There is an expression that applies to small business owners: You are either running your business or being run by it. That describes how things have gone for PC Handyman over the years. Reacting to the needs of customers can absorb all the bandwidth from a one-person business. It’s the dilemma of how to grow the business if you don’t have the revenue. That is good and well but how do you get the revenue if you don’t have the people to help you grow? If you are going to run your business and provide the best service or product possible, you have to strive to be excellent wearing all the hats of the trade. Marketing for small businesses like us is the first thing to go budgetarily. At this point in our development as a business, we have to address marketing earnestly while not overspending with limited or no results.
Over the years, we have tried lots of digital marketing tools. We have tried Post Scramblers (programs that take a post and reorder the paragraphs.) It worked to attract backlinks to the site, for a little while. Then Google wised up and started dinging sites that regurgitated the same content but in different sequences.
On to the next thing. I was a proud user of Tweetadder. If you have never heard of the program, it was a tool that auto followed and unfollowed users to promote the impression that their twitter accounts were active and relevant. That did a great job of promoting your brand while doing the work of attracting attention. But then, Twitter caught on to its use and that was the end of the story.
I’ve used HootSuite, a browser-based program that aggregates your social media feeds for management. I am sure it is a great program, but my experience was not great. I found it to be too awkward and busy with social accounts side by side. Distinguishing a Twitter post from a Facebook post was a bit complicated for my ADHD and any analytics to test efficacy were difficult to find.
After those experiences (and more) with tools promising social media success, it became clear that the only way to attract genuine interest in your brand is rolling up your sleeves, and doing the work. I have found that CoSchedule fits the bill for social media marketing.
CoSchedule is a marketing strategy platform that allows its users to load curated social media posts or WordPress blog posts in a calendar format. The interface makes it easy to distinguish content to work for the different social media formats. I am actually using it right now to write this article. I believe this platform is fantastic because it allows my team to independently work on social media engagement well into the future.
Once you sign up for a 14-day trial, you can start adding your social media accounts. We have set up the following accounts: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and Linkedin. It was as easy as clicking the link for the social profile you want to add, another window opens and asks for your login details. Once you give CoSchedule permission to access your social media accounts it is ready to go. The only social media profile that caused some challenges was Google Plus. You have to use a third party app called Buffer. Thankfully, CoSchedule has excellent documentation to help you along. If you aren’t an autodidact, chat, and email are also easily available. Once you get it configured you will be fine.Â
My social media marketing team consists of two 14-year-old kids, and myself. For a summer job, my daughter and friend are writing 1 social media post each per day that is related in some way to computer repair. The rules are, stay clean, watch your grammar, and find articles that peak your interest. I thought it would be an interesting experiment that adds some freshness to the subject of computer repair and technology. I also thought that this could be a great little job for my kid. Her friend, JoJo, has an interest in graphic design. This experience might send him on the path to digital marketing. I signed up for the Essential Plan with three users and Requeue.