Social Media Marketing for Freelancers and Small Businesses

Tips and technologies — from analyzing to scheduling

Published in

Content Grind

10 min readJun 30, 2020

Social media icons on colorful wall, female figure — Photo by Code💻 Ninja⚡ on Unsplash

Even today, there still seems to be a stigma attached to social media in some quarters. I must confess that I too am a late adopter of social media. For years, I dismissed it as a fad, something teenagers do after school, certainly nothing to do with professionals running a business. Over time, though, I noticed that more and more colleagues and clients were using it, some extensively.

In fact, statistics suggest that 72% of marketers believe that traditional marketing is no longer sufficient, and digital marketing will raise company revenues by 30%.

So the question was: do I want to keep ignoring social media and get left behind, or invest a few hours of my time to explore it and stay in touch with peers, clients, and what’s happening in the industry?

The answer is obvious, so it is important to be aware of the benefits of social media marketing for freelancers.

Social media marketing basics

First of all, let’s take a look at what social media is and what it isn’t. For freelancers, the main purposes of using social media are:

getting found by potential clients and marketing one’s services
connecting and staying in touch with colleagues around the world
keeping up-to-date on industry events.

What social media is definitely not is a magic client generation machine. Signing up with a few social media networks and then expecting orders to flood in is unrealistic. The same goes for relying solely on social media and neglecting all your other marketing activities. Social media marketing is a very useful addition to your traditional marketing activities, but it certainly doesn’t replace them entirely.

Social Media — Professional Marketing Tool or Gimmick?

How freelancers should approach social media

medium.com

The main advantage of social media marketing for freelance professionals is gaining direct access to decision-makers. About 41% of local businesses depend on social media to drive revenue, and 74% of consumers rely on social media to guide purchasing decisions. These numbers are significant, and small business owners should be taking advantage of them.

Online reputation

There is no better and faster way to position yourself as an expert in your field and develop a solid online reputation than by using social media. Social networks are ideal for building and maintaining your online reputation both within and outside of your industry.

To succeed in this endeavor, it is important to present yourself professionally. That means absolutely no pictures of your pets or children on your professional profiles. After all, there is no second chance to make a first impression!

In order to position yourself as an expert, join groups relevant to your areas of specialization and participate in discussions, comment in forums, and post relevant content to showcase your expertise.

This goes hand in hand with leveraging social proof: get recommendations and referrals and prominently display them on your social network profiles.

LinkedIn has an excellent “Recommendations” feature, for example. Clients can leave you feedback, and this in turn will consolidate your reputation and status as a reliable professional. Many clients will not consider applicants without any recommendations or testimonials, so making the most of this feature is crucial.

The flip-side of online reputation building is that your reputation can be ruined just as quickly. This usually happens when there is no clear line between business and personal use of social networks. Always ask yourself, “Would I be happy to say this to my business contacts in real life?” before making a public posting.

Needless to say, rants about clients or colleagues are an absolute no-no and are sure to damage your reputation. So if you are about to publish something you wouldn’t say in real life or that’s not suitable for public view, then don’t post it on your business page.

I would also recommend creating separate profiles for personal and business use. It’s absolutely fine to post your latest holiday snaps or catch up with friends about your child’s potty-training progress — but only on your personal page.

Facebook, for example, offers the option to create a personal profile and a separate business page. Some professionals choose to use personal pages to interact with business contacts, but I strongly recommend that you create a business page and only use your personal page for private networking, i.e. your family and personal friends. If do you choose to connect with clients via your personal profile, it is advisable to update your privacy settings accordingly, so they can see only appropriate content.

SEO and visibility

Social media marketing is a great tool to boost your visibility and SEO to grow your business. All small businesses want to be found by clients, and one of the best ways to achieve this is to rank highly in Google searches.

Search engine rankings are based on your page’s keywords, traffic, and level of activity. And, perhaps not surprisingly, social networks boast the highest traffic in the world and have excellent Google rankings. If you already have one or more social network profiles, try a little experiment right now: type your name into Google and check the results page. Most likely, your social network profiles on Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. will rank on the first results page.

So it’s very important that we make the most of this fantastic exposure opportunity that I like to call a free shop window for your business.

Use optimized keywords to ensure customers find you when looking for a specialist in your field of expertise. If your profile says “Italian translator,” for example, this doesn’t make you stand out at all and doesn’t tell your potential client anything. But if it is clear from the tagline on your LinkedIn profile, for example, that you are a “Certified Italian legal translator and patent specialist with 10 years of experience,” this will immediately catch the eye of a client looking for an Italian patent translator.

LinkedIn also offers the option to have your profile in different languages. So you may also want to consider translating your LinkedIn profile text and keywords to attract more traffic.

