Social media is such a valuable tool. Whilst we’re used to using it for keeping in touch with friends and sharing moments of our personal lives, it can also be invaluable for business. What other service can, for free, put your business in front of potential customers world wide?

Algorithms 

I definitely don’t profess to be an expert on this, but social media uses algorithms to decide what gets shown to which members of your audience, rather than just showing everything as it’s posted, in chronological order. The more we try and fit the criteria that the algorithm likes or recognises, the more people will see our posts. Interaction is key to the algorithms, the more people interact with, share or save your posts (depending on the social media platform) the more people will see your subsequent posts. In this blog I’m just going to talk about Facebook and Instagram, as these are the social media platforms I use daily. I do also use LinkedIn and have just started to use Twitter and Pinterest, but I’m still learning with these, hopefully next year I’ll be able to give some advice about these platforms too!

Visibility

The first thing to remember is that you need to be consistent. You should post at least once a day, as then your posts are more likely to be seen by a wider audience. The more interaction you get on one post, the theory is that the following post will be seen by more people. You can post the same thing across multiple platforms, your audience is likely to be different on each, and not everyone will see what you post everywhere, so don’t worry about repeating yourself.

Routine 

Try and work out what time your audience is most likely to be online and post at that time of day. If you can schedule or post at a time when your ideal customer is likely to be online your posts are more likely to be seen in their feed. If you post at a similar time every day, your audience will even start looking out for your posts and hopefully that will help you gain more interaction and comments on your subsequent posts. You can find out when the best time to post is for you, using the insights on your account.

If you’re on Instagram, on a business account, click onto your profile page and then click the ‘insights’ box at the top. This will bring up a page which gives you information about how many accounts you’ve reached in the last 7 days (or 30 days if you click and change the setting), and if you then click on ‘total followers’ and scroll right to the bottom of the ‘audience’ page, you’ll see the ‘most active times’ and can plan when to post on your account.  You can also switch from ‘hours’ to ‘days’ and see if some days are more active than others. For me, my most active time seems to peak at the 6pm time slot, so I usually try and post at around 4.30 or 5pm to ensure my posts are already there in the feed when my audience starts scrolling.

For Facebook you need to use the ‘Business Suite’ app (which is free), and inside here you can see your insights both for Facebook and Instagram (as they’re owned by the same company). If you click ‘see all insights’ at the bottom, and then click on ‘trends’ at the top, you can see your reach across the last 7 days. There’s not quite as much information in here as there is on the Instagram app itself, but it still helps you to see which posts are doing well and you can work out approximate times to post from the graphs.

Insights

A fantastic way to get information about how well your posts are doing is to check your insights. You can see which posts are getting more likes and comments, and you can figure out what type of post your audience is responding best to. You can also find out where in the world your audience is, and what age categories and gender they are which is really interesting! If you’ve already thought about your ideal customer or target audience, you can see if you’re reaching them, and if you don’t have one in mind, perhaps the insights can help you identify your ideal customer’s age, gender and geographical location!

On Instagram, if you have a business account, you can find these below each post. Click ‘view insights’ and you can see how many people have liked your post, how many comments you have received, whether anyone has messaged you in response to the post, and whether your post has been saved by anyone. If you scroll down you will see how many people have visited your profile, what your ‘reach’ is, and more statistics about how people have found your post, whether it’s from the hashtags you’ve used, or from your profile etc. You can also see your ‘discovery’ which is the number of accounts you have reached which weren’t already following you.

If you’re on Facebook, again with a business page, you can click on the blue text/link below each post which shows you how many people you have reached with that post. Once you click on that you’ll be able to see the ‘reach’, the number of reactions (likes, loves etc), the number of comments on the post, and the number of times people have shared your post. You will also be able to see the number of ‘clicks’ if you’ve included a link in your post. 

Share 

If people share your posts it helps with the algorithm, and sharing of course allows more people to see your post as you’ll reach their audience as well as your own. Try to encourage your audience to share your posts, when appropriate, as this is something that friends and family can do to help support your business, and it won’t cost them a penny. On Instagram people can also save your posts (with the icon to the bottom right of each post/image) and this will really help your posts be seen too, as if people like your post enough to save it, the algorithm will think it’s worth showing to more people.

I hope this information has been helpful to you, let me know if anything is unclear and I’m always happy to give advice when I can.