Franziska: Hi there, my name is Franziska, and I’m one of the founders of Basic Bananas.

One of the questions we get ask a lot is about social media. We get actually hundreds of questions about social media. How should I use social media for my business, and should I use social media, and which channel should I use?

What I thought I would share is a five-step framework that we use at our social media agency here socially, so when we work with our clients in the social media agency, we look at five different steps for each client.

The first one, I’ll go through each of them individually now, to share with them, so you can apply this to your business. The first one is the strategy, so the social media strategy. In this first step, we, of course, we look at which channels that we want to use for this specific business, and how you find out which channel that you want to use is you find out where your audience is hanging out.

Where is your target marketing spending time? Are they using Instagram? Are they using Facebook? Are using Twitter? Are they using Pinterest? LinkedIn? Where are they, and that’s where you want to be.

As a general rule, for small businesses, because you already have a huge list of things to do, it’s better to pick two or three or even one of these channels, and do a really good job, rather than going crazy, and trying to cover everything, but only doing a half bad job. Do a really amazing job instead.

Now, the only thing we also do in this strategy is what is our perception? We talk about this a lot, so I won’t go into detail here, but how do you want to be perceived in your brand, and how are you going to translate that in your social media voice?

Now, the second step in this framework is the content creation, and content really matters. The content you put out there really makes a difference to whether someone who wants to keep following you, it makes a difference to whether you build your authority, it makes a difference to whether you become popular and talk-about-able.

Make sure that you crop really good content, and content usually is divided between, what’s the word, it comes together as imagery usually and text, so the imagery and the text usually play together and create this beautiful piece of content.

Some of you also only have an image or only text, but often times, you have to piece it. You want to make sure that rather than doing a lot of content, you do less, but you do really good content. People sometimes don’t understand that they think, “Well, I have to post five times a day, so, and I don’t have time to create five really good pieces, so I’m just going to do something just to get rid of it.”

No. If you look at the piece of content, and you look at it and you think, “I wouldn’t share this if I saw this on social media,” don’t post it. Only post really good content; it’s part of your brand. You want to make sure your brand is represented in the way that you want to be seen.

Number three is social media advertising. Luckily, most of these networks now, like Facebook, and Instagram, Twitter, they all have, and LinkedIn, they all have in-built advertising platforms, so they all allow you to advertise.

If your audience is on these channels, it might be very smart to spend a little bit of your marketing budget on social media advertising. I’ve seen some incredible results with our clients at the social media agency using, for example, Facebook advertising and also Instagram advertising to get in front of the right people.

It can be very effective because it is highly, highly, highly targeted, way more targeted than if you run an ad in a big newspaper, for example, and also a lot cheaper, too.

Number four is community management. Community management really means that you engage with your audience. You make sure that it’s a two-way conversation. Social media has it’s called social or social networking because it’s meant to be social. It’s meant to be a two-way street. It’s not you as the business just blasting and talking at people. It’s you having a conversation with people, so you have to make sure that you engage.

If somebody is giving a reply on one of your posts, make sure you engage with them. You ask questions, you basically want to facilitate a two-way conversation.

And the last tip, the last step in this framework is insights and analytics, so all of these platforms, again, have in-built analytics inside these social networks, and the data that you can get in there is impressive. It’s very interesting to look at this maybe once a week, and see who is engaging with you, so who are the people that are actually engaging with you? What sort of demographics are they? What sort of interests do they have?

Also, have a look at which of your content pieces is popular, and which one is maybe less popular because then you can do better, and better, and better every week. At Basic Bananas, for example, we have a meeting every Friday with our social media team, and we look at these steps. We look at what’s the growth in our community across each channel, and we also look at which posts, which pieces of content did a really good job, which were popular, and which ones got a little bit less engagement so we can keep improving, and we can keep serving and adding value with the pieces that we know that our audience wants to see.

That’s it. That’s the framework for social media. I trust this is useful. Apply to your own business, and let me know how you go, because now, rather than doing a scattered approach to social media and doing random stuff, you can now have a little bit more of a framework. You have the five steps that really matter when it comes to doing a good job on social media.