If you've been hanging around our much loved MoE Society you'll know I'm often advising us (yes myself included) business owner folk to not put ALL our efforts into social media. Yes, it's amazing and yes, it can certainly help grow our business, but if it all went away tomorrow (or like it did for a few minutes/hours earlier this year 😱) would you still have a way of contacting and communicating with your customers? But more on that another day (though if you wanted to hear a bit more about that - watch this). When we are on social media, I'm sure like many many many of us, you're in the battle of trying to get those sacred customer's eyes on your posts. So, what is the secret? Quite simply, there isn't any. I get asked all the time why it's so hard to get engagement and decent organic reach. But the maths will always be against us. People (/us!) are liking more and more Facebook Pages, we're joining more and more Facebook Groups, we're adding more and more Facebook friends... and yet on average, we're spending the same amount of time scrolling our newsfeed. So there's just no way you can see all the posts from all the Pages and Groups and friends AND Facebook ads in that scroll time. Facebook
has to be clever and try to show you only what they think you want to see by tracking your activity (both on and off 😯) FB. A bit scary, but hey, that's the way of the modern monitored world we live/scroll in. Anyway! So we know why organic reach is so freakin' hard - it makes sense and we don't totally blame FB. What we can do is try and make our Page/Group appear in our followers/likers field of interest so they see our posts more. The simple answer is that our posts need to be interesting, engaging, captivating, alluring, attractive, emotive etc etc. Basically, they need to grab our audience's attention and make them stop and read/look/comment/share etc. One of the easiest ways to create content that ticks a few of those boxes is to imagine that you're texting your ICA (ideal customer avatar). If you're sharing an image of your product/service - how would you communicate that if you were messaging your friendly and much loved ICA? - who you should know very well even if that's just in your imagination! If you're sharing a funny meme (appropriate to your industry/niche) - what would you say about it when sending it via a text message to that ICA? If you sell baby clothes, for example, and you've had new stock arrive, would you say "These new rompers have arrived and are available on our website" if you were texting a friend? Or would you say "Look at how cute these rompers are! They've just arrived and I'm so excited to see our lovely little customers strutting their stuff in them. Which colour's your favourite??" Of course the second one... unless you've got an oddly professional tone with your friends 🤔. Your followers want to hear from YOU, so be YOU. In today's crazy weird world, we're lacking connection more than ever. If you can help your customer feel connected to you or your business, even for a second, you're on the right track. Remember, people want to buy from people. They want to be involved or at very least understand your story, so don't hide away behind stiff and starchy posts. The era of stiff upper lip professionalism is over, people want REAL and GENUINE communication and connections. So go out there and find your voice and be YOU. Now I hear you saying, "argh Suzy I've already tried a few posts like that and it's still crickets when I post!"... I know I know it can be a hard slog sometimes. But you have to stick with it! When you type your posts, read them out loud, imagine your ICA, and ask yourself, 'would this post make her/him stop scrolling and engage in some way?'. If no, then start again! Keep going, be consistent (and no you don't HAVE to post every day, 4-5 times per week can work too) and keep rechecking your posts before posting. Eventually, the tide will change and FB will start increasing your page rank/visibility and engagement will increase. JUST STICK WITH IT! Is this the magic bullet that's going to fix all your social media woes?? Of course not! There are 101 other factors to look at, but this one's a biggy and can most definitely help improve your social media efforts.
OK gorgeous lady, that's all for now.
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Keep an eye out for our social media masterclass coming out in the summer with the rest of our tips and tricks. As always, we LOVE hearing your feedback and REALLY LOVE hearing your success stories, so pretty please tell us when (not if, when!) you start seeing some success from this tip.
