Social Media for Small Business: A Practical Roadmap to Growth

Slide 1: (Video starts to: 25 seconds)

Hi, my name is Patrice Valentine. I'm the president and owner of Profusion Web Solutions. And today we're going to take a look at social media for small business, a practical road map to growth. By the end of this presentation, our goal is that you have a list of things that you can go do to enhance your social media profiles to connect with your community greater or just grow your profiles so that you have a more meaningful time on social media.

Slide 2: Introduction – Why Social Media Matters? (0:26-2:42)

Let's first take a look at why social media even matters. Well, 97% of consumers look online before making a buying decision. Now, this could be they're looking at your website. They could be looking at your Google business profile. And quite often, they are looking at your accounts like Facebook and Instagram or Pinterest, for example. They're looking at these accounts because it does provide some level of modern-day credibility. It allows users to be able to look in and see a different view of your business. It could be looking at how you treat your employees, how you treat your existing customers, how you're engaging with people in the comments. It allows people to kind of sneak peek in behind the curtain and see what's really going on with your business before they are engaging or purchasing from you. If you're not active now on social media, you are likely invisible to some customers. There are whole populations, and we'll jump into who and where, that do the majority of their research for products on platforms like Instagram and Facebook. They're finding new products this way. They're learning about new tools on social media accounts. So, if you're not active, if your business is not engaging on social media, you might be completely invisible to a whole group of potential customers. And the last thing why we want to talk about social media is Instagram. As of actually July of 2025, Instagram now allows search engines like Google to display your public posts on the search engine results page. So, if you own a restaurant in Bellingham, Washington, and you've been posting regularly to Instagram, you've been posting your weekly specials, you've been posting, you know, customer testimonials, you've taken pictures of people on their birthdays and anniversaries when they're coming in and celebrating at your restaurant. If you have a public account, all of that information that you've been posting is now searchable and will show up in the search results when people are searching for, you know, a restaurant in Bellingham, for example. So, your Instagram posts, which did not used to be really indexable by Google, are now highly indexable and it happens quickly. We're seeing posts that are made, you know, a couple of hours ago already showing up in the Google search results. So, your social media profile and what you're posting is also a really important part of your search engine optimization strategy.

Slide 3: Know Your Audience (2:43-4:33) 

Before you jump into social media, the very first thing you want to do is find out where your audience is. If you're regularly posting on Instagram, but your audience isn't on Instagram, then you're really just what we would say, you know, shouting into the void. So, you want to make sure that your audience is actually there. We'll talk a little bit about how you can find this out and see where your audience actually is. But the first thing to do is is go take a look at what your audience looks like right now. If you are on social media platforms, go and see who your current followers are, who currently likes you. Are those the kind of people that you're trying to sell to? Do you want more of those kind of people? So finding out who you're trying to reach and then where they actually are, what platforms they're on is your step one. If we take a look at the graph that's on my screen right now, you'll see that this is the percentage of US adults who say they ever use any of these platforms. And you'll see the very first one is YouTube. I have a whole slide dedicated to talking about videos. So, I'm not going to get too much into YouTube at the moment, but just know that short-form video or even long-form video at this point is incredibly important to your social media strategy. So, if we just look through the the top five there, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, and then I'm going to add in number six, which is LinkedIn, because that seems to be really important for the B2B community. So, those top six right there are the ones I'm sure you you've heard and talk about a lot, and maybe you're even posting regularly to those, and those are the ones that seem to get the the most traction on a regular basis. They have the most users, but YouTube, being the first one up there, over 80% of adults are saying that they use YouTube on a regular basis.

Slide 4: Social Media Platform Used By Age Group (4:34-6:49) 

