Setting up your small business

Setting up your small business

Right I’ve realised I like nothing more than helping people realise their vision. It must be the teacher in me! As a result of this I’ve helped out a couple of friends and clients get their small business visions into something tangible. I’ve also come to realise how much I’ve had to learn during this short space of time. It’s odd because you don’t realise how much you’ve learnt along the way until you it on.

Apart from the obvious stages of setting up a business, for example getting an idea together, working out start-up costs and writing a business plan there is actually a lot to be done now social media is so important. The internet keeps telling us how easy it is and that anybody can set up a Facebook business page. Well I’m not disagreeing with that statement but how many people just know how to build it up and maintain it?  Whilst I’m not a Facebook (FB) Guru I think I’ve found out a few things along the way.

Ok so I’m going to break it down, starting with Facebook:

Your business name. This will be unique, personal and convey a message so choose wisely. You’ll the need to set up a FB business page. This is fairly simple and involves clicking ‘create page’ button and following a step by step instructions. These will include opening times, bit about your business and contact information

SO you’ve done all of that and you’ve got yourself a page. How does it look? You need pictures, high quality not blurry pictures. This is normally where a photographer will come in handy. Don’t try and scrimp on this. How many of you have something by its appearance? Well your business is the same, you could be amazing but it’ll take someone who knows your product to see past a low-quality FB page or even worse a shoddy website.

For me it just screams low budget and therefore low end. Remember it’s all about perception. Someone once said to me think of your cover photo as your shop window. It needs to send out a message. This was the main reason why I came up with the subscription service.

Small business: Reach and Scehduling

Right pictures done, great. What about a logo? Creating a clear brand is key to setting up your business so it’s worth putting some thought into that at this point too. That goes for colour schemes too, less is always more.

So it’s all looking pretty. However, there is nothing on there. Now you have to get writing. Introduce yourself. Then introduce your business, get people engaged and getting to know you. That’s your first post done, include a picture of yourself doing something to do with your business. Now you’ve written your first post how are you going to keep up with the Daily Grind of SM? Planning is the answer, schedule your posts.

Take a note of popular days, like father’s day or mother’s day and work something around them. I schedule all my posts on a Monday. If I know I am going to be at event at the weekend I’ll leave that blank. Don’t worry that you are spamming people. Thanks to the Facebook algorithm not everything you post will be seen by everyone. Schedule, schedule and schedule some more. Research popular days, like national pet day, national armed forces day and tie your posts in to that. This then means there is a hashtag just waiting to be used!

You’ll hear a lot of chat about ‘reach’ too. This basically how many people have seen your post, so how many people you’ve reached. This is a very important piece of SM and every-one wants good reach. In order to get this, you need to avoid words like ‘share’ or ‘like’ in your post. Plus, you’ll need to tag people and get it showing on their connections timelines. It’s all really tricky.

Small Business: tagging and sharing

So tagging people. First of all like their page as your business page. Use the three dots in the top right hand corner, next to the share button at the top of the page.  Then before you type their name add the @ sign before it. It can be quirky so best to do it on a PC and then the name of the business you want to tag will appear. You’ll want to do this for a number of reasons including picture/product credit but mainly to get your post seen.

If you can’t add them then check in, this function seems to work a bit better

One common thing I hear is what do I post? Well anything is my reply. People love a picture, will watch a video and will read posts but often the shorter ones seem to be better. If you work with horses buying/selling producing then post a quick between the ears snap. A video or a quick update will take 5 minutes but keep your content fresh. Remember what I said about FB filtering people’s newsfeeds, so make sure you’re post regularly. I aim for once a day sometimes twice depending on if I need to re-post/share something.

Download the pages app for your mobile, this does work better than standard Facebook and its super easy to post via it and schedule posts. Remember the content doesn’t need to be all you. If you see a relevant post by someone else then share it, sharing is caring on FB-we love it, if you click Share-Write post then you can share to a page. Select your page and write a little intro and instant content with no effort.

Hopefully by this point you’ve got your page up and going with some scheduled posts. Any problems just get in touch I’m always happy to help with logo design and also photography. Also for stock images that you can use legally have a look at Pferd

Next blog post:

Images, what can I use without getting into trouble