Each year, I give a theme to my business based on the next steps I want to take. This year, the theme is all about numbers and social media presence. That means I’m focusing more time, effort and even some money into boosting my social media presence online.
Boosting your social media presence as a freelancer can help you get new clients, establish yourself as an expert and get media opportunities. The truth is social media is extremely important to marketing in the 21st century. The problem is, most freelancers don’t have a whole lot of money to spend on increasing their social media presence. It’s also extremely time-consuming if you’re doing it manually.
Fortunately, since this has been my mission this year, I can report back on how to boost your social media presence when you don’t have a lot of money. I’ve already made a ton of mistakes ( Read: wasted a lot of time and money) so you don’t have to repeat them in your own business.
Find low-cost ways to automate.
One of the most effective ways to boost your social media presence is to automate engagement on social media channels. This propels people to follow you. Now, if you hired someone else to do this it would cost an arm and a leg. Additionally, if you try to do it yourself you end up spending your days on Twitter instead of doing client work.
The good news there are plenty of affordable online tools that can help you automate and grow your social media presence. Below you’ll find some of my favorites:
- Edgar: This is for automatically posting on different social media channels. At $49 a month, it’s probably the most expensive on the list. However, because the schedule for Edgar runs on a loop it ends up paying for itself because of the amount of time you save. There’s no need to spend hours scheduling things out each week or each month.
- Boardbooster: Automate pins on group boards found on Pinterest. Starts at $5 a month.
- Later: Schudule out Instagram posts. Free.
- GetQualityFollowers.com: This is for Twitter engagement and it does actually work. Plans start at $19 a month.
- Instagress: Same concept at GetQualityFollowers.com but for Instagram. I went from having 750 followers to over 4,000 in a matter of three months. You can get an entire year of this service for $79. That comes out to $6.50 a month!
Educate yourself on tips and tricks
I’m very fortunate to have a very well-connected network of online entrepreneurs that I’m constantly learning things from. This has come in handy as I begin to grow my social media presence – especially as it pertains to Facebook!
For example, since Facebook rolled out Facebook Live, they tend to give more visibility to videos on Facebook Fan pages. This means you automatically get a boost without having to pay for it. You can then boost it with $5 and target your fans and their friends. From there, invite the people who’ve liked your video but haven’t yet liked your fan page to become a fan.
Another trick I learned was that you can actually target people from your email list and have Facebook encourage them to like your page. All you have to do is upload a CSV of your email list to the Ads Manager and Facebook will begin to suggest your page to people in your email list!
Final Thoughts
You’ll notice that I didn’t really mention a lot free options in this article. That’s because I already learned the hard way that free equals manual which equals a lot of time and money lost.
That’s why it’s important to find affordable options that can help you save time.
