Gano Excel Affiliates are pros at working outside an office. Work from home? It’s one of the reasons you decided to start your own Gano Excel business in the first place!
Taking smart steps to growing your business online, however, may be somewhat new territory for you. You may be new to social media marketing, or you may be an expert. No matter your experience level, it is helpful to set a strategy for your activity. This step will help you track and analyze what works best for you.
In this chapter, we will share a few tips to make sure you are getting the most out of your social media activity. You may even find that you want to make social media a permanent part of your business plan!
1. Set Social Media Goals
Just like you do with the rest of your Gano Excel business, you want to set goals with how you use social media. Avoid the temptation to set too many goals, make them too complex or too difficult. Be good to yourself and set two or three goals that you know you can achieve in the next two to four weeks. An acronym to remember is the keep goals SMART:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Relevant
- Time-based
A goal such as “Get more followers” does not fit the SMART framework because it is too vague. It will be hard to measure, and how will you know if you’ve achieved it or not? Instead, use a goal like “Attract 100 followers in the next four weeks using quality images and videos.” Now, this may take some work, but it is achievable, measurable, relevant and gives a timeframe.
Talk over your goals with your Upline and leaders for some feedback if you are unsure what an achievable goal for you can be. Each Affiliate has unique skills and talents and this could look different for everyone.
2. Think About Prospects
As with your face-to-face prospecting, take some time to think about how and where to reach people who need to hear about your Ganoderma lucidum products and the Gano Excel opportunity. Put some thought into the people you are trying to reach, as well as where and how they spend time when on social media.
Some details to think about:
- Age groups
- Geography
- Languages
- Interests
- Favorite social networks to use
- Reasons for liking your Gano Excel products
- Common obstacles or objections
Don’t know who your prospects are? Certain apps, such as NextDoor focus on neighbors in your community, while others such as Facebook allow you to reach people all around the world. Your personal network is a good place to start, and you can also join community groups that share some of the common traits you wrote down.
3. Shape Your Social Media Strategy
It’s time to start making some decisions about how you will use social media to reach your goals. Connect the dots between what you want to achieve and what you know about your prospects and customers online. If there is a platform, such as Instagram, that you are comfortable with, and your customers use it often, then it makes sense to allocate most of your time to that platform.
Select Your Platforms
There are hundreds of social media platforms, and let’s get this out of the way now: you don’t need to be using every single one of them. Even using the 10 most popular platforms can be too much for even big businesses. You only want to join a new network if you can commit to posting regularly. And here’s some good news: your ideal customer is most likely just using a small handful of favorite social media apps. He or she probably has a favorite out of those few.
We know you love being your own boss as a Gano Excel Affiliate, and so it’s time to make an executive decision. What are the one to three social media platforms you will dedicate your time to?
Popular social media platforms include:
- Facebook – 2.23 billion monthly active users
- YouTube – 1.9 billion monthly active users
- WhatsApp – 1.5 billion monthly active users
- WeChat – 1.06 billion monthly active users
- Instagram – 1 billion monthly active users
- Tumblr – 642 million monthly unique visitors
- Twitter – 335 million monthly active users
- LinkedIn – 294 million monthly active users
- Snapchat – 255 million monthly active users
- Pinterest – 250 million monthly active users
Decide on Types of Social Media Content
Every social media platform works differently and manages some content better than others. On YouTube, video content is king, on Pinterest it will be still images, and on Twitter short text is the way to go.
Depending on the channels you’ve chosen, the types of social media content you use could include images, videos, interviews and articles. Whatever you choose, make sure you are equipped to create high quality content that will engage your prospects and customers. Play to your strengths. Are you good on camera, or better at writing short pieces of advice?
When and How Often to Post
Finding out when the best time to post will be takes some research, including trial and error. You can begin by thinking about when people are likely to check social media and create a calendar to test if your strategy is right. Over time, you will be able to see when people are most likely to like, comment, and share your content and you can plan accordingly.
You also want to find the perfect balance between posting too often and not enough. Most users do not want too many messages crowding their news feeds and doing so may annoy them to the point of hiding your posts or unfollowing you altogether. Post just frequently enough for them to remember you – having high quality content is a huge help as well!
Once you’ve determined the types of social media content you’ll be sharing, the time you’ll be posting, and your posting frequency, you can create a social media content calendar. It will contain all of this information so that you can keep track of what you are doing in order to measure and achieve the goals you have for your Gano Excel business.
4. Track Your Progress
We know by now you’re probably excited to get started creating content for your social media plan. In Chapter 3 we will look at some tips on how to create great content. However, before you get started, here is one last tip for you.
Do a simple audit of your current social media content across every platform you plan to use. Look at what your typical likes, comments and shares look like for text updates, photos and videos. What works the best, and what needs some love?
Take this information and start a journal to keep track of your progress. As you implement your strategy, take note of what works and what doesn’t work. This will help you adjust your strategy as needed and continue creating great content for your prospects and customers.
Here are a few tools that you may find helpful when tracking and managing your social media content. They even give you great statistics to learn from!
- Buffer – social media posting, scheduling, analyzing.
- Hootsuite – social media posting, scheduling analyzing.
- HubSpot – social media management, analyzing.
- Sprout Social – social media management, analyzing.
- Tagboard – keyword or hashtag tracking.
- Bitly – shortens any URL so that it fits perfectly on your social media channels and tracks responses each time a link is clicked.
These social media management tools enable you to schedule posts ahead of time, manage conversations and engagement, and track and analyze responses to your strategies to gauge whether your objectives are being met.
Ready to start posting some great content on social media? In Chapter 3, we will tackle some tips on how to make your content attracting and engaging on social media.