Going All-In on Marketing: One Social Media Channel at a Time

Social media is a marketing tool that has become crucial in building a business over the last ten years. Marketing is what you do to attract customers to your business, from cash flow problems caused by a lack of marketing to managing the incoming responses to your marketing via your notifications and inbox. It’s all marketing.

This week you’re going to dive a little deeper into the social media marketing side of things.

You see it happen all the time. People get excited about a social media and set up business accounts on all kinds of channels with the best of intentions of marketing their business, and then a few weeks later they end up abandoning them because they can’t keep up or they don’t know what to say. The information they’ve shared becomes outdated, there are comments and reviews left without responses, and when prospects and customers go to check out the business, they end up wondering if they’re even still up and running.

It’s better to do a few things really well, than a bunch of things poorly.

Stop buying into the myth that you’ve got to be everywhere all the time to be successful when it comes to marketing.

Here’s a challenge for you:

Grab a pen and paper and write down every social media account you have for your business. Start by putting a star by the ones that you use on a regular basis, or would like to use on a regular basis, and put an x beside the ones you haven’t used in forever (come on, I know you’ve got an abandoned Myspace, Snapchat or ello account out there somewhere!) Now, out of the starred accounts, which one do you get the MOST leads from?

This month, your challenge is to go ALL-IN with that social media channel. Make a decision, and then make that decision the right decision for your marketing.  You can pick Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Instagram, or YouTube if that’s your thing, it doesn’t matter which one, as long as you commit to being completely focused on using this marketing tool for the next 30 days.

Here are six things you’ll want to do:

1. Update your profile pictures and cover photos. Is the image you have as your profile picture recent? Is your profile picture easy to see and for others to identify as you or your business? Is your cover photo representative of your business and what you’ve got going on at the moment? If not, you can design a quick and easy cover photo on canva.com if you don’t have a graphic designer to create something for you. (There are some nice looking templates on there, too).

2. Update your description or “about” section. Too often we let that little “about” section get neglected, and when someone new comes along to check out your page, they end up reading about the book that you launched 3 years ago instead of the new program you’ve recently developed. Do an audit of all the copy that is written in the about section and be sure it’s up to date.

3. Commit to sharing at least two pieces of content per day, unless you chose YouTube, and then commit to one a day.  For every channel but YouTube, these pieces of content can be pictures, videos, links to other people’s articles, or blog posts. Anything that adds value for your customer is a good idea to share.

4. Engage with OTHER people’s content, interact with your customers, your service providers and people you’d like to do business with.  You can start a conversation in a Facebook or LinkedIn community, share someone else’s post, or comment on a post and be part of a conversation. Keep in mind, this does NOT mean plugging your business on someone else’s post, you want to be SWIIFT (See What’s In It For Them if you haven’t read my book.) Show up, interact with others, and deliver value, and people are bound to check you out, too. Do this every day with at least 3 people.

5. Utilize the live function once a week. Whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, YouTube or even LinkedIn’s native video, you can do this. Be brave! Live video is the hottest thing in social media marketing right now and it allows your audience to see the real, raw, and authentic you. Not to mention, a lot of platforms favor live video over other content in their newsfeeds, so you’ll have a better chance to be seen and heard. When you dare to go live, you are really going all-in, you can’t edit live which is why it’s so popular.

6. Track your results. If you’re going all-in for the whole month, you should keep a close eye on the results you get from your efforts. With that said, you’re not going to get famous overnight or have an onslaught of new business, but you do still want to get in the habit of checking in on how your engagement and website traffic is doing so you can see your progress. If you don’t have Google Analytics, the Facebook Pixel and LinkedIn insight tag on your website, you’ll want to do that right away.  Measure things like the number of daily visits to your website, size of your following, size of your list, size of your custom audiences, and amount of engagement and/or live video views.

What do you say? Do you accept this challenge to go all-in on one social media channel for one month?

If you go back to that initial list you wrote of the social media channels you’ve got up and running and there are a bunch with no stars next to them…it may be time to retire those accounts for good. It’s better to show up consistently in a few places than to have scattered engagement everywhere.

Let me know in the comments if you have accepted this challenge, and if so, which social media platform have you chosen to go all-in with?