Did you know that the average person spends roughly 2 hours per day on social media? That translates to more than 5 years of an average person’s life span spent on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, and other social media platforms.1
The extensive exposure these websites get provides a golden opportunity for your wellness business. Harnessing the full potential of social will help you grow your business in many ways, including:
Building brand recognition
Increasing audience base
Establishing relationships with your audience
Connecting with the right people
Sharing your content
Driving traffic to your website or blog
Whether you have no social media presence whatsoever or you’re not getting the results you want from your current social media endeavors, these 9 steps will set you up to attract more clients and build relationships that will help your business thrive.
1 – Determine your goals
Likes and shares are great, but ultimately you want to gauge your success with social media on the amount of leads, sales, and referrals you are bringing in. Aim to hit specific monetary goals with the social media platforms you use. Increasing likes and shares may be a key strategy to help you reach your goals, but they shouldn’t be the end goals in themselves. The more specific and detailed your strategies and goals, the more likely you are to achieve them.
2. Choose your platforms
The platform you choose should come down to your target audience and the best ways to reach them. Facebook is the largest social media website, so you are bound to find prospects there whether you are a practitioner or essential oils distributor. YouTube can also be incredibly effective at reaching your target audience. Pinterest and Instagram are particularly popular for oilers, while LinkedIn may be a better choice if you are a practitioner.
Having multiple social media accounts can be a solid strategy. Just make sure that you aren’t on so many platforms that you can’t manage them all. Tools like HootSuite can help you manage your accounts more effectively, but you may be better off choosing 2 or 3 platforms rather than spreading yourself too thin on 5 or 6 different platforms.
3. Complete your profile
Once you have chosen which social media platforms to utilize, don’t neglect to complete your profiles and/or pages. This includes sharing your business information, explaining who you are and your story, and adding a profile photo.
Additionally, branding is important whether you have a business name or are using your name as your business brand. If you don’t have a logo, create one yourself or work with a graphic designer. Again, even if your name is your business, you can still create a logo from it. When designing your profile, consider that the colors you use will impact how people perceive you. This basic color guide can help you decide what colors to use for your brand and your profile design.
4. Create shareable content
Creating content that people want to share is a key component of social media success. This involves knowing what your target audience is interested in and what is relevant to your business. This could be as simple as a quote or image, or an infographic or link to an in-depth blog article.
When you create content on social media, you should follow the 80/20 rule: 80% of your content should be informational, and only 20% should be promotional. If you have a website, you should be promoting the pages there on social media—especially your blog posts.
You can also post curated content in addition to content you create. Curated content is content gathered from other quality sources. If you are a distributor, the company you distribute for can be a great source for curated content. However, you should always add your value and voice to the content you curate and post.
Whether unique or curated content, some of the most sharable content on social media includes:
How-to articles
Positive content
Trending topics
Social causes
Humorous content
Contests and offers
Personal stories
On the topic of personal stories, Instagram and Facebook have a Stories feature that allows you to visually share authentic moments from your business. Facebook stories are growing in popularity, and nearly have as many daily active users as the entire Snapchat app.2
Facebook Live and Twitter Spaces provide another way to share content in an unfiltered setting. This can be useful for sharing information, addressing questions and comments, promoting events, and providing an inside look at your business.
5. Optimize content
Creating or curating content is only part of the social media equation. Another equally important part is optimizing that content. One critical component of content optimization is simply to post frequently. Daily posting is recommended to build consistency and recognition in your business. And to ensure that you aren’t scrambling to get a post out every day, schedule your posts for the week, or month, in advance. Additionally, experiment with posting at different times during the day. You will probably find that people are more responsive to your posts at certain times than others.
Next, don’t forget about the all-important hashtag. Hashtags will help you find and reach new people, and also gives people a way to find you. Finding the best hashtags for your content will require some research. Find out which hashtags are trending and which ones that influencers in your niche are using. Creating your own hashtags can also be effective for promoting your own contests or marketing campaigns. Many social media sites also allow you to use geo-hashtags or other location features such as geostickers. These can be especially useful to make your business more visible in your location.
