Being a solopreneur business owner can be rough, wouldn’t you agree? If you truly want to have social media work for your solo business, you need to have a strategy. Otherwise, you’ll end up stressed out, unfocused, and overwhelmed with social media (and will most likely give up completely!)

In addition to being a solopreneur myself, many of the clients I work with are also solopreneur business owners. Using the strategy below for your business will help you have clarity, confidence, and focus for your social profiles and for your business.  

Building A Social Media Strategy For Your Solopreneur Business (Cheat Sheet Included!)

Identify your goals for your solopreneur business

Before we start building a social media strategy for your solopreneur business, we first need to identify the goals you have for your business.

Because ultimately, any and everything you do on social media should be supporting one of your goals for your business. Your goals for social media should never be to “have thousands of followers” or “earn thousands of dollars.”

Say one of your goals for your business is to increase your client load to two more clients. Your goals for social media should support you in getting two more clients.

This may mean creating posts that shares your services, featuring testimonials from happy clients, participating in Facebook groups to get your name out there, or participating in relevant Twitter chats where your target audience hangs out.

You don’t have to do all of these things and you can create ideas that are unique to your business. The important thing is that you make sure everything you share (your content plus 3rd party articles) are all supporting your business goals.

Identify your target audience

Once you know your goals for your solopreneur business, you’ll have a better understanding of what your goals should be for your social media platforms.

The next step is identifying your target audience and narrowing in on where they hang out the most.

What I find helpful is to write out a paragraph describing your target audience in detail. Give him or her a name and describe who they are, what they like, where they shop, what sites they visit,  and what their values are.

Here is a great article that helps you create an audience avatar.

Using the information that you discover about your target audience and what resonates with them most will help you understand exactly what type of content they will want to read about, both on your blog and on your social platforms. This will help you also discover which platform they use the most.

Focus on one platform at a time

From the previous step, you should have identified the platform that your target audience hangs out on the most. Whichever platform that may be, we’re going to focus solely on that platform.

Yes, you will be tempted to use the other platforms. Yes, you may feel uncomfortable with not posting regularly to one of your platforms but you know what…that’s OKAY. It will still be there when you’re ready to come back, I promise.

The point of doing this is so you can fully be present on the one platform. It’s time to be helpful, show up, and start working toward your goals.

Schedule time in your calendar every other day to commit to this platform (or plan ahead if you don’t think you can be there that often). Even if it’s just 10-15 minutes, do the work and commit. Over time you will start to see traction and all of your hard work will pay off.

Related post: How To Be More Consistent With Blogging, Social Media, And Basically Anything In Life

Observe what successful people post

The best out there are the best for a reason. There’s something about their posts that resonate with people. Observe what type of content they post (video, picture, text?), how often, and tone. 

Does their content resonate with people because it’s informative? Or is it because it’s more personal?

Are they sharing primarily videos, photos, text or a mix of all three?

Now this isn’t to say you should copy exactly what they do, but more of an overall observance their content and why it resonates with their audience. You can then start to brainstorm ways you can share content that will resonate with your audience.

Define your content calendar

After observing what works for others, you’ll have an idea of the type of content you’ll want to share on your platforms.

You’ll want to define how often you are going to post as well as what type of content. Keep in mind how much time you can reasonably dedicate to doing these tasks because they will take some time if you’re running a solo business.

While you’re defining your content calendar, you might as well schedule the time during your work week that will do these tasks. I find batching tasks to be the most efficient way to complete these items.

The complete guide on building a #socialmedia strategy for your #solopreneur business from @BrittneyLLynn! Click To Tweet

Make sure your profiles are completely filled out

This may seem like an obvious suggestion, but you would be shocked to know how often I’ve worked with clients in the past who didn’t have a complete profile.

A running list for a complete profile includes:

Facebook

• Professional profile photo
• Cover image
• About section
• Tabs

Twitter

• Professional profile photo
• Header image
• Link to email subscription or website
• Brief description of what you do and who you help

Instagram

• Professional profile photo
• Link to email subscription or website
• Brief description of what you do and who you help

Pinterest

• Professional profile photo
• Link to email subscription or website
• Brief description of what you do and who you help
• Board descriptions including keywords related to your niche

LinkedIn

• Professional profile photo
• Brief description of what you do and who you help
• Filled out summary & bio

Find a way to automate

Yes, you can get help from automation programs!

Some people think that automating parts of your business me and your business is less personal. If you set them up to sound like a robot, then you indeed will not come off as personable.

But it is possible to automate and sound like a normal human being, it’s all about how you set it up.

Programs I currently use, use for clients or have used in the past include:

• IFTTT
• Hootsuite
• Buffer
• Facebook scheduler
• MeetEdgar
• BoardBooster (affiliate link)

Programs I haven’t used, but have heard great things about:

• Planoly (Instagram)
• Later (Instagram)
• TailWind (Pinterest)
• Sprout Social

Related post: 10 Tools I Use Every Day To Keep My Business Booming

Find ways to network on the platforms

Automation is wonderful, but you will still need to devote some time to network on the different platforms. Some platforms aren’t built for much networking (i.e. Pinterest) but there are still ways to network on each of the platforms. Below are a few ideas to get you started.

