We all know how important social media and online marketing is, especially in this increasingly competitive business landscape we live in today. It doesn’t help that digital marketing can be confusing, engagement is going down, you’re already busy, and nearly everyone else is trying to reach the same audience!
To make life easier, we’re sharing 5 ways to promote your business on social media in 30 minutes or less that you can start doing right now. In 5 days from now, you’ll be on your way!
Day 1: Create a Facebook Page and Instagram account (30 Minutes)
If you’re not already on social media, well, to be honest, you’re already behind and it’s time to start. The good news is we’re going to keep it simple and just stick to Facebook and Instagram, both of which take about 15 minutes each to set up.
To create a business Facebook page (not a personal account) just:
- Visit facebook.com/pages/create,
- Follow the prompts and
- Invite your friends to like the page.
To create an Instagram account just:
- Download the app,
- Press ‘Sign Up,’
- Fill out your profile and
- Follow 200 people. You’ll be done in no time!
It’s important to make your accounts complete and looking good. Use the same profile picture (or logo) on both of your accounts, try to have the same username, bio and basically make it match across all platforms. This way you’re staying consistent and you will also be a lot easier to find and recognise for people trying to track you down!
Day 2: Create an Awesome Piece of Content (30 Minutes)
Without good content social media would be boring. In fact, content comes first, and social media should be a way to distribute that content along with your message in a fun and creative way, otherwise, your accounts will be empty and borderline pointless.
So now that you’ve got your accounts, it’s time to create something your customers want to read or watch. Either shoot a quick video (your smartphone is fine) or write an article about the most popular topic in your niche. Think about the number one question your customers ask you. Time to write it down!
If you need ideas, go to the top 5 most popular accounts in your industry and see what they are doing. Just cherry pick the best ideas. Put your own spin on it so it’s unique, and you’ve got a great piece of content. Just remember to ADD VALUE!
Don’t talk about yourself. This is where people overcomplicate marketing. When it comes to marketing all you need to do is:
- Understand who your customer is,
- Find out where they are,
- Find out what they want and
- Give it to them!
It’s even easier when you look for things they already enjoy and share your take on it. There’s a quote that says “Sell what people are buying.” Simple!
Day 3: Share Your Article to Your Page, to a Group and to Individuals (30 Minutes)
Now we’ve got some content, share it to your pages and also to anyone who might find it interesting.
Tip – Make sure you post natively. Meaning, if you’re going to share something on Instagram make a nice square piece of artwork for free on Canva. If you’re sharing on Pinterest, make it the right dimensions. Each platform is different and you want to make sure you’re speaking its language!
- What Facebook groups are there that you could join?
- What people in your space might be interested in?
Spend the first 3 minutes sharing to your accounts, and the rest of the time individually messaging people who might find it useful. Send them a link to your post – just remember to lead with value or ask for their opinion, don’t look for promotion (people hate that). The key to getting engagement is to engage with others.
Social media is a two-way street and you need to give if you want to get.
Go through your feed and connect with people, and after that you can search for relevant hashtags or locations and connect with those people too. Build your own little community and it will start building your brand – even if people have no idea who you are yet!
Day 4: Create a Facebook Ad (30-Minutes)
Your content is now live and some people have seen it – why not get a few more people? This is where Facebook Ads come in. From your Facebook page, underneath your new post you’ll see a button called ‘Boost.’ (Personally I never actually do this as I use the Ads Manager – but for simplicity’s sake, this will do).
Hit that button and it will ask you to add in your targeting. Just keep it simple – think about your customer, where they are and what they’re into. Type in the location you want to target.
Pro tip – If you’re a super local business you’ll want to drop a pin on your business and adjust the radius to 3-4 miles. By default Facebook’s smallest radius is 10 miles and that’s way too big!
Then add in interests and demographics.
- What are your customers into?
- What pages do they like? Not every page will be available (they have to be a certain size e.g. you could target Kmart but you couldn’t target the specific Kmart around the corner).
- You can also target parents, people that are married, job title etc.
Pro tip – You can also ‘Narrow’ the audience, so people have to match a certain criteria ANDanother criteria. E.g. I might target people who are interested in social media AND small business to get a slightly more defined audience. This isn’t compulsory, just a tip!
Then choose your budget, attach a payment method and you’re away.
If you’re wondering how much to spend, you can start with $10 a day for 10 days, which will give you a pretty good idea on what’s working and what isn’t. Once this is launched, simply check in once a week to see how it’s doing, and create a new ad if you’ve got new content.
Day 5 – 10: Learn and Implement (30-Minutes)
It’s been a week and a lot has happened.
- What went well?
- How can you capitalise on that?
- What didn’t really work?
- What did you learn?
Write down 5 – 10 dot points with key takeaways from this experience and what actions you will take moving forwards.
People overcomplicate things in life, and especially in marketing. Take a look at what you’re doing. Do more of what works and invest your money there, and aggressively cut what isn’t working. Granted you need a bit of time and a reasonable amount of data to make a decision – but when you know, don’t over complicate it!
Day 10+: Optimise
Now that you’ve got social media accounts, new content, some interaction and a Facebook ad, you can start making tweaks, improving your accounts and making better content. The 5-day process with only 30 minutes got you started, now we can fine tune it!
More articles like this: 12 Easy Skill Set Tips to Empower Small Business
About the Author
Mitch Hills is an entrepreneur, marketer and problem solver from Brisbane. He runs Mastered Marketing, a business on a mission to make world-class marketing available to small businesses. You can keep up with new content from Mitch on his Instagram @mitchills or on SavvySME.
