1) Brainstorming

Nobody knows your business better than the people working in it. Therefore, it is well worth getting everyone together on a regular basis to brainstorm some ideas. Just because you’ve employed someone to manage your social media doesn’t mean they don’t have great ideas for what your customers and potential customers would like to see from you online, but getting all your employees together in a group may stir up more ideas and inspiration, and may predict potential issues in the future.

Try to create an open, supportive space, where people know their ideas will not be shot down or laughed at. Encourage people to speak their minds without fear of retribution, and to share their ideas. When your employees feel their opinions and ideas are valued, this can really improve staff morale and can be a goldmine for your social media marketing. Not only will you have some great ideas, your employees are more likely support the project, either behind the scenes, or by posting about it via their own personal social media channels.

2) Posting about work

Some companies have a strict policy that says employees should never mention their jobs on social media. Of course, talking about customers in a negative way or complaining about a manager is never a good idea, but it can be beneficial to encourage them to post about the positive sides of their jobs. You can then share these posts on your business page, which provides you with extra content and social influence.

That said, it is important that anyone who is publicly an employee of your business has a reasonably professional-looking profile. You don’t want mentions of your brand to be interspersed with images of drunken nights out, or swear-laden political rants. Just take a look at these bad examples of employee social media. It’s definitely important for you to set guidelines and provide advice and training where required.

Don’t forget that if employees are promoting your business, they need to disclose that they are employees. This could be by using the hashtag #emp on Twitter for example.

3) Employee of the month

You can use your social media accounts to show off how great your staff are and to show them appreciation. An obvious idea for this is by doing a regular “employee of the month” feature, or you can get a little more creative! Photos of the office where you tag staff members are a great way to get more eyes on your posts, while also making your staff feel valued and noticed. You could introduce new team members, wish people a happy birthday, mention weddings and so on. All of this helps to make your staff feel valued and appreciated. This will then encourage them to post more positive things about their job. Showing that you value and appreciate your employees also shows your customers what sort of business you are. Many people prefer to deal with a company whose employees are happy in their work and it can help to show your company as being more human, rather than a faceless entity.

4) Ask them to share

Something as simple as asking your employees to share your content and products can really help. Obviously, you don’t want their personal pages to become a big advertisement for your brand, but encouraging them to share a post here and there can really help if everyone gets on board with it. If you sell a product your staff members can use, give them a free one to use on the understanding they will post a photo or two on their Facebook profile. You could also look at a “friends and family” offer, where your staff can provide their contacts with an offer code or another incentive to try your products. Sky, for example, has a great staff introduction plan which you can see here.

Employee Advocacy is Extremely Valuable

Speak to your team and explain honestly that you need their help. People love to feel needed, and getting your staff involved in your social media strategy by asking them to share one of your posts each week is a great way to help them feel included. If they share your posts and can see this translate to more calls, more leads, more sales, this will also be great for their personal development and they will see that they can make a difference.

Of course, any sharing needs to be natural and not out of context. For example, if your company unblocks drains, you wouldn’t have your 16-year-old Saturday employee post about how great your service is. However, you might ask them to post about it if they’ve received a call from a happy customer, or if you have a special offer. It’s about encouraging your team to take pride in their work and to share that pride with their followers. Some businesses will even go as far as to create suggested content for their employees to use, which they can copy directly to their social media channels, editing it slightly so that it is personal to them.

Whatever the size of your business, whether you have several different departments or just four of you sharing an office space, you are missing valuable opportunities if you do not encourage everyone to get involved with social media. Of course, you do need to have a social media policy in place, which details what people should and should not say about your company. But once this is written and signed by employees, it can pay dividends to encourage your staff to join in with social media.

It might feel daunting to encourage your staff to get involved in the social media for your business, but done right, it can produce massive rewards for all of you.

Do you get your staff involved in your social media campaigns? Leave a comment and let us know how you’ve encouraged your team to become brand advocates.

The post 4 Tips for Developing Employee Advocacy in Your Business appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Times have changed since this term was coined nearly 200 years ago. The original freelancer jobs still exist, but they’re outnumbered by millions of independent contracts in almost every profession. Every year, the number of self-employed workers increases along with the need for contract work.

You may ask why you’d want to freelance when there are secure and stable jobs available. Doing your own thing might seem risky, yes, but working as an independent entity on a project-per-project basis is becoming the norm.

There are even predictions that solopreneurs, freelancers, and independent entrepreneurs will make up the vast majority of workers in only a few years from now. Getting into the freelancing market now is a good investment in your future. Enjoy the benefits of designing your own work and life systems around your skills.

Let’s take a look at how you can get up and running with your new freelancer status.

Step 1: Focus

The first step is to position your business in the market for potential clients.

Ask yourself why someone would hire you over an agency or more established business. Don’t focus on pricing at this stage. You might think you can charge less because you have fewer overheads than an agency. But setting prices too low harms your business. And offering services for free will set you up for burnout. You might not offer a premium service, but make sure it’s not a race to the bottom on price- that’s a race you can’t win.

