Tools You Need to Manage Your Own Social Media

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Welcome to the Circle Sessions featuring the Circle of Experts. The Circle of Experts are Yasmine Robles from Robles Designs, Tonnisha English-Amamoo of TJE Communications, and Don The idea Guy. I'm Brett Johnson from Circle270 Media Podcast Consultants. Each week, one of The Circle Of Experts joins me to talk about some critical aspects of growing your podcast. We'll focus on marketing, social media monetization, and website design with the idea of implementing all of these together. This week, Tonnisha is here from the Circle of Experts. Tonnisha is on a mission to help small businesses level the playing field through digital marketing solutions. Tonnisha, thanks again for joining me. Appreciate it.

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Yes, as always, thank you for having me.

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We had previously talked about content calendars in a previous episode, but there are some tools that can help you manage content calendars beyond what we talked about briefly. What we talked about was great, but it's one of those, but there are tools out there to manage your social media. How do we go about looking at that as a social media person and getting in that world?

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Yes. Well, I'm sure hopefully other marketing agencies and social medias don't hate me for this, but I tell people all the time that anybody can do their own social media with a little bit of planning and really just paying attention to the trends and doing a little bit of reading. It's really all about planning. And honestly, if you haven't listened to the content calendar episode, pause this one and go back because for me, content calendars is the only way that I can manage social media for myself.

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Right, exactly. I think your point is good in regards to everybody can do social media. Whenever somebody hires someone out to take care of it, they realize they don't have the time to do it. That typically is that I can spend my time doing something, not better, but more important to my business growth right now and I need help with social media. So I think that's a really good way of putting that.

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Yeah. Honestly, those are the clients I love, the ones that know how much work goes into it, which is why they hire versus the ones who believe it's simply just posting and try to tell you how to do what you do. Right.

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So I guess. From what we talked about in the last episode as well, too. Those tools help you be purposeful in regards to what you do. And I don't think a lot of people realize that the good ones, the people that really have a good control of their social media planning do it on purpose. They have a purpose because they need to be on purpose to help them get through their months. Otherwise, they are scrambling. So you had given me some ideas and a script, basically, from earlier on some steps to creating your social media and how to manage it. So let's go over that, starting with step one.

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So step one, of course, is going to be to create your content calendar. So if you want to manage social media on your own, you really need to figure out what are you going to post. And this should be directly tied to whatever your KPIs or key performance indicators are when it comes to social media. So for me, it's brand awareness. For others, it may be leads. For some people, it may be revenue. You want to sell stuff. So when you understand what your KPI is, then you'll have an understanding of the type of content you want to create to create that content calendar. The next step after that would be to learn how to use Canva. I'm not an Adobe girl. I'm not a graphic designer. And honestly, for the ones that are, God bless them because they are amazing. And sometimes even when you're managing your own social media, it will call for an expert. But on a daily basis, you can get away with using a tool like Canva. Canva. Com, it is a free design tool. There are hundreds, probably thousands at this point of different templates that you can use to create posts for your social media.

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So they have different graphics you can use for Facebook. You can resize them for Instagram stories. I mean, it's one of those tools where I can say that it's easy and when you first get in there, you might not believe me. But then once you take the time to play around with it, you'll realize that it really is a great tool for you to not even just create graphics, but they also have a nice bank of stock images if you do need pictures for things.

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Right. Your next step, pulling it all together, finding a scheduling tool.

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Yes. I'm a little biased. I am a partner with Sprout Social, which is a really great scheduling tool that I love mostly because of the reporting. I love the reporting so that we can look at what we've done, what we're doing, is it working? And if not, how do we then create content that will work? But there are tons of other tools out there, even with Facebook and Instagram. If you didn't know, Facebook does own Instagram, and you can use Facebook's publishing tool, which is free, to schedule your Facebook and Instagram posts directly through Facebook. So that is something that you can do.

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How do you like that tool as a dashboard? Do you like it? Not really compare and contrast, but I've used it, it seems to work.

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Yeah, I think it does its job. It does exactly what you need it to do. It's there to help you schedule. And it's the perfect starting point. Sprout social is a paid tool. I'm all about using things that are free until you can't use it for free anymore until you need to grow and go somewhere else. So if you're just now starting off with managing your own social media, yes, definitely utilize a tool like that. Before you were able to schedule posts on Instagram, I used to create the posts in Instagram and then save them as drafts. And then I would set a reminder like, hey, go post this post, go post that post and then go in and post it. So whatever way that works for you to be able to remember to make those posts. That is cost effective is definitely where you want to start.

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Where do you and when do you decide you need a paid social media planner or posting software? What made you look at that? Okay, I need it paid.