So, so if you're saying, Patrice, how do I how do I know? I don't know if my users are on YouTube or Facebook. I know this might be kind of hard to read, but what this what this is showing, it's on my screen right now, is basically breaking it down of the percentage of users each platform gets by age group. So, YouTube, you can see across all ages, really, 18 to 24 all the way up to 65 plus, you're at 10% or more of those age groups that that use Facebook. if you go down to Twitter or X, for example, or even Snapchat kind of shows you a a greater drop off for the the folks over the age of 50. So the the drop off is heavier on platforms like Snapchat or X or even TikTok. The older users are there. They're just not using it as much as they're using say, Facebook, for example. So it's important to kind of take a look at at what's on my screen right now to just get an idea of the age group. So, if you have a a product that you know is a great fit for folks that are between the ages of 18 and 24, uh, Instagram is going to be a great place for you. Pinterest, to some extent, is going to be a great place for you. Uh, TikTok Tok a big one for you as well. And then you can see even Facebook is going to have a good amount of followers and folks in that age group that are actually using those platforms. So, I wanted to include this just so you can get an idea of this research is out there. This data is published on a regular basis. You can see if you're looking for females that are between the ages of, you know, 35 and 55, you can kind of go and see which platform would make the most sense for you to spend time on. But the goal here is for you to take a minute to actually profile your customers, figure out what their age group is, what their demographics are, and then do a little reverse engineering to figure out what social media platform they're most likely going to be on. And that's where you can spend your time. What we don't want to do here is say you better go create an account on every single one of these platforms and then post to them, you know, three times a day and create this this false sense of of of importance in in in posting to all of them. What we really want to look at today is to make sure that you are posting in a place that's going to reach your audience. If you're not reaching your audience, there's just really there's no point in being on social media. The goal is to make sure that you're reaching your audience.

Slide 5: Clarify Your Goals (6:50-8:34) 

So once you've defined your target and you kind of have that information, then you need to ask yourself, okay, what are my actual goals on social media? I think most small business owners are like, well, gosh, we obviously want to increase our sales and lead generation. That's going to be item number one. But along with that, is there brand awareness? Are you trying to make yourself more credible in your local market? Are you trying to educate customers so that you might be able to, you know, take a little heat off of your customer service staff? Like maybe you could put your FAQs on your Instagram posts or on your LinkedIn uh posts and and start educating people that way. So clarify what some of your goals might be. Obviously, lead genen is going to be a big one, additional sales a big one, but are there other goals that you would like that are going to be able to be achieved via social media? Then your content strategy, which we will talk about in a couple slides, should align with those goals. We'll talk a little bit more about, you know, how much selling you should be doing in social versus how much educating or inspiring or entertaining. There is a balance, just like anything. So, think about what your content strategy could be now that you have some of your goals laid out. Different platforms may require different goals. So, on LinkedIn, you may be all about education. You might write regularly and contribute to other people's posts, and you may have feedback that you're providing to people on LinkedIn via their post section. And education might be your main goal on LinkedIn. And then on Instagram, maybe you have a sales course or you have a product that you're trying to to actually get out there, and you might talk more about that in a short-form video. So different platforms might have different goals and that's perfectly okay based on the audience that is going to be on those different platforms.

Slide 6: Spy on the Competition (8:35-10:21) 

So once you have your audience defined, once you know what your goals are on social media, now it's time to do a little recon and go take a look and see what your competition is doing. This is not so you can copy them. It's to see kind of if you've hit the nail on the head as far as audience goes. What this allows you to do is go see what are they posting. What does their engagement look like? Do they have people and followers that are the kind of people and followers that you want for your company? And you can see just based on looking at a competitor's page, how many likes they're getting, how many comments they're getting, how many views they're getting on something. You can see all of this. And that way it just kind of allows you to hone in your strategy a bit to see, okay, maybe video is working really well for them and you can see the kind of video they're doing or maybe it's not working well and you think it's because their video just isn't done in a way that resonates with your audience. It gives you a little bit of an idea on what may be working and what may not be working for your audience. If video just isn't working, it might mean that you don't need to spend your time creating videos either. Or if your competition is completely ignoring video, maybe it's how you step into the market is with really great videos that are helpful and that provide a lot of good information to your audience. So spying on the competition isn't so you can copy what they're doing. It's so you can kind of check their strategy and see what's working and what's not working. They might be targeting a completely different audience than you, and you might be able to see just from that that there's an opportunity for you to go after something that they have missed. So, it's just a good idea to see what's going and what's working well in your space. What's working for them could be a shortcut for you, or it could be a point where you say, "Okay, I'm going to do something completely different."

