in a series where we will be discussing the various trials and tribulations that lead me to creating my Three Pillars of Business Success, a framework that represents the foundational systems that contribute to sustainable business growth.
If you’re interested in learning more, please join us in our free Balanced Business Leaders Facebook Group at facebook.com/groups/balancedbusinessleaders.
Ready? Alright, let’s dive in.
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So I started this podcast as a way to tell my story, particularly when it comes to the many, many different lessons that I have learned over the years when it comes to founding, developing, running, and growing small businesses.
This particular episode is about Content Creation, because you need to know how to craft content that is formatted ideally for each platform that you use.
So why is creating content important? Because you need to tailor your content so that it is best suited for each of the individual platforms that you’re posting to. Whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, videos, or emails, there are best practices for each and, in order to maximize your impact, you need to tailor the content for each.
I didn’t realize the importance of this when I was first starting out, I thought that I could just create one piece of content and copy and paste it into every platform without changing anything.
But, if you have potential customers and clients who follow you on multiple platforms - say they follow you Instagram, Facebook, and are signed up for your email newsletter list - then, they’re going to get tired of the repetition and unfollow you on some of those platforms. Because they might think that there’s no use in following you on multiple platforms if they’re not getting any added value from those additional platforms.
How often you post on each of the platforms is also important to consider, the audiences on each of the platforms have different viewing and consumption habits from platform to platform so you can actually streamline your time by posting more strategically.
Because you don’t actually need to post on every platform every single day, so that saves you time and energy in the long run.
And, after you’ve figured out what platforms are best for your target demographic - something we talked about in a previous podcast in this series - then you can save even more time and energy by just focusing on the platforms that will provide you with the highest quality returns.
What’s the point of posting on Instagram every day if your ideal audiences aren’t even on Instagram? That’s just wasted time and effort.
So, today, I’m going to focus on the top 3 online platforms: Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn - and what kinds of content works best for each platform, starting with Facebook.
Your personal Facebook page is going to be primarily for your personal friends and family, people who are in your close network. There are some social media experts out there who advocate for using your personal profile to “friend” potential customers and clients, which works to some extent, but I find that it tends to alienate people at the end of the day. Because:
(1) You run into the issues of Facebook restrictions. Facebook really doesn’t want you doing business from your personal profiles, so they’ve actually put a limit on how often you can post business links on your personal page. The limit is 30%, so if your business posts exceed 30% of your total posts on your personal page, your personal page will be marked as spam by Facebook, and
(2) You run into the issue of people feeling spammed if you only friend them on your personal page in order to pitch to them. There’s a trend out there of people friending people who they think might be potential customers and clients, then they add them to all kinds of facebook groups, events, pages, etc. without even taking the time to talk to them and get to know them. The people who do this are only concerned about their numbers, they’re not concerned about the quality of their Facebook relationships, and it makes people feel objectified and depersonalized.
So my recommendation is that you keep your personal Facebook profile only for close friends, family, and your close networks - like people in your network groups with whom you’ve developed trusted relationships.
The content that you post on your Facebook personal profiles is going to be content about you, content that builds credibility and familiarity, content that showcases you as an imperfect, lovable, warm human being.
And you want to focus on posting to your personal Facebook profile at least once a week, if not more.
When it comes to Facebook business pages, on the other hand, this is where you provide more professional content or business-oriented content. Although, we're not focused on pitching all the time here. Think about using a 10 to 1 ratio with your content - 10 pieces of content that are educational, provide value, build your credibility, and then one piece of transactional promo. Transactional promo is basically a post that says “give me money for this thing.”
Again, we’re focused on building the know, like, and trust factor with all of our content. So use that 10 to 1 formula to make sure that people get the chance to know, like, and trust you outside of your transactional pitching, outside of your sales tactics.
When it comes to Facebook business pages versus Facebook groups, business pages are not going to get as much engagement as groups. Because when people like your business page, Facebook’s algorithm does not naturally show a lot of your business page content in their personal newsfeeds - unless they interact with your business page content consistently and continually.
Whereas with Facebook groups, group members will automatically get a notification every time something is posted to the group - unless they opt out of the group notifications. So that’s why Facebook groups get a lot more engagement than Facebook business pages - there’s a much higher chance of the group content reaching the group member’s newsfeeds than your business page content.
So think of business pages as kind of like a brochure, think of them as a website that you update every now and then. You really don't have to post there that often, maybe once or twice a week at minimum. Basically, you’re just posting on your Facebook business page to show the world that your business is still alive and kicking.
Moving onto Instagram:
Again, Instagram personal profiles are going to be for your friends and family, maybe potential clients but I highly recommend that you keep your Instagram personal profile private. Keep it kind of close to the heart and maintain it for your inner circles because you can use your Instagram business profile for all the business stuff. So I highly recommend that you keep your Instagram personal profile private and then have an Instagram business profile where you post all of your business content.