Additionally, people are more likely to engage with your content if it has compelling visuals,3 so make sure to include visual elements in your posts such as videos, infographics, GIFs, or high-quality photos. Your audience may prefer certain types of visuals to others, and you will begin to see which ones perform better through trial and error.
Another thing to keep in mind is that you need to optimize your content differently based on the social media site you are using. Character limits vary by platform, and according to research, the optimal amount of characters to use on a post varies based on the platform as well.4 Images and video size requirements also differ depending on the platform. This cheat sheet will help you create images that fit these requirements.
For videos, you can also do this by using a tool like Veed.io, which offers both an editor with an inbuilt video cutter function that helps you create videos to fit the required size, as well as an MP3 converter for MKV files and a podcast editor that’s easy to use.
Lastly, your posts should always have a compelling call to action, whether that’s to take advantage of an offer, visit your website or blog, leave a comment, or watch a video.
6. Monitor and engage
Social media provides a great opportunity to build relationships with your audience. You should do this not only through posting content, but also joining other discussions and adding your value where you can. Frequently monitor what followers and influencers in your niche are saying and comment, like, and share their posts when relevant. Make sure to be genuine in your comments rather than just trying to get exposure.
Engaging also involves connecting with like-minded individuals and businesses. You can simply ask clients and associates to connect with you to build your social media presence. Keep in mind, though, that the quality of your connections is more important than quantity.
Social media platforms like Facebook allow you to communicate with clients and customers through messenger platforms as well. This provides yet another opportunity for you to quickly and easily communicate with current and potential customers, as well as other influencers in your industry.
7. Harness influencer marketing
Finding and utilizing influencers is one of the most effective ways to build your social media presence. When looking at potential influencers, make sure that their audience is similar to yours and they have at least 10,000 followers. Sites like Grin and Ifluenz can help you find trustworthy and relevant influencers in your niche.
Once you have targeted an influencer, you can reach out to them privately about your business. When you do, show them that you understand their audience and discuss how a partnership could benefit both of you. This includes paying them to collaborate with you in promoting your content, products, and services.
When working with an influencer, the influencer is required to disclose their partnership with you in the post. This means using an “ad” or “sponsorship” hashtag and including a written and verbal disclosure for video reviews.5
8. Use targeted ads
Although building a strong social media presence organically is certainly possible, many people have found success with adding targeted ads to their marketing strategy. This is an easy way to get your business seen by potential customers.
Facebook Ads is the most popular among social media platforms for targeting ads. Some of the ways in which you can target people with Facebook include:
Location
Demographics
Interests
Behaviors
Engagement
Other social media platforms help you reach more people with targeted ads as well. For example, Pinterest allows you to target based on interests, keywords, and your current audience.
9. Take it offline
As effective as social media can be, you still need to deliver value offline for your business to be successful. Social media shouldn’t be a replacement for other marketing activities like hosting local classes or attending events and tradeshows. Rather than a replacement, social media should be used to complement your offline business activities.
A common misconception is that it’s easier to build a business using social media than it is offline. In fact, it often takes longer to build your business online. However, once you build momentum on social, the results can be amazing.
About Seth Morris
Seth Morris is an experienced article writer with a background in marketing, Web content creation, and health research. In addition to writing and editing content for the ZYTO website and blog, he has written hundreds of articles for various websites on topics such as holistic wellness, health technology, and Internet marketing. Seth has earned Bachelor’s Degrees in Business Management as well as Literary Studies.
Sources:
1. Asano, Evan. “How Much time Do People Spend on Social Media? [Infographic].” Industry Dive. Socialmediatoday.com.
2. Constine, Josh. “Facebook Stories reveals 150M daily viewers and here come ads.” Verizon Media. Techcrunch.com.
3. Mawhinney, Jesse. “45 Visual Content Marketing Statistics You Should Know in 2019.” Hubspot, Inc. Blog.hubspot.com.
4. “The ideal social media post length. A complete guide to every platform.” Promo Republic. Promorepublic.com.
5. Newberry, Christina. “The Complete Guide to Influencer Marketing.” Hootsuite Inc. Blog.hootsuite.com.