Slide 7: Choose Paid + organic Together (10:22-14:11)

Whether you're just getting started with social media or you already have an audience, you'll have to make the decision to do paid social media, which means you're going to pay for additional people to see what you're creating, or just doing what's called organic. Organic is the free content. So that's you opening up your Instagram account, you know, hitting the post, writing up your caption, and then adding that picture to your feed or to your story. That's your organic, that's your free content that anyone can go do. Anyone can post free to their wall or to their profile. Now, paid advertising, which could be a boosted post or a sponsored post, is going to allow you to get additional people to see what you're putting out there on social media. Our recommendation on what to do here is to do both. Again, if your audience is using social media, using both paid and organic is going to help you grow faster on social media. Organic does help build trust and create that community. It's good to continue with the organic posts. However, about 5% of your audience is going to see your organic posts. If you have a 100 followers on Facebook, for example, only 5% of them are going to see your organic posts at any given time. So, it used to be in chronological order and people could scroll through and they would see almost all of your posts if they went back far enough. Now, based on Meta's algorithm for Facebook and Instagram, they're going to see posts that are that are being favored by the algorithm. And what I mean by that is they're going to see posts that are engaging that other people are commenting on that appear to be somewhat sticky. So, it's relevant, it's educational, it's, you know, informative, it's entertaining, things like that. So, organic content is still very important. Again, like we first started this presentation out, it is also is what is going to be seen in the search engines results. So organic is very important, but paid social media is going to get you seen by new people faster. This is where you can choose your demographics. So I can choose to have my paid or boosted post only be shown to women of a specific age in a specific zip code that have children and have indicated that they like animals. So you can really drill down in social media when you're boosting or when you're doing the paid advertising. So, it allows you to get your message shown to people who you have identified as your target audience a little bit faster. It also allows you to piggyback on your existing users. So, if you have a really engaged community who is, you know, commenting on what you're posting and they're sharing it, it allows you, the paid services will allow you to have other people who are friends with your followers also see your posts. So, you can pay to share your content with your followers friends. Typically, they're going to have people that they're friends with that have the same interest as them. So, it's it's kind of by extension a a referral type process where I can see that my friend also likes this page and by then it kind of gives me some level of comfort that if my friends like it, maybe I will like it, too. The strategy here is going to be to boost your best organic content to get more from it. So, if you have a post that you've put up on social media and it's getting good engagement, it has comments, it's been shared, there are likes on it, that's the kind of content that you're going to want to boost or promote so that it can get more eyeballs. It gives you an idea to see here's the content that's working. Let's get it out there to more people. So, the best strategy is really to do paid and organic together as you can find what's working with your existing audience and then grow your audience based on that. It'll help you just get additional eyeballs on the content that you're creating.

Slide 8: Build a Content Strategy (14:12-17:52)

Speaking of content that you're creating, you're going to want to have a strategy around it. Facebook is based on interest, not intent. So very few users go to Facebook. I would say maybe with the exclusion of Facebook Marketplace, but they're not going to Facebook technically to purchase something. They're going to see what their friends are up to. They know they're going to see some level of ads on it, but they're not typically going based on the intent to purchase. They are going to see things that they are interested in. And therefore, 80% of the content that you post should be informative. It should entertain and it should educate. This would be things like how-to tips or behind the scenes, a day in the life, those kind of things. Staff spotlights, industry updates. If you send out a newsletter, you can pull things from your newsletter and you can put that on social media. 80% of the content that you're putting out there should be meant to inform, entertain, and educate. Then the 20%, here's that old 8020 rule. The 20% you can use to promote. So if you have a special offer, great. Put it out there. If you have a new product, wonderful. Tell people about it. If you have a an opening that you know, you had a cancellation and you have an opening now, and you want to you want to share that really quickly, put out that book now post so that people know that your schedule has an opening. But that can't be 100% of your content. It's best to vary your post to include different types of content. Things like brand story post, things that what's going to help you build authority, those educational-type contents, lead nurturing posts, testimonials, things like that, and even personal post to some extent. This is social media. It's not meant to be all business. There is some personal elements to it. So, put that into that 80% and then 20% you talk about sales and and special offers and new products, and things like that. Nobody wants to follow a walking billboard. If all you're doing is shouting at me that you have a special or a sale or a new product, that's not necessarily going to want me to stick around. I have a comment down here that says, "Don't buy likes." Because buying likes is not a content strategy. You'll see that there are companies out there that offer, you know, 5,000 real human likes for $500, for example. I get these kind of offers in my inbox all the time. And what this is is while they are probably real humans, some of them are probably fake accounts as well. But buying likes is not going to help your engagement even a little bit. Specifically speaking of Meta, Meta is smart enough to realize that if all of a sudden you're a business in Bellingham, Washington, and you all of a sudden have hundreds of followers in New York and Florida and India and Pakistan and all over these places where you maybe don't even serve those areas that that is going to look a little bit fishy if you if you just grow this audience all of a sudden, especially without some level of your content going um you know, really having a high engagement. So purchasing likes, if you've bought a lot of likes, while it's a vanity metric and it's nice to see that, oh, my business has 5,000 likes on it, all that's going to do is kill your actual engagement. So, it's going to make it so that the people who really have said that they've liked your business, that really do want to hear from you, it's going to bury your posts even deeper for those folks. You you will be penalized for that. You might have an initial spike, but overall and over time, you will see that your content will have far fewer engagement if you have purchase likes. It is far better to have a small but hyperengaged audience than a large unresponsive one.

