EPISODE 64 OF THE MARKETING SOLUTIONS PODCAST: WHERE SHOULD YOU BE FOCUSING YOUR ATTENTION ON INSTAGRAM (AND HOW LONG SHOULD IT TAKE?)

Sonia McIntyre Reid:

Are you finding yourself either spending too much time on Instagram or avoiding it completely? In this episode, I break down a simple plan to maximize your impact on Instagram in less than two hours a month.

Welcome to the Boom Your Biz podcast, a podcast for the movers, the shakers, and even bigger action-takers in business. I'm your host, Sonia McIntyre Reid and each week I'll be exploring the question of what really makes businesses and organizations thrive. I'm on a mission to educate, empower, and inspire business owners and myself along the way.

Three things most business owners struggle with when it comes to building a presence on Instagram. One, taking forever to create and publish posts. Two, not knowing what to post. And three, not posting consistently. Here's the the thing, you really do need to have some level of consistency when it comes to posting on Instagram, whether it's showing up on Stories every day or posting multiple times throughout the week. Only posting when you're having a sale or running a promotion is kind of like being that friend who only calls when they want something.

From your customer's point of view, it's not really adding much value and it can come off as a little shady. On the other hand, spending hours each day on Instagram because you read somewhere that you should post multiple times a day and engage for 15 minutes before and after you post isn't an effective strategy either. The good news, you don't have to post multiple times a day and you don't have to hang out in your DMs 24/7 either. Once you have a structure in place, you can create a ton of content all at once. This will have the obvious benefits of saving you time and stress, but it will also mean you can show up consistently, add value, and create real connections with your customers and clients.

The issue around how much time you should spend on Instagram came up recently when I was chatting with a local business owner. They'd recently handed the organic social media management for their business over to an admin assistant who was spending up to two hours a day on Instagram. And by the way, she was just planning Stories, she actually wasn't posting anything. As you can imagine, this ate into the time they had to complete everything else they had to do in the day and their work was beginning to suffer. You might think two hours, wow, that's excessive, but I'm pretty sure that most of us at one time or another have sat down for a five minute scroll and realized that five turned into twenty or even an hour without realizing. Realistically though, to create and schedule content should take you no more than two hours a month.

So how do you avoid getting sucked in and wasting a quarter of your work day? The trick is to understand your purpose for being on Instagram. If it's simply to showcase your product range and any questions customers might have, then two hours a day is definitely excessive. If you're a coach who uses Instagram as a platform to open dialogue, create connection, and as integral component of your sales funnel, then two hours a day might be right on the money. But it all comes down to what your goals are and if it's actually generating leads for you.

For the purpose of what I want to talk about today, let's assume that you fall into the first category. That is you're showcasing a range of service and answering questions. And the first thing we do as an agency when coaching organic social media clients is to help them create content pillars. Content pillars give you around three to five main themes that you build all of your content around. For a retail business, content pillars could include new products, special offers, your team, product features, and the importance of buying locally. For a service-based business, your content pillars could include your story, what people should be doing in their appointments with you, testimonials and reviews, as well as industry specific information.

Obviously, these content pillars will vary from business to business, but you get the idea. Once you have your content pillars, it's time to batch create your content. So let's say one of your content pillars is new products. Instead of wasting time deciding which product to post and what to write as the caption, when new stock comes in, choose four pieces, take photos, and write four captions. Schedule them out using a scheduling tool, one a week for the next four weeks, and then go on with your day, knowing that one of your content pillars is taking care of the whole next month.

A time-saving tip here. If you want to write full posts about the same thing, it's good to have a structure that you follow for your captions. Here's a good example from service-based business. We have a builder client who likes to use before and after images on their Instagram. To save time, we have a caption structure that goes like this: a brief intro, what they did in terms of the build, and the result. So three key points that we cover off on. This means that the team can write up a quick blurb without fretting over what to include, whether the caption is too long and it keeps things consistent across the board.

Another content pillar I love is reviews and testimonials. Here's the thing, you can tell everyone how great your product and services, but the opinion of real customers holds so much more weight. Think about it. If you've just moved to a new town or suburb and wanted to find a plumber or a doctor or even an osteo, you're going to do a quick search, right? What's interesting here is that people are now searching on Instagram in a similar way to how they have traditionally searched on Google. We see this particularly in hospitality menus.

Recently, when I was in Melbourne, I searched Melbourne brunch on Instagram before I went to find a spot with great food for a meeting. I was totally swayed by an account that not only had gorgeous pictures of their food, but every ten posts or so they uploaded a screenshot of one of their reviews. This is what we call social proof. It's the opinion of people who have used a product or service and they've liked it so much that they took time to leave a positive review.

So how do you use social proof on your socials? Once a month, check your Facebook and Google reviews and when you find one that you want to use, simply screenshot it or type it into a pre-created Canva template, then add a caption. Your caption could even be as simple as, "Another happy customer." From a business owner's perspective, asking people to give you a review is a great way to keep the lines of communication open. Reach out to clients and customers from the past month to check in, see if they're happy with the product they purchased or the service they received, and ask if they'd be so kind as to leave you a review. They can email it to you or leave you a review on Google. Either way that's content you can use and you might be surprised at how much repeat and referral business you get simply from following up. It shouldn't take more than 30 minutes for you to caption and schedule four or five reviews, and if it takes longer than that, you might be overthinking it.

My other tip is spending less time on Instagram and more time on things that make your business money is to simply schedule your content. There are a number of options to scheduling content and many clients waste time trying to find the perfect scheduling tool. It really doesn't matter. My advice, pick one and run with it. There's not a lot of difference between the schedulers out there and there are plenty of free options available. We use Buffer and Later and we love it.

To sum it all up, here's how you're spending less time creating content. One, choose three to five content pillars. Two, create four pieces of content for each pillar each month. Four. Sorry, three, follow the same caption structure for each post. And four, schedule it in. Now once that's done, you know content is going to be rolling out, check in once or twice a day to answer any questions or comments and give a little love to the other local businesses around you. I would also try and get up an Instagram story each time that you do check in on your Instagram, and this can be just behind the scenes of your business and what's happening. You might even find that customers are tagging you and so you can re-share their stories as well.

A final tip is to give yourself a time limit and either set an alarm or a meeting for when you want to finish so you don't get drawn in and waste precious hours of your day. Instagram is a fantastic tool for showcasing your business or brand, but is not the only way to reach your customers. And if you find yourself regularly with your head in your phone typing a caption when you could be serving the customer in front of you, you might want to think about trying some of the tips I mentioned in this episode.