Back to the Basics: Overviews and Updates of 5 Social Media Platforms

KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCASTYour organic reach on Facebook is decreasing rapidly. If you post regularly, your audience won’t see your posts. Facebook prioritizes content from friends and family over pages. You should be using Facebook Ads to combat this new algorithm.Instagram is the second largest platform behind Facebook with 1 billion monthly active users. You can create content for Instagram daily without having something that photographs well each time.Twitter is the best platform available for communicating and engaging with your audience. It is great for building community, but it does take a lot of work due to the new algorithm change.LinkedIn isn’t as noisy and fast moving as the other platforms. Posts and content hang around a lot longer there than on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, making it great for engaging with B2B companies.Pinterest isn’t only for pinning home décor and recipes. Instead, it is a great tool for business use by driving traffic. The whole point of Pinterest is finding content outside of the platform. Use it for things like blog posts, checklists and tools for your audience.THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…When you are marketing on social media, you are on borrowed ground. If the platform makes a change and you have pinned your marketing on one platform, it will negatively impact your success. Think about how to move your social media followers to your own email list.HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN'T MISSPlatform #1. Facebook – 02:58Reap the benefits of using Facebook groups – 05:43Platform #2. Instagram – 07:26You may be surprised to know who uses Instagram – 12:02Platform #3. Twitter – 13:02Don’t repeat your content on Twitter – 15:06Platform #4. LinkedIn – 18:14Platform #5. Pinterest – 22:07LINKS TO RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY'S EPISODEEpisode 2: How Lead Magnets Help You Build Your List & Stay Connected With Your FollowersEpisode 6: 5 Tried & Tested Strategies to Build Your Email ListEpisode 8: InstaStories: How to Use Instagram Stories to Elevate Your BusinessEpisode 14: Facebook Algorithms Explained: How to Post Better, Get More Engagement & Improve Your ReachEpisode 15: 5 Reasons to Use Twitter to Market Your BusinessEpisode 20: 4 Social Media Mistakes That Businesses Should Stop Making NOWTranscript below Hello and a super warm welcome to this week's episode of the Social Media Marketing Made Simple Podcast. I'm your host, Teresa Heath-Wareing. I hope that wherever you are in the world you're having a great day and that you're getting ready for summer. I suspect that because we've had such lovely weather in the UK that actually our summer's been gone. However, we have got the children summer holidays coming up and then breaking from school. My daughter actually broke up last Friday. So if you're a parent, you've got that tricky time of year where you've got to work out what to do with them for the six or eight weeks they're off while you carry on working. As a business owner, that is just as difficult. I am very lucky that I work from home so my daughter can certainly hang around here while we're working, but it doesn't make it any easier I can assure you.Anyway, I want to jump straight in and get on with today's podcast episode because it's going to be a good one. Today I am going to take you back through the main five platforms of social media. We're going to be looking at Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn, and I'm just going to give you a quick overview and a very quick update and how am I feeling about these platforms today, because one thing that I talk about when I train is whatever I tell you today, in two, three weeks', months' time could be completely different because social media is one of the fastest moving industries in the world. If you are on any of the apps personally, you know you will go to your phone today and it will look a little bit different to how it was yesterday, which means it's constantly changing and evolving in terms of how we use these platforms for business, which means that my advice and my content constantly changes as well.I was really aware that we're 21 episodes in and I haven't done a kind of back to basics overview. So that's what we're going to cover today, and I hope it's going to be really helpful to help you think actually, is my strategy still correct? I didn't know that that change happened and actually now that makes a change as to how I use it, or should I consider a platform that I haven't considered before? Let's dive straight in.The way this episode is going to work is I am literally going to talk you through those five different platforms, each one at a time, and then I'm going to kind of give you a quick overview and a little bit of what's good and what's bad and what strategy I'm using right now. Platform #1. Facebook Let's get started with the biggest, Facebook.Facebook has 2.19 billion monthly active users, which means it is far and away bigger than every other platform out there. Although over recent months Facebook hasn't shone itself in glory and has had a few problems in terms of data breaches and the way they're using data in Facebook, however, they are still huge and they still have loads of monthly active users.My strategy on Facebook has changed because of the facts that the algorithm, we've talked about this before. In fact, if you go back to episode 14, I do a whole podcast just about the algorithm. But basically your organic reach on Facebook is declining even more than it has already done, which was huge anyway, to the point where hardly anybody is seeing your post.One of the downsides of Facebook is that if you're posting regularly people are not going to be seeing your post, because Facebook want to make their users happy and in doing that they want to show them content that they're interested in, so they are going to prioritise content from people's friends and family over content from pages. As I said, it's a huge platform, but organically i.e., without paying, you are struggling for people to see your posts.At the moment I am putting a lot less effort into posting on Facebook as I am in some of the others because it's getting much harder to see my posts because that algorithm is getting even stricter. However, on the plus side the one reason I will always continue to use Facebook for my business, not just because it's huge, but because it has an amazing advertising platform. So for me if you're using Facebook, you really, really should be advertising because without the advertising it's kind of pointless.Now I say this. If you're using Facebook today and you're getting engagement and it's working for you, then obviously I am not saying to you stop, don't it use anymore. But I'm just saying go back and have a look at your last few posts, think about how much time and effort you're spending on Facebook and is it really reaping those awards. Don't necessarily just think of, "Right, that's it. I'm going to come off," but have you looked at the advertising tool? Are you doing anything on that side? Because like I said, the advertising tool on Facebook is amazing. Reap the benefits of using Facebook groups The other thing that Facebook is really good for is groups, and community is becoming even bigger in marketing. If you can create a community or a tribe around you, your product, your service, then this is a fantastic way to start marketing to people, adding that value, creating a group where you provide people value around what you do and that will help start to increase that following.Notifications are different on a group. If you do put someone in a group or someone chooses to be in your group ... Actually on a side note there, please don't just add people to groups. It's a horrible tactic. In fact, my episode last week where I said the four things I really didn't like about social media or four things that businesses do that I didn't like, I should've added adding people to your groups. Anyway, other than adding people randomly to your group, groups are really effective tool within Facebook. Also, things like Facebook Lives are still really good.The other good thing about Facebook is it has a real mix of demographics. So even though on the outside looking in lots of people think that they don't have a very young demographic because they're choosing to use things like Snapchat and Instagram, actually Facebook have the widest demographic. They really are still attracting people of all ages. But as I said, unless you're advertising, getting any kind of reach or any kind of interaction is really difficult. For that reason, like I said, I am not working as hard on it as I have been but I am still using it to...