Social media is sometimes a necessary evil for an entrepreneur. If you want to make sales and build the community you need to be where your ideal client congregates and for many business owners that is social media. If you’re trying to run a business and build a community you may be wondering how to benefit from social media hacks. Not all hacks work and the word “hack” means a shortcut and sometimes there are no shortcuts to building community.
Social media is here to stay and if you want to stay relevant you need to be where your people are.
How To Benefit From Social Media Hacks
You don’t have to spend all of your working hours on social media – you can jump in a couple of times a day or even a few times a week and still build a community. Don’t sacrifice your area of genius to poke and plod around social media. It may also make sense to hire a social media manager to take that burden off you and to focus on building your online community.
Here are some of the ways we have found that an entrepreneur can benefit from social media without sacrificing business tasks.
- Set a schedule. If you’re only going to post a few times a week — stick with the same days. You may want to experiment with times and days until you strike the balance where your audience is and where and when they are looking at your content. If you have a lot of activity on your posts on Sunday at 1 pm Eastern, then stick with that time.
- Hashtags matter. While your hashtags may not be all that useful on Facebook, they are on Twitter and Instagram. LinkedIn is more hit and miss with whether your hashtags will bring eyes to your posts. Use hashtags that are relevant to your post, relevant to your industry and if possible, trending, if it fits with what you’re posting. For example if you’re posting about “how to stay focused during coronavirus” then a #coronavirus or #covid19 hashtag certainly should be used.
- If you’re writing blog posts, share them on your social media. Don’t write a post and abandon it on your site. Share. Share. Share.
- Are there influencers in your industry or in a complementary industry with whom you could partner? You share their info and tag them, they share your info and tag you.
- It’s great to have high numbers of followers on your social media pages but if you have one million followers but only one follower interacts — is there any value to the one million? Not really. It’s ideal to have high numbers if they’re actually interacting. If you have a small, but an engaged community that is the dream!