You know you need to use social media to grow your business, but as you get started, the work becomes overwhelming and unwieldy, often yielding no results. The problem with most social media marketing resources is that while they do adequately explain the various networks and how to use them, they don’t do a very good job at explaining how to make a daily social media plan. If you’re struggling with social media, here are tips to making a plan that is effective without taking too much time.

Pre-Planning

Before embarking on any social media campaign, you need to make sure your profiles are ready and you have an idea of what you want from social media. The first step is to visit each of the social networks you use and make sure you’ve:

1) Uploaded an appropriate picture. Unless you make bathing suits or sell travel services in your home business, a picture of you in a bikini at Cancun probably won’t work. Consider your business and audience and choose a photo that fits. Make sure it’s a good quality photo, which doesn’t mean it has to be taken by a professional, but it should have good resolution.

2) Completed the majority of the profile sections. On some sites, you can get away with not filling out everything, such as your favorite movies, but you should complete all the sections that are important to your business.

3) Followed influencers in your industry. Social media isn’t just about people following you, it’s about you following others as well. Start by connecting with people who you admire or enjoy particularly in your home business industry.

4) Integrated social media tools on your website or blog. At a minimum, you should have links to your profiles so that your visitors can follow you and social media share buttons so they can share your content with their followers. However, there are many other great tools you can use to save time and increase results. For example, including a “Click to Tweet” option on your posts (you can use this Click to Tweet generator or a WordPress plugin - search your plugin directory) makes it easy for your reader to tweet your content. Integrating Facebook comments on your WordPress blog can increase engagement with your market. I use a plugin called CoSchedule to create and schedule my blog posts within WordPress. But you can use Hootsuite (which has WP plugin) or Buffer instead. Another WP plugin to consider is Revive Old Post, which after 30 days (or whatever you choose) will randomly pick content in the categories you choose and Tweet it.

5) Establish the results you want from social media. The short answer to that is sales, but posting “buy my stuff” all the time doesn’t work and, in fact, will result in losing followers. Instead, think about things you can post that ultimately lead to sales. Some social media posting goals might be to:

1) Increase readership of your blog.

2) Get more email subscribers.

3) Find more followers across other social media sites (i.e. promoting a Facebook fan page on your Twitter feed).

4) Increase influence (credibility and expertise) with your target market.

5) Built rapport with your target market (i.e. showing you’re fun or friendly).

Every social media post you make should have an end goal result attached to it. So if you post the URL of your most recent blog article, the goal might be to increase readership and influence,  and to build rapport.

Sharing on Social Media

When it comes to social media, there are actually two jobs. One is to share stuff to meet your goals above and the second is to engage with others. First we’ll cover sharing.

Sharing Your Content

The challenge in social media sharing is in maximizing it when each platform is different. Here are some easy steps to planning your sharing strategy:

1) Select 1 to 3 quotes from your content that would make great social media posts.  For example, I might select “Every social media post you make should have a end goal result attached to it.”

2) Create an image with your quote(s). Ideally, you should create a graphic in the size recommended by each social network. For example, according to Buffer, the ideal social media graphic sizes are 1,200 X 628 for Facebook, 1,024 X 512 for Twitter, and 735 X 1,102 for Pinterest. That means creating a graphic for each network because resizing isn’t an option without losing graphic quality or staying within the correct dimensions. If you’re only going to use one size, pick the one for the network you have the most engagement with. Resources such as Canva and PicMonkey make graphic creation easy. Use the graphic in your blog/website post.

3) Share your post on your networks at the time of the post.

4) Schedule reposts of content over the next few days. For example, you might Tweet your various quotes (on a graphic is recommended) with a link to the post once a day over the next three days. When it comes to posting, watch that you don’t over post to certain networks. For example, you can get away with sending many Tweets (various content, not just your posts) a day, but that doesn’t work as well on LinkedIn. Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick in their book,The Art of Social Media (get the ebook as the print version doesn’t have URLs to all resources mentioned) recommend casual social media users post to Facebook 1-2 times, Google+ 3-4 times, LinkedIn 1 time, Pinterest 6 times and Twitter 8-12 times a day. These numbers double for hard core users. Finally, don’t forget to schedule content for your followers on the other side of the world, especially on Twitter so they’re more likely to see it.

Engaging On Social Media

This is the area that many home business owners don’t pay enough attention to, but is crucial to social media success. Only posting your content all the time is the same as being at a party and only talking about yourself. So along with preparing content to go out, you need have a plan for commenting, sharing and engaging with others. Here are tips to doing that.

1) Sign up for social media management tool, such as Hootsuite, that allows you see your feeds in one place, as well as schedule posts. If you use Hootsuite, add the Hootlet to your toolbar so you can easily share content you find online. Using a social media tool that offers scheduling allows you to share (including ReTweets) content at different times, as opposed to posting everything at once.

2) Pick one or two times a day to do social media engagement. Plan for 15 to 20 minutes a day total (not including preparing your posts as indicated in the section above).

3) Share 2-3 pieces of content as appropriate for your network. Using an RSS feed-reader such as Feedly or a content curator like AllTop can help you find content in your industry.

4) Share 2-3 three social media posts from people you follow (i.e. Twitter retweet, Pinterest Pin, etc).

5) Comment on 2-3 posts from your followers.

6) Reply to others who share or comment on your posts.

7) Like other people’s content as you come across items that appeal to you. The “Like” (Facebook) or “Favorite” (Twitter) and other similar single click engagement doesn’t pack as much punch as sharing or commenting, but it’s still engagement.

8) Repeat daily.

At first, it might seem like a lot to create, share and engage on social mediate, but if you use a check list, set your goals and follow through, it will become easier the more you do it.