It’s a tough world out there for a small business. Sometimes, you find yourself in a position where it feels like the only thing standing between you and success or failure is a Yelp review. If you are a solopreneur and you find yourself checking your business’s social media feeds with mounting anxiety every week, it might be time for you to check your social media strategy.
Here are 6 of our best tips for managing social media as a solopreneur and making sure that social media trolls are not undermining your business. If you have personal profiles that are associated with your business profiles, you should find ways to use these tips to reflect on your personal profiles as well.
1. Choose Sites Carefully
One of the important components of a business strategy that was never present before is choosing social media sites for your business. One of the biggest rookie mistakes of business owners as they curate their social media presence is thinking that all social media sites are created equal. This is just not true.
Certain social media sites are better for certain types of business, while others are good for others. For example, you probably want to have a strong LinkedIn presence if you are a law firm, and a strong Tik Tok presence if you are a fashion brand.
2. Manage Engagement
Some entrepreneurs worry that managing people’s engagement with their social media presence will decrease their business’s integrity. Step away from this myth. You should carefully manage the way people can interact with your business on social media and change your strategy if you have issues with trolls.
Don’t be afraid to block comments on certain posts (or even all of your posts). You should also feel free to report people who are being online bullies.
3. Don’t Create More Than You Can Maintain
Quality over quantity should be your mantra when it comes to creating social media accounts. If you only have time to manage one social media account well, you should only have one account. You can always create new accounts, but it can be difficult to revive an account that has fallen into disrepair and has become a message board for trolls.
If you are a solopreneur, you should make sure you are not spending too much time managing your social media accounts, when you should be growing your business. Finding the correct balance between engaging online and building your business can be incredibly tough.
4. Educate (Sometimes)
An important aspect of entrepreneurship is to know when to educate and when to ignore. If you find that lots of people on social media are bringing up the same points to you, you should consider answering these points over social media. However, you should make sure that you are not giving a big platform to people who do not deserve it.
If lots of people online are saying the same thing and that thing is prejudiced or irrelevant, it’s not worth taking your time to correct it. Just go ahead and delete that comment.
5. Be Politically Aware
One of the biggest targets for online trolls is political content. Try as hard as you can to avoid politicizing your content any more than you have to. Of course, it is important for businesses to engage politically in issues that matter to an entrepreneur, but you should make sure you aren’t doing it unnecessarily.
This also helps you get a stronger base of people who support your business, because they will see you as an upstanding business that does not stoop to the level of politics. If you do choose to engage politically as a business, you should probably deactivate comments on your political posts.
6. Create Community Guidelines
Sometimes, what you really need to do is create guidelines for people engaging with your content. Social media sites have many features that help you create guidelines and enforce them. If you have persistent problems with online trolls, you should create a pinned post with guidelines for how you want people to treat each other when they engage with your content. This is especially important if you are creating groups where your business’s community can engage with each other. It is your job to protect your community and make sure that it is safe for everyone.
As you build your online presence as a solopreneur, sometimes you need some guidance to figure out the best ways to engage. At Matcha Design, we offer social media management help to get you started on your journey of marketing your business online.
