10 Minute Tips: Choosing What To Post About on Social Media

One of the bigger challenges clients tend to face is just not having enough time to build up their online presence and, consequently, their audience. But you don’t have to spend hours on your online strategy.

Instead, you can break things down into smaller and more manageable concepts and then apply them in small bursts to slowly put in the effort to build out your brand over time!

In this 10 Minute Tips series, I want to challenge you to take 10 minutes after reading through this post to help build up your online presence. Today’s topic? Breaking down what kind of content will be the best for you to post on social media!

When you’re getting started with social media, or you’re reevaluating what you’re doing, there are two angles that we recommend coming from to get an idea of what to do with your social media platforms. One is researching businesses that are similar to you, and second is researching best practices for your particular business.

To give an example, I timed myself on 10 minutes to see what it was possible to get information about within that time frame. The hypothetical business I did this work for is an average nail salon in suburban south jersey, which offers manicures, pedicures, eyebrow work, and some waxing services.
To start out, I first googled “nail salon near Haddon Township NJ”. The first thing we’ll notice is that there is a Google My Business panel, which includes the Top 3 businesses that were rewarded by Google to show up as the first businesses to trust. I followed their websites to try and see first what was on their website, and then hopefully find their social media. After a bit of digging I was finally able to find their social media, and found some helpful nuggets of ideas to post.

The first company I found had already implemented a really good strategy which was to have customer highlights of reviews. So the salon would take reviews off of google, and had an image with lovely flowers that said thank you for the review! They also showed some classic images of nail work that the technicians did that was a part of their portfolio. There weren’t that many other posts on their social, other than some acknowledging COVID-19, so I moved on. After looking at two other businesses, I ran into a bit of a dead end. One of the businesses had some images that talked about discounts, but other than that, they all just posted images of their nail work. Now, this is still very good, because it shows a breadth of work, but it’s best if possible to find things you can post about that are directly encouraging an action of some kind in addition to showing your work.

So now that we have some inspiration from competitor content, we can think about where to post based on your business goals. With highly visual content, platforms like Instagram and TikTok are more effective. Still, their audiences tend to be more consumer-heavy like Facebook. For a B2B company, LinkedIn is a must for being able to engage directly with people that might be involved in procurement but a Facebook account tends to show more of a more public-facing pulse. For this example, the platforms that would make sense would be Facebook for that more local presence and Instagram and TikTok for building a wider following and displaying the artistic qualities of the work.

Finally, if you are in an already fairly common industry, its easy to find recommendations for effective types of post content through google. We want to focus on creating conversions, or an action that a visitor uses that is meaningful for the business so for our example we want to focus on getting people to make a reservation:

• Photos of the interior or exterior of the salon are great for this to make the actual experience more enticing if you have a good ambience
• Images of life working at the salon, like staff spending time together or staff events, give a more personal touch to your content – knowing that real people are behind a brand is something people like to see
• Images of nail work are essential since this is your actual product – you need people to know you are good at what you do
• Customer Review Highlights are a great way to build up your trustworthiness – having other people to vouch for you is priceless
  Promotions and Discounts for clients keep people interested in following your accounts – people are more likely to stay connected to you if they have incentives to do so
• Different Service Options are good to include for new guests and even regulars who only get one thing – you could have services that your guests aren’t aware you offer
  Talking about your favorite brands of products provides additional incentives for people to follow your social media – if they like your work in person they might follow just to try to get the same experience at home with your recommendations

So from this, we now have a rounded-out group of posts that we can circulate through. There’s still more work that will need to be done before we can actually send out our posts, but for now, we have developed critical information that will help us in developing a plan for social media that helps us give clear calls to action to encourage interaction! But now it’s your turn, try your best to just spend 10 minutes to find some of your competition, and see what they do well or could improve on in terms of social media, and then do a quick search to see what other people in your industry recommend for doing with social media! Then, compile that together, and see what you have as an end result. Be sure to reach out through the form below or at [email protected] if you want additional help or to do a quick consultation to talk about your social media strategy.