Your Social Media Journey

FInd more information about this and all my other episodes on my website, www.yoursocialmediajourney.com

In my quest to find inspiring individuals who have not allowed this wretched lockdown get in the way of their business ambitions - I came across Chantal Kyles. Chantal is a young entrepreneur, who, at 21, has started her own social media marketing business and already has years of experience behind her! In this episode, you will learn exactly how she is starting her side hustle, while doing a full time job! To follow Chantal on social media, you can:Follow her on FacebookFollow her on Instagram Follow her on TwitterAs always, do get in touch with comments and suggestions! My email is hello@yoursocialmediajourney.comShikhitax

See full notes on my website, www.yoursocialmediajourney.com

For full show notes, please go to my website www.yoursocialmediajourney.com

For full show notes, please go to my websitewww.yoursocialmediajourney.com

For full show notes, head over to my website www.yoursocialmediajourney.com

For full show notes, please go to my website, www.yoursocialmediajourney.com

For full show notes, please go to my website, www.yoursocialmediajourney.com

For full show notes, please go to my website, www.yoursocialmediajourney.com

For full show notes, please go to www.yoursocialmediajourney.com

For full show-notes, please go to my website www.yoursocialmediajourney.com

For full show notes, please go to my website www.yoursocialmediajourney.com

For full shownotes, please go to www.yoursocialmediajourney.com

For full show notes, go to www.yoursocialmediajourney.com I will link to all the websites and tools that I mention in this episode.

In this episode, I sat down with PR expert Dina Behrman. Dina used to be a journalist and a commissioning editor, so she knows exactly what it is that newspaper and magazines are looking for and which businesses get published. Public Relations or PR is exactly that - essentially, you get in touch with journalists and publications to get them to write about you and your business in a magazine or newspaper. Believe it or not, people do still read magazines and newspapers! Even when most of us have our faces buried in our phones, we are likely reading a magazine or newspaper website, or keep up to date with their social media channels. Being featured in a magazine or newspaper is huge for a small business - and, in this episode of my podcast, we discussed how you, as a small business owner, can start finding out about PR and approach journalists yourself.I paid someone to do some PR (Public Relations) a long time ago, to boost my then business, Fair Cake. I sold Fair Cake last month. I found PR to be an excellent method of promoting my small business, once I got over the inhibition of getting photographed and interviewed! Once I was in a magazine, I found that people kept coming back to me for months afterwards.Instead of transcribing the entire podcast episode, here are the key takeaways -3.27 - How Dina’s career as a journalist started6:50 - Challenges of being a free lance journalist8:00 - Did Dina hire a coach herself?9:44- How are decisions made in newspaper/magazine offices about what to write about12:43 - How to get over the embarrassment of promoting yourself!15:17 - What should your first PR steps be for your business (DIY PR)17:28 - How to contact journalists to promote your business18:35 - The biggest mistake small business owners make when it comes to PR20:30 - Dina’s online courses about doing your own PRDownload my FREE list!I have been using social media to promote my business for more than a decade! In this time, social media has changed a lot - Instagram is no longer chronological, Facebook’s wall has disappeared and Twitter’s character limit has doubled. In all these years, I have learned a lot! I have made an entirely FREE list of Ten Most Common Mistakes To Avoid on Social Media. If you run a small business, or are looking to start a small business, THIS is the training to get your started. This is a free audio training that comes with a pdf memory jogger.Do you have any specific questions? Get in touch!A question for you!Would you like to be able to download a full transcript of this episode? It is fairly time consuming to do, but if there is enough demand out there, I will consider doing it. Let me know by using any contact form on this website or by emailing me on hello@yoursocialmediajourney.comMy next episode is a review of my year in business. This has been an eventful year for me. I sold my first business, Fair Cake, and I started this one! January 2019 was very different to what January 2020 promises to be. Aside from everything else, I would like to document this journey for any one out there who is looking to take big steps in 2020, I know that I could have done with reassurances earlier this year and if this is read by anyone needing exactly that reassurance, my job is worthwhile!

Hello and welcome to episode of your social media journey. If you are new here, my name is Shikhita, I make regular podcast episodes that help small businesses figure out their own social media journey. I speak from my own experience and I also interview guests that have built up their own businesses and use social media for marketing. Today, well today is a very different episode. Today’s episode is about how I built my own business and then sold it, twelve years later, as a going concern. I will share exactly how I did this - so sit back and grab that cup of tea, its a bit of a story. The rest of this transcript can be found on my website www.yoursocialmediajourney.com

Welcome to episode 18 of Your Social Media Journey. In this episode, I speak to Rebecca Stuart of The Garden Gate Flower Company Our talk is all about how she set up her incredible business, from scratch, the early days and her present strategy that serves her so exceptionally well on social media. For full details and all the shownotes, head over to my website, www.yoursociaimediajourney.com

Hi everyone and welcome to episode 17 of your social media journey. My name is Shikhita and in this podcast, I talk about social media and how I have used social media to build my business. Now, I won’t call it is a six figure or seven figure business, because I find that all a bit dubious. What IS a six figure business anyway? Is it 999,999 in revenue? Or is it 999,999 take home pay? Or is it a 100,000 in revenue - which, if you live in the UK, you will have to pay £20k in VAT PLUS your income tax and pretty soon, you will be welcomed back with open arms into five figures. Joking aside, I find it pointless. Let’s get to the point of today’s podcast episode, which is Instagram stories.Instagram stories have been around for a while now and while every single user and brand out there is using it, not everyone is using it to its fullest potential. I follow a number of businesses and individuals on Instagram. The stories that tend to have the most impact on me are the stories I SEE! As simple as that. And the stories that I see, are the stories that are on the top of my feed. But, as soon as I am bored, which does not take a lot of time in this short-attention-span day and age, I exit stories and am back to my real life. In my case, I can safely say that it is no more than 5-10mins of my time at a time. So what ends up happening, and I am sure you will know this from your own personal experience, is that I keep seeing the same people on stories. Generally, these are people who made such an impression on my that I was tempted to send them a quick DM, or a little thumbs up or a little love heart of a little like. THAT is what it is - that little interaction. Podcast episode over! Oh wait, let’s explore this further!So the bottomline is that only those viewers of your stories will see your stories who either did not exit once your story turned up on their phone, or who actively interacted with you when they saw your story. It does not matter if they follow you - if they do not interact with you, your feed and stories will fall off their phone. And then, that follower number, ceases to make any difference. There is no point to having a large follower count if the levels of engagement that you are getting is minimal. It is that level of engagement that will ultimately lead you to your clients, right? I am glad we both agree.So what can you do to make your stories more appealing? On the one hand, raw and behind-the-scenes kind of footage works really well, on the other, it needs be attractive enough that people stay watching your stories long enough to be impressed by what they see. It IS A tricky balance to strike. Luckily, there are ways you can do this. Let’s dive into these.Number 1 - Refrain from selling. That’s right. If all you do is sell sell sell on your stories, then most people are going to exit by swiping away. Yes, strategically, a selling message will work, however, if all you do is point people in the direction of what you are selling, it will not work. Remember that stories are now more popular than your feed, so don’t be that person in the party who approaches everyone with a sales pitch!Number 2 - Plan your content. This is much easier said than done, especially if you are the only one in your business, or if you work in a small business juggling many tasks. But, if spontaneous picking up the phone is not something you do, then it is much easier to plan your stories content. Even if you simply jot down two to three rough ideas, it is a start. For example, if you are going to point the camera to yourself and talk about your business, thats great. Just make sure that you keep it concise and entertaining. According to Buffer, who analysed 15,000 Instagram stories from 200 of the world’s top brands, the ideal number of stories to post at a time is one to seven. I am sure you have noticed this yourself - and, if you have not, do a little experiment! I know that if my stories go over seven, the number of viewers drops off quite significantly. In numbers, if I have 4000 views on a story, the second story tends to get around 3800 views and the third will get 3200 views. So the difference in viewership also increases. By the time someone has seen the 20th story, there are only a few hundred viewers remaining. I am talking about my account for Fair Cake, which is my own business that I set up almost 12years ago. As of now, it has more than 440,000 followers, so it gives me plenty of room to experiment. On to number 3.Number 3 - To make your content more entertaining, use polls and quizzes. These have an extra benefit of people interacting with your account which is what you ultimately need. So a quick poll or a quiz works wonders. For example, if you are a florist, perhaps put up a picture of two very different arrangements and ask which one people like better. Now, WAIT. Don’t just walk away here people. Wait the full 24hrs that the poll is up for and then, and this is what you should really be paying me for, but you are not, so whatever — look at who answered how. Say your poll was about pink vs orange dahlias. Go ahead and send a quick DM to through that answered pink and another quick DM to those that answered orange. This way, you are acknowledging their input. Yes, not everyone will reply and yes, if you have a small account, say 40 followers, you might only get 3 replies. HOWEVER, you are building up! The more YOU interact with people, the more they will interact with you. So the next time you do go ahead and point everyone at a sales page, those very people who interacted with you? They will be sure to see it. Aha! Did you just say that? Now would be the time to pause this podcast, head over the Apple podcasts or wherever you are listening and leaving me a great 5* review. Go ahead, I am waiting.Number 4. Use graphic design to stand out. While everyone can point the phone towards themselves and start talking, not everyone has the time to utilise graphic design. This is where a little bit of prep work can come in handy. Download an app such as Unfold or Over, I will leave the links in the show notes to both these apps. These apps can help you transform your stories. Right from coming up with your brand colours, to blurring bits of images to ensuring that your story flows smoothly. If you have a bit of time, or if there is someone in your office who has a bit of time, it is worth looking at these apps. I will be the first to admit that this will take time. Let’s be realistic about things, shall we. Not everyone is creative and not everyone is a writer of witty captions. But, if you invest a bit of time, you can then set up templates, or at least choose a ready made template that you use, say every Friday - or whenever you do show up with that sales pitch. That little yellow border or that custom font will go a long way towards making you look more professional. It does not matter that you are still packing your goods in your basement and will take a sackful of packets to the post office yourself tomorrow morning and stand in line yourself to send them to your customers. The point is that you will LOOK more professional online, so more orders will come in and eventually, you will be able to afford a workshop where you can pack goods and stuff them into sacks and then arrange collections! Been there and done that, my friend, been there and done exactly that!Finally, Number 5. Find out the best time to post your stories. Now, this is where conventional wisdom, that is Instagram analytics and I will differ. I was interviewing someone for this very podcast this morning and she said that although Instagram tells her that the the time most of her followers are online is the afternoon, she finds that she gets more engagement in the early mornings. This is something that you will find, too, I am sure. According to research done by Buffer, I will link the article in my show notes, the best time for posting in stories is outside of working hours. It makes sense. Stories are engrossing and entertaining. So of course the time that most people who work, your ideal customers (they have the money to spend!) can look at stories is when they are not working. So this would be commuting time, lunch hour and late evening.So there you have it, five practical tips that you can start implementing today that will get you on the right path for your business Instagram. Now, of course, no one approach works for everyone so I do urge you to experiment. There is no harm in experimenting at all. If you were to do a simple experiment of posting very similar stories at two different times of the day, you will yourself see the difference in analytics. The more you test, the better your will be at using Instagram for your business.I hope you enjoyed this episode and sorry about the lack of new episodes recently. It is because - well, I cannot tell you yet. So let’s leave it at that. When I can, I will.Please do send me a direct message on Instagram or email me if you have any further questions on how to use Instagram stories for your business. My email address is hello@yoursocialmediajourney.com. Right, now I must go and edit this morning’s interview, which is awesome and I cannot wait to share it. I have plenty more lined up for the next few weeks and am really looking forward to sharing my secret soon! Until next time, bye for now!x

