Create Social Media Posts – Part 1

You want people to know you have an online business, right? So can’t rely on your website alone to bring you traffic. A website is great to bring traffic, but you want to have that extra chance of getting more traffic. To do that, you need to use your social media pages the right way.

Make sure you have installed a plugin on your website that allows users to give you a follow on your social media accounts.

In order to get traffic to your website from your social media accounts, is to create social media posts. Before you do that, you need social medias accounts and yes, some people don’t have any social media accounts and that’s fine. Maybe now is the best time to create one.

There are different school of thoughts on what type of social media accounts you should have to promote your affiliate marketing business.

*May contain affiliate links. Clicking on the affiliate links will most likely result in the same price you would pay elsewhere or you may get a special offer using those links.

Personal accounts

One is to use your personal accounts and modify them a bit so people also see that you have a business up and running. This also means adding strangers to your friends list so you can keep in touch and pitch them with some offers you have for the products your promote. Your profile becomes a hybrid between a personal profile and a business page

What you have to do here, on Facebook, is to grow your friends list over 5,000 people. In order to do that, you follow influencers in your niche, you go to the comments section and you add people who interact with the posts to your friends list. You want to make sure they live in the tier one countries, tier two is good too.

The reason why is that people have money to spend in these countries. So you want to prioritize people from the U.S. A, from Canada, from New Zealand, from Australia and from United Kingdom.

Try to add a max of 20 people per day. I think 30 is the maximum. You can get your account flagged or deactivated for adding too many people in the same day. Just be careful with that.

Why you do want to grow your friends list? Apparently, the people engaging with influencers in your niche are already warm up to the idea of buying something that will help them solve a problem they have. So it would be easier for you to promote your affiliate products and get a good conversion rate.

I personally don’t feel comfortable with the idea of adding strangers to my friends list in my personal Facebook account. It’s a personal account with things I want to share with people I know. Plus, most people I friended on Facebook speak French and everything about my business is in English. There is no way I’m going to sacrifice my real friends by publishing English posts only to try to make money online.

Also, I don’t want people I don’t know snooping around my old pictures and posts. That’s me. That’s my reality. Yours can be different and I know people who have transformed their Facebook profile so it is more of a business page. Let me know about what you think in the comment section.

Yes, you can create a new profile and start from scratch. It could be harder to add people to your list. Think about it, are you likely to accept a friend request from someone brand new to Facebook, someone you don’t know? Since there are so many scams and fake accounts on the web, you may find it harder to build your audience that way.

Business accounts

The other way to use Facebook, the one I prefer, is to create a business account. That way, you keep your private life separated from your business and people looking at your business page, mostly on Facebook can also see that you have a personal profile, that you are a real person. The best thing with the business page is that you can schedule your posts.

Same with Instagram accounts. I have two accounts, one personal and one business. A nice thing with business accounts is that you get access to your stats. It’s always good to know what type of post reach the most people, what time works best, etc without relying only on the number of likes and the comments (when you start getting some!)

With the business account, you have the possibility to create paid adds, boost your posts or promote your page to a targeted audience. That way, people know you exist on social media.

Of course, the longer your accounts have been up, the more credibility you gain. It’s hard to trust someone with brand new everything. You want to have a minimum of 10 publications on your social media page before you start inviting people to like your page. On the other hand, if you don’t have at least 10 posts on your website, wait before you create your business accounts. People will click your links and you want them to find something good so they come back.

How to create social media content?

I’m going to talk about Facebook and Instagram in this article. I will talk about other social media platforms in another post.

To create good content for your social media audience, you need to give value to your followers. Building a sustainable online business is a lot of work. Be original. Create your own posts as often as possible.

Vary the type of post you publish every day. Your followers will be happy to follow you when you vary the type of post on your page. Motivational quotes and inspirational quotes are big on social medias. You might want to include them in your publication rotation.

You also want to post content relevant to your niche. That’s where it is important to have written articles for your website. They will help you find inspiration for your first posts. Think of all the subjects that are related to your niche and start to create posts.

Find topics relevant to your niche

How many topics can you find? If you have no idea on where to get started, make a quick search on social media and follow influencers in your niche. It will help you get some inspiration. You can also read the comments and use questions to create your posts.

If you ever feel stuck, you don’t know what to talk about, you can try to create a mind map or a topic wheel. There are apps available for you to do that the easy way. It will help you break down all the topics related to your niche and help you get ideas for your posts.

