Holy moly, it is episode 52! Do you know what that means? That means that we have been publishing this vlog, the #GetSocialSmart show for one full year. I am so fired up. If you joined us from the beginning of our journey, we sure appreciate it. If you’re just joining us right now, welcome, welcome!
In our very first episode I shared my sort of simple setup and I kind of jokingly said, “Oh, we’ll see where we’re at a year from now” and let me just say, equipment wise, yeah, I’m using the same equipment I was using a year ago. I’ve got my iPhone. I’ve got my tripod. I’ve got a simple microphone. I’m sitting in front of a window. Before I get into the topic of today’s episode, I just want to say that if you’re thinking about content and you’re thinking about video, do not wait. You don’t have to have all your ducks in a row, just do it now. Nike said it best, “Just do it”. Don’t suffer from analysis paralysis. If I would have waited until I had all the fancy equipment, the fancy green screen and everything, we would not still be here. That was my quick message before I get into the meat of today’s post.
In today’s video we’re going to talk about how to create a social media roadmap. I have five simple tips for you to think about today.
Number one: Plan ahead. The whole reason I was able to create 52 episodes is because back in December of last year, we basically planned out the next 52 weeks. Now some of you might be thinking, “Oh my gosh. I don’t even know what I’m having for dinner tomorrow night, let alone the 52 weeks. How in the heck do you do that?”
The way that you plan out 52 weeks of content is you shut down your phone, you shut down your laptop, you get a piece of paper or a spreadsheet or however you work best and you brainstorm things that you get asked all the time.
Think about things that you answer over the phone, your email, what are simple topics that have to do with your business, with your market, with your area that you know that you can bring great value.
Of course, things can change and we move around things and things like that but that’s number one is how do you get that social media roadmap. It’s not just social media for the sake of posting, it’s content. And we can’t talk about how to create a social media strategy and not talk about content, right? That’s the name of the game.
If you want to stand out in 2018 and beyond when it comes to social media, you can’t just set it and forget it, you can’t just hire someone to post everything for you. You have to think about what type of content are you going to create that’s going to tell the story of what it feels like to work with you.
By the way, I’m saying this and I’m assuming you’re going to create one piece of content each and every week. While I’m not promoting this, well, we have found that that cadence tends to work really well. I’ve done it where I’ve just done it once a month. I’ve also done it where I’ve created like three or four things every single week, which is a lot. And we’ve found that once a week is a great balance to keeping things fresh and updated and it also allows you an opportunity to slice and dice that content and repurpose it and really promote across your multiple platforms.
The second thing to think about with your social media roadmap is what type of content are you going to create with that roadmap, with those 52 weeks of content? If you have a blog and your own website and you like to blog, you might decide to blog. I would guess for most of you, for a lot of you, you probably don’t consider yourself writers, you may not have a blog on your website. I would highly encourage you to think about video content when it comes to content.
We really stepped up our game last year and instead of just providing blog content each and every week, I said, “You know what? I’m going to practice what I preach. We’re going to do video content”. That’s exactly what we did for the last 52 weeks.
Again as I said in the beginning, you don’t need a fancy setup. Do you have a phone? Probably yes. Probably you’re watching this on your phone. So start there. Start with either video content or Facebook Live content. Those are two of the easiest places that you can start. The hardest part of video content is getting over yourself. Getting over how you look and how you sound and everything that we think about psychologically when it comes to video. As a good friend once told me, “Katie, that’s how you look and that’s how you sound”, right, “You’ve got to get over that part of it”.
The third tip I’m going to give you to plan out your social media roadmap is commit to what day you are going to publish. I cannot tell you how important this is. When I started blogging, maybe a decade or so ago, this was one of the biggest tips that a big mentor gave me. He said, “Pick a day and stick to it, whether it’s Fun Friday or Tip Tuesday or whatever it might be. Pick a day”. And we’ve been doing that with our #GetSocialSmart show. We’ve been publishing every Wednesday. Now that might change for whatever reason as time marches on. But as of right now, that’s when we publish.
Being consistent, it’s huge. It helps you because it will get you into the rhythm and it also helps build your following. Because people come to expect, “Hey, so and so’s going to be broadcasting every Wednesday morning” or “every Friday morning” or whatever that might be.
Number four: Have a promotion schedule. Well what I mean by that is once you have your big piece of killer content, you have got to have a list of what you are doing with that piece of content because the biggest mistake most people make is they create a video or Facebook Live and then they don’t promote it so they only promote it once and then they’re like, “I didn’t get a lot of traction from it”.
You want to have a complete checklist of how many times you’re going to share it to Facebook. Is it going to be one time this week? One time again in three months? One time six months from now? How often are you going to tweet it? Are you on LinkedIn? Are you going to share it on LinkedIn? You can upload your video to LinkedIn. Are you going to boost it by $10, $20, $50, whatever your Facebook budget might be.
You want to have a checklist and I would recommend 10 to 15 things that you’re going to do every single time you have a video.
Now, here’s the good news. If you have a small team or an assistant, someone who can help you with some of that, that’s where that outsourcing part could definitely come into place, right? If you have a great assistant or someone that you’re working with who can help on the promotion side of things, that can help you big time. And that way it frees up your time to do what you do best, to create the content. Because nobody can replace what’s up here. But you can always get a little bit of help when it comes to the posting and things like that. You just want to make sure that whoever is helping you has a sense of what type of content, where they’re going to post it, they have a sense of your brand, your language, your tone, all of that good stuff.
The last piece of your social media roadmap is figure out your budget, especially with Facebook Ads. If you ask Facebook how much to spend, they’re going to say, “Well, how much do you want to spend”, right, “You want to spend hundreds of dollars, thousands of dollars?”
I would recommend that now is the time to really double down on your Facebook Ads. If you’ve only been spending $5 or $10 on a Facebook Ad, now is really the time to crank that notch up a little bit and start spending $20 to $30 on doing things like boosted posts and Facebook Ads. Because when you start to double down on your Facebook Ads, you will see an exponential growth in the amount of people who are seeing your content, especially with video and Facebook Live Ads. And we’ve got a whole module inside of our #GetSocialSmart Academy that talks all about this, about targeting and budgeting and all that good stuff.
There is so much we could talk about when it comes to Facebook Ads. But you have to have a budget. Don’t make it just sort of a haphazard, “Oh, yeah, by the way, let’s boost this” but really thinking through what that budget might be. And maybe that means taking a little bit of your budget from other pieces. Maybe you’re doing some print marketing or newspaper ads or post cards and if those aren’t converting for you, if those aren’t working well, consider taking $50 or $100 from that budget each month and putting that towards Facebook Ads. As of the recording of this video, Facebook is getting noisier than ever before. So to stand out from the competition, to generate the leads in business that we want from social media, it’s really two things. It’s consistent, relevant, great content and number two, putting a little bit of money behind that.
Alright. I know this video is a little bit longer than you’d usually expect from the #GetSocialSmart show but we want to make this a special episode, really dive in, give you some great meaty tips.
As always, if you have any questions, leave them in the comments below. We would love if you’d like, comment and subscribe. If you’re not subscribed to us on YouTube, we would love if you subscribe to us on YouTube.
Thanks again for an amazing year – we’ll see you in 2018!
