Where to post? How much to post? How to get more followers? It can be so overwhelming.
There's tons of information out there about how to optimize your social media, which can also be extremely overwhelming too.
Here's my recommendation: try out a few of them and then pick the ones you like the best. You don't have to be posting on Pinterest if you don't want to. Hate Twitter? That's cool, don't use it!
I think it's also important to try to figure out where your customers are. If you're feeling the social media overwhelm, it may help you to know where your customers are in order to make the decisions on where to post. If you're selling patterns on Ravelry, you can go to the Purchases section in your RavelryPro and check out the "Referred By" column. While the majority of my sales come directly from Ravelry, I've found that I do get a fair number of sales coming in through my posts on Facebook. While Facebook isn't my favorite social media, it's worthwhile to focus some effort there. I know that's where my customers are!
Once you've figured out where you're going to post, you have to decide how to keep it all organized. Here's some different ways you can organize your social media online:
- IFTTT.com (If This Then That) allows you to set up rules for a whole bunch of sites. For example, you can set up a rule that if you post a photo to Instagram, then it will also go to Twitter.
- Buffer allows you to schedule a variety of social media posts. You can schedule a few at a time with a free account, or for a monthly fee you can schedule up to 100 posts.
- CoSchedule is another site you can use for scheduling posts. There's an article on Buffer vs. CoSchedule here.
I use a good old paper calendar. It's the one inside my paper planner (I've recently switched to using an Erin Condren planner as I've become obsessed with planner decorating, but that's a whole other post).
For me, this is the easiest way to track everything. I've been considering trying Buffer, but I'm a total paper planner person, and this system currently works pretty good for me. I think what I like the best about my system is that it feels a little more personal. My opinion is when you start scheduling too many things to push from one social media to another, you can start to sound a little like a robot. I mean, robots are cool, but maybe not the exact tone you're going for in your social media posting.
I'd love to hear from you! If you have a business, I'd love to know how you track and organize your social media. And, because this is a social media post, here's all mine:
