Have you ever struggled with creating a smart social media plan? Don’t worry. I can help. Today I want to share with you five simple steps for creating a smart social media plan.
Step #1, Audit Yourself. One of the things we do with a lot of our corporate clients when we’re doing corporate consulting is we do a social media audit. Now the word audit can feel a little nerve wracking. But one of the things we’ll do is we’ll pull up a client’s social media profile and we’ll look to see what is the low hanging fruit. Things that could get changed pretty quickly like is your cover photo updated, or maybe that link to your website’s broken, or maybe that paragraph where you wrote about yourself three years ago needs to get updated as well.
So what I would encourage you to do is take 10 or 15 minutes, open up different windows on your computer, open up your Facebook, your Instagram, your Pinterest, your Twitter all these different platforms that maybe you created at some point and just audit yourself. What you’re looking for is consistency in terms of your photo, in terms of text, in terms of the links that you have and that might also be an opportunity for you to possibly shut down or temporarily maybe disable some accounts that are there, but you’re not really using because maybe the lights are on, but nobody’s home. So that’s step #1.
Step #2, I want you to brainstorm who you want to work with. Who do you really want to work with? Who do you like to work with? This is an important step when you think of your social media strategy. A lot of times we say, “I can work with everybody. I can work with anybody.” It’s important to really think about who do you love to work with, because when you start to create content and post on social media consistently and you have those type of people in mind, the good news is you’re going to start to attract the people you want to work with and instead of chasing leads, you’re attracting the right type of clients. So brainstorm, who do you really want to work with and maybe who you don’t want to work with.
Tip #3, brainstorm content. Brainstorm content, this is one of the things a lot of people get really stuck on is what to post and here’s a quick tip. I would encourage you for the next 24 hours, every time you have a conversation with a client, every time you do something related to business, write it down. Have a little notebook handy. I did this recently and I came up with 10 new topic ideas because I was focused on just being inspired throughout my day. I was inspired by things I saw on social media, conversations I had with some of our Academy members, conversations with our team and when you look at your life as content, it’s amazing how many ideas you can come up with.
Step #4, commit to original content. Yup, that’s right. Commit to original content because guess what, in 2019 it’s not enough to just be on social media and post things for the sake of posting them. The agents and brokers that we see getting a lot of business from social media, one of the biggest things they’re doing is they’re creating original content. That could be recorded video, that could be Facebook live content, podcast content, blog content. The reason why this is really valuable is when you’re putting yourself out there, when you’re not just creating information but you’re putting yourself out there with your voice, with your opinion, that’s how people are really going to resonate with you. Again it goes back to this idea of attracting the people you want to work with versus just chasing leads. In addition to putting out original content, you’ve got to commit to consistency. Commit to a day each and every week or each and every month that you’re going to be consistent when it comes to that original content. And you want a big secret? The secret is, there’s no perfect day. Just pick a day and stick with it.
My last tip, tip #5 for creating a smart social media strategy, is repurpose your content. If you’re posting a great video each and every week, or each and every month, there’s no reason you can’t re-share that maybe a few days later or even a few weeks later, especially if you’re putting out content that’s evergreen or timeless. Content that’s valuable today but it’s also valuable in two, three, four, five months down the road. Most of the time we only post something to Facebook once and that’s it. We never re-share it. So think about how you can repurpose your content, re-share some of your content periodically, cross promote it on different platforms and really think about how you can slice and dice and make the most out of one piece of content. It’s a small thing that makes a really big difference.
I would love to hear from you. What are the biggest struggles you have when it comes to your social media strategy? Put your questions in the comments of the video.
If you’re struggling with your social media strategy, we would love for you to download your free copy of our content grid. We’ve had tens of thousands of agents download our content grid and it’s been the small thing that’s helped them tremendously when it comes to their business.
