Selling With Social Media: Creating and Pushing Content

I've already started to talk about social media, here: Social Media Network Marketing, Simplified What we want to get out of social media, as direct sellers, are network connections that will help us grow our business, and customers who are interested in our products. Those network relationships should be long term, or at least longer than a single sale. Obviously, social media connections will come and go, but you want to focus on developing long term relationships, trust and credibility on social media.

Of the four key social media networking marketing activities, this blog will focus on the first: creating and sharing content. In my first social media blog post, I mention spending 10+ hours a week creating content, and that you begin to see engagement after about 6 hours a week of work. Spend as much time as you can creating original, quality content.

Since this is a two step process (1. Creating Content, 2. Pushing Content) you will see details on how to accomplish both parts of the process. In addition, you will find a summary of the top marketing Social Media Channels, the best time of day to share and the frequency of sharing.

Creating Content

The quickest, cheapest and easiest path to creating content is to create a blog. A blog will keep all of your content in one place, it is technologically one of the least challenging, and it offers one of the highest values. Another benefit of a blog is that you begin to build your personal brand. (See my blog post about personal branding, here: Personal Branding Yourself For Direct Sales)

Here is the challenge with creating content, such as a blog. You need a few content creation tools.

Social Media Accounts. Yes, you share your content on social media accounts, but you also acquire content from those same accounts. Spend some time setting up social media accounts, and begin following people. (I am currently on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn and YouTube.) It is highly recommended that you use your own name for all of your social media accounts, in order to develop a strong personal brand. Follow the people you are interested in. If you want to focus on nails, follow ALL the nail artists and nail art people you are inspired by. See what they are talking about, read their blogs, view their images, and see who they follow. As you begin to follow people, you will begin to experience follow for follows. Be careful about this: if you spend too much time following, and not start to provide content for your followers, they will begin to fall off over time. As you develop followers, make sure you begin to give them content, too.

A Spiral Notebook. I am a professional writer. Yet, I surprisingly do not always go straight to my laptop to write - I pull out my old school spiral notebook. Physically writing does a few things for your brain that computers are not able to do. (There is a while bunch of brain science research on this.) With your spiral notebook, begin to collect ideas. Write down things you want to blog about, things you want to research, and ideas you have for content. If we are still talking nails, maybe your list would look like this: tools used to create nail art, my favorite spring nail artists, how to make suchandsuch nail art step by step. Start with your passion, and you will quickly have a list of things to write about! I also use my spiral notebook to outline or draft my content, but not everyone likes to do it that way.

Technology. The tools I recommend are: a computer/laptop with a full size keyboard and mouse (makes the content management process much easier if you have access to this tool), a smartphone, a Google account. That's it! I use my Google account for email, Google docs, sheets and slides, and Blogger (though some people prefer WordPress).

Images. Finding images can be tough, but people are visual and images are a necessity. Be careful about using other people's images, as there are copyright issues. I have had the most success with either taking photographs myself (of products, of myself, of things I like) or creating images by layering text on top of backgrounds. Images up the ante on your content - it attracts people to your textual content with visual enticement. Images help people to connect to your content, and if there is a product involved, seeing the actual product encourages people to purchase.

Pushing Content

PUSH your content. Once you have created your content, you need to get that content in front of people. Share the link to your blogs on your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, everywhere you have social media accounts.

"Sharing quality content across your social channels is one of the most important things you can do to engage your audience and attract new followers." 
Source: http://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-editorial-calendar/

Editorial Schedule. The biggest tool you should be using is something called an "Editorial Schedule". What content will you be posting on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday? An editorial schedule will include your blog posts, and it will also include all of the content *around* your blog post. Share key products related to that post, industry news, inspirational images, trends, summaries from other people's blogs, headlines from related magazines, images you curate, Pins that are in the same category. Try to share the minimum recommended below for each channel. (It's not easy, I know BUT the closer you are to that goal, the closer you are to building your social media presence to where you want it.)

I use a tool called Hootsuite to schedule my content shares throughout the week. I know other people prefer to use Buffer.

One more time, for people in the back: THE MORE ORIGINAL, QUALITY CONTENT YOU CREATE AND PUSH, THE MORE ENGAGEMENT YOU WILL SEE.

Social Media Channels

Channel	Content	Times	Minimum	Maximum
Facebook	I like this new makeup.	between 1pm and 3pm	3x per week	10x per week
Twitter	I'm wearing #makeup	noon, 5pm-6pm	5x per day	none
Pinterest	Here's an infographic of makeup.	2pm-4pm and 8pm-11pm	5x per day	10x per day
Instagram	Here's a filtered photo of me wearing makeup.	1pm-4pm	3x per week	10x per week
Google+	I can't find any makeup here.	9am-11am	5x per week	10x per week
LinkedIn	My skills include wearing makeup.	7am-9am and 5pm-6pm	2x per week	5x per week
YouTube	Here I am showing how to apply makeup.	2pm-4pm	1x per week	5x per week

(Content ideas modified from The Cyber Advocate's "donut" example.)

How do I know it's working? Measuring your social media efforts can be done in a few ways. Many social media channels, blog tools, offer some kind of analytics that show you how many people have viewed that content. When you shorten your links back to your estore, use bitly, which will also track how many times people click on that link. To measure your personal brand and social media health, use a tool called Klout, which gives you  a score based on your social media presence strength. Finally, the key indicator whether your social media content is working is customer engagement: are people communicating with you? are there sales happening on your estore? If you are not seeing that, focus on creating and sharing MORE content. I read somewhere that you will not start to see customers until you have at least 1,000 blog posts! It will take time. Be patient.