Slide 9: Create a Content Calendar (17:53-20:42) 

So, this is the part that makes most small business owners start to sweat a little bit is creating that content calendar. What are you supposed to post? Well, the easiest thing is to plan ahead so that you can stay consistent. Decide how often you can realistically post. For you, this might start off as one time per week. You might say, "Okay, I can dedicate one day per week to actually go sit down and create a post." Or you're going to spend one day per month creating those four posts that you're going to that you're going to create for each week. You can use themes. So, Monday might be your tip day if you're going to do three times a week. Monday could be a how-to, a tip, a behindthescene type thing. Wednesday could be uh we've got behind the scenes here, but it could be meet day at an employees if you have multiple employees or it could be testimonial Wednesday uh what they said Wednesday, something like that where you're where you're showing people real use case studies of your products or services. Friday, you can put in a promo or a special or talk about, you know, an interesting way that your product was used so that you're still talking about your products without having it say on sale, buy now, you know, uh, price reduction, without feeling that that urgency to promote. Tools for scheduling, things that can help you with this is going to be the Meta Business Suite. So, if we're specifically talking about Facebook and Instagram, they have Meta Business Suite, which you can go in and you can schedule posts far ahead of time. So, go ahead and go use that. uh Canva, the graphic design program, has a built-in scheduler as well. Then there's also programs like Later, Buffer, and Hootuite that allow you to go in and not only schedule your posts, but you can have some level of engagement there as well where you can respond to comments, you can do some hashtag research. They have those additional features built in. If you're scheduling, you also want to leave room for those spontaneous posts. Um that'll be events. If you're out and about and you see a customer and you're both at a networking meeting, go ahead and take that selfie and post it. Do the spontaneous things as well. Spontaneous things are fabulous to share on your story. So, if you're on Instagram and Facebook, having that active story that shows what are you doing dayto-day as business owners, we have so many things going on.

Documenting a few of them to share online is actually a great strategy. So leave room for those spontaneous posts, the events, the real time, the real life moments. Certainly leave room for those. So if you have something scheduled, but you have, you know, something there's a news story that comes up that you really want to provide feedback on, go ahead and and unschedule your post and and, you know, put in your your real-time spontaneous one or post twice that day. There's no penalty for for posting more than what you had planned on. So create that consistent content calendar and then add to it as you feel inspired or as something comes up and as you start kind of getting into this habit of looking for things that might make a good social media post.

Slide 10: Video is King (20:43-24:37)