Are websites still important?Hi everyone and welcome to episode 16 of your social media journey. I hope you have had a great summer and are ready to get back into work with renewed excitement. I know that I am!Today’s episode is about the importance of having your own website and my own experience of making one from scratch. If you are someone who is worried that it is beyond your level of expertise to make your own website, you are listening to the right podcast because I am about to prove that it isn’t.Behind the scenes, I have been working on my website, www.yoursocialmediajourney.com. It might not look like much, depending on when you are listening to this episode - I hope to have it close to where I want it to be before the end of October 2019! So if you are listening after then, you will see the result of my work. If you listen to this episode beforehand, you will be able to see the “before” website.Now, why is it so important that I have a website - after all, I am a social media consultant and I should be getting all my clients on social media, right? Well, sort of! While I am a big fab of using social media for business purposes, I am also very aware of its limitations. You will have heard the phrase of using someone else’s real estate for your own business. That is exactly what social media is - unless you ARE Mr. Zuckerberg and own Facebook, you are simply a Facebook user. Nothing wrong with that whatsoever. However, if Facebook were to change their rules tomorrow, what you need to be able to figure is where YOUR business will land? Is Facebook too big to fail? No, it isn’t. Remember MySpace? Or AltaVista? Or AskJeeves? My point is that having your own website is not only peace of mind, it is still THE place people will look for you if they are to part with hard earned cash. A business that thrives only on social media is not exactly thriving, it is fully dependant on the head honchos of social media companies not changing their minds.Ok, so you are convinced about having your own website, but isn't’ it a bit too technical? Well, my friend, no, it is not anymore! There are a bunch of ways you can make your own website, with no technical knowhow needed. Before you roll your eyes, let me explain. It USED to be the case that to have a great website you absolutely needed a web designer and an IT expert, but things have changed rapidly in the last few years. You really do not need much technical knowledge to create your own website now. And besides, once you have even a BASIC website, at least your business is up and running and you save yourself thousands of pounds in doing so? Now do I have your ears?So, here is how I made my own website this time. I say this time because I have two businesses. One is called Fair Cake, you can find it at www.faircake.co.uk - that is NOT a website that I have made myself. That is an example of an expensive custom written website that my business depends on. My second business, this podcasting business, can be found on www.yoursocialmediajourney.com. Now THIS is a website that I have made entirely myself. It took me three whole days, it was a bank holiday, and I made myself this website. The reason I am such a big fan of making your own website is that you can change your mind any time you want! If you do not like a colour, change it. If you do not like an image, change it. If you do not like the way you are coming across, you can change it without spending a penny. Here is the process I followed and I hope that is useful for you - my mantra is BREAK IT DOWN. You will see what I mean -My first requirement of this website was that I was going to put my podcast episodes on it. So the first thing I did was to google “websites for podcasters”. A huge number of resources came up. Reading around, I found that podcasts need to be hosted by a different company and your website merely links to it. This was getting complicated. But somewhere, during all the googling, I found a link to a YouTube video by Jess Freeman and it was called How To Start a Podcast on Squarespace. I will link to this video in the show notes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsG1kTh5Vn0I watched her video and ended up interviewing her for my podcast once my website was up and running, META! It was episode 6 of this podcast, have a listen to it!It took me just a bit more googling around to figure out that Squarespace was looking like the right choice and I was going to use it for my website. Then I immersed my self into more YouTube videos about how Squarespace websites were built. Much tea was consumed, the occasional coffee, too. Then I found videos by Louise Henry on YouTube, also known as Solopreneur Sidekick. I also interviewed her for my podcast - what can I say, I lead a majorly meta life, it is episode 9, if you wish to listen to that one. Louise has this unique way of breaking things down into extremely simple steps on her YouTube channel. I was then hooked. This was made for me. If other people could make their own websites from scratch, so could I!The next step was opening an account on Squarespace, watching some of THEIR videos on how to get started and then I got started. I chose a theme, watched a few videos on how other people had used the theme and then set about making my own site. The images? I am bit of a dab hand with a camera, but most images are graphic design images that I use apps on my iPhone for - I use several apps, some of which are Canva, Adobe Spark, Snapseed etc. Again, mostly free stuff. You are listening to someone who loves free stuff. So I created my images on my phone, transferred them onto my computer and then onto my website.I had a clear idea of how many webpages I wanted - NOT many! Come on, we live in the age of tidying up and decluttering, why would I want a cluttered up website?! And once everything was looking lovely and clean, it was time to buy the domain. The domain is that address, yoursocialmediajourney.com - which I bought on a domain registeration website. Once I had the domain, it was a simple case of mapping my website to my domain name and bingo. I made my own website. If you are someone who is considering making your own website, I highly recommend Squarespace, it is super simple and easy to use.Coming back to why websites are so important. In the last couple of weeks, I am sure you will have noticed, the signup page slogan on Facebook homepage has changed. it used to be, “Its free and always will be” to “Its quick and easy”. Not reading too much into it, but it is a fairly significant change and if I were putting all my eggs in Facebook’s basket of fake accounts mingling with real accounts, I might think twice. So while social media is all well and good and a fabulous way to market your products services, I still maintain that there is no better advertising than your own website.Once you do have your own website, you can start treating it as the central location to which all your customers go to. You can then link the website everywhere - from your Facebook page to your Instagram, from your Twitter to your Snapchat. It them becomes THE place that people start going to look for you when Facebook or Instagram is down.Having said all this, there is an even simpler way of making your own website and that is Google! If you have a few images up your sleeves and are confident about what you want to write about to attract customer and clients, then head over to Google’s My Business service. My previous podcast episode is exactly about this and how you can use it to make a placeholder website until your real one is up and running. It is extremely simple to use - I do recommend using a computer, rather than a phone, at least to begin with.Now what does all this have to do with your social media journey? Well, plenty, my friend, plenty! When you create content for social media, which you do, on a regular basis, you are giving it away, for free, literally to another website such as instagram.com and facebook.com. If you used some of that content and created a blog post on your website, and keep adding content to your own website, you will then be using the content that you are creating anyway for your own benefit - twice over. Let me explain. Ultimately, you are listening to this podcast episode because you want to make money, right? More money in the bank, who does not want that? So if you are creating content anyway, why not have it on your own website? So that the next time someone is looking for a product or service similar to yours, YOUR ocntent from YOUR website will be picked up by Google. If your content is shining brightly only on instagram, there is so much on there to distract your viewer! Say you put your heart and soul into making a video about how to make the perfect pasta dish. You know, those beautifully shot 30second videos? Well, as soon as your video is finished, the viewer will scroll away to another video. Now imagine if you had a website with several such videos, the scroller would only go to YOUR next video! So while you should be using social media to promote your business and put those videos on social media, no two ways about it, do consider the merits of owning your own piece of real estate on the internet. It is a game changer.I hope you enjoyed this episode! If you have any questions, I am always available by email or on social media. You can find my contact details on my website, that I made myself, www.yoursocialmediajourney.com. I am now taking bookings for Skype consultation sessions that I tailor make for you and your business. If you are interested, do get in touch. As always, I would love it if left me a five start rating and a good review. I have lots of cracking podcast episodes planned for the next few weeks, including a couple of interviews that you would not want to miss. So hit that subscribe button if you want to be kept updated with new episodes. Until next time, bye for now…

This episode was my pleasure to produce! I have been following Jane Means, of www.janemeans.com on Instagram for a while and I was totally enchanted by her business. If Jane Austen had a business, it would be this! I am being totally serious!So when I contacted Jane and she agreed for an interview, I was on cloud ribbons and paper. When Jane and I finally spoke, we covered all sorts of areas, including how she got to start her wonderful business - out of a penchant for gift wrapping and all the lovely details that go into it, despite people assuming that such a business would not work. Starting as one person in 1995, she employs a team of 20 today and is much in demand.For me, it was an incredible opportunity to dig deep into her social media strategy and it was a mini thrill to find out that Jane manages her social media herself - I do believe that the founder/owner of a business is THE best person to manage social media. Nobody loves the business as much as the owner!Since this episode is an interview, I do not have a full script written, but I do have below all the links that were mentioned -The podcast episode will give you all the details. Here are all the links mentioned in this episode. If there is anything I have missed, do please get in touch with me.Jane’s website can be found hereFollow Jane on Instagram hereThe app that Jane uses to freshen up her appearance during very busy periods of work is called FaceTune and can be found hereThe app that Jane uses to visualise her Instagram feed is UNUM - it can be found hereThe key take aways from this episode, at least for me, are:Do not take your business super seriously, humour is key to building an audience!Understand your audience and serve them with exactly what it is they are looking forIf you are managing social media yourself, invest in improving your photography skillsIf YOU are the brand, share what is important to you and whyTwitter is great for building a relationship with the pressDo not underestimate the importance of local contacts for building your businessThank you for tuning in to Your Social Media Journey. As always, you can find me on social media, especially Instagram - where I discuss not only social media tactics and strategies, but also my own experiences in starting and running a business. Until next time, bye for now!

Hi everyone and welcome to Episode 14 of Your Social Media Journey. If you have become a regular listener, you will know this podcast is about starting a running a business and using social media as a marketing tool. If you are a new listener, welcome! In this episode, I talk about the grand daddy of all things social – Google.My name is Shikhita and I started my business, Fair Cake, in 2007. It is a cookery school dedicated to all things cake and we have a workshop in Greenwich, London. Since 2009, I have been using social media for marketing my business – so if you are interested in the journey so far, you might be interested in the other episodes I have in this podcast. Today, though, let’s talk about Google.My first brush with Google was a very positive one. As an avid user of the search engine, and who isn't, these days?! Once I quite my job and set up my own company, I got to experience the other side of Google. The long wait for my website to start showing up, even when I was searching for my own website's name! However, once those initial bumps were gone, Google was an absolutely phenomenal help in building my business. As long as I put descriptive text on my website, informational content and suchlike, these words would get picked up in people's searches and my website started getting a whole lot of organic reach. Organic reach means that I was not paying for any of these people to come to my website, I was not paying Google – I was simply ensuring that I had high quality content on my website and that I was following all the rules that companies such as Google put in place. These rules, for Google, determine which websites they show on their searches and which they do not. For instance, if you simply repeatedly type a keyword, one that you would like your website to show up for on a Google search, your website is not likely to show up. However, if you use that keyword, in context and people that land on your page as a result of finding that keyword are interested in what you have to say, then Google will show your site. So far, so simple. I make a high quality website, write lots of descriptive text and put pictures on my site, I offer a great service and my website gets a lot of hits and in turn, I get business.Well, all good things must come to an end I suppose. Things started to change for me when social media became prevalent. It wasn't that social media was taking hits away from my website. It was that being on social media was taking away the TIME that customers would have spent searching on Google – a big difference. Now people were looking for businesses like mine on social media rather than Google, so obviously, I had to strengthen my game on social media too – which I did, by building an online presence to rival big brands. Fair Cake punches well above its weight with half a million odd followers across social media. So far, so good.So, as you can imagine, Google is facing stiff competition from the likes of Facebook and, believe it or not, Amazon. How Amazon, you ask? Very simple. Time was, if you wanted to buy a high definition TV, you would do your research on Google and Amazon would be just one of the websites you would turn to. Now that Amazon is so well established, a large number of people simply search on Amazon, for everything from TVs to fresh produce and they bypass Google.So what does Google do to fix this?! It is facing competition from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Amazon and other similar websites – and Google Plus, its own social media platform died a weird death a few months ago.Well. You will have noticed how Google's search pages have changed. Remember those days when you would simply see a bit of text from the website and a link to the website? Well, things have changed my friend, big time! This is all due to a service called My Business. Now, when you Google for a business, if THAT business is using My Business, then you will see a lot more detail about them, not just their website words and links. So, as I have mentioned previously, Google is becoming more like Facebook – this is how. Starting with businesses, we are now asked to Update Our Status. Sound familiar? Businesses are also encouraged to add pictures and videos and regular updates on what is going on. Again – very similar to social networks! Now, Google has accepted defeat on the social network, or so we thought! Just a few weeks ago (I am recording this in July 2019), a brand new social network has been announced, called Shoelace! Much like Gmail first started, you had to have an invitation to have an account and it all felt very privileged, Shoelace is also, currently, invitation only.The reason I bring this up is because it seems that the dependance of, especially small businesses is increasing on social media – so if you are finding yourself spending more and more time to get that perfect Instagram aesthetic or chasing the best engagement rates on Facebook, do not do so at the expense on your own website. Your own website is your best asset. Just recently, a few weeks ago, a large number of social media managers were reporting very little engagement on Facebook and Instagram. The number 18% down was bandied about. Now, if you were focussing on your own website, then this 18% would not matter to you at all. My point is that your own real estate, your own asset is your website and your business depends on it. Because Instagram is going exactly how Facebook went a few years ago – towards paid advertising. And yes, there is still a lot, a lot to be said for building and using a social media presence, this should not be at the expense of your own website. Think about it – you own and control your website, nobody can leave random comments on it, nobody can follow or unfollow you. And now, Google clearly has woken up to the power of images and videos associated with a website – so why not use it?!To use this, what you need to do is sign up to Google's product called My Business. It is pretty straight forward. In fact, if you have a few images saved up in your Google Drive, Google will make a temporary website for you. I had a little play around with this Google website today, and it was not bad, not bad at all. In fact, if you do not have a website, this might be the way forward for you to get started. Just for fun, I put together a website for Fair Cake, my own business and you can view it here.The most powerful feature that I found about My Business was that aside from detailed Insights, that tell you how your posts are doing, it also gives you the search queries that people will have used to go to your website. Now that information is worth its weight in gold because that is exactly what your keywords would be WERE you to invest in paid advertising, ever.So I do think that Google is flexing its muscles and will become very important for a business – in a social media-ish way. It was already super important because that is how most people found your business in the first place, but even more so now. You will have heard of the term SEO a lot, I am sure. It can be a minefield. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. I promised that I would not go deep into SEO. I say so because I am no expert and the kind people at Google have laid it out very clearly how you can make your website Google friendly. All I do is try to ensure that none of the links on my website are broken, that I add a fair bit of text to my website so that Google can index it and that I follow rules and never try any SEO hacks. That is it, really. But, if you wished, I am sure you can find plenty of SEO experts to help you out.This new My Business on Google, however, is very easy. It is as easy as having an Instagram account. What you need to do is Google for “Google My Business”. You need to claim your website and away you go. If you are in the creative industry, I am sure you have awesome pictures to share. Use the same pictures and share these on Google, too. You can even add events and product images, separately and link these back to your own website, where they can be checked out.Given that Google is not giving up on the social media side of things and is still the biggest player out there on the internet, I reckon it is important to keep it on our side. Especially now that competition on social media has become so intense, it pays to pay attention to other avenues.So that was it, my episode on how Google is becoming more like Facebook, for businesses at least. What do you think? I would love to hear from you! You can always find me online. The best place is Instagram DMs, where my account is @yoursocialmediajourney, or you can email me. My email address is hello@yoursocialmediajourney.com. And, if you do have a spare minute, please leave me a good review and do, of course, subscribe to this podcast so you do not miss a thing. There, I have said what everyone else says. Done my duty.I am organising some awesome interviews for the next few episodes, including some absolutely incredible businesses that punch above their weight, thanks to their online presence. Looking forward to sharing those. Until next time, bye for now...

