In today’s episode, I’m going to answer the question: How do I manage all of my social media platforms?
My answer might actually surprise you!
Here for the links referenced in the show notes?
Episode 280: How to get more followers on Facebook: tashcorbin.com/280
Episode 281: Q&A: What’s the best strategy for growing a Facebook group? tashcorbin.com/281
$0 FB Marketing Plan free training: tashcorbin.com/zero
Not only am I going to talk about how I manage my social media platforms, but I’m also going to talk through how I’ve scaled up to the space that I’m in today because what I’m doing isn’t necessarily going to work for everyone – especially not if you’re in the early stages of business.
I want to talk about the early stages as well as what to do as your business starts to scale up.
Let’s dive into this one!
If I were to give you the short answer to the question, it would be that I don’t.
I want to be really upfront with you about that.
People see me in a bunch of different spaces online, especially all over Facebook where I have:
- My own Facebook community
- Other people’s Facebook communities
- My page
- My Conference page
- Paid Facebook groups where I’m working with my paying students and clients
It could be very easy to assume that every time you see something from me on Facebook, that I have done it. But that’s just not the case.
I have a team and I get support.
It’s important to note that for some of my social media channels (such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and even to an extent some of the things you see from me on Instagram), it’s not me, or it is me, but it’s just completely automated and pushed to that channel from another one.
I’m not on a bunch of different social media platforms at any one time.
I’m not someone who spreads myself thin over lots of different social media platforms or even lots of different spaces within a platform.
What I do is I prioritise where I’m going to show up and connect and engage with people. And then the rest, I automate and put on autopilot as much as I can.
But what if you’re not at the stage where you can hire a team to support you with your social media platforms yet? You’re not yet at the point where you can really schedule a bunch of stuff in advance, and maybe you don’t even know what to be sharing on socials yet?
What I’ve done for you today is I’ve got a five-step process of how I would prioritise and work out how I’m going to show up, where I’m going to show up and what to get rid of first if I were to start my business all over.
1. Prioritise your spaces and put the ones where you’re not going to be active on autopilot
Anything that I post on my Facebook page gets pushed to Twitter.
That’s my Twitter strategy.
I don’t think I’ve logged into Twitter for over a year.
My main follower on Twitter is my brother in law, who regularly comments on my tweets and retweets some of the things that I share. That’s where we’ll have a conversation because he’s not actually on Facebook.
Honestly, I forget that I even have a Twitter account.
Do I think you should set up a Twitter and automatically push stuff to Twitter if you’re not on Twitter? No.
The only reason that it still does it is because I set it up back in 2013 and I’ve never turned it off.
It costs me nothing to keep it turned on. It costs me nothing to have that re-shared over on Twitter, so I just leave it going. I don’t even think about it.
Here’s what I want you to really think about: Out of Facebook and Instagram, where would most of your ideal clients be? And where can you most easily engage with them?
For a lot of people, most of their clients are on Instagram, but it’s way easier to engage with them on Facebook.
They might not be on Facebook as much, but when they are on Facebook, they’re easier for you to engage with.
An example of this would be if you work with women entrepreneurs and non-binary folk.
Entrepreneurs who are up to about the $200,000 a year mark (and even beyond that) are particularly active in Facebook communities – especially entrepreneurial communities.
There is a great opportunity for you to engage with and interact with your audience in Facebook communities.
That’s a great way to get started in building your own audience, especially on social media.
Have a think about where your audience is most active but also where you have easiest access to be able to engage with them… then pick one or the other.
We do this in the Take Off program. People are always so torn because they say that there are so many opportunities on Instagram, or there’s so much stuff on Facebook.
If you just try and be perfect at both, you’ll end up nailing neither.
Pick one that you’re going to prioritise. ONE social media platform – Facebook or Instagram – and set everything else up on autopilot, or don’t set it up at all
If you set up Facebook, there are ways that you can automate stuff to go onto Instagram without really thinking about it, and you might as well have a presence. For now, you can just set that up.
You might decide to go and play with Instagram a little bit later – you might as well start growing your audience there, so you can absolutely set that up on autopilot.
You can choose to focus on Instagram, and have ways to set that up on autopilot so it’s still pushing content to your Facebook page. Simple, right?
Prioritise which one platform you’re going to focus on, and then autopilot the other.
That is what I would recommend.
A lot of people will ask me about Twitter, LinkedIn or other platforms. There are some extreme examples where I’d tell you to go for LinkedIn, but the same rule applies.
LinkedIn is getting all of your energy and attention – autopilot everything else.
If that makes you feel as though Facebook is way more fruitful for you, then you’ve got your answer.
If your response to that is that it feels good for you because you don’t really want to be on Facebook and Instagram, then you’ve got your answer.
Pick one. Prioritise it.
That’s the space where people can show up and engage and interact with you. And everything else is on autopilot, or completely ignored for now.