We are seeing more and more that video is king. Algorithms love video. Even if you go and search right now for a Chevy Cruise headlight replacement, you're going to get not only the parts, but you're going to get the how-to videos on how to change those head headlights so that you can do it yourself. So, video content is super searchable. It's incredibly helpful and incredibly engaging. Teaching people how to do something often initiates that law of reciprocation where if you teach me how to do something, I will feel kind of beholden to you and want to do business with you or will want to do something to return the favor because you produced a good amount of content that taught me how to do something. Your content does not have to be super high quality. The thing that I will tell you is the most important is going to be have a clear visual and have clear audio. If you're using audio in your video, if you have someone speaking like I'm doing right now, make sure that it is crystal clear. There's really nothing worse than going off mic like this and having someone attempt to hear what you're saying without the microphone. Right? There is a big difference between having a microphone and speaking very clearly and having muffled or covered sound that is that is inaudible. You can also use captions. So, if you have found that maybe your audio wasn't great, like that little bit ago where I was just off mic, we're going to make sure that we have captions on this video so that if you don't want to have the sound on, quite often people will watch these videos while at work or while in a co-working space and they don't necessarily want other people to hear the video, so they'll read the captions. Make sure you have captions as well. It's good for just the the video itself and then also good for your ADA compliance and and just making sure that your videos are accessible as possible. So, good sound is going to be something that I will continue to harp on. And then good lighting. If you have a product or if you are being featured in a video, make sure the lighting is decent. A a a ring light is now like 20 bucks on Amazon. They're relatively inexpensive. They're relatively portable and they're super easy to set up. So, really, if you're going to do your own videos, invest in good lighting, invest in audio, and that will help your videos be able to reach a wider audience. If you're just starting out creating videos, it can be scary hearing your own voice, seeing yourself on video, uh looking at all the little missteps and the things that you did wrong. It can be a little consuming. So, start off with things that you know. Start off with product demos. Start off with quick tips. Do a meet the owner introduction series. Uh time-lapse videos. If you build something or even if you build like tacos, right? do a time-lapse video of here's us prepping this, here's us putting it together, here's our happy customers eating it, right? So, creating videos like that and then people love a day in the life. If you are a business owner, I I I don't know what your life looks like. It's it's always fun to kind of get that behind the scenes of here's what I do. Here's the habits I've established. Here's the disciplines. And while you're doing that, you're establishing not only who you are as a business owner, but what your business is. People get to see those disciplines and those habits, and they attribute that to your business as well. I know we've reviewed this a little bit already, but I want to make sure that we're driving home the amount of people that are looking at videos. So, if you look at that YouTube column right there, 93% of 18 to 29 year olds look at YouTube. This is this is people who are picking their top four social media by age group. And YouTube is in every single person's top four. So, 18 to 29, 30 to 49, 50 to 64, it's the dominant one. Even in 65 plus, it's the dominant one. Then followed by Facebook. So if you're not creating videos and putting them on YouTube, let this be your wakeup call a little bit to start creating videos and putting them on YouTube.

Slide 11: Engagement Is not Optional (24:38-27:55) 

If you get nothing else from this presentation today and only take home what is on this slide, I will I will feel great. I will feel some victory. Step eight is engagement is not optional. I can't tell you how many times we see businesses do what's called a a post and ghost. And what that means is they will put up the post. They might even schedule it. So, it's been scheduled for two weeks. They put it up there. And let's say it starts to get a lot of traction. People are commenting, they're sharing, they're asking questions, they're even maybe providing some critical feedback. And you'll see that the business owner or the company doesn't respond. its users commenting without a response from anyone on that social media team. And social media really is a two-way street. We encourage you to respond to every comment or message that is posted on social media. And I will say any comment or message that is not a spam bot. You'll see posts that are say, "Hey, DM me this post." Those people you can remove. Those are spam bots. You don't need to respond to those. But anyone that is a human that has taken the time to thank you for the video, to appreciate the content you're putting out, to ask a question about the content, or to even leave feedback, even if there's even if there's something slightly negative in the comments, respond to all of those. It is really a two-way street. Not only are you going to be commenting back on all of your own posts, so when someone comments on yours, but go like and comment and share other people's posts that are part of your industry or part of your community. If you are a local business and you are attending a networking event or you are going to be out and about at a community fair for example, you should be sharing and talking about those things as well. It gives again that human element. It gives that that side of humanity that just shows we are not just a business, we are the people behind this business as well. So comment on and share other people's posts as well. When you meet someone at a networking event, go follow their company page and then comment on their most recent post saying something like, "It was so nice to meet you at whatever networking event." And encourage it encourages that conversation. It takes it not only off, you know, email, which can get lost, but it puts it into kind of more of a public forum that allows that relationship to develop. Algorithms reward conversations, not silence. The more engagement your posts get, the more likely the social media networks are going to be to show it to other people. Again, the algorithms are rewarding you for conversations, not silence. This is not a race to see who can put up the most content. It is really about establishing those connections and creating those relationships and having that happen in a somewhat public forum. Although it can feel unnatural, it shows that again there is some human behind this business. And that's the engagement that is not optional. That has to be part of your strategy. Whether it's 10 minutes a day, 15 minutes a day, or if you set aside one hour every Friday, go through and comment and like and share so that you're engaging and you're not just doing what we called again that post and ghost.