Hi everyone and welcome to episode 13 of Your Social Media Journey. Today, I want to unpack that loaded term. Marketing. I want to talk about using content marketing, in particular. Content marketing is the practice of using your own content to build your business’s image in a way that is condusive to getting more sales. But, we need to look a bit deeper in here. So I will start with my own experience and results and then give you my four essential tips that made my own business succeed.Advertising and Marketing is something that either business owners, especially new ones, shy away from, or THROW themselves into it. I remember being super excited about some business cards I ordered when I first started my business. It was a cupcake business and I went around handing out my business cards to anyone and everyone I met. Soon, I ran out of my 100 business cards. Guess what? The phone never rang. I bought a new mobile phone, just for the business, so that I did not have to use my personal number. You know? Just in case the phone started ringing a LOT? Well, it did not ring at all. Where was I going wrong? In hindsight, I was going wrong because I was trying to make customers out of people. Customers were not finding me, I was trying to find customers. Once this little equation changed, my business turned around. Once customers started finding me, my business started going from strength to strength. It did not happen overnight, oh gosh no! It took a while before I realised what needed to be done. What needed to be done was me being found as a maker and seller of cupcakes in London. Bear in mind that competition was tough! For every friend that I spoke to told that another of their friend was in the cake business. Or it felt like that anyway. It seemed that everyone was in the cake business. It only took me ten years to realise that this was not the case and the cake making industry is really rather small! It felt like everyone was in the cake business because I was interested in it. Its a bit l are wearing a red dress at a party, you will immediately notice someone else wearing a red dress, its like the others are simply not there. And this confirmation bias, to give it a proper name, is everywhere. Especially so in marketing. And what I see ends up happening is that people end up doing what everyone else is doing and then try to figure out once they have lost either a substantial amount of money or a substantial amount of time, or both.So how do you market your business? Advertise without being annoying or pushy? There are ways, my friend, there are ways. The best thing you can do to market yourself is by having a website. If you have listened to my last podcast, episode 12, you will have heard Clare Drake and me talk about something new called lead pages. These are essentially one page websites that you can create without any tech knowledge and fairly inexpensively. The reason I am such a big fan of websites is because it was my website that started bringing my clients to me. That first phone call that came from a woman who randomly found my website on Google and gave me a ring was such a thrill that I cannot even describe it! She found me on Google, liked my style of baking and placed an order. As simple as that. Now, I will be the first to admit that my cupcakes then, back in 2007-08 were not brilliant. They certainly needed a lot of work to make them anywhere near as good as what I can do today. But, there was a market for those and the market was finding ME! It almost did not matter that my cupcakes were not super amazing, my customers were more than happy with what they were getting. And, of course, the more I sold, the more I made and the more I baked, the better I became. So it became a happy little spiral I climbed quite rapidly. What I did find out, and this took some time, was that not only were customers happy to pay for my products, they were also not obsessed with the latest cake trends. It was cake makers, that is, people in my own industry, the sellers – they were interested in the latest cake trends. And I see the same thing happen now. Each industry, especially creative industries, have trends. And people in the know discuss these, try to get better at these and try to sell the trendy stuff to their customers. And yes, customers buy it, too. However, if you see this from the customers point of view, customers do not care about trends, to a certain extent. They want a good quality product at a good price. Of course, there will be exceptions to the rule, but it is easy to get carried away with trends.So how does this affect marketing your business? It does enormously. Lets take the cake industry, just because I am super familiar with it and really understand it. If you don't know it already, I established Fair Cake, my business in 2007-08 and have managed to make a cake business succeed in fairly difficult economic climate. Check it out, www.faircake.co.uk.Every few months, there is a new cake trend going one. A few years ago, drip cakes became popular. Then, we had geode cakes, which I find pretty unappealing, that took over. Then, we have the stripy cakes. Then, what is known as fault line cakes. Now, where are these cakes becoming popular? Online. Customers still want vanilla cake with chocolate frosting and a Happy Birthday written on it. But if you want to make a fault line cake and show that off, your customers might not see that you are equally capable of making a Birthday cake. I hope that makes sense! I see cake maker feed after cake maker feed trying to impress - each other, I guess - with their take on the latest trend. However, the cake makers getting actual business - they are the ones that are quietly churning out cakes, cakes that their customers want! Now, don’t get me wrong, if your customer wishes for a fault line cake, please, go ahead and make it. But, your, dare I say it, bread and butter cakes, will not be the trendy cakes. Just in case you are not a cake maker and are wondering what a fault line cake is - it is a relatively tall take, and it looks like it has cracked in half, horizontally. The middle “fault” sometimes reveals macarons or chocolate or simply cake. It is a fun cake, look it up! But the amount of time cake makers spend in trying out new ideas and pretty much forcing it as content on their pages - that is what the issue is. Because ultimately, we are all pressed for time. And if you are running a business, you do not have a lot of time to do marketing and advertising, let alone go for trendy stuff!What I have found is that small business owners either emulate others, in their marketing efforts, or fall in the trap of advertising online - which is now extremely expensive, without giving much thought to their own content. Lets dive deeper into content. Content is every picture you put on your website, or on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest. It is every video, live video, podcast episode or blog post you write. It is literally all you do online, which is public and publicly consumed. So, your first job is to ensure that your content is accurately representing who YOU are. And, it is not very difficult to do, either. You need to be sure of your products or services, what you are offering to paying customers. Even if what you are offering is the same as many other people, it is still different - it is you who are offering. I am sure you have seen shops in your own town, village or city offer exactly the same product, sometimes for different prices - and each shop succeeds in staying in business. Why? Because there is enough demand. So there is not need to reinvent the wheel. There is need to make a good wheel, supply it well and offer services when it breaks, but no need to reinvent it.Right, now that my little lecture rant is over, and somehow it feels like a rant - here are some tips for marketing that have worked for me and that I have seen work for other business owners and hopefully you can use them in your own business.Tip number one: Decide exactly what you are selling. So easy, right? Well, actually, especially in the creative industry, it is tricky to find your own product or service. And your content should ideally reflect what it is that you are selling. If you are selling exquisite looking jewellery, but your content is all about house plants or your latest vacation, that does not match now, does it? The easiest bit of content that you can make is take pictures of your products. I have a podcast episode about how to use smartphones for taking better pictures. If you haven’t already, do give it a listen. The second kind of content that you can use is graphics - essentially, words, written on either pictures or just shapes and patterns. This is also a powerful bit of content because it gives your customers YOUR side of the story. So if you are passionate about a particular aspect of your business, the graphics will help you there. But to use any of this, you do need clarity about exactly what it is that you are selling.Tip number two: Look beyond the trends. Easy to say but very difficult to put in practice. It can feel like that you are lagging behind or not keeping up. But, remember that you are in business to make money from customers. Lets be honest about that! Facebook and Instagram likes, alas, do not mean money. If I had even a single pence for every single like that my posts got on social media, I would be a millionaire. I am not. Following trends is being compliment hungry. Which is totally fine and completely understandable. But, your focus should be on your customers. Try to see your feed from your customers point of view. What are they getting out of following you? What is adding value to their scrolling? To do this, you either entertain your audience, or educate your audience. The more they stop on your page or your feed, the more your chances are of making a sale when you decide to make that sale.Tip number three: Do an audience survey. This is actual hard work, I admit it, but it is the BEST way of figuring out where to spend your energy. Simply ask people what they are looking for from your business. One of the first customer surveys I did was by asking every single friend I had if they would let me come to their house or their offices, ideally their office, with cupcakes. At the time I thought to myself, “Who would possibly say no to free cupcakes?”, and believe you me, there were no-sayers! Anyway, it was at face to face meetings that I figured out the I was putting WAY too much buttercream on cakes and it was putting people off. Well, guess what? I saw everyone was doing that ONLINE - everyone online was making massive buttercream swirls on cakes, so I assumed that there must be demand for these cupcakes. But, in real life, NOBODY wanted such a lot of buttercream on a cupcake. And there was no way I would have figured this out had I relied entirely on my online experiences. I cannot emphasise this enough - a real life connection is ten times more valuable than an online one.Tip number four: Change! What works today will very likely not work tomorrow. Just today, mid July 2019, several social media influencers are saying on Twitter and Instagram and Facebook and all over the media that engagement levels on social media are down. Way down. It seems that social media is become saturated with sponsored content, influencer marketing and people are becoming savvy. This is especially true of the younger generation that has grown up with social media. So now, it is even more important that you really look at what content you are serving to your audience, no matter how big or small those numbers are at present. If people are getting value out of your content, they will stick around. If not, they will move on. And to keep on top of all of this, you must be ready to change your marketing strategy. Gone are the days that you could stick pretty pictures online and sales happened – that is simply not going to happen.So there are my four tips for marketing your business, online and offline. To recap, these are:Decide on your product or service, have clarity about itLook beyond trends, seek out what the customers want.Do a survey.Be prepared to change your strategy.Hope you found these tips useful. As always, it is that time of the show when I beg for reviews. And my begging is paying off, too, I am getting lovely emails and comments and reviews. So just in case you have not done so already, please do take a moment to let me know how you found this episode. If you let the world know by leaving my a 5* rating wherever you are listening to this, that would be ACE. Ok, enough begging. Begging ends.My next episode is about, Google. Yes, our old friend, Google. And how it is becoming more like Facebook! Intrigued?! Well, you will just have to come back to the next episode, won’t you? Until next time, bye for now!

Here are all the links that we speak about in this episode. First of all, a huge Thank You to Clare Drake for sparing her time to be a guest on this podcast, it was an eye opening episode! Here is Clare’s website - essential reading if you are exploring the idea of using Pinterest to market your business. https://www.claredrake.com/You can find Clare’s own Pinterest page here:https://www.pinterest.co.uk/claredrakepinterest/In this podcast episode, we spoke about Lead Pages, here you can find more information - https://www.leadpages.net/Don’t forget to look for alternatives!And finally, if you are looking for one-to-one Pinterest mentoring, you won’t find a person more approachable and friendlier than Clare! Here contact details can be found on her website and she is, very generously, offering 15% off to all my listeners! All you need to mention is that you found her here, after listening to this episode. As always, you can find more podcast episodes on my own website, www.yoursocialmediajourney.com