• Twitter chats
  • How to find relevant Twitter chats
    • Search by keyword topic on this website
• Facebook groups
  • How to find relevant Facebook groups
    • Search on Google for “keyword + Facebook groups”
    • Search on Facebook for niche keywords and search under groups
• LinkedIn groups
  • How to find relevant LinkedIn groups
    • Search in the search box on LinkedIn for niche keywords
• Pinterest group boards
  • How to find relevant Pinterest group boards
    • Search by keyword topic on PinGroupie
• Instagram hashtags
  • How to find relevant Instagram hashtag
    • Check out this article on finding great hashtags

Final Thoughts

I want to make sure to note that building your brand on social media will take time. It is rare for a business to suddenly explode on social media, especially these days. Don’t have expectations that overnight your profiles will skyrocket. Slow and steady wins the race.

Oh! And the best reminder —> Stop comparing yourself. To other business owners, to other businesses, to everyone and everything. Comparing will not get you anywhere and will not make you feel better. Stay in your lane and enjoy the ride.  

 

With new social media networks coming out what seems like every other day, it can be easy to get overwhelmed.

“Well I have to be on Facebook because everyone is on Facebook!”

“Might as well throw in Twitter too.”

“Oh, what about Instagram? Yeah, gotta share those filtered pictures to my audience for sure.”

“What’s this Snapchat thing? And Periscope? So I just record myself talking and people will want to see it?”

By the end of the day, you spent all of your time on social media, and zero time actually doing the work required for your business!

My hope is to help ease your mind and explain how not to get overwhelmed managing your social media. Let’s get to it!

Have a strategy

Everyone claims that you need to have a “social media strategy” for your business, but what does that mean?

In simple terms, it means answering this question: Why are you doing whatever you’re doing on each social platform? What is your goal of participating on being on a particular platform?

There needs to be a “why” to everything you do for your business and the same goes for social media. Do not be on social media just because “people tell you to.” There needs to be a reason, otherwise you’ll lose motivation to continue engaging.

Batch scheduling

I’m a big fan of batch scheduling in different facets of my life, but especially with social media.

Yes, I work in social media, so shouldn’t I always be socializing on these platforms? No.

For one, I have to write this blog right? Two, I need to meet and discuss with clients, which also takes time. So even I’M not on social media 24/7.

Here’s what I do:

Each Friday, I look at my calendar for the week ahead. I first notice any social engagements, appointments, meetings, etc.

I then plug in my workouts into my calendar.

Then, I schedule out my work week, scheduling chunks of time to just schedule social media posts or find content to share. I could easily spend hours on social media, but having those chunks of time dedicated helps me remember to save it for then.

Turn off notifications

Just do it. Nothing monumental will happen, I promise. To get a notification on your phone every time someone likes your Facebook page, or tweets at you is distracting and not doing you any favors.

I check my social platforms around three times a day: 1) once right when I wake up, 2) around lunchtime, 3) before going to bed.

Your audience understands that a human being is responding back to comments on these platforms and they know you might not respond immediately and that’s okay. You’re a small business, not a huge corporation that has 10 team members watching its social platforms.

Don’t be on every platform

Yep. I said it. You don’t need to be on every platform as a small business owner. Figure out where your target audience likes to hang out, choose those, and lose the rest.

Having a Twitter page just for the sake of having one but never posting on it does you no good. In fact, I think it actually hurts your business more than if you just didn’t have one in the first place.

I’ll use myself as an example. For growing my business, I’m currently only focusing on building my Pinterest and Twitter accounts. These two are where I’m getting the most value for my time right now, so I don’t promote on Facebook or Instagram.

Now that doesn’t mean eventually I won’t move onto those other platforms, but I’m only taking on what matters most to my business while I’m still building.

Focus on one account

Pick one platform that you know your target audience is on. Just one. I know it’s hard to ignore all of those other ones but this will save you time and will also save your sanity.

Why focus on just one? So you can master it.

Have you ever heard of “just in time” learning? It’s this way of learning something right as you need to learn it, versus trying to learn allthethings at one time.

Focusing on one account (ideally, the platform that your audience is on the most) will give you time to learn everything there is to know on how to grow that account and make it sustainable. Once you’ve mastered it, you can move onto the next.

Automate

Alright, so you have a strategy, you’ve turned off your notifications, and you’re ready to handle multiple accounts. Now it’s time to automate.

There are many systems out there to automate your social platforms. Some are free, some aren’t. Some only handle certain social accounts.

For me right now, I use a mixture of the free version of Hootsuite to schedule my tweets and just started using ViralTag for Pinterest. I am hoping to do a full review of ViralTag in the near future.

My best advice is to use what system that works best for your budget and your business. It might take a lot of trial and error but once you find the right match, it will keep you from getting overwhelmed.

Hire out

If your small business is growing at a rapid pace (awesome job!) then it might be time to outsource some of your social media tasks.

It can be hard to hand over part of your brand to someone new, but it could help grow your brand exponentially if you’re then free to do what you do best in your business.

Thinking of hiring someone to take on your social platforms? Feel free to check out my services page or contact me directly. I’d love to chat!

Question: How do you keep from getting overwhelmed with social media?