Slide 12: Watch Your Metrics (27:56-30:02)

We touched on this a little bit, but do watch your metrics. It is important to kind of gauge how you're doing, whether you're meeting those goals that you set when you first got started on social media. What we want to caution you on is not to spend too much time focusing on what we call vanity metrics. That is your number of likes and number of followers. Because again, you could get caught up in that trap of, oh, I need to have 5,000 followers by the end of the year. But really, what you want is that that community of engaged users. And if that's 250 engaged users, that's great. Those are people who are saying they like you and that want to have a conversation with you. Don't get too caught up in the vanity metrics again, which is the likes and followers. What you want to look at is engagement rates. Things like uh the number of likes and comments versus the total views. So, if 100 people viewed your video and you got 30 likes and you got 10 comments, those are things that you're going to want to take a look at. Not the overall likes and followers on your account, but on the individual pieces of content that you're putting out. Is it resonating? That's going to tell you if if what you're posting is hitting the audience correctly is looking at your engagement rates. So the likes and comments versus total views. You do also want to pay attention to your reach. This is how many people actually saw your post or your ad or your boosted promoted, you know, post that you put out there on social media. So how many eyeballs actually got on it? That's your reach. And then if you're using a call to action, you do want to look at link clicks. The number of link clicks. You can also then go back to your website analytics to see, okay, how many people clicked on from my ad versus how many people actually made a purchase versus how many people actually filled out my contact form and things like that. And that will start to give you your conversion rate if you're selling something online or if you have a a course online or if you're offering a download of some kind. So, you do want to take a look at the link clicks if you're using calls to action as well. The thought here is test it, learn, and adjust as needed. So test the content, put it out there, do those videos, get uncomfortable a little bit, learn from the from the statistics and your metrics, and then adjust as needed.

Slide 13: Harness the Power of User-Generated Content (30:03-32:39) 

I didn't want to go through this whole presentation without talking about user generated content. This is content created by your customers or fans that feature your business. This means a ton to any business. If you have a person who's willing to share a picture of themselves using your product or share a video testimonial of of how their experience was using your your product or services, that goes a really long way because then people are hearing from your customers and not just hearing from you. So this could be photos, videos, reviews, testimonials. They might be tagging you in a post. So, you know, if you sold a fishing reel, if that's your business, and they're tagging you in the picture of themselves holding their giant fish, um you you would reshare that content because you've been tagged in it. If someone tags your business in their story, remember those stories go away after 24 hours. So, this is why you do want to be checking your social media accounts daily because if you've been tagged in a story, the the most horrible feeling is being tagged in a story where someone's saying great things about your business and then you don't see it until after that post is gone after the 24 hours has has been up and then you don't get to reshare that. No one else gets to see that. So, the best thing you can do is is if you're asking for user generated content, which I suggest you do, make sure that you're checking in on a regular basis so that you're quick to respond and you're quick to be able to share any content that is being created by others on your behalf. How do you get user generated content? You you ask for it. That's a that's a simple answer there. After a purchase or service, invite customers to share a photo, tag the account, to leave a review, and maybe screen. You can screenshot the review and then share it in your account. When this happens, you're going to want to repost with credit. So, obviously, you will have asked the person if they're willing to tag you in the post. It's most likely they're going to be very fine with you re-sharing it to your accounts, but always tag them and think that thank them for the for the content. You can also display signage if you have a brickandmortar location. If you have a physical location, have a little sign with a QR code that says, "Tag us, review us." um you can have a chance to be featured. If you're putting out a newsletter, include it in your newsletter, things like that. So, having people create content on your behalf is such a great way to be able to really put the social in social media. It shows people using your products. It shows the experience of using you as a service provider. And that is fantastic use of social media.

Slide 14: Contents (32:40-36:56) 

