Distribution

Distribution is not something many small businesses consider as an important issue to deal with when it comes to social media marketing. Many small businesses post natively to their social accounts. Good as this is, the reality is that it can take a huge amount of time to post across multiple platforms from Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin and the many others that exist.

The time it takes you to distribute your content natively should definitely be a concern for you. You might not think it’s a big deal, but you are duplicating tasks and creating a huge amount of inefficiency. It might only be a few minutes each time, but when you equate this over a course of a year, you’ll be wasting a lot of time! And let’s not forget the old adage of time is money! You’ve spent enough of it planning and creating the content. We now need to find efficiencies in distributing it too.

The good news is that there are plenty of solutions which enable you to post onto a single platform which then distributes your content to all your social channels. Using a platform not only enables you to make your life a lot easier, saves you time but also gives you a birds eye view of all your scheduled content. You can then easily tweak the content and make it relevant and unique, rather than exactly the same across the different channels you are posting to.

Of course, you can use social media marketing agencies to do this for you. But for a DIY solution we are big fans of Buffer. It’s what we used when we first started our agency before we moved onto more comprehensive solutions.

Now whether you choose to use Buffer or the many other solutions that exist. The point is it might cost a few pounds a month to subscribe, but it is a huge time saver for small businesses and it means you can be a lot more efficient in the distribution of your content, which will ultimately save you lots more than it costs you.

Planning how you are going to distribute your content in the most efficient way is critical to simplify social media marketing for your business and ensure you maintain your momentum.

I’ve explained what hashtags are in Chapter 2 and how they work. But a quick recap; they are quite simply a way to help your content be discovered and for users to search for topics they are interested in. 

But when you are thinking of what hashtags to use, there are a couple of things you should consider.

Firstly, you should spend some time doing hashtag research and thinking about what hashtags your audience might search for or be interested in. Remember it’s not about you, it’s about them.

There are hashtag research tools that marketing agencies like us use to help identify the latest trending hashtags. But to begin with a really simple way to do this is via Instagram. if you are on Instagram, try searching under ‘Tags’ for keywords relevant to your business and look at the number of posts.

Hashtags with large numbers are great in so much you know a lot of people are interested in that keyword and if you can be seen, your reach will go much further. However, the chances of your post being seen with a hashtag of millions is virtually zero if you don’t have a big social following.

Instead focus on hashtags related to your niche but with less competition.

For example a new tech startup might want to use the #techstartup as that's who they are. But as this hashtag has 249k posts, it might be hard for them to be discovered as there is lots of competition. However, a related term #techstartuptips only has 466! This means there is a lot less competition and any post targeting this smaller hashtag is far more likely to be successful and reach more people than the first!

Not only this, but as you start to dominate a particular smaller hashtag, a waterfall effect occurs which means you’ll start ranking for those harder hashtags that you want to ultimately aim for.

But don’t forget who your audience is!

Remember although it might be worth doing obvious hashtags for your niche, also think about your audience!

For example, it might make sense for a digital marketing agency to include the hashtag #digitalmarketingagency (as that's who they are) and lots variations of this term. Of course, that's great as it will mean people will discover them when looking for that particular term.

But if their niche was helping tech businesses launch their startups, it might also be sensible to get seen by them, right? But what happens if these tech businesses don’t search for these terms? What if they are just focused on themselves, like most people and businesses are?

Well the marketing agency won’t be discovered by the tech businesses!...

The reality is that most people are only searching or looking at things within their silo! Just like any business, the tech startup in this example are likely to use hashtags that represent them and what they are doing i.e #techstartup.

Occasionally people and businesses leave their world to find something they need, but generally speaking they are only focused on their niche. So instead of hoping your audience will search and find you, instead create great content that is discoverable and adds real value to your audience.

Like I said, we can’t assume our next potential customer will always search for us! So the way to resolve this issue is to quite simply include hashtags that are relevant to them. In the example where a marketing agency wants to be discovered by a tech startup, aside from including hashtags that describe them i.e #digitalmarketingagency it would make sense to also use terms relevant to their audience i.e. #techstartup #techstartupfounder and other variations of this term.