At a glance:
- Social media can be draining, hard work. It doesn’t have to be
- Once you own a channel, you shouldn’t neglect it
- babel Monkey has an effective, affordable solution that automates a substantial part of social media for business
- A fully managed service is available
Running social media effectively is, for many, a daunting commitment. Which platforms to use, what to post, when to post, and which hashtags to use… are all common stress points for many business owners. The lack of understanding of social media and its strategy often translates into not posting anything! And yet, posting regularly allows you to show case your business, how it helps people, and shows you care about your brand’s image – so it’s a must! It takes time, though, and for many of us, lack of time is an issue. It’s one reason you so often see Twitter accounts that haven’t been updated in two years, frozen Facebook pages, and Instagram accounts where the latest image is from the Christmas before last.
What does that say about your organisation? You might have the best customer service in the world and regularly win awards. Still, suppose a potential client sees a Twitter account in stasis or a LinkedIn account that ‘hasn’t been updated in the last 90 days’. In that case, this indicates a lack of professionalism and care by the owner of the social media channel concerned. That is the kind of first impression that puts people off – in a world where it is often said that online, you have 6 seconds to attract a fresh viewer before they lose interest.
What if your social media time commitment could be reduced, managed, and partly automated, freeing up your time for other priorities? There are various ways to do this, and a popular one, as babelMonkey has discovered, is to have expert help in crafting social media posts that showcase your business offering, platform by platform, to cycle on a timed-release schedule. Having quality posts appear at intervals to maximise the chance of their being seen and engaged with by potential clients provides a strong core output. We call this our ‘Evergreen Social Media Plan’.
Finding a way of making the Evergreen service affordable to smaller businesses has been a goal of babelMonkey for a long time. Not all companies, particularly start-ups, can find the income to outsource a managed social media service, so the Evergreen Plan offers a sensible staged outlay and, longer term, a small monthly maintenance cost.
Since we started sharing the Evergreen service, it has been picked up by clients in the I.T. and logistics field, health, sports and leisure, financial advice services, business services, and many more. The Plan has drawn praise from our clients such as Sarah Forde, Online Business Manager, Sue Tappenden at Headspace for Change, and Richard Wraith at WESH UK.
What do you get with the Evergreen Plan? In short, it delivers a structured social media plan that showcases your business, and your services and highlights why people should choose to buy from you. First, we take the time to properly understand the service or products you want to promote. Then, we discuss which platform(s) are most relevant to your business (currently, we offer LinkedIn, Twitter, Google My Business, Facebook, and Instagram) and create posts that highlight the benefits of those products and services, along with supporting evidence, such as your articles, testimonials from clients, etc. In total, 60 posts are created, written in the style and tone of your brand, and uploaded to a scheduling tool and automated to post three times per week. The creation of the posts is spread over 4 months, delivering an instalment-like process giving a social media strategy delivered from Month 1 and spreading the plan’s cost. After all posts have been created, there is simply a maintenance charge to keep the scheduler running. Thus, a framework of consistent messaging is developed and managed in a manner affordable to all small businesses.
In addition to the Evergreen Plan, we offer a fully managed social media service, where our experts (Troopers as we call them) actively spend half an hour each working day per channel, interacting with users, including prospects and clients, posting topical news and advice, and finding and contributing to relevant groups on your behalf. We catch up with you regularly and use your feedback to run the selected social media channel(s), taking account of your latest news and priorities. We can also offer a blog and news copywriting service, and by publishing such content, you will boost your organic Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) so your service or product is found more easily by people using search engines. We can also advise on online advertising as part of a fully managed social media strategy.
So, consider if you’re putting more time and effort into social media than you’d like. Think about the strain of having to write compelling posts regularly so that people can be reminded of your services. Just when did you last post or tweet? Was what you did well enough written to impress? If you want to take better control of your social media, check out babelMonkey’s affordable Evergreen Plans as your first step.
babel Monkey Top Tip:
With social media, if you don’t use it, close it or at least put up a holding message. For example, perhaps you haven’t used your Twitter account for six months. Unless that is to change, you should take the account down and remove any icon/link to it on your website. If you think you might resume the account later and you are afraid of someone else taking the name, one option is to add a ‘sticky post’ that will sit at the top of your feed. You can make that a message such as ‘We’re taking time off from Twitter, check out our latest updates on [insert link to current platform]’.
