When I say keep growing I mean not only your business, but keep growing yourself too. Grow your skills, grow your knowledge, grow your confidence, grow your connections, grow your support network, grow your audience, grow your motivation, and grow your content bank. All of these come together to grow your business and you can do them all using social media!
During this difficult time for the entire planet, where ‘normal’ has been picked up and thrown out of the window, it is hard to know what you can do to help your business weather the storm and emerge from this crisis strong and raring to go. We are each facing similar but unique challenges within our businesses and homes. Shops are closed and face to face meetings are on hold, some can’t trade at all and some have had to adapt quickly, it simply can’t be ‘business as usual’ for most. So how can you possibly grow in this period of time? I have a few ideas🌻
Grow Your Skills and Knowledge
I’m sure you have all noticed the abundance of challenges and live trainings that have popped up in your social media news feeds. If you haven’t yet seen any that resonate with you or relate to your business then get searching! As business owners we have to wear many hats and some of these hats are easier to wear than others. Is there an area of your business that you need to get to grips with? A gap in your knowledge, that if filled would enable you to confidently take care of tasks that have previously taken up too much of your time and left you feeling drained? Get involved and get learning. How good will it feel when you can complete these business tasks confidently and quickly?!
Grow Your Confidence
You are the expert in your business and your industry. Don’t keep all of that valuable expertise to yourself! Do you have something to teach, coach, or educate others about? Even if you think you don’t, you almost certainly do in the eyes of other people. It’s easy to forget just how much you know about your industry that other people don’t. Offer up something on social media that will help others and make their day a little easier. If you get stuck trying to come up with ideas then ask your social media audience what they would like to know and learn from you, or what they are struggling with at the moment. The more you do this the more your confidence will grow, I know this from personal experience. Here are a few ways to help others and grow your confidence:
🌻Create a series of Top Tip posts to publish on your business pages
🌻Record informative videos to publish on your business pages
🌻Host Lives and Q&A’s on Facebook – don’t forget to let your audience know in advance so they don’t miss out
🌻Reach out to any groups you belong to (and join new ones) and offer to speak to their members as an expert
🌻Create Facebook Events to invite people to your training
🌻Write an informative blog and share it on your social media
🌻Invite feedback so that you can keep improving
Grow your Connections, Support Network and Audience
These are all connected and each helps the others to grow naturally. So firstly, do you network? If you don’t, then start. I don’t know how well I would have coped recently with business or mindset if it wasn’t for the networking groups I belong to. They (and the beautiful people within them) have been absolutely priceless to me, not just now but from the moment I dipped my toes into the world of networking just last September. Each group is a treasure trove of business knowledge, support, accountability, encouragement, skill swapping, friendship, motivation……the list is actually endless and I am thankful for each and every one.
Find your local networking groups on social media and give it a go, lots of them have groups all around the country and the beauty of them being online at the moment is you can ‘attend’ meetings that you wouldn’t normally be able to. Networking is a fantastic way for your business to be seen by lots of other businesses, for you to find out about other businesses, to make new business connections, and for you to all help each other’s businesses grow through referrals and recommendations. This will also naturally grow your social media audience because everyone is keen to follow, like and support your pages, and then their connections see your business too! Here are some of my very favourite (Gloucestershire) networking groups:
OMNI Local Business Networking
Stroud Business Women’s Network
Women’s Informative Networking
Now, don’t forget to socialise on social media as your business. Follow other businesses as your business and interact with them. Like their posts, comment on their posts and reach out to new accounts as your business. By interacting as your business on their accounts you are not only making valuable business connections, you are also being seen by their audience. Be sure to nurture your own audience too by responding to comments on your posts, answering messages to your accounts and thanking your loyal followers for the support they show your business online.
Grow Your Content
The best advice I can give you about social media for business at this time is STAY VISIBLE. This means posting and interacting as your business across all of your social media platforms. Now, you don’t need to be on every one and I would highly recommend choosing just a few and doing them well, especially if you have limited time available. Try to post every day if you can. If you can’t then make sure you post at least a few times per week. I know it can be tough to come up with a constant stream of things to post about so here are a few tips. Keep people updated on any changes you have made to your business during this time, educate them, entertain them, show them behind the scenes, be real and authentic and let them connect with you as a person as well as a business. Ask past customers and clients to leave a review on your page or send you some feedback, then use a tool like Canva to make them into an image to use as a post. Repurpose old content and post it again, a very tiny percentage of your audience gets to see your business page posts organically thanks to those pesky social media platform algorithms so you’ll likely reach fresh eyes when you repeat posts, just make sure you leave some time between posting these. Think about businesses you follow on social media. What types of posts do you like to see from them? Obviously you need to come up with your own original posts, but you can get some great ideas to help you here. Why not also save any posts you create into a document too? Then you will end up with a whole collection of posts saved to your computer and can dip in and grab one when you don’t have time to come up with something new.
I recently launched the Social Media Magic Content Calendar in collaboration with the amazing Kerry Scorah Magician (whom I met through one of my networking groups incidentally). It is a 365 day fully editable calendar, with post ideas for every day, spaces to include post text, image links, hashtags, and the platforms you want to post on. We are running regular free trainings on how to get the very best out of the calendar for your business too, so take a look! It’s just £10 until the end of May.
Grow Your Motivation
Ok, so I’m cheating a bit with this one……..
All of the above will grow your motivation massively, almost magically. The more you do them all, the more you will get back for you and your business and the more motivated you will feel to do more and get bigger results.
So that’s it for now guys. I hope you found it helpful. I would love to hear your feedback and how you get on if you try any of these things out, so feel free to leave me a comment or get in touch with me on social media! I look forward to connecting with you
Keep growing, look after yourselves and stay safe.
Karina