2. Start batching up content creation
If you’ve chosen Facebook, or if you’ve chosen Instagram, there are certain types of posts that you can create and schedule. You can batch it up in advance and schedule it so that posts are going up more consistently.
It takes less time, it is really easy to do, and both Facebook and Instagram can be natively scheduled through Facebook Creator Studio.
As far as I’m concerned, there are no excuses. There’s no reason not to.
If you want to make your social media actions and your social media presence easier, give yourself the gift of batching some content up in advance and scheduling it.
If you keep saying that you don’t have time to do that, then how on earth do you have time to be organically present each day? There’s something wrong in your model.
Let’s fix that, shall we?
Start batching up your content for your social media platforms.
It can be as simple as setting aside 20 minutes every Thursday, and in that 20 minutes, you schedule up a post for every second day for the next 10 days. Simple!
Don’t try and go from zero to four posts a day, every day for the rest of your life in one giant leap. That won’t be sustainable for you. Just work your way up.
It also generally results in some algorithm dramas when you have this huge influx of posts and you end up posting six times a day, and you’ve gone from posting once a month at best, to posting six times a day consistently.
Facebook doesn’t like that anyway. You might as well give yourself the gift of a gentle, gradual journey to batching things up.
3. Outsource distribution first
This is where I think a lot of people get themselves messed up. They think if they’re going to get a team member to help them with their social media, then that team member just comes up with the content and creates the content as well as distributes it.
But that’s not often the smartest way to move forward because it takes time for a team member to learn your voice. It takes time for a team member to understand your content. And not all team members are created equal.
Not all team members have the skill to show up and create content that feels like it’s you and your voice.
Even to this day, as a multi six-figure earner nudging towards the million-dollar mark, I still am responsible for 90% of the content that you see from me on social media platforms.
I’ve created it.
Even the stuff that’s been created by someone else, they’ve used an old blog of mine to get the way that I talked about it, or they’ve used three previous posts that I’ve done and written something similar but slightly differently worded.
It’s still me, and it’s still my content. It’s just being repurposed and retooled.
A lot of people are looking for someone to create the content for them because they don’t like the content creation process.
They don’t feel like they can say things right, or they put pressure on themselves to write the perfect captions, or they haven’t actually learned how to write for their business and how to speak for their business.
They think that they can outsource that to someone else, but that actually doesn’t work.
What I would recommend is to take responsibility for being the voice of your business, because you are the voice of your business and outsource the distribution of that content first.
That’s cheaper as well. You can pay someone under $10 an hour to schedule some things to Facebook or Instagram for you.
It’s generally easier to outsource because they don’t have to magically become you in order to help you with your social media presence. It frees up so much of your time to be able to do the real-time connection and engagement with your audience, which is where your zone of genius is anyway.
That’s where you should be dedicating most of your time.
4. Give yourself time and space for social media
For most people, social media is their number one client attraction and conversion strategy… yet, it’s the thing that they’re trying to avoid the fastest. It’s the thing they try and outsource the quickest. It’s the thing they try and get rid of.
Yet it’s your most fruitful space for attracting and converting clients!
That to me feels like a really silly business decision.
This is your free (or low cost) advertising platform. It gives you:
- Access to engage with and have conversations with your audience
- The ability to have a two-way conversation
- Amazing opportunities for you to be selected for and find out about co-creation opportunities
- Joint opportunities to help and support other people in their growth of their audience
- Space where people are showing up as human beings, and you don’t have to be perfect in order to create connection and momentum
Yet it is almost looked down upon as a part of your business strategy.
If you’ve chosen a social media strategy and a social media model to grow your business, give it the time and space that it deserves and needs in order to snowball and start creating growth and momentum for you.
There are so many people who got their first 100 to 200 clients from social media channels, and yet they forget where those clients came from when they get into really large scale growth strategies in their business.
People poopoo it and they say that social media is dying as a space to get clients, or that the algorithms are the worst and it’s a pay-to-play platform where you don’t get any reach on your pages.
You could choose to view social media in that way. If you decide to use non-social strategies to grow your business then great! But then don’t whine about social media.
If you’ve chosen not to engage in it, if you’ve decided it’s not the platform where you want to grow your business, stop whinging about it!
Just go and do the things that you’ve decided to do.
But if you have decided that this free opportunity to attract and convert clients is a strategy you want to explore and play with, and you want to work out how to get good at it and get it working for your business, then give it some time and give it some space and give it some positive reinforcement.
I look for EVIDENCE that I’m getting amazing reach for free on social media… and I get amazing reach for free on social media.
If I was to look for evidence that Facebook is just a giant capitalist machine that is trying to squeeze every dollar out of me that it can and is pushing down the little guys, then that’s the evidence that I will see.
Give social media some time and space and give it some energy if you choose it as a strategy.