For example, if you have a baby (baby is too broad for a niche, you would want to go with one of the sub-topic in the mind map) related niche, you write baby in the middle, to get started. Then, think about what revolves around babies: clothes, cribs, car seat, strollers, toy, monitors, etc. For each sub-topic, you find other ideas. For clothes: summer clothes, holiday clothes, winter, etc. For cribs you could find 3-in-1 cribs, sheets, accessories, etc. And you keep on going like that, breaking down every topic and sub-topics. Summer clothes: hats, bathing suits, etc. Here is an example of what it looks like:

That way, you create infinite possibilities of posts. I didn’t push the map too far since it’s an example. You can use those ideas to create articles for your website too! It’s a life saver once your mind gets into the map making.

It can be hard to get started on the mind map/topic wheel. Write down what comes first. Everything you know about your niche, every topic you can think of. Give yourself some time to get the ideas out there. It always takes a few minutes or sometimes more to really get into it and see the map grows.

Share popular posts

You can also share what others are creating on your profile, but you want to be original. Don’t spend your time searching for the perfect idea to share on your profile. Create your own content for the most part. That way, you won’t be publishing things people have seen multiple times already and you will increase your chance of interaction on your posts.

In order to share posts that will bring value to your audience, you have to spend time scrolling on social medias. Be careful about the amount of time you will spend searching for posts. It can become time-consuming if you are not looking in the right place.

Like I said earlier, follow influencers in your niche and other accounts that are related to your niche. Spend some time everyday looking at the things they are posting and see if anything could be shared on your accounts.

Depending on how many times a day you publish posts on social media, try to share other’s content every other day. If you are posting 5 times a day, you can share popular posts once a day. Use what you see on others profile as an inspiration to create your own posts.

Create posts for Instagram

Instagram is growing in popularity. Your target audience may be hanging out on Instagram, so you want to create a presence there.

It’s very visual and you can diversify your publications. It could be one picture, a carousel, a reel, a video or a story. Instagram wants people to stay as long as possible on their platform, same with Facebook. You will have better chances for success if you create carousel, since it requires more time and shows Instagram that you are serious about your business.

Make good-looking posts that are pleasant to the eyes, appealing, fun to read, that make people want to engage, give you a like, write a comment, share your post and even save it for later. You get extra points with Instagram when people save your posts and will give some extra visibility for a little while.

Try to stick to a color pallet. When people will look at your past publications, they will see a continuity, a consistency in what you are creating. It may takes a little while and some experimentation before you find the perfect match for your personality, Here is an example, from @lebluecremerie, of what I mean:

In this example, there is a variation on the pallet used depending on their menu. They create seasonal themes and have pictures that go with it. So this is another example:

They have very bright colors in their posts and they represent their brand. Other companies also use very bright colors. They choose a few, like yellow, pink and orange and create their post using those colors. It all depends on your niche.

You don’t need to stick to one color, you can simply choose the same filter on every picture so it creates your brand. What you post becomes your brand, people will recognize your post by the way it looks. That is very good for your business.

To create great posts for Instagram, you might want to use Canva. What is appreciable with Canva is that you can select the type of post you want to create. For example, you can select an Instagram post and it will give you the right picture size to create your post. You can also use Canva to create the pictures you use on your social media profiles.

You can use pictures that are in Canva, you can use you own or you can use pictures that are free to use for business purposes, like on FreerangeStock. Be creative and add value.

It is better to post every other day and give good value to your followers than just publish posts because you have to publish something. This also apply for Facebook.

Create posts for Facebook

On Facebook, you can use what you have created for Instagram and publish it on your wall.

What I like about Facebook is that you can share links directly in your post. It doesn’t work with Instagram. All the articles you create for your website, when you have one, you share on your Facebook account. That way, depending on the amount of articles you write in a week, you have at least one post for your Facebook page per week.

With Facebook, you can create a publication without using a picture. Which is great, it can save you a lot of time when planning your posts. Vary the length of your publication. It can be as short as “How are you doing today?” and can get as long as you feel to write something valuable.

You can start with something plain, writing a few lines. Then you can play with the different backgrounds Facebook offers when you write your posts and you can add emojis. You don’t have to, but it will help make your publications stand out from the sea of publications we see on Facebook.

Keep in mind that only a small percentage of your followers will get to see your publications on social media. Try to grab their attention for a few seconds and put a call to action in each of your posts to see how people are responding.

Now you have to basic steps to get started creating posts for Facebook and Instagram. I will tell you about the different types of posts you can create for your pages. Stay tuned for “Create social media posts – Part 2″

In the meantime, you can start working on your mind map or topic wheel, to get a head start with your publications.

Let’s Get Started,

Cynthia