Shelby Watkins

I would like to share some tools and tricks that can make your business social media look great without taking up too much of your time. Hiring a designer isn’t in everyone’s budget, but having a great-looking presence is!

4 Tips for Curating an Attractive Social Media Presence:

• One of the greatest tools you can use is Canva. Marketed as a free design tool for non-designers, one of the greatest features about Canva is built-in templates that are sized correctly for social media posts and social cover images! They have great design templates as well to get you started if you want to include some kind of graphic. It’s fast, free, and easy to use.
• If you do have Photoshop, Photoshop Elements or another design program, there are SO many resources available on Creative Market at very little cost. Everything from series of posts, to Instagram stories and cover image templates. At the very least, you may be able to find some inspiration for what to make in Canva! Creative Market has 6 free goods every week for registered users. Careful– this site is addicting!
• An easy tip for making your Instagram look more curated is to use the same filter for every photo, this automatically ties even very different photos together with a common theme!
• Looking for (FREE) trendy stock photography for backgrounds, quotes, etc.? Make sure you check out Pexels!

Many people don’t know where to start with Instagram. Whether or not you use it personally, it can be frustrating to figure out how to use an image-based app in an industry like doors and hardware. You can search hashtags and find hundreds of accounts that admire and photograph doors and hardware, but these are not necessarily the purchasers of such.

Instagram Strategy

Here is the strategy advice that can be a game changer: Instagram is not just about sharing photos— it’s an online magazine. If you are struggling to find what to post, think of what your buyers would want to read in a magazine. A great photo with 1 to 2 paragraphs of text is ideal, but text can be longer if necessary to tell your story!

Other strategies for gaining engaged followers include using relevant hashtags (if you use more than 4, put them in the comments). You can also visit accounts similar to yours that are experiencing a lot of engagement, then view who is liking and commenting on recent posts and follow those accounts! An app, such as Followers, tells you who is not following you back— enabling you to unfollow those accounts later if you wish!

These last strategies may increase your follower count. However, getting followed by and engaging the people you wish to convert to buyers won’t happen without a solid content strategy, such as the online magazine concept. So keep in mind that while an individual post should stand out on its own, it should also be part of an overall story!

Learn more about Instagram

I highly recommend trying a free webinar from Dean Street Society!

This was originally published in DHI’s Growing Social E-Newsletter

Why Measure Your Social Progress?

One important concept to identify with social media is why you are doing it. “Because we are supposed to” is not a valid reason, and here’s why: As with anything you do in any business, you should look at ROI (return on investment).

For social media at a very basic level, there is a time investment. What is your goal with this effort? Brand recognition? Increased followers? Increased engagement (likes, shares, comments)? Converting people to customers that spend money with your organization? What your goal is will determine what you should measure (it’s not necessarily the same for every organization). Someone once told me, “You cannot improve what you do not measure.”

Tracking Your Social Success

A very basic way to keep track is with a spreadsheet. Then, depending on your goals you can list your key metrics for each social media platform, such as number of likes or followers each month, engagement on certain posts etc. After a few months, you should be able to start drawing some conclusions. Is what you are doing moving you toward your goal? Which types of content is drawing engagement? Find what works for your audience and your goals to invest your time wisely!

Originally Published in DHI’s Growing Social Newsletter

The biggest hurdle I see [a legacy] industry face as it tries to adopt social media is that posts tend to read like magazine advertisements. Social media is… well, social! Users are there to be entertained, to interact, to get the latest news, and to learn.

So what is the “right” way for a business to do social media?

One of my favorite quotes is “Twitter is like a water cooler, not a bulletin board.” It is all too easy to “do social media” by doing nothing but posting your product or sharing your content. Only one out of five posts should be shameless self promotion, the rest should be relationship building.

I Repeat: Traditional Advertising Strategies Don’t Work on Social Media

I challenge you to get out there and have some fun, interact, use emojis. Show some personality. Run a contest; make a quiz. Share content from others. Picture your accounts less as a salesman in a business suit, and more as a trusted, intelligent, and entertaining friend.

Originally published in DHI’s Growing Social Newsletter