During this Coronavirus pandemic, it’s become difficult to connect with customers in-person. Nearly 10 states have closed bars, restaurants and gyms. Schools are closed in 33 states with more closing them by the day and that presents a new opportunity for engaging with your customers. People who are usually at work are at home with their kids, families and loved ones. Now is the time to engage social media at it’s finest.
Embrace Facebook And It’s Tools
If your business is new to Facebook, now is a time to set up a business Facebook page. Here’s a link on “How to Set Up a Business Facebook page.
This is a FREE service from Facebook. Unlike other social media platforms, Facebook has a built-in scheduling tool, “Publishing Tools”, that allows you to write posts and schedule them to publish at a future date and time saving you time and energy. For example, you can develop all your content on Sunday and schedule it for the entire week to post M-F. Set it and forget it; let Facebook do the work.
Use FREE TOOLS FOR OTHER NETWORKS
There are a host of other free social media tools to publish content on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and the like. One of our favorite here at Dekaf Digital is HootSuite. HootSuite’s Free Plan allows you to manage up to 3 social profiles, schedule up to 30 posts and connect social apps as well. We use HootSuite to manage several social media profiles and find it to be very easy to use and schedule conent.
However, there are a lot of other tools. Some of them include Buffer which offers a free version although there are restrictions on the free version. Agora Pulse offers a free 28-day trial and is a robust tool for social media publishing. It’s a bit pricey after the free trial but allows for sharing calendars with more than one person as well so it’s more than just a social media publishing tool.
Finally, we have eClincher. This is a savvy social media management tool and it’s packed with some great features. It allows you to connect all your social accounts in one place, including publishing and scheduling content. However, it also comes with a social inbox feature so you’ll be able to manage all the live conversations of your social media accounts. They offer a free trial and then you have to pay for the service.
Linked Is best for B2B companies
If your business targets other businesses as it’s customers, you want to focus your energies on LinkedIn. First things first, leverage your company by building a Company LinkedIn Page. Here’s a link on How To Build a LinkedIn Page.
Once you have your page up and running, you want to post regularly (once/day) to keep in regular contact with your customers. Many businesspeople will be working from home and checking their LinkedIn pages more frequently than usual. Now is a good time to reach them. Leverage the social media publishing tools we suggested above to plan, schedule and publish content on a regular basis.
What to do if this is all new
If social media for your business is new to you, don’t go it alone. This is a representation of your brand and you can’t “set it and forget it” or “test the waters” and think there won’t be any harm. You need to have a strategy that aligns with your brand, brand voice and reaches your customers in an appropriate way, on the right social networks. If you need help, reach out to us or an equally qualified social media management agency. We’re here to help in this time of need and are happy to set up a strategy and let you implement it or mange it all for you. Let’s collaborate.
