A Simple Guide To Get Started On Social Media

Ashley Bryan

Published On Aug 23,2022

Contents

This basic guide on social media plan provides tips to get started with business social media, in only 15 minutes per day.   The plan uses a 5-day cycle and is easy to implement.

Initially use the same posts for Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus (will need to be cut down to <140 characters for Twitter). Later, vary the post text for each. Later still, treat each channel entirely separately with its own plan.

Hootsuite.com allows you to manage all your social media from one console. You can post to all channels simultaneously, schedule posts, look at all your feeds and respond.  The free plan is a great way to start: https://hootsuite.com/plans/free?icn=primtopnav&ici=Free

The idea here is to mix it up a bit and create variety and see what works.

Work on a 5-day social media plan:

Day 1: Piece of advice/tip

Post a tip or piece of advice:

  • Trawl back through your blog posts or other website content and extract a suitable piece of interesting content, tidy it up if needed and post it. For example of paragraph or two of text or a brief list of tips.
  • Link back to the source blog post
  • Use suitable hashtags (run the hashtags in the social media channel search box and check the result – do you want your content to be included in that stream?)

Day 2: Repost someone else’s popular content

Repurpose someone’s else’s successful work (but give them credit):

  •  Go to topsy.com and enter a suitable and relevant search term
  • On the left, set to a suitable timeframe
  • Look at results and select a suitable item. Open it.
  • If suitable write a very quick summary about why it is a great piece, or summarise key points
  •  Post it to your social media and link back to the source post
  • Use suitable hashtags and hashtag the source author or company

With this there could be opportunity you could use content that is a bit different/humorous/video, left field etc

Day 3: As per day 1

Post a tip or piece of advice

Day 4: Post about a relevant news item

Capitalise on recent popular or trending news:

  • Do a Google search for a relevant topic
  • Check to see if there are any suitable news items appearing in the those results
  • If not, switch from “Web” to “News”
  •  Select “search tools” and change “recent” to past 24 hours.
  • If necessary change “The Web” to your own country.
  • When you find a suitable item write a very quick summary about why it is a great piece, or summarise key points
  • Post it to your social media and link back to the source post
  • Use suitable hashtags and hashtag the source author or company

Day 5: Salesy item – self promotion

  • Ask a question to which your business/products/services are the answer. Then answer it.
  • Add a link to the relevant service or product page on your website.
  •  Add suitable hashtags.

Analyse monthly!

At the end of each month look at your Facebook Insights which gives you data on the performance of your website.

Facebook:

  • From your business page, click “Insights” at the top
  • Look at your performance
  • Identify areas of strength and capitalise on that
  • Identify top performing posts to see what is working

Twitter:

Go to https://analytics.twitter.com/user/twittername/home

  • Check the summary page
  • Use the links at the top to look at your performance
  • Identify areas of strength and capitalise on that
  • Identify top-performing tweets to see what is working