When it comes to social media and your online presence for small business owners & independent entrepreneurs, if you want to see results -- it's simple (not easy, but simple) -- you have to put in the time & the effort.

6 Mindful Steps to Creating a Social Media Strategy: 1. Establish Goals.

This can be setting goals such as, increase awareness, grow your following, increase engagement with followers, or get your following to direct message or reach out to you. Setting goals will help you to have a better idea on how to execute a proper strategy.

2. Identify Target Audience. Who is your target audience? Who are your clients/customers? Donors, volunteers, or sponsors? It’s important to figure out what kind of people represent your audience. Make a list of specific characteristics that might make up the people in your target audience. For instance, gender, values, interests, or socio-economic status. Knowing these types of things will help to give you a better idea of who your target audience will be.

3. Identify Content Categories. You want to utilize a variety of content categories and cycle through them to highlight different aspects of your business, non-profit or organization. The key to creating content categories is to provide 3x the value of what your audience is asking. For instance, inspirational quotes or heartwarming stories give value because when you do eventually ask people to get involved or donate they will more than likely want to get involved because of the strategy you’ve already implemented through utilizing different content categories.

4. Create Your Content Framework. You can now create your style-guide or theme for your social media. This will entail using your brand colors, templates for social media posts, assets for testimonials, images – these can be stock images or vector art—and of course, your own photos and videos. It is vital that these have a consistent look and feel to your brand because your brand is derived from who you are, who you want to be and who people perceive you to be – most importantly, it differentiates you from your competitors!

5. Determine Your Post Frequency. At minimum, you should be posting at least once a week. The key is to be consistent!! Whether you decide to post once a week or five times a week, you must keep that consistency! We recommend posting at least five times a week, and if that sounds like a lot, it’s because it is! Thankfully you can utilize platforms like HootSuite which will help you to organize your content and posts, however, you must dedicate at least a few hours a day once a month to doing this! Schedule this in your calendar in advance, that way you hold yourself accountable.

6. Create Engagement. If you want to be effective on social media, you need to set aside time every single day or every other day to be engaged with your following. Make sure to do things such as utilize CTA’s (call-to-actions), comment and reply to other people’s posts and make sure that you reply in a timely manner. Most importantly, you actually want to contribute to the conversation with your following in order to provide an organic feeling—you are not a bot, so don’t act like it!-- and build relationships.

To sum it up, it takes A LOT of time and effort, but if you want to see results then you have to make it a priority (and hopefully these 6 mindful steps will help guide the way)!

- Hannah & Adriana 🍃