Our social media channels do not generate the majority of our revenue, but they are a large part of our business and demand a lot of time and attention. We use social media to help create brand awareness, to maintain visibility in our market, to provide examples of our work and to allow our followers to get to know the team behind the brand. Like most areas of our business, our focus and strategies behind social media have changed as we’ve grown. When we started out, we typically posted to Instagram at the end of the day with the best picture on our phone and a spur-of-the-moment comment. And we sent out a newsletter about once a quarter, if that. We didn’t plan or strategize or create any content in advance, which made social media feel more like a chore than an opportunity. As we’ve grown we’ve relied more on systems to help with our social media content. Here are some of our favorite tools for social media and some tips to maximize social media for your business:

PLANOLY FOR INSTAGRAM

The best piece of advice we can offer for Instagram is to create a content calendar and batch your posts in advance. To batch means that you create and schedule several posts in one sitting for future postings instead of working on a post the day it goes live. Melinda manages our Instagram account and currently uses Planoly to schedule out her daily posts. We are planning out our social media quarterly and then scheduling posts about 1-2 weeks in advance. Planoly helps keeps our posts organized and scheduled through a calendar view so that we can visual our future grid. The system also allows for automatic posting as well as lets all members of the team access, ed. Here are some top considerations for Instagram:

• FREQUENCY OF POSTS - Base frequency on how often YOU can post consistent, quality content. If you’re starting out and trying to gain traction, we recommend that you post at least 3 times per week.

• TRY DIFFERENT TYPES OF CONTENT - Your audience may respond better to different types of content, so mix it up with feed posts, stories, reels and long videos. Watch to see what works well and repeat!

• IDENTIFY CONTENT BUCKETS - Identify themes or topics that align with your purpose and goals, which allows you to be more consistent with your messaging.

• GIVE A LOT, ASK A LITTLE - Most consumers don’t like to be sold to, so spend time to share your expertise, tips and behind the scenes rather than selling your services in every post.

CANVA FOR BRANDED MATERIALS

Particularly in the last year, we have created a cohesive, branded look across all our social media channels. So the look and feel that you see on Instagram is consistent with our website, our e-mails and our marketing materials. We use use Canva to create our branded templates, which gives us a professional and designer look with little time and effort. Many of the templates are free, but Canva also offers a premium, paid membership. Here are some top considerations for Canva:

• IDENTIFY A COLOR SCHEME AND TYPE STYLEs FOR YOUR BRAND - At first glance, Canva can be overwhelming with thousands of templates for all types of media. It’s important to find templates that align with your brand and to customize them with the colors and type styles that you use across all platforms.

• DEVELOP TEMPLATES FOR YOUR CONTENT BUCKETS - We use Canva templates in our Instagram feed several times a week for different types of content. For example, we use specific templates for new listings, before and after posts, and for client testimonials. There is no need to use tons of different templates - find a few that work for your brand and run with them.

• USE YOUR BRANDED MATERIALS ACROSS ALL PLATFORMS - We spent a lot of time in our early days trying to crank out new content each and every day. We were foolish to think anyone would notice (or care!) that we reused or updated old content. Today we create branded content to use on our social channels, as well as in our physical marketing materials that we leave behind at our projects and provide to staging and design clients. We refresh the content as needed and occasionally swap out pictures and statistics to stay current, but we do not recreate the wheel with new materials.

FLODESK FOR E-MAIL MARKETING

While Instagram and Facebook are flashy platforms with big results, we technically do not have any information about our followers, such as names and e-mail addresses. So in the event those platforms changed or shut down, it’s possible to lose the ability to reach our audience. So we put a lot of emphasis on e-mail marketing, where we do have some control over our list. We recently converted our e-mail marketing platform to Flodesk and we couldn’t be happier. Not only does Flodesk have beautiful templates that align with our brands, it’s easy to use and customize. Here are some considerations for e-mail marketing:

• CHOOSE A FREQUENCY THAT WORKS FOR YOU - We send out a weekly newsletter and occasionally send one-off e-mails to announce events or specials. The point of e-mail marketing is to stay top of mind, so try to pop in to your audiences’ inboxes periodically with content that resonates and with a frequency that you can manage.

• BE CONSISTENT WITH YOUR BRAND CONTENT - If you were to compare our newsletters, website and Instagram feed you’d recognize that we use consistent content and images in all three platforms. Our goal is to provide cohesive messaging across all our social media and for our followers and customers to know and recognize our brand. So those templates we created in Canva, you’ll see them in our newsletter.

• FOLLOW A PATTERN WITH YOUR CONTENT - It can be daunting to create new, fresh e-mail content on a weekly basis so we’ve created a formula which takes out the guesswork. Each week we include the following segments in our newsletter: what’s new or local, a redirection to the blog, a redirection to our LiketoKnow.it feed, and information about an Olive + Opal service. Our e-mail audience does not consist solely of people wanting staging tips and tricks, so we mix up the content to reach those different groups within our followers.

Social media may not drive all your business, but it’s certainly important for brand awareness. Planoly, Canva and Flodesk are instrumental tools that we use to maintain our social media. We hope these systems and tips will help you find efficiencies in your social media processes and take your brand presence to the next level.