Keep in mind that Instagram is an image-based platform, so your Instagram content is typically going to have less text than your Facebook content. And for all of your content across the board, you want to include a Call to Action, which is typically an invitation to your viewers to do something after reading your post. This could be encouraging them to sign up for your newsletter list, it could be inviting them to visit your website, it could be asking them to sign up for your group program - you are calling them to take a certain action.
Also because Instagram is primarily an image-based platform, people typically don’t like to read through big blocks of text in your captions. Instagram users are usually scrolling through their feeds at a fairly rapid rate and don’t want to get slowed down by big paragraphs of text. They want to be able to scan your content easily.
So that’s why it’s highly recommended that you provide paragraph breaks between sentences in your post captions, but unfortunately Instagram does not make this easy because it will sometimes reformat your caption as you publish the post.
However, there are awesome people out there who have figured out a work around to this issue - I personally use a handy dandy tool called IG Caption Line Break Maker. If you write your caption inside of this application, copy the text and then paste it into your Instagram post - the paragraph breaks will remain. It’s a bit of fancy coding that helps out a ton. I literally use it every day.
Alright, now let’s talk about hashtags. Hashtags are highly recommended on Instagram because they expose your posts to people who aren’t following your profile. So you get much wider exposure by using hashtags. There’s a limit of 30 hashtags per post, so it is typically recommended to use all 30 when posting but I encourage you to stick to hashtags that have at least 40,000 posts associated with it.
You will see, when you’re typing out a hashtag to include on a post, it will show you how many posts are associated with that particular hashtag and if there’s only a couple hundred, then it’s probably not a highly searched hashtag. Make sense?
And, again, for all content across the board - organic engagement is super important. So the more people that like and comment on your posts, the more your post is going to show up in other people’s feeds. This is true on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. So always encourage engagement and always respond to comments on your posts.
Now, for LinkedIn, it’s going to be a lot more business-to-business focused for products and services and the upside about LinkedIn is that not a lot of people post on this platform regularly - I’ve even heard that 99% of LinkedIn users don’t post. So you’re going to be ahead of the curve if you post to Linkedin at least once a week.
Any post that you publish to LinkedIn is probably going to get more attention than posts that you publish to your Facebook business profiles, for example. Because the LinkedIn platform is a lot less saturated than the Facebook platform.
And, when it comes to personal LinkedIn profiles versus LinkedIn business pages - it’s not as important to keep these separate as it is on Facebook and Instagram. That’s because LinkedIn already has the expectation of being a professional platform, so you are going to want to keep your personal LinkedIn profile professional anyways.
However, if you have a larger company that has employees, then you will want to create a separate LinkedIn business page so that you can link all of your employee’s personal LinkedIn profiles to the business page to show that you are a robust company full of awesome people.
Just remember to keep all personal LinkedIn profiles very professional. People on LinkedIn aren't interested in seeing pictures of your dog, people aren't interested in seeing pictures of your kids, people aren't interested in your trip to the grocery store, so really keep your content on here professional and business-oriented.
Focus on sharing relevant articles or videos in your industry. It’s really more about networking versus building that know, like, and trust factor on a personal level. You’re still building a know, like, and trust factor - but you’re positioning yourself more as a trustworthy expert in your field.
And, when it comes to hashtags on LinkedIn, they’re not as valuable as on Instagram but they still make a difference in your potential exposure. So use them to some extent, but focus first and foremost, again, on organic engagement.
Always encourage likes & comments, and always respond to comments on your posts. Because the great thing about LinkedIn is that you have exposure to your connections’ networks. So if you are connected with a certain individual and they comment on your post - their connections will see their comment on your post even if they aren’t connected to you themselves. It’s a great snowball effect.
But keep in mind that you need to be very respectful of other people’s networks and connections on LinkedIn, it is highly recommended that you include some type of note when you request to connect with someone. Let them know how you found them, why you’re interested in connecting, basically give them context for your potential connection with them.
The moral of the story here is - Each platform has its own culture, just like every workplace has its own culture, so you need to get a feel for the standard norms before posting and interacting with others.
So next time, we’ll be going more in depth into the fifth step of Marketing Strategies, Content Management. I hope to interweave my personal experiences with the business lessons I learned along the way so that I can paint a full picture for you guys.
And please let me know what you think! I am always open to feedback and love connecting with my audiences.
If you want to learn more, I personally invite you to join us in the Balanced Business Leaders VIP Group Program. In as little as one hour per week, you will walk away with a clear action plan to grow and scale your business sustainably.
Please visit linktr.ee/liminalclarity for more information.
You can find the episode outline, video recording, transcript downloads, related links, etc. below.
And, until next time, love you all, take care, and I hope you have a good day wherever you are.
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