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I need a paid level. Yeah. So for me, I decided to use a paid level because I wanted to be able to add that value to my clients where I'm not just posting and I'm saying that we're doing well. I really wanted to have access to some reporting to prove out what we were doing. But honestly, if I was just in it for myself and didn't have a type of business that service people, I probably wouldn't have a paid tool, honestly. I'd probably use something that was free. Let's say I was selling something, I would use my Shopify Analytics to prove out what I was doing versus something like that. Especially now that Facebook and Instagram do offer some insights. If you have a professional page, you can see the demographic of men versus women or the ages, the type of content that's doing well. They even tell you the times that your followers are online. So there are those basic analytics you can get from the tools themselves. But yeah, for me, it was just all about a value add for clients that maybe go ahead and pay for.

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A tool. Right. Okay. That's good to get that because we mentioned that. And I think some people jump into it going, maybe they don't necessarily have to. The tools offer some pretty good stuff already. And you're right. Is there another measuring factor you should be looking at versus views and plays and such on a social media could be more of your selling items. You need to say how many is your sales quota going up, up, up and are you meeting that quota? And if that, then it's probably from what you're doing. And that's a good thing that resonates as well, too. And you mentioned step four, I love this creating a routine, which I'm guilty. I don't do very well.

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I'm.

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Like, someone's doing.

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Looking good, someone's not. For myself, it's terrible. For clients, though, we build out content calendars on a monthly basis. Usually, as we're getting to maybe the third week of a month, we talk about, okay, what's coming up in the next couple of months that we want to promote? What's happening? What's going on? What do you want me to put out there? T hen from there, I build out the calendar, get it approved and scheduled as we move into the new month and then do it again. Building out monthly can feel overwhelming. So if that does feel overwhelming, start with weekly. Let's say this week I'm going to post twice on Instagram, and this is when I'm going to post and this is when I'm going to post it. Whatever that routine looks like for yourself. For me personally, when I need to create content for the TJE business, it's usually not during a normal work day or work hour. It's something that I have to set aside and say, this is something that I'm setting aside for myself, for my business that I have to do. And sometimes I don't want to do it and it doesn't happen.

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And that's okay. I mean, to be honest, if any of us skip a day on posting, the world's not going to stop, right? But if we do have goals that we're trying to meet, and honestly, I think I've gotten a little lazy because I'm at capacity with my business. So it's like my posting is for brand awareness. And right now, I really don't want anybody to be aware because I can't take on anyone because I'm pregnant at the moment. So I've gotten lazy, but I took new pictures last week or so, so I'm going to get back to it soon. But creating that routine is what helps helps. And if you have to put it on your calendar and you block off a time where it's like, this is my time, do that, the hardest part is sticking to it. But the first step is at least building out the time. And then if you keep seeing that come up every week or every month, hopefully then you'll start to get into that routine. Even if it's just 30 minutes, just take 30 minutes to work on content. Maybe you'll build that up to an hour or two hours or a whole day, whatever works.

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But definitely taking that time out for yourself is super important to be able to manage your own social media.

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I have a tendency to go down rabbit holes when I start working on things. You mentioned starting an hour, two hours. How do you behave properly, let's put it that way, to not go overboard and all of a sudden you've lost an hour on one post. Yeah. Because I can, but it's a fun tool once you get in there. I'm sure there are some rules in your head to stay within color scheme, decide to do for all. You can control that piece without getting too creative. But do you have a suggestion in regards to how to stop the creativity, I guess, and let done be done?

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Yeah. So I usually, if I have a can but template, I put it in my mind, I'm going to use this template for this entire quarter. We're not going to change it. We're not going to do anything extra. And we'll think about revamping it in the next quarter versus every month trying to do something different. That's what helps me. I also use a really cool tool that's also free called Toggl. It's T oggl. Com. I use that to time myself on everything that I'm doing. So even right now, recording with you, I have tied that under professional development. If I'm working on business stuff. I got to send invoices. I log that as admin time. So as you're working on social media, log that as marketing and look and see how much time you're spending on that and if it makes sense. Or if there's a way to... If you did spend an hour on it, what did you do in that hour? Did you scroll TikTok for the first 45 minutes before you started? Or have you been moving around the same little piece for the last 30 minutes in Canva and it's just not working?

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And maybe just take a break and try to come back to it another day. But I think sticking to a template and saying you're going to stick to it for X amount of time is what helps me not go overboard with trying to... And keep in mind, we're not designers or else we probably wouldn't use Canva because most designers I know actually hate it. So it's not going to be perfect. It's fine. And that little thing that won't move the way you want it to move, most likely you're going to be the only person that notices it. No one else is going to notice. Exactly.

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No one's going to unfollow you because that is in the weirdest spot.

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I'm not following her anymore. Why would she use this color? I'm done. I'm blocking her. Probably not going to happen.

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Said no one, exactly. Those are some great tips. I love that. So if anybody has any more questions about this or maybe you actually want a deep dive into more of what we talked about, how can they get a hold of you about this?

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Yes, you can connect with me on Instagram. My Instagram is @tjecom. That's T J E C O M M and send me a DM and we can chat.

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Super. And thanks for following and subscribing to the Circle sessions from Circle270 Media Podcast Consultants.