Hi everyone and welcome to episode 11 of Your Social Media Journey. I am super excited that this is the 11th episode, I am over ten episodes and that my friends, is worthy of a little tea party for me. I shall by throwing myself a little party to celebrate!If this is your first time listening to my podcast, my name is Shikhita and I started my business, Fair Cake, in 2007. In the last eleven years or so, I have extensively used social media to promote and market my business. Fair Cake now boats of more than half a million followers across Instagram, Twitter and Facebook and is still going strong as London’s best Cake School. In this podcast, I share my experiences of starting and running a business, and, above all, how I use social media to minimise my marketing budget. I also interview other business owners and discuss with them their strategy of how they use social media on a day to day basis to best represent their business online, to find new clients and to advertise and market their products and services.Today, we will chat about that dreaded question, WHAT TO POST. I have another podcast episode about Content Creation, this was episode number 2. This was all about content creation and has some great ideas. So if you haven’t yet had a listen to that episode, do check it out after this one. That question, that What-To-Post question - I am VERY familiar with that. I have two businesses, one is this, where I produce this podcast, have an Instagram account where I answer everyone’s questions and offer one to one consultancy on building and maintaining a strong social media for businesses. This takes up a fair bit of my time. I also currently manage the Fair Cake social media, which is Facebook and Instagram (and a bit on Pinterest) - the two businesses are very different! So when I say that I am well aware of the What-To-Post question. And sometimes, it matters most when I am just about to go for a little break, a holiday or just when I am NOT in a mood to create and share - and I am sure you have felt this too. Whatever business you are in, you do not want to be all chirpy when you are having a tough day! However, you and I both know that a decrease in your content production rapidly leads to a decrease in audience engagement. And nobody wants that! So in this episode, I will walk you through what you could be doing to avoid long delays between posting on Facebook and Instagram - these are the two social media networks that MOST of my audience uses, so this is where I will focus today. And how do I know what my audience is using? Because of all the emails and DMs I get, plus all of my one to one work that I do with clients. So far, my clients have been individuals who have set up their own business and wish to use social media as an effective marketing tool. But, of course, time is a limiting factor. If you had limitless time, of COURSE you would post on Instagram and post on Facebook and pin on Pinterest and tweet on Twitter and create for YouTube and link on LinkedIn. But, all of us have 24hrs, so what you do with those 24hrs is crucial.What we decide to do with our 24hrs is crucial. So you must decide which social media platforms YOU want to be a part of and where your audience hangs out. I decided to focus on Facebook from 2009 - 2015 and then my focus shifted from Facebook to Instagram. Why? Because my audience went over to Instagram. It is July 2019 and these are the latest figures that I have found about demographics using different platforms. I will, of course, link to the source of this date in the show notes:https://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheet/social-media/https://www.avocadosocial.com/latest-social-media-statistics-and-demographics-for-the-uk-in-2019/)Facebook - The user-base on Facebook is skewed towards women, with 54% of women and 46% men using it. In the UK, Instagram shows a similar skew towards women using Instagram more than men. LinkedIn, however, according to data released by MicroSoft, its parent company, has 60% users that are male with 40% female users - so there is a huge difference there. Similarly, Twitter has 60% male and 40% female users. Please do bear in mind that all this data comes from users’ own input - and we all now know about bots and fake accounts and all THAT jazz. So do take everything with a giant pinch of salt. But it is not hard to figure out where your business lives. I had an account on Facebook and simply by keen listening, I was able to figure out that my audience was moving to Instagram because they were tired of family dramas being played out on Facebook! There - that is information you won’t find on any official study - people do not like drama, so they hopped over to Instagram. Nobody LEFT Facebook, they simply added Instagram and spent more time on it!So, coming back to what to post. I am sure you have a pretty good idea of where your audience is hanging out. You don’t? Where you DO hang out? If you are a sole trader or the owner of a small business, chances are that you use social media - otherwise, I do not think you would be listening to this podcast! Si where do YOU spend most of your time? Because if you are spending most of your time looking at Instagram, you clearly like that style of interaction and imagery and THAT is where you will be best building your audience. However, if you prefer Facebook, which IS more personal and is now encouraging more and more private conversations, that is perhaps where your own talents will lie. Do not underestimate the knowledge you ALREADY have from being on these platforms!Now, organising your content on social platforms is different for different platforms and this is where a little bit of planning come in handy. That What - To - Post question becomes much easier if you already know, at least roughly, which topic you will be talking about or what subject you will be addressing. It is also cool to know some tips and tricks to up your content game.First of all, you do NOT need to produce ALL the content that you post. You heard that right. If a single person - running a business, making a product, delivering a service, doing the accounts, running their personal life, showing up as ALL their different avatars then had to CREATE EVERYTHING they post - nuh uh. Nope. I refuse to believe that they will have time left for anything! The beauty of social media is sharing. Think about WHY you are on social media in the first place. To play the long game. The long game is to attract and serve your very own audience, to inform, educate and entertain them - so that when it comes for them to buy a product or a service, they will buy from you. Simple. It simply does not work any other way. If all you did was post pretty pictures of your products online and expect people to buy, no matter how much you try, they will move on. Competition is fierce, my friend. However, if you understand your audience and, more importantly, your audience understands you, then you can do business together. So how does sharing come in? I will give you my own example. I must put my hand up and say that try as I might, I cannot create beautiful and meaningful quotes that really resonate with people. I cannot. I can talk, I mean, I can really talk, but these are long paragraphs, not succinct words. However, I LOVE reading quotes. A good quote for me is like a little treat, a little pick me up. Now, I completely realise that not everyone likes quotes. BUT, I also know that a large number of people DO like reading quotes and have a similar reaction to quotes, the same as I do. So, the next time I see a good quote, I share it on Instagram and Facebook stories. Sharing it as a story means that you do not need to write a lengthy ode to the creator (because, chances are, they probably copied it from somewhere anyway!) - nor do you need to format it. You simply share it. And bingo. You have shared content - completely legit. Of course, this means that YOUR account was active, that YOUR audience sees that content. And, if you are savvy enough to use polls/quizzes or interactive stickers, then it is YOUR account that will get engagement. So the next time you like something, save it - build your story around it and share it when you have nothing of your own to share. A little tactic that totally, legitimately, works.The reason you want to maximise engagement is simple - your engaged audience, one that routinely interacts with you - THEIR friends and family see their engagements. For instance, on Twitter, if I follow someone, I see, on my feed, what THEY like. So I get a pretty good picture of what their personality is. In fact, I usually decide to unfollow someone NOT when they tweet something I do not like, but when they LIKE something I do not like! Similarly, on Instagram and Facebook, your audience can see what you like and dislike and, obviously, what you share. What you share is majorly important and not only paints a picture of what you are selling and why you are selling it, but WHO you are. And that Who matters a lot. Especially when you are selling a service, unless it is VERY very niche, you are competing with other people. And aside from a price point and the quality of what you are selling, it will be a similar product to what others are offering. Social media allows you to attract an audience of people who are similar minded to you. So if you share Seth Godin quotes, like I did today, and your audience likes it and reads it to the end, the next time they are online, your account will show up because they actively read and paused on your stories. And, you get bonus points if you manage to get them to interact with your account.The next bit that you can do is to share User Generated Content, or UGC. Now, this is fairly simple to do - you can either share this content on stories or your feed. So what is user generated content, you ask? It is literally anything that your customers or clients are saying about, it is images and videos of customers or clients using or wearing or eating your product - its basically when your audience starts to upload THEIR images and videos of what YOUR business means to them. And this is absolute gold - because not only are you not having to create content for that one day, you can also show off your success. This only applies to an established business, of course, but is something to keep in mind. You need not have thousands of followers to start using UGC, you simply need an engaged audience who is happy enough with your products or services to shout out about your business on social media. To encourage the generation of UGC, you can offer incentives to people who do create this content for you. I am sure you will have seen special offers for cafe customers who agree to put a picture of their cup of coffee online, or special shout outs to customers promised in return for UGC. It need not always be about money, people get creative! The thing is that marketing and advertising professionals are not always appreciated - so when you see a business shouting out from the rooftops about why they are the BEST, they are not always trusted! Simple as that! People are savvy. But, if we see a friend of ours, someone we trust, say that this particular cup of coffee sets them up for the day, we will most likely check out the cafe ourselves, right? UGC gains you trust. Trust is everything on social media, which is why Authentic is such a big buzz word.And finally, of course, as I mentioned in episode 2, a content calendar is everyone’s best friend. When you do have a spare afternoon, google Content Calendar. Agreed that most of the content calendars out there are absolute rubbish. I agree. Some of them are HUGE, like, HUGE. For every penny I had for filling out each of those cells in a massive spreadsheet, I could be a millionaire. Ok, a thousandaire. But you get my idea, do not just go and get yourself a massive content calendar. Look for one that looks like it is closely aligned with you and your audience. If, for instance, you are targeting a market where parents of school going children will be a large percent of your audience, then your content should reflect that over school holidays. So, on a spare afternoon (I am very jealous of your spare afternoons, by the way), say, in July, you could, if you wanted to, make some posts up about Christmas planning, holiday specific recipes, New Year party ideas etc. These holidays are not going anywhere and you can always use this content when YOU are on Oxford Street, shopping last minute! All you will have to do is to post it then and not miss out on that content train.And why is it so important to post consistently? It is very simple - imagine someone finds you online, on social media - they find you on a Friday. They like your post, they like your business ethics, they love your content. Then, you disappear for two weeks. Your brand new follower will have moved on by then. Say they had a budget of £50 to buy their kid’s new shoes and it is exactly that, kids shoes that you sell - but while you disappeared entirely from their newsfeed, they might go head and spend that £50. That sale could have been yours. Now, before you say, but but - we were simply on a break! Yes, breaks work - but every single time I take a break, I see an immediate decline in engagement and followership. That is the truth, my friend, that IS the truth. So, if you are willing to sacrifice that - which you might be, then it is absolutely fine to take a break. But social media is a bit of a content crunching beast and, in my personal experience, only works if you consistently feed it. Just in case you are the ONLY person in your company that can manage social media, do consider scheduling your posts. My favourite scheduling app is Buffer, there is also HootSuite and of course, Facebook’s own Creator Studio. So check those resources out, they will be linked to in my show notes.I hope this episode was useful in helping you understand content a bit more. I would LOVE to hear from you. You can find me on Instagram @yoursocialmediajourney or you can send me an email via my website www.yoursocialmediajourney.com. It is that time of the podcast again, where, without fail, I ask for a review or 5* rating, wherever it is that you are listening. Or, for bonus thank yous, please share this podcast with your entrepreneur friend. That’s it, begging finished. I have two absolutely fantastic interviews lined up for you in my next few episodes. One is all about Pinterest - a platform that I have not used in the way businesses are using it now and I have an absolute Pinterest expert coming in to tell us all about it. So you and me will both learn at the same time. Cool? Cool. Until next time, bye for now….

Hi everyone and welcome to episode 10 of Your Social Media Journey. Today’s episode is all about photography. Good photography has never been more crucial for a business, if you are to use social media as a marketing channel. And, for social media to work for you, it is very important that you be switched on all the time as a photographer - because, lets face it, it is impossible to have a professional photographer present at all times! One of the main reasons my own business, Fair Cake, managed to make a big impact online was because I take very good pictures. Not boasting, just casually claiming. I have never claimed to make the best cakes, far from it, but I do take good enough pictures - those that did my products justice. And, I also know how to edit them. Before you accuse me of, well, cheating, know that pretty much every picture you see on social media has been edited. In fact, you probably already know that different cameras give you different results. Some smartphone cameras give you a saturated image even before you tell it to. In this episode, I will break it down - I will tell you the BASICS and some tricks about how to take good pictures. But, if you are already in the know about f-stops and exposure and apertures, maybe give this episode a miss because you are already way ahead of me, my friend!If this is your first time listening to my podcast, my name is Shikhita and I started my business, Fair Cake, in 2007. In the last eleven years or so, I have extensively used social media to promote and market my business. Fair Cake now boats of more than half a million followers across Instagram, Twitter and Facebook and is still going strong as London’s best Cake School. In this podcast, I share my experiences of starting and running a business, and, above all, how I use social media to minimise my marketing budget. I also interview other business owners and discuss with them their strategy of how they use social media on a day to day basis.So, lets get back into photography.Smartphones were not around in 2007, so I started my business with a little Canon point and shoot camera that produced images of 8megapixels. I was very happy with that. My current iPhone shoots images of 12mega pixels. I am also happy with that! Back in the day, I used to shoot the images on my camera, then attach the camera to my computer and then download images there. I used a free software called Gimp (or GNU Image Manipulation Program) to edit those images and then would put them on my website. Phew! Now, I mostly take images with my phone, which is currently a slightly damaged iPhone 7+, use apps to edit and post them straight onto social media. Things have moved forward. However, the principles have remained the same.I do have some experience of DSLR (Or Digital Single Lens Reflex Cameras) photography and I will can tell you the that image difference between a DSLR camera and an iPhone camera is still HUGE. There is a reason that photographers are MORE in demand, even though most of us have a super computer in our pocket - its because DSLR photography does produce better results. However, having said that, you can still use your smartphone to take equally good pictures. Here are some tips on how to take good pictures, using a camera or a smartphone.1. Tip number one is to use a tripod. You will not believe just how useful a tripod is. You can buy a tripod very inexpensively online and they are even cheaper secondhand. Once you have a tripod, if you are using a smartphone, you need to ensure that you also purchase a mount on which to clip on your phone or camera. Having a tripod made a HUGE difference to my photography. Firstly, I was able to shoot similar images of different products. Second, it helps by eliminating hand jitters and third, you can focus on rearranging the product for multiple images than worrying about the camera. Once it is set, it is set and ready to go. When the camera angle remains the same, and you get multiple images, it is much easier to sort through and choose the best one. So this is a non-negotiable basic requirement, get yourself a tripod!2. Tip number two is to not photograph things in directly sunlight! I know, this is so counterintuitive. Things SEEM so well lit on a lovely sunny day, but actually, they cast really rather strong shadows. The best outdoor light for photography is that where shadows are not strong, so an overcast but bright day is perfect. In my experience, the best place to photograph pretty much anything is next to a large window, but indoors. If the sun is streaming through that window, I hang a light weight white bedsheet as a curtain to keep the light coming in but not the shadows. Even when photographing cakes, no matter how pretty they look in the sunshine, I prefer to photograph them indoors. This is true especially of selfies - and if you are taking pictures of someone. When the sun is bright on your face, you most likely squint your eyes, or if you force them open, then your forehead sort of crinkles. Trust me. I have several of my own wedding pictures to prove - it was a lovely sunny day, thank you very much!3. Tip number three is to use the Portrait Mode. Check the settings on your smartphone. If you have an iPhone7 and above or have bought your phone over the last couple of years, chances are that the phone will have a portrait mode. Portrait mode allows you take professional looking picture with a blurry background. It is great for, well, portraits and product images. Now the reason whey portrait mode works is because it computationally, big word there, fixes the issues that you will face when taking a selfie. Now, ordinarily, when you take a selfie, your camera is usually less than two feet away from your face. It is proven that selfies distort your face by around 30%. I will link to this article in the show notes, if you are a geek like me, check it out. To ensure that your nose does not look rounded or massive, it would be great to have five feet long arms, but we have not evolved that much yet. Instead, use portrait mode and you will see a difference straight away. If someone else is taking a picture of you, ask them to use portrait mode. If you are taking it yourself, get that tripod out. There is a big difference!4. Tip number four is to find a plain background for your images. Not one-colour plain, but plain as in fuss-free. Again, this is because a fussy background detracts from the image itself and our eye is drawn to everything else that is happening in the picture. Most of the very highly successful photography brands on social media tend to have very simple images. Simple does not mean easy, a lot of effort goes into it! For product photography, especially cake photography, the set up in my workshop is very simple. I buy photography paper -if you look this up on google, you will see that you can buy large rolls of different colours and prints. I tend to stick to colours rather than buying prints. This paper is draped on a photography backdrop stand, which is essentially a horizontal bar propped up on two stands. Then I place a table in front of this backdrop and click away. The whole thing can be folded away. Pretty much all cakes that are featured on the Fair Cake website were photographed this way! The focus then becomes the cake rather than anything else.5. Tip number five is to avoid using flash. Using a flash adds a very shiny light to your image, it pretty much never looks good. You can use a flash artfully on proper cameras by making light bounce here there and everywhere, but smartphone flash pretty much never does anyone any good!6. Tip number six to avoid zooming in. Since smartphone cameras do not have a long lens, such as the one you would find in a proper camera, they zoom in computationally. As a result, the final image is not as high a quality. If you must zoom, see if you can get closer to the subject. I’m sure you have seen photographers perched on the boundaries of big football matches and music concerts - with their HUGE camera lenses. Now those are proper zoom lenses. Our smartphones are not quite there yet, not in 2019 anyway!7. Tip number seven is good editing. Sometimes, despite great effort, by the time you got the subject in place, and the tripod all set up, the sun goes behind the clouds! Or, someone calls you on the phone you are taking pictures with or some other bit of life takes over. And before you know it, the cake that you were photographing is slightly tilted, or a bit of a comic book shows up in one corner of the image, or, the light was not quite right. We used to have PhotoShop, which was relatively expensive and, not to mention, technical, or free photo manipulation software that tended to be counterintuitive (at least I found so!) and overly tricky to use. Well, my friends, the good news is that there are so many apps that you can now use to fix your images. Here are some of the things you can now do, without being an IT wizz -a) If an image looks a bit tilted, you can straighten it up. Most iPhones will allow you to do so in their own built in photo editing tools, so will most Android phones. If you wish to do so using an app, look for one that allows you to change Perspective. A free app is SnapSeed. It is by Google and is fairly simple to use on your smartphone.b) If the light was a bit poor when you were taking a picture, you can brighten it up, not just by using brightness and increasing it, but by increasing exposure. Again, on SnapSeed, you can do so fairly simply.c) If your product or subject is looking a bit washed out and you wanted to make it look more colourful, try playing around with saturation settings. Incidentally, you can do a pretty good job of editing pictures on Instagram, including saturating with colour and fixing tilts.d) Finally, if there was a little smudge on the tablecloth or a little mark on the picture that is totally bothering you, you can fix that, too! On SnapSeed, you can fix this by using a feature called Healing. Good name, eh?So I wish that SnapSeed were sponsoring this podcast episode, by they are not. I just like the app. But, if someone in Google is listening, get in touch - I would love to have a you as a sponsor. Back to photography -After you have upped your photography game, you will feel so much more in control of your social media presence. Images play such a big role in representing you and your brand that it is worth investing some time and effort into good photography.Having said all of this, I do still believe that a professionally taken picture can do absolute wonders for your brand. And, if a professional photographer is much too expensive for you to consider, then consider buying a proper DSLR camera and take a photography class. It is easier than you think. But DO take that class! In the last few years, I have met countless people who come to my workshop with super fancy cameras, but use it in the Auto mode! I took the route of taking a one-day photography class and have never ever regretted it. We learned three basics - f-stop, exposure and aperture and it changed my life. So I highly recommend you take a class. It is much easier to learn when someone can tell exactly what you are doing and what you could be doing better.I actually recently got a quote from a photographer to take some pictures of me. I am after those pictures - you know the ones? The ones where I could be laughing perfectly, looking away from the camera, with perfectly white teeth? Or the ones where I am sitting on a desk, behind a laptop, with a coffee in hand and typing effortlessly? Though, how would I type with one hand? I am sure you have seen the kinds of pictures I am talking about, personal branding pictures. Anyway, the quote was around £350 for 10 images. That is £35 per image. I will definitely get those done, because I know that I NEED good images of me, BUT, it is still a high price. But before I hire someone for £350, I want to make certain that I have the entire photoshoot planned, the outfits ready and a venue ready. Before that happens, I will also practise smiling at a camera - in order to do that, I have gone ahead and ordered a bluetooth remote and will take my own pictures with my iPhone. If you want to see what these pictures look like, you can follow me on @yoursocialmediajourney on Instagram, because they will definitely end up there! And when I do end up getting a professional photoshoot done, I will be sure to make a podcast episode all about it.So there you have it, seven tips on how to up your smartphone photography game. As always, I would love to hear from you. The show notes of this episode are available on my website, www.yoursocialmediajourney.com/podcasts/10. Thats yoursocialmediajourney.com/podcasts/10. Here you will find all the tips written out and the names of any apps I have mentioned . If you have not done so already, please subscribe to this podcast. I would love LOVE a good review, especially on Apple Podcasts. And, if you have any questions, please do let me know. you can reach out on Instagram where you can find my on @yoursocialmediajourney or you can send me an email via my website. And I DO mean ANY question - I remember that feeling myself when you feel that your question might be too basic. Well, basics is what I am good at - so send away! And, if you have a contact that works for SnapSeed, send them a link to this podcast. Why not, eh. Until next time, bye for now!