Pick a narrow focus or an in-demand niche to benefit from the “expert” advantage. It’s easier to become an expert in a narrow field. Remember that jacks-of-all-trades do not, in most cases, earn as much as specialists. Prove to clients you are the best guy or gal for the job in your niche and you’ve got a better chance of securing a deal. If you try to please everyone, you’ll please nobody. Stay focused!

Step 2: Showcase Your Work

Let’s face it: If you can’t show off your work online as a new freelancer, you’ll have a hard time convincing clients to hire you. Word of mouth is a fantastic marketing method, but it’s also limited. And even word-of-mouth referrals will look for evidence of your skills.

“But I can’t show my work visually,” I hear you say. It’s easier for designers and graphic artists to display their skills online but here are examples of how freelancers with non-visual skills can showcase their work. But it can be done even if you are not in those fields.

Some examples:

SEO expert: Show improvements in traffic on charts, Google analytics graphs, and other traffic measurement tools. Post images of keyword ranking improvements. Detail how this helped the revenues of your client’s business. 

Writer: Post excerpts of your work and show how it helped your client. Did the blog post improve traffic? Was your article able to generate more revenue for your client? If it’s an article on your own website, did it boost your website authority?

Analytics expert: Showcase graphs you created to help your clients understand their web traffic. Give details of how they used this information to grow their business.

Step 3: Find Clients

Finding clients is often the most time-consuming and frustrating part of freelancing. But many people skip the most important part: identifying your ideal client. Casting a wide net will catch you fish you might not want to eat. The same is true when prospecting for clients. The local deli doesn’t need your programming skills.

Create a profile of your ideal client. What kind of business do they have? What business problems do they need solving? How much does their business generate and how much could they spend on freelancers?

Once you’ve found your ideal client, you’ll want to impress them with your tech skills.

Show the client how easy it is to work with you by sending them an impressive proposal with software such as open source invoicing solution, Invoice Ninja. Professional proposal software such as Invoice Ninja can make even non-techies look like design and tech whizzes. Stand out from the crowd with a professional proposal.

Step 4: Manage Your Money

 Many people fail to understand the impact of irregular income until they are deep in the freelancing trenches. A regular job pays you a fixed wage every month. Freelancing can be a famine or feast experience. Some months you’re ready to pop the champagne and other months you’ve downgraded to ramen and water for dinner.

For the life of a freelancer, you need to have a good grip on your finances and cashflow. This doesn’t have to be painful or arduous, however; online money management software such as Mint can make it relatively easy to track your expenses.

Step 5: Track Your Time 

When you are your own boss, it’s easier to drop work for other things. Implement a system of time tracking as a way of holding yourself accountable. People work better with systems. A great system for optimizing your output is to monitor and evaluate your time.

Keeping track of your time is a skill you need to master if you want to make it as a small business owner or solopreneur. Use online time tracking software to help you understand which clients take up the most time, which projects generate the most income based on time, and where and when you are wasting time.

Step 6: Build Your Reputation

Besides being a platform for showcasing your work, your website can be a great marketing tool. Want free traffic from Google? Content marketing is the way to go. Generate leads from potential clients by answering their questions in blog posts. Write about what you know. Imagine you’re having dinner or a drink with a friend and they ask you about something in your business. Write about this topic (make sure it’s relevant to clients) in a friendly, clear way.

Love it or hate it, social media is here to stay (for the next few years anyway). Connect with potential clients or business partners on social media. For some freelancers, connecting online is a vital part of their business strategy. Just like face-to-face networking, communicating via tweets, online chats, and Facebook groups can help build your brand. You can use services such as Buffer or Hootsuite to make that social media presence just a little bit easier.

Brand recognition is a big part of many businesses success. The more people hear about you, the more they trust you. Get your message out there and show the world you’re available to help. And that leads us to the last step.

Step 7: Give To Receive

Don’t just focus on your business. Give value. Help people. Offer advice. Setting yourself up as an expert in a world of experts is difficult. But if you can walk the talk you’ll stand out. If someone asks for your advice give them half an hour of your time over coffee to offer your best advice.

Help others achieve their goals by creating a tutorial on a topic you know about. Share it online for free. This is a slow burn method for long-term success. It’s difficult, but the rewards for this authority building exercise make it worthwhile.

“Giving away my best content for free has been my gateway drug to so many amazing opportunities,” says serial entrepreneur, Gary Vaynerchuk.

Vaynerchuk recommends that you should stop thinking with a transactional mindset and just give without receiving. When you do, good things happen and it actually ends up benefiting you even though the giving was not geared for it.

Freelancing isn’t always easy. But with these seven steps, you can ease the process and actually join the ranks of those who control their own financial destiny.

The post 7 Steps to Launch Your Freelancing Career Full-Time appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

I know, I know …

BFO (Blinding Flash of the Obvious) from the Big D.

Thanks a lot.

Unfortunately, that same thread keeps getting pulled because so many businesses do NOT listen, or if they do ask questions, their head is not open to hearing the answers or acting on them.

Over and over again, Explore speakers explained why something so simple is vital to business success.

A Jedi Listens