The other way that you can grow an account relatively quickly and with active and engaged users is to run a contest. Now, I don't want to give away things just for the sake of giving things away, but a contest, a a really well-curated contest is great for boosting engagement and reach. So, getting additional eyeballs onto the post or content you're creating. Some ideas for a contest could be a photo contest. Show us how you used our product. tag us in, you know, a time where you're again going fishing with our fishing reel or whatever it is. So, add a photo contest element if you have a funny uh picture of something that happened at your office and you have a caption this photo contest where people are going in and leaving comments that show the caption for the photo. tag a friend giveaways who hasn't been tagged in in one of these type of giveaways where you know they might be giving away a product or service and the rules say something like tag a friend share this to your story we'll pick our winner you know in a week or whatever it is and what that does is when I comment and I tag my friend in that my friend now gets notified that Patrice has tagged them in this post they will typically go look at that and then they can decide oh I want to do that too and then they tag a friend so it's a great way to kind of if you think truly of a spiderweb or or kind of like everything being a little bit connected, running a contest in a tag a friend type giveaway is a great way to kind of just extend your reach to people who already like you and then infiltrating a little bit to their friends as well. Similar to tag a friend is going to be your like slash comment to win. So this could be you have let's say you have uh different color mugs that you're giving away and you're going to say comment on your favorite color mug to win that mug. we're gonna pick our winner again a week from now or whenever it's going to be and then people will comment with specific colors of of the mugs that they like. If you're going to run a contest, make it very easy to enter. So, don't have so many rules that it becomes confusing for someone to even enter the contest. And then be very clear about what the prize is, how do I enter, what the deadline is, and how and when you will be announcing the winner. Again, go back to your goals. So, go back to step two. Once you've identified your audience and you you know your goals, take a look at those goals and think about how might a contest help me reach my goal. We were trying to promote a a local area, a local business that had just opened up. And one of the contests that we ran was we curated a lovely basket full of local products and we put them all in a basket. And we when we did the giveaway, we tagged each one of those product manufacturers. And we didn't ask them to do anything. We didn't we didn't ask them to donate the products. We purchased the products that we were giving away. And every single one of those businesses that we tagged in that giveaway post re-shared it because why wouldn't they? Basically, what we're saying is we think that your toffee, we think that your pottery, we think that your blanket that you made, we think that your, you know, mug that we made and your coffee that you made, we think all of these products in our local area are so good, we're willing to give them away to our customer. And then they shared that, showing their customers and their followers that like, hey, you want some a chance at a free product from us, go and and like this other person's post. So it it extended the reach of our giveaway just by choosing really specific products as part of our giveaway. Now again that was a pretty hyper local example for what we were doing for a company that we were trying to grow in our local market. So again think back to what your goals are. Think back to who your audience is and then curate a contest based on that. Last uh point in contest is use a branded hashtag. So, #Your business challenge, local company challenge, whatever it's going to be. And then always, always follow the platform rules for contests, especially for Facebook and Instagram, because you can get banned or blocked if you run a contest that does not follow the rules. The rules change every once in a while, or else I would have put a slide up here showing you the rules, but um I didn't want to give out information that would be potentially outdated in a couple of weeks. So, just make sure you're you're take a look at contest rules and follow those.

Slide 15: Be Consistent (36:57-39:21) 

Right? I know we've talked about this already a little bit, but being consistent on social media is one of the biggest keys. Again, if you take away one thing, I already said it. If you take away one thing, it's engagement, engagement, engagement. Go like, comment, and share. Don't post and ghost. If you take away anything else, it's be consistent. You may not see results immediately. This might not be something where you post, you know, tomorrow. You may see zero people because the algorithm is not used to you posting yet. So, start posting and then be really consistent with the content that you are posting. A dead account. So, an account that you might not have posted to in a while could be doing you more harm than having no account at all. If your last post, and I just saw this from a restaurant, was in 2019, it does make the consumer really wonder, are you still open? Do you care about your business? How have you not been tagged in any posts from anyone since 2019? It it just leads to a lot of questions that don't need to happen if you have a dead or really stale account on social media. Again, people will check your social media pages before they buy or visit, particularly for local companies. So, it's really important that you're posting frequently so that when people do come to your page, they don't see that your last post was 3 months ago or 3 years ago or in the case of that restaurant, 8 years ago. So, set that schedule that you can realistically maintain. Again, that might be once a week at this point to get started with until you start seeing some of those results. you may not get quick results based on one time a week because you won't have a good opportunity to really learn what is resonating with your audience. If that's the case, ask your audience what they want to see from you. It's easy to post a story to Instagram, for example, if that's where your audience is, and say, "Hey, we've been a little silent on social media. We want to re-engage with our audience. What type of content do you want to see from us?" and then have a a place where they can either type in an answer or give them a multiple choice answer where they can tell you, "Hey, we want to see how-to videos. I want to see behind the scenes. I want to see more content about your your children because maybe you have a dozen of them. I don't know." But ask the audience what they want to see and then start delivering that on a consistent basis.

