Carving out time for your business- social media edition

One of the biggest issues freelancers face is that work (ironically enough) gets in the way of doing our business.

The kinds of ways the workload and schedule we keep can impact us are:

• Stops us for keeping up with our social media and blogging

• Screws up our invoicing (and therefore our cash flow)

• Causing huge amounts of pain at tax time through neglected book keeping

• Becoming reactive as opposed to responsive to client work

• Stealing the joy

How deep you want to go with your business is up to you. However, no matter the business, you will at times find that client demands drown out your ability to do business. And you may find in quiet times that focussing on your business is the only way to keep you from feeling nervous and powerless.

Today, we’ll dive into social media.

The power of social media

The fact of the matter is social media works. I did a weird backhanded experiment (read “couldn’t be arsed”) doing my social media properly for 2 and a half months. What happened was my community stopped reading my emails, my rankings dropped for keywords even though I kept blogging, my site hits reduced and my enquiries went down.

This is because I have styled my business to gain a position of authority by being active on social media and giving a lot of free information out to people to help them along their business journey. A disruption to that caused calamity.

Now you may rely on different techniques to get your leads such as cold calling and cold emailing. Or attending live networking events, working through employment agencies or directly applying to job boards.

The point here is if you start on one of these routes, you need to make time to maintain momentum. I have to give a blog a fortnight and day a month to social media scheduling because I have trained my clients and readers to have an expectation of this level of content. I have also trained people to expect answers and assistance in various online forums.
However, it is effort that pays off in the end through referrals, clients watching from afar and learning to trust me and so on.

So how do you know social media or any style of work you are doing is working? By reporting on it.

REPORTING: Metric Measurement Social Visibility

• Hard numbers month by month on each social channel

• Uniques and overall visitors in Google Analytics

Social mentions

• Facebook- use the weekly report within Facebook itself

• Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+ and Facebook can all be tracked in Hootsuite, Buffer etc– or you can do a manual count

Back links Use http://smallseotools.com/backlink-checker/ and keep a running monthly tally- and avoid ones that are not genuine. Citations in online media You’ll usually find these happen through being notified by Wordpress or having people link their info to your social media.
Keep a manual running tally. Social Shares Set up Hootsuite reporting and cross measure with Google Analytics
OR
You can manually count for all.
You’ll need to manually count reblogs, followers and comments for Tumblr and
Manually count Pins, comments, likes and re-pins in Pinterest
Monthly. Website measures Use Google Analytics to check the following:

• Number of visits overall

• Unique visits

• Country of origin

• Source of visit (i.e. straight through, Google keywords, social media, referral etc)

Newsletter Use Mailchimp to measure:

• Number of subscribers

• Number of email opens

• Clicks on links within email

• Forwards to friends

• How many registrations there are for the Easter email

Blog Monitor via Google Analytics the:

• Popular pages

• Uniques

• Visits overall

Via Wordpress the:

• Links and citations to other blogs

Via Shareaholic (social sharing plugin) the:

• Count of how many people have shared the article

And gather that on a monthly basis Anecdotal Feedback When people say they’ve heard of your stories, ask them where Avoid Broken Links Run your site through http://www.brokenlinkcheck.com/ on a semi regular basis (and to discover your current broken links)
For blog reporting, check out my blog on the subject.

No matter the technique you use as your “social media” you need to track things. If you cold email or cold call, you need to count conversions, requests for further information, direct sales or being kept on file. You also need to schedule in times to remind them you are there.

So for a cold call or cold email campaign it may look like:

• Initial contact

• Response

• Follow up contact

• Result

Never assume you’re annoying them either. You are just one of many things in a day they need to deal with. ALWAYS FOLLOW UP – and that could mean 5 times before you get an answer.

The process of reminding people you exist is all part of getting your leads via social activities.

For networking, the measurements you may want to track are:

• Event attended

• Business cards given and/or meaningful chats had count

• Lift in social media and/or eNewsletter as a result

• Direct contacts made to you

• Follow ups made by you that are positive

• Leads generation

• Referrals from those leads (or influencers if they send work your way but don’t directly hire you)

The point is you need to know which kind of “social marketing” works for you. But make it a part of the mix. Be there to help with advice and be a friendly port in the storm. People love it.

How to make the actual time?
You must set aside 1 day per month as a minimum for social media activities. That means using a scheduler or sending out your emails or spending 10 hours networking etc. Track all of it based on result.

Now for a lot of it, you probably won’t see results until the 6 to 12 months mark. Many a freelancer (and business for that matter) has thrown in the towel at 3 months and declared it a big waste of time. But that’s a pretty foolish way to think about it.

Instead, think about how much time is takes for you to trust someone and develop a deep relationship where you’ll ask for help when you need it.

Now realise in a business setting, that probably happens in 15 minute bursts at most (it’s probably closer to 2 minute bursts).

This is why it takes time to build rapport and take the relationship to the next level. The same time you invest with someone to build that trust is required, but it’s in a lot shorter dose. That’s why you need to make those sort doses concentrated, worthwhile and regular.

Exercise:

• Choose your social marketing weapons

• Review you current presentation at social media, networking, cold calling and so on

• Look at ways you can improve what you do

• Put together a monthly timetable of outreach (e.g. frequency of events, social media schedule plan and so on)

• Plan out a strategy for the next 2 months across the various outreach platforms

• Build your way to track the reporting and what measurements you will include

• Set aside time to activate

And don’t forget to report on these results monthly. You’ll soon see what is working.

Next, we’ll tackle common ways you can screw up invoicing and how you can streamline your taxation process.