If you don’t want to choose it as a strategy, that’s your choice and that’s fine.
But don’t spend all of your time focusing on whinging about social media platforms and how corrupt they are and how limited they are and how pay-to-play they are if it’s not your choice.
Just make a decision and move on.
Stop giving it so much emotion and energy and attention if it’s not your space. And if it is your space, give it the time and energy and the focus that you want to give it and that it deserves.
It’s going to need to create that snowball effect.
I know there’s a lot of messaging out there that suggests that you can spend five minutes a day on social media platforms and get millions of followers.
But that’s not actually my experience.
My experience is with some really simple, really boundaried, really easy and effective strategies, you can create an audience and start snowballing that audience and make sales from it. That’s my experience.
If that’s what I keep looking for evidence of on social media, then that’s what I keep seeing.
And if that’s what I teach people to be able to do on social media and that’s the results they’re getting, then that’s what I’m going to keep seeing.
I’ve made my choice and I might change my mind about that choice in the future, but I’m not going to forget how lucky I am to have been able to create my business the way that I have. I’m not going to forget the time and energy and space that I gave to my social media channels in order to get the reach that I currently get.
It’s easy for a lot of people to say that it’s not worth it or it doesn’t get a return on your time, because they already have ways to access their audiences that are cheaper or easier, or they’ve already built their following.
It doesn’t make sense for them and they don’t understand what it takes to grow an organic audience these days.
But I do because I help people in startup all the time.
That’s where I focus my energy and attention.
I know what it takes to get followers on Facebook, and I know what it takes to grow your algorithm and get that reach for free and really start snowballing that reach.
I still believe that it’s a really smart way to grow a business online, especially in startup. Absolutely!!
5. Look for where the return on investment is
Look for the return on investment!
So many people come to me and ask how they can start a Facebook group of their own. And I always tell them that there’s no ROI on it so don’t do it.
I have two recent episodes of the podcast where I talk about this:
- Episode 280: How to get more followers on Facebook
- Episode 281: Q&A: What’s the best strategy for growing a Facebook group?
In both of those podcasts, I was really upfront about what a good use of your time is, and what’s going to get appropriate and adequate ROI to be able to justify it.
In most cases, starting your own Facebook group is not one of those strategies anymore.
It used to be, so there are a lot of people who are still selling very expensive courses and very popular courses on creating your own Facebook group, because they have used strategies that either are not grounded in consent, or that worked in the past but don’t necessarily work any more.
There are still some people who are having success with starting their own Facebook groups from scratch right now, but it’s the exception, it’s not the rule.
I would rather see you focus your time and energy on something that’s going to have a great return on investment… not just now, but also in an ongoing, scalable way.
Look for social media strategies and platforms that give you a great return on investment. Remember that it takes a bit of time to snowball, but if you can be smart with those strategies, you absolutely can snowball your growth and your reach organically as well as with some low-cost ad strategies.
Pay attention to whether those strategies are bringing in money or not!
If they’re not necessarily bringing in money, then maybe they’re not the right strategy for you right now. If they’re going to take years to create that return on investment, maybe that’s a future-you strategy.
For most people who I work with, especially when they’re in startup, their number one requirement right now is cash flow and proof of concept.
A two-year return on investment, longer-term strategy isn’t necessarily going to meet that need.
If you don’t have proof of concept yet, then building for two years into the future with stuff that’s unproven is a risk.
Focus on the spaces that are creating the return on investment that you need at this stage of your business.
The return on investment for my business at this stage is list growth.
If I get list growth from my social media strategies, I know it’s going to turn into income for my business. The more I focus on growing my list, the higher my income goes, the better my launches perform.
If my social media strategies are getting list growth, I will continue to do them. Full stop. That’s it.
My launches, marketing strategies and email marketing strategies do an amazing job of getting the return on investment from those social media strategies.
Any sales I make directly on social media are a bonus.
As long as I’m growing my list from my social media strategies, everything’s hunky-dory. I am 100% confident that my social media platforms are bringing in great return on investment for me.
With all of that being said, if you’ve decided that you want to explore how to grow your social media return on investment and you’d like to explore how to do that with Facebook, I have a great free resource for you.
It’s called the $0 Facebook Marketing Plan.
This training is a step-by-step process on how to make money and get initial sales in your business, and start to create that snowball with Facebook using free marketing strategies only.
Before you go and invest in Facebook ads, before you go and scale up, let’s make sure you’ve got proof of return on investment from your Facebook marketing.
That training is absolutely free, so go and access it at tashcorbin.com/zero.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode on how to manage all your social media platforms!
As always, come on over to the Heart-Centred Soul-Driven Entrepreneurs Facebook group and share any aha moments you’ve had using #podcastaha and the episode number (283).
Until next time, I cannot WAIT to see you SHINE.
