What happens when you don’t promote your business on social media? 
The answer here is simple: nothing.

Unless you are using social media for your practice, people simply won’t find you there.

Being present online helps you stay familiar. When you offer valuable insight, resources, and support to your clientele online, it creates tremendous value for your community. In turn, your visibility helps keep you in mind for referrals and scheduling time with you.

Whether you’re on social media already, or are wondering whether you should be, learn to avoid the most common mistakes heart-centered practitioners like you make.

The Top 4 Mistakes

1) Believing Social Media = Facebook
Twenty to forty somethings often think “social media” is essentially the same as saying Facebook. And maybe Twitter, too.

If you take such a narrow approach, it will almost certainly slow down the growth of your business.

If you only have a Facebook page, then you essentially work for Facebook. Your activity on Facebook helps the company, and they have the power to lay you off at anytime.

Most people don’t know, but even when people “like” your Facebook page, most of your posts will be hidden from their news feed. If you want people to see your updates, they need to select “Get Notifications” when they like your page by selecting it from this menu:

Seem complicated? It is. And it’s not by accident. According to this CNBC report, Facebook is doing more to prevent pages from reaching their audience than it’s doing to help them. I couldn’t agree more, and see many businesses struggling to reach their fans.

To reach all of your Facebook page’s fans, you literally need to pay for advertising on Facebook. And then, if you reach new fans, you’ll need to pay again if you want your posts to keep reaching them.

Any social platform you choose has the potential to lose popularity or change its practices. If you’re just using one platform to do outreach, then you’ll be vulnerable to being silenced if this platform stops working. You could literally lose access to your community overnight.

Solution: 

Choose several strategies for reaching out to your clientele and referral network online. Make sure at least some of your outreach is through activities that you control (eg. emailing customers, posting on your own blog, having a great website).

2) Imagining You Need to Be on Social Media
No, you don’t. If you’re working solo as a practitioner and you’re your only promoter, your time is limited. You need to choose your promotional strategies very wisely.

Lots of solo-prenuers think that being on social media is the key to growing their business. It’s not, and for many people, it will be a lower-return strategy than other promotional activities.

Solution:

Track where people are hearing about you. If you want to grow as quickly as possible, you can set up tracking on your website so you can see where people are finding you. (I recommend Google Analytics or the standard “Stats” tracking in the dashboard of WordPress.com sites.)

Make it a habit to check your stats once every few days or once a week. If you’re getting lots of visitors from social media posts, that’s wonderful. Keep posting. If not, then shift your focus to those activities giving you better results.

3) Thinking All You Need is a Facebook Page
If you want to get the most out of social media, you need to think about where your ideal clients and referrers spend their time.

Don’t assume that Facebook is the best place to be (for many businesses, it’s not). Instead, you can start at the beginning. Think about your ideal client. Where does this person spend time online? It may be Facebook, but just as likely, your ideal client may be spending time on mommy blogs, recipe blogs, Instagram, Twitter, Buzzfeed, news magazines, etc.

Solution:

Find out where your ideal customers really are, and then show up there.

Your online outreach options include: 

• Pinterest
• Facebook pages
• Twitter
• Blogging on your own site
• Email
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Google+ circles, video chat, and posts
• Tumbler
• Instagram
• Meetup
• Craigslist
• Berkeley Parents Network
• Yahoo Groups
• Facebook groups
• Guest blogging on other people’s blogs

4) Posting the Wrong Things
So you’re using social media, using it wisely (i.e. making sure you’re using the online platforms where your ideal clients are spending time). Now, what to post?

If you only think about what you want people to do (eg. book a session or sign up for your workshop), you risk hitting a dead-end with your outreach. People tend to tune out and ignore you if you are only using outreach to promote your services.

Solution:

If you want to reach people, you need to post things that have genuine, 100% value for them. If what you’re posting doesn’t, it will fall flat on its face. Try to give away valuable support and tools, and engage real conversation. 

Take a few minutes to think about your ideal clients. Picture one person who you really love working with, and let that person lead your strategy about what to post. Think about what that person needs, what they want to read, and what gets them excited.

Those are the things you should be posting. It’s alright to post your class announcements too. Just make sure you’re also posting other great content.

If you ever hope your community of readers will sign up for your service when the time comes, don’t train them to be passive readers of your posts. Write posts that invite interaction. Engage people with questions, ask them to check out to a great website they’ll love, share an inspiring story from your practice, or invite them to try your favorite recipe.

They’ll enjoy the great posts, thank you for them, and all the while they’ll be learning who you are and what value you offer as a provider. You’ll know you’re getting it right when you hear thank you’s, get likes or comments, or see website traffic or bookings from a post.

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Have a comment? Post it below! I’d love to hear what you’re social media you’re using and how it’s going.