Social media is a fantastic way of reaching people all over the world for very little or no money. You can advertise your business to the world and social media within itself is a great reason to make your business present on social platforms. The most popular ones to use are Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and Pinterest. In order to be fully present on social media platforms, you need to use it regularly both by posting content and interacting with others. That is a very time consuming process which is why so many companies have people to take control of it.
The good news is, there are programs that can help with scheduling posts which will post to multiple platforms automatically. Later is one of my favourite programs to use as it will take me half a day to schedule all of the posts and captions for a month.
In order to create social media posts, there are various tools you can use. One of the most popular tools is Canva.
Canva offers so many templates for free that you can use instantly or edit and then download. You can also create posts from scratch. There is a pro version which offers you more images and fonts that you can use but there are still plenty of free options that enable you to make high quality social posts. The other great thing is that you can select the type of post you want to create which automatically sets the correct size for that type of post (i.e. facebook ad).
There is also a great image editor online called Photopea which is basically a free version of PhotoShop. It works in the same way and has the same functionality; you just need a computer that can process it. When you take your own photos, you can edit them in any way you want in PhotoPea just as you would in Photoshop. Then you can decide whether you want to create the social post there or in Canva.
When creating your social media posts, try to use the same kind of theme. Instagram especially is very centred around aesthetics. You also want to create your brand so that people instantly recognise your posts away from anyone else's. You want it so that when they look at your page, they like what they see. There are also apps like Preview where you can play around with the layout of your posts to make them the most aesthetically pleasing.
One of the hardest aspects of effective social media posts are the captions. You want to make it engaging and also have a clear call to action. If you have used a photograph as the post, you can tell the story behind the photograph. If it is an image that you have created, you can use a simple call to action or discuss the topic the image is relating to. Remember to be personable. It makes a huge difference if people feel like they are connecting with a real person rather than a brand. Instagram also uses hashtags so it is worth commenting on your own post with hashtags that relate to you and your content. You also need to engage a lot with other accounts by liking and commenting on their posts as that will naturally boost your post and account so that more people can see it. Facebook doesn’t use hashtags in the same way so it may be worth using Facebook ads to boost your post or share it amongst your existing friends in order to get it out there.
Twitter is a good way to keep people updated with new developments or opinions on current topics although you can also share the same posts that you post to Facebook and Instagram. Pinterest is also a great place to share your social posts to increase your brand awareness.
YouTube is quite separate to the other platforms and you need to have good quality video content. The videos don’t need to be long but they do need to be clearly targeted to your audience and ideally should be informative but also entertaining.
When building up your social media following, it will take a few trial and error attempts in order for you to find what you like and what appeals to others. Remember that engagement is key in getting your account and posts shown to others.
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