Slide 16: Best Practices (39:22-42:34) 

If we go through just some of our best practices, there's a couple things that you can do when you're initially setting up your accounts. first is to keep your bio and your contact information up to date. Your biography and your contact information. That is what people are going to see when they first go to your profile. They're going to see, you know, in Instagram, for example, there's a little blurb that you can write that tells who you are as your company. You can tag owners in that. You can put your contact information, your hours, your web address, anything you want to include in your bio. Make sure that's up to date and make sure it's something that people are going to care about. So, your bio is just a little short snippet of content that allows you to kind of indicate to people what your business is all about. When you are posting, do use hashtags. They're not dead. People are still searching based on hashtags. So, so find, you know, three to five to 10 maybe hashtags that are really relevant to the content that you're posting. And then use those hashtags based on what you're actually posting. So, if you're not posting a video, don't use the hashtag, you know, video tips or something like that. Make sure that the hashtags are relatable and relevant to the content that you are actually posting. And then do cross-promote your posts on email, on your website, in your newsletter that you send out. If you've got really good content on social media, there's no reason why you wouldn't also share that content in a webinar like this, for example, or if you're, like I said, sending out your newsletter. Include a link to your social media accounts on your newsletter. Make sure people can find those social media accounts based on the other content that you're putting out there. We talked a little bit about this when we were talking about contests, but do tag partners. If you have a testimonial that you're putting out there, tag the person in that and that way they can share the testimonial to their account. So tag partners, tag local businesses that you're working with. If you're having a staff meeting at a local restaurant, tag, take a picture and tag the restaurant saying, "We love having our staff meetings at this restaurant." Tag them. Again, small business owners are all looking for content to post online. They're all looking for social media things that are easy that they can post without having to put a bunch of thought into it. So, if you're regularly tagging people, tagging your partners, it just allows them to share and get your content out there and helps their business as well. If you have willing staff, get your staff involved. More faces equals more trust to the consumer. It also helps kind of show the true personality of your business. If you have engaged employees that are willing to do an account takeover, for example, or they're willing to share, you know, tips from the marketing department or tips from customer service, any little things that are going to kind of again bring forward your business personality is going to do well on social media. And then use branded templates for a consistent look. Canva is a very simple, easy to use and also featurerich application that allows you to create nice little templates that can keep your fonts consistent, keep your colors consistent so that when you are going to create a Instagram post or a Facebook post or something for LinkedIn that you can have a template that you regularly follow so all of your testimonials look similar or all of your how-to tips look somewhat similar and it's just a nice way to make sure that your brand looks very consistent across your uh different platforms.

Slide 17: What Success Really Looks Like (42:35-44:02) 

So, some final thoughts here. Again, social media is all about building that relationship. It is that two-way conversation, which is why we stress engagement so much. Being online, responding to the conversations and and posting consistently is going to provide that human element behind your business. And ultimately, people want to do business with other people that they know, they like, and trust. And that is what social media will provide for you. Encourage your audience to help you create some of that content with that user generated content. Again, this might make you feel uncomfortable because you're going to have to ask people for this. Ask them to be in a testimonial video. Ask them to create some content on behalf of your brand. But that content is going to go a long way in helping you share your message with people who are similar to the audience that you're attempting to to reach. A good contest that keeps in mind your audience and your goals can help you create buzz and draw in new people. Again, just make sure it's it's well thought out and is relevant to your business and that it follows the rules. And then again, one great post may not change your business, but 90 days of effort might. going in and and continually engaging with people for 90 straight days might actually change your business, might get you in front of people that you weren't in front of before you started engaging on social media.

Slide 18: Contact Us (44:03-45:20) 

I know that was a lot of information. If you have questions, if you're now shaking your head thinking, gosh, that's a lot more work than I thought it was going to be. I thought I could just post a meme and then be out of there. Memes are great. We love them. But you do have to remain consistent, and you do have to engage with people. If this content was helpful for you, go to ProFusionWebSolutions.com/newsletter and sign up for our newsletter so you can get tips like this directly into your inbox. We do them in a lot shorter form content in our newsletter. So little bite-sized helpful nuggets there. If you have questions, you can email info@ProFusionWebSolutions.com. If you'd like to hit me directly, you can go to patrice@ProFusionWebSolutions.com and and directly send a message to me. We're always happy to take phone calls. In this day and age, our phone actually rings to us and real humans answer it, which we know seems crazy, but we like to talk to people. And then we do share regular updates on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. That's where the majority of our audience tends to be, so that's where we post. Instagram, our account is Profusion Web Solutions. That's the same across Facebook and LinkedIn. And we would love for you to engage us and talk to us on social media as well. Again, if you have any questions, we would love to talk.