Social media marketing tools

A lot of freelancers who don’t yet use social media are often put off by the amount of time they think they’ll need to invest in their social media marketing strategy. There are, however, a whole range of useful tools that make our lives so much easier and take some of the hassles out of our social media marketing activities.

What many new social media users are unaware of is that there are several free applications that do some of the hard work for you or that you can use to make social media marketing simpler.

URL shorteners

Space is of the essence when posting on social media. A post should grab the reader’s attention and not be too lengthy, or users may simply move on. Twitter posts, for example, must not contain more than 140 characters, so you’ve got to keep it brief.

URL shorteners are almost indispensable for this purpose. One of the most popular ones is Bitly. Bitly shortens any website address and, if you sign up for a free account, lets you customize each URL (e.g. https://bit.ly/DesiredName) and track the click statistics.

Other popular URL shorteners worth looking at are Short URL and TinyURL.

Automation tools

Automation tools are quite controversial among social media users. Some people argue that human interaction should be at the core of social networking, and nobody wants to talk to a robot. On the other hand, automation tools can be considered technical tools to help you manage your social media presence, and it would be almost foolish not to utilize them.

Bear in mind though that it is vital to have a healthy mix of automated and personal posts and interaction to avoid driving away followers.

What exactly are automation tools? Automation tools are applications that will either post automatically from your profile after you’ve configured them to your liking, or they will publish posts you have entered manually at scheduled intervals, also specified by you.

This means that you will technically only have to spend a couple of hours a week to draft and schedule all your posts for the week on your different social network profiles, and your application of choice will post them accordingly, even while you’re asleep.

This is especially useful if you live in a different time zone than your target audience and will allow you to reach out to them even while you’re tucked up in bed. After all, it is pointless to post interesting content while it’s night-time for your audience who will then miss your posts entirely.

Two very popular and easy-to-use automation tools worth taking a look at are Hootsuite and TwitTimer. The latter is a very basic application that lets you schedule your tweets in advance without even having to create an account. You simply enter your tweets and the times when you’d like them to be posted, and TwitTimer will post them for you at the scheduled times.

Hootsuite is the leading social media dashboard and a bit more sophisticated than TwitTimer. It allows you to manage all your social media accounts from one place, schedule posts, and track your traffic.

Another application I’d highly recommend is Dlvr.it, which has free and paid options. It differs from TwitTimer and Hootsuite in that it doesn’t require you to create your own content, but instead sources relevant content for you and posts on your behalf at scheduled intervals.

Initially, you will need to spend an hour or two to configure Dlvr.it to suit your needs. You may, for example, want to use it to position yourself as an expert in a very particular niche and post content relevant to that area. To do so, you will need to identify a few high-quality sources ‎you trust and link their RSS feeds to your Twitter account. You can also specify how many posts a day or an hour you’d like Dlvr.it to make on your behalf.

The obvious downside is that Dlvr.it will post content independently, so it’s crucial that you add only trustworthy, reputable sources and check the content regularly to intervene immediately should anything have been posted that you don’t wish to be associated with — a key component of online reputation management.

Measuring your results

As with any marketing activity, it is essential that you measure the results of your social media marketing campaign to determine if your efforts are paying off and what you should do differently.

Social media analytics primarily measure the number of click-throughs from social media links back to your website and the level of user engagement, i.e. how many people are sharing your posts or pictures, liking your content, etc.

Analytics tools

There are a number of free and paid services such as Sprout Social (which acquired and incorporated the excellent Simply Measured in 2018) available to track your social media results. These services analyze your Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Pinterest profiles, and several others.

Some social media networks also offer free built-in analytics tools, e.g. Facebook Page Insights. For each post you have made on your business page, Facebook will show you the reach (i.e. the number of people who saw your post), the number of engaged users (i.e. the number of people who actually clicked on the post), the number of users talking about this post (i.e. the number of people who liked, commented on or shared your post, and the virality (i.e. the percentage of people who engaged out of the total number of unique people who saw your post).

Photo by Stephen Phillips — Hostreviews.co.uk on Unsplash

What’s more, Facebook Page Insights also provides overall statistics for business pages, such as the number of posts, number of people talking about your page and the number of people who have seen your page as such.

Social media measurement tools

Instead of accessing each social media network individually for statistics, you can also sign up to social media measurement tools such as Kred. These tools measure your influence across a range of social media networks. As these applications measure daily activity, they are helpful for measuring the level of interest in or reach of your social media campaigns.

Kred, in particular, also lets you identify and engage with influencers in your network.

Social media marketing schedule

Decide how much time you want to dedicate to social media marketing each day and view the sample schedule below, which refers to the three core networks Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

10 minutes a day

Twitter:

Follow one colleague and one user from your field of specialization
Tweet content specific to your specializations
Ask a question others can reply to, or find and retweet one interesting tweet

Facebook:

Post one interesting link on your page and/or in a group
Like one new page and comment on it
Like someone’s interesting content

30 minutes a day