The Exact Way to Use Social Media for Your Business

Marketing your business on social media is basically a full time job. While there are a lot of different social media sites you can use to promote your business, understanding the right way to use them is very important.

I’m going to share with you the exact way to use social media for your business to gain more followers. If you’ve just been randomly sharing posts, or links to your website, then you’ve probably been wasting your time and not getting anything out of it.

Before you read through how each social media site works understand that not all social media sites are intended for the same purpose. In order to effectively promote your business, you’ll need to learn what the purpose of each site is.

Let’s go!

Facebook

Facebook is one of the original social media sites that’s still around. While many businesses are finding it impossible to get noticed on Facebook even when they have thousands of fans, it’s still not worth throwing in the towel just yet.

In order to have a Facebook business page you’ll need to have a personal profile. Facebook is a mixed bag of content types, but you’ll find success in sharing articles, sharing videos/GIFs, posting achievements and major updates, asking questions, asking recommendations and promotional offers.

Follow the 80/20 rule for Facebook, 80% of your posts should inform, educate, and entertain your audience and 20% should directly promote your business.

Hashtags are optional for Facebook but they aren’t commonly used.

Instagram

Instagram is my #1 resource for meeting new clients. It’s very visual and not heavy on content (you can’t share links on Instagram).

Users love tapping images that are beautiful photos, personal pics, behind the scenes, artistic, shoppable (you can now link to products from your post), shared images (with credit to the original post), questions, inspirational quotes and promotional offers.

Hashtags are essential on Instagram, unless you have tens of thousands of fans. Do your research on hashtags and try not to use generic hashtags like #fashion or you will get overlook very quickly. There are even some hashtags that are blacklisted so you won’t want to use them since you’re limited to only 30 hashtags per post.

Twitter

Compared to Facebook and Instagram, Twitter is a more unique social media platform. It’s less visual than Instagram and less social than Facebook. But you can still get great engagement with links, images, quotes, retweets (posting someone else’s tweet), questions or comments of your own.

It’s important that your tweets are very compelling and kept short. Tweets that are paired with an image are shown to have more engagement.

Hashtags are essential on Twitter but you won’t get to use as many as Instagram because of the character limit so choose wisely.

Retweets are vital to getting more followers, especially is someone retweets you! Curate some content on Twitter and retweet what you think your audience would find interesting.

Pinterest

Pinterest has become more than just a social media site, it’s a search engine.

One thing about Pinterest that is completely different from the other social media sites is that personal posts (ex. “I just got engaged!”) do not work well.

Pinterest is about sharing content, visually. Most bloggers create customized blog post images for their posts that can be shared on Pinterest so that it’s easy to read the title of the post and entices the user to either save the pin or click through to read the post.

The types of posts that perform best on Pinterest are informational lists and articles, lists of resources, advice articles, how-to’s, DIY’s, weddings, holidays, recipes, crafting, fashion advice, diet/nutrition advice, beauty how-to’s, interior decorating, parenting advice, book suggestions, business advice and design tips.

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Organizing all of these posts can be really overwhelming. It’s almost impossible to manually post every day, like I said earlier, it’s a full time job. I use three amazing tools that help me schedule all of my posts ahead of time and send them out automatically.

I use SmarterQueue^* to schedule all of my posts for Facebook and Twitter. One of their features that I really love is repurposing old posts. I schedule certain posts to be reposted later on in case someone misses it.

For Instagram I use Planoly^* which is an awesome visual grid for planning Instagram posts. My favorite feature is being able to save groups of hashtags. Typing out hashtags manually on my phone was leading me to just not use Instagram all together because it was way too time consuming. With Planoly I’m now able to schedule out MONTHS of posts in advance.

Pinterest works differently in that I use Tailwind^* to schedule out pins from my own site, and also new pins I’ve sourced from Pinterest that get pinned to my boards. I definitely do not have hours each day to spend on Pinterest (I wish I could though!). With Tailwind it’s basically like I’m sitting at my desk all day pinning, but the application is doing it for me using timeslots I’ve chosen.

Disclosure: I get a commission for purchases or clicks made through links with an asterisk. I’ve got your back though because I’ve used all of these services for my own business and highly recommend them!

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