For many small business owners, Social Media Marketing is something they do as part of their day to day business rather than the only thing they during their day to day business
Whilst I do believe every business owner has time for Social Media, I understand that difficulties do arise at holiday season where business hours are often halved due to child care.
And of course we all deserve a break and some time away from the business
Managing your social media during the holiday season requires putting systems and plans in place so your social media continues as normal and your customers feel you are still open for business
1.DON’T WORRY – EVERYBODY ELSE IS IN THE SAME SCENARIO AS YOU
There’s a tendency with any small business owner to think they’re the only ones struggling
The reality is we’re all going through the same issues
Even as a social media marketing company when it comes to holiday’s, even we have the last minute panic of getting worked prepped before we head away for 10 days relaxation
The reality with social media is, when it comes to the holiday season
- Everybody is looking forward to their holiday
- Everybody has got family to look after
- Everybody wants to take off that one day a year in the UK we get some Sun
So don’t panic – because over the next 7 tips we’re going to make it easy for you
2. PLAN AHEAD BY DOING A TIME AUDIT
We all have time for Social Media and you can manage Social Media effectively in 30 minutes a day
So do a time audit of those spare moments you get free every day
And trust us – there will be moments where you can dip in for 5 or 10 minutes throughout the day
The moment the kids go in the shower, the time the kids go to bed, the 20 minutes you spend in the morning reading the newspaper, the 5 minutes you sit waiting for a meeting that is running late, the 30 minutes you catch up with the news at 6pm, the soap that you no longer like but watch out of habit
I’m not saying to work 24 hours a day – but find those pockets of time where you can dip in for social media engagement in the day. Your average 1 hour TV show will have around 10 minutes of advert breaks – that’s a perfect time to dip in and build stronger relationships with your target market
3. SCHEDULE UPDATES
It’s perfectly fine to schedule some of your social media updates
It’s not realistic to expect a small business owner to be tied to their computer or phone all day posting updates live
Corporates do it, small businesses do it and there are plenty of options from Hootsuite to Buffer to Tweetdeck to Sprout Social. Even Twitter and Facebook themselves have scheduling options for businesses
The key with scheduling is to punctuate it with real time updates in those gaps you freed up in your time audit and to still keep up the engagement and talking to people live
Also be mindful that joe public might not be aware you have scheduled updates – so when tragic events happen like Paris and Nice – be mindful of what you have scheduled in advance and log in and change and adapt
You don’t want to be scheduling “Isn’t everything wonderful today?” 2 hours after a terrorist attack has happened for instance – the world will assume you posted that live and are totally insensitive rather than thinking you have scheduled it
4. USE LISTS FOR ENGAGEMENT
Twitter is a lot noisier than it used to be
We started tweeting about our hometown in 2009 – we are known as the original Altrincham tweeters. Now there are about 30 accounts doing exactly the same as what we did in 2009, every single business that opens now joins twitter as standard and spambots fill the local town search
It can be hard to cut through the noise for engagement – so much so we’ve actually launched a Digital Decluttering course here
So segment your VIPS and people you really want to talk to into Twitter lists for engagement so you can see important updates rather than spam all the time
Even on Facebook you can have close friends lists / interest lists to make Facebook more manageable as well
The moment you start using lists, not only will you save time in the long run – you’ll actually start to enjoy your social media more
5. DISTRIBUTE OLD BLOGS
The great thing about blogging every single week is you have an archive of evergreen content that you can repost at holiday season
When I talk about blogging to small businesses, one of the biggest mistakes they make is with the distribution of each blog
Why would you spend 30 mins to an hour writing a blog to only post it once on Social Media
We have blogs we wrote back in 2012, that are still massively relevant, that our new followers have never seen – that’s why periodically we will post them again
And holiday season is a perfect time to fill those gaps in Social Media with relevant evergreen content
For instance – this blog will be relevant every single Summer holiday and Christmas holiday period – it’s timeless
6. USE THEME WEEKS FOR SOCIAL MEDIA / BLOGS
Data is your friend when it comes to producing new content
Take 10 minutes today looking at your google analytics data for the past year or 2
Look at which blogs have got the most views, most time spent on them and lead to most customer conversions
And then work out if you could possibly do a follow up blog to that popular piece or do a series of blogs or tweets based around those blogs
Over the years we’ve used data to produce themes that we can use every year on blogs and also to look at what we can expand on for series of blogs rather than one off pieces of content
For instance our 10 Twitter Mistakes That Businesses Make Daily post was so popular we immediately followed up with a series on LinkedIn and Facebook
7. REPURPOSE CONTENT INTO DIFFERENT FORMATS
You want to extract as much value out of every piece of content you produce as possible
Far too often people will treat each piece of content as one offs – they will produce a business talk, a blog, a tweet – and not connect them all together
The reason this blog has happened is because I was asked to talk about the subject for Sue France’s Connecting Cheshire Networking Group
So I extracted the value from it so you could read the advice today and I will produce a number of social tiles around the subject that I can use on Instagram
In time to come I could do a Facebook Live video or a Periscope video.
Look at what content you already have that can be repurposed on different platforms
8. HUMANISE YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA
The cross section of what interests you, what fits your brand and what your customers are interested in are the areas that you can humanise your social media
The advantages of being a small business owner over a large corporate is that it’s easier to humanise the brand – often you are the face of the business
Even though you are massively passionate about your business – when it comes to holiday season be it Summer or Christmas people have other things on their mind
Why not talk about what you are up – if it’s summer and you are sat in the garden, it’s perfectly acceptable to post that photo. It makes you more human and relatable than being a corporate brand
People know so much about myself at Altrincham HQ outside the fact I offer Social Media Training and Management – they know I love rock & roll music, watch gritty British dramas, am vegetarian and love trying out new restaurants
What do your customers know about you? How can you make yourself more human?
CHAT TO US
Chat to about Social Media for YOUR business so we can better understand YOU and what will grow your business
We can only find out what is unique to your business by chatting to you
Please call Alex on 07806774279 or email alex@altrinchamhq.co.uk
