Social Media has been one of those things that has made itself necessary to any business owner who chooses to market themselves other than word of mouth. And from someone who has been on Social Media for 10 plus years using it consistently, I must say it is a beast. Now mind you when I started on Social Media like Facebook it was for college students and then it grew to this massive ad pumping machine. Who needs to rent out an ad slot commercial on the TV or rent out a billboard? Social Media is crucial to the small business owner and for the most part it is FREE to use unless you are paying for ads.

Social Media is FREE to use to advertise your business.

Today I want to help you. Yup I am going to be spilling some Social Media Tea and my hope is that I give you rich information for FREE that will allow you to level up your social media game. I am starting a blog series called getting started with Social Media – Instagram. And once a week I am going to drop a new post for YOU, yeah you. I want to see you win on social media. I want you to use Social Media to convert your followers into paying customers. But first let’s get you set up on Instagram or set up properly.

First, things, First!

Instagram. Let’s start with that. Instagram was created in blah blah blah. Lmbo, yall can go to Wikipedia for that. Whenever you start on Instagram you want to keep in mind, “crisp, clean, popping photos and videos/reels”. So when you are out and about, you want to create content that you can use on your page that points back to your business someway or another. If you are a Life Coach, grab some content aka video(s)/photo(s) that will captivate your audience and stop their automatic Instagram scrolling. Maybe it’s a picture of a nice garden and you can have the caption be like “when was the last time you stopped to smell the roses?”. Or maybe you own a spa, “you can share a picture of BTS (behind the scenes) of your latest client’s facial and write the caption to be something where they can smell and feel the experience. This calming facial was created to make your face as smooth as a baby’s bottom and the smell makes you feel like you just stepped off the plane in Hawaii and will have you thinking that you are in a sea of pineapples. It is an facial that you can be sure that you want to experience.

Whoa, girl! Slow down what is caption? What is content? That’s a lot, I need a more like “beginner beginner” tutorial.

I gotchu.

Content is literally the material you use for social media, blogging or vlogging. So if you are a realtor your content could be a video of the house or educational content could be something like- educating your followers on what is needed when applying for a loan for a house.

#2 This is an Instagram post. And the green poster with the words and photo is an Instagram template that I created in Canva. Templates are used when you know you are going to use the same type of post multiple times and just change the words or pictures. Instagram templates are great to use because you can reuse the template multiple times without reinventing the wheel but just tweaking the template a few times. Instagram templates can be used on Facebook and LinkedIn. Click here if you’d like to place an order for your own custom 30 templates for $34.99.

#1 Location is super important because you want to be sure that you are speaking to the audience that you are servicing. I have a balloon business and right now I am based in Tulum, Mexico so I don’t want to put the location for Dallas, Texas because that isn’t where I am. But then this is about to screw with your brain. My Social Media biz – Keepin It Social is a virtual business so I choose the location that I feel like people would be interested in my services. So basically choose the location to where your business is based or where your target audience lives.

#3 Like, Comment, Share. The heart icon is where people can like your post, the middle icon is where someone clicks if they want to leave a comment and the arrow icon is what someone would use to share with another person. You want people to engage with your post in some shape of form and it helps when you ask your audience to “like this post if this resonated with you” or “leave me a comment if you have experienced XYZ” or “share this with a friend”.

#4 The save button is a new but now old feature lol, does that make sense? It was not always around when we were just liking pictures on Instagram- it is a new added feature, I am not sure how long it has been out though. #4 is the save button. Instagrammers can now save a post for later that they want to review AND they can put these items in categories. So lets say I see a post about photoshoot poses for my brand, I can create a folder/category and call it poses. So now every time I see any pose IG videos, I can save that post to that folder to later review it. If you are providing a lot education or cool quotes or you are an inspirational person who posts in that nature then you want to have a call to action that states, “save this post for later.”

#5 Caption is where you can captivate your readers with copy written material. Your words, your way. Maybe you’ll share an experience, educate them, or inspire your followers. Writers are the ones that show up strong in captions and then there’s the witty writers – one sentence and wham bam, they make their audience laugh or engage with the post by leaving a comment or liking the post. In the caption is where you can educate your audience about your product, tell them how to purchase the product/service. You can write up to 2,200 characters in a Instagram post which is way longer than twitters 280 character tweet posts.

Well folks, that was a lot of information and I hope it was really informative for you. Please feel free to leave a comment if you want any other educational lessons on Instagram or any other social media platform. Put me to work, lol.

Connect with me on Social

Feel free to follow me @keepinitsociall (extra L) at the end on all social media platforms- Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Snapchat and YouTube. Also let me know if this blog post helped you in any way shape or form.