Social Media Promotion for Nero’s Notes

I’m deeply suspicious of social media. Time spent endlessly scrolling doesn’t feel the most productive. I try to limit my presence.

However, Nero’s Notes requires a steady stream of sales to keep it running. I'm not prepared to engage with the tech companies, giving them customer data in exchange for targeting, so I limit myself to putting out nice images and links. If people want to come buy, they do. It's not the most efficient method, but it means I can sleep at night.

Tool

Buffer allows the scheduling of posts. How many, to how many places, impacts which plan is needed. I post to Instagram, Facebook and Twitter for Nero's. So a free plan is sufficient. When I was posting to my other channels and businesses, I had a paid plan.

Requirements

  1. Links. For Facebook and Twitter, I can include a link to a product, category or landing page. I go copy all the links I'll need and put them somewhere, a note for example. I really need to up my clipboard manager game.
  2. Images. Dragging an image from the website sometimes works, but often doesn't. It comes at the wrong size, or shape or format. The storing and managing of photos has always been a challenge for me. It just seems to take way too much time and effort. I download the images that I'm going to use to the desktop.

Current Process

  • Copy product / article links to Drafts or Apple Notes

Images

  • Download images to desktop
  • Edit images. Buffer can only post single, square images to Instagram. Put the wrong image in, and it will schedule a "reminder to post" rather than a post.

Schedule

  • I have the channels set to post once per day, and the free plan allows me to schedule 8 posts per channel.
  • I post the image and write some text.
  • For Instagram - I add some hashtags.
  • For Twitter and Facebook, I post the image, add a link and write some text. I may add a hashtag for Twitter.

This allows me to deal with posting once per week on the Nero's channels. I still have to check in daily, to reply to comments or answer questions, but even if I'm busy, I know that Nero's is "present" on social.

Conclusion

From a reference point of view - that's it. Realistically, a focused hour, should get me a minimum presence online for Nero's. However, I'm not writing these workflows as a reference, but as a way of identifying where I need to improve my processes.

Expansion

From time to time, I decide that I should market this blog and my other business on IG, FB, Twitter and LinkedIn. Maybe I should put together an anti money laundering dance for Tik-Tok?

I sign up for a paid plan and up the scheduling to 4 times a day per channel and generate buckets of posts. Hu-Ha! I'm a one-man social media machine.

Thing is, I'm not passionate, and quickly, the quality of output falls, the scheduling exceptions increase, and I end up sinking huge amounts of time for no real increase in return. Then, I fall behind the schedule, start re-posting old posts to buy myself some breathing space and become an anxiety-ridden mess.

Process Improvements

Image Management

Images play a critical part in an online business. Every product has one or more. The website has multiple "hero shots" and "sliders" that should be regularly changed. Every mail shot requires images. Every blog post too. These images need to be optimised for each purpose and available to a number of different people in disparate locations. There's a whole range of processes that I need to write!

I need to decide where to park my links. Almost certainly there are multiple options here - and I need to identify one that works for me.

Get Help

I could outsource. I've looked before, and discovered I'd still need to sort out the image issue above. Then, you're not going to believe this, but social media managers want paying! Yes. They feel that they should be recompensed for their time. Outrageous, I know. Additionally, these professionals really earn their stripes with clever targeting and ad management, which takes me back to that whole customer data question and my desire to sleep at night.

The Way Forward

I'm going to find out how best to manage images. I'll reach out to connections and ask their advice. If you have any ideas, tweet me @stulennon or become a Member, hit me up in the Slack. Likewise, clipboards/links. I suspect I have the tools I need, I just don't know how to use them.