Hi everyone and welcome to episode 9 of Your Social Media Journey. This is a special podcast episode - I interviewed Louise Henry, aka Solopreneur Sidekick. Louise is a digital nomad. A digital nomad! This means that she runs her business from glamorous locations around the world, the only stipulation being that there should be a good wifi connection! Am I envious? A tad. Just a tad.I first found Louise on her absolutely brilliant YouTube channel. It was her tutorials that gave me the confidence to use Square Space to make my own website, www.yoursocialmediajourney.com. Once I followed her on YouTube, I immediately jumped to her Instagram and Facebook pages. Of course I noticed that she is AMAZING in using social media for her business, so I simply had to request an interview.We covered many a topic, including how she uses Trello to organise her business, and the app Plann to add spaces to her Instagram captions. Louise also uses Plann to plan her content on Instagram - it is a great app and I do recommend you check it out if the overall aesthetic of your Instagram account is important to you!We spoke a bit about a “link in bio”. This is something I found as I spent yet another hour looking for social media on the internet. During my travels across the internet, I found this very interesting article about Instagram’s Link in Bio strategy and how it might not be working as well as it did. Here is the article, you can make your own mind up!I hope you enjoyed this episode. The shownotes are tricky to produce and I do hope I have not missed out anything. If I have, please let me know!My next episode will be about avoiding mistakes on Instagram. I have been offering FREE Instagram account audits to my audience and I have seen a common pattern of mistakes. I will talk all about it in the next episode. Until next time, bye for now…

Hi everyone and welcome to episode 8 of Your Social Media Journey.Today’s episode, as promised, is about graphics and how you can use this to make content for your social media accounts. If you are trying to grow your Instagram account or your Facebook page or your Twitter account or your Pinterest reach, then you know that the struggle is real! You are competing with millions of other similar profiles and accounts. In order to make an impression and stand out from the rest, you need to look beyond simply taking pictures and posting these. I am sure you have seen other accounts use memes or words - in fact, it is very common to see every alternate post on an Instagram feed that is a graphic - the reason this works is by keeping people engaged - and, of course, it gives you consistent content. If you do not have images to post on your account regularly, then graphics come in very handy because you can create these without reaching for your camera!The majority of us will use our smartphones to do all of this - from picture taking to editing to caption writing and then posting. I bet you do that, too! So how do we ensure that the image that we are building for our business remains consistent and focussed on the goal of getting more customers? After all, Likes and Comments are NOT income and money in the bank, are they? For that, you need content that is powerful enough to establish your business as THE place to shop when the time comes - and graphics can be a great tool to send this message out.The most important thing to keep in mind is that the sizes of images that you are posting to each platform is correct. To find out image sizes that you should be using, simply google “Twitter image sizes” or “Instagram image specifications” - and you will immediately find out what the optimum sizes are. If this is too much hassle, then make sure that you are using an app or a website that will do this automatically for you. Most graphic design apps now offer pre-fab templates for every single social media image you might need - from Facebook cover images to Instagram Stories to Twitter banners. So you do not need to worry about the exact image sizes, you simply use the pre-fab templates to do the work for you.So how DO you make your pictures stand out? Well, there are several ways and I am sure you have seen these in action on Instagram. It is just a bit tricky to do this yourself because when the time comes to post on your social media accounts, you, if you are like me, are most likely trying to get it over with and get on with your day. So what ends up happening in real life is that you look through your pictures from the last few days, pick one, think, ‘this will do’, add a caption and do exactly that - get on with your day - with a tiny nagging feeling that you are doing EVERYTHING you can, and yet your account does not seem to be generating any business for you! Well, this is where a little bit of planning can come in.If you want to make your pictures stand out a bit more than others, there are several free apps you can use to enhance your images. I use a combination of these apps on my images and videos to make my content stand out. So lets talk about the kind of graphics I am talking about. And no, I do not have any official training in graphic design. What I do use are free apps, and some paid ones, to make my posts shout! Lets get into the nitty gritty, shall we? And just in case you are listening to this in your car or in the gym or on a walk through a beautiful park, be assured that the complete show notes are available for this episode on my website www.yoursocialmediajourney.com, so you can go there to find that one app that you liked the sound of.Here are five different ways I use graphic design to make my content stand out:A very simple step is to frame your post or story with a colour or white frame. If you start doing this consistently, on every single picture and video, then your feed aesthetic will start to look very much your own. I have recently started doing this on my Instagram stories and pretty much any image that I need to stand out a bit. The apps I use are Unsplash, or Snapseed. Both apps are fairly simple to use and, most importantly, free! You see my friends, I like a freebie just as much as the next person!A second simple idea is adding text overlay on photographs. If you have a picture with a fair bit of white or light space, this can be used beautifully to add words. But, of course the space has to be empty. Adding text to a cluttered image looks, well, cluttered. You can choose a picture that you have taken yourself, or use a stockphoto. And no, I do not see any shame in using these. In fact, if I want instant content, this is where I look first. To add text, I tend to stick to one font, at most two. The larger the number of fonts you use, the weaker your message becomes because of visual clutter. I also shy away from very bright colours, ALL the time. Sometimes, yes, but all the time, no. The apps I mainly use for this are Adobe Spark Post, Canva and SnapSeed. There will be links in the shownotes to all these apps.A third way in which I use graphics is by using Instagram’s inbuilt tools for stories in addition to apps to create stories. Now, before you say that there is not point in working so hard on stories, the buzz is - and this is good well sourced buzz, that stories are going to take over news feed on Instagram. Facebook is really pushing on getting Stories ahead, Instagram is now allowing Stories Ads, so stories are not going anywhere. Episode 3 of this podcast was all about stories, so go and check it out if are looking for more information about Stories and how to use them. So, the BEST to create fuss free but visually interesting stories that I found is an app called Unfold. It has a free version and very affordable paid version. It even lets you see what your story will look like when you post it online - before you post it. It really is worth a try. So, in addition to creating stories on Unfold, I then use Instagram’s inbuilt tools to enhance further or to add more interest. This includes simple tools such as arrows to point towards a particular sentence, or simply searching for a gif (do you pronounce it Jif or Gif?! - that is the question!) - so searching for a gif that is relevant to my story. For instance, the other day I was creating a story for my main account, Fair Cake and I was going to share some user generated content. Instead of just starting to share on stories, I created a quick story page, looked for any gifs associated with the word “sharing”, selected one gif and left this on the page. The more you use gifs, the better you become at using these. Of course, less is more, but they are fun to use!One side note - if you wanted to create a post for your feed, rather than stories, you now can. Adobe Spark Post now offers the same stickers - so you can make an Instagram square or a Facebook image look exactly like Stories, but in a different image size, check it out if you are interested!A fourth way to use simple graphic design is by using templates. Now there are several of these available for free and it is entirely up to you how to use them. There are absolutely fantastic free templates available on Canva, Adobe Spark and a brand new graphic design app I was recently introduced to, this is www.designwizard.com. The simplicity of this website is absolutely wonderful. Where Design Wizard wins is the lack of overwhelm. There is something as too much choice right? This website is easy to use and super quick in helping you create content that stands out. If you have not seen this already, give it a go!A fifth way is to add icons to your images to add an extra bit of interest. Say you are running a series of posts for a specific purpose and you would like each to be coordinated. You can choose an icon, which is a simple vector image that you can resize to add to your post or banner. A vector image is something you can resize without losing the quality - so it will not become pixilated if you have to increase the size of your icon. There are a million and one of these icons available on pretty much every single graphic design app there is. So, for instance, you can search for a Frame in the search bar in Adobe Spark Post and you will see hundreds of picture frame icons appear. If you were trying to highlight a particular product, you could then plonk your image inside a pretty frame - so it will stand out from the rest of your feed. Its a fun way to add interest to whatever it is that you are doing.So there you have it, five different ways of introducing graphic design, with zero background in graphic design - using these tools will help you create richer content for your audience and is especially useful if you want to communicate specific ideas. A picture does tell a story, but sometimes, it needs a nudge! To recap, the five ways are:1. A simple white or coloured frame around your image2. Adding text to your images3. Using gifs or gifs4. Using pre-fab templates5. Using icons to add interestIf you liked this podcast, please take a moment to give me a review. A podcast will not be a podcast without a little beg for reviews now, would it? I have some fantastic interviews and more awesome episodes lined up for you - including an interview with a fabulous entrepreneur who has set up her business against the odds of geography! If you want to get in touch with me, my Instagram is @yoursocialmediajourney, and I am always available to answer questions by Direct Message. Until next time, bye for now….

