Facebook. Instagram. Linkedin. Pinterest. Google. Yelp. YouTube. TikTok. Snapchat. There are other social media sites that I don’t even know about because I am just not that cool. Or I’m too old to know about them!
One thing I do know is that social media is a necessary evil for our businesses. Staying relevant in an ever-changing world is always one of the hardest things, I feel, for businesses to do. I am sure I could do social media 100 times better than I currently do if it was the only thing I had to focus on. But I’m a shop owner and I manage the shop, so I get to wear all of the hats. You know the hats, right? Estimator, accounting, HR, social media guru, quality control, paint specialist, the list goes on. So yes, maybe I could be doing social media 100 times better if it was all I had to do, but I would still have to say our shop does social media better than a lot of small businesses.
When I started using social media for the shop, I was managing everything myself. I was creating the posts and uploading them and responding to comments, likes, questions and everything else that needed to be done. But as more and more social media platforms began to pop up, I found the task harder and harder to manage. I also found our social media starting to lack and that’s when I started to really focus on how to make it work for me with a lot less time on my part. These are the basic rules that I follow for our social media platforms. I wish someone would have told me when I started out using the social media platforms for business.
For starters, if you haven’t claimed your Google Business page, do that now.
Next, get a social media scheduling platform that has the option for reusable, or evergreen, content. These schedulers make it easy to post content to almost all of the major social media platforms all at once instead of having to log in to each one and post separately. The problem with most schedulers is that you still have to log in and schedule content for the next week, month or however far in advance you would like to schedule. This is fine and dandy, but I don’t have time once a month to spend a whole day scheduling content in the social media scheduler so my shop has content for the next month.
This is why I recommend using a social media scheduler like eClincher with reusable or evergreen content. You set a posting schedule for each of your social media platforms and then you set categories that you want the scheduler to choose from. Examples of categories would be Before & After Pictures, Public Service Announcements, Advertisements, etc. Then you upload your content and add your wording and tags and all the other details it lets you choose. Next, select a category for each piece of content. Once you have around 30 posts (content pieces) uploaded into the reusable scheduler section, you turn your reusable scheduler on. The system then looks at your posting schedule and uses content from the categories you have selected to post for that particular schedule.
Here’s an example. On Mondays and Fridays, I want to post a Before & After picture of a vehicle. The scheduler knows that on Monday, I want to post a Before and After Picture on Facebook and Google at 2 p.m. and on Instagram at 5 p.m. It then goes into the Before & After category and pulls one of the Before & After pictures that I uploaded into that category and posts the picture on those social media pages at the specified times.
The scheduler gives me the freedom to not have to worry about always posting on social media because the system is doing it for me. This way I can focus on making a few good posts each month to upload into my reusable content categories on my scheduler. I know I have content going up even if I am not doing it myself each day. If I feel motivated to add something else to my social media pages, it doesn’t feel like it is such a hassle and doesn’t feel as overwhelming.There are a lot of other little tips and tricks to having a good social media presence but the tip of having a social media scheduler with reusable content is one I wish I would have known about in the beginning because it has freed up so much of my free time.
Tiffany Menefee is president of Pronto Body Shop, Inc., in El Paso, Texas.
