1) Make scheduling your new best friend

Maybe invest in some new alarm clocks too…

If your business is still fairly new, you’ll have been thrown into a whirlwind of new set-up processes and business events that seem to make your time disappear each week. Whilst it’s great if you can cover a lot of what’s happening on social media and share it with your new fans, another great thing that will save you mountains of time is scheduling for the month ahead. Get all your images, info, website links and blog posts ready and scheduled for the rest of the month. On-the-day content and spontaneous posts can complement this, but scheduling will mean you have a consistent stream of content that prevents your engagement from becoming unpredictable or sporadic.

2) Mention, tag, follow, shoutout.

Engaging with new fans or followers individually by mentioning them in posts, sharing their content and engaging in #FF (Follow Friday) tags can help a lot with creating a strong community around your brand. No matter whether the business is big or small, personalised engagement with users will boost their impression of your brand and increase the likelihood that you’ll also appear in their friends’ timelines and streams as well (a golden egg in itself, as Facebook algorithms make this difficult).

3) Followers & Fans = Prizes

One of the most effective ways to get new followers and fans on your pages is to run a competition on your social media. Ask fans to Like your Facebook page and Share a post, or Follow your Twitter account and retweet a competition post, and create a prize draw with a specific deadline. Make your prizes good: the most attention-grabbing prizes are often bundles or hampers. Stock it with your product or vouchers for your service, and include a little something for everyone. Not only will this boost your follower numbers, but it will increase brand exposure and awareness.

4) Make the most of Instagram and Pinterest

As a new business, it can be tempting to put all your time and effort into social media platforms with more direct engagement, such as Facebook and Twitter. But spare a little consideration for Instagram and Pinterest: although they aren’t necessarily text-heavy, they can be great tools for sharing attractive, engaging photo and video content with your followers. (Video content is also one of the best ways to engage with your fans!). Pinterest is also a great directive gateway through which you can draw users in with attractive visual content and then direct them forwards to your website. 

Although Instagram and Pinterest don’t offer integrated scheduling, there are some great services which facilitate this. Schedugram is great fro Instagram scheduling, and Tailwind makes Pinterest planning a dream (and hey, here’s a Tailwind How-To Guide as well!).

5) Retweet, share, repeat.

The golden ‘5-3-2’ rule should be one that you live by from Day 1 on Twitter and LinkedIn. If you aim for 10 tweets or updates per day, then 5 of those should be content from other people, whether it’s retweeting a customer or sharing some information from another business that your fans will find interesting. Three of the updates should be directly about your service or product. The other two should be something a little more informal or off-the-cuff – content that demonstrates to your users that there’s a human sitting behind the screen of your business.

Dividing up your content this way keeps it focused and on-brand without falling into the trap of appearing self-obsessed or chasing a hard-sell. Social media engagement should always be an exchange, not a transaction.

Have you got a great trick or time-saving hack that new business should know about? Comment below and let us know.

By Olivia Rose French

Olivia is an expert writer, blogging specialist and Copywriter at Shake Social.

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