Hi everyone,Welcome to episode 7 of Your Social Media Journey. Hope you are doing well and thank you so much for tuning in. In today’s podcast, I will dive deep into what it takes to expand your viewership on Instagram and Facebook using hashtags. If you have a small business or are thinking of setting one up, this episode is for you. Over the past ten years or so, I built my own business, Fair Cake, using social media as a major marketing tool. Not only do I have lots of experience in using social media as a channel for business marketing, it is pretty much all I talk about to other business owners! So grab yourself a cup of tea or coffee and lets get into this!Now that Instagram and Facebook are moving towards becoming e-commerce websites, where users can shop directly from there, without leaving their platform, it makes sense to understand what you can do to maximise the chances of your product or service being found on social media. This move towards a shoppable instagram might not seem important, especially if you have your own website where you do all the selling - but it IS! The potential future is that instead of going to Google and looking for a particular product or service, social media users will stay inside these platforms, such as Facebook or Instagram, look THERE for a product or service and check out without leaving. Facebook or Instagram will then get in touch with the vendor with dispatch details and process payment .The customer will not even visit the vendor’s website! Now do I have your ears?! Well, all you have to do is have a kickass social media presence so that when this change is rolled out to all businesses, you are right there with yours and do not miss out on this amazing opportunity. This is being trialled with just a few select brands at present and the response from customers AND the brands has been overwhelmingly positive, so be prepared for this to be rolled out to all businesses soon!In order to understand how you can maximise your business’s potential on social media, lets talk about hashtags. Yes, hashtags. They are a very important part of being seen on instagram and can help your account in being discovered. Once your account IS discovered, it is then your job to keep your audience engaged by serving high quality content. I did a podcast a few weeks ago about creating content - it was episode no. 2, have a listen if you are interested in content creation for social media - it is especially useful if you find yourself stuck with the what-to-post-today question! Right, on to today’s topic.The word “hashtag” was added to the Oxford dictionary in 2010, and the Scrabble dictionary in 2014. Hashtags, it seems like, are here to stay. (though, quick side note, we thought that Google Plus was here to stay and would become as big as Facebook, sooo… yeah, that did not happen). So hashtags are not going anywhere in 2019 :) Now hashtags have only been around since 2007, in fact, they can be traced back to a single tweet sent by one Chris Messina, if you are interested in how they came about, check his website out, its chrismessina.me or search for Chris Messina on Twitter. I love geeky things like that - it brings out the inner geek in me, inner geek in me is a nice person!Using a hashtag on your posts is simple, you simply add a hash # sign before your word or phrase. You can use single or multiple hashtags on your posts, depending on the social network you are using. The reason you would use a hashtag is simple - you want your post to be found when someone else clicks or taps on the hashtag. If your account is public, anyone who is searching for that particular hashtag will be able to see your post. Using hashtags correctly will yield better engagement on your social media accounts and this will lead to more leads, more exposure as a business and ultimately, more sales. Now who here does not want more sales?! If your posts are showing up in front of the right audience, you have won half the battle towards engaging in a high quality conversation with your ideal audience.Having said all of that, it is important to understand how and why hashtags work, why they DON’t work and how you can use them to your maximum advantage. As with all things social media, this podcast is relevant now, summer 2019, because I am SURE things will have changed in just a few months time.The reason you used to use hashtags in the first place would be to add more description to your posts on social media. If you have a personal account, and you are having a frustrating evening trying to do something and you wanted all your friends to know that you were having a frustrating evening, you would have posted (or probably still do) a picture of yourself or anything that is making you frustrated, and add #frustrated to the caption. It replaces an entire sentence. At least this is how it started. Soon, people started using them as witty comments and an unwritten rule appeared that one did not use a replacement for space in hashtags. If you have been using computers for as long as I have (#Istartedin1995) then you will know that spaces were not allowed in file names? Does anyone remember that? And instead of using spaces, we would use the underscore. Anyway, fast-forward to social media, you will be hard-pressed to find underscores in hashtags. Its a thing! Now hashtags are information rich words that can help you get more traffic to your feed. And the more traffic to your feed results in more interest in what you are doing and ultimately this will lead to more sales.Now, as a business user for hashtags, you need to ensure that you are using them correctly. It will be absolutely pointless for you to appear in hashtag searches if you used hashtags such as #frustrated or #love to further define your posts. The REASON you use hashtags, as a business, is SO that your posts appear on users’ newsfeeds when they are searching through a particular hashtag. So, if you have used #shoes in your post about your handmade moccasins for babies, it won’t get your post anywhere because last time I checked, just on Instagram, #shoes returned 94.3m posts. If you use #babyshoes, you are still competing with 1.6m posts. If you use #handmadebabyshoes though, your post will show up amongst the 18.1 thousand posts - a much better number to stand out in. The idea is that if anyone out there is following this hashtag, your posts will start showing up in their newsfeed - and, if you have compelling pictures and great captions, that someone will then go on to buy your products from you, or share your post with a friend who might become your customer.Lets start with how you can use hashtags before diving into how to hashtag correctly for maximum exposure.You can join in on conversations with hashtags. How? Say you are attending a wedding with the hashtag, #amyandtomgetmarried. It is now surprisingly common to see wedding invitations that encourage all guests to use a particular hashtag. With such a specific hashtag, all the guests will be able to see all the pictures and videos that were taken at said wedding - and the bride and groom (and perhaps their parents/siblings/best man/woman etc.) will be able to go to each post and personally thank the guests. So, it can be one giant social media party. Similarly, if there is a conference or event that encourages attendees to use a particular hashtag, all the attendees will later be able to not only re-cap on what they saw and heard, they will also be be able to connect with speakers or other attendees after the conference. Finally, a general interest hashtag, such as #gameofthrones or #universitychallenge will bring up all the latest conversations happening about that particular topic. If you are running a competition, you can create a specific hashtag so that everyone that posts using that hashtag can be found by you.So you can see how hashtags work and users use these to find further information about a particular topic they are interested in. You can also see why using a very general hashtag, such as #love is not useful. I mean, its beautiful, who does not like love, but it is not useful as a business! Interestingly, hashtags, work very well on Instagram - you are allowed a maximum of 30 and there is absolutely no shame in putting all of them together underneath the caption. Depending on your choice, you can either put them underneath the caption, or in the first comment afterwards. Both strategies work. Remember, on Instagram, you can follow hashtags. So it is possible to simply follow hashtags rather than actual accounts. On Facebook, however, hashtags are a slightly different beast. According to research done by postplanners.com, the more hashtags you have, the lower the levels of engagement on Facebook. On Facebook page, it is recommended that you use 1-3 very relevant hashtags and within the caption rather than a blatant grouping underneath the caption. It is a different audience you are talking to! On Instagram, some marketers are of the opinion that between 9-15 hashtags yield more engagement tha using all 30. Most research data suggests so. It is also, of course, possible, that it is actually quite difficult to generate 30 HIGHLY specific hashtags for each post. So one reason could be that by the time you have typed in your 15th highly specific hashtag, you are out of ideas and start adding generic hashtags and your post starts to become irrelevant for followers of those generic hashtags. And the more irrelevant your post becomes, the lower the engagement levels. Its an analysis game - try things out, keep doing what works for you and discard that does not!So here are three ways you can use hashtags to boost your business’s presence on social media:1. Use very relevant hashtags - If you get a lot of local custom, ensure that you are using your locality’s name in your hashtags. For instance, if you are a photographer looking for clients in a particular area, use that - #photographer is too generic, but #londonphotgrapher or #bristolphotographer immediately brings you closer to your ideal clients located near you. If locality is not an issue, make sure that you are staying specific to your product or service. If you are not sure which hashtags to use, point number two will be useful.2. Do some digging - thats right, dig around for what works for you. Rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, do a search for the most relevant hashtag in your industry. Keeping with the same example, if you follow the hashtag #bristolphotographer, you will notice other photographers using this hashtag. Look at what other hashtags they are using and bingo - you will have Rthe hashtags that YOU need to be using in order to be discovered. In general, if you can find hashtags with at least a few thousand posts behind them, they can give you a great platform to be seen on. Of course, the quality of your content matters. Simply observing the other posts on relevant hashtags will allow you to see the quality of posts that you need to be aiming at.3. See what works for you - this is an important step and a very ignored one! You need to check what is working for you! You need to keep an eye on insights that you will have access to if you are using a business account, on whether engagement levels are falling or rising for certain hashtags. The easiest way to do this is on Instagram - keep an eye out for engagement levels. You can tell yourself what is working and what might need more work. I’ll tell you a little Instagram secret - from earlier on in 2019 until a few weeks ago (I am recording this in June 2019), if you had a business account, you could actually see where your audience was coming from - so you could tell whether they found your account in Explore or their Home feed or from hashtags. This information does not seem to be available anymore, but I am sure this will come back.As with everything social media, ultimately, we are working with private companies, using their platforms - and they can change their mind anytime they want. How nice! However, if you keep an eye on what is happening currently and use it to your advantage, you will keep ahead of this game. My next podcast will be about using graphics and fonts and all that good stuff, to enhance your content and keep your customers interested in what you have to say or sell. If you like this podcast, please could I request a review? Especially if its a good one? Every single good review helps me keep motivated and producing good content that will prove useful for you and your business. An even bigger gesture would be to share this with your friends. As always, the show-notes to this episode are now available on my website, www.yoursocialmediajourney.com. Thank you very much in advance for your emails, reviews and direct messages. I try to reply to each and every one of them and deeply appreciate all of you listening out there. If you have any questions about this episode, feel free to get in touch with me. Until next time, bye for now!

Hi everyone! I’m afraid I do not have detailed show notes for this episode, because this is an interview and it would take me hours to transcribe it! However, here are the websites and apps mentioned in this episode. If you are unsure about anything mentioned here, please do reach out to me, either on social media @yoursocialmediajourney (Instagram) or by emailing hello@yoursocialmediajourney.comToday’s interviewee is Jess Freeman of JessCreatives. Jess’s Instagram can be found here, and her superb YouTube channel can be found here. Her Pinterest page is here.Websites and Apps mentioned in this episode:Stockphotography site: www.unsplash.comFavourite apps: Afterlight, SnapSeed, Unfold

Is it all about the follower count? No, it is not! Social Media, be it Instagram, Facebook or Twitter, has changed. Follower numbers are NOT all that matters, it is all about engagement!

Hi everyone, welcome to Episode 4 of Your Social Media Journey. Today I will talk about branding, why you do not need to spend money on it and why it is important that you think about it.Branding is not about logos, colours, fonts or fancy business cards - though they are fun to create and shop around for. Branding is about how you are perceived by your customers. How do you come across? Do you customers see a bit of themselves in you? Do your clients see YOU as the person who will solve a problem they have?Think about it. If the price were the same, what would make you choose a particular vendor more than others. Its how you perceive their business, their ethics and their values. For example, say you were looking for some cocoa powder to bake a cake. In a supermarket, there are two cardboard boxes, side by side. One says COCOA, in big bold letters on a plain background. One says, COCOA, but in a swirly font, says where the cocoa comes from, if it is Fair Trade or not, has a little recipe on the pack to bake an excellent cake and a website address where, perhaps, you can go and check out their company even more. Assume that the price is exactly the same. Which would you choose? Option one, or option two? That tells you what YOU prefer. If you as a business prefer strong bold lines, a no-nonsense branding system - then that is exactly what you should do. If, however, you prefer the sound of Option 2, where the customer is given a fair few options to interact with the company, then that is perhaps what you should be chasing. BE YOURSELF. It will be a very difficult business journey for you if you start off on the wrong footing.Your next question is probably - but what if my customers want Option 2 and I am more of an Option 1 kind of person. Yes, there is that and there are ways you can address it. You do not have to strip your business of your own personal brand. I firmly believe that that is a bit of a recipe for disaster. Branding is a very personal affair. The reason that social media has become SO popular in recent years is precisely this - people have been able to find other people, online, of a similar taste. We can discuss the broader societal impacts of social media and this particular aspect of it in another episode, or perhaps another podcast. But here, we will focus on business. Back to branding. If YOU are a business owner and you are the one looking after social media for your business, I would not start trying to be someone else.I will give you my own example. When I first started my company, Fair Cake, I was very excited. I was busy figuring out how fonts work on websites, how they print, colours for my new website, designs of cakes, choosing colours or no colours on my cakes etc. etc. etc. I desperately wanted to be the Cool Girl selling cake with kooky and quirky designs. Well, guess what. I was not cool. I was on the edge of uncool. Try as I might, I just could not come up with funny and quirky captions for my products, or my website. I was Plain Jane. I figured out that I liked making sugar roses. I did not WANT to like making sugar roses, they looked and seemed dated to me. But not only did I like and enjoy, perhaps secretly, making sugar roses, I was very good at it. So I gave up fighting with myself and gave in - to sugar roses. The more I made them, the better I became. The better I became, the prettier they looked. The prettier they looked, the more demand there was for them. And that is how my customers found me, they were looking for MY style of roses - not anyone else’s style. MY style. And that soon became my brand.In the last eleven plus years, I have spoken to a lot of other business owners. We geek out, us people in business. We bond over HR, we laugh about trends, we complain about banks. Its riveting. The longer a person is in business, the more experienced they are in sorting out nonsense from stuff that actually matters. And I can tell you one thing for sure, aside from sheer grit, THIS is what sets them apart. Understanding what works and what does not. Fancy logos, fancy card stationery, fabulous ribbons and pretty boxes for products - they can come with time, when your business can afford it. Plunging money into all this at the very start will eat up precious resources that you have. Instead, if you have clarity about your values, your USP (Unique Selling Proposition) and your style, you will go a lot further.By the way, if you happen to have a giant cash injection - say you are a start-up and have just raised a million pounds in your first round of funding - get in touch with me, I can sort out social media for your start up, like nobody else can ;)This is how I built my brand - I called my business Fair Cake. It was a pun on Fairy Cake, which is a British term for cupcakes. I looked into getting a logo designed, but soon realised that it would cost me a fair chunk out of the £1000 I had set aside for starting a business. Anyway, I decided to not have a logo, but a fancy font. And that is exactly what I did. I used the same font on all my communications, my website and even as a little strip of text underneath pictures of my products. And it worked fine. I decided I needed some business cards and I did get some printed, before realising, very quickly that a majority of my clients found me online, so there was no need for business cards whatsoever. And then I got some very fancy leaflets designed. I paid someone to design A4 size leaflets that were folded into thirds. I then proudly displayed these leaflets just outside my workshop in London in a little perspex box. Well, my lowest point came when I went to the local pub, its called Cutty Sark, and right outside in the bin, the bin, was my leaflet. So someone had picked a leaflet up, walked 100meters and threw it in the bin. I spent around £700 on the whole designing/printing thingy. Right. Literally, in the bin. Oh and that perspex box outside my workshop that housed all the leaflets? That soon got filled wiht mini-cab cards. So other people were using my box to advertise to me. I am going to move on from this story, it is not fun!Don’t get me wrong, I am sure that leaflets and business cards work fantastically for some people. They did not work for me. Not one, not a single client of mine ever said that they had a business card or a leaflet of mine. They ALL found me online. I make it an absolute point of asking every single client where they found me. So if everyone was finding me online, why on earth was I spending money on leaflets and business cards?!So how does this affect you? You need to decide WHERE you think people are finding you. If you have a website, people will find you on Google - as long as you have an attractive website and are speaking clearly on the website about what EXACTLY it is that you do and what can people expect when they do business with you. So here is how you can build your brand, without spending much money -1. Be consistent with colours and fonts throughout your business - on your website and your social media channels, so that a visitor can see that it is the same company. Be sure to link your website to your social media channes and vice versa.2. Be authentic - I tried to be cool, but I clearly was not. As soon as I realised that, I was able to channel my creativity positively and business boomed. The beauty of social media is that you WILL find people who are into exactly what it is that you are selling, you just need to find them! And by creating content that is true to your personality, you will not only succeed in doing that, it will be infinitely easier for you to do so.3. Think about how you want to come across - if you are in the wedding industry, but you want to shake it up a bit, perhaps you won’t be using super cursive fonts. If you are in the restaurant industry and are offering healthy eating, perhaps you will be considering bright colors, clean looking food plates and an artful chicpea, casually sitting atop a wooden platter. If you are in the make up industry and specialise in theatrical makeup - you probably will not have a no-makeup look model on the homepage of your website.So, how do you do all this on a budget. Well, there are several free tools online that you can use.1. For fonts, I love the website www.dafont.com - it has thousands upon thousands of fonts, some free, some paid but all awesome. Trawl there and find one that you like the look of. Hand this to your web designer, or, if you are a web designer yourself, use it. Of course, if you ARE a web designer you are already using a website similar to this one, aren’t you?2. For colours, I love the Canva. It is an app that I use frequently on my phone. The same company has a webpage where they list 100 brilliant colour combinations. This is a great starting point to find out the look and feel that you like the most. You can pick up the colour codes from here and use them every single time you make graphics for your business, I will leave a link the show notes. By the way, the transcripts for all my podcasts is always available on my website, www.yoursocialmediajourney.com forward slash episode number. So since this is episode 4, it will be www.yoursocialmediajourney.com/4 https://www.canva.com/learn/100-color-combinations/3. If you are a product based business and you make your own products to sell - such as a cake maker, there is a clever way of defining your style without making every single cake - Pinterest! Link your website to your Pinterest page where your potential customers can see what YOU like. For example, if you like making pale pink wedding cakes, make a Pinterest board of pale pink wedding cakes. If you are into bright and vivid colours, then your Pinterest board can show exactly what you like!4. Once you have clarity in exactly what it is that you are selling, make sure that ALL your online presence is consistent - and that you stay true to it. And, if you do decide to change from pale pink to bright and vivid, change it all at the same time. Imaging the shock of someone wanting a pale pink meringue of a wedding dress, who found your website, only to come to your Facebook page and see your posts about brides in biker shorts and leather jackets - the poor bride will faint!This, of course, is just my perspective, how things worked for me and my friends who have businesses. I will soon try to bring other perspectives to this podcasts, though I was laughing out loud this morning over a cartoon I saw on Twitter about podcasters. If you want to see this, head over to my Instagram or my Twitter account, link is on my website.And, as always, I would love to hear from you - if you agree or disagree with me. If you agree with me, leave me a good review. If you disagree with me, perhaps do not leave me a review, but send me an email, or a DM and we can talk and debate. Until next time, bye for now…

