A Hera Hub Business Booster with Lucy Kelleher

You’ve started a company, or your company has been in business for a while, and you’ve decided that you want to up your game with social media. But which social media should you be on? Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Reddit, and more. It’s confusing. Which one to choose? Why? What to do on each platform? Use all of them, or just one? Will it produce revenue?

Stop! First, ask yourself, do I need to be on social media? If you do, what is your intention? Jumping on social media without intention ends up as one more thing on your list that doesn’t get done and a distraction from what you can do. Social media is a long-term investment, you build it, nurture it, engage people and they may come and stay. Social media is an opportunity to develop Lucy’s 3 R’s: Relationships, Referrals, and Revenues.

Your presence on social media is driven by your intention, strategy, and understanding your customer base. What are your business plans and goals? Are you on social media to sell, inform/educate, launch your business presence, be a speaker, build a community, be a thought leader, entertain, or another purpose? What challenge is your audience experiencing that you can help them with? What are you offering people that they need and can benefit from?

Once you’ve developed your strategy and intention and chosen your platform(s), now what? What do you post, when do you post it, how often, and how do you respond to comments/likes? Remember, social media is about engagement and relationships. The idea is to Connect, Capture, and Convert.

  • Connect: When you post, you are reaching out and starting a conversation. Responses to your post will indicate how well you are connecting. How often are people liking or commenting on your posts? The time of day or day of the week might make a difference in engagement. Do more people respond if you post in the evening, on a Wednesday, or at noon? Once someone has responded, are you engaging them in a conversation by responding to them—thanking them for their comment or noting something interesting that they have said. This is the first step in creating a relationship that you can eventually take offline and develop.
  • Capture: Once people start interacting, have a plan. Respond to every comment, start a conversation, take the message offline to direct message and get their contact information so that you can continue the relationship. Why is taking the relationship offline important? Many social media platforms, such as Facebook, own the content, not you. What happens then if you are locked out of your account, or a Facebook group has only one administrator and that person is unavailable or the internet goes down?
  • Convert: Once you have a relationship, you have the opportunity to cultivate and ideally convert that connection into a customer, collaborator, or partner. In any one of these categories, they can become a referral source and an advocate for your business.

Focus on being strategic and intentional about how you are going to use social media to connect the people you need for your business. Engage in a conversation, then a relationship, then convert that relationship into benefit and ROI for your customers and your business.

About the author:

Lucy Kelleher is a member of Hera Hub Carlsbad and their Client Retention/CRM Specialist Guru. She is the founder of Keep Them Loyal, a B2B service that provides a systemized and strategic approach to leverage your contacts for increased revenue, repeat business, and consistent referral channels.

Website: www.keepthemloyal.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucy-kelleher/