Five Principles You Can Follow to Build a Thriving Community on Social Media

Dr. Barnes explains how to use five social media marketing principles to create a social media plan that attracts customer attention to get your personal brand, business, or nonprofit noticed. This episode is based on Dr. Barnes' book "5 Social Media Mistakes Your Business Should Avoid." In the book, Dr. Barnes walks you through the steps you can take to give your social media a makeover that works. A free video course Social Media Makeover Made Simple can be found on the Bricks-To-Clicks Marketing Facebook page. View the pinned post for details.  

Transcription:

James Barnes: (00:07) Welcome to the Bricks-to-Clicks Marketing Podcast. If you're a small business owner and you struggle with marketing your business, this podcast is just for you. I'm your host James Barnes and thank you for listening today. Let's get started. James Barnes: (00:22) So in season one, we've been talking about five social media mistakes your business should avoid. And we've covered all five of the mistakes. In the last episode, we talked about mistake number five, not using social media. Today I want to talk about how you take all these five mistakes and you turn them around. Let's make avoiding mistakes into principles to follow. There are five principles to give your social media a makeover. James Barnes: (00:50) If you start doing this, if you start writing words, using imagery video to show these things, you're going to start to get more attention online for your brand and your business and that's going to be a good thing for you. So today I want to go through all five of these principles. These are the things that you can do now to really start to give your social media a makeover. James Barnes: (01:08) Now, remember, this is about the words that you write, the imagery that you use. These are the ideas that you want to implement. Okay? So principle number one, you want to explain your customer's problem and how it costs them time, money, frustration, or other losses. I don't know what it is that your customer has as a problem, but whatever it is, it's costing your customer also something. They're giving up something. You can even go so far as to tell them if they do nothing, it's going to continue to be a problem. Some problems are even worse if you don't address them as soon as you have them. James Barnes: (01:42) And you can use images or video to add to any or all of these points, but that's really principle number one. When we talked about this early on you had to connect problem and loss. That's what you want to do is you start to write and create content to go up on your social media. It's one of the ways you can get attention. James Barnes: (02:00) So let's shift forward now to principle number two. We want to explain that we understand our customer's problem, whatever it is, and the losses they experience. And that may be painful for some people, the advertisement example I gave you throughout those five episodes was all about a billboard that I had seen where if you had a gambling problem, this rehab facility offered a solution for that. And so what did they do? In big, bold letters in the middle of the billboard, they said, "We can help," in bold letters. James Barnes: (02:32) So empathy is an important part of that. Your customer needs to understand that you get it, you have been there, maybe you even have the proverbial t-shirt to prove it, right? So you've been down that path. You understand it. So you want to use empathetic language and then call them to do something about it. If you remember in the advertisement, the billboard, that rehab facility provided a phone number. That was the action step they wanted their customer to take. Once they understood the problem and loss and then empathy, boom, then they jumped and said, "Here's our name the rehab place. Here's the phone number, call." That's the kind of stuff you want to do. Principle number two, use empathy, start using empathy. James Barnes: (03:15) Principle number three, really talked about the mistake in number three, not using your secret weapon. Whatever you're selling your product or service should not be a secret weapon. I mean, people should know what it is. And if you use problem, loss, and empathy first in the content you create, then you can pivot to using content to show here's what we sell, here's how it's going to help you have a better life. And you can use images or videos either one or both to show that your product or service really does solve your customer's problem and ends their frustration, pain, and losses. It really is effective at doing that. James Barnes: (03:51) So if you say the problem is something is difficult or complicated, you want to make sure when you use words to describe your product or service, that it becomes easy and simple and effective. You want to relieve that tension or that drama that you created with the problem statement. So you want to use that. So that's principle number three, start using video and images to talk about your product or service as it solves the problem your customers have and the pain points they have, whether it may be in the losses, economic, whatever it may be. James Barnes: (04:25) Principle number four, you want to identify your customer's villain. We talked a lot about that. And you want to do this so you can show how it causes their problem and losses. We talked about mayhem and how Allstate uses that particular villain and they do that. And you want to call them to action to defeat the villain by buying your stuff, whatever it is, the product or service that you sell. It could be a book that you write, could be lots of things, but the idea is that there's a villain causing problems out there. You need to identify what that is for your customers and then give them what you sell as the solution they can use to beat that villain. James Barnes: (05:01) And for the example in the book that we talk about, is the company that sells the camera hog guy. And for them, it's landowners who face a villain called feral hogs, wild hogs that run on their property, damage their habitat, the crops, the pasture, just all kinds of damages that they create. And then that has an economic consequence. Damages that are going to cost you money. So they may tear up your property, but that has economic damage or damages that go with it too. James Barnes: (05:31) So you want to identify your villain, don't leave that out. It's going to give you a lot of ways to build your brand and get noticed. So you got to fight against the villain. We talked about T-Mobile and how they named AT&T as being their villain. So sometimes it can be your competitor even, but when you do that, you're going to attract attention. So you got to be ready for their fight so to speak when you start doing that kind of content, but there are lots of brands that do it. So that's principle number four, really identify your villain, use it in your content. James Barnes: (05:58) Principle number five, we talked about it in the last episode about mistake number five. Really it was, you're not using social media ads because it's overwhelming. It's just really overwhelming to use and to do and to get started. Talked about ads you could use to get started and get out of that. And that's really what you want to start doing. Once you've got the content going in the right direction with these principles, you want to use ads to start amplifying what it is that you're doing. And you're going to be doing ads to build awareness and get page likes. You're going to be using ads to get engagement and giving away free content, getting people to give you an email address. You can build an email list with that. James Barnes: (06:35) And then ad number three was a testimonial where you're starting to build trust. Now it's a relationship process building that you're going through, but now you're building trust. And you're serving the first ad to just your target audience and then ads two and three you're really serving to just your fans. You're trying to build that engagement with them. And so that's what you want to do. And that's principle number five. You want to be using social media ads to boost and build your brand. And we gave Facebook as an example last time in that episode. James Barnes: (07:05) So that's it, those are the five principles that you want to use to implement successful social media. Principle number one, you want to talk about the problem and loss. Principle number two, you want to use empathy and empathetic language when you're talking to your customers about the problem and loss that they have, and principle number three, position yourself as what you sell to be the solution to the problem your customer has. James Barnes: (07:28) Principle number four, don't forget the villain. Don't forget the villain. The villain's important. You want to be identifying who or what the villain is for your customer. And then finally you want to be using principle number five, and that is to use social media ads to amplify, build up, and get awareness for your brand. You get more engagement and start building trust with the fans that are on your page. James Barnes: (07:51) Remember you can get the downloads and show notes and much, much more for all the episodes of the podcast just by going to our Facebook page. Just search for Bricks-to-Clicks Marketing. Well, that's it for this episode. Each and every time we get on here I try to keep it really short and to the point. Those are the five principles you really need to be using to build content on your social media to avoid the mistakes that we've talked about this season and season one. James Barnes: (08:14) And if you do that, you're going to grow your business using social media. And in the next episode, we're going to start talking about the social media makeover blueprint. And I've got a set of questions that you can ask and go through and start to implement these principles. That's what we're going to do in the next episode. So check out the next episode.

Thank you for joining me in the Bricks-to-Clicks Marketing Podcast. Wish you all the best in marketing your business and I hope it grows each and every day.