Hi everyone and welcome to Your Social Media Journey, episode 3. My name is Shikhita and in this episode, we will be talking about Instagram stories, how I have used these, four practical ideas for using them for businesses and how to determine how your stories are working. According to recently released data by Instagram, more than 500million people use stories every single day. This number is greater for under-25-year olds and a THIRD of most viewed stories are created by businesses. THAT is what I want to tell you about - a THIRD of the most viewed stories are created by businesses. Thats right - and the reason is pretty simple. A business will usually spend some time adding graphics, words, emojis etc. to actively make their story more interesting. A personal user will probably not put as much effort into a story and the numbers are now speaking for themselves. The BIG news is that Instagram stories are soon set to take over from the news feed - you heard that right, more people will soon be spending more time flicking through stories than watching content on their news feed. According to CNN, Instagram stories are TWICE as popular as SnapChat, so it is worth spending a bit of time understanding how they work.To make the most of Instagram stories, you need a few essentials sorted. First of all, there is no point using Instagram, or any other social media, for that matter, for your business if you are not tracking what works and what does not. A high follower number is not the only indicator of a great social media account because, like it or not, there are plenty of fake follower accounts out there. In fact, every now and then, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter do a sweep and delete fake follower accounts and suddenly, there is a jump down in follower numbers. Try not to let daily ups and downs bother you, if you focus on your long term plan and startegy, social media is still a fantastic marketing tool.Back to stories. I am assuming you know how to add a story to Instagram and Facebook. It used to be, back in the early days of stories, a mere two years ago, that you could not add anything to stories if it was not less than 24hrs old. Instagram quickly saw the flaw in this and now we can add any image or video to stories, no matter how old. This gives businesses a fantastic oportunity to use stories as a marketing tool.Of course, with any such tool, if you try to sell-sell-sell, the strategy backfires. If you have heard my first podcast, you will have heard me describe the difference between been seen on Google - when your website is found, and being seen on social media - where you are actively trying to find your customers and cheerleaders - this fundamental difference is crucial to remember when you are using Instagram stories. If you haven’t listened to that podcast yet, I recommend listening to it. In it I describe four ways of creating content and my own experiences of getting started on social media.By the way, you can see the metrics behind exactly how your stories are working on Instagram. It is quite easy to do, but difficult to describe in a podcast, so I will leave that for a webinar. If you want to keep up to up to date with my webinar plans, coming soon, sign up to be informed of these on www.yoursocialmediajourney.com. And before I carry on, I would LOVE a review on Apple podcasts, Stitcher radio or spotify - a good review goes a long way in supporting this content and, most importantly, motivates me to keep going!Before I get started on HOW to use stories, I urge you to switch to a business account on Instagram. This will allow you to see how well your stories are being received, how many people see them, where these people are from and many more insights that will help you refine your stories strategy.Lets get into this. Here are four lessons that I have learned from using stories for my own business -1. Very raw stories, simply sharing your day-to-day work - these are good, but are limited in their reach and engagement. This is perhaps more useful for personal accounts, but you need to CRAFT a story for it work on Instagram. and crafting means exactly that - think about why you want someone to tap on YOUR story rather than simply swipe away to the next account. It takes a bit of time and testing, but soon you wlll find exactly what works best. The easiest way to tell is by using Instagram’s metrics. If you have a busines account, you can find these metrics by going to your home screen, going to the three horizontal lines on the top right of your screen and tapping on insights. The top insights are your metrics about the main newsfeed, scroll down to the bottom and here you will see the insights for your stories that you have posted in the last 14 days. These insights are fantastic because you can see everything from how many people your story reached, to how many people visited your profile as a result of your story - in fact, there are metrics available for how many people tapped back, made calls, emailed you, exited, followed, forwarded, found out the directions to your business etc. etc. etc. Isn’t that amazing information?! I find this incredibly useful when planning my content. This is only available on business profiles - so if you are serious about using social media for your business, it would be silly not to use this data - about how exactly your stories are performing - to inform your future Instagram posts.2. Creating engagement - this means you ask people to ask you a quetion, or conduct a poll, or or ask them to rate an image etc. A very recent addition in April 2019 is the quiz feature, where you can make a quiz for your audience and they can answer. All these options can be found under the square smiley face symbol that comes up when you start writing your story. Now, these are good, however, there is such as thing as engagement fatigue! Use these options sparingly, but regularly. MOST of your social media presence is about entertaining, educating or informing your audience - the first two of entertainment and education being more important than informing. Think of your social media platforms as your very own TV channels. If all you do is advertise, your audience will run away! So in between content that is entertaining and educational, ask questions, run polls and create quizes. This is a fantastic way of, for lack of a better phrase, bulking up your content. I shall give you an example -Say you are a florist and you took an incredible picture of a rose. Just one picture. Now, of course you will post that one picture of your rose on your newsfeed and write a beautiful caption. You get your likes, you get your shares, you get some comments and your job is done. Nope! Not yet! Take that picture of rose and -First Idea) Share it as your story with a gif of “New Post”Second Idea) A few days later, take that rose picture and post a little scale of a smiley face or a face with two hearts for eyes across it, artistically - so that your audience can simply tell you how pretty they find that rose - you know the one I am talking about? The scale is usually used for how much someone loves a particular thing?Third Idea) A few days later, take that rose picture and put it next to a different rose picture and run a poll and ask audience which rose they like better. You can use a free app such as Canva to attractively create a story with two rose picturesFourth Idea) Post that same rose picture in stories a few days later and ask your audience if anyone has any questions they might like to ask about roses that you could answer - you will be surprised at how many you will get!Fifth Idea) Once a few weeks have passed - bring the rose back and weave it into whatever it is you are doing thenThe idea behind this is creating engagement. The more you get people intersted in what it is that you are doing and the more they react to you, the better the Instagram algorithm rates you. The better it rates you, the more your account shows up in Explore. The more you show up in Explore, the more engagement your account gets - so on and so forth.These are just some ideas, be creative! And, if you are not naturally creative, seek other creatives and learn from their stories - see how they present information, answer questions or create engagement, take notes and then apply these yourself. You will be surprised at how far your rose picture will go! Before you say, but won’t people get bored of seeing the same image over and over again? No! First of all, not all your followers will see your content, your content is only served to a few of your followers, so chances of them seeing all the instances of your rose are minimal. Second, you need to ensure that the CONTEXT of your image is different each time. Third, I am not saying do not do anything else, just take a picture of a rose and be done with it - while doing all of this, you will be creating more content, of course. For four very practical ideas, give Episode 2 of this podcast a listen. Repurposing content is tried and tested and absolutely essential. Especially for sole entrepreneurs, content creation is a massive task, so we must be smart about it, shouldn’t we?3. Going live - Going live doesn’t have to be you infront of the camera, though that will help bond with your audience, it could be going live about your work, what you are up to, what your workspace is looking like (say, for instance, if it is all neat and tidy and organised, show it off!) etc. If you ARE confident in front of a camera, then a great idea is to ask your audience to submit questions first, in stories, of course, and then go live and answer these. In case you are worried about make up or how you look, use a filter! I must say, this held me back for a long while. I would turn on the selfie camera of my iphone and was never happy with the way my hair would look or my under eye dark circles lookd particularly vicious (side note - I reckon a majority of Indians or people of Asian descent have dark circles, I believe we, as a population, are responsible for keeping afloat the undereye concelear industry!) - ANYWAY, once I found filters, and there is no shame in using these, I pretty much always use these. They are fun to use, and they do add an element of fun to the whole thing. Lets not take this TOO seriously now!4. Finally, creating stories on a separate app - Since Stories are, well, stories, you can use a separate app to make a story using music, images and videos and quotes and then post this to stories. Look for video editing apps - some are more intuitive than others and have a go at creating a story. See it as a story writing exercise - your story should have a beginning, middle and end and should be short and to the point. Remember, we are dealing with exceptionally short attention spans here.Now you will have seen the Swipe Up feature on Instagram. Currently, this is only available to accounts that have more than 10,000 followers. Personally, I think its bizarre that it is only available to big brands, especially because Facebook, Instagram’s parent company readily admits that they grapple with the issue of fake followers all the time. So whey they would make this 10,000 follower a marker for any account is beyond me. But there we are, it is what it is. So your best bet to use this feature is try to get to more than 10,000 followers as soon as possible :) In the meantime, there are ways of creating thumbstopping stories and redirecting your audiences towards your newsfeed. This is how you do it - you will have seen me do this on my account, if you follow me there. My account on Instagram is @yoursocialmediajourney and my main business’s acount is @faircake. Every time I post a new post on the news feed, once the image or video has uploaded and is showing up, I click on the Add To Story button, which looks like two stuck triangles or an airplane, whichever way you look at it, right under the post. I add that post to stories - sometimes creating a story out of that post using gifs (or is it pronounced @j@ifs? I say gifs!) - anyway, I enhance the post and then add a “tap here” marker to it. So if my story is good enough and engages someone’s attention, they will tap on the “tap here” sign and then a little button appears that says “see post”. if someone taps on “See post”, they are taken back to my newsfeed, where my caption and ready and waiting to charm them.So there you are - this is how I use stories and these are just some of the basic methods I use.To recap - these are the four ideas:1) Raw Stories crafted into interesting content2) Creating Engagement by using questions, polls, quizes etc.3) Going live4) Making videos on separate apps specificaly for storiesI would love to answer any questions that you might have about this podcast. The best place for this would be sending me a DM on Instagram. My account there is @yoursocialmediajourney. You can also send me an email via my website, www.yoursocialmediajourney.comA huge thank you for listening. Until next time, bye for now!

Hi everyone and welcome to Your Social Media Journey. My name is Shikhita and this is episode number two, this is where the real podcast starts. If you wish to find out more about me and my credentials, check out my first introductory episode - here, we are going to jump straight into today’s topic: CONTENT.To understand why content is so important, lets start with an example. In a magazine, when we see advertisements, our eyes usually glaze over. The first few pages of a magazine do not get much of a look in. However, once we get to the editorial content, we start getting genuinely interested in what the content has to say. Now if that editorial content talks about a specific product, a travel destination or a brand of chocolate, we are definitely more interested in that brand. But, if the same brand advertises about just how good it, on the very next page, our eyes are likely glaze over again . Know what I mean? Social media is just that - you are building your business’s editorial content, first, and then you will direct people to your product or sale.By the way, if you like this podcast, please do take a moment to leave me a review, especially if you are listening on an Apple device. It takes moments and goes a long way towards supporting this podcast.Right lets get started. I have first hand experience of building an audience online - and this treasured audience is now my biggest cheerleader. Let me take your through my business journey and how I have used social media to reach out to my ideal customers.I started using Facebook for my business, Fair Cake, back in 2009. Then, all I did was post pictures of cupcakes I was making at home. My entire business was just that, selling cupcakes. I had quit my job in 2007 and set up my business from home. I made a very basic five page website, I am not sure we even had Wix or SquareSpace then! My customers found me on Google, gave me a ring, I made cupcakes, packed them up and either delivered them myself or got my customers to pick them up. Of course, before the cupcakes went out, I took pictures. Lots of pictures. That was pretty much it. A quick side note - Fair Cake now is an entirely different business. It is a cookery school that specialises in teaching people how to make cupcakes and large cakes, including speciality cakes such as those for weddings and special events. And its entire metamorphosis from a simple cupcake business to a well established and loved cake school was shared on social media. I will discuss this huge change and how this came to be in future podcasts. If you wish for me to talk more about it, send me a DM on Instagram or an email.Once I joined Facebook in 2009, I realised that just a few pictures for my website were not cutting it and I needed more content. It might seem weird now, but the word “Content” was not a thing back then! Anyway, I realised that I needed to get people’s attention - because this audience, my Facebook audience, was NOT LOOKING for cupcakes. This was a major moment when I realised that my website traffic was people actively looking to buy my products, cupcakes, but my Facebook audience was simply a large bunch of potential customers. There were NOT looking for cupcakes, so no point putting a great big “for sale” sign up.That was, for lack of a better phrase, all hail Oprah, my AHA moment. I might get into trademark trouble by using the phrase, watch this space!So that is it. That is the sum total of all my social media knowledge. Do. Not. Sell.Ok, wait, of course there is more! But that is a pretty good place to start. Your next question is, what do you do on social media, as a business, then? Well, several things. Lets list them -1. Create content2. Keep potential customers interested in your content3. Build a reputation4. Engage with your customers - answering questions, comments and such like5. Once you have all of that, then you can point your potential customers towards something your are selling6. Repeat the whole cycleAnd it is this, this creating content that makes social media a different beast to, say, owing a website. You see, on your own website, you can dump a whole lot of pictures and words, and perhaps some videos. If you have an e-commerce website, you will have the means of selling products or services and taking payments. Once you have set everything up, you will more or less relax and focus on being found on different search engines - to get people actively looking for you to come and buy from you. So you can get away with static content. Let me give you an example. If you sell home made chutneys and jams, you will have pictures of your chutneys and jams, perhaps in beautiful jars, perhaps on top of perfectly imperfect table tops (you know what I am talking about!) and with a silver spoon next to them. Or maybe not. Maybe you will have simple images of your chutney jars on a white background. That works, too. Lets get out of this image jam here :) Anyway, you can add products to your own website. Mr. X is looking for chutney jars as a return gift for a very posh party he is throwing. He looks up posh chutney jars on Google, your website comes up, he has a look around, is impressed by what you are offering and places an order for 12 jars, because he has 12 posh people coming to his posh dinner party. Job done. Stay with me, we are just getting started, this will all make sense!Great, you made a sale. All that setting up of website etc. was done once. But wait, what if you can hear crickets after Mr. X has checked out. What if no one else seems to be buying your chutneys and jams? This is exactly where social media comes in. You see, while all this was happening on your website, you could be creating content for social media and putting that idea into your potential customers heads that even if they did not feel like buy a chutney or jam jar themselves, it makes for a great hostess gift. Or host gift. Now it is up to you to actively seek out more Mr. Xs! The way to do this is by creating content that is very relevant to what you are selling. No point in taking pictures of your latest shoes haul if you are making chutneys and jams, now, is it? But this is exactly the mistake I see people make on Instagram and Facebook. A number of businesses end up sending confusing messages to their followers. YES, it is important to inject a bit of personality into your social media presence, but that line becomes very blurry indeed.So how DO you create content, endlessly, to keep an interested following - so much so that when they do need your product or service themselves, or are in a position to recommend someone, they recommend you? For some people, this comes naturally. These are usually creative people - they make things, they have an eye for a good picture, they are confident in front of a camera and are definitely not shy. It is not to say that if you do not have these qualities, you will not be a great content creator! On the contrary, if you are ready to do some planning and can organise your work, you will probably do a whole lot better than someone who is simply relying on their creative skills.Lets go into some specifics, shall we. Here are four content ideas, that you can flesh out for your own business.1. Product pictures2. Behind the scenes3. Special events4. CollaborationsLets talk a bit more about each of these in detail1. Product pictures - Product pictures are great, but mostly businesses tend to have quite boring product pictures for their website. Coming back to the chutney/jam example. If you already have these on a white background, great. But ideally, you want these a bit more interesting - and here is the good part, you can learn how to take good pictures. If you have a smart phone, and chances are that you do, head over to YouTube and sit through a few tutorials on how best to use your phone camera. I am being completely honest here, a large number of us simply do not understand or use these incredible cameras that we have in our pockets! As an example, I am linking two products in the shownotes. One is a Fortnum and Mason jar of Manuka honey, as pictured on their website and one is of the same jar photographed for their Instagram news feed.Website: https://www.fortnumandmason.com/products/manuka-honey-500-mgo-200gInstagram: https://www.fortnumandmason.com/products/manuka-honey-500-mgo-200gIf you go to the links via the show notes, or from my website, you will see this - their website image is a very websitey image - very clear, photographed brilliantly and to the point. The Instagram image, which, as of today, in spring 2019, has more than 1400 likes and multiple comments, is less, shall we say, formal. This is the perfect picture for social media. It shows a lot more than an image of the honey jar, it shows the packaging and has a slightly blurry background, but with fairy lights. It shows how the honey is special, it is sitting on other honey jars and looks lovely and homey and comfy. The look and feel of the two images is very different and you can tell exactly why each is perfect for its purpose. The Instagram image simply connects more with the audience ! If you read the captions on both - their website and their Instagram picture of the SAME product, you will see that they are different. We will definitely talk about captions in a lot more detail in another episode!2. Behind the scenes - This is a great way of connecting with your audience and finding the like minded potential customers and clients. I remember that in the early days of Facebook, when I was experimenting a lot, I posted an image of my rather messy office desk. I invited photo replies from my followers of their own messy desks - and lo and behold, there was a connection! My post resonated with my followers and before I knew it, I was inundated with images of messy desks! The reason this worked was because it connected with my audience on a very basic level. When my workshop is all set up before a cake class, I always shoot a quick video. By the way, I am pretty much never in the video! I am fairly camera shy. The videos are a reminder to my audience that I have a physical workshop, that we do not offer online cake courses and that THIS Is where everyone learns baking. And it works - images of my workshop yield some of the highest levels of engagement. Behind the scenes is a powerful tool and you do not have to be on camera. Showing off your process of work, absolutely works and you get an instant connection with your audience. The best place to do so is on Facebook and Instagram stories - the footage is usually very raw and you can use gifs very effectively.Behind the scenes connects you to your audience in a way that no website can - they see who you are, why you do what you do and your personality shines through. In this increasingly competitive business world, if your customers and clients see a little bit of themselves in you, they are more likely to buy your product or services. Think about it - you probably have your own favourite shops that you shop from. Sometimes, price and quality remaining the same, we simply PREFER one shop to another. Its because we feel more comfortable there. This comfort is what behind the scenes does for you and your business on social media. It connects you and your customer on a level that up until now was simply not possible.3. Special events - This is a big one and I sometimes wonder if magazine editorial calendars were simply commercial decisions! Lets take it from the start - New Year, Valentines Day, Mothers Day, spring, Easter, May bank holidays, Fathers Day, summer, August bank holiday, summer holidays in general, back to school, autumn, halloween, thanksgiving, pumpkins, Christmas and then winter. Then, peppered among all of this will be your local holidays and events. I know that Diwali, Rakshabandhan and Holi are big Indian festivals, then there is Eid and Chinese New Year. Lets not forget the National Donut Days of our social media calendars. My point is, if you are wondering about WHAT to post about, you can always find a special event. Your job is to weave the special event into your work and make it into content. Simple graphics celebrating the event are the simplest ideas. A simple illustration that is true to your brand style simply saying “Happy Mothers Day” is great content. Do stay true to your own branding though - if you are a chutney maker and you have big hairy dudes on Harley Davidsons saying Happy Mothers Day on your news feed (unless they appear elsewhere, eating your chutney!) - that won’t quite work out, would it? Incorporating special events into your news feed is a great way to connect to what your audience will be thinking about around that time of the year.4. Collaborations - Collaborations are a great way to increase your visibility on social media. If you are unsure about how to go about collaborating, do not worry. Everyone starts somewhere. Simply send a message requesting a collaboration to an account that you like. Ideally, it should be similarly sized as yours and have a similar audience. Collaborations could be going on Instagram live together. It could be working together to produce new pictures and videos. Collaborations make your account more interesting and break up the news feed a bit - they are excellent because you get access to a whole new set of people who are probably your ideal clients - and so does your collaborator. It is a win-win situation!So there you have it, four of my tried and tested content creation ideas. There are a million other ideas out there, but these are four pretty solid ones to start with. In future episodes of this podcast, I will talk about simple photography - they keyword being SIMPLE. You do not need fancy equipment for social media photographs. If you have fancy equipment, great, but you really do not need it. I will also talk about simple graphic design, using ready made content and caption writing. If there is anything specific that you would like me to talk about, please do send me a direct message on Instagram, my account is @yoursocialmediajourney.Thank you for listening. Since I have already requested a review, I will say bye for now, until next time….

Hi everyone and welcome to my podcast! Starting a podcast has been a goal of mine for a while now. A looong while. I decided to bite the bullet today. My name is Shikhita, or to prnounce it correctly, Shikhita. I have been living in London for the last 20 years, but I am originally from India - which I why I have a slightly strange accent. Now that you know why I sound how I sound, lets get into the actual podcast. This IS slightly strange that I am sitting here, in front of a computer and a microphone and talking. Very strange, indeed. But I am sure I will get used to it!My podcasts, starting with this one, will be about using social media to further your business. I found social media immensely useful for my own business, Fair Cake, that I started back in the pre-Facebook days of 2007. Pre-Facebook, do you even remember that?! It was a mad world. We had no smartphones, either! Chances are, you are listening to this podcast on a smart phone, most probably plugged into your car, while driving. Thats how I listen to podcasts - but I digress.Back to social media. As I was saying, it is THE tool that allowed my business to flourish. If you have a small business, or are thinking of starting a side hustle or even your main hustle, you can use social media to your advantage. Big time.It is an ever changing scenrio, though. You need to keep up with what is going on in terms of what each platform is up to. You need to read as much as you can about what works and what stopped working in 2016 (remember when all your followers saw what you uploaded in the ORDER that you uploaded? In technical terms, this was called a chronological feed.) Practically every business that used Instagram then panicked and urged followers to hit the “post notifications” symbol on. That did not quite work. If someone is following aroud a 100 accounts, their phone will be going ding dong ALL the time!And of course now, in 2019, things are even trickier. Instagram stories, Facebook stories, Twitter catch ups and the old fashioned news feed - where you do you even start? Well, over the course of the next few podcasts, I will address exactly that.I have now been using social media for more than a decade - for my business. I have first hand experience of how social media has actually worked and not worked. I have a confession, I am slightly geeky. I get quite excited about numbers and graphs and analytics and website traffic. I am really into experimenting and changing my strategy (and Oooh yes, there IS a strategy) depending on what works and what does not. The best thing about using social media to promote your business is that you will finally stop depending on friends and family to talk about YOUR business to THEIR friends and family. I recently posted on Instagram in my account faircakeconsulting that I felt that when I started my businesses, I quickly bored my friends and family to tears by going ON and ON and ON about my business. They had their own lives, their own concerns and while they were very supportive of what I was doing, it soon became clear that their time for my business talk was very limited. My abundant enthusiasm about creating a website and making cakes and photographing them and cropping the photographs and learning how to edit pictures - yadda yadda yadda was exhausing for them.Social media saved me! Here I could find fellow entrepreneur geeks, photography geeks, website geeks - all sorts of people who were INTO the world that I was soon becoming a part of. THAT was exciting.I will stop here for this podcast. I will upload my very first episode after this one, so check it out. And I would absolutely 100% love it if you shared it with anyone else you might know who is at the start of their business. And a podcast will not be a podcast without me begging for a review. There, I begged. A good review REALLY supports me in continuing this journey, so thank you already. Bye for now, until next time….